I signed and would sign 100 times over if I could. Democracy is in danger. It’s time our elected representatives started behaving accordingly. A Tweet by Amanda Hollis-Brusky @HollisBruskyPoliSci Prof @pomonacollege

In 2022, democracy itself is on the ballot. The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln

A couple of days ago, when I posted my concern that we are losing our Democracy, I was worried that I was overreacting. Then, yesterday, a group of one hundred academics specializing in government and politics issued a Statement of Concern that is both scarier and more hopeful than my post. Their concern is that, When democracy breaks down, it typically takes many years, often decades, to reverse the downward spiral. In the process, violence and corruption typically flourish, and talent and wealth flee to more stable countries, undermining national prosperity. It is not just our venerated institutions and norms that are at risk—it is our future national standing, strength, and ability to compete globally.

Their biggest worry seems to be that, if we lose our Democracy, we will lose market share, which seems like a pretty conservative position to me. Not populous conservative like Fox News, but more business conservative like Forbes. Still, it is surprising that they lay the blame on the Republicans, saying, Elected Republican leaders have had numerous opportunities to repudiate Trump and his “Stop the Steal” crusade, which led to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Each time, they have sidestepped the truth and enabled the lie to spread.

When I was eight – I don’t actually remember it as happening when I was eight per se but I do remember wearing a Dewey button home which upset my dad no end, so that would have made it 1948 – I asked my dad “Why don’t people like Roosevelt?” He said that he didn’t know because “…even rich Republicans should love Roosevelt, he saved Democracy and Capitalism.” It was one of those answers that I bought into as an eight-year-old but, as I got older, seemed more like hyperbole. A hyperbole that I’ve heard many times since. Now, at eighty, I’ve come full circle. Now, watching Trump claim he won and the election was fixed, watching his followers – not all his followers of course, but the rabid ones – actually storm the Capitol, watching the majority of Republican Representative and even Senators say it didn’t happen, I am starting to understand how fragile our government really is. Now I understand that President Franklin Roosevelt probably did save Democracy and Capitalism.

That is what President Joe Bidden has been saying and that is what the signers of this Statement of Concern seem to be saying. What I find surprising is that so many of them seem to be conservative. And, while they are professors of government and politics, the wording suggests they are concerned with the business of America. There are ten signers from Stanford including Francis Fukuyama – one of the few signers I didn’t have to Google – who has always seemed pretty conservative to me. These professors are part of the establishment and they think the establishment is threatened; they don’t want the hoi polloi getting their pitchforks out.

There were 54 votes in favor of enacting the January 6 Commission, and 35 opposed, but because our rules are completely bananas that means that the 35 WON THE VOTE. The filibuster must go. A Tweet by Brian Schatz @brianschatz United States Senator from Hawaii. Dad. Climate Hawk. Chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. Chief Deputy Whip. ÜT: 19.72105,-155.087417 brianschatz.com

I was going to say that the headline in the LA Times says it all but it really doesn’t. Driving home last Friday, I heard the news on NPR, and it wasn’t a shock or even a surprise. Still, I was instantly outraged and I turned off the radio – turned off is probably too mild – but I still couldn’t shake the deep sense of betrayal I felt. At first at the 34 Senators who voted against looking into what happened, not so much as looking into what happened as much as to even acknowledge the insurrection and put it on the record. My sense of betrayal spread like an oil slick, sliming out from the 34 Senators that voted against it, then the eleven cowards, including two Democrats, that didn’t even have the guts to show up for the vote, the guts to say “Fuck you America, I’m voting to protect the traitors.” My sense of being betrayed spread to the Senators who say they are our friends and want to vote the way 67% of Americans want but the rules won’t let them, then, irrationally, my sense of betrayal spread to our the entire Government.

My whole life – well since about the first grade – I been told to trust the Government and, deep under my cynicism I do (or want to, at least). Still, increasingly, I feel the government has betrayed us. Not The Government, really, because The Government isn’t real, only the people in it are real and, if they don’t act for us, the Governed, if they only act for their own self-interest or for their corporate benefactors, then then this whole democracy thing is a charade and I am increasingly worried that has come to pass. Our country has a long history of government that looks like a Democracy, has the form and trappings of a Democracy, but really isn’t. Our founding document, The Declaration of Independence, says; We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, but, the reality of our founding is that only White Male Landowners had the right to vote. So, while I’m sure we’ll keep the trappings of Democracy, I feel betrayed because I am fearful that our reality will never match our aspirations. Worse, on this Memorial Day weekend, I am fearful that the country is drifting backward into rule by an oligarchy of the rich and powerful for the very rich and very powerful.

The new Google Earth is a mind blower and I don’t say that lightly. For a couple of reasons, it’s been probably more than a year since I’ve dropped by Google Earth and the transformation in the interim truly shocked me. The main reason I haven’t wandered over to Goggle Earth is Google’s fault, I just haven’t had the need to go there because Goggle Maps is so terrific and handy (and it didn’t help that the Go-To-Google-Earth Icon – for lack of a better name – mysteriously disappeared from my toolbar for some reason, maybe because Google Earth is now only reachable from my browser). Anyway, once there, I found it difficult to leave. This has to be the best map(s) in the history of Humankind.

Everything is just seamless, from Earth floating in space down to the fisherman trails around Thousand Island in the Sierras. It is addictive to follow a trail I hiked decades ago and then just wander up a side trail that I didn’t take.

We can do this seemingly anywhere, although the quality of detail suffers in areas where it appears everything was only mapped by satellite and/or has lots of tree coverage. Still, this is an amazing jump in mapping. Google deserves a standing ovation.

I got a Standing Desk with the stimulus money I got from the government. I’m still not exactly sure where in the government the money came from, but the authorization was the $1,9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Since the whole point of the American Rescue Plan is to jumpstart the economy, I figured that it was my moral obligation to spend the money as soon as possible rather than, say, pay quarterly taxes or make a house payment. Additionally, it seems to me, the money is better spent here in the good ol’ US of A rather than buying something, like, say, a mechanical watch, from China. As an aside, I guess buying anything from China these days, is both verboten and nearly impossible to not do. End aside.

To be accurate, I didn’t get a standing-only desk, I got a desk that goes up and down – from sitting to standing – at the push of a button. The whole idea of a standing desk has sort of intrigued me since Donald Rumsfeld times – actually, Donald Rumsfeld intrigued me, he was so smart and so wrong, like a bad replay of Bob McNamara in Vietnam – but getting a standing-only desk was too big a step. The only downside is that the desk I got was made in Texas, however, Texas is still in the US so I’ll live with it.

So far, I am delighted, my thought was that a standing desk would be healthier but the big surprise is how convenient a standing desk is. I can just walk up to it and start working (if working is the right word for what I’m doing). Thanks, Mr. President, I wouldn’t have done it without you.

[This is] the best of all possible worlds. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz^[as quoted in Voltaire’s Candide.

You might have fantasized about an Obama presidency, perhaps, sailing on a generational wave of optimism, radically transforming American society by bending the arc of history toward moral justice, or whatever…No: it’s the gaffe-prone friend of insurance companies and segregationist Senators, the old guy who still goes to Mass for non-performative reasons, the non-threatening Scranton-made moderate who history perversely decided would become the agent of an attempted American revolution from the left. Andrew Sullivan in a Daily Dish Column titled The Strange Fate Of Joe Biden, The unlikeliest would-be revolutionary in American history

But we’re not talking about reality. We’re discussing the federal government. Sarah Vowell in an editorial in the New York Times.

President Joe Biden is the best President we could have right now.

I didn’t always feel this way, at the beginning of the primary, way back in 2019, I said: Joe Biden is probably the most extreme Trump is the [only] problem candidate and his campaign has a sort of restoration of virtue vibe about it. To my ear, that sounds like “Let’s go back to business as usual” and although I don’t see Biden getting the nomination, he has a lot of money and, seemingly, a big part of the Democratic Party Establishment backing him including the mainstream media. I say that because the questions at the debate had a distinctly pro-Biden, anti-Sanders cast. I went on to say that Biden, doesn’t speak about the oncoming Climate Disaster with much conviction and I hate his take on international relations… Lastly, he is really too old, really really and his age is showing; watching Biden stumble around mid-sentence on some semi-memorized bit, it’s hard not to laugh, he gets so befuddled. However, my opinion of Joe Biden has changed.

Part of my change in attitude is because I was wrong about Joe Biden and part of it is because Biden has changed in reaction to the changing world. I was wrong about Biden because I didn’t see him fitting the criteria that I think a President needs to bring about change. I used to think we needed an outsider like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton to bring a fresh viewpoint to Washinton but outsiders don’t bring change, insiders do. Don’t get me wrong, I still am a Barack Obama fan, he is the public figure I would most like to have dinner with, but Obama as President was a disappointment. He wasn’t the revolutionary President the country needed. Obama ran as a Revolutionary and I think believed he would be a revolutionary, I certainly did. I thought he would be a revolutionary President when I volunteered for his Primary campaign and I still thought he would be when he was elected President – his slogan was Change We Need, after all – but I was wrong.

I began to realize that during Obama’s second term. But I wondered Why? Why aren’t we getting the change we were promised? At the time, I began to come up with a proto-theory, Outsiders are not agents of change which covered Clinton in addition to Obama. Since then, I have become even more convinced that change has to come from an insider, somebody who knows and is not intimidated by the inside the beltway elites. Although I didn’t see it in January, a year and a half ago, Joe Biden is today’s ultimate insider. I think that he has a chance to be another Roosevelt (and he knows it, BTW ).

Back in November 2019, after the fifth Democratic Debate, I still didn’t think Biden could win. As an aside, at the time, President Trump acted as if Biden was his biggest threat, and I thought Trump was wrong or faking or something. End aside. After that debate, I wrote: the heavy hitters were Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, with supporting roles by Harris, Buttigieg, and Gillibrand. Bernie, in my opinion, is the most influential candidate up there, pulling almost everyone else left, still, I don’t think he will get the nomination. It just feels as if his campaign has peaked and I think that’s why Harris went after Biden first, thinking he is the top dog. Speaking of which, watching Kamala Harris eviscerate Biden reminded me of Trump taking on Jeb! only much more nuanced. Whereas Trump made an ad hominem attack, saying something like “Look at him, just low energy, he won’t get anything done”, Harris went after Biden’s actions and made them personal. As an aside, when somebody starts out with, “I don’t believe you are a racist, but…”, it probably won’t end well. End aside. The thing is, I think Biden is a racist, almost all of us are. It is how we react to that innate racism, acknowledged or not acknowledged, that sets us apart. In Biden’s case, I think he reacted defensively which is why Clarence Thomas’ accusation of “High-tech lynching” was powerful enough to get Biden to close those long ago hearings.

However, thinking back on Biden’s Vice-presidency, Biden, like Trump had a sense of the electorate that Obama and most other inside the beltway politicians didn’t, and still don’t. Biden felt the economic and cultural change and dissatisfaction in the country just like Trump did – and Bernie, for that matter – which is why then Vice-President Biden came out for gay rights before Obama (which caused somewhat of a kerfuffle). Biden could feel the country change in its general tenor towards Gay Marriage. I don’t think that makes Biden a Liberal in the Bernie Sanders sense but, rather, that it illustrates that he can actually see/feel what’s happening in the country and react to it, maybe because he spent so much time commuting on Amtrack. I do want to quickly point out that the difference between Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s reactions, however, seems to be that Joe Biden reacts from a place of compassion rather than anger, perhaps that is because has had so many setbacks that he can acknowledge other people’s pain.

By the time Joe Biden got the nomination, I was getting on board the bandwagon., writing: Wow! The Democratic Platform Is Encouraging…[Biden] is an old man with, seemingly little interest in Climate Change and a long history of being on the wrong side of what I consider the major problems facing our country and the world today. However, when times change, people change, sometimes; this has been a time of huge change, and Joe Biden seems to be changing with it. He is running on a platform that is substantially to the left from where he started. At last, he is taking the Climate crisis seriously, saying; “To reach net-zero emissions as rapidly as possible, Democrats commit to eliminating carbon pollution from power plants by 2035 through technology-neutral standards for clean energy and energy efficiency. We will dramatically expand solar and wind energy deployment through community-based and utility-scale systems. Within five years, we will install 500 million solar panels, including eight million solar roofs and community solar energy systems, and 60,000 made-in-America wind turbines.“

Now, in a sort of semi-State Of The Union speech, President Biden has doubled down on Climate Change Is The Problem (along with, as he said: “The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War”). What I didn’t take into account is that Joe Biden believes in government and, when we have national problems, that Government Is The Answer. In that regard, President Joseph Robinette Biden also seems to be the answer.