The GOP in Trouble based on Midterm Results & the Big Trouble Trump is in…There are a number of articles further below showing the reality of a GOP in trouble & the reasons for that. But the nation as a whole is in trouble for many reasons, including our increasing polarization & debt levels. The article we begin with proves American households are also in trouble with rising personal debt levels. Is this our disturbing new pledge?: One nation under God, indivisible?, with student loan, mortgage &/or credit card debt for all. See details in these excerpts inside american-household-debt-nearly-trillion-dollars-higher-it-was-2008-recession:
The total debt shouldered by Americans has hit another record high, rising to $13.5 trillion in the last quarter. Flows of student debt into serious delinquency – of 90 or more days – rose to 9.1 percent in the third quarter from 8.6 percent in the previous quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported on Friday. That propelled the biggest jump in the overall U.S. delinquency rate in seven years. It was a reversal after a period of improvement for student debt, which totaled $1.4 trillion. Serious-delinquency flows have been growing on auto debt since 2012 and on credit card debt since last year, raising red flags for some economists. A 2012 report cited by Bloomberg noted the delinquency rates for student loans are likely to be underestimated because about half of the loans are in deferment, in grace periods or in forbearance. The world’s largest economy has grown well above its potential this year on the back of strong consumer spending and the lowest unemployment rate since the 1960s. If growth continues for another year it will be the longest U.S. expansion ever. But many Americans are struggling. Total household debt, driven by a $9.1 trillion in mortgages, is now $837 billion higher than its previous peak in 2008, just as the last recession took hold and brought on massive deleveraging across the United States. Indebtedness has risen steadily for more than four years and sits more than 21 percent above a trough in 2013. The total mortgage debt of was an increase on the second quarter but was lower than the 2008 mortgage debt peak of $9.2 trillion in the third quarter, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Being Gouged by Big Pharma
Folks, don’t look now, but as Americans we’re getting ripped off! We’re the most over-prescribed nation in the world with by far the highest drug prices, while big-pharma is raking in the huge profits at our expense. See the numbers posted here from pharma-health-care-economy-q3-profits:
Ten companies controlled half of the health care industry’s $50 billion of global profit in the third quarter of this year, according to an analysis of financial documents for 112 publicly traded health care corporations. Nine of those 10 companies at the top are pharmaceutical firms. The bottom line: Americans spend a lot more money on hospital and physician care than prescription drugs, but pharmaceutical companies pocket a lot more than other parts of the industry. By the numbers: The health care industry’s $50 billion of profit came from $636 billion of revenue, equating to a cumulative profit margin of almost 8%. Those are the highest figures of the past four quarters.
*Approximately 63% of the profit total went to drug companies, even though they collected 23% of the revenue — numbers that mirror our past analyses.
*Pfizer had the highest profit total ($4.1 billion) of any publicly traded health care company in the third quarter. Pfizer also said it will go back to its “normal” routine of raising drug prices after a public skirmish with President Trump.
*Of the 19 companies that tallied at least $1 billion of third-quarter profit, 14 were drug companies. The others were either health insurers (UnitedHealth Group and Aetna) or involved in the drug supply chain (Walgreens, CVS Health, Express Scripts).
*The analysis does not include not-for-profit hospital systems, but early returns still show the biggest systems have a lot of money.
Between the lines: The Republican tax law, which slashed the corporate tax rate, also continues to bolster the industry. The big picture: The health care industry arguably has more financial power now than at any point in its history, and a split Congress likely won’t change that in the short term — even though patients are fed up with the system.
About those Tax Cuts
I’ve written a lot about & posted probably hundreds of articles about those misguided tax cuts over the past year. Nearly a year after that legislation, it’s become clear the trickle-down effect was a mirage, producing a sugar-high with higher deficits with nowhere near the capital investments the GOP anticipated. Here are excerpts from yet two more op-eds detailing the failures of that tax bill, starting with Krugman-Why-Tax-Cuts-Fizzled:
Along-time critic of Republican fiscal policies, economist Paul Krugman takes on the GOP tax overhaul in Friday’s New York Times, asking, “Why Was Trump’s Tax Cut a Fizzle?” Krugman notes that the tax cuts failed to provide a political boost for Republicans in the midterm elections and appear to be failing to provide the long-term investment boom that was promised by President Trump’s economic advisors. The reason, Krugman argues, is that “business decisions are a lot less sensitive to financial incentives — including tax rates — than conservatives claim.” The other part of the GOP tax plan – the big jump in growth to be delivered by the repatriation of billions in corporate profits held overseas – fares no better in Krugman’s analysis. As many critics have argued, Krugman says that repatriation is largely a matter of accounting transfers that have little effect on real investment. The failure of the tax cuts to produce the promised results is nothing less than an indictment of Republican economic doctrine, Krugman says: “[T]his doctrine keeps failing in practice. President George W. Bush’s tax cuts didn’t produce a boom; President Barack Obama’s tax hike didn’t cause a depression. Tax cuts in Kansas didn’t jump-start the state’s economy; tax hikes in California didn’t slow growth. And with the Trump tax cut, the doctrine has failed again.”
And more is posted here from A-year-after-the-Republican-tax-cuts-reality-looks-nothing-like-Republicans-said-it-would:
With last year’s corporate tax cuts, Republican lawmakers were finally able to step up and deliver on their most cherished of theories: The more you cut a rich person’s taxes, the better off the common rabble will be. Lobbyists for the uppermost class have been extremely insistent on this for decades, would-be wonks like Rep. Paul Ryan went to the trouble of drafting up visual aides with big, bold letters saying so, the party finally had a president who would sign anything they put in front of them and there ya go. It’s been nearly a year, so how’s that working out? It’s working out exactly as actual economic experts predicted; a short-lived stimulus that is already receding, in exchange for long-term structural problems that will threaten the economy, exacerbate inequality and screw up social services for a generation. The New York Times has a rundown. The short version is that great gobs of the promised corporate re-investment are instead being translated into stock buybacks and other payouts to shareholders–which is what analysts predicted. Workers, however, continue to be eaten alive. Which is also what analysts predicted. Many companies also said they would use tax savings to create jobs. But the Just Capital research finds that, since the tax cuts were passed, the 1,000 largest public companies have actually reduced employment, on balance.
As for the deficit? Ah, what can we even say. Back during the Great Recession the Republican Party was aghast at the notion of stimulating the economy via short-term government spending, no matter how many jobs had been lost or how long the crisis might drag on. It was all garbage, and they were lying, and if you see any pundit explaining away their actions during the recession compared to their actions now without noting that it was garbage and they were lying that pundit is Bad and Wrong and is probably trying to sell you something. Because while Republicans insisted that stimulus during a recession was an insufficient reason for burdening the federal government with more debt, the Paul Ryan brigade lit the damn budget on fire with this one. The growing budget gap means the Treasury must borrow more to keep the government running. The Treasury expects to borrow a total of $1.338 trillion from global investors this calendar year. That would be 145 percent higher than the $546 billion the federal government borrowed last year. That would be the highest level of borrowing since 2010, when the American economy was struggling to recover from the great recession. This, too, is what the analysts predicted, which suggests that economic experts continue to largely know what they are doing and conservative pundits, lobbyists, lawmakers, and yacht-polishers continue to very much not know what they are doing.
More Articles to Search on the Fragile Economy (by doing a copy/paste on the bold titles):
There’s plenty of anxiety over this supposedly strong economy: thehill/americans-anxious-about-economy-despite-strong-growth-poll
While Wall St. is also nervous, with gains for 2018 wiped out: motherjones/wall-street-is-still-not-happy-with-the-economy
Credit markets tightening: newsmax/credit-market-worst-year
Immigrants & Humanity
We could get true immigration reform if the extremes on both sides were only willing to compromise: most-americans-have-common-ground-on-immigration-congress-should-listen-to-them. A judge just ruled Trump can’t just gut the existing asylum system. And some of the troops at the border are being pulled back, showing the deployment all along was a sham. Those in my own faith have left me baffled: white-evangelicals-immigration-trump-honduras-caravan-theology. The Pope weighs in on what the Christian perspective should be on the poor & the destitute, becoming a more compassionate world based on human decency, charity & morality. This article from apnews.com/c183ed8b9269499ea0f537d9e8a9f2b6 is posted here:
Championing the cause of the poor, Pope Francis on Sunday lamented that “the wealthy few” enjoy what, “in justice, belongs to all” and said Christians cannot remain indifferent to the growing cries of the exploited and the indigent, including migrants. Francis invited about 6,000 poor people as well as some of the volunteers who help them to the splendor of St. Peter’s Basilica where he celebrated Mass on a day the Catholic Church dedicates to the needy. Later, he sat down with 1,500 of the indigent for a lunch of lasagna, chicken, mashed potatoes and tiramisu in a Vatican auditorium. In his homily, Francis said “we Christians cannot stand with arms folded in indifference or with arms outstretched in helplessness” about those in need. He cited the “stifled cry” of the unborn, of starving children, “of young people more used to the explosion of bombs than happy shouts at the playground.” He also drew attention to the plight of abandoned elderly, the friendless and “the cry of all those forced to flee their homes and native land for an uncertain future. It is the cry of entire peoples, deprived even of the great natural resources at their disposal.” Francis said the poor were weeping “while the wealthy few feast on what, in justice, belongs to all. Injustice is the perverse root of poverty.” “The cry of the poor daily becomes stronger but every day heard less,” he said. That cry is “drowned out by the din on the rich few, who grow ever fewer and more rich,” the pontiff said. Last week, doctors, nurses and other health workers volunteered their time to offer medical assistance to the homeless and other need from morning till night in St. Peter’s Square. The initiative reflects the Francis’ determination that the Vatican promote by way of example priorities for rank-and-file faithful. Francis said during Mass Sunday that “it is important for all of us to live our faith in contact with those in need.” Later, in remarks to pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter’s Square, Francis spoke of the futility of making riches one’s goal. He noted that with at the end of each life “the power of money and of economic means with which we presume with presumptuousness to buy everything and everyone won’t be able to be used anymore.”
Geographic Divides
America has become a nation of haves & have nots, which is an income divide not only based on occupations, but regions. Posted below is the beginning to the article from are-trump-voters-better-off-than-they-were-two-years-ago-especially-compared-to-clinton-voters:
Two years have passed since Donald Trump made his famous campaign promise in disaffected regions across the country: “We are going to start winning again!” For many voters who felt that they had lost ground in recent decades, the candidate argued, a vote for him would be rewarded with renewed prosperity and prominence. It was a classic campaign promise, overly ambitious and cleverly vague. What exactly did “winning” mean? Certainly, many reporters believed voters perceived the promise as an economic one. So let’s measure the promise’s success that way. How have Trump voters fared economically, compared with Hillary Clinton voters? Not noticeably better, according to the data. By most measures, my latest research shows, Trump counties — and especially counties with higher proportions of Trump voters — continue to fall farther behind the rest of the country economically. The story of our economy, like the story of our politics, continues to be a story of division and divergence.
It is no secret that the country is as geographically fractured as it is economically unequal. In fact, the two trends are intertwined. In separate studies, economists Rebecca Diamond and Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag revealed a widening gap in incomes, skills and wages between low-income and high-income regions, beginning around 1980. After decades of converging, in other words, our cities and states have been growing apart. The wider the income gap grows between the regions, they show, the harder it becomes for those in service and even blue-collar jobs to afford to live in high-income, high-rent places with high-quality amenities such as clean air, good schools, low crime, strong job markets, transportation infrastructure and retail stores. Driven out of thriving communities by those rents, people who were just getting by are surrounded by others who were also struggling, in areas that the better-off had fled. That leaves a skimpy tax base, shrunken opportunities and economic segregation. Thus, we increasingly live in two Americas, and we vote accordingly.
Do a search for these 3 articles also giving cogent thoughts on the widening prosperity gaps in America based on geography:
nytimes/opinion/economy-trump-red-blue-states
axios/america-largest-cities-most-post-recession-employment-growth
cnbc/charts-democrats-represent-modern-economy-republicans-left-behind
In Dems We Trust?
With the GOP shirking their responsibilities of reversing the misfortunes of the working class, being sellouts to large corporate interests, our best hope going forward may be with the Dems: can-democrats-save-capitalism. But they’d better find a way to bridge that wide geographical divide, as found from this post inside dems-must-wield-power-against-the-powerful-to-win-back-rural-america:
Much of the commentary surrounding the midterm elections focuses on the divide between increasingly Democratic metropolitan areas and increasingly intensely Republican rural and small-town America. Some pundits and former elected officials claim an emphasis on “the opioid crisis” and rural economic development policy proposals can address Democrats’ weaknesses in areas with disproportionate power in the Senate. A good solution requires a good understanding of the problem. I believe Democrats’ problems are two-fold; one, a history of insufficient energy in office in fighting the villains victimizing rural and small-town America; and two, extreme difficulty communicating with voters in media deserts. Thus, I propose that in 2019, Democrats do better than promising to fight on behalf of rural and small-town Americans. Democrats should actually wield government oversight power to fight for them. Thus, Democrats must not just identify economic problems in antiseptic policy proposals, but actually demonstrate an eagerness to wield power against the powerful on behalf of small-town America. That would mean vicious cross-examination of rich opioid pushers, angry back-and-forth with executives from Monsanto, examining the practices of the processing goliaths and hauling before Congress the “seed, livestock and banking” monopolists who “are punishing rural America.”
Here We Begin the Articles showing the GOP in Trouble
I refer to Jennifer a lot, since she understands the underlying reasons for the GOP in trouble & articulates it well. The start to Rubin’s op-ed is posted here from the-gop-has-just-two-problems-trump-and-trumpism:
A midterm election cycle that looks more like a tsunami in Democrats’ favor after nearly two weeks of vote-counting should prompt Republicans to assess their policies and political prospects. While data confirm President Trump is a problem, he may not be the Republicans’ biggest problem. In a post-midterm poll, the Pew Research Center finds “nearly two-thirds of those who say they voted in the midterm elections (64%) say Trump was a consideration in their vote, while 35% say the president was not much of a factor. Overall, 39% say their vote was a vote against Trump, while fewer (25%) say their choice was a vote for Trump.” While a majority of Republicans (61 percent) don’t want a primary challenger, 37 percent do; moreover, the groups that the GOP has the most trouble holding on to — women and younger voters — are more open to a challenger (43 percent and 48 percent, respectively). So Trump is a problem insofar as he appears to have provoked a huge defection from the GOP of women and, more generally, college-educated voters and suburbanites. That, however, is not the worst of it for Republicans. After an election in which Trump’s tax cuts were a political loser and attempts at killing Obamacare were a political death sentence, Republicans should wake up. On nearly every issue, what they are selling voters aren’t buying.
Search for other pertinent articles today from Rubin over the same general topic from this list:
washingtonpost/trumps-political-safety-net-hangs-by-a-thread
washingtonpost/the-unraveling-is-just-beginning
washingtonpost/the-republican-party-isnt-grand-and-its-old-ideas-are-making-it-irrelevant
washingtonpost/morning-bits-thanks-to-all
A Leak in the Bow
With the GOP in trouble, it’s about time for the GOP holdouts to head for the lifeboats: opinions/its-time-for-the-rats-to-leave-trumps-sinking-ship. Staying on that Trumpian ship about to crash into the breakwall just isn’t worth it, as explained in this posting pulled from Republicans-need-to-decide-if-protecting-Trump-is-worth-the-price-of-destroying-their-party:
With Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, Donald Trump has been able to operate as if he is above the law. Congressional committees tasked with oversight and protection of the balance of powers instead have served as Trump’s personal protection racket. Even as Trump undermined national security, acting no differently than if he were an actual asset of a hostile foreign despot, Republicans but play-acted as if they cared, and in the end shrugged and abandoned even that pretense. They have supported his extremist agenda, and did nothing as he fomented every form of bigotry, even when it inspired murderous violence. But with Democrats soon to be in control of one house of Congress, things are about to change. And Republicans are going to have to make some choices. The Democrats just won a massive wave election. The depth and breadth of that wave has become more clear, day by day, but Democrats picked up more House seats than in any election since 1974, just a few months after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace. Which may be a clue and a portent. As in this can get even worse for the Republicans. Democrats also flipped seven governorships, at least eight state legislative chambers and over three hundred state legislative seats, and now hold a majority of state attorneys general. Their overall national popular vote margin for the House rivals that of the largest Republican waves, with only unethical, undemocratic gerrymandering preventing their seat gain from being even larger. Even more ominously for Republicans, the usual national political battleground that is the suburbs swung hard for Democrats, and it’s hard to see it swinging back even toward the middle anytime soon.
This election was a referendum on Trump, and Trump failed. And in failing, Trump failed his Republican Party. And the Republican Party that has been Trump’s protector, enabler, and lapdog failed at the polls because of its failure to stand up for democratic principles and basic human decency. And soon to be subject to legitimate congressional oversight, Trump is in deep trouble, and his next-level meltdown since the election suggests that he knows it. Even the supposed Republican consolation prize of having netted one or two Senate seats is much less than it seems, and is, in fact, yet another warning, particularly to those senators who will be up for re-election in two and four years. Democrats this year faced a brutal Senate map. They had incumbents trying to hold seats in numerous states Trump won, while Republicans only had one incumbent running in a state won by Hillary Clinton, none in a state considered reliably Democratic. But in two and four years, Republicans are going to have to defend more Senate seats in states that are considered blue or purple, and that’s where the real story lies. In this year’s election, no Democrat lost a Senate seat in a traditionally Democratic state. More tellingly, every Democratic senator running in a state that is considered purple not only won, but did so fairly easily. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) , Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), and Bob Casey (D-PA) had to defend Senate seats in Rust Belt states that narrowly gave Trump his Electoral College victory two years ago, and all three won easily. So did Sherrod Brown, in Ohio, which can be a swing state, but usually leans toward the Republicans.
Something I might have said
I’m also a former GOP’er turned independent, knowing the party has sacrificed its values & principles, needing to be abandoned until the party returns to sanity (or self-destruct so we can start fresh with a new party). In a NY Times reader editorial from opinion/letters/trump, this lady seeing a GOP in trouble from being hijacked by a leader who can’t tell the truth, basically echoes the same sentiments I have as seen here:
I am a 68-year-old woman and have been a Republican most of my life, but now I am an independent voter. I was unhappy with Donald Trump before the 2016 election and more than uncomfortable after the election. When he insisted that the inaugural celebration was the largest ever, alarms went off in my head. If I cannot believe the president about the numbers of people at an event, how can I believe him about more important issues? It seems to me that every time he speaks, he misrepresents facts about common situations. I truly believe that we are lucky not to be at war because of his personal shortcomings. I am not going to go over all the upsetting events that have happened since the election. My problem is that I do not understand how to do something about it. Why is Congress not confronting a president who is a true narcissist? Isn’t one of you strong enough to say enough is enough? This has nothing to do with policy opinions. My concern is about the morality of our country, about our reputation in the world and mostly about the safety of our citizens. Message to members of Congress who share my concerns: If you do not want to confront Mr. Trump, please explain why you do not see that our country is at risk with a leader like this.
GOP Needs a Cleanse
Such attempts to challenge Trump in the 2020 primaries are futile as the GOP currently exists: reublicans-look-to-new-hampshire-for-a-potential-trump-2020-challenger. Being possessed of an evil cult with seemingly supernatural powers, the first step is to fully expose the deception, corruption & moral depravity that’s running through the party in such a blatant way, so even some Trumpeters will recognize the damage being done. In fact, most of the GOP base has been consumed by this profane spirit of deception & needs to be enlightened. It’s going to take rock-solid evidence of widespread criminal activity among the top cronies around Trump, including by the president himself, to break this sinister spell.
With a GOP in trouble & corrupted beyond recognition, the only thing to do is fight back till the party rids itself of this menace & his entire support system. Once the current GOP has been thoroughly discredited & taken down, should that happen soon, it could open up a wide lane in 2020 for rational, constructive, principled GOP candidates to run in. And if Trump is this unpopular now with those outside the cultish Trump base: donald-trump-2020-election-hillary-clinton-running-republicans-democrats-poll, we can imagine how some of his remaining base would whither away as proof of his crimes come to light.
Even in these midterms, the Dems got almost as many votes as Trump did in a presidential election!: democrats-did-something-virtually-unprecedented-in-the-2018-midterms. Flipping this Reagan stronghold by turning orange to blue is also quite an accomplishment, a LA suburban district which is better educated & didn’t care much for the caps on their mortgage deductions from the tax bill: california-democrats-sweep-house-seats-orange-county. See this, not smart: trump-is-surrounded-by-fools. I always respect comments from Boot: now-we-know-the-full-magnitude-of-trumps-defeat-republicans-should-take-notice. Trump’s unprincipled, dishonest & bullying management style is written about in these excerpts from the-trump-doctrine-a-triumphant-incoherence:
President Donald Trump has brought policy making by chaos to be the new normal. Repeatedly, we learn this president’s seat-of-the-pants decisions are founded upon contrivance, and they often appear poised to injure our interests and our ideals simultaneously. Most alarmingly, these injuries concern the basic expectations of national security and international justice. New satellite images confirm that North Korea is still moving ahead with its ballistic missile program. It appears that Trump’s earlier reassurances about “peace” with North Korea were not merely silly, but deliberate falsifications as well. Naturally, there are corollary consequences for America’s allies in South Korea and Japan, some of them potentially existential. Credo quia absurdum, said the Romans. “I believe because it is absurd.”
Systematically, this president avoids knowledge-based judgments. He blamed California “mismanagement” for recent unprecedented wildfires. He also recently declared his intention to unilaterally abrogate this country’s stabilizing legal obligations under the INF treaty – which will impair our codified promises at both international and domestic legal levels. He withdrew the United States from the July 2015 Iran deal (the JCPOA), an agreement that the UN’s IAEA reaffirmed has been respected by Tehran. There are further examples of President Trump undermining America’s most primary legal and moral obligations. All reflect his core assumption that attitude, not preparation is what counts. Not surprisingly, Jared and Ivanka have not yet been able to fashion a brilliantly coherent plan to save the Middle East.
Trump’s strange war against his own intelligence agencies and legal institutions is unhidden. Donald Trump is no scholar. To be sure, no one expected anything else. But he is especially weak on matters of law and justice. International law is not irrelevant to the United States, but remains an integral part of the law of this country. Among other places, it says so in the Constitution, that document Trump’s supporters are so fond of citing in reverential tones. Article 6 states “…all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.” The United States is a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which contains (at Article 33) the basic principle of non-refoulement: “No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
Under President Trump’s fitfully-released executive orders, impermissible expulsions and returns have become “official” policies of the United States. For the moment, “ground-zero” for such presidential manipulations has been “the caravan” and its eagerly awaited “invasion.” Mr. Trump is not the real “pathology.” Rather, his law and government-violating presidency is merely the most visible symptom of a much more widespread and deeply systemic disorder: This is a starkly anti-intellectual American society that frowns upon even a scintilla of serious independent thought. Significantly, though generally unknown to Americans, the due process clauses of the Constitution protect all “persons,” and not just “citizens.” Jurisprudentially, this authoritative scope of competence – one drawn from the Natural Law or Higher Law bases of the American Republic – is “beyond legal question.” Ultimately, in both life and in law, truth is exculpatory.
This is not by any means a normal and law-abiding American presidency. But, we must now ask: Is this a dress rehearsal for a still-widening chaos? Alarmingly, Donald Trump plainly cherishes chaos in both national and international politics, a deeply troubling affection that is impossible to reconcile with even the most rudimentary legal expectations of U.S. government or law. Inevitably, Mr. Trump’s supporters, who still number in the tens of millions, yearn openly for the tangible warmth of “belonging,” of being part of a shrill and shrieking crowd, and of enjoying the numbingly false pleasures bestowed by simplistic explanations. Complexity, after all, is always difficult and daunting for those who would reject intellect in virtually any form. “I love the poorly educated,” offered candidate Trump during the 2016 campaign.
The Founding Fathers of the United States did not generally believe in democracy – that’s why they created a republic. Most agreed with Alexander Hamilton’s trenchant observation that “the people are a great beast.” Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most democratic of the founders, tied any hopes for a decent democratic ethos to a suitably challenging system of education, but even he still described “the people” in distinctly unflattering terms. Were he alive today, bearing witness to the stark declensions of the Trump White House, the third president of the United States would likely blame a pervasively anti-intellectual and unphilosophical ethos in the underlying American electorate. To fully understand how Mr. Trump can repeatedly get away with debilitating policy errors, apparent illegalities and outright falsehoods, we must look no further than the fractious and truth-averse American society.
His Days are Numbered?
Mueller may have the final say on the end of Trump. An important role may also soon be played by the House intelligence & judiciary committees. Whatever the final outcome of these numerous investigations, we just want to know the facts of what really happened. The election also showed an unmistakable trend against Trump, so we really do have a GOP in trouble with Trump at the helm. We posted these insights which came from the-end-of-trump:
When Donald Trump’s political autopsy is written, the exact time of death will be uncertain, but it will be fixed sometime around the 2018 midterm elections when enough of the country decided that it had had enough. Cause of death, somewhat unexpectedly, will not be a single event, not his racist reaction to Charlottesville, or his siding with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence branches, or his obstruction of justice, or his threatening to cut off federal aid for the burned-out citizens of California’s fires, or any of his other misdeeds, but rather the accumulation of all of them. In medical terminology, the cause will be “death by misadventure.” This accident of democracy will have politically expired, due to “deliberate assumption of unreasonable risk by the victim.” In other words, he came too close to the edge too many times and finally fell. How can we be so certain that Trump’s political days are numbered? First, now we can see more clearly that the blue tide kept rising as many of the closest races, especially for the House, flipped to the Democrats as the final votes were counted. Democrats are now set to gain nearly 40 seats in the House — their biggest gain in decades. Second, we have the smart analysis this past weekend from Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg that the shift away from Trump in 2018 was more profound than many initially believed. In fact, Greenberg makes a strong case that the election was “transformative” with Trump losing support, not only with suburban, college-educated women, but all women. And Democrats gained ground in other areas, too, including working-class men and in rural areas.
Race for President
And I’m not referring to 2020, but the race I’m talking about is who our next president might be in 2019. Should evidence of high crimes & misdemeanors result in the ouster of Trump through resignation or impeachment, it’s very conceivable VP Mike Pence could follow him out the door if the Mueller report shows him involved in some way to the Russia scandal. The next person in the presidential line of succession is Speaker of the House. Despite the jawboning of some House Dem reps, Nancy Pelosi will return as Speaker in January & even has the backing of Trump.
So the battle for House Speaker may turn out to be what determines our soon-to-be acting president. It was floated a rep in the district next to mine here in northeast Ohio could challenge Pelosi. Marcia Fudge is in a hideously drawn up gerrymandered district that envelopes the east side of Cleveland, then winds its way down south to also include inner-city sections of Akron. Those are mostly poor, predominantly African-American neighborhoods, where the bizarrely-shaped district was intentionally drawn to group all those voters in the same district for essentially disenfranchising their votes, while also ensuring their votes don’t spill over into suburban/rural & mostly white districts like the one I reside in. Fortunately, here in Ohio those crazy shapes are required to be fixed in a couple years. But could this wind up being the fight over the presidency?: house-democrats-speaker-fight-nancy-pelosi.
The Bitter Divide
Polarization has devolved into angry tribalism, which could even disintegrate into something far worse, seen in excerpts from inside andrew-sullivan-what-happens-if-no-one-trusts-the-system:
It’s been quite a while now that the phrase “cold civil war” has been bandied about. And it’s useful, so far as it goes. Polarization has now become tribalism, and tribe is now so powerful a force it is beginning to eclipse national loyalty. The two nations, to borrow Benjamin Disraeli’s description of 19th-century Britain, stand facing each other, without blinking, faces flush, equally matched, on trigger alert for offense or another set battle. What we don’t quite know is if this tenuous, balanced equilibrium is sustainable indefinitely, the system careening from one party’s bitterly contested rule to gridlock and back again, until our tribal tensions are somehow exhausted. Or whether the cold civil war could at some point get a little warmer, or even, shall we say, hot. What we don’t know, in other words, is when the legitimacy of the entire political system could come into doubt, across the ideological spectrum, in a way that might sanction undemocratic responses. By legitimacy, I don’t mean having deep differences in policy with a president or his party; I don’t mean contempt for, or even mere opposition, to the powers that be; I mean denial of the core validity of the key institutions and players in our system. It’s one thing, after all, to disagree profoundly with an administration’s policies; and another thing entirely to believe an administration, or a congressional majority, or a Supreme Court majority, is fundamentally unjust, and its decisions therefore nonbinding.
We currently, for example, have an acting attorney general, the appointment of whom was almost certainly unconstitutional. The last time anyone checked, the AG reports directly to the president, is a “principal officer” in the Cabinet, and wields extraordinary power over our entire system of justice. Installing him as acting attorney general without the advice and consent of the Senate breaks a fundamental principle of liberal democracy and American constitutionalism: No single person should have complete control of all those in the Executive branch, without some severe risk of corruption. And corruption is, of course, the entire alpha and omega of Whitaker’s appointment. He is a partisan hack, far out of the legal mainstream (he once opined that Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided, for Pete’s sake), and seemingly has been installed to shut down or neuter an independent investigation into the president’s campaign. That very possibility is why the Founders wanted the Senate to have a role in this level of appointment. Without such involvement, Whitaker is, in a word, illegitimate. And when the chief law enforcement officer in the country has no constitutional authority, the entire rule of law comes into question.
Civil War looms?
This next article with excerpts from slow-motion-civil-war provides terrifying speculation that with our bitter divides, America is already in the early stages of another civil war mostly divided along racial lines, urban vs. rural, & red vs. blue states. Such a civil war could erupt into open warfare should concrete proof of Trump’s criminal history require removal from office. Hang on, 2019 could get real ugly. Hopefully it won’t get that bad with cooler heads prevailing, but there’s no question there is a violent element out there & we’d better be ready for most anything, especially with the hot-tempered unpredictability of their new confederate commander (who happens to be our current president). The party of Abe has now taken the wrong side:
In both cases, they were young, and they were white, and they were male, and the actions they took started civil wars. In 1861, they were cadets from the Citadel Military Academy in South Carolina. On January 9, of that year, they were manning an artillery battery on Morris Island, an uninhabited island in Charleston Harbor when they fired on the United States steamship Star of the West, which was attempting to resupply the American garrison at Fort Sumter. The shots they fired that day, along with the bombardment of the fort by the Confederate States Army beginning on April 12 of that year, are generally considered by historians to be the first shots fired in what became the American Civil War. In 2017, they were members of the so-called “alt-right” — white supremacists, neo-nazis, neo-confederates, white nationalists, and neo-fascists who were in Charlottesville for the so-called “Unite the Right” rally. On the night of August 11, 2017, as many as 200 of them marched carrying burning torches through the campus of the University of Virginia chanting white supremacist slogans such as “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” When they reached the statue of Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, they clashed with a group of students who had surrounded the statue. The alt-right demonstrators swung and threw their torches and used pepper spray against the counter-protestors, injuring several.
The next day, the alt-right demonstrators marched through Charlottesville carrying Confederate and Nazi flags chanting “white lives matter,” “Jewish media is going down,” and “make America great again.” Many demonstrators were armed, some with semi-automatic assault-style rifles. They clashed again with counter-protestors, and at 1:45 p.m., a white supremacist demonstrator identified as James Alex Fields Jr. drove his 2010 Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. She was not the first to die in the new civil war. Already dead were black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina; a native of India in Olathe, Kansas; an Army lieutenant in College Park, Maryland; and many others. But the death of Heather Heyer would become a focus of the violence and killing in the new civil war, because President Trump would put it there. Later the day she died, President Trump went before the cameras at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and said, “We all must be united and condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Let’s come together as one!” Responding to a question, he went on to say, “we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” He was roundly criticized that day and the next for blaming the violence that caused multiple injuries and the death of Heather Heyer on “many sides.”
Responding to the criticism three days later, Trump addressed the media at Trump Tower and repeated his claim that there was “blame on both sides.” Responding to another question, Trump asserted, “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.” He went on to criticize the movement to take down Confederate statues as “an attempt to change history,” and criticized “the very, very violent alt-left.” He went on to defend the protest by the alt-right in Charlottesville by saying “there were very fine people on both sides.” In an interview the next day, Steve Bannon, who was then serving in the White House as Trump’s Chief Strategist, called Trump’s press conference the previous day “a defining moment” in Trump’s presidency because Trump had chosen “his people” over “globalists.” At a rally in Phoenix, Arizona a week later, Trump defended his statements at the Trump Tower press conference and again criticized the movement to take down Confederate statues. “They’re trying to take away our culture, they’re trying to take away our history,” Trump said. “And our weak leaders, they do it overnight.” Like a blind squirrel who found an acorn, Steve Bannon was right that Trump’s remarks after Charlottesville were a defining moment in his presidency. Trump had taken the side of “his people” when he told the world there were “very fine people on both sides,” and said “they” were taking away “our” culture and history.
It was crystal clear who “our” refers to, crystal clear why Trump felt compelled to note that “not all” of the demonstrators in Charlottesville were “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists.” He stood with those defending the celebration of the Confederacy with statues of Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. ”Our” people are white people. The New York Times created a stunning portrait of the new civil war on the cover of its Sunday magazine on November 11. Against a photograph of a burning Nazi swastika at a white supremacist rally in Georgia this year, the Times displayed a list of 70 white supremacist demonstrations, shootings, bombings, and planned attacks going back to the killing of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by white supremacist Dylann Roof on June 17, 2015. The Times used the list to illustrate an article about how federal and state law enforcement agencies have failed to respond to the threat of white supremacist violence in this country. Read another way, it’s a list of battles in the new civil war.
(See the article for a long list of recent neo-Nazi, white supremacist, confederate attacks)
That is only a partial list of the killings and other incidents carried out by members of the “alt-right” and white supremacists. It happens day by day, week, by week, month by month, one after another. It’s a slow motion civil war, and it’s being fought by Trump’s “very fine people.” The warriors in this civil war include a lot of people who are fighting against what might be called a pluralistic United States. Many of them have guns. Some of them have bombs. Some of them have killed the people they are at war with. Others have held repeated rallies and demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction with the United States as it is presently comprised. Many want a separate state of white people, ruled by white people. They want a new Confederate States of America. Trump is helping to give them one.
Beginning on March 10th of this year, Trump held 45 rallies to support Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Reading that list is reading the list of Trump’s America: Southaven, Mississippi. Johnson City, Tennessee. Richmond, Kentucky. Missoula, Montana. Houston, Texas. Columbia, Missouri. Fort Myers, Florida. Elkhart, Indiana. Macon, Georgia. Murphysboro, Illinois. Topeka, Kansas. Wheeling, West Virginia. Red districts in Trump’s red state confederacy. This weekend, Trump will travel to California, which is not one of the states in Trump’s confederacy. It’s a state he dismisses for its “sanctuary” cities and for its high taxes and its liberal political leadership and for is “mismanagement” of its forests, which he claims cause the fires that have destroyed the places he will presumably visit. To prepare for the visit by Trump, the citizens of California might consult the citizens of Puerto Rico, another place Trump doesn’t consider part of his confederacy, which he visited after a natural disaster. He might even toss them some paper towels. Donald Trump has made a decision that he isn’t the president of the United States of America, but president of the red states of America. Trump has embraced a new confederacy, and he is their Jefferson Davis, and a new civil war has been joined.
FIRE!!!
The link below has a song from a concert in the pouring rain, the kind of rainstorm which is finally about to hit California. Such a rain can help put out the fires & improve the air quality, but the heavy rains forecasted also raise the risk for floods & mudslides, while adding to the challenge of finding the remains of fire victims. A horrifying tragedy, this was the most devastating fire we’ve seen in America in our lifetime. A thousand are still missing. We do need to find solutions to these more frequent & deadly fires besides the prez getting out his rake. As Trump visited California for the photo op & spouting inane ramblings how to prevent forest fires, we picked this song based on this verse:
A simple prop to occupy my time
This one goes out to the one I love
Fire!
Fire!
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