Month: August 2020

John Oliver on the continuing saga of the border wall:

One of many boondoggles and outright frauds old 45 has been entangled with in one way or another from the get-go. Something to remember as the Convention of Doom unfolds in all of its apocalyptic glory.

Bar is open and drinks are on the house.

As the weird facsimile of a Republican National Convention launched on Monday night, the latest polls for President Trump were almost unremittingly bad. He’s behind everywhere that really matters, including by a hair in the most recent surveys out of Texas and Ohio. What’s more, the news environment was bad for Trump, his family, and his political allies.

Closest to home, word got out that Trump’s niece had surreptitiously taped his sister making disparaging and hurtful remarks about him. Someone else had secretly taped his wife Melania dumping on him and her step kids. One of these step kids, Eric Trump, was in hot water for failing to comply with a subpoena issued by the New York attorney general for Trump Organization records. Meanwhile, the president had just lost a court fight with porn star Stormy Daniels and was ordered to pay her legal fees. That came on the heels of him losing a fight in federal court to shield his tax records from the Manhattan District Attorney.

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell Jr., whose 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump was critical to his success, was embroiled in the most sordid kind of sex scandal and in the process of being forced out as the president of Liberty University. New scrutiny will be applied to the question of whether or not Trump bagman Michael Cohen blackmailed Falwell about the affair to secure his support.

The news was horrible, too, for the man and woman who replaced Paul Manafort as Trump’s 2016 campaign leaders. Steve Bannon was arrested on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht, and Kellyanne Conway’s daughter took to TikTok to accuse her parents of abuse and say that she would seek to be legally emancipated from their custody. This prompted Conway to announce her departure from the White House at the end of the month.

Under the circumstances the first night of the “convention” went off fairly well and was probably more effective than most liberals recognize or want to admit. If nothing else, it took attention away from all the negative stories that were swirling around. The theory behind the first night’s programming wasn’t difficult to discern. Black voices attested to Trump’s lack of racism, while white voices spoke to suburban fears of black crime. Trump is trying to cut into Biden’s margins in his areas of strength, and he’ll hope to do it without hurting the enthusiasm of his more rural base. Trump also used his primetime to rewrite the history of the COVID-19 outbreak, hoping to make this less of a liability for him at the polls.

Based on the goals for the night, it seemed like they hit all their marks. The message was necessarily mixed and contradictory, so the programming was anything but consistent or truly coherent, but they made the arguments they wanted to make, and it made strategic sense. They were probably pretty pleased with how it went, but it won’t do much to fix the legal and family problems that keep mounting around the president, his family, and his allies.

I’ve written two posts about Frank Luntz that I consider to be fairly good, one in 2014 and the other in 2016. Needless to say, I don’t consider him an expert on much of anything beyond the best techniques for selling shitty policies. That’s why it kind of grated on me when Tim Alberta went to him first to discover what the modern Republican Party stands for.

I decided to call Frank Luntz. Perhaps no person alive has spent more time polling Republican voters and counseling Republican politicians than Luntz, the 58-year-old focus group guru. His research on policy and messaging has informed a generation of GOP lawmakers. His ability to translate between D.C. and the provinces—connecting the concerns of everyday people to their representatives in power—has been unsurpassed. If anyone had an answer, it would be Luntz.

This is really aggressive in the way that it misses what Luntz has spent his life doing for the Republican Party. Luntz’s job has never been to figure out what everyday people want. His job is always to convince everyday people to stomach policies that are designed to help people who have a lot of assets or who run businesses and want to avoid regulation, taxation or antitrust enforcement. The Estate Tax becomes a Death Tax. Capital gains taxes become double taxation, etc.

In 2014, Luntz despaired that his techniques were no longer working after the Great Recession.

“You should not expect a handout,” he tells me. “You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don’t, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them.” The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone. “We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that’s why they voted for him,” he says. “And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great.”

By 2016, he was inconsolable that young people were fuming about the cost of college and housing, and socialism was beginning to look more appealing to them than capitalism. Of course, he blamed college professors for this rather than the objective economic conditions of millennials.

“We have lost. It’s not like we are losing, we have lost that generation. And I don’t care if you are a Democrat, Republican, independent, none of the above. The fact that 58 percent [of millennials] say socialism is the better form of economics, that is the damage of academia,” he said at a breakfast event here.

When Alberta reached him, he was surprised to discover that Luntz could not articulate a single policy or principle that defines the Republican Party:

“You know, I don’t have a history of dodging questions. But I don’t know how to answer that. There is no consistent philosophy,” Luntz responded. “You can’t say it’s about making America great again at a time of Covid and economic distress and social unrest. It’s just not credible.”

Luntz thought for a moment. “I think it’s about promoting—” he stopped suddenly. “But I can’t, I don’t—” he took a pause. “That’s the best I can do.”

When I pressed, Luntz sounded as exasperated as the student whose question I was relaying. “Look, I’m the one guy who’s going to give you a straight answer. I don’t give a shit—I had a stroke in January, so there’s nothing anyone can do to me to make my life suck,” he said. “I’ve tried to give you an answer and I can’t do it. You can ask it any different way. But I don’t know the answer. For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer.”

Part of this is on Trump. He’s certainly destroyed the idea that Republicans care about deficit spending, although after the performance of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, that idea never should have had much credibility with Luntz’s focus groups. Trump also did away with the argument that Republicans are strong on national defense and for strong global American leadership. He won’t even protect our deployed troops from Russian bounties. As for moral rectitude and traditional family values, Trump somehow made himself a cult leader to white evangelical Christians while living a life filled with sexual hedonism and business fraud.

But Trump hasn’t so much changed the Republicans’ priorities and values as expose that they were ruses all along. The party’s elected officials prefer the retention of power to any of their principles, and the base has been crystal clear that they wanted resentment-based populism more than anything Luntz claimed they wanted (or convinced them that they wanted).

So, now we see the unvarnished truth:

It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator [Mark] Sanford alluded to. If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

It’s alarming how far the Republicans can still get with such a limited appeal, and it’s simply not true that no one in the Republican base cares about public health or the environment or education or fiscal restraint or American leadership. This is one reason the Republican base is shrinking. It’s becoming clear that the GOP not only stands for nothing, but they never really stood for anything.

But what none of them will admit is that white nationalism is the organizing principle of Trumpism. It was also an organizing principle of Reaganism, but at least Reagan utilized it in the service of other policies. With Trump, the racism is not a tool but the entire point. Insofar as Trump cares about anything other than himself, he cares about his white nationalist agenda, and that’s the primary reason why he should be considered the leader of a fascist movement.

This is what is new. The old Republican Party had fascist tendencies, but they still operated within the broad confines of a bipartisan consensus on many things, including both written and unwritten rules about how the government should operate. That’s over now, which has eliminated the last few things Luntz might have clung to when trying to identify a principle other than white nationalism that defines the GOP.

[On a side note: many thanks to the generous people who responded to my plea for help by getting subscriptions and making donations. Much of the anticipated programming cost of fixing this site has already been met, and I could not be more grateful! I hope to have someone working on the job as soon as possible].

So even Mary Trump is a viper. This is quite the family.

In response to a question from The Washington Post about how she knew the president paid someone to take the SATs, Mary Trump revealed that she had surreptitiously taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with [Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump] Barry in 2018 and 2019. She provided The Post with previously unreleased transcripts and audio excerpts, which include exchanges that are not in her book.

She was secretly taping her aunt because she wanted to prove that her aunt had cheated her out of millions of dollars when the president’s father [her grandfather] died in 1999. But she wound up with evidence that Trump hired someone to take his college entry exams. She also got some pretty unvarnished opinions about who Trump really is from his sister, who obviously knows him better than anyone.

I think the important thing is the complete contempt Barry has for her brother’s character. The details are of great interest, but the bottom line is what really matters. Trump’s sister thinks Donald is cruel. She thinks he has no principles. She think he’s unprepared. She thinks he’s only in things for himself.

Maybe the point is made most explicit when Barry says that she doesn’t want any of her brothers to speak at her funeral because she’s still so upset that Donald only spoke about himself at their father’s funeral.

These will be hard things for Trump to hear. It’s a harder message than Barry would likely deliver to his face, and now the whole world knows about it. Sibling relationships don’t survive this kind of hurtful language. As for Mary Trump, she recognizes that she betrayed her aunt by divulging their private conversations and she doesn’t expect to ever speak with her again. So, this whole spectacle has landed like a bomb on what remains of the Trump family. I have to assume Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka will take their father’s side, and they probably won’t be communicating with their aunt from here on out.

However, this is not our problem. Our problem is that Trump is still on the ballot and still has a chance to be reelected. What voters need to know is what Trump’s own sister has to say about him: “You can’t trust him.”

On the list of things that are important, anything having to do with Stormy Daniels is pretty low on the list, but that doesn’t mean her case can’t be pretty consequential. After all, former Trump bagman Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in part for his role in paying Daniels for her silence about an affair she had with Donald Trump. And, you might remember, President Trump was “individual-1” in that case. The only reason that Trump wasn’t convicted for the same crimes as Cohen is that there is a rule at the Department of Justice that precludes its prosecutors from charging a sitting president.

Nothing says Trump can’t, or shouldn’t, do jail time once he leaves office, so anything that bolsters his involvement in the Daniels case can weaken his future defense. And that’s what happened on Monday in a California Superior Court, where a judge ruled that Trump will have to pay for Daniels legal fees in a case related to her effort to escape a non-disclosure agreement.

Trump’s lawyers tried to argue that he wasn’t a party to the agreement, but the judge was having none of that for two reasons. First, he reimbursed Michael Cohen the $130,000 the non-disclosure cost, and second, the Trump legal team had previously attempted to force arbitration in a defamation suit that Daniels filed against him, per the terms of the non-disclosure agreement. Since he had both paid Daniels for her silence and argued in court that its terms should be enforced, the judge saw no reason to rule that Trump was not bound by the agreement himself.

This creates a predicate in court to argue that Trump was most definitely a witting participant in the conspiracy that landed Cohen in jail. I think that was already close to a slam-dunk case, but every little bit of legal scaffolding that is erected will help nail down a conviction, assuming anyone seeks one.

In the short term, the ruling will only cost Trump about $45,000. But it has the potential to do him more damage in the future. Paying off porn stars is hardly one of Trump’s biggest crimes, but there’s no reason he should escape the same justice Michael Cohen faced.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Wilderstein, the Hudson Valley home of FDR cousin Daisy Suckley. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly above.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

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

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

I have now covered all the white areas on the building with a preliminary layer of paint. The shadows are a bit murky but things will change soon enough. Stay tuned.

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.

In his nominating acceptance speech on Thursday night, Joe Biden was wise to cast the election as a choice between someone who can get control of the COVID-19 viral outbreak and someone who obviously cannot. Of course, we have no proof that a Biden administration can return our lives to something approaching normal, but we already know that Trump is prolonging and exacerbating our misery. Most of this argument has already been made for the American people, so it’s not particularly heavy lifting to make it work politically.

Biden emphasized, correctly, that we have to control COVID-19 before we can get people fully back to work, but we’re going to need to do more. We’re going to need a lot of big infrastructure projects and investments in the green economy. The government is going to have create work, whether directly or indirectly, to help compensate for all the carnage to the job market. This was done during the Great Depression, and we need a 21st-Century version to deal with our current situation.

Biden’s main initial focus with therefore be the virus and employment, and this is precisely what the American people want. If they accept the linkage between the two, then any residual advantage Trump may have on the economy will vanish. It’s not that common for the politics to line up so neatly with what needs to be done and what people desperately want. As schools fail to reopen, or reopen only to quickly close, the people’s sense of disruption and discomfort is only going to rise. Biden has the message for the moment.

As a side note, there have been a couple of problems that have cropped up with the Progress Pond site due to updates to WordPress and certain plug-ins that didn’t integrate properly with the site’s architecture. Most of this is being experienced on the backend and impacts the people who are creating content for the site. But it has also made it so some people cannot comment or post videos in their comments. I’ve already conducted three interviews with programmers and it appears that fixing all of this is probably going to cost me more than $2,000, and perhaps substantially more.

I try not to nag people about getting subscriptions or making donations, but I could really use some help due to this unexpected expense. Unlike Steve Bannon, you can trust me to use the money to fix the problems and otherwise improve the site.

The subscriptions are super cheap and come with all the content you won’t see at Washington Monthly. My subscribers make it possible for me to continue to do what I do, and that’s especially true when unexpected things crop up that add substantial costs to running this site. So, please consider lending me a hand here, and I’ll do my best to make it worth your while. Thank you.

August 20th got off to a rough start for the president of the United States. His former campaign CEO and chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, was indicted for bank and wire fraud. Trump also saw a Federal District Court judge rule that he must turn over his tax returns to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. who is investigating an array of potential business and financial crimes. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Elections Commission looks like it will keep Kanye West off the ballot, and the Montana Supreme Court blocked the Green Party from appearing on the state’s presidential ballot. In both of these latter cases, it was obvious that Trump was behind an effort to dilute his opponent’s vote by confusing voters with bogus alternatives.

Perhaps even more hurtful, Trump discovered that Sean Hannity privately tells his friends that he is “a batshit crazy person.” It didn’t help that a Morning Consult poll was released finding him trailing Joe Biden by double digits and pulling in a mere 36 percent among all potential voters.

In what can only be described as a desperate move, Trump planned to spend the day in Joe Biden’s childhood home of Scranton, Pennsylvania. I suppose he thought this a clever way to distract from the fact that Biden will be accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the evening. It will do more to remind folks that their Hometown Hero has done good.

As an aside here, the Republicans have outpaced the Democrats in registering new voters in Pennsylvania, but then there is this: 1,280,391 registered Democrats requested absentee ballots in the primaries compared to 526,706 Republicans.

In any case, Trump is still smarting for watching Kamala Harris call him a “predator” during her vice-presidential acceptance speech, and he could not have enjoyed being skewered by former president Barack Obama as an unserious person who is simply incapable of performing his duties.

On the whole, it seems like Trump’s plans aren’t going very well. He must be stressed when he thinks about his upcoming convention will compare to the Democrats’ show, which has been very well produced. We know Trump is obsessed with how things look on television, which is why he was insisting on a traditional convention with no masks or social distancing until it became clear that no one would cooperate with his directives. But he’s the furthest thing from prepared to air a virtual convention.

Multiple sources told The Daily Beast that when Democratic officials met with various broadcast network executives about their convention coverage plans, the executives stressed that they could not broadcast two hours each night in part because they then would have to give the same airtime to Trump, and all the wild unpredictability that might entail from an editorial perspective.

“We don’t know what that content is going to be,” was the line offered up, according to one source.

While the Democrats decided months ago that their national convention would be a virtual event, it wasn’t until July 23—when Trump decided that the COVID-19 pandemic would make his plans for a gathering in Jacksonville unworkable—that the GOP followed suit. The result was that the Democrats provided the networks with a detailed schedule of speakers and videos while the Republicans’ convention schedule is still a moving target.

Executives at multiple networks told The Daily Beast privately that they were still almost completely in the dark about basic details of next week’s RNC, including its format and its roster of speakers.

Biden had two former presidents appear, as well as 2004 nominee John Kerry. Trump can’t count on that. Bob Dole is 97 years old and George W. Bush won’t speak on his behalf. In fact, the last Republican candidate before him, Mitt Romney, voted to convict Trump of an impeachable offense and remove him for office. The widow of John McCain appeared at the Democratic convention and endorsed the Biden/Harris ticket.

The list of announced speakers at the Republican convention is very sparse:

Vice President Mike Pence, meanwhile, is expected to deliver remarks on Wednesday from the Fort McHenry monument near Baltimore. Trump’s family, including first lady Melania Trump and some of the president’s adult children, will also have prominent speaking roles next week.

Some of the lawmakers expected to deliver convention speeches include Trump’s former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, according to reports from The Washington Post, CNBC and CNN.

I’m not sure why Joni Ernst wants to associate herself with Trump since she’s facing reelection, but it’s notable that only two U.S. Senators are slated to appear, and none of them are part of the leadership. I don’t know how they expect to produce four days of programming on such short notice and with so few willing participants.

It definitely sucks to be Trump.

I don’t think Jeff Flake has a strong record of being correct about things, and I suspect he’s wrong about this:

Former Sen. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) said if Mr. Biden were elected president and the Republicans held onto the Senate majority, there would be a sufficient number of Republicans willing to work with the Democratic administration.

Mr. Flake said he expected Mr. Biden and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), who served together in the Senate for decades and worked together when Mr. Biden was vice president, to be able to compromise.

He said the party’s left flank was likely to pressure Mr. Biden, but added, “Joe Biden, of anybody that’s running, is well equipped to handle this kind of thing. He’s a creature of the Senate, he knows how to negotiate.”

A more interesting (and plausible) thought experiment involves contemplating how the Republicans will react if Biden wins the presidency and the Republicans lose the Senate. In that case, there will the legislative filibuster to consider, and it will be relevant to both sides. In that scenario, the Republicans would have no power at all if the legislative filibuster were eliminated, so they’d have an incentive to cooperate just enough to make it difficult for the Democrats’ to get rid of it. Yet, Mitch McConnell isn’t known for cooperation, and it’s very hard for Republicans to work with Democrats without getting punished by their own media organs and their own primary voters. Even more problematic, the Republicans most likely to cross the aisle will be the ones that just lost their seats.

Still, there’s at least a chance that Biden could push through some modestly bipartisan legislation with the filibuster still in place. It will be a pyrrhic victory, however, because the larger effect would be to kill any truly ambitious legislation. He’d probably be trading a couple of decent bills and some good news cycles for the loss of his honeymoon period without truly transformative change. It makes much more sense to simply eliminate the GOP as a barrier to action.

If he does that, however, he’ll lose a natural brake on the demands of the left and discover that his veto pen is the only restraint on legislation that might cause a significant political backlash. To protect him from those types of decisions, a pro-Biden faction will develop within the Democratic Caucus with the responsibility to protect the administration from the progressives’ ambitions which might be too heedless of the politics. The point at which the progressive wish list passes from righteous to suicidal will be debated, and it’s quite possible that the Biden faction will be overly cautious, but there is an actual dividing line.

The point of winning elections is always to exercise power, not simply to protect it so that you can win the next election, but we saw in 2010 how a president’s freedom of action can be taken away in one bad midterm election. Many progressives are issues-oriented and don’t have the responsibility for keeping a majority, so they’re not going to restrain themselves. All of this makes it likely that the Democratic Party will become fractious if the Republicans lose all their power to obstruct. It’s more comfortable for everyone if any limitations on what can be done legislatively is imposed from without than from within.

But these are problems that we should welcome, because they’re so much better than what we’re dealing with now or would face in a second Trump term.

I do believe that Biden has genuine Republican friends in Congress, and I think he can probably make that work for him in some limited cases, but he’s going to be better off by a mile if he’s fighting with his left flank than if he’s fighting with Mitch McConnell.

I have been running into a few technical difficulties. Right now just attributing to user error.

In the meantime, I am finding comfort in somewhat quirky early 1970s progressive rock. And I do mean quirky. Most people think prog rock and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer or Yes spring to mind. For me, it might be Eno or Krafwerk.

Here is the title track to Eno’s first solo LP, “Here Come the Warm Jets”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP-RFsuv-8Q

And here’s Krafwerk at their very beginning:

This was well before Kraftwerk did a complete image overhaul and began to add a very healthy dose of eurodisco into their sound.

Finally, something a bit more chill – let’s go back to Eno. This is “Becalmed” from 1975:

The drinks are on the house. If I ever get the video posting in the comments thing figured out, I’ll start doing that again.