Tuesday Reads: Summer’s End

Isaac Levitan, Golden Autumn, Slobodka, 1889

Good Afternoon!!

Meteorological Autumn has begun, even though most of the country is still experiencing hot weather. Here in New England, it looks like we will have summer weather for at least the first half of September. It has been in the high 80’s lately, and later this week it will hit 92 for a couple of days. Of course it’s still comfortable here in my cozy apartment with my heat pump keeping things cool.

I was thinking this morning that I’m an orphan now. My Mom and Dad are both gone, along with all of their siblings. I’m in the older generation now. How does time go by so quickly? I can really tell that I’m old now. People my age (75) are dying every day. I come from long-lived stock on both sides, so I probably have a few years left, but you never know. I just hope I don’t live to see fascism take over the U.S.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. Maybe you learned about his theory in school. I’ve always liked it.

— Infancy – Basic trust versus mistrust

— Toddler – Autonomy versus shame and doubt

— Preschool-age – Initiative versus guilt

— School-age – Industry versus inferiority

— Adolescence – Identity versus identity confusion

— Young adulthood – Intimacy versus isolation

— Middle age – Generativity versus stagnation‌

— Older adulthood – Integrity versus despair

I guess I’m finally moving into the 8th stage; but I still care a lot about what happens to the next generation, so I’m still partly in stage 7, generativity–when you care more about giving to the next generation than satisfying yourself.

When I was in grad school, my mentor, Richard, (who is gone now, too, sadly) used to teach that Erikson’s states are flexible. You can go back and repair the damage that happened in an earlier stage and you can be in more than one stage at a time. Because people live longer than in Erikson’s day, it can take longer to get into that last stage, where you are supposed to look back on your life and come to terms with all you have experienced, good and bad.

I do find myself looking back at times, reevaluating things that happened to me and reaching acceptance. I believe that I did repair damage from the past over the 40+ years since I’ve been sober, and I’ve learned to accept my life as it is most of the time.

Now back to the present moment, where we are up in the air as to whether our country will be a democracy or a dictatorship ruled over by an insane idiot. Today is a slow news day, but here is some news:

CNN: Capitol Hill doctor: McConnell did not have a stroke or seizure when freezing before cameras.

The Capitol’s attending physician, Brian Monahan, said in a new letter that Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell did not suffer a stroke or seizure – and is not suffering from Parkinson’s disease – after the 81-year-old Kentuckian was evaluated by a group of neurologists following two recent health scares in front of TV cameras.

Vincen Van Gogh, The Garden of St. Paul’s Hospital Leaf Fall

The new letter, released by McConnell’s office Tuesday, comes after he froze in front of cameras for the second time in as many months, raising questions about whether the GOP leader could continue to hold his powerful position atop the Senate GOP Conference. After he froze last week in Covington, Kentucky, McConnell was evaluated by four neurologists, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Monahan said in the Tuesday letter that he consulted with McConnell’s neurologists and conducted several evaluations, including brain MRI imaging and a test that measures electrical imaging in the brain.

“There is no evidence that you have a seizure disorder or that you experienced a stroke, TIA or movement disorder such as Parkinson’s disease,” the letter said.

So what did happen, then? No one knows.

It’s still unclear exactly why McConnell froze up for roughly 30 seconds each time.

The Republican leader’s office had attributed the two frozen moments to “lightheadedness,” and Monahan had indicated in a previous letter that it’s “not uncommon” for victims of concussion to feel lightheaded. McConnell suffered a concussion and broken ribs after falling at a Washington hotel and hitting his head in March, sidelining him from the Senate for nearly six weeks.

I still say he should retire. He’s 81, for heaven’s sake!

The media keeps telling us that Republicans are going to force a government shutdown. Politico claims to know what Democrats are going to do about it: How Democrats are bracing for a ‘MAGA shutdown.’

There’s still a month to go, but Capitol Hill is girding for an appropriations breakdown — and Democrats are already strategizing over how to make Republicans pay for what some have already started calling a “MAGA shutdown.”

Their challenge: Maximizing the GOP political pain while avoiding blame themselves. After all, it has been a full 10 years since the government has shut down with a Democrat in the White House. And this time, the president needs to win reelection in 14 months.

The Birch Wood, Gustav Klimt

“This is really going to be driven by the House,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) told reporters in the Capitol on Friday. “They’re the ones that are going to bring [a shutdown] upon the country.”

To be sure, top House Democrats are still hoping to avoid a shutdown, and the party’s rank-and-file stands ready to approve a bipartisan deal — preferably a clean stopgap with some amount of Ukraine and disaster aid attached, likely sent over from the Senate.

But the key funding decisions lie with Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his capricious Republican conference, and putting a deal along those lines up for a vote could prove disastrous to McCarthy’s standing as leader.

With members of the hard-right Freedom Caucus escalating their threats, Democratic leaders want their members to stay unified around a message decrying GOP hostage-taking and accusing Republicans of reneging on a bipartisan deal on spending caps reached in May.

A solid Democratic front, the thinking goes, will squeeze Republicans from districts won by President Joe Biden and force McCarthy to the negotiating table. Absent that pressure, “I don’t think there’s a lot of hope that Kevin McCarthy for once will actually stand up to the far right,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.).

The House comes back next week, so I guess we’ll learn more about their idiotic plans then.

CNN: First lady Jill Biden tests positive for Covid-19.

First lady Jill Biden tested positive for Covid-19 on Monday and is experiencing “mild symptoms,” the White House said. President Joe Biden has tested negative.

The diagnosis has upended the first lady’s plans to begin teaching the fall semester at Northern Virginia Community College on Tuesday. She is working with the school to “ensure her classes are covered by a substitute,” Vanessa Valdivia, the first lady’s spokesperson, said.

Dr. Biden, 72, who remains at the family’s home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, typically teaches on Tuesday and Thursdays.

Biden will be “monitored by the White House medical team” after her diagnosis and follow the team’s advice about when to return the White House, Valdivia said. In addition to starting school on Tuesday, Biden was supposed to speak in the evening in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, at a send-off dinner for the US team competing in the Invictus Games in Düsseldorf, Germany next week, but now she will not participate, Valdivia said.

An administration official told CNN Monday that there are no changes to White House Covid protocols or to the president’s schedule at this time.

I just hope the president doesn’t come down with it.

Claude Monet, Autumn on the Seine at Argenteuil, 1873

Raw Story: George Conway reveals why ‘nihilist’ Republicans have turned ‘anti-American.’

George Conway diagnosed the underlying problem that’s causing Republicans to undermine military readiness and attack law enforcement.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) continues to block military promotions to force the reversal of a Pentagon policy granting leave and travel expenses for military personnel stationed in states where they cannot obtain an abortion, but the conservative Conway told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” the political stunt was emblematic of the GOP’s attitude toward the U.S. government at large.

“They hate the United States military because it’s a part of the United States government,” Conway said. “This is basically, the Republicans have become anti-American, anti-government, anti-the United States. That’s their shtick now. That’s why they’re attacking the State Department, FBI, prosecutors, and they attack the institutions that normally Republicans were very, very supportive of — now, it’s just this nihilistic attack on American institutions.”

More Conway from HuffPost via Yahoo News: ‘Beyond Question’: George Conway Hits Trump With Dire Prison Prediction.

Conservative attorney George Conway said Donald Trump should be locked away for good if he’s found guilty in the two federal cases currently pending against him.

The former president has been charged in Washington for his attempts to cling to power after the 2020 election, and in Florida over his retention of classified documents.

Conway shared a tweet from former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, who wrote that Trump should be given a prison sentence “equal to or greater than” the sentences handed down in other key Jan. 6 cases if convicted in Washington.

That would make 18 years a starting point ― but Conway said the 77-year-old former president’s potential prison time could be much longer than that if he’s convicted in the classified documents case.

“It’s beyond question he should spend the rest of his natural life in prison,” Conway wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter….

Conway has called the Florida case against Trump “airtight,” and said “he should and he will” go to jail over it “because the obstruction case is just so strong.”

If only . . .

Cresheim Glen, Wissahickon, Autumn, 1964

The Guardian: Elon Musk threatens to sue Anti-Defamation League over lost X revenue.

Elon Musk has threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League after accusing the civil rights group that campaigns against antisemitism and bigotry of trying to “kill” his X social media platform.

The owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, said the ADL was trying to shut down his company by “falsely accusing it and me of being antisemitic”.

In a series of posts on X, Musk said advertising sales for the business were down 60% and “based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss”.

The world’s richest man also indicated that he would sue the group for defamation, posting on X that “it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League … oh the irony!”

Musk recently sued another anti-hate speech group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, in a lawsuit accusing it of damaging X’s relationship with advertisers. CCDH has said it will fight the lawsuit and keep holding “Twitter’s feet to the fire”.

In his posts on Tuesday, Musk added that to be “super clear” he was in favour of free speech “but against antisemitism of any kind”.

Yeah, right. If Musk sues, the ADL will be able to get discovery of all the anti-Semites and Nazis Musk let back on Twitter, so he’s unlikely to do it, but you never know. The guy is really stupid, as far as I can tell.

This is from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: Musk’s Epic, Antic Labor Day Weekend Against The Jews.

Because Twitter is no longer a publicly traded company with a public stock price there’s no straightforward way to assess its current value. But most market analysts estimate the company is now worth no more than a third of the $44 billion Musk paid for it a year ago. To be fair, Musk clearly overpaid for the company. He paid a premium over the company’s current stock price and even that price was probably inflated. But there’s no question Musk’s erratic and destructive reign has dramatically damaged the company, torching its public reputation and leading to a catastrophic decline in ad revenues which Musk and independent press reports have pegged at between 50% and 60%.

Gustave Courbet, Forest in Autumn, 1841

But Musk has found a new scapegoat: the Jews. Or rather, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish community’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to fighting not only anti-Semitism but all forms of racial and religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination. But I suspect the “rather” or the distinction in general might be lost on Musk’s 155 million Twitter followers. Over the past several days Musk has gone on a tear claiming that the catastrophic decline in his company’s value since he purchased it is mostly or entirely the fault of the ADL and churning up Twitter debates that at least big time anti-Semitic accounts think is clearly boosting their cause.

As is often the case, Musk’s attacks have evolved out of tag teaming with notorious anti-Semitic accounts on the platform. It kicked off on Friday when Musk responded to a tweet by Keith Woods, an Irish white nationalist and self-described “raging anti-Semite.”

“ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter,” Musk told Woods.

From here, Musk went on to gin up support for the #BanTheADL hashtag while alternately claiming that he should ban the group but might not, before rolling into claims that the ADL was responsible for tens of billions of dollars of Twitter losses. This all culminated with Musk announcing he was being forced to sue the ADL “to clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism.”

Discussing the defamation suit, Musk claimed the ADL could “potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly $22 billion.” Later he said that “giving them the maximum benefit of the doubt,” the ADL might only be responsible for $4 billion in damages.

Read the rest at TPM.

So that’s today’s news as I see it. Please share your thoughts and any other stories that interest you.