Author Archives: Brian Lambert

Where Wannsee Meets the MAGA White House

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Because I’m concerned about my mental state, I hope I was the only one watching yesterday’s January 6 hearing, listening to the blow-by-blow breakdown of that “unhinged” December 18 White House meeting and havng a kind of acid flashback vision of the Wannsee Conference.

And yes, I realize this is an invocation if you will of Godwin’s Law.

But really people, how do you not jump to Reinhard Heydrich and the deranged zealots of the Third Reich while trying to comprehend another collection of … deranged zealots … trying to sell a former reality TV performer a military-assisted coup to overthrow an election and seize control of the United States? Lakeside Berlin 1942, or the Oval Office 2020, both in their way were seeking a … final solution.

Some day … soon … I hope Armando Ianucci, director of such classics as “In the Loop” and “The Death Of Stalin” (and behind the scenes of “Veep” and “Succession”) stages a verbatim film of this episode of the MAGA Reich, circa 12/18/20. (There have seen several films about the 90-minute Wansee Conference. I like this ’80s German version, although the Kenneth Branaugh version is also quite good.)

Long past the point where you thought the clown show train wreck of the Donald Trump presidency … (and the mere sound of those three words together still sounds like something out of “Idiocracy”) … couldn’t get any more berserk and farcical we have … The Overstock.com guy sitting in the Oval Office trying to sell the failed casino operator on a plan for the army to march in and grab voting machines. Fraudulent machines manipulated by Italian satellites controlling thermostats clogged with Chinese bamboo … or something like that.

Jeeeeeezus keeee-rist.

One of my criticisms of the pundits gasping and hyper-ventilating anew at yesterday’s December 18 tick-tock was the pervasive suggestion that the likes of Mr. Overstock (with Minnesota’s own MyPillow Guy only a phone call away) Sidney “Kraken” Powell and Mike “Fifth!” Flynn were only the dregs of the Trump White House “advisory council”. The adults had left the building.

Please! That crew was there only because others far more culpable in sustaining Trump had — at long, long last — shrunk back in shame and out of fear of extreme legal peril. And those would be people like Pat Cipollone, the uber-Catholic father of 10 and friend of Laura Ingraham who had no problem with Trumplandia, and made no effort to provide testimony in the second impeachment, until it was obvious he too was going to have to wear an LfT badge — Lunatic for Trump — on his chest for eternity if he didn’t show up and finally spill.

And along with him throughout the Trump Circus Dementia we had the likes of Peter bleepin Navarro who is easily as “unhinged”, as the kids say, as the Kraken or Lt. Gen. Flynn … and possibly the Overstock.com Guy as well. And — but wait there’s more! — let’s never forget transparent grifters like Ryan Zinke, Wilbur Ross, Scott Pruitt, Steve Mnuchin, Mnuchin’s glam-sucking wife, Sean Spicer, Kayleigh McEnaney, Donny Jr’s shrieking girl-friend, Jared, Steve mother-bleepin’ Bannon, Dan Scavino, Jason Miller, Stephen Miller, Kellyanne “alternative acts” and on … and on … and on … and not ending with … Bill Barr.

No satirist could invent a more farcical, corrupt and incompetent collection of impausibilities, (with Barr exempted from the “incompetent” charge.)

But all humor and Godwin-like references aside, the chilling part of this whole clown show is that, A: The Trump fools almost succeeded throwing it back to the state legislatures (many — like Wisconsin and South Dakota — populated by more of their ilk), and B: They’re not done yet.

The key takeaway — as millions have said before — is that Trump and these people were idiots. Truly and factually, based on the receipts we now have. They were incompetent at being nefarious, and they were buffoonish on top of it.

But … post-Trump Trumpists like … pick one … Ron DeSantis, Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley have taken notes, have no need for nakedly batshit zealots like Mike Flynn or The Kraken … or The Overstock Guy. The so-called “competent Trump” characters squeezing into the starting gate are far, far more serious and disciplined about force-feeding white Christian MAGA ‘Murica all the authoritarian oppression (of others) they can swallow.

And that’ll make a much less hilarious movie.

Joe’s Too Old to Run Again.

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If The New York Times had called me and asked if I wanted Joe Biden to run again for President, I’d have said “no.”

Then again, if they asked me if was upset about his policies, or blamed him for “the country heading in wrong direction” or the price of gas, I’d also have said, “no.” And if they asked who I’d vote for if Biden ran against The Orange God King in 2024, I’d have said something along the lines of, “I’d vote for Beelzebub himself before Trump, only because the cloven-hoof guy smarter, less embarrassing and more honest.”

Columns and podcasts are clogging with pundits arguing that Joe Biden is simply too old to run again … unless he runs against Trump. And I’m on board with that. Unlike Fox and whatever passes for a deep thinking at Breitbart, the Gateway Pundit and InfoWars, I don’t see Biden as senile or “out of it.” Far from it. He’s clearly more rational and in control of a wider and deeper set of facts than the former casino bankrupter.

But no, Biden needs to begin the process of the hand-off. By the summer of 2023 at the latest.

Among the central personal qualities essential to success in our 2022 political world are personal energy and a sustained, crowd-pleasing ferocity in the face of shameless stupidity and bad faith. And those are virtues born in a younger generation than a pre-Boomer.

Whenever anyone asks about Trump 2024, I say I doubt he’s serious about another campaign, because he knows he’d lose even worse than 2020, but that the grift is just too sweet and easy to rule it out until the very last moment. Hell, if he can raise/steal $250 million from his delusional rubes for a legal defense that never existed, there’s got to be another quarter billion to rake in before declaring “everything’s rigged” and bailing out an hour before the New Hampshire primary.

But where do the Democrats go for a candidate with the chops to destroy a truly villainous slime like Florida governor Ron DeSantis?

A couple days ago Politico (aka “Tiger Beat on the Potomac”, thank you, Charlie Pierce), suggested Jon Stewart was the (kind of) guy Democrats need in a world where venomous pricks like DeSantis are regarded as anointed saviors of our white Christian nationhood. And given the performance of a smart, quick-witted, disciplined ex-comedian leading Ukraine in its fight against Trump supporter Vladimir Putin, I can follow their thinking. But the next guy/gal has to want the job, and Stewart doesn’t.

Part of the argument for a Jon Stewart candidacy, or an Oprah candidacy or any fill-in-the-blank-personality candidacy is that the low-information “persuadable” voters who can tip North Carolina, Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania safely into a Democrat’s hands feel a child-like relationship with famous faces they see on TV. (Trump would never have gotten where he did if simpletons didn’t actually believe he was the business genius they saw on “The Apprentice.”) It’s a sad reality of human nature/modern life, but try convincing me or anyone it isn’t … a fact.

Which leads us to people like California governor, Gavin Newsom, a Hollywood-savvy glamor-puss who lately has been enjoying sticking it to … Ron DeSantis … with mocking comparisons of California v. Florida quality of life, including nuances like privacy and women’s right to choose. Newsom — tall, with ridiculously good hair and a gravelly, manly voice — is like something out of Central Casting and easily ridiculed for looking it. But as I and others weighing his chances have to concede, he pulls it off … and he likes the fight.

Glamor-aside, I’ve always been a fan of Pete Buttigieg. He was my pick in 2020 and with moments like this — on Fox no less — he’s shown time after time that he has the focus and composure for the relentless brawl with misinformation-spewing stooges. But Pete, clearly the smartest candidate in either party in 2020, doesn’t deliver the ineffable “matinee idol” ju-ju that someone like Newsom does.

Either way, Joe Biden will be much too old were he reelected in ’24. The modern world needs someone deeply, and when it comes to negotiating absolutely critical issues like climate change, I do mean “deeply” versed in the technologies and rhetorical warfare of this era.

I await the Times’ next call.

Now We Understand Why Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony was “Urgent”

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Watching tbe Cassidy Hutchinson testimony the other day I kept asking, “This is all pretty juicy, but what exactly about it did the committee see that made it ‘urgent’?”

Today’s subpoena for Trump’s top lawyer, Pat Cipollone, confirms what sharper legal minds than me understood. Namely that young miss Hutchinson was placing first-person eyewitness fingerprints on office elders who both knew what in hell was going down but were either unable or uninterested in doing anything about it. And that sliding her into the careful sequencing of testimonies was a vital strategic play.

More to the point, with D.C. basically taking a nap for another couple weeks, now was a good time to peel the scab off people like Cipollone and ex-restaurateur/voting fraudster/Trump wingman, Mark Meadows, and give them a few days to decide how far down the sewer of history they really want to get flushed for Donald Trump. The consensus suspicion being that while Meadows — the guy on his couch doom scrolling on his cellphone as the armed mob attacked the capitol — is so deep in the drain he’s beyond rescue, Cipollone, a guy with a real career and reputation might … might … finally see the wisdom in getting on the ethical side of The Big Lie.

As I read this morning, the betting line is that while Cipollone might … might … consent to a written deposition, it is unlikely he will step up to a John Dean moment and place his face on national TV for all of the world and MAGA Nation to see. Cipollone — introduced to Trump by FoxNews’ Laura Ingraham — has to be seeking advice on how to A: Maintain good standing with his ultra-Catholic/Federalist Society social and professional bases, while, B: Not getting rendered a historical stooge and sap for going down with the Trump ship of fools.

It may be a fascination unique to me, but much like John Roberts getting stampeded by a rampaging Supreme Court bearing his name, Cipollone is another old school, educated, well-mannered Republican watching his legacy getting tucked inside a flaming bag of manure and dumped on the streets of DC. Put another way, after enabling all sorts of fire-breathing, borderline unethical behavior in the name of “conservative values”, guys like Roberts and Cipollone are getting third-degree burns from vandals with neither manners or morals.

Cipollone is certainly also aware of what the House Committee has in its possession and is preparing to play next. And that would be, as ex-Republican Cong. Denver Riggleman and committee investigator told Nicole Wallace yesterday, a trove of text and e-mail messages from Meadows to … well, very likely to and from characters closely aligned with if not including the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and other members of a carefully oreganized, armed riot.

As White House counsel who had constant interaction with sewer rats like Meadows, Cipollone has to be thinking how he can create safe distance from that kind of reckless, indictable idiocy.

There is Only One Way to Restore a Representative Supreme Court

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In the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade we’ve heard the usual, predictable cries from liberals and Democrats. You know it because you’ve heard it before. “By god, we’re going to fight!”

“Fight” being a standard, and I would say treadworn cry from every politician desperate to rally supporters after some miserable defeat. It sounds fierce … but I’m sorry, it’s lame. It’s been rendered as stale as “thoughts and prayers” after each day’s mass shooting.

Nancy Pelosi’s “fight song” is calling for Democrats to, you know, get out and “vote” in November, and presumably throw out the current bunch of rat bastards. To which I say, “Yeah, great. By all means. Vote Democrat. That’ll slow them down for a while … maybe. Or at least until the next election when the bastards surge back, promising to restore $2 gas, close the borders and slap down the silly, woke mob.”

But let’s get real. Voting in fresh liberal troops is utterly transitory.

Post the Roe decision, we liberals can see our dilemna clearly and without any credible disputing evidence. We are dealing with an emboldened Supreme Court packed (via naked connivery) with conservative ideologues. These are partisan zealots with life appointments. And they’ve proven beyond any doubt that they are willing to override any legislation and any will of the people, no matter how long established and no matter how deep and vocal the reaction from the substantial majority of citizens.

Point being … unless “the Supreme Court problem” is resolved, no hard-fought legislative action or lower court victories ever mean anything. Literally everything is negatable, even after 50 years of being established law with the constant support of 70% of voting-age adults.

Which brings us to the one “fight” liberals must focus on with the intensity, focus and connivery, if necessary, that conservatives used to bring down Roe.

And that is … the elimination of the electoral college.

As many have noted, not one, not two, not three, but five of the votes against Roe were delivered from justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. Alito and Roberts by George W. and of course, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett by that incorruptible conservative intellectual powerhouse, Donald Trump, (a guy who we have no reason to suspect has ever been personally involved in an abortion.)

Here’s a breakdown of the serious obstacles to neutering the electoral college by constitutional amendment and … and … an explanation of how the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact could achieve the same end. Basically, once enough states pass the NPVIC into law to reach 270 electoral votes, the archaic Electoral College, created 250 years before 80% of the American population was living in cities, would be rendered moot.

(In Minnesota the Democrat-led House passed the NPVC in 2019, but it has been blocked by Senate-controlled Republicans ever since.)

It goes without saying that the current Supreme Court ideologues, driven by Sam Alito, will search high and low for another “novel legal argument” to overturn an NPVIC law. And can we say that after ramrodding both the Citizens United decision (all the dark money any politician could ever want) and the defeat of Roe, Alito is now a far, far more consequential figure than the hapless John Roberts?

And this is where the white hot focus of liberal legal scholars, big donors and activists becomes essential. They/we have to accept as brutal fact that all their “fighting” for, you name it, gay rights, climate legislation, gun control, immigration reform and on and on … and on and on … is for nought as long as the Electoral College keeps sending popular vote losers to the White House.

Given the other brutal fact, namely that the liberal coalition is a sprawling mash-up of hundreds of interest groups, many with little to no overlap, such a white hot focus strikes me … at this moment … as futile. Where conservative ideologues can coalesce behind a handful of issues — i.e. anything smacking of white Christian rights, more guns, lower taxes for the wealthy and resistance to silly woke liberalism — the progressive agenda is a longer read than your average Stephen King novel, and in some ways just as scary.

But you tell me, can you point to any other single “fight” promising as much deep and pervasive reform as putting an axe to the neck of the Electoral College?

At Long, Long … Last Some Actual Reporting on Minnesota PUBLIC Radio

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Amid the crush of news, good, bad, horrifying and ridiculous, it is easy to shuffle past a piece from a largely unknown source burrowing into the bureaucracy of a respected state icon. But anyone who values serious, thorough reporting owes it to themselves to read all of Jay Boller’s exploration of the inner functioning of Minnesota Public Radio, (i.e. AMPG). If only because his story is the only thing like it produced in the past half dozen years.

Boller is a co-founder of an on-line local news start-up called “The Racket”, which more or less created itself from writers laid off at City Pages when the Star Tribune shut it down a year ago. The Strib owning City Pages, the last remnant of the Twin Cities’ once robust alternative press, was always problematic in that when functioning properly the alternative press regularly surveilled the Strib and other legacy media operations and reported on their weaknesses and failures. Failings with important consequences for their audiences.

Boller’s MPR story is remarkable on several levels, and I say that as someone once in the business of covering local media. (The fact my employer was far, far more interested in celebrity gossip is a story running on a separate but parallel track.)

There was far less of that kind of coverage when the Strib was paying the salaries of people like Boller, and Mike Mullen, to name one other whose by-line I miss. And there was none at all once they were cut loose.

I have railed on before about the way MPR … i.e. Minnesota Public Radio … was arguably the least transparent and forthcoming of any local media operation I had to deal with. (In later years, the Star Tribune managed to equal MPR in opacity.) The place was a vault, by design and edict .. as best I and anyone else who approached could ever tell. Feel free to tweet David Brauer and Adam Platt to see how much their experiences covering MPR differ from mine.

The comparison of conversations with any level of MPR and say one of the local TV stations was always startling. Most reporters and many managers enjoyed or at least tolerated the standard thrust and parry, shuck and jive of a fellow reporter digging into their business. Such people are proudly combative and hardly defenseless. But the inescapable impression from interacting with MPR, at any level for any reason, was that employees there were, to put it bluntly but not necessarily hyperbolically — fearful of saying … anything.

The essence of Boller’s piece is that a lot of changfe and attrition has been going on at MPR this past couple years and now, with so many newsroom casualties, some are willing to talk.

It’s a solid story with solid numbers. He and his sources focus on a highly-corporatized, boardroom-to-boardroom focused financial strategy rewarding executives at frankly absurd levels, for a public media operation, while ignoring commensurate “compensation” for news staff and women in particular, or so Boller’s sources argue.

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The presence of Strib owner Glen Taylor’s daughter as MPR’s CEO naturally invites speculation as to why no one at the Strib has ever produced a story even close to Boller’s aggression.

Reading Boller, my spit-take moment was the $580,000 annual “compensation” for one high(er) ranking MPR executive. That character was memorable for once inviting me over for a friendly get-to-know-you coffee, a routine enough encounter with local TV and radio managers, but previously unheard of by anyone at MPR.

The chat was friendly and professional. But weeks later, when I naively assumed he would be open to commenting on the next MPR story I was working on, he recoiled, pleading that I needed to “protect” him. And then he was gone … into the familiar MPR ghost zone, never to be heard from again.

“Protect” him from who, for chrissake? And for what?

It wasn’t like I was asking him to confirm management had wheeled in hookers and blow for the MPR Christmas party. I forget the specific story, but it was standard management decision stuff. The kind of thing I could reliably get Stanley Hubbard on the phone to comment on. And Stanley doesn’t run a public company.

That all said, the one area I encourage Boller — or anyone — to look at more closely is the pervasive claim of gender discrimination at MPR. His sources paint a picture of systemic “old boy” culture and under-compensation for women. But given MPR’s history of women in news room management, on their news reporting staff and the near complete evolution from male to female jocks at The Current, I’d like a little more certainty supporting that charge.

Simultaneous with digesting Boller’s piece I came across this on the site of one of my favorite bloggers, Kevin Drum, formerly of Mother Jones.

Feeding off an Intercept piece on the internecine flight within progressive, non-profit organizations, Drum writes, “The widespread revolt of young staffers, especially in the nonprofit space, is the subject of endless talk within the progressive movement, but you’d never know it on the outside because it’s been written about only in bits and pieces that never quite add up to a full story.”

Adding, “The clash [Ryan] Grim describes between workers and management has been brewing for a while—since the election of Donald Trump, at least—but took off in earnest only after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Staffers at progressive nonprofits, in a game of follow the leader, all began issuing demands, writing manifestos, and declaring that the organizations they worked for were hopelessly misogynistic, classist, white supremacist, and, inevitably, ‘unsafe’.”

Point being: it’s a perspective on a kind of woke herd mentality, worth apply to and testing on at least one level of the MPR situation described by Boller.

Finally, here’s a link to The Racket … and your opportunity to be a … wait for it MPR fans … subscribing member. I haven’t checked their 990s, but I doubt Boller or anyone else over there is pulling down $580,000 in public “compensation.”

Here’s Hoping the January 6 Committee Has Its Show Biz Pants On

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They stormed the Capitol, then posed for selfies | The Economist

The cheap and easy joke is that if producers want to guarantee an audience for these January 6 hearings they need to put Johnny Depp and his girlfriend on the stand. Or at least get a celebrity masked singer to blast out The Star Spangled Banner.

Whatever the issue — a worldwide pandemic, a military invasion, gun slaughter — Americans insist on being entertained. Not necessarily with a laugh, but with a story that has easily identifiable villains and relatable heroes, spectacle and most of all … pace. The characters and scenery need to change frequently. Things may not drag. If your show is “slow”, you’re dead. “Boring” is the cardinal sin of show biz. Alternate viewing is a half-second away. With a tap of a button your vitally important, democracy-protecting message, and — oops — your long-gestating cri de coeur, has been replaced in America’s family rooms with pizza-spinning super heroes.

So here’s hoping the (mostly all) Democratic committee staging the hearings over the next couple weeks are being honest when they say they’ve applied basic show biz thinking and pacing to the packaging of these 90-minute, primetime events.

The critical question is whether they’ve got enough suspense, revelation and sex appeal to reach beyond the usual Trump-reviling choir. Personally, I’m skeptical I’ll see or hear anything I don’t already know or suspect. And that includes the promised video-taped depositions of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

I have no confusion whatsoever about the “hows” and “whys” of Jan. 6. I understand what drove it, who fomented it and who was meant to benefit from it.

But I understand the central purpose of this capitol hill mini-series. It is, not to put to blunt a point on it, to create enough populist mass to compel Attorney General Merrick Garland to finally, formally indict Trump and his long … long … list of stooges and cronies responsible for everything that went into a plot to overthrow an election/stage a coup. Poor ratings and bad reviews may be taken as a sign there’s insifficient public “will” to prosecute Trump, with all the certain hellfire of backlash from MAGA-land that would ensue.

But … maybe … possibly … with a good, compelling TV show producing a large audience and that dominates a half dozen consecutive news cycles, the Justice Department will accept the risk of a US v. Trump trial and indict a man who has obviously, clearly committed a staggering long list of crimes against … contractors, bankers, insurance companies, individual women and oh yes, the vaunted Constitution.

So yeah, I’ll be watching.

I just suspect “The Masked Singer” will pull bigger ratings.

After 19 Dead Fourth-Graders It’s Time to Apply “Muscular Bravado.”

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Like everything else, reaction to Beto O’Rourke’s crashing of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s post Uvalde press conference immediately split into two separate camps. Tribe A was indignant that anyone, much less Abbott’s rival, would “exploit a tragedy” for “political gain”. Tapes of the incident include voices from the stage around Abbott calling O’Rourke a “son of a bitch” and ordering him thrown out of the building.

The other camp, of which I’m a part, applauded O’Rourke for having the chutzpah, the cojones, the level of proportionate moral indignation to get in the face of a cynically self-serving cast of gun-slaughter enablers, right then and there with all cameras rolling. And this was before we learned how much of what Abbott and other “leaders” of Texas’ law enforcement community was saying at that presser was pretty much utter bullshit.

The O’Rourke Incident instantly recalled an interview with Atlantic writer, Anne Applebaum, that I was listening to driving back from up north this past Tuesday, almost simultaneous with the murder of 19 kids and two adults at yet another America school. Applebaum was the guest on New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s podcast and the topic was her new introduction to the classic book by Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Klein is an interviewer with an exemplary talent for drilling down to the most salient issues of whatever topic he’s covering. And soon the discussion was moving into the “why” of people’s response to often crude, authoritarian leaders and their flagrantly obvious perfidies. I encourage you to listen to the entire episode for all that Klein and Applebaum get in to.

But at one point Applebaum used the phrase “muscular bravado” to explain the appeal of characters like Donald Trump.

Rogues like Trump present themselves as unfettered-by-common-rules-of-decorum warriors defending what large masses of people want defended. Or at least as “fighters” antagonizing the same people large masses want antagonized. The responses are not entirely rational. But it often translates to “heroic” in the eyes of people, as Applebaum and Arendt say, isolated by their ignorance and fearful of what they don’t understand.

A salient point here being that in 2022 USA this kind of bravado is entirely in the possession of Trumpist Republicans, and this explains much of the imbalance of energy and enthusiasm between Republicans and Democrats.

The takeaway is that politics/leadership is a profoundly emotional game. Barack Obama swung millions his way in 2008 through charisma and the belief that he had the strength and bravery/star-power to make change happen. More to the point, liberals, Democrats and the millions rightfully repulsed and horrified by the complicity of Republicans in America’s gun slaughter, erosion of Constitutional rights, degradation of our court system, indifference to climate change, wildly out of balance tax system, etc. have no real choice but to accept the power and importance of “muscular bravado” in rallying voters.

Liberals may accept this in theory, but are often embarrassed by it in reality. Bravado of a sort that appeals to largely non-ideological, non-partisan voters strikes the average policy-intense liberal as corny and suspicious, and beneath the dignity of a serious leader.

The dilemma for liberals, is that bravado works, on swing voters if not them. And in our current moment, as we reel from yet another grade school slaughter, genuinely indignant bravado could be a very effective emotional trigger for voters.

O’Rourke isn’t a newby to gun reform. He’s favored a flat-out ban on assault rifles for a while now. So I’m accepting his indignation as genuine. He’s demonstrated he’ll take the political risk that comes with his position on the issue. Just as with his “stunt” at Abbott’s press conference he’s demonstrated he’s prepared to take the blowback for getting right up in the grilles of the ghouls (Ted Cruz was standing behind Abbott) and accuse them for their complicity.

Liberals are notoriously not single-issue voters. Get a Democrat or a Democratic politician going on what needs to be done to set the country right and you invariably get a list longer than a Cheesecake Factory menu.

But 19 more dead fourth-graders presents as unequivocal a single-minded life-or-death issue as any imaginable, and O’Rourke is correctly calculating that no matter how short our attention spans, the outrage over gun-mutilated grade schoolers is something that carries deep, long-lasting moral outrage. Horror-struck outrage of a kind that can — and should — be resurrected repeatedly, with muscular bravado, for months until November and years beyond that until the cynics are driven back under their rocks.

The final point being, Republicans have no good faith response to their role in our gun insanity. With an unabashed siege on their corruption and reckless disregard for … children! … Democrats have an issue that like Joe Pesci in some Marty Scorsese mob movie they can hold Republicans’ faces to the burner with.

They need to do it.

Forget the Dead Kids, Guns are Existential for Republicans

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Texas school shooting: Uvalde in 'state of shock' - Los Angeles Times

You know and I know that despite the emotional pleas of the past 24 hours nothing whatsoever will be done about America’s gun insanity. If Mitch McConnell was able to rally his Senate caucus against the most modest invigoration of gun laws after 26 grade schoolers were murdered at Sandy Hook, he won’t even have to bother after 21 were slaughtered in Uvalde.

While the originalists on the Supreme Court plunge on ahead to take away a right supported by 70% of the public for 50 years, no conservative or red-district liberal is going utter a peep about serious gun control — beginning with universal background checks, red-flag laws and a ban on assault rifles — supported by 60%-plus of their voting age constituents. And we all know why.

Guns are existential for conservatives struggling to maintain authority through the country’s demographic shift. Republicans simply can not win elections without showing support for each and every relaxation of gun laws that gets traction in paranoid America.

You’d like to focus “existential” attention on the victims of our ceaseless gun slaughter. Not just the 21 murdered in Texas yesterday, or the 10 in Buffalo a couple weeks ago, or all those killed in the over 200 mass shootings … in just the first five months of 2022 … (27 in schools) … or those dying from single-victim, gun-homicides/suicides at the rate of … 110 a day, month in and month out. “Existential” has played out for all those people.

But the key to how this truly astonishing level of carnage is sustained lies in the existential threat to the careers of conservative politicians, most but not all of whom are Republicans, should they raise so much as a sympathetic eyebrow at the thought of any … any … kind of controls on the sale and use of guns and ammo. The hard, let’s make that “obscene”, fact is that guns are so deeply and thoroughly hard-wired into the insecure psyches of a deeply threatened minority of Americans they are the very definition of single-issue voters. They may tell pollsters that “immigration” is their biggest concern, but we all know, “immigration” is code for “more brown/black criminals I need to protect myself from.”

In my experience talking “Second Amendment” with “guns rights” supporters, the unmistakable takeaway is that a life without the potency that comes from gun ownership (and display) would be indistinguishable from castration. So good luck getting those remarkably reliable single issue voters to support restrictions on a fundamental life function.

A Pew Study says this:

“White men are especially likely to be gun owners: About half (48%) say they own a gun, compared with about a quarter of white women and nonwhite men (24% each) and 16% of nonwhite women.

“Like the gender gap, the education gap in gun ownership is particularly pronounced among whites. Overall, about three-in-ten adults with a high school diploma or less (31%) and 34% of those with some college education say they own a gun; a quarter of those with a bachelor’s degree or more say the same. Among whites, about four-in-ten of those with a high school diploma or less (40%) or with some college (42%) are gun owners, compared with roughly a quarter of white college graduates (26%).”

FWIW the same survey shows three times as many conservatives own guns as liberals. … if you’re assessing “the fear factor.”

In a country not held captive by an electoral college system that sustains minority rule …

Assault rifles would be banned.

Internet gun and ammo sales would be banned.

Red flag laws would be universal, with heavy penalties for any seller who violated them.

Bullets would be taxed at a 400% rate.

A license, showing certified training and insurance would be mandatory for every gun owned by anyone anywhere. The market would determine premium prices.

Manufacturers of firearms could be sued, just like manufacturers of death-and-injury causing cars, microwaves and fast food.

But we don’t live in same galaxy as that imagined country. Instead we have the latest mass murder — of school children — in a state where the Republican Governor (Greg Abbott) — who, along with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is scheduled to speak to an NRA convention in Houston this coming week. A state where Abbott and his mostly (but not all) Republican legislature recently relaxed gun laws to the point customers aren’t required to even take training before toting a gun to church.

And a country where instead of acting with conscience conservative politicians routinely release the same anodyne responses to the most vile tragedies.

When you hear the phrase “race to the bottom” that kind of overt pandering to paranoia and cynical contempt for public safety is what they’re talking about.

As Sordid an Example of “Legislating from the Bench” as We’ll Ever See.

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How the Federalist Society came to dominate the Supreme Court – Harvard Gazette

Not that there was really any question, you understand. But with this “leak” of the Supreme Court’s imminent abortion ruling we can pretty well dismiss the notion that there is ever a “settled” argument in this great, grand democratic experiment of ours. Given sufficient connivery, bad faith and partisan fervor, nothing is ever truly decided and settled.

Court watchers and other sage heads — like Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick — are at the moment undecided about why and who leaked Sam Alito’s 98-page screed/draft of the court’s upcoming opinion. Was it someone trying to gin up enough public outrage to … do something about it? On a court where there’s a locked-in-stone five votes to decide in favor of anything the Federalist Society/evangelical right has on their to-do list?

Or was the leak from someone sympathetic to overturning Roe? An arch-partisan wet dream that has never polled higher than 30% with Americans since 1973? The thinking being that given Americans’ inability to focus on anything longer than two weeks would mean the howling and protesting — from the majority of citizens — will be exhausted by June when the formal decision is expected to be handed down?

Predictably, FoxNews world is already declaring that the “real scandal” here is … the leak … not Alito’s thinking.

Whatever, there’s little doubt that overturning a “settled law” that has maintained 70% support for 50 years will be the signature decision of John Roberts’ court. This vote will be his legacy. And as I’ve followed the news since last night, Roberts has neither said or signalled anything about how he will vote or whether he’s trying to work the team to modulate the greatest example of “legislating from the bench” in modern American history.

The Roberts angle of this is interesting because from everything I know about the guy he is the classic between-the-forty-yard-lines institutional conservative … getting trampled like so many others of his fading ilk by hyper-partisans with a truly hypocritical regard for constitutional integrity. Like so many old-school, country club Republicans, he’s watching the cumulative effect of so many of his status quo/progressive-resistant decisions coming back to wreak havoc on the dignity of the institutions they claim to so revere.

The abortion argument is so treadworn there’s nothing fresh to be said about it. My personal attitude — shared by many in polling over the decades — is that while I could never consent to it in my relationships, and certainly not as “casual” birth control, the idea that The Government has any standing to dictate to a woman what she can and cannot do — even in the case of rape or her health for chrissakes — is about as anti-democratic, anti-libertarian and anti-American experiment as it gets.

What makes the pro-life argument even worse — which is to say even more hypocritical — is that poll after poll and study after study shows that Godly-divined, Christ-sanctioned anti-abortion partisans are nearly as rabidly opposed to social welfare spending — for people like single-mothers — as they are to choice. For them, support for life stops at birth.

Here’s George Carlin’s classic “pro life” rant.

Amy Klobuchar popped up on Rachel Maddow’s show last night making brave sounds about how this means liberals and everyone else in favor of Roe as it stands has to, you know, band together and gird for the fight to change Congress before this authoritarian stampede gets any worse.

To which I say, “Well, good luck with that.” As someone pointed out on Twitter this morning, over two million people have signed a petition to cut Johnny Depp’s ex-wife out of the next “Aquaman” movie because she was so so crazy mean to Johnny.

By contrast, the outrageously sordid tale of Clarence Thomas’s wife cavorting with abject nutjobs and insurrectionists — with his full knowledge — trying to subvert the Constitution by overthrowing an election has faded from public interest with no apparent legal consequences.

It Was Time for the Mask Mandate to Go.

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The best mask to wear on an airplane

Personally, I’m just fine with pulling the plug on the public transportation mask mandate. At the risk of sounding like a raging, bug-eyed Trump goober — or Bill Maher — masks, as a universal mandate have served what purpose they could and it’s time to move on into the next phase of COVID protection.

How the mandate has been ended is a whole other story. I am not alone in thinking it bizarre-to-appalling that in a highly-developed society of 320 million people one strategically placed partisan with precious little legal and no medical qualifications can dictate/induce a health policy for everyone. Really folks, WTF? Can we get some half-baked judge somewhere to require every pot hole in the country get fixed today?

(This on the judge from Charlie Pierce: “You see, Judge [Kathryn] Mizelle is one of those folks that the Federalist Society sent up the pneumatic tube that led from its labs to the White House. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and was rated as “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. She was 33 when she was nominated and confirmed as the 2020 lame-duck session was winding down. She was eight years out of law school and had never tried a case of any kind. Her husband was chosen to be acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security through his connection to that noted devotee of the Constitution, Stephen Miller. She had no experience, but she had the golden resume.“)

Have you read her argument on “sanitation”? What for godssake is the woman babbling about?

But the science of masked airplane travel has escaped me for a while. If every environment in which we spend time in close quarters with other humans was as well ventilated and filtered as an airplane I seriously doubt COVID would have spread as far and as deep as it has.

The larger point is that after two years, and after everything we’ve learned about the virus, after the vaccines and boosters and all that is readily knowable about transmission and individual vulnerability, we are truly at the point where it is up to each of us to protect ourselves. Pre-vaccine I wouldn’t have said so. But now I do.

Feel free to tell me how completely wrong I am, but two shots and two boosters later and with no underlying conditions (other than general mule-headedness and irritability) I’m not seeing myself as particularly vulnerable to serious infection from COVID as it exists today, even in its sub-variants. Likewise, based on my understanding, if I’m carrying any level of the virus, (which immunologically may actually help me avoid a more serious infection) my viral load isn’t potent enough to do much if any damage to another similarly vaccinated, otherwise healthy person.

Which gets us obviously to those who are either not vaccinated or afflicted with some other significant health problem.

At this point in the pandemic everybody has had enough time and has access to enough information to have made an adult decision about vaccinations. Not that “adult” means “good”, you undersatand.

For those still avoiding vaccination because of some utterly imbecilic hyper-partisan political reason (which usually covers both “religious” issues and athletes with “body purity” excuses) … well, good luck to you. If your fierce stand for “personal freedom” gets a tube jammed down your throat and an early grave, you can hope that Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem or some other sociopathic right-wing grifter will show up and say a few appreciative words at your funeral.

For people with emphysema, diabetes, etc., they absolutely should continue protecting themselves with masks in public settings. More to the point, they should have been doing that before COVID. It unfortunately comes with their territory.

For the rest of us, we’ve followed science, as opposed to cable TV entertainment theory, and have every good reason now to move on. Exercising, mind you, similar basic cautions we use to avoid harm from… well, pick as many as you like … spinal meningitis, hepatitis, diptheria, measles, strolling blind across six lanes of freeway, jumping out of airplanes without a parachute, French kissing Matt Gaetz … (sorry about that last one) … and on and on … and on.

Point being, there’s something out there somewhere for everyone, given the right circumstances and bad luck.

Life is like that.

What Do You Say We Build a Wall Around South Dakota?

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A deer doesn't look like a human": Republican attorney general involved in fatal South Dakota crash | Salon.com

[Updated: With the proper use of “lying.”] With everything going on in the world you can be forgiven if you haven’t paid a lot of attention to … South Dakota. I mean, to most of us it’s just that big flat place “over there”. A place where unless you’re counting pheasants and super spreader motorcycle rallies nothing much ever happens.

But then you get a story like the one where the state’s top law enforcement officer — protecting and serving, y’know — kills a guy with his car — and given the place’s 90% Republican control, gets off with a hand-slap, essentially Scot-free, at least until he doesn’t.

Yesterday the South Dakota legislature finally summoned the courage to impeach Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg for, A: Killing 55 year-old Joe Boever by hitting him as he walked alongside a rural highway, and then B: Flagrantly lying about it, claiming he thought Boever, a guy whose head came through Ravnsborg’s windshield, was a deer.

South Dakota AG Ravnsborg was 'distracted' when he hit, killed pedestrian with car: Investigation - ABC News

The story has played here in Minnesota and nationally, but usually without the telling details, some of which were only partly known until the full North Dakota BCI report was released several weeks ago. (The incident took place Sept. 12, 2020.) Having already established that the dead man’s glasses were lying on the passenger seat of Ravnsborg’s car, thereby making it, well, pretty damned unlikely the Attorney General didn’t know he’d hit a human being, the report revealed that far from Boever walking on the road, Ravnsborg — a guy who at at age 46 has already accumulated 25 traffic citations — was completely off the road, as in his entire car, a full-size Ford, was on the other side of the rumble strips and fog lines, practicaly in the ditch, when he hit Boever, who was carrying a flashlight, so hard Boever’s head not only came through the windshield but one of his legs was torn completely off.

Ravnsborg crash: What we know about how it happened | KELOLAND.com

And about that flashlight … . A local sheriff rolled out to the scene in response to Ravnsborg calling in a report of hitting a deer, (something you have to do for insurance reasons). Neither of them bothered to check around for the deer. So neither noticed the light from the flashlight lying in the ditch back near the point of impact. (The car – traveling at 68 mph — carried Boever about 100 feet before throwing him off.) When Ravnsborg and other cops returned to the scene the next day and found Boever’s body, the flashlight was still on.

So much for thorough law enforcement work.

So now Ravnsborg will face a Senate trial that like — pick your Trump impeachment — requires a 2/3 vote to convict. How that goes is anyone’s guess. But — and here we get into more wildly dysfunctional, contemporary South Dakota politics — he does not have friends in high places. You see, Ravnsborg is in a death match feud with South Dakota’s “presidential contender” governor, former beauty queen Kristi Noem. She wants him gone real bad, and right now, she carries more water in South Dakota than he does.

Noem needs far less introduction than Ravnsborg. She is best known to anyone with a conscience as the appalling Trumpist politician who so resolutely denied COVID that South Dakota for a time (around when Ravnsborg killed Boever) had the highest death rate per capita of any place in the world.

For her brave stand for “personal freedoms” Noem became a darling of FoxNews and was catapulted into the pantheon of self-serving gargoyles considered suitable successors to the Trump mantle. (Semi-notorious Trump “adviser” Corey Lewandowski has become a, mmm, regular traveling companion as Noem makes the required CPAC/Trump rally circuit of activities having nothing to do with responsibly governing South Dakota.)

South Dakota Governor DENIES having an affair with ex-Trump aide Corey Lewandowski | Daily Mail Online

I could go on about Noem’s scandal-ette over big-footing her daughter’s real estate license, then pushing out the bureaucrat who denied it, and the $400,000 fence she had put up around the Governor’s residence (with no hint at all of any unique threat to her), or the constant use of state aircraft to get her and Lewandowski to MAGA rallies. But, in the annals of South Dakota today there’s something better … but far more opaque.

With all the news about sanctions on Russian oligarchs, seizing their super yachts and chasing their extremely murky finances all over the planet, it’s worth noting that flat, boring South Dakota is today a rival to Switzerland when it comes to — let’s call it what it is — hiding money.

Back in the ’80s another Republican governor, Bill Janklow, yet another Republican politician with a notorious driving record — 13 citations — and a guy who while speeding killed a Minnesota motorcyclist on a South Dakota highway, opened the doors to the industry of remarkably air-and-light tight trusts. Over the last ten years alone, as every millionaire-billionaire with a reason to hide money has set up such “legitimate financial tools” the amount of cash stashed in South Dakota has risen seven-fold, from $50 billion to $355 billion as of late 2020.

That’s a third of a trillion dollars protected from prying eyes and taxes by … South Dakota.

South Dakota Foreign Grantor Trust – Bridgeford Trust Company

How much of those billions is utterly nefarious, maybe even from Russian mobsters? No one knows and South Dakota certainly isn’t going to do anything to make it easier for investigators to find out. (Amazingly South Dakota — tough negotiators over there — doesn’t get even the tiniest of a percentage of a taste for hiding all that loot.)

It almost goes without saying that aggressive journalism is a deeply endangered species in full-on, proudly red and merrily Trumpian South Dakota of 2022. But there are a few brave souls doing what they can.

South Dakota’s descent into The Alabama of the Midwest was taking root back when Tom Daschle was a top Democrat. But I can only imagine what George McGovern and James Abourezk think of their once dull, fly-over home state?

As for us here in Minnesota, thank god we’ve got Wisconsin.

Remembering When Crime Didn’t Pay

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Richard Linklater's new film 'Apollo 10 1/2' premieres at SXSW
Director Richard Linklater

So I’m trying to remember when I stopped believing, “Crime doesn’t pay”? As a teenager, I suppose. But the question connects to why I believed it in the first place? Where did that reassuring, fanciful notion come from in the first place?

Mom and Dad? As I recall they were quite clear in their belief that the bastards were always getting away with things. The nuns at St. Joe’s Catholic School? Well, if impure thoughts about cute little Marcia with the pigtails was a crime, I knew for sure I was going to burn in eternal hell. Something in the water in rural Minnesota? Mmm, maybe. It was an awful long ways from the crimes I saw on the evening news.

This all rattled through my alleged mind while watching director Richard Linklater’s latest film, “Apollo 10 1/2” on Netflix the other night. For those unfamiliar with Linklater, I regard him as one of the most acute and compassionate observers of modern American mores working today. He’s most famous for films like, “Dazed and Confused”, the “Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight” trilogy with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and “Boyhood”, which somehow lost out for Best Picture in 2015. (In 2022 Hollywood it would of course have to be re-titled “Identifies as Non-BinaryHood.”)

Technically, “Apollo” is a re-visit of the rotoscope animation Linklater used in his 2001 film “Waking Life”, which explored American culture via dream states. (Highly recommended.) Thematically though, “Apollo” is one of the most charming and evocative strolls any Boomer can take down through the mediums of an era that formed us far more, says I, than Mom, Dad or any nun or minister.

Apollo 10 1⁄2' review: Richard Linklater's dreams of childhood - Los Angeles Times

Set among a big, loving, idiosyncratic family in suburban Houston during the rise of NASA and the race to the moon, it is chock full of references — reminders — of where our arguably naive notions of truth, justice and the American way came from. Which is to say … from television and pop culture, far more than strict, sterile religious authority figures.

Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022) - IMDb

The story — built around one of the son’s/narrator’s fantasy of being sent to the moon before Apollo 11 — is basically a hang-out with the family enjoying the innocence of the era. Its like a long, carefree summer full of TV shows — “I Dream of Jeannie”, “Bewitched”, “Bonanza”, “Gunsmoke”. Pop music like “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies, Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”, Janis Joplin on Dick Cavett. And movies like “The Shakiest Gun in the West” (at the drive-in where half the kids are snuck in under blankets in the back of Dad’s station wagon) and “2001” (with the narrator trying to explain the ending to his glazey-eyed buddy.) And days at space-themed amusement parks like AstroWorld.

It’s a lovely little film, full of bittersweet nostalgia.

Bittersweet, because I wonder what 10 year-old now, much less any 16 year-old still believes “crime doesn’t pay” or that “the bad guys always lose in the end.”?

What sort of sensory deprivation would such a kid have to be living in to not see:

The President of the United States, defeated in a fair election, set off a riot at the Capitol and (to date) face no consequences for it?

Or the same guy on TV, lying to everyone’s face thousands of times a year, killing tens of thousands of his own voters with venality and gross incompetence, not to mention defrauding banks and insurance companies for years and avoiding any kind of day of reckoning?

Or watch greed-crazed bankers and manipulators crash a world economy without a single top executive ever going to jail?

Or a dumb kid practically their age kill a couple people with a rifle in full view of police and be acquitted by a jury of his peers?

Or, hell, a Russian sociopath unleashing genocide on a neighboring country and continuing to enjoy the fruits of two decades of outrageous kleptocracy?

The sweet summery innocence Richard Linklater shows in “Apollo 10 1/2” was of course an illusion even then.

But I can’t help but think that the illusions of Boomer youth were stronger and therefore more real than whatever lessons the kids of 2022 are taking away from what they’re watching today.

Russia’s Great Shame

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andrei rublev tarkovsky - Google Search | Film, Klasik filmler, Klasik

Among the torrent of stories coming out of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — military atrocities, blunders, sanctions, seized super-yachts, top-level spies and generals under house arrest and on and on, are regular reports of Russians, captured soldiers but self-exiled Russians in particular, expressing shame. Shame for what their country is doing and for what they didn’t do to prevent it.

You don’t have to be raised Catholic to agree that shame is a powerful human emotion. Few emotions motivate civilized people more. (My Jewish friends and I argue over who was raised in a denser cult of shame. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Simultaneous with these stories, I dropped in my DVD of “Andrei Rublev” , the classic 1966 film that is really more of a biography of 15th century Russia than the legendary painter of Eastern Orthodox icons. I don’t expect many of you to have have seen it, although I encourage you to give it a try. All three and half hours of it. (Shot in 2:35:1 “CinemaScope” black and white by the equally legendary Andrei Tarkovsky. ) Along with its mesmerizing imagery and epic scale, the film is often mentioned as the most vivid depiction of medieval Russian rural life ever put on film.

And, following the life of the ever-conscience stricken monk, Rublev, it simmers in shame.

The question I’ve been asking myself as I follow Putin’s invasion is, “What responsibility do common Russians have for what their leaders are doing in their name … again?” And, is it ever fair (or meaningful) to hold an entire culture responsible, with shaming, for repeated cycles of kleptocracy, despotism and psychopathology in its ruling class?

I ask this because Russia, of the world’s so-called “great powers”, is demonstrating again that it is unique in its inability to prevent regular devolutions into violent autocracy.

“Andrei Rublev” opens in 1400 with the peasant class living in farm animal squallor, periodically raided by rival villages if not Tartars from the Far East and wholly subservient to a regal class defending its status with vicious militaristic policing. Midway the film depicts the 1408 sacking of the city of Vladimir, organized by a Russian prince conspiring with marauding Tartars, in an attempt to kill his twin brother. (Although financed by the Soviet bureaucracy, Leonid Brezhnev’s Kremlin refused to release the film for years and cut it by almost 50%. The Criterion edition runs the original, full 209 minutes.)

And 1400 was already at least five centuries into Russia’s organized despotism, not even halfway through, with the calamitous eras of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, various weaker but no less vicious Czars, Josef Stalin, the grim, grey Soviets and now … Vladimir Putin still to come. In all, a truly remarkable thousand-year cavalcade of sociopaths … accepted, tolerated and often revered.

The informed will argue, “But every culture experiences this!” And the most woke liberals will point out the United States’ genocide of the Indians, racism toward Blacks and innumerable military misadventures. All of which is fair. As is the fact that Russia’s history is pock-marked with invasions from almost every direction.

But I still believe Russia is different. Not only is the violence of Russia’s despots borderline irrational and invariably unapologetic, but the common Russian, even today, in an era of Twitter, TikTok, McDonalds and Boeing jets, remains largely subdued, cowed and mute. For all our failures, the West, meaning the US, Europe, Japan, the Commonwealth and the like, has largely brought what you might call “the despotic impulse” under control. Certainly to the point where one man, a flagrant gangster, is not likely to be able to commandeer a vast army to attack a neighbor. Even repressive China sees that a better, stronger (near-term) future lies in providing cheap manufacturing for Western corporations.

So what is about Russian psychology that keeps its culture in this endlessly repeating, violent, self-destructive trap?

I’m asking. I don’t know.

But the eminent Russian historian Stephen Kotkin, recently interviewed by New Yorker editor and Russian authority in his own right, David Remnick, suggested that in addition to Russians’ historically heavy indoctrination in threats from “others”, they have also been fed a wildly disproportionate belief in their “exceptionalism.” (The FoxNews, American right-wing echo chamber comparison is right there to behold in all its naked ignominy.)

It’s as though having produced Rublev, Rachmaninoff, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Sakharov and Tarkovsky (indisputably one of film world’s all time greats) they believe themselves every bit the cultural, technological and inventive equal of democracies like the United States, Britain, etc.

(Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institute and has been regularly interviewed on all things Russian. Here’s one recent video.)

The problem, says Kotkin, is that they are not. Not even close. Their repeated cycles of repression, kleptocratic corruption and violence pushes them back every time — as with Gorbachev — they showed the possibility of shaking off neo-Czar-ism or whatever you might want to call it. Consequently, because it regularly slides back into medieval tyranny and isolation, Russia simply hasn’t achieved like the “super power” it insists it is.

And today — with the world watching horrified and in real time as Russia bombards maternity hospitals in an obscenely irrational assault on a peaceful-enough neighbor — the shunning and shaming of Russia, all Russians, not just Putin, is going to be worse and more immediately punishing than it has ever been.

So the mostly younger, urban, elite, “modernist” class — the very people a retrograde culture needs to shake off the “despotic impulse” — is fleeing Russia in droves unlikely to ever return. (If you were young and bright how long would you wait abroad before you were convinced Father Russia had fully and permanently exorcised Putinism?)

From Turkey, or Europe or wherever will take them, they’re looking back, rightfully ashamed at their native land for what is doing, again, and for what they didn’t do to stop it from doing … again.

Thanks to Vlad, The Greatest Tranformation Ever is Now Beginning

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Billions poured into electric-vehicle companies, but much more will be needed before the auto industry changes - MarketWatch

At the risk of sounding like a poor man’s Tom Friedman, I’m watching the truly astonishing turns of events in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and thinking that this holds potential to be the single most transformative global episode since WWII. And not just militarily.

Just a few things that come to mind:

In automotive terms, the rubber is truly meeting the road in the US of A. I see no one expecting the price of gas to return to pre-invasion levels for months, if ever. In fact, based on my diet of articles and YouTube videos of economists, finance ministers, etc. there isn’t anyone who does not see prices continuing to escalate upwards all summer long. $6 a gallon and higher in Minnesota is not out of the question this year.

The effect on vacation travel — by car or plane — and commuting habits is plain to be imagined . (And this just as businesses, post-COVID, were coaxing employees back into the office.)

Then imagine consumer demand for immediate alternatives to the average family’s 5000-pound SUV and pickup. With the US cutting off the 8% of oil it gets from Russia, and Europeans slapped across the face with the existential dilemma they’ve created buying billions of euros of gas from a homicidal maniac, an even more dramatic/disruptive tightening of the tap is inevitable.

(In a couple months, I expect to see some real bargains for people shopping for a 13 mpg Ford F-150. Computer chip shortage be damned.)

“Transformative” also applies here to the no doubt foul-smelling deals being cooked up with the Saudis, Iranians and Venezuelans to reduce cost-at-the-pump issues here and make up for fuel Europeans will need next winter when — not if — they stop doing business with Vlad the Invader.

So let’s imagine the new-found demand for electric transportation. Mass and personal transportation-wise. It’s been a common understanding for years now that cost is the critical factor in any transition to electric vehicles. Well, a 50%-80% increase in gas prices is pretty much what the good green doctor has always ordered if you want to dramatically increase the US’s 2% electric vehicle fleet substantially and permanently higher. True, there are basic material issues related to the invasion, but I’d bet the longer term viability of electric wins out over ever more impractical internal combustion cars. (It would be nice if we could capture some of that gas price increase for state and national treasuries but … share-holder value, you know.)

Then we get to the power required to both manufacture and charge not thousands but tens of millions more electric vehicles. Solar and wind and other nice green renewables are simply not sufficient — currently — to handle such demand. Which is where next generation nuclear becomes a serious part of any grand energy (and climate) transformation.

When I think of the great, convulsive events that have taken place in my lifetime — the Cold War/Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, various assassinations, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the crash of 2008 — none of them set off the combined shift or reinvigoration of alliances, reexamination of national priorities and changes in day-to-day consumer habits and lifestyle that we can see erupting here from Putin’s hellish blunder.

And this is all based on the situation as it stands today, before a truly desperate Putin — a man for whom “losing” equals death, figuratively and quite possibly literally — escalates this war into something truly catastrophic.

Please feel free to tell me where I’m mistaken about any of this.

Who Tastes Putin’s Food Taster’s Food?

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Could Anyone Have Saved the Romanovs? - HISTORY

For years I’ve been making the joke about Vladimir Putin’s food taster. As in: Who is that guy? How did he get the job? How does he keep the job? What’s his pulse rate when he tries out the caviar? And, if he’s only the latest, how long do Vlad’s Official Tasters last?

Now, with Putin feeling pressure on a number of fronts, I’ve begun wondering Who Tastes Putin’s Food Taster’s Food? I mean, we are talking Russia here, where a long line of kings and czars and leaders of one stripe or another have, um, “succumbed to nefarious retribution” by one time loyalists suddenly in the mood for their blood.

Obviously, I am no Russia expert. But Russia and Russians have occupied a significant space in my alleged mind nearly my entire life. I was 11 years old during the Cuban missile crisis. We actually did the “duck and cover” drills in grade school. The godless Russian Red Menace was a regular feature of my Catholic upbringing as well as the evening news when I toddled home from school.

As a result, over the years, I’ve padded out the usual consumption of news stories and analyses of Russian government behavior with books about the country, films from the old Soviet Union and more lately, YouTube series from Russian vloggers. Eventually, you do get a grasp of something like the “average Russian mind set”. A mentality set in a startlingly shambolic realm where, to quote the title of one of the better recent books I’ve read, “… Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible.“

Consuming the reporting and punditry of the past five days, I note that plenty is being said about the sanctions on Putin and his closest circle of oligarchs — iuncluding very high profile characters like Chelsea football team owner Roman Abramovich, an early “investor” in Russia’s oil and aluminum businesses. Few believe Putin’s fortune, thought to be well protected in Swiss banks and other off-shore accounts, is in any immediate danger, as in next month or next year. But there have been noisy public statements from European countries — Britain in particular, where the capital has been so saturated with Russian mobster money it has been nicknamed “Londongrad” — that they will at long, long last make life difficult for flagrant thieves who own not one, but two 400-foot yachts, their own personal 787 and … a Premier League football team.

A side story of great interest to me is what the notoriously corrupt international soccer agency, FIFA, floating on gobs of Russian mob money, does in response — to the response — to Putin’s invasion? (Imagine the reaction of American chuckleheads of Biden did something that obliterated the NFL?)

(Another not at all far-fetched notion is what a Spanish Civil War-like call for freedom fighters — from all over the world — to come to Ukraine’s aid might do? Do you doubt there are millions who see this as the moment to make a heroic stand against authoritarian criminals?)

My ship is bigger than Russian Billionare Abramovich's new yacht... Just Barely
One of Abramovich’s yachts
Inside 162.5m Blohm+Voss megayacht Eclipse

What then does that crowd do to Putin if they are refused access to Western ultra-rich society, have their London, Paris and Miami mansions seized, their children expelled from the toniest British schools and their byzantine financial transactions/money-laundering hobbled by banking restrictions? Is their loyalty to Putin — who made them, despite getting a reported 50% kickback on their lootings — really all enduring? If not, at one point do they in effect, or in reality, gather the Putin family in the basement of a dacha in Yekaterinburg?

Why the Romanov Family's Fate Was a Secret Until the Fall of the Soviet Union - HISTORY

The idea of someone — or some cabal — taking out Putin would be preposterous if his invasion of Ukraine didn’t appear so ill-conceived and delusional, so completely divorced from reality. I mean, the guy was on TV the other day ranting — Trump-like — about “drug addicted neo-Nazis”, a reference apparently to Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (Abramovich is also Jewish.)

If your billions in ill-gotten gains are dependent on a character sounding as histrionic and unhinged as that, how long before you start looking for a food taster who knows his way around a vial of Novichuk?

I Think Putin’s Getting Himself in a Pickle

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How to talk to Mr Putin | The Economist

At this moment in the drama I’m probably in the minority who thinks this will end badly for Vladimir Putin. In these first moments he seems to hold all the best cards. But the consequences for this kind of naked aggression in the 21st century are yet to be felt.

Leading up to yesterday’s invasion of Ukraine there was plenty of discussion of why Putin would risk something like this? The most common answers being that he sees himself as the Grand Restorer of the Russian (i.e. Soviet) empire, and he’s doing it now while he still has the kind of economic leverage over the West that comes with pumping so much gas onto the world markets. It’s a leverage even he must know will dry up once western Europe in particular goes green (or nuclear) and stops sending him — and I do mean him, personally — billions of dollars (and they’re mostly dollars) in exchange.

But Putin’s bigger problem is also largely of his own making. He is administering a shockingly sick country. 20% of Russians don’t have indoor plumbing. The country is ranked 70th in the world standard of living. It has a GDP 20% smaller than Italy. Russian conscripts are paid the equivalent of $28 a month. (One pundit joked that this war would end today if the European Union offered citizenship to every Russian soldier who laid down his rifle and migrated west.)

Under Putin’s 23 year rule, he has orchestrated a partnering with a cadre of mob-like oligarchs to whom he is Vito Corleone. Each of these characters are not just looting Russian resources — gas, aluminum, etc. — for their private fiefdoms but are kicking back so much cash to Putin he is widely regarded as the wealthiest person on the planet as of this morning, far beyond the wildest dreams of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

How Putin's Oligarchs Got Inside the Trump Team | Time

And every (thinking) Russian knows this.

Whether the sanctions — and other retaliations by the West — cyber attacks and the like, will be enough to incite revolt inside Russia remains to be seen. Russian history is after all a tale of an endless series of semi-god-like strong men tolerated by the woefully abused masses out of fear that Oppresive Leader is their only protection from another invasion — from the Asian east or the imperial/fascist West (Napoleon and Hitler).

But that was before the internet. Before a constantly interconnected liberal intelligentsia could see and hear in real time what was true and what was just the hysterical war-mongering of Putin’s state media.

Here by the way is a sample of what Russian TV (your average Rooskie’s FoxNews) was saying prior to the invasion. (Via the Los Angeles Times:

“To hear Russian media tell it, the government of Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis waging a genocidal campaign against ethnic Russians in the country’s east, where Moscow-backed authorities regularly uncover mass graves full of the corpses of women and children with bound hands and bludgeoned heads even as they face the hell of constant shelling.

“Such false images and narratives have become a daily staple in Russia….The Russian media have gone into overdrive with stories depicting a government in Kyiv so cruel that Moscow has no choice but to swoop in and protect the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

“ ‘It’s a war between the Ukrainian government and its own people…. People are dying there every day. Thousands of civilians died there. Thousands of children lost their limbs there, buried in little coffins’,” Margarita Simonyan, head of the state-funded broadcaster RT, said on a talk show on the Russia-1 channel.”

Having successfully undermined international confidence in the United States through his manipulation of social media and fluffing up Donald Trump, and by degrading Great Britain with Brexit, Putin appears to believe he’s succeeded in splitting the West. To the point that the principal forces of NATO are now so polarized and fragmented they are incapable of wreaking any serious economic damage on him personally.

Judging by Trump and Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and Mike Pompeo and the other usual suspects aligning themselves more with Putin than the United States and NATO, it’s tempting to think he’s right.

But I think he’s delusional. A creature of his own bubble. I believe NATO in particular, and world markets in general, are tired of the constant corruption-induced chaos they’re suffering at Putin’s hand. To the point that, with something as unquivocally outrageous as this invasion, they’re united enough to want him — Putin — to suffer a resounding defeat.

You’re hearing it from many quarters: Direct, personal sanctions on Putin and his high-flying mob cronies. Freezing of their accounts, confiscation of their property, (much of it likely acquired via money-laundering — hello again, Donald J. Trump), expulsion from Western communities, colleges, etc.

The tough nut on the personal finance front is — as usual — getting international bankers, our good friends the Swiss in particular, to accept that playing cute with the Third Reich wasn’t lesson enough. If you want credibility in the 21st century, you cut ties with indisputable, war-criminal gangsters.

America’s Trumpist media will continue align with Putin, and more loudly as gas prices spike up towards $5 and $6 a gallon. But I don’t see them convincing a majority of Americans – other than the 20% of Republicans who view Putin more favorably than Joe Biden — that this is anyone’s fault other than Putin’s and that things will only get worse if he prevails.

“Sharing Curriculum” and the GOP’s Ceaseless Parade of Naked Cynicism

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Puppet Master and Paul Gazelka

Many years ago I was talking with a veteran local TV political reporter. It was the Newt Gingrich era. You know, “balanced budgets” and “term limits” and all that other transparently cynical “revolutionary” bullshit.

My question was, “Why are you taking this seriously? Why even give it respectful attention?”

His answer was, “At least there are some ideas there”, avoiding any acknowledgment that the Gingrich PR machinery was “the hot issue” at the moment and, in straight pendulum terms it was time for the press to shift balance after a couple years of mostly favorable Bill Clinton coverage.

The overwhelming scent of bad faith politics, of the “loyal opposition” doing nothing other than throwing gravel in the gearworks of government was, you know, a “speculative” judgment. Reacting to manufactured topicality was a better position, journalistically speaking.

This comes to mind with the latest “revolutionary” proposal from Minnesota’s anything-but-loyal opposition. Namely, the transparently cynical proposal by top Republicans, including gubernatorial candidate Paul (Cotton Mather) Gazelka, to require the state’s teachers to “share” curriculum with parents — and should parents object to heretical texts like, oh I don’t know, “To Kill a Mockingbird” — offer “alternatives”, like, who knows? “The Selected Sermons of Jerry Falwell Jr.”

With Tim Walz still in office and Democrats controlling the House, this latest exercise in shameless pandering — dubbed the “Minnesota Parents’ Bill of Rights” — isn’t likely to go anywhere. But, still, there it is.

After two years of throwing up nothing but impediments to combating an international pandemic, and dismissing the impacts of police violence, this naked appeal to Critical Race Theory racists … (there, I said it) … is what Republicans are selling as a fresh idea. Something that truly improves the safety, prosperity and happiness of all concerned.

I have several teachers and ex-teachers among my family and circle of friends and it’s safe to describe them as universally disgusted. On top of Republicans regularly deriding the work of public school teachers for decades, (because as a group they tend to read a lot of books, have a union and vote Democrat they are a threat to Trump-era conservative ambitions), this latest brainstorm would add hours … and hours … of uncompensated time to every teacher’s workload. (Feel free to suspect that this “fresh idea” was handed down to Minnesota’s deep-thinking Republicans by some ALEC-like dark money cabal which is simultaneously sliding cash to their campaign funds.)

My problem, on the beat reporter/editor level, is declining to aggressively confront the naked pandering of this and other even more cynical positions taken up by 2022 conservatives.

Like, for example, the “fraudulent 2020 election” claims pushed by Trumpists and widely-to-unanimously accepted (publicly) by Minnesota Republicans.

Post January 6 there was a brief moment when a truly revolutionary idea kicked around professional journalism circles. Namely, every interview with any politician would begin with the simple question, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election fair and square?”

Any answer other than, “Of course he did”, meant the interview was over and the politician, self-revealed to be a pathetic toady for a corrupt reality TV performer, would have to get his free publicity from some other outlet. (Working reporters could hand him business cards for Joe Rogan.)

That moment dissipated an instant later. Which means we have returned to treating cynical nonsense like “sharing curriculum”, (more accurately described as “censoring” or “canceling curriculum”) as though it is a good faith proposal to improve the academic outcomes of Minnesota students.

So I ask again, does this crowd have even one constructive idea?

Don’t everyone answer at once.

I’m Feeling Another Sarah Palin Payday

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One-time vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is joined by "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson during a tea party rally against the international nuclear agreement with Iran in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 9.

Purely as a distraction you understand, I’ve taken an interest in Sarah Palin’s defamation trial against The New York Times. A decision may come down today, and betting money says she’ll lose. But losing could likely mean yet another in a series of pop culture paydays for the ex-mayor, ex-governor, ex-vice presidential candidate and ex-Masked Singer.

If you haven’t followed this at all, the very short story is this: Palin is accusing the Times, its editorial department and its editor at the time, James Bennet, of sullying her reputation in 2017 when he referenced an ad her “team” ran in 2011. The ad, fairly typical of other rabble-rousing pro-Second Amendment fund raising appeals, used gunsight imagery — a collection of crosshairs — over 20 Democrat-held congressional districts. You know, “They’re in our sights.”

Truly clever stuff. But invariably effective in ginning up small dollar contributions from the right-wing base.

The issue is that one of the “targeted” districts belonged to Gabby Giffords, who not long after was seriously wounded by a lunatic in a Tucson rampage that killed six people, including a nine year-old girl. (After being shown the ad prior to the attack, Giffords herself said, “We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they’ve got to realize there are consequences to that action’.”

Sarah Palin vs. Ernie Chambers – Ricochet

Six years later Bennet added in a reference to the ad as he edited an opinion piece in the wake of the baseball field shooting — by a Bernie Sanders supporter — that seriously wounded Republican congressman Steve Scalise. His intended point, he says, being to draw attention to how violent rhetoric and imagery can lead to truly violent actions by the unstable.

Palin wasn’t having it. She had been sullied! And by god and mama grizzlies she was going to take the Times to court.

The truly ludicrous part of Palin’s claim is that the editorial — which Bennet and the Times corrected within hours — had “damaged” her in some way. Which way, she couldn’t say exactly, as Times’ lawyers pointed out that her standing in her political community and by extension her finances didn’t diminish much at all in the aftermath.

Put in another, less polite manner; being accused of anything by a citadel of godless, anti-freedom, elitist-liberal intolerance like The New York Times is — as everyone knows — like a monsoon of gold from the hillbilly firmament. In other words, mam, “Exactly what damage have you suffered?”

True to form, court room observers have noted that Palin hasn’t lost her touch when it comes to self-parody. At one point she declared that this editorial was just another example of how the Times had “lied” about her. The only problem with that being was that no one, not even her, could come up with that other, um, you know, example. Said Palin when pressed in court, “I don’t have the specific references in front of me.”

Right. Well, we understand you’ve only been preparing for this trial for five years. But you get back to us when you’ve done some more research.

Then you factor in Palin being a very high profile-to-notorious public figure and how difficult it is to make a case abut defaming any famous personality.

So how a jury possibly rules in her favor will be a fascinating thing to see.

But the behavior of Mr. Bennet does expose the Times to a standard criticism of bias, certainly in the eyes of the usual right-wing echo chamber suspects. I mean, he did reach back six years for an example of a conservative politician using violent imagery. That leaves him open to accusations of fixed bias.

However, as Bennet — who was later driven out of the Times by the Times itself after running an incendiary opinion piece by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton demanding troops be sent in to subdue George Floyd protestors — explained in court, he was unable to find even one example of a liberal politician using similar violent imagery. In other words, its kind of a PalinWorld thing, that “targeted”, “get ’em in our gun sights” money raising pitch.

If Palin loses today or tomorrow I do hope someone keeps tabs on the speaking circuit/cheesy singing show/reality TV/FoxNews appearance/fund-raising haul that comes her way in the wake of being treated so cruelly and predictably by … a jury of New Yorkers.

I tell you, there’s gold in being a perpetual victim of elitist liberals.

How Much of a Fool Do You Have to Be to Even Listen to Joe Rogan?

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By the strictest rules of commentary I shouldn’t say anything about this Joe Rogan business. Why? Because I’ve never listened to a second of his podcast, nor do I have any use for Spotify. But thanks to our amazing world of bubble-specific watchdogs and punditry, Rogan’s shtick gets regular coverage on websites I patronize, and I at least know what Spotify is.

My general impression of Rogan, based on a few YouTube clips and the near constant reporting on his dialogues with various guests is: Another one of those guys.

If you know nothing about him, check out this recent conversation with self-acclaimed revolutionary thinker, Jordan Peterson. It’s an epic in the annals of clap-trap.

Rogan is yet another self-satisfied dude (always a guy) selling the image of the blue-collar provocateur-savant. A guy — stop me when you’ve heard this before — up from the hardscrabble. He’s a “comedian, television host and mixed martial arts commentator” mixing it up with and putting it to the prissy, pedigreed class. It’s a decades-old media shtick that persistently sells the notion to a mass audience of his educational and cultural peers (mostly younger men with masculinity issues, IMHO) that he, and therefore they, are really every bit as savvy as the snobby elites with their titles and actual experience in politics, arts and science.

We’ve seen this act hundreds of times before. It’s just another variation on FM morning drive radio, a forum steeped in reassuring the chronically aggrieved that the “smart asses” aren’t any smarter or moral ethical than you, me and Buddy down there at the end of the bar. (Even though we all make jokes about how f**kin’ dim Buddy is.)

Because this kind of act only succeeds by practicing The First Rule of Show Biz, i.e. “Give the people what they want”, Rogan-like theater means stirring in ripe accents of class and racial resentments, the sort of thing that puts out a stink to … well, precisely the prissy elites that it’s designed to annoy.

So, you know, kind of a “win win.”

For some time the issue with Rogan, in addition to his always “mass audience”-friendly side trips into trans-phobia, Islamophobia, etc., has been his “real American”, blue collar disinformation about COVID vaccines. (His contract with Spotify is worth $100 million, FYI.) I won’t pretend to know who inspired him down this path. But it goes without saying that the “freedom of choice”, “I’ve done my own research” shtick, whipped up into a lighter-than-air frappe with standard issue anti-“big gummint overreach” has a large, ready and receptive audience … of easily confused men. (IMHO, again.)

Rogan’s own recent history with COVID should have been disqualifying as anything but an illiterate. We do remember that after telling “young healthy people” they couldn’t get seriously ill from COVID, the heavily-tattoed 52 year-old Rogan contracted the disease, supposedly treated himself (and pitched to his credulous fans) the value of the horse de-wormer ivermectin as opposed to “vaccine mandates.”

In an enlightened world he’d be written off as a fool. But the baritoned-morning-radio-jock-savant shtick is so powerful, especially with men who don’t know what to believe, acts like his become their gold standard for credibility.

With big name pop stars, beginning with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell now yanking their music from Spotify, the pressure is on for the streaming music to “do something about Rogan.” But, with that $100 million on the line and his low-information audience to avoid displeasing, no corporation is going to get rash. Not even after 270 doctors and scientists issue a publc statement complaining about Rogan giving regular exposure to … well, charlatans pushing bullshit quasi-science.

(Spotify charges roughly $10 a month to stream hundreds of thousands of songs, meaning artists see very, very little in the way of royalties. It’s no big deal if you’re Young or Mitchell or The Rolling Stones, but it snuffs out plenty of CD and Apple Music sales if you’re farther down the ladder of fame.)

As of today Spotify’s response is that it will not be a “content censor.” But it will offer Rogan’s audience an advisory anytime he applies his deep thinking to, you know, COVID science. Because after all, Spotify’s CEO says, ” … it’s become clear to me that we have an obligation to do more to provide balance and access to widely-accepted information from the medical and scientific communities guiding us through this unprecedented time … .”

Uh huh. Right.

But excuse me. Because what I hear him saying is he’s going to provide “balance and access” to accurate information about a global pandemic that has already killed 5.4 million people and staggered hospital staffs across the planet … but in no way is he going to instruct a guy he is paying $100 million to stop spreading outright lies about the very same disease.

Being good capitalists, we understand the CEO’s problem. I mean, what if Rogan gets pissed off at being told he can’t spread disinformation about a fatal disease? What if — horrors — he dumps Spotify and gets a sweeter deal at, I don’t know, Donald Trump’s new media empire?

How would the CEO replace him? I mean other than with any of a thousand guys working the same bogus shtick every day?

How Did Local Media — or the Times or the Post — Know Scott Quiner Was Anywhere?

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First … my condolences to the family of Scott Quiner. No matter the circumstances, someone’s death, especially an entirely preventable death, is a sad occasion. That said, the telling and reporting on Mr. Quiner’s last days leaves several questions unanswered and a lot to be desired.

Quiner is the now nationally famous man from exurban Minneapolis who, unvaccinated by choice, contracted COVID in late October. He was hospitalized and intubated since early November before his wife sued to prevent Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids from disconnecting him. Then just last week, we’re told she flew him to “a hospital in Texas”. At that point her lawyer … told the press (which promptly reported) that though badly malnourished Quiner was once again responsive … before then relaying on that he died two days ago.

My issue with this story from the get-go was how we knew much of anything about what was really happening here?

Like every other hospital, Mercy in Coon Rapids, has laws and rules about disclosing patient information. So it has said little to nothing about Quiner’s condition or it’s reasons for planning to disconnect him … after two and a half months on a ventilator amid a new crush of COVID patients and a dire lack of ICU capacity for “normal” emergencies. (The average ICU stay is three days.)

Everything after that is the word of Mrs. Quiner or her attorney, including where exactly he was being treated in Texas … if anywhere.

This from a Jan. 17 Strib story, “Scott is now in a hospital in Texas getting critical care’, said Marjorie Holsten, a local attorney hired by Quiner’s wife, Anne. ‘The doctor said Scott was the most undernourished patient he has ever seen. The last update I got was yesterday afternoon after some tests had been run; all organs are working except his lungs’. Holsten did not name the Texas hospital.”

How do we know any of that is true and accurate?

What is known, but has only been hinted at, is that Mrs. Quiner — to her credit, some might say — played every card in her hand to get her husband treated as she saw proper. A January 14 Star Tribune story says, “Anne Quiner repeatedly had asked the hospital to try various treatments, including some that are not widely used. But the hospital refused, she said. ‘They basically said they have the authority to do this no matter what I say’, Anne Quiner said Thursday on the Stew Peters Show, a podcast that broadcasts from the Twin Cities and has been critical of COVID vaccines.”

” … has been critical of COVID vaccines.” Hmmm. That’s applying a very light hand to (yet another) MAGA-fueled podcaster regularly pumping out COVID misinformation and inflaming the ill-informed. Nor does it even hint at the barrage of outraged anti-Vaxxers, ivermectin enthusiasts and the conspiracy-deluded who, I’m told by a first-hand source, bombarded newsrooms across the Twin Cities demanding, you know, truth and justice for Scott Quiner. (As is so often the case, the callers, outraged at the lame stream media cover-up sounded as though they were reading from the same script.)

A New York Times story at least said this, “On Jan. 12, Ms. Quiner pleaded for a lawyer’s help on the ‘Stew Peters Show’, a podcast whose host has falsely called Covid vaccines ‘poisonous shots’ and given a platform to pandemic conspiracy theories.”

Want to know a bit more about Minnesota’s own Mr. Peters? Try reading this, and drop me a line if you can find where any Minnesota news outlet wrote a similar piece, or hell, has “reported” on Mr. Peters at all.

What this looks and sounds like, but has not been acknowledged by any news organization — that I have yet found — is that local newsrooms were badgered by political partisans into covering a story where by every plausible assumption the victim(s) — all adults — made conscious choices that resulted in severe illness, hospitalization (at staggering cost) and death. Moreover, the news organizations then relented, likely justifying coverage on the grounds that a judge issued a rare restraining order against a hospital.

But, I’m sorry, that is a long ways from telling the whole story of what went on with Scott Quiner. Nor does it explain why any news room would accept the word of the family’s lawyer in lieu of any verification that what she was saying was true.

Perhaps, the Strib and other local news rooms can explain how they verified Quiner had been flown anywhere? (The family raised roughly $40,000 via GoFundMe-style appeals.) Or that he was actually in a hospital or “care facility” in Texas and that his condition was improving … until, he died. Or, now that we’re told he died, will any of them follow up and seek a copy of the death certificate?

The Washington Post says, “Quiner died at the Houston hospital where he was flown for care during the legal battle, according to Marjorie Holsten, an attorney for the family. He remained on a ventilator at the time, Holsten said, but she declined to identify the facility or provide additional details on the circumstances of his death.“

Fear of pitchfork mobs, even in the form of a tidal wave of spittle-flecked raging via telephone, is a sad reality in modern newsrooms … so assert I. Would any of the same newsrooms care to dispute that they weren’t goaded/badgered/threatened into giving the Quiner story the coverage it got? And whether — or why they didn’t ask — the basic journalistic question of, “Where exactly is he now? So, you know, we can confirm what you’re telling us.”

An attorney refusing to supply “news basics” like that would, to my mind, mean putting the story on hold until she did, or it could be confirmed in some other way.

After that, let me suggest that there may be a “feature profile” on Stew Peters, who is clearly a local character with enough potency and influence to whip up sufficient anger that he manufactured soft, fundamentally sympathetic coverage in major media for a family that made a series of extremely bad choices, against all science and logic, and lost.