The Most Worrisome Headline in the 2016 US Politics

Is this:

Clinton's popular vote lead surpasses 2 million

Trump's administration will be a minority government, with no mandate.  Yet his picks show an extremist taint, a desire to pull the country even further to the wobbly right edge of political thinking.  That's fascinating.  And worrisome.

 

 

 

The Demolition Derby Administration

It's fun, on this Thanksgiving Day, to think about the kind of administration Donald Trump plans to give us as a present for at least the next four years.

A few examples:

1.  The administration's Chief Strategist is the Breitbart News Chief Executive Stephen Bannon, who once called the Breitbart site "the platform of the Alt Right":

We're the platform for the alt-right," Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July. Though disavowed by every other major conservative news outlet, the alt-right has been Bannon's target audience ever since he took over Breitbart News from its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, four years ago. Under Bannon's leadership, the site has plunged into the fever swamps of conservatism, cheering white nationalist groups as an "eclectic mix of renegades," accusing President Barack Obama of importing "more hating Muslims," and waging an incessant war against the purveyors of "political correctness."

 The Alt Right is polite-speak for racists, misogynists and white supremacists.
Their representative is now the chief strategist of this country.  And sure, perhaps Bannon doesn't really believe in white supremacy, but he certainly exploited its dog whistles in designing Trump's presidential campaign.

2.  The man Trump picked to oversee the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is Myron Ebell.  He doesn't believe that climate change is real.  He has no qualifications relevant for that job, and:

In an interview with Business Insider in August, Ebell repeatedly referred to climate scientists as "global warming alarmists" and suggested that climate research is in fact an arm of a coordinated political movement.
"I think that the global warming movement has three parts," he said. "One is to exaggerate the rate of warming, one is to exaggerate the potential impacts of warming and how soon they may occur, and the third is to underestimate wildly the costs of reducing our emissions by the magical amount that they have picked."

3.  Trump's choice for the head of the Department of Education is a billionaire who wants to gut public education:

Betsy DeVos is hardly a household name, but the Michigan billionaire and conservative activist has quietly helped change the education landscape in many states, spending millions of dollars in a successful push to expand voucher programs that give families taxpayer dollars to pay for private and religious schools.

What fun we will have if DeVos succeeds in that and taxpayer-funded madrasas sprout up all over the United States!  I very much doubt deVos thinks of any other religion than Christianity when she promotes religious education.

Anyway, public education is at risk.  There are good theoretical reasons why markets don't do very well in education, and there are extremely important reasons for worrying about the rise of sectarian religious education.

4.  Trump's Attorney General will be Jeff Sessions.  He is going to lead the agency in charge of protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans:

This is not the first time Sessions has earned a presidential nomination as an administrator of justice. In 1986, President Reagan tapped him to serve as a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, but at the time the Senate found him too racist for the post, and he became the second nominee in 50 years to be denied an appointment.
During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions was pressed on accusations that he had called a black prosecutor “boy” and a white civil rights attorney “a disgrace to his race.” He was called out on his comment that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was OK until I found out they smoked pot” and that the NAACP and ACLU were “trying to force civil rights down the throats of people.”

Sessions has also been opposed to

the Violence Against Women Act, the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and the expansion of anti-hate legislation to include sexual orientation.
He fought the removal of the Confederate flag from public buildings, immigration reform, and criminal justice reform.

The White Supremacists love Sessions as the Attorney General!  They love him.

The rumor mill has also listed the fracking mogul Harold Hamm as one of the forerunners for the Secretary of Energy, which would be terrible news for alternative energy.  Though Hamm is not the only possible pick, all the picks look like energy insiders to me.  You know, the side which wants oil to remain the only feasible alternative.

And so it goes.  The basic principle Trump uses is demolition derby for the departments he hates*, which would be those departments not catering for the interests of the one percenters or the religionists.  The departments he loves get something different, of course, and that would be those departments which are needed to protect the one percenters:  the department of War (or whatever euphemism you wish to give it) and those arms of the law which must embrace nothing but the property rights of the one percent.

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* Or picking a wolf to mind the sheep, if you wish.  All Americans are invited to the feasts of the Trump administration, but some of us will be the main course, the appetizer or the dessert, while others should dress appropriately (white hoods?) to sit down and enjoy the meal.

Today's Our Dear Leader-Elect News

1.  Greetings from the Alternative Reality (Alt Right) where white supremacist-misogynists regard Trump's victory as theirs.  The Washington Post tells us about the thoughts of one Richard Spencer, a wannabe Nazi, who gave a speech to his white supremacist followers:

For years, Spencer and his followers worked in obscure corners of the Internet to promote pride in white identity and the creation of an “ethno-state” that would banish minorities. Then came the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, whose attacks on undocumented immigrants, Muslims and political correctness deeply resonated with them. They crusaded for him on Twitter and celebrated his improbable victory as a seminal moment for their cause.

They exulted again when Trump announced that his chief White House strategist would be former Breitbart News chairman Stephen K. Bannon, who once called his site “the platform for the alt-right.”

You can imagine what Spencer's utopia would look like, because you may have read about one attempt at it in your history books:  The forced removal of all other races from the White Homeland, the means of that removal not spelled out clearly.  But Spencer is also very clear on what the role of white women would be in that utopia:

Spencer, of course, would expel Muslims from his ethno-state. And most women, he said as he was being driven from the hotel to his next appointment, would return to their traditional role of bearing children.

As I've written before, the White Bigots' dreams are very similar to the dreams of ISIS, with the proper adjustments to who it is who is allowed to exist in their dystopias.  Women, always, are to be viewed as breeding stock.

I haven't heard our Dear Leader-Elect say much anything about these wonderful people and their proposals about the rest of us.  Until he disowns them I'm assuming that he agrees with their platform.

2.  Our Dear Leader-Elect has now met some representatives of the media.  In that he has shown a mature and statesman-like attitude:

Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told The Post.
“It was like a f−−−ing firing squad,” one source said of the encounter.
“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.
“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing-down,” the source added.
A second source confirmed the fireworks.
“The meeting took place in a big boardroom and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said.
“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful, dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room, calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.

So.  The freedom of the press is the cornerstone of democracy, right?  If the US media can be bullied into reporting only adulatory snippets about our Dear Leader-Elect, we are going to be in deep s**t. 

But at least Mr. Trump is following in the footsteps of another Great Leader, Idi Amin:

3.  Our Dear Leader-Elect wants Britain to appoint the British version of a white supremacist leader as Britain's ambassador to Washington, DC.  That would be Nigel Farage who also believes that working mothers are worth less than working men because they have children, the same Nigel Farage who interpreted Trump's pussy-grabbing stories as something all guys do and also as alpha-male boasting.

But those are extremely minor aspects of Mr. Farage's platform.

As to this whole little debacle:

It is unprecedented for an incoming US president to ask a world leader to appoint an opposing party leader as ambassador, and the statement puts May in a difficult position.

...

Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to Washington, said he was baffled by the tweet. “UK ambassador in DC exists to defend UK interests in US, not US interests in UK,” he tweeted. “Can’t have foreign presidents deciding who our [ambassador] should be.”

Political rules and customs as well as laws are for Little People, not for our Dear Leader.

The new Alternative Reality is shaping up quite nicely.

The End of Identity Liberalism. Or The Re-Branding the Democratic Party

As is common in the aftermath of a loss (1), various voices are proposing a new and improved Democratic Party or a new and improved liberalism, the kind which can attract the white working class guys in the Rust Belt.

So you'd guess that those voices would mention that we need to fight income inequality, that we need to fight for saner labor markets, living wages, better parental and sick leave arrangements and so on, right?

You'd guess only partially right.  Some do advocate those things, as have I many times in the past.  But others advocate something different, and Mark Lilla is one of those.

Mr. Lilla wants to see the end of identity liberalism, because it divides us and doesn't unite us:

But it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly (1), as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny. Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton, who took a page from Reagan’s playbook. He seized the Democratic Party away from its identity-conscious wing, concentrated his energies on domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance) and defined America’s role in the post-1989 world. By remaining in office for two terms, he was then able to accomplish much for different groups in the Democratic coalition. Identity politics, by contrast, is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections — but can lose them.

 It's ironic that Bill Clinton's national health insurance proposal failed miserably.  It's even more ironic that Bill Clinton's support for various globalization initiatives is where the seeds of the Rust Belt devastation were scattered.  But never mind, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were unifiers, says Mark Lilla.

Lilla's piece is cleverly written, because most of the important achievements of what he calls identity liberalism are picked from the past, while the more recent examples he mentions are largely about the "celebration" of diversity and about the doings of privileged (hah!) college students inside the gentle world of academics.

Stacking the deck that way is unfair.  Many might agree with his message if the forms  identity liberalism take consist of nothing but, say,  a focus on trigger warnings and linguistic purity policing on the left.  But Lilla's examples are carefully picked to give that impression.

In reality the concept of "identity" is much more important than that:  Consider that "identity" is something others can impose on us (you n***er, you c**t), consider that it can determine what we may do with our economic careers and working lives, consider that it can determine what kinds of crimes might victimize us, consider that people like Mark Lilla don't really see their own stances determined by "identity," because the face he sees in the mirror while shaving is the default face of this country.

Thus, I have several points to make about his argument that the Democratic Party must now focus on issues which unify us, not on issues which divide us.

A Tourist In An Alternative Reality. Visiting The Extreme Right.

So I spent some of my precious hours studying to understand those who are drawn to the extremist thinking of Stephen Bannon, the man who is promising us the reign of the working man.  And the most important truth I brought home with me is this:  Those folks really do live in an alternative theory, with a very different alternative set of "facts."

For instance, did you know that George Soros is behind everything having to do with the progressive causes?  Hillary Clinton was his puppet, he funded and perhaps hired professional agitators for the Black Lives Matter protests.  Indeed, because he has given money to all sorts of liberal causes, from La Raza to NOW, all those organizations now do his bidding.

Many YouTube videos provide "evidence" on all this, including "evidence" on what George Soros has said publicly, though the problem is that those statements come without the questions he answered or the context in which he answered them.

Some of the videos also show brown people committing violent acts or wrecking lamp posts and so on, but there is no information who the people in the clips are, where the videos were taken or when.  We are simply told that the violence is by, say, Middle Eastern or African refugees in Europe, and that Soros is somehow behind the refugee crisis.

Interviewing the New Ideologue of This Country

Stephen Bannon, of the Breitbart News fame, and now Donald Trump's ideological brains, has given an interview about our future:  It's going to be fifty years of Alt Right power.  Or white supremacy, if you wish.

At the end of the interview, the writer of the piece says this:

Bannon now becomes part of a two-headed White House political structure, with Reince Priebus — in and out of Bannon's office as we talk — as chief of staff, in charge of making the trains run on time, reporting to the president, and Bannon as chief strategist, in charge of vision, goals, narrative and plan of attack, reporting to the president too. Add to this the ambitions and whims of the president himself, and the novel circumstance of one who has never held elective office, the agenda of his highly influential family and the end-runs of a party significant parts of which were opposed to him, and you have quite a complex court that Bannon will have to finesse to realize his reign of the working man and a trillion dollars in new spending.
"I am," he says, with relish, "Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors."

Bolds are mine.  So I guess what Bannon is openly willing to defend is not white supremacy, but male supremacy.

From The No-Comment Files

This:

We are going to have a lot more of this.

And this:

The rules are different now. 

Well, they have always been different for Democrats.  Republicans can yell "Lock Her Up" at rallies, Wall Streeters can yell "Lock Her Up," too, but no, you can't boo Mike Pence at a Broadway Show because that is rude.  Talking about pussy-grabbing, however, is not rude, and our new Attorney General -elect isn't even sure if it's sexual harassment to grab someone's vulva.

I'm beginning to get the feeling that those pesky rules are different for girls, too. 

My Thirteenth Blog Anniversary

Was on the election day.  There's a deep message in that, I guess.

Thank you for your company along whichever section of the road you have traveled with me.

A White Supremacist Speaks

To get a better idea of the people who believe that Donald Trump is in their camp, check out this NPR interview with one white supremacist.  David Duke also loves Trump's choices.  And more about Stephen Bannon.

I put my hazmat  suit on a few weeks ago and waded into several white supremacist sites (they hide behind the term Alt Right).  It's important to point out that those sites are also woman-loathing.  White women wouldn't have a good time inside the white supremacy.  Women are seen as a fertility resource, owned by the men in the movement, and many of the more misogynist MRA themes about women are very common on the Alt Right sites:  Women are treacherous, manipulative and in need of male control in all spheres of their lives.

The Post-Election Anger

I understand the anger of those who lost.  The results had not been predicted, the winner didn't only campaigned on economic policies which struck a chord, but also on racism, white supremacy and misogyny, and those, too, struck a chord or at least didn't matter enough for many who voted for Trump.  The new America that is being created is not going to be a country of equal opportunities for all.  After all, Stephen Bannon is its head strategist.

What I don't understand is the continuing anger of those who won, especially the radical extremist wing of the Trumpeteers.  Yet there are many examples of that anger, from the attacks against minorities and women on the streets to the Starbuck protests and plans to boycott firms such as Pepsi, because of this:

 PepsiCo garnered their wrath last week when CEO Indra Nooyi talked about the election in an interview with the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin at a conference on Thursday. “They are all in mourning,” she said of her daughters and employees. “Our employees are all crying. And the question that they’re asking, especially those who are not white: ‘Are we safe?’ Women are asking: ‘Are we safe?’ LGBT people are asking: ‘Are we safe?’ I never thought I’d have had to answer those questions.”

These comments were unacceptable to the radical extremist Trumpeteers.

Just think of that for a moment.  Rather than reassuring all of us who belong to the groups (which together constitute the majority) Trump kept Othering all through his campaign, those Others should now do what?  Shut up?  Submit?

What would a mature leader do in this situation?  Let me think.  How about giving a speech telling his supporters to stop the harassment and slurs?  How about reassuring people who have been Othered that they are going to be safe?

Donald Trump may be mature in age, but he is certainly extremely immature as a statesman.  Indeed, he is doing very little to rein in the white male supremacist wing of his coalition.  I doubt he cares, to be quite honest, because this is not about accolades and people cheering him.

How To Fight Back: Second Tip: Refuse To Condone Hate

The Southern Poverty Law Center has tips on community organizing against hate.

They have a petition to ask Donald Trump to condemn bigotry and hatred (heh).

Added later, because I forgot the most important part of this post:

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Protestant pastor who emerged as an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps.

Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for the quotation:


First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

For Laughs

From the Onion, a political satire site:

A video letting you get acquainted with Stephen Bannon, Trump's Best Friend Forever.

The great relief when the tyrannical yoke of moderate respect for women has been removed by the election of the pussy-grabber-in-chief.

Today's Political Reading List

From one of those disgusting coastal elitists.  What else can you possibly call a goddess, though a little more respect is expected.  After all, it might rain snakes next week if I feel so inclined, and I do.

More seriously, I am gathering here articles which enhance our understanding of some aspects of the 2016 elections and which might point out areas where action is beneficial.

 Zeynep Tufekci writes about the role of fake political news on Facebook.  Social media is now the most important source for news in the United States, but not all those news are real ones.  Two examples:

Donald J. Trump’s supporters were probably heartened in September, when, according to an article shared nearly a million times on Facebook, the candidate received an endorsement from Pope Francis. Their opinions on Hillary Clinton may have soured even further after reading a Denver Guardian article that also spread widely on Facebook, which reported days before the election that an F.B.I. agent suspected of involvement in leaking Mrs. Clinton’s emails was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide.

There is just one problem with these articles: They were completely fake.

The Denver Guardian doesn't even exist.  It turns out that teenagers in Macedonia were behind many of the false right-wing news, because they could make money out of them.  I recommend the entire Tufekci article.

We must demand that Facebook does better than this.

Several articles have recently surfaced on rural white resentment, sometimes on rural white Christian resentment.  I recommend this view of what took place in the rural areas of Wisconsin, and this very opposite view concerning what the problem really might be.

The above overlaps with white working class resentments, whether they are economic, racist or sexist or (as is most likely to be the case) a knotted mess of all of those things*.  This is one take on some roots of that resentment.  It also mentions the traditional views about gender roles in that population.  Some argue that the women among the white working class didn't mind Trump's grab-them-by-the-pussy utterances, because that kind of stuff is just everyday life for them, just the way they believe men are.

The recent treatment of white working class voters as the possible-to-swing-voter-group that Democrats lost in this election is extensive all over the media**, even though most of those who voted for Donald Trump were your usual suspects:  Registered Republican voters, many quite affluent.  The white working class voters got prominence because of their role of defeating Hillary Clinton in the swing states.

What should be done about the white working class deserting the Democratic Party?***  Should anything be done to lure them back?  Or should we just wait for them/us to die out?

Most of what I've read on the latter topic veers into the distasteful category.  For instance, to write, with hope,  that the demographic decline of whites in the United States will take care of the problem the Democratic  Party has amounts to saying that we'll just wait until you guys die out, taking your cultures**** to extinction with you.

That is pretty insulting. Try replacing "whites" in such statements with any other racial or ethnic group and you will see what I mean.  And so do those white working class members who voted for Trump.

On the other hand, those who urge the Democratic Party to focus on the resentments of white working class voters will have to explain to me how the Party would cope with the fact that many of those resentments are not purely about economics but also about race and gender roles.

An increased focus on jobs, pay, vacations and combating rapidly rising economic inequality gets my strong recommendation.

But what compromises would that entail, given the intertwined nature of economic, racial and sexual resentment?  Would women's issues (affecting more than half of the population) once again be labeled "special interests," something to be put on the back burner?  I have recently met that old argument again.



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*  As described in this article:

What they want is what they used to have: predictable jobs and long-standing social networks in stable communities. As liberals note, the social networks in which they were embedded reflected strict racial and gender hierarchies and enforced a conformity to community norms that was very painful for gays and lesbians, political dissidents and women who dreamed of doing something in the world outside the home. But they provided a stability that has since disappeared.

More on all that, especially the role of women voters (of all races and ethnic groups) and issues affecting women will be served to you in the near future.  On this here blog.

**  See here for a critique of the white working class focus.  Possible links to the white working class topic are so many that I cannot pick among them.  They are easily found, however.

In reading them remember a couple of important caveats:  First, the voting data we have now is from exit polls, which have their problems, and, second, the working class doesn't consist of only white workers, and despite the election-linked focus on white working class men, the economic plight of both working class women and minority men is greater, on average, than that of white working class men.

*** Note that the desertion of the party by the white working class began a long time ago.  Remember the Reagan Democrats?

****  It's crucial to stress that many in the white working class, both men and women, voted for Hillary Clinton.  We must not create a bogeyman out of one group, when most of those who voted for Trump were long-term Republican voters.  And yes, it's "cultures" in plural, because the working class cultures are place-specific.

Let's See What Trump Is Doing For His Not-So-Wealthy Base

For all those who voted for economic Change with a capital c*, let's see what the tea leaves predict might change, compared to the Obama administration:


1.  The estate tax might go away.  Such a relief, because it currently affects all ordinary Americans who leave 5.45 million dollars or more to their heirs.  I can already see the boom this causes in the Rust Belt, even if the Trump administration replaces it with a capital gains tax for that portion of the inheritance which exceeds 10 million dollars:

If estate tax repeal happens, it would be a tremendous gimme to the rich (including eventually Trump and his family). In tax year 2015, just 4,918 estates paid $17 billion in estate taxes (less than 1% of federal revenue). More than a third was raised from the richest of the rich—the 266 estates valued at $50 million or more brought in $7.4 billion to the Treasury.

2.. Wall Street is celebrating:

Christmas has arrived early for Wall Street in the early days of the Donald Trump era.
A populist candidate who railed against shady financial interests on the campaign trail is now putting together an administration that looks like an investment banker’s dream.

Former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin has been seen at Trump Tower amid rumors that he’s the leading candidate for Treasury secretary. Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross appears headed to the Commerce Department. Steve Bannon, another Goldman alum, will work steps from the Oval Office. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon remains a possibility as Treasury secretary and will serve as an outside adviser if he doesn't get the job.
It’s a restoration of Wall Street power — and a potential flip in the way the industry is regulated — perhaps unparalleled in American history.

3.  Remember how Trump swore not to touch Medicare, the federal health care funding program for the over-65 population?  Well, things have changed, what with the election, and now it will be "modernized:"

There’s a lot that you should know about the Republican Medicare plan, a plan that Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) hopes to enact shortly after President-elect Donald Trump takes office, but the entirety of it can be summarized in just one sentence.

Republicans want to charge seniors a lot more for inferior health coverage.

Given that voting for Trump was positively correlated with age, that's an interesting choice.  Note, also, that Medicare is not the only program funding the health care needs of the elderly.  Medicaid, the system which currently funds health care for the poorest of the poor, also funds a considerable chunk of long-term nursing care for the elderly.  The Republicans plan to suffocate it over time:

It is hard to overstate the importance of Medicaid, which insures 77 million people, pays for more than half of all births in some states, covers about two-thirds of nursing home residents and provides treatment for many people addicted to opioids. Spending on Medicaid, by the federal government and states combined, exceeds $500 billion a year.

Of the 20 million people who have gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act, officials estimate, 12 million are insured by Medicaid — with few of the problems that have plagued the new insurance exchanges, or marketplaces.

But change is coming. In his campaign manifesto, Mr. Trump said Congress must repeal the Affordable Care Act and give each state a lump sum of federal money — a block grant — for Medicaid. Congress passed legislation in January to repeal the health law and roll back its Medicaid expansion. Mr. Obama vetoed the measure, but Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin has vowed to put similar legislation on a Republican president’s desk.

Bolds are mine.

Block grants are wonderful devices for cutting funding, if they are not adjusted for inflation or population changes over time.  If the Republicans are successful in making such cuts, Trump-supporters, among others, may have to start saving a lot of money for grandma's nursing home expenses (which averaged almost 7000 dollars a month in 2016).

4.  Trump campaigned on huge tax cuts for the middle class, for the "forgotten men and women of this country."  Reality is more complicated:

But Trump's plan does the opposite, says Lily Batchelder, a law professor at New York University and visiting fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
"If you look at the most wealthy, the top 1 percent would get about half of the benefits of his tax cuts, and a millionaire, for example, would get an average tax cut of $317,000," she says.

And not all middle class Trump voters would see their taxes drop:

Lily Batchelder, a law professor at NYU and visiting fellow at the Tax Policy Center, says Donald Trump's plan would boost taxes for many families, with some of the largest increases applying to single-parent families "because of the repeal of the head of household filing status and personal exemptions."

• A single parent with $75,000 in earnings, two school-age children and no child care costs would face a tax increase of around $2,440.
• A single parent with $50,000 in earnings, three school-age children and no child care costs would also face a tax increase of around $1,188.
• A married couple with $50,000 in earnings, two school-age children and no child care costs would face a tax increase of about $150.
• Other married couples would get almost no benefit.

Hmm.  Wonder if any of that was intended?  After all, the Christianists who voted for Trump don't like families led by single mothers, though of course these rules also apply to single fathers and widowed individuals, whatever their sex.
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* This post concentrates on proposed changes which are not going to help Trump supporters with moderate incomes.  The super-rich are naturally going to have a bonanza.

And The Rest Of The World? How Will It Survive Trumpism?

This is quite a fascinating interview about Trump's possible foreign policy.  Try to find your jaw from the floor afterwards.  Note, also, the statement made by the former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, around ten minutes and 34 seconds into the interview.

He states that if Trump's foreign policy will be based on the three themes he has persistently talked about over the years,  it would mean the end of the West as we know it.

He then elaborates on that apocalyptic vision.  The interviewer summarizes that elaboration as stating that Trump's theoretical platform on foreign policy would make the West poorer, more likely to be at war, and it would also reduce freedom, democracy and human rights in the world.

I recommend listening to the whole discussion, because the participants actually know the field, and because there is something eerie about hearing their calm and careful pronouncements about this mess we are now in.

How to Fight Back. First Tip: Give Mike Pence a Christmas Present

This will be a series of posts, I hope, including one about the best ways to intervene to stop street harassment of those who have been declared prey in this world where the Alt Right guys think Trump has given them a hunting license.

I'm beginning with something easy and safe:  Donate to Planned Parenthood.

Many poor women have no other source for gynecological care.

Better still, give your donation in the name of Mike Pence:

He staunchly opposes abortion rights and in 2011 led the charge to defund Planned Parenthood as a member of the House of Representatives, an effort that ultimately failed but nearly forced the federal government to shut down. As governor, he signed one of the nation’s most stringent abortion laws, which mandated that miscarried or stillborn fetuses be buried or cremated and that women have an ultrasound at least 18 hours before a scheduled abortion. It also barred abortions of fetuses with disabilities or because of their race, sex or ancestry.

The Eleventh Commandment: Do Not Normalize The Ideology of Donald Trump

1.  Do not normalize Trump values.  Do not normalize bigotry and hatred because it was expressed in a folksy way.

Some already  interpret the election results as a right to go out and kick people who don't look exactly like they do.*  Many are now afraid of their fellow citizens, what they might do, and how far Trump might allow it.  He has appointed an out-and-out racist-misogynist-whitemalesupremacist as his chief strategist, and that man has his ear.  That man's news organization is also suing the media for stating that the organization is one for white supremacists, despite this statement by Bannon himself:

"We're the platform for the alt-right," Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July.

 For more on that, check out my post below.

2.  Do not expect that Trump will act as an outsider**.   The Republican Congress still aims to give the rich humongous tax cuts, aims to destroy Social Security and Medicare as well as all environmental  protection.  No, we are not going to get Trump-the-billionaire-outsider; we are going to get both the old wingnut fundie your-wombs-are-ours stuff and the old wingnut big-wallet-boyz stuff, but on top of that we are going to get white supremacist horrors.

3.  Stop the bickering about who caused Trump's coup on our side of the aisle.  It's a waste of time, even if the purpose is to learn for the sake of the future, because it's like sitting in your living-room, trying to figure out how to buy better fire insurance while all the time the house you are in is on fire.  Besides, the wounds that bickering cause will fester much longer and create a revenge-is-best-served-chilled mentality in all  participants.

It is the voters who ultimately bear the responsibility for both getting informed and for the way they voted.  A large enough minority of Americans voted for Donald Trump, and that minority will now rule because of the Electoral College.

4.  Stop normalizing what is needed to cooperate with the Trump administration.  You can cooperate with him, but you cannot normalize the vicious hatred in order to do so, you cannot explain that Breitbart News is just an ordinary news organization for just very conservative conservatives when it publishes articles with headlines such as this:

 ‘Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?’

Equal rights for more than one half of this country's population is like cancer?
We cannot allow that way of thinking to be seen as normal.  We cannot collude with those values by normalizing Bannon's messages.

5.  The time to fight back is now.  It is much harder later on when the Trump Reich is in full swing.   And small attempts to destroy the underpinnings of democracy, such as the idea of the president suing the media for what they write, should be extremely strongly protested, because if they are ignored we will soon have no free press.

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* The main targets for attacks have been African-Americans and Hispanics, but women in general have also met with a higher level of attacks and more online threats, and anti-Semitic symbols, such as the swastika, are used more.
 For some recent incidents see here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

And lest you think that feminist bread-and-butter issues will not be affected, note that misogynists also feel empowered.  For one example of how "might makes right" see what this commenter to one of the hate sites has to say about us women:

**  He might, because he is utterly unpredictable.  But what I have seen so far is that he is going to pass all the normal governing to extremist Republicans, while he gets the accolades (and presses the nuclear button, should someone insult him).

Meet Stephen Bannon, Trump's New Strategist

It's a sign of these times that my first reaction to hearing that Trump's Chief of Staff would be Reince Priebus was a sigh of relief!  Please, someone, turn off this nightmare.

If you can't do that, you might be interested to learn that the man I feared would hold that position, Stephen Bannon, will be Trump's chief West Wing strategist.

Stephen Bannon is an extremist right-wing media provocateur, the executive chairman of Breitbart News,  a website which has published articles with these titles under his rule:

“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”
“Political Correctness Protects Muslim Rape Culture.”
“Suck It Up Buttercups: Dangerous Faggot Tour Returns to Colleges in September.”
“The Solution to Online ‘Harassment’ Is Simple: Women Should Log Off.”
“Two Months Left Until Obama Gives Dictators Control of Internet.”
“There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews.”
“Trannies Whine About Hilarious Bruce Jenner Billboard.” 

My friends, this is the man who now has continuous access to the president of the United States, and he is a beauty!

This article argues that he is connected to the White Supremacist Movement, and he certainly is connected to the Alt Right, which I think is the White Male Supremacist Movement:

"We're the platform for the alt-right," Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July.

...

Exactly who and what defines the alt-right is hotly debated in conservative circles, but its most visible proponents—who tend to be young, white, and male—are united in a belief that traditional movement conservatism has failed. They often criticize immigration policies and a "globalist" agenda as examples of how the deck is stacked in favor of outsiders instead of "real Americans." They bash social conservatives as ineffective sellouts to the GOP establishment, and rail against neo-conservative hawks for their embrace of Israel. They see themselves as a threat to the establishment, far bolder and edgier than Fox News. While often tapping into legitimate economic grievances, their social-media hashtags (such as #altright on Twitter) dredge up torrents of racist, sexist, and xenophobic memes.

I have visited the Alt Right websites.  First and foremost they are racist.  But they are also sexist.  White women are needed to populate the white Vaterlands, but they are certainly not viewed as equal participants in the movement.  More like the resources the movement requires, something along the idea that women's sphere should be limited to Kinder, Küche, Kirche.

That's the background of our Stephen.  We shall soon learn what he has in mind for the citizens of this country.  Sadly, that is now likely to depend on the race and ethnicity of those citizens.  Oh, and of their wives, of course. 

Voters Were Fed Up With LIars

I was told that those who voted for Trump were fed up with lying politicians, such as the crooked and vicious Killery, and that's why so many voted for Trump, the super-liar.

And because he is an outsider.  Only outsiders fly in their own helicopters and own several houses where those can land.

But now we are told that Killery isn't even a killery!

In his first television interview since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump described on CBS News' "60 Minutes" his phone call with Hillary Clinton and said that the former secretary of state is strong and smart.
"It was a lovely call, and it was a tough call for her, I mean, I can imagine. Tougher for her than it would have been for me. I mean, for me, it would have been very, very difficult," Trump sad, referring to Clinton's call after Trump secured victory. "She couldn’t have been nicer. She just said, 'Congratulations, Donald, well done.'"
"And I said, 'I want to thank you very much, you were a great competitor.' She is very strong and very smart," he added in the interview set to air in full on Sunday.

The lies, they are never-ending.

Also check my post below for the evidence of Donald-the-weathervane.  He is running away from his wider base as fast as he can, straight into the arms of the money boyz and Christianists.  But he has not said anything about his narrow base of white supremacists misogynists, the people who just might be doing all that recent harassing of minorities and white women.  I haven't heard a peep from him about the importance of respect and so on.

The Morphing Face of Donald Trump. Or How Quickly Campaign Promises Are Forgotten

Now imagine this:  All those wonderful promises that Donald Trump made have already started to disappear or to morph into your usual ultra-right-wing fanaticism.  And he has been president-elect for four full days!

1.  Trump campaigned against lobbyists, but they are part of his transitioning team.   He vowed to drain the swamp that is Washington.  Instead, he is petting all the swamp critters and inviting them into the White House:

In the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. by, among other things, introducing tough new restrictions on lobbying.

“I am proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again,” Trump said during the October 17 appearance in Green Bay, Wisconsin where he first used the “drain the swamp” line.

It appears Trump is already backtracking on that pledge. Politico reports that “lobbyists are all over” Trump’s transition team. Those lobbyists include Cindy Hayden of tobacco company Altria; Michael Torrey, owner of a lobbying firm representing the American Beverage Association; Steve Hart, chairman of the Williams & Jensen firm; and Michael McKenna, who lobbies on behalf of Dow Chemical.

2.  Trump's transitioning website has had some careful alterations.  For instance, he never campaigned on the privatization of Medicare, but now his site tells us that Medicare will be "modernized," a euphemism for privatization.

3.  And a new insertion concerns the rights of all health care professionals to control the behavior of slutty women and to determine exactly how they should suffer while receiving health care.  The so-called "conscience clause" is an integral part of the religious right wing's demands, and Trump is going along with them.  I've read that ninety percent of them voted for the man with three serial wives and several additional mistresses, perhaps, because gods send weird messengers.

But note that Trump did NOT campaign on that issue.

4.  Neither did he vow to strongly cater for egg-Americans, but his transitioning site promises that his government will

Protect innocent human life from conception to natural death, including the most defenseless and those Americans with disabilities

I'm not sure if that means the immediate banning of all abortions for any reason whatsoever, once the Supreme Court has been stuffed with Christianists, but that's the most likely outcome.  As an aside, it seems that only innocent human lives will be protected, and only if they die in a natural way.

Very bad framing, all that, though of course I get the subtext:  That euthanasia is out and that egg-Americans have not yet murdered anyone.  Wonder what he plans to do about those egg-Americans who are not in the soon-to-be-socialized wombs of this country's womb-men.

5.  Finally, remember how Trump railed against Wall Street and bankers in his campaign speeches?  Only a few days later:

Trump’s reliance on insiders goes beyond lobbyists. His financial advisory team is full of veteran Wall Streeters such as former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin, the Wall Street Journal reports. Both Mnuchin and former JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon are reportedly in the mix to be Trump’s Treasury Secretary.

All this makes perfect sense from Trump's angle:  He gave the speeches he needed to win.  Once he won, the ideas in those speeches had done their job which was to secure him a victory.  They have no further use value for him, and are thus tossed out with the garbage.  Because he doesn't care about those promises at all, and neither does he care about those who voted for him.

The promises are replaced with things Trump has been persuaded to include to satisfy the arch-conservatives and Christianists among the Republican base.  It looks to me that someone is influencing him.

Very very sad.  Humongously sad!  Sad in a bigly way, especially for those who believed Trump's messages.

But perhaps even sadder for the rest of us.

 

And Here We Go, Indeed: The Death of Medicare

Talking Points Memo tells us that Paul Ryan intends to phase out Medicare and replace it with a private insurance plan for the elderly.  The New York Magazine tells us a little more:  That Ryan is lying and just wants to kill Medicare.  Trump didn't talk about Medicare in his campaign, so there's no way to know if he likes Ryan's idea or not.  But here's the gist from a Fox interview with Bret Baier:

“Your solution has always been to put things together, including entitlement reform,” asks Baier, using Republican code for privatizing Medicare. Ryan replies, “If you’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare, you have to address those issues as well. … Medicare has got some serious issues because of Obamacare. So those things are part of our plan to replace Obamacare.”

Ryan tells Baier, “Because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.” This is false. In fact, it’s the complete opposite of the truth. The Medicare trust fund has been extended 11 years as a result of the passage of Obamacare, whose cost reforms have helped bring health care inflation to historic lows. It is also untrue that repealing Obamacare requires changing traditional Medicare. But Ryan clearly believes he needs to make this claim in order to sell his plan, or probably even to convince fellow Republicans to support it.

What would it mean if Medicare was replaced by private insurance?  Would the elderly get a lump sum government subsidy, to take and to turn into a private insurance policy?  And what would the size of that subsidy be?  What would the private insurance cover?

And how would the premia be set?

Remember this:  The elderly have very high health care costs, on average.  If they are going to be put into their own class, the premium for that class will be high, and the subsidies needed to cover those premia will also be high.*

Would that be better than the current system, in any case?

The answer is a resounding no, because Medicare has lower administration costs than private insurance plans and because its centralized purchasing power means cost savings to tax payers.

Because those articles don't tell us about the subsidy the elderly would get from the government it's hard to know what else might happen.  For instance, the subsidy might be set too low to cover a good insurance package, and there wouldn't be that much the elderly could do about it.  In any case, I think the idea of the frailest elderly having to shop for an insurance plan that would accept them is macabre, because insurance plans have a strong incentive to keep the high-risk users out.

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* If, on the other hand, the insurers are forced to offer them insurance with the same average premium as is used more generally, the premia will go up for everyone enrolled in that plan.

My Election Feelings

I move slowly in a nightmare world where the United States has chosen as its leader a man with a severe personality disorder, an extremely thin skin, fingers which itch for the nuclear button, utter lack of expertise and knowledge the president is supposed to have, and arrogance combined with a thorough lack of interest in any values or principles that are not about his own glorification.    That is the short version.

An even shorter version is that now anything could happen, anything at all.

That all the branches of the government are in Republican hands could mean that the welfare state will be dismantled, but even if it does not, the frailest and most needy among us will certainly suffer, while tax cuts go to fatten the already fat wallets of the one percent.

I sincerely doubt that those who voted for Trump for reasons of economic desperation will find any improvement in their status.  It's more likely that their handicapped children will be stripped of any government support they are getting now, and that grandma or granddad will have to move in with them.  It's more likely that corporations will gain and that workers will lose, all over the country, because Trump will abolish as many regulations that he can, possibly including any that have to do with the safety and security of jobs.  And jobs returning to the US on Trump's say-so?  I have a bridge for sale to those who believe that he can accomplish that.

Naturally I want to be wrong.  I want Trump to be something greater and better than the man I have learned to know during his campaign:  A miserly mind, taking insult from everything and everyone, writing down enemy lists, proposing things which are against the Constitution, seeming, at least, to suggest that suing journalists will be something he is going to do.  And the first tweet he has made since becoming President-Elect (and being allowed back to access his Twitter account by his minders) is yet another childish, petulant complaint about the media.

As R. McGeddon wrote in Eschaton comments:

He's going to get the nuclear codes, while his staff couldn't trust him with a Twitter account?

That is the roots of my fear, and fearful I am.  Trump is too erratic, too unpredictable, simply too frightening as the president of the United States. What would trigger him?  What would he react to in international politics with threats and bullying?   I cannot predict him, at all, but some of the choices he has made suggests to me that he plans to drive this world to its end, if necessary, for his personal comfort, and he also plans to follow the old Republican model of appointing those who hate a particular government department to run it.  To the ground, that is.

Finally, an even longer and more personal reaction:

Remember When Trump Spoke About the Election Being Rigged?

Well, it was, in a way, because this was the first election without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act.  Ari Berman writes this about Wisconsin:

 For example, 27,000 votes currently separate Trump and Clinton in Wisconsin, where 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID. Voter turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest levels in 20 years and decreased 13 percent in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives, according to Daniel Nichanian of the University of Chicago.

And more generally:

 On Election Day, there were 868 fewer polling places in states with a long history of voting discrimination, like Arizona, Texas, and North Carolina. These changes impacted hundreds of thousands of voters, yet received almost no coverage. In North Carolina, as my colleague Joan Walsh reported, black turnout decreased 16 percent during the first week of early voting because “in 40 heavily black counties, there were 158 fewer early polling places.”
Even if these restrictions had no outcome on the election, it’s fundamentally immoral to keep people from voting in a democracy. The media devoted hours and hours to Trump’s absurd claim that the election was rigged against him, while spending precious little time on the real threat that voters faced.

The ability to vote is fundamental for democracy to exist.  To take away that ability, to make voting much harder in some places and some people, that is not democracy.  The Republican Party is using an anti-democratic strategy to keep those likely to vote for Democrats out of the voting booth.  

President-Elect Trump's Plan For The First Hundred Days

Is ambitious!  Just on the first day Trumpmas:

Laying out the aims of his administration, Trump said he will “repeal and replace ‘Obamacare,’” “immediately suspend the admission of Syrian refugees,” “order a review of every single regulation issued over the last eight years,” “begin lifting all regulations that are hurting our workers and our businesses,” “terminate every single unconstitutional executive order signed by President Obama,” “restore the rule of law to our land,” “begin implementing plans for construction of a wall along our southern border” and “get rid of” international gangs of thugs and drug cartels — all on his first day.

Repealing Obamacare means that Trump will bring back what existed before Obamacare, albeit in a more stringent version.  There will be Health Savings Accounts!  They are subsidized in the direct proportion of the tax-payer's actual tax rate, so the rich get larger subsidies than the poor.  And of course the rich can afford to save much more for later ICU expenses.  But very few of us can save enough for even a week in the intensive care ward, sigh.

That will really really help those voters who chose Trump because of their dire financial status.

Immediately suspending the admission of Syrian refugees is good for international relations.  Other countries will admire the United States for its generosity and kindness toward those who lost everything.

I adore the idea of lifting all regulations that hurt workers and businesses, because what hurts workers and businesses is not necessarily the same thing (so how does one choose?) and because it would be easy to insert almost all regulations, whatever their benefits,  into that basket, to be tossed out.

The last three points (about restoring law-and-order, the wall against Mexico and the one-day-operation of getting rid of all international gangs of thugs and drug cartels) are just so much hot air coming out of the President-Elect's mouth, and law-and-order is conservative code for a societal pyramid where some perch on top and others silently obey.

But clearly Donald is going to work very hard.  After the first day he will start fixing the country's place in the world and the climate crisis:

Trump has said he will renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal, call a NATO summit to update the organization’s mission and rebalance members’ “financial commitments,” cancel payments to the United Nations’ climate-change programs and divert that money to domestic infrastructure improvement.

At least we will have nice new streets when we gag to death from air pollution.

Fascinating, though, to see what the Trump voters will get on the first days of Trumpmas:  Health Savings Accounts and no more "Mexicans."  Now consider that 33% of Latinos and 26% of Latinas voted for Trump.  Granted, that's considerably less than the equivalent white (Anglo, I believe?) percentages of 63% and 53%, but at least the latter group isn't directly attacking itself.

The rest of the first-day-presents go mostly to firms who will be allowed to rampage freely on those nice new streets. 

The Morning After

And the sun rose!  For a while I thought it might not, given the other "black swan" experiences of yesterday.  Donald Trump is now the most powerful politician on earth.  He also seems to be an utterly unpredictable one, and that is frightening.  What will he do?  His list of impossible promises doesn't add up.

Will he really abolish the ACA and replace it with subsidized savings accounts (aka no insurance for anyone but the very rich)?  How is he going to reconcile the immense tax cuts he has promised with his pledge not to cut Social Security or Medicare?  How many wars will he initiate?  How is he going to force firms to return jobs to the United States?  What international treaties does he plan to break?  How is he going to build that wall and make Mexico pay for it?

Nobody knows the answer to those questions.  Whatever I might think about George Walker Bush, at least he was a politician who worked within the framework of his party, and that made him somewhat predictable.  Trump is a loose cannon, a man with the thinnest of skins who takes umbrage at everything, whose reactions cannot be easily predicted, whose skills for the job he has won are non-existent.

No wonder the financial markets have jitters.  And no wonder many of us are shell-shocked.

None of the polls I read before the election  foretold the events of last night.  Why was that the case? 

I have been told that the white working class turned up to vote in much larger numbers (for Trump)*, that the base of the Democratic party did not turn up in sufficiently large numbers,  and that something akin to the Bradley effect might have operated with those Republican voters who were going to vote for Trump, come hell or high water, but weren't going to admit to it when pollsters queried them.  Other explanations are no doubt possible.

Then, of course, the Republicans will also dominate the House and the Senate, and will nominate new Justices to the Supreme Court.  Those Justices are very likely to be either religious fanatics of the Christian type and/or in the pockets of large corporations.

At least one exit poll study has already appeared.  Treat it with some caution, given that it is based on exit polls, not actual votes.   Still, it offers some data on the demographics of Clinton and Trump voters.  For instance, here's the split by race and sex:

Note that white men went overwhelmingly for Trump and that the majority of white women did, too.  That is a pattern familiar to us from prior elections:  The base of the Republican Party consists of whites, especially of older whites.

But this is fascinating:  See how inside each racial or ethnic group more men than women voted for Trump?**

All the tables in that survey are interesting.  I want to pick out the income table, because it raises some questions about the economic motivations Trump voters state they have:

Finally, this is a fun table:  How much Trump's treatment of women bothers the respondent in the survey:

So it goes.

Well, better buckle up, because we are in for some turbulence. 




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* But note the income table later in this post.   It suggests that the Trump voters are not particularly economically disadvantaged.

** The same pattern is visible for Independents, too, and within each of the two major parties slightly more men than women chose Trump. 
  

Logic According to the Trump Campaign

Roger Stone does this hilarious shtick about Hillary Clinton being too old to run for president, about how she has no agenda at all, about her vindictiveness and so on.

It's good for a laugh, because all those things he mentions apply more to Trump than to Clinton:  He is older, he is tremendously vindictive and he has no realistic agenda of any kind.  Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has reams and reams of stuff on her policy proposals.

But watching that short video clip is a learning experience.  There are many folks in this country who watch crap like that day in and day out.  No wonder they live in an alternate reality.

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Added later:  Of course what "too old" means for women and men in the mind of someone like Roger Stone is not the same thing.  Women need to be nubile to be seen, though not still heard.  Men just need to still breathe to be an acceptable age for presidency.

VOTE! And No Peeking!

These snapshots of Donald and Eric Trump voting remind us why voting by mail and similar otherwise excellent inventions might not always guarantee the integrity and privacy of one's vote:

From here.

And:

Now, the Messrs Trump might not be peeking there, even though it looks like it, but I wish they had those curtained booths back.

Go vote if you haven't already.

Feel Good Election Stuff

Susan B. Anthony's grave has become a site for pilgrimages.  She worked for women's suffrage in the United States, and now her tombstone is covered with "I Voted" stickers.

The secret Facebook group Pantsuit Nation was created as a safe haven for those who support Hillary Clinton for president.  That such a safe haven is needed is worth a post or two, by the way.  At the present time it has over two million members.

This site, I Waited 96 Years,  gives pictures of women who were born before women could vote in the US of A.

Go Vote!

Rankings And Positions in Soccer at Harvard University

I'm sure you have come across the story already:  Harvard University 2012 men's soccer team decided to rank the incoming members of Harvard University's women's soccer team in terms of their fuckability or lack thereof.  These rankings were circulated online.

When this "scouting report" became public, Harvard suspended the men's team for the remainder of the season:

University president Drew Faust said in a statement on Thursday night that an investigation into the 2012 team found their “appalling” actions were not isolated to one year or the actions of a few, but appeared to be more widespread across the team and continued through the current season.

“The decision to cancel a season is serious and consequential, and reflects Harvard’s view that both the team’s behaviour and the failure to be forthcoming when initially questioned are completely unacceptable, have no place at Harvard, and run counter to the mutual respect that is a core value of our community,” Faust said.

I strongly recommend that you read the wonderful response by several players of the women's soccer team. Because those women are not mean-spirited, the response doesn't consist of producing equivalent rankings of the men whose "scouting report" resulted in these events.

But imagining such a reversed report is a learning experience.  Some guy's most basic physical characteristics are discussed online, possibly in very negative terms!  What's not to like about that?

A large group pondering whether a man is at all fuckable, whether he'd be best served with parsley, in a cream sauce or with an apple in his mouth,  all that is just innocent and intoxicating fun!  Besides, it's great for female bonding, for reminding everyone that men are meant for stud use, not for sports, and for demonstrating one's societal power over others.

So I am mean-spirited, sigh.  Do remember to vote.

The Candidate of the FBI: One Donald Trump

Several articles have questioned why FBI decided to use the ten days or so before this election to tar the Hillary Clinton campaign with as many brushes as it could find.  Could this be politics?  Or just stern and impartial investigators following the tiniest letter of the law about when to publish new information?

I cannot tell.  But it turns out that last week's giant Clinton scandal has already fizzled to nothing, as Comey's most recent letter about the FBI investigation into Hitlery* demonstrates:

In other words, this new investigation has found nothing new, Hitlery won't be sent to prison or burned as a witch, at least yet.  For that you must wait until the impeachment rounds begin, should she win on Tuesday.

But isn't it delicious to see the FBI again in the J. Edgar Hoover terms?  A state within a state, a sovereign power with its own political goals?   The Guardian writes that the FBI is "Trumpland,"  where many agents openly discuss their desire to have Trump as their boss.  Vanity Fair tells one story about the hilarious happenings inside the FBI:

Throughout her campaign, Hillary Clinton has battled accusations of fostering a “pay for play” culture at the State Department, giving undue access to major Clinton Foundation donors. So far, Republicans have failed to find a smoking gun, but the narrative has served its purpose: tarnishing the public perception of the Democratic nominee and her family’s namesake charity. For this, no one deserves more credit than Peter Schweizer, Breitbart editor-at-large and the author of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. The controversial, mostly discredited book has been held up by many as irrefutable proof of wrongdoing, or at least common venality, by the Clintons. It also found plenty of eager readers within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, The Wall Street Journal and New York Times report, galvanizing a number of F.B.I. agents to launch an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, based mostly on assertions made by Schweizer in the book.

Why is that hilarious?  Because the author himself admits that his book doesn't prove any wrongdoing:

The argument is certainly a compelling one. Even Schweizer—whom the Journal reports was interviewed on several occasions by the F.B.I. agents interested in the Clinton Foundation—has conceded that he does not have any “direct evidence” to prove that the Clintons have done anything beyond the pale. During an interview with ABC’s This Week in April 2015, the author said, “The smoking gun is the pattern of behavior,” and when pressed by host George Stephanopoulos, added, “It’s not up to an author to prove the crime.” 

I suffer from this odd naivete which assumes that people who work in, say, the FBI are actually trained in how to investigate evidence.  Then I wake up to news of this sort, and dark humor is the only good response.  But imagine someone launching an investigation just on the say-so of a propaganda book!  I've read enough of those books to know that you have to be very biased not to interrogate the evidence in them.


Then there's this tweet:

 That sentence may be the first one in which I love acronyms!

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*  Hitlery is the endearment the Trump people use for Hillary Clinton.  Note that last week's campaign probably did what it was intended to do:  Stop some voters from bothering to vote for H. Clinton.