Tag Archives: 2020 Election

Enough Is Enough, or A Sixty-Day Vacation

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I have various reasons for doing this blog. I enjoy writing. I like to express my opinions. Writing helps clarify what I think. And there’s always a chance that my words may interest or benefit somebody who reads them (it can happen).

Saving the world is definitely a long shot, but the world needs all the help it can get. The post from earlier this month with the email addresses for the Postal Service’s Board of Governors was viewed more than 3,000 times (I hope they got some emails). That puts it in second place between Apple Core! Baltimore! (4,500 views) and The Fendertones Take Us Back To 1965 (1,700) (there’s a message here).

I mention all this because I’m wondering how to continue. Not whether to continue, but how.

We have an election in two months. It’s hard to believe it will be close. Millions of voters who gave the maniac the benefit of the doubt four years ago or couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman don’t have the same excuse this time. This is a president who has never had a positive approval rating. The reasons not to give him four more years are overwhelming. But Republicans don’t need a majority to win. They have the Electoral College on their side.

What this means is that some observers are warning Democrats not to be too optimistic. They’re writing articles with headlines like these:

Txxxx’s convention was repulsive and dishonest. I fear it was also effective.

To everyone who thinks Txxxx is a goner: He’s just getting started.

Liberals are quick to dismiss Txxxx. They do so at their peril.

Could It Be Bush v. Gore All Over Again?

Biden’s Loose Lips Could Sink His Chances.

In some cases, the people expressing these opinions want to come across as hard-headed realists. If, god forbid and against all reason, the maniac wins, they can say they got it right. Nobody will remember if they got it wrong.

Thus, Michael Moore, who warned us what would happen in 2016, is back:

Michael Moore warns that Dxxxx Txxxx is on course to repeat 2016 win. Film-maker says enthusiasm for president in swing states is ‘off the charts’.

Although the same publication has this as well:

Txxxx must win the Midwest. But out here his breezy reelection gambit falls flat.

I don’t think I can handle this for another two months: the “watch out, it’s gonna be bad” stories, even when they’re counter-balanced by a few “good times ahead”.

Something else I don’t want to take until November is all the lying.

Fortunately, I’m not one of those people whose job requires them to pay attention to the maniac’s pronouncements or those of other Republican politicians. Being exposed to one ridiculous lie after another is stressful. I imagine a White House reporter dreaming of grabbing Txxxx’s press secretary by the throat, screaming at her to just shut her damn lying mouth. Consider the poor (but highly-paid) reporters who had to keep the sound on during every minute of the Republican convention.

From Margaret Sullivan:

Daniel Dale met President Txxxx’s convention speech with a tirade of truth Thursday night — a tour de force of fact-checking that left CNN anchor Anderson Cooper looking slightly stunned.

The cable network’s resident fact-checker motored through at least 21 falsehoods and misstatements he had found in Txxxx’s 70-minute speech, breathlessly debunking them at such a pace that when he finished, Cooper, looking bemused, paused for a moment and then deadpanned, “Oh, that’s it?”

So, so much was simply wrong. Claims about the border wall, about drug prices, about unemployment, about his response to the pandemic, about rival Joe Biden’s supposed desire to defund the police (which Biden has said he opposes).

Believe it or not, Republicans lie more than Democrats. One big reason is that they have an unpopular agenda. They want to cut taxes as much as possible for the rich, so they have to say they’re doing it for the middle class. They want to stop Democrats from voting, so they say they’re doing it to fight voter fraud. They’re in court trying to kill the Affordable Care Act’s protection for people with pre-existing medical conditions, while claiming to be the ones who will protect us from the insurance companies. The president has no interest in providing health insurance to the uninsured, but keeps promising to announce a wonderful healthcare plan two weeks from now. It’s always two weeks from now. Republicans want to privatize Social Security and Medicare, but claim to be those programs’ biggest supporters. The list goes on.

In fact, way back in 2003, Al Franken published a book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. The next edition will come as a five-volume set. (That’s a lie, but not a bad one.)

Being lied to is stressful. It’s even worse when you can’t confront the liar. I want to avoid some of that stress for the next two months.

These two considerations, the pessimistic warnings and the constant lies, have convinced me to take a news vacation. I want to back away from the daily news cycle. Since politics has been this blog’s biggest topic, that will probably mean fewer posts or less pressing subject matter. But breaking the internet news addiction until after the election is worth a try. I already know who to vote for. So should you. Besides, the world will still be here to save after November 3rd.

Sorry, All We Need To Know About the Republican Convention, Part 2

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I thought we already knew all that we needed to know. But there was a bit more today.

From Charles Pierce of Esquire:

You may not have noticed [I sure didn’t], but the president* was renominated early Monday afternoon. Then he accepted the nomination and spoke for almost an hour. So that means the Republican National Convention is over now, right? Right?

Right?

Damn.

I watched the Roll Call of the States. . . With every vote, a small but noisy claque . . . would hoot and holler in a ballroom in Charlotte that was gussied up and looked like a student’s civics-project facsimile of a national convention. I swear they stuck the loudest yahoos they could find next to all the C-SPAN crowd mics.

And then, to everyone’s apparent surprise, Himself showed up to say thanks and to speak…and speak…and speak. Almost a full hour’s airing of all the usual grievances, and a serious emphasis on what is going to be the theme of this week’s festivities—namely, that any result in November that does not result in his winning will be illegitimate.

They are trying to steal the election like they did the last time with the spying…This is stealing millions of votes. We’re in courts all over the country and hopefully they give us a fair count, because the only way they can take this election away from us, is if this is rigged election.

Earlier Monday, at the House Oversight Committee hearing at which Postmaster General Louis DeJoy proved himself to be one of the smuggest SOBs ever to appear before Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan gave away a little more of the game away. It is clear that, if there’s one second in which the president appears to be ahead after, say, 10 p.m. Eastern time, they will declare victory, demand Joe Biden concede, and then run to every courthouse they can find to stop the counting of legitimate ballots after election day:

. . . We all know what this is about. This is about these guys [Democrats] wanting chaos and confusion. . . I think you know this. They know that, on Election Day, President Txxxx is going to win. They know come the Election Day vote count, President Txxxx is going to win and they want to keep counting six weeks, four weeks…That’s what they want.

It is imperative that we keep an eye on this through line all week and throughout the 60-odd days remaining until Election Day. It’s what they have.

Unquote.

So the Narcissist-In-Chief was nominated early in the proceedings, not near the end, and they don’t want all the votes counted in November. Ok, that’s all we need to know.

Just Do It

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The Washington Post editorial board is launching a series of editorials that might be called “Stating the Obvious”. But this is well-done:

After he is nominated at a pared-down Republican convention next week, President Txxxx will make this argument to the American people: Things were great until China loosed the novel coronavirus on the world. If you reelect me, I will make things great again.

Seeking reelection in the midst of the worst public health crisis and sharpest economic downturn of our lifetimes, this may, realistically, be the only argument left to him. But, fittingly for a president who has spoken more than 20,000 lies during his presidency, it rests on two huge falsehoods.

One is that the nation, his presidency and, above all, Mr. Txxxx himself are innocent victims of covid-19. In fact, his own negligence, ignorance and malpractice turned what would have been a daunting challenge for any president into a national disaster.

The other is that there was anything to admire in his record before the virus struck. It is true that the economic growth initiated under President Barack Obama had continued, at about the same modest rate. Mr. Txxxx achieved this growth by ratcheting up America’s deficit and long-term debt to record levels, with a tax cut that showered benefits on the wealthy.

But beyond the low unemployment rate he gained and lost, history will record Mr. Txxxx’s presidency as a march of wanton, uninterrupted, tragic destruction. America’s standing in the world, loyalty to allies, commitment to democratic values, constitutional checks and balances, faith in reason and science, concern for Earth’s health, respect for public service, belief in civility and honest debate, beacon to refugees in need, aspirations to equality and diversity and basic decency — Mr. Txxxx torched them all.

Four years ago, after Mr. Txxxx was nominated in Cleveland, we did something in this space we had never done before: Even before the Democrats had nominated their candidate, we told you that we could never, under any circumstances, endorse Dxxxx Txxxx for president. He was, we said, “uniquely unqualified” to be president.

“Mr. Txxxx’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together,” we warned. “His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.”

The nation has indeed spent much of the past three-plus years fretting over whether that experiment could survive Mr. Txxxx’s depredations. The resistance from some institutions, at some times, has been heartening. The depth of the president’s incompetence, which even we could not have imagined, may have saved the democracy from a more rapid descent.
But the trajectory has been alarming. The capitulation of the Republican Party has been nauseating. Misbehavior that many people vowed never to accept as normal has become routine.

A second term might injure the experiment beyond recovery.

And so, over the coming weeks, we will do something else we have never done before: We will publish a series of editorials on the damage this president has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term. And we will unabashedly urge you to do your civic duty and vote: Vote early and vote safely, but vote.

Unquote.

Hell, you can vote early, vote safely, vote late, vote unsafely. Just vote.

Decency

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All the evidence indicates that Joe Biden is a decent human being. A cynic or a Republican might say it’s all an act. They often find it hard to accept reality.

Last night at the Democratic convention, 13-year old Brayden Harrington appeared in a video talking about how Biden helped him with his stutter. You may have already seen it.

Their original meeting in February in New Hampshire deserves to be seen too (you might have to do an extra click to see the video):

Biden meets Brayden

Every time we elect a president, people say it doesn’t matter who wins. Nobody should say that this year.

Mysteries

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I did something I usually don’t do, which is look at one of those articles about rural or suburban voters in the Midwest who voted for Txxxx and will do it again (“Txxxx supporters still support Txxxx!”). Everything he said was about how he’s doing personally. His farm is doing well. The pandemic is mostly far away. He expressed no concern about anybody else and made inane excuses for the president (e.g. it’s so unfair that the news media report all this bad news — they’re purposefully ignoring the good things (?) the president does).

Fortunately, however, the thrust of the article was that Txxxx will do worse in Iowa than four years ago and possibly lose the state.

Along with the mystery of why anyone would vote for such a terrible person and president, there’s the mystery of why the stock market is doing so well. Paul Krugman helps answer that question and warns of darker times ahead:

On Tuesday, the S&P 500 stock index hit a record high. The next day, Apple became the first U.S. company in history to be valued at more than $2 trillion. Dxxxx Txxxx is, of course, touting the stock market as proof that the economy has recovered from the coronavirus; too bad about those 173,000 dead Americans, but as he says, “It is what it is.”

But the economy probably doesn’t feel so great to the millions of workers who still haven’t gotten their jobs back and who have just seen their unemployment benefits slashed. The $600 a week supplemental benefit enacted in March has expired, and Txxxx’s purported replacement is basically a sick joke.

Even before the aid cutoff, the number of parents reporting that they were having trouble giving their children enough to eat was rising rapidly. That number will surely soar in the next few weeks. And we’re also about to see a huge wave of evictions, both because families are no longer getting the money they need to pay rent and because a temporary ban on evictions, like supplemental unemployment benefits, has just expired.

But how can there be such a disconnect between rising stocks and growing misery? Wall Street types, who do love their letter games, are talking about a “K-shaped recovery”: rising stock valuations and individual wealth at the top, falling incomes and deepening pain at the bottom. But that’s a description, not an explanation. What’s going on?

The first thing to note is that the real economy, as opposed to the financial markets, is still in terrible shape. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s weekly economic index suggests that the economy, although off its low point a few months ago, is still more deeply depressed than it was at any point during the recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

And this time around, job losses are concentrated among lower-paid workers — that is, precisely those Americans without the financial resources to ride out bad times.

What about stocks? The truths is that stock prices have never been closely tied to the state of the economy. As an old economists’ joke has it, the market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.

Stocks do get hit by financial crises, like the disruptions that followed the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the brief freeze in credit markets back in March. Otherwise, stock prices are pretty disconnected from things like jobs or even G.D.P. [the Gross Domestic Product] [although the market does quickly, sometimes violently respond to the latest earnings reports].

And these days, the disconnect is even greater than usual.

For the recent rise in the market has been largely driven by a small number of technology giants. And the market values of these companies have very little to do with their current profits, let alone the state of the economy in general. . . .

Take the example of Apple, with its $2 trillion valuation. Apple has a price-earnings ratio — the ratio of its market valuation to its profits — of about 33. [The historical P.E. ratio for the stock market is around 15.] As long as they expect Apple to be profitable years from now, they barely care what will happen to the U.S. economy over the next few quarters.

Furthermore, the profits people expect Apple to make years from now loom especially large because, after all, where else are they going to put their money? Yields on U.S. government bonds, for example, are well below the expected rate of inflation.

And Apple’s valuation is actually less extreme than the valuations of other tech giants, like Amazon or Netflix. . . .

[Prof. Krugman left out another well-known factor helping the stock market (a factor he understands very well). That’s FOMO (fear of missing out). When stocks go up, it’s natural that people want to own stocks. The stock market is, among other things, a giant casino. When some gamblers are having a great time, other gamblers want to join in the fun.]

Unfortunately, ordinary Americans get very little of their income from capital gains, and can’t live on rosy projections about their future prospects. Telling your landlord not to worry about your current inability to pay rent, because you’ll surely have a great job five years from now, will get you nowhere — or, more accurately, will get you kicked out of your apartment and put on the street.

So here’s the current state of America: Unemployment is still extremely high, largely because Txxxx and his allies first refused to take the coronavirus seriously, then pushed for an early reopening in a nation that met none of the conditions for resuming business as usual — and even now refuse to get firmly behind basic protective strategies like widespread mask requirements.

Despite this epic failure, the unemployed were kept afloat for months by federal aid, which helped avert both humanitarian and economic catastrophe. But now the aid has been cut off, with Txxxx and allies as unserious about the looming economic disaster as they were about the looming epidemiological disaster.

So everything suggests that even if the pandemic subsides — which is by no means guaranteed — we’re about to see a huge surge in national misery.

Oh, and stocks are up. . . .