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Month: February 2020

Trump’s authoritarian buddies have his number

Published by digby on February 26, 2020

There has been a lot of discussion over the past few days about Bernie Sanders’ comment on “60 Minutes” that the authoritarian Cuban leader Fidel Castro had boosted literacy among his people. Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist so I suppose it’s not surprising that this would attract some attention, but his comment really wasn’t anything a standard-issue liberal wouldn’t have made. In fact, the most revered Democrat in America, Barack Obama, said pretty much exactly the same thing when he moved to normalize relations with Cuba in his final years in office. 

Nonetheless, the subject was raised again at the presidential debate on Tuesday night when the moderators asked Sanders whether Americans could trust that a socialist would give authoritarians a free pass. Seriously.

I don’t know whether anyone’s noticed this, but Fidel Castro is dead. It’s interesting that such a dull observation about literacy programs in communist countries would cause such hand-wringing when you consider that our current president’s favorite global leaders are all authoritarian strongmen who are very much alive. In fact, Donald Trump was being fêted and fluffed by one of those at the very moment the press was calling for the smelling salts over Sanders’ mundane comments.

Trump was on a state visit to India, which he’s been very excited about ever since Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to America and filled a stadium in Texas with 50,000 people, promising Trump he would deliver something even better when the president visited India. Last week, even as our entire country was riveted by the prospect of the Department of Justice and the office of the director of national intelligence being corrupted by Trump cronies and character assassins, Trump himself couldn’t stop talking and tweeting about his upcoming state visit, telling the press corps on the airport tarmac that while India “treats us very badly,” he likes Modi a lot. Why?

He told me we’ll have 7 million people between the airport and the event. And the stadium, I understand, is sort of semi under construction, but it’s going to be the largest stadium in the world. So it’s going to be very exciting. But he says between the stadium and the airport, we’ll have about 7 million people. 

Modi did end up putting on quite a show. The Indian government built walls to block visibility of poor neighborhoods along the parade route and filled that new stadium with 100,000 people singing along to the Village People’s “Macho Man” as Trump entered the stage. He gave a rambling speech, blessedly avoiding his usual rally insults and digressions, managing throughout to mutilate every Indian word he haltingly tried to pronounce. (Well, he managed to say the words “Taj Mahal” but then he once bankrupted a casino by that name, so it was somewhat familiar. )

The crowd began leaving in large numbers halfway through, but Trump didn’t seem disturbed. He had gotten what he wanted, a gigantic public spectacle in his honor.

Like the Saudis and the Chinese, the Indians have Trump’s number. Give him a big pageant and you have him eating out of your hand. Show him around and he’ll embarrass America. Classless as always, Trump didn’t even think to honor Mahatma Gandhi or his message when he visited the legendary Indian independence leader’s ashram. But then Gandhi believed in nonviolent resistance which, in Trump’s worldview, means he was a loser.

 Modi has understood what he was dealing with from the beginning. Recall this:

As they met during the president’s first visit to Asia in October 2017, Narendra Modi spelled out his concerns about China’s ambitions in the region, which Trump replied to by saying, “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.”

In their book, “A Very Stable Genius,” two Washington Post reporters detail how “Modi’s eyes bulged out in surprise” at Trump’s apparent failure to understand that his country did indeed share a border with China, a line that extends some 2,500 miles.

That anecdote shows that even when Trump has business dealings in foreign countries he knows nothing about them. He literally couldn’t find India on a map despite the fact that the Trump Organization has more business there than in any other country outside North America. In fact, his son Donald Jr. caused quite a stir when he traveled to India in 2018 to promote some Trump properties, despite the family’s protestations that they had abandoned foreign business ventures while the president is in office. It’s easy to see why Trump would be anxious to please the leader of an enormous nation with a fast-growing middle class, and it isn’t because he is concerned with the geopolitical implications of a U.S.-Indian partnership.

Trump is likewise unconcerned with human rights violations, either in India or anywhere else. In the past he’s excused Russia’s authoritarian President Vladimir Putin’s killing of journalists, admired Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent crackdown on drug users and, of course, has relentlessly bragged about his bromance with Kim Jong-un, the sociopathic leader of North Korea. We can add to that list Chinese President Xi Jinping, Brazil’s thuggish Presidnt Jair Bolsonaro and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, all of whom know that Trump is a fool. Modi is just the latest of those to flatter him and shame America in the process.

It’s never been so starkly demonstrated how little Donald Trump cares about anything but himself as it was in India this week. As he was being unctuously massaged and fawned over by the Indian government, there was mass violence in the streets of New Delhi against India’s Muslim minority, spurred on by Modi’s recent decree that threatens their citizenship.

Trump could not care less.

We all know, including Modi, what Trump’s “travel ban” was all about. In his campaign, he was very clear. On Dec. 7, 2015, a day which will live in infamy, he went on stage in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, and said:

Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. We have no choice, we have no choice.

Of course Trump didn’t say anything to Modi about his increasingly violent anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist movement. He doesn’t know the first thing about Hinduism, of course. But he agrees with a vicious crackdown on Muslims.

Trump had to water down his “Muslim ban” somewhat in order for the Supreme Court to put some lipstick on it and call it constitutional. But he got ‘er done. And he’s sent a message to every strongman in the world that the U.S. will reward them for such actions as well. You just have to give President Trump a little sugar and put on a little show. 

My Salon column reprinted with permission

Some People Just Don’t Know When to…

Published by tristero on February 26, 2020

Just great:

As new countries confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths from the virus Wednesday, President Trump on Twitter called for a 6 p.m. news conference with officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others to discuss the spread of the virus.

I’m not prone to hypochondria but when the person is Trump and when, instead of appointing even minimally competent officials to handle the Covid-19 response, he calls a news conference where he will almost certainly force CDC officials to minimize the risk to Americans, I start to really fucking worry.

Adding: Covid-19 is serious and demands a rational, effective response. Unfortunately we have a deeply unserious clown for a president who is profoundly irrational and effective only at sowing chaos and misery.

To learn what a real plan for handling potential pandemics might look like, Elizabeth Warren and her staff have thought deeply about what needs to happen. Read about Warren’s plan here. It’s terrific.

Shouting “change” into a power vacuum

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 26, 2020
2020 U.S. Senate forecast from The Cook Political Report current as of Feb. 5, 2020.
Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com .

Sen. Elizabeth Warren almost addressed the elephant in the room during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Charleston, South Carolina. Warren used her support for eliminating the Senate filibuster to draw a contrast with the current Democratic front-runner. Sen. Bernie Sanders opposes eliminating the rule:

Understand this: The filibuster is giving a veto to the gun industry. It gives a veto to the oil industry. It’s going to give a veto on immigration. Until we’re willing to dig in and say that if Mitch McConnell is going to do to the next Democratic president what he did to President Obama, and that is try to block every single thing he does, that we are willing to roll back the filibuster, go with the majority vote, and do what needs to be done for the American people. Understand this: Many people on this stage do not support rolling back the filibuster. Until we’re ready to do that, we won’t have change.

Former Vice President Joe Biden also opposes that change. Sen. Amy Klobuchar may or may not.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg followed up on Warren’s challenge with a biting observation:

I want to come back to the question of the filibuster because this is not some long-ago bad vote that Bernie Sanders took. This is a current bad position that Bernie Sanders holds. And we’re in South Carolina. How are we going to deliver a revolution if you won’t even support a rule change?

But debating ending the filibuster is shouting into a power vacuum. Unless Democrats take control of the U.S. Senate next year, it matters little which Democrat sits in the Oval Office. Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell will likely rule the Senate. No Democratic legislation — Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free college, etc. — will move beyond his desk. He has sworn himself to it. Gleefully.

The larger debate we are not having is which candidate, if any of them, can bring enough money, organization, and voter enthusiasm to the fall races to help Democrats flip the Senate. As the Cook Political Report’s Feb. 5 projection at the top of this post suggests, Democrats have some ground to make up before realizing their dreams of “political revolution” or “big, structural change.” Without keeping control of the U.S. House and gaining control of the Senate this fall, Democrats nitpicking each other’s policies and positions on the filibuster is so much vaporware.

Ezra Klein gets to the nub of the problem:

Every Democratic debate so far has featured a lengthy argument over the details of Medicare plans that the next president will have limited, and if there’s a Republican Senate, no power to pass. None have featured a sustained debate over the questions that will actually decide what kind of Medicare plan — and climate plan, and gun control plan, and minimum wage bill, and infrastructure plan — will pass: which candidate is likeliest to sweep more Democrats into the Senate, and whether and how the various candidates would convince Senate Democrats to change the rules to make ambitious governance possible again.

The most recent revolution (for those who missed it) occurred with the Democrats’ “blue wave” in 2018. But taking control of the House was only Step 1. Wresting control of the Senate from the 18 percent of the nation’s population that controls a majority in that chamber is Step 2. Our fixation on November’s “main event” obscures that objective, or else assumes it will simply take care of itself with the right candidate atop the Democratic ticket. It will not.

Control of the U.S. Senate is on the line this fall. Plus, redistricting. TV talking heads will provide endless horse-race coverage of the presidential campaigns and threats of Russian interference in the 2020 federal elections. Meanwhile, control of state legislatures and 2021 redistricting is on the ballot. Even without the late Thomas B. Hofeller, godfather of the GOP’s 2011 state and federal district maps, Republicans will be working quietly to maintain minority control not just in the U.S. Senate, but in the House and state legislatures too.

In 2016, I argued here for setting a larger goal than winning the presidency:

I live in a state taken over by a T-party legislature that has passed one of the worst voter ID bills in the country, drafted absolutely diabolical redistricting maps, passed HB2 as a get-out-the-vote tool, and launches regular legislative attacks against our cities where the largest block of blue votes are. President Bernie isn’t going to fix that for me. Neither is President Hillary. And not in Michigan or Wisconsin either. We have to beat them ourselves. Here, not in the Electoral College.

With Super Tuesday 2020 fast approaching, stop second-guessing which candidate can beat Donald Trump. It will take more than money and good polling. Ask which can mobilize the kind of enthusiasm Barack Obama did in 2008. The metric I’ve used this cycle when people ask how to decide which of the Democrats can beat Trump is this: Which candidate would you knock doors for in the heat of August?

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Remember the 2012 Ebola campaign?

Published by digby on February 25, 2020

Trump jumped on the Ebola outbreak in 2014 to try to affect the mid term election that year and there is plenty of evidence that it was effective.

You can see why he’s nervous now. He knows what he did. And he knows it worked. The difference today is that unlike President Obama, who handled the Ebola outbreak by the book, Trump has destroyed the US response o pandemics and the government is now scrambling to do even a minimal response.

We may come through this ok. But it will no thanks to Trump. Of course, we can expect him to claim he single-handedly cured it if it is contained but that’s the price we will have to pay for having the good luck to escape disaster. And that’s what it’s going to take: luck.

John Ratcliffe, bad penny

Published by digby on February 25, 2020

Trump just can’t quit him.

President Donald Trump is revisiting the idea of nominating Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe to be the next Director of National Intelligence, two sources told CNN.

Ratcliffe withdrew his name from consideration for the same job last year amid bipartisan concerns about his qualifications but the President now appears open to the idea of tapping him for the DNI job a second time.

Trump has spoken with Ratcliffe and another candidate, US Ambassador to the Netherlands Pete Hoekstra, about the DNI job in recent days, multiple sources said. These have been preliminary discussions and Trump could speak with additional potential nominees in the coming days.

During these initial conversations, however, Trump has attempted to assess how loyal potential nominees would be to him should they be nominated and confirmed for the job, two sources said. Trump is looking for a pick who would back his mandate, explained one of the sources.

What mandate? To cover up his crimes for him? That mandate? He is a known liar so there’s that.

After Trump announced his intent to nominate Ratcliffe, reports surfaced revealing the Texas lawmaker had embellished his credentials — prompting swift criticism from Democratic members of Congress.

At the time, CNN reported that Republicans also privately raised concerns about Ratcliffe’s nomination to the White House.

Trump then blamed the media reports for Ratcliffe’s decision to pull his name.

In the time since that debacle unfolded, Ratcliffe has remained a faithful ally of Trump and was one of the members of Congress who Trump mentioned in his victory speech after his Senate impeachment acquittal.

Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned Trump Tuesday against nominating Ratcliffe.”I think there was pretty uniform bipartisan opposition to that pick earlier and I don’t think anything has changed,” Warner said.

I wouldn’t count on that. Since GOP Senators (except Romney) are all implicated in Trump’s behavior now, they are even less likely to buck him now than they were then.

But even if this is just a feint to make whoever they choose look like a safer choice, there is no safer choice. Trump has made his demands clear. The Intelligence Community is to be loyal to Donald Trump above all else. Grenell is cleaning house already and Trump won’t stand for anyone who doesn’t pledge total fealty. It may not be a clown like Ratcliffe, but it’s sure to be a toady. He won’t have it any other way.

A very sick Black Swan

Published by digby on February 25, 2020

I’ve been writing posts about the Wuhan virus for the last month here on this blog. The potential for a global pandemic, and possible panic, has been obvious from the beginning.

Here’s the latest:

Health officials in the United States warned Tuesday that the spread of the novel coronavirus in the country appears inevitable, marking a significant change in tone as global travel disruptions continued to worsen, South Korea neared 1,000 cases and Iran reported at least 15 deaths.

China and South Korea announced new cases of the coronavirus, raising concerns in both nations about how long it could take for normal life to return. South Korea confirmed 144 more cases, bringing its total to 977, the most outside China. President Moon Jae-in visited the city of Daegu, where more than half of the country’s confirmed cases have been found, Tuesday afternoon local time.

Travel disruptions continued to spread, with the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s most critical aviation hubs, saying it would suspend all travel to and from Iran, where authorities confirmed that the death toll has reached at least 15. In Iran, an opposition lawmaker and the deputy health minister tested positive for the virus as the death toll there climbed.

Early Tuesday, global markets appeared to stabilize after Monday’s heavy losses — until the Dow Jones fell 850 points, wiping out a 150-point gain.

Here are the latest developments:

● The Chinese government said Tuesday that there had been 508 new confirmed cases by the end of the previous day, along with 74 deaths, bringing the total number of accumulated infections nationwide to 77,658, with 2,663 deaths.

●“Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in the United States,” Nancy Messonnier, a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters. “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses.”

● Iran confirmed 95 cases across the country, with at least 15 deaths, as concerns grew about the outbreak’s spread through the Middle East. Meanwhile, South Korea reported 144 new cases of coronavirus, bringing its national tally to 977.

● A Chinese health official warned that at least 28 days without new cases are needed to be able to say an area is free of the outbreak, raising questions about how long it will take for normal life to resume.

● A fourth former passenger from the Diamond Princess cruise liner has died. Japan says 691 people on the ship tested positive for the virus, although that figure does not include more than 20 people found to have the virus after returning to their home countries.

The US is unprepared:

In 2005, during the H1N5 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development ran a program called Predict to identify and research infectious diseases in animal populations in the developing world. Most new viruses that impact humans — apparently including the one causing the Covid-19 disease — emerge through this route, so investing in early research is the kind of thing that, at modest ongoing cost, served to reduce the likelihood of rare but catastrophic events.

The program was initiated under George W. Bush and continued through Barack Obama’s eight years in office; then, last fall the Trump administration shut it down.

That’s part of a broader pattern of actual and potential Trump efforts to shut down America’s ability to respond to pandemic disease.

Trump and his accomplices care nothing about any of this, not really. They are concerned with how it’s affecting markets and his re-election.

President Donald Trump’s top aides faced an increasingly urgent threat Monday with potentially monumental implications: a global outbreak knocking down the U.S. economy and walloping markets in an election year, all against accusations about whether the Trump administration had mismanaged and underfunded a critical response with American lives on the line.

A swift drop in the stock market — the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 1,000 points, its largest slide in two years — jolted officials in the White House and across Washington, delivering implications from the long-simmering coronavirus threat to a wider swath of Americans.

“The view in the White House is that this is one of those classic black swan events, and all we can do is control the health issues in the U.S.,” said Stephen Moore, an informal economic adviser to the Trump team.

With the possibility of a U.S. outbreak growing by the day, Trump allies and advisers have grown increasingly worried that a botched coronavirus response will hit the U.S. economy. Even Donald Trump Jr. has mused to associates he hopes the White House does not screw up the response and put the president’s best reelection message at risk, said two individuals with knowledge of his comments.

The good news is that he can say that everything’s fine and make it so. He’s magical that way:

Well, ok then…

Trump’s big Indian adventure

Published by digby on February 25, 2020

The man Russia supposedly likes because he’s such a good “dealmaker” scores another big victory. Well, if you consider success to be getting a foreign leader to put on a big pageant to appease the overgrown toddler who runs the most powerful nation on earth.

You have to watch that whole comment about how he received the greatest greeting in world history to believe it.

The reports are that Trump mispronounced half the Indian words in his speech and people walked out in droves.

Politico: “President Donald Trump will close out his 36-hour trip to India Tuesday without striking a long-coveted trade deal to ease tariffs… The self-proclaimed master dealmaker is arguing that he is holding out for a bigger and better deal. Trump said during the trip that his team was in ‘the early stages of discussion for an incredible trade agreement,’ even though his staff had been working on a deal for more than a year and had indicated just days before the visit that it would be cinched while in India.”

Associated Press: “Trump’s India visit prioritizes pageantry over policy.”

Wall Street Journal: “The leaders of the world’s two largest democracies focused their discussion on complimenting each other, instead of the two countries’ sticking points on trade or deadly protests in New Delhi over a controversial new citizenship law.”

Trump got his boots licked and Modi got the president of the United States downplaying his anti-Muslim authoritarian crack-down.

President Trump commended Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for “working very hard on religious freedom” and refused to discuss a controversial new citizenship law that set off protests across the country, saying that the matter was “really up to India.”

Trump’s comments came amid the worst outbreak of communal violence in India’s capital in decades. At least 13 people were killed in Delhi on Monday and Tuesday when clashes broke out between Hindus and Muslims in the northeastern part of the city.

As long as Trump got his big parade and stadium speech, he’ll do anything for his pal Modi. Even take a pass on trade negotiations. Adulation, phony or otherwise, is all he needs and wants.

Law Enforcement and Intelligence trim their sails

Published by digby on February 25, 2020

Don’t make trouble, amirite?

Russia’s influence campaign is driven by a desire to “watch us tear ourselves apart,” a senior FBI official said Monday, comments that come after details of a classified briefing to lawmakers became public in news reports, including a claim by the intelligence community’s top election security official that Moscow is interfering with the goal of helping President Donald Trump.

They also come as CNN is learning that details related to Russia’s preference for Trump were not discussed in another classified briefing with committee staff, which took place prior to the closed-door meeting with lawmakers that has come under scrutiny in recent days.

Speaking at a conference on election security in Washington, David Porter, the assistant section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, said that Russia is waging a “brazen and disruptive” operation against the US aimed at dividing the population and undermining traditional sources of information, like the news media, to make room for misleading narratives.

“Election interference is one of the vectors in this space. It’s designed to degrade confidence at the very foundation of our democratic system and our leaders’ ability to govern,” Porter said.”It’s also designed to weaken the adversary from within by identifying existing 

Aaaand, the IC weighs in too:

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence pushed back Monday on reports that a senior intelligence official told lawmakers that the Russian government was actively aiding President Trump’s reelection, though it did not specify what the official did say at a classified, now-contentious briefing before the House Intelligence Committee on February 13.  

“During the [February 13] briefing, the Intelligence Community did not state that Russia is aiding the re-election of President Trump,” a senior official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told CBS News. “This was an interagency briefing with pre-coordinated messages that had been briefed to other congressional committees.”

The senior official also said that the briefing, which focused on election security, was broad and covered threats from adversaries beyond Russia.

The official’s pushback was a rare effort by ODNI, which serves as the head of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, to dispel inaccurate accounts that have emerged of an intelligence assessment delivered at the House briefing by Shelby Pierson, the Intelligence Community Election Threats Executive. Pierson, a former national intelligence manager for Russia who coordinated election security efforts in 2018, was accompanied at the briefing by representatives from multiple agencies, including the FBI, CIA and NSA.

If the administration hadn’t been so obvious in strongarming the DOJ and the ODNI, people (other than the media) might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Anyone with only the slightest bit of common sense knows that Russia favors Trump for obvious reasons. He’s destroying the United States of America. What’s not to like?

“Going viral” takes on a whole new meaning

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 25, 2020

After the walloping financial markets took Monday in belated reaction to spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), Politico wonders whether our acting president’s usual bag of tricks are a match for a black swan event. A pandemic is not the usual kind of chaos (of his own making) in which Donald Trump thrives:

With the possibility of a U.S. outbreak growing by the day, Trump allies and advisers have grown increasingly worried that a botched coronavirus response will hit the U.S. economy. Even Donald Trump Jr. has mused to associates he hopes the White House does not screw up the response and put the president’s best reelection message at risk, said two individuals with knowledge of his comments.

“Trump’s reelection effort is so closely tied to the strength of the stock market and the economy,” said [Stephen] Moore, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and 2016 Trump campaign adviser. “Anything that shakes us off of that pro-growth track is a concern, but I think the view of officials in the White House is that this will be contained.”

“Once the virus is contained, the market will bounce right back,” Moore added.

Good luck with that. Austria and Croatia have confirmed their first cases this morning. Iran has an outbreak and the UAE has banned flights to or from its Persian Gulf neighbor. The International Olympic Committee “estimates there’s a three-month window to decide whether the Tokyo Games can go ahead due to the spread of coronavirus.” The games are set to open July 24.

What contingency plans does the Democratic National Committee have for a Milwaukee nominating convention — contested or otherwise — that ends a week ahead of the Olympic Games? Or for earlier state-level conventions? Watch this space.

Luckily, most cases of the illness are mild. Some are asymptomatic. But spreading even faster are the rumors and misinformation on social media. Axios reports, “The tide of bad information is undermining trust in governments, global health organizations, nonprofits and scientists — the very institutions that many believe are needed to organize a global response to what may be turning into a pandemic.”

Trump’s insistence that the spread is “very much under control” in this country may not age well. It already sounds like something out of Animal House.

The World Health Organization has already posted a “Myth busters” page to stem the spread of misinformation.

More from Axios:

Three main actors are driving misinformation: People trying to inform their friends and family without vetting the information; entities aiming to harm China’s ruling government; and “longer-term actors in the disinformation space that find this an extremely useful vehicle … to undermine trust in governments, NGOs and fact-based media,” [University of Washington professor Carl] Bergstrom says.

That there are recognized “longer-term actors in the disinformation space” undermining trust in governments (and science) elides the fact that Fox News, the President of the United States, and his supporters from the White House to the state house are among the most prominent disinformers. And unlike the Internet Research Agency, they spread misinformation right out in the open.

It would be perhaps the ultimate irony for the Trump administration to be felled like H.G. Wells’s Martians by an unseen virus after all the protests, investigations, and other political weapons, exhausted, have failed.

And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians–_dead_!–slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

“Going viral” takes on a whole new meaning: its original one.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Finally…

Published by tristero on February 24, 2020

Confession: I’ve been very reluctant to admit how much I’ve loathed this show. Not anymore. Finally, someone admits to disliking WSS about as much as I do. Never liked the thing, not the demeaning portrayal of the “exotics” and not the story.

But even something this awful has some redeeming qualities. Music students use the opening of “Maria” to memorize the interval of a tritone and “America” demonstrates hemiola rhythm quite nicely. There are some other interesting moments for music nerds.

I recently had a chance to see it again for free. Great cast, of course, but I could only take one act.