Darkest December

 

What will become of the Republican Party?  Will the Tr*mpists stay in power, solidifying its drift towards fascism?  Will the more "moderate" neoliberal corporatists regain power?  (Unlikely.)  Will Republican corporatists abandon the GOP and find common cause with Democratic neoliberal corporatists?  If that happens, what becomes of the progressives, who make up (according to Bernie) about 40% of the Democratic Party, and so about 20% of voters?

Historically, corporate interests (think Krupp and I.G.Farben) have been far more accommodative of fascism than of anything smacking of socialism.  Mind you, this is not a prediction: just one of a number of things I've found to worry about lately.  Another worry is Tr*mp choking on a Whopper (pun intended) and dropping dead.  "Murdered" by the "deep state," he becomes Christlike to his conspiracy-addled followers.  Tr*umpism becomes a religion, zealously protected by Tr*mp's Supreme Court, and we're in big trouble.

That kind of thinking has no place in a reality-based blog; but reality is more than a little screwy these days.  It's also possible that the Democrats could win both seats in Georgia, and Biden could appoint Stacey Abrams Attorney General; and she could order a review of the redactions of the Mueller report, possibly satisfying a lot of curiosity.  The biggest problem of dealing with now is that the possibilities are endless, and the chance of making any kind of accurate prediction is negligible.

Add in an underwhelming "relief package" from Congress, and Biden could still find a superspreading homeless encampment on the front lawn of the White House when he moves in.  Or not.  That's the problem with reality-based blogging these days: too much reality.  Any internally consistent explanation of what's going on is most likely a conspiracy theory, whether or not you're inclined to believe it.

A very merry Winter Solstice to all, the time of the year when the days start getting brighter.  Fingers crossed.

Waiting for Brunhilde

 

The opera has grown increasingly Wagnerian, and I never had much tolerance for Wagner — too long and just too noisy to sleep through.  Although all the major news outlets have accepted the idea that Biden won the election, a distressingly large number of Americans still firmly believe that Tr*mp was “robbed” of  victory.  The cognitive dissonance suffered by Our President is shared by his loyal base; and their news sources are working hard to preserve their illusions.

Trump still seems to be counting on “his” Supreme Court to back up his play to remain in power, and the first test of loyalty will be his attempt to discount illegal immigrants when allocating representation in the House.  Frankly, I can’t see how self-proclaimed “Originalists” and “Literalists” can twist the plain language of the Constitution to exclude them, but logical consistency, of late, hasn’t been held in especially high regard.

For all the optimism around the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines, it’s hard to imagine a two-dose protocol having enough impact to make much of a difference. It’s hard enough to get people inoculated even once, much less have them return for a second dose a month later.  In the Third World especially, dispensing on-time second doses will be next to impossible.

Wagner’s painfully long Ring Cycle “ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings” — and it looks like the fat lady, this time around, isn’t even waiting in the wings.

Tr*mp, the Opera

 

Reality being what it is at the moment, I’ve found it easier to cope by viewing current events as a kind of dramatic performance which, sooner or later, will have to be over.  Too tragic for farce and too farcical for tragedy, it has to be opera.  The music is in my head.

In my libretto, Tr*mp sincerely believes the craziness he’s been spouting (and Giuliani sings the role of Tr*mp’s id.). All his life, Tr*mp has been a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking.  He genuinely believed he would win a second term: after all, positive thinking always had worked for him before!  (It often works pretty well for those who are born to rich fathers who bail them out of all their failures.)

Friedenberg’s cognitive dissonance theory gives us a useful description of how people behave when their deeply held beliefs are disconfirmed.  Their first response is to double-down, finding rationalizations for why the disconfirmed belief remains valid.  With a decent number of fellow believers (or sychophantic enablers) around them, they can cling to their delusions for a long time.  

Chorus: Indeed, Sir, ’tis a dark conspiracy!
             If you believe it, we, of course, agree!
Rudy:    And I, your knight, shall rout the enemy
              Including Soros, Gates, and AOC!

(In a subplot, Christian Soldier Mike Pompeo is off in the Middle East, pursuing policies aimed at hastening the Apocalypse and the Second Coming.  He has his own delusions, and his own agenda.)

I don’t know when the curtain finally will come down on Tr*mp, and I expect that Tr*mpism will outlast him.  Meanwhile, the virus thuds along the bass clef like a tympani, impossible to ignore for long, however hard we try.  This opera, I’m afraid, is Wagnerian — too dark, too noisy, and too damned long.
 

About that election...

 

 You may feel like it's okay to take a breath now, but the stink of authoritarian populism still hangs heavy in the air.  Biden may aspire to lead a united country, but it won't be happening any time soon — if ever.  Some of the oversized American flags may come off the pickup trucks, but the American reservoir of racism and misogyny remains full to the brim, continues to spill over into the streets, and will allow Republicans to continue exploiting the divisions that make minority rule possible.

Tr*mp's supporters. whether they know it or not, are okay with fascism — and there are a hell of a lot of them.  Add in the 20% who didn't trouble themselves to vote – which probably means they figure they can live with anything – and that's a significant majority of America.  That ratio is probably neither better nor worse than what you'd find in other developed countries, human nature being what it is, but the past four years offered ample evidence that the threat of fascism in the USofA is real. 

October

 

 

The avalanche of news this month kicked up a tsunami of commentary.  I saw no reason to kick in my own half-pint, having nothing especially original to offer.  Maybe I'll have something new after the election — maybe not.

Briefs

 

• I've watched every presidential debate since Nixon-Kennedy, and last night's performance was easily the most entertaining.  I also found it more useful than most, in that it provided a clear delineation  of the characters of the participants — Tr*mp as a bully, and Biden as far more impervious to bullying than many may have expected.  Those looking signs of senile dementia should have seen far more in Tr*mp's behavior than in Biden's — and for those just looking for signs of basic decency, Biden was the clear winner.

• Anticipating a loss of the presidency – and, perhaps, their Senate majority as well – Republicans are certain to confirm the Religiulous ACB to the Supreme Court in coming weeks.  If Democrats follow through on a threat to "pack" the Court with two new Justices, Chief Justice Roberts once again will become the swing vote – but well may be less inclined to support positions of the Democrats who "sullied" the institution he holds dear.

• If a District Attorney can "get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich," it's pretty clear that Kentucky's Attorney General could have won indictments of the cops who killed Breonna Taylor if he'd had any desire to do so.  Granted, a Kentucky jury most likely would have swiftly acquitted them — but the process would have looked at least a little more like "justice."

Reality Check

 

“Alternative facts” are facts indeed — in alternative realities.  As you’ve probably noticed, the USofA is suffering a bad case of multiple reality disorder at the moment.  Even a Democratic sweep in the upcoming election won’t change that. 

Not much of what a human being “knows” is based on personal experience.  The bulk of our “knowledge” comes from trusted authority figures — parents, teachers, scientists, priests, talking heads on TV, celebrities, social media influencers, etc. etc.  The only thing we ask of them is reasonable consistency with our other authority figures.  Human beings have always lived in bubbles where received knowledge included large dollops of misconception — but in the past, the bubbles didn’t bump up against each other nearly so often.

The QAnon cult is pretty firmly entrenched in Evangelical Christianity these days. The Boogaloo crazies will remain well-armed, and the racists will be even more paranoid.  Fox News won’t lose any viewership.  I’d like to know how a Biden Administration will handle that.  “Bringing the nation together” sounds good, but it won’t happen in Joe Biden’s lifetime.

__________

The death of RBG was a gut punch to progressives.  If a Democratic President and Senate decide to go ahead and "pack the Court," they won't hear any complaints from me.

The Real Story

With all the chatter going on about Tr*mp's "mini-strokes," I figure I ought to tell you what really was happening that day at Walter Reade.  I have absolutely no evidence, but hey, it's 2020 — and it sounds good!  What more could you want?

 Frankly, I was sure about what was going on the day the news broke about Tr*mp's surprise hospital visit.  News that Pence was put on-call "in case" Our President needed anesthesia has only confirmed what I thought then.  Anesthesia was planned: Tr*mp was scheduled for a colonoscopy.  Unless he chickened out, Pence actually got to be president for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Of course, a colonoscopy is pretty standard for a man in his seventies – so one might wonder why it was such a big secret.  The answer, of course, is Tr*mp's fragile ego and macho pretensions.  He just couldn't stand that anybody might envision him bare-ass with some guy probing between those enormous buttocks.  (I don't much like envisioning it myself.)

If you really need confirmation, you might want to check how much tweeting he did the night before.  He'd have spent quite a bit of time on the toilet.

 

Catch-up for August

August was, to put it royally, a mensis horribilus.  So many upsetting things were happening, and so much was being said about them, that I didn't feel any particular need to toss my two cents in.  Just the same, there are a few points I haven't heard from the usual talking heads.

• Mohammed bin Zayed knew just as well as Bibi that the annexation plan was dead in the water – so what did MbZ get in return for formal UAE recognition of Israel?  My guess would be an assumption of military support if the Shi'a majority in the Emirates made any significant effort to overthrow the Sunni monarchy, threatening its monopoly aver all the power and wealth.  Israel would cite Iranian involvement – which is pretty much inevitable anyway.

• You've probably heard a lot of confusing explanations for why the market is soaring, but the real explanation is simple.  The Fed created a few trillion dollars of new money.  It was distributed quite broadly across the population – but, the American economy being what it is, all that money was slurped up to the top with the usual giant sucking sound.  That money had to go someplace, and bonds are paying bupkis.

• Both parties are running fear-based campaigns this election season, and it remains to be seen whether Americans are more afraid of racial minorities or fascism.

Basic Economics

If you take $400 per week away from the 20 million people most likely to spend it, businesses lose well over $30 billion in sales every month.  If you're trying to revive a cratering economy, that's really a pretty dumb idea — but that's the Republican proposal for "helping" the unemployed.

Granted, many of the unemployed currently are collecting more in unemployment benefits than they earned while they were working, which might make them hesitant to return to their crappy jobs – mostly "heroic" ones like cashier, busboy, and pedicurist.  Sorry – no extra pay for your added risk.  Many more will stay unemployed because their jobs have disappeared, and aren't coming back any time soon.

While some Republicans in Congress must see their $200 proposal as a starting point in a negotiation, the hard right would like to end the benefit entirely.  They play on the politics of resentment, which may be the defining feature of the Tr*mpian base: "Why should somebody else get something if I'm not getting it — especially those people?"  Needless to say, opponents of enhanced unemployment benefits will masquerade as "fiscal hawks," but one can't help but notice how their hawkishness waxes and wanes depending on who gets the money being spent.

Brief Briefs

Indecent Exposure
It is true that laws requiring us to wear face masks impinge on our personal liberty,  The same is true of laws requiring us to wear pants, and demonstrations against that restriction might be more entertaining than the anti-mask protests.

The Twitter Hack
Smart enough to hack the accounts of  lot of famous people, including some leading Democrats, the hackers were not smart enough to run a profitable con, pulling in less that $120,000 from some very gullible people.  They may have done better had they hacked leading Republicans; Our President's account could have brought in millions.

Positive Thinking
The Tr*mp family attended Marble Collegiate Church when it was led by Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking and a forerunner of today's Christian conservatives.  I suspect his influence on young Donald may have been profound, but, sadly, positive thinking hasn't worked on the coronavirus.

Talking about senility...

Just in case you missed yesterday's presidential "press conference," here's a sample of what Our President had to say:

“We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.”

Monuments

Now that the USofA finally has achieved some degree of consensus regarding just who won our Civil War, it certainly is time to remove all those monuments to the losers.  A big question, though, is just what to do with all that statuary that may be of some historical and/or artistic value.  Some want them relocated to private property, but all that would accomplish would be to create a network of private shrines to racism.  I have a better idea.

Let's create a new Losers National Monument on some suitably desolate expanse of desert land out West, where it will be possible to display them all together.  They would be removed from their pedestals and placed with each abutting the next, bearded cheek by mutton-chopped jowl and horse's ass by horse's ass – with just enough room for  intrepid visitors to squeeze between them for access to the statues that particularly pique their interests.   Better yet, the relocated statues could be arranged into a maze for added tourist appeal – a classic American roadside attraction.

Then, perhaps, we could turn our attention to that other monument to slavery, the United States Constitution — where concessions to slave states resulted in our profoundly non-representative Senate and Electoral College.  As that unrepentant racist Winston Churchhill once said, "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

I'm not sure he got that right, but I don't have a better idea right now.

Bounties

Nobody is surprised that Our President doesn't read his intelligence briefings, placing more confidence in Fox News than in the CIA.  (Personally, I suspect his aversion to reading may be because he's dyslexic.)  Republicans say nobody told him because the evidence for Russia paying bounties on the deaths of US service members wasn't strong enough.  Democrats say nobody wanted to tell him because he doesn't like to hear bad things about his buddy, Putin.

Another possibility is that he was told, and got on the phone to Putin to "find out if it was true."  Putin, of course, denied it — and Tr*mp, of course, believed him, just as he believed Putin's denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election: "President Putin says it's not Russia," Tr*mp proclaimed in Helsinki.  "I don't see any reason why it would be!"

Tr*mp has spoken to Putin by phone five or six times since he "didn't find out."  What were they talking about?  Oh, yeah — we're not allowed to know.

Gorsuch on Gay/Trans Rights

Everybody was surprised when Justice Neil Gorsuch voted to extend employment protection to gay and transgender individuals under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  My first thought was, "Aw, that's really sweet!"  It was a choice that, to me, demonstrated his respect and affection for his mentor, retired Justice Anthony Kennedy.

News commentators have made much of Gorsuch's commitment to "textualism" – the idea that judges should interpret law according to its specific language rather than trying to descry the lawmakers' specific intent.  Textualists, though, are the Jesuits of jurisprudence: individuals expert in spinning eminently logical arguments in defense of foregone conclusions.  In Bostock v. Clayton County, Gorsuch demonstrated his mastery of the art.

The four decisions in support of LGBT rights written by Justice Kennedy are likely to be viewed by history as his most significant actions in his time on the Supreme Court.  While I'm certain Kennedy made no attempt to influence his former clerk's decision, I'm equally certain that preserving Kennedy's historic legacy was a powerful factor in shaping the younger man's thinking.

Yeah, that's really sweet.

Cops

I had this funny feeling for a couple of days, and it took me that long to figure out what it was.  It had been quite a while since I'd experienced twinges of optimism.

That horrifying snuff film starring Derek Chauvin and George Floyd had set off what was beginning to look like a genuine mass movement.  Our President's psychopathy was becoming so evident that even a few Republicans were looking uncomfortable, and voices from the military offered some reassurance that our armed forces might not support a Tr*mpian coup d'etat.  I suppose that's cause for "hope," but the "change" part will be harder to come by.

Structural racism is just one component of a larger structure: a social system that allows a small number of individuals to amass great wealth and power at the expense of everybody else.  For a sizable chunk of the white working class, white privilege is the only privilege available, and they are loathe to give it up.  Also, consigning people of color to an underclass makes it so much easier for the agents of our overlords – the police – to recognize just whom they're supposed to repress.  Restrictions that keep minorities geographically separate make the task of repression even simpler, and the show of force is far more important than the "control of crime."

Cop culture is macho, authoritarian, and insular.  I suspect it is held together primarily by shared privilege: everything from never getting traffic tickets to  "qualified immunity" for murder.    Maintaining that privilege demands intense loyalty to each other: hence, the "blue wall of silence."  Compounding that opacity, municipalities save money by conceding "free" items in negotiations with police unions, like periodic deletion of public complaint records, or contract language that keeps them secret.

I'm not encouraged by any of the "reform" or "defund" ideas making the rounds now.  None of them addresses the real problem: somebody has to be repressing the underclass to keep the elite in its very comfortable place.  Somebody has to ensure that the working class remains divided and at odds with itself.

Just the same, I keep getting this funny feeling . . .

Existential Anxiety

Reading fiction as a distraction from our current depressing Situation was working pretty well for me until, at 2AM, I encountered this passage from Keiichiro Hirano's novel, A Man:

...Kido saw his life as composed of several stages linked together by a shared name, with himself as their culmination.  A significant portion of the life given continuity by the label "Akiro Kido" that had once lain ahead had already been relegated to the past, and so his identity was in large part already determined.  Of course there might have been other paths he could have taken and therefore other people he might have been.  Perhaps an infinite number.  It was in the light of such considerations that he confronted his former question anew.  The problem was not who he was in the present but who he's been in the past, and the solution he sought was no longer supposed to help him live but to help him figure out what sort of person to die as.

Hirano wrote in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed Fukushima — an event just as arbitrary and unforeseen as a pandemic, and just as likely to provoke a little existential anxiety.  It's a common human condition, albeit most humans can't put a name to it when they feel it.  We respond by immersing ourselves in the present, focusing on some current, less transcendental outrage.

That's why I'm having a problem this time around: I seem to be suffering from outrage fatigue.  I've been outraged so often recently that it's become hard to work up a good surge of anger anymore.  My head has been bombarded by the corruption and the inequalities and the classism and the blatant lies and the manipulations of reality.  Where the hell is that revolution I wanted fifty years ago, and that I never stopped wanting?

There.  That feels much better.  I'm back! :)

Extra brief briefs

 

The last economic depression led to the creation of social safety net programs.  It also weakened the rule of law and led to the rise of fascism.  These are dangerous times.  Meanwhile. . .

◆  Richard Burr (R-NC) led the Senate Intelligence Committee, which affirmed the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.  Now he's under criminal investigation for insider trading, unlike other members of Congress who dumped a lot of stock before the virus induced market crash.  One wonders . . .

◆  The normally taciturn Clarence Thomas has been surprisingly talkative in the context of hearings by telephone, which might make some of us suspect that Ginni Thomas could be feeding him his questions.

◆  Quite a few Tr*mp supporters could be okay with reopening the country because the virus "mostly" kills blacks and Latinos.

There is no available "evidence" to support any of this, but those with the proper mindset will have no trouble believing it.  After all, "evidence" is so 2015!  Isn't it?

Biden as Sex Offender

I suspect a great many people, including many Republicans, will dismiss Tara Reade's accusation against Joe Biden; not because they trust his moral character, but because they see him as kind of a dweeb.  Okay, he gets his jollies squeezing shoulders and stroking necks, but that's just more evidence of his dweebishness.  They don't think he's aggressive (aka "manly"} enough to take it any further.  Unless there are more accusations, he'll probably skate.

Maybe that was just my own first impression, but I'm confident I'm not alone.  Of course, everything is as clear as mud at the moment; and as they said on the radio when old Joe was a pup, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"  Government being government, though, there has to be a personnel file for Tara Reade in some archive or another, and some bureaucrat should be able to find it.  It wouldn't hurt at all if Biden let a couple of archivists at the University of Delaware go through his papers for the relevant time period, and see if they can find any reference to Tara Reade whatsoever.  If he doesn't want to antagonize a lot of progressive Democrats, he'd better do it soon.

Sarcasm

I flipped on the TV while folding some laundry, just in time to receive Our President's latest medical advice.  His thought process could not have been so clear had it been displayed in a crawl at the bottom of the screen.

"Antiseptics kill germs, right?  And I heard somewhere some kind of light kills them too.  I wonder if they thought of that?

Simultaneously, his lips started moving – and a moment later, he was bouncing his great idea off Birx and the scientists.  It is not easy to be Fauci (not invited this time) or Birx, but I guess they hang in there for fear of whom their replacements might be.  Tr*mp, meanwhile, was imagining how neat it would be when he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

While I don't anticipate any Lysol shortages, I won't be surprised if there's a rush on UV lighting fixtures, possibly advertised on Fox News.  Soon, I predict, there will be plant lights shining down on the MyPillow® accoutred beds of many who comprise Our President's base.  Somehow, it seems appropriate.

What comes next?

Maybe there's a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, but nobody has any solid ideas about what else we'll find down there.  Pretty clearly, though, things will be different.  Both socially and economically, our current situation is a lot more novel than the novel coronavirus; and major societal disruptions provoke culture change.

Nobody is surprised by leaders like Orban, Duterte, and Modi becoming more authoritarian.  Tr*mp might dream of emulating them, but Tr*mp's general ineptitude and lackluster popular approval should make that impossible.  Meanwhile, economic collapse has prompted Congress to adopt a series of "socialist" initiatives that may be the forerunners of broader socioeconomic reform.

Granted, the plutocratic class will do its best to stymie any significant change; but workers who lose their health insurance along with their jobs are a lot more likely to abandon their "preference" for employer provided plans; Americans with little or no savings, including a sizable slice of the Red Hat Brigade, will come to recognize the need to expand safety net programs; and America's massive wealth disparities will become increasingly intolerable as the pandemic and its aftermath make them increasingly impossible to ignore.

Even if Tr*mp's "miracle" happens, and the virus subsides substantially in coming months, economists agree that recovery from its economic damage is likely to take years.  With weak consumer demand, many of the "safe" jobs currently being performed at home also will disappear.  Nobody is truly immune, and all of America will come to understand that.

Those who follow this blog know that optimism is not one of its defining characteristics, but this time there is some reason to hope that we eventually will emerge from this crisis with a more just society.  To be sure, November's elections will make a big difference.  One only can hope that the Democratic establishment can move beyond Clinton-era ideas of what is "practical" and start listening to the party's more progressive wing.

Relief!

Mitch McConnell always sounds like he's grumbling, so it's hard to say just how he feels about the largest welfare program in American history.  Apparently, though, he agrees that it's necessary.  Now that McConnell has broken the ice, only a few stubborn holdouts still say "stimulus" — the word du jour is "relief."  Add the restraints on the Administration's ability to dole out corporate loans, and restraints on how that loan money can be used, and the overall tone of the bill is classic Welfare State Democratic.

Progressive Democrats wanted more, of course, but Pelosi is offering some proposals for "phase four" that might offer them more satisfaction.  If, somehow, science turns out to be right and Tr*mp turns out to be wrong (imagine that!), "phase four" will be along in short order.

How will the USofA pay for the bills it's running up at the moment?  Essentially, it won't.  The Fed is gearing up to increase the money supply with extensive, near-zero interest loans to the Treasury. It will be inflationary, but that makes the biggest losers the ones with the most money.  The Fed hasn't met its inflation target since the Great Recession, so you could say there's some catching-up to do.

By the way, I really like the idea of some workers collecting more in unemployment insurance than they earned in salary: clearly, they're people who weren't making nearly enough money to begin with.

Stimulus?

You can almost read the thought balloon: "People like money, so if I give them money they'll like me – and I'll be reelected!"  Toss in some corporate giveaways — the standard Republican solution to every problem — and you have the Administration's plan to "stimulate the economy."  Economic stimulus helps in a typical recession, but the current crisis is far from typical.  It's hard to go out and spend money when you're barricaded at home, and when the places you might spend it are closed.

Democrats, of course, have no aversion to giving away free money, but hope to put some limitation on how corporations can use essentially interest-free loans, hoping to avoid some of the abuses we saw in the 2008 economic crisis: using government funds for stock buybacks and absurd levels of executive compensation.  By the time you read this, there's likely to have been some sort of "compromise" negotiated.

The current plan to pay $1200 to 85% of the American people, and a bit less to another 5%.  The "stimulus" effect would be negligible.   To many higher earners, $1200 will be just a blip in the bank balance; and with so few places to spend it, most of the "stimulus" wouldn't make it into the broader economy until the pandemic is over.  For the unemployed, $1200 won't cover a month's rent.

Proposals coming out of the House, though, seem to recognize that what America needs now isn't stimulus, but relief — money individuals and small businesses need to survive the crisis.  Needless to say, there will be plenty of resistance to new "entitlements," but if you're going to give people money, it makes sense to give it to those who need it most.

Time to Panic?

 

Maybe.  Fresh from arresting an uncle and a cousin on charges of plotting a coup, MBS roiled oil markets by launching a price war against Russia, exacerbating instability in a world economy already teetering from the impact of COVID-19.  Investment houses think recession is likely.

The manufacturing sector already is in recession from Tr*mp's trade war, global supply chains are a mess, and a virus is not especially susceptible to economic interventions.  However much money is pumped into the economy, it doesn't do much good if people won't go out and spend it: so whatever fiscal stimulus Congress comes up with probably won't make much difference.  The Fed will cut rates again, but interest rates already are so low that a further cut can't have significant impact.  The truth is that firms already have plenty of cash-on-hand were they interested in expansion — but who's interested in expansion while there's a pandemic going on?

I suspect the coronavirus may have done some good for "Grandpa Joe" in yesterday's primary contests: weird "Uncle Bernie" seems far too angry to offer much comfort and reassurance.  If the viral threat persists, of course, "Mean Boy Donald" fares even worse.

Catch-up

Our President's "deal of the century," the proposed "peace agreement" that would formalize Israel's currently de facto apartheid state, failed to deliver Israel's Parliament to his buddy Bibi; and may have helped the Arab-led Joint List win two additional seats.  Since the main disagreement between Bibi's Likud and Benny Gantz's Blue and White Party is over whether or not Bibi goes to jail, parliamentary paralysis may have been the best possible outcome at this point.

Meanwhile, in the USofA, the Democratic establishment has solidified around Joe Biden.  The push was especially evident on MSNBC, where invited guests heavily favored Biden over Sanders.  Chris Matthews may  have gone a bit overboard, though: he's losing his prime-time slot, possibly in response to complaints from MSNBC's more progressive viewers.

I still have serious doubts about Biden's "electability."  While the media tout his "improved" debate performances, he still has problems remembering his talking points, much less thinking on his feet.  I can't help thinking that his staffers are praying that ARVID-19 will damage Tr*mp enough to compensate for their candidate's many weaknesses.  Some think tank, somewhere, has to be calculating how many Americans have to die to ensure a Biden victory.

Also, although we haven't heard much about Burisma lately, it's coming.  By hook or by crook (mostly the latter), Tr*mp can count on Dan Barr to deliver in time for the presidential campaign

Rare as it may be, I feel some sympathy for Erdogan's efforts to keep another million Syrian refugees out of Turkey, which already is overburdened – and equivalent sympathy for the government of Greece, left to muddle through the refugee crisis with no real EU support.  At the same time, I understand that admitting more refugees can only further empower AfD, National Front, and other far-right parties.

Putin is having a very good week.

Bernie's "electability"

At this point in 2016, the consensus among the talking heads was that Donald Tr*mp could never win the Republican candidacy, much less the presidency.  Surely, they opined, Tr*mp was too extreme, too unorthodox: the nominee would be a far safer candidate.  (Remember Jeb Bush?)

What the punditry missed was that it was Tr*mp's unorthodoxy – his disregard the "rules" – that powered his candidacy.  Tr*mp was a disruptor – a norm-breaking agent of change – and change was just what many voters desperately wanted.  It was the same impulse that helped Obama win in 2008.  (The black guy just had to be different – right?)

For decades, American optimism has been in decline.  Only a third believe their children will be better off than they are, and the data indicate that the majority two-thirds are probably correct.  Over the past three years, nothing has happened to change those attitudes.  A low unemployment rate makes it easier to find a second job when your first job won't pay the bills, but that's not a recipe for life satisfaction.  In the critical Rust Belt states, Tr*mp's trade wars have reduced the number of well-paid manufacturing jobs; and insecure "gig" jobs with no benefits offer little comfort.

The face of change this time around is Bernie Sanders, and his plan for disrupting the status quo centers around redistributing wealth from the obscenely rich to the rest of us.  Granted, the USofA already may be too corrupt for that goal to be attainable, but that doesn't make the goal any less attractive to the many who feel left behind, or any less valid if we hope to salvage some of what we call "democracy" in America.

Tr*mp's own weaknesses could make him vulnerable to any potential Democratic opponent (with the possible exception of Joe Biden), but cautious incrementalism doesn't inspire voters to flock to the polls.  The real "swing voters" aren't cautious moderates; they're angry malcontents.  Like it or not, Bernie is the Democratic Party's best chance to win over those voters and take the presidency.

Justice

I'll never forget the look of shock and horror on the young ADA's face when the grand jury I was serving on failed to endorse just one count of a multi-count indictment against a drunk who had seriously annoyed some local cops.  It was the only charge we failed to endorse among the dozens of cases brought before us that month.

I wish I could have seen the expression on William Barr's face when his prosecutors told him they couldn't win an indictment of Andrew McCabe after nearly two years of  trying — but I guess I'll have to be satisfied by his tortured efforts to explain how Our President's tweets make his job {punishing Tr*mp's enemies and rewarding his friends) "impossible."  If he was trying to salvage a scrap of self-respect, his effort was singularly unsuccessful.

"I'm not going to be bullied by anyone," the AG proclaimed.  Perhaps.  Maybe it doesn't count as bullying when you've already rolled over and played dead.

The Romney Vote

It wasn't Mitt Romney, Republican Senator, who voted to find Tr*mp guilty of abuse of power yesterday: it was Mitt Romney, Elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Romney is serious about his role as a Mormon leader, and felt duty-bound to make a moral decision.  While "situation ethics" overwhelmed American Evangelicals as they transformed their religious movement into a political force, Mormons seem more inclined to stick with first principles.

Clearly, the LDS Church is conservative, despite some of the "socialistic" aspects of its theology; and has been reliably Republican at least since Ezra Taft Benson served in the Eisenhower administration. Nevertheless, Mormons remember their long history as outsiders in America, forced to flee from the East Coast to the Midwest to the deserts of Utah and Nevada.  Other politically conservative Christian denominations still refuse to accept them as "real" Christians – so their integration into the American mainstream remains incomplete.  Mormons remain a "minority group" in the USofA.

While Romney's vote to impeach may do him some political damage in Utah, it's hard to imagine Mormon Utah failing to re-elect him to the Senate in 2023.  Still – despite the fact that his political peril is far less than what other prodigal Republican would have encountered – his decision to vote for impeachment was courageous and worthy of admiration.