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Some speculation

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

I’ve been thinking a bit about Individual-1’s threats to declare a national emergency so he can build his wall. I’m not 100% wedded to this idea, but It occurs to me that it is a way for him to declare victory while essentially preserving the status quo. The reality is that any such declaration would be mired in the courts for years. One aspect of it that doesn’t, in my humble opinion, get enough attention is that in order to build a wall on the border you have to take private property rights by eminent domain,a process that takes years and will likely be strongly resisted, even by many Trumpers. How you do that when no money has been authorized, in the face of a explicit constitutional amendment requiring both due process and fair compensation, is a puzzle.

But, declaring the emergency may be a way for Trump to tell his base that he’s won and simply allow what is already happening on the border to proceed. This gives him a way to save face while caving on the shutdown issue. He might even get the media to echo those claims.

Were he to go that route, he would nonetheless be guilty of an abuse of power of sufficient magnitude to justify impeachment, but, given the present Republican Party, and the both siderism media that will surely compare it to some act by a Democrat that is not at all really comparable, that’s unlikely to happen, meaning that even though such a declaration might have little tangible effect on the issue it purports to address, it would still be a landmark on our journey toward dictatorship.

UPDATE: For the record, and as further evidence in support of my offer to write a column in the Day, I must point out that I got there first.

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An anniversary

Sunday, January 6, 2019

Another snippet from my journal. One year ago today Individual-1 pronounced himself a “very stable genius”. It seems so long ago.

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An open letter to the New London Day

Saturday, January 5, 2019

First, let me congratulate you on your recent addition of rightwing radio jock Lee Elci to your stable of regular columnists. This is yet another milestone in your years long effort to offer a wide range of opinions among your columnists, which opinions now range along a continuum from pundits who sometimes put their toes a smidgen to the left over the ever rightward floating media location of “centrism” to the extreme right, where the likes of Elci dwell.

I would like to propose that you think about adding yet another columnist to your stable: me. Adding me to the mix would widen the continuum all the way to the extreme left. Well, at any rate, to what’s considered the extreme left by the pundits you currently feature. Consider the radical stuff upon which I would opine:

  • I believe that Medicare for All is a good idea. Pretty radical right? I’ll bet none of your other pundits would even touch that, since everyone knows that a progressive idea supported by at least 60% of the country doesn’t bear discussing.
  • I believe in facts and learning from history. For instance, despite assurances from Republicans that this time a tax cut for the rich will result in more tax revenue, I continue to believe that it won’t, based merely on the historical record, basic economic theory, arithmetic, and common sense. You have to admit that’s pretty radical and would make me a perfect far left commentator to add to your stable.
  • Even more radically, I don’t believe in false equivalence. I don’t believe that a Democratic congressperson who danced. when she was in college is as morally bankrupt as an entire political party that has, since 1968, based its strategy for success on exploiting and fomenting racism and hatred and is now passively allowing a racist Russian puppet to destroy our democracy. No David Brooks I!

 

There are countless other ways in which my wild eyed rationality would place me far to the left of your other columnists, which would provide much needed balance to your opinion pages.

Another way in which I’m sure to differ from your present columnists is that I’m likely to establish a record of being proven mostly right about the issues about which, and politicians about whom, I choose to comment. I know that being right is far from an occupational requirement for pundits, but it can’t hurt, can it? As you may know, I have been writing a blog for something like 14 years and I’d invite you to compare my prescience with that of, say, David Brooks or Bill Kristol, not to mention people like Lee Elci. As one small example, I can produce witnesses who will testify that I predicted in 2012, after Obama was re-elected, that the next Republican candidate would be a whackjob. Got it right, didn’t I!

Really, after re-reading the foregoing, I can’t see how you can turn me down. Please let me know when you want me to start and what days my column will run. So far as pay is concerned, I’ll take whatever you’re giving Elci.

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A few disjointed observations

Friday, January 4, 2019

I started writing this a few days ago. In this day of instant reaction to the news via twitter that might as well be decades, but I’m going to post it anyway.

As I browsed through my blog reader recently I found a number of common themes. I have nothing to add to the universal scorn being heaped on Mitt Romney, except to add that, true to form, the mainstream is hailing him as a hero, instead of writing him off as this year’s Jeff Flake.

What I’ve seen just in the past few days, and what I’ve seen commented on in a number of places, is the beginning of the compartmentalizations of potential presidential candidates. This is generally not done with Republicans, perhaps because none of them ever present a real threat to the pocketbooks of the people who own major media. For instance, we’re seeing Elizabeth Warren being written offas “unlikable”, though there is little basis for the charge, except in the minds of those asking how she can overcome it, who happen to be the same people who will work hard to spread the “unlikable” meme. Pride of authorship, don’t you know.

Warren, like Hillary, can do no right. No matter what she does, the press will give it a negative spin. Her release of her DNA results is a good example. Had a Republican male subjected to similar charges (not that such charges would have had any shelf life against a Republican male) done exactly the same thing he would have been pronounced triumphantly absolved. With Warren she somehow “handled it wrong” by proving the charges against her were without merit. Had she done nothing, the same media that criticized her handling of “it” would have provided an echo chamber for Republican sniping at her Native American ancestry.

The real objection to Warren is that she poses a threat to the oligarchs. She even names them by name. We can’t have that. It’s one thing to demonize immigrants. Tasteless maybe, but not the threat posed by someone demonizing the people actually responsible for impoverishing the 99.9%.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects are hard at work pumping up Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the oligarchs, since he carried water for them while in the Senate, and he is sure to run the kind of bland, inoffensive, and uninspiring campaign the mainstream expects from a Democrat. I should add, parenthetically, that they were fine with Obama’s inspiring 2012 campaign, because while he talked in lofty phrases, they were gratifyingly devoid of any substantive content, and he never had a bad word to say about the oligarchs (In fact, he took great big gobs of their money). Back to Biden: the media loves his shtick about being a regular Joe and a friend of the worker, though they know whose interests he served when push came to shove. And lest we forget: Clarence Thomas.

Part of the process by which the media exalts shitty Democratic candidates is by giving prominence and credence to Republican concern trolls, who tell us they are only giving us advice for our own goods. Atrios points outthat the reverse is never true; Democrats are never quoted giving advice to Republicans.

Generally there’s always a push from centrist types for Democrats to put a Republican on the ticket, and a lot of concern trolling from Republicans telling us about the one Democrat that maybe they could vote for (but won’t). No one ever tells Republicans to run a “unity ticket” and Professional Democrats don’t pitch editors for pieces about Who Republicans Have To Nominate If They Want To Win because that’s stupid. So is the reverse, which happens all the time.

If we’re going to win we can only do it by giving people something to vote for. We shouldn’t take a win for granted, since the Republicans have proven beyond doubt that they are good at stealing even not so close elections. As others have noted recently, and as I’ve noted before, we also need to focus people’s anger where it belongs. Warren, Sanders, and I think, O’Rourke all understand that. They, or at least Warren and Sanders (not sure about O’Rourke) are proposing easy to understand, popular proposals to reverse the tide of inequality in which we are presently drowning. That’s why the mainstream wants to marginalize them. But they can only succeed if we let them. They wanted to marginalize Trump too, and they couldn’t, even though, in his case, he was an obvious fraud. We can win with a real progressive as our candidate. We will not win with a Biden or a –shudder-shudderGillibrand as our candidate.

On a slightly different subject, all hail Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As all the world knows by now some Republican troll attacked her on twitter for having (gasp!!!) danced. It didn’t go over well, and her response was perfect. It’s about time Democrats learned that they have to stop apologizing for every made up transgression that the Republican media concocts. I agree with the author of the post to which I’ve linked that the attacks on her are both sexist and racist (that’s pretty much standard Republican fare) but I think there’s more to it. I think they’re scared of her and what she represents: an aggressive progressivism that doesn’t back down or propose timid half measures in the name of a one-sided bipartisanship. If all Democrats followed her lead, the media, which in the name of both-siderism, tolerates Republican racism but gets in a twit about a Democrat being “uncivil” would have to start changing its behavior as well. They are the way they are because Republicans bullied them for years; they will only change if we start bullying them too, and that means pushing back vigorously every time they promote a Republican attack meme.

This post is too long and has no unifying theme, but that’s okay. I’m putting it up.

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Lest we forget

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

I have mentioned previously, I think, that I’m keeping a journal of sorts, of extremely doubtful literary merit. Every day I try to document the atrocities so far as Individual-1 is concerned. The app I use automatically shows you your entries from one year ago, two years ago, etc., so I am constantly reminded of such atrocities that have long since slipped into the memory hole.

But today I’ll pass along an atrocity, as I think it’s fair to say that it would be a prime exhibit in any what if Obama (or, really, any Democrat) had said this proceeding.

One year ago today, Trump took credit for the fact that there were no passenger plane crashes in 2017. In fact, no American passenger plane had crashed since 2009, which just coincidentally (and I mean that quite literally) is the year Obama took office. Imagine if Obama had taken credit for that. They’d still be talking about it. It hardly raised an eyebrow when Trump did it.

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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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