Tuesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

Zombies, Vampires and Republicans

Republicans have been peddling the same voodoo economics since 1980 and, despite their formula's failure to ever work as claimed, they are back pushing it with a vengeance both in terms of proposed tax cuts (including ending the estate tax that would only benefit married couples with a combined estate of almost $11 million) and through healthcare "reform" which would provide enormous tax cuts to the very wealthy.  Most recently Kansas Republicans led by homophobic nutcase Sam Brownback implemented the full package of Republican economic principles and it proved to be an utter disaster that led to severe cuts in governmental services and budget crisis.  Only tax increases save the state's operations and economy.  Yet despite this real life experience, the Congressional Republicans appear posed to implement a still secret revised version of Trumpcare that will likely harm literally millions of Americans, including many of the fools who fell for Trump's calls appealing to their racism and bigotry and put a wholly unfit individual in the White House.  A column in the New York Times looks at the brain dead GOP:

Zombies have long ruled the Republican Party. The good news is that they may finally be losing their grip — although they may still return and resume eating conservative brains. The bad news is that even if zombies are in retreat, vampires are taking their place.

What are these zombies of which I speak? Among wonks, the term refers to policy ideas that should have been abandoned long ago in the face of evidence and experience, but just keep shambling along.

The right’s zombie-in-chief is the insistence that low taxes on the rich are the key to prosperity. This doctrine should have died when Bill Clinton’s tax hike failed to cause the predicted recession and was followed instead by an economic boom. It should have died again when George W. Bush’s tax cuts were followed by lackluster growth, then a crash. And it should have died yet again in the aftermath of the 2013 Obama tax hike — partly expiration of some Bush tax cuts, partly new taxes to pay for Obamacare — when the economy continued jogging along, adding 200,000 jobs a month.

Despite the consistent wrongness of their predictions, however, tax-cut fanatics just kept gaining influence in the G.O.P. — until the disaster in Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback promised that deep tax cuts would yield an economic miracle. What the state got instead was weak growth and a fiscal crisis, finally pushing even Republicans to vote for tax hikes, overruling Brownback’s veto.

Will this banish the tax-cut zombie? Maybe — although the economists behind the Kansas debacle, who have of course learned nothing, appear to be the principal movers behind the Trump tax plan, such as it is.

But even as the zombies move offstage, vampire policies — so-called not so much because of their bloodsucking nature, although that too, as because they can’t survive daylight — have taken their place.

Consider what’s happening right now on health care.

Last month House Republicans rammed through one of the worst, cruelest pieces of legislation in history. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the American Health Care Act would take coverage away from 23 million Americans, and send premiums soaring for millions more, especially older workers with relatively low incomes.

This bill is, as it should be, wildly unpopular. Nonetheless, Republican Senate leaders are now trying to ram through their own version of the A.H.C.A., one that, all reports suggest, will differ only in minor, cosmetic ways. And they’re trying to do it in total secrecy. . . . Clearly, the goal is to pass legislation that will have devastating effects on tens of millions of Americans without giving those expected to pass it, let alone the general public, any real chance to understand what they’re voting for.

Why this combination of secrecy and speed? Obviously, this legislation can’t survive sunlight — and I’m by no means the first to make the analogy with vampires.

This is unprecedented. Ignore Republican lies about how Obamacare was passed: the Affordable Care Act went through extensive discussion, and Democrats were always very clear about what they were trying to do and how they were trying to do it.

When it comes to the Republican replacement for Obamacare, however, it’s not just the process that’s secretive; so is the purpose. . . . . the one obvious payoff to taking health care away from millions: a big tax cut for the wealthy.

So this isn’t a Trump story; it’s about the cynicism and corruption of the whole congressional G.O.P. Remember, it would take just a few conservatives with conscience — specifically, three Republican senators — to stop this outrage in its tracks. But right now, it looks as if those principled Republicans don’t exist.

 The other element to all of this, of course, is the hypocrisy.  The GOP pretends to be the party of "Christian values" but there is NOTHING Christian about the party's reverse Robin Hood agenda of taking from the poor and middle class and giving the stolen wealth to the very rich./  

Virginia's Wake-Up Call to the Morally Decent Republicans

Ed Gillespie and extremist Corey Stewart

Having grown up in the Republican Party and then having been an activist, I know that for many it is easy to push out of mind the fact that what they knew Republican Party to be in the past simply no longer exists.  Yes, Republican Women's club still have their functions and locally in Virginia Beach, they still hold the Star Spangled Ball (the last one was in April, 2017, at the Hilton Virginia Beach Oceanfront) to raise funds for Republican candidates.  The truth is, however, that many of these long time Republican women have no more in common with much of the party's base today that the man in the moon.  Most are educated, polite, relatively well informed even if Fox News viewers, and are neither white supremacists or religious fanatics.  As the recent Virginia Republican gubernatorial primary results underscored, that cannot be said for much of the GOP base be it in Virginia or elsewhere. The issue thus becomes this: when will these people - and this applies to a number of our neighbors and friends at the yacht club - cease closing their eyes and voting Republican because it is what they know and are used to doing for decades?  I witnessed the beginning of the take over of the party base by the Christofascists.  Now, the racists and white supremacists have joined them in hijacking the GOP.  As a piece in The Atlantic argues, it is time for a wake up call for both morally decent Republicans (some do exist) and the party establishment that has utterly lost control.  Here are article highlights:

Ever since Donald Trump became president, wary Republican elites have believed he was an anomaly—a unique candidate who owed his success to celebrity appeal and weak opposition, despite some noxious views and behavior. Take away Trump the person, they believed, and there would be no Trump phenomenon.

That viewpoint got a rude wake-up call this week, in a Virginia Republican primary that wasn’t supposed to be a contest at all. And while the GOP establishment’s preferred candidate still won, the surprise result showed there’s still a substantial appetite in the party’s base for the populist impulses Trump represents.

[T]his year, it was Democrats whose primary looked like a pitched battle. Two well-credentialed progressives—one the sitting lieutenant governor, the other a former congressman and Obama administration official—were locked in a battle for the party’s soul. But despite polling showing a tight race, the Democratic establishment candidate, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, pulled out an easy win, defeating Tom Perriello by a 12-point margin. On the Republican side, meanwhile, Ed Gillespie expected to coast to an easy victory over his main challenger, Corey Stewart, a Trump acolyte who highlighted his hard line on immigration and support for Confederate monuments. It doesn’t get much more “establishment” than Gillespie, a former D.C. lobbyist and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Polls had shown Gillespie up by 20 points over Stewart, a local county board chairman. Gillespie had all the major endorsements and many times as much money as Stewart. Gillespie and Stewart’s vote totals hovered within a point of each other for hours after the polls closed. Gillespie was finally declared the winner by just over 1 percentage point, drawing 43.7 percent of the vote to Stewart’s 42.5 percent.

I spent the weekend before Tuesday’s vote following Stewart and Gillespie, on the theory that their primary was an early test of the Trump era’s most pressing political question: whether the unorthodox new president represents a long-term political realignment or just a weird one-off. Had Gillespie walked away with the primary as expected, it might have been evidence that the Republican fever had broken, and that the GOP was looking to return to business as usual with sensible, practical candidates rather than race-baiting firebrands.

Virginia isn’t exactly Trump country: The state went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Trump won the state’s primary by a narrow margin over Marco Rubio. Despite its Southern geography, Virginia today is an urban, transient, diverse, highly educated state, where many local Republican activists are wealthy consultants and lobbyists like Gillespie.

Gillespie’s campaign was premised on the notion that Virginia Republicans were looking for a candidate who, while not openly repudiating Trump, was the polar opposite of Trump in temperament and orientation, emphasizing tax cuts and economic growth over culture-war controversies.

Stewart’s theory was the opposite: that Trump changed everything and showed what the GOP base was really looking for. Serving as the Trump campaign’s Virginia state chairman last October, he led activists in a march on the RNC headquarters, where he charged that the “establishment pukes” were undermining Trump’s campaign.

The Stewart supporters I spoke to, at a campaign rally in a diner in Fredericksburg, were galvanized by his nationalist message. There were numerous Confederate flag bumper stickers in the parking lot, and one woman wore a stars-and-bars hat with the word “REBEL.” They told me they were disgusted with Republican leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan, and put all their faith in Trump.

On Tuesday, there turned out to be a lot more of these types of Republican voters than Ed Gillespie expected. . . . . Democrats were clearly energized: More than 540,000 turned out to vote in the Democratic primary, compared to 370,000 in the Republican primary.

Stewart, of course, believed he was going to win, and he didn’t. But in coming as close as he did, he gave the Republican establishment a scare—and showed that a sizable portion of the GOP base doesn’t want to go back to business as usual. Far from being weary of the controversial and unorthodox president, a lot of Republicans want more candidates like Trump. 

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Sunday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

Allies Start Planning a Life Without America

Vladimir Putin must be smiling.  How could he not be as we witness America's allies moving forward with plans for their security and economies with America no longer a dependable ally.  The champagne must be flowing in at the Kremlin.  Der Trumpenführer has accomplished what decades of Soviet and then Putin efforts failed to do: splinter American alliances and fray the ties of NATO. An editorial in the New York Times looks at this phenomenon which could prove disastrous for America down the road.  Here are excerpts:

Many governments must be thinking along the same lines, but few have spelled it out so clearly. Germany did, when Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “The times in which we could rely fully on others — they are somewhat over.” Now Canada, a country tightly bound to its neighbor by history, alliance and the longest border in the world, has declared the need to recognize that the United States is relinquishing its role as the “indispensable nation.”

“The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership puts into sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course,” Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, told her Parliament this month.

Ms. Freeland never mentioned Donald Trump. That wouldn’t be diplomatic. But every line of her speech before a silent House of Commons was clearly about a world order thrown into crisis as President Trump scoffs at trade agreements, hectors allies, rips up the landmark Paris climate accord and otherwise demonstrates disdain for anything that isn’t “America First.” Canada’s course, Ms. Freeland said, would be the opposite of Canada First; it would be “the renewal, indeed the strengthening, of the postwar multilateral order.” The problem is that it’s not so much Mr. Trump’s policies as his chaotic absence of clear policies that is pushing Canada, Germany and other allies to draw back from Washington. Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, sought early in the Trump administration to find ways of working together. But according to Canadian news reports, Mr. Trump’s rejection of the climate agreement was what finally persuaded Mr. Trudeau that he had to find his own way. Ms. Freeland’s powerful speech was, in effect, the proclamation of a new Trudeau Doctrine of actively pursuing multilateral trade, strengthening multilateral institutions and building a stronger military.

Neither Canada nor any other ally, of course, can begin to match the United States in might or wealth, and it remains to be seen whether Mr. Trudeau comes up with the money to achieve the goals Ms. Freeland enunciated. But it is surely to the advantage of Canada and other allies to step out from under America’s long shadow and take more responsibility for their shared security and values. How much better that would be, however, if they were not doing it largely to escape a shadow that has turned dark, turbulent and dangerous.

The Right Freaks Out - and Lies - About Rise of LGBT Millennials

click image to enlarge

The 2016 General Social Survey was publicly released back in April, 2017, and it reported on many things, including the growing number of people who admit to being LGBT.  In fact, the data that Gallup shared showed that the LGBT population increased dramatically between 2012 and 2016, from 3.5% to 4.1% of the U.S. population (or an estimated 8.3 to 10.052 million people).  That’s a big change for a short period of time.  And the majority of that change could be accounted for by large increases among young people, women, the college-educated, people of color, and those who are not religious.  The findings showed that a great deal of that increase can be accounted for by Millennials.  Perhaps not surprisingly, given marriage equality (at long last) younger generations have become progressively more likely to identify as LGBT.  But the gap between Millenials and other generations is large and growing much to the horror of the right wingers. Rather than admit to the fact that Millennials have left religion in rapidly accelerating numbers (nearly a third at this point) and correspondingly do not feel the shame and stigma of being LGBT that Christianity seeks to inflict, the right wingers blame the rise of LGBT Millennials on what might be called recruitment.  Anything rather than admit that sexual orientation is fixed at birth or accept modern medical and mental health knowledge.  A piece in American Conservative illustrates the longstanding lie that is being promoted. Here are highlights: 

[F]or those who want to grapple honestly with this issue, these data from Patrick Egan show pretty clearly that the nurturing that culture provides does make a big difference.

Therefore, for communities who wish for their children to remain heterosexual, to form heterosexual marital unions, traditional families, etc., neutrality on the matter of sexuality will result in five to eight times as many people claiming homosexuality or bisexuality as would have otherwise been the case. (There have also been skyrocketing numbers of people claiming to be transgender.)

Sexuality is a lot more fluid than we think. For post-pubescent adolescents, teenagers, and young adults in their twenties, re-setting the boundaries of what is permissible resets the boundaries of what is thinkable, and for a meaningful number of them will change the way they behave.

Here’s what I mean. It must be that there are young people who experience homosexual desires as teenagers, but who do not act on them for reasons of religious belief or social custom. Later in life — in their twenties, say — their sexual desire solidifies as heterosexual, allowing them to form a stable marital bond with someone of the opposite sex, and start a family. Had they had the opportunity to experiment with homosexuality as a teenager, they might have remained confused and unstable well into adulthood.

What we have now says there is virtually no sexual norm outside whatever one feels is right for them, right now. If one thinks that one would like to try out being gay, or bi, or the opposite gender, well, why not? One big problem with this, though, is: what about the kids? Social science has abundantly demonstrated that kids need stable homes in which to thrive. If issues of sexuality and gender identity remain fluid, it will be very difficult to create the kind of environment in which these young people can be formed in a healthy way.

It's pretty much the same lies promoted for decades by anti-hate groups and even the Catholic Church - even as the Vatican turned a blind eye to the rampant raping of children and youths by priests - and which is contrary to findings by legitimate associations of gay parenting.  Andrew Sullivan rightly goes ballistic.  Here are excerpts from his response:

 I’m usually pretty good at staying calm under assault from the religious right. . . . . But this latest post by my friend Rod Dreher deeply upset me. Titled “Born That Way? Really?” it accuses those of us who have long argued that homosexuality is involuntary or innate of being cynical liars: “The ‘truth’ in this matter [0f the origins of homosexuality] has always been ‘what works to advance the cause.’” He then argues that there is such a thing as “latent homosexuality” that can be “made active” by a more tolerant society. Hence the need to reinstate stigmatization of gay people as human beings who have chosen sin — to keep anyone else from experimenting and thereby becoming gay.

His sole evidence for this? A graph from a comprehensive study of the 2016 election that shows much higher identification as bisexual among today’s millennials than among older generations.

It is merely a measurement of who is prepared to identify as such in a survey. That’s a far more malleable and amorphous figure. And it finds, to Rod’s horror, that around 13 percent of 18-year-olds now identify as bi. That drops to around 6 percent for those who are 28; and around 4 percent for those now in their 30s. Another longitudinal survey — from Gallup — also shows a sizable increase among millennials who identify as “LGBT” in the last few years. The change is from 3.5 percent in 2012 to 4.1 percent in 2016.

If Rod’s interpretation is correct, it means that there were far, far fewer gay people as a proportion of the population a few decades ago than there are now. It means that, by the study Rod cites, there were almost no gays or lesbians born in America in 1930. It means that more progressive and secular countries, like the Netherlands, would have much higher numbers of gay people than in the past or elsewhere. There is no solid evidence for any of this.

But the obvious explanation for these numbers is a simple one: it is that millennials simply have much less shame about sexual orientation than older generations. Growing up in a world of legal marriage equality, that should not be surprising. Gallup suggests as much: “It’s likely that millennials are the first generation in the U.S. to grow up in an environment where social acceptance of the LGBT community markedly increased. This may be an important factor in explaining their greater willingness to identify as LGBT.” Maybe destigmatization will mean that more bi people will experiment with same-sex relationships, even though the study actually shows gay identification as stable for the past few decades. They might even — God forbid — have happier, healthier lives as a result. But what distresses me about Rod’s post is his belief that homosexuals should be restigmatized for the sake of others, that one part of the population should be shamed and targeted purely to send a message to otherwise confused kids that being gay is wrong. The only word for this is cruelty, the immiseration of gay kids for the sake of controlling those who may eventually be bi. I cannot see anything remotely Christian about that.

Trump’s Derangement Deepens

As America hurtles down the road to what ought to result in the impeachment - if not criminal prosecution of Der Trumpenführer (and Mike Pence who claims to know nothing much like Sergeant Schultz in Hogan's Heroes) - we are faced with the frightening reality that the White House is occupied by a mentally imbalance criminal and that the Vichy Republicans will likely do nothing about it.  Andrew Sullivan has a good review of what could be the beginning of the end of American democracy.  Even long time Republican apologist David Brooks of the New York Times seems to have belatedly realized last month the danger that Trump and his enablers in the GOP pose to the world, not just America, in a piece entitled "When the World is Led by a Child."  Republicans talk ad nausea about  patriotism and being the representatives of "real Americans" yet they are now the party of treason and the destruction of the rule of law that however imperfect has guided America.  They seemingly would be fine with a Putin style dictatorship so long as they held onto their offices and perks.  It is a situation that is beyond disturbing.  Here are highlights from Sullivan's piece: 

Let me put this as simply as I can. After firing FBI Director James Comey for investigating the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians, the president is now openly smearing and threatening to fire his successor as most prominent investigator, special counsel Robert Mueller. There is no question about the motive behind all this, because Trump has told anyone within hearing distance or access to a television that he fired Comey to kill a vital and important investigation into Russian interference in our elections, which yesterday Putin all but admitted: “They meddle in all other countries’ affairs, what did they expect?”

This is now a slow-moving version of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre — but graver. It’s graver because the original crime — the Kremlin’s attempt to hack our elections in possible cahoots with some on the Trump campaign — has so much wider ramifications than an office break-in. It’s an act of virtual war by a foreign adversary that came close to rigging the voting machines, for Pete’s sake. If it was in any way abetted by an American connected to Trump, we absolutely need to find out. And this crisis is more dangerous because the president has not only been trying to prevent or rig any such investigation for months — demanding personal loyalty from the FBI director, pressuring national intelligence officials to exonerate him before the inquiry is finished — but also continues to boast about this obstruction of justice as if there were nothing wrong with it at all.

Which brings us to Trump’s mental illness, by which I mean simply that he would not pass a clinical psych test for any other job in the country. Yesterday morning, the mad king tweeted: “They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice.” He then called Mueller “a very bad and conflicted” individual.

The truth is Trump cannot abide any kind of investigation of his campaign or of himself by anyone. That would require him to defer to someone else, and his psyche cannot let that happen. (This is the core reason behind his refusal to release his tax returns.) The very idea of actually wanting inspection to clear his name simply doesn’t occur to him. After a lifetime of lying, fraud, debt, secrecy, and bankruptcy, his instinct is always to deny everything and to do all he can to subvert any smidgen of accountability or transparency.

He literally knows no other way. And he is likely to keep doing this — especially if he is now under direct scrutiny for abuse of power. Asking him to subject himself to a neutral third-party inquiry comes as easily to him as it would to Putin or Duterte or Mugabe. It seems absurd to them — and they, like Trump, would react with incandescent rage.

Again, it takes a while for this to register. But the president, in his anger, is now asserting that the FBI inquiry was initiated by nameless people who already knew that there was no basis to the allegations. Therefore the investigation is “the single greatest witch-hunt in American political history” — surpassing the lowest lows of McCarthyism no less. If Trump cannot stop the investigation, he is doing all he can to delegitimize it, whatever the costs to the credibility of our system of government.

[T]his is more potentially lethal to our democracy than Watergate because today’s Republican Party is utterly different than Nixon’s. It has been taken over by a mass movement led by a cult idol and there are no Republicans of any stature or heft who are prepared to stand up to him, as some once famously did with Nixon.

The official RNC talking points in response to the latest Washington Post bombshell about Trump himself being under scrutiny include this beaut: “This story is nothing more than an example of even more leaks coming out of the FBI and special counsel’s office in an effort to undermine the President.”  The right-wing media chorus is also instantly on fleek.

And so it seems to me completely plausible — even inevitable — that Mueller will be fired too at some point. More saliently, if his team’s work eventually exposes and proves Trump’s obstruction of justice, the only possible recourse, impeachment, will never happen. There will never be 18 Republican senators who will vote against the leader in this Congress or any other. We will have a criminal in the White House indefinitely, utterly impervious to sanction, and emboldened even further. And he will have brought almost half the country along with him, digging deeper in with every news cycle.

Over a year ago, in this magazine’s pages, I wrote the following sentence: “In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event.” We are about to find out if I was right.

 Here's Brooks'  belated view of Trump:

At certain times Donald Trump has seemed like a budding authoritarian, a corrupt Nixon, a rabble-rousing populist or a big business corporatist.

But as Trump has settled into his White House role, he has given a series of long interviews, and when you study the transcripts it becomes clear that fundamentally he is none of these things.

At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.

First, most adults have learned to sit still. But mentally, Trump is still a 7-year-old boy who is bouncing around the classroom.

His inability to focus his attention makes it hard for him to learn and master facts. He is ill informed about his own policies and tramples his own talking points. It makes it hard to control his mouth. On an impulse, he will promise a tax reform when his staff has done little of the actual work.

Second, most people of drinking age have achieved some accurate sense of themselves, some internal criteria to measure their own merits and demerits. But Trump seems to need perpetual outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself.

He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence. . . . He is perpetually surprised because reality does not comport with his fantasies.

Third, by adulthood most people can perceive how others are thinking. For example, they learn subtle arts such as false modesty so they won’t be perceived as obnoxious.  But Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. 

Sunday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1