I spent a life-giving two weeks in the desert outside of Tucson studying to become a certified spiritual director at the Hesychia School For Spiritual Direction at the Redemptorist Renewal Center. Spiritual Direction is an ancient practice of companioning another person in their spiritual search and practice. One of the questions we ask a lot in spiritual direction is, “Where is God in all of this?”

Spiritual Direction is a different modality from therapy, which presumes a problem, issue, pathology or struggle to work through. SD is also different from pastoral counseling, which often involves advice-giving and religious guidance. Spiritual Direction is a practice of active listening where the director essentially holds a space for the directee to explore how the spirit is moving in their lives (or maybe not moving — and the directee wants to dedicate time to wonder about that, to question it, or to investigate their beliefs with a supportive person).  A spiritual director will not think you are having a nervous breakdown or psychotic break if you have a mystical experience. They might wind up referring you to a psychiatrist, but they will not react negatively or suspiciously at the outset of a report of hearing voices or seeing a vision or having a prophetic dream or other such phenomena that can trouble the modern soul and society.

For me, the beauty in Spiritual Direction is its foundational claim that God/Spirit/Higher Consciousness is real, that it can be trusted, and that dedicating a portion of our lives to pursuing time with it is a worthy and important endeavor. God is real. There is another dimension to our reality than what we can see and touch, and there’s a lot of meaning to be found there.

There were about twenty-five of us in the program, from all over the country and a wide selection of religious traditions, and we became a tight team. It was the most joyous imaginable thing to spend all day with a group of people who speak fluent Spirit! We were Catholic priests, Protestant pastors and ministers, Jewish chant musicians, lay people, Southern Baptist consultants, Unitarian Universalists, nuns, etc. — and what we shared in common was a belief that creation is holy, that people’s stories are sacred, that those in religious leadership must  protect the community’s spiritual mission from the the capitalist cult of production and busy-ness, and a passionate desire to connect to the divine on a regular basis.

Got a little rainbow for you.

There are lots of different methods of spiritual direction (many directors use the Ignatian Exercises, for example), but  I am being trained in the non-directive, or evocative method.  We started doing practicums in the second week of our intensive, and I found that I loved sitting in silence with my practice directee. I loved the silence so much that I was gently critiqued for leaving the directee feeling a bit vulnerable or emotionally abandoned after they had shared something deep. It’s a hard practice! Where I am tempted to jump in and actively enter into conversation, I know that is not my role. When I settle comfortably into the more contemplative listening mode, I can settle in there too deeply! Earth to Vicki.

But I loved it. The desert filled my well. I hate to be corny with the desert metaphors but having read a lot of the desert mothers and fathers, I was excited about studying spiritual direction in the environment they lived in all those centuries ago when they withdrew from Christian life in the city. I think it’s hilarious that as far back as the 4th century people were already like, “Ech, the Church is so corrupt.”

I mostly expressed my sense of reverence and awe in response to the desert landscape by walking around and saying things like, “Oh my God, what ARE you?” and “Holy s*%$, what even IS this?”

ouch! but yet …flowers

These darlings will literally attack you if you brush up against them. I saw hikers in Joshua Tree National Park yanking the spikes out of their arms and heels with pliers. Blood everywhere. The desert does not mess around!

We stayed in little rooms on a beautiful campus and ate breakfast at 8AM, started sessions at 9:30, worked until noon when we broke for lunch, went back for afternoon session at 1:30, worked until 4:30, and had dinner at 6PM.

We walked to breakfast in this kind of situation…

And did things on our breaks like hike, read or walk the labyrinth:

It’s like something out of Dr. Seuss

Loretta is a wonderful pastor from Wisconsin.

I am not really a group person. I’m a strong extrovert in some ways, but more than one day of structured programs with the same group of people usually chafes at me. The only time I remember loving a residential learning and retreat experience was when I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1993 and spent three weeks studying Emerson, Thoreau and the New England Transcendentalists at Oregon State University with Professor David Robinson.

Usually though, I skip a lot of retreat programming and flee into solitude for my mental health. I find group process to be laborious and over-earnest and then I beat up on myself for being cranky and critical.  My own UUMA (the Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association — a professional, dues-paying clergy organization and yes, UUs are the only denomination that has such an organization) has been in a horrific meltdown for a couple of years, culminating in a past 12 months of divisive, vicious, grace-denying, Spirit-ignoring, accusatory, vengeful, schismatic actions and reactions. We are ostensibly a covenantal organization but the covenant has been blown to smithereens and I doubt that there will be genuine collegial trust in my lifetime. I feel exceedingly grateful to have well-established friendships and decades of close working relationships and fellowship with many colleagues, so that I retain affection and loyalty even to those with whom I am in disagreement over the latest contretemps. I also serve a congregation that is stable, has strong and healthy leadership, in a beautiful location within a vibrant wider multifaith community of mutual care, concern and social justice effort.  I have a very good and fulfilling life in ministry.

But there is that thing we do, that rational, smart-sophisticated people thing religious liberals and New Englanders do. And I am GenX, which adds a layer of sardonic detachment to the rational smart reasonable people thing. We don’t go around talking about God. Even with my best friends, even with my parishioners, even with my closest colleagues, we keep our mystical experiences and promptings of the Spirit pretty private. We touch on the subject carefully, most often (I find) out of respect for other people’s time and tolerance for such religiosity.  We are careful not to assume that our ways of expressing how God/Spirit/Deeper Reality/Soul presents itself in our experience will be comprehended or accepted by others, and even those with whom we are in spiritual community.

That’s our way. I remember in Div School people would walk around asking each other about their prayer practice and say things in the hall to each other like “How is your walk with Jesus?” and I would flinch.  It felt so forced, and also invasive, and also like bragging. I wanted to yell out, “Be careful you don’t step on Jesus’ robe and trip him on your walk!” just to let the air out of the piety.

But at Hesychia, we sat in a lot of silence and heard from one another about how confusing, demanding, inspiring, frightening, exciting, upsetting, healing and disruptive the movement of the Spirit is in our lives today, right now, and in our pasts. We told stories about how, when we really attended to our souls, we felt guided, loved, led and supported through the most harrowing of times. We shared tears over recollections of suffering, times where we felt empty or abandoned, when our spiritual practices bore no fruit at all.

We listened to each other without interruption and without judgment. We brought insensitivities or mistakes to each other’s attention with care and respect. We trained and disciplined ourselves not to fix, not to project, not to say “I know just how you feel” or “You know, that reminds me of something…” or “there’s a book you should read.” We waited in silence for more truth to emerge. We protected each other’s privacy and honored each other’s feelings. We showed non-verbally that we cared, that we were paying close attention to every word in our practicum sessions, that we were intensely committed to being a companion in the work of going deeper.

I get to go back for the last two weeks at the end of April. I will write more later about some life insights I recorded while in the desert. They’re not radical or new, but they led me to make some interior shifts that have brought me more peace and equilibrium, and who doesn’t need that?

With love.

This was the February full moon. I was walking to the dining hall for dinner when I saw a group of my sister Hesychasts looking out to the mountains and I gasped. Almost missed it. 

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered two vintage communion kits from eBay sellers. This is the first of a short, open-ended series about what I bought, what I plan do with them and (since there’s not an endless supply of such kits) what some alternatives are.

I bought two because figured that between them I would have enough parts to have one good kit. But don’t go looking for a chalice or linens. These are the communion kits well known to “low” Protestants, and are often used for communion in home or hospital visitation. They typically include small, individual glasses and a way to present them, a vessel for serving some kind of bread and containers to store the bread and wine. Today (and for the two decades I’ve been ordained) these kits can be quite small: larger than an eyeglasses case, but usually smaller than two combined.

Unfortunately, they’re also often quite cheap looking, made of plastic or some other unknown hard material, lined with acetate cloth or molded plastic. These are nicer than most. Some use disposable plastic cups. (I’ve even seen one that is basically a carrying case for those all-in-one juice and wafer sets. The ones that look like individual coffee creamer cups. Think Keurig for communion; on second thought, don’t. My sacramental theology isn’t so high, but this form is so ugly, that I couldn’t bear it and wouldn’t serve it.) The most you can say for the typical communion set is that it’s convenient and light-weight, but they cost more than they should.

Contrast this with how beautiful and refined other consumer goods have gotten, and it’s clear to me that we can and should do more for worshiping God. The Lord’s Supper shouldn’t compare poorly in form to a take-out cup of coffee.

Next: what’s in the cases.

• Examining the fear against the potential return
• Believing that one will survive the worst case scenarios
• Feeling the fear and taking the risk anyway 

The dark days are not “coming”. The dark days are here.

– Rachel Maddow (2-21-2020)

This week’s featured posts are “What’s Wrong With a Decision-Making Convention?” and “Accelerating Corruption and Autocracy“.

This week everybody was talking about the Justice Department

I covered this in “Accelerating Corruption and Autocracy“.

and Bernie Sanders as front-runner

Sanders’ win in the Nevada caucuses was impressive. He was a clear winner among Latino voters, a demographic that wasn’t behind him in 2016. Sanders is now the clear front-runner, partly due to his own strength and partly due to the fracturing of his opposition. Even if you wanted to vote for the stop-Bernie candidate (and from my comment stream, I can tell that a lot of you don’t), who would that be?

Now that I’m a Massachusetts voter, I have to make my choice on March 3. I’m still undecided, but I promise to explain my thinking next week, the day before I vote.

Right now I’m wondering if I’ve given Bernie a fair shake. I’ve been rooting against him, and I’m not sure whether that’s for justifiable reasons, or whether it’s because I’m still annoyed from 2016. In 2016, I was part of his big majority in the New Hampshire primary, but I was voting more to send a message to Hillary than because I seriously intended to make Bernie president. As the campaign wore on, I came to regret that vote.

Unlike some people who voted for Hillary against Trump, I don’t fault Bernie for not campaigning harder for her in the fall. I think he did as much as could have been reasonably expected. But I thought a lot of his late-primary-campaign criticism of Hillary was unfair, that it continued well past the point where he had a chance to win, and that it set up Trump’s “crooked Hillary” rhetoric. It was irresponsible, and he should have known better.

That said, this is one of those situations where turnabout is not fair play. As Bernie becomes the front-runner, I think we all should bear in mind that he may well become the nominee. And while I’m all for every candidate’s and every voter’s right to criticize, I think we need to try very hard to criticize fairly. For example, I think it’s fine to say that Bernie should release his medical records, or to ask how his plans will be paid for, or how he will get them through Congress. But I don’t think it’s fair to call him a “communist” or to lie about what his healthcare plan will do. Trump will want to do that in the fall, if Bernie is nominated, and his rhetoric will sound more convincing if it can be prefaced with “Even Democrats say …”

On electability, I don’t know what to think. Polls consistently show Sanders running as well or better against Trump than the other Democrats do — worse than Biden in some polls, but never by much. At the same time, I have yet to meet a Republican who’s afraid of facing Bernie in the fall. Many of them are actively rooting for him, including (it seems) Trump. Maybe they’re just stupid, or maybe they have some insight.

and the continuing spread of the Chinese virus

It’s now known as COVID-19. Outbreaks are now happening in Italy and South Korea, which might imply that they will eventually happen everywhere.

Even so, try to maintain some perspective. Staying away from Chinese restaurants is not going to make you safer.

but you should pay more attention to Trump’s acting DNI

I also discussed this in “Accelerating Corruption and Autocracy“. Few things are could be worse than a Director of National Intelligence who tells the CIA what the President wants to hear them say, rather than tells the President what the best experts think is true.

and you also might be interested in …

As I write this morning, the stock market is plunging. The Dow is about 1300 points below the peak it hit a week or two ago. I don’t think the fall is Trump’s fault any more than the rise was, but if you live by the sword you die by the sword.

I don’t know how good her chances are, but I’ve got to root for Amy McGrath to beat Mitch McConnell. This online ad is from last summer, but it’s still worth looking at.

Remember the original justification for the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani? Supposedly it prevented one or more “imminent attacks“.

Well, never mind. The White House has sent Congress its official explanation for the raid, and the imminent-attack justification has vanished. Now the purpose of the assassination was to “deter future attacks”.

Without the threat of an imminent attack, there was no reason the administration couldn’t have consulted Congress, as envisioned in the War Powers Act. Instead, the report makes the argument that Congress intended the pre-Iraq-invasion Authorization for the Use of Military Force to include Iran, which is patently absurd.

In short, the Soleimani attack was an illegal assassination, and the President’s initial explanation of it was a lie.

Researchers at Scripps Oceanography Institute offer some good news on climate change: One of the tipping-point disaster scenarios is less likely than previously thought.

A long-feared scenario in which global warming causes Arctic permafrost to melt and release enough greenhouse gas to accelerate warming and cause catastrophe probably won’t happen.

and let’s close with something ambiguous

Sometimes it’s hard to tell who a satirist is satirizing. ABC News reported:

Pigeons wearing MAGA hats and Donald Trump wigs have been released by a shadowy protest group calling themselves P.U.T.I.N. – Pigeons United to Interfere Now — across the city of Las Vegas, Nevada

When I saw that, my first thought (after some concern about the pigeons) was “What a clever protest against Trump!” Plainly, the stunt casts MAGA-hatters as pigeons — stupid and gullible. When I heard the group was calling itself PUTIN, that cinched it.

But apparently not, at least if the Las Vegas Review-Journal has it right.

The pigeon release was done as an “aerial protest piece in response to the arrival of the 2020 Democratic debate,” the group said. Six Democratic presidential candidates will debate Wednesday night in Las Vegas.

“The release date was also coordinated to serve as a gesture of support and loyalty to President Trump,” said a group member who goes by the alias Coo Hand Luke.

Or maybe Coo Hand Luke is spoofing the local reporter, pretending to be precisely the kind pigeon-like Trumpist the birds represent. Or not. Maybe the satire is too subtle for any of us to grasp.

Ever since he came down the escalator pledging to protect us from Mexican rapists, Donald Trump has shown corrupt and autocratic tendencies. Before long, he was leading chants about locking up his political opponents, welcoming Russian help in his campaign, encouraging his supporters to be violent, profiting off of campaign events, and saying that he would only accept the election results “if I win“.

Since taking office, he has funneled public money into his private businesses, continued building his wall without a Congressional appropriation, refused all demands for financial transparency and Congressional oversight, obstructed the Mueller investigation, assembled the most corrupt cabinet since Nixon, lied many times per day, and repeatedly expressed his envy of dictatorial regimes like North Korea and China.

But the authoritarian drift has definitely accelerated in the three weeks since every Senate Republican but Mitt Romney voted to let Donald Trump remain in office, despite proven abuses of power. As Atlantic’s Adam Serwer puts it, Trump’s acquittal marked “the end of the Trump administration, and the first day of the would-be Trump Regime.” Think about what we’ve seen since the Senate’s abdication of its constitutional role in controlling would-be autocrats.

A purge of “disloyal” officials. The disloyalty here is not to the United States, but to the person of Donald Trump.

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, for example, has behaved exactly as an officer should: When something about Trump’s Ukraine call seemed odd to him, he reported his concerns up the chain of command. When Congress subpoenaed him, he appeared and testified honestly. For this, he was not just fired, but escorted out of the White House like a criminal. His twin brother, who played no role in the impeachment hearings, was also fired just out of vindictiveness. (Fortunately, the Army has refused Trump’s suggestion that Lt. Col. Vindman be investigated and disciplined.)

Other people who are now gone: Ambassador Bill Taylor, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Ambassador Marie Yovanovich, Undersecretary of Defense John Rood, and Deputy National Security Adviser Victoria Coates. They join everyone in the FBI who had any connection to the original Russia investigation, most of whom were purged long ago: James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr, and Lisa Page, as well as the Justice Department leadership that refused Trump’s pressure to shut the investigation down: Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein.

The purge is expected to continue throughout the administration. (See below for purges at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.)

Interference in the Stone trial. It’s important to understand what Roger Stone (along with Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn) represents: the last loose ends in the obstruction of the Mueller investigation. (One of the obstruction-of-justice claims explored in Part II of the Mueller Report was that Trump engaged in witness-tampering with Manafort, including hinting at a pardon.)

Stone was the Trump campaign’s link to WikiLeaks and from there to the Russians who hacked Democratic computers. Manafort was the campaign’s link to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and from there to Russian intelligence. Flynn’s relationship with Russian Ambassador Segei Kislyak (in particular why Flynn and Jared Kushner approached him about creating a “back channel” to Russia) has never been explained. These men are not just Trump’s “friends”, they’re his accomplices.

In the Stone case, Trump (through Bill Barr) reversed the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation (causing all four prosecutors to withdraw from the case rather than participate in political corruption of the processes of justice), attacked the judge, and attacked a juror. He didn’t stop Judge Amy Berman from sentencing Stone to 40 months in prison, but he did set up his justification for a post-election pardon, along with pardons of Flynn and Manafort. This would send a clear message to anyone else who could testify against Trump: Keep your mouth shut and the boss will take care of you.

Notice what has been missing from Trump’s defense of Stone: acknowledgment of the fact that he’s guilty. Stone lied to Congress to protect Trump, and he threatened a witness who could expose that lie. A jury of his peers unanimously found that Stone’s guilt had been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Pardons for money. Corrupt Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich got the attention, but the most obviously corrupt of Tuesday’s pardons was tax evader Paul Pogue, whose family has contributed over $200K to the Trump Victory Fund. Criminal financier Michael Milken was pardoned after a request from billionaire Nelson Peltz, a Milken business associate who had just hosted a Trump fundraiser that netted the campaign $10 million.

Pardons to maintain a corrupt network. Jeffrey Toobin (who testified for Trump in the House impeachment hearings) pointed out the authoritarian flavor of the other Tuesday pardons:

Authoritarianism is usually associated with a punitive spirit—a leader who prosecutes and incarcerates his enemies. But there is another side to this leadership style. Authoritarians also dispense largesse, but they do it by their own whims, rather than pursuant to any system or legal rule. The point of authoritarianism is to concentrate power in the ruler, so the world knows that all actions, good and bad, harsh and generous, come from a single source. …

In this era of mass incarceration, many people deserve pardons and commutations, but this is not the way to go about it. All Trump has done is to prove that he can reward his friends and his friends’ friends.

Trump’s pardons did not percolate up through the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney. They all had some personal connection to Trump or his circle of friends and donors. Blagojevich, for example, was a contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice”, and his wife pleaded for his pardon on Fox News shows Trump is known to watch. (It’s worth noting that there is no doubt about Blagojevich’s guilt. We have the tapes.) Bernard Kerik was a crony of Rudy Giuliani.

All the beneficiaries of Trump’s mercy were convicted of the kinds of white-collar crimes Trump’s people might commit themselves. That was the point, Sarah Chayes (who covered Afghanistan for more than a decade) explained in “This Is How Kleptocracies Work“:

In return for this torrent of cash and favors and subservience, those at the top of kleptocratic networks owe something precious downwards. They owe their subordinates impunity from legal repercussions. That is the other half of the bargain, without which the whole system collapses.

That’s why moves like Trump’s have to be advertised. … Trump’s clemency came not at the end of his time in office, as is sometimes the case with such favors bestowed on cronies and swindlers, but well before that—indeed, ahead of an election in which he is running. The gesture was not a guilty half-secret, but a promise. It was meant to show that the guarantee of impunity for choice members of America’s corrupt networks is an ongoing principle.

Threats to the rule of law. The Justice Department had retained some measure of independence until Bill Barr became attorney general. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, shared Trump’s policy goals, but respected internal procedures for maintaining the rule of law. For example, he recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his own connection to the Trump campaign — a move which angered Trump and for which Sessions was never forgiven.

But Barr has made a number of moves in the Justice Department to shield Trump from investigation and intimidate his enemies. The best summary I’ve found is by Marcy Wheeler:

• The Stormy Daniels hush-money investigation sent Michael Cohen to prison, but all the follow-up evaporated after Barr took over at DoJ. Cohen claimed he worked under Trump’s instructions, and that the Trump Organization reimbursed his illegal campaign contribution. But those leads have been dropped.
• SDNY seems to be slow-walking its investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine shennanigans, now that a new US attorney has been appointed. The head of the neighboring Eastern District of New York has been put in charge of Ukraine-related investigations that SDNY had been pursuing.
• A new US attorney in D.C. has led to a “review” of investigations there, including cases involving Michael Flynn and Erik Prince.
• Barr assigned Connecticut US attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the Trump/Russia investigation. Anyone tempted to investigate further Trump wrongdoing now knows that they risk becoming targets themselves.
• Barr tried to stop the Ukraine whistleblower’s account from reaching Congress, and did not recuse himself even though he is mentioned in the complaint.

Tightening control of the intelligence services. Like the Justice Department, the intelligence services maintained their independence when Dan Coates was Director of National Intelligence, and the subsequent acting heads had failed to bring them under control.

As a result, occasionally conclusions unfavorable to Trump have made it to Congress or the American public: Russia did help elect Trump in 2016. North Korea is not denuclearizing. ISIS is not defeated. Trump may not like to hear such facts, or to allow the American public to know them, but the whole point of having intelligence services is to correct the leadership’s misperceptions.

The most recent example was a February 13 briefing to House leaders of both parties, in which Shelby Pierson, an aide to then-acting DNI Joseph Maguire, reported that Russia was repeating its 2016 interference in the 2020 election process, again for the purpose of electing Trump.

You might expect an American president to react to such news by giving Vladimir Putin a stern warning to back off — as Bernie Sanders did when told that the Russians might be working to help him win the Democratic nomination. But no: Trump welcomed Russian help in 2016, sought to extort Ukrainian help with the 2020 election, and seems to welcome further Russian help now.

The intelligence report did make him angry, but at the intelligence services. He dismissed Maguire and replaced him with Richard Grenell, who has no intelligence background whatsoever. In a Washington Post column, retired Admiral William McRaven lamented Maguire’s fate:

in this administration, good men and women don’t last long.

In a different article, the WaPo quotes a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center:

Nothing in Grenell’s background suggests that he has the skill set or the experience to be an effective leader of the intelligence community. … His chief attribute seems to be that President Trump views him as unfailingly loyal.

As Ambassador to Germany (a position he still holds), Grenell was noted for his identification with right-wing parties like Alternative for Germany. (US ambassadors typically avoid such partisan interference in the politics of our NATO allies.) The German news magazine Der Spiegel couldn’t get an interview with Grenell, so it interviewed more than 30 sources including “numerous American and German diplomats, cabinet members, lawmakers, high-ranking officials, lobbyists and think tank experts.”

Almost all of these sources paint an unflattering portrait of the ambassador, one remarkably similar to Donald Trump, the man who sent him to Berlin. A majority of them describe Grenell as a vain, narcissistic person who dishes out aggressively, but can barely handle criticism. … They also say Grenell knows little about Germany and Europe, that he ignores most of the dossiers his colleagues at the embassy write for him, and that his knowledge of the subject matter is superficial.

Oh, by the way, Grenell used to work for a corrupt Moldavian oligarch, but didn’t register as a foreign agent. Under any previous administration, he wouldn’t be able to get a security clearance.

Grenell in turn has ousted the #2 intelligence official, Andrew Hallman, replacing him with Devin Nunes staffer Kashyap Patel, who is known for promoting pro-Trump conspiracy theories. More personnel changes are expected.

The NYT reports that Grenell has “requested the intelligence behind the classified briefing last week before the House Intelligence Committee where officials told lawmakers that Russia was interfering in November’s presidential election and that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia favored President Trump’s re-election”.

This move recalls how Vice President Cheney abused intelligence during the Bush administration: By “stovepiping” raw intelligence to his own office rather than letting it pass through the analytic process, Cheney was able to manipulate conclusions that favored the policies he preferred, most notably the invasion of Iraq.

Summing up. If you don’t follow US government closely, you may not see the problem. After all, the President is in charge. Why shouldn’t the people under him do what he wants? Isn’t that how it always works?

It isn’t, and there are good reasons why it doesn’t. One problem — you might fairly say it was THE problem — the Founders were trying to solve when they wrote the Constitution was how to control executive power. Unfettered executive power quickly becomes dictatorship, and the rights of the People are then only as safe as the Dictator allows them to be.

For that reason, power was divided among the three branches of government, so that Congress and the Courts would be able to hold the President in check. Congress got the power of the purse and the power of oversight, both of which are now in jeopardy.

Subsequent to the Founding, executive power has also been controlled through the professionalization of the various departments, each of which balances political control by the President with its own inherent mission. So the Justice Department takes its policy from the President, but pursues the departmental mission of justice. The intelligence services try to find truth, the EPA protects the environment, the CDC defends public health, the military safeguards our country and its allies, the Federal Reserve balances economic growth against the threat of inflation, and so on. For the most part, presidents have known when to keep their hands off.

Until Trump. More and more, Trump makes everything political. There is no truth other than the story Trump wants to tell. There is no mission other than what Trump wants done.

Students of authoritarianism have been warning us about his dangerous tendencies since he first began campaigning. But, as Rachel Maddow noted Friday night, we are well past the time for warnings. “The dark days are not ‘coming’,” she said. “The dark days are here.”

The last contested Democratic convention nominated Adlai Stevenson in 1952.

The results of the early Democratic primaries and caucuses have been mixed: Bernie Sanders has replaced Joe Biden as the front-runner, but the vote remains split among many candidates, nearly all of whom are continuing to campaign at least through Super Tuesday on March 3. Unlike the Republicans in 2016, Democratic primaries all award delegates proportionately, and there are no winner-take-all contests. So it’s a growing possibility that come July no candidate will arrive at the Milwaukee Convention with a majority of delegates.

If that happens, then it will be up to the Convention to make the decision, i.e., to settle on a candidate without clear instructions from the primary voters.

A number of commentators (Chris Hayes, for one) have painted this possibility as a disaster, particularly if the candidate who comes to Milwaukee with the plurality of delegates isn’t nominated. Bernie’s supporters in particular — who picture their candidate as the one most likely to come in with a lead — are already talking about how the nomination will be “stolen” from him if anyone else gets it.

I’m not seeing it. Whether or not the convention’s choice seems legitimate depends on the scenario, and in a number of the scenarios I would regard as legitimate, the candidate who comes in with a lead doesn’t leave as the nominee.

The delegates. Before getting into that, let’s make sure we understand the process. According to the Green Papers, the primaries and caucuses will choose 3979 delegates, and only those delegates get to vote on the first ballot. If that first ballot doesn’t result in a majority choice, 771 “superdelegates” are added to the mix. Superdelegates are party officials, Democrats who hold prominent offices (like governors and members of Congress), various other distinguished Democrats (Barack Obama, for one), and representatives of key Democratic constituencies (like labor leaders).

So a first-ballot majority is 1990 delegates. Any candidate who gets that many delegates out of the primaries and caucuses is the winner. On the second and all subsequent ballots, a majority is 2376.

Scenario I. A clear leader with a near miss. One possibility is that some candidate is the clear leader and falls just slightly short of that first-ballot victory. Rather than 1990 delegates, Bernie or Bloomberg or somebody else [1] winds up with, say, 1950 delegates, and the rest are scattered among half a dozen candidates, none of whom have more than a thousand. Similarly, national polls show the front-runner to be the clear leader, perhaps with majority support among Democrats or Democratic-leaning voters. The front-runner also polls as well or better than any other candidate in head-to-head match-ups with Trump.

In that case, I agree with Chris Hayes: Something untoward would have to happen to deny that candidate the nomination, and his or her supporters would be right to feel cheated. In particular, any scenario in which a majority of elected delegates forms after the first ballot (as might happen when other candidates drop out) but gets reversed by the superdelegates, would be an anti-democratic travesty.

Unlike the Bernie supporters who imagine a stop-at-nothing conspiracy against them, though, I regard that scenario as extremely unlikely. The superdelegates are there to rescue the party from a hopeless deadlock, not to overrule the voters. (It’s worth remembering that in 2016, when superdelegates could vote on the first ballot, Bernie’s campaign was arguing that they should overrule the voters. Hillary was well ahead in primary votes and elected delegates, but the Sanders campaign argued that if they finished strong, the superdelegates should respect their momentum and swing the nomination to Bernie.)

But there are other scenarios.

Scenario II. A clear delegate leader suffering voters’ remorse. A lot can happen between now and July, some of which might cause voters to change their minds after they cast their primary ballots. So imagine a delegate split like Scenario I, but also that the polls have drastically changed due to some unanticipated event that has damaged the front-runner: Bernie has another heart attack, or Biden stumbles over his words in a way that implies dementia, or some lurid sex scandal reminds Buttigieg voters of all the bad gay stereotypes.

In this scenario, the front-runner in delegates is no longer the front-runner in the polls, and running him or her against Trump is like carrying out a suicide pact.

At that point, I think we all say “Thank God for superdelegates” and prepare to unite behind somebody else.

Even then, though, it matters who Somebody Else is. The primary voters may have changed their minds about the front-runner, but there’s no reason to think they’ve changed their entire political philosophies. So the nominee should be someone who represents the voters who supported the front-runner. So replacing Sanders with, say, Warren would be legitimate in a way that replacing him with Bloomberg would not be. Ditto for replacing Biden with Klobuchar rather than Sanders.

In other words, the nomination shouldn’t automatically fall to the second-place candidate if the front-runner implodes. In this scenario it might even be legitimate to nominate a candidate who wasn’t previously running at all, but who represented a compromise between the progressive and moderate factions: Sherrod Brown, for example.

Scenario III. Several significant candidates. What if the candidate in second place is closer to the leader than the leader is to a majority? Say, for example, that three candidates are splitting the delegates 40-35-25.

In that case, I don’t think the Convention has any obligation to nominate the 40% candidate, particularly if the second and third-place candidates are similar to each other and different from the front-runner. In that case, nominating the front-runner might be going against the primary voters.

For example, imagine Sanders is leading Biden and Bloomberg, or Buttigieg is leading Warren and Sanders. In either of those scenarios, one faction of the party (moderate or progressive) represents the majority, but the front-runner comes from the other faction. Imagine that on the second ballot, the third-place candidate drops out, and his or her delegates mostly vote for the second-place candidate, who becomes the nominee. Those delegates are arguably representing the voters who sent them to the convention, so I don’t think there’s anything to complain about.

Why is this happening? Not since 1952 has a convention failed to produce a first-ballot nominee. (The 1976 Republican Convention, though, was so closely split between sitting President Gerald Ford and challenger Ronald Reagan that there was some suspense.) So why does it seem likely to happen now?

For reasons that are, by and large, good. In the past, late primaries have often been unrepresentative winner-take-all affairs, which generally allowed the leading candidate’s delegate count to go over the top. Also, campaigns were funded more by big donors who wanted a return on their investment, and so were unwilling to keep supporting a candidate with little chance to win. Now campaigns are funded more by small donors who remain loyal even if early results are disappointing (or by billionaires like Bloomberg and Steyer, who remain loyal to themselves). As a result, we have more candidates surviving deeper into the primary calendar.

If you imagine those two factors continuing into the future, we may have to get used to multi-ballot conventions again. They didn’t used to be controversial. (When I was first getting interested in politics as a teen-ager in the 1960s, contested conventions were recent enough that they were a regular feature of political novels like Fletcher Knebel’s Convention, or of movies like The Best Man.)

Abraham Lincoln, for example, was well behind William Seward (173.5 votes to 102) on the first ballot of the 1860 Republican Convention, but won on the fourth ballot. The 1932 Democratic Convention required a 2/3 supermajority, and it took four ballots for FDR to get there. In 1924 Democrats needed 103 ballots to nominate John Davis, who lost to Calvin Coolidge in the general election.

Not necessarily “brokered”. In the old days, conventions were dominated by well-established power brokers like the leaders of New York’s Tammany Hall and other big-city machines. Corruption was rampant and deals were cut without much concern for what the voters wanted. The early primaries were viewed as field tests of a candidate’s popularity, and weren’t central to the nominating process. It wasn’t until JFK’s 1960 campaign that primaries rose to prominence. (Lyndon Johnson went to the 1960 Convention as Kennedy’s main challenger, but had not campaigned in any primaries.) Nominations were decided in “smoke-filled rooms” where the power brokers cut deals.

As a result, we still refer to a convention without a first-ballot winner as a “brokered convention”, a pejorative term implying that some dirty deal is happening. But that needn’t be the case. A convention without a clear primary winner could instead function like a ranked-choice caucus, where delegates vote for their second or third choice when their first-choice candidate drops out.

There’s nothing unseemly about such a process, even if the candidate who enters the convention with a lead doesn’t leave with the nomination.

[1] In judging whether a scenario is fair, I think it’s important to imagine it happening to several candidates — not just to the one you particularly like or dislike. If it would be fair to deny Bloomberg the nomination in certain circumstances, then it would be fair to deny Bernie in similar circumstances. And vice versa.

Mornings like this remind me why I do this blog weekly: Two weeks is a lot to face all at once.

If you’re curious about where I was last week, I went down to Florida to give a talk I call “The Spirit of Democracy”. You can find an earlier version of it here. The Florida version had to be updated for recent developments, so I’ll probably post the text of that talk later this week on my Free and Responsible Search blog.

Anyway, the drift towards autocracy that we’ve been worrying about since Trump got elected has accelerated since the Republican Senate majority assured him that nothing he could possibly do would be impeachable. You can’t really call it a “drift” any more. It’s more of a direct movement. So: the purge of “disloyal” officials — i.e., people more loyal to America than to Trump — has continued. It started with the witnesses who testified in the House impeachment hearings, has extended to the top people at National Intelligence, and is threatening to spread through the whole administration. (As Admiral McRaven commented, “In this administration, good men and women don’t last long.”) We found out more of the ways that Bill Barr has corrupted the Justice Department. A report that Russia is again interfering in our politics in Trump’s favor raised the President’s anger — at the people reporting it, not at the Russians.

That will be discussed in one featured post, which I haven’t titled yet.

The other featured post will discuss the possibility of a “brokered” Democratic convention — a pejorative term I dislike, since it conjures up images of smoke-filled rooms where anonymous power brokers cook up dirty deals. I think we need to get comfortable with conventions that make decisions rather than just anoint a nominee, because the processes that make things more democratic are also making it harder for a candidate to assemble a majority of the elected delegates. If there isn’t a “brokered” convention this year, there will be in some future cycle. So I raise the question “What’s Wrong With a Decision-Making Convention?”

The weekly summary also covers the nomination process, where Joe Biden has faded and Bernie Sanders has emerged as the new front-runner. I need to make my own voting decision by Super Tuesday, and I’m not there yet, but I’ll muse about it a little. The coronavirus has only gotten scarier in the last two weeks. The Trump regime admitted that its assassination of Qassim Soleimani didn’t really have anything to do with an “imminent threat”. And a few other things happened, which I’ll try to get to.

Here’s my schedule. The convention article will post first, between 8 and 9 EST. Then the article about the recent moves towards autocracy around 11, and then the weekly summary by (I hope) 1.

I preached from this sermon manuscript at Universalist National Memorial Church, on February 23, 2020 with the lectionary texts from the Book of Exodus and the Gospel of Matthew.

From the twenty-fourth chapter of the Book of Exodus:

Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.

I would like to thank Pastor Gatton for asking me into the pulpit again, and thank you for welcoming me back.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, and this is why that’s important. To transfigure here means to transform in such a way that improves and elevates, namely by being brought closer to God in space and purpose but mostly in spirit, and in so doing becoming more like God. It’s this becoming more like God that I think is the main purpose of life, and how we are able to enjoy a life of blessing here and now. If you want to know the point of the sermon, it’s that. It’s one thing to believe we are loved by God (and we are) but another to become more wise, more loving, more compassionate, more creative, more forgiving and so much more. In other words, to accept the inheritance we have as beloved children of the God who is. So I believe that we can, by grace and patience, grow in a God-like way.

Which makes the Transfiguration — the feast and the concept — very important. The passage we heard in the second reading is its warrant. It’s marked today in some Protestant churches: the capstone of the season following Epiphany. On the day of Epiphany, last month, Jesus’ divine essence was disclosed by the presence of a star and discerned by foreign sages, the “three Wise Men.” Now at the Transfiguration, the dim light of a star has become a light that is unavoidable and blinding, though seen only spiritually and not with the eyes. At Epiphany, we come as seekers, but at the Transfiguration we approach as trusted (if unsettled) friends. But the message is essentially the same: we will have more understanding, and that is what will guide us towards God. The wonder and amazement remain constant.

Today’s last-Sunday-before-Lent observance is a Christian minority opinion though. Catholics, Episcopalians and the Orthodox observe it on August 6, which you will recall is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. That makes me shudder. But perhaps reminds us that dramatic change can also be traumatic change, and that bright light and power can also utterly destroy. And yet that horrible coincidence, which chills the blood and might move you to tears, is also a reminder that change for the sake of change promises us nothing more than change. What we want is a change towards something better. And yet the Godwards life has no promise of happiness, or sweetness or creature comforts in the usual sense. There’s so much pain and hurt in our world. To both love the people and living things in it, and yet hope for something greater and eternal, will stress us, will tear us, will break our hearts.

And so being changed is usually unwelcome, often distressing, and sometimes painful. But it is not optional. To live is to change. How you change, and what you become, relies in part on what you choose to become. Growing into the likeness of God means taking God as your guide. There are other options, but I cannot recommend them. Becoming an indifferent person (say) with a callous soul is also a change and a path, but one where where others pay the price for your comfort.

Sometimes I complain that the recommended passages from the Bible are hard to preach. After all, in any number of lessons brought together by custom or committee, it’s sometimes hard to see the connection. Or there’s a bit of Iron Age morality that needs to be interpreted for the Silicon Age. But I’m not complaining today; the lessons lock together like puzzle pieces. Someone early on, hearing the passage from Matthew, might have thought, “I know where this is going.” And like any good story, you’re happy to hear it in a new voice or from a new angle. Even in Jesus’ time, the story from Exodus about Moses and the rest was ancient. Arthur and Merlin and Guinevere ancient. Moses took his key deputies to a high place, where God was made manifest to him in the others’ presence. And Jesus took his key deputies to a high place where they had a stunning, divine vision of Moses and Elijah. So Jesus made the connection himself, and it was obvious to the disciples, if overwhelming.

These are both hierophanies, manifestations of a higher power like God, but can also be legendary heroes, angels and the like. We can anticipate them or prepare for the to a degree —that’s part of taking a pilgrimage, say — but we don’t have control over them, and there’s no reason to believe that any of us will have this transcendent experience. But can try and understand experiences like those in the reading. And we do have moments in our lives on which we must pivot or chose, and very often we don’t have control over those either.

But what if we have experienced something. Moses experienced hierophanies, and one can say that Jesus was a hierophany. What makes a manifestation a manifestation? Perhaps you’ve had an experience that defies description, or didn’t demand an explanation: an experience where you were called by God without words, or were just pulled up by a sense — somewhere between grief and elation — to a new place where you understood something in a new way. And that leads us to the devouring fire atop the holy mountain. Its light reveals what we carry in our hearts.

On the mountain in the gospel reading, Jesus was also joined by a manifestation of Elijah, and Elijah also had a hierophany It was one of my preaching texts a few months ago, but I don’t expect you to recall the details. He had just slain the priests of Baal — that’s another sermon — and now was on the run for his life. From the first book of Kings, chapter nineteen (7-12):

And the angel of the Lord came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee. And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God. And he came thither unto a cave, and lodged there; and, behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said unto him, What doest thou here, Elijah? And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away. And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

The New International Version translates the sound of God as “a gentle whisper” and the New Revised Standard Version as “the sound of sheer silence.”

And so seems to me that the violent storm surrounding Elijah, the “devouring fire” on the top of Moses’ mountain or even Jesus’ sure crucifixion mentioned in his disclosure to his disciples that a hierophany isn’t made up of troubles and tumult, violence and strife, but that they surround and perhaps hide it.

And one thing is sure: you don’t return from the mountaintop the way you came. The experience changes you. And even as we live, we are not exactly the same people we were. We do have some choices: to grow or to wither; to learn or to ignore; to take on a greater likeness to God or withdraw and betray what we might be.

Hierophanies give an experience of great and holy things, but not the means to interpret them to others. That is what we add to our experience of the holy. But direct language fails, even though we have vocabulary and concepts the people living millennia ago didn’t. We can speak meaningfully (if partially) of the working of our minds, of language, of various religious experience, of economics, of the natural world in the micro and macro scale and much more besides. Little wonder we turn to figurative descriptions and the arts to help. Little wonder we relive them though ritual. Preaching is supposed to help explain or at least describe sacred encounters, but can only go so far with the words and gestures we have in common.

Nevertheless, once we have experience of the Holy (if we have it) and once we have some interpretive means for understanding it in our lives — and this interpretation will take on new meanings over the years — you have to do something with it. Growing into a greater likeness with God has responsibilities.

Universalists have not, historically, made much of the Feast of the Transfiguration. An exception is Edwin Hubble Chapin, long-time minister of the church now known as Fourth Universalist in New York. He described a painting in the Vatican by Raphael depicting the Transfiguration, and what its moral implications were.

Writing in his Living Words (1860), he had to paint his own pictures in words of what he saw. The first thing you would see is Jesus is blazing white garments, lifted up as if swimming in the air.

But [Rafael] saw what the apostles at that moment did not see, and in another portion of his picture has represented the scene at the foot of the hill, — the group that awaited the descent of Jesus, the poor possessed boy, writhing, and foaming, and gnashing his teeth, — his eyes, as some say, in their wild, rolling agony, already catching a glimpse of the glorified Christ above; the baffled disciples, the cavilling scribes, the impotent physicians, the grief-worn father, seeking in vain for help. Suppose Jesus had stayed upon the mount, what would have become of that group of want, and helplessness, and agony? Suppose Christ had remained in the brightness of that vision forever, — himself only a vision of glory, and not an example of toil, and sorrow, and suffering, and death, — alas! for the great world at large, waiting at the foot of the hill ; — the [280] groups of humanity in all ages: — the sin-possessed sufferers: the cavilling sceptics; the philosophers, with their books and instruments; the bereaved and frantic mourners in their need! (pp. 279-80)

Raphael tied the scene of the Transfiguration with the next passage in Matthew, where Jesus healed the boy with epilepsy and scolded the faithless around him. Chapin carried the point in his own ministry in New York. The experience of God demands a change, and that change demands positive action that shows that each of us are heirs to God, whether we know it or not. And it shows God that we have heard and seen.

Now, if you know your Moses, Elijah and Jesus, you’ll recall a span of forty days. It’s a biblical convention for a long period of time. Elijah survived forty days on the divinely provided food he ate. Jesus fasted in the desert for forty days. And Noah had his forty days of rain and flood when all the earth was destroyed.

Friends, starting this Wednesday, we are beginning our own forty days with the coming of Lent.

In our society, Lent has become something between a self-improvement opportunity and a running joke, if it is known or understood at all. This is fine, so long we see the forty days as a preparation for a persistent change in our lives. We wouldn’t give up cruelty for Lent, only to re-adopt it for Easter. At its best, Lenten discipline changes you for the better, putting your steps in a Godwards direction. So I charge you not simply to do better but to be better. If you choose a Lenten discipline, make it something practical than will stretch you, but you can accomplish. Tie it to the direction that you feel God leading you towards. If you do not have a clear sense of how God is directing you, make your discipline an act of discovery. Review your life, so as to get a better scope of your life. Learn from the example of others who have gone before you, both to test your self-examination and to encourage you.

And with renewed focus, you can be better by adopting those habits of love and mercy that the logic of this world can not readily understand. Or if it does understand it, it is through the evidence of our lives made glad, living in a way that honor loving kindness.

In short, we will be known by our love for one another, with love to spare and overflow.

•  Develop a platform plan by March 1, 2020
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• Inner Child – January 30
• Kel and Brother Coyote Make a Deal – February 15  

Facing facts

Have you ever really looked at projections for sea-level rise? On a map? Of where you live?

This morning I did. The map’s legend identified red as “land at risk.”

To the north of us, half of Vancouver, BC, was red. Including its busy international airport. When? In thirty years.

I looked south, to Seattle, where the city sits on land that rises straight up from the sea—on mountains whose feet are already underwater. Sea level rise will affect low-lying areas between Tacoma and Seattle, along the Seattle waterfront, and north of Seattle in Marysville, Everett, and Snohomish. The region’s main north-south highway, I-5, will be underwater, both south and north of the city, as will the city’s ferry docks.

Big changes, coming at us fast.

What will we do?

Mental strength—and particularly the ability to regulate our emotions, to respond rather than react—and climate change adaptation are inextricably linked.

We all know people with a deep and wide antisocial streak, a toxic amalgam of cynicism, narcissism, paranoia, and straight-up sociopathy. They look at climate projection maps and start planning how to survive. Not as a community. Not as a species. As individuals.

Plant your flag on higher ground. Prepare to defend it. Build an arsenal—and a bunker.

Most people play ostrich. Climate change? Ah, the weather’s always changing. We’ve always survived before. Don’t worry so much.

I lean toward anxiety and despair.

“OMG! The sky is falling! We’re all going to die! Suffer, and then die!” screams my Henny Penny brain.

“I know, I know,” groans my Eeyore brain. “And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Developing mental strength

As a species, we need to develop the kind of mental strength that says to our ruthless, survivalist brain, “Yeah, I know you’re looking out for number one. Did you know that working together with others is our best chance of survival?”

That says, “Um, excuse me, Ostrich. I know this is scary and you’d rather not think about it. But not thinking about it just makes the inevitable worse. Can we pull our heads out of the sand? Find other people to face facts with? It will be less scary if we’re not alone.”

That says, “Thank you, Henny Penny, for sounding the alarm. I’m sorry people are not paying attention, or doing exactly the wrong thing, or think that nothing can be done. You’re right to be scared. How about we find a few people who are paying attention, and trying to do the right thing? We’ll still be scared, but we’ll be working together to do what we can.”

That says, “Hey, Eeyore. That gloom and doom thing? Not what we need here at the end of the world. We need courage, and the best way to get courage is through camaraderie. Let’s find some friends, and get to work. We might die, but we’ll die doing our best, with friends at our side.”

The sky is falling. The water is rising. I’m working on my mental strength. I don’t have nearly enough—yet. I’m planning new career moves so I can help others become more mentally strong.

The sky is falling, and the water is rising. This is how I’m responding. How are you responding? Would you like to work together?

The post Climate change adaptation will require mental strength appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

Bluebird by Charles Bukowski
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
But I’m too tough for him
I say, stay in there
I’m not going to let anybody see you
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
But I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke
And the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks
Never know that he’s in there
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
But I’m too tough for him
I say
Stay down, do you want to mess me up?
You want to screw up the works?
You want to blow my book sales in Europe?
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
But I’m too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes
When everybody’s asleep
I say, I know that you’re there
So don’t be sad
Then I put him back
But he’s singing a little in there, I haven’t quite let him die
And we sleep together like that with our
Secret pact
And it’s nice enough to make a man
Weep
But I don’t weep
Do you?

Sermon: Hush

A couple months ago, my daughter was having an especially hard moment of being in 8th grade.  Feeling awkward. Insecure.    

I decided to show her a picture of me in 8th grade (which I will not be posting here), and I told her that if she knew what I was like when I was her age, she’d never feel awkward or insecure again. 

So I showed her, and immediately, she was like, wow.  You’re right mom.

Especially after I broke my leg skiing in November of 8th grade, and I had a full straight leg cast for four months – “Awkward” doesn’t cut it.

That heavy, clumsy cast experience (plus whatever was going on with my bangs) would’ve been enough to call 8th grade a big year for me.  But it didn’t end there. 

That same year, one of our family members came to live with us while she was pregnant. A lot of my memories that year are related to her pregnancy – rubbing her growing belly, watching her skin move like there was an alien inside her, laughing at her unusual cravings. 

And, looking at profiles from prospective couples, people who would be the baby’s parents, someday. 

See, her mom had decided to make an adoption plan for her child. So alongside all the other parts of that year, I also remember all the dreaming we did to create a future for this emerging human that I already loved.  A future where she would not know me.

I was at physical therapy (my cast finally removed) when the call came: the baby was coming. She came home a few days later – big brown eyes, healthy, beautiful. And for three months, she was ours. 

Until the day came, when we had to say goodbye.  I was old enough to understand, and of course I didn’t understand at all.  

I remember the feel of her head on my lips, the inhale and exhale of her skin. 

And then, I remember she was gone, and my stomach hurt. 

Or rather, I don’t remember my stomach hurting, at least not with my thinking brain. 

I feel my actual stomach hurting while I tell you this story.  It’s not nausea, it’s tension, like a fist in my gut.  

My breathing becomes shallow, and short. It’s not as intense as it was 30 years ago, after we said goodbye.  But I can still feel it. 

My mom, if you’ve met her, you know she’s a talker.  She believes in talking as a cure for most anything. So she made sure, we talked about this experience– before, during, after.  She sent us to a therapist where we talked some more.

So while this is a really formative story for me – and it’s not like I forgot about it, I didn’t actively think of it as unresolved – until 14 years ago.  Which is when we picked up my daughter from the hospital when she was 2 days old.  Because within a few days of Gracie living with us, my stomach started to hurt in exactly the same way it did when I was in 8th grade. 

My kids were both adopted through foster care, so there was about a year with Gracie where we didn’t know for sure if she would stay with us – with Josef it was more like 5 months – still, plenty long.  

During this time, we loved them already, claimed them; and we didn’t know for sure that they would stay. 

My stomach is beginning to clench a little, even now.

Last week, Sean talked about the power of naming our emotions, and taking hold of the story that has attached to them. The power of language to process and heal and grow through our feelings.  Which remains – true.    

And, what we also know, is: language has limits.  Language can only take us so far when it comes to describing our emotions, and even more, language can only go so far in processing or healing our emotions. 

Before the language, and the naming, there is the experience. Before the thinking brain attaches the story to the feeling, there is the body where the experience happens.    

Feelings happen first, in the body.  Before the words, or the meaning-making.   

This is why Sean asked us during the music last week to name the experience we were having in our bodies – first, before we give that experience a name. 

And it’s why my spiritual director asks me all the time, when I’m telling her about an emotional reaction I’m having: Where are you feeling that feeling in your body?

To which I often reply: I have no idea.   Or, I say, I feel it in my head.  I thought it in my brain…so, here….?

Actually, the first few times I first heard this question, I was like: what does that even mean? I thought it was a joke. 

Where do I feel a feeling in my body? Do people actually feel things in their body?

I mean, in the past couple months, I’ve been running again after a few years not running, and I feel that in my body. 

But – connecting emotional “ideas” from my brain – into a felt body experience – what does that even mean?     

My very patient teachers have helped me to break the question down a bit – first by offering some options – for how you might answer….    

For example, as you focus in on an emotional experience, in your body, you may notice an expansiveness. An ease.

Or, you might find numbness.  Floppiness. Weariness. 

Or, you might notice constriction.  Tightness. Pain. Energy. Warmth.

If a feeling is pretty alive, you might notice your heart beating faster, your breathing intensifying – or the opposite, like, you start to slow down, check out. 

All of these experiences are the work of the vagus nerve – the place where we first experience all emotions: Love.  Fear. Grief. Hope. Belonging. 

All of the things that make us human start with the vagus nerve. 

Which is maybe why somatic therapist and activist Resmaa Menakem calls it the Soul Nerve. 

The Soul Nerve connects to literally everything in us – from the throat to the lungs to the kidneys – everything – except the thinking, rational brain.  The Soul Nerve does not do “thinking.”  Instead, it does things like alerting the body to danger – especially by initiating the flight, fight or freeze response, regulating our breathing, our heart, our blood pressure.  Its other job is to do the opposite: to say to our bodies, you’re ok. You’re safe. 

Instead of consulting the thinking brain to decide: danger, or safety – the soul nerve mostly consults – our guts.  Literally, the soul nerve is all about “gut feelings.”

Which means my stomach ache was my soul nerve being all:

DANGER, DANGER!

 A lot of the time when my spiritual director asks me: where do you feel that in your body?

I have to say, honestly: I don’t.  I connect in with my body – and there’s just, nothing.

 This whole struggle can seem funny- I’ve spent many hours laughing with my sisters about it, they struggle with it too….but it also brings up a lot of shame, and judgment.    

I think: I should be more connected, more integrated – I’m a minister, a Unitarian Universalist minister.  I should’ve gotten over these anti-body messages that are clearly at the root of this disconnection, messages from my childhood, from Catholicism, from the culture. I am fully grown, queer, feminist – a mom of two middle schoolers.  What is wrong with me?   

These were the very loud messages in my head at the workshop I attended last year about this time, with Resmaa Menakem, as he was telling us to locate our feelings in our bodies. 

The silence in the room was thick and expectant, and I waited.   But – nothing.  Except my head, and the voices saying I should be better. 

But then he said:  If you’re struggling right now, I want to tell you, that you’re not defective, you’re just protective. Your body, probably across generations, has learned to protect itself; your mind has learned to protect your sense of self – by disassociating yourself from yourself.  These feelings you are trying to feel were at one time – truly dangerous. And the body will do anything to ensure its own safety. Including putting a hard barrier between your mind, and your body –  it’s not defective, it’s protective. 

Hearing this, draws me out of judgment, and lures me instead into compassion even for myself – a feeling I can almost feel in my body. 

When we remember, as in Charles Bukowski’s poem – all the ways we say to the bluebird in our heart: “I’m too tough for you, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you” – 

We’re not defective, just protective.  

Especially for men, in our culture – when we say: “stay down, do you want to mess me up?….You want to blow up my book sales in Europe?”

Not defective.  Protective. 

Remembering this opens up compassion, starting with ourselves. 

Resmaa tellsthe story of his grandmother’s hands.   He used to rub them for her, when they hurt.  Her hands were rough, and hard, too big for her small body.

One day he asked how they got like that. She explained: she started picking cotton when she was four, “the cotton plant has pointed burrs in it. When you reach your hand in, the burrs rip it up.”

When she first started, her hands were torn, and bloody; but then her hands got thicker and harder and bigger – until she could reach in without any bleeding. It had been a long time since she’d picked cotton, but her hands didn’t ever change back.  

I try to remember this story when someone is being particularly cold, short, calloused – I try to imagine that maybe sometime in the past, this same behavior was helpful, maybe it even saved their life. It moves me out of judgment, into compassion.

Especially when I pair it with another insight –this one from psychologist Noel Larson – he says, “If something is hysterical, it’s usually historical.” 

He means: if someone is having a reaction that has far more (or far less) energy than what the situation seems to call for, it’s likely because it’s bringing up un-processed – or what Resmaa calls “unmetabolized” feelings from the past….if it’s hysterical, it’s usually historical….the soul nerve in its unthinking ways, often seeks to repeat whatever has been left unresolved, it tries to find healing – for things from our past, and from even farther back than that. 

Over the past few decades, neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda has been studying the physical effects of our biggest feelings, by studying veterans, and holocaust survivors, and survivors of 9/11. In each of these, she found very similar physical manifestations of their stress, and trauma – memory loss, muscle weakness, chronic anxiety and depression – all of which she found, they pass on to their children, and grandchildren.

As she says, “the trauma itself is inherited.” 

Inherited first through the embodied behaviors of those whose bodies carry the original trauma. The ways their bodies express all that depression, anger, anxiety – the impact this has on their children – the new trauma the children experience. 

And also, trauma is inherited literally in the body – through biology. Yehuda’s work discovered that grandchildren of holocaust survivors –show the same genetic markers as if they experienced the holocaust itself. This same pattern is seen across generations in African American communities, Jews, Native Americans, and although it hasn’t been studied as extensively, surely it is present in today’s immigrant community. 

Still, Yehuda is quick to point out that the impact she’s describing is not confined to large scale traumatic events – whenever any of us experiences an overwhelming change that floods our system, our bodies, our soul nerve – it can take up residence in our systems in the same ways. 

Overwhelming feelings like this, she says, often “reset and recalibrate multiple biologic systems in an enduring way.”  

Feelings happen in our bodies, and when they are overwhelming and under-processed, they are passed on person, to person, across generations – biologically inscribed, inherited – like a contagion –which we should not take to mean that these same feelings are our destiny. 

Actually, it’s just the opposite. 

The body does not just contain painful, traumatic feelings afterall; the body also holds resilience.  Intelligence. Joy. Hope.  The capacity for growth, and change.  In our bodies lives a visceral longing for freedom.  

With practice, we can engage the soul nerve in its wisdom – rather than only its wounds. 

Especially through the use of ancient practices in a community setting – practices that somatic teachers call “settling.”  Things like singing, or humming.  Swaying, or rocking our bodies. Stuff we do in church – I mean, “ancient practices in a community setting” !!  

Settling the soul nerve so that we are not perpetually in in flight, fight, freeze – or flood – is not in and of itself healing.  But is a pre-requisite to healing. 

This is important, let me say it again.  

Settling ourselves – becoming calm, feeling safe, peaceful; remaining connected, and present – this is actually not healing. We often seem to think it is – that if we can get to serenity, peace – that we are healing.  But really, it’s the pre-requisite to healing. 

Practicing settling when we are not in distress or discomfort, allows us to more easily feel settled when distress and discomfort arises.  We learn to tolerate discomfort, without shutting down. We teach our soul nerve to trust that even when we are uncomfortable, we are OK.  

Which in turn allows us to go towards what might otherwise see, TOO MUCH, TOO PAINFUL…we build a capacity to feel the feelings as they actually are, in our bodies – and by feeling the feelings we metabolize them, heal them.

To do this, we might use ritual, art, movement… likely many of the things we named in community time – these practices that engage our bodies. Remembering that it’s not just trauma that gets transmitted, but healing, too.   

One more story.

My father’s father – his name was Gus, was 7 when his father took a train ride across the country, promising to bring him back a special toy.  But while he was gone, he got an infection, and he died – so he never returned.  A few months later, my grandpa’s mother also became ill – she died.  My grandpa had 8 siblings, and when their parents died, within a few short months of each other, all 9 were sent out to foster families, across three states – they didn’t meet again until they were adults. 

When we brought Gracie home, and I loved her immediately, and my stomach clenched with anticipatory grief – I didn’t think about my Grandpa, or the loss he must have held in his body his whole life.  Any more than I thought of myself in 8th grade. 

And yet right there, as my stomach tightened, I was given a chance to heal not just for myself but for two generations back. To stay present there, to feel the anxiety and the grief. 

And even now each time I choose to lean in to the experience of loving my children -which is, even now they are middle schoolers, often an embodied experience….to feel all all the feelings, to not shut down, or close off from the risk, the grief, the fear – it feels like small way to metabolize at least some of these experiences of grief and overwhelming loss that live in my body -like the bluebird longing for freedom – feelings from my own past, and from the past I have inherited. 

We all carry in our bodies feelings like this, our own, our inheritance – stories that words cannot help or touch.  In the silence, and in the space between us, our bodies have everything we need to heal, we have everything we need to release everything in us that longs to be free. 

• Agape – love of humanity.
• Storge – love of family
• Philia -- love of friends
• Pragma – love which endures.
• Philautia – self love
• Ludus – flirtatious/playful love
• Eros – romantic and erotic love.

• Short paragraphs and headings, as you see here. This works well for informational blogs; not so much for narrative.
• An SEO tag in the title. I have a few that I use for my blogs, although I sometimes forget these because they're new to me.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

– Abraham Lincoln
2nd Inaugural Address (3-4-1865)

As everybody knows, my family, our great country, and your President, have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people. They have done everything possible to destroy us, and by so doing, very badly hurt our nation. They know what they are doing is wrong, but they put themselves far ahead of our great country.

– Donald Trump
at the National Prayer Breakfast (2-6-2020)

This week’s featured post is “Let’s Talk Each Other Down“. Think of it as a counterweight to all the depressing or panic-worthy stuff in this summary.

This week everybody was talking about Iowa and New Hampshire

OK, Iowa was a mess. But there’s a reliable paper trail, so there’s good reason to believe the result. Tomorrow is the New Hampshire primary, which I am amazed to discover I have not covered at all. I have not been to a single candidate event this year, despite living just over the border in Massachusetts.

To a large extent that’s because the main thing that matters to me is electing Not Trump. I have likes and opinions, but I’m all-in for whoever gets the nomination. Anyway, here’s one comment about each major contender:

• Biden’s fourth-place finish in Iowa was a huge disappointment, and he doesn’t look to be running well in NH either. He’s counting on his black support to get him back in the race in South Carolina. I’ll bet Kamala Harris is kicking herself for getting out, because there is no obvious inheritor of Biden’s black support if he fails.
• Bloomberg is running such an unorthodox campaign that it’s hard to know whether his strategy is working or not. But he gets Trump’s goat better than any other candidate, and that has to count for something.
• Buttigieg was the biggest beneficiary of Iowa. Sanders won the popular vote, but Buttigieg was the big surprise and wound up with the most delegates. His NH polls shot up afterwards, largely, I think, because his Iowa performance gave people who already like him a reason to take his candidacy seriously. (Likeability is one of those nebulous concepts that is easy to abuse and hides a bunch of prejudices. But for what it’s worth, Pete is the candidate I feel the most affection for. That doesn’t necessarily mean I plan to vote for him, though.) It’s hard to tell whether this week’s debate blunted his momentum or not.
• Klobuchar is the tortoise in this race. She also got on the map in Iowa, and is probably the second choice of a lot of Biden’s white supporters. She’s polling near zero in South Carolina, though, so she needs to do well in New Hampshire to stay in the race.
• Sanders got more first-round votes than any other candidate in Iowa, but his case for beating Trump didn’t do so well. The theory of how Sanders wins in November is that (even though he may lose some voters in the center) he raises turnout by inspiring a lot of new voters to come to the polls. But turnout in Iowa was not much different from 2016, and much lower than 2008, when Obama really did inspire people. He needs a win in NH, but he also needs to win the right way, with a big turnout.
• Warren is the president I would appoint, if the Universe would grant me that power. She’s got to be disappointed in her distant third-place finish in Iowa, and recent polls have her running third in NH as well. She was briefly the front-runner last fall, but it’s hard to see where her break-out state is.

Josh Marshall makes a prediction of how Trump will smear Bernie, should he become the front-runner. He also pre-debunks the smear.

and the final impeachment trial result

The biggest surprise of the Senate vote was that Trump’s acquittal wasn’t a party-line vote, and that the lone defector was a Republican, not a Democrat. After lots of speculation that Joe Manchin or some other red-state Democrat would find a way to excuse Trump, the Democrats held firm, and Mitt Romney found his conscience.

I’ve been a bit appalled at how uncharitable many of my social media friends have been, trying to see Romney’s choice as some kind of 2024 calculation. That seems really unlikely to me. Mitt is smart enough to realize that no matter how badly Trump blows up, nobody is going to get the 2024 Republican nomination by being anti-Trump. Assuming Trump even bothers to observe the term-limit rule — I mean, the Constitution is just a piece of paper — the next Republican nominee is either a Trump successor (Pence? Ivanka? Don Jr.?) or somebody who has stayed conveniently off the national stage (like Paul Ryan or a governor).

I think Mitt is at a point in his career where he sees History staring him in the face, and doesn’t want to be remembered as Trump’s accomplice. I’m amazed that more late-in-their-careers Republicans haven’t looked at things that way. Lamar Alexander, for example, has just guaranteed that none of the things he’s proud of will be remembered. The headline of his obituary will be that he shut down the witnesses to Trump’s crimes.

Mitt’s vote has provided contrast for the cowardice of the other Republican senators. We can hope other Republicans will be emboldened to take a stand as well.

and reprisals against those involved in Trump’s impeachment

The Washington Post put President Clinton’s and President Trump’s post-acquittal speeches side-by-side. They could not be more different. Clinton was short, contrite, and tried to put conflict behind him. (“I believe any person who asks for forgiveness has to be prepared to give it.”)

Trump, by contrast, was long-winded and dishonest, and took no responsibility for the acts that started this whole national trauma.

Trump repeatedly called Democrats involved in the impeachment “evil,” “corrupt” and “vicious and mean.” He railed against the Russian investigation, former FBI director James B. Comey, and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, adding, “It was all bullshit.”

He seemed poised for revenge, and soon began to take it. Donald Jr. made the threat explicit:

Allow me a moment to thank—and this may be a bit of a surprise—Adam Schiff. Were it not for his crack investigation skills, @realDonaldTrump might have had a tougher time unearthing who all needed to be fired. Thanks, Adam!

After the show trial, the purge. Ambassador Gordon Sondland lost his job, as did Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman at the National Security Council. Somewhat stranger, Vindman’s brother Yevgeny was also fired from his job as an NSC lawyer. But that also fits the Stalinist pattern: Once you’ve been judged to be an Enemy of the People, your relatives are also suspect. That’s probably why Mitt Romney’s niece, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, has been so quick to declare her fealty to the regime.

Joshua Geltzer and Ryan Goodman comment on the Just Security blog:

Some have suggested that the outcry sparked by Friday’s reprisals was overblown. After all, any president is, on some level, entitled to surround himself at the White House and be represented overseas by those he trusts. But the question raised by Friday’s purge is: trusts to do what? And that’s where these actions raise serious concerns for American democracy: because Trump increasingly wants an executive branch that’ll serve not the United States of America but Donald J. Trump personally.

Trump was punishing key witnesses for doing precisely what the United States Congress swore them in to do: explain what they’d seen and heard.

… [E]xploitation of America’s diplomatic, military, and law enforcement mechanisms was the very usurpation of power that got Trump impeached in the first place. At the heart of the Ukraine extortion scheme was Trump and his personal lawyer’s appropriation of those mechanisms for political benefit and to the detriment of the country’s national security interests. Having survived impeachment, Trump now seeks to accelerate the redirection of America’s instruments of power into his own instruments of power.

Trump is not the only Republican engaged in post-impeachment reprisals. During the trial, Senator Rand Paul on numerous occasions named someone he claimed was the whistleblower whose complaint started the Ukraine investigation.

Friday, Tom Mueller (author of the book Crisis of Conscience about the history of whistleblowing) wrote a complaint to the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, explaining how Senator Paul’s behavior violated the law.

Senator Paul’s actions constituted a retaliatory outing of a government witness—which is criminal conduct. Federal criminal law prohibits the obstruction of justice, and provides that “[w]hoever knowingly, with the intent to retaliate, takes any action harmful to any person, including interference with the lawful employment or livelihood of any person, for providing to a law enforcement officer any truthful information relating to the commission or possible commission of any Federal offense, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.”

Paul’s outing of the whistleblower occurred not just on the floor of the Senate (where it might be constitutionally protected) but also outside the Senate and on Twitter.

If Senator Paul goes unpunished, this will be the kind of weakening of the law typical of the descent towards fascism. In the late stages of fascism, criticism of the Leader is punished by the State directly. But in earlier stages, critics simply lose the protection of the laws and can be attacked by followers of the Leader without consequence. When the Brownshirts come to beat them up, the police watch and do nothing.

Speaking of brownshirts: Immediately after Romney’s guilty vote, CPAC chair Matt Schlapp disinvited him from the flagship conservative convention. Yesterday, Schlapp said “I would actually be afraid for his physical safety” if he showed up.

and the State of the Union

The State of the Union address was Tuesday. Trump stayed on script, but the script was full of lies and exaggerations.

At the end of the State of the Union address, Nancy Pelosi very decisively ripped up Trump’s speech. For some reason, this display of disrespect resounded across right-wing media, as if this were most uncivil thing to happen in months. I agree with Trae Crowder, a.k.a. the Liberal Redneck:

The level of disrespect she showed by, like, ripping up the president’s speech at the State of the Union like that — it’s nowhere near disrespectful enough. … This is the most disrespectful motherfucker on Planet Earth.

Medals of Freedom are essentially lifetime achievement awards that presidents give to people who make Americans proud. Usually that means other Americans, but sometimes a medal goes to a foreigner (Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking) who just makes us proud to be human.

Presidents have complete discretion to pick whoever they want, and for the most part they’ve done a good job. Over the years MoF awards have gone to authors like John Steinbeck and Harper Lee, artists like Georgia O’Keefe and Andrew Wyeth, musicians like Count Basie and Bob Dylan, and businessmen like Henry Ford II and IBM-founder Tom Watson. Computer-programming pioneer Grace Hopper got one, and so did photographer Ansel Adams. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel got one for being the conscience of the world.

In baseball’s Hall of Fame not everyone is Babe Ruth, and the same thing happens with Medals of Freedom. They’ve also gone to people who were famous and deserving of respect but not legendary, like actor Tom Hanks, Western-genre author Louis L’Amour, and Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. It happens. Presidents have their own idiosyncratic tastes. Some awards looked fine at the time, but shameful in retrospect, like President Bush giving one to Bill Cosby in 2002.

Well, Tuesday during the State of the Union address, President Trump awarded one to Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh has been a purveyor of hate and lies for more than 30 years. Who can forget his branding of Georgetown student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” for the unpardonable sin of defending ObamaCare’s contraception mandate?

So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.

Feel proud yet? How about when he accused Michael J. Fox of exaggerating the symptoms of his Parkinson’s Disease? Or when he made up a series of “facts” in order to falsely blame measles outbreaks on immigrant children? Or his addiction to prescription drugs, which resulted in a settlement with the State of Florida to get them to drop charges for doctor shopping?

Politifact has looked into 42 of Limbaugh’s controversial statements, and found zero of them to be entirely true. Thirty-five were rated Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire.

In short, if I were Sidney Poitier or Buzz Aldrin or some other living recipient of the Medal, I’d be looking at that award with considerably less pride than I did a week ago.

Not all of Trump’s awardees have cheapened the Medal. (I thought NBA legends Bob Cousy and Jerry West were worthy choices.) But a number of them look like deliberate attempts to debase the award: ethically challenged Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese; Arthur Laffer, creator of the discredited “Laffer Curve” theory that tax cuts increase revenue; and Miriam Adelson, wife of GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson.

This is some of the hidden damage Trump is doing to America. Even if we get rid of him in November, it will take a while to recover the value of things he has desecrated.

and you also might be interested in …

David Fahrenthold has found yet another way that Trump is profiteering off the presidency: He’s making the Secret Service stay at his properties, and then overcharging them.

President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties — billing U.S. taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night, according to federal records and people who have seen receipts. …

“If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Trump’s son Eric said in a Yahoo Finance interview last year.

Are you surprised to learn that’s a lie? However, the really scandalous part of the story is the extent to which Trump has kept the public in the dark about his self-dealing.

The Secret Service is required to tell Congress twice a year about what it spends to protect Trump at his properties. But since 2016, it has only filed two of the required six reports, according to congressional offices. The reasons, according to Secret Service officials: key personnel left and nobody picked up the job. Even in those two reports, the lines for Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago were blank.

A somewhat technical but worth-reading NYT article about Instex, a device Germany, France, and Britain set up to avoid US sanctions on countries and businesses that trade with Iran. It’s not working, but the lengths the US is going to in order to keep it from working is a lesson in how hard it is to be an independent US ally these days. Either you give up sovereignty and let Trump write your foreign policy, or the full economic fury of the United States will be unleashed on you. Sooner or later, our former allies will realize they need to work with China to balance our power.

China’s National Health Commission announced the 97 people died of coronavirus yesterday, more than any previous daily total. That brought the overall Chinese death toll to 908.

and let’s close with an inside joke

In order to understand this, you need to know the stories of my people.

Looking around this week — in the media, among my friends, inside my own head — I observed that a lot of people are freaking out. Because Trump was acquitted, because he has started his revenge tour, because Republicans know he abused his power and don’t care, because the Democrats are doing it all wrong, because a virus is spreading out of control, because the State of the Union was full of lies, because both the National Prayer Breakfast and the Medal of Freedom have been desecrated, because a US senator willfully and illegally endangered the life of a whistleblower, because it’s been 65 degrees in Antarctica, because the Attorney General has given Trump carte blanche to violate campaign laws, because a billion-dollar disinformation project has begun, and because, because, because.

There’s been no lack of stuff to freak out about, if that’s what you feel inclined to do. You’re not wrong. I can’t tell you that all those horrors aren’t happening. But let me try to talk you down in a different way.

In general, people freak out for a very simple reason: They’ve been telling themselves “It’s all going to be OK” when they don’t really know that. When events start to crack that false sense of certainty, one natural reaction is to flip over completely to: “We’re all doomed.”

Allow me to point something out: You don’t really know that either.

So if you come to me hoping I’ll tell you it’s all going to be OK — sorry, I can’t do that. But I can tell you this: Uncertainty is the natural state of human beings. Maybe we’re doomed, but maybe things will be OK — or something in between, more likely. That’s how life is and always has been. It might be true that the arc of the Universe bends towards Justice, but you can never count on that bend being visible in any given lifetime. If you’ve comfortably lived in denial of that reality until this week, I’m sorry you had to find out like this. It’s not really my fault, but never mind: Accept my apology anyway, because probably nobody else will offer one.

You know something that’s even worse? You might be in this state of uncertainty for the rest of your life. Maybe we’re doomed, but maybe we’re not. Nobody really knows. Democracy in America might soon be over, or it might get a reprieve. Truth might finally drown in a sea of disinformation, or maybe it will figure out how to swim in that sea. People are endlessly surprising. Just when you think they’re hopeless, they do something hopeful. And vice versa.

So: Breathe. Breathe again, to make sure that one wasn’t just luck. Keep breathing. You can do this, at least for now.

And try to accept something: You don’t need to know that it’s going to be OK.

You can do something to make things better without being sure it’s going to work. Because … well, what else are you going to do? (I don’t know if you’ve ever tried giving up, but I can tell you a little about that too: It’s no fun either. Sometimes when you get worn down, you might think that waiting helplessly for inevitable destruction would be an nice relief. But trust me. It isn’t.)

Affirmations can be useful in a situation like this, but only if you choose to affirm things that are at least vaguely believable. Try this one: I don’t know that things are going to be OK, but I don’t need to know. I can try to do good things anyway.

Now say it out loud. “I don’t know that things are going to be OK, but I don’t need to know. I can try to do good things anyway.”

Maybe one or two of the things you’ve been trying to do really are doomed, and maybe that’s finally become obvious to you. You can shift your effort to something else. There’s no lack of things to do that still might be useful.

Because you don’t know what’s going to happen. We all like to think that we do, but we don’t.

Now let me tell you something about the particular challenge we’re facing now: Trump. At his core, Trump is a bluffer. He puffs himself up to make people think he’s bigger and richer and stronger than he really is. It’s the only trick he knows, but sometimes it works: He scares people into giving up or going along. (That’s what we just saw happen in the Senate. You don’t really believe that all those Republicans thought keeping him in office was good for the country, do you? Or even good for their party, or for themselves? They got scared, so they went along.)

When something like that works for him, he uses it to puff himself up further and scare more people. That’s what’s been going on this week.

Don’t help him.

Don’t run around scaring other people about how big and powerful he is. When a bluffer gets on a roll, you can never predict how far it will go. But we do know one thing about bluffers: When their empires start to collapse, they collapse quickly, because each failure causes more people to think “I don’t have to be scared of this guy.”

You can never predict exactly when that process is going to start. The balloon always looks biggest just before it pops.

Steve Almond put it like this:

We must organize rather than agonize.

This optimism should not be confused with naiveté. We all know that the Trump regime will do everything in its power to rig the 2020 election. We’ll see more voter suppression, more fearmongering, more Russian trolling.

Nihilism remains the GOP’s ultimate Trump card. They are counting on citizens of good faith to give up, to quit the field, to say “who cares?” So is the party’s most reliable ally, Vladimir Putin. And so are the oligarchs, domestic and foreign, who have converted our planet into a vast and decaying casino.

Don’t let them sucker you.

Be a fanatical optimist. Make a plan. Take action. Listen to your conscience. Vote.

A brighter dawn might await all of us, but we have to work for it.

I’ll quibble with him using the word optimism rather than hope. (I’ve written about that elsewhere.) But the key word there is might. If you’re waiting for a guarantee, for a political almanac that will tell you exactly when the sun will rise and the tide will turn, you’ll keep waiting and you’ll do nothing. Don’t go that way.

Be hopeful. Throw your effort out there and see what happens. Because you never know.

This was a week that seemed to get to a lot of people. It’s Trump’s nature to puff himself up to look as big and scary as possible, and his acquittal by the Senate blew some more air into him. So he’s out there making threats and kicking better men (like Colonel Vindman) to the curb. At the same time, the Democrats had a PR disaster in Iowa, which got a lot of folks thinking “What if we don’t beat this guy?”

The point of Trump puffing himself up is to scare people into giving up or giving in. Like mice, we’ll freeze and make ourselves small and maybe we’ll survive. That strategy is deep down there in our mammal DNA, and at times like this it pops up and almost sounds reasonable. Why we’re in this sorry position now is that dozens of Republican senators froze and made themselves small.

But that strategy is the reason why there’s no Mouse Republic. Democracy is about envisioning what could happen if we all came together, and then all coming together around that vision. It’s a fundamentally courageous way of approaching the world, and it’s precisely what the Trumps and Hitlers and Caligulas have tried to scare us out of all through history. That’s what FDR was on about when he said, “We have nothing to fear but Fear itself.”

We need to come together and get big, not stay separate and get small.

So anyway, I decided that the best thing we could all do for each other today is try to talk ourselves down. That’s the point of the featured post “Let’s Talk Each Other Down”. It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary, though, has to cover all the scary things that make us want to curl into a ball, so it does: the acquittal, the revenge tour, the mess in Iowa, the virus, the State of the Union, and a lot more. Then I close with a reference to my favorite Star Trek episode. That should be out before noon.

Witch is a hat I wear
on Halloween; five dollars at Goodwill
got me one inhabited by spiders and a mouse.

Witch is a hat I wear but not usually out loud;
it shows up in blurts, in unavoidable lurches,
in hunches, in stubborn rebellion,
in transgression, in escape,
in exile.

Witch is a hat I wear, like Emily:
tell the truth, but tell it slant:
the truth must dazzle gradually.

Witch is a hat I wear, like Julian:
power focused by constraint.
All shall be well, little hazelnut.
All shall be well, beloved.

Witch is a hat I wear, like Hildegard:
scribbling, drawing, racing to catch enough
of what the mind sees and hears.

Witch is a hat I wear in the forest, in the garden,
when I gather eggs from my chickens,
when I walk with my goats.

Witch is a hat I wear when I cast my cards,
when I read Scripture with a heretic’s eye,
when I throw down the tablets
and grind the calf to dust.

Witch is a hat I wear—
do I dare?
Yes, I dare.

Witch is a hat I dare
to wear.

The post Witch is a hat I wear appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

• Honorable Mention in 48th New Millennium Writing Awards, Runner up in Cook Publishing 2019 Short Story Contest 
• Published in A3 Journal, by Riza Press (online) and Submittable Stories (online). 
• Second place in 12 Stories 2019 Contest.       

The proper procedure, the gathering of evidence — these things mean nothing, not anymore. Not since Hitler. He cuts through these decadent superfluities and shows us that the conclusion is everything, Gunther. You of all people should understand this. The important thing in concluding a case successfully is actually concluding it.

– SS General Johann Rattenhuber,
as fictionalized in Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr

Will we pursue the search for truth, or will we dodge, weave, and evade?

— Senator Mitch McConnell,
discussing investigations of President Clinton, 2-12-1998

This week’s featured posts are “If Obama …” and “Jared’s Plan for Mideast Peace“.

This week everybody was talking about impeachment

Friday, the Senate voted not to hear any witnesses or subpoena any documents. The vote was 51-49, with Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and all 47 Democrats voting to hold a real trial. The other 51 Republicans voted to join Trump’s obstruction conspiracy.

it was predictable (I predicted it Tuesday on Facebook) that the number of Republican crossovers would be either two or many. If a third Republican voted to hear witnesses the motion would still have failed, but then all 50 Republicans voting against a real trial would be personally responsible. (“You, Cory Gardner, could have made the difference and let the American people hear what John Bolton had to say, but you joined the cover-up instead.”) If exactly four voted with the Democrats, each of them would be held personally responsible by Trump’s base. Nobody wanted that kind of responsibility, so it had to be two or many.

As it is, the only surprising thing was that the Senate didn’t go straight into an acquittal vote Friday by the dark of night. Instead, Senators will get the opportunity to make speeches explaining their positions before voting to acquit Trump on Wednesday.

I intend the quote at the top of the page as a comment on the Republican approach to this trial: The conclusion was fore-ordained, and nothing mattered other than getting there. Don’t think about the evidence, don’t try to find out what happened, don’t concern yourself with the good of the country — just get to the conclusion, because that’s all that counts. It’s fundamentally a fascist approach to justice, so I think the Nazi comparisons are appropriate.

Mitt Romney’s vote to call witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial had immediate consequences: It got him explicitly uninvited from CPAC 2020, the flagship convention of what used to be the conservative movement. Not even his niece would defend him. If she did, maybe she’d become an Enemy of the People too.

Romney’s expulsion just underlines something that should be obvious anyway: Today’s “conservative” movement is no longer about conservative principles, or any principles at all. It’s a cult of personality centered on Donald Trump. Romney’s vote didn’t subvert conservatism in any way, but it did inconvenience the Great Orange Führer. So Mitt is excommunicated.

Alan Dershowitz’s opinion that Trump’s misdeeds are not impeachable represents a complete reversal of the opinion he held during the Clinton impeachment. But he explains the difference like this:

[Then] I simply accepted the academic consensus on an issue that was not on the front burner at the time. But because this impeachment directly raises the issue of whether criminal behavior is required, I have gone back and read all the relevant historical material as nonpartisan academics should always do and have now concluded that the framers did intend to limit the criteria for impeachment to criminal type acts akin to treason, bribery, and they certainly did not intend to extend it to vague and open-ended and non-criminal accusations such as abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Tuesday, Josh Marshall pulled no punches in his assessment:

To put it baldly, if it’s a topic and area of study you know nothing about and after a few weeks of cramming you decide that basically everyone who’s studied the question is wrong, there’s a very small chance you’ve rapidly come upon a great insight and a very great likelihood you’re an ignorant and self-regarding asshole.

Then, in the Q&A period Wednesday, Dershowitz went completely off the rails:

[I]f a hypothetical president of the United States said to a hypothetical leader of a foreign country, “unless you build a hotel with my name on it, and unless you give me a million dollar kickback, I will withhold the funds.” That’s an easy case. That’s purely corrupt and in the purely private interest.

But a complex middle case is, “I want to be elected. I think I’m a great president. I think I’m the greatest president there ever was. If I’m not elected the national interest will suffer greatly.” That cannot be impeachable.

A lot of people misrepresented this doctrine as saying that the president can do anything to get elected, and it’s OK. Bad as it is, it doesn’t quite go that far. A better explanation is here.

and Jared’s Mideast “Peace” plan

I originally just wanted a quick note about this, but it got out of hand and became its own post.

and the Iowa caucus

It’s tonight, and I have no idea who will win. Bernie Sanders seems to have the late momentum, but the polling is really tight. The RCP polling average has Sanders at 24.2%, Biden 20.2%, Buttigieg 16.4%, Warren 15.6%, and Klobuchar 8.6%.

and Brexit finally happened

It became official in London Friday night at 11, which was midnight in Brussels. The United Kingdom is no longer part of the European Union. There is still a lot to work out: an UK/EU trade agreement, trade arrangements with other countries that are used to dealing with the UK as part of the EU, whether Scotland will seek independence and rejoin the EU, and so forth. But at least the uncertainty is over and the adjustment can begin. I’m reminded of a quote from the South African author Alan Paton:

Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

and the Coronavirus is still spreading

The latest numbers say that 361 Chinese have died from the virus. That already makes it deadlier than the 2002 SARS outbreak, which killed 349 people in mainland China. There are more than 17,000 confirmed cases.

Large parts of the Chinese economy have shut down in response to the virus, and it’s anybody’s guess how big a hit the world economy will take. Lots of manufactured goods contain some part that is made in China and nowhere else, so it’s hard to say how far the ripple effects will go. And if your company sells products in China, your financial plan may take a hit.

you also might be interested in …

This week three news stories made Trump’s border wall look a little less “impenetrable” than advertised. Wednesday, a section of it blew down in a windstorm. (We knew that coyotes were helping migrants sneak across the border, but now it looks like the Big Bad Wolf has gotten involved as well.) Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the wall is vulnerable to flash floods, and so it will need flood gates that will have to be left open for months at a time. Also on Thursday, US officials announced the discovery of a tunnel under the border; it’s 70 feet underground and goes for nearly a mile.

Previous articles have noted how easy it is to saw through the wall or climb over it.

I’m not sure how I missed this Vox video “Why Obvious Lies Make Great Propaganda” when it came out in August, 2018. It examines the “Firehose of Falsehoods” propaganda technique, which was pioneered by Putin before it was adopted by Trump.

Unlike most propaganda, the lies in the firehose aren’t intended to be credible. The point is not to convince people that your lies are true, but to demonstrate that reality has no power to control what you say. Ultimately, the goal is to reduce everything to a struggle: There is no True or False, only Our Side vs. Their Side.

A justice of the peace in Waco has been refusing to perform same-sex marriages, despite being the only marriage-performing JP in town. When the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct gave her an official warning, she sued. She is seeking $100K in damages. The state attorney general is refusing to defend the Commission in court, claiming that this is a “religious liberty” issue.

Once again, “religious liberty” being used as a code-word for Christian special rights. Imagine, for comparison, that a devout Hindu health inspector refused to sign any permits to open restaurants that serve beef. It’s absurd to think the Texas AG would stand up for his non-Christian religious liberty. “Religious liberty” is for conservative Christians, not for anybody else.

My position: I think public officials should either do their jobs, implement reasonable workarounds that are invisible to the public they serve, or find new jobs. No citizen should ever go to a public office, only to be told that they can’t be served because some official’s “religious liberty” allows him or her to discriminate against that citizen.

The Trump administration rolled back Obama’s restriction on the use of land mines because … . I got nothing; it just looks like evil for the sake of evil.

Well, I don’t exactly have nothing, I have an attack of paranoia: What if this is a prelude to mining the southern border? I haven’t heard anybody in the administration threaten to do this, so my fear is based on nothing right now.

In spite of an $28 billion dollar federal bailout, farm bankruptcies were higher in 2019 than in any year since 2011.

Six more countries have been added to Trump’s travel ban, including Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa.

Every week I could do a bunch of Trump-is-stupid stories, but I don’t think they serve much purpose. Occasionally, though, one is actually funny.

So after the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl last night — in a great game, BTW — Trump tweeted congratulations for how well they “represented the Great State of Kansas”. (The tweet was later removed.) The problem: Kansas City straddles the Kansas/Missouri border, and the Chiefs play on the Missouri side.

Recalling Trump’s hurricane-threatening-Alabama fiasco, somebody on Facebook came up with a Sharpie solution.

and let’s close with something backwards (or not)

Weird Al’s song of palindromes: “Bob“.

It’s such a simple idea: If the Palestinians just surrender all their claims and accept whatever Israel is willing to give them, then there will be peace!
Why didn’t somebody think of this sooner?

As soon as the Palestinians realize how easily they can achieve peace — just give up — I’m sure they’ll get on board with the “Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People” the Trump administration unveiled Tuesday. How can they refuse if Jared Kushner keeps sweet-talking them like this?

You have five million Palestinians who are really trapped because of bad leadership. So what we’ve done is we’ve created an opportunity for their leadership to either seize or not. If they screw up this opportunity — which, again, they have a perfect track record of missing opportunities — if they screw this up, I think they will have a very hard time looking the international community in the face, saying they’re victims, saying they have rights.

Such a charmer, that young man. I wonder if he was this endearing when he proposed to Ivanka. (“Say yes. You don’t want this relationship to fail like all your others have.”) Later on in the same interview, we get to this:

The Palestinian leadership has to ask themselves a question: Do they want to have a state? Do they want to have a better life? If they do, we have created a framework for them to have it, and we’re going to treat them in a very respectful manner. If they don’t, then they’re going to screw up another opportunity like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.

Can’t you just feel the respect? Why wouldn’t you want to make a deal with somebody who sees you as a perennial screw-up?

Of course, Jared’s “state” is a euphemism for something far less than a state. As the map above shows, it is a collection of isolated regions, two of which are connected by a fantasy tunnel. Amir Tibon describes it like this in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

The solution that the Trump plan offers to this situation is the creation of a Palestinian “state” that could potentially be established four years from now, in the areas of the West Bank that will not be annexed by Israel. This future state, however, will have none of the actual characteristics of a state. The streets of all of its cities, towns and villages, as well as the roads connecting them, will be under the full control of the military of another state – Israel. It will have no control over its borders, which will also be controlled by Israel.

In addition, this state, despite Trump’s claim that it will have territorial continuity, will in fact be dissected by Israeli settlements that will remain as “enclaves” inside its territory and will be under full Israeli sovereignty. This means that Palestinian citizens of the future “state” could still stand at Israeli checkpoints – not at the border points between their state and Israel, but well inside their own state, between one town and the next. The official reason for these checkpoints could easily be given as the need to protect the Israeli communities located within Palestinian territory.

The chance that any Palestinian leader agrees to accept such a “state” under these conditions is nonexistent. What the Trump plan is offering the Palestinians is basically to take the existing reality – living under Israeli military occupation, with settlements spread in-between their cities, towns and villages – and to enshrine it by labeling it as a state.

The animating philosophy of the proposal is Might makes Right. Israel is stronger, and the Palestinians will never get rid of their Israeli overlords by force. So they should just give up. Forget about the ways they’ve been victimized, stop talking about having rights, and just take whatever the Israelis are willing to offer. Because if they don’t, the next offer will be worse. Israeli news anchor Eylon Levy said as much in the Washington Post:

[The plan] recognizes that any solution has to work with the fact that Israel has basically won, instead of denying it or attempting to reverse it.  … Throughout history, the victors have always dictated the ultimate terms of peace. Is that fair? Maybe. Is it how the world works in reality? Yes. Conflicts don’t end when both sides agree they are tired of fighting; they end when one side, the loser, recognizes it can’t keep up the battle and decides to get what it can before things get worse.

You’d think a culture that makes a shrine out of Masada would understand: At some point you just don’t care that the other side is stronger. You’re not expecting victory any more; you’re just trying to make your enemies respect you.

Coincidentally, Jared’s argument resembles the one Trump used to make to the contractors he shafted: It doesn’t matter who’s right. My lawyers can bankrupt you, so just take whatever I decide to pay you and be happy.

The announcement of the plan made a nice media-distraction event for Trump and for Bibi Netanyahu. Trump, of course, had an impeachment trial going on in the Senate, while Netanyahu is under indictment for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.

Shortly after the announcement, Netanyahu’s administration said the cabinet would vote Sunday to annex the major Jewish settlements on the West Bank, the ones that just about every country but the US and Israel think violate international law. But that vote didn’t happen, and Kushner is suggesting that it be delayed until after the Israeli elections in March.

Saturday, the Arab League unanimously rejected the plan.

For what it’s worth, I keep repeating the same analysis of the conflict. I see four possible resolutions.

1. Two states, Israel and a new state where Palestinians have actual territory and self-determination.
2. One democratic state, in which Palestinians become citizens of Greater Israel, and may eventually become a voting majority.
3. One Jewish ethno-state, where Palestinians are a subject population, possibly with a puppet-government to save face.
4. One Jewish ethno-state, from which Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed.

Every year, (1) and (2) seem less and less likely. Getting to either one involves building trust — Northern Ireland could be a model — but both sides seem intent on building distrust instead. Partisans of either side can give you a long list of events proving that the other side can’t be trusted and doesn’t really want peace.

The status quo is basically (3), and Jared’s peace plan seems designed to kill off (1) and lock (3) in place. Even so, though, (3) seems unstable to me. I don’t think the Palestinians will ever accept it, and at some point I think the Israelis will decide that the Palestinians are ungovernable.

That leaves (4), which is what I think will eventually happen. It will be a traumatic thing for the Israeli people to see themselves do, which is why it will take another couple decades for them to work up a sufficient self-justification. But the extreme right wing of Israeli politics is there already, and that seems to me to be the direction everything is drifting.

A series of thought experiments Democrats have been running for the last three years is the “What if Obama did this?” genre. It most recently showed up Wednesday, when House Manager Adam Schiff created a fantasy about Obama’s race against Mitt Romney in 2012. (Romney, of course, is now a senator and was sitting in the room.)

[Schiff] suggested the hypothetical example of Obama telling [the Russian president at the time Dmitry] Medvedev, “I know you don’t want me to send this money to Ukraine cause they’re fighting and killing your people. I want you to do me a favor though,” Schiff said, echoing wording in Trump’s July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he allegedly asked him to investigate the Bidens.

“I want you to do an investigation of Mitt Romney and I want you to announce you found dirt on Mitt Romney,” Schiff continued with his hypothetical. “And if you’re willing to do that quid pro quo, I won’t give Ukraine the money to fight you on the front line. “

Schiff then asked senators if there is any question Obama would have been impeached for that kind of conduct.

“That’s the parallel here,” he said.

At times I wonder about the usefulness of if-Obama thought experiments, because they’re based on the assumption that the same moral rules ought to apply to everyone. In recent years, though, more and more Republicans have adopted a purely tribal point of view which rejects any reciprocity between Our Side and Their Side. Of course it would be wrong if Obama had done the same thing that is right when Trump does it, because by definition Obama is wrong and Trump is right. [1] Republicans seem to be losing the capacity to feel shame about this kind of hypocrisy. [2]

Even recognizing that, though, I can’t resist one more if-Obama thought experiment, because I don’t think Schiff’s fantasy goes quite far enough. Instead of 2012, let’s think about 2016, and suppose that Obama believed — as he undoubtedly did believe — that Trump’s election would be a disaster for the country.

Let’s take one further step and imagine that Obama understood what Vladimir Putin was capable of. Already in July of 2015, Trump is telling Russian agent Maria Butina that he would revoke the sanctions Obama had placed on Russia after its invasion of Crimea. [3] So Putin has good reasons to want Trump elected. But what if Obama goes to Putin and puts in a higher bid for his support?

Maybe he says something like: “During the transition period after the election but before the new president takes office, I’ll be in a position to help you out in Ukraine — at least if the election turns out the way I hope it does. We’ll forget about sanctions, and if you want to take over the rest of Ukraine, that would be OK too; we wouldn’t do anything. Of course, we’d expect something in return. But anyway, I just wanted you to know that you should be rooting for Clinton, the same way I am.”

Obama doesn’t want to be guilty of a criminal conspiracy, so he doesn’t spell out what he wants, other than for Putin to “root”. But let’s say Obama’s personal lawyer — just to make it specific, let’s choose Greg Craig, a Democrat who was indicted in a Mueller-related case, but found not guilty — talks to some of Putin’s people and lets them know that Putin should do for Clinton all the stuff he had been planning to do for Trump. Again, nothing specific — just do it.

So Putin does: His people hack Republican computers and Trump campaign computers, then pick out the most embarrassing stuff and release it (drip, drip, drip) via WikiLeaks. They use their social media resources to push hundreds of anti-Trump fake news stories to exactly the kinds of wavering voters Trump needs. And all that stuff doesn’t happen to Clinton.

When Clinton wins, Obama does exactly what he said he would. He cancels the Russia sanctions, and stands by idly while Putin carves up the rest of Ukraine.

On the one hand, this is all reprehensible: My fantasy of Evil Obama has torpedoed an ally, put the rest of eastern Europe at risk of Russian expansion, and invited foreign interference in a US election. But by the standards put forward by Trump’s current defenders Obama has done nothing wrong.

• He never specified what Putin should do, so there was no deal. He hinted and Putin understood what he meant, possibly due to more roundabout channels of communication, but that doesn’t matter. As Jim Jordan said about Trump’s Zelensky phonecall: “Tell me where the quid pro quo was.” If it’s not spelled out, it doesn’t count.
• Laws were broken — anti-hacking laws, campaign finance laws, etc. — but because Putin broke them without Obama’s direct instructions, that’s crime doesn’t count against Obama. There may have been all kinds of collusion between Obama’s people and Putin’s people, but (as the Mueller Report says) “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” If there’s not enough evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy, there’s no problem.
• Whether or not to defend Ukraine is a policy decision that is within the president’s power. He can’t be officially called to account for exercising his legitimate prerogatives, no matter how destructive to the national interest those decisions turn out to be. “Maladministration,” Alan Dershowitz tells us, “is not a ground for impeachment.”
• But what about his corrupt intent in making this deal-that-wasn’t-a-deal? His party may have gotten political advantage from it, and national security may have suffered, but that doesn’t make it corrupt because Obama honestly believed Clinton’s election was in the public interest. Serving his party’s partisan interest above the national interest is not an abuse of power, because in the President’s mind, his party’s partisan interest is the national interest. As Dershowitz put it: “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” It would be even less of a problem if he thought somebody else’s election was in the public interest.

So: trading Ukraine to the Russians to get Hillary Clinton into the White House — you may not like it, but it’s just one of those things. “Get over it,” Mick Mulvaney would say.

[1] This shows up most clearly in the Republicans whose beliefs about impeachment have made a 180-reversal since Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 and his trial in 1999. Lindsey Graham is the most obvious example; he proposed a very expansive definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for Clinton then but a very restricted one for Trump now. Mitch McConnell looks just as bad. In 1998 he asked the question: “Will we pursue the search for truth, or will we dodge, weave, and evade?” This time around, he’s on the side of dodge, weave, and evade.

Lawyers who testified for the Republicans have also reversed themselves since Clinton. Then, Alan Dershowitz said “you don’t need a technical crime” to impeach Clinton. But as he watched these last two decades from his seat in the Afterlife, James Madison must have changed his mind. Because for Trump “the Framers intended that the criteria be, high crimes and misdemeanors — that is, existing criminal statutes.”

Jonathan Turley likewise didn’t think Republicans needed to prove that Clinton violated any specific law. “While there’s a high bar for what constitutes grounds for impeachment, an offense does not have to be indictable. Serious misconduct or a violation of public trust is enough.” But it’s not enough now that Democrats have impeached a Republican. “This would be the first impeachment in history where there would be considerable debate, and in my view, not compelling evidence, of the commission of a crime.”

Given this context, I’m not surprised that Republican senators don’t worry about the precedent they’re setting for a future Democratic administration. The precedent is that the rules are looser for Republicans than for Democrats. I expect them to uphold that precedent in any future impeachment.

In case you’re wondering, I laid out my criteria for impeachment before I knew what Robert Mueller would report, and long before the Ukraine scandal erupted. The current articles of impeachment fit them perfectly:

(1) Loyalty to self has eclipsed loyalty to the country. … (2) The president’s actions threaten the integrity of the election process. … (3) The president’s actions prevent investigations of (1) or (2).

[2] I wonder how much this tribal perspective is related to the increasing identification between the GOP and evangelical Christianity. Evangelicals see no similarity between their own sins (which God forgives) and other people’s sins (for which they will burn in Hell). So Trump is forgiven and Clinton is not — end of story.

[3] The 2015 video of Trump responding to Butina is worth watching for another reason: It demonstrates how much mental deterioration Trump has suffered in the last five years. In this video, he is asked a question and he answers it. He stays on topic for two whole minutes and speaks coherently the whole time. How long has it been since you’ve seen him do that?

The big news of the week is that the Republicans in the US Senate lived down to my lowest expectations: They resolved Friday that they will not make any independent effort to find out what Trump did. So, they will not hear from John Bolton or any other witnesses. They will not subpoena any documents. They’ll have some speeches this week and then vote Wednesday to acquit Trump of whatever it is somebody says he’s supposed to have done — not that they’ve been paying attention to that. Along they way, Trump’s lawyers made some truly appalling arguments that would do away with Congress’ impeachment power for any practical purposes, and more-or-less do away with checks and balances completely. (Good thing Republicans will forget all this stuff as soon as a Democrat gets elected.)

But the world didn’t stop to watch. The coronavirus kept spreading through China, and the world’s stock markets began thinking about the economic effects of the plague. Jared Kushner’s long-awaited Mideast peace plan came out, and was as one-sided as expected. (Israel gets what it wants, and the Palestinians are just supposed to give up.) Brexit finally happened. A chunk of Trump’s impenetrable wall blew over in a windstorm. Next year’s budget deficit is expected to pass $1 trillion, a mark never before reached in a year without an economic catastrophe.

Oh, by the way, the Iowa caucus is tonight. Nobody has the faintest idea who’s going to win.

So I wrote an extended fantasy about how the ideas expounded by Trump’s defenders would have allowed Obama to rig the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton without doing anything wrong. That should be out shortly. My reaction to Jared’s “vision” for peace just kept getting longer and longer, so I finally had to move it out of the weekly summary into its own article. That should come out by 10:30 EST. The weekly summary will mention all that other stuff, before closing with a Weird Al music video celebrating palindromes. That should be out around noon or so.

Last week, I was musing in front of minister friends about how I should read David Bentley Hart’s That All Should Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation (Yale, 2019) for reasons that should be obvious to even casual readers of this site. And past the obvious: who would be the best audience for the book? I’ll write about it as I get deeper into it.

Well, muse in front of friends and what happens? One ordered a copy and had it shipped to me. My thanks to the Rev. Victoria Weinstein, D. Min. for the gift.

Last week was full of unhappy (personal) news, and a token was a balm and an encouragement. (It worked.) That’s a benefit of having friends for a long time. But she is not only a friend, but a colleague. The graces of collegial support aren’t always formal or programmatic, though it’s tempting in professional spaces to privilege structures and forms. Indeed, I wonder if most acts of ministerial collegiality are informal, or at last the ones that have lasting impact. Informal but not unimportant. It’s no secret that I don’t participate in formal, institutional collegial structures; my reasons are several and have changed in priority over the years. But my informal connections — some deep, some momentary — are now as wide as ever, and that’s a gift that also deserves thanks.

• A gratitude journal -- three things I'm grateful about and why
• Doing good for other people
• Using my signature strengths (link to find out here) 
• Meditation

Reading: Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front 

Sermon: Inefficiently Yours 

Every day this week, I had at least one package on my front porch when I got home. 

Every day.  At least one.  Not all of them were from Amazon, but most. 

My partner and I decided to get a bunch of small things to get more organized – new shelves, towel rack, that sort of thing. 

We didn’t have a lot of money, so getting good deals mattered. We love free shipping.

Plus, with two middle schoolers, a clumsy dog, and both of us working in demanding jobs –  we don’t have a lot of extra time, either.

A few clicks, a careful read of the small print and the dimensions, a few more clicks – done. Packages on their way. 

It was perfect, and felt like freedom, even for a few fleeting moments. 

All of this clicking was especially ironic this week because – in addition to my low-grade always-awareness of the negative impact of Amazon has on local economies, small businesses, the environment – over the past couple of weeks, in preparation for today’s service, I have been paying closer attention to the conditions for Amazon employees.

Specifically the conditions for the people who responded to my clicks by finding my item.  Packing it up with other boxes in a bigger box.  Placing the blow up supposedly recyclable plastic things in the empty places to keep things in place, and then shipping it directly to me in two days or less.

 “Soul sucking” more than one employee called it.  “Soul Sucking.” 

Usually when I hear someone say “soul sucking” I assume they’re being hyperbolic. But in this case, I’ve started to think it might be accurate.  That Amazon is literally sucking our souls. 

To start, the work is physically demanding – 12 hour shifts where you end up walking 15-20 miles with lots of squatting, and reaching, and lifting.   You can get used to this, and it’s not entirely new or unique for blue collar work. 

What’s new and uniquely soul-sucking at Amazon comes down to what they call their “efficiency standards.”  They ways they have centered success entirely around efficiency.  Equiated efficiency with BEST. 

Each employee is given a scan gun for every component of their job, which allows everything they do to be monitored, and timed, and also to alert a manager if there’s too many minutes where they are “off-task.” 

Generally, you are allowed 18 minutes off task per shift. 

This year, Amazon will likely employ 300,000 people, most of those working in the warehouses.  

Many of us are familiar with our economy’s crisis of income inequality – As a recent NPR report confirmed:“the gap between the richest and the poorest US households is the largest it’s been in the past 50 years” –  

But Mennonite theologian Mark Baker says that even more pressing, and much less tended to; even more pressing especially for us as people of faith is our economy’s crisis of human dignity.

~~~~~

When I first started thinking about the Amazon warehouse, my first question was: why don’t they just use machines? If they really want a hyper-efficient work enviornment – why don’t they just use robots? 

After all, humans are inherently inefficient.  For example, humans have bodies.  And bodies require bothersome things like using the bathroom, eating, sleeping – all incredibly inefficient. And, humans are wired for conversation, connection, emotions, relationship – all, inefficient.

One Amazon employee theorized that their assignments were especially designed to ensure they crossed paths with as few other humans as possible.  

Loneliness and isolation are some of the biggest complaints from workers today.  Not just at Amazon. The younger you are, studies show, the lonelier you are – nearly 8 in 10 Gen Zers (age 18-23) and 7 in 10 millennials report being lonely; only half of boomers.  (The study I read says nothing about Gen Xers, those of us in the middle of our working lives….which is, typical.)  

Humans are not wired for loneliness – it turns out to have the equivalent health impact of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. 

And even more obviously, humans are not readily oriented towards highly inflexible, repetitive tasks over long periods of time, which is the epitome of efficiency.   

But machines have none of these issues.  Machines are not hard wired for connection, or relationship.  Machines don’t get lonely. And they are good at inflexible repetitive tasks. That’s the point of machines. 

So, why doesn’t Amazon just use machines?

As AI technology and robotics engineering continues to develop, I’m guessing, they will someday. Which will be another sort of crisis for all those 300,000 workers, when it happens.

But for now, what I learned was – humans have a few particular advantages over machines that make them preferable to Amazon and other efficiency-driven work environments. 

Two things: fine motor control, and subjectivity.  Machines aren’t yet as good as humans at the fine motor skills, and at least for the foreseeable future, humans are better at inference, nuance, subtlety and gut-feelings than machines. As anyone who has ever tried to ask Siri or Alexa anything but the most straightforward question would attest. 

All this means that work environments – and increasingly our whole culture – expect us to perform like our machines in all areas except the couple where we are better. Our work, and increasingly our entire culture expect us to conflate efficiency with ultimacy.  

Which means we have created an economy, and increasingly a culture that requires us to suppress our humanity. Suppress your humanity, or lose our job. Suppress your humanity, or struggle to do life today.    

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made….When they want you to buy something they will call you. 

Check, check, check, check, check.  

~~~~~

Now, as anyone who has ever worked fast food will tell you, there’s always been a push to get the most done with the least amount of time, money, or energy.  Anyone who has ever worked anywhere in corporate America would probably say the same thing.

What’s new is just how efficient we believe we can be – technology has changed our expectations exponentially. 

Which is not just because of Amazon – it’s also Netflix, and Hulu, and all the apps on my smart TV that I LOVE.  It’s Grubhub and Instacart and King Soopers Pick Up (which also SAVES me regularly). It’s messaging apps and facetime and its spotify, Youtube, Stitch Fix, and maybe most of all it’s Google. 

All of these technologies – these amazing, salvific, liberating technologies – have taught us that whatever it is we need, we can get it now. 

Without much effort – just click!

 My son recently found this sweatshirt that he was so excited about, he had the money to pay for it, but then it said it would be delivered in three weeks.  He was like: nope.  

Three weeks. There was literally no reason for him to need it sooner.

I tried to explain to him about the Sears catalogue and about the little forms we had to fill out, number by number, and then we had to mail them in, and wait, and wait….but he’d already moved on.

If something’s going to take more than a couple steps, today – and if each of those steps aren’t guaranteed to lead us to a successful end, my son is not alone we often decide, it’s just not worth it. (Which I’ve come to believe is the business model for health insurance companies.  How many people find the process to submit for reimbursement so confusing and time consuming, you just give up?! It can’t just be me…)

Our technologies have taught us that life can be, should be instant. Seamless. Effortless. Continuously available and responsive to our every impulse. 

These expectations for life in turn become what we expect from each other – instant. Seamless. Effortless. Continuously available and responsive….and we come to expect this from ourselves too – that we will be continuously available and responsive…

It’s why Mark Baker encourages us to think not only about how we might influence Amazon, but even more, how Amazon is influencing US.

“Efficiency is our existential purpose;” This is a quote from Malcom Harris; he’s talking specifically about millennials and the ways the generation born between 1981 and 1996 has been “optimized” for efficiency their whole lives.  “Efficiency is our existential purpose; and we are crafted to be lean, mean production machines.” He says, it’s especially true for millennials and Gen Zers; but it applies to so much of our culture today. Efficient has become a synonym for “best.” 

And of course, sometimes efficiency is best.  In the middle of an emergency, we hope first responders love efficiency.  That they are OBSESSED with it.

Efficiency is also a necessary antidote to bureaucracy.  When we set up the Emergency Immigration Fund a couple years ago, we made sure that our system for getting the money to someone in crisis – was as efficient as possible.  One call, one day, check in hand.    

And in case my confession at the top didn’t make it clear –  as writer and activist Courtney Martin says, “efficiency is a survival mechanism” for many of us.

She writes:

“I simply couldn’t care for my children and make a living and nurture friendships and contribute to a community in the way that I want to unless I was extremely judicious with my time and energy.”

When I read that I’m like: yes.  I bet she orders from King Soopers pick up too. 

Growing up, my sisters and I were expected to help bring in the groceries when my mom got home.  Sometimes we’d try to carry lots of bags all at once; they were paper bags, so we’d have to rush to the house before the bags broke. 

My dad would chastise us, saying, don’t take the lazy man’s load. And we’d sigh and put a few down, and make more trips. 

But later, we started to resist his advice with a quick retort:

“It’s not a lazy man’s load, dad; it’s an efficient woman’s load.”

Efficiency can be a way to survive, it can feel like freedom, even if fleeting.

And besides, inefficiency is often a luxury, made possible by having enough resources to create margin in your life, time to dawdle, or even loiter as in that great essay from Ross Gay we read back in December. 

If you can pay someone to clean your house, prepare your meals, tend to your lawn – you can be quite inefficient in all other things and still manage to accomplish the basics requirements of being a grown up today.    

Inefficiency is a luxury, and at the same time, poverty is a recipe for inefficiency. Without reliable transportation, employment, housing – and all the stuff that comes in a house – a washer and dryer, a shower, a place to put all of your things for easy access – inefficiency is destiny. 

It’s one of the traps of poverty, that everything that is obvious, easy and seamless to middle class folks becomes maddeningly time-consuming and demoralizing when those basics aren’t reliable. 

Which makes acquiring those basics a colossal feat. 

It helps to explain why, when you talk to low wage workers today, you mostly hear resignation about those soul-sucking conditions; and gratitude, for a steady job.     

~~~~~

Anyone remember the book The Jungle from high school English? Upton Sinclair’s 1906 expose on the meat-packing industry was a part of a journalistic reform movement known as the Muckrakers. 

For about a decade at the turn of the century, the Muckrakers investigative reporting led to one systemic change after another – from safety conditions for coal miners to child labor laws to election fairness and anti-corruption measures – and yes, reforms for the meat-packing industry.

I was thinking about The Jungle this week, and the muckrakers, because sometimes we forget that there is nothing inevitable or mandatory about the world we live in. 

Our economy, our society, our culture – this crisis of human dignity we find ourselves in – there is nothing inevitable or mandatory about any of this. 

Despite a pervasive popular pull towards efficiency as our “existential” purpose today, our faith reminds us that we hold both the agency, and the responsibility to create a world that amplifies and celebrates our humanness – our true existential purpose which our faith names as our utterly inefficient interdependent humanness – we hold both the agency and the responsibility that celebrates our humanness, rather than suppresses it.

For example, I’ve been thinking that the most counter-cultural value we could promote today might be patience.  Patience that is not to be confused with complacency, but rather, patience connected to an unwavering commitment to the long-haul faith we explored a couple Sundays ago.

To create a world that amplifies and celebrates our humanness would require that we practice and prize a faithful patience, that we become experts in patience, model it, and teach it, declare it our good news for a world overly focused on instant success and frictionless ease.

Over the past few weeks, in this series about the future, I keep imagining all the people from the past who worked for a future they did not live to see.  People like James Reeb that we heard about last week.  Or even Roy Jones whose sermon we heard a couple weeks ago. 

All those whose dreams we inherit.  Our grandparents, great-grandparents.  Our ancestors – familial, spiritual. 

This year marks the 100 anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, so I’ve been especially tuned in to the stories of the suffragettes, women who worked to get the vote.  I imagine they must’ve taken so much ridicule, including from their own husbands. They probably had so many reasons to stop turning up at the White House, for march, stop writing letters, stop speaking up. 

They weren’t perfect, especially in terms of race and racism. 

And still, their willingness to plant trees they would not live to harvest means that no one here today, has ever lived in a time when women could not vote. 

The idea is as unimaginable to us as it is to my son to wait 3 weeks for a sweatshirt.

I wonder, what future will we invest in today so that 100 years from now, all those who gather together will take for granted its reality?  And I wonder, how we will cultivate the patience required for such commitment? 

Afterall, the future does not have to be faster, more automatic, more stimulating in the ways it’s been imagined in movies.  The future could be slow.  Manual. Even, boring.  The future could also be connective, personal, playful, real.

Every day, we get to decide, in the smallest moments, private moments – the future we will make. 

 So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it

Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.

Wendell Berry’s manifesto is brilliant, instructive for our crisis of human dignity – most of all the last line of the poem – two words that often feel like a shock when it is read; fitting for a poem that urges us to remain unpredictable and wild – he says:

Practice resurrection.

In these days, let us remember that it is never too late to begin again; to create life anew; to forge an entirely new way.  It is never too late to forge a future where all of humanity flourishes, freely, and together. 

Right matters. And the truth matters. Otherwise we are lost.

– Adam Schiff

This week’s featured post is “Can Bankers Become Allies Against Climate Change?”

This week everybody was talking about the impeachment trial in the Senate

Tuesday was taken up with procedural votes that all went along party lines: Republicans rejected motions to call witnesses or subpoena documents prior to hearing the lawyers’ arguments. Another vote will be taken this week, and is expected to also hew close to party lines.

All through the week, Republican senators kept saying that they were hearing nothing new. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand responded:

To my Republican colleagues who’ve complained that there’s no new evidence in this impeachment trial: You voted more than ten times to block relevant witnesses and evidence. Don’t bury your head in the sand and then complain that it’s dark.

The House managers presented the case against Trump Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Adam Schiff was the lead voice, and he was brilliant. His 2 1/2 hour opening statement Wednesday pulled the various pieces of the argument together in a compelling way. His 48-minute closing statement Friday pre-buted the arguments Trump’s lawyers will make this week.

That no-new-evidence stance got a lot harder to justify yesterday, when leaks about John Bolton’s book appeared in the NYT. I can see why Trump doesn’t want him to testify.

President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies.

We’ve also seen a cover letter showing that Bolton sent the White House a copy of his manuscript on December 30. So presumably Trump’s lawyers know what’s in it. That raises another question about whether they have intentionally lied during the Senate trial.

Will any of this make any difference to GOP senators? I’m starting to doubt it. More and more it looks like seemingly independent senators like Collins or Murkowski or Romney are still puppets of McConnell, who is a puppet of Trump (who is a puppet of Putin).

To the extent that it makes any sense at all, Trump’s defense is basically the same one a clever mob boss would use: He worked by implication rather than by making explicit deals. Trump’s phone call was “perfect” because he got his point across without telling Zelensky something like: “Here’s the deal: I deliver the aid you need to defend your country from Russia, and you announce that you’re investigating Joe Biden.” Instead, Trump segued from Zelensky’s mention of Javelin missiles to “I need you to do us a favor, though” and then talked about investigations. The quid pro quo was implicit, so it’s OK. (And in case Zelensky was dense, Trump representatives like Gordon Sondland and Kurt Volker and Rudy Giuliani had previously explained the explicit quid pro quo to Zelensky’s people.)

It’s like when the mob boss says, “That’s such a lovely daughter you’ve got. I’m sure you worry a lot about the kinds of things that can happen to girls these days.” and then goes on to say what he wants the father to do for him. Because he never says, “I’m threatening you. Do what I say or your daughter gets hurt.” it’s a perfect conversation. At least in TrumpWorld.

Finally, somebody makes the obvious counter-argument to Trump defenders’ claim that impeachment is disenfranchising the voters who elected Trump. Frank Bruni:

If Republican leaders were really so invested in a government that didn’t diverge from voters’ desires, more of them would be questioning the Electoral College. Because of it, the country has a president, Trump, who received about three million fewer votes than his opponent.

Impeachment-and-removal is a constitutional process for getting rid of a corrupt president. Yes, it partially reverses the 2016 election. (It’s far from a complete reversal, because Mike Pence, not Hillary Clinton, becomes the next president.) And so it partially undoes the votes of the 63 million people who voted for Trump. But the Electoral College, another constitutional process, already completely undid the votes of 66 million Clinton voters. Trump’s people were fine with that disenfranchisement.

The strangest “defense” of Trump came from Lindsey Graham:

All I can tell you is from the president’s point of view, he did nothing wrong in his mind

That’s not a claim of innocence, it’s an insanity plea. I’m not exaggerating. One of the original statements of the insanity defense is known as the M’Naghten Rule:

to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

Isn’t that more or less word-for-word what Graham is claiming?

More support for the insanity defense: Wednesday, Trump tweeted or retweeted 142 times, a new record. Consider what that means: If you were online for 14 hours and tweeted something every six minutes, you’d still only get to 140. I think the guy needs to get a real job.

A Trump tweet from Sunday morning: “Shifty Adam Schiff … has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!” A bit of translation is in order: In Trumpspeak, “our Country” means “me”.

So if you’re violent Trumpist like the El Paso shooter, you have your marching orders. The term for this is “stochastic terrorism“.

Last week I pointed out that the White House’s closing arguments had become more and more about intimidation. Thursday, CBS News tweeted:

A @POTUS confidant tells CBS News that GOP senators were warned: “vote against the president & your head will be on a pike.”

But what other argument do they have? It’s not like they can tell senators to do the right thing.

GOP senators are denying that the warning ever took place. I can imagine that the “@POTUS confidant” was speaking figuratively rather than relaying an exact quote.

Are there any bigger snowflakes than Republican senators? They were outraged that Jerry Nadler called their cover-up a cover-up. They were outraged when Adam Schiff referred to the CBS report about the “head on a pike” threat. (But so far they have expressed no outrage about Trump’s implicit threat of violence against Schiff.) It’s all distraction; they’d rather talk about their outrage than about what the president did, or how abjectly they’re bowing down to him.

More new evidence: A short video of a dinner in 2018 where Lev Parnas told Trump that he needed to get rid of Ambassador Yovanovich, and Trump said, “Get rid of her.” The importance of the video isn’t so much that Trump wanted Yovanovich out — presidents can have the ambassadors they want. (This is part of a 90-minute audio.)

The significance is twofold: First, Trump was lying when he said he didn’t know Parnas. This isn’t just a photo op, it’s a dinner conversation with a significant policy discussion. (Parnas’ attorney says he has other recordings of conversations with Trump.) Second, it’s not clear who Trump is telling to get rid of Yovanovich. If it’s Lev Parnas, that’s really weird, because Parnas is just a guy working with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney.

and the new virus from China

Coronaviruses are common, and normally cause things like colds. But a new strain of coronavirus has appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where it has caused pneumonia symptoms in thousands of people, leading to 80 deaths so far. Comparisons are being made to the SARS virus, which killed nearly 800 people in 2002-2003. Isolated cases of the new virus have been found in other countries, including five so far in the US. All five had traveled here from Wuhan, so thusfar there is no example of somebody catching the virus in the US.

China is taking this very seriously: Wuhan has been quarantined. At last count, the quarantine affected 50 million people, making it the largest quarantine in history.

One of the things I learned reading The Great Influenza (about the 1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic) was that there is no libertarian answer to plague. Still, public health experts have considerable skepticism about the authoritarian approach China is taking. Somebody has to make public-health decisions and enforce them, but they only work if the public cooperates; that depends on a level of trust between leaders and citizens that is often lacking in authoritarian states.

and Mike Pompeo

Mike Pompeo’s interview with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, and her description of its aftermath, speaks volumes about this administration’s attitudes towards the press and the public. The interview is 9 1/2 minutes long, with an extra 1 1/2 minutes of Kelly describing what happened next. [Listen.]

The first topic is Iran. Pompeo repeats a number of common Trump administration lies about what Obama’s Iran nuclear deal did and how well Iran was complying with it. Kelly points out that since Trump pulled out of the deal, there are no longer any constraints on Iran’s nuclear program. She asks how the administration plans to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Pompeo stonewalls.

KELLY: My question again: How do you stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?

POMPEO: We’ll stop them.

KELLY: How? Sanctions?

POMPEO: We’ll stop them. The President made it very clear. The opening sentence in his remarks said that we will never permit Iran to have a nuclear weapon. The coalition that we’ve built out, the economic, military, and diplomatic deterrence that we have put in place will deliver that outcome.

Then Kelly shifts to Ukraine, and in particular to whether Pompeo adequately stood up for Ambassador Yovanovich, who was targeted by Rudy Giuliani’s smear campaign, and then removed suddenly without explanation. Kelly is a tough but fair interviewer here, refusing to let Pompeo mischaracterize her question as based on “unnamed sources”, and referencing precisely the testimony she’s referring to. Pompeo again stonewalls (“I’ve done what’s right for every single person on this team” with no specifics.), and then abruptly cuts off the interview.

Kelly describes to he All Things Considered co-host Ari Shapiro what happened next:

You heard me thank the Secretary. He did not reply. He leaned in, glared at me, and then turned and with his aides left the room. Moments later, the same staffer who had stopped the interview re-appeared, asked me to come with her — just me, no recorder, though she did not say we were off the record, nor would I have agreed. I was taken to the Secretary’s private living room, where he was waiting, and he shouted at me for about the same amount of time as the interview itself had lasted. He was not happy to have been questioned about Ukraine. He asked, “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?” He used the F-word in that sentence and many others. He asked if I could find Ukraine on a map. I said yes. He called out for his aides to bring him a map of the world with no writing, no countries marked. I pointed to Ukraine. He put the map away. He said, “People will hear about this.” And then he turned and said he had things to do, and I thanked him again for his time and left.

So asking tough questions gets a reporter yelled and cursed at. I assume the beatings won’t start until the second term. (I’m being a little flip there, but not much. How out of character would it be?)

Afterwards, Pompeo claimed:

NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly lied to me, twice. First, last month, in setting up our interview and, then again yesterday, in agreeing to have our post-interview conversation off the record.

At least one of those claims was a lie. In an email exchange with Pompeo’s press aide Katie Martin, Kelly refused to limit her questions to Iran, as the aide had suggested.

Kelly responded, “I am indeed just back from Tehran and plan to start there. Also Ukraine. And who knows what the news gods will serve up overnight. I never agree to take anything off the table.”

Martin replied, “Totally understand you want to ask other topics but just hoping . . . we can stick to that topic for a healthy portion of the interview .

Pompeo went on to imply, while leaving himself room to deny it later, that Kelly pointed to Bangladesh. In addition to probably being a lie as well, what’s with that test anyway? It’s obviously a planned thing, because how many people keep blank world maps handy? And incidentally, how many countries does he think Trump could find on a blank map?

Former Ukraine Ambassador Bill Taylor (who you may remember from his testimony in the impeachment hearings) answered Pompeo’s “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?” by explaining why we should.

Russia is fighting a hybrid war against Ukraine, Europe and the United States. This war has many components: armed military aggression, energy supply, cyber attacks, disinformation and election interference. On each of these battlegrounds, Ukraine is the front line.

and you also might be interested in …

Retired basketball star Kobe Bryant, star of five championship-winning teams, died yesterday in a helicopter crash. He was 41.

Trump’s trip to Davos cost over $4 million, plus another couple million for Air Force One.

The number of US service members reporting concussions or traumatic brain injuries from the Iranian missile attack two weeks ago is now up to 34. Immediately after the attack, Trump announced: “no Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime. We suffered no casualties, all of our soldiers are safe, and only minimal damage was sustained at our military bases.”

As we all know, the Great Leader can never be wrong. So he has stuck by that assessment, dismissing the injuries as “headaches”.

I’ve noted on several occasions that in the last several years American life expectancy has been negatively affected by so-called “deaths of despair“: premature deaths due to suicide, drug overdoses, or the long-term effects of substance abuse.

A new study claims that we can do something to mitigate that problem: raise the minimum wage.

Using data from all 50 American states and the District of Columbia from 1990 to 2015, the authors estimate that a $1 increase in the minimum wage is associated with a 3.5% decline in the suicide rate among adults aged 18 to 64 with a high-school education or less. This may sound small, but the numbers add up. The authors reckon that a $1 increase would have prevented 27,550 suicides in the 25 years covered by the study; a $2 increase would have prevented 57,000.

I have to make the standard correlation-is-not-causality disclaimer. Maybe it’s not the minimum wage per se that produces the effect. It’s possible that the connection is more roundabout. For example, maybe high-minimum-wage states are mostly blue states that have fewer guns. (Guns make suicide attempts much more effective, and so raise the suicide rate.) Or maybe they have better mental health services.

Even if you’re not into basketball, you might find this NYT sports-medicine article interesting. Zion Williamson is 19 years old, stands 6-6, weighs 284 pounds, and is an incredible leaper. When he jumps, he puts more pressure on the floor (and hence on his body, in a Newtonian equal-and-opposite reaction) than any athlete previously tested. In college last year, he once changed directions with so much force that his sneaker exploded.

Two things result from that jumping and cutting ability in a man his size: (1) He was the #1 choice in last spring’s NBA draft, is widely projected to be the next great pro basketball star, and (2) he tore the lateral meniscus in his right knee during the pre-season, so he only played his first NBA game this week.

The article centers on two questions: Is Williamson’s knee just doomed to break down under the unprecedented stress, or can he still have a long career if he strengthens supportive tissues and learns to jump and land with better stress-distributing technique? And more generally, does premature specialization — playing nothing but basketball from an early age, rather than the usual seasonal round of sports — lead to greater injury risk in adulthood?

Hardly anybody noticed when, just before Christmas, ICE changed its standards to allow harsher treatment of detained immigrants. This week, Texas Observer noticed:

ICE broadened the reasons a detainee can be placed in solitary confinement and removed language preventing officers from using “hog-tying, fetal restraints, [and] tight restraints.” The agency also extinguished requirements for new facilities to have outdoor recreation areas and provisions guaranteeing that nonprofit organizations have access to the detention centers. There were also significant revisions to protocols in the case of serious injury, illness, or death, such as allowing guards to notify ICE “as soon as practicable” (as opposed to immediately) that a detainee needs to be transferred to a hospital and removing any mention of how to proceed if a detainee dies during the transfer. …

The new guidelines apply to as many as 140 facilities across the United States, including as many as 18 in Texas. The standards primarily apply to local jails and prisons that have contracted with ICE to rent beds to hold immigrants alongside other inmates. … Under the new weaker standards, chances are that local jails and prisons will have an easier time passing inspections and keeping their lucrative contracts with ICE in place.

But the new standards may just codify bad behavior that ICE was allowing anyway.

Although ICE conducts annual inspections in most detention centers, even those that repeatedly violate the standards are given a pass. Among the most egregious examples is Alabama’s Etowah County Detention Center, deemed one of the worst in the country, where the sheriff personally pocketed $400,000 meant to buy food for detainees while roughly 300 of them were served barely edible food. Despite the fact that the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties called for ICE to stop detaining immigrants at Etowah, a contract remains in place.

This is the end result of the Trump administration’s dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants. (He seldom mentions immigrants without talking about “invasions“, or about criminal gangs, who are “animals” that “infest” our country.) We tolerate inhumane treatment because we’ve stopped seeing the victims as fully human.

Good article in Grist about plant-based meat. It has a lot of potential, but so far it’s mostly a curiosity. In order to have a serious impact on the climate, production will have to scale up a lot. And the people in the best position to produce on that scale, ironically, are the established meat-processing companies.

Right now, the best results are in replacing burgers or chicken nuggets. Imitating steak is much harder.

and let’s close with something amusing

Some signs at airports tell us more than we want to know.

The people who run the global financial system are beginning to recognize that “the stability of the Earth system is a prerequisite for financial and price stability”.

Bankers are easy to demonize. They are generally more interested in money than in people, and when they do show interest in people, it’s usually not the ones who are poorest and most in need of concern. On the contrary, they often align with large corporate interests that squeeze profits out of anyone they can victimize.

In short, if you approach the world from a moral perspective, you will often find bankers on the wrong side of the issues you care about. (At least in their role as bankers. In private life some may, for all I know, vote Green and write checks to the Sierra Club.)

But no matter how often they side with the dark angels, bankers are not themselves demonic. They are not into evil-for-evil’s-sake, and (unlike certain religious sects) they would rather not hasten the apocalypse. They just look at the world through a particular lens, and moral concerns have to bounce off several distant mirrors before hitting that lens.

Stability. One thing bankers do value is stability. Morally, that is sometimes a bad thing; it’s why they can be friendly to tyrants and skeptical of even the most justified revolutions. (In the lead-up to the Civil War, for example, few bankers were abolitionists, even in the North. Slaves represented a huge amount of capital, which collectively collateralized loans of enormous dollar-value. What would happen to the economy if all those people suddenly belonged to themselves, rather than to the owners who had borrowed against their value?) But stability is also a mirror in which they can see the threat of climate change: What could be more unstable than a world going through a climate catastrophe?

This week the Bank of International Settlements (described by the NYT as “an umbrella organization for the world’s central banks”) put out a report: The Green Swan: central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change. A lot of that report is full of banker-speak and is hard for non-bankers to read. But nonetheless I think environmentalists would do well to pay attention, because central banks could become allies in certain fights if environmentalists learn how to talk to them and recruit them. (The same might be said of generals, because the Pentagon also recognizes the dangers of climate change).

Perhaps more importantly, a lot of powerful people who don’t trust environmentalists or care about polar bears do trust bankers and care about the risk of financial collapse. Quoting the BIS (or the subsequent reports I hope to see from the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank) will carry more weight with such people than quoting Bill McKibben or a report from the Environmental Defense Fund. Learning the language financial people use to express their climate concerns could help mobilize a larger coalition.

Background: black swans. One thing you need to understand about serious central bankers and macro-economists is that the Great Recession shook their confidence. A lot of them look back on the 2007-2008 collapse and think “Who knew that could happen?” Risks that they had been modeling as independent variables turned out to be correlated in ways nobody expected. So when the dominoes started to fall, the chain reaction went much further than anyone would have predicted.

That experience has led to interest in what have become known as “black swan events“. Black swans are an old metaphor for a simple fallacy: If you see a large number of things that look very similar (white swans), you start to assume that something radically different (a black swan) is impossible. But in fact black swans do exist. The term was popularized in financial circles by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who had the good timing to publish The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable in 2007.

The simple version of the black swan fallacy is that just because you’ve seen a lot doesn’t mean you’ve seen it all. You may feel confident because your data goes back 50 years, but what if there are catastrophic events that only happen every 100 years or 500 years?

The more complex version of the black swan fallacy is that statistical analysis often assumes that risk variables obey a normal distribution when the distribution actually isn’t known. That mistake can make extreme events seem far more improbable than they actually are. (When you hear statisticians talk about “long tails”, that’s what they mean.) Maybe something you’ve modeled as a once-in-500-years event is actually a once-in-40-years event that is overdue to happen.

Worse, there is a difference between risk and uncertainty. A risk is something that can be known and modeled. (A insurance company is taking a risk when it sells me life insurance, because I might die before I pay enough premiums to make them a profit. But the odds of a man my age dying in some particular future year are well understood.) Uncertainty is something you just don’t know. (Will Trump wind up in a war with Iran? How could you attach a number to that possibility?) Modeling something as a risk when it is actually uncertain can fool you into thinking you understand things much better than you do.

Green swans. One big problem climate-change activists have is that they are predicting things no living person has seen before. So rather than sober risk-managers, they can sound like religious fanatics. After all, somebody is always predicting the end of the world, and yet here we are.

We’ve seen a lot, so we think we’ve seen it all. And we’ve never seen Iowa turn into a desert or Miami get swallowed by the sea. (Until recently, though, we’d never seen Australia on fire either.) A very natural human response to such predictions is to say “That never happens.”

So the first challenge the BIS report has to overcome is its readers’ temptation to write the whole thing off as Chicken Littleism. That’s the point of its key image: the green swan. Green swans, like black swans, are unprecedented and largely unpredictable shocks to the system. But they don’t just surprise us because we’ve mis-estimated their probability; rather, they surprise us because we’ve entered new territory that we don’t really understand.

A green swan … is a new type of systemic risk that involves interacting, nonlinear, fundamentally unpredictable, environmental, social, economic and geopolitical dynamics, which are irreversibly transformed by the growing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate-related risks are not simply black swans, i.e. tail risk events. With the complex chain reactions between degraded ecological conditions and unpredictable social, economic and political responses, with the risk of triggering tipping points, climate change represents a colossal and potentially irreversible risk of staggering complexity.

Two kinds of shocks to the system. Green swan events are of two major types: physical shocks and transition shocks. A physical shock is something that happens in the natural world: fire, drought, flood. Normally such things happen on a local scale that local systems can more-or-less take care of. But climate change could cause much larger physical shocks; for example, if a major ice sheet slid into the ocean all at once, raising sea levels suddenly rather than gradually. Think about this not from a human perspective, but from a central-bank perspective: Port facilities around the world all get wrecked at the same time; all the beachfront property in the world has suddenly dropped in value; banks that hold mortgages on that property are insolvent, as are insurance companies. As in the Great Recession, the financial dominoes start falling; you can’t pay me, so I can’t pay the other guy, and bankruptcies cascade to people and businesses nowhere near the ocean.

A transition shock is the market’s sudden revaluation of some class of assets, maybe because of a new government policy (like a carbon tax) or because some herd instinct causes investors to all change their minds at the same time. Dealing with climate change is going to involve revaluing a lot of assets. The biggest example is the value of fossil fuels still in the ground. Energy companies carry those assets on their books and value them at trillions of dollars. But if the world gets serious about climate change, most of those fuels will never be burned, so they’re not worth much at all. What happens to the world financial system if trillions of dollars of assets are suddenly worthless?

The two kinds of shocks trade off against each other: If we transition to a low-carbon economy quickly, we’ll see fewer physical shocks, but more transition shocks. If we move slowly, there won’t be so many transition shocks, but bigger physical shocks are coming.

The tragedy of the horizon. This is another bit of econo-speak that environmentalists can use. Every economist understands the “tragedy of the commons”, when a shared asset gets ruined because each individual can profit by overusing it.

So like “green swan”, the “tragedy of the horizon” plays off a well-understood concept. This time, the tragedy is that typical financial analysis happens on a timescale that minimizes climate effects. This is a “tragedy” because there’s no villain; financial analysis just isn’t trustworthy over long timescales, so practical people have learned to ignore it. (Example: Estimates of next year’s US federal budget deficit are usually pretty good, but nobody believes the ten-year estimate.)

This is what Mark Carney (2015) referred to as “the tragedy of the horizon”: while the physical impacts of climate change will be felt over a long-term horizon, with massive costs and possible civilisational impacts on future generations, the time horizon in which financial, economic and political players plan and act is much shorter. For instance, the time horizon of rating agencies to assess credit risks, and of central banks to conduct stress tests, is typically around three to five years.

One challenge the BIS report sets for the financial community, but does not solve itself, is how to overcome that tragedy. To appreciate the full scope of climate change, you have to look 50 or 100 years into the future. A climate plan that just tells us how to get by for the next ten years is all but useless. But how can that kind of thinking interact with models of inflation or unemployment or GDP that are pure fantasy at those timescales?

Epistemological breaks. A lot of the subtext of the report is that bankers are going to have to get used to living with uncertainty. Climate change is a large-scale multi-disciplinary problem that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of precise econometric modeling a central banker would like to see. (An unpredictable drought may cause an unpredictable migration of refugees and an unpredictable glut in the labor market of the sanctuary country.)

The term the report uses for this is the “epistemological break”. In other words: the way you’ve been thinking about things just doesn’t work any more. The kind of “knowledge” you’re looking for doesn’t exist.

The report calls for two epistemological breaks: First, to place less importance on predictive analysis based on past data (i.e., next year’s earnings estimates), and instead to stress-test against a variety of forward-looking scenarios (i.e., how would this bank do in case of a sudden jump in the cost of carbon emissions?).

[T]raditional approaches to risk management consisting in extrapolating historical data based on assumptions of normal distributions are largely irrelevant to assess future climate-related risks. Indeed, both physical and transition risks are characterised by deep uncertainty, nonlinearity and fat-tailed distributions. As such, assessing climate-related risks requires an “epistemological break” (Bachelard (1938)) with regard to risk management. In fact, such a break has started to take place in the financial community, with the development of forward-looking, scenario-based risk management methodologies.

And second, to be proactive in pushing both governments and the private sector to implement carbon-limiting policies.

Whereas they cannot and should not replace policymakers, [central bankers] also cannot sit still, since this could place them in the untenable situation of climate rescuer of last resort

Central bankers like to portray themselves as “above politics”, but they certainly express opinions about taxes and deficits; they should do so about climate policy as well. (The report regards some form of carbon tax or carbon pricing as a no-brainer. Governments should do at least that much.)

So what’s a central banker to do? Typical central banking picks up the pieces after disasters happen. That’s what banks and governments did after the Great Recession: bought up troubled assets and created a lot of new money to get economies rolling again.

The report says that won’t work as a green-swan policy, because of the “limited substitutability between natural capital and other forms of capital”. In other words, if the Earth stops producing the stuff humans need to survive, giving people money won’t help. In a limited disaster, money allows the people affected to import resources from elsewhere. But in a global disaster, there is no elsewhere.

Central banks’ main power is in creating money and setting interest rates, but they also regulate the banking system, which in turn influences the companies the banks deal with.

The ways in which accounting norms incorporate (or not) environmental dimensions remains critical: accounting norms reflect broader worldviews of what is valued in a society (Jourdain (2019)), at both the microeconomic and macroeconomic level. From a financial stability perspective, it therefore remains critical to integrate biophysical indicators into existing accounting frameworks to ensure that policymakers and firm managers systematically include them in their risk management practices over different time horizons

The report (in some of its more technical passages, which may have gone over my head) proposes a number of ways central banks might use this power to change the economy as a whole. By defining new measures of sustainability and demanding that client banks report those measures, a central bank can alter the overall financial culture, with the result that “climate-related risks become integrated into financial stability monitoring and prudential supervision”.

[A] systematic integration of climate-related risks by financial institutions could act as a form of shadow pricing on carbon, and therefore help shift financial flows towards green assets. That is, if investors integrate climate-related risks into their risk assessment, then polluting assets will become more costly. This would trigger more investment in green assets, helping propel the transition to a low carbon economy (Pereira da Silva (2019a)) and break the tragedy of the horizon by better integrating long-term risks

Adding up to this:

Faced with these daunting challenges, a key contribution of central banks and supervisors may simply be to adequately frame the debate. In particular, they can play this role by: (i) providing a scientifically uncompromising picture of the risks ahead, assuming a limited substitutability between natural capital and other forms of capital; (ii) calling for bolder actions from public and private sectors aimed at preserving the resilience of Earth’s complex socio-ecological systems; and (iii) contributing, to the extent possible and within the remit of the evolving mandates provided by society, to managing these risks

What’s it mean for us? The direction of the world seldom changes all at once, and different sectors catch on at different rates. As different segments of society change their minds, it’s important to let them do so, and to encourage them. Each will have its own language for talking about its new ideas, and they can’t be expected to learn our language just because we got there first.

During the transition period, people whose worldview comes from that sector will have both the new frame and the old frame in their minds simultaneously, and either can be activated depending on how you approach them. (This is similar to what George Lakoff says about swing voters. It isn’t that they have a well-worked-out in-the-middle worldview; it’s that their minds contain both a liberal frame and a conservative frame. Depending on how they are approached, one frame or the other will be activated.) If you want to get such people on your side, it helps if you learn the language of their new frame and bypass obsolete arguments, rather than sticking with the old terminology and insisting on winning those arguments.

I think you’ll be pleased to learn that this week’s Sift is not entirely about impeachment. I’ll pay attention to the Senate trial, of course, because how can you not? But the featured article is about a much longer-term situation: I’ll explain some of what’s in a fascinating report from the Bank of International Settlements, The Green Swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change.

OK, maybe that didn’t sound as fascinating to you as it did to me, but give me another sentence or two. The report represents an important shift: the world’s central bankers are starting to get religion about climate change. They could become allies instead of enemies, at least on some issues. The report contains this line, which is (on the one hand) obvious to environmentalists, but (on the other) revolutionary in central-banking circles: “The stability of the Earth system is a prerequisite for financial and price stability.”

I’m running a little late this morning, so that article probably won’t be out until 11 or so EST. The weekly summary has a lot to cover and will run long: the impeachment trial, the drip-drip of new evidence against Trump, the Chinese coronavirus, Mike Pompeo’s outrageous attack on an NPR reporter, the sports-medicine significance of Zion Williamson’s knee, and a number of other things. I’ll predict that to appear around 1.

If I see Trump as a pestilence, I may not see in your tome of plans a cure.

– Charles Blow “To Beat Trump, Put Ideals Before Ideas”
1-15-2020

This week’s featured post is “Ten Principles that Unify Democrats (and most of the country)“.

This week everybody was talking about the impeachment trial

House impeachment managers head over to the Senate.

So it’s official now. The House delivered the articles of impeachment to the Senate on Wednesday. Thursday, the senators took an oath to render “impartial justice”. The substance of the trial will start tomorrow.

Fairly soon, the Senate will have to vote on the key question of whether to hear witnesses. Trump blocked the most important witnesses from testifying before the House, but would have a harder time blocking them from the Senate, if the Senate chooses to subpoena them. Mitch McConnell is against witnesses, because the less the public learns about this case, the better for Trump.

How this vote will go is still not clear. All 47 Democrats will probably want to hear witnesses. USA Today picks out Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Lamar Alexander as the most likely Republicans to vote for witnesses. I’d love to hear how other Republicans facing tough re-elections — Cory Gardner of Colorado comes to mind — will try to spin this. They have to realize that stuff is going to come out anyway. (John Bolton is writing a book, after all.) How will a decision to participate in Trump’s cover-up look when it does?

It’s striking how much of the closing message of Trump’s defenders is just simple intimidation. Here’s Rand Paul’s threat to Republican incumbents who might be thinking of taking their oath seriously:

Paul says if four or more of his GOP colleagues join with Democrats to entertain new witness testimony, he will make the Senate vote on subpoenaing the president’s preferred witnesses, including Hunter Biden and the whistleblower who revealed the Ukraine scandal — polarizing picks who moderate Republicans aren’t eager to call. So he has a simple message for his party: end the trial before witnesses are called.

“If you vote against Hunter Biden, you’re voting to lose your election, basically. Seriously. That’s what it is,” Paul said during an interview in his office on Wednesday. “If you don’t want to vote and you think you’re going to have to vote against Hunter Biden, you should just vote against witnesses, period.”

And Marc Thiessen warns that Hunter Biden could just be the beginning of a parade of witnesses that would lead to the former Vice President himself.

Biden has been shaky under mild questioning during the debates. How would he fare under the withering pressure of legal cross-examination? If he stumbled, or appeared confused, it could expose to voters how old and frail he really is at the very moment they are going to the polls to decide their party’s presidential nominee. Do Democrats really want to put Biden through that, especially since they know that the president is going to be acquitted?

And for what? Democrats have no idea what Bolton will say under oath. His testimony may be exculpatory for the president, in which case they will have opened the Pandora’s box of witness testimony for nothing. So, call your witnesses, Sen. Schumer. They may very well pose a greater danger to Biden’s presidential prospects than they do to Donald Trump.

Trump’s defenders can’t credibly argue that he’s innocent, so this is what they’re left with: Do what we say and nobody gets hurt. [BTW: I think the Biden-is-shaky point is off-base. Biden has a lifelong stuttering problem, which can make it hard for him to answer quickly, as you have to do in a debate. As a witness, he could take a moment to compose his answers.]

and the new evidence

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I get suspicious when a bad guy suddenly switches sides and starts telling us exactly what we want to hear. Lev Parnas is under indictment, so it would make sense for him to tell this stuff to his prosecutors to get a plea deal. But it’s not clear what advantage he gets from putting it all out there in public. So I’m listening closely to what Parnas is saying, looking at the corroborating documents he’s providing, and wondering where the trap is.

Nonetheless, I think Tom Malinowski has got it right:

GOP Senators are entitled to be skeptical of Parnas, since he wasn’t under oath. They’re not entitled to be skeptical while refusing to call sworn witnesses who could corroborate or refute him.

That point makes sense across the board. Again and again, Republicans have complained about the evidence House Democrats assembled: The witnesses weren’t always in the center of the action they were describing, few of them talked to Trump directly, and so on. Those are all reasonable things to complain about in the abstract. But it’s unreasonable to complain about those issues when you have the power to resolve them, but you’re refusing to do so.

Another major development this week was that a GAO report came out, saying that Trump’s freezing of the Ukraine aid violated the Impoundment Control Act. So much for the “no laws were broken” defense.

So who is Parnas anyway? He’s a crony of Rudy Giuliani who was working the Ukraine side of Trump’s get-Biden scheme. He did a long interview with Rachel Maddow that broadcast this week, and he’s provided a bunch of text messages and other relevant documents to the House impeachment investigators. Pieces of the Maddow interview are available online, but I haven’t found a complete video or transcript of it yet.

The Hill boils it down to five big points:

• Trump was ready to withhold all aid from Ukraine if they didn’t announce a Biden investigation.
• Bill Barr “had to have known everything”.
• Trump knew exactly what was going on.
• When Mike Pence cancelled his trip to the Ukraine president’s inauguration, that was part of the pressure campaign.
• The effort to pressure Ukraine was never about corruption; it was about Biden.

In addition, I was struck by how clear Parnas makes it that Giuliani was operating as Trump’s personal attorney, not as a government official. So far, none of Trump’s defenders has been able to explain why (if this whole scheme was legit) it had to be done outside ordinary channels. To me, the off-the-books nature of things looks like consciousness of guilt.

Why, for example, couldn’t Trump just fire or transfer Ambassador Yovanovitch because he wanted to? Why did she have to be smeared and followed and threatened first?

Another thing that’s striking me: For a long time there, Rudy Giuliani just couldn’t shut up. He was all over TV saying all kinds of crazy things. Since Parnas started talking though, where has Rudy been?

Ben Rhodes asks a more general question:

Can you imagine how many corrupt grifters there are like Parnas circling around Trump’s foreign policy? On Saudi, UAE, Venezuela, China, Russia?

and the Democratic debate

The featured post was inspired by watching Tuesday’s debate, but doesn’t actually say that much about it. Here’s the transcript.

The debate in Des Moines was much like the previous debates, with the difference that there were only six candidates. That meant that each got to speak often enough that I never forgot who was up there. So while the previous debates looked like cattle calls, this one looked like a collection of possible nominees (with the possible exception of Steyer, who I still can’t take seriously). That had to work to the benefit of Amy Klobuchar, who trails the clump of Iowa front-runners (Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren), but looked like she belonged in that group.

Any of the front-running four is polling close enough to the top to win, especially considering how bizarre the caucus process is. So I don’t understand how soft all the other candidates were with Biden. Biden is the leader in almost every national poll. He could win Iowa, and if he does, that victory could be the beginning of the bandwagon that he rides to the nomination. This debate was the last chance to take him down before the caucus, so I don’t understand why nobody tried to exploit that opportunity.

So while Biden wasn’t all that sharp in the debate — he almost never is — to me he came off as the winner, because his opponents missed another opportunity to knock him down.

The NYT endorsement came out this morning: a split decision between Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.

The whole Bernie-and-Elizabeth spat has got to be the dumbest story in this debate. Warren claims Sanders told her that a woman couldn’t beat Trump; Sanders denies saying that. It was a one-on-one conversation, so there’s no tie-breaking witness. I have two reactions:

• So what if he did? Lots of people — most of them women — have told me in private conversations that (after watching what Hillary went through) they doubt that a woman can beat Trump. If Sanders were arguing publicly that people should vote for him rather than Warren because women aren’t electable, that would be terrible, because he’d be trying to cash in on the public’s sexism. But in private it’s a completely legitimate point of strategy for two politicians to discuss. So I think this whole thing should never have become an issue and CNN shouldn’t have asked about it. If Warren is responsible for raising the issue (and she may not have been), she shouldn’t have.
• I thought Bernie’s response in the debate (“as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it”) was unskillful, because he turned the disagreement into a somebody-must-be-lying issue. I agree with GoodNewsRoundup on Daily Kos, that people can remember conversations differently without either party lying about what was said. So Bernie could have answered: “That’s not what I believe, so I can’t imagine that I would have said something like that. But apparently something I did say gave Elizabeth that impression, so I wish I had caught that misunderstanding at the time.” From there he could have segued into the rest of his answer: “If any of the women on this stage or any of the men on this stage win the nomination … I will do everything in my power to make sure that they are elected in order to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of our country.”

and you also might be interested in …

I’m not all that interested in the British royal family, so I’ve mostly ignored the Harry-and-Meghan-move-to-Canada story. However, BuzzFeed did some interesting research into what might have motivated the move: The article pairs 20 Meghan stories in the British press with directly comparable stories about her sister-in-law Kate Middleton. Again and again, something that was covered positively or indulgently for Kate and William was covered negatively for Meghan and Harry.

Here’s the transcript of a rally Trump held in Wisconsin on Tuesday. It’s common to read isn’t-that-outrageous articles based on specific quotes from Trump rallies. But what strikes me about this rally isn’t any particular part; it’s the impact of reading the whole thing.

If your Dad or Grandpa were this incoherent, the family would need to have a conference and make some decisions. You wouldn’t want him living on his own any more, and probably you’d want someone with him whenever he went out.

BTW, he still says Mexico is going to pay for the wall. “It’s all worked out. Mexico’s paying.” Sad.

The claim that no Americans were injured in the Iranian missile attack on January 8 … let’s just say it wasn’t completely accurate.

and let’s close with something that will blow you away

You might think that since the Netherlands is so flat, Dutch bicycle races wouldn’t be that arduous. However, there is one very Dutch obstacle: the wind. Every year on some very windy day they hold the Dutch Headwind Cycling Championships: 8.5 kilometers straight into a wind that gusted up to 127 kilometers an hour, riding a standard upright single-speed bicycle.

Since I don’t speak Dutch, most of the YouTube postings on the event are unintelligible to me. But Global Cycling News covered it like this, with one word of commentary: “Nutters.”

By focusing attention on comparatively minor policy differences, the debates are obscuring a broad Democratic consensus that voters need to hear about.

Several years ago I was having lunch with a friend when the Democratic candidate for Congress came through the nearly empty restaurant, shaking the few hands available. After she left, our young waitress came to the table, and I could tell that she had a question unrelated to food. I expected her to ask whether we knew anything about the candidate, but her actual question was much more basic: “Do you know anything about Congress? Is it, like, important?”

That encounter taught me a lesson I have not forgotten: People who pay attention to politics often talk about “low-information voters”, but most of us have no idea just how low-information they are.

Back in 2004, Chris Hayes learned similar lessons from the undecided voters he canvassed in Wisconsin.

The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn’t name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The “issue” is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It’s what makes up the subheadings on a candidate’s website, it’s what sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it’s what every candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it’s what we always complain we don’t see enough coverage of.

But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. … The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief — not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

Year after year, elections come out they way they do because people like my waitress or Hayes’ undecideds vote one way or the other or stay home. Those decisions are made on a much simpler level than we usually imagine, and the arguments we find so convincing often miss their targets completely. If such voters are persuaded, it is more likely because of our earnestness or our tone or something we said in the first ten seconds. Or maybe we inadvertently convinced them to vote against our candidate for some similarly tangential reason.

That’s what I was thinking Tuesday as I watched the final Democratic debate before the Iowa caucus, which will happen February 3. Debates draw out differences, and when candidates share basic goals and values, their differences are often deep in the details of policy. Those policy distinctions — like Medicare for All vs. Medicare for All Who Want It vs. adding a Medicare-like public option to ObamaCare — mean nothing to most low-information voters.

Worse, the squabbling over programmatic details hides the candidates’ vast areas of agreement. The New York Times, justifying its decision to endorse both progressive Elizabeth Warren and moderate Amy Klobuchar this morning, wrote:

The Democratic primary contest is often portrayed as a tussle between moderates and progressives. To some extent that’s true. But when we spent significant time with the leading candidates, the similarity of their platforms on fundamental issues became striking.

I believe that those points of consensus should be the central message of the campaign against Trump. That consensus is the best definition of what it means to be a Democrat, and is a better predictor of what the next Democratic administration will accomplish than any particular candidate’s program — even the winner’s. (In 2008, Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan had an insurance mandate and Barack Obama’s didn’t. But when Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, it had a mandate. So if you voted for Obama over Clinton to avoid a mandate, you failed in your purpose.)

Political wonks are always tempted to dive down into the weeds of policy and argue why Candidate X’s plan is superior to Candidate Y’s. And I understand how those differences can seem terribly significant when you are in the throes of a primary campaign. But I think that’s exactly the wrong thing to be doing when we get rare moments of national attention, as we did Tuesday. What the public needs to hear are the principles that unify Democrats and set them against the current administration, not the fine details of policy that differentiate one Democrat from another.

Charles Blow made a similar point Wednesday morning:

Trump has laid out his vision for America: It is the racial Hunger Games. … The Democratic candidates, too, would be well warned to stick to a vision — a diametrically opposite and dynamically animating vision that will activate and energize the targets of Trump’s aggressions.

If I see Trump as a pestilence I may not see in your tome of plans a cure.

Here’s where I stand: If Candidate A’s policies are analytically superior, but Candidate B is the more convincing proponent of the Democratic consensus, I want to vote for B. That’s the difference I’d like to see the debates showcase. That’s not “electability” as it is commonly discussed; it’s who we should want as our spokesperson.

What do I think is in the Democratic consensus? I thought you’d never ask.

1. If you get sick, you should get the care you need, and your family shouldn’t have to go bankrupt paying for it.

If you showed this statement to the 20-odd candidates who have run for the Democratic nomination in this cycle, I firmly believe they would all agree with it.

Their differences are all about how to get there: What is the most efficient way to deliver that much healthcare? How would the country pay for it? What’s the most politically expedient path forward?

Bernie Sanders wants to get there in one fell swoop, with a government insurance plan that eliminates private insurance and is paid for by taxes. Most of the other candidates on the debate stage (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar) don’t believe they could pass such a plan, so they want to take a smaller step in the same direction by building on ObamaCare. (Once the public sees how that works and develops confidence in it, take another step.) Elizabeth Warren is somewhere between, proposing a Bernie-like program with a phase-in period.

That’s what they’ve been arguing about. Trump, on the other hand, has sabotaged ObamaCare, tried to repeal it in Congress, and is still backing a lawsuit that would declare it unconstitutional. Despite a lot of rhetoric about “replacing” ObamaCare, he has never released a plan for doing so. The upshot is that if he succeeds in his aims, tens of millions of people will lose health coverage.

2. We can and should do much more to slow down climate change.

President Obama did a number of things to slow down climate change, but Trump has undone almost all of them: Obama joined the Paris Climate Accord; Trump withdrew from it. Obama substantially raised fuel economy standards for cars and trucks; Trump initially froze them at the old levels, then agreed to a minor increase. Trump reversed Obama’s Clean Power Plan to cut carbon emissions from plants that generate electricity. Trump’s plan to roll back standards on methane emissions is too radical even for some oil companies.

All the Democratic candidates want to do more than Obama did, not less. They disagree about how much more and how fast it can happen.

None of the candidates denies or tries to minimize the significance of the scientific consensus on climate change: It is real. We already are seeing the effects. It is caused primarily by the carbon emissions that happen when we burn fossil fuels. It will reach catastrophic levels if the world does not substantially reduce its carbon emissions.

3. If you’re willing to work hard, you should be able to find a job that pays a decent wage.

Trump has reason to crow about the unemployment rate, which is very low right now. (Whether low unemployment due to any policy of his, or is just the continuation of trends that started under Obama — that’s another debate.) But a lot of the people who have jobs are still not making a wage they can live on.

The federal minimum wage is still $7.25, the same as it was in 2009. The purchasing power (after inflation) of the minimum wage peaked in 1968. (The value of 1968’s $1.60 wage is $12.00 today.) In none of the 50 states is a two-bedroom apartment affordable on a full-time minimum wage.

President Obama tried to raise minimum wage to $9, but couldn’t get Republicans in Congress to go along. All Democratic candidates want a much greater increase. Both Bernie Sanders (the most liberal Democratic candidate) and Joe Biden (one of the least liberal) are calling for $15.

Democrats across the board want to create jobs paying good wages by repairing our country’s roads and bridges, modernizing the electrical grid, and shifting to renewable energy sources that don’t contribute to climate change.

4. The burden of taxes should fall primarily on those best able to bear it.

The benefits of the Trump tax cut went almost entirely to large corporations and the very rich. Despite the promises he often made during the 2016 campaign and repeated early in his administration, the new tax rules particularly favor people like him. In fact, many of the tax breaks that the law preserves or extends seem to be targeted precisely at benefiting Trump himself or his family. (That’s one reason he doesn’t want you to see his tax returns.)

This is part of a long-term trend that has lowered the tax rates paid by the super-rich.

(Sometimes you’ll see an article claiming that the very rich carry more of the tax burden than they used to, but these claims are deceptive: The very rich have seen their incomes go up many times faster than the rest of us. They get a much bigger piece of the pie than they used to, but while their share of the tax burden has gone up somewhat, it has not gone up proportionately.)

Corporations are also carrying a much smaller tax burden than they did in decades past. The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy lists 60 corporations that among them made nearly $80 billion in profits, but paid no taxes in 2018 under Trump’s new law.

Meanwhile, the federal deficit (which Republicans thought was an existential crisis when Obama was president, but have since forgotten about) has nearly doubled under Trump — from $665 billion in FY 2017 to a projected $1.1 trillion next year. This comes at a time in the economic cycle when the deficit ought to be going down, because it will rise even further when the next recession comes.

All the major Democratic candidates would reverse most the Trump tax cuts, and all call for shifting more of the tax burden back to the rich. Elizabeth Warren is the most vocal about this, calling for a 2% wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million. The rest don’t go quite that far, but all  agree that the rich should pay more.

5. If you want to develop your talents through education, money shouldn’t stand in your way.

States used to put big money into their university systems, but they no longer do. As a result, college of any kind has become unreasonably expensive — far more expensive than it was a generation ago. (Until 1970, the University of California charged California residents zero tuition.)

As a result, too many of our young people face a terrible choice: Give up on developing their talents after high school, or take on debts that they may never be able to pay off. Or their parents face the choice: See their children stuck in dead-end jobs, or take all the money they had hoped to retire on and hand it to a university.

Wasted talent isn’t just a personal tragedy, it’s a loss for all of us. If our young people don’t learn 21st-century skills, American businesses will have a harder time finding good people, foreign companies won’t want to open branches here, our economy as a whole will be less prosperous, and the professionals we have to deal with in our personal lives (doctors, accountants, dentists, teachers, etc.) won’t be the best people. There is also a more subtle cost: the loss of the American dream. When only the rich can afford to send their children to college, the upper classes become entrenched; where you are born is where you will stay.

Democratic candidates have a variety of plans to do something about this: Some want to make public colleges free for everyone, or maybe just free for people whose parents aren’t rich. Some want to forgive all student debt, or only part of it. As with healthcare, the difference isn’t in the general principle, it’s in how to bring it about and who will pay for it.

The Trump administration’s priorities are diametrically opposed: They are constantly looking for ways to cut back on student aid or student loans, or to make them harder to pay off. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has consistently shown more interest in for-profit colleges that rip students off than in the students being victimized.

6. America should be a positive example to the rest of the world. When international cooperation is necessary to solve global problems, our country should lead.

We’ve fallen a long way from the “shining city on a hill” Ronald Reagan used to brag about. These days, if you’re a third-world dictator and you want to torture people or channel government money into your own pocket or use your law enforcement agencies to investigate people who cross you or accuse the press of being “the enemy of the people” or claim a phony emergency to grab power from your legislature, you just point to the United States and quote its president. It’s fine. All the best countries are doing it.

We’re now a country none of the other countries trust, because our word means nothing. Imagine how shocked our loyal allies in Canada were when we raised tariffs because we considered Canada a risk to our national security. Or talk to the Kurds, if you can still find any.

Historically, America has been an idealistic nation. Since World War II, it has led the community of nations towards higher standards of human rights and a freer exchange of ideas and people. The US has been key in setting up regional alliances for mutual security, with NATO being the shining example.

Today, the world faces many problems that no nation can solve on its own; most significantly, climate change, but also terrorism, nuclear proliferation, floods of refugees fleeing wars or climate-change-related catastrophes, and several others. But the Trump administration has chosen to step back from world leadership with a go-it-alone policy. Given our military power and central role in the world economy, no other nation can take our place.

Democrats want the US to be a good citizen of the community of nations, and to rally the nations of the world to confront the unique challenges of this century.

7. Every American should be encouraged to vote, and all votes should count equally.

For the last decade or so, Republicans all over the country have been putting obstacles in the way of people who want to vote, particularly if they are poor, black, HIspanic, or in school. Even if such people do manage to vote, gerrymandering can concentrate them in a small number of districts so that they wind up with fewer representatives in Congress or state legislatures. You can see the result in a state like Wisconsin, where Republicans maintain power no matter how the people vote. (In 2018, 54% of Wisconsinites voted for Democratic candidates for the state assembly, but those candidates won only 36% of the seats.)

The first bill Democrats passed when they got control of the House of Representatives last year was House Resolution 1 of 2019: The For the People Act. That law would end gerrymandering, extend voting rights, and set up a program to limit the power of large donors to political campaigns. The Republican-controlled Senate refused to vote on it.

Ultimately, Democrats would also like to get rid of the Electoral College — which allowed Donald Trump to become president even though Hillary Clinton got nearly 3 million more votes.

8. All Americans should be equal before the law, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, income, religion, or any other characteristic that isn’t relevant to the purposes of the law. All citizens should be treated with equal respect by law enforcement.

“Liberty and justice for all” is a key part of our national identity, but we haven’t been doing a good job of delivering it. Race makes a difference at every level of our justice system: Black neighborhoods are more heavily policed, leading to more arrests. Arrested blacks are more likely to be charged with crimes; charged blacks are more likely to be convicted; convicted blacks on average get longer sentences. The result is that a substantial portion of the black male population is in jail. (Laws preventing felons from voting, even after they leave prison, are a major way that minorities are prevented from exercising political power proportionate to their numbers.)

Far too often, black men and women die in encounters with police without ever reaching the justice system.

These problems existed long before Donald Trump took office. But as with climate change, the Obama administration was trying to do something about them, and the Trump administration has undone all that progress. In particular, Trump’s Justice Department has all but stopped oversight of racism in local police departments. Trump himself has actively encouraged police to physically abuse suspects.

Any Democratic candidate for president would get back on the Obama/Holder track of trying to reduce the racism in law enforcement and the legal system.

9. As much as possible, politics should be insulated from the corrupting influence of concentrated wealth.

Briefly, controlling campaign finance looked like a bipartisan issue. Republican Senator John McCain made it a central plank of his first presidential campaign in 2000, and he teamed with Democrat Russ Feingold to produce the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002.

But Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents have subsequently declared unconstitutional just about any substantive limits on political spending. One of the few remaining options for controlling big-money politics is disclosure (i.e., letting the public know who is financing political ads, rather than letting big-money interests hide behind shell organizations with vacuous names like “Concerned Citizens Against …”), but the Republican Senate has blocked any such legislation.

This is one of the clearest differences between the parties: Republicans want big-money donors to have as much power as possible, while Democrats want to limit the power of money in general, and (to the extent that those limitations prove impractical) enhance the power of small donors.

10. The basic constitutional covenant is still necessary and should be respected: majority rule that respects minority rights, three branches of government that check and balance each other, and an appropriate balance between the public good and individual freedom.

For years, preserving or restoring the Constitution has played a major role in Republican rhetoric, but President Trump has made a mockery of all that. This is one of the major issues in his impeachment, and should be a major issue in the 2020 campaign as well.

The Constitution assigns Congress the “power of the purse”, which means that no money can be spent without Congress’ approval. But when Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall last year, even after a lengthy government shutdown, he declared a phony “state of emergency” and seized the money from other programs. He also illegally held up money that Congress had appropriated to aid Ukraine.

Congress has a constitutional duty to keep oversight over the executive branch, but Trump has routinely refused to provide subpoenaed documents and witnesses, arguing in court that he has “absolute immunity” against any investigations whatsoever. His legal arguments are absurd, but will serve to delay things in the courts long enough to keep the public from finding out what he’s been doing until after the election.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but he committed an act of war against Iran without consulting Congress.

Again and again, Trump has shown that he admires dictators: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and many others. (The New Yorker’s satirical Borowitz Report says “Ayatollah Mystified That He is the Only Dictator Trump Dislikes“.) That’s because he wants to be one.

In spite of decades of Republican rhetoric, Democrats are now the party that stands for the Constitution.

Of course the big news this week centered on impeachment: The trial in the Senate formally started, we got a bunch of new evidence from Lev Parnas (who I still don’t trust), and the Government Accounting Office officially stated that Trump’s hold on the Ukraine aid was illegal.

What I decided to write about this week, though, was inspired by the Democratic debate on Tuesday — not any particular point made in the debate itself, but the general impression it left: If you were a low-information voter who happened to tune into this event, you would probably not grasp just how many things Democrats agree on, and how sharply that consensus differs from what the Trump administration and Republicans across the country are trying to do. By emphasizing differences, the debate format creates the false impression that the various Democratic candidates represent wildly different points of view.

So I decided to counter that with a piece I’m calling “Ten Principles that Unify Democrats (and most of the country)”. That should be out, let’s say, around 10 EST.

The weekly summary will cover the impeachment developments, what the Democrats actually did debate about, and a few other things, before closing with an extremely odd Dutch bicycle race. That should appear sometime after noon.

• Me: You know my part.
• The artist: I play with images, I play with image. I play this scene with you, and I will not tell you why. I could stab you with this feather; fear not, it's all illusion.
• The feather: I am a pen; from me ideas flow. I am an arrow; Cupid does not miss. 
• The paper: There are no secrets. I announce success
• The airport: I am the place where people cross, where people greet and part, the resting place between journeys.