Ten movies, two series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Max, TCM, YouTube.]

Invitation (dir. Gottfried Reinhardt, 1952). Dorothy McGuire is Ellen Bowker Pierce, a rich young newlywed with a respiratory ailment that’s soon to end her life. Her greatest happiness is to see her husband Dan (Van Johnson) off to work (he’s “doing beautifully in business”) before planning the evening’s dinner. The couple’s happiness is threatened not only by the future but by what lies in the past: the machinations of Ellen’s father (Louis Calhern) and Dan’s inconclusive relationship with the venomous Maud Redwick (Ruth Roman). Soap opera with a difference, so weird and so good. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

23 Paces to Baker Street (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1956). A recently blind playwright (Van Johnson) overhears bits of a shady conversation in a London pub, and he, his ex-fiancée (Vera Miles), and his butler (Cecil Parker) join forces to figure it out. The police, of course, aren’t interested. Amateur sleuthing at its finest, with some clever deductions (Baker Street, get it?), a dip into Burke’s Peerage, echoes of The Lady from Shanghai and Rear Window, and a scene that must have influenced Wait Until Dark. Look for the indefatigable Estelle Winwood as a barmaid. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Make Haste to Live (dir. William A. Seiter, 1954). The backstory is daft: when a mobster’s wife (Dorothy McGuire) discovers what he’s all about and disappears to make a new life with a new name, the mobster (Stephen McNally) ends up taking the rap for her murder. And now the mobster is out of prison and making his way into his wife’s new life. The movie’s end is telegraphed early on, too early, and it’s difficult to think that anyone is ever really in danger here. The creepiest element in the movie: the mobster’s interest in his daughter (Mary Murphy). ★★ (YT)

*

Man in the Attic (dir. Hugo Fregonese, 1953). Another take on Jack the Ripper, with a real Jack (Palance) as Mr. Slade (ahem), a pathologist who rents a room to live in and an attic in which to conduct unexplained experiments. The house in which he’s renting is owned by the Harleys, a pleasant couple (Frances Bavier and Rhys Williams) whose niece, the beautiful actress Lily Bonner (Constance Smith) comes to live with them. Did I mention that Mr. Slade’s mother was an actress who ended up a prostitute, and that he has removed all the pictures of actresses that graced the walls of his room? Lots of atmosphere, lots of fog (a “London particular,” as Dickens called it), and lots of menace. ★★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Neo-Noir feature

Night Moves (dir. Arthur Penn, 1975). “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” A faded movie star hires a private eye (Gene Hackman) to find her runaway daughter (Melanie Griffith), and he uncovers a criminal scheme that will end up taking several lives. Some exciting moments, but an awful lot of painful dialogue, and I’m aware that I used up two sentences to give an example. ★★

Obsession (dir. Brian De Palma, 1976). I’m a Vertigo obsessive, so I’m surprised that I’d never heard of this movie before finding it at Criterion. It’s a brilliant homage, recasting Hitchcock’s Orpheus-and-Eurydice premise in novel and outrageous terms, with many deft touches to please a Vertigo fan. Cliff Robertson, Geneviève Bujold, and John Lithgow are the principals. A bonus: Bernard Herrmann’s last score. ★★★★

Eyewitness (dir. Peter Yates, 1981). When janitor Daryll Deever (William Hurt) discovers a dead body in the office building where he works, he claims more knowledge of the murder than he has in an attempt to establish a relationship with local-television reporter Toni Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver), the object of his long-standing obsession. Meanwhile, Deever suspects and fears that his friend and fellow janitor (James Woods) is the killer. Capable performances (the leads, Morgan Freeman, Christopher Plummer, Irene Worth) and some moments of genuine suspense, but also a considerable number of inanities (fleeting attempts to give minor characters more depth), plot holes, and a bonkers conclusion that might be meant to echo Strangers on a Train but feels laughable. And the movie never seems to allow that there’s anything stalker-y about Deever’s obsession. ★★

Absence of Malice (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1981). Sally Field is Megan Carter, a Miami journalist who writes a story asserting that liquor distributor and bootlegger’s son Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman) is under investigation in the disappearance of a union official. Yes, he’s under investigation; that much is true. Many complications follow; the plot becomes increasingly convoluted; and the movie struggles to make Carter and Gallagher’s off-and-on relationship appear plausible. That this movie has garnered so much praise amazes me. ★★

*

Ten Cents a Dance (dir. Lionel Barrymore, 1931). Taxi dancer Barbara O’Neill (Barbara Stanwyck) has a wealthy admirer in Bradley Carlton (Ricardo Cortez), but she falls for her luckless boarding-house chum Eddie Miller (Monroe Owsley), gets him a job with Carlton, and marries him, only to learn that he’s stolen from Carlton’s company to cover stock-market losses. Stanwyck gives a terrific performance — kind, seductive, desperate, indignant, and fiercely assertive by turns. Cortez and Owsley are, well, adequate. Fun to think about how the story might have developed post-Code. ★★★ (YT)

*

State and Main (dir. David Mamet, 2000). A struggling film production (“I need eight hundred grand”) comes to a small town in Vermont to shoot, but the old mill that was to give the movie its title burned down decades ago, and comic complications and a crisis of conscience ensue. I suspect that many a viewer watching this movie will think of Gilmore Girls (which began in 2000), but the inspiration there and here is Preston Sturges. A spectacular ensemble cast, with William H. Macy as an addled director, Alec Baldwin and Sarah Jessica Parker as troublesome stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a writer-naif in the world of pictures, and Rebecca Pidgeon as an adorable bookstore owner. My favorite line is about making your own fun, something anyone living in a small town should understand: “If you don’t make it yourself, it ain’t fun — it’s entertainment.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Empire Falls (dir. Fred Schepisi, 2005). An adaptation of Richard Russo’s novel about life in a Maine town whose mill has shut down, with three generations of characters present and past. At the center of things is Miles Roby (Ed Harris), a divorced father with a daughter (Danielle Panabaker), an indentured servant of sorts presiding over the Empire Grill, a George Bailey who’s never broken away from Empire Falls, nor from Martha’s Vineyard, where he takes a modest vacation every year for reasons he cannot (yet) admit. Yes, he’s borne back ceaselessly into the past, a point made abundantly clear. This two-parter is more than slightly disjointed as it begins, with a considerable amount of exposition, but it gets better and better as it goes on, with considerable darkness and ample light. With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt, Paul Newman, and many more, including Joanne Woodward as town matriarch Mrs. Whiting, the Mr. Potter to Miles’s George Bailey. ★★★★ (M)

*

Olive Kitteridge (dir. Lisa Cholodenko, 2014). A four-part miniseries from Elizabeth Strout’s stories, set in a town in Maine, focused on twenty-five years in the lives of a junior-high math teacher, Olive Kitteridge (Frances McDormand) and her pharmacist husband Henry (Richard Jenkins). Olive is no-nonsense truth-teller who seems (seems) righteously devoid of self-doubt; her husband Henry is the incarnation of kindness and patience, even if his kindness is at times colored by other impulses. Familial tensions, accusations, regrets, and, sometimes, the possibility of happiness. The best line: “It baffles me, this world; I don’t want to leave it yet.” ★★★★ (M)

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Names in school (Project 2025)

Here’s another passage from the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, from Chapter Eleven, concerning the Department of Education — which, this chapter says, should be eliminated. So much is left unaddressed in this chapter. Just one example: despite graphs showing declines in reading and mathematics, there are no suggestions to improve those outcomes. Let the states figure it out, I guess.

But this document is clear on several points. For instance, in all K–12 schools under federal jurisdiction:

No public education employee or contractor shall use a name to address a student other than the name listed on a student’s birth certificate, without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.

No public education employee or contractor shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.

No public institution may require an education employee or contractor to use a pronoun that does not match a person’s biological sex if contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral convictions.

As always, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug. Imagine what it would feel like to be a trans or non-binary kid called, again and again, a name or pronoun not of your choosing. Imagine what it would feel like to be a trans or non-binary teacher or staff member referred to, again and again, with the wrong pronouns. Imagine too the dilemma the first of these prohibitions would create for a sympathetic teacher who wants to honor a student’s choice of name. And notice too: even if a student has written permission regarding their name and pronouns, a teacher or other employee cannot be required to honor that request. Again, cruelty abounding, and I have to wonder what kind of “moral convictions” would prompt a person to be so unabashedly cruel. The deeply sinister message here is that individual identity is not one’s own to decide.

Practicalities: if such a policy were ever to be implemented, every Ash, Barb, Cal, Dee, &c., &c., had better bring a note from home.

Teachers, incidentally, are identified in this document as a special-interest group in the world of education.

Related posts
Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles : Mary Miller and biblical models of the family

Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles

It is to laugh: Melania Trump just hosted a fundraiser for the Log Cabin Republicans, a group devoted to LGBTQ+ rights. “This Republican Party is one for ALL Americans,” the group proclaimed.

Perhaps the Log Cabin Republicans should have a look at the Project 2025 Policy Agenda. Chapter Fourteen, devoted to the Department of Health and Human Services, leaves no doubt that these aspiring makers of policy view marriage as a heterosexual union. Here’s a passage from the plan for the HHS Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education for Adults initiative:

Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.

For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father. Despite recent congressional bills like the Respect for Marriage Act that redefine marriage to be the union between any two individuals, HMRE program grants should be available to faith-based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.

Look at the details:

~ The federal government is to maintain a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family. But while marriage can be a religious institution, it is, in the United States, also and always a civil institution. And “biblically based” has an uncertain meaning. I trust that the Project 2025 idea of a biblical model does not allow for polygamy, concubinage, and death by stoning for disobedient children.

~ There’s no acknowledgement of the woeful life consequences that may befall children raised in dysfunctional heterosexual households.

~ If the average length of same-sex marriages is indeed half that of heterosexual marriages, that might have something to do the fact that same-sex marriage became legal in every state only in 2015. Many same-sex marriages can now be, at most, just under nine years old.

~ This document leaves little doubt that the only form of marriage it deems legitimate is marriage between a man and a woman (unrelated!). Marriage, the document says, is between “not just any two adults,” as if the partners in a same-sex relationship are just randomly paired people.

~ The roles assigned mothers and fathers are curiously retrograde: a mother provides “love and nurturing”; a father provides “play and protection.” Cannot any parent, male, female, or otherwise, provide all those possibilities?

The broad outlines of Project 2025 are frightening enough. Reading the details makes it all look much worse. Log Cabin Republicans, you’re kidding yourselves.

The document is available here.

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Relative frequency of words in Project 2025 : Mary Miller and biblical models of the family

Mary Miller, shilling

East-central Illinois’s Mary Miller (IL-15) was one of the faithful yelling outside the courthouse today.

And someone in the crowd yelled back: “You’re shilling for a rapist!”

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Postal consolidation

The United States Postal Service is planning to “consolidate” thirty processing and distribution centers. In Illinois, four processing and distribution centers outside of Chicago are slated for consolidation. That seems to mean that all outgoing mail will be processed in Chicago and environs. Snail mail indeed.

The website Save the Post Office has the complete list of locations and more information. If you click on the PDF for a location, you’ll find a link to a webpage for comments from the public.

To her credit, Mary Miller (IL-15) has joined Nikki Budzinski (IL-13) in a letter to Postmaster Louis DeJoy arguing against postal consolidation. I’m a bit addled to find that I agree with Mary Miller about something. I would imagine that Nikki Budzinski might say the same.

[If you’re wondering: “the president of the United States does not have the authority to remove the postmaster general.”]

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, Max, TCM, YouTube.]

From the Criterion Channel’s Pre-Code Divas feature

The Divorcee (dir. Robert Z. Leonard, 1930). A tour de force for Norma Shearer as Jerry, a rich young married who gets even with her one-night-stand adulterous husband Ted (Chester Morris) by having a one-night stand of her own. Her husband objects — and the movie makes clear his hypocrisy. Complications follow, in this marriage and that of Paul (Conrad Nagel) and Dorothy (Judith Wood), who married after she was disfigured in a car wreck caused by his reckless driving. Look for Robert Montgomery as Ted’s friend Don, and Charles R. Moore, a member of later Preston Sturges’s stock company as First Porter Opening Window. ★★★★

Night Nurse (dir. William A. Wellman, 1931). Here we have a new nurse, Lora (Barbara Stanwyck), her colleague and roommate Maloney (Joan Blondell), a bootlegger (name unknown until the last scene), an alcoholic mother of two young girls, and the mother’s murderous chauffeur Nick (Clark Gable), intent upon keeping the mother drunk as her daughters starve to death. (There’s a trust fund he’s after.) Toss in a drug-addicted doctor, some grim hospital jokes, and gratuitous scenes of Stanwyck and Blondell undressing, and glory in the shock of the pre-Code world. Stanwyck’s Lora has courage and smarts as the fierce protector of the helpless girls, and as — I can’t help seeing it — Mary Richards to Blondell’s Rhoda Morgenstern. ★★★★

Daughter of the Dragon (dir. Lloyd Corrigan, 1931). “I have taken the oath of a son”: so says Princess Ling Moy (Anna May Wong), vowing to exact the vengeance her father Fu Manchu (Warner Oland) demands of her as he dies. The Hamlet-like scenario is complicated by two love stories, with the princess (a professional dancer) drawing the attention of an English aristocrat (Bramwell Fletcher) and a dashing Chinese detective (Sessue Hayakawa) working with Scotland Yard. Wong is an extraordinary screen presence: her character made me think of Louise Brooks, if Louise Brooks were murderous and not just insouciant. With mind control, poisoned tobacco, a secret passageway, and moments of wild violence. ★★★★

Back Street (dir. John M. Stahl, 1932). From a novel by Fannie Hurst. True romance — or is it self-abasement? — run rampant: Ray Schmidt (Irene Dunne) gives up a position as the highest-ranking woman in her firm to live in a paid-for apartment as the mistress of banker-philanthropist Walter Saxel (John Boles). Best scene: Walter’s son confronts the adulterous pair. “There isn’t one woman in a million who’s ever found happiness in the back streets of any man’s life.” ★★★★

Three on a Match (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Three girls from P.S. 62 take different paths in life: Mary (Joan Blondell) is a thief turned showgirl; Ruth, a stenographer (Bette Davis); Vivian (Ann Dvorak), the unhappy wife of a wealthy lawyer (Warren Williams). An overheard conversation in a beauty parlor reunites the three women, with dramatic changes in fortune to follow. Dvorak is the standout here, and her desperation and courage bring the story to a shocking end. With copious alcohol, implicit cocaine, and Humphrey Bogart. ★★★★

[The other movies in this feature: Hell’s Angels, Dishonored, No Man of Her Own, Scarface, This Is the Night, Baby Face, Design for Living, I’m No Angel, and She Done Him Wrong. Also these two.]
*

Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022). I’ve never been impressed by Adam Gopnik — see his inane comments on Armstrong, Ellington, and Proust — so any movie that begins with the real Gopnik interviewing the fictional conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is already in danger of losing me. This movie did lose me: it’s one of the most pretentious I’ve seen, dropping knowing shorthand references to musical personalities and institutions with alarming frequency. Lydia Tár is driven, humorless, manipulative, sexually exploitative, and vengeful: we’re meant, I think, to ooh and aah at the posh furnishings and tsk deeply at her personal history — and tsk again, perhaps, at the punishment exacted for that history (all while not laughing at her conducting). What bugs me most is the movie’s spooky, faintly stalker-y, supernatural dimension, never made enough of: what’s it doing there? ★★ (DVD)

[For a markedly different take on the movie, see an essay by Dan Kois. It’s spoiler-rich.]

Brief Encounter (dir. David Lean, 1945), We watched it again (for the third or fourth time?) so as to share it with friends who’d never seen it, and now I’m wondering why it’s never shown up in one of these movie compilations. It’s a profoundly bittersweet movie, the story of two married people, Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who meet by chance in a train station’s refreshment room, and whose further chance meetings develop into love. And always time is running out: whistles blowing, an unseen station master announcing incoming and departing trains (the voice of Noël Coward, who adapted his play Still Life for the screenplay). Think of Dido and Aeneas in England — with a difference, because it’s England. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Manic pixie dream girls

Sweet November (dir. Robert Ellis Miller, 1968). I adore Sandy Dennis, who here plays Sara Deever, a Brooklyn Heights resident who every month chooses a new man to move in with her — just for one month — so that she can improve him. Her project for November is Charlie Blake (Anthony Newley), a British manufacturer of boxes, and a man who is, in the language of the time, uptight. For most of its length, the movie feels like a ditzy comedy, with Sara as a manic pixie dream girl and Charlie composing dopey poems and submitting to a mod makeover. That these two people will fall in love is to be expected, but things take a semi-unpredictable turn that casts a new light on all that precedes the end. ★★★★ (TCM)

After Hours (dir. Martin Scorcese, 1985). A chance encounter in a Manhattan coffeeshop pulls hapless word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) into a night of funny, sad, crazy episodes in Soho. Joseph Minion’s screenplay is deadpan funny in countless ways; I began to think of this movie as a Buster Keaton comedy — if Keaton were making the downtown scene in the 1980s. The movie is also a set of dark variations on the manic pixie dream girl, with the women Paul encounters (played by Rosanna Arquette, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and Verna Bloom) becoming ever more hazardous to his well-being. My favorite line: “It’s not even 2:00 yet.” ★★★★ (TCM)

[I thought I’d seen this movie before, but I had it confused with Something Wild (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1986.]

*

Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (dir. Hannah Olson, 2023). Amy Carlson, a McDonald’s manager, figured out that she was Mother God, God incarnate, and thus attracted a small group of followers to form Love Has Won, a community in Crestone, Colorado, a town that draws spiritual seekers. This documentary series explores Carlson’s life and death and eclectic theology, which draws upon ancient myth (the Anunnaki), New Age beliefs (portals), pop culture (Carlson was in constant communication with the dead Robin Williams, leader of “the Galactics”), and conspiracy theories (Carlson was queen of the universe, and thus the Q of QAnon), all informed by a vague Manichaeism, all fueled by generous intake of alcohol, tranquilizers, and colloidal silver. And there’s a series of Father Gods (Carlson’s lovers), the last of whom we see wearing an ankle monitor. What would make this three-part documentary more compelling: a Frontline-style narrator, a voice of sanity to counter the unrelieved blather of Carlson’s followers. ★★★ (M)

*

Man’s Castle (dir. Frank Borzage, 1933). In Depression Manhattan, Bill (Spencer Tracy) and Trina (Loretta Young) shack up together — literally, living without benefit of marriage in a makeshift encampment off Park Avenue. Bill, who’s more than a bit of a jerk, has itchy feet — he’s always alert to train whistles and birds taking flight, even with his caring, self-sacrificing, incredibly beautiful partner by his side. A showgirl with money (Glenda Farrell) and a camp hothead (Arthur Hohl) cause trouble; an old alkie (Marjorie Rambeau) is there to step in as a deus ex machina. Remarkably pre-Code, with Bill and Trina lying in a bed together — withnot one foot on the floor. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942). Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale, a young woman deeply damaged by a tyrannical mother (Gladys Cooper). A sister-in-law’s intervention brings Charlotte to a forward-thinking psychiatrist (Claude Rains), who helps her to develop the means to a life of greater freedom. Enter Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), an architect, unhappily married. After seeing this movie a second time, I think it’d make a great double-bill with Brief Encounter: happiness is happiness, however fleeting, however partial. ★★★★ (TCM)

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All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

The Santos vote

Did my member of Congress vote to expel George Santos from Congress?

Of course she didn’t!

Did yours? The Washington Post has the results (gift link).

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Illinois-15 in The Washington Post

“Political scientists and analysts said that when state Democrats packed so many conservatives into a single district, they created the environment for [Mary] Miller to win despite holding views that are out of step with most general-election voters in Illinois and even with most GOP House members”: The Washington Post takes a long look at Illinois’s gerrymandered fifteenth congressional district.

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[Gift link, no subscription needed.]

Mary Miller and the four seasons

Mary Miller (R, IL-15), my representative in Congress, is not the sharpest knife in the block. Here is what Miller said on the House floor a few days ago:

“The farmers in my district recognize climate change as summer, winter, spring, and fall.”

The context: her effort to defund USDA Climate Hubs. Pete Buttigieg’s comment on Miller’s comment: “Are we really doing this?”

C-SPAN says that Miller was making a joke. Not so. I think she was reading a line that was meant to sound smart and sassy, but she wasn’t joking. She doesn’t recognize climate change as a reality. Her lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters: 2%.

Mary, goddammit, you’re willfully ignorant. And you make the 754,000+ residents of your massive, gerrymandered district look ignorant too. Only some of us are.

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[The transcription is accurate: Miller had the seasons out of order.]

The Daily Tar Heel front page

[The Daily Tar Heel, August 30, 2023. Click for a much larger view.]

I sent a copy of this front page to my member of Congress, Mary Miller. She won’t read it, but perhaps an aide will. Miller is, of course, what they call a “staunch defender” of the Second Amendment. I hope this page gives someone in her office reason to think about the culture of fear and violence their boss fosters.

Today’s newspaper is here.

Plenty of nothing

Champaign-Urbana’s News-Gazette reports that millions in federal money are going to projects in downstate Illinois. But nothing for Mary Miller’s congressional district. Miller refuses to do earmarks.

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Hitler Moms

News from Indiana, as reported in The Indianapolis Star:

The Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national organization recently listed as an "extremist group" by a civil rights watchdog, apologized Thursday morning after it launched a newsletter called The Parent Brigade Wednesday that featured a quote from Adolf Hitler on its front cover.

The quotation was a variation on the words Representative Mary Miller (R, IL-15) spoke on January 5, 2020: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” The Moms have it as “He, alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”

The Star also reports on two other appearances of these words in recent American discourse, on a billboard in 2014 and in a 2023 Facebook post by a member of a Colorado Springs school aboard.

It never occurs to these dangerous people that Hitler did have the youth — the Hitler Youth, as I reminded Mary Miller in 2022. But as I pointed out to her, he did not have the future. And neither will the Moms.

Notice who’s speaking later this week at an event the Moms are promoting: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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A chart, not especially helpful

The New York Times has created an ingenious scrolling chart (gift link) to sort out congressional Republican responses to the second indictment. The only problem: an ingenious scrolling chart is not especially helpful for anyone who wants to check on a particular member of Congress. There are no names, just small photographs of faces, greyed out until one scrolls to a relevant category of response and some faces turn full-color. Faces are arranged from less to more conservative, though it’s not clear what their arrangment into rows means.

I had no problem finding Illinois’s Mary Miller: I looked at the more conservative end of the spectrum and scrolled until her tiny head turned blonde. There she was, one of just thirty-three members who claim that the indictment signals the advent of autocracy (“BANANA REPUBLIC,” Miller wrote on Twitter), and one of just nineteen members who call the indictment “election interference.”

What would be a much more useful presentation: an alphabetical list of members, with categories of response to the right of their names. That would make it easy to find a given member and see how many categories of response apply to that member’s comments.

I’ll invoke my mantra about technology: Technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. That one can arrange tiny greyed-out faces into a chart doesn’t mean that one should.

Heather Cox Richardson on the Second Amendment

From the May 6 installment of Letters from an American:

For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history.

I’m sending a copy of the article to my representative in Congress, Mary Miller, who made her Washington debut by announcing that “Hitler was right on one thing.” I doubt that she’ll read what Richardson has to say. But perhaps some bored young aide tasked with opening the mail will read Richardson and find something to think about.

Giving up the whole game

In the latest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson addresses the assertion of CPAC speaker Michael Knowles that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” Richardson points out that Knowles’s statement is not just an attack on transgender people. She makes a connection to Hungarian autocrat’s Victor Orbán’s efforts to end liberal democracy:

Tapping into the anti-LGBTQ sentiment that Orbán and those like him have used to win voters, the statement was a crucial salvo in the attempt to destroy American democracy and replace it with Christian nationalism.

But there is a very simple answer to the radical right’s attack on LGBTQ people that also answers their rejection of democracy. It is an answer that history has proved again and again. Once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have stamped your approval on the idea of rulers and subjects. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in the lesser group.

A useful supplement, from Samuel Perry, professor of sociology: How can we spot #ChristianNationalism in the wild? And a related post: Mary Miller and trans rights.

A letter to Mary Miller

Yet another one. You might enjoy reading it.

[Click for a larger view.]

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Mary Miller, going places

“My” representative in Congress, Mary Miller (R, IL-15) — and how I tire of having to type the quotation marks — is headed to Chicago — a city she has often reviled — for a fundraiser. It’s hardly coincidental that she just announced the creation of Congressional Family Caucus.

And here I have to take issue with a nearby NPR affiliate, the same one that last February described Vladimir Putin as beginning “peacekeeping operations in Ukraine.”

From the station’s news item:

Miller says she believes Congress has a moral obligation to protect the natural family from what she calls the radical left, which wants to destroy it.

A possible revision:

Miller says she believes Congress has a moral obligation to protect what she calls “the natural family” from what she calls ”the radical left,“ which she says wants to destroy it.

As I’ve already suggested to the station, it’s not appropriate to repeat Miller’s language as if it has an obvious, uncontested basis in reality. I e-mailed; they said they’ll change their report.

Miller’s recent tweets refer to “the natural family” and “the traditional family, ordained by God,” and she invokes Deuteronomy 6 as a model for parent-child relations. Nice work of cherry-picking, Mary. Deuteronomy 21:18–21 has some interesting guidance for parents. In the King James Version:

18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: 19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; 20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. 21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

And there’s lots more.

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Getting things done

The Republican House majority got something accomplished yesterday. From the January 3 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :

The first thing they did was to remove the metal detectors that were installed after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The removal was one of the things Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) promised far-right Republicans in hopes of winning their votes to elect him speaker. The House has not yet voted on the rules package that ends “Democrat fines for failure of Members to comply with unscientific mask mandates and security screenings before entering the House floor,” but the metal detectors are gone, just three days before the second anniversary of the January 6 attack.

So far, the removal of those metal detectors is the only concrete outcome of McCarthy’s attempt to woo the extremist members of his conference.

The New York Times looks at those extremist members and finds that most are proponents of the Big Lie or members of the (so-called) Freedom Caucus or both. Illinois’s own Mary Miller is, of course, both.

[I watched a lot of news yesterday without learning about the metal detectors. One more reason to read Letters from an American.]

A letter to Dr. Laura Schlessinger

From Letters of Note, a letter from Kent Ashcraft, a musician, with some hilarious questions for Dr. Laura Schlessinger about biblical do s and don’t s. Here’s one question:

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Leviticus 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?

Context, from Wikipedia:

Over the years, Schlessinger expressed opposition to homosexuality based on biblical scripture, at one point referring to homosexual behavior as “products of a biological disorder.” Her rhetoric eventually prompted an open letter penned in the year 2000 responding to her position that used text of Bible decrees.

I can think of at least one congressional representative to whom I’d like to send this letter, Illinois’s own Mary Miller. She’s already ranting about the Respect for Marriage Act, which she calls the “Anti-Marriage Act.”

[Whatever became of Laura Schlessinger? She’s on satellite radio. And she really has a doctorate, in physiology, from Columbia University. Holy smokes! No pun on the burning bull.]

Another Mary Miller vote

I should no longer be surprised that “my” representative in Congress, Mary Miller (R, IL-15), takes the wrong position on everything. But I’m still sometimes surprised. She just voted against S. 4524, the Speak Out Act,

a bill to limit the judicial enforceability of predispute nondisclosure and nondisparagement contract clauses relating to disputes involving sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Voting yea: 215 Democrats and 100 Republicans. Voting nay: 109 Republicans. Not voting: 4 Democrats, 4 Republicans.

There’s something about Mary.

In better news, the Respect for Marriage Act is is on its way to becoming law.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)