Doom Report (Week -1: Hot Flashes)

In 1935, about 100 cane toads were imported into Australia to control the cane beetle, a pest which was destroying crops.  By 2011, there were an estimated 200 million: they eat bugs that native species used to eat, edging them out; they poison anything that eats them, from native species to family pets; and, to add insult to injury, Wikipedia says that “there is no evidence that they have affected the number of cane beetles which they were introduced to prey upon.” And that’s how cane toads became the poster child for the law of unintended consequences.

Once upon a time we thought eating butter was bad for you, so we invented margarine, which we made out of trans fat, which (it turns out) is way worse for you than butter.  And remember how our government had this briliant idea to cure public drunkenness and alcoholism by inventing a little thing called “Prohibition”?  Turns out what they actually invented was organized crime.  Well, in the grand tradition of all those brilliant ideas, today (literally the day I’m posting this), our government brings you yet another one: they’re banning TikTok.  Can’t imagine there’ll be any unintended consequences from that.

Oh, wait: there already are.  See, TikTok creators, in anticipation of the looming shutdown, have started flocking to RedNote, an app much more closely tied to the Communist Party, and whose terms and conditions are entirely in Mandarin.  Reporting on what you’re actually agreeing to when you click on that varies—it’s a bummer, but apparently no one in the world can read Mandarin and tell us what it says—but, at a bare minimum, you’re apparently agreeing not to “slander” the culture of China, nor violate the basic principles of the Chinese Constitution ... you know, the document that establishes the Chinese Communist Party.  Actually, the proper name of this app is “Xiaohongshu,” which more literally translates to “Little Red Book.” So glad that our government is keeping TikTok from collecting everyone’s data!  You tell ’em, Congress, and also Biden, and also the Supreme Court: if you want Americans’ data, you’ll just have to buy it from Facebook and Google like everyone else!

Since this is (ostensibly) a short post week, I’ll keep the remainder of my comments on the cesspool of the week’s news to quick takes:

• The Republicans are quite outraged at the mismanagement of the wildfires in Southern California, and they’re claiming that they’re going to condition aid on policy changes.  I mostly agree with Jonathan Harris over at Some More News, who says this is probably all performative, but they’re really hammering on the bits about Gavin Newsome taking all our water because of smelt (which is complete bullshit), and Karen Bass (who is obviously a DEI hire because she is neither white nor a man) cutting the budget of the LA fire department.  They probably have a reasonable point on that last one at least, but it’s also instructive to listen to Heather Lofthouse, who pointed out on this week’s Coffeee Klatch:

But I mean, it’s “Karen Bass cut the budgets: how dare she” is ... kind of the headline, as we give Elon Musk an office in the White House and his mandate is to cut the budgets for vulnerable people and for the things that matter.  I mean the hypocrisy around that and “I’m not going to spend it, I’m not going to spend it, I’m not going to spend, but that person cut budgets in the wrong way” is wild to watch, too.

• But the thing that most irks me about the wildfires is the utter refusal to understand how climate change is such a huge factor.  Instead we have Joe Rogan trotting out his “whiny liberal” voice and mocking people saying “it’s climate change!” and then following up with “no, it’s arson, stupid.” Which, even if it were arson—which there is currently no evidence to support, at least for the largest of the fires—but even if that were true, is arson making the winds blow 60 – 100MPH and spread the fires over miles in seconds, and also whip up the fires to truly horrific peaks?  (Or, as Jon Stewart put it on The Daily Show this week, it’s like fire fucked a tornado.)  Arson didn’t cause the flooding last year, nor the drought this year, the combination of which resulted in a massive quantity of new growth which is now bone dry and just waiting to catch fire at the slightest provocation.  I honestly thought that once climate change started costing all the rich assholes a lot of money, they’d finally do something about it, but it turns out that the response to insurance companies losing billions in natural disasters like this is that they just stop insuring people.  Whew! problem solved.

• Biden and Trump have been fighting over who deserves credit for the cease-fire agreement in Gaza.  How about we wait to see if it actually happens before we quibble over who gets the kudos?

• Biden gave us a farewell address in which he warned us about the dangers of oligarchy.  Many this week lamented “where was that message during the CAMPAIGN??” Which is fair.  Of course, Biden essentially has senioritis (in multiple meanings of the word, I suppose) and has entered his “I don’t give a fuck” phase.  But note how neatly this lines up with my thoughts (such as I outlined last week) that what the Dems really need to do is start talking about how evil the billionaires are.  (Also it amuses me that Biden, 82, is finally catching up to Bernie Sanders, 83, and Robert Reich, 78.)

• People are also whining this week about how the lack of reporting on Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s insurrection indictment is a failure of the traditional media.  Well, duh: the traditional media is now all owned by the same billionaires who are funneling all their money to Trump.  The meme that people are stupid from getting all their news from the Internet is dead: the implication was always that you might not be able to trust what you hear from some rando on Reddit or Facebook.  Now, sadly, you might be able to trust what you’re reading in the Washington Post or the New York Times even less.

• On this week’s The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviewed historian Jon Meacham.  As expected, he trotted out one of his favorite talking points: that democracy is, increasingly, an analog system in a digital world:

And the chasm that that creates between the emotional catastrophizing of its people versus the kind of glacial pace of change—I do think democracy itself has to find a way for government to be more agile and responsive.

To which Meacham pointed out that this was the same argument Anne Morrow Lindbergh used to justify her “America First” position in 1940 that the US needed to become more like Germany and Italy and Russia: obviously totalitarianism was the solution to the sluggish response time of democracy.  Not saying I’m favoring Meacham over Stewart here, but it is food for thought.

• Speaking of The Weekly Show, every episode ends with Jon talking to some of his producers.  At first, this was Lauren Walker and Brittany Mehmedovic, but within a few episodes they were joined by Gillian Spear, who, in addition to being an associate producer, is also their fact checcker.  I really enjoy these post-show chats, and especially appreciate the fact that Spear often drops little truth bombs.  So here’s your Gillian Spear fact-of-the-week:

... the Democrats haven’t won the white vote since 1964.  And what happened after 1964?  The Civil Rights Act ...

• If you recall how this whole series started, you’ll remember my talking about the phone conversation I had with my friend.  I mentioned in passing that I’d pointed out to him that Project 2025—and, by extension, Trump—wish to erase trans people.  I did not, however, mention his reaction: he scoffed at me.  In this day and age, I don’t experience a lot of scoffing.  But I can’t think of any other word to describe it.  This was, to judge from his reaction, an utterly ridiculous prospect.  Except that, of course, here we are 10 weeks later, Trump hasn’t even taken office yet, and already utter psychopath Nancy Mace has introduced a rule to ban transgender people from using public bathrooms that don’t match their “biological sex”—a rule that would impact a single person, by the way (incoming representative Sarah McBride)—and the Republicans in the House have voted to ban transgender athletes.  So, I dunno ... maybe not so crazy after all.

• On this week’s Election Profit Makers, we are somehow still talking about Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter.  Apparently a listener wrote a long email about how disappointed he was in Biden for doing it, and then another listener wrote back challenging that opinion, and so forth.  My opinion is simple: I care not one whit that he pardoned his son—it was a thing any father should be willing to do for his child, especially one that was being harassed by bullies.  I was a bit disappointed in him saying he wasn’t going to pardon him ahead of time.  It’s the same situation with Bush (Sr) ... remember how that guy said “read my lips: no. new. taxes.”? and then he went and raised taxes?  Same deal: the sin was not in the doing, but rather in the foolish promise prior to it.  A stupid promise that was nearly impossible to keep ... one would think politicians would learn not to do that by now.  Apparently not.

• It’s also occurred to me that Trump has so flooded the zone with shit (as I discussed last week) that he’s managed to completely eclipse the news coverage of the New Orleans terrorist attack.  Of course, part of that is probably because the MAGA nutjobs got so excited over the fact that the terrorist drove his truck across the Mexican border that they wet themselves, and then it turned out that the guy was an American—not a naturalized immigrant, but someone born in the US—and then all of a sudden they found other interesting things to talk about.  And it saddens me that we, as a nation, didn’t even talk about it very much.  I’ve been to New Orleans 3 times in my life, and I’ve walked down Bourbon Street in those packed crowds, and it hurts my heart to think that 14 people died and we never even made the Repubs babble on about how everything was to blame except for the AR-10 rifle and the Glock wielded by the domestic terrorist.  It’s like it’s now so commonplace that we can’t even be bothered to go through the motions any more.

• And, while I continue to be skeptical of Brian Tyler Cohen’s repeated screeds about how the entire problem is that mainstream media is overlooking important stories (although also see first point), I do wonder how no one is reporting nationally on the Republicans in North Carolina literally stealing an election from an NC supreme court judge.  Democrat Allison Riggs, one of only two Democrats on the court, won her election by a mere 734 votes.  A slim margin to be sure, and her opponent demanded a recount, as well he should.  Riggs won that recount by the exact same number of votes.  So her opponent demanded a second recount, which seemed a bit over the top, but, sure: that’s his right.  Riggs won that one too, by, say it with me now: 734 votes.  So then the crazy Repub demanded that the board of elections throw out 60,000 votes.  Yes, that’s correct: sixty thousand votes.  But only for the supreme court justice race, of course: the votes would still count towards Trump’s victory in NC.  The NC board of elections (obviously) rejected this insane request.  But the schmuck appealed it ... to the NC supreme court.  The elections board tried appealing up to a federal level, but they kicked it back.  So now we’re waiting for 4 Republicans and 1 Democrat (Riggs recused herself, obviously) to decide whether they will unilaterally just pick their fellow Republican over the will of their own electorate.  And I think we’d better be cognizant that, if it works there, it’ll become the new pattern of how to rig elections in the future, everywhere.  So it may not be hyperbole to say that the entire fate of respecting election results depends on whether at least 2 Republicans on the North Carolina supreme court have any scruples or not.  I’m not hopeful.

• Finally, I’ve been much amused over the past few weeks as Brian Tyler Cohen and other pundits claim that the only “good” thing about the Republicans having control over all 3 branches of government is that they no have no one else to blame: whatever mistakes there are going forward, they own them.  To which I can only reply: oh, my sweet summer child.  If you think the Repubs can’t blame the Democrats when the Dems have nothing to do with anything, you just haven’t been paying attention.  Remember when it took 15 tries to elect Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House and they blamed the Democrats?  Remember all the whiny Trump moments from his first presidency?  It’s the Democrats, it’s the Deep State, the system is rigged, my enemies are everywhere: I’m the most powerful man in the world, and anything that gets accomplished is absolutely my doing and also anything that didn’t happen is someone else’s fault.  Blame shifting is the most powerful weapon in the Republican arsenal.  Expect to see it on full display, starting ... well, tomorrow.

Well, this “short” post ballooned into something out of control.  So I’ll leave it there for now and wait for ... week 0? week 1?  I haven’t quite decided if this should be like going from 1 BC to 1 AD or if it should be more mathematical than that.  I guess we’ll find out next week.

Doom Report (Week -2: That's Enough Flooding, Thank You)

A few months back, I watched a really good Some More News video on Ronald Reagan.  Specifically, on how Reagan led us to Trump, and that included a long section on how Reagan fucked up the Democratic party.  This was a thing I had never considererd before: while I understood that Reagan fucked us over in a number of really important ways (his racism amped up the “war” on drugs; his economic policies started the whole “trickle-down” lie; his man Robert Bork reinvigorated corporate greed by saying that, no, monopolies were actually good for consumers; he killed the popularity of unions by firing all the striking air traffic controllers, which the safety of the air travel industry has never recovered from; etc etc etc) ... while I knew all that, I never thought that the Democrats might have gotten fucked up too.  But, what Cody and team point out in this quite persuasive video is that Reagan beat the Democrats so badly that they all started to adopt his policies.  Clinton, for instance, ran on “ending welfare as we know it” (which he delivered by crippling the program in ways from which it’s never recovered), passed crime bills that led to today’s mass incarceration crisis, and signed NAFTA, which allowed—nay, encouraged—America’s corporations to move jobs off-shore to get cheaper labor, thus screwing over the working class.  Really, if you think about it, Clinton often sounds more like a Republican president than an Democratic one.  Even Obama, who campaigned on hope and change, sadly listened to all those Third Way advisors and in the end actually delivered very little of either.  And the point of all this is, the Democrats learned the wrong lessons from Reagan.  They figured, he beat us, and he pushed this stuff, so now we better push this stuff too.

I think about that this week because there appears to be a lot of learning the wrong lessons going around these days.  I mean, Trump won, right?  So obviously that means that the country wants its leaders to be more racist, attack minorities more, and be nicer to our poor, persecuted billionaire class.  At least that seems to be what people are getting out of it: Zuckerberg, for instance, says he’s getting rid of all Facebook’s fact checkers, moving moderation to Texas (because those evil liberal Californians can’t be trusted, obviously!), and that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression.” Of course, the roots of Facebook are comparing women like cattle, so the fact that the restrictions against referring to women as property are now lifted makes perfect sense.  Or how about Amazon announcing that it would pay $40 million to the Trumps for the rights to make a documentary about Melania?  Attached to direct: Brett Ratner, who hasn’t been seen in Hollywood since being disgraced during the #MeToo movement.  (Side tangent:  People on the right are always going on about how you can never be sure whether the women who accuse men of sexual misconduct are telling the truth, and that people should be considered innocent until proven guilty.  And it’s true that there were a very few innocent people who got caught up in #MeToo (Chris Hardwick, for instance).  But I’ve never understood why people—on either side—have difficulty with figuring out whether someone is guilty of what they’re accused of when it comes to this particular behavior.  Basically, there are exactly two things that occur immediately after one woman comes out and says that a famous man assaulted her: either a dozen more women come forward to support her, or 3 or 4 women come forward to say they’ve never experienced anything but support from the man and no other woman agrees with the accuser.  If you ever hear about a situation that doesn’t fall into one of those two camps, then you can wonder whether the man’s guilty or not.  But so far I never have.  And, if it does follow one of those two patterns, no need to wonder: you know whether or not they did it.  By the way, guess which one Ratner’s story falls into?)  So, I guess the lesson we learned from Trump’s victory is, it’s okay to call LGBTQ people “freaks,” and also thatarapists aren’t so bad—after all, we’ve now elected our first rapist-American president!  Overall, the nearly immediate flood of fake headlines on Facebook, including one that announced that Zuckerberg was the “recipient of world’s first rat penis transplant,” is cold comfort.

Of course, the news this week has been dominated by Trump’s insane rantings about taking over Greenland and changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico.  (Presumably, he plans to do the latter by taking his trusty Sharpie and crossing out “Mexico” on all the maps in the world.)  He’s also talked about reclaiming the Panama Canal Zone, and even annexing Canada.  Don’t worry: it gets crazier.  President Musk has even started a poll to ask users of the site-formerly-known-as-Twitter if the US should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” I find it difficult to take any of this seriously, though, because that’s what they want us to do, and I’m just stubborn enough to refuse to do it.  Because, see, all this bullshit talk is Trump following the advice of Steve Bannon, who once famously said:

The Democrats don’t matter.  The real opposition is the media.  And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

Or, as Michael Lahanas-Calderón said in this week’s Coffee Klatch:

But isn’t this ... one of the many distractions that the Trump Administration presumably has—if not pre-planned, down the road will make up some—to keep hiding that oligarchic control that you’re talking about, right?  This is to throw people off balance more than anything ...

Which is spot on.  Because now the prime Minister of Greenland has to respond, and the government of Denmark has to respond, and the president of Panama has to respond, and the new president of Mexico has to respond, and the prime minister of Canada has to respond, and even the counter-extremism unit of Great Britain has to investigate.  Trump has managed to send dozens of world leaders—not to mention the media—scrambling after moronic ideas that will never come to fruition ... more importantly, that were never serious in the first place.  Meanwhile, the grift goes on: the billionaires are falling in line, the judge in the one case that managed to struggle through to conviction grants him an unconditional discharge, the special counsel that bedevilled him by actually listing all his crimes is resigning, and the media has no more space to report on his insane cabinet picks, such as trying to appoint a potential Russian asset as Director of National Intelligence.  The zone is flooded, the shit is knee high and climbing, Trump continues to live a consequence-free life, and the rich just keep getting richer.

Let me leave you with this.  I’ve been calling out Robert Reich quite a bit in my previous posts.  Partially that’s because I tend to highlight the opinions of pundits most when they’re different from my own: if we’re all in agreement, there’s not much more to be said.  But partially it’s because Reich, like many of the public personalities whose opinions I respect in spite of the fact that they’re Democrats, has just had some terrible takes on why the Democrats lost to Trump.  But, for all my criticism, I really do like Reich, and I really respect someone who’s achieved that level of old age without losing all their progressive fervor.  (While I like to think that I’ve thoroughly debunked the young-equals-liberal-old-equals-conservative meme, it is sadly true that the right wing tends to be dominated by old white guys, while the progressives are full of youth and diversity.)  And I like Reich precisely because he sometimes says some pretty smart shit.  This is what he said this week:

There really are two kinds of populism.  The right wing the ... Trumpers have been embracing for years: cultural populism.  And that means going after the symbols of elitism—many of them made up!—I mean, transgender people, you know, you go after them; go after immigrants; go after the Deep State; go after all sorts of symbols that people can get riled up again.  But the alternative to cultural populism is real, and that’s economic populism.  That’s going after the Musks and the people who abuse their their wealth, and and turn it into political power.  That’s what’s happening in this country, and this is why I am optimistic (just to repeat myself) that, as we descend into the horrors of the Trump Administration, people will actually see how important economic populism is.  Democrats will find their voice—and, if they don’t, we’ll have another party that will replace them and find its voice.

I’m not sure I share his optimism that the Democrats might actually get replaced one day.  But I think he’s onto something nonetheless: maybe someone, somewhere inside the party, will learn the right lessons from Trump’s victory.  And the right lesson is that people are tired of all the billionaires standing on their necks while picking their pockets.  That people need change which actually accomplishes something, and they’re just going to keep voting against whoever’s in power at the moment until they get it.  That that FDR fellow was onto something when he decided, in the first hundred days of his first administration, that he would thumb his noses at the rich fat cats in the stock market (well, those that hadn’t thrown themselves out windows, at any rate) and actually help the working class for a change.  And, as long as the Democrats keep doing what Kamala did by staying hands-off the big corporations, they’ll keep losing.  When they figure out that that all that corporate money isn’t doing them any good if all the working class people hate them, then maybe we’ll see some change.

Doom Report (Week -3)

Well, it’s a New Year, finally.  I was supposed to celebrate the new year on Tuesday night, along with everyone else, but that didn’t really happen.  Having had the flu (or perhaps a bad cold) for several days just before Christmas (along with the rest of the family), I had stopped doing my daily fiber.  And, since I have diverticulosis, not doing fiber for an extended period has a tendency to result in a diverticulitis flare-up.  So that’s what I was doing on New Year’s Eve.

Happily, I soon recovered, and we celebrated New Year’s on Friday night.  It’s actually quite nicer when you can pause the ball drop at any time.  So a bottle of champagne for the older two, a bottle of sparkling strawberry lemonade for the younger two, and we “cheers"ed at whatever time the littlest one said she was getting too tired to stay up any longer.  So, 2025, ye have been rung in.  For all that’s worth.

In the ongoing political drama, the only interesting development, to my way of thinking, is the memo put out by Susie Wiles.  Wiles, you may recall, is slated to be Trump’s chief-of-staff.  She’ll be the first female chief-of-staff, which is nice and historical and all, but, as we might expect from anyone associated with Maga World, she’s not exactly a model human being.  Still, she seems to have a few redeeming qualities.

The first time I ever heard of Wiles was when it was reported that Trump had to pick Gaetz while Wiles was out of the room.  The implication was clear: if Wiles had been around, she never would have approved.  Even more intriguing, there was just a hint, just a whisper that Trump wouldn’t have dared do it if she’d been there.  Now, that is an impressive woman—actually, fuck that: that, friends and neighbors, is an impressive person utterly regardless of gender.  If there’s one thing that we can say about Trump somewhat consistently, it’s that he does whatever the fuck he wants.  The mere idea that anyone could control him—even a little!—is a bit amazing.  So that’s when I started to wonder who this pit bull of a person was.

And now, apparently, she’s put out a memo “reminding” everyone that people up for government positions do not speak for the incoming administration.  Now, she apparently stressed that this doesn’t apply to Musk, as he’s not actually up for a government job, because the “department” of government “efficiency” is a thing that doesn’t exist, and Trump can’t make it exist, because that’s not a power that presidents have.  So, supposedly, this memo has nothing to do with Musk, and nothing to do with Musk’s little kerfuffle with Bannon and Loomer (which I mentioned last week).  To which I, much like the author of the article at the other end of that link I pointed you towards, say: bullshit.  And, the best part is, it seems to have worked.  No more episodes of Vicious Tweets, at any rate.  Which means that the world’s richest man—a.k.a. the world’s biggest brat—just got put in his place by a little old white-haired lady who Trump, apparently, calls the “Ice Maiden.” Quite impressive indeed.

We shall see what the future holds, I suppose ...

Doom Report (Week -4: Goodbye, 2024)

The rapidity with which Musk and Trump are falling out is highly amusing to me.  I mean, they are two malignant narcissists: they were never going to be able to work together for long.  But I did think it would happen after he actually took office.  The fact that they just can’t wait to start sniping at each other is quite delightful to me.  Is this schadenfreude on my part?  Oh, certainly.  Does it make me a bad person?  Shit, I dunno; maybe.  Do I care?  Fuck no.

I should clarify: Trump and Musk have not quite started going directly at each other.  Mostly what’s been happening over the holidays is that Musk (in typical Musk fashion) could not wait to start putting his agenda out there, and part of his agenda is to ramp up H-1B visas: people on such visas don’t typically ask for raises, and they certainly can’t unionize, so they’re sort of the perfect workforce for someone like Musk.  But, see, the crazy MAGA-heads don’t want more immigrants: they’re busy trying to get rid of all the ones we already have.  And they (in typical crazy MAGA fashion) don’t much care who’s footing the bill—they’ll spew all over whoever gets in their way.  So it’s less Trump going after Musk and more Steve Bannon and Matt Gaetz and ever-reliable looney Laura Loomer doing so.  If you want a breakdown of the ongoing saga, which I would title “Vicious Tweets,” you could watch a recent BTC video, but, trust me: you don’t actually want that.  It has all the high intellectualism of a middle school mean girls drama (the high school equivalent would have much more depth, believe it or not) and even lacks the draw of making you want to root for one side or the other, because in this case both sides are equally execrable.  Just take my word for it that it’s all unraveling before it’s even gotten started.

Now, Trump has been conspiciously missing from these articulate “you’re a poopyhead!” “nuh-unh! you are!” exchanges, because he actually does know (and, apparently, care) where the money’s coming from.  Remember, people like Bannon and kids-in-cages architect Stephen Miller appear to be true White Nationalist believers, but Trump is strictly in it for the money.  He’s not Christian, but he’ll take money from the Christians (see also: $60 Bible).  He’s not a neo-Nazi, but he’ll take money from the neo-Nazis (stand by, Proud Boys!).  For Trump, being President is the ultimate grift: he overcharges the Secret Service for staying in his hotels, secured billions from the Saudis by going through Jared Kushner, and conned ABC into donating $15 million not by having a great case (the case was almost certainly unwinnable), but because parent company Disney didn’t really want to be on the wrong side of the incoming administration.  At this point, he’s basically selling cabinet positions and ambassadorships: we will soon have a cabinet with a net worth of over $10 billion dollars, and that’s not even considering Musk, whose “department” is not even a real department, so he won’t be part of the cabinet.  So Trump knows where his bread is buttered, and he’s not quite willing to join in with the MAGA nutjobs.

BUT.  At the same time, Trump hates it when people other than him get attention.  And the Democrats know this, and so they started the whole “President Musk” meme.  Just as they knew that talking about his dwindling crowd sizes would get under his skin, they’re transparently playing him, trying to drive a wedge between him and Musk.  And the great thing about playing this game with Trump is that it always works, no matter how obviously you do it.  So where I see the true friction—the real breakdown of the bromance—is in this fantastic clip where he goes back and forth, nearly Gollum-like, between praising Musk and snidely pointing out that he can’t be president, because he wasn’t born here.  You really have to listen to that part of the clip: the fake, Nelson Muntz-like laugh at Musk’s foreign-born status, followed by a whiplash-inducing “nah, he’s a great guy” is so revealing.  If the Dems can keep the whole “President Musk” thing in the news for a bit longer, that’ll solve the problem right there.

But the pitched battle over immigration—“absolutely no one” on the one side vs “only the ‘good’ ones” on the other—is also pretty entertaining to watch, though I’m not sure it will lead to the dissolution as fast as the President Musk bit.  At the end of the day, Trump likes people like Bannon and Loomer because they worship him.  But he doesn’t need them.  If they become inconvenient, he’ll ditch them in a heartbeat, as he has so many others.  Loyalty is never rewarded in Trump-world; Trump lives by the credo of the old Janet Jackson song: what have you done for me lately?  So, from his perspective, he’s happy to sit back and watch them fight it out—he probably thinks of himself as a Roman emperor, facilitating gladiatorial “survival of the fittest” fantasies—but I think that if he has to pick, he’ll go with the checkbook.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the show in the meantime.

Because we must take our joys where we can find them.  Though that clip doesn’t show it, the speech Trump is giving there is the same one where he said this:

On my first day back in the Oval Office, I will sign a historic slate of executive orders to close our border to illegal aliens and stop the invasion of our country.  And on that same day, we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than that of President Dwight D Eisenhower.

Of course, the deportation is a grift as well: the value of the private prison industry is soaring right now, and which company gets to lock up all those prospective deportees will no doubt go to whichever company manages to line the pockets of the Trump family most effectively.  But that doesn’t ameliorate the wave of human misery that is about to be unleashed.  I’ve heard many commentators point out that this will be radically unpopular and may be the very thing that costs the Repubs control of the government ... but there’s a real cost to real people in the meantime.  Will some of those rounded up end up being Americans who actually voted for Trump, possibly screaming “wait, wait: I didn’t think you meant me!” the whole time?  Maybe.  But not that many of them.  So, even if we’re cruel enough to revel in the classic joke of “I never thought leopards would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, it still wouldn’t be worth the cost to all those who never even got the chance to vote, because ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS DON’T VOTE ILLEGALLY.  Man, I thought the con man who convinced people to pay for bottles of something that comes out of the tap for free was a genius, but the hustler who managed to convince half the country that people terrified of being deported would risk their freedom to do something nearly half of Americans can’t be bothered to do ... man, that guy was really slick.  So the horrors, they are a-comin’, and thus we takes our small joys where we can find them, even when they’re a bit cruel.

And, by the way, if you find yourself a bit overwhelmed by the thought of all that human misery and unsure what to do about it, I’ll pass on a message from Jesse Thorn, founder of Maximum Fun and co-host of Judge John Hodgman, who’s worked with his wife Theresa for a couple of different immigrant advocacy organizations.  Jesse advises us to donate to Al Otro Lado (that’s “to the other side,” for those whose Spanish is a bit rusty).  While they’ve already nearly doubled their goal as I write this—blowing away the amount that Jesse and Theresa pledged to mach dollar for dollar—I’ve no doubt they’d still be happy to receive more financial help.  These are folks who provide free legal help to immigrants (remember: unlike most people who are arrested in our country, immigrants don’t have access to a free attorney), and, as Jesse said in a recent episode of JJH:

One of the pieces of good news that I can offer is, as cruel and unjust as our immigration system is for migrants, migrants who have legal representation and have legal assistance actually have a pretty good shot.  The reason is that our government is so incompetent that they always mess up a thousand things.

And that’s, once again, a bit of a sad place to find comfort, but, as I said: wherever we can find it.

Finally, I thought I’d address the “Trump can’t take the oath” thing that seems to be going around.  Remember how, in 2020, the MAGA crowd kept saying that Trump would just refuse to leave the White House, and that way he’d stay president?  Remember how we all laughed at them and shook our heads sadly at how deluded they were?  Well, liberals have their sad little delusions too, and this is one of them.  Let’s break it down.

Remember how Trump incited an insurrection?  And remember how the 14th Amendment says that people who do that can’t hold office?  Okay, now remember how several states sued to keep Trump off the ballot on the grounds that, you know, the 14th Amendment said he couldn’t be President?  And then remember how the Supreme Court said, fuck the Constitution! we work for Trump, and he can do whatever he wants!  Remember all that?  Well, it wasn’t quite like that.

See, the Supreme Court didn’t actually say that the 14th Amendment didn’t apply to Trump.  And they didn’t say that Trump wasn’t an insurrectionist ... because they couldn’t.  Although the Supreme Court has gotten very good lately at doing things they’re not supposed to be able to do, they weren’t actually willing to go as far as that.  See, one of the rules of an appeal to the Supreme Court is that they’re not there to overturn what’s called “findings of fact.” And the Colorado courts (and a couple of others as well) had adjudicated Trump as an insurrectionist as a finding of fact.  So the Supreme Court couldn’t (theoretically) even look at that aspect.  They just had to decide whether that fact meant that he could be kept off the ballot.  And what they decided, in the end, was that the 14th Amendment never says an insurrectionist can’t run for President ... only that they can’t take the oath of office.  So taking someone off the ballot isn’t an option.

But now (so the liberal delusion goes) it’s actually time for that oath of office, and so now the 14th Amendment will kick in and Trump can’t become President.  See?  Where this fantasy falls apart is, of course, that the person administering the oath of office is ... the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.  And remember how the Supreme Court works for Trump?  Well, it might be more fair to say that the 6 conservatives on the Court work for Trump.  And, actually, it might be even more fair to say that Alito and Thomas work for Trump—and even more fair to point out that Thomas just works for whoever pays him the most—while Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh work for the Conservative legal movement (and Barrett sort of does too, though I suspect that one day she’ll be more of a moderate than most people think at the moment).  But I think that’s a distinction without a difference in this case: Roberts has absolutely no problem with ignoring the whole inconvenience of the 14th Amendment and giving Trump the Oath, which he will do, and there we’ll have it.  It’s a really pretty fantasy, guys, but it’s just that.

So that’s where we are, here at the end of another fairly awful year.  Do I wish I were talking more about, say, the fact that a favorite hobby of mine has returned after nearly 15 years being out of print?  Sure.  Or that I were talking about how my middle child (typically referred to in these posts as “the Smaller Animal,” despite the fact that they’re now the tallest of my children, and nearly a foot taller than myself) became an adult this year, getting to vote in their first Presidential election?  Definitely.  But we are where we are, and there’s no use crying over spilled water under the bridge or what-have-you.  The year has held a few bright spots, but mostly it’s been a great steaming pile of shit, and I don’t think I’ll be too sad to see the back of it.  Next year?  I mean, honestly I don’t hold out a lot of hope.  So I’ll take my amusements—like watching idiots such as Loomer and Musk go at each other like the Real Housewives of MAGA—while I can still get ’em.  Wherever we can find it.

Everything's gonna be cool this Christmas

This week, we’ve all been ridiculously sick.  Which is a shame too, because I totally wanted to talk about the whole “President Musk” meme.  But I’m sure there’ll be time for that later.  Till then.

Doom Report (Week -6)

This week, I really enjoyed The Weekly Show, where Jon Stewart interviewed billionaire Mark Cuban.  Cuban is famous for supplanting Warren Buffet as “the good billionaire”: a billionaire who seems to want to do some good in the world instead of just screwing over everyone else.  When Stewart talks about how people only rail againt billionaires on the “other” side—basically, that whatever billionaires do is fine, but only if they’re “our” billionaires—the billionaires he’s talking about as being “ours” are Cuban, Buffet, and perhaps George Soros, who of course has long been the boogeyman billionaire of Fox “News,” where they constantly trot him out to cover for the much more sinister billionaires behind the curtain that are propping them up, like Murdoch and the Koch Brothers and Harlan Crow (most notable for being the “emotional support billionaire,” as the ladies of Strict Scrutiny put it, of at least one Supreme Court justice).  One gets the idea that Stewart is vaguely saying that all billionaires are probably bad, though he typically has a good enough time talking to Cuban that he doesn’t want to go quite that far explicitly.  And, if you’d like to hear a well-reasoned rant on why all billionaires are bad, Adam Conover has you covered, and, if you’d like to hear specifically why George Soros is the target of so many right-wing conspiracies, and which ones may actually have some foundation in reality, the Some More News team has got you covered there too.  But, in general, I think that people like Cuban—and maybe even only Cuban, since I’ve never heard Buffet or Soros talk as openly about their philosophies—are a fascinating mix of good billionaire and bad billionaire.  Many people (such as Ingrid Robeyns and, to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders) have argued that you can’t be both a billionaire and a good person, and I think there’s some grain of truth to that.  Certainly there are times when I’ve listened to Cuban and thought, ah, there’s the coldness and moral apathy that earned him those billions.  But there are also times when he says things that are both articulate and progressive.  So I always have a fun time listening to his interviews.

I noted this one for a couple of places where he seemed to be agreeing with some of my prior posts.  For instance, when talking about AI, he said this:

Cuban: Then there’s using AI.  And so there are things like NEPA, which go into the environmental protection stuff to try to find out if there’s a little frog or whatever before something’s built.  In my opinion, in the conversations I had with some of the Harris folks, is that’s where AI really, really can apply.  Because there’s a process designed for the people in NEPA who go through and determine what should be approved and what data is required and what friction should be added or what friction should be removed.  Artificial intelligence is great for that. All the rules that the individuals on those councils and boards that make those determinations, they have rules that they follow. They have guidebooks that they follow.

Stewart: It’s onerous.

Cuban: Yeah, it’s onerous.  There’s tons of bureaucracy, but tons of data there.  You put that into artificial intelligence,
into a large language model, and you use that to train the large language model.  And then when a new project comes along, you set up agents which then feed the questions and the answers, and the answers to the responses to that new organization, whatever it is they may be building.

Which is exactly correct: this is using AI in how it’s meant to be used.  There’s a process, and it takes a long time for humans to complete that process, but a computer can do it faster.  Up until now, whenever that process involved people weighing different abstract factors and trying to figure out what’s the best approach, you just couldn’t use a computer to speed things up, because computers can’t do that.  But AIs—more specifically, LLMs—can.  (You can read more of my thoughts on the current crop of AIs in my post questioning is AI intelligent and several other posts: just click “technology” in the “Things about Things” box over there to the left.)

But Jon comes back with this:

Stewart: Does that abdicate our autonomy?  ...

Cuban: ...  The challenge is, who makes that decision?  When it’s obvious, it’s easy.  When it’s not so obvious, it’s far more difficult.  And so that’s where the AI comes in and large language models.  Because across the breadth, however many instances of evaluations that need to take place across the country, you don’t want individuals having to make those decisions.

Stewart: But I thought that’s the whole point.  I thought the whole point of people running for office is that they’ve got a vision and they earn our trust, as opposed to AI. And this, again, may be more of the Luddite’s view of not understanding ... AI. I’m nervous about abdicating that.  At least with people, there is a certain regime of accountability that we can bring through.  I can’t vote out a large language model.

And Cuban was, surprisingly, not able to mount a cogent response to this.  I, however, am.

• You can’t vote out the dozens—sometimes hundreds—of people in the EPA or whichever bureaucracy we’re talking about who are making the decisions about how to navigate all those regulations either.  You can vote out the guy at the top, maybe, but they’re just the person who either approved or rejected the work of all those faceless bureaucrats.  How is that different from the AI example?  Asking the AI to help make a decision doesn’t automatically mean that there’s not someone at the end of the day who will either approve or reject the AI’s plan.
• Jon says it would be better to just get rid of all the red tape.  Well, duh.  Of course that would be better.  Sadly, the “science fiction” plan of replacing the work of all those bureaucrats with AI is more feasible (and likely) than any plan to reduce the current bureaucracy of our governmental agencies.
• Jon also says that people can cut through the red tape too, like Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro did when fixing the collapse of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.  Cuban points out that humans can do things quickly when the answer is easy, but not so much when the answer is harder.  This is vaguely correct, but it doesn’t explain things well enough.  He was closer when he talked about the “little frog.” There are always going to be cases where the “right” decision means weighing environmental factors vs economic ones (to take a simple example), and for the most part we have a tendency to devolove into camps.  There are people who are always going to take the side of the environment, regardless of the cost, and there are people who are always going to take the side of the business, regardless of the impact on the planet.  But an AI doesn’t have a predetermined agenda.  It can weigh factors, given all the background context, and make a dispassionate decision on where to draw the balance.
• And, despite the fact that people are predisposed (by scifi thrillers, mostly) to believe that AIs are black boxes and we can never understand how they arrive at their decisions, the truth is that, at least for the LLMs that are currently what we mean when we say “AI,” we actually do know exactly how they arrive at those decisions.  LLMs use something called “chain of thought reasoning” (usually abbreviated in LLM literature as CoT), which basically means that LLMs “think out loud” so that humans can review all their logic and make sure it’s sound.
• Which also knocks down Jon’s other objection (which is expanded upon in the show’s closing segments, where his producers talk about the very real cases of people losing their jobs to AI): that this process will eliminate people’s jobs.  Sure, in business this is a very real problem: many businesses look at AI as a way to save money, and eliminating jobs is one way to do that.  But that ain’t an AI problem.  Why do so many companies lay off people right around Christmas?  Because it makes their bottom line look better at end-of-year.  Companies killing jobs to improve their bottom lines ain’t an AI problem: it’s a shitty company problem.  But government is different.  Most government workers have protection from being downsized in this fashion.  Plus, the whole reason all this red tape takes forever is that the government is constantly understaffed.  Having AI make decisions which are then reviewed by experts doesn’t in any way reduce how many people you need to get the thing accomplished: it only reduces the amount of time those people have to devote to the job.

Anyway, another place Cuban appeared to agree with me is on the topic of insurance, which I broached in a long tangent last week.

Cuban: But it gets worse.  It gets worse.  And so now these providers, the hospitals and doctors, they negotiate with the big insurance companies.  And it’s fascinating.  If you walk into a hospital to pay for an MRI, as an example, and you don’t mention your insurance, you just say, I want a cash price, they’ll probably say it’s $350 to $450, depending on where you live.  That same hospital will negotiate with what they call the BUCAs, the big insurance companies.  For that same thing, they’ll negotiate a price of $2,000.

Stewart: What?

Cuban: Yeah.  So you would think that big insurance company negotiating with the hospital and that insurance company
covers millions of lives.  They insure or deal with—

Stewart: Why wouldn’t they negotiate that if it’s a bulk thing to $100?  Why would it be higher?

Cuban: Because the hospital needs the insurance company as a sales funnel to bring patients in so they can pay their bills. And the insurance company wants that price to be higher, particularly for things like the ACA, because the ACA requires for all the plans they cover that they spend up to 85%.

Again, I’m not sure Cuban is explaining it particularly well, but remember how I put it last week: “companies couldn’t charge that much for medical care if the insurance companies weren’t picking everyone’s pockets ...  insurance is enabling the whole cycle.”

Anyway, that’s my too-long review of the Mark Cuban interview.  I’ll just ding Stewart one last time—and I really do love Jon Stewart, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not always right, and I’m not afraid to call him out on it—on some lack of self awareness.  In the wrap-up with his producers, he reiterates his skepticism on using AI that I talked about above: he refers to it as “dystopian” and then extrapolates to “hey, just so we’re clear here, you’re saying that the computer controls the entire hospital and decides what oxygen to turn on and turn off through analytics?” Then, less than a minute later, he answers a listener question about what he thinks his mistakes were for the year.

Well, you guys know this.  I get annoyed at myself for being a little high-horsey.  And you get a little of the sanctimony in there.  So I try to relax sometimes on the certainty of my opinions.

Oh, you get a little sanctimonious, do you?  You mean, like you did a few seconds ago?  Work harder on the relaxation part, my man.

But, all that aside, still a great host, very incisive, very trenchant.  Looking forward to more shows next year.

Doom Report (Week -7: Stop Calling It Inflation!)

This week, many of my normal political shows collided, either in radical agreement, or complete contradiction.  While I’m not a political expert by any means, I do seem to have the advantage of apparently being the only person in the world watching all these sources at once.  At the very least, they’re definitely not watching each other.  Here, then, is my synthesis of the week’s news.

These are the shows I’ll be referencing throughout this week’s report; feel free to watch them yourselves and evaluate whether you think I’m fairly representing their views:

• On this week’s episode of The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Bernie Sanders on “Rebuilding Trust & Efficacy in the Government”.  Stewart is of course the former host of The Daily Show, and is now back there one night a week; I trust I don’t need to explain who Sanders is.
• On this week’s episode of Some More News, Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll do a fairly in-depth post-mortem on the election somewhat incisively titled “Is Everyone Stupid?” Cody and Katy were writers for Cracked.com, where they worked on a faux news report à la SNL’s “Weekend Update” called “Some News”; Some More News is a continuation of that.  They’re super-progressive and not particularly fond of the Democrats.
• On this week’s episode of The Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich, Heather Lofthouse, and Michael Lahanas-Calderón do their weekly news roundup, this week entitled “Rage Against the Machine”.  Reich was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton (meaning he’s as old as Biden and Trump), and has been a professor and political pundit in the years since, mainly expounding on our growing income inequality (much like Sanders).  He cofounded Inequality Media; Lofthouse is the president of Inequality Media’s Civic Action org.  Calderon is their director of digital strategy, and the official Gen Z represntative on the panel.  These guys are fairly pro-Democrat and moderately progressive.
• This week, Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed Mehdi Hasan on his YouTube channel.  BTC is a staunch Democrat, and the only “serious” news source that I picked up during the writer’s strike that I still watch.  He’s often too pro-Dem for my tastes, but he also covers things I can’t get elsewhere.  Mehdi is a British-born journalist perhaps most famous having his MSNBC show cancelled during the early days of the genocide in Gaza; the network said that fact that he was Muslim was “coincidental.” Yeah, right.  This year he started a new website and YouTube channel called Zeteo (a Greek word meaning “to seek out the truth”); contributors will reportedly include Greta Thunberg and Bassem Youssef.  He’s fairly liberal and not afraid to drop an F-bomb, so I might watch some of the Zeteo videos.¹

So, first and foremost, we need to stop calling the horrible price increases we’re all dealing with “inflation.” I really think this is part of the messaging problem that the Kamala campaign was suffering from.  As I talked about in our last Doom Report, there does seem to be a strong concensus developing that a big part of Kamala’s defeat—if not the entirety of it—was because she toed the Biden party line that the economy is going great, even though people can easily see (and feel) that it really isn’t.  Mehdi Hasan talked about how the administration has done all these great economic things, but they aren’t getting “credit” for it.  BTC ate this up, since it reinforces the line he’s been harping on since the election: the right-wing media machine is very effective, and the left-wing media machine basically doesn’t exist.  And this, of course, is why voters were too stupid to realize that the economy is actually great.

I malign BTC, of course: he didn’t actually call the voters stupid.  Even Cody wouldn’t go that far, and he was hosting a video titled “Is Everyone Stupid?” But, in the first section, Cody opined that people aren’t stupid ... they just don’t know as much about politics as the rest of us.  You know, us smart people.  I’m being a bit unfair to Cody as well, but I think both of these takes are missing the point.  While it’s been reported that Google searches for “what are tarriffs” spiked after the election, understandably leading many to (figuratively) facepalm and wonder why folks couldn’t have Googled that before they voted, it’s still overly dismissive to ascribe this disconnect to ignorance.

So what, in my opinion, is the problem?  The problem is that the Democrats kept telling people that inflation was going down, and it was.  But prices aren’t coming down.  And that has nothing to do with inflation.  Inflation, as an economic term, is defined as follows: “a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency.” But when prices are high because corporations are just gouging us—which they can do because Reagan (primarily following the philosophy his solicitor general Robert Bork) gutted antitrust enforcement—that ain’t inflation.  Bork tried to convince us that consumers benefit from corporate mergers in his 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, but 40+ years of actual experience (and data) show us that that’s bullshit.  If a corporation can raise prices, they will, and, during the pandemic, they could, so they did.  Why would they bother to bring them back down?  Well, in a marketplace with vigorous competition, they’d bring them back down because, if they didn’t, the competitors would eat their lunch.  But when you’re a company that controls 85% of the market (which is true of multiple industries in our country at this point), you’ve got no real competition, so fuck it: keep on gougin’.

So, when the Democrats were saying “inflation is down” and “the economy is much better,” they were right.  And also completely missing the point.  What they should have said is, “yes, you’re paying too much for everything these days, but it’s nothing to do with inflation: you’re getting screwed by corporations.”

And, here’s the fucked up part: as SMN pointed out, The Atlantic broke the story that Kamala wanted to go after big business, but apparently her brother-in-law Tony West—the chief legal officer of Über—wrote her a letter urging her not to do that.  So she didn’t.  So she lost.

Okay, I’m oversimplifying again.  But try to imagine how much different things would be if Kamala had answered the question “what will you do differently than Biden?” by saying “I’m going to go after these corporate oligarchs who are raping and pillaging our country and picking your pocket.” It makes for an interesting thought experiment at the very least.

Sadly, the Dems are not only not going to start doing that, they’re probably not going to start doing much of anything differently.  The people who advised Harris, as well as other Democratic strategists, are already looking for other people to blame.  In reponse to Maureen Dowd’s contention that “politically correct” language like “Latinx” and “BIPOC” are responsible for the Democrats’ loss, Katy Stoll responds:

Does she present any actual data that the term “BIPOC” alienated half of the country or more?  Let’s see ... no, no, that’s dumb.  Who needs data?  Data’s for wokes.  Also, as we already showed, there isn’t any data.  It’s just vibes.  But, beyond vibes, these people are transparently trying to cover their own asses.  Kamala Harris ran the campaign they wanted.  Joe Biden reads Matt Yglesias and watches Joe Scarborough.  They got the centrist, non-woke campaign they’re complaining that they didn’t, and now they’re scrambling to blame someone else, because that campaign lost.

Mehdi Hasan goes further:

We’ve seen ... all the team of advisors around Harris ... basically saying, we got nothing wrong.  We did nothing wrong, we’re not contrite, we have no apologies, we’d do it all the same.

Sure, it’s true that incumbents lost all around the world.  But, as Mehdi points out: okay, but why did they all lose?

They [Harris’ campaign strategists] keep going, “well, you have to understand: we inherited a really bad situation.  The internal polling was really bad.  Joe Biden was more unpopular than even you knew.” Then why the F did you not break with Biden ... ?  It actually makes it worse for them, not breaking with Biden, by them now admitting that they knew he was more unpopular than the public knew.  Because, then, the arguments were “oh, well, we can’t break with a sitting president”—you can if your internal polling is telling you that he is toxic and pulling you down.²

Blaming phrases like “Latinx” is just blame-shifting.  Sure, it’s true that, as a strategist pointed out in a clip that Katy showed, Latine people don’t themselves use “Latinx,” because it’s impossible to pronounce and it’s just weird.³  But to then extrpolate that that’s why Latine’s didn’t vote for Harris is just insane.  I’m not sure I want to go so far as Katy in saying that a lot of these liberal elites are just blaming minorities the same way that Republicans are, but it’s also fair to note that Maureen Dowd is absolutely a Boomer (and white): she’s just 6 years younger than Trump.

Look, at the end of the day, Jon Stewart nails the whole shebang right in the opening sentences of his interview:

But I got the sense that, what kind of happened to the Democrats was that they were in a position to defend a status quo that most voters—certainly, many—felt was no longer delivering for them.  ...  that many Democrats felt like: oh, no, we are improving your lives.  You just don’t realize it.

Sanders responds that, among other things, Citizens United has turned Congresspeople into employees of megacorps.  Which means that any party that wants to appeal to working class voters has two options: pretend that the system is working just fine, even when people can clearly see that it’s not, or .... you know, just lie.  Also known as, the Democratic strategy and the Republican strategy.  Sigh.

Reich bemoans that we now take democracy for granted (contrasting us with South Korea, who this week quashed a coup by barricading the doors of the National Assembly and just voting; Riech’s point was that democracy in South Korea is new enough that their people are still willing to fight for it).  But this is naïve: Stewart points out that defending democracy isn’t appealing to people for whom democracy is failing them.  Or, as BTC puts it:

By saying, “we have to protect our institutions; we have to protect our democracy,” for so many people out there for whom democracy (and our institutions) isn’t working, that is not the message they want to hear.  That is the message that’s going to push them away.

So what should the message be?  Mehdi points out that, with the exception of Joe Biden in 2020, when the Dems put up an “establishment” candidate (e.g. Kerry, Hillary, Kamala, Al Gore), they lose.  When they put up a “Washington outsider” (e.g. Clinton, Obama), they win.  And that’s probably not a coincidence.  As Cody pointed out, Obama won by running on hope and change.  Maybe we didn’t get enough of that once he actually got in office, but that’s what he ran on, and he won.  Twice.  When BTC asks why so many Dems won House seats even though the country shifted to the right in the Presidential election, and mentions the success of Golden in Maine and Perez in Washington, and wonders if they won because they tacked right, Mehdi responds:

You mention Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: yeah, I don’t share their politics; they’re definitely to the right of me.  But, did they run right-wing campaigns, or did they run populist, authentic campaigns?  Did they say “right to repair” (in her case); ... “anti-monopoly” (in his case)?  All right, this is what we need to be talking about right now.  It’s not about whether you sign a tick-box of “I’m left,” “I’m right,” “I do these policies”; it’s about: Who are you fighting for? Do you have a fighting spirit? Do people know what you stand for? Are you authentic, or are you just a kind of, poll-tested, focus-group-tested, bland person who no one thinks is going to fight for them in Washington, D.C.?

Will the Dems do this?  Unlikely.  They’re still trapped by the corporate profit cycle.  Stewart and Sanders talked about the food corps spending all this money to design food which is making us diabetic, and then the drug corps spending all this money to develop drugs to cure our diabetes.  And they do this because it makes them money.  (I would have added that the insurance companies enable this.  You think you need insurance because otherwise you couldn’t afford medical care, but of course companies couldn’t charge that much for medical care if the insurance companies weren’t picking everyone’s pockets and funneling the cash to big pharma and big healthcare companies such as United Health Care.  If no one could afford to pay those exorbitant costs, we’d all just die and the companies would go out of business.  Instead, insurance is enabling the whole cycle.  But I digress.)  Stewart asks Sanders what it would take for Congress to wake up and understand how badly things are going for ordinary people, but Sanders points out that they do understand: it’s just that all the corporate money prevents them from voting their conscience.  Stewart says that that’s depressing: it means they know they’re screwing us and it’s all cynical.  Sanders counterpoints that when megacorps have millions of dollars to devote to destroying you in your next election, and you realize that the guy who replaces you could be much worse, it’s not you that sucks, but the system.

Basically, as Cody and Katy point out, the Repubs have the Dems playing defense, and you can’t win playing defense.  These episodes—and my synthesis of them—contains several ideas on how they might turn that around into playing offense, but they don’t seem inclined to want to do that.  Hell, take a simple example: Cody points out that campaign strategists told Walz to “lay off” calling the Repubs “weird,” even though it was actually working.  Mehdi goes further and says Walz was “buried”; when Walz badmouthed the electoral college; the Harris campaign disavowed his remarks, even though the American public really hates the electoral college.  Yeah, Tim: stop saying all that stuff that actually appeals to people!  Walz was really hard-done by these “strategists.”

Gaza is another place where the Dems could have made some inroads, but dropped the ball.  Mehdi said that he had at first decided that Trump’s margin was so large that the loss of Muslim-Americans over the Dems’ Gaza policy must not have made any difference.  But he later reconsidered: sure, 65% of Muslims voted for Harris, but it’s also true that Harris lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a combined 230,000 votes (roughly).  If slightly more than 115,000 Muslim-Americans in those three states had switched from voting for Trump to voting for Kamala, she might well have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote (and what delicious irony that would have been).  Impossible to say whether he’s right on that score, but he also points out that, even above and beyond the numbers, vowing to do better than Biden on the Gaza situation would have at least been a difference from Biden, the lack of which was, again, her biggest weakness.

I’m also pretty sick of hearing this, which Reich repeated this week:

Well, in fairness, she only had 3 months.

THE ENTIRE UK GENERAL ELECTION TOOK 43 DAYS.  Kamala had 107.  Shut the fuck up about not having enough time.

Speaking of United Health Care (as I was a few paragraphs ago), their CEO was assassinated this week.  There was a lot of hand wringing about how awful it is that some people on the Internet are ... shall we say ... lacking in sympathy over this incident.  Lofthouse and Reich had this exchange:

Heather: But, so what are the big take-homes from this?  Medicare for all?
Reich: Well, I would say ... you can’t use somebody’s death ... to do anything with.

On which I have to call bullshit.  This is the crap that Republicans say when there’s a school shooting.  When a tragedy happens is exactly the time to talk about the factors that led up to it, and how we can change things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  And it is possible to say that the killing of this man is a horrible tragey on a personal level, and to feel overwhelming grief for his family, and to note that he made $10 million dollars a year and that UHC has made a policy of denying claims which has led to the deaths of thousands of Americans ... probably more.  If you need more info on how terrible a company UHC is, More Perfect Union has a good video on the topic.  Does that mean he deserved to die?  No, of course not.  It also doesn’t mean we should pretend that none of that is true.⁴

I have two big takeaways.  The first is that the Democratic party is not the answer.  I am strongly considering joining the Working Families Party.  It’s in some ways a faction inside the Democratic party (much like the Tea Party Republicans), but also in many ways a completely separate party, with a strategy for creating a third party alternative that doesn’t take votes away from one party or another.  Which sounds like a fantasy, but they’ve been working at it since 1998, and they’ve achieved some amazing things.  On the city council of Philadelphia, there are 2 WFP members to only 1 Republican; on the Hartford CT city council, there are 3 WFP members and no Repubs at all.  In a few states, such as New York, you can vote for the Democratic candidate on a separate line; this helps the candidates understand where their support is coming from.  Beyond some good articles on the Internet, there are 3 videos that I think help people understand who they are:

• quick intro by Maurice Mitchell, the National Director (brief)
• Building Blocks of WFP Power, a bit more info (informative)
• Maurice Mitchell on WFP Post-Election Mass Call, the WFP election response (inspiring)

Secondly, when I wrote my election reflections post, I went on for some time about how I hoped I was wrong about all my dire predictions.  I was somewhat pleased to hear Cody Johnston echo my words nearly exactly:

We have to assume Trump is going to do all the stuff he said he wants to do.  Granted, there are things that might prevent him from doing those things, and, if he is prevented from doing them, people are gonna call us alarmists for saying he’ll do bad stuff, but frankly, that would be great.  I would love—love—to be wrong.  I would love to prepare for the worst and for that to be a waste of time.  But that’s not gonna stop me from preparing.

Can’t sum it up better myself.

__________

1 But probably only the non-serious ones.  They have a series where they talk to comedians about news that sounds pretty interesting.

2 Yes, he actually said the letter “F” instead of “fuck.” It was early in the interview.  He loosened up a bit by the end.

3 If you need more details about this difference, there are good articles about that on the Internet.  Short answer: “Latinx” is a white people thing.

4 Speaking of More Perfect Union and healthcare, they just did a fantastic video on Medicare “Advantage”, which I, sadly, am rapidly approaching the age where I really need to know that.  Spoiler alert: it’s not particularly advantageous.

Doom Report (Week -9)

This week, the saga of Trump’s cabinet is both better and worse.  Matt Gaetz at least is gone, and he was certainly the worst of the bunch.  But, then, Gaetz is the very epitome of shifting the Overton Window.  If you don’t know that is (and aren’t willing to click that perfectly good link I just dropped on you, though you really shoud), I’ll give you a quick precis:  The Overton Window is the set of what’s acceptable to voters.  But it’s constantly shifting over time, usually in small increments.  For instance, gay marriage wasn’t even remotely acceptable in the 50s—you couldn’t even bring it up in conversation.  Now it’s legal (at least temporarily).  Same for smoking pot, although that was still considered verboten as late as the 80s, and isn’t legal everywhere even today.  Those are things that took decades for the window to shift.  But, if you’re clever (and have some sort of authority behind you, like being an intellectual thinktank, or a president-elect), you can shift the Overton Window much more quickly.  All you need to do is, put forward an idea that is so ridiculous, so outlandish, so ... well, to use the official Overton term, unthinkable ... that suddenly the ideas that seemed radical before are now not so crazy.

So Matt Gaetz was a bridge too far.  To the point where everyone was stunned by it—even the Republicans.  Susan Collins, who you may remember from her comment that Trump had “learned” his lesson after the first impeachment (her exact quote was that he would be “much more cautious in the future”), said she was “shocked” by the Gaetz nomination.  (Apparently there’s much money to be made on betting whether Collins will see things coming, like, say, the changing of the seasons.)  Lisa Murkowski and John Thune (the latter set to be the new Sentate Majority Leader now that Mitch McConnell is finally being put out to pasture) also expressed doubts.  And now Gaetz is stepping down.  See, the system works, right?

But, the thing is, that was all a distraction from the other insane picks.  Which keep on coming: Linda McMahon (yes, the wrestling executive) to head the Department of Education, and Dr. Oz, the TV quack huckster, to run Medicare and Medicaid.  And let’s not forget the previous insane picks: Pete Hegseth, the Fox “News” host, is in no way qualified to run the two trillion dollar Defense Department, and is also apprently a sexual predator.  Then again, as many have pointed out, that’s apparently a unifying theme for his cabinet: Hegseth, RFK Jr, Musk ... even McMahon has been sued for enabling sexual abuse.  But I suppose that makes sense for the adjudicated rapist who’s hiring them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are falling over themselves to blame each other for why Kamala lost.  Many, for instance, are saying that her campaign was “too woke.” Which is completely moronic, because the Kamala campaign flew so far to the center that they were actively pissing off the proper liberals: from trans folk to people opposed to the Palestinian genocide.  Palling around with the Cheneys, for fuck’s sake, is about as far from “woke” as you can get.  But still people want to believe it’s someone else’s fault.  Awfully convenient for the white supremacists that the Dems now apparently want to blame the same “others” that the Republicans do.

As to what is the real reason why Kamala lost, I’ve heard a lot of theories in the past weeks.  But probably the best one came from the author of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class, in a recent Jon Stewart interview:

So yeah, people are hurting.  And if you’re looking at them in the face and saying, “actually, you’re not” ... whether that’s a move to kind of defend your own administration that, of course, the Democratic candidate was part of—and that’s very difficult to thread that needle, the task she was handed to propose how we’ll change, but also still be riding with the last administration.  ...  But most people are hurting. And here’s the thing, because I know that a lot of liberals and Democrats and progressives alike might be saying: ... the Democrats have the better policies. They address all of those needs better, even if imperfectly.  In the end, ain’t the Republicans worse?  And while I happen to agree with that, here’s the trick: the Republicans, meanwhile, are the ones validating the pain.  And politics is an emotional business before it’s a rational one.  And that’s why they win.

— Sarah Smarsh, The Weekly Show, 11/14/24

Partially I like this because it lines up with my own theories that I talked about nearly a year ago, and partially because it’s the more insightful version of what James Carville pegged as the reason.  Carville is a bit of an asshole, but he ain’t stupid, and his assessment was that it all came down to when Kamala was asked (in her interview on The View) what she would do differently from Biden, “and she froze.” Or at least that’s how Carville put it; I would instead say that she waffled and ducked the question, but the end result is the same.  And while trying to boil down an entire failed campaign to one moment is overly simplistic as well as reductive, it is emblematic of the point that she was trying to toe the party line that everything was going great with the economy while ignoring the real concerns of real people.  And, even more incisive to me personally, it’s exactly what my friend said to me in the conversation I reported on a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a trenchant observation.

Of course, let’s not discount the sexism!  Here’s one of Stewart’s producers on another episode:

It can also be true that there’s some sexism and racism ...  Every election, the person who has spent the most money has won, except in two cases: the women.  Just saying.

— Lauren Walker, The Weekly Show, 11/21/24

Again, haven’t fact-checked this, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.  I’m not entirely sure what it says about says about us that we’re finally willing to elect a member of a religious minority that’s around 25% of the population, and a member of a racial minority that’s around 15% of the population, but not a member of the gender that’s not a minority at all.  But not anything good, I don’t think.

Will things get worse before they get better?  No one can say for sure, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s where the smart money is.  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned to find out.

Doom Report (Week -10)

This week, I’m watching the news and wondering where all those people my friend was talking about last week are ... you know, the ones that are supposed to stop the idiot we just elected from doing bad things if he goes too far.  And yet, our future president has suggested we put a climate denier in charge of the EPA, a Russian asset as head of national intelligence, a pedophile as the Attorney General, a person who believes in neither vaccination nor pasteurization to run the CDC and the FDA, and a Fox “News” host who thinks that women shouldn’t serve in combat to head up the Department of Defense.  Theoretically, all those people have to be approved by the Senate, but he’s already asked the new Sentate majority leader to keep the Senate in “recess” until he appoints whoever he wants to wherever he wants, and it’s not clear whether that request will be rejected or not.  And, even if it is, it’s not clear whether the new Republican-led Senate will just do whatever he wants anyway.  And that’s not even considering that he wants to put a guy with billions in government contracts in charge of the budget by inventing a new government department (which, technically, the president can’t do, but, again: if Congress is just going to give him whatever he wants, that’s not much of an obstacle).

I continue to hope I’m wrong.  I mean, the guy’s not even president yet, so all of this dreck may not come to pass.  And, as I mentioned last week, I’m far more interested in you being able to tell me “I told you so” than the other way around.  But, the fact that the guy’s not even president yet and is still able to cause this much chaos does not bode well for our chances, I fear.