Archives for category: Trump

Chris Whipple, who wrote about

On Monday, Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, testified in an effort to move the Georgia racketeering case against his former boss Donald Trump and co-defendants to federal court. On the stand, he said that he believed his actions regarding the 2020 election fell within the scope of his job as a federal official.

The courts will sort out his legal fate in this and other matters. If convicted and sentenced to prison, Mr. Meadows would be the second White House chief of staff, after Richard Nixon’s infamous H.R. Haldeman, to serve jail time.

But as a cautionary tale for American democracy and the conduct of its executive branch, Mr. Meadows is in a league of his own. By the standards of previous chiefs of staff, he was a uniquely dangerous failure — and he embodies a warning about the perils of a potential second Trump term.

Historically, a White House chief of staff is many things: the president’s gatekeeper, confidant, honest broker of information, “javelin catcher” and the person who oversees the execution of his agenda.

But the chief’s most important duty is to tell the president hard truths.

President Dwight Eisenhower’s Sherman Adams, a gruff, no-nonsense gatekeeper, was so famous for giving unvarnished advice that he was known as the “Abominable No Man.” In sharp contrast, when it came to Mr. Trump’s myriad schemes, Mr. Meadows was the Abominable Yes Man.

It was Mr. Meadows’s critical failure to tell the president what he didn’t want to hear that helped lead to the country’s greatest political scandal, and his own precipitous fall.

Donald Rumsfeld, who served as a chief of staff to Gerald Ford, understood the importance of talking to the boss “with the bark off.” The White House chief of staff “is the one person besides his wife,” he explained, “who can look him right in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down that road. Believe me, it’s not going to work.’” A good chief is on guard for even the appearance of impropriety. Mr. Rumsfeld once forbade Mr. Ford to attend a birthday party for the Democratic majority leader Tip O’Neill because it was being hosted by a foreign lobbyist with a checkered reputation.

There used to be stiff competition for the title of history’s worst White House chief of staff. Mr. Eisenhower’s chief Adams was driven from the job by a scandal involving a vicuna coat; Mr. Nixon’s Haldeman served 18 months in prison for perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal; and George H.W. Bush’s John Sununu resigned under fire after using government transportation on personal trips.

But the crimes Mr. Meadows is accused of are orders of magnitude greater than those of his predecessors. Even Mr. Haldeman’s transgressions pale in comparison. Mr. Nixon’s chief covered up a botched attempt to bug the headquarters of the political opposition. Mr. Meadows is charged with racketeering — for his participation in a shakedown of a state official for nonexistent votes — and soliciting a violation of an oath by a public officer.

Mr. Meadows didn’t just act as a doormat to Mr. Trump; he seemed to let everyone have his or her way. Even as he tried to help Mr. Trump remain in office, Mr. Meadows agreed to give a deputy chief of staff, Chris Liddell, the go-ahead to carry out a stealth transition of power to Joe Biden. This made no sense, but it was just the way Mr. Meadows rolled. Mr. Trump’s chief is a world-class glad-hander and charmer.

As part of the efforts to subvert the 2020 election, Mr. Meadows paraded a cast of incompetent bootlickers into the Oval Office. This culminated in a wild meeting on the night of Dec. 18, 2020 — when Mr. Trump apparently considered ordering the U.S. military to seize state voting machines before backing down. (Even his servile sidekick Rudy Giuliani objected.) A few days later, Mr. Meadows traveled to Cobb County, Ga., where he tried to talk his way into an election audit meeting he had no right to attend, only to be barred at the door.

All the while, the indictment shows that Mr. Meadows was sharing lighthearted remarks about claims of widespread voter fraud. In an exchange of texts, Mr. Meadows told the White House lawyer Eric Herschmann that his son had been unable to find more than “12 obituaries and 6 other possibles” (dead Biden voters). Referring to Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Herschmann replied sarcastically: “That sounds more like it. Maybe he can help Rudy find the other 10k?” Mr. Meadows responded: “LOL.”

Mr. Meadows’s testimony this week that his actions were just part of his duties as White House chief of staff is a total misrepresentation of the position. In fact, an empowered chief can reel in a president when he’s headed toward the cliff — even a powerful, charismatic president like Ronald Reagan. One day in 1983, James A. Baker III, Mr. Reagan’s quintessential chief, got word that the president, enraged by a damaging leak, had ordered everyone who’d attended a national security meeting to undergo a lie-detector test. Mr. Baker barged into the Oval Office. “Mr. President,” he said, “this would be a terrible thing in my view for your administration. You can’t strap up to a polygraph the vice president of the United States. He was elected. He’s a constitutional officer.” Mr. Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, who was dining with the president, chimed in, saying he’d take a polygraph but would then resign. Mr. Reagan rescinded the order that same day.

Why did Mr. Meadows squander his career, his reputation and possibly his liberty by casting his lot with Mr. Trump? He once seemed an unlikely casualty of Mr. Trump’s wrecking ball — he was a savvy politician who knew his way around the corridors of power. In fairness to Mr. Meadows, three of his predecessors also failed as Mr. Trump’s chief. “Anyone who goes into the orbit of the former president is virtually doomed,” said Jack Watson, Jimmy Carter’s former chief of staff. “Because saying no to Trump is like spitting into a raging headwind. It was not just Mission Impossible; it was Mission Self-Destruction. I don’t know why he chose to do it.”

In their motion to remove the Fulton County case to federal court, the lawyers for Mr. Meadows addressed Mr. Trump’s now infamous Jan. 2, 2021, call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — during which Mr. Meadows rode shotgun as the president cut to the chase: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes ….” Addressing Mr. Meadows’s role, his lawyers wrote: “One would expect a chief of staff to the president of the United States to do these sorts of things.”

Actually, any competent White House chief of staff would have thrown his body in front of that call. Any chief worth his salt would have said: “Mr. President, we’re not going to do that. And if you insist, you’re going to make that call yourself. And when you’re through, you’ll find my resignation letter on your desk.”

Mr. Meadows failed as Mr. Trump’s chief because he was unable to check the president’s worst impulses. But the bigger problem for our country is that his failure is a template for the inevitable disasters in a potential second Trump administration.

Mr. Trump’s final days as president could be a preview. He ran the White House his way — right off the rails. He fired his defense secretary, Mark Esper, replacing him with his counterterrorism chief, Chris Miller, and tried but failed to install lackeys in other positions of power: an environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, as attorney general and a partisan apparatchik, Kash Patel, as deputy C.I.A. director.

Mr. Trump has already signaled that in a second term, his department heads and cabinet officers would be expected to blindly obey orders. His director of national intelligence would tell him only what he wants to hear, and his attorney general would prosecute Mr. Trump’s political foes.

For Mr. Meadows, his place in history is secure as a primary enabler of a president who tried to overthrow democracy. But his example should serve as a warning of what will happen if Mr. Trump regains the White House. All guardrails will be gone.

Chris Whipple is the author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency” and, most recently, “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.”

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Thom Hartmann: How Trump Ate and Swallowed the GOP

By dianeravitch

September 1, 2023 //

Thom Hartman explains how Trump managed to devour the Republican Party, leaving nothing but an empty shell, without a platform or a philosophy. The internal collapse of the GOP started half a century ago….

He writes:

The Republican presidential debate wasn’t encouraging: Trump’s hold on the GOP appears stronger than ever. And that’s bad news for America.

In Robert Hubbell’s excellent Today’s Edition Newsletter on Substack, he made the point… that Trump’s relationship to the GOP is like that of one of those parasitic wasps that puts an egg into a caterpillar or spider and when the wasp larvae hatches it eats its host, leaving behind only a husk.

I’d take the metaphor a step farther: there’s a fungus, cordyceps, that infects ants and seizes control of their brains to alter their behavior ooto the fungus’ advantage. Another example is the toxoplasma parasite that’s often spread by cats: when mice are infected with the parasite, they no longer fear the smell of cats (and sometimes even want to play with them!), thus becoming easy prey. Scientists call it “fatal attraction.”

What Trump has done to the GOP is really quite impressive, worthy of either cordyceps or toxoplasma. And, frankly, it’s amazing that they didn’t even see it coming or try to stop him. (More on that in a moment.)

A registered Democrat and donor to the Democratic Party his entire life, Trump appropriated much of Bernie Sanders’ platform in 2016 to ingratiate himself with working class Americans.

He promised universal healthcare “cheaper than Obamacare,” taxes so high on the morbidly rich that “my friends won’t speak to me,” said he would bring America’s factories back home from overseas, and pledged to strengthen and expand Social Security and Medicare.

All, it turns out, were lies, although most in his base believe to this day that he did or nearly did all those things.

Having used Bernie’s policy positions (and a healthy dose of dog-whistle racism, essential for the Republican base) to win office in 2016, he proceeded to step into, take over, and then — like cordyceps or toxoplasma — alter top-to-bottom the behavior of the GOP.

Trump’s no idiot. He saw how the GOP was weakened, first by the Nixon scandals, then by Reagan’s neoliberalism that gutted the middle class, then by Bush and Cheney lying us into two unnecessary and illegal wars. The party was in a state of crisis when the nation elected our country’s first Black president, which gave Trump his opening.

Fifty years earlier, Nixon had injected the first “egg” of racism and white supremacy into the GOP with his “silent majority” and “war on drugs.”
The former was an explicit shout-out to white racists abandoned by the Democrats in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed through and signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the latter an explicit technique to disrupt the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Abandoning all subtlety, Nixon called it his “Southern Strategy.”

A decade later, Reagan pulled southern racists even deeper into the GOP by kicking off his 1980 election campaign with a speech about “states’ rights” to an all-white audience at an obscure Mississippi county fair near the site where three Civil Rights workers were brutally slaughtered in June, 1964. While most Americans — and all major American newspapers and TV networks — missed the significance of the event, southerners heard the whistle loud and clear.

Reagan amplified it with his “welfare queen” comments and his sympathy for white people offended by a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”

With the ground laid by Nixon and Reagan, that singular event of Obama’s presidency gave Trump the lever he needed to inject the larvae of his sociopathy into the moribund GOP.

He began with his claim that Obama wasn’t even a US citizen but had been born in Kenya, as clear a reference to race as his assertion earlier this week that the Black prosecutor Fani Willis and the Black judge Tanya Chutkan are both “Riggers.”

But Trump was only able to finally take over the GOP in 2016 because a group of corrupt politicians and rightwing billionaires got there first, setting up the party’s faithful to believe absurd lies and step into alternate realities.

It started with Nixon claiming he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War when, in fact, he’d reached out to the Vietnamese and scuttled an actual peace treaty that LBJ had negotiated in the summer of 1968.

When President Johnson called Republican Senator Everett Dirksen to tell him about it just days before the election, Dirksen accused Nixon of “treason.”
Reagan then convinced America’s Republican voters that if they’d just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would “trickle down” to average middle class people because it would “unleash” the “job creators.”

His cutting the top tax bracket from 74 percent to 27 percent unleashed them, all right: it unleashed them to buy thousands of politicians at both the state and federal level; to flip more radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers hard right; to purchase yachts and mansions around the world, and even to build their own spaceships.

Reagan told Republicans if they stopped enforcing the anti-trust laws that Republicans had fought for in the 1890s and Republican presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Robert Taft had used, prices would drop and America’s small towns would prosper. Instead, the average American family pays $5,000 a year more than citizens of countries that still enforce their anti-monopoly laws and small-town America has been gutted, with literally millions of local retailers and small employers put out of business by Big Box stores.

Reagan sold Republicans (and a few Democrats) on the idea that “free trade” would lower costs for Americans and, to some extent, it did: our stores were quickly filled with cheap, disposable junk. But the price we paid was 50,000+ factories and over 16 million good-paying union jobs moving to Asia and Mexico.

Reagan promised us if we’d just follow Milton Friedman’s advice (when he was secretly being paid off by the real estate lobby) and end rent controls, cut home mortgage subsidies like those through the FHA and VA, and throw our housing markets open to unrestrained speculation and both corporate and foreign ownership, every American could live the American Dream.

Instead, foreign investors and massive hedge funds run by Wall Street billionaires are buying up America’s housing stock and turning it into rental properties, both exploding the price of houses and rents. The clear and measurable result is an epidemic of homelessness and tent cities.
Reagan promised us if we’d just end “oppressive regulations” — designed to keep our food supply safe, our drugs affordable, clean up our air and water, and protect our children from death by firearms — the “magic of the free market” would provide all those things in spades.

Instead, our food supply is filled with chemicals, microplastics, and heavily processed faux foods that have produced two generations of obesity and related metabolic disorders in children along with an explosion of cancer, birth defects, and other once-rare diseases.
Reagan promised us if we’d just stop funding public schools and stop teaching civics and instead direct that money to private for-profit or church-run voucher and charter schools it would grow the levels of literacy, civic engagement, and healthy political dialogue.
Instead, about half of all American adults cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. Only 39 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government, leaving our nation vulnerable to racist white nationalists and fascists wanting to transform the democratic experiment our Founders began with our American republic.

The next Republican president, George W. Bush, nakedly lied to America about the “threat” presented by Saddam Hussein and Iraq to justify a war that cost our nation dearly in both blood and treasure, just to enrich the failing Halliburton (former CEO: Dick Cheney) and other oil companies in Bush and Cheney’s orbit.

Bush also pushed through a plan to clear-cut forests he called the “Healthy Forests Initiative,” and a plan to deregulate pollution controls he called the “Clear Skies” legislation.

By 2010, Republican voters were primed to believe pretty much anything party politicians told them. That was the year the billionaires really got busy taking control of the party’s base.

They started by funding the Tea Party, theoretically a response to President Obama’s effort to provide affordable healthcare for all Americans. Tri-cornered hats and bizarre signs saying things like “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare” popped up all over America, as the billionaires’ Astroturf movement rented high-end busses to bring gullible retired boomers to staged media events across the nation.

That morphed into the “freedom agenda,” branding everything in sight with the word. From trashing queer people, to calls for more tax cuts for billionaires, intimidation of teachers and librarians, massive Red-state-by-Red-state voter purges, legalizing open carry of assault weapons, criminalizing abortion, and a campaign to end the teaching of Black History, “freedom” has spread across the GOP.

This week we even learned that the billionaire-funded Freedom Caucus in the House intends to try to crash the US economy just in time for the election (knowing Biden will get the blame) by refusing to fund the government for the 2024 fiscal year.

Republicans have taken their “freedom agenda” to such extremes that they’re actively suppressing dissent to promote it. When a group of moms of children who died or barely survived a mass shooting at the Covenant Elementary School wanted to testify before the Tennessee General Assembly, they were escorted out by state police the Republican leader, Rep. Lowell Russell, had called.

In today’s GOP, fully in the thrall of Donald Trump and his authoritarianism, dissent is not allowed. Just ask Justin Amash or Liz Cheney.

Trump has done his work, and the Republican Party is no longer a legitimate political party. Like a cat with a toxoplasma-infected mouse, he’s eaten the party whole.

It has no platform, no moral compass, and no loyalty to the Constitution or America’s historic ideals. Instead, it does whatever the billionaires who own it tell it to do (with the ability to bribe given them by five Republicans on the Supreme Court who legalized political bribery in Citizens United).

This grift, started by Richard Nixon’s treason and lies and exploited over the years by the morbidly rich, has now so completely absorbed the party that it’s hard to see it returning to the conservative-but-willing-to-compromise entity it was during the Eisenhower presidency. Hell, most Republican voters today don’t even remember Eisenhower, much less venerate him.

As the esteemed Republican activist and constitutional scholar J. Michael Luttig told CNN a few weeks ago:

“A political party is a collection and assemblage of individuals who share a set of beliefs and principles and policy views about the United States of America. Today, there is no such shared set of beliefs and values and principles or even policy views as within the Republican party for America.”

Mourning the loss of the party he was once proud to be part of, Luttig added:

“American democracy simply cannot function without two equally healthy and equally strong political parties. So today, in my view, there is no Republican Party to counter the Democratic Party in the country. And for that reason, American democracy is in grave peril.”

A return to some semblance of normalcy in theGOP is essential to restoring a normal, functioning government to our nation, as Luttig points out. Odds are, however, it’s first going to take a widespread destruction of that party — provoked by huge Democratic wins in 2024 — to come about.

And, given the bizarre spectacle we witnessed in the Republican presidential debate, that can’t come soon enough.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Environment, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Why You Should NOT Vote Third Party

By dianeravitch

August 29, 2023 //

147

Thom Hartmann is one of the best political bloggers in the nation and a superb journalist. This is a very important article. In 2016, I pleaded with readers not to vote third party because Trump was clearly unhinged and ignorant. Jill Stein siphoned off enough votes to elect him. I’m still haunted by the infamous photo of Jill Stein sitting at Putin’s table with Michael Flynn before the election.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates…

One of the most fashionable statements these days among progressive-leaning voters who pretend to great political insight is:

“I want to vote for the person I like themost, not some party or candidate that I only half-agree with.”

Its corollary is:

“You’re just trying to get me to vote Democratic because you support that party’s corruption. I won’t be intimidated: I’m going to vote for the best person to run the country!”

Often these types of statements are followed by:

“People in France and Israel can vote for any one of a dozen parties and nobody complains that they’re ‘throwing away their vote.’ This is America: we’re even better! So, I should be able to vote for anybody I want!”

Some people pushing this line simply don’t understand the difference between thepolitical systems of France/Israel and theUS.

Others are cynical hustlers (this is true mostly of the talk-show and YouTube hosts trying to differentiate themselves by pushing this), trying to grab and hold an audience by being “edgy,” “iconoclastic,” or “a rebel with a cause.”

So, let’s review some political basics.

Whatever its genesis, this opinion — that ignoring our two-party system and “voting for the best candidate is a good thing” — is widespread. After all, intuitively it seems to make perfect sense.

In a rational world, who would want to vote for anyone less than the best candidate? Unfortunately, though, America’s political system is not as rational as that of countries with proportional representation or ranked choice voting.

A 2022 Pew poll found people’s unfavorable view of both parties has gone from 6 percent in 1994 to 27 percent today. Similarly, 38 percent of Americans “wish there were more political parties to choose from in this country” and may be persuaded to vote for a third-party candidate.

So why is it that third parties don’t work in America, but they do in France?

The United States, in 1789, became the first modern democratic republic founded on thenotion of the leaders of a government, through elections, “deriving their just powers from theconsent of the governed.”

The Framers of the Constitution had never heard of proportional representation or themodern parliamentary system (more on that in a minute), so they went with a simple strategy that’s today referred to by political scientists as “first-past-the-post winner-take-all” (FPTP) or, sometimes, as “majoritarian” or “plurality” election systems.

Whoever gets the most votes becomes theelected politician, and everybody else gets nothing. If you voted with the majority, you’re represented; if not, you’re not at all represented by a person or party that shares your view.

America was an English-speaking country and, as a result, this system spread mostly throughout the English-speaking world and in former British or American colonies. Majoritarian FPTP systems like ours are used in Canada, the UK, India, Jamaica, Liberia, Singapore, Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Bangladesh.

As a result, most all of these countries are dominated by two parties who tend to pass control of the nation back-and-forth over time. (Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland use Ranked Choice Voting, an even more recent innovation which allows for more political parties; more on that in a moment.)

In such a system, third parties almost always act as spoilers, drawing votes away from the major party to which they’re most closely aligned. People who vote Green, for example, generally would have voted Democratic, thus reducing that party’s vote; people who vote Libertarian would have voted Republican with the same effect.

For example, in Florida in 2000, Ralph Nader on the Green Party’s ticket got 97,488 votes, while George W. Bush “won” Florida by 537 votes.

It strains credulity to assert that the majority of Nader’s voters would have either voted for Bush or not voted at all, which is why when David Cobb ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2004, he explicitly told people in swing states not to vote for him but to cast their ballots for John Kerry instead.

Jill Stein had no such moral compunction with her Green Party candidacy in 2016. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin provided Trump’s margin of victory in theElectoral College over Hillary Clinton, and, in each of those states, Stein pulled more votes than Trump’s margin.

(In Michigan she got 51,463 votes and Trump won by 10,704; in Pennsylvania she won 49,678 versus Trump’s margin of 46,765; and in Wisconsin Stein carried 31,006 votes but Trump only won by 22,177.)

In other words, had liberals not voted for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would have become president and we never would have been lied into a war; had people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not voted for Jill Stein in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president and America would have been spared thetrauma of 500,000 unnecessary Covid deaths and the ongoing assault to our democracy.

This is apparently not lost on sour-grapes Jill Stein, by the way; she’s reportedly helping run Cornell West’s 2024 Green Party candidacy. It’s also not lost on the Democrat-hating folks at No Labels, who have pledged to put up a candidate for president (presumably Joe Manchin) in 2024.

In the 1950s, French sociologist Maurice Duverger published several papers on this odd quirk of FPTP systems and the way they turn aligned third-party candidacies into agents for the opposition party.

This simple reality — apparently unknown to those who advocate third party candidates — has since come to be known as Duverger’s Law.

So, why can France have so many political parties without damaging their political system but here in America third parties harm those they’re most closely aligned with?

This goes to the invention of what’s called “proportional representation.”

It wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party parliamentary democracies in his book Considerations On Representative Government.

It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — all of them countries that became democracies after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.

In Mill’s system, if a political party gets, say, 12 percent of the vote then they also get 12 percent of the seats in that country’s congress or parliament. A party that pulls 34 percent of the vote gets 34 percent of the seats, and so on.

The result is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in thedaily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.

Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.

Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to theextreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.

The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties.

It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at thepolitics and lifestyles in most European nations.

In our system, though, if a party gets 12 percent of the vote — or anything short of 50 percent plus one — they get nothing. Whoever gets 50-percent-plus-one wins everything and everybody else gets nothing, which is why we always end up with two parties battling for thehigher end of that 50/50 teeter-totter.

Pretty much every democracy in the world not listed above under the FPTP label are using Mill’s proportional representation. But we don’t, which is why we’re stuck with a two-party system.

Australia and New Zealand have diminished the damage third parties can do to themain, established parties, by using a voting system called ranked choice voting. In a system like that I could have voted for Ralph Nader as my first choice in 2000, with Al Gore as my second choice. When it becomes apparent that Nader isn’t going to make it, my first choice is discarded by thesystem and my vote for Gore becomes theone that gets counted.

Over 300 communities in America are now using ranked choice voting (including Portland, Oregon) and it works great. Moving from FPTP to proportional representation would require amending the Constitution, though, so that’s not going to happen any day soon: ranked choice voting is a nearly-as-good alternative.

At the national level, though, the best way to solve the problem of some Democratic politicians not being as progressive as we’d like is to get active by joining theDemocratic Party and becoming a force for positive change within it. To stand up for public office and elect more progressives, something that can only be done within theDemocratic Party.

To not “throw away your vote,” but to help rebuild the institution that brought America Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, regulatory agencies that defend and protect the environment and working class people, support for people in poverty, and that built America’s first real middle class.

Yes, there are corrupt and bought-off politicians within the Democratic Party. Ever since the Supreme Court fully legalized political bribery with their Citizens Uniteddecision and its predecessors, there have been more than a few Democrats who have enthusiastically put their hands out. The most obvious and cynical ones call themselves corporate “Problem Solvers.”

But voting for a third-party candidate and thus handing elections to Republicans won’t solve that problem: if anything it will make it worse, because the entire GOP has committed itself to being on the take and, as we saw with Nader and Stein, third-party candidacies often simply hand more power to the GOP.

Try to find, for example, even one Republican who isn’t benefiting from the billions in oil dollars that have flowed through the Koch network over the years and is thus willing to do something about climate change. Republican governance and their fealty to the fossil fuel industry is literally destroying America.

This is why real progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal stay and work within theDemocratic Party. For progressives to take over the country, we must first take over the DNC.

In other words, get inside the Party and take it over! It’s what hard-core conservatives did with the GOP over the past 20 years, starting with the Tea Party movement, and it’s what progressives must do with the Democratic Party.

Cornell West is a great guy, but with our FPTP election system a vote for him for president in a swing state is effectively a vote for theRepublican nominee. No third-party candidate has ever won the White House, and none ever will until we have nationwide ranked choice voting.

So, the next time somebody tells you how they’re going to only vote for “the best candidate,” you may want to give them this little Civics 101 lesson, along with the phone number, website, or email address for their local Democratic Party. And get behind themovement to bring ranked choice voting to national elections.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us, in part, by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates

Categories Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Michael Hiltzik: The Republican Plan to Dumb Down America’s Youth

By dianeravitch

August 27, 2023 //

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, finds a pattern in the Republican attacks on the schools and universities. Their hostility to teaching Black history, their encouragement of book banning, their strategic defunding of higher education, their treatment of teaching about race, gender, and climate change as “indoctrination”—together point to a goal: the dumbing down of American young people.

Republicans say they want to get rid of “indoctrination” but they are busily erasing free inquiry and critical thinking. What do they actually want? Indoctrination.

He reminds us of the immortal words of former President Donald J. Trump: “I love the uneducated.” Republicans do not want students to think critically about racism or the past. They do not want them to reflect on anything that makes them “uncomfortable.” They want to shield them from “divisive concerns.” They want them to imbibe a candy-coated version of the past, not wrestle with hard truths.

He writes:

For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.

Donald Trump set forth the principle during his 2016 primary campaign, when he declared, “I love the poorly educated.”

In recent months, the right-wing attack on public education has intensified. The epicenter of the movement is Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, where the faculty and course offerings of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, New College, have been eviscerated purportedly to wipe out what DeSantis calls “ideological indoctrination.”

The state’s K-12 schools have been authorized to supplement their curricula with animated cartoons developed by the far-right Prager University Foundation that flagrantly distort climate science and America’s racial history, the better to promote fossil fuels, undermine the use of renewable energy and paint a lily-white picture of America’s past.

Then there’s West Virginia, which is proposing to shut down nearly 10% of its academic offerings, including all its foreign language programs. The supposed reason is a huge budget deficit, the harvest of a systematic cutback in state funding.

In Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission is quitting the American Library Assn., after a complaint by a Republican state legislator accusing the association of pushing “socialism and Marxist ideology.”

In Arkansas, state education officials told schools that they may not award credit for the Advanced Placement course in African American history. (Several school districts said they’d offer students the course anyway.) This is the course that Florida forced the College Board to water down earlier this year by alleging, falsely, that it promoted “critical race theory.”

I must interject here that I’m of two minds about this effort. On the one hand, an ignorant young electorate can’t be good for the republic; on the other, filling the workforce with graduates incapable of critical thinking and weighed down by a distorted conception of the real world will reduce competition for my kids and grandkids for jobs that require knowledge and brains.

Let’s examine some of these cases in greater depth.

Prager University, or PragerU, isn’t an accredited institution of higher learning. It’s a dispenser of right-wing charlatanism founded by Dennis Prager, a right-wing radio host. The material approved for use in the schools includes a series of five- to 10-minute animated videos featuring the fictional Leo and Layla, school-age siblings who travel back in time to meet historical figures.

One encounter is with Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist. The goal of the video is to depict “Black lives matter” demonstrations as unrestrained and violent — “Why are they burning a car?” Leo asks while viewing a televised news report. The animated Douglass speaks up for change achieved through “patience and compromise.”

This depiction of Douglass leaves experts in his life and times aghast. Douglass consistently railed against such counsel. Of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act — arguably the most detested federal law in American history — he stated that it illustrated how “slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life blood of the nation.” In 1861, he thundered that “all compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”

Patience? The video depicts Douglass quoting from an 1852 speech to a Rochester anti-slavery society in which he said “great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.”

But it doesn’t include lines from later in the speech, reproaching his audience for prematurely celebrating the progress of abolition: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … all your religious parade and solemnity, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Another video in the series parrots the fossil fuel industry’s talking points against wind and solar power: Standing over the corpse of a bird supposedly slain by flying into a wind turbine, the schoolkids’ interlocutor states, “Like many people … you’ve been misled about renewable energy, and their impact on the environment…. Windmills kill so many birds, it’s hard to track how many…. Wind farms and solar farms disrupt huge amounts of natural habitat.”

Acid rain, pollution, global warming — those consequences of fossil fuel energy aren’t mentioned. The video ends with a pitch for nuclear power, never mind the unsolved question of what to do with its radioactive waste products.

PragerU’s sedulous attack on renewables perhaps shouldn’t be much a surprise: Among its big donors is the Wilks family, which derives its fortune from fracking and which approved “future payment” of $6.25 million to PragerU in 2013.

As for New College, its travails under the DeSantis regime have been documented by my colleague Jenny Jarvie, among many others.

In a nutshell, the Sarasota institution possessed a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s outstanding havens for talented, independent-minded students. Then came DeSantis. He summarily replaced its board of trustees with a clutch of right-wing stooges including Christopher Rufo, known for having concocted the panic over critical race theory out of thin air and then marketed it as a useful culture war weapon to unscrupulous conservative politicians, including DeSantis.

Rufo and his fellows fired the university president and installed a sub-replacement-level GOP timeserver, Richard Corcoran, in her place. Faculty and students have fled. Students who stayed behind and were in the process of assembling their course schedules for the coming year are discovering at the last minute that the courses are no longer offered because their teachers have been fired or quit.

Instead of ambitious scholars committed to open inquiry, Corcoran has recruited athletes to fill out the student body, even though the college has no athletic fields for many of them to play on. According to USA Today, New College now has 70 baseball players, nearly twice as many as the University of Florida’s Division I NCAA team.

More to the point, the average SAT and ACT scores and high-school grade point averages have fallen from the pre-Corcoran level, while most of the school’s merit-based scholarships have gone to athletes. New College, in other words, has transitioned from a top liberal arts institution into a school that places muscle-bound underachievers on a pedestal. DeSantis calls this “succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission.”

Finally, West Virginia University. Under its president, Gordon Gee — who previously worked his dubious magic at Brown Universityand Ohio State University, among other places — the school built lavish facilities despite declining enrollments. The construction program at the land grant university contributed to a $45-million deficit for the coming year, with expectations that it would rise to $75 million by 2028.

But the main problem was one shared by many other public universities — the erosion of public funding. As the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy points out, “if West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for [fiscal year] 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”

The decision on which programs to shutter at WVU points to a shift in how public university trustees see the purpose of their schools, trying to align them more with economic goals set by local industries rather than the goal of providing a well-rounded education to a state’s students. Trustees in some states, including North Carolina and Texas, have injected themselves into academic decisions traditionally left to administrators, often for partisan political reasons.

When it comes to interference in educational policies by conservatives, such as what’s happened in Florida, Texas and Arkansas, there’s no justification for taking these measures at face value — that is, as efforts to remove “indoctrination” from the schools. The truth is that the right-wing effort serves the purposes of white supremacists and advocates of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — they’re moving to inject indoctrination that conforms more to their own ideologies.

Take the attack on critical race theory, or at least the version retailed by Rufo and his ilk. “The right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle,” the Black scholar Robin D.G. Kelley of UCLA has observed, by caricaturing a four-decade-long scholarly effort to analyze “why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality” into “a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their ‘race.’”

(The inclusion of Kelley’s work in the AP African American Studies course was cited as a “concern” by Florida officials in their rationale for rejecting the course; Kelley’s work was suppressed by the College Board in its effort to make the course more acceptable to the state Department of Education.)

These attacks are couched in the vocabulary of “parents’ rights” and student freedom, but they don’t serve the students at all, nor do they advance the rights of parents interested in a good, comprehensive education for their children, as opposed to one dictated by the most narrow-minded ideologues in their state.

Where will it end? Florida’s ham-fisted educational policies won’t produce graduates with the intellectual equipment to succeed in legitimate universities, much less in the world at large. The only university many will be qualified to attend will be Prager U, and that won’t be good for anyone.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Higher Education, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Racism, Stupid, Trump

Fact-Checking the GOP Debate

By dianeravitch

August 26, 2023 //

I am reposting this because the first version was incomplete.

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post frequently fact checks claims by politicians. He was very busy during the Trump administration. He identified more than 30,000 outright lies by #45. He awards “Pinocchios” to lies. Four Pinocchios’” is for the worst lies.

This is his fact check of the first GOP debate.

Fox News aired the first GOP debate of the 2024 election cycle from Milwaukee on Wednesday night, featuring eight candidates. Not every candidate uttered facts that are easily fact-checked, but following is a list of 10 suspicious claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates. These claims are examined in the order in which they were uttered.

“We all need to understand Joe Biden’s Bidenomics has led to the loss of $10,000 of spending power for the average family.”

— Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.)

This seems wildly overstated. In April we had checked a claim by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income. We tracked down the source of that statistic — E.J. Antoni, a research fellow in regional economics with the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. As of last week, he’d revised his estimate down to $6,800.

But, more to the point, economists we contacted were dubious about the math, which relied on a change in purchasing power and a change in borrowing power. The change in borrowing power relied on mortgage rates — and not every family is looking for a new home. As for Antoni’s reliance on average weekly wages, this measure does not follow the same workers across time, and consequently the economists said it was an imperfect basis for families’ income changing over time.

Several economists pointed to another metric — real disposable personal income per capita— as a better gauge. That figure is produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Commerce Department.

Per capita income, after inflation, was $46,790 in December 2020 and $46,795 in June 2023 — an increase of $5. That’s basically flat — but a far cry from a $10,000 decline.

“A 15-week ban is an idea whose time has come — it’s supported by 70 percent of the American people.”
— Former vice president Mike Pence

Recent polling does not back up Pence’s claim of such support for banning all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, when people are directly asked about it, though in general, polls have shown majority opposition to second-trimester abortions.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll last year found that 36 percent supported and 57 percent opposed a law that would make abortions legal only in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Last month, a Marquette Law School poll found that 47 percent of those surveyed favored a ban after 15 weeks, compared with 53 percent who said they would oppose it.

Also last month, an AP-NORC poll found that about half of Americans say abortions should be permitted at the 15-week mark.

A Fox News poll in April found that 54 percent supported such a ban, while 42 percent opposed it. But that is still well short of 70 percent.

“We’re better than what the Democrats are selling. We are not going to allow abortion all the way up till birth, and we will hold them accountable for their extremism.”
— Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

This is a common Republican talking point — that Democrats support nationwide abortion-on-demand up until the moment of birth. The implication is that late-term abortions are common — and that they are routinely accepted by Democrats.

The reality, according to federal and state data, is that abortions past the point of viability are extremely rare. When they do happen, they often involve painful, emotional and even moral decisions.

About two-thirds of abortions occur at eight weeks of pregnancy or earlier, and nearly 90 percent take place in the first 12 weeks, or within most definitions of the first trimester, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which favors abortion rights. About 5.5 percent of abortions take place after 15 weeks, with just 1.3 percent at 21 weeks or longer.

Increasingly, there is a period when premature births and late abortions begin to overlap. The CDC recorded almost 22,000 births between 20 and 27 weeks. Babies born before 25 weeks are considered extremely preterm, with vital organs such as heart, lungs and brain very immature. But the survival rate has climbed to 30 percent for 22-week babies and 55 percent for 23-week babies, according to a 2022 study.

Some states record whether a fetus was born alive during an abortion and whether efforts were made to save it. Seven were born alive in Florida in 2022, nine in Arizona in 2020, one in Texas in 2021 and five in Minnesota in 2021. A CDC study of 143 cases between 2003 and 2014 found that most died within hours, with only 4.2 percent surviving for more than 24 hours.

“Crime is at a 50-year low in Florida.”
— DeSantis

This statement is based on incomplete data, according to the Marshall Project, an online journalism organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.

“About half of the agencies that police more than 40% of the state’s population are missing from figures the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) used for a statewide estimation,” the news organization said.

Participation in national data collection is even lower, with less than eight percent of Florida’s police departments included in an FBI federal database. Many of the largest, such as the Miami Police Department, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department, are missing from the national numbers.

It is impossible, then, to compare Florida’s crime rate with that of other states. And in any case, the crime rate in Florida has been steadily declining for three decades.

“We have a crime wave in this country.”
— Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy

This is a bit out of date. Crime spiked during the pandemic, and though rates are still higher than before the pandemic, homicides are dropping in dozens of major cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Examining homicides in 30 cities that make homicide data readily available, an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice found that the number of killings in the first half of 2023 fell by 9.4 percent compared with the first half of 2022.

Moreover, gun assaults (-5.6 percent), robberies (-3.6 percent), nonresidential burglaries (-5 percent), larcenies (-4.1 percent), residential burglaries (-3.8 percent) and aggravated assaults (-2.5 percent) fell in the first six months of this year compared with the same period last year. However, car thefts continued to increase.

FBI data shows that the nationwide violent crime rate peaked in 1991 with 758.2 crimes per 100,000 people; in 2020, the rate was 398.5. The nationwide homicide rate reached a high in 1991, at 9.8 per 100,000 population. By 2019, it had dropped to 5.1.

“Not only weaponization in the Department of Justice against political opponents, but also look at the parents who show up at school board meetings. They’re called, under this DOJ, domestic terrorists.”
— Scott

This is a frequent GOP talking point but it’s false. Attorney General Merrick Garland has never equated parents to terrorists, and in fact he told Congress he “can’t imagine” a circumstance under which that would happen.

This all started with a Sept. 29, 2021, letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) that asked President Biden for federal resources to help monitor “threats of violence and acts of intimidation” against public school board members and other school officials. Five days later, Garland issued a memo addressed to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and federal prosecutors. He called for action within 30 days to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats” against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.

Garland’s memo never mentioned domestic terrorism, but the NSBA letter that prompted it included a line that asserted “these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” There was enough blowback to that language that on Oct. 22, the NSBA apologized for the letter, saying “there was no justification for some of the language included.” A new executive director for the association was installed, the letter was deleted from the NSBA website, and the association announced in February that it had launched an independent review of how the letter was created.

Nevertheless, the Justice Department never equated parents to domestic terrorists.
When questioned by Republicans in congressional hearings, Garland and other top Justice officials have insisted that they do not think concerned parents are terrorists. “I can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor can I imagine a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorism,” Garland told the House Judiciary Committee.

“The Biden administration wanted to put 87,000 people in the IRS instead of giving the money we need to our own Border Patrol.”
— North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum

“Let’s fire the 87,000 IRS agents and hire or double the number of Border Patrol agents.”
— Scott

This 87,000 figure is a common GOP talking point but it is wildly exaggerated to speak of “agents” as Scott did. When Congress passed a bill to provide the IRS with an additional $80 billion in funding over 10 years, that money was to be used in part to hire 86,852 full-time employees in the next decade. But many of those employees would not be enforcement “agents” but people hired to improve information technology and customer service. Treasury officials say that because of attrition, after 10 years of increasing spending, the size of the agency will have grown only 25 to 30 percent when the hiring burst is completed.

The administration’s strategic plan for the IRS, released in April, estimated that an additional 1,543 full-time employees would be hired for enforcement in 2023, or about 15 percent of newly hired staff. That would grow to 7,239 in 2024, or 37 percent of new staff.

Biden administration officials have pledged that enforcement efforts to collect unpaid taxes will concentrate on those earning more than $400,000.

“We secured the southern border and reduced illegal immigration by 90 percent.”
— Pence

Ninety percent is a cherry-picked number, apparently comparing May 2019, the highest month for border apprehensions during the Trump administration, with April 2020, when apprehensions plunged because of lockdowns at the start of the covid pandemic. Another complicating factor is that U.S. Customs and Border Protection changed the way it counted apprehensions during the pandemic, making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult because the numbers were inflated by people who were expelled for health policy reasons, not just enforcement actions. But generally, annual apprehensions increased during the Trump administration.

“We eliminated critical race theory from our K through 12 schools.”
— DeSantis

Critical race theory refers to an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, and not just demonstrated by individual people with prejudices. It is generally taught in higher education, such as law or graduate school, not at lower grade levels. So this is a bit of an empty boast. Educators, school officials and several Florida public school districts told PolitiFact that critical race theory wasn’t taught in Florida’s elementary, middle or high schools.
PolitiFact rated DeSantis’s claim as “mostly false,” saying that at most the state under DeSantis “rejected prospective teaching materials in recent years that it claimed was related to CRT. But questions remain about its rationale in several cases.”

“I did not grow up in money.”
— Ramaswamy

Earlier in the debate, Ramaswamy had said, “My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago.” But then he went further later in the evening with the line “I did not grow up in money.” His parents did well enough, however, that in his book “Nation of Victims,” Ramaswamy wrote that by the time he was in sixth grade, he had a “comfortably middle-class family with two incomes.” His father worked for General Electric, which had a cost-cutting boss at the time, and he wrote that the fear of a layoff was ever present, so his father “tried to make himself indispensable” by becoming a patent attorney for the firm.

By the time he was 18, Ramaswamy had a stock portfolio significant enough that he earned $453 in dividends in 2002, according to his tax return. By his sophomore year in college, when he made about $3,500 in wage income, he earned $11,712 from dividends alone.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies, Trump

Jim Hightower: The GOP Plans to Eliminate Federal Programs to Mitigate Climate Change

By dianeravitch

August 24, 2023 //

Jim Hightower, an outspoken liberal voice in Texas, posts a warning about the Republicans’ strategy to wipe out environmental regulations if they regain the presidency in 2025. Despite the climate disasters occurring all over the world and in every corner of this nation, the GOP puts greed over survival.

Hightower writes:

When your political opponents push extremist public policies that would be disastrous for America, should you wring your hands in dread… or applaud?

Consider “Project 2025,” put together by former Trump officials and the Koch brothers’ network of billionaire plutocrats. Their strategy is to win the presidency next year by demonizing all environmental protections and promising to halt all national efforts to cope with the obvious crises of climate change. Their proposals include repealing regulations that curb fossil fuel pollution, terminating our nation’s transition to renewable energy, shutting down all environmental protection agencies, encouraging more oil and gas drilling and use, and promoting the deadly delusion that global warming is not a real problem.

Moreover, they intend to implement Project 2025 in the first 180 days of a right-wing Republican’s presidential term – obviously anticipating that Donald Trump will be that president. “We are not tinkering at the edges,” brags a far-out right-wing group that instigated the scheme, “We are writing a battle plan and we are marshalling our forces.” They’ve already drawn up a list of agencies and policies they’ll begin eliminating on Day One, and they’ve readied a list of some 20,000 right-wing henchmen to put on the federal payroll immediately to enforce their plan.

If this sounds ludicrous, it is. But it’s actually happening, for the Republican Party has decided to be ludicrous. As the director of Project 2025 told the New York Times, “[This is] where the conservative movement sits at this time.”

Maybe, but it damn sure won’t sit well with the American people, who’re presently suffering the hellish ravages of our rapidly overheating climate. Indeed, here’s a great chance for Democrats to demonstrate their bipartisan spirit by doing all they can to publicize the Republicans’ let-it-burn global warming policy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Dark Money, Deregulation, Environment, Koch Brothers, Republicans, Stupid, Trump

Tom Nichols: Trump Should Skip All the Debates

By dianeravitch

August 23, 2023 //

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic thinks that it’s great that Trump will not join the Republican debates. Nichols thinks Trump should not participate in any debates.

Donald Trump has decided to skip the Republican presidential debates. That’s just as well: Debating Trump is demeaning to everyone involved, and it serves no purpose.

Contempt for the Electoral Process

Donald Trump confirmed on Sunday that he’s skipping the Republican-primary debates, the first of which is tomorrow night. His decision makes political sense: A candidate who is crushing the entire field has little incentive to walk into a lion’s den and take on eight challengers. Of course, a candidate who cares about politics, policy, and the voters might want to show courage and respect for the electoral process—but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so those are not real considerations.

Strange as it may seem, I not only support Trump’s decision, but I think both parties should seize the opportunity to make it permanent for this election. I love debates and watch theattentively, and in a normal political year with a normal election and a normal candidate, I would be thumping the desk and saying that every candidate should respect our grand tradition of debate.

But this isn’t a normal year. It’s not a normal election. And Donald Trump is not, in any way, a normal candidate. To allow Trump onstage in either the primaries or the general election is bad politics, an insult to our electoral process, and corrosive to American democracy. All of the 2024 candidates, including President Joe Biden, have good reasons to embrace Trump’s refusal to debate and to shun any further interactions with him.

First, as we should have learned in 2016 and 2020, Trump has nothing but contempt for the electoral process. (I’ll get to his open attack on the process in 2021 in a moment.) Trump benefits from arenas where his opponents are constrained by rules that he himself ignores, and so he treats debates like performance art. He insults, interrupts, babbles, and pouts. In 2016 he stalked Hillary Clinton around the stage and suggested that he’d toss her in jail. In 2020, he tried to suck the oxygen out of the room—oxygen that Trump (according to his own chief of staff) knew was carrying his COVID infection and thus was a very real threat to Joe Biden’s health. Exasperated with Trump’s stream of blather, Biden spoke for many of us when he finally said: “Will you shut up, man?”

Second, to allow Trump on the stage is to admit that he is a legitimate candidate for public office. He is not.

I agree with—and this is quite the list—two lawyers who are members of the Federalist Society and the joint view of the conservative retired Judge J. Michael Luttig and the liberal law scholar Laurence Tribe when they argue that the Fourteenth Amendment bars Trump from office. I also agree, however, with my friend Charlie Sykes that the issue of constitutional disqualification is irrelevant: No one is going to take the measures needed (including, probably, a trip to the Supreme Court) to remove Trump from the ballot.

But as is the case with so much of our Constitution, the real check against someone like Trump is not black-letter law, but the inherent virtue and good sense of the American public. As James Madison long ago warned, if “there is no virtue among us” then “we are in a wretched situation,” and it is a continuing tragedy that millions of voters have failed to summon the basic decency to reject Trump and his assault on our values.

At the very least, the Republican Party (if it had a nanogram of spine left) would seize this moment to say that a candidate who bails out of the primary debates cannot run as a Republican and will get no assistance from the national party. The GOP under Ronna McDaniel (a woman who stopped using her family name of Romney professionally because of needling from Trump) is not going to take any such steps. But the failure of Republican voters and their cowardly leaders to exile Trump from their party—and from our public life—is no reason to treat Trump as if he is just another candidate.

Third, to allow Trump on a debate stage would, at this point, be an affront to the dignity of the Constitution and our republic. Trump’s antics would create yet another evening of both national and international humiliation and add more scar tissue to our already battered democratic norms. The United States—all of us—deserve better than to encourage such a demoralizing circus yet again.

And speaking of the Constitution and our political system: No candidate should have to share a stage and shake hands with a man who is credibly accused of multiple felonies for his efforts to overthrow the American constitutional order.

I am, even now, somewhat amazed even to write those words, but here we are.

Remember, Trump does not deny many of the things he is accused of doing. He (and at least some of his alleged co-conspirators) instead claim that what they did was not technically illegal. But we do not need a conviction to reach the conclusion that Donald Trump is a threat to our freedoms and the rule of law. We can shun him in public spaces, including the debate stage, for all of the acts to which he’s already admitted.

Think for a moment what it would look like if Trump showed up for any of the debates. You might not think much of Mike Pence, but no national purpose is served by asking Pence to walk onstage and smile and shake the hand of the man who supported a mob that was trying to hang him. And although it might be satisfying to watch Chris Christie strip the bark off Trump, a shouting match between two of the most obnoxious politicians in America would not help the voters, nor would it be a moment worthy of our democracy.

Likewise, it is beneath the dignity of President Biden—or any president of the United States—to stand next to Trump and have to pretend that the other podium is occupied by just another political contender instead of the leader of a party that has degenerated into a violent, seditionist cult. America knows both of these men, and knows what they stand for. The real question is whether a pro-democracy coalition will finally defeat Trump and his authoritarian movement, and we don’t need pointless and destructive debates to settle that issue.

Categories Elections, Politics, Trump

Thom Hartmann’s Debate Prep: Biden’s Accomplishments in Three Years

By dianeravitch

August 23, 2023 //

The Republican debates, starting tonight, will attack President Biden relentlessly. Thom Hartmann has compiled a list of Biden’s accomplishments to counter the lies and exaggerations of Republican contenders for the nomination.

He writes:

The first Republican debate of the 2024 election cycle is tonight, and while all the drama seems focused on whether or not anybody beyond Chris Christie will take a serious swing at Trump, odds are most of the evening’s time will be devoted to trashing President Joe Biden.

So, to help keep you sane through all the lies and BS — and the fog you may be in by the end of the debate if your drinking game involved the word “woke” — here’s a quick summary* of the things that Biden has accomplished (with a little help from Democrats in Congress) in his first two-and-a-half years in office.

First of all, Joe Biden has restored trust, confidence, and faith in the honesty, credibility, and integrity of America. He doesn’t suck up to dictators like Trump did, and doesn’t lie to Americans or our allies. He’s restored independence to the Department of Justice and funding and support to regulatory agencies like the EPA.

Over united Republican opposition, the Biden administration has succeeded in lowering most Americans’ cost of living. The Inflation Reduction Act has reduced inflation to a full point lower than it was when Reagan was running his “Morning in America” ads in 1984 (unemployment is several points lower, too!).

Because of that law, for the first time, Medicare is able to negotiate the price of certain high-cost drugs: a month’s supply of insulin for seniors is capped at $35, Medicare beneficiaries pay $0 out of pocket for recommended adult vaccines, and seniors’ out of pocket expenses at the pharmacy will be capped at $2,000 a year.

America has just completed the strongest two years of job growth in the history of our country. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office — including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, and a record number of small businesses have started since Biden took office. Black Americans and Hispanic Americans have near record low unemployment rates and people with disabilities are experiencing record low unemployment.

We’re experiencing a boom in manufacturing and the construction of manufacturing facilities like we haven’t seen since before the Reagan Revolution began offshoring American factories and jobs. Companies have invested more than $300 billion in good jobs, many of them unionized, as America’s technical capabilities sharpen along with this job growth.

Biden has expanded services available to our veterans (after Trump cut them), including 31 new clinical sites and a comprehensive program to help the estimated 5 million veterans who, like President Biden’s son Beau, have been exposed to toxic chemicals as a result of their service to our country.

President Biden brought together Democrats and Republicans to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major piece of gun safety legislation in three decades. The law will save lives by:

— requiring young people ages 18 to 21 to undergo enhanced background checks;
—narrowing the “boyfriend loophole” to keep guns out of the hands of convicted dating partners;
— funding crisis interventions, including extreme risk protection orders (“red flag”) laws;
— making significant investments to address the mental health crisis in America, including in our schools;
— clarifying who needs to register as a federally licensed gun dealer and run background checks before selling a single weapon;
— and making gun trafficking and straw purchases distinct federal crimes.

Over ten years ago, President Biden announced his support for marriage equality, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. government official to do so. Building on his longstanding support and generations of civil rights advocacy, President Biden signed historic bipartisan legislation protecting marriage for same-sex and interracial couples.

And the President took historic steps to advance full equality for LGBTQI+ Americans, including reversing the discriminatory ban on transgender servicemembers in the military, strengthening non-discrimination protections in health care, housing, education, and employment, and ensuring that transgender Americans can access government support and services.

Biden has put a more diverse group of people on the federal judiciary than any president in history. Sixty-six percent of his nominees have been women and 65 percent were people of color, including the Supreme Court’s first Black woman justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

After Putin declared war on democracy and launched a terrorist invasion of Ukraine, targeting civilians and using rape as a weapon of war, President Biden has brought the world together to stand up to a fascist autocracy and defend Europe’s largest democracy.

Following Trump’s humiliating groveling before Putin and attacks on NATO, the European Union, and our democratic allies around the world, President Biden has rebuilt the American alliances that have, in some cases, stood for over two centuries. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, and China appears to be re-thinking their belligerent attitude toward Taiwan after last week’s meeting and agreements between the leaders of the US, South Korea, and Japan.

After Trump unilaterally closed all but one of our air bases in Afghanistan to maliciously make his successor’s job more difficult, the Biden administration ended the war in Afghanistan that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had lied us into. He’s also decapitated the leadership of ISIS and El Qaeda.

Ever since six Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted American women’s right to abortion (and multiple Republicans are now trying to ban birth control), President Biden has stood up for women’s healthcare rights. He’s signed several Executive Orders to protect access to reproductive healthcare (including for our military). When 19 Republican state attorneys general demanded the healthcare records of women who’ve sought abortions in more than thirty states, Biden signed an Executive Order strengthening patient privacy.

The Biden administration rolled out a plan to cut as much as $20,000 from the debt carried by America’s student borrowers (student debt of these proportions, the direct result of the Reagan Revolution, does not exist in any other nation on Earth). When a Republican lawsuit before the Supreme Court blocked his efforts, he announced a plan to provide millions of borrowers with more affordable monthly student loan payments through changes to income-driven repayment plans.

While Red states still put people in prison for years for possessing a single marijuana cigarette, President Biden pardoned allAmericans who’ve ever been convicted of a federal pot offense. He’s more recently initiated a multi-agency review of the drug’s Schedule 1 status, with an eye to decriminalizing it nationwide.

After centuries of police violence against Black people and other minorities, Biden signed a landmark executive order on safe, effective, and accountable policing that mandated federal reforms such as banning chokeholds, restricting no-knock entries, creating a national police accountability database, and restricting the transfer of military equipment to local police departments.

Through over a hundred executive actions and the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden has finally put America on course to cut our emissions in half by 2030 and to get to net-zero by 2050. He also protected more lands and waters in his first year than any President since John F. Kennedy.

While Republicans continue to strip people off Red state Medicaid rolls in their pursuit of cruelty, Biden expanded the Affordable Care Act. Millions can now find healthcare for $10 a month or less, and most Americans will see an Obamacare saving of an average of $800 a year.

Since he took office, there has been a combined 50 percent increase in enrollment in states that use HealthCare.gov and the nation’s uninsured rate is historically low at 8 percent. Over 16 million Americans signed up for quality, affordable health coverage, the highest number ever produced in an Obamacare open enrollment period.

Perhaps the most important accomplishment of President Biden has been re-aligning the Democratic Party with its progressive base. Biden worked hand-in-hand with Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders to put forward a sweeping progressive agenda involving an investment of over $5 trillion in America and American working people.

Although united opposition from Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats (including Manchin, Sinema, and the “corporate problem solvers”) forced him to cut the program back, it is still revolutionary given the past 40 years of bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism.

Reversing the anti-organized-labor trend started by Reagan that continued through the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, President Biden has aggressively promoted unions and unionization as essential to the future of working people in America.

President Biden also worked with and helped Nancy Pelosi pass through the House the For The People Act, which would have rolled back much of Citizens United and ended most Republican voter suppression by asserting Americans’ absolute right to vote. Had he not been betrayed by Manchin and Sinema, it would now be law.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (founded by Bernie) has gone from the handful of members (fewer than 10) it was when I did fundraisers for them more than a decade ago to being one of the strongest and largest in Congress (104 members right now). While this isn’t Biden’s doing and much credit goes to its members, Biden is the first Democratic president since LBJ to fully embrace progressives in Congress and fast-track their legislation.

Biden has also:

— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Advanced cutting-edge research on cancer and other diseases through the ARPA-H initiative
— Signed legislation to put more cops on the beat and invest in community policing
— Signed the Electoral Count Act, which takes long overdue steps to protect the integrity of our elections
— Lowered the cost of hearing aids by making them available over the counter
— Created more manufacturing jobs in 2022 than in any single year in nearly 30 years
— Signed an Executive Order to encourage competition across industries
— Took action to lower energy costs for families
— Lowered seniors’ health care expenses, including by capping out of pocket expenses on prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 per year, ensuring that people enrolled in Medicare will not pay more than $35 for a month’s supply of insulin, and recipients will receive free vaccines
— Accelerated adoption of electric vehicles by reducing costs for families, jumpstarted the first national EV charging network, and made historic investments into EV batteries and materials
— Rejoined the Paris Agreement on day one to reassert the United States’ global leadership to combat the climate crisis
— Jumpstarted the American offshore wind industry and convened the nation’s first federal-state offshore wind partnership
— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Lowered the deficit with the single largest annual reduction in American history
— Secured commitments from 20 leading internet providers to increase speeds and cut prices
— Signed legislation to reauthorize and strengthen the Violence Against Women Act
— Awarded the most ever federal contracting dollars to small businesses and disadvantaged small businesses
— Reignited the Cancer Moonshot with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half over the next 25 years
— Appointed a record number of women and people of color to serve in his Administration
— Hosted the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in over 50 years and released a National Strategy to end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases and disparities by 2030
— Awarded more than $1 billion to initiate cleanup and clear the backlog of 49 previously unfunded Superfund sites, over $250 million to clean up hundreds of contaminated brownfield sites, and $725 million for abandoned mine lands
— Restored protections for Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments and designated Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument to conserve our lands and waters, honor our nation’s veterans, protect Tribal cultural resources, and support jobs and America’s outdoor recreation economy
— Signed an Executive Order on Improving Public Safety and Criminal Justice for Native Americans and Addressing the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People
— Invested historic funding for Tribal governments and Native communities, and
— Mailed over 740 million free COVID-19 tests directly to tens of millions of Americans

Below are a set of handy memes you can copy and paste into social media if any of these accomplishments resonate with you or you want to back up claims you’re making online. Just right-click and choose to save, copy, or download them: they’re copyright free.

Here’s to a fascinating (and, no doubt, infuriating) debate!

OPEN THE LINK TO SEE HARTMANN’S MEMES.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Funding, Health, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: How Biden Responded to the Tragedy in Maui

By dianeravitch

August 22, 2023 //

Remember when Donald Trump flew to Puerto Rico after that island was devastated by a major hurricane? He threw rolls of paper towels to people who needed food, water, electricity, and shelter. What Trump did was humiliating to the Puerto Rican people and cringeworthy.

What did Joe Biden do in response to the devastating tragedy in Maui?

Heather Cox Richardson answers the question.

The wildfires that raced across Maui, Hawaii, on Tuesday and Wednesday, August 8 and 9, driven by high winds across land that had been suffering a drought, have fed a familiar political narrative.

That firestorm roared into the 13,000-person town of Lahaina, killing a confirmed 114 people, with more than 1,000 still unaccounted for. It is the deadliest fire in modern U.S. history. While local officials had warned that such a fire was likely, emergency systems were either understaffed or unprepared, or failed for other reasons. Figuring out exactly what happened and why, mourning the dead and injured, and rebuilding, will take years.

President Joe Biden received notice of a brush fire on August 8 as part of his “daily extreme weather memo,” and over the next two days received additional briefings.

“Jill and I send our deepest condolences to the families of those who lost loved ones in the wildfires in Maui, and our prayers are with those who have seen their homes, businesses, and communities destroyed. We are grateful to the brave firefighters and first responders who continue to run toward danger, putting themselves in harm’s way to save lives,” President Biden said in a statement on August 9. He explained that he had ordered all federal assets on the island to help with the response, including the U.S. Coast Guard and the Navy’s 3rd Fleet, as well as the Department of Transportation to coordinate commercial airlines for evacuation.

The next day, August 10, Biden began a speech about the PACT Act in Salt Lake City by saying: “[L]ook, before I begin, I want to say a word about the devastating wildfires that have claimed at least 36 lives in Maui, in Hawaii. [W]e have just approved a major disaster declaration…for Hawaii, which will get aid into the hands of the people… desperately needing help now. [A]nyone who’s lost a loved one, whose home has been damaged or destroyed is going to get help immediately.”

He explained the moves the administration had already made and promised, “I just got off the phone, before I got here, for a long conversation with Governor Josh Green this morning and let him know I’m going to make sure the state has everything it needs from the federal government to recover…. In the meantime, our prayers are with the people of Hawaii, but not just our prayers—every asset we have will be available to them. And we’ve seen—they’ve seen their home, their business destroyed, and some have lost loved ones. And it’s not over yet.”

On that day, August 10, Biden signed a disaster declaration, saying that a major disaster existed in Hawaii, and ordered federal aid to the state to supplement state and local recovery efforts. Federal funding helps with temporary housing and home repairs, some property losses, debris removal, and hazard mitigation.

By August 15, almost 500 federal personnel had been deployed to Maui, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had provided 50,000 meals, 75,000 liters of water, 5,000 cots, and 10,000 blankets and shelter supplies to six shelters run by the American Red Cross and Maui County for survivors who couldn’t go home. FEMA had also approved Critical Needs Assistance (CNA), which provides a one-time payment of $700 per household to those without housing to replace vital items like medication on an emergency basis.

The Small Business Administration had begun making low-interest federal disaster loans available to Hawaii businesses and nonprofit organizations. The Department of Agriculture approved Hawaii’s request for extra Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra declared a public health emergency retroactive to August 8, which gave Medicare and Medicaid greater flexibility in meeting emergency health needs for beneficiaries, then deployed disaster response personnel to Hawaii.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was on the island clearing roads, stabilizing the electrical grid, and working with the Environmental Protection Agency to remove hazardous waste. The U.S. Forest Service Incident Management Teams and Wildfire Liaisons worked with state officials to put the fires out and prevent flare ups, while the U.S. Fire Administration was working to support local firefighters. The Department of Defense was moving supplies across the state.

On August 17, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida and Republic of Korea (ROK) president Yoon Suk Yeol arrived for Friday’s historic trilateral summit at Camp David, and Biden fell publicly silent about Maui. Promptly, the right wing insisted that he had done nothing for Hawaii. In fact, public documents suggest Biden was speaking daily with state officials in Hawaii and increasing the federal response there. By August 19 there were more than 1,000 federal personnel on the ground. “We’ve offered whatever support the governor needs,” General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said.

Whether or not you agree with the level of response the Biden administration has provided to those suffering in the fires, the pattern of using the media to establish a narrative that the administration is ignoring Americans when it clearly is not is almost exactly what happened with the East Palestine, Ohio, railway disaster in February 2023. Then, pro-Russian accounts promptly began to argue that the Biden administration was ignoring a disaster at home—when emergency personnel were on the ground immediately—in order to fund Ukraine’s war against Russia’s invasion.

Now, behavioral scientist Caroline Orr Bueno, a specialist in disinformation, noted that the X (Twitter) account that seeded the “Hawaii, not Ukraine” narrative was created just last month and that accounts associated with both Russia and China are amplifying the narrative that Biden has neglected Maui. It seems telling that the same right-wing “independent journalist” who went to East Palestine has flown into Maui to attack Biden’s response, showing up on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s “War Room.”

Indeed, one of Biden’s strongest suits is his foreign policy initiatives, and as Republican presidential candidates have virtually nothing to offer on that front, some Republicans seem to be trying to use the Maui fire as a way to undercut Biden’s foreign policy triumphs. Increasingly, they are turning against aid to Ukraine as they back former president Trump, who boasted on Friday that he was “the apple of [Russian president Vladimir Putin’s] eye. Supporting Ukraine in its battle against Putin’s authoritarianism has been a key aspect of Biden’s attempt to protect democracy at home and around the world, and as the 2024 election approaches, House Republicans, at least, are reluctant to continue funding that effort.

Today the extremist House Freedom Caucus released a list of what it demands before it will agree even to a short-term measure to fund the government this fall; Ukraine funding is one of the things to which they object.

Today the president and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden visited Maui, where after seeing the devastation, President Biden said that “the country grieves with you, stands with you, and we’ll do everything possible to help you recover, rebuild, and respect culture and traditions when the rebuilding takes place.” He promised that we will “rebuild the way the people of Maui want to build.”

Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) said, “We in Hawaii have been through hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions—but we have never seen such a robust federal response. Thank you.”

—

Notes:

To read the footnotes, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Trump

Katherine Stewart: The Fascist Intellectuals and Crackpots of the Right

By dianeravitch

August 22, 2023 //

Katherine Stewart has written several important books about the insidious Right and their radical, racist views. In this article in The New Republic, she looks at an influential reactionary organization, the Claremont Institute, and traces its ideological forebears. From crackpots to intellectual gurus, she traces the Right’s fascination with manliness, racism, anti-Semitism, and its longing for a world led by a new Caesar, a strong man who will protect other men from rapacious women and immigrants.

It’s a long read but worth your time. Stewart looks at the Fascist underbelly of conservatism, and it’s repulsive.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Gender, Trump

How Mark Meadows Failed as Trump’s Chief of Staff

Thom Hartmann: How Trump Ate and Swallowed the GOP

Thom Hartmann: Why You Should NOT Vote Third Party

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates…

Michael Hiltzik: The Republican Plan to Dumb Down America’s Youth

Fact-Checking the GOP Debate

Jim Hightower: The GOP Plans to Eliminate Federal Programs to Mitigate Climate Change

Tom Nichols: Trump Should Skip All the Debates

Thom Hartmann’s Debate Prep: Biden’s Accomplishments in Three Years

Heather Cox Richardson: How Biden Responded to the Tragedy in Maui

Katherine Stewart: The Fascist Intellectuals and Crackpots of the Right

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We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates…

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