More Sunday Male Beauty

 

The GOP’s Desperate Culture-War Hail Mary

For decades the GOP has used "god, guns and gays" to dupe their electorate into voting against their own economic and financial best interests, gays and the transgender being the favorite GOP bogeymen. With a month until the 2026 mid-term elections and the Felon's poll numbers completely in the toilet and the latest polling for Democrats in red states suggesting a number of formerly viewed "safe seats" for Republicans might potentially flipping to Democrats, Republicans are dragging out the same old made up bogeymen in the hope fear and/or bigotry will motivate voters to vote Republican even as the Felon and his GOP enablers have trashed the economy for millions of Americans. As noted and as was the case in 2024, the favored GOP bogeyman are transgendered Americans. Never mind that a review of sexual abuse cases reveals no drag queen or transgender perpetrators but plenty of GOP politicians and right wing clergy being indicted for sexual crimes.  The big questions is whether the GOP's disingenuous fearmongering will be enough for their sheep like base to ignore high gas prices, unprecedented corruption at the White House, rising interest rates and increased inflation.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the desperate GOP messaging. Here are excerpts:

Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.

With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans. . . . . In Texas, Republicans are running an unsettling AI-generated ad that shows the Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about girls with mustaches. A spot in Iowa accuses the Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” On X, former Representative Matt Gaetz offered a tidy summary of his party’s agenda: “I hate the war too,” he told a concerned voter. “But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”

Partly, this is because Republicans don’t have much else to say. The administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy isn’t exactly popular. Voters have lost faith in the GOP on economic issues. Meanwhile, the president is obsessing over Corinthian columns. But Republicans also have some reason to believe that making trans happen is a useful strategy: It’s helped them before.

“They believe that it energizes the base and divides ours,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. “And they’re right about that.”

The most jaw-dropping attack on Talarico probably comes from the American Principles Project, which has released an ad that is essentially a modern version of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy,” a sinister spot about the threat of nuclear war. The ad opens with a little girl standing in a field, counting flower petals. Everything is gray. Suddenly, the scene shifts, and the girl is in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask. An AI-generated Talarico looms over her in a pair of scrubs. “Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries,” the vaguely southern narrator declares. “This November, stop them before it’s too late.” . . . . (Talarico, for his part, is running ads focused on funding schools and health care, and countering corruption in Washington.)

The [Felon] president is aligned on the persuasive power of the anti-trans message. At the GOP convention in Dallas last month, Trump said that he was “petrified” that Democrats might change their position on transgender athletes in sports. “That will really hurt us,” he said. “That’s one of our great sound bites of all time.”

Unfortunately for him, some Democrats are already doing just that. . . . Asked last month whether girls should play in boys’ sports, he [Talarico] answered: “As a former public-school teacher, I care a lot about our student athletes, I care a lot about our students. And so I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it risks safety or fairness.”

Two years ago, this might have gone differently; Talarico might not have responded to Republican attacks at all. . . . In the run-up to November, Erickson, who advises Democrats on how to talk about LGBTQ issues, has seen a sharp increase from candidates in requests for help. As GOP campaigns launch their last-minute trans-focused ads, Democrats want to know when to respond, what to say, and how to avoid offense. “They’re so scared they’re going to say the wrong thing,” she said.

Erickson, who declined to name the specific candidates she’s advising, offered some general advice. When answering questions about transgender players in sports, she argues, Democrats should embrace the sandwich method: Start with empathy, mention rules and fairness, and end with a little more empathy. Questions about health care for minors can be answered by reiterating that parents, not lawmakers, are the best decision makers for their own kids.

Gina Hinojosa, who is running to replace Texas Governor Greg Abbott, has said that she won’t take up legislation related to the “culture wars” as governor; in a new ad, she declares, “My pronouns are mom, Texan, and soon-to-be governor.” The Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown’s strategy is to point out the absurdity of focusing on trans issues at a time like this. “Here they go again, those same attacks against Sherrod Brown,” one voter says in a new Brown ad. “With everything going on, that’s what they’re talking about?” says another voter.

Republicans are hopeful that a dogged focus on trans issues in the final days of this election season can depress turnout among Democratic voters like Childrey just as much as it energizes their own base. Democrats will have to hope that, this time, the GOP’s gambit will fail.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Trump Has Empowered Iranian Extremists While Weakening America

Historians and military war colleges will likely teach the Felon's war of choice against Iran as an example of presidential hubris and lack of proper planning can swamp a presidency and lead it to military solutions that only make everything worse.  With an incompetent president and perhaps even more incompetent Secretary of Defense who has purged experienced top levels of generals and admirals, the military disaster was foreseeable and now prices of everything, particularly gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel have soared.  Meanwhile, the Iranian leadership has become more extreme and militant and rather than preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, the Felon's poorly thought out war of choice has made the desire for a nuclear weapon even stronger among the Iranian leadership.  With the final withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, the specter of increased Iranian influence in Iraq may only increase.  Worse yet, the war has depleted American munitions and shown to the world the limits of American military power.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the Felon's debacle:

In early March, nine days after starting his war with Iran, President Trump held a news conference to crow about his “military success, the likes of which people haven’t seen.” “We’re winning very decisively,” he claimed, and “the result will be lower oil prices.”  Peter Navarro, a White House senior counselor, wrote an essay in March explaining why: “Iran War Will Lower Energy Prices.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in April announced “a historic and overwhelming victory” that had rendered Iran “combat-ineffective for years to come.”

Instead, Trump’s Iran war should be taught for decades as a model of how not to conduct either war or foreign policy. It’s an example of how hubris can swamp a presidency and lead it to military solutions for difficult global problems — and, in the process, make everything worse.

Now Trump finds himself stuck in the Sartre play “No Exit.” “The unsettling reality is that the conflict is nowhere near over,” Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group writes in a Foreign Affairs essay titled “The New Forever War.”

Still, the Trumpian myopia persists, with the administration continuing to claim that its pressure on Iran is a smashing success. “The blockade is working; it’s working like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News in September.

Hmm. Diesel prices at a few places in California have hit $9.99 a gallon, the maximum price those pumps can display. The United States has already spent more than $43 billion on the war, by a lowball Pentagon estimate — more than enough to provide free college education for a year to every American family earning less than $125,000 annually. Higher prices caused by the war have cost the typical American family about $1,000, according to the economist Mark Zandi. More broadly, we’ve depleted our arsenal, cost American and Iranian lives, possibly committed war crimes, exposed American vulnerabilities, effectively lost access to some bases and weakened American military credibility as far away as East Asia.

It’s true that the Iranian economy is a catastrophe and that ordinary Iranians — the people we are supposed to be helping — are suffering greatly. The exchange rate is now more than 2.5 million rials to the dollar, one-tenth of the rial’s value in 2021.

Yet Washington doesn’t seem to understand that instead of surrendering, Iran may choose to escalate. “They’ve come to the conclusion that the only way they survive is to shoot their way out,” Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. He suggested that Iran could increase attacks on shipping and, especially if it is attacked, strike oil infrastructure around the Gulf.

“Iran did not wage a scorched earth campaign — but it may yet do so if the current situation persists for too long. That is what everyone who actually follows this region and its dynamics is worried about.”

It’s difficult to see a deal being reached, partly because both Trump and Iran have a history of overreaching. It doesn’t help that Trump’s chief negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, are real estate investors chosen for their closeness to Trump rather than for, er, their diplomatic savvy.

Iranian leaders also seem cocky. Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, boasted in August that Iran had brought the United States “to its knees.” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told “Meet the Press” that Iran was fully prepared for a new round of fighting, “even if it comes to a doomsday war.” . . . Trump’s war may have actually increased the likelihood of Iran’s making a drive toward a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s war began by killing the previous supreme leader, who had issued a fatwa saying that Iran would not develop nuclear weapons. The new supreme leader, his son, does not inherit that fatwa and has not issued his own, so now “there’s a serious conversation in Iran” about pursuing nuclear weapons, Nasr told me.

We should take these warnings seriously. One reason professors will teach Trump’s war as an example of military malpractice is that it fits neatly into a larger pattern of counterproductive American policies toward Iran. I deplore the brutality, corruption and economic incompetence of Iran’s rulers — so it’s infuriating that America has repeatedly empowered Iranian extremists.

First, the United States helped topple a democratically elected prime minister in 1953, energizing nationalists and souring Iranians on the West. Then in the 1960s and 70s, the United States gave Iran a nuclear reactor, backed an increasingly autocratic shah and overstepped in ways that helped allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to become a national force by denouncing American imperialism.

President George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq war toppled Saddam Hussein, an enemy of Iran, and empowered Shiite militias that support Iran. In 2018, President Trump announced his withdrawal from the Obama nuclear pact with Iran. The capstone in this “march of folly,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Barbara Tuchman, was Trump’s war on Iran this year, which has bolstered military hard-liners in Tehran and enabled them to project greater power over the Persian Gulf and global oil markets.

That’s what I find particularly worth studying: How is it that for three-quarters of a century, we Americans have so bungled our foreign policy that we have systematically empowered Iranian extremists? They call us the “Great Satan,” but in truth our ineptitude has made us their benefactors.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Dinner Parties, Socializing, and American Loneliness

We hear much about the increased loneliness and sense of isolation experienced by everyday Americans and the role it may play in political polarization and the rise of MAGA.  While some on the far right would blame the phenomenon on the decline of organized religion and a loss of "fellowship", as a piece in The Atlantic reviews, the real cause is perhaps due to modern trends that make self-entertainment at home far easier, without the need to included friends and neighbors. One of the starkest declines is in the number of Americans who entertain at home and throw dinner parties. Indeed, the data indicates that the share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.  In addition, many modern homes have eliminated formal dining rooms which were once a standard feature of most homes. The end result is an increased view of others as "strangers" with declines in a sense of community.  Personally, this is an unknown experience. Growing up, my maternal grandmother held family dinners weekly and my parents would likewise host friends.  Currently the husband and I host two or more dinner parties in our home every month (some fancy and others simple comfort food) and frequently we go to dinner parties hosted by friends and neighbors.  And that's when we are not having dinner with friends at restaurants or the yacht club a block down the street.  Besides perhaps setting the stage for political polarization this plunge in socializing does not bode well for aging Americans where studies have found frequent socializing helps ward of mental decline. I'm not sure what the solution is, but the dinner parties and socialization from years past are one aspect of the "good old days" that perhaps need to be restored.  Here are highlight from the Atlantic:

Mid-century Americans knew how to throw a party, for better or worse. In some of the most famous titles of the 1950s and 1960s—Couples, by John Updike; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee; Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates—the drama (and martini-soaked melodrama) took place in middle-class living rooms. The stories were fictional, but the setting was realistic. Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.

Then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamental, they stopped visiting one another. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Although cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared with the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys.

In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.

So what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century? To get an apples-to-apples answer to that question, the polling group Data for Progress replicated the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys cited by Putnam. Unfortunately, the upshot is about as brutal as you’d imagine.

In the past 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards; attend a sporting event; go to the bar; volunteer; work on a community project.

When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they’ve hosted guests or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent, from 88 to 67 percent—and that’s in addition to the declines that Putnam noted a quarter century ago.

Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.

Perhaps, an optimist might think, Americans are hosting fewer dinner parties because they’ve simply moved all of their hangouts to restaurants and bars. Nice idea, but almost certainly wrong. As Putnam wrote in his book, “the practice of entertaining friends has not simply moved outside the home, but seems to be vanishing entirely.” Overall face-to-face socializing has declined significantly in the past few decades, and the restaurant industry has actually noted a sharp increase in people eating alone.

Another plausible theory is that Americans have replaced dinner parties with other forms of healthy socialization. Americans do engage in some activities much more frequently than in 1975, such as going to concerts, traveling, and exercising. All very good.

But the evidence suggests that, despite the increase in running clubs, the surge in exercise time seems to be mostly solo. A lot of people are going to the gym with a podcast to keep them company or rolling out a yoga mat in the basement. Most important, it is impossible to assert that Americans are getting out of the house to socialize in new ways when time spent at home has certifiably exploded since the 2010s.

In short, the great disinvitation is real, and we can’t wish or explain it away by arguing that Americans are just finding new ways to be with friends. Here are four explanations:

First is that people are more harried, especially those in dual-earner households. In the 1970 book The Harried Leisure Class, the Swedish economist Staffan Burenstam Linder wrote that as a society gets richer, leisure time takes on the frantic quality of work, because each hour of downtime practically shouts, Excuse me! You could be making money right now! We multitask and pack various activities into short periods. . . . Taking several hours to coordinate with other busy people to set up a lengthy dinner party is a tougher sell.

That’s a sociological explanation, but the decline of hosting is also about macroeconomic trends. In Bowling Alone, Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household-management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack.

The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s. Theoretically, married couples should have even more time to have people over for food and drink. Other facts must be squeezing out socializing.

Another possibility is that intensive parenting leaves less time for hosting. Americans used to have many kids whom they cared for sparsely; now they have fewer children to whom they devote every minute of their life. . . . Thus evenings that adults once spent hosting adults are now spent holding, bathing, driving, tutoring, playing with, and talking to their children.

A third explanation is that friendship networks are shrinking, especially for poor people who aren’t married. If you’re going to throw a dinner party, you probably need a few things first. Say, a dinner table. Chairs. Food and drink. And also: friends. It is rare to host a dinner party for people you’ve never met. But the average number of close friendships is declining with each generation, and the decline is steepest for Americans without a college degree. So it’s not just that married people have fewer dinner parties; poor people, who are less likely to be married, have fewer friends, period.

[T]he two groups most likely to say they never entertained people in their home in the previous year were political independents (44 percent) and people without a college diploma (39 percent). The latter isn’t surprising, given all of the evidence that socializing is declining most rapidly among poorer Americans with less education. Hosting friends, like so much socializing, is in danger of becoming a luxury good.

The political wrinkle is more intriguing to me. I sometimes hear from people who tie everything back to politics that political polarization might lead to social fragmentation. But I wonder if the opposite is just as plausible. Maybe people who are less embedded in strong social networks are less likely to attach themselves to groups of all kinds, including political parties. In this way, America’s long-term detachment from groups and institutions is leading to a kind of pox-on-all-parties mentality that cashes out in an increase in independents.

The average time that Americans spent at home increased by almost two hours a day from 2003 to 2022. Cocooned within personalized entertainment fortresses, more Americans have shrunk the great buffet of all possible leisure activities to the small plate of screened media.

Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45 p.m., looking at a screen is easier than hosting a party. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. . . . . We keep creating opportunities for downtime that eliminate the need for other people to be present. Not all progress is progress.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

The Felon Is Repeating a Biden Mistake On The Economy

If one believes the narrative that the Felon was re-elected because voters believed he would improve the economy - rather than because he was greenlighting open racism, hate and bigotry - more than a Democrat president. In reality, through his tariffs, multiple trade wars, the ballooning of the federal debt, and the Felon's war of choice in Iran, the Felon took what was actually a fairly good economy and drove it into the ditch. Inflation is higher, mortgage rates are higher, gas prices have soared, and consumer prices has risen across the board. The Felon's response? He says "affordability" is a hoax, claims that America's economy is in a new "golden age" - perhaps if one is a billionaire or a member of the Felon's family - and he continues policies that will push energy prices, especially electricity, still higher.  Perhaps equally bad, while millions of Americans are struggling financially, the Felon has posted over the top images of the recent state dinner that are so out of touch that they'd embarrass Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  Indeed, it's little surprise that a recent poll showed the Felon's approval on his handling of the economy is down to 17%.  A column in the New York Times looks at the mistakes being made by the Felon and his regime:

When I served in President Joe Biden’s White House, we had good economic news to report: robust job creation, rising wages, low unemployment and a manufacturing jobs revival. Yes, inflation spiked early in his term, but by the time he left office, it had come down considerably.

Mr. Biden wanted his team to highlight his domestic agenda. His policies were working, and he wanted the country to understand what he was doing and why. But the polling was clear: Our economic message didn’t land.

Senior White House advisers, myself included, would meet for hours, day after day, trying to get a handle on the mismatch between the strength of the data and the flagging public confidence. . . . We pored over the numbers, worked through different messaging options and kept looking for a way to break through.

But Americans weren’t feeling it. Too many people were struggling with the prices of groceries, rent, child care and gas. Their lived experience did not match the encouraging economic news, and that disconnect shaped the entire public conversation.  We believed that if we laid out the evidence clearly enough, people would see what we saw. They didn’t, and we didn’t adjust to meet them where they were.

The truth is, we had a stale message and outdated models for delivering it. It cost Mr. Biden and, eventually, Vice President Kamala Harris dearly. President Trump is now making a mistake even more damaging.

The economic indicator that hurt Mr. Biden the most, inflation, is higher today than it was when Mr. Trump returned to office. The bond market has been roiled. The Federal Reserve just raised interest rates. Mr. Trump’s trade wars and his war with Iran are hurting the overall economic picture. All of which helps explain his sinking poll numbers.

Mr. Trump’s refrain that we’re the “hottest country anywhere in the world” is a no-sale, both because the facts really aren’t on his side and because he’s barely acknowledging Americans’ legitimate economic worries. By and large, people aren’t buying his assertions that “affordability” is a “fake word” or his insistence that higher gas prices are “a very inexpensive price to pay” for his war aims. . . . When leaders neglect lived experience, the message collapses.

Why? To start, facts and figures alone no longer carry the weight they once did. There was a time when people would absorb accurate information presented clearly through official channels, like the White House press briefing. They might disagree on what it meant, they might challenge certain points, but it wasn’t automatically treated as spin.

Today, anyone can be a content creator, producing videos, podcasts and memes with subjective, sometimes bogus interpretations of the news. Many Americans now get their news only from outlets that confirm their political leanings. Social media algorithms clearly favor outrage and certainty, not accuracy.

In that environment, official charts and summaries rarely break through. . . . And once a narrative rooted in daily life takes hold, it is almost impossible to dislodge.

We learned that lesson with the economy and again with the debate around Mr. Biden’s age. Looking back, we misread the public mood, thinking the age conversation would fade. At best, my responses from the podium about Mr. Biden’s age failed to put out the fire; at worst, they fueled it.

The Trump White House should realize that over the next two years, there will be only more, not less, scrutiny when the president appears to drift off during meetings, is cagey about the results of his medical exams or goes on one of his erratic, late-night social media screeds. His communications team should know by now that the prices at the pump and the self-checkout line are undefeated.

When people don’t believe what their government says, institutions lose legitimacy. Conspiracy theories flourish. Urgently needed legislation stalls. Elections are lost.

A decade ago, his bluster, so unlike traditional politicians, grabbed ears and eyeballs. Now even many of his fans can see that he’s frequently just seeking attention. Look at just about any poll and you get the sense that voters increasingly don’t trust him.

That tension, the ability to dominate the conversation while struggling to earn trust, defines this moment. . . . Once people believe their government is not speaking to their reality, it becomes incredibly difficult to earn that trust back. I felt that tension every day in the White House briefing room. I see it happening again now.