Lying in political ads is legal. Really.

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Guest column by Noel Holston

Athens, Georgia — Throughout the day, and especially around evening news time, Atlanta’s commercial television stations are bombarding viewers in the greater metro area with paid political advertising. The primaries for Georgia governor, U.S. Senate and other races are just three weeks away.

One spot in particular jumps out. Former President Donald Trump, in a voice-over, endorses David Perdue for Georgia governor over incumbent Brian Kemp. Trump derides Kemp for refusing to find him the votes to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 and for failing to exercise his supposed authority to simply throw out the ballots.

This is, of course, a bald-faced lie — indeed, part of the “Big Lie” that is even now being investigated by a U.S. House select committee.

Mainstream media ads also amplify The Big Lie.

Even as a grand jury convenes in Atlanta to determine whether Trump criminally interfered in the election when he phoned Kemp and pressured him to alter election results.

Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, both Republicans who themselves had voted for Trump, simply declined to exercise powers that didn’t have. They refused to ignore recounts and facts. They refused to cheat.

But still the ad runs and runs, with Trump kvetching about what was “stolen” from him and his supporters.

How can this be? How can these TV stations keep showing attack ads that make claims that their own news anchors, both local guys and their respective network counterparts, routinely mention only with the modifiers “false” or “baseless”? Is there no “truth in advertising” requirement?

Short answer: No.

At least not where political advertising is concerned.

I emailed my concern about this a couple of days ago to WXIA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Atlanta that I most often watch for news. What can I say? I have a crush on Andrea Mitchell.

A WXIA representative got back to me this afternoon. Here’s the reply. I’m guessing you did not know this:

“The Federal Communications Commission’s political broadcast rules actually prohibit television stations from refusing or altering political advertising from any legally qualified candidate,” WXIA’s spokesperson said.

“More specifically, the FCC says that a person who has publicly announced his or her intention to run for nomination or office, is qualified to run under the appropriate federal, state or local laws to run and has met all of the other necessary qualifications to run for and hold the office they are seeking, is permitted to purchase political advertising time within 45 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general or special election in which that person is a candidate.

“Additionally, television stations cannot censor or alter the content of political ads being run in any way. The ads must be run in their original form — even if their content differs from the ordinary program content that the station would regularly air.

“A station is also prohibited from rejecting a political ad from a candidate, despite its content. As a result, broadcast stations are not responsible for the content of those particular political ads, even if the content may be demonstrably false or defamatory in nature.” (bold italics mine)

So, even if Trump accused Brian Kemp of sheep shagging or Kemp said Trump and Perdue are having an affair, the Atlanta stations would be obligated to televise their ads uncut. And so, in similar situations, would all other federally licensed commercial TV stations in other parts of the country, including yours.

And we worry what Elon Musk is going to do with Twitter.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his insights and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.

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.

Public libraries, public enemies

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Guest post by Noel Holston

News item from The Washington Post:

“According to the American Library Association, conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana, have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures.

“Leaders have taken works as seemingly innocuous as the popular children’s picture book In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak off the shelves (and) closed library board meetings to the public. . . .”

All I can say is, IT’S ABOUT TIME!

Public libraries are a public menace, especially for young, impressionable minds. I am living proof — living, permanently scarred proof.

I grew up in Laurel, Mississippi, now best known as the star of HGTV’s popular house-makeover show Home Town. In the late 1950s and 1960s, when I was in my formative youth, it was better known for its shady mayor, Klan activity and a stinky Masonite plant.

Laurel, however, did have a great public library. I was a regular from an early age, especially in summer, when you got a star on a big poster board for every book you consumed.

As I moved into my tweens, I was still happily reading Hardy Boys mysteries, inspirational, youth-oriented biographies of great men like Admiral Richard Byrd, Thomas Edison and Yogi Berra, and occasionally a mystery by Agatha Christie or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I saved my money and even bought books occasionally at Laurel’s Baptist Bible and Book Shop.

At some point, I decided I should read something from the best seller list. I asked at the front desk of the library for recommendations, little knowing there was a subversive librarian just waiting for any easy mark to pounce on.

Miss Eva Mae, a soft-spoken gray-haired lady with a sweet smile, said, in essence, “You know, Noel, there are many better books here than what’s on those best-seller lists.”

“Really?” I said.

“Come with me,” she said with a nod of her head, leading me deep into an adult-section aisle.

She showed me several books. They tended to be slightly worn looking and lacking the fancy, pictorial dust jackets of the newest arrivals.

I passed on David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights. I’d seen the movie versions on TV. I settled on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the fattest, heaviest book I had ever checked out.

And that’s how I was lost. The story of the Joad family, hardscrabble farmers like my ancestors, told of poverty and bad luck, desperation, mean bosses, heartless bankers, courage, anger.

Just like that, I outgrew Joe and Frank Hardy. Tom Swift, too. I was soon checking out books by James Baldwin, J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner.

And so it was that I gradually morphed into a free-thinking, questing liberal. I couldn’t stop myself. I read books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Women’s Room, Slaughterhouse 5 and The Other America.

When I had kids, two sons, I read In the Night Kitchen to them — many, many times — despite the fact that it included a couple of illustrations of the hero, a boy named Mickey, in his birthday suit. I let them read To Kill a Mockingbird before they reached puberty.

They became even more progressive and free thinking than I.

So, you see, those Texas folks are right. Public libraries are dangerous places, especially for the young.

They might get ideas.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his insights and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.

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.

Biden’s Real Problem

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Guest post by Noel Holston

You know what Joe Biden’s biggest problem is? He’s boring.

That ought to be a good thing, because he’s boring in the positive sense of the term, boring like President Dwight D. Eisenhower was boring. Like Ike, Joe gets things done, maintains his composure, doesn’t dance.

Remember how they called Biden’s Democratic predecessor “no drama Obama”? Comparatively speaking, Obama is Jim Carrey to Joe’s Gary Cooper.

Some of us believed that this was what we wanted — and what the nation needed — after four years of Donald J. Trump’s tweeting, bleating, bragging, lying, bitching and preening. But whether you worshiped The Donald or recoiled at the sight of him, he got us all accustomed to having a President who was a noisy, ongoing public spectacle, a Fast and Furious binge-watch.

Trump only accelerated a trend, however. Climb aboard the Wayback Machine with me for a moment.

Barrack Obama didn’t call himself a rock star or sell himself as such, but once the label was suggested, he took to the role with ease and enthusiasm. Silver spooner George W. Bush had has good ol’ boy act and his flight suit. Bill Clinton had his Arkansas drawl, his sax and his sex appeal. Ronald Reagan was our first “acting” President.

The trend is usually traced back to JFK. He was our first made-by-TV President, quick with the quip, athletic, married to glamour. He probably wouldn’t have beaten Richard Nixon — a one-man psychodrama to come — if he hadn’t been better looking.

Biden, then, is at a distinct disadvantage. He’s just plain Joe, and he’s gotten plainer and paler and slower moving with age.

Which is not to say he’s incompetent. Far from it. It’s just that he doesn’t make the applause meters go haywire. As result, his administration’s real, impressive accomplishments don’t get the respect they’re due.

He’s been President 14 months. He got his historic, decades overdue infrastructure bill passed in 10. The Affordable Health Care Act — Obamacare — took 14.

Dealing with the pandemic, Biden has acted methodically and scientifically to limit the spread and slow the Covid death toll despite the efforts of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers that his predecessor had encouraged.

On his greatest foreign policy challenge, Biden has been caught between Americans who want us to boot the Russians out of Ukraine militarily and the who’d like a Putin type, if not Putin himself, to be our President. And that’s just the Republicans.

Still, Biden has handled the crisis with resolve and caution, encouraging our NATO allies without hogging the spotlight. His worst “gaffe,” supposedly, was to intimate that Vladimir Putin murderous assault cannot be forgiven. I’ll take a President who feels moral outrage over one who’s morally outrageous any day.

Biden’s great bungle, supposedly, was our military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. It probably could have been handled better, though whatever “better” might have looked like would have been panned in some quarters anyway.

Just don’t forget that he bit that bullet, shouldered that responsibility, and foreclosed a boondoggle that three previous Presidents did not. And in doing so, he incalculably improved the standing from which we could condemn Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

Yes, inflation is cancelling some of the gains of an otherwise booming economy, and while economists point out that pent-up pandemic demand and complicated supply chain snarls would be inflationary factors no matter who was President, Biden is the one who (really, truly) won the election. Inflation is his problem to deal with, and he is.

He hasn’t fixed immigration, reversed income inequality, halted climate change, stopped crime or cured cancer yet, either, but he has committed to those fights. And he hasn’t even served half his term yet.

His approval rating is stuck at a worrisome 41 percent, but I’d wager that if he just weren’t so unexciting, he’d be 10 or 15 points higher.

Maybe if he dyed his hair an unnatural color and learned to play the saxophone.

We do love a show.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his brilliance and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.

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.

Lt. Governor Matt Birk? We Need to Know a Lot More

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Former Minnesota State Senator Scott Jensen (R-Chaska) announced who he believes is the second most qualified Minnesotan, after him, to run Minnesota’s state government during very challenging times.  Jensen picked — fake gjallarhorn, please! — the Minnesota Vikings’ former Center Matt Birk. 

A celebrity! Intriguing! Fresh!

An all-white male ticket! That has got to be first for Republicans, right?

Predictably, the Birk announcement got a lot of uncritical news coverage in Minnesota, particularly from local TV and radio newsrooms.  These are some of the same jock sniffers who spend roughly one-third of most news broadcasts building up local athletes as heroes.

And who knows, the Birk stunt just might work, politically speaking.  After all, this is a state that “shocked the world” and elected an outlandish and churlish former fake wrestler, and then was shocked when he turned out to be an outlandish and churlish fake Governor.

To be fair, Birk is certainly no Ventura. The Saint Paul native is Harvard educated, and not clownish like Ventura . He’s also done a lot of admirable charitable work in the community. On many levels, I admire him.

But he’s applying to be Governor, and he is largely an unknown quantity on policy issues. So maybe the local media should pump the breaks just a bit on the Birk bandwagon. You know, like maybe ask him a few questions about his actual plans and positions? 

Reasons for Skepticism

Here’s a few reasons why skepticism is warranted:

He’s an Extremist Abortion Banner.  One of the few Birk policy positions we know about is that he supports overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy.  Birk feels so strongly about this that he refused to join his Baltimore Ravens teammates in being honored at the White House, because Birk would have had to stand in proximity with then-President Barack Obama, who opposes overturning Roe.  

Citizen Birk obviously had every right to express that opinion. But he is now applying to be Lieutenant Governor for all of Minnesota, and this position puts him at odds with the a huge majority of the people he seeks to represent. Surveys show that two-thirds (67%) of Minnesotans oppose overturning Roe. 

At a time when it looks likely that the court is about to overturn Roe and start allowing state governments to take away women’s abortion rights, Birk’s refusal to listen to two-thirds of his constituents on this timely issue is a particularly big deal.

He’s an Extremist Marriage Equality Banner.  Abortion isn’t the only issue where Birk is out of step with a majority of Minnesotans. In 2012, he very actively campaigned in favor of the Minnesota Marriage Amendment that would have changed the Minnesota constitution to specifically prohibit marriage equality for same-sex couples. 

Once again, Birk is on the right wing fringe, ignoring the opinions of two-thirds of his would-be constituents. A 2018 poll shows 67 percent of Minnesotans support same sex marriage. 

Birk’s positions on abortion rights and marriage equality would seem to portend how he would come down on other socially conservative changes being pushed by the far-right, such as book banning and “don’t say gay” laws.

He’s Unqualified for the Job. Then there’s the small matter of qualifications. Birk currently has as much directly relevant experience to be a heartbeat away from the top position in state government as current Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan has to be a professional football player.  

After electing a wealthy celebrity with no governing experience President blew up in the nation’s face, maybe we should be a little more cautious about hiring someone who has never done any actual state governance to lead a very complex $48.5 billion per biennium endeavor. How many times do we have to make this same mistake?

He’s Hitched His Wagon to a Extremist Quack.  Even if you like Birk as a player, philanthropist, and sports analyst, and I do, you should learn a little more about his running mate Scott Jensen before signing up to be a Jensen-Birk supporter.  

For instance, the non-partisan fact-checking organization Politifact cited Jensen as a major source of its 2020 “Lie of the Year 2020 about coronavirus downplaying and denial. This is arguably the most lethal political lie of our times, and Jensen played a very prominent and destructive role spreading it. 

Jensen also joined U.S. Capitol insurrectionist Simone Gold and others in suing the federal government to prevent children from receiving COVID-19 vaccines.

But apparently none of this bothered Birk.

COVID denial and anti-vax messaging earned Jensen a lot of love on Fox News and other far-right outlets, but now he is trying to win a plurality of votes in Minnesota, a state with the second highest rate or boosted residents, and where about three-fourths (74%) of voting age residents rejected Jensen’s ignorant, irresponsible medical quackery and got themselves vaccinated.

What We Don’t Know

Beyond the handful of issues cited here, Minnesotans have no idea where Birk stands on a whole host of other important issues. 

Paid family and medical leave?  Public funding for free birth control, which is proven to dramatically reduce unplanned pregnancies and abortions?  Giving Minnesotans the option to buy into MinnesotCare?  Prayer in public schools? Which religion’s prayer? Taxpayers subsidizing billionaire sports team owners’ stadiums?  Making the wealthiest 1% of Minnesotans, which includes Birk, pay higher taxes to fund education improvements?  Accepting Obamacare funding for Medicare expansion in Minnesota? Maintaining the MNsure Obamacare insurance exchange? “Don’t say gay” laws to punish teachers who mention gay people in school? Allowing parents to ban books from school libraries? 

In addition, the state where a majority (52.4%) of 2020 voters rejected Trump should know whether Birk voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and whether he plans to vote for the insurrection inciter in 2024.  We also must know whether Birk supports the Big Lie that Trump didn’t lose the 2020 election.

I’m very interested to know the answers to these questions. Is Birk Trumpy enough to win far-right primary votes, but too Trumpy to win swing voters in the general election? Or will Birk expose himself to be insufficiently Trumpy, and subsequently be a “kiss of death” for Jensen in the primaries, where Trump loyalists are dominant and demand total obedience.

To be clear, I deeply respect the man’s ability to calmly read a defense with another man’s hands nestled firmly in his buttocks. Skol!

But maybe Minnesotans deserve to know more about Matt Birk than that.

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.

Have Things Really Never Been Worse Or Are We Just Getting Older?

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The mind tends to wander a bit on a long, solo road trip. There’s only so much singing along to your own music anyone can take, (especially if you have to listen to voice like mine.) Eventually you check out local radio — in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and on — and counter-balance that with a few select podcasts.*

That said, the take away from a recent spin listening to AM radio out West, reading local papers and catching up on sage punditry is that things have never been worse. This can’t go on much longer. A day of reckoning is coming. Survival is not assured.

It’s enough to make a guy pull over, abandon the vehicle (along with all hope) and like a diseased bull elk, wander off toward the high mountains and accept the end of days.

But is this accurate description of January 2022? Is this the worst “things” have ever been? Furthermore, how do you begin to judge such a thing?

After 70 comparatively comfortable and happy years on this planet I find it very difficult to buy into the thinking that humankind has never experienced a worse confluence of perils. Still, it’s a question worth posing every so often, if only to regulate your temperature.

If you’re an age-peer of mine you remember the Sixties. A cold war with the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation. Assassinations of enormously popular (liberal) leaders. An immensely foolish, ill-conceived hot war. Near constant racial violence. The white, male power structure mashing the fire alarm over drugged-out, over-sexed hippies “rioting” in the streets and angry, fed-up women calling the old boys out for the sclerotic anachronisms they were.

It was a wild time. But not unlike the proverbial frog in the cookpot, the average teenager, tucked away on a Midwest prairie, thought of it all as nothing other than normal. Bad. But normal. More craziness like what has always gone on.

The fever of that era broke, mostly. The war ended. Bull Connor-style racial violence subsided. Doped-up kids got jobs. Women were heartened by the gains they made, albeit still a long way from cracking the glass ceiling. In a way time itself was an analgesic.

So it’s tempting to regard our moment today as essentially similar to then, or to any other spasm of rage and horror. Whether WWII, the repeated waves of Mongol hordes, the religious-based genocides of the Dark Ages or, hell, the stone-club and spear attacks of one Cro-Magnon tribe on another. Mayhem has always been with us.

But … but … there are several powerful differences between 2022 and any other era of stress and chaos.

At no other time has the entire human race faced a common looming lethality like climate change. Plagues have come and gone. But climate change will, by any and every estimation, inflict enormous physical, financial and emotional damage … and remain, likely escalating its chaos year after year.

I’m among those who think most of the insanity of this era is due to our inability to comprehend and adjust to the effects of social media, a revolution in human community-building, delusion-spreading and anger-inflammation unprecedented in the 200,000 or so years we’ve “cooperated” with one another. Never before has so much superstition and ill-will been able to spread so quickly and with such virality across the entire planet.

Compounding that menace is of course a segment of the leadership class exploiting superstition and ill-will for personal gain. That sort of thing too though is as old as the aforementioned cave men. But the number of exploitables, is now thousands of times greater than the Stone Age, and looking at population growth, easily double what it was when I was a teenager.

Of coyurse, age itself has to be acknowledged. With its remorsely increasing frailities aging enhances our sense of peril. We aren’t as strong or as psychologically flexible as we were in youth. We then become more isolated and fearful as a consequence of feeling susceptible to street crime and mutating viruses. Simultaneously, having a measure the young don’t have for how things once were, we are less able/willing to see a clean path forward. Hopelessness adds to our sense of doom.

The young may not have such feelings in the same depth. But I’m sobered by how many 20, 30 and 40 year-olds acknowledge climate change (and the leadership class’s inability to be serious about it) as a very dark cloud on their personal horizons.

I came to no definitive conclusion on the question of whether this is as bad as it has ever been. Clearly, raging ignorance withstanding, there are millions of people of intelligence and conscience determined to forestall and counter the impacts of climate change. So that glimmer of hope exists.

A lot of this sort of thing was rolling around my alleged mind as I took a side trip in western Kansas to see a geological anomaly known as Monument Rocks. It’s barely five acres of bizarre chalk towers, standing up to 70 feet tall amid the wide prairie of grazing cattle. The rocks are an 80 million year-old remnant of an island in the once vast inland sea that split incipient North America way back then. Every inch of the towers representing 700 years of accumulating sea creatures and sediment.

The point?

You can look at these strange pillars and arches and see only an accumulation of death. Or … you can see tens of millions of years orf life that has given way to grassland sustaining a new generation.

Which is to say that, while not supremely comforting, we can accept with certainty that life will go on long past this chaotic moment. You and I may not experience the same comparatively comfortable and happy style of living 20th and 21st century America provided us. But in some form life will survive.

https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/ted-talks-daily-2262/episodes/what-explains-the-rise-of-huma-42224783

https://podcast.thebulwark.com/january-6-was-built-on-years-of-lies-and-propaganda

https://getpodcast.com/podcast/ezraklein/e-o-wilsons-plan-to-save-the-world_7fd63512c2

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/c4a3b1da-5433-49e6-8c14-0e1da53be78c/episodes/9b105261-7830-432a-b467-5afb77fd041f/the-ezra-klein-show-best-of-why-sci-fi-legend-ted-chiang-fears-capitalism-not-a-i

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/michael-pollans-trip-report/id1528594034?i=1000531452648

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/68-reality-and-the-imagination/id733163012?i=1000382815809

Who’s “Pro” and Who’s “Con’ About “Don’t Look Up”?

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I can’t say how telling it is. But there’s a sociologically and culturally interesting schism currently on display over the Netflix movie, “Don’t Look Up.” Maybe you’ve seen it. Maybe you thought it was hilarious. Or important. Or heavy-handed. Or so unspeakably dull you turned it off 10 minutes after Leonardo Di Caprio and Jennifer Lawrence discover a Mt. Everest-size comet heading straight for Earth.

Movies, like music and fashion and every other damn thing you can think of comes with a lot of subjectivity. “Consider the source” is usually the best you can say about someone calling “Transformers 4” “really cool” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “unbelievably dull, except for the monkeys at the beginning.”

“Don’t Look Up”, is a star-packed satire of modern America’s utter inability to take anything seriously. Not even to the point of uniting long enough to deflect our own doom. Released Christmas Eve, it has not just dropped a cleaver between the usual tribes. It has also divided a majority of critics from a generally pretty bright chunk of the audience.

Because it is ambitious, and energetic and full of ideas and more than a little angry, it is also illuminating the short-comings of another sub-set of modern America.

The film is the latest from Adam McKay, a guy with a very long list of producing and directing credits, including “Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby”, HBO’s “Succession”, “The Big Short”, “Vice” (the Dick Cheney story) and the two “Anchorman” movies. McKay is as Ron Burgundy would say, “kind of a big deal.”

So big that Cate Blanchett, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Ariana Grande, Timothee Chalamet, Tyler Perry and Meryl Streep, (as the Trumpier-than-Trump POTUS) and a dozen others signed on at fees significantly below their starring rates.

With the mere mention of that list of names, the MAGA crowd is already on its hind legs howling about “liberal Hollywood elites”.

Hence you get this from The National Review: “Don’t Look Up is Netflix’s evasive, misstated excuse for political satire that fails very badly because writer-director Adam McKay doesn’t grasp his own political prejudices. Unlike Jude, McKay has no real sense of humor, just sophomoric ridicule. He brazenly broadcasts the entitled sense of obnoxiousness encouraged in Hollywood or Broadway environs, where liberalism has turned into progressivism. And as essayist David Horowitz observed, “inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” [The guy’s quoting David Horowitz with a straight face. Jeeezus.]

And then there’s the far-from-Hollywood-and-only-dreaming-I-was-elites, like me, who find it hilarious. And not just the Streep White House. Where characters can’t focus on doomsday because of bad polling over (and looming mid-terms) over a lunk-headed Supreme Court candidate revealed as a one-time porn actor (with whom POTUS once canoodled). That’s funny. But better, richer and even more relevant is the dead-on, can’t be over-stated satire of a culture so addled by entertaining itself it has lost the ability to find seriousness in anything that doesn’t deliver celebrity-scented sex appeal, charm and, you know, constant distraction from “all that ugly stuff out there.”

Beyond the salaried critics who have given it a low 55% score on Rotten Tomatoes, most complaining about “lack of focus”, “heavy-handedness”, “too long” and how it is “aggressively mean-spirited and smug”, there’s the social media backlash, (ironically a constant target of the movie.)

Here’s a hot take from a local PR guy: “Just watched the worst movie we have seen in five years. Make it 10. It’s on Netflix and is called ‘Don’t Look Up’. Everyone in its all-star cast should be embarrassed. Storyline, acting, concept all awful. Total waste of time!”

And these responses from his “friends.”

“It was a weird one… that presidential role played by Streep turned me off and tuned me out. I can’t believe an HOFer like her signed off on this.” [Who remembers The Orange God King calling Streep “overrated”?]

“Yep, it’s a total satire & sad whim of Hollywood’s elite directed at a young audience. Several of my educated & arts-cultured friends under 40 loved it.”

And this from someone who obviously had no trouble identifying with the film’s fattest targets, “What, you didn’t like a bunch of Hollywood snobs telling us how stupid we are?!?”

Now, as I say, people disagree about everything … all the time … (another point McKay plays with.) But the need to jump out and get on record … about a movie … is interesting and kinda goads me into the following conjecture.

Among all our tribes, there is the one I refer to as the Traditionalists. They’re a significant bunch.

In my experience over lo these many years this crowd works its way into respected institutions because they have some talent. But primarily, they clean up well, show up and do exactly the job they were hired to do. Soon upon arrival they burrow into the bureaucracy and usually flourish … because they, like their institution, they respect and never seriously question the status quo.

“Challenging” equals trouble.

Basic fact of life here: institutional movie critics are expected to be in step with the institution’s audience. Those who regularly wet their pants over obscure Bulgarian dramas are usually not hired to begin with, and certainly find themselves in a difficult place, newsroom-wise, if they can’t get on board with the latest “Spiderman Returns for the Fourteenth Time” re-boot.

Other Traditionalists include people who have respected the norms of American commerce, especially of the media-manipulation variety, where the status quo sells things to each other, again something McKay ridicules with exuberant relish. “Don’t Look Up” is an almost wall-to-wall mockery of The Great American Shill. The arena where people are products and ideas are interchangeable frostings.

My bet with “Don’t Look Up” — which I’m not saying competes with “Citizen Kane”, “The Seventh Seal” or “2001” in terms of art, (although there’s a heavy dose of “Dr. Strangelove” at play here) — is that it is one of those cultural artifacts that will grow in popular estimation as the months and years go by.

I.e. “cult status.” (We can sell that!)

‘Don’t Look Up” is the sort of thing Traditional minds may never accept as anything but “terrible”. But it I strongly suspect so many others appreciate it they’ll turn it into a cultural touchstone. A “classic.” Thereby, long after first blush, embarrassing those refusing to see the sad comedy of the world around them.

Yellowstone Offers a MAGA-era Rorschach Test

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Paramount Network’s television series Yellowstone is a huge hit, and I’ve been pondering why.  After all, raising cattle is not something that one would guess most contemporary Americans would likely find particularly riveting.

It strikes me that there are two very different ways to view Yellowstone.  To many like me, it’s consumed as a mafia story. Mafia families use extortion, violence, and other criminal methods to make money and preserve power and privilege, and that is precisely what Yellowstone’s Dutton family is all about, episode after episode.

There’s a lot to like about Yellowstone. It is entertaining, beautifully shot, and well-acted.  As with many a mafia story, the story about what will become of the family members pulling out all the stops to maintain their power and privilege has been worth watching.  Before watching it, I might not have believed that a Montana-based Sopranos yarn would work, but it does for me.

It’s far from perfect. The story line gets preposterous at times, the trash-talk scripting often feels particularly contrived, the level of violence displayed is gratuitous, and the simplistic characters seem mostly unwilling or unable to see gray areas in the situations they encounter.  Talented actresses like Kelly Reilly could have been even more interesting to watch with scripts that weren’t so simplistic and over-the-top.  

But beyond the familiar mafia formula, there is another very different way to view Yellowstone.  Many viewers see mega-rancher John Dutton and his loyal family as superheroes, not criminals.  They see an ultra-honorable family fighting for what they believe was once great about America – more hard work, more family loyalty, more agrarian lifestyles, less “politically correct” nonsense, and a might-is-right approach to ensure you always get your way. 

In this case, the superheroes’ superpowers involve guns-a-plenty, humiliating trash-talking, bullying of dissenters, corruption of state and local government, and an unflagging certainty that it’s their God-given right to control anything they damn well want, despite what “the others” – urbanites, environmentalists, the insufficiently macho, and Native Americans – do or say.

A lot of people seem to see Yellowstone this way.  Go to any rural or small town area, and you’re going to see folks wearing Yellowstone gear, just the way people wear Captain America, Superman, and Wonder Woman gear.  These folks not only want to watch the Duttons, they want to be them.

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reported that Yellowstone first became a hit in smaller, more rural markets, not on the coasts.

The show wrapped its fourth season Sunday night with an average 10.4 million total viewers on the Paramount Network, up from 4.5 million in season 1.  The unconventional path “Yellowstone” took to ratings dominance shows how audiences can accrue and change over a series’ lifespan and how regional differences still matter…

Lafayette, Ind., is a “Yellowstone” stronghold. The area around Purdue University had the highest proportion of viewers during season 1 of any small market outside Montana and Wyoming, the region where “Yellowstone” is set, according to Nielsen data on viewers ages 25 to 54.

Loyalists there include Jim Hedrick, 62, whose company Horizon Ag Consulting works with farmers across the Midwest. He says “Yellowstone” mines issues that matter in his circles, such as family cohesion and the development of rural areas.

When “Yellowstone” premiered in 2018, the show ranked fourth in the 25-to-54 age group in the least-populated TV markets, categorized by Nielsen as D markets. In the country’s most populous areas—dubbed A markets, which include New York and Los Angeles—“Yellowstone” didn’t crack the top 50.

Like other superhero tales, Yellowstone sometimes gets pretty unrealistic.  In the real world, no business, including ranching, is immune from criminal law enforcement, environmental protections, eminent domain rules, and political realities.  Deep red rural states trend in those directions, but they’re not nearly as extreme as the Dutton-dominated Montana.

As such, the Yellowstone fantasy offers an escape for viewers who dream of a world where people who look and act like them find ways to control everything. That seems like the “secret sauce” that makes Yellowstone so delicious for so many.

Why are the Duttons viewed by so many as heroes rather than criminals?  For many viewers, the Dutton’s brutal crimes are forgiven – lustily cheered on, even – because of the enemies involved.  The Duttons hate the same people that Trumpists hate — fakey latte-sipping urban dwellers, clueless environmentalist brats, rule-bound government dweebs, hopelessly soft beta male, snowflake cucks, and coddled minorities.

And who doesn’t want to see someone stick it to those guys?

Yellowstone is a kind of Rorschach test that is being seen different ways depending on the individual viewer’s biases and values.  How you interpret it reveals personality characteristics, such as an authoritarian instinct and willingness to rationalize violence and other crimes. 

I have no proof of this, but it seems a safe bet that there is a strong correlation between Trump fans and people who view the corrupt, murderous Duttons as righteous superheros rather than a privileged, power-obsessed crime family.

(By the way, the other way that Yellowstone is fantasy is that the actors like Kevin Costner and Kelly Reilly who are playing right wingers’ heroes are not conservative in their real lives. After campaigning for Reagan earlier in his life, Costner has campaigned for Barack Obama and the Biden Administration’s Pete Buttigieg. And the English actress Reilly is reportedly a Democrat.)

Because Yellowstone has proven so overwhelmingly popular, we surely will see more programming like it. We can expect more “us against them” narratives giving comfort and encouragement to viewers whose fondest wish is to own the libs without pesky laws in the way. 

If I were a right-wing billionaire intent on fanning the culture war flames as a means to maintain and grow my financial power and privilege, I’d bankroll more Yellowstone-like shows to provide entertaining propaganda tools to compliment the news-like propaganda tools that those billionaires already control to great effect.

Everyone likes to fantasize about being a superhero, and shows like Yellowstone offers heroic role models and road maps for white people bending and breaking laws to maintain their privilege in a rapidly changing world. 

And you know what? If the acting, story, scenery, and production levels are as good as they are in Yellowstone, the chances are that plenty of liberals like me will probably watch the coming Yellowstone clones, though through a very different lens.

Kim Potter is Unequivocally Guilty of Failing to be a Professional

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Kim Potter on Daunte Wright death: 'I'm sorry it happened' | WKBN.com

The jury is still out as I write this Tuesday morning. And I concede I’ve never had high expectations for a conviction in the Kim Potter trial. But that said, I was startled and relieved that not even one juror in the Derek Chauvin case clung to the “my cops for good or bad” line of thinking.

First degree manslaughter was always going to be a stretch. Potter would have to be a persistent, unbridled, nearly sociopathic menace to public safety (a la Chauvin) for a jury to go that far. But second degree should be a slam dunk.

Deep in ForWhatIt’sWorth land, my view of Potter’s guilt, her culpability, is built around her failure to be the experienced cop, the Alpha Dog, of the incident that ended with Daunte Wright’s death.

In her testimony she admitted that the trainee cop riding with her that day instigated the stop. Her failure, as a 26-year veteran, was not saying, “Uh, no. We’re not going to bother with expired tabs and an air freshner hanging off his mirror.” Moreover, as a veteran training a newby, she should have admonished the rookie that just because he spotted a young black kid driving a late model car was not a satisfactory reason to rolling in closer and look for some kind — any kind — of “stop-worthy” (revenue-enhancing) violation.

But rather than exert veteran, professional influence, Potter allowed the stop to go forward, then got so swept up in the bully boy(s) confrontation she panicked — panicked — mistook a yellow Taser for a black gun … and killed the kid.

A good number of people were moved by her emotional, sobbing testimony last week. Maybe it was real. Or maybe every reckless Minneapolis cop’s best friend, attorney Earl Gray, advised her that a good tissue-grabbing crying jag might work as well for her as it did for Kyle Rittenhouse over in Wisconsin.

(And on the subject of Mr. Gray, has anyone ever seen the precise numbers of the payouts to him for his defense in lo so many panicked cop cases?)

And speaking of theater, I loved Officer Potter’s costuming. Not a uniform. (She’s no longer on any force.) Or anything too, you know, “authoritarian.” But instead, a soft, cream-white embroidered Christmas-y blouse. By which, with tears and tissue, she was transformed from an out-of-control, gun-wielding assailant into everyone’s favorite middle-aged Minnesota mom.

There are reasons I’d never make the jury on a case like this.

If it were in my power to re-write sentencing guidelines, I couldn’t care less if Potter ever does a day in jail. Unlike Chauvin, a career thug with more than a dozen complaints for unnecessary violence against him, not to mention that $460,000 tax fraud he and the Mrs. were running when he killed George Floyd over a maybe fake $20 bill, Potter presents no on-going threat to the (mainly black) citizens of the Twin Cities.

But she is indisputably guilty, of failing to maintain command over subordinates and her own professional composure. Is it really asking too much that a court and a jury assert, with a verdict, that cops have a legal responsibility to control their biases and emotions?