Will Democrats not be able to tell the difference between winning and losing? (Say what?!)

Political scientist Reinhard Heinisch from the University of Salzburg has been giving notably good commentary on the US Presidential election and post-election on Austrian TV. But for some reason, in this Facebook commentary he falls back on clichés like American TV pundits use. 

[NOTE: At the time of this posting, it appears almost certain that Georgia and Pennsylvania have gone to Biden.] 

                                                    T-shirt design from TYT.com

But he's definitely right to say that Trump is trying to create a "Dolchstoss-Legende," referring to the post-First World War effort by German authoritarians to paint German democrats as being to blame for the loss of the war and to stigmatize the democratic Weimar Constitution as illegitimate.

"If Biden wins, the victory will feel more like a defeat." Uh, Democrats may sometimes be slow on the uptake. But in what alternative reality will Democrats see Biden winning the popular vote and the Electoral College and taking Donald Trump's place as President as feeling "more like a defeat"?!? No, they won't. Even the most timid Democrats can tell the difference between winning and losing!

Yes, Trump got more votes than in 2016, including some more black and Latino votes. Biden also got way more votes in 2020 than Clinton in 2016. (There's some simple math involved: the overall turnout was way larger than in 2016.) In fact, I believe Biden already has not only more votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 but more than any other candidate ever of any party, including Obama in 2008. By current counts, Biden has about four million more votes than Trump, no matter how the final Electoral College count comes out.

Heinisch: "The GOP will stop any Biden agenda in the Senate and the Supreme Court, freeze nominations and court appointments." What? We won't know the composition of the Senate until after two runoff elections in Georgia in January. How successful the Republicans will be in blocking Biden nominations and legislation will depend in no small part on how aggressively Biden and the Democrats push back. For example, does Mitch McConnell want to block pandemic-related funding and make his self-selected nickname of "the Grim Reaper" even more literal? (The Democrats are way too often inclined to roll over and play dead, but it's not a foregone conclusion!)

He also indulges in a Both Sides Do It trope: "A frustrated Democratic base will further radicalize and push Biden from the left, which will frighten the suburbs on which Biden’s victory largely depended." The Republican base is going all in on loony QAnon conspiracy theories and brought out a white mob to try to stop the counting of votes in predominately black Detroit. The biggest push from the Democratic base - which I suppose is what he means by "the left" - will be over whether and how hard Biden and the Democrats in Congress fight for the platform they ran on.

Since Heinisch is fretting about Florida, it's worth noting that Florida on Tuesday passed by a large margin a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr., which is part of the Democratic platform, although Biden's campaign didn't stress it in Florida or anywhere else. That's one big indication that emphasizing popular parts of the actual Democratic platform rather than basically running only on "I'm Not Donald Trump" would have improved Biden's margins.

Quincy Institute panel what the military's role might be in a post-Presidential-election transition crisis

Andrew Bacevich's Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft held a panel discussion yesterday on the current but eerie topic of The US military’s role in a contested election 10/28/2020. The full video is available at the link, and also on Facebook. The three panelists were Bacevich, Amber Smith, and Mark Hertling. The link has brief bios on them. 

There also a Facebook link: https://fb.watch/1pwVmwn9wk/

On the sensational-sounding possibility of some kind of military coup happening in the wake of a contested election, they all agreed that the possibility was highly unlikely. They all agreed that an August Open Letter by John Nagl and Paul Yingling on the topic (“. . . All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic”: An Open Letter to Gen. Milley Defense One 08/11/2020) that attracted quite a bit of attention was "irresponsible" on the part of Nagl and Yingling. Or, as Bacevich put it, "utterly irresponsible and stupid." But they did discuss the hypothetical of Trump losing the election and just refusing to leave office.

Bacevich put it this way, saying that if Biden wins the election he becomes President on January 20. "If Donald Trump decides he wants to continue to reside in the White House, who cares?" Biden would be President and that would be a minor problem to deal with. Smith said that in that case, which all three agreed was unlikely, it would be the responsibility of law enforcement and not the military to deal with it. Hertling suggested that if Trump refuses to leave the Oval Office, they should just turn out the lights, don't bring in any food, and wait for him to get tired and leave.

They also discussed that in case there was actual serious civil violence in some places after the election that neither local police or the state National Guard could adequately handle, the President does have the authority to declare martial law in an area or to invoke the Insurrection Act. Hertling commented that both laws are "squishy," meaning unclear in some ways. But all three panelists agreed on the obvious that neither should be used to suppress protests. Hertling said it would be justified only in cases of "extreme violence". That means, something a lot more serious than someone smashing store windows or setting a fire in a trash can.

Hertling also commented more generally that he is "absolutely opposed" to the increased militarization of the police.

And he stressed that state National Guards are normally trained in handling civil disturbances, crowd control, and so forth. But the military is trained to handle such matters primarily in a hostile foreign environment. And he noted specifically that it means that soldiers sent into American cities to handle such situations are more likely to start shooting earlier.

Bacevich expressed his opinion that it is a bad development for retired senior military officers - I assume he has mainly generals in mind though he didn't specify - to make partisan political endorsements, although as he noted, there is no law against it nor should there be. But his worry is that such endorsements contribute to normalizing the notion that it is legitimate for the military to be a partisan political body. Hertling explained why he disagreed, while Smith just complained about former military officers criticizing Trump.

I recall that Biden at one point responded to a question about Trump refusing to leave office in a somewhat offhand way by saying if that were to happen the military would just come take him out of there. In the moment, it conveyed the point that if he were elected President, he wouldn't stand for such a ploy by Trump. I was relieved to hear that at the time, because it showed more of a willingness to fight against Republican misconduct that Democrats are often willing to.

But technically speaking, that was a Biden "gaffe". Because it would be a law-enforcement responsibility, presumably the Secret Service, to take appropriate action to remove Trump if he decides to illegally trespass in the White House after a new President is inaugurated.

Defects in the US media system to be wary of after Election Day

US Election Day is three weeks and one day away.

There is likely to be a major fight after Election Day in which Trump's Republican Party tries to use the courts to suppress the count of Democratic votes and keep Trump in office. Some Republican-controlled states could even override the popular vote and select a slate of Republican Electors even if their states votes for Biden.

Justin Hendrix points to Six Disinformation Threats in the Post-Election Period (Just Security 10/08/2020). His six bullet-point list of post-election manuevers to guard against includes the following. These are largely features of the broken media environment in the US which bad actors like Trump can exploit. How acute they will be immediately after the election will largely depend how far the Republicans go with Trump's threat to steal the election:

1. The news media fails to effectively handle the president’s lies about voter fraud and the integrity of the election.
2. Social media platforms fail to take urgent and effective action against false claims in the post-election period.
3. An army of Trump “election observers” produces a trove of false voter fraud “evidence” that obsesses the right for years.
4. Militias invested in a narrative act on that narrative no matter what the result is at the polls
5. Foreign adversaries that seem, in some respects, to be on the sidelines right now jump into the game 
6. We find out if the QAnon network has any gas left in the tank

Hendrix rates the probability of the first two as high, 3-5 as medium, and the sixth as low.

On the QAnon point, he quotes this tweet from Ben Collins of NBC:

No doubt how major platforms like Facebook and Twwitter handle toxic conspiracy theories will be a major factor. But the popularity of QAnon-type conspiracy theories is only the latest iteration of the continuing radicalization of the Republican Party that has been proceding without meaningful pause for the last three decades. I would argue that the George H.W. Bush Administration did represent a partial drawing back from that process that gained dominance in the party with Reagan's nomination for President in 1980. It's hard to see who among Republican leadership today will make a stand against QAnon-type conspiracism, which is hard to distinguish between Rush Limbaugh's or Alex Jones' versions of conspiracism.

Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum even argue that in the US we are seeing a new type of conspiracist thinking. In their book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (2019), they write, "Conspiracy theory is not new, of course, but conspiracism today introduces something new — conspiracy without the theory." I'm not sure that what they are identifiying is anything qualitatively new as it is an increasing prominence of a type of conspiracism in society.

But they point to theorizing about the JFK assassination as being focused on trying to adduce documentary evidence to support their arguments as being characteristic of popular conspiracy theories in the recent past. We see something similar with what has been called the ur-conspiracy theory of today's Republican Party, the notion that Franklin Roosevelt orchestrated the Japanese attack on Pearly Harbor in 1941. In other words, by "insisting that the truth is not on the surface, classic conspiracism engages in a sort of detective work."

They contrast that with what they see a new version:

The new conspiracism is something different. There is no punctilious demand for proofs, no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying ...” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!” - a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory.

What validates the new conspiracism is not evidence but repetition. When Trump tweeted the accusation that President Barack Obama had ordered the FBI to tap his phones in October before the 2016 election, no evidence of the charge was forthcoming. What mattered was not evidence but the number of retweets the president’s post would enjoy: the more retweets, the more credible the charge. Forwarding, reposting, retweeting, and “liking”: these are how doubts are instilled and accusations are validated in the new media. The new conspiracism - all accusation, no evidence - substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough. [my emphasis]

In Hendrix' six post-election disinformation threats, the last three items could be taken as the propaganda conditions required if they first three more directly substantive threats to succeed in stealing the election for Trump and the Republicans. The "militias" and the FOX News/QAnon bubble will b e stewing in conspracism if Biden wins, no matter what. But not only the first three elements but official moves by the Republican Party like bringing court cases to stop the vote count and legislative overrides of popular votes in individual states would have to fall in place for the latter three to have a significant effect in deciding the practical outcome of the Presidential contest.

Biden at Gettysburg, Biden and Trump on bipartisanship

Joe Biden gave a justifiably well-regarded speech at the Gettysburg Battleground this week (Biden delivers campaign speech in Gettysburg PBS Newshour 10/06/2020):

It's within the context of his main campaign framing of I'm Not Donald Trump rather than on building a mandate for Democratic positions. Thanks largely to the coronavirus and the economic depression it kicked off, that strategy is working well so far. Also, because of Trump's continuing personal disintegration.

Scott Destrow reports for NPR (In Election's Final Weeks, Biden Makes A Case For Unity Amid A Tumultuous Time 10/06/2020):

Speaking Tuesday afternoon overlooking the battlefield where Union soldiers tilted the tide of the Civil War in Gettysburg, Pa., the Democratic nominee tried to frame his call for unity within the arc of American history.

"Today, once again, we are a house divided," Biden said, echoing the words of President Abraham Lincoln. "But that, my friends, can no longer be."

The Gettsburg Address is not the House Divided speech. But let's not quibble. You know, Lincoln the Greatest President, honoring fallen soldiers, bringing the country together. For an establishment Democratic politician, it's a good use of historical symbolism. Of course, he was relying on the historical symbolism of a Republican politician, so I guess we can't have everything ...

I would love to see Status Quo Joe roll out this Lincoln quote from 1861:

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. ...

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. ... A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them.

He won't do it, of course. But it would be cool if he did.

Lincoln himself declared that his two main Presidential models were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the two major founders of the Democratic Party, both of whom today's Democratic politicians were prefer not to invoke theses days. Times change. Historical narratives evolve.

(I'll use this opportunity to make another plug for Heather Cox Richardson's lecture series on The American Paradox, which takes a sophisticated and sensibly nuanced to the development of democracy in the US. I don't know if she thinks of herself as a Hegelian in some way, but she does take the unfolding of contradictions in history seriously.)

I instantly broke out in hives when he said "bipartisan". But he did make a point of unequivocally condemning Trump's "very fine people" at the murderous neonazi marches in Charlottesville in 2017 and going after the Republican Party's current overt support for violent white supremacist goon squads. Even Joe can be "antifa" when he puts his mind to it.

Bipartisanship is only a good thing if it involves getting something constructive accomplished. If it means another Democratic Administration giving a free pass to people in government who broke the law in serious ways in the previous Republican administration, it's destructive. Trump is out there listing political opponents he wants arrested and prosecuted. We just can't afford to have a situation where Republicans are willing to pursue blatantly partisan prosecutions and the Democrats refuse to allow the Justice Department to impartially and independently enforce the law against crimes committed by Republicans. The Republicans will give their "bipartisan" endorsement to that arrangement. But it's not the rule of law.

Lindsey "we-got-thuh-votes-tuh-do-at-so-we-gone-do-at" Graham's position on the Barrett nomination is the Republicans' current position on bipartisanship. If the Democrats keep the House majority and win 50 Senate seats with VP Kamala Harris as the deciding vote - and given the current poll numbers that's a modest expectation - that means the Democrats have the votes to enact everything in their party program. Period. Joe Biden was in the Senate longer than Lyndon Johnson was before he became President. He knows how to twist arms to get key votes in line. If he wants to get a couple of Republican Senators to vote his way so a conservative clown like Joe Manchin can vote with the Republicans, well, in that case, hooray for bipartisanship!

I take it for granted that the Democrats will end the anti-democratic Senate filibuster rule. *Not* ending it would basically be a bipartisan surrender to the Republicans on issues across the board right out of the gate. I don't even want to think about what a disaster that would be.

Starting the night of Biden's Gettysburg speech, the Grand Wizard of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, had some partisan ideas (Kyle Cheney, ‘Where are all of the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his foes Politico 10/07/2020):

Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.

Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration.

“Where are all of the arrests?” Trump said, after several dozen tweets on the subject over the past 24 hours. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

By early afternoon, Trump was letting loose his frustrations in an all-caps missive that seemed aimed at nobody in particular.

“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN - GOT CAUGHT!!!” Trump tweeted.

Now, the FBI arrested several members of a far-right terrorist group for "a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer." And maybe murder her. The President responded by ... attacking Gov. Whitmer. Bunker Boy may be garbled in a lot of his statements. But his position on this is very clear. Here's a report from a Michigan FOX News station, President Trump tweets about Gov. Whitmer, Joe Biden responds with tweet Mid-Michigan NOW Newsroom 10/09/2020.

See also, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer slams Trump in response to kidnapping plot Guardian News 10/08/2020:

The Supreme Court vacancy, the Democratic Party, and asymmetric partisan polarization

Asymmetric partisan polarization is one of the most prominent defining characteristics of American politics. The Republicans fight for their positions - and court appointments! - and trample on precedent, decency, and the law to attain their ends. The Democrats keep seeking "bipartisan" cooperation with a continually radicalizing Republicans Party, hoping despite decades of evidence that "the fever will break" in the Republican Party.

After at least 30 years of this pattern, the Republicans are on the verge of establishing a Hungary-style "Orbanist" post-democracy controlled by the Republicans and the favorite oligarchs.

Here's an example from earlier this year on how this works. Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority leader, made a clumsily-worded statement reminding the two Trump-appointed Justices, Neil Gorsuch and the particularly odious Brett Kavanaugh, that they should respect the Roe v. Wade precedent on abortion rights. Republican Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, publicly scolded Schumer for his comments. And he, of course, meekly backed down. (Andrew Desiderio, Schumer walks back SCOTUS comments after Roberts rebuke Politico 03/05/2020)

Here's how the Republicans went on the attack against Schumer, for a comment that for Mitch McConnell would have just been "Tuesday" and for which McConnell himself would have doubled down and flatly refuse to retract if he had been in Schumer's position:

Schumer’s remarks [apologizing] came after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday accused him of trying to “bully our nation’s independent judiciary,” a day after Roberts condemned Schumer for “threatening” the two justices. ...

In a scathing address from the Senate floor, McConnell (R-Ky.) also attacked the Democratic Party as a whole, accusing lawmakers of undermining and threatening U.S. institutions. He said Schumer’s comments were “astonishingly reckless and completely irresponsible.”

“He literally directed the statement to the justices, by name,” McConnell said. “The minority leader of the United States Senate threatened two associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Period.” ...

For more than 15 minutes, McConnell laid into Schumer and portrayed the New York Democrat’s comments as a wider problem among the progressive movement. He accused Democrats of “rampant” anti-institutionalist rhetoric and said Democrats “appear more interested in attacking the institutions of our government than in working within them.”

“As long as this majority holds the gavel, we will never let the minority leader’s dangerous views become policy,” McConnell said. “This majority will ensure the only casualties of this recklessness are the reputations of those who engage in it.”

McConnell’s fellow Republicans were also piling on, taking to the Senate floor and social media to harangue Schumer and urge him to apologize. President Donald Trump, too, took to Twitter on Wednesday night to criticize Schumer for a “direct and dangerous threat” against the Supreme Court.

The point of relating that story is not to say that Schumer's original comment was beyond criticism, but rather to show how the asymmetric partisan polarization works. Republican leaders say the most outrageous things without apologizing and then double-down when criticized for it and whine that the mean Dem-u-crat Party is pickin' on them.

Democrats rush to surrender and let their actual message get quickl flushed down the memory hole.

A Democratic leader more willing than Chuck Schumer to fight the Republicans could have easily responded along the lines of, "Of course what I was saying was that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would pay a price in their reputations if they disregard precedent on Roe v. Wade. Abortion rights are a critical part of women's rights and, yes, I defend that and I expect all the Democrats in the Senate to defend it. And since Justice Roberts took the unusually partisan step of criticizing my remarks, I'll add that his disgraceful rulings in the Citizens United case allowing a flood of private money to buy elections, and his support of striking down the Voting Rights Act which greenlighted the Republican voter-suppression we now see ballooning across the country, will be a blot on his reputation for the next two centuries."

It's easy to imagine that kind of response, because the Republicans play that game all the time. And they achieve two things by doing so. One is that the propel their political message. The other is that they show the public and their voting base that they fight for their own side.

Now with Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing, the Republicans remind us again how completely shameless they are. After piously insisting they were respecting the electorate while flatly refusing to even hold hearings on Obama's last Supreme Court nominee, they are now smugly insisting that it's absolutely critical to approve another Neanderthal Trump nominee immediately and insisting that there's not the slightest inconsistency from their previous position.

The single most important thing they do for themselves with that approach is to signal dramatically to their base voters, "We're fighting for our side." Bunker Boy even upped the ante on Saturday by saying of Joe Biden, "You can't have this guy as your president. You can't have — maybe I'll sign an executive order, you cannot have him as your president." (Tommy Beer, Trump Threatens To Issue Executive Order Preventing Biden From Being Elected President Forbes 09/20/2020

In the current situtation, I see it as absolutely critical for the Democrats to block any Trump Supreme Court appointment until after Inauguration Day. Chuck Schumer has got to pull out every procedural obstruction that exists and invent some new ones if that's not enough. Nancy Pelosi also needs to do everything she can to block it as well. Impeaching one Cabinet Secretary or Trump family member per day from now until as long as it takes and demanding that the Senate take immediate action on them is one of several attractive options. Actually, the House should have been holding impeachment hearings on Clarence Thomas 20 years ago!

And I know that Republican-level message discipline is to Democrats what green kryptonite is to Superman and his Kryptonian relatives. But they need to do it this time! No Democrat should be on TV for any reason without saying, "It's a disgrace that the Republican hypocrites are trying to ram through a Supreme Court Justice and anyway [whoever the nominee turns out to be] isn't fit to serve as a county clerk, much less a Supreme Court Justice. And we're also going to impeach that rapist thug Brett Cavanaugh!"

The Trumpistas surely have more than one plan to get the Presidential election results in front ofe the Supreme Court to get a Bush v. Gore II blessing for stealing the election. And Snapping Turtle Mitch McConnell will jam a nomination through in a couple of weeks if the Democrats don't block him. We're only about eight weeks out from SCOTUS having a shot at handing down a death-blow-to-democracy Dred Scott type decision. The Democrats cannot afford to screw this one up.

Anne Applebaum made a suggestion on Twitter that I see mainly as a reflection of how accustomed everyone has become to the situation of: Republicans fight, Democrats surrender.

The link to her full article is here: If You Care About the Court, Don't Talk About It Atlantic 09/20/2020. Applebaum has important insights on history and politics. And she's going through an interesting process of re-evaluating the assumption of post-1989 Cold War triumphalism. But a don't-fight-for-your-own-side in American politics in 2020 is pretty much identical to: surrender to the Republicans.

The Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden addressed the Court vacancy in a Philadelphia speech Saturday. Allan Smith reports ('Constitutional abuse': Biden challenges Senate Republicans in blistering Supreme Court speech NBC News 09/20/2020):

"To jam this nomination through the Senate is just an exercise in raw political power," Biden said. "I don't believe the people of this nation will stand for it."

The immediate question, though, is how much hell the Democrats will raise to block it.

Biden said that should Trump submit a nominee, the Senate should not act until the election is resolved.

"If Donald Trump wins the election — then the Senate should move on his selection and weigh that nominee fairly," Biden said. "But if I win the election, President Trump's nomination should be withdrawn."

The only sentence Biden should be using before that election that begins with, ""If Donald Trump wins the election" should be one describing the horrible results of such an outcome.

He called on Senate Republicans to help "de-escalate" tensions and to follow their "conscience," saying they should "cool the flames that have been engulfing our country."

This is just another version of the-fever-will-break-talk that pretends asymmetric partisan polarization doesn't exist. In this election campaign, that's just surrender talk.

"I'm speaking to those Republicans out there, Senate Republicans, who know deep down what is right for the country and consistent with the Constitution," he said. "Not just what's best for their party."

No, the fever won't break. Not until Trumpism, aka, the real existing Republican Party, is decisively defeated. And even in the best scenario, that will take years, maybe decades.

The Hill: "Democrats back away from quick reversal of Trump tax cuts" (and most likely any "slow" reversal as well

For all the large numbers of potential swing voters who are absolutely committed to making sure the wealthiest American are never burdened with paying taxes to support their own country and who are clamoring for society to be even more oligarchical than it is, the usual suspects in Democratic leadership are already reassuring them that, oh no, of course we aren't serious about any of our promises to reverse the gigantic Trump tax cuts on the wealthy: Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Debbie Stabenow, Richard Blumenthal, Chris Coons, Third Way.

As Alexander Bolton reports (Democrats back away from quick reversal of Trump tax cuts The Hill 09/15/2020:

Democrats are backing away from vows to reverse President Trump’s tax cuts if they take control of the Senate and White House.

Senate Democrats had suggested they could move quickly on the issue, but now say they are likely to delay stand-alone tax legislation if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected president and their party controls the House and Senate.

Instead, the priority will be on spending to create jobs and raise wages, investments in green technology and infrastructure and a national plan to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

Some of those stimulus and relief bills could include tax incentives for clean energy infrastructure and strengthening the nation’s supply chain and domestic manufacturing base. Tax relief in the form of child tax credits and earned income tax credits for lower- and middle-income families are also on the table.

But potential tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations are expected to come into play later, depending on how significant the deficit concerns are next year. [my emphasis]

The most telling paragraph in the story is this: "Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a prominent Biden ally, laughed out loud when asked what the Democratic plan for tax reform is next year." 8my emphasis)

But he didn't call voters "suckers" and "losers" for believing the Democrats were serious about their own (nominal) tax policy, so at least there's that.

One of the favorite legislative scams is to pass "tax incentives" that give corporations more money to buy back their own stock and juice the stock prices and pass that off as "investment". 

Extreme economic economy undermines democratic governance, as we see it doing dramatically right now. Unchecked it will eventually destroy the substance of democracy altogether, even is a facade of "illiberal democracy" persists.

The Republicans under Trump have essentially imploded as a democratic political party, leaving them a Fidesz-style authoritarian party on the model of today's Hungary.

But if the Democrats can't address the current depression and radical maldistribution of wealth with more than requiring the wealthiest to pay even lower taxes, along with the major crisis in democratic governance represented by the Citizens United campaign-financing system, the nationwide crisis in policing (i.e., cops killing black people for no good reason), and the impunity they also run a real risk of imploding as a functional opposition party at the national level even while they are relegated to permanent minority status nationally.

Looking back at Joe Biden's policy statement in Foreign Affairs

Joe Biden's version of the traditional Presidential candidate's Foreign Affairs article on his foreign policy views was published in their March/April 2020 issue, Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump.

It's a mostly safe statement that's pretty much standard Democratic foreign policy rhetoric of the last 30 years. Which of course is Better Than Trump.

But this is one thing that stands out, not strictly a foreign policy issue, which I take as a commitment on his part that I expect him to follow through on as President:

I will also take steps to tackle the self-dealing, conflicts of interest, dark money, and rank corruption that are serving narrow, private, or foreign agendas and undermining our democracy. That starts by fighting for a constitutional amendment to completely eliminate private dollars from federal elections. In addition, I will propose a law to strengthen prohibitions on foreign nationals or governments trying to influence U.S. federal, state, or local elections and direct a new independent agency - the Commission on Federal Ethics - to ensure vigorous and unified enforcement of this and other anticorruption laws. The lack of transparency in our campaign finance system, combined with extensive foreign money laundering, creates a significant vulnerability. We need to close the loopholes that corrupt our democracy. [my emphasis]

By "starts," I assume he means it's something he'll start pushing in a serious way at the first of his Administration. I look forward to hearing that in his Inaugural Address.

I'm being a bit sarcastic, of course, because this was not something he stressed during his campaign. It was almost certainly a line tossed in to respond to criticism that Sanders and many others - not strictly on the left - make of the current campaign finance system.

It's always important to pay attention to what Presidential candidates of the major parties say about their foreign policy. At the same time, there is a well-developed foreign policy jargon that requires some effort to interpret. So we have to look at pieces like this one as a general indication of policy preferences. And, despite our national narcissism and our country's actual enormous power, US foreign policy doesn't control the world. So to a significant extent, US foreign policy is aspirational, depending very much on the responses of other international actors. The Vietnam War and the Iraq War provide a couple of dramatic examples of those limitations.

It's hard not to notice that the two issues that are literally existential threats to the survival of humanity are only discussed in passing until near the end:

The United States must lead the world to take on the existential threat we face - climate change. If we don’t get this right, nothing else will matter. I will make massive, urgent investments at home that put the United States on track to have a clean energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050. Equally important, because the United States creates only 15 percent of global emissions, I will leverage our economic and moral authority to push the world to determined action. I will rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of a Biden administration and then convene a summit of the world’s major carbon emitters, rallying nations to raise their ambitions and push progress further and faster. We will lock in enforceable commitments that will reduce emissions in global shipping and aviation, and we will pursue strong measures to make sure other nations can’t undercut the United States economically as we meet our own commitments. That includes insisting that China - the world’s largest emitter of carbon - stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars’ worth of dirty fossil fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative.

On nonproliferation and nuclear security, the United States cannot be a credible voice while it is abandoning the deals it negotiated. From Iran to North Korea, Russia to Saudi Arabia, Trump has made the prospect of nuclear proliferation, a new nuclear arms race, and even the use of nuclear weapons more likely. As president, I will renew our commitment to arms control for a new era. The historic Iran nuclear deal that the Obama-Biden administration negotiated blocked Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Yet Trump rashly cast the deal aside, prompting Iran to restart its nuclear program and become more provocative, raising the risk of another disastrous war in the region. I’m under no illusions about the Iranian regime, which has engaged in destabilizing behavior across the Middle East, brutally cracked down on protesters at home, and unjustly detained Americans. But there is a smart way to counter the threat that Iran poses to our interests and a self-defeating way - and Trump has chosen the latter. The recent killing of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, removed a dangerous actor but also raised the prospect of an ever-escalating cycle of violence in the region, and it has prompted Tehran to jettison the nuclear limits established under the nuclear deal. Tehran must return to strict compliance with the deal. If it does so, I would rejoin the agreement and use our renewed commitment to diplomacy to work with our allies to strengthen and extend it, while more effectively pushing back against Iran’s other destabilizing activities. [my emphasis]

Nuclear arms reduction and nonproliferation are actually a more urgent threat than climate change. Because a nuclear war would inflict catastrophic destruction immediately. And it would induce massive and very rapid climate changes that would kill more people than the initial nuclear blasts. It could literally make the Earth uninhabitable for homo sapiens in a very short time frame. Nuclear proliferation is distinct from the longer-term global climate change. But the danger of nuclear war is also the single most serious aspect of the climate crisis. Eliminating fossil fuels entirely won't save humanity if there is an all-out nuclear war involving the US, Russia, and/or China. Even a "small" nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would have catastrophic and rapid global effects because of the huge clouds of particulates it would spew into the atmosphere.

I hope it doesn't take a new edition of the Cuban Missile Crisis for nuclear arms reduction and nonproliferation to g et the urgent priority they should be getting right now.

The Democratic Party side of the asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

As a Sanders voter who is actively engaged for electing the Biden-Harris ticket, because of course even half-competent government would be a distinct improvement from the Bunker Boy fiasco, I'm not part of the main target audience for the current Democratic National Convention's daily infomercial blitz that counts as a convention this year.

But it's hard not to fear that the Democratic Party leadership isn't stuck in the same corporate-friendly, Woke approach to campaigning style of 2016: lots of talk about harmony and diversity ("Stronger Together"), take the actual voter base for granted, and assume that Donald Trump is such an obvious incompetent and such a narcissistic mess that he has to lose.

Political campaigns always have something of a sports event about them. And longtime Democrats are sorely tempted to focus the idea that as long as Democrats hold the White House, everything will basically be all right. That's especially true of relatively well-off Democratic voters over 60 or so. I suspect that part of it is that the closer one gets to the higher end of the average life span, people with some actual feelings of responsibility for society as a whole would find it nice to think that we're leaving behind a better world than the one we were born into. And for anyone with a broadly liberal outlook, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris come much closer to offering that assurance than the Trump-Pence ticket does.

The American oligarchs would find it very convenient if the election were seen by the public as really nothing more than a sports event. That way, the electoral part of politics could be reduced to a harmless reality show while the neoliberal principle of TINA (There Is No Alternative) held sway in in economic and social policy as well as foreign policy, economic elites could fight among themselves over who would get which piece of the pie. But they wouldn't have to suffer the annoyance of actual democratic rule in which a majority of the people might prefer policies like public education for all or pensions and health care for everyone that don't directly benefit the wealthiest 1% in an immediate, direct way.

Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic makes his case that the Democrats are stuck in their own past in The Democratic Convention Put the Party’s Contradictions Front and Center 08/18/2020, dated the day after the first day of the current DNC:

The first night of the 2020 DNC was a fitting event for a party that prefers defeat to change. After a humiliating and close to delegitimizing election loss in 2016, Democratic leadership refused to take stock of their own failings, and blamed an assortment of outside forces: Russia, Facebook, Jill Stein, James Comey, to name a few. With Biden at the helm — a candidate with all the same weaknesses as the one who lost four years ago, but even worse — they decided to rerun the exact same campaign as last time, from the all-consuming focus on Trump’s failings right down to the attempt to bring prominent and rank-and-file Republicans into the party fold.

Yet at the same time, the party understands the precarious position it’s in. Between Trump’s outright stated intent to cheat his way to victory, the yawning enthusiasm gap between his and Biden’s supporters, and a raging pandemic that will keep people physically away from the polls, the party elite are well aware low turnout from unenthusiastic sections of the base — voters who are either deeply suspicious or totally indifferent to its candidate — could sink their chances. But any alternative approach that might be more promising would likely involve policies alienating the two constituencies they truly prize: conservative voters and corporate donors. [my emphasis in bold]

One could easily make the same judgment is somewhat less categorical terms. The reason that Biden-Harris have a strong chance is the same reason Hillary Clinton did in 2016: that Trump is a malicious character who is obviously unfit for such a responsible job that can affect the lives of so many people in the world.

But Biden-Harris also face the same risk that previously active Democratic voters don't turn out to vote. With the added risk this time that aggressive voter-suppression efforts by the Republican are significantly more intensive than in 2016, which COVID-19 in play as a wild card with hard-to-predict effects on turnout. I'm concerned that the pandemic may limit the traditional kind of get-out-the-vote operations the Democrats need.

In an interview with Jon Wiener in 2018, Michael Moore talked about the Michigan turnout problem in 2016 (Michael Moore: How Democrats Paved the Way to Trump The Nation 09/21/2018):

We all know that more people vote in a general election than in a primary. But the Democratic primary in Flint in 2016 had a turnout much larger than the general a few months later. Nobody has bothered to look at that or ask why. I do, in this film [Fahrenheit 11/9]. And the reason isn’t because people in Flint decided there was no difference between Trump and Hillary. Nobody took that position. It was because the Democrats actively depressed the vote. First, in the primary debate in Flint between Hillary and Bernie, the DNC gave Hillary the questions in advance. When that was revealed a month or two later, the people of Flint, the mothers of the kids poisoned by lead in the water, the people who had stood at the microphone to ask a question that they thought that she was hearing for the first time, when they found out that it was rigged, many people in Flint, and certainly the people that were there at the debate, felt used as props by the Hillary campaign and by the Democratic Party.

Then one month after the debate, President Obama comes to Flint and drinks the water and says the water’s fine. But it wasn’t fine, and everybody knew it was still poisoned, and nobody could understand why he would do this. That was like a knife in the heart to the people of Flint. So on Election Day, the turnout was much lower than it had been in the primary. And Trump carried Michigan—by 10,000 votes. And it’s not just Flint. All over this country people felt that the party of the people has let them down. [my emphasis]

Michael Moore's Rumble talk of today (08/19/2020) on the election, Ep. 110: The Moment of Truth Is Here. But he expresses a partisan intensity that I'm afraid we many not hear from Biden and Harris.

Marcetic recalls a disappointing moment during the Obama Administration:

Unfortunately, the strategy of taking the party’s disaffected sections for granted and courting conservatives didn’t work out in 2016, while the party hectoring its own voters is often a precursor to its electoral defeat. Just look at Biden on the eve of Obama’s 2010 mid-term “shellacking,” admonishing “our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives.” Two months later, the GOP took the House with the biggest win in seven decades and the Democrats lost their Senate supermajority, closing the door on whatever transformational aspirations Obama might have had for the rest of his eight years. [my emphasis]

And he reminds us, "The GOP takes care of its base; the Democratic elite dislikes theirs." (This is a variation on The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010) And Marcetic concludes, "And for all their hopes to the contrary this year, that might still make a difference."

The Kamala Harris pick

Joe Biden has picked California Senator Kamala Harris as his Vice Presidential running mate. Harris is safely establishment, though with a more liberal streak than Biden has shown for most of his career. Progressive hero (and my former Congresswoman) Barbara Lee supported her Presidential bid in the primaries.

Vice Presidential picks generate media interest. Their actual effects on the outcome of the Presidential election is much more dubious. Lyndon Johnson in 1960 was arguably important in attracting Southern voters to the Kennedy ticket during the waning years of the Solid South, i.e., when the South generally voted Democratic in the Presidential elections. The polls in 2008 indicated that Sarah Palin's presence on the Republican ticket actually hurt McCain's Presidential bid. George McGovern's ill-fated initial selection of Stuart Symington as his running mate didn't help his 1972 campaign, but he was facing huge odds in any case.

Harris will be the first black woman on a major party ticket in the US and the first Asian-American. How capable a campaigner she will be in the general election remains to be seen. Ironically, her strongest moment during the primaries was her shot at Joe Biden during a debate over his record on busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. The Vice Presidential nominee is automatically considered a top contender for the top of the party ticket next time around. And there is a good chance that if he wins, Biden will not stand for re-election in 2024.

Obviously, Biden-Harris is a far superior ticket to the disastrous Bunker Boy-Mike Pence one. Trump and Pence have gone a long way in damaging democracy and the rule of law. They've also shown the stunning incompetence in governance and shabby corruption that are also typical features of authoritarian governments. There's no serious doubt that Biden and Harris will do a better job on the COVID-19 crisis and will not display the kind of blundering, incoherence, and shameless bigotry we've had in the Bunker Boy Administration.

One real concern I have about Harris as the VP candidate is that the single most important task for a Biden Administration when it comes to the rule of law will be to hold members of the Trump Administration who committed serious crimes in their official position legally accountable. The Obama-Biden Administration notoriously adopted a look-forward-not-backward position on official crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration, including the torture crimes. As Don Froomkin wrote in 2011 (Is Torture In America’s Future As Well As In Our Country’s Past? Huffington Post 2011):

[Obama] But he has also repeatedly expressed his desire to “look forward instead of looking backward.” As a result, there has yet to be any accountability for the actions of the Bush/Cheney administration. And none appears forthcoming.

And without accountability — without either criminal prosecutions or some sort of official national reckoning of what took place — there’s no reason to think that the next time a perceived emergency comes up, some other president or vice president will not decide to torture again.

The de facto impunity for serious official crimes the Obama-Biden Administration gave to their predecessors was very obviously taken by Trump and the Republican Party as a license to consider themselves above the law and the Constitution. The Republicans are certainly willing to use laws against Democrats; Trump just publicly accused Obama of having committed treason. But for the Republican Party to make partisan prosecutions against Democrats and leftwing protesters while the Democratic Party adopts a policy of refusing to enforce the law against actual Republican violators is not the rule of law.

And Harris' record raises serious doubts about whether Harris is willing to enforce the law against the rich and powerful on an equal basis.

Carla Marinucci reported on charges that Harris was soft on accountability for misconduct by big banks during the mortgage crisis in New book whacks Kamala Harris’ AG record during housing crisis Politico 10/22/2019:

Kamala Harris catapulted to Democratic stardom on a narrative based on her role as California’s attorney general during the housing crisis, when she was an unrelenting adversary of big banks and mortgage lenders, and a champion of consumers.

But a new book by Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter Aaron Glantz challenges that storyline, arguing that Harris not only allowed Steve Mnuchin’s OneWest bank to get away with foreclosing on tens of thousands of state homeowners, but then tried to bury the evidence.

The book, titled “Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall St. Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions of Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream,’’ was published this week by Custom House.

It posits that a group of Wall Street moguls including Trump Cabinet appointees Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, as well as White House insiders like Steve Schwarzman and Tom Barrack, took advantage of “a rigged system” to transfer billions of dollars from individual homeowners into their own pockets during the Great Recession.

Sam Seder interviewed Aaron Glantz on this topic in 2019, Why Didn't Kamala Harris Prosecute Steve Mnuchin? The Majority Report 11/05/2019:

David Dayen wrote about the Mnuchin case in Treasury Nominee Steve Mnuchin's Bank Accused of "Widespread Misconduct" in Leaked Memo The Intercept 01/03/2017.

The PBS Newshour has a sketch of her as the VP pick, Kamala Harris’ path to the Democratic presidential ticket 08/11/2020.

They also include this discussion of how she is likely to play out as the nominee, What Kamala Harris offers the Biden campaign as VP nominee 08/12/2020. This segment strikes me as a notably sympathetic presentation. Gushing, even:

One thing to keep in mind is that Harris' political career has been based in safely Democratic and generally liberal-leaning California. How her pragmatic political approach plays out on a national scene is mostly still to be seen. Her first run for San Francisco District Attorney is worth remembering. Lee Fang covered it in In Her First Race, Kamala Harris Campaigned as Tough on Crime - and Unseated the Country's Most Progressive Prosecutor The Intercept 02/07/2019:

Many in San Francisco view the campaign as a defining moment for Harris, who carefully cultivated a base of support among police officers, domestic violence advocates, wealthy donors, and a diverse range of local officials and community leaders who had bristled at [Terence] Hallinan’s leftist politics and abrasive style.

The 2003 race stands apart from the image she has projected in more recent years. Far from the “smart on crime” mantra she touted in her successful bid to become California’s attorney general or promoting her efforts to hold corporations accountable when she ran for the U.S. Senate, Harris’s first campaign reflected familiar tactics in an era of booming mass incarceration. [my emphasis]

He also reports on a disturbing difference in Harris' approach as San Francisco District Attorney to the problems of people abused by Catholic priests in As San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris's Office Stopped Cooperating with Victims of Catholic Church Child Abuse The Intercept 06/09/2019.

Establishment Democrats are sorely tempted to assume that the current surge in civil rights activism around the issue of wanton police murders of black people will automatically benefit the Democrats. And in 2020, it almost certainly will. However, highly engaged activists are a minority of voters. We saw the Democratic vote drop significantly in 2010 as the presence of an African-American Democrat in the White House energized the Republicans and Obama's studied moderation - including the ridiculous Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission - fell short of the hopeful vision of 2016.

Even more devastating, after eight years of seeing Obama slammed around by the Republicans in Congress with no comparable pushback from the Democrats, low turnout in the key Midwestern swing states among Democratic-leaning African-American voters. Black voters may vote "defensively," as the pundits repeatedly told us in the leadup to the South Carolina Democratic primary this year. But that's not enough if they don't turn out to turn.

Politically, 2020 is a stunningly favorable year for even a Democratic ticket of Status Quo Joe the crime bill guy and Kamala the Cop. But even if Biden wins, not being Donald Trump will just not be enough for the Democratic Party in 2022 and also not in 2024, even if Bunker Boy himself heads the Republican ticket that year.

Doing something meaningful and visible to cut down on arbitrary police murders is one essential thing they need to do to avoid discouraging young voters and African-American voters. Mandatory federal reviews of questionable killings on the part of police is essential. But neither that or anything else is going to be supported by Republicans or the various police lobbies. And that means any meaningful action will require a Biden-Harris Administration to put up a real fight for it. Meaningless gestures like "more funding for bias training" are little more that a declaration of indifference in the current moment.

Making a real fight for improvement on that front will go strongly against the past political practices of both Biden and Harris which they have seen as being succesful for them. I hope the popular pressure will be enough to persuade them to jump that particular shark and take on a new perspective.

What we don't need from her in the campaign or as Vice President are cringe-worthy moments like this one of her giggling weirdly about draconian threats against parents of student with truancy issues. Kamala Harris Laughed About Jailing Parents Of Truant Kids The Rational national 01/31/2019:

Joy Reid gave Harris' selection the kind of glowing treatment we can expect to see her receive during the Presidential campaign on MSNBC, Joe Biden Picks Sen. Kamala Harris As The Running Mate To Defeat A Trump-Pence Ticket 08/12/2020:

Is Biden ahead in the polls because of magical moderation?

[Update:] I did not yet know when I posted this a couple of hours ago that Michael Brooks, one of whose videos is embedded at the end of this post, passed away suddenly yesterday. This is really tragic news. A Variety has an article by Jordan Moreau on his death, Michael Brooks, Political Commentator and Podcast Host, Dies at 37 07/20/2020]

Ezra Klein provides a strange example of Beltway Village worship of "moderation" in How Biden is winning Vox 07/20/2020. Basically, he argues that Biden's current lead in the polls is a total validation of his pitch in the Democratic primaries that the voters are clamoring to Make America Boring Again and definitely to avoid the Democrats doing anything to address the intensity gap between The Democratic Party and the Trumpified but continually radicalizing Republican Party.

He describes what he calls "Biden’s view of the Republican Party":

He sees it not as a monolith but as a coalition. Some members of that coalition love Trump and will grieve his defeat. They’re not going to work with Biden, and he doesn’t expect to work with them. But some Senate Republicans dislike Trump, regret what their party has become, and are looking for redemption. What they need is a Democrat they can work with — a Democrat who doesn’t antagonize their voters and won’t rub their noses in their loss. What they need, Biden thinks, is Biden.

But this isn’t just Biden’s theory of governing. It’s also his theory of the campaign.

But Ezra's doesn't seem to realize that his argument that moderation on Biden's part is the basis of his popularity isn't entirely compatible with his additional observation that Biden's popularity is largely due to the fact that Joe Biden is not Bunker Boy. But, of course, that would also apply to any other Democratic Presidential candidate. He writes:

Trump’s approach to politics and lethal mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic have also given Biden an advantage, in part by neutralizing Trump’s ability to distract the country with feuds and flotsam, and in part by ensuring Democrats are mobilized to vote against Trump no matter what Biden does. Biden can take base mobilization somewhat for granted because Trump will do much of the work for him. “Trump is great at energizing his base,” says political scientist Alan Abramowitz. “But he’s equally good or even better at activating the Democratic base.”

Of all the very, very foolish things Democrats might do, being complacent about turnout would be the most politically irresponsible. It's worth recalling that the Hillary Clinton campaign made a similar complacent assumption. We know how that turned out.

Ezra's analysis of Biden's approach to the Senate filibuster rule plains also scares me (to put it mildly):

My question [in an interview last week] was simple. Democrats don’t have a path to 60 seats in the Senate. So how will Biden keep his agenda from dying at the hands of the filibuster? Would he support filibuster reform, or elimination? Biden’s reply was his campaign in miniature, reflecting both the instincts that have made him successful and the caution that has frustrated many on the left.

“I think it’s going to depend on how obstreperous they” — meaning Republicans — “become, and if they become that way,” he replied. “I have not supported the elimination of the filibuster because it has been used as often to protect rights I care about as the other way around. But you’re going to have to take a look at it.”

That answer, which reflected a genuine shift in Biden’s rhetoric on the issue, made some headlines. But it wasn’t the end of Biden’s argument. “I’ll say something outrageous,” he continued. “I think I have a pretty good record of pulling together Democrats and Republicans.” He went on to say many Senate Republicans will feel “a bit liberated” by Trump’s defeat and may be ready to work with Democrats on issues like infrastructure and racial inequality.

“In my career, I have never expected a foreign leader or a member of Congress to appear in the second-edition Profiles in Courage,” Biden said. “But I’m fairly good at understanding the limitations for a senator or leader and helping them navigate around to what they want to do from what they’re having political trouble doing. I have been successful in helping my Republican friends find rationales to help me get what I’m pushing over the top.” [my emphasis]

I can believe based on his career that Biden may actually believe he can charm Republicans into being reasonable on substantive issues critical to the Democratic Party. But the idea that Republicans will suddenly start actingwith  the "Tip-'n-Ronnie" comaraderie that Beltway pundits still take as their model of nicey-nice bipartisanship is delusional. And when Reagan became President in 2001, there were still substatial remnants of the situation from previous decades in which liberal-conservative divisions on some major actually did cut across party lines.And the Republicans hadn't just had two Presidencies whose seriously lawless action were not just countenanced be actively enabled by the Republicans in Congress.

Here's another examle of what asymmetric partisan polarization looks like.

House Democrats just forcefully responded to the #Portland situation by...

[squints at screen]

...obediently passing Trump's Homeland Security appropriations bill https://t.co/nwm1TnZXGK

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 19, 2020

Meanwhile, Bunker Boy is threatening to veto the Republican Holy of Holies, the Pentagon budget, unless it's changed to reduce the amount of Covid-19 testing available inside the US.

That's asymmetric partisan polarization. And once again, the Republicans get what they won't, the Democrats don't get what they want. Even when, in this case, what the Democrats want is to do something responsible to deal with a pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of Americans just this year.

Michael Brooks has a brief discussion from a left (pro-Bernie) perspective about some elements of Biden's program that are at least positive proposals that the pro-labor left can approve, even though they are insufficient to the challenges and opportunities of a new Democratic Administration. What Biden’s Campaign Is Getting Right (TMBS 148) 07/17/2020: