More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Much of the Media Is Aiding Trump's Treat to Democracy

In my opinion a largely feckless - I'd also add lazy - mainstream media that never let go of the pretense that Donald Trump was a "normal candidate" and engaged in endless "both side do the same" myth aided and abetted Trump gaining the White House in 2016.  Now, eight years later and after the January 6, 2021, insurrection which most Americans watched on television as it happened and which was examined in detail by the House January 6th Committee much of the mainstream media continues to make the same mistakes and in the process betrays democracy and aids in Trump's perversion of objective reality.  This is a situation where there are NOT two differing views of what happened during the coup attempt or the guilt of those who have been prosecuted for sacking the U.S. Capitol.  There is the truth and the reality of the assault on the Capitol and the lies perpetrated by Trump and the bootlickers and self-prostituting Republican members of Congress who continue to fall over themselves as they abase themselves to Trump and the hideous MAGA base.  Simply put, as a piece in Vanity Fair lays out, there are no two sides to Trump's threat to America's democracy.  If democracy is to survive, it is long past time that the media cease its mindless false equivalency and pretense that Trump and today's GOP are in no way normal.  Here are article highlights:

On January 6, 2021, I watched CNN as thousands of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. As someone well-versed in watching tragedy on television, I was struck by just how indisputable the facts were at the time: violent, red-hat-clad MAGA rioters, followed by Republicans in Congress, tried to stop democracy in its tracks. Trump had told his followers that the protest in Washington, DC, “will be wild,” and in the assault that followed his speech, some rioters smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol. Hundreds of them have since been convicted on charges ranging from assault on federal officers to seditious conspiracy. These are stubborn facts, the kind that do not care about your feelings. These facts include the inalienable truth that Trump is the first president in American history to reject the peaceful transfer of power.

It never occurred to me that these facts could somehow be perverted by partisanship. But three years later, we are seeing just that, as Republicans cling to the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Joe Biden and are poised to make Trump their 2024 nominee. And perhaps even more dangerous than the GOP ditching reality is the news media’s inability to cover Trumpism as the threat to democracy that it very much is.

I had to read this headline last week from the Associated Press several times because I was sure I’d had it wrong: “One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry.” . . . . And perhaps the most offensive headline both-sidesing reality was from USA Today: “Biden and Trump’s split over Jan. 6 is as divisive as it is for voters.”

The facts of January 6 and its aftermath should be clear to any journalist who simply watched the events that day—and especially if they watched the damning House committee hearings or followed the exhaustive reporting since. It’s not Biden’s opinion that Trump is a threat. It’s not my opinion. It’s a fact. The guy who told Sean Hannity he wanted to be a “dictator” for his first day in office is, in fact, a threat to democracy. Liz Cheney warned that electing Trump again would be “sleepwalking into dictatorship,” and Chris Christie said that Trump “acts like someone who wants to be a dictator” because he “doesn't care about our democracy,”

But the problem is, when all you have is conventional political framing, everything looks like politics as usual. One candidate makes a claim; the other disputes it. Two sides are divided, etc. This framing only works if both parties operate within the frameworks of a shared reality. But Trumpism doesn’t allow for the reality the rest of us inhabit.

Journalists may be well-intentioned in trying to be “objective,” or they’re simply afraid of being labeled partisan. Either way, coverage of January 6 that gives equal weight to both sides—one based in reality, one not—is helping pave the road for authoritarianism.

History shows us that conventional framing enables extremism by making it seem like politics as usual; the Times infamously once ran this headline: “Hitler Tamed by Prison; Released on Parole, He Is Expected to Return to Austria.” Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works, texted me: “Conventional political framing is by definition conventional. It is therefore totally inadequate for unconventional times. It makes a false presupposition of normality, that its audience is therefore invited to accept.”

Trump is such a powerful figure in the Republican Party that he’s all but flattened his political rivals. Perhaps motivated by Trump’s popularity in polls, these political rivals have accepted Trump’s version of reality; with the notable exception of Christie, they have largely gone along with his lie that the election was stolen.

In Iowa on Saturday, Trump said that the rioters acted “patriotically and peacefully” on January 6, and those in jail are “hostages.” . . . Describing such people as “hostages” is the latest example of Trump pushing a version of events divorced from reality—one that some in his party were quick to promote.

Every time elected Republicans repeat a Trump lie, the schism between reality and Trumpian reality grows. By endorsing Trump’s unreality, Republicans are effectively endorsing Trump’s autocratic nature in which everything he says is to be believed, no matter how baseless or just plain bonkers. But of all Trump’s many lies, his bogus claims about the 2020 election and the events of January 6 are the most dangerous for the future of democracy.

The current president, meanwhile, remains clear-eyed about this tragic day. 

“We saw with our own eyes the violent mob storm the United States Capitol,” Biden said in a Friday speech pegged to the three-year anniversary. “It was almost in disbelief as you first turned on the television. For the first time in our history, insurrectionists had come to stop the peaceful transfer, transfer of power, in America. First time. Smashing windows, shattering doors, attacking the police. Outside, gallows were erected as the MAGA crowd chanted, ‘Hang Mike Pence.’ Inside, they hunted for Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi. The House was chanting as they marched through and smashed windows, ‘Where’s Nancy?’ Over 140 police officers were injured.”

This isn’t Biden’s opinion, or his side. It’s what happened. 

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Trump’s Lawyer Walked Into a Trap of His Own Making

This past week Donald Trump's attorneys argued before the District of Columbia U.S. Court of Appeals (pictured at right)  appealing the finding of the District Court that held that Trump was not immune from criminal prosecution.  The breath of the immunity they claimed applied to literally any action Trump took while in office was so extreme that it not only flew in the face of the plan language of the U.S. Constitution but would place Trump above the law.  While I have written a number of appellate briefs - something I enjoy - I have only argued one appeal (before the Virginia Supreme Court) on my own and know from that experience that the questions from the judges/justices can be withering and if one is not careful, you can be lead into a trap.  Seemingly, Trump's attorney in pressing his -  in my view near ridiculous -  argument forgot this simple reality and was pressed to basically state that a president could authorize the murder of political opponents and be immune from prosecution.   One has to wonder whether he was making his argument to please an audience of one, namely Trump,  as opposed the the members of the three judge panel. Simply put, things did not go well for Der Trumpenfuhrer and the Court will likely rule quickly against Trump.   A piece in The Atlantic by George Conway looks at the debacle: 

It was a cold and rainy morning in Washington, D.C., yesterday. Five years ago, Donald Trump said that was enough to deter him from visiting Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, to commemorate the fallen American soldiers—soldiers who died defending the nation whose Constitution he had sought to abrogate but now seeks to invoke. But yesterday, he showed up anyway. Appearing in court was more important to him, because this was about him.

And so at 9:25 a.m., the former president and his entourage strode into Courtroom 31 of the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse on Constitution Avenue, just a few blocks away from the Capitol his supporters had ransacked three years ago Saturday, and took their seats. It took just a few short minutes for their case to come completely apart.

[T]he panel of judges who heard the case: three women, of differing backgrounds and of fine reputations, each sworn to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and the rich.” The question these jurists faced in the appeal they heard yesterday—styled United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, No. 23–3228—came down to whether justice could be administered to a former president of the United States.

D. John Sauer, a former solicitor general of Missouri (appointed by then–state Attorney General Josh Hawley), an advocate with an exceptionally gravelly voice that runs as fast as any New Yorker’s, stepped to the podium to speak for Trump.

In a case called Midland Asphalt Corp. v. United States, the Supreme Court made clear that the collateral-order exception must be narrowly construed, particularly in criminal cases. No court has ever addressed how Midland Asphalt applies to a criminal prosecution of a former president for acts he committed in office.

Sauer, as expected, argued that the exception does apply, and that the court could hear the appeal. I say “expected” because it could be no other way for his client: If this appeal were dismissed, Trump would not be able to pursue his claim of immunity from prosecution until after he is (as I admittedly hope he will be) convicted and sentenced.

But the jurisdictional back-and-forth was merely a sideshow; what everyone came to hear was the merits of Trump’s immunity argument, and the court’s reaction to it. Sauer and the judges soon obliged. Sauer warned, in effect, that the heavens would fall—ruat caelum, for fanciers of Latin legal axioms—were his client tried for his crimes. “To authorize the prosecution of a president for his official acts would open a Pandora’s box from which this nation may never recover.”

Sauer never got the chance to answer his own rhetorical questions, because at this point, the panel’s most incisive and persistent questioner jumped in. “Can I explore the implications of what you are arguing?” inquired Judge Florence Y. Pan, a Biden appointee and longtime federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital who also served on the Superior Court as well as the United States District Court there. “I understand your position to be that a president is immune from criminal prosecution for any official act, even if that action is taken for an unlawful or unconstitutional purpose. Is that correct?”

Sauer’s answer: Yes, but with an exception. The exception being that, if a president is impeached by the House of Representatives and convicted by the Senate, then and only then can he be prosecuted in a criminal court, after he leaves office, for the offenses for which the Senate had convicted him.

This was not a great answer. . . . . . appellate courts usually don’t find convincing a litigant’s efforts to combine two weak points in order to make a stronger one. Usually, the weakness in one bad argument bleeds into the other, and vice versa—producing a sum that is even less than its parts. And that’s what happened here.

As Judge Pan’s question pointed out, Trump’s main argument on this appeal is that presidents can’t be prosecuted for their official acts. That argument is based on a line of civil cases establishing that presidents can’t be held liable via monetary damages for their official actions—more specifically, as the Supreme Court held in 1982 in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, there is “absolute Presidential immunity from damages liability for acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”

[T]he rationale behind Fitzgerald encompasses only civil liability because it is grounded in the fear that, if presidents could be hauled into civil court by the countless people affected by their official acts, then the leader of the free world might fear doing his or her job. And even if this protection from civil-damages liability could be extended into the criminal realm, it surely oughtn’t apply here, where Trump was not only acting beyond the “outer perimeter” of his official responsibility, but utterly abjuring that official responsibility.

Still, Trump’s immunity argument is at least an argument: Not a good one, not a winner, but not completely and totally ridiculous. . . . The same cannot be said about the other major contention Trump has urged on this appeal, the argument that Sauer took to conflating with the immunity argument in response to Judge Pan’s questioning.

That second argument relies on what’s called the Constitution’s impeachment-judgment clause, in Article I, Section 3. That provision, in its entirety, says (with the relevant part italicized):

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

By its express terms, all this language does is make sure everyone understands that double-jeopardy protections don’t apply when a federal public official is impeached, convicted, and removed from office. The clause makes clear that the official may still go to jail—that he remains “subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment” even after he is removed from his job.

But Trump’s lawyers contend that this text says something it absolutely does not say: : that, if a public official, namely the president, is not impeached and removed by Congress, then he cannot be prosecuted under criminal law. 

[A]s Judge Childs dismissively put it, and it’s absurd for any number of reasons even apart from the plain meaning of the English language the clause uses. For one thing, a wealth of historical evidence contradicts the argument. . . . . for “if no such second trial could be had, then the grossest official offenders might escape without any substantial punishment, even for crimes.”

Worse yet, as Henderson and Pan later pointed out during the argument, Trump’s own lawyers conceded to the Senate in February 2021 that, even if Trump were not convicted on the impeachment charges, he could still be criminally charged. Oops.

Sauer, by extending that argument to make a limited concession to Pan’s questioning about whether he was arguing that presidents could never be criminally prosecuted—remember, he said that this could happen if the president is first convicted by the Senate—unwittingly set a nasty trap for himself.

A trap that Pan’s brilliant interrogation shut tight.

The judge wasted no time in drilling into the implications and inconsistencies in Sauer’s position. Pan asked, incredulously, “Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival? That’s an official act—an order to SEAL Team Six.”

To which Sauer replied, unresponsively, that a president would quickly be impeached and removed for that. This was followed by more unresponsive words from Sauer.

Pan wanted an answer—to the question she had asked.

Pan: I asked you a yes-or-no question. Could a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival [and] who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?

Sauer: If he were impeached and convicted first—

Pan: So your answer is no?

Sauer: My answer is a qualified yes.

Pan interrupted again: “I asked you a series of hypotheticals about criminal actions that could be taken by a president and could be considered official acts and have asked you: Would such a president be subject to criminal prosecution if he’s not impeached and convicted? And your answer, your yes-or-no answer, is no?”

Sauer, realizing he was being cornered somehow, tried to avoid the door closing behind him. But Pan was having none of it.

It’s hard to know whether the criminal defendant, sitting at the counsel table, could understand enough of the dialogue to know that his immunity argument had completely collapsed, right then and there. But it had.

Sometimes during appellate arguments, there’s a moment when you know exactly how the court will come out. And this was one.

As for the special counsel on Tuesday morning, he, too—like everyone else in the courtroom—knew from Judge Pan’s withering questioning and Sauer’s evasive responses to her that Trump is going to lose. The only question is how quickly it will happen. I have little doubt it will be soon.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

The GOP’s Cruel Resistance to Food Aid

The Republican Party continues to falsely claim that it is the party of "family values" and "Christian values" yet the policies it pushes are diametrically the opposite these supposed values and leaves one thinking that Christ would be horrified by the actions of those who claim his name.  Instead of caring for the sick, the poor, homeless, the hungry and the stranger, they continually seek to slash assistance to the poor, the sick, the hungry and the homeless - all so they can give ever more lavish tax breaks to the wealthy - and treat migrants and immigrants as "vermin", totally ignoring their ancestors' one time immigrant/migrant status.  The most cruel and hideous of such morally bankrupt efforts is the push to block and/or reject federal funds to provide food and nutrition assistance to poor children.   One of the ironies is that over the long term, even if one ignores the moral issues, not feeding and educating poor children leads to far more costly expenditures to deal with the adverse results of malnutrition, poverty and lack of education.  Indeed, it is hard to conclude that cruelty is not the goal of such Republicans who want more tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations  but care nothing about hungry children.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP's anti-child agenda.  Here are highlights:

In the 18 months since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Republican officials have had ample opportunity to prove they’re not merely antiabortion but also pro-child. They keep failing.

GOP politicians across the country have found new and creative ways to deny resources to struggling parents and children. Take, for instance, the summer lunch program.

Under a new federal program, children who are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches can also receive food assistance during the summer. The policy, created as part of the bipartisan budget deal in 2022, gives eligible families $40 per month per child, or $120 total over the summer. It often works essentially as a top-up for food stamps, since these families must buy more groceries when their children lose access to nutritious school meals when classes go out of session.

The federal government pays the entire cost of the benefits associated with this new food program and half the administrative costs. The program isn’t automatic, though; states had to opt in by Jan. 1.

Republican governors across 15 states chose not to . . . . Up to 10 million kids will be denied access to this grocery aid as a result.

Why have these governors rejected food assistance, even amid soaring grocery prices and pledges to help families strained by inflation?

Some states, such as Texas and Vermont, cited operational or budgetary difficulties with getting a new system running in time for this summer. These obstacles could presumably be surmounted in future years. In other states, GOP politicians expressed outright disdain for the program.

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, for instance, said of the new program, “I don’t believe in welfare.” A spokeswoman for Florida’s Department of Children and Families cited vague unspecified fears about “federal strings attached.”

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds suggested there was no point in giving this grocery assistance to food-insecure children “when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.” Reynolds is apparently unaware that obesity is linked to a lack of reliable access to nutritious food and that children in food-insecure homes face a higher risk of developmental problems. This suggests withholding this nutritional assistance hurts not only the state’s children today but also its workforce tomorrow.

This is hardly the only time GOP politicians have worked to swipe food from the mouths of hungry children — and their moms.

For a quarter-century, Congress had a bipartisan consensus that it would fully fund the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, which provides food assistance to low-income families determined to be at nutritional risk.

That consensus fell apart last year, when Republican lawmakers crafted a bill that would have eliminated or reduced benefits for 5.3 million kids and pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding adults.

Thankfully, that bill didn’t pass. But with the Republican-controlled House still unable to agree on broader government spending numbers . . . . Keeping funding flat would also result in millions of hungry young children and pregnant and postpartum adults being turned away, since food costs and program participation rates have risen sharply, according to estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Elsewhere in this ongoing federal budget battle, Democratic lawmakers have been begging their Republican counterparts to consider expanding the child tax credit to make more poor children eligible.

When Congress last passed such an expansion, in 2021 (with only Democratic votes), the program was phenomenally successful: It slashed child poverty nearly in half. But the expansion was temporary. When it expired, child poverty doubled to its pre-pandemic level.

There are a few Republican lawmakers, such as retiring Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), who have heroically supported reviving some form of a child allowance, even for poor kids. But for the most part, others in the party have been somewhere between indifferent and hostile to the idea, instead gunning for more tax breaks for corporations.

Indeed, if a version of a child tax credit expansion ultimately materializes — and it might in the next few days — that will happen only because Democratic lawmakers explicitly held those corporate tax breaks hostage in exchange for aid to poor kids.

Republicans keep assuring the American public that they really, truly care about helping women forced into bearing children even when they’re not financially or emotionally ready to do so. They claim they want to protect youngsters and invest in their financial future.

Time for the GOP to put its money where its mouth is.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Trump's Frightening Immunity Claims

If there were any doubt that Donald Trump wants to be a dictator , the arguments made by his legal counsel - who, in my view need to be brought up on bar charges - before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals should remove any remaining doubt.  Trump wants complete immunity for any criminal activity he might commit while in office to such extreme lengths that as one of the judges hypothesized, he could murder his political rivals with no consequence.  Arguments by Trump's counsel, combined with Trump's January 6, 2021, coup attempt Trump also give the inference that Trump would never leave office if re-elected. Trump apparently wants to be another Vladimir Putin and answerable to no one with no end to his regime.  Thankfully. from the oral arguments and the judges' interjections, it appears that the Court is not buying Trump's frightening and preposterous arguments which frankly showed that Trump views himself as a monarch and not an elected official.  A column at CNN by a renown legal scholar takes apart Trump's arguments and looks at the likelihood that the Court will completely reject the arguments that Trump's counsel can only be viewed as having made in bad faith.  Here are column excerpts:

On Tuesday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in Donald Trump’s appeal of the trial court’s rejection of his claim that he has absolute criminal immunity. The former president’s presence in court signaled the issue’s exceptional importance. While it is sometimes difficult to predict from judges’ questions where they are heading, the argument strongly suggests Trump is going to lose — and resoundingly.

Right out of the gate, Judge Florence Pan, who emerged as the panel’s most incisive questioner, presented Trump’s counsel John Sauer with a hypothetical that exposed the unthinkable consequences of Trump’s extreme position: Could a president who used his official authority to order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival ever be prosecuted?

The question answers itself, and Sauer couldn’t square his client’s immunity claim with that and other confounding hypotheticals about extreme presidential action — an ominous sign for how Trump’s appeal will ultimately fare.

At that point, and time and again on Tuesday, Sauer attempted to rely on an escape hatch — one that malfunctioned badly. He argued that his position was not extreme because of a purported constitutional out: the impeachment judgment clause. He argued over and over again that the Constitution did allow prosecution of an ex-president — but only after he or she had been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate for the same conduct.

But the panel was having none of it, refusing to take that entirely novel argument seriously. A key problem with the argument is that the impeachment judgment clause says the opposite of what Sauer claims. It states that “the Party convicted [in an impeachment trial] shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.” In other words, the clause enshrines the rule that presidents can still be prosecuted even if they’re convicted of impeachment, not that presidents can be prosecuted only if they’re first convicted by the Senate.

Indeed, a central argument that senators defending Trump made at his 2021 impeachment trial was that his acquittal would leave him fully accountable for criminal prosecution later on. And as the judges underscored on Tuesday, Trump’s own counsel admitted the availability of later prosecution at the time.

Accordingly, Judge Pan took Sauer to task by noting that he really wasn’t even arguing that there was absolute immunity, but was claiming that an impeachment conviction was simply a precondition for prosecution. Her implication was clear: If the court brushed aside his nonsensical interpretation of the impeachment judgment clause, there was nothing to stop this prosecution of Trump.

Team Trump tried to press the argument that this doctrine mandates presidential immunity. But placing presidents above the law — by making them immune from criminal accountability — gets separation of powers backwards and upends the rule of law. Indeed, the one judge on the panel thought most likely to be favorably inclined toward Trump, Judge Karen Henderson, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, pointedly remarked that it seemed paradoxical to say that a president’s constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed entitles him to violate those very laws.

The separation of powers principle is among the reasons why there is no express constitutional provision permanently immunizing presidents for crimes committed while in office. Faced with that problem on Tuesday, Trump turned to the structure of the Constitution and its framers’ intent. But his arguments were left in tatters by the special counsel and indeed by the judges’ questions.

Trump also attempted to argue that the DC Circuit should apply the civil immunity standard, which was established by the Supreme Court in Nixon v. Fitzgerald . . . . To treat it as protected by Fitzgerald would require considering a president’s efforts to overturn the lawful results of an election as part of his official duties. The Constitution’s framers would be aghast by that even as an idea, let alone as the law. The panel seemed to agree, with Judge Childs noting prosecutors’ argument that Trump engaged in his scheme not to carry out his official duties as president but rather to secure his re-election to that post.

The American people want and deserve to know if Trump criminally abused presidential power, which he is seeking to regain, to attack our democracy.

Based on Tuesday’s proceedings and the DC Circuit’s expedited handling of this appeal, we think that the panel has no intention of shying away from its merits and risking any delay. Look for them to rule briskly, likely this week or next. And when they do, expect them to reject Trump’s audacious claim that former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for criminally abusing their power.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Is Negative Economic Sentiment All About MAGA?

As previous posts have addressed, the American economy continues to purr along at a good clip and the December jobs report once again exceeded expectations, yet the media continues to report that voters are supposedly pessimistic about the economy notwithstanding the objective economic data. Some of the same pessimism plagues some economist who have repeatedly and wrongly predicted a recession.   A column in the New York Times looks at the disconnect between perception and reality and blames it largely on two factors: (i) the reality that today's Republicans will never be happy if a Democrat occupies the White House, and (ii) today's mainstream media which always prefers to report negative news and to stir controversy in the hope of boosting page views and clicks on links.  Throw in Fox News and other right wing propaganda outlets and the negativity is near nonstop.  Interestingly, Democrats do not suffer from the same always negative mindset that plagues todays MAGA Republican Party.   The take away is that we can expect more economic naysaying no matter what the economy actually does while Trump and congressional Republicans are actively hoping for bad economic news with no regard for the harm done to average Americans. Here are column excerpts:

The economy is good, but Americans feel bad about it. Or do they?  The more I look into it, the more I’m convinced that much of what looks like poor public perception about the economy is actually just Republicans angry that Donald Trump isn’t still president.

Last year was a very good one for the U.S. economy. Job growth was strong, unemployment remained near a 50-year low and inflation plunged. Some reports I’ve seen suggest that this favorable combination was somehow paradoxical and contrary to economic theory. In fact, however, it’s exactly what textbook economics says to expect in an economy experiencing an improvement in its productive capacity. And I do mean textbook economics. . . . . on the effects of adverse and favorable “supply shocks”.

[T]he source of the positive supply shock is obvious: The economy finally got past the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Working out those disruptions took longer than almost anyone expected, then happened faster than almost anyone expected, but there’s no great mystery here. If some prominent economists denied that such a thing was possible, well, that’s their problem.

What is a mystery is why the improving economy hasn’t been reflected in public perceptions. There have been some fairly elaborate analyses of the divergence between economic fundamentals and consumer sentiment, . . . . consumer sentiment remains at levels that in the past were associated with severe recessions, very high inflation or both.

As I and many others have pointed out, consumers’ behavior doesn’t match the grim answers they give pollsters: Actual consumer spending remains strong. Still, where is that negative assessment coming from?

[O]ne of the factors everyone knows is affecting consumer sentiment — partisanship — may be even more important than most economists realize. Indeed, weak consumer sentiment may be almost entirely about MAGA.

It has been obvious for a while that views of the economy have become increasingly partisan. It’s also clear that this partisanship is asymmetric: Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say that the economy is good when their party holds the White House and bad when it doesn’t.

Republican assessments of the economy soared when Donald Trump took office. Even during the pandemic recession, when unemployment rose to almost 15 percent, Republicans had a more favorable view of the economy than they did in the Obama years. And when Joe Biden came in, almost all Republicans declared that the economy was bad — a view that has barely budged in the face of good macroeconomic news.

Democrats are not Republicans’ mirror image. . . . . Democrats did feel better about the economy after Biden won, but the economy actually was improving as we recovered from the Covid shutdown. And Democrats’ economic sentiment thereafter followed economic fundamentals, declining as inflation rose, then improving as inflation came down.

What I find most interesting about Democrats’ numbers is what we don’t see: a clear drag on sentiment from the level of prices. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence — and innumerable posts on social media — to the effect that Americans are upset about how much things cost rather than the inflation rate over the past year. But that’s not obvious from the Civiqs chart on Democrats, who are roughly as positive about the economy now as they were in Biden’s early months, before the big price increases of 2021-22.

So maybe we should at least entertain the hypothesis that the historically anomalous behavior of consumer sentiment reflects the historically anomalous nature of the modern G.O.P., two-thirds of whose supporters believe — based on no evidence — that the 2020 election was stolen. Maybe economic polling, like everything else with this crowd, is all about MAGA.

If that’s really true, the political implications are somewhat ambiguous. Poor economic sentiment may not weigh on Biden because it’s being driven by people who would never vote for him anyway. On the other hand, this interpretation suggests that most of the political upside of an improving economy may already be baked in, since Democrats have already accepted the good news, while Republicans never will.

In any case, the general point is that you just can’t interpret surveys of economic sentiment, or for that matter anything else, without taking into account the fact that the modern G.O.P. bears no resemblance to the Republican Party of past years, or for that matter any political party in modern U.S. history.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Republicans' Flood of Anti-LGBTQ bills

Other than their self-prostitution and swearing of fealty to Donald Trump, nothing more signifies the efforts of Republican officeholders to pander to the evangelical/Christofascist dominated MAGA base than the legislative war these politicians are waging against LGBT Americans.   The number of anti-LGBT bills introduced last year set records and many believe the 2024 legislative sessions in states across the country will be even worse with both more bills and ever more extreme bills being introduced.  Republicans see such bills as a way to thrill the hate obsessed MAGA base with little risk of offending other voters who all too frequently ignore such bills because they foolishly do not see them as a risk to themselves.  Hence the effort to make LGBT individuals invisible in public schools and to strip LGBT citizens of public accommodation protections and to deprive transgender youth of appropriate medical care.  Thankfully, the 2023 elections in Virginia which saw Democrats take control of both houses of the Virginia General Assembly means that for the next two years Glenn Youngkin's efforts to turn Virginia a watered down version of Florida will be blocked.  For those living in red states with districts deeply gerrymandered by Republicans, they will not be so lucky.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP jihad against the LGBT community.  Here are excerpts:

A bill that would have restricted healthcare access for transgender and gender expansive youth in Ohio was vetoed by the governor last week. Now, after cutting their winter recess short, Republican lawmakers in the state are flocking back to the capital to override the decision — a move representative of the larger GOP crusade against LGBTQ rights nationwide.

Last Friday, Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine struck down House Bill 68, which would have prevented doctors from providing puberty blockers, hormones and gender affirmation surgeries to patients under the age of 18, and barred transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams in high school and college, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

DeWine blocked the bill just minutes before he was set to publicly announce its fate. He told the media that he came to the conclusion after convening with medical providers of gender-affirming care at children's hospitals, speaking with families and young people who have sought and had varied experiences with that care, and reviewing testimony supporting and opposing the legislation. 

[T]he Republican governor's veto upset party members in the state legislature and across the country, even drawing rebukes from former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 presidential candidate and Ohio native.

Given that the bill cleared the Republican-dominated Ohio House and Senate with a supermajority — 62 of the 99 representatives and 24 of 33 senators — the legislators could garner the three-fifths vote necessary for an override, though it is unclear if they will retain all the support. 

These legislators' apparent enthusiasm to make the anti-trans bill become law reflects the greater push by GOP lawmakers across the nation to strip rights from LGBTQ Americans through legislation targeting their protections, freedom of expression and access, a campaign signified by the record number of anti-LGBTQ proposals advanced — and passed — in the United States in 2023.

The American Civil Liberties Union recorded more than 500 proposals progressing and over 80 passed in 2023 targeting LGBTQ Americans, particularly trans and gender expansive youth, a rate previously unseen in the organization's nearly eight-year history of mapping the legislation. 

Per the ACLU's tracker, 510 bills advanced across all but three states — New York, Illinois and Delaware — and Washington, D.C. in 2023, taking aim at LGBTQ civil rights broadly, trans people's access to accurate identity documents and the community's free speech and expression protections as well as healthcare, public accommodations and education provisions.

Eighty-four of the anti-LGBTQ bills became laws across 22 states last year, ACLU data shows, a huge spike compared to the 17 proposals signed into law in 2022 and the six or fewer enacted in 2020, 2019 and 2018. 

Most significant about the bills isn't just how they've grown in number but how they've escalated in their extremity and impact, she added. 

The vast majority of the proposed legislation sought to limit trans kid's access to healthcare by way of gender-affirming care bans and restrict student and educators' rights by barring trans students from participating in gendered school sports, forcing teachers to out students or censoring in-school discussions about LGBTQ people and issues. Of those 370 bills, 26 healthcare restrictions and 34 student and educator rights limitations passed. . . . viewed together, they represent an effort to, in so many words, eradicate trans people from public life."

Gender-affirming care bans exacerbate physical health disparities among gender expansive youth and young adults, while other targeted legislation threatens their mental health as well as that of LGBTQ people overall. . . . the proposals' presence in state legislatures still causes harm to LGBTQ youth, especially trans, intersex and nonbinary children, Debussy told Salon.

The volume of anti-LGBTQ legislation progressing in the U.S. last year even prompted the Human Rights Campaign to declare a national state of emergency for LGBTQ Americans, marking a first for the advocacy organization. 

"We have states where governors have turned their own trans constituents into refugees in search of health care, and good education, basic rights and freedoms," Brandon Wolf, the HRC's national press secretary, told Salon,

The state of emergency is not just one large danger, he added, quoting HRC President Kelley Robinson, "it's millions of individual moments of crisis that happen every single day."

Those crises contradict the views of anti-trans-bill supporters, who believe gender transitions are harmful to children and young adults, and argue patients should wait until they're older before making the decision to begin transitioning. Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp referenced such a claim when announcing that he signed a bill barring doctors from beginning hormone therapy for trans minors in March.

"Anti-trans legislation has become such a target for some lawmakers because they view it as a way to score easy political points," she told Salon, adding: "At the same time these bills are fueled by misinformation, the misinformation also allows these bills to perpetuate themselves."

The defeat of 228 anti-LGBTQ bills in 2023 also suggests that most Americans aren't buying into the conservative paranoia and right-wing rhetoric that stokes the anti-trans legislative movement, Wolf told Salon. 

Right-wing activists in America "promised the power-hungry politicians who signed up for their agenda that anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria would be a political slam dunk," Wolf said. "They promised that it would deliver election wins, that it would help usher in an area of authoritarian power, where democracy is no longer regarded as a shared value but seen as simply an obstacle. And by and large, they failed."

"[T]here really is no such thing as freedoms that only belong to other people, that when you allow one group of people's rights and freedoms to be restricted, you're really just laying the groundwork for the same to be done to your own."

1930's and 1940's Germans learned the hard way that attacks on Jews were just the beginning of the erosion of rights for all,

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Evangelicals' Unholy Alliance With Trump

For decades now I have said that "evangelicals" and right wing "Christians" pose a clear and present danger to constitutional government in America.  In fact, white Christian nationalist and dominionists are quite open in their desire to overthrow the U.S. Constitution which they would replace with a "Christian" theocracy where a minority of Americans, namely themselves, would rule over the majority.  This, combined with the reality that a number of surveys have shown a large overlap between evangelical "Christians" and white supremacists.  Thus, in some ways it is little surprise that this segment of American society is full onboard with Donald Trump's racist and fascist agenda which seeks to see Trump installed as nothing less than a monarch who is above the law.  The irony, of course, that these self-styled "Christians" pay little attention to Christ's gospel message of love of neighbor and instead embrace a hate driven, cherry picked version of Old Testament passages which they weaponize to disparage those they deem "other" - namely all non-whites, non-Christians, LGBT individuals and anyone else who does not subscribe to their toxic beliefs.   The irony, of course is that evangelicals have played a major role in driving people from organized religion and Christianity in particular.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the unholy alliance between evangelicals and Trump. Here are article highlights: 

Karen Johnson went to her Lutheran church so regularly as a child that she won a perfect attendance award. As an adult, she taught Sunday school. But these days, Ms. Johnson, a 67-year-old counter attendant at a slot-machine parlor, no longer goes to church.

She still identifies as an evangelical Christian, but she doesn’t believe going to church is necessary to commune with God. . . . . No one plays a more central role in her perspective than Donald J. Trump, the man she believes can defeat the Democrats who, she is certain, are destroying the country and bound for hell.

White evangelical Christian voters have lined up behind Republican candidates for decades, driving conservative cultural issues into the heart of the party’s politics and making nominees and presidents of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

But no Republican has had a closer — or more counterintuitive — relationship with evangelicals than Mr. Trump. The twice-divorced casino magnate made little pretense of being particularly religious before his presidency. The ardent support he received from evangelical voters in 2016 and 2020 is often described as largely transactional: an investment in his appointment of Supreme Court justices who would abolish the federal right to abortion and advance the group’s other top priorities.

But religion scholars, drawing on a growing body of data, suggest another explanation: Evangelicals are not exactly who they used to be.

Being evangelical once suggested regular church attendance, a focus on salvation and conversion and strongly held views on specific issues such as abortion. Today, it is as often used to describe a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically and Mr. Trump looms large.

“Politics has become the master identity,” said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.”

This is most true among white Americans, who over the course of Mr. Trump’s presidency became more likely to identify as “evangelical,” even as overall rates of church attendance declined.

The Republican caucuses in Iowa next week will be a test of how fully Mr. Trump continues to own that identity. Among his rivals, Gov. Ron DeSantis has invested most heavily in courting Iowa evangelicals, using a traditional playbook. He has secured the support of prominent evangelical figures and attested to his hard-line bona fides on abortion, an issue on which he has criticized Mr. Trump for being inconsistent, and in culture-war fights in Florida, his home state.

But Mr. Trump’s track record and recent polling suggest that is not certain. In early December, Mr. Trump had a 25-point lead over Mr. DeSantis among evangelical voters, according to a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll.

What may matter more than endorsements and policy plans are Mr. Trump’s embrace of Christianity as a cultural identity — and his promises to defend it.

At a recent rally in Waterloo, Iowa, Mr. Trump cast Christians as a broadly persecuted group facing down a government weaponized against them. Catholics are the current target of “the communists, Marxists and fascists,” he said, citing a recent controversy about a retracted F.B.I. memo, and adding that “evangelicals will not be far behind.”

Church membership in the United States has been slipping for decades, along with the share of Americans who identify as Christian — and particularly as Protestants, the branch that has historically been the gravitational center of American religion. In the middle of the 20th century, 68 percent of Americans described themselves as Protestant. By 2022, 34 percent did, according to Gallup.

At first, declines mostly affected the more liberal mainline Protestant denominations. But in recent years, self-identified evangelical church attendance has dropped as well, and a larger share of conservatives than liberals report leaving church. In 2021, for the first time on record, less than 50 percent of Americans were members of a church.

The transformation has been particularly visible in Iowa, where self-identified evangelicals, who make up about a quarter of the state’s population, are influential bellwethers in Republican politics — but where religious practice has changed more starkly than almost anywhere else in the country.

From 2010 to 2020, the state’s population of church adherents — people with some level of involvement in a congregation — fell almost 13 percent . . . Some once-faithful attendees now join services online, in some cases sampling the streamed offerings of churches far from home. Others simply never got back in the habit of attending at all.

And the schedules of blue-collar jobs and youth sports no longer consider Sunday mornings sacrosanct, making regular attendance more difficult for working people and families.

But the drop-off has had impacts far beyond individual spirituality. As ties to church communities have weakened, the church leaders who once rallied the faithful behind causes and candidates have lost influence. A new class of thought leaders has filled the gap: social media personalities and podcasters, once-fringe prophetic preachers and politicians.

There was little sign at the outset of the 2016 Republican primary season that evangelicals would take to Mr. Trump as enthusiastically as they eventually did. . . . But as Mr. Trump gained ground in the early primaries, his growing strength among white evangelical voters became clear. Polls showed that the future nominee was most popular among one group in particular: white evangelicals who seldom or never went to church.

Mr. Trump elevated a cohort of obscure evangelical pastors and media figures, who were often outside the theological mainstream but unwavering in their devotion to him. He increasingly championed Christians as a constituency, rather than nodding to their values, as previous presidents had. His rallies took on a tent-revival atmosphere.

Mr. Trump himself has become a model for embracing evangelicalism as an identity, not a religious practice. . . . . He is rarely seen in church, but a poll this fall by HarrisX for The Deseret News found that more than half of Republicans see Mr. Trump as a “person of faith.” That’s more than any other 2024 Republican presidential candidate and substantially more than President Biden, a lifelong Catholic who attends Mass frequently.

An increasing number of people in many of the most zealously Trump-supporting parts of Iowa fit a religious profile similar to the former president’s. “Iowa is culturally conservative, non-practicing Christians at this point,” Mr. Burge said. “That’s exactly Trump’s base.”

For evangelicals who do not embrace Mr. Trump’s politics, the politicized identity now regularly attached to the label has occasioned some soul-searching. . . . “It was becoming very difficult,” said Dale O’Connell, a Presbyterian pastor in Lucas County, who retired from the ministry in 2016, after 50 years, in part because of an increasingly right-wing atmosphere in some of the congregations he served.

The evolving evangelical identity is already scrambling how politicians appeal to these voters. Mr. Burge’s research has found that “cultural Christians” care relatively little about bedrock religious-right causes like abortion and pornography.

Shifts in evangelical identity have also threatened the influence of the evangelical leaders whose posts at large churches, Christian media companies and faith-based organizations for decades made them power brokers in Republican politics.

In recent months, Republican candidates competed for the endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, a power broker in Iowa’s evangelical politics. But polls show his endorsement of Mr. DeSantis in November having little effect on the loyalties of evangelical voters, who continue to favor Mr. Trump broadly.

“This election is part of a spiritual battle,” Mr. Tenney said. “When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”

Hatred towards and retribution against others is what now defines evangelicals who both make a mockery of the "Christian" label and Christ's social gospel. 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Trump Doesn’t Speak for the Silent Majority

While Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election due to the flawed Electoral College and the electors failure to act as the Founding Fathers to block unfit individuals from the presidency, he and his MAGA base have never won the majority vote of Americans.  Trump/MAGA may win in backward red states - typically thanks to evangelical extremists and white supremacists are terrified by their waning power to control the lives and beliefs of others - in no election has the silent majority of American voters supported Trump and his MAGA imitators.  In elections in 2018, 2020, 2022, and here in Virginia in 2023, Republicans and MAGA candidates have either greatly underperformed expectations or gone down to defeat(7)5 of "moms for Liberty", a/k/a "Moms for Three Ways" thanks to co-founder Bridget Ziegler, were defeated).  In each instances, Republican calls for extremism, racist discrimination, homophobia and general misogyny have failed to attract the majority of voters outside of deep red states, many of which remain economic and cultural backwaters - think Alabama and Mississippi to name just two.  Sadly, too much of the mainstream media and, of course, Fox News and its copycats, continue to falsely depict the MAGA base as the "silent majority" when, in fact they are not. A column in the New York Times looks at the true reality:

It’s for good reason that the results of the 2016 presidential race shocked, surprised and unsettled many millions of Americans, including the small class of people who write about and interpret politics for a living. There was a strong sense, in the immediate aftermath of the election, that journalists were woefully out of touch with the people at large. Otherwise, they would not have missed the groundswell of support for Trump.

One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.”

What’s been lost — or if not lost then obscured — in the constant attention to Trump’s voters, supporters and followers is that the overall American electorate is consistently anti-MAGA. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. The MAGA-fied Republican Party lost the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump lost the White House and the Republican Party lost the Senate in 2020. In 2022, Trump-like or Trump-lite candidates lost competitive statewide elections in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Republicans vastly underperformed expectations in the House, winning back the chamber with a razor-thin margin, and Democrats secured governorships in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin, among other states. Democrats overperformed again the following year, in Kentucky and Virginia.

“Since 2016,” wrote Michael Podhorzer, a former political director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., in a post for his newsletter last summer, “Republicans have lost 23 of the 27 elections in the five states everyone agrees Democratic hopes in the Electoral College and the Senate depend on.”

He continues: When Trump was sworn in, Republicans held four of those five states’ governorships, and six of the ten Senate seats. Moreover, Republicans defied history by losing nearly across the board in those states last year, the only time anything like that has happened to a Party running against such an unpopular president in a midterm.

Too many commentators have spent too much time fretting over Trump’s voters — and how they might react to the effort to remove the former president from the ballot — and not enough time thinking about the tens of millions of voters who have said, again and again, that they do not want this man or his movement in American politics.

There’s been no shortage of critics of the disqualification effort who have asked us to consider the consequences for American democracy if Trump’s supporters believe he was cheated out of a chance to run for president a third time. It’s a fair point. But I think we should also consider the consequences for American democracy if the nation’s anti-MAGA majority comes to believe, with good reason, that the rules — and the Constitution — don’t apply to Trump.

[I]t is not anti-democratic, or even all that objectionable, to disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. What unites Trump with the former secessionists under the disqualification clause is that like them, he refused to listen to the voice of the voting public. He rejected the bedrock principle of democratic life, the peaceful transfer of power.

Democrats need to galvanize the true majority of voters to go to the polls in November and defeat the ugly minority that wants to exercise tyranny over the majority of Americans.