Category Archives: Politics

Dates that will live in Infamy

President Franklin D. Roosevelt described December 7, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy” in his speech the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 12/7 was a date seared into the memory of those who lived through it, although I think not nearly as meaningful to those who like me were born considerably later. Even infamy may have a half-life, and I suspect that today most people look at ‘Pearl Harbor Day’ on the calendar and don’t think that much of it.

We of the current generations have two dates of our own that live in infamy at least for now: 9/11 and 1/6. What these dates have in common with 12/7 is that they all represent thankfully rare dates on which the United States was attacked. But 1/6 isn’t quite like the others. The attack was from within not from a foreign power. And the evocative power of that date seems less universal, as some have taken to downplaying the significance of the sacking of the Capitol, and of the attempt to set aside the results of the Presidential election.

The January 6 Commission Report sought to nail down the history and to protect the popular memory, and the polity, from they-were-just-tourist revisionists and Big Lie conspiracists. In this, the Committee members were only partly successful, although the (multiple) juries are not just still out, but not even empaneled, as the Trump legal team tries to delay a formal reckoning of his and his associates’ conduct.

Here’s hoping the evocative power of those dates will fade with time in a normal, healthy way rather than being erased by lies or enshrined as the beginning of the end of the ‘American experiment’.1

  1. I was surprised to learn the this phrase, commonly attributed to Democracy in America, does not appear in the French original, but is apparently an invention of Tocqueville’s first English translator Henry Reeve. []
Posted in The Scandals, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Dates that will live in Infamy

None Dare Call It By Its Name?

Press WatchMy brother Dan is very good at piercing through social niceties. Sometimes this can be a very good thing, as in his column today, at Press Watch, How much of Trump’s support is due to racism?.

Here’s a small taste:

There is one theory that fully explains the massive support that Trump continues to get among the Republican voting base: That they’re racist.

To be clear, this is a theory, not a conclusion.

But it’s certainly a likely enough theory that the mainstream media should be testing it to see if it’s true rather than avoiding the topic like the plague.

[…]

When mainstream journalists do address racism, they do so with euphemisms and denials. These days that means they understate the racist rhetoric from Trump and other leading Republicans, and they actively cover up the racism of his supporters and make excuses for them.

They don’t ignore racism entirely. What they do is worse: they normalize it.

The Washington Post, for instance, had a long, overdue front-page article on Sunday about how Trump and his fellow GOP candidates are taking overtly racist positions – except get this: They substituted the word “polarizing” for racist.

But there’s more, and even better, where that came from.

Posted in 2024 Election, Dan Froomkin, Trump | Comments Off on None Dare Call It By Its Name?

Trump Trial Testimony: Read It (and Weep?)

Press WatchMy brother, the journalist and now journalism watchdog, had a great idea:

Donald Trump took the stand on Monday in his civil fraud trial in a Manhattan courtroom.

But because television cameras were not allowed inside, the public was only given a filtered look at the proceedings, through the eyes of journalists whose takes varied considerably. Without the ability to record audio, reporters were unable to capture longer passages and exchanges.

Precisely what went on in that courthouse should not be shrouded in mystery. So I tracked down the court reporter working that day, and purchased from her the full transcript. (I raised the money to do so through a GoFundMe. Thank you to all who contributed!)

And now I’m making it public, for all to see. Feel free to download and repost.

You can read Trump’s trial testimony online or read Trump’s trial testimony in PDF.

Thank you, Dan!

Posted in Dan Froomkin, Law: Everything Else, The Scandals | Comments Off on Trump Trial Testimony: Read It (and Weep?)

Evil Leads in Race vs. Crazy But Paralysis Still in First Place

Steve Scalise

Source: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It seems a narrow majority of the House GOP conference has plumped for ultra-rightist but somewhat establishment Rep. Steve Scalise over ultra-rightist bomb-thrower Rep. Jim Jordan as its choice for Speaker of the House–an office the Washington Post recently called ‘the worst job in Washington’.

But it also seems as though there currently are enough House GOP rebels to prevent Scalise from having the necessary 217 votes to get elected over Democratic opposition. So we remain in a state of paralysis while Gaza burns and Ukraine hangs in the wind. The chances that Scalise would cut a deal with Democrats to get elected, pass a budget, seem remote.

When looking for culprits for this state of affairs, in addition to the obvious do not forget the American campaign finance system, which allows unlimited dark money in federal campaigns, and the increasingly gerrymandered districts in so many states in which partisan majorities work to create as many safe seats as they can.  If fewer districts are competitive, there is no incentive to tack to the center, nor to work with the opposition.  Indeed, any sign of cooperation becomes a dangerous trait, as it leads to primary opponents.

Posted in Politics, Politics: The Party of Sleaze | Comments Off on Evil Leads in Race vs. Crazy But Paralysis Still in First Place

Didn’t Waste Much Time

Fake images from DeSantis Campaign

Click for larger version

Hot on the heels of his official Twitter-disaster campaign announcement, the Ron DeSantis campaign has launch an attack on Donald Trump–for being too chummy with that demon Anthony Fauci.  And what better evidence than pictures of Trump hugging and kissing Fauci?  Pity they didn’t exist. But no problem!  Deepfakes:

A Ron DeSantis presidential campaign video shows three pictures of Donald Trump hugging and kissing Anthony Fauci, all of which seem to be fake images generated by artificial intelligence. One professor told Ars today that there is “no doubt” the ad uses fake AI images.

As reported by AFP yesterday, media forensics experts say the images, which the DeSantis ad passed off as photographs taken during Trump’s presidency, have telltale signs of AI. Even non-experts may notice oddities, such as incomprehensible text on a sign that should say “White House” and “Washington.”

Of course, another giveaway is that then-President Trump and Fauci weren’t really on hugging and kissing term

The Ars Technica link above gives a lot of details as to how one can tell the images are fakes.  No comment from the DeSantis campaign yet, although this is consistent with an m.o., part of which seeks to take advantage of the old adage that the ‘truth is still putting on its boots while a lie speeds around the world’.  (I used to think the original was coined by Mark Twain, but it seems not…)

 

Posted in 2024 Election | 5 Comments

A 2024 Freedom Agenda (ver. 0.1)

FDR Memorial Copyright © 2002. Some rights reserved CC BY-SA 3.0.

President Biden has trailed the idea of a Freedom Agenda as the central theme of his re-election campaign. (“The freedom for women to make their own health-care decisions, the freedom for our children to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to vote and have your vote counted. For seniors to live with dignity, and to give every American the freedom that comes with a fair shot at building a good life.”) It of course harkens back to FDR’s Four Freedoms (“the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear”).

What would a Bidenish Freedom Agenda look like if I were designing it for the 2024 campaign? Here’s my first very tentative stab at a draft.  It’s not as pithy as FDRs!

Political Freedom

  • Freedom to vote. End political gerrymanders. Require states to enact policies that provide sufficient polling places and times to ensure fair geographic access, allocate resources designed to cut waiting times at polls, and set times to vote that fall outside working hours. Stronger rules, at least for ballots with federal elections, designed to minimize partisan meddling with vote counting and reporting.
  • Freedom from tyranny. Protection against tyrants foreign and domestic. We need to be vigilant against domestic militias and other insurrectionists. We should continue our support for Ukraine and Taiwan lest we embolden their neighboring tyrants. Meanwhile, we should reduce our support for autocrats who abuse their people, and support pro-democracy movements, whenever strategically possible.

Personal Autonomy and Empowerment

  • Freedom to control your own body. National legislation to overturn state laws telling people what they can do with their bodies, notably most forced birth legislation, and also most limits on what parents can do in directing their children’s care.
  • Freedom to breathe. A strong clean air and clean water environmental agenda.  Seek to remove the vast majority of man-made toxic–and especially carcinogenic and hazards to reproduction–out of our air, water, and food. Revisie our public health system to prepare for the next pandemic, so we don’t have to be afraid of each other’s breath.
  • Freedom to learn. Public college should return to its history of being very low cost, or maybe even free.  We could start with community college and the first two years of a four-year degree in state college. Plus,
    • Freedom to read. Stop  book-banning in schools based on parental vetoes that extend beyond their own children, while still leaving space for educators to select age-appropriate books for curricula and school libraries.
    • Freedom to know. Stop textbook censors who are blocking mention of historical facts such as race discrimination, civil rights, and the Holocaust.
  • Freedom to age in dignity. Solve the social security funding crisis even if it means new revenue source including removing the cap on social security taxes. Do  not require people to work until they are older to retire, nor to survive on less when they do.

Economic Freedom

  • Freedom to compete. Revive strong anti-trust enforcement, and re-tool it for new digital markets. Market power is too concentrated in a large number of industries. Part of this is the rise of network industries, and the so-called ‘winner-take-all’ economy but a lot of it is just due to lax anti-trust enforcement. When competition falls to monopolies, capitalism looses its dynamism, and owners and managers of dominant firms accrete more wealth and power than is healthy for society along with the ability to acquire (and sometimes choke off) innovative potential competitors.  At its worst we get ‘too big to fail’ firms that can extort government support with insufficient consequences for management and shareholders when the firms make bad decisions.
  • Freedom to organize. Revise state and federal laws to remove anti-union bias, including so-called right-to-work laws. It’s clear that unions do more for wage equity than any other single thing.

Missing from the above is something about global warming.  “Freedom from roasting” doesn’t sound quite right….but “Freedom from climate change” or “Freedom from Carbon” sounds like a pipe dream.

Not on ver 0.1 of the list but maybe belongs on it: Freedom to travel   Gun control. Better policing, which protects the innocent while not committing violence on them; probably this will require setting up new kinds of paramedics and social workers to take on dealing with people whose primary issues are due to illness and other factors.

Important issues that may not lend themselves to this treatment.

  1. Taxation/deficit issues in the shadow of inflation.
  2. Immigration reform.
  3. Basic structural reform of the national government:
    1. Ethics rules and term limits for the Supreme Court;
    2. Restructuring the Senate so it more closely reflects the national population — currently most states have smaller populations than LA County alone, but they each have two Senators.  Something is wrong there. but ‘freedom from the dead hand of the past’ is not a good slogan…..
Posted in 2024 Election | 6 Comments