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The Doomsday Club

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 4, 2023

Welcome to the party, pals

The Atlantic this morning delivers a full spread of articles announcing the imminent demise of the Late Great United States of America, all part of its “If Trump Wins” series. There is growing alarm about another Trump presidency and reason for it. But it’s not as if Robert Kagan’s, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” just last week did not give many of us sleepless nights already.

Conventional wisdom has finally caught up with what Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) and Timothy Snyder (“On Tyranny“) have warned about for years. This Trump guy whom sane people treated as an ignorant, loudmouth jerk, and his red-hatted band of equally loudmouth sycophants and Beltway collaborators, are a genuine threat to the country’s existence. Have you heard? They ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There’s video.

Trump is out for revenge, writes David Frum. He will dump NATO, warns Anne Applebaum. His second term will be all loyalists, lapdogs and cronies, explains McKay Coppins. And with control of the Department of Justice, he’ll get away with it, predicts Barton Gellman.

Frum sounds the alarm:

A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.

It is satisfying that major outlets have finally discovered that “Trump and Trumpism [are] a direct existential threat to the future of U.S. democracy.” But a person can only take so much gloom and doom. I almost did not click on any of them.

An acquaintance I encountered last night could not take the stress 18 months ago and had checked out. She was resigned last night to doomsday arriving posthaste. While it’s nice that CW has figured out it is time to call fascism fascism and raise democracy’s DEFCON status, we must be careful not to overdo it.

Dr. Helen Caldicott of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the anti-nuclear group, once tried in her talks to shock listeners into action about the threat of nuclear weapons. By blasting her audiences with a flood of frightening statistics (I attended one of those speeches in person) the crusader sometimes accomplished the opposite:

PSR Executive Director Jane Wales, while acknowledging a huge debt to Caldicott, said in 1984 that the time for the “bombing runs” (as insiders call the speech) was past. “We knew it was past when someone interrupted the speech one evening, actually interrupted it, and said, ‘We know all that, but what can we do?’”

So, don’t panic. The antidote to despair is not less engagement, but more. Get busy. Celebrate little victories.

I’m assembling mailing lists for the 5th Ed of For The Win right now. Two years ago 40% of Idaho’s counties either had no functioning Democratic committees (or no sign of them on the Net). Today all do. Two years ago an even higher percentage of Iowa’s counties were MIA. Today only 5 are. Sure, it’s red Idaho and Iowa, but it’s dramatic progress in two short years. Nobody knows about that. Now you do.

Bad news stands out. Good news doesn’t.

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 4, 2023

That’s one explanation

That Statista chart is from May 10, 2022. A followup from Oct 18, 2023 reports the market has cooled somewhat since last year. Nevertheless:

While house prices have continuously grown in recent years, incomes have not followed at the same pace. That means that for aspiring homeowners, purchasing a home has become increasingly unaffordable. In a survey among people actively looking to buy a home, one in three millennials cited the high house prices as the main barrier to homeownership. Meanwhile, inflation is on the rise and has forced the Federal Reserve to introduce a gradual increase in interest rates, leading to a double increase in the cost of borrowing. As a result, homebuyer sentiment plummeted, Americans across all age groups agreeing that the current time was not a good time to buy a home.

Home ownership is still one of the main ways Americans build wealth. If I were Gen Z, I’d be pissed too.

The Redfin chart above is also from summer 2022. But rents are still near record highs today even as pressures have subsided slightly:

The rental market has cooled in part because there’s a lot of new inventory, which means landlords are grappling with rising vacancies and have less leverage to raise rents. That’s the reverse of what’s happening in the for-sale housing market, where prices are rising due to an inventory shortage. Listings in the for-sale market have plunged because surging mortgage rates have prompted many homeowners to stay put, as moving would mean trading in their low rate for a much higher one.

Is there a housing supply problem? That’s the word on the street. But institutional investors looking to squeeze more profit from the housing market are another factor:

Between Invitation Homes, Blackstone BX +1.7%, and the major groups that are buying single-family homes, 1 in 3 houses in Texas were bought by a PE firm last year and Wall Street owns 1.2 million homes across the country. With that type of buying power in any market center, the shortage of homes is not just a product of supply and demand. These investors are looking for certain types of homes and taking inventory away from middle class Americans or first-time home buyers – the average buy box is a 1,400-2,300sqft., 3- or 4-bedroom single family home. Although this doesn’t affect high target markets like San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles, Americans are no longer able to buy a house in the submarkets where the average purchase price is $350-450k. When there are 1.2 million homes that are owned by Wall Street in today’s market center, institutional investors ultimately don’t care about the price of the home – they’re just trying to make yield on the rents because they can afford to pay cash for the homes. They have no intention of releasing these homes into the market center, which is adding to the housing shortage and creates a bigger problem. We can’t build our way out of the shortage of inventory.

Looking at housing in our town one Sunday, I spotted three houses on one street bought the same day by the same real estate group out of Boca Raton. They are now rentals. Yes, it’s a factor.

The Threads user at the top observes:

People don’t look to the thing that has gotten better for them (like more options for jobs.) They look to the things that have gotten worse for them, and 30% more expensive food and 50% more expensive houses over the course of 3 years is a huge shock and the only way out of that is through.

Financial analysis does not reduce individual angst. If you’ve seen $5 and $6 boxes of breakfast cereal in stores in the last couple of years, you know what he’s talking about. People cannot eat GDP.

I Gotcher Legacy For You, Right Here

Published by digby on December 3, 2023

I saw a man on the street interview this week in which an RFK Jr fan was going on about the “Kennedy legacy.”

RFK Jr is a certified nut who was pulled into the race by ratfucker Steve Bannon. Let’s just hope he doesn’t get on the ballot anywhere important.

Bad Faith All The Way Down

Published by digby on December 3, 2023

Heidi Przbyla at Politico reports on yet more degradation of the Supreme Court:

Princeton Professor Robert P. George, a leader of the conservative legal movement and confidant of the judicial activist and Donald Trump ally Leonard Leo, made the case for overturning Roe v. Wade in an amicus brief a year before the Supreme Court issued its watershed ruling.

Roe, George claimed, had been decided based on “plain historical falsehoods.” For instance, for centuries dating to English common law, he asserted, abortion has been considered a crime or “a kind of inchoate felony for felony-murder purposes.”

The argument was echoed in dozens of amicus briefs supporting Mississippi’s restrictive abortion law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that struck down the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. Seven months before the decision, the argument was featured in an article on the web page of the conservative legal network, the Federalist Society, where Leo is co-chair.

In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito used the same quote from Henry de Bracton, the medieval English jurist, that George cited in his amicus brief to help demonstrate that “English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime.”

George, however, is not a historian. Major organizations representing historians strongly disagree with him.

That this questionable assertion is now enshrined in the court’s ruling is “a flawed and troubling precedent,” the Organization of American Historians, which represents 6,000 history scholars and experts, and the American Historical Association, the largest membership association of professional historians in the world, said in a statement. It is also a prime example of how a tight circle of conservative legal activists have built a highly effective thought chamber around the court’s conservative flank over the past decade.

A POLITICO review of tax filings, financial statements and other public documents found that Leo and his network of nonprofit groups are either directly or indirectly connected to a majority of amicus briefs filed on behalf of conservative parties in seven of the highest-profile rulings the court has issued over the past two years.

It is the first comprehensive review of amicus briefs that have streamed into the court since Trump nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, solidifying the court’s conservative majority. POLITICO’s review found multiple instances of language used in the amicus briefs appearing in the court’s opinions.

Read on to see just how bad it is. Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society are right int he middle of it, of course.

The article delves deeply into the self-serving arguments being made by various right wing actors to bolster the specious priors of the conservative justices. The way they have gamed the justice system is unbelievable.

This is one of the reasons why I’m reluctant to hold out too much hope that the courts are going to save us from Donald Trump. I think it’s 50/50 at best. These people may not be MAGA but they are something just as dangerous in their own way. They have a far right agenda and they have corruptly adopted the willingness to shelve intellectual integrity and legal principles in order to enact it. That’s the tie that binds the coalition together.

Truth

Published by digby on December 3, 2023

If you are a person who understands the trauma that October 7th caused to Israelis and Jews around the world, you should see the reality here. The ongoing carnage in Gaza cannot be defended and Israel is very close to losing the support of the rest of the world that currently supports it:

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel risked “strategic defeat” in its war with Hamas if it fails to heed warnings about the mounting civilian death toll.

“I have personally pushed Israeli leaders to avoid civilian casualties, and to shun irresponsible rhetoric, and to prevent violence by settlers in the West Bank,” Austin said in a speech to the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday.

Austin’s comments come as top US officials have grown increasingly vocal in their warnings to Israel about the death toll in the Gaza Strip. Those warnings, previously confined to closed-door meetings, have been thrust into the open by mounting pressure from Israel’s Arab neighbors, human-rights activists and opinion at home — including the left of President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party.

While Austin and other US leaders have vowed to continue supporting Israel, they worry that American support could become untenable if civilian casualties continue to mount.

“I learned a thing or two about urban warfare from my time fighting in Iraq,” he said. “Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. And the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian corridors.”

“The lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians,” he said. “In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

Natanyahu is a bloodthirsty, self-interested monster who will continue the killing as long as he thinks it will keep him in power. The Israeli people must get rid of him. If they don’t find a way to do that they are consigning themselves to the pantheon of collective punishers and will be shunned by the rest of the world.

Where Have We Heard This Before?

Published by digby on December 3, 2023

DeSantis tries to ape Trump again, in the stupidest way possible:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would replace Obamacare with a “better plan” — part of an interview in which he criticized former President Donald Trump for failing to deliver on numerous policy promises during his term in the White House, including frequent pledges to replace the health care law.

“Obamacare hasn’t worked,” DeSantis said in the interview with moderator Kristen Welker, which aired Sunday morning. “We are going to replace and supersede with a better plan.”

He declined to provide details about how his plan would “supersede” Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, adding that his campaign would most likely roll out a proposal in the spring.

I can’t wait.

I think this is good. With all the Republicans now falling in line to repeal Obamacare and kill Social Security and Medicare, in addition to their hostility to abortion rights, I think we have the makings of a good domestic argument about the future. And they are on the wrong side of it.

Who’s Losing It?

Published by digby on December 3, 2023

Trump has always been a sloppy speaker. But he’s not the same person he was, that’s clear. Someone pointed out the other day that the past and the present seem to be merging in his mind at times. The stuff where he’s talking about golden showers and how his wife took it and constantly saying that Obama is president are tells that something is off in his sense of time and place.

Here are a couple more excerpts from speeches he gave this weekend. They are bizarrely disjointed even for him. Some are just the usual misspeaking but he doesn’t seem to realize he’s done it. In the past he would do some verbal gyration to cover it (of course, he would never say “excuse me” and correct himself as normal people do) but he just sails past this stuff now.

This is just delusional:

This is a massive Freudian slip:

Of course, he’s also the same jackass he always was:

The Flock of Seagulls hairdo gets more elaborate by the day. Can he not see it?

I Know. Let’s Make Everything Worse For Everyone.

Published by digby on December 3, 2023

Via Axios:

Muslim Americans in several swing states are scheduled to gather in Michigan on Saturday to start a campaign they’re calling #AbandonBiden, a reflection of their outrage over President Biden‘s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

 Arab American and Muslim American anger could hurt Biden’s re-election prospects in most of the 2024 swing states he won in 2020, as those groups have been heavily Democratic.

Muslim American leaders from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are expected to meet in Dearborn, Mich., to start the new campaign.

“This #AbandonBiden 2024 conference is set against the backdrop of the upcoming 2024 presidential election and the decision to withdraw support for President Biden due to his unwillingness to call for a ceasefire and protect innocents in Palestine and Israel,” the group said in a statement.

“Leaders from swing states will work together to guarantee Biden’s loss in the 2024 election.”

The campaign primarily will focus on social media for now, organizer Jaylani Hussein of Minneapolis tells Axios.

Hussein said Muslim leaders acknowledge that not supporting Biden could result in the re-election of former President Trump, who is disliked by many Muslim Americans because of his racist retweets about them and his efforts to ban Muslims from migrating to the U.S.

Last night:

They’re fine with that:

“We recognize that, in the next four years, our decision may cause us to have an even more difficult time. But we believe that this will give us a chance to recalibrate, and the Democrats will have to consider whether they want our votes or not.”

I guess if you’re in a detention camp there’s lots of time to “recalibrate.” Nice to have that “chance.” But at least this will result in helping the people of Gaza.

Right?

There is no The Democratic Party

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 3, 2023

There are dozens

Still image from Moneyball (2011).

A Newsweek headline on Saturday caught my attention:

Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson compared the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Florida Democratic Party to the now defunct Soviet Union, telling Newsweek on Saturday that their actions ahead of the primaries are “essentially authoritarian.”

Williamson, along with fellow Democratic contenders Cenk Uygur, a political commentator and creator of the The Young Turks, and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, has slammed the Florida Democratic Party’s decision to not include their names on the primary ballot. Instead, Democratic voters in the southern state will only see Biden’s name listed—unless the decision is reversed.

In an earlier story, Newsweek reminded readers that Uyger is ineligible to serve as president. But that’s an aside. As for the Florida Democratic Party, it’s been a mess for some time. Not that we can talk here in North Carolina where Democrats in 2022 opposed Green Party recognition. Unwisely, I think. I hope that’s changed.

As for Democrats nationally and the DNC, let’s review. There is no The Democrats (from 2020):

One of the leaders of North Carolina’s Bernie Sanders delegation to the 2016 national convention in Philadelphia called to say he’d just come out of his first caucus meeting with the convention’s 57 delegations.

Fifty-seven? Right. Fifty states, the territories, the District of Columbia, and Democrats Abroad. As often as critics condemn the Democratic Party, the call brought home that there is no The Democrats. There are 57 party organizations that trickled into the union over nearly two centuries, each with its own charter and bylaws, local history, and local languages and customs (not all of them European). The Democratic National Committee may organize the quadrennial convention and administer the national voter file, but it is not the One Ring that rules them all. Chairman Tom Perez runs the DNC. He does not run the party.

Beyond those 57 delegations are several other major players pursuing independent agendas.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) recruits and raises money for state legislative candidates.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) recruits and raises money for congressional candidates, including for reelecting its congressional incumbents.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) recruits and raises money for U.S. Senate candidates, including for reelecting its Senate incumbents.

See a pattern?

Guess what the Democratic National Committee’s primary job is? And it’s not running the other 60 organizations. That it does is an internet rumor, an urban legend.

That’s not to say that a lot of thinking among the old boys in many of those groups is not medieval (and defensive when it needs to be aggressive). But changing that won’t happen by changing the top. Change happens from the bottom up.

FYI.

‘Collaborator’ is the new ‘colonizer’

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 3, 2023

Sleepwalking into dictatorship

The first time I heard colonizer used was (IIRC) in Black Panther (2018). Since then the smear has caught on a bit, and not in a Martin Luther King sort of way. But that single word of dialogue served in the film to instantly replace the European view of Africa with an African view of Europeans. It carries racial connotations, but is anchored not as much in skin color as behavior, on what Europeans do.

We’ve used enablers in the past to describe Donald Trump’s allies inside and outside of government. Former Rep. Liz Cheney offers on “CBS Sunday Morning” a more pointed term for Trump’s confederates based on what they do. They are collaborators, and she doesn’t mean colleagues. She deploys collaborators as the French Resistance might against the Vichy government.

“If you look at what Donald Trump is trying to do, he can’t do it by himself,” Cheney tells John Dickerson. “He has to have collaborators. And the story of [Speaker] Mike Johnson is the story of a collaborator.”

“The Speaker of the House is a collaborator to overthrow the last election,” Dickerson suggests in this clip.

But Cheney means more. Johnson, et al. are collaborators in Trump’s plan for overthrowing the United States Constitution should he get reelected. Trump is blunt about his plans.

“One of the things that we see…is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”

Something to ponder from Pwnallthethings (@pwnallthethings.bsky.social):

Humans have an incredible ability to underestimate how much worse life can get for them personally, and to rationalize themselves as the exception to what would come from putting people like this in charge of the apparatus of government

Update: Here’s the link to the full story.