Our Crazy Politics Carries On

 I suspect that anyone stumbling across this blog either finds posts like this me preaching to the choir or meaningless. Sorry, but part of this blog's purpose is to make a record.

Also, I want to clear out my email. 

It may also be that my sister came down here and had a psychotic break over directions to the new place. She depends on her GPS; only that does not show there is no parking in front of the apartment building. I sent her directions. She said she couldn't look at her GPS and the email at the same time. Which told me she had never looked at the email. I asked if she hadn't printed the email. She doesn't have a printer; she doesn't print out things. I offered her the printer I have, and she turned it down. In the end, I get blamed for her being confused, driving around a two block area of Muncie. I have learned I am no longer the crazy one in the family. In the old days, it would have degenerated into a shouting match. I only shook my head and kept my cool. Then she left. Why mention all this in this post? Because she is a dedicated Trumper. I am thinking now that she has always been more attuned to following authority than I ever was. GPS is that authority for her when she travels. I guess she does not want to consider her faith in this authority — just as she would never reconsider Trump, or conservatism. GPS is her cloud by day and fire by night, guiding her through the desert of America. I think it will be a long time before I invite her down; this time it was on her own initiative.

Losing The Rule Of Law (Sheila Kennedy)

Under the rule of Trump, inevitable conflicts between public safety officials and people with whom they engage become conflicts “between angels and demons.” In Trump’s mind (I use the word “mind” hesitantly), “military police are heroic patriots by virtue of being in his military police.” Criminals are people who anger or cross him, or object to Trump’s will. By definition, they are dangerous insurgents who must be rooted out.

In other words, criminals are whoever Trump says are criminals, including the invented rioters and murderers in his fanciful descriptions of the horrors of life in Blue cities–descriptions so at odds with reality that they confirm his mental derangement.

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It was significant that all 50 respondents faulted Congress for doing little or nothing to fulfill its role of restraining the president–and a majority also faulted the rogue Supreme Court. When checks and balances no longer check and balance, autocracy flourishes. 

It is the rule of law that keeps our economy intact and attractive to foreign investment. You can go into court and enforce your rights to money or the enforcement of contracts, without worrying about the arbitrariness brought about by kleptocracy or autocracy (if the two do not end at the same place). 

Young GOP leaders racist, fascist, anti-Semitic and sexist messages are vile--but perfectly sum up MAGA (The Dean's Report) 

 Politico was able to gain access to a trove of Telegram chats that spanned more than seven months of messages between young GOP leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. These comments were written by Republicans who thought no one but their fellow young GOP leaders would read them. In other words, they were revealing who they really were as opposed to the lie they peddle to the public about not being bigoted and hate filled.

In sum, “the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely.” While no one would be surprised that young MAGA fans were spewing hate, there is something very jarring about seeing these messages in writing complete with the name of the GOP leader who wrote it. While these comments are awful, it’s important that people read them so you can fully grasp the threat we are facing.

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Giunta also revealed to others in the chat his excitement that Orange County Teenage Republican organization in New York were ideologically aligned with the hate being spewed. Giunta wrote about them in glowing terms, “They support slavery and all that shit.”

The people in this chat were not outliers. They perfectly sum up today’s MAGA movement. In fact, Politico reported that many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics—with one serving as a state senator. Add to that, one now works in the Trump administration: Michael Bartels, who serves as a senior adviser in the U.S. Small Business Administration. 

‘No Kings’ Has Republicans in Disarray (Joe Perticone)

“Democrats want to wait for a big rally of a No Kings protest when the bottom line is: Who is running the show in the Senate?” Duffy said. “Chuck Schumer’s not running the show. The No Kings protesters or organizers are running the show.”

The idea that Democrats are waiting to cave on a deal to reopen the government until after the D.C. rally could perhaps make sense if you adopt a squintingly cynical view of politics. Senate Democrats I’ve heard from said that’s nonsense and reiterated that any deal is contingent on health policy concessions combined with good-faith negotiation.

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I spoke with Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of Indivisible, who said, “Go to a No Kings rally. What do you see? You see moms and grandmas and kids and dogs and funny signs and dancing and happy displays of opposition to the regime that are foundationally nonviolent. And on the other end, you’ve got a regime that’s led by a guy who cheered the January 6th insurrection.”

“The real question is like, why? Why is this coming out now? Like, why are they saying it? And I think it’s quite clear: This is an authoritarian regime that is very scared of mass organizing, peaceful protest, and that’s true of any authoritarian regime,” Levin added. “It is the number-one thing they’re concerned about. Because authoritarian regimes are not popular. What Trump is doing is not popular, and he projects strength and is lashing out. And his hope is that people feel alone.”

I did not go to the meeting tonight to prepare for the protest on Saturday. After my sister's visit, I had a slight headache and CC over at her storage bin needing to be retrieved. I will be on the bridge Saturday. If you read this thinking like MAGA thinks of  "No Kings", take a look around here and see what kind of person shows up at a protest nowadays.

Amid backlash, Benioff clarifies his support of National Guard in SF (SFGate)

Benioff told the New York Times that the company was funding hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to patrol the area surrounding the convention. He noted that the city, in his view, doesn’t have enough of a police presence to manage crime during large events, and further suggested that Trump should send in federal help. 

In a sharp departure from his past liberal stances, Benioff told the outlet he “fully” supports the president and thinks the National Guard should be deployed to San Francisco. “We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he said. 

Benioff added he wanted to see a return to heavier law enforcement downtown. “You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he said. “That’s how it used to be.” 

City officials were quick to condemn the comments, with Mayor Daniel Lurie pushing back in an Oct. 12 interview with KTVU-TV. 

“We are doing everything we can to drive crime down, and it’s working. It’s down 30% this year,” the mayor told the outlet. “The good vibes in San Francisco are coming back. … San Franciscans know that San Francisco is on the rise.” 

SF District Attorney Brooke Jenkins sat down with KGO-TV on Oct. 10 to comment. “To invite chaos into our city, no, Mr. Benioff needs to know that’s not the solution,” Jenkins said. “And I want the president to know we don’t want his version of law and order.” 

I keep getting surprised by the thin-skinned stupidity of America's super rich. The man thinks there is not police (meant to protect the public) for his big events (private enterprise seeking profits). In other words, it is not about public safety but private profits.

Another Nobel Prize That Trump Will Never Win: Economics (The New Republic)

No, it’s the awarding of a Nobel Prize in economics to Northwestern’s Joel Mokyr (along with Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France and Peter Howitt of Brown) that’s the real spit in Trump’s eye.

This rebuke may not seem obvious, given that press coverage of the award focuses mostly on Aghion and Howitt’s mathematical models of “creative destruction,” the economic principle Joseph Schumpeter introduced in 1942. Destruction is one of the Trump administration’s favorite pursuits as it targets government agencies and rival power centers.

But let’s clear up a misconception. Silicon Valley egomaniacs and, I suspect, Project 2025 architect and White House budget chief Russell Vought wrongly think Schumpeter intended to praise destruction by calling it “creative.” Not true! As I explained in my 2023 review of Samuel W. Franklin’s underappreciated book The Cult of Creativity, “creative” was not, at the time Schumpeter wrote, a term of praise. It was, rather, a neutral adjective that meant “tending to create.” An act of disruption is no work of art.

In any case, Mokyr’s work runs in a different direction. Mokyr is interested not in what must be destroyed for economic growth to flourish, but rather in what must be present. Very high on Mokyr’s list is that MAGA bête noire the university.

 A bit of a rebuke to Indiana, too. Our culture here denigrating education, especially higher education, as it does with the result of low end jobs for the majority.

The Mainstream Media Is Moving Right. Here’s What We Can Do About It. (The New Republic)

A growing number of Americans get their news from social media. The audiences for traditional network news programs have long been stagnant; same for the Post. So the issue is not that the Post or CBS will deliver pro-Trump news that reaches a wide swath of Americans and makes the president dramatically more popular. Those outlets just don’t have that kind of reach. I am not sure the entire mainstream media does anymore. 

Instead, what we should be worried about is the mainstream media’s agenda-setting and framing powers. Outlets such as ABC, CNN, and NPR often all decide something is a big deal, with nearly every outlet covering it extensively, resulting in that issue or event showing up in everyone’s social media feeds and becoming a national conversation. The media made Trump separating children from their parents at the border the issue in June 2018; same for the killing of George Floyd two years later. That’s agenda setting. Framing is the tone and tenor of that coverage. For example, in 2017, the media rightly cast Trump’s remarks after a white nationalist group marched in Charlottesville as crazy and unbecoming of a president. In Trump’s first term, mainstream media outlets often made Trump’s actions the central focus of their coverage and covered them very negatively, combining the agenda-setting and framing powers into a force against the president. 

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So what can be done? First of all, average voters, activists, elites, and left-leaning politicians need to adjust their media consumption. CBS News and the Post, in the midst of Trump attempting to become America’s dictator, have intentionally shifted their coverage and leadership to be more favorable to him. Move on from those outlets. You can keep subscribing to the Post or watching 60 Minutes for the occasional big investigative story they break. But outlets such as The Guardian provide comprehensive daily news coverage that isn’t trying to appease Trump. Add those to your daily or hourly news consumption, and drop outlets or at least sections (Post Opinions) that aren’t fully committed to defending democracy. 

There is nothing new about the mainstream media either not forcefully defending democracy or undermining it. Because of Watergate and other instances in recent American history, we think of the mainstream media as a democratizing force in the United States and a check on autocratic politicians. But as Kathy Roberts Forde, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explained in a recent Right Now episode, news organizations have been part of “antidemocratic projects” throughout American history, mostly notably Southern newspapers that defended Jim Crow segregation. We can have a successful pro-democracy movement in America without CBS News—and it appears we must. 

Second, we need a change within the media itself. Many left-leaning outlets have traditionally offered alternative framing of the news, but not an alternative agenda. So those outlets cover the same stories as the mainstream media but with a more liberal perspective. That’s not the right approach for today. The mainstream media is failing (intentionally) in what stories it chooses to cover and how much: i.e., agenda setting. They are refusing to offer coverage (or the volume needed) on stories that make Trump look like the authoritarian that he is. So liberal outlets should not just offer opinion pieces and analysis of the events that traditional news outlets are covering but should also have their own agenda for which events are worth covering and how much. Pro-democracy news organizations should be ones that editorialize more in favor of democracy; they should also be ones that cover threats to democracy more rigorously than other outlets. 

Pete Hegseth changes Pentagon press policy: Five takeaways (The Hill) 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that reporters agree by 5 p.m. Tuesday to a new policy, under which they would need to pledge to not obtain or use any unauthorized material, even if the information is unclassified — or hand over their press badges in the next 24 hours. Media outlets say this is a violation of their First Amendment rights, and nearly every news outlet has refused to sign.

Only one news outlet has signed on to Hegseth’s media loyalty oath — even Trump-favoring Fox News is boycotting it (The Independent)

In fact, amid the continued backlash against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new rules – which the Pentagon Press Association called an “unprecedented message of intimidation” – only one media organization has agreed to sign the letter: Trump-boosting channel One America News.

On Tuesday afternoon, Fox News — the network where Hegseth once served as a weekend morning host — joined other broadcast television news networks in rejecting the Pentagon’s press prohibitions, stating that the new rules were unprecedented and threatened journalistic values.

This Pentagon idea is very bad. Probably worse than what has been recognized. I have not heard if CBS is going to blockade the ban. WAPO is. So, I wrote my a friend of mine.

My friend, KH, wrote me the following:

CBS wouldn't sign. A lot of reporters are turning in their credentials- which might have the same affect.

What the First Amendment doesn’t protect when it comes to professors speaking out on politics (The Conversation) - is something we should all be giving more attention.

But the First Amendment only applies to the government – which includes public colleges and universities – and not private institutions or companies, including private colleges and universities.

New student loan limits could change who gets to become a professor, doctor or lawyer (The Conversation) is — to me — late to the game. I realized decades ago that student loans were going to channel lawyers into firms, not solo practice, in order for the lawyers to pay their student loan payments. Even firms in smaller cities may not be able to pay enough for newly-minted lawyers. That means an ever older and thinning population of lawyers in areas away from Indiana's big firms, or even the bigger firms. I see this happening in Anderson right now. Also, forget newly-minted lawyers from joining public service firms, such as Indiana's ACLU.

Professional students already graduate with a lot of debt – often far more than the new loan caps will allow. In 2020, more than a quarter of graduating medical students and nearly 60% of graduating dental students had borrowed more than the new limits would allow, author Mark Kantrowitz, who is an expert on student loans, has found. In 2024, nearly a quarter of medical school graduates left school with more than $300,000 in debt.

The new borrowing limits will likely hit minority students especially hard. While about 61% of all graduate students take out student loans, the share is much higher for Black students compared with white students, 48% to 17%.

While some might be able to supplement their federal loans with private ones – which tend to have much worse terms for borrowers – I fear that many others will be forced to end their educations prematurely.

That, in turn, would worsen the already severe shortage of doctors serving the Black community. As pointed out in a 2023 report of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the shortage of Black primary care physicians is directly related to overall lower population health and ultimately higher mortality rates within the Black community. As of 2023, fewer than 6% of U.S. doctors were Black, versus 14.4% of the population.

Research has suggested that student loan relief would help diversify the medical workforce. Adding new restrictions would likely have the opposite effect, making the profession more homogeneous and significantly undermining Black public health.

Or consider attorneys. Law school costs have risen more than 600% over the past two decades. The average 2020 law school graduate left with $165,000 in student debt.

Black law students face unique challenges, graduating with approximately 8% more debt on average than white students and facing significant wage disparities once they enter the legal workforce. Making it harder for Black students to afford law school could reduce the number of Black attorneys, which has held steady at about 5% of active lawyers over the past 10 years.

Reducing access to federal student loans risks disproportionately affecting women, since they hold roughly two-thirds of all student debt.

There is more than one road to serfdom, Doctor Hayek.

Back to Trump and The Bulwark for my last entry in this post: Is He Lying or Crazy? Does It Matter?.

But there’s more than just a simple double standard going on here. The post is the core of how Trump sees the world: Trump people and Biden people, heroes and villains, patriots and terrorists, angels and demons. All political actors are sorted into two great camps, and what matters aren’t any of the actual relevant facts about their behavior, or their motivations, or their leadership. All that matters is whether Trump perceives them as loyal allies or outside agitators. He may have been president on January 6th. But an FBI that wasn’t jumping to do his will at that given moment was a Biden FBI, in his brain.

It isn’t just the tweets—Trump now runs the whole government this way. It’s the belief that underlies freezing half-finished green energy infrastructure projects, or purging law enforcement agents because they happened to work on January 6th cases, or carrying out firings at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency because he’s still mad at Chris Krebs. These people are the demons—they’re Biden-coded—so all you can do is root them out. On the flip side, there’s the pledges he has made to police officers not to prosecute abusive behavior, his firings of a host of internal government watchdogs, his dead-lettering of the Hatch Act and of corruption laws. All these things only exist to constrain him and his allies—the good guys.

During the Biden days, questions about the president’s awareness and fitness for office tended to boil down to whether it was actually him calling the shots. Was the president being shepherded through the motions of basic sane governance by the people around him?

Nobody’s asking that question today. At any given moment, Trump may be lying or he may be hallucinating. But he’s clearly calling the shots. The task for the rest of the apparatus of government is to get to work turning that lie or hallucination into reality. When he type-shouts “DO SOMETHING!!!” there’s no question: They do.

Mainstream media shies from reporting on Trump's mental aberrations, or his governing by temper tantrum.

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