Frittering away the presidency in a lost cause

Since Biden no longer is campaigning for office, and has about 6 months left in his term, one might wonder what he will do in his remaining time. This actually ought to be normal — it’s weird that the leader of our country typically seems to spend about two years out of four focused on re-election, rather than doing their job. At least we can say that Biden is going out with an ambitious goal.

President Biden endorsed sweeping changes to the Supreme Court on Monday, calling for 18-year term limits for the justices and a binding, enforceable ethics code for the high court.

He is also pushing for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit blanket immunity for presidents, a rebuke of the Supreme Court after it ruled this month that former president Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for official acts.

I approve, although I might favor even shorter term limits. These are essential changes, because the judiciary is totally broken right now (I’d argue that the electoral college is even more broken, and that the Senate is an archaic relic, but let’s fix one thing at a time.) However, let’s get real: Joe Biden is not going to achieve his goals.

The calls, however, are largely aspirational at this stage given the long odds they face in implementation. Term limits and an ethics code are subject to congressional approval, and the Republican-controlled House is unlikely to support either. Both proposals also require 60 votes to pass the Senate, and Democrats only hold 51 seats in the upper chamber. Passing a constitutional amendment requires clearing even more hurdles, including two-thirds support of both chambers, or via a convention of two-thirds of the states, and then approval by three-fourths of state legislatures.

But that’s OK. Maybe the old man will prepare the way, get everyone used to the idea that the Supreme Court is not inviolable, and maybe scare a few justices into cleaning up their act.

That’s a cunning way to defund education and kill a lot of children

Trump has a new campaign promise: he’s going to defund all schools that have a vaccine mandate.

You know, they all have vaccine requirements. Here in Minnesota, kids are required to be immunized against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DTaP), polio, measles, mumps, rubella (MMR), hepatitis B (Hep B), and varicella (chickenpox) before kindergarten. I’m not enthused about the return of polio! Or all those other diseases! It’s a strange political ploy to promise to rewind that childhood mortality curve all the way back to 1800, but that’s what the Republican party wants.

Out-of-touch billionaires showing their whole asses to the world

You’ll never believe why Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz are supporting Donald Trump. It has nothing to do with the petty concerns of mere peasants.

The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.

These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce.

“Subsidiary issues” also include trivialities like abortion or Ukraine or Palestine or the rule of law or democracy. Only peons care about that stuff! Obscenely wealthy dumb-ass venture capitalists like those two have much grander concerns. Like…lowering their taxes and crypto.

We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.

For Horowitz, “probably the most emotional topic” is crypto — a16z started a $4.5 billion crypto fund in 2022, and the pair believe that the Biden administration has been deeply unfair to crypto. In Horowitz’s view, the Biden administration “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry.”

Seriously, my dudes? You’re defining your political choices entirely on a foundation of cryptocurrency? They threw $4.5 billion down that rathole — speaking of a mega sunk cost fallacy — and now the primary concern for American citizens should be about salvaging your idiotic losses in a stupid scam?

Those two guys have totally lost the plot.

Laughter humanizes

It looks like one line of attack the Republicans will be taking is to disparage her laughter. This is a collection of clips compiled by the Daily Mail, so you know it’s a stupid complaint.

What’s wrong with that? It’s a hearty, energetic laugh, and I like that she can find something to laugh at nowadays.

Who is turned off by that perfectly normal laugh?

Now I’m wondering…what does Donald Trump’s laugh sound like? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it.

Nosedive right into the sewer

We should have expected this. Donald Trump’s good buddy, Sebastian Gorka, responds to the news that Biden has resigned and will almost certainly be replaced by Kamala Harris:

Gorka joined Mark Dolan on GB News to discuss how Harris would stack up against Donald Trump in a race for the White House.

This disaster whose only qualification is having a vagina and the right skin colour… he said before being interrupted by GB News host Mark Dolan.

She’s a DEI hire, she’s a woman, she’s colored, so therefore she’s gotta be good, and at least her brain doesn’t literally freeze in mid-sentence.

We can’t expect that most right-wingers will be that blatant. Another pundit, Chloe Dobbs, on GB News tried to rephrase the hate to be a little more palatable.

Political commentator Chloe Dobbs said she sympathised with Gorka’s view, but felt he worded it too strongly.

I wouldn’t have used exactly the same words, but he does have a point, she said.

Being a woman of colour in this world definitely gives you a leg up. She is very unpopular and she is often accused of using word soup, no one understands what she stands for, she is a very weak candidate.

How do you get to that position when you’re that unpopular? I think the colour of your skin and the fact you’re a woman plays some part.

She wouldn’t use the same words, she says, before saying exactly the same thing.

The reality is that she is an accomplished politician, and that Harris is as popular as Biden, even slightly more so, and she hasn’t even begun a prominent campaign for the office. I’m far more comfortable putting her into the oval office than I was for Joe Biden.

Another reason to dislike JD Vance

A terrifying visage

He’s a naive eugenicist. This review of Hillbilly Elegy (both book & film) notes that he blames all the problems in his family history on “bad genes”, and entirely ignores the issues of mental health and poverty.

The ways in which each version of “Hillbilly Elegy” avoids this crucial topic are different, but both are tragically ill-advised. The book itself is a Frankenstein hybrid of looping, repetitive memoir chapters told almost entirely in a voice-over style summary (the creative writing teacher in me kept screaming give us something to see, smell, feel — any sensory detail at all, please!) sandwiched between slapdash social science commentary on the “lurking” “ethnic component.” Vance argues that the bad genes passed down through his Scots-Irish ancestors are the cause of the current social ills he is examining. He bases this argument almost entirely on a blog post from Discover magazine by a writer with a history of contributing to racist, far-right publications.

But James Watson himself told me that he’s Scots-Irish, and that that is the best ethnic background to have!

Well, I guess if Vance has a “lurking” “ethnic component,” that ought to disqualify him for the position of vice president.

They can’t stop lying

I caught a glimpse of the Republican National Convention out of the corner of my eye last night: Sarah Huckabee Sanders praising Trump as the the greatest president ever, while Trump himself smugly grinned and mugged for the camera, and then she went on to talk about how she was the first woman governor of her state, a woman press secretary, a woman this, a woman that, and that the Democrats hated her and were mean to her, implying that she was disliked because she was a woman. No, sorry, we disliked you because you were a dishonest propagandist for a corrupt administration. That was enough for me. I had to leave the room to avoid more exposure to the Trump cultists and liars avoiding mentioning their evil policies to revel in authoritarianism ahd cult of personality bullshit.

I went in to a different room and listened to Rebecca Watson explain Project 2025.

The Supreme Court nominations, of course, led to policies beyond what they previously would have even dreamed of stating publicly, such as Roe v. Wade falling and more recently giving the President the power of a God Emperor. All of that set the stage for Project 2025, where they could finally say the quiet part loud and publicly reveal their end game, which includes but is not limited to outlawing abortion nationwide through the Comstock Act, ending same sex marriage, removing all protections for LGBTQ+ people, criminalizing pornography, neutering Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, eliminating public education and replacing it with private Christian schooling, consolidating control of the government under the President, and replacing tens of thousands of civil service employees with political appointees who will do whatever the President wants, drawn from a vast database that the Heritage Foundation has been building for the past decade or so.

That’s what they want to do. That’s what they say they are going to do. They’re not going to openly brag about it at the convention, because those are wildly unpopular policies, so we’re only going to see Republicans wallowing in victimhood and avoiding talking about how they’re eagerly planning to fuck over the entire country if they get into power once more. The RNC is simply the shiny, glossy, colorful cake made out of poison that they’re enticing the electorate to gobble down. They want what’s worst for everyone. They’re just plain evil.

The lies they tell themselves

Yesterday, I strolled through Cornucopia Days in Kent, Washington, which was mostly huge numbers of booths selling interesting food, and was filled with an impressively diverse collection of attendees. I had to take a photo of this one sad and lonely booth on the fringe, though.

WE ARE REPUBLICANS
Individual Freedom • Parental Rights • Human Dignity • Public Safety • Fiscal Responsibility • Government Accountability

I think they mean Individual Freedom (If you’re a wealthy white man), Parental Rights (the right to force women to be a parent, and the right to abuse your children), Human Dignity (under the thumb of an imaginary Christian god), Public Safety (more guns, more cops), Fiscal Responsibility (says the party that runs up tremendous deficits whenever in power by granting tax exemptions to the rich), Government Accountability (conservatives recently declared their president/king free of all accountability). Every word they wrote is a lie, but that’s what they believe their party is about, as it does the reverse.

No, I didn’t talk to them. I had better things to do.