Month: January 2020

The way to become popular on the right is to stand out as the proudest asshole in the flock. It makes it a lot easier to raise money which frees you up to golf and hobnob with oil executives.

I have drafted motions to subpoena Adam Schiff, the “whistleblower,” Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden to testify. If the Senate calls witnesses, I will ask for votes on all these next week https://t.co/NW1fuyYVF4

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) January 25, 2020

This is possibly going to be the last year in my lifetime that I advocate for traditional political solutions to our nation’s problems. If the Republicans retain any federal power whatsoever outside of the courts after November, I believe I’ll probably determine that solutions cannot be found through politics, at least in the short term.

I don’t believe, at all, that I’ll be alone in this. The Democrats have won the presidential popular vote in every election since 1988 except for a narrow loss in 2004. Despite this, we’ve had to endure three catastrophic terms of Republican presidencies. The Democrats are winning the popular vote in Senate races and yet not coming close to winning the Senate. The same has happened in the House, where gerrymandered districts give the GOP more power than they ought to have. The playing field is not remotely even, and things look even worse when you contemplate the compromises the left has to make on its values simply to compete in a Citizens United world where right-wing media dominates left-wing media.

Trump has absolutely filled the federal courts with the worst kind of people, and that’s a problem that will take decades to fix.

The 2020 elections will not be decided in a fair fight, and the Democrats can count on no recourse if they are cheated. I won’t, in good conscience, be able to tell people that getting involved in politics has the realistic potential to remedy any of this if the Republicans have another decent election cycle. The evidence is in, and if the information can’t get to the people through the din of right-wing media and pro-Trump Russian propaganda, then there isn’t any hope that things will be any better in 2024. In fact, they’d undoubtedly be far worse by then.

This outcome would be unfortunate, because social movements that work outside of politics are by necessity lawless. Revolutionary behavior is not conducive to the maintenance of social order. But it can become necessary when the political system becomes so one-sided that there is no accountability, and especially when the will of the majority is consistently thwarted.

Mass protest and civil disobedience is far more likely to come from the left than the right. The right handles disagreeable situations by using governmental force against the people. They don’t take over our cities and cause massive work stoppages.

The Establishment in this country is on its knees, and they only have one savior at this point. That savior isn’t going to come from the right, but from the left. And that person is going to look a lot like FDR in the sense that they’ll be notably progressive compared to what came before them, but actually quite moderate compared to the available alternatives. The editorial board at the Des Moines Register has seen the writing on the wall, but I can’t say for certain if they’ve identified the right person for this moment in time.

The Des Moines Register editorial board endorses Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses as the best leader for these times.

The senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts is not the radical some perceive her to be. She was a registered Republican until 1996. She is a capitalist. “I love what markets can do,” she said. “They are what make us rich, they are what create opportunity.”

But she wants fair markets, with rules and accountability. She wants a government that works for people, not one corrupted by cash.

I’m not here to tell anyone who to vote for in the Democratic primaries. I’m still undecided in any case. But if you want something between Josef Stalin, Huey Long and Herbert Hoover, you might find it in Elizabeth Warren. If you’re looking for a more center-right savior for the “system,” then perhaps you’ll agree with the right-wing New Hampshire Union Leader editorial board.

If there is to be any realistic challenge to Trump in November, the Democratic nominee needs to have a proven and substantial record of accomplishment across party lines, an ability to unite rather than divide, and the strength and stamina to go toe-to-toe with the Tweeter-in-Chief.

That would be U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. She is sharp and witty, with a commanding understanding of both history and the inner workings of Capitol Hill.

Trump doesn’t want to face her. He is hoping for Bernie, Biden, Buttigieg or Warren. Each has weaknesses, whether of age, inexperience or a far-left agenda that thrills some liberals but is ripe for exploitation in a mainstream general election.

Sen. Klobuchar has none of those weaknesses and the incumbent needs to be presented a challenger who is not easily dismissed.

The Sioux City Journal selects Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination while remaining agnostic about who they’d prefer in a general election against Trump. They also say they’d like Biden to pick Klobuchar as his running mate. Their reasoning is basically that these two moderates will save the system without turning the country into a Soviet Socialist Republic,

You can put whatever stock you want in these editorial endorsements. What they share in common is a belief that things are not so fucked yet that we need to look for help from Bernie Sanders. The Democratic electorate may not agree about that.

Senator Bernie Sanders has opened up a lead in Iowa just over a week before the Democratic caucuses, consolidating support from liberals and benefiting from divisions among more moderate presidential candidates who are clustered behind him, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely caucusgoers.

Mr. Sanders has gained six points since the last Times-Siena survey, in late October, and is now capturing 25 percent of the vote in Iowa. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. have remained stagnant since the fall, with Mr. Buttigieg capturing 18 percent and Mr. Biden 17 percent.

The rise of Mr. Sanders has come at the expense of his fellow progressive, Senator Elizabeth Warren: she dropped from 22 percent in the October poll, enough to lead the field, to 15 percent in this survey. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is garnering 8 percent, is the only other candidate approaching double digits.

Bernie is looking strong in New Hampshire, too. It could be that he’s the only candidate who is perceived as anti-Establishment enough to appeal to the left at the moment. I’ve said from the beginning that he and Biden were the likeliest nominees, and it’s still looking that way. To my mind, however, only one of them has any chance of rallying the support of the nation behind a complete committal to push Republicanism into the sea. I have no interest in going into November with a divided Establishment that can’t make up it’s mind that Trump and Trumpism is the most unconscionable choice. I don’t want a candidate who can’t even unite Democrats against Trump, and I don’t care how well they sell on college campuses.

This is our last chance as I see it. After this, if this doesn’t work, the center will not hold and the consent of the governed will vanish into disorder, disrespect for authority and the law, and economic disruption. Sadly, that will be the logical and likely the moral choice for patriotic people.

It’d be nice to fight this most important battle under the banner of someone who can keep every anti-Trumper in the anti-Trump camp.  But I’ll fight this one last fight under whatever banner you choose.

There’s a clear hubris to the Trump defense team’s strategy.

“White House lawyers are gearing up for a scorched-earth defense of President Trump in the impeachment trial, mounting a politically charged case aimed more at swaying American voters than GOP senators — and damaging Trump’s possible 2020 opponent, Joe Biden,” the Washington Post reports.

“Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal attorney, plan to use their time in the trial to target the former vice president and his son, Hunter… Trump’s allies believe that if they can argue that the president had a plausible reason for requesting the Biden investigation in Ukraine, they can both defend him against the impeachment charges and gain the bonus of undercutting a political adversary.”

It’s hard for the modern mind to understand the original meaning of hubris, but it’s really inseparable from the idea that you can transgress against the gods by inflating your own sense of power and control. It’s the idea that you can act with impunity and without consequences. It was often used to describe cruel behavior towards people who are powerless to fight back, but also wanton sinfulness and immorality. I think that pretty well describes the situation we have here, where the defense team thinks they are assured of an acquittal and so can focus all their time on punching the Bidens rather than defending their client.

The assumption is that this is a luxury Trump can afford and that nothing he does could change the outcome. He and his defense team may very well be right about this, but the Greeks had witnessed enough counterexamples to see the need for a term to describe a situation where things didn’t work out as planned.

Perhaps the Indians interpreted the same thing a bit differently with their concept of karma. But whether or not you believe there is some divine or ethical order to the universe, it often happens that foul deeds have negative and unanticipated consequences for the perpetrator.

In this case, Trump is on trial for misusing his office to gain a political advantage, specifically against Joe Biden. In that light, it’s particularly egregious to attack the Bidens as a central part of the defense. Some might call it “spitting in the face of the gods.” The Greeks might see it as defiance against the gods, like a challenge that invites retribution.

In a purely secular sense, this looks like overconfidence. I really do think that some Republican senators will sense this and it will give them offense. They’re being asked to eat a tremendous amount of shit, and this is a few extra and unnecessary heapings on their plate.

Rather than offer a true defense, the Trump team will use their time to compound the original sin.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bell Rock in Sedona, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit just a few weeks ago.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

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

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

For this week’s cycle I have added preliminary layers of paint to the canvas panel. Note the shadow up top and the distant butte to the far right. I do miss Sedona.

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

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

 

Want proof that nothing matters?

President Trump’s approval rating has climbed to match the highest of his presidency, boosted by majority approval of his economic stewardship even as Americans remain deeply divided on whether the Senate should remove him from office, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The Post-ABC poll finds 44 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s overall job performance and 51 percent disapprove. While views of Trump remain negative, Trump’s approval rating is significantly improved from his 38 percent mark in late October.

I need a pep talk, people.

The House Managers spent a good amount of time during the impeachment trial on Thursday talking about how ridiculous it was for the president of the United States to be pushing the Crowdstrike conspiracy theory on a foreign head of state. Trump took an impossible and silly story cooked up by the Russians and deputized Rudy Giuliani to convince Ukraine to formally accept it by announcing that they would investigate it. Perhaps the most farcical part of this is that the theory attempts to blame Ukraine for hacking into the Democratic National Headquarters and then spreading the most damaging information to WikiLeaks in order to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. At the same time, Russia and Trump argue that Ukraine was trying to help Clinton in 2016.

These two idea are mutually exclusive, but that doesn’t matter to the Kremlin or the White House.

In the president’s defense, Senator Lindsey Graham says, “All I can tell you is from the president’s point of view, he did nothing wrong in his mind,” and “If thought he was doing something wrong, he would probably shut up about it.”

It’s an interesting defense, in part because it’s not really clear that it’s true.

After all, Trump would not be president today if he had not first promoted the Obama Birther conspiracy theory and thereby won over a good part of the conservative base that reveled in his audacious and unrepentant racism. That theory was equally implausible, holding that Barack Obama should not be president because he wasn’t born in America, even though that alone would not have made him ineligible. Obama’s mother was an American citizen, so even if he had been born in Kenya, he still would have been considered a natural-born citizen. In any case, all the evidence supported the fact that Obama had been born in Honolulu.

In 2011, Trump claimed that he’d paid for investigators to visit Hawaii and that they had found evidence to support his theory. He was lying.

While the world is focused on Trump’s impeachment trial, the administration continues their assholery unabated:

The Trump administration on Thursday will finalize a rule to strip away environmental protections for streams, wetlands and other water bodies, handing a victory to farmers, fossil fuel producers and real estate developers who said Obama-era rules had shackled them with onerous and unnecessary burdens.

From Day 1 of his administration, President Trump vowed to repeal President Barack Obama’s “Waters of the United States” regulation, which had frustrated rural landowners. His new rule, which will be implemented in the coming weeks, is the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to repeal or weaken nearly 100 environmental rules and laws, loosening or eliminating rules on climate change, clean air, chemical pollution, coal mining, oil drilling and endangered species protections.

I don’t know who wittingly votes for stuff like this. It has zero appeal to anyone other than some business executives and a few farmers here and there who are negatively impacted. But it’s in keeping with Trump’s goal to approach every subject with the aim of being the biggest prick possible.

Fox News broadcast the first two hours of the impeachment trial on Wednesday in a normal manner, but after that, they turned off the sound:

Starting with The Five, the network’s early evening roundtable commentary show, and continuing throughout the evening, Fox News broadcast portions of screen-in-screen video of the trial. But instead of playing the audio, network hosts provided the normal Trumpian spin. So while someone who just looked at the screen may have concluded Fox News was covering the trial, in fact it wasn’t covering it at all.

Their post-truth business model couldn’t withstand the House Managers’ methodical destruction of their viewers’ hero, so this is telling but not at all surprising. Just don’t call them a news network, or treat them like one.

Meanwhile, the president was so desperate to distract his base from hearing the truth that he set a personal tweeting record.

As he flew back to Washington on Air Force One, Trump stirred up a veritable Twitter storm as he tweeted and retweeted messages primarily about impeachment, particularly from his Republican defenders—a barrage that marked the most tweets of any day of his presidency, with 142 as of 10 p.m., according to Factba.se, a website that tracks Trump’s tweets and speeches.

None of this was likely to have much immediate effect inside the Senate chamber where a captive audience was subjected to a spectacularly well-prepared and delivered case against Donald John Trump. Some Republican senators abandoned their posts and left the audience for extended periods, but the vast majority honored their duty as jurists and heard a compelling case for the president’s removal from office.

It remains to be seen if it will have a meaningful effect on Mitch McConnell’s tenuous control of the process. He already beat a retreat once, on his rules package, in order to maintain unity within his caucus. But he and the White House desperately want to avoid allowing witnesses.

Now, Mr. McConnell is working to convince his colleagues that expanding the trial to include witnesses—a prospect Mr. Trump’s team wants to avoid at all costs—would be more trouble than it was worth.

“Pursing those witnesses could indefinitely delay the Senate trial and draw our body into a protracted and complex legal fight over presidential privilege,” he said.

That message could well prevail.

Yet, the House Managers did a masterful job on Wednesday of providing a different message. The Republican base probably heard little of it, but McConnell’s colleagues were impressed. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham stopped Adam Schiff in the Senate hallways to compliment his performance.

I’m a bit groggy after staying up half the night watching the world historical butt-whupping the Democratic House Managers put on Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump throughout the first full day of the impeachment trial. But, in the end, it was a fixed fight, and the Republicans won on every scorecard. From the looks of things, this is the theme that will be repeated every day for as long as this impeachment lasts.

In a way, it’s something the Democrats are getting used to. From the hanging chads in Florida in 2000 to the Electoral College loss in 2016, the Republicans make a living winning despite losing. They’ve become dependent on cheating and rigging the rules of the game, and they’re experts at it at this point.

It’s been so long since they’ve gotten the better of an argument, and so long since it has mattered, that the GOP is perfectly content to live in a post-fact universe. Still, it is occasionally embarrassing for them to be trounced in intellectual combat.

If there is to be a quick acquittal in the end, the battle will be over the consequences, and in that respect there is good reason for the Democrats to hope that they will get the last laugh. They were certainly laughing quite a bit on Tuesday as it became apparent that the president’s defenders came completely unprepared.

Evidently, they did not know they’d be watching the Democrats make their case for eleven straight hours as they debated pre-trial amendments on the rules. Meanwhile, the House Managers came armed with concise arguments backed by lots of video tape. If this were a normal trial, the jury would not have been present for any of it, but the 100 senators were glued to their chairs and barred by law from speaking.

Around midnight, Mitch McConnell called for a brief recess and was seen roaming the halls of the Senate in a bedraggled and exhausted state. If he had cornermen, they would have thrown in the towel. All his plans had backfired in spectacular fashion and I’m sure his phone was filled with panicked messages from the White House.

Yet, McConnell had the jury in his pocket and so it was foreordained that he could lose every round and still be awarded the victory. Trump is counting on the same thing.

A 30 (something) year old song from The The.

You know the drill. You have a Froggy Bottom Cafe if you can keep it, so to speak.

Bars’s open. Your humble DJ may be a bit busy. You know. Life getting in the way sort of stuff.

Cheers.

Trump lies about health care…a lot. According to the Washington Post, he has lied about preexisting conditions 73 times. He’s told lies about the Veterans Affairs Mission Act 113 times. He’s lied about Medicare 56 times. Overall, there are 901 documented instances of Trump bullshit pertaining to health care since he was inaugurated in 2017.

This is a subset of the “the more than 16,200 false or misleading claims he has made in his three years since taking the oath of office.” And his rate of lying has been increasing:

Now the database shows Trump made 8,155 suspect claims in 2019, up from 5,689 claims in 2018 and 1,999 claims in the first year of his presidency.

“In a single year, the president said more than the total number of false or misleading claims he had made in the previous two years,” our colleagues Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly write. “Put another way: He averaged six such claims a day in 2017, nearly 16 a day in 2018 and more than 22 a day in 2019.”

Numerous polling outfits, including Gallup, are finding health care as the top concern of American voters going into the 2020 election. In that context, the cost of prescription drugs is the most important. And, yet, the president lies about health care constantly, and that very much includes the subject of prescription drugs.

Obviously, it will be important to educate the American voters about the truth if the Democrats want to win the presidency. And, as we know, that is much easier said than done.