Month: November 2023

And then there were five. That’s how many Republicans qualified to participate in Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate in Miami-Dade County. Since the second debate in September at the Ronald Reagan Library, former vice-president Mike Pence has dropped out. Asa Hutchinson did not qualify for that debate and he hasn’t qualified for this one either. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum has been disqualified, too, for failure to meet minimum polling requirements. And despite meeting all the thresholds for participation, Donald Trump is not eligible because he has so far refused to pledge to support the eventual nominee, assuming it is not him. He has no interest in debating in any case considering his commanding lead in all polls.

So, we’re left with the two South Carolinians, Sen. Tim Scott and former governor and ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and businessman Vivek “the fake” Ramaswamy. Only Scott and DeSantis currently hold elected office.

Christie is purely a spoiler who is running against Trump rather than for the nomination. Ramaswamy’s star seems to have faded. And Tim Scott barely qualified for the debate and appears to be running on fumes. So this really appears like a race between Haley and DeSantis. On Monday, DeSantis received the important endorsement of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds who said, “I believe [Trump] can’t win, and I believe that Ron can.”

It’s important that someone makes the case that Trump can’t win because the polling indicates he would beat Joe Biden if the election were held today, so there’s little objective evidence to support that Trump is a fatally flawed candidate. As his losses in court begin to pile up, that may change, and it certainly has to change if DeSantis or anyone else is to have any chance of winning the nomination.

The debate will have to compete with news coverage of Ivanka Trump’s testimony in the Trump Corporation’s Manhattan fraud trial. I doubt it will have a major impact on the race unless there is a major gaffe by either Haley or DeSantis. But it will be interesting to see what strategies they use, especially on the topic of Trump and his legal problems. So far, it seems to anger Republican voters when Trump is criticized, but a case has to be made that despite the current polls he isn’t a viable candidate. Will either Haley or DeSantis join Christie in making that argument?

It must be hard to choose a strategy, especially because there are two distinct ways of winning the nomination. The first is the traditional path of winning the most delegates. That’s a tall order considering Trump’s polling advantage. The second is to win in a brokered convention, and that could happen if Trump is convicted on federal or Fulton County, Georgia charges before the Republican National Convention crowns a winner. In the latter case, it’s likely that Trump-pledged delegates will decide the winner, so being their second choice is important.

It’s a tricky business. DeSantis is a more natural second choice for the MAGA crowd than Haley, so he probably wants to avoid antagonizing them and blowing his advantage. Yet, if he wants to compete in Iowa he needs to start making the electability argument now, and quite forcefully.

These Republican debates are painful to watch, but at least there are some questions the curious will have answered.

President Joe Biden is in his home state of Delaware on Monday touting “$16.4 billion in new funding from the 2021 infrastructure law for passenger rail projects along the Northeast Corridor.” There’s a good reason for that. Over in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republicans are struggling to pass the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill. It was supposed to come to a vote on Friday, but there was a problem.

About a dozen House Republicans, including several New Yorkers, have concerns with cuts to Amtrak included in the bill, according to two Republican aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Republican dynamics. Some of them have threatened to vote against it if it comes to the floor.

According to the Washington Post, new Speaker Mike Johnson is running into problems already with his funding plans. He wants to pass all the appropriations bills in a prompt manner to strengthen the party’s negotiating hand with the White House and U.S. Senate. But the schedule is slipping, and it looks like he has no path to pass some of the bills, including funding for Commerce, Justice, and Labor, Health and Human Services and Education and the agricultural Farm Bill.

Each bill has its own hurdles, but the similarity is an inability to get near-unanimity within his own conference. He’s even having a problem with a provision to ban using postal delivery of abortion pills. The proposed bills all have a combination of steep cuts and culture war provisions that put off at least some members, particularly those in tight reelection races.

But the larger problem is that Speaker Johnson needs to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open past November 17. He doesn’t have the votes to do this, however, just as his predecessor Kevin McCarthy didn’t have the votes. He’s trying to appease the holdouts by showing that he can pass the appropriations bills and thereby avoid a last second omnibus deal where the Senate can jam up the House and force them to spend more than they want. It’s not clear that this plan can work, but to have any realistic chance of success he needs to get the appropriations bills passed, and it doesn’t look that is going to happen on schedule.

It’s not a great plan anyway, as Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska points out:

[Bacon] also questioned why Republicans are forcing lawmakers to take tough votes on bills that include steep spending cuts that have no chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate or becoming law. Most cuts that House Republicans vote for in the House will be rolled back if House and Senate leaders negotiate a spending deal.

“Why don’t we just do that to begin with?” Bacon said. “That’s what I’ve advised.”

It’s a solid point. The Democrats are relishing all these votes for unpopular cuts (not to mention culture war provisions) they can pin on Republican incumbents. In a different world, they’d be the ones forcing Republicans to take these votes rather than having them self-inflict this political pain on themselves. But Johnson has no room to maneuver. To avoid a government shutdown without relying on Democratic votes, he needs his nearly every member of his caucus to vote for a continuing resolution, and he has to show that he has a plan to force deep cuts further down the line.

But, again, if he can’t pass the deep cuts even for bills that will never become law, how can he demonstrate that his plan will work?

And let’s remember that even if he does pass all the appropriations bills, each of them will have to be reconciled with the Senate version, and then those compromise bills will have to avoid a White House veto. In other words, he’ll need Democratic endorsement of the spending bills at some point, even if he never gets any endorsement from House Democrats.

So, what we’re witnessing is a big demonstration of denial. The House Republicans can’t get unanimity around anything that’s realistic so the strategy is to just pretend that they can get their way eventually by some kind of magic. This delusion is what cost McCarthy his job, and it’s what is forcing Johnson to go through all these hoops. Last Thursday, Johnson even made a loopy proposal to have a “laddered” continuing resolution.

While it’s not totally clear how that would work, Johnson seemed to be referring to different lengths of funding for each of the 12 individual appropriations bills, triggering ongoing shutdown threats for different parts of government. A continuing resolution typically extends current funding levels for all appropriations bills until one later date, buying time for lawmakers to haggle over an updated government funding deal.

This would potentially create a ladder of partial or rolling government shutdowns. I’m pretty sure it’s a non-starter in the Senate and it doesn’t remove the need to compromise with the Democrats.

In the end, there’s no way around the fundamental problem which is that the House Republicans do not have the ability to pass spending bills using only Republican votes, and even if they do accomplish this, they still have to negotiate with the Democrats in the Senate and White House. Since they can’t keep the government operational on their own, they need to face reality and cut deals with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, but the Speaker isn’t allowed to do this and keep his job.

Speaker Johnson has not found a way around this problem, and so it looks like we will have a government shutdown of indeterminate duration. And eventually there will be some Republicans who are willing to defect and make a deal to get the government open again. This will most likely have to happen through a discharge petition to force a vote on a clean continuing resolution. And that means that Speaker Johnson will have lost control of the House floor on the most important matter, which is how money is spent.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Jerome, Arizona 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.

I have now started the awnings and refined the old hotel to the far rear.

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 Washington Post has an interesting article by Hannah Natanson on a major debate in a school district in Washington state about whether Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird should be required reading for ninth graders. The novelty of the debate is that it was teachers rather than parents who brought the challenge. And the challenge wasn’t that the book is too “woke” but that it is harmful to black students.

I actually like how it was resolved. The book is no longer required reading but it is permitted reading, meaning the decision on whether or not to assign it is left to individual instructors.  The reason I like this outcome is because I don’t really believe in mandatory book assignments. At most, such designations should be temporary and regularly revisited. No book, no matter how good, deserves a permanent place in the curriculum.

I also think good literature is almost always painful to read. And it’s really up to the teacher to contextualize things so that students understand the purpose of that pain. That’s why I am not overly sympathetic to some of student complaints. For example, one black student said she was unmoved by the book because “because it wasn’t written about her — or for her.” But I have trouble thinking of any pieces of classic literature that were written about me and I find it very valuable to read books that were written “for” people other than myself. It forces me to see things through a different prism.

It’s true that To Kill A Mockingbird wasn’t written for a black audience except, perhaps, in the larger sense that it advocates for black rights. But then Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail wasn’t written for a black audience either. It was written to eight white southern religious leaders. Should black students not read King’s letter because it wasn’t written for them? Much of what King wrote was an effort to make a sympathetic white audience understand how their support was inadequate, and the learning really comes from seeing what King found necessary to explain. Likewise, Harper Lee shows how difficult it was for whites to stand up for black rights. Atticus Finch needed uncommon courage, and the lesson was that this courage was correct, heroic and, most importantly, required.

Another complaint from both students and teachers was that the black characters in To Kill A Mockingbird are “two-dimensional” and the book “centers on whiteness” and “presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature.”

On this score, I’d agree that To Kill A Mockingbird is not suitable for the purpose of teaching a black point of view of the Civil Rights era or of representing black literature. If it is used for primarily for historical instruction, it needs to be supplemented with other reading and black literature obviously has black authors. This is one reason why I don’t think To Kill A Mockingbird should be mandatory reading, especially in perpetuity. On its own, however, it is not a barrier to learning anything.

It’s an excellent piece of literature, but it’s not essential. I don’t think anything is essential. Teachers should assign it if they want to, but they shouldn’t be forced to assign it.

Since the turn of the 21st Century, there have been four events that caused me to suffer depression to the point that I didn’t want to get out of bed. The first was the attacks of September 11, 2001. The second was the election of Donald Trump. The third was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And the fourth was Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.

In each of these cases, I immediately realized that something truly catastrophic had occurred, but that the real problem was how the world was going to respond. It hasn’t helped that I caught a lingering cold from my son in early October, but my energy levels have been staggeringly low for nearly a month. I think the current crisis in the Middle East may be the worst of the four events, simply because I don’t know what to say.

The discussion of a cease fire is a good example. Currently, Israel is still under sustained rocket attack both from Gaza and from Lebanon. Hamas is holding hundreds of hostages in tunnels that are accessed below densely-populated neighborhoods. The security fence and Iron Dome system that were supposed to provide security for Israelis proved wholly inadequate. The leadership of the country is completely discredited on every level and yet remains in power. The people demand justice and that security be provided somehow. I can’t see how a cease fire is realistic under these circumstances.

Yet, what Israel is attempting to do is almost incomprehensible in scope. It wants to move a million people from the north of Gaza to the South so that it can dismantle 300 kilometers of tunnels and kill anyone who wants to put up a fight. In the meantime, they are destroying the homes and infrastructure those northern Gazans depend upon, which will leave them nothing to return to. And when they’re done with the north, they’ll turn to the south, which is also being methodically destroyed.

And this is all happening in a closed box. No one is allowed to exit the kill zone. The only thing that might stop this humanitarian catastrophe is also unrealistic. Hamas could release the hostages and surrender en masse. They initiated this phase of the conflict and they can save their own people by taking responsibility. But that’s not going to happen.

That really leaves the United States as the only entity that can possibly restrain Israel, but what should the U.S. recommend? Is it going to force Israel to accept a status quo where Hamas remains in their tunnels holding hostages and lobbing rockets at them incessantly? I don’t know that the U.S. could convince the Israelis even under threat of losing aid and support.

And yet the U.S. simply can’t sustain its support of Israel under conditions as they’re unfolding because the human toll is far too great. As Israel moves into Gaza City, the civilian death toll is going to go off the charts. With the collapse of the hospital system, lack of fuel, electricity, food, water and shelter, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians could perish.

It’s incomprehensible to me that Benjamin Netanyahu is allowed to preside over this after everything he stands for has been proved a complete moral and strategic failure. To me, that’s the starting point. The impossibility of restoring security to Israel without committing unspeakable atrocities in the process is the iron-clad proof of this. Thinking Hamas was an asset to Israel because the terrorist group gave them a ready excuse not to negotiate for a Palestinian state was short-sighted, cynical and deeply immoral. Gobbling up the West Bank likewise was the ultimate in bad faith. Israel needs to throw out the leaders who brought them this catastrophe and get serious about a negotiated settlement.

But, again, how do you negotiate with Hamas?

The rocket fire needs to stop. The hostages need to be returned. Israel needs the space to get their breath and reset.

But all I see is more excuses for why no one can do the right thing. And that’s why I just want to spend all my time sleeping.

 

Howdy, everyone. It is that time of the week again. I’ve been happy to have my late night talk show hosts back, and this week, I’ll turn my attention to Seth Meyers’ opening monologue, which is typically worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyMtVP3cD1I

With so much going on in the world, sometimes it’s healthy to laugh about it a bit. Cheers!