Opinion

As I began to type this, the despicable Ohio congressman, Jim (Gym) Jordan, made a third attempt to garner enough votes to become our 119th Speaker of the House of Representatives. By the time I was done, he lost, and our media continued to normalize this dangerous abomination and his anti-American political party.

Whether Jordan continues to beat his thick head on the Speaker’s lectern by calling for more votes this weekend, or finally relents and slithers back into his hole, the damage to America will have been done.

— How many American will face “climate gentrification” and what will be done? During the seven years that Louise and I (and three cats and a dog) lived on our 46-foot boat (the Freedom) in the main Washington, DC waterfront marina, we saw a dramatic transformation of the area. It was mostly housing for the poor when we moved in; by the time we left it had been nearly completely gentrified because a developer group had moved in and re-done the waterfront.

That was a case of gentrification for the most common reason: to make money by upgrading an otherwise-desirable place to attract more upscale residents. But Miami — along with coastal cities all across America and around the world — is facing a different type of gentrification: it’s being forced by climate change. Little Haiti, a largely poor and Black neighborhood of Miami, is ten feet above sea level and thus much more immune to the rising water that’s already causing regular tidal flooding all over the rest of the city. As a result, the developers are moving in and buying up property to upgrade and re-sell or rent to higher-income people looking to escape the flooding.

That would have been bad for reasons I recount here and here (the latter link includes an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch – highly recommended). A Speaker Jordan would have added more chaos to an already chaotic House of Representatives. The whole point of his career has been going to war with democratic institutions.

By Monday, it looked like he’d beaten into submission enough “moderates” to win. Even Fox’s Sean Hannity took a turn at lobbying for one of Donald Trump’s favorite toadies. All that remained was a floor vote, scheduled for Tuesday evening, to see who remained.

Over at The New York Times yesterday, Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the horrors of the past two weeks and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go.

“All this is happening,” she notes in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.”

I have been hesitant to weigh in on the terrible attacks in Israel by the Hamas terrorist group because I am not an expert on the region, nor the ongoing, many-decades-long disagreements between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Old age has taught me to try to stick to writing about what I know, and to be damn careful when commenting on the ongoing events in this region, where opinion on both sides can strike with lightning, and is lodged in solid, immovable rock.

In a very real way, the US and Russia have been at war for eight years now.

Russian partisans will tell you that the US started it when Victoria Nuland was representing US interests in Ukraine in 2014, around the time Russia invaded and seized Crimea. Robert Mueller and the FBI will tell you it really started in 2015 and 2016 when Russia spent millions (via the Internet Research Agency) to successfully intervene in the US election and put Trump into the White House.

— What threat does ‘Day of Jihad’ pose to American cities? As US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was giving a press conference yesterday in Doha, the capital city of Qatar, right down the street at the international headquarters of Hamas (yes, Qatar hosts them and nobody has arrested them) that terrorist organization’s leader was calling for yesterday to be a “Day of Jihad”: a call for Muslims across the world to attack Jews and anybody or any nation perceived as Israel’s ally. New York City mobilized its entire police force and there were a few incidents of people being knifed around the world, but it seems to have been a bust. With their attack on Israel, Hamas has clearly overreached (much like Al Qaeda did with 9/11), and the challenge now will be for Israel not to make the same mistakes Bush did by overreacting in response. If there ever was a time that needed diplomacy along with police/military action to respond to terrorism, this is it. That said, I have a lot of faith in Anthony Blinken.

— Voting rights had a bad day in the Supreme Court. The decision won’t come down for months, but the questioning around the South Carolina gerrymandering case suggests the Republicans on the Supreme Court are going to go along with the GOP in drawing districts that cement in Republican rule even when the majority of state voters cast ballots for Democrats (much like right now in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Wisconsin). Meanwhile, in Virginia, which is currently in the midst of an election for every member of that state’s legislature, Republican Governor Glen Youngkin is fielding criticism for removing thousands of Democrats from the voting rolls and a GOP-aligned group, Virginia “Fair” Elections, is reportedly fielding over 10,000 “poll watchers” who will challenge people of color and other voters in largely Democratic districts. In some places, these kinds of challenges force voters to go home and get birth certificates, marriage licenses and change-of-name/marriage certificates (this hits women particularly hard), etc., if they want their votes counted. They’re planning to take this “Virginia model” of vote suppression national for the 2024 election, although it’s just an extension of William Rehnquist’s old “Operation Eagle Eye” from the 1960s when the man who leveraged his activism into becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court used to stand outside polling places in his native Arizona and loudly (and effectively) challenge/intimidate Hispanic and Native American voters. The Republican effort that I documented in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting rolls along (and is picking up steam). Based on everything I’m seeing them doing publicly, without even considering what they are probably planning privately for the last minute, I’m guessing they will successfully suppress several millions of votes in 2024. We already saw some of the fruits of this: when Ron DeSantis started parading Black people in shackles for the cameras because they had voted after getting off parole in a state where a referendum had legalized that, Black voter participation dropped.

Steve Bannon even proclaimed it as the main goal of the Trump presidency in their first months in the White House, saying Trump’s goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Talking about government regulations that protect the environment, punish companies and con men who rip off consumers, and provide for a safe workplace, Bannon said in March, 2017:

“That’s all gonna be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.”

It’s built into our major salvationist religions, particularly Christianity and Islam. Even when killed or facing death, Jesus and Muhammed managed to ascend to heaven at the last minute and claim eternal life.

By this worldview, no matter how terrible a life you’ve lived, if you say a handful of magic words at the last minute before you die, you’re guaranteed a spot in paradise. There’s always the last minute.