Category: Uncategorized

What will I take away from this clash of titans? “DeSantislies.com.” That’s pretty much it.

Well, there’s a little bit more:

1. DeSantis came across, as usual, as angry and charmless. He reminds me more of Richard Nixon every day. Haley wasn’t much better.
2. Presumably in an effort to hoover up the Chris Christie vote, Haley went further to criticize Trump and his views of the Constitution than before. DeSantis was more equivocal, as you would expect.
3. Most of the debate revolved around allegations pertaining to behavior while in office. It looked and sounded very petty.
4. DeSantis and Haley actually disagree on Ukraine and Social Security. That’s about it. The rest is just sound and fury signifying nothing.
5. Based on about two decades of history, anyone proposing a flat tax is showing signs of desperation. In DeSantis’ case, he wouldn’t even stand by his own idea. The whole point of a flat tax is to get poor people to pay more, and rich people less. If the rich get a huge tax cut, and the poor get a small one, who is going to pay for government? It’s practically impossible.
6. I think Haley wants to go to war with Iran. DeSantis just wants to give the Israelis the resources to fight in whatever manner they please, with no questions asked. I suppose that is another difference.
7. Both candidates are totally insensitive to the needs of the Palestinians and the Arab states. That’s terrible policy.
8. DeSantis is not a small government conservative; he inherited a tiny state workforce, thanks to Rick Scott, and expanded it some with federal money. He just plays a CL on TV for the benefit of his donors.
9. DeSantis’ disagreements with “woke corporations” are just populist rubbish he employs to justify a huge tax cut for business. He’s about as big a populist as Trump on economic issues.
10. While there was slightly more emphasis on Trump than in the past, it was overshadowed by the bickering. Trump won this debate, just as he won all of the others.

I just returned from our local grocery store. While I was there, I discovered that Pepsi had jacked up the price of a two-liter bottle again without any justification relating to increased costs. Their product isn’t even competitive with Coke on price anymore. This is a classic example of greedflation.

On a related note, it seems the French grocery store Carrefour is putting up signs identifying products that are the subject of greedflation, and is even refusing to sell Pepsi products at their current elevated price.

This is the way you resist greedflation. The government can’t do it, but retail stores and consumers can.

In 2020, Biden stayed in his basement and let Trump be the center of attention, believing that the incumbent would destroy himself. It worked. The public got tired of Trump’s antics, particularly with regard to the pandemic, and voted him out.

The plan is the same this year. The problem is that Trump–completely inadvertently, as he loves being the center of attention–is avoiding public scrutiny; he only makes news through his almost daily courtroom martyrdoms. Not debating, and so not subjecting his ideas to criticism, also helps. That makes the election a referendum on Biden, not him.

This will change. The courtroom dramas help Trump with the base, but probably not with swing voters. In any event, his behavior and unconventional policy ideas will get a lot more attention once the primaries are over and the MSM starts to focus on him rather than DeSantis and Haley. If the election is a referendum on him, not Biden, he will lose.

There is nothing in the text of the Constitution that supports the notion of absolute presidential immunity. There is no case law to support it, and no favorable legislative history. The practical impacts of it would be devastating. As a result, I think the Supreme Court as a whole will have no problem disposing of this argument; in fact, it may choose not to hear the issue in an attempt to look nonpartisan.

But my analysis does not apply to the two extremely reactionary, partisan justices: Thomas and Alito. What will they say? Will Thomas figure out some way to reconcile the creation of a dictatorship with his supposedly originalist beliefs? Can he somehow scrape up some loose language from, say, Hamilton to justify turning our president into a man on horseback?

We’ll see. Thomas is really hard to embarrass, so I’m guessing he will find a way to support Trump in every issue that comes before him even if it makes him look like a complete hypocrite.

The NYT is doing its best to persuade us that Trump is not inevitable. It’s true; he isn’t. The polls have always shown him to be more unpopular that not. The reactionary base only represents about a third of the electorate. Finally, of all of the elections in which Trump was directly or indirectly on the ballot, he only won one, and that by a handful of votes in a few swing states.

So he can be beaten. But there is a good reason for those feelings of learned helplessness; we know perfectly well that Trump and his followers don’t play by the same rules of liberal democracy that we do. Their sense of entitlement is so strong that they are willing to do practically anything to seize power. They have guns, too, and we don’t.

We are looking at either four years of fascism or a renewed insurrection by the same bizarre coalition of pagans and Christian nationalists after November. If that isn’t reason to be depressed, I don’t know what is.

Netanyahu has always been passive-aggressive in the West Bank. On the one hand, he does just enough for the Palestinians to keep the Americans off his back, and when prominent reactionary politicians call for ethnic cleansing, he denies that it is government policy. On the other hand, he quietly approves settlements and physical improvements that make a two-state solution more difficult. It’s a tightrope act, but in his eyes, it has worked; the idea of a Palestinian state is farther off than it was 30 years ago.

We may be seeing some of the same dynamics in Gaza. Extremist members of the cabinet are openly calling for ethnic cleansing and Israeli settlement. The president of Israel denies that is government policy. In the meantime, the Israeli military is pounding Gaza to ashes. Soon, the world will be hearing from Netanyahu that the only humanitarian response to the situation is to encourage the Palestinians to leave. We and the Arabs, as the story will go, have a moral obligation to clean up Israel’s mess. Facts on the ground prevail over justice.

It won’t work. The Palestinians won’t want to leave; the Arab states won’t accept them; the Saudis and Americans won’t pay for it; and no Israelis will want to settle in Gaza. It’s not exactly the land of milk and honey even when it hasn’t been reduced to rubble.

The Hamas attack is often compared to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. How do the two stack up?

Here’s my analysis:

1973/2023

AGGRESSOR: Egypt/Hamas

MODE OF ATTACK: Conventional War/Terrorism

VICTIMS: Soldiers/Civilians

OBJECTIVE: Retake Land/Boost Morale and Isolate Israel

ISRAELI COUNTERATTACK: Yes/Yes

And the winner is . . . the 1973 war, which both boosted Sadat’s prestige in the Arab world and convinced him that a military victory was a chimera. It ultimately led to a peace agreement. From all of the evidence I have seen, 2023 is going to lead to nothing but misery, destruction, and ethnic cleansing, as Bibi’s desire to cling to power will drive him further and further to the right, American opposition notwithstanding.

He made his reputation as a strong supporter of tariffs. He insisted that tariffs would increase the wages of workers even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Fortunately for him, the nation was experiencing difficult economic times for other reasons, so his tariffs were not the political poison they should have been.

Is it McKinley in 1896 or Trump in 2024? Time will tell.

With her inept performance before Congress and her plagiarism issues, Claudine Gay loaded the pistol and handed it to her opponents. It was center-left former supporters who pulled the trigger. But it was the right that made her a target, because, as Christopher Rufo explained, she was the very personification of DEI. She was an affirmative action baby. She lacked “merit.” She had to go.

This is the very Christopher Rufo who, with his reactionary trustee friends at New College, decided to recruit male athletes with low test scores in order to create a more conservative, “balanced” student body.

I guess “merit” and DEI are kind of elastic concepts for the right.

Ron DeSantis is apparently accusing the Democrats of “waving the bloody shirt” over 1/6. What did he mean by that, and is he right?

“Waving the bloody shirt” is an allusion to a campaign tactic used with some success by Republican candidates after the end of the Civil War. It was employed, as you would expect, to challenge the patriotism of Democrats who were lukewarm at best about the war.

DeSantis is implicitly admitting that there is a connection between the 1/6 rioters and the Confederacy. By attacking the use of the “bloody shirt,” he is essentially arguing that the Democrats, like the Republicans after 1876, have a moral obligation to forego protecting democracy and let white reactionaries wreak whatever havoc they like.

In other words, DeSantis is showing his true colors by associating himself with racist Confederates. Yes, in that sense, the allusion is both truthful and appropriate.

A mostly admirable, but uninspiring, elderly president is the victim of economic circumstances over which he had little control. The base had little use for him; it longed for someone who was more charismatic and fed them more red meat. His foreign policy successes were ignored during the campaign. A third-party candidate siphoned votes from him. History treated him kindly, but his contemporaries did not.

Yes, if you’re a Democrat, the historical analogy you should fear is 1992. The essential difference is obvious, however; Biden may resemble George H.W. Bush in some respects, but Trump is no Bill Clinton.

The Court intends to expedite the review, which is clearly appropriate. But if the decision to expedite is based on the public interest, why isn’t a quick resolution of the absolute immunity issue also appropriate? Doesn’t the voting public have a right to know the answer to that question prior to the primaries, as well?

This looks like the Court putting a thumb on the scale.

An NYT column makes the case that the closest analogy to 2024 is 1948; America had just experienced two years of high inflation, which was just starting to subside. Is the analogy appropriate?

Yes. The similarities go beyond inflation, poll numbers, and low unemployment:

1. Both Biden and Truman were uncharismatic Democrats following much more celebrated predecessors;
2. Both of them had third party challengers;
3. Both of them had been successful in creating international coalitions against a formidable enemy; and
4. Both of them had Republicans in Congress to use as a foil.

There are differences, however:

1. Dewey was a risk-averse, eminently respectable liberal Republican, which makes him about as far from Trump as he could get;
2. Biden’s party is far less divided than Truman’s, and the third party challenge is nowhere near as serious;
3. The nation was far less polarized than it is today; and
4. The New Deal and World War II were viewed by virtually everyone as successes for the federal government. The pandemic and the recovery from the resulting recession, not so much.

Like Truman, Biden is viewed as being a hapless, doomed candidate by many. He’s not. Does that mean he is destined to win? I don’t know.

Donald Trump–projecting, as always–insists on the stump that Joe Biden is the real dictator in America. In the meantime, his legal team is arguing that he is absolutely immune from any criminal liability for his behavior while in office. The king can do no wrong–or so they say.

Just think about what that means if you take it seriously. Joe Biden, the supposed dictator, is president, not Trump. He then logically has the unlimited right to use the vast resources of the federal government to remain in power regardless of the state of public opinion. Trump’s candidacy, by his own words, is doomed.

Of course, Trump knows that Biden isn’t really a dictator; that’s why he’s free to make his bogus immunity argument, which will receive short shrift even from a friendly Supreme Court at some point in time.

A large majority of the GOP senators voted against convicting Trump after the second impeachment based on January 6. One of the arguments one frequently heard from them at the time–most notably, from Mitch McConnell–was that Trump was subject to the criminal law for his actions, so the impeachment process was inappropriate.

Today, the GOP, to a man, sees all of the Trump criminal indictments, including those encompassing the unlawful effort to overturn the election, as an outrageous partisan prosecutorial overreach. Trump is even using his “acquittal” in the impeachment trial as an argument that the prosecution violates the Constitution.

Go figure.