When they can’t win a fair fight, they rig the system

I finished the book The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper. It’s a gay teen romance that is science fiction adjacent. The narrator is Cal. He lives in Brooklyn and finished his junior year in high school. He’s a budding journalist and has a social media following for his video posts of what is going on around NYC. He occasionally creates news, such as asking city candidates awkward questions they didn’t expect from a teen. Then his father announces he’s the final hire in NASA’s class of 20 astronauts for their program to go to Mars. The move to Houston happens Monday. Cal is upset at leaving his life in Brooklyn. Once in Houston Cal sees most of the astronauts are parents of young children, with one exception. Kat and Leon are his age and Cal is immediately attracted to Leon. We know where this is going. NASA’s funding to go to Mars is in a large part because of StarWatch, a celebrity gossip network. Their program Shooting Stars is about the astronauts and their families, the modern version of Life magazine which presented the 1960s astronauts to the public. The show host and producers thrive on presenting the families with as much drama and not-quite scandal as possible. Some of the astronauts have gotten good at deflecting or redirecting those attacks. StarWatch does not like Cal offering an alternate portrayal, one of information and truth. NASA does. That is the driving conflict of the story. I enjoyed the book. I call it science fiction adjacent because the focus isn’t on getting to Mars, it’s on StarWatch and Cal, who is helped by NASA’s public relations office. I was amused and baffled by one small point. The cover illustration shows two young men sitting on the ground with their backs to us watching a rocket launch. Their fingers are intertwined. I got the impression that one was white, the other black. But because of the light of the launch I could not be sure. I was about a third of the way through the book before skin color was mentioned in passing, then it was never mentioned again. Race was never a factor in their growing relationship. Yeah, that’s a good thing. However, without those brief mentions of skin color Cal and Leon would be seen as two white lads. Alex Samuels of Daily Kos reported that the law firms that caved to the nasty guy’s demands are facing serious backlash from their clients. The nasty guy targeted these law firms because at some point they helped his opponents. He pulled security clearances to make business difficult for them. Then he offered a deal – give him millions of dollars in free legal help for his unconstitutional agenda and he would return them to his good graces. Several firms sued. At least nine major firms submitted and took the deal. In response, many of their clients are walking. Their reasoning is simple. If the law firm can’t stand up for itself it’s not going to stand up for its clients. The firms look like the legal arm of the White House. They lost credibility. Submitting has a steep price. That’s in addition to many of their lawyers leaving for other, more ethical, law firms or starting new ones. Carter Walker, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, discussed voter fraud in the 2021 mayoral election in tiny Millbourne, Pennsylvania, suburb of Philadelphia. It’s tiny as in 50 acres, less than a tenth of a square mile, and about 1,200 residents. It is now majority Asian and many are Bangladesh immigrants. The fraud was done by Muhammad Nurul Hasan with help from Muhammad Munsur Ali. They illegally registered dozens of nonresidents as Millbourne voters, then cast ballots for them. Hasan’s opponent was Mahabubul Tayub. He reviewed the voter rolls before the election because adding 29 names to the rolls in a short time in a town with 600 voters didn’t make sense. Tayub recognized the names of several people who did not live in Millbourne. Last month Hasan pleaded guilty. Walker noted that these small cases of election fraud are used to claim fraud is rampant and laws to protect against it (while actually suppressing voters) are necessary. But cases of fraud look like what happened in Millbourne – a small number of people affecting a small number of votes that could make a difference in a local race. Scaling up the effort to make a difference in a state or national race is much more difficult. It would involve a lot of people, and they would leave markers that officials would see. The perpetrators would be caught. Alas, the difficulty in scaling up is not a persuasive argument. And that can undermine trust. The Millbourne town council is only five members. Two resigned for reasons unrelated to fraud. The three remaining members, barely a quorum, include Hasan and Ali. Though they are convicted (sentencing pending) they are still on the council. Nothing says they must resign. And if they did the council could do nothing until new members could be voted in. That is making for difficult moments in the tiny council meeting room. The Congressional Budget Office rated the Big Brutal Bill, about to be taken up by the Senate, and said the bill will raise the national debt by trillions. Some Republicans by saying the CBO has been taken over by partisan hacks and its numbers can’t be trusted. They claim big tax cuts for billionaires will actually pay for themselves – a line Republicans have been using consistently since Reagan with plenty of evidence the opposite is true. In yesterday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Jessica Reidl:

Elected Republicans are coalescing around the talking point that CBO's tax cut estimates are complete fiction and that tax cuts pay for themselves. Well, CBO's 2018 and 2019 revenue estimates - which included the previous year's TCJA - were ... 99.5% accurate.

The TCJA is the 2017 tax cut bill. Way down in the comments exlrrp posted a couple memes about Elon Musk:

Elon Musk, who was once worth over $400 billion in December 2024, has seen his fortune plunge by $200 billion, setting a new world record for the largest personal wealth loss in history.

Contrast that with this:

Elon Must is officially out of DOGE. It might look like he failed since he didn’t save us any money, find waste, or uncover fraud, but his true goal was in data mining and on that front, he made out like a bandit.

In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo about Musk’s departure from the White House along with Musk calling the Big Brutal Bill and abomination.

Musk isn’t shifting sides here. He’s complaining that the cuts to social programs in the GOP budget aren’t deep enough. He claims this is about growing deficits. But he’s not said anything about the centerpiece high income tax cuts which are the drivers of those deficits. So while it’s probably obvious to most of you reading this, it’s important to note that Musk isn’t in any way switching sides...I’m skeptical.

Down in the comments are several cartoons and meme in response to what Sen. Joni Ernst said in a town hall meeting. Ernst talked about how wonderful the Big Brutal Bill was. A constituent said that because of the cuts to Medicaid people would die. Ernst cold-heartedly replied, “We’re all going to die.” My favorite cartoon shows a man on the ground reaching towards Jesus, who says, “Why bother healing you? We’re all going to die.” Three weeks ago Lisa Needham of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s efforts to keep us in the dark. He closed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather and Climate Disasters program so we can’t learn the cost of extreme weather events. Also, agencies are barred from considering the economic effects of climate change. Don’t believe in climate change? Don’t track the costs of climate change which allows pretending it doesn’t exist. Also gone are over a dozen health-tracking programs. Who needs to know about pregnancy risks, cancer clusters, childhood lead poisoning, domestic violence, or police misconduct? If risks can’t be shown there is no downside to eliminating regulations.

If Republicans refuse to track the bad effects of their bad policies, they can obscure the harms their policies create. Genius move for them, but bad news for everyone else.

Yeah, this is a chance to clean out my browser tabs. Nearly four weeks ago Oliver Willis of Kos tackled the question of why the right hates colleges. He gives several examples. Yeah, the attack on Harvard and other top schools. There is the harsh restart of payments of student loans and the work to eliminate the Department of Education and its programs who help the financially disadvantaged to get to college. So why? One answer is that conservatives have long seen college as a source of liberal indoctrination – their children come home as liberal radicals. But millions of college graduates voted for Republicans.

What is really going on isn’t indoctrination, but a failure of conservatism to win the war of ideas. And as is so often the case with the right, when they can’t win a fair fight, they try to rig the system from the inside. Republicans fail to enlist those who go through a college education to their side of the aisle, so they undermine student loan programs, try to bully colleges, and even attempt to turn college sports into another casualty of the bigoted “culture war.”