MTG Out, Trump Kisses Up to Mamdani; Indiana Republicans Swatted, Fixing Our Problems

 Running around this morning reading about politics for no good reason other than hoping the country does not go down the tubes.

Where I first heard the news:

Stephanie Ruhle - MTG & Trump meets Mamdani

I find it more interesting that she doesn't want to defend Trump in an impeachment proceeding. That seems like twisting a knife in the back.

'Maybe It's Time to Pick a Fucking Side,' Says Murphy After Trump Calls for Execution of Lawmakers (Common Dreams)

Opinion | Trump’s Latest Epstein Gambit (Common Dreams) - everyone seems to agree that Trump will release nothing of substance.

Trump offers Zohran Mamdani nothing but praise after their first meeting (NBC News)

“I met with a man who’s a very rational person,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office following the private Friday afternoon meeting. “I met with a man who ... really wants to see New York be great again.”

“I’ll really be cheering for him,” Trump added.

Standing alongside the president, Mamdani described the meeting as “productive” and “focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers.”

When asked by a reporter, Trump even said he would be comfortable living in New York City with Mamdani as mayor, saying they had more in common than he had expected.

How the redistricting fight has scrambled dozens of midterm campaigns across the country

In Indiana, the lack of Republican support for a redistricting effort there has led to Trump issuing broadsides at GOP leaders in the state, accusing them of “depriving Republicans of a Majority in the House, A VERY BIG DEAL,” and saying he’d support primary challenges against them. One Republican legislative leader was the victim of a swatting incident at his home hours later.

Bill Maher being cranky about woke, but under it all there is a ray of good sense; we get nothing by being sanctimonious prigs:

 King Donald, JD, and the Silicon barons (The Article)

The unaccountable barons of Silicon Valley, the main hub of AI, are, along with Trump, the main protagonists in the compelling story of democracies entering a new epoch.  How the political and the socio-economic are put together, combining to create a new political economy, is the $64 trillion question. The Greek economist and former politician Yanis Yaroufaxis in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Penguin 2024), takes an entertaining crack at explaining how the tech giants make a fortune out of our addiction to small bright screens with their pictures and information, hoovering up masses of data in order to influence our behaviour.  It is a prodigious and worrying development.

Hybrid cars run on petrol and electricity.   In the US, political life runs on money and social media. The tech oligarchy offers both of them in exchange for proximity to and influence over government.  This relationship is analysed in BBC 1’s  November 3rd Panorama programme, “Trump & The Tech Titans”, revealing the malign consequences of the US Supreme Court’s 5/4 ruling in the crucial 2014 case, McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission.  The five Supreme Court judges declared unconstitutional 1971 legislation which had capped over two years political donations towards federal electoral campaigning, “the aggregate contribution limits”.  The issue was deemed to be one of freedom of speech, bearing no negative impacts on government and offering no opening for corruption.  The case cleared the way for floods of corporate and private money to enter and shape American politics.

BBC Panorama documented how the extraordinary wealth of the tech titans had been the lubricant for their entering the circles of power.   Their wealth is unprecedented: Elon Musk is worth $497 billion; Larry Ellison, who owns Tik Tok, CBS and CNN, $320 billion; and Peter Thiel, around 100th in the global wealth table at $23 billion, is a founder of Paypal and Palantir.  All are donors to the Republican party and are close to the Trump administration.

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What the Panorama programme intimated, though never came right out and said, is that we should be worrying more about Vance than about Trump.  The tech barons – and the Republican Party — may well feel their money, influence and future are better invested in Vance than in an aging Trump. For Trump to run in 2028, he would need  to tear up the clear constitutional doctrine, enshrined in the 22nd Amendment, that no President can serve more than two terms.

Since before 2016 when he was denigrating Trump, Vance has made a 180 degree turn, and now holds to the whole of Trump’s extreme right-wing agenda. He could  even do another 180 degree turn. Vance and the power of his backers — yes, power not “agency” — would mean relatively uncontrolled development of AI.   He could also normalise fascist-leaning populism as the MAGA masses tire of Trump.  JD Vance is a clear and future danger to democracy. 

 Contributor: Trump's 'industrial policy' is just bad economics (Los Angeles Times)

The problem isn’t that industrial policy has been done badly. It’s just bad economics.

Dreams of reviving manufacturing jobs face the reality that modern manufacturing is capital-intensive and largely automated. Even if subsidies or government loan guarantees spur a factory boom — and history suggests otherwise — it won’t bring back 1950s-style armies of industrial workers unless we somehow outlaw productivity. Today’s factories run on robots and engineers.

Nor will tariffs bring a manufacturing revival. Taxing inputs and components only raises costs, weakens U.S. competitiveness and ultimately punishes the firms protectionists claim to support. True American industrial strength rests on productivity, innovation, competition and access to global supply chains, not on coddling producers behind walls of higher prices.

Mazzucato and her ideological opposites commit the same error. They imagine a politics-free technocracy that can “direct” the economy. In the real world, politics always dominate economics. Subsidies and tariffs are never tools of neutral expertise; they are invitations to lobby. Every “strategic investment” quickly becomes a political IOU.

Biden’s programs came loaded with child-care mandates, union preferences and “Buy American” rules. Trump’s industrial interventions are indeed erratic, but the notion that his protectionism would work if wrapped in a more “mission-oriented” narrative is even sillier. Industrial policy doesn’t fail because it’s chaotic, it fails because it’s political, and human politicians are incapable of the precision markets achieve every day.

After conducting a sweeping review of five decades of U.S. industrial policy, Economists Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Euijin Jung’s conclusion was unambiguous: Subsidies and trade protections for individual firms have been politically irresistible but economically ruinous. Government protection delays economic adjustments; innovation succeeds. In the rare cases when industrial policy showed positive results, the government limited itself to supporting open, competitive research and innovation — programs like DARPA or Operation Warp Speed — rather than shielding firms from competition or subsidizing failing industries.

Josh Marshall Hits A Home Run (Sheila Kennedy)

Talking Points Memo just celebrated 25 years of online political reporting. It’s a “go-to” source for many, if not most, political observers. Heather Cox Richardson, among others, frequently cites publisher Josh Marshall, and TPM is one of my trusted sources for insightful political analysis.

In a recent column, Marshall proposed a basis for evaluating Senators, and I strongly agreed with his criteria for “purging” those who don’t pass his tests. He identifies a series of issues that he says can give voters “a clear indication of whether they are serious about confronting the challenge of the moment or battling back from Trumpism.” He analogizes the process to a status interview you might hold if you were a new manager hired to turn around a failing company–a “sit down” with every employee to determine whether they’re part of the solution or part of the problem. 

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Marshall identifies five issues. The first is the filibuster. He writes that lawmakers who support keeping the filibuster “are not serious about moving the country forward in any positive direction.”....

The second identified issue is Supreme Court reform....

Number three is (finally!) making DC and Puerto Rico into states. He acknowledges that this isn’t as essential as the first two, but it’s very important, and it’s the right thing to do. DC and Puerto Rico should in fact be states....

We now know that Marshall’s number four is especially important. He calls it “clearing the law books.”....

And number five? Here, Marshall proposes something near and dear to my heart: outlawing gerrymandering with a federal legal framework governing how maps can be legitimately drawn....

I think the fellow is right. We need to get over the excuse of how hard it is to amend the Constitution. Terms limits for the Supreme Court and Congress, must be added to the Constitution - among a few other changes.

 Overtime with Bill Maher: Killer Mike, Donna Brazile (HBO) has me wondering if Maher understands the military has never had to disobey unlawful orders.

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