HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
Heather Cox Richardson
September 28, 2021
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Today, the fight over the debt ceiling continued. As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that breaching the debt ceiling would delay Social Security payments and military paychecks, as well as jeopardizing the status of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offered Senate Republicans “a way out” from having to participate in raising the ceiling, despite the fact that the Republicans had added $7.8 trillion to the now-$28 trillion debt during Trump’s term. Schumer asked for unanimous consent to pass a debt ceiling increase with a simple majority that the Democrats could provide alone.
Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) blocked the effort. “There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will go out of our way to help Democrats conserve their time and energy, so they can resume ramming through partisan socialism as fast as possible,” he said.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that McConnell is deliberately running out Congress’s clock, and it is hard to ignore that the big item on the Senate’s agenda is the Freedom to Vote Act, which Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Jon Tester (D-MT), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Angus King (I-ME) have worked to hammer out in place of the voting rights bills passed by the House.
The Freedom to Vote Act protects the right to vote. It also bans partisan gerrymandering.
States have already begun to carve up districts based on the 2020 census numbers. The Texas legislature, for one, has gerrymandered its state—one that is imperative for the Republicans to hold for the 2024 presidential election—to protect Republicans and underrepresent Black and Latino voters, who tend to vote Democratic. (Growth in the Latino population is what gave the state two new representatives.) If Texas redistricting is completed by November 15, the candidate filing period will end on December 13. At that point, after candidates have filed according to established district lines, it will be significantly harder for courts to overturn those lines before the 2022 election.
So if McConnell can tie up Democrats over the absolutely must-pass debt ceiling increase and can stave off a voting rights bill, Republican gerrymandering might well survive for the 2022 election.
Indeed, the political news out of Washington must all be read with an eye to the 2022 election, including the other big story from today: the testimony of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and General Kenneth F. McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Before his testimony, Milley submitted a statement that was quietly remarkable. A highly decorated career soldier, Milley was appointed by former president Trump and, after making the mistake of walking with Trump across Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square in June 2020 for the former president’s ill-received photo-op with a Bible, has become a principled and outspoken advocate for the military’s defense of the United States Constitution, even, when necessary, against domestic enemies.
In his statement, Milley laid out the course of the war in Afghanistan. He noted that in 20 years there, more than 800,000 U.S. military personnel served; 2,461 were killed in action, 20,698 were wounded, and countless others came home with internal scars. Milley expressed his opinion that their service in Afghanistan prevented another attack on America from terrorists based there.
Then Milley talked of our exit from the country, emphasizing that it is a mistake to focus only on our rushed exit in August. In 2011, we began a long-term drawdown of troops from their peak of 97,000 U.S. troops and 41,000 NATO troops. On February 29, 2020, when the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban, there were 12,600 U.S. troops, 8,000 NATO troops, and 10,500 contractors in Afghanistan. With that agreement, known as the Doha Agreement, we agreed to withdraw if the Taliban met seven conditions that would lead to a deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban, while we agreed to eight conditions.
Milley wrote that the Taliban honored only one of its seven required conditions: it did not attack U.S. personnel. It did not cut ties to al Qaeda, and it significantly increased, rather than decreased, its attacks on Afghan civilians. Nonetheless, in the 8 months after the agreement, “we reduced US military forces from 12,600 to 6,800, NATO forces from 8,000 to 5,400 and US contractors from 9,700 to 7,900….”
On November 9, 2020, six days after the presidential election, Milley and then–Secretary of Defense Mark Esper recommended stopping the withdrawal until the Taliban met the required conditions. Two days later, on November 11, then-president Trump ordered the military to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021. Blindsided, military officers were able to talk Trump out of that rushed timetable, but on November 17, Trump ordered Milley to reduce troop levels to 2,500 no later than January 15.
So, when President Biden took office, only about 3,500 U.S. troops, 5,400 NATO troops, and 6,300 contractors were still in Afghanistan, leaving him with the problem that he would have either to leave altogether or to put in more troops in anticipation of resumed hostilities with the Taliban. Biden ordered a review of the situation and ultimately decided to withdraw from the country altogether.
Milley went on to explain some of the issues that have preoccupied pundits. He said he saw no predictions that the Afghan Army would melt away in 11 days. “The speed, scale and scope of the collapse was a surprise.” He said that holding the Bagram air base would have required 5,000–6,000 additional troops and that staying on after the August 31 deadline would have required 15,000–20,000 more troops, who would have faced significant risks, including the likelihood of casualties. “While it was militarily feasible,” he wrote, “we assessed the cost to be extraordinarily high…. Therefore, we unanimously recommended that the military mission be transitioned on 31 August to a diplomatic mission in order to get out the remaining American citizens.” In response to a question from Senator King, Milley put it more clearly: “On the first of September, we were going to go to war again with the Taliban. Of that there was no doubt.”
In short, Milley’s statement was a clear explanation of the last year and a half of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and it placed the blame for the messy withdrawal largely on Trump, rather than Biden, despite Milley's own advice to Biden that the new president keep in place the troops remaining there when he took office.
But that did not reflect the questioning of the Republicans on the committee. They focused not on finding out about the failures—or successes—of our time in Afghanistan, but on attacking Milley himself. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted that the Republicans “assassinated his character and impugned his patriotism, accusing him of aiding the enemy and of placing his own vanity before the lives of the men and women serving under him.” Milley explained that recent reports of his having communicated with his Chinese counterpart to assure him the U.S. would not attack in the last day's of Trump's term were incomplete: he was authorized to do so by law, did so with the knowledge and advice of Esper and other administration officials, and made the calls with a significant number of people in the room.
Nonetheless, Republicans berated him, often not permitting him to respond. They seemed to be following the pattern established at hearings during the Trump administration of creating sound bites for later right-wing media stories. In this case, though, there is a deeper story: they are continuing the right-wing media’s undermining of the military officers who defended our Constitution.
The Republicans accused Milley of working with “the Chinese Communist Party” and leaking “private conversations with the president.” Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) suggested that Milley was personally responsible for the deaths of the 13 personnel killed in the last days of the Afghanistan evacuation and told him: “General, I think you should resign.”
It’s hard to miss the mechanics and narratives being set up for 2022.
“I have served this Nation for 42 years,” Milley wrote in his statement. “I’ve spent years in combat and buried a lot of my troops who died while defending this country. My loyalty to this Nation, its people, and the Constitution hasn’t changed and will never change as long as I have a breath to give. My loyalty is absolute.”
Notes:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcconnell-stops-schumers-latest-attempt-raise-debt-ceiling-limit/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/texas-republicans-redistricting-proposal/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/politics/woodward-costa-book-trump-afghanistan-memo/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/28/mark-milley-senate-hawley-blackburn/
TOM FRIEDMAN
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Do Democrats Have the Courage of Liz Cheney?
Sept. 28, 2021
Opinion Columnist
A few months ago I had the chance to have a long conversation with Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney. While we disagreed on many policy issues, I could not have been more impressed with her unflinching argument that Donald Trump represented an unprecedented threat to American democracy. I was also struck by her commitment to risk her re-election, all the issues she cares about, and even physical harm, to not only vote for Trump’s impeachment but also help lead the House investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
At the end of our conversation, though, I could only shake my head and ask: Liz, how could there be only one of you?
She could only shake her head back.
After all, a recent avalanche of news stories and books leaves not a shred of doubt that Trump was attempting to enlist his vice president, his Justice Department and pliant Republican state legislators in a coup d’état to stay in the White House based on fabricated claims of election fraud.
Nearly the entire G.O.P. caucus (save for Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger, who is also risking his all to join the Jan. 6 investigation, and a few other Republicans who defied Trump on impeachment) has shamelessly bowed to Trump’s will or decided to quietly retire.
They are all complicit in the greatest political sin imaginable: destroying faith in our nation’s most sacred process, the peaceful and legitimate transfer of power through free and fair elections. Looking at how Trump and his cult are now laying the groundwork — with new laws, bogus audits, fraud allegations and the installation of more pliant state election officials to ensure victory in 2024 no matter what the count — there is no question that America’s 245-year experiment in democracy is in real peril.
Our next presidential election could well be our last as a shining example of democracy.
Just listen to Cheney. Addressing her fellow Republicans on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, she noted that when they abet Trump’s delegitimization of the last election, “in the face of rulings of the courts, in the face of recounts, in the face of everything that’s gone on to demonstrate that there was not fraud … we are contributing to the undermining of our system. And it’s a really serious and dangerous moment because of that.”
This is Code Red. And that leads me to the Democrats in Congress.
I have only one question for them: Are you ready to risk a lot less than Liz Cheney did to do what is necessary right now — from your side — to save our democracy?
Because, when one party in our two-party system completely goes rogue, it falls on the other party to act. Democrats have to do three things at the same time: advance their agenda, protect the integrity of our elections and prevent this unprincipled Trump-cult version of the G.O.P. from ever gaining national power again.
It is a tall order and a wholly unfair burden in many ways. But if Cheney is ready to risk everything to stop Trump, then Democrats — both moderates and progressives — must rise to this moment and forge the majorities needed in the Senate and House to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill (now scheduled for a Thursday vote in the House), a voting rights bill and as much of the Build Back Better legislation as moderate and progressives can agree on.
If the Democrats instead form a circular firing squad, and all three of these major bills get scattered to the winds and the Biden presidency goes into a tailspin — and the Trump Republicans retake the House and Senate and propel Trump back into the White House — there will be no chance later. Later will be too late for the country as we know it.
So, I repeat: Do Representative Josh Gottheimer, the leader of the centrist Democrats in the House, and Representative Pramila Jayapal, leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have the guts to stop issuing all-or-nothing ultimatums and instead give each other ironclad assurances that they will do something hard?
Yes, they will each risk the wrath of some portion of their constituencies to reach a compromise on passing infrastructure now and voting rights and the Build Back Better social spending soon after — without anyone getting all that they wanted, but both sides getting a whole lot. It’s called politics.
And are centrist Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema ready to risk not being re-elected the way Liz Cheney has by forging a substantive compromise to ensure that consequential election integrity, infrastructure and Build Back Better measures go forward? Or are they just the Democratic equivalents of the careerist hacks keeping Trump afloat — people so attached to their $174,000 salaries and free parking at Reagan National Airport that they will risk nothing?
And, frankly, is the Biden White House ready to forge this compromise with whatever pressures, Oval Office teas, inducements, pork and seductions are needed? It could energize the public a lot more by never referring to this F.D.R.-scale social reform package as “reconciliation” and only calling it by its actual substance: universal pre-K, home health care for the sick and elderly, lower prescription drug prices, strengthened Obamacare, cleaner energy, green jobs and easier access to college education that begins a long-overdue leveling of the playing field between the wealthy and the working class. Also, the White House needs to sell it not only to urban Democrats but to rural Republicans, who will benefit as well.
The progressives need to have the courage to accept less than they want. They also could use a little more humility by acknowledging that there could be some unintended effects from such a big spending bill — and far more respect for the risk-takers who create jobs, whom they never have a good word for. If Biden’s presidency is propelled forward and seen as a success for everyday Americans, Democrats can hold the Senate and House and come back for more later.
The moderates need to have the courage to give the progressives much more than the moderates prefer. Income and opportunity gaps in America helped to produce Trump; they will be our undoing if they persist.
We’re not writing the Ten Commandments here. We’re doing horse-trading. Just do it.
None of the Democratic lawmakers will be risking their careers by such a compromise, which is child’s play compared with facing the daily wrath of running for re-election in the most pro-Trump state in America, Wyoming, while denouncing Trump as the greatest threat to our democracy.
But I fear common sense may not win out. As Minnesota Democratic Representative Dean Phillips (a relative) remarked to me after Tuesday’s caucus of House Democrats: “The absence of pragmatism among Democrats is as troubling as the absence of principle among Republicans.”
Howard A. Tullman
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN
The
Best Way to "Pay to Stay."
You
can't hang on to key staff simply by throwing money around--even if you have
it. Here are four rules to keep in mind as you negotiate your way through the
Great Resignation.
BY HOWARD
TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS@TULLMAN
As we approach the end of another crazy year
and businesses continue to bounce from week to week between gunning the gas and
hitting the brakes in their hiring, there's been a lot of talk about
compensation levels. The discussion ranges from looking backwards -- hazardous
duty pay and "thanks" for sticking around payments -- to addressing
current hiring needs. That includes offering bribes to workers to come back.
Which is stupid. And then on to the future
questions about what kinds of post-pandemic salaries are going to be required
-- especially given the competitive demands for top talent -- for the
leadership teams that have not only successfully survived but in some cases
already started to quickly bring their businesses back from the brink.
My sense is that the company execs -
especially in pre-profitability mode - are going to be very surprised at how
reluctant and slow their boards and comp committees are going to be to approve
any significant bumps in six-figure salaries regardless of the circumstances,
including competing offers, until the dust really settles. They're going to
wait to see what the whole budget packages are going to look like for next
year. And anyone who thinks we have a clue about what the next 16 months will
look like in terms of the economy needs far better glasses and a reality check.
No one knows, which, unfortunately, gives the reticence of the ultimate funders
more support and justification than they probably deserve.
Needless to say, it's a lot easier and less
stressful to make these kinds of do-nothing calls sitting safely in a board
room or on a Zoom call with your fellow board members than when you're the
person sitting across the table from a key employee (and a definite keeper)
who's just explained why he or she thinks they need to accept a better outside
offer. Everything is easy for the people who don't have to run things
themselves. But it's the folks on the front lines who have to worry every day
about rebuilding their businesses, keeping their people in the boat and content
(or at least not actively unhappy), and working all this magic with the least
amount of dollars and going-forward commitments possible.
And, in case anyone has wondered recently, the
gig on modest, multi-year, slowly vesting options for the troops is pretty much
up and over as well. You can't pay your over-priced rent or feed your family
with futures. If you don't necessarily believe that, just ask your peers and
friends what they think about such offers. They'll most likely tell you that
you need more out-of-the-money options like a fish needs a bicycle.
So, if stock options are not likely to be very
effective, and long-term salary adjustments aren't going to fly, but the board
still wants to see your plan as soon as possible to: (a) stem the ongoing
attrition, (b) attract new talent to fill the holes and support new growth, and
(c) keep rebuilding the business to where things were before COVID-19, what
exactly can you propose to respond? My own preference, in addition to limited
and very strategic salary changes, is to use retention bonuses. Obviously,
every business is going to have some different concerns, various prospects and
their own reactions to the problem, but there are a couple of approaches that
make a lot of sense even if you need to adapt them substantially to your own
situation.
(1) Limit your action horizons to
realistic timeframes.
While sooner is better than later in terms of
taking action, shorter is better than longer in terms of the kind of
forward-looking expenditures that your board and team are going to be
comfortable with. Making a plan through year end makes a lot more sense now
than signing up for 12-months or longer obligations when you can't even accurately
estimate your expected demand or required headcount or even the direction that
either may be headed. Band-Aid payments, like brief bumps or one-time bonuses,
are a better bet right now than budget-busting salary adjustments, which you'll
be stuck with for a much longer time if you can even get them approved.
(2) Target the People Who Give You
the Biggest Bang for the Buck.
While every business believes that they could
use more skilled employees, few folks would argue that in tech-centric firms the
overwhelming pressure to hang on to key players is highly concentrated in two
main areas - engineers at every level and high-level operations personnel. As
you plan to attract and retain your most important players, keep in mind that
talent and contribution are two different things. You need to focus on the
players who make the greatest contribution to the team's efforts and success,
both in terms of their individual actions and in terms of their leadership of
others. As some football coach used to say, "I play my best 11, not my 11
best." That's even truer when you're talking about software development
and support, which is 100% a team sport.
Another key part of the calculation is
influence. When you're talking about someone walking out the door, many young
managers don't understand that it's often not just one person who goes, it's his or her little group of friends,
peers and followers that leaves as well. This can be unbelievably devastating
in cases where that mini team may be responsible for an entire part of the code
base, operation or other function like sales support. Even if you just focus on
the current keepers, how you treat them isn't lost for a moment on their
followers who may grow to be important parts of the future team that's really
central to your success. If they don't like how their own career path
looks going forward or believe that the company cares about it and them as well,
they're likely to bolt at the first opportunity.
(3) Decide How Much to Offer and
Stick to Your Guns.
The hardest decision at the moment, assuming
that targeted salary bumps will only get you part of the way, is whether
concrete and specific retention bonuses - payable at year end, based partly on
company performance through that period - make sense. Even more critically, how
big do those payments need to be to make a real difference? I'd suggest that,
as long as everyone acts in good faith and believes that these are real
promises, it makes a lot of sense to commit a finite, one-time, substantial sum
of dollars to the goal of keeping the key members of the team together. Handle
this process carefully. Don't turn it into individual negotiations; it's got to
be an announcement relating to various specific groups of employees, not a
one-off reaction or a response to any one person's threat to leave. The amounts
in question, especially relating to relatively short periods of time, don't
have to be breathtaking or life-changing, but they do have to demonstrate a
serious effort to reward each person's efforts, loyalty and commitment to the
firm.
(4) Don't Try to Do Cheaply What
You Shouldn't Do at all.
You will not make everyone happy; that's not
possible. Likewise, it's also not worth making a half-assed gesture to a bunch
of your employees that won't be impactful and is more likely to offend than
placate them. Treat everyone within a given group fairly and equitably, but
don't try to spread your largesse so broadly that it loses value. If you handle
the plan and the communication reasonably well, even the people who didn't
benefit will grudgingly acknowledge that it makes sense for the business to take
care of those who did. Human nature being what it is, they may not say this out
loud, but they'll know it in their hearts.
In the end, for the best people, staying put
or leaving won't ultimately be decided by the amount of money involved. Just
like any other business deal, where you end up in dollars and feelings isn't
anywhere near as important as the time and care and attention you put into the
process of getting there which is what is really likely at the end of the day
to make folks stick around.
SEP 28, 2021
The
opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of
Inc.com.
Monday, September 27, 2021
HOW DUMB DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO BE A REPUBLICAN?
I've had it. I'm done with Republican voters and politicians who cater to their ignorance.
Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and all the rest of them. I'm finished.
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The grim race to the grave.
If we ever had any doubt that Republicans and Democrats are producing markedly different COVID numbers, that doubt has been put to rest. Today the New York Times reported that “the political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state.”
In Tennessee, presided over by Republican governor Bill Lee, 55 percent of residents are unvaccinated. In Alabama, overseen by Republican Kay Ivey, that number is 58 percent. In Texas, Greg Abbott’s home state, 49 percent are unvaccinated. In Ron DeSantis’ Florida, 43 percent haven’t been vaccinated, but its lower number is only because the state has such a large percentage of senior citizens.
The blue state with the worst rate is Nevada, with 50 percent unvaccinated. All the rest are below, or well below that number.
That’s not all. “Covid deaths are also showing a partisan pattern,” the Times reported. “Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America.” Over the last seven days, an average of 70 people died every day in Tennessee. In Texas, an average of 300 a day died. Alabama averaged 116 COVID deaths a day. Florida averaged 335 deaths each day.
In blue states, the numbers were much, much lower: Maryland averaged 17 COVID deaths per day; New Jersey, 20; Connecticut, 8. Even blue states with large populations all averaged under 100 deaths a day, with New York at 41, Illinois at 38, and even California, the bluest and largest state of them all, with nearly 39 million residents, averaged only 93 deaths from COVID each day.
The COVID differences between red and blue states have held steady for the entire time the disease has ravaged the country. The Times cited Charles Gaba, a health care analyst who has kept track of the figures: “In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June,” Gaba found. “In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.”
Earlier this month, the CDC released its finding that unvaccinated people are about 11 times more likely to die of COVID than vaccinated people. For some reason, the CDC hasn’t calculated what the percentage of COVID deaths are for the unvaccinated, but in June, the Associated Press analyzed CDC data and found that less than 1 percent of people who have died from COVID have been vaccinated. And that was before the spike in cases in early September, when new cases rose to 175,000 a day. (The average over 7 days last week was 120,000.)
I’ll bet the percentage of people dying from COVID who are vaccinated is below a half percent by now. And here’s the thing: all these figures are out there. You can google “COVID deaths,” or “COVID cases” and easily find the figures for every state in the Union. People who live in Texas and Florida and Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama know a lot of people around them are dying. Hell, they live there. The local papers run the obits. Some of them even run news stories from the AP and other reliable sources that have covered the incredible increase in COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths over the last two months.
The paleo-conservative website Breitbart, which used to be owned by the pardoned Steve Bannon, published a story on September 10 that…wait for it…blamed it all on the libs. According to Breitbart, “the left has us right where they want us.”
You can take your fist out of your mouth you’ve been using to stifle that scream. But I’m not kidding. Breitbart’s theory is that libs like Howard Stern and Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci and of course Joe Biden “are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated.” And how are they doing this, you might ask? Why, they’ve all gotten together and conspired to encourage people to get vaccinated because they know it will have the opposite effect on Trump voters. If you don’t believe me, listen to the Breitbart “logic:”
“If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!”
Got that? It’s all a big conspiracy by the libs to kill off Trump voters! “The push for mandates is another ploy to get us to dig in and not do what’s best for ourselves because no one wants to feel like they’re caving to a mandate,” according to Breitbart.
So it’s not Republican governors’ fault. Noooooo, not governors like DeSantis of Florida, Abbott of Texas, Lee of Tennessee, Reeves of Mississippi, and Ivey of Alabama – all of whom have passed laws or issued executive orders banning mask mandates and vaccine mandates. They’re looking out for the well being of their constituents, that’s what they’re doing! Because, you know, the way to get people vaccinated is to ban the stuff that’s trying to get them vaccinated. And the way to keep them alive is to make fun of mask wearing and encourage turn-out by rednecks at local school board meetings so they can yell at all the libs in their “Nazi” masks, as one lunatic screamed at a school board meeting last week.
This shit isn’t just upside down and backward, it’s turned inside out and on its way to being reverse-engineered. The guy who wrote the Breitbart article is so tied in knots he can’t make up his mind what’s going on. “Right now, a countless number of Trump supporters believe they are owning the left by refusing to take a life-saving vaccine — a vaccine, by the way, everyone on the left has taken. Oh, and so has Trump,” he writes.
“If the left is all vaccinated and we’re not, who’s winning?” he asks. “When you learn that almost everyone dying is unvaccinated, that’s a come to Jesus moment. I could be wrong. Maybe the left isn’t that evil and sly. Even if this isn’t the left’s plan, who’s owning who?”
Duh.
Of course it never occurs to him that “the left” might just be interested in saving lives, among them, some of their own, because not everyone on “the left” is vaccinated, so there have to be at least some libs out there dying of COVID. But I think the Breitbart guy, for all of his confusion and generalized numbskull-ness, is just beating on a door that’s already closed, and you know who slammed it shut? The Republican Party and the aforementioned governors who are out there speaking at rallies and riling up the loons to scream at school boards and passing bans on mask and vaccine mandates so they can get the people they have identified as Trump’s base to vote for them, and for him if he runs in 2024, which to a Republican Party member they seem to have assumed he will.
This shit isn’t just a race to the bottom, it’s not even a race to the basement. It’s a race to the grave. And according to them, it’s all the libs’ fault.
Well, this lib is happy to take the blame, because I’m finished with them. I’m sick and tired of their anger, I’m sick and tired of their ignorance, and if they want to ride their “freedom” and “liberty” right into the ground and shovel dirt in on top of themselves, I’ve got a shovel, and I’m ready to help.
Sunday, September 26, 2021
TRUMP AND HIS REPUBLICAN THIEVES AND THUGS CONTINUE THE BIG LIE
September 25, 2021
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Sep 26 |
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For weeks now,
I have vowed that I would finish these letters early and get to bed before
midnight, and for weeks now, I have finally finished around three in the
morning. That was not the case two years ago, when I started writing these at
the start of the Ukraine crisis: it was rare enough for me to be writing until
midnight that I vividly remember the first time it happened.
I got to
thinking today about why things seem more demanding today than they did two
years ago, and it strikes me that what makes the writing more time consuming
these days is that we have two all-consuming stories running in parallel, and
together they illuminate the grand struggle we are in for the survival of
American democracy.
On the one
hand we have the former president and the attempts by him and his loyalists to
seize control of our country regardless of the will of the majority of voters,
while Republican Party leaders are refusing to speak out in the hopes that they
can retain power to continue advancing their agenda.
Since the
1980s, this branch of the Republican Party has tried to dismantle the
government in place since the 1930s that tries to protect equality in America,
regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting
infrastructure. Members of this faction of the Republican Party—the faction
that is now in control of it—want to take the government back to the 1920s,
when businessmen controlled the government, operating it to try to create a
booming economy without regard for social or environmental consequences.
Although
initially unhappy at Donald Trump’s elevation to the White House, that faction
embraced him as he advanced the tax cuts, deregulation, and destruction of
government offices they believed were central to freeing businessmen to advance
the economy. Believing that Democrats’ determination to use the government to
level the playing field among Americans would destroy the individualism that
supports the economy, they had come to believe that Democrats could not
legitimately govern the country. And so, members of this Republican faction did
not back away when Trump refused to accept the election of a Democratic
president in 2020.
Almost a year
later, the leadership of the Republican Party, composed now as it is of Trump
loyalists, is undermining our democracy. It has fallen in line behind Trump’s
Big Lie that he and not Biden won the 2020 election, and that the Democratic
Party engaged in voter fraud to install their candidate. This is a lie, but
Republicans at the state level are using that lie to justify new election laws
that suppress Democratic votes and put control of state elections into their
own hands. If those laws are allowed to stand, we will be a democracy in name
only. We will likely still have elections, but, just as in Russia or Hungary
now, the mechanics of the system will mean that only the president’s party can
win.
This attack on
our democracy is unprecedented, and it cannot be ignored. Tonight, for example,
Trump held a “rally” in Perry, Georgia, where, to cheers, he straight up lied
that the recent “audit” in Arizona proved he won the 2020 election. And yet, to
overemphasize the antics of the former president and his supporters enables
them to grow to larger proportions than they deserve, feeding their power.
Tonight, for example, Newsmax and OAN covered Trump’s rally live, but the Fox
News Channel did not, and the audience appeared bored.
On the other
hand, in contrast to the former president's party, President Joe Biden and the
Democrats are trying to demonstrate that democracy actually works. Rather than
simply fighting the Republicans, which would permit the Republicans to define
the terms under which they govern, they are defending the active government the
Republicans have set out to destroy. Biden has been clear since he took office
that he intends to strengthen democracy abroad, where it is under pressure from
rising autocratic governments, by strengthening it at home.
To that end,
he and the Democrats in Congress have aggressively worked to pass legislation
that benefits ordinary Americans. The wait for such legislation to appear can
be frustrating, but that is in part because the Democrats are actually doing
the kind of work that used to be commonplace in Congress: hammering out
compromises, finding votes, arguing, amending legislation.
Today, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) released a letter she sent to her caucus, telling
members they must vote this week to pass a continuing resolution to fund the
government, as well as the two major infrastructure bills on which they have
been working for months: the Build Back Better Act and the bipartisan
infrastructure bill. While news stories have often turned the negotiations over
these bills into a fight between moderate and progressive Democrats, it is
important to remember that while a handful of Republicans were willing to agree
to rebuild roads and bridges and to bring broadband to rural areas, most of
them are simply not negotiating at all. They reject the idea that the
government should invest in infrastructure, especially that kind outlined in
the Build Back Better measure: infrastructure involving childcare, elder care,
and climate change. And if they can run out the clock and convince voters that
government can’t get anything done, so much the better.
Democrats disagree
about the details of their measures—exactly as one would expect from a big-tent
party—but they all accept the principle that the government should actively
help ordinary Americans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and
Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) might disagree on the size of the infrastructure
package they want, but they both agree that the government should support
infrastructure.
Republicans
reject that idea, standing instead on the principle that the government should
simply stay out of the way of businessmen, who are better equipped to manage
the country than bureaucrats. The Charles Koch–backed Americans for Prosperity,
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Federation of Independent
Business are all pouring money into defeating the $3.5 trillion Build Back
Better bill, warning: “A government takeover of our economy is a fundamental
departure from the spirit of entrepreneurialism we’ve relied on for generations
to drive prosperity, and there’s only one outcome—unmitigated economic disaster
that will be difficult to reverse.”
The profound
disagreement between the Republicans and the Democrats over the role of
government has led to a profound crisis in our democracy. Democrats’ argument
that the government should work for ordinary Americans is popular, so popular
that Republicans have apparently given up convincing voters their way is
better. Through voter suppression, gerrymandering, the filibuster, and the
Electoral College, and now with new election laws in 18 states, they have
guaranteed that they will retain control no matter what voters actually want.
Their determination to keep Democrats from power has made them abandon
democracy.
For their
part, Democrats are trying to protect the voting rights at the heart of our
democracy, believing that if all eligible Americans can vote, they will back a
government that works for the people.
And so, the
task of writing these letters has gotten more complicated of late. I try to
detail the growing threat that the Republicans will succeed in destroying our
democracy while also explaining the ways in which the Biden administration is
trying to move beyond the current crisis to demonstrate the vitality of
American democracy.
And, always, I
try to keep front and center that these fights are not academic. They are,
fundamentally, a fight to determine whether a nation, “conceived in liberty and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...can long
endure.”
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