Immoral

 Richardson flags several Senate Democrats' speeches that makes the case that not only is the OBBB fiscally irresponsible, it's immoral. Krugman amplifies this by pointing out that Medicaid is really popular.

Both note that the Republican Party has been on a decades long quest to destroy the New Deal and the Great Society. The very idea that government should provide benefits beyond public order is tyranny according to GOP ideologues. The problem for them is that this ideology is unpopular. When Newt Gingrich went after Medicare, it was unpopular. When George W. Bush went after Social Security, it was unpopular. As Donald Trump goes after Medicaid, it is unpopular.

At the moment, the bill does not have the votes in the Senate to pass. Rand Paul says it's fiscally irresponsible, which - you know -it is. Tillis won't vote to gut his constituents' health care. Collins and Murkowski also apparently can't vote for the final bill. I would not put it past the GOP to find a way to force them into line, but if they do, I really think it will deliver the Senate to Democrats in 2026.

Tell Us, Tillis

 Republican Senator Thom Tillis's speech in which he announced his intention not to run again in the face of a primary challenge by a True Trumpist will be a fascinating document for future historians. A current historian, Heather Cox Richardson, excerpts from it:

In a statement, Tillis said: “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” He wrote: “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.”

Tonight, Tillis told the Senate: “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?... [T]he effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

What Tillis, in effect, admits to is that he has NOT represented "the great people of North Carolina to the best of (his) abilities." He has warped his principles in service of the malignant Baal encamped in the White House. 

You hear this from Democratic Members of both the House and Senate. There are Republicans who are also somewhat aghast at what Trump says and does, and they admit is much when the mics are off. Yet, time and time again, they shut up and toe the line, afraid of Trump using his social media bullying to level a primary challenge against them. Yes, sure, there are feral weirdos like Markwayne Mullin or Marjorie Traitor Greene. There are moronic bigots like Tommy Tuberville and Lauren Boebert.

Right now, the fate of millions of Americans hinges on Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Tillis and Rand Paul - of all people - have signaled that they will not vote for this OBBB. Meanwhile, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Cynthia Lummis are wavering because it's not cruel enough.

Almost exactly 8 years ago, Collins and Murkowski saved the Affordable Care Act - with a dramatic late assist from John McCain. They have been subsequently re-elected, so that vote absolutely did not hurt them. Still, Trump's improbable win last November has imbued him with some sort of magic that has so many Republicans fearful of saying anything that might cross him.

I remain hopeful that one day a hamburdlar will do its patriotic duty and rid us of this evil man. When that happens, what becomes of the Republican Party? What becomes of a Lindsay Graham, who has contorted himself into something hateful and stupid to appease Baal? There is no way that JD Vance can inspire the same fear that Trump does. Vance is evil in his own way, but it's as much his lack of true principles as opposed to Trump's bedrock character that makes Vance evil. Trump is evil like Sauron; Vance is evil like Grima Wormtongue.

Thom Tillis is simply the latest Republican to be defeated by Trump's malevolence. He joins Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Kevin McCarthy and more than I can relate here. Men and women of different ideological positions, all of whom were destroyed by Trump. HR McMaster, John Kelly and Rex Tillerson are gone, replaced by evil, mendacious creatures. 

I dunno, maybe we shouldn't have let the absolute worst people in this country run the Executive Branch, especially since the other two branches are run by the craven, the cowardly and the sycophantic.

Waddling Into The Abbatoir

 Richardson compares the OBBB to the McKinley Tariff that largely fueled the growing agrarian populist movement of the late 19th century. The tariff - which grossly shifted wealth upwards during a time of already growing inequality - led to massive Republican losses in the subsequent election. It is worth noting that McKinley himself lost his seat in the 1890 midterms, but then won the presidency in 1896. The wild swings in control of the House during the period aren't likely to occur, though we are in a similar period where control of the House - if not the margins - is similar.

The Senate advanced the monstrosity with two Republicans - Thom Tillis and Rand Paul - siding with Democrats in opposing advancing it to the floor. Collins and Murkowski are not firm yesses on the final bill, which is interesting, but while they have done the occasional right thing in the past, I'm not sure this environment lends itself to principled stands against King Donald I. 

This leads one to wonder what, exactly, the GOP thinks it's doing. As always, the question is now whether we have free and fair elections. States - not the Federal government - run elections, and there are hopefully enough Republicans like Brian Kemp who are not willing to end American democracy. The actions of many Republicans in Washington seems to be that they won't have to face electoral consequences for their actions. Perhaps gerrymandering has rendered them safe. Or maybe those in purple seats will follow Don Bacon's lead and retire.

As long as elections happen, the House seems sure to flip. Flipping the Senate could be tougher, but not impossible, if this grotesquerie becomes law.

What Is The Goal Of The Chaos?

 Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling is deeply troubling in multiple different ways, but the near term effect will be to sew chaos in the legal world. The implications are that you cannot have a national injunction from a local or district court, which seems reasonable at one level while being absolutely chaotic in the real world.

If you are being deported because you were born here but your parents were undocumented, then you would have to sue as an individual to get relief. Needless to say, most people cannot afford lawyers. This is, as Justice Jackson notes, an assault on the fabric of the law.

This ruling is ostensibly about stopping people from shopping for favorable judges - a tactic the right used a lot during Biden's term - that then apply nationally until a higher court can rule on it. This would seem to mean a patchwork of local rulings will take hold.

 Meanwhile, the Shit Sandwich working it way through the Senate could also sew chaos into Medicard, Medicare, various Federal agencies...just mass pandemonium. 

I suppose Republicans have, in the past, governed in a way to make the government terrible, then turned around and said, "Look, see! We were right! Government is terrible."

I'm skeptical it will work, and it backfired in places like Kansas under Sam Brownback. If it can backfire there, I'd say it will backfire in Florida, North Carolina and even Ohio.

What is the long term plan in destroying so much and creating so much chaos?

I'd Almost Forgotten

 How awful the Roberts Court is.

TV Nation

 Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Kegsbreath...Hegseth...went on a feral rant during a press conference. Perhaps he's drinking again, but just as likely is that he was performing his job using the qualifications that got him the job in the first place. Hegseth, like so many others, was hired because Trump saw him being a tough-guy asshole on Fox. He wanted more tough guy assholes than he had last time, which is why he staffed his Cabinet with people he saw on Fox. 

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans seem intent on making Ebeneezer Scrooge look like Santa Claus. Their budget bill is amazingly worse than the House version, which was incredibly terrible. It always seemed to me like the House was passing a terrible bill in order to please Trump and their worst members, hoping that the Senate would force some sanity on the process. The Senate, however, is making the bill even worse. 

Luckily, Majority Leader Thune has said they won't overrule the Parliamentarian, so some of the awful non-budgetary stuff should get axed. Still, this sort of performative cruelty probably plays well in the corner offices at Fox, but it's a remarkably unpopular bill. 

There are a lot of reasons why Madisonian democracy is teetering on the edge of collapse. Resurgent racism and sexism, the normalization of Trumpist lying and the psychological trauma of Covid. You have to say that one of the main pillar - perhaps THE main pillar - in this fascist edifice is Fox News and the ugliness that it has injected into our political life.

Hope?

 Politico sucks, as it always sucked, but then was bought by a right wing German billionaire. However, that may give them some access into the GOP.

They are reporting that the atrocious Big Beautiful Bill is running into real trouble. This is a draconian attack on the social safety net that will deprive millions - tens of millions - of Americans health insurance and lead to the closing of rural hospitals. There's also a host of awful things in there that will make America weaker, poorer, sicker and dumber.

My worry is that we have these sort of moments where vulnerable GOP members stroke their chins and worry about the impact of a terrible piece of legislation and then cave and vote for it anyway. See Susan Collins. 

In some ways, gutting Medicaid could be Democrats path back to a Senate majority, as whether Tillis votes for it or not, Republicans will get blamed.

Best case scenario is that their efforts to pass the massive bill fails and they have to basically just extend the 2017 tax cuts. Not great, but not as painful as it could be.

Trump Might Be Going Insane

 OK. More insane. 

Trump, for whatever reason, hitched his brand to being anti-war in some vague notional way. The problem is that authoritarians are always violence prone, and while he seemed content to visit violence upon American cities like Los Angeles, he seemed unable to help himself when Israel started bombing Iran.

I wrote that the mission seemed a tactical success but a strategic failure. It seems now that it wasn't even really a tactical success. Iranian nuclear capabilities have been damaged but hardly "obliterated" as Trump keeps shouting into whatever social media feed he can shove his greasy maw into. 

What's more, Trump's bizarre "ceasefire" announcement seems kind of deranged. Like so many of his bullshit screeds, Trump seems to think he can just repeat an untruth until it becomes true. Certainly for his cult, that is accurate, but that's not the way reality works. Most Americans seem to be unsupportive of the strikes, because America seems to be justifiably wary of another Middle Eastern war. 

Look at it this way:

- His big beautiful birthday parade was upstaged by millions of Americans protesting his policies.
- He's underwater on every issue, including deportations.
- His big beautiful bill looks to be in some trouble, but I'm not hopeful that it will die. Republicans always rally to do the worst thing possible.
- He launched attacks on Iran that appear not to have worked and according to multiple reports occurred because he liked what he saw on Fox News about the IDF strikes and wanted to piggyback on that success.
- He's bizarrely fixated on winning the Nobel Peace Prize (because Obama won it) and the idea is so laughable that it has to drive him insane.

Basically, we have a man whose baseline state is stupidity and malignant narcissism, who is experiencing cognitive decline. He thought his re-election would lead to every pony he could possibly imagine, and that isn't happening. He's suffering from repeated public embarrassments and humiliations that typically do not go well for narcissists. 

He wants to be king, but he has to actually do the job of being president every once in a while and that's hard.

Seems to be sort of decompensating before our eyes.

Populism For The Democratic Party

 Yglesias does one of his "radical centrist" takes on the movement of the Democratic Party towards cultural leftism. There are a few nuggets in there that have some merit, but I remain convinced that the turn of white working class voters away from Democrats is mostly about "vibes" and the poisoned media landscape, rather than real policy issues.

Paul Krugman writes today about how Silicon Valley turned against Democrats, when Democrats tried to rein in the worst abuses of tech companies - especially the pernicious influence of social media. 

Seems to me there's an opening here.

People generally are favorable towards technological advances in theory. What Krugman notes is that tech companies are following the model of enshittification. He quotes Cory Doctorow's definition:

First, com­panies are good to their users. Once users are lured in and have been locked down, companies maltreat those users in order to shift value to business customers, the people who pay the platform’s bills. Once those business users are locked in, the platform starts to turn the screws on them, too – extracting more and more of the value generated by end-users and business customers until all that remains in the meanest residue, the least amount of value that can keep everyone locked into the platform.

I think we've all seen that dynamic when a new technology or app comes along and it's great! Then it gets slowly worse. The best example of this is Facebook, which started out fun and is not so choked with ads that you really can't connect with your friends, many of whom left. The same is doubly true with Twitter, though often for different reasons. (Nazis. The reason is Nazis.)

Secondly, the real villains are not the engineers and inventors. The villains are Silicon Valley, which is less a cradle of innovation and more an ecosystem of venture capitalism. There's no better example of this than Elon Musk. Musk isn't some genius inventor.  He's a rich guy who got into a growth industry - batteries - at the right time after being involved in PayPal - which is also didn't invent. He's a venture capital dudebro who knows enough about engineering to seem like Tony Stark. He's not. 

Yes, the oligarchs of Wall Street are bad. Some are really bad. But per capita, the "bad billionaires" really seem to be concentrating in Silicon Valley - Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks. OK, those are just the South African broligarchs, but still. There's a hard right turn among a cohort of these guys that is nakedly anti-democratic and makes them natural enemies not only of the Democrats but of democrats.

Running against Silicon Valley will not be easy, as many Democrats are cozy with the overall tech community - many of whom still support Democratic policies. There is a lot of money there.

Still, we have Musk mining American's personal data to feed his AI monster. We have the rise of AI itself, which figures to have incredibly disruptive impacts on Americans. We have the coming crypto crisis, which figures to be for Silicon Valley what 2008 was for real estate and Wall Street. 

There strikes me as being a real opportunity here for Democrats to get right with working class voters, especially as the economy teeters from the effects of Trump's trade wars and deportations. Tie it to these authoritarian, nerdy techbros. 

No one really like the idea of billionaires. No one really like the state of tech, including social media. Focus some of your energy there. 

UPDATE: My senator makes the same case. Sort of. 

Interesting Read

 Paul Campos relates an argument about how hippies and evangelicals actually represent a sort of horseshoe theory when it comes to what the author calls "intuitionist" thinking. This is at the root of what passes for populism in 2025. Some people believe in science and reason and some people don't. 

As Campos notes, you can't argue with someone whose beliefs are based in spiritual belief. That means that the entire edifice of Madisonian governmental theory and practice are largely helpless to resolve these issues. 

I'll give an example.

I saw my cousin - deeply religious - post some MAGA shitbird complaining about the No Kings protests and the argument went something like "How dare they complain about 'kings' when they shut down schools and made me wear a mask. They are the real tyrants."

Look, Covid killed around 1,100,000 Americans. For about a year and a half, we had strong distancing measures in place that attempted to mitigate that, but even those measures struggled to work, because freedumb. The idea that public health measures are at all equivalent to ignoring the Constitution, ignoring court orders, militarizing police to attack American citizens...How do you even argue with that?

And if you tried, the retreat into faith and "what I know to be true" would deny you any ground to establish an argument on.

Both sides of the debate are relying on abstractions to order their world, but they are so fundamentally opposed to one another, that I don't see how you reconcile them.

Functionally Illiterate

 Tucked into her discussion of Trump's shifting position on war with Iran, Richardson notes that Tulsi Gabbard - whose job seems to be on a death watch - considered delivering the Presidential Daily Briefing as a video, because Trump doesn't read. compare that to Trump's listless, fumbling speech the night of the strikes on Iran. He seemed both half asleep and read as if he had never seen the words before.

Trump is not "illiterate" in the sense that he cannot read. He's illiterate in the sense that he doesn't or won't. Again, this makes him a perfect avatar for so many Americans in the first quarter of the 21st century.

When we saw Obama speak the other night, he made an off the cuff remark about reading that he then circled back to and amplified. Reading, more than any other activity, expands our minds. Reading, he said, requires us to slow down and consider what we are seeing. Reading narratives forces empathy upon us. I'm reading Percival Everett's James, and I have to place myself inside Jim's perspective, hear his voice in my head and feel what he's feeling. The same was true of the last narrative non-fiction books I've read about 18th century mariners. I have to imagine the seas, feel the hunger, taste the awful food.

Reading is dying. Of course, it's been dying. The 1984 film, Ghostbusters, features a throwaway line from Egon: "Print is dead." In the same ways that American education has always been failing, reading has always been on the decline. 

Yet this era feels different. My students don't read for pleasure (except the brightest ones). Sometimes they don't even read for class. Many use various apps to have the text read to them. This passivity simply doesn't work for learning. Combine this with the prevalence of ChatGPT, and students are simply abandoning the foundations of real learning.

Trump, therefore, really IS representative of America in that way. The reality TV star and tabloid feature reflects a country that is slowly watching its critical thinking wither away. Trump is stupid. However, I do think he has a reading based learning disability. That's why he was shipped off to New York Military Academy. That's what rich folks did with kids with learning disabilities back then. Having a reading disability is NOT being stupid. However, if you don't work around your ADHD or dyslexia, then it's like just giving up walking when you can drive. It's like becoming a shut-in. 

Anyway, that guy - who is not bright, has a learning disability, hasn't worked to compensate for that LD issue, has used wealth instead to make sure he never has to work around that LD issue - is now having to make sophisticated and nuanced decisions of national security.

Lies

 We were told that we wiped out the Iranian nuclear program.

Surprise, that was a lie!

We shouldn't be surprised by this, but we should worry if they are lying to themselves. I struggle to think that Trump's minions are giving him the unvarnished truth.

Tactical Success, But...

 I don't agree with Yglesias most of the time, but I think his points here are very strong. Iran should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons, but that was precisely what the JCPOA had done: prevented them from getting a nuclear weapon. Trump pulled out of the JCPOA because Obama and now has resorted to bombing Iran to stop them from acquiring the weapon that the JCPOA prevented them from having before he tore it up.

Someone noted about Netanyahu that he has enjoyed multiple tactical successes since 10/7. The decimation of Hamas and Hezbollah; the brutal cowing of Gaza; the fall of Assad. What he has not achieved is anything like strategic success. He hasn't created long term security for Israel. 

This feels very similar to what we have just done in Iran. Israel has largely destroyed Iran's air defenses, so dropping the bombs on the three nuclear sites was actually fairly low risk/high reward - if all you care about is delaying their nuclear program. Not ending it, mind you, just delaying it again. This all feels like something we are going to have do again and again, as long as Iran is a rogue state.

Yglesias also notes that Netanyahu played Trump perfectly with this, because Trump is stupid and vain. What's more, there is a stunning lack of experience in the entire national security apparatus right now. These are not 12 dimensional chess type people. Do we really think the president and those around them are looking weeks and months and years down the line?

The initiative now shifts to Iran. Trump has said that Iran has to "negotiate" - which I think means capitulate - in order to avoid more strikes. Iran, however, is in an existential crisis. The regime HAS to strike back. The Straits of Hormuz and various oil sites around the Middle East would be a natural target to retaliate. Driving up oil prices is their most immediate tools available. Certainly various terror attacks against soft targets should be expected. Or, given the state of their air defenses, they simply lay low and wait. Strike next fall.

The strikes on Iran were unconstitutional and illegal, but LOL nothing matters. The next step will be taken by Iran. They are in a precarious place, but I don't think capitulation is something that they can entertain. At some point, I could see a decapitation strike against Khamenei, but I could also see Iran strike at American politicians, too. 

I suppose they could shoot up a school, but Republicans don't seem to care about that.

Terror attacks in the US would further enflame Trumpist assaults on civil liberties and would be the worst outcome for the US and accelerate our descent into authoritarianism. Blowing up some oil tankers and attacking some embassies...that's probably a best case scenario at this point.

Strategically, this doesn't make us safer in the long run.

And for other would-be Irans, the lesson is clear: get a nuclear weapon before the US can blow your program up. 

Transitions

 In the past few weeks, we have said goodbye to our 14 year old dog; driven to Georgia for our son's graduation; driven back; flown to Europe; spent 12 days driving around the Alpine region; flown back; gotten an offer on an old house that has been in our family since 1962; driven there to empty the house of items before the sale; and driven home.  We will close in the next ten days.

That's...a lot. 

We think certain things will always remain the same. The dog will never die; the child will never grow up; the four walls around us will stay the same.  Obviously they don't. 

Trying to make sense of the gulf between one way of looking at the world and another - between stasis and change - isn't easy. However, we are looking at a global politics that also struggles to accommodate that dynamic. Some people simply can't fit change into their world. I think putting my pronouns into my email signature is a bit silly, but whatever. I can accept that. Obviously tens of millions of Americans and billions of humans cannot.

The problem for them is that change is going to come. It doesn't care if you don't like it. It's indifferent to your preferences. I'm not sure how we find a way to drive that point home.

Obama

 Last night, my wife and I went to see Barack Obama speak in Hartford. He had one insight that was new to me: he felt that among the many impacts of smart phones was the ability of people in poorer parts of the world to see the richer parts. In America, this led to the resentment that poorer rural areas have for the coasts but in the rest of the world, it doubtless fueled the migrant surge of the past 15 years. I had never thought of that last bit.

The rest of his comments were not especially revelatory. He remains a formidable speaker. I remember when he said something was pernicious, and I struggled to imagine Trump even being able to define that word. He speaks in measured cadences, considering every word that leaves his mouth. Going there, I resigned myself to the fact that he was too smart to say anything especially controversial, and he did couch everything in terms of "that guy" or "some people" in keeping with the norms that former presidents butt out of current politics. I do find that annoying, in the sense that one side abiding by norms while the other tears them up seems like asymmetric warfare. 

Still, his criticisms were real, and he made the unassailable argument that the members of our current government are not loyal to the ideals of American democracy that stretch back to World War II and again further back to our founding. He reiterated his position that there are two stories in America. While he didn't mention him, I would argue that it's the two stories present within the person of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, the democrat, who believed in the natural rights of all people. Jefferson, the slaveholder, who limited the universal rights because he simply could not see Blacks, Natives and women as equals.

Of course, Trump and the entire GOP are loyal to the story that there are some "real Muricans" and then there are vermin. Trump's American Carnage, his language about cities and Democrats, the rhetoric just this weekend about the assassinations in Minnesota, his ridiculous invocation of "Marxists" and "lunatics" are all part of the caste system that has always been part of the American story.

(I think Heather Cox Richardson, the moderator, asked maybe four or five questions over the course of an hour and a half. Dude can talk.)

He also echoed a thought I've had for years, which is that we have so balkanized our public life that there is no common civic language. He specifically and pointedly noted the abandonment of factual truth by Trump and the GOP, but he rightly noted that this is deeply cultural. 

In all, it was a defense of the sort of postwar and post-Cold War liberalism that has brought great good to the world, but has also led to disruption, as free trade has left some people and regions behind. It was intelligent, coherent, wise and completely at odds with the current leadership of this country. It was also, I need to say, an argument that Joe Biden simply could not make in 2024. It was an argument that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris articulated forcefully, but latent misogyny led to it falling on deaf ears.

I miss the guy.