Month: September 2021

A little over four years ago, white supremacists protested the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA while chanting “You will not replace us.” Donald Trump’s suggestion that the protesters were “good people” drew condemnation from almost every corner of the country – including many Republicans.

The slogan the protesters were chanting has a long history among white supremacists, reflecting their adoption of the “great replacement theory,” that whites are being replaced by non-white immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, and the end result will be the extinction of the white race. The danger of this kind of rhetoric is demonstrated by the fact that it spurred killing sprees in Christchurch, New Zealand; Poway, California; and El Paso, Texas.

Nevertheless, the great replacement theory has been a staple on Fox News over the last couple of years.

But as I pointed out previously, this hate-filled message isn’t just coming from Fox News hosts and guests. It has been picked up by Republican elected officials, candidates, and right wing commentators.

Wednesday night, Tucker Carlson was at it again. This time he claimed that, during remarks in 2015, Vice President Biden “explained the entire point of mass immigration.” Carlson then showed a video clip of Biden saying this:

An unrelenting stream of immigration. Nonstop, nonstop. Folks like me who are Caucasian, of European descent, for the first time in 2017 we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be white European stock. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.

Carlson went on to say this:

“An unrelenting stream of immigration.” Why? Joe Biden said it. To change the racial mix of the country. That’s the reason. To reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the third world. And then Biden went further and said that non-white DNA is the source of our strength. Imagine saying that. This is the language of eugenics. It’s horrifying. But there’s a reason Biden said it. In political terms, this policy is sometimes called the great replacement — the replacement of legacy Americans, with more obedient people from faraway countries.

Your first clue that something is amiss with that Biden quote is that it begins mid-sentence. He made the remarks as an introduction to a White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism. After commending several U.S. cities for their work to prevent the recruitment of people to violent extremism, Biden said this:

I want to make it clear, though, I’m not suggesting to the press or any of our guests that I think America has all the answers here. We just have a lot more experience. By that I mean we are a nation of immigrants, that’s who we are. That is not hyperbole. We talk, we teach our kids we’re a melting pot. The God’s truth is, we are a polyglot, we are a melting pot. It is the ultimate source of our strength, it is the ultimate source of who we are, what we’ve become. And it started all the way back in the late 1700s, there’s been a constant, unrelenting stream of immigration. Not in little trickles, but in large numbers.

The former vice president then went on to recount a conversation he had with the former Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew, who said that countries like China were looking for the figurative “black box” that “allows America to constantly be able to remake itself, unlike any other country in the world.” After commenting about this country’s skepticism for orthodoxy, Biden returned to the theme of immigration, which is where the clip Carlson showed kicks in. But here’s the context.

I said, “There’s a second thing in that black box — an unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop.” Folks like me who are Caucasian, of European descent, for the first time in 2017 we’ll be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be white European stock. That’s not a bad thing, that’s a source of our strength.

And so, we have been — we haven’t always gotten it right. I don’t want to — I don’t want to suggest we have all the answers. But we have a lot of experience of integrating communities into the American system, the American Dream.

A generation from now, as I said, things will be changed even more. It’s not merely that we’re a melting pot, but we’re proud to be a melting pot. And with that, we’ve made a lot of mistakes, but we’ve also made a lot of progress. And you know, we’ve learned a lot of hard lessons.

But the most important lesson we’ve learned, we don’t always practice it, is that inclusion counts. Let me say that again — inclusion counts. Inclusion counts. Being brought in and made a part of the community — whether as my Irish ancestors with signs, “No Irish need apply,” and the anti-Catholic movement of the Know-Nothings in the late 1800s, straight through to how some respond today to the number of folks in the United States of America that are Hispanic in background.

It’s always — we’ve always ultimately overcome it. But it’s always been about inclusion, being a part of the whole. As I said, we still have problems, but I’m proud of the American record on cultural and economic integration of not only our Muslim communities but African communities, Asian communities, Hispanic communities. And the wave still continues. It’s not going to stop, nor should we want it to stop. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the things I think we can be most proud of.

Perhaps now you understand why Carlson had to cherry-pick from Biden’s remarks in order to remove them from a context that is a direct challenge to the great replacement theory.

Already today, both Charlie Kirk and Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) have picked up on Carlson’s lie. Here’s Rep. Babin:

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1441102623977791489?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1441102623977791489%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F

Carlson has once again given Republicans their talking points and we’re likely to be hearing these kinds of lies about Biden whenever the topic of immigration comes up. Aaron Ruper is absolutely right: the great replacement theory (read: white supremacy) has become mainstream Republican thinking.

The always-delightful Balloon-Juice contributor known as Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix had a scathing post yesterday scorching Slate’s Lili Loofbourow, who wrote an execrable piece throwing shade at those of us who read the Herman Cain Awards on Reddit.

Yesterday, Lili Loofbourow wrote a piece at Slate where she churned out a bunch of words about the Herman Cain Awards subreddit…

There’s a lot of talk, including in the Slate piece, about how the Hermies are “dark” and the goal of the HCAs is not to change minds so they’re somehow bad. Yes, it is dark to see a bunch of idiots sharing and re-sharing the same cookie-cutter memes that compare Fauci to Hitler, Fauci’s penis size to the size of Hillary Clinton’s penis, etc. Seeing those lies followed by tales of suffering and death is even darker. Still, if anything is clear from weeks of looking at Awardees, it is that these minds are not easily changed. Gentle persuasion is not going to do a fucking thing for a bunch of idiots stubbornly ensconced in a Facebook bubble.

I realize that the HCAs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But I refuse to be bullied into being the “responsible liberal” who has to work harder than Dr. Doolittle to talk kanga to these kangaroos, simply because their precious fee fees might be hurt when they learn that people are documenting their needless, stupid deaths (after personally identifiable details are blacked out). This god damned country has been catering to the hurt feelings of a bunch of undereducated, overprivileged white folks for 20 years — all we’ve gained is a clown President and wannabes like DeathSantis who wanted to kill liberals, but now are killing their own.

It’s hard to take Ms. Loofbourow’s complaint seriously, and as a regular reader of the HCAs, I have no sympathy at all for the nominees and award-winners. They are 100% responsible for their predicament, and on top of that they seem to be the nastiest, meanest, shittiest people you could hope to (not) meet. But my hostility to them is amplified because, as Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix writes, “they are hogging resources and causing others to die.” Now, the New York Times gives us an idea of what that looks like.

In chronic pain, Mary O’Donnell can’t get around much. At most, she manages to walk for a short time in her kitchen or garden before she has to sit down. “It’s just frustrating at this point,” said Ms. O’Donnell, 80, who lives in Aloha, Ore. “I’m really depressed.”

She had been preparing for back surgery scheduled for Aug. 31, hoping the five-hour procedure would allow her to be more active. But a day before the operation, at OHSU Health Hillsboro Medical Center, she learned it had been canceled.

“Nope, you can’t come, our hospital is filling up,” she said she was told.

Faced with a surge of Covid-19 hospitalizations in Oregon, the hospital has not yet rescheduled her surgery. “I don’t know what is going to happen,” Ms. O’Donnell said, worrying that her ability to walk might be permanently impaired if she is forced to wait too long.

I added the italics to drive home the point: some 80 year-old lady might lose what little independence she still has because of these selfish shits. Lili Loofbourow says we’re being MEAN and “rejoicing at death.”

In Columbus, Ga., Robin Strong’s doctor told her a few weeks ago that the rising Covid caseloads there would delay a procedure to repair a vocal cord that was paralyzed in a previous surgery.

Because of her condition, she chokes easily and has a hard time breathing. “I just cry all the time because of my situation,” she said.

Compounding the physical discomfort is her frustration that so many people in her state won’t get vaccinated against Covid, and they are getting sick and taking up hospital beds…

“They are punishing people like me,” Ms. Strong said.

A bunch of fools got themselves sick on purpose with a deadly disease—and are now insisting on every possible effort to save their miserable lives while someone who presumably did the right thing and got the jab has to wait for necessary surgery. But don’t say that—it’s “heartless and unrepentant schadenfreude,” according to Lili Loofbourow.

With precious few available intensive-care beds, Idaho hospitals had largely stopped providing hernia surgeries or hip replacements before the new order. Now they are postponing cancer and heart surgeries, too, said Brian Whitlock, the chief executive of the Idaho Hospital Association. The hospitals there “have been doing their level best,” he said.

People who refused to believe in science got Covid, and now folks with cancer have to wait while they take up the resources. The article goes on and on like this—and no joke, these delays, which are entirely the fault of willfully unvaccinated people demanded every single resource even though they’re likely to die, are having a negative impact on everyone else.

Some hospital officials say they have been assessing the effects of delayed care caused by the shutting down of elective procedures earlier in the pandemic. “It was very clear that many of these folks had decompensated or were more acutely ill than they would have otherwise been,” said Dr. Bryan Alsip, the chief medical officer at University Health in San Antonio, Texas.

Again, I added italics for emphasis. Decompensation refers to “the functional deterioration of a structure or system that had been previously working with the help of allostatic compensation. Decompensation may occur due to fatigue, stress, illness, or old age. When a system is “compensated”, it is able to function despite stressors or defects. Decompensation describes an inability to compensate for these deficiencies.”

So what this means is that a patient—again, thanks to covid idiots taking up the beds—has a longer (and more expensive) road to recovery, if they recover at all.

Meanwhile, Lili Loofbourow at Slate is clutching her fucking pearls that Reddit readers aren’t adequately kind and sympathetic to these disease-spreading parasites, who use all the medical resources available in an effort to stave off the death they brought on themselves, while people with other, just as important, medical conditions are forced to wait. Sometimes until they die.

Maybe someday Lili will write about those people—the folks who are unfairly forced to wait for treatment til they die—instead of griping about those of us who are justifiably fucking sick of the pigheaded, disease-spreading, pandemic-prolonging, unreasonable, unpersuadable assholes who are causing these problems to begin with. Or is that not contrarian enough?

So, there are these white mothers down in Tennessee who worry that textbooks for second graders about the Civil Rights Movement will make their kids feel bad about themselves. You know, there’s pictures of black people being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses and of white people jeering at Ruby Bridges as she tries to attend a segregated public school in Louisiana. And I get it. Content like that is going to raise some questions and who can tell how an impressionable young child will process it all? Maybe they’ll conclude there’s something wrong with them because they’re white.

It’s kind of weird, though, that these white mothers don’t ask how black kids will feel when they discover that blacks were slaves for hundreds of years. You think that might do some damage to their self-esteem? Should we not teach about that in school? The thing is, they’re going to find out anyway from their own families, but without a school lesson the white kids might not hear a peep about the history of white supremacy in Tennessee.

Teaching people history is at least in some sense neutral. It’s true that you can emphasize certain things and you’ll inevitably leave most things out. But it’s not supposed to be about how it makes people feel. That’s largely up to them. We’d like it everyone could agree that slavery and segregation were wrong, but people might come to a different conclusion. Some white kids might conclude they’re naturally superior and the fact that blacks were once enslaved proves this. Some black kids might feel similarly. If that’s the lesson people take from the history, it’s unfortunate but it’s not a reason to censor what happened.

Just today, I learned that Michael Flynn, a white man, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and briefly the national security advisor to President Donald Trump, is going around telling people that the government is going to put COVID-19 vaccine in people’s salad dressing.

Now, that’s something that might one day be taught in a second grade classroom. Kids will learn that a prominent white man was behaving this way during the height of the COVID-19 crisis and that might make the little white boys feel some kind of way about being white. I know that if I felt  a strong solidarity with other white men, Flynn’s behavior would make me ashamed. But I think it would be really silly if I decided this history should be glossed over to preserve my feelings or the feelings of my white son.

Hell, when we teach about the Holocaust, we don’t worry that white Christians will be totally demoralized and consumed with self-hatred. Why? Because what the Nazis did doesn’t reflect on everyone who looks like them or who shares some of the same cultural and religious features. That doesn’t mean I can’t feel a bit shitty about how my own cultural background overlaps German history and development. It doesn’t mean I can’t hang my head a little bit about how my forebears treated Jews. The lesson is supposed to be that I shouldn’t be like them. I shouldn’t repeat their mistakes, let alone their atrocities.

That’s what should be taught about Michael Flynn, too, when all is said and done.

It’s a part of history, and generally speaking, people have been awful to each other for as long as people have existed. All we want is for people to do better, to make progress. It shouldn’t be so controversial, or so hard.

 

Hi!

I have probably recycled this video a time or two. I’ve always liked it, since it first dropped in 2011. Wire were among those from the early punk and post-punk days as the 1970s drew to a close doing ground-breaking work. At the time, they were quite young. By the time this video was recorded, the remaining original members were well into middle-age (where I am now). The question then becomes one of relevance. Did they still have something to say. The basic ethos of Wire was that they stopped whenever they ran out of words. Turns out, they could still pen some timely lyrics and they could still experiment with their sound. Wire adapted. As I understand, they continue to adapt.

Okay. The jukebox is there. So is the bar. Use your imagination. Want to talk? I check in once a day. I have done so for the most part for quite a long while. In the meantime, make sure to check out the front page. Martin, Nancy, and Brendan have been on fire as of late. Don’t miss it. Cheers!

When it comes to major issues like climate change and the coronavirus pandemic, right wingers have positioned themselves firmly against the scientific consensus. But now that the Supreme Court has validated what amounts to a ban on abortions in Texas, there are those in their ranks who want to claim the mantle of following the science.

Case in point: Andy Puzder, who isn’t a scientist, but a businessman, recently published an article on the Fox News website titled: “Biden ignores science on abortion – he follows politics on question of when life begins.” Puzder’s case basically boils down to this:

The science on when human life begins is not in serious dispute. For example, the American College of Pediatricians’ (ACP) website states that “[t]he predominance of human biological research confirms that human life begins at conception—fertilization. At fertilization, the human being emerges as a whole, genetically distinct, individuated zygotic living human organism, a member of the species Homo sapiens, needing only the proper environment in order to grow and develop. The difference between the individual in its adult stage and in its zygotic stage is one of form, not nature.”

So the American College of Pediatricians has stated that, according to biological research, human life begins at conception. That sounds official, doesn’t it?

But wait…what is the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds)? It is important to note that they are NOT the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP), which was founded in 1930 and currently has a membership of over 67,000 physicians. ACPeds was founded in 2002 when a small number of socially conservative AAP members broke away from the professional association after it endorsed adoption by same-sex couples. Here are a few quotes Southern Poverty Law Center pulled from the ACPeds website:

“Homosexual men and women are reported to be promiscuous, with serial sex partners, even within what are loosely-termed ‘committed relationships.’ Individuals who practice a homosexual lifestyle are more likely than heterosexuals to experience mental illness, substance abuse, suicidal tendencies and shortened life spans.”
—“Homosexual Parenting: Is It Time for A Change?” updated July 2017, available on ACPeds website

“Driving in this morning I began to wonder. Why isn’t the movement of LGBT not the PLGBT movement: ‘P’ for pedophile? …In one sense, it could be argued that the LGBT movement is only tangentially associated with pedophilia. I see that argument, but the pushers of the movement, the activists, I think have pedophilia intrinsically woven into their agenda. It is they who need to be spoken to and against.”
—Blog post on ACPeds website, July 15, 2015

“[T]here is sound evidence that children exposed to the homosexual lifestyle may be at increased risk for emotional, mental, and even physical harm.”
—“Homosexual Parenting: Is It Time For Change?” ACPeds article, January 22, 2004

“For unwanted sexual attractions, therapy to restore heterosexual attraction has proven effective and harmless.”
—Facts About Youth website, 2010

“Gay, lesbian, and bisexual students are not born that way. The most recent, extensive, and scientifically sound research finds that the primary factor in the development of homosexuality is environmental not genetic.”
—Facts About Youth website, 2010

That is the organization Puzder relies on to suggest that there is “scientific evidence” to support the claim that life begins as conception. The group also believes that homosexuals are serially promiscuous pedophiles who pose a danger to children, but can be “cured” via “reparative” or sexual orientation conversion therapy. Nothing in any of those statements is backed by any more scientific evidence than the one about life beginning at conception.

As you can see, it is no wonder that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled ACPeds a hate group and the ACLU refers to them as a fringe group that has acted to promote “unscientific and harmful ‘reparative therapies’ for LGBTQ students.”

The anti-choice movement in this country has a long history of attempting to adopt abortion restrictions that fly in the face of facts and science, as Rachel Bensen Gold and Elizabeth Nash have documented.

At least 10 major categories of abortion restrictions—including measures based on claims of protecting a woman’s health—lack a foundation in rigorous scientific evidence.

These restrictions include unnecessary regulations on abortion facilities and providers, counseling and waiting period requirements that belie the scientific evidence, and laws based on false assertions about when fetuses can feel pain.

To those we could add the Hobby Lobby lie that certain birth control methods are abortifacients as well as the misnamed “fetal heartbeat bills,” like the one recently passed in Texas.

The idea that science has determined that life begins at conception is preposterous. Those who promote it, like Puzder and ACPeds, are engaging in propaganda, not a rational argument.

The Democrats have 99 problems right now, with President Biden’s entire agenda in peril and the country on the verge of a debt default, so they don’t have the bandwidth to focus too much of their messaging on the coup attempt of January 6, 2021. The release of a memo from Claremont Institute senior fellow John C. Eastman has revealed the “legal” basis the Trump administration hoped to use on January 6 to steal the election. Some people are reasonably reacting with discussion of how the the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is too vague and should be strengthened to prevent future shenanigans. That’s a good idea, but a more urgent idea is not to treat this as some kind of legal argument but more like a seditious  conspiracy involving many easily identifiable bad actors who should face something on the order of the Nuremberg Trials.

Eastman’s memo was taken very seriously, and Mike Pence reportedly sought to follow its roadmap to a coup until he was talked out of by former Vice-President Dan Quayle. The key fact is that the plan depended on simply not counting the votes from seven states that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won. By doing so, the threshold for victory would be reduced from 270 Electoral College votes down to 228, and Trump would win by 232 votes to 222. If the Democrats complained about this, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives where Trump could still prevail because the Republicans controlled the delegations in 26 states.

It’s not a defense that the plan was unlikely to work even if Pence initiated it. The mere expectation that Pence would initiate it caused the January 6 insurrection that resulted in several deaths, dozens of serious injuries, and millions of dollars in property damage, not to mention a mortal threat to our nation’s lawmakers.

I know that the House of Representatives has created an investigative committee that will be looking into everything that went into the January 6 insurrection, and that’s fine for what it’s worth. But this is still being treated as a hiccup rather than a betrayal on the scale of the South’s secession from the Union.

It’s critical that the country stand up for itself here and that begins by defining this as among the most serious and foul crimes ever committed in this country, and the perpetrators need to be treated as enemies of the state on a par with war criminals.

 

 

In August 2019, as I grew frustrated with the early stages of the Democratic presidential primary, I wrote a piece called How to Campaign When Nothing is Possible. It predicted the political landscape in 2021 for an incoming Democratic president under three different realistic scenarios. In none of the scenarios would the policy differences between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders (or the other contenders) add up to a hill of beans. This was my main point. I was trying to educate people, but also to calm them down.

Fortunately, the first scenario, which envisioned the Republicans holding onto control of at least one chamber of Congress, didn’t come to pass. But here’s what I said about it.

If the Republicans maintain their majority in the Senate, the new Democratic president will not be enacting one iota of their top shelf legislative agenda. There will be nothing major on health care or college loans or immigration or climate change. Even judges will be only confirmed in the most belated and begrudging manner, and only if they’ve never said anything on the record that conservatives find irritating. All legislative progress that can be made will come as the result of leverage over must-pass bills, and the leverage will only be truly significant so long as the Democrats retain control of the House of Representatives. But navigating government shutdowns and threats of national default in order to attach a few things to appropriations bills is not going to turn many of a candidate’s campaign promises into reality.

The second scenario envisioned the Democrats winning the trifecta–control of the White House, Senate and House, which is what actually transpired–but not having the balls to preemptively change the Senate rules to do away with the legislative filibuster. Does this look like what you’re witnessing now?

If, however, the Democrats win control of the trifecta (White House, Senate and House), they will still be hamstrung by the Senate’s legislative filibuster and the limits of what vulnerable or conservative Democrats are willing to support. It’s actually becoming foreseeable that the Democrats will do away with the legislative filibuster, thus allowing them to pass bills with fifty instead of sixty votes. But that would require them to be completely united, or nearly so if they somehow win even more than four GOP-held seats in 2020. Because the Democratic caucus includes many institutionalists, it’s probable that they won’t kill the filibuster for good until they’ve given the Republicans most of the 2021 congressional calendar to provide some compromise. Only if they are frustrated in that effort (and they will be) does it seems possible that every Democratic senator will be ready to make the move.  As a result, President Biden (or Warren or Harris or Sanders, etc.) will probably lose all the momentum normally enjoyed during the honeymoon period of a new chief executive.

The only way around this is to use the budget reconciliation process to cram as much of President Biden’s through the Senate as possible, and that’s the strategy the Democrats have attempted. I’ll come back to this in a minute, but I also provided a last scenario when the Democrats actually would take preemptive action to eliminate the legislative filibuster.

Yet, even if the Democrats win the trifecta and eliminate the legislative filibuster, they’ll still have huge problems passing legislation. Even assuming that Nancy Pelosi can push the president’s agenda through her chamber (and this is doubtful for some of the policies the candidates are pushing), there are senators (like Michael Bennet of Colorado, for example) on the record opposing much of the progressive candidates’ agenda. There are senators like Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia who vote with the Republicans almost as often as they vote with the Democrats. Manchin, by the way, will probably be the chairman of the Energy Committee, making impactful climate legislation next to impossible to pass. And then there will be the freshman class. In order to get a net gain of four seats, the Democrats will have to win a seat or two in states like Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Kentucky and Tennessee. Even the seemingly easy pickings in Colorado, Arizona and (perhaps) Maine are going to bring in freshmen who won’t feel very safe in their seats.

In this scenario, the only things that will be legislatively possible are going to have to pass muster with the one or two most conservative/vulnerable Democrats in the Senate. And this is the rosy scenario. One way of putting it is that if Joe Manchin doesn’t want it to happen then it almost definitely is not going to happen.

I think the best way of looking at the present situation in Washington DC is that it’s combination of the second and third scenarios. The Democrats did win the trifecta and they did leave the legislative filibuster in place. But much of what I discussed in the last scenario applies to everything they’re trying to do through budget reconciliation because it depends on total unanimity within the caucus. Even on specifics, parts of the third scenario apply. Just yesterday, the New York Times published a piece detailing Senator Manchin’s role in crafting Biden’s climate plan and why this is going to be inadequate. Meanwhile, Senator Sinema has informed the White House that she’s opposed to their plan to let Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices. So, even when the Democrats can pass things with just 50 Senate votes, we discover that progressive ideas cannot get through.

I didn’t get into all the procedural minutiae in my 2019 article, but I could have predicted that the Senate parliamentarian would present an obstacle to progressive change, too. The Associated Press reports that the Democrats won’t be allowed to include key immigration reforms in the budget reconciliation process.

Democrats can’t use their $3.5 trillion package bolstering social and climate programs for their plan to give millions of immigrants a chance to become citizens, the Senate’s parliamentarian said late Sunday, a crushing blow to what was the party’s clearest pathway in years to attaining that long-sought goal.

The decision by Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate’s nonpartisan interpreter of its often enigmatic rules, is a damaging and disheartening setback for President Joe Biden, congressional Democrats and their allies in the pro-immigration and progressive communities. Though they said they’d offer her fresh alternatives, MacDonough’s stance badly wounds their hopes of unilaterally enacting — over Republican opposition — changes letting several categories of immigrants gain permanent residence and possibly citizenship.

I didn’t enjoy being a wet blanket, but I wanted people to understand that all the arguments over policy between the Democratic candidates were basically irrelevant to the situation they’d face if elected.

So, what are the prospects for enacting Medicare for All, as many of the candidates have proposed? Could a President Biden or Bennet even hope to add a public option to Obamacare? How is President Inslee going to convince Manchin to pass a good climate bill through his committee? How can any of the candidates proposing that we decriminalize illegal border crossings get that through Congress? How about abolishing ICE or creating a slavery reparations program? Is Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren going to be able to deliver a massive trillion dollar college loan forgiveness program that isn’t even supported by many progressives? Will the DREAMERS get any relief? Will comprehensive immigration reform pass? Will Trump’s tax cuts get repealed? Any chance of closing Guantanamo?

The reasons these things were not going to happen was really a matter of mathematics. It was clear even in August 2019 that the Democrats were not going to win 60 seats in the Senate or do away with the legislative filibuster. It was also clear that even if they won control of the Senate, they’d have only the slimmest of majorities, and that members like Sinema and Manchin would be the gatekeepers on what could pass through Congress.

It actually turned out a bit worse than this because the Democrats lost so many House seats that, even though Nancy Pelosi retained the Speaker’s gavel, the moderates became gatekeepers in that chamber as well.

I was able to foresee how this would play out and I got most of the details correct. I find it mysterious why so few progressives were able or willing to offer similar analysis in 2019, but I was a lonely voice at the time. People who offer depressing news don’t get rewarded in our media environment, so I didn’t prosper like many of the people promising ponies and unicorns did. If you like getting good rather than necessarily feel-good analysis, please consider getting a subscription. I feel like I add something that’s badly needed and that you don’t find elsewhere, and I’d like to be able to continue providing this service.

It’s not easy to write about the difficulties facing Afghanistan right now. I don’t want to leave the impression that I believe we should have stayed there. I don’t think we should be indifferent to what’s going on either, but we have to accept that our options and influence are limited.

It’s just hard to watch.

The latest tragedy is that female middle- and high school students can no longer go to school. Try to imagine if that suddenly happened in America. Paired with this, almost all female municipal workers in Kabul have been fired. Those that remain either have critical expertise that cannot immediately be replaced or work in gender-specific roles, like bathroom attendants. The same pattern is happening throughout the country.

The Taliban believe that they’re being very religious by imposing these rules. That strikes me as ridiculous, but more importantly, it’s not something Afghanistan can afford. There are already food shortages, and they’re creating unemployment. Even if the women’s jobs are handed over to Taliban fighters, that’s a severe dumbing down of government services and it’s a very bad look for attracting foreign aid.

What the Taliban should be focused on is rooting out corruption. They really have a mandate to do two things: create peace and security, and replace a government that was rotten to the core. If they focus on those two things, they’ll have some room and space to govern and the country might begin to recover from decades of war. But they’re still too similar to their 1990’s iteration that imposed a rigid and medieval version of Islam that cannot exist in the modern world without insane levels of coercion and violence.

Afghanistan cannot afford more strife, and it can’t afford the brain drain that is already taking place in response to the Taliban’s takeover. Now they’re going to stop educating women and girls, and remove them from the workforce. That’s obviously going to make the economy less productive.

To be clear, this is wrong from a human rights perspective and in a sense nothing further needs to be added. But women aren’t the only ones who will suffer. It’s going to make a humanitarian crisis worse and Afghanistan will continue to be a miserable place that creates problems for others, and not just those in their immediate vicinity.

I wish we could have prevented this, but in some ways we helped bring it about. There are still things we can pursue that might help on the margins, but mostly we just have to watch. And that’s not a good feeling.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Chincoteague, Virginia 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 5×7 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 continued to refine the painting. The green has now been overpainted. I have added shadowed areas up front, along the central portion and to the far rear. It’s starting to look like something.

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.

One of the reasons I’ve always been interested in the NeverTrumpers is that I too was once immersed in conservative politics. Questions began to emerge – one often leading to another. Rather than deny those questions, I thought them through. The process was gradual, but eventually I found myself on the other side of the political spectrum.

It might be a bit of projection, but I see the same process happening with the NeverTrumpers. Due to the insanity of Donald Trump, it came a lot quicker for most of them. But someone like David Frum started the break years ago, as was evidenced by a column titled “Waterloo” in which he explained how the Republican Party had been captured by right wing media.

One of the columnists who went through a more abbreviated process was Jennifer Rubin from the Washington Post. She was an avowed Republican who couldn’t stomach Donald Trump. I watched as she began to ask questions, coming to the conclusion in late 2017 that the GOP couldn’t simply be rebranded, it needed to be junked. Here is how she described her former party:

If there is a single idea animating Trump’s GOP, it is that “blood and soil” (or race and religion, if you prefer) — not the American creed (“All men are created equal…”) — is the defining feature of the United States. Whatever else that is not white and Christian is foreign, alien and a threat to “real America.” Whether in day-to-day politics, foreign affairs or domestic policies, there is no right and wrong, only them and us. That’s Trumpism in a nutshell.

Regardless of how you feel about Rubin’s conversion, she was spot-on.

I say all of that because on Thursday, Alex Thompson and Nick Needzwiadek at Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” decided to launch an attack on Rubin. They suggest that she has become one of the White House’s most reliable defenders and have a big problem with that. The evidence they provide: White House staff sometimes tweet her articles. They go on to say that this is because “she usually backs up the administration.”

OMG – an opinion columnist who often agrees with a president! What an affront to journalism! Of course, Thompson and Needzwiadek don’t provide any specifics about where Rubin and the president were wrong because being accurate or inaccurate is not the issue. For them, real journalism means that you are required to find fault with both sides.

The authors then engage in a typical Politico pattern of reporting on a whisper campaign from anonymous sources suggesting that Rubin has stoked divisions within the Post newsroom. Here’s a quote from one of their sources at the Post:

“She is an opinion columnist and does not represent the newsroom,” said one Post reporter. “I think our news coverage has been pretty sharp toward Biden on a number of fronts — immigration, Afghanistan, etc. — and we have a lot of good reporters. Jen Rubin is not a good representation of the news coverage of the Washington Post. I have been asked before if I hate sharing a newsroom with her… I reply that I don’t.”

Now that’s the kind of journalism Thompson and Needzwiadek applaud. Being “sharp toward Biden” is what “good reporters” do, regardless of accuracy.

From there, things get even worse. The authors point out that they reached out to Rubin to get a response. Initially she ignored them. But recently she sent them an email with the subject line: “OFF THE RECORD.” They quoted the whole thing anyway, justifying it by saying that they hadn’t agreed to conduct an off the record conversation. So the folks who are attacking Rubin for her style of opinion journalism decided to reprint communication that she clearly wanted to be kept private. What blazing hypocrites they are!

Since they’ve already published Rubin’s email, it is worth noting that she is also spot-on in her assessment of Politico.

How utterly predictable that Politico would run the zillionth hit piece on a prominent woman, especially one candid in her critiques of Politico’s hysterical, clickbait style of coverage. The notion that I am polarizing in a newsroom (as opposed to any of the dozens of other opinion writers) is a “take” only Politico could come up with — by of course running around to ask the question in the first place. I trust the Post’s superb news side folks spend zero time thinking about me (as is entirely appropriate).

Of course, the Politico piece was picked up by right wing sites like Fox News and Red State. It also garnered applause from Tucker Carlson’s favorite guest, Glenn Greenwald. So if, as I suggested recently, the new owners of Politico want to pattern it after their European tabloid by mainstreaming the far right, the publication is already well on its way to fulfilling that goal.

It is worth wondering why Politico went after Rubin when they could have chosen other targets at the Post like NeverTrumper Max Boot, or perhaps a liberal opinion columnist like Jonathan Capehart who also tends to agree with the Biden administration. This is the kind of dilemma women often face. They have to wonder if attacks like this are motivated by sexism. Rubin suggests this isn’t the first time Politico went there when she wrote that this would be their “zillionth hit piece on a prominent woman.”

I’ve been clear for a while now that Politico is a big part of the problem with mainstream media. Commenting on the fact that the publication has recently been bought by the German media company Alex Springer, Perry Bacon suggests that Politico bears some responsibility for the fact that political journalism drifted off course.

Politico largely embraced the prevailing orthodoxies of political journalism, particularly in its early days — it was Beltway-focused, obsessed with not offending Republican readers, sometimes resembled sports coverage and its leading reporters were nearly all White. It was in many ways just a faster, more interesting version of how politics had long been covered…For more than a decade, not only did Politico keep gaining strength, but the entire political media became more like Politico.

And this is where things went wrong. It was (and is) fine to have a publication focused on insider politics. But it was not ideal when The Post, the New York Times and many other major mainstream news outlets drifted toward this model — and when they did so was particularly problematic.

The Politico approach is probably fine if you are covering parties and politicians who share some values and norms…But early in the Obama years…the most important stories in American politics were the deepening polarization of the American electorate along cultural and racial lines and the growing radicalization of the GOP. But a Politico-ized national political press was both largely unwilling and in some ways unable to center its coverage on those realities.

Bacon ends his piece on an upbeat note, suggesting that the presidency of Donald Trump shook up those norms. But as this attack piece on Rubin demonstrates, that is not the case at Politico. For that publication, woe be to any columnist who shuns bothsiderism in favor of making rational arguments.