Kyrsten Sinema rains on Democrats’ parade

Democrats barely had two days to celebrate the Senate victory by Democrat Raphael Warnock over Herschel Walker that gave them a 51-49 edge in that body when Arizona sentaor Kyrsten Sinema said that she was leaving the Democratic party and changing her registration to Independent but would still caucus with the Democrats, joining Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine.

“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington. I registered as an Arizona independent,” she said in an op-ed for Arizona Central, a local media outlet.
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Sinema said her shift came as a growing number of people in her state were also declaring themselves politically independent, rejecting the Republican and Democratic political labels.

“Like a lot of Arizonans, I have never fit perfectly in either national party,”
she wrote.
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Education measures did well in elections

There has been a sustained conservative assault on public education by those who do not want their children to be exposed to any ideas that their parents object to and to learn to think. Their fight to get books that they do not like removed from school and public libraries is part of this broader anti-education campaign.

However, the 2022 mid-term elections saw some positive results on the education front. The article says that while Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida exploited the bogus critical race theory issue and still won, Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan also won, running on platforms that were strongly pro public education.

Voters also were in favor of taxing the rich to pay for public education services.
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Who have been truly awful Democratic candidates?

There is no doubt that Herschel Walker is absolutely the worst candidate for state and national office that I can think of, at least in my lifetime, someone who is utterly unsuited for any responsible position. And that is against stiff competition from Sarah Palin, Doug Mastriano, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mark Finchem, Lauren Boebert, Louis Gohmert, Paul Gosar, and the list goes on. In an earlier post, I expressed my amazement that he had got over 1.7 million votes and came within 100,000 votes of defeating Raphael Warnock, and wondered how so many people could for for such a cartoon candidate. Is it just that they were going to vote for the party however bad the candidate was? Was there no bottom to what they were willing to ignore as long as the candidate had an R after their name?
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Doing the math on the Twitter deal

The comic strip Pearls Before Swine took aim at the financial situation that Elon Musk faces after purchasing Twitter.

(Pearls Before Swine)

(Pearls Before Swine)

As I understand it, Musk paid $44 billion for the purchase. $27 billion was put up by him and $4 billion by other investors, while $13 billion was borrowed. This is what is known as a ‘leveraged buyout’ in that it is the company that is being bought that borrows the money, not the buyer. So if the loans go into default, it is Twitter that is on the hook, not Musk personally. This strikes me as a bit weird but what do I know about high finance? It appears that the banks seem to think that Musk will not drive the value of Twitter below the $13 billion valuation so that they can recoup their loan even if things go south.
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McConnell and McCarthy snubbed by Capitol police and their families

Congress voted to give its highest award to the Capitol and Washington DC police for their efforts to stop the rioters on January 6th from entering the Capitol building and attacking members of Congress. The ceremony was held yesterday and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were in line to shake the hands of the recipients.

But the officers as well as the family of a police officer who died, clearly still angry at how Republican leaders made excuses for Donald Trump’s incitement of the violence, ignored their outstretched hands and walked right past them.

McConnell, the Senate minority leader, was caught on video with his hand outstretched, waiting in line for handshakes that never came as senior officers and Sicknick’s parents warmly greeted the Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer.

The relatives and officers in uniform then walked straight past the Republican duo, barely looking at them.

“They’re just two-faced. I’m just tired of them standing there and saying how wonderful the Capitol police is, and they turn around and … go down to Mar-a-Lago and kiss [Trump’s] ring,” Sicknick’s mother, Gladys Sicknick, said, according to a tweet by CNN congressional reporter Daniella Diaz.

“It just hurts.”

Sicknick’s brother, Ken, was also forthright. “They have no idea what integrity is. They can’t stand up for what’s right and wrong,” he said.

They people made it clear that they had decided together in advance that they were not going to shake their hands.

Donald Trump’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Tuesday was a bad day for Donald Trump.

First off, Democrat Raphael Warnock defeated Republican Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff, giving the Democrats a welcome 51-49 margin in the US senate. Walker was the candidate promoted by Trump despite the fact that he was utterly unsuited for the position and party insiders knew that he had many skeletons in his closet that came out during the campaign. What is depressing is that there were over 1.7 million people willing to vote for a cartoon candidate like Walker, which is astounding to me. Warnock won by a margin of 51.4% to 48.6%, or by about 95,000 votes, a margin close to what pre-election polls indicated. When added to losses by Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Blake Master in Arizona, this one just adds to Trump’s image as a loser who also backs losers and will provide ammunition to those in the party who want to avoid having him as the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.
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A community in American Samoa leapfrogs into solar energy

I have been reading several books on anthropology recently and decided to revisit a classic, the 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead. This was Mead’s first book, published in 1928 when she was just 27 and was based on nine months field work in 1924 on the island of Tu’a in American Samoa and it made her famous. She was investigating whether the conflicts that seemed to arise in the US between adolescent girls and their parents after they reached puberty was biologically based or was because of the cultural context in which they grew up.

Mead was part of the anthropology program at Columbia University and Barnard College directed by Franz Boas that claimed that evidence showed that race, sexuality, and gender were not fixed, biologically determined categories but were fluid and a product of culture. Boaz expanded on these themes when he wrote in the Foreword to Mead’s book, “Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.”
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Nonbelievers are making their presence felt in politics

The atheist movement in the US, and skeptics generally, has advanced to the stage where for many it is no longer sufficient to simply be public about one’s disbelief in gods and the supernatural. The next stage is what one does in practical terms and it is encouraging that the skeptical community is now much more focused on becoming politically active on a wide range of causes. They are transitioning from making their presence known to making their presence felt.

While skeptics belong to all political persuasions, they tend to be much more on the left-liberal end of the spectrum, which is not surprising with the rise of the religious right and their reactionary political agenda.

When members of the small Pennsylvania chapter of Secular Democrats of America log on for their monthly meetings, they’re not there for a virtual happy hour.

“We don’t sit around at our meetings patting ourselves on the back for not believing in God together,” said David Brown, a founder from the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore.

The group, mostly consisting of atheists and agnostics, mobilizes to knock on doors and make phone calls on behalf of Democratic candidates “who are pro-science, pro-democracy, whether or not they are actually self-identified secular people,” he said. “We are trying to keep church and state separate. That encompasses LGBTQIA+, COVID science, bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.”
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Can the swastika be reclaimed?

In Sri Lanka, one would occasionally come across the swastika symbol in various places. This had nothing to do with Nazis. The swastika predates the rise of the Nazis by millennia and is a religious symbol for many people around the world and even in the US. It only became a hate symbol with Hitler.

The equilateral cross with its legs bent at right angles is a millennia-old sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism that represents peace and good fortune, and was also used widely by Indigenous people worldwide in a similar vein.
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The symbol itself dates back to prehistoric times. The word “swastika” has Sanskrit roots and means “the mark of well being.” It has been used in prayers of the Rig Veda, the oldest of Hindu scriptures. In Buddhism, the symbol is known as “manji” and signifies the Buddha’s footsteps. It is used to mark the location of Buddhist temples. In China it’s called Wàn, and denotes the universe or the manifestation and creativity of God. The swastika is carved into the Jains’ emblem representing the four types of birth an embodied soul might attain until it is eventually liberated from the cycle of birth and death. In the Zoroastrian faith, it represents the four elements – water, fire, air and earth.
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Trump’s white supremacist allies put his Republican enablers in a bind, again

The Republican party is in a dance with death with its leader Donald Trump, as he keeps going further and further in his ties with the worst elements of American politics, consisting of racists, misogynists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. His dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West/Ye has forced even the more servile members of the party criticize him.

House and Senate Republicans are speaking out against former President Donald Trump’s dinner last week with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

“There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday. “And anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”
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The leaders’ reactions to the dinner came a day after former Vice President Mike Pence said that Trump should apologize for even sitting down with Fuentes.

“Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier a seat at the table,” Pence said in an interview with News Nation Now. “And I think he should apologize for it, and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.”

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