Month: August 2019

This Greenland shit is epic enough for me to take a little break from my sabbatical to offer some snark. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was so “nasty” towards our president over his harebrained idea to buy Greenland that Trump stomped his feet on his own toys and cancelled a scheduled September 2, 2019 visit to the land of the Danes. Then the Danes were like, why didn’t you offer the Queen of England a ten-spot for Canada? And then they got all huffy about Trump standing them up, as if they really want his ripe ass stinking up their beautiful country.

Queen Margrethe II had extended the invitation, so it’s really her who is getting blown off here, irrespective of what Trump says about Frederiksen’s tone. The people of both Denmark and Greenland treated Trump’s idea as a joke because they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe he is serious. But, of course, the only reason anyone knows about our president’s desire to buy Greenland is because some staffer got so exasperated having to listen to him drone on the topic for the umpteenth time that he leaked the story to a bigfoot reporter.

At that point, Trump has a choice. He could have said it was “fake news” and tweeted something about how he’s not going to do a damn thing about gun violence. But he decided to own the story and make his case for the purchase of Greenland.

That just invited widespread mockery and disbelief. It also inspired a bunch of GoFundMe campaigns–some to help Trump raise the required money and some to save Greenland from his clutches.

Like most of the rancid things that find life in the president’s brain, this idea couldn’t survive five minutes of contact with reality. But even if Denmark were inclined to sell one of their most valuable assets, it would be like buying the ice in a freezer that has broken. That’s something Trump would absolutely do, but it’s not something anyone else would respect.

Anyway, he canceled the trip because he’s a stupid, immature man.

Here’s some fun news.

Joe Walsh, a pugnacious former congressman, is preparing a Republican primary challenge to President Trump that he previewed as a daily “bar fight” with the incumbent over his morality and competency.

Mark Sanford, a former South Carolina governor and congressman, said he is inching closer to a bid of his own by sounding out activists in New Hampshire and other early-voting states about an insurgency focused on the ballooning deficit.

Jeff Flake, a former Arizona senator and Trump antagonist, said he has taken a flurry of recruitment calls in recent days from GOP donors rattled by signs of an economic slowdown and hungry for an alternative to Trump.

And former Ohio governor John Kasich will head to New Hampshire next month to “take a look at things” after experiencing “an increase” in overtures this summer, an adviser said.

The anti-Trump movement inside the Republican Party — long a political wasteland — is feeling new urgency to mount a credible opposition to Trump before it’s too late.

Sanford, I think, hits the nail on the head when he calls these challenges—including his own—”preposterous,” but there’s still value in challenging Trump. As the reporters Bob Costa and Phil Rucker note, “anti-Trump organizers are courting wealthy independents or even liberals to contribute in the GOP primary, if only to bruise the president and help the eventual Democratic nominee in the general election.”

So my message to Republican candidates who are disgusted by Trump is pretty simple: if you can’t bring yourself to follow Tom Nichols’ advice to vote for the Democrats in 2020, feel free to jump into the race and siphon off a few protest votes. It can’t hurt!

Look at this unmitigated fraud and grifter:

Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who built a political brand around unfiltered frank talk aimed at political opponents and constituents alike, is starting a think tank centered on something unexpected: Civility in politics.

“Unfortunately our politics have gotten so ugly and divisive in the country that people are not having civilized conversations,” Christie told NJ Advance Media, which broke the news.

The nonprofit and nonpartisan Christie Institute of Public Policy, based at Christie’s law office in Morristown, N.J., will fund research into public policy solutions, finance scholarships for law students interested in public office and public policy, and present a quarterly lecture series moderated by Christie himself.

Not only is this the most transparent scam I’ve seen in a long time, it’s also completely off-brand. No self-respecting New Jerseyan wants to lecture people about civility in politics or anything else. This is particularly true for the least civil governor in the Garden State’s history. Chris Christie spend eight years in office without having a civil discussion about anything more contentious than the brilliance of Bruce Springsteen, and now he wants money to run a think thank based on everyone having reasoned debates that presumably don’t involve shutting down lanes on the George Washington Bridge out of petty vindictiveness.

I guess it is upsetting a lot of conservatives that the New York Times, on the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves arriving in Virginia, is dedicating a lot of ink to telling the history of our hemisphere. The latest effort is on the history of sugar production. It’s shocking, I guess, for some to learn that no one wanted to go to the trouble of mass producing sugar until they discovered they could make slaves do it for free. Now Americans (especially the descendants of those slaves) consume twice as much sugar annually as they should and people are obese and die of diabetes at alarming rates.

It is un-American to tell this story?

I certainly don’t think so. I think it’s educational. Just don’t try to convince Professor Newt Gingrich of that.

“The NY Times 1619 Project should make its slogan ‘All the Propaganda we want to brainwash you with’.it is a repudiation of the original NY Times motto,” the former House speaker said Sunday on Twitter.

Why would a while male conservative from Georgia consider the history of slavery in the New World to be propaganda?

The question answers itself.

This will be a brief post. While visiting family in Maine, I am pretty sure I slipped a disk. It hurts like hell down my left leg, thigh and shin, there’s shooting pain in my buttocks, and muscle weakness. I’m limping like an old mare that’s ready for the glue factory. I’m a pretty athletic guy, so this is a real problem.

But I got laid off from work several weeks ago, and don’t have a stable income. I can’t afford an ACA plan. Not that I ever got got a call back from a healthcare navigator in Tennessee, the state where I live, when I called to set up a plan. No one answered the phone, no one responded to email, no one responded to voicemails.

Tennessee is also a state that didn’t expand Medicaid and is in the process of dismantling its state-based health care program for low-income residents, TennCare.

So I’ve been doing stretches, trying to avoid lifting, and making sure I don’t drive for too long without getting up to walk around. Some days the pain is worse than others, and sometimes it disappears entirely. Mornings seem to be the worst.

But hot damn: if I have to go to the doctor it’s going to take a bite out of my savings. I can’t imagine if surgery is required. I may have to relocate back to Pennsylvania (and quickly!) if I want to get care that seems to be pretty necessary. That state, for all its flaws, was smart enough to replace its idiot Republican governor with a Democrat, who immediately expanded Medicaid. But even that will take a few weeks or days, and I have things to attend to in Tennessee.

On a semi-related note, I’m writing from Montréal, where I dropped my kid off with his mom. I typically stay over for a day or two after the trip (if you don’t mind saving money going the hostel route, and I don’t mind at all, I highly recommend Alexandrie Hostel Montreal).

Every time I come up here, I am tempted to just never come back. The fact that health care is available to everyone in Canada—REALLY available, not this verkakte “health care access” as we pretend in the US—is one of the many reasons why. It ain’t perfect up here, but at least you can get a standard of care without going bankrupt.

In the meantime, ouch.

One one level, this is the most insufferable horseshit:

White House hopeful Joe Biden doubled down on his vow to cooperate with Republicans should he be elected president, saying he successfully worked across the aisle as vice president.

“There’s an awful lot of really good Republicans out there,” he said Saturday at a Massachusetts fundraiser. “I get in trouble for saying that with Democrats, but the truth of the matter is, every time we ever got in trouble with our administration, remember who got sent up to Capitol Hill to fix it? Me. Because they know I respect the other team.”

Biden acknowledged that while Republicans and Democrats appear at odds on most issues plaguing Washington but said many conservatives are being “intimidated” to follow in lock step with President Trump.

“They’re decent people. They ran because they care about things, but they’re intimidated right now,” he told the fundraiser’s attendees.

Decent people don’t belong to organizations led by people like Donald Trump. Not for long, anyway. I am as tired as anyone of hearing Biden suggest otherwise. And I’d like him to produce an itemized list of the supposed breakthroughs he made with the Republicans when the Obama administration sent him down to the Hill to iron things out. He didn’t accomplish shit with those lunatics because it wasn’t actually possible to accomplish anything with them.

But, as grating as Biden’s routine is, I actually do think it’s smart campaigning. It feeds into a hunger a lot of Democrats have for a less winner-take-all kind of politics. It also chips away at efforts to paint Biden as a radical socialist who is out of the mainstream, so it’s a solid general election strategy too. I really do not believe that serving up partisan red meat is going to be a winning strategy next year, and when Biden does it, he’s going to make it about Trump rather than his party or his supporters. I think it’s pretty clear that this enables him to give permission to as many people as possible to vote for him, and that that is the smartest way to beat this president.

After all, Trump isn’t going to win a likability contest with Biden, nor with most of the other Democratic candidates for president. He’s going to try to bring his opponent down to his level and paint them as threatening to core, perennial Republican interests. He’s going to argue that he’s the only thing standing in the way of radical change that people won’t like, so his biggest problem is a candidate who promises a return to normalcy. Against that kind of campaign, his rhetoric will be unconvincing and ineffective.

Biden has a clear and sensible strategy. It’s low on risk because this is a very winnable election and why take needless chances?

Still, playing it safe brings its own kind of risk. Elizabeth Warren is catching up to Biden is some recent polls and may speed out in front of him. If that happens, his strategy could suddenly become a big liability because he’s isn’t positioned to run a come-from-behind campaign.

It could be that Biden is miscalculating about how much the Democratic electorate values normalcy over progress. His stupid happy-talk about “decent” Republicans is a giant turn-off to a lot of partisan Democrats. And they may have enough power to deny him the chance to use his general election strategy.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of FDR’s house. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since last time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now begun to paint the siding, sky and shadowed foreground. Most of the siding seen in the photo is comprised of a stony stucco-like material. I wish that paint could convey that texture but it would be difficult, especially on a canvas of this size. Much more for next week.

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.

I really enjoyed Princeton professor Matthew Desmond’s big piece in the New York Times on the impact American slavery has on our capitalist system today. What I found particularly interesting is his explanation of what led up to the financial crisis of 1837 and how similar it was to the housing crisis of 2007-2008.

In short, cotton-producing slaveholders developed a system of finance very much like the one that led to the housing bubble. Slaves were used for loan collateral, but in a way that grossly exaggerated their true financial worth. Collateralized debt instruments were invented to pool the risk from these loans, meaning that many investors were unaware that they were profiting from slavery or that the soundness of their investments was tied to an unrealistic expectation that the price of cotton would go up forever.

Then, when it all collapsed and the planters couldn’t repay they mortgages, they largely escaped the consequences, with many fleeing to the independent state of Texas with their slaves to avoid foreclosure.

You should read the whole thing, but here is the conclusion to the article:

Furious bondholders mounted lawsuits and cashiers committed suicide, but the bankrupt states refused to pay their debts. Cotton slavery was too big to fail. The South chose to cut itself out of the global credit market, the hand that had fed cotton expansion, rather than hold planters and their banks accountable for their negligence and avarice.

Even academic historians, who from their very first graduate course are taught to shun presentism and accept history on its own terms, haven’t been able to resist drawing parallels between the Panic of 1837 and the 2008 financial crisis. All the ingredients are there: mystifying financial instruments that hide risk while connecting bankers, investors and families around the globe; fantastic profits amassed overnight; the normalization of speculation and breathless risk-taking; stacks of paper money printed on the myth that some institution (cotton, housing) is unshakable; considered and intentional exploitation of black people; and impunity for the profiteers when it all falls apart — the borrowers were bailed out after 1837, the banks after 2008.

During slavery, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, “Flush Times and Fever Dreams.” That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.

One important theme to the piece is that American capitalism is particularly harsh when compared to other capitalist systems, especially to wage workers, and this is a straight-line legacy of slavery which drove down wages for everyone and relied on a legal construct that was very light on regulation and worker’s rights. The other main theme is that many important innovations they were adopted by businesses during the Industrial Revolution were first developed on plantations to keep track of and control workers, and to improve their productivity.

This is must reading.

Despite enjoying the nation’s highest level of home ownership and lowest level of seasonally adjusted unemployment, 53 percent of New Hampshirites disapprove of Donald Trump’s job performance. In an article for the Associated Press, Hunter Woodall talks to a random sampling of people on the street and hears some of the concerns  people have about the president.

One is an Obama/Trump voter.

When Chad Johansen voted for Donald Trump in 2016, he hoped he was picking someone who could help small-business owners compete with bigger companies. But that hasn’t happened, and now the 26-year-old owner of NH iPhone Repair feels what he calls “Trumpgret.”

The Republican president has done little to address health care issues for a small employer, he said, and the Manchester man remains on edge about how Trump’s tariffs could affect his business, which employs fewer than 10 people. Beyond that, he said, unrelenting news about bigotry and racism in the Trump administration is “a turnoff.”

“The president’s supposed to be the face of the United States of America,” said Johansen, who voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2012. “And supposed to make everyone be proud to be an American and stand up for everyone who is an American. And I don’t feel that President Trump’s doing that. I feel like it’s chaos.”

I’ve been unrelenting over the last four years in talking about how Democrats are not doing enough to address market consolidation and monopoly power. This is why they didn’t win Mr. Johansen’s vote in 2016. Now Johansen can choose someone like Elizabeth Warren who is laser-focused on the issue, but he’s not leaving Trump because he’s excited about the alternatives. He’s just turned off by Trump’s racism, thinks he his economic policies are chaotic, and is ready to punish him for failing to keep his health care promises.

Then there’s the Romney/Trump voter:

Gino Brogna, a 57-year-old chef manager, described himself as a Republican “by nature,” though he isn’t “solely stuck to it.” He didn’t like Democrat Hillary Clinton and recalls feeling as though his 2016 vote for Trump was “something that was necessary.”

It doesn’t feel necessary for him again.

“I don’t think that he’s true to his word on a lot of things,” Brogna said of Trump. “I wouldn’t vote for him again. That’s not going to happen.”

Here, the only expressed regret is that Trump is too dishonest. It’d be interesting to learn which lies are most concerning to Mr. Brogna, but the cumulative effect has been sufficient that he won’t be voting for Trump again.

There’s a narrative on the left that Trump voters are unreachable, deplorable racists who showed through their 2016 support for the man that they have no moral standards. Polls showing the president retaining the support of 90 precent of more of Republicans tends to confirm this opinion. But the truth is that Trump got votes for many different reasons, including from many traditional Democrats who were frustrated about the economy and from Republicans who opted for him only because they had spent a lifetime marinating in anti-Clinton storylines.  Trump has taken these voters for granted, and it’s likely to cost him.

The Democratic candidates can help this process along by developing themes that probe the weaknesses Trump has created for himself, but he’s done an excellent job of giving away votes all on his own.

He may be able to bring some new deplorable voters out of the woodwork by sticking to racist “pro-white” themes, and it’s possible that he can consolidate and expand on the “community support” I’ve often described as the driving force behind his huge rural numbers in 2016. Basically, at a certain point, it can be so socially uncomfortable to openly support a Democrat that the numbers tip dramatically in the Republican’s favor.  Something similar can happen in our nation’s cities that drives up the numbers for the Democratic candidate. This is how Trump can potentially be reelected using a white ethnic approach.

But his chances of success are badly diminished if he’s not actually holding onto 90 percent of his 2016 voters, and I am certain he will fall far below that number.  He has lost the support of soft Democrats and even lifelong Republicans, and it’s not going to be easy to win it back. I think he best chance at this point is that the Democratic nominee will follow suit and do things that lose some of Clinton’s votes. And the only place that can really happen is in the suburbs. New Hampshire is effectively a suburb of Boston, so it’s a good laboratory for watching for this effect.

There are certainly more important things to do than inspecting the corpse of a dead pedophile, but this seems more than a little hinky.

An autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein sustained multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings, deepening the mystery about the circumstances around his death.

Among the bones broken in Epstein’s neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam’s apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.
[…]
Jonathan L. Arden, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, said a hyoid can be broken in many circumstances but is more commonly associated with homicidal strangulation than suicidal hanging.

Arden, who was not involved in the Epstein autopsy, said that in general, a finding of a broken hyoid requires pathologists to conduct more extensive investigation. That investigation can include analysis of the location of the noose, how narrow the noose is, and if the body experienced any substantial drop in the course of the hanging.

Perhaps that’s why “there was shouting and shrieking” coming from Epstein’s cell the day he died, according to CBS News.

I don’t like trafficking in conspiracy theories but it’s a little convenient that Epstein suddenly died when he was about to cause so many problems for so many powerful people. It reminds me of that old Russian saying: ““Death solves all problems — no man, no problem.”

Photo credit: NBC News/screen shot