Month: December 2020

Better late than never!

A video combining stock footage of Anna Pavlova and a track that Cluster and Brian Eno collaborated on in the late 1970s. Some tranquility seems fitting.

The bar’s open. Jukebox is working. This is the last Midweek Cafe and Lounge of 2020. Next week, we start off fresh with a brand new year.

Have a happy, healthy, and safe New Year!

Cheers!

It’s interesting that Nate Silver changed his mind while writing his analysis of the Georgia runoff elections. Before he started, he thought he’d be concluding that the Republicans, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are slight favorites. In the end, however, he couldn’t give either side an edge and wrote that a split-decision must be considered a strong possibility.

In his opinion, Raphael Warnock is more likely to win than Jon Ossoff.

There is new polling out today which probably wasn’t part of Silver’s calculations. The JMC Analytics poll shows that Warnock is stronger, while the Trafalgar poll show Ossoff in an almost imperceptibly better position.

JMC Analytics

• Jon Ossoff (D) 50%, David Perdue (R) 43%
• Raphael Warnock (D) 53%, Kelly Loeffler (R) 44%

Trafalgar Group

• Ossoff 50%, Perdue 48%
• Warnock 50%, Loeffler 49%

Both of these polling outfits have a strong right-wing predictive bias, and Trafalgar has a C-minus rating with FiveThirtyEight which is the equivalent of saying their surveys are hot garbage. In this case, however, they’re predicting Democratic victories in both races.

Maybe their game is to scare Republican voters out of their complacency.

For me, that’s the best way to interpret these results. As projections, they’re worthless, but the GOP must be worried if their polling allies think the best tactic right now is to advertise that they’re losing.

President Trump continues to war with congressional Republicans as 2020 comes to an end. On Tuesday, he responded to the House’s Monday override of his annual defense spending bill veto by calling GOP leaders “weak” and “tired.” He accused them of committing a “disgraceful act of cowardice.”

However, thanks to Bernie Sanders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was not able to hold his own veto override on Tuesday, but will have to keep the Senate in session through the New Year’s celebrations in order to overcome the Vermont senator’s procedural objections.

Sanders’ gambit is pretty simple. He wants the Senate to vote on increasing the $600 individual checks in the COVID-19 relief bill to a more meaningful $2,000. The House voted to do this on Monday (with 44 Republican votes), and it has the support of both Trump and president-elect Joe Biden. Unless McConnell brings this to the floor, Sanders will object to any effort to bring the defense veto override to a vote.

In itself, Sanders’ move is little more than a dilatory inconvenience for McConnell, as he can file for cloture. But McConnell can’t avoid the politics. Seventy-eight percent of Americans support the larger $2,000 checks, and this combined with Trump’s advocacy has put so much pressure on Georgia senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who are facing  January 5 runoff elections, that both are now supportive.

When the Senate gaveled in at noon on Tuesday, McConnell was noncommittal about allowing a vote on the stimulus checks, but he blocked efforts by Sanders and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to force the issue. If he relents at all, he’s likely to attach poison pills to the measure.

McConnell on Trump demands for $2K checks, Section 230 reform & election investigations:

“This week the senate will begin a process to bring these three priorities into focus.”

It’s possible McConnell links these together to poison the well on dem votes for the $2K checks

— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) December 29, 2020

This would force the Democrats to object to a vote on the checks and remove some of the pressure. It would also allow Perdue and Loeffler to say they support $2,000 checks without ever having to actually vote for them. For these reasons, McConnell will probably opt to go with the poison pill maneuver rather than approve the checks. This will anger Trump, but increasingly McConnell doesn’t care what Trump thinks.

On the other hand, it’s not likely that Perdue and Loeffler will benefit. With Trump railing against gutless Republicans in Congress, it’s unclear why this will make Trump-supporting Georgians eager to vote for Republican senators.

Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all attempted to get a line-item veto, which would allow them to strike certain expenditures out of appropriations bills while still signing the legislation into law. It’s not an insane proposition. Forty-four out of 50 governors have some form of this power. But, in 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that its unconstitutional on the federal level because it violates the Presentment Clause. Efforts to craft a line-item veto that can pass constitutional muster have since passed in the House, but none have won approval in the Senate.

Therefore, President Trump did not have the option of amending the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill Congress sent him last week. Since the relief bill was attached to the $1.4 trillion omnibus government funding bill, he was presented with a take it or leave it situation. He couldn’t veto foreign aid he didn’t like in the State Department budget without also vetoing extended unemployment insurance and a foreclosure moratorium. He couldn’t reject the COVID relief portion because he wanted $2,000 checks issued instead $600 checks unless he was also willing to cause a government shutdown.

If Trump was unhappy with sections of this massive bill, the time to weigh in was prior to it being passed by both houses of Congress, but he was preoccupied with trying to overturn the results of the presidential election, which he lost.

On Sunday night, Trump finally relented and signed the bill, but in doing so he issued a statement that demonstrates that he’s spent four years in office and still hasn’t learned how the government is funded. Once he signed the bill, the bill is law and Congress doesn’t have to respond to his complaints.

I will sign the Omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed. I will send back to Congress a redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill.

He actually did send Congress some kind of recession request, not that it matters. This Congress is only in office for another six days. They’re not reopening the omnibus bill. They may override Trump’s veto of the defense appropriation bill, however, and Speaker Pelosi has hilariously agreed to hold a vote on Monday on increasing the $600 relief checks in the COVID -19 bill to a more generous $2,000. She’ll do it under a suspension of the rules, which means it will require a two-thirds majority to pass.

All the Democrats will align with Trump in supporting this increase, but the House Republicans will have to provide about half their votes if it’s going to pass. That means if the bill lands in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s lap, it will arrive with substantial bipartisan support and Trump’s blessing. This is the equivalent of making Moscow Mitch eat shit, as he and his caucus have been inalterably opposed to checks over $600, seeing them as un-targeted and wasteful. He’ll probably do nothing and leave the question for the next Congress. It may never come to that if House Republicans won’t help Pelosi pass the bill.

Trump also won a rhetorical agreement from the Senate to look at Section 230 of  the Communications Decency Act (which I discussed here) and non-existent voter fraud.

Additionally, Congress has promised that Section 230, which so unfairly benefits Big Tech at the expense of the American people, will be reviewed and either be terminated or substantially reformed.

Likewise, the House and Senate have agreed to focus strongly on the very substantial voter fraud which took place in the November 3 Presidential election.

The Senate will start the process for a vote that increases checks to $2,000, repeals Section 230, and starts an investigation into voter fraud.

Big Tech must not get protections of Section 230!

Voter Fraud must be fixed!

Much more money is coming. I will never give up my fight for the American people!

Trump might win the battle for the $2,000 checks, but the odds aren’t great. He’ll get nothing on Section 230 and voter fraud. He’ll get nothing on his rescissions. We could call of this face-saving bluster that allows him to justify signing a bill he called a “disgrace” just last week. But, it’s clear that Trump was actually duped into signing the bill by desperate aides and Republican congressional leaders who took advantage of his colossal ignorance of how the government is funded.

Whatever works, I guess. At least the government didn’t shut down and we’ll get the 600 bucks.

I took a couple days off from paying attention to Donald Trump to celebrate the Christmas holiday with my family, but I see from his Saturday morning Twitter activity that nothing has changed. He’s still in some kind of bizarre denial that he has lost his bid for reelection, and he’s still lashing out in wild and crazy ways that are unfathomable in a U.S. president.

Meanwhile, as president-elect Joe Biden points out, “It is the day after Christmas, and millions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet because of President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority. This abdication of responsibility has devastating consequences.”

I’ve spent far too much of my life focused on Trump and I couldn’t be more ready to be done with him, but he’s still our president for another 25 days. He can complain all he wants, but it just does more damage to his record as the worst leader this country has ever had. It’s actually hard to imagine that we could ever have someone worse, even if America persists for another thousand years.

On the other hand, he’s at least done us the service of demonstrating how vulnerable we are. He said he wanted to make  America great again, but he actually showed us how far from great we have been all along.

Hello again painting fans.

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

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×10 inch canvas panel.

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

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

I have now revised the sky and distant buttes. The buttes will receive a few highlights in the weeks to come. The central are has received some green paint. I am pleased with the progress.

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.

Hi photo lovers.

Happy Holidays! It’s been a while. I continue to venture outside a bit more when I can socially distance. Usually I like to go to the urban trails along the riverfront in my city for power walks. Fortunately the weather is much more inviting now. Some days I really don’t slow down for photos. Some days I do. I appreciate the stark beauty of the surrounding as we reach the end of Autumn and begin winter. The photo I chose this time was taken the day before the Winter Solstice. The sky was clear, and the water was just that shade of blue I love to capture on film or its digital equivalent.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for over two years. It seems to serve me well, for now, but I know that the lives of these devices are limited. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, so I suspect I may eventually have to succumb and go to the Dark Side of The Force. In a recessionary environment, my default is to avoid major purchases for as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters seems to have commandeered it. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

Peace.

Ariel Edwards-Levy reports on a new survey for HuffPost that shows Republican voters and right-leaning independents who voted for Trump are likely to side with the president in any dispute with congressional Republicans.

In the case of a disagreement between Trump and Republicans in Congress, 52% of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters say they’d be more likely to support Trump, according to the poll, conducted Dec. 15 through Sunday. Only 15% say they would side with the GOP legislators, with the rest saying they’d back neither or that they’re not sure.

Similarly, 62% say they would back Trump over their own representative, and just 14% say they would support the latter.

This is of immediate interest because Trump has vetoed the defense spending bill and threatened to veto the combination omnibus/COVID-19 relief bill, calling the latter a “disgrace.”

But these numbers are worth paying attention to in the longer term. In particular, the following numbers should be of intense interest:

A 42% plurality of Republican and Republican-leaning independents who voted for Trump in this year’s presidential election say they consider themselves more supporters of Trump than of the Republican Party. Just 21% feel that they are more supporters of the party, with another 31% saying they are supporters of both.

We won’t know what remains of the GOP until Trump has been out of office for a bit, but the GOP has plenty to worry about seeing that only one in five of their voters have more loyalty to the party than to the outgoing nutcase in the White House.

The party without Trump seems to have precious little strong support, and it’s just hard to figure out what unites the right going forward. Ideologically, it seems the base is immensely flexible, and definitely far more populist than the Paul Ryans of the world would like. They may be easiest to control simply by focusing their attention on opposing anything Biden wants to do, and Trump’s efforts to make Biden illegitimate will help in that respect, although it will also make it very hard to work with Biden on anything, and that will sometimes be politically disadvantageous.

Assuming Trump isn’t a candidate in four years, it will be very interesting to see how the presidential contenders try to differentiate themselves, since simply opposing Biden won’t do the trick.

The lack of any policy goals or clear and consistent ideological message is a new feature for the Republican Party, and in the short term it basically precludes any possibility of the kind of unity that Biden campaigned on.

The only good news is that the Republican Party seems to have shrunk considerably during the Trump Era, which has been masked by Trump’s cult of personality. I think a pretty sizable majority of the people are actually in Biden’s corner, and even bigger majority wants to see the GOP give him a chance to fix all the things that are obviously broken.

I don’t know how it will shake out, but I expect it to be acrimonious and yet ultimately unpredictable in terms of where the GOP heads next.

We survived it to another midweek. Enjoy another day that ends with the letter y.

It’s been a bit crazy as of late, so here’s some tunes that are variations of an earlier dark and paranoid time.

Yeah, things are a bit more on edge these days.

Have a safe holiday season, however you celebrate. I grill steaks for Christmas. Have done that for a while now. Keeping to the small immediate family gathering vibe for very obvious reasons.

Cheers!

Mike Pence has a problem. As vice-president of the United States, he a constitutional responsibility to validate the election results, a grim duty that other defeated vice presidents including Al Gore and Dan Quayle have endured with stoicism. President Trump does not want Pence to gracefully announce in front of Congress and the world that Joe Biden won the election. After four years of obsequious subservience in which he has assiduously avoided any hint of separation from the president, he now has reached a moment of truth. If, as Axios reports, Trump would view Pence’s fulfillment of his duties as “the ultimate betrayal,” how can the vice-president avoid losing his presidential viability among Trump’s supporters? Could it be that after working so tirelessly to position himself as Trump’s successor, he finds it was all for naught?

The first thing to understand is the vice-president’s role in the process.

On December 14, the Electoral College met in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and certified that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were the winners of the 2020 presidential election, 306 electoral votes to 232. Trump watched the process unfold on television in the dining room off the Oval Office. He complained that the television networks were, according to the Associated Press, “treating it like a mini-Election Night while not giving his challenges any airtime.” That evening, he sacked Attorney General William Barr, presumably because he hadn’t used the Justice Department to overturn the election results.

The certification of the vote was only a midway point in the obscure process of determining the winner of the presidential election. It actually began months before Election Day when the Archivist of the United States sent a letter to the governor of each State and the mayor of the District of Columbia detailing their constitutional responsibilities and asking for a point of contact for receipt of the election results, which were then sent to the director of the Federal Register.

This was a two-part procedure, wherein the states first sent Certificates of Ascertainment to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). These certificates listed the Electors and the preliminary results of the states’ elections. The official results came on December 14, and the Certificates of Vote were due at NARA on that date.

Pence’s role begins on December 23, the deadline by which he and NARA must be in possession of the Certificates of Vote. If the Senate has not received copies of these certificates from every state by this date, Pence, serving in his capacity as president of the Senate, is required to request a copy from NARA. In other words, it’s his responsibility to make sure this request is not required or to make it if it is. Whether Trump knows it or not, this is Pence’s first opportunity to shirk or fulfill his constitutional duty. If Pence does ask NARA for any certificates, they must be delivered to the Senate no later than January 3^rd.

Pence’s most visible role takes place on January 6, when Congress meets in joint session to count the electoral votes and he, as the President of the Senate, serves as the presiding officer. Here’s how that is supposed to look:

The President of the Senate announces the results of the State vote and then calls for any objections. To be recognized, an objection must be submitted in writing and be signed by at least one member of the House and one Senator. If an objection is recognized, the House and Senate withdraw to their respective chambers to consider the merits of any objections, following the process set out in 3 U.S.C. §15. After all the votes are recorded and counted, the President of the Senate declares which persons, if any, have been elected President and Vice President of the United States.

 Axios reports that “Pence’s role on Jan. 6 has begun to loom large in Trump’s mind” and that Trump spent Monday evening meeting with a handful of House Republicans in the Oval Office to plot their strategy for objecting to the Electoral College votes. That plot to overturn the election will fail, and Pence will then be forced to declare Biden and Harris the winners.

It’s the same task Joe Biden performed in January 2017 to declare Trump and Pence the winners over Clinton and Kaine. There’s no way for Pence to avoid it, although he could, from the presiding officer’s chair, make a Trumpian statement about how unfair it is.  It’s unclear what Trump would have him do instead. Not show up? In that case McConnell could appoint a senator to fill the chair and execute the announcement.

What is clear is that all eyes will be on Pence on January 6, and he’ll be in a no-win situation. The most loyal of all Trump allies will be scrambling to assuage the boss’s temper.