A tortured bad-faith reading of the Constitution

I had lunch today with my friend and debate partner. He opened with a debate he had with others. He and they rejected tomorrow as the founding of the country because in 1776 we were just a bunch of argumentative colonies, not a united country. So when can we claim the start of America the country? How many states were needed to ratify the Constitution? Yeah, the version with the Bill of Rights. Three-quarters of the original colonies? Two-thirds? So I looked it up. New Hampshire was ninth when it ratified the Constitution on June 21, 1788. Virginia was tenth four days later on June 25, 1788. That was enough for either threshold. Rhode Island, the last, didn’t get to it until May 29, 1790, well after George Washington started his term as president on April 30, 1789. The Supreme Court ended its term and released its rulings on some big cases. A week ago Thursday Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported the Court was very good at supporting the nasty guy’s racism. Which means non-white immigrants will get the shaft. The decisions were: First, remove due process protections for green card holders. That will lead to deporting people who have come legally. Second allow the elimination of a way to apply for asylum. Refusing entry for people fleeing for their lives (which is why they are seeking asylum) is just cruel. Third, allow the nasty guy to eliminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians. TPS for these countries was set up because the countries are not safe and they aren’t any safer now than when TPS was granted. And Venezuela, likely next on the nasty guy’s list, just suffered a double earthquake that has killed at least 2,500 people. Needham wrote on the Mullin v. Al Otro Lado decision about asylum claims (though it could apply to all three) written by Justice Alito:

In the ruling, Justice Samuel Alito goes through a tortured bad-faith reading of immigration statutes to get to his decision that the administration doesn’t need to process asylum claims if it doesn’t feel like it.

In this case Alito wrote that an asylum seeker must actually enter the US and if a US agent prevents them from stepping a foot across the border, oh well, too bad.

On its face, this is a dispute about how to interpret statutes. In reality, it means that the United States is free to refuse to ever let anyone apply for asylum for any reason—which was always the goal of the Trump administration. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out in her dissent, this is an abandonment of the policies adopted by the United States and other countries following World War II.

Needham points out additional ways all three rulings are absurd. Alito had a goal in mind and reasoned his way to it no matter what law or the Constitution says.

It’s all disingenuous bigotry dressed up as even-handed, rational, sober-minded statutory interpretation. But it’s anything but. This is straight-up racism—and under this Supreme Court, it’s increasingly the law of the land.

Needham and colleague Alix Breeden review the TPS and asylum cases in more detail. They first give the legal view, then the human impact. In addition to tossing out a lot of Haitians and Syrians, on which many companies such as nursing homes depend, the ruling allows the nasty guy to end TPS for several other countries. On Tuesday this week Needham wrote about a couple more rulings by the Supremes. These two cases are about whether the nasty guy has the ability to fire at will the heads of agencies that Congress set up to be independent of the president. One case is about the Federal Reserve, the other about all the other agencies. For all the other agencies the ruling, written by John Roberts, says the nasty guy is free to fire who he wants to without supplying a reason. For the Federal Reserve Roberts said it is special and the nasty guy must show cause before firing.

Why is the Federal Reserve special here? You won’t find a genuine answer in the opinions, both of which are written by Chief Justice John Roberts. It’s honestly nothing more complicated than that Roberts is perfectly thrilled to give the most worm-brained toddler of a president free rein to remake the administrative state in his image, but not to give the most worm-brained toddler free rein to destabilize monetary policy. Gotta know what’s really important here.

The nasty guy certainly shouldn’t be allowed to destabilize the economies of the billionaires that give so lavishly to the Court’s conservative members. Of course, the nasty guy shouldn’t want his billionaire donors to be destabilized, but his thinking probably isn’t rational.

How does Roberts square this? He doesn’t, really. And why should he? This isn’t about what the law actually is. It’s what Trump and Roberts want the law to be.

The ruling says that though the Constitution gives Congress the power create independent agencies, that really isn’t true. The Court is simply restoring balance. Which means:

Indeed, that’s exactly what Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent: “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time.”

I’m sure Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson are getting mighty tired that a major portion of their job is to call out the BS of the six conservatives.

What Trump now gets is nothing less than a return to the spoils system, where the whole of federal jobs are filled with allies, cronies, and failsons and faildaughters who need jobs, regardless of any actual qualifications.

As for the Federal Reserve and the nasty guy’s target Lisa Cook, the ruling says he can’t simply fire her. But the ruling does not say in any detail what he does have to do to legally get rid of her. The big case before the court was whether the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees whether a person born in America is a citizen of America. Kos of Kos wrote the ruling by the Court looked at the plain reading of the Amendment and said, yes, that’s what it says. But the decision was not unanimous. That’s scary. Kos quoted Alito’s dissent, in which Alito described a case of birth tourism in which the baby grows up to plot against the US. Then Kos wrote Alito’s argument is about policy, wishing the Amendment was written differently than the way it was. The Constitution asks whether they were born here, not whether they’re patriotic. The First Amendment says Americans are free to hate their government. If someone plots against the country, that’s what intelligence and law enforcement are for. And Alito’s hypothetical hasn’t “posed the constitutional crisis he imagines during the 158 years since the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.”

What makes Alito’s dissent so striking isn’t simply that he reaches a different conclusion. It’s that he barely attempts a textual defense at all. His objection is that the Constitution produces a result he finds unacceptable. That’s a perfectly legitimate argument for amending the Constitution. It’s a terrible argument for pretending the Constitution already says something else. Every day, this hyper-partisan, hyper-ideological court proves that it has lost the moral authority that should accompany its constitutional role. More than ever, it is in dire need of reform.

The number of views this blog got in June didn’t quite top that of May, though for much of the month it looked likely. The number of views in May, not quite doubling the previous monthly record, was 313,818. For June the total was 298011. For three weeks in June the daily number of views was mostly near or above 12,000 with some days going up to 20,000. Then in the last week the daily number of views dropped to 2,000 and went down from there to about 1,200. I have no idea why there was a dropoff.

This isn’t about the 2020 election, it's about 2026 and 2028

I finished the book The Mother by B. L. Blanchard. It is a companion book to The Peacemaker by the same author I read back in January. That book is set in a North America that had never been colonized and all the characters are natives. This book is set in a Europe, particularly an England, that had never colonized. Though the blurb on the back of the book starts with that I don’t see that it made much difference to the story. Yes, this is a different Europe and England, but how it became the way it is depicted doesn’t seem to depend on not colonizing. The England we see is modern – characters use phones and computers – but high in patriarchy and governed by Church Law, which appears to be Catholic Church Law, not Anglican. The main characters are from the aristocracy where a woman’s sole job is to produce a male heir. The story is mostly centered on Marie. However, I’ll start with her mother Charlotte. She was married to an Earl and had three daughters – Alice, Emma, and Marie. Since she hadn’t produced a son and her husband seemed to be auditioning successor wives she faked her death and disappeared. Alice was able to get a husband, though she was not beautiful and thus not a trophy, and produced three sons for him. Emma announced she was pregnant by the stable boy and thrown out and disowned. Marie married a Duke, a step up for her, but did not produce any children, son or daughter. When Marie hears her mother-in-law speak in a way that implied Marie had failed in her sole job and her son should should get rid of Marie, she fakes her death and flees, taking a few jewels and other valuables with her. Marie found Emma (who wasn’t hard to find) and learned Emma hadn’t been pregnant, she just wanted out of that life. Marie also wants to act on hints that her mother is still alive. So off they go. And they soon discover the Duke’s family is after them to drag Marie back to his manor house. The rest of the story is Emma and Marie rediscovering each other. That is mixed in with the chase. There are lots of dangers and narrow escapes as they travel across Belgium, Germany (still the Holy Roman Empire), and France. It’s a gripping story – I usually read in sessions a little longer than I usually do. And while I enjoyed the tale it was not the story I wanted it to be. I wanted a depiction of a Europe that had avoided the need to colonize. What I got was a Europe that was still very much in the mindset of the 15th century but with modern technology. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that while the Senate is refusing to pass the Save America Voting Act (which is full of voter suppression and other nonsense pushed by the nasty guy) Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas gave hints about what the next House budget will include.

Right now we are actively working on reconciliation 3.0. It’s gonna include healthcare, housing, election fraud, election integrity fraud, energy, defense, and tax portions.

I’m not sure what “tax portions” are and I’m afraid of what Republicans handling of “housing” would look like. I do know what “election fraud, election integrity fraud” means and I know “reconciliation” means crafting a budget using a process that doesn’t need Democratic votes. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy is pushing so hard on the Save Act that he’s willing to sacrifice national security. The story is convoluted so forgive me if I’m not accurate in my summary. Bill Pulte was appointed as acting Director of National Intelligence, about to take over for Tulsi Gabbard, who is leaving to care for an ailing husband. Since the Senate soundly rejected Pulte (they didn’t have to take a vote to get their point across) the nasty guy nominated Jay Clayton. Clayton’s hearings were to begin this week, but the nasty guy halted them. He wants the Senate to pass the Save Act first. The Senate doesn’t have enough Republican votes to pass it. The nasty guy also wants a vote on James McDonald, the guy who is taking the job Clayton is leaving. Also in the mix Democrats are refusing to vote for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which expired. It, once passed, allows surveillance of foreigners in the US. But refusing to vote is different than voting no, meaning FISA is stuck too. With Clayton’s nomination stuck Pulte may be able to serve as DNI anyway. But the nasty guy’s snit means national security is vulnerable. Dion Nissenbaum and Alexander Shur, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, reported the FBI is investigating the 2020 election. Agents were sent to Milwaukee to talk people who said they saw suspicious things, though suspicions are not evidence for a judge. But...

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.” ... John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention. “They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community wrote about previous Republican efforts to rig elections. In 1968 Richard Nixon learned of the deal between President Johnson and the leaders of both North and South Vietnam. Nixon reached out to the South Vietnamese leaders, promising riches, of they backed out of the deal. Nixon won and Humphrey didn’t. The war lasted another seven deadly years. Everett Dirkson, Republican leader in the Senate, called it “treason.” In 1979 during the Iranian hostage crisis, Reagan promised the new regime weapons if they held onto the hostages through the 1980 election. The hostages were released as Reagan took the oath of office. That new regime is the same one the nasty guy has been battling. In 2000 Florida governor Jeb Bush, in order to help his brother George W. was aggressive in “cleaning” voter rolls. There were estimates of between 10,000 and 70,000 black people were unable to vote. GW Bush won the state by 537 votes, and thus the presidency. In all three cases we didn’t learn of the manipulation until well after the affected election. We didn’t have a chance to protest the action. In contrast, the nasty is openly trying to rig this year’s election.

If it’s true that Trump became president in 2016, as Robert Mueller’s investigation found, because of major help from Putin, then the last legitimately elected Republican who didn’t commit or at least flirt with treason to become president was Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961). By coincidence, he was also the last Republican president to reject the influence of America’s oligarchs and instead kept the top 90% income tax rate on oligarchs and actually worked to increase union membership and expand Social Security. So, get ready. We know in advance at least some of the dirty tricks they’re going to try to pull. Musk and Zuck spinning their social media outlets; Fox, CBS, and CNN under oligarch’s thumbs; ICE disruption; seized ballots; corrupted mail; and now realistic, highly deceptive AI-generated Republican deepfakes are already appearing in the Texas senatorial election.

In a second article Hartmann expanded on what the nasty guy is doing to steal the 2026 election.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open. ... The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

The nasty guy and others have talked about such things as have ICE surround the polls to intimidate voters. Todd Blanche, formerly the nasty guy’s personal lawyer and now acting Attorney General told a conservative crowd, “[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done. A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

Blanche has reason to be worried. He knows the true nature of the nasty guy quite well. He isn’t being paranoid.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights. ... These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible.

Make sure you’re registered to vote, then actually do it. Vote by mail if you can and do it early so the Post Office can’t interfere. Tell your senators and representative how you feel. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quotes the late columnist Molly Ivins on Thursdays. Yesterday was a quote from 1995 on why Rush Limbaugh was so popular. The reason is still true.

A large segment of Limbaugh’s audience consists of white males, eighteen to thirty-four years old, without a college education. Basically, a guy I know and grew up with named Bubba. Bubba listens to Limbaugh because Limbaugh gives him someone to blame for the fact that Bubba is getting screwed. He’s working harder, getting paid less in constant dollars, and falling further and further behind. Not only is Bubba never gonna be able to buy a house, he can barely afford a trailer. Hell, he can barely afford the payments on the pickup. Limbaugh offers him scapegoats. It’s the “feminazis.” It’s the minorities. It’s the limousine liberals. It’s all these people with all these wacky social programs to help some silly, self-proclaimed bunch of victims.

Between 2010, when I started having Blogger track viewership, and October 2025 this blog received one million views, most of that in the two years before then. Now just eight months later the number of views has passed two million and is at 2,008,968. In the last 30 days there have been 32.9K views from Brazil, 17.4K from Bangladesh, 17.1K from Iraq, and 16K from the US. Surprises include 12.1K views from Saudi Arabia and 10.2K views from Tunisia. This is post 5646. I’ve spent a lot of evenings over 18 years writing this blog. Brother is coming again for a short visit, this time with his daughter and her family. So I probably won’t post again until the middle of next week.

A hard-charging, uncompromisingly conservative faction

My Sunday movie was the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. Reeve is best known for being the title character in the Superman movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. When he said he was going to that audition his acting friends thought he was selling out. The first one rocketed him to stardom. The fourth was forgettable. But he did a lot more than that. In one film (maybe two) he played a gay character. The one I know about was Deathtrap, which is a thriller (or dark comedy) and I remember seeing after it was released in 1982 and made its way to TV. He also played gay in a stage production (I didn’t get the name) which annoyed some people that Superman would stoop to that. The other thing he was well known for was a horse riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He lived another nine years totally dependent on others. He still managed to do a lot. Growing up he had a messy home life that did not show a healthy marriage and ended in divorce. He had a father who was hard to please. From both of those he found relief in theater. When filming Superman he met Gae Exton, who became mother to his children Matthew and Alexandra. They never married and after a while the relationship fell apart. Months later he met Dana who became the mother of son Will (who now looks a lot like his father) and became his wife. Will Reeve is in the film industry as an actor and producer. Dana made sure to include Matthew and Alexandra as part of the family. Reeve saw how a marriage should work. He was roommates with Robin Williams in acting school (Julliard?) and they were lifelong friends. After the accident Williams was able to get Reeve to laugh and he knew life would be okay. Reeve used his stardom to gain access as an advocate. After the accident he became an advocate for those paralyzed, creating the Christopher Reeve Foundation to raise money for paralysis research. He wanted to find a cure. Dana wanted to improve the care of those paralyzed. Before the accident Reeve was quite active. After that he realized what was important wasn’t the activity but the relationship. That deepened with his kids. I very much enjoyed the film and recommend it. Christopher Reeve was a hero both on and off the screen. An article by Kavitha Surana for ProPublica and posted on Daily Kos discussed Emily Waldorf and her miscarriage and its complications, made worse because she lives in Arkansas. She was caught in limbo, her body started the miscarriage but over several days couldn’t complete it. In the meantime her uterus was open to infection. But doctors said they could do nothing until the fetal heartbeat ended, she went into labor, or she showed signs of dangerous infection. When doctors told her they could not treat her she started keeping notes of her experience. Texas modified its rules around abortion and miscarriage to say Waldorf’s situation is one where evacuating the uterus was medically necessary. Arkansas and many of the others that ban abortion haven’t done the same. Other women with this complication have died. Waldorf lived to tell the story, though resolving her case required a four hour ambulance trip to Kansas, were abortion is legal. There her uterus could be emptied. The whole thing left her with $147,000 in medical costs, which includes $5,000 for the ambulance ride. She worked at the hospital that refused to treat her. She did go back after he medical leave was over and quit a month later. No doctor has yet been sued under the abortion ban. But the hospital lawyers are way too wary of over eager prosecutors. To me they aren’t sufficiently concerned about malpractice. Eleanor Klibanoff, in an article for The Texas Tribune posted on Kos, explains how the nasty guy has transformed the Republican Party in Texas (and elsewhere). There was a lot of news recently about the nasty guy endorsing Ken Paxton for US Senate over incumbent John Cornyn, which Paxton won big. The story is enough Republican voters are loyal to the nasty guy to vote for whoever he says to vote for and get the results he wants. But Klibanoff wrote the dynamics began before the nasty guy appeared a decade ago. Before MAGA there was the Tea Party (remember them?), which formed the ground from which MAGA arose.

Once led by chamber of commerce conservatives who preached small government and big business, the Texas Republican Party has been conquered over the last 15 years by a hard-charging, uncompromisingly conservative faction, operating on the vanguard of the nation’s culture wars and driven by a sense of perpetual insurgency.

Since then there has been a power struggle in the party where “the hardliners, who paint themselves as the perennial underdogs, just keep winning.” The nasty guy cultivated candidates who were “aggressive, ideological, proudly politically incorrect and, above all, loyal.” And voters keep voting for them. Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series Explaining the Right delves into why Republicans continue to support the nasty guy.

For decades, the conservative media ecosystem primed these voters for a political figure like Trump. Right-wing talk radio, news sites, and especially Fox News have beamed propaganda into millions of American homes. Trump, an avid watcher of Fox News, learned what many other Republicans struggled with: that conservatives are extraordinarily responsive to messages that echo what they hear as part of their daily media diet. While other Republicans tend to focus on conservative policy issues, Trump has focused on the red meat of the right. This means snappy, punchy, insulting, bigoted statements and the like.

Voters want to continue with candidates ready with the insult rather than supporting the party establishment. So what the party does when the nasty guy can no longer be on the ballot is an open question. At the moment Republican candidates are sticking as tightly as they can to the nasty guy.

Right now, the most prudent path for Republicans probably seems to be the pro-Trump lane, but the writing is already on the wall. Voters have been rejecting Trumpism in droves. And the odds are it will hurt them in the long run.

That is American voters who are rejecting the nasty guy and all he’s been doing. Republican voters still vote for their man. Stephen Fowler of NPR went to a Republican rally in Iowa and reported on what he heard there. Most of the speakers Fowler featured did the usual thing that all good stuff comes from Republicans and all bad stuff comes from Democrats. What caught my attention is the anger coming off one speaker. The anger level was so high I wanted to cringe and cower. Alas, since the transcript doesn’t portray the anger I can’t tell which one it was (and I’m not listening to it again). In today’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted Lawrence Winnerman of Blue Amp discussing what is actually happening in the American economy. He says it is worse than a recession.

We are running an economy this week on the country we were in February. The shelves still look mostly normal. The shipping bays still seem mostly full. The cargo still appears mostly on time where it is supposed to appear. None of this is the world we are actually living in. We are spending down the last inventory of the country we used to have and we are spending it down on a clock. Inventory is mercy. Inventory is the cushion the world leaves you between the moment a thing breaks and the moment you feel it break. The blast wave is real, but the blast wave is also delayed by the length of a supply chain, by the contents of a warehouse, by the days it takes a tanker to cross an ocean. We have this week the strange privilege of standing inside the cushion. We will not have that privilege for long.

Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about the recent legal issues of the nasty guy and his minions. A pair of them caught my attention. The first of the pair is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and his handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. The Campaign for Accountability decided there’s enough unethical stuff in Blanche’s actions they’ve filed a complaint with the bar of New York. The second of the pair is Blanche’s predecessor and former boss Pam Bondi. She’s facing a bar complaint in Florida. And she no longer has the protection of being a member of the president’s cabinet. This here blog has set another record in viewership with 313,818 views during May! That is 76% higher than the previous record of 177,760 set in April. Just a few days ago the daily viewership hit 29,010, also setting a record. As I mentioned last month the viewership is now quite broad. Blogger shows me the top 19 countries (“Other” is the 20th) and over the last seven days every one of those countries has had at least 1,860 views. That one is Tunisia. At the top of the list is Brazil at 12,878 views, Bangladesh at 6,000 views, Iraq at 5,704 views, and Vietnam at 5,234 views before we get to the US at 4,762 views. Other is at 39.8K views, so there are at least 21 more countries that have viewed this blog over the last week.

What’s possible when Democrats finally stop wimping out

I wrote yesterday about the Supreme Court gutting the part of the Voting Rights Act that banned racial gerrymandering. Many Republican legislatures announced they were ready to rework district maps that would eliminate perhaps a dozen black Democrats from Congress. Emily Singer of Daily Kos wrote that the Democratic governors of New York and Illinois that they would work to eliminate more Republican seats. The redistricting race will continue. Back in 2010, when Republicans began to put serious, computerized effort into gerrymandering Democrats were more concerned about maintaining fairness. This time they’re willing to fight in the manner of Republicans.

Ultimately, this is a race to the bottom. But if Democrats don’t follow Republicans to the gates of Hell, then it gives Republicans carte blanche to draw their way to a permanent majority—something Republicans are already crowing about doing.

Illinois had been preparing a statewide Voting Rights Amendment. That effort is is being scrapped because it would have prevented this type of redistricting. In a second post Singer discussed the possibilities of Democratic gerrymandering efforts. She included a tweet by Stephen Wolf that showed by 2028 Democrats could flip 19 seats in 9 states (based on a Republican winning the seat in 2024, recognizing some may flip to Democrat this year). In addition to those mention this redistricting could be done in New Jersey, Maryland, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. In contrast Republicans might be able to squeeze out another 12 seats in eight Southern states. Of course, the Democratic response can only be done in states where there is a Democratic governor and Democrats control both chambers of the legislature. So vote for Democrats this fall. And we hope that in 2028 with Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress and with a Democrat as president they will pass a nationwide gerrymandering ban to stop this race. I’m hopeful, but they had a chance in 2022 and didn’t take it. Lisa Needham of Kos writes a weekly column on what the courts are doing. Alas, many of the stories are about how they support the nasty guy. This column is from last week. In what should have been an obvious decision Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said that Texas can require schools to display the King James version of the Ten Commandments because it “looks nothing like historical religious establishment.”

Per Duncan, the separation of church and state is only implicated if the state tells churches how they could worship or punishes someone for rejecting the Ten Commandments or takes your tax dollars to support clergy. It also “does not co-op churches to perform civic functions.” Come on, man. This is impossibly, deliberately slippery. No, the law didn’t say “we hereby outsource evangelical churches to perform the civic function of education,” but it did say, essentially, “the civic function of education now must include a specific religious text with the specific religious language used by specific, conservative, evangelical churches.”

Red states keep passing laws that they know lower courts will block. This is an example. They keep doing it so they can get the cases before the “theocrats” on the Supreme Court so they can explain our understanding of the separation of church and state has been wrong these past 250 years and our founders really did want to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments. There is news about the Senate race in Maine. Susan Collins has been one of their senators and is known for her “concern” about what her fellow Republicans were doing, yet would vote with them anyway. It’s a seat that seems within Democrat’s grasp. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit described the Democrats campaigning for the seat. There is Governor Janet Mills, 78, who has done a fine job, is appreciated by the citizens, and is the darling of the party insiders who want the “safest, most ‘electable’” candidate to beat Collins. The other candidate is Graham Platner, oyster farmer, whom Hartmann describes this way:

Maine’s Democrats saw a guy who’d actually served three tours in Iraq, who runs a small business on the working waterfront, who talks the way they talk, and who isn’t afraid to say out loud that the people robbing them are the billionaire class and the Republican shills they own.

Platner has been across the state, speaking wherever a group will listen and raising lots of money. Yes, there have been problems, such as a tattoo of a Nazi emblem that has since been removed. Platner has become so popular and raised so much money that yesterday Mills suspended her campaign, even though the primary is still a couple months away. That leaves Platner as the presumptive challenger to Collins. Hartmann says Mills’ withdrawal is sending a message to the rest of the party and they had better listen. That message is adjacent to the reason I touched on yesterday.

People are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.

Note the “corporate” label. That refers to Democrats who don’t want to upset the billionaire money spigot. As Mills withdrew the Congressional Progressive Caucus rolled out its New Affordability Agenda, a ten point plan. Here’s a bit of it: + Make drugs cheaper (and they provide detail on how). + Make utilities cheaper. + Make gas cheaper by taxing extra profits. + Make childcare cheaper, max of 7% of income. + Make housing cheaper. + Make groceries cheaper + Abolish Super PACs so billionaires can’t buy politicians so easily.

New polling from Data for Progress found that every single one of those proposals is supported by close to 60% of Republican voters. Among Democrats it pushes into the 80% range. That’s not a “leftist” agenda. That’s a genuine populist agenda that works for the actual American electorate.

Hartmann says Democrats began to go astray with Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” that included “End welfare as we know it” and sucking up to banks, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Defense, and defending Netanyahu no matter the count of war crimes. Hartmann then reminded us what the Republicans have been doing with the power voters keep giving them. Here are the nine points Hartmann listed: + Cut taxes to billionaires (the national debt just crossed 100% of GDP). + Rigged elections. + Cheered wars. + Allowed the nasty guy’s grift. + Kept the minimum wage at $7.25. + Taken money from the fossil fuel industry in spite of global warming. + Taken money from the gun industry. + Hijacked Christianity, pushing a twisted version. + ICE. Sounding mealy-mouthed against that isn’t going to please voters. So if that New Affordability Agenda is popular with 80% of Democrats it is good politics.

Maine just showed the rest of the country what’s possible when Democrats finally stop wimping out and trying to appease Republicans. Voters want candidates like Graham Platner who’ll take names and kick ass.

Ruben Bolling of Kos, in his Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon poses an interesting idea. The nasty guy has been saying he needs a new ballroom as part of the White House for security. The shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner confirmed the need (at least in his head). So a great way to keep children safe at school is to turn each school building into a ballroom. Though there is the problem of getting shrimp cocktail sauce on the math worksheet. Back in October I wondered if my blog had become famous because in September there were 163,988 views, beating by three times the previous record. Since then the peak in views was last month, at 67,191. April finished at 177,760 views, most of that in the second half of the month, setting a new record. Back then I had just cleared a million views (since 2010). New the all time tally is 1.47 million views. A bit more than a quarter of those views came from Brazil and the US. However, what caught my attention was this: Blogger tells me the top 19 countries that view this blog. It then groups all other countries under “Other.” And this group is close to a third of all views. Since Blogger orders countries by number of views those grouped under “Other” will have no more than the bottom country in the list. That means there are at least another 20 countries that have viewed this blog in the last month and the number is likely far higher than that. So compared to the record set last September this record appears to come from a much broader base.

If he gets immunity for official acts, so does she

I mentioned yesterday that the federal debt went up by $1 trillion in eight weeks in August and September. Three weeks ago Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported what the government is doing with our money can’t be determined. Neither budget experts nor Congressional appropriators can figure out the savings DOGE supposedly brought us, or probably cost us. There is supposed to be “savings” from canceled contracts, from money appropriated by Congress that the nasty guy has refused to spend, and from the salaries not paid out to employees who were fired or resigned (made more confusing by the need to rehire some of them). And there is supposed to be income from tariffs. So how did the national debt go up by $1 trillion in two months and by $1.8 trillion since he took the Oval Office? A week later Needham reported:

Trump is demanding that the Department of Justice give him $230 million as compensation for being the subject of past federal investigations, according to The New York Times. He’s reportedly submitted his claims through an administrative claim process, under the Federal Tort Claims Act, and he has apparently done a bit of back-of-the-envelope math to come up with the idea that the U.S. taxpayers owe him nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.

Since the people who need to authorize that payout are already in the nasty guy’s pocket or are highly ethically compromised they’re quite likely to approve it.

It should be a five-alarm fire that, in the middle of the GOP’s government shutdown, Trump is demanding taxpayers cough up hundreds of millions of dollars to slake his endless twin thirsts for grifting cash and airing his grievances. But these days? It’s just par for the course for a president who sees the federal government as his personal piggy bank.

Two weeks ago Emily Singer of Kos reported:

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has now been in recess for an entire month—and it's all because House Speaker Mike Johnson does not want to release the government’s files on accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. ... Yet, rather than bring the House back to negotiate with Democrats to reopen the government—much less pass individual appropriations bills to fund the government for longer than just a few weeks—Johnson has kept the House out of town. And it's all because bringing the House back would require Johnson to swear in Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who is expected to be the final signature on a petition to force the House to vote on releasing the government’s files on Epstein.

As I’ve mentioned before Johnson’s reasons for not swearing in Grijalva have been shown to be bogus. Even a far-right Republican is criticizing Johnson.

“The House should be in session working,” far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wrote Monday in a post on X. “We should be finishing appropriations. Our committees should be working. We should be passing bills that make President Trump’s executive orders permanent. I have no respect for the decision to refuse to work.”

Two weeks later the House is still closed. Not everything is bad news. Two weeks ago Alex Samuels of Kos reported that House Democrat LaMonica McIver is claiming the same legal immunity the Supreme Court gave the nasty guy. She was indicted on charges that she “forcibly impeded” immigration officers outside a detention facility. She was there as part of the Congressional duty of oversight. An ICE agent shoved her. As part of a chaotic protest she pushed back. She was accused of assaulting and obstructing officers. Her lawyers say if the nasty guy gets immunity for “official acts,” she does too. And oversight of what ICE is doing is an official act. She is not charged with corruption or a financial crime, the usual indictment of members of Congress. There could be a cost to McIver. Samuels wrote, “Members of Congress cannot accept pro bono legal help, according to Politico, meaning an extended court battle could be financially devastating.” Bearing such costs could chill Congressional oversight. Last week Samuels reported that the nasty guy’s Justice Department announced it would send election monitors to several places in California and New Jersey. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, says this is groundwork to sow doubt in the election results and scare away voters. Monitoring is not necessary, but federal officials will be welcome. In response California will have monitors of the monitors to make sure they don’t interfere in the election. California may be receiving a lot of threats from the nasty guy, but it isn’t backing down. During the first week of September liberaldad2 of the Kos community shared an email from California Gov. Gavin Newsom touting some of the good things about his state. Here are a few of them.

Middle class families in California pay LESS in taxes than in states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. 50 million of the 52 million jobs created since the Cold War have been created in Democratic administrations. Republican presidents have one thing in common: recession. Life expectancy, infant mortality, deaths of despair, wages and uninsured rates are all worse off in red states. For Greg Abbott: California is the fourth largest economy in the WORLD. We contribute $83 billion to the federal government while Texas takes $71 billion.

Toonerman posted a cartoon from a year ago, though the incident that prompted it appears to be from four years ago.

Caption: (“See you in church on Sunday”) William Gallagher, Texas Christian talk radio host and author of “Jesus Christ, Money Master,” has been convicted to 30 years for ripping off old people with his Ponzi scheme. Toonerman’s dog: Really? ‘Jesus Christ, Money Master?’ Jesus (holding bags of money): Yep! It’s what I do! You can read about it in Denominations $100:10-50

This blog’s viewership for October is similar to what it was in June and July – and significantly down from what it was in September. The number of views in September was 163,988, prompting me to wonder if I was now famous. The total for October was 47,467 and for July was 48,646. After hitting 9K to 11K views per day in the last week of September, views dropped on October 1st to 1,600 views. That was when I reported September’s numbers. There were almost 5K views on October 8, but in the last two weeks the number of views in a day has been mostly under 300. That’s quite a drop from a month before. Fame is fleeting.

Am I famous now?

Wow! The number of views for this humble blog for September is 163,988. This is more than three times the previous monthly record of 48,646 set back in July. The views started picking up at the start of the month, averaging roughly 4K views a day. On September 20 the average jumped to roughly 9K a day. In the last 30 days over 100K (61%) views were from the US, over 30K (18%) from Singapore, 23K (14%) from Hong Kong, nearly 6.9K (4%) from Mexico, and over 1.2K (less than 1%) from Britain. There were views from at least 15 other countries. Since I asked Blogger to keep track of statistics in July of 2010 this blog has now passed 1 million views, currently at 1,058,937. More than 15% of recorded views are in the last month. Until 2023 most months had fewer than 4K views and 12K or 15K views in a month were a big deal to me. The current rise in views started in May 2023. I mentioned these numbers to my friend and debate partner over supper together. He asked if I knew what triggered this sudden rise, such as a big site mentioning this one. I don’t see anything in the stats Blogger shows me that would explain this jump. This big jump in views did not change another aspect of this blog. There have been all of three comments since 2020 and only 235 comments in the nearly 18 year history of this blog – that’s excepting spam comments, which I promptly delete. I do appreciate comments and may respond in a following post. In the nearly 18 years of this blog – I’ll mark that anniversary in about six weeks – this is post 5,528. The main page of this blog has a “Best of the Nest” list, what I consider the most important posts. Those posts are getting a lot of views right now. Nine of the top ten posts with the highest views are from this list with view counts from 63 to 53 in the last week and 294 to 262 in the last month. My Sunday movie was Diciannove, which means “nineteen” in Italian. I saw it at the Detroit Film Theater. Leonardo is the nineteen year old of the title. At the start of the film he is leaving home, which is Palermo, to go to college. He first goes to London, where his sister is and where he is to study business. But after a night of clubbing he decided he’d rather study Italian literature in Siena. In Siena he really gets into the books, but thinks the professor is boring and clueless (I’d agree to the boring part). He pushes away attempts to be his friends. Then what is he supposed to do? He’s at the age where he feels he’s no longer a teenager but not quite an adult. He tries hookups, but doesn’t get very far. He admires young men he sees on the street (is he gay?) and goes to parties with women (is he straight?). At the end of the year he hasn’t figured out much, which is typical for someone who is nineteen. DFT offers a sheet with an introduction to its movies. This one says don’t expect the usual story arc of encountering a difficulty and conquering or at least learning from it. Yeah, Leonardo does learn a few things in the year (such as some vegetables rot if not eaten quickly), but in that year he hasn’t done much in the process of coming of age. Again, typical. Actual discussion of news will have to wait for another post.

The idea that scientific progress is the devil

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been in the news this past week for three different issues and none of them are good. Renuka Rayasam, in an article for KFF Health News posted to Daily Kos, discussed the contradiction of the Republicans in Congress cutting food assistance, making healthy food more out of reach for poor people, as Kennedy pushes his healthy eating as the cure for America’s illnesses. In many grocery stores fruits and vegetables, the healthy stuff, are cheaper than highly processed food, now considered the unhealthiest. But stores that carry the healthy stuff are usually not in poor neighborhoods. Tiffany Terrell founded A Better Way Grocers in 2017 to bring fresh and healthy food to people who can’t travel to a grocery store. She bought a school bus, replaced the seats with shelves with produce, meats, and eggs and drives her mobile grocery to senior communities, public housing developments, and rural areas. It’s an important effort. But not enough to undo the harm of widespread cutting of food assistance. Stephanie Armour for KFF wrote the second Kennedy story posted on Kos. This isn’t about what Kennedy said recently, more about the whole effect of what Kennedy and his people at the Department of Health and Human Services are saying. The general message is: Have a chronic illness? It’s your own fault.

“This is at the heart of so much of our national problem with health,” said Robert Califf, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the Obama and Biden administrations. “It’s these two extreme views. It’s every health decision is up to the ‘rugged individual,’ versus the other extreme view that it’s all controlled by environment and social determinants of health. The truth is, it’s on a continuum.”

Some of the messages, many of which are quite harmful: Treat diabetes with cooking classes and not just throw insulin at people. My sister was diabetic and would have died as a child, decades before she did, without insulin. Birth control polls show a “disrespect for life.” Children diagnosed with ADHD are fidgety because they have sedentary lives, limited sunlight, and too much untraprocessed food. But those messages don’t take into account lack of access to healthy food, having too many jobs and no time to cook, or in a rough environment where outside exercise isn’t possible. These faulty messages are now affecting policy decisions.

“It’s impacting the kind of care and treatments patients will have,” said Andrea Love, a biomedical scientist and founder of ImmunoLogic, a science communication organization. “It sends the message that it’s your fault. It’s very much victim-blaming. It creates the idea that scientific progress is the devil, demonizes things that aren’t individually harming health, while avoiding addressing systemic issues that play a much larger role in health.”

The third article is by the Associated Press, posted on Kos:

The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary and a longtime vaccine critic, announced in a statement Tuesday that $500 million worth of vaccine development projects, all using mRNA technology, will be halted. The projects — 22 of them — are being led by some of the nation’s leading pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna to prevent flu, COVID-19 and H5N1 infections. The mRNA vaccines are credited with slowing the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Kennedy said in the Tuesday statement that he wants the health department to move away from mRNA vaccines, calling on the department to start “investing in better solutions.” He provided no details on what those technologies might be.

A lot of health officials have said how wrong this decision is. More on the continuing saga of Democrats of the Texas House breaking quorum by leaving the state to prevent the Republicans from passing a more highly gerrymandered Congressional map. Emily Singer of Kos says Democrats are fighting back. They’ve found their spine. It’s the resistance Democratic voters have been yearning for since the nasty guy started wrecking the federal government. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has made a variety of threats against the absent Democrats, including expelling them and appointing their replacements. But legal experts say he can’t do either of those things. Various Democratic governors vow to gerrymander their states to favor their party, which would prompt other Republican states to do the same, a gerrymander war. One of those Democratic governors is Gavin Newsom. California was one of the early states to turn their redistricting to an independent citizen commission. To gerrymander Democratic seats in Congress he would have to work around or through them. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois is hosting many of those Texas Democrats. He said:

“What do MAGA Republicans in Texas do when Donald Trump ignores, well, his oath of office and theirs, and they're taking it upon themselves to thwart the will of the American people?” Pritzker said. “When Donald Trump calls, they say, 'Yes, sir. Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boots, sir.' When Donald Trump says ‘Jump,’ [Texas Gov.] Greg Abbott and [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton say ‘How high?’ They don't care that they're violating the Voting Rights Act and racially gerrymandering their state. Well, they're hoping they can rob the bank and get away before anyone notices.”

I had heard Texans didn’t draw this map. The nasty guy’s minions did. And Texas is quite happy to approve it. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported on comments by state Rep. Ann Johnson, one of those Democrats not in Texas. She objected to being described as “running away.”

“Abandoning your job is going to Cancun in the middle of a deadly freeze, right?” Johnson said, referring to Sen. Ted Cruz. “Abandoning your job is cutting health care when people need access. Abandoning your job is cutting public education when we already have one of the worst education systems in the nation. What we are doing is the fundamental protection by our founding fathers in the Texas Constitution that says the minority party has the opportunity to break quorum when you know that the majority has really gone off the rails.” Johnson also compared what’s happening in Texas to how Georgia officials resisted Donald Trump's attempt to change the results of the 2020 election after he lost to former President Joe Biden. “They said, ‘No, sir. That's a step too far.’ But when he called Texas Republicans and said, ‘I need you to fill me five seats,’ they said, ‘Does July work for you?’” Johnson said. “This is not just about our voters—it's about the nation. And it's important for people to know. They have threatened us personally. They have threatened our arrest. They have threatened our jobs. They have threatened us. The solution is, if we show up today at 3:00 and sit and be quiet, then we get to keep ours. But it kills the voice of everybody in this country. And so we won't. We won't sit and shut up to have them shut up the voices of voters.”

I heard on NPR (no link handy) that the Texas legislature pay is minimal (it is also not full time). Members need an outside job. Which means Democrats can’t stay away forever. They will soon have to return to their jobs. So Republicans will likely win. Which is what happened the first time Republicans gerrymandered the state twenty years ago. Singer reported on the staffing problems at Immigration and Customs Enforcement in their efforts to arrest and deport 3,000 people a day. They were far from meeting that goal in June and arrests were down 20% in July. Another issue is ICE agents with a bit of humanity are quitting. They were told they would be arresting actual criminals, but to get their numbers up they are going after the easy cases – day laborers and farm workers. ICE needs agents. They need to replace the ones who have quit and add to the ranks to meet their quota. To help with recruiting efforts they have removed the age limit (I think it had been 55). They have also removed the requirement of an undergraduate degree. Singer wrote, “All uneducated racists are welcome!” To further entice people they are offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000 and offering student loan forgiveness. Singer concluded:

But relaxing standards for ICE agent hires is dangerous. History shows that doing this could increase misconduct in the agency—which is already abducting citizens off streets and holding them in detention facilities without charges. ... “Any time you have massive political pressure to beef up overnight, it never turns out well,” T.J. Bonner, former president of the Border Patrol agents union, told the Associated Press. “Too many corners have to be cut. Then when things go wrong, the fingers get pointed.”

Clay Bennett posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows the traditional costume of Uncle Sam with the shirt and coat on a hanger, the striped pants neatly folded, the stars and stripes tophat set aside. On top is a note:

Representing the United States of America has been a great honor, but after the embarrassment of the past six months, I am resigning my position effective immediately.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos commented on the shooting in Fort Stewart, Georgia, in which a few soldiers were injured (and expected to recover). Bill took on the NRA mantra of “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” But in this incident the soldiers who tackled and subdued the shooter were all unarmed. This is the 1100th post to this blog that I’ve tagged with “GOP.” That’s out of 5494 posts over 17 years. I’m pretty sure none of those 1100 posts were complimentary to Republicans. Other subjects most frequently tagged are: “Gay marriage/Marriage Equality” (name change partway through) – 711, “Donald Trump” – 672, “Supreme Court” – 403, “Michigan” – 400, “Gay acceptance” – 360, “Coronavirus” (the term used before reporting settled on COVID) – 348, “Racism” – 332, “Authoritarian Rule” – 304, and “Conservatism” – 303.

Ideological bumper stickers are for fundraising, not life

Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported the Big Brutal Bill has passed the Senate. Three Republican senators voted no so the vice nasty broke the tie in favor of passage. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska seemed to be heading towards no, but the Republican leadership gave her a deal that the Medicaid cuts won’t hit Alaska and threw in some other goodies so she voted yes. How sweet that Alaska is protected from a bill that screws over all the other states. How annoying that Murkowski doesn’t care about all the other states. And then said she hoped the House would correct some of the bill’s problems. The bill goes back to the House because the Senate made changes to what the House passed. One of those changes was deeper Medicaid cuts. Already some of the Freedom Caucus members are saying the bill doesn’t cut Medicaid and the social safety net enough. They don’t like how the bill will balloon the national debt and they certainly aren’t going to give up on tax cuts to the wealthy. Singer reported the vice nasty wrote on X:

The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The OBBB fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass. Everything else—the [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.

Yeah, he wrote that throwing millions of people off Medicaid is “immaterial” and just “minutiae.” Singer rebuts the opening lie: Immigrants lower budget deficits by about $100 billion a year because undocumented workers pay taxes but can’t receive benefits. Then Singer quoted several Democrats who say the loss of Medicaid is not “minutiae.” Merlin196360 of the Kos community used a term I like: “MAGAcaid.” They started their post with a tweet from digby:

One more time, folks. This isn't a Trump thing. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”--Vice President Dick Cheney "They'll get over it." - Mitch McConnell This is all performative nonsense meant to secure tax cuts and keep working America poor, sick and desperate. It's their raison de'etre.

Merlin196360 added:

While some element of fear of Trump supporters may have played a role in MAGAcaid, what’s really going on is that the current GOP is filled with people who simply hate to pay taxes for the social safety net. Full stop. The legacy media still talks about — cough, cough — “moderates” in Congress, but I’m with Catherine Rampell of now MSNBC: GOP moderates on the Hill are like Bigfoot sightings. There is no proof they exist.

Republicans say they vote for the bill because they fear the nasty guy. But what this post says, and what I’ve concluded, is Republicans, nearly all of them, want the Medicaid cuts because they hate paying taxes so that other people get “free stuff.” I don’t know the origins of the various pieces of this gigantic bill. I know the nasty guy campaigned on extending the big tax cuts that favor the wealthy. Did he also say the cuts should be “paid for” by cutting Medicaid? Or did that cruel mess come from Congressional Republican leadership? Oliver Willis of Kos reported that Elon Musk decried the bill the Senate passed because it isn’t cruel enough, it doesn’t cut the social safety net enough. When one hast $400 billion (didn’t Musk lose about half that over the last half-year?) why does the cost of Medicaid matter so much to him? Why does he demand to make the lives of poor people even worse? From what I’ve figured out he doesn’t value his life for who he is or for the huge amount of money he has. He values the difference between what he has and what the lowest people have. The further he beats them down the better he thinks he looks. Musk’s comments did not please the nasty guy, so their “feud” is back on. The nasty guy is talking about having DOGE examine Musk’s billions in government contracts. He also mentioned perhaps deporting Musk, sending him back to South Africa. That is one worth sending back. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had a few good quotes. A tweet from Greg Sargent commented on the vice nasty’s quote above:

What JD Vance is really doing here is telling MAGA voters who are set to lose health coverage due to Medicaid cuts not to think too much about that eventuality. It'll all be worth it once they get to see lots more migrants detained and frog-marched on to deportation planes.

Jilll Lawrence of The Bulwark talked about transgender kids:

Studies do not support the idea that peer pressure leads to “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” among susceptible teens or young adults (the “social contagion” effect). In addition, research shows that the prevalence of regret among people who transition is “extremely low.” And intriguing recent research points to possible factors in brain anatomy that correlate with identifying as transgender—which suggests it is wrong to describe transgender identity as a “subjective preference,” as the Ohio attorney general did in 2023. So let’s be clear: Trump’s “two-genders-only” is not science, it’s an ideological bumper sticker. Fundraising pitches are just that simple, but life is not. Here’s what the American Medical Association told governors in 2021: “Empirical evidence has demonstrated that trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”

G Elliott Morris tweeted a graph about Medicaid. Before I got to that I thought to check what the government spends on Medicaid. The number isn’t straightforward because Medicaid is open-ended. The federal program pays a particular percent of whatever the state Medicaid programs incur under the rules of the time. At least that’s what I came up with while scanning a Medicaid financing document put out by Congress. The closest I came up with for a dollar amount was from Figure 2: All personal health care in 2023 was $4.1 trillion. Medicaid paid 18.8% of that total or $771 billion. Figure 3 says that for 2023 federal spending was $614 billion and state programs paid $280 billion. However, news organizations have been saying there would be $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid. I didn’t flunk arithmetic all those decades ago and I’m pretty sure $771 billion is less than $800 billion. Then I see, as in this article from CBS News, there is a missing phrase (at least in my memory): “over a decade.” So $80 billion a year (or $93 billion a year in the Senate version). That makes more sense. Which means (a guess here) that for 2026 the cut is about 10%. So back to that graph that Morris tweeted. It divided up the Medicaid recipients in 2022 into groups. 37% were children and 9% were 65 and over. That meant 54% were working age. Out of that 54%, 48% (or 26% of the total) worked that year. 7% worked the next year 27% were disabled. 12% would soon leave Medicaid. And only 6% (or 3% of the total) were not working. From the way Republicans say it (and I quite possible have mixed this up) they want to get that 3% working so they institute work requirements and figure Medicaid expenses will go down by 10%. Yeah, my math isn’t mathing. In the comments are several good cartoons and memes. One by Kevin Kallaugher shows a globe with dynamite attached that is labeled “US Gov’t, Int’l Relations, Int’l Trade, The Environment, ETC.” The nasty guy is about to set off the dynamite. Behind him is this discussion:

Lady Liberty: “Are you going to watch and do nothing?!” Elephant: “NO!! I’m going to close my eyes and do nothing!”

Art Garfunky posted a cartoon of a cop holding up a skin color chart beside a stopped driver. The pale colors on top are labeled “Ignore” while the darker shades are labeled “Yank out of car.” Garfunky added:

There are almost a million people residing here illegally from Europe, Canada, and Australia, but you don’t see footage of ICE hassling them.

In a cartoon Lalo Alcaraz has a better name for the new detention center in Florida I wrote about yesterday. He calls it “Alligator Auschwitz.” exlrrp posted a tweet from the Florida GOP. They are indeed selling “Alligator Alcatraz” shirts and other merch. paulpro posted a meme that starts with a tweet from Adam Kinzinger, “Imagine being a grown man waiting for Donald Trump to tell you what to do. Lol. Super beta.” paulpro replied to that with a cartoon by Clay Bennett showing a man in his hands and knees wearing a GOP shirt and red hat with a dog collar around his neck and holding a leash in his mouth looking up at a guy in a dark suit and red tie. In another tweet paulpro quoted a tweet by The Serfs: “If it took 8 days to build a massive concentration camp in Florida then it means they could build and house the homeless at any point but choose not to.” Then paulpro quoted chris.writes.books:

Elon Musk said, “Homelessness is a lie.” Hear that? A billionaire thinks you’re faking your poverty. You genuinely can’t make this up. Even comic book villains are less cartoonishly evil.

Captain Frogbert responded to cartoons about abortion (which I won’t describe) first with a quote:

The conservative solution to any problem is always the proximate cause of the problem to begin with.

Then Frogbert added:

How to have fewer abortions: + Provide universal, age-appropriate sex education. + Safe and effective birth control to everyone asking for it. + Universal healthcare including pre- and post-natal care. + Ensure a living wage for all Americans. + Secure the civil rights of women. + Investigate and punish all rape severely. + Teach boys to be better men. + Do the work needed to make abortions safe, legal, and rare. How NOT to have fewer abortions, but ensure more women die: + Criminalize abortion. Conservatism is ignorant and harmful to humanity. Conservatism is not Christian.

In June, the views of this blog set a record of 48,310 views. It is quite a bit higher than any month in over a year. In the last 30 days (which doesn’t line up with June, but it is info I can get), 18 thousand views came from Brazil, 13.5 thousand from the US, 8.9 thousand from Vietnam (!), and about 1.5 thousand from both Britain and Argentina. Blogger will give me view counts from 19 countries and at the bottom of the list is Colombia with 133 views. In the last 7 days there were 7.5 thousand views from Brazil, 6.8 thousand from the US, 2.2 thousand from Vietnam, down to 38 from Russia. In overall statistics (from when Blogger started keeping stats for me in 2010) the top ten countries are the US (238 thousand), Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, France, Brazil, Russia, Germany, Vietnam, and Sweden (9.8 thousand). Brazil hit the top ten in January and is now at 6th. Vietnam didn’t have enough views for me to notice until mid May and is now at 9th. The number of views has been climbing since March 2024, when it was 2668 views. There were a few months in the year before then that had high counts, but not consistently. After 17 years of writing the world has found my blog and declared it worth reading.

A sledgehammer to the federal government

My Sunday movie was Joel Kim Booster, Psychosexual, a live taping of his stand up comedy act in Los Angeles in 2022. It’s just over an hour long. I had first heard Booster on the NPR show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. He is Korean, though adopted and raised by a white family, so he wasn’t raised in Asian culture. He’s also gay. I chose this one because I didn’t want a long movie and many towards the top of my to-see list are close or over two hours. I had also seen a few LGBT comics over the last few months (some great, some OK) and was willing to try another. I thought with a title of Psychosexual he would get into some interesting insights about the difference between men and women and LGBTQ and straight. Yeah, there was some of that. But the jokes and stories were a lot raunchier and there were more jokes about drugs than I would have liked. I guess I’ll need to check reviews some of the other comedian shows before watching. I’m done with the book The Fire Dwellers by Margaret Laurence. Being done with it isn’t the same as finishing. I bought the book at the Stratford Festival in Canada back in August. I had watched The Diviners and was delighted by it and how well it did what theater does best (quite different from what cinema does best). The play is based on a novel by Laurence that take place in the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba. This novel is part of a series based in that town. The series is highly regarded in Canada. Since I enjoyed the play so much I considered buying a novel in the series. Most of them are quite thick. I chose the one on the thinner side (300 pages) that had an appealing blurb on the back. The story is about Stacey, wife and mother of four ages 14 to 2. The setting is Vancouver (I presume) of about 1960. This story is part of the series because Stacey is from that small Manitoba town. The problem with the story is while there are incidents that happen, nothing seems to change. Stacey and her husband Mac are very bad at communicating – he tends to misinterpret her intent, then doesn’t want to talk about it, and she backs down way too easily. I got halfway through it, hoping the characters would show a little growth or there would be some explanation of why things are they way they are. But none of that by the halfway point. So I stopped. I wonder if my dissatisfaction with the story is part of the difference between what Americans and Canadians expect from their national stories. I know Americans want conflict, resolution, and a happy or triumphant ending. I’m not Canadian and haven’t read many Canadian novels so I’m not sure what they prize in their stories. This past Sunday was the 17th anniversary since I started this blog. This post is number 5363. Over the last 30 days there have been 13,500 views from Singapore, 5,380 from Hong Kong, 3,920 from Canada, 610 from the US, 580 from France, and smaller numbers from other countries. Since I was able to start keeping track of views in 2010 the top ten countries with the most views are the US, Singapore, Italy, Hong Kong, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, Canada, and Britain. I know I wrote that I won’t be able to comment on all of the nasty guy’s horrible picks for cabinet positions and the horrible things they do. But some of them have to be mentioned. One that needs mentioning is the pick of Robert Kennedy Jr as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported on the pick and wrote:

Kennedy's history of pushing pseudoscience and debunked claims about vaccines is long and distressing, and his ideas to “Make America Healthy Again” are dubious at best.

Some of Kennedy’s ideas: He wants to remove fluoride from public water. He wants to “investigate” vaccine research. He wants to promote healthier diets (the same topic first lady Michelle Obama tried to promote). That last one could be good, or not, depending whether his definition of “healthy” is influenced by Big Ag. Einenkel also reported on reactions to Kennedy's nomination. Democrats are horrified. Republicans praise the pick or defer to the nasty guy. In an article posted on Kos, Arthur Allen of KFF Health News discussed the reaction of scientists to Kennedy's nomination. And much of that reaction is dread.

Should Kennedy win Senate confirmation, his critics say a radical antiestablishment medical movement with roots in past centuries would take power, threatening the achievements of a science-based public health order painstakingly built since World War II.

Allen wrote that Kennedy says Americans have been crushed by industrial food and drug company deception. I might agree about being crushed by industrial food. But the second part might mean new vaccines may never get approval and vaccine mandates might wither. Dangerous or useless therapies might be promoted. Scientists at National Institute for Health, Federal Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are considering retirement or work elsewhere amidst the talk of trimming the number of research institutes. In the comments of a pundit roundup for Kos exlrrp posted a meme:

got polio*? Me neither. Thanks Science. * or diptheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, HPV Haemophilus, Pneumococcus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, varicella.

Morgan Stephens of Kos reported that Caroline Kennedy, sister to Robert, has disavowed her brother because of the man and conspiracies he has embraced. Caroline’s siblings have also spoken against him. Oliver Willis of Kos wrote:

Republicans are expressing surprise in both public and private that with the announcement of his slate of unqualified Cabinet picks, Donald Trump is still as unhinged as he has always been. ... These picks are in line with Trump’s demonstrated leadership style, valuing people who appear on Fox News to say nice things about him over qualified experts. It is the leadership style that, in his first term, led to results like the failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic and a net job loss when other presidents, even Republican George W. Bush, managed to increase jobs. Despite this, there are new signs of supposed confusion and bewilderment from the GOP establishment. ... Republicans chose Trump to lead their party almost a decade ago. He hasn’t changed. Their purported surprise that he hasn’t changed is the only “shocking” part of this equation.

An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that nasty junior said pushback from Washington establishment means the cabinet picks are the disruptors voters are demanding (well, some are, and they’re not a majority). And, compared to 2016, the nasty guy knows what to expect. One of those picks is Tulsi Gabbard, “a former Democratic lawmaker who has in the past publicly expressed sympathy to Russian causes, as director of U.S. intelligence services.” Embrace Moscow or get out. Max Burns of Kos wrote that a new president’s cabinet picks are a great view into how he will will govern. And the nasty guy’s picks are “a sledgehammer to the federal government.” They’re also a loyalty test for any Republican dissenters. Fall in line or a loyal candidate will be run against you in the next primary. And they nasty guy has been good at removing disloyal Republicans. That’s a good reason to fall in line.

How Senate Republicans respond to Trump’s list of patently unqualified grifters will determine the shape of our democracy not just over the next four years, but for future administrations. History is littered with the painful stories of legislatures voluntarily surrendering their independence to a corrupt and powerful leader. None of those stories have happy endings.

The nasty guy is the least intellectual occupant of the Oval Office. But he understands how weak people respond to pressure. Each of these nominees requires a different way to declare loyalty.

Kennedy requires the GOP to elevate a known kook and science denier to a critical science-based gig. Gaetz marks an explicit acceptance that the Department of Justice is now a Trump-captured body. [Defense nominee Pete] Hegseth is an admission that decades of Republican tough talk about standing by the troops has been a lie. And in Gabbard’s case, a final acceptance that Republicans are now an overtly pro-Russia, pro-Putin, NATO-skeptical party.

The nasty guy is demanding complete submission. It will redefine the relationship between Congress and the executive branch in ways that will affect the balance of power for years. Senate Republicans can protect the country. Do they have it in them? Republicans have been claiming this election and their sweep of the federal government gives them a “mandate.” Einenkel says don’t believe it. The nasty guy got under 50% of the popular vote. This is the most Senate races lost in states the presidential candidate won since 2004. One must go back 50 years for a smaller House majority. Tom Tomorrow posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows two guys in a car accelerating towards a cliff. The driver insists the last time the nasty guy was in the Oval Office was great and this time will be better. The passenger insists it will be a disaster. Once over the cliff the driver blames the passenger’s condescending attitude. Einenkel reported Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a few things to say about the election results. She mentions an ad that was anti-transgender.

"There is something to be said about—it doesn't matter that [Trump’s] lying. He's saying that ‘I'm fighting for you,’” she added after being asked about the seeming incongruence of being angry at billionaires and still voting for Trump, a billionaire. ... “What I think people are paying too much attention to is the first half of that ad, which says … 'Kamala Harris is for they/them,’” she said. “They're not focusing on the second half of that ad, where he said, 'Donald Trump is for you.'” “Political races are not about one candidate versus another candidate,” she added. “Too often it gets pigeonholed like that. It is a race to convince a person about who cares about you more."

Kos of Kos wrote about a tweet from October 2015 and how it applies today. The tweet is from Adrian Bott and says:

‘I never though leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

Kos offered some examples. Biden was the most pro-union president. The Teamsters refused to endorse him. Project 2025 “is an anti-union corporatist’s wet dream.” Leopards will feast. Muslim Americans didn’t vote for Democrats because of Biden’s support for Israel against Hamas. Muslim leaders are now deeply disappointed in the cabinet picks. It seems Netanyahu ignored Biden’s peace efforts in hopes of the nasty guy winning. Farming communities have been the bedrock of the nasty guy’s support. The farm industry is alarmed at the nasty guy’s proposed tariffs and that sales of soybeans and corn to China could be affected. They are also alarmed by his pick of Kennedy. The nasty guy has been talking about tariffs for quite a while. Weren’t they listening? Or did their source of news leave that part out? Perhaps Democrats should avoid bailing out farmers until they consider voting for Democrats. Immigrants believed that their undocumented relatives were safe because they weren’t “criminals.” Many women voted for both abortion rights and the nasty guy. Many in red states are thankful Obamacare saved their lives, yet voted for the party that has been trying to kill it.

From Social Security cuts to curbs on press freedoms, and from higher grocery prices to raw-milk illnesses, and to say nothing of the return of measles, polio, whooping cough, and other once-eradicated diseases—these next four years will be awful. And those bearing the brunt of the awfulness will be disproportionately Trump voters. And the rest of us? For now, all we can do is look on and ask every time a leopard takes a bite, “Is this what you voted for?”

A totally corrupt Court, protected by a corrupt Congress, protecting a gangster

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reports that the Supreme Court has accepted the case of whether a former president has immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct involving official acts while in office. The court had previously ruled that presidents are immune from civil liability for official acts, which makes sense as it avoids people suing him for actions and policies they don’t like. Lower courts have rejected the nasty guy’s claim that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity. The Supremes will hear arguments in late April with a ruling by the end of June. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that the Supremes taking the case is an enormous gift to the nasty guy. His method of operation is delay cases as much as possible, and in this case he wants to delay it until after the election, until after he resumes office, so he can tell his compliant Attorney General to call off all federal cases. And the work of the Supremes will definitely make that scenario much more likely. If the ruling comes at the end of June the multi-week trial likely won’t resume until September when cries of election interference will be much louder. Of course, no matter when the trial resumes the nasty guy will raise more appeals, reducing the chances of completion by the election. The ruling by the appellate court is considered so definitive the Supremes didn’t need to take the case. But at least four justices agreed to give the nasty guy his desired delays. So even though a definitive ruling is out there the Supremes could give the nasty guy a favorable ruling. In the comments of a pundit roundup Kos member kurious discussed the difficulty in removing a Supreme Court justice for corruption. Included is a quote from an article on Vox. The unquestioned assumption is that impeachment and conviction is the only means of removing a corrupt federal judge. From the Vox article:

Once a staunch conservative like Thomas (or Gorsuch) is in office, Republicans have an overwhelming incentive to keep that justice in his seat regardless of whether the justice behaves unethically.

A response by kurios:

So, we have a totally corrupt Court, protected by a corrupt Congress, protecting a fellow grifter and gangster—and seditionist—smug in their own ability to behave as corruptly as they wish, and judge themselves innocent of wrongdoing.

In another pundit roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Greg Sargent of The New Republic:

First, Democrats should stress that voters need to know before the election whether Trump committed crimes—and this is due to them as a matter of right. Second, Trump is seeking these delays to end all prosecutions of himself if he regains the White House—to corruptly place himself above the law by pardoning himself or having his handpicked lickspittle attorney general do it. Democrats must say clearly that if the court helps delay the trial until after the election, it will be enabling him to do that.

Yesterday I had written that Moscow Mitch will be stepping down from the leader of the Republicans in the Senate. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that there are candidates already running for the position, though it doesn’t officially open until November. There are three categories of candidates. The first is those representing the Republican establishment. These candidates are “The Johns” – Cornyn, Thune, and Barrasso. Then there are candidates representing the MAGA movement. And the third category is those directly endorsed by the nasty guy. Even with the categories, the guy to take the position will be one the nasty guy approves of and who supports him. And that will be the end of the withering Republican establishment. That is Mitch’s legacy. He was the most powerful Republican in a position to stand up to the nasty guy. And he didn’t. This post marks the 500th time I’ve tagged a post for the nasty guy. Considering I didn’t write about him in the first seven years of this blog this means I’ve been writing about him a lot since then. The nasty guy is third in my list of most discussed topics. Republicans (GOP) top the list at 1013 posts, then is gay marriage/marriage equality (I changed the tag) at 705 posts. Then the nasty guy. I wish I didn’t have to write about him anymore. Alas, he’ll be around – and continue to prompt me to write about how much he annoys me – for quite a while. Sumner reported that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people gathered in Moscow for the funeral of dissident leader Alexi Navalny. This was in defiance of Putin and defiance of threats from security forces and that took considerable courage. Some in the crowd changed “No to war!” and “Ukrainians are good people!”

It would be wonderful to think that the tragedy of Navalny’s death might be redeemed by an anti-war movement that would save thousands of lives, but at this point, there is little to indicate this is a threat of the scale that might get Putin’s attention, much less force him to change his mind about the illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

And if it did get Putin’s attention he would respond with more murder.

Tax cuts for the rich don't inspire voters. Racism does.

My Sunday movie was Theater Camp, the story of a summer camp for theater kids in the Adirondacks. Yeah, eccentric kids working with eccentric adults. There are, of course, problems. While out doing recruiting and fundraising Joan, the leader of the camp, has a seizure and is in a coma. That leaves the camp in the hands of her clueless son Troy, so there are financial issues. Every year the director of acting and the director of singing write a musical – which they haven’t started yet, though that does give them a chance to write Joan’s story. Early in the movie there is a claim it is a documentary. But it didn’t take long for me to doubt that. I had watched a documentary last week and this didn’t feel like one. Shots looked too planned, catching pivotal moments documentarians would not be able to plan for. And, I was right – there is a cast list showing which character was played by which actor. I think the word is mockumentary. IMDb trivia for this movie did say why there is a bit of a documentary feel – all the dialogue was improvised. That would have been fun for creative actors and it explains why they ended up with 70 hours of film – enough to film each scene 46 times. There are credited writers, who also played major roles, so I’m sure they had strong outlines for each scene. I enjoyed this one. Several years ago my friend and debate partner told me about a movie he had seen. I think it was called Sound and Fury. I looked in IMDb and see at least eight movies by that name, so I’m not going to sort through them all. The story was about a deaf community debating whether a newborn should get cochlear implants. A great deal of what I do has to do with music, which, of course, is sound and one needs functioning ears to take in. So I’m puzzled why someone would want to be shut out from that and from all the communicating our world does through voice and ears. I’ll admit right now I have no idea if cochlear implants are actually any good at allowing one to hear the full expression of music. I bring that up because I finished the book Deaf Utopia, A Memoir – and a Love Letter to a Way of Life by Nyle DiMarco. He was born deaf (well, he can hear things louder than a lawnmower), the fourth generation of deaf people. He grew up in a house where the primary method of communication was American Sign Language. He went to deaf schools and Gallaudet University. And he explains all that to us. In the intro DiMarco explains that he sat before a video camera and signed the whole book. His college roommate Robert Siebert (also deaf) watched the videos and translated the signs into English. Then the two polished up the English text. DiMarco ignores my puzzle entirely. He’s deaf. He’s become quite a fan of Deaf culture and glad to be a representative. At the time his parents and grandparents were in school the primary goal was to get them to function in a hearing world – reading lips and speaking. The philosophy of teaching the deaf (set out by hearing people and reinforced by the wider world) meant if one couldn’t speak one was considered not very intelligent. Students are guided into professions accordingly. But DiMarco, who had been in an ASL environment since birth learned much better in ASL. Part of his story is a campaign to let students learn using the tools that are best for allowing them to learn. If it is hearing aids, great. If it is ASL, do that. Nyle’s twin brother Nico, also just as deaf, became fascinated by music, though he had to crank the volume all the way up to hear it. After college he became a DJ. After DiMarco graduated he got into modeling. That got him onto the show America’s Next Top Model. He tells the story of being assigned an ASL interpreter, but on one important day the regular interpreter needed a break and the substitute didn’t show. Though he loves being a part of Deaf culture, it was a frustrating day of not understanding what was going on. He had related earlier of the time his grandfather went to the hospital and, even though the Americans with Disabilities Act was law, the doctor refused an interpreter and pen and paper, insisting on explaining things verbally to Grandma and Mom. That was scary. After ANTM DiMarco was on Dancing With the Stars (this isn’t a spoiler alert, both shows are mentioned on the book’s back cover). He found it pretty easy to follow a pattern of movements in a particular tempo. Cranking up the music so he could hear it was just confusing. In one performance he planned for the music to fade and he and the backup dancers did their moves to silence. He did just fine. The backup dancers had problems. After that he tried an acting career, but few directors wanted to imagine characters as deaf. So he is settling into being a TV and movie producer, working on shows that display at least part of the vast deaf experience, such as Deaf U on Netflix. He wants to show that “deaf and dumb” do not go together. There is one more aspect of DiMarco’s story. During his time in college he realizes he’s ... not straight. And after college he makes a connection. When young he and his twin celebrated a Power Ranger themed birthday. Nyle chose the pink one, a female character. It was only much later that he realized he wasn’t in love with the pink one, he wanted to be the pink one because she was in love with the green one and he was pretty hot. This book is a good one. DiMarco is a quite good storyteller. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community wrote about the history of the rich over the last 45 years. He wrote it during the World Economic Forum in Davos, that gathering of rich people. The article uses the term neoliberalism many times so I start with a definition (which the article does not supply). Neoliberalism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary is “A political theory of the late 1900s holding that personal liberty is maximized by limiting government interference in the operation of free markets.” Oligarchs really like this idea (except when the government has benefits for them and not the poor). The article also discusses populism, which the AHD defines as “A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.” Oligarchs don’t like populism. And the nasty guy is leading a populist movement. The rich are troubled by the rise of populism because they thought the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan would bring greater prosperity. It did – for the rich. Since Reagan the rich pay a lower tax rate than the working poor, America shipped jobs to China, and money in politics is no longer regulated. Strip malls and small towns lost small businesses to monopolistic national chains. Those changes don’t get discussed in the medial because massive corporations and billionaires own over 90% of our media. Before Reagan people were getting what they wanted from Congress. Afterward, the money was sucked up by the 1%. Before Reagan there were 13 billionaires and the richest had $6 billion. Now there are nearly a thousand billionaires and three of them have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans. Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3% of the nation’s wealth. Millennials in their 30s today own 4.6% of the nations wealth. The missing 17% went to the rich. A Kinsey study reported on Forbes found almost 60% of Gen Z aren’t meeting their basic needs.

As a result, working class Americans are pissed. They know they’ve been screwed, but most couldn’t tell you what neoliberalism or the Reagan Revolution were if their lives depended on it.

This is where we get to the grand Republican misdirection, led by the nasty guy. They are very loud in saying yeah, we know you’re screwed. It was black people, immigrants, and women (and any other group of not white males) that did it to you. In other countries that embraced neoliberalism over the last 40 years the impoverishment of the working class and the gains by the billionaires are driving populist movements. And their leaders are also pushing the siren song of racism and xenophobia. Reaganomics turned a people who largely got along into an ongoing riot directed by the most hateful voices in the Republican Party. Jamie Dimon, the head of some bank or investment firm – an oligarch, isn’t worried about the nasty guy back in the White House. He knows his desires will be met. There is a bit of good news:

Most Americans have no idea that President Biden is the first president of either party since Lyndon Johnson to explicitly reject Reagan’s neoliberalism. Biden has raised taxes on giant corporations (with his 15% minimum tax on profits), strengthened union protections, forgiven billions in student debt, expanded the social safety net, and fought to raise the minimum wage nationwide. He’s successfully bringing manufacturing home from overseas, and is kickstarting a nationwide electric vehicle infrastructure.

So this election can be seen as a choice between falling deeper into oligarch repression or rejecting Reaganomics and let Biden return to the family and worker oriented values of FDR and LBJ. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about the nasty guy’s supporters, the ones not in his cult. It matches what Hartmann wrote:

They know Trump is a liar, that he lost the 2020 election, and that many of his ideas are bad. They support him because they’re just tired and disappointed with their lives. They believe Trump will change things. They really don’t care how. In past cycles, some of these voters talked vaguely about “economic anxiety.” But this time around, they seem even less focused. They don’t know what’s wrong, and they don’t know how to fix it. They know only that they want things to be different. Even if, for some, that means burning it all down.

Sumner then discussed various people interviewed by media outlets. One of those was interviewed by Politico:

This isn’t someone who thinks all Americans are behind Trump, or that Trump will heal the nation’s divides, or that Trump even has some policy that will help him personally. He’s looking for the opposite of all that. He’s looking for damage. He’s looking for people to hurt.

Alas, the people who would be hurt are not the ones that caused his hurt. Another is still a believer in Reagan’s trickle-down economics, saying taxing his boss more hurts him. Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary to the nasty guy by 12 points, much better than the 32 point loss in New Hampshire. She vows to stay in the race until Super Tuesday in March. Matt Davies posted a cartoon that gives New Hampshire an Oscar, “For acting as if the presidential primaries matter in 2024.” Haley was also in the news because she said America has “never been a racist country.” Yeah, that ignores taking the land from the natives, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, the KKK and lynching, police brutality, and all the rest. One can find memes with a variety of rebuttals. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote rebuttal that is a bit different. Yes, America is racist and Republicans want to keep it that way.

Because if it isn’t, they’ve been wasting literally the last 60 years and billions in political donations in a strangely quixotic quest to nail down the racist vote and make it their own. In fact, if this nation were not as racist as it is, there likely wouldn’t be a modern Republican party to begin with.

Republicans are all about doing the bidding of the rich. They may add in the religious right and those who oppose abortion. But that is far from a national majority and Republicans know this.

That is why the Republican Party has, for the past 60 years—and now, even more virulently thanks to Trump—turned to crude racism as its chief motivator to get out the Republican vote. Because its actual policy goals of more tax cuts and more deregulation don’t particularly inspire people, Republicans must rely on something that does. That “something” is and will continue to be appeals to racism, the seemingly overwhelming human impulse to believe, as Webster’s explains, that a person’s race is determinative of inherent superiority or inferiority, and that policies and attitudes should implicitly work to advantage one race over another. In practice, such racism is typically channeled as a justification for discrimination and oppression, and this country is certainly no exception to that rule.

There have been lots of laws passed over the last sixty years in an attempt to reduce racism. Republicans have continually worked to undermine those laws, though they haven’t re-established racism as a fixed governing principle.

In its quest to satisfy the needs and desires of its primary donors and sponsors, the Republican party has quite deliberately exploited the continued appeal of racism in this country at nearly every turn over the past 60 years. ... Their party’s standard-bearer, Trump, clearly views exploiting Americans’ racism as a viable political strategy. He’d be awfully disappointed (and probably politically impotent) if that weren’t the case. Because if it was, both he and the rest of his party would have to explain to their voters what their actual goals are. And those voters would probably not be impressed.

This post marks 1,000 times I’ve tagged a post for discussing Republicans. I’m sure only a tiny number of those discussions were complementary. This post is number 5,211. I’ve been writing them over 16 years.