Month: August 2021

This is really strange but it’s not hard to find an explanation:

…among non-incumbent candidates running for the House in 2022, the top fundraiser is a Democrat with no political experience running in a deep-red seat: Democrat Marcus Flowers has raised over $2 million (as of June 30) in his bid to unseat controversial Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, which is a whopping 55 percentage points more Republican than the country as a whole, according to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric.¹

Here’s a bit of advice. Don’t make a political donation to Marcus Flowers. He is almost assuredly not going to win. If he somehow defies the odds, it will be because Marjorie Taylor Greene proves so toxic that even the constituents of Georgia’s 14th congressional district can’t tolerate her. But, their tolerance for wingnuttery isn’t just extremely high, they virtually demand outright lunacy from their representatives. In any case, Flowers already has enough money to organize in the district and pay for a healthy advertising campaign. There’s just no rationale for giving him a donation when there are dozens of races where your money is more likely to make a difference.

Democrats aren’t acting rationally, however, mainly because they just want to express their hatred and distaste for Greene. Financially supporting her opponent is a way of feeling better rather than a way of doing something productive. And it’s so easy to donate money today, with just a few clicks of the mouse, that money is flowing based on impulsive and emotional behaviors.

Don’t join the crowd on this. Take your time and do some research. Figure out where you can make an efficient use of your time and resources. This is a very critical election cycle that’s coming up and we need to use our smarts.

For about seven months now, the so-called “moderate” Democrats who’ve been in the news are Senators Manchin and Sinema. But as the House began to take up the infrastructure bill and the budget reconciliation plan, the mantle passed to Rep. Josh Gottheimer and eight other members who wrote a letter threatening to upend the unified strategy to advance President Biden’s legislative agenda. Here is their demand:

Earlier this week, the Senate passed an historic bipartisan infrastructure package, with a supermajority of sixty-nine votes. President Biden swiftly applauded its passage, stating that he hopes Congress will send it to his desk as soon as possible. The House of Representatives should heed his call and immediately pass the legislation…

Some have suggested that we hold off on considering the Senate infrastructure bill for months – until the reconciliation process is completed. We disagree. With the livelihoods of hardworking American families at stake, we simply can’t afford months of unnecessary delays and risk squandering this once-in- a-century, bipartisan infrastructure package. It’s time to get shovels in the ground and people to work. We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law.

This week Speaker Pelosi finalized an agreement to hold a vote on the infrastructure bill no later than September 27th in exchange for their support on the rule to get the reconciliation process underway.

The whole affair has me wondering what it means to be a moderate in the Democratic Party these days. What is it that motivates them? Pelosi, Schumer and the Biden White House were all on board with the plan to consider these two bills together (and based on the deal Pelosi negotiated, that might still happen).

Of course, there are always those who assume that every politician who doesn’t agree with them is caving to big money donors. The problem is that an explanation like that is always handy – no matter its accuracy – and it tends to cut off any other line of inquiry. So let’s consider some alternatives.

If we take these representatives at their word, their letter suggests that they wanted the infrastructure bill to pass now so that projects could begin immediately. That is what Rep. Gottheimer told Punchbowl news earlier this week. But according to Rep. Jan Schakowsky, none of the money in the bill can be allocated until after the new fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1st. So why the rush?

Perhaps the most intriguing suggestion of what motivated these politicians is the one about how they represent “swing districts” where Trump performed well in 2020. As Bill Scher wrote, “They want to avoid being attacked in TV and digital ads with having voted with their party’s most loathed member (who will it be this time? Pelosi? AOC? Ilhan Omar?) 90 percent of the time.”

The first problem with that reasoning is that we should all know by now that EVERY Democrat, no matter their voting record, will be tarred by the right wing as a “socialist extremist.” But a deeper look at who did (and didn’t) sign on with this group undermines the argument completely.

Only one of the nine who signed on to this strategy represents a district Trump won in 2020: Jared Golden, who represents Maine’s 2nd district. Cook rates that district R+6. Here are the other eight:

• Gottheimer, NJ 5th, R+1 (Trump lost by 6%)
• Carolyn Bourdeaux, GA 7th R+2 (Trump lost by 6%)
• Filmon Vela, TX 34th, D+5 (Trump lost by 4%)
• Henry Cuellar, TX 28, D+5 (Trump lost by 4%)
• Vicente Gonzalez, TX 15, D+3 ((Trump lost by 2%)
• Ed Case, HI 1, D+14 (Trump lost by 29%)
• Jim Costa, CA 16, D+9 (Trump lost by 20%)
• Kurt Schrader, OR 5, D+2 (Trump lost by 10%)

I don’t know. It seems like sometimes people start off with something principled and they wind up in a really strange place. That certainly happened with David Gilbert, a college-aged hell-raiser who in the 1960’s fulminated against racism and the Vietnam War as a key member of the Students for a Democratic Society. When that organization proved too timid for his tastes, he co-founded The Weathermen, a group that utilized terrorism rather than rhetoric. In 1970, his girlfriend died while making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.

Things reached a truly absurd state when Gilbert joined up with six members of the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brink’s truck in 1981. The idea was to reappropriate money to the victims of slavery.

They stole $1.6 million in cash from a Brink’s armored car at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, New York, killing a Brink’s guard, Peter Paige, seriously wounding Brink’s guard Joseph Trombino, slightly wounding Brink’s truck driver guard, James Kelly, subsequently killing two Nyack police officers, Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown, and seriously wounding Police Detective Artie Keenan.

That “principled” escapade earned Gilbert a conviction on three felony murder counts and a 75-year sentence in the slammer. On the day he resigned from office, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo commuted Gilbert’s sentence to time served. Gilbert could be a free man soon if he can convince the parole board he’s not a threat, but that doesn’t make him any less of an idiot. Somewhere, somehow, he lost his moral compass and went off the rails.

I thought about his example when I saw that Delta Air Lines is now going to jack up the health insurance premium for employees who aren’t vaccinated against COVID-19.

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian notified employees Wednesday that they will face $200 monthly increases on their health insurance premiums starting Nov. 1 if they aren’t vaccinated against Covid-19, citing steep costs to cover employees who are hospitalized with the virus.

Unvaccinated employees will face other restrictions, including indoor masking effective immediately and weekly Covid-19 tests starting Sept. 12 the Atlanta-based airline said in announcing new Covid policies for employees.

The connection with Gilbert is probably not immediately obvious, but I imagined that those who feel strongly that the choice of whether or to get inoculated is a matter of personal liberty will react poorly to discovering that it comes with a hefty price tag. Some of them may become convinced that their freedoms are under threat and find “principled” reasons to fight back with violence.

It’s not a wholly ridiculous idea. I can easily imagine circumstances where the government insists that people make health decisions that should be left to their discretion. For example, reproductive rights could be completely curtailed or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there could be a program of coerced sterilization.

Infectious disease, whether we’re talking about polio, small pox, measles, or whooping cough, creates a challenge to personal liberty. I’d actually be a little concerned if there were no push back against compelled vaccination programs, no matter how clear it is that the benefits outweigh the risks and costs.

There are obviously nuances to this. Delta Air Lines is not the U.S. Government and no one has any “right” to be employed there. It’s a bit different than telling parents that their children have to be in school but they can’t go to the free public school unless they are vaccinated. Either way, though, the exercise of liberty isn’t free.

It’s important to note that Delta isn’t firing unvaccinated workers. Instead, they’re making it expensive and extremely inconvenient to eschew the shot. It’s similar to the strategy the NFL is using to coerce compliance among football players. We’re going to see more of this now that the Pfizer shot has been fully approved by the FDA.

We’re already seeing other inconveniences, like service industries demanding proof of vaccination to eat in a restaurant or attend a game or concert. Collectively, this creates a definite second citizenship class. No one should be surprised if they feel oppressed and some of them begin to act accordingly.

Yet, however much they may think that they’re in the right and acting to protect all of our freedoms, when they lash out violently, they’re going to look just as stupid as David Gilbert, and possibly they’re going to do just as much time in prison.

Maybe forty years later some disgraced governor will have mercy on them. Who knows?

On Tuesday the rock world lost yet another one of its legends, Charlie Watts. Keith Richards has been quoted stating that “Charlie Watts is the Stones.” If so, long live Charlie Watts. Long live the Rolling Stones. He wasn’t flashy like many other drummers of his era, but he was very adept as a musician and what’s not to admire about the calm and detached persona on stage (and in videos) that truly was his brand. He will be missed.

I hope you all are doing well. Stay safe out there.

Let’s go!

Nancy “the Magician” Pelosi has struck again, and Joe Biden’s presidency has been rescued from the brink. In a 220-212 vote, the U.S. House of Representatives just adopted a budget reconciliation plan that will do more to transform this country than anything since The New Deal.

House Democrats on Tuesday approved a roughly $3.5 trillion budget that could enable sweeping changes to the nation’s healthcare, education and tax laws, overcoming internal divisions in a debate that could foreshadow even tougher battles still to come.

The 220-212 vote came after days of delays as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) scrambled to stave off a revolt from her party’s moderate-leaning lawmakers. With the frenzy resolved, the chamber averted what would have been a political embarrassment to take the next step in enacting President Biden’s broader economic agenda.

She’s smarter than I am. I hadn’t considered that she could promise to hold a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill before October but was under no obligation to reconcile it with the Senate’s version or to send it along to the White House before she’s good and ready.

Call it keeping a promise without keeping a promise. It allows the moderate Democrats to crow that they won big concessions but still satisfies the progressives’ demand that the larger $3.5 trillion dollar spending package gets first dibs on enactment.

The most important thing is that the House committees with jurisdiction can begin writing bills on healthcare, education, taxes, climate, and even more infrastructure with the knowledge that it can all pass through the Senate if the Democrats remain united. The filibuster is no longer an obstacle.

The top-line $3.5 trillion number will probably get trimmed down in a concession to both House centrists and some skittish Democratic senators–especially Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Some of the taxes might not ultimately fly either, but that’s all for later negotiation.

This is going to get done. Biden will go down as one of the most progressively transformative and consequential presidents in our country’s history, and it’s thanks to Pelosi finding a way to break the impasse in her caucus.

You should be excited!

Six weeks before he was inaugurated as vice-president in 2009, Joe Biden met with president-elect Barack Obama upon his return from a fact-finding mission to determine what the new administration was facing in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Peter Baker reported, the news about the latter was not good.

“It has deteriorated significantly,” Biden said. “It’s going to be a very heavy lift.”…

“He came to question some of the assumptions and began asking questions about whether there might be other approaches that might get you as good or better results at lower cost,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who has been consulted by Mr. Biden on the matter…

“His concept was to keep a small footprint, have an offshore strategy as the sole approach to seeking better security and stability in Afghanistan and focus on counterterrorism and the hard-core ideologues who won’t change,” General McNeill said.

Former Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren recently wrote this about why the situation in Afghanistan had “deteriorated significantly.”

Whether Joe Biden made any serious tactical mistakes in the withdrawal is irrelevant in the larger scheme, because Afghanistan was doomed almost from the beginning. It started out ostensibly as a hunt for Osama bin Laden and his protective cadre of al Qaeda. But in December 2001, as U.S. and allied special forces began to narrow the search down to the Tora Bora mountains near the border with Afghanistan, strange information began to cross my desk at the House Budget Committee, where I then worked as a defense budget analyst.

The budget supplemental requests told the story of a huge military buildup in progress. Was it perhaps to send more U.S. ground troops to establish a cordon around the Tora Bora area to supplement the pathetically few special forces on the job? No, the troops and their gear were bound for the Persian Gulf, to prepare for the invasion of Iraq – a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

Senator Bob Graham was one of the few members of Congress who were disturbed by the fact that capturing bin Laden – ostensibly the cause of all our problems – played second fiddle to George W. Bush’s personal vendetta with Saddam Hussein, particularly when the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Tommy Franks, told Graham the administration was even pulling critical forces already in Afghanistan to move to the Gulf.

We now know that it was eventually President Obama who tracked bin Laden down in Pakistan and sent in special forces to eliminate the threat he posed.

That is just some of the context that reporting about the current situation in Afghanistan has completely ignored. Both right wing and major media outlets are obsessed with words like “chaos,” “doom,” and “failure” to describe what they see as a massive miscalculation by Biden. In wrestling with that obsession, Josh Marshall suggests that they have “bought in” to what Ben Rhodes once referred to as “the Blob” (the American foreign policy establishment).

[O]fficial DC, which means the city’s elite national political press, was deeply bought in. This doesn’t mean they were warmongers or rah-rah militarists…But they were deeply bought in in ways that are likely best seen in sociological terms. Countless numbers embedded with US military formations. They accompanied members of Congress on “CODELS” to the warzones. They’ve been immersed with a Pentagon which has spent two decades building hammers to hit nails in the Middle East and Central Asia. Their peers study and write in the world of DC think tanks focused on the best ways of striking those nails…

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion…Nowhere has this been more blindingly clear than in the Capital’s news-driving email newsletters and the eager voices of the same folks on Twitter, ramping themselves up into escalating paroxysms of outrage and doom casting over the ugly scenes emerging on viral videos, all the while overlooking their support for the policies that made the events inevitable. The intensity of the reaction, the need to stay tethered to the imagery of Sunday and Monday, is a perfect measure of the shock of being forced to confront the reality of the situation in real time.

What made it all hit home for me was a line from CNN’s Luke McGee. He described Biden’s decision to end our military occupation of Afghanistan by saying that the leader of the free world was “washing his hands of a global problem.” Behind a statement like that is the assumption that the only way the U.S. can engage global problems is via military intervention.

I was reminded that in 2016, then-President Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg that “real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence.” He went on to talk about his own struggles with “the blob” —which he referred as the Washington playbook on foreign policy.

“Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power,” he said. “That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.”

Neither Obama nor Biden are anti-war. But they’re also both smart enough to know that when it comes to foreign policy, the United States isn’t limited to militarized responses. Here’s how Biden addressed that during his remarks about Afghanistan last week:

We will continue to support the Afghan people. We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence and our humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world.

I’ve been clear, the human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery. But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments. It’s with our diplomacy, our economic tools and rallying the world to join us.

I can hear the cynics now. They’re saying: “that will never work!” But we’ve been engaged militarily in Afghanistan for almost 20 years now. How did that work?

The point here is that media outlets have bought into the Washington playbook’s assumption that violence is the only way for the U.S. to exert power in the world. I am personally grateful that Biden knows there are other tools we can deploy.

I’m sorry, I have to laugh about the reports that Andrew Cuomo abandoned his dog and left it at the governor’s mansion in Albany when he moved out. First, everyone knows that a dog is man’s best friend, and this is about the worst time for a friendless person like Cuomo to be without his canine companion.

But let’s face it. This dog has always been a problem for Cuomo. From the beginning, he couldn’t control it.

Cuomo first introduced the dog, then 14 weeks old, in 2018 to a delegation from the state Conference of Mayors when they visited the Executive Mansion.

Then he complained that it would “only urinate indoors” and “has some kind of climate sensitivity that overpowers his bowel movements.” Now there’s an anonymous source that claims the dog has been nipping state troopers. Sounds like a nightmare to me, but one that’s probably manageable when you have taxpayer-paid staff to clean up the mess.

Naturally, Cuomo doesn’t want to be responsible for this dog. As his spokesman Richard Azzopardi states, “He wants to go on vacation.”

If I were Cuomo, I’d want to dig a giant hole and live in it for the rest of my hopefully brief life, but I’ve never been accused of rampantly inappropriate sexual behavior and forced to resign from a high profile office.

But the real story is not about dog abandonment. Supposedly a staffer took it home and soon discovered that living with it was a form of water torture. That’s a shame, but it’s understandable that the dog from hell isn’t exactly Cuomo’s top priority with his life in ruins, moving trucks parked all over the place, a hurricane battering his state and a transition of power to manage.

But being a horrible person earns you brutal unsympathetic news coverage, so he’s now the guy who abandoned his dog. It’s freaking perfect. Complete poetic justice, and so funny…

At least he’s not the guy who strapped his dog to the roof of his car and went on the interstate.

Newsweek reports on something that might seem of little import and consequence, but is actually somewhat of a mystery.

Former President Donald Trump was booed by his own supporters during a rally in Cullman, Alabama Saturday night after he encouraged the crowd to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

“I believe totally in your freedoms, I do, you gotta do what you gotta do, but I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good,” he said, drawing boos from the crowd of supporters.

“That’s okay, that’s alright,” Trump continued, brushing off the disapproval. “But I happen to take the vaccine. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know. But it is working. You do have your freedoms, you have to maintain that.”

I will never give Trump credit for anything. For me, he’s incapable of doing anything for the right reasons. This is a good example of how that plays out. Yes, he’s been telling people to get vaccinated, and he repeated that message on Saturday. But his other actions related to the pandemic have been so toxic that his positive and productive message cannot compete for influence with the overall impression he’s left with his base.

What they got from him was skepticism that COVID-19 is a real threat. Instead, they perceive it as a political weapon aimed at them. Religious leaders are familiar with cafeteria adherents who accept the teachings they like and ignore the teachings they find inconvenient, and this what we’re seeing here. Like a Catholic bishop, Trump is revered by the faithful, but he’s not treated as infallible. Even though he wrote the scriptures they follow, they’re not above booing him if he departs from his brand.

He created feelings and a disposition rather than tenets of belief and behavior. One can imagine Joseph Smith, Jesus or Mohammed being similarly heckled by their flock if they started emphasizing things that ran counter to the magnetic message they had initially used to attract support.

And Trump’s message isn’t about stamping out polytheism or reform of a sclerotic and hypocritical priestly caste. It’s not about some new divine revelation or a new system of ethics. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what Trumpism is about, but it’s definitely hostile to reason, logic, education, and science. Vaccines are bad primarily because elites said they are good. They address a problem that was supposedly hyped for political advantage and so is not a problem at all.

Trump doesn’t like being booed, so it’s likely that he’ll drop his vaccination pitch from future rallies. Regardless, this event shows that the damage he’s done is extensive and has now slipped out of his control.

The New York Times is doing some good reporting on how decisions and preparations were made for the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, but I still don’t like the tone of their coverage. On one level there were clear intelligence failures, especially about the strength of the Taliban and the weakness of the central government. But, on another level, it was precisely these factors that Biden understood and that led him to conclude that our mission had failed.

An example is the request made by then-president Ashraf Ghani on June 25 in the White House that Biden be very low-key about evacuating non-military Americans lest it cause a panic and collapse in morale among Afghan troops. This was obviously a very real concern, but in the end it was not one that would matter. Morale was catastrophically low irrespective of how obvious it was that westerners were fleeing the country.

Biden tried to honor President Ghani’s request, and his reward was a bigger problem when the government collapsed in days and Ghani fled to the United Arab Emirates. A little less concern for optics in July would have facilitated fewer people stuck in Afghanistan now.

Another example comes from a request Biden made to Ghani in that June 25 meeting.

Mr. Biden had his own request for Mr. Ghani. The Afghan forces were stretched too thin, Mr. Biden told him, and should not try to fight everywhere. He repeated American advice that Mr. Ghani consolidate Afghan forces around key locations, but Mr. Ghani never took it.

So, yes, while it’s true that the intelligence community did not predict that the Taliban would take over Kabul before we even reached the official August 31 withdrawal date, one of the reasons that outcome came about is that Ghani did not consolidate his forces to protect the capital.

One thing that’s obvious is that the weakness of the central government led the Americans to take actions that look stupid in retrospect but which were actually decisions based on accounting for that weakness.

Another lazy criticism involves the decision to move troops out before evacuating civilians. This was done to avoid a military rout and at the Pentagon’s request, and had Biden instead ramped up the military for a civilian exodus he’d be receiving a different and possibly more damning set of critiques now.

It’s fine to point out that there were a lot of faulty assumptions that went into the withdrawal plans, but it’s important to also report on how hamstrung Biden was by conflicting demands. He knew the Afghan government was too weak to stand alone but he didn’t want to make things more difficult for them. For one, he needed them to hold turf which they ultimately could not hold. Had he spoken candidly and taken the appropriately panicked steps to get everyone out, it would have ramped up the odds of chaos and failure.

This isn’t to say that the planning went as well as could be expected, but a balanced picture requires more than just pointing to what went wrong and who made bad predictions. In the end, we can now see that we were defending something that could not stand on its own. That’s the reason we had to leave, not a reason why we should have stayed.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle, UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

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.

For this week’s cycle I have concentrated my efforts on the area surrounding the moat. Note the revised causeway. Above the castle I have painted another layer of paint in anticipation of details to come. Those will be seen 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.