9/11/01 by Art Spiegelman for The New Yorker.

With his party facing electoral disaster, President Donald Trump delivered a lengthy, muddled “midterm convention” speech in which he begged his supporters to vote in November — and preposterously claimed that he will send $5,000 checks to every adult citizen in the U.S. if Republicans hold onto Congress.

It’s not the first time in his second term Trump has claimed Americans will receive free money from his administration, even though a president doesn’t have the authority to send out such payments without congressional authorization. The promise seemed to be an act of desperation.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000, it will be called the Trump dividend,” Trump said Wednesday night at the Republican Party’s “midterm convention” ahead of November’s elections.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the president’s proposal, essentially a voter bribe that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, if not more than $1 trillion. Not that Congress would ever approve it.

The president’s party typically does badly in midterm elections, and Republicans face considerable obstacles in their quest to hold the House and Senate, thanks especially to stubborn inflation worsened by Trump’s tariffs and his war in Iran, which has driven record-high gas prices.

Trump acknowledged the historical pattern on Wednesday. His promise to pay Republican voters, delivered during a nearly two-hour rambling speech, seemed like an effort to beat the polls and defy history.

I’m still waiting for my tariff rebate and my DOGE check.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied Missouri Republicans’ attempt to jam through a new gerrymander that would leave Democrats with only one House seat to their seven.

Minutes later, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark — a Trump appointee — handed down a temporary restraining order requiring Missouri to use the new maximal Republican gerrymander. The state is now under contradictory orders; an appeal of Clark’s ruling could come as soon as tonight.

“We have a very clear Missouri Supreme Court decision and the state today says that decision is valid and in effect,” Chuck Hatfield, counsel for People Not Politicians, told reporters Tuesday evening. “Judge Clark has not overruled that decision, in fact I don’t know that he can; he doesn’t have the authority to overturn the Missouri Supreme Court decision.”

“An individual federal district judge does not have the authority to overrule a decision of the state Supreme Court,” he added. “The U.S. Supreme Court certainly does, absolutely.”

Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) had to exert extra effort to try to muscle the new map through: The state allows citizens to put legislation up for a statewide vote before it can be implemented if they obtain enough signatures to back a ballot measure. The group People Not Politicians did just that, submitting the thousands of required signatures back in December. Hoskins was then supposed to verify the signatures; if the group had collected enough valid ones, the legislation creating the new map would be frozen until voters got the chance to vote it up or down.

Hoskins, though, tried to avoid that vote by dragging his feet, waiting to reject the petition until the last possible day — August 4, the date of the Missouri primaries, which were held under Republicans’ new 7-1 gerrymandered map. State Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R) said publicly during a radio interview earlier this year that “delay works in our favor.” Hoskins declared the petition insufficient, saying that the citizen referendum process did not apply to maps passed by the legislature.

People Not Politicians kept fighting in court, last week notching a major victory as the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the referendum process does cover redistricting, and that the new map should have never been implemented.

Hoskins then lobbed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to intercede so Missouri could use the maximal Republican gerrymander — which was drawn in the first place after the Court’s Callais decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and made racial discrimination in redistricting all but impossible to prove. Many other states, mostly in the South, have similarly rushed to eliminate their Democratic, majority-Black districts to artificially bolster Republicans’ seat tally.

Hoskins’ application for a stay, filed Friday, was denied by Justice Brett Kavanaugh (who oversees cases from that region of the country) on Tuesday. That order, if it stands, clears the way for Missouri’s general election to be held under its 2022 map, and its citizens to decide then whether they want future elections to be governed by the 7-1 gerrymander.

The Supreme Court did not immediately publish any explanation to accompany the rejection of the stay request. The Court will likely weigh in again before the election, given Judge Clark’s last-minute order pushing in the opposite direction.

This is effing crazy.

Where were you on Thursday, September 8, 1966?  I was about to turn 14 and it was the first week of Grade 8 for me, but I was allowed to watch TV on a school night to watch the first aired episode of a new series: Star Trek.  It was broadcast on WSPD Channel 13 in Toledo, and I saw it in black and white because we wouldn’t get a color TV for another two years.

I was a steady watcher of the series, noting the multi-cultural cast and themes about exploring new life and new civilizations — at least new to us — and invoking the Prime Directive, which fore-swore interference with the natural evolution of another world.  But I wasn’t surprised that it only lasted three seasons, and when it was cancelled in June 1969 — a month before Apollo 11 landed on the moon — I didn’t think we’d miss it.

But of course I was wrong.  It came back as an animated series for Saturday morning cartoons on September 8, 1973 with many of the original cast doing the voices for two seasons.  Thanks to syndication, including WKBD Channel 50 from Detroit, Star Trek was on every afternoon in 1974, it lived on, spawning new series like tribbles:  The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Short Treks, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy for a total of 967 episodes over 52 years.  And then there are the movies: fourteen in all (as of this writing) covering the original cast and evolving to those from The Next Generation and beyond.

A lot has been written about the messages of Star Trek, but I go back to what Gene Roddenberry came up with back when he proposed the series: to show a future where exploration was for seeking knowledge, not conquest; friendship and cooperation, not domination.  It was heady in the 1960’s, but it’s still a lesson for us sixty years later.  And while there’s plenty of room for parody — Galaxy Quest and my own spoof Chewie, Get Us Out of Here — it’s undeniable that the concept of peace and understanding still inspires and sells tickets.

Live long and prosper.

Having grown up in a union town that was near a large city that relied on union labor, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the people who most hate unions are folks who think that it is unconscionable that workers should have the same rights as the managers and the owners of the company. How dare they demand a living wage and safe working conditions. Who do they think they are?

Yeah, yeah; in every large group there are bad apples and examples of bad faith and extremism. Welcome to the human race. The Republicans hold the unions up as the boogeyman of the Western world and label them as thugs… and give tax breaks to the corporations because they know that if they don’t, the corporations will kneecap them. Not literally; they’ll just stop giving them money, which, in corporate circles, is thuggery. The people who whine about “class warfare” always turn out to be the ones who are winning the war.

Perhaps one of the reasons that union membership is down is that unions have accomplished a lot of what they set out to do 100 years ago. Factories are safer, working hours are reasonable, wages are better than the minimum, and pensions provide some security. The unions have learned, however awkwardly, to accept that they have been successful, but they also know that if some people had their way in the world, they would turn back to clock to 1911, put children to work, take away the healthcare, and demand more production. After all, it works for the Chinese, and look how they’re doing.

By the way, not all union workers are Democrats; they certainly weren’t where I grew up. A lot of them are hardcore Republicans or conservatives — including police officers — who don’t care about the politics; they just want to be treated fairly. And a lot of people who are not union members are working under union contracts; in most places there is no requirement to join a union to benefit from their efforts. So while actual union membership may be down to 15% in certain industries, the number of people who are part of the union is far greater. That includes public sector jobs as well as private. So the next time someone feels the urge to union-bash, be sure you’re not peeing in your own campfire.

Since the pandemic, and perhaps as a result of so many people leaving the workforce due to business shutdowns, workers in jobs and businesses that have traditionally been non-union such as the service industry, are organizing.  Starbucks, which tries to give the appearance of a small-town operation, is seeing their workers organize, and there’s talk of workers in the fast-food chains doing the same.  They’re running into resistance from the corporate headquarters (hello, Amazon), but the tide is turning.  Fifteen dollars an hour sounds like a lot, but annualized it’s a little over $31,000 before taxes, and in this economy, that’s not much to raise a family on or live in a decent place.  In large urban areas like Miami, it’s still minimum.  No wonder they’re starting to look for the union label.  Unions are making their strength felt now in ways that most Americans will feel it: wait until the new TV season doesn’t show up and the best streaming is dubbed movies from Norway.

Full disclosure: I am a dues-paying member of a union of sorts; I belong to the Dramatists Guild. It provides services for writers and lyricists and makes sure that when our works are produced, we have a fair contract and get paid our royalties. The joke among us is that we don’t go on strike; we just get writers’ block.