Only fools and toddlers care about contribution limits

My Sunday movie was The Piano Lesson, a screen adaptation of August Wilson’s play available on Netflix. This is not about someone sitting at the piano and learning to play it. The story, set mostly in Pittsburgh in 1936, is the conflict between Boy Willie and his sister Bernice. He wants to sell the piano to get enough money to buy the land where their ancestors were slaves. He’s quite intense in his demand. She refuses to sell because it is a family heirloom – one of their slave ancestors carved family portraits into the wood. Because of bad memories she also refuses to play it. There are questions why this land is now available. The descendant of the slave owner died by falling down his well. Was he pushed? Why does Bernice say she sees the landowner’s ghost in her house in Pittsburgh? I enjoyed it. I had held off on watching it because it didn’t get great reviews. I would have placed it higher than the Metacritic score of 69. It came out last year and I heard about it both because it is based on the August Wilson play and because it is a Washington family production. Boy Willie is played by John David. It’s directed by brother Malcolm who also co-wrote the screenplay. Don’t recognize those names? And one of the producers was father Denzel. I’m sure you recognize that one. In a minor role was Olivia and a bit of searching showed she is Malcolm’s twin. And the credits show Katia, John David’s older sister as another producer. Alex Samuels of Daily Kos discussed some of the recent surveys. One of interest is opinions of aspects of the nasty guy’s agenda. For example, opinions on various parts of his immigration policy show 39% of adults in support, 45% opposed, for a net difference of -6. The topics include DEI at net -14, executive power at -26, and at the bottom is health care at -31. At the top at net +10, and the only one positive, is LGBTQ rights. Scary that his policies are aimed at rolling back our rights, yet 10% more people support his position than don’t. Samuels wrote:

Why the outlier? It’s likely because Trump’s LGBTQ+ policies are really about attacking transgender people. For instance, rather than loudly going after same-sex marriage, which a strong majority of Americans want to remain legal, Trump is targeting a vulnerable minority. And unfortunately, discomfort with transgender people remains widespread, even among Democrats. As grim as that is, it explains why a lot of voters support Trump here.

Another survey of interest was about safety of air travel. Plane accidents for the last three months are down compared to last year, but public perception says safety is worse. Samuels says part of the answer is the media coverage of the big disasters. Another part is the nasty guy, in pushing to fire air traffic controllers, is not helping public confidence. Andrew Mangan of Kos says the nasty guy is waging war on our fridges. He’s doing it in two ways. First, the Food and Drug Administration is planning to end most routine food safety inspections. Some, but not all, inspections can be shifted to the state. 84% of voters oppose such a move, including 75% of Republicans. The second war on fridges is the plan to end the Energy Star program. This is the blue star logo that indicates how energy efficient an appliance is compared to similar products. It has saved more than a half trillion dollars in energy costs. Every $1 the Environmental Protection Agency spend on the program resulted in nearly $350 in energy savings and massively reduced greenhouse emissions driving he climate crisis. Yep, 55% of voters oppose killing it. 86% of Democrats want the EPA to keep funding the program, though only 22% of Republicans feel the same way. I had talked about the nasty guy boosting the value of his personal crypto currency by offering investors dinner with him. Yeah, that dinner has happened, and Emily Singer of Kos says it was as corrupt as one might think it would be. The dinner was held at his own golf club in Virginia and he used a military helicopter to get there (as in taxpayer-funded), yet the White House won’t release a guest list because the nasty guy attended on personal time. That detail is of interest because the Supreme Court said he immune from prosecution only for official acts. (So is someone going to prosecute?) The attendees said they spent millions on the coin to get access to the nasty guy. These are foreign nationals, people who are banned from contributing to his campaign. The top contributor was Chinese crypto magnate Justin Sun who spent $40 million. He’s been sued by the SEC for fraud. He got a gold watch for his troubles (plus face time with the nasty guy). Another investor praised the nasty for being good to his sponsors, who expect a return on investment. Singer wrote: “That's as blatant of a ‘pay-to-play’ scandal as it gets.” Lisa Needham of Kos has a weekly series titled Injustice For All to show the nasty guy is trying to weaponize the justice system and the people fighting back. In last Saturday’s edition Needham wrote vice nasty declared that Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t understand the judiciary, saying the judiciary is supposed to allow the deportations the American people voted for. Needham wrote:

Good god, man. The Roberts court invented immunity for Donald Trump. The Roberts court is the reason you have a job. The Roberts court is wholly controlled by your allies. The executive is not exactly beleaguered here, you big baby. But aside from Vance’s usual whining about how oppressed the Trump administration is, this is also spectacularly wrongheaded in terms of how separation of powers works. Vance’s theory of governance seems to be the one that the administration as a whole has settled on: Because people elected Trump, they implicitly endorsed every future action Trump takes, so courts can’t rule otherwise. If they rule against the administration, goes the thinking, that violates the separation of powers. Such a theory, of course, makes courts entirely unnecessary, which may actually be Vance’s goal.

Needham also wrote about that crypto dinner.

What is the current price of dinner with the president? Well, it’s variable based on the price of his stupid crypto meme coin, but here’s how it breaks down: 220 people, many of whom are anonymous, bought $394 million of scammy crypto coins owned mainly by two Trump-affiliated private companies. Individual spend ranged from $55,000 to $37.7 million, averaging out at roughly $1.7 million per head. Federal per-person campaign contributions are capped at $3,500, but everyone knows that only fools and toddlers care about that. Savvy folks know the move is just to bribe the president directly by investing in whatever scam he’s got going. Never thought we’d long for the low-key days of everyone bribing Trump by spending a few thousand bucks at his D.C. hotel. Things used to be so innocent.

Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote that the Qatari jet has been delivered to the Department of Defense. This is the gift that is worth $400 million, but the DoD would need to spend a billion to make it usable as Air Force One. The necessary modifications probably won’t be done before the nasty guy’s term is up. That means the plane should go straight to the presidential library. That presidential library is becoming a corruption magnet. Missed out on donating to the inauguration? It broke records in pulling in money. So the next way to get time with the nasty guy is to donate to his library. Donating to him directly is supposed to be illegal because of the Constitution’s Emolument Clause. Mother Jones wrote that because of the nasty guy’s known shady handling of classified document and his lack of transparency we should not believe what anyone of his team says about how much is actually going to the library and how much to current pockets. Yeah, presidential libraries are expensive. The price tag for constructing Obama’s is about $830 million. But building his was not an invitation for bribes. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Crispin Sartwell of Splice Today, a person Kev is surprised he agrees with enough to quote.

Let me express my skepticism. I don’t think that Biden’s cognitive decline or his late withdrawal made a decisive difference in the outcome. And I think the direct claim that it did, as in Klein’s headline (the “cover-up” “re-elected Trump”) is self-serving in a familiar way. Also in a way that indicates that Democrats will find it difficult to absorb useful lessons from their 2024 disaster. [...] I don’t think that the Democrats would’ve won in 2024 if Kamala had had more time to run. I agreed with those commentators who at the time argued that the compressed schedule might be an advantage for her. I don’t think that there are good reasons to believe that if there had been a full-fledged or compressed primary and the Democrats had nominated Buttigieg or Shapiro or Whitmer that they would’ve done any better. Harris was as plausible a candidate as any, and ran a fairly competent campaign. The Democrats are fooling themselves if they stick to Biden’s dementia as their explanation, and that without a more honest assessment, they’re liable to lose again. Going into Election Day, everyone on both sides and in between seemed to agree that 2024 was “a referendum on Trump.” I think, by and large, that’s just what it was, and that a variety of factors had the whole country, essentially every region and every demographic group, trending to Trump by Election Day. I don’t see any reason to believe that it would’ve been any different with Gretchen Whitmer. Trump is an overwhelming personality who’d become even more overwhelming after his 2020 loss. It’s hard to focus on anything else while he’s there, yapping and thrashing away. Maybe there wasn’t even exactly a rightwards sing in 2024, but rather a swing to Trump, which isn’t ideologically defined except perhaps as a sort of screeching nationalism.

Peter Orszag is a former Office of Management and Budget Director and writes for The New York Times.

For years it was reasonable to tune out the worrywarts carping about deficits. With very low interest rates, a lack of particularly attractive alternatives to U.S. Treasuries for investors and a muted market reaction to serial Capitol Hill dramas over raising the debt limit, those who bemoaned the unsustainability of deficit spending and debt levels seemed to cry wolf — a lot. Even as a former White House budget director, I grew skeptical of their endless warnings. Not anymore. Two things have changed: First, the wolf is now lurking much closer to our door. Annual federal budget deficits are running at 6 percent of G.D.P. or higher, compared with well under 3 percent a decade ago. Interest rates on 10-year Treasuries have more than doubled — around 4.5 percent now versus just over 2 percent then — and in the current fiscal year the government is projected to spend more on interest payments than on defense, Medicaid or Medicare. That’s right: Our borrowing now costs us more each year than each of these big, essential budget items. Meanwhile, federal debt held by the public, excluding Federal Reserve holdings, as a share of G.D.P. has increased by about a third since 2015. The Congressional Budget Office, which I once led, projects that by 2029, our debt as a share of our economy will grow to levels unprecedented since the years after World War II. All of this is occurring against a backdrop of an even more polarized political system, increased tension with foreign debt holders and less confidence in American security protections that promoted the dollar as the world’s safe haven.

Back in mid May Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos honored George Carlin on what would have been his 88th birthday. One of the Carlin quotes:

To my way of thinking, men have only one real problem: other men. That's where all the trouble starts. A long time ago, men gave away their power. To other men: princes, kings, wizards, generals and high priests. They gave it away, because they believed what these other men told them. They bought into the okeydoke. The bulls---. Men always buy the okeydoke when it comes from other men.

Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows a man, woman, and child wearing life jackets and in the water. The man’s life jacket is labeled Medicaid. An elephant in a speedboat comes alongside and says, “You heard me. Billionaires need your life jackets...”