Dear Trump Supporters

Dear Trump Supporters,

I voted for you.  Not your guy, you.  Your guy won; my gal lost.  Which means, I'm afraid, that you lost.  I'm a college educated, white-collar, technology professional.  I'm gonna be fine in a Trump presidency.  You... well things are going to be harder for you.  Let me tell you how this is going to go down, one promise at a time, as enumerated on Politifact.

In Which We Discuss The Scripting Of Debates

Since Kennedy destroyed Nixon in the 1960 Presidential Debate (unless you were listening on the radio, in which case Nixon smashed Kennedy) a great deal of thought has gone into how debates are structured and the subtle details thereof.  Rarely, however, do we get a behind-the-scenes look at how that process works.  At the time of this writing the major contenders for the Republican Presidential Nomination are engaged in a lengthy primary battle and debates are a big part of that; problems with the debate format, and in particular the most recent CNBC debate, have sparked a campaign-revolt against the RNC on the subject of debates.

This morning a letter from Ben Ginsberg, who has been tapped to help the campaign negotiate collectively (an irony that should not go unobserved, given the fervently anti-union position of everyone involved), was leaked to the public.  The letter enumerates the demands that the campaigns wish to make and, while some items are more obvious than others, taken as a whole it reveals a great deal about the debate process and how debates are viewed from within the political machines they serve.  You can find the full letter here at the Washington Post, but I wanted to go through the demands themselves to explore the meaning behind the requests.

On Confederate Flags

Since the shooting of nine parishioners in a church in South Carolina by a self-avowed white supremacist earlier this month a great deal has been said and written on the subject of the Confederate Flag and its place in American - and particularly Southern - culture.

Unambiguously Wrong

Daniel W Drezner, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, penned a solid "big picture" piece on the cartwheeling fireball of catastrophic failure that has been the GOP's ongoing attempts to meddle in foreign policy since winning the Senate in the 2014 elections.  The piece is, as I said, really quite good and I strongly recommend it, but one sentence jumped out at me in particular.

"It takes real effort for people, such as Les Gelb, David Ignatius, Fred Kaplan, Richard Haass, Phil Zelikow et al, to get off their bipartisan fence and blast one party for acting recklessly on foreign policy — and yet Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter has managed to pull it off."

Treason?

In January of 2003 an unnamed White House source was quoted as saying the following: "[President Bush] considers this nation to be at war, and, as such, considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason."

How far we have come.

Why do liberals think banning guns will end violence?

I wrote the following in response to a massively down-voted AskReddit post and figured I may as well repost here:

Liberals, writ large, don't all want to ban guns but they do want differing degrees of restriction upon them so I see where you're coming from with the "ban" language; a ban in whole or in part is still a ban. Likewise, while such a "ban" likely won't "stop" violence completely it may significantly reduce it which is another "in whole or in part" type thing. These linguistic quibbles matter because, as we are about to see, this issue isn't as terribly simple as many would like it to be.

So why do I think stricter gun control will reduce violence?

Image Politics and the Palin Clan's Drunken Brawl

Apparently the Palin clan was involved in a 20 person drunken brawl at an "Iron Dog/Snowmachine party," whatever that is.  The sources on this seem scattered and the account is difficult to piece together but Addicting Info seems happy to report it as fact and even headlines it with "Police:" which gives a bit of additional weight to the suggestion.

The Trouble With Phil

Let's start with what was actually said.  Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson, in a series of unscripted interviews with GQ, said the following, igniting a storm of controversy, accusation, and cultimating in his eventual suspension from his show on A&E.

Phil On Growing Up in Pre-Civil-Rights-Era Louisiana
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

On sin and sinfulness
Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right

Almost overnight, Robertson has gone from a pop-culture star to a cause celeb on the American Right with the likes of Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin wading into the media waters to defend him.  Most of those defenses echo the same "free speech" refrain -- Robertson was only speaking his mind and he has a first amendment right to do so.

And he does have a right to do that -- the trouble with it as a defense is that no one is taking that right away from him.  Robertson's not in prison and no one is threatening him with anything like it.  Invoking the 1st Amendment in Robertson's defense amounts to an endorsement of some kind of government regulation prohibiting businesses from firing people for things they say to the media.  It's hard to imagine that Palin and Jindal would actually back such a measure.

Ultimately the problem with Robertson's comments isn't the faith behind them; it's the politics they inform.  Suggesting that pre-civil-rights black people in Louisiana were happy and godly and that post-civil-rights black people aren't suggests that the systematic racism and oppression which characterized the Jim Crow south was somehow good for African Americans.  That line of argument picks up the patronizing notion of a "white man's burden" lumps it together with an implied racial component to entitlement and welfare, and flings the whole sordid mess at the feat of the people who fought for equal rights.

Likewise, Robertson's judgments on sin -- ignoring the patent absurdity of placing homosexuality at the center of some kind of hierarchy of sinfulness -- has repercussions in the world of politics.  While Robertson does condemn adulterers, idolaters, and prostitutes as well as drunkards, slanderers, and swindlers in the same breath, those people do not find themselves in the unenviable position of having their government judge them ineligible for participation in civil institutions by virtue of their sins.  While Roberson's defenders point to an apparent lack of concern for his identification of drunks as sinners, the fact is that drunks are not out fighting for their right to sit by a loved one's deathbed and comfort him in his final hours.

Homosexuals are.

Robertson's comments could thus be understood more succinctly to mean "ya'll don't need rights; you need Jesus."

For those fighting and sacrificing for those rights such a sentiment is deeply offensive.

Get Ready For Stupid

Unless something very significant changes in Washington in the next 12 hours or so the US government is going to start shutting down in in the early hours of Tuesday morning in a last-ditch attempt to keep from defaulting on its debts.  To be clear, the entire mess is avoidable; the budget line-items covered by a debt increase amount to expenditures which Congress has already signed off on and the only thing standing between the House and a budget that would sail through the Senate and across the President's desk is political grandstanding over an issue on which they've already held more than 40 votes.

What's happening in Washington right now amounts to the Republican Party threatening to wreck the nation and its economy if they don't get their way.  It's government by hostage taking.

False Religion

The hits just keep on coming from the Republican Party, both in Washington DC and, apparently, in Richmond.  Virginia plays host to the only competitive Governor's race this year and as things heat up national attention is focused in on the race between Ken Cuccinelli (R) and Terry McAuliffe (D).

As weird as that race is shaping up to be -- Cuccinelli is actively under investigation by the FBI and McAuliffe is featured in almost every Cuccinelli doing what looks like a shot -- it's nothing compared to the race for Lieutenant Governor featuring Republican E.W. Jackson and Democrat Ralph Northam, who's name I actually had to look up because he's so irrelevant to the race.

Northam is an unmemorable candidate and his presence or absence in the race will likely not move the polls one point in either direction.  Jackson, on the other hand, is a loose cannon, espousing all manner of highly controversial, almost theocratic, views on a wide range of social issues.  The most recent, though far from the most outrageous, of these was given voice in a sermon he gave at the Restoration Fellowship Church in Strasburg, VA in which he described non-christians as "engaged in some sort of false religion."

Good luck defunding Obamacare

It is rare that this blog, leftist as it is, agrees with much of anything that Karl Rove has to say but before being Leftist I strive to be a Pragmatist and in this I have to give Karl a tip of the hat.  His editorial in the Wall Street Journal is spot on.

Understanding Chemical Weapons In 10 Easy Lessons

This post on PolicyMic is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. There are many, many good reasons for the United States to avoid involvement in the Syria situation, not the least of which is that the people we would be aiding - the rebels - have had their movement largely co-opted by more or less the exact same folks we've spent the better part of the last decade fighting in Afghanistan.

Wesley Messamore, however, thinks that we lack "moral authority" to intervene in Syria because of "10 chemical weapons attacks Washington doesn't want you to talk about."

Let's run down Mr Messamore's list, shall we?

Syria

There is something profoundly unsettling about the raft of political pundits and play-callers who seem absolutely sure of themselves as to what the Obama administration and the US Government more broadly should do about Syria.  Polls show that the American people, by and large, do not support military intervention in Syria and that a large majority want Obama to seek the approval of Congress before undertaking any use of force.

At least that latter point is one that we can all agree upon.  The recent leaks about the US intelligence apparatus in conjunction with the lingering memories of the Bush Administration's fabrication of a casus belli for the Iraq war have left Americans justifiably skittish of a hawkish President.  

So Obama should go before Congress... and then what?

Of course the NSA used taxpayer dollars to cover PRISM costs

Apparently the new revelation in the ongoing NSA spying story is that the agency used taxpayer dollars to pay for the participation of US communications companies.

Well of course they did.  The NSA story is perhaps the most important political story since Watergate but that doesn't change that this is a fairly obvious point.

The NSA is a government agency. It has a taxpayer funded budget and expecting private corporations to pick up the tab for its operations in time of war or peace is arguably a great deal worse than using tax dollars to fund the latest NSA outrage.
Also, if the NSA were forcing private companies to cough up for its quasi military intelligence operations there would be a fair case for some 3rd Amendment violations on top of the trampling of the 4th and 5th.

It's not news when it's obvious and it's certainly not scandalous.

What's Lacking In The Tea Party: Basic Human Decency

I post this video both infuriated and frustrated.  The fury I feel is for the brave little girl who stood up and asked a difficult and personally painful question in a public form.  She deserved empathy and understanding form her Congressman, regardless of the politics surrounding the immigration issue.

A Hispanic, Republican Obama?

Apparently it's never too early to start running for President because Rasmussen has an interesting poll out detailing who Republicans most and least want to see as their party's nominee for the 2016 Presidential race. For a company that's built its reputation on data and polling, Rasmussen is stingy with the numbers so I'll break them out for you here.

The survey asked "Suppose the 2016 Republican Presidential Primary were held in your state today. If you had a choice between Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker or Paul Ryan, for whom would you vote?"  The results break down as follows:

Chris Christie: 21%
Marco Rubio: 18%
Jeb Bush: 16%
Rand Paul: 15%
Paul Ryan: 13%
Scott Walker: 6%
Other: 3%
Undecided: 8%

These numbers show little movement from the results of a McCaltchy poll conducted last month which also showed Christie, Rubio, Bush, and Paul in close contention but there is, of course, much more to a primary than the numbers.  The American primary system pits the candidates in a marathon like race across numerous states.  It's about money, endurance, and not a small bit of quirky luck.  Remember that in the run-up to the 2012 race the GOP primary saw moments where Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and Santorum all lead the polls.

Nonetheless, my money is on Rubio.

How would you like it if Congress took away your health benefit?

Imagine that you're a white collar employee.  You went to college, got good grades, applied to competitive internships.  You snagged a much sought-after position in a competitive field, go to work every day, go "above and beyond" at your job to make sure that the enormous workload of a confusing and arcane subject matter gets handled responsibly -- people's lives could be on the line -- and you go home exhausted and drained at the end of the day.  You make a decent wage but one of the real perks of the job is the benefits - your employer kicks in a tidy 75% of your health insurance premium.

Now imagine that the US Congress took that away.  Imagine how upset you'd be, how betrayed you'd feel.  Now stop imagining because Congress did that as part of the PPACA -- the so-called "Obamacare" law.

Outrageous, right?  We should repeal that part immediately, right?  Surely the Republicans on the Hill have your back on this one!

Shot for Teacher

Imagine that your kids go to a school where a number of the teachers are armed and trained to respond with deadly force in the event of a school shooting.  I don't mean that they carry concealed handguns; we're talking about a week and a half's worth of training, shoot-or-don't-shoot scenarios, the whole bit.  They're even licensed as security guards by the state.

Would you want your kids there?

A train-wreck of close-mindedness and bigotry

Decisions Are Made By People Who Show Up

If I am overly fond of quoting NBC's The West Wing when it comes to American politics it is only because it is a cache of among the best one-liners and summations of the realities of the entire field.  This post's title comes from something White House Press Secretary CJ Craig says at a Rock the Vote rally.  She is exhorting the youth to turn out and vote because for Democrats, the involvement of low-commitment voters is what makes or breaks an election cycle.