Month: November 2018

When I was in high school in the 1980’s, we were taught that the Lincoln-Douglas debates were a standard for high-minded political debate, and in more recent years I’ve seen them mentioned favorably in comparison to the kind of debates we typically see between candidates in our era. It’s true that the format allowed for a much fuller exploration of issues than we get in our rapid-fire debates today. Each candidate was given an hour to talk and then an additional half hour was provided for the first speaker to give a rebuttal. They alternated who went first throughout the seven debates.

On the other hand, the kind of rhetoric Sen. Stephen Douglas used was as base as anything we saw from Donald Trump. Here’s an example that includes audience participation:

I ask you, are you in favor of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges of citizenship? (“No, no.”) Do you desire to strike out of our State Constitution that clause which keeps slaves and free negroes out of the State, and allow the free negroes to flow in, (“never,”) and cover your prairies with black settlements? Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, (“no, no,”) in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves? (“Never,” “no.”) If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. (“Never, never.”) For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. (Cheers.) I believe this Government was made on the white basis. (“Good.”) I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races. (“Good for you.” “Douglas forever.”)

Because I was born in 1969, I was lucky to just miss seeing this kind of rhetoric used out in the open. Even today, no one is quite this forthcoming about their white supremacy–not even David Duke or Steve King. But it’s no longer foreign-sounding the way it was for the first 45 years of my life. Douglas’s invading horde didn’t come in a caravan from Central America but from neighboring Missouri. His insistence that blacks not become citizens and voters is at the heart of these comments from Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi.

A video surfaced Thursday of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi saying it might be a “great idea” to make it harder for some people to vote, and her campaign quickly responded that she was “obviously” joking.

Hyde-Smith, who is in a runoff against Democrat Mike Espy on Nov. 27, made the remark at a campaign stop in Starkville, Mississippi, on Nov. 3. It was posted to Twitter on Thursday by Lamar White Jr., publisher of The Bayou Brief. Smith earlier this week posted video of Hyde-Smith making a comment on Nov. 2 about a “public hanging” that started a controversy.

“And then they remind me that there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who … maybe we don’t want to vote,” Hyde-Smith is heard saying. “Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.”

A sitting U.S. Senator said she thought it is “a great idea” to make it more difficult for blacks to vote because Republicans don’t want them to vote.

I don’t see this as high-minded political debate. I don’t consider Sen. Stephen Douglas’s argument against equal rights and the abolition of slavery as high-minded. And I don’t see a whole lot of difference between these two examples.

Douglas does have one thing in his favor that cannot be said about Sen. Hyde-Smith, though, and that is that he quite accurately predicted that the country might enter into a civil war if Lincoln’s position prevailed. If he had stuck to that argument to urge caution and restraint, I’d feel differently about his performances, but he appealed to the basest emotions of his audiences rather than to their intellects.

Hyde-Smith isn’t trying to avoid a national catastrophe and hundreds of thousands of deaths. She just wants to win a full-term to the Senate. And she thinks one good way to assure she wins is if blacks have difficulty voting or having their votes actually count.

I actually think what she is doing is worse than what Douglas was doing. Her support of white supremacy might be implicit where Douglas’s support was explicit, but she can’t even hide behind the possibility that her cynicism is in the service of peace and national unity. Her cynicism is entirely self-serving and based on the unstated premise that blacks neither have nor deserve equal rights.

This isn’t something you can joke about because there is no joke or punch line. It is the policy of Republican Party to suppress the black vote by every means available, and we’re seeing that now play out in states like Georgia and Florida. Sen. Hyde-Smith is facing a black opponent in a runoff election on November 27. Mike Espy served as the Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton administration.

It would be nice if all the people who want to support him have an easy time casting their vote, but that’s apparently a laughable idea in Republican circles.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Abraham Lincoln was the Republican in those Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Not infrequently, a Republican or Democratic candidate for office loses by a narrow margin and people point at a third party candidate who is supposedly to blame. For Republicans, this is usually a Libertarian who got more votes than the difference between the two major party candidates, and for the Democrats it is usually a member of the Green Party. There’s undeniable merit to these charges, but it’s also impossible to know how third-party supporters would have voted if they didn’t have their preferred candidate as an option.

It’s probably safe to say that Al Gore would have won Florida outright (and thus the presidency) on Election Night in 2000 if Nader hadn’t been on the ballot, and it’s likely that Hillary Clinton could say the same thing about Jill Stein. But people still argue about these elections because there’s no clear way to know for sure what would have happened in one-on-one races.

Maine has devised a solution and we can no see the results. Incumbent Republican Bruce Poliquin, who represents the state’s 2nd Congressional District, took a plurality of the vote on Election Night. However, he did not get a majority. In some southern states, this would lead to a second runoff election between the top two finishers. But in Maine the voters were asked to list the candidates in order of preference.

With ranked-choice ballots, if no one gets an initial majority, all but the top two finishers are dropped and votes for other candidates are reassigned. When this was done on Thursday, the Democratic candidate Jared Golden pulled ahead and was declared the winner.

We can surmise what happened. There were more third-party voters who listed Golden above Poliquin as a second choice, and that allowed Golden to leap ahead of Poliquin and claim a majority.

With this system, you can vote for a left-leaning third-party candidate instead of the Democrat or a right-leaner instead of the Republican without worrying that it will change the election result in way you don’t support. It gives you the option to support the candidate you like without guilt or extraneous considerations interfering in your decision. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t prefer this system to what we have in the rest of the country.

I’d think third-parties would support it because it gives people more permission to consider their candidates. It should make it easier for them to occasionally finish in the top two. The major parties should like it in general (if not necessarily in every individual case) because it prevents fake candidates from running as spoilers who will peel away support.

I very much doubt we’d have suffered through eight years with George W. Bush as our president if we had ranked choice voting, and we almost definitely wouldn’t be dealing with President Trump now. But the best thing about ranked choice voting is that we don’t have wonder. More people in Maine’s 2nd District preferred Jared Golden to Bruce Poliquin, so they got the representative they wanted.

That didn’t happen for the country in 2000 or 2016.

I guess the Republicans won’t like this system after all.

While most of the political world was focused on supposed disarray within the House Democratic caucus as they prepare to decide whether Nancy Pelosi will have a second go-round as Speaker, the House Republicans actually held their leadership elections on Wednesday. There were no surprises.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who is virtually the last California Republican seen in nature, obliterated his Freedom Caucus challenger Jim Jordon of Ohio in a resounding 159-to-43 tally. He will become the House Minority Leader, which is the position Pelosi holds now. The White House requested that Jordan be compensated with the top job on the House Judiciary Committee so he can help fend off impeachment, but McCarthy shrugged that off. The Republican Steering Committee will decide who gets the Judiciary position, and they have no love for Jordan or the Freedom Caucus.

The job of House Minority Whip, the GOP’s number two position, went easily to Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana in a voice vote. Back in June 2014, when Scalise won the job of House Majority Whip, I was so unfamiliar with him that I wrote a piece called “Who is Steve Scalise?.” Before long, it emerged that Scalise had spoken at a European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) conference, but courting white nationalists didn’t keep Trump out of the White House and it didn’t cost Scalise his leadership position.

Scalise is a more sympathetic figure these days because he was nearly mortally wounded in the June 14, 2017 Congressional Baseball Shooting. He handled that with a lot of grace and courage, but his politics remain the same.

The most disturbing outcome of the GOP’s House leadership elections was the uncontested elevation of Liz Cheney of Wyoming to the number three position that was once held by her father: chair of the House Republican Conference.

She made her bid for the spot on Nov. 7 with a letter to colleagues in which she criticized Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), who has held the position for three terms. McMorris Rodgers announced the next day that she was stepping aside from her leadership role and seeking to climb the ranks of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The elder Cheney, who served as GOP conference chair from 1987 to 1989, was present for Wednesday’s vote for his daughter.

“He told me not to screw it up,” Liz Cheney told reporters with a laugh Wednesday afternoon when asked what advice she received from her father.

That ought to send a cold chill down the spine of the entire world as it could be the first sign of the Zombie Apocalypse.

In 2013, Cheney announced a primary challenge to incumbent Wyoming senator Mike Enzi but she withdrew ignominiously by January 2014 when she couldn’t gain any traction or overcome the perception that she was a Virginia-based carpetbagger. Unfortunately, a vacancy allowed her to capture Wyoming’s lone congressional seat two years later, with a 60-29 percent advantage.  It’s hard to avoid the perception that the sophomore lawmaker owes her quick rise to the leadership more to her name than to her accomplishments. What’s not clear is why the Cheney name is still good in Republican circles.

Here’s how the rest of the elections went:

In other uncontested races, Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), a Baptist preacher and leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee, was elected GOP conference vice chairman, while current GOP Conference Secretary Jason Smith (R-Mo.) won another two years in that post.

Meanwhile, Republicans picked Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) to lead candidate recruitment and campaign efforts as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee as the GOP tries to win back the majority in 2020.

In the only other competitive race, Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) defeated fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) in the race for GOP Policy Committee chairman.

The most consequential of those picks is the election of Minnesota’s Tom Emmer to lead the NRCC. One of only three surviving Minnesota Republicans in Congress, he was just reelected with 61 percent of the vote. His exurban 6th district, which straddles the Mississippi River as it winds its way from the Northwest into the capital region, was formerly held by the infamous Michele Bachmann.

Rep. Emmer will replace Ohio’s Steve Stivers whose NRCC leadership team included defeated members like Mimi Walters of California, Kevin Yoder of Kansas, Ryan Costello and Rep. Keith Rothfus of Pennsylvania, John Katko of New York, and the nearly defeated Rodney Davis of Illinois, Bill Johnson of Ohio and Will Hurd of Texas. Former NRCC chairman, Pete Sessions of Texas, was also defeated.

Like fellow Minnesotan Pete Stauber, an incoming freshman Republican serving the state’s 8th District, Emmer is a former hockey player. This seems to be a new prerequisite for a Republican hoping to win election in the land of 10,000 lakes. For some reason, the southern-dominated House Republican caucus must have convinced itself that Emmer can win back the suburbs, but Emmer is most famous for narrowly losing the governor’s race in the most favorable year of 2010, despite taking enormous donations from Target and Best Buy. I am sure the Democrats will shortly remind voters that Emmers was twice popped for drunk driving before becoming a legislator and sponsoring a bill that would have reduced the license suspension time for getting a DUI and ended the practice of revoking a license immediately prior to an actual conviction in court.

So, the GOP’s new House leadership is made up of a nearly extinct species, the California Republican, a Louisiana friend of white nationalists, the newest member of the blood-gargling Cheney clan, and formerly hard partying hockey player who is a favorite of big monopolizing retail chains.

Surely, they will lead the Party of Lincoln back to its former glory.

The EU and UK negotiating teams have finally come to a deal just in time for a November EU Summit and a pre-Christmas rush to have “a meaningful vote” on the deal in the House of Commons. There is no telling what mood conservative law makers will be in after they have been exposed to the Tory faithful back in their constituencies over the Christmas period. So the UK government strategy seems to be to get this over with as quickly as possible.

Initial reaction in the UK has been almost universally hostile even before the precise text of the deal has become known. This is where various Brexiteer delusions meet the harsh winds of reality: Boris Johnson is not altogether wrong when he claims that the deal is “vassal state stuff” with the UK continuing to be subject to some of the rules of the Single Market without having a direct say in their development over the years.

Ostensibly that has all come about because of a shared EU UK commitment to avoid a “hard” customs border within Ireland. Had it not been for Ireland’s continued membership of the EU, the fate of the Irish border would not have merited a moments thought on the part of Brexiteers, and indeed it it did not occupy any media or mind space during the referendum campaign, despite the Irish government’s frantic efforts to raise the alarm.
So Theresa May’s solution is for all of the UK to remain within the Customs Union and Single Market (CUSM) for a limited period, to be ended only when all sides are agreed an alternative mechanism for avoiding a hard border in Ireland has been found and implemented. For Brexiteers, this may mean never, and even Remainers are aghast: The deal is so obviously inferior to remaining a full member of the EU with a say in how the rules of the CUSM are developed in the future.

Most people in the UK are probably puzzled as to how such a seemingly peripheral issue as the border within Ireland could have become such a central driver of the progress of the negotiations and the shape of the final deal. But this would be to misunderstand Theresa May’s negotiating strategy: In reality, Northern Ireland, and the risk of a return of “the Troubles” there, was merely the lever Mrs. May used to prise open continued access to the CUSM and maintain “frictionless trade” for British business for the foreseeable future.

For the EU, this solution was only acceptable if British business continued to be subject to the rules of the CUSM so as to maintain a “level playing field” with everyone else.  The Brexiteer dream of striking out onto the world stage and negotiating their own trade deals with countries all over the world will have to wait until membership of the CUSM has been replaced by a Canada style free trade deal and an agreed mechanism for keeping the Irish border open.

Basically all the more difficult decisions have been postponed. British business can continue to trade with the EU (and the rest of the world) on current terms and thus avoid the disruption and chaos that no deal would have wrought. In fact very little will change on 29th. March except that the UK will no longer have a direct say on the future development of the EU.

Trade deals can take a very long time to negotiate and may never be ratified, as the aborted EU US trade deal has shown. Trump has shown more interest in tearing up existing trade deals rather than negotiating new ones, and even within the EU, new trade deals are no longer the preserve of the technocratic elite: they are coming under increasing scrutiny in national parliaments (all of which must ratify any new deal) as the benefits of globalization are no longer unquestioned dogma.

So what are the chances of Theresa May getting this deal through the House of Commons? Almost none, has been my view for the past two years, such is the gulf in expectations within the UK between what the Brexiteers promised, and what can be delivered in reality. Brexiteers must shout “BETRAYAL” as otherwise their little ruse to “take back control” (for themselves) will be uncovered. Somebody else has to take the blame for the obvious disparity between their promises and reality, and Theresa May is the designated fall girl.

The Labour opposition must do what oppositions must do: Oppose, even though what Theresa May has delivered looks very similar to what they themselves have been proposing. The important difference, of course, is that they want to be the ones to take back control, and it is more than convenient that it is the Tories who will take the fall for the obvious, and inevitable short comings of the deal. The consequences of Brexit must always be someone else’s responsibility.

For Remainers, the deal probably represents the least worst option if they can’t get their expressed wish for a second referendum to reverse the Brexit process. It avoids the chaos of the no deal option and raises the hope that the economic status quo can be maintained almost indefinitely, until a second opportunity to have a re-think on Brexit presents itself. But do they really want to be associated with such an unpopular deal? At best, they will hold their noses and claim they are only doing this to save the UK from the disaster of no deal. Some may vote against in the hope of precipitating a crisis that will lead to a second referendum. It’s a high risk strategy.

The DUP will be hypersensitive to any clauses which indicate that N. Ireland is being treated any differently to the rest of the UK. They too, want to take back control – of N. Ireland – something which has been denied to them by the Good Friday Agreement’s insistence on cross-community governance and “parity of esteem” between the Unionist and Nationalist communities. They claim to speak for N. Ireland even though they only received 28% of the vote in the 2017 Assembly elections.

And so they are happy to enforce differences between N. Ireland and Great Britain on marriage equality, abortion services, transparency of political funding, recognition of non-English languages, and the regulation of animal health and food products on an all-Ireland rather than on an all UK basis. But they have to be in control. Ceding control to the EU, Ireland, or even a future UK government is not an option.

So the choice for all in the House of Commons is to accept the current deal, or hold out for something better. For Labour, that something better is obviously a general election and the prospect of power. For Brexiteers and the DUP it is the prospect of toppling May and putting one of their own in charge with a mandate to conduct a more robust negotiation with the EU. They crucially need to convince the waverers that a better deal is still possible. May loyalists need to convince any waverers this is the best deal possible and the only alternative is the prospect of a no deal Brexit.

The EU can bask in a glow of satisfaction that they have discharged their primary obligation under A. 50 of negotiating an exit deal with a departing member. They have done so without throwing a continuing member (Ireland) under a bus or creating any damaging precedents for any other member who might seek to leave. If the UK now chooses to reject the deal and leave without any deal, then so be it: the choice and responsibility for the consequences is theirs.

The EU can afford to wait until expectations in the UK have moderated sufficiently in the aftermath of no-deal chaos to impose almost any deal they like. Certainly they are unlikely to revisit and substantially revise the existing deal on offer under any circumstances, including in the event of a change of government in the UK. Why would they?

For Ireland, the deal represents a triumph of diplomacy to be shouted about as little as possible in order to avoid making political life for Theresa May even more difficult. Ultimately, the Irish government is agnostic as to whether Theresa May survives or not – the Tories are no friends of Ireland – but it is in Irish interests to see this deal succeed. Seeing the DUP squirm may add some vicarious pleasure, but is not the point of the exercise. The hard won benefits of the Good Friday Agreement must be safeguarded, and this trumps all other considerations.

The consequences of this deal being rejected by the House of Commons are for another day. In the meantime we can watch as the British political establishment tries and perhaps fails to come to terms with the reality of Brexit. This is no time for schadenfreude.

By the time Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1995, the House Republicans had spent sixty-two years in the minority, with the exception of two single-session majorities they gained after the 1946 and 1952 elections.  The first of those exceptions was a fluke related to a contracting postwar economy, and President Truman won a surprising election in 1948 by dubbing the Republican majority the “Do-Nothing Congress” and running aggressively against them.  The second exception came in the midst the unpopular quagmire in Korea and with the help of Dwight Eisenhower’s unifying coattails.  That Congress became famous for its witch-hunt against alleged Communists.

For the rest of the mid-20th Century, the Republicans were in a mostly deep minority in both chambers of Congress, although they did regain the Senate for the first six years of Reagan’s presidency.  You can’t really understand the modern Republican Party or the rise of conservatism within their ranks without understanding that Republicans spent more than a half century having almost no say about how the federal government spent its money.

Eventually, this frustration and powerlessness would find a partner in Jim Crow Democrats who were frustrated with Supreme Court rulings and Civil Rights legislation that stripped them of their power to discriminate against and oppress their black populations and maintain one-party rule in the South.

When these two sets of grievances came together and combined with the anxieties of religious conservatives, the Reagan Revolution was born and set in motion a process by which conservatives would take over the Republican Party and eventually win control of Congress.

The key point is that the unifying spirit of the coalition was an opposition to the federal government’s power. Economic elites had gravitated to the Republican Party primarily out of a desire to avoid taxation, regulation, and pro-labor policies. Southern whites and religious conservatives wanted state control and local autonomy.  And Republican lawmakers were sick and tired of having federal monies appropriated in a way that didn’t necessarily put their constituents first.

Seen in this light, conservatism was ill-suited to actually run the federal government and enforce or oversee its laws.  As soon as Gingrich took the Speaker’s gavel, Congress immediately entered into a conflict with the Clinton administration that resulted in a government shutdown.  Shutdown politics dominated the last six years of Barack Obama’s presidency.  In between, the George W. Bush administration briefly lost its Senate majority to a defection when they couldn’t act with enough moderation.

This basic picture did not improve during Donald Trump’s first two years, as Congress failed in all its top priorities with the exception of the first tax cut in history to actually be a political liability for the party that enacted it.  Even with total control of the White House, the House,  and the Senate, the Republicans couldn’t pass normal budgets or push through the non-vital appropriations bills that fund the government.

Ordinarily, politicians want the responsibility of governing and are rewarded for gaining positions of influence, but this isn’t the case with conservatives. The Republicans have actually had trouble getting people to serve on the  Appropriations committees despite the fact that appropriators are showered with lobbyist money which relieves them of a lot of the grunt work it normally takes to raise campaign cash.  The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rodney Freylinghuysen of New Jersey, decided to retire rather than face the electorate.  Tom Rooney of Florida unexpected retired as well.  Appropriators John Culberson of Texas, Kevin Yoder of Kansas were defeated.

This pattern repeated itself on several other influential committees. The chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Jeb Hensarling of Texas, retired, as did senior member Ed Royce of California.  Steve Pearce of New Mexico and Luke Messer of Indiana unsuccessfully sought higher office. The following members were defeated: Randy Hultgren of Illinois, Keith Rothfus of Pennsylvania, Mia Love of Utah, Tom MacArthur of New Jersey, and Claudia Tenney of New York. Bruce Poliquin of Maine will probably fall victim to that state’s unique form of ranked-choice voting.

The powerful Ways and Means Committee saw many losses as well.  Three members (Jim Renacci, Diane Black, and Kristi Noem) decided to quit Congress and run for office in their home states. Rep. Sam Johnson of Texas and David Reichert of Washington retired. Three other members were defeated.  You might remember that the Republicans had difficulty convincing Paul Ryan to run for Speaker because he had just achieved his lifelong goal of winning the gavel on Ways and Means. It’s not normal for people to flee the tax-writing committee, but conservative voters don’t value this kind of power and the conservative movement doesn’t allow its lawmakers to take full advantage of their federal power. In fact, far from being revered or rewarded, Republicans are more apt to invite a primary challenge when they actually participate in running the government.

Some Republican committee chairs retired this year either because they could see the writing on the wall and anticipated that they’d be serving in the minority next year or because the party’s internal rules limit how long members can serve as chairmen and their time was up.  Scandal even played a part.  Still, the list of lost chairmen is telling: Rodney Freylinghuysen of New Jersey (Appropriations), Jeb Hensarling of Texas (Financial Services), Ed Royce of California (Foreign Affairs), Bob Goodlatte of Virginia (Judiciary), Lamar Smith of Texas (Science), Trey Gowdy of South Carolina (Oversight), Pete Sessions of Texas (Rules), and Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania (Transportation).

The truth is that most House Republicans will feel more comfortable in the next Congress because they will never be strong-armed to vote for federal spending on anything. They won’t have to decide how to divvy up money within our federal agencies and departments. They can just go back to opposing everything the federal government does, and that’s what conservatism is really all about. That’s how it evolved and developed in the 20th Century, and they don’t know how to actually govern nor do they really want to govern.

The exceptions to this rule are the people who actually step up to serve on the key committees or in the leadership, and those leaders never remain popular for long. Gingrich flamed out rather quickly, and Boehner and Cantor couldn’t survive, nor could Paul Ryan. The Republican members who walked the plank to keep the government open during Obama’s presidency found themselves facing primaries or a hostile base and most either retired in frustration or were defeated in the 2018 midterms.

Unfortunately for the GOP, they have Donald Trump in the White House and the government still needs to be funded. When they oppose everything, they’ll eventually be opposing the administration’s ability to cut a deal to keep the government open.

For this reason, they won’t be truly happy until there is a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate. Only then can they focus entirely on what they’re actually good at, which is to make up conspiracy theories and scream bloody murder.

Trump is the perfectly logical expression and culmination of the conservative movement.

Happy Hump Day!  I’m taking over the DJ and bartender duties while Don Durito is on walkabout.  For today’s theme, I’m being a good environmentalist and recycling the songs I posted in the comments to Midweek Cafe and Lounge, Vol. 85, which were the finalists for Music Video of 2018 at the People’s Choice Awards.  Yes, I love awards shows.

Selena Gomez, “Back to You”

Ariana Grande, “No Tears Left to Cry”

Childish Gambino, “This Is America”

Camila Cabello, “Never Be the Same”

BTS, “Idol”

I begin with the winner of not only Music Video of 2018, but also Song of 2018, Group of 2018, and Social Celebrity of 2018, BTS with “Idol.”

While I voted for “This Is America” by Childish Gambino, I can see why “Idol” won.  Speaking of which, here is my personal favorite among the finalists.

My second favorite nominee was “No Tears Left To Cry” by Ariana Grande.

I’ll post the videos of the other two finalists plus videos of songs by the other music winners in the comments.
Once again, I’m concluding the diary proper by quoting Don Durito.

For those of you wondering how I and Neon Vincent are circumventing Sucuri to embed videos, here is an example of the embed code we use, so that you can replicate as wanted:

Just remember that each unique 11-digit video code in YouTube needs to be pasted in two separate locations within the embed code in order for your video to show up properly. So easy that I can do it!

With those instructions, feel free to post your favorite music videos in the comments.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that North Korea “is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images.” Today, the president of the United States called this “nothing new” and “fake news.”

The story in the New York Times concerning North Korea developing missile bases is inaccurate. We fully know about the sites being discussed, nothing new – and nothing happening out of the normal. Just more Fake News. I will be the first to let you know if things go bad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2018

There’s more than a little reason to believe that President Trump is not an objective judge in this case. While campaigning unsuccessfully against Senator Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Trump described his relationship with Kim Jong Un this way, “…we fell in love, OK? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”

This is insane. But it’s also the kind of thing that warrants removal from office. Unless you think North Korea’s nuclear and intercontinental missile programs are trifling matters, it’s simply too dangerous to have a commander in chief who refuses to take the intelligence seriously.

I don’t really understand why Trump has an affinity for the world’s most horrible leaders or why he picks fights with our allies. To some degree, he can choose who he likes and who he doesn’t. But when it comes to the threat of a nuclear attack on our country or on our allies, we can’t tolerate someone who won’t look at evidence.

This subject is a whole lot more serious than violations of the Emoluments Clause, violations of campaign finance law, or even obstruction of the Russia investigation. It could be a matter of life and death for hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Maybe it’s because this is so serious that the media can’t seem to treat it with the urgency and prominence it deserves.  I would hope that Trump’s cabinet understands what is at stake, but I don’t see much evidence for that.  The longer this goes on, the more normalized it becomes. And the threat grows.

I didn’t know until today that when columnist Robert Novak tarred George McGovern as the candidate of legalized pot, draft amnesty and legal abortion (later alliterated to acid, amnesty and abortion) that his source was McGovern’s future running mate Tom Eagleton. Of course, Eagleton also contributed to McGovern’s historic drubbing by declining to disclose that he’d been treated for depression with electroconvulsive therapy. Once that became public, McGovern felt compelled to drop him from the ticket in favor of Sargent Shriver.

The acid, amnesty and abortion charge was never a fair characterization of McGovern’s stated positions. He did not favor the legalization of either acid or marijuana, his position on abortion was that it should be left to the states to decide, and Nixon, Carter and Ford all favored some kind of amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers, so it’s hard to see how McGovern really stood out from his peers.

Nonetheless, the accusation captured something fundamental about the chasm that was opening between the new left and the old, and the full measure of the backlash would be felt at the ballot boxes in November 1972. The Democrats under McGovern’s leadership had gotten too far ahead of the rest of the country and whatever the merits of their positions at the time it’s fair to say that they were out of touch with the electorate and had alienated an essential part of their political base.

Something similar seems to be happening now to the Republican Party. As Ron Brownstein details in his careful review of the midterm election exit polls, traditional GOP constituencies are moving against the party with what can only be described as revulsion and indignation. Chief among these are white professionals, particularly women, and particularly in the suburbs.

In McGovern’s case, he shed Democratic voters while doing very little to win over anyone from the Republican side, resulting in a landslide loss. The Republicans aren’t in quite so dire a position because they’ve actually been gaining support among the Democrats’ traditional farmer/labor wing. In other words, we’re not seeing the playing board tip so much as watching the pieces get moved around. That’s why the 2016 election was so close and why the Senate is so evenly divided and why bellwether states like Florida are still delivering toss-up results. Yet, this swapping of voters is not going to remain close to even for long because the Democrats are much better positioned for the future.

More than anything else, the midterms exposed an enormous generational divide.

The exit poll measuring preferences in House elections found that Democrats carried fully two thirds of voters aged 18-29. That was their best showing with them in exit polls since at least 1986 (narrowly exceeding their level even in former President Barack Obama’s sweeping 2008 victory) and a big improvement on Hillary Clinton’s 55% among them in 2016. And preliminary calculations indicate that youth turnout may have been half again as large in 2018 as it was in 2014, the most recent midterm.

Even more striking was the consistency of the Democratic advantage around the nation. The Democratic candidate won voters aged 18-29 in all 21 Senate races with an exit poll except for Indiana, where Joe Donnelly tied Republican Mike Braun. (These figures do not include the exit poll in California, where two Democrats ran against each other after claiming the top spots in last June’s state top-two primary.) Senate Democrats carried about three-fifths or more of these younger voters in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota (both for incumbent Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, who was elected in a special election), Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Democrats also reached at least 60% with them in governor’s races in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In the California governor’s race, Democrat Gavin Newsom carried 69% of younger voters.

Just as important, the Democratic advantage extended up the age ladder. Against Trump in 2016, Clinton carried only 51% of voters aged 30-44; while Trump won just 41% of them, a substantial 8% scattered to third-party candidates.This time, those voters consolidated behind Democrats. In the national House exit poll, Democrats won 58%.

As younger voters get older and settled in their communities, they will vote in greater percentages, while the base of the GOP is already geriatric. It’s true that today’s kids will likely get more conservative and tax-averse as they reach their peak-earning years, but the GOP is starting off at a very low point with this generational cohort. That they’re already losing people in their peak-earning years is a bad sign for the future.

An obvious reason why the Republicans are doing so poorly with people under retirement age is that their message is basically a rebellion against the growing diversity of America. That movement isn’t going to slow down and will in fact accelerate regardless of whether or not Trump succeeds in building a southern border wall.

If the Republican Party doesn’t change to adapt, they will suffer increasingly big political losses over time.

The other major indicator in the midterms was educational attainment. Pretty much any area with above-average education levels was a killing zone for the GOP. With some exceptions in the Senate races, like West Virginia, Montana, and Nevada, any places with below-average education levels were unfriendly to the Democrats.

This creates an unfortunate problem. Just as conservatives now see diversity as a political threat, they are beginning to see a college education as a political threat. It’s not just that college students are increasingly hostile to conservative opinions. The Republicans aren’t going to remain committed to higher education if they think it is costing them elections.

When their ideas are seen as disreputable and immoral by academia, that makes it easier for them to reject expert opinions and the entire scientific method, leading them into an unfit condition to exercise leadership. They’ve already traveled pretty far down this road, but it’s likely to get far worse in the near future.

Increasingly, the GOP doesn’t want to live in reality. They don’t want the country as it is, and they don’t want the evidence that scientists and experts provide. They’ve created a right-wing media-saturated bubble to protect them from outside facts, but this seems more like a holding action than any kind of permanent solution.

The deep erosion of the Republican Party’s position in Texas is a leading indicator of where things are headed if conservatives retain their iron grip on the Party of Lincoln. But, unfortunately, the results of the midterms will make things worse. The GOP in January will be representing a less diverse, less educated, and less affluent slice of America than they are today, making it unlikely that they’ll hear the right messages from their constituents.

It appears that they’ve entered the same kind of death spiral that the Democrats suffered leading up to the Reagan Revolution.

I have written regularly about this angle on Trump’s impossible victory in the 2016 presidential U.S. Election. While the Hillary Democrats and the US intelligence community went after decoy Putin and Russia. Nice play Bibi Netanyahu.

[Links in article below are mine – Oui]

Saudis Close to Crown Prince Discussed Killing Other Enemies a Year Before Khashoggi’s Death | NY Times |

Top Saudi intelligence officials close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked a small group of businessmen last year about using private companies to assassinate Iranian enemies of the kingdom, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

The Saudis inquired at a time when Prince Mohammed, then the deputy crown prince and defense minister, was consolidating power and directing his advisers to escalate military and intelligence operations outside the kingdom. Their discussions, more than a year before the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, indicate that top Saudi officials have considered assassinations since the beginning of Prince Mohammed’s ascent.

Continued below the fold …

Saudi officials have portrayed Mr. Khashoggi’s death as a rogue killing ordered by an official who has since been fired. But that official, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, was present for a meeting in March 2017 in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, where the businessmen pitched a $2 billion plan to use private intelligence operatives to try to sabotage the Iranian economy.

○ Salman Hit Squad Murdered Khashoggi

During the discussion, part of a series of meetings where the men tried to win Saudi funding for their plan, General Assiri’s top aides inquired about killing Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and a man considered a determined enemy of Saudi Arabia.

…
As for the businessmen, who had intelligence backgrounds, they saw their Iran plan both as a lucrative source of income and as a way to cripple a country that they and the Saudis considered a profound threat. George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, arranged the meeting. He had met previously with Prince Mohammed, and had pitched the Iran plan to Trump White House officials. Another participant in the meetings was Joel Zamel, an Israeli with deep ties to his country’s intelligence and security agencies.

○ Collusion Trump Transition Team with UAE/Israel

Both Mr. Nader and Mr. Zamel are witnesses in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, and prosecutors have asked them about their discussions with American and Saudi officials about the Iran proposal. It is unclear how this line of inquiry fits into Mr. Mueller’s broader inquiry. In 2016, a company owned by Mr. Zamel, Psy-Group, had pitched the Trump campaign on a social media manipulation plan.

George Nader, who was cooperating with the Mueller investigation, has fled to the UAE after UAE officials “pulled strings” with the Trump administration, the Daily Mail reports (_link)

— Liz Sly (@LizSly) March 22, 2018

[Al-Jazeera recently noted that Nader worked for over a year in a brazen attempt to curry favor with the Republican National Committee on behalf of the UAE.]

A spokesman for the Saudi government declined to comment, as did lawyers for both Mr. Nader and Mr. Zamel.

○ Israel’s Pegasus: Tracking Software for Saudi Dissidents
○ EmerData: Cambridge Analytica founders behind new London-based data processing company
○ Notorious Mercenary Erik Prince Is Advising Trump From the Shadows
○ Former Mossad chief joins Black Cube
○ Report: Israeli private security firm Black Cube spied on Obama aides for Trump

Related reading …

○ US-funded resources used in 2015 campaign to unseat Netanyahu | Ynet News |
○ International Coalition to Defeat Democrats and Hillary in 2016
○ UAE and Shared Values with US of Trump
○ New Fascist Pariah States America and Israel Lashing Out

Matt Taibbi makes one unassailable point in his latest piece for Rolling Stone. Whenever the Republicans lose they say that their candidates were insufficiently conservative and whenever the Democrats lose the media say that the party needs to move to the middle. Because the Democratic Party leadership tends to listen to the media while the Republican leadership tends to listen to their own propaganda, the result is an inexorable march of American politics to the right. Beyond that, though, his long essay is a tiresome exercise in setting up a false dichotomy based on the flimsy premise that “Big Ideas” are the answer for everything.

It’s fair to question if the media have any real grasp of what defines “the middle” or what the American people really want. It’s fair to argue that the Democrats have tried to move to the middle in the past and have had uneven results at best. But one thing we know about losing campaigns is that the losers needed to get more votes from somewhere. If not from the middle, then from fringes or the apathetic. If not from cities, then from the suburbs. If not from the suburbs, then from the small towns and rural areas. If not from men, then from women. If not from the young, then from the old. If not from Florida, then from Michigan and Wisconsin.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton sought to run up the score in the affluent and well-educated suburbs and she succeeded. The Democrats built on that success in 2017 to make huge gains in Virginia and take back the governor’s mansion in New Jersey. They built on it again in 2018 to win back the House of Representatives. As far as I can tell, though, this hasn’t really been as much a carefully calibrated success based on political messaging as a natural revolt of the educated and civil against whatever the fuck you want to call Trumpism.

It appears that Democratic candidates could use almost any message in the 2018 midterms and win provided that the state or district was at least somewhat invested in the idea that reality has a factual basis. On the other hand, if the education level of the state or district fell below a point certain, the Democrat could curse Pelosi as the devil and call their own party a bunch of loons or pitch Medicare-for-All and the abolition of ICE and none of it would make a lick of difference. They were going to lose.

This isn’t the kind of 50-50 split any healthy country should want to see. In 2020, it’s quite possible that a Democratic contender will figure out how to get the 200,000 or so additional votes Clinton needed in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to win the presidency, but that won’t make them some kind of genius, give them some kind of mandate, or reconcile the other half of the country to their term in office. And I don’t think this changes at all based on the formula the candidate uses to succeed.

Maybe they’ll win by dominating by even larger margins in the suburbs, or maybe they’ll get more disaffected people to engage. Maybe they’ll dominate the gender gap, winning women by an insurmountable margin. Maybe they excite the base to a greater degree than their opponents. If it results in some tiny victory then nothing much is going to get done and very little is going to change.

Winning is enormously better than losing, and you can look to the makeup of the federal courts if you need any proof of this, but trading turns stuffing the judicial branch with partisans isn’t going to lead us out of this mess. The only solution in sight will require the kind of thumping Nixon gave McGovern or Reagan gave Mondale. If the public cannot be convinced to repudiate Trumpism with at least the same conviction that they rejected Herbert Hoover, then everyone in this country and not just the Democratic Party will have failed, and failed miserably.

Try as I might, I can’t envision “The Big Idea” that would really help make this happen.

Here’s what I know.

For the party of the left to win a landslide presidential election, they will need to present something that at least gives permission to a lot of people to support them who have powerful reasons and a long history of withholding support.  Hillary Clinton couldn’t do that. It’s possible someone else can.

The best argument against Trumpism is the man and the results. In no way can this be described as “A Big Idea.”  It’s more of a basic idea.  The best coalition against Trump is the biggest coalition against Trump, and that means a movement that is ideologically flexible and culturally welcoming.

That doesn’t really have anything to do with progressivism versus centrism, but it does mean arguing over, e.g., single-payer versus the public option is a diversion from the mission.  People disagree about that stuff, but they can find consensus on their desire for a return to normalcy and a government based on some semblance of competency and sanity.

People care about issues and they’re going to fight for them. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but over the next two years anyone fighting over the best plan for raising the minimum wage or paying for free college is engaged in a battle that has nothing whatsoever to do with building the biggest possible movement against Trump.

If this country has anything left worth saving, we’ll run Trump out of office on a rail long before Election Day in 2020. Maybe we’ll be fighting the smoking husk of a Pence administration by then. Either way, we should have the opportunity to bring together a much bigger coalition than anything we’ve seen since FDR was in office.  But we’ll need someone who is seen as acceptable by a large number of people who do not consider themselves on the left in any ordinary sense.

One thing the success of Trump’s campaign has shown us is that ideology is overrated as a political vote-getter, as is the idea that candidates can’t violate taboos. That doesn’t mean that ideas don’t matter, but it does mean that it makes little sense to say that our choice is between progressivism and centrism.  There’s nothing inherently centrist about running an inclusive non-ideological campaign.  There are plenty of non-threatening progressive ideas that the vast majority of citizens can agree with, whether they’re concerned about the climate or gun violence or the health of their local economy.

Taibbi summed up his argument this way:

Something as dangerous as Trumpism isn’t going to be defeated by catch-phrases and political marketing tricks. The best bet is big ideas, and no matter what the talking heads on cable say, moving to the center — again — probably won’t cut it.

I think that’s all wrong. On the cynical front, it’s hard to see how anyone could see the success of Trump as anything but catch-phrases and marketing, so the most obvious answer is to do a better job of it than he does. On a more serious front, the only big idea that matters is that something has gone desperately wrong and it needs to be corrected. People agree on that and not much else. The job is to collect those people from wherever we can, and a lot of those people are in the center or even to the right-of-center. That doesn’t mean that the Democrats should all become Blue Dogs. The Blue Dogs went nearly extinct for a reason. But it means that the winning approach isn’t going to be to find the candidate who warms the hearts of the most ardent progressives with a language that appeals only to them.

The times call for a unifying leader, and if they understand what’s wrong with Trumpism then they’ll be someone we can trust to get the job done. If they get the message right, they can probably be as progressive as they want to be.