Month: February 2023

He even went beyond Marge’s demands and delivered for proven liar Tucker Carlson

Last week, America received proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Fox News is a dishonest institution that spread Donald Trump’s Big Lie knowing full well that he did not win the election. In a court filing from the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Machines against the company, it was revealed that all of the top brass and their stars were fully aware that the election had not been stolen yet remained terrified of losing their deluded audience (which they had been instrumental in brainwashing) so they parrotted Trump’s bogus claims. In this specific case, they spread the falsehood that the Dominion machines were rigged for the Republicans. As Dominion argued in the filing:

“Not a single Fox witness testified that they believe any of the allegations about Dominion are true. Indeed, Fox witness after Fox witness declined to assert the allegations’ truth or actually stated they do not believe them, and Fox witnesses repeatedly testified that they have not seen credible evidence to support them.”

And they had the receipts. The emails from the likes of owner Rupert Murdoch, and stars such as Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson are unequivocal proof that these people are all liars. For their part, Fox News dismissed Dominion’s findings as “a lot of noise and confusion.” 

In the wake of the network’s call on election night giving the Arizona electoral votes to Joe Biden, which was true, their audience, under instructions from Donald Trump, left the network in droves for the competition, Newsmax and OAN. The executives and the stars were terrified that the stock price was being negatively impacted by their decision to tell the truth. As Salon’s Igor Derysh reported, Carlson was so distraught when a reporter on the network reported that election security officials stated there was no evidence that the voting machines had been compromised that he texted Hannity:

Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck? I’m actually shocked… It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

This filing was a shocking set of documents that, in a normal, healthy democracy, would finish Fox News as a credible media company to the remainder of society that didn’t already know it wasn’t. But America is not a normal, healthy democracy and it could not be clearer that it isn’t by the fact that just days after that stunning revelation, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he saw fit to give unfettered access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection to none other than Tucker Carlson.

It’s almost as if McCarthy was playing some kind of elaborate practical joke. After what we learned about the Fox News host, how in the world can McCarthy justify handing over such sensitive information to Tucker Carlson?

Without a second thought for the security of the institution or the safety of his fellow officials, McCarthy’s decided that MAGA love is all that matters.

These tapes have been closely guarded by the Capitol Police ever since the event and have been turned over to the January 6 Committee and Justice Department prosecutors, as well as defense lawyers, but no one in the media has been given access — until now: 

The committee asked for permission from U.S. Capitol police before they used any of the footage in public hearings, these people said, as they did not want to publicly disclose the location of security cameras in the building. The committee cut and minimized use of the footage accordingly, these people added.

According to Politico’s Kyle Cheney, “Tucker Carlson doesn’t “have” any Jan. 6 footage. He hasn’t “obtained” it. His people are viewing it on a terminal in the Capitol and it’s unclear when he’ll get permission to air any of it, let alone lots of it.” If Cheney is right, worries about the footage getting into terrorist or extremist hands for nefarious purposes (if you don’t count Carlson) may just be overblown. On the other hand, Carlson did say he would have “unfettered” access so who knows?

The real problem is that this release could compromise some of the ongoing criminal trials. Carlson will almost certainly try to create a counternarrative of January 6, which won’t be hard to do since most of his audience probably never even saw the hearings or read anything about what actually happened. Instead, they’ve been fed a steady stream of lies, particularly from Carlson, since that fateful day. 

Calson’s most well-known bit of slickly produced propaganda on the subject is his “documentary” called “Patriot Purge.” In it, Carlson suggests that January 6 attack was actually a plot by Antifa, the FBI and other members of the “deep state” working in concert as a false flag operation to make Trump look bad. Fox News commentators Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg resigned in protest over it but it did Carlson no harm. He’s never been more popular.

He declared the January 6 Committee investigation a lie and, with characteristic unctuous sanctimony, told Axios that “if there was ever a question that’s in the public’s interest to know, it’s what actually happened on January 6. By definition, this video will reveal it.” He went on to say: “It’s impossible for me to understand why any honest person would be bothered by that.” I’m not sure that honest people are bothered so much by the video being released to the public as they are bothered that it’s being released to a proven liar and propagandist, like Tucker Carlson, who will likely dole out the tidbits he thinks will twist what happened into a believable alternative theory of what we all saw with our own eyes that day. If anyone’s up for the challenge, it’s him.

The truth is that the calls to release the footage have been out there almost since the day it happened, led by none other than Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. In June of 2021, the Republican sent a wild letter to top government officials demanding the release of the footage (among other things) in order to assist what she calls “political prisoners” who were arrested for sedition conspiracy. This has been one of her hobby horses ever since and she’s been joined by such luminaries as Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Az., and Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., who made it clear that this was a condition of voting for McCarthy for Speaker of the House.

Thank you to the 20 patriots who helped EARN this commitment from the Speaker.

Thank you @SpeakerMcCarthy for affirming this commitment you made.

Keeping promises is how trust is built.

I’m growing more optimistic by the day! https://t.co/uYAaT5sG0f

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) January 12, 2023

So this was another total capitulation to the far-right extremists in the party for Kevin McCarthy. He just took it to a whole other level by releasing it exclusively to Fox News and specifically to Tucker Carlson.

No other speaker in history would have done something so blatantly partisan as that with something so sensitive. Without a second thought for the security of the institution or the safety of his fellow officials, McCarthy’s decided that MAGA love is all that matters.

But he must know that they will never really love him. He’s just their submissive servant and they will make him demonstrate that every day he holds the office. It would be uncomfortable to watch his ritual humiliation if he weren’t so very eager to let them do it. 

Salon

“Unlucky President, Lucky Man”

Some guy from Georgia, a former governor, spoke at my university in 1975. Jimmy Carter. He seemed nice enough, but a long shot for the presidency. It wouldn’t be the last time I misjudged a candidate’s chances.

James Fallows worked for him as a speech writer and reflects on the legacy of a lucky man and unlucky president. Jimmy Carter has always been the same person:

Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another.

Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did.

Carter was easy to admire but harder to work for. He was driven to succeed and always engaging. “No other candidate has gone from near-invisibility to the White House in so short a time,” Fallows writes. And a fusion of cultures from the Naval Academy to Bob Dylan to the Allman Brothers.

“What if Carter’s trademark lines on the stump—I’ll never lie to you and We need a government as good as its people—had not been so tuned to the battered spirit of that moment, and had been received with sneers rather than support?” Carter’s timing was lucky, but he made his own, too. As president, it lasted only four years.

He did a lot in those four years, not all of it popular — he made mistakes, and was unlucky. Fallows offers a list of accomplishments.

Jimmy Carter took office in the “before” times. We live in an unrecognizable “after.” He did his best, in office and out, to promote the values he cared about through it all.

Carter has been luckier in life than in his presidency, Fallows observes, having lived vigorously until 98. Carter invented the modern post-presidency and became known worldwide for his human and voting rights advocacy and more.

Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized, including near eradication of the dreaded guinea worm, which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived to see his character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he has set.

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

I bristle whenever I hear chest-thumping “values” types who are MAGA now deride Carter. Read the whole thing.

They’ve shown us who they are

No, I’m not going to quote Maya Angelou yet again. You can read the quote on the back of your eyelids by now.

Anchorage Daily News:

Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman sparked outrage online after asking whether there could be economic benefits from the death of abused children.

Eastman asked a series of questions during a MondayHouse Judiciary Committee hearing on adverse childhood experiences — such as physical and sexual abuse on children or growing up in a household marred by domestic violence — and how they can negatively affect a person throughout their lives.

As part of the presentation, documents given to legislators estimated that when child abuse is fatal, it could cost the family and broader society $1.5 million in terms of trauma and what the child could potentially have earned over their lifetime.

Eastman said that he had heard an argument, on occasion, that when child abuse is fatal, it could economically benefit a society.

“It can be argued, periodically, that it’s actually a cost savings because that child is not going to need any of those government services that they might otherwise be entitled to receive and need based on growing up in this type of environment,” he said.

Just after admonishing his disciples In Matthew 6 not to make a public show of piety, and after teaching them The Lord’s Prayer, and immediately after reminding them not to be hypocrites, Jesus instructs:

¹⁹ Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

²⁰ But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

²¹ For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Guess where Eastman’s heart is? And just where did he hear it “argued periodically” that the death of an abused child is a cost savings to society?

The late comedian Jack Benny (with his pennypincher shtick) used a stickup man’s “Your money or your life!” as the setup for the punchline, “I’m thinking it over!”

Guys like Eastman don’t have to think. It’s no shtick.

Apparently he’s an Oath Keeper, too. https://t.co/TIhXtcKPKF

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) February 22, 2023

Jeff Sharlet’s correct (Politico, Tuesday):

Before Alaska’s 10 a.m. winter sunrise, in a mostly empty courtroom here in December, Republican state Rep. David Eastman went on trial accused of betraying his oath of office.

The charge: that Eastman, a hard-line conservative and fervent Donald Trump supporter, had violated a “disloyalty clause” embedded deep in the Alaska Constitution — and was thus ineligible to hold office in the state.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Eastman was in Washington, D.C., to rally for the defeated president trying to overturn the 2020 election. Eastman says he never went inside the U.S. Capitol, and he hasn’t been accused of any crimes connected to the riot that day. But he also has ties to the Oath Keepers, the far-right group whose leader was found guilty of seditious conspiracy for a violent plot to disrupt the transfer of power on Jan. 6: Eastman purchased a lifetime membership to the group nearly a decade ago.

Throughout the saga, Eastman has shown no remorse or regret. If anything, the civil suit launched against him has emboldened him.

Naturally. He won his case, too, on First Amendment grounds.

Eastman continues to serve in the Legislature, as something of a pariah but defiant as ever. And his presence is a glaring reminder that two years after Jan. 6, the insurrectionist forces unleashed by Trump and his allies have yet to be expunged from American politics.

We know who they are. The only thing American about them are their birth certificates.

The AP and the NY Times interviewed the Special Grand Jury forewoman in the Fulton County election interference case. She was surprisingly open, although she did say that she was following the guidelines laid out by the judge overseeing the case. Here are just a few tidbits from the AP article:

During a lengthy recent interview, Kohrs complied with the judge’s instructions not to discuss details related to the jury’s deliberations. She also declined to talk about unpublished portions of the panel’s final report.

But her general characterizations provided unusual insight into a process that is typically cloaked in secrecy.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was on the receiving end of Trump’s pressure campaign, was “a really geeky kind of funny,” she said. State House Speaker David Ralston, who died in November, was hilarious and had the room in stitches. And Gov. Brian Kemp, who succeeded in delaying his appearance until after his reelection in November, seemed unhappy to be there.

Kohrs was fascinated by an explainer on Georgia’s voting machines offered by a former Dominion Voting Systems executive. She also enjoyed learning about the inner workings of the White House from Cassidy Hutchinson, who Kohrs said was much more forthcoming than her old boss, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Kohrs sketched witnesses in her notebook as they spoke and was tickled when Bobby Christine, the former U.S. attorney for Georgia’s Southern District, complimented her “remarkable talent.” When the jurors’ notes were taken for shredding after their work was done, she managed to salvage two sketches — U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence — because there were no notes on those pages.

After Graham tried so hard to avoid testifying — taking his fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — Kohrs was surprised when he politely answered questions and even joked with jurors.

Former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was funny and invoked privilege to avoid answering many questions but “genuinely seemed to consider” whether it was merited before declining to answer, she said.

When witnesses refused to answer almost every question, the lawyers would engage in what Kohrs came to think of as “show and tell.” The lawyers would show video of the person appearing on television or testifying before the U.S. House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, periodically asking the witness to confirm certain things. Then the scratching of pens on paper could be heard as jurors tallied how many times the person invoked the Fifth Amendment.

At least one person who resisted answering questions became much more cooperative when prosecutors offered him immunity in front of the jurors, Kohrs said. Other witnesses came in with immunity deals already in place.

Trump’s attorneys have said he was never asked to testify. Kohrs said the grand jury wanted to hear from the former president but didn’t have any real expectation that he would offer meaningful testimony.

“Trump was not a battle we picked to fight,” she said.

Kohrs didn’t vote in 2020 and was only vaguely aware of controversy swirling in the wake of the election. She didn’t know the specifics of Trump’s allegations of widespread election fraud or his efforts to reverse his loss. When prosecutors played the then-president’s phone call with Raffensperger on the first day the jurors met to consider evidence, it was the first time Kohrs had heard it.

The NY Times got an even jucier tid bit:

A special grand jury that investigated election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia recommended indictments of multiple people on a range of charges in its report, most of which remains sealed, the forewoman of the jury said in an interview today.

“It is not a short list,” the forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said, adding that the jury had appended eight pages of legal code “that we cited at various points in the report.”

She declined to discuss who specifically the special grand jury recommended for indictment, since the judge handling the case decided to keep those details secret when he made public a few sections of the report last week. But seven sections that are still under wraps deal with indictment recommendations, Ms. Kohrs said.

Asked whether the jurors had recommended indicting Mr. Trump, Ms. Kohrs gave a cryptic answer: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science,” adding “you won’t be too surprised.”

Whether DA Fanni Willis decides (or already decided) to present all this to yet another grand jury, as their procedure requires, is unknown. But it sure sounds like the prosecutors put on quite a case.

I sure hope this woman is prepared for what’s about to happen to her.

Amanda Carpenter on DeSantis’ craven Fox and Friends pandering on Ukraine. I guess he knows he doesn’t have to show any leadership or sophistication when it comes to foreign policy in order to win the GOP nomination.

It’s going to be a long campaign:

Gross things can happen when you convince yourself that, no matter what, you must position yourself in complete opposition to your political opponents. Just look at what Ron DeSantis is doing.

Before pursuing elected office, DeSantis was a Yale undergrad-turned-Harvard legal scholar, a history teacher, and a military officer. So, one would think his first reaction to President Biden’s surprise visit to war-torn Kyiv to show solidarity with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky would be, at a bare minimum, to show some respect for the Ukrainian resistance and maybe hold off on the self-serving commentary for a few hours.

That is not the choice DeSantis made. Instead, the Florida governor, who aspires to be president himself, decided to position himself in front of the cameras of Fox & Friends to . . . wait for it . . . blame Biden for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

DeSantis said:

I don’t think any of this would have happened, but for the weakness that the president showed during his first year in office, culminating, of course, in the disastrous withdrawal in Afghanistan. So I think while he’s over there, I think I, and many Americans, are thinking to ourselves, okay, “He’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything to secure our own border here at home.” We’ve had millions and millions of people pour in, tens of thousands of Americans dead because of fentanyl, and then, of course, we just suffered a national humiliation of having China fly a spy balloon clear across the continental United States. So, we have a lot of problems accumulating here in our own country that he is neglecting.

We could get into the requisite back-and-forth about how it was really former President Donald Trump who emboldened Russia by coddling Putin and holding up congressionally approved aid to Ukraine. Or how, in a quainter era, domestic political disputes would stop at the water’s edge.

But what DeSantis is doing is far more cold-blooded and detached.

The crimes against humanity that Russia has committed in Ukraine are heinous. Putin has indiscriminately attacked civilian targets and summarily executed Ukrainians, piling them into mass graves. His troops have abducted and deported thousands of Ukrainian children. Accounts of rape and torture are numerous and well documented.

It is difficult to summarize all of Putin’s war crimes, which Ukraine alleges are at least 58,000. Each one represents a level of cruelty that is difficult to fathom. But Putin’s savagery is not in dispute.

Known evidence of his butchery includes:

-The entombment of more than 600 souls inside the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol, where hundreds of children were sheltered.

–Hundreds of attacks on healthcare facilities and providers, including the Mariupol maternity hospital.

-A strike on a railway station where civilians attempted to flee the fighting.

-A strike on a crowded shopping mall in the same city where more than 1,000 were inside.

-A strike on a nine-story apartment building inside a residential neighborhood with a heavy missile designed to sink ships.

None of those incidents came up during DeSantis’s interview.

The hosts wanted to know if it was a “good move” for Biden to visit Ukraine, and that’s when DeSantis blamed Biden for not appropriately focusing on domestic priorities.

One of the hosts prompted DeSantis by asking: “We’ve seen incoherence from this administration. No defined policy on Ukraine, no defined objective of what winning, you know, looks like. I think a lot of Americans are asking how much more money, how much more time, how much more human suffering?” (Whose “suffering” the Fox host meant was unclear.)

DeSantis proceeded to criticize Biden for supposedly having a “blank check policy” when it came to aiding the Ukrainians in the fight to protect their homeland:

They have effectively a blank-check policy with no clear, strategic objective identified. And these things can escalate, and I don’t think it’s in our interests to be getting into a proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea. So, I think it would behoove them to identify what is the strategic objective that they’re trying to achieve, but just saying it’s an open-ended blank check, that is not acceptable.

After questioning the supposed “objective” in Ukraine, DeSantis then downplayed the threat of Russian aggression. In response to a question about what a “win” would look like in Ukraine, DeSantis dodged and went in a different direction:

It’s important to point out the fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all of that and steamrolling that is not even come close to happening. I think they’ve shown themselves to be a third-rate military power. I think they’ve suffered tremendous, tremendous losses. I got to think that the people in Russia are probably disapproving of what’s going on. I don’t think they can speak up about it for obvious reasons, so I think Russia has been really, really wounded here. And I don’t think that they are the same threat to our country, even though they’re hostile. I don’t think they’re on the same level as a China.

What DeSantis either does not know, or will not say, is that even third-rate military powers are dangerous when they are led by authoritarians. Russia is only militarily degraded today because of robust international intervention, not from a lack of might or will on Putin’s behalf. And, still, Putin has not backed down. He continues to conscript scores of thousands of Russians into military service, throwing their lives into the maw of war to further his expansionist dreams.

DeSantis disregards this reality so that he can then pretend he is unaware of the “objective” of the U.S.-Ukrainian alliance—and then declines to say what such an objective should be. Maybe the objective should be Russian defeat; maybe it should be a settlement negotiated by the Ukrainians. That could be debated. But stopping the slaughter of innocent Ukrainians would seem to be an absolute baseline requirement. Ron DeSantis could not be bothered to say even that much.

Ron DeSantis isn’t really this dense—Yale, Harvard, QED. He’s just acting dumb because he thinks it’s politically smart. And in doing so, he has revealed quite a lot about what he might be like as a president.

DeSantis has positioned himself on the wrong side of Ukraine because he thinks that opposing Biden, no matter what Biden does, is the only way to stay on the good side of MAGA voters. Even if that means turning a blind eye to the plight of the Ukrainians.

As the lady said: When people show you who they are, believe them.

Let’s see if the mainstream media will see him as he is instead of the dreamy macho dude they are selling. I don’t have high hopes …

Highlights:

Peter Doocy characterizes Biden's Warsaw speech as "not the solemn set of remarks that we were kind of told to expect based on the existential threats that [Biden] sees. It has almost a campaign rally feel, like if they were having a campaign rally for democracy." pic.twitter.com/dM8coQjFCW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2023

What’s wrong with that?

Biden: "When President Putin ordered his tanks to roll into Ukraine, he thought we would roll over. He was wrong. The Ukrainian people are too brave … we were too unified. Democracy was too strong." pic.twitter.com/olUddi0b8J

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2023

Biden addresses the Russian people: "The US and the nations of Europe do not seek to control or destroy Russia. The West was not plotting to attack Russia, as Putin said today … this war was never a necessity. It's a tragedy. President Putin chose this war." pic.twitter.com/jkvYTFPF3I

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2023

Biden closes his speech in Warsaw: "Freedom. There is no sweeter word than freedom. There is no nobler goal than freedom. There is no higher aspiration than freedom. Americans know that and you know it." pic.twitter.com/Qz7Pe8aSAd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2023

Biden left the stage after his speech posing for photos with children in a sea of Ukraine, Poland and USA flags. 🇺🇦 🇵🇱 🇺🇸 The White House says 30,000 people were in attendance tonight, per the mayor’s office. pic.twitter.com/wHj5bcangl

— Jenny Leonard (@jendeben) February 21, 2023

The speech was very strong and very dramatic. Good work, Joe.

He gave a speech a year ago when everyone assumed that Russia would roll over Ukraine in a matter of weeks if not days, NATO could fall apart and everyone was far less optimistic. Today, he was able to say that NATO is actually stronger and the Ukrainians are fighting like hell to save themselves.

Killing them would be a choice

Paul Krugman sets the record straight:

​The G.O.P. response to President Biden’s truthful statement that some Republicans want to sunset Medicare and Social Security has been highly gratifying. In other words, the party has reacted with sheer panic — plus a startling lack of message discipline, with both Mike Pence and Nikki Haley saying that actually, yes, they do want to privatize or “reform” Social Security, which is code for gutting it.

Now Republicans are talking about slashing “woke” programs like Medicaid and food stamps. It’s going to be fun when the party realizes who depends on these programs and how popular Medicaid, in particular, is even among its own voters.

The press’s response to Biden’s remarks has, however, been less gratifying. I’ve seen numerous declarations from mainstream media that of course Medicare and Social Security can’t be sustained in their present form. And not just in the opinion pages: There’s been at least some reversion to the early 2010s practice of including anti-social-insurance editorializing in what are supposed to be straight news reports, with highly disputable claims about these programs’ futures presented as simple facts.

So let me try to set the record straight. Yes, our major social programs are on a trajectory that will cause them to cost more in the future than they do today. But how we deal with that trajectory is a choice, and the solution need not involve benefit cuts.

A good starting point on all these issues is the Congressional Budget Office report on the long-term budget outlook — a report issued every year, with the most recent report released in July. (The numbers were updated this month, but the basic picture hasn’t changed.) The C.B.O. does excellent work, without a policy agenda, and is an extremely useful resource.

The current report offers a very clear depiction of both the budget challenges facing our major social insurance programs and the sources of those challenges. Here’s my favorite figure, showing projected changes in spending over the next 30 years:

But the budget office is not necessarily always right — in fact, the ways in which it has proved wrong in the past are highly illuminating. To put this chart in context, there’s a widespread narrative to the effect that Medicare and Social Security are unsustainable because they won’t be able to handle the mass retirement of baby boomers. But as you can see right away, only about half the projected rise in spending is the result of population aging. The rest comes from the assumption — and that’s all it is, an assumption — that medical costs will rise faster than gross domestic product.

Before I get there, a word about demography. You might think that the projected aging is all about the baby boomers. But the baby boom is generally considered to have ended in 1964. So the last of us — yes, I’m one of them — will hit 65 in 2029, just six years from now. Most baby boomers are already there.

So why does the C.B.O. project continuing budget pressure from aging? Because it assumes that life expectancy, specifically life expectancy at age 65, will keep rising. That has certainly been true in the past, but given America’s mortality problems, I’m not sure that it’s safe to assume this trend will continue at past rates.

Still, let’s grant the aging bit. What about “additional cost growth” in health care?

Well, historically health spending has risen faster than G.D.P. — largely, we think, because doctors can now treat many more things than in the past, and this effect has outpaced cost savings from improved technology. But excess cost growth has slowed considerably since around 2010 — perhaps in part because of cost-reduction aspects of the Affordable Care Act. In any case, the leveling off is unmistakable. Here’s national health spending as a percent of G.D.P.:

This health-cost slowdown has, as it should, affected budget projections. Back during the early 2010s, the heyday of the Very Serious People who insisted that Medicare and Social Security were unsustainable, C.B.O. projections assumed that health spending would grow at historical rates. This meant that under current policies long-run projected spending was indeed enormous, and obviously unsustainable.

But that has changed, a lot. I don’t know if people still repeating the old slogans about the need for entitlement reform realize just how much projections of future spending have come down. But here’s a comparison between projected Medicare spending as a percent of G.D.P. from the 2009 long-term budget outlook and the most recent projection:

A side note: The C.B.O. used to do 75-year projections, but apparently realized at some point that these are of little value, because nobody has any idea what the world may look like in 75 years. I used to joke that long before we got there, Skynet would have killed us all, but now we know better: Bing’s chatbot will do us in. In any case, the projections now go only 30 years ahead.

Anyway, C.B.O. projections now show social insurance spending as a percentage of G.D.P. eventually rising by about 5 points, which is still a lot but not unimaginably large. And here’s the thing: Half of that is still the assumed rise in health care costs. And there are things we can do to control costs that don’t involve cutting off Americans’ benefits. Bear in mind both that U.S. health care is far more expensive than that of any other nation — without delivering better results — and that since 2010 we’ve already done quite a lot to “bend the curve.” It’s not at all hard to imagine that improving the incentives to focus on medically effective care could limit cost growth to well below what the C.B.O. is projecting, even now.

And if we can do that, the rise in entitlement spending over the next three decades might be more like 3 percent of G.D.P. That’s not an inconceivable burden. America has the lowest taxes of any advanced nation; given the political will, of course we could come up with 3 percent more of G.D.P. in revenue.

So no, Social Security and Medicare aren’t inherently unsustainable, doomed by demography. We can keep these programs, which are so deeply embedded in American society, if we want to. Killing them would be a choice.

It’s exhausting having to set the record straight on this stuff over and over again. But they won’t stop trying to kill them so we have to defend them with the facts.

(You don’t need to see what she’s talking about,. It’s bullshit, of course.)

For the record, I’m not entirely against it. But the Blue States will not be paying alimony or child support to the Red States. No trade and interstate travel either. Not for you. You’re on your own.

I’m not going to pick this apart. I’m sure she thinks she’s being clever and satirical but she’s just a housewife who was reading QAnon posts on facebook three years ago and decided to run for congress. That she turns out to be the perfect avatar of the GOP base says everything about them, not her.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: "If Democrat voters choose to flee these Blue states…Well, once they move to a Red state, guess what? Maybe you don't get to vote for five years" pic.twitter.com/AcAPwmYXcu

— Jason S. Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) February 21, 2023

Finally, someone asks this question, and it should be asked of every throwback GOPer who uses it. This WaPo article describes the right’s use of the word and how its being deployed as a pejorative, noting that it come directly from Black culture which is not a coincidence.

But what is it they are so upset about?

Many Republicans, however, define wokeism in starkly different terms and with varying levels of fluency — including when they are asked about the term.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) described wokeism as “cultural Marxism” in a brief hallway interview last week, naming-checking both “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling — who has been criticized for her anti-transgender comments — and a former Levi’s executive, Jennifer Sey, who decried “woke capitalism” as recent victims of the phenomenon.

Wokeism, Cruz said, “is the left seizing institutions of transmission of ideas and that includes education — K-12 and universities. It includes journalism. It includes entertainment — Hollywood, movies, TV, sports, music, video games. And it’s characterized by demanding one uniform view on any particular topic, engaging in brutal punishment for any who disagree, including most simply being canceled.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said wokeness was very important to Alabama families and would be a “huge” part of the 2024 Republican presidential primary. But he was vague when pressed to actually define the concept, which he said he views as “more in the education field.”

“To me, education is about reading, writing and math, having an opportunity to grow up in an unbiased world — not biased — and to me that’s what all this woke stuff is, pushing one thing on our young people,” Tuberville said.

And Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), another frequent critic of wokeness, defined it in a military context, citing the recently rescinded coronavirus vaccine mandates for troops; adopting usage of different pronouns for gender; concerns about domestic extremism in the ranks; climate change preparedness efforts; and an alleged focus on “toxic masculinity.”

“I can just go on and on but there’s a lot of it out there,” he said.

Right. It’s obviously just another word for “liberal” or “stuff I disagree with.”

And for these people, of all people, to complain about “seizing institutions of education” when they are banning books, firing teachers, mandating what educators can and cannot say, is enough to make your head explode. As for private company policies to accommodate their customers and employees, well, I guess they don’t have that “freedom” either with Governors like DeSantis using the long arm of the government to dictate what they can do. Authoritarians complaining about cancel culture would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

Anyway:

Some political operatives are skeptical that anti-wokeism will ultimately prove a successful messaging strategy for Republicans. James Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, generated buzz early in Biden’s first year when, in an interview with Vox, he criticized Democrats for their “faculty lounge” politics and declared, “Wokeness is a problem, and we all know it.”

Now, however, he said an interview that “I don’t use the W-word anymore” — because it originated with Black Americans “and then overeducated White people ruined the word.”

To him, the deployment of “woke” as a political attack represents the culture wars of previous eras — the latest version of dismissing coastal elites as chardonnay-swilling, latte-sipping liberals.

“It used to be that [Republicans] were kind of free traders and anti-Russia and pro-military and for entitlement reform,” Carville said. “Well, that’s all out the window. The only thing they have that unifies them is cultural resentment — ‘Let’s all attack the trans kid’ or ‘We shouldn’t tell seventh graders there are gay people because then they’ll never know.’”

Rich Thau, moderator of the Swing Voter Project — which conducts monthly online focus groups with adults who live in competitive states and voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but Biden in 2020 — conducted two focus groups last month in Florida, shortly after DeSantis used part of his inaugural address to first define and then criticize wokeism.

The findings, as he chronicled in an essay for The Bulwark, were striking, as the participants “struggled to explain what wokeism is, even in the most general of terms,” he said in an interview.

It may be a compelling argument with the Republican base, Thau said, but he is dubious it will prove successful in winning over the sorts of swing voters who can prove critical in a general election.

“The question I have now is: How effective is it as a strategy to attack wokeism among people who don’t particularly understand it?” he said. “I am looking for evidence that attacking wokeism is a strategy that converts people to that candidate’s side.”

Carville is correct. This is an old story. If you were alive during the 90s you will no doubt remember the uproar over “PC.” And I don’t think I need to remind anyone of what happened in the 1960s and 70s. This has been the story of my life.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t have any power. Backlash is real (just ask Richard Nixon.) But during all that time I have never seen the right as batshit insane as they are right now and I think the majority of the country is faced with a choice between dealing with the usual cultural evolution that is largely driven by idealistic youth and oppressed minorities and a full-on fascist movement trying to roll back the clock at least half a century.

I’m not saying that it’s in the bag by any means. As I’ve said — backlash gonna backlash. But this is a different time and it the Democrats and the center-left stays calm and focused they can beat this back.

Yet another reminder

Regular readers know that when conservatives talk about freedom and choice; when they complain about government waste, fraud, and abuse; when they raise the alarm about federal deficits; and when they talk about replacing the New Deal with a “better deal”; they are acting as Wall Street shills. They don’t care about the amount of government spending, only about into whose pockets that spending goes.

Nor do they care about improving not-for-profit government services they think should not exist if, even just in theory, they might be provided by the private sector at a markup. Like public education. Not exploiting government spending for private profit is a crime against capitalism.

We’ve seen in the last few day how commerical interest corrupts the delivery of accurate news. Adam Serwer wrote of Fox in The Atlantic (emphasis mine): “The Dominion filing drives home a few points. One is that there is a Fox News propaganda feedback loop: The network inflames right-wing conspiracism, but it also bows to it out of partisan commitment and commercial incentive.“

Fox has always been a propaganda operation. The Dominion filing just ices that cake with Tucker Carlson’s insistence that a fact-checker be fired because his audience doesn’t want facts. “The stock price is down. Not a joke,” Carlson texted nighttime anchors Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity.

I mentioned the other day that I was listening to  Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk.” One of his most-shocking and under-reported tales of the Trump administration involves Trump’s appointing commercial actors to run government agencies, operations they viewed as direct competitors. People like Barry Myers, CEO of Accuweather, whom Trump appointed to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a branch of the Department of Commerce (Quartz, 2018):

Lewis emphasizes the importance of this little-publicized agency: “[NOAA] had collected all the climate and weather data going back to the recordings made at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson. Without that data, and the weather service that made sense of it, no plane would fly, no bridge would be built, and no war would be fought—at least not well,” he says. The weather service’s data is free to the public,  and proprietary models used by private weather companies, including Accuweather, are powered by its raw data.

“By the 1990s, Barry Myers was arguing with a straight face that the national weather service should be, with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of Accuweather,” says Lewis. “The exception was when human life and property was at stake.”

What actors like Myers did when placed in charge of public, taxpayer-funded data (massive data collection no private actor would finance) was to take it offline, out of public view. Myers is in the business of repackaging and selling that public data back to those same taxpayers. Even tornado warnings that the National Weather Service issues for free. NOAA was not the only agency under Trump to restrict public accesss to public data.

Chief Data Scientist of the United States DJ Patil

saw “nothing arbitrary or capricious about the Trump administration’s” data suppression, telling Lewis that “Under each act of [such] suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive,” followed by several examples he attributed to Trump (p. 188). Such special-interest corruption of political decisions is a failure inherent in the political process and hardly unique to the Trump administration, but Patil saw the problem as a rift coursing through American government which “was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money” (pp. 188–89).

Guess which type predominate in one of the major political parties?

Matt Taibbi (beore he went the way of Glenn Greenwald) wrote of two Americas in “Griftopia,” “one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land … the government is something to be avoided.” For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making money.” Exhibit A: Grifter-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump. Exhibit B: Barry Myers. There are more besides.

Lewis told NPR:

So it matters — it matters a lot — who’s in these places. And it’s a problem when the person knows nothing; it’s an even bigger problem when the person has an incentive to screw it up.

Caveat emptor. Look for those narrow commercial motives.