Monday, August 29, 2022

Power and Obligation

What is the responsibility of those with power? Do they merely have an obligation to refrain from the misuse of that power? Or do they have a duty to protect those without it?

- Jennifer Walters, opening lines of She Hulk: Attorney at Law

This week's featured post is "The Return of the Bitter Politics of Envy".

This week everybody was still talking about the Mar-a-Lago search

https://www.facebook.com/mikeluckovichajc/posts/pfbid0RtsXy1m6Nqz5Vvma7GsX1uiKJNkBrJAZg6wNecVAYxYWt9EKGEJKEjLg23ovk7RZl

In fact, we've been talking too much about it. You can waste a lot of time on this kind of story. Some new detail emerges almost every day, but there's still a lot we don't know, creating room for endless speculation about what will or ought to happen.

I recommend viewing from a distance: Trump continues to claim that he's the victim of political persecution by the "Deep State" [see definition below]. But with every new revelation, it becomes clearer that the Feds had good reason to search Mar-a-Lago and did everything by the book. Here's the gist:

  • When he left office, Trump kept dozens of boxes of documents that by law now belong to the US government and should be overseen by the National Archives.
  • Many of those documents are classified at the highest levels. We don't (and shouldn't) know precisely what's in them, but their classification markings indicate that some of them (if they got into the wrong hands) would compromise human intelligence sources and/or the US government's capabilities for intercepting signals.
  • Intelligence officials are now studying the recovered documents to assess the specific risks associated with them.
  • Mar-a-Lago is not a secure facility approved for housing such highly classified documents. (And that may understate its lack of security.)
  • The government tried to avoid a confrontation, which is why the documents weren't seized more than a year ago. The Archives asked nicely, the Department of Justice served a subpoena, and still they didn't get everything back. Going in and taking the documents was a last resort that Trump's intransigence made necessary.
  • Trump has not explained why he needed or wanted these documents.
  • Laws were clearly broken. DoJ now has to decide whether to bring charges or to be satisfied to have the documents back.
  • Trump allies like Lindsey Graham are threatening violence if Trump is charged for his crimes.

There are also a few things about Trump's defenses that you might notice from a distance without obsessing. Ask yourself:

To me, those all look like strategies for guilty people. They're not about establishing innocence, they're about making it hard for the government to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

You may now return to your ordinary news consumption. Don't let Trump suck all the oxygen out of the room.

https://jensorensen.com/2022/08/17/mar-a-lago-fbi-raid-cartoon/

Another development this week: The memo that then-Attorney-General William Barr used to justify not charging then-President Trump with obstructing the Mueller probe has been released over the objections of the Garland Justice Department.

The memo is basically a whitewash to justify what Barr had decided to do anyway. One part of it is particularly bad, as former Mueller assistant Andrew Weissmann observes:

Key "reasoning" of Barr/Engel/O'Callaghan memo: if you successfully obstruct an investigation, you cannot be charged with obstruction as you were not charged with the crime under investigation. Future defendants will have a field day with this memo unless DOJ repudiates it soon.

When Senator Graham threatened violence, he compared Trump's crimes to "the Clinton debacle", i.e. the Hillary email thing, which was very thoroughly investigated and was not anything like what Trump has done.

I did all the background reading on Hillary's emails about a month before James Comey explained his reasons for not charging Clinton, which was exactly the same conclusion I had come to. Other people who do more-or-less what Clinton did never get charged. People who do what Trump did always get charged.

If you want a laugh, check out Mrs. F talking to Trump as if he were a toddler.

Do you understand why they took those items from you? ... No, not for no reason, friend. Those did not belong to you. You took them home and you were not supposed to, so they took them back. The FBI. Yeah. We need to start taking some responsibility for our actions.

[Deep State]: As I've said before, the "Deep State" is an ominous way of pointing to people who aren't that hard to understand: They joined some government agency because they were committed to its institutional mission, and they continue to be more loyal to that mission than they are to the chain of command leading up to the White House.

So deep-staters at the EPA kept trying to protect the environment even when the Trump administration wanted to let corporations trash it. Deep-staters at CDC tried to fight Covid when Trump wanted to happy-talk it away. Deep-staters in the military pushed to stay in Afghanistan despite both Trump and Biden wanting to get out. Deep-staters in DoJ want to investigate crimes, and so on.

and Biden canceling some student debt

I cover this, and the Republican attempt to turn it into a culture-war issue, in the featured post.

and the pandemic

Reported cases are trending downward, for what that's worth. But lagging indicators are lagging the way they should if something did indeed turn around a few weeks ago. Cases are down 14% in two weeks, hospitalizations down 10%, and ICU admissions down 7%. Deaths, the longest-lagging indicator, have barely budged, down 2%.

and you also might be interested in ...

The uncrewed Artemis I mission was supposed to launch this morning, but got delayed. It is the first step towards new missions sending astronauts to the Moon, where no man has boldly gone in nearly half a century.

In 1960s science fiction, it was considered plausible to set missions to Mars and perhaps even Jupiter in the 1980s. By the 21st century, you could go almost anywhere in the solar system.

The Ukraine War has passed its six-month mark, leading to assessments of where things stand. Short version: Russia has lost in a lot of ways. Its initial plan to overwhelm Kiev failed, its military has badly underperformed expectations, and it has suffered enormous losses of both soldiers and equipment.

But that doesn't necessarily mean Ukraine is winning, in that there's no quick or obvious way for Ukraine to achieve its goals either. Russian forces continue to occupy territory in eastern Ukraine, and the Ukrainian military may not have what it takes to force them out.

One provision of the Inflation Reduction Act was to fund more employees at the IRS. This makes tons of sense, because IRS budgets have been trending downward for years, and every year there's a huge backlog of unprocessed returns. In 2020 the Congressional Budget Office reported:

The IRS’s appropriations have fallen by 20 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars since 2010, resulting in the elimination of 22 percent of its staff. The amount of funding and staff allocated to enforcement activities has declined by about 30 percent since 2010.

One result is that rich people with clever accountants can gamble on outlasting the IRS; they can cheat in ways that IRS can only catch if they're willing to invest a lot of person-hours they don't have.

But the prospect of a larger IRS staff has turned into a major bugaboo on the Right. In the right-wing imagination, the employees the agency hopes to hire over ten years are all going to be there tomorrow, and they're all going to be armed agents, rather than, say, people who answer questions on the phone or keep the computers running. Seriously, folks on the Right are scaring each other with visions of an IRS army breaking down their doors.

Dana Milbank sets the record straight. Bookmark this in case some social-media friend starts ranting about "87,000 armed IRS agents".

Last week I forgot to mention the knife attack on author Salman Rushdie in upstate New York. Reports say he was on a ventilator for a time, but is now "articulate", though still in a hospital.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1016118/the-statue-of-oligarchy

Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader who essentially picked Trump's three Supreme Court nominees, heads a new conservative group that just got a $1.6 billion donation from one guy. The group is the Marble Freedom Trust and the guy appears to be Barre Seid, an electronics-industry billionaire I had never heard of. (Several news organizations followed a paper trail to figure out who he is, but the law didn't require any official announcement.)

Because of Supreme Court decisions by other Federalist Society judges, there are few limits on what Leo can do with all that money.

To put the total in context: If every person who voted in the 2020 presidential election sent in $10, we could almost equal Seid's gift.

Republicans are trying to make hay out of Biden's remark tagging their ideology as "semi fascism", as if he were insulting everyone who voted for Trump rather than accurately characterizing the extreme MAGA faction -- and perhaps giving it too much credit with that "semi" modifier.

It amazes me how sensitive MAGAts are, given how often they accuse liberals of being pedophiles and groomers and haters of America.

The comparisons being made to Hillary's "basket of deplorables" line are accurate, but for the wrong reasons: Hillary was absolutely right, and subsequent history has vindicated her. Like Biden (and like Liz Cheney in other contexts), she was trying to get McCain/Romney Republicans to look at who they're supporting these days: people who are fundamentally against democracy, who have formed a personality cult around their leader, and who feel justified in resorting to violence if they get outvoted or if their leader faces legal consequences for committing crimes. If that's not "semi-fascism", what do you call it?

and let's close with something deep

If you go 3000 meters below sea level and hang around long enough, you might see an 8-foot-long sea creature known as a Solumbellula Sea Pen.

Posted by at No comments:

Monday, August 22, 2022

Horrible Things

A very important aspect of cult is the idea that if you leave the cult, horrible things will happen to you. This is important, and it's important to realize. That people outside of a cult are potential members, so they're not looked upon as negatively as people inside the cult who then leave the cult.

- Steve Eichel, quoted in "How to Identify a Cult"

This week's featured post is "Governing Party vs. Personality Cult".

This week everybody was talking about the Mar-a-Lago search

I cover the details in the personality-cult portion of the featured post. (Look at the quote above in light of how Liz Cheney has been treated.)

Something that didn't make it into that article: It would be easier to believe Trump's "witch hunt" rhetoric if his people didn't keep pleading guilty to multiple felonies, as his CFO Allen Weisselberg did this week.

and the tide shifting for the fall elections

https://www.politico.com/cartoons/2022/08/03/august-2022-00049552?slide=6

Once or twice a year, I actually sympathize with Mitch McConnell. Like this week, when he lamented how "candidate quality" might keep Republicans from taking the Senate. (For what it's worth at this stage of the campaign, Nate Silver agrees. His Senate forecast gives Democrats a 63% chance of holding the Senate compared to a 21% chance of holding the House -- though even that number has been going up lately.)

"Candidate quality" is an oblique way of saying that Trump and his personality cult have pushed a lot of bozos through the Republican primaries, leaving McConnell little to work with.

In Georgia, an anti-Trump Republican group is airing an ad in which Herschel Walker's ex-wife describes him holding a gun to her temple and threatening to blow her brains out. But no, the GOP isn't anti-woman.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic senate candidate John Fetterman has mastered a technique that Republicans have been using since the first President Bush weaponized the Pledge of Allegiance against Mike Dukakis in 1988: latching onto some symbolic issue that works against your opponent and refusing to let up. His opponent, Mehmet (Dr.) Oz, has ten houses, and mostly lives in the one in New Jersey, where People magazine found him in 2020.

https://people.com/home/inside-the-new-jersey-mansion-dr-oz-and-his-wife-lisa-built-from-scratch-20-years-ago/

Fetterman keeps finding new ways to poke this issue, like getting a Jersey Shore TV star to weigh in on it, or hiring a plane to pull a banner welcoming Oz "home" to New Jersey, or tweeting a photo of Boardwalk with ten houses on it.

On abortion, Republican candidates keep digging deeper and deeper holes for themselves. Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Nixon justifies forcing a 14-year-old rape victim to bear a child because of the bonds some girls have formed with their babies. "Out of that tragedy, there was healing through that baby."

I shouldn't have to point out that we don't buy this logic in any other situation. Stories of heroism and community bonding come out of every natural disaster, but we try to avoid disasters all the same. We want fire departments to put out blazes before they spread, even though the great fires of Chicago and London allowed those cities to rebuild themselves better. The archetypal World War II movie is about a tentative young man who grows up quickly and finds inner strength through his combat experiences, but those accounts shouldn't inspire us to go out and start more wars.

Similarly, some 14-year-olds (or even younger girls) may rise to the occasion and make something positive out of bearing a rapist's child. (More often, I suspect, a young woman looks back on a hellish period of her life and constructs an upbeat narrative to make peace with it.) But that's no excuse for the government to force girls down that path.

Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano (a 2020 election denier who organized busloads of Pennsylvanians to go to Trump's January 6 rally) associates with self-styled "prophet" Julie Green. She was invited to give the opening prayer at a Mastriano rally, where his campaign aide introduced her as "a representative of God". Mastriano has posted one of Green's 20-minute videos (where she made a series of vague National-Enquirer-style predictions that will be easy to verify after something-or-other happens, but also predicted a scandal for that "treasonous snake" Mitt Romney), and also a picture of himself with Green.

Green has said a lot of interesting stuff: Nancy Pelosi drinks children's blood. Joe Biden actually died and has been replaced by an actor. Adam Schiff will face God's judgment because "all will see the proof of your disgusting acts against My son, the true President". In the same post, God speaks to Chuck Schumer: "Chuck Schumer, your story is similar to that of Nancy, Adam, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and Obama. ... you will reap your Harvest though not before you see your nightmares come to pass. My son will return and will be put back in his rightful seat. You will all pay with your lives, and your plans will not succeed."

Maybe I'm over-interpreting, but it sure sounds like she's saying that when Trump gets back in power, he will have all his enemies killed. And that's supposed to be a good thing.

The GOP isn't the party of Romney and John McCain any more. If you're still a Republican today, you're in bed with a bunch of lunatics like Julie Green and Doug Mastriano.

and the pandemic

Reported new cases (for what those numbers are worth in these days of home testing) seem to have leveled off at 130K per day in mid-July and then started downward in August, going under 100K this week.

The theory that something turned in August is supported by the lagging (but more solid) statistics: hospitalizations (down 7% in the last two weeks) and deaths (down 7%).

Now we wait to see whether the start of the school year triggers a new surge.

As an aside: Much of the country is acting like Covid is over, as if 460 deaths per day (which, if it held, would work out to 168K deaths per year) isn't worth our attention.

By now we all know people who have had Covid and appear to have recovered completely. But you can't count on that, especially if you're older.

The study found that 4.5 percent of older people developed dementia in the two years after infection, compared with 3.3 percent of the control group. That 1.2-point increase in a diagnosis as damaging as dementia is particularly worrisome, the researchers said.

and the Republican war on public education

Who didn't see this coming? If your daughter loses an athletic competition in a state that bans transgender women from sports, you can accuse the winner of not being female.

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2022/08/18/bagley-cartoon-hate-comes-home/

In that case, the UHSAA was satisfied with school records, which listed the young woman as female every year back to kindergarten. So it wasn't necessary to pull down her pants. An out-of-state-transfer or homeschooled-until-recently student might not have been so lucky.

The UHSAA says it takes all such complaints seriously, even if it's just “that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”

Meanwhile, in Florida ...

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10227936154139777&set=a.1493806195677

This Onion headline was just realistic enough to make me do a double-take: "Texas Schools Require Clear Bags To Prevent Students From Bringing In Books". It's satire. For now, at least.

But a real news story is only slightly less disturbing: A new state law requires every Texas public school to prominently display a poster stating "In God We Trust". So it doesn't matter if you're raising your child in an atheist or a polytheist home; the government of Texas has decided that monotheism is best, and wants to make sure your child knows that.

The law's defenders point out that "In God We Trust" is the national motto of the United States. But, like the "under God" addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, that motto wasn't adopted until the 1950s. The Founders could have left us a religious motto, but chose not to, just as they chose not to include the word "God" in the Constitution.

It's easy to debate the specific religious beliefs of the Founders, who were sometimes vague, sometimes changed their minds, and often disagreed with each other. But one thing they universally didn't want was to repeat what England went through in the 1600s, when rival sects competed for control of the government, often violently. The Founders wanted religious competition to happen outside of government. Using government power to champion one group's theology over another's violates their vision.

This is just one more piece of evidence that originalism is a facade masking Christian privilege. When Christians want privileges that would have horrified the Founders, originalism goes out the window.

A good piece of journalism from the NYT. They talked to history teachers in different parts of the country about what they actually teach. So much of the "critical race theory" or "wokeness" debate is based on people's fears and fantasies. It's good to get some actual information.

and you also might be interested in ...

A week from tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of President Biden pulling American troops out of Afghanistan.

CNN's security analyst Peter Bergen makes the this-was-a-huge-mistake case, which basically boils down to the fact that the Taliban is bad: It has destroyed women's rights, has no interest in democracy, has mismanaged the country into a famine, and appears to be sheltering Al Qaeda again.

That's all true. But what Bergen doesn't offer is any plausible alternative plan other than to keep losing American troops there forever. Yes, the Afghan government we supported folded immediately after we began pulling out, without even waiting for us to finish withdrawing. The army that we had spent so much money equipping and training turned out to have no interest in fighting. So the withdrawal was an ugly scene.

To me, that collapse just underlined how badly we needed to get out. Twenty years of nation-building ended up building nothing that could stand on its own for even a week. Tell me: What could we have accomplished by staying another six months? Two years? Fifty years? Why would our exit be any less ugly then, after we had spent another few trillion dollars and gotten several thousand more of our soldiers killed?

Yes, Afghanistan was a huge American mistake, but the mistake was staying for 20 years when we weren't accomplishing anything. Biden was the president who stopped living in denial, and I thank him for that.

On appeal, the NFL increased DeShaun Watson's suspension from six games to 11 and added a $5 million fine. The league, Watson, and the players' union have agreed to this, so my worst nightmare won't happen: I was afraid the case would get into the federal courts, and that Watson would be allowed to play until a decision came down.

But I'm conflicted about this outcome. It wouldn't be fair to suspend Watson forever, because (1) he was never indicted or convicted of anything, and (2) I disapprove of situations where a corporate monopoly gets to dictate terms to its workers.

Going in, I thought that anything less than half a season (8.5 games) would be a slap on the wrist. So I feel like I ought to be happy with 11 games.

But through this process, Watson has done nothing to earn my sympathy or empathy. He insists he did nothing wrong.

I’ve always stood on my innocence and always said I’ve never assaulted anyone or disrespected anyone, and I’m continuing to stand on that.

So I suppose he wants us to believe that those two dozen massage therapists (who tell strikingly similar stories about him) must be making it all up. It sure looks like Watson has learned no lesson (other than possibly "don't get caught"), so I'll be surprised if he isn't in trouble again before long.

In the meantime, I'm just grateful that I was never a Cleveland Browns fan. By trading for Watson and giving him a rich contract, the franchise has stained itself for years to come.

and let's close with something artificial

People are having way too much fun with those AI algorithms that turn phrases into artistic images. Here, the opening lines of famous novels get the AI treatment. Like Gravity's Rainbow's "A screaming comes across the sky."

Posted by at No comments:

Monday, August 8, 2022

Outliers

Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.

- James Holden,
a character in the novel Babylon's Ashes by James Corey

This week's featured post is "What's the point of punishing Trump?".

This week everybody was talking about Kansas

https://www.reformaustin.org/political-cartoons/kansas-abortion-vote/

In a deep red state, the Republican-dominated legislature hoped voters would approve a constitutional-amendment referendum that would let it ban abortion. So it scheduled the vote to coincide with a low-turnout primary where Republicans had interesting races and Democrats mostly didn't. Result: the amendment failed by a wide margin, 59%-41%.

The result raises an obvious question: If an anti-abortion referendum can't pass in Kansas, where could it pass? The NYT tried to answer. This kind of speculation is always sketchy, but here's what they came up with: A similar national referendum (if such a thing existed) would be opposed by 65%. Seven states would clearly pass the anti-abortion referendum, and the question would be a toss-up in several more.

One thing the Kansas referendum proved is that people will come out to vote on this issue. During the Roe era, that was always the question: People might tell pollsters they supported abortion rights, but would they cast a vote on that issue, or just count on the Supreme Court to protect them?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23290714/kansas-abortion-referendum-primary-turnout-charts

The next question, which won't be answered until November, is whether voters will choose candidates based on abortion rights. For years, suburban Republican women in particular may have thought of themselves as feminists, but have cast their votes with other priorities in mind, like taxes or national security.

The clearest test of this question is the Michigan governor's race, where Gretchen Whitmer faces Republican challenger Tudor Nixon, who would ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

Indiana banned abortion Friday, except in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality, or serious health risk to the pregnant woman. Along the way, a Democratic representative unsuccessfully offered an amendment also banning erectile dysfunction drugs.

If an unwanted pregnancy is an act of God, then impotency must be an act of God.

Here's how the abortion issue is being used in Texas by Mothers Against Greg Abbott (the other MAGA).

Texas has virtually banned abortion, but that doesn't mean it values fetuses. Bloomberg has a long article about how bad maternity care is in rural areas near the Mexican border. Presidio (a town of 4500 or so residents) has no full-time doctor. The nearest hospital is 90 minutes away: Big Bend in Alpine (population 5900). But that hospital has had trouble staffing its labor and delivery unit.

Some months it’s been open only three days a week. ... If [visiting Dr. Adrian] Billings’s patient goes into labor when the maternity ward is closed, she’ll have to make a difficult choice. She can drive to the next nearest hospital, in Fort Stockton, yet another hour away. Or, if her labor is too far along and she’s unlikely to make it, she can deliver in Big Bend’s emergency room. But the ER doesn’t have a fetal heart monitor or nurses who know how to use one. It also doesn’t keep patients overnight. When a woman gives birth there, she’s either transferred to Fort Stockton—enduring the long drive after having just had a baby—or discharged and sent home.

Why can't Big Bend staff its maternity unit? Covid, of course, but also a more basic problem:

As quaint as Alpine is, it has some drawbacks. It’s three and a half hours from El Paso and more than five from San Antonio. There’s one grocery store, and the closest Walmart is an hour away. There’s no day care, which makes it hard for businesses to recruit families with two working parents.

“We’ll hire a nurse who’ll say, ‘Great, I can start work in two weeks. Just let me get day care set up.’ We tell them, ‘Well, we don’t have day care in Alpine.’ They’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’ They can’t accept the job,” says Roane McLaughlin, Alpine’s only obstetrician and gynecologist. Before she moved to the area in 2014, Alpine didn’t have an OB-GYN at all.

In short, rural Texas is a bad place to be pregnant, whether you want to be or not. The state is anti-abortion because it's anti-woman, not pro-fetus.

Thinking about related rights, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby defends Rep. Glenn Thompson against charges of hypocrisy. Thompson is the GOP congressman who voted against a bill to codify same-sex marriage rights, and then delivered an upbeat toast at his son's same-sex wedding. So: yes, a hypocrite.

Jacoby defends the vote because the Respect For Marriage Act is a "political gimmick" that is unnecessary because same-sex marriage rights aren't in danger. We know this because "the court’s majority opinion [in Dobbs] repeatedly emphasizes that the overruling of Roe v. Wade does not cast doubt on prior rulings involving marriage or gay rights".

And Supreme Court justices would never mislead us about something like that, would they? Also, if the bill accomplishes nothing, why not pass it? What harm would it do?

For those of you who don't follow the Boston papers, before I read a Jacoby column I always ask myself "What would Pope Benedict have said about this issue?" That's usually a good predictor.

BTW: the religious Right doesn't think protecting same-sex marriage rights is a phony issue. They're solidly against it, and are pressuring Republican senators.

and the Inflation Reduction Act

https://claytoonz.com/2022/08/02/working-in-a-coal-mine/

The Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act Sunday, 51-50 on a straight party-line vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie. (Remember this the next time someone tells you there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats.)

The IRA is primarily a climate bill that over-funds itself by cracking down on corporations that pay no taxes, leaving $300 billion to offset the deficit over the next ten years. It also protects ObamaCare subsidies, cuts drug costs for seniors, and does a few other things. According to the environmentalist website Grist:

Independent analyses estimate that the IRA would slash approximately 6.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s emissions ledger over the course of the next decade, prevent up to 3,894 premature deaths per year by 2030, and get the U.S. two-thirds of the way to Biden’s goal of reducing total emissions 50 percent compared to 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

It now goes to the House, where it is expected to pass quickly.

This is a big deal. It's much smaller than the $4 trillion plan Biden originally proposed, and smaller yet than the $6 trillion plan Bernie Sanders wanted. But getting it through the Senate with only 50 Democratic senators was a major accomplishment.

https://www.politico.com/dims4/default/086864b/2147483647/resize/1160x%3E/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F96%2Fad%2F456e06334ac190a7d9ffad513914%2Fwuc220805-1160.jpg

In other legislative news, Tuesday Mitch McConnell's Republicans relented and passed the Honoring our PACT Act to help veterans suffering from the effects of toxic fumes from burn pits. It was the exact same bill they blocked last week.

The history of this bill is a lesson in Republican disinformation. In June, a version of the bill passed the Senate with 84 votes, which means at least 34 Republicans voted for it. (The 14 No votes were all Republicans.) The House passed the same bill, minus one line deleted technical reasons that had little impact on what the bill would do. So it went back to the Senate, where it was expected to pass without incident.

But then Senator Manchin announced that he had found a version of Biden's Build Back Better plan he could support, now relabeled the Inflation Reduction Act (see above). McConnell decided to throw a tantrum by scrapping whatever bipartisan bill he could find, which turned out to be PACT.

Suddenly, 41 Republican senators -- the exact number needed to sustain a filibuster -- had grave reservations about PACT. In particular, Ted Cruz (who had voted for the nearly identical bill in June) now denounced it as a "budgetary trick" that would lead to $400 billion in pork-barrel spending.

Over the weekend, the GOP realized just how unpopular it is to play games with the health care of veterans who may be dying from something we did to them. So they came back and passed the same bill that was so terrible last week. Cruz voted for it, and put out a statement applauding its passage. All the features Cruz complained about when he blocked the bill had been in it when he voted for it in June, and when he voted for it again Tuesday.

Bear this history in mind as you hear Cruz and other Republicans tell you terrible things about the Inflation Reduction Act.

and the economy

The late-pandemic economy is breaking all the usual patterns. By some definitions, we're already in a recession, but job growth is still booming and unemployment is the lowest it's been since the 1960s. Year-over-year inflation is the highest since 1981, but gas and food prices have been dropping this last month or two.

In short, just about anything anybody says about the economy these days, good or bad, deserves a yes-but response.

and the pandemic

Case-numbers are nearly meaningless in this era of home tests whose results are never reported. But hospitalization and death statistics continue to creep upwards. Deaths per day are running just under 500, up from under 300 in early June.

and Alex Jones

A jury ruled that he has to pay nearly $50 million to two parents of a child killed at Sandy Hook. I discuss this in the featured post. I didn't get around to mentioning that his lawyers' blunder has exposed him to a possible perjury charge. That's what happens when you should have called Saul.

and you also might be interested in ...

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=613388396799259&set=a.305833804221388

Even the "courageous" Republicans are lining up to support election-denying anti-democracy Trumpists once the primaries are over. Peter Meijer endorsed the guy he lost to. After seeing anti-democracy Republicans win the primaries in his state, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey tweeted:

This is going to be an important election given the issues our state is facing and it’s important for Arizona Republicans to unite behind our slate of candidates.

It's party-over-country, all the way.

I wish all the Biden's-low-approval-rating articles would break out WHY voters disapprove: How many conservatives think he's too liberal? How many liberals think he hasn't done enough? How many people of all sorts don't know what he's done or believe he's done something he hasn't?

I remember similar polls about how unpopular ObamaCare was at first: They never broke out how many people wanted the status quo versus how many wanted universal health care. Those polls fooled Republicans into thinking a repeal would be popular.

Jamestown, Michigan just voted to defund its public library.

The controversy in Jamestown began with a complaint about a memoir by a nonbinary writer, but it soon spiraled into a campaign against Patmos Library itself. After a parent complained about Gender Queer: a Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel about the author’s experience coming out as nonbinary, dozens showed up at library board meetings, demanding the institution drop the book. (The book, which includes depictions of sex, was in the adult section of the library.) Complaints began to target other books with LGBTQ+ themes.

One library director resigned, telling Bridge she’d been harassed and accused of indoctrinating kids; her successor also left the job. Though the library put Kobabe’s book behind the counter rather than on the shelves, the volumes remained available.

“We, the board, will not ban the books,” Walton told Associated Press on Thursday.

The library’s refusal to submit to the demands led to a campaign urging residents to vote against renewed funding for the library.

I emphasize: This is a town library, not a school library. "Jamestown Conservatives" are trying to control what their fellow citizens are allowed to read.

Christianity Today looks at White Southern Protestants who have mostly stopped going to church. (About 45% of White Southerners report going to church once or less in the past year.) When Northeastern Catholics left their church, they tended to become more liberal, particularly on social issues. But WSP's aren't doing that. Instead, they're just losing their trust in other people.

When asked, “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance or would they try to be fair?” 54 percent of white Protestant southerners who attended church no more than once a year said that most people would try to take advantage of them.

In response to the question “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” 58 percent said the latter.

The responses from white Southern Protestants who attended church every week were almost the direct opposite. Sixty-two percent said that most people would “try to be fair” rather than take advantage of them, and 57 percent said that most of the time people “try to be helpful.”

This isn't news, but it's such a good line I have to repeat it. In the preface to the 10th anniversary edition of his spy novel Slow Horses (now an Apple TV+ series) Mick Herron confessed that he actually doesn't know that much about spies.

A writer spends the first part of his or her career hoping to be discovered; the rest hoping not to be found out.

and let's close with something sporty

Legendary sports announcer Vin Scully died Tuesday night at the age of 94. He called the Brooklyn/LA Dodger games for 67 seasons (1950-2016), but also covered a wide variety of other sports events. If you're a sports fan, you probably know his voice from historic moments like Hank Aaron's 715th home run.

But if you don't remember Vin or his voice, here's some amusing proof that he could make anything sound engaging: A guy who did the sports report for a San Diego rock station (and met Scully in the press box during a Padres/Dodgers game) once asked Scully to read his grocery list.

Posted by at No comments:

Monday, August 1, 2022

Kosher Legislation

Eventually is not OK. Tell someone with cancer that's been fighting this for years that eventually they'll get the help that they've earned. That is not an acceptable answer. It is despicable to continue to use America's men and women who are fighting for this country as political pawns for anger you have about separate issues. This bill is utterly and completely focused on veterans' issues. There is no pork in it. It is a kosher bill.

- Jon Stewart, responding to the claim that the PACT Act will pass eventually

This week's featured post is "A Week When Congress Mattered".

This week everybody was talking about important legislation

The featured post covers the CHIPS Act, which passed last week; the Honor Our PACT Act, which Republicans blocked in the Senate; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which came back from the dead last week and now just needs Senator Sinema to sign on.

and a third party

https://www.anselm.edu/new-hampshire-institute-politics/blog/voting-america-democrat-or-republican-or-neither

Some moderate, Trump-rejecting Republicans and Democrat Andrew Yang announced a new political party this week, calling it Forward.

I think this effort is doomed, for reasons spelled out by NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie. A winner-take-all method of election, like the one that prevails in most the US, favors a two-party system. There's no way to form a coalition after the election, as parties do in proportional-representation parliamentary systems, so there's a strong incentive to form a majority coalition before the election. Typically that results in two coalitions battling to see which can command a majority.

Third parties, then, are temporary phenomena in America. They arise primarily when both of the existing parties have agreed to ignore some contentious issue. In the 1840s, for example, Democrats and Whigs both tried to downplay the slavery issue, which split both of them regionally. The Republican Party arose because there was effectively no way to vote against slavery. The Whigs then broke apart, the Civil War was fought, and Republicans took the Whigs' place in the two-party system. (If you're wondering how we got from there to here, where Republicans are the white-supremacy party, I explained that in 2012.)

Most third parties never even make a splash. The few that do usually get co-opted by one of the major parties. For example, when the Democrats in 1948 embraced the previously Republican issue of civil rights, the Dixiecrats gave worried Whites an anti-civil-rights option. That led to George Wallace's American Independent Party in 1968, whose issues eventually got co-opted into the Republican Party by Nixon's "southern strategy".

The typical thought pattern of a third-party voter is "Neither major party offers any hope on my issue, so I don't care which one of them wins." That's why third parties usually emerge on the extremes. If Donald Trump had lost the Republican nomination in 2016 to another John-McCain-style neo-conservative who would probably support the same foreign interventions as Hillary Clinton, an America First Party could have made a significant run. If Democrats continue to spin their wheels on climate change, a Green Party is a possibility. Either of those movements would probably fail at first, while simultaneously wrecking the chances of the major party closest to it, so the faction that spins off really needs to have hit that I-don't-care-any-more point.

Like Bouie, I don't see how to make that work in the center. Picture it: "I am so committed to my sensible middle-of-the-road agenda that it makes no difference to me whether America gets 'woke' or goes fascist." Who thinks like like that?

The only way a centrist third party can succeed in our current system is with some non-partisan national hero at the top, like a Dwight Eisenhower fresh off of winning World War II. But Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman can't fill those shoes.

The other way a third party works is if we change the system first, say by instituting ranked-choice voting, as Alaska and Maine have. Why shouldn't John Kasich have offered a centrist-Republican third option in 2016, if his Hillary-fearing voters could have listed Trump as their second choice?

The Forward platform resembles what Matt Yglesias promotes as "popularism": focusing on the popular parts of your party's message rather than the unpopular parts. David Roberts explains why that's not likely to work:

Every proposal for a third party in the US ends up amounting to the same thing: a dream of center-left policy without all the nasty politics. It's just a bunch of [very serious people] thinking, "hey, *we* won't talk about defunding the police or pronouns, so the right will leave us alone."

In other words, it takes the right's bad-faith characterization of the left as its starting point. Of course, if such a party ever became a threat, the right could just as easily smear it! Then I guess the VSPs would start pining for a fourth.

The right's entire raison d'être is to make being on the side fighting for fairness & justice *unpleasant*, to associate it with marxism or pedophilia or whatever. Third party wankers think they can escape this dynamic by being theatrically Reasonable, but they are deluded.

and tomorrow's votes

According the Kansas Supreme Court, that state's constitution currently contains a right to privacy that prevents the legislature from banning abortion. There's a provision on tomorrow's ballot that would change that, setting up a possible abortion ban (which the very Republican legislature would almost certainly pass).

This is the first time actual voters have gotten to weigh in on abortion since the Supreme Court junked a federal right to abortion in June. You'd expect a conservative state like Kansas to pass it, but the polling is unclear.

Also, it's a confusing situation: The legislature scheduled this vote to coincide with a primary, when turnout is low. Initially that was assumed to favor anti-abortion voters, but abortion-rights voters may be more motivated than the legislature expected.

Plus, a Yes vote is a vote against abortion rights, while a No vote is a vote for abortion rights. Some number of voters are going to get that backwards.

The other state to watch is Missouri, where the GOP Senate primary tests just how much scandal the MAGA electorate is willing to write off. Former Governor Eric Greitens resigned in 2018 to avoid impeachment, assailed by charges of sexual assault on his mistress as well as various campaign finance violations.

Charges were eventually dropped and he escaped going to trial, but the claims are still out there. In addition, his ex-wife has accused him of domestic violence.

But Mr. Greitens has adopted the Trump guide to making vileness and suspected criminality work for you: Brace up, double down and bray that any and all allegations are just part of — all together now! — a political witch hunt.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Greitens is a political grievance peddler. Also like Mr. Trump, he saves his most concentrated bile for fellow Republicans. One of the most puerile ads of the midterms thus far has been Mr. Greitens’s “RINO hunting” spot, in which he leads a group of armed men in tactical gear as they storm a lovely little suburban home in search of G.O.P. heretics.

Greitens was the front-runner until big money got behind an ad campaign highlighting the ex-wife's claims. That seems to have brought him down, but he's still close enough that it's not a foregone conclusion that he'll lose.

Multiple polls show the former governor’s support slipping, dropping him behind a couple of his opponents. The state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, appears to have taken the lead. He, too, is an election-denying Trump suck-up. But at this point the G.O.P. is operating on a curve; simply weeding out those alleged to be abusers and other possible criminals can feel like a major achievement.

We'll see what happens tomorrow.

and the DoJ's 1-6 investigation

With Congress' 1-6 hearings on hiatus, attention shifts to the Department of Justice. From the beginning, pundits have been skeptical of Attorney General Merrick Garland's stomach for indicting the political actors behind the insurrection. Sure, DoJ might prosecute rioters by the hundreds and get convictions for trespassing and so forth, but would investigators ever start to climb the pyramid?

It looks like they are. The federal grand jury has been interviewing aides to Mike Pence, and asking them questions about conversations with Trump. DoJ also seems to be looking into Trump's fake-elector scheme.

DoJ investigations are supposed to make as few waves as possible until indictments come down, and to vanish without a trace if there is no crime to indict. So you need experienced tea-leaf-readers to interpret the signs. My favorites are the folks at Lawfare.

you also might be interested in ...

The Biden administration has been trying to get Russia to accept a prisoner swap for WNBA star Brittney Griner and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, but so far it's not working.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1015537/the-trade

She's black and female and in trouble with Russia, so course we know what side Trump will come down on: Biden shouldn't try to get her out at all, because she's "spoiled" and "loaded up with drugs". (To me, that sounds like a good description of Don Jr.)

[The Russians] don’t like drugs. And she got caught. And now, we’re supposed to get her out — and she makes, you know, a lot of money.

Griner makes the WNBA max salary of $227K, less than what Bill Russell was making in the 1960s. That's not a lot of money for somebody who is (1) at the top of her profession and (2) expecting the short career of a professional athlete. The reason she (and other WNBA stars) go overseas during the off-season is to supplement their income.

The Celebrity Net Worth web site estimates her entire fortune at $5 million. It takes Steph Curry about ten games to earn that much.

The Juice Media has a project it calls "honest government ads". Here's one for the Supreme Court.

Amanda Marcotte points out the similarities between Republican reactions to mass shootings and to horror stories from their abortion bans: Blame the victims, claim liberals have manufactured the story, and blatantly gaslight about what their laws actually say.

This is all in line with what I was pointing out two weeks ago: It's an article of faith that conservative policies have no victims. If some obvious victim begins to get attention, that story has to be knocked down by any means necessary.

Michelle Goldberg makes a similar point:

Members of the anti-abortion movement, including [Alexandra] DeSanctis, often claim that abortion is never medically necessary. If they can’t bear to look clearly at the world they’ve made, maybe it’s because then they’d have to admit that what they’ve been saying has never been true.

Welcome to the world, George Jetson, who (according to a Warner Brothers wiki was born yesterday. Other sources have his birthday as August 27, but there's general agreement he's born in 2022.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1015535/woke-democrats

Bill Russell died at age 88. He was arguably the greatest winner in sports history. In his 13-year NBA career, his Boston Celtics won 11 championships. He also won two NCAA championships at the University of San Francisco, and an Olympic gold medal with the US national team in 1956.

Also dead at 89 is Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek series. Her character wasn't as central to the show as the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triad, so her importance is easy to overlook these days, when we're used to seeing black actors in all sorts of roles. In 2016, a 50th anniversary retrospective noted:

Those of us who weren’t alive at the time probably can’t grasp how groundbreaking the character of Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols, was for audiences of the day. She was one of the first black women on TV not portrayed as a servant. ... Nichols played her part in Star Trek’s most famous milestone - what is widely considered the first inter-racial kiss on American television. It wasn’t, in fact – Nancy Sinatra smooched Sammy Davis Jr on TV the year before, to name but one instance – but the moment was so iconic and definitive that it deserves credit.

and let's close with a science-meets-horror moment

The researchers are calling it "necrobiotics", which sounds like it ought to be the study of the living dead. Talk about high concept: the movie just seems to write itself. They're manipulating dead spiders to grab things. What could possibly go wrong?

It turns out that after spiders die, their corpses are basically hydraulic devices. If you can suppress your urge to run out of the room, it's actually pretty cool.

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)