WHEN DO YOU GIVE UP ON A CELEBRITY?

 Micheal Jackson.  Woody Allen.  Bill Cosby.  Kevin Spacey.  These are some of the celebrities that the world has turned on recently when they were reasonably accused  of criminal sexual  behavior (only Cosby was actually convicted, and even that was overturned).  I myself will admit that I once was an admirer of all them,  but I still have moved away from supporting them to different degrees (I still have Thriller on my itunes, and sometimes watch Woody Allen movies).  It's always hard to separate art and artist, especially since so many great artists over the years have done terrible things (Miles Davis, Lou Reed, James Brown and John Lennon all used to make great music, and they all physically abused their wives and girlfriends).  The decision to admire the work of any artist always raises many questions, like  is there a waiting period after their death that makes it alright to admire them?  I noticed that the recent Sight and Sound magazine list of the 100 best films ever made included no films by Allen or Roman Polanski, but did have two by Charlie Chaplin, who once impregnated a 15 year old girl when he was 32.  Obviously, these things are complicated with no easy answer.

Which brings us to a recent concert I attended with Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock.  Like many other people, I've been a fan of Chappelle ever since his sketch show blew up about 20 years ago, and I've always enjoyed his stand up specials in which his incisive bits about race combined with his likable persona and gift for imitations were great.  That is, I did admire him until his recent Netflix special in which he declared himself a "Trans-exclusionary radical feminist" or "Terf" and railed against the rights (and really, the existence) of trans people.  It was a mean spirited bit  that played into the recent conservative demonization of trans people that has lead to hatred and even violence against them all around the country.  Chappelle has described himself as a Democrat, but here he was playing right into the Republican playbook of division and hatred against a small group of Americans who just want to lead their best lives.

So when a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go see Chappelle performing with  Chris Rock here in San Francisco, I reluctantly agreed I'm also a fan of Rock and I knew that he would be going first and I could always leave early if Chappelle started bashing trans people.  Thankfully, except for one brief reference, Chappelle didn't touch the issue, mostly sticking to crude sex jokes that didn't much for me (an entire bit built around the infamous Chuck Berry sex tape was not one I needed to hear).  Still, his set wasn't bad, even though I think Rock was better.

As the show wrapped up, it looked like controversy had been avoided.  But then Chappelle impulsively invited Elon Musk to come up and share the stage without considering how Musk's recent chaotic takeover of Twitter had made him unpopular in San Francisco.  It was an awkward moment in that Musk clearly didn't know what to do on stage, made even more awkward when many people in the audience started to boo him loudly.  At first Chapelle made a pretty good joke about how some of the people in the audience were the ones that Musk had fired from Twitter.  But then he later added that all the booing seemed to be coming from the cheap seats in the back row, which didn't exactly help the situation.  (When Chapelle,  who's paid tens of millions of dollars for his comedy specials, introduces one of the richest men in the world to the stage and then ridicules the poorer members of the audience for booing him, he inadvertently laid bare the unfair class issues in this country).  At that point, Musk tried to say something, but then a serious fight broke out in the crowd (between a Musk supporter and a Musk hater?  Who knows).  Chapelle then tried to calm things by saying how much he wished well for the whole audience, and then quite lamely got Musk to shout out one of Chapelle's old catch phrases from his show ("I'm rich, bitch!") before drawing this odd spectacle to a close.

At first, I mostly shrugged off this show's crazy conclusion as just a strange way for things to end.  But then I wondered about why Chapelle thought that bringing Musk out on the stage was a good idea.  Did he really think that the crowd would cheer for Musk just because he's rich?  Has he no idea how terrible Musk's takeover of Twitter has been, with a resurgence of hate speech on the social media site?  When I combine his comments about trans people with his open ridiculing of the poor at this show, I've decided that I can't support his career anymore.  I hope that other fans of his will join me.

THE CONSERVATIVE WAR ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

 

During the pandemic, harsh tensions arose between school teachers and parents concerning school lockdowns.  Parents were stressed about their school age children being home all day, and having to use a remote learning system that clearly wasn't the same as a classroom.  Teachers were stressed about a reopening of schools exposing them and their families to covid.  It was a difficult situation in which there were no easy answers, and it lead to school board meetings that turned into shouting matches.

Not surprisingly, even with the pandemic mostly over, teachers still feel undervalued, underpaid and overworked, and many of them have responded by leaving the profession, making those who choose to remain work even harder to cover for those missing positions.  Currently, polls show that over half of teachers are considering quitting.  You would think that this situation would result in a reevaluation of how our country treats the teaching profession, with higher salaries provided for their essential work.  Instead what we have mostly seen is right wing politicians sensing a weakness in public education and pouncing.

Since 2020, Republican politicians have seized on the issue of so called "Critical Race Theory", implying that "woke" public school teachers are teaching white students how to hate themselves when they teach American history.  Ignoring the fact that there was no such specific curriculum in out public schools, the right wing media whipped up  fear of white children being "brainwashed".  Then, quickly moving onto another school issue, conservatives dusted off the old chestnut of children being exposed to "pornographic" books, and started pushing for concerned parents to start searching and purging school libraries.  As with the whole CRT controversy, this was all absurdly overblown, with one conservative politician running an ad in which her young son appeared and  said he once got nightmares from a book he read in school, without mentioning that he read that book when he was 17 and in an AP literature class, and that the book in question was Toni Morrison's Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Things got even worse earlier this year when Florida Governor RonDe Santis passed  the so called "Don't say Gay" bill that limited what teachers and students could talk about in classrooms concerning sexual orientation.  After passing the bill, he claimed that anyone opposing it supported  sexually grooming children, which now has become another conservative talking point.  As the New York Times pointed out, in the last two years a dozen states have passed laws limiting what teachers can teach, and even say, in their classrooms.

Personally, I do't think that any of those attacks on public schools would have happened if the pandemic hadn't primed already angry parents to vent at school board meetings.  With teachers already pushed to the breaking point, the time was ripe for conservatives to strike.  Conservatives  have been angry at public schools for decades; part of it is from the Christian fundamentalist wing of the party, that miss the days when creationism was taught as fact.  Another part is the fact that public school teachers are one of the few remaining union jobs in the country, and unions have favored Democrats ever since President Ronald Reagan fired members of the Air Traffic Control union way back in 1981.  

And there's an even deeper movement at play here: the conservative school voucher movement, which has been used  already in some states, and which would allow parents to take the government funds that were to be used on their children's schooling and use them to pay for tuition to private schools.  Conservatives know that the more public schools are thrown in disarray, the more popular the school voucher movement becomes.  And the real danger of the voucher movement is that it provides an end around over that pesky separation between church and state.  Putting it bluntly, if conservatives have their way, government tax dollars could be used to pay for children to attend schools that teach them dinosaurs were too big to fit on the ark!  For conservatives, this is a no brainer, as it's a simultaneous attack on unions and a way to try and turn our nation's children into good little right wing voters.

Sadly, the days of school vouchers could become a reality soon (I can't imagine that the current Supreme Court would oppose them).  The only recourse we have for now is Americans to start appreciating the difficult job that our public school teachers have and support them as much as we can.

MITCH MCCONNELL HAS NO ONE TO BLAME BUT HIMSELF

 

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell has been the Republican leader of the Senate for the past 15 years.  Recently, Florida Senator Rick Scott has decided to challenge him for that position given the poor showing that the Republican party just had in the midterms; normally, the party not in the White House makes gains in the midterms, and the Republicans were expecting a so called red wave this time.  But it never came and while the party will in all likelihood take the House, they made no gains in the Senate, and may even lose a seat depending on how the run off in Georgia goes.

While I doubt that Scott will defeat McConnell, the fact that he is being challenged after building a reputation as a conservative hardliner while leading his party in the Senate is surprising, and if he were pushed out it would be quite a come down for a man that even Democrats have admitted was an effective leader.  

Even if Scott doesn't depose him, McConnell will still have to spend the next two years as a minority leader with little power.  He saw all of this coming: as far back as August, when he  openly complained that his party's chances of winning the Senate were being undermined, saying that "candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”  This was, of course, his diplomatic way of saying that former President Donald Trump was endorsing a poor crop of Senate candidates (like Dr Oz) who were running extremist campaigns that alienated swing voters.  And, as it turned out,  he was right. But what he won't mention is that this is all his own fault.

Why?  Because after the January 6th riot of 2021, McConnell did little to hide his disgust with Trump's actions, saying on the Senate floor that the former president's actions before the riot were "a disgraceful dereliction of duty."  Clearly he thought that Trump was guilty of inciting a riot.  And yet, he still couldn't bring himself to vote to remove Trump from office, and, without his support, the vote failed to reach the 67 vote majority that was needed in the Senate by 10 votes.  (While we don't know for sure, it's pretty safe to say that if McConnell, as Republican leader in the Senate,  had voted to remove Trump, it would have paved the way for other Republican Senators to follow).  Trump, in typical fashion, still insulted McConnell after the vote, calling him a "stupid person" and nicknaming him "Old crow".

While it appears that McConnell and other Senators thought it wasn't necessary to vote to remove Trump given that he was almost about to leave the White House anyway, they miscalculated something.  Removing him from office would have crucially prevented him from ever running again.  Which meant that Trump's hold over the Republican party would have been broken, and with no chance of ever running again, he would have retreated to Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds.  And with him out of the picture, the midterms could have just been about Joe Biden and the economy with normal Republican candidates instead of Trump forcing his hand picked candidates to constantly say that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and the Republicans would almost surely have taken the Senate. 

Instead, as we all now know, Trump has decided to run again in 2024, and the Republican party is stuck with the choice of supporting him despite his losing streak of three straight election losses, or trying to find another candidate and alienating his cult like followers in the Republican Party.  Either way, McConnell looks like a fool for missing the opportunity to expunge Trump from his party, and there may be more losses coming soon.  I hope.

TRUMP LOSES AGAIN

 

The midterms elections yesterday looked like a sure thing for the Republican party: with inflation stubbornly persistent, violent crime increasing and Joe Biden's approval rating in the low 40's, a red wave looked inevitable.  And yet, with vote totals still coming in,  it really hasn't happened.  While the GOP is still favored to win the House, it will be by a much smaller margin than predicted, and the Democrats may hold  the Senate.  Putting it bluntly, this will be the weakest midterm election for a party out of power in the White House in decades.  While there are a number of reasons for this (the abortion issue is one of them), I think the main one is Donald Trump and his continuing influence over the Republican party.

Consider everything that has happened since Trump's unlikely victory in 2016: his party lost seats in the 2018 midterm, lost the presidency and both houses of congress in 2020, and have now underperformed in the 2022 midterms.  (And, because the former president seems obsessed with bragging about the size of his rallies, it should be pointed out that anger at his election inspired the 2017 Women's March, the largest single day protest in American history).  Add to that the fact that the former president has spent the last two years purging his party of anyone who doesn't publicly contest the 2020 election and pushing forward terrible, unqualified candidates like Dr Mehmet Oz, making this midterm election as much about him as his party,  and it's clear to see that Trump has little ability to reach beyond the rabid base of the Republican party that still worships him.

So what can the Republican party do, chained to an unpopular, wildly egotistical leader who's poised to announce his candidacy for 2024 any day now?  The answer may lie in Florida, where governor Ron DeSantis cruised  to an easy reecletion victory last night with one eye clearly on the White House.  Trump already clearly appears worried about a DeSantis run: not only did he not campaign for DeSantis in Florida, he held a competing rally there, and tried out a childish new nickname for the governor ("Ron DeSanctimonious").  While DeSantis is currently running behind Trump in primary polls, his victory in Florida and the party's poor showing nationally may push other Republicans to rally around DeSantis.  It will be interesting to see how it all plays out: DeSantis would probably have a much better chance at winning in 2024 than Trump, who is so divisive outside of his own party.  But will primary Republican voters choose him?  Watching the two men share a debate stage while agreeing on the issues and attacking each other personally will probably make for a low point in American politics, but then, that's where we've been stuck at ever since Trump first announced his candidacy in 2016.

Personally, while I think DeSantis is a terrible politician who recently used Venezuelan refugees as political chess pieces, I don't think he poses the deep, existential threat to democracy that another Trump presidential run does.  While I obviously hope neither of them wins in 2024, at least DeSantis doesn't make me think that the country could fall into outright fascism under him. 

WILL INFLATION RUIN DEMOCRACY?

 

Last summer, there was brief time period in which polls showed that the Democratic party might actually do well in the upcoming midterms.  President Joe Biden had just signed his Deficit Reduction Act into law, and the overturning of Roe Vs Wade was sparking anger against the Republican party.  But now, it seems, the pendulum has swung back in the Republicans favor, as Americans have accepted the overturning of Roe as not that a big a deal (even if a majority of them don't agree with it), and the economy has become the number one issue for voters.  And by the economy, they mean inflation and high gas prices, which, unfortunately for the Democrats. has remained stubbornly high in the past few months even as the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates more than once. (Gas prices have gone down, but are still higher than they were when Biden took office). While the Republican party has claimed that they will somehow "fix" inflation, they have no real concrete plan to do so, because they don't need one.  Voters tend to blame a poor economy on the party in power, even though much of the economy is beyond the control of the president and congress.  (If Joe Biden had a "stop inflation" button on his desk, he would have pushed it by now).    While it is possible that the Democrats will hold onto the Senate, they are likely to lose the House of Representatives, which would lead to two years of the kind of gridlock that both Obama and Trump often faced during their tenures in the White House.

None of this is unusual: the party of the President in power almost always loses seats in congress in the first midterm election, from the public turning against Bill Clinton in 1994 to the rise of the anti Barack Obama tea party movement in 2010.  And, Biden can take solace in the fact a poor showing in the midterms doesn't mean that a President won't win reecletion, as we found out with both Clinton in 1996 and Obama in 2012.

But there is a bigger problem with possible upcoming Republican victories, and, once again, that problem is linked to former President Donald Trump.  Trump's continued unfounded assertions that he won the 2020 election is still embraced by a majority of Republican voters.  And that has lead to a stunning almost 300 different Republican candidates across the nation running for office who agree with his assertions (heck, 10 of those candidates actually attended the January 6th Rally!).  These candidates winning, especially in swing states, could lead to a truly frightening possibility: Trump could steal the 2024 election.  Remember that it was Republicans standing up to him (like former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Brett Raffensperger) that finally pushed Trump into leaving the White House.  With Trump election loyalists ensconced in offices like Secretary of State or the Governorship, there are any number of ways that our system of voting could be corrupted in swing states with close vote counts, with certain votes being rejected and Trump being named the winner, democracy be damned.

What can Democrats (and really, anyone who cares about American democracy) do?  Unfortunately, not a lot, with the Republican victory in a few days looking more and more assured.  If the Republicans do win, the best thing that can happen in the country before 2024 is that Trump may not feel up to another campaign run (he will be 80 in 2024 after all) or even that one of the several investigations into his possible criminal behavior will turn up an actual conviction (although several cynics have pointed out that there's nothing in the Constitution that says that you can't run from a jail cell).  But we can't bet on those things happening, and, as unbelievable as it may seem, a man who lied about losing an election and then set off a violent riot over it, could find himself back in power in 2024.

HERSCHEL WALKER ISN'T THE FIRST

 

Georgian Senatorial candidate Herschel Walker has always been a terrible choice for the Republican party to promote; he has no political experience, and is only really known for once being a great football player.  Add to that his history of mental issues that have led to violent behavior in the past, and his penchant to brag and lie about his achievements (he has no background in law enforcement, nor did he graduate at the top of his class) and his candidacy would seem to be a poor choice. 

And that choice has gotten worse in the past few weeks: as the whole world now knows, Walker has had several children with different mothers that he barely had a hand in raising (this after her scolded absent black fathers in the African American community) and once paid for the abortion of  a woman he impregnated, even though he says he supports a ban on all abortions.   While he first tried to deny this, the woman in question revealed the receipt and his check as proof, and she has also claimed that he tried to pressure her into getting a second abortion.  Now you would think that someone who's actions run completely against their stand on family values would cause the Republican party to abandon him, but the opposite has happened, with many conservatives doubling down on their support. ("I don't care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles," said conservative commentator Dana Loesch "I want control of the Senate!").  While part of this shows just how much Republicans care about power more than consistency, it also shows how low the party has gotten since they rallied around Donald Trump, with Walker's recent troubles resembling the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.  (And, of course, Walker's in the race mainly because Trump urged him to run).  

This would seem to be a new low for the Republican party, but Walker is not the first Republican political figure to violate their political beliefs in his personal life and get away with it.  Consider the case of Scott DesJarlais.  Desjarlais started his political career as part of the Republican Tea Party movement and was elected to the House of Representatives, representing Tennessee 4th district, in 2010.  Right away, the fact that his ex wife accused him in divorce proceedings of harassment, intimidation and physical abuse that included things like holding a loaded gun in his mouth for three hours didn't stop him from winning. He also testified that as a doctor he had had sexual affairs with at least two patients, three coworkers and a drug representative. Things got even more complicated for him in 2012 when a recording of him in 2000 appeared in which he coerced one of his mistresses into getting an abortion.  He would also admit that he pressured his wife into getting two abortions while they were married, saying “things were not going well between us and it was a mutual decision.”  (Which really sounds like a pro choice argument.) It should also be added that he pleaded no contest to violating the Tennessee Medical Practice Act by having sex with patients.

So what happened to this utter hypocrite?  This man who talked women into getting abortions while calling himself pro life?  Nothing.  Oh, there were some attempts to unseat him in the primaries, but for the most part Desjarlais has been able to shrug off what should have been career disqualifying scandals and forged ahead as a reliably conservative vote from a reliably conservative state.  And remember, all of this happened well before Trump and his numerous scandals appeared.  Really, much of the change in the Republican party into a win at all costs machine began back in the 1990's when then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich brought his brand of personal attack politics to the fore in the party, doing things like pushing for Bill Clinton's impeachment for lying under oath about an affair while he himself was cheating on his own wife.  Although Gingrich may not be in office anymore, his legacy of cruelty and personal attacks has continued, with Trump obviously picking up the ball and running with it.  And, sadly, that  win at all costs attitude just may bring the absurdly unqualified, utterly hypocritical Walker to the congress, where he can rub shoulders with the equally hypocritical Dejarlais. 

A CRUEL POLITICAL STUNT

 

While watching Ken Burns's recent documentary "The US and the Holocaust", I was struck by an excerpt from a  poem written by American poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich that went like this:  "Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild, motley throng.  In street and alley what strange tongues are these?  Accents of menace, alien to our air, voices that once the Tower of Babel knew.  Oh liberty, white Goddess, is it well to leave the gates unguarded?"  Take away the flowery language, and you basically have the same anti immigrant sentiment stated by so many Republicans today.  What's even more striking is that that excerpt came from a poem Aldrich published in 1892.  Of course, his point of view was nothing new; ten years earlier congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to limit the number of Chinese people immigrating to the US during the gold rush.

Yes, the hatred and fear of immigrants, based on our shared human tribal instinct, has been in America almost from the beginning.  But that doesn't make the recent usage of Venezuelan refugees as pawns by Florida Ron DeSantis any less repulsive.  As everyone now knows, DeSantis recently took around 50 refugees from Texas and flew them to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts to "send a message" about immigration to the mostly liberal people that live there.  It should be pointed out that these refugees (which included several children) were lied to about where they were going and that there was no warning given to the authorities of Martha's Vineyard about what was about to happen.  It's obvious that was just a cruel political stunt pulled by a Republican governor who wants to be president and knows that the road to the White House for his party lies in being as xenophobic as humanly possible.  It's also telling how the different media outlets reacted to it, with the right wing media hailing DeSantis's move as smart politics and the rest of the media pointing out that the essential premise of the stunt failed when the people of Martha's Vineyard welcomed the refugees.  There is a chance that Desantis could face some legal charges for what happened, given the level of deception involved, but as with all the charges facing former president Donald Trump, there's little chance of him ever paying a serious price, and it clearly is helping him in conservative circles.

Lost in all this is the fact that Venezuela, the country the refugees were from, is a Socialist dictatorship not unlike the one run by Fidel Castro in Cuba, and in Florida Cuban refugees are often warmly embraced by Republicans like DeSantis.  The depressing reality is that Venezuela is run by a corrupt dictator, Nicolás Maduro', who's reign has lead to a crackdown on human rights triggering economic sanctions from countries like America.   Those sanctions wind up hurting the average Venezuelan more than the leaders, which causes widespread poverty and crime, leading to people fleeing the country.  In other words, there's no easy answer here, although putting people on planes is no solution. 

Also ignored in this controversy is the fact that the US needs immigrants.  According to US Census Bureau, the nation's population growth in 2021 was 0.1%, the lowest in our nation's history.  Sure, part of that was due to the pandemic, but the trend was already heading downward before Covid hit. And the country needs young workers paying into our retirement system to keep it funded, and that means we need more workers coming into our country.  Workers like these refugees that Republican leaders dehumanize.  

I'll finish this post with another quote from that Ken Burns documentary: "What has happened to this country?  We have always been ready to receive the unfortunates from other countries, and though this may seem a  generous gesture on our part, we have profited a thousandfold from what they have brought us."-Elenor Roosevelt, 1939.

TRUMP'S 10 LAWSUITS

 Former President Donald Trump's current legal woes are unusual, to say the least,  for an ex president.  Even the disgraced Richard Nixon was allowed to fade away for a few years and then eventually return as an elder statesmen and political author.   But then there's nothing usual about Trump, who, in the past 30 years, has been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits.  ("Who knows litigation better than Trump?" He once asked a crowd.)  This pile of lawsuits has allowed Trump to skate away from his troubles under a blizzard of litigation, many of them fading from memory.  For example, how many people remember how the class action lawsuit against Trump University went?  He had to pay out a 25 million dollar settlement in the kind of scandal that would sink most political careers, but was just a blip in Trump's.

Here's a roundup of his 10 latest,  yet to be resolved legal battles:

1.  The FBI is investigating his storing of classified documents in Mar-o-Lago.  Ok, we've all heard about this.  But it's a potentially a very big deal: documents that could endanger the lives of American agents in the field (and may have nuclear weapon secrets) were stored in Trump's closet at his not so secure resort.  Add that he held on to these documents even after formal requests were made to return them, and that he's never given any real explanation as to why he hung on to them after he left the White House in the first place, and we have the makings of a potentially large, criminal scandal.  Unfortunately, a Trump appointed judge has approved his legal team's asking for a special master to view the documents and sift out ones that fall into attorney client privilege or personal, which will delay the process.  

2.  The findings of the January 6th. hearings. While this has been overshadowed by the FBI raid on Mar-o-Lago, it should be remembered that Trump still may face formal criminal charges from Attorney General Merrick Garland for his behavior on and before the January 6th riot.  Really, if the fact that Trump did nothing to stop the riot for hours while it was happening, and even sent out a tweet criticizing then Vice President Mike Pence, which inflamed the mob even further, isn't considered a crime, then there's really nothing any president could ever do that would be labelled as such.

3.  In Georgia he's being investigated for criminal election disruption.  In one of the more chilling moments in Trump's failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Trump tried to verbally coerce   Georgia's Secretary of State  Brett Raffensperger into "finding" him enough votes to overturn the election in that state.  (This in a state which, it should be mentioned, had already counted the votes three times at that point and found no change in the outcome.)  Once again, this sure seems like a crime to me, but we'll see how the investigation goes.

4.  In New York he's being investigated for misleading tax authorities about his wealth.  Recently, Trump's former CFO Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 felony counts of illegal tax avoidance stretching back decades.  Part of his plea bargain was that he would not testify against Trump or other members of his family directly, but he can be made to testify against the Trump organization itself, which should aid the ongoing lawsuit against that organization.

5.  The New York Attorney General has her own civil case against him.  This is a separate and similar case to the one above being brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.  Trump has described the African American James as “a racist attorney general” and recently pled the 5th repeatedly after being compelled to testify in the case.

6.  Capitol police officers and some Congressional Democrats are suing him for inciting violence on January 6th.  Even if Trump never faces criminal charges for his riling up of protestors and aiming them at the capitol building on January 6th., this civil lawsuit brought against him by the DC police (so much for backing the blue!) could hit him financially.

7.  Author E Jean Carroll is suing him for defamation.  Lost in the constant swirl of controversy around Trump during his presidency was the accusation that EG Carroll made against him, in a 2019 article, that he raped her back in the 1990's.  (Which brought the number of women who have accused him of sexual assault or rape up to a whopping 26.)  He has, of course, publicly denied it, and she is suing him for defamation.   A judge dismissed Trump's attempt to countersue, and the trial will begin in February. 

8.  His niece, Mary, is suing him.  After a 2018 New York Times article (which won a Pulitzer) bore the headline "Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father", Trump's niece, Mary began a lawsuit against him, alleging that Donald and other members of the Trump family "designed and carried out a complex scheme to siphon funds away from her interests, conceal their grift, and deceive her about the true value of what she had inherited."

9.  His former lawyer Micheal Cohen is suing him.  Cohen, Trump's lawyer and right hand man for over a decade, went to jail for tax invasion and paying hush money payments to women who claimed that they had had affairs with Trump.  Cohen claims that, while he was given home incarceration privileges during the pandemic, he was pushed back into jail by the Trump administration for wanting to write an anti Trump book, in violation of his first amendment rights.

10.  A Federal Grand Jury is investigating his fund raising.  Most recently, a federal grand jury has started investigating the Save America political action committee, which was formed after the 2020 election by Trump.  Much of the committee's funding came from donations made by voters who may have been misled into thinking that they were donating to legal funds to fight against the election results, when Trump was really spending the money on other things.

Whew!  Not enough for you?  Why not add the fact that along with admitted criminals Weisselberg and Cohen, criminal charges were also  filed  against his campaign advisors Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, George Nader, Elliott Broidy, Roger Stone,  Steve Bannon and former National Security Advisor Micheal Flynn, (Trump pardoned those last four). Is it a surprise that so many people around Trump are criminals? No, this is clearly a man who has always lived his life on the edge of legality, always being lucky enough to have enough money (and lawyers!) to avoid any criminal charges.  

Now while I'm hoping that this time will be different, and that finally one of those first three criminal charges will stick to him, I'm not getting too excited.  From the first moment he entered politics, Trump's rise has exhibited everything that's wrong with America, not just our bigotry and xenophobia, but also the fact that the rich have a different justice system than the rest of us, one in which wealthy white men can get away with almost anything.   In a perfect world, Trump would have gone to jail on any number of criminal charges years ago, instead he's poised to be the Republican candidate for president in 2024.

LIZ CHENEY, PROGRESSIVE HERO?

 Liz Cheney just lost her seat in the House of Representatives in a primary challenge to Harriet Hageman by a wide margin.  It was an ignoble defeat for a woman who had easily won reelection in 2020.  What changed, of course, is her support of  former President Donald Trump.  After the January 6th riot at the capitol, Cheney became one of Trump biggest critics, from joining with only 9 other Republicans in the House to vote to impeach him, and disparaging him in the media, to having a prominent voice in the January 6th investigation in the House, Cheney has never missed a chance to criticize the former president.

Lost in all the criticism is the fact that Cheney loudly endorsed Trump in both 2016 and 2020, voted with him over 90% of the time, and reportedly in 2019 even publicly asserted that she was more "Trumpier" than Senate Republican Rand Paul.  So what happened? What turned a Trump loyalist into a critic?  Even if Cheney did not believe that Trump actually won, she could have easily lied about it on the campaign trail, shrugged off the January 6th riot like so many Republicans have, and cruised to a reecletion victory.  But she chose not to, knowing full well that she was turning against the beliefs of the vast majority of Republican voters.  I think the answer as to why she did it lies in her seeing a certain event that triggered her sense of empathy.  

You see, as anyone who's ever argued with someone with opposite political beliefs can tell you, progressives and conservatives experience the world very differently.  Studies have shown that progressives and conservatives brains respond to various stimuli differently, with conservatives responding more to fear, anger  and disgust (which explains right wing media!).  Conservatives also have a harder time expressing empathy for anyone not within their own social circle.  

What does this have to do with Cheney turning against Trump?  I think the exact moment that changed her mind was seeing then Vice President Mike Pence being rushed out of his Capitol office by security as Trump supporters chanted for his death.  And the reason that moment struck so hard for her was because her own father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, once worked in that very office, and it was easy for her to understand the horror that Pence was being subjected to.  It hit home for her because she could imagine her own father in that situation.  

So that was the breaking point in her 4 year support of Trump, it affected her in a way that it didn't to other conservatives, who, unlike her, could condemn the January 6th riot without voting to impeach Trump and then eventually downplay the riot entirely.  Interestingly, her father is also an example of conservative empathy: during the 2004 presidential campaign, when then President George W Bush ran on a platform of adding an anti gay marriage amendment to the constitution, Dick Cheney disagreed and said he supported gay marriage.  He did this because his other daughter, Mary, was a lesbian.  Once again, having a family member affected by something caused him to go against his own party's political beliefs.

Liz Cheney is now said to be considering running for president in 2024, and while I would certainly prefer her to Trump and admire her for standing up to him, I certainly couldn't vote for someone who supported Trump while he was making bigoted statements and separating families at the border.  Just because one dramatic image changed her view about Trump doesn't make her a progressive hero. 

THE MAR-O-LAGO RAID

 For months now, progressives have been wondering if Attorney General Merrick Garland was going to ever formally charge Donald Trump for the crimes he seemed to have committed as president.  The question as to what Garland was waiting for got louder as the Congressional January 6th Committee released its findings, revealing even more corruption from the former president.

Well, yesterday it appears that Garland finally has decided to do something, with Trump himself announcing that Federal Agents had raided his home in Mar-O-Lago while he was out of town.  This is a truly unprecedented move made by the Federal government; such a raid has never been carried out against a former American president, but, then again, no American president has ever been as openly corrupt as Trump was.  And it's important to note that this raid was made by agents who first were granted a search warrant by a federal judge, meaning that they were able to prove a strong belief that illegal materials were in Mar-O-Lago and that only such a raid could obtain them.  So, it was not an action taken lightly by the Justice Department.

Somewhat amusingly, the media has pounced on this story and drawn attention away from congress's successful passage of the Deficit Reduction bill.  Yes, as always, Trump sucks up all the attention, good or bad.

The crazy thing is that this raid may not have anything to do with January 6th; it appears it is in response to him taking classified documents that legally belong to the American public out of the White House and refusing to return them.  Combine this with recent reports that Trump also routinely tore apart, flushed down the toilet or even ate classified documents, and you can see why Garland took action.  And while we may never know just why Trump decided to destroy(or steal) so many documents, it certainly doesn't put him in a good light.

The former president has, predictably, blasted the raid an "attack by Radical Left Democrats."  And, even  more predictably,  Republicans in congress have joined him in piling on, and even darker statements have been made by Pro-Trump right wing media figures, like on the Steve Bannon podcast “Bannon’s War Room,”  when, Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington said “This just shows everyone what many of us have been saying for a very long time, we're at war."  

As always, the right wing in this country has no last straw when it comes to Trump; really, why should they?  They stood by him after he bragged about sexually assaulting women, called white  supremacist rioters "very fine people", refused to admit that he lost the 2020 election and incited a riot.  What's a little illegal stealing of presidential documents after all that?

Even more depressing is the possibility that this raid, as necessary as it seems to be, could wind up strengthening Trump's chance of winning if he runs again in 2024, as he most surely will.  Constant complaints about how he has been unfairly persecuted is a big part of his dishonest persona.   What just happened at Mar-O-Lago  could just push his followers to support him even more, as he screams about how unfair it all is, and how it was all partisan.  I hate to think about it, but Donald Trump has so completely rewritten the rules of acceptable political behavior (and decent human behavior), that even having his home subject to a criminal raid may not stop him from regaining the White House, and it could even help him.

CONSERVATIVE EVOLUTION?

 

Ever since Ronald Reagan joined the Republican party with the Christian fundamentalists, many Republicans have tried to pass legislation that allowed creationism to be taught in public schools, or at least they tried to undermine the theory of evolution.  When courts rejected the teaching of creationism, given that things like carbon dating and fossil evidence revealed that the earth is billions of years old and not around 12 thousand as the creationists said, they eventually came up with a new idea sometime in the 1990's: intelligent design.  This belief accepted that evolution did indeed happen, but it was guided by a divine being all the way.  (And while they never explicitly said who that divine being might be, I'm guessing they weren't thinking of Vishnu.)  It was a sneaky way to bring a modified (and yes, evolved) form of creationism into public schools.  Thankfully, this theory was rejected as the religious indoctrination it was  in 2005 when a George W Bush appointed judge made a strong ruling against it.

But conservatives learned the lesson of evolving their beliefs to fit with the times more, and they have continued in other ways.  For example, for years the Republican party openly attacked homosexuals as "unnatural", and President Bush's claim that he wanted to put a ban on gay marriage into the US constitution is probably what won him a second term in 2004.  But now that gay marriage has been legal for years and polls show around 70% of Americans support it, conservatives have pivoted to attack trans people far more than gay, lesbian or bisexual people.  Sadly, this makes sense, given that according to a recent NPR poll, only about 0.6% of American adults call themselves trans, which means that large numbers of Americans have never met a trans person before, making them easy to demonize.  And the right can pounce on any number of issues, from which bathrooms trans people can use to pronoun preferences, inflating something that affects less than 1% of the population into a polarizing issue.  Hopefully, this kind of hate will eventually wear out as an issue as more Americans come to realize that trans people are just people who want to feel comfortable in their own bodies.  But don't expect the Republicans to stop attacking the rights of trans people anytime soon.

The last version of modern conservative evolution can be found in their feelings about climate change: for years the Republican party has dismissed the idea as a hoax (Donald Trump once tweeted out: "Let's continue to destroy the competitiveness of our factories & manufacturing so we can fight mythical global warming. China is so happy!").  On this issue they put themselves to the right not only in this country, but really, the whole globe as well, with the Republican party being the only major political party in the entire world to deny the science of climate change. For decades, this was easy for the party to do, with proof of the effects of climate change hard to show to the average American.  But now that each summer seems to bring more global record heat temperatures, along with drought and wildfires, continuing to say that climate change doesn't exist is getting harder and harder.  So once again they have evolved, saying that moving too fast on the issue would harm the economy (as if putting out record wildfires every year is cheap!).  Or, as Republican Senator Mike Capo of Idaho put it, “I’m not in a position to tell you what the solution is, but for the president to shut down the production of oil and gas in the United States is not going to help." (This is a mischaracterization of what Joe Biden wants to do, instead of shutting down oil and gas, he wants to incentivize using renewable energy sources and electric vehicles).  So, instead of denying climate change, Republicans are now  just saying that we should continue to burn fossil fuels and not worry about it, or propose "solutions" that are currently not viable, like carbon capture and clean coal. They also add that giving financial government incentives to renewable energy companies makes the federal government pick winners in the free market (of course, they don't mention the 20 billion dollars a year oil companies get in tax breaks and incentives).   In a way, this downplaying of the worst crisis the world is facing is even worse than the denial of that crisis they've pushed for years.  Now some Republicans have offered up conservative blueprints for dealing with the issue, but none of them want to stop or slow our country's continued mining and usage of fossil fuels. Even the common sense idea that American kitchens should transition from gas burning to electric stovetops, which would be both better for the environment and safer, has become a political issue, with Republicans condemning the idea.

While the Republican stance of climate change is depressing, there was good news out of congress recently, with Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Senator who has killed so many climate change deals, said that he has agreed to support a new bill.  Even with out any Republican votes, the bill looks likely to pass in the Senate.  While this bill may not be perfect (it has some carve outs for oil and coal interests in Manchin's state), it still would be the largest bill dealing with the climate change issue in our nation's history; it's effect would be, according to the New York Times, transformational.  So, there is some hope that our nation will do something about this pressing issue.  No thanks to the Republican party, though.

SO NOW WHAT?

 

The January 6th committee hearings have been great TV.  There's been surprising testimony, even more surprising new videos and an amazing look at just how childish, and obstinate  Donald Trump was in the last few months of his presidency after his defeat.  One of the effective things that the committee has done is to have former members of Trump's own staff (and even members of his own family) testify as to how corrupt he was: from his refusal to accept his loss in 2020 to the fact that he seemed to openly enjoy watching the riot of January 6th. on TV and was reluctant to stop it.  As the committee showed, he  even added fuel to the fire at one point when he tweeted out attacks against his own Vice President, Mike Pence, while the riot was going on.  (New footage of the rioters showed them responding to the texts and getting even angrier because of them).

To me the most chilling part of the presentation was when former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump, wanting to make sure that his January 6th rally, that took place just before the riot ,had as many people as possible attending.  So he wanted the metal detectors around the rally removed, because he saw the people at the rally as no threat to him.  In other words, the president was fine with armed people coming to his rally, even as he told them to march onto the capital building afterwards.

But the committee hearings, as gripping as they were, upset me more than shocked me.  It was clear from the moment that riot began that Trump's months of lies about the election incited it.  He was a criminal once the first capitol officer was beaten.  

But it's easy to say that, and a whole other thing to prove it.  Now that the committee is over (although there will be more findings released in the upcoming months), the big question is, will Attorney General  Merrick Garland formally bring charges against Donald Trump?  Over 60% of the American people in recent polls believe he should.  While it may seem obvious that Trump is guilty of at least one crime in relation to the riots, getting an actual conviction against him may prove harder than it would seem.

First of all, there seems to be no question that Trump is going to declare that he's running again in 2024 any day now, which would allow him to dismiss any criminal charges against him as a partisan witch hunt. (Some people around him have said that he sees running again as a "get out of jail free card".)  And the fact that no Attorney General has ever brought up criminal charges against a former president, shows how difficult a process this could be. One complication is trying to find an impartial jury; I mean, how can you find 12 adults in America who have no strong opinions about Trump either way?  Remember,  it would only take one Trump loyalist on the jury to wreck the whole process. And if Trump were to beat the charges, it could embolden his allegations that it was all a partisan issue even more, and help him politically.

Despite these difficulties, I personally still think that Donald Trump should be formally charged with crimes by Merrick Garland, because one of the fundamental truths of our country should always be that even the President of the United States is not above the law.  Clearly, Trump committed criminal acts before and on January 6th., and if the country lets him off the hook, it opens the way for another president, perhaps one smarter and more competent than Trump, to get away with similar crimes.  The issues here are too big to ignore; Trump can reasonably face any number of charges, from inciting a riot to illegal obstruction of congress.  He is even open to separate charges due to his attempt to overturn the election outcome in the state of Georgia, which should be easy to prove given that there is a recording of him openly asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" him votes.  (And as a side note here, I would point out that Trump has had 2 secret recordings of him released in the past few years.  The first was the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women, and this one in which he tried to get a state official to steal an election for him.  So, one in which he bragged about getting away with a crime, and one in which he committed one!).

Even if he never reaches the White House again, the stain of the Trump presidency is one that will hang over the country for years.  Holding him accountable for the terrible crimes that he committed on January 6th is one step in removing that stain.  For once in his life  he should be punished.

A DOUBLE BLOW TO THE FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE

 When Joe Biden was elected president two years ago, I never thought that I'd be writing three separate posts cursing West Virginia  Senator Joe Manchin for blocking Biden's agenda, but here we are.  Yes, once again the congressman who seems to relish his position as  the Democratic senator who can hardly stand the Democratic agenda has killed a movement to do something about climate change when he backed out of a senate spending package deal yesterday.  Is it any surprise that the man who has taken more money from oil and coal companies than any other person in congress wants to do nothing in the fight against climate change?  It is a sign of just how ridiculous the American version of democracy is that a senator from a state with less than two million people can hold so much power over the rest of the country.

The timing of this couldn't be worse: just a few days ago our extremist Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (and by extension, the Biden administration) cannot regulate the carbon emissions that greatly contribute to climate change.  Given the court's ruling, congressional action seemed to be the only way for the country to do anything about what is the greatest problem facing the world today, and now that looks doomed too. (Manchin, has, as he always does, said that he may still be willing to make a deal, but don't count on it!). While it's easy to get angry at Manchin over this, it should be remembered that the Republican party, which is still the only major party in the entire world to deny the science of climate change, is even more to blame.  From the George W Bush administration removing all references to climate change from their own EPA reports to Trump ripping up the Paris climate accord, the Republican party's denial of science has been disastrous for both the country and the world.

And while the Supreme Court and Manchin are fiddling, the world is burning: 50 million Americans are currently threatened by overwhelming heat, the west coast is suffering through the now yearly ritual of terrible forest fires, and Europe is also in the middle of a crippling heat wave.  This is hardly the time for inaction.  Thankfully, the court ruling left  some things Biden can do around the edges, like regulating some air pollution, and cars and trucks.  But most of the work now must be done at the state level and local level; the good news is that states like California, Colorado and Ohio are passing laws to deal with the growing problem.  One encouraging sign is that on last April 30th. the state of California drew almost a 100% of its energy from renewable sources, and where California goes, other states will follow.  Meanwhile,  with electric vehicles are finally becoming popular in the US and more and more auto manufacturers are planning to abandon gas engines in the future.

Will action against climate change on the state and local level be enough to make the difference?  Sadly, it doesn't look like it will, but with the Republican party poised to retake the house and maybe the senate in November, it looks like laws passed in some states is all the country is going  to do in the near future.  Given that the Paris climate accord's goal was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030, something that now looks almost impossible in the US (which is the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world), science deniers like Manchin and the Republican party seem to have won again, with the world the loser.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR BIDEN

 It's one of the oddest stories in presidential history: on October 2nd., 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke so devastating that it left him in bed for weeks.  During his incapacitation, his wife Edith had so much influence over his communications that some called her the first female president.  Amazingly, Wilson continued as president for over a year without completely recovering.

Decades later, when former President Ronald Reagan was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, there were many whispers about how he had started showing signs of that affliction as early as the mid 1980's.  Years later, former President Donald Trump spent the first two years of his presidency watching hours of TV and tweeting everyday, along with many rounds of golf or holding rallies in which he made random remarks entirely off the cuff.

I'm telling these stories to make a point; although we use lofty terms to describe the president in this country (the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world, the commander in chief), there is a certain automatic pilot quality to the president.  That is, the president has so many cabinet members and advisors, not to mention people planning out his schedule, that he can just cruise from one document signing or meeting to another without ever really doing a whole heck of a lot of work himself.  Even if the president blurts out the wrong thing at the wrong time in front of a camera, there are press agents and media types who will massage his words to fit the actual policy.  

Now, am I saying that this job is easy?  Of course not, just look at how much Barack Obama seemed to age between 2008 and 2012!  But this really depends on the president himself; Obama showed the wear and tear of the job because he truly wanted to make changes, which took numerous amounts of policy meetings and negotiations.  Trump didn't show the strain of the office because  he was mostly in it for himself, and he quickly realized shortly after taking office that he could just let everyone around him do the hard work, while he watched TV.  (This system  actually seemed to work for him until the coronavirus revealed his utterly incompetent nature).  In other words, it's the president's choice as to just how hands on he will be.

But then there's another factor: luck.  Much of the perceived success or failure of a presidency lies on the hands they're dealt when they're in office.  Bill Clinton, for example, came into office in 1992 when the cold war was over and rise of the internet caused huge economic growth, leading to a time of peace and prosperity.  The fact he didn't do anything to create the conditions necessary for that peace and prosperity didn't matter. He still reaped the benefit, easily winning a second term in office.  He was, like I said, lucky.

I used to think that Barack Obama, inheriting the disastrous Iraq war and the worst economy since the depression had the worst luck as a first term president.  But poor Joe Biden has him beat.  Just look at yet another devastating recent poll in the New York Times, showing a majority of registered Democrats not wanting him to run for a second term, partly because of his age, but also because of his job performance.  There is a perception that Biden is out of touch with the needs of the average voter and a desire that he is not doing enough about runaway inflation and high gas prices.  But the sad fact of the matter is that there is very little that he can do about those things.

I don't think the American public gets the idea of  just what the world has gone through in the past few years: the first global pandemic in over a 100 years, and the first war in Europe in over 80.  The pandemic drove up demand for physical goods as people stayed home and bought things online, driving up the prices.  The fractured supply lines both here and in other countries also lead to product shortages, another source of inflation.  And Russia's invasion of Ukraine has deeply effected the global economy; Ukraine is one the world's biggest exporters of wheat, and the war has inevitably greatly reduced the country's ability to make those exports, driving up food prices.  Meanwhile, attempts to reduce oil exports from Russia has lead to increased oil prices globally.  

If Joe Biden were lucky, he could be an autopilot president and take credit for good times, like Trump did for his first two years in office.  But because he took office at a historically bad time for the world, Biden has been beset with low approval ratings within months of taking office (February of 2022, when Vladamir Putin started the invasion of Ukraine, was when things got bad for him).

None of this is to say that I think Biden should be left off the hook, not at all.  He (and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen) should have seen the inflation problem coming.  And his inability to get his economic agenda passed through congress has made him look weak.  But the public's anger and desire to take out high prices on him is mostly just plain bad luck.  And it looks like it will make him a one term president.  

ROE VS WADE OFFICIALLY OVERTURNED

 

Anyone who follows politics knew that this day was coming, but it still is hitting like a ton of bricks. This is a day that will bring deep changes to this country, many of which seemed inconceivable just a few years ago.  The Supreme Court has now, officially, overturned Roe Vs Wade.  Nearly half the states in this country will soon ban the procedure outright, subjecting millions of American women to second class status.  It doesn't matter that a majority of Americans oppose this ruling, our system is open to the perversion of popular sentiment, and that's what's happened here.  It is appalling to consider that out of 9 Supreme Court judges, 5 of them were appointed by George W Bush or Donald Trump, neither of whom won the popular vote when they were elected.

This has been a huge struggle that stretches back decades. To me, one of the most transformational moments in American politics came in 1980, when then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan gave a speech in front of Christian Evangelicals and announced "Now, I know this is a non-partisan gathering, and so I know that you can’t endorse me, but I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorse you and what you're doing."  Before that speech, the Republican party was not strongly opposed to abortion rights (Gerald Ford was himself pro choice), but from then on, Christian Evangelicals and the Republican party would forever be joined at the hip with the party supporting an anti abortion, anti LGBT rights platform in every presidential election since.  And over the years the Evangelicals have focused mostly on one thing, overturning Roe Vs Wade, giving votes, money and vocal support to Republicans as long as they pledge to support overturning that law.

It's been a odd sort of alliance at times; one would think that a thrice married man who has often publicly bragged about his sexual conquests and faces 26 accusations of sexual assault or rape would not be the type to be embraced by the religious right, but it was Donald Trump who got them over the finish line. Thanks to the Machiavellian manipulations of Mitch McConnell in the Senate, Trump put 3 hard right judges onto the Supreme Court in only 4 years.  Quite a turn of events for a man who once called himself "very prochoice". 

So what can pro choice Americans do now?  Sadly, not a lot.  Considering that court justices serve lifetime appointments, the changes that need to occur in the court probably won't happen for years, perhaps even decades.  One long shot is that the next Democratic president could boldly move to expand the number of justices on the court.(I don't see a traditionalist like Biden doing this.)  While this would be seen as a wild and unprecedented move, it should be pointed out that it was also unprecedented for the Republican led Senate to refuse to endorse President Obama's judicial appointment for 10 months before the 2016 election.  So why shouldn't the Democrats aim high?  Perhaps the chaos that this ruling will inevitably lead to could build support for such a move.

In any event, this already divided country is about to get even more deeply divided in the coming months, as pro and anti choice states will start passing laws clashing with each other, and women who have miscarriages will inevitably be accused of murder in some states.   Abortion is a difficult and polarizing issue, and with this ruling the Supreme Court has thrown fuel on an already blazing bonfire in this country.  Things are about to get  very ugly here.

HARD LUCK BIDEN

 An aging president with dropping poll numbers driven by high inflation tipping into a recession.   Whispers in his own party of whether or not the oldest president ever should be replaced rather than run for a second term.  Sound familiar?  I'm talking about what happened to Ronald Reagan back in 1982.  

Yes the poor situation that President Joe Biden currently finds himself in has a precedent, but that doesn't make his troubles any easier.  Will Biden get lucky like Reagan did, and have the economy bounce back right before an election year?  We'll see.  One thing seems to be clear, despite the findings of the January 6th committee, which is exposing even more of Donald Trump's despicable behavior as president, and also despite the fact that the Supreme Court is about to make the unpopular decision to overturn Roe Vs Wade, there appears to be no way that the Democrats won't get clobbered in the midterms in November.  

Part of this is normal; the party that owns the White House almost always loses seats in the House and the Senate during the midterms, with angry voters showing up more than supportive ones.  But the danger of this election is that if there is a red wave of Republican victories across the land, that  would put in power people in swing states who have publicly endorsed Trump's utterly baseless assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from him.  And as we saw after that election, there are many different ways that vote counts can be challenged (and maybe even thrown out entirely).  Which means that if Trump does run in 2024 (and he sure looks like he will), he may have allies in congress and in swing states  willing to help him steal a close election. All of which means that his assault on American democracy probably isn't over.

With the stakes this high, and Biden approval ratings tanking, it is reasonable to ask if maybe he should step down.  And his age is a factor; in 2024 he will be 82 years old, which would push him close to 90 by the end of a second term.  Now, other world leaders have competently run a country at an even greater age, but the US President is a unique leader in that he controls the world's largest military, and has an influence on the world's largest economy.  (The US President is called the leader of the free world for a reason!) So the job is very stressful and relentless.  Plus, if 2024 is a Biden-Trump rematch, it would mark the first time ever that both presidential candidates are over 80 years old, not the best way to be looking forward.  And, a younger candidate could appeal to younger voters, who tend to swing left politically but vote infrequently.  For the record, Biden has repeatedly stated that he plans to run for reecletion, but with a Republican congress inevitably investigating everything about him that it can (get ready to hear a lot about Hunter Biden's laptop in 2023), and possible continued sagging poll numbers, having him stand as a transitional president who had to bring some level of decency back to the White House after the chaos and corruption of Trump, seems appealing. 

So let's say Biden does decline to run.  Who will replace him?  The logical person is Vice President Kamala Harris, but she has had her own issues with low approval ratings and bad press.  And, while I'm an admirer of her, I do wonder how she would do in a race against Trump.  The 2016 election sadly revealed that much of the country seems reluctant to put a woman in the role of Commander in Chief, and that could easily happen again to Harris.  This is, of course, why Biden got the Democratic nomination back in 2020; a lot of Democrats saw an old white man as  more electable against Trump than a nonwhite woman like Harris.  And they were right.   So who else does that leave? If it has to be a while male under 80, that leaves out Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.   I like Pete Buttigieg, but again, an openly gay candidate may prove to be too groundbreaking.  Perhaps Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, who's about to cruise to reelection?  He's likable, but maybe California is seen as too left by the rest of the country?  Another likable candidate is Beto O'Rourke, although he's probably about to lose a governor's race in Texas, which won't be a good look. And I'm sure there are many other potential Democratic candidates out there that aren't household names yet who could be good candidates.

Of course, all this kind of guesswork is like predicting the weather, because two years is a very long time in politics. As I stated at the beginning of this post, things looked bad for Reagan back in 1982, and sure enough his party lost 27 seats in the House in that election, but two years later, in his reecletion campaign, he won 49 states.  While there's no way that  Biden could have that kind of victory, things could turn around for him.

AN ANGRY, SCARED COUNTRY

Primary midterm elections began yesterday, and they confirmed what recent polls have revealed: Americans are angry.  Angry about inflation, about lingering covid, about gas prices.  And Americans are scared.  Scared of violent crime.  In San Francisco, progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, was ousted in a recall vote because he was seen as being "soft on crime"  (the fact that crime rates in the city did not actually go up under his regime doesn't seem to matter).  This showed that in even a famously progressive city like San Francisco, fear of crime and a desire to get tough and put more cops on the street, can work.  (Plus a multimillion dollar campaign funded by conservatives against Boudin didn't hurt.)

It understandable that the public are upset about the recent spike in violent crime that happened during the pandemic.  The problem is that they are falling into the usual pattern of wanting tougher sentences  and increasing the number of police on the streets.  While these two solutions may seem reasonable, they have proved ineffective in the past.  Take prison, for example: if sending more people to prison reduced crime, then America would have the lowest crime rate in the world, because we already have the largest prison population in the world (China has a billion more people than we do, and incarcerates less people).  And increased policing also does not necessarily mean less crime; as a 2021 New York Times  article pointed out, "For decades, scholars have acknowledged that local crime rates cannot be predicted by officer strength and police budgets. Sometimes a boost for policing is followed by a drop in crime; sometimes it isn’t."  The article went on to mention that increased policing leads to more arrests for low level crimes, which leads to more tension between police forces and the public.

Personally, I think that the recent spike in violent crime can be chalked up to the pandemic; first of all, the pandemic obviously upset and scared Americans, and when Americans get upset and scared, a lot of them go to the gun store.  Gun sales have boomed to record highs in the past two years, with all the potential violence that can bring.  Also, the pandemic has put the entire country on edge; just look at the increase in negative effects that have hit the country since it began: divorces are up, so is depression, drug and alcohol use, overdoses, traffic deaths, I could go on.  Given all that, the increase in violent crime is just one part of a pattern. Really, it's not surprising that people forced to stay inside start to get on each other's nerves, and conflicts that might have ended in shouting matches before, now often end in violence. As a study from the Council for Criminal Justice in February of 2021 said, "domestic violence incidents increased 8.1% after jurisdictions imposed pandemic-related lockdown orders."  It's really important to remember that this pandemic has been transformative, an experience that no one alive has endured before, and the effects of it will be felt for years to come.

Look, I understand that a politician who responds to the public's fears about the recent increase in violent crime by saying that violent crime was worse in the past (which is true) and that the crime rates will probably decrease as the world moves away from the pandemic (which I also think is true), will get clobbered by the voters, but I still think that more police and tougher sentencing is not the answer.  

The big problem with crime in this country is that Americans seem to reject or ignore a simple fact: the US has a higher crime rate than most industrialized countries because it has a higher child poverty rate than most industrialized countries. (A UNICEF study of child poverty in 2012 found that the US had the second highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world).   Really, is it any shock that children that live in neighborhoods where they risk exposure to lead paint or asthma from poor air conditions, and who attend underfunded public schools that treat them like prisoners, often wind up becoming criminals?  That's why it's so frustrating to hear that voters want something done about crime when one of the best tools to prevent crime came and went during the pandemic: the stimulus money for families with children.  During the pandemic, both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations passed stimulus plans that included $300 a month for each child in families making $150,000 a year or less.  While not a lot of money, it lifted millions of children out of poverty.  Sadly, when that money ran out, a second bill that would have made the payments permanent, failed in the Senate.  

Along with reducing child poverty, other common sense ways to lower crime rates include more funding for impoverished public schools, more after school programs, and, heck, even cleaning up vacant lots and putting in more street lights have shown positive results.  These solutions may not bring the strong feeling that locking up bad guys has for Americans raised on cop shows, but they actually provide better results in the long run at a lower expense.   We already have enough people in jail and enough cops on the street. 

NOT AGAIN

For the second time in a month there has been a horrific mass shooting.   It happened in an elementary school in Texas, and this time the targets were mostly schoolchildren around 9 or 10 years old.  It was the second worst school shooting ever, and unlike the other recent shooting, the shooter was killed by the police and we may never know what his motive was.  

What is clear is that once again a uniquely American tragedy has taken place.   And once again there is little to no chance that anything will be done about it.  As Gizmodo pointed out today, prominent Republicans have already sent out tweets that read like they're all filling in the same form letter, sending out "thoughts and prayers" without offering a damn bit of possibility that their party could pass even the mildest form of gun control.  We know this because, after the last shooting at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012, an attempt to pass an expanded background check failed in congress, and several states actually passed laws making it easier to get a gun.

Personally, I wish that our country could just get rid of the Second Amendment, considering that it was written when a gun could only be fired one shot at a time.  Then we could pass laws like they have in Europe or Japan.  (Japan has around 10 people die from guns each year, the US has around 30,000).  But I know that won't be happening anytime soon.  

But why not make gun ownership like car ownership?  Everyone knows that you don't just get to drive a car when  you turn 16, you have to prove that you can handle it responsibly because, obviously, a car driven recklessly is very dangerous.  So why can't we say the same thing about a gun?  Why not require potential gun owners to take a class in gun safety and then take a written and hands on test to prove that they can handle it securely?  Plus it should be pointed out that both of these shooters were 18 years old, why not say you can't buy a gun until you're 21, on a nationwide level?  Surely beer shouldn't be harder to get than an assault rifle.

Everything I just said in the last paragraph seems like common sense to me, but  common sense and this country's relationship with guns are very different.  During the pandemic, gun sales skyrocketed, and today there are more than guns owned than there are citizens.   And already right wing websites have started spreading conspiracies about this shooting being a "false flag", that is, faked by the government as an excuse to ban guns.  And inevitably the National Rifle Association will issue statements about how teachers should be armed, and how we need more "good guys" with guns.  Even those these two gunmen saw themselves as good guys.  And even those there was a security guard with a gun at the grocery store shooting, who wasn't able to stop the heavily armed gunman.

The depressing reality is that most Americans seem to have a short attention span when it comes to these shootings; we are saddened by them for a few days, and the world and the media move on.  And, while most Americans in polls express support for some of the laws that I just listed, they also  rate gun control as "low" in every list of issues that are important to them in elections.  And with the Republican party poised to retake congress this year, you can forget about any kind of common sense gun policy getting passed.  Right now, we live in the United States of the Nation Rifle Association, and little will change in the near future.