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Spines in short supply

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Sort of a follow up to my post of a few days ago about the probability that the Democrats will find a way to blow it in next year’s election, provoked by a piece at Hullabaloo, with which I totally agree. Titled, We must ensure that the Resistance keeps up the pressure. Without it Democrats will cave., the post makes the point that next month’s vote on the debt limit may be the make or break point for the Democrats:

The latest (hopefully temporary) cave on DACA is not reassuring. If the Democrats lose their spines going into this election and allow Trump to be seen as a “winner” by bringing them around to his side, if they even think of kissing his ring like those Republicans have done, in the midst of a strong economy, the GOP will win. And we will be done.

It is vital that they stay strong and resist. Any capitulation to Trump will demoralize the Democratic base and give the other side a good reason to come out and vote for their team next year. Keep in mind that Democrats must have an unusually high turnout in a mid-term which is always very difficult for them and the Republicans must stay home in a midterm which is uncommon.

The Resistance is called what it’s called because of a massive grassroots demand that Trump not be normalized or validated. We must push these Democrats to hold the line.

In order for the Democrats to use the leverage they have on the debt limit they must do two things. First, they must stand together, something which, amazingly, they have been pretty good about so far during this presidency. Second, they must have their talking points ready so as to shift blame for any actual shutdown to the Republicans, who, after all, are in control of all three branches of government. They have not been particularly good on this score, but prior to now, circumstances have been such that it wasn’t critical. It will be critical if they decide to grow spines and actually refuse to increase the debt limit unless some of their demands are met.

My own guess is that the message won’t be needed, because in the end, the spines will not be grown. They’ve already gone along with two “temporary” extensions, and they will likely go along with more. The Republicans will be perfectly happy to adopt the expedient of using short term resolutions to avoid dealing with the issue. This would all be part of the Democrats long term strategy to lose (or at least not win) in November, by convincing as many of the currently energized members of the resistance as possible that it doesn’t matter who gets elected in November. Right now the odds are against the Democrats pulling off a defeat, but, hey, they managed it last year and they can do it again.

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Yet another in a seemingly endless series of modest proposals

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

The Republicans have passed their tax bill, designed from top to bottom to shift money from the bottom 99.9% to the top .1%, with those of us in the top 20% being robbed the least, while those in the bottom are being robbed the most. It is class warfare on an unprecedented scale, and given past Republican attacks in the class war, that’s saying a lot.

Despite the best efforts of the Fox propagandists, and the sometimes ludicrous both siderism of the mainstream press (Dean Baker points out here that the Washington Post claims that the bill had working class roots), the bill, if the pollsters are to be believed, is the most unpopular piece of major legislation in the history of polling.

This presents a challenge to Democrats: How, in the face of Donald Trump’s unpopularity and the unpopularity of this, the Republicans only major legislative accomplishment, are they going to manage to blow it in 2018? I, for one, think they’re up to the challenge.

But lets, for the moment, assume that the Democrats wanted to take maximum advantage of these gifts? How would they do it, with respect to this tax deform bill?

As I pointed out above, the bill amounts to class warfare. Normally there are two sides in a war, and I would strongly suggest that the Democrats throw in their lot with the folks the Republicans are attacking. That means accepting the fact that this is class war and being unabashedly on the side that’s being attacked.

We have a funny tradition in this country. The Republicans stage an attack in this war and when the Democrats feebly protest, it is the Democrats who are accused of being class warriors while the Republicans get a pass. They get it because the Democrats meekly back down. Despite the fact that it is Republicans who are the aggressors in this war, it is the Democrats that consistently take the blame for the war itself.

Once again, what’s needed is a consistent Democratic message. My modest proposal here is that part of that message consist of commercials contrasting the effects of this tax bill on ordinary Americans with the benefits conferred on specifically identified Americans, such as the Koch Brothers and various members of the Trump Crime Syndicate, including Trump. A variant: there are rich people out there who are perfectly willing to say that they don’t need or want this gift. Find them, and put them on such a commercial, contrasting the benefits they are getting that they don’t need, with the human costs being inflicted on the rest of us, particularly on people living on the margins. Add in, by the way, some clips of people like Marco Rubio admitting that the tax bill represents the opening wedge in the achievement of the Republican Holy Grail: the final destruction of Medicare and Social Security. It really shouldn’t be difficult to put together some truly effective spots driving these messages home, and, unlike the Republicans, we wouldn’t even have to lie.

Of course the Democrats will be attacked once again for engaging in class warfare. And here I have a stunning suggestion: ignore the attacks and keep fighting. It is class warfare. They’ve got the money but we’ve got the numbers (apologies to Jim Morrison and the Doors for that one). We can win if our side gets out and votes; but that’s not going to happen if the Democrats assume their typical defensive crouch.

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A time to wallow

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

A few things about the Jones win last night.

First, now this means I won’t get an email from him every hour. I should add that I responded to several.

Second, thank you black people of Alabama for doing the country a huge favor.

Third, the victory is made the sweeter by the fact that I refused to let myself believe that he could win. I recommend this as a strategy. Along the same lines, I would suggest that we stop talking about wave elections, and run scared and hard everywhere. But what this election does prove is that we should run everywhere, and stop conceding huge swaths of the country to Republicans. We can make inroads in the South if we start playing the long game and start pushing a message to the people down there that they are being consistently screwed by the Republican Party and that, whether stated explicitly or implicitly, they have more in common with the black people they’ve been trained to hate and blame, than they do with the people that are manipulating them.

Finally, now that the wildly improbable has happened, we all deserve at least a few days of wallowing. And as a friend observed in an email sending this photo, this sums it up nicely:

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More on zero tolerance

Saturday, December 9, 2017

A few days ago I wrote about my fear that the Democrats would adopt a zero tolerance position regarding allegation of sexual impropriety. Not surprisingly, some have:

As calls for Senator Franken’s resignation rose yesterday, there was talk about the need for zero tolerance of sexual misconduct. For example, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) tweeted: “We must commit to zero tolerance—which is where I believe we as a country and Congress should be—and that means Senator Franken should step down.”

This sort of extreme view seems to have become almost settled wisdom among Democrats in DC, but if my own observations are any guide, it is not so widely shared outside the DC bubble. Opinions were almost unanimous, and most strongly voiced by some of the women at our recent Drinking Liberally group, that Franken should not have resigned.

It does appear that people not totally immersed in the bubble are beginning to see that a bit of nuance, and, at times, cold political calculation, are necessary, particularly in the political clime in which we now find ourselves. Nancy LeTourneau, the blogger whose post I linked to above, went on to make an observation similar to that I made in my post:

The arena in which I am most familiar with the use of zero tolerance is schools. It began as a slogan over 20 years ago to suggest that schools should draw a clear line about what was unacceptable behavior and administer harsh consequences to any student who crossed it. The entire effort was a huge failure that became the feeder for the school-to-prison pipeline. Here is an ABC News report on zero tolerance that aired back in 2003.

…

At this point, a lot of people (especially politicians) are trying to position themselves as “tough” on this issue by gravitating to simplistic responses like zero tolerance. Those of us who are actually interested in real change need to speak up on behalf of responses that help all of us grapple with a difficult issue and set the stage for some common understanding of a complex problem. We shouldn’t settle for anything less.

It should be noted here that already Republicans are taking advantage of the Democratic zero tolerance push. The Republican governor of Michigan has put off a special election to fill John Conyers position, thus depriving his consitituents (mostly black, so who cares, right?) of representation for almost a year, while, the Democratic governor of Minnesota has done what all Democrats seem to do:

Now Gov. Mark Dayton is throwing a wrench in the works by evidently appointing a caretaker on the condition she not seek to keep the seat, which opens the seat up to the real possibility of Republican capture in 2018 (maybe by Norm Coleman, the Republican Franken defeated in 2008). I wonder how many Senate Democrats calling for Franken’s head would have thought twice if they’d known Dayton was going to pull that boneheaded move, instead of appointing a younger star like state Attorney General Lori Swanson who could build a real Senate career.

As the post above goes on to point out, there’s something not quite right about demands that people resign without any form of due process. Democrats were unwilling to let the ethics process play out, and, if Heitkamp’s statement is any guide, will be unwilling to do so in the future. So, someone like Franken, who acknowledges wrongdoing, the seriousness of which is not yet really known, must go, while politicians who simply deny, deny, deny, get to stay. This, of course, yet again favors the Republicans.

The national Democrats act as if they have Senate seats to spare, and can easily throw a few away in service to a zero tolerance policy that make no real sense. I suspect with good cause that their constituents don’t see it in such black and white terms, but the beltway bubble is a real cultural phenomenon. A lot of us are more concerned about the fact that by throwing Franken under the bus, the Democrats may have destroyed any chance we have to prevent a Trumpian takeover of the Supreme Court. Our always marginal chances of taking over the Senate have not been enhanced by this move and that’s the point most of the Liberal Drinkers, male and female alike, were ranting about at our recent gathering. The future of the planet is at risk. We really have to think twice about imposing purity tests on our own, when we have no capacity to impose like standards on the Nazis who currently control our government.

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David Brooks is an asshole (but you knew that)

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

I believe I have paid tribute to driftglass before, but I must do so again. He reads and deconstructs David Brooks so that I don’t have to.

I normally don’t even glance at Brooks’ column, but this morning some evil spirit possessed me and I perused the first few paragraph, in which I read this:

Five years ago, Charlie Craig and David Mullins walked into a bakery in a strip mall in Lakewood, Colo., to ask about a cake for their wedding. The baker, Jack Phillips, replied: “I’ll make you birthday cakes, shower cakes, cookies, brownies. I just can’t make a cake for a same-sex wedding.”

As Adam Liptak of The Times reported, Phillips is a Christian and believes that the Bible teaches that marriage is between a man and a woman. Phillips is not trying to restrict gay marriage or gay rights; he’s simply asking not to be forced to take part.

Craig and Mullins were understandably upset. As Mullins told Liptak, “We were mortified and just felt degraded.” Nobody likes to be refused service just because of who they essentially are. In a just society people are not discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.

At this point, Craig and Mullins had two possible courses of action, the neighborly and the legal.

At that point I did two things. I calmly and without raising my voice one tiny bit (do not try to confirm this characterization of my actions with my wife) pointed out to my wife that David Brooks is a fucking asshole. I then thought to myself: “I need not trouble to go further, as I can wait until later today and let driftglass do my spewing for me”.

He has come through admirably.

By the way, did I mention that David Brooks is a fucking asshole?

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Gosh, whatever happened to States right?

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Men and women of principle:

The garbage fire in the White House may have his hands full stumping for a Republican child molester this week, but never doubt the rest of his party’s willingness to stump for the nation’s mass murderers.

Republicans lined up a vote this week in the House on making it easier for gun owners to legally carry concealed weapons across state lines, the first gun-related legislation since mass shootings in Nevada and Texas killed more than 80 people.
The bill is a top priority of the National Rifle Association, which calls it an important step to expand the right of gun owners to travel freely between states without worrying about conflicting state laws or civil suits.

Ask them and they’ll all tell you they are fervent believers in state’s rights, so long, as it turns out, that those rights are used to enrich the rich, destroy the environment, or oppress the oppressed, among other noble goals. Try to improve people’s lives and suddenly they’re all for the Feds stepping in.

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More ranting about Democratic messaging

Sunday, December 3, 2017

I just want to pass on this post from Crooks & Liars. It features a clip of Orrin Hatch condemning the folks who are draining the government fisc be dependence on government benefits, thus making renewal of the CHIP program, so hard, after he voted to give people who inherit from daddy or mommy billions of extra unearned dollars:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-naturally) of Utah has been flirting with the idea of retiring, so perhaps it’s that “nothing left to lose” attitude that lets him go on the Senate floor and bemoan the millions and millions of freeloaders (buying into liberal philosophy) that drain the federal treasury so that it’s difficult to keep good programs like CHIP running.

Read the whole thing, but for me the important thing is the obvious point, made by the C&L blogger, that this sort of thing is fodder for exploitation come the fall, if only the Democrats would have the sense to use it:

If the Dems were smart, they’d make ads of this clip interspersed with pictures of Americans struggling while Jared and Ivanka go on yet another ski trip and Don Jr. and Eric go hunting wild game and run them continuously between now and 2018.

The post links to articles documenting the millions it is costing us to support our new royal family. It couldn’t be hard to put together an effective advertising campaign around all this. Why do I find it so hard to believe the Democrats can pull it off?

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Hello, Fellow Peasants

Saturday, December 2, 2017

It now looks like only a miracle will prevent the passage of the Transfer the Money from the Masses to the Aristocrats tax deform bill. That miracle is not likely to happen, so I think it’s safe to say that we can declare today to be the official beginning of the American plutocracy, which perhaps will become a national holiday someday. Wait, take that back. Our overlords aren’t about to create any more holidays, since they’ll want to keep us working, since they’ll only have to pay us enough to keep us in bread and water.

There are some on the left who are sure this will lead to electoral victory for the Democrats in 2018 and beyond, but such people have too little or too much faith in the Democrats, depending on how you look at it. I have faith that the Democrats can snatch defeat not just from the jaws of victory, but from its very gullet. The Democrats have not, at least since the days of Reagan, been able to come together behind a coherent and effective message to sell their party to the American people. We see right now that instead of a concentrated attack on the Republican effort to destroy the middle class, the Democrats are falling all over themselves to insist that some of their number resign over sexual harassment allegations. Whatever the proper response might be to any individual case, that is not what the Democrats should be talking about at the moment. We will probably gain seats next November, but our uninspiring message and our Wall Street friendly DCCC recruited candidates will leave many discouraged and homebound.

So, time to learn how to tug at our forelocks, whatever in hell a forelock is.

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A foolish consistency

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Over the past few weeks the nation has engaged in a rather heated conversation about sexual harassment. Republicans have been their usual hypocritical selves. Many liberals, meanwhile, have bent over backward to avoid the charge of hypocrisy have embraced what I submit is a foolish consistency. The urge to consistency requires two things. First, we must believe any woman who steps forward with a claim that she has been harassed, and second, any man who has engaged in any form of conduct that can be characterized as sexual harassment must be tossed aside. If he holds a public office, he must resign. If he is an entertainer, he must never get another job.

The end result of all this may be more of what we’ve seen in the past. Republicans get a pass (think, David Vitter), while Democrats are banned from public life (think Eliot Spitzer). We can also see a variant of this coming with the information leaking out about Congressional settlements of workplace harassment claims; so far it’s two Democrats to zero Republicans, and you can almost bet that we’ll hear nothing about any Republicans while getting a steady drip of Democrats.

I’m not saying avoiding hypocrisy is unimportant, but I do think that it’s also important to have a sense of perspective and that we consider the context in each individual case. Adopting a zero tolerance policy is not necessarily the way to go. I recall, when I was on the school board, being put in the position of expelling a little kid who brought a tiny little knife to school in violation of such a policy. It seemed a bit much.

It is certainly the case that we should not reflexively accuse the accusers of lying. On the other hand, we live in a politically charged moment. It seemed odd, to me, that the first we heard of the Franken charges was a tweet from Roger Stone before the woman herself came forward. In addition, she also works for Sinclair broadcasting, and was herself filmed grabbing a guy’s butt during the rehearsal in which Franken allegedly harassed her. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do something he shouldn’t have done, but it suggests that the context is such that the political death penalty is not necessarily in order. I understand we’ve just seen a reverse example; a woman went to the Washington Post with a made up story that she had been harrassed by Roy Moore in order to set the newspaper up. In a perverse way, the woman, who was working with James O’Keefe, has buttressed the stories of the actual victims, because the Post exposed her. So, going forward, it is not the case that we must believe every accuser; though we should certainly not dismiss them out of hand, nor should we engage in attempts to blacken their reputation unless and until evidence comes out to justify it, as in the situation at the Post.

It is not hypocritical to fail to call for the resignation of every politician accused or guilty of some sort of sexual impropriety. Context matters, as do other factors. Consider Moore vs. Franken. Moore has denied what appear to be extremely credible allegations. He is accused not just of sexual harassment, but of predation upon minors as young as 14 years old. Rather than showing remorse, he has blamed the victims and used the accusations as a fundraising tool. He is, moreover, an avowed political foe of women’s equality generally. Franken, on the other hand, has shown what appears to be true remorse for an incident in which he was either in the wrong or that was morally ambiguous. He has made no attempt to blame the victim, even though the circumstances are such that there is at least a whiff of something not quite right. Nor has what remains of the liberal media sought to demonize her, as the folks at Fox would have done were the situation reversed. Franken is a supporter of women’s rights. You can call that hypocrisy given what he is accused of doing, but the fact is that everyone, in the course of their life, does something stupid that they come to regret. The important thing is that they come to regret it, and don’t blame others for their acts. There is a world of difference between the two men, and that implies that there is a difference in how they should be treated at the present time.

And now, slightly off the point; a prediction. Given that he is running in Alabama, which may be the stupidest polity in the nation, if not the world, I give Moore a 90% chance to win. I sincerely hope I’m wrong. Once he’s ensconced in the Senate, his Republican colleagues will forget all about his sexual transgressions, just as they were willing to overlook his racism, provided he votes to enrich the rich. Meanwhile, they’ll go after Franken. The folks at Fox will have no problem with that, and the word hypocrisy will never be uttered on that channel, at least not in this context.

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A % here and a % there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money

Sunday, November 19, 2017

It goes without saying that Paul Ryan and the Republicans are lying when they claim their tax bill is designed to benefit the middle class. Okay, some of them may not be lying. Some of them may be so stupid that they believe the bullshit Ryan is peddling but, same difference. If you’re a Member of Congress you can be presumed to be smart enough to educate yourself beyond getting a daily dosage of Fox and Friends.

Anyway, this is a gimmick that I hadn’t heard anything about, so I’ll pass it on. I have been familiar with the Republican attempt to use a “chained” CPI to determine Social Security benefit increases, but hadn’t thought about the possibility that it could be used to screw people in other contexts.

By way of background, the “chained” CPI assumes that when tuna gets too expensive, people will switch to cat food, and so it’s only right that the inflation index track the cost of cat food and forget about tuna altogether. It’s been floated previously as a way of reducing Social Security benefit increases, but, as Dean Baker explains, it’s also a backdoor way to raise taxes on the middle class, one that the Republicans have included in their tax plan:

Reductions in Social Security benefits are extremely unpopular across the political spectrum. The program enjoys enormous support among both Democrats and Republicans and people are far more likely to say that benefits should be raised than cut. For this reason, the public should be paying attention to a little noticed provision in the tax bill passed by the House today and which also appears in the bills under consideration in the Senate.

In both cases, the basis for indexing tax brackets would be shifted from Consumer Price Index (CPI) to the Chained Consumer Price Index (CCPI). The difference is that the CCPI takes account of when people change their consumption patterns in response to changes in relative prices.

The classic example is that beef rises in price and chicken falls, we would expect people to consume less beef and more chicken. The CPI assumes that people don’t change their consumption patterns while the CCPI adjusts its basket to assign less importance to beef and greater importance to chicken.

For this reason, the CCPI shows a somewhat lower rate of inflation than the CPI. Typically the gap is 0.2–0.3 percentage points. This matters in the tax bill because the cutoff for the tax brackets is adjusted each year by the CPI. If the CCPI is used rather than CPI, then the cutoffs would rise less rapidly.

For example, if the cutoff for the 25 percent bracket is $40,000 for a single individual and the CPI showed 2.0 percent inflation, then it would rise to $40,800 for the next year. This means a single person would face a tax rate of 25 percent on income above $40,800. If the CCPI showed an inflation rate of 1.7 percent, then the cutoff would rise to $40,680. This means a single person would face a tax rate of 25 percent on income above $40,680.

In a single year, this difference will not mean much, but after 10 years, the difference in the indexes would be between 2.0–3.0 percent and it would grow more through time. This will add a fair bit to many people’s tax bills.

Baker goes on to point out that the change in the tax bill will make it easier to apply a chained CPI to Social Security, even though there is less justification to apply it to the elderly than to the population as a whole, as Baker explains in his post. But for the moment, it’s a gimmick that amounts to a backdoor way of raising taxes over and above what they would otherwise be on a substantial number of people; with those bearing the brunt definitely not in the .01%.

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