EXPENSIVE, UGLY AND DISHONEST

 Everything about the coming midterms shows the worst in American politics: first, its shows the influence of money, as over eleven billion dollars have been spent on these elections, a new record.  While it appears, thankfully, that the Democrats are poised to prevail, especially in the House of Representatives, the enormous influx of cash that the GOP has gotten (with hundreds of millions being spent by the odious Elon Musk) has helped the party do better than it deserves to.

Along with the power of money, this election is showing just how much politics has degenerated in the  in the Donald Trump era of the past decade or so: once upon a time, politicians never would have hurled the kind of mean spirited insults at their political opponents that the Republican party has been, lead by the president himself.  Along with him calling Texas Senate candidate James Talarico a freak, a secret vegan and insinuating he's gay, Trump has also gone after Michigan Senatorial candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed as a “vicious, violent jihadist.”  

Pictured above, the end of America, according to Bo French

Also in Texas, Bo French,  the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, posted a picture of young people celebrating at a football game, many of whom were of South East Asian descent, and said that it showed   “The problem is now obviously far worse that anyone imagined.”  Despite inspiring anger from even some Republicans, French has predictably defended his post, showing the never apologize, always attack mentality that has taken over the modern Republican party.   Or as Jeff Flake, an Arizonan Republican who has often criticized Trump put it, "It's awful.  We’ve gotten progressively more crass and crude and vulgar."  Yes, sadly we've come a long ways from the days when Senator John McCain corrected a woman who smeared Barack Obama as a Muslim while running for president.  The time of the GOP showing  that kind of decency in a campaign ended when it became the cult of Trump.

And if the speeches are bad, the political ads are worse.  Recently, America Next, a conservative political action committee, ran an ad in which a cowering white woman said "I can't even show my face because my skin is white, and they'll spew hate at me."  It's a truly strange ad that doesn't endorse any specific candidate or movement, it just claims that "Liberals are the new racists".  I suppose it shows how desperate the GOP is before the midterms that they would resort to such obvious bigoted race baiting, but the ad is still shocking in its brazenness, revealing that the conservative movement in this country has always benefited from white middle class Americans feeling ripped off, even while conservative politicians gut their healthcare and cut taxes for the rich.  Even though he said it decades ago, former President Lyndon Johnson's quote still applies:  “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

And even that race baiting ad doesn't sink to the level that Ohio Gubernatorial candidate  Vivek Ramaswamy has in his campaign: he recently ran an ad in which Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of his political opponent Amy Acton, called her daughter a liar and told people not to vote for her.  By doing this Ramaswamy has ignored the fact that decades ago Arthur chose to stay with the man who was arrested for raping Acton when she was twelve rather than support her daughter.  Thankfully, many Republicans have denounced the ad, like the outgoing Governor Mike DeWine who called it "deeply, deeply troubling", but, shamefully, both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have endorsed the ad, and Ramaswamy has doubled down on it, spending more money to keep airing it.

The only good news here is that it appears that all of the money and offensive attacks by the GOP aren't working, with the Democrats currently favored to retake both the House and the Senate on Tuesday.  Yes, after what has seemed like an eternity with Trump dominating politics even when he was out of office, his era will soon to start ending, with him spending two years as a lame duck president (and you just know that he will hate that term!) before fading from the scene.  Good riddance! 

TWO MORE TERRIBLE TRUMP DECISIONS

 

Ok, I must give credit where credit is due; just a week ago I posted angrily about how the Donald Trump administration was planning to live stream an execution by firing squad.  But recently, after initially supporting it,  Trump has decided against it, reportedly because the prisoner who was going to be executed, Nidal Malik Hasan, is in a wheelchair.  Yes even a psychopath like Trump knows that the image of a man in a wheelchair being shot isn't something that should be streamed into millions of homes. I'm glad he backed off on this.

But that good decision has already been overwhelmed by two terrible things that his administration has done recently.  First, the home of Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, has been raided by Homeland Security agents with less than a month to go before the election.  While the raid is ostensibly to look for possible evidence that years ago she applied for citizenship as a minor when she was actually eighteen, the real reason is that Trump wants her deported.  Although in interviews Trump has tried to imply that the decision for the raid was made by the justice department independently,  it is clear that from the moment he took office in his second term that he intended to use that department to punish his political enemies like Omar.  And Trump's openly bigoted and disgusting hatred of Somali immigrants has been one of his obsessions in his second term; on Truth Social he recently posted that the “once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.”  While he may stop short of openly supporting violence, his message is clear.  Add to this a recent Axios report that said that ninety nine point nine percent of all refugees allowed into the US in 2026 were white South Africans fleeing the so called "white genocide" going on in that country, even though numerous news outlets have debunked that so called genocide, and you can see where Trump's hatred of the Somali people is coming from.  Clearly he wants to put a huge White's Only sign on the country when it comes to refugees or immigrants.

The second terrible thing that Trump has done is his decision to break the sanctions against Russia and purchase billions of dollars worth of diesel fuel from that country, even as it continues its brutal and disastrous invasion of the Ukraine. The reason for this is that Trump's failed war on Iran has sent the price of diesel fuel skyrocketing in this country and Trump is trying to look like he's doing something about it before the mid term elections next month.  But the amount of fuel the administration wants to buy would only amount to a fraction of a typical day's usage in the US.  So it's an empty gesture that won't make a real difference here.  What it will do is give billions of dollars to Russia to help fund their war machine.   Or  as  Vitaly Sych, the editor in chief of the Ukrainian news outlet NV, texted to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently, Trump  "is openly siding with Russia, pushing for Ukraine’s capitulation and calling it a peace deal.  If Ukraine hits an oil refinery in Russia, there is always an outraged post from the U.S. president on Truth Social. Is he now the Kremlin’s spokesperson?”  For years now there have been rumors that Trump is somehow a Russian agent or asset; personally, I have a skeptical nature about conspiracies, and I don't think that's the case.  What I do think is happening is that Trump is jealous of Vladimir Putin because he has an iron clad control of Russian media, and has even had reporters who he dislikes killed, while Trump has to put up with a media that, despite his best efforts, still is allowed to tell the truth about his policies and even make jokes at his expense.  Yes, the man who for years spread lies about Barack Obama not being an American citizen on right wing media when Obama was president is now saying that anyone who criticizes Trump is treasonous.    This explains why Trump has also repeatedly shown a fondness for King Jong Un, the Communist Dictator of North Korea, who also controls his country with an iron fist.  Where most people see brutal, undemocratic dictators, Trump sees strong leaders who can have people jailed or killed at their whim, the way he wishes he could rule in this country.

Normally, a president who wants to limit people allowed to become US citizens to whites only and openly  admires authoritarian leaders like Putin would be  scandalous, but, as always in the past ten years, Trump will glide through this mostly unscathed, as we go on to the next corrupt or outrageous thing that he does.   The only to keep him in check is for the Democrats to retake congress next year, which is looking likely thanks to Trump's declining approval ratings outside of his MAGA base.  Hopefully the last two years of Trump's term will see him besieged by investigations of his various corruptions and in full retreat.  For a man that I think should have gone to jail years ago on any number of offenses, that's just what he will deserve.

A TRULY BARBARIC SPECTACLE

 

The death penalty and how it is used in America has been in the news a lot lately.  First, there was the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, who survived after being given a dose of drugs that failed to kill her.  Then there was the recent announcement by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, would be killed by firing squad and that the live execution would be available to be seen by the public, making in the first state sanctioned public execution since 1936.  

To me both of these stories display just how barbaric and unnecessary our capitol punishment system is in this country.  There is no humane way to kill another human being, and while both of these people have confessed to their terrible crimes, the public spectacle of their executions is ugly. Put simply, there is no good reason to have capitol punishment in a modern society; while nearly every European country has put an end to the practice, by continuing to use it the US is stuck in the past with authoritarian governments like China and Iran.

Sadly, the Donald Trump administration has pushed for more uses of capitol punishment in this country, even while homicide rates have dropped, because pushing for the ultimate punishment fits into Trump's strongman image.  And while I will admit that most Americans still support the death penalty, accelerating its use only increases the chances of innocent people being wrongly put to death, something that most death penalty proponents claim never happens, despite its inevitability.  

Of these two recent cases, it's the second one that bothers me the most.  The wildly unqualified Hegseth, who has brought an almost childish macho swagger to his position as Defense Secretary, made the announcement of the live streaming of Hasan's public execution with a ghoulish and sickening glee. And Trump has, with equal glee, said that he "absolutely' approves of it, as he continues to act more like a fascist dictator than a president.

It should be pointed out that even proponents of the death penalty have objected to Hegseth's plans.  For example, Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina,  posted on social media that “Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting, Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”  I agree, and it should be pointed out that in the case of Hasan, being killed publicly allows him to a martyr to his cause, whereas forcing him to spend the rest of his life in prison would have seen him fall from relevance.

With the pushback from some fellow Republicans and general outrage from the public coming quickly, it's possible that Hegseth will not go forward with live streaming Hasan's execution.  But the mere fact that he would suggest it and that Trump would second that suggestion shows how unfit for office both men are.

THE GOP CAN'T GET AWAY FROM TRUMP

 

Donald Trump is almost halfway through his second term as president, meaning that his decade long dominance of the Republican party (and politics in general) is almost at an end.  And seeing as how his  tariff policies and the Iran war have proven so unpopular that his approval ratings hover well under forty percent, it would be logical to assume that he, as an unpopular, soon to be lame duck president, would back away from party politics, especially given how his unpopularity could hurt the GOP in the upcoming midterms.

But logic has never driven Trump, and so he decided to have a Republican mid term convention a few days ago in Dallas, Texas, something the party has never done before.  But there' s never been a president as obsessively narcissistic as Trump before, who called the gathering "Trumpalooza" (yick!) and used it to brag about his alleged accomplishments.   At one point he announced that  "You know what? Just everybody loves me, and I love everybody.” Which, as many pundits have pointed out in the last ten years, sounds much more like something a cult leader would say than a political leader.

Somewhat amusing, many congressional members of the GOP running in November found excuses not to attend the rally and be seen with him, and even the stadium the convention was held in wasn't full, despite what Trump and Fox News had to say about it.  And the TV ratings for it were nothing special, especially since it was up against an opening game for the NFL.  None of that mattered to Trump, who basked in the adulation, bragged and lied about how great the economy and the war are going, and claimed that the Democrats are all Communists.  

And, since the TV trained Trump loves a big reveal, he announced that if the GOP hold both branches of congress, he will send a five thousand dollar check to every adult in the country.  Even many members of his own party blanched at this idea, given that conservatives once used to rail about big government handouts, and the trillion dollar plus cost of the checks would be excessive, especially given how the national debt just hit forty trillion dollars for the first time ever.  Even more absurd, this isn't the first time in his second term that he's made such a promise, as he earlier promised three thousand dollar checks for Americans to come from the money his tariffs have raised, which, of course, never materialized.   In other words, even if the polls are wrong and the GOP does hang on to the House and the Senate, don't expect those checks to arrive.

Since Trump first took over the Republican party ten years ago, he has used it  more as a way to line his own pockets and pump up his ego with ballrooms and arches than as a way to help the average American.  (Although he's certainly helped out his wealthy donors).  His low approval ratings, the lowest ever for him, may show that for the first time his base of blue collar white conservatives may finally be on to his scam, no matter how much he appears to hate the same people that they hate. If only they had never listened to them in the first place.

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS ARE HAVING A MOMENT

 Recently in Florida, self described Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon defeated a better funded opponent to win the Democratic nomination for the Senate.  Her victory marked a recent upsurge in Democratic Socialist candidates nationwide, with five other Democratic Socialists winning primary victories all across the country.  Part of this is a generational thing, with younger voters understandably cynical about capitalism and more open to the "help the poor and middle class" sentiments of Socialism. But another reason seems to stem  from a progressive backlash against what is seen as a weak Democratic party that is helpless in the face of Trump's corruption and bullying.  

Some have called this a Tea Party moment for the Democrats, and there is some truth to that; back in 2008-09 the Republican Party couldn't really do anything to stop Barack Obama and the Democrats in congress.  So a far right group calling itself the Tea Party sprung up out of this conservative anger.  The reason for this is obvious; our partisan system is designed so that if one party has the White House and both houses of congress, there is little that the opposing party can do to stop them, leading to anger from their voters about their inability to do anything.

Really this is an example of just how deeply divided our country is; look at how the presidencies have gone in this century:  George W Bush tried to reverse everything Bill Clinton did, Barack Obama tried to reverse everything Bush did, Donald Trump tried to reverse everything Obama did, Biden tried to reverse everything Trump did, and now Trump is trying to reverse everything Biden did, while also somehow still blaming many things on Obama.  This whipsaw series of changes is not good for the country.  Look at the auto industry, who were all set to start transitioning to electric vehicles under Biden, who was encouraging it with subsidies for electric vehicle buyers and more charging stations being built.  But then Trump came and trashed all of that, pushing for more oil drilling across the country, making car companies scramble to keep up with the new regime.  But even then they have to brace themselves for the inevitable day when a Democratic president will return to the White House, leading to another reversal.

All of this is leading in some circles to a belief that America in its current state cannot last.  Recently, writer Kurt Anderson wrote a column in the New York Times about this belief entitled "Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?"in which he compared the red states and the blue states in this country to a married couple who can't stand each other but won't get a divorce.  In that article he quoted former congress member Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently said “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.”  He also cited a recent poll that found around one third of Americans think there could be a another civil war sometime soon.

Now while I think idea of another civil war happening in this country is impossible, the notion  of a peaceful separation does appeal to me; the last ten years of Trump dominance has shown that too many Americans will just never see eye to eye in  this deeply divided country. Look at California, the state I live in.  How does it benefit from being part of this nation? By itself the state has the fourth biggest economy in the world and every year it sends eighty billion more dollars more  to the federal government than it gets in spending.  Despite that, the state is a whipping boy for red state politicians, who berate its policies and ignore its economic strength,  while Trump is currently trying to overrule state environmental regulations and open the state's beautiful coastline to oil drilling.  Honestly, I would prefer California peacefully leave the country rather than have to pay so many taxes towards a federal government that hates our state when a Republican is running it.  Actually, what would be even better is if California left with Oregon and Washington state, becoming one powerful coastal country.  (Heck, if I'm dreaming, why not have them join up with Canada?).

While it's understandable to entertain these ideas, the feasibility of such a separation is essentially impossible.  There's nothing in the constitution to allow for it, so just how it would be achieved and who would draw up the new borderlines is almost impossible to consider.  Add to that the fact that not everyone in blue states is progressive and not everyone in red states is conservative, despite the winner take all nature for most states in the Electoral College.  For example, in 2024 over six million Californians voted for Trump, almost 40% of the electorate.  In Texas, almost five million voted for Kamala Harris, which was over 40% of the electorate.  Are we going to expect millions of people to just accept that their state will be leaving America to become more conservative or progressive than they are?  Add to that the fact that while red state politicians may dump on California, they know that the country needs that eighty billion dollars in tax revenue it gets from the state every year.  They don't want to lose Silicon Valley and its huge value to the country.

Yes, the sad fact of the matter is that it appears that America will just continue lurching forward, zigging and zagging from conservative to progressive, for the foreseeable future, with neither side every really getting all of what it wants.  To use Anderson's broken marriage metaphor, we can't just divorce each other and go our separate ways, we're in too deep now. 

WHERE IS THE BOTTOM WITH THE GOP?

 

I'm old enough to remember that way back in 1987, Douglas H. Ginsburg, then President Ronald Reagan's choice to be on the Supreme court,  had to drop out before he was confirmed.  Why?  Because he admitted that he smoked marijuana years earlier.  Today we live in a world where Robert F Kennedy JR will admit to once being a heroin addict and recently said that he once snorted cocaine off a toilet seat, and nobody seems to mind that he's  the Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Obviously, the pendulum has swung a long way.

This brings us to the upcoming mid term election, in which two Republican candidates have been accused of shameful behavior and yet are staying in the race.  The first is Ken Paxton, who is running for the Senate in Texas.  Paxton's history of corruption is stunning: in 2023 while he was serving as Attorney General, the Texas House of Representatives investigated him and  produced a 20 point list of impeachable offenses.  He was impeached by a landslide vote in the  majority Republican Texas House; he was only the third state government official to be impeached in Texas history, and the first in this century.   Sadly,  the Texas Senate failed to vote to remove him from office.  It should be pointed out that much of this investigation came from information brought by whistleblowers in Paxton's own office, making them hardly partisan.  Despite this, Paxton has barreled on with his campaign for the Senate, shrugging off all the charges and making false claims about his opponent, James Talarico.

And then there's Representative Max Miller from Ohio.  He has been accused of physical violence in the past by three different women; his ex wife claims that he once held a loaded gun to her head and fractured a bone  in their two year daughter.  Perhaps the most damning statement made about Miller came from a man who is both his former father in law and a fellow Republican Congressman,  Senator Bernie Moreno, who has said that Miller should retire from congress, adding that he showed “increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior.” Sadly, few Republican members of the House of Representatives have called for Miller to step down, and he appears determined to continue running, dismissing all of the allegations and calling all of his accusers liars.

It's obvious that the rot here starts at the top; both men are clearly hoping that the same way that Donald Trump shrugged aside two impeachments and 34 felony counts to eventually re win the White House  will also allow them to glide to victory.  The level to which Donald Trump has brought down the standards of the GOP in the past ten years is sickening, with decent people in the party either falling in line behind him or leaving outright like Mitt Romney.  While the Democrats are far from perfect, when similar charges were made against congressional candidate Graham Platner recently, he eventually withdrew from the race.  But now the Republican party seems to believe that just ignoring corruption or sexual misconduct charges and calling them partisan is all that's needed to win.  Just look at Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who have all done the same.

The one silver lining here is that it appears that both Paxton and Miller may lose their campaigns, especially Miller, who even the Trump administration has been reluctant to endorse publicly.  Still, the mere fact that two such corrupt men are even running for congress is a stain on the Republican party and the nation in general.  Undeniably, the last decade of Trump has severely damaged this country. 

THE CONTINUING INFLUENCE OF OIL

 

In all the media coverage of the current months long war with Iran, none of the reporting points out an interesting fact: the last three Republican Presidents have all started wars in the Middle East in which oil reserves played a factor.  Yes, the American addiction to oil has been influencing American foreign policy for a long time.  

It's not just wars that have been fought over oil; in 1949  General Motors, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, and Standard Oil of California were all found guilty of buying and dismantling the Los Angeles electric transit system to promote oil using vehicles.  In 1953 Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown by the CIA and British Intelligence at the behest of western oil companies.  He was replaced by the Shah of Iran, who ran the country with an iron hand until he was overthrown in 1979.  This caused the emergence of an even more repressive theocratic government in Iran,  which was the beginning of the American adversarial relationship with that leadership.  And, of course, for decades the oil industry has spent billions of dollars attacking the science of climate change, pushing the Republican party to be the only major political party in the entire world that denies that science.  And, to be fair, our oil addiction hasn't only been driven by Republicans; during the Bill Clinton era of the 90's, oil consumption increased in this country, and Clinton did little to fund renewable energy.

Yes, much of  America's political history in the 20th and 21st. centuries has been driven by oil. But  it's the three outright wars we have fought in the past forty years that are the most dramatic examples of that, with trillions of American tax dollars and thousands of American lives lost for those wars.  And the sad fact of the matter is that each war has been fought for worse and worse reasons.  The first Gulf War in the 1990's, however you may feel about it, was perceived by the public as a smashing success.  Perceptions aside, it did have clear goals going in that were met with a minimum of American casualties.  While the ostensible reason for the war was a retaliation against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Paul Wolfowitz, the Under Secretary of Defense, put it in blunt terms when he said "the fundamental US interest in the security of the Persian Gulf is oil."  

Then came George W Bush's far more disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq.  Although oil interests were never given as the reason for the invasion,  with false allegations of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda given, oil certainly played a factor.  Once again, Wolfowitz, serving under another Bush president, claimed that Iraqi reconstruction after the war would not be heavily funded by the US because of high Iraqi oil revenues.  Those claims would, of course, be proven wrong as the Iraq war quickly became a multi trillion dollar boondoggle, sending the second Bush's approval rating down to record lows.

And then we have the Trump war on Iran, the worst planned and ill conceived of them all. While Trump's reasons for starting the war back in February have been vague, other than a desire to be remembered as the president who "solved" the Iranian problem that has bedeviled the country since 1979, it's easy to believe that increased access to Iranian oil fields for American oil companies was a factor in his thinking.  That has, of course, blown up in his face as Iran's  shut down of the Straits of Hormuz has  hurt the entire world's economy and driven oil prices up in the US.  Trump's approval ratings now have never been worse, and while he may publicly deny this, privately even he must realize that the war has gone poorly, which explains why he tried to negotiate a recent cease fire that has, not surprisingly, already fallen through.

As the primary fuel of the 20th century, the importance of oil is undeniable, especially in the US, which still leads the world in overall oil consumption.  But now, with the global oil market again having prices soar (they also did in 2022 after Russia invaded the Ukraine), and climate change being seen as a reality by most of the world (and even most Americans), it appears that the age of oil may finally be coming to an end.  More and more countries are making the common sense switch to cheaper forms of energy like solar and wind power.  But, sadly, the US is a pariah on this issue, still clinging to fossil fuels, brought on by decades of mostly Republican policies; as we've gone from Ronald Reagan saying that trees cause pollution to Trump calling climate change "a hoax", America has been feeding its oil addiction with our tax dollars and the deaths of thousands of American service people for far too long.  It's time to end it.