More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

The GOP Is Anti-Family and Anti-Kid

One hears endless bloviating by Republicans about how the GOP is the party of "family values" and allegedly supportive of families and children.    They endlessly attack Democrats as being "anti-family" and "anti-child".  Like so much coming from the lips of today's Republicans, the claims are a lie and if one looks at Republican policies, they are actually anti-family and anti-children.  The "family values" of Republicans consists of seeking to inflict Bronze Age derived religious dogma on all Americans and endless demonstrations of false piety.   As for families and children, only some count in the GOP universe: white, right wing "Christian," heterosexual headed families, preferably with a married man and woman.  The rest? Merely disposable garbage to be discarded and maligned in the endless GOP quest to demonize those they label as "other."   The hypocrisy of these Republicans is even worse when one looks at the consequences of actual GOP policies: increased child poverty, higher child mortality rates, and reduced health care for families most in need.  While Democrats are hardly perfect on issues of families and children, they are head and shoulders above Republicans whose policies are diametrically opposed to their claims that they are pro-family and pro-children.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the true anti-family and anti-child Republican policies.  Here are excerpts:

In attacking Democrats and Kamala Harris, Republicans have been making a legitimate point: One of our major political parties has worked to undermine America’s families.

The problem? While neither party has done enough to support families and children, the one that is failing most egregiously is — not surprisingly — the one led by the thrice-married tycoon who tangled with a porn star, boasted about grabbing women by the genitals and was found by a jury to have committed sexual assault.

You’d think that would make it awkward for the Republican Party to preach family values. But with the same chutzpah with which Donald Trump reportedly marched into a dressing room where teenage girls were half-naked, the G.O.P. claims that it’s the Democrats who betray family values.

“The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” JD Vance said in 2021. . . . he went further in a conversation with Megyn Kelly, saying that Democrats “have become anti-family and anti-kid.”

This is gibberish. Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).

One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again. Can anything be more anti-child?

Well, maybe our firearms policy is. Guns are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, largely because of Republican intransigence and refusal to pass meaningful gun safety laws.

It’s because of the G.O.P. that the United States is one of only a few countries in the world without guaranteed paid maternity leave. Republicans fought universal health care and resisted the expansion of Medicaid; that’s one reason a child in the United States is three times as likely to die by the age of 5 as a child in, say, Slovenia or Estonia.

Think of it this way: We’d be saving the life of one American child between the ages of 1 and 5 every three hours if we had the same child mortality level as Norway or Finland.

Project 2025, a blueprint for a Trump administration that Trump is frantically trying to disavow, would make things worse. It would end Head Start, a lifeline for low-income children, and would dismantle the Department of Education.

Republican extremism has led to obstacles to in vitro fertilization, especially after an Alabama court ruled that a frozen embryo must be considered a child. The Southern Baptist Convention, a bastion of support for Trump, this summer criticized I.V.F.

Vance has supported a watered-down bill that he says protects I.V.F., but Republican senators blocked stronger legislation to defend I.V.F. fertility treatments and expand access. They are leaving hanging so many of the one in seven women who have trouble conceiving or sustaining a pregnancy. Can anything be more anti-family?

I’m troubled by the collapse of marriage in America’s working class — more than 70 percent of Americans without a high school diploma are unmarried. If we care about child poverty, we must face the reality that households headed by single moms are five times as likely to live in poverty as those with married couples. So concerns about family and children are legitimate, and Democrats should do better.

But for Republicans to blame Democrats is ludicrous, for the G.O.P. has seemingly gone out of its way to undermine families and children.

Union membership among men raises their marriage rates, for example, apparently because they then earn more money and become more stable and appealing as partners. But Republicans have worked for decades to undermine unions.

Likewise, one way to raise marriage rates may be to help teenage girls avoid pregnancy; then they may be more likely to marry in their 20s. But Republicans have often been suspicious of comprehensive sex education and have tried to defund Title X family-planning programs, and it’s no accident that the states with the highest rates of births to teenage mothers are all red states.

I’m glad Republicans are squawking about the challenges facing families and children. But if Trump, Vance and other Republicans want to blame those most responsible for the plight of families and children in America today, they should look in the mirror and hang their heads in shame.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Being a Republican at the DNC and Backing Harris

This past week's Democrat National Convention was remarkable in many ways, not the least because of the number of Republican speakers who spoke and urged other Republicans to vote for the Harris/Walz ticket and send Donald Trump down to defeat. Many of these speakers never would have pictured themselves in such circumstances even a few years ago, yet appeared and spoke because they were putting country and democracy over cult allegiance to Donald Trump who has transformed the Republican Party into something ugly, betraying all of the principles that once undergirded the GOP. I suspect many felt as I did over twenty years ago now when I resigned from the Republican Party and similarly found myself warmly welcomed by Democrats.  Some  - like the Christofascists at The Family Foundation, Virginia's leading hate group - act as if I am a flaming liberal yet if one goes to the Virginia State Corporation Commission and pulls up a copy of the articles of incorporation for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach, you will find my signature as the incorporator.  Like many of the speakers at the DNC, I did not leave the GOP as much as the GOP left me.  In my case, it was the GOP's efforts to erase the separation of church and state that pushed me away.  Now, with Trump heading what has become a cult, there are countless more reasons to abandon the GOP in its current state which bears no resemblance to the party my grandparents and parents supported.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at these Republican speakers at the DNC:

Geoff Duncan served as the Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, and with his conservative suits, power ties, and neatly coiffed hair, he looks the part. But last night at the Democratic National Convention, he delivered an impassioned plea for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

“Let’s get the hard part out of the way: I am a Republican. But tonight I stand here as an American—an American that cares more about the future of this country than the future of Donald Trump,” he said. “Let me be clear to my Republican friends at home watching: If you vote for Harris in 2024, you are not a Democrat. You are a patriot.”

Duncan is one of several Republicans who have spoken at the convention. The former Trump spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham made some news Tuesday night in a speech in which she said Trump called his own supporters “basement dwellers.” Ana Navarro, the CNN personality and former Jeb Bush aide, hosted part of Tuesday’s program. John Giles, who is the mayor of the conservative Arizona city of Mesa, and two former Trump voters spoke in the first half of the week . . . . the number of Republicans at this DNC is remarkable.

For these speakers and for the Democrats, this was a little surreal. Olivia Troye, who worked in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump and who spoke last night, recalled staffing the 2000 Republican National Convention. “If you would have asked that Olivia if I would ever imagine myself at the DNC, I would have laughed and said you were probably crazy,” she told me.

I watched Duncan’s speech from the floor of the United Center with members of the Georgia delegation. I asked whether they ever expected to be applauding Duncan at the DNC, and they shook their heads and grinned incredulously. “Never. Never,” one said.

“There’s not a lot of Republicans that show up at the DNC, so it was certainly awkward, but I’ve rarely been to a political event where people were as inviting as they were,” Duncan told me this morning. “Not one person walked up to me and questioned my policy positions, my conservative track record. They said, ‘Hey, welcome to the team for this election cycle.’”

Democrats are happy to celebrate Trump critics. The harder task is getting ordinary Republicans to vote for Harris—or at least to stay home and not vote for Trump. The Harris campaign sees the large number of GOP primary votes cast for Nikki Haley and other non-Trump candidates—including after he had sewn up the nomination—as an opportunity in November. The campaign even has a Republican on the payroll, running outreach to GOP voters. Democrats don’t expect a mass exodus, but they believe that in battleground states, a small number of Republican defectors could make a difference.

That will require winning over not just longtime Never Trumpers, but people who previously were open to Trump and might still be. That’s why the DNC has featured speakers, like Troye, who haven’t been fiercely anti-Trump since the start, and why many of them emphasized their continued political disagreements with the Democratic Party and with Harris herself.

During her speech, Troye described her upbringing as a conservative, a Catholic, and a Texan. “Those values made me a Republican,” she said. “And they’re the same values that make me proud to support Kamala Harris, not because we agree on every issue but because we agree on the most important issue: protecting our freedom.”

Freedom has been a big motif at the Democratic convention, an attempt to frame Harris’s agenda in a way that steals a traditional issue from Republicans. Democrats in Chicago have embraced the idea. But whether many Republicans are convinced, besides those in attendance here, is a question for November. 

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

GOP v. Democrat - Competing Visions for America

With the Democrat National Convention over, Americans are being presented with two starkly different visions for America's future.  The Trump/Vance ticket offers darkness, endless grievance, a constant looking towards the past, including racial division and the elimination of civil rights to those who do not embrace the MAGA agenda of taking the country backward in time (to a time when blacks are to be subordinate, gays invisible, and women's rights were restricted) and a framing the purpose of government principally to be maintaining white "Christian" supremacy.  In sharp contrast, the Harris/Walz ticket looks to the future and offers inclusion to all and the promotion of a kind of freedom that allows citizens to choose whatever culture they like, as long as they are law abiding and respect the Constitution. In some ways Harris' surge seems driven by those who want this more expansive future and who also cringe at the very thought of returning to some of the worse bigotry and discrimination from the nation's past, hence the phrase "we are not going back."   A column in the Washington Post looks at this sharp contrast through the two tickets' vice presidential candidates.   Here are excerpts:

You can see why Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate, and why Democrats have fallen in love with him. The guy delivers a stemwinder in the tradition of the great plains populists, full of passion and humor and plain-spoken defiance.

But let me tell you something: Nobody delivers a speech that good unless he’s got a clear intellectual argument behind it and a burning conviction that he’s right. And that’s why the contrast between Walz and JD Vance might be the most interesting of the campaign.

We’ve seen Donald Trump meander and contradict his way through endless stretches at a lectern. You’ll soon see Harris capably work her way through an amalgamation of platitudes and applause lines.

But in the contrasting rhetoric of Walz and Vance, in particular, we get a much sharper sense of what’s really being litigated in this election: two sharply contrasting views of what being American actually means.

The most important passage in Vance’s convention speech last month was the one where he described the country as something physical, rather than an abstraction. “America is not just an idea,” Vance said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is in short, a nation.”

Literally speaking, this is not debatable . . . . But Vance isn’t being literal. He is articulating the central idea that animates all forms of nationalism (including the white variety), as well as the Trump movement. He is arguing that there is such thing as a common American culture, with its own language (English), its own religious ethos (Judeo-Christian) and its own concept of family (heterosexual, with naturally conceived children).

[I]n his view of America, the outsider becomes American by adopting a set of cultural norms — living here “on our terms,” as he put it in his speech. In this way, he sees America as no different, really, from France or Russia or any other country with common ethnic heritage. The price of admission is cultural conformity.

What Walz articulates — about as clearly as anyone has in the party since Barack Obama arrived on the scene 20 years ago — is a competing view that says, no, actually America is very much an idea. Alone among nations, we have from the very start been a collection of immigrants and outsiders, bound together not by any common origin or culture, but rather by a common set of laws and values and institutions — what Abraham Lincoln called our “political religion.”

In the America Walz described in his convention speech, it doesn’t matter what language you speak at home or what god (if any) you worship, or whether you have kids (naturally or otherwise). Because as long as you believe in the American promise of liberty and adhere to its laws, you’re just as American as anyone else, and anybody who doesn’t like it should “mind their own damn business.”

Community, in Walz’s telling, isn’t defined by somebody’s idea of cultural norms, but rather by your connection to your neighbors. If you’re willing to help out with a stranded car or a bake sale, then he doesn’t care if you’re an atheist or a cat-owner (or, God forbid, both).

[T]his is a very big disagreement, and I would argue that it’s more important than any one policy having to do with the price of groceries or the tax code. It is an argument that will shape the way we govern ourselves for years to come — whether we conceive of American liberty as something that exists chiefly to protect White, Christian Americans from having their culture trampled, or whether we understand liberty to mean the freedom to choose whatever culture you like, as long as you respect the Constitution while you do it.

I come down firmly on the Harris-Walz side here. My own sense is that historians in the distant future will place the Trump movement among periodic eruptions in our history of the basest kind of nativism — Know-Nothings, the Immigration Restriction League, the Japanese American internment, Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. How significant this eruption will be in that continuum depends, I suppose, on whether Trump is elected a second time.  

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

The Right's Obsession With Race and IQ

Donald Trump has a long history of being a racists.  Indeed, as far back as the early 1970's the Trump companies settled a discrimination suit with the Department of Justice over its refusal to rent to black tenants.  Trump may say he "has black friends" but he only likes blacks with lots of money - all the rest he disdains.   From the outset of his campaign launch in 2015, tirades and lies about non-whites has been a hallmark of Trump's campaign.  Worse yet, he has green-lighted racism and made it respectable on the political right - remember his comments about the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rampage - and MAGA cultists regardless of their claims that racism doesn't motivate their support for Trump are lying to both themselves and anyone who questions their allegiance to someone as foul and morally bankrupt as Trump. Throw in racist evangelicals and it is a toxic brew where skin color and religious dogma define who is acceptable and worthy and who is not.  A result is that bogus "race science"  - something common under Jim Crow - is making a comeback and further fueling racial animus. A piece in The Atlantic looks at this discredited justification for bigotry being embraced on the political right and amplified in the face of Kamala Harris' rising poll numbers.  Here are column highlights: 

“Joining us now is Steve Sailer, who I find to be incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers,” Charlie Kirk said on his internet show in October. Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization, slowed down as he said “noticers,” looked up at the camera, and coyly flicked his eyebrows.

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological. In his interview with Kirk, Sailer noticed that “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites, and it’s not just all explained by poverty.” . . . He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs). Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.

Sailer has written for decades about race science, but his appearance on Kirk’s show—one of the most popular on the right—came amid a year in which he has earned newfound prominence. In June, he also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. The far right has long espoused outright racism and anti-Semitism, especially in the Trump era. But more right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding that bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification. They see race not as a social construction, but as something that can be reduced to genetic facts.

Race science is hardly a new idea. During Jim Crow, the idea was used as justification for sterilizing Black people. In Nazi Germany, the veneer of science and biology was used as a pretense for genocide. In recent decades, race science has chugged along in the U.S., mostly subterraneously. It has occasionally popped out into public view, in many cases to be met with swift condemnation. A version of that played out in 1994, when Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which argues, in part, that race and intelligence are linked.

More recently, after the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, early in the Trump presidency, race science was boosted by far-right figures such as Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer, though not to the extent or with the conviction it is now.

What’s different now is that race science is moving into the open. Sailer may have once been a fringe oddity as well, but these days his views are broadcast to the millions of people who listen to Kirk and Carlson. Neither Carlson nor Kirk pushed back on Sailer’s views: “Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk told him.

Other peddlers of race science also have the ear of those in power on the right. Take Nick Fuentes, a 26-year-old white nationalist whose many followers call themselves “Groypers.” He has repeatedly argued that white people are intellectually superior, and praised people who believe in race science. In a single podcast interview in 2022, Fuentes said that “there is a genetic basis” for Black people committing criminal acts and that Black people are “more antisocial and have higher incidences of sociopathy and on average a lower IQ.” . . . . He has also made inroads with elected Republicans; in 2022, Fuentes dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Like Fuentes, Bronze Age Pervert, a prominent far-right influencer on X who has dabbled with race science, is especially popular with young conservatives. His book, Bronze Age Mindset, reportedly became a popular read among congressional and White House staffers during the Trump administration. Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it.

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience.

Attempts to legitimize racial animus have a clear purpose. Even though racism persists in the U.S., overt racism is still extremely unpopular. Attempts to advance racist beliefs have to work within that paradigm. Trump’s Muslim ban was racist, but it hid under justifications of national security and counterterrorism. Trump’s attempts to stake his claim as a “law and order” candidate are a revival of Richard Nixon’s similar strategy in the 1960s to energize racist voters without being racist out loud. When Trump has accidentally pierced the veil, as he did when he referred to predominantly Black nations as “shithole countries,” he has tried to deny having said so in the first place. Race science is used as a crowbar to try to overturn the idea that racism is bigoted. Instead, its adherents insist, they are simply acknowledging a cold, hard truth about the world.

The allure of a supposed truth of racial statistics is about more than data, of course. For certain white people, it can be appealing to believe that you have been shut out by a “system that doesn’t recognize your genius, because it’s set to the demands of the grubby many,” as the conservative thinker Sohrab Ahmari, who has written about the creeping eugenic tendencies of right-wing youth, told me. DEI measures in the workplace may not be why a white person hasn’t succeeded in their career, but they become easy scapegoats. This feeling of racial aggrievement can fester at a time when the cost of housing, food, and health care have all hit new highs relative to income. Economic vulnerability helps keep ideas like race science fertile.

What makes the return of race science such a problem is that once the logic has taken hold, it is hard to root out: The natural order has already been settled. The poor are dysgenic and disgusting. The rich are heroic and smart. Everything is in its place. 

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Harris' Economic Agenda: A Solid Center-Left Agenda

As he fails around throwing insults and racially motivated barbs Donald Trump has called Kamala Harris a "communist" simply because she proposes policies that would reduce child poverty - which can be costly for all of us down the road - seek to address the affordability of housing, and go after corporations that price gouge to line increase their profits at the expense of consumers.  None of the proposals are radical or in any way "communist."   Her policy proposals do, however, underscore the stark contrast with Republican proposals that would further reduce taxes on the very wealthy and large corporations (Harris would increase taxes on these segments of society), eliminate public safety regulations and allow corporations to engage in unfettered corporate greed.  And none of that includes Trump's proposed tariffs that would increase prices for all consumers and hit the non-wealthy the hardest. In short, Harris seeks to assist the many in America while the Republican agenda - I call it "reverse Robin Hood" - would aid the few.  A column in the New York Times looks at Harris' proposals:

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris gave her first big economic policy speech as the Democratic presidential nominee. It was, of course, very different from the “economic” speech and news conferences Donald Trump has held in the past couple of weeks.

For one thing, Harris actually outlined her economic proposals, rather than veering off onto topics like who has the biggest crowds and how windmills are killing birds. For another, she doesn’t seem to have said anything demonstrably untrue — a sharp contrast with Trump, who lied or distorted the facts about twice per minute during an event at Mar-a-Lago.

But what about the substance? The usual suspects are claiming that Harris revealed herself to be an extreme leftist. . . . . saying that she’s essentially calling for price controls, which is odd, because she didn’t say anything like that.

All in all, Harris staked out a moderately center-left position, not too different from President Biden’s original Build Back Better agenda, which he was able to implement only in part because in an evenly divided Senate, Joe Manchin had an effective veto.

So let’s go through the substance, working off a fact sheet released by the Harris campaign, which provided more detail than the speech itself.

The most important and, as I see it, best proposal was for the restoration of an expanded child tax credit, which the Biden administration implemented in 2021 but expired at the beginning of 2022 because Democrats didn’t have a big enough congressional majority. This credit significantly reduced child poverty while it was in effect; Harris would supplement it with an even bigger credit for families with children in their first year.

Let’s start by saying that the case for aggressively fighting child poverty is overwhelming, not just on moral grounds — in a rich country, why should children who happen to be born into lower-income households suffer deprivation? — but in terms of the economics: On average, Americans who grow up in poverty have worse health and lower incomes as adults than those who don’t, which makes fighting child poverty an investment in the nation’s future.

I’m less enthusiastic about Harris’s proposals on housing, which combine tax incentives for homebuilders with down payment assistance for first-time home buyers. These aren’t bad policies per se. But the broader problem with housing affordability in America is zoning and regulation that blocks construction of new housing units. Unfortunately, these barriers to construction exist mainly at the state and local level and are out of reach of any politically plausible federal policy.

Finally, about prices: I’ve been amazed at how many credulous commentators, and not just on the right, have asserted that Harris is calling for price controls, making her out to be the second coming of Richard Nixon if not the next Nicolas Maduro.

What she has actually called for is legislation banning price gouging on groceries. Obviously, this is a populist political gesture — a way to offer something to voters upset about high food prices. But just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea.

We don’t have a detailed Harris price-gouging plan, but it’s unlikely to be more aggressive than a bill introduced this year by Senator Elizabeth Warren. And that bill is surprisingly mild — not all that different from the anti-gouging laws already on the books in many states.

Why do we have laws against price gouging? Mainly because voters hate it when businesses take advantage of shortages to charge very high prices, but also because when there aren’t effective price limits, businesses sometimes act to make shortages worse — some of us still remember the California energy crisis circa 2001, when power producers reduced supply to drive up electricity prices.

And for those comparing Harris to Nixon, who imposed price controls in 1971, bear in mind that Nixon also pressured the Federal Reserve to juice up the economy before the 1972 election — while Harris has been clear about respecting the Fed’s independence.

So what have we learned about Harris’s economics? She is, as expected, moderately center-left. And for those determined to view her as a communist — sorry, she isn’t.

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Policy Isn’t Going to Win The 2024 Election

The Democrat National Convention kicks off today and the mood is festive and above all else hopeful.  Hopeful that Donald Trump and all he stands for, including Project 2025, and the normalization political violence and open racism will go down to defeat and hopeful that the nation can focus on the future and moving the nation forward.  Trump with his promises of millions of deportations and embrace of white supremacy and far right religious extremism may thrill the MAGA base which would welcome a return of the Jim Crow laws and sodomy laws and the empowerment of a new generation of robber barons, but I believe that a majority of Americans and voters want none of it.  Add to that Trump's rambling speaking and signs of perhaps dementia and the bizarre statements of JD Vance and it seemingly fuels the desire of so many to leave Trump and his chaos, doom and gloom, and hate in the rearview mirror.  Some in the press - many of whom are the same ones who continue to give Trump's derangement a false equivalency - are whining that Kamala Harris has not  laid out detailed policy statements filled with minutiae, yet much of the public - likely a majority - seemingly could care less. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the current state of the campaign and why policy may be a limited factor.  Here are excerpts:

One of the great myths of American politics is that detailed policy positions are crucial to winning elections. Yes, policy matters in broad strokes: Candidates take general positions on issues such as taxes, abortion, and foreign policy. Rather than study white papers or ponder reports from think tanks, however, most voters count on parties and candidates to signal broad directions and then work out the details later.

In the 2024 election, policy details matter even less than they usually do. Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, seem to have figured this out. Harris has been blasted by Republicans for avoiding the press, and some journalists have griped that she hasn’t sat down for a long interview and didn’t make a major policy speech before this past Friday. But Harris and Walz seem to be making a strategic choice—and for now, a good one.

Policy proposals are supposed to differentiate the candidates, but drawing policy distinctions with Trump is hard when he presents almost nothing beyond “I will fix it.” . . . . Trump knows that his base has never really cared that much about policy; he sees such details as bumf that only gets in the way of his supercharged appeals to the limbic system.

Trump is so allergic to policy details and so unwilling to be pinned down about them that when the Heritage Foundation organized Project 2025 and produced a 900-page cinder block of proposals for Trump’s first days in office, Trump—who once seemed to praise Heritage’s initial work on the project—disavowed the whole thing as soon as Democrats highlighted some of the disturbing and creepy stuff in it.

Back in 2016, Trump’s ignorance about policy wasn’t much of an issue for the GOP. Republican elites knew they would send him to Washington—with adult supervision, of course—as a populist figurehead who would sign off on tax policies and judicial appointments that he neither cared about nor understood. But they also hoped Trump could control his bizarre and dangerous behavior, and when that proved impossible for him, Joe Biden chose a simple message in the 2020 campaign: Donald Trump is too awful to remain in office. . . . but in the end, what Biden promised above all was a return to a normal life after COVID.

The Biden campaign in 2024 tried to make that same case, but this time, Biden seemed flummoxed by voters who decided that he was no better than Trump because food was too expensive and gas prices were too high. At their only debate, Trump—for once—managed to keep relatively quiet, while Biden stumbled through a bunch of wonky talking points.

Perhaps the focus on policy was Biden’s idea, but someone should have talked him out of it: Letting the candidate go out there and drown in his own factoids was basic staff malpractice.

Harris has taken a different approach. I have said many times that I am comfortable voting for almost anyone who could stop Trump, but most people, understandably, want someone to vote for rather than against: Harris and Walz seem to believe that Americans are tired of gloom and drama, so they are presenting themselves as normal, cheerful people, politicians who everyone might not agree with but who won’t make America dread turning on the television.

Harris’s people also seem to grasp that when Trump is repeatedly melting down in public, Democrats should not interrupt him. And they’re right: Allowing anyone to drag Harris into the thickets of policy just to satisfy the demands of some journalists—and a lot of angry Republicans who will never vote for her—while Trump is hurting himself would, like Biden’s debate, constitute political malpractice.

In the past few weeks, Trump has attacked Harris’s race, her intelligence, and her looks. His unhinged rants are worse than ever. Last week, he managed to remind Americans yet again how much he hates military people by claiming that the presidential medals he gave out are “much better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor because people get them while they’re healthy and happy instead of all shot up, lame, or even dead.

Meanwhile, his running mate, J. D. Vance, continues to earn the label of “weird” that Harris and Walz have plastered on him. This weekend, for example, during an interview on Fox News, he said that “giving Kamala Harris control over inflation policy” is like “giving Jeffrey Epstein control over human-trafficking policy.” . . . . I’m pretty sure that making an analogy using a dead sex offender—who was once a well-known friend of your running mate—is not the most adept move.

In the middle of all this, Harris and Walz are supposed to sit for an interview and explain their plans for … what, exactly? Federal burden-sharing with the states for highway repair? Any adviser worth their salt would block the gates of the Naval Observatory rather than let Harris and Walz distract the public from the Trump and Vance tire fires by wonking out about school lunches or Ukrainian aid.

I wish that Americans cared more about policy, but they don’t. . . . . They care about a handful of large issues where the differences between Harris and Trump are stark, such as abortion, and that’s about it. Republicans might not like it, but Harris is wisely refusing, at least for now, to do anything that would take the spotlight off the awkward soap opera that is the Trump-and-Vance campaign.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Trump’s Medal of Dishonor

Over the past week, between them  Donald Trump and JD Vance have seemingly been engaged in a contest as to which of them could alienate more would be voters through their thoughtless or bizarre statements. Of the batshitery, the most shocking for one living in an area with a large military population is Trump's statement about the Presidential Medal of Freedom being "much better" than the Congressional Medal of Honor for those who have exhibited valor and courage under combat.  The episode underscore Trump's lack of empathy or awareness towards those to whom valor and patriotism actually means something.  With Trump, it's all about himself  and satiating his ego above all else. One can only hope that members of our armed forces will remember Trump's disrespect when they vote this fall.  A piece The Atlantic looks at Trump's dishonoring of those who have in many cases given everything for their country.  Here are highlights:

Former President Donald Trump sparked near universal criticism last week when he said that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, was “much better” than the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for military valor. Trump made these comments during an event at his Bedminster, New Jersey, estate about anti-Semitism, in which he was drawing attention to the work of Miriam Adelson—the widow of his friend, the casino magnate and megadonor Sheldon Adelson—who received the Medal of Freedom from Trump in 2018. Trump’s bizarre logic was that many recipients of the Medal of Honor are in “bad shape” because of their wounds or receive the award posthumously, and that the Medal of Freedom is better because a “healthy, beautiful woman” like Miriam Adelson can receive it.

Valor awards recognize what was, likely, one of the worst days of someone’s life. This is particularly true if a person is being written up for the highest awards—the Silver Star, Navy Cross, Air Force Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, or Medal of Honor. These are not given after a mission where everything went right and everyone came home.

The process of approving these awards is arduous, and each of the services handles it a little bit differently. The Marine Corps requires a “summary of action,” a lengthy document that outlines in detail what occurred and why it merits the award. This is followed by multiple witness statements from those who saw the actions of the awardee—many a hero has gone unsung because no survivors existed to write these witness statements. Once all of this documentation is gathered, it goes into an awards packet, which then circulates through a labyrinthine bureaucracy; at every level of command, the award is either recommended for approval, downgraded, or, in some cases, upgraded.  . . . Awards boards meet only periodically, so this process can take years. Valor awards are not bestowed by fiat.

When confronted with American valor, Trump has a history of making disparaging comments, dating as far back as 2015 when he said of the late Senator John McCain, a recipient of the Silver Star, that he “was only a war hero because he was captured,” adding, “I like people who weren’t captured, okay?” Perhaps Trump thinks the Medal of Freedom is “better” because he, as the president, can award it to whomever he pleases, including friends and donors. The Medal of Honor affords him no such discretion. Also, it seems beyond his comprehension that an award could simply lead to another chapter of service and not become an accolade used for simple personal advantage.

During Trump’s presidency, he presided over 12 presentations of the Medal of Honor. If he wins the White House in November, he’ll likely preside over more. I doubt anyone will be saying at any future White House presentation that an award wasn’t deserved. But they might say, instead, that the man presenting it doesn’t deserve the honor of performing the task.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Far-Right Influencers Turn Against Trump's Campaign

Republicans take delight when Democrats are split on issues and engage in intra-party infighting.  Now, Democrats can take delight in some of the infighting on the right as far right influencers - some of whom are down right crazy and others are open white supremacists - attack Donald Trump's campaign for not veering further to the far right.  While most are not attacking Der Trumpenfuhrer directly, his campaign staff and leadership is another story.  One can only hope they are successful in their mission to move Trump to the far right and in the process stifle Trump's appeal to moderates and independents who correctly view these self-styled influencers as down right scary or insane.  It's a familiar phenomenon here in Virginia where the knuckle dragging GOP base always claims that far right candidates will allow them to win despite election results indicating otherwise - Youngkin won in part by pretending his was a moderate, which he is not.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the revolt of these far right players and what it may mean for the Trump campaign.  Here are excerpts:

Some of the internet’s most influential far-right figures are turning against former president Donald Trump’s campaign, threatening a digital “war” against the Republican candidate’s aides and allies that could complicate the party’s calls for unity in the final weeks of the presidential race.

Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and podcaster who dined with Trump at his Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago in 2022, said on X that Trump’s campaign was “blowing it” by not positioning itself more to the right and was “headed for a catastrophic loss,” in a post that by Wednesday had been viewed 2.6 million times.

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist whom Trump last year called “very special,” said his “weak” surrogates had unraveled his momentum and that his approach “needs to change FAST because we can’t talk about a stolen election for another 4 years,” in an X post that was “liked” more than 8,000 times.

And Candace Owens, a far-right influencer with 5 million X followers who was photographed with Trump in March, described the conservative infighting in a podcast Tuesday as a “MAGA Civil War” fueled by anger that Trump’s policies and persona had been softened to boost his mainstream appeal.

“I’m just not sure who is driving the MAGA bus anymore,” she said, making it clear like other vocal far-right influencers that her problem isn’t with Trump but with his staff. “You’re losing that support from the people that believed in you. … You need those people.”

The insider attacks, which come as other backers are calling for Trump to take a more disciplined, policy-oriented approach to his campaign, highlight a new vulnerability in one of the loudest corners of Trump’s nationwide base. With millions of followers, the far-right provocateurs have long been one of the most reliable engines for winning Trump attention online, helping to build the viral energy that boosted his political career and his strong lead among predominantly White male voters.

As Trump’s campaign grapples with slumping performance in the polls, the far-right activists argue that it has failed by not adopting harder-right positions on race and immigration. They have also called for the campaign to fire its co-managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, blaming them for a lackluster strategy.

Many of the campaign’s hard-right critics said they still stand strongly behind Trump himself. But some of them have vowed to pummel the campaign online and at Trump rallies unless it changes course, presenting a challenge for campaign officials who have worked to publicly disavow or disregard extreme voices for fear they could alienate voters.

Some campaign officials previously argued the far-right influencers offer value by amplifying political messages to their audiences. But the more overt recent attacks of Fuentes and his followers, who call themselves “groypers,” have become a “noisy” and counterproductive distraction to the campaign, said a person familiar with its operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

“If anything, [Fuentes] is hurting the idea of getting fresh blood into the campaign, because it makes it far more difficult for Trump if it looks like he’s responding to the groypers,” the person said.

In an appearance last Sunday on CBS, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, called Fuentes a “total loser” and said the proper response was to “ignore” trolls like him until they “go away.”

But the far-right criticism has proved agitating for some of Trump’s most devoted online cheerleaders. Brenden Dilley, a pro-Trump podcaster in Georgia, on Monday asked whether Fuentes and others who had attacked Trump were all part of a secret psychological operation, or “psy-op,” designed to “reinforce the Kamala Harris surge narrative.”

Colin Henry, a researcher at George Washington University who has studied political extremism online, said influencers on the far right have grown visibly frustrated in recent weeks by Trump’s fading performance in the polls and the campaign’s disavowal of hard-line policy proposals, such as Project 2025. “They saw that as a shot across the bow from the mainstream folks, who wanted to do all this stuff with policy and institutions,” he said.

The anger of far-right influencers matters because they have proven adept at “punching above their weight” in conservative circles in a way that could bedevil Trump’s campaign, said Ben Lorber, a senior researcher at Political Research Associates, a think tank in Massachusetts that monitors right-wing groups.

“This movement has the ability to move conservative discourse and to open up space far to the right of acceptable conservative opinion for people like Trump to move further rightward,” he said.

In an interview, Fuentes said he intended to push his followers to adopt “guerrilla” tactics and “escalate pressure in the real world,” including through mass appearances at Trump rallies in battleground states such as Michigan, until the campaign had met their demands to stop “pandering to independents.” He has urged followers to withhold their votes for Trump, saying it was the only way to awaken a campaign that had “no energy … [and] no enthusiasm.”

“If they blame me for Trump losing, so be it,” he said. “He’ll have lost because he stopped talking to the MAGA base he had in 2016.”

Collaborators of Fuentes have worked for far-right members of Congress, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.). And at times, messages from Fuentes — who calls for a white ethnostate in the United States, in which even legal immigration is banned — and more established pro-Trump accounts have closely aligned.

A Tuesday tweet by the campaign account @TrumpWarRoom labeled a photo of Black men “Your Neighborhood Under Kamala” and warned: “Import the third world. Become the third world.”