CAN BIDEN SURVIVE THIS DEBATE?

 

The first televised presidential debate took place in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy.  People listening to the debate on the radio thought that Nixon did better, but people watching on TV preferred Kennedy.  The reason given was that Nixon refused makeup beforehand and looked pasty on the screen.  And after seeing tonights first debate, it's possible future historians may see  Joe Biden's sore throat as the equivalent of Nixon's lack of makeup. 

I tuned into tonight's debate with cautious optimism: there seemed to be some momentum towards Biden in the past few weeks, with Trump's lead shrinking after he was convicted on 34 felony counts.  But within minutes of the debate starting my heart sank: the sore throat giving Biden a scratchy voice hurt, but even worse were the moments were he seemed to lose his train of thought, which Trump pounced on.

Although Biden did seem to get better as the debate went on,  it didn't make up for his earlier stumbles.  And he seemed to have to no counterpunches to Trump's absurd verbal charges.  He looked, weak, feeble and yes, old.  The one thing he needed to show was that he has enough vigor to get through 4 more years, and he didn't clear that bar.

Trump for his part ran through his usual list of grievances, lies and boasts.  He shrugged off the felony charges and accused Biden of being a felon at one point.  He ducked questions and moved each one to attacks on Biden concerning the border and inflation.  As horrible as he is, he came across as stronger, certainly more energetic, and yes, presidential.  

Now, presidents have recovered from bad debate performances before: Barack Obama clearly lost to Mitt Romney in 2012 in their first debate, but Obama turned it around in later debates.  In 1984 Ronald Reagan  lost his train of thought and rambled through a debate, and he too turned it around in later debates and won handily.  But I don't see Biden, in a race as close as this one is, recovering from this disaster.  

Is it too late for Biden to step down?  Technically, no, he doesn't accept the nomination officially until the Democratic National Convention in a few months.  But there's no way for him to pushed out, he has to step down on his own, and his clearly doesn't want to do that.

My hope is that his aides sit him down tomorrow and plainly tell him that he lost, show him the clips from the debate that made him look weak, and say that he has no chance of winning.  Perhaps that will change his mind.  Finding another candidate would be tricky for the Democrats, but this debate was a mess, and Trump, who was already leading, will have the wind on his back after this.  Four more years of Trump is starting to look likely.

THE BIBLE STORY YOU PROBABLY HAVEN'T HEARD

 

Recently the state of Louisiana passed a law requiring that all public school classrooms  post the biblical ten commandments on the wall.  After he signed the law, Governor Jeff Landry said“ If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”  What I find hypocritical here is that conservatives like Landry will use the bible as justification for their actions, and then reject specific passages from that bible when they are confronted with them.  For example, let's take a look at how Moses himself enforced one of those commandments from the King James version of the bible, Numbers chapter 15 verse 32-36: 

 Now while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day. And those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron, and to all the congregation.  They put him under guard, because it had not been explained what should be done to him.Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man must surely be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.”  So, as the Lord commanded Moses, all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him with stones, and he died.

Yes, that's god working through Moses saying that a man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath should be put to death.  Now, obviously, Landry wouldn't pass a law giving the death penalty to anyone gathering sticks on the wrong day.  But if he's going to use Moses as an example of a righteous law giver, why should he reject the way Moses carried out that law?  If the argument is that times have changed since then, why use Moses as an example at all?  As is so often the case in this country, politicians quote the parts of the bible that they like and ignore the rest, assuming that very few people have actually read the whole thing.  So passages from the book of Leviticus condemning male homosexuality are quoted, and other passages sentencing women found not be to a virgin on their wedding night to death, are not.  

While supporters of the law have shrugged off objections by pointing out that the paper with the commandments in the classroom can't be more than 11 by 14 inches large, and can therefore be easily ignored by students who don't want to look, it's clear what's going on here.  This isn't just about this one law, this is about states testing the boundaries of a conservative Supreme Court to allow religion in public school classrooms.  If the conservatives win here, and there's a good chance that they will, they won't stop: soon there will be laws mandating crosses in classrooms, and before you know it we'll be back to debating whether or not "Intelligent Design" can be taught along with evolution in public schools.  This is despite the fact that that gussied up version of creationism was thrown out of public schools years ago. Sadly, the desire of conservative Christians to impose their beliefs on others and officially proclaim America as a Christian nation never seems to end, even as more and more Americans every year say that they have no religious affiliation.  

Much like the conservative desire to allow school vouchers that would use public funds to pay for children to go to religious private schools, putting more religious imagery  into  public schools is all about trying to influence the next generation of Americans into following their conservative beliefs.  Much like the debate around so called "critical race theory", conservatives want their values fed to the children of America so that they can stay in power for as long as possible.  The youth are the future, and they want to control them.

TRUMP'S WORST DAY AS PRESIDENT?

 

While the horrifying thought of Donald Trump returning to the White House continues to be a possibility, it doesn't hurt to look back at the chaotic 4 years of the Trump presidency.  There were many terrible days during the Trump administration: from  his possibly criminal behavior  on January 6th to his  offensive defense of white supremacist protestors in Charlottesville (remember "wonderful people on both sides"?), to the utter stupidity of him suggesting that injecting bleach could stop Covid.  

While all of those days were awful, I think today marks the 4 year anniversary of the absolute worst day of the Trump presidency.  On this day he held the first public rally of his 2020 campaign.  The rally itself was unimportant: it featured his usual ridiculous talking points about Covid, or what he offensively referred to as "kung flu".  But it was the context of the rally that made it so terrible: it was held at the BOK center in Tulsa Oklahoma, an indoor stadium.  And while masks were available, they were also optional.  It was the kind of gathering of thousands of people in one place that would have normally been banned during the dark days of the pandemic in 2020, long before the availability of a vaccine.

But Trump's enormous ego and desire to stand again in front of a cheering crowd was so great that he clearly didn't care that he was threatening the lives of his own supporters (not to mention other people that they would come in contact with).  While whether or not there was a surge of cases in Tulsa after the rally is a matter of some debate (different studies say different things), there simply was no good reason for Trump to have held this rally other than his incredible need for constant praise.

The perfect example of this can be found in the sad story of Trump supporter (and former presidential candidate) Herman Caine.  Caine attended the rally in Tulsa, and then planned to attend another Trump rally on July 4th.  On July 1st. Caine tweeted out" Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!".  But Caine did not attend that second rally, because he was hospitalized for Covid on July 2nd and died before the month ended.  While it is possible that Caine contracted the virus somewhere other than the rally in Tulsa, it's certainly likely that attending an event with thousands of screaming people, few of whom were wearing masks, is what eventually killed him.  

For the record, Trump did make some public condolences about Caine's death on July 30th, the day he died.  But the next day he  just shrugged off the distinct possibility that Caine's attendance at the rally was when he first got Covid.  As always, Trump sees all other people as lesser beings; surely his rally was more important to him than the life of Caine and any other people who caught Covid at that rally.  And sure enough, a few months later he would boast that there were "no problems" from his rallies, essentially forgetting the death of Caine entirely.  In many ways Caine's sad story echoes that of former Governor Chris Christie, who nearly died from Covid that he is convinced he got from Trump while he was helping him prepare for a presidential debate.  And in typical fashion, Christie claims that Trump called him when he was sick, and his only concern was whether Christie would tell other people if  Trump was the one that gave Covid to him!

While there are many examples of Trump's psychopathic behavior over the years, I think that holding that rally four years ago was the absolute low point; a completely unnecessary gathering that could have been a super spreader event.  How anyone can vote for this man who clearly has so little concern for anyone other than him is beyond me.

TO JAIL OR NOT TO JAIL

 One of the frustrating things about politics in this century is how, every time a Republican presidential candidate wins the presidency while losing the popular vote, conservatives loudly say that "That's the system we have, accept the result."  But recently, after Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in a court of law by a jury of peers, as our judicial system  dictates, virtually the entire Republican party has echoed his baseless assertion that the whole system was rigged.  It's obviously hypocritical to say that a system only works when it benefits your side, but that's where America is politically in 2024.  And that argument about a rigged legal system gets even weaker in light of President Joe Biden's son Hunter's recent conviction under that same legal system.

Hypocrisy aside, the question that now awaits is just what kind of penalty Trump should pay when he is sentenced by Judge Juan Merchan on July 11th.  Penalties include fees, community service, probation and yes, even jail time (with a maximum of 4 years).  

But should Trump go to jail? On the one hand, he's an old man, this is his  first criminal  offense, and it's a nonviolent crime.  On the other hand, he's been found guilty on all 34 counts, he's clearly shown no remorse for the crime he's been legally found to have committed, and he violated the gag order put on him  by the judge ten times during the trial.  Plus,  he would not be the first criminal convicted of falsifying business records in the state of New York to get jail time.

I'm not quite sure how I myself feel about this; Trump in an orange prison outfit is an amusing image   to me, and I am sure that the man has committed criminal offenses in the past that he's gotten away with (it's not hard to believe those 26 women who have accused him of sexual assault or rape).  So it is satisfying to think that man who has seemingly gotten away with so many terrible things over the years is finally facing jail time.  But there is every reason to believe that it would push his already insanely loyal supporters over the edge into some kind of act of violence, perhaps something even on the level of what happened on January 6th.

But it's not just his fervent supporters I'm worried about; since we would be entering completely uncharted territory with a presidential candidate behind bars (and yes, he could still legally run while incarcerated), it's impossible to gauge exactly how the American public would react to such a thing.  While there's a good chance that many swing voters might turn away from him in disgust, it's also possible that they might believe his lies about the system being rigged and see his incarceration as a political act master minded by Joe Biden, even if it's not true.  It seems crazy, but since American politics has been completely changed since Trump took that escalator ride back in 2016, we have no way of knowing whether jail time would help or hurt his campaign.  

Given that, I am leaning towards idea of Trump having to do community service instead of prison time: Trump with a pair of tongs picking up garbage off the highway would be such a humiliating thing for a man so obsessed with his own perceived strength that I think it would weaken his image and his campaign, while actual prison time could have the opposite effect.  But, again, who knows?  I remember thinking that Trump was going to be forced out of politics when he said that John McCain wasn't a real war hero, so what do I know?  

GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS

 

Today's jury finding in the Donald Trump hush money trial was both surprising and somewhat inevitable: on the one hand, he has become the first former president in American history to be found guilty of a felony (actually, its 34 felony counts, to be exact).  This is truly a historical moment, and proof that our judicial system can work even against the most powerful of people.

On the other hand, its's not shocking to anyone who's been following the trial; the evidence of Trump's illegal payoffs were numerous, from signed checks to recorded conversations discussing them.  Even if the jury were to disregard the testimony of admitted liar and thief Michael Cohen,  Trump's former fixer turned informer, there was just too much evidence to ignore.  As Mitt Romney recently put it, "You don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you"!

Because this will be Trump's first conviction and the crime isn't violent,  he probably will be put on probation instead of serving actual jail time when his sentencing arrives in July.  Still, this is a very big moment, as the words "convicted felon" can now be put in front of his name instead of "former president".  And for news media followers like me, it's very satisfying to see a man who has danced on the edge of criminality for years without consequence finally get what's coming to him.  While two other recent financial court decisions against him recently (one for defamation of character, the other for fraud) must have stung, nothing hits harder than a felony conviction.

The big question now is how will this change the presidential race, given that recent polls have Trump beating President Biden in several swing states? I really hope that this conviction will be the final straw for Republicans who will, at long last, turn against his lies and corruption.  But I doubt it.  Not when the right wing media will scream that the whole trial was rigged.  Not when the party has stood by him after the access Hollywood tape in 2016, his 2 impeachments as president and his continued lies about the 2020 election and January 6th.  Trump's son is already trying to spin this as good for his campaign, a frightening thought.

But even if he does hold onto the party base, will swing voters, many of whom have not been paying attention to the campaign or this trial, finally wake up?  I am cautiously optimistic that the majority of Americans not firmly in the Trump camp, the ones who voted him out last time, will realize that even though  Joe Biden is old and on the wrong side of some issues for you, he's no convicted criminal.  

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  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're 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.