More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

A Blue Wave Will Not End America's Oligarch Problem

The mid-term election is less than two weeks away - I have already voted early - and the amounts of money being donated by the super wealthy, including Elon Musk who I view as a menace to democracy, to mostly Republican candidates is off the charts.  These billionaires and ultra-wealthy donors are in effect trying to buy candidates and the election, demonstrating the flawed ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which insanely held that corporations are "persons" with free speech rights, including the right to spend enormous amounts of money in elections. That ruling needs to be reversed, although that would nor rein in malevolent actors like Musk.  With luck - and assuming the Felon does not try to declare martial law or other illegal election interference - a blue wave will sweep Republicans from control of both houses of Congress and some measures can be taken to rein in the Felon's lawlessness and blatantly corrupt efforts to enrich himself, his slimy family members, and the wealthy willing to pay what amount to bribes in pay to play free for all.  Unfortunately, as a piece in The New Republic lays out, a blue wave will likely not be enough to stop billionaires and oligarchs from attempting to buy elections. Here are article highlights:

The candidates favored by billionaires and industry backers almost certainly won’t do as well in the midterms as they did two years ago, when the favorites of Elon Musk and other superrich individuals won numerous races, including the presidency. But big money is still warping American elections, putting weak candidates on equal financial footing with stronger ones, making politicians from both parties beholden to the rich instead of their constituents, and blocking more populist policies. There is little doubt that Democratic victories this fall will put the United States on a better footing, but our democracy ultimately can’t thrive if a class of oligarchs can use their wealth to dominate the political system.

Judicial rulings, mostly notably the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, have eliminated most restrictions on campaign spending by the wealthy and corporations. Each subsequent election cycle since, companies and billionaires have upped their political involvement, in terms of both raw dollars and the aggressiveness of their efforts. The 2024 cycle represented something of an inflection point. About 20 percent of campaign donations to candidates and political donations, more than $3 billion in total, came from billionaires and their immediate family members, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Six individuals or families donated more than $100 million, led by Elon Musk, who spent an estimated $290 million. He funded a get-out-the vote operation in swing states, the kind of organization usually built by candidates or political parties.

All six of those families backed Republican candidates. That spending helped the GOP win the House, Senate, and presidency.

Meanwhile, numerous companies funded super PACs and other campaign committees, usually to defeat Democratic candidates and boost Republicans. Perhaps the most notable was the cryptocurrency industry, which donated more than $40 million to a super PAC to oust a critic of the industry, then-Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio.

This year, billionaires have already donated at least $1.7 billion. Of that, $1.2 billion (69 percent) has gone to help Republican candidates, according to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Musk alone has pumped in at least $366 million, according to the Times. Cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, Big Tech, and online betting companies have spent at least $294 million this cycle, according to Public Citizen.

Unless something very surprising happens, all of that spending won’t deliver the government that the rich and big corporations want. Democrats will almost certainly win the House and reduce the GOP ranks at the state level. They may win both houses on Capitol Hill and trifectas in states where a majority of Americans live.

But even if we have a blue wave, the corporate and billionaire spending will have mattered. How? First of all, this spending is almost certainly limiting Republican losses. Democratic candidates in House and Senate races are vastly outraising their GOP opponents.

Such fundraising advantages could lead to Democratic candidates running vastly more television ads and having much better get-out-the-vote operations than their Republican rivals. But conservative-leaning billionaires and corporations are pumping tens of millions of dollars into helping these Republican candidates, essentially leveling the playing field, as my colleague Emma Janssen explained in a piece Tuesday.

Billionaire spending can’t prevent a Democratic wave, but can limit its extent. Much of this billionaire and corporate spending is in traditionally red districts and states like Texas and Iowa, as polls suggest that Democrats could win this year in places they usually don’t. . . . .If Republicans keep control of the Senate and/or Democrats win a fairly narrow majority (220–229 seats) in the House, this billionaire and corporate spending will have been a huge asset to them.

And that’s not just an anti-Democratic story but an antidemocratic one, as well. The concept of “one person, one vote” doesn’t really exist when some individuals donate more money to campaigns than thousands or even hundreds of thousands of other Americans combined. Our campaign finance system has never been particularly democratic. But it’s more democratic for a candidate to raise $30 million from 30,000 or 300,000 people than just one.

In addition, the staggering spending by Musk and other billionaires essentially guarantees that the politicians who win with their financial backing will do their bidding in office.

And it’s not just Republicans who are beholden to the superrich. Democrats are accepting huge sums from the rich too. Democrats correctly argue that they shouldn’t unilaterally disarm and allow GOP candidates to get massive spending from conservative-leaning billionaires while liberal-leaning billionaires remain on the sidelines. And unlike in federal races, Democratic hopefuls in gubernatorial and state legislative contests are often being vastly outspent by their GOP rivals. So in the last few weeks, Democratic operatives and campaign operatives have urged big donors to get more involved—and they have.

Wealthy Democrats like Bloomberg are wary of the party embracing more populist policies, such as wealth taxes and more stringent regulation of big companies. Democratic candidates and the party overall are gun-shy about adopting progressive economic views in part because they know it will cost them financial support from big donors and therefore make it harder for them to win elections. . . . . It is both a democracy problem and an electoral one (voters support populist economic policies) that liberal billionaires can effectively veto progressive policy and personnel.

But their veto powers are surprisingly vast. Labor activists got a one-time 5 percent tax on the wealth of billionaires on the ballot in California. Whatever your views on the proposal itself, the debate over this policy shows the democracy problem caused by billionaires. With massive donations from the superrich, the opposition to the wealth tax has raised more than $330 million to convince Californians to oppose Proposition 40. The pro–wealth tax side has raised $33 million. That’s not a fair debate about the merits of a wealth tax—it’s the rich drowning out the message of their opponents.

Progressive ballot initiatives across the country nearly always have to overcome opposition from the superwealthy. And that’s distressing because ballot initiatives are often the only path to populist economic policies in red states and even blue ones. State legislators and governors often won’t advance policies that their donors don’t like. But as California is showing, the superrich can block ballot initiatives too.

The good news is that hundreds of millions of dollars from Elon Musk and other conservative billionaires probably won’t prevent an anti-Trump backlash. The bad news is that billionaires and big corporations still have a hold, and often a veto, in both parties. America can have an oligarchy or a democracy—but not both. When Democrats next have national power, they must restrict the political power of billionaires, even including the so-called liberal ones that help put them in power.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

The Felon Has Betrayed the Western World Order

A decade ago Hillary Clinton warned all of us about the Felon's allegiance to Vladimir Putin and the Felon's actions of the last week have made it perfectly clear that the Felon places loyalty to Putin above all else, including America's national security and the interests of the American public.  Between his supposed deal to buy Russian diesel supplies - which is performative for his base and low knowledge voters and will not reduce domestic diesel prices - and the lifting of Congressionally imposed sanctions on Russia, while threatening Ukraine and European allies, it is becoming impossible to ignore the reality that the Felon is a Russian asset.  Historian Heather Cox Richardson has noted "how much more evidence is necessary to assess that Trump has undermined U.S. national security and is working for Russia? And how much longer will Republicans in Congress continue to protect him as he does it?" Indeed, payments for Russian diesel supplies will throw Putin an economic lifeline and aid Russia in funding its war against Ukraine and aid to Iran - a nation the USA is at war with.  A piece in The Atlantic goes so far as to accuse the Felon of allying America with Russia and against the western world order that has lasted since the end of WWII.   Here are column highlights: 

In the past week, the [Felon - or is Traitor better?] president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.

Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.

In September, Trump signed a sanctions bill that Congress had passed, named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a pro-Ukraine hawk. The legislation sanctioned Russia as well as other countries that are supporting Russia’s invasion and brutalization of Ukraine. The bill was approved with bipartisan support, but some Republicans and most House Democrats voted against the law, arguing that it contained a trap door, a provision that would allow Trump to suspend the prescribed sanctions at will.

Those critics were correct to be worried. Trump pulled the lever on that trap door just two days before the law was supposed to go into effect. In an executive order signed on Friday, Trump said that “such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States”—he declined to explain exactly how the waiver was in America’s interests—and that the law would remain unexecuted until such time as his administration decides otherwise. This waiver came a short while after Trump lifted restrictions on Russia’s sales of diesel fuel to the U.S. and other markets.

Trump’s recent actions in support of Russia are so obvious that they have generated a rare moment of bipartisan disgust: Both Democrats and Republicans now seem to share a horror at the betrayal of Ukraine, and at the president’s reckless abdication of America’s role as leader of the free world.

The [Felon's] president’s aides are scrambling to explain why this capitulation to Russia isn’t exactly what it looks like. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when pressed by a reporter, said that the administration would “assess” the impact of the Graham Act after a 60-day period. This was nonsense: The executive order includes no such timeline, and no one seriously believes that the administration is running numbers to decide whether sanctions are a good idea.

Rubio was joined in his excuse making by a handful of desperate Republicans who tried to cast Trump’s decision as some sort of tough-love patriotism.

Some conservative commentators, including Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who writes for National Review, expressed considerably more rage. McCarthy wrote on Saturday that Putin is on a “quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy,” and that “President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.” As a lawyer, McCarthy surely did not choose those words at random. Aid and comfort are part of the criteria in Article III of the Constitution of the United States that define treason.  McCarthy called for “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

Trump’s decision has nothing to do with American national security. His de facto alliance with Russia is a sordid arrangement rooted in his own fears and hatreds.

First, Trump knows that Republicans are almost certainly facing a beating in the midterm elections, in part over the price of gas—a spike caused by the kind of war in Iran that he promised during his 2024 campaign to never start. He is desperate to do anything he can to lower the price of gas, and because he does not seem to understand how the international economy works, he may well believe that some janky diesel deal with Russia will alleviate high fuel prices in the United States. (It will not, although it will certainly help some Russian companies.)

As Malcolm Rifkind, a former defense minister of the United Kingdom, put it this weekend: “Donald Trump has shown himself as a person to be repulsive; as a President of the United States to be a disgrace to his own people as well as to his international responsibilities. We all know his actual reasons for this are a grubby attempt to win a few more votes in the midterms by trying to get oil prices down.” The result, Rifkind rightly added, is that Trump will now be “directly responsible” for the deaths of Ukrainians who will die while Putin uses the Russian alliance with America to continue the fighting.

But even if the American economy were in better shape, Trump’s history with Putin suggests that he was never going to allow the sanctions in the Graham Act to be enforced. Trump’s suspension of the law is a signal to Ukraine, to Russia, to Europe, and to America’s NATO allies that the Trump White House and Putin’s Kremlin are now on the same side.

Occam’s razor suggests a more direct explanation: Trump is a weak man who is intimidated by stronger and smarter men. His humiliating relationship with Putin is different only in degree from the way he interacts with other authoritarian leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un . . . Trump posted a whiny screed on his Truth Social site in which he pleaded with the public to understand how overmatched he is against Putin.

Consider what the American president just told the entire world: Please don’t interfere in my relationship with a murderous dictator, or he might help the country that America’s men and women in uniform are fighting at this very moment. The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet—yes, that’s still the United States right now—is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran. Nothing better illustrates just how weak a supplicant Trump has become in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.

Trump engages in this kind of personalized diplomacy in part because he believes himself to be—against all evidence—a master dealmaker. But the greater irony, considering how much he rails against globalism, is that he also behaves this way because he is in fact a globalist himself. He does not view the world as a collection of sovereign nations; he sees it instead as territories run by mob bosses. The weaker ones, especially America’s allies, can be abused and threatened at will. The stronger godfathers, including America’s dedicated enemies, are peers and thus treated with respect. The interests of the innocent millions in those countries are of no consequence. What matters is what’s good for Trump, his underbosses, and his family.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Will Cheating, Lying, and Dividing Fail Republicans This Time?

For years since I left the GOP over 25 years ago, Republican candidates and strategists have relied on cheating, lying, and dividing citizens - usually on racial and culture war issues - to win elections by duping voters into voting for falsehoods and against their own best economic interest.  This has been the norm in Southwest Virginia and other rural areas in Virginia that vote Republican even though GOP policies have harmed them.  Currently, a number of rural hospitals in Virginia (which are typically the largest employer in their area) are facing possible closure due to Medicaid cuts under the "big beautiful bill" and GOP candidates are waving the bogeymen of blacks, gays, Muslims and "communists" to frighten these same voters into voting once again against their own best interests.  At the federal level, the only significant legislation out of Congress has been (i) the aforesaid "big beautiful bill" - which harmed literally millions while giving huge tax cuts to the super wealthy, and (ii) funding for ICE to further terrorize undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. Throw in the Felon's war of choice against Iran and the soaring prices it has ushered in and GOP truly has little to run on.  Hence the current efforts to cheat, lie and smear Democrats, and trotting out the GOP's favored bogeymen to divide and frighten gullible and Kool-Aid drinking voters.  Given the GOP abysmal record over the last two years, hopefully these efforts fail this election cycle.  A piece at The New Republic  looks at the campaign of lies, division and, of course, efforts to cheat:

We’re two-plus weeks out from Election Day. Republicans are in a dead panic and taking the wildest of swings. Maryland Representative Andy Harris, who is as close as we have in the United States Congress to an actual, bona fide fascist (I know that’s saying a lot, but Harris’s father served in a pro-Nazi paramilitary unit in Hungary toward the end of World War II, and Harris himself veritably worshipped Viktor Orbán), tried to blame diesel prices on the Democrats. He got laughed out of the room. Democratic candidates who are barely really liberal are suddenly not just socialists but Communists. And it practically goes without saying that they’re all gay.

This kind of scaremongering has been a part of Republican campaign strategy for my entire life. I hit my first Little League baseball the same year Richard Nixon launched the Southern Strategy, his dog-whistling and race-baiting campaign to carry the South in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey. I was a young man when Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 general election campaign near Philadelphia, Mississippi, touting “states’ rights” and making a point of doing so not far from the spot where three civil rights workers were killed by the Ku Klux Klan 16 years before.

But these kinds of moves used to be only part of a Republican campaign. Once upon a time, Republicans did try, sometimes, to advance forward-looking ideas, or something resembling that. Reagan had his optimism; Newt Gingrich, his Contract With America; George W. Bush, his global democracy agenda. At the very least, these Republicans understood that the scare tactics had to be dressed up in the finery of something resembling a positive vision for the country.

But that was then. Now the scare tactics are the whole package. The GOP of 2026 is stripped of all artifice. It’s down to its essence. The closing days of this campaign will feature three trajectories from the GOP. They’re going to try to cheat. They’re going to lie. And they’re going to try to win on grotesque and open bigotry.

First, the cheating. This is all about suppressing the vote and trying to convince Americans that noncitizens are going to be casting votes by the thousands or even millions (OK, this involves a dose of bigotry too). On Thursday, Todd Blanche’s Justice Department sent a letter to California and Los Angeles County demanding that they prove—within 48 hours, mind you—that some 20,000 voters are citizens.

The Trump administration has tried this before. Very recently, in fact. Just last month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged that there were 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada. He then whittled that down to 185 names (heck of a whittle!). DHS said it had confirmed that these 185 were noncitizens. Nevada looked into it. Every one—every single one—was a citizen.

It’s impossible to predict how else they’ll try to cheat between now and November 3. At Democracy Docket, which you should be checking between now and Election Day if you aren’t already, they’re tracking dozens of voter suppression lawsuits. And Axios reported on Friday that MAGA activists are pushing the Trump administration to prepare to declare martial law.  . . . We can be sure that the administration has thought of things we haven’t.

Next comes the lying. Of course, cheating of the sort described above is lying, but I mean a different kind of lying. I mean here the kind of lying Trump does at his rallies, about how great the economy is, how “hot” America is; and the lying House Speaker Mike Johnson does, about this Congress being the most productive in 80 years.

All politicians from both parties offer up to voters their version of reality. But they rarely say the naked opposite of reality. . . . But no one has ever done what Trump is doing. There’s no sign it’s working—in fact it’s probably making things worse because you just can’t tell people the sky is blue when it’s full of clouds.

What’s amusing is watching Republican candidates across the country try to walk this tightrope. Some gently break with him, as Maine’s Susan Collins and Michigan’s Mike Rogers have done on tariffs. But most defend them or try to change the subject. Some still blame the economy on Joe Biden. And all of them, having voted for the Iran war, just pray that that subject doesn’t come up.

And finally—the dividing. It’s JD Vance hinting not so subtly that James Talarico is gay. Rogers and others, including Trump, talk about Abdul El-Sayed being part of the Muslim Brotherhood. On a debate stage this week, Georgia GOP Senate candidate Mike Collins slipped in a reference to Jon Ossoff’s “friend” El-Sayed, for no apparent reason other than to be able to scare viewers with a Moozlem name. And of course the flood of dehumanizing anti-trans ads continues apace and will continue through Election Day.

This is what they’ve got. And it’s what they’ve got because it’s who they are. Oh, plus they have hundreds of millions or maybe even billions of dollars, much of it from a small handful of people—like real-life supervillain Elon Musk—who want to own the government. It’ll be pretty depressing if it works.

And if it fails? It will upend decades of conventional wisdom about how Republicans can win and about voters’ susceptibility to such campaigns. And that may mark the start of a new and at least marginally less cynical and less hateful and less stupid era in American politics. And it will be made all the better by the fact that it will have been brought on, ironically enough, by the stupidest and most cynical and hateful man in recent American political history.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty