Archive for January, 2023

Gun Violence: A Uniquely American Disease Devouring Our Soul

Thursday, January 26th, 2023

America suffered through 647 mass shootings in 2022, which is just a little better than the worst year on record, 2021, a year in which we saw 692 of them. In the last nine days, three mass shootings happened in California, killing 18 people. Thus far, in the first 26 days of 2023 there have been 40, which is more than any other January on record.

The 40 mass shootings in the the first 26 days of January resulted in 86 deaths. Although any death from gun violence is tragic, deaths from mass shootings make up a small percentage of all gun violence deaths. In 2022, there were more than 44,000 of them, 20,138 if you exclude suicides.  Through the first 26 days of January, there have already been 3,030 gun violence deaths nationally.   Here’s a map from the Gun Violence Archive* showing where all those deaths happened. Remember: It’s only 26 days.

If you extrapolate this for the full year, you’ll project more than 45,000 deaths. Now, mass shootings are not proxies for overall gun violence, but it could be instructive (and scary) to realize January is an historically low mass shooting month (relatively speaking).

How does America react to this continuing carnage? It yawns.

Oh, we hear from the politicians with their “thoughts and prayers” routine and go through the required few hours of television coverage (TV’s Mantra: “If it bleeds, it leads”), but after that we slip back into our desensitized cocoons. Most of the mass shootings go unnoticed. At 1.77 per day, who can keep up?

Beginning in 1959, and as it has every year since, the Gallup organization polled Americans with this question: “Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?”  When Gallup asked that question in 1959, 60% of Americans said “Yes, there should be such a law.” Thirty-two years later, in 1991, the “Yes” group had decreased to 43%, and thirty years after that, in 2021, only 19% of Americans were still saying “Yes.” A whopping 80% now said “No.” Credit the NRA. It has done a magnificent marketing job.

Since 1959, when Gallup also reported 78% of Americans believed laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, the decline in support for banning guns has been inversely proportional to the 63-year steady, linear rise in gun ownership and violence. The result is what we have today. Forty-five percent of all households now own at least one handgun. US gun owners possess 393.3 million weapons, according to a 2018 report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based organization. That is at least 60 million more guns than there are people. It is no surprise gun deaths routinely exceed the number of deaths due to auto accidents.

And it only got worse after Americans went on a gun buying spree beginning in 2020. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which the FBI collects, is a significant indicator of firearms purchases. It is noteworthy that background checks jumped 40% in 2020 from the previous year to 39.7 million checks. The frenzy only cooled slightly to 38.9 million checks in 2021.

Where do all those guns come from? Why, from the 71,600 federally licensed gun dealers operating nationwide, of course. That’s more than 1,400 per state.

It may interest you to know that the proposition reflected in Gallup’s question precisely mirrors the law in the UK. No one is allowed to own a gun except “police and other authorized persons.” Exceptions are made for hunting and target shooting, but these are highly regulated and controlled by government. There is very little handgun violence in the UK. To this, you may say, “Without guns, people will just find another way to kill.” To which I reply, “I’d rather try to outrun a knife than a bullet.”

I, like many others smarter than I, have written about this often. It almost seems as if it’s an annual requirement in which we fulfill Albert Einstein’s (possibly misattributed) definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.”

A University of Washington 2015 study found three million Americans carried a loaded handgun daily; nine million did so at least once a month. Since then, 19 states have passed permitless carry laws, which allow residents to carry concealed handguns in public without a license. There are now 25 states that allow this. If all this weren’t bad enough, only 18 states require “live-fire training” for people carrying concealed firearms.

Is gun violence evenly distributed around the country? Actually, no. It is far more prevalent in red states. These are the states with “stand your ground” statutes and permitless concealed carry laws. Once again, Mississippi leads the way with 28.6 gun violence deaths per 100,000 persons.

Firearm Mortality by State

Compared to the rest of the developed world, every one of our firearm statistics are staggeringly out of whack. As I reported in May of 2022, the US dwarfs the 28 most economically developed countries in the 38-member OECD** in deaths by firearms. Not only is our firearm death rate nearly 25 times higher than our OECD companions, our total homicide rate is eight times higher. Can’t get away from it. We are a violent society.

It’s not much, but there is one ever so tiny glimmer of light invading the darkness of firearm carnage in America. That would be the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, signed into law by President Biden in June, 2022. This is the first major gun reform law in three decades. It includes $750 million in funding for states to improve or enact red flag laws and other crisis intervention programs, $250 million for community-based violence intervention initiatives, and $200 million for improving the national background check system. Millions more will go to school safety, police, and mental health programs.

Gun violence is a cancer eating away the heart and soul of America. It is amazing to realize that, despite the never-ending bloodbath, the country has managed to survive, prosper, thrive, and lead the world in so many areas.

Amazing, indeed.

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*The Gun Violence Archive is a nonprofit research group that tracks shootings and their characteristics in the United States. It defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrator(s), are shot in one location at roughly the same time.

**The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, founded by the US and it allies shortly after the close of the Second World War. Its members are the most economically developed countries.

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis Builds His Educational Petrie Dish

Tuesday, January 24th, 2023

I know it’s masochistic, but I couldn’t help it. I found myself thinking about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his all-out assault on education, specifically education about racism, Wokism (if that’s a word), the LGBTQ+ community, and anything else he doesn’t agree with.

I began my long and winding journey down the DeSantis rabbit hole when I learned that yesterday was the day in 1964 when South Dakota became the deciding and 38th state to ratify the 24th amendment to the US Constitution.

The 24th Amendment prohibits making the right to vote conditional on paying a poll tax, or any other kind of tax. It reads:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The 24th Amendment applied to Presidential and Congressional elections. Two years later, in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes for any level of elections were unconstitutional. It said these violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Seven states never held a vote to ratify the Amendment. They are Wyoming, Arizona, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia. One state voted to reject the Amendment’s approval altogether. That was Mississippi. Mississippi again. The state seems to rejoice in being the bottom of the country’s bird cage.

Four states, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama and Texas, waited years to ratify the Amendment, with Texas being the last, in 2009.

If you don’t count Virginia, which enacted a poll tax in 1876, but repealed it six years later in 1882, Florida was the first state to make a poll tax a condition of voting, enacting the legislation in 1885. It became effective in 1889. In 1941, 52 years later, Florida repealed its poll tax.

Florida did not repeal the poll tax because its legislators were conscience-stricken and knew they had to do the right thing. No. The state repealed the tax because too many white legislative candidates (they were all white) were buying votes by paying the tax for poor black and white constituents (disproportionately black, of course) who couldn’t afford it themselves. In essence, the tax was no longer doing what it was intended to do: suppress black votes.

Florida had two other legislatively approved ways to suppress black voting. The first was the Literacy test. According to the Tampa Bay Times:

In 1915, the Legislature enacted a literacy test along with a companion grandfather clause. The clause, common throughout the South, declared that any person who had a relative who voted prior to a certain date did not have to take the test.

According to the proposed Florida law, if you had a relative who was eligible to vote on Jan. 1, 1867, you were exempt from taking the test. Since no black Floridian was voting prior to that date, all of them had to pass the test.

Blacks were frequently asked more technical and legal questions than whites. When one black applicant was asked what “habeas corpus” meant, he responded: “Habeas corpus means this black man ain’t gonna register today.”

The final way the legislature held down, disenfranchised, the black vote in Florida was by means of the Criminal Disenfranchisement Law. This law, first enacted in 1868, reenacted in 1968, and in effect even today, bars anyone with a felony conviction from ever voting. Florida is one of seven states that still retain this disenfranchisement statute, which disproportionately affects blacks.*

Disproportionate imprisonment of blacks is not something peculiar to Florida. Nationwide, according to Bureau of Justice data, 18 and 19-year-old black men are 12.4 times more likely to be imprisoned than their white peers. And it doesn’t get much better as blacks age, as the chart below shows.

With this as background (and here are 24 more charts showing pervasive racism directed at blacks), Governor DeSantis insists there is no such thing as institutional racism, especially in Florida. And he’s gone to great lengths to make sure anyone in Florida who suggests otherwise will require divine intervention to escape punishment.

Ask Andrew Warren. Last August, DeSantis suspended Warren, the twice-elected Hillsborough County State Attorney, saying he violated his oath of office and has been soft on crime (Remarkably, Florida’s Governor has the legislative authority to do this). What had Warren done? Nothing, except for signing a group statement with other prosecutors saying “we decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions.” In other words, Warren was suspended, not for something he did, but for something he said he might do at some time in the future.

Warren sued to get his job back. Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that, although DeSantis violated the Florida Constitution and the First Amendment, he lacked the power to reinstate Warren. In his 53-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, while grudgingly dismissing the case, excoriated DeSantis and his staff for attacking Warren for purely political reasons. Nonetheless, DeSantis won, which is usually the way things work in Florida.

And now, as we are smack dab in the second day of “Florida Literacy Week,” comes the Florida Department of Education’s new rules to enforce the Governor’s Parental Rights In Education Act, known by critics as “Don’t Say Gay” or the Stop WOKE Act and Florida law 1467, the Curriculum Transparency Law, which requires school districts to be transparent in the selection of instructional materials and library and reading materials.

Taken together, these two statutes limit what teachers can teach and what their students can read.

The two statutes are supposed to apply to what goes on in the classroom. Consequently, in federal court filings, lawyers representing DeSantis insist  the statutes do not apply to library books. In practice the opposite is true. A recent 23-slide librarian training program, approved by the Florida Department of Education, asserts: “There is some overlap between the selection criteria for instructional and library materials.” One slide says that library books and teacher instructional materials cannot include “unsolicited theories that may lead to student indoctrination.”

Good luck trying to understand what an “unsolicited theory” is, or what “student indoctrination” means. Indoctrination into what?

The rules are confusing for librarians, but they’re even murkier for classroom teachers, many of whom have created little classroom libraries over the years of their teaching. The Department of Education’s new rules require “media specialists” to vet every one of the non-curriculum  books teachers may have in their classrooms, as well as all the books in the school libraries. In Florida, some school librarians earn “media specialist certificates.” These are the “media specialists” tasked with vetting all the books in Florida’s 4,202 K-12 public schools. In Popular Information, Judd Legum reports that Kevin Chapman, the Chief of Staff for the Manatee County School District, told him that County principals told teachers last week they are subject to a third-class felony charge if unvetted books in their classrooms are deemed to violate the prohibitions contained in either of the two statutes.

Needless to say, those little classroom libraries are disappearing faster than the small piece of meat I dropped on the kitchen floor this morning right in front of my 80-pound dog, Lancelot (so named because he’s not Lance-a-little).

Florida law 1467 on Curriculum Transparency is particularly pernicious, because it prohibits teachers from exercising their own educated judgement regarding what is appropriate for their particular students. For Florida’s teachers, this is scary stuff. They are going to have to be very careful with what they say, or even suggest, in their classrooms.

Some teachers, perhaps many, will refuse to give up their intellectual freedom. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. As George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

Nevertheless, it seems Governor Ron DeSantis has achieved in Florida what all autocrats crave. He has brazenly fastened iron bonds on what the next and future generations of Floridians are allowed to know. To my mind, he has also underestimated the youth of his state whose intelligence, curiosity, global involvement, and just plain desire to know and learn cannot and will not be inhibited by anything an autocratic governor, whose overarching goal in life is to rule the world, will ever do.

My money’s on the kids.

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*Angela Behrens, Christopher Uggen, and Jeff Manza, Ballot Manipulation and the “Menace of Negro Domination”: Racial Threat and Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 1850-2002, 109 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 559 (2003).

 

 

Martin Luther King—Sharing The Spotlight With Confederate “Heroes”

Tuesday, January 17th, 2023

Yesterday, the city of Boston celebrated Martin Luther King day as no other city in the nation could. On Boston Common, the oldest public park in America, Mayor Michelle Wu and other leaders unveiled The Embrace, Hank Willis Thomas’s five-years-in-the-making monument to Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King.* 

The huge bronze hug is 38,000 pounds and sits 22 feet high and 40 feet wide. Boston’s newest monument is inspired by a photo of the Kings hugging after Martin won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The monument sits in an open circle with bench seating in the middle of Boston Common within another memorial, the new 1965 Freedom Plaza, which honors Boston civil rights activists.

The Kings had met as students in Boston and were married there in 1953. Among other things, the monument signifies the linkage between them in the civil rights struggles to which they each committed their lives. Coretta Scott King, in addition to being the wife of MLK, was also an artist, an activist, and a driving force who was by his side  doing the work with him, which she carried on after he was assassinated. She founded the King Memorial Center and never gave up fighting for a federal holiday honoring King’s legacy. Mrs. King’s efforts resulted in the federal holiday we now celebrate, when President Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into law in 1983; it was first observed three years later on January 20, 1986. In 1995, Congress designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day as the first and only federal holiday observed as a National Day of Service. Congress charged the Corporation for National and Community Service with leading this national effort.

All 50 states now recognize Martin Luther King day as a state holiday, South Carolina being the last in 2000. But when that happened, the South Carolina legislature also voted to create Confederate Memorial Day, which would be celebrated on the same day we honor King. And South Carolina is not alone. As Shoshana Gordon, Jacque Schrag and Russell Contreras report in AXIOS, “Ten states — all in the South — observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day plus at least one Confederate holiday.” This from the AXIOS report:

Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas all have at least one day commemorating the Confederacy on other days of the year.

Mississippi and Alabama each celebrate a total of three Confederate holidays every year — Robert E. Lee Day, Confederate Memorial Day and Jefferson Davis’ Birthday — all paid holidays for state employees.

Many lawmakers in the ten states believe it is wrong to celebrate the confederate holidays, but nobody seems to want to propose legislation to repeal any of them. Now why would that be? Here is a map showing the states honoring the confederacy:

Of particular note is Tennessee with its three days honoring the confederacy. Why? Because one of them is Nathan Bedford Forrest Day (first observed in 1921). In honoring the confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s (R) 2019 proclamation saluted a “recognized military figure in American history” and a “native Tennessean.”

In these ten states Martin Luther King is lumped in with slaveholders, secessionists and murderers. The whole thing just oozes a terrible irony, especially when you consider how King’s life ended―and where―Memphis, Tennessee.

Those states aren’t the only places where Dr. King gets little respect. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI considered King “the most dangerous man in America” and conducted decades-long surveillance of him, surveillance encompassing more than 300,000 pages of documents.

Film director Sam Pollard chronicles Hoover’s efforts in his 2020 documentary, MLK/FBI. According to Pollard’s research and as reported on NPR:

The FBI campaign against King began with wiretaps, but quickly ballooned. When wiretaps revealed that King was having extramarital affairs, the FBI shifted their focus to uncover all evidence of his infidelity by bugging and taping him in his hotel rooms and by paying informants to spy on him. Eventually, the FBI penned and sent King an anonymous letter, along with some of their tapes, suggesting that he should kill himself.

Yes, like all of us walking God’s green earth, Martin Luther King had feet of clay. But he also had a heart as big as Texas and a passionate, life-long commitment to freeing his people from the chains of racism, a struggle that continues to this day, 163 years after the civil war’s first shot.

Were he alive today, King would probably be the first to acknowledge the tremendous strides made in the long journey for true equality in civil rights. He would also be the first to acknowledge how far away the last mile really is.

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*The Embrace has not won instant acclaim from everyone. In fact, there has been quite a bit of snarky criticism, some even calling the artwork “obscene.” It all reminds me of another monument, a memorial dedicated in late 1982—Maya Lin‘s minimalist Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. When it first opened to the public, politicians, celebrities, regular citizens and, most important, Vietnam Veterans, lined up to criticize it. It became known as “the black gash of shame.” Well, 42 years later, veterans go to the Wall and weep as they see the names of their fallen comrades. It is embraced by all, as will The Embrace be more and more as time goes by.

Big Oil’s 50-Year Deception Revealed. It Is “Breathtaking.”

Friday, January 13th, 2023

On 4 February 1996, Mike Wallace’s whistleblower interview of Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, former Director of Research for tobacco company Brown & Williamson, aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes. That interview began the destruction of what had been the myth of the invincibility of big tobacco’s power. Out of its fear of the epic lawsuit big tobacco could bring, CBS  refused to air the interview for several months. When it did air in February, the House of Tobacco began to crumble. Three years later, Russell Crowe, Al Pacino and Christopher Plummer would star in the Academy Award-winning movie that told the tale, The Insider, with Crowe, as Wigand, winning Best Actor.

Wigand suffered mightily  for his outing of big tobacco’s big secret: That nicotine is addictive, and a cigarette is, in his words, “a nicotine delivery device.” Of course, many people were decrying the evils of cigarettes during the 1990s, but they did not have Dr. Wigand’s inside knowledge. At the time of his 60 Minutes interview, 45.8 million Americans, nearly 26% of the US population, smoked, according to the CDC; today, the percentage has dropped to 12.5%.  Between 10% and 20% of smokers develop lung cancer. Jeffrey Wigand’s heroism has saved a lot of lives.

The current big worldwide battle is over Climate Change, and the science is finally winning. But, although scientists have been working in a Herculean effort to educate the countries of the world to get them to move collectively before time runs out on reversing the warming, there’s no Jeffrey Wigand in this fight.  This battle is not with Big Tobacco, but rather with Big Oil, and today, researchers from Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, writing in Science, catalogue in exquisite detail oil giant Exxon Mobile’s monumental 50-year coverup of its knowledge that human-induced climate change has been making the world warmer all along.

The new research has found Exxon privately “predicted global warming correctly and skilfully” only to then spend decades publicly attacking such science in order to protect its core business.

This story comes in three parts. First, in 2015, investigative journalists discovered internal company documents and research papers that established Exxon knew of the dangers of global warming from at least the 1970s. Additional documents then emerged showing that the industry’s largest trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, along with other oil industry companies knew of the risk even earlier, from around the 1950s. However, the industry forcefully and with great skill mobilized to attack the science to prevent action to reduce the use of fossil fuels.

But today’s publication in Science discloses and makes clear that Exxon’s scientists, not only knew about their industry’s contributions to global warming, but also were uncannily accurate in their projections from the 1970s onwards, predicting an upward curve of global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions that is close to matching what actually occurred as the world heated up at a pace not seen in millions of years.

Lest you doubt the thoroughness of the researchers, here’s how they did it:

We analyzed 32 internal documents produced in-house by ExxonMobil scientists and managers between 1977 and 2002, and 72 peer-reviewed scientific publications authored or coauthored by ExxonMobil scientists between 1982 and 2014. The internal documents were collated from public archives provided by ExxonMobil Corp (28), InsideClimate News (29), and Climate Investigations Center (30). The peer-reviewed publications were obtained by identifying all peer-reviewed documents among ExxonMobil Corp’s lists of “Contributed Publications,” except for three articles discovered independently during our research (31) [see supplementary materials (SM) section S2 for details on the assembly of the corpus]. These constitute all publicly available internal ExxonMobil documents concerning anthropogenic global warming of which we are aware, and all ExxonMobil peer-reviewed publications concerning global warming disclosed by the company.

Lead author Geoffrey Supran, who characterized the team’s findings as “breathtaking,” said, “This really does sum up what Exxon knew, years before many of us were born.”

Chapter three of this saga began relatively recently and is ongoing. In it, the fossil fuel industry acknowledges publicly the now undeniable (even by it) dangers of global warming and vows to do all in its power to reverse what is rapidly becoming irreversible.

Here are three pieces of data to show the depth of the hole we’ve dug:

  • Burning fossil fuels accounted for 74 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.
  • The fossil fuel industry receives at least $20 billion in direct federal subsidies.
  • In 2020, renewable energy accounted for about 20 percent of U.S. electricity generation, and that share is expected to continue to grow. Seventy-four percent versus 20%. We have a long way to go.

In a telling irony, a gentleman by the name of Rex Tillerson was Exxon Mobil’s CEO from 2006 until 2017, when he retired to become Donald Trump’s first Secretary of State. I doubt we’ll have an academy award-winning film showing Tillerson’s heroic efforts to unleash the truth of global warming.

But suppose someone had done that, say one of the scientists who correctly predicted the coming debacle. Imagine what would have happened if Big Oils’ Big Lie had been outed a la Wigand 30 years earlier. Imagine if the US and the rest of the world had had a chance to begin reducing fossil fuels and going green so much earlier. Imagine if we heeded Carl Sagan’s warning in his 1985 testimony to the US Congress that climate change and human-induced global warming was a “real phenomenon.” And he had data to prove it.

If that had happened, poor Kermit the Frog would never have had to sing, “It’s not easy being green.” 

___________________

For those interested in diving into the weeds, here are three graphs from the Science paper illustrating how closely Exxon’s predictions matched reality. In the third one, global temperatures are charted over the last 150,000 years. I’ve highlighted where we are today.

Historically observed temperature change (red) and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (blue) over time, compared against global warming projections reported by ExxonMobil

(A) “Proprietary” 1982 Exxon-modeled projections.
(B) Summary of projections in seven internal company memos and five peer-reviewed publications between 1977 and 2003 (gray lines).
(C) A 1977 internally reported graph of the global warming “effect of CO2 on an interglacial scale.” (A) and (B) display averaged historical temperature observations, whereas the historical temperature record in (C) is a smoothed-Earth system model simulation of the last 150,000 years.

Mike Pence And His Book Deal Shenanigans

Wednesday, January 11th, 2023

There are so many compelling and thought provoking things happening every day that it’s ridiculously easy to miss a few you’d rather have known about. Today, I see my job as helping you avoid that unfortunate circumstance. Read on and be enlightened.

Question: How many books must an author sell in order to make the New York Times Bestseller List?

Answer: A minimum of 5000 book sales in a single week across diverse retailers and from multiple geographic locations.

There are ways to manipulate sales, chief among them bulk sales and authors buying their own books. Wikipedia has a nice synopsis of sales manipulation:

Manipulation by authors and publishers. In 1956, author Jean Shepherd created the fake novel I, Libertine to illustrate how easy it was to manipulate the best-seller lists based on demand, as well as sales. Fans of Shepherd’s radio show planted references to the book and author so widely that demand for the book led to claims of it being on the Times list. Author Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls) attempted to “butter-up” Times-reporting booksellers and personally bought large quantities of her own book. Author Wayne Dyer (Your Erroneous Zones) purchased thousands of copies of his own book. Al Neuharth (Confessions of an S. O. B.), former head of Gannett Company, had his Gannett Foundation buy two thousand copies of his own autobiography. In 1995, authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema spent $200,000 to buy ten thousand copies of The Discipline of Market Leaders from dozens of bookstores. Although they denied any wrongdoing, the book spent 15 weeks on the list. As a result of this scandal the Times began placing a dagger symbol next to any title for which bookstores reported bulk orders. However, daggers do not always appear; for example Tony Hsieh‘s Delivering Happiness was known to have been manipulated with bulk orders but didn’t have a dagger.

Enter stage right former Vice President Mike Pence. In 2021, CNN reported the ex-VP had signed a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster worth $3 million to $4 million, a pay day few, if any, Trump alums will get, especially if they did not resign immediately after the 6 January insurrection. Also not getting book deals are members of Congress who voted not to certify the 2020 presidential elections. All these people are damaged goods in the publishing world. Nothing personal; publishing is a business.

To fulfill the first half of his deal, Pence recently released So Help Me God. Now, it is assumed by everyone masochistic enough to follow the political scene that Pence aspires to run for President in 2024 (he also aspires to win) and that his book lays a marker down, a sort of sword in the sand. But how to get people to read it (Another question: How to get them to believe it?)? Although Pence is known to be deeply religious (in his own way) his book isn’t exactly as captivating as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which spent 136 weeks on the Times Bestseller List.

The way out of this dilemma is to join the manipulators. And that’s what Mr. Pence did. As reported by Zach Everson, writing for Forbes, on 9 November 2022, Pence’s PAC, the Great America Committee, paid Books on Call NYC $91,000 for what the PAC described as “collateral materials,” according to a report the PAC filed in December with the Federal Election Commission. A spokesperson for Pence confirmed the money went to buy the book at $21.78 per copy, 4,178 of them to be precise, leaving friends and family only having to buy another 822 to make the Bestseller list. Sort of reminds me of Donald Trump in the early 1990s masquerading as fictional publicist John Miller (sometimes John Barron) and calling reporters to let them know what a brilliant and wonderful person his employer Donald Trump was.

Because Pence was not yet an official candidate for the 2024 election, it was legal for his PAC to do this.

So Help Me God debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times’ best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction and remained there for six weeks. The Times says when retailers report bulk orders of a book a dagger marking is supposed to appear beside the book’s name on the List. Inexplicably, no dagger ever appeared next to So Help Me God.

If you’re interested in being able to talk about So Help Me God without having to actually read it, you can find a number of reviews all in one place. The general verdict from all of them: Although the book is “well-written and well-paced,” (so says the Wall Street Journal), once again Pence is all things to all people. Whenever he writes something in So Help Me God, you can be sure it will be followed by, “On the other hand…”

I know it’s not charitable, but Mr. Pence has always reminded me of a cross between the David Copperfield’s unctuous Uriah Heep and a mortician describing his casket collection to the relatives of the dearly departed.

“Autobiography,” George Orwell once wrote, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful…since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” The defeats Pence documents in So Help Me God are the ones that make him look good.

One thing Pence doesn’t talk about in the book is his brother Greg, a member of the House of Representatives from Indiana’s 6th congressional district since 2019. That’s the seat brother Mike held for 12 years. On the day of the insurrection, after the madding crowd had erected a gallows outside the Capitol Building and were now marching through the halls looking for brother Mike and screaming, “Hang Mike Pence,” Greg was with his brother and family. The Secret Service evacuated him with the Vice President.

Hours after emerging from a secure location, Mike Pence gaveled the joint session of Congress back in session and presided over the certification of the election, despite Trump’s demands. His finest hour. The one the history books will mention.

Greg Pence, meanwhile, joined 146 other Republican election-denying members of Congress who sided with Trump and cast a vote rejecting the outcome in Pennsylvania, the state that clinched the election for Biden.

You won’t find any of that in So Help Me God.

 

 

 

 

Once More Unto The Mayhem

Monday, January 9th, 2023

I don’t know how you welcomed in the month of December, 2022, the month ending a year most were happy to put behind them, but I spent the early morning hours of the 1st of December undergoing a total anatomical replacement of my right shoulder. Since then, I’ve been living 24/7 in the Donjoy super-duper Ultra-Pro Sling (except for showering, thank you very much). Tennis did this to me. Specifically, hitting nearly one million various forms of overheads. Serves, put-aways, you name it. Then there’s the Rafael Nadal buggy-whip topspin forehand. That certainly didn’t help. What we sow, we reap.

But now, nearly six weeks later, although I’m still not allowed to lift even a coffee cup, I do seem able to traverse a computer keyboard (as long as it’s in my lap). So, time to return to the fray.

And what a fray it’s been, culminating in House Republicans sending white smoke up the chimney early Saturday morning after 15 Freedom Caucus-driven votes over four tumultuous days to elect a Speaker for the 118th Congress. Let’s begin there.

Habemus Ducem! Sed infirmus est.
We have a Leader, but he’s wounded.

Throughout history, Populist political movements have appeared with regularity, most often in times of economic hardship when, at the instigation of fire and brimstone rabble rousers, people perceive their government working against them rather than for them.  America has been no exception. Consider the proto-populist Greenback and Granger movements in the 1860s and ’70s, William Jennings Bryan’s Populist Party in the 1890s and Louisiana politician Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth program during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then there were the Anarchist and Socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th century. Historically, there’s nothing new about the Freedom Caucus; it’s just new to us.

That said, how did we get to this political moment, the ascendency of the Republican Party’s Freedom Caucus, a 54-member disruptive group within the House of Representatives? Did it begin in the early 1970s with the corruption of the Nixon Administration’s Watergate scandal? Or maybe it began in 1992 with Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America? Or perhaps they spawned on 19 February 2009, when Rick Santelli, a commentator on the business-news network CNBC, referenced the Boston Tea Party (1773) in his response to President Barack Obama’s mortgage relief plan during the Great Recession?

More likely, the Freedom Caucus gradually grew out of all those things and found its apotheosis in the bile falling from the mouth of Donald Trump, who continues to cling, as skin clings to a grape, to his hatred for anything or anyone not sufficiently worshipful.

However it began, they’re here now, and 20 of them held government hostage last week while they extorted concession after concession from now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who ultimately prevailed when he had nothing more to give. After it was all over, one of their ringleaders, Florida’s Matt Gaetz, told the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, “I ran out of things I could even imagine to ask for.”

Speaker McCarthy, after he had finished selling what remained of his soul, took the gavel from Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffreys, and proudly announced to the world he had proven he would “never give up.” Maybe not give up, but sure as shootin’ give in. He’s now the quintessential hollow man.

And what about these House Disruptors? What they seem to want, crave even, is power, but to what end? They’re long on cutting spending, but short on good governance.  It looks as if they’ve come to Washington, a place they deride, for the sole purpose of feeding red meat to their base back in Wherever, USA. The Republican Party created the Freedom Caucus, an animal with four back feet, each pointed in a different direction. What we sow, we reap.

Look closely at the Freedom Caucus. Try to find one coherent, let alone intelligent, proposal to do anything vaguely related to public service. You’ll be looking a long time. Every one of these characters is a one-trick pony, and the pony limps. They deftly avoid offering up their own proposals, as a helmsman avoids rocks. Why? Because if they did, they’d have to defend them.

They’re Kevin McCarthy’s problem now. Will he still wield the gavel six months from now? Or will the US House more closely resemble Animal House, food fights and all? Tonight’s vote on the Rules Package McCarthy and this Mephistopheles agreed to will provide the first opportunity to see whether adults have entered the room.

Government will certainly be difficult for a while, but, as has happened so many times in our nation’s journey, these people and their corrosive vitriol will someday fade into history’s dust when better people with good ideas emerge, as surely they will.

However, it’s hard to imagine that happening in this 118th Congress.

What we sow, we reap.