Now that Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, speaker Kevin McCarthy is paying off his debt to all those in his caucus who held him hostage in his attempt to become speaker by letting them hold all manner of hearings on culture war issues.
However, I think that they will never run out of things to be outraged about. Outrage over trivialities serves to distract from their lack of any program of action that can command mass support.
Yesterday Joe Biden released his budget proposals for the next fiscal year. In the ritualistic role-playing that is the annual budget process in the US, a president’s proposals are taken seriously as likely to be implemented only if the president’s party controls both houses of Congress. Otherwise, the opposition party that is the majority will dismiss the proposals outright. Those are the usual opening moves in this dance and it is being followed this time with Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy and others in his party’s leadership dismissing the budget.
In a joint statement, House speaker Kevin McCarthy and other top Republicans accused Biden of “shrugging and ignoring” the national debt, which they called one of the “greatest threats to America”.
”President Biden’s budget is a reckless proposal doubling down on the same far-left spending policies that have led to record inflation and our current debt crisis,” the statement said.
McCarthy’s statement looked like it might have been written well in advance since he accuses the Biden budget of ignoring the national debt when in fact Biden argues that his budget will lower it by $2.9 trillion over the next ten years. The precise numbers are always subject to debate but it is incorrect that Biden is ‘ignoring’ it when it is the top line item.
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An estimated 26.9 million people of all ages (8.2% of the U.S. population) have been diagnosed with diabetes. A further 7.3 million adults ages 18 years or older (21.4 percent of adults with diabetes) are estimated to have diabetes but are undiagnosed. For people with diabetes, insulin is essential for them to live but in the US, insulin prices have been much higher than elsewhere in the world resulting in crippling costs for users, so much so that some people cannot afford to buy the drug.
One of the major achievements of Democrats and the Biden administration in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) at the end of last year was that it allowed Medicare to negotiate down the price of insulin for those over 65.
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In political analyses of political races in the US, the kids in the media these days like to use the metaphor of ‘lanes’ to signify where candidates stand with respect to their rivals. Traditionally, the lanes had labels such as progressive, liberal, centrist, moderate, and conservative that, while hardly precisely defined, gave one a vague sense of whether that person was aligned with ones own values or not. One could make the distinctions more fine-grained by separating them on economic/fiscal and social polices, so that one could describe someone as a fiscal conservative who is socially liberal and so on. So in principle one could identify many different ideological lanes that people could be pigeonholed into. (Warning: This post is going to overwork the lane metaphor to death.)
But when it comes to current Republican politics, all that has to be thrown out of the window because since Donald Trump, the lanes are no longer defined by ideology. What we have is the Trump lane and the non-Trump lanes. The Trump lane is defined by whatever Trump thinks serves his own interests and will enable him to win and that ideologically amorphous structure makes it harder for his competitors to find their own lanes, since the Trump lane can weave erratically across ideological lines, as he opportunistically seizes on any issue to attack his opponents, even if it involves flat-out lying about them and himself. For example, his stance against cuts to Social Security and Medicare makes those who are on record as favoring privatizing or cuts (such as Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence) vulnerable to attacks from him. He has already started doing so.
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In the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examines Ron DeSantis’s record as governor of Florida and shows that his schtick is entirely based on fighting what he calls ‘wokism’, a word that is undefined but seems to mean anything that he dislikes and can be used to rile up the party base on culture war issues. He does not seem to have done anything that materially improves the lives of Floridians but instead feeds their grievances.
The Republican party, in terms of its policies and rhetoric, seems to have gone all in on appealing to white, older, xenophobic, and conservative voters. And yet, at the same time, it seems to be able to put forward, and get elected, people of color for various offices, and also attract some people of color as supporters. This article looks at what is going on with that seemingly contradictory dynamic.
Does [the Republican party] continue to move rightward, exciting its base by stoking white racial grievance?
Or does it pursue a multiracial strategy that can expand the party’s reach?
Recent trends in the GOP suggest that it wants to do both – and that indeed the two strategies are not so much at odds as it might appear.
In a striking development, Michigan Republicans selected in February 2023 a Christian nationalist and election denier as chair of the state party.
This rightward shift of the party is not itself surprising.
What’s striking is that Kristina Karamo, a Black woman, was elected over a white male candidate who also had Trump’s endorsement.
The same voters who elevated Karamo also cheered Trump’s supercharged racist rhetoric against Black people, immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims and nonwhite countries more generally during his campaigns and presidency.
And yet Karamo is hardly an anomaly.
While the party has made no substantive changes or moderation to its politics or policies around long-standing racial justice issues, it is slowly but steadily growing more racially diverse in its grassroots base, elected officials and opinion leaders.
State Sen. Nathan Dahm (R-OK) has penned several bills loosening gun restrictions, including the nation’s first anti-red flag law. He thinks these bills protect the Second Amendment – and that they make us safer. We think it's probably one or the other. Watch it on @AppleTVPlus. pic.twitter.com/T7fLFLjTQ5
— The Problem With Jon Stewart (@TheProblem) March 3, 2023
Joe Biden sometimes surprises me. I never had a high opinion of him, seeing him as epitomizing the neoliberal centrism of the political establishment, a caretaker of the status quo and an appeaser of the right wing. My support of him during the last election was driven by my horror at the thought of the lying, grifting, narcissist Donald Trump getting to be president for another four years. But I must admit that Biden has done better than I expected. True, he is no Bernie Sanders when it comes to advancing progressive policies but he has managed to push through some important pieces of legislation in his first two years that have made real improvements in the lives of ordinary people.
A big test is the one that will occur this June or so when failure to raise the debt ceiling will reach a crisis point. Republicans were clearly planning to use that issue as a hostage to obtain cuts in spending. What cuts? They refuse to specify but their target has always been programs that benefit those who are in need. (For a list of the programs that they are likely targeting, see here.) But their main target has always been the Big Three: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These programs are expensive but extremely popular and cutting them will cause a backlash. Republicans know this and thus they seek to create a crisis so that cuts to them will be seen as inevitable and have Democrats share at least part of the blame.
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The US government gives religious institutions all manner of tax breaks and also tends to not scrutinize their workings too closely. Crooked people have been exploiting the extra freedoms given to ostensibly religious institutions, such as so-called pastors living the high life on their tax free incomes and perks.
ProPublica exposes the workings of yet another religion-based fraud that left a lot of people, who trusted the institution would do right by them because they were Christian, in the lurch. They describe the case of Bonnie Marin who purchased insurance through a Christian health insurance company. When she developed a cancerous tumor, she thought that she would be spared the huge cost of treatment. To her shock, after a while, they stopped paying out.
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During his week guest hosting The Daily Show, Hasan Minhaj discussed how social media enable even not-so-smart grifters to scam people.
This was in a new recurring segment on the show called Long Story Short where the host tackles one issue in depth. Seth Meyers has long been doing that on his show in a segment that is called A Closer Look. Both of them seem to be inspired by John Oliver’s success with Last Week Tonight where almost the entire show is devoted to a single topic.
It looks like many viewers are like me in wanting to see more in-depth examinations of important topics laced with humor.
