More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

The Platform the GOP Is Too Afraid to Publish

As the Republican convention continues, it is displaying the alternate universe in which the Republican base dwells.  It's a reality that is disconnected with the reality of America's changing demographics and the reality in which the majority of Americans live their lives.   As a consequence, the true party platform - even though the GOP claims not to have one in 2020 - would alienate the majority of Americans and voters and perhaps set the stage for a Trump defeat even in critical swing states and possibly some red states.  What's in this unspoken agenda?  The usual: more tax cuts for the super wealthy, dismantling the Affordable Health Care Act where access to health care is the privilege of the few, voter suppression,  the rejection of science and knowledge that shows that Covid-19 and climate change are not hoaxes, and white supremacist policies.  As David Frum, a former Republican argues in a piece in The Atlantic, it's little wonder the GOP claims not to have a 2020 party platform even though the goals of the GOP are very clear and the antithesis of a diverse and equal society. Here are article highlights:

Republicans have decided not to publish a party platform for 2020.

This omission has led some to conclude that the GOP lacks ideas, that it stands for nothing, that it has shriveled to little more than a Trump cult.

This conclusion is wrong. The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. I’m about to list 13 ideas that command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans.

Once you read the list, I think you’ll agree that these are authentic ideas with meaningful policy consequences, and that they are broadly shared. The question is not why Republicans lack a coherent platform; it’s why they’re so reluctant to publish the one on which they’re running.

1)      The most important mechanism of economic policy—not the only tool, but the most important—is adjusting the burden of taxation on society’s richest citizens. Lower this level, as Republicans did in 2017, and prosperity will follow. The economy has had a temporary setback, but thanks to the tax cut of 2017, recovery is ready to follow strongly. No further policy change is required, except possibly lower taxes still.

2)      The coronavirus is a much-overhyped problem. It’s not that dangerous and will soon burn itself out. States should reopen their economies as rapidly as possible, and accept the ensuing casualties as a cost worth paying . . .

3)      Climate change is a much-overhyped problem. It’s probably not happening. If it is happening, it’s not worth worrying about. If it’s worth worrying about, it’s certainly not worth paying trillions of dollars to amend.

4)      China has become an economic and geopolitical adversary of the United States. Military spending should be invested with an eye to defeating China on the seas, in space, and in the cyberrealm. U.S. economic policy should recognize that relations with China are zero-sum: When China wins, the U.S. loses, and vice versa.

5)      The trade and alliance structures built after World War II are outdated. America still needs partners, of course, especially Israel and maybe Russia. But the days of NATO and the World Trade Organization are over. The European Union should be treated as a rival, the United Kingdom and Japan should be treated as subordinates, and Canada, Australia, and Mexico should be treated as dependencies.

6)      Health care is a purchase like any other. Individuals should make their own best deals in the insurance market with minimal government supervision. Those who pay more should get more. Those who cannot pay must rely on Medicaid, accept charity, or go without.

7)      Voting is a privilege. States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among Black Americans and new immigrant communities.

8)      Anti-Black racism has ceased to be an important problem in American life. At this point, the people most likely to be targets of adverse discrimination are whites, Christians, and Asian university applicants. Federal civil-rights-enforcement resources should concentrate on protecting them.

9)      The courts should move gradually and carefully toward eliminating the mistake made in 1965, when women’s sexual privacy was elevated into a constitutional right.

10)  The post-Watergate ethics reforms overreached. We should welcome the trend toward unrestricted and secret campaign donations. Overly strict conflict-of-interest rules will only bar wealthy and successful businesspeople from public service. Without endorsing every particular action by the president and his family, the Trump administration has met all reasonable ethical standards.

11)  Trump’s border wall is the right policy to slow illegal immigration; the task of enforcing immigration rules should not fall on business operators. Some deal on illegal immigration must be found. The most important Republican priority in any such deal is to delay as long as possible full citizenship, voting rights, and health-care benefits for people who entered the country illegally.

12)  The country is gripped by a surge of crime and lawlessness as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and its criticism of police. Police misconduct, such as that in the George Floyd case, should be punished. But the priority now should be to stop crime by empowering police.

13)  Civility and respect are cherished ideals. But in the face of the overwhelming and unfair onslaught against President Donald Trump by the media and the “deep state,” his occasional excesses on Twitter and at his rallies should be understood as pardonable reactions to much more severe misconduct by others.

So there’s the platform. Why not publish it?

There are two answers to that question, one simple, one more complicated.

The simple answer is that President Trump’s impulsive management style has cast his convention into chaos. The location, the speaking program, the arrangements—all were decided at the last minute. Managing the rollout of a platform as well was just one task too many.

The more complicated answer is that the platform I’ve just described, like so much of the Trump-Republican program, commands support among only a minority of the American people. The platform works (to the extent it does work) by exciting enthusiastic support among Trump supporters; but when stated too explicitly, it invites a backlash among the American majority. This is a platform for a party that talks to itself, not to the rest of the country.

And for those purposes, the platform will succeed most to the extent that it is communicated only implicitly, to those receptive to its message.

The challenge for Republicans in the week ahead is to hope that President Trump can remember, night after night, to speak only the things he’s supposed to speak—not to blurt the things his party wants its supporters to absorb unspoken.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

The GOP Convention Becomes a Festival of Fear

Many of us anticipated that the Republican convention would be a cavalcade of batshit craziness  and the first night did not disappoint as it alternated between abject - and ridiculous - fear mongering to fawning over the "glorious leader," Donald Trump. Perhaps none of this should have been a surprised since the lead consultant to the convention produced “The Apprentice” for Trump. Some of the commentary was so over the top as to be utterly absurd to anyone sane and not subsumed in the cult of Trump.  Jim Jordan - who looked away while male athletes were being sexually abused - insanely accused Democrats of not allowing Americans to go to church. Meanwhile, most of us going about our daily lives and not obsessed with perceived lost privilege and a desire to take the country back to the 1950's could not recognize the nation as described by the list of extremist speakers.  Indeed, if we have any real fear it is that we will be infected with Covid-19 by Trumpists who refuse to follow CDC guidelines and wear masks. If anyone is a threat to western civilization, it is the science and knowledge denying Visigoths of the GOP base.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the fear mongering and insanity.  Here are highlights:

President Trump over the weekend said he expected a “very uplifting and positive” convention. Uh-oh. Dude must have gotten into the hydroxychloroquine again.

The Republican National Convention on its opening day was as uplifting as the apocalypse, as positive as perdition.

“The woke-topians,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) warned, “will disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door, and the police aren’t coming when you call.”

Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former Fox News personality and current girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., informed the convention that Democrats “want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom.

Midway through this rage-fest, the convention went to news footage of violence and destruction in the streets and bleeped-out obscenities — then cut to the wood-paneled interior of the mansion of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who were charged with firearms violations after they threatened racial-justice demonstrators with a pistol and military-style weapon.

The pair, personal injury lawyers both, spoke about the “out-of-control mob” and the “Marxist liberal activist” and “radicals” who menaced them by walking past their house — which “could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country.” . . . “Make no mistake, no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”

It was a veritable festival of fear — made all the more intriguing because it was delivered by the incumbent president’s party, much of it from an ornate hall near the White House, the Mellon Auditorium, named for a robber baron. Four years ago, Trump pledged to end “American carnage.” Now he’s asking for another four years to put an end to all the additional American carnage he created in his first four years. The difference is his leadership has turned the dystopian America Trump pictured into more of a reality.

It served up implausible testimonies about what a fabulous job Trump has done handling the pandemic. The Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, spoke with a straight face about Trump’s “reverence for the office of the presidency.”

The party officially resolved to “adjourn without adopting a new platform.” Instead, the party made its convention into a virtual assembly of the cult of Trump. The president, after his afternoon appearance in Charlotte, appeared in two prime-time segments of the convention on Monday to receive praise from virus survivors, health workers and former hostages, and he is expected to speak Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, too. His wife, four of his children, a daughter-in-law and various Trump pals are also in the lineup. The lead consultant to the convention produced “The Apprentice” for Trump and was a judge on Trump’s Miss Universe pageant.

But the celebration of Trump was tedious — even Fox News cut away from live coverage — and the rage and dystopia invariably overtook the scripted calls for “hope.”

Charlie Kirk, head of a conservative group who has partnered with Jerry Falwell Jr. at Liberty University, proclaimed that “the American way of life is being dismantled by a group of bitter, deceitful, vengeful activists.” He cast Trump as “the bodyguard of Western civilization.”

Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley warned of a “socialist left” bringing “anarchy.” A Cuban American, Maximo Alvarez, accused Democrats of siding with “anarchy and communism.” And Donald Trump Jr. warned of “Beijing Biden” (“the Loch Ness monster of the swamp”) encouraging tyranny, illegal immigrants, rioting, looting, vandalism, torch-bearing mobs and “radicals who want to drag us into the dark.

 Amazing how Donald Jr. confused his father's torch bearing supporters for Democrats. Perhaps he should speak with the residents of Charlottesville so he can set the record straight.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

Millions Fall Back into Crisis as Stimulus and Safety Nets End

As the Republican convention is poised to begin and display Trump's unmatched narcissism, millions of Americans are back on the brink of desperation as the stimulus payments and safety net of the CARES Act come to an end and the GOP controlled Senate is on recess having passed no extension of relief benefits.  It's a fitting dichotomy given that today's Republican party ceased caring about average Americans years ago, a trend that has only accelerated under Der Trumpenfurher.   America - among the wealthiest nations in the world - may soon see homelessness and hunger not seen since the Great Depression. The GOP convention will likely act as if none of this is happening.  Food banks are attempting to assist, but soon the magnitude of the problem will overwhelm their resources. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the magnitude of the problem.  Here are story highlights:

One of the most successful elements of the government’s response to the coronavirus recession — protecting people on the margins from falling into poverty — is faltering as the safety net shrinks and federal benefits expire.

Major recessions are especially fraught for low-income earners, whose finances can veer from tenuous to dire with one missed paycheck. But as the economy cratered this spring, economists and poverty experts were mildly surprised to discover that the torrent of government support that followed — particularly the $600 a week in expanded unemployment benefits and one-time $1,200 stimulus checks — likely lowered the overall poverty rate.

Now, data show, those gains are eroding as federal inaction deprives Americans on the financial margins of additional support. If the unemployment rate stays around 10 percent and no new stimulus is delivered, “we can expect poverty rates to rise and climb higher than those observed in the Great Recession,” Parolin said.

For the week that ended July 21, the most recent numbers available, roughly 29 million U.S. adults — about 12.1 percent — said their household sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat the preceding seven days, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Nearly 15 million renters said they were behind on rent during the same period.

Code of Vets is used to requests for help with funeral expenses, hospital bills and housing issues. Since the pandemic, the nonprofit says, it has been inundated by veterans who can’t meet their basic needs: groceries, medications, utility bills. Diapers are a chronic concern for those with young children.

In January, a typical month pre-pandemic, it handled 86 cases, . . . . In April, after more than 20 million Americans lost their jobs in the coronavirus recession, Code of Vets had more than 1,300 cases. The scale of need has been consistent, Smith said, even with the federal stimulus.

Karin Smith, 52, of Jupiter, Fla., recently opened the two-bedroom townhouse she shares with her 13-year-old son to a fellow single mom with a daughter. They’re all facing eviction, much like the 22 million other Americans behind on their rent, according to an analysis by the Covid-19 Eviction Defense Project, a Colorado-based community group. Despite the federal moratorium that ended July 24, some landlords are raising rent, issuing late fees and initiating eviction proceedings earlier than the federal deadline, which requires 30 days notice for eviction.

Karin and her son, who has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects connective tissue, have been living on food stamps and unemployment benefits that did not arrive until May. The state jobless aid started at $125 a week and was recently bumped to $225. She was earning $96,000 a year, but as a single mom with tens of thousands in student loans, health insurance premiums and other expenses, she didn’t have a lot of savings.

Although Karin has a PhD in educational psychology, she hasn’t been able to find a job in her field, and a minimum wage position wouldn’t cover the rent. When Sept. 1 rolls around, she doesn’t know what the four of them — plus two cats and two dogs, most taken in from others who had been evicted — will do.

Diane Yentel, the president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said the 40 million U.S. households projected for eviction by year’s end — and the lack of legislative action to prevent them — is nothing she’s ever seen. . . . more people are living on the streets, in their cars, crowding into apartments, and living in shelters or encampments, Yentel said. Social distancing, a key defense against the coronavirus, is impossible.

Hunger has hovered near record highs since the beginning of the pandemic, as shuttered school meal programs and vanishing income left many without a way to feed their families. About 22 percent of the population has been food-insecure since the pandemic began, according to an April report by the Hamilton Project, an economic policy project of the Brookings Institution. For mothers with children 12 and younger, the figure is more than 40 percent, according to Lauren Bauer, who wrote the report.

the Trump administration recently decided against extending a food stamps waiver that allowed needy families to bypass certification, such as providing pay stubs. The move will reduce the number of eligible families in the coming months, even as other stimulus measures expire.

Food banks nationwide have struggled to keep up with demand, and surging grocery prices are compounding the strain, said Crystal FitzSimons, the director of school and out-of-school time programs at the Food Research & Action Center.

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

The Lost Cause Myth: South’s Fight for White Supremacy

One hundred and fifty five (155) years after the end of the Civil War, the Lost Cause myth created after the South's defeat is alive and well in many quarters and with the presidential election bearing down on us, Donald Trump has embraced Confederate statutes and military base names as a means to fire up his white supremacist base.  Like much of America's true history the "Lost Cause" myth seeks to sanitize and cover over some of the ugliest aspects of the nation's past and those brutalized by the predominate culture.  The movie Gone with the Wind's original introduction epitomizes the myth making: 

The fanciful, introductory foreword to the film explains:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind... 

A piece in the New York Times review of books looks at the the myth's creation and the continuing effort it embodies to avoid recognizing America's racist past and present.  Here are highlights:

He had tried, and failed, once before. In 1859, the Virginian Edward Alfred Pollard, a journalist and Southern partisan, had published a defense of slavery, “Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South.” Then came the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, which abolished the system of slavery Pollard had hoped to preserve. After the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, he turned to a new project, publishing, in 1866, a book titled “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.”

This effort would succeed where the first had fallen short. Pollard’s framing of the “Lost Cause” was to long endure, and it’s safe to say that no other American title of 1866 is shaping the nation in the way Pollard’s is even now.

Here, then, was the ur-text of the Lost Cause, of the mythology of a South that believed its pro-slavery war aims were just, its fate tragic and its white-supremacist worldview worth defending. In our own time, the debates over Confederate memorials and the resistance in many quarters of white America, especially in the South, to address slavery, segregation and systemic racism can in part be understood by encounters with the literature of the Lost Cause and the history of the way many white Americans have chosen to see the Civil War and its aftermath.

To Pollard, the Southern side had fought nobly for noble ends. “The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead,” he wrote. “Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.” Pollard declared that a “‘war of ideas,’” a new war that “the South wants and insists upon perpetrating,” was now unfolding.

And in many ways it unfolds still. The defiance of federal will from Reconstruction to our own day, the insistence on states’ rights in the face of the quest for racial justice and the revanchist reverence for Confederate emblems and figures are illuminated by engaging with the ethos of which Pollard so effectively wrote. He enlarged on his thesis in “The Lost Cause Regained,” published in 1868. Pollard wrote that he was “profoundly convinced that the true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained’ by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.” The issue was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.”

As the decades after the war went by, that post-bellum victory seemed assured. In his essential book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” David W. Blight detailed how a white narrative of the war took hold, North and South, after Appomattox.

White Americans chose to celebrate one another without reference to the actual causes and implications of the war. “The memory of slavery, emancipation and the 14th and 15th Amendments never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism,” Blight wrote, “and in which devotion alone made everyone right, and no one truly wrong, in the remembered Civil War.” To recall that the war had been about what Lincoln had called a “new birth of freedom” meant acknowledging the nation’s failings on race. So white Americans decided to recall something else.

By minimizing race in the story of the war, white Americans felt free to minimize race not only in the past but in the present — leading, as Blight wrote, to “the denigration of Black dignity and the attempted erasure of emancipation from the national narrative of what the war had been about.”

As in the Lost Cause of the South and the reunion narrative of the whole nation, white Christianity of midcentury America chose the comforting elements of history and theology rather than the uncomfortable ones.

Baldwin closes the book by imagining the interior monologue of the white American who has been raised on the false history of the Lost Cause. “Do not blame me,” Baldwin wrote of the white “stammering” in his conscience. “I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me. … But, on the same day … in the most private chamber of his heart always, he, the white man, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much” — a history manipulated to make the unspeakable palatable.

“A man is a man,” Baldwin wrote, “a woman is a woman, and a child is a child. To deny these facts is to open the doors on a chaos deeper and deadlier, and … more timeless, more eternal, than the medieval vision of Hell.” Only when Pollard’s Lost Cause is truly lost will the nation escape those flames, and begin at last to glimpse the light.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

Trump’s Sister: Trump has "No Principles" and "You Can’t Trust Him"

Some of Donald Trump's family members are among his most candid critics as a new secretly recorded tape of his sister, a retired federal judge, talking about her brother indicates.  One can only imagine how furious the malignant narcissist is that his sister has his number and was candid in talking with Trump's niece whose book he attempted to block.  The comments also were scathing of his evangelical base who have betrayed everything they pretend to support and who who history will likely view as having hastened the demise of Christianity as  the majority religion in America through their hypocrisy and embrace of cruelty.  The timing of the release of the tapes and transcripts is delicious since it is on the eve of the Republican convention that launches tomorrow and which is sure to be filled with lies and falsehoods. Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

Maryanne Trump Barry was serving as a federal judge when she heard her brother, President Trump, suggest on Fox News, “maybe I’ll have to put her at the border” amid a wave of refugees entering the United States. At the time, children were being separated from their parents and put in cramped quarters while court hearings dragged on.

“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”

Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president. “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”

Lamenting “what they’re doing with kids at the border,” she guessed her brother “hasn’t read my immigration opinions” in court cases. In one case, she berated a judge for failing to treat an asylum applicant respectfully.

“What has he read?” Mary Trump asked her aunt. “No. He doesn’t read,” Barry responded.

In the weeks since Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her uncle has been released, she’s been questioned about the source of some of the information, such as her allegation that Trump paid a friend to take his SATs to enable him to transfer into the University of Pennsylvania. Nowhere in the book does she say that she recorded conversations with her aunt.

In response to a question from The Washington Post about how she knew the president paid someone to take the SATs, Mary Trump revealed that she had surreptitiously taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry in 2018 and 2019. She provided The Post with previously unreleased transcripts and audio excerpts, which include exchanges that are not in her book.

Barry has never spoken publicly about disagreements with the president, and her extraordinarily candid comments in the recordings mark the most critical comments known to have been made about him by one of his siblings. No one else in the family except Mary Trump has publicly rebuked the president.

The transcripts reveal the depths of discord between the president and his sister, illuminating a rift that began when she asked her brother for a favor in the 1980s, which Trump has frequently used to try to take credit for her success.

At one point Barry said to her niece, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

Mary Trump, 55, told The Post recently that her uncle is unfit to be president and she plans to do “everything in my power” to elect Joe Biden.

The allegation that the president paid someone to take his SATs, which was one of the most publicized allegations in Mary Trump’s book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man,” stems from a conversation that Barry had with her niece on Nov. 1, 2018.

Barry told how she tried to help her brother get into college. “He was a brat,” Barry said, explaining that “I did his homework for him” and “I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college.”

Then Barry dropped what Mary considered a bombshell: “He went to Fordham for one year [actually two years] and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.” . . . . That’s what I believe,” Barry said. “I even remember the name.” That person was Joe Shapiro, Barry said.

Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump, said that she began taping conversations in 2018 with Barry after concluding that her relatives had lied about the value of the family estate two decades earlier during a legal battle over her inheritance, in which she received far less than she expected.

Under New York law, it is legal to tape a conversation with the consent of one party, which in this case was Mary Trump.

Bastardi said she recorded the conversations with Barry to gain information that would show she had been misled by the family about the estate’s value. “She hoped to prove this, as is often done, by recording words contrary to their sworn statements. She never expected to learn much of what she heard,” Bastardi said.

“Donald is out for Donald, period,” Barry said. Mary questioned Barry about what he had accomplished on his own. “I don’t know,” Barry said. “Nothing,” Mary responded.

“Well he has five bankruptcies,” Barry said. (Trump’s companies filed for six corporate bankruptcies but he has never declared personal bankruptcy.), Good point. He did accomplish those all by his self,” Mary said. “Yes, he did. Yes, he did. You can’t trust him,” Barry said.

How any decent, moral person can support Trump is dumbfounding and, in my view, certainly raises questions about such individuals decency and actual morality.  One cannot support immorality and be moral oneself.