Month: February 2024

Two days ago, Robinson Meyer wrote about Chinese electric cars in the New York Times, and he had a warning. The Big Three American automakers are about to get destroyed. And he made a compelling case, beginning with the arrival of Chinese carmaker BYD’s new “plug-in hybrid that gets decent all-electric range and will retail for just over $11,000.” Detroit can’t compete with that.

Perhaps the Big Three deserve destruction; after all, they hooked us on S.U.V.s in the first place and then fell behind in the E.V. race. But letting them die is not a tenable political option for the Biden administration. One goal of Mr. Biden’s presidency is to show not only that decarbonization can work for the American economy but also that it can revive moribund fossil-fuel-dependent communities in the Rust Belt. Mr. Biden has also fought for and won the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, which just cemented a generous new contract with the Big Three and now needs them to thrive.

He has reason, in other words, to help the Big Three even before you get to the harsh electoral realities: The legacy auto industry employs more people in Michigan than in any other state, and Mr. Biden’s path to re-election all but requires him to win Michigan in November.

Meyer also put production numbers in perspective. Chinese automakers are building factories like crazy.

[BYD] sold three million electrified vehicles last year, more than any other company, and it now has enough production capacity in China to manufacture four million cars a year. But that isn’t enough: It’s building factories in Brazil, Thailand, Hungary and Uzbekistan, to produce even more cars, and it may soon add Indonesia and Mexico to that list. A deluge of electric vehicles is coming.

This is all happening too fast for the Big Three.

Ford’s and GM’s earnings rest primarily on selling pickup trucks, S.U.V.s and crossovers to affluent North Americans.

In other words, if Americans’ appetite for trucks and S.U.V.s falters, then Ford and GM will be in real trouble. That creates a strategic quandary for them. In the coming years, these companies must cross a bridge from one business model to another: They must use their robust truck and S.U.V. earnings to subsidize their growing electric vehicle business and learn how to make E.V.s profitably. If they can make it across this bridge quickly, they will survive. But if their S.U.V. profits crumble before their E.V. business is ready, they will fall into the chasm and perish.

That’s why the flood of cheap Chinese electric vehicles poses such a big problem: It could wash away Ford and GM’s bridge before they have finished building it. Even a wave of competitive electric cars from the Sun Belt automakers — like Kia’s EV9, a three-row S.U.V. — could eat away at their S.U.V. profits before they’re ready.

So, it looks like some kind of delaying tactic is required, right? But will that be enough?

Mr. Biden will need to impose trade restrictions. But here’s where it gets messy. The case for protecting the American auto market from Chinese E.V.s is obvious and politically essential but also highly troublesome. In the short term, American automakers — even the homegrown electric-only carmakers like Tesla and Rivian — must be shielded from a wave of cheap cars. But in the long term, Mr. Biden must be careful not to cordon off the American car market from the rest of the world, turning the United States into an automotive backwater of bloated, expensive, gas-guzzling vehicles. The Chinese carmakers are the first real competition that the global car industry has faced in decades, and American companies must be exposed to some of that threat, for their own good. That means they must feel the chill of death on their necks and be forced to rise and face this challenge.

But, for now, the Biden administration has pulled a rabbit out of a hat. In a White House statement released on Thursday, the administration declared Chinese vehicles a “risk to our national security.” This is primarily because cars are now smart cars, exactly like phones are now smart phones, and so buying and using a Chinese car is just like giving the Chinese government the passcode to your phone.

Most cars these days are “connected” – they are like smart phones on wheels. These cars are connected to our phones, to navigation systems, to critical infrastructure, and to the companies that made them. Connected vehicles from China could collect sensitive data about our citizens and our infrastructure and send this data back to the People’s Republic of China. These vehicles could be remotely accessed or disabled.

China imposes restrictions on American autos and other foreign autos operating in China. Why should connected vehicles from China be allowed to operate in our country without safeguards?

So today, I am announcing unprecedented actions to ensure that cars on U.S. roads from countries of concern like China do not undermine our national security. I have directed my Secretary of Commerce to conduct an investigation into connected vehicles with technology from countries of concern and to take action to respond to the risks.

As President I vowed to do right by auto workers and middle-class families that depend on the auto industry for jobs. With this and other actions, we’re going to make sure the future of the auto industry will be made here in America with American workers.

I bet you did not see that coming!

So, Biden is making sure the union autoworkers in the Midwest know he’s got their backs. But is this going to help at all when it comes to competing internationally? Is it perhaps going to hurt by preventing the Big Three from feeling “the chill of death on their necks”?

It’s emasculating for a Republican Speaker of the House to depend on Democrats, but that’s the situation in Congress right now, and it’s not going to change. Even though the GOP has a 219-213 majority, they can’t muster enough votes to pass spending bills on their own. They can’t pay our nation’s bills on time on their own. So, that means the Speaker has to go in search of Democratic votes.

This is what cost Kevin McCarthy his gavel late last year. Far right Republicans made a motion to vacate the chair because they were displeased with McCarthy for striking a deal with the Biden administration to avoid a national credit default, and then for passing a continuing resolution to keep the government operational. No Democrats came to McCarthy’s rescue and so he lost his leadership position.

His replacement, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, faces the same problems. The debt issue has been addressed for now, but Johnson still needs to avoid a government shutdown. And since he cannot do that without Democratic votes, he also is quite limited in what kind of concessions he can get from the Democrats. This makes the far right loonies steaming mad.

But what really grinds the gears of the far right is military and economic aid for Ukraine. Huge majorities in the House and Senate are in favor of it, but Johnson is worried that if he allows a vote on it he will get chucked out like McCarthy. That’s why we’re seeing this:

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic [House] leader, said on Wednesday that he believed “a reasonable number” of lawmakers in his party would protect Speaker Mike Johnson from removal from his post if he allowed a vote on a foreign aid bill that includes money for Ukraine and faced a Republican mutiny as a result.

In other words, Johnson can rest assured that he won’t lose his job. But what about his dignity? What about his autonomy? He’s already the leader of a mostly Democratic bipartisan caucus that pays our debts and makes our spending decisions, but now he would literally be Speaker only by virtue of Democratic support. And that support could be withdrawn at any time.

In that case, Johnson could continue to act like the leader of the House Republicans, but that would no longer be an accurate job description. Which is okay, because the job description of the Speaker of the House is different from the leader of a political party. That’s why all members vote to elect a Speaker.

Normally, I’d ask for some power sharing and committee chairs in exchange for saving Mike Johnson, but the Ukraine aid is pretty important and time-critical. Getting the aid while simultaneously neutering the Republican Speaker seems like an acceptable short-term deal.

Howdy. I noticed that Seth Meyers had President Biden on as a guest on his late night talk show. So, let’s check it out:

There’s a good blend of humor and candid talk about the issues of the day. Quite a way to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Seth Meyers’ late night talk show.

See you next week. Cheers.

 

In 1988, my friends and I, including my girlfriend, went on summer tour with the Grateful Dead. We drove from New Jersey out in Bloomington, Minnesota. From there,  we saw shows in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Maine. After the Maine shows on July 2nd and 3rd, our car’s engine ran dry on oil somewhere in Rhode Island and we were stranded in the middle of the night on I-95.

Somehow my girlfriend and I and my best friend and his girlfriend made it to the Providence bus station. From there we traveled to the Port Authority in Manhattan. I don’t know what we did after that. I know I never saw any of the possessions I left in that car again. And I know my girlfriend and I eventually made it up to her family camp on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks.

Their place was (and still is) on the north shore and had no car access, but someone delivered the New York Times every day by boat. And I sat on the dock and read that paper for at least two weeks running, as it detailed how Mike Dukakis was winning and then losing in the polls as he challenged George Herbert Walker Bush for the presidency.

It appeared that the Willie Horton ad had turned Americans against Dukakis overnight. But it began earlier, while my friends and I were dancing up in Maine:

Over the Fourth of July weekend in 1988, [Lee] Atwater attended a motorcyclists’ convention in Luray, Virginia. Two couples talked about the Horton story featured in the July issue of Reader’s Digest. Atwater joined them without mentioning who he was. Later that night, a focus group in Alabama had turned completely against Dukakis when presented the information about Horton’s furlough. Atwater used this occurrence to argue the necessity of pounding Dukakis about the furlough issue.

I remember calculating in my 18 year-old mind how many millions of Americans were represented by the drop in the polls Dukakis experienced. It depressed the hell out of me. I really lost faith in the whole concept of the popular will for a while. I wasn’t at all sure democracy made sense if the people were so impressionable as to be swayed by something as simple as a 30-second attack ad.

I don’t think I really regained my faith until Bill Bradley announced he was running for president in 2000, and the way that whole election cycle turned out wasn’t a confidence builder either.

I mention all of this as a prelude to saying that this makes me feel eighteen again:

“The average favorable rating for Donald Trump hit its highest level since before the 2022 midterm elections, as the former president marches toward a likely November rematch against a less popular Joe Biden,” Bloomberg reports.

“The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows 42% of voters say they have a favorable opinion of Trump, up from an all-time low of 36% in December 2022. He’s now viewed better than Biden, whose poll numbers soared over Trump early in his presidency. Around 40% have a favorable opinion of Biden.”

I haven’t been this down on the popular will since that summer on the dock in the Adirondacks. I wish I go back on tour.

The next best thing is to listen to a snippet of that tour, this taken from the first set in Pittsburgh on June 26, 1988. It includes the best Little Red Rooster I ever saw the Dead play.

Enjoy.

I’m more in the mood for sustained panic than sober analysis, but I can’t get too far off brand, can I? And that’s why I welcome the latest from Nate Cohn. In my thinking, Donald Trump should be about as popular as setting yourself on fire, and any evidence that he’s more popular than that is a good reason to lose all faith in humanity. So, I’ll take comfort in any evidence I can find that people hate his guts.

It’s still early in the primary season, but a whiff of a possible polling error is already in the air. That’s because Donald J. Trump has underperformed the polls in each of the first three contests.

• In Iowa, the final FiveThirtyEight polling average showed Mr. Trump leading Nikki Haley by 34 points with a 53 percent share. He ultimately beat her by 32 points with 51 percent. (Ron DeSantis took second.)

• In New Hampshire, he led by 18 points with 54 percent. In the end, he won by 11 points with 54 percent.

• In South Carolina, Mr. Trump led by 28 points with 62 percent. He ultimately won by 20 points with 60 percent.

As Cohn notes, these are small polling discrepancies but they all lean in one direction. What might explain it?

First up there is the idea that undecided voters don’t and won’t ultimately choose Trump. If they could put up with Trump, they’d have already have chosen him. The second one is that the pollsters are using shitty turnout models that, in particular, don’t anticipate Democrats turning out to vote in Republican primaries. That was easy for Democrats to do in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and tempting since there is no competitive or meaningful contest on the Democratic side. A third explanation is that pro-Trump voters have flipped from their prior habit and are now more likely to talk to pollsters than anti-Trump voters.

But the last explanation is the most satisfying: “Anti-Trump voters are highly motivated to turn out this cycle.” What we really mean here is that they are disproportionately motivated to turn out. Because if that is the case then Trump will have a very hard time consolidating the Republican primary vote. He’s losing 4 in 10 Republican votes now, and that’s not terribly worrisome for him on its own. It’s also not too problematic that many Nikki Haley voters say they won’t support Trump in November. Most of them are either lying and simply don’t know themselves as well as they think they do. But if we’re talking about very highly motivated anti-Trump sentiment, then that could have the needed lasting power.

I hope this is the case, and also that undecided voters in this cycle are going to break heavily against the orange shitgibbbon.

Still, polls that are far closer and the actual Biden win might give me a heart attack before Election Night.

 

I almost never look at Maureen Dowd’s opinion columns. I’m pretty sure the last time she was on my must-read list, Dick Cheney was still living in the Naval Observatory. But today she decided to write about the virility of the president of the United States and I just had to see what was up.

“The Golden Bachelor” showed that sex is not just for spring chickens. Hearing aids and making out in a hot tub can go blissfully together.

Now comes the Golden President. Even though fretful questions about his age have engulfed Joe Biden’s campaign, one thing is clear: His romance with Jill is still crackling.

I have observed that myself.

I could just leave this right here. It’s kind of priceless as it stands, don’t you think?

But the column doesn’t limit itself to the present day. It takes in many of the more randy statements uttered by Joe Biden, going back to the aftermath of the tragic death of his first wife.

The most famous profile ever done about him was Kitty Kelley’s Washingtonian piece in 1974 — a year and a half after his beautiful young wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, tragically died in a car crash at Christmastime.

“Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover,” he said. “The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports.” In an office with 35 pictures of Neilia, he pointed out one of his “beautiful millionaire wife” in a bikini, noting, “She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?”

He said he was so exhausted from campaigning for the Senate in 1972, “I’d come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn’t have much time for anything else.”

Why is Dowd writing about this? There actually is no good answer to that question, but it’s a set up to contrast with the Republicans’ pinched attitude towards sex, sexuality and even artificial acts of insemination. Biden has healthy robust sex with his wife, while these puritanical GOP bastards are trying to “stamp out sensuality.”

Never mind that marital sex is perfectly consistent with puritanism. Dowd wants to write embarrassing stuff about Biden while making it look like praise. It’s so titillating!

I suppose it could be worse. Dowd could have written an entire column intimating that our president can no longer get it up. Actually, that’s probably going to be the topic of her next column.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Cape May, New Jersey 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’ve now further refined the house to the left. Note the second story windows.

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.

I feel like I started tuning out the right wing media environment sometime during the Trump presidency. But it really became a problem once Trump left office. I think I just reached some kind of limit on how much toxicity I could tolerate in my life. This wasn’t a conscious decision and when I talk about toxicity, I’m not referring simply to meanness and cruelty. In my life, watching someone say something stupid is physically painful and spiritually deadening. Gullible people make me lose hope, and a critical mass of Fox News-marinated morons can lead me straight into despair.

So, back in August 2021, I was aware that the pillow guy, Mike Lindell, was holding some kind of  “cyber symposium” in South Dakota but I didn’t really pay attention to it. I knew he was claiming to have some trove of data that proved the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, but I figured he was just trying to sell his shitty pillows. I had no idea he was offering $5 million to anyone who could prove his data had nothing to do with the election. Had I known that, I might be $5 million richer instead of Robert Zeidman, “a computer forensics expert who voted for Trump twice.”

This story is in the news again because Lindell stiffed Zeidman and refused to cough up the promised award money.

Zeidman is owed the $5 million payout plus interest, [Federal] Judge John Tunheim wrote in his Wednesday ruling. The decision is the latest development in a years-long effort to claim the prize, after Zeidman found that the data was not related to the 2020 election.

Let’s all have a laugh at Pillow Guy’s expense. Ha ha ha.

But let’s not forget that Lindell was already on the Rudy Giuliani Road to Financial Ruin. Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems are suing the crap out of him and his stupid MyPillow company. This is from the Dominion filing:

After hitting the jackpot with Donald Trump’s endorsement for MyPillow and after a million-dollar bet on Fox News ads had paid out handsome returns, Michael Lindell exploited another chance to boost sales: marketing MyPillow to people who would tune in and attend rallies to hear Lindell tell the “Big Lie” that Dominion had stolen the 2020 election.

As when MyPillow previously faced legal action for deceptive marketing campaigns, Lindell knew there was no real “evidence” supporting his claims. And he is well aware of the independent audits and paper ballot recounts conclusively disproving the Big Lie.

But Lindell—a talented salesman and former professional card counter—sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows. MyPillow’s defamatory marketing campaign—with promo codes like “FightforTrump,” “45,” “Proof,” and “QAnon”—has increased MyPillow sales by 30-40% and continues duping people into redirecting their election-lie outrage into pillow purchases.

Accountability for these folks is coming in a hot stream now. Lindell is out $5 million today, maybe $500 million later. Already indicted in Georgia, John Eastman is losing his law license. Peter Navarro has to turn over his presidential records before he heads for four months in the federal slammer. Steve Bannon will eventually join him there. Sidney Powell, the Kraken Lady, pleaded guilty and got 6 years of probation. Among his many other problems, Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million in damages to two Georgia election workers he defamed and is drowning in debt. And Trump is setting new records for losing money in court. He owes E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million, and that could still grow. He owes New York State north of $450 million for being a giant financial fraud.

These things are the antidote for despair.

But I have to admit that I completely tuned out the effort to impeach Joe Biden. I mean, once I determined that there was no case against Biden whatsoever, I spent no effort to discover what bullshit the Republicans were repeating to their right wing news audience. That’s why I had never even heard of Alexander Smirnov or his idiotic allegations before he was arrested for making them up. What I can tell you, however, is that I spent years writing pieces about Trumpworld’s ties to Russia and Russian intelligence, and that the least surprising thing in the world to me is that the effort to impeach Biden has been a Russian intelligence operation from the beginning. House Republicans don’t even care about this anymore because they see Putin as an ally and Biden as an enemy. Trump is Putin’s puppet and the GOP is Trump’s party. Everything follows very predictably from this, and that’s why we can’t get any military aid passed through the GOP-controlled House.

I don’t have to pay close attention all the time because this is all baked in the cake at this point. So occasional good news aside, we must win this November election or there’s no point, no hope, nothing but the darkest pit of despair.

Howdy. It’s that time again. Here’s a blast from the past.

The English language of this song tended to get considerably more airplay on in the area I lived in at the time, although I’d hear this version and even see the video on one of the UHF video shows of the era. The German version has more of a punch to it – and now there are subtitles for a rough translation.

See you, hopefully, next week. Cheers.

 

I was still in college on September 13, 1993, when President Bill Clinton brought Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat together for an Oslo Accords handshake at the White House. As seen from Clinton’s rhetoric that day, modest initial steps were matched with outsized long-term ambitions:

“Today the leadership of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization will sign a declaration of principles on interim Palestinian self-government. It charts a course toward reconciliation between two peoples who have both known the bitterness of exile. Now both pledge to put old sorrows and antagonisms behind them and to work for a shared future shaped by the values of the Torah, the Koran, and the Bible.”

“Interim self government” didn’t sound like a whole lot, but this was the basis for creating a Palestinian government that could eventually govern much of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Getting Israel to recognize Arafat’s PLO for this purpose was not easy. Nor was it easy to get the PLO to recognize Israel as its legitimate partner.

We can look back now 30 years later and point to this or that event that derailed everything, but it’s clear that the hope at the beginning was that eventually the Palestinians would take over full governing responsibility for their people and their territory. To make that happen, they needed more than to just build up institutions, they also needed to make the Israelis comfortable with ceding control.

The Israelis also had to keep their end of the bargain. If the Palestinian Authority demonstrated its competence and trustworthiness, the Palestinians then needed to inherit their territory. And this is where Benjamin Netanyahu comes in, because when he first took power in 1996, he did not believe in the agreements that had been struck back in 1993, and he did everything he could to prevent the Palestinians from getting a state. He’s bragging about this right now, in case you’re inclined to disbelieve me.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said he would introduce legislation to match the cabinet decision rejecting “international diktats” seeking to push Palestinian statehood — boasting of his decades of thwarting any such move.

In a video statement, Netanyahu said Israel has for months resisted international calls to halt the war in Gaza against Hamas but is now facing new pressures, in particular “an attempt to force upon us the unilateral establishment of a Palestinian state which will endanger the existence of the State of Israel.”

“We flat out reject this,” he said.

After passing unanimously in the cabinet, where he noted “different opinions for a permanent arrangement,” Netanyahu said he was certain the Knesset legislation will receive wide support, “show[ing] the world that there is wide agreement in Israel against the international efforts to force on us a Palestinian state.”

The prime minister added that “everyone knows that I am the one who for decades blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger our existence.”

For Netanyahu and perhaps most Israelis, the October 7 invasion from the Gaza Strip demonstrated precisely why Israel can’t adequately defend itself against a future Palestinian state. For the rest of the world, it appears to have to led to the opposite conclusion, which is that denying the Palestinians a state leads inevitably to insecurity for Israel and violence and upheaval for the whole Middle East.

These lessons are not easily reconcilable. But I can say unreservedly that Israelis won’t politically support leaders who seem to reward Hamas’s October 7 attack by embracing a reinvigorated two-state solution process. Israelis blame Netanyahu for allowing October 7, but his decades-long opposition to a Palestinian state actually looks prescient to them now.

So, the United States is in a pickle. We want a reinvigorated tw0-state solution, and our Arab allies are on board with that. But Israel is absolutely not on board with it, and the opposition is from the political right, center and most of the left.

Just today, the U.S. exercised its United Nations Security Council veto to kill off a resolution calling for a cease fire in Gaza. It’s true that we offered an alternative that is tougher on Israel than anything I’ve ever seen us do at the UN, but most of the world just sees us as enabling genocide against starving Palestinians.

People who want peace or a cease fire need to recognize that the less secure Israelis feel, the less likely it is that violence will stop. And that’s been true and will remain true whether there’s an active war on or not.

The U.S. may have a rupture with Israel soon over this basic disconnect. And I don’t think Netanyahu is the root of the problem, sadly. No Israeli is more responsible than Bibi for three decades of failed peace process, but the consequences are here with or without him. For now, Israelis cannot envision being safe in a two-state world, and a lot would have to change to prove them wrong.

This is going to lead to pariah status and isolation for Israel, but they can’t pull their allies along for the ride any longer. And their allies don’t have a magic wand to make things turn out okay.