Still Pissed? Do This!

Okay, we've had our march, and it's good to know we're not the only sane people left in America. But now what?

Here's what!

We need to focus like a laser on the 2018 elections: in the House, in the Senate, in the state legislatures. The Democratic Party has done a terrible job being a national party. It focuses only on the Presidential election and leaves the rest to the Republicans, who've been cheerfully collecting enough state legislatures to amend the Constitution or call a Constitutional convention.

We've got to stop them. We've got to build a Democratic Party that's as strong as it was in FDR's day.

Here's a two-step suggestion for getting started:

First, read this. It'll fire you up like you've never been fired up before.

Then, go to a web site called Swing Left. Swing Left was put together by a group who are not professional political people, but are pretty savvy in the use of technological tools.

At Swing Left, you put in your zip code, and it identifies the Congressional swing district nearest to your home. A swing district is one that could go either way in any given election. Many are Democrat-represented districts and need to be defended. The rest are Republican-represented districts that can be and need to be flipped.

Then, you pledge to help make sure that district votes Democratic in 2018 by giving them your email address. They send you weekly information about what's going on in the district, give you ideas on things to do to help, and let you know how to make contributions directly to the Democratic candidate there. What could be easier?

I have signed up to protect the nearest swing district to me, which is currently held by a Democrat, and to help win two swing districts nearby, currently held by Republicans. Oh, it would be so sweet to send them home.

Are you ready, Charlie?

BAM Takes to the Streets

Everyone got up unusually early for a Saturday. It was the day of the Women's March in Chicago, January 21, and BAM wasn't going to miss it. [BAM is the name the three girls are referred to by themselves and others, when they are referred to as a group. I'll refer to them here only by their initials.]

The 3 Feministas take it to the streets.

Under light jackets they wore white, they said, as a tribute to the suffragettes of a hundred years ago, on whose shoulders they consciously stood. B's t-shirt references the SCOTUS Angels, an allusion to the female members of the Supreme Court. 

March organizers had originally planned for 20,000 marchers. The night before, the prediction was raised to 50,000. But by the time BAM arrived at the neighborhood El station, all trains heading downtown were packed. It was already clear this crowd was going to be WAY more than 50,000.

There was a point when nobody else could get on.

M and B managed to grab a seat when someone got off, and one sat in the other's lap. A stood the whole way down. (As did the chaperone, need we say?) They alighted near the Harold Washington Library and, amazingly, immediately found friends from school. Their friends had made ... er, um ... uh ... let's call them "kitten" ears. They're actually called something else, a reference to one of Donald Trump's favorite pastimes when a TV celebrity (and, for all we know, even now). They had made extras and gave them to BAM. After some excited chatter, the group was off for the march assembly point.

Walking under the El on the way to the March.

It was just a matter of following the flow of the crowd, and in no time at all BAM found themselves separated from their friends and in the middle of a crowd (later to be reported as 250,000 souls) that was going nowhere.

And that's where they stood for about an hour and a half.  For a while, other marchers' signs were enough to keep everyone amused.

 

Clicking on a picture enlarges it and makes it easier to read.

 

While waiting for the march to begin, various chants started up in the crowd, including several initiated by BAM. The young marchers became intoxicated with their power. Well, no, not really. But they appeared to be enjoying it.

After a while, there was a slow but perceptible flow of movement toward the lake. A good theory was that the group just to the north of us (see aerial photo) was moving out, and BAM would come in behind them. But after about 10 minutes of shuffling, people in the crowd started pointing back towards the west, indicating BAM would be marching into the streets.

What no one knew until watching the news that night was that the entire march route was already effectively filled with protesters – there was no open space to march TO! The police had advised the organizers it would not be safe (not to mention possible) to have the march. The organizers then cancelled the march and retroactively made it a rally or demonstration.

All of which was totally unknown to about 250,000 people ready to march.

Presumably, somewhere people started moving off the parade route and going home, creating room for the crowd in Grant Park (see aerial shot) to take their place. This created enough movement for the Grant Park folks to move onto the streets – designated marching streets and otherwise – creating the sensation of ... wait for it ... MARCHING!

And march BAM did:

As did all those around them:

State Street (🎶that great street 🎶)

Finally, the chaperone suggested that any time BAM wanted to head back home would be okay. And within 10 minutes they were on their way to the El station. This time, though, they boarded early enough that there were seats for all three.

As the train passed the cross streets, it was clear the march had taken over the Chicago Loop.

Shot from the moving El.

A few notes about the March:

• The crowd was wonderful – friendly and cheerful.
• Early-on, we spotted some counter-demonstrators heading for the march. We never saw them again, and there was no trouble at all. Chicago Police reported there were no arrests.
• The chaperone, being an old fart, believes that minds are not changed by vulgar language and images – in fact, they are reasons to shut your mind to the message – and unfortunately there was some of both on a few signs. Too bad about that. But let's face it: Trump set the tone.
• BAM witnessed very little littering. We came across one sign on the ground. M picked it up and leaned it against a building so it could be read by passers-by.
• M's parents should know that I saw her slip a five dollar bill to a grateful homeless man. I'm sure they're proud of her, as B's and A's parents are proud of their girls, and of their girls' friends.

Poetry for a New Day

Our ultra-literate readers will remember William Carlos Williams's poem:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Well, a fellow on Twitter who uses the "handle" Chaosprime has rewritten it for us:

This is Just to Say

i have stolen
the presidency
which
you probably wanted
to go
to someone qualified

forgive me
i am so rich
and so white

While We're on the Subject of Prostitutes

We've received hundreds of letters and calls from people asking, "When is Sempringham going to update its data on persons listed as prostitutes in the U.S. Census to take into consideration the recently released 1940 Census?"

J. Edgar Hoover was not listed as a prostitute in the 1940 Census.

Well, we undertook a study of this very issue last year, but quickly discovered that we couldn't trust the raw data we were getting from Ancestry.com.  There are 440 people in the 1940 census whose occupation includes the word "prostitute," using the Ancestry search engine, but a closer look makes it clear that something has gone awry.

Because searching the 1940 U.S. Census is free to non-subscribers, you can reproduce our results.

Type "prostitute" into the "occupation" field, and no other search terms, and you will receive the list of 440 workers in the "sex industry", as it's called today. But click through to the actual records, and you will be surprised.

Ruth Flickinger, a 73-year-old living in Pittsburgh, is described as a "prostitute nurse" in the index, but a look at the original records reassures us that she was a "practical nurse". Her grandchildren are relieved, no doubt, but perhaps a tad annoyed.

Jay Ingram, listed as a "prostitute inspector" in Los Angeles, is actually a "parachute inspector" at the airport.

Joseph John Jr., of Aurora, Indiana, is not a "prostitute mail carrier", he is a "substitute mail carrier".

John Kaszuba's wife in Chicago will be relieved to hear he is not a "prostitute laborer" but a "painting helper".

And that's just going through the first six people listed in Ancestry's indexed records.

What happened? We have three hypotheses:

• The optical character reading software Ancestry uses is version 1.0.
• The census entries were indexed by someone making $2 a day, for whom English was not a first language.
• The records were indexed by a 400-pound person sitting on a bed somewhere.

But who knows?

Whatever the answer, you can see that this important research we have undertaken is not as easy as it seems. We have to stop laughing long enough to get the data written down. This may take some time.

Musical Interlude

Iris Luella Dement sings her song, "Let the Mystery Be". Lyrics below.

Everybody is wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
So it's all the same to me
Think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say once you're gone you're gone forever
And some say you're gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
If in sinful ways you lack

Some say that they're comin' back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
Think I'll just let the mystery be

Everybody is wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
So it's all the same to me
Think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory
And I ain't saying it ain't a fact
But I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory
And I don't like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
I choose to let the mystery be

Everybody is wondering what and where they they all came from
Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me

Think I'll just let the mystery be
Think I'll just let the mystery be

The World's BEST Prostitutes!

We always get more hits if we make liberal use of the word "prostitutes".  Apparently the people Googling "prostitutes" are legion.

But this is a legitimate use! Bloomberg reports that we have a judgment on what country has the best prostitutes in the world, and it comes from none other than former Village People groupie, Vladimir Putin:

Trump is “a grown man, and secondly he’s someone who has been involved with beauty contests for many years and has met the most beautiful women in the world,” Putin said. “I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.”

Vlad loves to relive his years as a Village People groupie.

Of course, if Vlad ever does decide to use the videotapes that don't exist, he will be "shocked! shocked!"

The rules of the Prostitute Olympics require Putin to turn in his score cards within two weeks.

What if They Had an Inauguration and Nobody Came?

David Frum reports that an Expedia search this morning shows 61 downtown Washington D.C. hotels still have vacancies.

 

Trump and Carnival Culture

David Brooks has a strange but interesting column this morning which concludes:

The sad part is that so many people treat Trump’s tweets as if they are arguments when in fact they are carnival. With their conniption fits, Trump’s responders feed into the dynamic he needs. They contribute to carnival culture.

The first problem with today’s carnival culture is that there’s an ocean of sadism lurking just below the surface. The second is that it’s not real. It doesn’t really address the inequalities that give rise to it. It’s just combative display.

This is a resolution I’m probably going to break, but I resolve to write about Trump only on the presidential level, not on the carnival level. I’m going to try to respond only to what he does, not what he says or tweets. I really wish some of my media confreres would do the same. [Italics are my emphasis.)

The problem with this is that the carnival culture is not just his tweets, it's his whole life, including "the presidential level". God help us.

Republican Health Care Plan Revealed

 Via Chris @Bassoonjokes:

"The new healthcare plan is everybody gets 50 Tylenol at birth. Those are your Tylenol. Use them whenever or however you want."

Did You See This?

British reporting about Christopher Steele, the MI6 agent who collected the dossier on Donald Trump:

Mr Steele also decided to pass on information to both British and American intelligence officials after concluding that such material should not just be in the hands of political opponents of Mr Trump, who had hired his services, but was a matter of national security for both countries.

However, say security sources, Mr Steele became increasingly frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him. He came to believe there was a cover-up, that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

It is believed that a colleague of Mr Steele in Washington, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who runs the firm Fusion GPS, felt the same way and, at the end also continued with the Trump case without being paid.

The whole article is here.

Mark Salter, John McCain's former chief of staff, writes:

If any of the allegations are true, and if our worst fears about Trump’s temperament are realized, no one with power or influence today will be remembered for whether they tinkered with Medicare reimbursement rates or lowered the corporate tax rate or disapproved of a  Supreme Court appointment or won a Pulitzer Prize or had the highest ratings on cable television.

They will be remembered for whether they tried to protect the country from the grave harm Trump could do or whether, by negligence or active support, they helped him do it.

 A poster across the street from the American Embassy in Moscow:

In the upper right is Aleksandr Bastrykin, a Russian spy who was sanctioned by Obama. In the lower left is a picture of Obama, with the caption "Bye-bye, Obama!"

David Corn talks about his October meeting with Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who may have saved the western world:

After speaking with the former counterintelligence official, I was able to confirm his identity and expertise. A senior US administration official told me that he had worked with the onetime spook and that the former spy had an established and respected track record of providing US government agencies with accurate and valuable information about sensitive national security matters. "He is a credible source who has provided information to the US government for a long time, which senior officials have found to be highly credible," this US official said.

Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post catalogs some things we know about Trump, exclusive of Christopher Steele's memo or the declassified version of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report on Russian involvement in the presidential campaign, including:

Throughout the campaign, Trump repeated slogans and conspiracy theories — “Obama invented ISIS,” “Hillary will start World War III” — lifted from Sputnik, the Russian propaganda website. Was this just Trump campaign chief Stephen K. Bannon borrowing ideas, or Manafort using tactics he perfected in Ukraine? Or was there deliberate linkage? 

She concludes:

Information doesn’t have to be secret to be shocking. Trump doesn’t have to be a Manchurian candidate who has been hypnotized or recruited by foreign intelligence. It’s enough that he has direct and indirect links to a profoundly corrupt and violent foreign dictator, whose policies he admires, whose advisers he shares and whose slogans he uses. That’s kompromat enough for me.

Inauguration Weekend

Headline in the Washington Post:

200 buses have applied for city parking on Inauguration Day. 1,200 have applied for the Women’s March.

The Republican Health Care Plan

It's all right here. A fascinating read.

H/T to Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine.

[Don't click around too much. There's nothing there. There hasn't been for six years.]

Deevolution

From Andrew Tobias:

Zac Bissonnette quotes Lincoln . . .

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

And then — “150 years of investment in education and social progress later” — President-Elect Donald Trump:

Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got “swamped” (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT. So much for being a movie star – and that was season 1 compared to season 14. Now compare him to my season 1. But who cares, he supported Kasich & Hillary.

The Things You Find on Twitter

T: Knock knock.
Me: Who's there?
T: to.
Me: to who?
T: to *whom*

Old News in a New Light

[Updated 12 p.m. January 7, 2016]


From a November 10 Reuters story:

The Russian government was in touch with members of President-elect Donald Trump's political team during the U.S. election campaign and knows most of his entourage, one of Russia's most senior diplomats told the Interfax news agency on Thursday.

Accused by defeated Democratic contender Hillary Clinton of being a puppet of President Vladimir Putin after praising the Russian leader, Trump has dismissed suggestions he had anything to do with the Russian government during the campaign.

But in comments that could prove politically awkward for the president-elect, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said there had indeed been some communications.

"There were contacts," Interfax cited Ryabkov as saying. "We are doing this and have been doing this during the election campaign."

Such contacts would continue, he added, saying the Russian government knew and had been in touch with many of Trump's closest allies. He did not name names.

From an October 31 David Corn article in Mother Jones:

On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid ... sent Comey a fiery letter saying the FBI chief may have broken the law and pointed to a potentially greater controversy: "In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government…The public has a right to know this information."

Kathleen Parker Goes There

Just to be clear: this is not Kathleen Parker.

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker writes for the Washington Post and is syndicated, according to Wikipedia, in more than 400 outlets.

Today she writes [my emphases]:

What is so obviously a conspiracy of Russian leadership, hackers and spies, Trump has repeatedly dismissed as lousy intelligence. Why would he do such a thing? Is it that he’s so thin-skinned he can’t tolerate anyone thinking that he might have benefited from the cyberattack? Or is it that he knew about it in advance and doesn’t want to be found out? This is how conspiracy theories get started. Then again, sometimes a conspiracy is just a conspiracy — and a fool is just a fool.

Consider what we know: Our best intelligence indicates that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Trump, who has long expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin (once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent), has his doubts.

Obviously, Trump wants to preserve the narrative that he won fair and square. And, clearly, claims of Russian interference would muss his ego. But is that it? Ego and narrative?

Consider further: Trump would rather make common cause with our fiercest geopolitical adversary (hat tip Mitt Romney) than take the word of our best people. Moreover, he has said he won’t receive daily security briefings and reportedly plans to reduce our security agencies.

Pray tell, whose side is this man on? When was the last time you had to ask that question about a president-elect?

 

On Friday, Trump met with real American spies and others who attempted to explain things to him, leaving open the question: Can Trump learn? From his statement following the meeting, it doesn’t seem so.

On Thursday, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the agency is “now even more resolute,” and that Trump is damaging American intelligence (not to be confused with the absence thereof, to wit, Trump). To top things off, former CIA director James Woolsey quit Trump’s transition team Thursday in protest against being bypassed.

In sum, when the president-elect persists in a state of denial, siding with the enemy against his own country’s best interests, one is forced to consider that Trump himself poses a threat to national security. 

In Russia, they’d just call it treason.

Meanwhile, Trump said a week ago that he knew things about the email hacking that others didn't know, and that he would share that information with us on Tuesday or Wednesday of last week. Guess what never happened!

Today's vocabulary word is popinjay: a strutting, supercilious person. Use it five times today, and it's yours.

And They Didn't Even Blush

Wikileaks complains about the release of confidential information:

The Question on Everybody's Mind

A few weeks ago nobody would have even thought it. But his constant attempts at redirection have only raised suspicions.

Eventually, somebody is going to start asking out loud:

What did he know about the Russian hacking, and when did he know it?

Update (January 6):

From the NY Times:

The Trump campaign knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans. Days before the Podesta email release began, Roger Stone, a Republican operative working with the Trump campaign, sent out an excited tweet about what was coming.

But in an interview, Mr. Stone said he had no role in the leaks; he had just heard from an American with ties to WikiLeaks that damning emails were coming.

La Même Chose

Marine Le Pen insists Russian annexation of Crimea is totally legitimate.

I guess it was sort of a Russian Anschluss.

Oh, well. Le Pen/Petain – c'est la même chose. I wonder if there are Russian collaborators in any other countries?

David Brooks Tries to Understand Trump

Over the holidays, a person I know started speaking favorably about "Republican values". I was dying to ask just what "Republican values" are, but it was the holidays, and really, I didn't see any plus side to blowing up the relationship.

Joe Biden says, "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value."

Which is only broadly related to this post, the purpose of which is to point you to David Brooks's column this morning.

It concludes:

I’ll be curious to see if Trump’s public rhetoric becomes operationalized in any way. For example, I bet his bromance with Putin will end badly. The two men are both such blustery, insecure, aggressive public posturers, sooner or later they will get in a schoolyard fight.

It will be interesting to see if that brawl is just an escalating but ultimately harmless volley of verbiage, or whether it affects the substance of government policy and leads to nuclear war.

Happy New Year!

Shaming Trump Supporters

The New York Times published a series of short essays after the election that sought to explain or complain. I thought this one made several good points. But is it also an example of what right wing pundits would call liberals' reflex reaction to blame ourselves?

It turns out that shaming the supporters of Donald J. Trump is not a good political strategy.

Though job loss and economic stagnation played a role in his victory, so did shame. As the principal investigator on a study of the middle class for the National Institute of Mental Health, I found that working people’s stress is often intensified by shame at their failure to “make it” in what they are taught is a meritocratic American economy.

The right has been very successful at persuading working people that they are vulnerable not because they themselves have failed, but because of the selfishness of some other villain (African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives; the list keeps growing).

Instead of challenging this ideology of shame, the left has buttressed it by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was something about which people ought to be ashamed. The rage many white working-class people feel in response is rooted in the sense that once again, as has happened to them throughout their lives, they are being misunderstood.

So please understand what is happening here. Many Trump supporters very legitimately feel that it is they who have been facing an unfair reality. The upper 20 percent of income earners, many of them quite liberal and rightly committed to the defense of minorities and immigrants, also believe in the economic meritocracy and their own right to have so much more than those who are less fortunate. So while they may be progressive on issues of discrimination against the obvious victims of racism and sexism, they are blind to their own class privilege and to the hidden injuries of class that are internalized by much of the country as self-blame.

The right’s ability to portray liberals as elitists is further strengthened by the phobia toward religion that prevails in the left. Many religious people are drawn by the teachings of their tradition to humane values and caring about the oppressed. Yet they often find that liberal culture is hostile to religion of any sort, believing it is irrational and filled with hate. People on the left rarely open themselves to the possibility that there could be a spiritual crisis in society that plays a role in the lives of many who feel misunderstood and denigrated by the fancy intellectuals and radical activists.

The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism, sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans. If the left could abandon all this shaming, it could rebuild its political base by helping Americans see that much of people’s suffering is rooted in the hidden injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.

Democrats need to become as conscious and articulate about the suffering caused by classism as we are about other forms of suffering. We need to reach out to Trump voters in a spirit of empathy and contrition. Only then can we help working people understand that they do not live in a meritocracy, that their intuition that the system is rigged is correct (but it is not by those whom they had been taught to blame) and that their pain and rage is legitimate.

Michael Lerner, the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, Calif., is the editor of Tikkun magazine and chairman of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

Just So There's No Confusion

Reince Priebus's Christmas message:

Merry Christmas to all! Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King. We hope Americans celebrating Christmas today will enjoy a day of festivities and a renewed closeness with family and friends.

Hat tip to Daniel W. Drezner, who apparently actually reads Reince Priebus's Christmas messages.

UPDATE: The RNC is offended that anyone read Priebus's Christmas message as referring to Trump.

Romney Punked?

What Mitt Romney said about Donald Trump:

Here's what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.

His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.

Yet Romney showed up for a job interview as Trump's Secretary of State.

I guess there's a couple of ways you can look at Romney's wanting to be considered for the job. In one version, he's doing his patriotic duty by trying to insert at least one responsible adult (himself, he imagines) into the Trump Administration. Maybe he could limit the damage.

In the other version, he's a man who doesn't even pay attention to himself: "Here's what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud."

The crazy old uncle at Thanksgiving Day dinner, and a confident of Mr. Trump's, Roger Stone, clues us in on what was going on with the job interview:

“Donald Trump was interviewing Mitt Romney for Secretary of State in order to torture him,” Stone claimed.... "To toy with him. And given the history, that’s completely understandable. Mitt Romney crossed a line. He didn’t just oppose Trump, which is his democratic right, he called him a phony and a fraud. And a con man. And that’s not the kind of man you want as Secretary of State.”

The Cabinet

Here at Sempringham, we're trying to be fair to Rex Tillerson, the current ExxonMobil CEO who appears to be Trump's nominee for Secretary of State.

Steve Coll in the New Yorker says this:

In nominating Tillerson, Trump is handing the State Department to a man who has worked his whole life running a parallel quasi-state, for the benefit of shareholders, fashioning relationships with foreign leaders that may or may not conform to the interests of the United States government. In his career at ExxonMobil, Tillerson has no doubt honed many of the day-to-day skills that a Secretary of State must exercise: absorbing complex political analysis, evaluating foreign leaders, attending ceremonial events, and negotiating with friends and adversaries. Tillerson is a devotee of Abraham Lincoln, so perhaps he has privately harbored the ambition to transform himself into a true statesman, on behalf of all Americans. Yet it is hard to imagine, after four decades at ExxonMobil and a decade leading the corporation, how Tillerson will suddenly develop respect and affection for the American diplomatic service he will now lead, or embrace a vision of America’s place in the world that promotes ideals for their own sake, emphatically privileging national interests over private ones.

 Matthew Yglesias tweets:

After you float Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani honestly any Secretary of State pick ends up looking good.

Phil Rucker at the Washington Post tweets:

Other Tillerson boosters, in addition to Gates & Rice: Stephen Hadley, Jim Baker & Dick Cheney. Full court press planned for confirmation.

It looks like Rick Perry is getting the Department of Energy post. Remember Perry's "Oops!" moment in the 2012 Republican debates? Pundits have been having a great time reminding us that it was the Department of Energy that Perry wanted to abolish, but couldn't think of.

Christopher Hayes at MSNBC wonders:

Is it crazy to think Trump named him to the post just so everyone would re-run his most mortifying moment on TV?

The Secret Anniversaries of the Heart

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows....

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Kicking Off the Holocaust - Part 2

As Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder reminded us in Thursday's post, the Nazis created or waited for crisis situations, then took advantage of them to take drastic actions. The day after the Reichstag fire, nearly all civil liberties were suspended in Germany: freedom of speech, freedom of press, habeas corpus, etc.

Professor Snyder's cautions hit home with me because for more than a year I've been immersed in 1930's Germany. I'm working on a book about Emily's family's escape from Mannheim, Germany, and because of that, parallels between that time and our own come screaming out at me.

It's scary.

The Hauptsynagogue in Mannheim, roofless after being set ablaze on Kristallnacht.

The Holocaust began with Kristallnacht, an orgy of thuggery across Germany in early November 1938.  Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps, Jewish businesses were vandalized and ruined, and 1000 synagogues in Germany and Austria were destroyed. As the elimination of civil liberties was "justified" by the Reichstag fire, the destruction and arrests associated with Kristallnacht were "justified" by the assassination of a German diplomat. Interestingly, the assassination was in revenge for the deportation of immigrants.

I have a section in the book about it:

Most mornings a barber visited the Rosenberger apartment in Mannheim. Opa Freiberg had a standing appointment – not for a trim, but to have his head shaved. Heinrich Freiberg's grandchildren thought he was mostly bald anyway, but he actually had a full head of hair; he just preferred a shaved head. Because it was not safe for the barber to serve Jewish customers in his shop, he came to the Rosenberger apartment, where he would not be observed.

On the morning of November 10, 1938, a Thursday, Emil was lying in bed when the barber arrived. Emil had a cold, and his mother decided it was best to keep him home from school. As he was lying there, he might have been thinking ahead to his bar Mitzvah, planned for later that month.

But on that morning, he heard the barber arrive with a terrifying warning: During the night mobs had burned down the Rosenberger's synagogue, he said, and now the SS were going from door to door, arresting all Jewish men.

[snip]

Just two weeks before the barber’s warning, 17,000 Polish Jews (called Ostjuden, or Eastern Jews), including many living in Mannheim and attending synagogue there, had been rounded up and expelled from Germany without warning.  The deportation was the culmination of a German/Polish tit-for-tat of legislation and decrees, each government determined to reduce the number of Jews within its borders.

In March 1938 the Polish legislature passed a law, targeted primarily at Jews, which revoked the citizenship of any person who had lived outside the country for 5 or more years without being in touch with the Polish government.  According to Nazi estimates, there were up to 70,000 Polish Jews living within German borders. If the Polish law  applied to them, they would be rendered stateless – with no country that would accept them – and thus permanent residents of Germany. At first, little action was taken by the Poles to implement their law, allowing the Germans to make a move of their own.

On August 22, a German police order announced that all residence permits for foreign nationals would expire by March 31, 1939. Although foreigners could request new residence permits before the end of 1938, the permits would be issued only to those considered “worthy”.  In the Nazi state, no Jew qualified as “worthy”.

The Polish government understood that the result of the German legislation would be the return of tens of thousands of Polish Jews, and moved to quickly cut off that possibility. On October 15 an order was published by the Polish Ministry of the Interior requiring citizens living outside the country to present their passports at a Polish consulate within the next 15 days. If, upon inspection, the provisions of the March legislation concerning 5 years’ absence from the country were found to apply, the presenter’s citizenship would be immediately revoked.

After seeking assurances from the Polish government that Polish Jews resident in Germany would be allowed to return to their native country regardless of the Ministry’s order – and receiving no such assurance – the German government took action. On October 27, Polish Jews were arrested throughout the country – including at least 75 men, women, and children from Mannheim. They were forced to leave all their possessions behind and transported to the border, where they were unceremoniously, and with great resistance from the Poles, deported.

North of Mannheim, in Hanover, a Polish family named Grynszpan was one of those arrested. Sendel Grynszpan and his wife, Rivka, had lived in Hanover for more than 25 years. At the trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961, Sendel, a tailor, described his family’s deportation:

On [Thursday] October 27, 1938, in the evening, a policeman came to my home and asked us to go to the 11th precinct with our passports. He assured us that we would be returning directly and that it was unnecessary to take our belongings with us. When I arrived at the precinct with my family, we found many people there, seated and standing, and some of them in tears. A police inspector was shouting at them, “Sign this paper. You are expelled.”

… On Friday night they put us in police vans, 20 to a van, and took us to the station. The street was full of people chanting, “The Jews to Palestine!” We were taken to Neu-Bentschen, the last German city before the Polish frontier, arriving at 6:00 a.m., Saturday the 29th.

… At the border we were searched and our money taken from us. They left us with only 10 RM each. German law forbade the export of capital. They said to us, “When you arrived, you only had 10 RM; there’s no reason for you to leave with more than that.”

Arrested and deported with Sendel Grynszpan were his wife, a daughter, Berta, and probably others of the couple’s six children. A son, 17-year-old Herschel, was in Paris for schooling.

Herschel received a note from his sister Berta on Thursday, November 3, describing what was happening to his family. On Friday he pored over lengthy and graphic accounts of the deportations in Paris’s Yiddish press, becoming increasingly agitated. Sunday Herschel purchased a pistol, and on Monday morning, November 7, he appeared at the German embassy, intent upon assassinating the German ambassador to France in revenge for what had been done to his family. Instead, he shot and wounded the first embassy officer to appear, a third secretary named Ernst vom Rath.

Herschel Grynszpan in French custody after shooting Ernst vom Rath.

Vom Rath died on the afternoon of November 8. Reaction from Berlin was swift in coming.  All Jewish periodicals in Germany were ordered to cease publication immediately. On Wednesday, November 9, inflammatory articles in the non-Jewish newspapers quoted Joseph Goebbels as saying, “The German people are entitled to identify the Jews in Germany with this crime.”

 And that night, using the excuse of a murder by a Jewish immigrant, Kristallnacht began.

Kicking Off the Holocaust – Part 1

The Reichstag Fire, 1933. Hitler used it as justification to suspend civil liberties.

To be clear: we are not predicting that America will become a fascist state. But we will not say it couldn't happen, either.

Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale University and a scholar of the Holocaust, is disturbed enough about the President-elect that he offers "twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today."

A number of items on his list are chilling, like:

15. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks. 

17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

19. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.

 One item, number five, touched on something I've been meaning to write about for months:

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don't fall for it. [My emphasis.]

Professor Snyder mentions the Reichstag fire, but he may just as well have mentioned the assassination in Paris of the German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, the event that Joseph Goebbels seized upon to launch what became known as Kristallnacht, the first pogrom of the Holocaust.

More about that tomorrow.

Henri Huet – A Guest Post

On Memorial Day I happened to call my eldest brother, Mike.  ("Eldest" sounds better than "oldest", doesn't it?) In the course of the conversation he mentioned that he was dedicating his Memorial Day to the memory of a photographer he met in Vietnam, Henri Huet. The more he talked, the more interested I became, and I eventually told Mike I would write a Sempringham post about Huet.

Then the Republicans nominated a megalomaniac as their candidate for President, and ambition went out the window.

Happily, Mike picked up the torch and wrote the post for me, in the form of an email to our siblings. He has given me permission to edit it slightly to make it more like a blog post, and to publish it here:

It's interesting: you can find many of Henri Huet's photographs in Wikipedia but little of his life. He was born in Vietnam of a French father and a Vietnamese mother. He was sent off to school in France at about the age of five. He studied art while in France and one observer wrote his photos were composed like paintings rather than photos. I can't comment one way or another on that but I do know that he was called "the best photojournalist of the Vietnamese war" by the Saigon AP bureau chief.

Henri Huet

I met him on only one or two occasions at the press club in Danang, Vietnam. One of his bureau chiefs wrote that it was enjoyable working with Huet because he always had a smile on his face. I observed that smile, and even then I thought it was not a smile of a happy man but of one who had seen so much that he felt it was better to smile.

The Marines of the Third Battalion, who were stationed in and around Danang then, thought highly of him. He had been in Vietnam during "The First War". He was in the French Navy, where he learned the basics of photography. He stayed in Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Henri had a wife in France and a mistress in Vietnam.

Medic Thomas Cole, wounded himself, assists a wounded soldier from the First Cavalry Division.

The Marines thought highly of him for several reasons. First, because he was the "old man"; he had seen this war back when it was a French war and now it was an American war. He had seen much carnage and death. Second, because he really immersed himself in the life and ways of  the Marines in "I Corps", unlike many photojournalists who were there to "cover the war". It was these people that I saw angrily pushed away by the Marines who didn't want "a goddamn camera" pushed into their faces while they were recovering the bodies of their buddies. I remember distinctly a group of college kiddies from some school in Ohio who came out to report on how horrible the war was. I was seriously afraid that we would have to get those kids out of there before the Marines slit their throats. You don't preach antiwar stuff to Marines who have just finished a firefight. Third, Henri could speak French, English, and Vietnamese, which made him useful. And interestingly, most of all the Marines considered Henri a good luck charm, since he always seemed to come back from even the worst battles with whatever group he went out with. I realize that I met Henri only once or twice but he made an impression on me that lasts until this day.

Infantrymen in a bomb crater search for snipers firing at them.

I don't know if any of you are familiar with his photographs. They made the front page of Life Magazine in the 60's. You might want to look some of them up, they are in Wikipedia. One I had never seen before was in the book that a brother sent me about photojournalists in Vietnam. You see a soldier dragging a wooden ammunition box up the bank of a river and in the background you see a 40 mm machine gun. I thought, "Gee it was pretty clever of them to set that machine-gun up on a sliver of soil in the middle of the Mekong River." And then you look more closely and you see that the machine-gun is being held up by one great big hand! Some soldier was crossing the river and didn't want to get the machine-gun wet so he was holding it up high over his head and that means the river water was over his head, he was walking on the bottom carrying an M60 machine gun (not one of those dinky AK47's)! This is an incredible photo.

Huet also captured this photo, similar to the one Mike describes above.

Henri's luck ran out in the early 70s – not with a bunch of Marines in a firefight but in a helicopter carrying several photojournalists and a Vietnamese general. The crash site was finally found after the second (i.e American) Vietnam War had been settled. They found small pieces of bone along with the helicopter wreckage. At that point there was no way of determining whose bones had been found and there was a big brouhaha about where to bury them. They were finally interred at the Newsmuseum in Washington, DC, in a small ceremony with about 100 attendees.

Huet took this photo of a chaplain administering last rites for photojournalist Dickey Chapelle as she died from a booby trap explosion.

Every Memorial Day I think about Henri and wonder if there are any people left in France who remember him and his accomplishments. Soon we will probably all be gone and people will have to look them up in Wikipedia.

Recount

J. Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan, explains why, though he does not believe the voting system in Wisconsin was hacked, it makes perfect sense to do a manual recount of the votes there.

For the record, I hope no evidence of hacking or otherwise miscounting is found. I hope they find that the votes were counted correctly. The Trump people just wouldn't be able to handle it otherwise.

Good-bye Public Schools?

Betsy Prince DeVos prepares for her confirmation hearing.

Here's a 2011 article about Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy Prince DeVos, and her husband, Dick DeVos. They have been campaigning for years to end public education in America.

The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.

[snip]

The conservative policy institutes founded beginning in the 1970s get hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy families and foundations to develop and promote free market fundamentalism. More specifically, their goals include privatizing social security, reducing government regulations, thwarting environmental policy, dismantling unions -- and eliminating public schools.

Whatever they may say about giving poor students a leg up, their real priority is nothing short of the total dismantling of our public educational institutions, and they've admitted as much. Cato Institute founder Ed Crane and other conservative think tank leaders have signed the Public Proclamation to Separate School and State, which reads in part that signing on, "Announces to the world your commitment to end involvement by local, state, and federal government from education."

 Only they're not calling it public education:

Dick DeVos also explained to his Heritage Foundation audience that they should no longer use the term public schools, but instead start calling them “government schools.” He noted that the role of wealthy conservatives would have to be obscured. “We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities,” said DeVos, and pointed to the need to “cut across a lot of historic boundaries, be they partisan, ethnic, or otherwise.”

The whole article is worth reading.

Jonathan Pie Explains Why Trump Won

We've met Jonathan Pie before, when he ranted about Brexit.  The British John Stewart?

His language is too rough for a high-class joint like this, but here's the link.

There are Options!

From Saturday Night Live:

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn – Oh, Jeez!

Be sure to read Nicholas Kristof's take on Trump's new team, including our next National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Michael Flynn. It's called Trump Embarrasses Himself and Our Country.

A few clips:

Flynn had a brilliant military career and did an outstanding job in Iraq and Afghanistan. Five years ago, he was widely admired as the best intelligence officer of his generation.

Then President Obama nominated Flynn to become director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he began to unravel. He turned out to be a catastrophic manager. Colin Powell, former secretary of state, explained in hacked emails why Flynn was fired: “abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management.” Powell added that ever since, Flynn has been “right-wing nutty.”

[snip]

Indeed, for an intelligence officer, Flynn seems to have trouble distinguishing truth from falsehood. Earlier this month, he tweeted an obviously fake story claiming that the police had found emails linking Hillary Clinton to sex crimes with children. When he was in government, subordinates had a special name for his delusions: “Flynn facts.”

Another problem is Flynn’s ties to foreign governments. He took money from Russia to attend an event in Moscow, sitting near President Vladimir Putin. He also appears to have taken money from Turkish interests and, without publicly disclosing the money, wrote an op-ed shilling for Turkey.

For his chief of staff, Flynn chose his son, who is a looney on social media, calling President Obama a communist and fascist, tweeting racially insensitive comments and sharing absurd conspiracy theories. [My emphasis]

Scared yet?

Hat Tip to Kevin Drum, who pointed us to Kristoff's column.

The Hamilton Fracas

Since Sempringham readers are, to a person, well-read, informed people, there's no need here to do more than summarize the incident this post will refer to. Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended a performance of Hamilton in New York City. When he entered the theater he was met by boos from the audience. At the conclusion of the play the actor playing Aaron Burr (hmmm) – with the support of the cast and the play's author – read a seemingly respectful statement to him, singling him out in the audience, affirming their hope that he will value diversity.

Whereupon Donald Trump tweeted that the cast should apologize. Whereupon Mike Pence stated he was not offended.

Here at Sempringham we were at first supportive of the Hamilton casts' action. Let's face it: no Trump/Pence fans here. But we were persuaded otherwise by the Chicago Sun-Times' drama critic, Hedy Weiss. In her column this morning, Ms. Weiss writes:

[W]hile I oppose almost everything this new administration stands for (aside from infrastructure repair) and admittedly cast my vote for the electoral loser in the race, I think both the New York audience protests and the emotional, carefully worded speech from the stage aimed at Vice President-elect Mike Pence were mistakes. How or why he went to see “Hamilton” in the first place remains a mystery. But perhaps, had he been allowed to just absorb the message of the musical, he might have been changed, if only in the most minute and imperceptible ways. Now, like a bull reacting to a red cape, any possibility of the show itself for serving as an agent of positive change or a subtle awakening in Pence has been lost forever. A missed opportunity, and a pity.

[Snip]

I think it is for Hamlet, not Hamilton, to have the last words on the whole matter: “The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

Find Hedy Weiss's whole column here.

Addendum, November 23: Be sure to read Uncle Ted's comment, below.