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Dems getting in shape to lose in 2020

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Okay, this post will assume a couple of things that are by no means a sure thing, considering we’re talking about the Democrats. Still, I’m assuming that even the Democrats can’t blow the election this year, since Trump is doing such a good job of handing the election to them.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to do their damndest to lose in 2020. Bear in mind that they have a hallowed tradition of losing big in years ending in zero, so they can enable Republican gerrymandering. But that’s just the start of it.

Check out this articlefor a rundown of Democratic priorities should they win the House. Nancy Pelosi will be the speaker yet again, and she will pursue, as per usual, Democratic priorities that will strike a chord with no voters anywhere. Why pursue policies with broad public support when you can artificially restrain yourself in the name of fiscal responsibility, even though you know you’re just legislating for show since the genius will veto everything anyway. Why give the public a glimpse of what they could get if they had a progressive government, when you can assure them that the Democrats are committed to giving you more of the same pallid policies if they regain the majority. This is especially discouraging:

Allen also points out that “Pelosi, despite opposition from some progressives, is committed to reviving the ‘pay-go’ (or pay as you go) rule she had during her previous run as speaker, requiring that new spending be paid for by budget cuts or revenue offsets. It’s almost as if she’s hoping to build up a surplus for the next Republican Congress to squander instead of doing anything useful for the American people. This is why more and more people are calling them Democraps instead of Democrats. Except for the hatred of Trump, this plan would keep people from bothering to even get out to vote in November.

So what happened to that “We’re the party that isn’t afraid to think big” thing? No transformative policy agenda here. What do progressives want that Pelosi and her team are ignoring? Obviously, Medicare-For-All, but also free state colleges and universities, spending real money to tackle the opioid crisis, passing a paid medical and family leave program, job guarantee, incentivizing veteran hiring, a massive investment in green infrastructure, moving towards 100% renewable energy, student loan debt relief. Not a hint of any of that in the Pelosi Plan. For one perspective, her plan is more conservative than the Republicans’. They both sing from the same hymnal but the GOP is always ready to abandon fiscal responsibility for their priorities– tax cuts, corporate subsidies, the military– while Democratic leadership is too scared to. Pelosi is sending a message that makes the Democratic Party sound like the GOP of the 1950’s– “We’re the party of responsible budgets. Elect us if you’re mad about Trump and his congressional enablers racking up trillion-dollar deficits with his gigantic tax cut.”

It was just a few weeks ago that Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) told NBC that “The instinct that some Democrats have, which is born out of a sense of responsibility as the ‘governing’ party, is to explain exactly how you’re going to pay for everything and how it all adds up. It puts you at a total disadvantage because you’re already constraining your priorities.” Schatz also said that “the GOP is skillful about never talking about paying for what they want and Dems are always trying to satisfy the 13 people who are doing Third Way work on K Street. It’s a game that disadvantages Democrats. I don’t want to play it anymore.”

It’s nice that Schatz doesn’t want to play that game, but it will be the only game in town if the Democrats win, and it’s the game most Democrats want to play. It boggles the mind that Democrats haven’t figured out the Republican balanced budget con, when it’s plain as day to everyone with an ounce of brains. This approach is a sure fire way to dampen turnout in 2020. Here’s hoping that the new blood being injected into the party will stage a coup and get rid of Pelosi and her geriatric entourage. But I’m not holding my breath.

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The Impeachment Issue

Monday, September 3, 2018

There’s been a lot of back and forth lately about whether Democrats should campaign on impeachment this fall. It’s something the media brings up quite a bit, implying as they do that Democrats can’t stop talking about it. Democratic consultants meanwhile, are urging Democrats to stay away from it and concentrate solely on economic issues. Of course, those same consultants would advise staying away from Medicare for All, because …. well, because despite the fact that about 70% of everybodyis for it, it is our bounden duty as Democrats to speak in numbing generalities that excite absolutely no one. If there is a more overpaid, underperforming group than Democratic consultants, I would like to know about it. On the other hand, of course, the DCCC will continue to recruit DINOs in their endless quest to get some of those NRA votes.

The correct approach seems fairly obvious. The fact is that the Trump Administration is already the most corrupt administration in American history. It has also done the most to increase inequality in this country, while destroying the environment, our health care system, voting rights, etc., in the process. The grounds for Trump’s impeachment and the political abuses of his administration are inextricably intertwined. It is his chronic criminality that got Trump involved with Russia in the first place. A candidate need not talk about impeachment explicitly; all he or she need do is connect the dots that proceed from his criminality, and that of his cabinet officersand assorted hangers on, to the economic situation in which we find ourselves. A candidate need not stop there, the recent travails of Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins are Exhibits A and B for the proposition that the Republican Party is rife with corruption. The Republicans are not just enabling Trump, they are enabling each other. 

Almost half the country wants Trump impeached, and that includes almost half of all independents. As the evidence mounts, those numbers will increase. You don’t have to use the word, but you can still deplore the criminality and corruption, and strike a chord with the voters that you need to turn out to win.

The question still remains: should the Democrats impeach Trump if they take over the House? I think they should, but only if they can agree on the correct messaging. They should concede in advance that the Republican Party is too corrupt to provide any votes in the Senate, no matter the nature of the evidence. In fact, they should repeatedly use that as evidence of the rank corruption and degeneracy of the Republican Party as a whole. They should gather the evidence, which will be massive, present it to the nation clearly and comprehensively, and impeach the man as a statement of principle, as a sort of “sense of the House”, and, at that point, sense of the nation. They should make it clear that’s what they’re doing, and they should time it so that it happens at the most opportune moment. The Senate Trial, properly conducted, would be great theater and could be a great propaganda exercise. The optimum result would be a fatally wounded, but still president, Very Stable Genius limping to the finish line in 2020, with Pence politically dead and the country ready to throw the bums out.

Do I think the Democrats have the capacity to pull this off? No, nor do they have the vision.

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More of this please

Monday, September 3, 2018

Everyone in Washington knows it. Indeed, every thinking person in the country knows it, but there is among many an unspoken conspiracy to avoid talking about the fact that the man who occupies the office of the president of the United States is seriously mentally ill. We don’t need no doctor to tell us this, but it can’t hurt to have one chime in and confirm it. So, it’s refreshing that Howard Dean, who is a doctor, is willing to state the obvious, who had this to say in the course of a discussion about Saint John McCain:

“I’ve long believed the president is mentally ill,” Dean replied, “and I believe narcissism overcomes his ability to know, A, what’s good for the country, and B, what’s good for him.”

“He’s not going to change after 70-odd years,” the former Vermont governor continued. “I don’t see this as just Washington elite. I see this as a matter of a statement of decency about the whole country. It’s not coincidence that Donald Trump is at the lowest percentage rating he’s ever been at, which is 36 percent.”

I wonder if it’s lost on Dean that Trump’s obvious mental illness goes so often unmentioned, while his own mental soundness was questioned repeatedly after the media stripped loud background noises and cheering from a video of him in order to make it look like he was screaming in a quiet room. 

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Friday Night Music

Friday, August 31, 2018

This is Labor Day Weekend. I can’t claim to know the details of exactly how it became a holiday, but it’s always been my impression that it had something to do with…you know…labor. Working people. Unions. Nowadays, of course, no one cares about working people, except the ones who go to diners in the Midwest and vote against their own interests to piss off the liberals. Anyway, I thought I’d try to find something about those working people, and this song seems somewhat appropriate, though I’m not so sure about the stay at home voter.

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A rant

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Inasmuch as this is my blog, and I have now reached the age at which I can officially be deemed a curmudgeon, I am going to vent my spleen regarding a certain matter that has little if anything to do with politics, but quite a lot about why certain corporations are having their clocks cleaned by Amazon, from whom I avoid purchasing anything if I possibly can.

Last week I decided to buy a dehumidifier. Lowe’s had none in stock and the salesman expressed no interest in getting one, so I went to Sears. They had three on display, but the one I wanted was not in stock. I bought it anyway, and was told it would be in the store today for me to pick up. Or, more exactly, it would probablybe in the store today, but I should certainly not count on that. Delivery to my home (about 10 miles from the store) since the delivery charge would be $69.00 more than the free that Amazon would charge me.

So, today I tried calling the local store at the number on my sales slip to see if the dehumidifier was in. I got a recorded voice who told me to tell her which department I wanted to talk to. She told me that if I wasn’t sure which department I could say “Department List”, but when I said that she insisted she couldn’t hear me. She hung up on me a couple of times before she finally heard me, and I got: yet another recorded voice, this time a male voice, who told me he could certainly help me. However, I told him I wanted to speak to a human being. He tried to reason with me, but I insisted, and finally I was switched to a human being. It quickly became clear that this human being had never been near Waterford. He eventually was able to find my order and tell me, with absolute certainty, that my purchase was scheduled to be in the store today. Not that it was in the store, but that it was scheduled to be there. That was the best he could do for me, but he was trying to be helpful, so he gave me the telephone number for my local Sears: the exact same number I had called in the first place. Needless to say, I declined to start the process all over. The curmudgeon in me asks: is it really too much to expect that I should be able to talk to a real human being at the local store? The thinking brain in me wonders how Sears expects to survive with customer service like that.

I often wish I could have been a fly on the wall at Sears board meetings in the early 1990s, where, I like to think, there was at least one person saying that Sears should take advantage of its nationwide scope and distribution system to sell things on the internet and deliver the next day. They could have done it, and had they, Amazon would be just a not so fond memory that Jeff Bezos would nurture as he asked for spare change somewhere in Seattle. But I’m sure that lonely voice in the boardroom was overruled by the majority, which insisted that, like digital photography, the internet was just an unimportant fad. Now Sears occupies a large and mostly empty (of people) space in our local mall, which itself is mostly empty. Sears will no doubt declare bankruptcy in the near future. Meanwhile Amazon continues to suck the life out of retail everywhere, and the loathsome Bezos (but then, Sears and Roebuck were probably loathsome too) is the world’s richest man.

I have to go now. As it turns out, I could have gotten a quicker answer to my question by taking a trip to my local Sears instead of calling them. So, off I go.

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The McCain myth

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Things move pretty quickly on the internet, so it’s no surpise that I’ve been beaten to the punch so far as McCain debunking goes. Here’s a pretty definitive account of his life.

It’s not surprising that we’re being treated to waves of adulation by the mainstream press. He self branded himself a “maverick” in 2000, and the press went with that until the day he died. To this day, it’s hard to see anything very mavericky in his career. He sponsored a reasonably good campaign finance bill until it became politically inconvenient for him, at which point he changed his position. He voted to preserve Obamacare, but that wasn’t out of any principle; he did it because he hated Trump. That’s laudable, I suppose, but he helped pave the way for Trump by introducing Sarah Palin to a wider world. Oh, and he never heard of a war that he didn’t want to fight.

The press loved him because they could use him to support their “both sides” narrative, though their own use of him belied that narrative completely. He was on the Sunday shows almost every week, a courtesy extended to exactly no Democrats. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, he was constantly cited as an independent minded Republican motivated by high principles.

It’s nice that he detested Trump, but that’s not so very hard to do, and like exactly all the other Senate Republicans (other than his Obamacare vote) he did exactly nothing to really oppose him. His myth endured to the last. As late as last week (not knowing his death was so imminent) there were those on the left who were spinning scenarios in which McCain would help prevent Kavanaugh’s confirmation. When push came to shove, McCain had only slightly more gutsy independence than Susan Collins.

Still, it’s nice that one of his last acts was an insult to Donald Trump. Perhaps we can say of him, what was said of Macbeth’s predecessor Thane, that “ Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

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The Democrats are the Red Sox of politics

Saturday, August 25, 2018

I have been a Red Sox fan all my life, albeit with varying degrees of intensity. When I was a lad of 10 or thereabouts I would listen to Curt Gowdy doing play by play late at night, my transistor radio tucked beneath my pillow. Many was the night that I suffered silently as they lost yet again. Being a Red Sox fan was a character building exercise for it taught one how to deal with disappointment. On the other hand, it also taught one to expect disappointment, which may not be the world’s greatest character trait. A true Red Sox fan expected, and still expects, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune at the end of every season, no matter how good things look at any other point. Our expectations are rarely proven wrong.

Being a Red Sox fan helped prepare me for being a Democrat, for just as the Red Sox always (or almost always) find a way to lose, so too do the Democrats. The Democrats are the Red Sox of politics. They may come into an election with a lead, but they almost always figure out a way to blow it.

The Red Sox are, as I write this, in first place, nine and a half games against the hated Yankees, the Republicans of baseball. There are Red Sox fans who have lost faith, who believe that this year’s Sox are simply incapable of blowing that big a lead. But I have faith. I know they can do it. I cast my memory back to 1967, 1976, 1986, and so many other years. Yes, they won in 2004, but that was, I am sure, due to a disturbance in the Force which will not be repeated. I am just as sure that the blue wave will dash itself against the rocks of Democratic stupidity before it reaches shore.

And yet, hope springs eternal in the human breast. So I submit that, just maybe, the fate of the Red Sox and the Democrats are inextricably entwined. If the Red Sox manage to go all the way, then so too, shall the Democrats. This year, the gods of baseball and the gods of politics have made a pact. As the Red Sox go, so goes the nation. Democrats: prepare for the worst.

UPDATE: I actually wrote this post early yesterday. The Sox now have an eight game lead and are losing as I write this update. I knew they could do it.

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Susan Collins: Stupid, or hypocritical political hack? We report, you decide.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Everything’s been said about Manafort and Cohen, so I’m going a bit in the weeds, since we all should remember that while that stuff is getting the headlines, the destruction of our democracy is ongoing. The lower courts have already been stuffed with racists and corporate whores, and the Supreme Court is about to be handed over to the oligarchs for a generation. Before I go on I should point out that the threat to abortion rights, while real and immediate, is hardly the true focus of the Republican Party. This is all about handing our laws over to the tender mercies of the oligarchs. We will, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, have a court firmly in the pockets of the Koch Brothers and their ilk. Even if we take the Congress and the presidency in 2020, we will be powerless to undo the harm that’s been done in the past few years, because the court will undo any effort to do so.

One of the purported glimmers of hope in this process is the fact that Susan Collins has done her typical imitation of Hamlet as the vote approaches. She has announced that she won’t vote for anyone who is hostile to Roe v. Wade. But, you know, she doesn’t know where Kavanaugh stands on the issue, and now she’s been cheered by the fact that he assured her that so far as he’s concerned, Roe is “settled law”. You can read about it at Think Progress, in a post entitled “Brett Kavanaugh thinks that Sen. Susan Collins is stupid”. 

Which raises the interesting question: Is he right?

We all know that Susan Collins plays the part of a GOP “moderate”, which can be loosely defined as a Republican politician that puts on a show of distaste for right wing policies before voting to enact them. So far, it’s worked for Collins, though it may be wearing a bit thin. Collins’ typical process is to secure promises related to her vote; vote against her alleged principles (she clearly has none) and then pretend not to notice when the promises go unkept.

So, is she stupid, or is she a hypocritical political hack? It would be an act of kindness to go for stupid, because then she might at least be acting in good faith, but I’m going with hypocritical political hack. Though, to be charitable, she might be both.

First, let’s stipulate that even if she is stupid, she’s still a Senator, and she surely knows that the phrase “settled law”, especially when used by a right wing judicial nominee, merely means that a particular decision is currently the last word on a subject from the Supreme Court, and ripe for overturning if the nominee disagrees with it. The use of the phrase does not mean, or even really imply, that the nominee prefers to leave it settled.

Taking it a step further. Kavanaugh knows that Collins needs cover, so he gives it to her by using a meaningless phrase. Collins knows it is meaningless. Kavanaugh knows she knows it is meaningless. Collins knows that Kavanaugh knows that she knows it is meaningless. Both of them know that the press will pretend it is meaningful, even though they both know that the press knows it is meaningless. The press knows that Collins and Kavanaugh know that the press knows the phrase is meaningless, and Collins and Kavanaugh know that press knows that they know that the press knows that the phrase is meaningless.

That’s how these things work. Collins will vote for Kavanaugh on the strength of his assurance to her that Roe is settled law. He will then vote to reverse it. Collins will pretend to be surprised, but mostly she’ll just pretend that nothing has happened, like she did when she voted to gut Obamacare after Mitch McConnell made some promises to her that she knew he wouldn’t keep; he knew she knew he wouldn’t keep, and … Well, you know how it goes.

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She’s not crazy, she’s a Republican

Monday, August 20, 2018

There was a time when this person would, without a doubt, have been the craziest person running for office in the entire country.

A frontrunner in the Republican primaries for a key midterm race says she was abducted by aliens as a child—and it doesn’t seem to have hurt her prospects.

Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, an educator, businesswoman, and former city council member, is running in the Republican primary in Florida’s 27th district, which includes part of Miami. Along with two other frontrunners, Maria Elvira Salazar and Bruno Barreiro, Aguilera is one of the best-known candidates in the primary. She even secured an endorsement from the Miami Herald, the same newspaper that first uncovered old interviews in which Aguilera recounted being abducted by aliens as a child.

via Motherboard

Nowadays, she’s just par for the course. It’s always okay if you’re a Republican.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, August 17, 2018

Aretha. Who else could it be?

I can’t explain why this brought tears to me eyes, but it did.

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