Month: December 2023

Sometimes animals save us as we save them

They need us and we need them:

Some say they were first brought in to take out the rats. Others contend they wandered in on their own.

What everyone can agree on — including those who have lived or worked at Chile’s largest prison the longest — is that the cats were here first.

For decades, they have walked along the prison’s high walls, sunbathed on the metal roof and skittered between cells crowded with 10 men each. To prison officials, they were a peculiarity of sorts, and mostly ignored. The cats kept multiplying into the hundreds.

Then prison officials realized something else: The feline residents were not only good for the rat problem. They were also good for the inmates.

“They’re our companions,” said Carlos Nuñez, a balding prisoner showing off a 2-year-old tabby he named Feita, or Ugly, from behind prison bars. While caring for multiple cats during his 14-year sentence for home burglary, he said he discovered their special essence, compared with, say, a cellmate or even a dog.

“A cat makes you worry about it, feed it, take care of it, give it special attention,” he said. “When we were outside and free, we never did this. We discovered it in here.”

Known simply as “the Pen,” the 180-year-old main penitentiary in Santiago, Chile’s capital, has long been known as a place where men live in cages and cats roam free. What is now more clearly understood is the positive effect of the prison’s roughly 300 cats on the 5,600 human residents.

The felines’ presence “has changed the inmates’ mood, has regulated their behavior and has strengthened their sense of responsibility with their duties, especially caring for animals,” said the prison’s warden, Col. Helen Leal González, who has two cats of her own at home, Reina and Dante, and a collection of cat figurines on her desk.

“Prisons are hostile places,” she added in her office, wearing a tight bun, billy club and combat boots. “So of course, when you see there’s an animal giving affection and generating these positive feelings, it logically causes a change in behavior, a change in mindset.”

Prisoners informally adopt the cats, work together to care for them, share their food and beds and, in some cases, have built them little houses. In return, the cats provide something invaluable in a lockup notorious for overcrowding and squalid conditions: love, affection and acceptance.

“Sometimes you’ll be depressed and it’s like she senses that you’re a bit down,” said Reinaldo Rodriguez, 48, who is scheduled to be imprisoned until 2031 on a firearms conviction. “She comes and glues herself to you. She’ll touch her face to yours.”

My favorite job of the week is searching for animal posts for the Friday night soother. I hesitate to admit how much time I spend “researching” them. But it makes me feel better when I do it. These stories bear out the fact that our relationship with the animals can be the thing that makes us human.

I don’t know that we can afford to be ecstatically optimistic but it is important to hear the positive case for the Democrats. It’s demoralizing to watch the news and constantly be told that Biden is toast. So here’s Simon Rosenberg’s final 2023 Hopium Chronicle. It’s New Year’s Eve. Enjoy it. The hard work starts day after tomorrow:

A Positive, Upbeat End to 2023 – Dow in record territory. Inflation running below the Fed target rate. Interest rates coming down next year. GDP growth 4.9% last quarter, looking close to 3% for this one. Best job market since the 1960s. The lowest uninsured rate in history. Crime has fallen across the US this year, rents are coming down too. Consumer sentiment is spiking. Wage growth, prime age worker participation rate and new business formation are all in historically elevated territory. Best recovery in the G7. US setting records for domestic oil and renewable production. $130b in student debt forgiven. The good news just keeps coming.

Democrats are also seeing improvement in national polling. A majority of the independent polls taken in recent weeks have Biden tied or ahead. The influential NYT poll, which had Biden trailing Trump two months ago, now has Biden up 47%-45% with likely voters. Dems have picked up 3 points in 538’s Congressional Generic tracker in recent months, and Navigator’s recent House battleground tracker polling found Republicans losing ground, and Democrats now with a clear advantage. The two most recent large sample Hispanic poll and youth polls found Biden running at or above his 2020 numbers – 57%-33% (+24) with 18-29 year olds in the Harvard/IOP poll, and 58%-31% (+27) in the bi-partisan Univision poll. The Economist/YouGov weekly tracker this week found Biden’s approval on the Israel-Hamas war 37%-32% (+5) approve w/18-29 year olds, the best of any age cohort, and 59%-23% (+36) w/Democrats – so no clear, sustained backlash there.

Here are the 16 recent polls showing Biden ahead or tied (via 538):

47-45 NYT/Siena (LVs)
49-48 Monmouth
49-48 NPR/Marist
47-46 Quinnipiac
42-41 YouGov/Economist 12/2
44-42 YouGov/Economist 11/25
39-37 YouGov
40-36 and 37-35 Leger
Reuters had Biden +4 in the battleground Presidential states
45-45 Clarity
44-44 Yahoo/YouGov
41-41 Cygnal
43-43 Economist/YouGov 12/6 and 12/20
43-43 Morning Consult 12/2

It can no longer be said Trump leads in the 2024 election, and in the polling which helped create the “Trump is ahead” take, Biden now leads.

2023 has been a blue wave electoral year for Democrats, a very good year. Now the economy, consumer sentiment and polling are all ending the year on an upbeat, optimistic note. Congratulations everyone. While we have a long way to go in the 2024 election, we are ending 2023 strong, with momentum, in my view in a far better place than Republicans, who are, in just about every imaginable way, an historic shitshow – full stop.

Remember our basic take on 2024 – Joe Biden is a good President. The country is better off. The Democratic Party is strong and winning elections across the US. And they have Trump.

The Biden-Harris Campaign’s New 2024 Memo – A Must Read – The campaign just released a memo, Why Biden Will Win in 2024. It begins:

As 2023 comes to a close, the choice before the American people in November 2024 is coming into sharper focus.

With less than a month before GOP primary voters begin casting ballots in Iowa, former President Donald Trump’s extreme and dangerous agenda once again looks poised to define the Republican Party in the 2024 election.

With that reality comes a stark and sobering fact: The choice for voters next year will not simply be between competing philosophies of governing. The choice for the American people in November 2024 will be about protecting American democracy and the very individual freedoms we enjoy as Americans.

Ever since white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville with the support of Donald Trump in 2017, President Biden has warned of Trump’s ability to incite political violence and wage attacks on our democracy and freedom.

President Biden wrote in The Atlantic in August 2017 that “We have an American president who has emboldened white supremacists with messages of comfort.”

When he launched his campaign for president in April 2019, Joe Biden told the nation that Donald Trump and his actions posed “a threat to this nation unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.” That the soul of America itself was on the line.

He made the same case when he accepted his party’s nomination in August 2020, and again in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, shortly before more Americans voted for him than for any candidate in history, and again last year at Independence Hall before the 2022 midterms – which yielded the best results for a sitting president since FDR. And, when he announced his reelection bid in April, his message was the same.

Make no mistake: The stakes next year are higher than they ever have been. But voters have been clear. They will not accept the existential threat to democracy that Donald Trump represents. They will not vote for his extreme policies and “dictator on day one” approach to control their daily lives.

They’ll be clear again next November.

Reading the whole memo is our Hopium homework tonight.

I’m very worried as we should all be. But I don’t want to feel demoralized when there really is good news.

Anyway, try not to get too depressed. You’re hearing a lot of nay-saying but remember, they aren’t always right. Red tsunami anyone?

Dispatch from the Trump cult

Watch the whole thing if you have time. Are there people like this at Biden events? I’m not saying there aren’t. But I’ve never seen them.

Democrats do have many crazies in their midst. it’s a big coalition. And I know there’s lots of woo and irrationality. Take RFK Jr. for example — there are plenty of left leaners who think he’s great. But I’d be surprised if there were many who believe that Donald Trump, for all his immense flaws, is draining blood from the brains of children and using it to drug the population. Yet Donald Trump has a not insignificant number of such people who believe this of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton following him.

Even worse than that (if that’s possible) is the fact that the woman in the video dismisses every indisputable fact by questioning, “where did you hear that?” and insisting that it’s fake news. You can’t deal with people who believe that all reality they don’t like isn’t real.

This is cult stuff and it goes way beyond the kind of grotesque propensity for racism and bigotry that characterizes so much of our species. This is superstition and brainwashing. And there’s a lot more of it than we’ve probably seen since the early days of human civilization thanks to the internet. It’s beyond creepy.

We’d better hope not

Jack Smith’s office has been working over the holiday and they’ve dropped quite a filing responding to Trump’s claim of immunity. The consequences of the court granting it are dire:

Special counsel Jack Smith warned in a new filing Saturday that ex-President Donald Trump’s bid for immunity could “license presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.”

The brief lodged in the D.C. Court of Appeals came in response to the ex-president’s claims that he is immune to prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 defeat because he survived an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, and because his plotting fell within the powers and duties of his office.

If these arguments—which District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected earlier this month—won out, a president could commit crimes freely so long as he threw up sufficient hurdles to keep two-thirds of U.S. senators from voting to remove him, Smith said.

“A former president could thus bank on the practical obstacles to impeachment (a remedy designed to remove, not hold criminally accountable, a corrupt officer) to provide a safe harbor insulating him from prosecution once he has left office,” the brief reads, highlighting one potential scenario that might unfold should Trump triumph. “Under the defendant’s framework, the nation would have no recourse to deter a president from inciting his supporters during a State of the Union address to kill opposing lawmakers—thereby hamstringing any impeachment proceeding—to ensure that he remains in office unlawfully.”

That was hardly the only apocalyptic vision that Smith and his colleagues conjured. The prosecutors attacked the defense’s claims that Trump’s conspiring with state and federal officials to block President Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College fell within the rights and responsibilities of a president to engage with other officials on matters of federal importance.

“That approach would grant immunity from criminal prosecution to a president who accepts a bribe in exchange for directing a lucrative government contract to the payer; a president who instructs the FBI director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy; a president who orders the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics; or a president who sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary,” Smith and his team wrote. “In each of these scenarios, the president could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as commander-in-chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy.”

It’s hard to imagine that the Supremes could possibly be so short sighted and partisan that they would agree with Trump’s argument but you never know. I suspect it’s much more likely they’ll put the case off until after the election and then call it moot if they can. The hypocrisy will be evident if they do that — they raced to decide the 2000 election. And the effect will be the same as if they decided for Trump if he wins because he will take no decision as a win and will do exactly as Smith predicts.

Surely that 6-3 majority can’t all be that myopic can they? Even as rank partisan Republican hacks they must see the danger in letting Trump off the hook? Right?

Yeah…

Teach Yellow Dogs new tricks

Even if a Democrat wins the White House in November 2024, we could a year from now be sitting on pins and needles wondering if Coup 2.0 is in the works. Watching the January 6, 2021 insurrection unfold may have been the most harrowing day in the lives of ordinary Americans who’ve never served in combat. One wonders if Trump country watched with beer and pretzels as if it was the Super Bowl halftime show. In any event, the Department of Justice, D.C. and Capitol Police, and nearby national guard units, will be anxious as well, and better prepared.

There’s a lot to do between now and then.

You help keep me/us sane by reading our daily rants. Thank you so very much for that and for your support. I don’t say it enough, thank God for readers:

[T]his blog’s proprietor, began writing here New Year’s Day 2003 after attracting a following at Atrios’s blog. She wrote that being invited to write by Atrios was “kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.”

That’s how I felt when Digby invited me to join her in August 2014. (We’d met at a conference in 2009.) I began writing occasional commentaries for the Asheville Citizen-Times in mid-September 2003, got named an official (unpaid) “community columnist” in 2005, and finally started up my own blog in March 2006. (It’s still out there gathering electrons.) Eventually, a local rabble-rouser invited me to join Scrutiny Hooligans (R.I.P.) before Digby asked me to fill in over a weekend. The weekend never ended. The Citizen-Times’ then-editorial editor, a Digby fan, greeted me at an event, smiled broadly, shook my hand and said, “My friend, you have arrived.”

Behind the scenes, I’ll be plugging away trying to teach Yellow Dogs new tricks. In North Carolina. In Arizona. Maybe even in Pennsylvania. In states where voters register by party, Democrats and aligned nonprofits might, with access to the right data and the capacity to think outside the box, turn out many more of those unaffiliated voters they’ll need to win races in November.

Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.
– attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley

Smaller, under-resourced, and less-experienced Democratic county committees may not get trained in the mechanics and logistics of turning out the vote for their candidates, especially those down-ballot candidates that constitute the farm team. State parties lack the budgets and bandwidth. So I do it.

For The Win, 5th Ed links will go out in a month or so to over 2,000 counties. (I’m essentially a spammer.) This county-level GOTV cookbook is still a lead-a-horse effort. But for county chairs open to learning new tricks, I can show them how to play like the big leagues on little league money.

Democrats tend to be policy liberals and campaign conservatives. Now is no time to go into a defensive crouch. If we mean to defend this republic from neighbors bent on turning it into an autocracy or worse — possibly much worse — we’ll need to stop listening to the Axelrods and Carvilles who stopped learning new tricks decades ago. Gen Z is bringing new energy to the table and gaining a foothold. Voters under 45 (you’ve seen the graphic) are where Democrats have the most potential for increasing voter turnout. Take risks.

Mansplaining to independents why they should vote Democrat is not the way to make that happen. Don’t ask them to do something for your party and candidate. Tell them why voting is doing something for themselves.

The new first principle of politics

The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad take place in Paris in July 2024. The organizers periodically add new events and remove others from sports that have fallen out of use/favor. Not having checked to see if that’s happened for the upcoming Olympics, I have a suggestion for a new event. Credit where due, David Frum inspired the idea.

Frum (indirectly) identifies in The Atlantic the dominant principle held by the Party of Trump: flexibility. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once advised a staffer and, hoo-boy, are Republicans flexible.* Frum provides a few examples where the Trump faithful nimbly pivot whenever it suits them. There’s a new first principle on the block.

Point out where Republicans benefit from and leverage our system’s anti-majoritarian features to engineer for themselves permanent minority rule? We’re a republic, not a democracy.

States rule that Donald Trump, post-insurrection, is ineligible under the 14th Amendment to hold public office in any capacity? Let the people decide!

Frum summarizes what we know of the Trump era — the lies, the hypocrisy, the attempts to rig the 2020 election, the attempts to rig the post-election. There’s no need to recount it all here. The point is this:

Trump and his supporters have conjured a series of self-serving rules. Where antique anti-majoritarian devices work for them, the antique anti-majoritarian devices prevail. Where crude gaming of filibusters and gerrymandering works for them, the crude gaming must prevail. Where fraud and violence work for them, fraud and violence must prevail. And where invoking democratic ideas works for them—well, you can complete the sentence.

How should people who are serious about democratic principles respond to this avalanche of bad faith? Democratic ideals don’t cease to be true just because they can be exploited by dishonest actors. Yet democracy also cannot become an optional principle that authoritarians can use when it suits them and then discard without consequences when it becomes an obstacle to their goals. Democratic systems have constitutions and constitutional remedies precisely to protect themselves against those who toggle in this way between breaking inconvenient rules and demanding the benefit of favorable ones.

Frank Wilhoit provided the most biting, class-based formulation of bad faith politics:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Even shorter: Heads, I win, tails, you lose.

Those of us living under minority rule know that one well.

Frum, once skeptical of disqualifying Trump under the 14th Amendment, is now “disqualification-curious.”

Maybe prudence genuinely does recommend leaving Trump’s disgraced name on primary and general-election ballots. But remember that old joke about the man who murdered both of his parents and then asked for mercy as an orphan? It needs to be replaced by a new joke about the ex-president who trashed democracy when he had the power, and then pleaded for the protection of democracy so he could have one more chance to trash democracy again.

As popular as public displays of conservative bad faith have become since the 2008 election, perhaps they deserve their own Bad Faith Olympic games event. Perhaps Donald Trump will compete. No one knows more about bad faith than Trump. Just ask him. He and his retinue already possess the necessary Nixonian flexibility.

* Read up on the Nixon renaissance at Politico Magazine.

This is one of the most surprising articles I’ve read in the NY Times in a long while. It’s about the Israeli military’s total lack of preparation for the October 7th attacks. I can’t really believe how bad it was. This was just not something most people ever thought could happen. They’re supposed to be the best military with the best intelligence in the whole region. My God.

Here is a gift link for you to read the whole thing which I highly recommend you do. The administration just approved a$147.5 million  emergency shipment of military aid. Wherever you come out on this issue, I think everyone can agree that the US should be very concerned about its ongoing military support for the country. And I would hope that it would convince even the hawks in both countries that Netanyahu has got to go. The buck stops with him.

A short excerpt:

The full reasons behind the military’s slow response may take months to understand. The government has promised an inquiry. But a New York Times investigation found that Israel’s military was undermanned, out of position and so poorly organized that soldiers communicated in impromptu WhatsApp groups and relied on social media posts for targeting information. Commandos rushed into battle armed only for brief combat. Helicopter pilots were ordered to look to news reports and Telegram channels to choose targets.

And perhaps most damning: The Israel Defense Forces did not even have a plan to respond to a large-scale Hamas attack on Israeli soil, according to current and former soldiers and officers. If such a plan existed on a shelf somewhere, the soldiers said, no one had trained on it and nobody followed it. The soldiers that day made it up as they went along.

“In practice, there wasn’t the right defensive preparation, no practice, and no equipping and building strength for such an operation,” said Yom Tov Samia, a major general in the Israeli reserves and former head of the military’s Southern Command.

“There was no defense plan for a surprise attack such as the kind we have seen on Oct. 7,” said Amir Avivi, a brigadier general in the reserves and a former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, which is responsible for protecting the region.

That lack of preparation is at odds with a founding principle of Israeli military doctrine. From the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, the goal was to always be on the offensive — to anticipate attacks and fight battles in enemy territory.

In response to a series of questions from The Times, including why soldiers and officers alike said there had been no plan, the Israel Defense Forces replied: “The I.D.F. is currently focused on eliminating the threat from the terrorist organization Hamas. Questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage.”

Unbelievable.

This isn’t the first time he’s said this, of course. He claims he actually won the popular vote in 2016 because of all the undocumented immigrants who voted for Clinton. He even created a commission to investigate it and, of course, they came up with nothing because it’s utter nonsense.

But today this actually refers to the Great Replacement Theory, which is much more pernicious. Sure, he’s laying the groundwork to claim he actually won again. And his people will be convinced of it, of course. But the Republican Party has now adopted this white supremacist theory and it’s inspiring people to take matters into their own hands. Example: The Tree of Life and El Paso mass murders, which were clearly inspired by this grotesque, racist propaganda. Trump may be doing it for his personal purposes, but a whole lot of people are absorbing this idea as a major threat to their way of life. It’s bad.