Category Archives: Politics

He’s Wrinkled, Rested, and Ready

I’m surprisingly OK with the idea of President Biden running for re-election. Although not the second coming of FDR that his most fervent partisans predicted, Biden has been far more successful than I would have predicted. The giant climate and jobs bill, the rallying of NATO to help Ukraine (plus its expansion to heretofore neutral northern nations), the judges (on the whole), plus a lot of smart regulatory moves, all together it’s a remarkably good track record.  I do worry about the upcoming debt limit fight, but that’s on Biden only to the extent that his team chose not to try to defuse the bomb during the lame duck session.

Anyway, despite all that, I thought this SNL bit was really funny:

Posted in 2024 Election, Completely Different | 1 Comment

A Simple Choice

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” — West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943) (Robert H. Jackson, J.).

vs.

I’ll tell you what you can talk about in school — DeSantis to expand ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law to all grades.

Justice Jackson

Justice Robert Jackson

Wrong Choice

Choose wisely.

Posted in 2024 Election, The American Orban | Comments Off on A Simple Choice

Where Are the Florida Senate Candidates for 2024?

Fla Senate results by County

County map of Florida 2022 Senate results by Aldinz333, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Now’s about when you would expect serious candidates for 2024 Senate election to let it be known they have an interest.  For legal reasons, it often makes sense to delay a formal declaration until much later, but you would expect to see subtle online campaigns, maybe an exploratory committee or three. Yet on the Democratic side it seems awfully quiet.

Although far from great, the general political picture is more mixed than it might seem:

That last point is in my mind the key: I can’t think of any Democrats with a statewide profile who’d be a plausible candidate.  Val Demings lost to Rubio, and I’ve seen no sign she wants another Senate race. That means the best Democratic candidate will be someone with a strong local base. I don’t follow local politics outside South Florida to even have an idea what the field is–which is a sign of the problem.

Thoughts, anyone?

Posted in 2024 Election, Florida | Comments Off on Where Are the Florida Senate Candidates for 2024?

GPT3Chat is a Coward

Posted in AI, Trump | 4 Comments

The Case of the Capitol Police and the January 6 Near-Putsch

Cop Jan 6

Capitol Police officer on Jan 6, 2021
© 2021 lvert Barnes via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License

At Press Watch my brother drops the results of an intensive investigation into the Jan. 6 committee documents and more in The story no one wants to touch: Why the Capitol Police enabled 1/6:

The news media’s continuing failure to explore why the U.S. Capitol was so scantily defended against an angry horde of white Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, has now been compounded by the House select committee’s refusal to connect the most obvious dots or ask the most vital questions.

It’s true that there were countless law enforcement failures that day — indeed, far too many to be a coincidence.

But the singular point of failure — the one thing that could have prevented all of it from happening — was that Capitol Police leaders brushed off ample warnings that an armed mob was headed their way.

They lied to everyone about their level of preparedness beforehand. Then they sent a less-than-full contingent of hapless, unarmored officers out to defend a perimeter defined by bike racks, without less-than-lethal weaponry and without a semblance of a plan.

Even the insurrectionists who actively intended to stop the vote could never have expected that breaching the Capitol would be so easy.

[…]

An examination of the committee reports, the accompanying depositions and supporting documents leads to the following conclusion:

  • The failure was not due to lack of intelligence. There was plenty. “I don’t think it was a failure of intelligence. I think it was a failure to operationalize the intelligence,” Julie Farnam, assistant director of the Capitol Police intelligence unit, told committee investigators. “They should have been ready for war, and they weren’t.”
  • The lag in mobilization of the National Guard is a red herring. No one at the Capitol requested their presence until after police lines had been breached. To the extent that it was discussed beforehand, it was in order to have the Guard help direct traffic on surrounding streets.
  • The Capitol Police were vastly unprepared. Despite Sund’s insistence that he was getting “all hands on deck,” he didn’t even cancel officers’ days off.
  • The perimeter was defined with bike racks, which are good only for protests where most people are law-abiding. They do nothing to stop a horde. In fact, they get turned into weapons to use against the police.
  • The Capitol Police had no backup plan in case multiple protesters posed a threat. Even as police lines had already collapsed, clueless police leaders were trying to deploy more bike racks.
  • Incredibly, chief Sund ordered the removal of some bike racks late on Jan. 5, for reasons that some of his colleagues considered suspect.
  • Actual calls for help were only made after it was too late. Justice Department officials said that even after they saw TV footage of insurrectionists parading through the Capitol Rotunda, Capitol Police officials told them they had things under control.
  • Police leadership simply could not conceive of white Trump supporters as the enemy. Time and again, law enforcement leaders were presented with intelligence showing that desperate Trump supporters were targeting the Capitol, but didn’t take it seriously.
  • Anti-scale fencing — the kind erected around the White House during the Black Lives Matter protests — would have stopped any of this from happening. It was never even considered.

There’s lots more where that came from.  IMHO, this deserves wide attention.

Posted in 1/6, Dan Froomkin | 2 Comments

The Devil Still Lives in Georgia (and Elsewhere)

On CNN last night after they called the run-off Senate election for incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, the commentators seemed giddy with relief. They liked Warnock, they disdained challenger Hershel Walker (“an insult to Black people” said the Black analysts, speaking of his selection as a candidate by GOP kingmakers).

The story line the commentators tried to push was that this election might be a turning point in at least three ways:

  1. It would start the process of weakening Trump’s control over the party–but only if senior elected officials started distancing themselves from him.
  2. The election mechanics were good.  And, Walker’s post-election concession speech–which was, simply, a concession and not election denial–underlined the turn away from election denial outside of Arizona.  So maybe that dragon is slain or at least mortally wounded.
  3. Warnock’s eloquent victory speech, full of non-partisan good feeling as these speeches traditionally were, signaled a possible new era of decreased political division.

CNN analysts’ bottom line: turning point.

Problem: most of it is bunk.

Even if Trump’s grip on elites were to slip, the issue is his grip on primary voters. That may slip too, but it’s too early to say that is happening.  I think it will turn on how many court cases he loses, and most of the important ones, the criminal cases, have yet to be filed and thus cannot be seen as certain to materialize.

More ominously, key party leaders such as Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, see their lane as “more effective Trumpism without Trump”.   That is, believe this Florida resident, quite a scary thing.

And one need only look at the machinations in the GOP House caucus, in which Speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy is being humiliated by his right flank. When MTG is one of your main supporters, and that doesn’t tame the cavepersons, you have a problem.

It may be that the fever of election denialism has broken, at least for now. But that is not even our biggest problem.

Imagine, if you will, how you would go about choosing a candidate for high office who was not just obviously unfit, but graced with attributes designed to turn off the modern voter. What might you look for?

  • ☑ Out-of-state residence.
  • ☑ No relevant experience.
  • ☑ No familiarity with issues.
  • ☑ History of unsuccessful businesses.
  • ☑ History of serious mental illness.
  • ☑ History of falsifying his resume.
  • ☑ History of domestic violence.
  • ☑ Child who says he is dangerous and unfit.
  • ☑ Ex-longtime girlfriend who says he is mentally ill and unfit.
  • ☑ Secret children out of wedlock who he then abandoned.
  • ☑ Frequent incoherence and confusion in interviews.
  • ☑ Procured abortions for at least two other women. (Running as ‘pro-life’ candidate.)

Well, Herschel Walker checked all those boxes and more. And, here’s the thing, Walker still got more than 1.7 million votes – 48.6% of those cast. Imagine what a candidate with only half those liabilities might have done.

Last night’s vote in Georgia, while welcome, is not a sign of a turn in our politics. Tribalism and party are still king.  This result for all it is very welcome is just a very temporary and limited reprieve from a still very potent and possible doom.

Posted in 2022 Election | Comments Off on The Devil Still Lives in Georgia (and Elsewhere)