Month: August 2024

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing my painting of Navajo Bridge near the Arizona/Utah border. My recent photo is seen 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 directly below.

I’ve now added some paint to the sky, far area and river below.

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 have some thoughts on Donald Trump’s decision to tell NBC News on Thursday that “if he is elected, his administration would not only protect access to in-vitro fertilization but would also have either the government or insurance companies cover the cost of the expensive service for American women who need it.” He also intimated that he might vote in favor of repealing Florida’s six-week abortion ban when he casts his ballot in November. His campaign later walked that back a bit by saying he had not made up his mind.

It’s a fairly standard practice for politicians to pander to their party’s base when running in a primary and then to pivot to more widely appealing policies and messages when trying to win a general election. Sometimes this is called “moving to the middle,” but I think it’s really about moving away from the unpopular. For Donald Trump things are a bit more complicated because he really didn’t need to sweat too much about winning the nomination of the Republican Party in 2024, but he has a four-year record in office. So, there are some things in his record as president that are liabilities now, and one of those things is his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices who banded together to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Kamala Harris is in a pretty similar situation. She’s been vice-president for four years and some of the Biden administration’s policies and record are not popular. In addition, when she ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, she pandered pretty hard to the party’s base, and she’s walking back several of those stances now in an effort to appeal to a general election electorate. This pivot would be more pronounced if she’d just run in a partisan primary this year, but she avoided that complication.

Moving to the middle isn’t necessarily a no-brainer move. I think of it like Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t break promises you made to your base without consequences. For every vote you pick up in the middle, you might lose one from the right or left. So, to figure out whether a middle-moving action will benefit a politician, you have to understand the mass, or size, of the affected constituencies. If your base is bigger than the world of persuadable voters, you could wind up losing more support than you gain.

This is simplistic, I know, because base voters are harder to move than persuadables. They can be disappointed and even angry and still vote for you if they consider the alternative to be much worse. For this reason, the third law of motion isn’t a perfect analogy. At the same time, it’s called a law of nature for a reason. Disappointed and angry voters are less likely to vote at all, and much less likely to donate their money or time. It’s obvious that a happy and enthusiastic base is preferable to one that feels betrayed.

And, to be clear, Trump’s shift on in-vitro and abortion is a giant betrayal to his most loyal constituency. Abortion-obsessed white evangelical Christians have stuck with Trump fully knowing that he’s a terrible human being because he’s delivered on the issue they most care about, while previous Republican presidents provided little more than lip service. But if you think every fertilized egg is a human being and that discarding unused fertilized eggs is murder, then it’s not possible to countenance government-funded in-vitro fertilization. And that’s not even getting in the expense of such a proposal. Kamala Harris hasn’t made any proposals this offensive to the worldview of these evangelicals. And if Trump opposes a six-week ban on abortion, that just compounds the problem, because he can’t be trusted to continue to advance their crusade for a total ban.

So, this is a test. Trump feels like his base will never leave him, and given that they’ve stood with him through so many impeachments, arrests, and scandals, he has good reason to hold that belief. But perhaps he doesn’t understand that their loyalty isn’t all about him but in large part because he’s been a very effective vehicle for the issue that most motivates them to be politically active.

In the game of wink-and-nod, it’s possible for Trump to make all manner of flip-flops and empty promises without alarming his base. He can even commit sexual assault and business fraud and cuddle up to dictators. But this is potentially different. This is a direct attack on the reason they give him a pass on everything else.

So, this Trump action is going to have a strong reaction, and I think it will depress his turnout and overall margins in his strongest counties and communities. Will he make up for this by winning over persuadles? It’s possible, but I doubt it. This could be a catastrophic political miscalculation.

I’m old enough to remember the House Republicans ousting Kevin McCarthy as the Speaker of the House and taking 22 days to settle on his replacement. It’s not ancient history–the whole saga took place between October 3 and October 25, 2023. If you want ancient history, you can go back to 2015 when I correctly predicted that McCarthy would lose his bid to become Speaker, or to January 2, 2023 when I correctly predicted he would fail as Speaker and be replaced before the year was out. The Republicans haven’t had a strong Speaker since convicted child molester Dennis Hastert resigned in 2007, and the main reason is the far right doesn’t want to govern.

This problem is about to come again for McCarthy’s successor, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who will try to avoid the umpteenth effort by MAGA/Freedom Caucus Republicans to cause a government shutdown. The fiscal year ends on September 30, and Congress needs to pass some kind of continuing resolution to keep the government fully operational beyond that date. This is the precise issue that brought McCarthy’s short term with the Speaker’s gavel to grief one year ago.

There are enough House Republicans who will never vote for a continuing resolution (CR) that Johnson can’t do it using just Republican votes. But even assuming he could, the Freedom Caucus is making the demand that he attach the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act).

There are all kinds of problems with this bill. To begin with, it seeks to address a problem that doesn’t exist, which is non-citizens voting in federal elections. Both parties agree that citizenship is and should remain a requirement for voting in federal elections, and this is reflected in current law which makes it a crime for non-citizens to register or vote. Because it’s a crime, and because one vote so rarely is determinative of outcomes, there’s almost no incentive for non-citizens to attempt to vote, and they almost never do. There are some local elections where they are permitted to vote, but in that case it’s legal and has nothing to do with the federal government.

A second problem is the bill imposes mandates on state and local election officials without paying for them. Republicans claim to hate unfunded mandates, but that’s not consistently true. Federal Republican officeholders would much rather make their state and local brethren come up with the money for programs than take responsibility for authorizing the spending themselves. And if this makes people angry with the federal government, so much the better. It fits right in with their anti-government messaging.

A third problem is that the bill is all about proof of citizenship, and “more than 9 percent of American citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, don’t have proof of citizenship readily available.” This is especially true of college students and the homeless, who would be disproportionately and wrongly disenfranchised by the new requirements in the SAVE Act.

This can be seen in Arizona where they passed a similar bill way back in 2004, The Supreme Court ruled that their proof of citizenship requirement violated the Voting Right Act, so Arizona created a separate voting list just for federal elections that includes people who are barred from voting in state and local elections for lack of citizenship documentation.

Arizona’s federal-only list provides insight into how a national documentation requirement might impact voters in practice. Analysis conducted by Votebeat found that rather than noncitizens, college students and individuals experiencing homelessness—both transient populations that are more likely to lack identifying documentation—were disproportionately represented on the federal-only list.

For all these reasons and more, with a few exceptions, the Democrats won’t for the SAVE Act, which will make it difficult for Speaker Johnson to pass. With a slim 220-211 majority, Johnson needs 215 votes to pass a bill, and he has several members who probably won’t vote for a CR under any circumstances. But even if he can pass a CR with the SAVE Act attached, there’s no chance that the Democratically-controlled Senate will follow suit.

At that point, the House would face the choice of backing down and funding the government without conditions (which is exactly what got McCarthy bounced) or forcing a partial government shutdown in October of a presidential election year.  Either outcome would be bad for the GOP, which is why reasonable Republicans want to avoid the fight in the first place.

The MAGA folks can only see the messaging upside of making it appear that the Democrats are in favor of non-citizens voting. That’s what they think they’d accomplish by forcing the Dems to cast a vote against the SAVE Act. It’s messaging that dovetails with Donald Trump’s constant lies about the issue, and I can see some advantage in having a unified message, even if it’s total bullshit. But it ignores how things will actually play out. The Republicans will ultimately lose in their effort to enact the SAVE Act, but not before weakening Speaker Johnson, dividing the caucus, making the rank-and-file angry with the leadership, and stressing everyone out once again about a shutdown.

Reminding voters about the historic dysfunction of this term’s House Republicans is political malpractice, but I don’t see how it can be avoided, especially since Trump supports the effort. Eventually, Johnson will pass a clean CR just like McCarthy did in 2023, and the GOP will having nothing to show for it but diminished election prospects.

Howdy! I hope you are all getting through yet another long week. It’s been a while since I dropped some jazz, so this week I am sharing a video I found of Electric Barbarian (a Dutch band active during the aughts and at the start of the 2010s before apparently disbanding) performing live at a jazz festival in 2010:

They’re a band I would have especially wanted to see when they had Gylan Kain (formerly of The Last Poets) as their resident poet/rapper. Alas, it was not to be. By the time I finally had some opportunities to visit the EU and the Netherlands specifically, they had stopped performing. But I do have a couple of the CDs, and memories of playing some of their songs on a radio show.

Cheers!

Unlike with their breathless 2016 coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the New York Times is giving the latest federal indictments of Donald J. Trump below-the-fold treatment. So it goes. Anyone relying on the Grey Lady to be a tool of the resistance will be disappointed. At times, it seems like they’re the exact opposite. CNN has more appropriate coverage:

Special counsel Jack Smith defiantly re-injected the question of Donald Trump’s bid to steal the 2020 election into the intensifying end game of this year’s White House race.

By trying to rescue his case after his initial indictment was gutted by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, Smith signaled that he is determined to bring the former president to justice — even though there will be no trial before Election Day.

“I think this is basically Jack Smith saying, ‘I still got this’” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a CNN legal and national security commentator, said after the special counsel on Tuesday filed a modified indictment endorsed by a new grand jury.

His move underscored the huge personal investment Trump has in winning the presidency in November: He not only would return to the nation’s top office, but would also gain the authority to halt this and another federal case against him and head off any sentences that could include jail time if he is convicted.

And CNN did a good job of explaining the stakes, considering the Supreme Court’s recent decision to make ex-presidents virtually immune from prosecution for any official acts they committed in office:

The decision also sent shockwaves through an already tumultuous presidential race, since it appeared to offer an ex-president who already believed he was all powerful the chance to pursue strongman rule if he wins November’s election. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris criticized the decision in her convention speech last week: “Consider, the power he will have … Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States.”

Smith’s move also creates other profound political, legal, and constitutional overtones at a critical national moment, 10 weeks from an election that could profoundly reshape the country and that may again test its institutions to the limit.

CNN concludes by predicting that future historians will ask precisely what voters should be asking right now:

Biden’s departure from the campaign and the pomp of the conventions have made Trump’s threat to democracy somewhat of an afterthought in recent weeks but the question of how a president who tried to overthrow American democracy avoided accountability and was able to run again for the White House — and potentially win it — is certain to preoccupy future historians.

Yes, how the fuck has Trump been able to run for office again after trying to commit a coup d’état? And why is so competitive that was until recently the clear favorite?

Jack Smith’s new superseding indictment may pass muster with the Supreme Court but he’ll only get the chance to try this case if Trump loses. Everyone blithely assumes, no doubt correctly, that if elected Trump will fire Smith and order the Department of Justice to drop all charges against him. But did President Joe Biden fire the prosecutors who won a conviction against his son? Did he abuse his power to make the charges go away? And if he had, would the Grey Lady put that above the fold?

You can bet your sweet ass they would have.

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For the 15th episode of the Progress Pondcast, Brendan and I reached a new milestone, which is our first interview with an elected official. Our guest is Pennsylvania State Representative Joe Hohenstein who became the first Democrat to represent the River Wards of Philadelphia in decades when he won election in 2018. His district, the 177th, is Democratic by registration, but obviously open to moderate Republican representation. It’s interesting to hear Rep. Hohenstein explain his approach to serving his somewhat unique constituency. One advantage of having a very large Pennsylvania House of Representatives is that he represents many fewer voters than a typical congressional district at the federal level. His district is smaller even than those represented on the city council. It creates an intimate environment where he can really get to know the people because he lives among them.

Hohenstein discusses a wide range of issues, including his work as an advocate for the disabled and the LGBTQ+ community, particularly trans kids. We talk about sensationalism in media, the importance of Narcan education, pet adoption, and his plan to get out the vote in his district for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Maybe the most fascinating part of our conversation is Hohenstein’s thoughts on Gus Walz which really made me think about advocacy of the disabled in an entirely new way.

Actually, “fascinating” is a good word to describe Hohenstein. He’s not what I expected when Brendan suggested we interview him. He’s just a really thoughtful and decent guy, and I think the kind of politician more likely to be found in an Aaron Sorkin fantasy than in real life. And that’s probably the pitch for me to make about why you should listen in even if you live far away from Philadelphia and its idiosyncratic problems.

It’s available on Apple and Spotify, and we’d love it if you would like and subscribe. But we’d also love it if you join us on Patreon and help us keep this Pondcast going. We’re going to be looking to have more interesting guests and get some real momentum going, but it’s costs a bit of money to do these jawns, and we could use your help.

Thanks for giving a listen.

When I saw the New York Times had invited National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry to write a guest column entitled “Trump Can Win on Character,” my eyes almost rolled off the edge of the Earth. After reading it, I’m a little more sympathetic. After all, Lowry isn’t writing for us, he’s writing for an audience of one. He’s giving advice to Donald Trump about how he can effectively improve his messaging. What better way to get his attention than to argue he can win on character?

As for the Times’ decision to print this piece, Lowry actually provides pretty good advice. The trick is that he’s not arguing that Trump can convince the American people he has better character than Kamala Harris.  When Lowry talks about character in the piece, he doesn’t mean things like honesty, marital fidelity, or not committing sexual assaults or leading political coups. He’s talking about the character you need in a president. If that sounds absurd, I’ll let Lowry speak for himself:

Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life, but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?

Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.

It’s nice that Lowry acknowledges that it’s a political plus to be trustworthy. And I can’t really argue that his somewhat cynical take about how presidential elections are won and lost is wrong. So, the job for Trump then is to convince voters he cares about them more than Harris does, and that he’s a strong leader while Harris is a weak one.

Again, I think that’s right. And Lowry identifies a path toward doing that that is not about rank insults and demeaning nicknames. Trump should focus on Harris’s 2019-2020 campaign for president which was a pretty spectacular failure in which she went very far to the left on the issues in a desperate and fruitless effort to avoid getting outflanked.

Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest this year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.

She has jettisoned myriad positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient. Even if what she’s saying is moderate or popular, she can’t be trusted to hold to it once she’s in office.

The idea is to tie everything into her being weak compared to Trump. In theory, this would just bolster the ingrained bias that men are more natural leaders than women, but it’s not gender-dependent. As Lowry points out, Dubya Bush effectively used the flip-flopping charge to make John Kerry look weak. Harris has flip-flopped on several issues, like fracking, since her 2020 campaign. The point is, strength provides dependability, which is an element of trustworthiness.

The other prong is winning the argument about who cares about the average voter. Lowry uses the example of Barack Obama successfully convincing voters that Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch plutocrat who couldn’t be trusted to look out for the average American. Here’s how Lowry would use the same strategy to go after Harris:

She didn’t do more as Vice President to secure the border or to address inflation because she didn’t care enough about the consequences for ordinary people. She doesn’t care if her tax policies will destroy jobs. She has been part of an administration that has seen real wages stagnate while minimizing the problem because the party line matters to her more than economic reality for working Americans.

Here the argument is that Harris is out of touch with ordinary Americans, either because she’s from Berkeley or ensconced in power or because her ethnic background is unique. She’s not one of you, so she doesn’t care about you. It’s not all that different for the successful argument against Romney.

I really have two thoughts about Lowry’s piece. The first is that Trump would improve his chances if he followed Lowry’s advice, but it’s not so simple. Trump uses the feedback he gets from his social media posts and his MAGA rallies to hone his messaging, and he discovered long ago that meanness and cruelty are his most effective tools for attracting fervent support. Thoughtfulness, even if he were capable of it, lands with a thud with his base. He occasionally offers something substantive, and he always abandons it immediately when it doesn’t get likes and applause. What I’m saying is that there’s not much use offering advice to someone who is incapable of following it. I think the fatal problem is that there’s no way for Trump to feel the effectiveness of a pitch to moderate or undecided voters because they don’t give him a response. An ordinary politician would look for a response in the polling data, but that takes patience. Trump has no patience.

The second thought I have is to wonder why Lowry is trying to help Trump. His publication, the National Review, was fervently anti-Trump in 2015-2016. Did this prediction come true:

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

As for strength, here’s what Lowry wrote in 2016:

For someone who wants to project strength, he has an astonishing weakness for flattery, falling for Vladimir Putin after a few coquettish bats of the eyelashes from the Russian thug. All in all, Trump knows approximately as much about national security as he does about the nuclear triad — which is to say, almost nothing.

Is there anything that’s happened since to make Lowry reconsider that judgment?

No? Well how about this for January 6th prescience?

His obsession is with “winning,” regardless of the means — a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power.

And here is Lowry’s conclusion:

If the [Republican Party] cannot advance a compelling working-class agenda, the legitimate anxieties and discontents of blue-collar voters will be exploited by demagogues. We sympathize with many of the complaints of Trump supporters about the GOP, but that doesn’t make the mogul any less flawed a vessel for them.

Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.

It’s pretty clear that by attempting to assist Trump now, Lowry is flip-flopping. And it’s a bigger more substantial flip-flop than Kerry on Iraq War funding or Harris on fracking and single-payer health care. And this isn’t a case where you change your position because you realize your previous analysis was wrong. Lowry has been proven correct about Trump’s crude and heedless populism and his trashing of the “the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP.” He was right about Trump’s susceptibility to flattery and inability to stand up to Putin. He even knew that he’d put “winning” over “ordered liberty” and the “limits of government power.”

But, you know what?

It turns out that the National Review cares about likes and applause just as much as Trump does. They have revenue to raise, and opposing the Republican nominee for president won’t raise it. They can get on board or they can look for new jobs, because the National Review will cease to exist before it endorses a Democrat.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is scene near the Arizona/Utah border. I’ve forgotten the name of the bridge from which the photo is taken. I thought that it was the Rainbow bridge but can’t confirm it.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo. Over this I added some preliminary paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Hi photo lovers.

It’s been a while. As usual, life continues to get in the way. I’ll leave it at that. A lot of times over the course of the summer, I’ve captured some beautiful sky photos right around or just past sunset. I just love how the remaining rays of sunlight appear from behind the tree line.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose. The distant hills in the background are in Crawford County, just a ways south of the Ozark Pleateau, which starts maybe a good half hour or so north of where I was standing. Across the river to my west is some unincorporated land in Oklahoma. I’m on the Arkansas side. It’s good to see that any remaining damage from the flood of 2019 has been repaired. I am grateful for some lovely scenery that is a very convenient drive from where I work and live.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for roughly five and a half years. My original LG v40 ThinQ is gone. The back of the phone came off. Apparently the battery began to burst. My initial replacement had a similar fate. I bought yet another version of the same phone about a year ago for hardly anything, as I simply didn’t have the time to really research a good permanent replacement. We will see how long this one lasts. I need more time to research smart phones, especially at the high end. I prefer to get a device and keep it for four or five years. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, but I am determined to avoid going that route. The newer Samsung phones look really promising. Given the times we live in, my default is to delay any major purchases as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (although the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters commandeered it. Presumably she’ll return it before she moves out. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.