Month: December 2022

In January, after the Arizona Democratic Party censured Krysten Sinema for opposing changes in the filibuster rule, I wrote that I was generally opposed to purity tests but that the move made sense in that particular instance despite carrying the “potential for her to simply switch parties and throw power in the Senate to the Republicans and Mitch McConnell.” The idea being that it sent a shot across the bow of any Democratic senator who might oppose filibuster reform in the future. Obviously, I didn’t assess the risk that she’d flip to the Republicans as high, but I didn’t directly assess the possibility that she might simply switch to an independent, as she has now done.

I did, however, write this:

Setting aside the possibility that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is one of the rare politicians who takes contrary positions purely out of principle, it seems clear that she’s modeling herself as a maverick in the same vein as former Arizona senator John McCain. That’s her brand– or theory for how she’ll get reelected, and it might not be delusional if she can somehow survive a primary from her left and get to a general election.

In that sense, she probably welcomes the decision by the Arizona Democratic Party to censure her for opposing changes in the U.S. Senate’s filibuster rule. It inoculates her thoroughly against any future charge that she’s too tied to the national party and gives her a wide berth to run in the middle. Whether our hyper partisan age has an appetite for candidates with crossover appeal is debatable, but Sinema will be a test case.

Those two paragraphs were pregnant with the logic of party independence. It was clear already that she would face a strong primary challenge and that she’d have a very uphill climb in surviving it. Her strength was as a maverick with crossover appeal but if she couldn’t get to the general election, it was a death sentence. Switching to the Republican side was one strategy, but the Arizona GOP (as just demonstrated by their slate of midterm candidates) is no more interested in middle-of-the-road standard bearers than the Arizona Democrats. It looked like Sinema had no future in either party, yet she still had a more natural home on the left than the contemporary right.

I see on social media that some Arizona organizers are suffering very hurt feelings about Sinema’s decision to leave the Democratic Party, but she didn’t have another move. From her perspective, this was necessary, and remember that the state party essentially disowned her, so this shouldn’t be treated as a new betrayal. Her betrayal was in how she acted after she was elected and that, and the ensuing reaction, has already played out.

All indications are that she’ll continue to caucus with the Democrats, which makes sense because it allows her to operate in the majority.

If so, she’ll be the third independent member of the Senate Democratic caucus, joining Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the left and Senator Angus King of Maine in the center. Her situation will also somewhat resemble that of Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who won a write-in candidacy in 2010 after losing in the primary, won the Republican primary and reelection in 2016, and then prevailed in a ranked choice runoff this November.

Of the three, her situation most nearly resembles Senator King, in that she’s hoping to win in a center-left lane. But King was a two-term independent governor of Maine prior to becoming a candidate for Senate, and he (along with Sanders) has been successful in preventing the Democrats from running serious candidates against him in general elections. Sinema will have a tougher road when she defends her seat in 2024, and she could become a spoiler who doesn’t win but splits the left and hands her seat to the Republicans. Conversely, she could conceivably attract more support from the center-right and help a Democrat prevail in a three-way race.

Either way, it makes sense for her to start building her brand as an independent now when it doesn’t appear to be so obviously a desperate move made under duress. It also sends a shot across the bow of her left-leaning critics and Senate colleagues, because she could always make life more difficult for them by caucusing with the Republicans.

The Democrats have a bit of a dilemma, in that it’s in their interest to poison her brand so that virtually no Arizona Democrats will support her independent candidacy in two years, but they’d also like her to remain in the caucus and provide key votes. That’s an easy task to screw up, either way.

In any case, she’s made her bed and now she’s crawled in it. If she wins another term, it will be a remarkable accomplishment, and quite surprising.

According to Nate Cohn, “the final Times/Siena polls showed that voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada preferred Republican control of the Senate.” Yet, in every case, they elected a Democrat to represent them in the U.S. Senate. It also appears that more registered Republicans turned out to vote than registered Democrats, so the only way this could have happened is that a lot of Republican voters simply could not support their candidates. It was so bad, in fact, that not even their preference for a GOP-controlled Senate could convince them to cast a ballot for their own party.

It’s the natural order of the political universe that the president’s party has a harder time turning out its voters in midterm elections than the opposition party. The Democrats succeeding in minimizing this effect, but they couldn’t eliminate it. Their relative success in the midterms was instead based on persuasion. In this, they got a giant assist from the Republican base which made one bad decision after another in selecting candidates in their primary elections. They got another assist in the Republican messaging, which was effective when it focused on crime and inflation but was too much bogged down in nonsense and trivial issues like Trump’s Big Lie and the supposed existential threat of transgenderism.

The Democrats need to be mindful that there is no guarantee that the GOP will continue to gift them seats, especially at the scale we just witnessed in 2022. It’s frankly appalling that the swing-state voters went into Election Night with a generic preference for Republican control of Congress. I don’t know what else the GOP could do to convince the public that they should not be within a country mile of being in control of anything, and yet the public still preferred them. Yeah, so, they often didn’t actually vote for them, but enough did to win the House and some winnable Senate seats in Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina.

There’s a weird split here in the Republican Party. The base is completely radicalized and continues to pump out unfit candidates, but the party’s electorate as a whole seems emphatic that it wants the government to be run by conservatives–just more mainstream and competent conservatives.

To win, however, both pillars of the GOP must be satisfied at the same time, and that’s becoming a feat that is harder and harder to pull off. The country someone accepted a moron like George W. Bush because he had a gift for keeping one foot in the fever swamp and the other in the Establishment. John McCain and Mitt Romney did not do well enough with the unhinged base, and Trump could never rally the Establishment. His 2016 election was an Electoral College fluke, and he completely misunderstood what he needed to do to strengthen his position for 2020. Doubling down on the base was the wrong move.

Kevin McCarthy is now Exhibit A of this conundrum. As he seeks the votes to become Speaker of the House, he must satisfy both wings of the party at once, and he’s no George W. Bush. In fact, one of Trump’s main contributions to this problem was to convince the base that the Bushes, and anyone remotely like them, are phonies who only serve the Establishment. The result is that Dubya’s “rancher” act no longer sells, so even he would probably not be able to successfully navigate the waters McCarthy is traveling.

The Democrats clearly have daunting challenges and should not be optimistic based on the 2022 midterm results, but at least they are very united. That gives them some real advantages, as they can utilize their numbers to the fullest, while the Republicans punch below their weight.

But this unity could also be a trap, because the lack of internal debate and dissent could prevent the Dems from being proactive about their problems. For example, looking at the Senate seats up for election in 2024, I think it’s safe to say that Texas (Ted Cruz) and Florida (Rick Scott) probably offer their most realistic pickup opportunities. After that, the cupboard is bare unless you think the party is in a condition to compete in states like Wyoming, North Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi. They’ll also be defending seats in states like Ohio, West Virginia and Montana. These are not places they are favored to win in the presidential election of 2024, or even to be competitive. Is there anything, anything at all, that the Democrats could do in the next two years to change that?

Someone should be asking that question, even if they ultimately conclude that the answer is that there is not. But the party might be convinced that all is well, especially when they compare themselves to their opponents.

Look around, though, because all is definitely not well in this country right now. In far too much of the country, the left is completely toxic and uncompetitive. And we can’t be satisfied with a plan based on the GOP continuing to shoot itself in the foot.

Can we all pause and say “phew” that Raphael Warnock won a full six-year term on Tuesday night and Herschel Walker will never be a U.S. Senator? For me, at least, this is a gigantic relief as I considered a matter of national pride.

With Warnock’s victory, the midterm elections are officially over and something remarkable happened. Not a single senator who was seeking reelection lost. This hasn’t happened since 1914, the first election after the Constitution was amended to allow for the direct election of senators. To all appearances, the American electorate was completely satisfied with the composition and performance of the Senate, so it decided to make no changes.

I doubt that’s true, but where is the evidence to refute it?

There was bound to be more turnover in the U.S. House of Representatives, not only because there were seven times as many seats being contested, but because it was the first election after the 2020 census and the ensuing redistricting process. A large percentage of the change in the House is due to this redrawing of seats. Some incumbents were pitted against each other, ensuring one would lose. Others were put into districts they could no longer win, which caused a handful of retirements and defeats. These factors had an impact in both Florida and New York, which seem to be the only two states to experience anything like the widely predicted red wave in favor of the Republicans. Overall, however, there was not much change, even though the control of the House did change hands. Almost all the incumbents (roughly 95 percent) who survived primary challenges went on to win reelection.

This number might seem impossibly high but it’s actually not out of the ordinary. It’s higher than 2018 (91 percent), lower than 2016 (97 percent), and the exact same as 2020. That incumbents tend to win is not news, but this year was supposed to be different, and more like 2010 when only 85 percent of incumbents survived.

Despite this seemly stability, the country is incredibly polarized and there’s widespread discontent. The last congressional approval poll by Gallup before the election had Congress underwater to the tune of 21 approve, 75 disapprove. On Election Day, President Biden’s aggregate approval number was 41 percent-53 percent. And polls leading up the election indicated a record percentage of voters felt the country is moving in the wrong direction.

Under these conditions, you’d think that voters would seek to change their representation but you’d be wrong.

When pundits and operatives talk about the Republicans blowing this election with bad candidates, it fits into this analysis if we posit that voters wanted change but not the kind of change on offer from the GOP. But that doesn’t explain why more Republican incumbents, like for example Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, didn’t lose. Did voters in the Badger State really think Mandela Barnes was too crazy and radical to serve?

The biggest change we’re going to see isn’t a direct result of the midterm elections. The biggest change is the total makeover of the Democratic leadership of the House, where Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn will be replaced by Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar.

On the other hand, it remains to be seen who the House Republicans will select to lead them, or if they’ll even be capable of settling on a leader. That hot mess is the best reflection of the actual political condition of the country, because the midterms provided a deceiving picture that all is well and the country is satisfied.

Here’s a jam from Donald Glover using his stage name Childish Gambino:

It certainly captures the zeitgeist. A bit of trivia: his stage name came from a Wu Tang Clan name generator. My Wu Tang name is Misunderstood Contender.

In the meantime, take a moment to celebrate Raphael Warnock’s re-election to the US Senate.

Cheers!

Ruth Marcus felt compelled to condemn Donald Trump for demanding the “termination” of the Constitution so he could be “declare[d] the Rightful Winner” of the 2020 presidential election.” She explained that she grew weary of writing about Trump in the latter years of his presidency but is making an exception now because his “willingness to entertain and encourage extra-constitutional action is alarming coming from a man who is seeking to return to office.” It’s an odd demarcation line since Trump has already attempted the coup Marcus warns us about.

This is insurrectionism by social media. Nothing — and certainly not imaginary “Fraud,” capitalized or not — “allows for the termination” of constitutional guarantees. Trump is laying the groundwork for a coup.

She should have said “another coup.” He’s been declaring himself the rightful winner of the 2020 contest since he went on television in the wee hours of election night and said, “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” Everything he did from that day until January 6, 2021 was a failed effort at terminating the Constitution. He was forced out of office, nonetheless, but he’s never wavered or changed his tune. The only thing that is different now is that he’s been explicit about what it will take for him to get what he wants.

It’s admittedly unique for a declared candidate for president to focus on being declared the winner of the past election rather than the next one, especially since there’s no mechanism, constitutional or otherwise, to make that happen aside from armed insurrection. And maybe that’s the implication that struck Marcus’s funny bone and activated a defensive reflex. But the threat from Trump has been constant and deadly serious from the very beginning, and his latest statement isn’t in any way an escalation. It’s literally par for the course.

Still, Marcus might have a least spent one sentence on what Trump was referring to in his statement. I mean, she did quote Trump in full.

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential election results of 2020 OUT and declare the Rightful Winner, or do you have a new election,” Trump posted. “A massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great Founders did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

And, he followed up, “UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!”

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of my neighborhood scene. The photo I am using 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.

Limited progress for this week. Note the foliage up front.

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.

Golshifteh Farahani is an Iranian actress who has lived in exile since 2008. She was reportedly under investigation in her home country after appearing in the Hollywood film Body of Lies without wearing a hijab. The movie starred Leonard DiCaprio and Russell Crowe and according to the Los Angeles Times, it set off a bootlegging frenzy in Teheran. Settling in France, she assured she wouldn’t be welcome back by posing nude for French magazines.

In an opinion piece in Friday’s New York Times, Farahani takes Western feminists to task for not being quicker and more vocal in their support of the protests that began in September in response to the death of Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Guidance Patrol officers.

The latest outpouring of rage started on September 16, triggered by the death of the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish student Mahsa Amini, who was bundled into a morality-police van reportedly for wearing tight trousers. Witnesses say she was violently beaten in the van and later collapsed inside a correction center, before being transported to a hospital where she died three days later.

Teheran police chief Brigadier-General Hossein Rahimi said she was also guilty of wearing her headscarf improperly. The incident served as a last straw for a generation of Iranians who have long chafed under the strict rules of the Islamic Republic. But I think Farahani goes too far with the following description of the principles involved.

So why is this uprising different? This time, there are no shades of gray. What Iran’s Generation Z wants is very simple: Freedom. Freedom of choice. Freedom for Iranian women to behave, dress, act, walk and talk as equals to Iranian men. There is no ideology involved, no formal political movement from the right or left. The simplicity of the demand for freedom is what makes it so powerful. There are no two perspectives. There is no complex argument. There is no room for confusion.

I feel this is the reason previous uprisings, some more violent and brutally suppressed, did not succeed and did not attract the same attention worldwide.

For this to be accurate, we’d have to completely dismiss the perspective of the government and its supporters. There are quite obviously at least two perspectives about the hijab law that went into effect in 1983 and how central it is to the identity of the revolutionary government. It should be noted that the first hijab law sought to ban the practice rather than making it mandatory.

The first attempt to use hijab as the subject of legislation was in 1936 by a new monarch, Reza Shah (1925-1941), who wanted to force women to remove the veil in public under his “unveiling” order. The shah’s vision of modernity, influenced by Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, included changing what Iranian women wore.

For almost 90 years, the ideological battle in Iran between tradition and modernity and western versus Islamic values has been caught up in what women are permitted to wear. Since 1979, and especially 1983, the question has been implicated in support or opposition to the revolution’s legitimacy and principles.

This becomes clear when we look at what the Iranian protesters in Iran are demanding. The want to overthrow the Islamic government.  Some are just yelling this in the streets, but others want it done through a referendum.

In a largely leaderless revolution, clerics and some students are making demands that the regime try to resolve the crisis by holding an immediate referendum with the presence of international observers. The original Iranian revolution in 1979 was endorsed by a simple referendum in which all Iranians aged over 16 were asked: “Should Iran be an Islamic Republic?”

The call for a new referendum was first made by Iran’s leading Sunni cleric Molavi Abdulhamid, who is based in the south-eastern city of Zahedan. “Hold a referendum and see what changes people want and accept whatever the wishes of the people. The current policies have reached a dead end,” he said.

“This constitution itself was approved 43 years ago and those who compiled it have all left and another generation has come. This law should also be changed and updated. Many clauses of this law are not up to date.

“It has been said many times that this law should be put to a referendum, but unfortunately nothing has been done and even the same law of 43 years ago has not been properly implemented.”

It’s unsurprising that a Sunni cleric would prefer not live under a Shi’a constitution, but that view is shared by most of the protesters whether they’re ethnic or religious minorities or not. It’s hard to see how this can truly lack an ideological component, unless we don’t consider the clerics who run Iran and their supporters to have an ideology.

These protests are about regime change, essentially, but that implicates so much more than women’s rights. It implicates everything the Islamic government has done in foreign policy in the Middle East (and now in Ukraine) since the fall of the Shah. It has implications for the country’s foreign relations pretty much anywhere you look, from Israel, the USA and the UK, to Russia, to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon.

In the end of her piece, Farahani makes a plea for support.

But this movement will fall apart without you. We don’t need military interventions. Even political interventions are viewed with suspicion by so many people in the Middle East. The foreign involvement in the 1953 coup d’état against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh is deeply ingrained in the Iranian psyche.

A movement like this needs raised voices of support. Remaining silent is being complicit. The way I see it, ignoring Iranian women and their courageous fight means turning your back on centuries of women’s struggles for freedom and equality.

I agree with her on two points. This movement deserves our moral support and Western help should not come in a military form. But I don’t agree that the movement will fall apart without us. As she notes, Iranians are suspicious of Western meddling in their affairs, and nothing is more meddlesome that lending aid and comfort to a movement in the process of overthrowing their government. I’d love to see them succeed, and precisely for that reason, we should be conscientious about keeping this an Iranian-led affair.

It started out as about women’s rights, and success in Iran could lead to advances for women throughout the Middle East and beyond. But we can’t look at this conflict through such a narrow lens. Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to see the clerics in Iran survive or fail, but it’s up to the Iranians to resolve.

 

I don’t follow her closely enough to know how or when it happened, but somewhere along the way Ann Althouse’s comment section became a relentlessly pro-Trump cesspool that is a great introduction into how the MAGA hive-mind is operating at any given time. That’s why I paid her site a rare visit when I saw she had written about latest New Yorker piece on the Kanye West (Ye)/Nick Fuentes meetup with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The article, penned by Isaac Chotiner, takes advantage of an inconvenient fact for the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) which had the extreme bad timing to closely precede the anti-Semitic supper in Palm Beach with a great show of support for the twice-impeached ex-president.

Two weeks ago, ZOA presented Trump with its Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion “for his unprecedented accomplishments on behalf of Israel and the Jewish-American community,” including brokering the Abraham Accords.

The award has only been granted to a handful of world leaders, including former British prime minister Winston Churchill, former US president Harry Truman, Israeli founding father and first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, and former prime minister Golda Meir.

But now the president of ZOA, Morton Klein, is expressing confusion.

It makes no sense. Somebody who’s such an extraordinary friend of Israel, whose daughter is an Orthodox Jew, whose grandchildren are Orthodox Jews—I cannot explain why he would want to have dinner with an overt anti-Semite and dinner with a white-supremacist Jew-hater, an ugly, ugly scum like Nick Fuentes. And Trump says, “I didn’t know who it was.” Even if I take him at his word, that he didn’t know who Fuentes was, fine, now he knows. Why doesn’t he say, “Fuentes is a despicable scum whose beliefs have no place in the United States of America”?

I don’t need to psychoanalyze Trump for the umpteenth time. The point here is how his supporters are reacting the Chotiner’s article. The primary reaction is a predictable “whataboutism” that shifts the conversation to the Democrats by mentioning Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and, of course, Hunter Biden.

The next three most popular defenses involve turning Trump’s defects into virtues. In the first, he was only showing loyalty to Ye, a friend in crisis who has been supportive in the past. In the second, it’s a critical part of Trump’s appeal that he refuses to dance to the media’s tune and refusing to give in to “cancel culture” and apologize for the dinner is exactly why they love him. In the third, Trump’s lack of guest vetting is admitted to be a major flaw but basically akin to NBA Hall-of-Fame Center’s Shaquille O’Neal’s incredibly low lifetime free throw percentage. In other words, their hero has an Achilles heel, but so what? He’s still the best to ever play the game.

As for any effort to resolve the cognitive dissonance expressed by ZOA’s Klein, they simply insist that Trump has proven he loves Jews and that’s the end of the debate. And if that isn’t good enough, commenters just close they eyes and ears.

Everyone on the right is called a white supremacist Nazi, Klan member. I’m sure I’d be called that if I had a larger presence on social media (or any presence). So when I hear accusations like that, to me they fall flat. They are meaningless.

And frankly, I don’t care enough about Nick Fuentes to look him up and see if he’s what the Left claims he is. They’ve cried ‘wolf’ about so many conservatives being Klan members for so long, I don’t even pay attention to it anymore.

So, this is how impervious the MAGA crowd is to anything that might reflect poorly on their leader. Which is important when we anticipate his eventual indictment on federal criminal charges. At The Bulwark, A.B. Stoddard warns that Trump will pursue the Republican Party’s presidential nomination but, if he is denied, he will burn the Grand Old Party to the ground. And if he is facing prosecution along the way, well, the Republican officeholders and candidates will have to act exactly like the commenters at Ann Althouse’s shitty blog.

…if there is a reckoning and Trump faces justice, are his Republican opponents going to defend the Biden Justice Department or Fani Willis, and tell Republican primary voters that the charges are credible and Trump’s conduct was criminal? Will they tell the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to chill out and stop threatening the lives of law enforcement and prosecutors and judges and their families?

How could they? These same people spent the last five years defending Trump from “witch hunts” and “fake news” and all the rest. They helped prime Republican voters to believe this stuff.

Trump understands that anyone who dares to get into the race with him will have to agree that yes, it’s all a political persecution and Trump is innocent and that the best way to own the libs is to vote for him again. He’s the best middle finger available.They will have to say this because if they don’t, then they will either lose the primary or lose some sizable percentage of Republican voters.

I’m not sure things will play out exactly this way, but it’s definitely true that Trump has no use for the Republican Party or anyone or thing else if they’re not loyally advancing his interests. The criminal justice system could cut his presidential campaign short, but if he’s still a free man (and even, perhaps, if he is not) and he does not look like he’s going to win the nomination, he will quit and run as an independent. If that’s not possible, he will make sure to absolutely poison his base against the Republican candidate.

And most observers, me included, believe this would be a fatal blow that all but assures that the Democratic candidate is victorious. So, the GOP is held hostage by Trump. They either stick with him both as a candidate and a criminal defendant, or they receive a long-deserved comeuppance. This is what circling the drain looks like.