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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]:

“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 was Monday, October 7, 2019
   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, 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.) …
5. Texas’ $7 billion plan to remake Houston highways once again targets homes, businesses in communities of color – Historic black neighborhoods like Independence Heights and the Fifth Ward are in the crosshairs of Houston highway plans, decades after expressways separated communities from the rest of the city. by Juan Pablo Garnham | ORG/ | Oct. 11, 201912 AM
   1. … [T]he expressways built after World War II disproportionately affected Houston’s communities of color. Independence Heights, the first municipality established by black Texans, was isolated from the rest of the city by Interstate 45 and the 610 Loop. And now the Texas Department of Transportation plans a new expansion of I-45 and other expressways in and north of the city’s urban core. Once again, that could impact communities of color, including historic black neighborhoods like Independence Heights and the Fifth Ward, as plans call for demolishing homes and businesses to accommodate more roadway space.
   2. The North Houston Highway Improvement Project is estimated to cost $7 billion and would add ramps, frontage roads and lanes for carpooling or transit, among other modifications. Work will focus on the downtown loop (which includes portions of Interstates 10, 45 and 69); I-45 between downtown and the 610 Loop; and I-45 north from the 610 Loop to Beltway 8.
   3. TxDOT estimates it will need to acquire 162 single family homes, 643 multifamily units and 508 public housing units.
   4. “At the core, this project aims to reduce congestion by improving ability and operational efficiency in I-45 and along I-10 and I-69 around downtown,” said Varuna Singh, a Houston district director for TxDOT. “Congestion is the main issue, and that is followed closely with reconstructing the corridor for current standards which will have the principal impact of improving safety.”
   5. Of course, more lanes don’t always solve congestion. After the $2.2 billion Katy Freeway expansion, travel times have actually increased for many commuters, according to Houston’s official traffic data. It has become a textbook example of what is called “induced demand,” a term to explain why more lanes sometimes spur more traffic.
   6. With the I-45 expansion project, some experts forecast the same outcome. They say the solution is financing more transit, rather than more highway lanes. The Public Interest Research Group, a nationwide nonprofit, declared the project one of its annual “highway boondoggles.”
   7. This seems obvious to 93-year-old Sammie Maxie, who has lived in Independence Heights since 1943 and every night hears ambulances racing over I-45.
   8. “People are constantly moving to Houston. It’s constantly growing and as soon as you finish an expansion, you have to do something else,” Maxie said. “You can’t fix something that is constantly growing.”
   9. Texas’ population growth is also fueling other urban highway projects across the state. In Austin, TxDOT will add lanes to several segments of I-35, although the project in the downtown area is not funded yet. In San Antonio, the agency might add two lanes to I-10 and make other modifications.
   10. The Houston region’s population is expected to grow from 5.8 million to 9.6 million people between 2010 and 2040. TxDOT says that average daily traffic will grow about 39% between 2011 and 2035 in and around downtown. In the area between I-10 and I-610, traffic is projected to grow 15% in the same period.
   11. But accommodating that is not the only goal of the project.
   12. “There are several factors that must be addressed. One is that some of the infrastructure in this quarter is the oldest highway infrastructure in the region, in some cases in significant need of repair and replacement,” said Alan Clark, transportation planning director with the Houston Galveston Area Council (H-GAC), the regional planning authority.
   13. Some of the northern portions of I-45 date from the 2000s. But others, like the intersection near where Lewis’ home used to be, are from the 1960s. Portions of the lanes are so narrow that tall trucks have tipped when they’ve taken the curve too fast. …
   14. … For decades during the 20th Century, when the interstate system started plowing through urban neighborhoods, local residents’ voices weren’t heard.
   15. In a 1944 issue of the black newspaper The Informer, coverage of the Gulf Freeway was accompanied by the headlines “Highway to replace homes” and “Owners in Furore Over Prospect of Being ‘Pushed’ Out.”
   16. The editorial page of the paper suggested an alternative route for the planned highway, one that would avoid displacing black families.
   17. “The process of repeating a highway expansion that goes through a community, takes away homes and displaces people is not new,” Blair said. “People coming together to say ‘enough is enough’ is something different.” …
   18. … TxDOT aims to publish the final environmental assessment report on the project by the end of the year, but the segment that circles downtown won’t start construction before late 2021. It’s estimated that it will take seven years to complete.
   19. “Many people have to say yes for a project to happen. And sometimes it only takes one group or organization to say no to prevent it from happening,” said Clark, transportation planning director with H-GAC. “These are the kind of checks and balances that are built in to decision making on transportation projects.”
   20. In Independence Heights, Tanya Debose wants the history of the neighborhood to be respected and she wants her neighbors to be able to stay if they want that.
   21. “We will try to use our leverage to move public policy towards making it more equitable,” Debose said. “Houston calls itself the most diverse city, but what will happen if all of us are gone from the inner city? But we still have an opportunity to save what’s left.”
6. Rashida Tlaib Says Democrats Had ‘Actual Serious Conversations’ About Detaining Trump Officials, By Jason Lemon | COM | On 10/13/19 at 10:38 AM EDT
   1. Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said on Saturday that lawmakers from her party have had “serious” discussions about the logistics of potentially detaining Trump administration officials who refuse to comply with congressional subpoenas to testify in connection with the ongoing impeachment inquiry into the president.
   2. “If they were to detain someone, where would they go and have them detained so that they can comply with the subpoenas?” Tlaib, a first-term Democratic who represents Michigan’s 13th District, said in an interview with Deadline Detroit.
   3. “There have been actual serious conversations about what the logistics would look like . . . if we did have to force someone through a court order to come before the Congressional committee,” she said. “This is pretty uncharted territory for many of us and even for Congress.”
   4. Congress does have a long unused power – referred to as “inherent contempt” – to exercise its constitutional authority and jail individuals and officials who defy the legislative branch’s oversight responsibility. Legislative committee leaders have often formally declared those who do not cooperate with subpoenas as being “held in contempt,” but they have not in recent times actually detained officials who’ve refused to cooperate.
   5. Tlaib isn’t the first Democratic representative to suggest the long dormant power could be resurrected in connection with President Donald Trump’s administration, which had officially said it will not cooperate or comply with the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry. Last week, after the president barred U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland from testifying before Congress, Representative John Garamendi, a Democrat from California’s 3rd District, argued that the legislative branch should simply jail Sondland and other officials.
   6. “With regard for inherent contempt, I’ve been for that all along,” Garemendi said in an interview with CNN. “I think that if they come and they simply refuse to answer questions, I think it’s time to call in the sergeant at arms, march them off to a little jail, which we do happen to have in one of the rooms of the Capitol.”
   7. Although Garemendi and other members of Congress have mentioned the jail in the Capitol, the existence of such a facility is actually a myth, according to Roll Call. Historically, such a facility did exist in the building but was removed long ago.
   8. “I went to the Architect of the Capitol and found out where the old Capitol jail was located. There was at one time a jail here in the Capitol where the Congress could imprison citizens who refused to comply with its subpoenas,” Senate counsel Chuck Ludlam said, the Washington, D.C. newspaper reported.
   9. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress who represents California’s 12th District, has said previously that she prefers not to start jailing Trump administration officials.
   10. “If we were arresting all of the people in the administration, we would have an overcrowded jail situation,” Pelosi said in May. “And I’m not for that.” …
7. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice – Pollution, anthrax – even nuclear waste – could be released by global warming., By Tim Smedley | com/Future |17th June 2019
   1. In 2012, Sue Natali arrived in Duvanny Yar, Siberia, for the first time. … [S]he had seen photos of this site many times. Rapid thawing at Duvanny Yar had caused a massive ground collapse – a “mega slump” – like a giant sinkhole in the middle of the Siberian tundra. But nothing had prepared her for seeing it in person. …
   2. … Alongside Pleistocene fossils are massive carbon and methane emissions, toxic mercury, and ancient diseases.
   3. The organic-rich permafrost holds an estimated 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon. “That’s about twice as much carbon in the atmosphere, and three times as much carbon than that stored in all the world’s forests”, says Natali. She explains that between 30% and 70% of the permafrost may melt before 2100, depending on how effectively we respond to climate change. “The 70% is business as usual, if we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate, and 30% is if we vastly reduce our fossil fuel emissions… Of the 30-70% that thaws, the carbon locked up in organic matter will begin to be broken down by microbes, they use it as fuel or energy, and they release it as CO2 or methane.” …
   4. … In November, when temperatures should have been -25C, a temperature of 1.2C above freezing was recorded at the North Pole. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world (in part due to the loss of solar reflectivity).
   5. “We are seeing a big increase in the thaw of permafrost”, confirms Emily Osborne, program manager for the Arctic Research Program, NOAA, and editor of the Arctic Report Card, an annual peer-reviewed environmental study of the Arctic. As a direct result of rising air temperatures, she says, the permafrost is thawing and “the landscape is physically crumbling as a result… things are changing so fast, and in ways that researchers hadn’t even anticipated.”
   6. The headline of the 2017 Arctic Report Card pulled no punches: “Arctic shows no sign of returning to a reliably frozen region”. …
   7. … The rapid change in North American permafrost is equally alarming. “In some places in the Alaskan Arctic, you fly over a swiss cheese of land and lakes formed by ground collapse,” says Natali, whose fieldwork has moved from Siberia to Alaska. “Water that was close to the surface now becomes a pond.” Many of these ponds are bubbling with methane, as microbes suddenly find themselves with a feast of ancient organic matter to munch on, releasing methane as a by-product. “We often walk across the lakes because it’s so shallow and it’s like you’re in a hot tub in some places, there is so much bubbling,” says Natali.
   8. But methane and CO2 are not the only things being released from the once frozen ground. In the summer of 2016, a group of nomadic reindeer herders began falling sick from a mysterious illness. Rumours began circling of the “Siberian plague”, last seen in the region in 1941. When a young boy and 2,500 reindeer died, the disease was identified: anthrax. Its origin was a defrosting reindeer carcass, a victim of an anthrax outbreak 75 years previously. The 2018 Arctic report card speculates that, “diseases like the Spanish flu, smallpox or the plague that have been wiped out might be frozen in the permafrost.” A French study in 2014 took a 30,000 year-old virus frozen within permafrost, and warmed it back up in the lab. It promptly came back to life, 300 centuries later. (To read more, see BBC Earth’s piece on the diseases hidden in ice.) …
8. GE freezes pension benefits for 20,000 employees in an effort to reduce its massive debt pile (GE), By Daniel Strauss | COM | Oct. 7, 2019, 08:57 AM
   1. General Electric announced on Monday it plans to freeze pension benefits for about 20,000 employees in an attempt to shrink its pension deficit and shore up its balance sheet. 
   2. The industrial conglomerate said the move would reduce its pension deficit by $5 billion to $8 billion, and shrink its net debt by $4-$6 billion.
   3. The effort comes as GE CEO Larry Culp works to bring the company back from a decline in its power-equipment business, address cash flow concerns, and control mounting debt. 
   4. Shares of GE rose about 3% in early trading on the news. …
   5. … About 100,000 former GE employees who haven’t started receiving pension benefits will also be offered a limited time lump-sum payment, the company said. GE is also freezing US supplementary pension benefits for about 700 employees.
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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