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Monday, July 20, 2020
Friday, April 10, 2020
The Progressive Case for Joe Biden
If elected, Joe Biden will be the most progressive President in the history of the United States of America.
As vice-President he was used as a "water tester", finding the best time and place to move the Obama Administration to the left on various issues. In particular with the Defense of Marriage Act and "Don't Ask Don't Tell." These were issues that, in Obama's first term, were not terribly progressive (there was clearly a political calculation to not push against DOMA at the time as the right were good at freaking out massive numbers of old people with the fear of gay marriage), but Joe could, and did, put things out there in his sort of rambling media forays and help guide public opinion to "move the needle" so to speak on gay marriage and gays serving openly in the military. I mean, there's a reason Obama chose him as his running-mate.
So let's look at what's meaningful with the difference between, say, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
The first, and presumably biggest, difference, is in healthcare. Sanders favors a "Medicare for All" and Biden favors a "public option."
Now, a public option, if actually enacted, would give us the most progressive national healthcare plan we've ever had. And Medicaid for All would be even more so.
But here's the thing: the President does not present legislation. Both houses of Congress would have to vote in favor of a bill that the President would sign. And the "Medicaid for All" is not popular with the public (which is the fault of our idiot media circus but that's a story for another time.) So it's very unlikely that a President who even champions Medicare For All will even get a bill to sign.
Furthermore, a "public option" might happen first and be a good gateway drug to more comprehensive healthcare. I'm sure that's how the Republicans will see it.
As for higher education, Biden favors a more conservative plan than Sanders, but again it would be the most progressive plan the US has ever seen if it got passed. However, introducing legislation is not the President's job. All bills start in the House. But then they need to be passed by the Senate. Everything is a moot point if Republicans control the Senate.
Both Biden and Sanders are aiming for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Sanders wants 100% renewable energy by 2030.
Early Childhood Development. Let's fact it, neither Sanders nor Biden can even come close to the detailed, exact, and specific plan that Hillary Clinton had. But between free Pre-K and raising teacher's salaries, I don't see a lot of daylight between Biden or Sanders' positions. Obviously a bill would need to be written and passed by both houses.
Central and South America. You'd think an old socialist like Bernie would be all over this but nope, it's Joe who wants to build what we might call the un-jerk plan for US relations with our southern neighbors. For those of us of a certain age, the constant American jerkiness of our policy toward pretty much every country of Central and South American has been a nightmare. Bill Clinton closed the School of the Americas. The Democrats have a pretty good record of doing something positive with the Americas and Biden seems to have a specific plan. This is an issue which is the purview of the President and honestly I'm a tad befuddled about Bernie's lack of policy, at least that I could find on his website.
Guns. Joe wants to have the government buy back assault weapons. He is WAY to the left of Bernie on guns.
Other than that, what have we got?
These are big freaking deals. These are all issues which directly affect the lives of workers. The NLRB has a great deal of power to affect, for instance, when overtime is paid. Right now many companies use a nonsense definition of "manager" in order to deny workers overtime pay. Under Obama, the NLRB was about to really help people who managed McDonalds and other places because in reality those people are dramatically under-paid and expected to happily work long hours without OT.
The CPFB puts the fear of god into banks who want to play games with consumer lending -- doing absurdly criminal things to lock poor and working people into worse than loan-shark-level loans.
A functioning pandemic response team that actually, you know, responds to pandemics. The sheer number of people who have died because of the blundering of this Administration is horrifying.
I would expect those appointments would likely be mostly the same between Joe and Bernie, perhaps not the same individuals, but people with the same sorts of ideological temperament.
Biden is pro-choice, pro-trans rights, pro-climate, pro-working-class, pro-science, pro-education, pro-early childhood development.
If elected, Joe Biden will be the most progressive President the United States has ever seen.
As vice-President he was used as a "water tester", finding the best time and place to move the Obama Administration to the left on various issues. In particular with the Defense of Marriage Act and "Don't Ask Don't Tell." These were issues that, in Obama's first term, were not terribly progressive (there was clearly a political calculation to not push against DOMA at the time as the right were good at freaking out massive numbers of old people with the fear of gay marriage), but Joe could, and did, put things out there in his sort of rambling media forays and help guide public opinion to "move the needle" so to speak on gay marriage and gays serving openly in the military. I mean, there's a reason Obama chose him as his running-mate.
So let's look at what's meaningful with the difference between, say, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
The first, and presumably biggest, difference, is in healthcare. Sanders favors a "Medicare for All" and Biden favors a "public option."
Now, a public option, if actually enacted, would give us the most progressive national healthcare plan we've ever had. And Medicaid for All would be even more so.
But here's the thing: the President does not present legislation. Both houses of Congress would have to vote in favor of a bill that the President would sign. And the "Medicaid for All" is not popular with the public (which is the fault of our idiot media circus but that's a story for another time.) So it's very unlikely that a President who even champions Medicare For All will even get a bill to sign.
Furthermore, a "public option" might happen first and be a good gateway drug to more comprehensive healthcare. I'm sure that's how the Republicans will see it.
As for higher education, Biden favors a more conservative plan than Sanders, but again it would be the most progressive plan the US has ever seen if it got passed. However, introducing legislation is not the President's job. All bills start in the House. But then they need to be passed by the Senate. Everything is a moot point if Republicans control the Senate.
Both Biden and Sanders are aiming for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Sanders wants 100% renewable energy by 2030.
Early Childhood Development. Let's fact it, neither Sanders nor Biden can even come close to the detailed, exact, and specific plan that Hillary Clinton had. But between free Pre-K and raising teacher's salaries, I don't see a lot of daylight between Biden or Sanders' positions. Obviously a bill would need to be written and passed by both houses.
Central and South America. You'd think an old socialist like Bernie would be all over this but nope, it's Joe who wants to build what we might call the un-jerk plan for US relations with our southern neighbors. For those of us of a certain age, the constant American jerkiness of our policy toward pretty much every country of Central and South American has been a nightmare. Bill Clinton closed the School of the Americas. The Democrats have a pretty good record of doing something positive with the Americas and Biden seems to have a specific plan. This is an issue which is the purview of the President and honestly I'm a tad befuddled about Bernie's lack of policy, at least that I could find on his website.
Guns. Joe wants to have the government buy back assault weapons. He is WAY to the left of Bernie on guns.
Other than that, what have we got?
- Supreme Court nominations.
- National Labor Relations Board appointees.
- Head of the CPFB appointment.
- A functioning Pandemic Response team.
- A working military that doesn't have to kow-tow the the President in order to save the lives of their soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen.
These are big freaking deals. These are all issues which directly affect the lives of workers. The NLRB has a great deal of power to affect, for instance, when overtime is paid. Right now many companies use a nonsense definition of "manager" in order to deny workers overtime pay. Under Obama, the NLRB was about to really help people who managed McDonalds and other places because in reality those people are dramatically under-paid and expected to happily work long hours without OT.
The CPFB puts the fear of god into banks who want to play games with consumer lending -- doing absurdly criminal things to lock poor and working people into worse than loan-shark-level loans.
A functioning pandemic response team that actually, you know, responds to pandemics. The sheer number of people who have died because of the blundering of this Administration is horrifying.
I would expect those appointments would likely be mostly the same between Joe and Bernie, perhaps not the same individuals, but people with the same sorts of ideological temperament.
Biden is pro-choice, pro-trans rights, pro-climate, pro-working-class, pro-science, pro-education, pro-early childhood development.
If elected, Joe Biden will be the most progressive President the United States has ever seen.
Friday, December 13, 2019
The Nationality of Jews
So Maggie Haberman, of the New York Times, wrote that three Administration officials said the new executive order would make Jews part of a nationality.
Now, either
1. Haberman made that up out of whole cloth, or
2. the three officials coordinated and lied to her or
the three officials coordinated and somehow all thought they saw the same language in the EO, or:
3. the nationality of Jews WAS in the original EO (written by Stephen Miller, whose ideology that would factually represent) and after the immense criticism, the Administration delayed the EQ after announcing it and Jared Kushner had it re-written to be similar to previous EO's.
As far as I know, Haberman has not explained why the EO turned out so anodyne.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
3 times
At least three times in my life has a Republican presidential candidate conspired with a foreign power in order to attain the office of the Presidency and succeeded.
At least twice, the previous Democratic administrations had been aware but decided to not bring the case to law enforcement or to the American people for fear that the press would consider it "politicizing" or fear of burning intelligence assets.
At least twice, the previous Democratic administrations had been aware but decided to not bring the case to law enforcement or to the American people for fear that the press would consider it "politicizing" or fear of burning intelligence assets.
- In 1968 Anna Chennault, conspired with the South Vietnamese government to scuttle the Paris peace talks, assuring Saigon that Nixon would give them a much better deal if he became President. It was a clear violation of the Logan act, which Johnson called treason. Chennault was directed by Nixon to contact Saigon and keep the Paris peace process from continuing.
- In 1980, the Reagan team clearly executed an agreement with Tehran to keep the American hostages until after he won the election, preventing Carter from getting an October Surprise. Yeah, the Gary Sick allegations turned out to be nonsense, but let's get real -- the hostages were turned over 20 minutes after Reagan was inaugurated and then, for some reason, the Reagan Administration decided to participate in the Iran-Contra Affair.
- And now, Trump/Putin.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Against
Who would have thought it would be any sort of radical statement to write an anti-rape essay? Well, these are the times we live in I guess. So here is my diatribe against rape.
I was watching the brilliant Hannah Gadsby and she was saying that the awful predators -- from Weinstein to Trump to Kavanaugh -- were not the exceptions but rather the rule.
I don't agree. And this is why.
Statistically they are the exceptions. Indeed, by knowing their names we are all but guaranteed to know they must be exceptions. (We don't tend to have lists of specific people in mind when we're talking about things which are typical.)
That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of them, many more than just the "top ten" of terrible men you can think of, but it does mean (and yes, I realize what this sounds like) it isn't most men. Not 51% of them. Sure, there are way too many of them, but they don't even make up a majority of men. And that's very important. Because the bigger concern is: what do the non-rapey men do?
Clearly, not enough.
The sex creep, the rapist, the bully: they all want all of us to think what they're doing is "normal."
When a woman gets groped in midtown and screams and the creep tries to run away and two bystanders catch him, what does he do as he's sitting there waiting for the cops? He tries to talk his way out of it. The perp tries to talk to the men who caught him. He chuckles, saying "Hey man, everybody does it."
Now that gets him a kick in the head.
Because here's the thing, they know they're outnumbered. So they want to gaslight everyone -- women and men -- into thinking this is normal boys will be boys this is normal If someone did not commit sexual assault in high school, then he is not a member of the male sex this is normal.
Kavanaugh knows he's sexually assaulted women. And he wants you to think it happens by everybody all the time. He wants to normalize assault on women.
But the problem he has there is that actually, most men are against it. Most men don't rape people. Some, like his weird friend, actually awkwardly stopped him from raping Ford by jumping on Kavanaugh.
To be sure, Mike Judge didn't directly address Kavanaugh and tell him what he was doing was wrong, so he took what he thought was the socially-acceptable path of drunk white boys and jumped on top of his friend to stop him from raping a 15-year-old girl. (And this is not to say Judge did not at other times partake in raping women and girls who had passed out from drugs slipped into their drinks, but he did at least stop one rapist once.)
So no, Hannah Gadsby, I agree with pretty much everything you say, but this behavior of men? It's not the rule. These jerks are the exception. They just really really want us to all believe what they're doing is the "normal" thing. They want to live in a world where all women are walking targets, and the only way to do that is to convince most men that's what all the other men do.
But it's not what they do. The exception is the rapists.
The rule is how they get away with it. They make a fuss about how "manly" it is to rape girls. (And the sheer number of women who blame other women for getting raped is simply unsettling in an existential manner.) Between those two pro-rape forces (the men who rape and the women who defend the rapists), it becomes harder to get what we might call "good" men to stand up and say "No."
Harder. But not impossible. So you know what?
No.
§§§
I was watching the brilliant Hannah Gadsby and she was saying that the awful predators -- from Weinstein to Trump to Kavanaugh -- were not the exceptions but rather the rule.
I don't agree. And this is why.
Statistically they are the exceptions. Indeed, by knowing their names we are all but guaranteed to know they must be exceptions. (We don't tend to have lists of specific people in mind when we're talking about things which are typical.)
That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of them, many more than just the "top ten" of terrible men you can think of, but it does mean (and yes, I realize what this sounds like) it isn't most men. Not 51% of them. Sure, there are way too many of them, but they don't even make up a majority of men. And that's very important. Because the bigger concern is: what do the non-rapey men do?
Clearly, not enough.
The sex creep, the rapist, the bully: they all want all of us to think what they're doing is "normal."
When a woman gets groped in midtown and screams and the creep tries to run away and two bystanders catch him, what does he do as he's sitting there waiting for the cops? He tries to talk his way out of it. The perp tries to talk to the men who caught him. He chuckles, saying "Hey man, everybody does it."
Now that gets him a kick in the head.
Because here's the thing, they know they're outnumbered. So they want to gaslight everyone -- women and men -- into thinking this is normal boys will be boys this is normal If someone did not commit sexual assault in high school, then he is not a member of the male sex this is normal.
 |
| Jackson Katz |
Kavanaugh knows he's sexually assaulted women. And he wants you to think it happens by everybody all the time. He wants to normalize assault on women.
But the problem he has there is that actually, most men are against it. Most men don't rape people. Some, like his weird friend, actually awkwardly stopped him from raping Ford by jumping on Kavanaugh.
To be sure, Mike Judge didn't directly address Kavanaugh and tell him what he was doing was wrong, so he took what he thought was the socially-acceptable path of drunk white boys and jumped on top of his friend to stop him from raping a 15-year-old girl. (And this is not to say Judge did not at other times partake in raping women and girls who had passed out from drugs slipped into their drinks, but he did at least stop one rapist once.)
§§§
So no, Hannah Gadsby, I agree with pretty much everything you say, but this behavior of men? It's not the rule. These jerks are the exception. They just really really want us to all believe what they're doing is the "normal" thing. They want to live in a world where all women are walking targets, and the only way to do that is to convince most men that's what all the other men do.
But it's not what they do. The exception is the rapists.
The rule is how they get away with it. They make a fuss about how "manly" it is to rape girls. (And the sheer number of women who blame other women for getting raped is simply unsettling in an existential manner.) Between those two pro-rape forces (the men who rape and the women who defend the rapists), it becomes harder to get what we might call "good" men to stand up and say "No."
Harder. But not impossible. So you know what?
No.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Space Farce
So, first of all -- I thought everyone was joking about this.
Okay. Not.
No joke.
Secondly -- how did Putin approve of this? How would this serve the Russian Federation's interests?
And again, last paragraph -- right there in the article.
Here's the exciting thing about the incredibly overpriced and behind-schedule F35 fighter. It can't dogfight. It can't fly faster than Chinese or Russian fighters. It is super-duper over budget.
But what's one thing it CAN do?
Pass undetected through Russian Federation airspace. In and out.
You might recall that one of the first things Trump wanted to do when he came in was to cancel the F-35 program. But then Republicans, whose districts had defense contractors, revolted. So the program didn't get cancelled.
Now, the US has known since the 80's and the "Billion Dollar Spy" (a Soviet national who was executed by the KGB for giving secrets to the US government) quite a bit about Soviet air defense capabilities. For a variety of reasons, including geography and the fact they don't have an economy because of the Magnitsky Act, Russia's modern defense system still ain't all that. And the US knows plenty about it, and how to build airplanes that can avoid it.
Putin knows this. Trump knows this.
So why Space Force? Well you see, it will help take apart the US military's ability to keep the Russian Federation from any (more) funny business in countries which punched out of the Soviet Union just as soon as they could. So how do you weaken the military under a smokescreen of not weakening it?
Space Force.
Space Force will necessarily require cannibalizing the other branches of the armed forces. And it'll start with the Air Force, which will likely be getting the most F35's (and will certainly have the F35's the Russian Federation is most worried about.) The more chaos is sown in the Air Force, the less able it will be to do anything if (say) Russia decides that it's time to force the issue on Ukraine.
So sure, this has little to do with what Putin can do to US sovereignty. This issue here is the Baltic states and Ukraine. Although Trump has done his darndest to dismantle NATO at the behest of Putin, he hasn't been able to damage it as directly as he'd hoped (and as Putin had hoped). "Space Force" is the next best thing -- take apart military capabilities that might affect Putin's aspirations to grow the Russian economy by expanding back into the Baltics and Ukraine.
Okay. Not.
No joke.
Secondly -- how did Putin approve of this? How would this serve the Russian Federation's interests?
And again, last paragraph -- right there in the article.
Here's the exciting thing about the incredibly overpriced and behind-schedule F35 fighter. It can't dogfight. It can't fly faster than Chinese or Russian fighters. It is super-duper over budget.
But what's one thing it CAN do?
Pass undetected through Russian Federation airspace. In and out.
You might recall that one of the first things Trump wanted to do when he came in was to cancel the F-35 program. But then Republicans, whose districts had defense contractors, revolted. So the program didn't get cancelled.
Now, the US has known since the 80's and the "Billion Dollar Spy" (a Soviet national who was executed by the KGB for giving secrets to the US government) quite a bit about Soviet air defense capabilities. For a variety of reasons, including geography and the fact they don't have an economy because of the Magnitsky Act, Russia's modern defense system still ain't all that. And the US knows plenty about it, and how to build airplanes that can avoid it.
Putin knows this. Trump knows this.
So why Space Force? Well you see, it will help take apart the US military's ability to keep the Russian Federation from any (more) funny business in countries which punched out of the Soviet Union just as soon as they could. So how do you weaken the military under a smokescreen of not weakening it?
Space Force.
Space Force will necessarily require cannibalizing the other branches of the armed forces. And it'll start with the Air Force, which will likely be getting the most F35's (and will certainly have the F35's the Russian Federation is most worried about.) The more chaos is sown in the Air Force, the less able it will be to do anything if (say) Russia decides that it's time to force the issue on Ukraine.
So sure, this has little to do with what Putin can do to US sovereignty. This issue here is the Baltic states and Ukraine. Although Trump has done his darndest to dismantle NATO at the behest of Putin, he hasn't been able to damage it as directly as he'd hoped (and as Putin had hoped). "Space Force" is the next best thing -- take apart military capabilities that might affect Putin's aspirations to grow the Russian economy by expanding back into the Baltics and Ukraine.
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