Over the weekend, the Texas State Senate voted to acquit Ken Paxton, the state’s Attorney General, of every one of the 16 bribery, unfitness for office, and abuse of office impeachment charges brought by the Texas House of Representatives in May. Paxton, who has been suspended from office since the charges were brought, was immediately reinstated.

Paxton, who fancies himself an “evangelical conservative Christian,” has long aligned himself with the most conservative, hard-line forces in the GOP – and many of those forces have backed him. Trump has supported him, lambasting the Republicans who impeached him as “RINOS,” or Republicans in name only, and calling his impeachment “election interference.”

This entire affair (which, as I’ll describe in a moment, is an excellent word to use in this case) has not covered either Paxton or his numerous Texas allies with glory. Rather, they are left dripping with what one might see dropping from myriad cattle roaming the Texas Plains. They don’t care. They won.

So, what was it all about?

There has been a cloud of scandal hovering over Attorney General Paxton for years. The ever-darkening cloud includes an in-plain-sight extramarital affair and involvement with Austin real estate developer Nate Paul who donated $25,000 to Paxton’s campaign and paid to renovate his home in return for favorable treatment by Paxton’s office.  Despite the scandal, and an indictment in state court for securities fraud dating back to 2015 (he has repeatedly succeeded in delaying his trial), he won re-election to a third term last year, largely by closely aligning himself with Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters.

In 2020, four high-ranking attorneys in Paxton’s office became whistleblowers by accusing Paxton of gross corruption. The aides — Ryan Vassar, Mark Penley, James Blake Brickman and David Maxwell — were all  Deputy Attorneys General, and Maxwell was Director of the office’s Law Enforcement Division. They told investigators that the Texas AG may have committed crimes including bribery and abuse of office. When Paxton found out about this, he fired the four of them. When that happened, they sued him.

Between 2020 and 2023, Paxton and his former aides worked out a settlement—for an apology from him and $3.3 million for them.

Then things began to get even more weird than they already were, because in early May of this year Paxton petitioned the Texas Legislature, i.e. Texas taxpayers, to pay the settlement for him, letting him off the hook. Speaker of the House Dade Phelan, no friend of Paxton, said that he did not believe there were the votes in the House needed to approve the payment; he also said that he did not himself support doing so. If the state paid the aides the $3.3 million settlement it would be like giving Paxton a very expensive Get Out Of Jail Free card.

Instead of doing that, the House Committee on General Investigating accelerated its investigation and subpoenaed records from his office.

During the Committee’s investigation an ugly piece of evidence emerged from the muck when it was learned that, in addition to donating to his campaign and paying to renovate his home, Texas real estate tycoon Nate Paul also gave Paxton’s mistress a job in his Houston office, which allowed Paxton a little adulterous convenience. What became immediately inconvenient was the fact that Paxton’s wife, Angela, is a Texas State Senator, and the Texas Senate would be the jurors for Paxton’s impeachment trial. The poor lady was prohibited from participating in the trial, but had to sit there listening to all the sordid details—for ten days. Senator Paxton was a secondary math teacher and school counselor for more than 20 years, and is the first educator elected to the Texas Senate in over two decades.

Required to attend, she listened stone-faced during the trial as multiple witnesses testified about her husband’s infidelity, exposing as a lie his 2018 declaration to her and senior aides that the affair was permanently over.

Senator Paxton’s not saying how she would have voted had she been allowed to do so.

The Texas Senate is comprised of 12 Democrats and 19 Republicans (given Senator Paxton’s situation, only 18 could vote). Twenty-one votes were required for a conviction. On all 16 charges, the votes were 14 for conviction, 16 for acquittal. Only two of 19 Republican Senators, Bob Nichols of Jacksonville and Kelly Hancock of North Richland Hills, voted in favor of convicting for any article — a stark contrast to the more than 70% of House Republicans who impeached the attorney general in May. Just goes to show the ideological differences between the Texas House and Senate. After his acquittal, Paxton’s MAGA supporters immediately promised full-throated primary attacks on the two who betrayed the cause. They’re probably toast.

You may be asking, “What about that $3.3 million settlement?” The Texas Office of the Attorney General said it’s unlikely Paxton will have to pay the settlement out of his own pocket. What did you expect?

Following his acquittal. Paxton was defiant. In a statement after the verdict, he blamed his impeachment on the Biden administration and “liberal” Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, promising to attack Biden’s “lawless policies.” He railed about the Biden White House weaponizing the justice department, which, according to him will not be allowed to happen in his Texas. Apparently, a lot of Texans agree with him. In the days following his exoneration his campaign raised $1.7 million.

Paxton still has obvious political liabilities. The securities fraud case mentioned above and a federal investigation into alleged corruption remain very much live wires. And the State Bar of Texas is seeking to sanction Paxton over his 2020 election stunt of filing frivolous lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin challenging the results that put Joe Biden in the White House. Paxton calls the investigation “a ploy by ‘leftists’ in the state bar association.” It’s conceivable he could be disbarred—barely.

Paxton’s defense relied heavily on his attorneys declaring that his various actions were not criminal, which even if true is of limited relevance, impeachment not being a criminal proceeding. As State Representative Andrew Murr, the House’s impeachment manager, said in his opening statement, “We require more from our public officials than merely to avoid being a criminal.”

Really? Well, maybe in some places.

Regardless, Ken Paxton is acquitted and back at his desk with more power than he had prior to l’affaire Paxton.

We Americans have come to live in a perpetual election cycle, and, although the next big election (these days they’re all big ones) is still 14 months away, you’d think it was tomorrow given the hair-on-fire catastrophizing spewing from the myriad Republican presidential candidates.

The candidates seem to have landed on four issues to hyperbolize: migrants coming across the southern border, the continuously rising crime rate (which, devoid of evidence, Republicans say the migrant “invasion” exacerbates¹), inflation, and, lately, Joe Biden’s old age decrepitude.

Folks, from here to November 2024, ad nauseam, we are going to hear about the horrors implicit in each of those  horrendomas, particularly so if one happens to live in or near one of the seven “battleground” states that, according to all the pundits, will decide who wins: Arizona and Nevada in the west, Georgia and North Carolina in the southeast and Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in the northern industrial belt.

And I’m not kidding about ad nauseam. According to the political advertising intelligence company AdImpact, as reported by David Lauter of the LA Times, on-air advertising for this presidential cycle will top $10.2 billion. That’s up 13% over 2022’s midterm election spend. Contrast this to the 2012 election cycle when President Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney each managed to break through the $1 billion mark. How quaint eleven years ago seems.

Seldom have so many spent so much to persuade so few.

Regarding those four hot topic issues, the alleged migrant “invasion,” inflation, Biden’s age, and exploding crime, let’s focus on violent crime for a moment.

Much of the more than $10 billion projected to be spent during this election cycle will be spent to convince Americans we are in the midst of an explosion in crime, and if you don’t elect the right person (take your pick), it will be coming to a doorstep near you in the blink of an eye.

How true is that?

Actually, not very.

Criminology academics have long known that for nearly 25 years Americans’ perception of crime has been far greater than the reality of crime, which in the Department of Justice is known as the “violent victimization rate.” It was in the presidential race of 2000, pitting George W. Bush against Al Gore, that political operatives discovered the carrying power of scaring people by exaggerating about violent crime, which is, and has been, steadily declining for 30 years. As the Department of Justice reported in 2022, “the last 3 decades saw an overall decline in the violent victimization rate from 79.8 to 23.5 per 1,000 from 1993 to 2022.”

But you’d never know that from listening to the Republican candidates for President, all of whom have made curbing violent crime—getting tough on criminals, as they put it—a central issue of their campaigns.

Americans also believe crime in the rest of the country is much worse than in their neighborhoods.

The crime issue has become overwhelmingly partisan. No matter who occupies the Oval Office since 2000, the opposition is screaming about crime, as this chart from Gallup shows. Notice the huge spike after Joe Biden’s election.

And nearly three quarters of Republicans, as well as about a third of Democrats, say migrants make things worse in the areas of crime and the nation’s economy (see Note 1).

These opinions contradict facts, which show an upsurge in violent crime has not happened and the country’s economy has markedly improved during the Biden presidency. For example, the U.S. has added more than 13 million jobs—including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs—and unleashed a manufacturing and clean energy boom. Moreover, there were more than 10 million applications for new small businesses filed in 2021 and 2022—the strongest two years on record.

Nonetheless, if one looks objectively at the political scene in this election cycle, removing partisanship as much as possible, there are a few areas of justifiable great concern.

First, the clamor about Joe Biden’s age is not going away. This is a high hill for Biden to climb, because it is not a reflection of his current job performance, but rather a fear that if he wins and takes the oath of office as an 82 year old man, he will not be able to finish his second term, because of death or steep decline in cognitive function. Research has shown that Americans want assurance that the trust they place in candidates by voting for them will be validated by the candidates they elect, at the very least, serving out their terms competently.

Second, immigration, a tremendously complicated issue, will continue to bedevil and bewilder the nation regardless of who is leading it.

Third, the affordability of health care, which, with the exception of criticizing Medicare’s new-found ability to negotiate drug prices, thereby lowering costs to seniors, none of the candidates wants to talk about. This, despite 64% of Americans considering health care costs a “very big problem,” according to the Pew Research Center. Yet, reining in our highest-in-the-world health care costs seems an almost insurmountable challenge, given the well-entrenched special interests that have driven costs to more than twice the OECD average.

Fourth, another thing the Republican candidates avoid is any discussion about the winnowing out of the middle class. As Richard V. Reeves and Isabel V. Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution, wrote in 2020, middle class income has grown much slower than either the highest or lowest quintiles in the nation since 1979, resulting in the middle class shrinking from 61% of households to 50% today. They posit the principal reason for this is because the middle class lacks “economic power.” They write, “Importantly, the modest income growth of middle-class families is almost entirely due to the rise of working hours and especially the wages of women.” The unfortunate result of all this middle class economic stagnation is that, for the middle class, as the economist Jared Bernstein so memorably put it, “economic growth has become a spectator sport.”

Fifth, there are our thermonuclear culture wars. Since the birth of the Freedom Caucus, nothing exemplifies the toxicity of our public discourse more than citizens showing up at Library Trustee Meetings to harangue their volunteer neighbors about the books on the shelves.

You will not hear these, or other critically important issues, debated by the Republican candidates for President. Why? Because they’re complicated and cannot be reduced to sound bites.

But sound bites are what we’ll all get—ad nauseam.

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¹ According to a study by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh, Andrew C. Forrester, and Michelangelo Landgrave, native born Americans commit about twice the rate of crime as both legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants. If you doubt that, read the study.

In 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published its long-awaited report, Racial and Ethnic Tensions in American Communities: Poverty, Inequality, and Discrimination Volume VII: The Mississippi Delta Report. This groundbreaking report was the product of four years of investigation and, for a moment, shocked the nation. It described abject poverty throughout the region.

Yesterday, 22 years later, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released data on unemployment in U.S. counties from 2002 to 2022. The BLS report focused on the Mississippi Delta, the same area studied by the Civil Rights Commission. Although employment in the nation grew by 17.8% during the period, employment in the Delta dropped 0.6%, the result being that the Mississippi Delta is now, and has been since 2001, the poorest region in America. Why is this?

First, some background.

The Lower Mississippi Delta region is an enormous area encompassing portions of seven states: Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee. It begins in southern Illinois and ends at the southeastern tip of Louisiana. The Delta is composed of 219 counties and is home to 8.3 million people, the majority of whom are black, and their current socioeconomic condition, which has been the subject of numerous studies, can generally be characterized charitably as one of limited economic resources, inadequate employment opportunities, insufficient affordable housing, and poor quality public schools.

The region’s unique history of slavery carries with it debilitating legacies: the sharecropping system, Jim Crow laws, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a minority white population, the political disenfranchisement of blacks, and the nearly total social segregation of the races. All of this has been well documented and is generally viewed as the most significant factor in the region’s present position as the poorest section of the nation based on virtually every socioeconomic measurement.

The Delta, which when the Civil Rights Commission was studying the area was known as a “Third World Country in the heart of America,”¹ was an agricultural powerhouse in the 19th century that was left behind by the industrial revolution. For all the reasons listed above, the unemployment and poverty we know today followed.

The preponderance of poverty lies in four states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama, and the poverty rates in these four Delta states are about the same or have gotten worse since the Civil Rights Commission’s report.

Notwithstanding these statewide numbers, the poverty rate in most Delta counties is 30 to 40 percent. The predominant demographic is the Black population.

Let’s focus on Mississippi. The percentage of Black families with incomes below the poverty level ranges from 46.4% in Washington County to 68% in Tunica County. In stark contrast, the poverty rates for white families in the same area range from Holmes County’s 7.2% to Tallahatchie County’s 14.9%.

This is an ongoing tragedy, and the reasons for it are legion. However, political ideology is a big one. Historically, governmental administrations in the four cited states have been firm in their resolve to go it alone, rather than asking for and accepting federal assistance. You can still hear echoes of the state’s rights arguments of the civil war period.

Mississippi’s governor is Republican Tate Reeves, who has refused expansion of Medicaid, along with a number of other federal programs. His predecessor, Republican Phil Bryant,  offered incentives to attract two tire manufacturing plants — one is open, the other being built. Neither is in the Delta.

But, while the Delta region continues to labor, the overall Mississippi economy seems to be in a slight rebound for three primary reasons, one of them offering some benefit to the people in the Delta:

First, there is the growth of the Dockside Casino industry, the entirety of which is in the Delta. In 1990, the state passed a law allowing dockside casinos along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast. Today, there are 38 casinos in Mississippi, employing nearly 33,000 people. Most of the casinos are in impoverished Tunica County. The trouble is, while casinos have brought employment to many, other industries, such as manufacturing, have reduced employment.

Second, Mississippi’s agricultural industry is once again booming. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the state now ranks in the upper tier of the nation for agriculture with producers raising and and selling $6.2 billion in crops and livestock in 2019. In 2021, the Tyson company invested $61 million to expand its operations in the Magnolia state.

Third, there is the significant economic impact generated by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of November, 2021. The Jobs Act was bipartisan, with 19 Republican senators voting for it, including one of Mississippi’s—Roger Wicker. The Act will bring $4.6 billion to the state. Because of this, construction jobs in the state are on a dramatic rise. Mississippi’s other Senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith, voted against the bill, because of its cost. She said it was “a bridge too far.” Frankly, as a Senator from the poorest state in the nation, perhaps Hyde-Smith should take whatever she’s offered and say, “Thank you.”

Mississippi, especially its Delta region, has a long way to go, and I’m sure its citizens are sick and tired of being the nation’s economic bottom-of-the-birdcage. Yet, in some pockets, things are improving thanks to some calm and rational people. We need more of them.

In particular, we need a collective and constructive approach to helping all the rural southern areas in the Delta. One positive step Mississippi could take would be to expand Medicaid, which would provide significant aid to 200,000 Mississippians who don’t have health insurance, because they can’t afford it, 70% of whom live in the Mississippi Delta.

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¹ Michael Parfit, And What Words Shall Describe the Mississippi, Great Father of Rivers, Smithsonian, February 1993, p. 36.

In 2018,  Congress passed, and President Trump signed into law, the VA Mission Act, a bipartisan effort to expand medical care for veterans proposed by Senators Jon Tester (D-MT) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA). The Mission Act greatly increased the availability of Community Care, which had been part of VA care since 1914 and which allowed veterans to access needed care from the private sector when care at VA facilities was overly inconvenient and a hardship because of distance.  For example, here in the Berkshires, the Community Care  provisions of the Mission Act allowed me to have my shoulder replaced a few months ago — that’s what hitting  nearly a million tennis overheads will do for you!

The Mission Act shows how the Department of Veterans Affairs strives to care for people who have given a part of their lives to the defense of the country. It is a medical, as well as a highly successful public relations program, in that the country sees a nation caring for its own, which translates to an incentive for attracting soldiers for future needs. In an obvious calculation, the country has decided that caring for its veterans is in its national self-interest.

This includes reproductive care.

When the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision throwing abortion up in the air for states to handle like a game of pick-up sticks, the Department of Defense faced a quandary. Reproductive care had long been recognized as essential and, because of Roe v. Wade had never been a problem. The DOD did not pay for abortions in compliance with the Hyde Amendment of 1976, but it allowed soldiers to take time off for the procedure. Dobbs changed that. Soldiers get sent all over the world and all over America. How was the DOD to guarantee reproductive care if many states decided to make it virtually impossible?

The only viable answer became to allow soldiers to take paid time off and travel at government expense to where reproductive care and abortions were legal.

To that end, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a new policy last October that he said would ensure all troops have access to reproductive health care no matter where they were.

In a memo, Austin said service members and their families were worried they may not get equal access to health care, including abortions after the Dobbs decision. And as many states began to impose more abortion restrictions, he noted that service members who often must move for various missions or training would be forced to travel further, take more time off  and pay more to access reproductive health care.

The problem, Austin said, would create extraordinary hardship and “will interfere with our ability to recruit, retain, and maintain the readiness of a highly qualified force.”

He ordered the department to allow troops and dependents, consistent with federal law, to take time off and use official travel to get to other states for reproductive care not available locally. That care includes in vitro fertilization and other pregnancy aids that also may not be accessible close by. As before, abortions would be paid for by the soldiers themselves in compliance with the Hyde Amendment.

Enter Alabama’s senior Senator Tommy Tuberville, who does not like what Secretary Austin and the DOD did even a little bit. Senator Tuberville, a former college football coach, is a man who has never served one day in the armed forces, who has never heard the special sound a bullet makes as it whizzes past your ear, and who has never experienced the family hardships soldiers face as they move from post to post around the country and the world. Military families move, on average, every 2.5 years, every move bringing change and the need to start anew for each member of the family. Military life has pros and cons, but among the downsides is the angst from having to negotiate these restarts. Children make friends in one school, then need to do it all over again and again.

Speaking from experience, I can tell you military life can be stressful, and the Department of Defense goes to great lengths to offer as much assistance as families need. That includes reproductive care.

Doesn’t seem to matter to old gridiron Tommy Tuberville. He seems to believe that allowing soldiers to get paid for travel to quality reproductive care is a military mistake akin to Napoleon invading Russia. And he’s done something about it. Deciding that military continuity of leadership is not necessary in today’s fast paced, modern military, beginning in March of this year he began single-handedly prohibiting promotions for senior military and civilian leadership. One Senator, out of a hundred, can do this. Nobody ever has until now. So far, he has blocked promotions for 301 senior field grade officers, generals and admirals whom the Department of Defense would like to promote to mostly replace retiring DOD senior officers. These include three members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and will shortly include Chairman Mark Milley, who is set to retire at the end of September.  If Tuberville’s intransigence continues we will find ourselves without a Chair of the Joint Chiefs. Already, Tuberville has left the Marine Corps leaderless for the first time in 164 years. DOD would like to promote Lieutenant General Eric Smith to the four-star level to replace Corps Commandant General David Berger who retired in July, but can’t, because of Tuberville.

So General Smith is in an “interim” role. This is not a minor thing. In an interview with the Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe, Smith said, for now he must “ruthlessly adhere” to admonitions from the Senate that he not presume his next assignment is assured.

“People say, ‘What’s your commandant’s planning guidance?’” Smith said, referring to a major document that the Marine Corps leader typically distributes at the outset of his term, to set priorities and expectations for the 200,000 active-duty troops and reservists under his command. The general’s reply: “You’ll have to ask the 39th commandant when that person is confirmed,” he said, “because I cannot work on that document.”

With hundreds of promotions at stake, Senate leaders would have to hold roll call votes on every single one of them to get around the hold. It’s a decades-long tradition for the Senate to group military promotions together and approve them by voice vote, avoiding lengthy roll calls, but doing them individually would tie the Senate in knots for weeks. Again, doesn’t matter to “Coach,” as his staff refers to Tuberville.

The Pentagon and lawmakers opposed to Tuberville’s actions, Democrats and Republicans alike, say the holds create a trickle-down effect that is hurting military readiness, preventing scores of officers from moving to new jobs, either as nominees or staff members. They argue that less experienced leaders are being forced to step in.

For his part, Tuberville says this whole thing can go away if the DOD reverses its decision to give time off and pay for travel for abortions. Until that happens — which it won’t — he will continue to prevent the orderly transfer of leadership, pretty much as he tried to do on January 6th, 2021, when he voted not to certify Joe Biden’s election.

Secretary Austin runs the largest and most sophisticated military in the history of the world, and this is not making his job any easier. It is a national embarrassment. More important, it is jeopardizing our national security.

I first wrote about Senator Tuberville and his current antics in July. And, frankly, I thought by now he would quit this “hold” nonsense, say he had made his point, fold his tent, and leave the field. But no. That would have been too easy. Instead, since then, he has dug the hole deeper. By weakening our armed forces as he is doing, he is violating his Constitutional oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…” 

I’ve always believed we get the leaders we deserve, and maybe Alabama deserves Tommy Tuberville. But the rest of us don’t, and, for sure, the valiant men and women of our armed forces don’t.

Climate change is all around us, creeping in from every side, making itself known more and more in ever more problematic ways. This has been happening since the dawn of time; it’s ecologically normal. What’s not ecologically normal is our helping it along.

I thought about this a couple of nights ago as I stood at the glass doors overlooking the gorgeous forest that borders our land here in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts. I was watching raindrops fall, just a few drops snaking through the lights on the deck. Falling so thinly, they seemed furtive, like the recon scout I once was, checking out the landscape for the armies to follow. Then, they slackened and died away. A minute later, they were back with billions of their buddies in tow to pound the roof and deck below.

That’s what it’s been like here this summer, the wettest on record. Is it just a blip in history, or something more, a portent of the future?

Climate has been changing repeatedly, over and over, since earth was first formed four and a half billion years ago. Humanity first blossomed in Africa about two million years ago (we are all Africans), Homo Sapiens two to three hundred thousand years ago, and for most of the time we’ve been here we have not seen climate change coming. Like my furtive raindrops, it snuck in when no one was looking and changed everything. But now, advances in science allow us to understand what’s happening, what’s happened before, and what’s just now coming over the horizon. And whatever’s coming, it seems to be gathering momentum. The question being debated is how much are we contributing to the process and, if we are, how can we slow it down?

Looking at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is instructive, and historian Kyle Harper’s magnificent, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease & the End of an Empire¹, particularly so. Why? Because climate change played a significant role in the slowly disappearing Roman Empire.

We are now in the Holocene geological epoch. It began about 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age. The Holocene has seen a warmer climate, yet one that wobbles between warmer and cooler. As Harper points out, the apex of the Roman Empire, the Roman Climate Optimum (RCO), was one of the most geologically and agriculturally fruitful periods in the entire Holocene. The perfect weather of the RCO, which lasted from around 150 BCE to 200 CE, allowed Rome to provide all the food its citizens would need to grow and prosper. The height of Romans increased, as did their life expectancy. With Egypt as its breadbasket, Rome was able to conquer the entire known western world and reign supreme for more than 500 years. But climate changed and three plagues arrived, and the hegemony elevator began to take everyone back down. At the end of the seventh century, the Roman Empire was a long gone thing.

The year 536 was a pivotal year. Two major volcanic eruptions blotted out the sky, and the year came to be known as “the year without summer,” which began the coldest decade in the last two thousand years and a more prolonged cold snap lasting 125 years. By this time, earth’s warming had stopped, rain happened less often, and the planet entered the Late Antique Little Ice Age, which was accompanied, unfortunately for the Empire, by two decimating plagues. There had been an earlier one, the Antonine Plague of 165 to 180, but under Marcus Aurelius the Empire bounced back from that to be stronger than ever.

When the apocalyptic Plague of Justinian struck in 541, Rome was a tired nation. The plague was a devastating pandemic, and we now know it to have been Europe’s first bubonic plague. The emperor Justinian was one of the ablest emperors Rome ever had, but he was faced with an  insurmountable confluence of bad news: a decline in solar output, as well as spreading aridification in North Africa and frequent flooding in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. The Egyptian breadbasket was a thing of the past. But Justinian tried, and tried mightily, embarking on a series of environmental engineering projects, building cisterns and aqueducts, moving riverbeds and reclaiming floodplains, all in an effort to safeguard his civilization. He failed.

Harper estimates the mortality rate of the Justinianic Plague at around 50 percent, and notes that bubonic plague continued to attack the empire for two more centuries after 541, riding on the backs of the empire’s rats and recurring in humans whenever environmental conditions conspired: some 38 times over the next 200 years. The halving of the population in 541, followed by these periodic aftershocks, sent every sphere of public life into disarray, notably decimating the army and wreaking economic chaos. Harper writes, “There is a relatively uncomplicated line from demographic collapse to the failure of the eastern empire.”

We do not face bubonic plague, but we have the ever-mutating Coronavirus staring us in the face, and what it will do in the future is anyone’s guess. Just yesterday, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health reported 2,179 new cases in the Commonwealth, with 359 hospitalizations and 12 deaths.

And, as has been demonstrated vividly in recent times, the climate times are changing. Wildfires, floods, warmer seas breeding bigger storms, ungodly heat in places that never experienced it before write our story now. The hottest years since records have been kept are happening now, right now, and the best minds studying this predict more is coming. Rising seas will put our coastal cities in danger whether we like it or not.

The degree to which mankind is contributing to this disaster-in-the-making is immaterial, because the fact is, it is happening. We should stop arguing, agree about the problem and then, like Justinian, do what we can for the good of humanity. We have a lot more weapons than he did.

We can never address this successfully if every country is doing its own thing and if governments are not empowered to generate collective action. What we need is a collaborative human endeavor, one in which humanity as a whole works together with common purpose and sacrifice. And there really isn’t time to waste.

The fate of Rome does not have to be our fate. But I can’t say I’m optimistic.

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¹ Harper, Kyle, 2017, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease & the End of an Empire, Princeton University Press.

At a Washington press conference on Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced the first ten drugs whose prices Medicare is now required to negotiate following passage of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The pharmaceutical industry is outraged.

This story has been 17 years in the making. It’s a story of government-enabled corporate greed. It centers on the Pharmaceutical industry, an industry that has done Olympian good while achieving Titanic profit, profit which has been surgically excised from the hides of American taxpayers who never felt the touch. Here’s how we got here.

Medicare Part D, a prescription drug benefit plan for Medicare beneficiaries, became law on 1 January 2006 under the George W. Bush administration and a Republican controlled Congress. The legislation was enacted with no funding provisions whatsoever. It also explicitly prohibited the government from negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry the drug prices it pays for its beneficiaries. Since then, Washington politicians have been arguing over whether this prohibition is appropriate and should continue. Medicare beneficiaries, all 64 million of them, and the public at large, have overwhelmingly supported such a move. Over the years, pharmaceutical companies have spent a king’s ransom donating to politicians to secure―should we say “buy?”―their votes in opposition.

What’s been the result?

• A study published in October of 2022 in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded more than a quarter (27.2%) of Medicare spending is now for prescription drugs;
• That would be $180 billion, as reported by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission for 2020;
• According to a 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation report, the total we in the US spent on prescription drugs in 2017 was $333 billion; and,
• In 2019, the Rand Corporation studied and compared US prices to 32 other OECD countries (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – the most developed nations) and reported our prices are “nearly twice those of other countries after adjusting U.S. prices downward to account for rebates and other discounts paid by drug companies.” Interestingly, while the Rand study found brand name drugs were 344% higher than prices in the other 32 countries, “For unbranded generics, U.S. prices were lower than those of other countries—specifically, 84 percent of prices in the comparison countries combined.” However, pharmaceutical companies have gone to great lengths to delay brand name drugs from making the tortuous journey to generics.

But now with Tuesday’s announcement, the gravy train will begin to slow and might even be forced over the next few years to stop. Why? Because of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Why hasn’t Medicare been able to negotiate drug prices for its beneficiaries like the Department of Veterans Affairs can for the veterans it serves? VA negotiations have resulted in the cost of its drugs being half what Medicare pays, or smack dab at the average OECD countries pay.

As the Kaiser Family Foundation explains:

Under the Medicare Part D program, which covers retail prescription drugs, Medicare contracts with private plan sponsors to provide a prescription drug benefit. The law that established the Part D benefit included a provision known as the “noninterference” clause, which stipulates that the HHS Secretary “may not interfere with the negotiations between drug manufacturers and pharmacies and PDP [prescription drug plan] sponsors, and may not require a particular formulary or institute a price structure for the reimbursement of covered part D drugs.”

In other words, the 2006 law forbade Medicare from trying to get a decent deal for its 64 million members.

Now, pursuant to the Inflation Reduction Act’s new Drug Price Negotiation Program, in 2024 Medicare is to negotiate the price of 10 Part D drugs, with new prices to be effective in 2026, another 15 for 2027, another 15 for 2028, and another 20 for 2029 and later years. The drugs to be chosen for negotiation will be selected from among the 50 drugs with the highest total Medicare spending. The number of drugs with negotiable prices  will accumulate over time.

And on Tuesday, Biden announced the first ten drugs to be price-negotiated. As required by the IRA, they are blockbusters. The top three drugs in the list are:

• Eliquis, jointly made by Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer, which treats blood clots and cost Medicare $16.5 billion in the one year period from June, 2022, through May, 2023;
• Jardiance, a drug to treat Type 2 diabetes, which is hyper-advertised on television and brought in $7.1 billion for its makers, Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim; and,
• Xarelto, another blood clot drug jointly developed by Bayer and Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a unit of Johnson & Johnson. Xarelto cost Medicare $6 billion in the last year.

In July of this year, knowing Tuesday was coming, the pharmaceutical industry and its allies filed four lawsuits in four different court venues, amounting to a legal blitz in the span of just over two weeks. The complaints include a range of legal arguments, some of which overlap.

The lawsuit filed by PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) and two other plaintiffs alleges the drug negotiation program is unconstitutional for three main reasons. First, the groups contend Congress shouldn’t have delegated such broad authority to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); second, the program denies manufacturers their due process rights; and third, it imposes a “staggering” tax for noncompliance.

Another lawsuit from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and local business groups made similar arguments, though they also included other claims in their quest to bring down the program.

Finally, the Jones Day law firm has brought suit on behalf of drug manufacturers Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck. Their arguments assert that the rules force the drugmakers to agree to the price HHS sets and thus violate their free speech rights.

“Force the drugmakers to agree to the price HHS sets…” Except — What the Inflation Reduction Act imposed on drugmakers was a negotiation, not a drug price mandate.

This seems destined to wind up on the docket of the Supreme Court.

As might be expected, AARP loves the idea of lower prices for its members, most of whom are Medicare beneficiaries. That’s a powerful voting bloc, and you can expect both President Biden and everyone else in the Democratic Party to look all 64 million of them squarely in the eyes and trumpet the lower Medicare drug prices due to the Administration’s negotiations, the results of which the IRA requires HHS to publicly disclose on 1 September 2024, just two months before the election. And you can be sure mention will be made repeatedly that not a single Republican voted in favor of the law that made it all possible.

One other change mandated by the IRA regarding drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries involves out-of-pocket costs, which can be considerable. In 2022, the average out-of-pocket costs for this group was $6,497. In 2025, the IRA requires those costs to be capped at $2,000.

The Medicare drug provisions of the IRA are wildly popular with both Democrats and Republicans. In a survey taken by the Kaiser Family Foundation late last year, 89% of Democrats and 77% of Republicans said they favored the plank of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorizes negotiations.

Notwithstanding what the public thinks, Republican members of Congress have been sharply critical of allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices it pays for drugs, calling the measure tantamount to imposing government price controls.

I’m curious to see how the Republican presidential candidates handle this issue. Although every single one of them has vowed, if elected, to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, thus far, with the exception of Mike Pence, who called it “bad policy,” they’ve all  been silent about Medicare negotiating the price of drugs.

Are they all, blissfully ignorant, swimming against the tide of public opinion, or do they know something the rest of us don’t?

What do you think?

“This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

The ten words in the above sentence appear at the end of every one of the 161 criminal acts listed in the first of 41 Counts of this week’s expansive indictment of Donald Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia and promulgate his voter fraud lies.

So, here we are again. Another week, another indictment. This time it’s Fulton County, Georgia. This latest one contains qualities that are both different from and similar to the ones that came before it. Different in that:

1. He’s been charged with leading a racketeering conspiracy under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). District Attorney Fani Willis brought the charges, with their 41 counts of criminal felonies.
2. Unlike his previous three indictments, this one alleges a conspiracy and also charges 18 other people. Some have become almost household names over the last couple of years: Meadows, Giuliani, Powell, Eastman. But the majority of those charged are only now having their moment under the arc light of infamy. The indictment alleges that all 19, led by Trump, comprise the members of the “criminal organization” that sought to overthrow the election of Joe Biden.
3. And there are others—unindicted, co-conspirator “individuals whose names are known by the grand jury.” These folks comprise the current mob of deer in the headlights who participated in the organized conspiracy and now wait to see if their cooperation with Willis’s team will keep them free.
4. Willis wants to try all 19 together at the same time beginning in approximately six months. This is hugely ambitious. Herding nineteen defendants with nineteen attorneys into the same corral-like courtroom will be quite a trick. Moreover, as Meadows is already attempting, the defendants, especially Trump, are going to try to move the case from the state of Georgia to the federal system. Why? For two reasons: first, doing so may get them a more sympathetic judge, perhaps one Trump appointed; second, if Trump is successful and wins the 2024 election he could pardon everyone at the stroke of his Flair pen. The optics would be terrible, but when has that ever bothered Donald Trump? He’s the odds on favorite to win the Republican nomination regardless of how much legal baggage he’s dragging behind him, and in the general election, as he already proved once before, anything can happen. But he can’t pardon himself or anyone else if he’s convicted in a state court.

Despite the completely new and different set of charges Trump is facing, there are some things that don’t change:

1. The Republican Party, on the whole, is four square behind the former President. Its leaders are, predictably, reacting as they have to every previous charge: the Democratic Party, the White House, the Department of Justice and the FBI are engaged in full scale weaponization of the country’s justice system to get Donald Trump. I thought the reaction of Jim Jordan (R-OH) was particularly rich: “Today’s indictment is just the latest political attack in the Democrats’ WITCH HUNT against President Trump,” Jordan, who heads the House Judiciary Committee wrote on X. “He did nothing wrong!”
2. Although new poll numbers aren’t out since the Georgia indictment, there is no indication that Trump’s MAGA universe, his Cult of Trump, which makes up 42% of the Party, is inclined to desert their hero and move to someone else.
3. In what I find to be the most bewildering news to emerge from the latest indictment, even Republican leaders who condemn what Trump did in trying to steal the election say they will vote for him if he’s the Party’s nominee. Even Georgia’s Attorney General Brad Raffensperger, he of the infamous and recorded phone call with Trump, the one during which Trump asked, no, demanded he find 11,780 votes to put him over the top in Georgia, the one in which Trump threatened the AG with criminal prosecution if he didn’t do “the right thing,” the one which is central to Fani Willis’s RICO case against Trump, even Raffensperger said he would vote for Trump if his is the name on the Presidential ballot. It is obvious that the addiction to power, power in the hands of the Republican Party, is the real Trump card in this political game. This is the very definition of commitment. Circling the wagons is what politicians do best. And this is not to say Democratic leaders might not act in precisely the same way if Joe Biden were the one being charged, but that is almost impossible to imagine, because the country has never seen political corruption of this magnitude, at least, not in our lifetimes. Whatever Hunter Biden did, it pales into insignificance beside this cabal.

A hundred years from now, when most of these people are nothing more than obscure footnotes in an obscure Wikipedia entry, will our descendants have learned anything from this descent into politically chaotic hell? Will they have recognized what happened to us for the immorality it is? Will their “better angels” have prevailed?

It would be so interesting to be able to stick around to see how history treats this sorry time.

Governor Ron DeSantis miscalculated badly

Writing in the Cook Political Report yesterday morning, Amy Walter reported on her conversation with Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark and a leader in the Republican Accountability Project. Over the last couple of years, Longwell has been conducting interviews and focus groups with Republican Primary voters to learn how they view their party, their candidates and the political climate. Longwell and Walter discussed the DeSantis campaign on this week’s episode of the Cook Political Report’s podcast, The Odd Years. Longwell told Walter voters believe DeSantis has made four critical mistakes in his run for the White House.

First, he entered the race too late and did it badly when he did jump in (Remember his technology-plagued announcement on Twitter sans video, sans sound?).

His propitious moment was the end of 2022 when he had a lot of wind at his back nationally. Longwell said, “There was the big Ron DeSantis boomlet. In the focus groups, we would have whole groups all the time who wanted Ron DeSantis to be the nominee. In fact, it was so complete and total, the interest in Ron DeSantis, that we actually started screening for sort of high favorability of Trump to find the Trump voters.” At that point, DeSantis was polling very close to Trump.

But DeSantis waited—until after Trump was indicted, which energized the Trump MAGA universe, and the Florida Governor has never recovered.

Second, nearly all of the likely voters reported their main concern in the upcoming election was law and order, not a war on Woke culture. They want a candidate who will focus hard on criminal justice and not get lost in battles about gender identity or LGBTQ+ issues. But DeSantis has based his entire campaign on becoming the anti-Woke candidate, and that is not selling.

Third, one has to account for DeSantis’s insularity (in the beginning he would only talk with friendly reporters from Fox News) and inexperience on the big stage. As Amy Walter writes, “I am a big believer that every campaign is ultimately a reflection of the candidate. In this case, DeSantis’ campaign reflected his wariness and discomfort with bringing new voices into his very small and parochial circle of loyalists — including his campaign manager, who had no experience in doing a job this big.” The result is embarrassing for him—in his short time as a candidate he has already had two campaign staff shakeups. His new nickname among the press—one Donald Trump did not invent—is Trainwreck Ron.

Fourth, when voters got to see him, “they found out he was weird,” according to Sarah Longwell. The man is an uncomfortable candidate. He has a weird laugh. He doesn’t know how to make small talk. And he’s bad at retail politics. A losing combination, if there ever was one. Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh notes that DeSantis, who speaks “in a sort of monotone nag,” could “illuminate a stage by getting off it.”

Candidates who are losing, and losing badly, react. DeSantis is now nearly 40 points behind Trump, and this week he reacted to the perception he’s all about the culture wars and light on law and order by once again removing from office a prosecutor elected to the office. This makes two. Last year’s victim was Hillsborough’s State Attorney, Andrew Warren. Florida law allows the Governor to do this (hard to understand, but there it is), and this time he did it to State Attorney Monique Worrell, duly elected by the citizens of Orange-Osceola county. Why did he do this? In his executive order removing her, he accused her of policies “allowing violent offenders, drug traffickers, serious juvenile offenders, and pedophiles to evade incarceration.”

WOW! That sounds bad. How did she ever get elected? When pressed by reporters from the Tampa Bay Times, though, neither the Governor nor his staff could or would provide any credible evidence of Worrell actually acting in this way. No cases of pedophiles, or drug traffickers, or any other convicted criminals evading incarceration.

But now the Governor has checked a box in the law and order column. He’s on his way.

High School kids in Florida will now take AP Psychology

After serious blowback from more than 30,000 parents of high school seniors who had been  deprived the opportunity to take the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology course in the Sunshine State because, as part of its curriculum, the course covered gender identity and sexual orientation, Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz informed school boards yesterday that the students actually could take the course, because doing so would no longer violate new state law prohibiting such instruction. That is the definition of pretzel logic.

The problem now is that most school boards, having been told teaching the course would violate the law, either removed it from the year’s curriculum, or contracted with another company to offer another version of AP Psychology. Unfortunately, this is not the course certified by the College Board, the organization that certifies AP courses for inclusion on a student’s transcript.

A bigger problem, of course, is that the Florida school year began two days ago, and courses have been pretty much curing in educational cement for the last week, or so. Wonderful timing, Commissioner Diaz.

This culture war stuff has turned Florida into an upside down state led by a man becoming more clueless every day. Perhaps the Governor should rethink his current career objectives, go home, lick his considerable wounds, and ponder 2028 when Donald Trump will be 82 years old and either spending his days in Leavenworth Federal Prison, or, having been exiled to Scotland, residing at his “very fine” golf course in an apartment built purely for the purpose of housing him in his dotage.

One can hope, anyway.

For the last eight months, Israel, America’s foremost ally in the cauldron of the middle east, has been an ally controlled by far-right extremists. This was driven home again this week in another episode of its government doing everything it can to antagonize its Arab citizens and the permanent residents of East Jerusalem.¹

Israel’s previous government had allocated Arab municipalities $85.5 million for educational programs in East Jerusalem. Moreover, additional funding was allocated for higher education preparatory programs for young Palestinians, designed to enable students from East Jerusalem to study in preparatory programs at Israeli academic institutions. Some 500 Palestinians have studied in them in recent years.

Although, given Israel’s precarious relationship with Palestinians, this educational funding may seem like one drop in a great big barrel of rain, it is at least a step toward the integration of East Jerusalem’s Arab population into academia that holds social, economic, and security importance for the long-term good of the country.

But now, defying stark warnings from Israel’s Shin Bet security service, as well as her international allies, the new government has frozen the funding and refuses to release it for the legislated purpose. The funding freeze can be laid at the door of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionist Party noted for his far right extremist views, especially with respect to Palestinians. He told Arab Israeli lawmakers in October 2021, “It’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”

Smotrich is also a settler in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The UN Security Council, its General Assembly, the International Red Cross, and others have all agreed settlements on the West Bank and the Golan Heights violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Doesn’t matter to Smotrich and his colleagues now leading Israel. They just keep building new ones.

This is all just more fuel thrown on the burning Israeli blaze opponents now call the Judicial Coup of 2023, which began less than one week after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cobbled together a coalition government in late 2022 after two previous elections that year had failed.

The coalition government consists of six political parties—Likud, United Torah Judaism, Shas, Religious Zionist Party, Otzma Yehudit, and Noam—and is led by Likud’s Netanyahu, who has taken office as the Prime Minister of Israel for the sixth time. With the exception of Likud, the other five parties are right-wing and religiously conservative, hugely influenced, perhaps dominated, by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, known as the Haredim.

The Haredim have long enjoyed benefits unavailable to other Israeli citizens: exemption from army service for Torah students, government stipends for those choosing full-time religious study over work and separate schools that receive state funds even though their curricula barely touch government-mandated subjects.

This new government, with dynamite in one hand and a flaming match in the other, is now in charge and, as I have written before, is doing its best to remake Israel’s judicial system by emasculating the country’s Supreme Court and consolidating all power in its own hands.

Israel does not have a constitution, It has 13 rather vague Basic Laws enacted at various times between 1958 and 2018. The 8th Basic Law, The Judiciary, enacted in 1984, lays out common sensible judicial requirements about honesty, transparency, judicial probity, process, and the like.

Unlike the United States, with two legislative bodies, an Executive, and a judicial system to provide tripartite balance, Israel has only its Knesset, controlled by the Prime Minster’s coalition, and its Supreme Court, which is the only check on government overreach.

The Basic Laws place a heavy burden on the country’s judiciary and its Supreme Court, the High Court of Justice, making it the final arbiter. By nature, the Court is always involved in a tense relationship with its sister institution, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. In this regard, both are critical pillars in Israel’s foundational house of democracy.

Every one of Israel’s allies has strongly urged Netanyahu to pause his judicial “reforms.” But Netanyahu wants to stay in power, and if he loses the loyalty of his far-right coalition, he won’t. Simple as that. So, he and his colleagues, the ones who, to the bottom of their cores, believe deeply in what they are doing, are marching toward the cliff at the edge of democracy. Eyes wide shut.

Two weeks ago, they prevailed, despite country-wide protests, in the first of their attacks on the Supreme Court by passing a law prohibiting the Court from exercising one of its foremost functions: ruling on the “reasonableness” of laws passed by the Knesset, which is akin to our Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of any law. Now, in a judicial irony of the first order, the same Supreme Court will rule on the “reasonableness” of the “reasonableness” law just passed. What happens if, as expected, it rules the new “reasonableness” law is unreasonable, is anybody’s guess.

To give you an idea of just how ferociously this problem has torn at the country, consider this. Israel, being a small country with areas that often can pretty much resemble a war zone, is one of the world’s few countries with mandatory, two-year conscription for its armed forces. In addition, following their time on duty, many soldiers continue service as reservists. There are 400,000 of them right now, many of them Air Force pilots, and they are essential to Israel’s defense. However, many reservists and active duty soldiers have publicly vowed not to serve if the judicial coup continues. As you can imagine, this is tremendously concerning  to the country’s military leaders (who also oppose the judicial “reforms”), its security services, and, most important, its allies—us, in particular. But it does not appear, despite the best efforts of President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken, that Netanyahu and his coalition partners are prepared to budge one bit. At this moment, there is no resolution on the horizon for this impasse.

Hard to believe, but Israel is now standing at the edge of that democracy cliff and thinking about jumping. There’s not a parachute in sight.

¹ Although offered citizenship after the 1967 war, many Arabs refused. That is why, though comprising 20% of Israel’s population, many Arab’s living in East Jerusalem are designated as “permanent residents.”

During the summer of my 15th year, my father walked into our very Roman Catholic home to find me reading a paperback book on the couch in our living room. “What are you reading, Tommy?” he asked. So, I showed him the book I was well into. It was The Tropic of Cancer. Whereupon, Dad became somewhat apoplectic, and rushed into the kitchen where my mother was starting to cook supper. “Mary, do you know what your son is reading?” he demanded. “Of course,” my mother replied. “I gave it to him.”

Tropic of Cancer is an autobiographical novel by Henry Miller, published in France in 1934 and, because of censorship, not published in the United States until 1961. And it is racy, indeed. It is also superbly well-written and compelling as it takes the reader on a tour of Miller’s mind as he lived a hedonistic life in the Paris of his youth. We should all be so lucky.

My mother knew a book would never hurt me. People could and would, but not books. And I’m happy to say she eventually convinced my father of the value of that proposition.

And it was my mother who introduced me to the works of William Shakespeare when I was 13. The play was Romeo and Juliet, the story of the star-crossed teenaged lovers from Verona. It’s a story of young love, but also a story of what hate can do when left to run amok. The writing was beautiful, especially to a new teenager whose hormones were flowing like Romeo’s.

Two years later, my sophomore class was assigned Julius Caesar. It was magnificent, and, to this day, is still my favorite Shakespeare play. I can quote large sections. Marc Antony was a part for the ages.

I bring this history up because of what’s happening right now in the Florida of Ron DeSantis where fair is made foul and foul becomes fair.

Like Donald Trump, Governor DeSantis has surrounded himself with sycophants, and the sycophant of the moment is his Education Commissioner Manny Diaz.

Diaz is an interesting character with an educational history that would cause neither Henry James, not his friend Edith Wharton, to sit up and take notice. He’s a politician first and an educator second. With a 1998 Master’s Degree in educational leadership from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, he became a teacher and baseball coach at Miami Springs High School. Following that, he taught social studies at Hialeah-Miami Lakes High School, where he spent eight years as an assistant principal. He filed for bankruptcy is 2012, citing $1.3 million in debts.

In the same year, he won a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. He became a champion of allowing students to go to private schools on state funding. He also became Chair of the Choice and Innovation and K-12 Appropriations committee during his tenure in the House. More important, he was a key member of Representative José R. Oliva’s team. Oliva rose to become Speaker of the House in Florida.

In 2018, Diaz was elected to the Florida Senate and became closely aligned with Ron DeSantis. So much so, that, like DeSantis, he opposes CoVid 19 vaccine requirements and, as of 2022, was not vaccinated, himself.

He sponsored SB148/ HB7 in the Florida Senate, the “anti-woke” legislation much beloved by Governor DeSantis. This is the legislation called “positively dystopian” by Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker, as he blocked key provisions of it in his 139-page decision in November 2022. Following passage of the anti-woke act, DeSantis appointed Diaz to his current position as Commissioner of Education.

I dwell on Commissioner Diaz because yesterday Florida schools, in order to comply with the provisions of DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” and “anti-woke” legislation, announced high school students would no longer read any Shakespeare play, but would, rather, discuss “excerpts.” From now on, it’ll be Cliff Notes for Shakespeare.

As Joseph Cool, a reading teacher at Gaither High School told the Tampa Bay Times, “There’s some raunchiness in Shakespeare,” and staying with excerpts, schools can teach about Shakespeare while avoiding anything racy or sexual.

This is all part of Florida’s new Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking. Thinking, that is, of a non-prurient nature.

Shakespeare would have loved this Floridian witch’s brew, “The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril.”¹

More “excellent student thinking” was on display last week, when Commissioner Diaz announced the cancellation of Florida’s Advanced Placement (AP) course in psychology, because the College Board, the administrator of the course, refused to take out any references to gender or sexual orientation.

This AP course has been taught in Florida high schools for the last 20 years without complaint from anyone. In 2022, 28,000 students took the course. However, in May, 2023, Commissioner Diaz’s Office of Articulation (whatever that is) “implored” the College Board to review all AP courses and remove any content that would violate Florida’s new law banning any instruction which may allude to gender identity or sexual orientation.

The College Board, to its credit, said “No.” Gender and sexual orientation, the College Board said, “must remain a required topic, just as it has been in Florida for many years.”

Now, Commissioner Diaz is scrambling to put the toothpaste back in the tube. He has turned to another course administrator, “pivoting to the college-level course offered by Cambridge International instead,” the Tampa Bay Times reports. Cambridge International says it will offer the course without the offending material. However, the College Board, which confirms student AP course completion for inclusion on student transcripts, says any course without the required content regarding gender or sexuality will not qualify.

All of this is now a certifiable mess, a full measure of “double, double, toil and trouble.”²

I wonder what Henry Miller would say? Probably something like (fill in the blank for extra credit):_________.

¹ The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act 3, Scene 5)

² Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 1)