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Tania MΓ‘rquez
Rethinking Thanksgiving Traditions:Β A Grateful Gathering
The prolonged challenges of Covid have led many individuals and organizations to examine their core values.Β Consideration of what is most important evokes fundamental life-style changes, moving toward living in harmony.Β
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At The Mountain, striving to live ourΒ core values, we are examining roles and responsibilities related to Thanksgiving traditions.Β Please join us for aΒ Grateful Gathering, a long weekend event Wednesday, Nov.Β 24 through Sunday, Nov.Β 28.Β This intergenerational event will include activities like making corn husk dolls, and shared meals featuring traditional, locally farmed, and ethically-sourced-food.Β Learn more and register here.
On October 15, 2021, at the invitation of Congresswoman Maxine Waters (yes, the Maxine Waters!), law professor and acclaimed author Sheryll Cashin testified before the Subcommittee on Housing, Community Development, and Insurance on Friday at noon about exclusionary zoning and what to do about it. She led with her book, White Space, Black Hood, and her theory of residential caste. She submitted the following testimony that is now part of the Congressional record.
~~~
Good afternoon. As a law professor, author, and former White House staffer in the Clinton Administration, I have spent nearly three decades grappling with the issue of US residential segregationβits origins, persistence, and calamitous effects in producing racial and economic inequality. My most recent book, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, reflects these decades of examination and analysis. It argues that we have a system of residential caste, in which government over-invests and excludes in affluent white spaces, and disinvests, contains, and preys on people in high-poverty Black neighborhoods. These are the extremes of American residential caste. But everyone who cannot afford to buy their way into high-opportunity neighborhoods is harmed by this system. People of all colors who are trapped in concentrated poverty are harmed the most. They are systemically denied meaningful opportunity for social mobility, no matter how hard they work to escape. In the book, I show that residential caste is animated by three anti-Black processes: boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance.
Boundary maintenance is a polite phrase for intentional state action to create or maintain racial segregation. The dominant response to at least six million Black βGreat migrantsβ moving north and west to escape Jim Crow in the twentieth century was to contain them in densely populated Black neighborhoods and to cut those neighborhoods off from essential public and private investment that was and is regularly rained down on majority white areas. In addition to racially-restrictive covenants, mob violence, mortgage redlining, and racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals, exclusionary zoning was a key tool for creating and insulating predominantly white neighborhoods. Exclusionary zoning was first sanctioned by the US Supreme Court in 1926 in the case of Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty. The Court explicitly endorsed the idea that certain uses of land, like duplexes, were βparasiticβ on single-family homes and the people who lived there. In ensuing decades, thousands of new suburban governments would form, enabling middle- and upper-class whites to wield the zoning power to exclude certain types of housing, particularly rental apartments, and therefore exclude unwelcome populations. Fast-forward to today and where high levels of Black segregation persist, researchers have found that it was actively promoted by zoning laws that restricted density and by high levels of anti-Black prejudice, particularly in places with large numbers of Blacks with lower incomes and education levels than most whites. And, according to a stunning, geographically mapped analysis produced by the New York Times, β[i]t is illegal on 75 percent of the residential land in many American cities to build anything other than a detached single-family homeβ (emphasis added). That figure is even higher in many suburbs and newer Sun Belt cities.
This hearing is about exclusionary zoning, which necessarily concerns local zoning power. But it is important to recognize the singular, outsized role of the federal government in creating and continuing Americaβs separate and unequal residential landscape. The federal government mandated redlining, marking Black neighborhoods as βhazardousβ and cutting Black residents out of its largest wealthy building subsidies (HOLC, FHA, and Veterans Administration-insured mortgage lending). The federal government, through its mortgage underwriting rules, insisted that lenders insert racially restrictive covenants in deeds. The federal government spent billions for βurban renewalβ to displace Black occupied housing and paid cities to build high-rise public housing that intentionally placed Black and white tenants in separate and unequal housing projects. These policies created iconic Black βghettosβ that exacerbated white flight and resistance to having Black neighbors. The federal government paid for and acquiesced in an interstate highway program laid to create racial barriers in cities and facilitate easy exit from cities to majority white suburbs. (For a detailed overview of this federal history see Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream, Chapter Three.)
The federal government still invests in segregation. To date, George Romney, Sen. Mitt Romneyβs father, is the only HUD secretary to have pressured and penalized communities for exclusionary zoning laws and for refusing to build affordable, non-segregated housing. For decades, both HUD and local governments regularly violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 requirement that communities βaffirmatively furtherβ fair housing. For decades, HUD has distributed about $5.5 billion annually in grants for community development, parceled among more than 1,000 local jurisdictions nationwide, with no meaningful accountability for promoting inclusive, integrated housing. The federal government also continues to concentrate poverty through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, its largest subsidy for affordable housing. Each year, the LIHTC funnels about $10 billion for affordable housing construction, and only seventeen percent of those units get built in high-opportunity neighborhoods with high-performing schools, low crime, and easy access to jobs. That keeps Americans who need affordable housing concentrated in the same low-opportunity areas.
This history and present of federally-backed segregation inform the legal and moral case for congressional action to disrupt exclusionary zoning and residential caste. Intentional segregation of Black people in the twentieth century shaped development and living patterns for everyone and put in place an infrastructure for promoting and maintaining segregation that lives on. Racial steering by realtors who nudge homebuyers into segregated spaces; discrimination in mortgage lending; exclusionary zoning; a government-subsidized affordable housing industrial complex that concentrates poverty, local school boundaries that encourage segregation; plus continued resistance to integration by many but not all white Americansβall are forms of racial boundary maintenance today.
The negative effects of systemic exclusion are clear. As demonstrated by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and others, segregated communities tend to rate low on social mobility for poor children. And the gap in life expectancy between Blacks and whites in very segregated cities can rise to more than twenty years because of increased exposure to trauma, lead poisoning, allergens in poor-quality housing, fast-food βswamps,β and healthy-food deserts. Meanwhile, residents of exclusionary affluent spaces rise on the benefits of concentrated advantages, from excellent schools and infrastructure to job-rich social networks to easily accessible healthy food. Less understood is the fact that the government-created segregation facilitates poverty-free affluent white space by concentrating poverty elsewhere.
In considering policy options that Congress might pursue, it is important to acknowledge that the main reason exclusionary zoning persists is the vested interests and expectations of people who live in poverty-free havens. Government at all levels has catered to these expectations. And again, another reason for persistent exclusion, at least in some places, is high levels of anti-Black prejudice. In California, a so-called blue state where ostensibly liberal Democrats are in charge, despite a grave housing crisis and abundant problems with homelessness, the state was only able to take the baby step of opening single-family neighborhoods to duplexes. So, if Congress wants to disrupt a near century of exclusionary zoning, serious pressure and accountability are required. Congress and the executive branch also must atone for the federal legacy of promoting segregation.
It bears remembering that, in the face of Southern massive resistance to school integration, school districts did not begin to desegregate with alacrity until the Johnson Administration threatened to withhold federal education funds pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (or they were ordered to do so by a federal court). I recommend not just spending incentives to deregulate or repeal exclusionary zoning ordinances but serious pressure on localities to adopt locally designed inclusionary zoning ordinancesβlike the highly successful mandatory ordinance Montgomery County, Maryland, has had in place for five decades. Because Montgomery County requires that all new development above a certain size include affordable units and sets aside some of those new units for residents of public housing, this extremely diverse, wealthy suburban county has no pockets of concentrated poverty, and poor children have more access to integrated, well-resourced schools.
In conclusion, I recommend that federal housing and community development and infrastructure funds should be conditioned on localities adopting inclusionary zoning ordinances and/or actually βaffirmatively furthering fair housing.β
~~~
Watch Sheryll Cashin give her testimony.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwsnvsvZirU?start=930]
About the Author
Sheryll Cashin is an acclaimed author who writes about the US struggle with racism and inequality. Her books have been nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, and an Editorsβ Choice in the New York Times Book Review. Cashin is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University and an active member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. A law clerk to US Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, Cashin also worked in the Clinton White House as an advisor on community development in inner-city neighborhoods. She is a contributing editor for Politico Magazine and currently resides in Washington, DC, with her husband and twin sons. Follow her at sheryllcashin.com and on Twitter (@sheryllcashin).
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The 14th Dalai Lama suggests that “True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason.” His Holiness teaches that the heart of compassion is to genuinely want for an end to suffering for all sentient beings. Many of the world’s respected religious paths have compassion as a tenet. We’ll explore some of these teachings this month.
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On July 16, 2020, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted rules to establish 988 as the new, nationwide, three-digit phone number for Americans in crisis to connect with suicide prevention and mental health crisis counselors. If you or someone you know is struggling right now, share this number so you and/or they can get the support you/they need.
– With care, Rev. Wendy and Rev. Lynn
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Rev Diane Dowgiert is accepting nominations for the Joan and Joe Moore Award.Β Details on the criteria for nominations (which include work at the Regional and Denominational level) and the nomination submissions form can be found here.
We accept nominations for this prestigious award until December 1.
Miracles represent freedom from fear. βAtoningβ means βundoing.β The undoing of fear is an essential part of the Atonement value of miracles. T-1.1.26:1-3
There is nothing to fear because God loves you unconditionally. It is the undoing of our fear of Godβs wrath for our separation from God which is the meaning of atonement. All it takes is a choice for the world of the spirit instead of the world of the ego. Jesus taught that the way to the kingdom is to βlove as I have loved.β As kids say, βEasy peasy.β
In Alcoholic Anonymous it is suggested, in step eleven, that we improve our conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation. This is a choice we have and actions we take. Do it or not, God is always there for us. All we have to do is listen.
In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning and this search takes us ultimately to the unconditional love of God which is found within us in our hearts as our natural inheritance once we get past the fear. When we do this, it seems like a miracle.
Today, we bypass the fear deep in our hearts to find the unconditional love of God which the Universalists have taught is there if we pay attention to it. Setting aside the fear we find the love of God which is our natural inheritance.
Iβve got an old mule and her name is Sal
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal
Sheβs a good old worker and a good old pal
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal
Weβve hauled some barges in our day
Filled with lumber, coal, and hay
And every inch of the way we know
From Albany to Buffalo
Chorus:
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for weβre coming to a town
And youβll always know your neighbor
And youβll always know your pal
If youβve ever navigated on the Erie Canal.
βThomas S. Allen, 1905. Original lyrics written to commemorate the 15 years of construction on the Erie Canal.
The Erie Canal opened October 26, 1825. Few innovations in American history had such immediate and far reaching consequences as the public works projectonce derided as Clintonβs Folly.
A canal linking Lake Eriewith the Hudson River at the New York capital of Albany was first proposed by Thomas Eddy, a businessman with interests in a failing canal digging companyand sponsored in the New York State Assembly by Jonas Platt, leader of the Federalists in the Senate. To gain bi-partisan support for the ambitious project, Platt proposed a commission carefully balanced between leading figures in both his party and the Democratic-Republicans.
On March 13, 1810 the Erie Canal Commission was created with the assignment to do preliminary feasibility studies, explore possible routes, and come up with plans to finance what would be by far the biggest engineering project yet undertaken in North America. Gouverneur Morris, a distinguished former Federalist Senator and one of the principal authors of the Constitution, was named as President. The other commissioners were Federalists Eddy, Stephen Van Rensselaer, and William North plus Democratic Republicans DeWitt Clinton, Simeon DeWitt, and Peter Buell Porter.
The driving force on the Commission quickly became Clinton with strong support, despite their different political connections of Van Rensselaer, the heir of the greatestof the Patroon dynasties of semi-feudal landownersin Up State. The Commissioners quickly went to work and several of them explored the route as far as possible by water and on an arduous cross-country trek via unimproved roads and trails. Clinton kept a detailed diaryof his adventures on this trip.
The following March the Commission issued a report that dismissed competing plans for a possible canal to Lake Ontario and proposed that a totally manmade channel be dug straight west from Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. Morris dissented proposing instead a physically impossible schemeto deepen existing rivers and have Lake Erie βempty into them to fill them.β Little wonder that his leadership on the Commission was by-passed. Perhaps most importantly, the commission acknowledged that the project was too big to be financed by private capitaland recommended public financing by the State.
In April 1811 the Legislature responded by authorizing the Commission to take all necessary steps to finance the entire project and granted $15,000 to begin its work. It also added Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston to the body. Fulton had launched a commercially viable steamboat service between New York City and Albany with Livingston, a member of a powerful political family, as his partner in 1807 which had spurred interest in a western canal. Both men were Democratic-Republicans, giving Clinton extra clout in addition to lending their enormous prestige to the project. Fulton would actively work with Clinton on engineering aspectsof the project until his death in 1815.
The War of 1812 ground progress to a halt. Van Rensselaer was appointed General incommand of the New York Militia. The frontier with Canada around Buffalobecame a major theater of operations in the war and was a jumping-off point for attempted invasions by both sides. The lack of reliable transportation to bring artillery, arms, powder, and supplies to the front crippled American efforts and provided a national defense justification for a canal.
Meanwhile Clinton, then serving as Mayor of New York City and Lt. Governor, was reluctantly draftedby a dissident Democratic-Republican rump and backed by the Federalists to run for President against James Madison in 1812. It was a close-fought election and Clinton took 47% of the popular vote while losing by a wide margin in the Electoral College. The run strained his relations with loyal Democratic-Republicans, notably the powerful Livngstons.
At the conclusion of the war, Clinton revived interest in the project by holding a large public meeting in the New York City. He promised residents that the project would bring about a boom:
The city will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations. And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city.
In 1816 the Legislature reformed the Commission with explicit authorization to supervise acquisition ofland and the actual constructionof the project. Clinton was named the new President and Van Rensselaer, who now abandoned the dying Federalists to become a Clintonian Republican, were held over. Joseph Ellicott, an agent for the powerful Holland Land Company which donated 10,000 acres of land to the project; Myron Holley, a state Assemblyman and political ally; and Samuel Young, who had written the influential book A Treatise on Internal Navigation: A Comprehensive Study of Canals in Great Britain and Holland.
In 1816 outgoing President James Madison vetoed a bill that would have contributed Federal funds to the construction. Madison supported using Federal funds for internal improvements but doubted that barring an authorizing amendment to the Constitution that the government had the authority. But there must also have been satisfaction to slapping back at Clinton.
1817 proved to be a big, break-out year for the canal. Clinton became the beneficiary when Daniel D. Tompkins was elected as James Monroeβs Vice President. Despite the bitter opposition of the growing Tammany organization in New York City, Clinton was easily elected to serve out Tompkinsβs term as Governor. With his support in April Legislature created a Canal Fund which was authorized to spend $7 million for construction of a canal 363 miles long, 40 feet wide, and four feet deep. Commissioners of the Canal Fund was made up of the state Constitutional officers.
Construction began on July 4 at Rome. The first 15 miles to Utica took two years to build due to the difficulty in felling trees through the virgin forest, excavating and removing earth by hand. An innovativestump puller was used, but at best three man crews with mules could only build a mile of canal and adjacent tow path in a year of arduous labor.
Also holding up construction was the fact that in the entire United States there was not one trained civil engineer. The surveyorswho had laid out the route, James Geddes and Benjamin Wright were in over-all charge of construction and learned by doing. They were aided by Canvass White, a 27-year-old amateur engineer who traveled to England at his own expense to study canal construction there and Nathan Roberts, a mathematics teacher. Despite the inexperience they laid out an impressive record of achievement, carrying the βCanal up the Niagara escarpment at Lockport, maneuvered it onto a towering embankment to cross over Irondequoit Creek, spanned the Genesee River on an awesome aqueduct, and carved a route for it out of the solid rock between Little Falls and Schenectady...β according to Canal historian Peter L. Bernstein.
The eventual arrival of thousands of Scotch-Irish laborersgreatly speeded construction. These navies, although Ulster Presbyterians, were the first of a wave of hundreds of thousand Irish laborers who dug the canals and built the turnpikes and railroads of their new country. Conditions were brutal. Over a thousand men died of swamp fever at Montezuma Marsh, the outlet of Cayuga Lake west of Syracuse. Work there ground to a halt until winter when the marsh froze over. But work in the frigid weather by men without adequate coats was almost as lethal. Soon Catholic Irishmen were replacing the Ulstermen. In 1825 Father John Raho wrote to his bishop that βso many die that there is hardly any time to give Extreme Unction to everybody. We run night and day to assist the sick.β
Despite the hardships, year after year the work pressed on. The middle section from Utica to Salina(now Syracuse) was completed in 1820 and traffic on that section started up immediately. The eastern section, 250 miles from Brockport to Albany, opened in 1823 to great fanfare as did another 64 mile section from Watervliet on the Hudsonto Lake Champlain.
Next, climbing the Niagara Escarpment up though an 80 foot wall of hard limestone was the great challenge. Generally following the course of a βwildβstream pouring over the cliff, a series of five locks were carved out so that bargescould be lifted to the level of Lake Erie. This is the only section where wide-spread use of blasting powder occurred, predictably with fatal consequences for many workers.
On the west end the village of Buffalo they dredged a channel of Buffalo Creek to make it navigable and built a port facility on Lake Erie. That secured the village as the terminus of the canal over neighboring, and much less enterprising, Black Rock on the Niagara River. In doing so Buffalo secured a futureas an industrial powerhouse and the economic center of the region.
Despite the apparent success of his great project, Clinton was in political trouble. Tammany politicians in New York City allied themselves with the Albany Regency, a masterfully assembled Up State political machine created by Martin Van Buren. Together they became known as the Bucktails faction of the Democratic Republican Party and declared war on Clinton and his supporters. Gaining control of a state Constitutional Convention in 1821, the Bucktails shortened the term of governor to two years and moved the term from a July 1 start to a January 1, thus shaving a year off Clintonβs term. They also passed a 2 million dollarappropriation for the canal attached to a measure that stacked the Canal Board with Clintonβs political opponents. The governor was forced tosign the measure or jeopardize funding of his pet project. In 1822 Clinton, despite huge personal popularity, was denied re-nomination by the Democratic-Republicans and he was out of office at the end of the year. In 1824 the Legislature ousted him as President and a member of the Canal Commission.
The last act proved a step too far for his opponents. With the Canal nearing completion, voter indignation over Clintonβs shabby treatment propelled him back into the Governorβs chair that fall.
It was with understandable glee that Governor Clinton got to preside over the ceremonies opening the canal in October 1825. He sailed on the packet barge Seneca Chief along the Canal from Buffalo to Albany then transferredto a steam packet for the trip down the Hudson to New York City. He poured two casks of Lake Erie waterinto the harbor in the City making a symbolic Marriage of the Waters to officially open the whole waterway system.
The economic and social effects of the Canal quickly surpassed the most optimistic predictions. The vast resources of the Great Lakes basin were immediately accessible in the east as they had never been before when the Allegany and Appalachian Mountains presented a substantial barrier to commerce. Freight rates from Buffalo to New York went from $100 per ton by roadto $10 per ton by Canal. In 1829 3,640 bushels of wheat were transported down the Canal. By 1837 this had increased to 500,000 bushels and four years later it reached one million. In nine years short years Canal tolls more than recouped the entire cost of construction.
Equally, if not more important, the Erie Canal became the great highway to the West for hundreds of thousands of settlers who were eager to claim land and begin to ship their crops east for good hard cash money. Previously growth of the trans-Appalachian West was limited to the heartiest pioneers who had to stay close to the great river systems to ship their produce to market via the long tripdown to New Orleans. The younger sons of New England and New York farmers, craving land and with the resources to buy it flooded the Old Northwest transforming Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and even distant Minnesota from frontier wilderness to prosperous, populous states by 1850.
Not only did the mostly farming settlers find easy access to market, others began to ship the endless lumber of the Great North Woods, iron ore to feed the smeltersand furnaces of an industrializing nation, and other resources. Within 15 years New York City had fulfilled Clintonβs dazzling prediction. It had leapfrogged its competitors, Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans and was handling more freight than all those cities combined. The Canal also spurred development in towns and cities along the route from Buffalo on down the Hudson. Many cities developed industries that fed manufactured goods into the interior. New York State communities along the path of the canal, the lateral canals built to feed it from the more remote interior of the state, and the Hudson River became boom towns.
The Canal was deepened and widened twice in the 19th Century to accommodate larger bargesand greater traffic. Between 1905 and 1918, engineers decided to abandon much of the original man-made channel and use new techniques to βcanalizeβ the rivers that the canal had been constructed to avoidβthe Mohawk, Oswego, Seneca, and Clyde plus Oneida Lake. A uniform channel was dredged; dams were built to create long, navigable pools, and locks were built adjacent to the dams to allow the barges to pass from one pool to the next. When it opened in 1918, the whole system was renamed the New York State Barge Canal.
The system remained an economic engine for New York State until the St. Lawrence Seaway was completed in 1959. Traffic then dropped to a trickle. In recent years the system has experienced arenaissance as recreational corridor. Abandon stretches of the original canal have been preserved in many places, including a 36 mile stretch in the Old Erie Canal State Historic Park from the town of DeWitt near Syracuse to Rome.
βWe pray for any among us who have not yet discovered
our own power to bless the world.
We pray to find the courage and grace
to move one step closer to healing, and to the sacred potential of our lives.
We pray for strength, grateful for all that is not lost,
for the ever-renewing powers of life,
for our chance to play our part in this life
we have been given to share with one another.β
-John and Sarah Gibb Milspaugh
Find the courage and grace to move closer to healing today.
On Oct. 17, NOAH held its annual public meeting. Well over 500 people were a part of the event. Mayor Cooper was in attendance and made commitments to each of NOAH’s 4 Task Forces. Also in attendance and making commitments to the Nashville community: school board representative as well as some of Nashville’s judges. Thank you to everyone who attended.
In case you missed the meeting, you may watch a video of the meeting on YouTube here
Are some people now truly above the law, beholden to nothing and no one, free to ignore the law and without consequence?β
This week’s featured post is “What Conservatives Tell Themselves About Critical Race Theory“.
The negotiations over Biden’s Build Back Better plan seem to be inching towards a finish line, though we won’t really know until there’s a complete agreement. It sounds like the top-line figure will be in the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion range, in addition to the $1-1.2 trillion in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. There are still probably a billion details to work out, but I think Democrats realize they can’t go into 2022 without more legislative accomplishments than they have now.
Once there’s an actual agreement, with a list of what’s in and what’s out, I’m going to try hard to look at it fresh, without comparing it to what I thought or hoped might be in it at some earlier stage. I think the right comparison is: What was I expecting on January 5, right after Ossoff and Warnock won the Georgia run-offs and gave Democrats their zero-vote majority?
The political style here is the opposite of what Obama did with the ACA. Then, Obama didn’t indulge much blank-slate dreaming. Single-payer was out from Day 1, and the variations of the bill debated were in a fairly narrow range. Biden has allowed a much wider range of visions to flourish, while knowing that most of them would fail to manifest. It’ll be interesting to see how those strategies contrast after Democrats have run the 2022 campaign.
I was glad to see the House take the January 6 Committee’s job seriously and recommend Steve Bannon be prosecuted for blowing off a subpoena. The case is now in Merrick Garland’s in-box. Garland has to realize that if he doesn’t prosecute, congressional oversight of the executive branch is pretty much over.
On November 4, a federal court is due to consider Trump’s suit to stop the National Archives from turning documents from his administration over to the January 6 Committee. It’s not clear the judge’s ruling will even matter, since the point of the suit is to run the clock out.
John Eastman, the lawyer whose memo laid out the plan for Trump to overturn the 2020 election results, now claims the point of his plan was to stop Trump from doing something worse. Trump wanted Vice President Pence to simply declare him the winner on January 6. But under Eastman’s plan, Pence would give states with Republican legislatures more time to replace their Biden electors with Trump electors.
Either way, the point was for Trump to stay in power after losing the election. If Eastman’s plan had worked, American democracy would have ended by now.
Cases per day in the US continue to drop at the rate of about 20-25% every two weeks, which works out to falling in half about every 5-6 weeks. The current daily average is 72,644, down 25% in the last two weeks. That’s about half what it was on September 18, five weeks and two days ago. Five weeks from now is just after Thanksgiving, which last year was the beginning of a holiday surge that continued through New Years.
The frustrating thing to me personally is that cases are falling just about everywhere but here in the Northeast. The region where I live had the lowest new-case rates in the country during the late-summer surge, but now our trends are flat while the rest of the country is improving to meet us.
The daily-new-cases-per-100K rate in my county (Middlesex, Massachusetts) has been stuck in the 14-18 range for months. Meanwhile, a county I watch because friends live there (Manatee, Florida) had bounced up over 120, but has now fallen below 10. I’m not wishing anything bad for the rest of America, I just want to share in the improvement.
The Atlantic published a disturbing article written by James Heathers, a “forensic peer reviewer” of scientific research. He’s begins by talking about ivermectin as a Covid treatment (which it isn’t), and finds that the problem isn’t entirely with YouTube videos and gullible retweeters: Enough published scientific studies said positive things about ivermectin that
it might seem perfectly rational to join the fervent supporters of ivermectin. It might even strike you as reasonable to suggest, as one physician and congressional witness did recently, that βpeople are dying because they donβt know about this medicine.β
The problem is that a bunch of those studies are really low quality, or even fraudulent.
In our opinion, a bare minimum of five ivermectin papers are either misconceived, inaccurate, or otherwise based on studies that cannot exist as described. One study has already been withdrawn on the basis of our work; the other four very much should be. …
Most problematic, the studies we are certain are unreliable happen to be the same ones that show ivermectin as most effective. In general, weβve found that many of the inconclusive trials appear to have been adequately conducted. Those of reasonable size with spectacular results, implying the miraculous effects that have garnered so much public attention and digital notoriety, have not.
Worse, the sorry state of ivermectin/Covid research may not be that unusual. In Heathers’ opinion, a lot of unreliable medical research gets published. In normal times, doctors ignore it
because it either looks βoffβ or is published in the wrong place. A huge gray literature exists in parallel to reliable clinical research, including work published in low-quality or outright predatory journals that will publish almost anything for money.
[This reminds me of when my wife (who is still doing fine, thank you for wondering) was taking a new drug to combat an unusual variety of cancer. Occasionally the oncologist would answer one of my questions by saying that a paper pointed in such-and-such direction, but he didn’t trust it yet. I remember one disparaging comment about “Italian journals”, which I never followed up on.]
But during a pandemic, apparent “cures” from the gray literature can slip past the skepticism of the medical community and go straight to a more responsive public.
In a pandemic, when the stakes are highest, the somewhat porous boundary between these publication worlds has all but disappeared. There is no gray literature now: Everything is a magnet for immediate attention and misunderstanding. An unbelievable, inaccurate study no longer has to linger in obscurity; it may bubble over into the public consciousness as soon as it appears online, and get passed around the internet like a lost kitten in a preschool.
[An aside: I wish I’d written that lost-kitten metaphor.]
Ross Douthat’s column “How I Became a Sick Person” is a reminder that underneath our divergent politics, we’re all human. Douthat describes a series of scary symptoms that his doctors couldn’t explain, culminating in a controlled but chronic illness. Feel better, Ross. I’ll be rooting for you.
So the choice has become clear: Democrats can’t preserve both the filibuster and voting rights.
The last time a voting rights bill came up, Joe Manchin claimed that it was too sweeping, and that a more targeted plan could get the ten Republican votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Manchin worked on crafting a narrower bill, which Republicans filibustered Wednesday. No Republicans at all voted to overcome the filibuster. I haven’t even heard one of them make a counterproposal. Up and down the line, Republicans are against any attempt to protect voting rights.
In light of the vote, key Democrats said they would regroup and try again to persuade Mr. Manchin and other Senate Democrats reluctant to undermine the filibuster that an overhaul of the chamberβs signature procedural tactic was the only way to protect ballot access around the country.
I’m not optimistic, but I also can’t guess how Manchin will justify himself now.
Two Republicans, former state treasurer Josh Mandel and J. D. (Hillbilly Elegy) Vance, have turned their Ohio Senate primary race into a who’s-the-craziest contest. Mandel is currently winning with tweets like this:
Maximize family time and keep working hard. Keep the freezer stocked and firearms at the ready. Buy #bitcoin and avoid debt. We will outlast these monsters and we will thrive for generations to come after God brings them down.
Vance will have to counter somehow, or risk surrendering the key doomsday-prepper voting bloc to Mandel.
On the Democratic side, Congressman Tim Ryan is also hoping to replace retiring Senator Rob Portman. His campaign website says:
Tim will fight to raise wages, make healthcare more affordable, invest in education, rebuild our public infrastructure, and revitalize manufacturing so we can make things in Ohio again.Β
Sure, Tim, but what about the issues Ohio voters really care about? What are you going to do about the monsters? What role do you see yourself playing when God starts bringing them down?
We can only hope that some significant segment of former Republican voters will be disturbed by the absolute insanity that Trump has unleashed in their party. (See previous note.) But if they’re not, maybe they’ll notice the insanity Trump has unleashed in something they care more about: their churches.
Peter Wehner has just published “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart” in The Atlantic. He talks to 15 Evangelical pastors who either have left the ministry or are thinking hard about it because of the right-wing political zealotry that is tearing up their congregations.
The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; itβs having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.
The problem is not just that Trump’s deranged rants have replaced the Sermon on the Mount as the center of many Evangelicals’ religion. It’s also that Trump’s anything-goes truth-be-damned style has corrupted how Evangelicals handle disagreements with each other.
[McLean Bible Church pastor David] Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold [for election]. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the churchβs constitution.
Platt, who is theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a small but zealous group within his church of βwokenessβ and being βleft of center,β of pushing a βsocial justiceβ agenda and promoting critical race theory, and of attempting to βpurge conservative members.β A Facebook page and a right-wing website have targeted Platt and his leadership. For his part, Platt, speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming, βMBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that itβs now Melanin Bible Church.β
BTW, clicking that right-wing website link, and then other links from there, is eye-opening. You’ll find yourself in a scary mirror world where a diabolical “woke” politics is taking over everything, including Evangelical institutions. And notice in the quote above how “social justice” has become a bad thing, something you don’t want to be accused of.
Speaking of insanity, check out Joy Pullmann’s “For Christians, Dying From Covid (or Anything Else) Is a Good Thing” over at The Federalist. Her main point is that churches should hold services and the faithful should attend them, independent of anything we know about how diseases spread.
Christians believe that life and death belong entirely to God. There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter: βall the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be,β says the Psalmist.
I have to wonder if this is her position in general, or an ad hoc view she takes purely with respect to Covid. For example, does she stop her children when they start to wander into traffic? If she does, what does she think she’s accomplishing?
On the other hand, maybe her article isn’t insanity. Maybe it’s just bullshit.
Trump has a new scam: his own social network. And it’s off to such a good start.
Back in November, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick announced a reward for evidence leading to convictions for voter fraud in the 2020 election: He had $1 million of campaign money to offer, and would give a minimum of $25K to each whistleblower.
He was, of course, trying to put meat on the bones of Trump’s bogus claims of fraud. But that isn’t how it has worked out: He awarded his first $25K to a Pennsylvania poll worker who caught a Republican trying to vote twice for Trump. This guy is one of five voter fraud cases being prosecuted in Pennsylvania, four against Republicans.
Nevada also charged a Republican with voter fraud this week: A guy appears to have mailed in his dead wife’s ballot in addition to his own. Four people have been charged in Wisconsin, though we don’t know who they were trying to vote for. (At least one of them seems to have made an honest mistake: He was a felon who was out of jail but hadn’t finished his probation yet. He apparently thought he could vote legally.)
So:
Neither of those results should surprise anybody. In spite of the claims Republicans keep making, study after study has shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. But Republicans like Dan Patrick have convinced their supporters that millions of Democrats get away with voting fraudulently every year — so it must be easy! Of course a few are going to try to “get even” by voting fraudulently themselves.
Oh, and what about dead voters? Pretty much the same story: Either the claim is false or the case involved people trying to scrounge an extra vote for Trump.
NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg reflects on Angela Merkel’s decision to let a million refugees from Syria and Africa settle in Germany in 2015.
But six years later, the catastrophes predicted by Merkelβs critics havenβt come to pass.
In the recent German election, refugees were barely an issue, and the [anti-immigrant party Alliance for Germany] lost ground. βThe sense is that there has been comparatively little Islamic extremism or extremist crime resulting from this immigration, and that on the whole, the largest number of these immigrants have been successfully integrated into the German work force and into German society overall,β said Constanze StelzenmΓΌller, an expert on Germany and trans-Atlantic relations at the Brookings Institution.
βWith the passage of time,β Marton told me, Merkel βturned out to have chosen the absolutely right course for not only Germany but for the world.β
Lately I’ve been cooking more, which Facebook somehow knows. So I’m being shown more videos about food. I was fascinated by this account of really authentic parmesan cheese.
WWUUD stream 