Christmas Eve politics open thread

It has been a discouraging year. The Repubs are in a orderly linear firing squad, calmly shooting at the Dems. In response, the Dems are in a chaotic circular firing squad shooting at each other and occasionally a Dem shooter shoots themself. I wish there was a reasonably disciplined, evidence-based third party. That's a pipe dream.

But at least, one can say the Dems are a big tent party and the Repubs are an ideologically cleansed party, giving them discipline.

COVID at the gym

At the gym yesterday, I noticed that no one other than me was wearing a mask, even though the sign at the door said a mask was required for entry. Speaking through my mask, I asked the minions at the front desk what gives? The corporate response: Well, Gavin Newsome (CA's governor) didn't sign anything, so nothing is mandatory. So, this gym is like a restaurant. You go in the restaurant with a mask on, but once seated at the table, you can take it off. Everywhere inside this facility is the restaurant table. 

Kudos to the genius who dreamed that scheme up. I was at the restaurant yesterday, not the gym! I feel safe for sure.

Compared to countries with competent governance, the US has given up on trying to be serious about the pandemic, assuming it ever was serious, which I now doubt. All of us except hermits are gonna get Omicron, vaccinated or not. 

A masked patriot

Stumbling and bumbling along 

The House committee is still messing around with its investigation of the 1/6 coup attempt. Despite some very disturbing findings, things are moving slowly and not much is happening. The ring leaders are safe. The ex-president is safe. Once the Repubs take control of the House after the 2022 elections, the whole thing will come to an end, whitewashed and Kyle Rittenhouse will be awarded a congressional medal of honor for shooting Dems in a street protest. Biden is asleep at the switch, so no chance of any movement from him or his incompetent Attorney General Merrick Garland. The rot of democracy continues.

We're fine, Canada says so

Anything else you want to discuss?

Was worry about the Insurrection Act a reason for the slow response to the 1/6 coup attempt?

A short segment on MSNBC last night by Chris Hayes focused on one possible reason the Pentagon was slow to respond to the attack on the capitol on 1/6. One expert, Ryan Goodman, argued that the Pentagon feared that if it ordered the National Guard to go to the capitol to defend it, Trump would use that as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and take control of the government by military force.

 

I didn’t recall hearing that concern expressed before in relation to the events surrounding Trump’s 1/6 coup attempt. Some searching showed that concern about the Insurrection Act was mentioned in regard to the George Floyd protests, but apparently not in regard to 1/6. There is some evidence to support Goodman’s argument. His website, Just Security, wrote on Dec. 21, 2021:

One of the most vexing questions about Jan. 6 is why the National Guard took more than three hours to arrive at the Capitol after D.C. authorities and Capitol Police called for immediate assistance. The Pentagon’s restraint in allowing the Guard to get to the Capitol was not simply a reflection of officials’ misgivings about the deployment of military force during the summer 2020 protests, nor was it simply a concern about “optics” of having military personnel at the Capitol. Instead, evidence is mounting that the most senior defense officials did not want to send troops to the Capitol because they harbored concerns that President Donald Trump might utilize the forces’ presence in an attempt to hold onto power.

According to a report released last month, Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of the Defense on Jan. 6, told the Department’s inspector general that he feared “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.” In congressional testimony, he said he was also cognizant of “fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” and that “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification.” 

Miller does not specify who held the fears that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, and he wasn’t asked by Congress. However, it’s now clear that such concerns were shared by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as former CIA Director and at the time Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Before Nov. 3, Milley and Pompeo confided in one another that they had a persistent worry Trump would try to use the military in an attempt to hold onto power if he lost the election, the Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported. “This military’s not going to be used,” Milley assured Pompeo.

After Trump issued a Dec. 19, 2020 call to action to his supporters to come to DC to protest the certification of the electoral college vote on Jan. 6 (“Be there, will be wild!”), “Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military,” and that he sought to stay ahead of any effort by the President to use the military in a bid to stay in office, Leonnig and Rucker write.

Milley, according to multiple reports, “feared it was Trump’s ‘Reichstag moment,’ in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.”

The top officials’ fears were warranted: Donald Trump, his close aides and a segment of Republican political figures had openly discussed the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act or using the military to prevent the transfer of power on the basis of false claims that the election was “stolen.” But the Pentagon’s actions with respect to the National Guard suggest a scenario in which, on the basis of such concerns, a potentially profound crisis of command may have played out on Jan. 6.

Close observers of the events of Jan. 6 have mainly posited two reasons for the delay in mobilizing the Guard. The first explanation is one of bureaucratic failures or managerial weaknesses in the military’s procedures that day. A second explanation is that the military was deliberately serving Trump’s effort to interfere with the election by withholding assistance.

We identify a third explanation: that senior military officials constrained the mobilization and deployment of the National Guard to avoid injecting federal troops that could have been re-missioned by the President to advance his attempt to hold onto power.

This third scenario, if true, raises fundamental constitutional questions about the transfer of power:

• Under what conditions might the U.S. military try to subvert the will of the President (even if one ethically agrees with the difficult choices the Pentagon made before and on Jan. 6)?
• What information did senior officials have concerning President Trump’s potential use of the military to hold onto power and who else did they believe was participating in such a scheme?

In June 2020, in response to the protests after the murder of George Floyd, then President Donald Trump indicated his willingness to deploy the U.S. military in American cities. 

• According to one account[1], Trump wanted the military to “beat the fuck out of” Black Lives Matter demonstrators. “Just shoot them,” he apparently told Milley and his Attorney General, William Barr.
• On Jun. 1, 2020, White House aides reportedly went so far as to draft a proclamation to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which allows the president to employ military forces to “suppress” major civil unrest.

The notion that the President might use the Insurrection Act was seeded among his loyalists. Before and after the 2020 election, a network of individuals close to President Trump suggested, publicly and privately, that he should consider declaring martial law or invoking the Insurrection Act with respect to the election:

• In a Sept. 10, 2020 interview with Alex Jones on his InfoWars program, Trump confidant Roger Stone called for martial law if Trump were to lose the election.
• In a Sept. 12, 2020 interview at the White House with Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, Trump was asked what he would do in the event Americans “threaten riots” in response to his winning the election. He replied: “We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that…. We have the right to do that, we have the power to do that if we want. Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send them in and we do it very easy. I mean it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it but if we had to we’d do that and put it down within minutes, within minutes. Minneapolis, they were having problems. We sent in the National Guard within a half an hour. That was the end of the problem. It all went away.” (emphasis added)

This bit of news seems to be underreported in view of how important it is to help understand what went on during Trump's 1/6 coup attempt.

Two points here are worth remembering:

• Trump wanted George Floyd protesters shot dead by the US military, not just wounded.

• The Pentagon worried that Trump would use the 1/6 insurrection as an excuse to invoke Insurrection Act and take control of the government by military force. 

Questions: 

1. Is Trump mostly an anti-democratic, violence-prone authoritarian or fascist, mostly a law-abiding patriot, or mostly something else?

2. If Trump claims he had no intention to take and keep power after the 2020 elections, would that be credible or not? 

Footnote: 

1. That account by CNN included these comments about the 2020 George Floyd protesters:

“That's how you're supposed to handle these people,” Trump told his top law enforcement and military officials, according to Bender. “Crack their skulls!”

Trump also told his team that he wanted the military to go in and “beat the f--k out” of the civil rights protesters, Bender writes.

“Just shoot them,” Trump said on multiple occasions inside the Oval Office, according to the excerpts.

When Milley and then-Attorney General William Barr would push back, Trump toned it down, but only slightly, Bender adds.

“Well, shoot them in the leg—or maybe the foot,” Trump said. “But be hard on them!”

The Role of Fox News in the Slow Motion Unraveling of The American Polity and Society

The following TV documentary provides a reasonably good account of the process by which Fox News became "The Trump Channel"-- ultimately making it possible for the Big Lie to spread quickly and deeply through the Right wing viewers destabilizing our polity as a result. The doc, "How Murdoch's Fox News allowed Trump's propaganda to destabilize democracy," runs about 50 minutes, and shines a light on one of the truly immoral purveyors of the ongoing Right Wing Trumpist insurgency, relying largely on insiders many of whom could not stay at Fox in good conscience. The doc goes back to the birth of the TV channel in the 90s and goes right up to the present, in which Murdoch's commitment to Trump propaganda has caused internal division within the Murdoch family-- between the brothers who were supposed to jointly inherit the business from their father. I think it's a worthwhile watch. As one interviewee puts it, "The US gave Rupert Murdoch a great deal, and he repaid it by doing America a great deal of harm."

 

Below the doc, I added a 5 minute interview with political scientist Barbara Walter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_F._Walter  who has worked with the US gov't predicting which states in the world are likely to descend into civil war and/or discord and violence. She maintains, along with others in the field, that we are so close to civil war or descent into chaos and violence that using the models developed by US intel agencies to monitor other countries, we no longer qualify as a democracy at all, but as a hybrid state "somewhere between democracy and autocracy, and edging closer and closer to autocracy."   As I have argued on this blog, the vast majority of Americans are in dangerously deep denial of this fact. I see the 2 clips (the doc and short interview) as complementary in providing insight into the current, rapid unraveling of the system here-- both the political system and the civilian population, the citizenry, the electorate, i.e. what sociologists sometimes call the "social system." When the political system breaks down, we have serious problems. But when the social system--the very medium of shared life at all levels in this country-- begins to unravel, the ensuing crisis is far more complex and difficult to address. When people are the glue, and the glue no longer holds, things can fall apart at breakneck speeds that are unforeseen by those who are unjustifiably complacent at this time. The first step is to shake these sleepwalkers from their illusory sense of security, to awaken a sense of just what is actually at stake here and now-- US Society and government as we have known them.

 

 

 

 

 

Please leave any comments on these topics. I would be very interested in any practical suggestions as to how we might issue a warning that will be taken seriously, hopefully snapping some Americans out of their induced state of hypnosis as the institutions that hold us together show serious signs of imminent decay.

The final collapse of ethics and rationality in government

I can see clearly and I like what I see!

Neoliberalism: a political approach that favors free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending; neoliberalism is a political development of capitalism and a political and economic ideology that seeks to (i) maximize the freedom of the market by removing barriers to the private accumulation of wealth, and (ii) become a power over and above the state directed to the ends of profit without government interference; neoliberalism opposes regulation over which it has no control; the controlling ethic of capitalism is prudence which leads to wealth, but the ethic of neoliberalism is the accumulation of wealth for its own sake which leads to political power; neoliberalism, as the de facto only available political and economic option has had catastrophic effects on society and the environment 

People who do not believe in ethics in government finally got almost everything they wanted. The complete withdrawal of restraints on insider stock trading by politicians and government employees is on the horizon. In this case, the Democratic Party is squarely on the side of corruption. About all that's left of government ethics, now an oxymoron, is legalization of federal employees and politicians to have the right to shoot people dead in broad daylight for any or no reason. And even that restraint questionable. The ex-president never tested it. Maybe it's just a mirage.

Rich people in the Democratic Party leadership sure do seem to be hard core neoliberals. A Washington Post opinion piece comments on the attack on a feeble (now apparently mostly ignored) law that bans insider trading law by federal employees and elected politicians:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stunned a lot of Americans this past week when she ardently defended the right of lawmakers — and their spouses — to buy and sell stocks while they serve in Congress.

“We’re a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters.

She should have advocated for tighter scrutiny on congressional trading. Even better would be a full ban on individual stock trades for members of Congress.

There’s a big catch to Ms. Pelosi’s “free-market economy” claim: U.S. representatives and senators have access to a lot of confidential, nonpublic information. That gives them an unfair advantage in trading.

Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, put it this way in a tweet: “It’s a ridiculous comment! She might as well have said ‘let them eat cake.’ Sure, it’s a free-market economy. But your average schmuck doesn’t get confidential briefings from government experts chock full of nonpublic information directly related to the price of stocks.”

When members of the general public trade on nonpublic information, they go to jail for it (just ask Martha Stewart). It’s theoretically possible to go after members of Congress for trading on insider information as well, but that has proved extremely difficult.  

In 2012, lawmakers passed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or “Stock Act.” It forbids members of Congress and staffers from trading on confidential information they learn on the job. It also requires them to report all trades within 45 days. The hope was that shining light on trades would be enough to prevent questionable — or outright wrong — trading. So far, the track record is thin.

Lawmakers from both parties made hundreds of stock trades in the early months of 2020 as they were receiving closed-door briefings about the coronavirus. While most of these lawmakers were not accused of doing anything wrong, it certainly gives a poor impression of where their priorities were during a massive crisis.

Furthermore, an investigation by Insider found that at least 49 members of Congress and 182 staff members were late in filing their stock trade reports in the past two years. Both Democrats and Republicans are on the naughty list.[1] There is no public record of whether they paid fines for filing late.

The irrationality of Pelosi’s argument is stunning: “We’re a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that.” 

Oops, is this over the top?

She sounds like a blithering Republican politician telling us that no one can look at the ex-president’s tax returns or investigate the 1/6 coup attempt. In this matter, Pelosi is not on the side of the American people or honest governance. She’s on the side of rich people, government corruption and making rich people richer via government corruption.

If people in congress can do insider trading, why can’t the rest of us? We would be prosecuted for insider trading if we got caught. Unfortunately, most of the rest of us, maybe about 75%, do not have significant insider information worth trading on. It would not help most of us. Just the insiders would have a shot at making money in insider-informed trades where the insider gains and the outsider on the other side of the trade loses. That is what asymmetry in information can do for a person. Maybe that is why someone once said, I think, ‘knowledge is power and wealth.’[2] That looks, quacks and walks like neoliberalism.

Questions:

1. Is Pelosi just a rich neoliberal looking out for her class, i.e., rich people, and/or is she something else, e.g., irrational, senile and/or confused?

2. Since tax cheats make off with about ~$1.2 trillion annually, should Pelosi argue that paying federal taxes is optional for just federal employees and politicians, or for everyone? 

3. Is what’s good for the goose (rich people), also good for the gander (the rest of us), or, as Joe Manchin believes, the gander cannot be trusted to spend money wisely so the less of it they have, the better it is for the goose, specifically the goose named Joe Manchin?

Footnote: 

1. This is an instance of unwarranted opacity in government. We do not know if anyone on the naughty list paid the fine for not reporting their trades. Of course, the fine for a first violation is a piddly $200. It makes one wonder what congress thinks, if anything, when it passes laws. A $200 fine is not a real penalty, it is an undersized fig leaf and an insult to honest Americans who actually still believe in the rule of law, feeble as it now is.

2. If someone didn’t say it, then I just did. Come to think of it, the big three are generally interchangeable. The mathematics of it, derived according to the logic by my illegal, unpaid minions is this:

knowledge ≈ power ≈ wealth

The ≈ symbol means about the same as, or “generally interchangeable.” 

Sorry for the deep mathematics here, but sometimes one just has to get their hands dirty because even though the job is dirty, it needs to be done.

The big three tend to go hand in hand. An increase in one tends to increase the other two. At least, that’s what the math says and math doesn’t lie or make mistakes.

Here's to a little more common sense and good will and a little less angst and celebrity fandom

 Right on the money. Since I could not have written a better op-ed, I will just post this one from Julie Doll

https://www.cjonline.com/story/opinion/2021/12/17/christmas-wish-list-includes-less-angst-scandals-and-more-expertise/8931844002/

It’s almost Christmas, which means it’s time for our wish lists. Mine starts with what should be an easy one.

I wish people would stop trashing our country. Litter and pet feces make our neighborhoods, our countryside and our society look dirty, tacky, inconsiderate and careless.

That people refuse to do something so simple — dispose of trash appropriately — suggests that perhaps our nation deserves some of those adjectives.

I wish that the stupid things people say or do — including things from more than a decade ago — were not so often hyped into national scandals.

Because we are part of a culture focused on churning up digital anger and angst, regrettable emails, tweets and other actions are blown up into sins against humanity. Further, the blunders or offensive antics of one person are claimed to be representative of whole categories of people.

The traffickers in exaggerated scandals are often as destructive and judgmental as the people they target.

I wish people could distinguish between wealth and intelligence. Just because someone is rich doesn’t mean they are smart, or even savvy about business. Usually it means their family and their bankers have hired competent people to look after the money.

I also wish people were better at separating fame and expertise. An NFL quarterback, for example, may be a genius about football, but that doesn’t mean you should listen to his advice about contagious diseases.

Americans are too enamored of celebrities. We buy their useless health products, call on them to testify before Congress, solicit their advice on national policies and admire them for their political activities.

I wish we were better at recognizing and appreciating true expertise, even when the experts tell us things we do not want to hear.

Experts aren’t always right, and they will be the first to tell you that. But they are far superior to the pretenders who promote themselves by trashing expertise, knowledge and science.

I wish people would be more considerate about using their key fobs to lock/unlock their cars. Honking your horn after 10 p.m. is not a neighborly thing to do, unless it’s a true emergency.

I wish every political debate did not have to be framed as either-or. Like Columbus Day or Indigenous People Day. Socialism or Capitalism. No gun restrictions or no guns at all. It makes us look simple-minded.

I wish we would stop trying to make heroes out of men who shoot unarmed people.

It now may be legal to shoot and kill someone because you are fearful of the situation you helped create, or because you’re afraid of the person you provoked. But it is not an act of heroism.

I wish there was more enforcement of traffic laws, such as speeding, distracted driving and aggressive driving.

Our roads are growing more dangerous, as evidenced by an 18% increase in traffic fatalities during the first six months of 2021. Bad drivers and bad driving have wiped out two decades of progress.

I wish the best to local newspapers, journalists and journalistic endeavors striving to succeed in the 21st century.

Lots of different ideas are being tried, but the goal ought to be the same for the varied approaches: Not only to help good journalists make a living but also to deliver credible, reliable local news and information, which are vital to sustaining strong communities.

Now a resident of Arizona, Doll is a native of Garden City, Kansas. A former journalist, she worked at newspapers in Kansas, California, New York and Indiana.

Republican talking point: You're playing into their hands, don't do it even though we told you to

Angry Republicans

In the last couple of months a possibly new, Republican Party talking point has occasionally bubbled up in Republican extremist rhetoric. If real, this beast is ice cold, cynical and cruel.  Crackpot and hateful comments from the Republican rank and file are being pushed back against as "You're playing into their hands," referring to the rhetorical value those comments give to Democrats.

Two examples make the cynicism and cruelty of this Republican propaganda tactic clear.

Republican opposition to COVID vaccines plays into their hands

This Tweet says it.

'You’re playing right into their hands' when you doubt the vaccine, President Trump says. pic.twitter.com/xJc7JTL0cR

— No Spin News (@NoSpinNews) December 20, 2021

The ex-president's propaganda advisors have convinced him (i) to reverse course and embrace COVID vaccines as his great idea, and (ii) tell people in crowds not to question, reject or attack the vaccines because 'You’re playing right into their hands.' Even while saying that, the ex-president still undercut the vaccines by opposing mandates: "You're playing right into their hands when you sort of like, 'Oh the vaccine.' If you don't want to take it, you shouldn't be forced to take it. No mandates," he said, as the crowd cheered."

One source comments: Federal research has found Trump’s views played a significant role in spreading misinformation and fomenting the response to vaccines he was fighting at Sunday’s event. While in office, he downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus early in the pandemic, repeatedly saying it would just “go away,” even as infections and deaths swelled. He flouted his own administration’s safety protocols by holding large rallies and packing the White House with unmasked guests. He and former first lady Melania Trump got vaccinated in private before leaving office, . . .

There is not one shred of Republican concern for anything other than propaganda value for Republicans. Human deaths, injuries and economic damage are not part of Republican thinking. Political concerns are relevant, not collateral damage. 

Death threats play into their hands

Another example is when rank and file Republicans in public crowds raise the matter of when it is time to shoot evil, tyrant Democrats dead. One source comments about a Republican rally in Arizona from last October: 

“At this point, we're living under corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny. When do we get to use the guns?” the man asked, to applause from the crowd. “No, and I’m not – that’s not a joke. I’m not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”

Kirk quickly denounced the man’s comments, .... “You’re playing into all their plans, and they’re trying to make you do this … ,” Kirk said. “They are trying to provoke you and everyone here. They are trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties, the likes of which we have never seen.”  

Sorry, Charlie, but “they” – whoever they are – aren’t responsible for the fact that your supporters are now asking when they should start shooting their fellow Americans. 

You own this, pal. You and Donald Trump, who has staged a year-long temper tantrum, unable to accept the fact that he lost the election.

You and all of the Republican leaders and aspiring leaders across the country who have promoted the Big Lie or remained silent, declining to stand up to the wanna-be emperor and tell him to put some damn clothes on.

Dissident Politics analysis

Clearly, Republican politicians, propagandists and financial backers have come to realize that rank and file GOP folks should not publicly say any of the most cruel, violent and/or grossly idiotic things things the GOP and ex-president have been publicly preaching for years. All those nasty propaganda effort chickens are home roosting and it isn't setting well with elite Republican propagandists and strategists. Apparently they fear a backlash and loss of some votes. 

In particular, neither the ex-president nor Mr. Kirk expressed any negative moral response about refusing vaccines or shooting evil tyrant Democratic socialists-communists dead. Their concern was only partisan political. Dead citizens and Democrats are just fine, but just don't say it in public.

Questions: 

1. Is that analysis just over the top hyperbole or pure lies, or is it a plausible description of the hard core, radical right or fascist Republican ideologue mindset?

2. Is the 'you're playing into their hands' tactic to try to tamp down some of the savage rank and file rhetoric just a one-off sort of thing and not really representative of the mindset behind the Republican propaganda and talking points political war on political opposition, truth and democracy? 

Local GOP Officials Fueled Supporters' Rage ahead of the 

Jan. 6 coup attempt