My amateur art critic view of the 2 most recent Iranian flags

I'm making no comment at all on which regime I like better, rule under the Shah or the current Shia Theocracy (short answer: they both suck), but on purely aesthetic grounds, I think the current official flag of Iran looks better than the one with the lion.

(Iranian flag: 1907-1980)

(Iranian flag 1980-present)

The lion and sun, evoking ancient Persia, in the top flag is not bad. But I really think it is exceeded by the cleverness of the bottom flag. I like how they made a hyper-stylized version of "Allah" look like a tulip in the center of the current flag. I also like how the border between the two colors looks like some kind of complex embroidery, but is really the Takbir written in Kufic script over and over. I'm also a firm believer that flags tend to be worse when they go beyond three colors. They could have made the Allah/Tulip gold, like the lion and sun were in the prior flag. But using one of the basic tricolors from the flag is just a better choice. (I'm not sure why they made the center Allah red and not green though).

Again, the post-revolutionary regime in Iran is awful. But I think their design choices were more clever.

Can all of the states implement the SAVE Act?

At least two states,. Oregon and Washington, conduct their elections entirely by mail. That is, in those two states there are not polling sites like you have in other states where people can vote in person. That has been true for more than a decade, and so I wonder if the SAVE Act passes and vote by mail is largely outlawed, how will Washington and Oregon handle elections?

I don't think the SAVE Act goes into effect in some future election, giving states time to build the apparatus to comply. The reason that Trump is pushing for its passage so hard is to save Republicans in the midterms in November. But do the all-mail voting states even have voting machines? If the Act passes this month, would there even be a practical way for them to comply?

Yeah I know that OR and WA are both blue states, but there are Dan Newhouse (R-WA), Michael Baumgartner (R-WA), and Cliff Benz (R-OR). The Republicans currently have a 5 vote majority in the House (218 Republicans to 213 Democrats) In an otherwise party-line vote and three votes switch, the law will fail.

I guess there are down-sides to having a stupid authoritarian president attack a country without a clear plan for anything

The thing that gets me about the quickly accelerating economic disaster we are heading into right now, is it was totally predictable and foreseeable. I foresaw it 20 years ago when W was talking about attacking Iran. And who am I? Just some young (in those days) blogger. I'm hardly and expert on international oil shipping.

If Trump hadn't fired everyone with expertise and competence, I'm sure someone would have mentioned this totally predictable and indeed often predicted consequences of attacking Iran. Or he could have just paid attention. Iran has been openly talking about doing exactly what it is doing now for many years.

Let's face it, everyone hates the State of the Union now.

One score and three years ago, I started this humble blog with, well, no real purpose. I fished around for a purpose for a while, some would say I am still fishing, but finally, in late January 2004, I found it: I always post about how much I hate the State of the Union Address.

Okay, that is not all I do here. I'm not sure what else exactly I do do here, but if it were just that, I would just post one thing a year. But posting about the SOTU, and how much I hate it, is one of the things that I do here, and I do it every friggin year.

But it feels a little more boring now. I once was a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness about how shitty the SOTU address is. Nowadays, it's pretty much accepted that it is awful. Members of Congress are skipping the event and doing counter-programming outside. Everyone is stealing my bit!

Plus, can we all agree that the state of the union (not the speech but the actual state of the union of the United States) is terrible at the moment? Trump is too addled to get what this thing is supposed to be for--a report from the President to Congress about how things are going. That's how bad our state is! We have someone who may be the stupidest president in the history of this great nation, with a narcissistic personality disorder who is waltzing through various stages of dementia while his political party does nothing to stop it. That's really really bad! Our problems go way beyond the fact that the modern SOTU address has always been a bullshit celebration of nothingness. It seems almost silly to get into my familiar whine this year, even on this crowded bandwagon where everyone is probably a lot more receptive to my message.

And yet, here I am, whining my whine like I have for (!!!) twenty-two years.

The Whine Cellar: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.

Trump instinctively wants to be a dictator, but his instincts also make it harder for him to pull it off

First rule of seizing dictatorial power: keep members of the military happy. I would suggest that forcing them to watch a terrible and boring film is not a good way to do that.

If you want real reform of ICE and CBP, end their officers' immunity

In our disfunctional government, shutdowns have become so common they are barely news. But believe it or not, we are in a partial federal government shutdown right now. The main issue preventing a budget resolution to be passed seems to be what, if any, new restrictions to be put on ICE and/or CBP. The restrictions Democrats are proposing, requiring that immigration agents get warrants and stop racial profiling, "real accountability" (whatever that means), and requiring them to wear body cameras.

The problem is that some of those things are already required by law. Judicial warrants are required by the Constitution! This administration has no problem ignoring legal requirements. And the administration is adopting body cameras this week, before reaching any funding deal.  But nothing would really stop them if officers turn the cameras off or stop wearing them. Plus they control the camera footage. Just having cameras does no good if this fascist agency has total control of the tape.

But there is one simple thing that the Democrats could insist upon that would make a real difference and would be enforceable: End qualified immunity for ICE and CBP officers. If ICE and Border Patrol were liable for their officer's misconduct, that could potentially be an enforceable check against abuse. If victims of ICE/CBP officer violence could sue for damages, that could mean real accountability, and compensation for people who they are harming. I bet if that happened we would immediately see a dramatic drop in the number of car windows smashed, ransacked homes, and even shootings. It would also create an incentive for ICE and CBP officers to have body cameras turned on--that is their alibi against false accusations. And without immunity that would give an avenue to get footage that is less exonerating through discovery.

But most importantly, lifting immunity for those officers would move enforcement of the new restrictions out of the executive branch that Trump controls. The courts would decide liability. We would not have to hope that the DHS honors any deal about how to restrict officers later on. I realize the courts  are flawed. There are a lot of terrible Trump-appointed judges on the bench who might dismiss cases about the most egregious abuses, and the number of Trump judges is growing. But there are still a lot of non-Trump judges, and the DHS can't bet on getting a Trump judge every time so it still could serve as a check.

Finally, having CBP and ICE pay for their abuses is  also a back-door way to have at least some of that enormous budget increase pay for something other than abusing people. When the huge increase in ICE funding passed last year, there was a lot of concern that would lead to even more egregious abuses. But if ICE officers did not have immunity, that enormous budget could at least partially be turned into a compensation fund.

Am I too optimistic about the power of lawsuits to bring justice? Maybe. But I don't think there is any question that lifting officer immunity would make a much bigger difference than any of the things that Chuck Schumer is  insisting upon now that the administration could easily ignore later.

ICE are not police

The Tenth Amendment reserves the "police power" to the States. Federal agents, like ICE, do not have the general power to enforce order and "preserve the peace" like police are supposedly for. That is why in the U.S. we do not have a national police force.

But the Trump Administration wants to pretend we do. So they have taken a relatively new agency, ICE (created in 2003), which has a narrow mandate of enforcing immigration law and enforcing customs (i.e. tariffs), and decided they are general purpose shock troops. In theory ICE officers don't have the authority to arrest protesters (at least not protesters who are U.S. citizens or lawful aliens) much less rough them up. If their job is disrupted by protests, they can call the local cops, like anyone else.

Which is why it is utterly absurd that ICE agents will provide security for the U.S. Olympic delegation. They are not a security service. The Trump administration really is trying to groom them to be their own all-purpose security brutes despite the fact that it has nothing to do with their legal mandate.