Thieves in the Temple.

Penny rants for March 13, 2023.

Good news in the battle against monopoly power: not only has our DOJ (and three state Attorneys General) sued to stop the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger, but Transportation Secretary Buttigieg announced his department would also move against the merger, and, as you may recall, Transportation can stop a merger without even going to court to do it. So American corporatists are saying et tu, Pete Buttigieg? as we speak. I don’t think the Biden Administration’s picking low-hanging fruit here, either, because Spirit is actually a good airline trying to get market share the old-fashioned way: by offering good service at lower prices. Certainly don’t get too upset that JetBlue’s stock prices fell, because America has to stop worshiping at the altar of the stock market. The stock market is not the be-all-end-all of our economy, it measures speculation more than anything else, and Our Glorious Elites have conditioned us to treat it like a big game decades before DraftKings brought sports gambling to every cellphone.

Cops arrest protestors for “domestic terrorism” at the infamous Cop City site in an Atlanta forest, and how good is their case against them? This good: “The probable cause stated in the warrants against the activists is extremely weak. Police cited arrestees having mud on their shoes – in a forest. The warrants alleged they had written a legal support phone number on their arms, as is common during mass protests. And, in a few cases, police alleged protesters were holding shields – hardly proof of illegal activity – which a number of defendants even deny.” And thus we learn that their aim is not to send protestors to jail, but to make them fight their charges, because the more they have to fight their charges, the less they can fight the cops. I always said they’d come after us with “terrorism” charges, and I was right. But please, right-wingers, tell us again how you support our police! And ask yourself if you’d support them if they treated you this way. And if you respond “they would never treat me this way,” ask yourself if there really should be one law for you and another for people you disagree with.

NPR reports on medical tourism in Mexico, with a shallow attachment to a ZOMG TEH CRIME WAVEZ!!!!! news hook (at least one of the four South Carolina residents abducted in Mexico earlier in March went there for a tummy tuck) and some rather incomplete information. Yes one would imagine follow-up care would be difficult if you get an operation in a foreign country, but the article cites CDC advisories about infections in countries that aren’t Mexico I wonder why, and anyway what are Mexico’s nosocomial infection rates vis a vis the U.S.? The article does not tell us, and we did just learn more about how bad some American hospitals can be. You remember, cockroaches in the operating room? OK, they were Florida hospitals, but Florida is still a part of America at the present time. Anyway, why do we have medical tourism again? Oh, right: because our health insurance industry does its damnedest not to pay for your medical needs. It’s not because getting a tooth pulled in Mexico City is on anyone’s bucket list, that’s for sure.

Penny rants for March 10, 2023: special "our 'liberal' media still sucks!" edition!

So Speaker McCarthy (E-CA) gave all this January 6 footage to Tucker Carlson, and Mr. Carlson concocted a January 6 narrative so phony that even Republican Senators have slammed it. Sen. Romney (R-UT) even sounds like a media theorist attacking him: “The American people saw what happened on Jan. 6. They’ve seen the people that got injured. They saw the damage to the building. You can’t hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on. It’s so absurd. It’s nonsense.” Sadly, we have to wait until paragraph 18 to get this analysis, which we should have gotten in paragraph one. Yeah, I know, Sen. Tillis calling Mr. Carlson’s January 6 gaslighting “bullshit” is a good sound bite, but Mr. Romney’s analysis is something everyone needs to know. And with Republican Senators (and our “liberal” media) now desperate to change the subject, we’re even less likely to know it.

In an absolutely related note, FAIR instructs us that “Scary Headlines Hype Dangers Rarely Faced by Tourists in Mexico.” 32 million tourists visit Mexico annually, and even Portland, OR currently has a higher murder rate than Mexico City, but let’s hype up a handful of drug-related murders and extend that to an entire country just so we can compare it to Iraq! Yes, isolated incidents never seem isolated if they happen to you, but people think crime is bad because “you see it on the news all the time,” when those half-dozen clips of violent crime you see on the news every day (some of which get repeated for days on end, right, Tucker Carlson?) would never stack up next to all the clips you could see of people getting through their day without any violence at all – clips you don’t see because they’re not titillating enough. It’s well past time we said to our media: enough of the drama!

In case you forgot about the tire fire Twitter’s become under Elon Musk, note that Mr. Musk just told his managers to nominate their best employee – and then fired them and replaced them with those employees, who are, of course, making less money. If you’re wondering why folks don’t just up and leave Twitter, remember that more than a few of them would also have to leave the country if they did, and remember that they’re also making less money. Some “free” marketeers still yell (yes, shouty-caps is yelling!) that this “fire-and-promote strategy” is just life in the private sector, but “(y)ou now have good devs (i.e., developers) managing, and not doing dev. That means you have less effective dev. You need good administrators to do the administration so the good devs can do dev.” Managers and workers use entirely different skill sets, but then so much wisdom dies at the “free” market altar. I hope all the fired managers on Twitter find more exciting and ennobling work elsewhere.

Penny Rants for June 29, 2022: good news for Democrats! Which is bad news *to* Democratic politicians.

For some reason, Kerry Eleveld’s report about the fall of Roe “disrupting” the Republicans-will-crush-it-in-November narrative starts off with reports about Democratic and Republican enthusiasm in the wake of Roe’s fall, when the big story, it seems to me, is that the generic ballot polls have been trending hard in the Democrats’ direction. NPR’s generic ballot poll, which was 47-44 for Republicans in April, is now 48-41 for Democrats; that’s a 10-point swing, basically, in two months. (A Politico/Morning Consult poll found a three-point swing toward Democrats in one week, albeit the week our Supreme Court overturned Roe.) Republicans had better hope gas stays at $5/gallon! Seriously, as I’ve said, people really hate politicians who take away things they count on, just like they did in 2017-18 when Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Nobody stopped them but the people. That’s how it’ll have to happen again.

Virginia Republican House candidate Yesli Vega – like most of today's Republicans, desperately trying to appear more anti-abortion than anyone who's ever lived – suggests that it’s a lot harder to get pregnant from rape than from consensual sex, “maybe because there's so much going on in the body” and/or “(b)ecause it's not something that's happening organically,” or because “the male” is doing it more “quickly.” Even worse than all that, though? She suggests that it must not happen all that often merely because she only saw it happen once in her decade-plus as a police officer, like she’s the center of all human experience or something. Admittedly, she may be a little harder to trap into a humiliating loss than Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin was, precisely because she’s clearly more prone to word salad, but it’s a long campaign, so I suspect she’ll give us other opportunities. Bonus: if Abigail Spanberger actually loses to her, she’ll have to confront the fact that the problem was never “defund the police” or “socialism” but her.

Finally, when I hear that Sen. Joe Manchin (D?-WV) not only won’t say he’ll support President Biden in 2024, which, like, who cares, but won't say whether he'd run for President as a third-party candidate, I feel compelled to first take a deep breath and then ask: what sane person thinks Joe Manchin is the answer to anyone’s problems? Our chattering class always whines that there are just no moderates anymore whenever a moderate is President, but Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans stopped us from raising taxes on the rich. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans took monthly $250 and $300 checks away from working families. Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans prevented American workers from getting four weeks of paid sick leave. And Joe Manchin and the 50 Senate Republicans kept child-care prices astronomically high for American families while pissing and moaning about inflation. And were he so dense as to run for President, that’s the ad I’d run over and over and over again until he slinks away into the oblivion he has most certainly earned.

Penny Rants for June 28, 2022: you gotta read past the headline, and other concrete cold facts.

A lot of times you read a scary headline and expect the article’s text to explain it away, but the AP headline “More Than 1 Million Voters Switch to GOP in Warning for Dems” requires even more qualification than the article’s text gives. And that assumes that the research backing that finding (which relies at least in part on “statistical modeling”) is even valid! Only in paragraph 9 do we learn that while 1 million voters “switched” to the GOP, 630,000 others “switched” to the Democrats, which already makes the scare number smaller. And I keep putting “switch” in quotation marks for a reason: in the article’s one anecdote (I know, only one!), a Colorado man complains about vaccine mandates to explain his switch from Libertarian to Republican. You can thus easily imagine (more easily than the AP, apparently!) that many folks “switched” from independent or unaffiliated to Republican, and that most of them were probably already voting Republican. And finally, at the risk of piling on, this information pre-dates our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and as I’ve said, people hate politicians who take away things they’ve come to rely on, as we saw during the Affordable Care Act debate in 2017.

You may appreciate the long and complex discourse here about a First Circuit Court panel splitting evenly over whether a warrantless telephone pole surveillance camera – which, in the case before the panel, took over eight months of video footage of a suspect’s front yard – violates our Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights. Or you may, like me, make up your mind at “warrantless.” Whenever law enforcement won’t get warrants, you have to wonder why, and you also have to wonder why the three judges who didn’t find eight months of pole cameras unconstitutional didn’t wonder why. And one judge’s notion that our government won’t abuse telephone pole camera surveillance because the polls are so expensive? That is to laugh. You can justify any expense once you tell yourself the world will end if you don’t, and law enforcement routinely gets exactly that apocalyptic about drug dealers. If only they felt that way about banksters or polluters! And if they did, I’d still make them get their damn warrants.

Finally, I don’t know what Ron Johnson means to accomplish by suddenly saying yeah, now that you mention it, he knew all about lists of “alternate electors” his office tried to give to Mike Pence and oh yeah, he got those lists from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA). People don’t just feel sorry for guys who can’t get their story straight about an attempted coup. (Rep. Kelly, for his part, denies the story, but that’s just drama.) I guess Mr. Johnson just figures he’ll run another feel-good ad everyone likes (maybe this one, though he’s dropped it pretty early in the cycle) and get re-elected no matter what he says or does, and given how well Democrats have run against him in the past, I can see why he placed that bet. Though he’s not running against Russ Feingold this time. If Ron Johnson is the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name, Russ Feingold is the master of tying one hand behind your back in a campaign.

Penny Rants for June 24, 2022: special "the main cause of inflation is corporate greed" edition!

Matt Stoller instructs us, in a piece provocatively titled “On Inflation: It’s the Monopoly Profits, Stupid,” that more economists are (finally!) coming around to the notion that we’re not in a “wage-price spiral” but a “profits-inflation spiral.” I mean, you and I just looked at rising corporate profits and rising prices and figured that out, but it’s still good to get some data behind it, not just from Josh Bivens at EPI (who said a few months back that price-gouging caused a little over half of our current inflation), but also at least two Federal Reserve banks and Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani at the Roosevelt Institute. Also too, “the most financialized sectors of the economy are the ones most adept at exploiting pricing power during the pandemic,” likely due to “cheap money from the Fed sloshing around Wall Street.” In other words, banksters ruin everything. And don’t forget how many CEOs brag about their ability to raise prices!

It’s easy to laugh at Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI) having an absurd amount of trouble explaining away why staffers in his office tried to hand former Vice President Pence an “alternate slate of electors” right before January 6, and indeed I don’t know how yelling “IT WAS ALL STAFF TO STAFF!” even sounded good in his head, but remember that this guy has won two Senatorial elections, albeit not with more than 51% of the vote, and with our “liberal” media doing its damnedest to create a Republican wave, Mr. Johnson is, once again, one really inspired TV ad away from winning an election, and maybe this time he won’t even risk getting peed on by his grandkid while changing his diaper. Still, even if he serves as long as William Proxmire God forbid, his underlings will get tired of him throwing them under the bus. I’d prefer not to wait for that to happen, though. Two terms is at least two terms too many for the man who gives the “Citizen Legislator” a bad name.

Finally, I don’t know if our Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade today – Friday’s a good day to do something like that, since our “liberal” media reporters will be trying to get out of town already – but if they do, I think two things will happen. One, right-wing politicians will not celebrate! Sounds counterintuitive, to say the least, but how can you celebrate victories when you’re constantly ginning up outrage among your votaries over what they’ve lost? Besides, right-wingers are hunting bigger game – making birth control illegal and domestic abuse legal in the short term, taking away a woman’s freedom to do anything but submit to a man’s whims in the long term. Two, if you remember how Obamacare suddenly went from Democratic liability to Democratic weapon in 2017 and 2018, you know that people really, really hate suddenly losing something they rely upon. Of course right-wing politicians will always be able to get abortions for their daughters and mistresses, but regular folks will not take well to having legal abortions taken away – and they won’t take well to the Republicans who took them away.

Penny rants for June 23, 2022: special "right-wingers still suck" edition!

Texas's state police head testifies, at a state House committee meeting, that enough police were at the Uvalde school quickly enough, and were armed enough, to stop the massacre, and though the officers' failure to check an unlocked door sure doesn't make them look good, we should suspect a narrative that places all the blame on one guy, in this case Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo. But admittedly I'd also suspect a narrative that places all the blame on "lack of training," tired as I am of trying to make police into the Swiss Army knives of our civilization. What narrative would I not suspect? The one that finally admits that "more cops" isn't the answer to every conceivable problem, that "freedom" doesn't mean more and bigger guns for everyone so much as the freedom not to get mass-murdered, and that we can in fact keep semi-automatic guns off the streets without touching handguns or rifles. Can we get used to a world where we don't reflexively trust police? Of course we can! We're Americans, after all.

So now Trumpholes are putting up fake wanted posters on social media supposedly depicting folks who helped "steal" the vote for Joe Biden, and probably the only thing saving these Trumpholes from multiple defamation lawsuits is that potential plaintiffs don't know they're out there like that. Of course social media corporations suck at their job – by which I mean they’re failing to enforce their own standards for using their sites! – but dig this response from True the Vote's founder about "voter fraud": "I do think that when 80%+ of America is concerned about election integrity, something must be done to address the situation." We can easily guess that 80% figure doesn't describe what she wants you to think it describes, but why would "80% of America concerned about election integrity" mean the "something" that "must be done" should be "we should randomly accuse people of election fraud"? Hell, why does it mean "we should make it harder to vote"? This is what right-wingers do: identify "problems" and then tell you their solutions are the only solutions.

Finally, I haven’t been watching the January 6 hearings with any regularity, because I don’t need to be told who the assholes are, and how much of my rage do I really want to relive? But I will note the testimony of Shaye Moss and her mother, “Lady Ruby” Freeman, two Georgia election workers targeted by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani as “election stealers.” But most news reports haven’t foregrounded the fact that Trump supporters forced their way into Ms. Moss’s grandmother’s house and yelled that they were making a “citizen’s arrest” on the pair. Get ready for a lot more of that garbage as Republicans lose more elections. That only makes me angry, though – hearing that Ms. Freeman felt guilty over maybe being the “cause” of her family’s stress made me sad. I wish more Americans understood who really causes their pain, and I wish more bad people felt guilty about causing that pain. I don’t even mean Messrs. Trump and Giuliani, because they're irredeemable; I mean the would-be “citizen” cops, who may not be.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 13, 2020: special "everyone who sucked last year still sucks" edition!

From the "We Kinda Always Knew This, But It's Good to Have Confessions" file: a lengthy Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting investigation finds that Monsanto and BASF introduced their versions of dicamba knowing it would damage competitors' soybean crops, and they released these products because they wanted to eliminate their competitors. It gets better: Monsanto deliberately undertested their dicamba product (since they couldn't control dicamba's drift onto other farms), and when they did test it, they tested it under conditions that were nothing like what actual farmers face every day. BASF even told folks that their dicamba wouldn't necessarily be safe even by applying it strictly according to the label. In a sane and moral society, Monsanto and BASF would be so broken by lawsuits they'd go out of business. In this sick, immoral, and decadent society, however, Republicans claim these failures require more of the "free" market medicine that enabled them in the first place -- and Democrats remain so hypnotized by the "promise" of "technology" that they sit on their hands.

Another day, another reminder that a crap-ton of full-time workers at fast-food and retail corporations don't make enough money to stay off of federal assistance like food stamps and Medicaid, this time from a Government Accountability Office (or GAO) study. And here you thought if you work full-time, you should be able to provide for your family and guide your children to a better future -- let alone be able to provide for your family without having to rely on government assistance. Which you've already paid into with your taxes, so don't blame yourself or imagine you're some kind of leech; that's what they want you to think -- and right-wingers are so quick to say just get a better job like they're not busy trying to outsource all the good American jobs so that American executives can gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes. Oh, and here's the kicker: our GAO did this study before the pandemic hit; one can only imagine how much worse it is now, with over 14 million more uninsured and our U-1 unemployment rate still close to 7 percent (the more instructive U-6 rate, which counts part-timers who want to work full-time and unemployed folks who've given up, is 12 percent).

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post lists every single Republican House Rep and state Attorney General who signed on to that ridiculous Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn our election, saying "they are laying the predicate for a contentious new phase of American democracy, if it can continue to be called that, in which election results -- after appropriate recounts and audits and certifications -- are no longer accepted. Instead, they merely open the door for a second phase of legal and political guerrilla warfare in which no tactic, no lie, no baseless claim is off-limits." Note well that these Republicans' loyalty to our soon-to-be-ex-President will most likely go unrewarded, not just because there'll always be a crazier right-winger to swordfight (just ask Scott Tipton!), but also because it only takes one deviation from Dear Leader's Holy Will to become a permanent outcast (just ask Bill Barr!). I did wonder -- because unlike these Republicans I do have the capacity for shame -- if we bore any blame for talking about Voter ID and Interstate Crosscheck, but no, we don't, not just because we always had evidence, but because we always said vote suppression happened before the vote.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, October 7, 2020: in which we confront various Presidential dramas.

Rachel Bade and Paul Kane at the Washington Post find that "the GOP’s predicted Supreme Court bump" from the Barrett nomination "has yet to materialize," either in polling or in campaign donations. But newsflash: there was no Supreme Court bounce in 2018, either! Maybe that's because the Kavanaugh hearings resolved too early in October to be much of a Surprise, whereas the Barrett hearings won't even start until next week, and maybe our President's plan all along was to draw out the Barrett hearings until after the election, so that it'd be fresh in right-wing voters' minds. But how many more votes can Republicans harvest from this stratagem? Seriously, the crowd that lives for right-wing judicial confirmations got into bed with this President a long time ago. And though they might complain about our President's obnoxiousness, they're quite happy there.

Walter Shapiro says that "crippling fear of a primary challenge" from a Presidential votary simply doesn't explain Republican cowardice in the face of our ongoing pandemic, adding that "(i)t is hard to imagine a 2022 primary challenge against Republicans solely for wearing a mask on an airplane or staying home when they feared they would test positive for the coronavirus." Oh, but I think Republicans will absolutely face primary challenges in 2022 for wearing a mask, not being Q-friendly enough, for actually protecting bans on pre-existing conditions, or a dozen other things I can't even imagine because I'm not a soulless prick. After all, once you've abandoned principle, science, logic, even common sense, where can you go? Only deeper and deeper into fantasy, and big corporate money will be there to enable those fantasies, just as it was for the Tea Party. And you know how that story'll end -- unless we act.

Don't make too much of reports that the elder Presidential scion thinks his dad is "acting crazy" and doesn't want to be the only one to tell him, or that the Presidential family is "divided" over our President's most recent "erratic" behavior, because what is that, class? Drama, that's what, and, as usual, not particularly good drama. For decades (not just the last four years!) Republicans have pretended to have "real differences" over policy, or process, or optics, but they don't -- they play out these dramas just to distract you from acting more decisively against their evil. Thus folks who say even Don Jr. thinks his old man's bananas, even if they don't mean to, give you permission to think you don't have to do anything about this sick, immoral, and decadent society. Every day the sun rises, we have to do something about that, and when we soak in drama, we make that task much harder.

Upon hearing that our President left Walter Reed Medical Center with the twittered advice that you should not let COVID-19 "dominate your life," you might well respond that the 200,000-plus folks he's let die from COVID would have something to say about that if they could. But then, "(d)on't let it dominate your life" ain't for those people, nor even for the American people: it's for his votaries, and no one else. Dismiss all reasonable warnings, don't worry about how your friends and neighbors feel, even tear off your mask and wander around indoors if you're infected -- those are the stand-by orders he just gave his votaries, and again, you can't dismiss the possibility that he plans to keep the pandemic going because he can only operate in a climate of chaos. I used to say George W. Bush screwed things up so that you'd cleave to him harder; this President is only the next logical step in that stratagem.

Penny Rants for Sunday, October 4, 2020: examining our latest Presidential drama.

You know all about Uber and Lyft, those "disruptive" and "innovative" corporations that redistribute the income of unionized taxi drivers upward to undeserving executives by helping good citizens use their own cars as a taxi service? Now ProPublica introduces you to Arise, the corporation that farms out customer service reps who work from home to other big corporations -- customer service reps who must pay thousands of dollars in "startup costs" because of course they're not employees but "independent contractors." But worse, even, than that, or all the corporate outsourcing this encourages, or the less-than-minimum-wage pay you'd get as an Arise "service partner," or the draconian rules about how long your service calls can be or how many refunds you can facilitate, is the former Arise CEO who refers to "lunch, breaks, and training" as wastage. You know, wastage, as in "every moment spent not pleasuring the executive is wasted time." Stupid workers, always needing to work on a full belly and blow off some steam every once in a while! Well, you know what they say: one person's hard-earned rights are another person's wastage. OK, people don't seriously say that, at least not in public, because if they did, they'd out themselves as evil.

Now that our President has COVID-19, Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden says he'll pause attack ads for a while, and (Rep. Omar's understandable criticism aside) that's not just a nice thing to do, it's a politically smart thing to do. Why, it might encourage Mr. Biden to say what he's for rather than merely what he's against (i.e., him losing and our President not losing). And would it be smart to extend that moratorium all the way to Election Day, though our President won't respond in kind? Especially because he won't respond in kind! The Sunday afternoon before Election Day, I watched the Eagles-Giants game and saw three hours of attack ads from both sides, and I knew right then that millions of folks wouldn't vote in two days, and who benefits when good Americans don't vote? Evil Republicans, that's who. So let our President wave his arms like a maniac about crime and protestors and foreigners in all his TV ads, and let Mr. Biden talk about creating jobs by building renewable energy infrastructure and keeping military weapons away from police officers. I know who wins that argument, even if our "liberal" media pundits don't, or pretend they don't.

Buried in paragraph six of this Gabriel Sherman report on how our President's illness has rattled his campaign is an unnamed Presidential ally saying "(i)t's weird that all these Republicans are getting it" and intoning unctuously that "when something major happens thirty days before an election, it usually has to do with the election," a lesson I bet he noted well back in 2016 when James Comey dropped that bomb on Hillary Clinton, amirite? I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but I don't enjoy bad ones at all, and I certainly don't enjoy people drunk with power suddenly pretending to be powerless. And anyway, why are "all these Republicans are getting it"? Because they're walking around without masks on and hobnobbing with sick people! Such tough guys, they are, pissing away all their unearned privilege and exposing their cowardice in the process. A real tough guy wears a mask, after all, because he cares about what happens to other people. (As an aside, I wish Sen. Grassley would get off his ass and get tested, not so much because he's about the only Republican left in the Senate who's worth a damn as because he's 87 damn years old.)

Finally, while we're still on the subject, I'll note that I don't wish COVID-19 on anybody, even someone as despicable as our President, and I want him to fight through and get better for his own sake -- while there's life, there's hope, they say, and if our President can use this adversity to transcend his own malignant narcissism, I'll be the first to applaud! But I'll still, ah, wait for the data on that transformation; after all, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had all those kind things to say about the NHS while it kept him alive, but we all still think he'll gut the NHS first chance he gets. We've seen worse, after all. And not for nothing, but our President will have access to a standard of health care ordinary Americans don't -- they tested him for COVID every day while they did their damnedest to test as few of us regular folks as they could! -- though I guess it's a species of justice that at Walter Reed he'll be getting the socialized medicine he always yells about. And you know what? I don't judge anyone for wishing the man dead. The fuck-your-feelings crowd never seemed to care about such niceties before. And maybe our President should have earned some damn goodwill, instead of using us all like toilet paper these past few years.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, September 30, 2020: unlikely hope in chaotic times.

So, wondering if this country has "collapsed," maybe? Indi Samarajiva at Medium, who lived through the tail end of Sri Lanka's 26-year-long civil war, says we have. "This is what Americans don't understand. They're waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That's not how it happens...Nobody comes on TV and says 'things are officially bad.'" Mr. Samarajiva's average day, as a twenty-something of some privilege in Sri Lanka, went a lot like this: "we used to go out, worry about money, fall in love — life went on. We’d pop the trunk for a bomb check. Turn off our lights for the air raids. I’m not saying that we were untouched...I know people who were beaten, arrested, and went into exile. But...(i)t was mostly food and parties and normal stuff for a dumb twentysomething." Privileged Americans may not yet draw their curtains whenever a pickup truck rolls by, but I find hope in all of this -- not in the sense that "life goes on" even as America dies (talk to George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or the over 200,000 dead from COVID-19 about that!), but that this is how death is supposed to look, and, as Mr. Samarajiva says, "(y)ou can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around." After all, Sri Lanka ain't doing too badly these days. They did just crush COVID.

Chris Taylor at Mashable advises us as to how we might stop worrying about our President "Stealing the Election." He says all of our President's flatugasma about maybe not conceding the election until he wins or maybe just throwing out mail-in ballots comprises what Teri Kanefield calls "The Strongman Con" -- if folks think our President really has the power and the will to steal an election, they'll be more likely to throw up their hands and give up and not vote, and so help him win an actual victory. But whatever his will, his "power," here, is far from absolute -- our military might resist walking him out of office but it'll also resist helping him suppress the vote, and state laws govern elections more closely and authoritatively than federal ones do. The reminder that Benito Mussolini marched on Rome with one-tenth of the number of troops he told everyone he had is particularly apt here, as is the reminder that all of our President's foaming at the mouth about "caravans" did not protect Republican House majorities in 2018. Mr. Taylor's prescription for action is a good one: "help() millions of Americans to vote in numbers too big to lie about." I do wish he'd said our President could file "frivolous" lawsuits instead of "spurious" ones in paragraph 13, but that may just be me.

Penny Rants for Sunday, September 6, 2020: concerning right-wing violence and "suckers" and "losers."

Our "liberal" media finally get around to covering the armed right-wing violence at a Democrat-sponsored voter registration drive in Tyler, TX over a month ago -- but even now they can't get it right! Even with an extra month of lead time! Luckily Dorothee Benz at FAIR helps us sift through all the lousy reporting, where "fights break out" and "disturbances happen" without any apparent causes and "people on both sides" are always to blame, even in "liberal" media reports like the Washington Post report of August 27 documenting eight incidents of right-wing violence and one incident of left-wing violence. Ms. Benz also reminds us (because, sadly, we need reminding!) that "privatized violence aimed at popular democratic demands is a hallmark of right-wing authoritarianism," and we can rather easily document how this trend's operating right here in America right now. One more thing: given the truck caravans that have rolled through protests across America (not just in Portland), how long before the pick-up truck stops being a symbol of hard work and starts being a symbol of racism?

Speaking of right-wing violence at protests, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) opines that infamous militia member Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three protestors in Kenosha over a week ago, actually showed "incredible restraint." If you wonder why someone shows up to a protest armed, or have seen him shoot two protestors plainly trying to disarm him, you'll be surprised, but let's let Mr. Massie explain further: "(h)e didn't empty a magazine into a crowd." What a low bar to set! He "showed restraint" because he only shot three people instead of a hundred! I'm old enough to remember when conservatives demanded a lot more of us (and each other) than that! Mr. Massie would have earned more sympathy if he'd pointed out that Mr. Rittenhouse is only 17 and shouldn't be tried as an adult; instead, the man who wouldn't ban semiautomatics because someone-somewhere can turn a rifle into a semiautomatic seems, again, only to care about protecting guns. No, not even "gun rights" -- as Russell Kirk used to say, rights have responsibilities.

What's the worst thing about our President calling dead soldiers "suckers" and "losers"? He's wrong! I think soldiers who die at war are generally the best ones, and their officers more likely just figured out how to get others to die in their place. All of which means I'm not surprised by our President's remarks, for who is better at screwing other people over just to protect himself than he? Here's what surprises me: he's been way too slow to portray these remarks as anti-war -- they would be pretty damn clumsy anti-war statements, true, but not irredeemably so, and they might also get that sliver of the anti-war vote he's going to need to get re-elected. He seems content with calling everyone a liar and speculating about who might have "betrayed" him, as any drama king would do. So, when our President said all the generals were stupid, his votaries could tell themselves he wasn't talking about the rank and file, but now that he's said the rank and file are "suckers" and "losers," how will they respond? I kid, of course -- they just say whatever makes them think they're owning the liberals.

Penny Rants for Monday, April 27, 2020: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck" edition!

When our President demands that our Post Office "raise the price" of its services "four times" or he won't approve any more funding, you have to remember that our President is demanding that our Post Office raise prices on us! He wants good Americans like you and I to pay more to send a letter though the post! The fact that our Post Office delivers good services so cheaply (despite all of our government's attempts to destroy it, I should add) is what makes it "a joke" to him -- it's just not serious, to him, unless some boss or other can parade his unearned wealth around. Consider, also, that "rais(ing) the price four times" is all that can make private mail-delivery corporations like UPS and FedEx competitive with our USPS -- they handle a fraction of the mail our USPS does, and frankly, they're not that much faster, not anymore. When right-wingers want to mismanage everything into oblivion to prove that "the private sector does it better," you should remember that when they do that, they are taking food out of your mouth. And how do you treat people who do that?

Right-wingers have their excuses for our President's apparent endorsement of injecting/ingesting disinfectants late last week, but they pale before the simple fact that calls about possible exposure to household cleaners more than doubled in New York City the day after. I have long hoped that our President would single-handedly destroy the Presidential bully pulpit merely through his bad behavior, and then folks would never trust what our President says again, as our Founders always intended. But I never imagined people might literally poison themselves first. We'll certainly never look at the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" the same way again. (As an aside, if we take his claim that "I was asking the question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen" at face value -- and when has divining his One True Intent behind his actions led anywhere other than rank absurdity? -- then you must conclude that a guy who would do that "just to see what would happen" is an evil bastard. And how do you treat evil bastards?)

Ryan Grim at The Intercept evaluates new evidence supporting Tara Reade's sexual harassment and assault complaints against then-Sen./now somehow presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden. As Mr. Grim reminds us, "(f)or Baker’s statement (denying that Ms. Reade had ever filed a complaint with Mr. Biden's office about his conduct) to be true, Reade would have had to have lied to her friend, brother, and mother about having complained to Biden’s office. There is no obvious reason Reade would make up a story to those closest to her about the Senate office not taking Biden’s harassment seriously, while at the same time resisting pressure to go to the press." Now might be a good time to remind everyone that Mr. Biden hasn't actually sewn up the nomination yet, and no one's advanced a sexual harassment/assault complaint against Sen. Sanders. (No, complaints of harassment and insensitivity against some of his campaign workers aren't the same thing, even if our "liberal" media did more pearl-clutching about that than they've done about Ms. Reade's accusation.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Pat Robertson agrees with a viewer that God sent this pandemic to America as punishment for abortion, gay marriage, and anti-Israel sentiment. Oh, but not just that, his remaining defenders will say -- he also said "we have abused the poor," which most right-wingers consider a duty, not a sin. But listen to Mr. Robertson describe abortion -- "we have taken the life of the innocent, slaughtering them by the tens of millions, children made in the image of God" -- and then listen to him hesitate before saying "we have abused the poor" and then quickly turn to describing how the pandemic has ravaged us, and you might come to one of two conclusions: a) poverty just doesn't get his anger up like abortion does, or b) he threw "we have abused the poor" in there just to stave off criticism that he's just another heartless evangelical. But he's not very good at the latter -- does anyone remember him speaking out about the necessity of fighting climate change in 2006? No? Well, now you know all the good that did -- and maybe (especially since he's a denier again) all the good he intended it to do.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, April 15, 2020: with more important reminders about evil, voting, and deficits.

You may be tempted to see it as a good sign that our "liberal" media have been picking on Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro for his abject mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, but Brian Meir at FAIR reminds us that a) he ain't the only world leader bollocksing up that job and b) our "liberal" media still excuse (or praise!) Mr. Bolsonaro's cruel economic policy and disgusting public utterings. You will also want to resist the temptation to make fun of Mr. Bolsonaro for apparently being unable to put a mask on, because right-wing politicians look stupid on purpose, partly so that you focus on their stupidity and not their evil, but also so that they seem more "normal." After all (so the reasoning goes), how evil can someone be if they can't put on a face mask or speak in complete sentences? Of course our own lived, shared experience -- not just of this President, but of Tha Bush Mobb and Ronald Reagan, in particular -- should lead us to answer "quite evil." If we haven't already split the knot and concluded that stupid is evil, that is.

Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight presents a pretty good analysis of last week's Wisconsin primary. I feared that right-wing coronavirus denialists would outvote regular Wisconsinites, but a liberal candidate unexpectedly pounded a right-wing incumbent in the state's sole Supreme Court race, which will hopefully make political parties pause before hiding important elections in primaries so that only their diehards will turn out. And speaking of turnout, about two-thirds as many folks voted in the 2020 primary as did in the 2016 primary, partly due to the pandemic (and, ah, all the state's machinations because of the pandemic!) and partly due to neither party's primary being particularly competitive. But the big story? Some 80 percent of Wisconsinites voted absentee, up from a mere 10 percent in the 2016 primary; as more Wisconsinites get used to the idea that they don't absolutely have to go to a polling place to vote, maybe that number will go up -- although we have to make Congress help out our Postal Service by then; you don't think UPS or FedEx are going to deliver these votes, do you?

You've hardly heard about this from teabaggers and the many other species of deficit peacocks, but our annual budget deficit could get as high as $4 trillion this year. That's of course due to recent pandemic-related legislation pumping out $2.5 trillion of as-yet-uncollected tax revenue, but let us not forget that our Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) said it'd be over a trillion this year well before the pandemic hit, just like it was about a trillion last year, and why? Because of the 2017 tax "reform," of course, a bigger gift to rich folks than the recent $2 trillion-plus "stimulus" was! You know how this game's going to go if Joe Biden beats our President at the polls this November: he'll be "hamstrung" to do anything of consequence because of the deficit, though deficits never seem to stop Republicans from cutting taxes on rich folk, and folks like Sean Hannity will yell TEH BIDENZ HAZ ALREADYZ TRIPLEDZ TEH DEFICITZ!!!!!, just like he blamed Mr. Obama after Tha Bush Mobb rammed a $700 billion bankster bailout down our throats at the end of their term. Of course, I fully expect Mr. Biden to go along with these fictions -- unless we make that impossible, of course.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 12, 2020: special "imagine a different world or die" version!

"To Heal from COVID-19," say Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin in an interview with C.J. Polychroniou at TruthOut, "We Must Imagine a Different World." They mean, of course, that we can't go back to the system ("government bad," "free market," "maximal profit") that created the awful response to the problem, and they also mean, of course, that we ought to stop doing things like giving out health insurance via one's employer (some 17 million Americans have lost their jobs over the last three weeks, and those who had health insurance of course lost it) and "squandering the enormous financial privileges enjoyed by the U.S. on propping up the neoliberal edifice that has denominated economic life in the U.S. and the world for the past 40 years," as Mr. Pollin puts it. You know what else we need to do, and I've been saying this for a long time? Stop being spectators in our own democracy. Our democracy and our heritage and our history all belong to us -- not our so-called leaders, the most corrupt and decadent people who have ever lived, who live to steal everything we've ever fought for and died for and who now stand that much closer to doing so.

Isaac Arnsdorf at ProPublica digs deeper into our President's removal of Glenn Fine from the pandemic relief oversight board -- and explains why the other members could go next. Our President essentially demoted Mr. Fine from his position as Acting Defense Department Inspector General and appointed someone else to the Inspector General position, which made Mr. Fine ineligible by law to serve on the oversight board, and guess what? Each of the other four members of the oversight board is also an acting Inspector General. Yes, this would be a very easy way to replace the entire oversight board with a bunch of cronies so that all of our President's other cronies can steal trillions of dollars of your taxpayer money! Remember when our President tried to fire all of our Inspectors General at the beginning of his term, only to be told that was illegal? Well, he figured out a way! I can't help but wonder: when Sen. Grassley (R-IA) teams up with enough other Congressfolk to change the law so our President can't pull this stunt again, what nefarious evil will Mitch McConnell extract from Mr. Grassley in exchange for allowing his efforts to succeed?

In a truly stunning moment, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya goes on cable news and says we'd be a lot better off letting hedge fund managers "get wiped out" than trying to preserve the economic system that seems to prize them above all others. "A hedge fund that serves a bunch of billionaire family offices?" he says. "Who cares? Let 'em get wiped out. Who cares? They don't get to summer in the Hamptons? Who cares!...on Main Street today, people are getting wiped out. And right now, rich CEOs are not, boards that had horrible governance are not, hedge funds are not. People are." Notice how he differentiates between hedge funds and people there? Yeah, I know CEOs are people, too, but you can understand why we would be confused about that. Of course the CNBC talking head says it would be "immoral" to let any entity get "wiped out" by the pandemic, but you know how it is with these clowns: their moral compass only flickers when some bankster gets hurt; when they contemplate their baristas getting fired through no fault of their own and struggling to pay their bills, they just shrug and say "that's life." Hard to believe that this era of conservative governance values people who don't work over people who do!

Finally, Taegan Goddard at Political Wire pointed out late last week (it was a members-only post, so I can't link to it) that our President's approvals for handling the pandemic are not only falling, they actually look better than they really are! (Scroll down to the top of page 5, Q 14_A, for the relevant data point.) Of the 48% who approved of our President's handling of the pandemic on Thursday, a solid 12 percentage points comprised people who "approved" mainly because "it is important to be supportive of (our President) during this time of national crisis" -- and, thus, not so much because they thought he was actually doing a good job! You'll recall, hopefully, that the infamous "70% approve of Iraq War" poll taken the day the war began included 15 percentage points of folks who didn't actually approve of the war but thought it was important to "support our President." Of course, it's not our job to "support our President"; it's our President's job to support us. And note well that the biggest chunk of respondents who "approve" this way are self-described independent voters, which should remind you that folks who call themselves "independent" ain't necessarily smarter than you.

Penny Rants for Tuesday, April 7, 2020: special "our leaders still suck, except for the few who don't!" edition.

From Julia Carrie Wong at The Guardian we learn how hydroxychloroquine became a coronavirus "miracle cure." It began in March with a study out of France that didn't draw treatment and control groups from the same population and didn't ensure that physicians didn't know which treatment they were giving out -- that's basic science, you know -- plus they gave some-but-not-all patients an additional antibiotic (at which point you don't really know whether the drug did its work or not!), plus they used a tabulating loophole to be able to claim a "100% cure rate" that didn't exist. Then a drama king study co-author made a viral social media video, fellow drama king Elon Musk tweeted about it to his 33 million followers, and drama king right-wing news outlets (including Fox News) banged the saucepan about it. And then our drama king President (who, not incidentally, has a small financial interest in a corporation that makes the drug) jumped on the bandwagon. Not for nothing, but not only have folks have killed themselves taking this drug, but other patients who need the drug for its intended purposes have less of it now, proving, again, that it's too short a walk from government stifles the individual to only I matter!

From Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt at Naked Capitalism we learn "What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know About Hospital Emergency Rooms." This will explain -- better than anyone else has, I think -- why you get all those surprise medical bills from your ER visit! A doctor might work in a hospital emergency room, but her employer will be a "physician staffing firm" that the hospital contracts to run the ER -- and that "physician staffing firm" will likely be out of your health insurance corporation's network, hence the surprise bills. Hey, guess what you wouldn't have to worry about if Medicare covered all Americans? Networks, that's what. But if you think BIG GUMMINT!!!1111 shouldn't run health care, you would have to explain why you think hedge fund managers should -- or you'd have to come up with an alternative that isn't "the free market," since "the free market" got us into this mess. In the meantime, you should look at TeamHealth's firing of Dr. Lin (for blowing the whistle on equipment shortages and bad hospital safety practices) as, well, exactly the sort of thing that happens in a totalitarian state. And then ask yourself whether you can vote out, or put popular pressure on, hedge fund managers the way you can do on our elected officials.

From Suze Wilson at The Conversation we learn how New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Arderns's handling of the coronavirus pandemic "is giving most Western politicians a masterclass in crisis leadership." As often happens, a lot of leadership is messaging -- "stay home to save lives" puts the action and the goal pretty succinctly -- but it's also about having a plan early, sticking to it, and getting people to buy in without threatening the Heavy Hand of Law Enforcement (that latter tool a favorite of those leaders who don't get it right early). And it's also about being genuinely accessible to your bosses, the people, which for Ms. Arderns happens in daily briefings that don't go completely off the rails, as well as in live Q-and-A sessions on Facebook. And where American punditoids flail about demanding a "date certain" when they can go back to their favorite coffee shop again, New Zealand stands virtually alone among Western nations in setting a goal to eradicate COVID-19, instead of just hoping we get through it. In short, I couldn't blame you for turning this into a big "Goofus and Gallant" strip with Ms. Arderns as Gallant and our President as a diaper-loaded Goofus.

Penny Rants for Tuesday, January 21, 2020: of economic "prosperity" and Presidential immaturity.

Joseph Stiglitz reminds us that our current economy is not a "good" economy, regardless of any propaganda from our President or our media -- and also says we should be looking at indices other than Gross National Product or the Dow Jones Industrial Average to determine our economy's health. "Neither tells us what’s happening to ordinary citizens’ living standards or anything about sustainability," he says, and thus he offers life expectancy, disposable income, percentage of citizens with health insurance, and "deaths of despair" (i.e., deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug ODs) as better indicators of our economic health. We'd need more kinds of data to measure the effects of climate change on the economy, of course, though measuring property damage due to extreme weather events is a good start. (And if you're still wondering how to counter our Administration's constant bellowing about TEH LOWEST BLACK UNEMPLOYMENT RATEZ EVERZ!!!!!, consider that black wages still lag well behind white wages.)

Jonathan Chait reminds us that our President has long desired to weaken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, even once saying, out loud, that "(i)t’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas." His economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, says the Administration is still "looking at" changing the law, though it's hard to imagine the House going along with that, having just impeached our President after he essentially tried to bribe a foreign leader with the prospect of getting more business overseas in mind. When you hear statements like we need to bribe people more -- and when you contemplate, frankly, everything else he's ever done -- you'll find it easy to conclude, as Mr. Chait does, that our President "actually approves of corruption." But, sadly, our President's votaries also approve of corruption, and not just because our President is Their Bastard -- it's also because they think they're a lot smarter than everyone else when they're just a lot more cynical than everyone else.

In the wake of reports that our President apparently called our highest-ranking military officers "a bunch of dopes and babies" to their faces, I feel compelled to remind you, again, that nothing will split the insane 25% of the electorate away from our President -- they'll insist that our President loves the soldiers so much that of course he hates their leaders, and I suppose that's what passes for class solidarity among that lot. They'll also point out that our President loves winning wars, and it's true that we don't dominate the world despite spending more on defense than the next eight big-spending nations combined, although, well, there may be another lesson in there. And naturally they'll also scrub their memories of all those times they slammed Barack Obama for "not listening to the generals enough," since being a votary of our President means (just as being a Bush Mobb votary meant) never having to admit you've ever been wrong about anything, ever.

Penny Rants for Saturday, December 28, 2019: lies, damned lies, and "winning" arguments with liberals.

Our President has put up a website called "Snowflake Victory" -- hope or fear, I can't tell! -- which purports to tell you how to win arguments with your liberal relatives over the holidays. But clearly he's not trying to win arguments with liberals, who will not be won over by all the childishness, cherry-picking, baiting-and-switching, scare numbers, and outright lies -- he's looking to convert less politically-aligned folks who might be overhearing. After all, everyone agrees that it's possible to "have a strong economy and a clean environment at the same time," but not everyone knows that it's more possible when a) your predecessor's clean air and clean water regulations are starting to have a positive effect right as you take office and b) federal courts strike down most of your attempts to roll back those very same regulations! And I do find it highly amusing to see these folks talk about "winning arguments with facts and reason," when they're the first ones who tell you facts and reason don't matter after you confront them with actual facts and reason. It's almost as amusing as hearing the "Fuck Your Feelings" crowd constantly whine about their own feelings.

From the "Wrong Headline" file: an Economist/YouGov poll finds, according to Newsweek, that "Almost 50% of Americans Say Donald Trump Will Go Down in History as (a) 'Poor' or 'Below Average' President,", but add up the 40% who said "poor" and the 9% who said "below average" and that still leaves a majority (51%) of Americans who don't agree. Eight percent said history would regard him as "average" (I bet that verdict would really stick in his craw!) and nine percent had no discernible opinion, leaving 12 percent who voted "above average" and 22 percent who voted "outstanding," that last figure mapping quite well onto my long-expressed suspicion that a quarter of our electorate is insane. These figures won't predict the 2020 election very well, of course -- people who think he's "average" or have no opinion of the man certainly don't seem likely to vote against him because he got impeached, do they? They're more likely to get "sick of all the partisan bickering" and stay home, especially after our President runs the most negative campaign in American history regardless of how "spotless" his do-nothing, please-everyone opponent supposedly is.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 8, 2019: concerning internet policy, tough-on-crime posturing, and impeachment.

Sen. Sanders releases his broadband plan, a plan big telecom executives won't like, according to Karl Bode at Vice. Sen. Sanders would restore net neutrality and break up big telecom monopolies, of course, but he'd also prevent big telecoms from imposing hidden and onerous fees -- which anyone who has ever paid a cable bill will like! -- plus he'd invest $150 billion (over how many years, his proposal doesn't say) in community broadband, which anyone who has ever paid a cable bill will also like. I'm not sure Mr. Sanders's plan is "Comcast's Worst Nightmare," though -- maybe Ben Tarnoff's "Socialist Plan to Fix the Internet" is. (No, I won't recoil from the word "socialist" just because idiots use the word to describe anything they don't like.) Mr. Tarnoff's plan is more a "sketch," containing a range of proposals including turning our internet into a free, publicly-owned utility and regulating corporations differently based on their size and function; you would think Comcast would rather deal with Mr. Sanders than Mr. Tarnoff.

Chris Calton at the Foundation for Economic Education writes about how asset forfeiture laws have mushroomed over the last half century -- with a vital assist from then-Senator/now Democratic Presidential contender Joe Biden. And also, sigh, with a vital assist from then-Assistant Attorney General/now Republican Presidential contender William Weld, which should (again) instruct us about the general uselessness of moderate Republicans. At first, RICO only went after the assets of convicted criminals, but within a decade Congress changed the law so they could go after indicted criminals -- and then Messrs. Biden and Weld stepped in, allowing law enforcement to take "substitute" property (like houses) without even demonstrating probable cause, let alone getting an indictment. Thus we now have a state of affairs that outrages liberals and conservatives alike -- not to mention good Americans who've lost their homes not because they broke the law, but because their local police department got hungry.

Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer reminds us that the Iran-Contra affair might predict what'll happen with the current impeachment effort better than the one against Richard Nixon. Mr. Reagan got away with that one, after all, and most Americans today look at the makeup of the Senate and conclude that our current President will, too. I recall that the Iran-Contra investigation essentially ended when NSA head John Poindexter told Congress that "the buck stops here with me," i.e., that he had decided to go ahead with the whole arms-for-hostages-plus-money-for-Contras deal and had actively kept President Reagan out of the loop. But that doesn't excuse our media's collective amnesia over that time a President committed an impeachable offense and Congress didn't impeach him. And while our current President ought to remember that he's a lot less popular than Mr. Reagan was back then, no matter what he says to screaming crowds at rallies, the rest of us should remember that he's not that unpopular -- at least not yet.

Penny Rants for Monday, August 19, 2019: special "media coverage of Democratic Presidential candidates still sucks!" edition.

Julie Hollar at FAIR catches our "liberal" media reframing attacks on Joe Biden as attacks on Barack Obama. They take their cue from Mr. Biden on this one, of course, just as objective journalists would! Of course, in the real world, where we observe and tabulate behavior more scientifically, we find the Democrats running for President going very far out of their way not to attack the Obama legacy, such as it is, and when your right-wing pals start yelling ZOMG ALL THEY DOEZ IZ ATTACKZ TEH OBAMAZ!!!!!, the bank-shot response will be "you mean like you did for eight years?" Democrats shouldn't take every criticism of policy as an attack on a person, since that's what folks do when they regard politics as a spectator sport, rather than the participatory exercise it actually is. And if I were Mr. Biden, I wouldn't be so confident that "Democratic primary voters" will make the "judgment" he hopes they'll make. After all, if the Obama Administration were that great, we wouldn't have the President we have now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders told ralliers that the Washington Post doesn't exactly like him, and our media protested that couldn't be true because OUR BOSSEZ DO NOTZ TELLZ UZ PRECISELYZ WHATZ TO DOZ!!!!, and then we are reminded that "liberal" media bias against Sen. Sanders is actually a thing that exists and can be measured. You may remember the 16-negative-headlines-in-16-hours spasm in which the Washington Post indulged back in 2016, but you may not remember the litany of Sanders-is-factually-correct-but-understanding-the-world-is-hard-so-he-must-be-wrong "fact checks" the paper has performed on his assertions since then. Calling his policy prescriptions "unrealistic" is just icing on the cake (and, you know, plenty of can't-happen stuff has actually happened), but saying his attacks on our media "echo" our President's is just plain wrong. Sen. Sanders accuses our "media" of bias, while our President calls their accurate reporting on him "fake news"; I wonder why they would want to equate the two.

Naturally it ain't just Bernie Sanders our "liberal" media doesn't like -- the New York Times treats us to a story of Democrats "worrying" about whether Elizabeth Warren has what it takes to defeat the beast, full of the usual anecdotal evidence and "conventional" "wisdom." The article worries about her "professorial style" in paragraph six, but it had already demolished that worry in paragraph two in telling us that "(f)ew candidates inspire as much enthusiasm as she does among party voters" -- after all, folks with "professorial style" don't "inspire" "enthusiasm," do they? Naturally the article also worries about her "uncompromising liberalism," even though at least one candidate stands to her left, and uncompromising centrism is clearly overrated as a winning formula. (Aside to the Democratic voter who says "(i)f it were completely up to me, I’d vote for her": it is completely up to you. Your job is to express your will, not get caught up in the 13-dimensional chess games Our Glorious Elites would rather you play.)

Our New York paper of record went on to cover the Beto O'Rourke campaign "reboot" with horserace analysis over whether Mr. O'Rourke can "break through." And the analysis ain't even that deep: can Beto somehow stand out among all the other candidates "taking the fight" to our President? seems to be the beginning and end of it; we don't even hear from moderate Democratic voters or think-tank punditoids, as we often do with Messrs. Warren and Sanders, respectively. Certainly the Times offers no analysis of whether "taking the fight" to our President doesn't play directly into his hands -- he loves it when you say his name and treat him like he's the center of the universe, and I'm old enough to remember when "taking the fight" to George W. Bush wasn't enough to beat him, either. The more you talk about how you want to make America a more perfect union, the less you talk about our President, but our "liberal" media is content to imagine that by criticizing Messrs. Sanders and Warren over "electability" concerns and Mr. O'Rourke over "visibility" concerns, they're being fair and balanced!

Penny Rants for Sunday, June 30, 2019: concerning certain law and order matters, plus did you know David Brooks is a "moderate" now?

In yet another decision purporting to demonstrate "non-partisanship," our Supreme Court rules that federal courts can't strike down state redistricting efforts that demonstrate extreme partisanship. The best I can say about their ruling is that it cuts both ways, and already has -- Pennsylvania state Republicans twice tried to interest Justice Alito in the state Supreme Court's redrawing of state districts before the 2018 election, but Justice Alito didn't bite either time. I could add, I suppose, that the ruling affirms Congress's right to make the process fairer (i.e., in the For the People Act), but that's not some elephantine act of generosity. And, at the risk of beating a dead horse, this Court would turn over every rock in Arizona to find an "animus" against religious folks whenever someone enacts an anti-discrimination statute protecting gay and transgender folks from bigotry, but seems utterly incurious about the actual animus of Republican politicians stupid enough to put their explicit intent to use the redistricting process to expand their power in writing.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court's ruling striking down our Administration's attempt to add a citizenship question to the census form will do some good in the short run, and I can't help but dig Chief Justice Roberts's understatement in saying Secretary Ross's reasoning behind the question "seems to have been contrived." I'm not as disturbed as other folks that our Court seems to think a citizenship question on the census is A-OK as long as you follow the Administrative Procedure Act in getting it done, because I'm not sure any Administration could get that done if they get too many public comments against it, which they almost certainly will. I'm far more disturbed that four of nine Supreme Court justices seem to think the Administrative Procedure Act doesn't mean a damn thing. I'm also annoyed to hear our President wonder, out loud, if he can "delay" the census, for "no matter how long." He can't, because our Constitution says we have to conduct a census every 10 years, and does not add "or whenever our President stops throwing a tantrum about a citizenship question."

Another day, another "moderate" warning Democrats to reject the numerous populist and popular positions they're just now starting to take again after all these years. And I know what you're saying: when did David Brooks become a moderate? I won't tabulate my objections to his argument, since they number approximately one per point made, but I will point out that the math he presents doesn't work the way he wants you to think it does. I don't even mean all his cherry-picked polls about the economy and health care; I mean presenting Gallup's notoriously misleading polling about how conservative, moderate, or liberal Americans think they are -- as if every last one of them will vote, let alone vote as a bloc, let alone vote in precisely the way they describe themselves. If you know any conservatives who would rein in corporate campaign spending or any moderates who would raise taxes on the rich or any liberals who would regulate handguns and rifles pretty much as we do now -- hell, if you know anyone who's ever described "holding their nose" in the voting booth -- then you know what I mean.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, June 5, 2019: Pete Buttigieg shows John Hickenlooper and John Delaney how it's done!

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper gets booed at the California Democrats' state convention after declaring that "socialism is not the answer" to the problems of defeating our President in 2020 and "achiev(ing) big progressive goals." What does he mean by "socialism"? Well, he says that"(m)assive government expansions may not be strictly speaking socialism, but trust me: Republicans will make it seem like socialism." And he volunteers this strategy as a way of confounding Republican efforts to define Democrats! Enabling Republicans who call everything "socialism" is no way to fight them; hell, it's no way to fight. Still, it might be worse for him to offer "focusing on kitchen table programs that will actually improve people's quality of life" as an alternative -- as if "socialist" programs couldn't possibly do that! But here's what's worst: he insists we either take a center-right tack or the President gets re-elected, which is what, class? That's right, a manufactured hostage crisis -- don't communicate your will to your politicians, or your country gets it!

For all that, Mr. Hickenlooper fared better than former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who got booed at the same event for a full minute after telling the assembled that Medicare-for-All "sounds good, but it’s actually not good policy, nor is it good politics." It routinely gets majority support in poll after poll and it's "not good politics"? His objection to Medicare-for-All as policy seems to be that it'll "kick() 115 million Americans off their health care" -- though it would give them cheaper, better health care, not "no health care." And naturally he took the criticism with the confidence and professionalism befitting a man who ought to be a frontrunner, right? Well, no -- first he said that "(i)ntolerance to alternative points of view is not what the Democratic Party should be about," which begs the retort that you cant 't President if you call criticism "intolerance." And then he said "(m)ost Republicans favor doing nothing and eliminating the ACA. What’s your choice?" Well, my choice is not to be part of your damn manufactured hostage crisis! You can't keep putting out a menu of wet oatmeal and a bowl of dung and expect people to say how great your restaurant is.

And these putatively "sane," "sensible" "moderates" could learn a lot from South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg about how to hide your centrism from the masses -- he told the California delegates that "the riskiest thing we could do is try to play it safe" in 2020, which is a stroke of genius even if, like me, you don't believe he really means it. The flesh is willing with statements like "(our President) wins if we look too much like Washington" and "when (our President) inundates the imagination with a horror show of taunts and tweets, let’s change the channel," and certainly I'd be glad if someone with a megaphone actually took on the noble project of "breaking the Republican monopoly" on words like "freedom" and "security." But the flesh has also seen this game before -- "new thinking, bold action, and a focus on the future" will remind you of, well, virtually every Democratic Presidential candidate who's either lost or disappointed you, and he opened with that. And what is this "new thinking"? We don't learn, which leads me to think that eight years of a President Pete Buttigieg will be eight more years of we-tried-but-Republicans-wouldn't-let-us.

Penny Rants for Sunday, June 2, 2019: confronting drama and the difficulties of vision.

I think my fellow liberals are reaching a bit in alleging that Robert Mueller's contention late last week that "if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that" is a "message to Congress" that they should, or must, impeach our President. Mr. Mueller also said that "(i)t would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of an actual charge" (referring to the Justice Department opinion that sitting Presidents can't be charged with crimes), saying that's why "we concluded that we would not reach a determination -- one way or the other -- about whether the President committed a crime." I'm tempted to say we need to spend less time trying to get our President out of office and more time proving he's unfit for that office, but even that isn't really the point -- we need to put our vision of a better America forward, and we need to keep putting that vision forward until it drowns out the drama upon which our President thrives. And it should go without saying that "we should work in a bipartisan manner with the people who are trying to destroy us" is not such a vision.

Sen. Sanders reiterates that taxes will go up to pay for Medicare-for-All, and naturally right-wingers respond with hysteria. The only flaw I'd find with this article is that it forgets to mention that the $32 trillion cost of Medicare-for-All over 10 years compares favorably with the $49 trillion projected cost over the next decade on the system we've got; possibly Mr. Corcoran figures it's piling on to spell that out, since he had already pointed out that TEH AVURAJ CANADIAN FAMILY SPENDS TEH $12,000 ANNYULLY IN TEH TAXEZ!!!! is not only flat-out wrong, but that the average American spends almost that much annually in taxes and premiums. And it's no use arguing that "the employer pays the premiums," because that could money could just as easily be part of your salary. Mr. Sanders might be thinking far ahead here: if he comes out and says he'll force corporations to count what they're spending on health insurance as worker salary and then extract that money as a payroll tax, the right will lie about it anyway, but if he calls it a tax at the beginning, and then explains how it'll result in lower health care costs without actually cutting into your paycheck, he might better fight those lies.

I try to avoid calling housing and health care "human rights" -- even though most of us, liberal and conservative, really have long assumed that they are -- but Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) makes the best case I've yet seen for calling housing a "human right" -- by saying that "our access and our guarantee to having a home comes before someone else’s privilege to earn a profit." If you're going to call something a "right," calling its main obstacle "privilege" is a damn good way to do it. Where it trips up a bit is "someone else's privilege to earn a profit" -- I might have said "some corporation's privilege to earn a profit," and not least because a corporation isn't a person and shouldn't have the rights of personhood that our Supreme Court has been granting it for close to 150 years. I would say you, as a person, have a right to earn a profit -- which is certainly not to say you have a "right" to gild the plumbing in your 19th vacation home, since your rights don't get to trample other people's rights, but you have a right to save money, both for future projects and as a bulwark against catastrophe. But I would not say a corporation has a "right" to make a profit. Hell, I wouldn't say it has a "right" to exist.

All the news programs seems to be talking about our President's announcement that he'll hit Mexico with tariffs until they fix the undocumented immigration problem, but all those folks who are cluck-clucking at his "stupidity" don't get what he's doing: he's linking the two issues that galvanize his base (trade and immigration) and using the one issue that attracts more independent-minded voters to him (trade) to bait them into aligning with him on the other (immigration). So when all the smartypantses on their TV say "tariffs don't work" and "you don't solve one problem by attacking the other," I can't be mad at anyone who gets mad at them -- TV is full of smartypantses, after all. And when my fellow liberals complain that "even the Republicans are against it," we'll have to remind them that that's part of the drama. This is why I say that, absent a complete collapse of the economy which I don't want to see and don't think tariffs against China and Mexico will bring about, that our President has a very good chance at winning re-election -- unless, of course, a courageous, straight-talking Democrat who changes the subject to the real causes of our problems wins the nomination, a phenomenon I haven't yet seen in my lifetime.

Penny Rants for Saturday, May 11, 2019: concerning Democrat weakness, "liberal" media propagandizing, and more of President Manchild's shameful behavior.

From the "How Many Times Must I Tell These Pimps?" file: Joe Biden says our current Administration represents an "aberration" as far as the Republican Party is concerned. We could tabulate, with ease, all the ways in which that's so full of shit it's coming out its eyes, but let's instead remember that Hillary Clinton rode that trope all the way to 48% in the 2016 election. And then let us remind ourselves that trying to "appeal to Republican voters" is a vain cause: 25% of our current electorate is bat-guano insane, and another 25% will hold their noses in the voting booth because he's pro-life or appointed good judges or "slashed regulations." Better that our Democratic candidates consider why 100 million people don't vote in Presidential elections and maybe figure out how to turn some of them out. Hint: people who don't vote don't give one rat's hind quarter if Democrats think Republicans are good guys, because that's drama; these voters only care about their government doing right by them.

Dave Lindorff, writing at FAIR, catches our "liberal" media trying to fool large numbers of Venezuelans and Americans into thinking that attempted coup against President Maduro was actually succeeding. Seriously, the only other way to interpret some of these "news" "reports" is to assume incompetence on an unprecedented scale -- how does one invent an election the would-be coup leader Juan Guaido "won" (as CNN did) or fail to notice zero supporters in an airfield instead of "thousands" (also CNN) or run photos of Mr. Guaido addressing supporters on a completely different day (the New York Times)? Luckily, there are plenty of news organizations -- ones that aren't so insecure as to call themselves "The Most Trusted Name in News" -- doing good reporting on Venezuela right now; Mr. Lindorff lists a few, though you'll have to go to the internet to find them. And this, again, is why we need a la carte cable packaging. And net neutrality. And anti-trust enforcement.

The aforementioned New York Times does dig into our President's taxes, again, finding that he reported losses of over $1 billion on his federal tax forms between 1985 and 1994, and naturally our President responds by simultaneously calling the report a (sigh) "highly inaccurate Fake News hit job" and explaining the report's findings away: "(y)ou always wanted to show losses for tax purposes...almost all real estate developers did -- and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport." So he says "show losses for tax purposes" and I say "steal food out of the mouths of our children and our children's children," and folks who agree that defunding schools and libraries and police officers is "sport" are not the kind of folks I want in my foxhole. (Hey, speaking of Fox, the Fox and Friends crew think the losses the Times report depicts a life that's "pretty impressive" and "beyond what most of us could ever achieve," without mentioning that such a life is more within your grasp when your father gives you hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Finally, speaking of our President, I really thought that 2017 ad that both extolled his record and told his critics to get off his back within 30 seconds was the most appalling example of self-absorption I'd ever seen, but this twittergasm -- "(d)espite the tremendous success that I have had as President, including perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most successful first two years of any President in history, they have stollen (sic) two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back" -- tops it. Or bottoms it, as the case may be. How can you be TEH GREATESTZ PREZNITZ EVAHZ!!!! and have your entire term as President "stollen" at the same time? For the man who won 46% of the popular vote, struts around like he won 66%, and whines like he won 26%, such mental gymnastics are child's play. And you know he misspelled "stolen" on purpose, in order to get everyone talking about that, and not about how shameful it is to see a grown man -- the nominal leader of the free world, no less! -- act like this in public.

Penny Rants for Sunday, May 5, 2019: special "Our Glorious Elites still suck!" edition.

Ho hum, our President overcharges our government, and therefore you and I, for services rendered to our government at our President's Mar-a-Lago resort -- including an infamous $1,000 liquor tab. This means, essentially, that our White House "pays a bill" and our President "reaps the revenue." Nice work if you can get it! I was about to ask what insignificant or imaginary plaints beginning with "well what about" will fill the mouths of our President's votaries when they hear this news, and then I thought, "why bother? They're a minority, and we should ignore them -- according to their own feelings about minorities!" But that would all be a bit glib, really -- whenever our President "sticks it to the man," these folks imagine it could be them "sticking it to the man," even though they'd actually be sticking it to themselves. Could this disconnect have come about because our government has, for many years, given nothing to its owners but the back of its hand?

Speaking of Presidential corruption, apparently Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller wrote Attorney General William Barr twice about the latter's misleading summaries of the Special Prosecutor's report. And after the second letter, Mr. Barr called Mr. Mueller and said told him to call him if he had an issue. (Mr. Barr himself told this story, to Congress, so no use proclaiming TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!!!) Of course, the answer to "what's with the letter?" is obvious: a letter puts Mr. Mueller's frustrations in writing, and writing is, of course, harder to ignore than the he-said-he-said of a phone call. Mr. Barr went on to say that Mr. Mueller was really upset with (guess who?) the media, although, again -- and here we go back to "what's with the letter"! -- Mr. Mueller apparently didn't even mention the media in his correspondence Mr. Barr. And then Mr. Barr did what they all do when they're caught doing wrong -- acted "peeved" about the whole thing. Once again, we find that the kind of folks who accuse everyone else of whining do most of the whining themselves.

And speaking of that: I give Kyle Kondik at Sabato's Crystal Ball a lot of credit, not just for saying that assessing a candidate's "electability" is "like nailing Jell-O to a wall," but also for reminding us that the very fact of our current Administration "presents a great counter-argument to the idea that campaign professionals and pundits can confidently determine in advance who is electable to the presidency and who is not." I'd go further: Our Glorious Elites constantly tell us that actual liberals aren't "electable" because if they didn't, we might elect more of them, and get more good things done, rather than keep settling for the hostage's choice of weak tea from Democrats or poison from Republicans. I mean, we should take heart that they used to say Ronald Reagan was too extreme to win the Presidency! About 100 million Americans don't vote; if an actual liberal can capture even five percent of them, maybe the word "electable" will have a definition that better approximates reality.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 31, 2019: concerning scare numbers and rhetorical hostage situations.

Dean Baker at Common Dreams reminds us that most Americans think huge amounts of taxpayer money go toward things like food stamps when, actually, they don't. People think we spend "20 to 30 percent" of our federal budget on food stamps and welfare when the actual figure is more like two percent. Mr. Baker essentially blames scare numbers: "(d)iscussing budget numbers in millions, billions and trillions is incredibly irresponsible reporting," particularly when reporters don't discuss these numbers in the context of, say, an annual federal budget of $4 trillion. Also, too, reporters regurgitate scare numbers about budgets without mentioning that they're budget figures over 10 years, and I'd be lying if I said that was solely a right-wing problem. And while some folks seem to think Americans are math-challenged, I don't -- I think Americans hate confronting the fact that they don't make enough money to pay their bills. We'd all be a lot better at math if we could make the math in our lives work.

When I first confronted the headline "Equality Act = Female Erasure," I said that of course it had to be written by Rod Dreher, the man who seems to think compassion and hysteria are interchangeable concepts. How would extending protections of the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folk "erase" "females"? By putting men in women's locker rooms, apparently. While it's true that women would fear a man in their locker room more than a man would fear a woman in theirs, women don't live very much of their lives in locker rooms, and locker rooms are not a law of physics unto themselves -- they're spaces that could be converted to single-person water closets with minimal difficulty. Anyway, leading with an anecdote about a transgender woman who acted badly in public (when will our laws ever protect property from destruction?) sure doesn't make it any more convincing. And the idea that men will call themselves women simply to win sporting events? Yikes, doesn't Mr. Dreher remember peer pressure?

When I first confronted the headline "The Liberal Case Against Bernie," I said that of course it had to be written by Eric Alterman, the man who hates Ralph Nader so much that he once dismissed his entire consumer protection legacy. And just as Mr. Alterman blames George W. Bush's Presidency on Mr. Nader and not, for example, on George W. Bush, he naturally blames Mr. Sanders for Mrs. Clinton's loss, and not Mrs. Clinton for her inability to defeat the worst Presidential candidate anyone can remember running. And he says the "take-no-prisoners" campaign Mr. Sanders supposedly plans to run would alienate the electorate? "Playing not to lose," by supporting candidates who don't mean what they say unless they say it to big corporate donors, actually alienates the electorate! This President's an ogre, but the professional hostage-takers on the left won't beat him. (I did click through to Mr. Eichenwald's summary of Republican oppo research on Sen. Sanders, but we all had worse on our President, and he still won.)

Penny rants for Sunday, December 23, 2018: concerning veterans' health care, right-wing drama, and "political correctness."

You remember when long wait times at the Veterans Administration were all over the news? And you remember how right-wingers said privatizing the VA would solve the problem? Well, surprise, surprise, a ProPublica/Politifact investigation finds the privatized part of the VA hemorrhaging money and subjecting our veterans to, guess what, longer wait times. Well, that's what happens when private health insurance corporations charge close to $300 for referrals! And dig one of the privatizers suggesting you calculate their overhead using "an average cost" rather than total costs! You know, like right-wingers tell you to calculate the benefits from their tax-cuts-for-the-rich based on an "average tax cut" that sure ain't making its way into your bank account. Maybe we should spend less on corporate welfare and more on soldiers' health care? Maybe we should stop making our soldiers fight stupid wars so they won't need so much health care in the first place? If you think these are big asks, well, that's not the attitude that abolished slavery.

You may have heard that our President has stopped following Ann Coulter on Twitter after she criticized him for (momentarily!) caving on his desired border wall funding, and you may have also heard that our President's beloved Fox and Friends hosts slammed him for announcing that our military will pull out of Syria, so before we go any further, let's all take a deep breath and remind ourselves that this is all drama, and bad drama at that. I mean, these aren't the kind of pissing matches that even make for good reality show drama, if such a thing can be said to exist. Right-wingers stage these "disagreements" to look "independent," so that when you accuse them of marching in jackboot lockstep agreement, as they do, they can point to that one time one of them yelled at another and hope you momentarily forget that one counterexample doesn't obliterate all trends. And, really, how "independent" can you be if you're coming at our President because he's not nativist enough, or not enough of a warmongerer?

"Liberal" media poll finds a majority of Americans oppose our nation becoming more "politically correct." So Americans oppose right-wingers constantly having swordfights over who's more conservative, or Nazi wannabes demanding "safe spaces" for their racism or demanding that everyone call them "white nationalists" instead of racists? Apparently not -- Americans believe that "there are too many things people can't say anymore," presumably about women and people of color, since the article insists that Democrats had better heed this poll. But folks losing their jobs over what they say at work is not exactly a new thing, since our First Amendment protects you from your government and not so much from your employer, and if folks really feel oppressed at the prospect of being shamed by their fellow-Americans, all I can say is waaaaaaaaaah. And I can't shake the feeling that if this poll had asked if Americans should be more sensitive to what other Americans go through just because they're women or people of color, it would have found a majority favored that, too.

Penny Rants for Sunday, December 17, 2017: special "net neutrality repeal sucks!" edition!

Reed Richardson at FAIR regards the FCC's net neutrality repeal as "Only Part of Trump's Surrender to Corporate Media." You'll be a bit depressed at the avalanche of corruption, bad faith, and outright lying that has surrounded not just net neutrality repeal -- how odd that Comcast retracted its promise never to engage in paid prioritization the very same day FCC Chair Ajit Pai announced the repeal plan! -- but also the FCC's loosening of media consolidation rules, which may lead to the notorious (and notoriously pro-Trump) Sinclair network reaching its tentacles into even more local TV stations and more American households, and the FCC's abdication of its enforcement function to the FTC (which, as former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler notes, may not legally even be able to enforce what little the FCC wants it to enforce). This is what happens to America when we let people who care literally nothing about ethics or civilization -- and who care literally only about nothing but money and power, become our leaders. We can only hope the face of this leadership is so repugnant to our friends and neighbors that they join us in beating it back.

Speaking of which, Donald Trump, Jr. unleashes a torrent of ignorance on Twitter, suggesting that most folks who complain about the FCC's repeal of net neutrality rules couldn't "explain it in detail." Having "explained it in detail" myself many, many times (all of which are easily searchable at this humble blog -- well, for as long as you can see it, at least!), I refuse to reinvent the wheel for his amusement. I will point out, though, that belittling your opponents is the last resort of a man who can't win arguments on the merits, and suggesting that so many folks have somehow "gotten on the bandwagon" when the FCC has received close to 30 million public comments on this topic over the years is a hell of a way of advertising your own ignorance. I'll even say that ranting and raving about the stupidity of the American people is something a fascist does when he knows he can't get his way through persuasion and cunning. Will shame visit Trump the Younger over this matter? I kid, of course -- being a Trump means never being ashamed about anything you've ever done, and people who don't feel shame are a menace to democracy and a menace to civilization.

Finally, I'm glad that some analysts are catching on that Roy Moore's defeat in the special U.S. Senate race in Alabama earlier this week isn't some freak electoral accident. A lot of Republicans are still telling themselves that Roy Moore was an anomaly -- after all, how often do you find out the guy you nominated spent much of his 30s trying to date teenage girls? But if Mr. Bannon plunges forward with his alleged plan to try to replace almost every sitting Republican Senator up for re-election in 2018 with a "Moore-like insurgent()," Republicans are going to find out Mr. Moore is not an anomaly, and they'll be just as disappointed with them as they must now be with folks like Rep. Farenthold. Consider, if you will, Mr. Bannon's oft-discussed plan to replace Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, who has voted with President Trump approximately 2,000 percent of the time, with former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince. If Roy Moore had skeletons in his closet, Erik Prince may well have the Catacombs of Paris in his. And with Berniecrats having taken over the party apparatus in the Equality State, Republicans might be better off dancing with the girl they brung, as they say.

Penny rants for Tuesday, December 5, 2017: concerning bad arguments and evil deeds.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) says we can't fund the Children's Health Insurance Program because "we don't have money anymore" but apparently also because "I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves." Always they bring the WE'RE BROKE!!!!!! rubbish, plus he had the cojones to say this right as he was shepherding a tax "reform" bill through the Senate that would reduce federal revenues by (in the Joint Committee on Taxation's rather charitable assessment) over $100 billion annually! So the question is this: does Mr. Hatch really regard children as "people who won't help themselves," or was he just deflecting into general rightwingmoocherspeak? It doesn't really matter, I suppose, because either way, it's bad argument. As a right-wing bumper sticker reminded me many years ago: know thy enemies, for they are your leaders. (If they would only just be our representatives, rather than the representatives of their big donors, we'd have no reason to hate them.)

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley is little better, not just trotting out the long-discredited notion that estate tax repeal will "help family farms" but also that "not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies." We already know that folks who "spend every darn penny" usually have to, and if they don't meet their bills it's because they don't get paid enough, but a philosophy that exalts investing and disdains spending is also a philosophy that says poor people are worse people than rich people, which, given the childish way Our Glorious Elites constantly act, we also know is not true. By the way, if I suggest that this is Mr. Grassley's actual political philosophy, please understand that I'm giving him credit. After all, most mammon-worshiping right-wingers want to shelter investment from taxation merely out of greed.

Surprise, surprise, the President of Honduras, who probably would have lost his recent attempt at re-election if it were a fair one, is now using forces trained by the United States to put down folks who are protesting the election results. You know, by instituting curfews, launching tear gas into crowds, and arresting people who bang saucepans, in addition to the usual fighting and killing. Anyone whose heart went out to the million Iranians who took to the streets at great personal risk after Mr. Ahmadinejad's "re-election" in 2009 has no business tut-tutting the protestors in Honduras. (They have no business tut-tutting American masked protestors, either, if they applaud the TIGRES.) And if you think this couldn't happen here, recall that our 46% President says he lost the popular vote because three million people voted illegally. Of course, if Democrats actually nominate an economic populist for President in 2020, instead of some centrist weakling who "can win," they might just make moot anything Mr. Trump might be tempted to try.

Penny Rants for Sunday, October 15, 2017: why video conferencing doesn't work for prisoners, and other horrible truths.

It begins: President Trump ends subsidy payments to insurers that offer health insurance plans in the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Though the end result of Mr. Trump's action will be higher insurance premiums for poorer working families -- indeed, higher premiums have already been the result of the mere uncertainty over whether the Trump Administration would continue the subsidies -- I doubt any lawsuit against it will succeed, which testifies mainly to how badly the Affordable Care Act was written. Congress might be amenable to funding the subsidies, but at what cost? At the cost of further raiding Medicare and Medicaid? At the cost of destroying the pre-existing conditions ban, which nobody except health insurance corporations hates? And you know how I hate to pile on, but a single-payer health insurance system would help us avoid these problems -- particularly the appearance of "bailing out insurers," which, really, is a PR bank shot for Mr. Trump.

The Straight Dope explains to us why "video conferencing" between prisoners and their families is a poor substitute for in-person jail visits between prisoners and their families. Surprise, surprise, video phone calls don't help prisoners stay out of jail once they get out as well as, you know, family actually being there for them, plus the service is crappy and expensive, and some jails stop offering in-person visits the minute they get video conferencing, often at the request of the corporation providing the "service"). This state of affairs does not exactly conjure up "the genius of the free market" -- surely video conferencing, if it were so great, could beat in-person visits on the merits. The punchline: Ajit Pai's FCC has lately stopped efforts to cap prices for this service, because you could stuff a burner phone into a dead cat and throw it over a prison wall! (How I wish I were making that up).

Here's a hopeful note: not long after whining that its hands were so tied it just had to offer Equifax a service contract Equifax didn't even win on the merits, the IRS has suspended said contract with Equifax, at least temporarily. Maybe the IRS hopes we'll all forget about it in a few days, particularly since our drama-addicted President will provide us with many distractions in the meantime, but the fact that the IRS backed down so quickly from their main argument (apparently that whenever a corporation sues them they have to do that corporation's will, how full of American can-do is that?) suggests that such arguments may be as transparent to good Americans as they should be. Consider, however, why on Earth the IRS would be outsourcing customer account verification to a private corporation. You'd think if the IRS did it itself, it'd cost the taxpayer less, regardless of the mountains of BS various PR hacks have fed us regarding the absurd notion that "private corporations do everything better."

Finally, because you deserve some edifying reading, Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker discusses "How Norms Change," particularly vis a vis our racist adolescent President. I've long hoped to report in a few years that Donald Trump single-handedly obliterated the bully pulpit, but whether we like it or not, Donald Trump is an "authority figure," and "authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think" -- the Supreme Court's 2015 legalization of gay marriage may not actually have changed very many opinions, for example, but it suggested to folks that other folks' opinions were changing, and so it goes with the President who has everyone thinking there are more racists then we thought, even though he only got 46% of the popular vote. So what do we do about a President who (for example) makes anti-Semitism appear more legitimate? Other authority figures must speak out -- ideally close-at-hand authority figures, like your professor or your pastor. I like to say we're all moral leaders in America, and that means we're all authority figures as well, so go forth and do good works.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, October 11, 2017: Alabama voting restrictions and Trumpian whining.

Sue Sturgis at Facing South describes the obstacles voters face ahead of the Alabama U.S. Senate special election in December. And not just Voter ID, either: freed from Voting Rights Act pre-clearance by the Supreme Court, Alabama closed nearly 200 voting precincts between 2012 and 2016, engaged in what looks an awful lot like good old-fashioned caging, and lifted restrictions for nonviolent felons without telling them. (The good news? Alabama doesn't participate in the Interstate Crosscheck system that has disenfranchised so many voters nationwide, and the Obama Administration stepped in to force the reversal of Alabama's notorious closure of 31 DMVs, disproportionately in black and impoverished areas.) But as Phil Jackson always said, if you have bad refs, you play above them. Maybe that's easy to say when you're putting Shaq and Kobe out there every night, but Doug Jones -- whose election would, frankly, be a victory for civilized people everywhere -- doesn't look ready to play above the refs, let alone be Shaq or Kobe.

President Trump whines -- on Twitter, the favorite place of whiners -- that "(n)obody could have done what I've done for Puerto Rico with so little appreciation!" Given that more than 80% of good Puerto Ricans still don't have power and four in 10 still don't have access to clean water three weeks after Hurricane Maria's landfall, it's hard to tell what he's done, besides a lot of golfing and yelling at pro athletes and tossing paper towels to hurricane survivors like they were all at a minor league baseball game. If Barack Obama had complained about "being unappreciated," right-wingers would have been all over him like white on rice, but Trump votaries don't see the Great Man's whining as whining, because they see themselves as the One True Oppressed People who Get to Complain All They Want. What a shame their rage addiction prevents them from redressing their real grievances, which (sigh) have nothing to do with race and everything to do with economic injustice.

Penny Rants for Friday, July 27, 2017: well, *someone* had a really good week.

Don't believe the hype that President Trump wants a middle-class tax cut and he wants rich folks to pay more. Not just because he's already proposed massive tax cuts for rich folks: don't believe it because we know that Mr. Trump will say anything to foment drama and chaos, and that fomenting drama and chaos is the only way he can get anything done. Of course, he's not really talking to us, at any rate -- he's talking to his votaries, who will dutifully cling to the belief that TRUMP CUTZ MY TAXEZ!!!! even as they're figuring out for the 20th straight month whether to keep the gas or the lights on. I really had my fill of government-by-drama-and-chaos during Tha Bush Mobb years; obviously God decided that, as a nation, we really didn't learn our lesson. Too often -- like, when I contemplate sensationalistic "liberal" media coverage in 2016, or how thoroughly Democrats have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over the years -- I find it hard to argue with that conclusion.

Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo explains why he doesn't "lay into" President Trump like many of his fellow Democrats do: "As a general rule, I haven’t found nasty ad hominem attacks on a person whose cooperation is needed to help your state especially helpful." Anti-kudos to Mr. Cuomo for using the word "help" twice in five words -- and that's not counting the synonym for "help" he used four words before that. "He decided early on he wasn’t going to stick a finger in Trump’s eye" would have considerably more gravity, of course, if Donald Trump didn't spend all his time sticking his finger in everyone else's eye. And Mr. Cuomo's statement also translates pretty well into "I'm happy being a hostage to circumstance, as is our unique heritage as Americans." If Mr. Cuomo is the Democratic nominee in 2020, Mr. Trump will beat him to a pulp -- why, Mr. Trump may even win the popular vote if Mr. Cuomo runs! He may even get a majority of the popular vote!

Hot on the heels of Mr. Trump's announcement of a ban on transgendered soldiers, ostensibly because their health care "costs so much," Josh Hafner at USA Today informs us that the added cost of transgendered soldiers' health care needs is equivalent to about four trips the President takes to his resort in Mar-a-Lago. It's also equivalent to 14 hundredths of one percent of our government's spending on our soldiers' health care, but the Mar-a-Lago figure is the most telling. I said yesterday that the up-to-$8.4 million added cost of transgendered soldier health care would be "chump change" in any other context to Donald Trump, but I forgot that his corruption always goes deeper than that: he also high-fives himself for sticking the cost of a month of weekend travel to Mar-a-Lago on the taxpayer, while crying crocodile tears about the "disruption" and "burden" of covering transgendered soldiers' health care for an entire year. What a fucking asshole.

Penny Rants for Thursday, July 13, 2017: of "treason" and higher education.

Rick Hasen at the Election Law blog lays out the possible charges Donald Trump, Jr. could face for allegedly soliciting "dirt" on Hillary Clinton from a well-connected Russian lawyer. Chiefly, Trump the Younger faces a fairly serious campaign finance charge, by soliciting a contribution "from a foreign individual or entity." And "contribution" doesn't just mean pile of money -- a contribution can be "anything of value," and "some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia" (as Trump the Younger's email contact put it) would qualify. And Mr. Trump isn't going to get off the hook by saying the emails don't actually show him asking for that information -- it's hard to imagine that a Russian official simply emails you with such an offer out of the goodness of his heart, and I doubt he'll convince a judge that "I love it" doesn't mean "I can't wait to see it." Mr. Hasen lists other charges Trump the Younger might face, but n.b. that none of them are "treason," a charge Sen. Kaine (D-VA) floated a few days back. Sorry, folks, that kind of thing really sticks in my craw. Isn't potential lawbreaking enough of a reason to act?

In a strange reversal, Pew finds that a stunning 58 percent of Republicans say that American universities have a "negative effect on the way things are going in this country." That's up from 37% just two years ago! And Democrats' attitude toward higher education has remained fairly constant (they're generally for it), which must mean they're the conservative party in America now. The Pew study (which also has much to say about Democrat/Republican feelings about other institutions) doesn't tell us why Republicans have come to hate college so much, but you could be excused for thinking it's all because of "political correctness," i.e., because right-wingers can't get a "safe space" for their ideas, and by "safe" I mean "safe from criticism." And dig Gov. Walker (E-WI) praising a bill allowing college administrators to expel students who "disrupt" speeches given at the University -- for its "commitment to free speech"! Call me old-fashioned, but I think protestors who are actually disruptive damn themselves in the eyes of all who see them, and that people who actually have something to say can handle criticism from any quarter.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 23, 2017: politics as sport and drama, and other considerations.

"CNN Treats Politics Like a Sport," says Carlos Maza at Vox, and "That’s Bad for All of Us." You know it's bad when CNN's own president says "(t)he idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way," as if no one overhearing that could possibly call it evidence of a sick, immoral, and decadent society. Of course, calling politics "sport" is a way of turning good Americans into spectators, though our Constitution demands that we be participants in our democracy. And the accompanying video reminds us that CNN also thinks of politics as "drama" ("drama" being, like a sporting event, something you watch rather than participate in). We then witness (among so many other things!) a CNN punditoid say something ridiculous and then CNN coverage of the fallout over the ridiculous thing he said as if it'd ever be a story in a sane and moral society. This video, which runs a total of 6 minutes, 2 seconds, is a more trenchant slab of media criticism than Outfoxed is, and Outfoxed ran 78 minutes.

OK, I'll admit, Jon Ossoff outperformed my expectations in last Tuesday's special election in Georgia's 6th House District -- his 48% outdid his late polling, so maybe voters (and not just Democrat voters) might actually prefer an obvious milquetoast moderate to a Republican right now. 48% doesn't avoid a runoff, though, and he'll have a tougher time with one opponent than he did with 17. On the other hand, that opponent is former Susan G. Komen Foundation executive (and former Georgia Secretary of State) Karen Handel, who should really be parlaying that résumé into a Senate seat, except she's already tried and failed. Democrats will pound Ms. Handel's involvement in the Komen Foundation's messy divorce from Planned Parenthood, but that won't get Mr. Ossoff over 50. Here's what would: Ms. Handel told supporters to keep Democrats from "steal(ing) a seat"; if Mr. Ossoff has the presence of mind to retort that seat belongs to the good voters of the Georgia 6th, not the Republican Party!, then he might actually pull this off.

So Bernie Sanders lent his star power to Omaha Democratic Mayoral candidate Heath Mello at a rally on Thursday night -- and then we learned that Mr. Mello not only opposes abortion but has advanced anti-abortion legislation while serving in the state legislature. I've long said that the pro-lifer who wants to bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income is more my ally than the pro-choicer who wants "free" trade agreements to outsource our jobs and nullify our laws, but I don't see much evidence that Mr. Mello actually is an economic populist -- even his infrastructure plan reheats the same "public-private partnerships" that Americans rightfully dismiss as corporate welfare. Democrats no doubt see an opportunity in a city Mrs. Clinton won by eight points, but Mr. Sanders is likely the cagier operator here, knowing that most folks will only remember that he went to bat for someone who didn't hew precisely to party orthodoxy. Still, I'd prefer he'd go to bat for an actual anti-abortion economic populist; I know they're out there.

Given all the weirdness involving an aircraft carrier going somewhere other than where the Trump Administration said it was going last week, some observers are floating the notion that maybe Donald Trump is crazy-like-a-fox. Authors Raymond Tanter and Ed Stafford negotiate the "madman approach" with some care; long story short, the "madman approach" might work OK against more rational states, but not against other states that, ah, may be "practicing" their own version of the "madman approach." But you should remember that some of Mr. Bush's supporters said the same thing about his apparent insanity in going into Iraq -- that he was attempting to scare our enemies with his craziness -- and, well, how did that work out? We got ourselves an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, where it wasn't before, and then out of American internment camps in Iraq we got an ISIS presence all over the Levant, and ISIS is doing its damndest to make al-Qaeda look quaint. So remember: so many folks fancy themselves as tricksters; so few folks are any good at it.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 16, 2017: hifalutin right-wingers, foolish liberals, and media "centrism."

Mr. Trump's OMB Director, Mick Mulvaney, has received a lot of well-deserved flak for saying he's against redistributing income from rich folks to poor folks and that deficits don't matter when cutting taxes, but you know what strikes me most about his words, as quoted in the link above? How freaking hifalutin he sounds -- when he suggests programs like Social Security and Medicare are "inefficient" and drops phrases like "wealth transfer" into his spiel, he sounds exactly like the smartypants egghead that is the cherished right-wing stereotype of liberals. And we live in a decadent time when folks get rich mainly by constructing elaborate income-redistribution-upward schemes, but we'll set that aside for now. Though Mr. Mulvaney sounds so "wonky" because he thinks right-wing politics plus the appearance of intelligence gives him an edge, Trump votaries still have to work harder to convince themselves that the Trump Administration is just-like-us when Trump mouthpieces sound like they think they're so much smarter than them.

Republicans dodged a bullet in a special House election in Kansas's 4th this past Tuesday, but you wouldn't know it from all the Jeff George Victory Laps they're doing over there, and I don't just mean President Trump, who acts like it wasn't a sign of weakness that Republicans had to drag their President into a special election in freaking Kansas. No, dig the arrogance of the winner, Kansas state Treasurer Ron Estes, who really should be parlaying his statewide office into a Senate gig, not a House gig -- "we really showed the pundits tonight"? Without the infusion of huge amounts of Republican money and effort, in a seat Republicans typically win by 30 points, Mr. Estes would have been toast. Democrats, for their part, are learning nothing from the experience. Their only path back to power in Congress is through Berniecrats like Mr. Thompson, just as the Republicans' only path back to power in 2010 was through the Tea Party, but Democrats don't want that, since it'll make sucking up to corporate donors at the altar of "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" harder.

National Democrats are, of course, banking (so to speak!) on a victory in Georgia's 6th, another deep-red Republican district (albeit one which went for Mr. Trump by less than two points) holding a special election. But what is the one thing we're constantly hearing about their nominee, Jon Ossoff? That he's raised a crapload of money, that's what. Because what energizes voters (particularly populist voters) more than hearing a candidate's raised a lot of cash? Democrats will lose this race. How do I know? Because Mr. Ossoff's still running ads saying he'll "work with anybody" and bring "high-tech" jobs to his district and fight wasteful spending. I suppose you win a red district by "sounding like a Republican," but you take it too far if you actually adopt Republican positions, or let Republicans set the terms of the debate. Case in point: his best ad (largely about foreign policy issues) doesn't mention his work exposing ISIS's sex slavery in Iraq. I'd have run that ad first, so that when Republicans fired back with ZOMG HE WORKEDZ FOR TEH AL JAZEERAHZ!!!!, they'd look like the petty fools they are.

"Liberal" media outlets are starting to declare that Mr. Trump's more recent flip-flops represent a "move to the political center." Ah, no: Mr. Trump isn't moving toward the "center," but toward the conventional wisdom of Our Glorious Elites, which isn't the same thing. Where's the center on health care, for example, if you judge by how the majority of Americans feel? Single-payer, that's where. Where's the center on bank regulation in America -- again, judging not by what the media and the political parties say, but what the people say? We might best describe the center as "people want banksters to stop hurting them for personal gain." Clearly our honeymoon with the "liberal" media is over; they've decided Mr. Trump is "normal" now, and they're ready to go back to pushing sensationalist drama and right-wing policy prescriptions for everything 24-7. The good news? It doesn't matter, and they don't matter -- the only people who matter are the American people, and, frankly, Our Glorious Elites need us more than we need them.

Penny Rants for Sunday, April 2, 2017: false flags, "free" trade, and internet privacy.

Emphatic non-truther Paul Street says "the time has never been riper for a false flag terror attack." Approvals in the 30s not even three months in, his first attempt at repealing Obamacare falling flat on its face, his first two anti-Muslim executive orders dying in court, his utter inability to put the Russian hacking story to rest -- yeah, the new President has sure made an entrance, and don't forget that 54% of the electorate voted for someone else. And don't forget, also, that George W. Bush didn't win the popular vote either, and sure looked headed for a one-term Presidency before 9.11 became his "opportunity" (Condi Rice's word, not mine). At least Mr. Bush actually put together a government; Mr. Trump hasn't even done that much, meaning there'll be fewer people in the conspiracy if there is one (and of course the bigger the supposed conspiracy, the more likely it doesn't exist). Remember that, incidentally, when the attack comes -- along with his refusal to attend intelligence briefings, his purge of the State Department, his golfing weekends in Florida, and his general strutting around like he's got the biggest cock in the universe. But, really, Mr. Trump may not need a conspiracy -- as one of my co-workers says, Mr. Trump's election is ISIS's endgame.

Mr. Trump says he won't scrap NAFTA, formerly "the worst trade deal," but will keep many planks in place when he goes to renegotiate it. And I bet you just can't guess one of them. That's right, the investor-state tribunal -- which the Times doesn't even mention until paragraph 20, though I'd say the mere existence of such tribunals, which threaten to destroy law and order in America and any other country in which they exist, was the main reason folks across the political spectrum hated the Trans-Pacific "Partnership." Were you wondering how Trump was going to fail us on "free" trade? This sure looks like how. But Paul Ryan's smoke-blowing aside, Mr. Trump hasn't exactly convinced everyone he's a "closer," and it looks like our neighbor to the north -- you remember that Canada was also a party to SHAFTYA, right? -- might have more urgent concerns about Mr. Trump's aims than Mexico does. Let's not allow the existence of Mexico's national sales tax lure us into accepting Mr. Trump's proposed American national sales tax "border tax," either. I'd be happy to accept our withdrawal from NAFTA. I'd even be happy to give Mr. Trump credit for it, as I do for our withdrawal from the TPP. (Not too much credit, though. We really deserve most of that.)

Wondering how to navigate the post-internet privacy world, as delivered by Congress this past week? Quincy Larson at Quartz advises us to set up a Virtual Private Network (or VPN) and certainly to enable HTTPS on our browsers, while Emily Dreyfuss at WIRED advises us to check out the Internet Noise website, which opens five tabs on your browser to websites chosen at random, and then visits five more websites every 10 seconds until you tell it to stop. I will admit to being quite attracted to the latter item -- as we learned in the Star Trek episode "Charlie X," one good way to deal with someone who's got too much power is to give them too much to handle -- but I also imagine that the better ISPs (and the better data-buyers) will ultimately figure out which traffic is trash. You should also worry (especially since Internet Noise's creator hasn't even evaluated all the search terms he uses) that an unscrupulous actor will concoct a terrorist plot from these searches -- Cardinal Richelieu once said "give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him." There's more than one way to give evil too much to handle, though -- one of my random searches led me here, and that sure brought back some happy memories.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, March 29, 2017: death spirals, cynics, and hapless futurists.

If you've been hearing from right-wingers that Obamacare is in a "death spiral," you should know that it's not really true. Paul Ryan's mistake, of course, was saying Obamacare was in "what the actuaries call a death spiral." I'm happy to tell you how badly the Democrats do trying to appear smarter than everyone else, but dropping in the ten-dollar word "actuaries" takes "death spiral" out of the realm of the colloquial (where Mr. Trump always leaves it, you notice) and into the realm where "death spiral" actually has a fairly precise meaning: it involves a health insurance market that suffers from "shrinking enrollment," "a deteriorating risk pool," and "rising premiums," and not only does Obamacare suffer from only one of those problems, that problem (rising premiums) has always been a feature of our health insurance market, and Obamacare subsidies are pretty much flattening its effect. Of course, if Mr. Trump runs Obamacare into the ground, folks won't remember the precise meaning of "death spiral" and they'll just conclude Paul Ryan was right. Which might make him clever, but wouldn't make him, you know, not evil.

I missed out on this piece about the career of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from early January, but it's worth reading. You may recognize the star of this piece, journalist Alec MacGillis, from numerous ProPublica articles, but he literally wrote the book on Mitch McConnell, a book aptly titled The Cynic, and here we follow Mr. McConnell from his early days targeting "lowerclassmen and unpopular kids" as a way of winning a high school election through his days as a center-left Republican fighting anti-abortion legislation and supporting collective bargaining to his reawakening as a Reaganite. The overarching theme is that Mr. McConnell "is obsessed with electoral self-preservation and improvement, with no clear larger purpose" -- hence his archives at the University of Louisville talk about his victories and not his accomplishments, and hence he crusades against campaign finance reform, because how can such a man win elections if not for larger piles of money? I hope and pray for a Damascus moment in his life, not because he's a potential bulwark against Mr. Trump, but for his own sake. From where I'm standing, it sure looks like he needs one.

Emily Dreyfuss at Wired describes how Silicon Valley "transhumanists" would like to "cure" death, but seem to be ignoring most of the ways it could actually help extend people's lives. An actual futurist lists some of the technologies that already "augment" our lives: "clean water; urban sanitation; smokeless cooking facilities; free access to healthcare; a guaranteed minimum income; a good, free education" -- and not "apps or toys for rich people," in the words of another observer. Of course, if you've been reading Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal! and have thus had your fill of watching contemporary Democrats natter on and on about the "innovation" coming out of Silicon Valley, you may have already decided that Silicon Valley's War on Death is more likely a war on your pocketbook. Also, not for nothing, but has anyone from Silicon Valley trumpeting the need to "add years to your life" actually talked to someone over 100? They lose not just their mobility but their eyesight and their hearing just by living long enough. They lose all their friends and outlive their children and even their grandchildren. It's far from an idyllic existence -- unless, I guess, you can buy friendship and love.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 26, 2017: follies concerning Russia, health care, and the Supreme Court.

Quite reasonable people have asked me why I don't think the Trump-Russia connection is really very much worth your time, and Masha Gessen at The New York Review of Books explains why better than I could. And with considerably more generosity than I would have done, too -- as I'm exhorting everyone to work-work-work, Ms. Gessen reminds us that the "Russian conspiracy" "is used to explain how Trump could have happened to us, and it is also called upon to give us hope. When the Russian conspiracy behind Trump is finally fully exposed, our national nightmare will be over." Still, "none of the information" coming from intelligence agencies "can be independently corroborated," which I'm sure doesn't surprise you, and a lot of the dot-connecting doesn't actually pan out (Russia's December execution of two cybersecurity experts had nothing to do with Mr. Trump, and a phantom Ukraine plank in the 2016 Republican platform wasn't even out of our foreign policy mainstream, to name two). And I still tell people Russia didn't create the Interstate Crosscheck database or "lose" all those non-votes in Detroit and Flint, and Russia didn't induce the Democratic party poobahs to get behind the "safe" candidate instead of the one who could actually inspire people to vote Democrat. If Democrats would work on matters like these, all the Russian interference in the world wouldn't matter.

One doesn't want to gloat over Mr. Trump's failure (at least in the short term!) to get his health care "reform" bill passed, but when he blamed Democrats for its failure, I laughed out loud. A more reasonable individual might have blamed his own attempts to make his bill even worse in order to attract votes from nihilists in the Republican "Freedom" Caucus -- the CBO re-evaluated the bill as it was revised mid-week and found it would not only deprive 24 million Americans of their health insurance but would actually cost more than Obamacare does, and it would take a special kind of stupid to pass that. Then Mr. Trump offered to make health insurance corporations cover many, many fewer essential health care services than the Affordable Care Act does now, which would have made useless the pre-existing condition ban Mr. Trump says he likes so much. So Mr. Trump blaming Democrats for the health care bill's failure is like the schoolyard bully whining that no one will play with him. Now, his statement that "(t)he best thing that could happen is exactly what happened"? He might be right about that -- we're still over 19 months away from midterms, which is plenty of time for Trumpcare to turn up in, say, a must-pass appropriations bill, or for something else entirely. So, think we might be getting a terrorist attack soon?

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) gets an earful at a townhall over his support for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. He goes so far as to tell his loudly-booing audience that "if you can’t understand that he is a qualified nominee, then you’re not listening" (so much for the power of persuasion!), and that "elections have consequences," which he must have imagined would sound better coming from the man who dutifully voted to confirm Justices Sotomayor and Kagan in 2009, but which only reminds folks that in this election, 54% of the electorate voted against the winner of the Electoral vote. He also plays the Straw Man card, by suggesting his attendees think "only liberals only can get their nominees and conservatives can't" -- this, though he's been in quite a few Congresses that simply refused to hold hearings on a Democratic President's judicial nominees. But that's not even the worst thing he said. Here's that: "I don't think that the Constitution was written so that you get everything you want and I get nothing." Actually, the Founders did write the Constitution so that an elected representative gets nothing -- elected representatives do the will of their constituents, not their own will. Why do we need to keep reminding our elected representatives of that, I wonder?

Penny Rants for Wednesday, March 22, 2017: the battle to win hearts and minds in America.

New York Times house conservative David Brooks has won a lot of plaudits from the left for describing President Trump's budget thusly: "He wants to cut any part of government that may seem soft and nurturing, like poverty programs. He wants to cut any program that might seem emotional and airy-fairy, like the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants to cut any program that might seem smart and nerdy, like the National Institutes of Health. But he wants to increase funding for every program that seems manly, hard, muscular and ripped, like the military and armed antiterrorism programs. Indeed, the Trump budget looks less like a political philosophy and more like a sexual fantasy." That's entirely accurate, of course, but, ah, read the whole column in which this insight appears, which is called "Let Bannon Be Bannon!" It's bad enough that Mr. Brooks thinks that Mr. Bannon is a populist, that he has a coherent governing philosophy, that a coherent governing philosophy is automatically superior to governing by the seat of your pants, and that Mr. Trump is actually governing by the seat of his pants. But, really, would Steve Bannon have come up with something more nurturing than the "hard power" budget? I suspect the next houseplant that man grows will be his first. And I bet he tries to make it grow faster by yelling at it.

Cracked columnist Christina H. writes about "What Changed My Mind" about being a "Hardcore Conservative," by which she means she used to be a stereotypical far right-winger who'd call Democrats "Demoncrats" and assume that liberals were all oversexed. Her condemnation of Hollywood on that last notion (among so many others!) is entirely appropriate, but here's the sentence you really need to attend: "(w)e all know nobody likes to admit they are wrong, but did you know nobody likes to admit they were until very recently wrong?" And thus she reminds us that usually we change our worldview far enough out of sight that we can hide it, if only to save our own egos. She also reminds us that conversations we overhear are more likely to change us than conversations we've invested ourselves in, that the stories we tell while we're just shooting the breeze do a lot more to change us than well-constructed arguments do, and that the folks "on your side" can do more to change you than the folks "on the other side," which is true even though it's regrettable that we describe folks in terms of "sides" at all. This is all important information -- it may even be enough to make you feel comfortable with the idea that you do your best and God does the rest.

Matt Harbowy at Medium writes "On Transgendered Bathrooms -- Or, as Most People Call Them, 'Bathrooms.'" I think he's actually quite generous to say that the brouhaha over transgendered folks in bathrooms derives, at the legislative level, from "the fears and tortured psyches of legislators trying to 'imagine' (since they typically have no direct experience with homosexuals of either gender) what it means if you put either homosexual or transgendered individuals into...the single gendered bathroom of their own childhood" -- I say "generous" because I tend more toward thinking these legislators are merely manipulative and heartless. But it's true that gendered bathrooms at schools are little more than "an opportunity for male bullies to be out of the watchful eye of mostly female teachers and supervisors," and it's also true that converting multi-urinal and multi-stall gendered bathrooms into single-stall/single-urinal non-gendered water closets would pretty much end the controversy. I think this idea (which would only be marginally less "efficient" than gendered bathrooms are now, especially when these are hardly ever filled to capacity) is exactly the kind of thinking this country needs -- though our political class wouldn't want it, since the result would be less drama, not more.

Finally, I wasn't waiting for this, but Hillary Clinton says she's "ready to come out of the woods" after her Election Day loss to Donald Trump -- and of course she's preaching about Americans finding common ground. The Clintons virtually invented the sport of Democrats and Republicans coming together to give Republicans whatever they want, so one could be excused, I think, for feeling something less than enthusiasm at this prospect. Besides, we not only can "ignore, or turn a cold shoulder to someone because they disagree with us politically," we must -- shame and ostracization are the tools of civilized people, even if some folks wield them in an uncivilized manner. Still, as it happens, Americans do have a lot of common ground: we like privacy, we like our right to dissent, we like good pay for hard work, we like clean air and clean water, we like not dying from health care problems, we like good government programs that deliver what they promise for our taxes -- and we hate corporate crime, media consolidation, media sensationalism, and "free" trade deals that let corporations outsource our jobs and nullify our laws. Of course, none of this lends itself well to a "bipartisan" "consensus" among Our Glorious Elites who only want to redistribute more of our wealth upward to themselves.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 12, 2017: health care, the "liberal" media, and taxes.

Rep. Chaffetz (R-UT) has taken a lot of well-deserved hits for saying folks who worry about the cost of health care should just avoid buying that new iPhone, and not just because health care costs are absurdly high (getting your appendix out, without any of the follow-up care you'd need, could run you about 20 iPhones), or even because Mr. Chaffetz implies you should just "grow up" if you want more from your government than the back of its hand. Mr. Chaffetz advances the notion that you should "invest" in health care, but you don't literally invest in health care -- if you could save $200 monthly in an index fund paying 7% annually and reinvest your dividends annually, it'd still take you close to six years to pay off that appendix removal, and hopefully nothing else happens to you in the meantime! Also, you need health care when you need it, not when you can draw off your investments, and that's why insurance works: a large number of people pool their resources together so that a few of them can endure a catastrophe at a particular time. Why would Mr. Chaffetz want you to think you're in this on your own, I wonder?

We discussed Josmar Trujillo's article about the New York Daily News's latest defense of "broken windows" policing last week, but I wanted to discuss one more aspect of his piece, since it slices the Gourdian knot of how we should approach the media during the Trump years. Mr. Trujillo opens with this statement: "When President Donald Trump rails against the mainstream media, it might not make much sense to come to their defense...the problems with media powerhouses like CNN and the New York Times are well-documented, and preceded any of Trump’s Twitter storms." I've been uneasy about the quickness to which so many liberals have jumped to the media's defense lately, and that's even though the media have been doing a better job. But the problems with the "liberal" media -- too corporate, too sensationalist, too hostile to non-whites -- still remain, and won't go away overnight. So you approach the media under a President who calls them "the opposition party" like you approach anything else -- honestly, without worrying whether we should consider the media to be on "our side" because our jerk of a President is on the other side. Your side is the truth, not "whatever side isn't Trump."

Finally, Michael Hudson also had so many good things to say about Trumponomics in his Counterpunch interview earlier this month that I just didn't have space to get into Mr. Trump's opposition to deducting certain kinds of loan interest from your taxes. Long story short: Mr. Trump says he supports ending the practice, and doing so would put the brakes on the corporate raiders and unscrupulous landlords (ahem!) who seem to benefit the most from it -- but Congress would never do it, since their biggest donors are these same corporate raiders and unscrupulous landlords. And of course Mr. Trump knows that his opposition will come to nothing -- nothing, that is, except a PR weapon to use against Democrats on Election Day. Yet I find I don't want to get rid of all of those deductions -- I'd let folks continue to exempt student loan debt interest, I'd limit the mortgage interest deduction to mortgages of less than $300,000, and I wouldn't let folks take the deduction on more than one house plus one home equity loan. All of that would make being a landlord unattractive, but what a shame that would be.

Penny Rants for Sunday, March 5, 2017: losing Democrat strategies, and losing tax cut plans.

You may have heard that Democrats think they have a shot at picking up Tom Price's old House seat in an April special election, because voters there only went for Mr. Trump by a 48-47 margin. But apparently Republicans are running ads compiling social media videos the 30-year-old Democratic candidate has made, thinking they'll embarrass him. This may work, and then again it may not -- it's 30 seconds too long, it makes an obscure and probably inaccurate point, and why would Georgia 6th District's voters find Mr. Ossoff making fun of spoiled rich girls in our nation's capitol a bad thing? But this strategy's effectiveness will be short lived in any case, since even Republicans will run out of old-people candidates one day. I think the two more damaging pieces of news are a) that Mr. Ossoff has raised $2 million already (because money is everything, and ideas are nothing!) and b) that two Hollywood actresses (neither a superstar, but neither a has-been) have endorsed him (presumably Mr. Ossoff's opponent will run that ad closer to Election Day). So this still looks like the Democrat formula of raising boatloads of money and creating celebrity "buzz" for uninspiring candidates, the same formula that just brought us our present disaster.

Economist Michael Hudson explains how the Trump tax cut plan is based on myth. "The more you compress the tax rates" (that is, make them flatter so everyone pays more or less the same rate) "the more you un-tax where the income is really made," i.e., by the rich, whose share of income growth under the Obama Administration was approximately all of it. Also, income doesn't "trickle down" from the rich, precisely because they don't spend their extra money but lend it, which creates more debt for the rest of us -- and which makes complete sense once you consider that someone who makes 100 times what you make doesn't need 100 times the calories or 100 times the living space, nor do they spend 100 times what you spend on a cheeseburger. And it doesn't get said enough, but whatever working families get from tax cuts they'll lose in the social services that get cut or privatized -- and that doesn't necessarily mean food stamps or welfare, but education and health care. Plus, at the risk of piling on, most rich folks don't make their money working, but off of capital gains -- and this tax, of course, is the one all politicians, regardless of party, have the biggest hard-on for cutting. End result: "a vast sucking of income and wealth upward."

Penny Rants for Wednesday, February 22, 2017: the exception to the rule is not the rule.

I wouldn't give Donald Trump too much credit for understanding and exploiting how folks tend to "take an aberration...and conflate it with the norm." Right-wingers have long been masters of taking isolated counterexamples and pretending they obliterated actual trends -- why, they built a whole tort "reform" movement on isolated, hysterical anecdotes. And it's not just right-wingers, either: media outlets have never thought a headline like "white man walks streets of black neighborhood without incident for 53 years" worth running, but be the white man who gets mugged or shot there and the media will make you immortal. Even Mr. Trump's threat to publish a list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants has lately been outdone -- the Little Green Footballs blog used to tabulate stories of Muslim-perpetrated violence during Tha Bush Mobb years, even though finding 100 incidents of violence out of a population of one billion still does not mandate that we condemn an entire religion. Our brains may be wired to receive stories better than we receive rigorous arguments supported by solid data, but that doesn't make the stories right and the arguments and the data wrong.

I have lots of issues with this New York Times article that asks "Are Liberals Helping Trump?" For one, its thesis (that when liberal animosity drives Trump supporters further into the arms of Dear Leader) rests on conversations with exactly three Trump supporters and two historians. For another, that thesis also assumes -- and, worse, excuses -- an intolerable amount of intellectual laziness on the part of conservatives: I mean, isn't it dumb to make a decision based merely of the ferocity of your opposition? For a third, I never see the Times wring their hands about liberals clinging harder to Bernie Sanders when right-wingers employ their brand of "moral Bolshevism," which they do, like, all the time. For all of that, I agree that liberals should refrain from assuming that everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist. Yes, you can assume someone making a white power signal at you is a racist, and yes, I agree that a vote for Mr. Trump enables racism, but most folks learn about their own racism better when (for example) you point out similar racism in other folks. And some of them even appreciate your generosity when you do.

Penny Rants for Sunday, February 19, 2017: just say no to the border tax! And other stories.

Republicans purport to wring their hands over "who would pay" for a 20% "border tax" on imports. That question's easy to answer: who always pays, i.e., everyone except corporate CEOs. That explains why they like the idea so much! Well, that and the fact that the "border tax" would (along with a 20% "corporate income tax") replace the 35% corporate tax, finally delivering that big corporate tax cut that corporations don't need because they already get so many handouts tax-wise. Of course all that's heinous, but what folks may not realize is that the "border tax" is essentially a back-door national sales tax -- you think Congress will lift a finger preventing big corporations from passing that tax on to consumers? -- and, as you may know, I hate sales taxes, because they hit working people far harder than they hit the well-off. When are we going to get back to taxing high incomes in this country? Don't tell me those high-income folks have earned it unless you can explain to me exactly how these hifalutin financial instruments are exactly like the real, hard work our parents and grandparents did when they built a middle class in America.

The Philadelphia Daily News's John Baer frustrates me at times, like when he describes the apparent difficulty good Pennsylvanians have been having getting hold of their junior Senator, Republican Pat Toomey. (I haven't been able to reach him on the phone for days myself.) He quotes Mr. Toomey's spokeshack extensively to the effect that Mr. Toomey only has four staff per office, all of whom who have other duties, which begs the question why not hire more staff? That would be job creation, after all. And while Mr. Baer reassures us that reaching out to your elected officials is "fundamental to creating or maintaining a society that actually cares about how and by whom it is governed," he's still a bit too eager to point out that "some, if not most or all" folks who complain about not being able to reach Mr. Toomey "are tied to a national online effort called 'Indivisible' urging grassroots opposition to Trump’s agenda." "Are tied to" should beg the question by whom?, if not the question why would a journalist use passive verbs?, if not the question why does that matter? And, having taken the Parable of the Prodigal Son to heart over the years, I've stopped cutting people down by saying where were you before the election?

David Brooks at the New York Times wonders "What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like." The spirit is willing to believe Mr. Brooks's assertion that Mr. Trump can be "played" by anyone who flatters him enough, but I still think we're better off believing that Mr. Trump and Our Glorious Elites are playing us, and that this "war" between himself and the "establishment" is a phony war. And sure I laughed out loud at the final "saving thought" that "(t)he human imagination is vast, but it is not nearly vast enough to encompass the infinitely multitudinous ways Donald Trump can find to get himself disgraced" -- but he disgraced himself in fairly unprecedented ways before Election Day, and still won. My real problem here, though, is that Mr. Brooks seems to think everything was fine until Mr. Trump got elected, that "moral arbiters in Congress like Howard Baker and Sam Ervin" ever did very much moral arbitrating, that "a single media establishment that shapes how the country sees the president" is a good thing. And I bet quite a few black folks could tell him that we already weren't "experienc(ing) the same reality."

From the "So Smart, They're Dumb" file: Democratic Party poobahs have apparently asked for Bernie Sanders's help in ensuring that all of this populist anger gets directed at Republicans and not them. Why they think they deserve a shield against populist anger is beyond me -- sure, they're "unified" against Obamacare repeal, but that's yet another place where unity won't actually help them fight repeal! Worse, they seem to think they deserve a shield not just against populist anger but against the popular will -- they have no business suggesting that, say, Pat Toomey should get pointed questions at townhalls but Robert Casey shouldn't, because Mr. Casey should be just as accountable to the people as Mr. Toomey. The Post doesn't report what Mr. Sanders said in reply, which should concern you if (like me) you worry that he now has the Democratic leadership's ear not because he's earned it (though he has!), but because they want to neuter him and co-opt his supporters. If he needs to, he can always ask Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tspiras how well ingratiating oneself with elites has worked for him.

Finally, embedded in this interesting assessment, by U.S. News and World Reportcontributing editor John Stoehr, of Donald Trump's weakness in the face of reversal, is his claim that white working class folks are predisposed to "authoritarianism" rather than "socialism," and that they "eat and sleep being told what to do." I'm not entirely sure what that last part means, unless he's telling us the workplace isn't a democracy and a great deal about familial relationships isn't particularly optional, but I know plenty of white working class folks myself, and they regard themselves as fairly independent thinkers, and you can only create a real authoritarian state if you convince the majority they're doing it on their own. Also, I'd say the white working class isn't predisposed to "authoritarianism" so much as they're predisposed to impatience. And you can't really blame them, not just because politicians fail them so often, but also because, well, being impatient is really part of our heritage as Americans -- we get crap done because we refuse to be thwarted, and impatience doesn't need to end in authoritarianism any more than conservatism needs end in reactionary extremism.

Penny Rants for Sunday, February 12, 2017: special "free enterprise for the poor, socialism for the rich" edition!

Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang talks about some of the "myths of neoliberal capitalism." "(F)ree enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich" you've heard before, but it's still true, and when your relatives call CEOs "risk-takers," Mr. Chang reminds us that they make millions of dollars even if they crash and burn their company. When he says "austerity is a very good way of pushing through a regressive political agenda without appearing to do so," you may recall Gov. Walker going on Fox News in 2011 to claim he was trying to destroy public worker unions because "we're broke." Mr. Chang also fears that any infrastructure spending President Trump approves will be just another bubble -- probably a real-estate bubble, since that's what he understands best, and that doesn't even mean it'll be like last decade's housing bubble, but simply that infrastructure projects will (like New York City's Second Avenue Line, as Michael Hudson described last month) benefit landlords more than regular folks.

Mark Paul explains at Naked Capitalism "Why the Dakota Access Pipeline Doesn't Make Economic Sense." I mean, sure, the pipeline will create around 50 jobs (no, not 50,000, fifty total), and perhaps bring tens of millions annually to a handful of states, and of course will help make some CEO rich somewhere, but the pipeline would also impose (in Mr. Paul's estimation) at least a $4.6 billion cost annually, because the problems associated with pollution -- not just the health problems from burning all that fossil fuel, but the inevitable remediations once our leaders get serious about dealing with climate change -- all cost money to fix. Right-wingers constantly whine about "cost-benefit analysis" and never count, for example, the cost of providing more health care to people who breathe in or drink all that poison (a cost the Clean Air Act has reduced by at least $12 trillion as of 2012). In short, the pipeline would "socializ(e) costs associated with pollution — and not counting them — while privatizing profits from the pipelines."

Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us that, repugnant as Mr. Trump's Muslim ban is, "Corporate Media Paved the Way" for it over the last few decades. Two of Mr. Johnson's three factors relate fairly directly to each other -- the "liberal" media's drumbeat of ISIS coverage certainly feeds into said media's propensity to view terrorism as an "existential threat" perpetrated almost entirely by Muslims -- but, yes, it sure would help if the media would describe non-Muslim terrorism (Alexandre Bisonnette, Dylann Roof, Robert Dear, oh hell Timothy McVeigh) as terrorism (and not "domestic terrorism," either -- you'd have to ask why that would deserve its own category). I'm not sure the war on terror's atheist fellow-travelers (of whom Christopher Hitchens was also one) have had the effect Mr. Johnson supposes, since I don't presume even very many atheists listen much to Messrs. Maher, Harris, and Dawkins. But when the "liberal" media give wall-to-wall coverage of things ISIS might do, they're doing ISIS' work for them. And you'll find more fake news there than in a hundred "Russian propaganda sites."

Finally, Clive Thompson at WIRED calls coding "the new blue-collar job." I agree that we should demystify computer programming a lot more than we do, and not merely because it's so much more everywhere now, but if you've attended Democrat economic dogma over the past few decades, you'll find, sadly, that Mr. Thompson's point jibes too well with it: "New" Democrats have been proclaiming for-freaking-ever now that workers simply have to adjust to the times, rather than try to bend the times a little more to their own will (which is certainly their right!), and trying to make everyone into a programmer won't actually make things better, because traditional blue-collar work and programming utilize vastly different skill sets. I mean, I generally believe the best about people, and I believe they're plenty adaptable, but I try not to let my optimism lead me into having unrealistic expectations. Training, say, factory workers to do solar installations sounds a lot more realistic to me than training them to write code -- but since that wouldn't please the politicians' big donors, we don't hear about it as often.

Penny Rants for Tuesday, February 7, 2017: who's to blame for terrorist attacks? And other burning questions.

Quite a few observers have raised alarms about this New York Times report describing (among many other things!) President Trump apparently being quite angry that he'd put Steve Bannon on the NSC in an executive order without really knowing it. But I don't believe that's how it went down -- it's all drama, and, again, it's bad drama; there is no daylight between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon, just as there's no daylight between Congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump. And the Times report is drama, too, pushing the notion that Mr. Trump is changing into the the kind of person who could actually be a President, without giving very much evidence for that notion. Maybe if his aides were to actually figure out how to turn on the lights in the cabinet room -- admittedly as bizarre a slice of White House life as I've ever read -- we could have some confidence that Mr. Trump is "adjusting." But his m.o. is to make the whole world adjust to him -- an m.o. that's not exactly conducive to wisdom, let alone competence -- and it's not our job, as citizens, to expect or to hope he'll change. Our job is to make him change.

Sarah Jaffe, at FAIR, explains how "crucial and increasingly difficult" it's going to be to "(m)aintain() some ability to discern reality" in These Interesting Times. Long story short: the main culprit in the rise of fake news isn't blogging or Facebook but "(t)he death of reliable, locally-based news outlets," though the False God of Objectivity (which invariably turns out to mean "never criticize people in power") and the use of button-pushing phraseology like "protests descended into violence" (which phrase obscures the important matters of "by whom" and "against whom") certainly don't help matters. There are things we could do, of course -- beyond defending net neutrality and media consolidation rules, we could force cable providers to sell cable channels a la carte, so we can starve cable news drama hounds of their money -- and Keith Olbermann also has a few good suggestions for the media, chief among them that media organizations shouldn't cover Mr. Trump's press conferences live and then fact-check them as they're reporting on them, which seems, I don't know, an awful lot like how sane people would do it. Be first with the truth, not with the scoop, what I say.

Finally, a U.S. District Judge (appointed by George W. Bush, no less!) blocked Mr. Trump's little Muslim ban late last week, and Mr. Trump hasn't been taking it well, saying that "if something happens," Judge Robart should get the blame. And they say liberals always blame the wrong people! If "something happens," i.e. a massive terrorist attack, we are first going to blame the attackers, whom we can be sure had other options besides blowing up craploads of innocent people (particularly since terrorists typically don't come from the poorer classes, like most folks suppose, but from the wealthier classes who watch the poor suffer). And then we're going to blame Mr. Trump, who struts around like he won 200% of the vote while also whining like he didn't win a single vote, who doesn't bother going to intelligence briefings, who purges ambassadors and State Department personnel, and who only tries to keep out the foreigners who don't attack Americans. He will, of course, blame everyone but himself when it does happen, as he has already blamed everyone but himself for the problems he's had thus far. Is it too much to ask that no one respects him by then?

Penny Rants for Sunday, February 5, 2017: the further adventures of Our Man-Child President (and the real majority that opposes him).

Democrats boycott committee meetings so Trump Cabinet nominees can't get votes -- and then Republicans change the quorum rule (whereby the minority party must have at least two Senators in attendance for a committee vote to proceed) to ram nominees through committees anyway. I'm not ready to call this "unfair" -- Republicans have the majority, so they have wide latitude to change Senate rules. But I'm also not ready to call it a defeat. In changing the rules, Republicans also suffer the shame of having had to change the rules in order to get some really terrible people in office. And, you know, Democrats could have avoided all of this and taken the Senate back, merely by listening to the American people, and before the Trump ascension made doing so easier for them. And I think everyone knows by now that the only reason the Democrats have had any spine at all through this whole process is that we've given it to them. When these awful Trump nominees start destroying our government, we'll be waiting with our voices, and our will.

Laleh Khalili at TruthOut theorizes that the Trump Administration planned for "chaos" with its Muslim ban, but not "resistance." Of course, one of the reasons we reacted so quickly was because we've already lived through a President who wanted all-chaos-all-the-time, though he got off to a slower start (and that's probably how he lasted so damn long!). Do you remember when Steve Bannon said, "(w)e're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." No, of course you don't -- because that was Karl Rove, in 2004. (Personal to the folks still telling me to "let Trump do his job": his job is to execute our will, and I see no evidence that our will is to ban refugees -- the ones least likely to terrorize others precisely because they've been beaten down by terror themselves -- from nations that haven't even been sending us very many terrorists. That is pretty much exactly the opposite of how you'd handle thorny immigration issues.)

Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times describes "How Social Networks Empowered Mass Protests Against Trump." Today's "Resistance" uses Facebook and Instagram and the like not just to get in touch with each other, but to post photos of their works at rallies and protests, so when Mr. Trump says he has "the popular will," or that the Muslim ban is going swimmingly, photos of Women's March and airport protests refute him fairly decisively, and when he claims that "professional anarchists" do all the protesting, you can check your Facebook news feed and find it's actually people you know doing the protesting. One thing, though: I wouldn't call the anti-Trump resistance an "alt-majority," not just because the "alt-right" label (you know, the label that means "racist prick") has tarnished the "alt-" label forever, but because Mr. Trump's imaginary majority is the real alt-majority. No, I'd rather just call us the "the majority," since that's what we are, and calling yourself what you are is almost an act of courage in These Interesting Times.

Penny Rants for Wednesday, February 1, 2017: pipeline accidents, Obamacare repeal -- and the coming horror.

Yonatan Zunger goes into some excruciating detail about "What 'Things Going Wrong'" in America "Can Look Like." Increased pressure to fire Latinos (because they "might be undocumented"), mass surveillance-then-registration-then-internment-then-deportation of Muslims, mass crackdowns on black protestors -- yeah, people, it's gonna be bad. But I bring this article up mainly for paragraph 13, which really gets at how horrible people like Donald Trump can get broad support: "when people are already stretched to their absolute limit emotionally, with financial stresses, family stresses, medical stresses, lack of a clear future stresses, then hearing anyone else ask for something — even if that something is as simple as 'the right to walk down the street without being murdered' — feels like an added imposition. And that can lead to a backlash, not just from people who are inherently racist or the like, but also from people who aren’t and just don’t want yet another thing dropped on their plate." The solution, of course, would be to alleviate these stresses with good legislation -- Medicare-for-all, tax hikes on the rich, actual infrastructure funding for public projects. That's going to take a lot more work now, but the first step is pointing it out.

"Protestors Say Pipelines Are Dangerous. Are They?" asks this provocative article from Inside Energy. Paragraph 4 tells you all you need to know whenever some right-winger says BUT TEH PIPELINE ACCIDENTZ HARDLY EVER HAPPENZ!!!!: "According to data from federal regulators, there is actually a low probability of a pipeline accident. But when there is an accident, the impact can be huge." I mean, really, saying that only .0x percent of pipelines burst doesn't matter when one pipeline bursting can cause so much damage to a regional water table. But the article concerns itself mainly with pipeline safety to human beings, which is important, but is hardly the only indicator of a pipeline's safety. And if right-wingers tell you that you'd better support pipelines because they're safer than rail transportation (pipelines spilled three times the oil that railways did between 2004 and 2012, per the IEA, but pipelines also moved nine times the oil railways did), you can always demand to know why the discussion always has to be about the safety of oil and gas transport, and never about the safety of solar and wind power. (They'll squeal about dead birds and "wind turbine syndrome," but they have always overstated these dangers.)

I do get tired of hearing about how Republicans are wringing their hands over how they're really going to repeal Obamacare. I mean, it's all theatre. Here's how Obamacare repeal will go down: Republicans will repeal all the taxes (on the rich!) that fund the Affordable Care Act, then they'll repeal the mandate on citizens to buy insurance -- but they'll leave in the ban on pre-existing conditions, since that's very popular, and then watch premiums for everyone skyrocket when the uninsured don't bother to buy insurance until they're sick. Republicans might pass their stupid "health savings accounts" or "buying insurance across state lines" initiatives, or they might not. But it won't really matter; Republicans thrive on failure the way some insects thrive on dung. Republicans will deal with the mess by doing one (or more) of these three things: 1) hope people blame their employers when they get thrown off their now much-more-expensive health insurance, 2) blame the whole mess on Democrats, and 3) hope for a terrorist attack to take everyone's mind off their skyrocketing health care costs. Remember: I say these things out loud so they're less likely to happen.

Some particularly sanctimonious and purist notes from *Penny Rants*.

Well, I said I'd do it, so I've done it: here are five pages from my book, Penny Rants: Notes of a Sanctimonious Purist, 2005-2012. The first comes from early in the blog's early days; in it, we contemplate a bucolic scene with both John Bolton and Christopher Cox, if you can believe it:

In the second, we discuss why Sen. McCain's effort to find common ground with students at the New School and Liberty University was bound to fail:

Here we discuss Hardball host Chris Matthews's apology for saying mean things about Hillary Clinton -- and what his apology actually tells us about the "liberal" media:

In this post, from June of 2009, we learn the real reason a certain Fox News personality (who now sits in the Hall of the Unnamed here at this blog, so great is his shame) is so dangerous:

And finally (for now!), we remember those halcyon days when the "liberal" media used to blame the American people for the fact that Congress couldn't do anything:

So, if Penny Rants seems like your cup of tea, you can get it right here, at my storefront, Blunt Instruments. If you did me the honor of buying my book, you'd pay for it through PayPal (which you can do even if you don't have an actual PayPal account), so I won't ever see your credit card information; I'll only see your name, address, and your email address (which I won't use for further marketing schemes or sell to third parties). Thanks again, good folks, for all your support.

Penny Rants: Notes of a Sanctimonious Purist, 2005-2012.

So, I wrote a book, pictured below:

You might say I spent years writing it, and that's because I did -- Penny Rants: Notes of a Sanctimonious Purist, 2005-2012 comprises the most representative writing from this humble weblog during the four years of George W. Bush's second term and the four subsequent years of President Obama's first term. When I say "most representative," I mean you'll pretty much get my entire political and social philosophy as I expressed it during those years -- in very small doses, of course, since the basic building block of both Thieves in the Temple and Penny Rants is the single paragraph, so that, as a typical post at this blog comprises two to six paragraphs, each with its own subject, Penny Rants comprises 232 paragraphs, one to a page. A few trips to the bathroom and you might finish the entire book, and I'd take it as a compliment if you did.

But why "penny rants"? Well, strictly speaking, because pennies are small and because my writings are on the short side. But it's mainly because writing lengthy, angry manifestos doesn't actually make me feel any better -- I'm usually just as angry after a long rant as I was when I started, and if that's the case, then what's the point? Many people find it cathartic to ventilate everything that's bothering them, but I'm not wired that way, and I've found that training myself to say something quickly is immensely satisfying; I'd even go so far as to say that not tabulating every thought that runs through my head has been my way of letting those thoughts go. Of course, saying something quickly has another use. Most people who purport to explain how our politics works seem to have a vested interest in mystifying how our politics works, and if you try to flatten their folly with a volume that could kill an aardvark, you'll take forever writing it and they'll have changed all the rules by the time you do. Better to puncture their folly with something short and sharp; that's what penny rants are, and that's what Penny Rants is.

You can get Penny Rants here, at my internet storefront, Blunt Instruments; as I'm able to make it available at other locations, I'll let you know. Price is $10, plus $3 for shipping. I've put up a few sample pages from the book that readers have told me they like; I'll put up a few more as time goes on. In the meantime, good luck and God bless, and always remember: one hard-won victory can sustain you through a thousand crushing defeats.

Penny rants for Sunday, August 2, 2015: "I see weak people!"

David Barton whines that putting a woman on the $10 bill proves that liberals "literally want to erase our history." After all, it's not like the other bills all have men on them or anything! But that wasn't the stupidest thing he said on July 27, and neither, amazingly, was his invoking of our Founders, as if he's not the guy who attributes all kinds of right-wingy quotations to the Founders without sourcing them. Here's the winner: "(t)hey want to remake this country; in fact, as Obama said, to transform America, and you don't transform America from what it was without trying to erase what it was." You know who thinks "transformation" can never, ever build on tradition or honor the past? Two kinds of people: 1) a simpleton, and 2) someone pretending to be a simpleton in order to turn emotionally-vulnerable people into right-wing rageheads. I don't believe you'll find very many simpletons in America, I really don't. But you'll find a lot of pretend simpletons -- or, as better folks than I have called them, "useful idiots" -- and they're very well-paid in our sick, immoral, and decadent society.

Sen. Cruz (S-TX) suggests he'd shut down the government over continued funding of Planned Parenthood. You know, over that stupid video that the "liberal" media is somehow covering as if it's not a badly-edited hit job, even though, you know, they're supposedly full of "journalists" and stuff, a lot of whom actually took classes in college about how editing creates reality, even! You'll recognize the threat as more right-wing swordfighting -- Ted Cruz can't just have a vote over defunding Planned Parenthood like Rand Paul, but has to shut down the government over it. (And then, of course, Mike Huckabee suggested he'd send in federal troops to stop abortions, which proves that someone always thinks they have a bigger sword.) But, ah, Politico? That headline is profoundly offensive -- Planned Parenthood wouldn't "shut down the government"; obnoxious politicians would shut down the government. I guess if Republicans threw a similar tantrum over, say, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, Politico's headline would read "How Black Voters Could Shut Down the Government."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), currently vying for the Democratic Presidential nomination, says he will not run as an independent candidate if he does not get the Democratic nomination, for one simple reason: "I do not want to be responsible for electing some right-wing Republican to be president of the United States." Memo to Sen. Sanders: you would not be responsible for electing a right-wing Republican as President if you were to run as an independent. Who would be responsible? The right-wing Republican Presidential candidate, obviously, for successfully lying to the American people about what he plans to do (cough Scott Walker cough), and also to the people who voted for him though it wasn't in their interest to do so -- and also to the spineless Democrat politicians who accomplish nothing when they have power and thus give no one any positive reason to vote for them. We liberals get enough guff for "always blaming the wrong people" that we should actually, you know, blame the right people when bad things happen.

Penny rants for Monday, July 20, 2015: featuring the bad behavior of Scott Walker and Comcast.

Lost in the controversy over Scott Walker suggesting that raising the minimum wage is a "lame" idea (so many Americans want it, it must be lame!) is his statement that "we need to talk about how we get people the skills and the education and the qualifications that they need to take on the careers that pay far more than the minimum wage." And how has he done that as Governor of Wisconsin? With a government website that matches Wisconsin residents up with jobs that are too frequently out-of-state? With a privatized economic development corporation so plagued with waste and cronyism that he is no longer its chairman? With his zeal to turn the state's vaunted university system into little more than a vocational school feeding worker bees to big corporations? Hell, if he's so great at "skills and education and qualifications," why is Wisconsin's economy lagging behind the rest of the country? But don't count on Democrats raising such objections during the campaign, since they learned during Tha Bush Mobb years that it's impolite, treasonous even, to tell everyone the Emperor's not just stark naked but doing the helicopter dance in front of you.

Comcast allegedly offers St. Paul (MN) seniors and economically-disadvantaged folks a 10% discount, but their commitment to that plan may be a bit suspect, as Comcast reps tell callers inquiring about the plan to stop asking for "handouts," allege the discount plan is only good in California or Puerto Rico, or just plain seem unaware of the plan's existence. The discount plan does sound like something big corporations put together to claim they're community-friendly when they never intend to do the hard work that would make it effective -- and I also suspect municipal governments tolerate that state of affairs, so they can give off a similarly-unearned "business-friendly" veneer to other corporations. The moral thing to do, of course, would be to hold corporations to their promises, especially when their franchise agreements seem to depend, at least in part, on such promises. Comcast, for its part, has apologized and said it'll re-train its workers about the discount plan, but that also sounds like an old song-and-dance. Well, it sure is a good thing the "free" market always provides alternatives to monopolists! I kid, of course -- Comcast is the only game in St. Paul.