Kevin Drum

Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times, "Cheer Up, Liberals. You Have the America You Wanted." If he had limited himself to noting that American political culture—represented by feminism, gay rights, civil rights, etc.—has largely moved in a liberal direction over the past half century, I'd nod and let it go. Instead he went quite a bit further:

I’m here as an agent of good cheer, asking liberals to step back, take a longer view and recognize everything they’ve won...while what once seemed like powerful right-of-center ideologies have gone down to defeat.... hawkish interventionism... so-called values voters... the conservative ideology of welfare-state retrenchment.

....So not one but three right-of-center ideologies — crusading neoconservatism, moralizing religious conservatism, Tea Party government-cutting — have fallen to progressivism’s advance.

None of these is really true. The war party on the right may be temporarily on the wane, but not because it's truly lost its lust for war. It's partly because the country is tired of war at the moment—a common occurrence in American history—but mostly because there's no particular war they want to fight right now. I guarantee you this, though: If something happens, all it will take is the usual marketing campaign from the hawks to gin up another round of war fever among the public. This is also a common occurrence in American history. War is always over until it's not. Progressives have won nothing on this front.

Moralizing religious conservatism, likewise, is alive and well. It's taken its lumps, but Donald Trump resuscitated it nicely and evangelical Christians now act as shock troops for the farthest right-wing faction of the Republican Party. They're the ones who believe America is about to disintegrate because liberals—who loathe traditional individual freedom—are deliberately tearing it down. It's this kind of paranoid certainty that produces things like the January 6 insurrection. The US may be getting steadily more secular, but the conservative religious coalition left behind is only getting more desperate as it becomes smaller.

As for Tea Party budget cutting—well, that's been part of the Republican brand forever, and the mere possibility of Democrats passing a largeish spending bill in the wake of a pandemic hardly means it's going away. All we need is for one Democratic senator to slip on a banana peel and we'll find out just how eager for battle the anti-welfare state faction remains.

Now, it's true that liberals have won their share of battles. In recent years alone, you can count Obamacare, gay marriage, and lots of stimulus spending among its victories. On the other hand, Republicans have won additional tax cuts for the rich, lots of freshly minted conservative judges, and the imminent prospect of striking down Roe v. Wade. They haven't done too badly either.

It should be entirely unexceptional to say this. Since 2000, voters have opted for 12 years of Republican presidents and 12 years of Democratic presidents. The Senate is currently split 50-50, and the House is on a knife edge. The federal judiciary outside the Supreme Court is almost exactly 50% Democratic and 50% Republican. Presidents are routinely elected by margins of a few percentage points.

We have been a 50-50 nation since at least 2000, and we still are. Conservatives have hung on to their half thanks to Fox News giving them a steady boost of a few percentage points based on fearmongering and white backlash. At the same time, liberals haven't really tried to build a bigger majority, instead experimenting with pushing the progressive envelope as far as they can without falling too far below 50%.

Eventually something will give and one side or the other will win a solid advantage for a decade or two. Or so I assume. But when?

Friday was dex night, so I drove up to LA and puttered around a bit, scouting a few things for future reference and experimenting with the drone, which I managed to crash into a tree. Among other things, I had planned to take some pictures of the Bradbury Building, a beautiful, restored Victorian office building in downtown LA. Unfortunately, it turned out to be closed until further notice, something its website conspicuously failed to mention.

But that was OK, because it gave me time to go outside and take pictures of the 5th annual women's march, which was focused on abortion this year. At a very rough guess, I'd say the crowd numbered around 3-4,000. As usual, it started at Pershing Square and made its way up Hill Street:

Then they made the turn onto 1st Street and then to Broadway, dogs leading the way:

By 11:00 everyone had gathered at Grand Park:

There was profanity:

And lots of signs in front of City Hall as the crowd waited for the speakers:

After a short introduction, Gloria Allred led off the speakers, later accompanied by Paxton Smith, the Texas teenager who switched her graduation speech and spoke about abortion after Gov. Greg Abbot signed a bill that effectively banned abortion in the state:

At that point, my time was up and I had to leave for other scheduled activities. Still, you're getting more here than you would from the LA Times, which ran a short wire report and a single Getty photo, even though the march took place in their own city. I guess they're bored with this stuff.

There are a surprising number of people who still don't know that a proper check of the 2000 presidential vote in Florida was conducted and concluded that Al Gore won. Here is CNN's summary:

A national media consortium — composed of CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Palm Beach Post — paid for the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, at the University of Chicago to review 175,010 disputed Florida ballots — 61,190 undervotes and 113,820 overvotes.

How it worked: NORC, a highly respected data and research organization, conducted the counting of ballots....Full statewide review

• Standard for acceptable marks set by each county in their recount: Gore wins by 171
• Fully punched chads and limited marks on optical scan ballots: Gore wins by 115
• Any dimple or optical mark: Gore wins by 107
• One corner of chad detached or any optical mark: Gore wins by 60

None of this means that Gore would ever have won the actual count in Florida. He never asked for a statewide recount, and those 113,820 overvotes never would have been tallied. George Bush legitimately won by the standard in use at the time.

Nevertheless, it's still a fact that a full count of all the votes shows that more Floridians voted for Gore than Bush. Just because Donald Trump is delusional doesn't mean that everyone else is too.

Hey look! It's Hopper with no cone. She is delighted with this state of affairs, and so far she's been very good about not licking her wound. All that's left now is for her shaved tail to regrow all its fur.

As you may recall from the dim recesses of your memory, a couple of years ago Donald Trump's attorney general appointed a US attorney to investigate ties between Trump and Russia. That is to say, he appointed someone to investigate Democratic lies about ties between Trump and Russia and the FBI's collusion in said lies, something that Trump has always been sort of maniacal about.

Anyway, the chosen investigator was John Durham, US Attorney for Connecticut, who has been diligently beavering away on this task. But what was Durham up to? Was he a serious investigator? Or a right-wing nutball determined to dig up dirt on Democrats?

This has come into sharper focus recently with Durham's indictment of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who passed on leads to an FBI official in 2016. Bizarrely, the indictment accuses Sussmann of lying about his ties to Hillary Clinton's campaign even though (a) the FBI official in question repeatedly testified that he had no recollection of whether Sussmann mentioned his ties to Clinton, (b) it doesn't really matter if Sussmann was doing work for the Clinton campaign, and (c) this obviously has no bearing on whether the FBI itself did anything wrong.

So why did Durham even bother with this? The answer appears to be that he had some things he wanted to get off his chest, and he needed an indictment to do it. Here is Jon Chait:

The perjury charge is merely the window dressing in the indictment. The meat of it — the part that has Trump defenders excited — is a narrative laid out by Durham attempting to paint Sussmann and the experts he worked with as liars who smeared Trump. That narrative part does not describe actual crimes, of course. Prosecutors can write whatever they want in their indictment. This one is like a Sean Hannity monologue wrapped around a parking ticket.

But wait. There's more. Here is Ankush Khardori in Politico:

All of this has had the distinct appearance of an effort on the part of Durham’s team to scapegoat Sussmann for potentially unseemly conduct on the part of the Clinton campaign that they are not prepared to criminally charge....It remains to be seen whether the latest subpoena to Sussmann’s firm will actually turn anything up, but at least from the outside, the effort looks suspiciously like a proverbial fishing expedition. These concerns were further compounded on Thursday, when both CNN and the New York Times published stories that suggested that allegations in the Sussmann indictment were based on a highly selective — and arguably disingenuous — characterization of relevant emails.

....In the two-and-a-half years and millions of dollars spent since his investigation began, Durham has yet to identify any misconduct of real consequence within the FBI. We find ourselves in the surreal position of having an ongoing criminal investigation concerning the 2016 election, while, at the same time, the DOJ under Garland appears to be sitting idly by as information continues to accumulate that provides further reason to investigate the conduct of Trump himself in the wake of the 2020 election.

It's pretty obvious what we have here: Ken Starr 2.0. There's obviously nothing of significance going on, but Durham, like Starr, figures that if he just keeps digging and digging maybe something will come up.

President Biden is obviously in a difficult situation. If he tells Durham to wrap things up then it looks like he's protecting his fellow Democrats. But if he does nothing, Durham will just go on and on and on—probably leaking juicy tidbits to Republican hacks along the way. What to do?

I dunno. But it's pretty obvious that Durham is bound and determined to find something—anything—that will make Fox News happy. The endless investigation has become a Republican specialty, and now we have their latest version. Welcome to hell.

Needless to say, many people disagree with me about whether the Democratic Party is blowing it by moving too far to the left. And maybe they're right! Personally, I'd be thrilled to see the country become more of a European-style social democracy.

But I don't represent the median voter or anything close to it. The median voter, for better or worse, worries about the deficit, is troubled about wokeness, and doesn't like the idea of just giving money away to everyone.

And speaking of giving money away, that's what Joe Biden's expanded child tax credit does: it gives families $3,600 per year for every child under the age of 6 and $3,000 per year for older children. It comes in the form of a monthly check, and it doesn't matter if you're working or even looking for a job. If you have kids, you get it.

This has been billed as the "largest anti-poverty measure ever," and perhaps it is. But consider for a minute how this comes across to many people. Here's the attack ad Republicans are likely to run:

OPEN ON SCENE OF WORKERS AT A FOOD BANK:

VO: Americans have always been generous to folks who are down on their luck.

RAPID MONTAGE OF ASSISTANCE TO THE LESS FORTUNATE:

Healthcare for kids.

Housing for the homeless.

Food and money for those out of work.

CUT TO BW FOOTAGE OF WHITE MOTHER IN FRONT OF MOBILE HOME AND HER FOUR SCROUNGY KIDS RUNNING AROUND:

But that's not enough for the militant "progressives" who run the Democratic Party these days. Nothing is ever enough for them. Last year they passed the biggest handout in American history.

They call it a "child tax credit," but not a single penny of it goes to kids. It goes to their parents, who get it whether they feel like working or not.

DOLLY IN ON MOTHER:

For her it means $13,000 a year in cash, no strings attached.

CUT TO MOTHER OPENING ENVELOPE WITH CHECK INSIDE:

They already get Medicaid. And food stamps. And welfare. Now Democrats are handing them even more. In cash. What do you think they'll spend it on?

CUT TO WHITE MAN IN HARD HAT WIPING BROW AT END OF DAY:

You work hard for your money. Is this how you want your tax dollars spent?

Paid for by Citizens for Common Sense.

Now, this is mostly just a standard anti-welfare ad. Republicans have been running stuff like this forever. So maybe it doesn't matter much what Democrats do.

Still, the Biden CTC is different. The very things that progressives like about it—it's cash, and everyone gets it, no questions asked—are precisely the things that moderates are most afraid of: It costs hundred of billions of dollars; it goes to the "undeserving" poor; and they figure it probably gets spent on booze and partying.

Again: I get that anti-welfare rhetoric is SOP for Republicans. But the Biden CTC really is designed like a cruise missile to hit all the things that moderates and conservatives hate the most about welfare programs. It will not help Democrats make inroads among swing voters who would otherwise be receptive to ditching the party of Donald Trump.

From Li Zhou at Vox:

For years, progressives have floated the idea of acting as a bloc and using their power to shape the Democratic agenda, a tactic levied by several of the most influential congressional caucuses.

On Thursday, they finally did: Progressives stood by a threat they issued this summer, when they promised to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill if it was considered in the House without a concurrent vote on a much larger reconciliation bill.

....This move marks a huge shift in the way the CPC has used its power and what it has asked of its members. Prominent progressives have long argued that if even a subset of the caucus stayed united, it could influence major legislation and make ambitious policy demands — modeling themselves after methods used by groups such as the conservative Freedom Caucus and the moderate Blue Dog Coalition.

Imagine my excitement: Yet another intractable caucus more interested in playing to the Twitter crowd than actually legislating. This hasn't worked out very well for Republicans, but at least they can just shrug if they end up passing nothing. It will work out even worse for us Democrats, who will be utterly defeated if we end up passing nothing.

Now, it's frequently the case that just as the shouting reaches a peak, suddenly everyone comes to an agreement and a compromise package gets passed. Maybe that will happen this time. We can hope.

More generally, though, it kills me to see the opportunity that we're passing up. With Trumpism taking over the entire conservative movement, this is an ideal time for Democrats to present themselves as the only sane alternative and build an unbeatable coalition of centrists and progressives. But the only way to do that is to appeal to purple districts and states, and that means moving toward the center. Not a lot, but at least a little bit. Enough to seem non-scary to middle-of-the-road voters in places like Iowa and Ohio, anyway.

Instead we're doing just the opposite, insisting that these voters will love us if we adopt the Bernie agenda lock, stock, and barrel. I don't understand why even delusional progressives would believe this, but I can only assume it's because they live in a bubble and have never actually met a moderate voter from Iowa or Ohio.

But maybe I'm wrong. I sure hope so. Because if I'm right we're blowing the chance of a generation.

Today is opening day for the David Geffen Theater, designed by Renzo Piano for the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. It's popularly known as the Death Star, but Piano gamely insists it's more like a soap bubble or a magic lantern or a flying vessel—and perhaps it is if you view it from above. But if you view it from ground level, as we do in real life, it looks like this:

Unfortunately, what it reminds me of is this:

For some reason, comic book characters with visible brains always seem to be villains. That's in the DC Universe, anyway. Maybe things are different in the MCU?

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is fired up with the idea of funding his city via cryptocurrency:

The lofty idea is the byproduct of a cooperation with CityCoins, a nonprofit that allows people to hold and trade cryptocurrency representing a stake in a municipality. By running software on their personal computers, CityCoins’ users mint new tokens and earn a percentage of the cryptocurrency they create. A computer program automatically allocates 30 percent of the currency to a select city, while miners keep the other 70 percent.

Since the nonprofit unveiled “MiamiCoin” in August, it has sent about $7.1 million to Miami....“When you think about the possibility of being able to run a government without the citizens having to pay taxes. That’s incredible,” Suarez said, adding that the partnership creates a “counternarrative” to the idea that city programs require raising taxes or “private sector philanthropy.”

Incredible indeed.

To be clear, MiamiCoins don't actually represent a share of Miami. They merely have Miami in their name. The city of Miami makes money only if fans of the city buy MiamiCoins and then CityCoins turns over a share of the purchases. Plus, of course, there's the usual future jackpot of holding onto their MiamiCoins and selling them for billions—maybe trillions!—once they skyrocket in value. Who needs taxes anymore?

The best you can say about this idiotic scheme is that it seems to be risk-free for Miami. If they get some money, great. If they don't, no harm done. Unless—

Well, unless they get so enthused that Miami's financial wizards decide to start playing games, much as my home of Orange County did in the '90s. That would be bad.

The best thing that could happen to Miami right now is for CityCoins to decline and die quickly. Miami will have its $7 million and will no longer have to fight the urge to do anything stupid. We can hope.

POSTSCRIPT: Feel free to come up with worst-case scenarios. Here's mine: MiamiCoins become the currency of choice for organized crime and drug smugglers and Miami gets rich. But only because it's literally being funded by organized crime and drug smugglers. Every time the feds come in and announce a bust, municipal revenues crater. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

Enough of this drone nonsense. Let's return to regular photography.

This is a picture of the Trajan Market in Rome. Unlike Americans—the ones here in Southern California, anyway—the good folks in Rome light up their monuments handsomely at night. This may or may not be a frugal policy, but it's certainly great for insomniac photographers.