Whoa, If True

Speaking of Republican plots to ensure the party a permanent majority through gerrymandering of state legislatures and House districts, they've seemed pretty scary to most of us—they haven't pretended not to be doing it, and we've seen plenty of evidence of success in the disproportions, at all levels, between how many Republicans vote in a given contest and how many seat they win—sometimes grossly unfair, as in 2012, when Republicans won a comfortable 33-seat majority in the House with just 46% of the vote, or these crucial and grotesque results for local legislatures in the 2018 election

As Eric Levitz put it in New York's Intelligencer rubric on Christmas Day,

The Democratic House majority was supposed to die in redistricting. For months now, pundits and political forecasters have predicted that Republicans could win back the House next year without flipping a single voter. After all, the GOP controls far more state governments than the Democrats, and this is a post-Census year, when states redraw their congressional maps. Republicans boast sole authority over the boundaries of 193 congressional districts, while Democrats command just 94. Given the slimness of Nancy Pelosi’s majority, several analyses projected that GOP cartographers would generate enough new, safe “red” seats to retake the House through gerrymandering alone.

But now, Levitz continued, Democrats seemed to be doing "weirdly well" in the redistricting process:

More Good News!

 

Drawing by Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer, June 2021.

You know how upset conservatives are about "cancel culture" and how they've reacted to this menace by going on a spree of banning thoughtcrimes like "critical race theory" and their proponents from educational institutions (it's not an attack on freedom of speech, it's just for the children's sake)

Btw still haven't heart a word about this shit from the anti-cancel-culture crybabies.

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) December 7, 2021

It's weird to imagine terms like "culturally responsive teaching" or "abolitionist teaching" or "free radical therapy" or "normativity" in an 8th-grade classroom, or a 12th-grade one either. Why wouldn't they ban them in the teacher training institutions where they might get used? I'm glad they're just banning the words and not the practice—abolitionist teaching sounds like a good thing

Good News!

Good cruise ship turning takes time—usually. Via.

1. You know how Bill de Blasio ran for the New York City mayoralty on a promise to do something about the "inequality crisis" as he called it in the 2013 campaign:

“Right now, as we’re gathered this morning, one New Yorker is rushing past an attended desk in the lobby of a majestic skyscraper,” de Blasio began. “A few miles away, a single mother is also rushing, holding her two young children by the hands as they hurry down the steps of the subway entrance…” The first New Yorker is thinking about how to profit from the bull market in stocks; the second is trying to figure out how to pay her grocery bill. 

And in the intervening years since he's been mayor every once in a while somebody pipes up to announce that he failed to do anything: from the not-at-all biased Manhattan Institute in 2017 to the not-at-all biased Manhattan Institute in late 2020. Well, I guess it wasn't that widespread. Still, de Blasio himself admitted just last month that he hadn't solved inequality in New York yet, in spite of having had eight whole years to do it.

On Wednesday, with his time in City Hall approaching its end, de Blasio sounded far less idealistic and admitted that his lofty promise to fix New York’s economic disparities remains unfulfilled.

“I don’t think anybody — literally, I don’t know a single person — who thought we were going to solve all the inequalities of society in four years or eight years,” he said in his daily morning briefing.

What a quitter, right? Not one single person? What about all his supporters at, you know, the Manhattan Institute, who were totally expecting him to fix inequality and so disappointed at his failure?

Anyway, guess what?

Joe Did What? The Return of Team Optimist

Can't believe I'm still doing this, but it's really not over, and there are some reasons to be pleased with today's program from Biden, assuming he's put it out because he really thinks he has a deal, and supposing he might be right—

“After months of productive, good-faith negotiations with President Biden and the White House, we have made significant progress on the proposed budget reconciliation package,” Sinema said in a statement. “I look forward to getting this done, expanding economic opportunities and helping everyday families get ahead.”

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), the other centrist holdout, would say only, “In the hands of the House” when asked about the new framework in the Capitol on Thursday.

If I understand that correctly, it means Manchin is saying his own work is done, until Pelosi sends the bill over for him to vote on—that is, he's not planning to undermine it any farther than he's already done. 

The worst cuts seem to be those of the paid leave provisions, which were supposed to cost somewhere between $494 billion and $547 billion over the ten-year period, the prescription drug pricing negotiation initiative, which would have saved the government between $460 billion and $530 billion over the same period, and the free community college. Sanders has had to let go his plan to include vision and dental care in the Medicare menu, but hearing remains. The immigration approach is not chopped liver ($100 billion to improve efficiency and humanity in green card process, asylum process, border, etc.) but isn't at all the promised reform (which I think probably couldn't fit in the reconciliation).

What's in the bill remains pretty good, if limited in time for some items:

Playing Position

 

Via.

Shana Tova and happy Labor Day! I'm upstate enjoying some R&R including some woods (lovely, dark, but fortunately not that deep), and trying not to worry about the Wall Street Journal story, of which I've only seen Steve's report, suggesting that the Democrats are going to give up on tax justice as they work through the reconciliation instructions to spend that $3.5 trillion, which I'm guessing (see above) wouldn't make them feel too sad over at WSJ. 

Nobody else seems to have been picking up on it—I mean, within our own bloggy circle, or out there in the magazines we read—and it's consistently remarkable how little discussion there is anywhere of the tax side of the Biden program, which I myself, as you know, am obsessed with. That is, I get why Democrats might be leery of talking about it, knowing how Republicans would be inclined to manipulate the discussion, as they normally do, making it sound like everybody's taxes are set to go up, as opposed to a relatively small portion of the top 2% (an individual earning $387,116, where the 98th percentile starts, won't see a rise in income tax, nor will a couple in the 99th percentile at $531,020; and you have to be earning $1,000,000 to get hit by the rise in the capital gains tax to a marginal rate of 39.6%). But Republicans aren't on the whole talking about it either, not the politics of it, neither concern trolling ("our Democrat friends will regret this gigantic assault on the middle class") nor handicapping its chances in Congress in the way WSJ just broached.

Glimmerings

Via.

Jeff Greenfield in Politico's magazine ("The Democrats Need a Reality Check") laid it out in pretty grim terms: President Biden can't be FDR in 1933, or Lyndon Johnson in 1964, because he doesn't have the votes in the Senate: a majority as thin as a razor blade and no cooperation from anybody in the opposition party. He thinks expanding the Supreme Court is a terrible idea (don't know if he's aware the Lincoln administration did that in 1863, adding a tenth justice in the hope of hemming in the vile chief justice Roger Taney) and getting rid of the filibuster is bad too; the John Lewis and For the People acts can't pass, and even if they could wouldn't solve the problem of state legislatures claiming authority to overturn national election. The only hope for Democrats, Greenfield concludes, is to find a way to "win more"—in "messaging", apparently, like by announcing every day that they want Jeff Bezos to start paying his fair share in taxes, an overwhelmingly popular idea with the American public. But it's difficult, because of the "political climate":

Of course this is a whole lot easier said than done. A political climate where inflation, crime and immigration are dominant issues has the potential to override good economic news. And 2020 already showed what can happen when a relative handful of voices calling for “defunding the police” can drown out the broader usage of economic fairness. (It’s one key reason why Trump gained among Black and brown voters, and why Democrats lost 13 House seats.)

Which, as Steve points out, is a problem Republicans (and bothsider journalists) have actively worked to create:

Culture War Update

 

Not for much longer: Photo by Jae C. Hong/AP, July 2016, via WBUR radio Boston.

Just as we were getting into the subject, some new research showed up in a report on NPR: 

Two dramatic trends that for years have defined the shifting landscape of religion in America — a shrinking white Christian majority, alongside the rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans — have stabilized, according to a new, massive survey of American religious practice.

What was once a supermajority of white Christians — more than 80% of Americans identified as such in 1976, and two-thirds in 1996 — has now plateaued at about 44%, according to the new survey, which was conducted by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. That number first dipped below 50% in 2012.

The feared white Evangelical Protestants, around 19% in the Pew survey of 2015, have stabilized at just 14% of the population, which leaves them for the first time in donkeys' years behind the white members of respectable mainline churches at 16%, while white Catholics constitute 12%.

Meanwhile the number of "nones", people of all racial groups who claim no religious affiliation at all, having more than tripled since their expansion began in 1990s, has plateaued at 23% (it was around 26% in 2016). 

It's the Same Old Story

 

Plato and Aristotle, ontology and epistemology, red and blue, in the School of Athens: you can see a hint that craftsman Raphael had a preference.

In epistemology—the philosophy of how we know things—it's been commonly understood that there are three basic kinds of knowledge, best known in the 1949 formulation of Gilbert Ryle: 

• propositional knowledge or knowledge-that a particular thing is true (I know Oxford is in Oxfordshire);
• procedural knowledge or knowledge-how to do something (I know how to finger-pick "Gospel Ship"); and
• acquaintanceship knowledge or knowledge-of something that you're familiar with (I know the 1-train stop at Columbus Circle)

In today's column, noted epistemologist David F. Brooks ("How to Destroy Truth") offers a remarkable new picture in which it is possible to know something without knowing whether it is true or not, and reducing the types of knowledge to two.

Great nations thrive by constantly refreshing two great reservoirs of knowledge. The first contains the knowledge from the stories we tell about ourselves.

This is the knowledge of who we are as a people, how we got here, what long conflicts bind us together, what we find admirable and dishonorable, what kind of world we hope to build together.

Accentuate the Positive

"I am certain that your energy, optimism and sense of humor will help you to defeat the illness...I sincerely wish you fast and complete recovery." V.V. Putin

As do we all.

To the tune of:

(Laura Michelle Kelly in the 2009 London staging)


In medical emergencies
You may be troubled by disease
But is that really something we should fear?
For me the only way to live
Is just keep thinking positive
And then
Disease
Will simply disappear—

For a spoonful of Clorox
Helps the chloroquine go down,
The chloroquine go dow-own, chloroquine go down,
Just a spoonful of Clorox helps the chloroquine go down
And kicks the Covid out the door!

And for the noble and the great
Who manage our affairs of state
A similar encouragement applies:
If things just now look bad to you,
Perhaps you're merely feeling blue;
Do you
believe
me, or your lying eyes?

For a spoonful of Clorox
Helps the chloroquine go down,
The chloroquine go dow-own, chloroquine go down,
Just a spoonful of Clorox helps the chloroquine go down
And kicks the Covid out the door!

So keep on never saying die
And holding that umbrella high,
And don't be vanquished by a little rain.
For though it may be wet today
Those eighteen greens won't go away;
For now,
Indoors,
It's snowing pure cocaine!

For a spoonful of cocaine
Helps anxiety go down
Anxiety go down, an-xiety go down,
Yes, a spoonful of Clorox helps the chloroquine go down
And that's what we were aiming for!

Gloom and Boom

 

Photo via Dawn (Pakistan).

Steve M picks up on the Republican campaign strategy as outlined at the Washington Post

Republicans will open their national convention Monday with an urgent mission: To convince voters pessimistic about the state of a country battered by the novel coronavirus, economic recession and racial upheaval that President Trump deserves four more years at the helm.

Convention organizers say the president and his surrogate speakers will showcase optimism and inspire hope in a time of worldwide despair, with programming planned around themes of “promise,” “opportunity” and “greatness” for the United States in a second Trump term.

“The big contrast you’ll see between the Democrats’ doom-and-gloom, Donald Trump-obsessed convention will be a convention focused on real people, their stories, how the policies of the Trump administration have lifted their lives, and then an aspirational vision toward the next four years,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in an interview Saturday.

and wonders how a candidate like "American carnage" Trump is going to manage an approach like that, concluding that he probably won't.

I think they've settled on this line because new campaign head Bill Stepien is trying to run the campaign in a traditional way, and you're supposed to settle on some coordinated line of attack after the other guys' convention. So this is it.

Part of the problem is that Trump can't sustain a positive, optimistic tone and doesn't want to.

But I think Trump's situation is worse than that. 

Foundering

Via.

Getting pretty crazy, huh? In the middle of a deadly pandemic, this whole other issue of police brutality, and US Army helicopters bearing the Red Cross insignia bearing down on protests in Lafayette Square under, apparently, orders from the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces who is as you know our head of state and head of government, a biggish failure in the fabled separation of powers in our constitutional setup, or the "highest levels of the Washington D.C. Army National Guard" (WaPo), or maybe the attorney general. Seriously, the attorney general? 

Mr. Barr was concerned about demonstrations near the White House over the weekend that had resulted in a small basement fire at St. John’s and graffiti on the Treasury Department headquarters, so he resolved to push the security perimeter farther from the mansion.

And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in military fatigues and the secretary of defense walking with the president and his all-white goon squad over to St. John's Episcopal (where the pastoral staff and colleagues from other churches, far from terrorized by the nearby graffiti and the small fire, had been passing out water bottles and snacks to the protesters while Black Lives Matter workers filled squeeze bottles with the mix of dish soap and water you can use as an eyewash in a tear gas attack) to, um, film him looking with puzzlement at a Bible and waving it in the air and dandling it up and down like a colicky baby.

Moment of Zen

Bloedel Reserve, Bainbridge Island, WA, via 2TravelDads.

Woke up sometime between 4:00 and 5:00, neither on purpose nor insomniac, just quietly listening to the brainchatter, when I suddenly realized I had forgotten all about the election—it had been absent from my mind for, I don't really know, the whole ten or fifteen minutes I'd been awake. That was kind of nice.

Fair enough--Democrats won the national popular vote by 9.4% and the House majority. We couldn't have done it without you! https://t.co/vfycSeX6zs

— Yas We Will. Vote! (@Yastreblyansky) November 7, 2018

And thanks for all the women! You did so much to make that happen.

— Yas We Will. Vote! (@Yastreblyansky) November 7, 2018

Lucky Ducky Democrats

Q: Why is the Trump-Putin relationship like the Rapanui heads? A: Nobody's been able to figure out how it was done! Image news.com.au.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has a take with an insight-producing wrinkle ("The Luck of the Democrats"):

One of the interesting features of this election cycle has been the gulf, often vast, between the hysteria of liberals who write about politics for a living and the relative calm of Democrats who practice it.

In the leftward reaches of my Twitter feed the hour is late, the end of democracy nigh, the Senate and the Supreme Court illegitimate, and every Trump provocation a potential Reichstag fire. But on the campaign trail, with some exceptions and variations, Democrats are being upbeat and talking about health care and taxes and various ambitious policy ideas, as though this is still America and not Weimar, a normal time and not a terrifying one.

Weimar was an abnormal time, but not necessarily terrifying. It was a thrilling time, after the end of the sclerotic Second Reich, full of possibilities. Nobody knew enough to be terrified about the political situation, when it was the economics that seemed to be the problem. Angry, no doubt, but terrified? What's frightening so many of us at the moment is that unlike the Germans of 90 years ago we do know what happened to them. To me it still looks very much like a second-time-as-farce case, in that our American would-be fascists are really too inept to do the worst, and the legal dispensations too strong to allow them—as we've seen with the failure to dissolve Obamacare or halt the Paris Accord and now with the crazed but fortunately impotent response to the migrant caravan. They can do a lot of harm, I mean, but it's on a much smaller scale than Nazis.

Woke af

Drawing by gackhammer/Imgur.

adjective, Slang. (often used in the phrase stay woke)

2. actively aware of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those related to civil and human rights:In light of recent incidents of police brutality, it’s important to stay woke.He took one African American history class and now he thinks he’s woke.
3. aware of the facts, true situation, etc. (sometimes used facetiously):The moon landing was staged. Stay woke!A tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. Stay woke.

(via dictionary.com)

"Hey, black people? David F. Brooks called, he said he wanted to borrow one of your words for a minute."

"Which one?"

"Ah, 'woke'."

"The fuck, again? Last time he did that he got it filthy and I never did get all the stains out."

Every silver lining has a cloud

Since yesterday's election results felt so great even Steve M, the Schopenhauer of the Intertubes, can't resist feeling a little giddy about them, I felt it might be a good idea for somebody to try looking for some bad news, and found some with Nate Cohn of the Upshot (the Nate with whom the Times replaced Nate Silver when he broke up with them, because you've got to go to battle with the Nates you've got rather than the Nates you might wish to have, but it's a mistake to go into battle with no Nates at all), who points out Ralph Northam's victory in the gubernatorial race in Virginia didn't look any different from Hillary Clinton's victory there a year ago, and even the stunning Democratic surge in the legislature races seemed to echo 2016:

The big surprise of the night was the huge Democratic surge in Virginia’s house of delegates, but that also came in Clinton Country. Of the 16 districts where Democrats currently lead in Virginia, Mrs. Clinton won 15 of them and received 49.7 percent of the vote in the other, according to data from the Virginia Public Access Project and Daily Kos Elections. Twelve of those 15 districts voted for Mrs. Clinton by at least five points.

So it sounds as if Democrats got the same results last night as they would have gotten then, and in that sense something new hasn't happened. 

The other side is that one reason it was so like 2016 is that so many people voted—47%, the highest turnout in a Virginia gubernatorial election in 20 years.  In a normal off-off-year election, the same kind of idiocy we're stuck with in New York City and New Jersey, the candidate of the leisured, the management, the retired, has an advantage. Not this year: voters just came out.

And not just voters; candidates too. In 2013, 56 out of 100 districts had no opposition (mostly Republican seats), and no election was required at all; 71 of them in 2015. But in 2017 there were just 12 Republican seats with no opposition (28 Democratic seats unopposed by Republicans), because Democrats came out in Virginia to challenge everybody they could, and they won such a startling number those seats because they showed up. That simple. (Apparently Trump really inspired folks to run, particularly women, just by being so disgusting.) (Guy on MSNBC—Stuart Stevens, Wikipedia says he's a travel writer—saying every woman running as a Democrat nationwide just won her race.)

Actually I can't make myself feel pessimistic at all. I did my best!

Repeal and repine

Updated early afternoon.

Drawing by Daryl Cagle via Juven Jacob.

Last week McConnell was in Kentucky telling the troops he might fail to put that health bill past his whole caucus—

“I’m in the position of a guy with a Rubik’s cube – trying to twist the dial in such a way to get at least 50 members of my conference who can agree to a version of repealing and replacing Obamacare,” McConnell told Kentucky voters at a town hall-style event on Thursday, according to NBC. “That is a very timely subject that I’m grappling with as we speak.”...

“If my side is unable to agree on an adequate replacement, then some kind of action with regard to the private health insurance market must occur,” McConnell told constituents at a Rotary Club lunch on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

“No action is not an alternative,” he added. “We’ve got the insurance markets imploding all over the country, including in this state.”

—which sounded to me like he'd already failed. And what he was offering as the next step, stabilizing "the insurance markets", sounded a lot like doing some of the things that need to be done to repair the ACA, to clean up some of the damage from Republican sabotage that has caused premiums in the individual marketplace to go up for the government that subsidizes them, and for those buyers who are too well off to receive subsidies. With no tax cuts, but no Medicaid devastation either. For which he would certainly be able to assemble a bipartisan majority in the Senate, even though he'd lose a serious number of Republicans.

It also sounded that way to Juliet Eilperin and Amy Goldstein at the Washington Post, and, as they noticed:

Maybe there's a plural working class

Most of them would already be voting Democratic, of course, but maybe not all.

Ziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, via Gegensmith.

Hate to keep picking at the scab of the 2016 election, but there's some really compelling new data out that isn't getting interpreted, I think, as usefully as it could be, in a survey for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group that was briefly reported on NPR yesterday morning.

The big general thing they found, in a YouGov poll taken in the weeks just after the election, with a sample of voters they had studied just after the 2012 election, was about the nature of the Trump electorate, which was that—surprise!—it was completely incoherent, dividing into five categories that had pretty much nothing in common with each other other than their disapproval of Hillary Clinton:

Legislative Leaping

Desperados of Richardson High School in the Texas State Capitol. From The Statesman.

So Majority Leader McConnell had to abandon his bill, as I expected he would, and send the troops off to their recess, while he and his elves theoretically work to rewrite the thing into a form that can pass after Independence Day, and the pandits aren't expressing much doubt that it can be done, referring to McConnell's "slush fund" of something over $300 billion in money that the bill theoretically saves the government, according to the CBO score, which could be used to pay for the traditional Christmas tree lights and ornaments with which legislation like this is festooned to get votes from the recalcitrant legislators.

I'm not changing my mind, mainly because I think Medicaid expansion is a much bigger deal than is widely understood—according to Times reporting picked up this morning by BooMan, it wasn't those prima donna dramatically wavering Republican Senators like Heller and Collins who really stopped the vote this week, it was Republican governors working a plan they'd been devising since February to preserve Obama's new Medicaid, and there's more to it than this week's defeat; in theory, a plan for some "moderate" group to work out a bipartisan proposal. Yeah, I'll believe that when I see it, but I don't see in the meantime how McConnell comes up with anything that overcomes these obstacles. (In Kansas in April, the utterly Republican legislature almost passed Medicaid expansion over the governor's veto—they were just three votes short of the two thirds they needed.)

The other day, lawrence090469 commented on my predictions of death for the bill:

Political hypochondriacs: Optimism report

Roller Coaster, by gechalx/DeviantArt. Nowhere to go but up! What's that you say?

It's so weird how we live now, like political hypochondriacs, constantly checking the national temperature for clues to how sick we are.

And that goes for Team Optimist as well as the despairing. I'm really pumped because yesterday was a Good Day, where Dutch voters decisively rejected fascism, I think, and Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu and Judge Theodore Chuang in Greenbelt, Maryland both concluded in separate cases that President Trump's "travel order" is meant as the fulfillment of his often repeated campaign promises of a "complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering this country until our country's representatives can figure out just what in the hell is going on."

Team Optimist

Image via verywell.com.

I'm once again on the holiday relief squad for Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog, and seeing as how Steve is a world-class pessimist, one of the things I try to bring there is a touch of sunny idiocy, as contrast, especially appropriate for the season of fresh starts and resolutions. And pretty challenging this time around, if we're talking politics, as we lurch into what seems certain to be the worst US presidential administration at least since Buchanan's, probably ever, led by a walking personality disorder in an impasto of pumpkin-colored pancake makeup.

And that's just for starters.

Is it possible that anything good can happen in 2017, or anything bad be forestalled? Not, surely, by the conscious intention of our president-elect or his Cabinet of Deplorables or the dreadful Republican leadership of the Congress. Maybe in states like California, where Governor Jerry Brown has already announced his determination to fight any Trumpian assault on environmental research and regulation: