DOGE IS A DOG!

Why, why, why, why, why, why do so many people I admire ultimately turn out to be frauds, posers, or just plain horrible people in general?  Gary Hart, Marion Jones, Hillary Clinton, Eric Clapton, Bill Cosby,  James Howard Kunstler, Facebook "friends" I never meet in person - the list is endless.  Sooner or later, of course, those people you admire appear to jump the shark, and little do you know they'd been on the wrong side of the shark all the time.  And Elon Musk is the latest such person to join my list - for being a fraud (he didn't found Tesla), a poser (his "inventions" are even more useless than Beatles pal Magic Alex's prototypical products at Apple Electronics), and a horrible person (he's a Nazi).

It turns out he's worse than even all that.  As the director of the fictional Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE?), Musk is going on a rampage through the federal government, shutting down the United States Agency for International Development and locking out it staff after accusing the agency of fraud, taking over the U.S. Treasury and putting kids fresh out of high school in charge of the computers, and getting data on the finances and bank accounts of every American taxpayer.  Having direct and illegal access to our personal data, Musk can now use it to destroy someone who, oh, I don't know, speaks out against him or Trump.  Up to now, he's only been able to delete X users who do so.  Now he can comb through BlueSky and go after anyone there who's opposed to him (i.e., everyone there).  Kash Patel won't need to use his power as FBI director to stifle opposition against the government because Musk can do it himself.

With the Treasury under his thumb, Musk can deny Social Security payments and Medicare assistance to anyone at whim - either because they've written a critical letter to the editor about him, because they've used their social media platforms (or blogs) to spread the truth about him, because they were active in the movement against apartheid in his native South Africa (Steven Van Zandt, take note!), or maybe because you bought a Lucid instead of a Tesla.  He may already be looking for congressional Democrats to harass and persecute to drive them out of office (paving the way for turning Congress into a Supreme Soviet-style rubber-stamp legislature).  Plus several more horror scenarios I can't fathom right now.  With all of the power Musk gave himself by bullying his way into crucial agencies, no one is safe.

All I can do is to keep tell you what's going on.  And while I won't qualify for Social Security for awhile, I too, as a blogger critical of Musk, have reason to fear him.  And it's not because I ever said anything bad about his cars.  That's what makes this so disgusting.  I admired Musk for everything he did for electric vehicles.  Now I look at Musk and, well, I can't believe I actually liked this guy!  But, in pretending to engineer the cars he makes and in pretending to be developing pneumatic trains to get people to stop talking about high-speed rail and buy more of his cars, all while profiting from his government contracts with SpaceX (another reason he took over the Treasury), Musk has been giving America two faces for the price of one.

America On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

The latest presidential polls from the New York Times and Siena College dropped this past Sunday like an atomic bomb.

Many Democrats thought President Biden's poll numbers would change as a result of his steady leadership.  In fact, this poll shows that Biden's numbers have changed - for the worse. shows Trump ahead of Biden in five out of six swing states - Arizona, Georgia, Michigan Nevada, and Pennsylvania - and in Wisconsin, Biden is ahead by only two percentage points. Trump is trusted more on the economy - this despite the rapid economic recovery from the COVID crisis.  Trump is trusted more on national security - this despite his praise of Hezbollah and his desire to sell out Ukraine to end the war in eastern Europe.  Trump is even seen as being more mentally aware and acute than Biden - this despite referring to a possible third world war as World War II, referring to Barack Obama as if he were still President, and confusing Sioux City, Iowa, where he recently campaigned, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  (Hey, sure, honest mistake, they're only 87 miles apart, in two separate states,  both along Interstate 29, why not?  Yes, that was sarcasm.)

And he's ahead of Biden despite promising to lock up his detractors and political opponents and his plan to sic the military on anti-Trump demonstrators as soon as he returns to power by invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law!   

How is this possible, you ask?  Let me answer that question with a question of my own.  How do you think "Two and a Half Men" lasted twelve seasons on television?

If I may expand on that . . ..  A lot of people in this country are really stupid, and Trump has proven time and again that P.T. Barnum was right.  Like most demagogues, Trump knows how to zero in on the gullible and use any verbal trickery to make them swallow the grossest delusion and buy the mean and stunted fruit he's selling them.  But there are other Trump supporters who are not stupid at all, believe it or else.  They've been on the losing end of an economy that has rewarded wealth and taxed work, which is what supply-side economics is.  Most of the areas in this country that have suffered over the past several decades are parts of the country that the coastal elites have looked down on.  Heck, some of these areas are just a few miles inland from either coast; New Jerseyans are dismissed as "bridge-and-tunnel" riffraff by New Yorkers, and Bakersfield, California, a locus of country music that resembles Nashville in the desert, is only 112 miles from LA but light years away.  The people in these areas are tired of being forgotten and ignored for so long by people who seem to think that they're superior to anyone else.  That famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover from 1976 sums it up.

Hey, I can relate.  Remember, I was a Martin O'Malley supporter when New York intellectuals and Hollywood A-listers wanted Hillary Clinton to be President. 

It's these people in the forgotten areas of America that President Biden needs to reach if he has any chance of winning re-election in 2024, and as Steve Schmidt recently noted, he's done an abominable job of it.  Schmidt says, and I agree, that "Bidenomics," the President's derivative catchphrase for his economic policy, is the greatest branding disaster in modern American politics.  (Let's go brandin'!)   Biden has spent the past few months telling ordinary Americans how good they ought to feel about the improving economy, but so many problems in the economy persist in the aftermath of the pandemic - mainly inflationary pressures - that no one is feeling good about the economy, and even those who do only have to watch TV news to be reminded about how the country is slipping into chaos between mass shootings and a coarsening culture.  Americans don't like being told what to feel or what to do about anything.  If you disagree, I have some metric-conversion mandate memos from the Carter administration I'd like to show you.  Use your brain.        

That's the last thing Democrats at the national level seem to want to do.  Although President Biden's policies have done a world of good for the country and the economy, not to mention the world, the Democratic Party at large, thanks to the misguided centrism that Bill Clinton imbued in the national party, is so beholden to Wall Street interests for the past thirty years that Democrats in Washington, who scaled back Biden's Build Back Better program down dramatically to the point where it looked next to nothing like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, almost resemble Republicans.  Meanwhile, the actual Republican Party is planning to eviscerate democratic norms and institutions, and the media keep reporting on the personalities and quirks of the leading presidential candidates as if it were just another election that can be condensed into horse-race metaphors.

There may still be time to turn all of this around, but unless the White House and the Democratic National Committee get their acts together,  this country is inevitably going to speed toward fascism.  

Red Tide Rising

There's a rising red tide, a blood-red tide, in the 2022 midterm elections, and as Rod Stewart once sang, you'd be a fool stop this tide.  As a registered voter who has voted in every single election from 1988 on, I've tried to stop this Republican tide, but after the 1994 Republican midterm victory, I tried to at least stem it.  Since then, I've had to conceded that the red tide is perpetually going to wash over us, and there ain't thing one we can do about it.  But 2022 - and 2024 after that - look to provide red tides - waves, really - that will drown us.

The Republican gains in governorships, the House, and possibly the Senate will sweep a lot of election deniers into office, setting the stage for a Trump comeback in 2024.  Trump himself is planning to challenge the midterm election results in states like Pennsylvania should Republicans lose any elections, according to Rolling Stone, and he has numerous sycophants to help him overturn all of them.  And in 2024, it may not matter when the Democratic presidential nominee is Joe Biden or . . . someone else.

We're on the road to fascism.  

Mitch McConnell has always said thath is primary goal as a senator is to keep the United States from becoming like a European country.  Given the parliamentary dysfunction in Great Britain, the rise of the far right in Italy and Hungary, and the abolition of abortion in Poland, it would appear that the opposite is true - European countries are becoming like the United States. 😱     

To Be Blunt About It . . .

President Obama apparently didn't know how big a hornet's nest he was stirring up by advocating a contraception insurance coverage directive that required faith-based institutions to provide such coverage to their employees. Although he revised it to allow religious organizations to be exempted and have insurance companies fill the gap by mandate, and although Catholic groups are pleased with the compromise, the pro-life movement in the Republican party sees the revised version as forcing other employers to provide coverage contrary to their own moral objections.

In that spirit of ill will, Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican elected in 2010, has introduced an amendment that would allow all employers the right to refuse coverage to employees for any medical procedure they deem morally offensive. These procedures include maternity care, HIV/AIDS screenings, diabetes testing . . . any procedure involving treatment and care for a medical condition which could have been brought on by a lifestyle that the employer may find unhealthy and/or immoral. Thirty-seven Senate Republicans, including accidental senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, have signed on to the Blunt amendment, which would likely be mated to a transportation bill - the same transportation bill ending dedicated funding to non-automotive transportation modes and initiatives - currently up for consideration in the House.

Oh yeah, don't think Brown is shooting himself in the foot with his support of this amendment as he runs for a full Senate term in liberal Massachusetts. It will likely get him more support from national Republican and pro-life groups and win him favor with Catholic Democrats and independents in his state. Brown can't fend off the challenge he faces in November from Democrat Elizabeth Warren with only Republican votes; he needs to fool enough gullible Massachusetts voters with his manly pro-life positioning. Enough Bay Staters, after all, were taken in to elect him to the Senate once - and to elect Mitt Romney as governor in 2002.

Meanwhile, the Virginia state legislature is pushing a pair of pro-life bills that could conceivably (no pun intended) become law. One would require mandatory ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. But because most abortions are performed within twelve weeks, a transvaginal ultrasound - literally inserting the instrument into a woman's body - would be required. So what, says Virginia State Delegate Todd Gilbert (Republican- male caucus) - abortion isn't really medically necessary all the time, he argues, it's mostly just a "lifestyle convenience."

The other bill would recognize fetuses as persons, similar to the bills rejected in Colorado and Mississippi. Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, a Republican, has indicated that he will sign at least one of them, most likely to burnish his vice presidential prospects.

Apparently, it's not the American infrastructure, antiquated as it may be, that is severely outdated. It's the American political establishment. And the idea that a handful of reactionaries could win power at the ballot box and use it to deny rights to others with a technologically superior communications system and a ruthless organizational structure suggests that we're closer to fascism in America than any of us have ever imagined.