Month: September 2017

The week has been looking pretty good, all things considered. We should celebrate.

I’ve been of the mind that any movement without celebrations, parties, and dancing is not one worth having. So celebrate, y’all. We need this.

I don’t understand Richard Cohen’s argument. Actually, I think the problem is that he doesn’t understand it. He seems to be saying three things. The first is that impeaching Trump for anything less than a triple-ax murder will cause some kind of simmering, unacceptably dangerous civil disturbance. The second is that Trump is not likely to be convicted even if he is impeached. The third is that he shouldn’t be impeached unless he’s convicted.

To be honest, I’m being generous here by delineating his arguments much more clearly than his opinion piece does. Let’s start with the easiest thing to concede. It’s not likely that a Republican-controlled Congress will impeach the president, let alone convict him and toss him out of office. I think we can all accept that.

But the next bit is that even trying to do this would lead to violence, so we should be careful what we wish for.

In one scenario, a majority of the House impeaches the president but fails to convince two-thirds of the Senate to convict him. While there might be some disturbance during the House and Senate’s deliberations, if Trump were ultimately acquitted then there wouldn’t be any more reason for lasting unrest than when Bill Clinton was acquitted.

In another scenario, a majority of the House impeaches the president and does convince two-thirds of the Senate to convict him. That would mean that at least 24 Republican members of the House and 19 Republican senators voted to remove Trump from office. Under those circumstances, we can anticipate that the evidence would be overwhelming. In that case, there are two problems with Cohen’s argument. First, does he really think there would be a sustained violent backlash if the face of evidence so overwhelming that it caused the Republicans to remove their own president? And second, what use is the impeachment clause if a president can’t be removed, for fear of civil unrest, even in the face of clear evidence of criminality?

If the Democrats controlled the process, it’s much easier to see how things could get ugly even with the same basic set of facts. But the Democrats don’t currently control the process.

Mind you, the headline to Cohen’s piece is: We would impeach Trump at our peril.

Now, I’ve called Richard Cohen the the single worst columnist in America today. I’ve said that “his desire to suck up to power is so great that he’ll leap to the defense of anyone powerful who is questioned too hard about their honesty or rectitude.” I believe these things are still true.

For my part, I’d argue that we let Donald Trump handle our foreign policy toward North Korea at our peril. I think I have the stronger argument when it comes to trying to save our mortal asses. But that’s not really the point here.

The point is that even on his own terms, what Cohen is saying doesn’t make much sense.

The problem begins with tackling the issue without addressing whether Trump ought to be impeached. He gives us a bunch of reasons why that might turn out to be the case, but not in the service of deciding whether people should go ahead and do it.

Trump is a dust storm of lies and diversions with the bellows of a bully and the greasy ethics of a street-corner hustler. The chances of him passing Mueller’s muster are slim. Just for starters, the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director raises questions of obstruction of justice, and the appointments of Paul Manafort as campaign chairman and Michael Flynn as national security adviser emit the Kremlinesque scent of borscht. The possible crimes line up like boxcars being assembled for a freight train. Trump is a one-man docket.

It would seem that a man who is a one-man docket probably shouldn’t remain as our president, but Cohen says it would be too perilous to do anything about it. He also says that nothing will be done about it unless something actually is done about it, in which case we’re all going to die.

Obviously, we don’t know what Bob Mueller is going to do or what kind of evidence he is going to find. But my question for Cohen is to ask what he thinks our lawmakers ought to do if Mueller produces overwhelming evidence of criminality that leads even a Republican Congress to want to impeach and convict the president. Should they let it go out of fear that some Trump supporters will react with violence?

And if he doesn’t believe this, then why did he write this stupid column?

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah held a hearing on the Graham-Cassidy health care bill yesterday despite declaring, “Everybody knows that’s going to fail.” Why did he bother?

Here’s about 95 percent of the explanation.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) did not rule out the possibility of holding a vote on the [Graham-Cassidy] proposal despite clear signs that it did not have sufficient support to pass. Many Republicans feel pressure from voters to keep pushing to repeal the ACA before moving on to other issues.

“There are a lot of people who want to vote yes and be recorded as voting yes,” Cornyn said, adding that the Republican conference would decide the matter Tuesday, when lawmakers will meet for the first time since leaving for recess last week. “I think there is some advantage to showing you’re trying and doing the best you can.”

In truth, the entire Republican strategy since the repeal effort first failed in early spring has been to get some advantage out of “showing” that they’re doing “the best they can.” I can’t say who among the Republican leaders allowed themselves to believe that they might actually succeed, but I can say rather confidently that this has been a major effort at passing the buck and avoiding consequences. It has also repeatedly provided opportunities for scores of Republican lawmakers to record a vote in favor of bills that they desperately and secretly hoped would never become law.

When Paul Ryan realized that he could not pass an Obamacare repeal bill out of the House, he was at first inclined to give up. But when he realized how unacceptable that would be, his new goal was to transfer the blame for failure to the Senate. To that end, he convinced his caucus to pass a bill that very few members thought was any good, based on assurances that the bill would either die in the Senate or come back in such an altered form that it didn’t matter what the House had originally proposed. This argument won over moderates and hardliners alike, and it succeeded in taking the pressure off Ryan and putting it on McConnell.

McConnell couldn’t pass anything either, and he was also inclined to give up. But the pressure was so great that he pushed forward with a bill he called the “skinny repeal.” He attempted to get the House to promise not to pass it. This was important because he had no way of getting the votes he needed from his own caucus if the thing had any chance of actually becoming a law. But Ryan knew a skunk when he smelled it, because he had tossed the skunk to McConnell in the first place. So Ryan made a very lukewarm promise that convinced no one, and the bill thus became something close to useless. McConnell didn’t want to live with the consequences of throwing 25 million people off their health insurance. He just wanted a bill that would pass his chamber and die in the other one. That’s also what the deciding votes in his caucus wanted. His bill failed because the risk was too great that the House might just be crazy enough to vote for it.

Personally, I don’t think the House would have voted for it, but we’ll never know.

It should have ended there, but the pressure was still too high, which is why the Graham-Cassidy thing happened. Officially the effort was humored, still on the basis of “showing” that they were making their best effort. In reality, the Senate leadership was annoyed that more energy was being diverted away from tax reform and a lengthy list of must-pass legislation.

Where does Graham-Cassidy stand today? Yesterday, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana was quoted saying, “I think we need to move onto tax reform. I think this bill’s dead.” And it almost definitely is. It was just for show anyway, and the show is almost over.

But the base simply doesn’t understand why a Republican president and a Republican Congress could not repeal Obamacare, and that means that no one wants to admit defeat. So the next stage in this game is to raise the prospect that they’ll try again.

Now, I have written about budget reconciliation, Obamacare, and tax reform many, many times. I really don’t want to do it all over again. But I have to address the latest reporting that the Republicans might use the process once again in another effort to repeal Obamacare.

The common wisdom is that the repeal effort will essentially expire with the end of the fiscal year on September 30th.  This is because the process they’ve been using to avoid a filibuster in the Senate is tied to last year’s budget bill that was supposed to authorize spending for this year.  The Senate parliamentarian recently ruled that they can’t keep using a budget bill past the end of the fiscal year for which it applies.

What some Republicans are suggesting is that this is really a fake deadline because they can just go ahead and attach the same budget reconciliation instructions to the next budget for the next fiscal year.  And technically, of course, they can do that. But there’s a big problem, and I am going to cheat and have the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explain it to you:

How Many Reconciliation Bills May Congress Consider Each Year?

Under Senate interpretations of the Congressional Budget Act, the Senate can consider the three basic subjects of reconciliation — spending, revenues, and debt limit — in a single bill or multiple bills, but it can consider each of these three in only one bill per year (unless Congress passes a second budget resolution). Consequently, in the Senate there can be a maximum of three reconciliation bills in a year, one for each of the basic subjects of reconciliation.

This rule is most significant if the first reconciliation bill that the Senate takes up affects both spending and revenues. Even if that bill is overwhelmingly devoted to only one of those subjects, no subsequent reconciliation bill can affect either revenues or spending because the first bill already addressed them.

That explanation should be simple, but it’s not. First, there’s that parenthetical aside about “unless Congress passes a second budget resolution,” which sounds like an easy out. But it’s actually a reference to the Republicans’ plan to pass two budget reconciliation bills this year, something that has never been done before. It was only possible because Congress passed no budget at all last year, so they were able to use the shell of last year’s budget to create the reconciliation instructions for repealing the Affordable Care Act. The plan was to follow that up by attaching budget reconciliation instructions for tax reform to this year’s budget. For several reasons, the Republicans won’t have the option of passing two budgets next year. Using that trick (see below) was a one-time offer.

The second complication relates to the reason they went to these lengths to set up this unprecedented and convoluted process up in the first place. They needed to have one budget for repealing Obamacare and one budget for tax reform because they’re not allowed to have more than one budget reconciliation bill in a single year that affects both spending and revenues. The only way around that was to pass two budgets in a single year, which obviously makes no sense but was possible because the first budget was only an empty shell.

What they never seriously considered was that they could avoid all this nonsense if they just combined Obamacare repeal and tax reform into a single large bill. For one thing, they wanted the Affordable Care Act repealed quickly and they knew tax reform would be a long process. For another, it’s kind of an insane idea to combine two totally different pieces of major and incredibly difficult legislation. But that’s what their fallback plan is now.

Here’s how it could be done: While the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that the repeal push under fiscal 2017 must die after Sept. 30, Republicans could provide reconciliation instructions for both health care and tax reform in the fiscal 2018 budget resolution that Congress must pass to again unlock the fast-track procedural powers. That might entail some procedural hurdles, but one GOP aide said Monday that because the Finance Committee has jurisdiction over about 95 percent of health care policy, “it’s not like we couldn’t slip it in anyway.”

That part in there about “fast-track procedural powers” is primarily a reference to the filibuster and how to avoid it. Now, as I said above, it’s technically true that the Republicans can lump Obamacare repeal and tax reform together in one big package with special rules that allow them to avoid any compromise with the Democrats. But then both bills will live or die together. If the Obamacare parts of the bill are opposed by three or more Republican senators, then the tax reform won’t pass. And if the tax reform is opposed by three or more Republican senators, then the Obamacare repeal won’t pass. Each bill can become a hostage for the other, which would greatly complicate the Republicans’ efforts to get the votes they need.

This is what Finance Committee chairman Orrin Hatch is obliquely referring to here:

“We’ve got to do both,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said of tackling both Obamacare repeal and tax reform next year. “They’re complicated by necessity. So I don’t think [bundling them] takes away the complications. But I think we’re supposed to be able to handle complications.”

Hatch added, however: “If it’s used to screw everything up, I’m not for that.”

It’s an odd quote, right? He says that they have to combine tax reform and Obamacare repeal in next year’s budget reconciliation instructions and that even though it will be complicated, they should be able to handle it. But then he acknowledges the likely truth of the matter, which is that it’s a stupid idea that would doom both efforts. To top it off, he’s the chairman, so if he is “not for that,” then it shouldn’t happen. Yet he’s saying that it has to happen.

This is an indication of how paralyzed the Republicans have become on this issue. And it’s only one indication.

Remember that the entire premise here is that the congressional Republicans will succeed, unlike last year, in passing a budget. Without a new budget, there can be no new budget reconciliation instructions and therefore no vehicle for passing bills that are not subject to the legislative filibuster.  So far, it’s not at all clear that the GOP can achieve consensus on a budget. The prospects are complicated by this new dispute:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the namesake of the GOP’s latest repeal effort which is now opposed by at least three Republican senators, has already vowed to vote against a budget resolution that doesn’t allow for the health care battle to go on. So has Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), another lead backer of the Graham-Cassidy bill. With just 52 GOP senators, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) can only afford two defections on a budget measure.

The more acute problem for Senate GOP leadership is that both Graham and Johnson sit on the Senate Budget Committee, where Republicans hold just a one-seat majority. If Graham and Johnson both follow through on their threat, they would tank next year’s budget measure — and tax reform — even before it hits the Senate floor.

“My preference obviously would be to pass [Obamacare repeal] this week,” Johnson said. “But if that’s not the case, I agree with Sen. Graham. We’re both on the Budget Committee and we’ll insist on passing a budget that would have reconciliation instructions for both tax reform and health care reform.”

It’s obvious that Republicans have known for months that they were unlikely to ever bridge their differences on Medicaid expansion and come up with a palatable repeal bill. They’ve been desperately trying to convince people that they “did their best” and move on to tax reform. Now we have two Republican senators on the budget committee who are insisting not only that the battle continue, but that the fate of tax reform be tied to the fate of Obamacare repeal. And they seemingly have the power to force the leadership’s hand. If nothing else, their threat is going to deny the leadership’s ability to sell the idea that they’ve made every effort at repeal.

It’s a nightmare. And it’s even more complicated because way back in August, the administration essentially admitted that a successful tax reform would have to be done through regular order, meaning that it would have to involve concessions to win eight Democratic votes in the Senate. McConnell has ignored their advice and instructions and plowed ahead with his effort to use budget reconciliation. In doing so, he effectively admitted that health care reform was dead even before he lost his “skinny repeal” vote. McConnell also admitted back in early July that “if his party fails to muster 50 votes for its plan to rewrite the Affordable Care Act, it will have no choice but to draft a more modest bill with Democrats to support the law’s existing insurance markets.” That’s what Sens. Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray were working on when the Graham-Cassidy bill upended their apple cart.

And guess what? Insurance companies have until Sept. 27th, which is tomorrow, to decide whether to participate in the Affordable Care Act markets next year. Now they’ll have to make that decision without the benefit of a bill that shores up the exchanges and without any clarity about whether such a bill will be forthcoming. McConnell said he’d have to shore up the markets and then failed to do so by the deadline.

Now, if the Republicans fail to pass a budget again, maybe they can use the shell of a budget for their reconciliation instructions, just like they did last year. The problem with that is that the only way they got the Freedom Caucus to vote for a fake budget in January was to promise them they would not be asked to do so again. That’s why it’s highly unlikely that they will be able to do anything without a real budget this time around, and also why they likely cannot attempt to pass two budgets in one year for the second year in a row.

All of this could theoretically be clearer, and I’ve “done my best” here, but the truth is that it doesn’t quite add up because the Republicans’ strategy has never added up. You can’t understand what they’ve done or what they’re trying to do by examining procedure. They’re motivated by the fanatical desire to avoid compromise at all costs. They’re motivated by the desire to accomplish impossible things. And they will go to almost any length to avoid an accountability moment where they have to concede their mistakes or admit that they’ve been making false promises. They lie to themselves and each other almost as much as they lie to us, and most of them begin to believe their own propaganda.

The White House wants tax reform done under regular order but McConnell won’t allow it. McConnell wants to get past Obamacare repeal, but his base won’t allow it. They need a budget to do either of those things, but his own caucus won’t pass one. He needs to shore up the insurance markets, but he can’t do that either.

I suspect that Graham and Johnson will eventually back down and support a budget that doesn’t address Obamacare repeal. They’ll do it so that McConnell can pursue a partisan tax reform that the White House thinks is doomed and doesn’t want. But it’s pretty hard to figure out what will happen because the main players have no idea what they’re doing or how to work together. And they all want to avoid accountability past the point where it can be avoided.

I’d like to be able to tell people with preexisting conditions that they can relax, but the best I can do is point out how dysfunctional and confused the Republicans are and let people draw their own conclusions about how likely it is that they can come together to do something truly awful.

The president really should be concentrating almost all his attention on foreign policy and domestic relief efforts. Puerto Rico needs the modern equivalent of the Berlin airlift, but this time on the scale not of a city but of a state or country.

Planning for something of this scale needs to start immediately because without it, the death toll in Puerto Rico will become unimaginable. The number of people who are out of money, food, water, fuel and critical medical supplies will grow every day. Many areas of the country are virtually inaccessible due to damaged infrastructure, obstructed roads, and lack of communications. There are people already suffering from lack of food and water, and starvation isn’t far off.

We need new airstrips and all hands on deck to restore power. We need thousands and thousands of cargo flights, probably on an ongoing basis for the next year. We need vast amounts of equipment and manpower to operate it in order to clear debris, clear roads, and get things in a condition to where people can begin to rebuild. We need mobile medical teams that can move in and out of remote areas and evacuate those who will die without supervision.

Here’s just one example of what’s going on in Puerto Rico right now, and you can imagine how quickly it will get worse:

The 63-year-old mother, Maria Dolores Hernandez, had cotton stuffed in her ears to keep flies out, since her now screenless windows were letting all sorts of bugs in. The gray-haired diabetic woman spoke with her daughter about her worries: that she would run out of prescription drugs, that they were almost out of generator fuel to keep her insulin refrigerated and to run the fans at night. With all the heat, she feared that her ulcer would become infected…

…Aldea, who works as a secretary in the mayor’s office, is living with and taking care of her mother in the tiny room downstairs. Darangellie spends most of the days with a relative in town, but at night she sleeps with her mother. The child has asthma and needs to use a daily nebulizer treatment — requiring her mother to turn on their generator at night. They have enough diesel to power the generator for one more day.

She has a half-tank of gas left and can’t set aside the entire day that would be necessary to wait in line for more because she has to care for her daughter and mother. It doesn’t help that driving to town for her job — which usually takes seven minutes — now takes more than a half-hour because of blocked or inaccessible roads.

But Aldea remained calm. More than anything, she is thankful to be alive: “If I don’t stay strong, how can I take care of the two people who depend on me?”

Aldea is brave and determined, but she can’t treat her mother’s ulcer or keep her insulin refrigerated, and she can’t give her daughter Darangellie her nebulizer treatment if her generator is out of fuel. She’s lucky because she has a job, but she won’t be able to get to it for long. How many people have jobs that don’t exist when there is no power? How many businesses can stay afloat when they have no power, can’t get deliveries or supplies, and have a banking system that is on its knees.

Consider this:

Just two gas stations were functioning in the town, and lines stretched for more than half a mile. Some people walked and rode bicycles for miles with empty gas canisters in hand.

One of the town’s two supermarkets was open Sunday, and employees would let in only 10 people at a time to avoid chaos. Residents, who stood in line for hours, could purchase only rationed food. There is no functioning bank or cash machine in the entire municipality.

The president should not be talking about sports. He should be talking about Aldea, Darangellie and Maria, and the millions like them suffering in Puerto Rico.

For many residents, the challenge of accessing the essentials of modern life — gasoline, cash, food, water — began to sink in. And government officials had no answers for them. Estimates for the return of electricity and basic services will be measured not in days but in weeks and months. For those most vulnerable, far too long.

Many have been openly wondering when help will arrive, whether from local officials or from the federal government. The first thing some villagers ask when they see outsiders: “Are you FEMA?”

Trump won’t be doing his job until the outsiders those villagers see are actually there with the supplies they need to help. If he explains the situation to the American people and asks for our help and support, we will give it.

If he doesn’t mobilize the nation for this effort, the result will be catastrophic.

Faced with a war against communists on the Korean peninsula that could not be won, the American people understandably had a great deal of confidence that the Supreme Allied Commander of World War Two, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, would be a trustworthy person to negotiate a difficult peace. Sixteen years later, facing a war against communists in Vietnam that could not be won, the American people understandably trusted a man who had built his political career on staunch anti-communism to use his “secret plan” to win the peace. It seemed unlikely that Richard M. Nixon would be weak in the negotiations. Whether you were Madly for Adlai or correctly saw Nixon for the man he actually was, in retrospect it’s easy to see why the American people voted the way that they did. I don’t know if we’ll ever feel that way about Donald J. Trump.

People have started comparing our current political environment to 1968 for some obvious reasons. The country seems more divided than it has been at any point since 1968. But the situation actually bears much more resemblance to 1953. That’s the year that the Republicans won the trifecta, and controlled both the White House and Congress for the first time since the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. It’s also the year that Eisenhower brokered the uneasy truce with North Korea that is currently under so much stress.

Looking back sixty-four years, through sixteen presidential elections, it’s easy to see the parallels to today. And we can also see how things worked out then and assess how likely it is that things will turn out as well in our own times.

The truce with North Korea has held and we did our part to make sure that South Korea became a case study of how our values could benefit the people more than the values espoused by Mao and Stalin. It wasn’t a straight line, and South Korea struggled through its own dictatorships and oppression which we enabled and tolerated at the time. But, from where we stand today, we can be proud of what South Korea has become and proud that we sacrificed blood and treasure to make it possible. Eisenhower deserves credit for knowing when to stop fighting and how to negotiate a peace that would have endurance. Only a handful of knowledgable people think our current president is likely to navigate our current crisis with the same deftness, and literally no one thinks Trump carries the respect of the people or commands the deference of Eisenhower.

In Congress, things are also interesting. When Eisenhower became president, the New Deal had been ongoing for twenty years. Then, as now, the rightwing of the country expected that a Republican Congress and a Republican president would be able to roll it all back. But that’s not how things worked out for the 83rd Congress. Eisenhower wasn’t interested in rolling back most of The New Deal, and the most memorable thing that happened in the Capitol came on December 2, 1954, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was censured by his colleagues. Second to that, the Republicans created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

It’s little wonder that modern day conservatives don’t celebrate the presidency of Eisenhower. But his steady leadership through the height of the second Red Scare on Korea and on domestic legislative policy already stands in stark contrast to the leadership we have right now. The contrast is so great in fact, that it seems almost irrelevant to discuss Eisenhower’s mistakes and shortcomings. Anyone with any sense would trade Trump for Eisenhower in a second.

On the other hand, it all looks very calm and seamless and inevitable from the remove of sixty-four years. In truth, the country and the Republican Party were as divided then as they are now. Back then, the GOP didn’t want to own The New Deal. Today, the Republicans don’t want to own Obamacare:

[Sen. Rand] Paul warned Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that if Republicans vote for a replacement plan that keeps core elements of ObamaCare in place, “the Republican name will be on health care and this isn’t going to work.”

“You’re going to end up having Republicans absorb the blame for a terrible health-care system,” he said.

When the American people went to the polls in November 1954, the Republicans lost control of the Senate and did not gain it back until 1981. They lost control of the House and did not gain it back until 1995. They didn’t know how to operate as a majority back then even with a Republican president, and they still don’t know how to do that today. But, in 1954, they had steady leadership at the top. In 2018, the Republicans will have Donald Trump.

Go to Puerto Rico, man.

Now it’s “The Biggest Tax Cut Ever!!!!!”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-promises-largest-tax-cut-ever

When will the rubes catch on?

What Trump wants to talk about:

1. Black sports professionals who won’t stand during the national anthem.

What Trump doesn’t want to talk about:

1. Bob Mueller asking his staff for all kinds of documents.

2. His failure to get funding for his border wall.

3. His failure to repeal Obamacare.

4. His preferred candidate in the Alabama special election losing on Tuesday.

5. The fact that Puerto Rico has no power and may have no power for months and months.

I’d also like to point out that Trump doesn’t want to talk about why some black athletes aren’t standing for the national anthem. He’s says it’s lack of gratitude. He says it’s disrespect. He doesn’t say it’s because a lot of police officers have gotten away with murder.

And, now, as of today, athletes of all colors aren’t standing because they’re protesting Trump and his racism and his disrespect.

He’s a sick person, but his calculation isn’t irrational. He’s forcing a conversation on us where he unfortunately has the opportunity to benefit politically.

Trump thinks this is a win for him and so do some of his most influential supporters:

Yes that's part of the plan. https://t.co/ULE87wdyEF

— Mike Cernovich 🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) September 23, 2017

It could be that he’s taken things too far now and miscalculated. That remains to be seen. But he can’t distract Bob Mueller. He can’t fake legislative victories that aren’t forthcoming. Puerto Rico isn’t going to fix itself. If Luther Strange loses on Tuesday, he’s still going to look weak and stupid.

So, it’s pretty clear that his plan is to continue to racially polarize the electorate while hiding behind the flag. It won’t work forever. Hopefully, it has already stopped working.

While it’s not the tactic I would advise, I’d like to remind everyone that people aren’t kneeling during the national anthem because they don’t like the singing or the lyrics. They aren’t doing it because they think our flag is ugly. Their point is not to show disrespect or disapproval of either. They’re kneeling to draw attention to the fact that people of color get shot or choked or tased to death by the police at an alarming rate in this country and that the shooters and chokers are almost never found to have committed a sanctionable offense, let alone a crime.

So, when the president says that the protesters are sons of bitches who should be fired for their disloyalty, that’s not just a calculated way to benefit politically, it’s primarily a way to avoid acknowledging the whole point.

That it is so easy to divert attention from the whole point and to benefit politically while doing so is a good argument against the protest tactic, and I might offer some alternatives that would be more effective. But I’d never dismiss the sentiment behind it. I’d never call someone a son of a bitch because they think it’s wrong that so many young men of color are losing their lives without any form of due process, or because he or she is outraged that it’s nearly impossible for a cop to be punished or prosecuted for taking a life no matter how strong the evidence is against them.

This isn’t really even a protest against the police. Not really. It’s only a protest against the police if the police collectively take the attitude that killing black and brown people with near impunity is not only a solid policy but their God-given right. If they believe bad shootings and wrongful deaths are no big deal, then obviously the kneeling becomes a protest against the police in general. But that’s their choice to react that way and turn the people against them. If they want to respond to people begging for black lives to matter by insisting that all this criticism is a way of arguing the blue lives don’t, then they’ve brought broad moral condemnation on themselves. No one forced them to misunderstand or pretend to misunderstand, or to take sides against the people who criticize the bad cops in their ranks.

The president is a born asshole seeking to lead every born asshole in the country. If you take his side on this, you’re joining a truly deplorable army. You can disagree with the tactic of kneeling during the anthem without joining an army of born assholes.

Well, except for the POTUS being uncensored and bleating the worst and most uncivil thoughts that flit through the minds of ugly Americans.

Unless you were there, it’s difficult to describe what it was like in 1966 and that assholes like Donald Trump were the norm.  This gets close:

Muhammad Ali’s most famous act of social activism — one that would strip him of his best fighting years, cost him millions of dollars, forever alter his image and eventually send him into debt — began with one off-hand quote: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
…
For the most famous athlete on the planet to openly decry the war was, at the time, blasphemous. When he declared his apathy toward the Viet Cong, public support of the Vietnam War was at its peak — in the first three months of 1966, the war’s approval rating was over 50 percent, according to Gallup. Ali, citing his faith and membership in the Nation of Islam, refused service and said he was a conscientious objector.
…
In a flash, Ali, already controversial for his conversion to Islam and name change from Cassius Clay, became one of the most hated public figures in the country. Nobody close to Ali’s level of fame had resisted the draft, and his seemingly flippant opposition to the war made him a target of ridicule from the public, the government and his sport. He’d spend the next four years battling for his beliefs in court instead of the ring, and after his 1967 arrest for draft dodging, all of his state boxing licenses were stripped. Ali’s boxing career was effectively over.
…
Anyone who immediately came to Ali’s defense put themselves in danger. In A People’s History Of Sports In The United States, writer Jerry Izenberg recalled receiving bomb threats and tons of hate mail because he was willing to hear Ali out in the early days of his service refusal. But in most of the media, nastiness prevailed. Unlike Izenberg, famous sportswriters like Red Smith and Jim Murray were calling Ali a “punk” and “the white man’s burden.”
… [emp added]

Wrote in March about how Trump's vocal obsession w/@Kaepernick7 opens Trump up to be sued for contract interference https:/t.co/H9cPzevPFg https:/t.co/EMy4Bqwawk

— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) September 23, 2017

It was really difficult to do, but last night Trump crossed that NFL/Roger Goodell line in the sand.

New NFL statement pic.twitter.com/XHPgVvPPfH

— Brian McCarthy (@NFLprguy) September 23, 2017

A bit mealy-mouthed from Goodell, but a big step up from his past silence whenever Trump trashed Kaepernick and other NFL players.  Will the NBA Commissioner speak out now that Trump has gone after a Stephen Curry?  Will other players join LeBron James?

U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!

— LeBron James (@KingJames) September 23, 2017

What it won’t be like is 1966 when nobody with a public voice and megaphone supported Muhammed Ali.  And that’s why today isn’t as bad at then.

The Guardian – NFL players protest during anthem after criticism from Donald Trump – in pictures

Beautiful pictures. Emotionally powerful. (As she wipes her teary eyes.)