D.C. Statehood, Plus Idaho's Red Dawn, Plus

A little clearing of the browser decks, plus music

A red-vented bulbul seen through a screen door (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review

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D.C. Statehood (Sure Woulda Been Nice)

Millions of U.S. citizens have no voting representation in Congress, not even counting the tens of millions more who are theoretically represented by legislators who are in fact bribed or bludgeoned into representing the interests of billionaires and corporations and powerful lobbying groups over the interests of their constituents.

That includes more than three million citizen residents of Puerto Rico and the better part of a million more distributed across D.C., Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with the bulk of those, some 700,000, in D.C.

Refusing to enfranchise citizens residing in our capital has always ranked toward the top of voluntary Congressional idiocies. Arguments can be made in favor of the practice, but they’re all stupid or venal. The argument against it is simple: U.S. citizens get to vote for congressional representation.

That’s true of citizens in Wyoming and Vermont, both of which have populations smaller than D.C.’s, and in Alaska and North Dakota, both of which have populations just barely larger. Everybody there gets two Senators and at least one fully-franchised House member just by virtue of living in a state, no matter how sparsely settled.

Heck, my own state, with two senators and two House representatives, isn’t even on the same continent as D.C., let alone hosting the federal government, and we get to vote.

So D.C. should be a state and, as Ryan Cooper wrote in The American Prospect last month, statehood would have helped ward off at least some of the current regime’s recent shenanigans there, and might well have locked up the 2024 election for Democrats.

Back in 2019 and again in 2021, House Democrats did pass a sweeping voting rights reform, the For the People Act, which included a ban on gerrymandering and [a provision for] D.C. statehood. Republicans obviously filibustered it, and in the latter case when Dems controlled the Senate, then-Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) refused to consider filibuster reform, so it died.

I won’t rehash the arguments about the stinking, rotten filibuster—an “institution” based on a clerical error, used to block civil rights bills for most of American history, which has caused grave damage to both houses of Congress, and in its current form dates back to about 2007—in too much detail. Suffice to say that moderate Democrats’ pigheaded refusal to end this fake tradition is a big reason why we are in this mess.

If Democrats had axed the filibuster—which could be accomplished with a majority vote in the Senate at any time—and passed the For the People Act in 2021, Trump would now find it considerably more difficult to impose a military occupation on the nation’s capital, and Republican states would face an obstacle to cheating elections by rigging district boundaries. Democrats also would have had 52 votes in 2021-2022 rather than 50, and President Biden’s Build Back Better Act likely would have passed instead of dying in the Senate. Had Biden’s massive expansion of the Child Tax Credit passed, Trump might not have won in 2024.

All that is water under the bridge. But it is an important lesson about the stakes for any future Democratic Congress and president. If they do manage to stop Trump’s attempt to consolidate a dictatorship, America’s political institutions will need a major overhaul. Manchin and Sinema are both gone, but their brand of “moderation”—some mixture of triangulating cynicism, corruption, and cowardice—is not. Supporting D.C. statehood is the bare minimum for any Democrat seeking a Senate seat.

Ah, the filibuster, allowing Senators to tie their own hands and then weep about how their hands are tied. Republicans could reopen the government tomorrow if they wanted to, just by killing the filibuster and voting for their own measure with a simple majority. (Probably worth asking why they don’t want to.)

But things like the prospect of D.C. statehood leave Senate Republicans reluctant to permanently kill a rule that allows them to block pretty much any vote not pertaining to nominations (for which both parties have modified the rule at various times) or items that can be passed under budget reconciliation rules. And the “moderate” Senate Democrats who stand most strongly behind the rule seem to fear that killing it could lead to Bernie—who supported retaining it until very recently—passing five-year plans and universal health care and reeducation camps for the Blue Dogs.

Coulda woulda shoulda. It’ll be a long while even in the best case before the prospect of statehood gets brought up again; meanwhile, we’re all headed toward the same second-class citizen status D.C.residents enjoy now. You gotta wonder what lessons will have been learned.

Idaho’s Red Dawn

Predictably, the news that the US is building a training site for Qatar on a US Air Force base in Idaho drew spittle-flecked disfavor from some Trump supporters.

[Laura] Loomer, a far-right activist, accused the Donald Trump administration of betraying its base by allowing Qatar to establish a “military base on US soil,” calling it “an abomination” and urging “the people of Idaho” to “revolt.”
. . .
Loomer also said “there isn’t a single Trump supporter who supports allowing Qatar to have a military base on US soil,” and suggested that the decision “made people not want to vote,” comparing it to something she “would expect from a President Ilhan Omar.”

She also issued a list of demands for any future candidates seeking her endorsement, including calls to “ban Muslims from holding political office,” designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, “ban Sharia Law,” and outlaw “the Burqa and Hijab.” Loomer wrote, “You are not worthy of my support unless you agree with everything listed above. I’m done with the GOP islamifying my country.”

The training site agreement predates the current regime, as this 2022 story reprinted from the Idaho Statesman explains.

The Qatar project dates to 2017 when the United States inked a $12 billion deal that provided Qatar “36 aircraft, their associated weapons systems, U.S.-based training, maintenance support equipment and logistics support,” according to the Air Force Times.

“The sale as a whole is obviously a big strategic advantage,” Yule said. “(It will) continue to increase capability of partner nations within the Middle East, a region of huge influence for the United States. So the more we can increase capability with our appropriations there, the less reliant we have to be on a large footprint by the United States military.”

The Statesman story goes on to wonder how Qatari pilots will adapt to their new lifestyle in the U.S. outback. “The Qatar trainees may be in for a culture shock should they find themselves in the city of Mountain Home,” it says. “More than 90% of Qataris live in the capital of Doha, which is full of skyscrapers, luxury hotels and attractions, museums and world-class food.”

Swimmin’ pools. Movie stars.

Negotiations for the deal were begun by the Obamans during his second term and concluded by the Trumpettes in 2017 during the regime’s dry run.

Jesus it’s a strange world.

A little clearing of the browser decks

I’ve been pretty diligent about not accumulating mass quantities of open tabs across my many browsers since I switched to the new laptop I got during the holidays last year but didn’t set up until about two months ago because I was skeered to.

(It’s a MacBook Air with the M3 chip, 24GB RAM and a 512GB solid state drive, for the record, replacing a 2018 Windows machine with similar specs other than a much slower CPU and graphics co-processor. Always been a PC user dating back to 1982 (!)) but no more.)

Recently, though, the tabs have gotten away from me a bit and in the interest of minimizing my anxiety, here are some links to more stuff I’ve read but not written about, so I can close these and related tabs in good conscience.

Early last month, artnet published a then-exhaustive timeline of and commentary about the regime’s assault on the artistic independence of the Smithsonian Institution and other organizations.

[A]brupt policy shifts are rippling through logistics and trade, prompting shifting how art dealers, auction houses, and other art market actors both in the U.S. and abroad to rethink their business strategies.

These moves aren’t just symbolic—they’re transforming the infrastructure of American culture. Experts say we are entering uncharted territory. “There is no precedent for the moment we are in,” said Marilyn Jackson, president of the American Alliance of Museums.

True dat.

NiemanLab, a project of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, ran a story a week or so ago about the role of “impact editors” in journalism.

In September, the Dutch investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports worked with six other news outlets to co-publish an investigation into how Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s totalitarian regime stole 300 Syrian children from their families and hid them away in orphanages in an attempt to force their parents to cooperate with the government.

Reporters spoke not just with victims’ families, but with psychologists, attorneys, and representatives from NGOs who wanted to help. After the story was published, Lighthouse created a WhatsApp group to connect all of these sources and help the families get support. (Lighthouse reports that at least another 3,700 children are still missing.)

Lighthouse’s role was “not just to deliver the story to the families, but also to use our position and connections to benefit the families,” the newsroom’s impact editor, Tessa Pang, said in a panel at the Incubator for Media Education and Development (IMEDD)’s International Journalism Forum in Athens, Greece, last month. “They’re not just providing us their stories, but they’re also benefiting from the journalism. This is an example of how an investigation can live beyond what is published.”

This kind of intentional journalistic activism has been, with rare exceptions, pretty much the opposite of how the major press organizations in the US approach their work. I wrote earlier this week, in connection with Bari Weiss’s ascension to the top slot at CBS News, about the network’s 1960 Fred Friendly/Edward R. Murrow-produced “Harvest of Shame” documentary addressing the conditions in which farm workers of the time lived and worked, which domestic news organizations such as NPR criticized as recently as 2010 for Murrow’s call to action at the end of the film.

Of course Weiss is nothing if not an activist, so that’ll probably change.

There’s a great story in the London Review of Books brushing lightly across China’s Generation Z and the challenges they’re facing, with a particularly lovely treatment of what happened when U.S. refugees from TikTok, which at the time seemed in danger of imminent closure, began flocking to what local users had thought was a Chinese-only app called RedNote.

Following the news in January that TikTok might be banned, many users in the US and Europe registered with the Chinese social app RedNote. The sudden influx of ‘TikTok refugees’ shocked many young Chinese people who thought the Great Firewall worked in both directions and that Westerners couldn’t access Chinese social media. They soon calmed down and started doing what they do best. Since the time difference between China and the US is around twelve hours, they decided it was fair enough for Americans to use the app while they were asleep. But on one condition: the refugees were asked to pay a ‘cat tax’, i.e. post a picture of a cute cat (handsome men could pay an ‘ab tax’ instead).

After paying their cat taxes, American children started asking the Chinese for help with their maths homework, while the Chinese children asked the Americans to help them with their English. Soon, adults started to compare notes on things such as salaries, food prices, healthcare and housing costs. Americans were shocked by the low cost of living in China, and the affordability of healthy food (especially the variety of vegetables). Chinese were shocked by how high American medical bills are. RedNote’s coding team worked overtime to make the translation function available within three days. Traditional media outlets praised it as a ‘global village’ or a ‘Tower of Babel’. One RedNote user didn’t get to enjoy this rare moment of Sino-US harmony, however. Maye Musk’s account was flooded with insults from newcomers and she had to disable comments for a while. She has lived in Shanghai on and off since her son Elon launched a Tesla gigafactory there, and Chinese women often praise her elegance and beauty on RedNote.

Western sceptics quickly noticed something odd about RedNote: too many users called themselves ‘momo’. The assumption was that they must be bots controlled by the Communist Party. While Westerners tend to use their real names and pictures on social media, Chinese users prefer to remain anonymous online. ‘Momo’ was once the default name provided by Chinese social media sites for newly registered users, and young people found it convenient. They formed the ‘momo army’ and adopted the slogan: ‘One momo did a bad thing; millions of momo share the blame.’ Chinese Gen Z-ers don’t want their parents or colleagues to know what they say, watch or read in the virtual world. Plus, cyber violence is rife: who wants to be doxxed over a silly comment?

It just sounds lovely, and for a moment it was.

The same writer, Yun Sheng, who works at a Shanghai university, wrote a piece about Chinese millennials in 2019 for the same magazine.

A typical​ Chinese millennial hipster will turn up to see you wearing a snug designer jacket, really saggy jeans or super-tight leggings, and white sneakers. They’ll be carrying an eco bag: not any old cotton tote, but one that’s trending on Instagram – the LRB tote perhaps. Baseball caps and dramatic eyewear are among the most popular accessories. Unlike the urban middle-class generation that came before them, Chinese millennials (roughly, those born between 1985 and 2000) aren’t particularly drawn to such luxury brands as Chanel, whose showy logo is considered too ‘mature’. And they’re reading Sally Rooney.

Chinese millennials are a product of globalisation. Like their Western counterparts, they don’t much like traditional marriage arrangements. We have smartphones to keep us in touch with our friends, single millennials might say, unlimited games to play and movies to watch, dating apps for hooking up, an inexhaustible supply of porn for solo sex (it has been said that porn forums in China are the most harmonious spaces on the internet, with users thanking one another for sharing content), numerous apps for ordering cabs and housekeepers, restaurant delivery within thirty minutes, fresh grocery delivery within the hour, dogs and cats to channel the sporadic parenting instinct ... What do we need marriage for? In 2018, the marriage rate in China dropped to a new low of 7.2 weddings per thousand people; before that the divorce rate had increased for 15 years straight, to 3.2 per thousand. Two of the most commonly cited causes of divorce are disagreements over the division of household chores, and parental meddling – parents of only children can be extremely protective.

I think Yun Sheng hadn’t really hit his stride back then, but I hesitate to say so given he writes better in his second language than I write in his second language.

If you didn’t read Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold,” the inspiration for my own meandering “Donald Trump Has Got A Cold” from the other day, please do. The link is to a printable version and I’m going to close the tab now.

Jeff Sharlett, who writes books, wrote a couple of weeks ago about the national security memo with the potential to criminalize a very broad range of speech and the people and organizations who engage in it.

The news cycle yesterday was still spinning around Kimmel, and tomorrow it’ll be busy with Comey. But in between came bigger news: the “memo” named in my subtitle. A “Terror Memo.” I don’t like sending traffic to this White House, but you should read it. In its expansive definition of “terror,” “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” may prove to be as much of an acceleration in this slow civil war as the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I’m no lawyer. Just a journalist, long on the rightwing beat, and an English professor who likes to linger in the luxury of close reading. What follows is my preliminary pass.

First, there’s the form: an executive memo instead of an order. Even as this memo goes into much deeper detail than Monday’s executive order designating an amorphous anything called “antifa” as a “terrorist organization,” the memo, as a form, is looser, free of the need to cite constitutional authority. And yet it retains the “force of law”—perfect for the president who says “it’s not illegal if it saves the country.” And, given what appears to be the vast reallocation of resources called for the Terror Memo, another advantage of the form is that it doesn’t require the Office of Budget and Management to issue a “budgetary impact statement.” What’ll the tab be? Don’t ask. Such questions could, according to the memo, become subject to investigation.

Here’s a story from the Wisconsin Examiner about ICE raids in Wisconsin dairy country.

While last Thursday’s raid in Manitowoc didn’t take place on a dairy farm, most of the individuals arrested were dairy workers. Beyond that, they were dairy workers in the county with the highest concentration of dairy factory farms in the state. Manitowoc County and its northeast Wisconsin neighbors are the epicenter of the modern farming powerhouse that maintains Wisconsin’s status as “America’s Dairyland.”

“It’s just sending an economic ripple effect across the dairy industry, which is Wisconsin’s rural economy,” says Luis Velasquez, statewide organizing director for immigrant advocacy group Voces de la Frontera. “And then also there’s the symbolic and political dimension to it as well. We are America’s Dairyland, and so this enforcement is not just an administrative matter, but it threatens the industry’s well being. Who are we going to be after all of this? Are we still going to be America’s Dairyland?”

Velasquez says the raid sent a “big anxiety wave” through immigrant communities across the state.

“These views have just spiraled out of control in terms of the rumors that have been sent out across the community, rumors of ICE coming into their neighborhoods, to their homes, to their schools,” Velasquez says.

“I have had serious conversations since the raid in Manitowoc of folks who are planning to leave after many years of being here,” he adds. “They just don’t feel like this is a humane lifestyle anymore. They’ve given many years of their lives, and many of them have children here.”

One last mention of Ray Muller’s 1993 Leni Riefenstahl documentary on YouTube, “The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,” which you should watch sometime.

Hawai’i’s education department is nationally infamous among educators and consultants, and this story about a report on how the DOE tried, sort of, and failed, definitely, to get the state’s schools air-conditioned helps explain why.

The report pulls few punches in its criticism of the heat abatement program and the Department of Education’s record-keeping, saying the DOE “was unable to provide us with a complete and accurate accounting of the $100 million that the Legislature appropriated.”

The auditors’ work was hampered by a lack of documentation due to high turnover in the staff of the Cool Classrooms Initiative, and the departure of its chief architect, DOE’s former public works administrator, who retired in 2017.

“Paradoxically, the more information that we were able to gather from DOE and its contractors, the less clarity there was about how much was spent, where it was spent, and what it was spent on,” the report said.

I mean, I love that. ‘The more they told us, the less we knew.’ It’s like the DOE is the Fox News of state agencies.

Music

I was remiss in writing a thing based around Bad Bunny the other day without including any of his music, so here he is on NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts.

Social Distortion, “When the Angels Sing”

Bob Mould, Here We Go Crazy, “When Your Heart Is Broken”

Turnstile, Never Enough, “I Care”

Ken Nordine with Fred Astaire and Barrie Chase, “My Baby”

Thelonious Monk, “Blue Monk”

Kinga Głyk with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, “Let’s Play Some Funky Groove”

toe, “Chiaroscuro”

And that, comrades in agitation, is all I got. Be well, take care, and if you’ve not already, please consider a subscription.