Category Archives: Short & Sweet … Short & Sour

Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Four quick takes on Republicans

● Seven Republican House members released a joint statement explaining why they would not oppose counting the electoral votes as presented to Congress by any of the states. Among the most significant reasons they offered, as Jim Newell noted (“Trump is Breaking Congressional Republicans on His Way Out”), is one that will “give Republicans a chance to keep winning presidential elections against the wishes of a majority of the country’s voters“:

From a purely partisan perspective, Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the last 32 years. They have therefore depended on the electoral college for nearly all presidential victories in the last generation. If we perpetuate the notion that Congress may disregard certified electoral votes—based solely on its own assessment that one or more states mishandled the presidential election—we will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024.

● Kevin Drum on the role of Fox News Channel: “As long as Fox News exists in its current form, American politics is going to be broken. But what’s the answer to that?“

I agree and I have no answer.

● “There’s been no serious talk of a challenge to his leadership position, and the legislative filibuster will grant McConnell plenty of clout even if Republicans lose both Senate races in Georgia and, with them, their majority. (Democrats are unlikely to be able to gut the filibuster with so narrow an advantage.) But either way, he’ll have to manage a conference divided between Republicans inclined to work with Biden on bipartisan deals (such as Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah) and a dozen or more conservatives who won’t even acknowledge the Democrat’s legitimacy as president.” — Russell Berman, “Mitch McConnell’s Slipping Grip on the Republican Party”

Yes, but while Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are perhaps the most plausible candidates who might be cast as “Republicans inclined to work with Biden on bipartisan deals” — if Mitch McConnell remains majority leader after Tuesday, it will be surprising to see much meaningful bipartisan cooperation. Max Baucus, for all his efforts, couldn’t find one or two Republicans to cast a vote for the ACA. And if significant Biden initiatives gain support across the aisle, it will likely extend more deeply into the Republican caucus than these three senators.

● From The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell by Alec MacGillis (which I’ve just finished), pp. 74-75:

Even as his position on spending limits or PACs or soft money shifted, McConnell had spoken in favor of public disclosure of political giving and spending. It had become his ultimate mantra: stop trying to limit the inevitable flow of money into campaigns, but just make sure it’s all out in the open. “Disclosure is the best disinfectant, and I think the maximum amount of disclosure is exactly what we need,” he said on a Sunday morning show in 1996. …

Even that last plank fell away. In 2010 Senate Democrats introduced the Disclose Act, legislation that would have forced outside  groups spending more than $10,000  on campaign-related expenditures to disclose contributors who had donated more than $10,000. It was, say Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the “last best hope for doing anything to ameliorate Citizens United.” McConnell held together his caucus—even John McCain—for a successful filibuster of the bill. McConnell explained his reversal on disclosure by arguing that the bill favored unions and that the increasingly toxic political atmosphere put a new premium on protecting the privacy of major donors against what he called “liberal thugs.” . . . 

As with his previous shifts, though, this maneuver could also be explained by changing circumstances in the partisan landscape.

Perhaps the most prominent recurring theme in the book is summed up in that last sentence. McConnell ingratiated himself among Republican senators by taking on McCain, Feingold, and other reformers on campaign finance reform. He found principled reasons — in the First Amendment — for his views. But the wily Kentuckian shifted his specific positions time and again (in response to specific legislative proposals or Supreme Court decisions), always embracing some principle or another for for doing so — but invariably his newfound position offered a political advantage for Republicans.

In 1997, when McConnell shifted from favoring a soft money ban (when he was convinced that soft money benefited Democrats) to opposing the ban (when Republicans had gained the advantage), he is reported to have told his colleagues: “If we stop this thing, we can control the institution for the next twenty years.” (p. 66)

(Photo: CNBC.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

CDC posts new guidelines Friday afternoon, then abruptly withdraws guidelines on Monday

This is no way to run a public health agency — but in the Trump era, with an election on the line, it’s business as usual. It both generates public confusion and damages the credibility of an authoritative voice. But for the Trump campaign (and FNC, Breitbart, …) destroying confidence in credible sources is a means of abetting confusion, and that is a deliberate strategy.

(Image of Donald Trump flanked by HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Robert Redfield from March 2020 Bloomberg video.)

Democracy, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Attorney General Bill Barr will go to any lengths to do Donald Trump’s bidding

Donald Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, spoke at Hillsdale College yesterday. While his remarks on numerous themes drew a great deal of attention, Dahlia Lithwick focuses on his continuing attempts — with Trump — to undermine confidence in balloting on November 3 (“Bill Barr Would Like to Undermine Your Faith in the Election”).

Barr, like Trump, is no longer content to blame foreigners and malign faceless vote tamperers. He also warned Kass that greedy mail carriers were apt to get in on the action: “A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman, here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots.” Just to recap, then: Your mail-in ballot is unsafe because foreigners want to forge it, Democratic governors want to steal it, antifa operatives plan to harvest it, oh, and Dot, your friendly neighborhood letter carrier will also gladly break the law in order to sell it. This narrative need not be provable or coherent; it’s enough that it’s rinsed and repeated on a near-daily basis in the media.

What Barr is actually performing here is the time-honored, Bannon-christened, Putin-sanctioned electoral practice known formally as flooding the zone with shit. What he wants most of all is for voters to doubt the capacity for the November election to be conducted fairly. That is why he told Blitzer that any effort to make voting safer in the midst of a pandemic—and of course that’s what the push for mail-in balloting was attempting to redress—is by definition tantamount to “playing with fire.” Under the pretense of concern for voter confidence, Barr jowlishly invents one reason after another to undermine it. . . .

Jonathan Chait, though he focuses on criminal prosecutions, observes that Barr and Trump are in sync regarding the role of the DOJ (“William Barr Lays Out Terrifying Theory for Corrupting Justice Department”):

Barr’s philosophy of the Justice Department is functionally indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s. The main difference is the level of sophistication in which they are expressed. Trump’s view is summarized by his aphorism “The other side is where there are crimes” — which is to say, by definition, Trump and his allies are innocent and whatever his opponents are doing is illegal. It’s either “lock her up!” or “dirty cops!,” depending on which party is at issue. Barr’s theories have multisyllabic terms and are decorated with historical references but boil down to the same two-track approach to justice.

Bill Barr is the Attorney General Donald Trump has long sought. Trump complained to Don McGahn [as quoted in the Mueller Report, v. II, p. 50], “I don’t have a lawyer,” and expressed the wish that Roy Cohn were his attorney.

Bill Barr will go to any lengths — will “invent one reason after another” and employ “multisyllabic terms that are decorated with historical references” — to do Trump’s bidding.

Blue State Blues, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Us vs. Them law enforcement at L.A. Sheriff’s Department doesn’t inspire confidence

Two Deputy Sheriffs were shot at close range in cold blood in Compton, prompting furious anger from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

The community is also angry. This was an opportunity for LASD to lock arms with the community. Instead, in a series of tweets, the department responded with racist derision (as reported in this morning’s L.A. Times):

Within 24 hours, a longtime Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman posted tweets about the attack that employed racist stereotypes in reference to a reward for information leading to the arrest of the shooter. In one post accompanied by a GIF of a Black man shuffling bills, she wrote: “And here’s the neighborhood homies and enemies ‘bout to come up’ on that $100,000 #REWARD because $100,000 dollas is $100,000 dollas.”

And this:

“My advice to all the ex-girlfriends, side pieces, friends, wifey, ol’ lady, dime, queen, baby momma who know the #ComptonAmbush shooter of 2 LA Sheriff’s about getting that $100,000 #REWARD…,” Navarro-Suarez wrote next to an image of a Black woman saying, “Make that money girl.”

There was also the rough encounter with the diminutive reporter for KPCC, the region’s all news and information NPR station, being roughly jerked around and slammed into the pavement as she was being arrested — apparently for doing her job.

The video doesn’t match the department’s characterization of what happened. And, in another instance of Us vs. Them, Sheriff Alex Villanueva has even gratuitously “singled out Lakers star LaBron James — who has been vocal about systemic racism.”

Columnist Erika D. Smith, casting a wider net of the department’s challenges (“We don’t know much about the ambush of two L.A. County deputies. But we have scapegoats”), adds this:

Through all of this, Villanueva has been stonewalling investigations by L.A. County Inspector General Max Huntsman, cutting off one of the only avenues the public has for accountability and oversight.

LASD’s motto is, A Tradition of Service. The patterns we’re witnessing are hardly examples of fulfilling that mission.

2020 General Election, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

In Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida: 24 hours of efforts to rig election for Trump and the GOP

No act is too brazen for the Republican majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. [Update: In a surprise,“the court’s newest conservative-backed member, Justice Brian Hagedorn,” shunning a party line vote, formed a majority with liberals to rule against mucking up the works.] Things didn’t turn out so well during the primary (apparently many Wisconsin voters resent the imposition of minority rule in the state). We’ll see if the latest attempt to throw a wrench into the works is a winning play by the Republicans.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court considers whether North Carolina’s recent history of discriminatory voting restrictions, which were found to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision,” should be considered in evaluating whether another law — with the same target — should be invalidated (“Court examines North Carolina’s new law that requires photo IDs for voting”).

While in another appeals court, a 6-4 majority found that Florida’s 21st century version of the poll tax passes constitutional muster (“Florida can bar ex-felons from voting if they owe court payments, appeals court rules”).

Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Reflecting on Lou Brock’s career recalls a team that challenged racial segregation

Lou Brock died today. He and Bob Gibson were my favorite Cardinals in the mid-sixties, when I was a teenage fan of St. Louis — in an era when they won two World Series, once in 1964 and then again in 1967.

No one on that team was a more exciting player to watch than Lou Brock. (Okay: Bob Gibson matched him.) Thinking about that team reminded me of David Halberstam’s book, October 1964, which recounts that major league season and highlights the racial differences of the era between the American League and the National League.

Image from ebay.

The Dodgers had introduced Jackie Robinson to major league baseball in 1947. Seventeen years later, the Cardinals had put together a lineup with a terrific nucleus of Black players at the heart of the team. (The American League, including the Yankees, were hesitant to add Black players.) This was the year that LBJ pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a year before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Beginning in the early ’60s, before winning the pennant, the Cardinals — who had spring training every year in St. Petersburg — had encountered Florida law that mandated segregated housing. White baseball players were allowed to stay in swanky hotels; Black players boarded with Black families nearby. Here is a brief description from October 1964 of how the Cardinals (owned by the brewing magnate, August Anheuser Busch, Jr.) changed that:

Finally, a wealthy friend of Gussie Busch bought a motel, the Skyway, and the Cardinals leased it for six weeks and rented some rooms in an adjoining one, the Outrigger, so that the entire team and their families could stay together. A major highway ran right by the motel, and there, in an otherwise segregated Florida, locals and tourists alike could see the rarest of sights: white and black children swimming in the motel pool together, and white and black players, with their wives, at desegregated cookouts. That helped bring the team together.

Things are so much different in sports today. How disheartening to have a president whose torrents of racial divisiveness have set the stage for white supremacists to enter into the contemporary political arena, where they have become a slice of the Republican base.

P.S. Since it’s Labor Day, let’s take note of the fact that the Cardinals’ center fielder in the ’60s, Curt Flood, fought baseball’s reserve clause, making labor history, though he lost his case before the Supreme Court.

P.P.S. And another Labor Day item: Kevin Drum has the graph of the day.

Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

With Donald Trump, it’s crooks, grifters, and scofflaws all the way down

“Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” said David Young, DeJoy’s longtime director of human resources, who had access to payroll records at New Breed from the late 1990s to 2013 and is now retired. “When we got our bonuses, let’s just say they were bigger, they exceeded expectations — and that covered the tax and everything else.” (“Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees says,” Washington Post, by Aaron C. Davis, Amy Gardner and Steve Swaine)

That pattern violates federal and state laws and raises the question of how far Postmaster General DeJoy would go to deliberately delay mail delivery in order to sabotage tens or hundreds of thousands of votes from being cast or counted.

DeJoy’s spokesman suggested that he “encouraged employees and family members to be active in their communities, schools, civic groups, sporting events and the politics that governs our nation.” Furthermore, “Mr. DeJoy was never notified by the New Breed employees referenced by the Washington Post of any pressure they might have felt to make a political contribution, and he regrets if any employee felt uncomfortable for any reason.”

Images of our first Postmaster General.

I’ll venture the observation that you don’t become “a top Republican power broker in North Carolina,” if you feel squeamish about pressing people for cash. Especially if you know you’re going to pay them back. Nor do you get rewarded as head of the U.S. Postal Service, if you’re sensitive about pushing people past their comfort zones.

Last month Steven Bannon was charged with fraud by federal prosecutors. Before Bannon, there were: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Michael Cohen.

Let’s hope Louis DeJoy will be joining that club in good time.

With Trump, the swamp is especially deep. And it’s not rocks or turtles, but shady characters of one sort or another, all the way down.

Donald Trump, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

The President of the United States, asked who pulls Biden’s strings, points to thugs on a plane

Landing on the following exchange, among so many others between Trump and Ingraham nearly a week ago, to illustrate how bizarre the President’s utterances have become, is virtually arbitrary. But it does cast doubt on the viability of Trump’s ‘strategy’ of portraying his Democratic opponent as mentally unfit.

Laura Ingraham interviews Donald Trump.

Ingraham: Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings? Is it former Obama officials?

Trump: People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. People that are –

What does that mean? That sounds like conspiracy theory? Dark shadows, what is that?

No. People that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They are people that are controlling the streets.

We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend. And in the plane it was almost completely loaded with thugs. Wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that. They’re on a plane.

Where is — ?

I’ll tell you sometime. But it’s under investigation right now. But they came from a certain setting. And this person was coming to the Republican National Convention. And there were seven people on the plane like this person. And then a lot of people on the plane to do big damage. They were coming –

Planning for Washington?

Yes. This was all, this is all happening.

But the money is coming from somewhere?

The money is coming from –

How can it be tracked?

— from some very stupid rich people that have no idea that if their thing ever succeeded, which it won’t, they will be thrown to the wolves like [you’ve never seen before.]

NBC’s Ben Collins traces this ‘rumor’ back to June 1, with a baseless Facebook post, which prompted numerous Trump followers — alert to the peril — to swing into action, arming themselves and setting out to counter the threat.

They may have regarded themselves (in Richard Hofstadter’s words) as “capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public.”

More frightening is that Trump, to whom the United States Intelligence Community reports, appears to have been taken in by the ‘rumor’ as well.

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Trump Job Approval at Personal Best 49%. Rising rating due to Republicans and independents – Gallup

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has risen to 49%, his highest in Gallup polling since he took office in 2017.

The new poll finds 50% of Americans disapproving of Trump, leaving just 1% expressing no opinion. The average percentage not having an opinion on Trump has been 5% throughout his presidency.

Trump’s approval rating has risen because of higher ratings among both Republicans and independents. His 94% approval rating among Republicans is up six percentage points from early January and is three points higher than his previous best among his fellow partisans. The 42% approval rating among independents is up five points, and ties three other polls as his best among that group. Democratic approval is 7%, down slightly from 10%.

The 87-point gap between Republican and Democratic approval in the current poll is the largest Gallup has measured in any Gallup poll to date, surpassing the prior record, held by Trump and Barack Obama, by one point. — Gallup, “Trump Job Approval at Personal Best 49%,” February 4, 2020

Never mind impeachment or the Iowa Democratic Party’s debacle or tonight’s State of the Union message. The most significant political news of the day is public opinion as measured by that Gallup survey.