https://twitter.com/IAmPoliticsGirl/status/1464745657617420292

McDonald's USA v. McDonald's Denmark

 McDonald’s USA — Employee: $9.00/hr, no benefits — Big Mac: $5.65 

 McDonald’s Denmark — Employee: $22/hr, 6 weeks vacation, 1 year paid maternity leave, life insurance, pension — Big Mac: $4.74

(tweet from Andrea Junker, @Strandjunker)

There are some good replies to Andrea's tweet:

starting wage in Canada at McDonald's is $13.50/hr

In Canada, the average McDonald's wage is $14.62 and the cost of a Big Mac is $5.69 

Bear in mind that those figures are Canadian dollars -- so the wages are not quite as high, and the Big Mac is a bit cheaper, than Americans might think.

 

Some HIghlights From HCR, November 22

 That's historian Heather Cox Richardson. A couple of notes from her post:

Today, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, based in Stockholm, Sweden, released its 2021 report on “The Global State of Democracy.”

“Democracy is at risk,” the report’s introduction begins. “Its survival is endangered by a perfect storm of threats, both from within and from a rising tide of authoritarianism.” “The world is becoming more authoritarian as nondemocratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law.”

The report identifies the United States as one of the democracies that is “backsliding,” meaning that it has “experienced gradual but significant weakening of Checks on Government and Civil Liberties, such as Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association and Assembly, over time.”​​

“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the report says.

Surprise, surprise. The U.S., which has always been a global leader in the advocacy of democracy and human rights, completely withdrew from that role for the four years of the Trump administration. He attacked fellow democracies while cozying up to dictators and autocrats all around the planet. 

I was pleased to see provocateurs Roger Stone and Alex Jones have been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Now if they can be forced to show up . . .

She says "conservative columnist Max Boot called out Republican lawmakers for “fomenting violent extremism” and noted that “they have also become hostage to the extremists in their ranks” because they fear for their safety should they stand up to the Trump loyalists. Right-wing extremists have threatened the lives of the 13 Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill."

It's kind of sad when elected representatives receive death threats for doing their job, and are cowed into going along for fear of violence to themselves or their families.  

Two long-standing Fox News Channel contributors, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, quit the enterprise today over Tucker Carlson’s three-part series Patriot Purge. That series, they wrote, “is presented in the style of an exposé, a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism. In reality, it is a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions.”

They say they could no longer work at the Fox News Channel because “we sincerely believe that all people of good will and good judgment—regardless of their ideological or partisan commitments—can agree that a cavalier and even contemptuous attitude toward facts, truth-seeking, and truth-telling, lies at the heart of so much that plagues our country.”

Well, I can't stand either Goldberg or Hayes, but it's a good thing that Fox News is too much for even them, and I'm glad they have called Tucker Carlson's "Patriot Purge" the hot mess that it is.

 

Audio Book L'Étranger, Albert Camus

Amazon says: 

The classic literary masterpiece The Stranger (Vintage International) is a story about an Algerian, Meursault, the titular character who commits a murder after attending his mother’s funeral. His understanding of the world, his emotional spectrum, and the general absurdities of the time all combine to form a compelling read. 

The story is aptly divided into two riveting sections, both told from the perspective of Meursault, who gives us his views before the murder in the first section and later walks us through his state of mind after the murder in the second section. The two parts in this thrilling novel encompass the protagonist’s mindset through the ordeal of grieving for his mother’s death while also coming face to face with his own moral compass for committing a murder. 

 The Stranger (Vintage International) is often cited as one of the finest examples of the philosophy of the absurd. The sense of culture and various human values interwoven during the turbulent pre-modern era is also best captured in the contents of this novel. 

L'Étranger, by Albert Camus, audio:

Here's the "dueling banjos" scene from Deliverance.

 The "banjo boy" was a young actor named Billy Redden -- but he's not playing the banjo; that's done by Ronnie Cox, the actor who's playing the guitar. Redden was neither autistic nor slow-witted. He was paid $500 for his appearance in Deliverance, and he's recently been working in a WalMart in Georgia.

 

Tax The Rich!

A tweet from Andrea Junker:

Wealth of Elon Musk

    2011: $2,000,000,000

    2021: $271,500,000,000

Wealth of Mark Zuckerberg

               2011: $17,500,000,000 

                2021: $121,900,000,000 

Wealth of Jeff Bezos 

                2011: $18,100,000,000 

                2021: $203,100,000,000 

U.S. Minimum Wage 

                2011: $7.25 

                2021: $7.25 

Three words: tax the rich.

Click here for the entry on Twitter; it's worth reading comments. There are pros and cons.

Trump's Machinations

Click here for the November 8, 2021, edition of historian Heather Cox Richardson's blog.

Here's an excerpt I found particularly interesting:

Excerpts from a new book by ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl say that Trump was so mad that the party did not fight harder to keep him in office that on January 20, just after he boarded Air Force One to leave Washington, he took a phone call from Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, and told her that he was quitting the Republicans to start his own political party.

McDaniel told him that if he did that, the Republicans “would lose forever.” Trump responded: “Exactly.” A witness said he wanted to punish the officials for their refusal to fight harder to overturn the election.

Four days later, Trump relented after the RNC made it clear it would stop paying his legal bills and would stop letting him rent out the email list of his 40 million supporters, a list officials believed was worth about $100 million.

Instead of leaving the party, he is rebuilding it in his own image. 

In Florida, Trump loyalist Roger Stone is threatening to run against Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 to siphon votes from his reelection bid unless DeSantis promises he won’t challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024. 

Voting Fraud In Virginia Election!

The Virginia gubernatorial election was won, with a thin margin, by Republican Glenn Youngkin.  The age limit for the election is 18, but Youngkin's 17-year-old son tried to vote -- twice.

Senior reporter Ari Berman for Mother Jones tweets:

Crystal Mason, Black woman in Texas, gets 5 years in prison for casting ballot on supervised release when didn’t realize ineligible & vote wasn’t even counted. Glenn Youngkin’s 17 year old son tries to illegally vote twice & no charges filed.

Important Article From The Washington Post

 Click here for an article in WaPo entitled The Attack, subtitled "The Jan 6. siege of the U.S. Capitol was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event." 

Poynter says the following about the article: 

On Sunday, The Washington Post published an exceptional three-part investigation about Jan. 6. It involved more than 75 journalists and included interviews with more than 230 people, thousands of pages of court documents and law enforcement reports, as well as hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings.

Here's the introduction:

President Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy began in the spring of 2020, when he issued a flurry of preemptive attacks on the integrity of the country’s voting systems. The doubts he cultivated ultimately led to a rampage inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob came within seconds of encountering Vice President Mike Pence, trapped lawmakers and vandalized the home of Congress in the worst desecration of the complex since British forces burned it in 1814. Five people died in the Jan. 6 attack or in the immediate aftermath, and 140 police officers were assaulted.

The consequences of that day are still coming into focus, but what is already clear is that the insurrection was not a spontaneous act nor an isolated event. It was a battle in a broader war over the truth and over the future of American democracy.

Since then, the forces behind the attack remain potent and growing. Trump emerged emboldened, fortifying his hold on the Republican Party, sustaining his election-fraud lie and driving demands for more restrictive voting laws and investigations of the 2020 results, even though they have been repeatedly affirmed by ballot reviews and the courts. A deep distrust in the voting process has spread across the country, shaking the foundation on which the American experiment was built — the shared belief that the nation’s leaders are freely and fairly elected.

The article is divided into three sections, but click here to read the full article. 

This is a good summary of what happened:

1. Before - Red Flags - Law enforcement agencies fail to heed mounting warnings before Jan. 6 as Trump propels his supporters to Washington, many with the intent to commit violent attacks.

• Law enforcement officials did not respond with urgency to a cascade of warnings about violence on Jan. 6
  

•  Alerts were raised by local officials, FBI informants, social media companies, former national security officials, researchers, lawmakers and tipsters.

• The FBI received numerous warnings about Jan. 6 but felt many of the threatening statements were “aspirational” and could not be pursued. In one tip on Dec. 20, a caller told the bureau that Trump supporters were making plans online for violence against lawmakers in Washington, including a threat against Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). The agency concluded the information did not merit further investigation and closed the case within 48 hours.
• One of the biggest efforts to come out of Sept. 11, 2001 — a national network of multi-agency intelligence centers — spotted a flood of Jan. 6 warnings, but federal agencies did not show much interest in its information.
• The FBI limited its own understanding of how extremists were mobilizing when it switched over its social media monitoring service on the last weekend of 2020.

• Pentagon leaders had acute fears about widespread violence, and some feared Trump could misuse the National Guard to remain in power

• Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy was left rattled by Trump’s firing of senior Pentagon officials just after the election and sought to put guardrails on deployment of the National Guard.
• Then-acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller did not believe Trump would misuse the military but worried that far-right extremists could bait soldiers into “a Boston Massacre-type situation.” Their fears contributed to a fateful decision to keep soldiers away from the Capitol on Jan. 6.

• The Capitol Police was disorganized and unprepared

• The U.S. Capitol Police had been tracking threatening social media posts for weeks but was hampered by poor communication and planning.
• The department’s new head of intelligence concluded on Jan. 3 that Trump supporters had grown desperate to overturn the election and “Congress itself” would be the target. But then-Chief Steven Sund did not have that information when he initiated a last-minute request to bring in National Guard soldiers, one that was swiftly rejected.

• Trump’s election lies radicalized his supporters in real time

• As the president exerted pressure on state officials, the Justice Department and his vice president to overturn the results, his public attacks on the vote mobilized his supporters to immediately plot violent acts — discussions that researchers watched unfold online.

2. During - Bloodshed - For 187 harrowing minutes, the president watches his supporters attack the Capitol -- and resists pleas to stop them. 

• Escalating danger signs were in full view hours before the Capitol attack but did not trigger a stepped-up security response

• Hundreds of Trump supporters clashed with police at the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial on the morning of Jan. 6, some with shields and gas masks, presaging the violence to come.
• D.C. homeland security employees spotted piles of backpacks left by rallygoers outside the area where the president would speak — a phenomenon the agency had warned a week earlier could be a sign of concealed weapons.

• Trump had direct warnings of the risks but stood by for 187 minutes before telling his supporters to go home

• For more than three hours, the president resisted entreaties from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, other Republican lawmakers and numerous White House advisers to urge the mob to disperse, a delay that contributed to harrowing acts of violence.

• His allies pressured Pence to reject the election results even after the Capitol siege

• John C. Eastman, an attorney advising Trump, emailed Pence’s lawyer as a shaken Congress was reconvening to argue that the vice president should still reject electors from Arizona and other states.
• Earlier in the day, while the vice president, his family and aides were hiding from the rioters, Eastman emailed Pence’s lawyer to blame the violence on Pence’s refusal to block certification of Biden’s victory.

• The FBI was forced to improvise a plan to help take back control of the Capitol

• After the breach, the bureau deployed three tactical teams that were positioned nearby, but they were small, specialized teams and did not bring overwhelming manpower.
• As the riot escalated, acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen scrambled to keep up with the deluge of calls from senior government officials and desperate lawmakers.
• Senior Justice Department officials were so uncertain of what was occurring based on chaotic television images that Rosen’s top deputy, Richard Donoghue, went to the Capitol in person to coordinate with lawmakers and law enforcement agencies.
  

3. After - Contagion - Menacing threats and disinformation spread across the country in the wake of the Capitol siege, shaking the underpinnings of American democracy.

• Republican efforts to undermine the 2020 election restarted immediately after the Capitol attack

• Eight days after the violence, state Republicans privately discussed their intention to force a review of ballots cast in Maricopa County, Ariz., setting in motion a chaotic process that further sowed doubt in the results and a wave of similar partisan investigations in other states.

• False election claims by Trump that spurred the Capitol attack have become a driving force in the Republican Party

• Nearly a third of the 390 Republicans around the country who have expressed interest in running for statewide office this cycle have publicly supported a partisan audit of the 2020 vote, downplayed the Jan. 6 attack or directly questioned Biden’s victory.
• They include 10 candidates running for secretary of state, a position with sway over elections in many states.

• Trump’s attacks have led to escalating threats of violence

• Election officials in at least 17 states have collectively received hundreds of threats to their personal safety or their lives since Jan. 6, with a concentration in the six states where Trump has focused his attacks on the election results.
• Ominous emails and calls have spiked immediately after the former president and his allies raised new claims.

• First responders are struggling with deep trauma

• Those who tried to protect the Capitol are contending with serious physical injuries, nightmares and intense anxiety. “Normal is gone,” said one Capitol Police commander.