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Bye Claire

Thursday, December 27, 2018

It would have been nice had Claire McCaskill been re-elected, had that re-election led to a Democratic Senate, but as it is, good riddance. It seems Claire has the same advice for Democrats that Republicans keep giving us. We should stop suggestingthat we want to do nice things for people and express concern for white working class Trump voters and she’s especially offended that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presumes to advocate for things that everyone wants, like Medicare for All and free college tuition:

McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who’s in her final days in office after losing her bid for a third Senate term, told CNN in a wide-ranging interview that her party must begin to focus and deliver on real issues to attract independent and white working class voters– not pie-in-the-sky policy ideas, such as tuition-free college, that have little chance of becoming law. Her concern: Voters grow cynical after hearing campaign promises that never go anywhere, empowering forces like President Donald Trump to rail against Washington for failed promises, as he did in 2016.

You haves to wonder precisely which issues she’s talking about that do attract independent and white working class voters, given the fact that she couldn’t seem to come up with any.

But I find this to be a funny thing. Republicans have been making promises that they don’t even intend to keep for years. I seem to recall a positively stable genius promising a wall that Mexico was going to finance. It helped get him elected.

In the opinion of this humble blogger, if the Democrats in the House pass progressive legislation it will be hugely popular. It won’t survive in the Senate, but that’s okay for now provided we can demonstrate to the American people what they couldget if they handed the government over to the Democrats. Should that happen, by the way, the precedent has now been established that filibusters are no longer allowed when they are inconvenient to the majority party. 

I got an email from Bernie Sander’s campaign to the effect that rightwing Democrats are already running attack ads against him because he is backing Medicare for All, which has widespread support among, you know, real people, including white people. The scare stories about increased costs are all bogus, because they don’t take the decreases in private insurance costs into account. From the consumer’s perspective, indeed, from any rational perspective, health insurance costs are a tax, whether levied by the government or profit seeking, claim denying private insurers. What’s important is the total bill, which is higher here that in countries that have a Medicare for All equivalent.

But I digress. Good riddance to Claire McCaskill. We’ll do much better with real Democrats.

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Bone spur reflections

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

I had thought of making this yet another modest proposal, but, for reasons I’ll get to, I’ve rejected that approach.

Anyone with half a brain has been morally certain that Trump’s bone spur draft exemption was a fraud, but today we have substantial evidenceto back that up.

I was going to propose that the Democrats start a concerted campaign to demand that Trump release his x-rays to prove that he does indeed have a bone spur. Sort of echoing Trump’s treatment of Obama (birth certificate) and Warren (DNA testing).

Ah, but here’s the rub. If he doesn’t release an x-ray, the press will simply dismiss the Democrats demands out of hand as deeply silly. They won’t, as they did with Warren, write up the issue as one that casts serious doubts on Trump’s credibility. (Wait, is that phrase, “Trump’s credibility” an oxymoron?).

On the off chance that Trump has developed a real bone spur since his draft age years, and can therefore produce an x-ray, the press, which after all must be fair to both sides, will pronounce it a Trump victory, rather than, say, push out a meme that he handled it wrong, as they did with Elizabeth Warren. No win situations only exist for Democrats.

So, no modest proposal on this one. We must let this story fly into the memory hole. I give it three days until it disappears completely.

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Sounds familiar

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

The New York Times has an articletoday about Hungary, which is an autocracy masquerading as a democracy. Other than a brief mention that Steve Bannon is a fan of dictator in all but name Viktor Orban, the article doesn’t draw any comparisons with these United States, but it’s awfully difficult to read the article and not see that many of the devices Orban used to solidify control are at work here. Consider this paragraph for example:

And though Mr. Orban commands a formidable majority, it is partly the result of this echo chamber in the media, which has muted alternative voices, and the redrawing of electoral boundaries and the restructuring of the electoral system to favor his party.

We’ll get to the echo chamber in a moment, but lets think about electoral boundaries, etc. We don’t often think about state lines as being electoral boundaries but they are when it comes to our most significant legislative chamber, the Senate, which controls appointments to the judiciary. There is an anti-democratic bias baked into our system, which is far and away more biased now than at the time it was designed. It suits the billionaires that buy our politicians to a T. No need to pay for an expensive Californian Senator when you can get two from Wyoming for a lot less, and, not only are they just as powerful, but the Wyoming electorate is far more easily made subject to Fox propagandizing. There’s a lot of talk about gerrymandering, as there should be, but the fact is that this country will never have a government that reflects the will of the majority so long as the Connecticut Compromisecontinues in effect. I haven’t researched it, but just as an example, Brett Kavanaugh would likely not be on the Supreme Court right now if the votes of the populated state’s Senator’s were weighted to take account of population differences. In sum, we have a system in which it’s fairly easy for the autocrats to buy the courts and the Senate, with gerrymandering taking care of the House. So it’s not that unlikely that Orban picked up some of his techniques from the USA.

Where Orban has American autocrats beat is in his total domination of the media, though I’d say it’s a tie in the courts.

Unlike in Communist-era Hungary, there is a Constitutional Court, along with dozens of other nominally independent state watchdogs. There is a plethora of private media outlets, whose journalists do not face physical danger for their reporting. And there are free elections in which anyone can run, but which Mr. Orban has won handsomely since re-entering office in 2010.

Beneath this veneer lies a more complex reality.

Mr. Orban’s allies control the Constitutional Court, while loyalists control which prosecutions make it to court in the first place. They have rarely, if ever, pursued corruption allegations against Mr. Orban and his ministers — and even if they did, few would hear about it.

By applying financial pressure on the owners of independent media outlets, Mr. Orban has gradually persuaded them to sell to his friends, or toe a softer line.

State media, meanwhile, is entirely loyal to Mr. Orban. After state television channels failed to broadcast more than a few fleeting clips of recent anti-Orban demonstrations, a group of opposition lawmakers visited their headquarters last week to request some airtime. They were refused, and later ejected by force.

We still have a somewhat independent media, though the non-propagandists are almost as destructive as Fox and Sinclair, since their guiding principle is a distorted both siderism, which insists on balancing genuine attacks on our fundamental democratic principles by Republicans with trivial Democratic transgressions, like lacking civility in their responses to Republican outrages.

It is comforting to think that Trump is too incompetent to pull off the total destruction of American democracy, and that the backlash against him will wind up strengthening our system. It’s unlikely that’s in the cards, though we have to hope. I’m beginning to think that there might be the votes in the Senate to impeach, now that Trump has pissed off the billionaires by tanking the stock market. If that happened, Fox would immediately beatify Pence, and he would pursue autocracy far more effectively and far more below the radar than Trump.

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Beto redux

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

This is truly irritating. A couple of days ago I passed on a blog post passing on an article by David Sirota in which Sirota argued that Beto O’Rourke was a pseudo progressive.

There is substantial evidence that this is simply a Bernie backer (I don’t think there’s any evidence that Bernie is directly involved) trying to poison the well so far as Beto is concerned.

Some details at this twitter thread.

We really don’t need this yet again. It would be nice if we could avoid a circular firing squad in 2020.

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One of life’s mysteries

Sunday, December 23, 2018

Just saw a truly funny comic in the latest issue of Funny Times, a publication I highly recommend. Essential bathroom reading. Anyway, here’s the comic:

Now, I have a great deal of respect for women, but like the poor fellow in the cartoon, I can’t understand why they can’t understand a simple equation like the one he’s demonstrating. Every man, regardless of his degree of education, appreciates the Three Stooges, while women, even those with PhDs, and maybe especially those with PhDs, don’t seem to be able to grasp their greatness.

One of life’s mysteries.

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My bad on Beto

Saturday, December 22, 2018

I know that there’s been a surfeit of crazy the last few days, but events move too fast for a hobbyist blogger, so let me start simply by saying that I was definitely not wrong when I diagnosed Individual-1 as being seriously mentally ill. Everything else that has to be said about recent events has been said elsewhere, so I will turn my attention to the Democrats. After all, this blog is called CT BLUE, dedicated to the proposition that Democrats should win, despite their best efforts.

It is my sad duty to confess error. Sometime in the past few weeks I expressed a tentative preference for Beto O’Rourke as our 2020 candidate. I did not do my homework. He was, of course, vastly preferable to Ted Cruz, but then, who wouldn’t be. He also talked a good game on the campaign trail, but apparently his actual record leaves a lot to be desired:

He’s not that bad. He’d be a better president than Michael Bloomberg or Kirsten Gillibrand or John Delaney. But the Biden people see Beto as a threat and the knives are out. Several Bernie supporters– this one included– feel Beto was getting a record-free free ride towards the nomination and his record– like Gillibrand’s and Biden’s, for example, needed to be examined.

David Sirota’s Guardian piece, Beto O’Rourke frequently voted for Republican legislation, analysis reveals is absolutely devastating. A presidential race is not the same as taking a runner against arch-villain Ted Cruz in a Texas midterm. Beto had nothing to lose and he got better and better as a candidate as the campaign picked up momentum. But his record as an office-holder didn’t change. “[A] new analysis of congressional votes from the non-profit news organisation Capital & Main,” wrote Sirota, “shows that even as O’Rourke represented one of the most solidly Democratic congressional districts in the United States, he has frequently voted against the majority of House Democrats in support of Republican bills and Trump administration priorities. Capital & Main reviewed the 167 votes O’Rourke has cast in the House in opposition to the majority of his own party during his six-year tenure in Congress. Many of those votes were not progressive dissents alongside other left-leaning lawmakers, but instead votes to help pass Republican-sponsored legislation.”

More details at the link.

I think a lot of potential Democratic candidates, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of the media, believe that almost anyone can beat Individual-1 in 2020. I beg to differ. First of all, there is no question he will be renominated, as he is currently in the process of absorbing the RNC into his own campaign organization.and there’s even talk of ditching primariesto make a challenge all but impossible. That setup will make the DNC tilt in 2016 look hyper-impartial. If he’s in jail, he probably won’t be renominated, but he won’t be, and therefore he will be the candidate.

It is already beginning to look like the Democratic establishment will do in 2020 what it did in 2016: tilt the playing field to support its favored candidate. That candidate is shaping up to be Joe Biden, the one candidate most likely to lose to Trump in 2020. It can’t be said that the risk we’d run in nominating him is worth running because he’s good on policy. That’s because he’s not. He’s horrible.

As one small example of what he’d be up against, consider his reputation as being “gaffe-prone”. If he says something even marginally stupid, the media will amplify it for weeks (see, e.g., Al Gore’s alleged dishonesty in 2000). They do this in order to be fair to both sides. As part of that fairness, they will report, and then forget, each and every colossally stupid thing Trump says, because, after all, that’s just Trump being Trump.

Apart from that, Biden will inspire exactly no one.

We need a young, dynamic, progressive candidate. I thought Beto fit that bill, but it looks like I was wrong. The rest of the pack, for one reason or another, present risks of their own. Most of them (looking at you especially, Kirsten) are self seeking, “moderate” Democrats who would do as Democrats have done for the past 40 years: avoid backing the progressive agenda in order to seek votes from brain dead Fox viewers. Votes they never get, but who’s counting?

We thought we were getting a young, progressive candidate in 2008, or, I should say, we deluded ourselves into believing we were. Obama is a very good person, don’t get me wrong, but he blew an opportunity to pursue a rational agenda in the vain and unrealistic hope that he could somehow bridge the gap between the rational and the crazy. I won’t belabor the point, but we don’t need yet another Democrat who will come in on a wave of hope and then proceed to pursue halfway measures that don’t appreciably or perceptibly improve people’s lives. Had Obama and the Democrats, in 2009, pushed through a recovery plan that did more than stop the bleeding, I firmly believe the red wave of 2010 would never have happened. We don’t need another in 2022.

Bernie would fit the bill, if Bernie were 30 years younger, but he’s not. Anyway, the Democratic establishment would move heaven and earth to prevent his nomination.

We may yet be stuck with Beto. He’s not what we want, but he may at least be what we need to win in 2020. As a candidate, he’d be great. As a president, he’d probably be a huge disappointment, and we’d see a red wave in 2022. But, on the bright side (and we should always look at the bright side of life), if he won, Individual-1 might end up in that jail cell, unless, of course, his successor decides to “heal the country’s wounds” by pardoning the bastard.

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Can’t stop laughing at this

Friday, December 21, 2018

I came across this picture when I followed a twitter link. As I’ve said before, I don’t know how to embed tweets, and I humbly apogize for my inability to give credit to the brilliant mind that put this together. Everytime I look at it I laugh.

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A Goodbye to the Flim-Flam Man

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Paul Ryan will be leaving us soon, and the folks at McSweeney’s are marking the occasion. I got a kick out of it. Here’s the start:

Sing to me, O Fox Muse, of that noodle-spined hero who traveled far and wide, born in Janesville, Wisconsin, the last born son of Dracula and a polo shirt. Many cities of men he saw on Listening Tours: men who were steelworkers, and coal miners, and men who toiled and farmed and hammered and sweat; he met with men with collars of blue and skin of white, and he made a very serious Listening Face at them, which was where he pursed his lips and nodded at three-second intervals, in this way fighting the urge to yell, “Your money should be my money!”

Yes, many cities of men he saw, and learned their minds, but he could not save them from — I’m sorry, is this right, Muse? It says he was trying to save them from being able to afford healthcare? He dedicated basically his entire life to that? That’s correct as written? Okay.

Yes, many cities of men he saw, and learned their minds, but he could not save them from the horrors and tumult of affordable healthcare, hard though he strove. Recall, Muse, how, as a young man, our hero helped care for his grandmother as Medicare provided for her late-stage Alzheimer’s treatment, and how there, he vowed before Gods and Men alike, that he would dedicate his entire life to making healthcare inaccessible not only to grandmothers, but also grandfathers, and grandsons, and granddaughters, and honestly, cancer-curing puppies wearing snow boots and scarves, if that kind of legislation were ever introduced.

It goes on. I don’t know if all the facts set forth about the hero are true. Did his kindergarten teacher really require each student to give a card to everyone else in the class “specifically to protect him”? I suspect not, but where it’s not strictly true, it reeks of truthiness.

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A bit of speculation

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

I don’t pretend to know all that much about British politics, but it strikes me that the Conservative Party is suffering from one of the anti-democratic maladies for which the Republican Party has become notorious.

Apparently, the British people, if given the chance, would vote to reverse the Brexit vote.It was, after all, the result of fraud on the part of its proponents mixed with a healthy dose of Russian interference. (Sounds familiar doesn’t it?) Yet Theresa may will have none of it:

With talk of a second referendum growing, May again reiterated her opposition to another vote last night and said parliament had “a democratic duty to deliver what the British people voted for”. She even described Tony Blair’s recent appearance in Brussels to support a second vote as “an insult to the office he once held and the people he once served.”

At first glance, you’d think that a second referendum would be a no-brainer, since if, as expected, it reversed the first referendum, there would be no need to come up with an exit strategy, which so far has proven to be impossible. Not only that, it might salvage May’s tenuous grip on her office.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that May is terrified of her base, just as our Republican politicians are terrified of theirs. 

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How do these idiots rise to the surface?

Monday, December 17, 2018

Okay, I guess if you run a propaganda network, you’ll give a forum to anyone. Here’s a person who has a columnin the New York Post, who’s invited on to Fox to talk about his suggestion that Trump supporters pay for the wall by starting a GoFundMe campaign:

Trump surrogates in the conservative media are so desperate to get a border war built so Hair Leader doesn’t look like a con artist (he does), that they are stumping Trump voters to chip in $80 apiece so they could fund the wall themselves.

Isn’t Mexico supposed to pay for Donald Trump’s border wall? Didn’t Donald Trump campaign on that proposition to the American people?

Michael Goodwin calls for Trump supporters to start a GoFundMe page in today’s NY Post.

Let the people who support the wall pay for it — directly and voluntarily. That’s what a number of readers suggest.–

“If the 63 million people who voted for Trump each pledge $80, we can build the wall.”

And as usual, a Trump supporter in the media who writes something that might help their petulant lordship, immediately got the call to be a guest on Fox and Friends.

This guy is an idiot, and he has a column in a (relatively) major newspaper and is allowed to bloviate on what is, alas, a major “news” network. I suppose it’s too much to expect such folks to address a rather fundamental issue here. Even ifyou raised all the money you’d need, you’d have no right to build the wall. It has to be authorized by Congress and you would need the capability to exercise the power of eminent domain to seize the land on which you built it. There are, in fact, a lot of property owners on the border who would prefer to keep their land as is, thank you very much.

The eminent domain issue isn’t discussed much in this context. Right wingers don’t like eminent domain. Supposedly. Witness the reaction from the right (all the way to the Supreme Court about the little pink house) when New London used eminent domain to facilitate a project that was supposed to bring jobs to the city. The city made the mistake of believing a major corporation, but that’s another issue. Of course, right wing hypocrisy knows no bounds, so we can rest assured that there would be no squawks from that quarter if the government seized border land to build a useless wall, so long as they could hate them some brown people in the process.

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