5 Calls

I like 5 calls for facilitating your day's phone calls:

• It knows your senators and representative, and their phone numbers.
• Gives you a choice of issues
• Gives you a short script

Propublica's Politwoops

Propublica has a tool for finding our elected officials' deleted tweets. Politwoops doesn't curate the tweets; it just lists them. Most of them are deleted because of typos, but some deletions are substantive. This morning there was an interesting deletion by Republican Congressman (Michigan 3rd) Justin Amash of this tweet:

I agree with Congressman Amash that Bannon may* require Senate confirmation, but regardless, shouldn't sit on the NSC.

Some fresh articles on Bannon:

• DailyKos reporting on Bannon's 2014 presentation to a small conference on poverty at the Vatican
• Foreign Policy “But there is not a lot of infighting right now, because to have infighting, there needs to be a power struggle, and there is no struggle, the intelligence official said.”
• A 2015 article from Bloomberg Joshua Green
• "We're going to war in the South China Sea"
• Democrat Stephanie Murphy bill to keep Bannon off NSC
• WNYC Brian Lehrer on The Power Behind Trump
• Bannon's reading list, reporting from Johnson and Stokols of Politico

On Congressman Amash: it is a little bit hard to confirm he is a Republican. Ballotpedia says: "Although Amash was classified as voting more often with the Democratic Party according to multiple outside rankings, this stems from his tendency to vote against many Republican-sponsored bills that he views as not conservative or libertarian enough." I do note that he is not on the DCCC's list of 58 targetted Repulicans to unseat in 2018.

Note *: If Bannon is not a permanent (dejure!) member of the NSC (he's on the principals committee) then he doesn't require Senate vetting. And maybe this was the reason Amash deleted the tweet!

#Resist

My definition of resistance includes being smart & discriminating. Picking our fights. There are a lot of us. More of us than them. Be loud. On all fronts. These are my field notes.

Twistance (focus on the more science agencies) & Twistance2 (others like DOE, POTUS, HHS ...). These are maintained twitter lists to follow of Alt federal civil servants. Here is one explanation, by @Alt_FAA, of their motives:



More and more agencies and departments have started AltGov feeds. I use TweetDeck.

A good summary of the brushfire from Politico.

What I'm reading:

• White house leaker, mandatory reading at Daily Kos.
• Politico's Gabriel Debenedetti reporting on the DNC's struggle to take the right stance.
• Naomi Klein on Pence & Katrina and disaster capitalism.
• NYT oped by Gail Collins on Pence's puppet.
• NYT oped by Yael Eisenstat on Trump's self-serving visit to the CIA.
• One person's articulate opinion on Trump imploding. The rejoinder is a faster introduction, because in the snap post, you get personal memoir and context first.
• Slate's Jamelle Bouie : Protest Works
• Erica Chenoweth, Guardian OpEd, 3.5% of population can stop dictator.
• New York's AG has power & jurisdiction to impede Trump by Propublica's David Freelander
• In Atlantic, #nevertrumper & Counselor for Condoleezza Rice, Eliot Cohen takes off his gloves

I'm listening to David Bowie: Under Pressure, Heroes ...

Data wants to be free:

• https://data.giss.nasa.gov/
• https://envirodatagov.org/event-toolkit/
• If you see something, save something.

Federal Worker's protection:

https://www.doi.gov/pmb/eeo/no-fear-act

Go to ACLU website or @ACLU on twitter for more info

Leaking:

• The New York Times
• Propublica Leak to Us
• AP

Phone:

• My representative Adam Smith, DC office 202-225-8901 Renton office 425-793-5180. 

Send a fax.

Whoever you are who are sending faxes to Reps and Congressman. It seems to be working, because they have to archive that shit.

— ALTImmigration🛂 (@ALT_USCIS) January 30, 2017

If the phones are busy at you congressman or woman's office, send a fax. hellofax: Free outgoing faxes with gmail account.

• Paul Ryan:202-225-3393, 608-752-4711, 262-654-2156, 262-637-5689

Prayer at Gray’s River

Prayer at Gray’s River

When a mother seizes one life
god moves mudstone like water
for miles toward the Pacific
and ash rains for months.

I build a little cairn from mudstone
crumbling along a bleached river bed
exposed by floods most winters.
If I leave the cairn sit,

Jack’s memories leach away.
So sometimes when I’m strong
I take one shard from the top
and taste the grit.

The stone is weak, unlithified,
like my memories.
I place it back gently--
undo only the slightest fleck

with my breath. The last time
I admonished Jack
I can’t remember my words
but I do see a glaring sun

and his cheeks flushed from drills
his sweat-matted hair
brushed back, the tears in his eyes
while he watches me instruct him to work harder

with the same eyes that challenged his mother,
It’s not like I’m going to die!
he vowed, two nights before she drugged him
and drowned him with a pillow.

Cairn

Cairn

Stone cries sand.
Stone cries soil.
A stone cries memory.
I had to stack the rocks
to make sense of them.

I don't like decorative stone
far from its native habitat,
the imported stone
that displaces weeds momentarily.

an Ars Poetica

an Ars Poetica

Mother says unless you have something nice to say …

she struggles now to finish

to say anything at all.

Mom stopped watching news a long time ago.

Maybe she will watch the weather when there's a storm in the Gulf.

If my sisters push her hard she’ll watch an Antiques Roadshow

and wake smiling when some hidden gem is unearthed

people are happy then.

Dust is wiped away.

What mom didn’t say was that if I had a rock

bleached almost completely white

tumbled smooth by decades of breaking waves

so smooth you can see a glacier’s heart beating inside

and if behind one line of cloud

the sun was setting

and if it was warm,

and if the road was empty,

and if a young crab clasped the culvert grate

and an osprey surveyed the salt marsh from its perch

so that the only noise I hear are pebbles

rocking in the gentle surf and H’s breath.

And if H chose the rock

for a photo she sent her daughter
wishing she were near

what mom didn’t say was

that if I have that rock

I have a poem.

Elegant and Palpable Variations

Just some notes.

In the second act [Cat on a Hot Tin Roof], the family members who have crowded into Brick's room disperse, and he and Gig Daddy are left alone together. During their fraught conversation, Big Daddy suggest, tentatively and with some trepidation, that his son's relationship with his best friends Skipper might not have been entirely normal. Brick responds with a swift disavowal but his detachment has been broken for the first time in the play. At this moment, the playwright himself bursts on the to the page with longest of the many italicized stage directions that exist between the lines of dialogue. 

The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to 'keep face' in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the 'mendacity' that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestations of it, not even the most important. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering--fiercely charged!--interplay of live human beings in a thundercloud of common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character, just as a great deal of mystery is left in the revelation of character in life, even one's own character to himself.

1.do you & me know each other, will we ever know each other, and ourselves
2. how social everything is, me in poetry land, how solitary, need to see the experience in a group of people.
3. big deal about Brick, the things that define me, no it might not be the thing that defines him ... is my ex-wife smothering my son Jack with a pillow after she's drugged him with sleeping pills at 12 years old because shes afraid that somewhere in the future he will suffer, she will suffer, and she wants to avoid that. `1 event maybe not even most the important.

Hunger, liquor, need, pieces, wrote. A sense was building in me that there was a hidden relationship between the two strategies of writing and drinking and that both had to do with a feeling that something precious had gone to pieces, a desire at once to mend it--to give it fitness and shape, in Cheever's phrase--and to deny that it was so.

Writing about Marguerite Duras, another alcoholic writer what liked to rake over the live coals of her own experience, Edmund White once observed:

"Perhaps most novels are an adjudication between the rival claims of daydreaming and memory, of wish-fulfillment and the repetition compulsion, Freud's term for the seemingly inexplicable reenactment of painful real-life experiences (he argued that we repeat them in order to gain mastery over them). And as with music, the more familiar the melody, the more elegant and palpably ingenious can be the variations." pg 171

imagination alcohol
fantasy alcohol
rewriting tragedy
preserving memory
gaining control over it

As to the role of alcohol in all this: imagine the mixed relief and terror of getting that sequence down. Imagine pressing the words, letter by letter, into the page. And imagine getting up, closing the door to your study and walking downstairs. What do you do, with that sudden space in your chest? You go to the liquor cabinet and you pour yourself a shot of the one thing no one can take from you: the nice good lovely gin, the nice good lovely rum. Click in a cube of ice. Lift the glass to your mouth. Tilt your head. Swallow it.

Hardly any wonder Recovery was unfinished. What a title. What an insane risk.

Excerpts from The Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing.

pg 173.