With Friends Like These Who Needs Enemies?

This article from Jacobin speaks for itself.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/senate-democrats-mitch-mcconnell-relief-checks-covid-19

Homeland Security

If one of Al Qaeda's intentions on Sept. 11, 2001, was to change America for the worse, they were definitely successful, albeit maybe not in the way they intended. Nothing is more illustrative of that than the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

When it was created, it was clear to some (or at least a few) that it was only a matter of time that its power would be abused. This doesn't mean that most of the functions within DHS aren't important and necessary. Keep in mind that there really were not a lot of new powers inherent in its creation. Pretty much everything it did was already being done elsewhere, in other governmental departments and agencies. These various things were rounded up and put under a new Department.

The abuse of its powers, of course, culminated under the Trump Administration, but the kernel was there from the start. If all those functions are now under an umbrella of "homeland security" then it is inevitable that threats will be seen everywhere. (The old cliche "when your a hammer, everything looks like a nail" was made for DHS.) And when you see threats everywhere, it really means that people of color and ethnic and racial minorities are in for a hard time.

The country would be better off without DHS, but it'll probably never happen. Even when things are unpopular or counterproductive, it's hard to undo them in the US. (Sex offender registries, cash bail, war on drugs, etc., also fall into this category.) But it's still worth debating.

Christmas Message from Eugene Debs

From Jacobin.  https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/eugene-debs-christmas-jesus-prisoner-letter

Conservative Draft Dodgers

My anecdotal experience is that conservatives who did not do military service--especially those who avoided service during the Vietnam War--overcompensate for this lack of service in a variety of ways. It may come out as uber-militarism (think of Dick Cheney). In others it might be a general military worship (finding "heroes" everywhere). In the case of Donald Trump's draft-dodging, his overcompensation seems to be pardoning war criminals. Why doesn't that surprise me?

Tweet of the Day

Only in America, can elected representatives threaten to shutdown government regularly, but the public never calls for #GeneralStrike.

It’s almost the opposite around the the world.

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) December 18, 2020

Sunday Night Trivia

• Maybe it's just me, but I think the world was a better place when Borders and Radio Shack were a part of it.

• There's a very good article in the New York Times that describes how the police in New York City badly mishandled the George Floyd protests. The police arrested peaceful protesters, often in a violent and aggressive way, and the were often responsible for turning otherwise peaceful protests in a violent direction. I expect this was true in other cities as well.

• Senator Johnson (WI) married into his ''wealth". I only say this because he tries to cultivate the image of a self-made entrepeneur.

• Most discussions about elections and Trump eventually talk about non-college-educated white voters. Indeed, in some discussions, that's all that's talked about. It's obviously an important topic. What's odd for me, though, is that almost all of the Trump voters I know (quite a few actually) are college-educated white people.

Megan McArdle Tripe

Here is Megan McArdle trying to spread the blame around for the mistakes made in the Covid pandemic. (I try not to bother reading her op-eds but now and then I get sucked in.)

This is simply another attempt at Trump apologia. Here's the thing. Of all the people and groups and institutions mentioned, the only one who is President of the United States is Donald Trump. No one forced him into this job. He wanted it. And he is the one who  acted in bad faith at almost every step of the way, which resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. Most other actors in this play may have made mistakes, but most of them were acting in good faith and were actually trying to do the right thing.  Many of the presidents in my lifetime were people I vehemently disagreed with, but I  am confident that none if them would have intentionally endangered the lives of so many Americans as Donald Trump did. So please...no more of these "there's-lots of-blame-to-go-around" op-eds. We only have one president at a time, and he was an utter and tragic disaster.

Where Voters Live

I came across this quote on a Twitter feed by a guy named Randall Munroe. He created an election map that tries to show where different voters actually live rather than just showing entire states in red or blue. The quote is really something to ponder:

"There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than NY, more Trump voters in NY than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont."

 

Good Riddance Betsy DeVos

One of the brighter spots of the incoming Biden administration is that Betsy DeVos will be gone. What an utterly awful person. Good riddance.

What a legacy for the Prince family to have begotten Erik Prince and Betsy DeVos. I can only imagine that the Princes made a Faustian bargain with the Devil: I will make you very rich, but in exchange your progeny will include pond-scum-war-profiteer Erik Prince and anti-education-student-loan-profiteer Betsy DeVos.

Their family must be so proud.

Republicans and Other Stuff

 

• You know the depths to which the Republican Party has sunk when Liz Cheney is becoming my favorite GOP House member.

• Cancel Culture is not a thing. When I read an essay that uses it as a part of its argument, I stop reading. It's just an intellectually lazy way to think you've proved some point.

• The Repubs never really believed in all the anti-science bullshit they spewed. It was just a way to justify policies they favored. Guess what? Now their base actually believes this stuff for real.

• The new LA County DA has promised to eliminate cash bail and re-evaluate sentences in thousands of past cases. Recently elected local prosecutors across the country--Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and now LA (and I am sure others)--are more valuable for progressive policies than federal initiatives. Most prosecutions are done at  the local level, and local prosecutors are the ones working for the police departments instead of the public they serve.

Tweet(s) of the Day

Well, at least I saw it today (it's from Dec. 11).

Here's how I see it: plenty of people are telling you who they are right now. Go ahead and take them at their word.

— Chris Krebs (@C_C_Krebs) December 12, 2020

Here is another tweet that is spot on.

Nothing could be less relevant in the case of politicians and their staff than their private feelings. These people are public actors- they should be judged for their public actions. https://t.co/0KqKq5jnfk

— Sam Seder (@SamSeder) December 11, 2020

What Bubble? Part 2

As a follow-up to my "What Bubble" post, here is a quote from a New York Times today.

Ms. Claveria said she was worried about what would happen during a Biden presidency. Mr. Biden, she said, “is basically planning to get rid of personal property and all of our freedoms.”

Mr. Trump is trying to stop that, she added, but every institution has obstructed him.

“I think it’s a big coup against our country,” she said. “The F.B.I.’s involved. So is the C.I.A. It’s crazy — even the judges!

This is the kind of batshit craziness expressed by millions of Trump supporters every day (and not just since the election). It has become the rule rather that the exception among Republicans. Unlike what is described in this article, I know a lot of them personally. But I am a coastal elitist in a bubble because I don't express understanding and sympathy for these "real Americans". If that makes me an elitist then I proudly say "guilty as charged".

 

Saturday Musings

 

• I find Joe Biden's appointment of Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense troubling because he really isn't a civilian. But he also is on the Board of Directors at Ratheon. That double disqualifies him.

• One theory I have considered is that SCOTUS dismissed the case without a hearing because they didn't want to have to listen to Ted Cruz for four hours, or however long it takes.

• As a layperson, my impression of the conservatives on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is that they are amateurish partisan hacks.

• What centrists say: "We're pragmatists and we get things done."
  What I hear: "The status quo ain't so bad."

• Quote of the day (Bernie Sanders on Twitter): "Endless money for wars? No problem. Endless money for tax breaks for the rich? No problem. Endless money for corporate welfare? No problem. But when it comes to providing a $1,200 direct payment to the working class during a pandemic, somehow we can't afford it. Not acceptable."
  
  It's funny how the Neera Tanden wing of the Democratic Party portrays Bernie as some sort of divisive demon. Why is it that on issue after issue--war in Yemen, support for labor unions, civil rights, defending Rep. Omar, income inequality, Israeli policy, death penalty, health care, you name it--Bernie is consistently the first one out of the block speaking the truth? Dems say he isn't a real Democrat, but he is consistently stating views that ought to be core values of the Party.

What Bubble?

I am not opposed to conspiracy theories.  I loved The X-Files. It's just that I also like some proof. I am still waiting for some evidence I can buy into about JFK's assassination, but it hasn't happened for me yet. At least with JFK there is kinda sorta some plausibility, just not enough to really sink your teeth into. In the case of the 2020 election, there isn't even a shred of plausibilty, except in the QAnon parallel universe.

Since 2016 (and maybe before), we have been deluged with articles lecturing us about how those of us on the left are in some kind of bubble, and that we refuse to try to understand and sympathize with all those wonderful Americans in flyover country. Well, all those flyover states are pretty much the same ones that joined Pardon-Me-Please Paxton's goofball SCOTUS case (which even the fringiest Justices didn't buy). Tell me please: just what am I not "understanding" about these people?

If I leave my condo and walk around the block, I am likely to encounter folks who are white, Black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, South Asian, other Asian, gay, straight, homeless, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, and many others. That doesn't make me anything special. But it does allow me to ask who is actually living in a bubble.

Political Contributions

I was watching Jacobin's YouTube channel yesterday (for the first time) and found out something I hadn't heard before. Sara Gideon, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, ended her losing campaign with $14 million in the bank. I was astonished. (I think some other losing candidates also ended up with sizable bank accounts.) We had been giving modest donations to Senate candidates around the country. Once you do that, you get daily emails from these candidates asking for more. Some days I would get two or three emails from the same candidate.

That is all well and good. I understand that the most efficient way to get money is to go to those who have already given to you. But to give money to a candidate and then find out it wasn't spent is a little odd. And then to have the centrists in the party blame their loss on people like me adds insult to injury.

This is intended not so much to be a grievance as it is just a statement of reality. It causes me to wonder if giving to candidates in partisan elections is the most efficient way to spend our money. If candidates collect all that money and then run bad campaigns and lose the election, not very much has been accomplished. I think it's reasonable to ask if, say, a $100 contribution to Sara Gideon or Amy McGrath would have been more effective if given instead to William Barber's Poor People's Campaign or the local Black Lives Matter or Democratic Socialists of America or the local food bank.

As always, there is also a cynical side to this, namely that the party infrastructure is designed for the benefit of the donor and consulting classes, not for the voters.

Sara Gideon, Amy McGrath, Cal Cunningham, et al, all lost their Senate races. But the important thing is that they lost without moving the needle. Lots of people--including many or most Democrats--don't care much for AOC and other progressive politicians, but the party can only deny that she moves the needle at its own peril. The fact that she gets so much negative press is testimony to that. When you cover someone--even in a negative way--you are also letting that same person set the terms of the debate in some way. For another example, the conventional wisdom is that Occupy Wall Street was a failure, but here we are today with income inequality being talked about as an important issue. Occupy Wall Street moved the needle much more than all these failed Senate candidates. BLM and abolish ICE have also moved the needle (admittedly not in the way that's comforting to the party establishment).

Our money will be going to those groups that fight for the things we believe and also move the needle.

  

I’m increasingly convinced the secret to progressive change in America is for Democrats to run on a centrist platform, implement very left policy, and then lie relentlessly about it without shame, like Republicans do

— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) November 15, 2020

Some (Unwelcome) Ideas for Biden and the Democrats

• Don't make Rahm Emanuel a part of your Cabinet.

• Since the Dems will be accused of socialism no matter what they do (remember Obama?), I say we should give them some of the real thing.

• If your going to have Republicans in your administration, how about some true progressives, too.

• I agree with Vox's David Roberts here. Biden should run a blitz of executive orders and let the Repubs and SCOTUS try to keep up.

• I know I am repeating myself here (I do so every chance I get), but stop blaming the lefties in the party for everything. I really want to be on your side but it's tough when you tell me I can be in the room as long as I shut up.

• When you say AOC's views might sell in the Bronx but not in the Rust Belt (or wherever), what I hear you saying is that the Rust Belt (or wherever) is more important or more worthy than the Bronx.

• Please please please no talk of deficits and debt.

I Like This Picture So I Put It Here

 

Friday Night Facts and Opinions

 

• As of this morning (12/4), according to the Cook Political Report, Biden's lead over Trump now exceeds seven million votes: 81.27 million vs 74.21 million (51.3% - 46.9%). For persepctive, this is a slightly larger margin of victory than the 2012 Obama/Romney contest.

• Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is not a hero. He is performing his job and his duties exactly as he should be--nothing more, nothing less. The fact that this behavior is labeled heroic is a very sad commentary of what has become of the Repubs and this country. Raffensperger was and is a Trump supporter. He was a supporter though some awful times, but Trump's behavior didn't trouble him then. Don't get me wrong. I'm very glad that Raffensperger did the right thing. That doesn't make him a hero. (I have singled out Raffensperger here, but the same applies to all the other Repubs who simply did their jobs correctly.)

• A good headline I spotted today in The Post (from November 27), from an opinion piece by Lyz Lens. (The article is pretty good, too.)
  
  White Women Vote Republican. Get Used to It, Democrats
  
  The problem is that they don't "get used to it". They'll continue to chase those votes and then blame someone else's slogan when they lose.

Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo

I consider the SCOTUS ruling favoring the Catholic Church in New York to be (in Max Boot's words) "pure right-wing judicial activism". And as Linda Greenhouse said in The Times, SCOTUS may now be controlled by a cohort of "grievance conservatives". Grievance conservatives find animus to religion around every corner. They even give speeches at the Federalist Society about it. They see the War on Christmas run amok. In this mindframe, they have created groups of people who no longer want equal treatment; instead they demand special treatment, and this SCOTUS is more than willing to grant it.  

A similar thing is happening in their commercial rulings. They have created a special personhood for corporations. Under this philosophy, corporations retain their "personal" immunity that corporateness is granted, but also are given free-speech rights that were never intended for them. So, corporations end up with the best of both worlds and, oddly, now have more rights than individuals. The same is now true for religious groups--at least ones favorable to Alito, Thomas, et al--who now have more rights than their secular counterparts.

First of December

 

• It's interesting to watch in France how the government actually responds to street protests. True democracy in action.

• This election showed us two things. (1) The Never-Trump Republicans were just that: anti-Trump. But (2) they are still Republicans, and voted GOP down-ballot. As Jeet Heer said, when you give Republicans more speaking time at the convention than you give your progressive base, then you are validating voters to vote Republican.

• So McConnell has nixed the bipatisan relief bill. This has always been the issue with the idea that these so-called pragmatic centrists "get things done". The problem is that what "gets done" often turns out to be crap like this. Having said that, the Dems had much more leverage earlier in the year to hold out for better relief bills that had aid to states and more help for actual people. They wasted that leverage. We kept hearing to wait until "the next bill". The Dems got outsmarted and outmaneuvered. They have no leverage now. All these centrists accomplished is to lower the bar so that whatever skinny bill McConnell allows will be even crappier than the compromise bill. They just made things worse.

• I guess I am a little puzzled by Biden's appointment of Neera Tanden to OMB. She'd probably do an okay job there but so would scores of other people. Tanden is such a divisive figure within the Democratic Party, and she has an open hatred for Bernie Sanders, and, by implication, his supporters. (That includes me.) I am hoping that this appointment isn't a way of giving the finger to the left flank of the party.

Defunding the Police

Rep. Abigail Spanberger has gone out of her way to condemn Black Lives Matter and progressives for slogans like "Defund the Police". I think she needs to read this article in The New Yorker about the police force in a California city in the Bay Area. Among other things, the article cites a study which found that police violence against citizens is much higher where police are represented by unions than those that are not. The police department in this article may be an extreme example, but the difference is in degree and not in kind.

My position on this is that we have tried police "reform" for a long time, to no avail. The problem will not be solved without some sort of defunding or other form of de-powering of police departments. Spanberger doesn't like those words. Maybe she can come up with a better slogan; I say go for it. But what I do know is that if the Democratic Party can only win elections by avoiding talking about controversial issues that make white people uncomfortable, then maybe they don't deserve to win those elections.

Saturday Opinions

 

• Trump's pardon of Michael Flynn weeks after he lost the election is, in my mind, prima facie proof that everyone in Trump's orbit believes that Flynn is guilty.

• The story about McKinsey & Company's contribution to the opioid crisis along with Purdue is not pretty. My experience with these kinds of consulting companies is that their work never benefits ordinary folks, only the corporate elite. But they have built an infrastructure in today's capitalism in which the very same corporate elite relies on McKinsey and others to justify its existence, like a feedback loop. It is not lost on me that there is some of this dynamic in the Democratic Party establishment, where the Party exists for the benefit of the consulting class and vice versa. And that consulting class is interested primarily in perpetuating its own existence rather than the interests of the Party's rank and file.

• I can be as cynical and negative as anyone, but there is this: defeating an incumbent president is a big deal. And especially one who probably could have guaranteed his reelection if he had been only half insane throughout 2020 instead of full-bore insane.

• Call me naive, but I doubt that assassination is a viable and sustainable strategy in dealing with Iran.

• I must admit that I am more than a little concerned that some of the folks in Biden's potential national defense team are too comfortable with the idea of military intervention as a foreign policy tool.

How Not to Build a Coalition

There are probably many ways for the Democrats to go about building a lasting coalition. But I do know some ways not to build one.

1. Don't ask progressive Democrats like me to support and contribute money to the campaigns of moderate Democratic candidates and then--when we do exactly that--blame progressive Democrats like me when they lose.
2. I support the Democratic Party because it supposedly represents values like racial justice, income equality, affordable healthcare, human rights in international affairs, and strong labor unions. Telling me that Democrats can only win if we abandon some or all of those things is hardly the way to maintain my support.
3. Putting all of the party's efforts toward wooing suburban white Republicans (who turn out to be not very reliable long-term supporters) and then bad mouth progressives like Rashida Tlaib and AOC (who worked tirelessly to turn out voters) is inviting just what happened. Like it or not, the Republicans don't forget who their base is. The Democrats can only ignore their base at their own peril.

Thanksgiving Eve

 

• So a bunch of authoritarian countries in the Middle East have gotten together and made some kind of diplomatic agreements--some of which seem pretty cosmetic and meaningless--and this is some sort of good thing? Yawn.
• I am to the left of all of Biden's Cabinet picks, but Biden is the one the Democratic voters wanted in the primary, and the American voters wanted in the general, so these picks are as good as we're gonna get. But I find it comical to have Republican Ivy League grads lecturing us about elitist picks (especially since Trump's Cabinet was full of elitist Ivy Leaguers and Wall Streeters).
• So...as this President descends deeper and deeper into lunacy--with the quiet approval of 90% of Republican politicians--he expects us to believe that this unhinged guy living in an alternate universe has won a trade war with China and made the United States respected once more? The four-year shit show is coming to an end, but don't ever think that we have reached bottom.

 

• Letter to the Editor in the Times: "Irony of ironies. If Donald Trump had spent a fraction of the energy on fighting Covid-19 as he has trying to overturn the election, he would have won the election."

  Bobbie Kaplan
  New York

• Of all the "farmers" that got welfare checks from the Vote Buyer in Chief, what percentage voted for Trump in 2020? I'd guess in the 95+% area. All we got from Obama was free phones. Ain't capitalism grand?

• Kudos to the one Michigan Republican who wasn't bullied by Trump and his cultees into not doing his duty. (Pretty bad when you have to congratulate someone for doing his routine duty, but here we are.)

• Most of Biden's Cabinet picks seem okay so far. He does have to get them by the Senate, so there is that constraint.

Biden Needs the Left

From Jamelle Bouie's opinion piece (here) in today's New York Times:

We now know that Biden will be president, but he won’t have the votes for F.D.R.-size legislation. This doesn’t mean he’s dead in the water, but it does mean that Biden will have to marshal every resource and rely on every possible ally to win whatever victories he can. And he should know, as Roosevelt did, that this means grappling with the left — all of the left, including its most radical edges.

... 

There was no building the American welfare state without the left, and if it’s to be rebuilt, the left will have to be part of it. Democrats, especially would-be heirs to F.D.R., should take care to remember that fact.

Social Security would not exist today without the acivism of the left (yes, this includes Communists) in the 1930s.

Thursday (continued)

 

• Pompeo says the BDS movement is anti-Semitic. Is he doing cancel culture?
• Do I think that this Supreme Court is capable of overturning this election result? I think it is unlikely, but I also think the probablility is greater than zero. Nota bene: this is not a compliment to the current Court.
• In public, Giuliani alleges fraud. But when he is in court he is careful to say he is not alleging fraud. One big reason is that (I think) he could go to jail for knowingly lying in court.
• It's pretty amazing to me that one of the few persons to show some integrity and backbone through this is a fairly right-wing Secretary of State in Georgia. The Republicans in Michigan seem to be full-blown QAnon groupies.
• Headline in today's New York Times: "Charges Against U.S, Protesters Are Being Dismissed by the Thousands".

Thursday Opinions

 

• Iowa's governor just issued a mask order. It's pretty clear she waited longer than she should have because she didn't want to piss off Trump before the election. More people will be dead because of that.
• Trump's call to that Michigan election board member was very Maduro-like. I think the US has lost whatever moral high ground it ever thought it had (which was never nearly that much in the eyes of the rest of the world anyway). It'll be nice to have the Mar-a-Lago mafia out of the White House.
• I really hope that the Dems win both of the Senate seats in Georgia, but I have no illusions of what that would mean in practice. We have Manchin, Sinema, and others who would constrain a lot of good things. It wasn't Republicans who made the ACA less that it could have been; it was the centrist Democrats.
• Republicans aren't satisfied with suppressing the Black vote before the election. Now they are trying to suppress it after the election, too. Then they pretend their tender feelings are hurt when they are accused of racism. Well, it quacks like a duck, so there you go.

Wayne County, MI

 

I see that a lot of Republican Trumpies are claiming that the Wayne County (MI) Election Board was unfairly bullied into reversing its decision of not certifying the election results, because they were accused of racism. While I personally hesitate to call people racist when I don't know them, what the two Republicans on the board did (since reversed) was indeed racist. That is judging the action and not the heart. It really doesn't matter if they are racists. They are either racists or might as well be. The result is the same. And when you do racist stuff, some people are going to call you racist. Pretty simple.

A Quickie

I am wondering why Trump and his Lindsey Graham stooges aren't arguing that Black votes should only be counted for three-fifths of a vote. That might sway the originalists if it ever gets to the Supreme Court.

Student Loans

There's a pretty interesting piece today on Jacobinmag.com. https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/christof-rindlisbacher) It encourages Biden to totally wipe out student debt by executive order as one of his first acts as president. There have been other similar ideas floated around, and especially since the Senate is almost certainly going to be under Republican control.

There are a few reasons why something like this would be a good idea. Firstly, it would be a gesture to the base of the Democratic Party. Now, we can argue all we want about whether the country is center-right, center-left, or whatever. But in my mind, the party's base is definitely some combination of Black and Left. Joseph Biden would not be president-elect without progressives voting overwhelmingly for him. And all the moderates that lost their Senate and House races were not for lack of votes from the base; rather, they were abandoned by centrists and the elusive swing voters that the party has been chasing. In any case, this is something Biden could do that would be enthusiastically embraced by the base without (I hope) turning off the centrists.

Plus, it is the right thing to do. And it would be economically stimulative.

Finally, it would be something to kind of dare the Supreme Court to overturn. Since we are in an environment where the Court has become just another political branch, it is a good issue to show whose side SCOTUS is really on. I understand Biden's tendency toward compromise. It is part of his brand. But there are a few areas where throwing down the gauntlet would be worth it (immigration is another). Eliminating student debt would be a good start.

Sunday Morning

• At one time, there might have actually been something you could call White Evangelical vote, but it has really evolved into what can more accurately be called the White Supremacist vote. It is instructive that support for Trump among this group seems to increase when he is more viciously racist and xenophobic. He doesn't become more Christian or Evangelical; he just vocalizes more racism. Many in this group hide behind the smokescreen of Evangelicalism, but the racist underbelly of it is always lurking. My view on this is not based on vague impressions from the media or elsewhere. For a leftie, I know a disproportionate number of people from the White Evangelical Right. At least anecdotally, what I described above is true.
• I have watched with sadness, dismay, and astonishment as my former church body, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), has become a conduit of validation for its members who support this White Supremacy
• So we lost House seats because we turned off suburban voters by talking about racial justice? Does this mean the Democratic Party should become less committed to racial justice?  I am not sure what else to conclude. As I've said before, if that's what it takes to get the suburban whites to vote for Dems, then maybe they should be looking elsewhere for more reliable and desirable coalition partners.

Puccini Flashmob

If you want to feel better about life, I recommend that you watch/listen to this YouTube video at least once a day.

 

Swift-Boat Ben

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/why-gop-superlawyer-ben-ginsberg-is-bucking-his-party-and-blasting-trumps-baseless-election-claims/2020/11/10/f2aa7056-236d-11eb-8599-406466ad1b8e_story.html

It is hilarious in a black-comedy sort of way to watch guys like Swift-Boat Ben Ginsberg try to put all the toothpaste that they've been squirting over the years back into the tube. He is as responsible as anyone for why we are where we are today. I love to see these folks become so highly-principled all of a sudden. Better late than never I guess, but he has a long way to go to atone for all the damage he's done to help get us Donald Trump and today's Republican party.

Random Bullets

 

• When I chalk up the Senate scorecard, I mentally disregard the Doug Jones loss in Alabama. He never should have had the seat. Any Republican who wasn't a child  molester would have won the seat in the special election. It was good while it lasted but it was a one-off fluke. So I regard this year's election as +2 for the Dems. Still not great, unless we get awfully lucky in Georgia (or Alaska?).
• If Biden manages to squeak it out in Arizona it's gonna be by a toenail. If he does hang on there, it will be by fewer votes than in Georgia. 
• I know I am just a legal layperson, but it sure seems to me that the concept of "standing" is something that is conjured case-by-case, depending on where you want to end up.
• If the entire ACA is thrown out, doesn't that eliminate all the money the Feds are currently sending to the states for Medicaid. That would be bad at any time but with Covid draining state coffers, this would be utterly disastrous for many/most states.

Addendum to My Last Post

As a follow-up to my last post, here is another good piece by Jeet Heer in The Nation making the case that Biden's very successful presidential campaign may have hurt Congressional candidates. By overemphasizing Republicans like Kasich, The Lincoln Project, etc., at the Convention and during the campaign at the expense of actual Democrats:

"In using Republicans to delegitimize Trump, Biden was also in effect legitimizing the Republican Party. His implicit argument was that the only real problem was Trump and that once Trump was out of the way, the two parties could go back to normal cooperation. Biden completely ignored the extent to which the GOP had become Trumpized and major Republicans like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell had been deeply complicit in Trump’s corruption.

Biden gave voters who leaned Republicans a plausible argument to vote for him. But he also gave those voters, and also many centrists, permission to split the ticket. After all, if the only problem is Trump, why punish the GOP? If Biden knows how to work with Republicans, why not have a divided government?

The real lesson of the election is that if you run a Republican campaign, you will get Republican results."

I think this is a legitimate take, and one you're not likely to hear on any national news outlet, especially television.

Still Waiting for PA, GA, and AZ

Some musings while I wait for the final count in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.

• Exit polls have proven to be pretty iffy in the past. With such a high percentage of votes by mail, how can exit polls have any validity this year?
• Still pretty disappointed at the moderate Dems who want to blame everything on the lefties in the party. I am in favor of a broad big tent, and once again I voted for a candidate way the to right of me, and I did so gladly. We even gave money to all those moderate Senate candidates who lost. But it seems like too many in the party want our votes but not our voice. Telling people they are welcome in the party as long as they shut up is hardly a way to build a broad and lasting coalition.
• This article from Jacobin offers an alternative take to the mostly fawning image of the Lincoln Project. If they helped beat Trump, that's great. But if it means that these Republicans are setting the policy agenda, it's not good. According to this piece, Trump got a higher percentage of white women than he did against Hillary did in '16 (but as I said above, not sure how much stock to put into exit polls this year). And if it sucked oxygen out of the economic message that was needed in the House races, it also might have hurt.
  

While I'm Waiting for Pennsylvania

• Indiana is amazing to me. Obama carried it in '08. In '20 (with 84% of the vote in) Trump is up by 59-38. It's really become a southern state. More southern than Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. What makes it even more amazing is how Trump used the state for photo ops about keeping jobs in the state,  and then all those jobs left anyway as soon as Trump was out of sight. He doesn't give a rat's ass about workers, but they are convinced he has their back. Hard to figure.
• With the Democratic majority reduced in the House somewhat in this election, we will have to face the significant probability/possibility that they could lose control of the House in the 2022 off-year elections, if history holds.
• I predicted a long time ago that the centrist Dems were setting up the left to take the blame if things didn't work out as they hoped. Sure enough, there's this story in today's Washington Post describing a meeting of Congressional Dems, where the Blue Dogs and other centrists blame the left for them losing some of the seats they flipped in 2018. This is entirely to expected. The centrists always take credit for successes and blame others for failures. If the only way for Dems to succeed is to appear less committed to justice, antiracism, affordable health care, opposition to police murders, etc., that is not a sustainable or desirable strategy. Apparently these white suburbanites are not reliable coalition partners if they jump ship so easily. Maybe the Dems need to solidify their true base by getting more young people of all colors to come out and vote. Telling people that it is bad to fight for what they believe in is hardly a message I am willing to get on board with.

Pre-Election Reflections

I am a seventy-something white guy. Between the almost four years of Donald Trump and eight months of Covid-19, I have had lots of reasons (and in 2020, lots of time) to reflect. Reflect on my own life and how I got to where I am, and reflect on my country and how it got to where it is.

It has occurred to me that--in some ways--my life has really been a process of unlearning and relearning the truths about America: what it was, what it is, and what it's always been. One of my life's regrets is that it has taken me so many years to get here.

And it's not only America. Among the "friends" of the United States, most (excepting most of our European allies, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) are run by undemocratic or anti-democratic tyrants, often fueled by religious hatreds analogous to the Religious Right bigots in the US: India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Philippines, Brazil, Egypt, et al. The idea that the arc of history bends toward justice sounds poetic and lovely, but it's wishful thinking.

So what sorts of things did I have to relearn? I went to pretty good schools in Wisconsin. But a lot of what I learned was at the very least a matter of using incorrect words. We learned terms like "manifest destiny", which was a euphemism for "genocide". Or "federalism" and "states rights" as substitutes for "Jim Crow". We never learned the rich history of slave rebellions. But we did learn that America supported democracy throughout the world, when in fact Yankee Imperialism backed despots everywhere and actively participated in anti-democratic coups all over the world, particularly in our own hemisphere. American history textbooks presented slavery as kind of a secondary cause of the Civil War.

Has America been heroic and good at times? Absolutely. And we have also been very wrong and very bad at times. That makes us like most other countries. The concept of American Exceptionalism is a sham, whether it's espoused by Reagan or Obama. (As a Christian I consider it out-and-out idolatry.) White folks show brief flashes of support and empathy when police murder George Floyd or Breonna Taylor. But the Whitelash is swift and unforgiving when the reaction isn't as nice and pretty as they'd like.

No matter who the winners are in the upcoming election, America has a lot of work to do. Trump's term has been unquestionably the worst of my lifetime, without any redeeming qualities. (This is quite a high--or is it low?--bar to clear, considering the disaster of George W's presidency.) America in my lifetime has done far worse under Republicans than Democrats, but the problems we face were created in a markedly bipartisan way. I will be looking for ways to take a more active part in that fight (and it is a fight). I think it is not too late. 

Headline of the Day

Headline from Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight website:

We Can’t Believe We Have To Say This, But You Win An Election By Being Ahead When All The Votes Are Counted

Quote of the Day - October 31

This op-ed piece in the NY Times by Jamelle Bouie is behind a paywall, but if you can get to it, it is definitely worth a read. The title is "Don't Fool Yourself. Trump Is Not an Aberration". This quote from the essay is a pretty good summary of Bouie's take.

For as much as it seems that Donald Trump has changed something about the character of this country, the truth is he hasn’t. What is terrible about Trump is also terrible about the United States. Everything we’ve seen in the last four years — the nativism, the racism, the corruption, the wanton exploitation of the weak and unconcealed contempt for the vulnerable — is as much a part of the American story as our highest ideals and aspirations. The line to Trump runs through the whole of American history, from the white man’s democracy of Andrew Jackson to the populist racism of George Wallace, from native expropriation to Chinese exclusion.

And this:

Perhaps more than most, Americans hold many illusions about the kind of nation in which live in. We tell ourselves that we are the freest country in the world, that we have the best system of government, that we welcome all comers, that we are efficient and dynamic where the rest of the world is stagnant and dysfunctional. Some of those things have been true at some points in time, but none of them is true at this point in time.

Every Time Cops Do This Crap it Makes It Easier To Demand Defunding

This story is pretty disgusting. Why do cops think people want to defund them? Because they keep doing things like this.

Trump's 2016 Promises

The way I see it, Trump ran in 2016 on broad promises in four areas.

1. Big infrastructure spending.
2. A trade war that would return millions of manufacturing jobs to the US, as well as getting rid of all trade deals and have new bilateral ones instead.
3. Dynamite new health care that was cheap and great for everyone.
4. Racist and xenophobic immigration policies.

(In fairness, he also said he wouldn't cut Social Secirity or Medicare and he pretty much kept that promise. But I also have no doubt that if he has a second term, those will also be in the chopping block.)

Well, number one simply never happened, and there is no objective way to claim otherwise.

For number two, the short answer is that Trump has pretty much already lost the trade war, if you can call it that. Other than a few photo ops at Carrier, Foxconn, and other plants (which just waited until Trump wasn't looking and sent the jobs to Mexico or somewhere else anyway), the manufacturing sector is worse than when he took office, and the tariffs have just made things more expensive for American consumers. Wisconsin has lost dairy farms at a record pace. The only people who think we are winning the trade war are Trump, Peter Navarro, and all the farmers who got billions in welfare checks. So much winning.

Health care doesn't require much discussion. It's a mess. And it's probably better than 50/50 that SCOTUS will scrap the ACA and leave millions without health coverage and Medicaid. No plan was ever in sight and never will be.

Well lo amd behold, that leaves us with number four! If there is one promise that Trump kept, this is the one. Then he went one better and brought his racism home as well. The one thing that Trump is successful at is racist shit. So if someone says they are voting for Trump because he delivered on his promises, we know which of those promises were important to them.

Quote of the Day

From Andrew Marantz's article in The New Yorker (October 19 issue), "Why Facebook Can't Fix Itself".

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/why-facebook-cant-fix-itself

In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem. In Clegg’s [a Facebook VP] recent blog post, he wrote that Facebook takes a “zero tolerance approach” to hate speech, but that, “with so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This metaphor casts Zuckerberg as a hapless victim of fate: day after day, through no fault of his own, his haystack ends up mysteriously full of needles. A more honest metaphor would posit a powerful set of magnets at the center of the haystack—Facebook’s algorithms, which attract and elevate whatever content is most highly charged. If there are needles anywhere nearby—and, on the Internet, there always are—the magnets will pull them in. Remove as many as you want today; more will reappear tomorrow. This is how the system is designed to work.

 

Some Bullets

• If you want to get a pretty good feel for Coronavirus in China, I recommend a series of articles by Peter Hessler in The New Yorker. Hessler has lived and taught there for number of years. His articles are pretty level-headed, informative, and without a particular ax to grind.
• I read Soul on Ice about fifty years ago. I decided to read it again. (I actually still have the 95-cent paperback that I think I bought in 1970 at the Army PX in Fort Campbell when I was in basic training.) I must admit that I don't remember a lot of it, so I'm glad I'm rereading. My reaction is: holy crap, this could have been written last week!
• Another story in The Washington Post today showing us again that Daniel Cameron's Breonna Taylor grand jury was a shit show. And showing again that--at the very least--Cameron grossly mischaracterized the proceedings, and maybe even out-and-out lied about it.  (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/20/breonna-taylor-grand-juror-says-no-homicide-charges-offered/) All Republicans have become Trump.
• Another WaPo article. This one about the Foxconn scam in Wisconsin. Scott Walker and Donald Trump had their lunch handed to them. If Trump can be had by one Taiwanese company, no wonder he lost whatever trade war he thought he was having with the China.  Trump is out of his league here, but the koolaid drinkers think he is winning something, not sure what.
  

Vote for Reagan (?!?), and The Lincoln Project

• Governor Hogan of Maryland says he wrote in Ronald Reagan's name on his ballot. He must have gone to the Susan Collins School of Ethical Principles. He is apparently "deeply concerned" about Trump, but not enough to actually do all he can to vote him out. (Let's not forget that lots of establishment Dems in the state effectively supported Hogan for re-election in the last election instead of the Democratic nominee.) Thanks for nothin'.
• There is a very good article in the October 12 issue of The New Yorker. While I am not entirely on board with the Never-Trump "movement", I still welcome any Republican who acknowledges the dangers of our current Fascist in Chief. And their political ads are very good. I do, however, take issue with what was said and implied a few times in this article, namely, that these Lincoln Project Republicans criticize the Dems for not being more explicitly anti-Trump (like they are) in ways that are more scorched earth in their approach. The issue I have is that today's main stream media--which are inexplicably assumed to be "liberal" by almost everyone--would never permit it. The Lincoln Project dudes are able to get away with it precisely because they are Republicans. If the Democrats tried the same tactics, the MSM would crucify them. Only Republicans are allowed to act that way. So go to it, Lincoln Project. We appreciate the help. Just be glad you are allowed to do it.

More Opinions

• After the 2016 election, and Trump's inauguration, the stock market went up largely because investors expected huge infrastructure spending, on which Trump campaigned. Of course, that never happened. The tax cut had some short-lived stimulus. And the trade war has been lost. The market is where it is today entirely because of the Fed, rather than for any organic reason.
• Do I believe ex-felons should have the right to vote? Yup. But then I also believe that felons in prison should have the right to vote.
• The fact that SCOTUS almost uniformly sides with voter suppression efforts in Republican states really is a tell of their agenda. Under the guise of "states-are-responsible-for-running-elections-and-we-can't-Consitutionally-interfere", we see a ruse for their political activism. They definitely have an agenda and then reverse engineer the case before them to put a "Constitutional" veneer on their agenda. In Bush v Gore they actually told the state to stop counting votes. And some current and future SCOTUS justices were involved in that case. Bald-faced activissm.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the day. From Elie Mystal in The Nation, describing the Republican Convention, or as he called it, the Republican Infomercial.

"But there are other racist white people who miss their dog whistles. There are white people who want every drop of privilege and power that flows from America’s systemic oppression of Black people, but don’t want that MAGA-hat-induced heat when they go to the grocery store. They don’t think of themselves as “racists”—and get more offended when they’re called racist than they do over actual acts of racism. They support the bigotry and xenophobia that Trump brings, but they don’t want to feel like bigots and xenophobes while supporting it.
These white people need some cover, and this year’s RNC is providing it in the form of Black people who support Trump. The Republicans have invited a cadre of professional “Black friends” to validate Donald Trump and make white people feel a little less racist while supporting white supremacy.
There’s a word for what Republicans are doing—tokenism—and there are a lot of definitions of the term floating around. So, at the risk of sounding as intellectually constrained as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, I’ll use the dictionary definition of the term:
tokenism | noun | the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce.
It is important to understand that tokenism is not done to benefit minorities, not even the token minorities used in the scheme. Tokenism is done for the benefit of white people, to make them feel more comfortable and less complicit in the prejudice and bias of their institutions, schools, and workplaces. It’s done to shield white endeavors from accusations of discrimination. It is, quite literally, a cosmetic adjustment: a mere lacquer of Black faces gilded onto the same old white spaces."

 

Bible Stuff

Several months ago, my wife and I decided to finally do the read-the-whole-Bible thing. So, we followed an outline and after dinner, a few chapters at a time, read the whole thing. What we found wasn't surprising, inasmuch as there has always been a conflict about what the Bible "says" about any number of topics.

It seems to me that--having read the entire thing--one is left with the impression that scripture values things like mercy, caring for "widows and orphans",  justice, and respect for the marginalized. Then, one can "interpret" the particulars of the Bible with those principles as a backdrop. Using this approach, I think, helps to keep the forest and the trees in perspective.

Conservatives have kind of flipped this over. The church from which we recently severed our relationship (Wisconsin Synod, aka WELS), seems to work in the opposite direction. They pick out a few particulars--in the recent past, most notably abortion and homosexuality--and then interpret the Bible in the direction from the trees to the forest. There is almost no mention in the Bible of either of these sins, at least not in the context of how they are used by WELS. For example, the verses about "knowing me in the womb" are presented as proof that life begins at conception, but those verses are an expression of the omnipotence and omniscience of God, not a biological definition of personhood. To use the passages in that way is injecting human beliefs that aren't there.

Today's conservative churches like the WELS have become two-sin churches, and all else revolves around that. This is why the church has become a big player in the culture wars--and therefore the political Right. Once you've declared your allegiance to that camp, you can work backwards and justify any human (or political) opinion as Biblical truth. To read the Bible in its entirety and conclude that God is "for" small government, low taxes, and lots of military spending, and is "against" immigration and Obamacare, is to mix up the forest and the trees. And it also explains why the most hateful things I have seen on social media have come from WELS people I know (as well as some Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod relatives). 

But this is where we are today. Scripture is used to justify all sorts of hate, injustice, and intolerance. If you cherry pick the right "trees" out of scripture, you can make the Biblical "forest" be anything you want.

Forced Labor in the US

I thought this was really interesting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/08/international-complaint-worker-protections/

Some US labor unions have filed a complaint with the UN's International Labour Organization, claiming--among other things--that American companies are utilizing a form of forced labor:

"And it charges the United States with violating workers’ rights in terms not typically associated with well-off countries, at one point saying the bind many essential workers have been placed in during the pandemic — forced to risk infection or lose their jobs and potentially unemployment benefits — amounts to a system of forced labor."

One thing is for sure. The NLRB views its job as protecting capital from labor, rather than the other way around. So, we have a Department of Commerce that looks out for corporations, and a Department of Labor that looks out for corporationns. Level playing field, huh? This has been happening under both Republican and Democratic administrations, but has reached its pinnacle with Trump, especially during the pandemic.

Some Opinions

• 200,000+ Americans dead (which is almost certainly an undercount) and Trump tells us not to worry about COVID.
• Quote of the day (from Max Boot): "The White House is a bigger coronavirus hot spot than all of New Zealand (which had just one new case in the past 24 hours)."
• I know by this headline (from Marketwatch.com) that this is an article I don't need to read. Next!

  Joe Biden defines income of $400,000 as ‘wealthy,’ but here’s why it’s barely scraping by for some

• Among the Trump supporters I know, there has never been a single thing he has done that they haven't enthusiastically supported, defended, and applauded.
• Abolish ICE.
• If Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron is so convinced that he did things right in the Beonna Taylor non-indictment, then why did he misrepresent what happened in the grand jury? It would have been another successful cover-up, except for one member of the grand jury going public with Taylor's dishonesty. If you are hiding the truth, I will assume you know you were wrong.

Pandemic Stimulus Was Misguided

I said at the time that these pandemic relief bills were passed that they were inadequate, misguided, and misdirected. They were not necessarily inadeqaute as to the total price tag, but rather that--as usual--they were top heavy. Also, "relief" to the wealthy was more permanent than the relief given to workers, the unemployed, and other individuals.

This article from the Washington Post addresses some of those issues. This quote from the article is a pretty good summing up of the problem:

The legislation bestowed billions in benefits on companies and wealthy individuals largely unscathed by the pandemic, ...while at the same time allowing special aid for unemployed workers to expire over the summer and leaving some local public health efforts struggling for money to conduct testing and other prevention efforts.

In fairness, this is not something unique to this administration. The Obama administration's response to the financial meltdown of the late aughts was also top-heavy: generous to those who caused the recession; and inadequate or nonexistent for those who were harmed the most.

It is just another example of the biases built into the economic system: bail out capital, and screw labor.

Reading this article is infuriating. This was entirely predictable. And it repudiates the Congressional Democrats' strategy that they'd get the things needed for workers and the states in "the next bill".

There's always a quote...

 

Trump actually said this on September 29.

Headline of the Day

Headline of the day:

 

Trump threw Saudi Arabia a lifeline after

 Khasshogi's death. Two years later, he has gotten 

 little in return

This is from a story in the Washington Post. I post it because it is kind of a poster child for the Trump presidency in the areas of trade and foreign policy. As long as the other party/country in question is sufficiently sycophantic to Trump, he pretty much lets them do whatever they want without consequence. He then tells us of all the concessions he got from the other party, but they are concessions that only exist in his head. So whether it's China, or Saudi Arabia, or North Korea, or the Eurozone, or anywhere else, the reality is far removed from what exists in the heads of Trump and his cultists.

So the farmers and factory workers and other kool aid drinkers continue to support him and will vote for him even though all his "victories" were really lost long ago.

Friday

 

• When Moscow Mitch is so insistent on giving Covid-related immunity to American companies, I interpret that as prima facie evidence that he knows many of them are guilty.

• As I said in a post a couple of days ago, the evidence of Trump's business non-success was always around. The fact that no reputable US Banks were willing to lend him money should have been a tip-off to the MSM.

• I will concede that there are probably things that are said by the Trump administration that are absolutely true. The problem is that when 80-90% of what you say is utterly false or made-up on the spot, it is hard to sift through what might be true. It's much more efficient to play the odds and assume it's another out-and-out lie.

• I have been a baseball fan my whole life, and I try not to be an old fuddy-duddy purist. But ESPN and MLB's decision to put a mic on a player in the field and converse with them while the ball is in play is one of the dumbest and worst ideas ever. (They are actually doing this during the playoffs.)

• The two American economies are on full display during this crisis, more than ever before. Also on display is how the Fed, Congress, and White House act with much more urgency when the financial markets are in distress than when actual people are in even greater distress.

Who Got "Owned"?

It's amazing to watch the Trump cultists, including friends and relatives, actually claim that Trump has been successful in his "trade wars". One of their problems is that they mistake his photo-ops for substance, and they especially like the photo-ops where Trump is especially noxious, arrogant, and cruel.

I remember him at the Carrier plant in Indiana, bragging about how he was keeping the plant open and saving all those jobs. The company was more that happy to have him there. I think there was even some government contracts or something directed to Carrier as a reward for kissing Trump's ass in public. It wasn't long after that about half those jobs went to Mexico, and another Carrier plant nearby was entirely closed. No photo-op for those events.

In 2017 Trump had Foxconn's chairman Terry Gou to the White house to brag up his role (along with the grifter Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin) for a new Foxconn plant in southeast Wisconsin. Lots of tax breaks and taxpayer investments in new roads and other infrastructure. There is no plant and there are no jobs.

These are only two examples out of many. Wisconsin dairy farms have been closing in record numbers during the Trump's reign. Trump's trade war with China was lost long ago. There have been two or three rounds of welfare payments to American farmers (aka vote buying). Instead of recognizing this as evidence of Trump's failure, farmers somehow seem to think it is proof of Trump's success?!? Or if they see the shortcomings they just blame it all on Obama or something. I am sure most of them are voting for him again.

The sad thing is that some people mistake owning the libs for improving their lives. Trump's disastrous "job-saving" and trade policies have cost working people their jobs and cost farmers their farms. Just who got "owned" here?

Ramblings

• The more that comes out about Kentucky AG Cameron's Breonna Taylor grand jury, the more it's obvious that it was a sham. And then he lied about it.
• I almost never watch presidential debates and one big reason is that they aren't really debates. They exist mostly to give the media something to talk about.
• I am glad someone was finally able to get ahold of Donald Trump's tax returns, but we really didn't need them to know that he was never as successful a "businessman" as he pretended to be. The evidence was always there, the media just never said the words.
• And to be fair, the tax code that produces this kind of BS is the responsibility of the Dems as much as the Repubs.
• Based on anecdotal evidence, my estimate is that 70-80% of Chicagoans are wearing masks outdoors and basically 100% indoors.

More Court Stuff

• I am tired of the term "Borked" being dredged up every time we have a SCOTUS nomination. It has become a truism--and not just on the Right--that the craziness of today has its origins in Bork having been Borked, and that Bork was treated unfairly. Bullshit. Robert Bork deserved a hearing and a vote, both of which he received. (Six Republicans voted against his confirmation.) He was entitled to that; he wasn't entitled to the seat. He was judged by the Senate to be unfit or unworthy of the seat. You can disagree with that, but he received a public hearing and a public vote. To somehow say he got the same treatment as, say,  Merrick Garland is utterly laughable.
• I think I agree with Bhaskar Sunkara here. There's not a lot to be gained by Biden having the Supreme Court as the focus of his campaign. Those for whom it's important are already on board. Don't run on culture war issues. That tends to make it a binary choice and to many conservative types--as Sunkara says--the importance of a conservative Court outweighs any misgivings they might otherwise have about Trump. (I, for one, have always felt that these "misgivings" are quite overrated.) Running on the old clichéd bread-and-butter issues is more productive. We can fight the culture war stuff after Biden is elected.
• Originalism in practice is just another term for "I can get to any decision I want." Originalists try to present themselves as more highly principled and intellectually disciplined that other jurists. But in practice they have pretty much pursued a political and cultural agenda, not really a legal one. A true originalist would never abide anything like Bush v. Gore, and yet Scalia was an eager participant. There's nothing originalist about money=speech or corporations are people, but here we are. So don't let the mainstream media fool you about these people. They know where they want to get and get there any way they can.

More on Breonna Taylor

The non-indictments for BreonnaTaylor's murder reinforce what I said here a few days ago about police unions. It wasn't the union that failed to indict, it was a guy in a suit and tie who manipulated the grand jury to get the result he wanted. Ferguson revisited. You can get rid of the union if you want, but it won't matter if you don't get rid of the enablers who find excuses for murderers.

Here's an excellent piece (if you aren't stopped by a paywall) by Radley Balko in The Washington Post, detailing the discrepancies and half truths put out by Attorney General Cameron. First, you manipulate the grand jury, and then you go "public" with only those "facts" that bolster your inaction. This is very bad.

So go after the police unions, by all means. But don't think that it will do away with this kind of injustice.

Quote of the Day

 "A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society."

        --Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

This is the fear many on the left have of a Biden presidency. The donor class definitely wants to push in this direction: some reforms around the edges but not changing the fundamental weaknesses of capitalist society. Perhaps it will not turn out that way. I am hopeful, but not optimistic.

Black Lives Don't Matter As Much

Another case of: this is a tragedy but the officers were "justified". I don't know what that means anymore. Trayvon Martin shouldn't be dead, but his death was nonetheless "justified". Tamir Rice shouldn't be dead, but his killing was "justified". Breonna Taylor did nothing wrong, but she is dead and it was "justified". Ho-hum. Sandra Bland shouldn't be dead but no one did anything wrong. Michael Brown shouldn't be dead, Freddie Gray shouldn't be dead.

People take tortuous paths to get to where these are "justified", but there are lots of dead people who shouldn't be dead. Something is wrong. When will we find the will to change that?

 

Life without RBG

How does one deal with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the fact that it's likely that a Trump-appointed replacement will be confirmed? I suppose there is at least some chance that four Republicans will not support filling the seat. So far, two have said they oppose doing so, but two more could be difficult, and I don't trust Susan Collins would actually come through.

Another way of asking this question is: how do you deal with something over which you have no control? Despair? Hardly helpful.

What if you back up and look at the situation? Is a 6-3 majority really the end of the world? Is the Supreme Court really the center of the universe? It's a bad thing, especially when some members of the Court are clearly pursuing a political agenda. But also recall marriage equality never happened under a more liberal court. So the question is, what positive things can be done to pursue a progressive agenda in spite of the conservative SCOTUS?

For the sake of argument, let's assume Biden wins and brings along a Democratic Senate. (If Biden loses, we get a sixth conservative anyway, so it doesn't matter.) I will start by stating that--although I am in favor of it in principle--expanding SCOTUS would not be the first arrow I would fire from my quiver. I think it might be better as a threat hanging in the background. Instead, the first tactic is to pass a lot of popular progressive laws and dare the Supreme Court to strike them down. The Court's reputation is already on shaky ground, and if they are seen as going too far in legislating from the bench and that they are just another political branch of government, then public sentiment could turn against them even more, and court packing becomes a more palatable option.

The list of possibilities is long. Medicare for All, a new Voting Rights Act, aggressive environmental and climate change laws, student loan forgiveness, progressive regulatory laws for banks and other corporations, a new campaign finance law, etc.

One thing is for sure: there is nothing to be gained by trying to work from the center as the Never-Trumpers would have it. There is no future in compromising with the "reasonable Republicans" because there aren't any. It's time to pursue a truly progressive agenda.

Random Thoughts on a Friday Afternoon

 

• I will take it as a non-coincidence that the countries with the highest incidence of Covid-19 cases--United States, India, and Brazil--are led by three of the biggest autocratic bigots--Trump, Modi, and Bolsonaro.
• If I hear the word "iconic" one more time today, I think my head might just explode.
• I have officially become a "dog grouch". I am lucky enough to live in an apartment that overlooks a Lake Michigan beach in Chicago. There are no dogs allowed on the beaches anywhere in Chicago. But every morning, it's overrun with dogs, unrestrained and running wild. I can't leave my apartment without running into dogs. I can't go for a walk without dogs everywhere.  I can't go to Starbucks or an outdoor restaurant without dogs. I can't even go to Home Depot or the grocery store without frickin' dogs there. Can't I at least have the beach? Or somewhere? Thanks for listening.
• George Will had an op-ed piece today telling Biden that he should make Chris Coons his Secretary of State. There are at least two things that should disqualify him. (1) His anti-free-speech position on the BDS movement. And (2) The fact that George Will recommends him.

Abolish ICE

 This Washington Post article is just another example of why we should abolish ICE.

Alexandra Petri Nails It Again

Alexandra Petri's column today , as usual, requires no commentary.

On Police Unions

Interesting letter to the editor in the September 14 issue of The New Yorker. It has become an article of faith among some liberal circles that getting rid of police unions is the silver bullet for police reform. But in some ways, the problem with police unions is the result of--rather than the cause of--bad policy. I 100% agree that police unions need to be brought into line, but as this letter suggests, there are equally bad actors in all layers of local and state government which enable and defend police misconduct.

Many of these bad actors can be voted out of office, as people have done in Philadelphia, Ferguson, and Chicago. So, by all means, we should do all we can to curtail the power of police unions. But if we don't also do something about this entire infrastructure of corruption, it will all be for naught.

Here's the letter:

I was impressed by William Finnegan’s cogent article about the New York City police unions (“The Blue Wall,” August 3rd & 10th). I have been following N.Y.P.D. issues for nearly thirty years, first as an executive at the New York City corporation counsel’s office, and then as a civil-rights lawyer suing N.Y.P.D. officers.

 

Unfortunately, police unions are not the only problem—just the loudest. Many governmental agencies have worked for decades to protect police officers from public scrutiny and accountability. Among the worst enablers are the New York City Law Department, led by a cadre of hard-liners whose super-aggressive tactics have prompted several federal judges to rebuke or sanction city lawyers; city comptrollers, who routinely approve millions of dollars in settlements against the police but never condition that approval on discipline of the officers; the City Council, which has failed to enact the stiffer disciplinary penalties demanded fifty years ago by the Knapp Commission; the state legislature, which has not repealed an outdated law, in place since 1940, that gives hearing officers controlled by the police commissioner sole jurisdiction over disciplinary proceedings; the city’s district attorneys, who regularly dismiss cases on the basis of false police reports but never indict the officers who lied in those reports; and the civilian complaint-review board and the office of the inspector general, agencies that are weak and ineffectual.

As for the unions, at least their power has waned, owing to the changing demographics of the city. Today, the police unions have very little electoral strength; their political influence is limited to a smattering of voters in certain areas of Staten Island. And, with the Democratic takeover of the State Senate, they can no longer cling to power by throwing money at Republican state senators. One must hope that the diminishment of their electoral strength will result in the elections of mayors, comptrollers, City Council members, state legislators, and district attorneys who will call for genuine N.Y.P.D. accountability and transparency.

Joel Berger

New York City

More on the Religious Right

Whenever I discuss right-wing religious groups, I try to avoid using descriptors like "Christian Right" because in the context of most discussions, Christianity isn't really involved. That's why I use the term Religious Right (which can also be a misnomer), since it really is far removed from Christian beliefs. On the contrary, the Religious Right is a business, and a big one at that.

I came across this article in The Guardian which is a good case in point. This particular article is about a group of "Christians" who have decided that disenfranchising voters is a "spiritual battle" for "control of the free world". It's not only Trump who hates mail-in voting. Apparently God does, too. One leader of the movement has apparently been "anointed" to do this important work of voter suppression because--and I quote: "We know that this [voting by mail] is from Satan".

This is only one example. Others on the Religious Right claim that Biblical Christianity demands gun ownership and Second Amendment "rights", low marginal tax rates, lots of military spending, and laissez faire capitalism. Oh, and also no masks. One thing to note here is the Americentrism of this brand of Christianity: God is mostly looking at and worried about America, not so much the rest of the world. God "chooses" America's leaders (at least the Republican ones), but not the leaders in the rest of the world (nor ones named Obama).

The irony is that the more conservative Christians claim they adhere to Biblical literalism and/or inerrancy. And yet, most of the political positions that they claim are demanded by their religion are not even remotely Biblical. They are simply human political causes and beliefs (and bizarre ones at that) which they try to shoehorn into the Bible. It's really quite extraordinary, and almost blasphemous.

Alternate Realities

I have been puzzled as to how Conservatives who were reluctant (so they say) Trump voters have been converted to all-in Trump supporters, and in particular QAnon conspiratorialists. I base this partly on friends and family that come across my wife's Facebook feed, as well as crazies I have seen in other social media.

There really were many people who didn't particularly like Trump because he wasn't a true Conservative, or they disapproved of his grab-em-by-the-pussy morality, or some other reason. They actively supported one or another of Trump's primary opponents. These people ended up voting for Trump--I think--largely because of their anti-abortion beliefs.* The problem arose for them because Trump turned out to be so much more awful that even I expected. So, in order to justify their vote for this psychopath, they have to create an alternate reality where Trump's opponents are even more evil than he is. As Trump got worse and worse, it required them to create more and more devilish opponents.

No longer are we just tax-and-spend liberals and soft-on-crime radicals. Now the Dems are just a cover organization for organized pedophiles hiding their evils in the (nonexistent) basements of pizza parlors. Or some other satanic cabal. It really is an alternate reality because they actually believe this shit and even run Congressional campaigns based on it. They really don't even defend Trump so much. It's more like he is our only choice against the Devil incarnate.

This is why it is impossible to engage these folks in any kind of dialog. We live in different worlds.

* The twenty-first-century conservative Christian church (to the extent that it is Christian or a church) has become a two-sin church: abortion and homosexuality. All other "sins" (i.e., the ones committed by conservative Christians) are secondary and less serious. Conveniently, it is now pretty easy to justify all sorts of judgment on others while overlooking one's own transgressions.