A MIXED REACTION TO A BRUTAL INVASION

 Last Thursday, Russian leader Vladimir Putin ordered his military to carry out a full on invasion of the country of Ukraine.  This unprovoked attack on a country that has been democratic since 1991 is a barbaric act that could result in the death of hundreds of thousands of people on both sides.  Putin's stated motivations are absurdly false, from claiming that the Ukraine is run by "neo-Nazis" to saying that NATO is threatening to destroy Russia.  His real motivation seems to be rooted in his anger at the breaking apart of the Soviet Union during the 90's.

The good news is that Putin has only strengthened the alliances of the NATO countries, and he may be in for a tougher fight than he expected because a strong majority of Ukrainians are opposed to the invasion.  He also may discover that occupying Ukraine after invading could prove to be difficult, just like the US found out in Iraq.  Even installing a puppet dictator would be met with strong resistance by the Ukrainian people.   And the war may not be popular with the Russian people, even with government propaganda running the media, as thousands of Russians have already taken to the streets to protest the invasion, a bold move given the country's often brutal crackdowns on such protests.

Putin's act of aggression shows the danger of one country being run entirely on the whims of one leader; he can lie about his reasons, or over how popular the attack is with the Russian people, but at the end of the day this is Putin's war for him and him alone.  Democracy may be messy system, and it often makes it  difficult to get things done, but it still requires more than one leader's decision to go to war.  There's a reason why there has never been a democracy that invaded another democracy.

President Joe Biden has responded to the attacks by arming the Ukrainians and slapping sanctions against Russia, while also gathering together American allies to do the same.   The Republican response has been mixed, to say the least.  Many of them have both agreed with Biden's actions while trying to say that his response has been "weak".  

The right wing media has been even crazier: just after the invasion, Tucker Carlson, the number one rated talk show host on Fox News, asked a series of odd questions that implied that he was angrier at American liberals and China (“Has Putin ever called me a racist?", "Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?”) than at Putin.  Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon on his right wing podcast said that it was“not our fight” and praised Putin for being "anti-woke."

And then there's Trump himself, who has always had an admiration for Putin.  Recently he said in a speech at Mara Lago that Putin was "pretty smart" and “He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions, taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.”  Yes, the former president is describing a military attack that could leave thousands of innocent people dead as "just walking right in".  It's obvious why Trump can't bring himself to criticize Putin, and it's not just that the Russian government helped him in the 2016 election.  Clearly Trump responds to strongman dictators who rule their countries with an iron hand, because he wishes that he could have run our country the same way.   Although a sociopath like Trump cannot truly care about any other person, he does respect power, and he sees the fear that Putin and North Korean leader Kim-Jong Un have over their underlings and wants that to.  The fact that Trump praises a leader who carries out an unprovoked invasion of a neighboring country is reason enough to hope that he never occupies the White House again.  But who knows?  The sanctions against Russia will more than likely wind up hurting the American economy, which would help Trump if he runs again in 2024.  As horrifying as it might sound, Putin might once again help Trump win the presidency. 

A DIZZYING DOUBLE STANDARD

 

Boris Johnson is in big trouble.  The British Prime Minister, it has recently been disclosed, held at least twelve different large parties at a time when when his country was under a severe pandemic lockdown.  The extent of these violations of his own government's rules is so big that it may lead to a police investigation.   The resulting outrage in England has caused Johnson's approval rating to plummet, with fully two thirds of the country wishing he would step down.  Even his own conservative Tory party has also turned on him, with the Guardian reporting that 48% of voters who supported him in 2019 would like for him to, as former conservative cabinet minister David Davis put it, “In the name of God, go.”

Obviously what Johnson did was extremely stupid, and while he has resisted calls to remove himself from office, it's clear that his standing as both a prime minister and a Tory have been diminished.  While I can certainly understand the anger at Johnson, I can't help but wish that some of that same outrage at a leader's corruption and incompetence could find its way to the US.

When you compare what Johnson did with how Donald Trump  handled the pandemic when he was president, it's seems clear to me that Trump's response was far worse.  Yes, Johnson holding parties during a lockdown was bad, but was it as bad as Trump's initial dismissal of the pandemic ("a liberal hoax"), and then his downplaying of its severity("it will disappear when the weather gets warmer")?  Or when Trump openly pushed for people to try hydroxychloroquine as a cure for covid, despite there being no research showing that it worked?  And his even  more absurd comments about injecting bleach? And then there was the rally that he held in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June of 2020, during the height of the pandemic, in which thousands of unmasked rally attendees sat  next to each other and screamed.  Add to that the fact we now know that our former president tested positive for covid and chose not to tell anyone for over a week, exposing hundreds of people to it, and it's clear that the Tory party's ability to see incompetent corruption for what it is in their leader is a quality that the Republican party lacks.

But then Trump's terrible reaction to Covid-19 is old news.  What about his more recent comments?  At a rally last Sunday, Trump openly showed sympathy for the January 6th. rioters who are currently in jail, and he promised that if he runs and wins the White House in 2024, he will pardon them.  So, the Republican party, the party that has successfully branded itself as the party of law and order, is still supporting a former president who wants to pardon rioters who attacked and beat police officers, stole their shields to smash in windows, and invaded the floors of congress.  How can the Republican party attack Democrats for wanting to "defund the police", (a stand that only a handful of  Democrats have actually supported), while cheering for Trump's call to pardon the violent insurrectionists?  

To be fair, there has been some criticism on the right for Trump, with Senator  Lindsay Graham saying that his pardon comments were inappropriate.  But even those comments were weak, and Trump immediately responded in an interview, saying that Graham "doesn't know what the hell he's talking about".  Anyone who's followed Graham and Trump for the past few years knows how this will end, with Graham going to Mar-o-Lago to beg Trump for forgiveness, followed by him announcing that if Trump wins in 2024, he can pardon as many police beating protestors as he wants to.   

A few months ago I wrote how angry I was at how the Democratic party's rightful rebuke of Andrew Cuomo for his multiple sexual harassment charges compared to the Republican party's ignoring the 26 charges of sexual assault or rape made against Trump.  And here we are again. I hate to be a broken record when it comes to Trump, but I just continue to be amazed at how he gets away with saying and doing the most horrible and incompetent things, with his command of the Republican party never really wavering.  I wish that  the Tory party's reaction to Boris Johnson could happen here with the Republican party and Trump, but then Trump has never really been  a politician like Johnson, instead he's a unique figure, equal parts showman, con artist, mob boss, cult figure, and  white nationalist leader.   While he currently  is under investigation for both his business interests and his attempts to steal the 2020 election while he was president, I fear that he will walk away unscathed from these charges just as he has so many times before.  Putting it bluntly, there is no bottom with Trump and the Republican party, and the possibility of him re winning the White House in 2024 is terrifyingly real.  

BETTER BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

 

The pandemic has taught us all one thing: child poverty in America could be eliminated easily.  The cash payments of $300 per child that were sent out by the Joe Biden administration as part of last year's stimulus bill, has, according to researchers at Columbia University, kept around 3.8 million children out of poverty, a nearly 30 percent reduction in the child poverty rate. (It also helped the economy). Sadly, the payments recently  ran out and Biden's Bill Back Better Bill, which would have reinstated them, is dead for now in congress.

Despite the money helping so many families in a time of need, most Republicans and some conservative Democrats opposed it  by implying (in a typically classist and racist attitude) that it would discourage work, or even worse, parents might  spend the money  on illegal drugs.   (Personally, I wish that every time the Republicans pass a huge tax cut for the rich, they would consider that a lot of that money is going to wealthy stock brokers, who's passion for snorting cocaine is legendary!).

But, putting the behavior of adults aside, what about the children themselves?  Does giving money to parents really benefit their  children?  A recent study that compared poor babies who's families  received $330 a month to ones that didn't found a definite increase in cognitive development for the babies in the families that got the money.  

Is this really so surprising?  As someone who has taken classes in childhood development, I can attest that the single most important thing for a baby's brain development is that it have parents and caregivers that bond with it, interact with it, respond to its needs and play with it.  So it makes sense that parents having a little more money will have less stress and more time to positively build an emotional relationship with their babies.  

Anyone who has ever interacted with a healthy, normal baby can understand this; when you look at a baby and smile and coo at it, the baby will usually smile back, encouraging you to continue.  You feel good for making the baby smile, and the baby also feels good from getting your attention.  These kind of simple interactions are crucial to a baby's development.  I once had a teacher in a child development class who told us about an orphanage in England during World War II where babies were cared for by nuns, who were too overworked to do anything with the babies other than feeding them and changing them.  Every baby from that orphanage grew up to have mental deficiencies, a sad example of how important affectionate interactions are for babies.

I think that this can be extended beyond the years of infancy; it's no secret that children in the US have lower test scores in math and science on average than children in most other industrialized nations.  While there are a number of reasons for this, one factor may be that the US is also the only industrialized nation to not have mandatory paid parental leave, robbing millions of babies of that crucial early developmental period with their parents that can, as this study clearly seems to show, give them a extra brain boost in  later life.  

And, and I always like to point out when discussing social spending programs, reducing child poverty benefits not only poor families but also society as a whole.  Children who grow up without the negative effects of poverty are going to be better educated and get better jobs, improving the economy for everyone, and they're less likely to wind up in prison, which we all pay for with our taxes.

Hopefully, the money for parents will be written into a new form of the Build Back Better bill sometime soon, and really I think it's just the tip of the iceberg of the changes that should be made to improve the lives of poor children in this country (How about national daycare?  Paid parental leave?  Increased per pupil spending in low income neighborhood public schools?).   Although these programs may seem expensive, they are just a drop in the bucket compared to other spending this country does (the cash for the parents program cost 80 billion dollars in one year, around a tenth of what we spend on defense), and they improve the country as a whole.  Put simply, the richest country in the world shouldn't punish children for being born into poverty.

BIDEN SUFFERS ANOTHER BLOW

President Joe Biden recently gave a fiery speech pushing for the voting rights bill that just passed the house to be also be passed by the Senate, which would require changing the rules on the filibuster.  His speech was strong, he invoked the civil rights movement and compared conservative resistance to the bill to the segregationists of old.  But some civil rights leaders refused to attend the speech, thinking that Biden had ignored their concerns for too long, or that the bill didn't go far enough.  Meanwhile, moderates and political pundits wondered why he bothered to give the speech at all, given that both Senator Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have said that they oppose changing the filibuster rule, dooming the bill.  Yes, for all its powerful rhetoric,  Biden's speech feels in many ways like the first year of his presidency: nice ideas, but impossible to get done in the current political climate.

 Biden has been president for almost exactly one year, and right now he seems mired in inability and incompetence.   It's a shame, because he started off well: he pushed for vaccinations, passed a stimulus bill, and stood ready to reap the political rewards of a recovering economy.  Instead, he has run into a number of problems: two different variants of the virus and a  stubbornly vaccine resistant populace (America currently stands at 63% vaccinated, the lowest of any industrialized nation according to the New York Times), inflation caused by a supply chain slowdown, and Manchin and Sinema's willingness to stab him in the back and kill his agenda in the Senate.  And while he has been able to appoint numerous judges and pass an infrastructure bill recently, Manchin's killing of the  Build Back Better Bill and his and Sinema's killing of the voting rights bill have left Biden, who ran as a former Senator who knew how to get things passed, look weak.

Things have looked so bad for Biden that a recent polling memo release attacked a poll that showed his approval rating at 33%, saying that it was really more like 43%.  Hardly something to brag about!

The depressing reality of this is that the Republican party has been swarming election boards in swing states with Trump loyalists who believe his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.  Once in power, these board members very well may find ways to reject vote counts in future elections.  Meaning that if Trump were to run again in 2024, state election boards may be able to swing votes in his direction through creative counting and discounting of the votes.  In other words, they've moved beyond voter repression into throwing out votes after they have been cast.  This kind of despicable, undemocratic election rigging is a horrifying possibility, and so far the Democratic party has done little to stop it.

Things get even worse when you consider the now very likely possibility of the Republican party retaking both the house and the senate next year.  Believe me, if Manchin and Sinema have been driving you crazy, wait until people like Margery Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are on investigative committees in the house.

Which brings us back to Biden's voting rights speech; while it may seem to be an empty gesture, one thing it may help do is fire up the base, and let African American voters know that Biden has their back, even if congress  doesn't.  This could lead to more donations and volunteering for the party in the upcoming midterm elections.  Will this be enough to hold a Republican takeover in congress?  Sadly, I doubt it.  The only thing that could help the Democrats this year is if the Supreme Court overturns Roe Vs Wade, which could result in the Republican party losing the all important white suburban women vote that they've had for years.  While I certainly don't want Roe Vs Wade overturned, that could be the one thing that saves both the Democrats and democracy itself.  We'll see.

THE BUSTED HELICOPTERS THAT DOOMED THE PLANET

 I can remember as a child in 1978 reading an article in my Jr. Science magazine that said that solar power was on the way.  The magazine heralded this amazing new technology as a cheaper, cleaner way to get energy.  A year later, the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, had solar panels put on the roof of the White House to heat water with.  Yes, it looked like solar power was going to be a big thing.  So what happened?  Well, seven years after Carter had those panels put up, his replacement, Ronald Reagan, the man who once said that trees cause pollution, had them taken down.  

When one looks at the devastation caused by the effects of global warming, the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and his singlehanded pulling of the entire Republican party away from caring about any environmental issues has to seen as one of the defining moments.  Before Reagan, the Republican party at least pretended to care about the environment (it was President Nixon, after all, who created the Environmental Protection Agency), but after his election the party has always sided with big corporations and fossil fuels over environmental protections every time.  From George Bush and son both leading invasions into Iraq in which American oil interests were part of the reason for invading, to Donald Trump tearing up the Paris Climate Accord, coddling fossil fuels and Republicanism have gone hand and hand.  Now I'm not saying that the Democrats have been perfect on this issue, far from it, but at the end of the day at least they admit that climate change is real.  The Republicans still deny it, despite worldwide record temperatures, flooding and droughts and other indicators of climate change.

One of the most depressing things is that the world would be much better off right now if  some helicopters hadn't malfunctioned 41 years ago.  What am I referring to?  Well, in April of 1980  President Carter ordered operation Eagle Claw, a military attempt to rescue the 52 hostages that  had been  held in Iran since November of 1979. The operation planned to use helicopters to airlift the hostages out under military cover.  Up to that point, Carter's inability to negotiate a release of the hostages was seen as proof of his ineffectiveness as a leader.  Obviously, this kind of bold action was intended to end that perception.  It's hard now to not look back and wonder at what would have almost certainly have happened if the operation had succeeded.  Positive coverage of Carter greeting the freed hostages at the White House and a national swell of pride would have easily won him a second term, and the more moderate wing of the Republican party would have turned away from Reagan's brand of extremism. 

Sadly, it wasn't meant to be.  Of the 8 helicopters that were deployed for Eagle Claw, only 5 managed to arrive ready to the first staging area; one was lost in a sand storm, another had a cracked rotor blade, and the third had hydraulic problems.  The military recommended the mission be scrubbed, so Carter did so.  Even worse, on the return trip one of the helicopters crashed, killing 8 servicemen.  So, what could have been a triumph for the Carter administration was a failure, one that he openly admitted to when he addressed the nation about it afterwards, sowing the seeds for his eventual defeat.   

History is, of course, full of small moments that lead to huge consequences, (just look up  Gavrilo Princip!) and who knows, maybe climate change would be just as bad now if Carter had won.  There's no way of knowing.  Still, it's hard for me not to look back and wonder how much better things would be today if those damn helicopters hadn't cracked up.

THIS GUY AGAIN

 After almost a year of the Joe Biden presidency, it's easy for a progressive to feel a sense of whiplash: on the plus side, the mere exiting of Donald Trump and all the corrupt and incompetent people he surrounded himself with  was a cause for relief and celebration.  Sanity was restored, with Biden cutting an elderly but good natured figure who would bring common decency back to the White House.  And while at first it appeared that the Republican party, other than Trump, did well in the 2016 election (they actually gained seats in the House of Representatives), when the Democrats pulled off a post presidential election upset by winning two senate seats in Georgia, giving them a narrow control of the Senate, things were looking up. Shortly after taking office, Biden passed a stimulus plan that cut child poverty in half.  He also just passed an infrastructure bill, something that Trump tried to do in vain for years.  Plus, even though the Supreme Court appears to be lost to progressives for decades, he's managed to appoint more lower court judges in his first year than Trump did.  

But, on the negative side, Biden's promise to put the pandemic behind us has proven hollow.   While this can be blamed on both the variants of covid and the conservative resistance to vaccines, it still makes him look bad, as a weary country about to face another deadly pandemic winter takes its anger out on him.  Add to that the fallout from inflation (especially in gas prices), the rise of violent crime and the general perception by the public that the economy is doing poorly (it's actually doing quite well) and it's easy to see why his approval ratings are low (although not lower than Trump's were at the same time in his term).

But from a progressive perspective, there has been nothing more frustrating from this presidency as the Build Back Better Bill.  First proposed almost a year ago, this was a bold multi trillion dollar package that would nationalize child care and paid parental leave, while also working to transition this country away from fossil fuels.  In its initial form, it would have been the most progressive bill passed since the new deal, and by raising taxes on the rich to aid the poor, it would have been the first genuine attempt to even this country's shameful class imbalance since Ronald Reagan's massive tax cuts for the rich and gutting of social programs drastically increased that imbalance back in the 1980's.

But then the Democrats discovered that a slim majority in the Senate meant that these welcome changes couldn't pass without serious revisions to the bill.  Not when every Democratic vote would be needed, and one of those Democrats was Joe Manchin of West Virginia.  From the beginning Manchin has demanded cuts to the bill before he would vote for it.  For months those cuts were made with a meat axe, with the cost of the bill sliced by more than half, muting the positive effects of it. Barely a week would go by in the past year without Manchin preening for the press while demanding more and more spending reductions in the bill. For a while, it almost appeared that Manchin had been placated, but just yesterday, in an interview on Fox News, he said he still opposed it, citing national deficit and inflation concerns.  He did this even after Biden had reached out to him personally, and even after every study of the bill found that any impact it would have on inflation would be minimal.  None of that mattered, Manchin shot the bill down.  It's a bit hard to understand just what Manchin's game is here: is he showing off for the Republicans before switching parties?  Is he killing the bill because he's afraid that the climate change provisions might hurt his coal rich state?  His national deficit concerns are really ridiculous, given that the bill's spending would take place over a decade, making its yearly amount a mere fraction of our nation's defense spending. (Congress just passed a $768 billion defense bill for this year, and that number won't be going down in the next ten years!)

So is it all over for the bill?  Hopefully not.  There's still a chance that a reduced version will be introduced that will win him over.  At this point, it would probably be best to let Manchin himself write the bill, which will probably be a hollowed shell of its former self, and sullen progressives in congress will have to support it just to avoid a total loss.  And once again, the concerns of the poor and middle class will be ignored in this country, as they have been for decades.

ANOTHER DESPICABLE ACT

 

Ever since Donald Trump left office there has been a stream of terrible stories about just how corrupt and incompetent our former president was.  Most have dealt with just  hard he was pushing to overturn the twenty twenty election (from verbally pleading with election officials to considering calling a state of emergency), and while those are all upsetting (especially given that Trump will probably run for the presidency again in twenty twenty four),  another kind of recent revelation has really stunned me.

Recently, Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows released his book about his time working in the White House.  At first, it appeared to be a standard issue tome that would sell well with conservative readers. Trump himself even gave a positive blurb to the book.  But then Meadows went and mentioned an important, unknown detail: that the former president had tested positive for covid three days before his debate with Joe Biden and that he openly exposed Biden to the virus during the debate without any kind of warning.  This ran counter to the administration assertion that Trump's positive test came after the debate. The host of the debate, Chris Wallace of Fox News, later said Trump was not tested before the debate because he arrived late.  He added that they relied on the honor system (always a mistake when Trump's involved).  And, of course it wasn't just Biden that was exposed, the Washington Post has found that Trump came in contact with five hundred different people without warning any of them of the possibility of infection or taking any precautions.  Perhaps most appalling, the day after that positive test he met with military families, putting all of them and their loved ones in danger.  This from a man who claims to love the military!

Trump has responded to this revelation by doing what he usually does; lying.  He called the reporting on the book "fake news", and Meadows himself now appears to agree with him, contradicting his own book.  But, because the timeline between  when Trump first tested positive and when he publicly admitted it has always been hazy, it stands to reason to assume that our former president avoided telling the public about his positive test.  Former New Jersey Governor Chis Christie, a former Trump supporter who now seems to be the only Republican willing to openly challenge him, has said that he definitely believes that it was Trump himself that gave Christie covid while he was prepping the president for the debate.  And, in classic Trumpian sociopathic style, Christie also says that Trump called him when Christie was near death from the virus to make sure that he didn't tell other people that it was Trump who spread the virus to him.   

Ever since Trump entered the presidential campaign in twenty fifteen, pundits have compared his popularity with the Republican base to a cult, with his passionate supporters attending rallies and cheering his every word.  After his June twentieth rally last year in Tulsa Oklahoma, in which thousands of supporters stood next to each other maskless and screamed at the height of the pandemic, I said that the Trump cult could now be called a death cult in which followers risk their own lives to express their adulation.  To me, it couldn't seem to get any worse.  But now,  once again, he's hit a new low, openly endangering the lives of military families and possibly thousands of others because he didn't want to admit to the world that he himself had contacted the same virus that he had been downplaying since it first arrived.  And, as always with Trump, this new information will do little to shake his popularity with his base, who will shrug off the threat he placed on innocent people by echoing his cry of fake news.  Truly, this man's ability to get away with despicable behavior without consequence is utterly depressing.  And the fact that he very well may run for the presidency again in twenty twenty four despite this latest news shows just how far our country has sunk since he first threw his hat in the ring, in what seems like an eternity ago.