THE DEBT CEILING DANCE

 President Joe Biden negotiating and then signing the debt ceiling today after it was passed by congress gives credence to his 2016 campaign's assertion that  Biden was going to be a good deal maker with congress, given his decades of experience in the Senate.  And while I'm glad that the deal was passed and the government can go back to its usual gridlock without the global economy being threatened, the whole debt ceiling drama is a manufactured, absurd dance.  

The debt ceiling is, basically, the amount of money that the country can borrow to pay off its debts; without it, government bonds, salaries, and payments to contractors would not be honored, with dire consequences for both the nation's economy and the world's.  The national debt really began to grow in the late '80's, after years of massive defense spending and tax cuts for the rich under Ronald Reagan found the nation falling into debt.  The number really climbed during the early part of the 20th century, as then President George W Bush fought two wars and created the Department of Homeland Security without raising taxes or cutting enough other spending to cover those costs. 

At the time congress passed the debt ceiling with little to no serious discussion.  But then when the Tea Party movement saw Republicans win the majority of The House of Representatives in 2010, they seized on it as a political issue, threatening then President Barack Obama with economic calamity if he didn't overturn his signature piece of legislation, The Affordable Care Act. Republicans, like Representative Paul Ryan, gave interviews in which they claimed that they were only concerned about reducing the deficit calling it an existential threat. The essential dishonestly of that stand was shown a few years later when Republicans not only voted to pass the debt ceiling when Donald Trump was President, they also, led by Ryan himself, eagerly passed Trump's massive corporate tax cut that added more to the same deficit they were so worried about when Obama was President.

While the debt ceiling that was just signed was passed by a congressional bi partisan vote, with both right and left wing politicians disappointed in it, the only reason it was a problem in the first place was Republican obstinacy; you would think that a party that only bare won the House and lost seats in the Senate in the midterms would not have been so brazen, but that's what happened.  And if they really supported lowering the deficit, they would at least consider raising taxes on the rich or lowering defense spending, but of course those possibilities were never even discussed by them.   

Now that this manufactured crisis is behind us, the question arises as to how to handle the debt ceiling in the future. Many pundits have said that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states that "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned", could be interpreted to mean that Congress cannot actually suspend the debt limit. But if Biden had tried that approach and basically done nothing about the debt, the validity of that argument would have inevitably been settled by a conservative Supreme Court who very well may have ruled against Biden, even if economic chaos was the result.  So, in the name of avoiding an unnecessary economic crash, Biden negotiated a deal, with the debt ceiling issue put off until 2025 and who knows what congress and The White House will be like by then?  Either way, the debt has been kicked down the road again, and that's mostly a good thing, although the country still needs to get serious about raising taxes on the rich in my opinion.

WILL 2024 BE ANOTHER 2016?

 After the Republican party had a weak mid term showing in 2022, it looked like perhaps the party was ready to move on from Donald Trump, given that his hand picked candidates faired poorly and his overall influence on the party hurt them in the election.  That poor showing, combined with the then ascendant rise of Florida Governor Ron De Santis as a 2024 candidate, seemed to indicate a possible change in the future of the party.

What a difference half a year can make!  The criminal charges brought against the former president regarding his Stormy Daniels pays off before the 2016 election rallied the party faithful around him, and made his primary opponents have to issue statements of support for him against the charges.  Meanwhile De Santis was in the tough position of somehow beating Trump in the primary without losing the support of his loyal base, while Trump could hammer away at him with impunity.("Ron Desanctimonious" is the typically childish and stupid nickname that Trump has picked for the governor), The result has been a huge drop in support for  De Santis in the past few months.  While he is still likely to announce his candidacy sometime soon, it already appears that De Santis's chances of winning the nomination are slim to none.  

Personally, I feel a bit torn about the whole De Santis Vs Trump thing; on the one hand, as much as I despise De Santis's politics, I think he would be a better president than Trump, given that he's not a wildly  corrupt sexual predator like Trump is.  So part of me wants De Santis to win just to put Trump in the country's rear view mirror.  But on the other hand, I think De Santis would be a stronger opponent to President Biden than Trump, given that De Santis is only 44, and he could hammer Biden on the age issue, which clearly is on the mind of voters (even a majority of Democrat voters think that Biden is too old to run again).  So part of me wants Trump to win the primary, given that Biden beat him before and should be able to  do so again.  But, that was also my thinking back in 2016 when Trump was mowing down his Republican opponents in the primaries; oh sure, I thought, the Republicans may love this guy, but there's no way he'll win in the general election.  Obviously, I was wrong, and Trump somehow winning in a 2024  Biden Vs Trump rematch certainly isn't an impossibility, especially given the Republican advantage in the Electoral College. 

Recent events have shown that there's just no limit to how low Trump can go and how much the Republican base love him for it.  Just watch his deplorable recent town hall meeting on CNN, in which the crowd cheered Trump's every lie and deflection, even as he repeatedly insulted E. Jean Carrol, the woman who had just won a 5 million dollar suit against him for defamation of character after he denied her allegations that he raped her in a dressing room back in the 90's.  (His comments were so vile that Carrol is considering suing him again!).  Although the town hall's moderator, Kaitlan Collins, vainly tried to fact correct him, the jeering crowd of his supporters helped him bully her into submission, and the night appeared to be mostly a win for Trump, who now seems to be inevitably barreling his way into the Republican nomination.  Somehow,  a twice impeached one term president facing multiple criminal charges (with more likely on the way) could be president again.  And that's a true national disgrace.

EVEN FOX NEWS HAS A BREAKING POINT

 

It took paying out a settlement for $787 million dollars and a host of damaging private messages, but Fox News finally did the right thing and fired their most popular TV host, Tucker Carlson.  While there are any number of good reasons why Carlson should have been fired in the past few years, from his racist, xenophobic comments (he once said that immigrants make America "dirtier") to his crazy, seemingly contradictory conspiracy theories (he recently edited footage of the January 6th riot to make it look the protestors were peaceful, this after previously implying that the whole thing was a false flag operation by the FBI!), to one of his top writers being fired for posting racist, sexist and homophobic comments  for years online under a pseudonym, Carlson clearly played up to white supremacist ideas without actually endorsing white supremacist groups, who got the message and flocked to his show.

He's not the first Fox News on air personality to be suddenly fired; Bill O'Reilly, who, like Carlson, was the host on the network with the highest ratings, was forced out in 2017 because of a large payment made by the network to women he had sexually harassed.  Glenn Beck, another popular host, was let go in 2015 after he called then President Barack Obama a "racist" and once joked about poisoning Nancy Pelosi.  

Still, Carlson's firing was sudden, given that he wasn't even given a chance to say goodbye on his show.  Now I wish that his firing was in reaction to his horrible comments, or the allegedly misogynistic  work environment that fostered on the show, but it really sounds like the breaking point was that, during the recent legal case that Fox was in with the Dominion voting machine company, private messages of Carlson's were revealed to the world that showed a lack of respect for Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and other network leaders.  Carlson clearly thought that, as the number one host on the network, he could express negative views about his bosses to his coworkers without risk.  Obviously, he was wrong.  I think his mistake was assuming that conservative audiences cared more about personalities than content.   Carlson was the number one host on Fox News because he was the one who pushed his hateful rhetoric to the brink of acceptability. (The New York Times ran a heavily researched study of his show in April of 2022 that revealed that many of his stories got their start in white supremacist chat rooms).  Who he was didn't really matter to the viewers, it was what he said.

Now while I would love nothing more than for Fox News to change its tone and do more actual reporting and less crazy commentary about the dangers of "woke" M and M's, I'm not getting my hopes up.  Yes, I'm happy that Carlson got the boot, just as I was happy when O'Reilly and Beck did too, but did those two earlier firings change the nature of Fox News?  No.  The simple truth of right wing media is that there will always be someone who will tell their mostly white, mostly old and mostly male audience what they want to hear along with conspiracy theories and ideas that will make them mad, even when those ideas don't make sense.  (A right wing relative of mine once assured me that the Green New Deal would have banned airplanes!).  In other words, Carlson may be gone, but the sexism, bigotry, homophobia and xenophobia he spewed can always be spewed by somebody else.

Hating the One Percent

“Gender-affirming care is medically-necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people.”-The American Medical Association

 It was one of the more defining moments of Trump's 2016 campaign: during a question and answer period with an audience, one middle aged white man stood up and said that "we have a problem in this country called Muslims", he then accused then President Barack Obama of being one, and then went even further by saying that there are "training camps growing, where they want to kill us."  In typical Trump fashion, he failed to correct the man about his crazed conspiratorial beliefs, and instead remarked  that "A lot of people are saying that."  While his inability to correct this man was deplorable, why was he asking such an extreme question in the first place?  

Because during  Obama's presidency, the right wing media, building on beliefs that the president himself was a Muslim, began spreading lies about how Muslim Americans were going to impose Muslim Sharia law in the US.  These fears were fanned by the conservative think tank the Center for Security Policy, which promoted lies about Muslims "infiltrating" the US government and imposing their beliefs on the rest of us.  

The was, not surprisingly, based on an  argument that clearly misunderstood what  Sharia law is (as New York Times investigative reporter Andrea Elliott put it in a 2011 interview, "One of the key points that is missing in this debate is that for Muslims living in non-Muslim countries like the United States, there is a broad agreement that Shariah requires them to abide by the laws of the land in exchange for the right to worship freely."),  but none of that mattered.  Sharia law was a scary sounding term that could whip up the conservative base into a frenzy when it was repeated on right wing media outlets and that's what happened.

The result of that frenzy was a spate of anti Sharia laws that, by 2014, were passed in Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee.  Along with that fact that there were no Muslim officials ready to go on the record as saying that America must abide by Sharia law, there was another ridiculous part of this whole thing: Muslims only make up one percent of the country.  The idea that somehow one percent of the country is going to pass laws that the other ninety nine percent don't want is, of course, absurd, but then fear is often irrational.  

Having dealt with that "threat", the right wing media recently turned their gaze to a new enemy: trans people.  It's hard to say exactly when conservatives decided to single out trans people, but demonizing them has become the new animating force on the right. And once again, the fear of trans people "taking over" has been absurdly exaggerated, with trans people only making up around one percent of the population. More importantly, polls have shown that the vast majority of trans people are glad to have transitioned despite all the hatred and discrimination coming their way.  They are, simply, just trying to live their best lives. 

And while things like puberty blockers may be new, the concept of people not falling into societal gender norms is thousands of years old; as rabbi Elliot Kukla pointed out in a recent New York Times editorial, ancient  writings in Judaism spoke of four different genders.  While in the modern world, The American Academy of Family Physicians  states that it "recognizes that diversity in gender identity and expression is a normal part of the human existence and does not represent pathology. The AAFP supports access to gender-affirming care for gender-diverse patients, including children and adolescents."

 While those anti Sharia state laws from the last decade were terrible, they were also purely symbolic; taking a stand against something that didn't even exist as a way to score political points.  The current anti Trans bills however, which have been passed in 10 states recently, are hurting real people.  Often, the same Republicans who cry for parent's rights when it comes to banning books in schools, are all for taking away the rights of parents who support their children's desire to use puberty blockers and other gender affirming care.  Sadly, this is in a community where suicide rates are higher than normal.

The crucial element in the success of this fear mongering is that the right wing media and politicians are spreading fear of groups of people that most Americans have never met.  Put simply, it's easy to demonize people that you don't know.  And most people (especially people  in rural areas) have never met a Muslim or trans person.  So when right wing media figures spread hatred of them, it's sadly easy for them to believe it.

While most polls show most Americans support equal rights for trans people, and that, along with the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association  also support gender affirming care,  but this issue excites the Republican base.   And that goes double for  Fundamentalist Christians who are still smarting from losing on gay marriage 8 years ago, and that  means that it will not go away as a political issue any time soon. Unfortunately , it appears that the spinning wheel of conservative hatred is now set on trans people, and it will stay there until there is another one percent of the population for to spread hatred of.

THE FIRST TRUMP INDICTMENT

 

Well, it's official!  Today, for the first time ever, criminal indictment charges were made against Donald Trump, making him the first ex president to ever be indicted in American history.  And the amazing thing is that there are probably more on the way.

There's a certain inevitably to this: anyone who has read honest media reports about Trump for the past decade knows that he is a man who has always lived on the edge of legality, who acts (and talks!) more like a mob boss than a businessman or politician.  And like a mob boss who avoids prison while his underlings take the fall for him, Trump is surrounded by criminals who often have been caught committing crimes on his behalf.  From Trump's former lawyer and convicted criminal Micheal Cohen, who's hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election started this whole mess for Trump, to former campaign advisor George Papadopoulos who was convicted of lying to the FBI, to Trump's long time accountant Allen Weisselberg who was recently convicted of tax fraud, some of the closest people to Trump have broken the law.  It's hard to believe that he himself would never  face some kind of charges.

The interesting thing about this indictment is that it may be the weakest of the 4 potential criminal charges that may be brought against him.  To get a felony conviction here, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will have to prove to a jury that Trump both falsified business records while violating campaign finance laws. While this may be difficult, clearly Bragg thinks that he has enough evidence to make a case.  We'll see.

The second possible criminal charge against Trump, (and the one that seems to be the  strongest),  is the one coming from the state of Georgia.  As we all now know from a recorded conversation, after losing the election, Trump called former Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to "find" him votes.  He even implied that Raffensperger himself might face some kind of charge if he didn't find those votes.  The fact that this call came after the state had already recounted the votes twice without changing the outcome meant nothing to Trump, and his behavior certainly seems criminal here, even if was still the president when he made that call.

Then there's a Justice Department investigation over whether Trump's stirring up of the mob on January 6th counts as a criminal incite to riot.  This is a bit tricky, since freedom of speech is important and Trump did use the word "peacefully" while addressing the crowd.  On the other hand, he had the power to stop the riot while it was going on and he delayed doing that for hours.  He even sent out a tweet condemning Mike Pence as the riot was taking place, further inflaming the crowd.  Plus there was testimony during the House of Representatives's January 6th investigation that said that he wanted metal detectors removed from the rally because the protestors were  "not there to hurt me.”

Finally, there's the stolen document scandal, in which Trump's refusal to turn over classified documents after leaving the White House prompted an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that resulted in over a hundred secret documents being found.  The crazy thing about this possible crime is that it reveals just how immature and downright stupid Trump is: he was told that he needed to turn over all the secret documents he had taken with him after leaving the White House, and he only returned some of them, leaving the rest in a closet in his resort/home.  All he had to do was hand them over, but, like a small child crying finders keepers, he refused, seeming to believe that any document he got as president was his forever.  If this is the crime that finally nails Trump, he'll be guilty of criminal stupidity.   

Inevitably, there's some worry in the media that this unprecedented step will galvanize Trump's supporters into some kind of violence, and while that fear is understandable, there is no doubt that it  right thing to do.  Every American who commits a crime should face charges for it, no matter who they are.

DO CONSERVATIVES WANT POWER MORE?

 

Back in 1992, "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", a book that intended to improve communications between genders, was released.  The central theme of the book was that men and women inherently saw the world so differently that it was often hard for them to understand each other.  Personally, I think a new version of that book could be released now, entitled "Conservatives are from Mars, Progressives are from Venus" because of the deep, often fundamentally different ways that conservatives and progressives see the world.  As anyone who's tried to argue with someone with different political views, agreement, especially in the age of Trump, is hard to find.

One big difference I see in the two different political mindsets is that conservatives seem to assume that power is their right; with the conservative image being one of the strong, aggressive person (usually a man) in charge, their assumption of power seems baked in.   Imagine if there were 2 recent Democratic presidents that won the White House while losing the popular vote.  The howls of "illegitimate!" from the right wing media would de deafening.  But when it happened to George W Bush and Donald Trump, they both swaggered into office claiming that they had a mandate.  

This lust for power can be seen in recent presidential elections dating back to 1968.  In that election, we now know that Richard Nixon sabotaged peace talks to end the war in Vietnam, fearing that an end to the war would help his Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey.   Add to that the coded racist language that Nixon used to win over white voters, known as the "Southern Strategy" and other dirty tricks his campaign pulled, and you can see that winning power meant more to him than anything, even when it meant prolonging a war.

Skipping over the presidency of Gerald Ford (who was, of course, appointed not elected) and we get to the 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan.  Although Reagan's 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter was seen as a landslide, it had been quite close until negations to bring back the American hostages in Iran fell through, making Carter look weak.  Recently, Ben Barnes, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, came forward to admit that he and other Republicans went on a trip to the Middle East before the election with one purpose: to make sure that the hostages didn't come home before the election. They did this by visiting Middle Eastern cities and telling regional leaders that Iran would get a better deal with Reagan.  While this may not have been as despicable as Nixon's extending the Vietnam war, it still was unconscionable, as it essentially kept the hostages in prolonged bondage to win the election for Reagan.  Add to that Reagan's continued use of Nixon's Southern Strategy (he announced his candidacy in the state of Mississippi, voicing his support of "state's rights", not far from where some civil rights workers were killed in the 60's while trying to register black voters), and we see another power hungry Republican President open to try anything to win the White House.

Eight years later, George Bush's won without sinking as low as the Nixon and Reagan campaigns did.  But he still resorted to an openly racist ad campaign by linking the furlough of felon Willie Horton with his opponent Micheal Dukakis, turning around the early polls that showed him trailing Dukakis.

2000, of course, brought the whole fiasco in Florida.  One of the uglier parts of that state's highly contested vote count was the reports that hundreds, perhaps even thousands of African American voters were turned away at the polls, told that their names were not on the voting lists.  We know now that they were victims of a voter purge done by the state to remove ineligible felons from the voting lists that also removed eligible voters.  The level of corruption in this election was such that George W Bush's brother, Jeb, was governor of Florida when all the madness occurred, and that the Supreme Court, which had members appointed by Bush's father, openly interfered in the election by  stepping in and ending all the recounts to hand the election to Bush.

And then there was the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump.  We now know that, even if the Trump campaign did not criminally collaborate with Russia during the election, that country definitely did interfere in ways both big (releasing thousands of hacked Democratic emails) and small (false Facebook accounts posting made up stories) to tip the election in Trump's favor.  On top of that, we also know that the story of an  alleged affair that Trump had with porn star Stormy Daniels in 2006 was killed before the election with a payoff made to Daniels by Trump's then personal lawyer, Micheal Cohen, who went to jail because of that payoff.  (Whether Trump will also be charged with a crime over it remains to be seen). 

There you have it, a brief history of conservative presidents using underhanded and sometimes criminal means to bring themselves to power.  And I haven't even talked about the means used by them and other conservative politicians to maintain that power, from passing laws specifically designed to keep black voters from voting, to gerrymandering voting districts, to opposing any limits on campaign financing, the modern Republican party has found a way to win elections even without getting a majority of voters.  Which means that, looking back at this history, I don't think I can see a future that will get any better, not when the next generation of  conservatives will continue to assume that power is their birthright.

WHY WE NEED BIG GOVERNMENT

 Bashing so called big government has been a go to talking point for right wing media for years.  Really, just putting the two words together conjures an  imposing and frightening image of a government imposing its will on the people like something out of Orwell's 1984 novel. (Or perhaps something by Ayn Rand).

But the boogeyman of big government is actually a lot less scary than what can happen when there's a lack of government in the form of regulations.  Recently, a train derailment in the small town of East Palestine Ohio released nearly 116,000 gallons of vinyl chloride.  The effects of this on the local people are potentially devastating, with possible health issues lasting for years.  While there has been the usual amount of finger pointing from both sides of the political fence, about this,one thing is clear: a train carrying such dangerous chemicals should have had more safety regulations.  Not surprisingly, such regulations were put in place by the Barack Obama administration and then were later repealed by the Donald Trump administration.  Now to be fair, it's unsure at this time if the Obama era regulations would have prevented the crash, but what it does show is how much corporate profits are often put over the safety of the American public.

A similar situation occurred recently with the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank; once again, the Obama administration had passed a  series of regulations to avoid the same kind of banking crisis that tanked the economy back in 2008, and once again those regulations were weakened by the Trump administration in 2018, sowing the seeds for a once prosperous bank (SVB was  the 16th biggest bank in the country) to fall into ruin.

The frustrating thing about regulations is that there's no way to know just how many are needed; as these two examples show, some regulations are necessary, even in a free market.  But, as every Californian can tell you, the high speed rail train between San Francisco and Los Angeles that voters supported in 2008 has been so stymied by cost overruns and, yes, regulations, that it may never get built.

So again, there's no easy answer here, but to me, the real problem in this country isn't the amount of regulations, it's the lack of them (and the enforcement of them), which has brought on by the huge influence of money and lobbying in our government.  Ever since the Supreme Court ruled that money equals speech in the Citizen's United case of 2010, more and more money has spent influencing (or you might call it bribing) the decisions of politicians, resulting in a country that is less safe overall.   When you compare America to other industrialized nations, it's clear that we generally have air, food and water, that is less clean than theirs, and we are more likely to be exposed to the kind of dangerous accident that occurred in Ohio.  An untamed free market can be a dangerous thing.