Monday, November 13, 2017

Soulless Battle

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear November 27.

This can't even be described as a battle for the soul of the GOP, but instead a fight over whether the party should have a soul at all.

- Robert Schlesinger, "Roy Moore's Sick Defenders"

This week's featured posts are "What Did Virginia Teach Us?" and "Roy Moore: Are we really having this conversation?"

This week everybody was talking about the Democrats' wins

(Well, except Fox News. Elections? Were there elections Tuesday?) The big race was Ralph Northam beating Ed Gillespie for the governorship in Virginia, which I discuss in one of the featured posts.

But it wasn't just the governor's race: Democrats took the other major statewide offices and gained substantially in the Virginia House of Delegates, making it close enough that control depends on recounts. But it's a measure of the power of gerrymandering that the seats split almost evenly, despite the total Democratic vote crushing the total Republican vote 53%-44%. Anyone who believes in  democracy has to be deeply disturbed that 44% of the vote might be enough for Republicans to maintain control.

And it wasn't just Virginia: Democrat Phil Murphy replaced Chris Christie as governor of New Jersey, beating Christie's lieutenant governor 56%-42%. By a wide margin, Maine voted to expand Medicaid.

and Roy Moore

I talked about this in the other featured post. In particular, adult men pursuing girls in their mid-teens isn't just a quirk of Roy Moore. It's something that happens in an extremely conservative Christian subculture.

One thing I didn't put into that article: I'm not the least bit shocked that there's something icky in Moore's past. When you style yourself as "the Ten Commandments Judge", you're compensating for something. Most Christians don't need to install 5000-pound granite monuments to prove how upright they are.

and Veterans Day

As I watched all the ways veterans were honored this weekend, it reinforced my impression that America has a strangely bifurcated relationship with its military. On the one hand, military service has never been more distant from the lives of most Americans. Soldiers serve and are in danger all over the globe, in places (like Niger) that most of us couldn't find on a map. We fight wars (like Iraq or Afghanistan) without any of the impacts on everyday life that previous generations took for granted: no rationing, no tax increases, no products missing from the shelves. If you didn't follow the news you might not even know it was happening.

Simultaneously, we also mythologize our military and its personnel more than I can ever remember. At sporting events, we have them stand up to be applauded. We stick pro-military slogans to our bumpers. Those who don't stand for the national anthem are condemned not for disrespecting our country, but for disrespecting our veterans. Politicians constantly tell us our soldiers are the best in the world, or the best among us.

And yet again, we only sort of care whether they're treated right. It's a scandal from time to time how badly the VA takes care of their medical needs, but it goes away, and most of us don't bother to find out whether anything was done. When our attention is drawn to veterans issues, we demand the best for them. But we don't follow through. We're embarrassed when we realize that we haven't done well by them, but we don't really care.

and tax reform

The Senate came out with its tax-reform bill, which differs from the House bill in a number of ways, but keeps many of the features that make it a bonanza for rich people: big cuts in corporate taxes, getting rid of the alternative minimum tax, and cutting taxes on income from pass-through business entities (such as most of Donald Trump's investments). (One report says that the rich don't get the biggest cuts in percentage terms, but they're not taking into account where the business tax breaks end up.) Like the House bill, it adds $1.5 trillion to the national debt over ten years. It differs mainly in which deductions it preserves or eliminates, but that's barely worth talking about for one big reason: This still isn't the bill they intend to pass.

The WaPo explains:

Senate Finance Committee aides said they planned to make adjustments to the legislation because it probably does not comply with the rules for a special Senate procedure they hope to use to pass the bill with 50 votes, rather than the 60 votes typically needed to beat a filibuster.

The big problem is that it will continue increasing the deficit after ten years, which reconciliation rules don't allow. This isn't just a frill that can be cut away without affecting the big picture; it comes from the revenue cuts that are what the bill is all about. So fixing it will require a lot more than mere "adjustments".

So this is where we are: The plan is still for the House to pass its bill by Thanksgiving, and for the House and Senate to agree on something they can deliver to Trump's desk by Christmas. But they still haven't told us what that will be, and both the House and the Senate know that the bill they are currently discussing can't be it. In other words, it's all still playing out like I predicted two weeks ago.


Tuesday, on a phone conference with 12 Democratic senators, Trump made this outrageous claim:

My accountant called me and said "you're going to get killed in this bill".

Bloomberg consulted a tax accountant, who said:

Not only is there not much in this bill that would presumably hurt the president, but it kind of seems like it's specifically designed to help him.

Of course, Trump could lay this debate to rest by releasing his tax returns, which (unlike every president since Nixon) he refuses to do. In the one year where we have some Trump tax information (2005), Trump paid $38 million in taxes on $150 million in income, about 25%. But $31 million of that total was due to the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which current proposals eliminate. Without the AMT, he would have paid less than 5%.

but Trump's Russia comments are very disturbing

Saturday, Trump called former leaders of America's intelligence agencies (James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey) "political hacks", and insisted that he believes Vladimir Putin's assurances that he didn't meddle in the 2016 U.S. elections. The whole controversy, he claimed, "was set up by Democrats."

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum commented that although we don't yet have proof that Trump conspired with the Russian interference at the time,

What is becoming ever-more undeniable is Trump’s complicity in the attack after the fact—and his willingness to smash the intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies in order to protect Putin, Russia, and evidently himself. ...

A year after the 2016 election, the Trump administration has done nothing to harden U.S. election systems against future interference. It refuses to implement the sanctions voted by Congress to punish Russia for election meddling. The president fired the director of the FBI, confessedly to halt an investigation into Russia’s actions—and his allies in Congress and the media malign the special counsel appointed to continue the investigation.

These are not the actions of an innocent man, however vain, stubborn, or uniformed.

“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard for criminal justice. It’s not the standard for counter-intelligence determinations. The preponderance of the evidence ever-more clearly indicates: In ways we cannot yet fully reckon—but can no longer safely deny—the man in the Oval Office has a guilty connection to the Russian government. That connection would bar him from literally any other job in national security except that of head of the executive branch and commander- in-chief of the armed forces of the United States.

[I added the link and the emphasis.]

John McCain issued a statement:

There's nothing ‘America First’ about taking the word of a KGB colonel over that of the American intelligence community. There's no ‘principled realism’ in cooperating with Russia to prop up the murderous Assad regime, which remains the greatest obstacle to a political solution that would bring an end to the bloodshed in Syria. Vladimir Putin does not have America's interests at heart. To believe otherwise is not only naive but also places our national security at risk.

and you also might be interested in ...

It's not just an American problem: Around 60K white nationalists from all over Europe came to Warsaw for an Independence Day demonstration.

Demonstrators with faces covered chanted “Pure Poland, white Poland!” and “Refugees get out!”. A banner hung over a bridge that read: “Pray for Islamic Holocaust.”


In the Roy Moore post I mentioned Jim Ziegler invoking Joseph and Mary to justify an adult man's pursuit of a teen-age girl. But that wasn't the week's worst piece of theology: Rev. Hans Fiene of River of Life Lutheran Church in Channahon, Illinois (part of the Missouri Synod that I was raised in) takes that prize for this observation about the Sutherland Springs church shooting.

For those with little understanding of and less regard for the Christian faith, there may be no greater image of prayer’s futility than Christians being gunned down mid-supplication. But for those familiar with the Bible’s promises concerning prayer and violence, nothing could be further from the truth. When those saints of First Baptist Church were murdered yesterday, God wasn’t ignoring their prayers. He was answering them.

You see, when Christians ask God to "deliver us from evil" in the Lord's Prayer, they are asking to be delivered from evil not just in the here and now, but eternally.

So when a madman with a rifle sought to persecute the faithful at First Baptist Church on Sunday morning, he failed. Just like those who put Christ to death, and just like those who have brought violence to believers in every generation, this man only succeeded in being the means through which God delivered his children from this evil world into an eternity of righteousness and peace.

So remember that, the next time a minister asks you to join in reciting the Lord's Prayer. Unless you're prepared for gunmen to burst through the doors and mow down your whole family, you might want to opt out.


Fiene's essay is based on the romantic view of persecution that causes so many Christians to imagine they are being persecuted for their religion when they're really not. The Sutherland Springs Baptists suffered exactly the same persecution as Sikhs in Wisconsin, country music fans in Las Vegas, and gay night-clubbers in Orlando: the persecution that we all risk by living in a gun-crazy society.

American Christians, who dominate this country only a little less completely than they used to, indulge in persecution fantasies the way that teen-agers safe in their parents' basements indulge in horror movies. Someone might try to force me to sell a gay couple the same cake I would sell a straight couple! Or to provide health insurance for my employees! It's just exactly like the stoning of Stephen, or facing the lions in Rome.


Oh, crap. We're losing Louis C. K. to the rolling sexual abuse scandal. At least he owned up to the accusations, rather than trying to convince us that his accusers are lying. But we've got to stop tolerating this kind of stuff.

Karen Wehrstein explains why she's still not convinced by the George Takei accusation, and what she would need to hear to become convinced.

and let's close with something that could eat a lot of time

Singing animojis, possibilities are endless, as this version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" shows.

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