Month: January 2022

Hey everyone! I hope you are doing okay. I am about to complete yet another trip around the sun.

I like to introduce different artists – ones who may have been overlooked – and Jenny Hval seems to be precisely the sort of recording artist I would have in mind.

Her label, 4AD, has either launched or rejuvenated the careers of a number of intriguing recording artists for roughly four decades now.

Cheers!

The latest revelation about Trump’s attempted coup came from the release of the unsigned executive order dated December 16, 2020, that would have empowered the defense secretary to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” voting machines. The scheme outlined in the document provided a pretext for Trump to stay in office past the constitutional January 20 inauguration day while an “assessment” was taking place by the director of national intelligence, and it also would have appointed a special counsel to oversee the operation.

The question remains, however, “why didn’t Trump sign the executive order?” It could be that his defense secretary refused to comply. It is worth noting that Mike Esper, who served in that capacity, had been worried that Trump would fire him the day after the election, but was hoping that he could hold on for a few days because “he was worried about what Trump might try to do with the military if he were not at the helm.”

Esper was right in assuming that Trump would fire him after the election. The ax came on November 9. The new acting Defense Secretary would be Christopher Miller, who told associates he had three goals for the final weeks of the Trump administration: #1: No major war. #2: No military coup. #3: No troops fighting citizens on the streets. Why would the man in charge of the Defense Department even contemplate the possibility of a military coup? Perhaps the executive order was making its rounds by then.

As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.

When writing about this previously, I pointed to an interview with Bob Bauer, a Biden campaign advisor, just prior to the election.

Frankly, I’ll tell you that there are agencies that [Trump] imagines under his command whose members understand they have legal liability if they follow illegal orders – and they won’t do it…I can promise you that if [Trump] were to attempt to disrupt or undermine the election, he will fail.

At the time I remember thinking that at least part of Bauer’s job at the time had been to consult with military leaders about how they would respond if Trump issued an illegal order to launch a coup. Bauer’s confidence stemmed from the fact that he knew what their response would be. Whether those leaders had already made up their minds, or Bauer and his associates needed to remind them of their constitutional obligations remains to be seen.

What we do know is that three days after the executive order was written, Trump summoned his own MAGA troops to the Capital for the January 6 insurrection.

Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, I have been watching the interplay between the former guy’s malevolence and incompetence. While a failed coup is just as criminal as a successful one, it certainly appears that this time, we escaped the death of our democracy because the bully’s ignorance and incompetence overwhelmed his malevolence.

I recently watched the “Get Back” documentary series about the Beatles. Not being a musician, there were long segments (especially during the first episode) that were pretty tedious to me. But my favorite part came during the third episode when Paul McCartney’s soon-to-be wife Linda came to the studio and brought her daughter Heather.

It’s clear from the footage that Heather was a self-confident, precocious six year old. She played and interacted amusingly with all of the band members.

https://twitter.com/swaying_daisies/status/1464618141997219851

But what stood out to me was the extraordinary bond between Paul and Heather. A few still shots from that day tell the story.

For people my age (ie, old), we grew up with the Beatles. Paul’s reputation was as a lead singer and the “cute one.” Of course, we later saw him as one of the most talented song writers of the modern era. But until I saw this, I never knew he was such a great dad. It isn’t just the rapt attention he shows with Heather, it is her complete trust in him that shines through – something that can’t be staged.

I saw today that Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against the New York Times has been pushed back to February 3 because the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate has tested positive for COVID-19. The U.S. District Judge overseeing the case remarked dryly, “She is, of course, unvaccinated.”

That’s hardly a surprise since Palin declared in December, “It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot.”

Her defamation case relates to an op-ed the New York Times editorial board ran in 2011 after Rep.Gabrielle Giffords was horribly injured and nearly killed in a mass shooting in Arizona. I wrote at the time that “Palin is too dumb to understand why she’s been criticized for putting crosshairs on a congresswomen who later got shot in the face.” That was a reference to the SarahPAC political action committee, which had produced a graphic placing 20 Democrats, including Giffords in crosshairs, basically targeting them for defeat. Many people, including the NYT’s editorial board, made an immediate connection when Giffords was subsequently attacked, but there was never any proof that the shooter was motivated by the SarahPAC image. For this reason, the Times issued a correction three days after the publication of their piece.

While Palin’s case was initially dismissed, an appeals court ruled in her favor, saying “Palin’s Proposed Amended Complaint plausibly states a claim for defamation and may proceed to full discovery.” I’m not a lawyer but I acknowledge that she may have a decent case.

On the other hand, this is a good opportunity to see what my take on the controversy was at the time. In January 2011, I wrote Pointing Fingers and Violent Rhetoric, and I’m going to provide and extensive excerpt from it below. I think it’s instructive to think about the Palin/Giffords incident in the context of what happened a decade later, on January 6, 2021.

The right-wing has been really stung by the massacre in Arizona and the criticism they’ve taken for contributing to an environment where such violence actually makes sense. They keep pumping out columns that seek to vindicate themselves and lay blame on the left for jumping to conclusions about the motivations of the shooter. The president asked us to stop pointing fingers and trying to assign blame. We all know that is not going to happen, but we could try honoring his wishes in this case out of respect for the victims and deference to the president’s wisdom and leadership. We could try, but first one thing needs to be made clear.

If it had turned out that the shooter had begun planning this atrocity the moment he received an email from Sarah Palin’s PAC that included crosshairs on his congresswomen, we wouldn’t have anything to debate, would we? If he said that he voted for Giffords’s opponent but after they lost he felt the need to take Sharron Angle’s advice and resort to a 2nd Amendment remedy, we wouldn’t be talking about whether the left’s criticism was off mark.

This isn’t a case of me saying that if we were right, we wouldn’t be wrong. What I’m saying is that the left has been complaining about the rhetoric from the right for a very long time because that rhetoric hints at violence, rationalizes violence, and sometimes openly advocates violence. How does it hint at violence? If the president isn’t a U.S. citizen, if he used ACORN to steal the election, then what is a patriot to do? Do we just let an illegitimate president continue serving or do we take some kind of action to correct this insult? Likewise, how should a patriot react to a president who is trying to turn this country in a Soviet Socialist Republic? Didn’t Thomas Jefferson say the following?

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure”

If half of what the Republicans say about the president and the Democrats were true, we should rise up and kill them all as a minimum down payment on proving our love of country. So, I don’t give a crap whether the guy in Arizona was motivated listening to Sarah Palin or Sharron Angle. The problem is so much bigger than one incident, even if that incident had a lot of casualties. Glenn Beck alone has inspired three thwarted assassination attempts, including the planned attack on the ACLU and Tides Foundation offices in San Francisco. That’s just one shock-jock with a television program.

So, what’s my point? Stop saying things that make murder seem like a logical step, or a patriotic step, or a morally justifiable step. Stop doing things that endanger public officials and even innocent bystanders. After all, the fact that the shooter may not have been influenced by Sarah Palin’s crosshairs is not exculpatory in the least. The fact that the right thinks that they can avoid responsibility for their actions by appealing to the motivations of the shooter just shows how little they understand about the criticism being leveled at them. Based on the rhetoric of the right, we have to wonder why they didn’t applaud the Arizona massacre. That’s the logic they’ve created and the message they’ve been sending.

How many of the January 6 insurrectionists have stated that they truly believed that the election was rigged and that they were doing their patriotic duty to protect the Constitution? I begged the Republicans to stop deceiving their voters in 2011 because it was clear that their rhetoric logically justified violence. But they don’t listen to my advice or pleas, and after another 10 years of marinating their base’s brains in a vat of toxic nonsense, we got a violent assault on Congress and an effort to destroy democracy in favor of dictatorship.

And, Palin, who really started the turn to complete nonsense for the GOP, is still with us, and still spewing deadly nonsense to the Republican base. She may survive her unvaccinated bout with COVID-19, but others who listened to her will not. Can she blamed for the deaths in a newspaper without creating grounds for a defamation case? I don’t really give a crap. She’s never cared if her words or actions get people killed. It’s actually the basis for her political appeal.

I’m sure that the people who make up the editorial board at the New York Times are fairly smart people. But that’s why it is so disturbing that they would write and publish an article with as many discrepancies as the one titled “President Biden’s Economy Is Failing the Big Mac Test.” This one literally has my head shaking trying to sort out all of the ways they contradicted themselves. So let’s take a look.

Of course, the “Big Mac test” is their way of talking about inflation. To exploit that issue though, they have to address what has happened to wages.

The dollar figures on workers’ paychecks rose handsomely over the past 12 months. But for most workers, that wasn’t enough to keep pace with the highest inflation in several decades, which eroded the value of each of those dollars.

The purchasing power of the average worker’s weekly pay declined by 2.3 percent from December 2020 to December 2021.

But later in the piece, they note the exception to those numbers.

Lower-wage workers have seen particularly strong wage growth. For workers in the bottom third of the wage distribution, Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, estimates that average wage gains have exceeded inflation.

For a country whose trajectory for decades has been to increase income inequality, the fact that workers in the bottom third are experiencing the strongest wage gains is what Biden might refer to as a BFD!

Similarly, if the purchasing power of the average worker’s weekly pay has declined, they need to address how this is happening:

People are trying to buy more cars than are readily available. Diners are more eager than waiters to return to restaurants. The nation’s cargo ports have been overwhelmed by a surge in imports.

The extreme head-shaking, however, was induced by the way they contradicted themselves about Biden’s role. On the one hand, they have nothing but praise for his “outstanding achievement.”

Mr. Biden inherited an economic crisis precipitated by the coronavirus pandemic, and his administration deserves credit for orchestrating a fiscal response on a scale commensurate with the nation’s need. The outstanding achievement of Mr. Biden’s first year in office was the passage of an economic aid package in March that shielded Americans from the economic effects of the pandemic and helped to deliver a faster recovery than in other developed nations.

To demonstrate how effective the aid package was, they note that the economy has added six million jobs, GDP has climbed above its pre-pandemic levels, and the S&P 500 reached historic highs.

These folks even provide some perspective on how Biden’s initiatives to battle the recession were well calibrated.

Some of the president’s critics assert that the United States missed a chance for a Goldilocks recovery, neither too cold nor too hot. They argue that a smaller dose of economic aid would have delivered growth without higher inflation. But European nations, which generally administered proportionally smaller doses of aid, are now experiencing both less inflation and slower recoveries. Critics also ought to keep in mind the not-so-distant past: In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the United States similarly delivered an inadequate dose of aid. Inflation remained quiescent, but that was little comfort to the millions who waited years to find work.

They also applaud what Biden is doing to address these issues over the long term.

The administration also has taken some significant steps to improve the nation’s longer-term economic prospects, notably by pushing an infrastructure bill through Congress and by launching a revival of antitrust enforcement.

The problem, as they see it, is that those long-term strategies are taking so loooong.

Mr. Biden also continues to present the administration’s longer-term economic initiatives, like antitrust enforcement and a push for child care subsidies, as measures that would help to combat inflation. The effect of such policies would not be felt for some time, and Mr. Biden’s insistence on this implausible narrative may be contributing to a sense that he is not taking inflation seriously.

But the crux of the matter is that the mood of Americans has soured because hamburgers are more expensive.

Most Americans don’t share the administration’s sunny view of its economic record, and it is little mystery why: The average worker’s paycheck doesn’t buy as many hamburgers as it did last year…The government’s Consumer Price Index rose by 7 percent in 2021, the biggest jump since 1982. Mr. Biden’s approval rating remains low, and poll after poll finds that Americans are not pleased with his handling of the economy. Nearly two-thirds say the administration is insufficiently focused on inflation, according to a recent CBS News poll.

Here’s the kicker contradiction:

The challenge now is to bring inflation back under control without undermining the economic recovery. The work will mostly be done by the Federal Reserve, not by Mr. Biden or his administration. The role of presidents in shaping the nation’s economic fortunes is generally overstated.

The argument seems to be that Biden did an outstanding job of dealing with the recession caused by the pandemic, but inflation is the problem now. Therefore, Biden has failed to address something that they admit isn’t even under his control.

It gets worse, take a look at this load of crap.

A one-year expansion of the child tax credit helped to reduce the share of American children living in poverty to the lowest level since the government began to keep records in the 1960s. But Democrats, unable to agree on the terms of a permanent expansion, have allowed the expanded benefits to expire, depriving millions of working families of needed help.

Oh…so it is Democrat’s fault that the child tax credit expired when the Senate failed to pass the Build Back Better Act – even though 48 Senate Democrats supported the bill and NOT ONE REPUBLICAN was willing to join them.

I’m definitely not an economist, nor do I try to play one on the internet. But even to me, this entire piece by the NYT editorial board is nothing but one hot mess. They are all over the map and fail to make any point definitively. I have no idea what they were actually trying to say. But they did manage to get the words “Biden” and “failing” in the headline…so there’s that.

When the Mississippi state Senate took up a bill called “Critical Race Theory; prohibit,” the black members of the chamber stood up and walked out. It might not be immediately obvious why they found the proceedings so objectionable. Despite the bill’s title, it makes no mention of Critical Race Theory and has no relationship to the legal theory.

The language of the legislation seems uncontroversial. It’s deliberately designed that way,

The text of the bill itself says that “no public institutions of higher learning, school district or public school, including public charter schools, shall direct or otherwise compel students to personally affirm, adopt or adhere to any of the following tenants (sic): (a) That any sex, race, ethnicity, religion or national origin is inherently superior or inferior; or (b) That individuals should be adversely treated on the basis of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.”

The bill also says that such entities cannot “make a distinction or classification of students based on account of race” except for the required collection and reporting of demographic information; that no school may teach a “course of instruction or unit of study that directs or otherwise compels students to personally affirm, adopt or adhere to” the idea that any one sex, race, ethnicity, religion or national origin is inherently superior or inferior to another; and that funds can be witheld from educational institutions that violate the text of the act.’’

The author of the bill, state Sen. Michael McLendon, R-Hernando, freely admits that he’s found no evidence that Critical Race Theory is being taught in Mississippi schools.

“So many people came to me concerned about what children could possibly be taught in Mississippi, so I contacted our school superintendent (about critical race theory) and he said, ‘No sir, not to my knowledge,’” McLendon said on the floor. “I contacted the Department of Education, (State Superintendent) Carey Wright, and she said, ‘No sir, not to my knowledge.’

McLendon’s problem was that he was being deluged with constituent calls demanding that he put a stop to a problem that doesn’t exist.

“But I did have enough constituents that were concerned over this, over national news—and I know you can take national news with a grain of salt—but there were so many issues and concerns that people had about this.”

It must have seemed like a good way to find a middle ground. He’d make a bill with a name that suggests he’s doing something about the teaching of Critical Race Theory, but the bill wouldn’t actually say anything except that school’s shouldn’t teach any sort of racial supremacy. Maybe that was his motive, but it didn’t satisfy the black members of the Senate. They correctly noted that it’s stupid and unnecessary to pass laws about fictional problems, and they rightly raised practical questions about how the law would be utilized.

If teaching about the enslavement of blacks makes some white students feel inferior, is that enough to justify a withholding of state funds? Will schools that are concerned about this risk change their curriculums to give themselves protection from frivolous charges of racism?

And, really, isn’t this kind of threat precisely the point of the anti-Critical Race Theory movement? Isn’t this a way of whitewashing history?

But I think it shows a pretty clear consciousness of guilt. The implication is that if white students learn the truth about the history of Mississippi, they were feel inferior to blacks. It’s not ordinarily the case that a group with power feels inferior to a group without power, so this judgment must be based on morality. What whites did by enslaving and oppressing blacks was wrong.

Ironically, the original proponents of Critical Race Theory might have approved of this legislation’s language precisely because one of the main principles of Critical Race Theory is that “race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit…” Therefore, treating race as less of a real thing, and preventing schools from teaching in racial terms would be potentially consistent with the goals of CRT.

In this case, the idea would be flipped, however, with white students being put in a socially constructed category of “oppressor.” If the Mississippi Republicans don’t like Critical Race Theory, they really shouldn’t be copying its premises.

But that’s a little side light. In practice, the goal here is political. Republicans want to maximize their share of the white vote, and therefore they want to act as the protectors of whites against attacks from the Democrats and the left. The implicit intention of this legislation comes through quite clearly–left to their own devices, schools will teach that whites are inferior to blacks. This has to be prevented.

I’m not sure walking out in protest is the best way to lesson the effectiveness of this political gambit, but I certainly sympathize with the black senators’ decision. In my book, the Mississippi bill is the most pernicious of all the anti-CRT bills I’ve seen, precisely because its language is so facially inoffensive.

Political pundits are suggesting that the odds are stacked against Democrats maintaining their slight majority in the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. They may be right. But a look at what is happening in Republican primaries indicates that the GOP might be constructing an uphill battle for themselves.

The first line of defense for Democrats will be to hold on to seats that are currently rated as toss-ups. Those include races in Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona. Here’s what’s happening in those Republican primaries:

Georgia – Trump-endorsed and intellectually-challenged Herschel Walker has all but tied up the Republican nomination. Nuff said.

Nevada – Former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt leads this race, but lost his bid for governor in 2018 to Democrat Steve Sisolak. Then in 2020, Laxalt was co-chair of Trump’s Nevada campaign. He took the lead in supporting the former guy’s Big Lie, suggesting massive levels of fraud in the Nevada election, only to fail to produce any evidence. Laxalt’s introductory video draws on the Star Wars theme of painting Democrats as the empire (evil) and Republicans as the rebels (good). Divisive enough for ya?

Arizona – At this point, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich holds the lead in the Republican primary, but as CNN reported, “he doesn’t seem to be putting together the resources needed for a top-tier campaign.” Trump hasn’t endorse a candidate in this race yet, but he did attend a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago for Blake Masters – COO of Thiel Capital. Masters not only continues to receive a paycheck from Peter Thiel, his boss has already donated $10 million to his campaign. The money has primarily gone to the Save Arizona PAC, which has produced ads like this one attacking Brnovich.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a scene from Sedona, Arizona. 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.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Over this I have applied some initial paint.

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.

The news about President Biden’s approval ratings is definitely not good. NBC News says that it points to a shellacking for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Analysts at FiveThirtyEight document that one year in, Biden has the second lowest approval rating of any president.

Pundits who attempt to explain what’s happening tend to point to (1) the persistence of the Covid pandemic, (2) inflation, (3) the failure to pass two pieces of major legislation. Those might all be factors, regardless of whether it is Biden who should be held accountable.

Gallup recently released their average Biden approval rating for his first year in office – which stands at 48.9%. Similar to what the analysts at FiveThirtyEight noted, that is the second lowest of any modern president. Only Trump did worse, and it was a lot worse, averaging 38% his first year.

But along with that piece of data, Gallup released some other numbers that must be included when analyzing why Biden’s approval numbers are so low compared to previous presidents. They included the partisan divide on presidential approval. This table shows the divide from the largest to the smallest.

But it’s even more helpful to present the information historically.

Biden    83% party gap

Trump  75%

Obama  65%

Bush     45%

Clinton  52%

Bush     45%

Reagan  45%

Carter    26%

Nixon    34%

Kennedy 29%

Eisenhower 32%

During the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the partisan gap in presidential approval rating hovered around 30%. Then in the 80s and 90s, it jumped to around 50%. Since then, we’ve gone from 65% for Obama to 75% for Trump and now 83% for Biden. 

To emphasize how dramatically things have changed, take a look at the fact that Eisenhower got a 56% approval rating during his first year from Democrats and Kennedy got 58% from Republicans. By the time we get to 2021, Biden got an 8% approval rating from Republicans during his first year in office. As polarized as things felt during Obama’s presidency, even he got 23% approval from Republicans during his first year. Any pundit commenting on Biden’s low approval rating must take this partisan gap into account.

Given the fact that so many Republicans live in a right wing news bubble where Biden is not only painted as a complete failure, but a threat to the country, it is unlikely that his 8% approval number will change much over the next three years. So I don’t expect the 83% partisan gap to narrow – no matter what happens. Because of that, it is very likely that Biden will continue to have historically low approval ratings. 

The place where Democrats can make some gains is with some of the voters who self-identify as independents. According to Gallup, Biden’s approval rating with that group is only 33%. But to make some headway, we have to clear up some of the misinformation and confusion about who those voter are. 

According to Pew Research, 38% of voters identify as politically independent. But in digging a little deeper, 13% lean toward the Republican Party and 17% lean toward the Democratic Party. Those “leaners” aren’t very independent in that they are often “much closer to partisans in their views than they are to independents who lean to the other party.” That leaves approximately 7% of voters who are truly independent.

Perhaps the most important thing to know about that 7% is that they are less politically engaged than partisans – including the fact that they are less likely to vote.

Being politically unengaged means that independent voters aren’t likely to follow the nuances of the power plays going on in Washington D.C. They also aren’t likely to listen directly to what politicians say, but will hear references to headlines in the media. So as mainstream journalists focus on things like blaming Biden for the pull-out in Afghanistan, inflation, and the continuing threat posed by Covid, they buy into the idea that he’s failing as a president.

As we get closer to elections, voters will hear more directly from candidates via advertising, as well as town halls and debates covered in their local news. At that point, there is often a discussion among Democrats about whether it is more important to persuade Republicans to switch their votes or mobilize those who don’t vote. To the extent that winning depends on garnering support from independents, mobilization is the key – perhaps especially in midterm elections. Improving voter turnout among both those who lean Democratic and those who are truly independent could make the difference between winning a losing.

Corporate news outlets that cater to a partisan audience will obviously have some bias in terms of what they choose to cover and what they choose to ignore. This is perhaps an issue if they’re using public wavelengths to broadcast, but it’s not inherently problematic. In fact, even a news operation that aims to shoot straight down the middle will unavoidably make editorial choices that demonstrate some bias, if only because they still aim to please and make assumptions about what their patrons will find interesting. But it’s a different matter when there is blatant hypocrisy involved, as is the case with Fox News’s coverage of DirecTV’s de-platforming of One American News (OAN).

As Erik Wemple details for the Washington Post, Fox News was apoplectic when Amazon Web Services, Apple and Google refused to host the right-wing social media site Parler last year. But when their direct competitor OAN was dropped last week by DirecTV, costing them an estimated 90 percent of their revenue, there was only a single mention of the story on Fox. 

“Speaking of Trump and the media, his favorite network, One America News, is being dropped by AT&T’s DirecTV. That’s a big blow to OAN in terms of its reach and its revenue,” said host Howard Kurtz on Sunday’s edition of “Media Buzz.”

Kurtz didn’t complain about this development, but merely observed that it was bad for OAN’s viewership and bottom line. He might have noted that it was great news for his employer or at least shown some solidarity with a beleaguered fellow right-wing cable news channel. He did neither of those things, and the rest of the network observed complete silence.

For the record, DirecTV isn’t explaining precisely why they’re dropping OAN, saying that there were a variety of factors. One factor, plainly, is that OAN broadcasts completely unhinged nonsense. But so does Fox News and that doesn’t seem to be a problem. The fact that it conceivably could be a problem in the future is precisely why we might expect Fox News to defend OAN. But they’re not that farsighted, and they’re so-called principles are too situational from them to take a principled stand in defense of the right to air right-wing misinformation.

Fewer viewers and less revenue for OAN means more viewers and revenue for Fox News, and that’s all they care about.