Easy Sunday: Push reset on your mental map of the world

Just look at this map of Earth. 

Absorb it. Let this image slowly creep its way into your consciousness.

We've been lied to, and it is time to accept a new mental map of Earth.

The true scale, with elevations

The true scale: countries labeled

Our mental map of the world is a matter of politics and status. It establishes the relative position and sizes of continents. Maps get labeled. The "Gulf of America" implies that the Caribbean is ours, U.S. turf, and that Cuba, for example, is in our gulf. The "Gulf of Mexico" implies to an American that the gulf is an international space we share with other countries. Cuba is not an interloper in the Gulf of Mexico. 

The sizes and positions of continents act similarly. Gerardus Mercator created the useful Mercator projection in 1569 and it has been in widespread use for 200 years. It made the lines of longitude parallel, which aided ship navigation. It became the standard view of the world in the U.S. when Earth is depicted on a flat map. We saw it in school. We didn't just "learn" it; we absorbed it and presumed it. How could we not? 

It was a comfortable view for Americans and Europeans. We weren't just on top; it made us bigger. Africa and the equatorial south got small. 

The most powerful ideas are ones we absorb as assumption. It is hard to look at a Mercator projection and not absorb the idea that North America and Eurasia, are more significant to the world than Africa and South America. The fact that Greenland was bigger than Africa is a statement.

This shows where the distortion takes place:

Give yourself a gift. Learn something new. Stop reading here and bring your eyes back up to the top two images, and gaze on them for another moment and be open to resetting your map of the world. First impressions are hard to change, but give it a try.

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Skip this post. No politics today. It's another vineyard update.

"Baby, the rain must fall
Baby, the wind must blow. . . ."
          Title song to the movie, "Baby, the Rain Must Fall"; hit song by Glenn Yarbrough, 1965

Wednesday evening in Medford all hell broke loose: lightning, thunder, hard rain and hail.

It was the hail that worried me.

The storm was a false alarm for the vineyard. The grapes are all right.

The hail roared as it hit my patio deck. Listen:

Click: 21 seconds

The thunderstorm moved slowly over the Rogue Valley. It went from my house in Medford toward and over the vineyard 13 miles away getting there about 15 minutes later. 

I have a lot of time and money in the grapes at this point. Stuff happens. A year ago a beautiful Malbec crop, so heavy we had to drop fruit to thin the plants, got wiped out by starlings in two days, just before harvest. The Pinot Noirs are about two weeks away from being ready to pick. The Malbecs would be next. Then the Cabernet Sauvignons. 

I was concerned that the hard hail, being blown sideways, would blast open the grape skins and ruin the crop. We purposely exposed the grapes on the east side of the plants by pulling the leaves on the side that would get the morning sun. The canopy of grape leaves might protect the grapes from hail coming straight down, but the hail in Medford wasn't coming straight down. It was blowing sideways from east to west, at a 45-degree angle. Grapes are grown to hang down from the cane wire where they are exposed to the air and sun. And hail, if the vineyard got it.

It turns out that for whatever meteorological reason the storm had exhausted itself by the time it got to the vineyard. There was rain but no hail, and the grapes looked safe and happy when I checked them. This is what the Cabernets look like, protected behind the black-mesh bird netting. I estimate that they are about four or five weeks away from harvest, based on the fact that the Pinots are about two weeks out.

All three varieties of grapes looked fat and happy.

Readers who garden will understand the parental feeling of care and nurture we have for plants we have tended. We spend a season protecting them and giving them what they need, so we are emotionally invested. It triggers the feeling we have about young children in our care. We babied these plants. The kids are all right. Everything is OK. Whew.

My neighbor climbed up the ladder on the side of one of my frost protection towers to take this photo at dusk. Bedtime.

Good night, vineyard. Good night, grape plants. Good night, the grapes hanging down from the cane. Good night, the bird netting and the trellis wires and the drip lines. . . .

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Could a Democrat win a Congressional seat in a bright red district? Usually, no. This year, maybe yes.

I am holding an event for Chris Beck, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Representative in my district.

It is this Sunday, at 2 p.m.

Yes, readers are welcome. Come say hello.

The invitation below is unusual. Instead of a red, white, and blue banner and a big photo of the candidate, there is a note from me where the Beck photo should be. I make the argument that voters have a binary choice, yes-or-no, on the Trump presidency. The incumbent Republican, Cliff Bentz, is a down-the-line enabler of the Trump agenda. He may have private reservations about Trump; he said he does. Private reservations don't count. Private reservations just show Bentz knows he is failing to do his duty. He has a job to protect the Constitution and the country with his votes and he does not do it.

Chris Beck would. So voters have a choice: A Trump enabler or an independent check on Trump.

If you live locally, come see Chris Beck.

Here is the invitation the campaign sent out:

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We are being chased out of the Middle East

Osama Bin Laden's 9/11 goal: The U.S. out of the Arabian Middle East.

We cannot hold up our end of the bargain with the Gulf's oil monarchies: We were to protect their oil infrastructure, they sell oil in U.S. dollars.

It turns out we cannot protect them. We cannot even protect our military bases.

CBS News published these photos of damage to U.S. bases in the region. They are undated photos but were presented as damage from recent Iranian strikes. There are multiple sources of confirmation that U.S. bases in the region are no longer safe or usable to place troops or weapons.

Prince Sultan Air Force Base, Saudi Arabia.

 Camp Buehring, Kuwait

Camp Arifjan, Kuwait

This isn't Trump's mess. It is America's mess, too.

In 1821 President John Quincy Adams said America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Since World War II the U.S. has ignored that advice. We have the capacity to try to fix things in countries that have resources we want or governments we dislike, and we have used that capacity. The world has seen our hypocrisy even if the U.S. has not. 

On February 27, the day before we started up this phase of the war with Iran, we were in negotiations to deal with Iran's nuclear facilities. Diplomats from Oman were on their way to Washington, D.C., with a draft agreement to freeze Iran's nuclear program. Ships passed through the international waterways of the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. Oil kingdoms pumped and refined oil and exported it. The U.S. was presumed to have such overwhelming military power that Iran did not dare threaten passage of commerce, nor threaten Gulf neighbors, nor threaten American facilities in the region. Oil was bought and sold in dollars, which meant that those sales got recycled back into U.S. Treasuries, which funded our deficits. The U.S. was presumed to have strong alliances with NATO countries and Middle East countries. American warships could be in the area as ominous threats to potential adversaries and as reassurances to countries dependent on our security architecture.

NY Times

Even Murdoch's MAGA-oriented NY Post is reporting the damage

Today, Iran and other countries in the region have learned the lesson that the U.S. would launch a surprise attack under the cover of negotiations. Iran has shown it can close first one and now two essential waterways of world commerce. Iran has shown Gulf monarchies that the U.S. cannot protect them. Iran has bombed American bases in the region, making them no longer usable, forcing our air power to retreat to the remote island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. China and Russia have drawn closer to Iran; China is now doing oil business in yuan. The Gulf monarchies are furious with us. Our NATO and other allies have told the U.S. that we are on our own there.

Meanwhile, the residual goodwill that Americans had for Israel has diminished dramatically. Candidates in both parties need to deny they are getting campaign help from AIPAC or other readily identifiable pro-Israeli groups. Our support for Israel enabled it to worsen its relations with the rest of the world and to reduce its security against rivals in the region. 

Moreover, the U.S. made assassination of foreign leaders and decapitation of foreign governments, done under cover of peace negotiations, the policy and practice of the U.S. government. What could go wrong with that?

Amid this disaster of bad strategy and outcome, the fact that is moving our politics is that gasoline and diesel are 30% more expensive than they were last year. In Medford, Oregon gasoline is now $5.30 a gallon, up from $4.00. The U.S. thought we had "the cards" against Iran; we could bomb them at will. It turns out that Iran had the cards because they had leverage where it mattered; Americans will tolerate a giant reset of U.S. standing in the world, a matter of generational consequence, but we won't tolerate higher gasoline prices.

Irony is not dead.

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The REAL reason the Supreme Court defied Trump

I wasn't worried that the Supreme Court would let Trump implement his Postal Service plan. And it didn't.

It would have been unpopular.

The Supreme Court protects Trump from himself. 

To be fair, sometimes the court acts like the one we imagined in high school civics: an honest, fair-minded interpreter of the Constitution. Maybe that is even true most of the time. Those are the cases where there is no particular partisan interest. This year, for instance, a 9-0 decision held that a defendant who lived in San Francisco, and was investigated there, could not be tried there if the underlying crime of giving false documents to police took place in Seattle. The Constitution says you're tried where the crime was committed, and there's no Democratic or Republican position on trial venue. The court played it straight.

But on issues with a partisan interest, the court finds a way to vote that interest. Tea leaves, sheep entrails, and the Constitution can be read to meet the need of the moment. The six Republican-appointed justices gave Trump immunity from prosecution. They allowed race-based gerrymandering as long as jurisdictions assert the racial component is incidental (wink-wink) to helping elect Republicans; southern states immediately gerrymandered out of existence districts with Black representatives. They ended Roe v. Wade, letting Trump fulfill his promise to the GOP's anti-abortion wing.

Yet the court says NO to Trump when he tries to do unpopular things. His effort to end birthright citizenship would put everyone's citizenship status in doubt. The current rule is simple and enforceable: born in the USA, you're a citizen; and we have good evidence of where people are born. Even so, as Trump's own claim that Obama's hospital and state records were false shows, an intransigent accuser can turn citizenship into a controversy. Under Trump's proposed rule, a parent's legal status and a father's paternity would all be subject to challenge. Neither hospitals nor state vital-records offices were ready to implement Trump's executive order. So the court said no. Chaos avoided; Trump protected.

That's also why the justices voted to stop Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs, a case where I filed an amicus curiae brief. The tariffs were unpopular, and the GOP Congress didn't dare defy Trump, so the court did what Congress feared to do.

Trump's plan to make the U.S. Postal Service the enforcer of voting eligibility, rolled out less than seven weeks before the election, would have forced mail-voting jurisdictions to build backup in-person systems overnight, unfunded. Trump may have imagined disenfranchised Democrats; the chaos would have hit red and blue states alike. County clerks across America would have erupted. Even unengaged voters would have noticed the chaos, and that it was Trump's doing. The implication was unmistakable: Trump was messing with the election to steal it. And what a mess!

The court made a wise political decision: this was a bad idea, badly planned, impossible to implement, and bad for Trump and Republicans alike. 

I almost hoped Trump would get his way. Give him rope. Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to make people vote for change; 1932's bank failures, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the 2008 financial collapse were all clarifying moments. Voters shake things up. People realize it is a new era. Republican officeholders might stop fearing being "primaried" by a Trump-endorsed challenger. Congress might start doing its job.

But I only almost wanted it. The trouble with chaos is that we never know how it resolves. Even amid anger at Trump, the votes that would be cast and get counted might come out exactly as Trump is trying to arrange. The lesson the world might learn is not that Trump is dangerous. It might be that democracy is easy to subvert if you control who votes and whose vote gets counted.

The Supreme Court ran interference for Trump. Two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, voted their partisan id. Four wiser Republicans said no. 

The result is a win-win-win for the GOP:

-- The court majority gets to look independent of Trump. See! We aren't his toadies!
-- Trump avoids a political setback.
-- And Trump gets to fulminate at rallies about how much better things would have gone had he gotten his way.

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Trump: "Cheat like hell." How it might happen.

"Cheat like hell."

Trump has a system that works. He tells us what he is going to do. He is shameless about it.

Then, when he does it, we aren't shocked. It was already on the table. He normalized it. 

President Trump is scrambling for a way to game the 2026 midterm elections. He got the extreme gerrymander done. He is trying to get the Postal Service involved. He has people with a history of election denial working in local election jobs, ready to find pretexts to object to the voting if a Democrat wins. He has posited declaring martial law amid a national emergency.  He has mentioned using ICE to cause disruption at heavily-Democratic polling places. 

We aren't being forewarned. We are being groomed.

College classmate Erich Almasy read my "Easy Sunday" post that listed two ways to cheat in an election and that got him thinking of others. He sent me these, perhaps in the manner of a person telling a ghost story around a campfire. After graduation Erich Almasy went to Harvard Business School, then had a long career on the consultancy/business management track. He and his classmate wife, Cynthia Blanton, live in Mexico.

Guest Post by Erich Almasy.

I try not to be a doomsayer, but after my comment on Peter’s Sunday column, I have compiled a few potential scenarios that should keep Democrats up at night. 

First, my comment that House Speaker Mike Johnson won’t certify Democratic Party wins, opening the way for the existing House to negate them after January 3rd. Various pundits have suggested this, including Bryan Tannehill of Byline. In this scenario, Mike Johnson, as Speaker, would not certify Democratic wins, and the current House configuration, with a Republican majority, would remain. This “rump” House would negate the election, throwing the entire process into the Supreme Court, with who knows what result. 

Second, my wife, Cynthia Blanton, believes that the recent firing of qualified military leaders by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a prelude to what would essentially be a coup with troops deployed to polling stations to intimidate or interfere with voters in key locations. By eliminating fair-minded generals and admirals, the stage is set for a “Seven Days in May” scenario in October. She bases her theory partly on what she witnessed in Arizona while caring for her dad. The nearby army bases were infested (my word) with born-again Christians, all avid Trump supporters. 

Fox News: just a temporary loss for Trump

Third, will the Supreme Court rule against the United States Postal Service's involvement in screening mail-in ballots? It seems straightforward that this step interferes with the constitutional role states play in administering elections. But reports suggest that, behind the scenes, the Postal Service is steaming ahead (and possibly steaming ballot envelopes) with plans to interfere. Will anyone trust that their ballot actually got to the proper election authorities? Oregon is the only state with 100 percent mail-in voting, but several states are not far behind, and the overall percentage nationwide in the last two elections was 31 percent. Even the president uses an absentee mail-in ballot. 

Detroit News headline

Fourth, and possibly the most likely scenario, is that President Trump, who seems to have a penchant for them, declares a national emergency either just before or just after the elections. Many of Trump’s followers, especially the White ones, still buy into his claim of widespread voter fraud in 2020, despite his losing over 60 court cases and there being no evidence of any significant fraud. This has not stopped their belief in fraud, and by playing to that, Trump could offer disinformation regarding voting machine manipulation, foreign country (probably China) interference, non-citizen voting, and/or mail-in ballot forgery. CNN rates this possibility as low, mainly because of the short time left, but the Missouri attorney general’s willingness to defy both his own Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court is dire indeed.

Finally, the president and the Republicans who are willing to tamper with America’s democracy may simply choose to amplify voter confusion. How will anyone make an informed voting decision with so many lies? Will even vigilant voters stay home? Will the results align with expectations? Will challenges diminish future support for voting? If any part of these scenarios happens, we may have seen the last true elections in the United States.

[A note from Peter: My wife and I have never trusted the Postal Service to deliver our ballots. We bring our filled-out ballots to the drop box in front of the county election office. Are we paranoid? I think not. We are being prudent.] 

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Good Event: Grass roots one-on-one politics.

What "moves the needle" in an election campaign? 

Do meet-and-greet fundraisers? Does knocking on doors? Do TV and social media ads? Do lawn signs? 

You never know, so you try them all.

Denise Krause met and talked with about 55 people Sunday afternoon.

Campaign fundraisers for state and local campaigns have a pattern. The candidate lines up a host and venue. The campaign and host invite people. The event last about two hours, starting with mingling for the first 30 to 40 minutes. The candidate makes the rounds. Then someone, usually the host, goes to the microphone and welcomes people. The host introduces someone well known to the audience who shares positive thoughts about the candidate for a couple of minutes. The candidate speaks and answers questions for about 40 minutes. Then someone other than the candidate makes a wrap-up speech urging people to donate money.

That is pretty much it. 

Sometimes the well-known person speaks briefly after the main-event candidate's speech, instead of before. That is what happened yesterday. A popular former Democratic county commissioner, David Gilmour, M.D., played that role.

On Sunday a guest, David Lane, stood up and shouted out an impromptu appeal to fellow guests to donate more than they had planned.

I did the wrap-up appeal for donations.

My wife later told me I went on too long. I reiterated a point I have made multiple times in this blog. Krause's opponent makes no mention of being a Republican. He presents himself as "working across the aisle" and opposing "rubber stamp" politics. That is smart messaging, but it belies the very partisan behavior of the organization he led, the Medford Chamber of Commerce and its PAC. It also belies the extraordinary amount of partisan Republican money he is receiving, which he is using to buy commercials saying he is neither partisan nor Republican. I watched CNN for 10 minutes this morning while making coffee. Hicks had two 30-second ads during those 10 minutes. 

I made the point that Trump has nationalized state politics. He has attacked Oregon's vote-by-mail system and his Big Beautiful Bill cuts the Affordable Care Act's support for insurance premiums. This is causing a cascade of cancelled insurance, cuts to the Oregon Health Plan, and distress and closure of Oregon's rural hospitals because the care they provide is billed but uncollectable. Republicans could publicly object to this, but don't. That means, even if they pretend otherwise, they are partisan Republicans.

I urged people to donate money, but Krause need not match Hicks' spending. Even casual followers of politics notice all the ads: Wow! The message is independence but the meta-message is a pawn in a party of billionaires. The public's unease with data centers and financial and industrial elites shows the danger in that meta-message. His being a former Chamber of Commerce executive further locks in that association: the candidate of very very big money. My own sense is that this is a structural disadvantage for Hicks, and more money doesn't cure it. Meanwhile, Krause has a structural advantage: a single mother, a long career in health policy, and scrappy survivor of both cancer and an insurance company that tried to deny coverage to her and women like her. 

Some voters will prefer Goliath in any contest. He represents powerful people and some voters trust that. My sense is that more people will prefer David here, especially this year. All David needs is a few stones to make her point, and that is what this fundraiser was about.

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