Month: April 2016

As good as this piece is, it’s missing something critical. Profs. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson have identified why the Republicans have managed to hit high-water marks in the states and in the House of Representatives during the same era in which they’ve done very poorly on the presidential level. What they don’t consider, however, is that the Republican Party has no necessary relationship to the Conservative Movement, nor does the balance of its fiscal, defense, and socially conservative factions have to remain constant.

Donald Trump can’t break the Grand Old Party, but he can reshuffle it. Whether he does or doesn’t, however, the Republicans are about to have a reckoning.

It’s true that the Republicans are fairly comfortable as an opposition party. Having spent most of the time since FDR’s election in 1933 in the congressional minority, they are suspicious of federal power, contemptuous of federal programs, and ill-suited for the job of running our federal agencies. They don’t want to lose presidential elections, but their higher priority is being able to obstruct the normal functioning of government rather than see to it that it runs smoothly.

For social conservatives, they want local control of schools and the right to discriminate. Fiscal conservatives want lower taxes and less intrusive regulations. Military hawks want money spent on military hardware, not school lunches and addiction recovery programs.

But things have been coming apart for a while now, and Donald Trump really has nothing to do with how the fissures have begun to open up within the Conservative Movement. While social conservatives want local control, what they want more than anything else is to control the courts, particularly with the long term goal of banning abortion. They cannot accomplish that if they keep losing presidential elections. Their concerns are the primary reason why the Senate Republicans will not capitulate on Scalia’s seat until after the ballots are cast in November. The party can’t afford to demoralize their Christian foot soldiers.

The business community wants lows taxes and lax regulations, but they also want our bills paid on time and they’d like to see substantial infrastructure spending. The bargain they made with the social conservatives doesn’t include defaulting on our debts and letting our bridges crumble. They also want free trade agreements and relatively liberal immigration policies. And they don’t want their corporate brands sullied by association with anti-gay or anti-Latino bigotry.

The hawks want nothing to do with the isolationists, and they know that foreign policy is ultimately set by the executive branch, so they’re the least complacent of all the conservative factions about their inability to win presidential elections.

These fissures have become so painful and so evident that they’re splintering the heretofore united front of conservative media. And this is probably more consequential that most people realize. Profs. Hacker and Pierson understand how geographical, demographic, and ideological sorting favors the Republican Party (allowing them, for example, to easily win the House in 2012 despite getting fewer votes). What they don’t consider is how key it is for the right to be able to speak to their constituents with one voice and one message. Nuance is the death of right-wing movements, and the Republican voter is getting inundated with nuance these days.

What appears to be dying is not the Republican Party, which, given enough time, could easily morph into either America’s socialist party or its National Front. It’s the Conservative Movement that is in real trouble, not the party they seized control of in the latter half of the 20th-Century.

It’s simply not true that the Republicans can hold together indefinitely under this kind of pressure. I believe the proof of this is what we’re all witnessing right now.

Can we blame Andrew Jackson for the fact that many states elect their judges or at least force them to occasionally win a retention vote to keep their jobs? If so, add it to the list of reasons why we shouldn’t honor the seventh president.

We can’t take the politics out of judicial appointments, but we can at least give judges some independence to issue unpopular decisions once they’re on the court. The correct system is to appoint them for a set but lengthy term, and to only remove them for unethical behavior through the process of impeachment.

Constitutional principles and human rights are not always popular, especially when the masses are fearful. We need an independent judiciary, and elected judges are the dumbest goddamned thing I’ve ever heard of.

Nate Silver has a pretty good piece up that explains why Donald Trump still has some series obstacles to hurdle if he wants to be the Republicans’ nominee. Almost everything he has to say could also be said about Bernie Sanders.

The two parties have different systems for awarding delegates, but most of these differences are fairly trivial. Both Trump and Sanders will probably need to rely on uncommitted delegates, most of which will be disinclined to support them.

In Trump’s case, his increasingly erratic behavior could be the biggest problem, but his lack of conservative orthodoxy and his inferior organization are also speed bumps, and these latter problems are ones he shares with Sanders to one degree or another.

Silver says that Trump is probably screwed if he can’t win on the first ballot, and I’m inclined to agree. I’d also say that Sanders is screwed if he needs to rely on superdelegates, which he will absolutely need to do. In a really best case scenario for Sanders where he pretty much runs the table of the remaining primaries and caucuses, he might manage to win the most pledged delegates, but he cannot win an outright majority of all the delegates. That’s why he and his campaign are talking about swaying superdelegates who have already committed to Clinton to change their minds.

I think this is a hopeless strategy, and mostly for the same reasons that Trump can’t hope to win on a second ballot.

The Sanders camp has adopted an adversarial posture toward the DNC and isn’t raising money for the party or many of the party’s officeholders. Clinton, meanwhile, is raising millions for both. Basic self-interest suggests that most superdelegates will prefer the candidate who is a team player and who brings in much needed money that will be used for organizing and advertising.

I don’t think Sanders has aroused the same kind of antipathy as Trump, but he isn’t doing the things he should do considering that his only path to success is to win over the party establishment.

I understand that it’s a difficult trick to run as an outsider and not alienate the insiders, but that’s the exact challenge facing Sanders and he does not seem to have figured this out.

He should realize that his mission is to take control of the DNC, not win in spite of it.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the 1940 Plymouth.  I am using the photo seen directly below.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on an 8×10 inch canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

There are many changes for this week’s cycle.  I’ve actually repainted the entire shaded side of the car.  There was a problem with color consistency, especially on the door.  The result is both a more consistent color and a color that seems a natural outgrowth of the lit portion.  Note the now correctly spaced grille bars as well.  Note also the revised front wheel.  I’ve also added another layer of paint to the Jeep and my old two tone Mazda Millenia to the rear.  Finally, the shadows have been overpainted as well.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

 

The strangest thing about this is that Sanders knows that the only way he’ll ever win the nomination is to win over the superdelegates. So, why doesn’t he even pretend to make an argument that he’ll be a better or even adequate provider?

During his presentation on a Dutch television show, Foreign Minister Bert Koenders did his utmost to explain the EU Association agreement has no meaning at all. It won’t cost the Dutch taxpayer a penney, it’s beneficial for commerce between EU and Ukraine, it will rid the Ukraine of rabid corruption within society run by oligarchs and it has no meaning whatsoever to help secure the borders of Ukraine or provide military assistence when under threat from its Russian neighbour.

It’s all very good to make another stride to expand the European Union towards archenemy Russia. The very nature of EU foreign policy in recent years is to work hand in glove under the umbrella of NATO to increase military spending and secure the expanded European borders into the satellite states of the former Soviet Union. Bringing the benefits of capitalism for the 1% under the mask of democratization to new states from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea and Near Asia region.

○ EU Signs a Pact on a Pipeline for Gas From the Caspian Sea with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey – 2009

Biden tells Ukraine’s Poroshenko U.S. to give $335 million in security aid | Reuters |

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that the United States was moving forward with an additional $335 million in security assistance, the White House said in a statement.

Biden, who met with Poroshenko on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit, also told the Ukrainian leader that efforts by Kiev to form a reform-oriented government were critical to unlocking international economic assistance, including a third $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, the statement said.

Defying Russia, Ukraine Signs E.U. Trade Pact | NY Times – June 2014 |

BRUSSELS — Dealing a defiant blow to the Kremlin, President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine signed a long-delayed trade pact with Europe that Moscow had bitterly opposed. He then declared he would like his country to one day become a full member of the European Union.

In so doing, Ukraine’s new leader, a billionaire confectionary magnate, has in effect raised a risky bet on the West that has cost his country hundreds of lives and the loss of the Crimean peninsula to Russia and has set off a low-level civil war in its eastern border region.

By signing the trade pact at the Brussels headquarters of the European Union, Mr. Poroshenko revived a deal whose rejection last November by his predecessor, Viktor F. Yanukovych, set off months of pro-European protests in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, and pushed the West into its biggest test of wills with Russia since the end of the Cold War.

The unrest toppled Mr. Yanukovych and drove pro-Russian activists in Crimea and the eastern region of Donetsk to demand annexation by Russia.

“This is a really historic date for Ukraine,” Mr. Poroshenko, who won Ukraine’s presidential elections in May to fill a post left vacant when Mr. Yanukovych fled to Russia in February, said at a news conference here.

The completion of the association agreement between the European Union and Ukraine marked a severe setback for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his oft-repeated goal of reasserting Russian influence in the “near abroad,” Moscow’s term for the territories of the former Soviet Union.

“The big loser in all this is Putin,” said Amanda Paul, a researcher at the European Policy Center, a Brussels research group. “He has gone out of his way to create problems internally in Ukraine but only pushed Ukraine further into the arms of the West than it ever would have gone before. It totally backfired for Putin.”

Moldova and Georgia, two other former Soviet lands that Moscow had pressured not to stray too far from its orbit, also signed agreements with the European Union on Friday. In Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, citizens celebrated with a large public concert, which was broadcast on all major domestic television channels.  

South Caucasus: Prospects For Regional Stability Pact Recede | RFERL – May 2006 |

EU officials told a Council of Europe hearing in Brussels that the bloc’s European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) would make a separate Stability Pact redundant. Representatives from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia were also lukewarm in their support for the idea.

The EU was expected to be the Stability Pact’s chief sponsor. But now the project — first floated by regional leaders at the 1999 Istanbul Summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) — now appears defunct.

Robert Liddell, a senior official with the EU’s executive European Commission, told today’s hearing he does not consider the project an improvement on the EU’s existing policy.

Liddell said the ENP already embodies a statement of the EU’s desire for stability, good governance and economic reforms in the South Caucasus.

Not The Balkans

Speaking on behalf the EU member states, the newly appointed special representative for the South Caucasus, Peter Semneby, discouraged parallels between the proposed pact and the successful, EU-backed Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe.

…
Semneby also noted that the South Caucasus is a far more unstable region, with its lingering “frozen conflicts” and Russia’s continued influence.

Caspian Energy Link

Both Semneby and Liddell indicated the EU also prefers to see the South Caucasus in a wider context. This is partly due to the active interest taken in the region by key countries such as the United States, Russia, Turkey, and Iran. But the EU’s evolving quest for energy security also plays an important role.

Liddell said the EU views the Black Sea region as integrally linked to the Caspian Sea [pdf] and energy reserves in Central Asia.  

South East European (SEE) Security Cooperation

The Regional Cooperation Council promotes mutual cooperation and European and Euro-Atlantic integration of South East Europe in order to inspire development in the region to benefit its people.

The Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) is developing, streamlining, facilitating and supporting South East European (SEE) regional mechanisms with low-cost activities and high impact on regional confidence building. These mechanisms are not `structures’ but are mutually accepted by the beneficiary countries’ as specific institutional forums for exchange of information and security experience, knowledge and lessons learned and have value added for the institutions benefits through regional cooperation.

Overall security and political stability have improved in South East Europe (SEE) in the past decade, with seven countries being members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and five participating in the Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme. Currently five RCC participants from SEE are members of the European Union (EU), which plays its own role through its security structures and through the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) activities.

The increased number of NATO countries in the region, as well as the closer links with the EU created new responsibilities for the SEE countries and the need for strengthening the regional cooperation.

This is just a casual observation, but I think Sen. Rand Paul is misdiagnosing the problem in several areas:

Paul, during a visit to Northern Kentucky Friday morning, said he will support whoever is the Republican nominee, even if it’s Donald Trump. He said it’s better than supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Paul criticized Clinton’s comments she made while campaigning in Ohio that she will “put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” Those words will likely reverberate around the state in the next few months and could hurt Clinton.

“I think we never get the candidate we exactly want unless you’re the candidate,” Paul said. “Think about it from this perspective. I’m from Kentucky, and Hillary Clinton recently said she would put coal miners out of business, and she would put coal companies out of business.”

Paul ended the press conference after that and didn’t take followup questions.

People aren’t asking Rand Paul if he’ll endorse Donald Trump because they’d prefer to be the nominee themselves, and they aren’t really suggesting that they’d prefer Sen. Paul, either.

More than that, though, it really doesn’t matter who the next president is as far as the future of the coal industry is concerned. Eleven years ago, we had the same argument over tobacco farming. Mitch McConnell fought hard for the state’s tobacco farmers, getting them generous terms in the final settlement, but he didn’t think the tobacco industry could be saved and preserved.

If McConnell and Paul want to help coal miners, they’ll get serious about helping them achieve a similar transition away from an unhealthy industry. Maybe Clinton will help them out with that.

I strongly suggest that you read through the recent Counterpunch article Bring on the Crackup: Hoping for a Trump-Sanders Election at least once…it deserves and requires much more attention than that…before you read the following piece.

==================

I started this article as a comment on Spink Akron’s reply to Booman’s recent post Does Trumpism Have Any Shelf Life?

Corporations are increasingly skittish of right wing ‘religious freedom’ laws. Some are expressing an unwillingness to be associated with the Republican convention. They’re being successfully educated that it might not be in their best interests for their ads to be broadcast on Rush Limbaugh’s show.  These sorts of things give me some hope.

Yes.

Capitalism at work, doing precisely what it does best.

Everything…including morality…is monetized by capitalism. This produces a sort of monetized democracy. The needs and possibilities of the various consumerist groups rule the way Big Corp spends its money on politicians and also on the arbiters of social control. (Social control. Read: “mass media.”) No matter how much effort is put into subliminal propaganda (Subliminal propaganda. Read “advertising” and “popular culture.”), there is no way on earth to…for example…turn massive numbers of people of color into dedicated white supremacists. Ain’t gonna happen. Neither will the entrenched societal fortresses of white bigotry allow themselves to be transformed into societies that believe in social inclusivity for all races.

From this “monetization” fact arises a numbers game.

Read on for more.
Big Corp produces products…including the so-called “policies” of various and sundry political parties and levels of government…that are aimed (and advertised trance-media style) at different segments of the consumerist whole. This often produces serious culturally dissonant rubs…for example, the same media giants own, produce and disseminate both highly profitable hip-hop/gansta rap/call it what you will for the African-American market while simultaneously doing the same thing with country music aimed at the rural white market. Only when a given market begins to break down in terms of profit does Big Corp start to back off of that particular feed trough.

Another example…the war baby cultural market that consumes Glenn Miller revivals and ’40s/’50s B films/TV series is just a tiny sliver of the cultural market now due to the plain fact that most of those people are either dead or too old/too economically limited by retirement to spend much money on anything but trying to stay alive. Twenty, thirty years ago? Big business.

Back to Trumpism. All population studies point to an onging march towards a non-white majority in the U.S. within a fairly short period of time. 18 years, 20 years, 25 years…maybe even sooner given my own observation that the U.S. census numbers are skewed way off due to the entirely understandable fear harbored by most non-white people regarding the federal government. This “Browning of America” is an unavoidable fact barring some sort of major disaster that breaks up the U.S. into smaller principalities.

Assuming that a disaster of that does not happen, so-called “Trumpism” in its basic whites-only guise will eventually simply run out of sufficient numbers of bigoted whites to be a major force.

End of story.

Trump himself is putting all his eggs in that white basket. Now, before the situation changes. So-called Trumpism itself, however, presently relies entirely on Donald Trump’s projected personality. As seems to be the case recently, that also has a limited shelf life. How limited? Hard to tell. We’ll know by November. If he wins the presidency it will sustain for a while. If Trump is as clever as I think he is, he will put forward an increasingly much more racially and socially inclusive message as he gets closer to the prize.

But…what we must all remember here is the following.

Monetization of human life in all of its aspects will remain the central aspect of capitalism. Read the following very dense article…it really is hard going, but worth the time…by the philosopher Bill Martin.

Bring on the Crackup: Hoping for a Trump-Sanders Election

Do not be fooled by its title. It is a much deeper examination of the forces that have shaped this extraordinary election year by someone who counts influences “from Plato to Kant… from Marx to Sartre…from Mao to Badiou, and from Buddhism.”

A sample:

…even with many variations, what is advanced as “politics” in mainstream, and even much of the “fringe,” of the United States is not really politics. Instead it is the calculation of interests under the imperatives faced by the capitalist/global imperialist ruling class of the United States. When Marx talked about “class dictatorship” so long ago, what people seem to miss, and that needs to be driven home once again, is that there is a ruling class, and this class operates according to certain imperatives.

Simply put, and on one level it is just this simple, in the United States and for pretty much the whole world, capital decides. To bring in a little complexity: 1) In other words, G. W. Bush, or even Dick Cheney, or Bill Clinton, etc., don’t decide, capital, as a social process rooted in (but not confined to) socialized production and reproduction (and, sure, its accumulated wealth and power), decides, the basic social decisions in a capitalist society are made by what is necessary for this process to continue to advance; again, to simplify, the accumulation of profit decides; 2) This is the case unless there is some truly countervailing force. And the point is that pretty much nothing, with perhaps some rare exception and not to be dogmatic about this, that works within the acceptable bounds of “politics” comes to anything like a countervailing force.

Set aside a block of time where you will have no distractions and read through this article until you thoroughly get it. It certainly clarified a large number of things for me.

Later…

AG

In one sense, I fear that Jeet Heer is correct. Once you open up Pandora’s Box, it’s not so easy to put its contents back in the container. This is a theme I’ve hit on repeatedly over the years, but it’s usually been in the context of breaking norms against torture and indefinite detention, or about lowering the standards for what credentials ought to be required in a would-be president or vice-president.

Some taboos should not be broken, and the Republicans have been breaking taboos left and right ever since they decided to impeach the president over a petty infidelity, or at least since hanging chads tripped up the 2000 recount in Florida.

There have been big things and small. It used to be that judges were vetted by the American Bar Association and a degree from Regent University wasn’t seen as a ticket to a high-level position of responsibility in our nation’s bureaucracy. It used to be that we didn’t start wars of choice that involved invading and occupying foreign countries based a tissue box full of lies. It used to be that White House press credentials weren’t given out to fake reporters writing under an alias who moonlight as male prostitutes.

The list is getting pretty long at this point. You don’t threaten the credit of the United States. You don’t shut down the government. You don’t filibuster every procedural move in the Senate. You don’t refuse to meet with a Supreme Court nominee.

And, yes, you don’t nominate someone like Sarah Palin or Donald Trump and then try to tell us that they’re well-qualified for the position. You don’t defend the crackpot things that they say, whether it’s about torturing people, nuking people, beating the shit out of people, or deporting them by the millions.

Once you break these kind of taboos, the standards fall away and we’re no longer a credible defender of human rights and nuclear non-proliferation, or a beacon of freedom and sanctuary from strife. The standards we had for what constitutes a qualified judge or elected official fall by the wayside. Even our norms against open professions of racism wither on the vine.

Still, I’m not sure that Heer is fully justified in his pessimism here:

We can expect future Republican presidential candidates, running in a party that has not only lastingly alienated Americans of color but threatened them with open hatred and violence—even expulsion—to borrow from Trump’s strategy of racial polarization. Trump might fail, in other words, but Trumpism will live on. And given the fact America has a two-party system and voters will inevitably want change, we have to face the prospect that even if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders wins the White House for Democrats in November, the historical odds say the United States will eventually elect a Trumpian president.

Yet Trump’s enduring impact won’t merely be political. “This is a movement,” Trump exulted last August during a campaign speech in Nashville, Tennessee. “I don’t want it to be about me.” He was right about that: Trump may be the icon of the movement he’s ignited, but it’s gone far beyond his actions or control. And while organized white nationalists are the animating core of the movement, beyond them are the far more numerous Americans who harbor racist attitudes and economic resentments but have no links to the likes of David Duke.

For decades, this cohort has had to grapple with the fact that public expressions of racism were becoming taboo. When politicians tried to win over these voters, they had to use code words and dog whistles. Trump has changed all that: The dog whistle has given way to the air horn. And now when white people want to harass Hispanic basketball players or Muslim students, they have a rallying cry: “Trump, Trump, Trump!”

This is a real concern, but it’s not inevitable.

Maybe because we have a two-party system, this future can be averted.

If Trump loses, and loses badly, I’m not sure that future Republican presidential candidates will want to emulate him. There might still be a window where a candidate can hope to win by racially polarizing the electorate and getting enough of just the white voters to win. But that window is closing if it is not already closed. If Trump can’t do it in 2016, it will take even more polarization to pull off in 2020. And it’s frankly pretty hard to see how you could be more racially polarizing than Trump and still retain the white voters who are turned off by this kind of politics. It’s not just that the country is getting browner by the year. The young voters are getting less race-conscious every year, too.

To see a full repeat of Trumpism, people need to see some margin in it. That means for Trumpism to have much a future, it needs to succeed now.

Otherwise, the Republican Party will have to reckon with what Michael Gerson is talking about:

But the durability of Trump’s appeal creates a conundrum for many Republicans. For decades, some of us have argued that the liberal stereotype of Republicans as extreme, dim and intolerant is inaccurate and unfair. But here is a candidate for president who fully embodies the liberal stereotype of Republicans — who thinks this is the way a conservative should sound — and has found support from a committed plurality of the party.

If the worst enemies of conservatism were to construct a Frankenstein figure that represents the worst elements of right-wing politics, Donald Trump would be it. But it is Republicans who are giving him life. And the damage is already deep.

If this is the logical endpoint of the Conservative Movement, well, it seems like we’re reaching the end.

That’s my hope, anyway.

I really ought to go over to the dark side:

Many of [Andrés] Sepúlveda’s efforts were unsuccessful, but he has enough wins that he might be able to claim as much influence over the political direction of modern Latin America as anyone in the 21st century. “My job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumors—the whole dark side of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see,” he says in Spanish, while sitting at a small plastic table in an outdoor courtyard deep within the heavily fortified offices of Colombia’s attorney general’s office. He’s serving 10 years in prison for charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy to commit crime, violation of personal data, and espionage, related to hacking during Colombia’s 2014 presidential election. He has agreed to tell his full story for the first time, hoping to convince the public that he’s rehabilitated—and gather support for a reduced sentence.

Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin America.

Analysis doesn’t pay, but ratfucking does.