Not Ready for Prime Time

 

Image by Markerarts via Butt Flood Designs.

One thing to remember about Stephen Bannon's celebrated tactical principle of "flooding the zone with shit" is that, in the end, you're landed with a shit flood, which isn't what you really wanted, though that may be OK if what you really wanted was a really big fat tax cut for yourself and your billionaire clientele. Somebody else can try to take care of the backed-up sewage, if they feel like it; you're up on the higher ground of the nice neighborhood, where you hardly even smell it.

I've been thinking of 2017, when the new administration started off with a big bang of regulatory crazy, with executive orders attempting to sabotage the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act on January 20, mandating a 90-day freeze on hiring federal employees, meant to kick off a long-term reduction in the number of civil servants, on January 23, directing DHS to build a Wall of separation between Mexico and the US (they thought it might be paid for with a 20% tariff on Mexican imports) and fast-tracking environmental reviews of infrastructure projects on January 24,  cutting federal funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" that did not cooperate with ICE and banning the EPA from contact with journalists on January 26, suspending the Refugee Admissions Program and barring entry to the United States for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (not, of course, Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Qatar) on January 27, and ordering all federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for every new one they proposed on January 30 (when he also installed Thomas Homan as acting director of ICE, without bothering to try getting the Senate to confirm the nomination).

None of these initiatives had any particular consequences, of course. They were ill-conceived, badly drafted, in some cases of questionable legality, or just dumb. The idea of the hiring freeze went back to Carter and Reagan, and it was well known that it had never done any good:

Birthright Citizenship

Wong Kim Ark, from a 1904 US immigration document, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, section 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Trump's executive order from last week "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship" suggests that there are categories of persons born in the United States who are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the federal government and hence not citizens, specifically:

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States:  (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth. 

This is such bullshit I'm still gobsmacked a week later. In the first place it doesn't even attempt to make a case against the baby, only against its parents. Section 1 doesn't say "all persons born...in the United States whose parents are subject to the jurisdiction thereof". And then do the authors have a clue what the word "jurisdiction" means?

Dictatorship Takes Shape

Dominance and Submission. Photo by Reuters/Jonathan Drake via Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

There's way too much going on. Two bogus emergencies formally declared, the one at the border and the "energy emergency" about Trump's weird belief that the US doesn't mine enough natural gas, and then I think what you might call a "woke emergency" signaled by his actions in the Justice Department: seen, for instance in the canceling of ongoing civil rights cases and police department consent decrees.

An ominous restructuring of the department's procedures was reported in today's Guardian in a piece on the DOJ's investigations of the Biden administration, of its "weaponization" of the federal government (read: its investigations of Trump's criminal participation in the January 6 insurrection and in the theft of government documents) and of its "censorship of speech" in the 2020 campaign--the Twitter Files stories attempting to suggest that when Twitter's trust and safety department blocked users from sharing the New York Post's October 14 Hunter Biden laptop story for a full 24 hours before allowing it was what James Comer called 

a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents...

in which the company was obeying the dictates of the FBI (it wasn't).

The new wrinkle in these two orders is in the reporting requirements: instead of directing investigators to direct the final reports to the department's office of personal responsibility or its inspector general, which would be the normal procedure, they will go to a political appointee at the White House—the deputy chief of staff for policy, who happens to be Mr. Stephen Miller, resuming the job he took with the first Trump administration in December 2016. 

Pardon Me, Boys

Is that the Mar-a-Lago Cuckoo?

From Sun Valley Serenade (1941), with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the always unbearably smug-faced Tex Beneke, in a stupid baseball cap, on vocals, redeemed later in the cut by the appearance of Dorothy Dandridge and the tapping Nicholas Brothers.

My dad's dad jokes tended to follow an exclusively linguistic pattern, as I guess they mostly do. If you gave him an opportunity to ask you, "What's an armored personnel carrier?" you'd answer "Tanks" and he'd say "You're welcome." And if you bumped into him and said, "Pardon me," he'd say, "Son, only the governor can do that." That's an index, by the way, of how rare the presidential pardon used to be.

So Joe Biden issued an official presidential pardon to his son Hunter for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, including the ones he was in fact convicted for (false statement on a federal form seeking permission to buy a gun he turned out not to actually want, and a very late income tax payment). Crimes that wouldn't normally be charged (nobody would know they'd been committed if the defendant hadn't told on himself by acknowledging he was a drug user in the first case and paying the damn tax bill in the second place, as he did before the charge was filed).

The Emperor's New Foreign Policy

Sorry about this piece of AI dreck, I saw it and couldn't resist it. I think the source has something to do with crypto, I won't link it.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that Democratic President Harry S Truman attempted to buy Greenland in 1867? (Hint: Truman was born in 1884, and his presidency was between 1945 and 1952.)

The Fox Friend in the video—I believe it's Katie Pavlich, who used to blog at the truly demented Heritage website Townhall, and now hosts Fox Nation's "Luxury Hunting Lodges of America", is that a real thing? where they burnish their anti-elitist cred by worshiping people like Harlan Crow?—really says those words. Click the link and watch if you don't believe me. I think I know what happened: there's a moment, around 30 seconds in, where she casts her eyes down at the table, as if checking her notes, and my idea is that's what the notes say, just "1867" and "Harry Truman", maybe drawn from a quick scan of the Wikipedia article on "Proposals for the United States to Purchase Greenland". A brief look of panic crosses her face as she realizes what she's saying can't be right, but she soldiers on with a smile.

It's part of a concerted effort on the part of the Trump Republican party, of course, to pretend there's nothing outlandish about Trump's suggestions, re-aired in his Tuesday press event, that the U.S ought to purchase Greenland, acquire Canada as a 51st state, reconquer the Canal Zone, and rename the Gulf of Mexico, and I don't know what all else. Look, folks, your Democrat Harry Truman did the same stuff, or some of it! It's not abnormal at all!

Question of Hu

Screenshot via ABC News, October 2023

I'll get to Carter in a moment.

But first I have a few words to say about Hu Yaobang, the popular general secretary of the Communist Party of China during the early parts of the Gaige Kaifang (Reform and Opening-Up) of the 1980s, when the real power in China was held by Deng Xiaoping from his shadowy perch as chair of the party's Central Advisory Commission. Hu really was pretty popular, in a way that hadn't been familiar in the Mao years (when being popular could get you disappeared, like Liu Shaoqi or Lin Biao), as an acknowledged architect of the government's move to what we call market socialism (and the CPC calls "socialism with Chinese characteristics"), especially among the people who stood to benefit the most from the reforms, such as university students; Deng didn't mind allowing him the credit for the hugely improving Chinese economy, perhaps because he also served as a lightning rod attracting the attention of Deng's enemies, the angry old Communists who saw the reforms as a political threat.

This became a big and problematic thing in 1986 and 1987, when students began agitating for political reforms in the context of a brutal 16% inflation rate and widely circulating stories of government corruption, particularly inside Deng's own family. The demonstrations began with students at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, who demanded the right to nominate their own candidates for the National People's Congress instead of having to choose from a government-nominated slate, and spread from there to some of the most prestigious schools in the most important cities in regions across China: Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, Kunming, Guangzhou, Beijing, and others.

The protests were not very well organized, and not especially successful, but they had an important consequence for Hu Yaobang, in that he failed to crack down on them and thence fell out of favor with Deng; that was more Opening-Up than Deng was prepared to put up with. Hu was pressured into resigning his power posts, though he kept his seat in the Politburo, and went into semi-retirement in the Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing, where he died of a heart attack suffered during a meeting on education reform, in April 1989, at the age of 73.