Yesterday the Justice Department indicted Steve Bannon on two counts of contempt of Congress, and there was much rejoicing. Merrick Garland did something! Yay! However, The Week is reporting that the judge assigned to the case, Carl J. Nichols, was appointed to the bench by Trump. He also once clerked for Justice Thomas. Oh, well. Bannon will get off with a slap on the wrist, no doubt. Let’s just see if Bannon’s indictments light any fires under Mark Meadows.

And before going on — do see the fundraiser I started yesterday to help me keep this beast of a blog online. And I do need some help.

Now on to another pending legal drama involving James O’Keefe and the contemptible Project Veritas. I take it that O’Keefe is being investigated for receiving stolen goods, namely Ashley Biden’s diary. O’Keefe says the diary was obtained legally, and that Ashley Biden “abandoned” the diary. Regarding this case, there is much hand-wringing going on about the Justice Department harassing journalists. And if O’Keefe is a journalist, I’m a toaster. But I fear that if the little weasel is indicted, the outcome will depend on the political orientation of the judge.

I have not been following the Kyle Rittenhouse trial closely, but from news stories I take it the prosecutor is doing a sloppy job, and the judge is biased in favor of Rittenhouse. It’s nearly certain he’ll get off.

Some of you may remember Jim Treacher. He is a right-wing blogger who used to drop by in the comments back during the Bush years. Treacher thinks the real injustice going on in the Rittenhouse case is that media isn’t reporting Rittenhouse shot three white guys and not three black guys. I don’t know about you, but I knew they were all white guys. Nearly every news story about the shooting ran pictures of the victims, all white. No, the text of the news stories don’t identify the victims as white, but exactly why that matters to anybody isn’t clear to me. I don’t think like a MAGA head, I guess.

Josh Marshall has an excellent commentary about Rittenhouse, but it’s behind a subscription firewall. Here is just one section:

To most of us it is pretty obvious that it’s not good for society to have lots of people walking around in public settings carrying loaded firearms. Open carry activists and ‘gun rights’ supporters generally say that’s all wrong. The problem isn’t guns. The issue is when someone decides to commit a crime with one. If someone shoots someone that’s a crime and it should be punished.

This flies in the face of human nature, common sense and the fact that laws are intended not only to punish crimes but make them less likely to happen in the first place. But let’s take this argument at face value. No one is physically injured by these yahoos strutting around with their AR-15s. The moment that changes we have laws that cover that. Those laws carry severe penalties. So far so good.

But the Rittenhouse case shows how that is not really true. Permissive self-defense laws allow a Rittenhouse to have his aggression double as self-defense. You intentionally go into a chaotic situation. You travel across state lines, highly and visibly armed, allegedly to ‘protect’ people who haven’t asked for your protection. Then you feel threatened, which seems likely to happen in a chaotic place when you show up, chest puffed out with a military style weapon. Your perception of danger entitles you to murderous violence, which you arrived locked and loaded to pursue in the first place. In Rittenhouse’s case part of his perception of threat came when people freaked out after he’d shot and killed the first person. And of course only other people get hurt or killed because you’ve got the over-the-top firepower and they don’t.

Yeah, pretty much. And the larger picture is that so many of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020 weren’t violent until the MAGA heads showed up, ostensibly to “protect” people.

I understand that the defense in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killing in Georgia want the jury to know that Arbery, as he jogged through the neighborhood, had frequently stopped to look at construction of a neighborhood garage. That’s tresspassing! Of course, if a white passer-by had done the same thing, no one would have noticed. Arbery hadn’t broken in to anything, just looked at it. Arbery’s interest in garage construction made him a burglary suspect, apparently, even though no one has been able to demonstrate that he ever took anything, or that he had stolen goods on him when he was killed. He certainly wasn’t jogging down the street with a tool box or a power drill.

I still hold out hope that there will be justice for Ahmaud Arbery, but as in the case of Trayvon Martin, the defendants assume the right to arm themselves and detain and threaten an innocent, unarmed person. But if that person acts in self-defense, the yahoos who initiated the confrontation can just kill him and claim they were defending themselves. This is just screwy.

It’s been a while, so here it goes. This will be a limited fund raiser to cover the cost of keeping Mahablog online.Earlier this year my web host raised the price to $900/year, so I’m aiming to raise the $900. (And let me send a special thanks to the folks who send a monthly donation. I really appreciate it.)

I have no regular income outside of Social Security, so the cost of the blog is a hurdle for me. Eventually I’ll probably have to move the site again, but I just don’t have the strength to deal with it now. I hate messing with re-doing this stuff worse than root canal. It always ends up eating days of time and causing oceans of aggravation. If anyone reading this is a web technogeek willing to donate some time, let me know. Maybe I’ll work up the fortitude to deal with it next year.

Here’s a link to a gofundme page.

Here’s a link to a PayPal donation page.

Happy Armisitice Day! Here’s one of the later verses of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” that hardly anyone gets around to singing:

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

Well, you may or may not be glad to know that we no longer have to appear before His judgment seat to have our hearts sifted out. Our Supreme Court has taken on that task now. The conservative judges have given themselves the authority to determine which religious views are sincerely held and which are not. Arguably, they are assuming God’s powers.

Do read Mark Joseph Stern, The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Finally Found a Religious Objection They Don’t Like, at Slate. (If you’ve exceeded your free article limit, just open the article in an incognito window.)

As you probably know, the conservatives on the Supreme Court have long favored religious belief over all other civil liberties.

… in recent history, the Supreme Court has emphatically refused to apply the slightest scrutiny to religious objections. When Hobby Lobby claimed that allowing their employees to access IUDs and morning-after pills through their health insurance violated the company’s religious beliefs, SCOTUS did not question its sincerity. The conservative majority even adopted Hobby Lobby’s position that these forms of contraception cause abortions, which is empirically false. When a pharmacy asserted that selling Plan B violated its religious beliefs based on the same misunderstanding, the conservative justices didn’t blink. When religious employers said that filling out a form to exempt them from the contraceptive mandate would undermine their faith, SCOTUS nodded along. When a baker declared that providing a wedding cake to a same-sex couple infringed on his faith, these justices did not ask why, exactly, the sale of baked goods contravened the tenets of his creed. When a Catholic charity claimed that simply certifying LGBTQ people as fit foster parents clashed with the church’s principles, not a single justice probed its sincerity. And when health care workers protested the COVID vaccine on religious grounds, three conservative justices avidly embraced the validity of their objections.

There is an argument to be made that it’s not up to the courts to decide if someone’s expressed religious beliefs are held sincerely. And it’s not up to the government to decide which religions are authentic religions and which are maybe not, unless the church is breaking laws all over the place. But that’s what the Court is doing, because now it’s questioning the religious sincerely of a petitioner.

During arguments in Ramirez v. Collier, several conservative justices expressed serious skepticism toward the sincerity of a religious plaintiff’s faith. The difference between Ramirez and every past case? John Henry Ramirez is on death row, and his demand for a Baptist pastor in the death chamber has delayed his execution date. It turns out that these justices do think that courts can assess the authenticity of religious objections … but only when the objector is about to be killed by the state.

Note that I do not approve of the death penalty under any circumstances. Note also that the only reason Ramirez’ request delayed the execution date is that the state of Texas changed its own rules about pastors in death chambers and didn’t inform Ramirez until just before his scheduled execution. Some of the conservative justices suggested that Ramirez was just jerking the legal system around to delay his execution. Justice Thomas asked, “If we think that Mr. Ramirez has changed his request a number of times and has filed last-minute complaints, and if we assume that that’s some indication of gaming the system, what should we do with that with respect to assessing the sincerity of his beliefs?” Ramirez’ lawyer pointed to his client’s written petitions, saying they were all making exactly the same request. But that didn’t persuade anyone.

We might ask, what does Texas have against Baptist ministers in execution chambers? This Texas Tribune article from 2019 explains it:

The state of Texas has banned all prison chaplains from its execution chamber, days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state could not execute an inmate without allowing a Buddhist chaplain into the death chamber with him.

The high court last week halted the execution of Patrick Murphy, a member of the infamous “Texas Seven,” after Murphy claimed that the state was violating his religious rights by not allowing him to have a Buddhist chaplain in the room with him at the time of his scheduled death. The state only allows prison employees in the death chamber, and only Christian and Muslim clerics are employed with the state. During executions, a chaplain will often stand at the feet of the prisoner and rest a hand on his leg mouthing silent prayers.

The court stopped Murphy’s execution hours after it was scheduled to begin, ruling Texas could not execute him until his late appeal was considered unless the state provided a Buddhist spiritual adviser in the execution chamber. The ruling came less than two months after the same court decided against stopping the execution of a black prisoner in Alabama who requested a Muslim imam at his execution. Justice Brett Kavanaugh issued an opinion declaring that the exclusion of a Buddhist adviser was religious discrimination and proposed two alternatives for the Texas prison system: Don’t allow any chaplains into the execution chambers, or allow chaplains of all religions.

So, Texas just banned all chaplains/ministers/priests from executuion chambers. That settled that. I wrote about the Alabama case and the Muslim imam in 2019; see The Christian Jail Monopoly. The Alabama prisoner, Domineque Ray, was executed in February 2019 without his imam.

Ian Millhiser writes at Vox,

The four justices who expressed the most skepticism of Ramirez’s claims raised arguments that would never have flown in previous religious liberty cases. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, suggested at one point that Ramirez might be denied a religious accommodation if granting it would increase the risk of something going wrong during his execution above “zero.” Several justices raised concerns that accommodating Ramirez’s religious beliefs would simply create too much work for the Court.

Too much work for the Court? Maybe we need to appoint a lot more justices to the Court to ease the burden. I hate to see people overworked.

I can sorta kinda see why Texas would not want to let strangers into the execution chamger. Maybe that person would try to interfere. But considering that Ramirez was sentenced in 2008, it seems to me there was plenty of time to do a background check on the minister, a pastor at the Second Baptist Church in Corpus Christi who has been ministering to Ramirez in prison for the past few years. Maybe they could even get the minister to sign a document saying he understands he is not allowed to interfere with executions. There are currently 197 prisoners on death row in Texas, and considering that it takes years for a sentence to be carried out, it shouldn’t be too burdensome on Texas to check out clergy who have been requested to attend executions. It seems such a small thing to do.

Today’s most attention-grabbing headline — Republican Presidential Hopeful Soft-Launches 2024 Campaign on Premise That Men Are Masturbating Too Much. This is by Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate, and the “hopeful” is Sen. Josh Hawley.

It turns out that Hawley’s premise is a big more nuanced than the headline suggests. Basically, Hawley thinks that American men are spending too much time watching video games and porn and not being real men. This is, of course, the fault of the Left.

Hawley’s premise is that by supporting free trade and transgender rights while condemning sexism and racism, Democrats have put white men out of work (corporate offshoring, outsourcing, etc.) while simultaneously telling them via cultural messaging that there’s nothing good about their identity. As Hawley put it then: “Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?”

Putting aside that “free trade” is hardly a central cause of progressive Democrats — there’s the rhetoric, and then there’s the reality.

Is Hawley himself really concerned about this? Well, he recently voted against the just-passed (and actually bipartisan) infrastructure bill, whose purposes include the creation of manual labor jobs in the U.S. On the other hand, he supported Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for multinational corporations who create value for themselves by laying men (and other people) off, and he’s taken almost $300,000 in campaign donations over the course of his career from the Club for Growth, which is arguably the country’s most powerful advocate for free-trade, free-market policies that protect the interests of executives and shareholders vis-à-vis the workers who they supposedly leave behind with nothing to do but [redacted] themselves like [redacted] [redacted] Jeffrey Toobin. Hawley also doesn’t support unions or living-wage laws.

Pretty much the entire Republican Party, in microcosm. Now, why can’t Democrats get behind some consistent messaging that exposes this?

Consider Republican reaction to passage of the infrastructure bill. Remember when an infrastructure bill was something Trump promised and couldn’t deliver? Now infrastructure is bad. Paul Waldman:

As the week began, Democrats were celebrating final passage of a long-overdue infrastructure bill, which will address a range of pressing needs from lead water pipes to crumbling bridges to broadband deserts, while it will likely create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Meanwhile, Republicans were livid that a few of their representatives voted for the bill, and took their anger out on Big Bird.

Yes, Big Bird is a communist, according to loyal Republicans.

Meanwhile, Democrats are asking themselves whether their infrastructure bill can actually be turned into a political winner.

There are at least a few Republicans who worry that it might. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (who voted for the bill) is touting the good it might do for his home state of Kentucky; he clearly doesn’t want Democrats to get all the credit. But the more visible its effects are — and the more Republicans characterize it as a socialist boondoggle (or attack their own leadership because a few of their members in the House helped pass it) — the more Democrats will have an opportunity to use it as a case study in what Democratic governance actually does for people’s lives. Already, the White House is dispatching Cabinet secretaries and members of Congress across the country to promote the coming repairs and upgrades to roads, bridges and much more.

Josh Hawley wants you menfolk to stop watching porn and playing video games and provide for your families.  But he’s not going to lift a finger to do that. If you want jobs, vote for Democrats.

Speaking of adult males who need some correction — Rep. Paul Gosar, Arizona, tweeted an anime-style video that showed him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden with swords. Gosar’s own sister was on MSNBC last night calling for somebody to do something about her horrible brother.

The sister suspects Gosar is suffering from some kind of neurodegenerative disease and is deteriorating. I think she’s probably right. Now House Democrats are reminding Kevin McCarthy that similar behavior would get one fired from any workplace in the country. Will anything be done? I’m not holding my breath.

I take it that the political pundits figured out that Democrats don’t do well with rural voters. Over the weekend I saw several analyses commenting on the Democrat rural vote deficit. For example:

• Democrats again lament their weakness in rural areas, but they don’t have an answer to the problem (Dan Balz, WaPo)
• Rural Democrats stare into the abyss after Virginia (Politico)
• Rural voters have turned their backs on the Democratic party (Business Insider)

And on and on. Google “democrats rural voters” and you get many, many recent hits.

This is something I’ve been complaining about on this blog for all the nearly twenty years I’ve been writing this blog. In most of the rural U.S., the only messaging anyone ever hears is Republican messaging. The only points of view people are exposed to are right-wing points of view. Democratic and progressive ideas and positions are not ignored; they are silent and invisible.

And this has been going on for a long time. This is a trend that began during the Reagan Administration, if not earlier. And as people old enough to remember Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman have died off, those areas have gotten redder and redder.

Exactly how this happened would take a book to analyze, but the ending of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of right-wing talk radio have a lot to do with it. The erosion of Union membership also impacts many areas, such as coal mining communities, and is causing rust belt communities to get redder also. Unions were a major disseminator of Democratic Party perspectives back in the day.

Before that, a whole lot of white working-class people abandoned the Democrats because of their support for racial equality, especially Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and corrective policies such as Affirmative Action. Rural areas especially do tend to be homogeneously white.

And, of course, rural areas tend to be culturally conservative, which is another big reason for the rural voter gap. For more, see How the Democrats Lost, Period, from 2006.

Democrats argue, rightly, that working-class conservatives who vote for Republicans are voting against their own interests. Get this bit from Dan Balz in WaPo:

Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies, headquartered in Whitesburg, Ky., said Trump gave rural voters a greater sense of pride in themselves and their communities at a time when their livelihoods, whether through coal mining or family farming, were being threatened — and as some coastal Democrats seemed to be disrespecting them.

“He wasn’t going to bring the coal jobs back, but he elevated them,” Davis said of Trump. “We’ve brought energy and food [to the nation] and served in the wars. Rural people always felt they were in service to the rest of the country, and now there’s a cultural chasm. .?.?. What the Democrats have a hard time understanding is that politics are cultural and not logical. It’s going to take more than a white paper to reverse what’s going on.”

I’d be willing to bet money that if you surveyed people in coal minining areas, current and former, and asked whether coal jobs went up or down during the Trump administration, people would tell you those jobs increased. Maybe not in their communities, but somewhere. Of course, the truth is something else.

In 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made a promise to coal miners at a rally in West Virginia. “For those miners, get ready because you’re going to be working your asses off,” he told them, wearing a white hard hat. “We’ll be winning, winning, winning.”

After four years of the Trump administration, coal has been losing, losing, losing. Not that Trump can take the blame (or the credit). Dismal economics have been inexorably displacing coal as the fuel of choice in the US and around the world. Trump made some attempts to stop the bleeding—easing air pollution laws and propping up ailing plants—and in 2017, falsely claimed those efforts were working. “We are putting the coal miners back to work, just as I promised,” he said.

But, the data tell a different story. The number of people employed by the coal mining industry has fallen 15% since Trump took office in January 2017. Despite job losses that temporarily stabilized during his years in office, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics Data, the trend is continuing. Jobs did not increase, unhelped by Trump’s trade wars and unsuccessful efforts to use the Defense Production Act to prop up coal plants, before the pandemic curtailed coal demand and employment.

So, Trump didn’t do squat for coal mining communities, but he made them feel better about themselves, and they voted for him in 2020. Trump got the farm vote also, even though his trade war with China hurt farmers a lot more than help them, but most of them stood by Trump. This was partly because Democrats never came up with a simple, unified message about the trade war and farmers. Individual Dems were all over the map, and trade is a complex issue. Of course, part of the problem with Democrats promising that we’ll do this, this, and this for you is that there is always a Joe Manchin getting in the way. Democrats need to deliver.

But it seems to me that the first thing Democrats need to do is form some policies regarding farmers and coal miners and other rural folk, and then individual Dem politicians need to get behind those policies. Work up some simple messaging that all Dems can repeat, repeat, repeat. Then buy television ads presenting that messaging, because otherwise it will never be heard by the intended audience. And repeat that over the next few years. I don’t know what else to do. And, whenever Democrats can, they have to deliver something to rural voters. Maybe more rural hospitals, maybe programs to bring new industries to replace coal jobs. Something.

In other red-versus-vlue news, the gap in covid deaths between Republicans and Democrats continues to grow.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Before moving on to the infrastructure bill, do note that the FBI searched James O’Keefe’s home today. That cheered me up, I can tell you. The feds showed up at at 6 am this morning at O’Keefe’s apartment in Mamaroneck, NY, with a warrant, banging on the door and yelling at O’Keefe to “open up.” A neighbor said they even had on FBI jackets, just like on teevee. So cool.

This was in regard to the diary of Ashley Biden, the President’s daughter. Last year burglers took the diary and other items from Ms. Biden’s home. Bill Barr’s Justice Department opened an inquiry. Shortly after that, portions of Ms. Biden’s diary were published on a right-wing website that is not directly connected to Project Veritas. However,

The company that owns the website that published the diary pages is reportedly registered to the same address as a consulting company that belongs to a former British spy named Richard Setton, who has worked with Project Veritas. The same address was also used to register another company that Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe was once the president of.

O’Keefe said he was offered the diary but decided not to publish it because he didn’t know if it was authentic. Like lack of authenticity ever slowed him down before. He also claims that his organization gave the diary to law enforcement last year. And no, I don’t know exactly what was in the diary that anyone would care about. Even right-wing media decided to not report on it. See also Legal expert explains how the theft of Biden daughter’s diary turned into a federal investigation.

In other news, a Dallas real-estate agent and January 6 insurrectionist who bragged she wouldn’t go to jail because she is white (and blonde!) just got a 60-day prison sentence. Heh.

In more other news, “a new lawsuit alleges U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley accepted $973,411 in illegal campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association during his 2018 Senate Campaign.” Heh.

Okay, on to the infrastructure bill. Last night before it passed the House, The Hill ran a headline that said Showdown: Pelosi dares liberals to sink infrastructure bill. Yeah, blame the “liberals.” Never the “moderates.” Makes me crazy. But this morning, National Review was ranting Disgraceful House Republicans Rescue Biden’s Flailing Agenda. Six Democrats voted no, but the bill passed because 13 Republicans voted yes.

To National Review, what’s in the bill doesn’t matter; a Republican’s only duty is to damage Democrats. The nation can rot.

I’m happy something passed, but people had better keep their commitments. The Hill reported yesterday,

The eleventh-hour deal between the Congressional Progressive Caucus, moderate Blue Dog Democrats and Congressional Black Caucus would allow the House to pass the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package and send it to Biden’s desk, as well as pass a rule setting up a future vote on Biden’s $1.75 trillion social and climate spending package.

The three-way agreement calls for a written commitment that moderates will vote for Biden’s $1.75 trillion social and climate spending package if the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score of the bill is in line with White House estimates. The statement would be backed by Biden.

I’ll believe the “moderates” will keep their agreement when they do it.

And, of course, the boundless and eternal Stupid that is Marjorie Taylor Greene had to react.

Republicans who hand over their voting card to Nancy Pelosi to pass Biden’s Communist takeover of America will feel the anger of the GOP voter.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene ?? (@mtgreenee) November 6, 2021

Yeah, real Americans don’t need roads or bridges to anywhere, I guess. One of the thirteen “traitors” responded.

Infrastructure=communism is a new one. Eisenhower’s interstate system should be torn up or else the commies will be able to conveniently drive! Red Dawn in real life pic.twitter.com/WTPtBYDSHx

— Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) November 6, 2021

Other members of the dimwit caucus, including Matt Gaetz, are also expressing outrage. The bill passed in the Senate with 19 Republican votes, including Mitch McConnell’s, but that was okay.

Aaron Blake says that five of the thirteen House Republicans who voted yes are from New York and New Jersey, and I can’t imagine that voting to fix infrastructure will hurt them with their voters.

The bill included lots of popular projects and, in another era, probably would’ve gotten significantly more GOP votes. But we live in this era, in which delivering a political win for the other side — however popular the bill and however much your constituents might want it — is seen as apostasy. The demand in the GOP for such devotion to the party line and its election prospects is even greater than on the other side.

President Biden is expected to sign the bill soon. I don’t know if it has been officially transmitted from the House to the President yet.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, passes by a Build Back Better for Women rally held by Democrats on the House steps of the U.S. Capitol, on Sept. 24, 2021.

I was pulled away from the computer for a couple of days, but now I’m back.

I see you all were busy trying to grasp what happened with the elections. So are the pundits. And the “moderates” are still working hard to sabotage the President’s agenda. This is from WaPo:

I’ll write something later, but if anyone wants to vent about yesterday’s elections, please go ahead in the comments. I’m not ready to deal with any of this yet. Too much like 2009. I’m having flashbacks.

Our Doug has a book out about his aerial adventure. You can read about the book and order it here.