Oh, snap. Now she wants to make war on poverty.

This—Trump defying a fire marshal trying to enforce crowd restrictions for safety reasons—put another, dreadful picture into my mind, crystallizing the sense of Trump is doing to himself and his whole filthy following at this point:

.@BraddJaffy Horrible to think that's how it could end, like Kriemhild and the the Burgundians. #Trumpendämmerung pic.twitter.com/Rn1WxCbpIE

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 10, 2016

Meanwhile, as Trump works to set his funeral pyre ablaze inside the great hall or big tent of the party he's occupied and some Republicans sneak out to look across the plain for some place of safety, Hillary Clinton has chosen a very odd way of picking up new Republican voters for herself, by proposing the first program dedicated to the profoundly poor since Lyndon Johnson was president.

I think (you'll correct me if that's an exaggeration). Certainly the first since her husband unwittingly enabled Newt Gingrich to destroy the old welfare leg of the New Deal.

Welfare as we knew it

In August 1996, as the welfare "reform" bill Bill Clinton had vetoed twice traveled to his desk once more, Even-the-Liberal-New-Republic ran this lovely image, black mom savoring a cigarette while her baby enjoys a bottle, over the headline "Sign the Welfare Bill Now". Image via SansEverything. Those were truly evil days, not that that excuses him, strictly speaking, for signing it the third time around, but it helps to explain why he ended up thinking he had to.

So far in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton definitely has an edge over Bernie Sanders on the issue of welfare, if not exactly a glorious superiority: she's promised that she'll say something about it eventually—

In the coming months she will discuss more details on her approach to addressing children and families living in poverty, including how best to support those families who rely on the safety net of welfare to temporarily keep their families afloat during the hardest of times

—and he hasn't promised a thing.

Although of course on the other hand Sanders was one of the 98 Democrats and Independents in the House of Representatives who voted against the the 1996 welfare "reform" bill (98 Democrats voted for it) which replaced the traditional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (supplied under Title IVA of the 1935 Social Security Act) with a Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program to be administered through block grants to state governments which would design their own programs, including strict working requirements for the beneficiaries, and putting a cap of 60 months on an adult's ability to receive such benefits during her or his lifetime. Whereas Clinton didn't have a vote at the time, but, as is pretty well known, was married to the president who signed the thing, as she still is.

You say you want a revolution, but what if you've got one?

William Howard Taft on carabao-back in the Philippines.

I'm not one of those who worries a lot about whether Bernie Sanders is electable or not, at least against anybody on the roster of Republican candidates including the imaginary ones like Romney or Ryan, and with the Democratic ground operation as it's developed over the past eight or ten years. He's a disciplined and attractive candidate, and he keeps saying things everybody knows to be true and nobody else does say. BooMan was quoting Dana Milbank the other day—

Watching Sanders at Monday night’s Democratic presidential forum in Des Moines, I imagined how Trump — or another Republican nominee — would disembowel the relatively unknown Vermonter.

—and I was thinking, are you crazy, Milbank? Since the whole Republican shtik is to pretend to this Catonian personal rectitude and an indignation at the corruptions of the times that Sanders actually exemplifies, simply standing next to Sanders at a couple of podiums might cause Trump or Cruz or Rubio to simply annihilate, in a blinding flash of cognitive dissonance.

That said, I don't have any real doubts about Clinton's electability either, I just don't think that's the question. I think the question needs to be how we see the two of them as president, and, like Krugman, I have a really hard time imagining what Bernie does in that situation. How does he pass those initiatives to reregulate the banking system, and overthrow the health insurance industry in favor of Medicare for all, with a Senate where a two-fifths vote counts as a majority that can defeat any bill? Elizabeth Warren was out in the Times the other day implicitly complaining about the Obama administration's failure to enforce the laws we already have on corporate misfeasance:

Happy Birthday Alexis de Tocqueville!

Jacques-Louis David showing his lack of painterly imagination in the 1824 Mars being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. Tocqueville really didn't know much about art. Image via Wikipedia.

A new superlatively bad writer, Arthur Milikh, assistant director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation, celebrating the 210th birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville on July 29 (or 225th in the original version, as you can see from the URL) in the Daily Dogwhistle Signal:

We often boast about having attained some unimaginable redefinition of ourselves and our nation.

Do you now? What gets you in the mood? Asking for a friend.

Annals of derp: Jonah Goldberg on American political theory

Welcome Crooks, Liars, and the people who love them! Thanks, Tengrain.

And on air guitar... Image via Crooks&Liars.

Mike Huckabee doesn’t have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job.

Imma let you finish, Jonah....

Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man...

Not quite all accounts. There's a little disagreement on that score. I mean, just on a couple of issues. Not necessarily anything serious. Or anything.

...Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels, and even William Jennings Bryan.

Ah, here we go. Progressives are the real Prohibitionists, or is it the other way around?

Progressive capital of the lolwut?

Check this out, Jim Hoft, is that a gang sign? Photo by AP.

All of a sudden young Andrew Cuomo has decided he wants my vote. Two mailers yesterday, and a phone call, where I'm afraid I got a little sputtery with what I'm sure was a very nice young volunteer (well, at least nice and young; I'll bet she was paid). One of the mailers said

Governor Cuomo helped New York reclaim its place as the progressive capital of the country

Really?

Well, last time he wanted my vote there wasn't even an election going on, in January 2013, when he delivered his third State of the State message, and announced his plans for a bunch of progressive initiatives. How's he doing on that list, by the way?

1. Called for a minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $8.75. Settled for $8 even. Less than California ($9), Connecticut ($8.70), D.C. ($9.50), Illinois ($8.25), New Jersey ($8.25), Oregon ($9.25), Vermont ($8.73), Washington ($9.32).

I often think it's comical

How Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That's born into this world alive
Is born a little Liberal
Or else a little Conserv--a--tive...

I heard some person-on-the-street reactions to this Pew survey on the radio this morning--to the question, more specifically, of why "progressive" is better than "liberal" in the public eye--and it was pretty interesting. Some of the respondents seemed to be where I would have expected a self-denominated progressive to be, with the view that liberalism is sort of wimpy and ineffective, where progressivism aims to get things done; but there were others....