Month: April 2019

There was a meeting at the White House today where the participants tried to pretend that things are normal in our nation’s capital.  Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and some other key Democrats trudged up Pennsylvania Avenue to discuss the possibility of passing a “bold” infrastructure bill with the president. By all accounts, the meeting was surprisingly civil.

In unusually positive comments about negotiations with the president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) both praised the meeting as productive and said they had agreed to return in three weeks to hear Mr. Trump’s ideas about how to pay for an infrastructure bill.

“There was goodwill in this meeting and that was different than some of the other meetings that we’ve had,” Mr. Schumer said.

Mrs. Pelosi said the two sides had “come to one agreement: that the agreement would be big and bold.”

There was one other development of consequence. Trump suggested that Congress revisit a bill introduced by Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee which would restore funding for the cost-sharing reduction subsidies that are a key component of the Affordable Care Act. Trump stopped paying these subsidies in October 2017, and it led to an increase in price for medical insurance, particularly for the Silver Plans in the Obamacare marketplace.

As he seeks reelection, Trump is looking for ways to brings down insurance costs, and he’s asking Schumer and Pelosi to give him an assist. He will probably find more resistance from his own party, but if he pushes for it he may get what he wants.

The Democrats’ congressional leaders also seem inclined to help Trump get a signature legislative achievement. At the least, they want to give the impression they’re open to working with him in a bipartisan way to pass a major “big and bold” infrastructure bill.  They agreed that something in the $2 trillion ballpark would be appropriate.

While is seems as if everyone was on their best behavior in this meeting, the major obstacles to enacting an infrastructure bill were not really addressed. The Democrats aren’t inclined to support anything close to the kind of bill that Trump floated in February which was pegged at a mere $200 billion and relied on funding from state and local governments and private investors. The Republicans weren’t willing to spend $200 billion in federal money then, and they certainly won’t want to spend $2 trillion on roads, bridges and airports now.

The Democrats will return to the White House in three weeks to hear how Trump plans on raising $2 trillion, but we already know that Schumer opposes raising the gas tax unless there are corresponding reductions in Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy.  The Republicans aren’t going to give up their most prized accomplishment of Trump’s first-term in office, so the prospects of a compromise solution don’t look promising.

Back in the real world, Joe Biden went on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” and said if Trump doesn’t relent on his refusal to cooperate with congressional investigations, the Democrats will “have no alternative to go to the only other constitutional resort they have: impeachment.”

It’s doubtful too many people are surprised that former vice-president Joe Biden has enjoyed a bump in the polls after formally entering the contest for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. But a deeper look into the cross-tabs may upset preconceptions about his base of support.

Biden is widely portrayed as a moderate or centrist candidate who has a less than stellar record on racial issues (school busing, Anita Hill, War on Drugs, crime bill) and a natural appeal to the hardhat, white working class voters the party needs to win back from Trump. He’s supposed to represent the party of the past and have little appeal to the younger generations.

You can pick up traces of some of that narrative in the data, but there’s a clear error on race. Biden is the overwhelming first choice of people of color. The candidate who seems to be struggling with brown and black folks is South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Among whites:
Biden 29%
Sanders 15%
Buttigieg 10%
Warren 8%
Harris 6%
O’Rourke 6%

Among non-whites:
Biden 50%
Sanders 14%
Warren 7%
Harris 4%
O’Rourke 4%
Buttigieg 3%

Harry Enten of CNN notes that “a majority of Democrats are over the age of 50, at least 50% of Democrats call themselves moderate or conservative and a majority lack a college degree.” This is supposed to be Biden’s sweet spot, and it’s true that he does extremely well in these demographics. On the other hand, he does pretty well outside of them, too.

Age: Biden’s up 30% to 19% over Sanders among Democrats under the age of 50. Among those age 50 and older, Biden holds an astounding 48% to 11% over Sanders. That is, his lead more than triples among older voters.

Ideology: Biden and Sanders are about even among those who call themselves “very liberal.” Biden though gains support as you go from left to right in the party. He holds an over 30 point advantage among moderate and conservative Democrats.

Education: Biden is up just 11 points among Democrats with a college degree. That climbs to 32 points among those without a college degree. (Note too this occurs on a continuous scale. Biden is weakest among postgraduates and strongest among those who never even attending college, let alone graduated from it.)

The top three in CNN‘s poll are Biden at 39 percent, Bernie Sanders at 15 percent, and Elizabeth Warren at 8 percent. Biden’s lead would not be so robust were he not breaking even with Sanders among the party’s most liberal voters. He’s actually leading Sanders among Democrats who have a college degree.

It’s accurate to say that Biden’s support weakens as we move left on the educational attainment, ideological, and age scales (younger voters are more liberal), but he is doing well enough in every demographic to dispel the notion that he has any major weaknesses within the party at all.

For pundits and analysts who are gaming out how the primaries are likely to go, there has long been a supposition that Biden is currently enjoying a name recognition advantage that is inflating his poll numbers. That’s almost certainly true.  At the moment, he’s also benefiting from a post-announcement bounce. But the premise that often follows is that his support will collapse once his record is closely examined and other candidates get a chance to capture the voters’ attention.

I have no doubt that the current number will not hold up.  It’s highly unlikely that Biden will best his nearest competitor by 24 points and capture nearly 40 percent of the overall vote.  Yet, his opponents cannot be encouraged after looking at the breadth of his support. He’s strongest among older voters who always have the best turnout rates. The character of his support is not ideologically determined (or, only weakly so), as he does best among both the white working class and people of color.

Bernie Sanders has to be disappointed that he is not currently enjoying any advantage over Biden with the party’s most liberal voters. These are the voters most likely to move away from Biden for ideological reasons, and they represent the only real hint of weakness for Biden in these polls. Highly-educated white liberals have an outsized voice in our political debates, but they aren’t numerically significant enough to carry a candidate across the finish line.  Biden’s rivals will have to eat into his areas of strength if they want to stop him, and they’re not going to do it with the kinds of attacks we’ve been seeing online.

Biden’s final advantage is that the people who don’t like him have so many alternatives.  He may be at his high-water mark in the polls at the moment, and over 60 percent of votes may prefer someone else or have no opinion, but unless someone emerges quickly to capture and consolidate the non-Biden vote, he has a long way to fall before he needs to be concerned.

This isn’t the shape of the race we’re seeing described in the media. Charles Blow of the New York Times has a problem with how the contest is being portrayed too, but he doesn’t question the basic accuracy of the assumption that Biden’s appeal is based on his potential as a white working class champion:

…there is part of the Biden enthusiasm, and to a lesser extent the energy around candidates like Bernie Sanders, that focuses too heavily on the fickle white, working-class swing voters and is not enough focused on the party’s faithful.

Indeed, in political circles, Biden’s chief attribute in this election feels like his apparent appeal to these white voters.I think that we need to question why the presence of the white male elder seems to ease anxiety among these white voters, and why the Democrats seem to be banking on that.

He argues that supporting Biden is a way of treating white working class voters as “white buffaloes — sacred entities,” and complains that that basis of his appeal stems from “Democrats (who) want to hold constant their support from women and minorities even as they chase the votes of people hostile to the interests of women and minorities.”

No doubt, some people are leaning toward Biden for these reasons, but the assumptions are flawed. Biden doesn’t need to “chase” the support of minorities because he’s currently leading Sanders 50 percent to 14 percent among non-white Democrats.  If you’re looking for the candidate who excites “the party’s faithful,” he’s easy to find. The real basis for Biden’s appeal is that he comes closest (at the moment) to uniting all the party’s factions across its ideological and racial lines, and that he is very strong in the middle where at least some undecided voters are available for poaching.

Every time I write about how formidable Biden is as a candidate, I am accused of supporting him. That’s not why I keep harping on this subject. I want to correct a bad narrative. There’s an enormous disconnect between what people think of Biden’s political base and his actual political base.  This is also true, to a lesser degree, for Bernie Sanders. If people don’t understand where they’re likely to get their votes, then they’re not going to do a good job of telling you what’s likely to happen once people start voting.

Congratulations, you’ve found the Froggy Bottom Cafe & Lounge! You’re probably wondering what kind of place this is and why it’s prominently displayed on the front page. Answering that question is going to take a little while, so why don’t you have a seat and order something to eat and drink:

To understand this place you first have to understand the name. It’s a play on the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington DC where the State Department is located, but it’s also a nod to Darwin the Frog.

From March 2005 to April 2019, this community went by the name of Booman Tribune. When I established Booman Tribune in 2005, I chose a frog in handcuffs as the mascot, and Darwin is the name this blogging community gave to the frog. The mascot was inspired by Ambassador Joe Wilson’s expressed desire that Karl Rove be “frog-marched” out of the White House for his role in outing his wife Valerie Plame as a covert CIA officer.

The motto of Booman Tribune was “We won’t rest until they’re frog-marched out,” and some people (raise your hands!) still have t-shirts and coffee mugs with the logo and motto printed on them.

Before there was a Cafe & Lounge, there was a Welcome Wagon. The Welcome Wagon was the invention of Diane Eller (known as Diane101) who sadly passed away in September of 2018. I wrote an homage to her here that explained her tremendous influence and importance in shaping the friendly culture of this community. Her basic insight was that people who were coming to the site for the first time needed some way to understand where they had arrived, how the site worked, how to post a comment or a video or a picture, and what kind of behavior was permitted or discouraged. Sure, people could read the FAQ, but they’d learn better and more quickly by socializing with other members. At first, Diane kept a watch out for new commenters and would invite them to come to the Welcome Wagon and make some friends.

Before long, the Welcome Wagon became a place for people to talk about things other than the war in Iraq or the latest outrages from the Bush/Cheney White House. It was really a kind of proto-social media environment where people talked about their children and pets and recipes and hobbies. The first Cafe grew out of the Welcome Wagon, and although much of the history is lost in the mists of time (or hiding in the archives), I imagine that someone offered a thirsty traveler a drink 🍺 and a bite to eat 🥪, and the idea for the Cafe sprung from there.

At first, the Cafe was so busy that the comments would quickly reach into the hundreds after a few hours, and new threads would be created several times a day.  The first Lounge was undoubtedly created when a new Cafe was needed at a time of day more suited to nightclubbing 💃🏻 than sipping coffee ☕ under an umbrella ⛱️.

The next step was people booking events in the Cafe. There might be a book club where people discussed their favorite novels, or a movie or music-themed thread. Two of the most popular offshoots were the Friday Foto Flogging stories and the painting diaries of user boran2. These traditions have been retained for Progress Pond.

The Cafe operates from 6am to 6pm (Eastern Time). Feel free to eat-in 🍔 or take-out 🥡. The lounge is open from 6pm to 6am. It serves wine 🍷 and spirits 🍹, although don’t forget to eat something 🌭 or you might pass out.

Every Friday, the space converts in the Foto Flog 📸, which is a place to share your favorite photographs and enjoy the photos submitted by other users. On Saturdays, the Cafe is often operated by longtime user boran2, who shares his progress with his latest paintings 🎨. You can enter the Froggy Bottom Cafe by clicking on the front-page icon, but remember that heavy political discussion is generally discouraged; frivolity is more the order of the day.

You can find the FAQ on the front page, but you’ll also find it here in the Cafe and Lounge. As soon as I’ve prepared a User Handbook, that will also be available in every Cafe. If you want help with something, put your question in a comment in the latest Cafe and someone will steer you in the right direction.

And, now, in keeping with the frivolous priorities of Cafe culture, let’s get the party started!

I am in pretty close to total agreement with what Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog says below, which is a disturbing self-realization. However, I don’t think he’s considered every angle:

I realize that many Trump critics don’t want to bother with impeachment because it seems futile (the Senate will never convict), or because they think impeachment will alienate swing voters going into 2020, or because they think the 2020 election is just around the corner (even though a year and a half is a long time).

But I also suspect that many Americans have simply come to accept the notion that white guys in expensive suits routinely get away with white-collar crime, and it’s just the natural order of things not to bring them to justice, or even to make an attempt at prosecution. The bankers got away with crashing the economy a decade ago. The executives who gave us the opioid crisis are all still at large. The George W. Bush administration got away with torture and Ronald Reagan escaped punishment for Iran-contra. That’s just how it goes.

That would explain why rank-and-file Democrats aren’t united in a push for impeachment — as noted above, only 62% favor it and only 53% strongly favor it, while 87% of Republicans oppose it, 78% strongly. What you don’t see among Democrats is the opinion expressed by many lefty pundits that impeachment must happen, otherwise it means we’ve given up on the rule of law. I think many Democrats believe that happened quite a while ago.

What’s missing here is a serious treatment of what happened the last time Congress attempted to remove a president for obstructing justice. At that time, the Republicans believed President Clinton couldn’t be allowed to just get away with lying under oath, using his secretary to conceal gifts he’d exchanged with his mistress, etc. To permit that, they felt, would do real damage to the rule of law. The Democrats didn’t really disagree. They did not propose that nothing happen to the president, instead advancing an official censure from Congress as more commensurate with the offense. After all, the president’s crimes were really committed primarily to avoid embarrassment and marital strife rather than to abuse his power. The left generally felt that it was Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr who had abused his power and gone on a witch-hunt, which is another reason it wasn’t inclined to mete out the severest punishment.

In the end, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives exercised their power to impeach Clinton, leaving an indelible black mark on his record, but the Senate never came close to convicting and removing him.

People still argue about which party benefited from impeachment in the years ahead. The Republicans did poorly in the 1998 midterm elections which took place in an environment dominated by the impeachment process.  As a result, Newt Gingrich lost his job as Speaker of the House. On the other hand, Al Gore took on some of the collateral damage from the scandal, and arguably overcompensated by picking Clinton-critic Joe Lieberman as his running mate. His narrow, controversial loss in the 2000 election is hard to imagine without the predicate of the Lewinsky scandal. It seems like the Democrats benefited from impeachment in the short-term, but not in the long-term.

As for vindicating the rule of law, that’s also hard to judge. In theory, slapping Clinton with an impeachment charge should have had some deterrent effect on future presidents, but then the fact that we was acquitted worked in the opposite direction. At the same time, incidents during the Bush administration, like the U.S.attorneys scandal, did more to undermine the rule of law than letting a perjurious president remain in office. If the American public is cynical about the justice system, a lot of the blame lies with the Bush administration’s decision to politicize the Justice Department. Had Al Gore become president, it’s possible that standing up for the rule of law in the Lewinsky matter wouldn’t have been swamped by subsequent events.

Either way, the public strongly opposed removing Clinton from power, and it’s widely conceded today even in conservative circles that the Republicans overreached.  Yet, the only salutary aspect of the whole saga was that Congress actually did stand up for the rule of law. The problem is that the Republicans didn’t respect it themselves when they regained the White House.

So, there are a lot of different aspects we can look at from the last time Congress had to consider what to do about a president who had obstructed justice.  Politically, the Republicans took a short-term hit that seemed to benefit them in the next presidential election. Clinton was not successfully removed, but he was chastened and punished. Yet, it’s hard to argue that it resulted in better behavior from future presidents.  You can’t successfully uphold the rule of law by being a hardass when it suits you and then letting things pass when it does not.

For the public, I think the episode is remembered with revulsion. It was thoroughly unpleasant at the time, no one got what they wanted, and nothing tangible was gained.  Another problematic legacy is a precedent was established that perjury and obstruction of justice are not necessarily high crimes. That’s not a great precedent, as we can see now as we consider what to do about the Mueller Report. I think Democrats look at the l’affaire Lewinsky and don’t see much they’d like to emulate.

So, while I agree that some of the resistance to impeaching Trump among Democrats comes from a kind of fatalism about ever holding rich, powerful men accountable for their actions, I also think it’s a response to what happened the last time it was attempted.  They became cynical so that today, when “lefty pundits [say] that impeachment must happen [or] we’ve given up on the rule of law,” they simply don’t believe that the rule of law can be effectively upheld by acquitting a president for impeachable crimes.

I don’t subscribe to this few myself, for one very simple reason. Donald Trump is suspected of being compromised by a hostile foreign power. He is destroying valuable norms on a daily basis. His offenses constitute an unambiguous abuse of power. It’s therefore a mistake to equate what happened in 1998 and 1999 with Bill Clinton to what must happen now with Donald Trump.

Back then, punishing Clinton was optional, and a formal reprimand would have been sufficient. Today, we have a serious problem that will not go away on its own.  We can’t ignore it, and we can’t go down without a fight.

 

On Easter, I wrote a piece that did not appear at Political Animal called “The Billionaires are Only Half Awake.” It was in response an article Greg Jaffe did for the Washington Post that detailed the emerging concern among many Silicon Valley billionaires that “the tech economy has somehow broken capitalism.” One thing I found frustrating about their perspective is that they saw Elizabeth Warren as a much bigger threat to their interests than Bernie Sanders, largely because they felt she actually understood their world.  They sensed that Big Tech was swallowing up everything and distorting capitalism, and she was the one who had most thoroughly diagnosed the problem. Yet, they did not value that at all. Their response was fear.

On Monday, New York magazine published an east coast version of this story. Gabriel Debenedetti’s article focuses on Wall Street Democrats and the anxieties they are feeling about the direction of the party. They tend to lump Sanders and Warren together, and when they strategize the financiers’ primary goal is to find a champion who can simultaneously deny them the nomination while still being well-positioned to beat Donald Trump. Debenedetti uses a recent gathering to demonstrate his point.

One night in early April, roughly 20 of the Democratic Party’s highest-profile donors from the financial industry sat down over dinner to discuss how exactly they were feeling about the 2020 presidential race. For the most part, it wasn’t great.

Convened by two veterans of liberal fund-raising — investors Steven Rattner and Blair Effron — the group had no hard-and-fast agenda except to share notes on the overflowing field of candidates. The crowd of Democratic heavyweights, including Clinton-administration Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs and Citi alum Robert Rubin, former ambassador to France Jane Hartley, and venture capitalist Deven Parekh, knew most of the contenders well. But coming to some kind of consensus, picking a plausible candidate they felt they could all live with and throw their considerable money behind — that was a far-fetched proposition.

Like their Silicon Valley counterparts, they are suffering from a palpable sense of dread. They also see Sanders and Warren as a dual-threat, with Warren being the more menacing of the two.

Nearly everyone else in the field, the financiers felt, was being pulled leftward by Bernie Sanders (the preposterously well-funded contender they considered too crazy to even imagine in the White House) and Elizabeth Warren (less crazy, Democrats on Wall Street think, and way more competent). “She would torture them,” one banker told me. “Warren strikes fear in their hearts,” explained a New York executive close to banking leaders from both parties — so much fear that such investors often speak of the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, a former law professor and consumer advocate, as a co-front-runner with Sanders. “How do we come up with an alternative?” asked one person at the dinner.

The article focuses on a subset of liberal-minded Wall Streeters, but any concerns that apply to them obviously apply with much more force to the larger contingent of conservatives in Big Finance. If the Democrats lose what little support they have in this world, they’ll feel the full undiluted weight of their power and wrath. How this turns out could have big implications for the country, not just in the upcoming elections but going forward.

There was no agreement. By evening’s end, multiple donors walked away planning to write checks to three or four or five candidates — hoping they stay relatively moderate — rather than going all in on any one. Among the committed Democrats on Wall Street, this wait-and-see, as-long-as-it’s-not-Bernie-or-Elizabeth posture has become the norm. “This is like venture investing. You really don’t know who’s going to break out, but your hope is you have a good portfolio and that one of these investments breaks out,” Bruce Heyman, a former Goldman managing director and ambassador to Canada, told me.

Of course, these longtime donors are more committed to the Democrats than the average guy on Wall Street. Two years ago, Trump seemed noxious enough that Democrats (reasonably) hoped to continue growing their considerable advantage over Republicans in the New York finance set. But one GOP-driven tax cut and one leftward shift in the Democratic Party later, a worried handful of bankers is considering turning that story on its head. “They’re too far left! They’re too far left!” said Alex Sanchez, CEO of the Florida Bankers Association. “I mean, honestly, if it’s Bernie versus Trump, I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do,” one Democratic hedge funder told me. “Maybe I won’t vote.”

I welcome the Democrats’ shift away from Wall Street and Silicon Valley, although I think the movement has been greatly exaggerated. In some ways, the angst this is causing is a sign of the party’s health. Yet, as I explained in my April 10 piece “The Left Wants to Pick a Fight It Cannot Lose,” there is a significant risk involved here. In that piece, I explored the economics of fascism and the commonalities I see between the 1920’s and 1930’s and the politics of the present. In particular, I focused on how Europe’s fascist parties enlisted the support of Big Business by promising to protect their interests and status.

Fascist regimes generally came into existence in times of crisis, when economic elites, landowners and business owners feared that a revolution or uprising was imminent. Fascists allied themselves with the economic elites, promising to protect their social status and to suppress any potential working class revolution. In exchange, the elites were asked to subordinate their interests to a broader nationalist project, thus fascist economic policies generally protect inequality and privilege while also featuring an important role for state intervention in the economy.

There are two sections of Debenedetti’s piece that have an ominous resonance. The first touches on social status:

Democratic donors aren’t especially worried about policy; few have sussed out where candidates stand on Dodd-Frank or the carried-interest tax loophole, and few believe that, aside from Sanders or Warren, any contenders are likely to make an aggressive new push for regulation as president. What agitates them instead is — in a replay of the alienation they felt during the Obama presidency thanks to a few stray “fat cats” comments — how Democratic rhetoric threatens their sense of status.

The second deals with financial interests:

Over coffee recently in midtown, an investment pro with a long history in Democratic politics described the struggle to resist the unexpected pull of Trump. “What matters more?” he asked, looking up at me. “My social values or my paycheck?”

While considering the threat this poses to our civil rights and representative form of government, I wrote:

I’d like to think that our business elite is different from the folks in Italy and Germany during the rise of fascism. I hope that they have enough patriotism and respect for our Constitution to see that it would be a mistake to align with Trump. But this isn’t something I have a lot of confidence in, and that’s what is keeping me up at night.

I guess this is less of a prescription than a warning. If the left in this country wants to run on an economically populist platform that scares the bejesus out of our big business community, they cannot afford to lose.

The big business community has a lot of big but fragile egos, as President Obama discovered when he experienced an outsized backlash against some mild criticism he sent their way.  They’re unduly susceptible to challenges to their status which makes this otherwise savvy group surprisingly irrational when assessing risk.  In the 1920’s and 1930’s, this helped moved them into the fascist camp.

What’s frustrating is that they sense something is desperately wrong with the the president, the country, and the economy, and they know that they bear some responsibility for that. They say that the only policies that really concern them are coming from Bernie Sanders and (especially) Elizabeth Warren, but as I noted in my billionaires piece, Warren is the one who has her finger on the pulse of what is ailing us. In the current issue of the Washington Monthly,  we have feature articles by Eric Cortellessa, my brother Phil and Grace Gedye that look at the problem of under-regulating Big Tech. Warren’s call to use antitrust enforcement to break up the power of these monopolies is exactly what these companies need whether they want to accept it or not.

Yet, instead of welcoming someone who understands their business and how to prevent them from “breaking capitalism,” they’re getting ready to move into Trump’s xenophobic, white nationalist camp in an effort to protect their status and their paycheck.

If they make that move en masse, it will have consequences. The Big Business/Big Finance/Big Tech communities often overestimate their ability to dictate political outcomes, but they have much more power that ordinary citizen groups.  We rely on them to aggressively protect the freedom of the press and not to “subordinate their interest” in protecting the American system “to a broader nationalist project.”

The Democratic primary voter doesn’t have much control over how this will shake out.  They can’t be expected to vote out of fear that they might offend the tender sensibilities of venture capitalists and Wall Street bankers. The responsibility for navigating through this minefield is going to fall on the candidates themselves, and in particular on whoever becomes the nominee.  The ideal candidate will be able to communicate effectively with the business world and convince them that some changes are necessary and for their own good.  They’ll also have to convince them that Trumpism represents a much bigger threat to their country, and ultimately their finances and status, than a return to the kind of regulated capitalism and antitrust enforcement that worked so well in the mid-20th Century.

Throughout his career in the U.S. Senate, I found Richard Lugar’s voting record to be consistently appalling, but I could say the same about almost every one of his Republican contemporaries. What set him apart was how he went about everything else a senator does other than voting. His committee work was serious; his hearings were generally substantive; his conduct was civil and his rhetoric was tempered. He presented a good example for how the Senate can and should work.

Near the end of career, I think he struggled with the direction his party was heading. The conduct of the war in Iraq obviously troubled him, as did the behavior of the Bush administration. He tried to walk a fine line, and for the most part I believe he failed. In the end, I was extremely disappointed in his performance, largely because I strongly sensed that he knew better and simply didn’t have the courage to stand up and be counted.

Having said that, I think he was basically a decent man in spite of his cowardice and despite holding many political beliefs that I found unconscionable. I’m sad to hear he passed away on Sunday.

The cause was complications from chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a neurological disorder, according to a statement from the Lugar Center, a Washington nonprofit organization focused on weapons proliferation, food security and other issues that he worked on in Congress.

Mr. Lugar began his public-service career on the Indianapolis school board and achieved national attention as the city’s mayor before winning election to the Senate in 1977. He twice chaired the Foreign Relations Committee — from 1985 to 1987 and from 2003 to 2007 — and he was the panel’s ranking Republican from 2007 until his defeat, by which time he was the longest-serving senator in Indiana history.

We’d all be better off if there were some people like Dick Lugar currently serving in the Senate’s Republican caucus. Sadly, I can’t point to anyone who deserves to be considered as a worthy successor. Some of the other serious legislators who were Lugar’s colleagues, like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch, kept moving farther and farther to the right along with the party as whole. Hatch recently retired, but not before defiling his once earned reputation as a top policymaker. Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming showed during the markup of the Affordable Care Act that he is capable of doing real work, but he’s fundamentally a troglodyte.

I can’t say that the Democrats currently have any partners on the Republican side that they can truly trust and work with productively, and that shows what was lost when Lugar was ousted in a primary.

I’ll remember him somewhat fondly, although always with a certain degree of bitterness.

Hello again painting fans.This week I will be continuing with the Pocomoke City, Maryland painting.  The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.  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 above.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.I’ve now painted over the shadows, roof and chimneys.  The shadows are far too dark and will be revised yet again, but the porch roof is now straight.  The green has been overpainted as well.

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

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

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Sounds like the circus is back in town folks.

I could easily spend a few hours/weeks/months going over the problematic politics in country music (and will probably write up an extended rant about the Old Town Road controversy, which shows that suits behind the contemporary country genre are still as racist as ever) but for now, this is just a contribution to our culture department.

Feel free to drop a few comments!

Personally, I think Elijah Cummings should have the former chief of the White House’s Personnel Security Office, Carl Kline, arrested by the House Sargent-at-Arms, imprisoned in the Capitol Building, and held over for trial for contempt of Congress. It’s time to stop fucking around and play hardball with these non-complying Trump administration officials who want to defy subpoenas. I spent April 23rd researching how this could be done and I wrote about it on the 24th. On the 25th, Axios took notice (without crediting me, of course), and now everyone is talking about Congress using its inherent contempt power.

It turns out that my idea wasn’t as outlandish as I thought because House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler was apparently discussing it privately in early April. Maybe my piece raised awareness on the right that this was a real possibility, because the ranking member on Elijah Cummings’ committee, Jim Jordan of Ohio, seems to have reacted.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, is seeking to resolve a tense dispute between Democrats and the White House as part of the panel’s review of the Trump administration’s security clearance process.

In a letter obtained by CNN and dated Friday, Jordan is asking White House counsel Pat Cipollone to allow former official Carl Kline to sit down for a voluntary transcribed interview to avoid a growing constitutional clash between the two branches of government. The move comes after the White House instructed Kline, who now works at the Defense Department, to defy a subpoena because Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings would not allow a White House attorney to attend Kline’s deposition, citing committee rules.

Cummings is now threatening to hold Kline in contempt, which Jordan says in his letter could happen as soon as Tuesday.

“To avoid unnecessary conflict between Congress and the Executive Branch and to de-escalate Chairman Cummings’ orchestrated interbranch confrontation, I write to ask whether Mr. Kline would agree to appear for a voluntary transcribed interview with committee staff,” Jordan wrote, offering next Tuesday or Wednesday as options.

Holding Mr. Kline in contempt is not an option. Assuming the White House doesn’t relent on their ridiculous conditions and Kline doesn’t unilaterally decide to comply, he will be in contempt of Congress. The only question remaining then is what to do about it. Should Cummings ask Attorney General William Barr to enforce his subpoena? Should he file a civil suit against Mr. Kline and fight it all the way up to the conservative Supreme Court in the hope that they will compel Kline’s testimony? Those options are wastes of times in more ways than one.

The only viable option is to arrest Kline on the House’s own authority and have a trial in the House of Representatives. They are allowed to imprison him until the end of this session of Congress. They should begin that process immediately, and when the White House and Mr. Kline realize that they’re serious, maybe some compliance will be forthcoming. They sure as hell isn’t going to be any compliance in the absence of that kind of aggressive move.

Rep. Jordan’s letter is a small indicator that the message is beginning to get through that the Democrats are considering going nuclear. If I can take some small credit for getting this ball moving, I’m glad to played my small part.

The Democrats aren’t dealing with the kind of political opponents who play by the ordinary rules. Either they bring the hammer down on them, or they will be on the receiving end of the hammer.

It’s not news that Donald Trump is a fraud, nor that he has poor record of practicing what he preaches. Still, I feel compelled to highlight his employment practices every time a new story emerges detailing his propensity to hire undocumented or foreign workers over American applicants.

For years, President Donald Trump has insisted it’s impossible to find Americans to fill seasonal jobs at his hotels, resorts, and wineries, leaving him no choice but to hire foreign guest workers instead.

“You can’t get help,” he has said.

But government records obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal for the first time that at least 58 US workers applied for the temporary jobs as cooks, servers, and housekeepers at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump resorts from early 2014 through mid-2018.

Only one of them appears to have been hired.

The last time I harped on this issue was back in January when I lamented that Trump’s use of undocumented workers should be a bigger scandal, but even then I admitted that I’d probably be moving on to focus on the next outrage, just like everyone else.

Perhaps it’s just a personal quirk, but I am especially galled by this particular brand of hypocrisy.  I think it’s because it gets to something that goes beyond my political disagreements with the president or even people with a conservative viewpoint.  If they aren’t worried about environmental degradation or access to health care, I can somewhat respect their opinions even if I think they’re cruel, short-sighted, or based on faulty information.  If they actually like the president’s style and are mostly pleased with his results, I can almost write that off as a difference of priorities and taste.

But I have real trouble getting past examples of the president doing things he professes to despise and that he’s premised his entire political career on stamping out.  I don’t much care if the president hires undocumented people to manicure his fairways and greens, and I don’t mind if he wants visiting Irish students to wash the dishes at Mar-a-Lago. It’s the people who make up his most fervent base of supporters who are supposed to care about these things, because it’s taking the jobs of hard-working patriotic Americans. He’s not putting them first. They should realize that he’s conning them, and they should be angry about it.

It makes me a little crazy that he gets away with this, and I just wish that one day the scales would fall from more people’s eyes.

Instead of giving jobs to local workers, the Trump properties applied for permission to bring in more than 375 low-wage workers from abroad on short-term visas. All of the requests were approved by the Department of Labor, the records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show.

The BuzzFeed article focuses on Trump turning down American applicants in favor of foreign workers on short-term visas, but this is legal and only half of the “problem.” He has consistently relied on undocumented workers who do not have visas, and that isn’t legal. Both of these practices fly in the face of Trump’s whole political raison d’être.

And, yet, Gallup says that 89 percent of Republicans approve of the job he is doing. It’s like some prion disease or brain virus has infected almost half the country.