Today's Must-Read: A Twofer

First, from Politico:

Views on how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic have become increasingly polarized, yet another political issue that for many culture war combatants is filtered through an ideological lens. The left has been almost uniformly — and loudly — in favor of sacrificing many personal liberties in exchange for containing the virus’ spread. The right has been divided, but the vocal activist wing of conservatism that has enormous influence on social media and Fox News, has been far more willing to attack the various infringements on where people can go and what they have to wear. . . .

For progressives, masks have become a sign that you take the pandemic seriously and are willing to make a personal sacrifice to save lives. Prominent people who don’t wear them are shamed and dragged on Twitter by lefty accounts. On the right, where the mask is often seen as the symbol of a purported overreaction to the coronavirus, mask promotion is a target of ridicule, a sign that in a deeply polarized America almost anything can be politicized and turned into a token of tribal affiliation.

Hide your irony meter:

Laura Ingraham warned that “social control over large populations is achieved through fear and intimidation and suppression of free thought” and “conditioning the public through propaganda is also key, new dogmas replace good old common sense.”

This from Fox's reigning Nazi Barbie, who has certainly done her share to effect just what she attributes to the left. It's called "projection".

Via Digby.

And from Digby herself:

Between McConnell making it clear he wants business to be given a pass on liability for failing to protect their workers if the blue states want to avoid bankruptcy and Trump demanding that the states succumb to his unhumane immigration policies if they want any federal aid, I think we are officially no longer one country.

This is now America, which is living under the US Constitution and Trumplandia, living under Dear Leader. Unfortunately Trumplandia, for the moment has the purse strings. It’s very important that America wins next November.

Ah, yes -- President Quid-Pro-Quo, who, as usual, is living in his own fantasy: It's not only blue states that are going to suffer:

Honestly, I think they’ll happily let people in their own states suffer if it means breaking public employee unions and their pensions. They aren’t even thinking about the rmifications. They just see an opportunity to advance their agenda and they’re going for it.

That's been the Republican party ever since Reagan -- "By any means necessary" might as well be their official motto. In that regard, I recommend this post by Tom Sullivan (OK, so it's a three-fer):

Watching workers go back to their jobs in life-threatening conditions to serve the economy punctuates the degree to which American myths are killing us. If the behavior of the acting president’s base seems cultish, it is because cultish behavior permeates the culture. A “deep sickness,” Digby called it the other day.

I frequently refer to the Midas cult, those of a certain economic class who view every human interaction as a potential for-profit transaction, who behave as though anything that might be turned into gold (profit) should be, especially not-for-profit public services such as education. For the Midas cult, anything less than private percentage off the top is a crime against capitalism.

The GOP has been working toward a return to the Gilded Age since forever -- after all, the billionaires own the party, and they are motivated by greed. I have to wonder what's missing in someone's makeup if they think they need five vacation homes or an elevator for their cars. There's something really wrong with these people.

Outrage du Jour

It occurs to me that with the Trump regime in place, I could make that an actual department on this blog. The problem would be deciding which one to highlight.

This one, however, deserves attention:

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is pushing ahead with the sale of oil and gas leases on land outside of Chaco Culture National Historical Park and other sites revered by Native American tribes, The Associated Press reported.

The latest listing — which quietly appeared on the BLM website not long after the government reopened after the shutdown — comes about a year after then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke postponed a lease sale in the Greater Chaco Region in response to intense public pressure over cultural and environmental concerns.

BLM will open a protest period for comments from Feb. 11 through Feb. 20 for a sale scheduled for March 28, according to the agency's notice. More than 50 parcels in New Mexico and Oklahoma will be on the auction block.

They will keep at it until they manage to do it. And it's not only the cultural and historical significance of the site: we're talking about an extremely fragile environment, in an area that is not so far away from the earthquake-prone West Coast -- and we know fracking contributes to earthquakes, or actually is a cause. I really have to wonder what kind of influence is at work here. Of course, since the GOP is working very hard to institute an oligarchy, this may just be the new normal.

In case you're not familiar with Chaco Canyon:

It happens to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well.

With thanks to commenter JCF at Joe.My.God.

Today in Disgusting People: If Ya Got It, Flaunt It

This pretty much speaks for itself:

Billionaire Ken Griffin, who is becoming almost as known for his prodigious purchases as he is for his investment acumen, has closed on a New York penthouse for roughly $238 million. The deal sets a record for the highest-priced home ever sold in the U.S. The purchase is the latest in a string of record-breaking acquisitions by the Citadel hedge fund founder. Earlier this year, Mr. Griffin bought several floors of a Chicago condominium for $58.75 million, setting a record for the most expensive home ever bought in that city.

He snapped up a penthouse in Miami Beach’s Faena House in 2015 for $60 million, setting the record for a Miami condo. Since 2012, Mr. Griffin has spent close to $250 million assembling land to build a mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., according to public records. And earlier this month, he acquired a London home for about $122 million in one of the priciest deals ever done in that city, according to people familiar with that deal.

There are approximately 400,000 homeless people in this country, including about 40,000 veterans.

Need I say more?

Footnote: For a number of years I worked closely with a woman who was, to put it bluntly, rich. I also knew a number of Chicago's wealthiest people, all of whom were actively involved in various charitable organizations. For the most part, they held one view in common: The world had been good to them, so it was only right that they give something back.

Too many of the rich don't seen to believe that.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Except maybe for an instant replay of Deepwater Horizon:

Regulators in the Trump administration are proposing to roll back safety measures put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a revision that would reduce the role of government in offshore oil production and return more responsibility to private companies.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which regulates offshore oil and gas drilling, estimates its proposed changes could save the industry [CLG8, -0.58%] more than $900 million over the next 10 years and reverse some risk-reduction measures the industry considered burdensome.

Because, of course, it's all about giving the industry what it wants.

And the cherry on top:

It also would strike a provision requiring third-party inspectors of critical equipment — like the blowout preventer that failed in the Deepwater Horizon case — be certified by BSEE.

Remember when there used to be a fishing industry in the Gulf?

And of course, they're going to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling -- like the Arctic isn't having enough problems already.

Today's Must-Read: The Ruling Class

Here's a good example of our betters:

The JCs' preferred narrative has worked its way so deeply into the public consciousness that Americans elected an arrogant, narcissistic, supposed billionaire as president one year ago. For who better to run a government that's not a business as though it were? Oddly enough, he's proven as superior at running a government as Facebook proved at sniffing out political ads purchased with rubles.

Like many plutocrats, he reacts badly to not getting his way and the deference royalty wealth demands.

The New York Times reported this week that another of the president's fraternity killed off his own business rather than treat employees as respected partners:

A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.

On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.

Digital media is a tough business, to be sure. Still, Ricketts' approach to to his employees was familiarly authoritarian. He wrote before the vote, “As long as it’s my money that’s paying for everything, I intend to be the one making the decisions about the direction of the business.” When he couldn't get his way, he threw a tantrum and broke his toy.

And for sheer pettiness, you can't beat this:

One week after the New York team unionized, Mr. Ricketts shut it all down. He did not try to sell the company to someone else. Instead of bargaining with 27 unionized employees in New York City, he chose to lay off 115 people across America. And, as a final thumb in the eye, he initially pulled the entire site’s archives down (they are now back up), so his newly unemployed workers lost access to their published work.

The "JCs", in case you were wondering, are the "job creators" -- you know, the ones who are creating jobs in China, Vietnam, Mexico, the Philippines, and lately, Ethiopia (making shoes for "women who work," because labor costs in China are too high).

That's the way they've created an environment in which they can get away with crap like this: those in the U.S. who actually have jobs are rightfully reluctant to rock the boat, especially since more and more states have become "right to work" (which means "employers' right to fire at will"). You see what happens when workers try to protect themselves. The owners want another Gilded Age, and to hell with workers' rights, child labor laws, workplace safety laws, and all this other crap that they don't need.

And please note, it's not all just greed, although that's a big part of it. It's power and control -- that's what they want, that's what they've always wanted.

And the Republicans are more than willing to give it to them -- they know who owns them.

A footnote: don't let anyone tell you that the 1% are creating the wealth of this country: they're not. They're appropriating the wealth created by their employees.

Today's Must-Read: More Than You Wanted to Know About Keystone XL

Aksarbent has very kindly pulled it all together:

Donald Trump has given TransCanada a permit denied it by President Obama for its Keystone XL pipeline, an extension to Keystone 1, which leaked 12-14 times in its first year of operation. The pipeline, touted as a guarantee of energy independence for the U.S., will actually raise oil prices in the Midwest, according to TransCanada's own internal documents.

It goes on. And gets worse. Much worse: Basically, everything we've been told by TransCanada and the Trump regime is bullshit.

Today's Must-Read: A Case Study

The case study, in this instance, is the press and its coverage of politics.

Paul Krugman leads into this by disassembling Paul Ryan very neatly in this column:

Many people are horrified, and rightly so, by what passes for leadership in today’s Washington. And it’s important to keep the horror of our political situation up front, to keep highlighting the lies, the cruelty, the bad judgment. We must never normalize the state we’re in.

At the same time, however, we should be asking ourselves how the people running our government came to wield such power. How, in particular, did a man whose fraudulence, lack of concern for those he claims to care about and lack of policy coherence should have been obvious to everyone nonetheless manage to win over so many gullible souls?

No, this isn’t a column about whatshisname, the guy on Twitter, who’s getting plenty of attention. It’s about Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House.

I’m writing this column without knowing the legislative fate of the American Health Care Act, Mr. Ryan’s proposed Obamacare replacement. Whatever happens in the House and the Senate, however, there’s no question that the A.H.C.A. is one of the worst bills ever presented to Congress.

And if you're asking yourself how such an empty suit got to be Speaker of the House, Krugman has an answer:

You see, until very recently both news coverage and political punditry were dominated by the convention of “balance.” This meant, in particular, that when it came to policy debates one was always supposed to present both sides as having equally well-founded arguments. And this in turn meant that it was necessary to point to serious, honest, knowledgeable proponents of conservative positions.

Enter Mr. Ryan, who isn’t actually a serious, honest policy expert, but plays one on TV. He rolls up his sleeves! He uses PowerPoint! He must be the real deal! So that became the media’s narrative. And media adulation, more than anything else, propelled him to his current position.

It's fairly short. Read it.

Via RawStory.

You Start to Go Numb

And then something like this pops up. From Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

In addition to the House ethics fiasco and Iowa Republican Rep. Steve. King's attempt to encroach on the Supreme Court's turf, on Tuesday a House Republican introduced a rule to make it easier for the United States to rid itself of public lands We the People own. Think Progress reported:

A new rule, written by House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT), establishes as fact that any legislation to dispose of public lands and natural resources would cost taxpayers exactly $0. This paves the way for the new Congress to get rid of vast swaths of public lands — all at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Some detail on the mechanics from Brody Levesque at NCRM:

The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed a rules change this past week by a vote of 234 to 193, that would allow Congress the ability to essentially give away federal lands and buildings for free. The new rule, authored by GOP Rep. Robert Bishop of Utah, Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, codifies that any legislation to dispose of federal land and natural resources would have a net sum zero cost to taxpayers. As the rule applies only to the House legislative rules, it is not subject to approval by the Senate or a presidential signature and is effective immediately. . . .

Since the House is required to account for any cost associated with any legislation it considers under Congressional Budget Office accounting rules and guidelines, legislation put forward now shall skip several steps in the normal legislative process, coming up for a vote without any discussion of the costs and benefits. This means that the House does not need to render an assessment or cost analysis of estimated financial losses resulting in legislation giving away public lands or buildings.

They're not wasting any time. The Bundys must be wetting their paints in glee. Wait until they find out that it's not for them:

The Wilderness Society said "this move paves the way for a wholesale giveaway of our American hunting, fishing and camping lands that belong to us all. Make no mistake, the giveaway is for the benefit of the drilling and mining interests that have a lock-grip on Congress and the rest of Washington."

(And just in case there's any doubt in your mind as to who the intended beneficiaries are:

According to the advocacy and activist group Oil Change International which tracks campaign contribution monies from fossil fuel corporations and the coal industry via the group's Dirty Energy Money web project, since 1999 Congressman Bishop has accepted campaign funds and contributions of more than $452,610 dollars from oil, gas and coal interests. Figures collected by Oil Change International show that greater than ten percent of that figure has come from the coal-friendly National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which has led the fight against the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan. Oil giants Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and Tesoro are also listed among Bishop's top campaign contributors.

When I was a kid, every summer we'd load up the car with our tent and camping gear and head west. One year, when my dad and mom were both between jobs, we did a grand tour: through the Badlands on our way west, then down to visit my uncle in Colorado, then up through Rocky Mountain National Park on our way to Yellowstone (you get no sense of how huge bison are from pictures -- you have to be standing a dozen yards away to really feel the kind of presence they have), then up to Glacier (looking across a mile-wide gorge and just being able to spot a little dot of white -- a Rocky Mountain goat picking its way across a mountainside), with a dip into Canada (just like Kansas, only flatter -- miles of wheat), then across the Idaho panhandle to Olympic National Park -- both

parts (I've never experienced such profound silence as in the mountain section, and the coast, foggy and all grays, was pure mystery). Down through Oregon to Nevada, Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon (a mile deep, and sort of a reverse Glacier: distances were down and across, instead of up and across, and equally vast). There were also times spent camping in the Everglades (which is mostly walkways -- there's not that much dry land -- and a boat ride through the mangroves, being paced by dolphins), and Smoky Mountains National Park (beautiful, old, worn-down mountains, not so far from my ancestral home, covered in forest, comfortable and reassuring).

So now some teabagger from Utah with no soul wants to give it away so his donors can make more money. Yeah, go ahead -- start fracking in Yellowstone and watch the whole West just go up in one huge eruption.

Assholes.

Finally (Update)

A newspaper willing to tell it like it is. The Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader has published a blistering editorial on Kim Davis and her battle for "religious freedom":

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis has chosen to prolong her moment in the limelight by defying a federal judge's order to issue marriage licenses to legally qualifed people who apply for them.

U.S. District Judge David Bunning kindly but firmly told Davis Wednesday that in our system her religious beliefs don't trump the rights of the taxpayers who pay her almost $80,000 annual salary. . . .

No doubt county clerks and their staffs over the decades have often looked at people applying for marriage licenses and questioned both the wisdom and the likely sanctity of the proposed union. Certainly they've often known things about the couple that many religions would frown upon. But we've never heard of a clerk denying a license to a divorced person, a philanderer, someone who's abused a partner or neglected children. It's easy to imagine the outrage and chaos that would ensue if clerks began morality-testing prospective opposite-gender spouses. But that's exactly the right that Davis is demanding. She wants to pick and choose, based on her beliefs, which legally qualified couples will get marriage licenses.

The real target, though, is Liberty Counsel, acting as Davis' attorneys:

Liberty's attorneys know they can't win the case in Rowan County. Same-sex marriage is legal since the Supreme Court's June 26 decision and it's Davis' job to issue marriage licenses.

So, why is Liberty Counsel marching alongside Davis in this losing cause? It takes a lot to keep that marketing machine humming and those executives paid, and the only way to keep those donations coming is to stay in the news. For that purpose a losing cause is just as good as, perhaps better than, a winning one.

That comes after a summary of Liberty Counsel's executive salaries and expenses -- excuse me, $600,000 for someone to send e-mails?

Read the whole thing. It's delicious.

(Apologies -- somehow, I forgot to provide the link. It's there now, so I've bumped this one up.)

Today's Must-Read

This post at Mahablog, on -- well, the best I can summarize is "ideology vs. the economy." She quotes from this commentary by Paul Krugman:

Never mind that the economic models underlying such assertions have failed dramatically in practice, that the people who say such things have been predicting runaway inflation and soaring interest rates year after year and keep being wrong; these aren’t the kind of people who reconsider their views in the light of evidence. Never mind the obvious point that the private sector doesn’t and won’t supply most kinds of infrastructure, from local roads to sewer systems; such distinctions have been lost amid the chants of private sector good, government bad.

I might point out that we're dealing with a mindset that prioritizes faith over evidence, that reveres authority, no matter how unqualified, and that is impervious to facts.

Maha makes a telling point:

I can never tell how much they believe their own crap, but basically we’re dealing with people who are long on ideological theory and short on experience. Unfortunately, you can say the same thing for most of our Captains of Industry, most of whom have no idea how the products they are selling actually get made.

It’s like a perfect storm of derp. The people in charge of things, public and private, have no idea how stuff gets done and no idea what stuff needs to get done. And the country is at their capricious and greedy mercy.

It became obvious to me long ago that major Republican "economic policy wonk" Paul Ryan had no idea what he was talking about. Unfortunately, he's not alone, and these people are in control of the country.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about how the equivalent philosophy plays out in the corporate sector, here's the example that blows all that to hell:

The madness of the holiday shopping season has come to this: It's no longer notable when a retailer says it will stay open on Thanksgiving Day. Instead, it makes headlines when one says it's going to close.

Warehouse chain Costco recently confirmed just that, explaining the decision as a thank-you to its workers. "Our employees work especially hard during the holiday season and we simply believe that they deserve the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving with their families," a spokesperson told the Web site ThinkProgress. "Nothing more complicated than that."

The decision is in keeping with the ethos at Costco, which has long shrugged off Wall Street's complaints about how well it pays its retail workers (Costco even gave raises during the recession). A 2013 report put the company's average hourly wage at $20.89, far above the minimum wage. It showers employees with good benefits, from low health-insurance premiums to matching and profit-sharing contributions in their 401(k) plans.

Note to WalMart and friends: You can pay your employees a living wage, give them good benefits, and still make money. That's the way the country used to run, and it worked just fine.

(A footnote: I gleaned from somewhere this morning that Macy's, after facing blowback last year for opening on Thanksgiving evening, will open earlier this year. I avoid Macy's in Chicago -- it used to be Marshall Field's, which was the best department store anywhere, not only in quality of goods but in customer service. My sister suggested I check them out when I was looking at TVs, because I might be able to score a deal if they had something good on sale. The State Street store, which used to be Field's flagship, doesn't even carry TVs. Sic transit gloria.)