Month: January 2020

Would they like you?
by Tom Sullivan

Compassion has been a dwindling resource for years in this country. Especially for the sort of people who would separate refugee parents from their small children and blame them for it. Especially especially when they claim the Jesus Christ Stamp of Approval for both the policy and its sponsor in the Oval Office.

I’ve argued since my earliest days on this blog that as much as we like to believe people’s voting choices are rational (and insist ours are), that’s not reality. There is a visceral component all our book-learning misses. Insisting people vote rationally is as nonsensical as establishing literacy or ideological requirements before granting citizenship rights to infants. It makes sense voters should make decisions more rationally, but they don’t.

Yascha Mounk examines in The Atlantic the notion people voted for George W. Bush because, as a poll question revealed, “most undecided voters would have preferred to drink a beer with Bush rather than his opponent, John Kerry.” What if the question gets it backwards? What if people actually preferred the candidate they felt “would rather have a beer with them.”

Mounk explains:

The original formulation of the beer question invites the question of why voters would care so much about something that is exceedingly unlikely to happen. If you invert it, however, voters start to look a lot less irrational. After all, they can’t foresee all the decisions politicians will need to make once in office, and have few ways of holding them accountable if they don’t follow through on their promises. So they need to estimate which politicians are most likely to understand and advance their interests.

A candidate’s attitudes toward “people like me” thus become a powerful heuristic. If a candidate generally likes people like me, then it seems plausible that he will look out for my interests in a wide range of scenarios. If he dislikes people like me—if he would hate sharing a beer with me, and secretly thinks I’m trash—then he is far more likely to sell me out.

That’s rational, but likely subconscious. It’s a gut-level measure of likedability, rather than likability, Mounk theorizes. It might explain Joe Biden’s stickiness at the top of Democratic presidential polls. His style suggests “he does not sit in judgment of either his would-be supporters or their loved ones. If there’s one thing that’s easy to believe about Biden, it is that he’d love to get a beer with you—and your dad, and your mother-in-law, and even your crazy uncle.”

Maybe it’s not just name recognition. Maybe it comes natural to Biden. Maybe it’s a degree of emotional intelligence.

Mounk adds:

Most Americans spend relatively little time thinking about public policy. Politicians who give the impression that they are quick to disparage any contrary opinions, or to dismiss voters who express the right values in the wrong ways, are likely to fail the real beer test.

This is a lesson Democrats should urgently take to heart. According to a recent poll, most Americans fear that the Democratic Party doesn’t really want them. Asked whether they feel that “people like me are welcome in the Democratic Party,” only 44 percent of all voters and 38 percent of independents agreed.

Uh-huh. Americans in general vote more with their guts than with their heads, agreed. But what makes columns warning Democrats to “change their ways” especially annoying is they guilt-trip the left for harboring feelings the right feels no shame in expressing openly. Hillary Clinton’s public “deplorables” comment was unwise and it was insensitive. But don’t expect conservative magazines to reprimand Republican voters for being insensitive. Or to remind millions of Trump fans to check their disdain for lefties at the coliseum door if they want to bridge the political divide. They don’t want to. The Republican Party’s internal 2012 “autopsy” advised them minority voters felt “Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” Rank-and-file Republicans ignored that advice and gave the world Donald Trump and their middle fingers. When was the last time public polling asked about that?

Even so, Democrats will be sending canvassers to knock doors across the country this year. If they’re smarter than the 2016 Clinton campaign, they won’t simply be working a base-turnout strategy. They’ll do some persuasion. And if they’re as smart as they think they are, they’ll check their condescension at the door.

I wrote in this space in September 2014 about a Georgia Republican state senator saying, “I would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters.” It wasn’t even a proper dog whistle. Fran Millar was complaining about African Americans being allowed to vote on Sunday at South DeKalb Mall:

Yet, I sometimes hear the same from lefties about poor, white, Republican voters. Occasionally, they just blurt out that voters are stupid. More often it’s couched in a dog-whistle complaint about people voting against their best interests. Which, if you think about it, is just a more polite way of saying the same thing.

As a field organizer in the South, I remind canvassers that, no, those voters are not stupid. They’re busy. With jobs and kids and choir practice and soccer practice and church and PTA and Friday night football and more. Unlike political junkies, they don’t keep up with issues. They don’t have time for the issues. When they go to the polls they are voting to hire someone to keep up with the issues for them. And when they look at a candidate — your candidate — what they are really asking themselves is simple: “Is this someone I can trust?”

One of my favorite southernisms is, “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like.” That, I caution canvassers, is how most Americans really vote, like it or not. And if you don’t purge the thought, those “low information” voters? They will know you think they’re stupid before you do. Right before you ask for their votes.

*scroll down for newer stuff

Thank You!

Many Thanks to everyone who participated in the fundraiser this year. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the support and the implicit endorsement of my work.

I also want to thank Tom Sullivan, my trusted morning man who writes so beautifully and is working feverishly to help progressives get elected all over the country. It’s a privilege to have his daily contribution and I treasure it.

Also a big shout-out to my old friend Dennis Hartley, movie and music guy extraordinaire. His collections are invaluable and his taste is impeccable. I look forward every week to getting his recommendations for movies new and old.

And many thanks to the occasional contributors tristero, spocko, and Batoccio. I’m always excited to see what has sparked their interest.

We have news. This blog will be moving to a new platform quite soon. It won’t change much other than the look (a little) and, hopefully, the ability to use some more modern bells and whistles. So stay tuned.  If at some point soon you find yourself redirected to a different place, just bookmark it and carry on.

So thank you for another year of blogging and the chance to cover the next year’s craziness. I know I’m going to need the therapy of writing and maybe you need the therapy of reading something from another citizen who sees what you’re seeing?

It’s going to be a long strange trip, that’s all I know. Let’s take it together.

cheers,

d

To all MSM producers: Tell us who pays the war experts you are booking now

by Spocko

MSM’s “America marches to war” shows will start Friday January 3, 2020.  Iran’s General Soleimani’s death has been described as a seismic event.

Cable news producers think, “This is probably going to mean a war in the middle east. Who can I book who is an expert in this region and war?” To the people in the news business that seems the obvious thing to do. They are just “covering the news” But they don’t see that who they have on to talk about war helps define the event and how people react.

Selling war involves authority figures explaining what they think could happen or should happen. Keep an eye out for those retired generals. Who pays them? Do they work for people selling missiles, drones or boots on the ground suppliers?

People need to hear from experts on NOT GOING TO WAR.Who are the DEESCALATION experts? What do they suggest we do?

We need to contact the shows and suggest, no DEMAND they list affiliations for every expert who talks about why and how America might have to go to war over this event.

Check their affiliations this time! That includes think tank people. Who funds them? Any foreign governments funding them? What are the names of the defense contractors who give millions a year to keep a “retired general” ready to go talk about the level of esclation we will have to start?

Lee Fang did a great piece on this in 2014 Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits? 

Dear producers: For every retired general can we PLEASE get an equal number of experts to talk about what we can do BESIDES go to war? Think of it like your favorite “Both sides” argument you use all the time.

Schoolyard tactics but no strategy

This post about the current mess in Iraq and Iran by foreign policy expert and experienced diplomat Wendy Sherman is well worth reading. She points out something that should be obvious but isn’t.

She writes that Iraq is always a problem which we made worse with the invasion in 2003.  And the strange bedfellows this created among all the various players in the region made it even more complicated.

She writes:

The U.S. troops worked alongside Iraqi and Iranian militia to destroy a common enemy, the Islamic State terrorism group. And even as Washington was confronting Iran over its nuclear program and malign behavior elsewhere, we maintained an uneasy coexistence in Iraq, where Tehran holds considerable sway.

Like much of Trump’s national security and foreign policy, his Iran approach is tactical and not strategic. The results have been devastating to U.S. interests. Iran’s most extreme hard-liners, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Quds force, which never wanted the nuclear deal, have gained more power, arguing that the United States couldn’t be trusted to honor any agreement.

Iran’s nefarious activities in the region have increased, because terror is not an expensive undertaking and so is largely immune from economic sanctions. Indeed, the IRGC has happily returned to controlling the lucrative black market under Trump’s sanctions. And Iran, after complying with the deal for nearly three years, now confronted with “maximum pressure” and no diplomatic track, has begun to unwind its compliance.

And worse than just being tactical without being strategic is the fact that his tactics are all twitter bluster and empty threats.

Read the whole thing if you have the time. We are in another dangerous moment. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get through it without anything terrible happening. But Trump made the huge mistake of saying that his “red-line” is any American life being lost. That was the reason they retaliated against the contractor being killed in the shelling last week. And it escalated the situation in exactly the way the hardliners hoped it would.

As Sherman says, terrorism is cheap. Sanctions don’t have any effect on that. But for someone like Trump who thinks everything in this world is about money, deals, quid-pro-quos, that just doesn’t compute. After all, he thought Kim Jong Un would give up his nukes in exchange for some condos on beach. He really did.

This is what happens when you elect the narcissitic fool at the end of the bar who has no experience and won’t listen to anyone who does.

Update: news at this hour of the possible killing of a top Iranian General by an American airstrike in Iraq.  Stay tuned. This is escalating quickly.

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Trump and his media enemies

I’m as much a proponent of meaningful anti-trust enforcement as anyone. Obviously, it’s a huge part of the structural imbalance in our economic system. (I recommend Matt Stoller’s new book “Goliath” on this subject.)  But using anti-trust to punish media companies that Trump doesn’t like is not good.

Recall that he intervened to deny Amazon a $10 billion Pentagon contract to wreak his revenge against the Washington Post.  And there was good reporting that he interfered in the ATT and Time-Warner merger in an attempt to make them spin off and weaken CNN. The New York Times reported in 2017 that “White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T.” The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer later  reported that Trump actually did try to make National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, block the merger.

More Ukranian shoes…

Just Security got a hold of some of the heavily redacted emails that were released to the Center for Public integrity a week or so ago. They offer more proof that the president himself was directing the bribery scheme, using hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money hostage to help his re-election campaign.

“Clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.”

This is what Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told Elaine McCusker, the acting Pentagon comptroller, in an Aug. 30 email, which has only been made available in redacted form until now. It is one of many documents the Trump administration is trying to keep from the public, despite congressional oversight efforts and court orders in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation.

Earlier in the day on Aug. 30, President Donald Trump met with Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss the president’s hold on $391 million in military assistance for Ukraine. Inside the Trump administration, panic was reaching fever pitch about the president’s funding hold, which had stretched on for two months. Days earlier, POLITICO had broken the story and questions were starting to pile up. U.S. defense contractors were worried about delayed contracts and officials in Kyiv and lawmakers on Capitol Hill wanted to know what on earth was going on. While Trump’s national security team thought withholding the money went against U.S. national security interests, Trump still wouldn’t budge.

As always he assumed his strongarm tactics would get him what he wanted. And truthfully, they almost did. Zelensky was ready to go on Fareed Zakariah’s CNN program (as instructed by the Trumpies) to announce that they would open the investigation into 2016 and Joe Biden. But, as usual, because he was crudely breaking the law, he ran into obstacles to his plan and by mid-September it had blown up and he had to release the money.

Trump is always dancing as fast as he can, creating new scams to cover for the old ones. He’s like Bernie Madoff only with the nuclear codes. This one was particularly idiotic and totally unnecessary but because he has a very sever personality disorder, he was seduced by the idea that since the Mueller Report didn’t deliver a lethal blow, the could get away with doing what he did in 2016, only with all the power of the presidency behind him. His sycophants and accomplices no doubt reinforced his self-destructive impulses.

Every day brings more evidence of Trump’s direction of events. Every other day Giuliani is out there making incriminating statements. At least once a week we have accomplices in Rudy’s scheme offering to hand over data to investigators.

Those Republican senators who are looking at a tough re-election have to be wondering if they are going to come out on the wrong side of this vote when all the evidence is in and end up paying for Trump’s sins.

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Australia’s Prime Minister looks forward to the apocalypse

This is the welcome every incompetent climate-denying Murdoch quisling should get across the Anglosphere. Good on the people of Cobargo for telling the Prime Minister of Australia what they think of him. https://t.co/bzUaz376DE

— Wesley Clark (@WesClarkjr) January 2, 2020

Prime Minister Morrison does not believe that climate change is causing any of Australia’s climate problems. He wants to increase the use of fossil fuels, especially coal. He says “prosperity” is the pressing issue of the day, not climate. Apparently, he sees Australia literally rising from the ashes.
Apparently Morrison is a lot like Trump but for different reasons. He won on an harsh anti-immigrant platform they called “Operation Sovereign Borders” in which they used the military to detain child refugees.

But unlike Trump he is a fundamentalist Pentacostal. This article in the Australian Monthly goes into it and it’s creepy:

Why would someone who followed the teachings of Jesus want to stop asylum seekers from attending a family funeral? How could a committed Christian keep children locked up while helping his daughter leave a present for detained kids under the church Christmas tree? These were legitimate questions, but the common answer that Morrison was a hypocrite was almost certainly wrong. Given how Pentecostal Christianity understands evil, it is much more likely that Morrison’s conviction came from the fact that he genuinely believed that the military deployment and harsh punishments for these unauthorised arrivals were the will of God. The likelihood is that, for Morrison, Operation Sovereign Borders was not just like a “war”, it was one. Faith was not being put to one side in favour of political self-interest but was being rigorously upheld. 

Belief in Satan and the imminent return of Christ also helps explain the prime minister’s less-than-passionate response to the most pressing environmental issue of our time. It is not surprising that Pentecostal activism about climate change is non-existent – the end of the known world is not a matter for mere mortals to decide. When Morrison proudly showed off a piece of coal in parliament, there is no reason to doubt that he believed what he held in his hand was a gift from God. 

It is also likely that Morrison has a level of skepticism about empirical science in general. One of the core doctrines of the ACC is that “all original life forms, including humanity, were made by the specific immediate creative acts of God … and that all biological changes which have occurred since creation are limited to variation within species”. In other words, humans and other animals were created by God in their essential form. If Morrison does not believe this, it should be easy enough to say so.

That also explains why some conservative Christians in America accept Donald Trump. If it were me, I would probably think he was the anti-Christ but they seem to take him at face value as being God’s chosen one.

Whatever the motives of the two leaders or their supporters, whether they want to bring on the apocalypse or put as much money into their own pockets as possible, the end result is the same: total resistance to urgently addressing the climate crisis. And it’s going to kill us.

If the people don’t get serious and use the power they have in these western democracies (before it’s taken away) to elect serious people we won’t make it.

Get your BS detectors working, people




Following up on Tom’s post below, I thought I’d post his as well:

He told a story about past English judges tolerating wife-beating. Minutes later, returning to his argument about how American permissiveness toward the abuse of women descends from centuries-old English permissiveness, he said this: pic.twitter.com/RxOYylfwz0

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 2, 2020

Biden’s claims about the roots of domestic violence in America can certainly be disputed — I’m not sure if he has all of his old-England history correct — but he certainly wasn’t making some general argument that America is solely a country of European culture, or something.

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 2, 2020

As Greg Sargent at the Washington Post explains:

Biden opened by talking about how English common law in the 1300s allowed for husbands to beat their wives, and then said that we had inherited this “cultural problem.” Biden then talked at great length about his father’s teachings to him, his work in the Senate on domestic violence, and other related matters. 

Toward the end, Biden circled back to English common law, and said this: 

Folks, this is about changing the culture, our culture, our culture. It’s not imported from some African nation or some Asian nation. It’s our English jurisprudential culture, our European culture, that says it’s all right. 

The edited video removes that first sentence and the very last clause, so all you hear is this:

Our culture, our culture. It’s not imported from some African nation or some Asian nation. It’s our English jurisprudential culture, our European culture.

Crooks and Liars correctly observes:

This is just a shot across the bow. Disinformation is the currency of Trump, the Trump campaign, Russians, and anyone else who feels the need to meddle in our elections. Since Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that election meddling is welcome in 2020, expect this to be the norm, not the exception. I don’t know who edited the video, I don’t know what team they were playing on, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it captured the attention of social media influencers, who picked up the ball and ran with it before realizing they’d been duped. Many of them deleted their tweets and apologized for reacting, but many did not, even when confronted with the full context of Biden’s remarks. 

Welcome to the disinformation decade. It’s on us to minimize the impact, by taking care not to amplify or spread disinformation. Context matters. Truth matters. Deliberation matters. Don’t let them win.

I would just add that this isn’t new. Recall this article from 2016 about how the GOP skillfully baited the left to turn against Clinton with bogus tweets. Too many people fell for it and amplified it for their own reasons and it ended up helping Trump. We know the Russians played in that pool on Facebook too, especially targeting the African American community.

Don’t be a Trump useful idiot. Be careful what you share even if it confirms your biases. Make a commitment to truth. What you do with the truth is fair game — spreading lies is not.

C&L helpfully provides the full Biden video and promises to be vigilant about this during the unfolding campaign. Thank goodness.

That video is the entire Biden comment.

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You children, don’t put your lips on that!
by Tom Sullivan

Good advice for 2020. Not a resolution, exactly, but some decent advice for those who remember 2016 too well. From the “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” Department, Farhad Manjoo offers some tips in a New York Times op-ed for surviving 2020 in the disinformation age. Here’s a key one:

Virality is a red flag. Suspect it.

If I were king of the internet, I would impose an ironclad rule: No one is allowed to share any piece of content without waiting a day to think it over.

People who should have known better shared a lot of misinformation/disinformation during the 2016 campaign. We know now about Russian trolls, ads purchased through phony Facebook accounts, and fake news from Macedonia. Facebook became so toxic it was something to avoid. Political discussions on social media? Don’t have political discussions on social media.

The 2016 item I remember best was a viral post about Hillary Clinton’s joint fundraising agreements with states. It arrived via a sibling. The author was an actress from the 1970s and 80s who I’d last heard about when she had a psychotic break in 1996. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she went on to become a mental health advocate. (She took her own life in 2018.) The detailed post purported to document the ways in which Hillary Clinton had bought the loyalties of the DNC and state party organizations. And maybe it did. But in the Internet Age what the lengthy post did not do was provide a single hyperlink to original source material. That should have been a red flag. But it confirmed what people already believed and that made it shareable.

But knowing what we know now about 2016 (to quote the sage), “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

Manjoo continues:

Social networks and even governments are looking into ways to curb viral misinformation, but this fight will define our age. The root of the problem is that humans are weak, gullible dolts; every day many of us, even people who should know better — folks with fancy jobs and blue check marks next to our handles — keep falling for online hoaxes. Virality hijacks our better instincts, and because so many of the internet’s business models benefit from instant popularity, there’s a great deal of money and power riding on our failings.

There is only one long-term fix: that a critical number of us alter how we approach viral content. Let’s all consciously embark on a mind-set shift. In 2020, question anything that everyone’s talking about, especially if it fits all your priors, or there’s some kind of ad money involved. (Hint: There’s always ad money involved.) If you can’t stop sharing, at least slow your roll. The stakes are enormous; there’s no room for error. Strive to be better, please.

Good advice. In a world where Don LaFontaine could declare “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” critical thinking skills are neither held in high regard nor taught. Even people whose judgment is generally reliable screw up. One “bit” of mine is to loudly poke a finger at someone’s chest and declare, “Oh, yeah? Well I’m not as smart as I think I am!”

Let Rudy “prosecute” the case!

@glennkirschner2 on @RudyGiuliani‘s Shenanigans and his “lawyering” not being up to par.. pic.twitter.com/z48gMVD97x

— Sassan K. Darian (@sasss31) January 1, 2020

“I would testify, I would do demonstrations, I’d give lectures, I’d give summations, or I’d do what I do best, I’d try the case. I’d love to try the case. I don’t know if anybody would have the courage to give me the case, but if you give me the case, I will prosecute it as a racketeering case, which I kind of invented anyway. It was 30 years ago, but let’s see if I can still do it.”

As Kirschner points out, Rudy seems a little bit addled about what role he might have in the impeachment trial. The prosecutors are the House managers. He would be the defense lawyer. I don’t think he’s ever defended anyone in court.

 He recently told New York magazine that he wanted to represent Trump in the Senate so he could cross-examine Democrats.

“I’m great at it. It’s what I do best as a lawyer. That’s what I would be good at Oh, I would love it, I could rip — you know, I hate to sound like a ridiculously boastful lawyer, but cross-examining them would be, I don’t know, I could’ve done it when I was a second-year assistant U.S. attorney. They’re a bunch of clowns.”

Apparently, he really believes the impeachment trial is actually the president’s prosecution of Joe Biden. Or something.

He is obviously still tight with the president, he was down in Florida over the holidays at all the big events. As far as we know he is still representing him and Trump can certainly have personal lawyers representing him in an impeachment trial. Bill Clinton did.

So why not Rudy? He knows the story better than anyone.

Of course, he is actually a co-conspirator but these impeachment trials are their own weird thing. Why not have an accomplice who thinks someone else is on trial act as the lawyer?

The Trump and Rudy show would be a ratings smash.

If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d