‘We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves’

 Worth repeating:

‘We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves’

Enthusiasm gap keeps getting worse for Dems

The last time the voter enthusiasm deficit was this wide, Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House.

At the end of October, Republicans held an 11-percentage-point advantage in voter enthusiasm. By January, that margin had ticked up to 14 points. Now, according to the most recent NBC News poll, it has swelled to 17 — a massive advantage that has foreshadowed devastating losses in Congress in prior years.

The latest poll would be bad enough for Democrats. But it’s the trend line that is especially grim, seemingly impervious to a series of events — including President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address and the nomination of a judge to the Supreme Court — that Democrats had predicted might improve their candidates’ prospects in the fall.

It’s beginning to look like nothing is going to bail the party out this year. The last time the enthusiasm gap was this wide, in 2010, Democrats lost more than 60 seats in the House.

“Things could change,” said David Axelrod, previously an adviser to former President Barack Obama, in an email. “But with only a quarter of the country believing things are headed in the right direction, the president sitting at a 40 or 42 [percent] approval and inflation at a 40-year high, the atmosphere clearly is not promising for Democrats to buck historical trends.”

Even without the enthusiasm gap — a measure of voters’ level of interest in the midterm elections — Democrats would be limping toward November. They are saddled with Biden’s weak job approval numbers and have fallen behind Republicans on the generic ballot — two leading indicators of midterm performance.

But now they’re confronting a super-charged Republican electorate, too. In the NBC poll, about two-thirds of Republicans say they have a high level of interest in the midterm elections, compared to half of Democrats. The party’s current enthusiasm deficit is a reversal from 2018, when Democrats retook the House.

The NBC poll wasn’t a one-off. A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll on Wednesday registered a double-digit spread between the share of Democrats and Republicans who are “extremely enthusiastic” about voting in the midterms and a smaller — but still measurable — gap when accounting for voters who say they are only “very” enthusiastic.

More of the ugly details:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/31/enthusiasm-gap-dems-00021774

Conclusion - and a message to unenthusiastic voters:

The doctor (you) is in…

What do you make of this tweet? Click on link:

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1510332893100453891?s=20&t=8pFK75dHT-2QWgdUtJQ0Tg

-Shocking/stunning

-Right on the money

-Pre-staged for/by the interviewer

-No comment

-Other

Your psychoanalysis please.

Trumpists struggle to define their position on war in Ukraine

Trumpists are now trying to figure out a way to defend their thinly veiled support for Putin and new authoritarianism in Europe by invoking the language of pacifism and "traditional conservative non-interventionism" which contrasts itself with neo-cons, whom they claim have reasserted influence in a GOP now supporting Ukraine. They recently held an "emergency meeting" to discuss this new challenge to their influence, as most Republicans in office have unambgiuously condemned Putin and voted for sanctions and assistance to Ukraine. Politico published this informative article on the "emergency" meeting and the issues it raises for the future of the GOP. (Note that their case for "peace" has nothing to do with the well-being of Ukrainians, or an attempt to imagine a diplomatic solution to the prospect of a long-term war of attrition. As the author states of those who spoke at the meeting: “Kyiv itself was essentially MIA — serving more as a proxy for a dispute about America nationhood than about the country’s own fate as it’s mercilessly pummeled by Putin.”) 

Politico writes in an article published April 2, 2022: 

J.D. Vance was on the warpath. “Using American power to do the dirty work of Europe is a pretty bad idea,” he told a crowd on Thursday, warning against the U.S. getting more involved in Ukraine. “We don’t have that many non-insane people in Washington. I need you to be some of them.” Vance wasn’t speaking at a campaign stop in Ohio, where he is running for the U.S. Senate, but at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Washington. The audience consisted of over one hundred mostly younger conservatives, and he was sounding the alarm about not just foreign intervention, but about other conservatives — the worrisome resurgence of the Republican establishment. The event was the “Up From Chaos” conference, a self-described “emergency” meeting organized by the Trumpian wing of the GOP to grapple with the political fallout from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The young men, almost all of them soberly dressed in dark suits, and women, almost uniformly wearing dresses, listened attentively as one speaker after another warned about the perils of intervention for their very own lives. 

A return to the thinking that led to Iraq and Afghanistan could result in nothing less than World War III over Ukraine, they were warned. And so, as Putin’s deadly and unprovoked assault drags on, the GOP is also going to war — against itself. As so often, the battle revolves around the America First doctrine first espoused by former President Donald Trump in April 2016, during the Republican primaries, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, where he promised that he would perform a U-turn in American foreign policy by shunning military intervention abroad. That promise never quite bore out. It was the Democratic President Joe Biden, not Trump, who ended up pulling American troops from Afghanistan. 

Throughout his erratic and volatile presidency, Trump never really gained control of his own national security advisers, hawkish thinkers such as H.R. McMaster and John Bolton who managed, from the perspective of Trump loyalists, to subvert his nationalist foreign policy. 

But Trump did manage to shift conservative thinking about Putin himself, a powerful adversary of the U.S. who wields power with an autocratic strength that Trump and his followers openly admire. Even the invasion of Ukraine has not prompted Trump to alter his fundamentally adoring view of the Russian leader. The most that Trump would concede is that he was “surprised” Putin had invaded. Then Trump reverted to type, trying once more to game the Ukraine crisis (as he did in 2019 during a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that led to his first impeachment) for his own personal benefit by imploring Putin, during an interview this week on Real America’s Voice network, to release information about Hunter Biden’s nefarious activities. 

Though Trump’s view of Putin may be little changed, the Russian invasion has broken open the uneasy marriage between the followers of Trump, who abhor foreign entanglements, and the hawks of the Republican Party, who have rarely seen a war they didn’t want to enter. After the debacle in Iraq, the neoconservatives who champion a crusading foreign policy based on democracy promotion and regime change came into bad odor. But almost overnight, the hawks are mounting a comeback as a new foreign policy consensus forms in Washington around bolstering the alliance with NATO and standing up to Russian aggression. “The neocons haven’t been able to put points on the board for years,” says Melinda Haring, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “With Ukraine, they’re back.” 

Maybe so, but nothing provided a better window into the ideological ferment of the GOP — and the staying power of the Trump wing of the party — than the daylong conference at the Marriott Hotel. Throughout, it became clear that the war on Ukraine is not prompting the Trump-aligned right to back down. Quite the contrary. As William Ruger, a Trump nominee to become ambassador to Afghanistan and the president of the American Institute for Economic Research, told me, “The neocons seem strangely buoyed by the current crisis, and love the Manichaean rhetoric coming out of the White House about this being a fight between democracy and authoritarianism. But the forces of realism and restraint are not going to back down from the fight. 

Unlike twenty years ago, the American public will not swallow neocon bromides.” The participants generally described themselves as “realists” and “restrainers,” and the meeting featured what amounted to realist royalty — politicians and thinkers, ranging from GOP Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.), Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Matt Rosendale (Mont.) to Michael Anton, Sohrab Ahmari, Mollie Z. Hemingway, and, of course, Vance. It was organized by the American Conservative magazine and American Moment, whose self-described mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” and which features Vance on its board of advisers. 

Their explicit aim is to create a young counter-establishment to the hawkish national security network that has flourished in Washington over the past several decades, one that could funnel ideologically reliable appointees into a future Trump, DeSantis, Cruz or Hawley administration. It was notable that at the conference, speaker after speaker targeted the GOP hawks more often than they spoke about Ukraine itself. Indeed, Kyiv itself was essentially MIA — serving more as a proxy for a dispute about America nationhood than about the country’s own fate as it’s mercilessly pummeled by Putin. The basic argument, outlined in a manifesto titled “Away From the Abyss” appearing in the new Compact magazine, is that aiding Ukraine is tantamount to hurting Ukraine. In resisting de-escalation, the U.S. and its allies, so the thinking goes, run the risk of encouraging hapless Ukrainians to battle to the last man, all in the hopes of pursuing a Western-led regime change policy toward Moscow that might well trigger a global cataclysm..... 

Several of the panelists either avoided talking about Putin or largely elided the brutality of his attempted subjugation of an entire people. But more than a few appear to harbor a conciliatory view of Putin’s prowess that was first enunciated by Patrick J. Buchanan eight years ago in a column in the American Conservative. Buchanan asked, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?  In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” The question was pretty much rhetorical. Buchanan’s argument was that America, not Russia, was the bad guy in the world. According to Buchanan, “President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire ‘the focus of evil in the modern world.’ President Putin is implying that Barack Obama’s America may deserve the title in the 21st century. Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.” 

At the conference, I asked Scott McConnell, a lapsed neocon who co-founded the American Conservative with Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos in 2002 to protest the Bush administration’s march to war in Iraq, why a host of conservatives shifted from the Reagan-era stance of supporting freedom abroad to backing Putin and other far-right populists like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. He explained, “Putin and Orbán are not communists. They are classic authoritarian autocrats. There is far more freedom in Hungary than there was thirty or fifty years ago.” It’s a point of view that is unlikely to disappear any time soon on the “America First” right — and that helps guarantee that the Marriott conference was but a fresh skirmish in a longer battle inside the GOP itself. 

Note: This is edited for DP. The full article (a long read) can be found here.  

Earmarks are back, and Republicans are hypocrites

One argument to explain the breakdown of congress into gridlock and chaos is that loss of earmarks transferred power from committee chairmen to rank and file members of congress. With earmarks, chairmen routinely offered earmarks for local spending back home ("pork barrel spending") as bribes for re-election in return for their votes. That system appears to have mostly gone away at some point in the past and it, along with some other things, coincided with the rise of an increasingly broken congress.

The New York Times writes:

Stuffed inside the sprawling $1.5 trillion government spending bill enacted in March was the first batch of earmarks in more than a decade, after Congress resurrected the practice of allowing lawmakers to direct federal funds for specific projects to their states and districts. Republicans and Democrats alike relished the opportunity to get in on the action after years in which they were barred from doing so, packing 4,962 earmarks totaling just over $9 billion [~0.6% of the total] in the legislation that President Biden signed into law.

“It’s my last couple of years, so I decided to make the most of it,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and a member of the Appropriations Committee, who is retiring after more than two decades in Congress. He steered $313 million back to his home state — the fourth-highest total of any lawmaker.

Often derided as pork and regarded as an unseemly and even corrupt practice on Capitol Hill, earmarks are also a tool of consensus-building in Congress, giving lawmakers across the political spectrum a personal interest in cutting deals to fund the government. Their absence, many lawmakers argued, only made that process more difficult, and their return this year appears to have helped grease the skids once again.

It is odd that some Republicans are joining in the festival of pork (porkfest) since Republican dogma claims that, e.g., all government domestic spending is bad, private sector markets and corporations (with the constitutional rights of citizens) solve all our problems, government causes all our problems, real Americans pull themselves up by their bootstraps, only weenies take tax dollars, America cannot afford domestic spending, and other hypocritical and/or mendacious drivel like that. 

On sacred principle, Republican states should refuse all of that evil spending and do their own bootstrap pulling instead of being pedophilic socialists and taking government blood money. Of course that won't happen. Those Republican states will grab every last tax penny with gusto. There will not be not one shred of concern about all those highfalutin conservative anti-government principles. All that claptrap about bootstraps and whatnot is just Republican Party propaganda nonsense. They talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.  

Hypocrisy microaggression alert!:

Republican claptrap → I hate spending, but gimme the cash

One can wonder why Democrats allow Republicans any pork at all. It is a mystery. Once the Republicans get back in power, it is reasonable to think that Democrats will get very little or no pork of their own. Guess the Dems have to learn the hard way. As Zuckerberg once said about people who used Facebook, Dumbfucks!

Alabama gets a lot of evil federal tax dollars

but won't complain about it one little bit

“I’m glad and proud of them,” said Mr. Shelby [R-AL], a legendary pork-barreler who has no fewer than seven buildings named after him in Alabama. The latest spending package adds another, renaming a federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa for him.

In March of 2021, the Brookings Institute wrote about earmarks:

Throughout much of the 2000s earmarking became synonymous with corruption. After a few high-profile scandals in the early part of that decade, Congress put additional rules into place in order to prevent such abuses. However, the conversation around earmarks was quickly hijacked. Some legislators and activists convinced Americans that earmarks served no purpose, were the cause of budget deficits, ballooned the budget, and were the well of legislative misanthropy.

The reality of earmarks is much different. First, they serve a real purpose, allowing legislators—who well understand the needs of their districts/states—to target funds for important projects that can solve policy problems and create jobs. Second, while abuses happen, the vast majority of earmarks were meant to respond to constituents’ concerns and needs. Third, earmarks have always composed a miniscule portion of the discretionary budget, typically less than one percent, and fall within a chairman’s mark—the top-line number set for an appropriations bill’s cost. Fourth, earmarks did not disappear with the so-called “earmarks ban” in 2011; it simply transferred the behavior to the executive branch or made them more secretive within the legislative branch. Fifth, earmarking is not a Democratic proposal. Democrats and Republicans have endorsed their use. It is also not a liberal proposal, as some of Congress’s most conservative members, like Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) have defended their use and opposed the original ban.

In a very direct way, the earmark ban stripped power from the people and their representatives in Congress and made the practice more likely to be corrupted, not less so. Zachary Courser and Kevin Kosar wrote powerfully recently as to why legislators and their constituents should embrace the return of earmarks with appropriate safeguards. They also highlight some of the institutional challenges within Congress that occurred at the same time the earmark ban was in place. My research has highlighted that federal spending power is an ongoing competition between the legislative and executive branches and when Congress fails to direct spending in specific ways, the executive branch performs that duty for them. In that setting, legislative earmarks become presidential earmarks. In that sense, Republican House members and senators who oppose legislative earmarks are working to transfer additional power to allocate federal funds to Democratic President Joe Biden.

Knock me over with a feather.... not!

 

Did you hear the latest??  Sarah “fingernails on a chalkboard (IMO)” Palin is running for the House, to take the place of recently deceased Alaska Rep. Don Young.  There is only one congressperson allotted to Alaska, and she would be it.

Link to the news.

So, what do you think?  

-How do you see her chances?  

-Is this a "positive" or a "negative" for the direction of U.S. politics?

Thanks for posting and hitting the recommend button.

Fallacious political thinking of our time

By Simon Kuper

https://www.ft.com/content/59b5d70e-00b1-44ee-9580-0871c7727ff4

Since 2016, a bizarre sequence of events has challenged our belief in political rationality. First, populism (chiefly, the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump), then the pandemic and now Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have uncovered previously concealed strains of fallacious thinking. People keep acting apparently against their own self-interest, from Brexit voters making themselves poorer to antivaxxers risking death, to the Russian state destroying the wellbeing of its citizens.

 Indeed, perhaps the emblematic politician of our time, Trump, displays an unmatched understanding of human irrationality, as if he’d absorbed the entire corpus of behavioural economics. Meanwhile, opponents of these movements, like me, keep failing to foresee their next illogical choices. Here I’ve tried to identify the biggest irrationalities on both sides. 

 The first is the self-interest fallacy: the notion that people will always choose their own economic advantage. From Karl Marx until 2016, it was widely believed that “it’s the economy, stupid” — an analytical error that I kept making. Almost the only argument of the Remain campaign ahead of Britain’s referendum was that Brexit would make the country poorer.

 But post-referendum research by academics Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin showed that most Leavers cared more “about perceived threats to their identity and national group”. I’ve finally grasped that when people have to choose between their status, their income or life itself, many choose status, suggesting Russia’s elite might prefer European war to status-destroying retreat. 

 Next up is the set of fallacies around expertise. It’s become apparent that many people don’t understand how it works, and demand a certainty and precision that expertise generally cannot offer. Experts aren’t always right. They are merely wrong less often than non-experts. Yet people still dismiss expertise by pointing to one expert’s error.

 Something else that’s poorly understood: expertise advances over time. Our understanding of Covid-19 changes as experts learn more. Lastly: experts are better at explaining what happened than at making predictions. So we know more about the mechanics of climate change than its future path. 

 When asked for predictions, experts prefer to lay out a set of possible scenarios. But this is too wishy-washy for some people. You see the demand for certainty in arguments about vaccine safety or nuclear energy. The way to think about these issues is by assessing relative risk: taking a Covid vaccine poses a tiny risk, massively outweighed by the benefits. Similarly, future risks from nuclear energy are probably outweighed by the present dangers of climate change. But relative risks seem hard to grasp.

 Of course, many people oppose experts for status reasons: experts may know things, but they are arrogant. A popular alternative to expertise is “simplism”: the belief that complex problems have simple answers. Simplists cannot accept that some explanations may be true and yet too complex for laypeople to understand. They prefer to blame, say, bad elites rather than intractable societal causes. Simplists stick to their views come what may, as per the Brexiter refusal to admit that Brexit has failed.

 Simplists like conspiracy theories. Any event can be explained in a satisfyingly simple manner by blaming it on a person or group who might conceivably benefit from it, from a witch 400 years ago to George Soros today. There’s a touching faith in the power of elite evildoers to co-ordinate impossibly involved conspiracies.

 Then there’s partisanship. As Steven Pinker argues in his recent book Rationality, most people don’t want to be rational: they just want their side to win the argument. When they try to understand the world, their first question is: who do I support? In choosing their side, some people reward norm-breaking — from unbrushed hair to bald-faced criminality — which they equate with authenticity.

 And people back the politicians who tell entertaining stories. This valuing of words over good government also pervades the American left, which sometimes obsesses more about insensitive speech than about discriminatory social structures.

 When people assess characters outside their own society — Putin, say — they often use the principle of “my enemy’s enemy”. Many western rightwingers liked Putin because he opposed their enemies: feminists, gay people and Hillary Clinton. Sometimes, though, your enemy’s enemy is just a war criminal.

 When political leaders get attacked, partisans respond with whataboutism. So any criticism of Trump prompts a takedown of Joe Biden. But whataboutism rests on the “two wrongs make a right” fallacy. It’s also usually incommensurate in degree: Trump and Biden are both flawed, as is everything else, but one of them could destroy US democracy whereas the other is merely a mediocrity. 

 There: now that I’ve explained irrationality, people will surely ditch it.

There: now that I’ve explained irrationality, people will surely ditch it.