Heat up the coffee and stay alert, it's minutes before midnight and the sea is running hard….
September 9, 2015 Leave a Comment
Andy Borowitz at the New Yorker nails it again:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Republicans, who mercilessly mocked Barack Obama’s lack of government experience before he became President, now favor Presidential candidates with no experience whatsoever, the head of the Republican National Committee has confirmed.
July 20, 2015 Leave a Comment
I’ve been immersed in reading the history of Benito Mussolini and the rise of fascism this summer and I have to say, the content, the declamatory reach and the wide hearing his views got come from the same chord Donito Trumpet is playing now.
For example, “Mexicans of being responsible for “tremendous infectious disease … pouring across the border”.
As with Mussolini, facts don’t matter. If caught out, repeat louder. Someone who sounds that sure of himself is surely right
Many are mocking. In fact, David Letterman came out of retirement to do so. He said Trump’s presidential race made him regret he had retired.
David Letterman’s Top Trump Ten
But should they (we) be mocking? At least one analyst says “stop laughing.”
… writing Trump off is dangerous. The billionaire may play the buffoon, but he is an important one — one whom Americans appear to adore. A USA Today-Suffolk University poll released Tuesday shows him leading all Republican presidential hopefuls. And while establishment candidates in both parties might want to ignore him, or express a milder version of his anti-immigration opinions, an enormous number of voters clearly like his views.
WaPo William Frey
And, from the middle of the road, Newsweek, comes an opinion piece that actually links Trumpet’s name with fascism. Sitting through a long speech, Jeffrey Tucker writes:
I’ve never before witnessed such a brazen display of nativistic jingoism, along with a complete disregard for economic reality. It was an awesome experience, a perfect repudiation of all good sense and intellectual sobriety.
Yes, he is against the establishment, against existing conventions. It also serves as an important reminder: As bad as the status quo is, things could be worse. Trump is dedicated to taking us there.
… Since World War II, the ideology he represents has usually lived in dark corners, and we don’t even have a name for it anymore. The right name, the correct name, the historically accurate name, is fascism. I don’t use that word as an insult only. It is accurate.
Though hardly anyone talks about it today, we really should. It is still real. It exists. It is distinct. It is not going away. Trump has tapped into it, absorbing unto his own political ambitions every conceivable resentment (race, class, sex, religion, economic) and promising a new order of things under his mighty hand.
I myself, would not use the word fascism in relation to what Trump represents; in fact it is wrong to refer to Hitler’s nazism as fascism — different animals of the same species. I suggest, as a native moniker, Trumpetism. But Tucker and Frey are on to something. Mockery may be a weapon to be used but it should be used without believing he is simply a fool. A fool with millions of adherents is a danger to us all.
July 14, 2015 Leave a Comment
From Bloomberg News, Margaret Carlson spots fraternal twins, Donald Trump and Scott Walker.
“On the surface, you couldn’t ask for two more different candidates than the real-estate mogul and the preacher’s son.
Trump is, well, Trump. Walker, on the other hand, is genial, affable and low-key. As a teenager, he filled in for his father delivering the Sunday sermons and flipped hamburgers at McDonald’s. He quit college, as he explained it to his parents, to make sure there was money to send his younger brother. Democrats who worked with him over the years admit how pleasant he is.
This is where the contrast between Walker and Trump ends and the similarities begin. In his political life, Walker has tried to bring about the America that Trump says we need. He did so first as an assemblyman (calling for a harsh “truth in sentencing” law, prison privatization, and voter-ID laws) and then as Milwaukee county executive (making cuts to spending on parks and public transit, and focusing on making life better in the suburbs rather than helping those in the city). By the time he left that post, Milwaukee had the second-highest black poverty rate in the U.S. and an unemployment rate almost four times higher for blacks than for whites.
He was elected governor with high turnout among his white base. His first act was to bust the public unions and give businesses a tax break.”
August 14, 2014 Leave a Comment
Paul Krugman is on to the “Libertarian Moment” being proclaimed in some quarters.
Is libertarian economics at all realistic?
The answer is no. And the reason can be summed up in one word: phosphorus.
As you’ve probably heard, the City of Toledo recently warned its residents not to drink the water. Why? Contamination from toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie, largely caused by the runoff of phosphorus from farms.
When I read about that, it rang a bell. Last week many Republican heavy hitters spoke at a conference sponsored by the blog Red State — and I remembered an antigovernment rant a few years back from Erick Erickson, the blog’s founder. Mr. Erickson suggested that oppressive government regulation had reached the point where citizens might want to “march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp.” And the source of his rage? A ban on phosphates in dishwasher detergent. After all, why would government officials want to do such a thing?
And in his on-line blog he reminds us of the cloth from which Paul Ryan is cut:
Brad DeLong reminds us of the original Ryan budget plan — or actually “plan”, as I’ll explain — and emphasizes its dire warnings about a looming debt crisis that wasn’t. But pointing out that the debt panic was unjustified only gets at part of what was wrong with that Ryan budget (and all his subsequent proposals). For the fact is that it wasn’t a proposal made in good faith.
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And, as to the idea that there is a libertarian tide rising, floating the boat of one Rand Paul, Ed Kilgore offers a corrective over at Talking Points Memo.
…to the extent there is something that can be called a “libertarian moment” in the Republican Party and the conservative movement, it owes less to the work of the Cato Institute than to a force genuine libertarians clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged are typically horrified by: the Christian Right. In the emerging ideological enterprise of “constitutional conservatism,” theocrats are the senior partners, just as they have largely been in the Tea Party Movement, even though libertarians often get more attention.
And here, Kilgore offers a short summary of the above.
February 9, 2014 Leave a Comment
San Diego, my home town in the tumultuous years of 1968-1969, and of close cousins their whole growing up years, always gets more than my passing glance when it’s in the news. Today it’s about the elections on Tuesday to put a fully elected mayor in, to replace the temporary one, Todd Gloria, who replaced the serial harasser Filner last summer.
The candidates are big-business backed city councilor Kevin Faulconer and David Alvarez, also a city councilor, who counts labor unions among his backers. After Filner, the first Democrat mayor in decades, stepped down to deal with the torrent of accusations about his unwanted sexual demonstrativeness, his voters seemed in disarray. Hope had been high that he would be an antidote to the corruption and budgetary malfeasance San Diego had suffered under for years, earning it the nickname of Enron-By-The-Sea.
His behavior and leaving office were a double punch to the gut of his voters who at first seemed in disarray. They seem to have recovered quickly with Alvarez as the standard bearer. The vote count on Tuesday is expected to be close.
The NY Times, characterizing the race as one of sharp ideological divides, gives a good backgrounder, though for the life of me I don’t understand how ideology is a good characterization of what is going on. There are almost twenty years of history to indicate the past effects of the policies Faulkner says he will continue to pursue. There are thousands of people whose pensions were gutted during past Republican mayors who naturally, would prefer a leader who takes their loss, and the abrogated contracts and promises, seriously.
As usual, the winner will be decided not entirely on the merits of his ideas or actions but by the variable winds of voter enthusiasm, understanding of policy-to-pocketbook linkages and, unfortunately, fealty to myths, beliefs and ethnicity.
Whoever wins, perhaps the conversation will have been begun –using the minimum wage increases proposed by Alvarez as proxy– over how any society determines what is needed for its citizens to produce enough in their working years to keep them alive and in dignity during the years they cannot work.
If, at the most abstract, one must earn enough in half a life to provide for a full life, how is that to be done? If no surplus is created during the working, or is raked off by others, how is life to be secured for the years of no-work? If during the working years, pensions can not be created, if the hope for living after the working years depends on the vagaries of a stock market — which can be sent soaring or falling by conditions in Brazil or Greece– do we have the basics of sound economies, and therefore livelihoods, even in place? It’s an enormous question which is never properly dealt with.
Tuesday’s San Diego election won’t answer the question but perhaps it will be formulated a bit more clearly and spoken more loudly.
January 13, 2014 Leave a Comment
From Krugman:
a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor.
Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren’t always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs — Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit — used to have bipartisan support. And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P.
For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America’s poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise.
http://nyti.ms/1af0TuF
January 3, 2014 Leave a Comment
From Rolling Stone: 50 Dumbest things Right-Wingers Said in 2013
1) “Yeah, I would.” – Nevada assemblyman Jim Wheeler, when asked if he would vote to reinstate slavery if his constituents wanted it
December 17, 2013 Leave a Comment
Don’t know if you’ve been following the saga of the George Washington Bridge lane-closure which, for one week, created a mist of automobile exhausted particulate matter all over Fort Lee, New Jersey. Rachel Maddow, at least, has been bringing us up to date every evening. Quite a bit in the print papers today, my favorite of which by Michael Powell in the NY Times begins thusly:
Gov. Chris Christie is a wonderfully primal New Jersey politician who embraces three truths: Transparency is for squares, bluster is your friend and fingerprints are a pain.
Richard Cohen, at WaPo unaccountably decides Christie can’t have known, much less ordered the lane closure, but has taken a body blow, nonetheless:
…the damage has been done. Christie’s all-but-declared presidential campaign has taken a hit. His Joisey bona fides — a certain swagger and cocksureness — have been highlighted. (No one would cast Jimmy Stewart for this role.) Christie is a man of rare political ability, but he has a short temper and the affect of a bully. Worse, he unaccountably lacks affection for the media and sometimes shows it. Lots of politicians play hardball. Christie plays beanball.
December 12, 2013 Leave a Comment
Interesting opinion piece by Rachel Maddow in the Washington Post.
The collapse of national leadership prospects for the Republican Party is one of the greatest political failures and most important legacies of George W. Bush. Barack Obama looks less likely to repeat that fate, but it depends on a strong grove of nationally viable Democrats starting to grow now. The crescendo of attention to Elizabeth Warren is a healthy part of that process, as is the growing national interest in such diverse Democrats as Sherrod Brown, Claire McCaskill, Cory Booker, Wendy Davis, Martin O’Malley, Deval Patrick, Andrew Cuomo and Amy Klobuchar.
Inside the White House, the task of growing one’s own successors must seem like one of the less pressing items on the president’s long daily to-do list. But the previous administration’s trail of scorched earth and exiles has curtailed the prospects for the Republican Party and governing conservatism more profoundly than almost anything that administration pursued in terms of policy. It is a cautionary tale that Democrats and the Obama White House should heed sooner rather than later.
December 11, 2013 Leave a Comment
Political momentum to keep a ban on cellphone calls during flights gained momentum Monday as lawmakers said it would be crazy to allow them.
Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) became the second lawmaker after Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to offer legislation to keep the ban in place.
“Let’s face it, airplane cabins are by nature noisy, crowded, and confined,” said Shuster, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “For those few hours in the air with 150 other people, it’s just common sense that we all keep our personal lives to ourselves and stay off the phone.”
The bills follow a flood of complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, which announced last month that it would look into ending the ban.
… “For passengers, being able to use their phones and tablets to get online or send text messages is a useful in-flight option,” Shuster said. “But if passengers are going to be forced to listen to the gossip in the aisle seat, it’s going to make for a very long flight.”
Shuster and Alexander, who both face primary challenges in 2014, say they are responding to popular opinion.
“Stop and think about what we hear now in airport lobbies from those who wander around shouting personal details into a microphone: babbling about last night’s love life, bathroom plans, next week’s schedule, orders to an assistant, arguments with spouses,” Alexander said.
“Imagine this noise while you travel, restrained by your seatbelt, unable to escape,” the senator continued. “The FCC commissioners will earn the gratitude of the two million Americans who fly each day by deciding: text messages, yes; conversations, no.”
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