More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

The GOP’s False Pro-Family Delusion

 

Republicans endlessly bloviate being the party of "family values" and being pro-family.  The reality is something far different from Republican lip service.  "Family values" in reality translates to trying to force Christofascist dogma - including forced birth on minors through abortion bans - on all of society even as the GOP is currently headed by a man who is utterly bankrupt morally and who is the antithesis of what are true Christian values. As for being "pro-family", the GOP's actual policies do little or nothing to aid families and efforts to block Medicaid expansion, cut aid to poor families and children,  and the pursuit of a reverse Robin Hood agenda in favor of the wealthy actively harms countless American families.  Recent incoherent speeches by Trump on childcare costs and insane statements by JD Vance who would force childcare burdens on grandparents and other relatives underscore the reality that the GOP has no plan to aid working families.  Meanwhile Trump's promises of across the board tariffs - which he idiotically claims would be paid by foreign countries and companies - would drive up costs for families and consumers significantly.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the GOP's false pro-family narrative:

Today’s Republican Party aspires to be a pro-family movement, but it has struggled to turn that desire into much more than a plea for people to have more children. Twice in the past two days, the GOP presidential ticket has demonstrated that it has no idea how to help people care for children once they’re born.

Yesterday, Donald Trump spoke at the Economic Club of New York, where he was asked whether and how he would make child care more affordable. The answer was, even by his standards, confusing and rambling: . . . it’s hard to reach any conclusion except that Trump not only has no plan for lowering child-care costs, but has not thought about the issue at all. What do tariffs have to do with day-care prices? This writer doesn’t know, and neither does Trump.

Vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance was asked basically the same question at an event in Arizona on Wednesday. Although he is supposedly the deeper policy thinker on the ticket, his answer was barely more sophisticated: . . . So one of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for day care is make it so that that, you know, maybe, like, Grandma or Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more.

The idea that young families can just rely on relatives is nearly as out of touch as Mitt Romney’s infamous 2012 suggestion that students could start a business by seeking a loan from their parents. Vance assumes that everyone lives near family members.

Even those who live near family may not be able to rely on them for help. Vance was famously raised by his own grandmother, who stepped in because his mother struggled with addiction . . . That relationship is not typical. Mamaw was able to care for young J.D. in part because Papaw had a good union job that enabled him to provide for a family, and then a pension; his wife stayed home with the children. Such arrangements are rarer now, and besides, many Americans work deep into their older years and aren’t available for babysitting.

Vance seems generally averse to looking outside the family for child-care support. In 2021, he tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” who, he said, would rather not have both parents working. The fact is that many families who might prefer to have one breadwinner and one caregiver simply can’t afford that arrangement, and for them daycare is a normal response. Vance has said that he and Trump represent the “most pro-worker Republican ticket in history,” but they’re scant on details about how exactly they’d bring back jobs like Papaw’s. Trump criticized the UAW for striking last year, and his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board as president were more friendly to employers than to workers.

At the Arizona event, Vance did offer one suggestion for cutting child-care costs: lowering barriers to entering the business. . . . But cutting red tape is unlikely to significantly lower day-care costs. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote in 2022, child care’s fundamental problem is that it’s highly labor intensive, and labor costs money. At a time when wages have risen and jobs are plentiful, day-care operators are losing employees to higher-paying jobs.

The gap between rhetoric and concrete results is a recurring theme of the fake populism of Trump-Vance Republicans. The GOP insists that it has become a pro-worker party in addition to a pro-family party, but when its policies are subjected to even minimal scrutiny, they seem to offer little to no benefits for working families. It’s enough to drive one to become a childless cat lady or gentleman.

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Father of Georgia Shooter Rightly Charged with Murder

I have long argued for strict liability for gun owners meaning that they should be held legally liable for anything bad that that is done with a gun they owner or that they purchase and give to someone who then commits a crime with the weapon.  For too long America's insanely lax gun laws have put the lives of the majority of voter who want strict gun laws behind the wants of the few gun fanatics who wrap themselves in the 2nd Amendment which has been warped beyond recognition by right wing judges and Supreme Court justices.  Strict liability for gun owners might motivate insurance carriers to either not insure homes that have one or more guns present whatsoever or at minimum sharply jack up insurance premiums so that gun ownership would become less financially viable for many homeowners.  Gun nuts could have their guns, but they might have to choose between homeownership where lenders require insurance coverage as a condition of their loans and their guns. This weeks horrific school shooting in Georgia and the charging of the shooter's father with murder is a step in the right direction toward a reality where gun ownership and/or irresponsibly providing a gun to anyone who commits a crime will carry a very heavy cost and might deter would be gun owners from purchasing a weapon and putting their freedom at risk.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at the charges filed in Georgia which I loudly applaud.  Here are highlights: 

Georgia officials charged the father of the suspected Apalachee High gunman with two counts of second-degree murder Thursday — the most severe charges ever filed against the parent of an alleged school shooter. The arrest came less than 36 hours after two students and a pair of teachers were gunned down with an AR-15-style rifle that, investigators allege, the man allowed his 14-year-old son to possess.

Along with murder, Colin Gray, 54, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children. His son, Colt Gray, has been charged with four felony counts of murder.

The father “knowingly allowed him to possess the weapon. His charges are directly connected to the actions of his son,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at an evening news conference. . . . . There were warning signs before Wednesday’s attack, according to law enforcement officials and family members.

A year ago, local investigators interviewed Gray and his son about alleged online threats the teen had made to shoot up a school, accusations that Colt Gray denied at the time. This week, the boy’s aunt, Annie Brown, told The Washington Post that the teen had been “begging” the adults around him for mental health support in recent months.

Before Thursday’s announcement, the teen’s grandfather, Charles Polhamus, said he wanted Colin Gray charged along with his son. “If he didn’t have a damn gun,” Polhamus said, “he wouldn’t have gone and killed anybody.”

The charges come five months after a mother and father in Michigan became the first parents of a school shooter sentenced for involuntary manslaughter, a less severe crime than second-degree murder. Investigators found that, in November 2021, James and Jennifer Crumbley had bought their 15-year-old son a gun, didn’t lock it up and ignored blatant warning signs before he opened fire at Oxford High in Michigan, killing four students.

Between the Columbine High shooting in 1999 and the one at Apalachee 25 years later, children have committed at least 195 school shootings, according to a Post database that tracks gun violence on K-12 campuses. Among the cases in which the weapon’s source was identified by police, more than 80 percent were taken from the child’s home or those of relatives or friends. Yet just 11 times have the adult owners of the weapons been charged with any crime because they didn’t lock them up.

The dearth of criminal consequences has often been blamed on weak firearms laws. Just 21 states and D.C. have passed statutes that impose criminal penalties on people who store guns where children could access them, according to the Giffords Law Center, an organization that advocates for gun-safety legislation.

As in Georgia today, Michigan had not passed a law back then requiring gun owners to safely store their firearms away from children — a legal obstacle that didn’t prevent McDonald from holding the Crumbleys accountable.

But unlike the case in Michigan, prosecuted in a Democratic-leaning county just outside Detroit, Georgia’s Barrow County is staunchly conservative, making both the seriousness and speed of the charges against Colin Gray especially notable.

Prosecutors and law enforcement officials across the country who are struggling to grapple with gun violence are likely to watch the Georgia prosecution closely to see how it plays out, legally and politically, in a state with loose firearms laws and a pro-gun culture.

I hope the father gets convicted and gets the maximum sentence. I also hope the families of the victims will sue him if he has homeowner's coverage and perhaps make risk adverse insurance carriers reluctant to insure homes were guns are present.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

The Far Right's Role in the Russian Propaganda Attack on America

One thing that continually amazes me is the willingness of many on the political far right to believe all kinds of insane conspiracy theories and, worse yet push these manufactured story lines to others and, in the process disseminate Russian propaganda.  Nothing seems too far fetched and the batshit craziness that the MAGA base is only too happy to embrace has caused me to unfriend some on social media because it simply is too exhausting trying to convince them that they are spreading lies.  Worse yet, as this week's indictment of Russian operatives by the Department of Justice underscores, some far right "influencers" are only too happy to be bought by the Kremlin and push Putin's propaganda.  Frighteningly, even some Republican members of Congress repeat Russian talking points and prove that their true allegiance is not to America but to their orange cult leader.  With the the indictment of the Russian operatives it has been telling to see those who took large amounts of money that should have made it obvious that something was amiss are now playing the victim role rather than admit they were either willingly duped or let their greed cause them to aid an enemy of America.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the phenomenon:

When people think of the world of espionage, they probably imagine glamorous foreign capitals, suave undercover operators, and cool gadgets. The reality is far more pedestrian: Yesterday, the Justice Department revealed an alleged Russian scheme to pay laundered money to American right-wing social-media trolls that seems more like a bad sitcom pitch than a top-notch intelligence operation.

According to a federal indictment unsealed yesterday, two Russian citizens, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, worked with a Tennessee company not named in the indictment but identified in the press as likely to be Tenet Media, owned by the conservative entrepreneurs Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan. The Russians work for RT, a Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlet; they are accused of laundering nearly $10 million and directing the money to the company.

Chen and Donovan then allegedly used most of that money to pay for content from right-wing social-media influencers including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, and Benny Johnson. Unless you’ve spent time sloshing around in some of the dumber wading pools of the internet, you may not have heard of these people, but they have several million followers among them.

So far, Pool, Rubin, and Johnson claim that they had no idea what was going on, and have even asserted that they’re the real victims here. On one level, it’s not hard to believe that someone like Pool was clueless about who he was working for, especially if you’ve seen any of his content; these people are not exactly brimming with nuanced insights.

And even without this money, some of them were likely to make the same divisive, pro-Russian bilge that they would have made anyway—as long as they could find someone to pay for their microphones and cameras.

On the other hand, you might think a person at all concerned about due diligence would ask a few questions about the amount of cash being dumped on their head. An op-ed in a newspaper or a magazine usually nets the writer a few hundred bucks. Well-known podcasters and the biggest writers on Substack—and there are only a few—can make $1 million or more a year, but most people on those platforms never get near that kind of income. . . . . the unnamed company agreed to pay one contributor $400,000 each month for hosting four weekly videos, and offered another a contract to make occasional videos at $100,000 a pop.

What’s really going on here is that the Russians have identified two major weaknesses in their American adversaries. The first is that a big slice of the American public, especially since the ascent of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, has an almost limitless appetite for stories that jack up their adrenaline: They will embrace wild conspiracies and “news” meant to generate social conflict so long as the stories are exciting, validate their preexisting worldviews, and give them some escape from life’s daily doldrums.

The other is that more than a few Americans have the combination of immense greed and ego-driven grievances that make them easy targets either for recruitment or to be used as clueless dupes. The Russians, along with every other intelligence service in the world, count on finding such people and exploiting their avarice and insecurity. This is not new. . . . . . But the widespread influence of social media has opened a new front in the intelligence battle.

Professional secret agents no longer need to find highly placed Americans who have access to secrets or who might influence policy discussions. Instead of the painstaking work that usually takes months or even years to suborn foreign citizens, the Kremlin can just dragoon a couple of its own people to pose as business sharps with money to burn, spread cash around like manure in a field full of half-wits, and see what blossoms.

Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva apparently developed and maintained a fake persona named “Eduard Grigoriann” who, for some reason, was just itching to plop a ton of money down on a venture in Tennessee. . . . Even more amusing, Grigoriann apparently missed a meeting with his American partners because he was on Moscow time when he was supposed to be in Paris.

As idiotic as this business was, Americans should not be complacent. Yes, people such as Johnson and Pool are execrable trolls, and yes, Chen has been fired from Blaze Media, a major conservative media outlet. But to the Russians, cooperative foreigners are interchangeable and replaceable. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is playing a very smart game here. For a relative pittance—$10 million is probably the loose change in the bottom drawer of Vladimir Putin’s desk—they gain a potentially huge amount of social discord, which in turn can translate directly into the electoral outcome the Russians so fervently desire: Trump’s return to the Oval Office.

The Justice Department finally seems to be going on the offense and fighting back against these Russian attacks on America. But this indictment is probably only the tip of the iceberg: Unfortunately, the Russians have scads of money, and plenty of Americans are despicable enough to take their cash.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Liz Cheney Endorses Kamala Harris

Well over more than two decades ago when I was an active Republican, honesty, allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, personal character and integrity, moral decency and the rule of law mattered.  Sadly, in the age of Donald Trump, none of these things matter in today's Republican Party. Today, cult loyalty to Trump, the embrace of racism, homophobia, far right religious extremism and misogyny are the sole factors that matter if one is to remain a Republican.  I continue to be shocked and saddened by the number of former friends and Republican colleagues who have betrayed everything they once claimed to stand for.  These people tend to get their "news" from Fox News - which in its defamation settlement  admitted that it was not a news outlet but instead an entertainment site - and far right ideologues peddling lies and conspiracy theories and seemingly drink the Trump Kool-Aid by the gallon. If one continues to embrace and uphold the the values of the GOP of yesteryear, the only viable option is to leave the Republican Party (as many I know have done) and/or vote Democrat in the hope that electoral defeats will bring the GOP to its senses. One such person is Liz Cheney who announced she will be voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 while underscoring the danger Donald Trump poses to the nation.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Cheney's endorsement of Harris: 

Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming, broke with the Republican Party on Wednesday to say she plans to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in November.

“As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this,” Cheney said at an event hosted by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy in North Carolina. “And because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”

With her promise of support for Harris, the former congresswoman becomes the latest on a growing list of Republicans who have come out against voting for Trump this fall. Democrats have embraced the GOP defectors, putting several Republican speakers on the Democratic National Convention stage last month — including former lawmaker Adam Kinzinger, who along with Cheney served on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Once the No. 3 Republican in the House, Cheney voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, saying at the time that “there has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” Republicans subsequently ousted her from her role as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference in May 2021 because she continued to challenge Trump over his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Trump has been critical of Cheney for years, with tensions forming after she criticized some of his actions as president. In his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, on the National Mall in Washington, before he urged his supporters to march to the Capitol, Trump said of Cheney, “We got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world.”

In March, he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, that Cheney and the other members of the select committee should go to jail. And in July, he shared another user’s post asserting that Cheney was guilty of treason.

Cheney, who weighed a third-party presidential run earlier this election cycle, emphasized on Wednesday in the battleground state of North Carolina that she does not believe voters have the “luxury” of supporting write-in candidates to protest Trump.

“Because we are here in North Carolina, I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I’ve just said about the danger that Trump poses, something that should prevent people from voting for him,” she said. “But I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states.”

I disagree with Cheney on numerous issues, but I respect her refusal to embrace the indefensible.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Red States: The Political Rage of Left-Behind Regions

Over the lifetime of this blog I have frequently bemoaned the reality that voters in red states and here in Virginia in Southwest Virginia and the so-called southside of the state continually vote for Republicans who play on residents' hatreds and bigotry to win votes while offering little or nothing in terms of policies and programs that would lift up economic backwater regions.  Indeed, most Republican policies actually would hurt these regions if implemented: ending the Affordable Care Act, cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security which disproportionately benefit rural states and regions which pay in far less in taxes than what residents and states receive from such programs.  Red states and red rural areas rant against blue states and the "urban elite" yet they are the equivalent of welfare queens supported by urban and blue state taxpayers. Yes, there are real reasons for rage over declining economic prospects in these left-behind regions, but Republican policies and reactionary social and religious beliefs that frighten away investment and development by progressive companies are not the answer. Meanwhile,  even as the Biden/Harris administration has sought to fund manufacturing and development in these regions, the local voters give them no credit and cling to Republicans who actually opposed such programs.  Hate and bigotry and grievance over ride any ability to rationally evaluate which party offers these residents the most hope.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon:

There were local elections in several German states a few days ago, and the results — a strong showing by the Alliance for Germany or AfD, a right-wing extremist party — were shocking but not surprising. Shocking because, given their history, Germans more than anyone else should fear the rise of anti-democratic right-wing forces. Not surprising because the AfD has been rising for a while, especially in the former East Germany, where the elections were held.

I am not any kind of an expert on Germany, and I won’t speculate about what these results mean for the Bundesrepublik’s future. What I can say as an American is that despite the vast differences in our nations’ modern histories, the rise of Germany’s modern far right — and especially its concentration of support in economically depressed areas — looks remarkably familiar.

Put it this way: In some important respects Thuringia, the German state where the AfD won more votes than any other party, resembles West Virginia. Like West Virginia, it’s a place the 21st-century economy seems to have left behind, whose population is in decline, with younger people in particular leaving for opportunities elsewhere. And West Virginia strongly supports Donald Trump and his party, whose doctrines bear considerable resemblance to those of the AfD.

After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, there was a lot of facile talk about voters driven by economic anxiety. Voters’ real motivations are more complex than that.

But MAGA’s rise does seem connected to the economic decline of much of rural and small-town America. This decline has happened in many parts of the country, including, for example, much of upstate New York, but it is concentrated in what Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser and Lawrence Summers have called the “eastern heartland.” In what follows I’ll focus on numbers for West Virginia, which is arguably the heart of that heartland, and epitomizes both the economic and political problems of left-behind regions.

So what stands out when you compare West Virginia with other parts of America is the number of men not working.  . . . . Here’s a comparison between West Virginia and New Jersey. Why New Jersey? I’ll explain in a moment. The chart shows the percentage of adults ages 20 to 64 who didn’t have jobs in 2019 (before the pandemic). . . . . . Adults of both sexes were much more likely not to be working in West Virginia, although the gap was larger for men (67 versus 43 percent).

Why is not working a problem? Obviously, it means you aren’t earning wages, but it goes deeper than that. Jobs are a source of dignity, a sense of self-worth; people who aren’t working when they feel they should be — a problem that, like it or not, is even now bigger for men than women — feel shame, which all too easily turns into anger, a desire to blame someone else and lash out.

[T]he lack of jobs for men helps extremist political movements that appeal to angry men. In Germany, the AfD has much stronger support among men than women. Polls show a large advantage for Kamala Harris among women in the United States, while Trump leads among men. Places where there are many men without jobs are fertile ground for MAGA, which is trying to court the “manoverse.”

Why are jobs, especially for men, so hard to get in West Virginia?

Despite what you may hear from the likes of JD Vance, native-born West Virginians aren’t losing jobs to immigrants because the state hardly has any immigrants — only 1.8 percent of the population is foreign-born, the lowest in the nation, while the corresponding number for New Jersey is 23.5 percent, close to the top.

The parallel between economic and political developments in the United States and Germany also rules out the idea that the heartland is suffering because trade deficits are undermining our manufacturing sector. For while America has indeed been running trade deficits, Germany has been running huge surpluses — yet is experiencing similar discontent and anger . . . .

So what’s the matter with the heartland? The most likely story is that the 21st-century economy is driven by knowledge-intensive industries that flourish in metropolitan areas with highly educated work forces. This has led to a self-reinforcing process in which jobs migrate to places with lots of college graduates, and college graduates migrate to the same places, leaving less-educated places like West Virginia stranded.

Is the solution, then, for the regions that have benefited from this process to provide aid to those on the losing end? The answer, in America at least, is that they actually do in effect provide such aid, although until recently it was the result of aid to individuals rather than reflecting a deliberate “place-based” policy.

The federal government provides a lot of support to U.S. citizens via Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; even poor states receive the full benefit of these programs. But poor states pay relatively little in federal taxes, which support these programs. So the result is huge implicit aid to lower-income states. . . . . In effect, the state [West Virginia] received “foreign aid” from wealthier states of almost 12 percent of G.D.P., which is huge.

West Virginia also benefited immensely from the Affordable Care Act, which greatly reduced the number of its residents without health insurance

You might say that the federal social safety net increases people’s incomes but doesn’t create jobs. But that’s not true. Social Security supports consumer spending, which creates jobs in retail and more. Medicare and Medicaid support jobs in hospitals, doctors’ offices, and so on.

What is true, and may partially explain political rage in left-behind regions, is that many of the jobs federal aid creates tend to be female-coded, certainly more so than coal mining — which may in turn explain why the problem of adults without jobs appears to be worse, at least in terms of its political weight, for men than for women.

That said, the Biden-Harris administration has been making a serious effort to promote manufacturing as part of its industrial policies — an effort that seems to be disproportionately helping heartland states.

The odd thing is that the politicians angry heartland voters support — Trump received more than twice as many votes in West Virginia as Joe Biden in 2020 — oppose the very programs that aid these depressed areas. Trump tried, in effect, to kill the Affordable Care Act. Not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which is helping to create manufacturing jobs in the heartland.

[W]hile the AfD talks a lot about “social distress” in lagging regions, this “does not translate into a platform that supports greater state spending.”

In Germany as in America, then, voters in left-behind regions are, understandably, angry — and they channel this anger into support for politicians who will make their plight worse.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Democrats Recaptured "Freedom" Back from Trump and Republicans

One hears constant blather and bloviating from Republicans and those on the far right about "freedom," yet their version of freedom translates to being free to discriminate against and mistreat others, rolling back the civil rights of racial and sexual minorities, taking away women's autonomy over their own bodies, censoring and banning books, and eliminating safety regulations so that corporations can pollute and abuse workers in their quest for ever higher profits.   The right's version of "freedom" equates to rights and freedoms for the few - particularly racist, white supremacists and Christofascists - and the loss of freedom for everyone else.  In a stunning turn of events, Democrats are recapturing the battle cry of freedom from the right wingers, fueled in part by the growing recognition by those excluded by the right of the existential threat that Trump and Republicans and, of course, the MAGA base pose for the majority of Americans. For Democrats, freedom means an expansion of rights and liberties for all, including the historically marginalized - while the Republican version means the shrinking rights for the many so as to advantage the few. Fortunately, the Republican push for abortion bans, book banning, restriction on voting rights, and desire to police bedrooms has made the Democrat pitch for "freedom" all the easier.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

In 2006, linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff published a book to address a striking political development: The quintessentially American concept of “freedom” had recently been commandeered by the right.

“There are two very different views of freedom in America today, arising from two very different moral and political worldviews,” he wrote. The traditional view of freedom, as he saw it, was inherently progressive, all about broadening and upholding opportunities and rights for a growing range of Americans. But in the second view, freedom was a way of describing the case against this expansion, casting it as an imposition by government against an older libertarian, imperialist, pro-Christian way of life to which we needed to return.

After the patriotic rallying that followed 9/11, freedom became a “frame,” as Lakoff used the term — a metaphor that shapes how we think about things — associated primarily with conservatives. The era gave us Operation Iraqi Freedom and “freedom fries,” renamed to mock the French for their resistance to the invasion, and later the far-right Freedom Caucus in Congress.

By the time Donald Trump was elected, Democrats had to accept “freedom of religion” as a basis on which to contest same-sex marriage, “freedom to bear arms” as an argument for Americans’ having to live under an omnipresent threat from assault weapons and “freedom from regulation” as a reason to let corporations pollute waterways. To some extent, they ceded the case.

But since Biden stepped aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris — incredibly, just over a month ago — “freedom” has come roaring back into fashion for Democrats, part of what seems to be a wholesale renovation of the party’s persuasive language. . . . The Harris campaign received the gift from Beyoncé of a banger of an anthem called “Freedom,” whose defiant refrain is now heard in ads and rallies: “I’m a keep running, ’cause a winner don’t quit on themselves.” That traditional, progressive vision of freedom, it seems, is back in style.

Why is this resonating? One reason is what’s on the other side. With decidedly restrictive Republican measures proliferating — bans on emergency abortion care, censorship of topics and books in schools, proposed political loyalty tests for federal bureaucrats, support for autocrats abroad, “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at their convention — the Trump campaign is having a harder time arguing that what they’re proposing is, in fact, freedom. American voters, with their attachment to their votes actually being counted, were mostly not fans of Trump’s refusal to accept election results in 2020 or a potential second loss in 2024. To many, Trump doesn’t sound like an avatar of liberty or self-determination. He sounds like an autocrat.

The overnight reembrace of freedom among Democrats pushes all of that back into its place. What if freedom was, all along, the bending-toward-justice model so many generations of Americans fought for?

This reclaimed vision of American liberty fits comfortably with other slogans that have come with Harris’s rise to the top of the ticket. “Mind your own damn business!” said Tim Walz at the Democratic convention, to roars of approval: That’s a cry for privacy, historically a priority of freedom-minded, small-government Republicans. “We’re not going back!” said Oprah Winfrey: That’s a direct rejection of “Make America Great Again” from the people whose rights gains over the last century are being targeted for reversal.

Honestly, this is a situation where Harris is better-off listening to the “feral 25-year-olds” running her social media accounts, as one deputy campaign manager described them this week. When we all live on the clapback-happy internet, are you really going to convince voters afraid of losing their liberties that they should just smile?

That’s the thing about freedom: Generations of people have died for it. Though “freedom” stands to do for Harris what “hope” did for Obama, it’s more than inspirational — it is a galvanizing signal to people who feel like they barely made it through one Trump administration that Harris sees and shares their fears.

Elections are not won on messaging alone. But snatching back the mantle of freedom after nearly a quarter-century suggests that Democrats have, at this late date, found a clear statement of purpose.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Musk’s Endorsement of Trump May Have Backfired

One thing that Elon Musk and Donald Trump have in common is that they are totally self-absorbed narcissists who have zero empathy for others and who believe they can denigrate and lie about others with abandon and without consequences.  At the moment, Musk's arrogance has his platform X, formerly Twitter, blocked in Brazil and the recent arrest of the Russian billionaire founder of Telegram for failure to block child pornography suggests that Musk's refusal to moderate posting on X - supposedly to support "free speech" - could lead to similar legal problems for Musk.  Add to this the possibility that Musk's endorsement of Donald Trump may be backfiring as Musk faces more attacks from Democrats and labor unions (a lawsuit has been filed against both Trump and Musk).  As a piece at NBC News lays out, Musk's endorsement of Trump has opened the door for Democrats and is aiding in the effort to depict Trump as the water carrier for plutocrats at the expense of the middle class and organized labor (which is a true depiction).  Here are article highlights:

Elon Musk’s endorsement of former President Donald Trump was meant to buoy the candidate’s chances in November. But more than a month after Musk officially put his weight behind Trump, a series of Democratic attacks have suggested that the endorsement has exposed a vulnerability. 

Since the tech billionaire endorsed Trump on July 13, the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly attacked Musk for his anti-worker stances. The campaign has called Musk and Trump “self-obsessed rich guys” and reposted audio from an event on Musk’s social media app, X, in which the two laugh together about firing striking workers. 

Harris allies including Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, have followed up with attacks of their own, and now some Democratic strategists look eager to keep highlighting the Musk-Trump alliance, which they see as reinforcing Trump’s weak points. 

“Every time that Elon Musk tries to do something to help Donald Trump, I think it fires up the Democratic base to work against him,” said Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist based in Chicago. 

“If you’ve got a billionaire helping out someone who says he’s a billionaire, but really isn’t, what does that really get you?” he said. 

Musk’s endorsement was supposed to hit the Trump campaign like a lighting bolt. He announced it the same day the former president survived an assassination attempt. His backing signaled that Trump would have all the cash and social media firepower he needed to regain the White House, and it added to a perception that Trump had won over a big share of America’s tech industry and entrepreneur class. 

But the weeks since have been defined by stumbles and missed opportunities. The two men publicly disagreed about how much money Musk would chip in. Musk’s super PAC went through a major staff shake-up soon after it launched. And many other Big Tech donors have declined to follow Musk’s lead, choosing instead to sign onto the Harris campaign. 

Then there was the live one-on-one discussion on X, which Trump’s campaign billed as “the interview of the century.” Partway through the two-hour event, Trump brought up how much he admires Musk’s handling of labor unions. 

“I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’” Trump said while laughing.  “Yeah,” Musk broke in, also laughing. 

Harris’ campaign added in a statement soon after the event: “Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.” (The event was delayed 40 minutes by technical difficulties.) 

The episode snowballed. The United Auto Workers union filed unfair labor practice charges against Musk and Trump, alleging they interfered with workers who may want to exercise their labor rights. The UAW’s Fain pressed the issue in media interviews. Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su said at an event at the Democratic National Convention: “You can’t be pro-Elon Musk and pro-worker.” 

Sean O’Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, slammed Trump and Musk’s comments as “economic terrorism.” 

The criticism of labor unions is likely to motivate part of the Democratic base, said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican-leaning campaign consultant.  “If I were the Harris campaign, I’d lean on that, too,” he said.  Harris leads Trump by 10 points among people who live in union households, according to a Fox News poll conducted Aug. 9-12. 

Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist in Texas, said Democrats appear to be pulling from the playbook they used in 2012 to defeat Mitt Romney, who also appeared to hold a casual attitude toward job cuts.  “They want to make Trump, Elon and people like them look like plutocrats,” he said. 

Steinhauser said there’s a danger for Republicans that the message could resonate in strong union states like Michigan.  “It can land if delivered effectively. I don’t think it will land, but it can,” he said, adding that it’s tough for any one message to break through in a crowded media environment. 

Seth Harris, a former labor policy adviser to President Joe Biden and a senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, said he believes Trump wants to be ambiguous on the subject of labor unions, a goal that he said is now much more difficult. 

“Elon Musk created the opportunity that Donald Trump took to unmask himself as rabidly anti-union, and he did that by praising Elon Musk’s anti-union, union-busting perspective and endorsing the idea of illegally firing striking workers,” he said. 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Ron DeSantis is Struggling to Maintain Power in Florida

Ron DeSantis is continuing his jihad against LGBT individuals - the state's tourism site recently deleted the section on LGBT tourism - and racial minorities in his war on all things "woke" but with the presidential campaign in full swing, focus has shifted from DeSantis whose positions were adopted to unsuccessfully court MAGA base voters. In this atmosphere of reduced media coverage DeSantis' troubles in Florida (including the abortion referendum on November's ballot and the state's continued homeowner insurance crisis) have to some extent gone unreported.  DeSantis played the culture wars to the hilt and helped launch the toxic "Moms for Liberty", pushed book bans, wage war with Disney, and signed Florida's draconian abortion law, yet the full embrace of MAGA and demonization of those that base deems "other" may be running out of steam, especially given that DeSantis is faced with term limits that block him from running for reelection as governor. One can only hope that DeSantis' fortunes continue to sink and that the abortion and marijuana referendums bring out many voters who will cast votes both for the referendum questions and Democrats in general.  A piece in Politico looks at DeSantis' struggle. Here are highlights: 

Gov. Ron DeSantis — whose pugnacious brand of politics made him a national Republican star — is now finding himself against the ropes at home.

DeSantis pulled back a contentious plan this week to add golf courses and hotels at some Florida state parks. The governor acted after his administration’s “Great Outdoors Initiative” faced a withering blast of criticism from across the political spectrum, including from one-time GOP allies who may run for governor when he’s out of office.

Local school board candidates he backed underperformed in the Aug. 20 primary. He is feuding with the lone Jewish Republican in the Legislature after that lawmaker called out DeSantis for recently traveling to Ireland — which has recognized Palestine as a country.

And two initiatives on the November ballot on abortion access and recreational marijuana appear poised to pass despite the governor’s opposition.

The hits follow DeSantis ending his presidential campaign after coming in a distant second in the Iowa caucuses. Both political supporters and detractors are watching closely to gauge how this will impact an anticipated run for president in 2028. Continued losses in his home state over the two years of his term-limited tenure would dampen his prospects.

[T]here is growing anticipation in Tallahassee that incoming legislative leaders who take over this November will be less accommodating to DeSantis, and that other politicians eyeing the governorship or cabinet jobs will also grow bolder in expressing their positions.

“I don’t think the backlash about parks was about him being a lame duck,” said Jamie Miller, a veteran political consultant who once worked for the Republican Party of Florida. “But I also do think that when the governor was tone-deaf in the past, people would go along with it. And now they’re positioning themselves for their political futures and you won’t see them do that.”

DeSantis did try to distance himself from the parks plan this week and called it “half-baked” even though it was his administration that first announced the initiative and even had scheduled public hearings related to it.

The potential passage of the two amendments on abortion and marijuana could also affect the governor’s legacy. DeSantis has been very vocal about the two measures and his chief of staff is running two political committees aimed at defeating them.

The recent events stand in stark contrast to most of DeSantis’ first five years as governor, including when he achieved a nearly 20-point reelection victory in 2022. DeSantis became a conservative star due to his handling of Covid-19 where he reopened schools faster than other states and fought against mask and vaccine mandates. He also waded into policy including a much-publicized battle with Disney after the company objected to a state law over classroom instruction of gender and sexual identity.

In the lead-up to his presidential run, DeSantis had continuous cooperation with the Florida Legislature on a series of laws about guns and abortion and other conservative touchpoints that he touted on the campaign trail.

But the presidential race tested the limits of his brand. Trump and his allies torched DeSantis until he got out of the race and endorsed the former president, which has had some lingering after effects. State Rep. Randy Fine, an outspoken Brevard County Republican who is running for state Senate, had endorsed the governor’s run but then switched to Trump last fall. At the time, Fine criticized DeSantis for not taking a stronger stance against anti-Semitic activity in the state. . . . . He even suggested the Legislature should consider eliminating some positions in the governor’s office.

Fine, in an interview with POLITICO, said he recognizes that DeSantis still has the “power of the veto pen” but added “he’s not in the same situation” that he was two years ago.

Fine said DeSantis has not done enough to develop strong relationships to weather these turbulent times. “You’ve got to be nice to people on the way up because there is going to come a time when you are on the way down,” said Fine, a sentiment he has previously expressed about DeSantis.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty