Quick Share to Vagabond Scholar's Annual Jon Swift Memorial

Many thanks to Batochhio, who blogs on his own at Vagabond Scholar as well as working every so often at Crooks & Liars to promote their blog round-ups. He does an annual memorial sharing of political blogs in honor of a well-known blogger from the early years who went by Jon Swift (no, not the original guy) and who passed away in 2009.

So here's a link to this year's memorial round-up, of which I contributed one of my articles. I ask you to take the time to read all the other bloggers listed there, and get used to keeping up with them from time to time especially in 2025 when any oasis of sanity will be welcome.

Unhappy Thoughts Part II

Update: I need to get back into the mood to blog, as Steve in Manhattan ended up using this from two weeks ago to share at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Blame it on the boogey(man) that is trump... /rage

The post-election blues continue on, obviously.

One of the things still haunting me a month later is how the results just did not fit the enthusiasm I saw among fellow Harris/Walz voters, how it just didn't seem possible that a deeply unpopular figure like trump could add to a popular vote count to win.

And now we have to cope with the "autopsy" as it were with people yelling and screaming where things went wrong.

Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this Monday pointed me to another blog where the artist created a cartoon basically highlighting all the (hindsight) armchair quarterbacking taking place among the Democratic ranks after the loss:

 

Visit Amp's blog to view the full image, please

As the artist Ampersand noted:

Lacking any clear-cut truth, most people just go ahead and say that the election proves that the Democrats have to endorse whatever policy stance they prefer or they’ll never win an election again...

I understand the impulse. I think the Biden administration has been horrifically bad on Gaza. Now that Harris has lost, it would be very convenient for me if everyone agreed that Harris lost because of the Biden administration’s terrible policies on Gaza.

But “convenient for me” isn’t the same as “true.” (Which is a very unfortunate way to set up a universe, and as soon as I locate the management I will make a complaint)...

Everybody's got a pet peeve and policy issue to defend. I've encountered a number of the ones presented in that comic: I've met people who are obsessed over reports how Elon Musk's Starlink system got election counting data before any official counting was done; I know a few people online who were genuinely upset about Biden's failure to rein in Israel's genocide of Palestinian families in Gaza and West Bank; I've read the arguments from the media pundits who think Biden (and by proxy Harris) were getting punished for higher prices even as inflation was trending down.

I myself am convinced that the mainstream media - led by the cowards at New York Times and Washington Post - failed to keep voters informed about how criminal and corrupt donald trump was, underplaying his scandals while punishing Biden/Harris/Democrats with a "both siderism" narrative that made Democrats look old and broken themselves.

But even I know that's not the entirety of the problem.

The real answer why Democrats failed to win this 2024 election cycle is that donald trump - leading a squalid and cruel army of Republican officials and voting base - appealed to the worst nature of a large plurality of our fellow Americans and got them to back his election. He stuck to his decades-long campaign hating on immigrants, hating on Blacks, hating on women; getting more and more Republican figures and media cheerleaders to push that fear and rage. And he got more and more voters - and not just angry Whites but also angry men and angry women from the very ethnic groups he's attacking - to buy in, spreading Hate like a plague. 

trump went from 63 million voters - when we could explain it away as a failure of a broken Electoral College - to 74 million - where we could avoid it by accepting Biden's popular vote win of 81 million - to 77 million where there's no other way to avoid this.

Democrats lost because Republicans appealed to sadists and assholes who are greater in number than we realized. The Cruelty was the point, and now it's policy. 

Every attempt to appeal to any rational Republican or centrist voting group wasn't going to work. Trying to get more liberal and progressive voters to show up seems limiting, and not enough of them were willing to buy in to the Big Tent Biden and Harris tried to build.

The reason why a lot of us who voted for Harris - who voted for competency and sanity and justice and an America we thought we knew - are skittish and unhappy today is that we've learned our neighbors, families, and communities are full of people who knew trump was a monster - a convicted felon and sex offender, openly willing to commit more crimes as President - and voted for him anyway.

Gods help us.

The Fall of Assad, and the Fate of Syria and the Middle East

This had been happening over the past two weeks, but I didn't want to say anything about it because I'm tired of getting ahead of myself on historic events as they occur, but in the Middle East - alongside all the fighting and bloodshed - we're witnessing the swift and sudden downfall of a tyrannical regime in Syria (via Willem Marx at NPR):

A rapid advance by Syrian rebel groups on the country's capital has led to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's control of a nation his family had ruled for half a century.

Crowds celebrated the seismic political shift in the streets of Damascus overnight and into Sunday, as Syrian state television broadcast a statement from a group of rebels, one dressed in a black hoodie, who announced that all Syrian prisoners had been freed from jail and Assad had been deposed.

The man reading that statement on television, just hours after the city's fall, had echoed calls from the leading group in this lightning rebel offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, demanding that citizens and fighters alike ensure the country's national institutions were protected. He ended his statement with a declaration after more than 13 years of bloody civil conflict: "Long Live a Free Syria..."

The British-based war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Assad had left the country to an undisclosed destination.

Hours later, Russia, which had long used its military to prop up the Assad regime against wide-ranging opposition forces, also said that the toppled president had left the country. The Russian foreign ministry did not say where he had gone.

There's a timeline at AP News that helps highlight just how quick this whole turnabout moved. A lot of foreign policy think tanks are working overtime - like this Atlantic Council - to figure out the massive implications that Assad's fall means not just for Syria but for the entire Middle East region.

We're talking about a key Arab nation that had long contributed to the violent instability and chaos in the region well back into the 1950s. Syria - alongside Iran, and backed by Russia - were themselves backers for such extremists groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, which contributed to ongoing violence with Israel and leaving Lebanon in political and economic turmoil for decades.

Syria itself has been broken by a decades-long civil war since 2011 - among a number of uprisings going back to the 1980s - that sent millions of civilians fleeing as refugees to avoid the indiscriminate bombing and gassing that Assad's regime deployed as means of putting down resistance. Gods, I last blogged about this civil war in 2015 when I pledged some financial support to help those refugees, and the war itself in 2013 when Obama's presidency attempted to defuse Assad's use of chemical weapons in that civil war.

The end of Assad means only a temporary respite in that war, unfortunately. Syria as a nation was cobbled together by a mix of differing ethnicities and religious groups - Kurds, Turks, Sunnis, Shi'a, Christians, dozens of smaller cultural communities - some of whom remain hostile towards each other even in this moment of possible nation-building into functioning coalitions.

This is the thing a lot of Western nations are dreading: the potential of Syria to backslide much like Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya into still-broken internally squabbling states that could become home to corruption and religious extremists.

In opposition to that dread, there looks to be a sizable amount of hope. The HTS rebels who claimed victory are posing - at the moment - as functional moderates looking to legitimize their rule. In the years that they've received training from their Turkish handlers, there is the decent possibility that they've learned how Turkey handles religious tolerance and can placate the larger Christian populations in Syria. The Turkish government - looking to reduce or end the ongoing Kurdish separatist movement in their own borders - would want Syria to take the burden of dealing with the Kurds: This would require genuine coalition-building.

A stabilized Syria should mean an end to one of the largest refugee crises facing the Middle East (and Europe/United States). Fourteen million displaced Syrians could start moving back - hopefully within weeks - just as long as serious rebuilding efforts are funded by foreign aid to rebuild cities and homes to move back to. Ending this crisis could well relieve a lot of discontent among the sanctuary nations - especially across Europe - that had their Far Right parties spewing racist outrage to promote their own agendas.

There is also the possibility that the end of Assad's regime - which was hostile towards Israel and a major backer of Hezbollah and Hamas - could shift the dynamics of the ongoing bloodshed that Netanyahu's government has been inflicting on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians over the past year. Cutting off Syrian support of Hezbollah ought to weaken their position in Lebanon to where the broken power-sharing system falls apart. Pacifying Lebanon ought to mollify Israel... although letting up on the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank is going to require different tactics.

A lot of this is going to involve diplomacy - and money - and gods help us if any of this drags long enough until trump is back in the White House to break it all out of his greedy self-interest, but let's not stress about that just yet (get on Air Force One NOW Biden, and get to Damascus to hammer out a deal before Christmas goddammit!).

The most obvious thing to note out of all this is how broken Russia is right now. As Michael Scollon and Frud Bezhan at Radio Free Europe point out:

When Vladimir Putin took the reins of power in a post-Soviet Russia in shambles a quarter-century ago, he immediately set about restoring Moscow's status as a global power.

It took 15 years, but Russia heralded its military intervention in the Syrian civil war as proof of its return as a force to be reckoned with on the international stage.

Moscow leveraged that image to expand its influence throughout the Middle East and beyond as a counterweight to the West.

Now, the fall of the government of President Bashar al-Assad, a key ally of Moscow, has dealt a serious blow to Russia's great-power ambitions.

"Putin's military adventure in Syria was designed to demonstrate that Russia is a great power and can project its influence abroad," said Phillip Smyth, a Middle East expert. "Losing Syria is a huge slap in the face for Putin."

Assad's ouster represents not only a reputational hit to Russia but likely a major strategic setback.

Syria is home to two major Russia military installations: an air base in Hmeimim and a naval base in Tartus. The latter is Russia's only warm-water naval base and provides Moscow access to the Mediterranean Sea...

Reports were fast and furious on social media that Russia's fleet at Tartus sailed out days ago - abandoning Assad even then - arguably forced to travel the long way around to the Atlantic and Baltic Sea, as getting back into the Black Sea means facing an eager Ukrainian torpedo boat drone attack that would happily sink it (that is if Turkey reopened the path through Istanbul's waterway for them).

Moscow capitalized on its involvement in both Syria and Ukraine to sell itself as a power capable of challenging the United States, NATO, and the West in general while expanding its global reach from the Mediterranean to Africa and Latin America.

Following Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Syria became more of an asset for Moscow, experts say, while also presenting the challenge of maintaining military campaigns on two fronts...

Syria's fall quickly makes it clear that Russia can't handle a two-front war. Putin is so obsessed and focused on conquering Ukraine that he can no longer provide manpower or equipment or time to any of the client states he's been propping up across the globe. Russia - aside from their nuclear missiles, and there's even some serious doubt about that - is no longer a military powerhouse. Their political and economic influences are just as diminished.

In fact, he's been vacuuming up equipment and manpower from those client states - look at all the weapons manufactured in Iran, look at the North Korean troops "volunteered" to slam into the meat grinder in Kursk - in a desperate attempt to force Ukraine to a negotiation table where Putin hopes to retain his land gains to justify retreating and repairing his losses. Putin dares not make any more mass conscription efforts among his own Russian people without risking draft riots. And he can't provide any mercenary support - bye, Wagner! - overseas (especially now that his long-range bases are cut off).

It used to be from the Cold War onward that Soviet Russia - and Putin's Russia - were militarily and financially capable of spreading their influence and support across the entire globe. Putin was attempting to market Russia as an alternative to other global powers like France and the U.S. across Africa, but now those efforts seem empty and likely unfulfilled. Client states like Cuba and Venezuela are now literally struggling to keep the lights on. Other nations that could be allies in Russia's time of need - China and India - are now too self-sufficient and too powerful themselves to where they can stand on the sidelines and see what benefits them most as things fall apart.

There's a lot of chaos still out there - not just in Syria and in Ukraine - and a lot of it can get worse when a meddling and incompetent trump gets back into office.

Keep hoping the good things happen before then.

The Killing

Respectable little murders pay/
They get more respectable every day
-- "Sunset Grill," Don Henley

With all of the drama and madness in this Darkest Timeline, with all the gun violence our nation witnesses on a daily basis, it's telling that the shooting of a single person only matters when that person was the uber-rich CEO of a healthcare corporation (via Jake Offenhartz, Michael Balsamo, and Michael R. Sisak at AP News):

New clues emerged Thursday in the hunt for the masked gunman who stalked and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, including possible leads about his travel before the shooting and a message scrawled on ammunition found at the crime scene.

The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were found emblazoned on the ammunition, echoing a phrase used by insurance industry critics, two law enforcement officials said Thursday.

The words were written in permanent marker, according to one of the two officials, who were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Investigators also now believe the suspect may have traveled to New York last month on a bus that originated in Atlanta, one of the law enforcement officials said...

One of the interesting developments in this story is how quickly social media jumped on the story... by satirizing (if not brutally mocking) the victim's status as an allegedly corrupt corporate boss of a major health care insurer with a known history of massive profits at the expense of denying millions of Americans any affordable health care. As Troy Farah over at Salon notes:

Violence is a strategy that never warrants celebration because it is crude, brutal and ineffective, not to mention immoral. There’s always a better way, even if it’s not as easy or as dramatic. Nonetheless, it’s not bizarre or surprising to see that Reddit is being flooded with memes mocking the murder, or that many on social media are seemingly trying (or failing) to suppress their glee. There’s now even a rush to cash in with merch, such as a ballcap using the company’s logo next to crosshairs and the phrase “We aim to please.” A chart from valuepenguin.com displaying the percentage of claim denial rates by insurance companies, with UnitedHealthcare topping the list, has gone super viral, with one user on Threads captioning it, “To paraphrase Chris Rock ‘... but I understand.’”

The overall justification for this celebration — the New York Times described it as a “torrent of hate” — lies in the widely understood the fact that health care companies inflict violence on thousands of people in this country, if not millions, every single day. Take the announcement this week from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, which couldn’t have had better or worse timing, depending on one’s perspective. That company proposed that its health insurance plans in Connecticut, New York and Missouri would no longer cover anesthesia care if a surgery or operation extends beyond an arbitrary time limit. That seems to have outraged the American Society of Anesthesiologists, which has called on Anthem to immediately reverse this proposal.

On Thursday, Anthem did just that, but the shock remains. If that’s not violence, what is? Whether you’re in an alley or on an operating table, if someone has a knife to you and demands your money, it’s violence. Or consider the innumerable examples that aren’t just proposals but routine policy: the tidal wave of denied or delayed claims, the noose of restrictive networks, costly deductibles, prescription refusals and on and on. There is also convincing evidence this walled garden especially excludes and discriminates against people of color, queer people and women, making this systemic violence not just prevalent, but also disproportionate...

Thompson's murder is not different from the many times a wingnut gunman went storming into a Planned Parenthood clinic to shoot at "baby killers," so celebrating the act would be monstrous hypocrisy for those us angered by Far Right violence towards women and the health care providers they need. If there is any difference, it's that most of those gunmen are pumped up on lies from Far Right media, whereas this gunman can well be acting out direct vengeance. Nearly every observer's comments/viewpoints on "motive" - something the police haven't confirmed yet, because there's a good chance of misdirection - are going by the things Farah highlighted about our nation's broken health care system: This shooter could well have lost a loved one to a fatal illness that Thompson's United HealthCare corporation refused to help.

That is of course pure speculation on my - and a lot of other people's - part. For all we know, the killer could have been a hired hitman: Thompson was under investigation for insider trading, for example.

Ah, as Farah noted: "...But I understand."

This killing brought to the fore news coverage of how hundreds - if not millions - of Americans are rightly angered by how our health care companies routinely deny any affordable health care. Just to share from Selena Simmons-Duffin's report at NPR:

Yolonda Wilson is one of many people who shared painful stories about health insurance gone wrong on social media this week.

Her insurer, UnitedHealthcare, denied coverage for a surgery about two days before it was scheduled, back in January. She finally got it approved, in the nick of time, with a lot of unnecessary stress and tears. "I did not know until Wednesday afternoon whether I would be able to have surgery Thursday morning," she told NPR.

Wilson, a professor of Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University in Missouri, noted that she was telling her personal story, not speaking on behalf of the university.

The shocking, targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Wednesday struck a nerve on social media, triggering an outpouring of negative experiences with the tangled health care system in the U.S.

Many people shared searing stories of health care denials from health insurers. One person said his mom's scan to check on her stage IV lung cancer was recently denied. In another post, a dad shared the letter UHC sent him denying a wheelchair for his son with cerebral palsy.

"A lot of people are in deep pain, and maybe didn't have anywhere to put that pain," Wilson says.

UnitedHealthcare is the biggest private health insurer in the U.S., with an outsized market share in both the commercial insurance and Medicare Advantage markets. UnitedHealth Group reported $371.6 billion in revenue last year and faces an antitrust lawsuit to block its $3.3 billion acquisition of a rival home health and hospice service.

Americans generally say they're pretty happy with their health insurance, according to survey data from health policy research organization KFF — unless they're sick. Those with "fair" or "poor" health are nearly twice as likely to be displeased with their insurance compared to those with "good" health.

The sick thing about getting sick in America is that the moment you do, those insurers who'd been taking your money all those years suddenly refuse to pay any of it back to you. God forbid they cut into those billions of revenues.

Pam Herd, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan who studies administrative burdens involved in accessing government services, says barriers to health care access are especially painful.

"It's one thing to be frustrated at the DMV because you have a ton of paperwork to fill out or you have to spend an hour in line," she says. "It's a whole other thing to face those barriers when they are the difference between whether you're going to get life-saving care or not."

Herd's research shows how barriers in the health care system can affect people's actual health — whether it's calling several times to just get an appointment or trying to find an in-network specialist or fighting to get a procedure covered...

For all the Far Right and Libertarian types out there who whine about the federal bureaucracy, the DMV ain't got shit on UnitedHealthcare or the other for-profit corporations out there that work to delay, defend, and deny any help to the people at all. Dealing with the stress of jumping through hoop after hoop and running into brick wall after brick wall is just as sickening as getting a life-threatening-yet-treatable illness.

One of the more shocking stories going public is how UHC under Thompson's reign implemented an AI-based automated process that generated 90 percent error rates while denying their clients the financial help they were supposed to get. That was originally a report from 2023, but only now are people really reading it.

Again: "...But I understand."

As of right now, the other CEOs of large corporations - not just in the insurance business - are hiring more bodyguards and clearing their names off the company websites to avoid getting on anybody's Naughty Lists. They are - obviously - not interested in responding to the growing public outrage towards their ravenous greed: They have, after all, just bought off the 2024 election cycle to guarantee trump and the Republican Party will grant them the massive tax cuts and deregulations they desire to add to the billions they already possess.

The CEOs - the true class-driven elite, the robber barons of the 21st Century - are mourning the death of one of their fellow greedheads while overlooking the body count of thousands of Americans who die because they didn't get their health care approved or covered in time, or worse the thousands who die because they can't get any insurance coverage at all.

THAT is why a lot of people suspect the assassin was acting out of vengeance. 

And yeah, we understand.

Which murders - the shooting of a CEO or the deaths of families and loved ones - get more respectable in the end?

The Problems with trump's Tariffs

This week's trumpian chaos focused a lot on his threat to impose broad and heavy tariffs on three of our major trade partners of Canada, Mexico, and China, something that the economic experts warn would trigger more inflation than U.S. voters realize and escalate retaliation and trade wars across the globe.

In the days following, there had been a good amount of punditry and pushback on the matter, during which trump's people walked back the comments or tried to reframe the topic. There are think pieces about how trump might be "bluffing," that he's trying to force the likes of Mexico and Canada to the negotiation table - much like how trump shredded the existing NAFTA deal to force a new USMCA agreement that barely changed anything - to gain more concessions he didn't get then.

My view on all this is to consider taking trump at face value when it comes to tariffs. he's had a long history of loving the concept of them, and he had spoken - early and often - that trade wars are "good and easy to win". And it's not even a trade war trump seems focused on: he talked during the 2024 campaign about the McKinley Tariffs of 1890 and how such tariffs could replace income tax as the government's main source of revenue.

There's no chess game here: trump genuinely wants to increase tariffs because he views them as win-win.

trump - and his pro-tariff allies in his transition team - refuse to see the larger historical trends surrounding tariffs, trade wars, and their impacts on economic stability. The non-profit Tax Foundation published Erica York's report looking into how other factors in the 1890s countered the negative economic impacts of the McKinley Tariffs... factors that were NOT in play during the later tariffs of the 1930s:

As a review, tariffs are a type of excise tax (a narrowly targeted consumption tax) applied to domestic consumption of foreign-produced goods. Since the depths of the Great Depression and the collapse in global trade after the 1930 Hawley-Smoot tariffs, US policy shifted away from restrictive tariffs in favor of multilateral cooperation to reduce tariffs (as economist Douglas Irwin explains in his book Clashing Over Commerce).

That shift in policy sent the average tariff rate on a downward path, from highs of 59.1 percent on tariffed goods and 19.8 percent on all imported goods during the Great Depression to an average of 4.7 percent on tariffed goods and 1.4 percent on all imported goods in 2017...

As Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, McKinley shepherded the Tariff Act of 1890 into law. At the time, the federal government was running a budget surplus of nearly 50 percent, and tariff revenues substantially outpaced government spending. The McKinley tariff was designed to fix that problem, moving sugar (which accounted for a large share of revenues) to the “duty free” list, providing direct subsidies to sugar producers (to replace the benefit of tariffs and increase spending), and raising tariffs on a variety of other imports.

The McKinley tariff and higher government spending brought a swift backlash, earning the Republican-controlled Congress the nickname of “Billion Dollar Congress,” and leading to Republican defeats in the 1890 midterm elections (McKinley himself lost his reelection). In 1892, while monetary and banking policies were larger issues, Democrats ran heavily against the protectionist tariffs and the “Billion Dollar Congress,” and won unified control of government.

Democrats did not get to make good on their promises to address protectionist tariffs immediately, because the nation fell into a deep recession (caused by monetary policies). In late 1893 and early 1894, Democrats took up the tariff issue, but as the bill worked its way through Congress, it strayed from its original goals: a House amendment added an income tax, Senate amendments added back many protectionist tariffs, and ultimately, President Cleveland allowed the law to take effect without his signature.

Dissatisfaction with the broader state of the economy, still in a monetary-policy-related downturn, led to a Republican sweep in the 1894 midterm elections and the election of Republican President McKinley in 1896. Just four months after convening, Republicans sent a new tariff bill, the Dingley Act of 1897, to McKinley, raising protective tariffs even higher than the Tariff Act of 1890.

Many at the time credited tariffs for the economic recovery that soon took shape. Likewise, Trump often credits these high tariffs with the industrial growth of the US during the period.

But as economist Doug Irwin explains, around the same time as the new tariffs were enacted, the global supply of gold began to increase, easing the monetary conditions responsible for the economic downturn and bringing about a recovery.

Further, many economic historians have cautioned that impressive growth in the late 1800s and early 1900s cannot be explained by high tariffs. Instead, labor force growth and capital accumulation—neither of which have strong links to tariffs—are responsible for America’s fast growth during this period. If anything, it is possible that the high protective tariffs of the late 19th century somewhat hindered America’s economic growth.

Ironically that period saw a massive increase in immigration, which fueled that labor force growth. Something that trump and his anti-immigrant allies are going to undermine the same time they'll push their tariffs plans. York and Irwin both point out how our gold reserves expanded - that Klondike Gold Rush by the by - back in a time when the gold standard established our currency's value. We won't have those resources today to balance out the economic chaos that trump's tariffs will unleash.

trump's agenda to replace our current income tax system - which would be a massive boon to the uber-rich - with tariffs would be a disaster all its own. Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld at the Peterson Institute for International Economics - a nonprofit think tank - looks at the numbers on that:

To be sure, when Trump vents before friendly audiences, one has to take it with a large grain of salt. But a partial substitution of tariffs for income tax revenues is nearly inevitable under a Trump presidency. He has repeatedly proposed increased tariffs, including a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all trading partners as well as 60 percent or higher tariffs on goods from China. He has also called for extending the tax cuts enacted in 2017, which are due to expire next year, a step that could easily cost as much $5 trillion over ten years. And Trump has suggested further cuts, particularly on the corporate side...

Can tariffs replace the income tax?

Simply put, NO. Tariffs are levied on imported goods, which totaled $3.1 trillion in 2023. The income tax is levied on incomes, which exceed $20 trillion; the US government raises about $2 trillion in individual and corporate income taxes at present. It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes. Tariff rates would have to be implausibly high on such a small base of imports to replace the income tax, and as tax rates rose, the base itself would shrink as imports fall, making Trump’s $2 trillion goal unattainable.

A recent Peterson Institute policy brief calculated that revenues from Trump’s 10 percent/60 percent tariff proposals would total about $225 billion per year in current dollars. This figure is certainly an overestimate because it does not account for lower economic growth due to the inevitable economic shocks caused by retaliation against US exporters and the losses suffered by the import-dependent manufacturing sector. Exporters would also be hit by an appreciating dollar...

Another consideration that comes into play is that the United States already raises about $50 billion from tariffs on imports. That amount reduces the revenue potential of new tariffs relative to figure 1. In addition, a tariff as large as 50 percent would create very large distortions in Americans’ economic activity (moving resources away from sectors where the United States has a comparative advantage and toward sectors where it is less efficient), while increasing tax avoidance and evasion (including shopping abroad, smuggling, lobbying government officials for exemptions, etc.)...

trump is looking to replace an established - and deep - means of revenues for our federal government and installing a revenue source that's neither deep nor reliable. If we want to talk about "running government like a business," this is akin to price-hiking your goods or services to where you lose your customers who refuse to pay even if you're the only business in town.

Now you can see how trump kept driving his own casinos into bankruptcy.

If there's any good news about all this tariffs speculation is that for anything tariff increase on a large scale, trump could be stymied by the existing USMCA agreement as well as a Congress - even one that's Republican-controlled - that's not about to commit political suicide like this.

However, we exist in a new reality where the Supreme Court expanded presidential powers to where trump could get away with ANYthing without Congressional approval under the umbrella of "official acts." And given how he'd unilaterally forced tariffs during his first term, he's going to want to do that again, this time with more devastating results.

Thanks again, 75 million voters. You unleashed this economic chaos on us. I only hope the Tariff Leopards eat you first.

Injustice For All

Update: Again, many thanks to Batocchio for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Sorry I'm not in a better mood. Please leave comments below, hopefully the revised Blogspot system is easier to navigate. I just want to hear from people. It's so lonely for me.

Ever since the election results, I've been dreading this moment. Special prosecutor Jack Smith - who had been pursuing two criminal cases against donald trump for both his involvement in the January 6th Insurrection AND the theft of thousands of classified documents - filed paperwork with the courts today to cancel those prosecutions now that trump will be legally protected with presidency. David A Graham at the Atlantic tries to cover the implications (paywalled):

Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump. Smith effectively had no choice. Trump had promised to fire him and end the cases as soon as he took office on January 20. (The president-elect reportedly plans to fire not only Smith but also career attorneys who were assigned to his team.)

In both cases, these were crimes that only a president could commit: No one else could have attempted to remain in office by the same means, and few people could have made off with boxes full of these documents. And only a president-elect with nearly unlimited resources could have gotten away with them.

Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.

The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority...

I decried trump's tactics, and I hated how the legal system seemed to go out of its way to play the game by his rules not theirs. And yet this is how broken our American Justice has become: 

But in Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump drew the ideal foil. The man overseeing the two cases against Trump is obsessive about proceduralism. His view was that the best way to restore the justice system, and the Justice Department, after the first Trump presidency was to do everything precisely by the book, no matter how long it took. It took quite a while—Smith was not appointed until November 2022, two months after the paperwork coup began and three months after the FBI seized documents at Mar-a-Lago. By the time Smith brought charges, in summer 2023, the timeline was tight, either for verdicts soon enough to inform voters or to avoid dismissal if a Republican won the presidential election...

Most important, Garland’s attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding accountable someone who had committed serious crimes in plain sight. And partly because of that, Trump will soon return to the White House with the power and intention to destroy all the independence and careful procedures that Garland took such pains to protect...

The lack of accountability for January 6 is an affront to the Constitution. But the lesson that Trump will take from charges being dropped, along with the immunity ruling, is that the system is not capable of holding him accountable for most rules that he violates. The affronts will continue.

With regards to the one criminal trial that did convict trump on 34 counts, even that is now facing turmoil as the prosecutors and judge try to figure out sentencing on someone who will be federally protected from the law. The civil trials that trump lost - the one involving tax fraud on his properties, and the ones involving his sexual assault and defamation on E. Jean Carroll - are likely to continue through the appellate process, but you can be damn sure trump will use every legal power the presidency can inflict on those rulings to weasel his way out of those matters.

I am angry at Garland - and at President Biden, who nominated Garland as a sign of professionalism and normalcy returning to the Justice Department - only as far as his inability to understand the seriousness and severity of everything trump represented. Dammit, man. trump was - still is - a clear and present danger to the United States.

I am more angry at a Republican Party that - confronted with multiple facts that trump was dangerous and criminal to boot - refused to hold trump accountable, and refused to regain any semblance of ethical responsibility towards the United States. They happily did something the Founders could never have imagined: They openly supported a convicted felon, tax fraud, and sex offender for the highest office in the land.

I am extremely angry at a Beltway media that repeatedly refused to remind the American public who and what trump really is. Not just the increasing signs of mental instability and the ongoing evidence of trump's sadism, sexism, and racism. They kept underplaying the facts that trump had been convicted of felonies, that he'd been exposed as a business fraud and gaslighter, that his contempt towards women drove him to acts of vulgarity. This is the same Beltway media that had fucking meltdowns over Hillary's emails, and they failed to point out how trump was the most corrupt person - in a field containing the likes of LBJ, Nixon, Harding, and Andrew Jackson - in presidential history.

But my deepest ire is for the 75 million or so fellow Americans who - with all the evidence that IS out there, with all the reporting that did happen that showed trump was a convicted felon and sex offender - still voted for a monster like him. There may have been a lot of low-information voters out there this cycle, and a number of them voted for trump without knowing - or comprehending - the facts that trump was a legal abomination. But enough of you knew. Enough of you knew he was a criminal and you voted for him anyway. Goddamn you.

trump is now the most dangerous person in America, because he's going to get granted executive powers - yet again - that he openly promises to abuse the minute he gets sworn into office. trump is going to twist the Department of Justice into his Department of Vengeance, attacking every person who exposed his criminal acts by turning them into criminals without evidence or rationale. Think of the disastrous Durham prosecutions that never proved trump's lies about the 2016 elections: Think of how worse it's going to be as trump pursues falsehoods and fantasies about 2020 being 'stolen' from him that four years of digging by his wingnut allies never confirmed. Think about all those people who were convicted for their roles in the January 6th Insurrection, that trump claims are 'heroes' and who'll get pardoned even after all those trials and juries proved how violent those insurrectionists are.

Think of how trump's entire existence - all the bankruptcies, all the acts of fraud he plead away - is proof that our legal system fails to hold everyone accountable. If you're poor, if you're a minority, if you're a woman, you won't find any justice with prosecutors or judges or cops who'll punish you even when you're innocent. If you're rich, if you're white, if you're male, you can buy and bully your way into favorable treatment and slaps on the wrist because you can afford the lawyers who play the game.

And if you're donald trump, you fucking get away with everything.

Goddamn us.

This Isn't Entirely Good News, But For the Moment We'll Take It (w/ Update)

So I've been struggling over the past week trying to write up about the dangers of trump's incoming Cabinet picks - a number of them absolutely unqualified for their positions and arguably dangerous in those offices - when the most notorious and ill-advised pick - Matt Gaetz for Attorney General - found out this morning how screwed his chances were and opted to withdraw his name (via Elena Moore, Deidre Walsh, and Lexie Schapitl at NPR):

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is withdrawing his candidacy to be President-elect Trump's attorney general, after sex trafficking and drug use allegations threatened to imperil his confirmation.

After meeting with Republican senators to discuss his nomination, Gaetz, a conservative firebrand from Florida and a loyal Trump defender, wrote on social media Thursday that "it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition."

Trump's pick to lead the Department of Justice has faced concern and questions from Republicans all week. His decision to bow out puts some of those to rest.

When trump announced Gaetz as his Attorney General pick, the original response from most congresscritters - the ones who knew Gaetz and knew full well how much of a scuzbucket he is (allegedly) - was a mixture of shock and horror. Never mind how he had absolutely zero experience in law enforcement or legal jurisprudence to serve as the top federal prosecutor: Gaetz was facing a major ethics probe ordered by former Speaker McCarthy of his own party - the details of which kept leaking even as the Republicans on the committee voted not to release it to the public - which made it difficult for the Republican senators to happily back the move.

One horrifying thing is that while Gaetz is no longer up for an important Cabinet position - one that trump wanted twisted to serve his plans for revenge - he is still going to sit in the same U.S. House of Representatives that investigated him for his sexual and drug abuses. He had resigned once trump offered him the AG post as a means of squashing that incoming ethics report, but because he'd been re-elected by a Florida district that doesn't fucking care that their representative is an alleged sex offender Gaetz is going back to get sworn in to the next session. Surrounded by colleagues who know how much of a pervert he is.

(Revised Update 11/27: It turned out Gaetz will not return at all. Apparently he did read the room and realized he was doomed if he went back to Congress. DeSantis ordered up a speedy special election in 30 days, as the GOP hold on the House is insanely slim and they need every wingnut they can forcibly gerrymander into Congress. Gods help us though, there's rumors Gaetz is going to run for Florida Governor next cycle...)

The other horrifying thing is that trump still has a roster of loyalist Republicans willing to do his dirty work of turning the Department of Justice into his personal Department of Vengeance. Deciding to stick with picking someone from the Insanity State, trump tabbed former Florida AG Pam Bondi for the spot. While Bondi has the legal experience to serve at that job, she's better known as one of the state attorney generals who refused to pursue fraud charges on Trump University even after it became known she solicited trump to donate to her re-election campaigns. This cost the victims in Florida a chance to recover their money from the $25 million settlement trump agreed to avoid the court ruling. She is bought and paid for, America, and trump will insist she prove her loyalty by attacking everyone he wants destroyed.

If there's any good news from all this chaos, it's how the Senate Republicans made it clear they weren't going to roll over and beg for mercy the way trump and his MAGA supporters wanted. Befitting his role as the bully, trump had been signaling he wanted all of his Cabinet selections - as bad as they are, Gaetz was just the most noticeable disaster - regardless of any senatorial objections. he's out there threatening to use an obscure recess maneuver to circumvent the Senate's role of approving appointments. he tried getting his loyalist Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott elected to Senate Majority Leader (if there's any real good news, Scott didn't even make it out of the first round of ballots). One of trump's loudest lackeys, Sen. Tuberville, tried to threaten retaliation on his fellow senators should they refuse to accept trump's picks.

But if there's anything about U.S. Senators - regardless of party - it's that senators enjoy the power they wield within the federal system. Being a senator is almost as good as being a President, with just about the same number of perks and with fewer headaches. Those powers to "advise and consent" on things like Cabinet/Judicial appointments and foreign policy are things senators will not give up willingly.

While a Republican-controlled Senate will likely grant trump most of what he's asking - much like they did when they approved the likes of Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court - even they have to abide by their own standards, to which many of trump's other Cabinet appointments - some of them like Pete Hegseth getting exposed with their own scandals as I write this - are going to face a hard public review.

This isn't going to get easier. It's going to get crazier, as trump keeps looking for ways to blow this all up.

Gods help us. Again.

Unhappy Thoughts Part One

Currently coping with a swirl of thoughts, most of them unsettling and troubling. There's so many of them that I'm going to have to break them down into bite-sized chunks.

I seriously believe the level of sexism in this nation means we will never see a woman elected to the Presidency. I know that people are pointing to "other issues" as to the reasons why the two major candidates - with Hillary in 2016 getting tarred with "her emails" fake scandal, with Kamala in 2024 getting tarred with "inflation" - lost to a clearly unqualified (and by 2024 clearly criminal) donald trump, but the backlash they both got from male voters can't be ignored. Olga Khazan at the Atlantic makes the case:

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was a former secretary of state and senator running against the politically inexperienced real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. She lost. People would vote for a woman, the thinking went, just not that woman.

In 2024, Kamala Harris was the vice president, a former senator, and a former attorney general also running against Trump, who was by then a convicted felon and sexual abuser. She also lost. People would vote for a woman, once again, just not that woman.

The events of the past eight years might prompt some to wonder: If Clinton wasn’t good enough, and neither was Harris, will a woman ever be good enough to be president? What kind of a woman would it take? According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president. “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”

...In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man. This bias against female presidential candidates, Ono and Burden found, was most pronounced among men and among politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with.

There is painful irony that women candidates lost to a man exposed as a vulgarian towards women, a court-adjudicated rapist and confirmed misogynist.

For all the decent - if not great - choices of women leaders in the Democratic ranks like Governor Whitmer or AOC, it is insane that too many men - even among liberals! - just won't consider it.

The Willful Blindness

Update: Steve in Manhattan, thank you again for sharing this blog to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! And to those of you stopping by, can you do me a favor and Follow Me if you can? It's... I'd like to know people out there are supporting each other. P.S. As soon as I can get a selfie of it made, I'm going to quit Twitter with both middle fingers aimed at Elon while I head off to Bluesky Social! Look for me there.

This is the thing driving me insane at this moment, and will likely keep me insane for a thousand lifetimes.

Due to the Republicans' effort to overturn Roe with the Dobbs decision, there were ten states this election cycle that had pro-abortion rights amendments for their state constitutions. The results showed that most of those states' voters - even dominated by Far Right powers - sided in favor of abortion rights (via Geoff Mulvihill and Christine Fernando at AP News):

Voters in Missouri cleared the way to undo one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans in one of seven victories for abortion rights advocates, while Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota defeated similar constitutional amendments, leaving bans in place.

Abortion rights amendments also passed in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Montana. Nevada voters also approved an amendment, but they’ll need to pass it again it 2026 for it to take effect. Another that bans discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy outcomes” prevailed in New York.

The results include firsts for the abortion landscape, which underwent a seismic shift in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a ruling that ended a nationwide right to abortion and cleared the way for bans to take effect in most Republican-controlled states...

For me the sad news is that Florida's pro-abortion amendment didn't pass, but only due to a super-majority (60 percent) requirement for state amendments. It still received 57 percent support, showing a clear number of residents - including other Republicans! - wanted women to have that right to abortion based on medical and psychological needs. If only 3 percent more had any more understanding of how rape victims and women suffering miscarriage are now burdened - or worse, forced to die - because Amendment Four didn't pass.

But what's driving me insane is how many of those same voters - here in Florida, and in Missouri, and Montana, and several others like Kansas and Ohio that saw pro-abortion support in voter referenda - went and voted back into office the same Republican bastards who took away abortion rights in the first place.

It's like those voters refused to pay attention to who caused this problem with women's rights. They didn't blame donald trump for appointing three anti-abortion Justices to the Supreme Court that passed the Dobbs ruling. They didn't hold accountable the Republican Senators who approved those Justices, and in fact gave the GOP control of the incoming Senate term. And they certainly didn't vote out of office the state-level Republicans who are so partisan in their Far Right agenda that they will ignore, obstruct, or defy those state amendments however they can.

In Florida's case, the pro-abortion amendment's failure is likely going to encourage DeSantis - that bastard - and the legislators still controlling Tallahassee to pursue even harsher measures such as going after birth control. They are going to double down on punishing women for being women, I guarantee you this.

How self-defeating can you get? Did ANY of you pay attention?

It wasn't just on abortion that the majority of American voters showed this schizoid desire to support relatively liberal positions while voting into office extremist conservative SOBs.

trump and the Republican Party pretty much campaigned on demonizing immigrants, not just the illegals crossing the border but lawful migrants like Haitians. For the love of God, trump held a last-minute Hate Rally in Madison Square Garden where Puerto Ricans - official citizens since 1917! - were insulted to their faces. And yet more Latinos ended up voting for trump and Republicans, in spite of the reality that trump and the likes of Stephen Miller are openly planning to attack birthright citizenship and attempt "denaturalization" of those who already cleared legal hurdles to citizenship. It's as though those Latino voters - and American voters whose communities rely on migrant workers to survive - don't believe the leopards will be coming to eat their own faces.

Most of the voters' ire towards the Democrats revolved around the high inflation that hit the nation in the Post-COVID economy. Nevermind the fact President Biden passed an Inflation Reduction Act that generated jobs and worked - slowly, alas - to reduce the inflation rate. And those angry voters sided with trump who wants to replace our income tax system with high tariffs that will create WORSE inflation - we're talking Great Depression levels - than we've ever known.

And in spite of the relative success of the ACA (Obamacare) that aid most Americans with their health care costs, those Americans just gave power back to a Republican Party eager to repeal the whole thing (and this time with no clear Replace plan to offer). The same Republican Party that literally DID NOTHING this past term of Congress (the lowest level of legislative activity ever seen).

This isn't about me being some "elitist" liberal snob - I'm barely middle class, goddammit - wondering why my fellow Americans just won't vote the way I want them to. This is me genuinely wondering HOW my fellow Americans haven't paid attention to who (evangelical Far Right greedheads) - and what (racism and sexism) - are causing the problems and turmoil that do affect them as much as all of us.

This is why I'm screaming into the void anymore. The willful blindness of my neighbors and even some family members to the real problems out there and how the Republicans they just voted for are the cause of those problems looking to double down on that madness.

It's like nobody among those 73 million trump voters remembered the madness, the cruelty, the broken acts of poor governance that trump and his Far Right cohorts brought about the first time around between 2017 to 2020. It's like they refuse to remember how since 1988 every time a Republican-led government broke things - Bush the Elder's recession, Bush the Lesser's failed wars and financial meltdowns, trump's excessive tax cuts and refusal to handle the COVID emergency with ANY level of competency or compassion - their partisan extremism made it impossible to solve those crises and were disastrous AND deadly for our nation.

What the hell, America. Seriously. Did you pay ANY attention at ALL?

The Void In Me

I went back into my blog to cross out all the hopeful things I had posted leading up to Election Day.

Gods. A nightmare.

My personal mood is stuck between Despair and Fatigue.

I've stopped playing a lot of video games. I've stopped watching television. I've stopped going to movies. I'm finding it harder to read any books now. 

I don't think I will ever experience true joy in my life. The brief moments of any kind of happiness I experience end quick, and I have so few people in my life within reach to share that happiness. I know what it's like to be in love, but I also know what it's like to never share it, to never figure out relationships, to figure out other people, to be normal. The only thing I know about love is the shape of the void it makes in my life.

My writing interest is waning. My short story submissions keep getting rejected and I can't find any other places to submit my work. I'm at the point of "why bother?"

After having all my blog articles for the Royal Palm Literary Awards ignored for FWA, it's just piling onto my despair of spending all these years raging against the madness of motherfucking trump and changing none of it. For all the limited views, for all the brief bumps I get from Crooks & Liars traffic, it's not worth it, is it? Anything I write is meaningless against the fear and hatred that a majority of Americans revel in today.

My chronic depression eats away at me. My social anxiety makes it harder and harder to even try and find people near me I could find friendship, or comfort. And it's hard already being stuck in a Deep Red county in a damned Deep Red state to find people who share my world-view.

If this reads like self-pity or wallowing, it probably is. But I've got nothing else to offer right now.

This is all I am: a tired, aging, emotionally broken nobody.

Screaming Into the Void

I went to bed early on Election Night because I didn't want the stress to get the worst of me.

I wake up to a goddamn nightmare.

I thought the worst case nightmare of a trump "win" was that he was going to fight legal challenges all the way up to the Supreme Court. I didn't consider even the possibility trump would claim more popular votes than Harris. trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by three million votes, and lost it more by seven million in 2020. trump had done nothing to improve his favorability numbers in all that time, and yet... what the hell?

And it's not that trump's winning by garnering a higher count than the 74 million he got in 2020: his current total is below that (last saw it was 71 million) and even after all the final tallying is done by this weekend it doesn't look like it'll be any higher than that 74 million from last time.

What's horrifying is how Kamala's vote total - based off the 81 million Biden got earlier - dropped off a literal cliff down to 66 million(!). That total should increase slightly during the final ballot counting, but there's no way she's finding 15 million votes hiding away under a sofa or something to regain the popular vote or flip the Electoral College. This is... wrong. This is broken.

WHERE THE HELL DID 15 MILLION DEMOCRATIC VOTES GO?

This was after all the reports of increased voter registration, this was after all the early voting reports of higher turnout. Pennsylvania and Florida in particular were reporting big turnout overall. There were few signs that the turnout numbers were favoring trump or Republicans. If anything, most of the turnout numbers were matching - if not exceeding in some states - 2020 numbers. AND YET. There's 15 million votes unaccounted for.

This can't be right.

By all accounts, Harris ran the final stages of the campaign - taking over from President Biden when he dropped out from media pressure to do so - just right. She fundraised better than trump. Her rallies drew bigger crowds. The ground game was knocking on every door in the battleground states and then some. There weren't any signs from the voting base itself that they disapproved of Harris (other than the pro-Palestinians fearing the year-long war Israel was inflicting on the Gaza and West Bank citizenry).

There wasn't any evidence that turnout was going to drop this bad. Where the hell did 15 million voters from 2020 go?

Other than grappling at the conspiracy train of thought that the voting machines were rigged - across every battleground state, even the ones where Democrats held local control - the only other thought is that all that voter turnout was a mirage, or that voters avoided marking off a choice for President on the ballots either way.

Looking at the results nationwide, it's not as though that 15 million votes went towards the Libertarian or Green candidates (the Libertarians had barely 540,000 votes, and the Greens got 611,000). Those 15 million votes are just... gone.

What the hell happened to the 81 million voters who showed up for Biden where 15 million of them refused - in an election that could have stopped a known felon and sex offender in trump - to show up for Harris?

This is both frustrating and alarming as hell.

And now we're stuck in hell.

I am regretting ever getting this emotionally invested into my nation's own well-being and survival against the forces of darkness that trump (and his BFF Putin) represent.

For a long time, I thought the Far Right was too extreme, too cruel, too corrupt to truly represent what the United States could be (even with all the racism and sexism dripping through our history books).

I believed the Republican Party wasn't truly reflective of the majority of Americans - not since the 1990s when the sheen of Reaganism fell away - and that they were really a minority party surviving on gerrymandering and voter suppression. The possibility that massive voter suppression happened last night is there, but on this scale? Considering how so many Americans ARE happy voting for a known criminal felon, tax fraud, and sex offender in trump, the only honest reality is that GODS HELP US a majority of Americans are truly this blind, truly this cruel, truly this spiteful towards their own communities and families.

I'm despairing for the poor, for the Blacks facing law enforcement crackdowns to serve trump's obsession for violence against them, for the Latinos and Arabs about to suffer hardships under a vicious anti-immigrant regime, for the women who are about to lose even more rights to an evangelical mob, for the children about to see their personal lives and their safety violated by anti-trans and anti-gay haters.

I'm not despairing for America though. Those sons of bitches voted for a monster about to blow everything up to feed their fear and hate, and they will get caught in the chaos and destruction they thought was going to inflict everyone else.

Goddamn us tonight. History and humanity will never forgive us.

Everybody Hold On Tight Election Day 2024 Edition

Update: Goddammit.

This is what we know going into Election Day this November 5th.

There is a gender gap in the voting trends, with more women showing up to vote than men.

There is a Dobbs Effect, where a number of deeply-held Republican states are seeing a massive shift of votes towards Democratic candidates and pro-abortion state referenda after the Dobbs ruling in 2022 allowed those Republican states to enact harsh anti-abortion laws. What we don't know is how massive those shifts will be and if they will flip enough Red states Blue.

There will be a harsh rebuke from Latino voters - especially Puerto Rican voters - towards Republicans in key battleground states Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida. When you have 85 percent of Puerto Ricans telling pollsters they're siding with Harris, that's a huge voting bloc numbering hundreds of thousands in each state giving Democrats advantages in places that were decided by mere thousands of votes.

The governors and Attorneys General in some of the Red states are going to do everything they can to block federal officials from the Justice Department to oversee vote counting, because they dare not let honest tallying take place. So we know the Republicans are going to try and disenfranchise voters they don't like as much as possible.

trump will claim he's winning in every state, and then when a state's counting starts shifting to Harris he will scream "Stop the Steal" and that there's mass voter fraud in that state. Then again, he did this LAST time during the 2020 count, and he threatened to do it in 2016 before that election, so this was going to happen anyway. trump can never admit he's losing.

What people should know going into tomorrow's election: When you get in line before the polls close, STAY IN LINE. It helps to get there as early as possible. Bring your own bottle of water or something because some of the Republican-controlled states banned people from providing drinks and health aid for people stuck in long lines.

If some Proud Boy asshole challenges your right to vote, defend your vote (and see if the precinct security guard can charge that SOB for election interference). If a poll worker challenges your right to vote, demand a provisional ballot. Bring a friend - go with a group of neighbors or family members who can vote at that precinct with you - so you won't be alone and easy to intimidate.

Do be prepared for the craziest election day our nation's ever seen: Crazier than 1968, more chaotic than 1876, and - oh gods, help us - probably more violent than anything (and it's shocking how many violent elections - at least at the local level - we've had).

Stay safe. Use your power to vote. And here's hoping for a strong Blue Wave to wash trump and his criminal ways from our land.

I Need to Blog Something to Open This Month of November So...

I don't want to stress.

I don't want to stress.

I don't want to stress.

I don't want to stress.

(grabs a Gatorade and guzzles it all in one gulp)

via GIPHY

I DON'T WANT TO STRESS.

I AM PERFECTLY FINE.

via GIPHY

ALL THE EARLY VOTING REPORTS AND FINAL WEEK OF POLLING, I DON'T CARE ABOUT ANY OF THAT.

(stops self from writing a prolonged blog essay freaking out over the post-election scenarios)

I AM AN OASIS OF CALM.

I'M FINE. I'M PERFECTLY FINE.

GODDAMMIT WILL WE JUST CONFIRM KAMALA HAS 99 MILLION VOTES ALREADY AND BE DONE WITH THIS?!

(slap)

via GIPHY

Okay. Okay. Whew. Better now.

(grabs the edge of the computer monitor to scream at the nine blog readers here) GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT FOR KAMALA AND EVERY DEMOCRAT ON THE BALLOT! GET IT DONE! 

via GIPHY

As Spock would say, "Party hard, you Vulcan motherf-ckers."

We're gonna need ALL the Romulan Ale by Tuesday night.

The Nightmare of 2024

As befits the day of All Hallows Eve, I need to describe the recurring nightmare that keeps haunting me as we get closer to Election Day.

The absolute utter dread that somehow donald motherfucking trump might sneak his way back into the White House.

It's been a nightmare being stuck in the Darkest Timeline since November 2016, not just coping with the reality that a solid plurality of my fellow Americans are happily siding with a known racist sexist idiotic shitgibbon like him. It's watching time and again trump committing public faux pas and mental meltdowns, and getting exposed as a financial fraud and adjudicated rapist; all the while violating every known rule of political gravity that should have ended this madness ages ago.

It's unnerving to even contemplate trump could win. Not through any honest means, obviously, but through deceit, rigging, and overt bullying.

I know it can't happen through the popular vote. trump never won the popular vote in 2016 or 2020 in spite of all his gaslighting lies, and there is no sign that trump can win the people over this 2024. 

It could happen through the Electoral College's broken system. For all the hope of a Blue Wave - for all the signs of higher voter turnout leaning towards Kamala Harris and the Democrats - there is still the nagging reality that nobody's really going to know until voters actually vote how the battleground states will play out. All it can take is three or four of the key states - Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina - to go in favor of trump to have the Electoral College negate the popular vote. Much like how Hillary in 2016 clearly won the popular vote by 3 million nationwide but lost the Electoral by 30,000 votes in Wisconsin and Michigan: Kamala could be up by 7 million over trump but if she loses Pennsylvania AND Georgia AND Wisconsin by 7,000... The absolute EVIL of the Electoral College will tear this nation apart.

If there's any good news about the likelihood of the Electoral College failing (AGAIN) is that most of the battleground states have polls and early turnout trending away from trump. trump is already complaining about "stolen votes" in Pennsylvania so there may be internal polling suggesting he's about to lose that state (it is considered the key battleground state: Winning it points towards winning states with similar populations like Michigan and Wisconsin).

If trump is hoping to stage another chaotic mess of fake electors or getting his allies in certain states to refuse to certify the results - anything to force chaos and make the system convert to the fallback option of having the US House choose a winner - that is unlikely to happen: The current election laws and mechanisms point towards having it all resolved in the Electoral College anyway.

None of that is the real nightmare.

The nightmare scenario is that Kamala Harris wins both the popular and Electoral votes in a decisive manner - it could be by 500,000 votes and a slim EV count, it could be by 20 million and an Electoral blowout - and yet still "loses" because trump gets his allies in the court system - especially the Supreme Court - to buy his false claims of stolen votes and throw the results to him.

Considering how this Roberts Court already bent over backwards to undo previous court rulings - and run roughshod over established norms - all to give trump a Get Out of Jail Free card - LITERALLY - we can't ignore the possibility that the six Conservative Justices on the high court will ignore the basic facts of 1) trump never having evidence that the elections are rigged, and 2) the clear majority of voting Americans sided with Harris and the Democrats on who should lead this nation.

What will happen if Harris gets over 90 million voters - as I'm hoping - while trump gets barely over 50 million, with a majority of states flipping Democratic Blue in the process, only to have six Justices whom no one directly elected tell that American majority their votes and their voices and their power don't count?

That's what terrifies me heading into next Tuesday: The response by angry American voters - not just Democrats but the Indy and anti-trump Republicans - betrayed by a corrupt Supreme Court. What the hell do we do if Harris and the Democrats honestly win and yet trump and the Republicans steal it away?

What If: the 2024 President Election Is an Honest-to-God Harris Landslide

Update: All of this was wrong. All of this was a lie. All of America is fucked up, don't tell me otherwise.

I'm still thinking about that USA Today report about early voting where Kamala Harris has a 63 percent lead in the ballots over trump's anemic 34 percent (with the difference going to third parties, natch).

Given how most of the modern - at least 21st Century - Presidential elections were not so heavily favored either way - balancing between 52-47 percent or closer - seeing THAT huge of a lead is stunning (and stirring up way too much hope for my own good, I admit it).

Logic dictates that the early voting is not a full representation of the likely voter turnout for this cycle. We're barely at a quarter of expected turnout - although with a week to go the numbers will go up - and more than half of the voters tend to wait until Election Day (some because they're still undecided, many because it's kinda traditional) anyway. We should expect a downward shift on that percentage lead to where the voting share fits the trends of a closer (say 55-45) election result.

We could be looking at the likelihood that a large number of Democratic - or Dem-leaning Independents - are voting earlier than the more traditional Republican voters who wait... except those early voting numbers show a near-level balance of Dem and GOP voters. So that narrative's a bit off.

The implications I'm seeing are 1) this is how the voting trends are going, and 2) there's a shocking number of Republican voters adding to that 63 percent Harris lead that can't be ignored.

So (dammit, my giddiness is getting the better of me), we are within the realm of positing a "What If": What if Harris really is getting close to 63 percent of the national vote this November?

One thing we shouldn't do is speculate on the final turnout numbers. Although there's signs of increased voter registration, there's still no guarantee of increased voter turnout (although the turnout numbers did go up in 2020 due to excessive use of mail-in ballots that made it easier to do so).

So let's go by the 2020 total turnout count, which was 158,429,631 Americans.

If that percentage trend (63) persists for Harris, she's looking at roughly 99,810,667 votes.

(jaw drops)

Considering Biden got roughly 51 percent and a total of 81,283,501 votes, I'd say that's a huge boost to the collective Democratic ego.

By comparison, trump's possible 34 percent will garner around 53,866,704 votes. It will be a decided drop off from the 74,223,975 he got in 2020 and also below his 2016 numbers of 62,984,828. It would be a massive rejection by voters tired of trump's antics the third time around.

Not only would the percentage difference be huge (Harris will win by 29 percent) but the vote total will be embarrassing (Harris will win by 45,943,963 votes). trump and the Republicans will try to scream "stolen votes," but on a scale that large there's no way even Far Right judges will buy that (or risk challenging it). 

(Also: Try imagining trump calling the Georgia Secretary of State and begging him to "find me 45 million votes.")

It would be a legitimate blowout for a Presidential election, something we haven't seen in decades. Looking back, the next closest election with that huge a percentage win gap was in 1984 when Reagan demolished Mondale 58 to 40 percent. Reagan won the Electoral votes of 49(!) states with roughly 54 million over 37 million. There's a reason why Democrats have campaigned with little joy until now, and that smackdown inflicted a ton of PTSD for years afterward.

You could consider Nixon's victory in 1972 over McGovern one of the biggest results in all of U.S. history - where he won 60 percent over McGovern's 37 for a massive popular vote win 47 million over 29 million - but then you have to remember Nixon and his CREEPs orchestrated a dirty tricks campaign to guarantee running against a massively unpopular McGovern.

The most recent Democratic win on this scale would be in 1964, with LBJ riding on Kennedy's legacy and against an (then) extreme conservative opponent in Goldwater where Johnson got 61 percent over Goldwater's 38 percent and a 43 million over 27 million popular vote turnout. 

I could go back to 1936 when FDR blew Alf Landon out of the water with a 60 percent vs. 36 percent result, but you get my drift. Harris getting 63 percent would top every other electoral trouncing to achieve a Blowout For the Ages. Even if that percentage slides down, if she's anywhere near Reagan's 58 percent turnout we're still talking a huge win trump and the GOP can't lie about.

One other thing that accompanied those big blowouts in 1984, 1972, 1964, and 1936 (and even the milder landslides we'd see from Eisenhower's 1952-1956 wins for example) were the Electoral College results (maps are from the 270towin website):

It would be pretty to see a Harris/Walz Electoral Map where most of the United States will color in as Blue...

I would argue that back in those days the geographic divisions between Democratic and Republican - or Liberal and Conservative - voters were not as severe as we have today. Back then, the states were pretty well mixed between the major parties, and moderates between them would slide one election to the next between candidates without fear of being disloyal. 

You could get an Electoral College map that would overexaggerate the popular vote wins because the winning candidate got past the bare minimum to win there (Mondale almost lost his home state in 1984 by 2000 votes! And we know how Hillary lost Wisconsin and Michigan by similar margins to our detriment...). In today's partisan environment - and where liberals and conservatives relocated to states more attuned to their worldviews - it's not as likely for Harris to flip so many states Democratic the way LBJ and FDR did in their day. 

Having said that, if Harris is garnering - and keeping - 63 percent of voters by Election Day, that HAS to mean a large number of once-solid Republicans are abandoning their partisan stance (at least for this cycle), and across a number of otherwise solid Republican-held Red states to where a massive Electoral College win is in the pipeline. Not just Harris keeping the states Biden won in 2020, and not just flipping key battleground states like North Carolina and maybe Florida, and not just the almost-real possibility of finally flipping Texas: I'm talking nearly every Red state could be in play with those numbers (save for of course deep Red states like West Virginia, South Carolina, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho). Dear 9 readers of this blog: Even ALASKA is in play.

...

Okay, with all THAT said, this "What If" fantasy is pretty to think so, but in the real world my track record for predicting things hasn't been all that great to begin with.

Like I said near the beginning of this wishful thinking, that early 63 percent lead can easily slide down as more voters show up and if more of them are leaning Republican and trump. The trend may look nice but actual voter turnout is what counts, and the early pro-Harris counts from Republican voters could just be that voting bloc getting their ballots done before they change their minds.

But... given that a sizable GOP voter bloc IS voting Harris and getting away from the once-rigid partisan voting habits, we ought to consider the reality that Harris is getting way above the now-standard 50-to-52 percent of winning we've seen in recent cycles. Even if Harris matches the more modest result of Obama's big win in 2008 of 53 percent, we're talking 83 million votes (a nice boost over 2020) and numbers that trump can't challenge.

Voter turnout remains key, fellow Americans.

We need 99 million or so of y'all to show up and vote Harris/Walz for the blowout we need to keep America free from trumpian misrule.

This is what 99 million Harris votes could look like

Let's do this.