Annus Horribilus

Another shit show year comes to a close.

Next year will likely be worse.

Predictions for 2019:

- Global recession caused by a breakdown in international trade caused by Trump and Brexit.
- Some sort of military adventure.  My guess? Venezuela. 
- Trump will grow even more erratic as the noose closes around him, and what few competent people around remain slowly depart.
- The Democratic primary will start before Valentine's Day, making everyone sick of everyone by Memorial Day.
- Putin will overreach somewhere, most likely Ukraine.  It will trigger an international crisis that Trump will be unable to handle.

Happy New Year.

Will This Stuff Hold?

Trump's daily outrages on the regulatory scene continue to mount.  This one is simply indefensible. 

The question a far-sighted business man should ask is whether these rollbacks will last one day longer than Trump's presidency.  Why would you rollback to earlier regulatory frameworks, when they could snap back in 2021?

The cost-savings of these regulatory moves are negligible, but they might even be less than negligible, since they might not even happen at all.  Or rather a few Don Blankenship types might roll them back, just to kill some poor people, but outside of that, who would work to undermine regulations that will simply return in two dozen months?

Blackwater Nation

One of the ominous trends of the past 30 years has been the privatization of many functions of the state.  During the Cheney Regency, this process was extended into the military, creating a network of private armies.  Blackwater, founded by Betsy DeVos's brother Eric Prince, was the most extreme example of this.

As Josh Marshall points out, one of the underlying stories behind the Trump/Russia scandal and now the allegations of fraud in Alabama is that you have private intelligence firms - freelance CIAs - doing all sorts of ratfucking in our elections and overseas.

After Watergate, there was a necessary fumigating of our politics.  If we don't seize the same opportunity at the end of Trumpistan, I'm not sure we can ever become the nation we once were.

Is He Though?

I respect the hell out of Martin Longman's political insights, but he's suggesting that the current allegations of proof that Michael Cohen visited Prague and met with Russians during the campaign could be the end of the line for Trump. There's some suggestion that Mueller knows this, Trump knows Mueller knows this and this is why Trump has been freaking out. 

But I will remain skeptical that there is anything Trump can do that would cause 20 Republican Senators to remove him from office.  They are simply too afraid of their own voters.

Taking A Wee Break

I'm going to see what 48 hours of not following the news does to my mental health.

Simple

There are parts of being President that should be easy, but only if you're a normal human being.  Trump is not a normal human being.

What Next, An Ongoing Series

Merry Almost Christmas.

Trump forced out Mattis early, because someone with 3rd grade reading comprehension finally explained that Mattis' resignation letter was more like a broadside.

Meanwhile, the markets continue to tank, and Jon Oliver Cosplay enthusiast, Steve Mnuchin, has made things worse.  The markets are collapsing for any number of reasons.  The normal business cycle is taking hold.  Wages never rose in the recovery, keeping demand just OK.  Trump's trade war has been a disaster.  Markets don't like instability, and Trump is unstable.  The GOP tax cut was squandered on stock buybacks which artificially inflated the markets, which are now coming back to reality.

The thing is, as you probably heard over the past 18 months, Trump's poll numbers are historically bad for a President during an economic expansion.  Once the economy tips into recession, Trump has not shown the sort of ability that would let him run a real estate business, much less the world's largest economy.  The collapsing economy will drive him poll numbers down even further at precisely the moment more and more news about his criminality will come to the surface and more and more GOP leaders edge away from him.  We can count on him to respond poorly.

Buckle up.

A Wrestling Issue

Lots if pixels have been spilled over a young wrestler from New Jersey who had to chose between cutting his dreadlocks and forfeiting his match.  Much of it is poorly informed, including calls to fire the trainer who cut his hair.  That's just nuts, as she was following his directives.  There's plenty of responsibility to go around.

The referee has a troubling history with racism, which removes much benefit of the doubt he should be given.  It seems from secondary reporting that Andrew Johnson, the wrestler, did not have a legal head covering.  This is not a racist rule.  All wrestlers who have long hair must have it covered.  However, it seems as if Johnson's cover was not legal. 

There are two reasons why it wasn't legal and I have heard both apply.  First, the head cover must by attached to his protective head gear, and perhaps it wasn't.  Or he may have had too large a corporate logo on it.  If the former, the referee was in his rights to prohibit the wrestler from competing, however, these issues should have been addressed before the meet. The rule says that any special equipment (and the head covering is special equipment) must be inspected when the referee arrives on site.  Because the referee waited until Johnson approached the mat ready to wrestle, there was no time to make a reasoned decision.  That's WHY these decisions should have been made before the meet.  Once the referee started running injury time, Johnson and his coach had 90 seconds to make a decision and implement it.  Adrenaline is pumping, competitive spirits are up, no one should be expected to make a good decision in that time frame.  Again, that's why these rulings happen well before wrestling starts.

If the issue was the size of a corporate logo, then that's a brand new rule, and the referee should've issued a warning and told him to become compliant by next match.  It's still early in the season, and a little understanding goes a long way.  If it was an issue of the logo, the ref and the National Federation will have some awkward explaining to do.  People have noted that he wrestled earlier in the season with his head covering.  That doesn't mean he was in compliance, because some refs pay little attention to those things.  The only previous matches were at tournaments, where those details often go unaddressed.  Again, this is where the referee's judgment comes into play, and again where he failed.

The coach also bears more responsibility than I originally thought.  He's responsible for having his wrestler properly equipped.  If Johnson had been given a proper, legal head cover and lost it, that's one thing.  But it sounds like the coach and school didn't provide a legal cover.  Perhaps he should have forfeited the match.  Again, the referee put him in a terrible position.  Johnson's match was the second match of the meet, so the coach had no idea if that 6 points would've mattered.  Again, that's why these issues should've been addressed before the meet. 

When faced with the prospect of forfeiting or having his hair cut, Johnson chose to have his hair cut.  He was put in an impossible position. The trainer simply had the scissors, and she was also operating under time constraints.  It would've been even worse if she had taken her time, Johnson had his dreads cut off and the 90 seconds would've expired.  The idea that she did something terrible is just something I can't understand.  You might as well blame the scissors themselves.

Johnson was forced to make a decision because a referee applied a rule at the wrong time. The rule itself is proper and not racist or sexist.  And yes, I've seen white boys have their hair cut.  I once cut a boy's hair - at his request - so he could lose the .10 of a pound he needed to make weight.  Any wrestler with long hair has to have a legal hair cover.  It should be inspected before the meet.

Andrew Johnson was failed by the referee and his coach.  But he didn't fail, and I applaud him for that.

Dear Leader

Yes, yes, we were right about Trump.  Whoopee.  Gives me no pleasure to say that.

There are two stories that are worth noting about our national descent into madness.  The first involves Kingpin cosplay enthusiast and acting AG, Matt Whitaker.  Trump fired racist hobbit Jeff Sessions because Sessions insisted on acting like a racist AG rather than as Trump's personal lawyer.  To be clear, Trump was fine with him as a racist AG, he just wanted "his own Roy Cohn."  Whitaker, who is as much an open sewer of public corruption as most late-stage Trumpistas, still feels bound by bits and scraps of law. Trump will not be able to find an AG who is corrupt enough for him, which will be like a hot knife into his gaping narcissistic wound.

Next, we have rumors that Trump wants to fire Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve.  Powell was one of Trump's few non-bonkers appointments, similar to Mattis or McMaster.  If he were to fire Powell, the tumult that we have seen in the stock markets these past weeks would look tame by comparison.  Trumponomics have already caused pain through his trade wars, his regressive GOP tax cut and now the government shutdown.  If he fires the Chairman of the Fed, all hell will break loose.

The basic reason why he's upset with a toady like Whitaker and a non-toady like Powell is that they don't show sufficient obeisance to Dear Leader, Hair Furor. 

Trump is a Cult of Personality that only he and the small sliver of deranged supporters believe in.

Yesterday Was A Very Long Year

There was enough news crammed into yesterday to fill a small book.  And yet there is no guarantee that today or next week won't have the same flood of chaos and conflict and disturbing revelations that yesterday had.

We started with the news that Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was told to recuse himself from the Mueller probe, so he simply ignored them and turned to political advisers who told him not to.  Again, remember the howling shitstorm because Loretta Lynch met briefly with Bill Clinton while the Justice Department was investigating Hillary's email server?  Clinton acted indiscreetly, but there is zero evidence it had any impact on Lynch or the Justice Department, but it led to days of coverage.  This is a more significant story and it was snowed over before the reporting had been completed.

We have the continued drop of the stock market, which is caused by both an over-expansion or the market caused by the supply-side tax cut, Trump's trade wars, Trump's unstable governance and Trump's looming government shutdown.  The Trump Recession is coming, and his incompetence and fealty to bad conservative ideas will likely make it much worse than it needs to be.

Ah, yes, the government shutdown.  Congress basically had found a way to get out of yet another inability to govern, when Trump got berated by the Howler Monkeys of the Far Right.  Limbaugh, Coulter, Fox and Friends and others lambasted him for not getting his stupid, expensive and inefficient wall.  So he's going to shutdown the government.  Right before Christmas.  Newt Gingrich - possibly the next White House Chief of Staff - saw his political ascendancy derailed when he shut down the government at Christmas time.  Trump is already spiraling, so it will be interesting to see what effect this will have on his poll numbers.  He might rally he base, but this will further drive independents towards the Democrats, and make independents of a few more Republicans.

Finally, the day ended with the bombshell that James Mattis will resign.  There is a legitimate debate over how long America should remain tethered to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In Iraq/Syria there is at least the compelling interest of containing and defeating ISIS while supporting our only true friends in the region: the Kurds.  I've lost track of why we are staying in Afghanistan, besides the fact that the people who likely take over Afghanistan are objectively terrible. 

The real issue is that Mattis was one of the few people surrounding Trump who wasn't a toady or an incompetent.  Secondarily, there is the issue of WHY Trump decided to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place.  The people who benefit from this decision are - roughly speaking - Putin, Erdogan, Bin Salman and perhaps Khamenei.  Certainly Putin benefits by seeing Americans leave Afghanistan and his proxy state in Syria.  Erdogan could see an opportunity to chastise the Kurds.  One group of people who were clearly not consulted were the National Security establishment - the very group that has been alarmed by Trump's closeness with our enemies.

Meanwhile, we had the spectacle of the House GOP pushing through a bill to fund that stupid wall that will die in the Senate, which will hasten the government shutting down in a few hours.  So craven and lickspittle is the Republican legislature that they meekly roll over whenever Trump barks the latest nonsense he heard on Fox News or Limbaugh.

Things will not get better when the Democrats take the House in two weeks.  If they had captured the Senate, things might have gotten better, because they could exercise real constraints on Trump's Cabinet appointments.  Instead, while we will get a clearer public picture of Trump's criminality, it will only enlarge his feeling of being besieged.  All the "bright red lines" he spoke of in 2017 - his taxes, his real estate business, his charities - will come under investigation.  We already know he's guilty of serial crimes.  As more and more comes to light, as his children, perhaps, get arrested, he will lash out more and more trying to distract from the closing circle.

And yet, as yesterday showed, there is increasing evidence that the GOP will do absolutely nothing to protect the country from his increasingly erratic tantrums.

We haven't hit rock bottom.

I'm not sure we even know what that looks like.

Speech

There is some predictable intramural squabbling over efforts by some to create a boycott against Tucker Carlson.  Carlson's career trajectory was George Will, right down to the bow tie.  He was a more or less middle-of-the-road neo-conservative partisan who had been scrubbed clean by his years at St.George's and Trinity College.  He was Marc Thiessen with a slightly less punchable face.

Upon landing at Fox, Carlson began has journey to dark, beating heart of Trumpistan.  He started with the usual bullshit Clinton scandals and the various oddball guests, but he wasn't full on Hannity yet.  Instead, as Trump's brand of vicious, racist, xenophobic politics ascended, Carlson hopped on for the ride.  While few people necessarily believe that Carlson believes everything he's saying, that somehow makes it even worse.  Jeannine Piro and Sean Hannity are open sewers of humanity.  They are simply terrible people.  Carlson actually brought his children to interview at our school and was warm and respectful, even to our resident Labour Socialist.

Carlson has moved into the language and cadence of white nationalism, just recently claiming that immigrants make America "poorer and dirtier."  Anyone with some historical literacy can see the parallels to the language of other ethno-nationalists.  Whether you're a Nazi in 1937 or a Hutu in 1994, you use the language that best dehumanizes your targets so that you can commit whatever atrocities you wish.

Carlson - and probably most Trumpists - probably don't want to kill immigrants.  I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on outright murder.  But the death of children doesn't bother them, because they have denied the humanity of people like 7-year old Jacklin Maquin, who died in the care of the Border Patrol.  They don't care about the impact of family separation.  They don't care about tear gassing non-violent crowds.

The language Carlson and others use matters.

As a result, groups on the left are trying to punish Carlson's advertisers.  This has made some people itchy.  On the one hand, it is trying to shut down a form of speech that some people find offensive.  That does present a "slippery slope" problem.  I would raise two counterpoints.

First, the Fox News phenomena is literally destroying American civic life.  Fear is the ultimate well-spring and fertilizer of authoritarianism.  Keep people scared enough, and they will believe any lie you tell them that both feeds and focuses their fear.  Fox has been a gusher of lies and fear mongering for years now.  Trump's rise and his continued support have their roots in the dark soil of Fox.  Pushing back against that is incredibly important, especially when it carries the terrifying roots of Nuremburg with it.

Second, one of the real problems in American politics right now is that there is a clear majority that favor Democratic policies and ideas.  This majority is centered in cities, but appears to be moving into the suburbs.  Because of the archaic design of our government, poorer, rural areas are drastically over-represented in the Senate and Electoral College.  Even the Blue Wave couldn't dent the natural gerrymander of the Senate.  Progressive political pressure - by default - has to be economic. 

Carlson will continue to get advertising dollars from catheter companies, orthotic shoe salesmen and doomsday preppers.  But if an insurance company or airline wants the business of younger, urban and suburban people, advertising on someone who uses racist language should be problematic for them.

This shouldn't be a "both sides" issue, it should be a wrong side/right side.  And if one side is echoing the language of dictators and fascists, then those people should be called out.  Richards Spencer and Milo Yannniwhatever should not speak on a college campus again.  There are, indeed, ideas too toxic for the public discourse.  Jefferson said:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

While that's laudable within the context of 1801, that precedes modern, mass democracy with its threat of demagogues and misinformation.  It's also an excuse that lead to Ft. Sumter.  Jefferson believed in reason, but we are discovering just how weak a force reason is on our politics.

Back during the states attorneys general lawsuit against Big Tobacco, they interviewed a smoker, asking them why they smoked with the warning label right on the package.  One replied that if that stuff was really true, they couldn't sell cigarettes.  Think about that.  It's that context that informed me that maybe some forms of expression are beyond the pale.  This is what leads a gunman into a newspaper office or a school or a pizza parlor.  This is what leads a lunatic to mail pipe bombs.

So, while I hear the arguments for free speech, right now is a crisis.  And Tucker Carlson is not owed anything by his advertisers.

Stupid Watergate

Jesus....

Giuliani denies there is a letter with Trump's signature.

There is a letter with Trump's signature.

Every time you think, "Well what if X turned out to be true?  Wouldn't that make a difference?"  And then it turns out X is, indeed, true.  And yet Republicans cling to Trump despite it all.

We've always assumed there was a breaking point.  I don't know that this is true.

I mean, let's just step back and consider a story you likely missed yesterday: Trump's charity was a crime.  Again, in a normal universe, that would be a major scandal.  Huge.  But in Trumpistan, it can barely squeeze out ten others just as bad.

The Jackpot And The Threat

As always in Trumpistan, the Bad and Terrible comes at you so fast and in such volume that it can be hard to keep up.  As we've processed the Twelve Days of Mueller, certain nuggets have slipped through the cracks.  One of the biggest is probably the AMI/National Enquirer story.

The Enquirer was basically Trump's media shield.  They would buy up damaging stories - and the exclusive rights to publish them - and stick them in a safe somewhere.  In other words, there is a trove of damaging Trump stories, and Mueller has them. Now we have a former editor, who presumably has seen most of those documents, who claims that there is outright evidence of criminal activity by Jared and Ivanka.

When we look around the Trump Clan, there has always been a desperate effort by certain media voices to normalize them whenever possible.  Don, Jr. and Eric were hopeless from the start, but efforts to make Ivanka, Jared and Melania somehow less complicit in the awfulness of Trumpistan are falling apart.  Melania is a Birther, an awful woman with cruelty stitched into her DNA.  But let's look at Ivanka and Jared.

These two are the Michael Corleones of this saga.  They are well scrubbed: boarding schools and Ivy League degrees.  They don't tweet semi-literate screeds in an Adderall fueled rage at 4:30AM.  They are quiet, respectable...and absolutely crooked and incompetent, too.  Jared has failed upwards and likely turned his privileged position in the White House into outright graft.  A lot of the sucking up to Prince Muhammad bin Salman has been Jared's doing.  Perhaps calling them Michael Corleone is too generous, since at least Michael was competent.

What seems inevitable in all this is that as the walls collapse around Trump, they will take his children with him.  I dunno, maybe Tiffany escapes.  Everything Fred Trump built and illegally siphoned to his son and that has been built for Fred's grandchildren will whither away.  That's fine.

My worry is that imagine if Trump had been more like Ivanka. What if he had been more Choate/Georgetown/UPenn and less Queens slumlord?  What if he had not tweeted so much?  What if he had buried the cruelty better?  What if he hadn't praised the Charlottesville Nazis, but simply issued a banal statement and then done nothing to counter the rise of RW extremism?

It is hard to separate Trump's politics from his policies.  But the GOP has, for years, been thumping the base with shit it doesn't really believe - abortion, for instance - in order to pursue the goals it does - stripping away everything possible from the working classes of the country to give to the rich.  Someone will come along and whisper all the parts that Trump shouts. He or she will be slick and say the right thing at parties or before the press.  Tom Cotton seems a likely candidate, Harvard with a Bronze Star, devoid of empathy or kindness, nakedly Machiavellian. 

And the press will fall for it.  And 49% of strategically dispersed Americans will fall for it.  Probably not in 2020 or 2024, while the lingering stench of Trumpistan still lingers over the body politic.  But sooner rather than later, someone will be Trump without the vulgarity; without the catalog of easily defined crimes.

That day scares the shit out of me.

Democrats

Here are two stories that I find really interesting.

First, New Jersey Democrats thought they would steal a page from Wisconsin Republicans and gerrymander the hell out of their districts.  When people - including prominent Democrats - objected, they withdrew the plan.

Second, Andrew Cuomo is a fairly lame politician by most standards. He's a bit tone deaf on certain issues and slow to realize the change that is coming to Left of Center politics.  However, he appears to have taken to heart the primary challenge he got from Cynthia Nixon and is embracing a lot of interesting proposals.

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to push forward assaults on democracy.

Simplifying things, one party is capable of being shamed and convinced, and one party isn't.

The Ostrich Caucus

Republicans are being asked about Trump's criminality, and they are burying their heads in the sand.  This, in many ways, is a continuation of the Fox News effect.  The Republican Party, as I have often stated, is a comfortable opposition party, but can't handle actual governance. This is because they fundamentally have come to believe that government should do the very least possible. That's nice as a theory from the 1700s, but it's insufficient for the modern world.

Ensconced in their comfortable ideological and informational bubble, they have not had to deal with unpleasant facts.  Trump himself might be the best example of this.  He never knew that being President meant being responsible for both his actions and the governance of the country.

But facts have an unwelcome way of making themselves felt.

The Senate GOP can run from the microphones as much as they want, but the public facts are already incredibly damning.  That dynamic will only get worse as the Democrats gain subpoena power.

Keep asking.  They can only evade the truth for so long.

UPDATE: Similar point.

Today In The Republican War On Democracy

Two-thirds of Florida voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that restores voting rights to certain felons who have completed the terms of their sentences.  It is an extraordinary measure that could have major implications in a state that always seems to vote 51-49 on just about anything.  Given how many minorities are living under felony drug possession convictions, this has the possibility of changing the nature of Florida elections.

Now - in a move that should shock exactly no one - the Republican governor and Secretary of State are talking about not implementing the amendment until the legislature weighs in.  The point of the referendum was to remove the legislature from the equation.  As someone in the article says, it should be self-executing.

Ultimately, as so often is the case in our modern republic, the courts will have to weigh in so that American citizens can vote.  Of course, Republicans have been stacking the courts with ideologues.

It's Florida.  It's elections.

Did anyone think this would be easy?

Art Of The Dull

Jon Chait has a nice take on how the Democrats masterfully managed to exploit the subtle cracks in Mr. Masterful Negotiator.

I'm not sure we can overstate the potential damage Trump is doing that we can't even see right now.  He is an emotional toddler and a fundamentally stupid man in early/mid stages of cognitive decline. What we saw in that Oval Office meeting was the Live-TV version of what the Russians and Chinese and Saudis and many other countries have known all along.

You're Out Of Your Depth, Donnie

Yesterday's surreal press availability with Trump, Pelosi and Schumer in the Oval Office was a master class in just what a simpering dumbfuck the President of the United States is.

First, let's enjoy the spectacle of a man whose understanding of Congress never extended beyond Schoolhouse Rock trying to lecture Nancy Freaking Pelosi on counting votes.  No Speaker in my lifetime has been a better vote whip than Nancy Freaking Pelosi.  Mansplaining?  Mansplaining. 

Second, if reports are accurate (and they usually are), Trump left the meeting in a huff, threw his little notecards from his tiny little hands, threatened to call another press conference and then backed down.  I've been saying for years that the modern GOP is a sustained tantrum against the 21st century.  Trump is the Toddler in Chief throwing hissy fits whenever he gets challenged and has to eat his carrots before he gets pudding.

Third, Trump has been attacked at a remove for the past two years.  Protests, the White House Press Corps, talking heads on CNN...all of these have been a little bit removed or buffered by the respect we accord the President as Head of State.  Foreign leaders have not called Trump out on his dumbassedness, because they realize that on some fundamental level, they have to work with him.  Like it or not, they have to find a way to appease the man-baby.  Pelosi and Schumer are under no such obligation.  They have demonstrated what the next two years will be like for Trump.

We know that Trump is a raging narcissist and that narcissists are fundamentally fragile egos who build lies around themselves to hide from the howling wound inside them.  As a "reality TV" star, Trump has never really been exposed to actual reality.  That was the subtext of the Access Hollywood tape, that he can "get away with anything." The Presidency is stripping every layer of lie that bare.  But it is going to get exponentially worse when Democrats get the gavels in January.  This was only a taste of what can be expected. 

Of course, you have the typical display of abject craven surrender from GOP "leaders" in the Congress, so much of this will degenerate into a partisan feud, when it should be seen as an effort to preserve American rule of law and democracy.  (Though it's an open question whether the Republican Party cares about that anymore.)  As Trump accumulates psychic wounds, how will that manifest in actions? 

That's profoundly scary to contemplate.

Impressive

One constant of the Bush Years was the unfailingly poor ability of Bill Kristol to predict future events.  An avowed and consistent Never Trumper, Kristol has since come around to evidence-based thinking.

Megan McCardle has now taken on the mantle of World's Worst Pundit. Her argument - if you want to dignify it with the label - is that Democrats are the ones really in jeopardy because of Mueller's probe.

Yup.

Democrats.

McCardle, as is her practice, twists every available fact into a substantial enough pretzel to fit her preconceptions.  Queen of the Hot Takes, she has decided that if everything we know to be true wasn't true, that would really mean what it means.  She "argues" that the Clinton Impeachment was kinda sketchy (true) and therefore the Trump Impeachment would be kinda sketchy (false equivalency).  Her assertion is that Mueller might not have enough evidence to warrant impeachment.

Let's see what we ALREADY KNOW.  Trump directed his lawyer to engage in campaign finance violations in terms of his hush money to various mistresses.  He then orchestrated a cover-up of those violations.  We know that he has charged Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Konstantin Kilminik, George Papadopolous and Michael Flynn.  Gates, Cohen and Flynn have been singing like canaries.  We have reason to believe he's circling in on evidence of physical meetings between Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi and others with Julian Assange, the cutout used by Russia to influence the election.

In McCardle's mind, this is terrible news for Democrats.

Going Swimmingly

Brexit is going well.  Yesterday, a Labour MP grabbed the ceremonial mace that represents Royal authority and tried to leave the Commons.  This would have effectively shut down the House of Commons until it was returned.  It's....bonkers, but there you have it.

This is the best metaphor for what is going on in Britain right now.

Basically, everyone know Brexit is a slowly unfolding disaster, but no one in power has the courage to do anything about it.

Given Trump's trade wars, rising interest rates, stagnant wages and the overall business cycle, I think we are on the verge of another recession.  A Hard Brexit could be the match that lights the bonfire.

Woocoodanode

Robby Mook makes a point I've been trying to make for some time now.  These "revelations" from Mueller are not really revelations at all.  They add, perhaps, some more evidence to the already heaping piles of evidence of what Democrats were saying in 2016: Russia wanted Trump to win, Trump wanted Russian help, they conspired together to help him win.  As Mook points out, this was the consensus of the cyber-intelligence community.  As we also know, Mitch McConnell - arguably a worse human being than Donald Trump - effectively blocked the report from the DNI that would have shared this information with the voting public

We knew all this in 2016.

As Mook points out, we have been fucked over by "Both Sides" journalism. There was an example this weekend of how persistent and pervasive "Both Sides" is.  Chuck Todd, the spirit of Both Sides made flesh to walk amongst us, was reporting on the unprecedented efforts by Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan to strip a newly elected Democratic governor of much of his power.  He concluded by saying that Democrats have done the same thing when they have been in the same situation.  This is bullshit.  The only time I can remember anything similar was when a Democratic governor took in North Carolina two years ago.  This is part of a concerted effort by Republicans to thwart democracy, because they are losing the support of a majority of voters.  There is no Democratic equivalent.

Back in 2016, any accusation against Trump had to be balanced by an accusation against Clinton.  If Trump was on tape bragging about sexual assault, what about Clinton's emails?  If Trump was apparently in cahoots with Wikileaks, what about Uranium One?  If Trump defrauded Trump University students and contractors, while using his charity as a slush fund, what about the Clinton Foundation.

Look, I've engaged in Both Sides when I teach.  I get the impulse to be impartial, to try not to take sides.  But the past two years, I've given up.  Yes, I reach for a John Kasich or John McCain or Lisa Murkowski to try and show "not all Republicans."  I try and make a case for Burkean Conservatism, because there's real merit there.  But there is no way to look at Trump and McConnell's Republican Party, remain objective and say: "Both Sides."

The depressing fact is that American liberals have been right far more often than they have been wrong.  Right about Iraq.  Right about tax cuts.  Right about deregulation.  Right about Trump.  History has shown this to be true.  And we are right about income inequality and global warming, too.

But it won't matter, as long as everything is framed as a binary story where each side is given value because of the nature of American journalism.

The Damage

We know the following:

- Trump is very credibly accused of campaign finance crimes.
- Trump is very credibly accused of conspiring to cover up those campaign finance crimes.
- Trump is very credibly accused of conspiring to work with a foreign power to influence elections.
- Trump is very credibly accused of conspiring to cover up those crimes.

We also know the following:

- The Republicans will do absolutely nothing about it.

Back in the 1840s and 1850s, Northern abolitionists made the argument that slavery was a moral abomination.  It wasn't simply that slavery was incompatible with American ideals or disadvantaged white labor, it was that slave holding was a sin and slaveholders sinners.  In response, the slaveholding South made arguments that slavery was actually a morally positive institution, because slavery elevated the slaves. Take a moment to think about what you have to convince yourself of, if you want to prove that slavery was good for the slave.

That's where the modern GOP is. Trump will be credibly accused of a multitude of crimes, as will the people around him and his family.  The GOP - in order to defend the indefensible - will twist itself into knots to justify Trump's behavior.

The damage to our politics will last longer than Trump's hold on the Oval Office.

You Have To Laugh, To Keep From Crying

Trump crime movies.

Yeah...So

Much of what Mueller has been dribbling out the last few days is what those of us who cared to try and follow these threads have known all along.  Russia helped the Trump campaign in many different ways.  As (I think) Josh Marshall pointed out, the dumbest and worst explanation always is the right one - Trump's Razor. 

What Mueller is doing to putting the evidence into the record.  And, yes, this is the biggest scandal in the history of the presidency.  And the Russia stuff is only part of it.  There's emoluments.  There's various garden variety scandals up and down the administration that feels like the Harding Administration.  Typically, the Unholy Trinity of Presidential Scandals consists of Grant (the Whiskey Ring, Fisk and Gould), Harding (Teapot Dome, the Veteran's Department scandal) and Nixon (Watergate, Agnew). Watergate is obviously the most damaging, because of its abuse of power.

Trump has likely blown through all of those.  He has the base corruption of the Whiskey Ring and Teapot Dome, the abuse of power and cover-up of Nixon.  He combines it with monumental stupidity.  Grant and Harding were, at least, personally honest.  They trusted people around them far more than they should have.  Nixon was personally involved in the corruption, but he at least had native intelligence and enough respect for the Republican Party to step down when asked.

Trump has none of these things.  He is all the worst of Grant and Harding, trusting figures like Stephen Miller, Ryan Zinke, Tom Price, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort.  He has the personal involvement of Nixon, without the intelligence to understand that there are in fact limits on his power.

So, this is the most corrupt, scandalous administration in history.  The response by the GOP - both its voters and its elected officials - is a resounding...so, what?

It's not just Trump.

It never has been.

Government By Dow Jones

Donald Trump now owns ten of the worst twenty single day declines in the history of the stock market.  This has all happened since the 2017 tax cut that funneled massive amounts of wealth to the stock market class.

Be skeptical of the claims that Wall Street is fundamentally the same as Main Street.  If anything, the volatility of the stock market is likely because large amounts of capital are flowing into and out of stocks with no regard to the underlying value of a company or the health of the economy.

However...massive inequality is not healthy for the economy.  Trade wars are not healthy for the economy.  Economic expansions always end.

We will be in a recession by 2020.

Read This Thread

Tom Nichols on the disaster that Trump spells for his most ardent supporters.

Unamerican

What is going on in Wisconsin and Michigan should surprise no one who has watched the modern GOP evolve into what is fundamentally an un-American party.  The GOP has basically decided that elections only count when their candidate wins, and if fraud happens to keep a Republican in office, so be it.  Their concern for electoral fraud extends as far as their own electoral gains.  They have gerrymandered Wisconsin so profoundly that Democrats won 190,000 more votes in state assembly elections and Republicans wound up with a super-majority of seats.

If American democracy - such as it is - depends on an accurate counting of votes in order to determine whom the people desire to govern them, then the GOP can safely be described as a party that no longer believes this.  They want to rule, and if that includes turning a blind eye to Russian interference in our elections, then they will do that.  Even if it includes elevating literally the worst person in our nation's history to the highest office in the land and then protecting him from legitimate consequences...

How can we describe the GOP as anything but an authoritarian party in the service of plutocrats and white nationalists?

Well...OK, Then

I read this whole piece about a Confederate nostalgic who insisted that slavery was not the root cause of the Civil War.  We've just covered the war and Reconstruction in class, and so all of this is fresh in my mind. 

I grew up in the vestiges of the Lost Cause.  Lord knows my grandparents believed it and my dad mostly did, too.  Trying to budge him wasn't easy.  Some of it was his lack of desire to read the scholarship that has come out in the last 75 years, but there is something deeply rooted in human nature that makes us turn away from evidence that discomfits us. 

The evidence that slavery was the root cause of the Civil War is overwhelming.  It is possible to cherry pick certain words and deeds to convince yourself otherwise.  Lincoln didn't mention slavery much in the early years of the war (though Confederate leaders did).  The reason was his desire to keep slave states like Maryland and Kentucky in the Union.  (Lincoln quipped: "I'd like to have God on my side, but I have to have Kentucky.")  As he himself noted, the longer the war went on, the more firmly cemented those states became to the North.  He also disavowed full emancipation until 1862.  However, Lincoln's position - and the reason for Southern secession - was not the existence of slavery, but its spread.  Lincoln refused to allow slavery to spread west into territories like Kansas, and his opinion was shared by millions of Northerners who were not abolitionists; they were Free Soilers.  The EXISTENCE of slavery was not why the South seceded, although they assumed that Lincoln was lying about his desire to leave slavery in place where it existed.  The SPREAD of slavery was very much on Lincoln's mind.  The South had lost the slave/free state balance in the Senate and it would never come back, unless they annexed more territory to the South.  There was an effort to annex Cuba in 1854, specifically to add slave states to the Union.

Motivated reasoning has come to define much of what I believe about American politics, and it exists to some degree on both sides.  Liberals, by definition, try and adapt their beliefs to existing evidence, but they can fall into a trap that has them ignore contradictory evidence, just like anyone else.  What is so pervasive right now among the American Right is a complete distrust of objective and expert data.  Climate change is a stand-in for economics, history, other forms of science...the list goes on.  Fox and the RW infosphere have created millions of Americans like Confederate Frank.

I don't know if we can survive them.

More Depressing News

Right now, everything sucks.  I don't want to do jack shit, I'm tired, I hurt, I have too much work to do...Happy Holidays!

And then we have this.   Basically, we have passed the point of no return on climate change.  Things - and by things I mean hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, floods and attendant refugee crises - are going to worse, probably much worse.

What's depressing is the Yellow Vest protests in France are about a fuel tax that was instituted to combat carbon emissions.  Macron "did the right thing" to address the spiraling crisis that will change human society forever.  It will cost him the presidency.

That's the reality of yet another problem with democracy in the age of instant information and instant anger.  Macron did the thing that needed doing and he gets riots in the streets.  How many of those rioters will vote for Le Pen, when climate refugees show up in Marseilles?

Everything sucks...

Online Revolutionaries

This is an interesting development noted by Anne Applebaum.  There have been widespread protests by a group in France calling themselves the Yellow Vests or Gilets Jaunes.  They are protesting...stuff.  Now, protesting is about as French as you can get.  As a country that has never really owned the dark side of it famous revolution, there is a consistent trend of taking to the barricades.

However, Applebaum notes two things.

First, there is a lot of anger out there.  Second, that anger travels faster and harder on the internet than it ever could before.  Time is the great perspective-giver.  It cools passion.  The internet does not allow for a cooling off period.  It magnifies the Hottest Takes, the Purest Outrage.  It has become clear that it gives an amplifier to the most extreme voices.  There were always Nazis sitting in their basement, fondling their replica Nazi gear.  Now they have their own Reddits, 4Chans and so on.  They dive into their various echo chambers and come back angrier and purer than when they went in.

It isn't clear to me whether liberal democracy (or social democracy) can survive this.  Both movements intend to disarm the Jacobins and the Brown Shirts by creating consensus.  You drain the anger of revolutionaries by providing answers to problems.  Social Security short circuits Socialism.  But now there is nothing to stop the angriest voices from dominating from the fringes.  This creates disorder, and - if Thomas Hobbes is right - disorder creates authoritarianism.  If France degenerates into chaos, they will look to someone like Le Pen to lead them out.  As Trump has proven, these demagogues can't actually solve any problems, but that won't matter. 

It's a dark time.  It's the 1930s, but different.  I don't know where we go from here.

Bush Assessed

The assessments of George H.W. Bush have started to roll in, and perhaps not surprisingly they are all over the place.  Bush was apparently guilty of the same sort of handsy behavior that ended Al Franken's political career.  He tended to grope and grab women at various times.

He also signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act, a true landmark piece of legislation that continues to provide protection and possibilities to millions of Americans.

He also pardoned the main figures in the Iran Contra Scandal, including ones that could have implicated him in wrong doing.  Iran Contra is easily the worst government scandal between Watergate and the myriad and on going crimes of the Trump Maladministration.  It involved a direct conspiracy by important figures in the White House to violate the law and cover those crimes up.

There were the numerous foreign policy victories, like the subtle management of the ending of the Cold War, the impressive coalition building of the Persian Gulf War.  (A friend of mine argued that Bush tacitly let Saddam invade Kuwait and then let him stay in power afterwards.  That doesn't make much sense.  I think 2003 proved the folly of going to Baghdad.)

But there was the abject cravenness in the face of the Tiananmen catastrophe.  There was the hypocritical invasion of Panama, done at least to help cover up Noriega's role in Iran Contra and various drug schemes.

There was the moderate stance on immigration and taxing and spending.  These positions have become impossible for Republicans in Washington to embrace.  Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 all either embraced immigration reform or tried to, yet the Republican Party has moved so far to the White Nationalist right that those positions are anathema to the party now.  Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge means that once again a Republican Congress has shredded fiscal discipline in pursuit of tax cuts to the rich.  HW did not do that.

But any assessment of Bush has to address the extraordinarily racist and cynical campaigns he ran in 1988 and 1992.  Bush's campaigns were prime examples of the Republican movement to "otherize" the Democratic Party.  His graceful note to Bill Clinton during the transition is held up as an example of how we don't have to be nasty in our politics.  But this stands in sharp contrast to every campaign he ran.  As I said yesterday, I was taken in by his attacks on Dukakis.  The "Tank Ad" was what what convinced me: vapid, cynical and shallow.  "Willie Horton" remains shorthand for racist demagoguery.

There was David Souter.  There was Clarence Thomas.

Bush was a complicated Republican, back when Republicans allowed themselves to be complicated.  Today, they have become a party of orthodoxy and deference to ideological authority.  His contest in 1992 with the odious Pat Buchanan gave him a sheen of respectability when it came to some issues that perhaps he didn't deserve.  He was a much better president than his son, and any comparisons to Trump are almost pointless.

Bush was the last pragmatic Republican, but he was also the progenitor of our nasty, divisive, racist politics.  You can't simply blame that on Lee Atwater.  They were his campaigns.

UPDATE: This is fair.

41

My first presidential vote was for Walter Mondale.  My second was for George H.W. Bush.  I was taken in, a bit, by the ad campaign depicting Mike Dukakis as an ineffectual wimp.  I don't necessarily regret that vote, except for Clarence Thomas.

Four years later, Pat Buchanan challenged Bush from the Revanchist Right.  While he lost, it was a sign of the coming lurch into racism, ignorance and grievance that typifies the far right in America today. 

I would be very surprised of Trump was invited to the funeral.

Underappreciated Story

This is a bigger deal than it gets credit for.  It's not Climate Change level of importance, but it's among the more important economic stories of the past decade.  The author hedges his bets as to why workers have not gotten appreciable raises, but he fails to mention the stagnation in the minimum wage.  While he mentions the decline of unions (and that is another important factor), the lack of growth in the minimum wage is a scandal.  It works hand-in-glove with the GOP tax bill that rewards companies for paying executives more and squeezing workers.  The recent cuts in jobs by GM is a good example of this dynamic at work.  GM executives will see their stock options increase in value, while blue collar workers are immiserated. 

A lot of these workers jumped to Trump in 2016 and there is some evidence that some of them flipped back to Democrats in 2018.  If Democrats can make the case that the GOP is screwing them over (which wouldn't be hard if it weren't for the alternative reality of Fox News and basic civic and economic illiteracy), they could see even greater gains in 2020. 

Trump ran on "I'm too rich to be corrupted."  That has proven laughably absurd (though it was in 2016, too).  A combined message of Trumpist personal corruption with stagnant wages can hopefully continue to cement the GOP as the party of Scrooge McDuck and Ebeneezer Scrooge.

The More Things Do Not Change...

This story from St. Louis is depressing but unsurprising.  There is ample evidence that three St. Louis police officers specifically planned and then executed a plan to viciously beat protesters.  One of the protesters that they beat was an undercover police officer, so there might be an actual consequence.  Yet... probably not.

With a few exceptions - most recently in Chicago - police officers are rarely convicted of assault against civilians.  Some of this is the nature of white juries siding with police and some is a consequence of District Attorneys not vigorously prosecuting police.  DAs and cops are two sides of the same coin, and DAs require good relations with the police to do their jobs.  It's little wonder that they don't go after cops who riot as vigorously as they go after corner boys dealing drugs. 

Missouri is also showing some really troubling tendencies in its politics and race relations.  Once an electoral bellwether, it's increasingly more like a populous Alabama. 

The evidence against the officers seems overwhelming.  I'm not convinced a jury will hold them accountable, though.

State of Flux

Things are all over the place with the Mueller probe.  Josh Marshall is right, in that we have no idea what this actually means.

My hunch is that you have a lot of people under a lot of pressure – making reckless moves, taking desperate actions, pulling ejection seat cords. They’re making wild moves. Some are lying. Some of the new details are accurate. But it’s hard to distinguish between the real information and the smoke and distractions various players are tossing up into the air. The confusion isn’t simply confusion. It’s a sign that something big is taking shape. What it is won’t be clear until Mueller speaks – figuratively.

Bad Idea

Cindy Hyde-Smith won fairly handily last night, because of course she did.  It was Mississippi.

However, there was some concern that allegations of her attending a white's only school and embracing neo-confederate groups would hurt her.  She handled the allegations poorly, but in the end it didn't matter.

I wonder if maybe it did matter.

In the general election, there were three main candidates.  One of them, Chris McDaniel, was a true white supremacist.  He was a bomb throwing demagogue, who upset the Mississippi GOP establishment.  He got 16.5% of the vote.  There was some question as to whether his voters would stay home, and them staying home was Espy's only route to victory.

Instead, the various attacks on Hyde-Smith likely helped her with those McDaniel voters.  On election day, she won 368,000 votes.  Espy won 360,000 votes.  Yesterday, Hyde-Smith won 457,000 votes, whereas Espy only picked up 388,000. 

The racism helped her.

I'm sure the NY Times will write a Very Serious Piece about how Democrats need to reach out to working class whites in Mississippi, but if I'm right, I just don't see how that's possible.  The racism wasn't a problem, it was the point.

MIssissippi

Special elections and run-offs are weird, but there's not a great chance for Mike Espy to knock off neo-confederate Cindy Hyde-Smith today.  Unless white Mississippians stay home and African Americans flood the polls, it's unlikely to happen.

But it would be...amazeballs.

Morons

I don't know what the everloving hell is wrong with these people.  The GOP majority craps all over them for years, so I get their desire to re-write House rules to empower the middle.  The problem is that these rules will hamstring Democrats in the majority, and once the Republicans regain the majority at some point in the future, they will un-do the rules. 

I don't believe Democrats should play the same politics that Republicans play, but they shouldn't hamper their own efforts with appeals to bipartisanship that have zero appeal outside of the donor base of a few wealthy individuals.

Slow Rolling Catastrophe

On Friday, the Trump White House quietly dumped an incredibly damning report about the immediate impact of climate change.  On the one hand, it was amazing that the report was even allowed to see the light of day, but obviously it demonstrates two things about information in Trumpistan.

First, they used the Friday News Dump.  This was a favored tactic of previous administrations - Dubya was especially good at it.  If you have bad news, get it out on Friday afternoon, so the story gets lost in the weekend.  Dumping it the Friday after Thanksgiving was especially deft, since literally no one is watching the news with any urgency.  This demonstrates, as if we didn't know, how little Trump and the entire GOP cares about climate change.  The GOP is literally the only major political party in the developed world (and that includes the Chinese Communist Party) that doesn't accept that climate change is man-made and needs a policy solution.

Second, it demonstrates how poorly news organizations can handle bad news in Trumpistan.  This is a big deal.  It's about...everything.  It comes on the heels of a major catastrophe in California.  It comes a few months after catastrophic hurricanes hit Florida.  There is context galore for major stories about the impact of climate change.

But simultaneous to this, you have a GOP Senate candidate exposed as a literal neo-Confederate; the ongoing outrage of Khashoggi's murder; the ongoing feud between Trump and Chief Justice Roberts; another migration crisis on our borders and...well, let's just see what Monday brings, shall we?

The complete overloading of the puke funnel with terrible stories is having an impact.  I believe that those formerly GOP leaning suburban women who flipped on Election Day were influenced by the steadily rising flood of bad stories.  It creates a feeling detached from specifics of a world gone shitty.  What it doesn't necessarily do is create focus on certain issues.  Right now there are probably two major policy concerns: in the short term, Trump's corruption, in the long term, climate change.  Neither one can hold any one's attention for more than a few hours before something else horrible comes along to distract us.

Remember: "May you live in interesting times" is a curse.

The Irreconcilable Issue

Abortion has long been the issue that divides Americans in truly irreconcilable ways.  For opponents, it's infanticide.  For supporters, it's about the autonomy of woman over her own body.  For obvious reasons, it hasn't been a "hot button" issue for me, though I've been pro-choice my whole life. 

Mostly, I'm sympathetic to the argument that those who demand that pregnancies be carried to term are simply demanding that women be vessels for childbearing.  Almost invariably, those who oppose abortion also oppose meaningful sex education or support for birth control.  Abortion isn't a first choice for birth control, it is - by definition - the last option.  Ideally, both the information and education about sex and the financial means to support birth control options would be in place to reduce the need for abortions.  That would seem to be a common ground.  The fact that it hasn't become common ground is the tell.

Some of this is the fault of the Roman Catholic church's insistence that birth control is immoral.  Given the moral quagmire on sexual issues that typifies the Catholic church, it's disappointing that a bunch of pedophile-defending old men can define this issue.  But even if Francis were to reverse fully that decision, evangelicals in this country will likely cling to forced child birth.

If there was a way to make this issue "go away" through a meaningful compromise, that might improve aspects of our politics.  But this is a legitimate difference in principles that can't be bridged.

Like so many other things in our country.

JFK

This is an interesting read on some of the facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination.  A few things pop out.

First, it should be said that Kennedy was something of a moral sewer.  Great image: young, handsome, eloquent, both Harvard and Irish.  But underneath it all was someone who was perfectly comfortable using others, especially women for sex.  His younger brother, Teddy, obviously inherited that behavior, I'm not sure how much Robert did, though he, too, clearly cheated on his wife.  The constant nostalgia for the Kennedys is a great example of how vacant celebrity politics are, whether it's the glamorous Kennedy clan or a reality TV vulgarian.  Kennedy spent most days medicated beyond belief on a cocktail of illegal drugs.  That was the guy who helmed the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Second, the fever swamps of right wing paranoia have deep roots.  Dallas in 1963 was basically a geographic expression of InfoWars today.  In '63, the John Birch Society was considered the lunatic fringe of American politics, yet it was a vibrant presence in Dallas and other Southern cities.  These were the nutjobs who believed flouridation was a Communist plot.  Of course today, we have nothing like that.  The year after Kennedy's death, Richard Hofstadter would write The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which remains a critical piece of scholarship in looking at the fringes - especially on the right - of American politics. 

JFK's assassination was widely considered to be the kick-off of the craziness of the 1960s.  His administration was the last of the 1950s, whereas LBJ oversaw the dramatic expansion of civil rights and public goods that radicalized white resentment and led to Nixon.  Vietnam and the fissures it tore in American society were real, but as we see today, it was largely the backlash to civil rights and the providing of public goods to "those people" that powered the rise of the Reagan Revolution and modern conservatism.  Kennedy's death in and of itself wasn't the reason why this happened, except to the degree it lead to LBJ having large majorities to pass the legislation that created the white racial backlash.

I'm Thankful For Badass Women

Encapsulated in this blurb is a tweet by Ocasio-Cortez.  Basically, the Five White Guys revolt against Nancy Pelosi has predictably fizzled on the fact of the facts.  Pelosi is a bad ass.  She will mess a fool up.  Seth Moulton has almost certainly earned himself a primary challenge for his troubles.  She will be the next Speaker, because she was always going to be the next Speaker, because...bad ass.

The tweet is instructive, too, because if Pelosi is smart - and she is - she will get AOC in front of the cameras frequently.  AOC is smart, especially about media.  There are a few of these younger generation legislators who are proficient in social media - Brian Schatz and Beto O'Rourke come to mind, too - and Pelosi needs to leverage those skills.

There is a generation of Democratic politicians, and here I'm thinking of Chuck Schumer and Steny Hoyer, who were conditioned by the 1980s.  The country lurched rightward and the Democratic party entered a minority period in the House in 1994.  Their reflex is to crouch against a coming blow and to "reach out" across the aisle for some sort of "bipartisan comity" that simply doesn't exist anymore.  Pelosi is from that same era, but she learned the important lesson that comity died.  It was Pelosi who saved Social Security in 2005. 

Find a new Majority Leader and stick that person in front of a camera.  I like Ted Leiu on social media, but there has to be someone under the age of 60 with the chops to take on bullshit talking points on Press the Meat.  Adam Schiff has his lane, but they need someone to be the face of the party while Nancy smashes the Republicans behind closed doors.

Welcome To The Party

Max Boot was a neo-conservative cheerleader of the Iraq War.  Recently, he announced that he was switching parties as one of the few meaningful Never Trump conservatives.  If you read his column today, you might be struck by how much he sounds like some leftists college professor.  His basic criticism - that economic dislocations have led to anti-democratic Populism - is hardly a controversial one in some circles, but I doubt that Boot held these positions five years ago. 

He does bring a certain narrow lens to his argument.  He neglects to mention the climate when he talks about the refugee crises that have led to racist demogoguery in Europe and the US, but he's right about the political destabilization in the border between the developed and underdeveloped world leading to massive immigration that seems to have no amiable solution.

What was interesting to me was not his argument (I could have made a similar one myself if the WaPo wants to give me a job), but rather that Boot was the one making it.  As I said, I doubt he would be making those arguments about wealth inequality five to ten years ago. 

It's almost like leaving the Republican Party has lead to him opening himself up to a world of evidence that he was blind to before. 

I've seen repeated arguments that white people, but especially white women, are being terrible racists for voting against Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum.  I think there's a great deal of truth to that, but I also don't think that calling them racists is going to change one freaking person's mind. 

Instead, if my observations of people like Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Joe Walsh is correct, the reason all these white people voted against Abrams and Gillum (and Bill Nelson and Beto O'Rourke) is because they are Republicans.  And Republicans are heavily invested - as a matter of their core political beliefs - that racism barely exists anymore.  It's just a made up weapon to use against Republicans.  I mean, what else is Cindy Hyde-Smith going to say?

However, if I'm right (and there's a first time for everything), I think that once you strip people away from the GOP, they open themselves up to a bigger range of opinions.  Not all of them.  Joe Walsh is still a gun-humping ammosexual, for instance.  But being a Republican is about being angry and defensive about everything.  The changes in the country, brown people not knowing their place, factory jobs disappearing, gay people being all gay and stuff... To be a Republican in 2018 is be engaged in a long and vocifreous tantrum against the 21st century.

Once you get them out of that mindset...who knows where that might lead us?  What happens if those college educated suburban women never return to the GOP?  What happens if the GOP loses half of college educated white men?  Or more?

Once you're out of the Fox News hermetically sealed bubble, suddenly there is a world of compelling information you can assimilate.  Global climate change isn't just about hotter summers, it's about natural disasters and refugee crisis, but it has a policy solution.  Critical levels of economic inequality is incompatible with a functioning democracy and expanding the welfare state, especially education opportunities and health care availability, can reduce those strains on society.

The essential glue that (barely) holds progressives together is the idea that we can make a better world through collective action.  The essential glue of conservativism is that this is wrong, and therefore we just need to hunker down amidst the old ways.  When the world convulses - as it is doing now - we can expect a last, desperate surge of conservatism like we saw at the end of the 19th century.  But in the end, we will need to embrace options to manage change.

If we can flip enough of the population to see this, we can usher in a generation of progressive change in this country and perhaps around the world.

Khashoggi

The moral and foreign policy disaster that is Trump's handling of the Khashoggi murder is a Rosetta Stone of the Trump "Administration."

First, there is the reflexive sucking up to a dictator.  Trump's credulity whenever a strongman is questioned is a feature of his foreign affairs.  It goes something like this: Strongman does something terrible, World cries out in outrage.  Trump meets with Strongman who denies it. Trump "believes" the Strongman with a "Whaddya gonna do" shrug.  Trump admires dictators, and he admires their ability to avoid consequences.

Second, is his disdain for the press, which is part of Trump's admiration for dictators' ability to avoid consequences.  Khashoggi was a staunch critic of the Saudi regime, and he was forced to leave the country, because of his criticism.  Trump is a coward, but he would love to have a Good Squad who would go around beating up or even murdering the press.  His cowardice is evident in his refusal to listen to the tape.  Trump had a Rich Boy's life of skating across the friction points most of us face.  The press is currently the greatest factor holding Trump accountable, with the courts a close second.  If a journalist gets killed, why would that upset Trump?

Finally, there is the rank corruption.  Part of Trump and Kushner's fondness for bin Salman is the fact that Saudi money has flowed into their properties since inauguration.  The Saudis know that the way to Trump is through his wallet, and they have been lavishing events on Trump properties around the globe. 

All of this is fair game for House Democrats in six weeks.  Smart Republicans should know this and get out front of this.  Anyone seen any smart Republicans?

UGH, Both Sides

Read this Washington Post story and see if you can tell me who won the midterm elections.  Democrats won at least 37 seats, and there could be a couple more that flip.  The GOP got wiped out in the suburbs and with emerging demographic groups.  You could walk from Puget Sound to El Paso and pass through one GOP held district.

The media's constant pre-occupation with Trump's base is appalling.  Yes.  Old white people like him.  Time to move on.

What It Looks Like

Any number of people have identified global warming as the premier long term crisis.  They are often derided by "very serious thinkers" on the right, because...tree hugging hippies, I guess.

The disasters in Puerto Rico, North Carolina and now California are of course difficult to pin solely on climate change.  Hurricanes and forest fires are natural events that would happen with or without a warming globe.  What climate change does is amplify and intensify these events.

The Camp Fire is an unbelievable tragedy.  The speed and intensity of the event has led to who knows how many deaths. 

Needless to say, we are not equipped with leadership that will address this issue. Every year, every day counts in trying to get a handle on this, and we are failing the future.  Thanks Republicans.

Tricky

Many people have rightly chided Trump and other Republicans for saying that people like Bill Nelson are trying to "steal an election" by requiring that all votes be counted.  Counting votes is the essential component of democracy.  Martha McSally was lauded for clearing the lowest possible bar: acknowledging math. 

Stacey Abrams has a plausible but not irrefutable case for voter suppression.  She is in the position of having to prove a negative, namely that if Brian Kemp had not done what he did, she would be the rightful winner.  Frankly, I have some doubts.  Stacey Abrams is a very impressive figure, but Georgia is still Georgia.  Quite a few otherwise sympathetic "White Liberals" will still cling to the Angry Black Lady tropes and have their doubts about black politicians in general.  Exit polls certainly suggest that Abrams didn't do well enough with the same sort of voters that flipped GA-6. 

Both Abrams and Andrew Gillum very likely came up against a racial wall.  They were running in the South, with populations that contain more than their share of aging whites. 

Abrams ended her bid without conceding, which is more than just a rhetorical device.  My hope is that she would run for Senate against David Perdue in two years, but to win, she will need two things.  First, she will need a more credible Secretary of State than Brian Kemp who will work to make sure that voting is easier than it is now, especially for people of color.  Second, she will need to win more white votes.  There are some who are taking a "fuck white people" approach, but again that is a misreading of how elections work.  Yes, white Georgians overwhelmingly voted for Kemp.  But Abrams doesn't have to win white voters; she has to win enough white voters.

My worry is that she will need to build bridges to communities who won't be happy with the non-concession.  If she doesn't, her statewide career won't go anywhere.  That would be a shame.  Same goes for Gillum, though he has conceded, and he doesn't deal with the double edged sword of gender that Abrams labors under. 

It is very hard to win statewide election as an African American anywhere, especially in the South.  In order to win, candidates of color will have to win "enough" white votes.  I'm not sure how they get there.

The Courts

Every time someone points out that Trumpistan feels like 1930s Germany, something like today's court ruling comes along.  In this case, Jim Acosta was ordered reinstated to the White House Press Pool by a judge appointed by Donald Trump himself.

Yes, Lou Dobbs' dessicated corpse was on Faux News blathering about illegal aliens voting for Democrats.  It combines contempt for democratic norms with contempt for Democrats with Goebbel's "Big Lie."  But the Fox-o-Sphere is increasingly insular. It reaches too many people, yet not enough to constitute a majority of Americans.  There is "a" fascist America, but America is not fascist.

It's Friday, so we remain interested in when Mueller will drop some indictments.  With Kingpin Whitaker in charge of DOJ, Mueller might be biding his time until Democrats get control of the House and there is an AG who isn't a complete Trumpian tool.  Still, one can hope that we will at least see Roger Stone's perp walk before too long.

No Confidence

Theresa May is not, generally speaking, a sympathetic figure.  However, she has been given an impossible task: negotiating a withdrawal from the European Union that will satisfy those who want nothing to do with the EU and those who wanted to remain part of it.  Not surprisingly, she has failed to square that circle.

May has negotiated what has been called a "Soft Brexit" that will leave Britain with one foot in and one foot out of the Union.  In particular, it will maintain the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  Currently, driving from Belfast to Dublin is like driving from Boston to Hartford.  A hard Brexit would make it more similar to driving from Detroit to Toronto. Few people on the island of Ireland wanted a hard border, but some did.  And some of those are part of Theresa May's coalition government.  (Her Conservative Party does not have a majority in the Commons by itself, and has to work with the Democratic Ulster Party.)

The presumption is that Hard Brexiteers will force a vote of no confidence on May's government.  This could lead to her resignation and replacement with someone else, or it could lead to new elections.  My gut says new elections could lead to a Labour government, or a Labour-lead coalition. 

Whatever happens, there is no good result for Brexit.  There is no result that will appease those who never embraced it in the first place, nor is there a result that will appease the Hard vs Soft Brexiteers.

This is an ungodly mess, and May has zero good options to clean it up.

What Do Incoming Freshmen Owe Nancy Pelosi?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez launched a protest in Nancy Pelosi's office over green energy yesterday, and - HURRAY - we are relieving the 2016 primaries on Twitter!

AOC - as we are apparently now calling her - was an activist.  Now she is a lawmaker.  Those can require different skills. AOC is very skilled in front of a microphone. Pelosi is not.  AOC also freaks out Fox News, than again, so does Pelosi.

There is a legitimate question as to what Pelosi's job should be right now.  She's the most effective legislative strategist the Democrats have.  The problem is that Democrats can't actually pass anything because of the Senate.  One thing Pelosi has been very good at is absorbing blow after blow from hte RW media and ignoring it and moving on.  She's incredibly tough.

If Democrats had control of the Senate, I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to make Pelosi Speaker, because she will shepherd through bills that would put Trump in a bad spot.  Perhaps she can do the same for McConnell.  There is an argument that perhaps she would be a better Majority Leader with someone else assuming the mantle of Speaker.  The problem is that the immediate names on the roster share the same problems as Pelosi: they are older and not especially media adept. 

Pelosi should meet with the Freshmen and put into place a plan whereby she will groom a next generation of leaders to step in and take her (and Steny Fucking Hoyer's) place. Probably in 2020, maybe in 2022.  She will need to make a positive case for why she should be the face of the Democratic Party until we pick a 2020 nominee.  But the incoming Freshmen would do well to remember that Nancy Smash got the ACA through an ideologically diverse House.  She's earned the right to be Speaker again.  Just not forever.

This Is A Problem

Look, there are more important things right now, but Amazon's decision to put its new headquarters in Washington and New York is a problem.

Amazon is effectively unrestrained from normal business considerations because of it's great size and near monopoly over the online retail market.  That's a separate issue.  The real issue is how geography is killing the post-modern economy.

The primary political chasm today is urban versus rural.  Cities are overwhelmingly diverse, forward looking and open.  Rural areas are homogenous, traditional and insular.  But even within the urban sample, there are winners and losers.  NY, LA, Chicago, San Francsico, Washington, Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, Denver...there's a long list of cities who are facing the 21st century and liking what they see (for the most part).

There are other cities that are decaying: Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore...let's stop there.

Why wouldn't Amazon choose Baltimore over DC?  Hell, even south of Baltimore?  BWI airport is right there, you have franchises in the NFL and MLB, and the NHL and NBA are just down in DC.  What's more, real estate is cheaper.  The DC area is one of the most expensive in the country - as is NYC.  If Amazon had moved to Detroit, they'd have the run of the place.  Same with Kansas City or Memphis.

We talk a lot about how divided America is along red and blue lines, but those lines are not sectional, they are regional.  Amazon just made that worse.

UPDATE:  Ocasio-Cortez makes some good points.

Motivated Reasoning

Josh Marshall lays his finger on an important truth here.  The closer we get to an election, the more partisans come home.  There was talk of a "Kavanaugh Effect," whereby Republicans rallied around the President and the GOP because Bart O'Kavanaugh had been treated so cruelly.  The reality is that they were coming home regardless.  Now that the election is over (and Democrats did well) his approval will slip some. 

If - as I hope and pray - Trump goes down to a ringing defeat in 2020, he will be written out of the GOP history of this era. 

Take A Knee

Donald Trump adroitly leveraged white Americans' outrage over Colin Kaepernick protesting the unnecessary deaths of African Americans by creating a sort of dime store patriotism: cheap, gaudy, loud and ultimately fragile. Trump's decision to skip a commemoration of the end of World War I because of the weather is just a huge glaring example of how fragile that "patriotism" is.  Soldiers exist as props for Trump (just ask the thousands of soldiers sent to the boarder as a political stunt). 

Clearly, too, Trump is a brittle narcissist.  Narcissists are created by psychic wounds that never heal.  Each new wound to the ego cuts deeper than the last.  Because he was wealthy and a celebrity, Trump has largely avoided consequences for his shitty behavior over the years.  It has to be sinking in to him that consequences are coming.  His public behavior since election day has been more erratic than usual.  Perhaps he just wanted to sulk in his hotel room like the petulant man-child that he is.

Either way, it was a disgraceful display.  Could you imagine if this had been Obama?

Here We Go, Here We Go, Here We Go Again

And so it comes around again: A Florida Recount!

It looks increasingly like Krysten Sinema will win in Arizona. So attention will shift to Florida and possibly Georgia.  The problems there are that - unlike Arizona - the GOP establishment seems intent on preventing a full vote count.  They are ahead in the three important races and they don't want to imperil that by counting more votes.  The fact that counting all the votes is a signature feature of democratic governance isn't really a high priority for them.  As the GOP shrinks into a smaller and smaller slice of the electorate, suppressing votes will be increasingly important to them.

Of course, the broader question is about how we run elections.  First off, we have a patchwork of state and local agencies trying to run a complicated national event.  Then, we add on to that a partisan agenda and the result is Florida. 

I hope Stacey Abrams forces a run-off and wins.  I would be thrilled if Andrew Gillum won the Florida governor's race.

But boring old Bill Nelson is a six year Senate term that could determine the balance of the Senate in 2021.  That's the gold ring.

Happy Hanukkah

I saw a tweet last night that said Election 2018 was not Christmas, it was Hanukkah.

The reason is that on election night, Democrats felt...OK.  When Indiana Senate flipped, that was a holy crap moment.  Then more and worse news came in from Florida, Georgia and Texas, Montana and Arizona looked bad, the House wasn't an emphatic a win as some might have hoped.

But over the last few days, some interesting things have been happening.  A number of close House races in California, New Jersey and elsewhere have flipped to Blue.  Tester pulled out the win in Montana.  Last night, Krysten Sinema pulled into the lead in Arizona.

And in Florida...well, it's Florida, isn't it.  The Senate race seems destined for a recount and perhaps the governor's race as well.  Georgia could head to a run-off.

The Republicans are dusting off the "voter fraud" playbook, because counting all the votes is fraud now, I guess. I mean, it worked in Florida in 2000, why not run that play again.

If Sinema holds on and Nelson somehow wins Florida, that means the Democrats will have lost Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, but won in Nevada and Arizona.  Despite an unfavorable map, they managed to hold their losses to a single net seat.  That puts the Senate in play in 2020, when Maine and Colorado races where Democrats should be favored, and North Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, and, yeah, I'll say it, Texas could all be targets. (They will likely lose Alabama.)

The bad results in Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota means that there is no map that gets Democrats to 60 seats in 2020, should a secondary wave sweep Trump and Republicans out of office.  But it means that they will have majorities that could pass decent budgets and potentially allow Puerto Rico and DC to become states.

Where The White Women At?

One of the questions/recriminations coming out of some of the disappointing losses in Georgia and Florida was the voting behavior of white women.  In Georgia, they broke hard for Brian Kemp.  The first assumption about this was that it must be racism.  There was probably at least a little/lot of that, but there are a few other observations I'd like to make.

First, they voted for Brian Kemp because they are Republicans.  Republicans vote for Republicans.  Now, maybe (especially in Georgia) being a Republican is intrinsically wrapped up in the racism of the Solid South.  But the most powerful force in politics today is partisan identity.  Some of that is wrapped up in ethnic and racial identity, but that's true of both sides.  You vote your tribe.  As 2016 proved, Republicans will vote for an angry, ambulatory, racist mango as long as he's a Republican.

Secondly, the way we run elections in this country, it's "winner take all."  You win with under 50% of the vote (like Jon Tester did), you still get 100% of the seat.  As a result, we tend to look at large demographics as "winner take all," too.  White women supported Ron DeSantis is true, but not true.  A majority did, but when you're talking a group as large as "white women of Florida" you're still seeing hundreds of thousands of white women voting for Andrew Gillum. 

Tribe is destiny, but you CAN change your tribe.  The challenge for Democrats is to make more Democrats.  Trump is actually helping with that.  We have two years to make another 5% of the white women switch tribes. 

That's the challenge.

Everyone Has Something To Be Unhappy About

As I wrote last night, Trumpist politics worked.  To a degree.  Trump targeted a number of Senate seats held by Democrats in Deep Red States, and he may have pulled off a remarkable string of victories in Indiana, Missouri, Montana and Florida.  Florida, Montana and Arizona are all still counting votes, but Republicans have leads, however small, and it's unlikely given what we've seen that Democrats will hold Florida and Montana and flip Arizona.  Those are six year terms and it just unbelievably sucks. It sucks that Trump's racist, xenophobic politics worked.  It sucks that even if Democrats win in 2020, they won't get to the 60 seats they need to pass meaningful legislation.

However...

In many other ways, Trumpist politics failed.  When we are done counting votes, my guess is that Democrats will have won about the "national popular vote" by about 8%. That's a landslide.  What's more, if those numbers continue through 2020, there is simply no way Trump retains the White House.  Given that Democrats now can conduct meaningful oversight and expose some of the corruption present in all levels of this administration, it's unlikely that things will get better for Trump.  Despite a booming economy, he remains a remarkably unpopular president.  If the economic bubble bursts - and expansions don't go on forever - I can see a case where he doesn't even run in 2020.  But if he does run, he wins the GOP nomination.  And he loses the general, providing Democrats don't fuck it up.

It was absolutely critical for Democrats to win the House.  It was critical to begin re-erecting the "Blue Wall" in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.  Important gains were consolidated on ballot initiatives.  There's an openly lesbian, Native American congresswoman from Kansas of all places. 

But the idea of an expanding map into Georgia, Texas and Arizona looks premature at best.  Florida remains a place where Democratic hopes go to die. 

It will be interesting to look at exit polls and demographics to see who stuck with Trump.  Age, in particular, seems like an important metric.  Did young people vote like we thought they would?  How old is the Trumpenproletariat?

Still, I feel relieved that American Democracy isn't irrevocably broken, while I'm literally nauseous that Trump's naked appeal to fearmongering and racism works so well on so many of my fellow Americans.

By All Accounts

The Democrats will win the House.  Maybe a lot of those tight races will go their way and they get a nice majority.  Who knows?  A gavel in the hand of Adam Schiff is the most important thing.  Quite a few governorships will change hands, which will help with re-districting.  Florida restored the right to vote to over 1.5 million people.  That might bear fruit in 2020, but 2018 looks headed to a recount.

In some ways?  It worked.  The racism and the xenophobia and the strong man antics.  It worked.  It preserved the Senate for the GOP.  Trump will be able to appoint Kris Koback Attorney General.  He won't get impeached.  He can nominate Jeannine Pirro to the Supreme Court.  It worked.

I remain hopeful that Democrats will win the House and use that leverage to remind people every day that Trump is an authoritarian kleptocrat.  But the American people?  A large part of them are completely OK with racism and sexism.  Joe Manchin won and Joe Donnelly lost, because one took a stand against rape and the other didn't.

The pipe bombs, the shooting of African Americans and Jews...it didn't move the needle.  Not enough.

I'm profoundly disappointed in my fellow Americans.