Month: December 2022

There are some things I don’t understand. For example, why would the wife of the chief of staff to the president of the United States rent a mobile home in the middle of nowhere, 90 miles southwest of Asheville, North Carolina? Why would she and her husband sign a year-long lease for the place when the landlord says she only spent “one or two nights there” and the North Carolina Department of Justice determined that Mark Meadows “was almost certainly never physically present at the…address”?

No one would ordinarily care about this even though it’s peculiar except that Meadows registered to vote at this address and then voted in North Carolina in the 2020 election by absentee ballot. Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein just decline to prosecute Meadows for voter fraud following the recommendation of his prosecutors.

The reasoning is that Meadows gets a pass because he was a public servant in Washington, DC, which meets the requirements of a residency exception. They also verified that his wife’s cell phone was active in the area in October 2020, which is somehow considered exculpatory.

“Our conclusion was … they had arguments that would help them if a case was brought such that we didn’t believe we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they had engaged in intentional voter fraud,” Stein, a Democrat, said in an interview.

That may be the correct judgment about their chances of securing a conviction, but it seems like a lot of bullshit to me. If this were a legitimate abode for the Meadows, I’d think differently. For example, if they bought or rented a place for them to live once Meadows was finished working for Trump in DC, and especially if his wife was spending time there, I’d consider it a reasonable use of the public service residency exception, even if Meadows had never once seen the property firsthand.

But there’s no explanation for why this mobile home was rented for a year and then only used for one or two days. Was the wife on a hunting trip with her girlfriends?

It’s obvious that Meadows wanted his vote to count for something, which wouldn’t happen if he cast it in the District of Columbia where Biden won 92 percent of the vote. Far preferable was to vote in North Carolina where Trump ultimately prevailed by a narrow 49.9 to 48.6 margin.

We know what happened here. And we see that Meadows got away with voter fraud.

I’ve never subscribed to the idea that there are circumstances where it’s better to lose in politics than to win. But, of course, if you have the benefit of hindsight, you can identify circumstances where being in power became a liability. For the Republicans, their chances of winning the presidency in 1948 and 1996 were probably hindered by them first winning the midterm elections in 1946 and 1994. The reason, in both cases, was that Republican-controlled congresses went too far in challenging incumbent Democratic presidents and made a poor impression on the electorate.

In those examples, the Republicans had won complete control of Congress after a long time in the minority. In the 2022 midterms, the GOP won control only of the House of Representatives, and after a relatively brief period in the minority. So, not everything is equal, but it seems likely that President Joe Biden can benefit from having a foil in the House Republicans.

As The Hill notes, the GOP is in deep disarray.

The Republican Party, which entered 2022 with ambitions of recapturing both chambers of Congress and using discontent with President Biden to mount a strong case for retaking the White House in 2024, is entering 2023 in a state of uncertainty across the board.

Former President Trump, who for the last six years has had a vise grip on the GOP, is politically weakened and legally vulnerable. Trump is the only declared candidate in the 2024 field, but the landscape for the presidential nomination remains unsettled with several others eyeing a bid.

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is facing blowback from a handful of state party leaders and some conservatives as she seeks to win another term during the party’s meetings next month.

In the Senate, Republicans are coming off a disappointing midterm showing that saw them fail to recapture the majority. And in the House, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is still short of the votes needed to secure the Speaker’s gavel next month as a handful of conservative firebrands withhold their support.

The common wisdom, as expressed by Politico Playbook’s Eugene Daniels, is that if McCarthy somehow manages to win the Speaker’s gavel, he will not hold it for long. He’s expected to crack up on the shoals of the debt ceiling.

There’s a consensus among many House Republicans, one that few would dare utter publicly, that if McCarthy starts the 118th Congress as speaker, he’s not likely to end it that way.

If he’s able to lock down the 218 votes he needs to be speaker, the thinking goes, he likely will have given away the store to conservatives — including the “Never Kevin” crowd’s demand to make it easier to call a vote to oust the speaker. Many Republicans are already predicting the Freedom Caucus will use that tool, known as the “motion to vacate,” against McCarthy as soon as he strays from a conservative hard line.

The question on everyone’s mind is: When? The year-end spending deal struck between Democrats and Senate Republicans clearly bought McCarthy time. Instead of having to negotiate a politically precarious funding agreement with Democrats in his first months as speaker, McCarthy won’t have to go there until September at the earliest.

But even McCarthy allies tell us the real looming threat is the debt ceiling deadline. At some point next year — likely in the third quarter, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center — McCarthy will have to figure out a way to raise the federal debt limit or risk a national default, a move that will tear the GOP conference in two.

This isn’t a problem unique to McCarthy. It’s a numbers game that will bedevil any Republican who tries to lead a strictly GOP majority caucus. They don’t have anywhere near the votes to extend the debt ceiling without Democratic help, and the second a GOP Speaker seeks help outside the caucus, he’ll need Democratic votes to survive a motion to vacate the chair.

No one has a solution to this problem that doesn’t involved some kind of hybrid bipartisan ruling majority. That’s a setup for a party in complete disarray. And Biden is likely to be the beneficiary.

If incoming Senator John Fetterman is looking for an issue to prioritize after he is sworn in, he should read Luke Goldstein’s new article in The American Prospect. It’s the story of how the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), “a leading health insurer in Western Pennsylvania, and Express Scripts, the pharmacy benefit manager for UPMC,” are fucking destroying independent pharmacies and screwing over rural Americans and veterans in the process.

This story focuses on health care and Pennsylvania but the broader issue impacts many industries and every state. Monopolies are gobbling everything in sight and leaving a smoking crater in place of the vanished American Dream.

The small town entrepreneur who ran a pharmacy or a bike shop, a hardware store, an auto repair garage, a local bank, or a grocery is getting crushed, and their communities are hollowed out as a result. Rural hospitals have closed, creating countless medical crises, especially for pregnant women.

It’s not an accident that the people left behind have gone stark raving mad. They can work for Wal-Mart or Amazon or they can fake an injury and get worker’s comp and a boatload of opioids with enough street value to make several mortgage payments. What they can’t do is make a profit going into business for themselves. They aren’t hiring folks, they’re not renting out local office space. They’re serfs as the mercy of far-off corporate boardrooms.

The only compelling messages they hear are coming from the right–something about building a wall and standing up to China in order to restore their previous way of life. The unions have withered, and in any case they didn’t prevent the merciless monopolization of their economies.

Fetterman should be on the ground in Western Pennsylvania talking to folks who have to drive thirty miles to get a prescription filled at a UPMC approved pharmacy. He should be talking to the pharmacists that are being driven out of business. He should then take that same message to all the other business owners who’ve gone under, or who soon will. And he should talk to their customers who valued those personalized services and tax base they provided.

And then he should partner up with some Republicans (most of these communities nationwide are now represented by Republicans), and write some legislation that puts real teeth into antitrust enforcement. To begin with, they can focus on how people are getting fucked by Express Scripts and put an end to it.

No doubt, most Republicans will take the big donor money and blame something else (Hunter’s laptop, Nicaraguan caravans) for the loss of private pharmacies. But this is a real enough problem that if a politician takes it on he or she can win folks to their side. In fact, this is one of the best possible ways to convince these folks that a Democrat can be on their side.

Greetings and salutations! This is the last midweek cafe & lounge for the year. Let’s close things out with Herbie Hancock getting the Headhunters back together.

The intro is just so much fun. I hope you all enjoy it. As always, I am grateful to still have a space at the Frog Pond to call home. Here’s to whatever comes next in the new year.

Cheers!

One byproduct of invading and occupying Afghanistan for two decades is that we’ve lost the ability to be dispassionate judges of its government’s policies. We are, at least in some ways, inextricably entwined in the web of responsibility for the way things are there. And if we’re justifiably indignant, it’s not like we’re going to go back in to try to force a change. Here’s the Washington Post’s editorial board:

With a single decision, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have crushed the dreams of a generation of women. The Islamist regime announced Dec. 20 that women would be prohibited from attending universities, on top of earlier decrees banning girls from middle school and high school. “They destroyed the only bridge that could connect me with my future,” a Kabul University student told the BBC.

The Taliban also barred women from working in non-governmental organizations, leading “at least half a dozen major foreign aid groups” to suspend operations in Afghanistan.

We tried to “fix” Afghanistan. It might have improved our chances if helping rather than punishing had been our first priority, but it’s doubtful the enterprise failed simply because we made suboptimal decisions. At this point, after so many years of foreign occupation stretching back to the 1970s, it’s probably time to let Afghans try to work some things out for themselves.

It’s worth noting that critics of Afghanistan’s education ban for women are not limited to the Western or non-Muslim world.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia have strongly condemned the Taliban’s nationwide ban on women attending private and public universities.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday that the ban was “neither Islamic nor humane”.

Speaking at a joint news conference with his Yemeni counterpart, Cavusoglu urged the Taliban to reverse the decision.

“What harm is there in women’s education? What harm does it do to Afghanistan?” Cavusoglu said. “Is there an Islamic explanation? On the contrary, our religion, Islam, is not against education; on the contrary, it encourages education and science.”

The Saudi foreign ministry expressed “astonishment and regret” at Afghan women being denied a university education. In a statement late on Wednesday, the ministry said the decision was “astonishing in all Islamic countries”.

It’s nice to see the Saudis take a strong stand since they, like us, bear a lot of responsibility for the current condition of Afghanistan. It was their funding for religious schools there and in Pakistan that created the Talib movement in the first place. I’m not suggesting that the Saudis made the Pashtuns more socially conservative (as if that were possible), but they made them more religiously medieval in their outlook.

Much like the Republicans fucked around with religious maniacs until the maniacs took control of their party, the Saudis funded fucked up religious instruction (originally to create cannon fodder for the Soviet-Afghan War) until the resulting Taliban government looked dangerously insane even to them.

Maybe the U.S. and the Saudis can best help Afghan women now by not trying to impose brilliant solutions from outside. But, as mitigation for our sins and failures, we should be welcoming to anyone who wants to leave to get an education.

At the beginning of this school year, I noticed that Teslas had become the preferred car of the Indian-Americans I encountered when picking my son up in the afternoon. I didn’t sense that this was any kind of political statement, but it definitely conferred some status. The cars aren’t cheap, after all.

But they’re also electric, and therefore have the potential to appeal to climate-minded people on the left. An earlier generation signified their environmental responsibility by purchasing a Toyota Prius, but progressives today seem just as likely to drive a gasoline-fueled Subaru Forrester.

I drive a hybrid but it’s reaching the end of its natural life, so I’ve been paying more attention than usual to what other people are driving. I’d like to be done with gasoline for good, so Teslas were definitely on my watch list.

But, like a lot of other people, that’s over now that Elon Musk has decided to declare himself my political enemy. To be honest, I never much liked him, but he hadn’t given me a reason to take my disdain out on his cars until he started cuddling up to Vladimir Putin. That was the end for me.

I don’t like that he purchased Twitter and I don’t like the way he’s been running Twitter. But it’s his friendliness with the Kremlin that crosses my red line. If you can’t take a stand against fascism, then I am definitely not giving you any of my money.

His generally right-wing attitudes are turning off people on the left in a major way, and the left is more of a natural market for his cars than the right, so it’s not surprising that Tesla’s stock is dropping like a stone.

I’ll find a different electric car to buy and I’ll hope he loses every dime he’s every made and winds up on public assistance.

Hello, everyone at the Frog Pond. I hope you are all staying warm. That’s my plan, anyway. I noticed CBS had a Paul Simon tribute going on. Mrs. Durito pointed reminded me, of course. It’s always fun listening to other artists cover the songs of one of our master songwriters.

This is one I probably first heard either on the radio as a kid or saw him perform on one of those first seasons of SNL. Most likely it was the radio first. Enjoy.

Happy Holidays, however you celebrate.

I basically have no opinion about “drag shows.” They’re not my thing. That puts them in a category with auto racing and golf. They’re a genre of entertainment that some people love and some people don’t, including me. That’s why I find it crazy to talk about making drag shows illegal. What gives the government the right to tell people what they can watch? We’re not even talking about nudity, which is generally regulated to some degree.

At 5 Points Diner & Bar in Nashville, Tenn., drag performer Veronika Electronika can often be seen strutting between brunch tables. Her big hair, glitzy outfits and quick wit keep patrons on their toes.

Veronika’s lighthearted performances are a staple of Tennessee’s drag scene, but on a recent Saturday in December, she abruptly stopped her show to address a heavy subject: a proposed state bill seeking to ban drag acts — like the one she was performing at that moment — from public view.

“If that law passes, I would be committing a potential felony,” Veronika said, as the audience booed the bill. “If you’re not a fan of that bill, I highly suggest you contact your state legislator.”

Tennessee is one of at least five states where Republican lawmakers are considering bills to restrict drag performances. The measure, known as Senate Bill 3, was introduced by Tennessee Republican Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson in November.

State Senate majority leader Johnson says, “The intent of the legislation is just to simply say that you cannot have sexually explicit entertainment … in a public venue where kids might be present.” Is a man dressed as a woman or a woman dressed as a man by definition “sexually explicit”? How about a cartoon rabbit?

I think it’s worth remembering that during the period William Shakespeare was producing plays in England, it was illegal for women to play any of the female roles. This didn’t scandalize that very socially conservative society.

How about the GI’s from the so-called “Greatest Generation” that fought and won World War Two?

Early in World War II, the National Theater Conference lobbied to authorize soldier shows as “a necessity, not a frill.” By early 1942, approval was granted by leadership in Washington for the Special Services in concert with the United Service Organization (USO) and American Red Cross to begin soldier show productions to entertain the troops both on the homefront and abroad.

The Army Special Services produced, published, and distributed handbooks for soldier shows. These publications, known as Blueprint Specials, contained everything you would need to put on an approved and pre-scripted soldier show. Blueprint Specials for soldier shows even included dress making patterns and suggestions for material procurement. “Girly” show choreography was outlined in the publications to ensure that the GIs looked good in their highly choreographed “pony ballet” numbers. A pony ballet is one where groups of masculine looking GIs dress in tutus and perform ballet routines often wearing their army issued boots.

Sexualized entertainment certainly includes cheerleading routines at high school sporting events, and pretty much all music videos. Are we back to complaining about Rock and Roll because the singers are gyrating their hips?

The Republicans are getting harder to distinguish from the Iranian government or the Taliban. They’re having some kind of panic about gender roles, and it’s not just dangerous for transgender people. It’s also just plain ridiculous.