Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 23:05 on 29 October 2019
As I wrote last month, “Whatever the [Ukraine phone call] transcript says, odds favor what was actually said was even worse.” Now we have credible testimony that points to the transcript having omitted key (and particularly incriminating) parts of the conversation.
Published at 11:24 on 23 October 2019
Willfully choosing to enable illegal tactics by Trump-supporting fascists? Why must you always, always be the party of weakness, Democrats? Why?
And yes, Democrats, you did willfully choose to enable those tactics. You should have had the Capitol police arrest the intruders and remove them. You should have, but you chose not to.
As such, any whining about “lawlessness” on the part of the other side will find exactly zero sympathy in my ears. Laws only matter to the degree that they are enforced, and you just chose not to enforce them.
The correct course of action I proposed above is, far from being an extreme one, actually a very moderate one. You will note that I didn’t propose filing charges this first time. Just let the perpetrators experience what it’s like to be arrested, and what the interior of a holding cell looks like. Then release them (without filing charges), because it’s a first time. Let them decide if they want to push things further or not.
You blew it big time, Democrats, but you still have a chance to learn from your mistake. Announce that next time there will be arrests. And pass a resolution censuring everyone involved in today’s intrusion.
Or just shut the fuck up and stop claiming to be enforcing the rule of law.
Published at 08:12 on 17 October 2019
I hate to say it, but Tuesday night’s debate underscored just how good Trump’s chances are in 2020, assuming his term doesn’t end early.
First, you had Sanders and particularly Warren evading the hard questions on single-payer health care. They’re liable to get eaten alive in 2020 if the Trump campaign raises the issues of how to pay for it or scare-mongers about taking away people’s private insurance. (And trust me, if it comes to that, it will.) Warren’s performance was particularly depressing given how well she did at the LGBTQ forum.
There are other hard single-payer questions to ask, of course (like how realistic it is to trust a broken political system with a health insurance monopoly), but that same broken system will ensure that one doesn’t get raised. Paying for it, and taking away people’s private insurance are the ones that can sink Sanders and Warren.
It is theoretically possible to resolve both the above problems with appropriate messaging, of course (single-payer has been successfully introduced in other countries). The rub is, I have as of yet seen no evidence that either Sanders or Warren are good enough at messaging to accomplish that.
That leaves Biden as the only likely eventual candidate who doesn’t have that liability. The trouble here is that Biden is an exemplar of the stereotypical Democratic Party failure-seeking missile of a candidate. Just like Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, he is a purportedly “safe, responsible” choice which is in fact neither, because he represents a failed status quo that for decades has seen the rich get richer while everyone else slips further behind.
The Democratic Party elite was sure that Barack Obama was unelectable in 2008, and threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton, yet Obama won that election handily. The party establishment prevailed in 2016 with Hillary, who lost against the weakest opponent any presidential candidate has faced in recent history. That alone should underscore how piss-poor the judgment of the party elite is about electability.
Nominate Biden and enough voters will choose to sit the election out to make another Trump win likely.
He’s an interesting guy. Atypically for a political moderate, he’s actually a fearless thinker. As such, he is not afraid to embrace ideas from the left if his logic leads him there; he outright mentioned the Biden problem I touched on above. He also mentioned some of the single-payer pitfalls. The trouble is he’s not even 40 years old, and he has no political experience save being the mayor of a mid-sized Indiana city. Plus, at best he’s polling at just a hair above 5%. Odds are he’s an also-ran.
They are, well, also-rans. They’re not going to get the nomination, either.
Simply, no candidate capable of winning the primary seems likely to prevail against Trump in November.
Published at 10:52 on 15 October 2019
As soon as Trump decided to betray the Kurds, the House Democrats should have announced with much fanfare that they are adding an investigation of Trump’s dealings with Turkey to the list of impeachment investigations. After all, Trump is himself on record as saying in 2015:
I have a little conflict of interest ’cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul. It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers—two towers, instead of one, not the usual one; it’s two… They have a strong leader.
To that add an investigation into Trump’s willful complicity with the genocide Saudi Arabia is currently committing in Yemen. Trump has business links with the House of Saud, too.
What’s particularly tragic about this failure is that carping on these issues could be expected to have a significant degree of cross-party appeal, and thus be able to peel off a fraction of the GOP vote. And it doesn’t require compromising any way on core principles, unless for some reason being weak on corruption is a core principle.
But, neither announcement happened. The institutional incompetence of the party that couldn’t win against a candidate as flawed as Trump marches on.
Published at 08:49 on 14 October 2019
In case you weren’t aware, was a Democratic Candidates’ forum in Iowa recently that specialized on LGBTQ issues.
Many Republicans, even those of the Never Trump variety, found it wince-inducing. And yes, if you search through the whole 2½ hour forum, you can easily compile a video of the “worst of the worst” excerpts. That’s more a function of the length of the event than of how bad (or not) it was. Any 2½ hour forum is going to have its off moments.
The LGBTQ community is one of the Democrat’s core constituencies, and it is an identity politics issue*. Thus, such issues can be brought up without the perceived risks of class politics, something the Establishment wing of the party is loathe to broach. Given that partywide consensus, such a forum is only to be expected.
* Note that labeling something “identity politics” is not a dismissal of it as an issue unworthy of concern. Most so-called identity politics is tightly bound to the cause of human liberation, and thus critically important. The rub is, so is class politics. Identity politics only becomes a problem when it is pursued in place of class politics, not in addition to class politics. Focusing on class politics without identity politics is as big and glaring an omission as is focusing on identity politics without class politics.
There was little or no effort made to standardize any questions, making comparisons between the candidates more difficult. Moreover, the moderators really slipped up on the format, allowing Williamson to give an opening statement but not any other candidates.
He stumbled when he wasn’t allowed his opening statement. Clearly, candidates had been informed they were to give one, then the moderators slipped up. He should have been pushier. Then he really stumbled when his past record was brought up, in many cases trying to employ technicalities and weasel words to deny his past positions.
Look, Biden has a problem: no other candidate has held an an office as high as he has, and public attitudes on LGBTQ issues have shifted a lot in the past quarter century. To get where he did, he had to espouse ideas, whether he believed them or not, which are now considered unacceptably backward. Biden probably couldn’t be that frank, but he could have said that despite his age, he’s open to learning, and his evolution on LGBTQ issues is evidence of that. Instead, he came off as slimy and evasive.
He was a no-show. To reiterate, focusing on class politics without identity politics is as big and glaring an omission as is focusing on identity politics without class politics.
There wasn’t much schoolmarm on display that night. She really connected with her audience. Her answer on the marriage issue was a classic. If this is a representative sample of how Warren is now presenting herself, she is a much more viable candidate than she used to be, and probably now the most viable candidate, period.
Published at 20:34 on 9 October 2019
It just might.
It’s such a heinously awful betrayal that it’s beyond sickening.
Genocide is the likely consequence.
Particularly if evidence of it starts showing up on TV, it just might underscore how with Trump, there simply is no bottom, in a way that’s sufficient to convince at least 20 Republican senators to vote to remove Trump from office.
Published at 17:10 on 4 October 2019
It’s official: Bernie Sanders suffered a heart attack earlier this week. That should serve to demonstrate that he is indeed personally past the age at which he has any business running for the most high-stakes and stressful job in the world.
As such, Elizabeth Warren now will enjoy a monopoly on the progressive vote, and none of the other candidates save for Joe Biden are polling high enough to be regarded as anything but also-rans.
Published at 16:48 on 1 October 2019
I’m now starting to get discount offer after discount offer from local big box stores, because they figure that as a new homeowner in the neighborhood, I might be in the market for a number of things, and they might as well try to build a relationship with me and become a store of choice.
Close, but no cigar. I was in a market for a number of things during my first month here. However, that moving-in phase is now mostly over. The last thing I did, I completed yesterday: correcting the undersized electric heaters.
Like most every place with electric heat that I’ve ever lived in, for some reason the builders decided to shave a few dollars more in profit by installing heaters that are ridiculously undersized (as in, about half the recommended heat output, given the living space). This they do despite the electricians installing wiring which is capable of serving the recommended wattage. Electric heater design has been very stable for decades, so the same manufacturers are still making the same exact models they were 20 years ago when this building was constructed. Therefore, it was a simple matter of swapping out the inadequate heater for an adequate one. For good measure, I swapped out the line-voltage thermostat, too, because I couldn’t find a rating for the old one and therefore wasn’t certain it could handle the new, higher current load.
But I digress. The heater upgrade was the last major thing on my move-in to-do list. I was going to put it off for several more weeks, but we’re having an early cool spell and as it turns out the inadequate heater was also making an annoying random rattling noise. Turns out that that was merely a foreign object in the fan area, but by that point I had already taken it apart and de-installed it. Might as well just replace the thing since I’d already done about half that job by the time I made that discovery.
So, I doubt I’ll make much use of any of those coupons.
Yes, yes, I know: it takes time for the public records of real estate purchases to filter through the system enough for marketers to be aware of them, so they can’t be blamed for the slowness. It’s still slowness, however. The reason for it doesn’t matter. Makes one wonder how much that tactic actually works for generating new customers.