Let's Cut Taxes: Party Like It's 1983!

After so many months of dreary headlines, usually beginning with the word "Trump" (enough to create a whole new expression--"Oh, that's another five letter word we consider obscene"--) we finally have some good news:  Republic-cons have decided to vote their benefactors a trillion dollar tax cut for the billionaire class.

It's a Corker!

Finally, something to celebrate.

I remember the last time they did this, back when Ronald Reagan was President. Here's the way President Reagan promised it would work:  You cut taxes and everyone makes so much more money,  even though they are paying at lower rates, they are being taxed on higher incomes, so the taxes collected actually rise and the government gets more money, which balances the budget. 

Got that?

George H.W. Bush--you remember him, the one before the demented George W. (who is looking a lot better by comparison to current Presidential timber)--called this "Voodoo Economics," a phrase which even Donald Dangerous has not topped, and the Donald is a great two word phrase maker. (Just ask Little Marco or Crooked Hillary.)

But, who cares?  

Once we get this tax cut in place, we'll be able to spend on infrastructure and dig new coal mines and lease out new oil rig drilling sites off the East Coast and in Alaska and maybe in downtown Topeka, and happy times will truly be here again.

You got to give Donnie Dubious some credit here--he has pushed the Republic-con party back toward it's glory days, when Ronald Reagan was President and we were enjoying Morning in America and getting Marines blown up in Lebanon and mucking about in Central America and nobody from Mexico even wanted to move here. 

We don't need no health care for all, no environmental regulations, no bad treaties, no bad trade deals. What this country needs is a trillion dollar tax cut.

That's leadership, right there!

The Trump Dump: Green Marble and Ham

One thing you have to admit about Donald Delirious is he has a sense of aesthetics. He leans toward the ornate, golf leaf and the sort of Roman Empire stuff.

He does not like green marble, which he says looks cheap and he wants the UN to replace that stuff, maybe with marble with gold leaf inlays, and some red plush drapes.


He will have Iran pay for that.

He also disparaged the White House, which he called a "dump" because some of the marble staircases were sagging, having borne the weight of Lincoln, Kennedy, Roosevelt and others over the centuries.  He'll work on replacing that and having Canada pay for that. Or maybe Korea.


This has actually been a great season, coming as it does during the golden age of TV, and we have Archie Bunker in the White House.


As long as he doesn't actually try to do anything, we ought to be alright and we can just enjoy the show.

Once he gets around to destroying healthcare--that "disaster known as Obamacare"--or deporting the 800,000 "dreamers"--or nuking Korea, then we can start gnashing and wailing, but until then, he's just a six year old demanding attention, which, if he's funny, can be amusing.


I'd worry more about that dark force coalition out there, all those foundations and think tanks with the bland names like "American Prosperity" and "American Enterprise" and "Free Congress Research and Education" and Cato, Hudson, Hoover, Manhattan, or the "Institute for Justice" or the Washington Legal Foundation.


You'd never know these are right wing nests of iniquity from those names. They sound so friendly, so open, so non judgmental.
 
But these are the real termites in the timbers which hold up the house. Trump may be out there shaking the rafters, but unless the little chewies have been at work over the years, the foundation holds.  Given a good strong infestation, however and all it takes is a good hard shake to bring it all tumbling down.

Liberals Behaving Badly

Who should have the right to define rape: survivors who have experienced sexual violence or those who are accused of perpetrating it?


One of the true talents of the radical right, which is to say the Republic-con party, is to find issues which draw out the most damaging and absurd statements from liberals and that makes progressives/liberals look bad--not just on a single front but on all fronts.

Betsy Devos has found one such area in the issue of "campus rape." 
The opinion piece in the NYT today about "Who gets to define rape" is a case in point.


Over the past 20 or 30 years ardent, self righteous people on mostly liberal campuses across the land have twisted the idea of rape into a shape so misshapen as to be almost unrecognizable. 

A  NYT article by Nicol Bedera and Miriam Gleckman-Krut, who are "campus sexual violence researchers" pursuing PhD's in sociology at the University of Michigan, begins with the sentence noted above, which is a rhetorical question, containing in it the answer they believe is obvious. The article was a response to  Ms. Devos's attempt to change the Obama policies on campus rape. As one letter writer noted, a girl who has had sex with her roommate's boyfriend and wakes up the next morning, hung over and regretful, has not been raped.


Nor has the girl who got drunk and walked back to an equally inebriated boy's room and had sex and wakes up the next morning and feels badly about that.


Rape is a violent crime which involves forcible sex against the expressed will of the woman. This should precipitate a criminal investigation with the presumption of innocence protecting the accused, including his identity until the appropriate time.


The argument of Ms. Bedera and Ms. Gleckman Krut is that the protections of the defendant are too high a hurdle and men should be punished for their depredations and the star chambers established by colleges allow this punishment on the least evidence and with the least protection for the accused, which is only right, if what we are most worried about is the feelings and the experience of the complainant.

the flag the Right captured

Harvard, and most egregiously Brown, have set up committees which well deserve the description of "star chambers" to meet in secret and determine the fate of accused without any of the rules which protect the accused in ordinary criminal proceedings.


There is no justification for this other than the emotional nature of the crime and there is quite a lot of "politics" by which I mean the individual act, which is always defined by particulars of person, place, time, personality are stuffed into a more general anger over women being forced into unpleasant and even horrific acts against their will and then "the system" making them a victim the second time.


The British series "Broadchurch" has depicted the difficulties of pursuing a case of a rape in great detail and as is true of most human experience, there are areas of doubt but evidence can be collected by well trained people which sometimes corroborates and sometimes refutes accusations.

One wonders about Ms. Bedera and Ms. Gleckman Krut.  They are professional advocates, I presume, as "campus sexual violence researchers" which means their bread is buttered by the creation of a need for their services. It is always difficult to get a man or woman to listen to reason if his/her salary depends on not listening to reason. Without knowing anything more about them, I suspect from these shreds of description, they are exactly the sort of liberals who give liberalism a bad name.

Unfortunately, the Right is right on this issue more than it is wrong and the left isn't even close to right.



There are other wedge issues out there:  Transgender rights, which the left too often has conflated with "homosexual" rights.  The right to free speech when that speech is offensive. 


As rabid Democrats, we ought to be very wary of getting drawn into traps.
They can make us look bad.

Dark Money and Why They Win

Reading "Dark Money" by Jane Mayer for a book club, I can understand why the Tea Party Republicons have been able to gain control of all three branches of government and both houses of the legislature.

Mitch McConnell is depicted as teaching a class in college, writing on the blackboard the three essentials for gaining and maintaining political power: "Money, money, money."

And the right has the money. Yes, the left had George Soros, but there are a dozen George Soros's on the right, most especially the Koch brothers.

As the Koch brothers are quick to point out, they've spent billions on elections their candidates lost, so money is not enough, but what they and their cohort have done is to provide the money that keeps enough right wing nuts continuously employed, and over time, with enough think tank cranks churning out stuff, feeding Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, it has an irresistible cumulative effect.

When Hillary Clinton described a "vast right wing conspiracy" she was engaging in what might be described as significant understatement.

The relentlessness, the desperation of the right is several orders of magnitude higher than that of the left because for the left, this is simply a matter of principle and the leftists have other things to do with their weekends like reading, or fishing or going to dinner and discussing Proust.  The right wing considers their expenses as essential to protecting their billions, their vast vaults of gold. For the right, the idea is they are protecting all their hard earned winnings; for the left political activity is just another expression of their ideals. 

It is true that Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump 9 to 1 in some counties and still lost, and you might think that argues that Citizens United and the Koch brothers don't matter because, well, what does money translate into?  Money is used to buy TV ads and to do oppositional research and to pay people to campaign for you, but if those ads don't work, as they did not for Hillary, then you can hardly argue that money can buy elections.

But the problem is, Hillary's money was spent too late. The Koch brothers had been spending money and forming opinions for years in the run up to 2016. All that effort paid off so by the time Hillary's ads hit the air, minds were already made up.

Money buying political contests is nothing new in American history.  
A President who isn't fit for the office is nothing new.
Class warfare is nothing new.
The rich buying laws which ensure they make more money and that others pay to support their business is not new.
Businesses despoiling the environment, the land, the rivers, lakes and oceans is not new. 

Ronald Reagan cut taxes for the rich, drove deficits and the national debt through the roof and the nation survived. 

The curious thing is that so much of the right is driven by two things:  
1. Extractive industries (oil, coal) and their owners (Koch brothers among others) want to keep making money selling oil and coal--which benefits only them. But renewal energy could eventually supplant these sources of energy and other people would make the money, so the overall economy would not suffer, just the oil and coal people. We went from whale oil to drilled oil and the economy bloomed. Same can happen shifting away from oil.

2. Fear and loathing of the "other."  Kris Kobach, Joe Arpaio, David Duke, simply fear the growing numbers of dark skinned people and want to keep America white or make America White Again.  Thus, allowing 800,000 children who grew up in the USA from age 3 to stay in America is an anathema. Send them home! But they are already home. No! These dark skinned people cannot claim this country as home! But the arc of demographics is bending toward the day when whites will be a minority. In the South, that minority has been able to dominate and subjugate the colored population. But this may not be true in the future. 
So now the right says it values the rule of law. And these 800,000 have broken the law, so they have to go. But these kids didn't know they were breaking any laws. No matter: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. You must obey the law always. Even when the law says any white person who advocates that the white race is not superior to the coloreds is breaking the law. (Mississippi law in 1960.)

So these two interests see themselves as fighting for their lives, for their fortunes.

Do people on the left have any such abiding, deeply held reasons to fight back?

The Case for a Post Menopausal President

Americans have typically gone for one or the other of two types of leaders in their Presidents:  The libidinous, hormone driven, charismatic guy --John Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt, even Franklin Roosevelt--who can charge up an audience, get his team roaring and charging out on the field, and maybe even lead them there or the guy whose been there, done that, and now is slowing down, testosterone levels falling, but who has seen it all before and is not too surprised or shocked by much--Eisenhower, Coolidge (about whom, when Dorothy Parker was told he had died, she asked, "How can they tell?")

So we went from Barack Obama, who visibly restrained all his lean, male althleticism and played the role of the good father, loyal husband, the Ozzie of Ozzie and Harriet, the Father Knows Best, sort of asexual, boring, reliable, dependable type and we went to Mr. Penis Erectus, volatile, fun, blustering, charging here and there, to and fro, tweeting Mr. Sweeney Erect.

It's hard to run against that bad boy type.  You need another bad boy.  Maybe Bernie Sanders is the best answer because he combines energy with white hair, but the Republicans will go after him as a grumpy old man and they may succeed.


It would be nice to find a guy or a woman, who combines lancinating wit, hard punching rhetoric with a sort of restraint borne of power.  if you are physically imposing enough, you do not need to be as voluble. 

It is well war is so terrible or we'd grow to love it too much.

So we need someone who maybe played professional football and then got his law degree, or better yet, an engineering degree and who still looks dangerous.  Sort of like the Jimmy Smitts character in "West Wing."  Maybe a combat veteran, but not physically broken like John McCain. Someone whose virility you don't question, but who has been there done that and now wants to avoid all that foolishness and is not about to react to Kim Jung Whoever with more than a disdainful glance.

"War is not popularity seeking."

He ought to be able to take on the stupidity of Lindsay Graham head on: "Oh, so now Senator Graham is telling us we don't want some government bureaucrat in Washington, DC getting between us and our doctor in the exam room. Oh, horrors!  Of course, Senator Graham does not mind at all if the billionaire CEO of the private insurance company gets between you and your doctor--that's just fine with Senator Graham.  As long as free enterprise is cooking, it's all fine with Senator Graham. As long as the insurance company gets it's pockets filled, as long as Senator Graham gets his election fund filled with insurance company money, that CEO can glove and gown in the operating room."


And all like that.


I'm looking around but I haven't seen that ideal Democratic leader. 


All we've got is the Chuck and Nancy show. I'm sure the Republicans thank God every day for that.

Where Did All the Charisma Go?

Last night, I attended a meeting of local New Hampshire Democrats. There was one good looking woman, but, for the most part, it was a sorry looking crowd of aged, bent and halt citizens, whose voices cracked and hands shook.

The speaker was a bright man, a lawyer, who said he was thinking of running for governor. He was five feet tall if he stood on a soap box.

Gets your attention

All I could think was, these people are bright, and they are right in their opinions, but they are losers. Not economic losers, for they were clearly affluent. But politically, losers. Nobody wants to be on their team.

Wrong Cause, but Charisma Plus

What ever happened to the Democrats who had dazzle? The Kennedys, the Roosevelts, the people who had charm, grace, charisma?

A general we can believe in

The closest thing we've got to charisma on the Democratic side is Bernie Sanders, who is tall, but stooped and looks every one of his seventy plus years.

We like Our Team

This morning, on TV, Sanders hosted a rally "Medicare for All" and he had Corey Booker (NJ) and Richard Blumenthal (CT) and Elizabeth Warren speak.  Nice people. On the right side, but weak voices, no energy.

Don't Mess With Our Team

I don't know.  I think we need someone new.

Band of Brothers

Democrats Need Don Draper

What the Democratic Party needs is marketing.

Reading "Dark Money" the thing that stands out is the Republicans have treated political discourse as marketing.  They know that Democrats have the arguments which should keep them in power:  1/ we need some form of universal health care 2/ We need regulation of markets to protect consumers from unscrupulous profit driven businesses  3/ we need to pay people enough money to keep them in the game, to give them a stake, so they want to cooperate enough to insure the continued flow of goods and services they want directed to them. 4/ we need to allow for the free expression of opinion and for free exchange of information so bad products and bad companies and bad practices (like cows standing in their own poop and chickens crowded shoulder to shoulder for their whole lives) can been exposed and rejected 5/ we need a planet unsullied by poisonous fumes and toxins.

So the Republicans have needed to come up with some appealing goodies to sell and they have hit upon keeping government off your back, resisting taxes and regulations and the knee of government on the neck of entrepreneurs who are our best hope for driving new knowledge, innovation.

Then the Republicans monetize these ideas by paying enough people enough money to keep them marketing these ideas--Rush Limbaugh has found his own pot of gold but there are numerous "foundations" and "think tanks" which employ people to get and remained "impassioned."


They know and know how to use anger.

President Obama, for all his great and many virtues did not do well with anger.  He failed, to the extent he failed, because he could not bring himself to get angry enough or often enough. He saw the American economy shoved to the brink of death by--well, who knows who was responsible really?  My best guess comes from reading "The Big Short" and stuff like that.
But Obama could not bring himself to rail against Wall Street greed, and nobody went to jail. NOBODY WENT TO JAIL!  In Iceland, after their 2008 crash, lots of bankers wen to jail. Made everyone feel a lot better. I saw the jails when I visited. And I thought, "We should have some American bankers, and American credit rating agency CEO's in jail. I'd feel a lot better.

Now Bernie Sanders writes an editorial in the NYT:

This is a pivotal moment in American history. Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care to every person as a human right? Or do we maintain a system that is enormously expensive, wasteful and bureaucratic, and is designed to maximize profits for big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and medical equipment suppliers?

We remain the only major country on earth that allows chief executives and stockholders in the health care industry to get incredibly rich, while tens of millions of people suffer because they can’t get the health care they need. This is not what the United States should be abo

Notice how he clearly identifies the bad guys, the bad values, the enemy.That's what you need in war, an enemy. FDR knew how to do that. Elizabeth Warren sometimes can identify the enemy, but she seems saddened by their perfidy rather than angered by it.

We need somebody to get angry.