Month: March 2023

Does anyone doubt there’ll be trouble?

NBC News reports:

Law enforcement agencies are prepping for a possible Trump indictment as early as next week

Meaning pro-Trump violence:

Local, state and federal law enforcement and security agencies are preparing for the possibility that former President Donald Trump will be indicted as early as next week, according to five senior officials familiar with the preparations. 

Law enforcement agencies are conducting preliminary security assessments, the officials said, and are discussing potential security plans in and around the Manhattan Criminal Court, at 100 Centre Street, in case Trump is charged in connection with an alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels and travels to New York to face any charges.

The officials stress that the interagency conversations and planning are precautionary in nature because no charges have been filed. 

The agencies involved include the NYPD, New York State Court Officers, the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the officials said.

NBC News has reached out to all of those agencies for comment, and all have declined to comment.

Does anyone think MAGA cult’s reaction will limit itself to Manhattan?

Marcy Wheeler urges the stenographer press not to make things worse:

Here's a headline that is accurate:

The former President is using reports of an imminent arrest to incite violence on social media.

You don't have to name him, accept his label of violence as protest, or disseminate his all-caps language. Don't reward him for this incitement.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) March 18, 2023

Trump has spent YEARS training journalists to reward him every time he ratchets up his language.

The more outrageous, the bigger reward from the press. Pavlov's pups exercised more self-control.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) March 18, 2023

We should expect better. I don’t.

The banality of Tiny D and Donald

News outlets broadcast the Trumpist riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 live from coast to coast. An hours-long insurrection was underway. Against the U.S. government, against our government, not some remote country in Asia, Africa, or South America. As unsettling as watching that was asking who are these people battling police with their Trump and Confederate flags, Christian nationalist, and even Nazi symbols? Unsettling answer: They walk among us.

The United States of America did not end that day. But reflecting on events in HBO’s postapocalyptic “The Last of Us,” Tom Nichols ponders “Who Would You Be If the World Ended?” In his newsletter for The Atlantic, Nichols drops a lot of spoilers I’ll try to avoid here.

What’s different about the series is how it differs from the Cold War versions of the genre. Mostly lone-wolf “Radioactive Rambos” would “would wander the wasteland, killing mutants and stray Communists” while shooting everything in sight and “saving a girl, or a town, or even the world” along the way.

Nichols observes:

But we live in more ambiguous times. We’re not fighting the Soviet Union. We don’t trust institutions, or one another, as much as we did 40 or 50 years ago. Perhaps we don’t even trust ourselves. We live in a time when lawlessness, whether in the streets or the White House, seems mostly to go unpunished. For decades, we have retreated from our fellow citizens and our social organizations into our own homes, and since COVID began, we’ve learned to virtualize our lives, holding meetings on glowing screens and having our food and other goods dropped at our doors by people we never have to meet.

We also face any number of demagogues who seem almost eager for our institutions to fail so that they can repopulate them in their own image and likeness.

The characters “The Last of Us” protagonists Joel and teenage Ellie encounter are more mundane, or were before a mutant fungus turned most of the population into raging zombies.

Kathleen, the murderous leader of a “brutal, ragtag militia” is “a vicious dictator who is no better (and perhaps worse) than the regime she helped overthrow.” No one in particular before the outbreak of the Cordyceps brain infection, Kathleen “raises the troubling thought that we all live near a Kathleen who is tenuously bound only by the restrictions of law and custom.”

David (about whom the less said the better) leads a band of religiousy survivors. But, Nichols writes, “he’s a fraud: He cares nothing about religion; he cares about being in charge, and he admits that he has struggled all his life with violent impulses. He is another character whom the apocalypse reveals more than it changes.”

The type of villain is not unique to “The Last of Us.” In Kevin Costner’s post-apocalyptic The Postman (1997), the principal antagonist is General Bethlehem, the brutal leader of an anarchist militia army. And before the world ended?

Prosecution Completes Testimony in Proud Boys Jan. 6 Sedition Trial https://t.co/sONDZVafWX

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) March 18, 2023

“I sold copying machines,” Bethlehem tells the Postman. “I was a salesman. The talent to lead men and devise and execute a battle plan were locked away inside me.”

Now he executes people on a whim. All he cares about is expanding his power and taking what he wants.

One does not have to look closely at some of the Jan. 6 defendants to recognize the type.

A Christmas Eve 2020 plan allegedly sketched out by Capitol riot defendant….

Per a Justice Dept Jan 6 sentencing memo in case of Larry Brock of Texas. His sentencing hearing begins at 11am pic.twitter.com/CPbJKlMnuj

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) March 17, 2023

Just tourists, yes? The Trump insurrection was just like a Carnival Cruise except with kidnapping, executions, mayhem, and a cash bar.

Nichols avoids invoking Jan. 6, but that subtext is barely subtext:

Again, this raises the creepy question of how many Davids walk among us, smiling and toting algebra books, restrained from their hellish impulses only by the daily balm of street lights and neighbors and manicured lawns. We should be grateful for every day that we don’t have to know the answer.

But that’s not exactly right, is it?

Donald Trump, inspirer and leader of the insurrection, still walks free, unaccountable as he’s been his entire life. Lying, eating fast food, and golfing as always.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (a.k.a. Tiny D), a socially awkward and weird bully who can barely manage small talk, is bent on turning Florida into an authoritarian fiefdom where freedom is what he says it is. And he wants to expand to the other 49 states.

MAGA members of Congress ran restaurants and gyms and sandwich shops before joining the Trump cult. Convicted rioters sold real estate and held other mundane jobs in suburbia before battling Capitol Police hand to hand, many after infection with the QAnon mind virus. They walk among us.

Joel and Ellie are themselves no role models. Joel was once a builder. The apocalypse turned him into a brutal killer. Ellie too has a violent streak. She is a child of the apocalypse and knows little else. They are the heroes in “The Last of Us.”

“Who Would You Be If the World Ended?” is something to consider before we get there. It’s not clear that these days are not the early stages.

Baby Zoomies!

 

 

Merida the highland cow is now just over a week old!

Be sure to hello to this bundle of fluff on your next visit to Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm in Bristol, UK.

She’s so fluffy!

The Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm’s (Bristol, UK) highland cow, Agnes, gave birth to a female calf in early March. Her keepers have named her Merida.

I don’t have a strong opinion on this Wuhan Lab Leak brouhaha because I don’t think it’s knowable one way or the other. But polling says that most Americans believe the virus was caused by a lab leak even as most virologists think it’s far more likely to have been passed from animal to human. It’s now a political football being used by the right wing to persecute Dr. Fauci and others for the pandemic. The usual.

Here’s the latest on the zoonotic transmission theory from a group of scientists:

An international team of virus experts said on Thursday that they had found genetic data from a market in Wuhan, China, linking the coronavirus with raccoon dogs for sale there, adding evidence to the case that the worst pandemic in a century could have been ignited by an infected animal that was being dealt through the illegal wildlife trade.

The genetic data was drawn from swabs taken from in and around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market starting in January 2020, shortly after the Chinese authorities had shut down the market because of suspicions that it was linked to the outbreak of a new virus. By then, the animals had been cleared out, but researchers swabbed walls, floors, metal cages and carts often used for transporting animal cages.

In samples that came back positive for the coronavirus, the international research team found genetic material belonging to animals, including large amounts that were a match for the raccoon dog, three scientists involved in the analysis said.

The jumbling together of genetic material from the virus and the animal does not prove that a raccoon dog itself was infected. And even if a raccoon dog had been infected, it would not be clear that the animal had spread the virus to people. Another animal could have passed the virus to people, or someone infected with the virus could have spread the virus to a raccoon dog.

But the analysis did establish that raccoon dogs — fluffy animals that are related to foxes and are known to be able to transmit the coronavirus — deposited genetic signatures in the same place where genetic material from the virus was left, the three scientists said. That evidence, they said, was consistent with a scenario in which the virus had spilled into humans from a wild animal.

A report with the full details of the international research team’s findings has not yet been published. Their analysis was first reported by The Atlantic.

As I said, I doubt we’ll ever know what happened and I have no doubt that millions of people will believe that China purposefully inflicted the virus onto the world. This will be used to justify military action should the time ever come. It would be nice if people didn’t play with this kind of fire by admitting they don’t know what they don’t know but I won’t hold my breath.

The New York Times takes a look at the latest polling for Ron Desantis:

It’s been a tough few months for Ron DeSantis.

Donald J. Trump and his allies have blasted him as “Meatball Ron,” “Ron DeSanctimonious,” a “groomer,” disloyal and a supporter of cutting entitlement programs. Now, he’s getting criticism from many mainstream conservatives for calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “territorial dispute.”

Is all of this making a difference in the polls? There are signs the answer is yes.

In surveys taken since the Trump offensive began two months ago, Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, has steadily lost ground against Mr. Trump, whose own numbers have increased.

It can be hard to track who’s up and who’s down in the Republican race, since different pollsters have had such wildly divergent takes on Mr. Trump’s strength. In just the last few days, a CNN/SSRS poll showed a tight race, with Mr. DeSantis at 39 percent and Mr. Trump at 37 percent among registered voters, while a Morning Consult poll found Mr. Trump with nearly a two-to-one lead, 52 percent to 28 percent.

In this situation, the best way to get a clear read on recent trends is to compare surveys by the same pollsters over time.

Over the last two months, we’ve gotten about a dozen polls from pollsters who had surveyed the Republican race over the previous two months. These polls aren’t necessarily of high quality or representative, so don’t focus on the average across these polls. It’s the trend that’s important, and the trend is unequivocal: Every single one of these polls has shown Mr. DeSantis faring worse than before, and Mr. Trump faring better.

A Widening Gap Between Trump and DeSantis

Every recent poll has shown Mr. DeSantis faring worse than he did two months ago — around the time Mr. Trump began publicly attacking him.

Sometimes it’s hard to explain why the polls move the way they do. This doesn’t seem to be one of those cases. It’s easy to tell a tidy story about why Mr. DeSantis has slipped.

–The DeSantis election bump is over. In the aftermath of the midterms, Mr. DeSantis benefited from extensive media coverage of his landslide win in Florida and Mr. Trump’s role in the G.O.P.’s disappointing showing.

–Trump went on offense. Beginning in mid-to-late January, Mr. Trump began testing various lines of attack, criticizing Mr. DeSantis’s loyalty and his consistency on Covid issues. In early February on his Truth Social site, Mr. Trump shared a photo and posts suggesting Mr. DeSantis was “grooming” female students when he was a high school teacher two decades ago. He has kept up the pressure ever since.

–DeSantis is on the sideline. When Mr. Trump attacked him, there was not much of a defense by Mr. DeSantis or counterattacks on Mr. Trump, whether by Mr. DeSantis or his allies. Mr. DeSantis hasn’t even declared his candidacy yet.

It’s a little hard to figure out which of these explanations matters most. Looking more carefully at the data, there’s reason to think all of these factors play a role.

For instance, there’s decent evidence that Mr. DeSantis was slipping even before Mr. Trump’s attacks began in earnest. A Monmouth University poll from Jan. 26 to Feb. 2 showed a significant deterioration in Mr. DeSantis’s support compared with a poll from early December. At this early point, the shift in the Monmouth poll and other surveys looks more like a fading post-midterm bounce than the effect of Mr. Trump’s attacks.

But Mr. DeSantis has kept losing ground in more recent polls, long after his midterm bump should have dissipated. This week, a Quinnipiac survey showed Mr. Trump making big gains over just the last month, with his lead growing by 12 points.

On average, Mr. DeSantis has lost four points in polls taken over the last month compared with polls by the same pollster between Jan. 15 and Feb. 15.

How important is it that Mr. DeSantis is losing ground? It may wind up not mattering much in itself, but it could say something important about the challenges facing the DeSantis campaign.

So far, there’s little evidence that Mr. DeSantis has suffered serious or irreparable damage, even if he’s lost ground against Mr. Trump. His favorability ratings, for instance, remain strong: The new Quinnipiac survey showed him with an exceptional 72-6 favorability rating among Republicans. If the national conversation around issues and events becomes more favorable, his position against Mr. Trump could easily rebound.

But there is a chance this episode betrays a deeper problem for Mr. DeSantis, even if the attacks themselves haven’t been especially harmful. He and his team have failed to respond to the attacks or shift the conversation, and it’s possible that’s because he and his allies don’t think they can safely engage the former president. It would help explain why Mr. Trump’s attacks have largely gone uncontested. It would help explain their effort to narrow areas of substantive disagreement with Mr. Trump, including on a topic like Ukraine in which Mr. DeSantis is now at odds with around half of his own likeliest supporters.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the DeSantis team was hesitant to engage someone who remains popular among Republicans and who has, shall we say, an ability to engage asymmetrically, as his “groomer” attacks highlighted. That’s a lesson a few former presidential candidates from Florida learned all too well in 2016.

It’s so early that it’s almost ridiculous to even look at this stuff. But it does appear that despite some of the Big Money Boyz’s early bets on DeSantis that it isn’t going to be a walk. And this pretty much guarantees that it’s going to be a bigger field at least for a while.

None of the Republicans running are acceptable but Trump and DeSantis are the worst. I look forward to watching the two of them eat each other alive.

Update:

Florida voters narrowly prefer former President Donald Trump to the state’s Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in a head-to-head matchup for the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2024, a new Emerson College poll finds, as the Florida governor has started slipping in polls following a post-midterms bump as Trump has escalated his attacks against him.

Not even Florida, Ron?

I’ve been saying for a while that the Republicans could not pick a worse time to play their little game of debt ceiling chicken with the economy still fragile coming out of the pandemic. Now, it may be suicidal.

Catherine Rampell writes:

A plea to lawmakers: If it was a bad idea to threaten default on U.S. debt before, it would be astoundingly, colossally idiotic now.

Recent financial-market turmoil — in regional U.S. banks, as well as some of the larger European institutions — suggests there might be much more fragility in the financial system than previously understood. In a sane world, politicians might respond to this new information constructively.

They might, for instance, figure out what they could do to ensure that financial regulators detect vulnerabilities at significantly sized banks sooner.

Politicians might also take some modest actions to combat inflation themselves, so that less of the burden of dampening demand falls on the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases — which are part of the reason we’re seeing stresses in the financial system today.

Unfortunately, that sane world does not appear to be the one we live in.

Faced with the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history, lawmakers retreated to their predictable partisan talking points. Democrats blame a 2018 rollback of “stress test” requirements on small and midsize banks. While this might plausibly have contributed to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, we still don’t know forcertain; bank supervisors might have spotted the problem on SVB’s balance sheet even without those requirements, given that the bank was relatively open about its poor risk management.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been grasping for some alternative explanation of what went wrong that would not implicate their general hostility toward greater oversight. So, some have instead blamed bank “wokeness,” a thoroughly incoherent (and yet very funny!) theory of the case. Hardcore Trumpers such as Peter Thiel patronized Silicon Valley Bank, so it’s hard to imagine the bank’s problems lay in too much emphasis on, say, critical race theory. We shouldn’t be surprised if Republicans start scapegoating drag queens soon, too.

After a scare like this, the next few months would normally be consumed with fights about what happened and how lawmakers should best address unexpected new weaknesses in the financial sector. But things haveso devolved into petty demagoguing that the biggest new risk is that demagoguing about SVB’s problems will dovetail with the other crisis that has been looming for months.

Since at least last fall, Republican lawmakers have been threatening to not raise the debt ceiling, the statutory limit on how much the federal government can borrow to pay off bills that Congress has already committed to. They have laid out a mathematically impossible set of conditions they say must be met before they would consider raising the government’s borrowing authority.

[…]

There is never a good time to toy with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, or otherwise question the validity of U.S. public debt. (Fun fact: According to the Constitution, it’s actually always forbidden.) But doing so right now seems especially unwise.

U.S. Treasury debt has long been considered virtually risk-free. The government has always paid its bills on time and in full, and all other assets are benchmarked against our relative safety. If we reveal ourselves to be unreliable borrowers — because we’d rather engage in political posturing than make good on our bills — that will not only call into question the riskiness of our debt. It will also call into question the riskiness of lots of other assets, too.

In the best of times, this kind of behavior could spook markets and set off a global financial crisis. Today, when there’s already mounting anxiety about the balance sheets of some financial institutions, is far from the best of times. Even hinting at default could trigger more panic in global markets.

[…]

Recent bank turmoil could indirectly accelerate how soon lawmakers need to raise the debt limit, too.(Before Silicon Valley Bank failed, forecasters were expecting the deadline would come as early as June.)

The FDIC’s rescue of depositors at SVB and Signature Bank should not affect how quickly the government runs out of cash, but some other things might. TheTreasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, for example, is currently being used to backstop the Fed’s emergency lending facility. Officials have said they don’t expect this special Treasury fund to be needed, but if it is, it could have a small impact on how soon Congress needs to again raise the borrowing limit.

Of course, if that happens, “we may also have bigger economic problems,” says Shai Akabas, a researcher at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Bigger problems like: a more widespread banking crisis, and/or severe recession.

These risks have so far not led Republicans to change their course. Last week, hours before Silicon Valley Bank failed, House Republicans proposed ordering the Treasury to prioritize payments in the event of a debt-limit breach. This is something that might not be technically feasible and is still, in any case, a different version of default.

If Congress is incapable of making financial conditions better, the least lawmakers can do is not make them worse.

Good luck to us. These people do not understand what they are doing, as was perfectly illustrated when they all fatuously shrieked “woke banks!” in unison, and more importantly, they don’t care. They are nihilists who are completely indifferent to the consequences of their actions. The only thing that might wake them up is the prospect of losing their seats but unfortunately their media and their base are committed to happy talk to keep them from ever contemplating that. Fasten your seatbelts.

Via the New Yorker:

Two decades ago, Bush and the Republicans were nearly united in their embrace of a brash militarism that sought to topple Saddam and transform Iraq and the broader Middle East in the process. Iraq, after paying a terrible price in the death of hundreds of thousands and disruption of millions of lives, was indeed transformed. But so, too, was American politics, where the backlash to the conflict arguably gave rise to the Presidencies of both Barack Obama—who first rose to fame as an antiwar state legislator—and Donald Trump. Trump is a Bush-basher of long standing, and he often framed his takeover of the Republican Party as an explicit repudiation of the extended Bush family and its internationalist legacy. Trump has said Bush “lied” to start the war, that he should have been impeached for how badly it was conducted, and that, over all, Bush had a “failed and uninspiring Presidency.”

Seven years after Trump won the White House by attacking the last Republican to hold the office, his views of foreign policy are now ascendant, if not yet dominant, in the G.O.P. Indeed, I cannot imagine the Party’s present state of inward-looking populism without the twin Bush shocks of the 2008 government bailout of Wall Street and the global overreach of the invasion of Iraq. Much as the Vietnam War did for a previous generation, the failures in Iraq shattered American confidence, shaped future debates over the use of military force, made the concept of democracy promotion itself suspect, distracted from rising threats posed by the revisionist great powers Russia and China, and splintered the previously unquestioned Republican commitment to a robustly internationalist American foreign policy.

If the country survives the Trump era’s assault on democracy and its recklessly inchoate foreign policy, this may turn out to have a silver lining in that breaking the GOP’s blind, rabid militarism is a positive development. Today’s so-called America Firsters are anything but pacifist, of course, and the first chance they get to wreak violence on non-white adversaries, they will jump at it. They love war. But dividing the party on these issues is still a good thing. We had 60 years of lockstep right wing anti-communism that led us down a terribly destructive path and that coalition had to be broken before we could go forward and debate these issues sanely. Will this lead us to a saner foreign policy? At this point it’s hard to see it with the GOP going completely batshit. But at least we’ve stopped fighting the last war.

MAGA writes a new script on January 6th

As the GOP presidential primary campaign gets underway it’s fascinating to see how the Republican Party has changed since Donald Trump descended onto the scene back in 2015. Ever since the successful White House runs of Ronald Reagan, virtually every Republican seeking higher office called themselves “conservative” and hewed to the Reagan revolution ideology — described as a “three-legged stool” — that centers global leadership and a strong national defense, traditional family values, low taxes and small government. Within that framework, there were minor differences on specific issues but generally speaking, in order to win the GOP nomination it was required that Republican candidates adhere to that basic philosophy.

In hindsight, it’s clear that this may not have been the huge winner Republicans assumed it to be since the party’s nominee has won the popular vote for president only once in 35 years. But for decades it was an article of faith in the political establishment and among the mainstream media, as well as the Republican party itself, that those policy priorities were held by a majority of the American people. However, over time, and through several incremental changes that were hard to see at the time, Reagan’s conservative movement became a shell of its former self. The right-wing populism popularized by talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh and then Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and ultimately Donald Trump now defines the Republican Party.

The main characteristic of what we are now calling the MAGA movement is the hysterical culture war issue of the day. Whether it’s immigrants allegedly taking over American society with their unacceptable foreignness or the educational system evolving with the multicultural society that the U.S. has become, modern Republicans are obsessed with grievance and backlash. But we’ve recently learned that they are also so insular and self-segregated in their right-wing media silos that they refuse to accept any facts that interfere with their worldview. They literally can’t handle the truth.

Variety commissioned a poll last week to find out whether or not the revelations in the Fox News story have affected their audience and unsurprisingly, for the most part, the 60% of viewers who have heard about it don’t care. I’m frankly surprised that many are aware of the scandal since the network hasn’t covered it. Of that 60%, 21% percent of them said they trust the network less after seeing the evidence. However, I don’t know that we can assume that means they trust it less because the network didn’t tell them the truth that Trump had lost the election. Maybe they trust it less because the Fox News stars don’t really believe that Trump won the election. I suspect there are more than a few of that 21% who are upset about the latter.

Nine percent said they were watching less now that they know about this while others said they are watching more for some reason. Perhaps they respect Fox celebrities and executives for being liars? 17% of those who heard about the lies said they now believe the 2020 election was not stolen. Huzzah! But 57% of those who know about it are still convinced it was. Trump’s Big Lie lives on and it seems that absolutely nothing will persuade them otherwise.

It does not appear that any of Trump’s rivals are going to even attempt to address this issue because they don’t want to alienate Fox, their main conduit to the GOP base, so that’s probably as good as it’s going to get. At this point, I’m actually more interested in the new Big Lie that’s forming around the January 6 insurrection. Unlike the 2020 election where skeptics could say that the process was obscure or that those in charge were engaged in subterfuge and fraud, January 6 happened on television screens all over the world in real time. There are hours and hours of footage taken by participants on the internet and hundreds of trials taking place in federal courtrooms in which not one J6 defendant has been found not guilty. That there could be any dispute about what took place that day is mindboggling.

It is unsurprising that some people would suggest that there were plants in the crowd who incited the riot. That’s almost a cliche. But to contend that there was no riot at all is simply deranged. Yet that hasn’t stopped Tucker Carlson from making that case nor has it stopped millions of Trump voters from throwing their last vestige of normal brain function out the window.

GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s gift to Carlson was the House security tapes from that day so that he could cherry-pick certain scenes was an extremely audacious maneuver. And it seems to have worked to convince a significant number of Fox News viewers that what they all saw with their own eyes never happened. It is a full blown mass delusion. Donald Trump is running with this new narrative, claiming that the investigations into the events of that day are a witch hunt and that the January 6 defendants are political prisoners. He has promised to pardon all of them if he is elected in 2024. And, as with the Big Lie, the rest of the candidates aren’t exactly jumping up to contradict this new narrative. Sure, they are on record saying the violence was wrong back when it happened, but most, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, are trying to walk a fine line with remarks like this on the first anniversary of January 6, playing down the significance:

“They are going to take this and milk this for anything they could to try to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump. When they try to act like this is something akin to the September 11 attacks, that is an insult to the people who were going into those buildings.

The last thing you would want to do is insult those very fine people who were beating cops over the head with flagpoles and chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” Of course, most of the voters DeSantis is trying to attract are now convinced that none of those things ever happened because according to Tucker Carlson, the police were actually leading the peaceful protesters on a guided tour of the capital that day.

All Republicans running for office are going to be required to parrot this line to some extent in 2024 because Trump and his accomplices in the House and at Fox News have declared it to be the official MAGA doctrine. If they want the votes of the Republican base they are going to have to run on the new official GOP slogan: “You can believe me or you can believe your lyin’ eyes.” It fits perfectly on a bumper sticker. 

Salon

Mike Luckovich is a treasure

pic.twitter.com/eHxsnxbsAG

— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) March 17, 2023

pic.twitter.com/NFdK7EATtV

— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) March 16, 2023

pic.twitter.com/HW2hw7XveQ

— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) March 15, 2023

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is lucky to have him.

Techies should know that. Should.

Believe it or not, a pair of tweets about last Friday’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank are still current.

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1634387467028647936?s=20

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1634246846129250310?s=20

Eugene Robinson writes about those conditionalities this morning:

Question: What is a socialist?

Answer: A libertarian tech bro who had money in Silicon Valley Bank.

There is nothing funny about the second-biggest bank failure in the nation’s history, which has roiled financial markets at a time when the economy is already unsettled. It is richly ironic, though, to hear luminaries of the tech sector, after years of complaining that “big government” was the problem, suddenly clamoring for massive federal intervention and largesse.

I’m talking about people such as David Sacks, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who is a member of the so-called PayPal mafia, a group of founders and early employees that includes bombastic anti-government billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. On Twitter, Sacks has railed against “profligate spending and money printing coming out of Washington” and the evils of what he calls “Bidenomics.”

But on Friday, Sacks was frantically calling for big government to come to the rescue of Silicon Valley Bank. He tweeted: “Where is Powell? Where is Yellen? Stop this crisis NOW. Announce that all depositors will be safe. Place SVB with a Top 4 bank. Do this before Monday open or there will be contagion and the crisis will spread.”

If Veruca Salt worked in Silicon Valley.

All that libertarian tech bro “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Startup” is bullshit when the shit hits the fan, isn’t it? There’s a reason we regulate engines and mechanical watches so they don’t overspeed and fly apart. That bit of engineering wisdom seems lost on our tech and financial wizards. Repealing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act led to the financial collapse of 2008 and the Great Recession. Donald Trump repealing Dodd-Frank contributed to the collapse of SVB and other banks last week.

If the original Dodd-Frank rules had been in place, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Greg Becker, the erstwhile chief executive of SVB, his bank “would have been required to maintain stronger liquidity and capital requirements and conduct regular stress tests that would have required SVB to shore up its business.” But no.

“Rules are not the enemy of markets,” Warren observed years ago. “Rules are the necessary ingredient for healthy markets,” as I mentioned in 2015:

That is why my business law textbook is 2-1/2 in. thick. It is chapter after chapter of real-world examples of who did what to whom, who gets paid, and who gets left holding the bag, demonstrating precisely why rules exist in business. It only works if everyone understands and plays by them. Rules need to be enforced again.

How many collapses will it take for them to learn? So long as the pain is felt by others, that question has no answer.