Month: July 2022

How much proof do you need?

Celebrating cruelty against others is a common, unsettling, and all-too-human bonding mechanism, Adam Serwer argued in 2018. Whether it is telling ethnic jokes, or adolescent men demeaning women, or white crowds smiling before lynching victims, “community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.”

For the most extreme on the right, taking out their anxieties on people even like themselves serves a similar purpose. Cruelty is about dominance and dominance is about power. Ask former President George W. Bush, known for giving demeaning nicknames to his closest friends and advisers. Cruelty is addictive and addiction eventually bites.

Matthew Sitman argues that Margaret Thatcher’s famous formulation that “there is no such thing as society” only “individual men and women and families” was about more than casting blame on the less unfortunate for their fates. It was political inspiration for a movement dedicated to proving her right. Cruelly, if necessary.

“The belief that society doesn’t exist, or shouldn’t,” Sitman writes at Gawker online, “is a rejection of neighborliness and trust, a democratic civic culture, and the possibility of encountering those unlike yourself on equal ground.” Equality was never the point for some among us. Rejection of any mutual responsibility means with “stand your ground laws and laws that allow protesters to be run over with vehicles, reactionaries are empowered to patrol the public square with increasing impunity.” Reactionaries insist everyone go around strapped for the next opportunity to shoot it out with passersby.

National Journal considers that Republican reactionaries have no qualms about proving even to other conservatives who’s boss:

The House of Representatives held two major votes last week designed to protect existing rights enshrined by Supreme Court decisions, but that Justice Clarence Thomas targeted in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: ensuring that states recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, and guaranteeing access to contraception across the country. Both bills were passed by “bipartisan” majorities, since some Republicans supported each. But the numbers show that in each case, elected Republicans are not representing their voters.

Forty-seven Republican representatives—22 percent of 211 members—voted in favor of protecting same-sex marriages even if the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision is ultimately overturned and some states stop issuing licenses for same-sex marriages. Polls show that around half of Republican voters support same-sex marriage.

Just eight House Republicans voted to protect contraception access—a paltry 4 percent of the caucus. The right to birth control is hardly controversial. The issue was settled in the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision. Gallup polling shows that 92 percent of Americans say contraception is morally acceptable. A PRRI survey shows that 77 percent of Republicans oppose laws restricting what types of birth control are available. Yet the vast majority of the Republican caucus voted against protecting access to this basic aspect of health care.

Age is only a modest factor in opposition to birth control (about 45% support among Republicans in the PRRI survey). House Republicans’ strategy is to align more with their party’s white evangelical wing (about a third of the party) than with the majority whose views a functioning democracy is designed to reflect.

Natalie Jackson predicts a backlash from within the party. She explains, “the long-term risks of this strategy might be devastating for the party if a supermajority conservative Supreme Court guts more rights that most Americans (and Republicans) support, and Republicans have refused to act to protect them. Same-sex couples might not be a large part of the Republican base, but women certainly are.”

Cruelty, dominance, alpha-dogness is unsustainable as a political project. The worry is that it is hard-wired, and the less pressure there is for acting, as Stiman writes, “as if we really did live in a society” with “obligations to each other, duties of care and concern,” the longer cruelty-as-policy can endure. Slavery persisted on these shores for a very long time.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

I wonder why?

This is fascinating:

Online fund-raising has slowed across much of the Republican Party in recent months, an unusual pullback of small donors that has set off a mad rush among Republican political operatives to understand why — and reverse the sudden decline before it damages the party’s chances this fall.

Small-dollar donations typically increase as an election nears. But just the opposite has happened in recent months across a wide range of Republican entities, including every major party committee and former President Donald J. Trump’s political operation.

The total amount donated online fell by more than 12 percent across all federal Republican campaigns and committees in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, according to an analysis of federal records from WinRed, the main online Republican donation-processing portal.

More alarming for Republicans: Democratic contributions surged at the same time. Total federal donations on ActBlue, the Democratic counterpart, jumped by more than 21 percent.

The overall Democratic fund-raising edge online widened by $100 million from the last quarter of 2021 to the most recent three-month period, records show.

Exacerbating the fund-raising problems for Republicans is that Mr. Trump continues to be the party’s dominant fund-raiser and yet virtually none of the tens of millions of dollars he has raised has gone toward defeating Democrats. Instead, the money has funded his political team and retribution agenda against Republicans who have crossed him.

Even Trump’s fundraising is down. Is it possible that the Republicans are getting tired? I don’t know. Polling suggests that they are enthusiastic and ready to vote but that usually goes hand in hand with donating money. You can be sure they’re being hit up constantly. It’s very interesting.

The bad news is that all the rich assholes who have always funded the Republicans are writing big checks so they won’t be starved for cash. But small donor enthusiasm has been a pretty reliable indication of enthusiasm for some years now and it’s the Democrats who are putting their money where their hopes are. Stay tuned.

The fantasy liberal hellholes red America loves to hate

Krugman with a good one. Very shrill. (Old timers will remember that reference…:)

Desensitization is an amazing thing. At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.

What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.

Urban elites are constantly accused of not understanding Real America™. And, to be fair, most big-city residents probably don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural areas and small towns, although it’s doubtful whether this gap justified the immense number of news reports interviewing Trump voters sitting in diners.

But I’d argue that right-wing misperceptions of blue America run far deeper — and are far more dangerous.

Let’s start with the politics. The other day The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, reporting from the campaign trail, noted that many Republican candidates are claiming that Democrats are deliberately undermining the nation and promoting violence against their opponents; some are even claiming that we’re already in a civil war.

Some (many?) of these candidates have been winning primaries, suggesting that the G.O.P. base agrees with them. Actually, I’d like to see some surveys along the lines of those showing that most Republicans accept the Big Lie. How many Republicans believe that President Biden and other leading Democrats are left-wing radicals, indeed Marxists?

Relatedly, I’d like to know how many Republicans believe that Black Lives Matter demonstrators looted and burned large parts of America’s major cities.

Now, the reality is that the modern Democratic Party is a mildly center-left coalition, consisting of what Europeans would call social democrats, and relatively conservative ones at that. To take one measure, I can’t think of any prominent Democrats — actually, any Democratic members of Congress — who have expressed admiration for any authoritarian foreign regime.

This is in contrast to widespread conservative admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who recently denounced other Europeans for “mixing with non-Europeans” and declared that he doesn’t want Hungary to become a “mixed-race” country.

On the domestic violence front, a study by the Anti-Defamation League found that 75 percent of extremist-related domestic killings from 2012 to 2021 were perpetrated by the right and only 4 percent by the left.

Finally, about B.L.M.: The protests were, in fact, overwhelmingly peaceful. Yes, there was some arson and looting, with total property damage typically estimated at $1 billion to $2 billion. That may sound like a lot, but America is a big country, so it needs to be put in perspective.

Here’s one point of comparison. Back in April, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, pulled a political stunt at the border with Mexico, temporarily imposing extra security checks that caused a major slowdown of traffic, disrupting business and leading to a lot of spoiled produce. Total economic losses have been estimated at around $4 billion; that is, a few days of border-security theater appear to have caused more economic damage than a hundred days of mass protests.

Yet pointing out these facts probably won’t change many minds. Nor does there seem to be any way to change the perception, also alluded to in that Post article, that a lax attitude toward law enforcement has turned America’s big cities into dangerous hellholes. It’s true that violent crime rose during the pandemic, but it rose about as much in rural America as it did in urban areas. And despite that recent rise, violence in many cities is far lower than it was not long ago.

In New York City, homicides so far this year are running a bit below their 2021 level, and in 2021 they were 78 percent lower than they were in 1990 and a quarter lower than they were in 2001. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has documented, New York is actually a lot safer than small-town America. Los Angeles has also seen a big long-term drop in homicides, as has California as a whole. Some cities, notably Philadelphia and Chicago, are back to or above early 1990s murder rates, but they’re not representative of the broader picture.

But who among the Republican base will acknowledge this reality? Whenever I mention New York’s relative safety, I get a wave of mail saying, in effect, “You can’t really believe that.”

The fact is that a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t have to speculate about whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.

Thank you.

Third world devolution update

Our infrastructure is crumbling in so many ways. This is just one example and it’s vital, particularly since the weather is now so volatile:

The patchwork of power grids that kept the country’s lights on for much of the last century is dangerously strained. Extreme weather and growing electricity use are demanding more of the grid at just the moment when the supply of 24/7 power is shrinking. With heat waves already roasting broad swaths of the nation, this summer’s brutal forecasts mean rolling blackouts are more likely than at any other point in living memory ― and the risk only gets worse by the year.

In Texas this month, where ideologically guided deregulation caused rolling blackouts last year that left hundreds dead, the grid operator urged customers to cut back on power use as demand surged. In New York City, where a nuclear plant that once provided the bulk of the five boroughs’ zero-carbon power shut down last year, the local power utility sent text messages last week urging ratepayers to cut back amid a heat wave. In California, rolling blackouts have become a feature of wildfire season as the utilities prefer shutting down power lines to the legal liability of potentially having some equipment spark a blaze.

Of the country’s nine grid regions, none is more vulnerable this year than the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). It covers Watkins and the 42 million other people living in 15 states along the Mississippi River, from Louisiana to Michigan and beyond, into the Canadian province of Manitoba.

“We’re the greatest country in the world,” said Tony Anderson, the general manager of the Cherryland Electric Cooperative in Grawn, Michigan. “And now we’re talking about shutting people off because we don’t have the generation to serve them.”

A New Era Of Power Generation

To understand why the MISO (pronounced MY-so) is in such peril, one could look to southwest Michigan, where the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station closed in May despite a last-ditch scramble by state and federal leaders to save the plant, which was deemed safe to produce enough zero-carbon power for 800,000 homes. The closure came just two days after the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the federally backed nonprofit responsible for developing standards for keeping the lights on across the continent, released its annual report listing the MISO as the system most at risk of blackouts this summer.

Across the Upper Midwest, coal and nuclear plants have come offline faster than new generators capable of matching demand are coming online, and routine infrastructure repairs have temporarily shrunk supply even more.

The seeds of chaos were sown in the 1990s, when states began “restructuring” electricity markets to force more competition among power plant operators. Undergirding this change was the belief that pitting plants against each other in hourly battles for market share would take profit away from the power plants and hand it back to the consumer in the form of lower prices on energy bills. As a result, electricity rates went from reflecting what monopoly utilities and the elected commissioners that regulated them said was needed to cover long-term costs to the lowest price in a daily bidding war. The market shift not only failed to deliver steadily cheap electricity, it allowed short-term thinking to dominate the system, a National Bureau of Economic Research study concluded in 2015.

That year marked something of a turning point for the grid. In 2015, as new federal regulations limiting toxic mercury emissions from coal stations were poised to come into effect, plant owners were forced to decide between investing in costly equipment upgrades or shut down. Many, already nearing the end of a coal plant’s ordinary lifespan, chose to close.

Construction of new coal plants is unlikely. Though coal has stubbornly defied forecasts of its demise, the extraordinary toll its pollution takes on the climate in the long term and on surrounding communities in the short term raises doubts over whether a new plant would last long enough to earn back the initial investment. Financial pressures mounted on coal plants over the past decade as the U.S. boom in hydraulic fracturing, the drilling technique known as fracking, made natural gas cheap. The plummeting price of wind turbines, photovoltaic panels and batteries squeezed coal even tighter.

Another wave of closures even bigger than 2015 is set to crash in 2028, when a record number of coal plants will cease operation.

Nuclear plants can most easily make use of the grid infrastructure built around coal stations. But nuclear power, which can deliver a bounty of coal-quality electricity without the climate-changing emissions, faces a similar problem. The nation’s aging fleet of roughly 90 reactors has struggled to compete against gas and renewables in markets that aren’t typically designed to factor in nuclear plants’ unique dependability or the subsidies and loans making renewables and gas cheap. As with coal plants, environmentalists have fiercely protested to close nuclear stations over concerns about Chernobyl-style accidents and the lack of permanent disposal for radioactive waste that remains dangerous for millenniums.

In many places, shutdowns of coal and nuclear plants have been lauded as steps toward cleaner futures. While that may be true of coal, new, cleaner forms of generation have not kept pace with closures, and the grid’s infrastructure has not undergone the costly overhauls needed to accommodate more renewables. If that mismatch of goals results in blackouts, environmentalists’ victories against coal plants could prove Pyrrhic.

Eliminating the 40% of U.S. climate-changing emissions that come from things like fueling automobiles and heating buildings will, in most cases, require swapping internal-combustion-engine cars for electric vehicles and gas furnaces for electric heat pumps. Even with more efficient appliances and conservation measures, that shift could drive up demand for electricity by 38% by 2050, according to a National Renewable Energy Laboratory study. And that estimate isn’t factoring in the myriad other potential new sources of intense energy demand in a hotter world, such as desalination plants to turn saltwater to freshwater or direct air capture machines to suck CO₂ from the atmosphere ― to say nothing of phenomena such as Bitcoin mining.

“Demand is going up and supply is going down. That’s the problem,” said Jim Matheson, chief executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, a trade group representing nonprofit co-ops in 47 states. “We can’t have some aspirational policy where if we remove these plants, somehow the market will take care of this in an orderly fashion. That’s not going to happen.”

Before the mercury regulations kicked in for coal plants, Eric Baker, chief executive of Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative, said he had never seen what is known as a “max gen” event ― a moment when demand is so close to eclipsing supply on the grid that operators halt all maintenance and planned outages to generate maximum volumes of power.

“Prior to 2016, there were none. Since 2016, we’ve had 40, and last year we had a record,” said Baker, whose co-op distributes power around rural Michigan. “That’s what I see as a canary in the coal mine that says the grid is being taxed.”

I’m sure you all remember the Enron debacle, just the most famous example of the 90s fetish for deregulation that was going to use “competition” to solve every problem. I remember my hairdresser telling me that she was getting into selling energy and thinking, “oh my god, it’s an Amway “get rich quick scheme.” We all know how that turned out.

When violent marriages were good for kids

I knew this guy wanted to go back to some fantasy era of good feelings in America but I didn’t realize that he fully embraces the actual horrors of the past:

JD Vance thinks parents should stay in violent marriages "for the sake of their kids." That's not just wrong, it's unbelievably dangerous. pic.twitter.com/aQnTGRCuNi

— Tim Ryan (@TimRyan) July 25, 2022

What’s so insidious about Vance and any number of other highly educated “populist” thinkers turned politicians is that they are nothing more than phony opportunists who’ve seen how easy it is to manipulate the right wing. Vance was, until recently, a completely different person:

D. Vance won the Republican primary in Ohio’s Senate race Tuesday — and all it took was sacrificing whatever integrity he had at the altar of a man he once suggested was “America’s Hitler.” During the onset of Donald Trump’s political ascendence, Vance presented himself as a kind of conduit between two Americas — Trump country and those horrified by Trump country. The Hillbilly Elegy author was horrified, too, back then — or at least he said as much, even as he called on liberals to show compassion and understanding for the put-upon, middle American Trump voter. “I’m a Never Trump guy,” Vance told Charlie Rose in 2016. “I never liked him.”

But that was then. Vance has not only fully embraced Trump in the intervening years — he has banked his own political ambitions on the precise kind of Trumpian demagoguery he once suggested to a friend was an indictment of the GOP’s “collective neglect.” It paid off: In April, he won Trump’s coveted endorsement — thanks to powerful right-wing allies like tech billionaire Peter Thiel and TV pundit Tucker Carlson …

“The people who are caught between the corrupt political class of the left and the right, they need a voice,” Vance said in a victory speech Tuesday, thanking Trump and acolytes like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz for their support. “They need a representative. And that’s going to be me.”

In many respects, Vance — a Yale-educated venture capitalist — is an unlikely torch-bearer for Trump’s populist war against so-called elites. Then again, so is Trump, a wealthy television star who somehow managed to convince a sizable chunk of America that he was just like them — a “blue collar billionaire,” as his son, Donald Trump Jr., once dubbed him. There is, of course, no such thing, and what Trump was selling wasn’t a real plan to rescue the “forgotten men and women” Vance wrote about in his memoir; it was an addiction to what Vance described in the Atlantic back in 2016 as “cultural heroin.” Vance disapproved of it then. But in his campaign for Portman’s seat, he began pushing the same product.

With the assistance of Thiel, who helped bankroll his campaign with a Super PAC, Vance took some headline grabbing swings. He accused Biden of purposely getting conservatives addicted to fentanyl out of a desire to “punish people who didn’t vote for him.” He shrugged at Russia’s hostility to Ukraine, telling former Trump strategist Steve Bannon in an interview before the war broke out that he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another” and suggesting that Biden only cared because Vladimir Putin “didn’t believe in transgender rights.” And he more or less suggested Trump declare himself dictator if he wins reelection in 2024, saying in an interview on a far-right podcast that he should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say…‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

There are others like him running right now — soulless, empty people who smell the opportunity that Trumpism provides. And they have no limits because they are nihilists who believe in nothing. They’re far more dangerous than the true believers.

conservative conferences are beyond parody pic.twitter.com/zNkcYHtJV1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 22, 2022

Aaron Rupar covered the TPUSA conference last weekend and it was worse than I thought. I had seen the infamous Matt Gaetz clip, which was repulsive. It turns out they were all repulsive:

Minutes later, Cruz’s Tampa audience erupted after he proclaimed, “I’m Ted Cruz and my pronoun is kiss my ass.” It quickly became clear to me that the summit would serve as a useful window into the state of US conservatism in 2022. Suffice it to say it remains very, very ugly.

Before the Friday portion had ended, Ron DeSantis decried “woke math” and Marjorie Taylor Greene goaded the crowd into a loud “lock him up!” chant directed at Hunter Biden. Saturday brought a manic Donald Trump Jr. pushing bonkers conspiracy theories about Covid. That was downright normal, however, compared to Lauren Boebert, who raised far more questions than she answered when she asserted during her speech that “contrary to popular belief, I have never been an escort for Senator Ted Cruz.”

The entire TPUSA was a festival of owning the libs. To the extent that policy even came up, it consisted of things like slagging Ukraine, defending the MAGA coup attempt, and portraying the climate crisis as a hoax.

Trump’s headlining speech was rambling and featured long stretches where his audience — which was pumped up throughout the weekend by pro wrestling pyrotechnics and frat boy-style crudeness — sat in silence.

Notable passages including Trump absurdly claiming he actually finished the border wall and announcing that at one point in his presidency he told NATO countries he wouldn’t come to their defense if they were attacked by Russia. He pushed the big lie by arguing vote totals from nursing homes must’ve been falsified because residents of them are too busy dying to vote.

It really does sound as though people are getting sick of his whining about 2020. He should realize that he’s made his point. They all believe it was stolen. But his obsession with the details is boring.

Here are some of the clips. I won’t post Gaetz’s juvenile insults again. I’ll post this one instead, from this morning:

Short: I don’t think Matt Gaetz will have an impact… in fact, I’d be surprised if he was still voting. It’s more likely he’ll be in prison for child sex trafficking… I’m surprised law enforcement lets him speak to teenage conferences like that pic.twitter.com/ALuay3VmoI

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 25, 2022

Lauren Boebert: "Contrary to popular belief, I have never been as escort for Senator Ted Cruz." pic.twitter.com/f7F8iiGncU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2022

Trump suggests he is the most persecuted person in American history as his audience sits in silence. Suffice it to say this was not a speech that will get TPUSA people pumped up. pic.twitter.com/FYNx77ENzo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2022

Trump claims nursing home residents "don't vote too much" because they're too busy dying pic.twitter.com/jXeKaNTG07

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2022

Oh my…

Two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence testified last week to a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the highest-ranking officials of the Trump administration so far known to have cooperated with the Justice Department’s widening inquiry into the events leading up to the assault.

The appearances before the grand jury of the men — Marc Short, who was Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, and Greg Jacob, who was his counsel — were the latest indication that the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the events surrounding and preceding the riot is intensifying after weeks of growing questions about the urgency the department has put on examining former President Donald J. Trump’s potential criminal liability.

The testimony of the two Pence aides marked the first time it has become publicly known that figures with firsthand knowledge of what took place inside the White House in the tumultuous days before the attack have cooperated with federal prosecutors.

Both Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob played important roles in describing to a House select committee conducting a parallel investigation of the Capitol attack how Mr. Trump, working with allies like the lawyer John Eastman, mounted a campaign to pressure Mr. Pence into disrupting the normal counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021, as part of an effort to keep Mr. Trump in office.

Mr. Short’s testimony was confirmed by two people familiar with it, as was Mr. Jacob’s.

The Justice Department has at times appeared to be lagging behind the House select committee, which has spoken to more than 1,000 witnesses, including some from inside the Trump White House. Much of that testimony has been highlighted at a series of public hearings over the past two months.

It remains unclear precisely what Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob told the grand jury or what questions prosecutors may have asked them. But both previously gave recorded and transcribed interviews to the House committee, and Mr. Jacob served as a live witness at one of the panel’s public hearings that focused on the effort to strong-arm Mr. Pence.

Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob were present in the Oval Office for a meeting on Jan. 4, 2021, at which Mr. Trump had Mr. Eastman try to persuade Mr. Pence that he could delay or block congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s Electoral College defeat.

Mr. Eastman’s plan relied on Mr. Pence being willing to accept, as he presided over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, that there were disputes over the validity of electors whose votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. had already been certified by the states — a baseless assertion that had been promoted by a number of Trump allies in the previous weeks as a last-ditch way to help keep Mr. Trump in office.

Mr. Pence ultimately rejected Mr. Trump’s pressure on him to go along. But the so-called fake electors proposal has been one of the primary lines of inquiry to have become public in the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation.

Mr. Short also provided the House committee with testimony that highlighted the sense of threat that built from Mr. Trump’s efforts to derail the congressional proceedings on Jan. 6.

Update:

Why is this so big? Jeffrey Toobin: "It's a really big deal … This suggests that the Justice Department is now criminally investigating the White House." pic.twitter.com/9ipqwktTss

— The Recount (@therecount) July 26, 2022

Well,well well…

Aspiring to be “heels”

Mary Trump, estranged niece of the country’s erstwhile chief executive, observed a year ago, “Donald gave people permission to be their worst selves. We’ve always had problems with racism in this country but he took it to a different level.” Donald Trump was open about it, got rewarded for it, and encouraged it in others. And more.

As a leader, Trump may be pretty sorry. But he is a trend-setter. He’s spawned a host of imitators. For a certain segment of the population, he made dirtbaggery cool.

Dirtbaggery is a guilty pleasure for ordinarily prudish Americans. For those of a certain age, the name Eddie Haskell defines the type. Those of a later vintage recognize Eric Cartman or Beavis and Butt-Head as cartoon variants. Few expected to see one as president or as a role model for one-third of the country.

Adrienne Matei explores dirtbaggery for The Atlantic. The term seems to have arisen in mountain sports. In a time of “historic lows” in confidence in major institutions, writes Matei,

the dirtbag’s recalcitrance makes a certain kind of sense. Even the internet-born concept of “goblin mode”—the temporary, shameless indulgence of one’s id, potentially as a coping mechanism amid chaos—feels like a descendant of dirtbaggery. Call them unkempt, disruptive, or brash; at least dirtbags are honest.

Matei’s subject is the dirtbag in current entertainment. Characters in shows she profiles share “a defiant outsider sensibility.” Except those in the Millennial Canadian sitcom Letterkenny also posess “a clear set of personal values, including helping friends in need, common respect, and no fighting at weddings.” Good fun. Good fiction. And a few yuks.

Trailer Park Boys’ creator, Mike Clattenburg, has said that the series isn’t intended to make fun of its characters but is “about the people playing the cards they’re dealt.” Our cards right now don’t look great: We’re living in a time of crisis, amid a pervasive feeling that everything’s getting stupider and sadder. This is a moment to reevaluate what we want to prioritize—even if, like the characters of Trailer Park Boys, it mostly boils down to spending more time goofing off with friends. We may not all wish to opt out of society and shotgun Miller Lites while blasting Megadeth. But we can still define fulfillment for ourselves. This, ultimately, is the wisdom of the dirtbag.

If only that “wisdom” limited itself to shotgunning Miller Lites. In reality, someone has to clean up after those who don’t, the ones driven by status insecurity, a lust for power, and an unhealthy fascination with assault-style weaonry. Sometimes what needs cleaning up is blood.

The Turning Point USA Student Action Summit over the weekend glorified dirtbaggery, introducing speakers with professional wrestling pyrotechnics. As attendees cheered the cavalcade of “owning the libs,” even by the ever-lamer Sen. Ted Cruz, the conference attracted Nazis outside. Inside, “things got pretty juvenile.” Naturally, Donald Trump was the headliner.

Conservatives pay good money to cheer for its dirtbags, the political equivalent of wrestling’s heels. But dirtbags are not just guilty pleasures anymore. Conservatives want to be them. Trump gave them permission to be honest about it.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

Do it now

Americans retaining their faculties — and that cuts out many — do not want to see a replay of the 2020 effort by Donald Trump to reverse the results of a presidential election. Accountability for their actions remains under investigation for some and prosecution for others. Republican controlled states have since passed legislation and launched election campaigns aimed at enabling a replay in 2024.

Enter the Collins-Manchin Electoral Count Reform Act bill. The proposed legislation would fix many of the deficiencies in the 1887 Electoral Count Act that controls how Congress counts electoral votes. The process was a ceremonial afterthought until someone as amoral and criminally minded as Trump occupied the White House and lost reelection.

Real banana republic stuff

By election law expert Rick Hasen’s count, Donald Trump and his merry band of election thieves tried over half a dozen tactics for attacking weak spots in the Electoral Count Act in their attempt to turn Trump’s loss to Joe Biden into a win. They capped off those failed efforts by inciting a violent insurrection and considered “ordering the federal government seize voting machines, perhaps to order an illegal election do-over supervised by Trump cronies. Real banana republic stuff.”

The bill proposed to fix the Electoral Count Act’s deficiencies has its own, say critics, but Hasen argues the time to pass it is now, before the 2022 election and before Republican support for the bill fades (Slate):

The Collins-Manchin Electoral Count Reform Act bill would fix a lot of the ambiguities and contradictions in the act and do much more. It not only would confirm what we’ve already known—that a vice president has no unilateral power to accept or reject election results. It would also raise the threshold for senators or representatives to object to valid electoral college votes, eliminate the chance that a state legislature could rely on that “failed election” language to send in alternative slate of electors, and provide a mechanism for federal judicial review of any action by a rogue governor to send in a fake slate of electors. These are all positive developments. (Matthew Seligman offered more details here at Slate.)

Some Democrats, such as Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, and good government reformer Norm Eisen, have expressed concerns about certain provisions of the proposed Electoral Count Reform Act, and whether they would provide new pathways for subversion or limit the potential for judicial review. But as Ned Foley, Matthew Seligman, Derek Muller, and Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith have shown, these concerns are based either upon misreadings of what the act actually does, or quibbles with some small amount of unclear language that could be improved upon as the measure makes its way through the legislative process.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, Hasen argues. The clock is ticking.

Right now there are nine Republican senators who have co-sponsored the ECRA, just one short of the ten necessary to overcome a potential Senate filibuster, and Senate Minority Leader McConnell has indicated his general support for this kind of reform. It thus has a realistic chance of passing, so long as enough Democrats and Republicans are willing to go along. This opportunity is unlikely to last even if Democrats keep control of the Senate in the fall. Republican Sen. Rob Portman, for example, is a co-sponsor of the legislation and he is retiring from his Ohio seat at the end of his term. If he’s replaced by Trumpist candidate J.D. Vance, that will be one fewer senator on board for this urgent reform. And if Democrats lose the House, there’s no way that Kevin McCarthy, beholden to Trump for his support, would bring up such a measure.

The bill may not address all the clever ways Republicans might devise for suppressing the vote. It might not address threats against election workers. But one bill does not have to do everything that needs to be done. It’s important to pass the fixes that are passable before they are not. Yes, Hasen acknowledges, more needs to be done to secure elections from vote-counting and election-certifying funny business at the state level. And paper ballots everywhere, please. That’s not too much to ask “in this era of mistrust and chicanery.”

But legislators often suffer the same need product engineers have for their bills to do, well, everything they might. I and others have questioned our need to make everything “smart” (Smart Objects, the Internet of Things, etc.). Wired once asked, “Have you ever wished that your T-shirts could tell you the optimal water temperature for removing that pesky mustard stain?” Actually, no. No, I haven’t:

A single phrase characterizes the need product engineers feel to pack as much into an electronic product as technically feasible: “feature rich.” It is not enough to have a watch provide accurate time when it can do so much more. Yes, I can have a coffee maker that is also a timer, an alarm clock, satellite radio, and that starts and warms up my car on cold mornings. But all I really wanted was a cup of coffee.

So I’ll settle for a bill that thwarts Trumpists’ next attempt at exploiting the Electoral Count Act by paths we have identified. I’m not devious enough to anticipate every way in which they might undermine democracy in the future. Neither are honest elected officials. The Electoral Count Reform Act only has to do one thing decently. The clock is ticking.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

Sometimes you just have to sit back and take a minute to appreciate beauty and genius:

“I just realized, Joni’s the least nervous person up here,” exclaimed Brandi Carlile halfway through a history Newport Folk Festival set that paid tribute to Joni Mitchell, in her first full set-length concert appearance in two decades.

Over 13 songs, Mitchell, who last appeared at the festival 53 years ago, in 1969, held court as a star-studded crew of musicians (Carlile, Blake Mills, Lucius, Wynonna, Celisse, Taylor Goldsmith, Marcus Mumford, and many more) sat around on couches on-stage playing a mix of her favorite oldies (“Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” “Love Potion No. 9” as well as an array of Mitchell masterpieces.

Sitting in a throne, Mitchell began the set by occasionally singing along to her own songs, accompanied by vocalists like Carlile, (“Carey”)  Goldsmith,  (1991’s “Come In From The Cold”) and Celisse (“Help Me”). But by the end of the hour-plus performance, the 78 year-old singer who only recently sang on stage for the first time in nearly a decade had stood up, played a length guitar solo (“Just Like This Train”) and sang a moving baritone lead vocal on Gershwin’s “Summertime’” as well as tear-jerking takes on “Both Sides Now” and “Circle Game.”

The premise: Recreating the recently infamous “Joni Jams,” the informal A-list gatherings of musicians at Mitchell’s Los Angeles home in recent years, where everyone from Carlile to Elton John to Herbie Hancock to Bonnie Raitt gather around Mitchell and trade songs and stories in the years following Mitchell’s aneurysm.”No one brings folk singers together like the humility of trying out a new song in front of Joni fucking Mitchell,” as Carlile, who curated and organized the entire set, explained in the introduction to the performance.

https://youtu.be/4aqGjaFDTxQ

https://youtu.be/CwN0dtTYcvs