Band of Brothers Ep. 2: Day of Days

Episode 2 of Band of Brothers, "Day of Days", follows the actions of Easy Company on D-Day. Compared to the character drama and leadership lesson of episode 1 this episode shifts to the classic war movie genre, where the miniseries stays until its last few episodes. The story becomes action driven, with soldiers having to overcome multiple challenges, many unexpected, to not only fulfill their mission but even just stay alive.

That said, there's still lots of great character development. Ep. 2 really brings the series' two main characters, Richard Winters and Bill Nixon, to the fore.



Winters and Nix are way more human and fun to follow than sadistic and ultimately gormless Capt. Sobel. They've got genuine bromance energy that (spoiler alert!) runs throughout the whole miniseries. By the time of D-Day, though, they've been split up by the powers that be. Leadership has tapped Nix to be an intelligence officer at the battalion level because he's got a sharp mind. Meanwhile, Winters leads a platoon in Easy Company and, without villainous Capt. Sobel looming over his shoulder, shines as a genuinely talented young military officer.

A few notes about terminology: Easy Company, or just "Easy" as it's called shorthand in many places in the show, does not mean the work is easy! The companies within a battalion are named by alphabet code. The alphabet code used by the US in WWII was Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, etc. So Easy Company was organizationally Company Number 5 within the battalion. Sometimes conversation is, "Dog will do this, Easy will do that, Fox will be over here." They're talking about companies' roles within the larger mission.

"The Day of Days", referenced in the episode title, is a reverential way soldiers referred to the unprecedented action of D-Day. Before it happened it was code named Operation Overlord. "D-Day" began a technical term used in planning. Leaders would say things like, "On D-Day, at T-Time, your company will do this," because the date was either not known or not shared in advance. Indeed, at the end of the previous episode the soldiers are all ready to go for D-Day, but D-Day is delayed to another day because of bad weather.



D-Day does not go exactly smoothly, BTW. As the scene follows the paratroopers in planes over Normandy, the aircraft start taking heavy fire from German positions on the ground. Yes, the planes are flying under cover of night (it's pre-dawn) but there are so many of them— a blanket of planes fill the sky— the Germans see and hear them coming.

Here the series takes on a definite tone of "War is Hell". It's a parallel to the War-is-Hell opening set piece of Saving Private Ryan. Both are about D-Day, though one is the beach assault and the other is the paratroopers dropping behind enemy lines. One was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Tom Hanks, the other is co-produced by Spielberg and Hanks.

Here, with the focus on the paratroopers, we see some of the planes shot down before the paratroops can even deploy. Entire squads of soldiers are killed before they even jump. (That's a direct parallel to how Saving Private Ryan showed entire landing craft of soldiers killed before reaching shore.) The new commander of Easy Company is one of them. This sets up an opportunity for Lt. Winters to step up and shine as an individual and as the series's central character.

Keep reading: Day of Days, part 2.

How Do You Solve a Problem like George Santos?

How do you solve a problem like Maria? asks one of the memorable songs from the classic movie, The Sound of Music. Voters in Long Island, New York, and many politicians nationwide might be asking themselves right now, How do you solve a problem like George Santos?— referring to the case of Rep. George Santos who was elected to Congress on an autobiography riddled with lies.

It's turning out that almost nothing salient Santos told voters about himself is true... other than being a Republican. Of course, for some that's enough. There are a lot of "Yellow dog Republicans" out there, people who'd vote for a yellow (sick or cowardly) dog, as long as it was a Republican, before they'd cast a ballot for anyone (or anything) Democratic.

For other, though— for people who care about even a shred of honesty in our elected representatives— what are the options to remove Santos from office? Sadly they're almost nil:

• Santos could resign. This is the fastest and simplest way to get someone better into office. ...Okay, yes, I can hear your laughter from here. There's nearly no way he's going to resign. Constant lying has become a hallmark of Republican Party for the past several years, dating back to the birther conspiracy against President Obama up through more recent canards such as the Big Lie of the 2020 election and Covid denialism.
   
• A recall election is not possible. While many states provide a way for voters to recall a local or state politician, there's no provision for recalling a member of Congress. If a state tried to enact one, it would like be found unconstitutional.
   
• The House could vote to expel Santos. This requires a 2/3 super-majority vote. It's unlikely that more than a few Republicans would join the Democratic minority in voting for such a thing. While many Republicans have already started paying lip service to how bad the things that Santos has done are, when it comes time to act (or even talk about acting) they'll change the subject and slink away.
   
• Short of actually expelling him, the House Ethics Committee could recommend his expulsion. Such recommendations in the past have prompted a few members of Congress to choose to resign, ahead of an actual expulsion vote. The new Republican majority, though, actually gutted the Ethics Committee last week in the new rules package it passed as one of its first orders of business. They removed 3 of the 4 Democrat committee members in the name of "term limits" and enacted absurd limits on hiring staff that will leave the committee hamstrung and toothless for at least the next 2 years.

Meanwhile, every day it seems that new lies Santos told about himself and his qualifications for office are exposed. It seems unlikely he's going to go anywhere for the next 2 years, though. He's a pathological liar, but now he's our pathological liar.

GOP's First Week in House Majority - Not Good

Last week was the first week of the new GOP majority running the House of Representatives in Congress. Fresh off selecting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on a nearly unprecedented 15th round of voting in the wee hours of Saturday morning then rushing home to salvage the remainder weekend, Republicans got to work on Monday. What did they do with Week One? Here's the score, and it looks like a rout for any constituency of truth or good governance.

Five Things:

• In the rules package McCarthy agreed to in partly secret negotiations to win crucial votes to become speaker, Republicans voted to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). They removed 3 of the 4 Democratic members in the name of "term limits" and made it all but impossible for their eventual replacements to hire any staff. Why is this so bad? One immediate consequence involves Rep. George Santos, accused of lying about pretty much everything on his resume. Leadership can refer him to the OCE, confident that no meaningful investigation will actually happen. Way bigger picture, a toothless OCE will not investigate the ongoing election lies of the majority of the Republican majority who voted to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and who still claim openly that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.
  
  
• The rules package also created a new subcommittee charged with investigating "the weaponization of the federal government". It's been promised this subcommittee will investigate the January 6 committee and witnesses, prominent public health leaders such as Anthony Fauci who spoke about the dangers of Covid, and representative and investigators involved in the impeachments of Donald Trump. In short, it's going to be 2 years of partisan conspiracy-theory horseshit.
  
  
• The first bill the new GOP majority passed was a measure to strip funding from the IRS for hiring new agents. Republicans have painted this as saving money, and saving honest ordinary people from overreaching government thugs, by not hiring 87,000 "enforcers". In truth extremely few of the 87,000 staff the IRS plans to hire would have police powers of badges and guns. The IRS has become woefully understaffed the past several years. Hiring staff would net-net reduce the government deficit, not increase it, as the extra staff would be able to catch tax cheating in excess of their salaries. Whatever happened to the GOP being the party of "law and order"? And BTW, it's phony populism. The IRS spends little time or money "going after" middle class Americans. Tax cheating is largely the province of big corporations and the 1%.
  
  
• Another GOP vote made illegal an abortion procedure that basically doesn't exist. Conservative fabulists have decrying for month, even years now, "born-alive" abortions. They rile up the far right base, who are primed to believe basically any horseshit their thought leaders tell them, with the notion that abortion rights mean women and doctors are allowed to kill babies surviving outside the womb. Such a procedure doesn't exist and it's never been legal anyway even if it did. But by golly, the GOP made sure of that last week.
  
  
• Finally there are the committee assignments. 11 of the 17 committee chairs Speaker McCarthy appointed are members who voted to overturn the popular election on January 6, 2020. These people have no business leading Congressional committees. Possibly the worst pick among them is Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who'll chair the powerful Judiciary Committee. As the January 6 committee showed through witness testimony, Jordan did more than just cast a vote to overturn the election; he was involved in planning the attempted coup with President Trump, senior White House officials and advisors such as Rudy Giuliani. The people who tried to destroy our Constitutional form of government two years ago should not be entrusted to run it today!

Fortunately the nonsense bills the GOP House is passing won't go anywhere. They're unlikely even to be brought to a vote with the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. And even if they did, and somehow won, President Biden would veto them. But the committee assignments and rules are done deals, and those plus even the dead-letter bills are examples of the lying and naked subversion of justice we'll see for at least the next two years.