Ken Martin has been elected as the chair of the Democratic National Committee. In his acceptance speech, he used “billionaires” several times, always in a perjorative sense. Can we hope that the Democrats will no longer be content with enjoying the view out of the Overton window, but rather try to get the working-class vote back? We’ll see…
I heard “out of the corner of my ear” on today’s Today show that Trump had fired several departments’ inspector generals. I Googled for it; and it turns out to be true: he did indeed fire 17 IGs overnight, presumably to replace them with the usual yes-men. I won’t bother including any links since several stories from outlets like Reuters all the way to Bezos’ Washington Post showed up right at the top.
It turns out that there’s a 2020 law that says that the president must give Congress 30 days notice before such a firing; and several congresscritters (including Republicans like Grassley) have already opposed the move. We’ll see whether there are enough principled Republicans for the Congress to say, “no, you can’t do that”.
One down, 1460 to go.
I’m not sure that the pardons and sentence commutations are the big story, although that’s what the media are covering, including some mild comments by a handful of Republicans. Getting less media attention is the executive order putting all federal DEI workers on paid leave and effectively shutting down all government DEI activity. I have every expectation that we’ll soon see many more departures from basic human decency.
If the numbers I’ve seen on the WWW are true (I haven’t verified them myself), Trump squeeked by with a margin of just 1.5% of the popular vote; and it seems obvious to me that he couldn’t have achieved anywhere near that without the roughly 80% of Christian fundies voting for their god’s chosen one. All the other guesses, e.g., refusing to vote for a woman, white working class men being abandoned by the Democrats, although probably true, strike me as small potatoes by comparison.
I’m coming to the conclusion that the real problem we have is a faux religion that’s just an excuse to be prideful, hateful, self-satisfied DIEhards. I wish I could be more understanding; but I’m finding myself simply disgusted.
He didn’t spend all his time bragging on himself as Trump would have done. He mentioned some of the good things that have happened during his administration, but that wasn’t the main part of the speech.
About ten minutes in, he started to go after the wannabe oligarchs and even briefly likened them to the late 19th century robber barons. He warned about the rising influence of social media and its spreading of misinformation; and he warned about what he called the “tech-industrial complex” as an analogy to Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex’. This part was encouraging.
The next important election in the U.S., one in which you and I don’t get to vote, will happen on Saturday, Feb. 1, when the Democratic National Committee will elect their next chair. We’ll find out then whether the Democrats will want to be a real opposition party and go after the 21st century robber barons, or if it’ll just be more of the same. (I’m rooting for Ben Wikler who made the Wisconsin Democratic Party actually effective and who has Chuck Schumer’s endorsement at least.)
I don’t usually follow the This Modern World cartoons, but I probably should.
Robert Reich passed along a good one on his Substack.
Mike the Mad Biologist reminds us of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
If I were a member of the House or the Senate, I’d introduce a bill to remove the disability and see whether it gets a two-thirds majority in both houses. That probably wouldn’t stop Trump because, even if the bill failed, we’d still need a finding that Trump engaged in insurrection or gave aid or comfort to those who did. It would likely make the news, however; and that would be fun. 😎
One thing that I’ve found striking is that, although there have probably been numerous deaths by gunshot in New York over the last few weeks, exactly one is all over the news. Indeed, it was the lead story on NBC Nightly News tonight, beating out Assad’s overthrow in Syria which came in second. And it’s not just the corporate media: although PBS News Hour had Syria as the lead story, apprehending the likely killer got second place with about ten minutes of air time.
What’s so special about this particular murder? The only thing that I can see is that the victim was one of the oligarchs.
Here’s a late addition to the support of Julia Serano’s post, and probably a boring one as well since others have already said it better than I, and I really have nothing to add.
But I do want to go on record as supporting LGBTQ+ rights which strikes be as just basic human decency.
(I also agree with others that we’re stuck with voting for politicians in the Democratic wing of the Oligarch party, but we should express our displeasure whenever we can at having no better choice.)
I just found out that I have a Substack account. 😎
A while back, I got a free subscription to some e-mails sent by Robert Reich; and after a time, I updated to a paid subscription, not because I wanted to use any new features, but because I wanted to support Reich’s work. The credit card I used at the time needed to be replaced because of some fraud; and this morning, I got an e-mail message saying that the card had been refused and I needed to update my payment details. OK, that makes sense.
I didn’t recall ever signing in to the account before (although I must have to do the paid upgrade); and it took me a while to remember what I had used as a user ID and password. After finally logging in and figuring out how to navigate through all the settings, I changed the card info…I hope. We’ll see whether I did everything correctly.
While I was in there, I added this blog’s URL as my “website”; and I think I figured out how to get a permalink to a particular one of Reich’s posts. I’ll probably try to use that shortly.
I think flex gave a good answer to the question in my previous post.
I’m now leaning toward an idea that I’ve had for quite a while which was reinforced by a recent e-mail message I got from Robert Reich’s Substack. Here are three of what seem to me to be the important bits:
On Tuesday, according to exit polls, Americans voted mainly on the economy — and their votes reflected their class and level of education.
…
While the economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees — that’s the majority — have not felt it.
…
While Republicans steadily cut taxes on the wealthy, Democrats abandoned the working class.
Yeah, professional Democrats and Republicans are pretty much united in their support of large corporations and billionaires (although the Republicans crank it up to eleven and the Democrats are much better on “social issues”). That’s why I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary when he was still a viable candidate (although I wasn’t a “Bernie bro” who stayed home out of spite).
I’d love to just quote the whole thing, but that goes way beyond “fair use”. I guess the next job for this old fart is to figure out how to link to a particular post on somebody’s Substack.