Month: October 2017

If the town of Pound, Virginia is famous for anything, it’s their ordinance against dancing that was overturned by a federal District Court Judge in 1999. The judge found that you couldn’t even put on The Nutcracker in Pound without applying for a waiver from the local ban. The locals said that dancing and alcohol were too volatile a mix to tolerate, which put a damper on the good times at the local honky tonk at the edge of town.

There isn’t much to do in this hamlet tucked into the farthest reaches of the Cumberland Mountains, 425 miles from Washington. A new four-lane highway bypassed the town a few years ago, and the nearest fast-food restaurant is 12 miles away.

But a federal judge is helping to liven up the place. His ruling has many residents here kicking up their heels. Literally. They’re dancing–and for the first time in 18 years, it’s legal.

The town is in the news again today because the Associated Press profiled the place as part of their look at the upcoming gubernatorial race in Virginia. The place went overwhelmingly for Trump but it’s decidedly less enthusiastic about the Republican candidate for governor, Ed Gillespie. By now, you should be familiar with this story.

The town of Pound, nestled near the Kentucky line, was once a booming coal center where the main drag got so busy with shoppers that people couldn’t find a parking spot. Now, many shops are boarded up with dusty “For Sale” signs. Some buildings are collapsing, overgrown with weeds. Jobs are scarce. Prescription pain pills are a major problem. The high school closed in 2011.

Eight out of 10 voters in Pound backed Trump, and some of the town’s remaining business owners and patrons say their faith has already been rewarded.

“I’ve seen more coal trucks in the last six months than I have in the past eight years,” said David Williams, who owns a TV repair and fishing gear store.

It’s one of the mysteries of our age that the same folks who would ban dancing have no real problem warming up to a person like Donald Trump.

Hair salon owner Kim Mcfall said what little she knows of Gillespie hasn’t impressed her — he’s not enough like Trump, and too much like a typical politician.

“He’s wishy washy,” she said, adding that she’ll probably vote for Gillespie — if she has the time on Election Day…

…To win over Trump voters without directly embracing the president, Gillespie has tried to run on Trump-like issues such as cracking down on unlawful immigrants who commit crimes and preserving Virginia’s Confederate statues. He also campaigned recently in Abingdon, one of southwest Virginia’s biggest towns, with Vice President Mike Pence…

…Cliff Cauthorne, a Pound council member and chaplain at a nearby state prison, said Gillespie has only one good option for motivating his town’s voters: a Trump rally, “or two.”

“Him coming here with a coal miner’s hat on, it would just fire people up. It would fire people up,” Cauthorne said.

Obama lost Wise County, Virginia 35%-63% in 2008 and 25%-75% in 2012. Clinton lost it 18%-80% in 2016. Maybe the demise of the coal industry explains most of this. I don’t know. It’s obviously a very culturally conservative area that is always going to favor the Republicans, but it does matter if you’re getting more than one in three of their votes rather than less than one in five of them. The difference between those two outcomes when magnified across numerous counties in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, explains why Trump is the president.

I can understand why the people of Pound are looking for something different from both political parties, but I still have trouble understanding why they don’t see Trump as a morally compromised person who is unworthy of holding the highest office in the land.

But if they’re not too interested in Ed Gillespie, then at least we share one thing in common.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran a piece on the voters in Terre Haute and Vigo County, Indiana. The area has the distinction of picking every presidential winner since the beginning of the 20th Century except Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and William Taft in 1908. And, yes, that means they voted for Barack Obama twice and also for Donald Trump. To me, that makes this community’s political behavior something that needs to be understood if the left is going to diagnose why they’ve been losing support in the Midwest, in rural and small-town America, and how they lost a presidential election to a man like Donald Trump.

Here’s one clue from the article:

Its economy is struggling. City finances are a mess. Markers of misery — lower family income, higher rates of smoking and obesity, surging opioid use — are many. Its 108,000 residents are much whiter than the nation as a whole, and its demographics are changing only to the degree that the population is skewing older and less educated. It has benefited from government programs, like disability payments and a stimulus grant under the Obama administration that delivered a flood control project, but people here rail against Washington…

…The headquarters of Clabber Girl, the baking powder company, is a point of civic pride, along with Indiana State University, which has rising enrollment, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a highly regarded science and engineering college. One old factory is being converted into lofts. But several people, when asked about the state of things, simply responded with a wince.

How did a philandering New York City real estate developer turn this relatively conservative area from Obama territory to Trump territory? I suppose we should also ask how how Obama turned them away from the Republican Party (twice), since they supported George W. Bush in both of his elections. Maybe the people of Vigo County are contrarian enough to turn against the party in power so long as an incumbent isn’t on the ticket. If that’s the pattern, they’ll be voting for Trump again.

Yet, the reporting for this article indicates that they have a lot of buyer’s remorse about Trump already, and it could become Democratic territory in 2020. What makes this part of Indiana interesting is its propensity to swing back and forth between the two major parties, but the general drift toward Trump in largely white communities has been evident almost everywhere.

The centrality of immigration and racial issues is seen as a main culprit by almost everyone, including the architects of Trump’s campaign. But we still need to account for the fact that Vigo County voted for a black candidate two times over a white man. Perhaps it’s easier to identify what didn’t work for the Democrats than what did work for Trump. The massive amount of attention that was rightly placed on the Access Hollywood tape in October did not convince the people of Terre Haute that Trump is a sexual predator. Or, if it did, they seemed to still prefer him to Hillary Clinton for some variety of reasons. Likewise, Trump’s uncivil behavior throughout the campaign didn’t turn them against him, nor did countless exposés of his failed and fraudulent business practices. His transparent lack of knowledge wasn’t enough. The fact that numerous prominent Republican politicians and pundits refused to endorse Trump didn’t sway them. The fact that almost no editorial board of a newspaper in the entire country supported Trump did not matter. Trump’s poor debate performances weren’t a substantial problem for him.

As long as the focus was on Trump, it seems he was capable of weathering almost any bad news or coverage. What mattered more, apparently, is that he was offering something different from a status quo that is still making the people of Vigo County wince when they’re asked to talk about it. I don’t think people saw Trump as particularly credible about virtually anything, but he was more credible than Hillary Clinton when it came to satisfying the desire to change things up dramatically.

Now, a lot of people mock the idea that economic hardship had more to do with the election results than racism. Conversely, the Democrats’ fixation with “identity politics,” however defined, is frequently blamed for turning off Obama voters in communities like Vigo County. I think both of these arguments are basically dead ends. What we know for sure is that protesting Trump’s racism didn’t have the effect we hoped and had the right to expect it would. We know that he wasn’t wrong-footed by his positions on transgender bathrooms or Muslim and Latino immigration or his blind support for police violence. He know women didn’t turn against in big enough numbers even after numerous victims of his sexual predation came forward.

We tend to get bogged down in these facts and attack the communities who overlooked all these signs. We want to write off any voters who would support a candidate after all the evidence that was presented against him. But Vigo County was Obama territory. It could easily become Democratic territory again. And, to be honest, the things the left supports on the cultural or “identity” plane weren’t much different in 2016 than they had been in 2012 or even 2008. The answer isn’t going to be magically found by pandering to cultural conservatism.

What’s needed is a focus on the things that make people wince. We tend to wince at sexism and racism, and we expect everyone else to have a similar reaction and fault them if they do not. I can’t fault us for that, but I think the evidence is in that it isn’t a winning political message in a lot of the country. I also don’t think it’s a brilliant idea to assume that the Democratic Party can just tinker with their message or focus on mobilizing their base. What the people of Vigo County need and want is a set of fresh ideas that haven’t been tried before. The reason I’ve written about anti-monopoly and antitrust issues is because it something new in the sense that we’ve gotten away from it for so long that it will seem fresh. The national party can do whatever it wants, but Democrats running in Obama/Trump areas need to have something new to offer.

Does this guy sound like he read my piece How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values?

Stephen Webber, the chairman of Missouri’s Democrats, told a Midwestern caucus meeting [at the Las Vegas DNC conference] that his party had developed a message for rural counties “where we used to win 60 percent of the vote and now barely win 15 percent” — a populist campaign against corporate farming conglomerates.

That’s the kind of thing I want to see. Salvation doesn’t lie with selling out our base or compromising on our values or in pandering to the prejudices of people who have supported us in the recent past. We don’t need to turn a blind eye to racism or sexism. But we do need to find out what is making people wince and come up with new, credible ideas to address their communities’ problems.

The two parties are not mirror images of each other. The Democrats can’t raise money for the DNC but individual candidates and the DSCC and DCCC are performing very well. Meanwhile, the president is raising a ton of money for the RNC, but the NRSC and NRCC are struggling mightily, and many of their most vulnerable incumbents are being outraised by the their Democratic challengers.

The Democrats’ problems are a hangover from the primaries and the contested race for a new DNC chief. There is plenty of blame to spread around for this, including from the Russians who fanned the flames of disunity with their release of hacked emails around the time of the Democratic National Convention. Of course, their active measure against the American left wouldn’t be as effective if their weren’t real embarrassing revelations involved. The best propaganda has an element of truth to it, and that was true all throughout the Cold War. Still, Democrats should be self-aware enough to be wary of doing the Russians’ work for them by perpetuating bad blood from 2016.

The Republicans’ problem is a predictable one. Trump is in only in it for himself, so he raises a lot of money for the organ responsible for helping him get reelected but actively suppresses his base’s interest in donating to the congressional fundraising arms.

In general, the Dems get the better end of this because the midterm elections will turn much more on what the congressional organizations do than on what the RNC and DNC do, so the Republicans should be very upset.

“House Republicans are growing increasingly alarmed that some of their most vulnerable members aren’t doing the necessary legwork to protect themselves from an emerging Democratic tidal wave. In some of the biggest media markets, where blockbuster fundraising is a prerequisite for political survival—most notably in New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston—Republican lawmakers aren’t raising enough money to run aggressive campaigns against up-and-coming Democrats.”

“Of the 53 House Republicans facing competitive races, according to Cook Political Report ratings, a whopping 21 have been outraised by at least one Democratic opponent in the just-completed fundraising quarter. That’s a stunningly high number this early in the cycle, one that illustrates just how favorable the political environment is for House Democrats.”

Trump is definitely making a major contribution to the problem here, which is why I contested Steve M.’s analysis last week.

How is this not obstruction of justice?

President Trump has promised to spend at least $430,000 of his own money to defray legal costs incurred by campaign associates and White House staff due to the Russia investigations, a White House official tells Axios.

The chief suspect pays for the witnesses lawyers?

I woke up sick and with back spasms and wasn’t sure I could coach my soccer team, but I sucked it up and was rewarded with a 12-6 victory. We’ve got a winning streak going now and seem to reach double digits in goals each week. Seems like I always get the kids whipped into peak form just in time for the season to end and for the team to get disbanded. I look forward to coaching a team some day where I get the same kids each season.

What’s on your mind?

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the El Morro National Monument painting.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 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.

The big change is the mid and foreground, which are now seen in colors similar to the butte above.  Note that the blue juniper shadows appear just a bit brighter than in the actual painting.  With the addition of my initials it is now done.

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

I’ll have more a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Bernie wing now has zero representation on rules committee, which will determine how the 2020 primary is run. What kind of unity is this? pic.twitter.com/XCbPAgMSaL

— Claire Sandberg (@clairesandberg) October 20, 2017

Lest anyone think the establishment is about anything other than holding onto power.

This is the group that will write the delegate rules for the 2020 Convetion.  It is the most important Committee by far.

And we have:
Harold Ickes – This name should should raise the hair on the back of any Obama supporter in ’08.  Ickes, if you will remember, was behind the rule to keep MI and FLA delegates from being seated if they held their primaries too early. Later, when it became clear Clinton needed these votes, he reversed himself and accused Obama of playing dirty pool.

He lied and created dissent throughout ’08 on this point.

HE IS BACK.

Kathy Sullivan.  If you are active in NH you probably unfortunately know her.  She spent 2016 blasting Sanders on Twitter.  

She is on the Rules Committee.

Donna Brazile – she leaked debate questions to Clinton.  CNN fired her.

She is on the Rules Committee.

Don Fowler
Was responsible in 1984 for increasing the number of superdelegates.

The single most destructive argument that emerged from 2016 was the widespread belief among Sanders supporters that the process was rigged.  This belief gained support from the Wikileaks.

As I have said here before, while I believe the DNC tilted to Clinton, I do not believe they were decisive.  We lost fair and square in the end.

If you were trying to seed discontent among Sanders people you would put the people they have  put on the Rules Committee.  They have made sure the Sanders people are not in the room.

Make no mistake: this will go off like a gunshot among the Sanders activists.

It isn’t a mistake: the goal here is to make sure they hold onto power in the Party.

But oh boy are they underestimating what they are doing to the chance for any sort of united front.

The truth is I think they believe and want war with the liberals.

They will get it.

As the Trump Era presses on, the weeks get longer and more dispiriting. When we get to the end, it’s hard to remember what outrage was central at the beginning. And that’s why we need dark humor:

I hope Trump can get in some golf this weekend, he deserves a break after a busy week insulting war widows and joking about hanging gays

— (((Jeff Tiedrich))) (@jefftiedrich) October 20, 2017

I have been shying away from documenting the atrocities lately, and trying to maintain some focus on the actual grinding of the organs of government, particularly the legislative process. This is at least partially a defense mechanism, because it allows me to focus on areas where the Trump administration is failing.

There are only so many ways that we can write about Trump’s character flaws. Eventually it feels like beating a dead horse. Anyone who doesn’t already get it probably isn’t going to get it until this presidency screws up their life in some fairly direct way. I can’t make that happen, and I wouldn’t want to if I could. So, I go looking for my audience less from people I consider persuadable and more from people who are curious about the kind of damage this administration can do or, perhaps, not do as a result of their cluelessness and incompetence.

I see this is as a better use of my time than writing one more story about how Trump is golfing while issues x,y, and z go unaddressed. At the same time, it’s very important that the atrocities are documented in intricate detail by someone. I respect the people who are willing to do this in real time, all day, every day. I took on that responsibility during the Bush years and I’m still amazed that I could write five to eight stories a day, every day for the last four years of Bush’s presidency that were virtually all about some new outrage.

I can’t do that anymore, so I’ll leave it to others who are perhaps younger, with more stamina and more intact faith in the American electorate.

Once again, I am relieved that it’s Friday. Now I can avert my eyes from this catastrophe, however briefly, and let my frustration level subside a little below the overflow point.

It’s going to be a grind to get our nation out of this mess, if we can get out of it. We’re all going to have to do our little part. And get rest where we can find it.

Issues of addiction became more and more central to me as they came at my family like a tsunami over the last decade. Most of the details of this are too private to share. Personally, I celebrated three years without a sip of alcohol last month, but I waged far more difficult battles, some of which were won (for now) and most of which were lost. What began as a knife-fight in a narrow alley expanded into a much broader universe as my focus expanded to helping other families deal with the addiction problems in their extended families. As a result, I got a crash course in how opioids are decimating our communities and in the inadequacies of our national response. It has been a very rewarding experience to become involved in the broader recovery community, but it comes with constant sorrow as death announcements arrive as steadily as the rain.

Thanks to some connections I had at the Obama White House, I was able to communicate my concerns fairly directly to them and to get invitations to sit in on both off and on the record conference calls about how they were moving forward on the opioid problem. I watched them deal with their own learning curve, so I know that it isn’t easy to get your head around the gap between what we have and what is needed to deal with the scale of opioid addiction we now have in America. And once you do get it, the next problem is that you can’t do much politically until everyone else also gets it. I was not satisfied with the Obama administration’s approach, but I did feel like I was dealing with people of good faith who had a sincere desire to learn and to find resources and solutions that would save lives. They were often just as frustrated as I was, and there was no sense for me that they weren’t taking the issue very seriously.

The Trump administration is much different. They’ve made all kinds of vague promises, and they’ve taken some steps to show that they’re working on the problem, but there’s a basic lack of seriousness. Nowhere is this more clear than with the president:

President Donald Trump overrode his own advisers when he promised to deliver an emergency declaration next week to combat the nation’s worsening opioid crisis.

“That is a very, very big statement,” he said Monday. “It’s a very important step. … We’re going to be doing it in the next week.”

Blindsided officials are now scrambling to develop such a plan, but it is unclear when it will be announced, how or if it will be done, and whether the administration has the permanent leadership to execute it, said two administration officials.

“They are not ready for this,” a public health advocate said of an emergency declaration after talking to Health and Human Services officials enlisted in the effort.

Trump’s off-script statement stunned top agency officials, who said there is no consensus on how to implement an emergency declaration for the drug epidemic, according to interviews with officials from the White House, a half dozen federal agencies, state health directors and lobbyists.

I know this is another example of Trump understanding absolutely nothing, but I have to wonder why the people in his administration don’t have a plan worked out yet. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie headed the so-called “opioid commission” for Trump, and they recommended an emergency declaration that was originally planned for August. Apparently, the plan was opposed by budget director Mick Mulvaney and former HHS Secretary Tom Price who had legal and cost concerns. Other than some meetings that were informally chaired by Kellyanne Conway, it doesn’t appear like any actual work has been done:

Multiple sources in and out of relevant federal agencies said key leaders on the opioid issue had not been asked to draw up strategies and tactics.

A senior FDA official said she did not know who was in charge of the emergency declaration efforts and described the effort as “such a mess.”

“I would hope that the agency heads had been asked to formulate a plan, and if they haven’t by now it’s hard to believe there will be substance to any announcement made next week,” said Andrew Kolodny, executive director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, which advocates for state and federal policies to combat opioid misuse.

Yes, I can and do blame President Trump for the lack of action, and for making an announcement that demonstrates his lack of focus on opioids more than his commitment to saving lives. But I would have thought it was clear that he wanted people working on the issue. How is it possible that nothing was set up by his chiefs of staff Reince Priebus or John Kelly? This is incompetence on a much wider scale than just at the very top.

But, then we have to remember that there is presently no head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, no head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and no secretaries of the Health and Human Services or Homeland Security departments.

It’s hard to coordinate an interagency response to a public health crisis when you have a bunch of substitute teachers in the classroom.

Ideology is an obstacle here, too, as there is a basic resistance to spending money on public health of any kind, and the main focus of the administration has been to destroy the Affordable Care Act, including the provisions in it that are helping people afford and get access to treatment.

Ultimately, we need Congress to act because all the administration can presently do is shift money around. But it is not encouraging that the administration hasn’t been doing the work they should have been doing so that the president can take some action without it being an empty promise and a joke.

I wonder if I am alone in thinking that it scarcely matters whether or not Roy Moore wins the December special election in Alabama and becomes a U.S. Senator. Naturally, it would mean something if he lost to Democrat Doug Jones. What I mean is that I don’t really believe that having Moore in the Senate would add to its dysfunction or meaningfully change how the chamber functions. As far as I am concerned, he might as well already be there.

Sure, we can point out how insane Moore is and predict that he’ll make a spectacle of himself in Washington. He’ll probably try to follow through on his promise to make his first order of business the impeachment of the five Supreme Court Justices, including Anthony Kennedy, who “legalized sodomy” in Lawrence v. Texas. I expect him to talk nonstop nonsense, like his recent take that it’s against the law not to stand and place your hand over your heart during the National Anthem.

Moore might bring a little of the flavor of the House to the Senate. I’m reminded of Rep. Louie Gohmert’s famous performance in committee when he stammered, “I cannot have a witness challenge my character! The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!” I don’t doubt that Judge Moore can top Rep. Steve King’s immortal claim that for every DREAMer who is a valedictorian, “there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” It’s true that Moore has this kind of rich potential.

But will he vote or commit forms of obstruction that really distinguish himself from his predecessors Jeff Sessions and Luther Strange? Individual senators have a lot of power, especially in a narrowly divided Senate, so I don’t discount the possibility that Moore could cause the same kind of problems we’e seen recently from members as diverse as Rand Paul, John McCain, and Susan Collins. But the overall behavior of the congressional Republicans is already so detached from reality that I don’t believe Moore can do much to make things worse.

I guess that’s bad news if you think he’ll come to DC and drain the swamp. But it’s actually bad news because things are so bad that it’s now really difficult to make them worse.