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Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston).

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker [L] with Mike, just before the show. (Dec. 7, 2015)

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]:

“It is incredible. You know, I wrote a column way back when around the time Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied service at restaurants. What we should be doing is shunning these people. Shunning, shaming these people is a statement of moral indignation that these people are not fit for polite society. I think any institution, University of Virginia, for example, for a bit had a relationship with Marc Short, who’s now back with the administration. It’s absolutely abhorrent that any institution of higher learning or any news organization or any entertainment organization that has a news outlet would hire these people. I want to echo something my friend EJ [Dionne] said. It’s not only that Trump has to lose, but that all his enablers have to lose. We have to collectively burn down the Republican party. We have to level them. Because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again and they’ll take it as confirmation that, hey, it pays to ride the waves. Look at me, I made it through. Up and down the ticket, federal state and local offices, the country has to repudiate this. It is NOT a normal administration, and when these people say, “Oh you can’t criticize us, it will deter public service,” it will deter people who are liars, who are enablers and who are really bad people and they should be deterred. They don’t get to escape accountability. That’s all of our job to hold them accountable for the rest of their lives. Yes, we need to burn it down. BURN IT ALL DOWN.” ~ Jennifer Rubin, on AMJoy (8/25/2019)

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Make sure you are registered to vote! (Show information begins after Item 2, after voting and election information.)

1. HarrisVotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
   1. Last Day to Register to Vote is Monday, October 7, 2019                        i.    Next Election: November 5, 2019 – General and Special Elections
   2. Harrisvotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
   3. VoteTexas.gov
   4. Countywide Voting Centers
      1. HARRIS CTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: Do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
         1. Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
         2. A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
         3. Current utility bill
         4. Bank statement
         5. Government check
         6. Paycheck
         7. (a) A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
      2. You may vote early by-mail if
         1. you are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
         2. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
         3. Sick or disabled;
         4. 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
         5. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
         6. Make sure you are registered:
   5. Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
      1. CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
         1. CLICK How to register to vote in Texas
      2. POLL LOCATIONS & BALLOTS: Find your ballots with simple information entries
      3. Outside Texas, try Vote.org.
   6. Make it a point to listen to my April 22, 2019 Interview with Harris County Clerk Dr. Dianne Trautman
2. I WANT TO RE-EMPHASIZE: FIGHT FOR YOUR State Legislature
   1. In 2010, the Republicans won a a swath of state legislatures which allowed them to gerrymander Dems out of State and Federal legislatures. It’s vital we must not allow that to happen again in 2020.
   2. Look for “flippable” seats in the State Lege and try to support this candidates.
   3. The battle for the Lege is gonna be lit, by Charles Kuffner | Off the Kuff | Jun 24th, 2019
   4. Citing from the Texas Tribune by Patrick Svitek | texastribune.org | June 13, 20193 AM: Some Democrats are mobilizing in hopes of taking the nine House seats they need for a majority in 2020 …
   5. …“Everything is focused on redistricting,” state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, said at a recent tea party meeting as he fielded questions about the demise of some controversial legislation this session. “There is nothing more important — not only to Texas, but literally the nation — than to make sure that we maintain the Texas House … going into redistricting because if you look at the nation — we lose Texas, we lose the nation. And there’s no other place to go.”
   6. ANALYSIS FROM CHARLES KUFF: At this point, the name of the game is one part candidate recruitment and one part raising money, which will be the job of the various PACs until the candidates get settled. In Harris County, we have two good candidates each for the [GOP] main targets: Akilah Bacy and Josh Wallenstein (who ran for HCDE [Harris County’s Trustee for its Department of Education] in 2018 …) in HD138, and Ann Johnson and Ruby Powers in HD134. In Fort Bend, Sarah DeMerchant appears to be running again in HD26, while Eliz Markowitz (candidate for SBOE7 in 2018) is aiming for HD28. We still need (or I need to do a better job searching for) candidates in HDs 29, 85, and 126, for starters. If you’re in one of those competitive Republican-held State Rep districts, find out who is or may be running for the Dems. If you’re in one of those targeted-by-the-GOP districts, be sure to help out your incumbent. Kelly Hancock is absolutely right: This is super-duper important.
3. WHY OFF-OFF YEAR LOCAL ELECTIONS AND ALL DOWN-BALLOT RACES MATTER. (And so does local and State reporting.)
   1. Analysis: Texas redistricting is hard enough when politicians trust the mapmakers – Lawmakers get jittery when it’s time to redraw their political maps, and the exercise is based on a mix of power, party, clout, tenure — and trust. That last one is a fleeting quality in the Texas House right now. by Ross Ramsey | ORG | Sept. 16, 2019, 12 hours ago
      1. The Texas Legislature’s once-every-decade* quest for new political maps will get a twist in 2021: The Texas House will have either a speaker whose trustworthiness is suspect, or a brand-new speaker who’ll be riding in the wake of a scandal.
      2. *About that asterisk up at the top: The Legislature draws new political districts for Congress, the state House and Senate, and the State Board of Education after every decennial census, adjusting the lines of the districts to reflect changes in the population over the last 10 years. But what would, at its simplest, be a one-time thing every 10 years, often turns into a continuous process as lawmakers and the courts sort out revisions to new maps. The legal fights that began with the 2011 redistricting maps, for example, are still not completely resolved as the decade ends. “Once every decade” is how this is supposed to work, but when the stakes are high, the fights never seem to end.
      3. What’s at stake, for lawmakers, is whether they’ll have a chance at staying in office with the new maps. (The process is already underway, as of last week.) That’s how it goes with redistricting and the Texas House: The representatives of 150 political districts decide how to protect themselves and ruin their enemies by moving the lines around. Powerful members do better, on average, than weak ones. Members in the majority do better, on average, than members in the minority. And members who are on management’s good side do better, on average, than members who are not.
      4. Members’ fates are, to a great extent, in the hands of the speaker. And they are trying to figure out whether Dennis Bonnen, who became speaker less than nine months ago, can be trusted.
      5. Bonnen has been accused of working against some of the incumbent Republican members of the House — people a Republican speaker would reasonably be expected to protect. In fact, he told reporters at the end of this year’s legislative session that he would punish House members who campaigned against colleagues from either party. The news in that — to reporters and to legislators alike — was that he was protecting Democrats as well as Republicans.
      6. But he had a meeting a couple of weeks after the session with Michael Quinn Sullivan, the head of Empower Texans and a regular burr in the saddle of establishment Republicans. Bonnen told reporters in May that the group was beyond appeasement — “and I sure as hell am not going to waste my time trying.”
      7. But he and then-House Republican Caucus Chairman Dustin Burrows of Lubbock not only met with Sullivan, but they allegedly ran their mouths, speaking openly and unflatteringly about other members and — according to Sullivan — offering to give House news media passes to his group if it would work for the defeats of 10 members of the House.
      8. They denied it, but Sullivan taped the meeting and played it for select members and activists over the last several weeks, building a grassfire of opposition to Bonnen in his own House. Most members haven’t heard the tape, although everyone from the governor to Bonnen to people on the outside have asked that it be made public. …
      9. … Speakers are supposed to protect the members of the House from outside dangers, like Sullivan’s Empower Texans, or sometimes the Texas Senate or the governor. That’s the job. And when it’s time for the task of drawing new political maps — a politically consequential moment for both the people inside the House and the people outside it, whom they’re supposed to represent — that protective embrace is even more important.
4. Report reveals play-by-play of first U.S. grid cyberattack, Blake Sobczak, E&E News reporter Energywire | Friday, September 6, 2019
   1. A first-of-its-kind cyberattack on the U.S. grid created blind spots at a grid control center and several small power generation sites in the western United States, according to a document posted yesterday from the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
   2. The unprecedented cyber disruption this spring did not cause any blackouts, and none of the signal outages at the “low-impact” control center lasted for longer than five minutes, NERC said in the “Lesson Learned” document posted to the grid regulator’s website.
   3. But the March 5 event was significant enough to spur the victim utility to report it to the Department of Energy, marking the first disruptive “cyber event” on record for the U.S. power grid (Energywire, April 30).
   4. The case offered a stark demonstration of the risks U.S. power utilities face as their critical control networks grow more digitized and interconnected — and more exposed to hackers. “Have as few internet facing devices as possible,” NERC urged in its report. …
5. How to remove Brett Kavanaugh without impeaching him – The bar for removing Justice Brett Kavanaugh by impeachment is so high as to be insurmountable. But there may be another way. By Ian Millhiser | COM | Sep 16, 2019, 10:50am EDT
   1. In 2006, … the Yale Law Journal published a provocative paper. The paper, “How To Remove a Federal Judge” by law professors Saikrishna Prakash and Steven D. Smith, lays out a road map for, well, how to remove a federal judge without resorting to the impeachment power. It argues that a provision of the Constitution stating that federal judges and justices “shall hold their offices during good behaviour” is widely misunderstood.
   2. Contrary to the “virtually unquestioned assumption among constitutional law cognoscenti that impeachment is the only means of removing a federal judge,” Prakash and Smith argue that the term “good behavior” is a legal term of art that would have been understood by the founding generation to allow judges to be removed by “judicial process.”
   3. Prakash, a professor at the University of Virginia, is a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. Smith, a professor at the University of San Diego, is a frequent contributor to conservative and libertarian So even if the paper did not precede the Kavanaugh hearings by more than a decade, it would be difficult to argue that it was published in order to lay the groundwork for a liberal victory over a conservative Supreme Court justice.
   4. The paper, which was published in one of the legal academy’s most prestigious journals but has had little impact on public policy so far, could wind up becoming important if Democrats capture Congress and the White House in the 2020 election.
   5. What is “good behavior?” – The thrust of Prakash and Smith’s argument is that an official who is appointed during “good behavior” may keep their office indefinitely, but that an official who misbehaves may be removed through an ordinary court proceeding.
   6. Misbehavior, they argue, was understood broadly by English courts and by early Americans. It can include “conviction for such an offense as would make the convicted person unfit to hold a public office,” but also may include much lesser offenses. The two professors cite the eminent 17th-century jurist Sir Edward Coke for the proposition that misbehavior may also include “abuse of office, nonuse of office, and refusal to exercise an office.”
   7. For this reason, Prakash and Smith claim that it is a mistake to read the Constitution as preventing a judge from being removed from office except by impeachment. The Constitution, they note, only permits impeachment of civil officers for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” But the term “good behavior” was understood to allow an official to be removed for much lesser offenses. Therefore, the Constitution’s invocation of this term suggests that federal judges may also be removed through a process other than impeachment.
   8. To prove their claim that the term “good behavior” allows officials to be removed in a judicial proceeding, the professors cite a raft of 17th- and 18th-century English cases that support their argument. They quote early state constitutions suggesting that service during “good behavior” can be concluded by a court proceeding — the 1776 Maryland Constitution, for example, provides that judges “shall hold their commissions during good behaviour, removable only for misbehaviour, on conviction in a Court of law.” …
   9. Would the courts let one of their own be removed without impeachment? – The two professors’ argument is … not universally accepted by scholars. Indeed, in the same year that Prakash and Smith published their Yale Law Journal piece, the Journal also published a response by Northwestern law professor Martin Redish, which takes issue with their definition of good behavior.
   10. In his piece, Redish warns of “the extremely problematic effect that [Prakash and Smith’s] proposed interpretation would have on the vital role that federal judicial independence necessarily plays in preserving the foundations of our political and constitutional structure.”
   11. But Prakash and Smith also offer a sharp rebuttal to this critique: “Any removal procedure authorized by Congress would have to be conducted by a court with all the traditional judicial safeguards.” Judicial independence, in other words, would be protected by the fact that the judiciary would ultimately decide which judges are removed.
   12. Such a process is hardly unheard of in the United States. Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, for example, was twice stripped of his judicial responsibilities by a special court that hears complaints against the state’s judges.
   13. A different critique of Prakash and … is that stability in the law is important. Whatever English courts may have done in the 17th century, or whatever Congress may have done in 1790, the seemingly unbroken practice of two centuries of American history is that judges may only be removed by impeachment. Does it really make sense to toss out such a settled norm because two clever law professors dug up some centuries-old legal documents?
   14. But the era when public officials stay their hands simply because longstanding norms advise them to do so appears to have passed. Not too long ago, there was a norm providing that Supreme Court nominees receive confirmation hearings, or that Congress should not use the debt ceiling to extract policy concessions from the president, or that filibusters should be used only rarely.
   15. The question for Democrats, in other words, is not whether norms of governance must be obeyed in the United States — clearly they are not. The question is whether Democrats want to tear down one more norm in order to remove a judge they view as uniquely odious.
6. Judge threatens to put prison officials in same uncooled cells as inmates, By Brooke Seipel | COM | 09/06/19 07:57 PM EDT
   1. A federal judge in Texas has threatened to put prison officials in uncooled cells after they failed to comply with an order to keep some prisoners in air conditioning at facilities known for topping 100 degrees.
   2. S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison made the threat during an emergency hearing in Houston on Friday, The Texas Tribunereported.
   3. The outlet reported that the judge appeared visibly frustrated, rubbing his forehead and furrowing his brow during his exchange with attorneys.
   4. “It seems the most obvious sanction is pretty straight forward,” he said at the hearing. “We ought to have prison officials in prison at the same temperature.”
   5. The hearing stems from a lawsuit filed by inmates from the William Pack prison in 2014 over temperatures in 75 units that don’t have air conditioning.
   6. The lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice links the high temperatures and lack of air conditioning to the deaths of nearly two dozen prisoners since 1998, with one death reportedly caused by heat in 2018 — though state officials debate the cause of death in that case.
   7. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has reported 56 prisoners and employees suffering heat-related illnesses in 2019 alone. The agency asserts that number shows an improvement from 2018, which saw 71 heat-related illness incidents in the prison facility.
   8. Ellison previously sided with inmates, calling the temperatures cruel and unusual punishment. He ordered the prison system to place prisoners in air-conditioned housing and ruled the Texas Department of Criminal Justice had been intentionally indifferent to the risk posed to prisoners. …
   9. … In the meantime, Ellison asked for more information on the prison temperatures and further testimony to decide on whether fines or a sanction were appropriate penalties. 
   10. “If that’s not done, then I think I have no option to award sanctions forthwith,” he said of the state officials needing to testify.
7. For older people, surgery poses risks that aren’t always made clear, By Judith Graham | COM | August 5 at 8:30 AM
   1. … Bob McHenry’s heart was failing, and doctors recommended two high-risk surgeries to restore blood flow. Without the procedures, McHenry, 82, would die. … On the operating table, Bob McHenry had a stroke. For several days, he was comatose. When he awoke, he couldn’t swallow or speak and had significant cognitive impairment. Vascular dementia and further physical decline followed until the elderly man’s death five years later. Before her father’s October 2012 surgery, “there was not any broad discussion of what his life might look like if things didn’t go well,” said Karen McHenry, 49, who writes a blog about caring for older parents. “We couldn’t even imagine what ended up happening.”
   2. It’s a common complaint: Surgeons don’t help older adults and their families understand the impact of surgery in terms people can understand, even though older patients face a higher risk of complications after surgery. …
   3. … Older patients, it turns out, often have different priorities than younger ones. More than longevity, in many cases, they value their ability to live independently and spend quality time with loved ones, said Clifford Ko, professor of surgery at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
   4. Now new standards meant to improve surgical care for older adults have been endorsed by the American College of Surgeons. All older patients should have the opportunity to discuss their health goals and goals for the procedure, as well as their expectations for their recovery and their quality of life after surgery, according to the standards.
   5. Surgeons should review their advance directives — instructions for the care they want in the event of a life-threatening medical crisis — or offer patients without these documents the chance to complete them. Surrogate decision-makers authorized to act on a patient’s behalf should be named in the medical record.
   6. If a stay in intensive care is expected after surgery, that should be made clear, along with the patient’s instructions on interventions such as feeding tubes, dialysis, blood transfusions, cardiopulmonary resuscitation and mechanical ventilation. …
   7. … “What we don’t ask is: What does living well mean to you? What do you hope to be able to do in the next year? And what should I know about you to provide good care?” said Ronnie Rosenthal, a professor of surgery and geriatrics at Yale School of Medicine and co-leader of the Coalition for Quality in Geriatric Surgery Project. …
8. You know who was into Karl Marx? No, not AOC. Abraham Lincoln – The two men were friendly and influenced each other
   1. It was December 1861, a Tuesday at noon, when President Abraham Lincoln sent his first annual message ⁠ — what later became the State of the Union ⁠— to the House and Senate.
   2. By the next day, all 7,000 words of the manuscript were published in newspapers across the country, including the Confederate South. This was Lincoln’s first chance to speak to the nation at length since his inaugural address.
   3. He railed against the “disloyal citizens” rebelling against the Union, touted the strength of the Army and Navy, and updated Congress on the budget.
   4. For his eloquent closer, he chose not a soliloquy on unity or freedom but an 800-word meditation on what the Chicago Tribune subtitled “Capital Versus Labor:”
   5. “Labor is prior to and independent of capital,” the country’s 16th president said. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
   6. If you think that sounds like something Karl Marx would write, well, that might be because Lincoln was regularly reading Karl Marx.
   7. President Trump has added a new arrow in his quiver of attacks as of late, charging that a vote for “any Democrat” in the next election “is a vote for the rise of radical socialism” and that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other congresswomen of color are “a bunch of communists.” Yet the first Republican president, for whom Trump has expressed admiration, was surrounded by socialists and looked to them for counsel.
   8. Of course, Lincoln was not a socialist, nor communist nor Marxist, just as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) aren’t. (Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) identify as “democratic socialists.”) But Lincoln and Marx ⁠— born only nine years apart ⁠— were contemporaries. They had many mutual friends, read each other’s work and, in 1865, exchanged letters. …
9. How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours, BBC.COM | 7 July 2019
   1. What is the point of sending someone to prison – retribution or rehabilitation? Twenty years ago, Norway moved away from a punitive “lock-up” approach and sharply cut reoffending rates. …
   2. [Are Hoidal governor of Halden Prison ] says “… in the early 1990s, the ethos of the Norwegian Correctional Service underwent a rigorous series of reforms to focus less on what Hoidal terms “revenge” and much more on rehabilitation. Prisoners, who had previously spent most of their day locked up, were offered daily training and educational programmes and the role of the prison guards was completely overhauled. … since our big reforms, recidivism in Norway has fallen to only 20% after two years and about 25% after five years. So this works!”
   3. In the UK, the recidivism rate is almost 50% after just one year.
   4. The architecture of Halden Prison has been designed to minimise residents’ sense of incarceration, to ease psychological stress and to put them in harmony with the surrounding nature …
   5. … “We start planning their release on the first day they arrive,” explains Hoidal, as we walk through to the carpentry workshop where several inmates are making wooden summer houses and benches to furnish a new prison being built in the south of Norway.
   6. “In Norway, all will be released – there are no life sentences,” he reminds me.
   7. Normalising life behind bars (not that there are any bars on the windows at Halden) is the key philosophy that underpins the Norwegian Correctional service. At Halden, this means not only providing daily routines but ensuring family contact is maintained too. Once every three months, inmates with children can apply to a “Daddy In Prison” scheme which, if they pass the necessary safeguarding tests, means they can spend a couple of nights with their partner, sons and daughters in a cosy chalet within the prison grounds. …
   8. … It takes 12 weeks in the UK to train a prison officer. In Norway it takes two to three years. Eight kilometres north-east of Oslo in Lillestrom, an impressive white and glass building houses the University College of the Norwegian Correctional Service, where each year, 175 trainees, selected from over 1,200 applicants, start their studies to become a prison officer.
   9. Hans-Jorgen Brucker walks me around the training prison on campus, which is kitted out with reproduction cells and prison-style furniture. I note a bulging pile of helmets and stab vests in one storage room. Brucker acknowledges that prison officers will undergo security and riot training, but he’s fairly dismissive of this part of the course.
   10. “We want to stop reoffending which means officers need to be well educated,” he says. He shows me a paper outlining the rigorous selection process, which involves written exams in Norwegian and English (about a third of the prison population is non-native, so officers are expected to be fluent in English) and physical fitness tests.
   11. “My students will study law, ethics, criminology, English, reintegration and social work. Then they will have a year training in a prison and then they will come back to take their final exams.” …
10. The hidden hunger affecting billions, By Michael Marshall | BBC.COM | 7-JULY-2019
    1. Two billion people do not get enough micronutrients in their diets, which can lead to severe health conditions.
    2. New kinds of crops could help to create better, more nutritious foods to beat these deficiencies.
    3. When children do not get enough iron in their food, the results are heartbreaking. They are slower to acquire language, struggle with short-term memory, have poor attention spans and ultimately do less well at school.
    4. “They can never live up to their full physical and mental potential,” says Wolfgang Pfeiffer, director of research and development at HarvestPlus, an organisation that develops nutritionally improved crops in Washington DC. “If they are deficient in their childhood, they learn 20% less as adults.”
    5. In the poorest parts of India and China, millions of children have their lives stunted through lack of iron. In South Asia, an estimated50% of pregnant women have iron deficiency, and it is also prevalent in South America and sub-Saharan Africa.
    6. But iron is only one small part of the story. There are several dozen other “micronutrients” – substances that we need to consume, in small quantities but regularly, to remain healthy. They include zinc, copper, vitamins and folates such as folic acid and vitamin B9.
    7. The traditional solution to micronutrient deficiencies has been to add more micronutrients to common foods, or to supply pills … But these strategies have limits. If people can’t afford pills or don’t have access to a pharmacy, they may still not get enough micronutrients. What’s more, adding micronutrients to food is a constant process: every batch of breakfast cereal has to be artificially dosed with iron and vitamins.
    8. A much simpler approach would be to go back to the crop plant from which the cereal is made, and ensure that it packs itself full of the micronutrient in the first place.
    9. This is the thinking behind “biofortification”, the process of creating crops that have unusually high levels of micronutrients like iron. HarvestPlus was founded in 2003 by economist Howarth Bouis, after a decade of lobbying and raising moneyto create biofortified crops and make them available where they are needed. Today HarvestPlus has members in more than 20 countries and has biofortified over a dozen crops, from rice to sweet potatoes.
11. India’s blowout election is a lesson for US Democrats, By Annalisa Merelli | COM/ | May 24, 2019
    1. Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, defied expectations when he won his second election in an even bigger landslide than the first one. He did so at the expense of India’s Congress party, which campaigned on a secular and pluralist platform.
    2. Turns out the nationalist message of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hugely popular with voters. It was a massive defeat—the second in a row—for India’s more liberal Congress party. It’s a bitter loss that came with many lessons, ones that Democrats in the United States would be wise to heed. …
    3. … Politics in India have traditionally been about the economy. This time, however, Modi and the BJP’s support of Hindu nationalism took a more prominent position than it had in past campaigns, exploiting tension with Pakistan to redirect the debate toward national security and anti-Muslim sectarianism. As Modi’s message grew stronger, [the once-dominant Congress Party] failed to really fight for India’s long-established secular ideals. …
    4. … The Congress isn’t known for its ability to learn lessons, but there are some more to note. And given that a left-leaning party promoting pluralism just lost to a right-leaning party promoting nationalism, the Democratic Party in the United States should probably read a long as it prepares for its own election season.
    5. Don’t make it about the candidate: Modi’s leadership of the BJP is strong, and there is no separating his party or government’s success and work from his own. His party capitalized on this, turning the election into a referendum on him—rather than his government’s record. Polarizing figures like Modi tend to benefit from these kinds of politics. His party understood this. His adversaries did not.
    6. Turning the campaign into a vote for or against Modi prevented the opposition from asserting its own ideas. Even when the Congress proposed policies that could have appealed to a broad electorate — for instance, guaranteed minimum income … — they received little attention. As George Lakoff explained in his 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, obsessing over a candidate’s flaws only makes him or her more popular.
    7. Democrats in the United States made this mistake in the 2016 election, running a campaign against Donald Trump instead of for their own policies.
    8. Dare to be different: … For many voters, the Congress party is associated with old-school elitist politics, corruption, and a perceived inability to bring change to India. Gandhi’s candidacy didn’t do much to change anyone’s minds.
    9. Make friends: Congress also failed to make strong alliances with other, smaller political parties…. Progressives seem to make this mistake a lot. While conservatives often stick together (the Republican Party’s support of Trump during the campaign is a textbook example), liberals often fail to find common ground. In the last presidential campaign, the Democratic primaries went on long after Trump was the presumed nominee. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent more time tearing each other apart than focusing on the bigger fight. The extremely crowded field of potential democratic candidates suggests the same thing could happen again.
    10. Focus the narrative: Modi’s narrative of a new, strong, corruption-free India—one with international power, credibility and gravitas—appealed to many voters. It delivered a clear vision of what he was promising, and one that Indians were fast to embrace. Congress never presented a clear vision of its own.
    11. [The Congress Party] decried the threat to secular values [Modi’s Party] posed, and held itself up as its defender. But rather than communicating how those values could help India succeed, the party focused more on what would happen if protections further deteriorated.
    12. This is not unlike what happened during the 2016 election in the United States. Just look at the campaign slogans: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had a clear if suspect mission. Clinton’s “Stronger Together” described a status, not an intention. Democrats could face the same problem they did in 2016—and the same problem India’s Congress party faced this week—unless they forget about the opposition, stop playing defense, and promote their own, clear vision.
12. Opinion – The Old Scourge of Anti-Semitism Rises Anew in Europe, Jews face threats from extremists on the left and the right. A third of European Jews have considered emigrating. By The Editorial Board (The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section. |com | May 26, 2019
    1. For years, Europe maintained the comforting notion that it was earnestly confronting anti-Semitism after the horrors of the Holocaust. It now faces the alarming reality that anti-Semitism is sharply on the rise, often from the sadly familiar direction of the far right, but also from Islamists and the far left.
    2. The worrisome trend was underscored by a report issued by the German government this month showing that anti-Semitic incidents in Germany had increased by almost 20 percent in 2018 from the previous year, to 1,799, with 69 classified as acts of violence. The most common offense was the use of the swastika and other illegal symbols; the rest ranged from online incitement and insults to arson, assault and murder.
    3. Of the total, the report attributed 89 percent of the incidents to the far right. Germany, like many other European nations, has seen a resurgence of a neo-fascist right, but much of the recent reporting in Germany on the rise of anti-Semitism has focused on hostility to Jews among Muslim migrants. A European Union survey conducted in 2018 likewise found that among German Jews who had experienced anti-Semitic harassment over the past five years, 41 percent perceived the perpetrators of the most serious incidents to be “someone with a Muslim extremist view.” …
    4. … That the rise in incidents was in Germany made the government report all the more concerning. But anti-Semitism is on the rise all across Europe, as well as in the United States. France reported an increase of 74 percent in anti-Semitic acts in a single year, with 541 incidents reported in 2018, including widely viewed videotaped insults shouted at the French Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut during one of the Yellow Vest protests. In Britain, nine Labour members of Parliament quit their party in part over the cloud of anti-Semitism hanging over the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. …
    5. … In the United States, attacks on synagogues by white-supremacist gunmen have led the growing list of assaults on Jews. [From ADL (the Anti-Defamation League – “The U.S. Jewish community experienced near-historic levels of anti-Semitism in 2018, including a doubling of anti-Semitic assaults and the single deadliest attack against the Jewish community in American history, according to new data from ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) issued today. ADL’s annual Audit of Anti-Semitic incidents recorded a total of 1,879 attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions across the country in 2018, the third-highest year on record since ADL started tracking such data in the 1970s.”]
    6. A tally of incidents does not tell the full story. To a degree, the numbers reflect the way hate speech, intolerance, anger and once-taboo themes have found their way into the open on social media or via populist movements, allowing hatred of Jews to come out of the shadows. But far-right and far-left politicians have often learned to project themselves as defenders of Jews while drawing on blatantly anti-Semitic tropes, as Mr. Orban has done in Hungary. Among the Muslims of Europe, and among some leftists, a resentment of Israel often crosses into hostility to all Jews. …
    7. … A CNN poll last November on the state of anti-Semitism in Europe found that a third of respondents said they knew little or nothing about the Holocaust. Nearly a quarter said Jews had too much influence in conflict and wars; more than a quarter said they believed that Jews had too much influence in business and finance. A 2015 survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 51 percent of Germans believed it was “probably true” that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.” These are the stereotypes that make anti-Semitism an especially pernicious form of bigotry, a grand conspiracy theory in which Jews spread evil in their countries through some illusory subterfuge, whether controlling capital, or the media, or whatever.
    8. All this is not news to European Jews, who for some time have been feeling less and less safe and welcome in their home countries. After polling more than 16,000 Jews in 12 European countries at the end of last year, the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights concluded that anti-Semitic hate speech, harassment and fear of being recognized as Jews were becoming the new normal. Eighty-five percent of the respondents thought anti-Semitism was the biggest social and political problem in their countries; almost a third said they avoided Jewish events or sites because of safety concerns. More than a third said they had considered emigrating in the five years preceding the survey.
    9. As appalling as these statistics should be to every European, they should also ring a loud alarm for every American leader of conscience. Speak up, now, when you glimpse evidence of anti-Semitism, particularly within your own ranks, or risk enabling the spread of this deadly virus.

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