The Sorensen Monologues
Decision 2022
This pretty much sums up how I feel about the midterms. I can’t believe so many contests are so close. Perhaps the most depressing one is the Ohio Senate race in which far-right extremist JD Vance — who has stated that the sexual revolution made it easier for women to leave violent marriages, and that this is bad somehow — has a very good shot at winning. Republican candidates can say just about anything these days, and it doesn’t matter. The old norms are gone; actual policy has become irrelevant.
In case you haven’t heard about the guys in tactical gear guarding a ballot drop box in Mesa, AZ, you can read more here.
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Disinformation Invasion
As this excellent column by Will Bunch explains, the organization responsible for these ads that are running during baseball playoff games on Fox Sports is a shadowy dark money group called “Citizens for Sanity” that is at least partly composed of former Trump administration officials with ties to notorious immigrant-basher Stephen Miller. This dangerously dishonest and inflammatory propaganda is simply incompatible with democracy, and it’s likely not a coincidence that it was allowed on a Rupert Murdoch-owned network. Having just finished Ken Burns’ epic documentary about US attitudes toward Jewish and other immigrants during the Holocaust, it’s especially harrowing to see some of the same ugly rhetoric resurfacing.
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What’s the Plan?
The Washington Post recently analyzed GOP candidates for the House, Senate, and key statewide offices, and found that over half — 299 out of 569 — have either challenged or refused to accept Biden’s victory in 2020. Of these, 173 are running for safe seats that they can expect to win.
According to TPM, more than half of U.S. states, 27 to be exact, have election deniers running for positions that would give them some degree of control control over voting.
I’m not actually sure what the best plan to stop this madness would be, but I do think good politicians need to be talking about this a LOT more than they are. We also desperately need greater moral clarity from political media.
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Vagabond State
I’ve seen various reports lately about universities not having enough housing for students, with some being forced into homelessness, sleeping in their cars, etc. It’s apparently a global problem — I just had a conversation with a woman in the Netherlands who was telling me about the plight of students trying to attend university in the Hague. As someone who spent four years living in university housing, this is almost imaginable to me. College is hard enough without worrying about having a roof over your head.
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A Visit to the Harmacy
Many women are finding that in states with strict abortion bans, drugstores won’t fill their prescriptions without special confirmation from a doctor or a privacy-invading consultation with the pharmacist. It’s yet another way in which anti-choice extremism is upending healthcare. This article in The Guardian provides an overview.
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Migrant Mixup
There’s not anything particularly complicated about what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are doing by shipping asylum seekers and migrants off to far-flung “blue” cities under reportedly deceptive pretenses. It’s just dehumanizing and cruel, exploiting desperate people to score political points with a base that’s been whipped into a hateful frenzy.
Lured by the promise of jobs, the migrants find themselves dumped in the middle of nowhere (or in front of Kamala Harris’s house in DC, in the case of those bused by Abbott). Some were given papers suggesting they had appointments hundreds or thousands of miles away in order to stay in the country. Communities like Martha’s Vineyard have risen to the occasion to help the migrants, but that’s apparently not enough to stop extremists on the right from celebrating some perverse “gotcha.”
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A Biden Speech to Please the Mainstream Press
I thought Biden’s speech was long overdue, and about as mild-mannered as could be given the circumstances. It could have been tighter and more eloquently delivered, but the important thing is that he did it. The nitpicking that ensued from the mainstream press completely missed the forest for the trees. He was mean to Trump voters! He engaged in “partisan” talk about policy! You would think that after all we’ve been through in the past two years, that maybe it would be OK for the President to finally criticize the MAGA movement. In fact, he has a moral obligation to do so.
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Funding Fanatics
$1.6 billion — tax free — is going to an entity run by Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the Federalist Society. This would be “the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. history” according to Propublica. Among other things, the Federalist Society is responsible for the radical tilt of the current Supreme Court. One of the Federalist Society’s star lawyers is John Eastman, who tried to overturn the 2020 election for Trump. You would think a legit legal organization would distance itself from an attorney who led a coup attempt — he insisted that Mike Pence refuse to certify the Electoral College results at Trump’s pre-insurrection rally! But no.
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Vanishing Video
Now, it’s one thing for a show to get canceled. What new CEO David Zaslav is doing is nuking shows — particularly animation series and kids’ programming — from the face of the earth. It’s possible they will never be seen again, or will only become legally viewable in a century or so once the copyright expires. The reason given for these actions is cost-cutting: a tax break available in mergers for writing off incomplete projects (like Batgirl), and savings on residual payments for the cast and creators of series. God forbid the artists make a few crumbs! Meanwhile, Zaslav’s compensation package in 2021 alone was valued at $241 million. This is capitalism at its most absurdly cannibalistic, of profits based on destruction.
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Black Hole Seized from Mar-a-Lago
Trump could openly threaten to suck us all to our doom and the mainstream media would still treat it like some sort of political parlor game where every move to stave off apocalypse is motivated by “partisanship” and nothing more. The irony of this cynical take is that the Dems — most especially Biden and Merrick Garland — seem to avoid confrontation religiously, until they would be breaking the law themselves if they didn’t do something. If that wet noodle of an Attorney General signed off on the raid, there was almost certainly a good reason for it! In fact, there’s not even that much to discuss beyond what were they looking for, what did they find, and how violent will the right’s response be.
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Remote Control
I think there is some value to socializing with your colleagues in person, at least occasionally. But for many workers, there are practical reasons to avoid the expensive and time-wasting schlep to the cubicle farm.
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What Does “Liberal” Mean, Anyway?
The word “liberal” has been through a lot. Since the ’80s, liberals have been ludicrously demonized by the right. At a certain point, I began using “progressive” instead as it seemed more contemporary and carried less baggage. These days, it seems that the concept of liberalism is often conflated with neoliberalism — which is pretty much its opposite. To the extent that some socially-liberal people are unconcerned with the excesses of capitalism and economic inequality, I would argue that means they are conservative, although that word has also become somewhat meaningless in an era of extremism.
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