Month: September 2017

Trouble with a capital T
by Tom Sullivan

Still from The Music Man.

That rhymes with V. Guess what that stands for?

You’d think the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky would be in Iowa selling boys bands. But no. The godfather of the voter fraud myth was in New Hampshire yesterday as part of Kris Kobach’s crack Presidential Advisory Commission On Election Integrity selling voter ID. The commission’s true goal is, as Mother Jones reports, “focused on building up a narrative about widespread voter fraud—and potentially laying the groundwork to impose new restrictions on voting in order to combat it.”

This has been the holy grail for Republicans at least since since Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich publicly declared in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote,” adding “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Reducing that populace has probably been a goal since the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965.

Kobach brought the commission to New Hampshire to investigate alleged voter fraud. Alleged by him in a Breitbart News column last week. Kobach claimed that Democrat Maggie Hassan’s U.S. Senate seat was “stolen through voter fraud” last fall. See (Aha!), of the 6,540 same-day registrants who voted using out-of-state driver’s licenses for ID, only 1,014 had filed for a New Hampshire license 10 months later. The fact that the bulk were college students voting where they attend school, as provided by law, went unmentioned. The only college Kobach is interested in is the electoral college.

Lobbing fraud smoke bombs has a long tradition. By the time the smoke clears and we discover once again there was never a fire, all the public remembers is they saw smoke and heard someone yelling, “Fire!” It’s all about the publicity.

Von Spakovsky was there to present evidence in the form of a Heritage Foundation database of voter fraud assembled from cases of election irregularities of any variety going back decades. The bulk involve absentee ballot fraud, but they pad out the case for erecting barriers to people voting in person, which of course is the point. Heritage earlier in the year urged the administration to keep Democrats and mainstream Republicans off the panel.

Former Secretary of State Jason Kander told CNN:

“I have seen the GOP voter suppression playbook up close,” Kander explained. “It has three steps. Step one, undermine faith in democracy. Step two, create obstacles to voting. Step three, create obstacles to the obstacles.”

“The commission is step one, it is convincing the American people that American democracy doesn’t work, so that they can then take laws that make it harder to vote and spread them all around the country,” Kander predicted. “It’s the core of Trump’s re-election strategy.”

Promoters of the erecting higher barriers to voting argue that people don’t vote because the system is rigged. Polls say otherwise, says University of New Hampshire political scientist Andrew Smith:

“The major reason that they see that people don’t vote … is that they just didn’t bother, they weren’t interested, they forgot,” Smith said. “Basically, issues of convenience and noninterest were the major reasons.”

Still, several members of the commission — including Kobach — have argued that voter fraud is a serious problem that undermines public confidence.

Except undermining public confidence to build support for erecting voting barriers is Kobach’s goal (von Spakovsky’s as well). Providing rubes with a solution to a problem they didn’t know they had before the traveling salesman conjured it was Harold Hill’s business model, as it has been Spakovsky’s for decades.

This is where Kander is mistaken. The commission isn’t step one. It’s the eleventy-leventh edition of step one.

The Brennan Center for Justice maintains an archive of documents relating to GOP attempts to suppress minority voting that dates back to 1982:

DNC v. RNC Consent Decree

November 5, 2016

In 1982, after caging in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods, the Republican National Committee and New Jersey Republican State Committee entered into a consent decree with their Democratic party counterparts. Under that decree and its 1987 successor, the Republican party organizations agreed to allow a federal court to review proposed “ballot security” programs, including any proposed voter caging.

The consent decree has been invoked several times, by the parties to the decree and by others. In late 2008, the Democratic National Committee and Obama for America sought to enforce the consent decree, claiming that the RNC had not submitted alleged ballot security operations for review. After the election, the RNC asked the federal court to vacate or substantially modify the decree. The court denied the RNC’s motion to vacate the consent decree and ordered the decree remain in effect until December 2017. The RNC then appealed to the Third Circuit, which unanimously rejected the appeal and affirmed the District Court’s decision. A subsequent petition for rehearing en banc by the full Third Circuit, and a certiorari petition to U.S. Supreme Court, were denied.

On October 26, 2016, the DNC filed a motion asking that the court find the RNC had violated the decree. On November 5, after abbreviated discovery, the district court denied the DNC’s request, ruling that the DNC had not provided sufficient evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and the RNC on ballot-security operations, but will allow the DNC to offer further evidence after the election.

The reason the GOP’s “voter fraud” promotion didn’t enjoy more press earlier is because in the 1980s conservatives did not have Fox News, talk radio, and social media to promote it. But the fraud fraud is nothing new. Suppressing the vote has been a GOP project for decades.

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Ted Cruz after dark


by digby

This is beneath me but I had to share:

It’s been a minute since Ted Cruz has humiliated himself in a disgusting way (see: white thing on mouth), but my god, was this one ever worth the wait. Around the witching hour of Tuesday morning, when all but a few stalwart tweeters were sound asleep, @tedcruz was discovered to have liked a porn tweet. 

The tweet in question, from the accurately named @SexuallPosts, showed a video (NSFW) that one might describe as “mommy porn” or “low-quality mommy porn.” Cruz’s account un-liked the tweet shortly after this was discovered, and his spokeswoman Catherine Frazier, slightly misunderstanding what had occurred, said “the offensive tweet posted on @tedcruz account earlier has been removed by staff and reported to Twitter.”

Catherine, my pal, @SexuallPosts is just getting started!

Of course, Ted Cruz is an evangelical Christian who once defended a ban on dildos in Texas, has referred to birth control as “abortifacients,” and pulled an ad during the 2016 primary when he discovered one of the actors he’d hired was a softcore porn actress, so this couldn’t have happened to a nicer or more sexually repressed guy. And our old friend Fuckin’ Craig, Cruz’s college roommate, certainly had something to say about this:

Now imagine Ted Cruz is doing this four feet below you in the bottom bunk bed.

Yes, my misery very much appreciates your company.

— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) September 12, 2017

I do really want to savor this moment, but I, like the rest of the country, am also now imagining Ted Cruz watching porn, which undercuts my enjoyment somewhat.

I’m just surprised he was watching something as anodyne as “Mommy porn” whatever that it. I frankly expected something a lot more dark and kinky. Like something that featured evil clowns and chickens.

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Yes, I need this

by digby

Mother Nature is very, very angry

by digby

We’ve got your massive hurricanes, your historic floods, your tornadoes …. aaaand you’ve got your out-of-control fires:

Despite record-breaking rain and snowfall across the West in 2017, this year’s fire season has been unforgiving.

Billows of thick black smoke and red-hot flames have consumed hundreds of thousands of acres in Montana, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, California and Utah.

More than 24,000 firefighters have been battling 137 blazes, some for as long as six months, leaving experts shocked at the scale and duration.

“Typically by the third week of September we see not as much fire activity,” said Jessica Gardetto, spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center. “But we just haven’t had that relief.”

The blazes have been responsible for the deaths of eight firefighters and have destroyed more than 500 homes. So far in fiscal year 2017, the Forest Service has spent $1.75 billion fighting fires; as of Sept. 1, the U.S. Interior Department has spent more than $391 million.

“Because fire season has been so lengthy we have to be strategic…. We have been stretched thin on resources,” Gardetto said.

What makes the fires burning across the West so extreme?

One aspect that sets this year apart is the length of time the fire season has lasted, in part because of dry air, conducive for sustaining wildfires.

Lightning strikes in Oregon and Washington have sparked many of the wildfires still ravaging large swaths of land, while drought-stricken Montana continues to battle several large fires.

“We didn’t think we were going to have large-scale wildfires like this in high elevation because of all the significant amount of snowpack. Fire season ended up being much more above normal than a lot of us had predicted,” Gardetto said.

In case you were wondering, the Trump administration said no to federal disaster aid for the fires. They aren’t sexy enough for POTUS and FLOTUS to tour the area and say stupid things.

Evidently, the congress managed to sneak it into the Harvey relief package. I’m sure it burned up Ted Cruz (no pun intended) that he had to vote to help anyone anywhere but the people he needs to vote for him next year. Trump surely regrets losing this opportunity to stick it to the western blue states that didn’t vote for him. Maybe next time.

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No condolences from Trump. He likes their suffering.

by digby

A sad comment on our times.
We are the richest country in the world and we act like this toward our next door neighbor:

Mexico on Monday withdrew its offer of aid to the United States to help victims of Hurricane Harvey, saying those resources are now needed at home as Mexico recovers from a separate hurricane and a devastating earthquake.

Last month, as Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston with days of record-breaking rains, Mexico issued a statement offering to send food, generators and medical aid to Texas “as good neighbors should always do in trying times.”

Mexico offered help even as President Trump was attacking the country on Twitter, calling Mexico “one of the highest crime nations in the world” and reiterating his claim that Mexico will pay for construction of a border wall between the two nations.

While Trump never responded to Mexico’s offer, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said his state would accept the country’s aid.

In a statement released Monday, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said that aid is now being redirected to care for Mexican families and communities still reeling from the recent one-two punch of natural disasters that struck the nation.

At least 95 people died in Thursday’s magnitude 8.1 earthquake, according to the Foreign Ministry, most of them in the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. While aid has arrived in many of the hardest-hit regions, where thousands of homes were reduced to rubble, local media have reported that in some places, survivors are still waiting for help.

While authorities scrambled to dig victims from rubble and provide shelter to the homeless on Mexico’s southwestern coast, a Category 1 hurricane struck Mexico’s Gulf Coast on Saturday. At least two people were killed by Hurricane Katia, which was downgraded to a tropical storm shortly after making landfall, officials said.

Trump did not offer condolences to Mexico after either disaster, as is common when tragedies befall U.S. allies, even as multiple American mayors and governors offered their sympathies and help. Nor did Trump offer U.S. aid to Mexico.

Trump’s silence as the earthquake death toll climbed was widely seen here as another sign of Trump’s cool attitude toward Mexico.

Cool attitude? He says they are sending all their criminals over the border to “drop babies” rape old ladies and shoot white girls. (And some, I’m sure are good people who clean your houses, fix your meals, mow your lawns and raise your children.) He ants to build a wall to keep the poison out of our pristine beautiful country where the people are clean and peaceful and never hurt a fly.

Yeah, he has a cool attitude.

I think former Mexican president Vicente Fox has recognized that trying to be diplomatic and decent isn’t really going to help. He knows how to communicate in language Trump will understand.

We’re not paying for that fucken wall:

Your whole image is as a winner, but if you keep robbing the poor to give to the rich, your tenants will take your name off your buildings, your children will take your name off your grandchildren, and you will go down as the single biggest loser your proud country has ever produced. This is a dark thought, ain’t it?

The first question to ask yourself before you start a war: Would you fight in it? Not now, obviously—you’d be useless unless we get attacked by golf balls—but back when you dodged the Vietnam draft, when bone spurs prevented you from serving your country but not serving on the tennis court. If a war you want to start today isn’t so fuckin’ righteous that a young Donald Trump would have willingly served in it, then don’t send other young people to die in it, OK?

Read all about Fox’s masterful trolling here.

It’s sad that it’s come to this but when you elect a buffoon for president somebody probably needs to get in his face. Who better than a former president of Mexico?

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Turning the swamp into a toxic waste dump

by digby

Via Raw Story:

A former National Security Council official who was among those purged from the forum by National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster will join the House Intelligence Committee staff, the Atlantic reports.

Derek Harvey, who was brought to the NSC by former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, was booted from the council over the summer. Now, he will join the staff of the House Intelligence committee, chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA).

Nunes “recused” himself from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election amid concerns of conflicts of interest, but continues to spearhead a separate investigation into the “unmasking” of Donald Trump campaign officials by Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Nunes’ “unmasking” investigation has garnered criticism from even members of his own party, including Senate intelligence committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC), who in July insisted, “the unmasking thing was all created by Devin Nunes,” an ardent supporter of Trump’s campaign.

As the Atlantic reports, Harvey was one of the more hawkish members of the NSC before his ouster this summer…

Former senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick—another Flynn loyalist—was likewise dismissed by McMaster this summer. Cohen-Watnick was one of the NSC officials who attended a clandestine meeting with Nunes on White House grounds in July to provide “evidence” of nefarious unmasking by the Obama administration.

That meeting resulted in a hastily-arranged press conference where Nunes insisted he would get to the bottom of Obama-era unmasking—a press conference Trump insisted “somewhat vindicated” his unsubstantiated claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential election. McMaster originally tried to fire Cohen-Watnick after taking over the NSC, but the “Flynnstone” successfully appealed to former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon and top Trump adviser Jared Kushner to save his job.

In a July statement about Harvey’s dismissal, NSC spokesman Michael Anton hinted the Flynn loyalist would stay in the Trump administration.

“General McMaster greatly appreciates Derek Harvey’s service to his country as a career Army officer, where he served his country bravely in the field and played a crucial role in the successful surge in Iraq, and also for his service on Capitol Hill and in the Trump administration,” Anton said. “The administration is working with Colonel Harvey to identify positions in which his background and expertise can be best utilized.”

Evidently, it was decided he could serve the president better by working with Devin Nunes to undermine the House investigation and probably share all the information they manage to get to help with Trump’s defense.

Trump may not have clue about how to be a president but he’s savvy when it comes to evading the law.

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Looking forward

by digby

What with all tiresome ongoing relitigation of 2016, I thought this we might want to take a look at the future: who are the current favorites for 2020?

I have no idea why Bernie Sanders isn’t on that list but he should be and I’d guess he’d be at or near the top. And in spite of Biden’s position in that chart I don’t think he’s that much more of a favorite than the ones below him although people clearly like him. Obviously, some of this is just name recognition.

It is quite an open field from the looks of it so it’s going to be a rollicking primary season. And I hate to tell you but it’s going to start very soon.

Oh god.

Bannon’s civil war

by digby

I wrote about Bannon for Salon today:

Steve Bannon went on “60 Minutes” last weekend and declared war. No, not on North Korea or ISIS or even the Democratic Party. He declared war on the Republican establishment. Democrats seemed to be strangely paralyzed by the man’s audacity, and many Republicans looked as though they needed to shelter in place. It was quite a performance.

But I suspect Bannon was really only performing for one person, a man he knew would be watching and to whom he sought to prove his undying loyalty: Donald J. Trump. He was trying to keep the most powerful man in the world focused on what Bannon believes he had chosen Trump to do: Take down the GOP establishment from within.

You have to give the guy credit. He has never wavered in that objective from the earliest days of his fascination with Trump. He told Vanity Fair in the summer of 2016: “Trump is a ‘blunt instrument for us, I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.’” The “us” to whom he refers? The white nationalist, neofascist movement he helped to popularize at Breitbart News, which he called the “platform for the alt-right.”

Indeed, Bannon wore not one, but two button-down black shirts for that interview. Considering that some of his most important intellectual influences are fascists and white nationalists, that may just be his own personal tribute to the previous blackshirt movement he claims to have studied. One of his favorite philosophers, the fascistic Italian writer Julius Evola, thought Mussolini wasn’t extreme enough.

According to Joshua Green, who wrote “Devil’s Bargain,” the recent book about Bannon, Trump and the 2016 election, Bannon claims to believe that the world is entering a very dark phase which was caused by the Enlightenment and can only be averted by adoption of a belief system called “primordial Traditionalism,” one of the progenitors of fascism. Evola thought it was a pretty darned good system:

There are positive and valuable aspects. Those which I could value are the reconstruction of the authority of the state and the idea of overcoming class conflict toward a hierarchical and corporative formation, to some extent, of a military and disciplined style within the nation, in addition to some of their anti-bourgeois proposals. To me, all of that is positive.

Green says:

[Bannon] is trying to not only take over American politics, but look at what he’s doing in places like the European Union. He’s trying to destroy what he would call these globalist edifices, which he believes [are] a manifestation of the rise of modernity and something that needs to be destroyed to pull us back to a pre-Enlightenment era.

Not that he’s ambitious, mind you.

Anyway, let’s just say that Bannon’s “blunt instrument,” Donald Trump, was always highly unlikely to “get it.” Trump’s idea of mystical philosophy begins and ends with Steve Doocy’s morning chitchat on “Fox & Friends.”

Bannon apparently thought he could make Trump his creature but found that Trump was far too narcissistic to allow anyone to have too much power over him. Bannon’s main goal was to use Trump to take over the Republican Party and build power to blow up the existing world order and create a new nation of traditional, predominantly white citizens, working under the authority of a strong state determined to protect its people from foreign infiltration and cosmopolitan influence. Somebody tried that already. It didn’t end well.

Trump may blow up the existing world order, but it’s far more likely to be because of a catastrophic mistake than by fulfilling Bannon’s visions. They are, after all, ridiculous.

Bannon didn’t talk about any of that with Charlie Rose on “60 Minutes.” He said that he is Donald Trump’s wingman, loyal to the end. He promised to “help” Trump by taking on the GOP establishment on his behalf. He plans to use big bucks from his sugar daddy Robert Mercer, to finance primary challengers against uncooperative Republicans to show them who’s boss.

This is not exactly a unique concept in modern Republican politics. Perhaps he hasn’t heard of some even wealthier sugar daddies named Charles and David Koch, who similarly financed a bunch of primary challengers in 2010 and 2012 on behalf of a group calling itself the Tea Party. They had a handful of successes and they did manage to scare the GOP into compliance when they took out one of its leaders, former Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, along with a couple of old-school incumbents.

Of course, Team Koch also ran a whole slate of crackpots all over the country who lost seats they should have won when they said silly things like “legitimate rape” and “I am not a witch” and “we may have to use our Second Amendment remedies.” Overal,l the project was a bit of a dud, and the Kochs have now backed away from electoral politics to some degree.

Bannon is in a much worse position than they were. First of all, there are very few moderates left in the party to pick off. And there seems to be an ever-lengthening list of GOP retirements. Perhaps all those seats will be won by Trump loyalists, but it’s at least as likely that the Democrats will pick off many of them.

Back in 2010, Republican voters were thrilled to rally together to deliver a GOP House and Senate to thwart Barack Obama’s agenda. Their hatred for him and the Affordable Care Act was a powerful motivator. If I had to guess right now, I’d say their love for Trump doesn’t equal their hate for Obama. Recall that when Bannon backed a primary challenger against House Speaker Paul Ryan in 2016, he got around 15 percent of the vote in Ryan’s exurban Wisconsin district — in the midst of Trump fever.

Running in the primaries isn’t easy. Taking on the party leadership is even harder. I’m not saying it’s impossible. Trump was elected president, which proves that anything can happen in politics these days. But watching Bannon on “60 Minutes,” one couldn’t avoid the sense that he knows his moment has probably passed. For all his bluster and bombast about having more freedom now to pursue the president’s agenda, being the White House senior strategist for seven months is as powerful as he will ever get. Bannon now looks and sounds like a man with his face pressed against the window, wishing he was back inside.

A month ago, Bannon was deeply involved in the most important decisions on the planet, and now he’s back to pushing his apocalyptic vision on a website named after someone else. If he weren’t such a malignant influence, I might even feel sorry for him. As it is, I’m relieved he no longer has a top security clearance. It makes me shudder knowing he ever did.

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Focused like a laser
by Tom Sullivan

Jonathan Chait observes certain parallels one can draw between Republicans and Democrats. While those can be sufficient to uphold the media’s commitment to both-siderism, the similarities are superficial, he argues. Commenting on a Vox essay by political scientist Lee Drutman that looks at the threat posed by increasing political tribalism, Chait writes:

It is certainly true that the psychological relationship between the parties has a certain symmetry. Both fear each other will cheat to win and use their power to stack the voting deck. “If Republicans win in close elections, Democrats say it’s only because they cheated by making it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote; if Democrats win in close elections, Republicans say it’s only because they voted illegally.” But while it is not true that Democrats have allowed illegal voting in nontrivial levels, it is extremely true that Republicans have deliberately made voting inconvenient for Democratic-leaning constituencies. The psychology is parallel, but the underlying facts are not.

The same extends to other beliefs vs. behaviors. For the left, one could argue, that is because of the structures the right has in place for advancing an agenda. The conservative media and its think tanks, to name two. Rush Limbaugh may boast he’s working with half his brain tied behind his back, but he has the advantage of not being constrained by a regard for the truth. The left tries to please a media still “open to contrary facts,” Chait writes, while right-wing media pushes a consistent narrative heedless of them:

In the meantime, whatever the very real flaws in the American political and electoral system, it is simply impossible to design any kind of a system that can withstand a stress test like a major party captured by a faction as radical as the conservative movement. Its absence of limiting principles to its ideology, indifference to empirical evidence, and inability to concede failings of its dogma lead to an endless succession of failures explained away to the base as faintheartedness.

The doom loop Drutman describes is, in reality, both sides responding to the phenomenon of Republican extremism. Republicans are sealed off in a bubble of paranoia and rage, and Democrats are sealed off from that bubble. Democrats fear Republican government because it is dangerous and extreme. Republicans fear Democratic government because they are dangerous and extreme.

The conservative movement has convinced itself and quite a large swath of supporters that the real problem in this country is people less well-off than themselves. When foreign Others wane as potent bogeymen, the poor are the go-to stand-ins. Even as many struggling not to fall out of the middle class believe the president speaks for them, he and his party will be laser-focused on worsening their lot and keeping them from voting if they do. The Constitution may guarantee protections for anyone born or naturalized, but some wielding power think there ought to be a club fee to keep out the riffraff, i.e., the rest of us.

Catherine Rampell provides yet another example for the Washington Post. Republicans are promoting “an innovative way to punish the poor and simultaneously increase budget deficits.” She writes:

To pull off this impressive twofer, they would put every American applying for the earned-income tax credit (EITC) through a sort of mini-audit before getting their refund. This would both place huge new burdens on the working poor and divert scarce Internal Revenue Service resources away from other audit targets, such as big corporations, that offer a much higher return on investment.

Business-minded conservatives, one would think, would legislate with an eye for the country’s bottom line. It’s just that their political bottom line comes first. The ostensible purpose is to target waste, fraud, and abuse, the free energy device of conservative economics and source of unlimited budgetary savings for offsetting the one percent’s tax cuts. The result of auditing EITC applicants will be additional delays and hurdles for the working poor.

Recall that Republicans have been steadily cutting the IRS’s budget, which is a silly thing to do if you’re truly a fiscal conservative who believes in “law and order.” The IRS brings in far more money than it receives, particularly in its work going after tax cheats.

And cutting the IRS budget is an especially silly thing to do if you’re also giving the agency an enormous new mandate likely to crowd out other enforcement activities — including those that bring in much bigger paydays.

But as with the voter fraud snipe hunt, eliminating the impact of the the miniscule amount of cheating is not the point. Nor is the country’s bottom line.

All the while the message from the right’s Mighty Wurlizer to the base will be that “those people,” the lesser-thans, are the real targets, not them. Even as their paychecks buy less and tax cuts help less, the base will believe.

Conveniently, the GOP will have help in furthering that notion from outside its think tanks and media outlets. The Daily Beast reveals that not only did Russia promote fake news on Facebook to aid Republicans’ 2016 efforts, it promoted events as well:

The Facebook events—one of which echoed Islamophobic conspiracy theories pushed by pro-Trump media outlets—are the first indication that the Kremlin’s attempts to shape America’s political discourse moved beyond fake news and led unwitting Americans into specific real-life action.

“This is the next step,” Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and expert on Russia’s influence campaign, told The Daily Beast. “The objective of influence is to create behavior change. The simplest behavior is to have someone disseminate propaganda that Russia created and seeded. The second part of behavior influence is when you can get people to physically do something.”

In the days pre-Facebook, I collected right-wing, “pass it on” emails from around the Net and wondered if, rather than just enthusiastic wingnuts, there wasn’t a think tank somewhere churning them out and circulating them to conservative email lists. I wonder now has anyone looked at whether the shop might have been in Russia?

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

NO WORDS

By Dennis Hartley

I don’t get out much. In 60 years, I’ve yet to travel anywhere more exotic than Canada. That’s me…born to be mild. Oddly enough, however, I was “out of the country” on September 11, 2001.

OK, it was Canada. I was enjoying a weekend getaway at Harrison Hot Springs, a beautiful Alpine setting in British Columbia. I was booked to check out of the hotel on Tuesday, September 11th.

I woke up around 9am that morning, figuring I had enough time to grab breakfast and one more refreshing soak in one of the resort’s natural springs-fed outdoor pools before hitting the road for the 3-hour drive back to Seattle. I was feeling relaxed and rejuvenated.

Then I switched on CNN.

Holy fuck. Was this really happening? I actually did not understand what I was watching for several minutes. It was surreal. It was especially discombobulating to be out-of-country at the very moment the United States of America appeared to be under attack.

My first impulse was just to get back to the U.S.A. I was overcome with a sense of urgency that I had to “do” something (realistically, of course…what could I do to help those poor souls in the towers?).

I went to the front desk to check out, and was advised by the clerk that there were reports that the U.S./Canada border checkpoints were closed (to this day, I’m not sure if that was just a rumor-I can’t track down any historical annotations). I was also hearing from fellow guests that lines of vehicles were miles long at the checkpoints. At any rate, they were offering American guests with a September 11 checkout a reduced rate if they wanted to try their luck on Wednesday.

With all the uncertainty and fear in the air, I decided to take them up on the offer and leave Wednesday morning instead (for all I knew, I could be returning to some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape anyway). I was less than 200 miles from home geographically, but spiritually I might as well have been Matt Damon’s character in The Martian.