Congress voted to roll back the various regulations that protected us from another wave of corruption and bank failures. What is most disappointing is that a group of Democrats voted with the Republicans on this bill for fat cats.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE)
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE)
Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH)
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL)
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) (to think I voted for this guy)
Sen. Angus King (I-ME)
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV)
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL)
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI)
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT)
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)

This one was a no-brainer.

Attention Dems supporting S. 2155 and looking for an off ramp to change your mind: THE CBO SCORE IS IT. CBO says it:

– increases likelihood of bank failure + taxpayer bailouts
– helps biggest banks, including $250B+, maybe Citi and JPMorgan
– adds $670 million to deficit

— Chad Bolt (@chadderr) March 6, 2018

I am not looking forward to the next election, because this is what we have to look forward to: greedy, rotten bastards on the Republican side and a battery of spineless Democrats trying to look like they’re resisting, but not resisting too hard, since they want to keep that sweet, sweet cash flowing from the same sources fueling the Republicans.

We are so screwed. There will be more cash grabs and emergency bailouts of the banks in the future.

She visited Minneapolis, went to a restaurant with her mother, and someone threw the contents of a glass of water at her. It’s the kinder, gentler version of Nazi-punching. And now I’m all confused.

Does Tomi Lahren deserve public scorn and opprobrium? Yes. She’s a horrible person profiting off the dissemination of hate and ignorance. I can’t get worked up about somebody dousing her with water…but at the same time, it would also be legit to arrest and fine the water flinger for assault (likewise, the guy who punched Richard Spencer did commit a crime). You take action, you take responsibility for the action.

But also, I recognize my own inconsistency. It’s one thing for someone to punch Richard Spencer, a male Nazi, but I’d be extremely uncomfortable if someone were to punch Tomi Lahren, his female equivalent. Part of it is the unfounded expectation that a man is supposed to be able to defend himself, while a woman is not. Part of it is the optics: it looks bad for anti-Nazis to be punching down on women (but that it’s even “punching down” to hit a woman is problematic). If you watch the video at the link, you’ll also hear someone shouting misogynistic slurs at Lahren — I don’t want that guy on my side, either.

In my perfect world, people who preach hate wouldn’t have a platform or an audience because no one would want to listen to them, and they’d wither away into irrelevance. In this far from perfect world, we have to struggle with appropriate responses to destructive ideas that rise to popularity in imperfect ways.

The lieutenant governor of Texas wants to ban doors. Now Hugh Hewitt suggests banning trench coats.

To the teachers and administrators out there, the trench coat is kind of a giveaway. You might just say, “No more trench coats.” The creepy people, make a list, check it twice.

Oh, excuse me…we’re going to ban “creepy people”.

That last bit might have some merit. I find Hugh Hewitt extremely creepy.

There are good reasons I’m incapable of watching Bill Maher any more — I’d have to rip the big screen off the wall and throw it through that expensive big picture window in our living room. This week, he had Bari Weiss on, because of course those two are made for each other.

“This week we opened the American embassy in Jerusalem which did cause a riot, as predicted, and of course people are blaming both sides,” said Maher.

During the embassy opening, a taunting event all but designed to inflame tensions, Israeli forces brutally massacred at least 58 Palestinians protesting along the Gaza border—including women and children. Many were killed by sniper fire hundreds of yards away. Weiss, however, saw no connection between the protests and the embassy launch.

“Bill, I love you, but the riots were not caused by the embassy move,” said Weiss. “They’re not linked. When Hamas attacked Israel in 2008, when Hamas attacked Israel in 2012, when it attacked Israel in 2014, the embassy was in Tel Aviv all of those times… They intentionally moved up the day so that it would coincide with the day of the embassy move so that we would all be disgusted and heartbroken when we saw this horrible split-screen of Ivanka Trump, looking like she was at a country club, next to poor, desperate people dying in Gaza.”

The first line set me back. How can you blame both sides when one side is being gunned down by snipers, and the other is armed, at best, with rocks? When one side is killing children?

But Bari Weiss managed to top it. How horrible that the Palestinian people planned their protest strategically? Why didn’t they schedule it for a day when it wouldn’t make Ivanka Trump look bad?

Talk about missing the whole point…it reminds me of the furious complaints when Black Lives Matter protests inconvenience people. How dare they march where people would notice! Couldn’t they just march down streets in the middle of nowhere that weren’t full of busy white people trying to get to a football game?

Just remember that Martin Luther King Jr. also protested strategically.

Let us remember not just King’s words, but also his actions. King was in his 20s when he helped coordinate the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted more than a year and brought the city to its knees. Too often today, we hear that protests for justice and equality are being done “wrong.” They’re too intrusive; they’re too loud. But one wonders how the country can laud King, whose efforts shut down public transportation in an entire city, but chastise Colin Kaepernick (also in his 20s) for his peaceful protest of taking a knee at a football game.

It was King’s desire that we each examine our role in the fight for civil liberties, justice and equality. It is not enough to consider ourselves simply “allies” in the fight. Instead, we must put our heads down, listen more, and do the work of improving the lives of a marginalized community to which we don’t belong. Then, and only then, might someone in that community determine that we are worthy of the term.

“Accomplice,” not “ally,” should be the goal. An ally is one who acknowledges there is a problem. An accomplice is one who acknowledges there is a problem and then commits to stand in the gap for those less fortunate than themselves, without hope or expectation of reward. An ally is passive; an accomplice is active.

When you’re more concerned about exposing the superficiality of Princess Ivanka and Slumlord Jared then you are about people being shot in the street, you’re being an accomplice, all right — to the wrong side.

There was another school shooting in Texas today; 10 people are dead. The Lieutenant Governor of the state has come up with a novel solution for this ongoing problem.

pic.twitter.com/FYRzJ3E3eo

— Tom Namako (@TomNamako) May 18, 2018

We may have to look at the design of our schools moving forward, and retrofitting schools that are already built. What I mean by that is that there are too many entrances and too many exits to our 8,000 campuses in Texas. … Now that will take a lot of work and a lot of money, but we have to do the work and do the money to protect our children the best we can.

That’s a new one to me. The problem isn’t that we have too many guns, it’s too many doors.

I think the real problem is that there are too many wingnuts in Texas.

Yet again, another major newspaper sends a reporter off on safari to Trump Country, to try and figure out what the heck they were thinking. It turns out that a big part of their grievances is a demand for respect. I’m having flashbacks to when my kids were very little, and would have temper tantrum in the aisles…only they were at least kicking and screaming for a cookie. These guys are being self-destructive, kicking their tiny little feet and shrieking for respect — and if they don’t get it, they’ll elect him again — and not realizing how their own actions undermine their desired reward. There are a lot of imaginary resentments here.

One older white working-class woman recalled that, when she first started voting, “There was so much respect for the president. And I don’t care what he did, or what he said, there was always respect. It was always ‘Mr. President.’” She said she is disgusted by the way people talk about Trump.

There was? I was born under Eisenhower — I don’t remember him — and was a young child under Kennedy and Johnson, but the fourth president, the first one I remember strongly, was Nixon. He was a crook and a liar. People were marching in the streets against him, and I don’t think there was a lot of respect for Tricky Dick. Ford was a bit better, but his only purpose was to hand over a pardon to the prior tenant. Carter was the first president I voted for, and I liked him (still do) and I think he has demonstrated that he was a man of integrity who deserved respect, but maybe also wasn’t quite the right man for the job.

And then Reagan. She’s disgusted by how people talk about Trump? Reagan began the whole Republican dynasty of incompetent turds holding the office by appealing to the South and Midwest with ‘common man’ demagoguery, and was despised while he was in office. Trump is simply getting in line with W and Reagan as examples of how the politics of resentment by the heartland consistently produces the most awful leaders.

Elect a good person to the presidency. Then maybe we can talk about respect.

“We voted for President Obama and still we are ridiculed. Still we are considered racists,” said Cindy Hutchins, a store owner and nurse in Baldwin, Mich. “There is no respect for anyone who is just average and trying to do the right things.”

Was electing a corrupt, racist, sexist fraud the “right thing”? You weren’t even trying to do the right thing. You were trying to lash out by doing the worst thing.

Notably, people in all seven of their categories expressed frustration, even a year after the election, that they are not understood, respected or valued by the powers that be on the East and West coasts. “In the short span of a generation, the face and focus of the Democratic Party nationally has shifted from a glorification of the working-class ethos to multiculturalist militancy pushed by the Far Left of the party,” Zito and Todd argue. “The driving construct of otherness … is at its core driven by perceptions of respect. … The professional Left focuses heavily on race-related questions in analyzing the Trump vote, but race-tinged subjects were rarely cited by Trump voters interviewed for this book.”

There is a difference between “understood” and “respected”. These are people we more or less understand, and we do not respect their bad decisions. Don’t think because we think you were grossly wrong to vote for Trump that that means we fail to understand you. We’re also able to read between the lines here. Notice: they didn’t cite “race-tinged subjects”, but everything they’re talking about is loaded with racial baggage.

I agree that the Democratic party has been doing a lousy job of appealing to the working class — they’d actually be doing things to support labor unions more, if they were trying. I think that’s accurate that the leadership has become detached from lower- and middle-class reality. But I guarantee you that when Midwesterners talk about the “working-class ethos”, all the people they’re imagining in their heads are white. Black and latino workers don’t count. They would be horrified if the Democratic party started helping all those brown immigrants working in the fields or the slaughterhouses to unionize, and when they’re being polite, they’ll refer to black communities as “urbans” and accuse them of living on welfare. Their vision of the working class omits all of the hard-working non-white people who are struggling just as hard as they are.

David Miller, a white 54-year-old, talked with The Post at a polling place in Cleveland last Tuesday as he pulled a Republican primary ballot for the first time he could remember to vote in the governor’s race. Like so many others, he said he came to feel left behind before the 2016 election. “I mainly was a mainstream Democrat,” he told Afi Scruggs. “Every time I turned on the TV, there’s a Democrat calling me a racist and I just got tired of it.”

Oh, really? How often did David Miller’s opinions get cited by name on TV?

I suspect that it’s more that we can’t avoid noticing that white middle-class men voted for a flamingly racist president by a large majority, so as a group there are a lot of deplorable racists among them. Mr Miller is practicing Identity Politics — he is confusing the properties of a class with the properties of the individual, and is aligning himself with the great white granfalloon. I thought these guys hated identity politics?

I am also a white middle class man. When I hear those kinds of accusations levied against my group, I do two things: 1) I recognize that there is considerable truth to the claim, and that I cannot claim perfect flawless innocence, and 2) I try to think of ways that I can change to be less racist, less sexist. I at least aspire to be more conscious of my place in reality, rather than deny it. And denial is all they’ve got.

“I’m far from being a racist,” he said. “I’m far from being a bigot. Not everybody makes the crude comments. Not everybody walks and talks like he’s a big bully, like the president can do sometimes.”

You mean you’re aware that Trump is a crude bullying bigot, and yet you overlooked all that to vote for him? And you still think your choices deserve respect? If you don’t see the problem with letting the racists run the country, then you’re pretty damned close to being a racist yourself. Indistinguishably close.

They want respect. Fine. We all want it. Now earn it. Don’t sit there waiting for the pat on the head and the participation trophy to be handed to you.

Also, if conservatives demand a respect they haven’t earned, maybe they should listen to what their representatives say. Here’s Eric Trump, expressing his father’s views about Democrats very clearly.

I’ve never seen hatred like this. To me, they’re not even people. It’s so, so sad. I mean, morality is just gone. Morals have flown out the window. We deserve so much better than this as a country. You know it’s so sad. You see the Democratic Party. They’re imploding. They’re imploding. They have no message. You see the head of the DNC, who is a total whack job. There’s no leadership there. And so what do they do? They become obstructionists because they have no message of their own. They have no solid candidates of their own. They lost the election that they should have won because they spent seven times the amount of money that my father spent. They have no message, so what do they try and do? They try and obstruct a great man, they try and obstruct his family, they come after us viciously, and it’s truly, truly horrible.

Democrats are not even people, and immigrants are just animals.

We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.

I don’t respect Republicans and Trump voters at all. But I do recognize their humanity and consider them to be people, at least. If you can’t disavow those comments, if you can’t see what a horrible president Trump is, don’t come begging me to be nice and friendly with you. You’ve earned your reputation.