Month: April 2019

Complaining that progressive bloggers are being mean to you is not a great look for a Democratic presidential candidate. Personally, I am not interested in tearing down the candidates with petty criticisms, but people are going to be critical and the Republicans will bring far worse. And if I decide I want to say something negative, I’m not going to be thrilled if candidates go whining to my editors.

Ronald Reagan wasn’t really that popular when he was president except when he needed to be. He peaked in 1984, during his reelection bid, but he was a major drag on Republicans in the 1982 and 1986 midterms, and he left office in a state of befuddlement and tarnished by the ongoing Iran-Contra investigation. There were three factors that turned Reagan into an icon.

First, he was the first president since Eisenhower to get elected twice and not be forced to resign. In that sense, he restored a sense of normalcy to what had become a dysfunctional presidency. Second, people like Grover Norquist launched a major program to name things after Reagan and to burnish his image, which is an unusual thing. Usually, political operatives are done with politicians when they are of no further use. The conservative strategists understood that they needed Reagan to be perceived as worthy of Mt. Rushmore to fend off any kind of return to the pre-Reagan days for the GOP.

The third factor was that Reagan was followed by another Republican president, thereby ratifying in a sense the job he had done. Even Eisenhower couldn’t make that claim.

One of the main costs of Trump’s surprise victory was that it denied President Obama this kind of ratification, and I remember really feeling the sting of that in the weeks after the 2016 election. It wasn’t just that his accomplishments would be unraveled by a spiteful Trump, but also that it would be an indelible mark against Obama for history. It’s one reason why Hillary Clinton apologized so profusely to Obama for losing.

Joe Biden understands that there are a lot of Democrats who felt and still feel the way that I did.

“Joe Biden is finalizing the framework for a White House campaign that would cast him as an extension of Barack Obama’s presidency and political movement. He’s betting that the majority of Democratic voters are eager to return to the style and substance of that era — and that they’ll view him as the best option to lead the way back.”

“The former Vice President has begun testing the approach as he nears an expected campaign launch later this month. After remarks at a recent labor union event, Biden said he was proud to be an ‘Obama-Biden Democrat,’ coining a term that his advisers define as pragmatic and progressive, and a bridge between the working-class white voters who have long had an affinity for Biden and the younger, more diverse voters who backed Obama in historic numbers.”

This is smart politics on Biden’s part, and it’s a powerful emotional message for Democrats who feel an affinity and fondness for President Obama.

Of course, Joe Biden is a different person. He has a different voting record. He has a different way of interacting with people. Obama frequently listened to his advice without following it. Biden wouldn’t truly be a third term for Obama, but it’s also true that he was shaped and remolded from his experience serving as Obama’s vice-president. He’s more a product of that political movement at this point in his career than a Delaware senator.

A lot of analysts seem surprised that Biden is consistently leading in the polls, and most appear to believe that his lead will slip and disappear. I think he’s starting from a very strong position, and it’s mainly because of his connection to Obama in the voters’ minds. Obama will never be able to erase the blemish of Trump on his legacy, but a Biden presidency would effectively be the American people admitting they made a mistake with Trump.

A lot of Democrats couldn’t care less about any of this and are more forward-thinking. Their biggest problem is that they have so many candidates to choose from that it’s difficult to build a movement to match what Biden can bring to the table.

I still think Biden is going to be formidable if he enters the race, and I think he’s figured out his biggest asset.

Pretty close to every day, I get a feeling in my stomach like I want to purge myself of a poison, and it’s all thanks to our president. One way or the other, we must be rid of this man.

So, what’s the stoopidest thing you’ve seen today?

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 below.

Since that timme I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week’s cycle I have added shadows to the porch and under the various gables.  I have also added yellow to the siding more of which will be added to the right rear.  Note that these are preliminary layers/colors and will change by the time I am done.

 
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.

President Trump’s plan to bus immigration/asylum applicants to major U.S. cities as political retribution, which he is still considering, is premised on dubious assumptions. As Philip Bump points out in the Washington Post, our major metropolitan areas are accustomed to new immigrants of both the legal and illegal variety, and they don’t generally see them as threatening.

Obviously the sudden injection of tens of thousands of people in nearly any city might tax city resources, though it’s not clear what the scale under consideration is in the White House’s aborted plan. But the entire point of sanctuary cities is to make immigrants feel as though they’re an important part of the community. The idea that San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York City would be baffled or outraged at the arrival of new immigrants sort of misses the fact that those cities have been welcoming new immigrants for decades — to the extent that they go out of their way to pass laws offering some protection.

Naturally, when people from foreign countries arrive here, they gravitate to communities that have preexisting populations of people who speak their language, practice their religion, and can offer support in housing and employment. The people who are granted asylum will mostly wind up in sanctuary cities even without being given a free bus ride there by the federal government.

It’s true that Trump could deliberately overwhelm the resources of a city by unloading bus after bus of new arrivals. But that would then be the primary problem, rather than any natural spike in crime. Most of these people are arriving with their children in tow. They’re not coming here to join criminal gangs or commit rapes and assaults. They’re coming here to escape gangs and crime.

It’s really only because the president and his inner circle seem to believe their own racist rhetoric about “caravans” that they think that Democratic politicians will face a giant backlash from their own constituents in response to a crime wave. If there is a backlash, it’s more likely to be related to budget fights that are caused by the federal government creating an expensive problem.

To the extent that any increase in crime actually results, the federal government would be liable for that, since it would be the result of their deliberate plan. If they try to get someone stabbed, raped or killed, and they actually succeed, then they’re clearly to blame for that.

Greetings photography enthusiasts. It’s Friday, and I am still trying this as a weekly feature. I took this one in Tampa last year, near the Convention Center.

Please note that this is a reboot of a series that went to seed a few years ago. I know that there are some photo hobbyists like me who post here already. As always, I am hoping to incite a bit more “community behavior” in our community blog. AndiF and BobX used to curate the old foto flog. Others contributed quite regularly. Folks like Hurria, JimF, KNUCKLEHEAD, dada, olivia, ask, tampopo, Man Eegee, and a whole host of others posted photos at one time or another. I am sure I have missed someone in that list.

I don’t use anything especially fancy. My Samsung Galaxy S6 finally died after a very long life. I had it for a fairly long time. Currently, I am using an LG ThinQ40. It has some nifty features that I am still playing around with. One of my offspring has commandeered my old 35mm film camera, so I don’t get to use that one very often. At over 30 years, finding replacement parts when something goes bad on it gets to be a bit tricky. That’s another story for another day.

Some of our regulars have actual professional equipment, and before Photobucket turned into such a drag, we were graced by some absolutely stunning landscape shots, close-ups of flowers and insects, and some abstract photography. I’ve often marveled at the creativity of the folks who have meandered in and out of this community over the years. I use flickr to host my photos for the time being, although given some changes at flickr, that may soon end. I have tried out imgur as well. So far, so good.

Consider this series as a homage to its predecessor, and dedicated to the spirit of its ancestors. Enjoy.

Maybe it’s because my family is dominated by academics, but I’m fortunate not to have any close or even remote relations that watch Fox News or regurgitate the network’s toxic talking points. A lot of people aren’t so fortunate. Luke O’Neil has collected a bunch of sob stories for a piece in the Guardian. Here’s a typical example:

I don’t watch Fox News because of course it warps your psyche, but it must have changed tone after Trump was elected. My dad slowly became even more xenophobic and angry than he used to be.

My wife and I are worried about letting our daughter stay with our respective parents, because their toxic anger and resentment is slowly becoming their entire identity. I hate what Fox News has done to almost everyone in my family. It’s absolute poison and the only thing I think is worse is that there are people who think that destroying the morals and conscience of multiple generations is worth a few more bucks. I absolutely refuse to believe that people like Hannity don’t know what they are doing.

I wish I could do something, but who has the time or energy to combat that?

This hits on a theme I often discuss, which is the destruction of people’s morals and conscience. As things have taken a darker and darker turn in our country, and really throughout the world, in the last two decades, I’ve come to see moral leadership as more and more important. I don’t think human beings are basically good or fundamentally bad, but they’re highly malleable. How they behave, even what they feel, can be influenced by whether they’re asked to be generous or resentful, welcoming or defensive, optimistic or angry.

Fox News definitely seeks to make many “bucks” by catering to people’s worst instincts, and it actually transforms people. It makes people fearful and furious. A liberal who spends all day watching MSNBC will have reasons to be anxious and upset, too, but they’ll also be receiving constant messages about the value of tolerance, inclusiveness, and care for the vulnerable. For the most part, the moral instruction is consistent with what you might hear Pope Francis say about the poor and with Martin Luther King Jr.’s aspiration that we judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

Fox News has such a broad reach in our culture that it is measurably damaging people’s morals and conscience. It’s turning good people into bad people, much the way that civil or sectarian conflicts harden populations against each other, sometimes for centuries. But it’s still just a news outlet. It’s influence is nothing compared to the influence of Donald Trump who has transformed one of American’s two major political parties into smoldering heap of dung.

I sometimes rolled my eyes when President Obama exhorted us with moral language and insisted that America was fundamentally good, and far better than how it was presenting itself. But, just by making that effort, he incrementally made us better people. Sometimes we are blessed with the right leaders at the right time, and sometimes we seem to be plagued by poor leadership. Right now, the West seems to be lacking competent leaders, and it’s having a crippling effect here at home and also in Europe. But we’re also suffering from outright bad moral leadership in some cases.

I began my adult life as a secular-minded philosophy student, impatient with moral arguments and suspicious of leaders who spoke in moral terms. My initial problem with the Bush administration was that their reckless disregard for the truth prevented people from having reality-based conversations. I no longer see this as the primary threat we face. What I see now is a daily devolution of the basic goodness and generosity of our people. Every day this gets worse, the path back gets longer, and the prospect of societal breakdown grows.

Our next president will hopefully bring as much of the country together as possible, but what they absolutely must do is exert moral leadership to stem and reverse this tide. If they can.

In Off the reservation I wrote I would “make some far out predictions based only on the most tenuous of currently observable facts.” At the risk of confirmation bias I will hereunder examine what evidence to support that thesis is gradually becoming available. I will rely heavily on Wikipedia compilations of all available polls as any one poll has to come with so many health warnings.

Even compilations of polls have to come with a health warning that they represent, at best, a snap shot in time, and are subject to becoming out of date very quickly in a rapidly evolving environment. For that reason I will rely as much as possible on polls whose field work was conducted after 29th. March 2019, the date Brexit was supposed to happen. I do so as I believe that date could come to mark a watershed in UK history.
I also believe that not a lot of significance may happen between now and 23rd. May, the starting date for the European Parliament elections. Westminster is in recess, and Theresa May has survived (again). The May Corbyn talks are being kept on life support so that both sides can claim they are doing something positive to resolve the mess, but it is in neither leader’s interest to actually come to an agreement.

Any agreement they could strike would probably split both the Labour and Conservative parties and might not pass in the House of Commons even with both leaderships applying the whip. Corbyn has absolutely no incentive to bail out Theresa May, and May has now achieved her immediate objective for the talks of providing a pretext for securing another A.50 extension.

It has come at the price of having to take part in the EP elections, but she can always claim that they are irrelevant in the context of delivering Brexit. Until she can’t.

What happens if the turn-out is much higher than previous EP elections and results in a large surge of support for Remain or second referendum supporting parties? Strangely for a departing member UK European Parliament elections turnout has actually increased slightly over the years, while it has declined almost everywhere else.

A poll for the Open Europe think-tank by Hanbury Strategy indicates the Tories would suffer a crushing defeat if the elections took place now.

Basically a 60:40 split in favour of Remain or second referendum supporting parties… This compares to the results of the 2014 UK EP elections as follows: Labour 25%, Conservatives 24%, UKIP 28%, Lib Dems 7%, Others 18%: Almost identical to the 52:48 referendum result. Basically, since then, Labour has gained over 10% support at the expense of hard Leave parties, UKIP and Farage’s new Brexit party.

These results are corroborated in General Election polling for the main parties:

The trend line is based on the average of the previous 15 polls. Basically the Tories have been in free fall since Theresa May failed to “deliver Brexit” at the end of March and the Labour decline has halted. Recent polls all show Labour ahead.

Strangely, there has been no Remain/Leave polling since March, but March polls all show Remain well ahead, often by double digit margins. Interestingly, some February polls show Remain ahead of leave by c. 50% among Labour 2017 voters living in Northern England and the Midlands – supposedly the heartland of Labour Leave supporters. Another February poll shows Remain ahead of Leave by 62% among respondents of voting age only since the 2016 referendum, and by 26% among non-voters in the 2016 referendum.  If Corbyn is worried about splitting the Labour party, it seems he has less and less to worry about.

Most polls show undecideds in the 10-30% range, so there is still plenty to play for. However it is hard to see those voters plumping for the Conservative party, given the humiliations it has wrecked upon the country since February.

This has resulted in a lot of voters saying they would boycott the European Elections:

Some 26% of Britons say they would sit out elections in protest, while 47% say they would vote in them, and 17% admit they would not vote in them anyway.

A higher proportion say they would vote than turned out in the 2014 EU elections in the UK – 36% of potential voters turned out five years ago, though usually more claim they will get to the ballot box than actually do so.

Four in ten (43%) say they will be angry if European Parliament elections go ahead (30% saying they would be ‘very angry’), while 28% would be pleased and 23% would not mind either way – 5% were unsure.

 —<snip>—

Forced to choose between no deal, Theresa May’s deal or a long delay with EU elections, 41% prefer no deal, 35% a long delay with EU elections, with just 16% favouring the prime minister’s plan – nine percent answered ‘don’t know’.

The vast majority of the boycotters seem to be Tory activists and voters: Rank and file Tories to BOYCOTT EU ELECTIONS – `Brexit shambles SHAMES BRITAIN’

GRASSROOTS Conservatives are set to “go on strike” and boycott the European elections after Theresa May extended Article 50, it emerged today.

Theresa May was forced to plead with the EU to extend Article 50 until June 30 to prevent the UK crashing out of the bloc without a deal. In her letter to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister said the UK would be participating in the European elections on May 23. But according to local party chiefs, “a lot of Tory activists are going to be on strike” because of the extension.

The Chairman of the Conservative London East Area said the Tories were struggling to find people to campaign for the party in the European elections.

Dinah Glover said: “They just don’t have that commitment – they’re just not going to put weeks of their lives on hold to campaign for something they don’t believe in.

“Going out to campaign would be giving a very literal example of the fact that we are still in the EU.

The mood among Tory activists is hardly going to be improved now that May has actually agreed a Brexit delay until October 31st. Basically I see no reason to alter my prediction in Off the reservation that the Tories will win only 15% of the vote and that the turnout will be high compared to previous EP elections. The Hanbury poll cited above also found that “The survey also suggests that Remain supporters would be more likely to vote – 47% compared to 38% of Leave voters” which should increase the Remain parties margin of victory.

So we have the perfect storm for Theresa May. Unable to get rid of her until December, her party has effectively gone on strike. Her supporters are much less likely to go out and vote, and Remainers – disappointed by the response to their 1 Million march and 6 Million petition signatures – are likely to turn the EP elections into an effective second referendum vote. If Remain and second referendum supporting parties can rack up in excess of the 17.4 Million who voted Leave, the argument could well be all but over.