Thursday, March 28, 2024

Newsletter in the Strict Sense of the Term

 

Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) in the Capitol just after midnight, January 7, 2021, helping to clean up the garbage left by the marauding Yahoos. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via NBC News.

Unbelievable torrents of news over the last few days, as if coming down on us from one of those "atmospheric rivers" they have in California now (of which I have a mental picture like a Dr. Seuss drawing, with foamy, roiling blue waves at the border of the stratosphere and lots of careless but energetic fish doing aerial maneuvers).

***

In New Jersey, First Lady Tammy Murphy dropped out of the Democratic primary race to replace the abominable Senator Robert Menendez, now under indictment for (among other things) representing Egypt instead of New Jersey on the foreign affairs committee, though he still claims to be running as an independent. The presumptive nominee, Rep. Andy Kim of the suburban district 3 east of Philadelphia, filed immediately after Menendez's indictment, but Murphy seemed inevitable, with her husband's political might behind her and the special Jersey trick known as the County Line, where 19 of the state's 21 counties print their own primary ballots with a top line which the voter can pick to vote for all the candidates endorsed by their party machine at one blow, which generally always wins.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Literary Corner: Just as Phony as It Can Be

To the tune of:

 

Gee but I'm happy to be back
Back at the Mar-a La... go
Where I have all the stuff I lack
When I'm on the road and fighting the Gesta... po
It's the same dilemma
Everywhere I go
I get charged with libel
When I'm only tryin to sell you a Bible
And I'm slapped with another indictment
When I only want to spark some excitement
Just tryin to keep the customer satisfied
Satisfied

Federal judge complains to me
Why you lyin to the bank... boy
You have lost your dignity
And now you're really lookin like a skank
It's the same dilemma
Everywhere I go
I get found liable
For a thing that people do in the Bible
And the rage increases
When I'm only tryin to get close to Jesus
But I'm trying to keep my customers satisfied
Satisfied
I don't really have a lot to say, except the news that Trump has gone into Bible sales made me think of the lovable Peter Bogdanovich movie with Ryan and Tatum O'Neal and Ryan O'Neal's death a few months ago and all the goodness and humor that seems to have disappeared from the world.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

 

Trump's "bloodbath" remarks in Ohio over the weekend don't seem to have been exactly what they sounded like out of context, a threat to start a civil war if we failed to reelect him in November, at least not as they started out, as a prophecy about the US auto industry under the Biden presidency:

“We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys if I get elected,” Trump said during a rally in Vandalia, Ohio. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”

Going back to the familiar message he was pushing as a young self-publicizer 36 years ago on Oprah and Letterman, about the menace of Japanese cars:

“If you ever go to Japan right now, and try and sell something, forget about it, Oprah. Just forget about it,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies.”

I think it's arguably the only economic idea he's ever seriously had, that the US government needs to put a protective tariff on automobiles to save the industry here, which of course gets wronger every year, as foreign car companies increase their manufacturing in the US, a fact Trump seems entirely unable to assimilate to his brain, and the industry goes from strength to strength from the bailouts of 2008-09 to the domestic manufacturing provisions for EV building under the "Inflation Reduction Act" and 100% tariffs are really stupid, and as Michael Tomasky noted at The New Republic,

outside of the sugar high that comes from that, they pave the way for retaliatory tariffs that hurt U.S. consumers. The U.S.-China Business Council, that well-known outpost of Marxist vermin, estimated in a 2021 study that Trump’s trade policies cost nearly 250,000 American jobs.

But Tomasky also notes something else:

It does seem that, in that half-finished sentence, he was briefly heading in the direction of saying, “It’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole auto industry.” If he’d said that and stopped there, I’d agree that his words were being taken badly out of context.

Notably, he didn’t stop there. What made him say “that’s gonna be the least of it”? Where was he going, in that mildewed brain of his? He stopped himself mid-sentence. Why? Based on what he went on to say, it’s a reasonable guess that he stopped himself because the words that were about to come out of his mouth, “auto industry,” just weren’t big enough—weren’t aggressive enough. So he had to amplify it and make it more threatening. The auto-industry bloodbath, he said twice, will be the least of it. It will be a bloodbath “for the country.” ....

Did Trump stop himself mid-sentence to broaden his indictment and deliberately use a phrase—not once but two times, for emphasis—that is ambiguous, open to dark interpretation? He most certainly did.




August 2023 when Tucker Carlson asked him if he foresaw civil war

“You know, Jan. 6 was a very interesting day because they don’t report it properly. I believe it was the largest crowd I've ever spoken before,” Trump said. “A very small group of people went down there. And then there are a lot of scenarios that we can talk about. But people in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they've ever experienced. There was love and that there was love and unity. I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love.”

“And I've also never seen simultaneously, and from the same people, such hatred of what they've done to our country,” he added.

Is open conflict possible, Carlson asked at the interview’s end.

“I don't know, because I don't know what, you know — I can say this: There's a level of passion that I've never seen. There's a level of hatred that I've never seen,” the 2024 GOP frontrunner said. “That's probably a bad combination.”

Apparently Trump did warn Republicans that the 2018 election would be a "bloodbath" if they failed to repeal and replace Obamacare: https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/07/politics/donald-trump-health-care/index.html

President Donald Trump warned House Republicans Tuesday if they can’t pass health care legislation after seven years of promises it could be a “bloodbath” in the 2018 midterm election, according to one member present in the meeting.













Much Worse Than Bloodbaths

 Something from the Republicans on ci-devant Twitter:



Folks, I think President Biden is merely trying to take the Ex-Guy seriously but not literally, as the very serious journalist Salena Zito advised us back in the day, and the very serious billionaire investor Peter Thiel, cheerfully plagiarizing her (he has nothing to fear from Christopher Rufo) in a talk at the National Press Club:

I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. ... I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.

So Trump never told people to inject themselves with bleach as a COVID cure, not literally; he merely said he thought it might be a good idea, injecting it or using it for "almost a cleaning", that or light, or UV, that was the bit that got me, the idea of injecting people with light, or sticking it in you "some other way", which he believed William Bryan, head of science and technology at the DHS, had just told the press conference about, while Trump complacently "clasped his hands in front of his stomach", as Politico later wrote, before offering his own remarks:

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

The Normalizing

Semaphore tower, via Encyclopedia Brittanica.

The Semafor story ("How Donald Trump learned to love the January 6 prisoner movement") about the lengthy evolution of Trump's views on the January 6 insurgents—

A detailed examination of his public statements and ten interviews with people now involved in the movement to support January 6 defendants show a gradual path from Trump’s instinctive support for some of the most hardcore members of his own MAGA movement to a semi-formal alliance with an organization founded by the family member of a January 6 convict.

—is the most classic example I've seen in a long time of the Trump "normalization" narrative, portraying the ex-president as a deliberative thinker, carefully considering how to respond to a problem, right from the lede

On January 7, 2021, as shell-shocked staffers swept up the Capitol and National Guard troops patrolled the Mall, President Donald Trump released a video denouncing the “heinous attack on the United States Capitol.” He declared himself “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem” and promised “to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

As if he'd had anything in particular to do even with writing the text for that video, which he read aloud in his most dead-voiced, resentful fourth-grader manner, making one of his typical reading-disability errors (because the phrase "in so doing" is a little too fancy for him),

Friday, March 15, 2024

Word and Deed

Gaza around the turn of the 20th century, via Palestine Remembered.

Jonathan Capehart was on my radio yesterday morning, talking about his NBC interview last week of President Biden, and they came to this exceptionally fraught moment:

Jonathan Capehart (06:22):

Some have suggested you should go back to Israel and address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Is that something you would do?

President Joe Biden (06:31):

Yes.

Jonathan Capehart (06:35):

Would that have to be at the invitation of the Prime Minister or could that be at the invitation of the President?

President Joe Biden (06:42 [after a pretty substantial pause]):

I’d rather not discuss it more.

Biden didn't mind saying he might address the Knesset, but he didn't want to say who might be inviting him. Or rather, since you wouldn't expect it to happen other than by an invitation from Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is by definition the head of the government in the Knesset, and runs the things that happen there, he didn't want to say that it might be from somebody else, such as President Herzog, the head of state (whose only direct interaction with the Knesset is when he's accepting the resignation of a prime minister, or inviting a politician to try to form a new government). Or he couldn't or at least didn't want to deny that he might have an invitation from President Herzog, let's say, so he preferred to drop the subject and let Capehart make of it what he would.

Brian Lehrer, the host of the radio show, was suitably gobsmacked, and expressed himself, as people so often do, with a "can you imagine" scenario, like "Can you imagine if some foreign leader came to Washington and addressed Congress over the head of President Biden?"

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

News From Bob-Bob

 


This is just maddening. I don't know about Rodgers, but there's no way WWE wrestling great and former politician Jesse Ventura is signing on to Bob-Bob's campaign. He's been a fervent advocate of masking

Former Minnesota governor and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura shared harsh words for non-mask wearers amid the pandemic, saying had Americans refused to make similar sacrifices during World War II that Adolf Hitler would have won the war. 

"The country sacrificed in WWII. Do you think there would have been any argument over wearing a mask for the people of WWII? I’ll tell you if we behaved like we are right now, Hitler would have won," said Ventura. "He’d a won because this country won’t face any type of – they don't want to sacrifice."

and of COVID vaccine


It seems as if Bob-Bob may have been misled by SOMETHING ON THE INTERNET like the thing where some fool showed up on one of Ventura's TV shows in 2009—

An old video, from a TV show aired in 2009 named “Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura” is doing rounds on social media. The video is getting attention on social media as several users are linking it to the COVID vaccination drive that was started in 2021.
In the show Jesse Ventura and his team of investigators examined mysterious conspiracy allegations of recent times.

In the video we see a woman, who is said to be Dr Lima Raibow, speaking about how the World Health Organisation (WHO) has been working on vaccines since 1974 to cause permanent sterility worldwide. In the video Dr Lima says that the WHO is concerned about the “90% too many people in the world” hinting that the UN agency is planning to depopulate the world on a large scale under an inoculation program.

—and decided that this piece of (irresponsible and irritating) showbiz represented his kind of people, without bothering to ask Jesse what he actually thought about the matter.

In this, Jesse is in the same position as Martin Sheen, Dionne Warwick, Mike Tyson, and Andrea Boccelli, artists that Bob-Bob announced would be coming to his birthday party before they had RSVP'd.  

American Values promoted the event last week by sharing it on X, previously known as Twitter, and the Daily Mail reported the appearance of all four stars at the gala. CBS News obtained a copy of the invitation, and although it didn't include the names of the artists, the super PAC confirmed the report.

But soon after the PAC's social media post appeared, Sheen said in an Instagram story, "I do not endorse RFK Jr. nor I will I be attending his party." Sheen, who played fictional President and former New Hampshire Gov. Josiah Bartlett in the award-winning show, added that he's "whole heartedly supporting Joe Biden and the Democratic ticket for 2024."

And Warwick and Boccelli followed up soon after saying the same thing. Last I heard we didn't know about Killer Mike. And Bob-Bob followed up by announcing he wasn't going to the party either.

This announcement is just more of the same. Bob-Bob is a completely unserious person, and if you take him seriously you're being a fool. Don't do it.

Monday, March 11, 2024

But Look, Clearly

 

Screen capture via Fox 5 San Diego. Rep. Greene looking a little like Spike Lee at a Knicks game, if the Knicks wore red, except Spike knows the difference between a basketball game and a joint session of Congress.

I'm just not ready to stop talking about the SOTU, because there are still more ways in which it was totally unique that I haven't gotten to, in the laundry list body of the speech as well, like when he warned the attendant justices of the Supreme Court that overturning Roe v. Wade had been a serious political mistake, throwing their own words in their faces:

Look, in its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect, justices, “Women are not without electoral, electoral power” — excuse me — “electoral or political power.” You’re about to realize just how much you got right about that.

Clearly, clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women. But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot. We won in 2022 and 2023, and we will win again in 2024.

If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.

Some nominal supporters of abortion rights were stomping on this because Roe v. Wade wasn't, in fact, all that radical, allowing states to set whatever restrictions they wanted on terminating pregnancy after 24 weeks, but those critics might not be aware of what "codifying Roe" has come to mean since Dobbs. It's not your grandfather's Roe, as evidenced by the formula advanced by Abigail Spanberger (D-VA, not known as a wild-eyed leftist):

The Spanberger-backed legislation would create a statutory right for providers to provide and patients to receive an abortion — without facing medically unnecessary restrictions. The bill would also block the government from requiring providers to provide inaccurate information to patients, remove the ability to require that patients make medically unnecessary in-person visits before receiving an abortion, and restrict the government from forcing patients to disclose their reasons for seeking an abortion before receiving care. 

Proponents are now rejecting the ahistorical idea that fetuses have rights that compete with those of the pregnant person, regardless of Justice Alito's bogus arguments. The new version is an unqualified right for the person with the womb.

He's also taken heat for referring to the man who has been charged with murdering a University of Georgia nursing student last month as "an illegal" in the speech, during his back-and-forth with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, although the way he used the word suggested he wan't entirely familiar with it (I think he picked it up from whatever Greene howled at him, but I'm not finding a report of her exact words):

Lincoln [recte Laken] Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal, that’s right. But how many thousands of people are being killed by legals?

What are "legals"? Sounds like he means legal immigrants, who are of course the least likely people in the United States to commit a violent crime, or any crime at all. The most likely are those who are citizens by birth, with the undocumented being somewhere between. (The best-confirmed example is homicide convictions: 2.8 per 100,000 US-born residents, 2.4 per 100,000 undocumented foreign residents, and 1.1 per 100,000 for the documented foreign-born.) Given that there are maybe 13 million undocumented  migrants and 30 million documented ones vs. about 285 million US-born, that certainly adds up to thousands of killings by the last group for each one by the first.

José Antonio Ibarra, the alleged murderer, is a Venezuelan asylum seeker, and thus not exactly "illegal" anyway. He and his then wife and her child crossed the border at an unlawful spot near El Paso in September 2022 and surrendered to CBP, which paroled them, and then somebody, presumably Governor Greg Abbott, had them bused to New York, where they were given court dates, and where he found work delivering meals and maybe got busted in Queens for endangering the welfare of a child, riding his moped with the wife's kid on his back, with no helmet (but NYPD has no record of the arrest). He eventually left New York to join his brother, who was living with a fake green card in Athens, Georgia, and found work there, but made his immigration court appearance in New York in December, and then apparently did this horrible thing, killing Laken Riley with a blunt instrument and dragging her body into the woods, though the wife continues to doubt he was the one who did it:

“We got married so we could join our asylum cases,” she told The Post. “He was the person I thought I could see through. We’ve known each other our entire lives. He wasn’t aggressive, none of that,” she said. “We had problems as a couple but our problems weren’t physical. We wouldn’t punch but we’d raise our voices."

Completely lost in the discussion is the thing Biden actually said to Greene after that, his important comment on the case, improvised away from the written text, which a lot of listeners may not have understood, though the congressmembers definitely should have:

To her parents, I say, my heart goes out to you having lost children myself. I understand.

But look, if we change the dynamic at the border — people pay these smugglers 8,000 bucks to get across the border because they know if they get by, if they get by and let into the country, it’s six to eight years before they have a hearing. And it’s worth the taking a chance for the $8,000.

But if it’s only six weeks, the idea is it’s highly unlikely that people will pay that money and come all that way knowing that they’ll be able to be kicked out quickly.

Most asylum applicants are going to lose their cases, even in New York, where immigration judges tend to be a lot friendlier than in Texas, and in many or most of those instances they probably don't really deserve to win, at least in terms of the law as it's written. But the law as written also demands that the cases be heard. 

Biden is saying that the incredible bottleneck that has existed for some time in the system, while Congress fails to pass a comprehensive reform, actually encourages people without credible fears to come to Mexico and cross into the waiting arms of a CBP agent, because they know that, while they will eventually lose and get deported, they'll have six or eight years to make and save some money before that happens, enough perhaps to turn into landlords when they get home. If José Antonio Ibarra's asylum case had been heard in El Paso a few weeks after his arrival, in October 2022, Abbott wouldn't have had an opportunity to bus him to New York, and Ibarra wouldn't have had an opportunity to commit any crimes there or in Athens. More than that, as Biden suggests, if he knew he'd be sent back to Venezuela that soon, he'd likely never have left.

That's a major part of the reason Biden's proposals for "fixing the border" always depend so much on beefing up the resources of the system, the CBP agents and immigration judges, along with trying to get people to apply for asylum without coming to the US, from consulates in their home countries, or from the Mexico side of border using the phone app. And (the legally and morally questionable aspect) making it easier for CPB to deport them straight away. It's because our immigration system is broken, as they say, and when they say it's broken they don't mean it's evil, though its consequences often are evil, hurting innocent people for no good reason; they mean it doesn't work any more—it's in need of major repairs that Congress has been putting off for many years, mostly because Republican members are afraid their voters won't like it.

Though there are Republicans, often in Great Plains states like Oklahoma that have been bleeding population for a century, who realize that we need more immigration, not less, which is why James Lankford worked so hard on the bill currently languishing in the House because Trump ordered Mikey Johnson not to put it on the floor.

I could wish Biden wouldn't work so hard insisting that Lankford's bill is "conservative"

In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators. The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen. Oh, you don’t think so? Oh, you don’t like that bill, huh? That conservatives got together and said was a good bill? I’ll be darned, that’s amazing.

but I understand why he does it: to highlight the perversity of the Republicans rejecting it, after wailing all year about the situation at the border, out of nothing but Trump's fear of giving Biden a W.

But it would be better to highlight the way these "bipartisan" feats of legislation always require Democrats to make all the sacrifices—while Republicans demand to be bribed, as they have been in all these matters involving immigration and foreign policy this year, to do the things they claim to want. It would be better to handle this the way he handled the abortion rights issue, asking voters to send him a better Congress so he can do a better job.

Somewhat edited version at the Substack.