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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).

Listen live on the radio, or on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.)

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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]:

“What we’re discovering is that the Constitution is not a mechanism that runs by itself. Ultimately, we are a government of men and not law. The law has no force without people who are willing to enforce it. The ball is now squarely in the court of the Republican Party, and particularly Senate Republicans. Will they ever be prepared to say enough is enough?” ~ William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution who graduated from college just before Watergate.

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Make sure you are registered to vote! (Show information begins after Item 4, 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. TODAY
   2. I’ve received my mail-in ballot. If you’ve qualified, yours should have arrived or will arrive shortly.
2. Next Election: November 5, 2019 – General and Special Elections
   1. Early voting runs October 21st – November 1st
   2. Sample ballot runs 8 pages, but my precinct ballot is only 2 pages.
   3. Propositions listed first.
   4. Unusual order on Ballot
   1. Harrisvotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
   2. VoteTexas.gov
   3. 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:
   4. 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.
   5. Make it a point to listen to my April 22, 2019 Interview with Harris County Clerk Dr. Dianne Trautman
3. 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.
4. 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.
   2. S. Supreme Court kicks off new term, with Justice Thomas absent, BY Lawrence Hurley, Andrew Chung | REUTERS.COM | October 7, 2019 / 9:42 AM / Updated 3 hours ago 4 Min Read
      1. The U.S. Supreme Court kicked off its new nine-month term with a flurry of activity on Monday, hearing arguments in three cases and rejecting numerous appeals that piled up over the summer.
      2. With conservative Justice Clarence Thomas absent due to an unspecified illness, the court began hearing its first argument
5. Judge dismisses Trump request to keep taxes secret in New York, By Erica Orden | COM | Updated 11:24 AM ET, Mon October 7, 2019
   1. A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Donald Trump’s effort to prevent his tax returns from being turned over to a New York grand jury.
   2. The ruling raises the likelihood that Trump’s tax returns will be provided in response to the subpoena, although any material obtained through a grand jury subpoena is covered by grand jury secrecy rules, meaning it would likely become public only if it were used as evidence at a trial.
   3. Dismissing Trump’s “extraordinary” claim that any occupant of the White House enjoys “absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind,” US District Court Judge Victor Marrero said in a 75-page opinion that such a position “would constitute an overreach of executive power.”
   4. An attorney for Trump filed an emergency notice of appeal to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals minutes after the district court judge filed his decision, and the appeals court immediately ordered a temporary stay of the subpoena. …
   5. Prosecutors are looking at whether the Trump Organization violated any New York state laws — including potentially filing false business records — in its effort to reimburse Michael Cohen …
   6. … The ruling is also a setback for the US Justice Department, which had asked last week to temporarily block the subpoena, to allow time for “appropriate briefing of the weighty constitutional issues involved.” …
6. U.S. says it will stand aside as Turkey moves into Syria – Trump and Erdogan spoke by phone, but the White House didn’t confirm Turkey’s announcement that they will meet next month. By Alex Johnson | NBCNews.com | Oct. 6, 2019, 10:56 PM CDT
   1. MIKE: Might as well be called, “US Abandons good ally for ambivalent ally”.
   2. The White House said Sunday night that Turkey would soon begin operations in northeastern Syria to resettle Syrian refugees — and that U.S. forces wouldn’t be there to help or stop them. …
   3. … The statement was issued after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke by phone with … Donald Trump earlier on Sunday.
   4. The [White House] statement didn’t mention the Turkish government’s announcement earlier in the day that Trump and Erdogan had agreed to meet in Washington next month.
   5. During the phone call, Erdogan expressed frustration with what Turkey sees as the failure of the United States to implement an agreement to establish a so-called safe zone east of the Euphrates River, Reuters reported.
   6. On Saturday, Turkey signaled its intention to begin operations, saying an incursion was “imminent” in the region, where U.S. troops have been seeking to broker an agreement between Turkey and the Syrian Kurds.
   7. The U.S. statement made it clear that the United States wouldn’t interfere, saying U.S. forces “will no longer be in the immediate area.”
7. North Korea doubts U.S. will have alternative plans inside two weeks, by Ju-min Park, Josh Smith | com | October 6, 2019 / 6:59 AM / Updated 9 hours ago
   1. North Korea said on Sunday there was no way the United States would bring alternative plans for their stalled nuclear talks to a meeting proposed by Stockholm in two weeks after weekend negotiations in Sweden broke down. The working-level talks between U.S. and North Korean envoys were broken off on Saturday.
   2. MIKE: WHY DO I MENTION THIS?
      1. Bolton undercuts Trump and says North Korea has no desire to give up its nukes, By CAITLIN OPRYSKO | POLITICO.COM | 09/30/2019 10:12 AM EDT
      2. At one of his first public appearances since his abrupt and rocky departure from the White House, [Ousted national security adviser John Bolton] did not name the president but delivered an unmistakable airing of grievances. Specifically, he threw cold water on the president’s assertion that North Korea is ready to make a deal and gave his “unvarnished” view that Kim would not voluntarily give up his nuclear weapons under current conditions.
      3. Bolton told attendees at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event that Kim “has not made a strategic decision to give up its nuclear weapons.” In fact, he argued, “the strategic decision Kim Jong Un is operating through is that he will do whatever he can to keep a deliverable nuclear weapons capability and to develop and enhance it further.” …
      4. … After outlining several paths toward diplomacy — including “limited” regime change and military force — that have a slim chance of coming to fruition under Trump, Bolton asserted that one of the consequences of letting North Korea go unchecked was that they could become “the Walmart or the Amazon of deliverable nuclear weapons.”
      5. … Trump’s apparent disregard for the resolutions undermines U.S. policy by giving off the message that its leadership doesn’t care about the sanctions in those or other U.N. resolutions.
      6. “When you ask for consistent behavior from others, you have to demonstrate it yourself and when we fail to do that we open ourselves — and our policy — to failure,” Bolton warned. …
      7. ALSO SEE: Ex-Trump adviser Bolton says North Korea has no intention to give up nuclear weapons, Reporting by David Brunnstrom and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Catherine Evans and Peter Graff | REUTERS.COM | World News September 30, 2019 / 8:49 AM / Updated 2 hours ag
      8. Bolton undercuts Trump and says North Korea has no desire to give up its nukes, By CAITLIN OPRYSKO |POLITICO.COM | 09/30/2019 10:12 AM EDT
      9. At one of his first public appearances since his abrupt and rocky departure from the White House, [Ousted national security adviser John Bolton] did not name the president but delivered an unmistakable airing of grievances. Specifically, he threw cold water on the president’s assertion that North Korea is ready to make a deal and gave his “unvarnished” view that Kim would not voluntarily give up his nuclear weapons under current conditions.
      10. Bolton told attendees at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event that Kim “has not made a strategic decision to give up its nuclear weapons.” In fact, he argued, “the strategic decision Kim Jong Un is operating through is that he will do whatever he can to keep a deliverable nuclear weapons capability and to develop and enhance it further.” …
      11. … After outlining several paths toward diplomacy — including “limited” regime change and military force — that have a slim chance of coming to fruition under Trump, Bolton asserted that one of the consequences of letting North Korea go unchecked was that they could become “the Walmart or the Amazon of deliverable nuclear weapons.”
      12. … Trump’s apparent disregard for the resolutions undermines U.S. policy by giving off the message that its leadership doesn’t care about the sanctions in those or other U.N. resolutions.
      13. “When you ask for consistent behavior from others, you have to demonstrate it yourself and when we fail to do that we open ourselves — and our policy — to failure,” Bolton warned. …
      14. ALSO SEE: Ex-Trump adviser Bolton says North Korea has no intention to give up nuclear weapons, Reporting by David Brunnstrom and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Catherine Evans and Peter Graff | REUTERS.COM | World News September 30, 2019 / 8:49 AM / Updated 2 hours ago
8. Elizabeth Warren Wants To Cut The Value Of Your Retirement Account, By Elizabeth Bauer Contributor (Retirement): I write about retirement policy from an actuary’s perspective. | COM | Sep 21, 2019, 08:00am
   1. So, as it turns out, Elizabeth Warren’s Social Security expansion proposal is not the only one of her plans to affect Americans’ retirement well-being. But the proposal of hers which will affect Americans’ retirement savings, in their 401(k)s and their IRAs and the funded status of their pension plans (which might be irrelevant for single-employer traditional pension plans guaranteed by employers but matters considerably for multi-employer plans), is tucked away in a component of her platform with the harmless-looking title, “Empowering Workers Through Accountable Capitalism.”
   2. It’s a proposal that’s a repeat of legislation she proposed in 2018, the “Accountable Capitalism Act,” which, as it happens, I dug into at the time on another platform. The most nebulous part of the proposal is the notion that large corporations would be obliged to pursue the “best interests” of a long list of entities, not merely shareholders but also employees, suppliers, customers, the local communities where the companies locations are based, and others, with the fundamental premise that such a corporation “shall have the purpose of creating a general public benefit.” But however much writers such as Kevin D. Williamson decried this as “the wholesale expropriation of private enterprise in the United States” this all appears to be aspirational and symbolic, without any enforcement mechanism included in the legislation, or administrative agency named to ensure the corporation is indeed “creating a public benefit.”
   3. (Read: Protect Your Assets From President Warren)
   4. What is far more concrete is a requirement that such “United States corporations,” that is, those with over $1 billion in revenue, would be obliged to bring onto their boards of directors, representatives elected by employees, at a minimum ratio of 40% of the total board members. The website declares:
   5. “Elizabeth’s plan gives workers a big voice in all corporate decisions, including those about outsourcing, wages, and investment,” and references Germany as an example of a country with a similar approach.
   6. In an abstract way, of course, directors are bound to represent shareholders; if 40% of board members no longer represent the shareholders, than this is, in effect, taking away from shareholders the ownership of 40% of the company. But this is more than just an abstract impact. How much of a difference would it make?
   7. In an analysis of Warren’s proposal in 2018, Matthew Yglesias at Vox cites research that ties the German “codetermination” requirement, as it’s called (which has required employee representation in many industries in 1951 and universally in companies with over 2,000 employees in 1976), versus the American principle of maximizing shareholder value, as responsible for the considerably greater growth of share prices in the U.S. compared to Germany and countries with similar requirements. Based on these differences, Yglesias writes, “share prices could fall by 25 percent.”
   8. … Yglesias because [claims] it’s only the ultra-rich who own stock: the richest 10% own 81.4% of the stock market, and the top 1% own 38% of the stock market wealth. But the study he derives these figures from focuses exclusively on household wealth based on a government … Survey of Consumer Finances, so it excludes from its calculations “wealth” owned by individuals in the form of promised future pension benefits (and backed by pension funds), and takes no interest in the amount of stock market wealth owned by nonprofits or other institutions.
   9. Take a look at the estimates from Pensions & Investments: [54% of stock market equity is held by institutions after subtracting out foreign owners of US stock (26% of the total]), 50% of US-owned US equities are owned within retirement funds.: that means, mutual funds, pension funds, 401(k)s, and the like. In particular, 37% of stock is owned by retirement accounts; … And it should go without saying that there is no way to “punish” the wealthy by causing the value of only the stock they own to go south while somehow protecting the 401(k) and other retirement accounts for the rest of us. It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face and, as someone with a 401(k) account, I’d really prefer not to do this.
9. We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is – A crucial part of his coalition is made up of better-off white people who did not graduate from college. By Thomas B. Edsall | nytimes.com | Aug. 28, 2019 ( Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.)
   1. On Feb. 24, 2016, after winning the Nevada caucuses, Donald Trump told supporters in Las Vegas, “I love the poorly educated.”
   2. Technically, he should have said “I love poorly educated white people,” but his point was well taken. …
   3. … In less than a decade, from 2010 to 2018, whites without a college degree grew from 50 to 59 percent of all the Republican Party’s voters, while whites with college degrees fell from 40 to 29 percent of the party’s voters. The biggest shift took place from 2016 to 2018, when Trump became the dominant figure in American politics. …
   4. … A paper [entitled], “Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era,” provides fresh insight into that transformation. The authors … make the argument that the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy has produced “tectonic shifts” leading to an “education-income partisan realignment” — a profound realignment of voting patterns that has effectively turned the political allegiances of the white sector of the New Deal coalition that dominated the middle decades of the last century upside down. …
   5. … the traditional alliances of New Deal era politics — low-income white voters without college degrees on the Democratic Party side, high-income white voters with degrees on the Republican side — have switched places. According to this analysis, these two constituencies are primarily motivated by “second dimension” issues, often configured around racial attitudes, which frequently correlate with level of education.
   6. Perhaps most significant, Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.
   7. Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party. …
   8. More than half of the voters Kitschelt and Rehm describe as high income are middle to upper middle class, from households making from $77,522 to $130,000 — not, by contemporary standards, wealthy.
   9. [The authors] write: Individuals in the low-education/high-income group tend to endorse authoritarian noneconomic policies and tend to oppose progressive economic policies. Small business owners and shopkeepers — particularly in construction, crafts, retail, and personal services — as well as some of their salaried associates populate this group. …
   10. … Low-income whites without college degrees have moved to the Republican Party, but because they frequently hold liberal economic views — that is, they support redistributionist measures from which they benefit — they are conflicted in their partisan allegiance.
   11. The authors point out that members of this group tend to support progressive economic policies and tend to endorse authoritarian policies on the noneconomic dimension. In occupational terms, this group consists primarily of low-skill and intermediate routine blue-collar manufacturing or clerical-administrative jobs (the ‘working class’). …
   12. … “What is noteworthy,” [The authors] write, is that most voters perceived the Republicans’ 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump as substantially more moderate than his party, and as more moderate than most Republican presidential candidates since 1980.
   13. For Democratic voters who switched to Trump in 2016, “this perception would have removed cognitive dissonance and inhibitions” that would have prevented them from supporting an economic conservative in the mold of Mitt Romney. Freed of that inhibition, they could vote for Trump, [The authors] argue, “based on socio-politically authoritarian, and often racist, positions that were served by Trump’s rhetoric.” …
   14. Emily Ekins, director of polling at the libertarian Cato Institute, argues in her paper “Does Religious Participation Moderate Trump Voters’ Attitudes about Diversity?” that white evangelical Christian Trump voters are substantially more moderate on issues of race and diversity than less religious Trump voters. At the same time, Ekins argues, the partisanship of these religious voters is stronger than their self-described moderate racial views, and their loyalty to Trump remains unshakable. …
   15. … In their critique of Ekins study, Djupe and Burge suggest that the racially moderate views of churchgoers may capture socially desirable representations and do not reflect their true attitudes. …
   16. … The strong support for Trump among religious conservatives at first may seem perplexing. But, it’s not entirely surprising given what we know about religious conservatives’ higher levels of partisan loyalty and the impact of partisanship on opinion.
   17. The Federalist Society Says It’s Not an Advocacy Organization. These Documents Show Otherwise. By AMANDA HOLLIS-BRUSKY and CALVIN TERBEEK | com | August 31, 2019 (Amanda Hollis-Brusky is an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and author of Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Calvin TerBeek is a Ph.D. candidate in political science)
       3235550. MIKE NOTE: The Federalist Society  – The Federalist Society is a tax–exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Our federal tax identification number is 36-3235550.
   18. This past March, when the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies held its 37th annual national gathering for conservative law students, the lineup of speakers and panelists included an impressive number of Republican Party and conservative movement stars. …
   19. Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party “or engage in other forms of political advocacy,” as its website says. The society does not deny an ideology—it calls itself a “group of conservatives and libertarians”—but it maintains that it is simply “about ideas,” not legislation, politicians or policy positions.
   20. Federalist Society documents that one of us recently unearthed, however, make this position untenable going forward. The documents, made public here for the first time, show that the society not only has held explicit ideological goals since its infancy in the early 1980s, but sought to apply those ideological goals to legal policy and political issues through the group’s roundtables, symposia and conferences.
   21. The question of whether the Federalist Society is properly characterized as a “society of ideas” or a political organization has significant ramifications. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges, a set of guidelines administered by the federal judiciary’s Judicial Conference, was revised earlier this year to bar sitting federal judges from participating in conferences and seminars sponsored by groups “generally viewed by the public as having adopted a consistent political or ideological point of view equivalent to the type of partisanship often found in political organizations.” (The Code does not “explicitly” apply to Supreme Court justices, though they have looked to it in the past.) One former federal judge argued that under the new ethics opinion, the Federalist Society is now a “no-go zone for federal judges.” The Society’s president, Eugene Meyer, responded, calling the former jurist’s argument an “absurd and ludicrous” interpretation of the rule, adding that the Federalist Society has said “time and again” that it is nonpartisan and does not take official policy positions.
   22. But the newly unearthed documents—a 1984 grant proposal and cover letter, written by Meyer on the Federalist Society’s behalf and now housed in the late Judge Robert Bork’s papers at the Library of Congress—provide evidence that the Federalist Society, in contravention of what the new Code states, in fact “advocates for specific outcomes on legal or political issues.” This suggests that federal judges, by attending Federalist Society events, are transgressing the Code’s new guidelines. Given the importance of active federal judges to the Federalist Society’s long-term goal of reshaping the law, barring them from the society’s events could hamper its continued ability to exert the political influence it has impressively built over decades. …
   23. …The Federalist Society’s founders and conservative patrons understood early on that the battle for control of the law would not be won on campuses alone. In the January 1984 grant proposal, Meyer, then the Federalist Society’s executive director, asked the conservative-leaning Smith Richardson Foundation for “seed money” to fund a new entity, a “Lawyers Division.” The central goal, Meyer wrote, was “to build an effective national conservative lawyers organization.” Meyer began the proposal by asserting that an alternative to “an increasingly radicalized bar,” exemplified by the American Bar Association, was now necessary because “lawyers continue to fill key positions in the modern instrumentalities of the welfare state.”
   24. SHORTER VERSION OF ARTICLE ABOVE- REVEALED: New documents show the Federalist Society has lied about its mission — and could blow up on sitting judges, By Matthew Chapman | COM | Published on August 31, 2019
       1. On Saturday, political science academics Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Calvin TerBeek wrote an exposé in Politico revealing that the Federalist Society, an association of conservative and libertarian lawyers infamous for forming a semi-official pipeline of right-wing academics into the federal court system, have deliberately misled the public about the purpose of their organization’s existence for years.
       2. “Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party ‘or engage in other forms of political advocacy,’ as its website says,” they wrote. “The society does not deny an ideology — it calls itself a ‘group of conservatives and libertarians’ — but it maintains that it is simply ‘about ideas,’ not legislation, politicians or policy positions.”
10. 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. …
11. 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. …
12. 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.” …
13. 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.
14. 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.

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