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 One of the rebuttals to the charge of right-wing bias at Fox is that both sides do it. That the NYT is biased, too. Well, yes, there are certainly egregious examples of bias at the Times. For example, Judy Miller shilling for the fake WMDs in Iraq to shore up the lies of the Bush Administration. And the Times stovepiping anti-Clinton propaganda from the FBI that ended up handing Trump the 2016 presidential election. For the record, we have a subscription to the newspaper of record, but I very seldom read it. But yes, the NYT is also guilty of right-wing bias. https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/mcgonigal-russian-oligarch-trump-2016-election-20230129.html

 On the one hand, I'd say go for it: a clear majority of American voters support Roe. Want to double down on the nanny state controlling reproductive choice for adult women? You be you. It was a net loser in 2022 and it will be more so in 2024, when the turnout will be higher. On the other hand, I realize the human suffering entailed by GOP extremism and certainly don't wish it on more people. Sadly, the lives of a lot of women will be collateral damage on the way to a permanent GOP minority. We've donated well over $100K to Planned Parenthood over the past four decades; inspired by the radical right GOP, we'll certainly continue. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/ronna-mcdaniel-abortion-rnc

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He's been blogging at "Informed Comment" since 2002. I donated to his recent fund drive, and recently received as a gift an autographed copy of his translation of Kahlil Gibran's "Spirit Brides." Gibran's "The Prophet" was popular when I was in high school and college. I think I read a few pages before I put it down. Recently, I read a reviewer who found the early part boring but was glad he finished. Since I had a copy of "Spirit Brides" in hand, and since it's only 70 pages, I figured I'd read it. There are three stories, told in the style of allegories. I read it more slowly than I usually do, to savor the words, since Cole put a lot of effort into the translation. The writing is almost poetical in imagery, but the writing is evocative without calling unnecessary attention to itself. I found myself unexpectedly moved emotionally ...

  The Republican House pretends to be concerned about the deficits and the national debt. Here are some simple solutions: 1. Raise the top marginal income tax rate to 50%. Think that will tank the economy? The top rate was over 90% during the Eisenhower administration, and the US economy was fine. Tax cuts never pay for themselves. 2. Tax capital gains and interest like income. The top 1% don't make their money from salary, they make it from investments. That's their income. Tax it like income. I can think of some others, but let's start with that. If the House GOP refuses to discuss any tax increases, they don't really care about the debt. And of course, they didn't whenever a Republican was in the White House. The debt only matters to the GOP when there's a Democrat in the WH.

I put that in between scare quotes in the hope that the Very Serious People will spare me their very serious lectures. Look, that slogan was never intended as a mandate for anarchy. It was a demand to demilitarize the police and return them to their mission to "protect and serve." As a White male, I understand that the current police practices in the US are mostly geared to protect me, people who look like me, and my property. If I were a Black man, I would do everything in my power to avoid the police. As the case of Tyre Nichols vividly demonstrates, it's not the race of the police, it's the attitude and practices of policing in America. Will that change when the men charged with Tyre Nichols' beating death are convicted and sentenced? No, of course not. Just like the latest mass shootings will do nothing to alter the ammosexual gundamentalist firearms fetish in America. What will it take? I'm an optimistic person, but I'm not stupid. I know that too man...

Over at the National Review, Charles Cooke finally gets around to acknowledging what many of us have known for years: "National Review senior writer Charles C.W. Cooke said Donald Trump’s rambling posts on his flailing Truth Social platform show his “deterioration” on “full display.” "In a column posted on Wednesday titled “Trump Has Completely Lost His Grip on Reality,” Cook wrote that the former president is “ranting like a deranged hobo in a dilapidated public park” with his messages." I actually clicked through and read the Cooke column, the first NR column I've read in years (did I mention that I seldom read fiction?) and was surprised to find the National Buckley repudiating a right-wing nutjob, something they haven't done, to my knowledge, since Buckley orchestrated the divorce between the GOP and the John Birch Society. Yes, I know this is just part of the NR pivot from Trump to DiSantis (who if anything is worse, only because he's slightly more lucid...

  While we wait to see how Fox News and their parrots rearrange their talking points, now that Mike Pence is also found with "confidential" documents, here are the important facts to bear in mind: 1) the government classifies way too much stuff, slapping that label on virtually everything; 2) Presidents and Vice Presidents staffs have to pack up millions of pages of stuff and inevitably get some they shouldn’t take; 3) most likely Biden and Pence have a bunch of low level things like daily briefs vs Trump who had stuff at the highest level; 4) Biden and Pence staffs found stuff, reported it and returned it. Trump denied having stuff and then refused to return it; 5) The Media is doing a lousy job explaining why what Trump did is different and far more suspicious and serious. For the record, to be guilty of a crime (any crime), there must be a demonstration of intent (mens rea). WRT holding classified documents inappropriately, there's no evidence for intent on the part of...

Just a reminder: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." Those words are in the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. According to the Constitution, the budgets that create debt for the US originate in the house, and if passed and signed, those become laws that are binding on the government. The executive branch is charged by the Constitution to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Thus, Biden has a constitutional obligation to direct the treasury to keep cutting checks to whoever the Legislative branch delegated the funding. If the GOP Congress objects, Biden can tell them to pound sand. He's just following the Constitution. Let's see if those Constitutional orginalists on the SCOTUS stick to their professed standards.

That line appears as a quote in one of the many obits for David Crosby that I've been reading. It's a good life philosophy for anyone. What really matters to one can change over time, and can sometimes be foolish in retrospect. Also, being able to do what really matters sometimes means doing stuff that doesn't matter as much in order to get to what really matters. I guess what Crosby is getting at here is integrity, being honest about who you are and what you want. There's a whiff of solipsism about the line, and I don't think Crosby is talking about being selfish, since he's attacked Neil Young for that. I think instead that he's referring to an antidote to conformity; what matters to him, not letting the expectations of others drive him. One of my favorite lines in a pop song is from Joni Mitchell, David's one-time lover: "You know the times you impress me most Are the times when you don't try" When you narrow it down to what really matte...

10-15 years ago, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) were a higher education fad. Universities could dispense with physical (lecture halls, heating, cooling, cleaning, security) and administrative (room scheduling) costs and just teach students online. During this period, I was associate dean for research and the Dean of our medical school brought up the suggestion that we could replace our first year medical school curriculum with MOOCs. Never mind that one of those Os in MOOC stands for "open," meaning tuition-free, open to everyone, which would do violence to our tuition-based business model. We were going to just give this away--seriously? I read everything I could at the time--it was hot, so there were plenty of articles and studies--to prepare for a Dean's staff discussion that never came. I don't know if he figured out on his own or was overtaken by more pressing concerns, but MOOCs fell off the agenda. The COVID pandemic was an ideal test bed for MOOCs, since ...

My chairman is Italian and grew up in Sicily. I recently sent him a link to an article about the organization of Centuripe, a Sicilian town that goes back to the 5th Century BCE. Here was his reply: "Ancient urban architecture was based on the principle of minimizing distances from a focus (castle, city hall, church, etc). When you apply this principle on a flat surface, you get concentric expansion as seen in the centers of cities like Milan, Bologna, Florence and Rome. When you can only expand in one direction, you get a distorted semicircle like Napoli, Catania and Palermo. When the surface is not flat, the expansion takes whatever shape allowed to minimize distances, hence Genova and your example of Centuripe. "You may want to take a look at Enna, near Centuripe. It was an important military outpost of the Roman Empire chosen for its central location from where they could dispatch troops to any corner of the island within the same amount of time. Basically, most of the Ro...

Two non-pharmacological interventions to reduce depression are exercise and sunshine. Walking in parks during the day is a good way to get both. "People who reported visiting parks three to four times a week were 33 percent less likely to use antidepressant and antianxiety medication than those who seldom did. Use of drugs for high blood pressure was 36 percent less likely among the same group. Although the study also included a category for people who visited parks five or more times a week, there was no further reduction in medication use among the most frequent visitors – in some cases they took slightly more drugs than those visiting roughly every second day. "The work complements a recently published study that found Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases develop more slowly in people who spend time in nature frequently." https://www.iflscience.com/visiting-urban-parks-linked-to-reduced-use-of-prescription-medications-67106?fbclid=IwAR0ec_-jcZOIS3FFxB6eiTXo7Gk1mbJnHSC...

The threat by the GOP to hold the debt ceiling hostage to their political agenda is a threat to destroy international confidence in the good faith and credit of the United States. If the US stops paying debts incurred by previous Congresses, it calls into doubt the trustworthiness of the US. The dollar is currently the world's reserve currency and US treasuries are, for now, among the safest investments. But blocking the debt ceiling increase is a threat to default on treasuries in particular and US government debt in general. Lenin believed that a key to the socialist revolution in Bolshevik Russia was to debase the currency by destroying confidence in the ruble: "Hundreds of thousands of ruble notes are being issued daily by our treasury. This is done, not in order to fill the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment. There is no justification for the existence of money in t...

The gummit is taking your light bulbs. The gummit is taking your toilets. The gummit is taking all your gunz. I guess the fundraising letters need a new bogey, and now they have it: gas stoves. Nobody is going to take your gas stove, the GOP just wants you to believe they are so you'll donate money in the name of this latest fake crusade. I've never owned a gun and will never own a gun. And I've never needed a gun. I've needed a stove (and oven) in my kitchen for as long as I have lived in an apartment or house. When we moved into The Little House On The Prairie, it had an electric stove and oven with a ceramic cooktop. I hated the cooktop: it took too long to heat up and cool off, and it was tedious to control. When the elements started to fail, we replaced it with gas, which I love to cook with. On top of that, electric in St. Louis comes mostly from coal, and gas is cleaner than coal. And at the time, gas was cheaper than electric. No regrets. Our house in Rhode Isla...

Because if it bleeds, it leads, the MSM is bleating about the classified documents found in Biden's former offices. Biden did it too, so stop persecuting Trump! Uh no. If you actually have been paying attention, you know there is a lot of daylight between Trump hiding documents at Mar-A-Lago and Biden leaving some documents locked in offices he vacated years ago. Still don't understand? Here's Kevin Drum: " . . .no one has ever cared very much if a few classified documents were accidentally taken from the White House when a president (or vice president) moved. Sure, we'd all prefer they be more careful, but it's not that big a deal for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. "What is a big deal is deliberately trying to hide the documents and then persistently obstructing efforts to retrieve them. That's what the Justice Department cares about. Trump did it. Biden didn't." Capisce? https://jabberwocking.com/joe-biden-did-not-obstruct-the-return-of-c...

The House apparently passed a bill to remove some funding from the IRS that had been included in a bill enacted last session. This repeal will go nowhere in the Democratic Senate. This and other similar performative GOP tantrum legislation should be ignored: it's just wasting taxpayer money and will end up pissing off the electorate that is souring on this kind of naked partisanship. But what about the budget and the debt ceiling. Kevin Drum has a suggestion: "Just ignore the debt ceiling and keep writing checks. That's it. Get an OLC opinion stating that (a) the spending in question has already been legally appropriated, and (b) the Constitution says the debt of the United States "shall not be questioned." Then tell Republicans to pound sand. The government will continue operating unless they go to court and get a judge to order the Treasury shut down. "Would they call this bluff? Going to court would shine a klieg light on the Republican Party's willin...

I don't subscribe to the WSJ and never will. I read journalism for timeliness and factual correctness. The posts I've seen quoting the WSJ that are factually correct I already knew about, and the stuff I didn't read elsewhere tends to be right-wing propaganda that I could easily find on Fox News if that's what I was looking for. So this comes as no surprise: " . . . this post is an example of why you should never believe anything you read on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. If you're lucky, the words on the page will be tolerably correct. But lucky or not, the editorial will never, ever provide a complete and fairminded argument. That would put them out of business." *yawn* https://jabberwocking.com/the-wall-street-journal-has-a-problem-with-the-truth/

 For the second time in three days, I see a FB meme about why don't marriages last as long today as they did in our grandparent's generation. My considered reaction is that marriage means something different today than it did then. And I'm fine with that. Every marriage is different and every ending to a marriage is different. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ~Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

The January 8 insurrection in Brazilia was notable not only for its similarity to the January 6 insurrection in Washington, but also for its differences. The January 6 seditionists were actively interfering with an official government function leading to a presidential inauguration and threatening the lives of elected government officials. The January 8 rioters vandalized empty buildings after the Brazilian president was already inaugurated. I don't mean to make light of what happened, but it seems like vandalism of property was an end in itself in Brazil. 

Can he be recalled? No Can he be charged with a crime for lying about his bio? No Can the House of Representatives refuse to seat him? No However: He can face criminal and civil fraud charges for lying on documents submitted to government entities and investors. He could be extradited to Brazil to face criminal charges there. He could be censured or expelled by the House. There is approximately zero chance that Kevin McCarthy and his band of merry insurrectionists will force Santos to resign, since he would be replaced by a Democrat. And there is certainly zero chance that Santos will resign on his own, since he can continue to serve even if tried and convicted on federal tax charges, for which he is currently being investigated. So unless and until the House GOP puts country before party (i.e., coterminus with the first verified report of porcine aviation), they and we are stuck with Santos through 2024. Sad https://gothamist.com/news/george-santos-lied-to-voters-so-what-are-t...

Several years ago, I got around to reading Moby-Dick. Since it's supposed to be "the great American novel," I did it out of sense of obligation. It was a colossal disappointment. If I hadn't already read some American novels, it would have put me off them for life. But I realize mine is a minority view. For those of you who want to relive the adventures of Ishmael, Queequeg and Cap'n Ahab, there's this: https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/moby-dick-marathon-2023/

As the circus resumes today in the House, keep an eye on Elise Stefanik. Sam Houston once said about Jefferson Davis that he was "as cold as a lizard and as ambitious as Lucifer." I think that sums up Stefanik as well.

The good news is that with a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic Senate majority, there's little the House GOP majority can accomplish. And in reality, the House GOP majority isn't because there are enough members of the whackjob extremist right to hold the rest of the GOP caucus hostage. Then, there's the razor-thin GOP majority, which will just get thinner when George "Storytime" Santos is forced to resign and is replaced by a Democrat. But look, the modern GOP isn't interested in governing, they're only interested in media attention, the Bitcoin of politics. So it doesn't matter what happens to Kevin. While taxpayer money is squandered, the "people's house" will spend the next two years on performative actions. I certainly hope that this portends a blue wave in 2024.

The Confederate flag entering the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, was not a coincidence. It was the point of the entire insurrection. It was the intent to call that a sign of "patriot" activity. And it was entirely buttressed by all those various monuments across the nation that portray the Confederacy as honorable.* Turns out that the removal of statues honoring Confederate treason in Richmond VA (the former capitol of treason) has been the work of a Black-owned company because no white-owned company would bid on the job. The task of making America great again fell to one Devon Henry. Here's Kevin Drum with the details: https://jabberwocking.com/white-people-in-richmond-refused-state-jobs-to-demolish-confederate-statues/ *this paragraph was lifted from the comment thread