Debate debacle

President Biden looks aghast at some of the many, many lies told by Donald Trump last night. We should all know by now that Trump brazenly bullshits about everything, so the startled face did the President no favors. He should have expected the spewing fountain of dishonesty and been ready to commandingly smack it down. While he did correctly call Trump a liar, the delivery was unconvincing.

So...that wasn't great.

Last night's presidential "debate" on CNN was profoundly disappointing and unsurprisingly has sent the pundit class into a state of panic. 

I had expectations going in, expectations that Donald Trump would be, well, himself, and thus provide myriad opportunities for President Biden to smack him down (metaphorically) and contrast the incredible successes of the Biden Administration to the disastrous incompetence that was the Trump Administration, thus illustrating how blindingly obvious voters' choice should be in November.

Those expectations were met. The problem was, Biden failed to capitalize on those opportunities and had the demeanor of an exhausted elderly grandpa. Which isn't to say he was terrible; what he had to say was substantively decent, if not completely on point, but it was delivered in a manner that was not easy to immediately understand and reinforced the Republican propaganda that unfairly paints him as a doddering old man.

All that was frustrating. It made me wonder what the hell all that debate prep time at Camp David was used for and why the campaign thought arming the president with statistics and lists of numbers was a good idea. Biden was at his best when he let his clearly-prepped answers drop and spoke from the heart. He became more energetic and feisty then. Feisty Joe was good. But the obvious struggle he was having with making sure he got the prepared numbers into his answers was just really bad form.

What was most frustrating, though, is the pitches Biden let go by. Big fat hanging curveballs right over the heart of the plate screaming "hit me" that he didn't even take a swing at.

I could make excuses. The president was clearly dealing with a head cold and may well have been on some sort of antihistamines or decongestant medicines that, as I well know, make you a little fuzzybrained for a while. If so, I again point to the campaign aides and say "WHY WOULD YOU SEND HIM OUT THERE LIKE THAT?" but maybe they didn't know. I could focus on the journalistic malpractice committed by the alleged moderators of the debate, who didn't moderate anything and allowed countless egregious, blatant lies to spew from Trump's bulbous head completely unchallenged.

But in the end, Joe Biden had an opportunity to crush a grand slam homer and instead struck out on three meatball pitches basically served up on a tee. It is, to say the least, dispiriting.

The immediate reaction from pretty much everyone that watched it was to freak out. Now you've got a lot of people within the Democratic party talking about trying to nominate someone else. Which is not going to happen and the more time spent talking about the idea is, as California Governor Gavin Newsom put it, "unhelpful."

Presidential debates—which have only existed since 1960—are structured to emphasize the most surface-level elements of a candidate, and every cycle I wonder about their usefulness. Some are better than others, the "town hall" type that we've seen here and there since the ’90s actually give some opportunity to get into something unscripted and revealing. But generally they favor optics over substance, largely because of format.

(Some years ago I read a novel by the late newsman Jim Lehrer called "The Last Debate." I'm not recalling the details clearly now, but it told the story of a small group of journalists who contrived for themselves to moderate a presidential debate in a race where one candidate was profoundly dangerous and unfit to serve. The journalists made a choice to risk their careers by using the debate to crush the campaign of the dangerous candidate. They held his feet to the fire, as it were, on all of his misdeeds and completely abandoned the "rules" of the event by turning it into an airing of behavior that would appall a great majority of voters. I was really wishing for something even vaguely reminiscent of that kind of courage from last night's moderators and, of course, got bupkis.)

Joe Biden has been and continues to be an excellent President of the United States. The record is tremendously impressive. He has staffed his administration with quality, intelligent, capable, and supremely competent people who know what they're doing and work hard to advance an agenda that is in support of the American population as a whole. There is no reason on the merits to even entertain the idea of nominating someone else. 

But the freak out is real, and it's based entirely on fear.

Fear of stupid people.

I get it. I, too, am terrified of stupid people in massive groups. The Republicans have been maddeningly deft in their efforts to manipulate and con the rubes of America, tens of millions of whom voted for the fascist last time without realizing he's a fascist. Republican politics have long been based in scaring the bejeezus out of their voters, but in the age of Trump they've abandoned all subtlety in their fearmongering, relying—apparently successfully!—on entirely made-up fantasies of nonexistent caravans of murdering migrant hordes, entirely made-up fantasies of mothers killing their infant children for the sake of convenience, entirely made-up fantasies of economics that even preschoolers on any Ferengi world would recognize as bullshit, and mountains of blatant racism and misogyny.

How many of those tens of millions of rubes believe the propaganda? I know there are plenty who don't believe it but still like it for the racism and sexism; those are the "baskets of deplorables" Hillary Clinton identified in the 2016 campaign. Those people aren't a new factor, we've always had them or people like them around. But the rubes. They scare us. And they are scaring people who should know better into calling for the President to walk away from this election.

President Biden held a rally today in North Carolina wherein he was far more energetic, far better in his demeanor, and was received with far more comfort from the masses. I've heard it postulated that the disaster of last night's debate might well spur the campaign into hyperdrive for the remainder of the summer and fall. Maybe. I do hope they learned from their mistakes, at least.

Joe Biden is 81 years old. President of the United States is a very stressful job. To those who worry about that, I say look at who he staffs his administration with. Kamala Harris is a brilliant vice president, and should the need for her to take over come to pass, we would all be in good hands. (I still maintain that a large part of the Republican-led opposition to Biden because of age is an unsubtle dog-whistle to the deplorables to be scared of the black lady taking over.) I am completely unbothered by Joe Biden's age because no matter how he performed at the debate or in any other forum, he does the job of President very, very well, and should he lose the ability to do that at some point, there will be capable people there to step in.

Besides, the other guys are running a con man. A convicted felon, serial fraudster, adjudicated rapist, wanna-be dictator who hates the very idea of American democracy and has no understanding of how anything works. Except, of course, how manipulating rubes works. That's his one skill. He has no others. (Except perhaps using blackmail to leverage otherwise-smart(ish) people into allying with him. Looking at the complement of dudes with an R by their names in the Senate seems to indicate he's had success with that.)

 Bad debate or no, I don't think anything has changed here. The race is today what it was yesterday and was the day before. I wish the President had been quicker on his feet and hammered those juicy hanging curveballs last night—that might have made a significant difference in his favor—but there's still time to get some more at-bats. Meanwhile, the contrast between these two men remains monumental. In the words of Mary Trump, "President Biden had a cold and stumbled badly. Donald Trump is a traitor. The former should not in any way negate the latter.... I’ll take the decent guy with the sore throat who believes in democracy over the rapist insurrectionist monster every single time."

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, President Biden, CNN, Journalism, Posted on June 28, 2024 at 11:55PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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The straw that stirs the drink

I did not watch the Rickwood Field game saluting the Negro Leagues between the Cardinals and the Giants last night as I was umpiring. But I have read the recaps and seen a couple of clips form the Fox (ugh) broadcast; the clip from the 5th inning when they went to a retro 1950s-style TV picture complete with no color, two or three camera angles only, and primitive on-screen graphics was pretty neat.

But the best writeup of the game comes from Craig Calcaterra, with special kudos for the section he wrote on Reggie Jackson's appearance in the broadcast booth. Rather than pick some pullquotes, I'll just share the whole section here.

Reggie Jackson brings the truth

 

Reggie Jackson joined the Fox MLB panel before the Cards-Giants game at Rickwood Field last night. During his appearance Jackson, who played 114 games for the Oakland Athletics’ Southern League affiliate in Birmingham in 1967, was asked by Alex Rodriguez about his feelings upon returning to Rickwood. Jackson did not lean into any feel-good sentiments that Major League Baseball or Fox likely wanted to hear from him. And he did not hold back.

"Coming back here is not easy," Jackson said. "The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled. Fortunately, I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn't wish it on anybody." Jackson then described about how he would be called the n-word and would be denied service at restaurants and hotels.

Jackson then said, that if it wasn’t for his teammates and coaches with the Birmingham A’s, things would’ve gotten even worse:

"Fortunately, I had a manager, in Johnny McNamara, that . . . if I couldn't eat in the place, nobody would eat. We would get food to travel. If I couldn't stay in a hotel, they'd drive to the next hotel and find a place where I could stay. Had it not been for Rollie Fingers, Johnny McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudi . . . I slept on their couch three, four nights a week for about a month and a half. Finally, they were threatened that they would burn our apartment complex down unless I got out."

Jackson said that without McNamara and his teammates, "I would've [gotten] killed here, because I would've beat someone's ass." Watch:

I embedded that video because it’s the only full-length, embeddable one I could find that focused on this part of his appearance, but it bleeps out the N-words Reggie used. They aired live on Fox, however and, given how prone baseball and baseball fans are to sanitize history and nostalgia, it was important that they did.

Listening to Jackson speak, I was struck by two thoughts.

First: though baseball didn’t put too fine a point on it, the game at Rickwood Field replaced the Field of Dreams Game in Iowa on the schedule as a special, small ballpark event. Though the reasons for skipping Iowa this year had more to do with business and logistics than anything else, kudos to Major League Baseball for moving away from the synthetic, sanitized version of history — if one can even call what was essentially a 1980s movie tribute version of baseball “history” — and embracing real history that actually matters.

Second: Jackson was not describing life in the Negro Leagues or during the heart of the Jim Crow era. What he described took place twenty years after baseball was integrated, over a decade after de jure segregation was outlawed, three years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and two years after the Voting Rights Act was passed. It was a time when many who are reading these words were alive, some of whom were adults. Jackson himself was an active major leaguer into the late 1980s yet he faced the sort of bigotry and discrimination that many people in this country tend to casually assume was the stuff of ancient history if, indeed, they even acknowledge it ever happened.

And make no mistake, we’re at a point in American history where there are many people — including people in positions of power or who are seeking positions of power — who are actively trying to bring back the conditions Jackson described and who want to turn back the clock to before the Civil Rights Era began. Our Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act and multiple state legislatures have passed laws forbidding the teaching or even the discussion of racism, institutional or otherwise, in public schools and universities. Republican politicians and activists have their eyes set on eliminating anti-discrimination laws and have, as both a matter of policy and rhetoric, embraced the notion of returning Blacks and other minorities to the status of second class citizenship. And they have done so shamelessly.

Indeed, just two weeks ago, Byron Donalds, a sitting Republican Congressman who is actively seeking to become Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, argued that things were better for Black people during the Jim Crow era:

“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” Donalds said. “And then HEW, Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”

Donalds didn’t get caught on a hot mic saying this. He said it before a crowd at a Trump campaign event in Philadelphia. And not a single Republican of consequence, let alone the man at the top of the Republican ticket, offered a word of criticism or pushback.

We’re living in a perilous time. A time when a large number of Americans want to erase the racial and social progress we have realized over the past 50-60 years. Those efforts cannot be stopped by our ignoring them. They must be actively fought, and the first step in doing so is by reminding people of what actually happened in those times and calling bullshit on those who wish to distort history.

In light of that, kudos to Reggie Jackson for not holding back on his account of his own personal history. Kudos to him for not contributing to the sanitization of history at large. It’s only through plain and straightforward words like his that we can keep others from dragging us back to the dark ages which so many fought and so many died to help us escape.

Craig's newsletter, "Cup of Coffee," is free once a week and subscription only for the other four days he publishes.

Tagged Politics, Baseball, Republicans, Posted on June 21, 2024 at 3:22PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Quotes of the week

A few notes from over the last week or so. I'd been meaning to post longer bits about each of these, but time got away from me and, you know, there was stuff to do. Anyway, a few things I heard/read that deserve some repetition:

• "I don't care about you. I just want your vote."  This was former president Cheeto Hitler in a rare moment of honesty, talking to the crowd at his hate rally in Las Vegas. The man cares about nothing other than power for himself and becoming a U.S. incarnation of Kim Jong Un.
• "If the hood fits..."  So said David Ferguson on The Bob Cesca Show last Thursday. David was referring to Supreme Court "Justice" Samuel Alito's outrage, outrage! at being called a bigot. "I just can't with these people," Ferguson went on. "They're like, 'how dare you accuse us of being prejudiced! We just hate black people and queers.' I want to Psycho-shower these people."
• “He can’t stand for 90 minutes, but he’s 100% able to be President? Have fun explaining that.”  That was alleged Congressman Josh Hawley (MAGA-MO) criticizing President Biden, thinking that the format for next week's scheduled presidential debate will have the candidates seated at a table and that said format was demanded by the president. I seem to remember President Biden standing for a long address at the House of Representatives a couple months back without any trouble. And guess what—standing is not a requirement to be President of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt held the gig for 12+ years without standing at all.
• "Time never applied to Willie Mays the way it applies to others. He is like a Kurt Vonnegut character, unstuck in time, everything, everywhere, all at once, simultaneously the Say Hey Kid playing stickball in the streets of New York and the wizard outrunning baseballs soaring toward the gap at Candlestick Park, and the slugger tearing into baseballs as if it is something personal, and the legend launching a million memories and making parents and grandparents feel like children."  That's Joe Posnanski, remembering the great Willie Mays, who died yesterday at age 93.
• And this, from satirist Andy Borowitz:
  
  THE OCEAN DEEP (The Borowitz Report)—Calling his longstanding fear of being devoured by them “delusional thinking at its saddest,” the world’s sharks issued a statement on Tuesday disavowing “any interest whatsoever” in eating Donald J. Trump.
     “Given his constant intake of Diet Coke and hamburgers, there is nothing to indicate that Trump would be anything resembling a nutritious meal,” the sharks’ statement read. “The very thought of biting into him is nauseating.”
     The sharks said that Trump’s anxiety about being eaten by them demonstrates “an inflated sense of his appeal, to say the least.”
     “We thought the same thing when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed he was eaten by a worm,” the sharks wrote. “Why do these narcissists think they’re so delicious?”
     In perhaps their most withering comment, the sharks concluded, “We might consider eating Trump if the only other thing on the menu was Steve Bannon.”

Tagged Politics, Baseball, SCOTUS, President VonClownstick, Posted on June 19, 2024 at 3:47PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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PAY ATTENTION

Anyone/everyone here watch The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu? (If you don't, you're missing out, it's excellent if scary.) You know the scenes that are flashbacks to the before-time, pre-Gilead, when things were incrementally sliding into theocratic fascist dystopia? We're on the cusp of living those flashback times for real thanks in very large part to our extraordinarily corrupt and willfully obtuse Supreme Court.

"Justice" Samuel Alito, third in seniority and first in fascistic ideology, brought us the latest SCOTUS ruling to roll back progress. Utterly ignoring the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, Alito declared for the Court that states can draw their district maps using racial demographics as their guide and it's just fine, so long as they put forth a "possible" claim that they're not using race as their "primary motivation" in their overtly-partisan redistricting agenda, and if a court rightly says "this is BS and violates the Constitution," just appeal it to the Supreme Court and they'll overturn that.

This is the latest in an apparently ongoing series of rulings SCOTUS has made to gut voting rights in this country and aid the modern Republican party in its efforts to disenfranchise, you know, "those people." In 2013, the Court delivered a ruling written by Chief "Justice" John Roberts that said the Voting Rights Act's key provisions were no longer necessary and struck them down, leading to a new wave of disenfranchisement legislating (the late Justice Antonin Scalia called the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement” during that case). In 2019, SCOTUS, in Alito's voice again, declared partisan gerrymandering didn't violate anything and could proceed without interference, placing limits on the challenges brought in the case ruled on this week that were still met.

Justice Elena Kagan delivered brilliant dissenting opinions in more than one of these cases. In the 2019 case, she wrote "If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government." She continued:

"The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country ... have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims. Those standards satisfy the majority’s own benchmarks. They do not require—indeed, they do not permit—courts to rely on their own ideas of electoral fairness, whether proportional representation or any other. And they limit courts to correcting only egregious gerrymanders, so judges do not become omnipresent players in the political process. But yes, the standards used here do allow—as well they should—judicial intervention in the worst-of-the-worst cases of democratic subversion, causing blatant constitutional harms. In other words, they allow courts to undo partisan gerrymanders of the kind we face today from North Carolina and Maryland. In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong."

Similarly, Alito and company once more ignored the judicial standard of conduct in this week's ruling, specifically the principle that a lower court be overruled only in cases of "clear error." From Kagan's dissent:

"In dismissing [the lower court's] strong case, the majority cherry-picks evidence, ignores credibility findings, misunderstands expert views, and substitutes its own statistical theories. Its opinion gives not a whit of respect to the District Court’s factual findings, thus defying the demands of clear-error review.

...

"What a message to send to state legislators and mapmakers about racial gerrymandering. For reasons I’ve addressed, those actors will often have an incentive to use race as a proxy to achieve partisan ends. And occasionally they might want to straight-up suppress the electoral influence of minority voters. Go right ahead, this Court says to States today. Go ahead, though you have no recognized justification for using race, such as to comply with statutes ensuring equal voting rights. Go ahead, though you are (at best) using race as a short-cut to bring about partisan gains—to elect more Republicans in one case, more Democrats in another. It will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end: Just raise a 'possibility' of non-race-based decision-making, and it will be 'dispositive.' And so this 'odious' practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and exploiting racial divisions, will continue."

This is just the latest abuse of power for partisan gain by the Roberts Court. It will continue, and continue, and continue until something is done.

We need Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress and in the White House. Only then will the bad actors perpetuating the ability of this lawless Supreme Court majority be circumvented and corrections can start to be made. Whether that comes in the form of impeachments of Alito and Clarence Thomas or expansion of the Court to 11 or 13 Justices or both or some other measure, the status quo cannot continue.

That way lies Gilead.

 

Tagged Politics, SCOTUS, Posted on May 24, 2024 at 11:27PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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One of these things is not like the other

A while back I made reference here to what I call the "battered spouse contingent" of the Republican party. I was subsequently asked what I meant by that, and it's pretty simple—people who continue to vote Republican despite the fact that Republican policies have hurt them repeatedly. That wasn't readily accepted as valid by my questioner, and in the interests of civility I didn't press the point overly much.

This individual reminded me a lot of people I've known over the years that have espoused sentiments like, "it doesn't matter who wins [a presidential election] because they're all the same." Or, "I voted for [third-party candidate] because s/he's the only one that I agree with," or for reasons of protest over the two-party system.

The "they're all the same" garbage seemed to peak (in my lifetime, anyway) in the 2000 campaign between George W. Bush and Al Gore. We can thank Ralph Nader for a lot of that. But regardless of the why, the result of people thinking like that was a GWB administration that began with corruption of the energy industry (Enron, anyone?), then 9/11 shocked the president despite his having been warned well in advance that something like it was being planned, then the response to 9/11 changed the world for the worse for decades.

They were not remotely the same.

While it's not as prevalent as it was in 2000, the idea that there's little to no difference between the parties is still espoused by a not insignificant percentage of Americans. Most of this is out of ignorance, some willful some not, but today the idea is being pushed indirectly by the Republican party—because if everyone is corrupt, then who cares that so many Republicans are? The Trumpification of the GOP has us more polarized than ever, but the parties have been starkly different for a long time. People who are not political junkies like me just don't know it.

So I had this idea to put together a little snapshot of how the country did under the last several presidents, something that would be easy to digest. Kind of like the back of a baseball card, with the important stats and facts laid out in black and white. (While my formal education in American history is limited to some University survey courses, I am a bit of a history nerd and know a thing or two from study and from having lived through time with my eyes and ears open.) And then I heard Buzz Burbank on The Bob Cesca Show joke about how we need a "pamphlet drop" to remind people about everything from 2016-2021, and I started expanding the thought.

In putting that idea into form, I found it isn't practical to just list economic stats and global crises if you want to convey the performance of an administration. You need more information. But I've endeavored to find a middle ground between back-of-the-baseball-card and pages-in-an-encyclopedia to show at a relative glance how the country fared under different administrations.

So, parameters:

Firstly, to my knowledge and judgment, the last Republican president who was worthy of holding the office—that is, who took his oath the the Constitution seriously, who actively worked for the benefit of the people as a whole, who didn't commit or abet crime or corrupt practices, and who wasn't otherwise overtly doing harm for his own purposes—was Dwight Eisenhower, POTUS No. 34, whose term ended in 1961. (One could make an argument for Ford, but he wasn't elected as either POTUS or VP and that pardon... No. The pardon is a disqualifier.) In Ike's time, the Republicans were a centrist party that balanced a belief in free-market capitalism with the needs of the populace, were staunchly anti-Communist and saw the US as a global force for freedom and democracy, and were happy to maintain the social status quo. Since then we can see a steady decline from that to today's autocratic, anti-democracy, isolationist, corruptly fascist Republicans, with mileposts along the way in Richard Nixon, Henry Kissenger, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, all the way to Trump and his Trump Sycophants.

So we begin with Ike's successor, John F. Kennedy, in 1961, and examine several items for each administration: economic indicators, military conflicts, scandals, global or national crises, notable staff, important achievements or policies, and Supreme Court appointments. I wrap each one up with a brief(ish) few paragraphs of context, keeping things to a single page (though I did have to adjust my typesetting format a few times to make that work). It's a remarkably even split between the two parties in power—in those 64 years, there have been six Democratic presidents and six Republican presidents, each covering a total of 32 years (including 2024).

But before getting into the individuals, here's a composite back-of-the-card snapshot.

DEMOCRATS (8 TERMS) Total budget deficit increase: (–$2.716 trillion) Avg. inflation rate: 3.25% Recessions: 2 (15 months; 4% of tenure) Major wars: 2, 1 inherited SCOTUS appointments: 9

REPUBLICANS (8 TERMS) Total budget deficit increase: $3.338 trillion Avg. inflation rate: 4.24% Recessions: 7 (6 years, 8 months; 21% of tenure) Major wars: 4, 1 inherited SCOTUS appointments: 15

 

Republicans added three and a third trillion dollars to the deficit, Democrats recovered over two and two-thirds trillion of it despite the handicap of having to pay all that interest on Republican debt. Republicans gave us almost seven years of recession to the Democrats' one and a quarter (more than half of which was recovering from The Great Recession of G.W. Bush). Tell me again how the Republicans are the fiscally responsible ones.

Anyway, here's the completed project. I plan on distributing it to some podcasters I like in hopes they will make it available to their audiences in hopes that members of those audiences will share it with folks they know and in an ideal world it "goes viral." Not really expecting that, based on my history in trying to promote things on the Internet, but we'll see.

Feel free to spread this around, everybody.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Democrats, Posted on April 23, 2024 at 4:23PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Thoughts on the State of the Union

I did not watch/listen to President Biden give his State of the Union speech in real time last night. I had an umpiring shift and was otherwise occupied going out to Cal Anderson Park and moving soccer players off of our field (they were, for once, entirely cooperative; thanks, guys) before officiating a few games. I got home around 12:30am, put a pizza in the oven, and settled in to watch the speech in the wee hours.

It did not disappoint. This was a home-run of a SOTU address, not only touting the various accomplishments of the Biden term thus far, not only setting an agenda for future accomplishments in term two, not only calling out the dire threat and horror show returning the previous guy to office would be, but taking the fight right to people in the room with him—Republican Congressmen and SCOTUS Justices—and once again deftly handling the hecklers and outbursts from Congressional nutjobs.

Referencing FDR's "no ordinary time" remark regarding World War II, the president got things rolling with, “My purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment, either.” We have a new fight against fascism today, and this time it's not just overseas but domestic. In a skillful poke at Republican hypocrisy he invoked Ronald Reagan and the Berlin Wall, comparing Regan's demand that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this wall" to Donald Trump encouraging Vladimir Putin to "do whatever the hell you want." Driving it home, Biden said, “A former president actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. I think it’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. And it’s unacceptable.”

Biden successfully (I think) reached potential voters with lines like "Does anybody really think the tax code is fair?" and "Clearly those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America." Direct, forceful statements that simultaneously attacked Republicans, offered positive hope for progress, and appealed to not just the Democratic base but ideological moderates and, frankly, a lot of people that wear MAGA hats. (I mean, that latter group is too far gone to hear it, but the appeal was made nonetheless.)

Oh, and he absolutely torpedoed the "dottering senile old man" caricature of him that right-wing media has been constantly perpetuating. In the moment, Republicans were complaining not that "Sleepy Joe" is addlebrained and weak but that Biden was too loud, too fervent, too mean. Make up your minds, asshats.

I read a lot of takes from around the Interwebs today. Most were effusive, none were really negative except Sean Hannity's, and all he could say was that the president "seemed off," like he was grasping at straws to find any way he could spin the event to fit his old-man-Joe narrative. Some, like Pod Save America's Dan Pfeiffer, focused on the nuts and bolts of the speech's content, but most honed in on Biden's energy, Biden's ability to be quick on his feet and ad-lib, and the astonishing behavior of the Republicans.

From Mary Trump:

In the course of his master class, Biden got considerable help from the other side—whose tantrums and outbursts and lies he handled with the deftness of a practiced Kindergarten teacher. They fumed, they pouted, they squirmed, and, like [House Speaker] Mike Johnson, they sat silently even when Biden was talking about removing lead from water in order to protect our children, lowering prescription drug costs, saving democracy from Russian aggression, and the record growth of small businesses—basically anything good about America or the positive progress this country has made since Biden had been in charge.

Joyce Vance:

Biden said, unlike all the people who don’t, that he would always tell the truth about January 6: “You can’t love your country only when you win.” He asked Congress to uphold their oaths and defend the country against all threats, foreign, and, Biden emphasized, “domestic.” Speaker Johnson pressed his lips together and looked mighty uncomfortable. I don’t think he enjoyed himself tonight.

And Steven Beschloss brought it back to the bottom line:

It was a bracing, optimistic, vigorous expression of what the next eight months (and beyond) can look like. Biden made clear last night, as millions of Americans were listening, that now is the time to choose—not just who we want as president, but what country and what future we want. Few times in our history has that choice been more critical.

Well done, Joe. Keep it up.

 

 

Tagged Politics, Republicans, President Biden, Posted on March 8, 2024 at 8:37PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Darrin Bell FTW

 

The genius behind Candorville cuts right to the heart of the matter.

I'm not sure what the green bottles signify. Any ideas? (UPDATE: Oh, are they spray paint cans, they've just retitled the banner? OK. Sorry, Darrin, it should have been obvious.)

Tagged Politics, Republicans, SCOTUS, Darrin Bell, Posted on March 2, 2024 at 6:10PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Supremely problematic

Bribes taken at the back entrance

As if we needed more evidence to support the idea, today's decision by the Supreme Court of the United States granting former president VonClownstick's request to an appeal regarding his claim of "presidential immunity" gives even more reason to believe the Court is corrupt and working in tandem with the Republican party and not in the service of the Constitution or the rule of law.

It's not a "win" for the former president in that all they've decided is to hear his appeal, not to necessarily agree with it, but it is a huge win for him in that it grants him at least two more months of delay in resolving this matter. The likelihood of his standing trial on this case—in case you've lot track, this is the Jack Smith/January 6th insurrection case, not the stolen documents case or the hush money case or the Georgia electioneering case or the civil fraud case or the suits against him from DC police or any of the other myriad court cases the guy's been up to his eyeballs in for his whole life—and a verdict being reached before the November election is now pretty remote.

The trial had been scheduled to begin next week, on March 4th. That won't happen now, as SCOTUS has suspended that until the outcome of its hearing the appeal, which won't happen until April 22nd. When they issue a ruling will come who knows how long after that. Quoting former US District Attorney Joyce Vance:

The case could have been handled much more quickly, especially because the issue before the Court isn’t difficult: either presidents can commit crimes to stay in office or they can’t. The timeline here was a choice, made by the Justices. They chose to give Donald Trump at least two more months of delay. We don’t know how a specific Justice votes on a cert grant. But we do know that at least five Justices voted to hear this case because while it only takes four votes to grant cert, it take five to grant a stay, and the Court’s order, continues the stay in the trial court while the appeal is underway.

It could be June or July before SCOTUS makes a call on this. A trial will take months. Election Day is immovable and doesn't care if a trial is over yet or not.

Clarence Thomas is corrupt. He's taken de facto bribes for decades and refuses to recuse when he's clearly got a conflict of interest in a case. Sam Alito has taken similar de facto bribes from people associated with the right-wing Federalist Society. Neil Gorsuch sold property to a lawyer with 22 subsequent cases before the Court (and no, he didn't recuse himself). Brett Kavanaugh somehow got confirmed by the Senate despite committing perjury in his hearings, having suspicious financial activity and very credible sexual assault allegations against him, and had eighty-three complaints of ethics violations levied against him for conduct in those hearings. Amy Coney Barrett, like Gorsuch, sold property to persons with business before the court and did not recuse; she also refused to recuse in a case involving the David Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group that spent "seven figures" lobbying for Barrett's confirmation by the Senate (AFP also lobbied for the confirmations of Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, who likewise refused to recuse). John Roberts' wife had a heavy financial interest in a case before the Court and Roberts was fine with presiding over it; he utterly failed to do his job in presiding over the Trump impeachments; and as the Chief Justice he has repeatedly claimed that everyone on his Court has behaved in an exemplary ethical fashion, declining to enforce any sort of ethical guidelines for the Court.

More important than any of that, though—but it is related—is that two-thirds of this Supreme Court has shown itself to be loyal to ideology, not law; Republican policy, not the Constitution.

They support states' rights until it conflicts with their ideology. They support legal precedent until it conflicts with their ideology. They support Constitutional principles—until they conflict with their ideology.

My favorite(?) example of a Justice's hypocrisy and obtuseness came when, in hearing the case regarding Colorado removing Trump from their primary ballot, Alito opined that a single state shouldn't have so much influence on who wins a presidential election. This was from a guy that worked on the Bush v. Gore case in Florida in 2000, a case where the Court completely improperly stepped in to halt a recount and declare that Bush won the presidency because of an incomplete ballot tally in one state.

If not for the presence of too many Republicans in the House of Representatives, Clarence Thomas, at least, would be looking at impeachment. (Personally, I think Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett should all be impeached, with the latter three being deemed to have been appointed by a treasonous president, but that's a pipe dream.) Gorsuch's seat was blatantly stolen by the Republicans when they refused to confirm anyone appointed by then-President Obama, giving his a uniquely tainted Justiceship.

There is so very much damage to repair from the Trump years, with correcting the Supreme Court near the top of the list. But to do it, we're going to need voters to step up and not only re-elect President Biden, but elect enough Democrats to the Senate and House to neuter the fascist plans of the now-authoritarian Republican Party.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, SCOTUS, Posted on February 28, 2024 at 11:14PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Journalistic malpractice

There has been a disturbing trend in the world of American political punditry of late. Journalists and commentators and substackers and the like, including people I generally respect, have been jumping on the "President Biden is too old and shouldn't run again" bandwagon. This bugs me on a number of levels, most of which redound to (a) Joe Biden has a remarkable string of positive accomplishments in just three-plus years in office and has shown zero evidence of losing his capability to keep doing so; and (b) it's another success story for Republican propaganda movers who spout bullshit on Fox "News" and the like and see it travel all the way into the words of people like Robert Reich and Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart.

Klein's piece in the New York Times is particularly galling because he all but admits he's furthering an argument based on propaganda.

Titled "Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden," Klein's essay spends a great many words on explaining just how awesome a job Joe Biden has done as President before concluding he has to go. It's insane. After trumpeting many of Biden's accomplishments—uniting the party leadership, wrangling a contentious Democratic caucus in the Senate to pass several pieces of landmark legislation, shepherding a post-peak-COVID economic recovery that is the envy of the world—he looks at the polling (which isn't currently great), mentions that Trump-appointed special counsel Robert Hur peppered a report utterly clearing Biden of any wrongdoing in a classified-documents matter following his vice-presidency with insults and innuendo deliberately fabricated to further this very bit of propaganda, and then basically throws up his hands like Bud Selig at a tied All-Star Game.

Acknowledging that there is no indication, zero, from anyone who works with the president, from White House staff to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, that Biden is in any way incapable or inattentive, Klein says that doesn't matter because campaigning for re-election is hard and tiring.

He cites as evidence that Biden isn't up for a campaign that the President didn't do a TV interview for the Super Bowl pregame show, as has become customary over the past several years. "The Super Bowl," Klein writes, "is one of the biggest audiences you will ever have. And you just skip it? You just say no?" Well, let's think about this for more than two and a half seconds, Ezra. Who would have conducted that interview? CBS claimed not to have a correspondent in mind for the job, but Margaret Brennan of "Face the Nation" was surely in the mix and she's...well, to be fair, she's not Chuck Todd or Sean Hannity, but nor is she Cronkite or Koppel. Whether Brennan or someone else, the hot topic of the day in  newsrooms was that stupid Robert Hur report, which was basically being regurgitated without pushback in mainstream news media. I don't blame the President for not wanting to provide another opportunity for a reporter to give more oxygen to GOP smears. Was it risky? Sure. It's a pass at a big audience, but not the audience Klein was making it out to be. The Super Bowl itself is a ratings bonanza. The pregame interview with the president is a few minutes when a large chunk of that audience goes out for a snack run or yaks with their guests at the Super Bowl party, they're not really watching.

Also, the media landscape isn't what it was even a few years ago. TV interviews have their place, to be sure, but in terms of campaigning, which is what Klein is talking about here, a sit-down on CBS with a correspondent more interested in drama than journalism probably doesn't serve much purpose. TV news is a different beast today than in decades past. Digital media is far more important for the under-50 demographic. Navigating that has its own set of challenges, but skipping the Super Bowl just isn't the big deal Klein and others make it out to be.

Yes, to campaign successfully, Biden needs to be in view doing his job and showing the world he's sharp. And yes, slipping up and saying the name of the former Chancellor of Germany instead of the current one isn't helpful, but it's the sort of thing Joe Biden has done for decades and isn't necessarily a sign of age-related decline. Journalists have to stop feeding the GOP meme that "Grandpa Joe is feeble and senile" and instead remind the public that age is but one factor when assessing one's overall health and in and of itself the number isn't indicative of anything. As stated by a professor at Australia's University of Sydney, "It’s important to realize that as people age they become more diverse in their abilities and characteristics, probably more so than at younger ages."

Joe Biden is 81. He bicycles (both on a traditional bike and a Peloton), lifts weights, and has a personal trainer. He doesn't have a special diet, but never overeats, according to his medical-doctor wife. He has a few ailments—acid reflux, arthritis, persistent sinus irritations, things most of us can relate to to one degree or another—and plays through the pain, as it were, of his osteoarthritic spine. He had COVID, but thanks to vaccinations and boosters did not have a serious case. He is, in short, a healthy dude.

Franklin Roosevelt died at just 63, he was literally dying during his last run for reelection. He actually did fall asleep during meetings and need a great deal of assistance due to frailty, but no one believes FDR wasn't up to the job. Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer's, by some accounts as early as 1984 when he was 73, certainly by the time he was into his second term at 75, yet people still lionize the guy (which is crazy, but not because of his dementia). JFK's physical health was terrible, he had Addison's disease and treated back pain with heavy use of amphetamines. (Kennedy's health was so consistently troubled that within the Kennedy clan, there was apparently a running joke that if Jack Kennedy were to be bitten by a mosquito the mosquito would die from food poisoning.) Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated in his early 60s by a stroke in mid-term and continued on with others largely running the show for him. Chester Arthur had a fatal kidney infection, a symptom of which was extreme fatigue, but ran for reelection anyway (he lost) before dying at age 57. Then there's now-77-year-old Trump, who has lied continuously about his own health and made sure that official reports were edited to show he had no ailments, suggesting he has many (plus he's, you know, sociopathic and staggeringly stupid). Every one of those guys was/is younger than Joe Biden and in far, far worse health.

Klein also disputes that the Joe-is-too-old issue is propagated by news media. He writes, "In poll after poll, 70 percent to 80 percent of voters are worried about his age. This is not a thing people need the media to see." Really? Why do you think those people were "worried about his age" if not because of what they saw on/read in the news? Because he said Mitterand when he meant Macron one time? Because he talks a bit more quietly than others? OK, then what are reporters like Klein doing about that? He almost does something about it with this piece, making many good points about how successful and capable Joe Biden has been and continues to be, but instead he chose to perpetuate the meme. Even if I were to accept the statement that "this is not a thing people need the media to see," here you are, Ezra, in the media, reinforcing the idea and making it worse!

"The presidency is a performance," Klein writes, using the word not in the sense of your annual performance review at work, but in the sense of an actor performing a role on stage. And people answering pollsters don't like what they see on the stage. So get someone else, practical concerns be damned, choosing the right person to do the job after the campaign be damned, the only priorities should be charisma and poll numbers.

Klein's conclusion seems to be, "Americans are stupid. Thus, if we want the Democrats to win, we must replace the man who has had arguably the most effective and successful first term as President since LBJ with a hypothetical younger person who may or may not be an empty suit."

My conclusion is, "American journalists are failing. They are allowing disinformation and propaganda to fuel their reportage without adequate analysis. They are prioritizing drama and conflict over truth and facts. And they convey that running for president is what's important, not the actual job of being president."

Look, Klein is scared. I get it, I'm scared too. This is a literal must-win election. Biden cannot lose or else Trump regains power and destroys this country as we know it, contrary to what Jon Stewart said the other night (he said, addressing supporters of both candidates: "If your guy loses bad stuff might happen, but the country is not over. And if your guy wins, the country is in no way saved." I never thought Jon Stewart would be one of the guys not paying attention). The fact that Biden is behind in the polls is unfathomable to anyone paying attention, and the fact of the matter is that a not inconsequential fraction of Americans are stupid. Rubes, conned into following a cultist who thinks they're disgusting and exist solely for him to exploit. Another percentage is not in the cult, but is ignorant enough to support candidates that hurt them, what I think of as the "battered spouse contingent" of the Republican party that has existed for decades. Between the two groups, there might well be enough of them to plunge us into a new dark age. It's fucking terrifying.

But: (a) Biden is who we've got, there is no practical way of replacing him on the ticket unless he voluntarily cedes the top spot to Kamala Harris, and then Klein and company will freak out because Americans are racist and sexist as well as ageist; (b) Biden is actually a damn good president; (c) Republicans and Russians (is there a difference any more?) will tar and feather whomever the Democrats nominate with fabricated propaganda and the sheep currently comprising the bulk of the American news media will regurgitate it all anyway. "But her e-mails." "Swift Boat Veterans for 'Truth'." Birtherism. The Willie Horton ads. Who the candidate is is merely a detail, the smear campaign will just be retailored.

We've got some time before November. Let's do better than the "journalists" in informing the public and getting out the vote.

---

 UPDATE: One newscaster/pundit that is trying to educate the public about true things is Lawrence O'Donnell, who took this on in his show a few nights ago. He covered some of the same ground I did above (written before I saw the clip), and I recommend this video, share it around. It's longish, but clarifying.

 

 

Tagged Politics, Republicans, President Biden, Posted on February 23, 2024 at 10:16PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Mass insanity

I am one of those people that follows politics and the national news fairly closely and that's not been terribly good for my mental health the last several years. The American Nervous Breakdown, as Bob Cesca calls the phenomenon that has led to our current social reality, has many facets. It's not just the propaganda that feeds the bonkers cultists who go to Trump rallies and buy AR-15s, the bonkers voters who elect the worst people Congress has ever seen, the bonkers corruption happening out in the open on the Supreme Court, and the bonkers racists that feel like they now have permission to be openly hateful in all their daily interactions. It's also those of us seeing all this going on and justifiably freaking the fuck out about it.

We have to keep tabs on it, too. It does no one any good, not even ourselves, to ignore it and act like that dog in the fire meme saying "this is fine." Yet, a huge percentage of us here in ’Murca are doing just that, either not paying attention at all or somehow are of the mind that the literal fascist uprising that is the modern Republican party is hunky-dory with them, and the consequences for this ignorance could be catastrophic. Thus, the anxiety meter goes to 11.

Joe Biden has an approval rating of just 41%. That's crazy. When you consider the obstructionist Congress and the sheer scale of damage to governmental function he inherited, his accomplishments are amazing. 

The recent polling—yeah, I know, polls; not exactly the most reliable information of late, the methodology is still in need of some tweaking—is astonishing. A huge majority of Americans think the economy is merely "fair" or "poor"?! Inflation is way down. Unemployment is remarkably low. People are spending. Yes, some things are more expensive than they were a couple years ago, but some of that is normal and the things that are a real concern for folks—housing costs, insurance, medical care—have to be looked at in context.

There is a lag time to policy change. Much as we might like the effects of legislation or judicial appointments to be immediate, they're not. Just as the inflation we've been dealing with of late can be traced to consequences of the COVID pandemic and its horrendous mishandling by the previous administration (as well as the consequences of some positive things, like rising wages), the stabilizing effects of the Inflation Reduction Act and tax reforms take time to spread through society. Just as the horrors being visited on us by the Supreme Court and other jurisdictions since Joe Biden took office are the result of the previous guy's appointments and the Republican Senate's leader preventing President Obama from filling a staggering number of judgeships—a years-long buildup—reclaiming the judiciary for the rule of law and the Constitution is not a short-term project.

We've got a critical vote coming up in 11 months. People better start paying attention.

Upset that your health insurance costs more? I am. I had to change to a worse policy for next year and I'll still be paying about 25% more in premiums. Is that Joe Biden's fault? Hell no! In fact, he's managing to keep it from being worse! The alternative—those fascist Republicans—want to kick people off of health coverage altogether. They want insurance companies to rob the rest of us blind. Give Joe Biden a Democratic supermajority in Congress and we'll get an expanded Affordable Care Act and better coverage for less.

Pissed that your groceries cost more? Well, in point of fact, not all of them do, some things are less expensive now, but the alternative to President Biden and Democratic attention paid to the affordability and quality of those groceries is those fascist Republicans, who want to abolish regulations that seek to ensure the meat and produce you buy won't put you in the hospital, a hospital that you won't be able to afford because they will have also taken away your health insurance.

Squeezed by your rent every month? Well, that's really a function of locality and a lot of interrelated factors, so I'm not sure what will help there. But I can tell you that the Republican policy that favors corporations over human beings will allow more and more disparity and exacerbate the wealth disparities that make cities like mine so damned expensive to live in.

And then there's the "Biden's too old" thing. When people say they're concerned about Joe Biden's age, there needs to be a follow-up question: What factors related to his age worry you and have you seen any evidence that he's at all incapable? Do people think he's forgetful or can't stay focused? All evidence says he's not and he can. Do people think if he does become incapable that he'll deny that reality and his staff and cabinet will allow it? Do they even know who's in the cabinet? Do people think if he dies in office or had to resign for his health there'd be no capable and effective replacement—i.e., do they fear Kamala Harris? Why? How much of the "he's too old" thing is camouflaged racism/misogyny regarding the VP? And, once again, even if people insist their age-related concerns are legitimate, consider the alternative: a doddering, fascistic criminal in far worse health and cognitively challenged even at his peak, who is bent on petty revenge and completely lawless, greedy, and sociopathic.

I swear, every election cycle it appears that more Americans get dumber. Here's a poll I'd like to see conducted: Let's survey Americans about their knowledge of how their government works. Show them some "Schoolhouse Rock" and ask if they knew about the details presented therein before.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, President Biden, Posted on December 2, 2023 at 11:47PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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The Plan: Fascism 2025

So went the introduction to the outstanding 2004 science-fiction show Battlestar Galactica, which chronicled the struggle of a human race from elsewhere in the galaxy struggling for survival after their worlds were wiped out by AI robots that had become pissed off at their creators.

Just change "Cylons" to "Republicans" and you have a description of the modern GOP.

The show was awesome. And dark. And eventually, in the end, had a fairly happy ending where humans and Cylons resolved their differences. I'm hopeful the United states will also have a happy resolution to its current shitshow, but I'm less hopeful that we'll get there without a BSG-style violent upheaval.

But let's look at the text. "The [modern Republicans] were created by [Americans.]" We (that's the collective "we," of course) created this problem. We voted in Ronald fucking Reagan in 1980, whose administration started down this road to normalizing selfishness and overt hatred of our fellow citizens. We permitted Newt Gingrich to rule Congress ten years later and model even more overtly asshole behavior. We reelected George W. Bush after his incompetence abetted 9/11 and his reaction to it was massively counterproductive. We kept sending Mitch McConnell back to the Senate. We let the "tea party" send representatives to Congress. And we allowed Donald Trump to ascend to the presidency. All made possible by propaganda outlets we have permitted to not just exist but flourish.

We created the modern Republican base. They evolved to master the ability to manipulate enough rubes to make violence and bigotry of all kinds acceptable to far too many of us. And they have all now rebelled against the very U.S. Constitution they pretend to revere. There are more and more MAGA-whackjob copies popping up in all kinds of offices, often indistinguishable from each other.

And they have a plan.

Unlike the Cylons, the Republicans have made their plan public. And it's scary. Cylon-level scary.

Funded by the right-wing "think tank" The Heritage Foundation, which is funded mostly by the Kochs, “Project 2025” starts with firing tens of thousands of government employees that form a backstop against authoritarian rule and replacing their positions with cultish obedient flunky jobs. The civil service was revamped under Jimmy Carter to enhance career professional continuity and lessen political bias in disruptive turnover; the Trumpublican Plan would turn it entirely into a political arm of EmperorPresident Palpatine. The Justice Department is, naturally, a high priority for The Plan, because everything the modern GOP does is in some fashion or other illegal and prosecutable and they can't have pesky things like the law getting in the way of their power. And the FBI has a thing about combating misinformation; since misinformation is the GOP's primary communication tool, the FBI can't be allowed to do that, so raze the DOJ is right there in The Plan.

The Plan also seeks to control the access of the press to the government, saying the new administration should stop giving the press corps space to work at the White House.  It seeks to reduce (in advance, presumably, of eliminating) the role of the Senate in confirming executive positions. It would eliminate environmental protections, put a stop to using renewable energy and expand fossil fuel use, and accelerate a climate change crisis that, without drastic intervention, will wreak havoc on the population of the planet in a very few years' time all for the sake of industry profit and putting a boot on the neck of "woke."

We see progress toward their authoritarian fantasy coming true by the elevation of Mike Johnson to Speaker of the House of Representatives. Johnson's full-on MAGA Trumpist ideology—plus selective bible-thumping, not a Trumpy thing but a huge part of theocratic wannabe authoritarians' agenda—promises to make for a truly destructive period of Congressional ineptitude.

2024 is just around the corner. Everyone needs to be registered to vote and ready to send a loud and clear message. Republicans need to be not just defeated but trounced in the elections a mere 53 weeks from now. If not, we're in for real trouble. Cylon apacolypse trouble. We created this, but we can still change course and rectify things if we show up and act.

As Commander Adama once said, “Sooner of later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things you've done anymore."

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Battlestar Galactica, Posted on October 27, 2023 at 3:12PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Historic imagery

I find myself wondering and imagining where and in what contexts this photograph will be displayed in years to come. History texts, to be sure. The Smithsonian, perhaps. Countless dartboards.

It's glorious. Due process, my dude. I know it's a new experience for you, but just think about how very, very long you've gotten away without having to endure it despite your life of crime.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on August 25, 2023 at 1:33AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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