Cats, charts, and politics
Hilbert has had enough. After three weeks of being bumped from Friday catblogging by the drama queen cone kitty he demanded his turn in the spotlight. Besides, the vet promised that the cone was coming off tomorrow, which means that Hopper has only a few more hours of sympathy left. So here is Hilbert, demonstrating who's really the cutest cat around.
To refresh your memory, here is the list of major items in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill:
Since Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are demanding that the cost of the bill be reduced, much of the conversation has been around which items to keep and which to abandon. To my dismay, but not to my surprise, my #1 item appears to be on no one's keeper list.
The reason for this is obvious but rarely discussed: Democrats are so committed to helping the poor that they ignore practically everyone else. The increased Obamacare subsidies would primarily help the middle class, which means they have very little support compared to other items on the list.
This is admirable, but it can also become self-defeating. Over the past few decades, the only help the middle class has gotten from anyone has been in the form of tax cuts from Republicans. That hasn't benefited the middle class a lot, but it's better than nothing—which is roughly what they've gotten from Democrats.
Democrats desperately need to address this. They spend a lot of time scratching their chins and wondering why the white working/middle class doesn't vote for them, and inevitably they decide that it's all about racism or religion. And some of it is. Somehow, though, Democrats never manage to acknowledge that they do virtually nothing to help middle-class voters. They're keen on helping the poor; and the disabled; and the elderly; and the marginalized—but not the broad middle class. After all, "they should quit griping, they're still better off than the poor."
This is a recipe for electoral disaster, which is pretty much what's happened. Democrats have abandoned the middle class and then seem perplexed when the middle class abandons them. The middle class deserves better, something that Democrats used to know. They need to relearn it.
Robert Kagan writes in the Washington Post that 2024 is shaping up to be the mother of all constitutional crises:
First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024....Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary....The amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office.
....The stage is thus being set for chaos....Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian.
Meanwhile, Rick Hasen, a law professor and election expert at UC Irvine, says much the same thing:
The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules. The potential mechanisms by which election losers may be declared election winners are: usurpation of voter choices for President by state legislatures purporting to exercise constitutional authority to do so, possibly blessed by a partisan-divided Supreme Court and acquiesced to by Republicans in Congress; fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by law- or norm-breaking election officials; and violent or disruptive private action that prevents voting, interferes with the counting of votes, or interrupts the assumption of power by the actual winning candidate.
How serious is this threat? I don't know, but Hasen is pretty level headed and he says he's scared shitless.
How can we avoid this? The only real answer is to pass federal legislation that sets rules for counting votes. Democrats have such legislation written and ready to go. However, it can't be passed via reconciliation and Republicans will filibuster it, so it requires 60 votes to pass. The only way it will become law is if Democrats kill the filibuster and then pass it with 51 votes.
Will they do it? It seems unlikely at the moment, but if they don't they can hardly claim to be taken by surprise in 2024 if Trump and the Republican Party do exactly what they're saying they'll do and steal the election in broad daylight.
Standing before a foil-wrapped, fire-proofed monument in Sequoia National Park amid a haze of wildfire smoke, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed a $15 billion climate package for California, the largest such investment in state history.
....Big-ticket items in the package include $5.2 billion for drought response and water resilience; $3.7 billion for issues like extreme heat and sea level rise; $3.9 billion for electric vehicle investment and infrastructure; $1.5 billion for wildfire response and forest resilience, and $1.1 billion for sustainable agriculture.
This makes sense. Fighting climate change is all very well—and California has done plenty of this—but the fact is that there's nothing you can do at the state level that has more than a minuscule effect. Hell, even at a national level it's hard to have much effect on a global problem like climate change.
So it makes sense to assume that temperatures are going to keep increasing and something needs to be done about it. That can be done at a state level, and includes measures to adapt to and protect from higher temperatures. It's not ideal, of course, but it's pragmatic to assume the worst and do what you can to deal with it.
This is your periodic reminder that America's political problems are largely the fault of Fox News. The rage and fear that are the hallmarks of contemporary politics are rooted almost entirely in the rise of Fox News, which needs to be buried in the ash heap of history, where it belongs.
In the meantime, you should shun anyone who works for Fox News or appears as a guest on their shows. I don't care what they do, they are enabling an organization run by rich foreigners whose sole ambition is to wreck the United States in return for money. You should no more treat Fox employees as innocent bystanders than you would treat members of the CSA as ordinary loyal Americans. There are plenty of other jobs available that don't require you to be complicit in a predatory scheme to destroy the country.
Here it is: the third and last of my mystery wildflowers. It looks fairly ordinary, but for some reason I was never quite able to match it up with anything in my Orange County wildflower book. What does the hive mind think of this?
Aaron Blake asks an obvious question today: Why are Republicans starting up yet another debt ceiling battle? Don't they know they always lose them?
The answer is equally obvious: Of course they know. But it doesn't seem to hurt them at the polls, while it does create a sense of crisis and chaos that gets in the way of Democrats getting anything done. It's a pretty understandable strategy for a minority party trying to put some sand in the gears of the opposition.
Republicans will cave in eventually, and nobody should be shocked when they do. After all, the whole thing is laughable. During past debt ceiling battles, people like me would earnestly break down the federal budget and announce that if the debt ceiling isn't raised it would require us to shut down blah blah blah lots of stuff.
This time there's no point to this exercise because our current budget deficit is so enormous. If we breached the debt ceiling and had to cut back spending to match incoming revenue, it would mean literally shutting down every single function of government, both domestic and defense, and whacking a trillion dollars or so from Medicare and Social Security. No one is going to do that.
But in the meantime it will make Democrats squirm. That's all this is about.
I call this "Moon and Mass: A Reverie on the Liminal in an Era of False Certainties." Signed prints suitable for framing are available on application to my agent.
A leading asthma patient group has issued a warning against a coronavirus treatment circulating on social media that is leading some people to post videos of themselves breathing in hydrogen peroxide through a nebulizer....“DO NOT put hydrogen peroxide into your nebulizer and breathe it in. This is dangerous!” wrote the foundation in a brief blog post.
Where does this shit come from? Seriously, who is it that makes up this random stuff? And what accounts for which weird treatments catch on and which ones don't?
What's next? Laetril?
States I have never visited:
I'm planning to cross Louisiana off the list later this year. Maybe I'll pop over to Mississippi while I'm there. Vermont and Alaska are both pretty, so they could be targets of photography expeditions someday.
But what about North Dakota? What excuse will I ever have for visiting Fargo?