Month: February 2017

Got your puke bucket ready?

Over at my own blog, I promised I’d get to the Razzie winners this week at the end of ‘Suicide Squad’ vs. ‘Deadpool’ at the Razzies and Oscars.  It’s time to keep that promise.  Take it away, Razzies!

Razzie Members from all over the world have cast their votes and the “winners” have been announced for the best of the worst.

The results make me happy, as “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party” won four Razzies, Worst Picture, Worst Actor and Worst Director for Dinesh D’Souza, and Worst Actress for Becky Turner.  I was hoping for that outcome.

I expect “Batman v. Superman” will win, but I am rooting for “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party” instead.  That movie is my pick for worst political movie of the year.

That prediction and hope was for Worst Screenplay, which “Batman v Superman” actually won, making that sentence a successful prediction, but I am very happy that Dinesh D’Souza’s attempt at a documentary beat out the one of the worst big-budget superhero flicks of the past year for Worst Picture, as well as D’Souza proving worse as himself than both Ben Affleck’s Batman and Henry Cavill’s Superman and worse than Zak Snyder as a director.  Finally, the movie’s lead actress Becky Turner won Worst Actress for a total of four Razzies, tying “Batman v Superman.”
Speaking of the Caped Crusader and Man of Steel, they were judged to be the worst combo in major Hollywood films last year.  It’s the fault of the writing, but yes, the two deserved it.  They had really lousy chemistry on screen except when Wonder Woman was present, so she gets the credit.

As for the two remaining awards, allow me to brag.  First, my comments on Jesse Eisenberg being nominated for Worst Supporting Actor as Lex Luthor.

Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor was worse than Leto as Joker…My wife and I agreed he wasn’t Lex Luthor, who should be colder and more openly calculating, but a more organized version of The Joker who had a goal beyond “watching the world burn.”

While I expressed doubts that Eisenberg was worse than the supporting actors in “Zoolander 2,” he did deserve the nomination and didn’t say he wouldn’t win.  I guess the “Zoolander 2” vote was split and Eisenberg’s Luthor was that bad.

Next, my observation in ‘Superman vs. Batman’ buries ‘Zootopia’ in rubble that I repeated in Razzie nominations confirm my guesses as to worst speculative fiction movies of 2017.

“Dawn of Justice” may end up with the same kind of dubious distinction “Fifty Shades of Grey” earned–nominated for both an Oscar (Special Effects) and at least one Razzie (Worst Reboot/Ripoff/Sequel).

And it won Worst Reboot/Ripoff/Sequel.  I called it a year ago.

Finally, why were these movies considered terrible?  “Batman v Superman” was judged bad because didn’t meet expectations, but the audience probably didn’t have much in the way of expectations for D’Souza’s hack job on Clinton, other than it being a hack job.  While it met those, which was enough to make it the biggest grossing documentary of the past year, it failed to meet every other standard for artistry and veracity.  At least D’Souza showed up to “own his bad,” proving he has some sense of humor, but he doesn’t seem realize it’s not the Hollywood insiders who were voting, it’s the fans.  Dude, Hollywood doesn’t hate your movie, America hates your movie.

Originally posted at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News.

I’m not sure, but I think the best strategy for surviving the Trump presidency may just be to never, ever watch anything he says, and certainly don’t read about it.

Ben Mathis-Lilley of Slate had an appropriate response to the statement the Trump administration released from Education Secretary of Betsy DeVos after their meeting with leaders of Historically Black Colleges and Universities yesterday. But, first, let’s look at the press release:

So, that statement is bonkers.

…this official 2017 federal government press release celebrates legal segregation (!!!) on the grounds that the Jim Crow education system gave black students “more options,” as if there was a robust competition between HBCUs and white universities for their patronage. (When black Mississippian James Meredith chose the “option” of enrolling at the University of Mississippi in 1962, a massive white mob formed on the campus; two people were shot to death and hundreds injured in the ensuing battle/riot, during which federal marshals came under heavy gunfire, requiring the ultimate intervention of 20,000 U.S. soldiers and thousands more National Guardsmen.)

It actually starts out in a defensible way. It’s true that HBCU’s arose because blacks were underserved and did not have equal access to (higher) education. One (sort of) accurate way of putting this is that black leaders saw “that the system wasn’t working” and that they “took it upon themselves to provide the solution.”

After that point, however, DeVos’s statement goes off the rails, catches fire and explodes.

HBCUs didn’t provide more choices. They provided a choice.

In 1862, the Federal government’s Morrill Act provided for land grant colleges in each state. Some educational institutions in the North or West were open to blacks before the Civil War. But 17 states, mostly in the South, had segregated systems and generally excluded black students from their land grant colleges. In response, Congress passed the second Morrill Act of 1890, also known as the Agricultural College Act of 1890, requiring states to establish a separate land grant college for blacks if blacks were being excluded from the existing land grant college. Many of the HBCUs were founded by states to satisfy the Second Morrill Act. These land grant schools continue to receive annual federal funding for their research, extension and outreach activities.

As you can see, it took more than “taking it upon themselves” to get HBCUs up and rolling. It took hard work from organizers and the allies in Congress they created. But that’s just a quibble. The real sin is in suggesting that HBCUs somehow justify DeVos’s educational ideology on school choice, school voucher programs, and charter schools. The HBCUs are not “pioneers of school choice” unless you mean a great student could choose between Howard and Morehouse.

But, look on the bright side, at least she didn’t say, as Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal did last November, “The irony of some of the groups who are opposing doing something to help these minority children is beyond my logic. If you want to advance the state of colored people, start with their children.”

Of course, Deal meant that you could help children by passing an amendment to the state Constitution that would allow for-profit charter schools to take over for failing public ones.

As you might expect, the NAACP opposed it. On Election Day, so did the voters.

It pains me to write this because it forces me to admit that my own countrymen let me down. But, looking back, I can see that Trump was able to basically follow the blueprint I created for Bernie Sanders to win the nomination and the presidency. Yes, of course, I would have tweaked the plan a bit if I had been writing it for someone seeking the Republican nomination, but it’s close enough that you’ll be able to recognize it in action.

Writing about Sanders, I noted that he needed to pull from three groups in addition to his natural constituency in places like Madison, Wisconsin. He needed some moderates, some conservatives, and some people who are usually disengaged from politics entirely. Try changing the names Sanders and Hillary to Trump and Jeb, and flipping other words like “Republican” to “Democrat,” “conservative” to “liberal,” and “socialist from Vermont” to “vulgarian from Manhattan.”

If Sanders has a mission, it isn’t to convince the natural constituents of the Democratic Party that they ought to vote for a Democrat. So, if you’re projecting how he’s going to do, you need to evaluate what his prospects for success will be among people who are more conservative or moderate, or who are normally disengaged from the process…To win the overall contest, including the presidency, however, he is going to have to achieve a substantial crossover appeal. If he beats Hillary, he’s going to lose a portion of the Democratic coalition in the process, and he’ll have to make up for it with folks who we don’t normally think of as socialists or liberals.

Some of this deficit can be made up for simply by bringing people into the process who would otherwise have stayed home, but that alone will never be enough. If you think the electorate is so polarized that Bernie can’t change the voting behaviors of very many people, then there’s really not even a conceptual way that he could win. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to wait and see if he can appeal to a broader swath of the electorate like he has consistently done in his home state, then the “white liberal” vote isn’t quite as decisive.

Honestly, a lot of these potential Bernie voters are probably toying with Rand Paul right now. Most of them probably can’t imagine themselves voting for a socialist from Vermont. But substantial parts of his message are really almost tailor-made for these folks. They hate big money in politics, for example, and feel like everyone else has a lobbyist in Washington but them. They hate outsourcing and are suspicious of free trade agreements. They’ve lost faith in both parties and their leaders. They can’t pay their rent or afford college. Their kids are all screwed up on painkillers and are seemingly never going to move out of the house. They’re sick of investing in Afghanistan while American needs get ignored. And they want the blood of some Wall Street bankers.

Bernie Sanders is going to make a lot of sense to these folks, even if they think Hillary Clinton is the devil and are trained to despise liberals.

It hurts to have to acknowledge that Trump succeeded in convincing folks, particularly Obama voters in the rural Midwest, that he would get big money out of politics and do something about the opiate scourge and keep us out of pointless wars and do something about their stagnating economies. But he convinced just enough of them to break through the traditional red/blue polarization, mainly by making red counties much, much redder.

It’s true that his approach, which was nakedly racist, cost him voters in the suburbs. But he won that tradeoff in the places he needed to win it, and he lost it in states where it turned out not to matter.

There are a couple of very important things to draw from this, and I think they’re mostly being forgotten or ignored.

The first is a little better appreciated, which is that this was antiestablishment year. What’s getting lost is that this was a bipartisan and even an independent revolt against the establishment. It didn’t have a clear left-wing angle to it. In and of themselves, being hostile to war in the Middle East or lusting for the blood of Wall Street bankers are not left-wing attitudes. Disliking government surveillance and distrusting the media are not necessarily left-wing attitudes. These things can be and were melded with racial resentments and religious insecurities. And, in the end, the voters who flipped parties were more conservative in their racial and religious worldview.

If I’d been a little more pessimistic about the American people, I would have recognized the potential for this when I was writing about how Bernie Sanders could go after the George Wallace vote. Looking back, that piece sounds a lot like what you’re seeing Sanders supporters argue today, which is that he could have won over the rural Obama voters and the disengaged voters that Trump grabbed on his road to victory.

We’ll never know the answer to that for sure, but Sanders didn’t perfectly follow my advice in the primaries and never got the chance to follow it in the general. So, it remains little more than a theory, although one that was at least partially proven true by Trump’s success. The part that was verified was that the country isn’t as rigidly red/blue polarized as a lot of people thought.

What I and a lot of other people missed is that the election wouldn’t be won by flipping counties from blue to red, but by making red counties redder than the blue counties turned blue. This was almost like a magic trick in that people didn’t see it coming. Trump would prove the elasticity of the electorate by making it more geographically polarized. The result wasn’t just a surprise result in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; it actually hid the secret from those who first started trying to analyze what happened.

Trump won mainly in the same places that McCain and Romney had won, and he mainly lost the places that they had lost. Overall, there was no big differential in turnout. Clinton typically netted close to or even more votes out of the cities, and most often outperformed Obama in the suburbs. In some of the richer better educated counties (see, e.g., the NYC suburbs in Connecticut), Republican support actually collapsed. What Trump succeeded in doing was converting northern rural America into a virtual one-party area much like we’ve seen for years in the Deep South.

As a result, I’m no longer comfortable arguing that these voters were equally available to either Trump or Sanders. It’s true that it was a revolt against the establishment of both parties, but it was also a white riot fueled by opposition to secularism, #BlackLivesMatter, the educated elite, and the browning of America. Conservative communities that had voted 65-35 for Romney (indicating a still-healthy level of two-partyism) suddenly voted 80-20 for Trump (indicating much more cultural consensus). And that cultural consensus was very one-sided in which establishment it chose to more strongly reject.

The second thing that’s being forgotten, though, is that Trump still won by spending nearly a year trashing every Republican in sight. So, even if the general election turned on a wholesale rural rejection of the mainstream and cultural left, the primaries turned on a wholesale rejection of contemporary Republicanism.

This is becoming a very important thing to understand as the Trump administration and Ryan and McConnell’s Congress start trying to hash out a budget. The voters may have given the Republicans the trifecta of power in D.C., but they spent most of the election cycle raging against the status quo in the GOP. It’s been much noted that Trump lost the popular vote, but less observed that even the right wasn’t ratifying Bushism or Boehnerism or the fruition of all Paul Ryan’s best laid plans.

Mr. Trump’s budget blueprint — which is expected to be central to his address to Congress on Tuesday night — sets up a striking clash with the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, who has made a career out of pressing difficult truths on federal spending. For years, Mr. Ryan has maintained that to tame the budget deficit without tax increases and prevent draconian cuts to federal programs, Congress must be willing to change, and cut, the programs that spend the most money — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

But Mr. Trump, in a dogged effort to fulfill his campaign promises, has turned that logic on its head in the budget outline he is expected to present to Congress this week.

The Sanders folks will readily recognize the problem. The voters made Trump the president but Trump didn’t run on austerity or slashing people’s retirement security. That Trump offered people everything (tax cuts, more defense and infrastructure spending, deficit reduction) and asked them for nothing is now an unsolvable problem for him as he attempts to keep all his campaign promises. It turns out that taking away health care from millions is actually asking people for something. And it turns out that you can’t pay for all the things he’s promised without going after entitlements.

Trump’s problem is that his agenda makes no internal sense and simply doesn’t “add up.” Paul Ryan’s problem is that the president basically promised not to enact his agenda. In fact, Trump destroyed eleventy billion Republican rivals who were all running on some version of Ryan’s agenda.

Because Trump’s victory was basically a rejection of status quo conservative economic or budgetary ideology, it leaves the Republicans without anything approaching majority support for a sweeping reform agenda. The people didn’t vote for what Ryan wants to do, and they never reckoned on the impossibility of what Trump was promising he could do.

This is important because it makes it likely that the GOP can be beaten in Congress even though they theoretically have the power to ran home very radical and catastrophic changes.

At the same time, because the election turned on a kind of furious rejection of the cultural left in very specific localities, the Democrats have never been a worse position to take advantage of the Republicans’ failures. The Republicans’ strength is the unlikelihood that more than a small handful of their members will be held accountable for their failures by losing their jobs. However inept and pathetic they are, at least they’re not trying to give the wrong people free stuff or criticizing the police or teaching their kids to doubt their religion.

Overall, the increased geographical polarization that occurred in the election doesn’t just hand most of our states’ legislatures into seemingly perpetual Republican control; it makes it very hard to win control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate, and it inoculates most Republican lawmakers from any challenges from their left.

Massive failure on a large scale will have an impact, obviously, but not one close to being commensurate with the will of the people.

What I’m arguing here is more frustration than defeatism. As I’ve spelled out, the Republicans’ problems are nearly as great as the Democrats’, and they have the disadvantage of being responsible for what happens. I’m frustrated that a minority of Americans have created this mess and that it will be so hard to fix it. I’m frustrated that the Republicans remain more scared of their right flank than their left. The implications of what I’m saying bother me because I have no desire to make accommodations or concessions to anyone on the other side of the culture war, and I really want to believe that this will never be necessary.

But I’m also frustrated with the left in this country, much of which seems to believe that the election can be explained and rectified simply by offering to do more redistribution or by taking Democratic Socialism to the sticks. There’s no question that the Democrats need to go into rural America with a program that can at least win back 30 or 40 percent of the vote there, but it’s not clear to me that anyone has come up with the economic program or messaging that would achieve that.

I wish I had easy, pat answers, but I don’t. And I am growing weary of people who pretend that they do. The model that might have worked for Sanders wound up working for Trump, instead. That’s a hard lesson.

How do you keep Texas from turning blue? Well, one of the best ways is to make neo-segregationist Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III the Attorney General of the United States so he can drop the government’s case against the Lose Star State’s racist voter disenfranchisement law that has already been knocked down in the courts.

President Trump’s Justice Department is ending the government’s opposition to a controversial voter ID law in Texas, according to a group involved in the case…

…After six years of legal wrangling, the Justice Department will no longer argue that Texas intentionally sought to discriminate against minorities when it passed the law that mandates voters show certain forms of identification before casting a ballot.

Did Texas intentionally seek to discriminate against minorities or was that some kind of incidental side effect?

While a federal appeals court struck down the voter ID law a few months before the 2016 elections on the grounds that it had a discriminatory effect, it sent the question about intent back to the lower courts. The Supreme Court rejected Texas’s appeal earlier this year on the first question.

The Department of Justice had one opinion until today, and now they have the opposite opinion.

“This signals to voters that they will not be protected under this administration,” [Danielle] Lang [the Campaign Legal Center’s deputy director of voting rights] told Talking Points Memo.

“We have already had a nine-day trial and presented thousands of pages of documents demonstrating that the picking and choosing of what IDs count was entirely discriminatory and would fall more harshly on minority voters. So for the [Justice Department] to come in and drop those claims just because of a change of administration is outrageous.”

…The Justice Department is expected to lay out its new position during a hearing on Tuesday. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a supporter of voter identification laws as long as they are “properly drafted” and has voiced skepticism about the Voting Rights Act.

Republicans argue that the limits are unnecessary burdens on a state’s right to make its own laws to protect the ballot box.

This has nothing to do with Texas protecting the ballot box and everything to do with neo-segregationists doing everything they can to find a modern equivalent to asking blacks and (now) Latinos to guess how many jelly beans are in the jar.

The new Jim Crow may not be as bad as the old Jim Crow, but it’s close enough to earn universal moral condemnation.

Back in March 2013, when rumors first emerged that the newly reelected President Obama might nominate Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez to be his second term Secretary of Labor, he wasn’t a household name. But a lot of labor leaders knew who he was and they energetically endorsed him. The main reason for this was that he had served under Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland as the head of that state’s Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation.

As Adam Serwer reported for Mother Jones at the time, Perez had pleased labor leaders by going after “employers who were dodging overtime pay, benefits, and taxes by classifying employees as independent contractors.” His efforts resulted in a new law in 2009 that set down new rules and stiff fines. Maryland AFL-CIO chief Fred Mason said, “This is someone who understands the relationship between worker rights and human rights.” The headline of Serwer’s piece was: A Labor Secretary Pick Progressives Will Love—and Republicans Will Hate.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley hated him more for the work he’d done at the Justice Department.

But Perez has made political enemies, too. Chief among them is Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, who has been harshly critical of the civil rights division’s aggressive approach. The politicization of the civil rights division in the Bush era has been well documented, but Grassley accused Perez and the current division of similar behavior. Grassley signed a 2010 letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) accusing the division of “widespread politicization and possible corruption” related to the discredited allegations regarding the New Black Panther Party. In 2011, Grassley complained that too many new hires at the civil rights division had previously worked for “liberal advocacy groups,” by which he meant civil rights organizations.

Our own Nancy LeTourneau has written on more than one occasion about the amazing turnaround at the DOJ’s Civil Rights division under Tom Perez. For example, back in March 2015, she noted that:

Some people might remember how that division was corrupted during the Bush/Cheney administration. Everything about the division became politicized – including hirings, firings and prosecutions…

…What we see is that on at least two issues that are of primary importance in maintaining civil rights in this country – voting rights and investigating police misconduct – the Executive branch of our government purposefully dropped the ball.

All of that changed with the Obama administration…

…[Perez’s] talk was backed up by plenty of walk. It all began with the Civil Rights Division hiring attorneys with actual civil rights experience. The Division has been aggressive in defending voting rights and investigating police misconduct…the Civil Rights Division of DOJ started an investigation of the Cleveland Police Department more than a year before Tamir Rice was killed.

Progressives, therefore, were largely enthusiastic about the idea of Tom Perez heading the Labor Department. I include myself in that group. You can see me celebrating here Tom Perez’s successful effort to pry money out of SunTrust for the “racial surtax” they charged blacks who sought home loans.

Somewhere along the line, though, a segment of the progressive community decided that Tom Perez is not their ally. And now a narrative has developed that he’s an actual enemy of progressives and his election over the weekend as the new head of the Democratic National Committee is some kind of defeat for progressives. Prominent in pushing this narrative is Matt Bruenig who wrote an essay after the vote declaring that “The establishment wing has made it very clear that they will do anything and everything to hold down the left faction.”

Now, I could spend a lot of time trashing Matt Bruenig rather than his argument, but I’ll simply note the basic biographical information about him that you need to know. He was fired last year from the lefty think tank Demos for being a jerk on Twitter. Specifically, he attacked Hillary Clinton supporters Joan Walsh and Neera Tanden in very personal terms, calling them “geriatric.” He’s been described as an “incisive poverty analyst” as well as “widely admired for his work on poverty.” After his firing, Glenn Greenwald took up his cause, and accused Demos of showing undue deference to Neera Tanden because they expected her to become chief of staff to President Hillary Clinton.

He fought w/head of most powerful Dem think tank- likely to be Hillary's WH Chief of Staff- so @Demos_Org fired him https://t.co/pBnGebeoPC

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 20, 2016

Bruenig’s clear preference was that Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison would become the new chair of the DNC, and he wants you to believe that his defeat is your defeat. But he makes a very curious argument in support of this idea.

It begins with Rep. Ellison leaping out of the gate a mere week after the November presidential election and declaring himself a candidate for the DNC chair. At the outset, all appeared normal. Ellison won praise and/or endorsements from major party players like Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders.

Yet, before long the New York Times reported that the Obama administration wanted some alternative to Ellison and were looking around to find a champion.

The way Bruenig characterizes this is “that point of this recruitment was to beat back the left faction that Ellison represented.”

Two immediate questions should come to your mind about this. The first is why the Obama administration would see Ellison as a much greater threat than Harry Reid or Chuck Schumer. Are the former and current Senate Democratic leaders not equally the embodiment of the Democratic establishment? And, secondly, if the object was to beat back the left, why did the Obama folks select a member of their cabinet who was so respected by labor unions and civil rights advocates?

Bruenig doesn’t attempt to answer these questions. Instead, he tells us:

On December 15, Tom Perez came into the DNC race. Around the same time, the establishment forces mounted a brutal smear campaign against Ellison, placing stories all over the place about how he was (or still is) an anti-semitic, Farrakhan-loving, Nation of Islam guy.

This effort ultimately paid off with Perez narrowly winning the DNC chair election over Ellison.

This in inaccurate in some basic ways. For example, I wrote about the opposition dump on Rep. Keith Ellison on December 1st, which was two weeks before Tom Perez declared himself a candidate. In fact, I didn’t even mention Perez in that piece and instead focused on Howard Dean (opposed by Schumer) and NARAL’s Ilyse Hogue (endorsed by Daily Kos‘s Markos Moulitsas). My focus at the time was my desire that whoever took over the DNC treat it as as full-time job, unlike Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The timing is important because it’s unfair to taint Tom Perez by associating him with a smear campaign against Keith Ellison by misrepresenting when that campaign was initiated.

For Bruenig, once Perez entered the race, it became a fight “between left and right factions of the Democratic party,” and this constitutes the core of his narrative. But there isn’t a single sentence in his entire essay dedicated to explaining why and how Perez represents the faction on the right. Bruenig says that those who worked to elect Tom Perez as DNC chairman were “trying to beat [their] ideological opponents,” but there’s not one word on why Perez is an ideological opponent of anyone.

And, of course, the first thing that Perez did after he won the election was to announce that he was selecting Keith Ellison to be his deputy which, if the point was really to “beat back the left faction that Ellison represented,” could only be considered a squandering of the spoils of war.

Perez’s deputizing of Ellison was an obvious nod towards party unity that ought to undermine the argument Bruenig has been pursuing.  But what’s really missing here is any clear idea of what was won by the faction of the right and what was lost by the faction of the left.

Other than the fact that Ellison endorsed Bernie Sanders and Tom Perez endorsed Hillary Clinton, it’s hard to understand why this ever became a fight between factions in the Democratic Party. If there were a substantive case that Ellison would have pursued strategies as chairman more pleasing to progressives than Perez, Bruenig surely would have mentioned them, but he didn’t.

I believe he didn’t because he couldn’t find any compelling differences between them on substance.

Yet, he says that this defeat is so insulting that “the left should not care” about the Democratic Party anymore except insofar as it can “focus its energies on organizing under alternative institutions” that will “attempt hostile takeovers of various power positions.”

It should go without saying that Matt Bruenig has no right to speak for progressives or for any left faction within the Democratic Party. Perez had an impressive roster of endorsements from progressive organizations, including the United Food and Commercial Workers, the United Farm Workers, and the International Association of Fire Fighters. And it shouldn’t go without mentioning that Bruenig’s faction used emails purloined by the Russians to smear Perez, so it probably behooves everyone to forgive and forget a little bit about the uglier aspects of this campaign.

Perez and Ellison are a team now, and that seems to have ruined the Pout Party some of Ellison’s more unhinged supporters had planned for this week.

As a progressive, I’m happy with the outcome and I don’t have any more patience left for folks who are more interested in fake fights than real ones.

The following article from Counterpunch expands very nicely upon what I have been saying about Donald Trump’s ultimate fate as president.

Read on.

The Republicans May Impeach Trump by Ted Rall

Campaign Ad: Paul Ryan for President 2020.

Speaker Ryan speaks into the camera.

“Impeaching a president from my own party wasn’t an easy decision,” Ryan says, looking sober as footage of disgraced former president Donald Trump departing the White House for the last time appears.

“Sometimes principle” — he pauses for a half-beat — “comes before party.”

A full beat.

“Country always comes first.”

Narrator: “He stood tall when America needs him most. Ready to make the tough decisions when they matter most. Paul Ryan for President.”

Trump-haters want Democrats to push for impeachment. Setting aside the Dems’ congenital cowardice and the arithmetic — a minority party can’t impeach anyone — the real danger to Trump is his nominal Republican allies.

On the surface, Congressional Republicans appear to have been shocked and awed by the president’s surprise victory and ideologically aligned with a Trump Administration whose hard-right cabinet is prepared to grant every item on the GOP’s wish list. But you don’t have to look hard to see that the pre-November split between the party’s old guard (Ryan, John McCain, Mitch McConnell) and the Trump insurgency remains.

The Donald struts the marbled corridors of the capital, his head held high like Caesar. Beneath their togas, the senators’ sharp knives await.

This is speculation, but I bet Republicans with presidential ambitions — Ryan, Rubio, Cruz, Paul — have already grokked that Trump’s days are numbered. Odds makers agree. Whoever takes credit for bringing down a feared and reviled leader will rid themselves of a rival and reap rewards up to and including the highest office in the land.

—snip—

The kicker here is the “”Odds makers agree” line. From that link:

Back when Trump, 70, was named president-elect in November, online betting site Ladbrokes placed the odds of him not making it through his full four-year term at 3 to 1. But in the last three chaotic weeks, those odds have shortened to just 10 to 11, or about a 52 percent chance of happening.

“Trump says he’ll get the job done, but the money suggest otherwise, and punters aren’t entirely convinced the next four years will be plain sailing, and he could be out of the White House via impeachment or resignation sooner rather than later,” Jessica Bridge, a spokeswoman for Ladbrokes, told the UK’s Independent.

—snip—

Like dat.

Barely one month after taking office, Trump’s approval ratings are tumbling into territory historically belonging to presidents mired in scandals and unpopular wars. Voters tell the latest Quinnipiac poll Trump is dishonest and doesn’t care about people like them. Trump’s numbers are within a rounding error of Richard Nixon’s during Watergate.

—snip—

Think on that for a minute.

Regardless of the real accuracy of “polls,” you can smell the smoke of smoldering popular opinion change across the board. And where there is smoke, there is almost always eventually fire. Of course, these particular smoldering coals have been fanned into fire my media breezes…many of them hot air, but that only accentuates their firestarter effects. You really do not need a weatherman to tell you which way this wind is blowing.

It has taken Donald Trump only two months to begin to equal the unpopularity of the most despised president in living memory, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon.

That is an astounding accomplishment all by itself!!! It is perhaps his only real accomplishment since bullshitting himself into office.

There is a computer programmer truism that goes like this:

“Garbage in garbage out.”

GIGO

Well…

Bullshit in, bullshit out.

BIBO

More from the Counterpunch link:

Right now, Donald Trump is constitutionally impeachable over his temperament and his brazen violations of the emoluments clause. But nothing will happen until he’s politically impeachable. Trump would have to commit a crime or mistake so colossal and irredeemable that mainstream voters of both parties would find him repugnant.

If I’m Ryan or Cruz or some other crafty GOPer, I’m thinking to myself: every president screws up eventually. But this guy Trump will definitely screw up big. Given his manic pace, his Waterloo will occur sooner rather than later.

Whatever form it takes — provoking a war, crashing the economy, corruption, one authoritarian move too far, conspiracy and obstruction of justice — the inevitable Trumpian disaster leaves House and Senate Republicans with a stark choice. Defend him or stand back silently, and Trump drags the Republican Party along with him as he flames out. Or they can throw him under the bus.

Remember, they never liked him in the first place.

Plan B is far more appealing. Becoming the party of impeachment at a time when impeachment is popular transforms crisis into opportunity, allowing Republicans to cleanse their Trump-era sins (trying to repeal the increasingly well-received Obamacare, paying for the Great Wall of Mexico with deficit spending, etc.) and seize the moral high ground in one swoop. Vice President Mike Pence takes the helm, steadies the ship, promotes their right-wing agenda with more grace than his former boss, and Ryan and his buddies prepare for 2020.

—snip—

This sounds about right to me…

Further:

As for the Democrats, this scenario leaves the party even more damaged than it is today. If they leave the task of deposing a wounded Donald Trump to the Republicans, they’ll likely never recover.

Still seething over the DNC’s shabby treatment of Bernie Sanders, the progressive base would consider the party completely discredited and hopelessly moderate for failing to lead the charge against Trump. Swing voters, and not a few Democrats, will give Team Ryan credit for their integrity in taking down one of their own. I can imagine the Warren wing forming a new Progressive Party, leaving the Democrats at less than half its current level of support.

Dems could dodge this looming catastrophe by declaring all-out war against the president. For example, Democratic lawmakers could shut down Congress, and thus deny Trump his entire agenda, by denying a quorum — i.e., failing to show up until the president agrees to resign. There are many ways to obstruct. But creating a constitutional crisis would require balls — something in short supply among Congressional Democrats.

Yup.

And I’ll bet that this was written before the Schumer/Pelosi wing foisted Thomas Perez on an already restive Democratic party.

This whole article sounds like prophecy to me.

Watch.

It’ll happen sooner rather than later.

They can’t leave him in long enough to gain any real power.

Too dangerous.

Watch.

                               Beware the Ides of March

Watch.

AG

Update [2017-2-27 13:3:0 by Arthur Gilroy]: P.S. Snicker-snack!!!

You can already hear the vorpal blades sharpening in the mimsy borogroves of Washingtoon, DC and other back rooms.

Why…they’re already bringing out the the big guns. The really big guns!!!

Like…

Like…

George W. Bush!!!???

Google News screen shot, 1/27/17 12.30 PM EST:

How the fallen have mightied!!!

It took a Trump to rehabilitate this fool!!!

Anyway…all’s fair in love and politics.

Except losing.

That sucks!!!

HRC knows…

Yes indeedy…!!!

Why do I have zero faith that our commander in chief is paying the slightest attention to this?

Maybe it’s because he never mentions it.

If you’re wondering why the Democrats selected former Kentucky governor Steve Beshear to deliver their response to Donald Trump’s speech in front of joint session of Congress on Tuesday, look no further than the Bluegrass State’s experience with Obamacare. According to Bloomberg, “at the beginning of 2016, almost one in three Kentuckians had Medicaid or insurance through a federally subsidized Affordable Care Act plan.”

More impressively:

Within two years [of enactment of the Affordable Care Act], the state’s uninsured rate had fallen to 6 percent of the population from 20 percent. More than 420,000 people had been insured through Medicaid expansion, dropping the number of uninsured in some low-income jobs — at restaurants, construction sites, gas stations and discount stores, among others — by between 35 percent and 52 percent, according to data from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, which studies impacts on the poor.

If you listen to the current governor of Kentucky, however, you will learn that none of these people were actually able to access health care.

…Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican from Kentucky, argued that coverage numbers aren’t a good metric to measure health plans by.

“What do we want out of the health care system? We want healthier outcomes,” he told reporters. “That should be the ultimate goal. Simply enrolling people serves absolutely no value if all we’ve given them is a plastic card that says you’re now covered. They take that to a doctor who won’t see them.”

Not that it will help Gov. Bevin’s case, but he was referring to a different set of metrics. He was looking at the results of a study that McKinsey & Company put together for the National Governors Association. It looks at what will happen if a House Republican plan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare is passed and signed by President Trump.

The analysis includes graphs on what the Republican plan to overhaul Obamacare’s tax credits, generally making them less generous, would do. They are based on the recent 19-page proposal that Republican leadership released about their plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. In particular, they look at the effect of switching from income-based tax credits (which give poor people more help) to age-based tax credits, where everyone would get the same amount.

The report estimates what would happen in a hypothetical state with 300,000 people in the individual market that has also expanded Medicaid. In the individual market, enrollment would fall 30 percent and 90,000 people would become uninsured.

An additional 115,000 people in that hypothetical state may also lose coverage because they are enrolled in Medicaid and cannot find an affordable private plan.

Depending on how you look at it, things would look even grimmer in states that did not expand Medicaid. Do you worry that over 50% of Obamacare enrollees in your non-expansion state would lose their insurance and be left with no affordable access to health care, or are you happy that your federal funding would only fall by 6% instead of by the 24% experienced in the states that did expand Medicaid.

The answer to that question will help determine just how much of a heartless ideologue you really are.

Now, Gov. Matt Bevin campaigned on repealing Obamacare but he didn’t quite manage to do it. He made it look like he was doing it by closing new enrollment in the popular individual Kynect market. But that just forces folks to use the federal webpage and stop pretending that Kynect wasn’t Obamacare by a different name.

As for Medicaid, well…

Instead of scrapping Kentucky’s expanded Medicaid, Bevin applied for the same kind of federal waiver won by other Republican governors, led by Pence. The waiver programs include Republican-looking add-ons — premiums, punishments, so-called skin in the game for the poor — that allowed the governors to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, while saying they were doing something else.

Bevin had to make his peace with Obamacare but that doesn’t mean he isn’t rooting for the Republicans in Congress to screw his constituents in the same uncomfortable places he was too squeamish to screw them himself. So, when presented with a study showing just how badly his people will get reamed by the House Republicans’ plan, he tells us that all they’ll be losing is a worthless plastic card that wouldn’t even allow them to see a doctor.

That’s his spin.

And he hopes he can get away with it because of another statistic:

Kentucky pushed Obamacare as anything but Obamacare in order to sidestep political hostility to the president, whose position on coal made him unpopular in a state with roughly half the coal jobs it had in 2010. Enrollees signed up for Kynect, the state’s brand of the health-law insurance, not Obamacare.

If Kentuckians want to hold a coal grudge, they’ll get more of the governance provided by Bevin and less of the tangible improvements in their lives provided by Gov. Beshear. Maybe they’ll figure this out when Beshear responds to Trump on Tuesday.

Even if they never get it, the Democrats are hoping that the rest of the country can figure it out.