THE TESLA OWNER'S LAMENT

 I first blogged on here about my mixed feelings about buying a Tesla in 2021.  (You can read that post  here and my other post about Elon Musk here .) Although I had misgivings then about the behavior of Elon Musk, I went ahead and bought a Tesla Model 3 anyway a few months later, mainly because of its superior charging infrastructure compared to other electric vehicles.

And then a few months after I got my car, Musk bought Twitter, and the world caved in.  Now I'm in the odd position of driving a car that I love and feeling self conscious about it at the same time.

In the days before the Twitter takeover, the feeling  on Musk was that, despite his erratic, impulsive behavior, Tesla kept making money while he was running it so he was some kind of eccentric genius.  (He has publicly made numerous promises that haven't come true in the past decade). At one point in 2021, Tesla was the most profitable car company in the world.  But recently it has been tanking: the rollout of the long awaited and delayed Cyber truck has been mostly a disaster: first there were production issues, build issues and range issues, and then there was a massive recall needed (the largest in Tesla's history)  for safety reasons.  Speaking of safety, continued investigations of Tesla's so called "full self driving" option have plagued the company.  And a recent  article in the website Jalopnik pointed out that after Tesla let car owners try out FSD for a month for free, only 2% of Tesla owners who tried it out actually purchased it for their cars.  

In a way, that FSD trial shows just what's wrong with the company: while I myself was excited to try it out for a month for free, it made several errors (including trying to turn into an oncoming car!), and it doesn't even work on overcast days.  Even though the cost of FSD was recently  lowered from $12,000 to $8,000, that's still eight grand more than I would ever pay for it.  The whole self driving thing seems to be one of Musk's obsessions, but I don't think the company should bother. Look at how Apple spent billions of dollars and years of research trying to create the ultimate self driving car before just straight up surrendering.  Despite Musk's obsession, truly autonomous self driving cars for the average driver are still a long ways off from being a reality. 

But self driving is just the tip of the iceberg with Musk.  On his social media company X he has posted and reposted numerous conservative messages and he has even appeared to endorse the right wing "great replacement" conspiracy theory, which states that Jewish puppet masters are attempting to replace white Americans with Mexican people.  Not only is this offensive garbage, it's also stupid for him to do from a business standpoint, with his  posts driving potential customers towards other electric vehicle offerings.  (A survey by market intelligence firm Caliber found Tesla's "consideration score" among potential US buyers dropped 8% between January and  February 2024,)  Not surprisingly in polarized America, most EV customers are progressive voters who find the once mostly progressive Musk's current conservative postings offensive.  And while right wingers have started praising Musk's recent conversion to their side, they still aren't rushing out to buy Teslas.

Along with his conservative conversion, Musk has made some other questionable choices as of late: he recently fired all the workers at Tesla in charge of building superchargers, despite the fact that the supercharger network is one of the company's strengths.  And along with his desire for full self driving cars, he's  also determined to make self driving robot taxis a  thing, despite the fact that several already existing self driving taxi companies have been struggling.  He has even envisioned a future in which Tesla owners will allow other people to use their cars as self driving taxis when they aren't using them (hard pass from me on that!).  He has also seemingly abandoned his oft made promise of introducing a Tesla model that would sell for only 25 thousand dollars.  While this would almost surely be profitable and throw down the gauntlet of making an affordable EV to other car manufactures, possibly revolutionizing the entire EV market, he doesn't think affordability is as sexy as robot taxis.

The results of his recent behavior have been devastating for the company, which has seen its value drop from 1.2 trillion dollars in 2021 to 661 billion now while 10% of the company's workforce has been laid off.  And yet despite this, Musk is expecting the Tesla board to  reinstate  a 65 billion dollar pay package for him that was recently rejected by a judge.  Giving a huge pile of money to the CEO of a company with tanking stock value doesn't exactly send the best message!

While it appears that the Tesla board of directors are unable to force Musk out as CEO, they can certainly nudge him towards stepping down, given that he is clearly costing them all money and seems determined to continue doing so.  Perhaps they can suggest that one person shouldn't run so many companies (along with Tesla and X he also has Space X, Neuralink and whatever the hell the Boring company is!) and push him towards moving on.  I would love for the grownups to take over Tesla, so that they can just make good quality cars without worrying about self driving robo taxis and ugly cyber trucks.

THE WORST THING THAT TRUMP WOULD DO

 

When Donald Trump first started polling well against President Joe Biden back in November, the White House was quick to dismiss the numbers as just a snapshot in time.  Surely, they thought, with Trump's legal troubles brewing and the economy improving, the country would turn away from giving him a second term in office.

Well, here we are months later, and Trump's is still beating Biden in most polls.  And with inflation stubbornly hanging on, the conflict in Gaza splitting progressives, and Trump's current legal trial hardly seeming to phase the public, the odds of Trump pulling off another victory seem to be growing.

This terrifying prospect gets even more terrifying give a recent interview Trump gave to Time magazine in which he laid out his plans for a second term.  While his desire to use the justice department to go after his "political enemies" is horrible, and the fact that he will try to roll back every advancement Biden has made in dealing with climate change is equally terrible, to me the worst thing that he would do is to push for even more deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Trump's plans here are pure xenophobic strong man tactics: he wants to use not only Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers but also local law enforcement, and perhaps even the national guard, to aggressively target undocumented immigrants.  Then he plans to have them put into border camps before being swiftly deported.

Morally, this is despicable, as it will result in families being  torn apart and hard working honest people being treated like criminals.  It would also be economically disastrous; there are between 10 and 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US now according to Pew research.  The vast majority of them work, and  pulling millions of workers out of the workforce in a short period of time would have terrible consequences for the economy, with companies scrambling to fill their depleted workforces.  

The history of America's reliance on undocumented Mexican labor is a long and complicated one: back in the 1940's, there was a labor shortage during the war when most of the young men were off fighting.  So in 1942, the US government began the Bracero program in which Mexicans were encouraged to come to America to work.  But then after the war ended, Mexican workers were expected to return to their homes, despite the fact that they were making more money here.  The backlash against migrant workers grew so strong that in 1954 the US government began a deportation program that was actually called Operation Wetback (!).  Not surprisingly, it was controversial, with reports of almost a hundred deported workers dying of dehydration when they were abandoned in the desert.  And even as that was going on, the Bracero program remained, (it would eventually end in 1964) showing just how complicated the whole issue was.

For the next few years, undocumented immigration was mostly ignored as  a political issue, with things like the economy, the cold war and the civil rights movement taking up more of the voter's attention.  The issue had so little resonance that in  1980  when Ronald Reagan spoke about the Mexican border, he said "You don’t build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations.” without any blowback from his party. Then 6 years later he signed an amnesty bill that gave citizenship to 3 million undocumented immigrants without any big controversy or outcry.  

So what happened?  Well, in 1994, with the economy doing well, the cold war over and Bill Clinton in the White House, the Republican party was looking for a new group of people to demonize.  Getting tough on crime was becoming popular, so why not crack down on a group of people that could be branded as "illegals"?  So, in the state of California, conservatives came up with proposition 187, a law that would prevent undocumented immigrants from using any public services.  Then California Governor Pete Wilson tied his successful  reecletion campaign to its passage.  Even though the proposition was eventually thrown out by the courts after it passed, it had proved an effective tool for Wilson (who ran political ads in favor of it that showed people pouring over the Mexican border like Trump ads do now).  And census polls in the early part of this century that  projected that white people would no longer make up over 50% of the American population by 2045, only added fuel to the fire.

Now, decades later, its seems unthinkable that the Republican party would ever not demonize undocumented immigrants, with scorn Trump taking the ball and running with it into openly racist territory. (He's described undocumented immigrants as inhuman and says that they are "poisoning the blood of America"). In many ways, undocumented immigrants have proven to be the perfect enemy for the right; not just because they'er both foreign and not white, but also because they lack political power.  Consider that for years the Republican party went after the rights of LGBTQ people, but now that issue is fading for them.  Why? Because the LGTQ rights movement has made great strides over the years, with lobbying groups in congress and wealthy donors backing them.  Undocumented immigrants, on the other hand, are far more vulnerable, as they have no lobbyists or large money donors, and, of course, they can't vote at all.  (And there is no truth to the lie that they are illegally voting).

The change in the Republican party on this issue was made stark in the 2016 election when, while running for the Republican presidential nomination, candidate Jeb Bush said, "The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn't come legally, they come to our country because their families,  the dad who loved their children, was worried that their children didn't have food on the table. And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it's not a felony. It's an act of love. It's an act of commitment to your family." Sadly, this reasonable call for understanding was blasted by Trump and his campaign.  (Trump also made racist comments about Bush's wife, because of course he did). 

So, as an essentially powerless group in America, the undocumented, have become an easy target for the right.  Sadly, many of the lies pushed by the right about undocumented immigrants have become ingrained in the American public, with polls showing that most Americans think that undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American citizens, even though every study done on that subject shows that the opposite is true.  And that easy targeting has lead to terrible excesses like the so called great replacement theory, which posits that rich Jews are attempting to replace white people with Mexicans in the US.  (A theory apparently endorsed by Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world).

To me, the bottom line is this: undocumented immigration occurs because it's a good deal for both the immigrants themselves and the companies that employ them.  As long as that reality exists, they will keep coming here, no matter how many people Trump deports.   Having worker visa programs and allowing undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship is just the right thing to do. The old saying may be  a cliche, but it's true, we are a nation of immigrants.

THE ANTI POLITICIAN POLITICIAN

 One of the odd things about the past decade of American politics is how the man who has sucked up so much of the media's attention is a political figure who's life shows that he's never really had any strongly held  political views.  Before he became a Republican, Donald Trump donated money to both political parties, held moderate views and seemed more interested in bragging about how rich he was (and how many women he had slept with) then American politics.  Then he became an extremely conservative president.  

Why did he change?  Because he has no real fixed views on politics;he once said that  he was "very pro choice" now he takes credit for appointing the judges to the Supreme Court who overturned Roe Vs Wade.   And even  his signature issue, his hatred of  undocumented immigrants, is coming from a man who often hired undocumented immigrants to work at his businesses over the years. So what drives Trump is not any political beliefs, instead, he has a single,  lifelong principle.  And that principle is that he sees himself as  the greatest human being that has ever lived in the history of the world.  Think I'm exaggerating?  Check his social media posts comparing himself to Jesus, or his assertion that he was a better president than Washington or Lincoln!  Because he believes that he should be worshipped like a god, Trump will always try to say whatever he thinks will garner him the most reverence from the American public.  

Look at his first foray into politics with his association with the birther movement.  While there's no reason to think he actually believed in the absurd and racist view that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, he found that every time he expressed this opinion in public, members of the Republican party cheered him on, so he just kept at it.  And, of course, once he decided upon being a Republican, he knew that he would have to be against abortion, even if that meant contradicting his stated beliefs going back years.  

The worst part of this messianic nature of his  is that he managed to instill his own god like self image into the minds of tens of millions of Americans, who hang on his every word at rallies and openly claim that they believe that he was sent by god to "save" America.  Really, the modern Republican party is more of a cult of Trump than a political party, and like any cult leader, Trump can do wrong in their eyes.  These cult like beliefs from millions of Americans would be bad enough for any leader, but they are made much more frightening when they are focused on a self serving sociopath like Trump.  While what happened at the nation's capitol on January 6th was bad enough, it may even be worse how Trump and many of his followers have embraced what those protestors did, with Trump himself calling violent,  convicted criminals "hostages".

This combination of a messianic sociopathic political leader worshipped by tens of millions of people could make for a very dangerous combination in November: if Trump loses, it's safe to assume that he will never accept it, even if he loses all 50 states.  So what will happen?  How far will he push his belief that he never loses at anything?  And how far are his worshippers ready to go?  Even worse, what if he wins?  Will there be anyone to stop him this time when he starts locking up children again, or sending the military to stop political protests against him?  Putting it simply, every Presidential election is called "the most important one ever" but this time that may be true in the worst possible way.  Another Trump presidency could end America as we know it, turning it something more like a dictatorship.  Either way, the next few months are going to very important in our country's history.

AMERICAN AMNESIA

 I'll never forget what happened in England when divisive former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died in 2013.  While there were some public displays of mourning, her political opponents openly celebrated, with the song "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" becoming one of the most popular songs in the country.  Contrast that with how America  dealt with the passing of former disgraced President Richard Nixon in 1991, with the man who had embarassed the country with his criminal behavior recast as a merely controversial figure.  Of course, the rehabilitation of Nixon's reign began the moment that Gerald Ford pardoned him, with Nixon writing books and columns acting as an elder statesmen and not a criminal.  And it seemed to mostly work for him, because Americans seem to forget about former presidents the second they leave office.  Look at George W Bush, who's now just seen as soft spoken guy who paints (lousy) pictures and not a man who stumbled the country into a disastrous invasion of Iraq. 

I think this phenomenon happens because our 24/7 news cycle puts so much emphasis on who the president is and what his regime is doing at every given moment, that former presidents are forgotten almost immediately.   The lack of white hot media attention causes the approval ratings of former presidents to rise the second they leave office, as the bad parts of their reign seem to be  forgotten, causing many Americans to get nostalgic for the old days, forgetting all the bad parts.

This amnesia could have disastrous effects in the coming election, with all the terrible things that Donald Trump did while in office somehow being forgotten by the public, who are still slightly favoring him in the polls.  And to make things even more depressing, remember that Trump outperformed the polls in 2016 and 2020, and that these are the best presidential poll numbers that he has ever had in his political career, and the stage may be set for a twice impeached man facing multiple felony charges to somehow wind up the White House again!

But there is some hope: for months, polls showed that most Americans couldn't believe that Trump was going to be the Republican party's nomination again.  Now that nightmare has become a reality, with Trump barnstorming his way into the nomination.  Since there is no question of his candidacy, voters who don't follow politics that much will start paying attention again, which will hopefully result in a remembrance of what a deeply divisive and awful man he is.  For the past four years Trump has mostly been communicating to members of his cult through right wing media, but now the public will be subjected to his obsession with how the 2020 election was "stolen" from him, along with his usual stream of bigoted, misogynistic and downright bizarre ramblings (what is it with this man and low flow sinks and showers?).  Add to that his criminal troubles and the court cases that he's already lost to the tune of almost half a billion dollars in penalties, and it's possible that the public's memory will suddenly return to the wildly chaotic, incompetent and corrupt regime that ran this country from 2016 to 2020 and they will come to their senses and vote for the slightly older man who's actually capable of caring about other human beings.  I really hope they do.

MITCH MCONNELL'S LEGACY

 Recently, 82 year old Repulican Senate leader Mitch McConnell announced that he soon will be retiring from the Senate.  McConnell was first elected in 1985 and has been the Republican leader of the Senate for 17 years. He said in an exit speech that he has realized that some of his political opinions have recently fallen out of favor with his party.  Accolades from Democrats who claimed to admire his old school pragmatism and willingness to compromise were made.

Personally, I can't imagine why any Democrat would say anything positive about a man who's cold, naked quest for political power saw him bend the Senate rules repeatedly.  And while it's true that he supports the Senate bill calling for funding for border security and aid to Ukraine that other Republicans have opposed, McConnell's history in the Senate is one of almost blind partisanship.  Remember how, after the violence of January 6th, McConnell gave a strong speech pinning the blame for the violence on Donald Trump, and then completely chickened out by failing to vote to remove Trump from office?  Even though he clearly thought that Trump was criminally liable for the violence of that day, he was too gutless to cast a vote that would have rightly prevented Trump from ever running again.

While that vote was shameful, McConnell's worst legacy will be the ultra conservative Supreme Court majority that he brought about entirely through his Senate actions as majority leader.  First, he denied President Barack Obama the chance to fill a vacant seat on the court for ten months before the 2016 election, and then he later  jammed through justice Amy Coney Barrett with less than a month to go before the 2020 election.  By doing this,  McConnell allowed a one term president who lost the popular vote by millions to pick three Supreme Court Judges instead of just the one he should have gotten in 2018.

And that conservative court has been busy, from overturning Roe Vs Wade to a brazenly partisan recent ruling that allowed Donald Trump to delay his upcoming legal trials by months, saving him the possible humiliation of being found guilty of a crime while on the campaign trail, and perhaps giving him the chance to dismiss the charges by winning the White House again.  And that overturning of Roe Vs Wade  has lead to an inevitable case of overreach, with the Alabama Supreme Court recently ruling that the frozen embryos used for in vitro fertilization were actually living beings, essentially ending IVF in that stare, a process used by millions of Americans that need help conceiving a child.  Although a bill to nationalize a right to IVF was put forth in the Senate, it was shot down by Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith,  who called the bill " a vast overreach".  Even while that was happening. many other Republicans have tried to say that they support the process, understandably not wanting to look like the oppose something that has led to the birth of more children. 

Along with these recent extremist rulings, there have also been stories of blatant corruption coming out of the court: first, it has been revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife Ginny was involved in Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election, even as Thomas refused to recuse himself from rulings the court was making about that election.  And then there's the huge favors that billionaire conservative Harlan Crow has been making for Thomas, from treating him to a half million dollar vacation to paying for his step son's education.  Thomas never declared this favors.  And he isn't the only one, with Justice Samual Alito not reporting a luxury private flight that he took and Neil Gorsuch selling property to a law firm that had a case before the court.  Given all this, it's no surprise that court now has a record low approval rating. 

Because Supreme Court judges have lifetime appointments, there's little that can be done to stop the current court's reckless and reactionary rulings.  But there is one solution: now, more than ever, it's time for Democrats to support packing the court.  While such a thing has never been done before (FDR considered it) I think that, given the hypocritical lengths that McConnell went to get a conservative majority, the Democrats should do it while they still have a majority in the Senate.  Oh sure, the Republicans would scream bloody murder,  but there's no legal way to block it.  And if Republicans run on adding more seats to the court themselves, so be it.  No matter how much they may deny it, the Supreme Court is not above politics, so why not treat picking more Supreme Court judges as just another platform for presidential candidates to run on?  Anything to prevent this current court from poisoning our political process for decades to come.

TRUMP'S FOLLOWERS BREAK ANOTHER PRECEDENT

 

Yesterday the US House of Representatives disgraced themselves by following the lead of a one term former president who's currently under indictment on over 90 separate felony charges.  Yes, by a margin of just one vote, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, was impeached by the House.  Never before in American history has a serving cabinet secretary ever been impeached like this, and to make matters worse, no actual constitutionally mandated charges of high crimes and misdemeanors have been proven against him.  

 Oh sure, the Republicans say they have their reasons, but this is really just a symbolic gesture.  For Mayorkas to be properly impeached, there would have to be a two thirds vote against him in the Senate,  and  there's no way that the Democratically controlled Senate would do that.  But none of that matters, this is, as I said before, just a case of Donald Trump's lackeys bowing to his orders.  Put simply, the twice impeached former president wants revenge, and since the House's impeachment investigation of President Joe Biden has provided no charges, why not take it out on Mayorkas?  And along with revenge, the impeachment also throws red meat to the Republican base by letting house members go after a Biden administration official who's position has him dealing with Trump's signature issue, our Western border.  

It shows how hypocritical the Republican party has become that, after voting against a conservative border bill that Biden would have signed, and that would have done something about our border crisis, the party is going after Mayrokas for, you guessed it, not doing enough about the border!  But this is where we are: conservatives are  saying that the border crisis is both an immediate threat and something that can't be dealt with before the election.  Trump feels that dealing with the issue would be seen as a win for Biden, so he would prefer that the problem remain unsolved until he's back in the White House.  He's also said that he hopes that the economy crumbles soon,  because he puts America first.

Once again, Trump has lowered the standards of this country, and now impeachment, which was one seen as a last resort against corruption, has become just another political tool to be used against a rival party.  Honestly, I often wonder if America will ever be the same even after Trump is long gone.  The crimes he's been accused of, the despicable racist things he's said publicly, and the level of corruption and ineptitude he had as president has hurt the future of our country, maybe for good.

HALEY CAN'T WIN, BUT SHE CAN HELP

 Like any woman that doesn't worship him like the god he thinks he is, Nikki Haley has gotten under Donald Trump's skin.  Trump, after winning the New Hampshire presidential primary over Haley by double digits, instead of giving a magnanimous speech as he had a few days earlier after winning Iowa, spent most of his victory speech ripping into her.  Previously he had childishly called her "birdbrain", in this speech he decided to insult her outfit ("I watched her in that fancy dress, that probably wasn't so fancy").  But in his usual morass of lies and boasts, he also stumbled on a truth when he said that Haley was"doing like a speech like she won,” though “she didn’t win, she lost.”

The thing that obviously needles Trump the most is that Haley did not immediately endorse him after losing.  Ron DeSantis, who for over a year had been seen as Trump's biggest possible challenger for the Republican Presidential nomination, immediately endorsed him after losing in Iowa.  But Haley, even though she came in third behind Trump and DeSantis, decided to continue her campaign, saying that she was polling well in New Hampshire.  And she continued her campaign after New Hampshire, even though the path ahead looks impossible for her.  Let's face it, the majority of the Republican party faithful still adore Trump, think that he won in 2020 and that he can't lose in 2024.  The idea that a woman, particularly one of color, would take Trump's place, even if she's doing better in polls agains Biden than Trump is, is crazy.

In the past few years, Haley has acted like a lot of  Republicans since Trump arrived.  At one point in 2016 she said of him, “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK. That is not a part of our party, that is not who we want as president. We we allow not allow that in our country.”  And like so  many other Republicans (like say Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham) she quickly forgot all her criticisms of him once he won and eventually she accepted a job in his regime  as US ambassador to the United Nations.  But unlike so many people who worked in the Trump administration, she was not forced out, found guilty of  a crime, or left because she couldn't stand him. (Perhaps because as UN ambassador, I doubt she dealt with Trump a lot directly).  Really, she's one of the few people to encounter Trump and emerge unscathed and relatively complimentary of him.

At first as a candidate, Haley was reluctant to openly criticize Trump, only making a few mild jabs at his age.  But now with DeSantis gone,  it seems like the gloves are off: she recently referred to him as "totally unhinged", and attacked his mental acuity.  Given that there's no way that Trump will ever forgive her for staying in the race and going after him, it seems possible that Haley has now thrown herself into the "never Trump" camp, even if she won's admit it.  While she has no chance of winning, her words (which will inevitably wind up in numerous attack ads against Trump), may hurt Trump with those crucial suburban women voters that can turn an election, especially, if Trump continues to make usual misogynistic comments about her.  The important question is, after she loses, will Haley support Trump, or will she just offer no endorsement of either candidate? Is it possible that she could even endorse Joe Biden?  I doubt it, but then, fellow Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie has already, so it's not impossible.  Whatever happens, given how close the 2024 election appears that it will be,  Haley may help turn the tide against Trump.