MASS MURDER

How come it happens here?

That's the question we should all be asking and answering.

Not whether we can better enforce red flag laws? Or child-proof guns so that toddlers can't fire them? Or make background checks universal? Or make it illegal for those on the terrorist watch-list to possess firearms? Or close the gun-show loophole? Or re-instate the ban on assault rifles?

All those other questions ask how we can better deal with the problem.

None of them tell us why we have the problem.

Which means that . . .

None of them will ever solve the problem.

So . . .

How come it happens here?

The answer is simple.

There are more guns here, by orders of magnitude, than anywhere else in the developed world.

According to the most recent statistics, Americans possess, either legally or illegally,  326,474,000 guns. According to those same statistics, America has the highest (120.6) estimated number of guns per 100 people; the next highest is Yemen at 52.8; the vast majority of countries are below 20 and most are in single digits. 

If you want to break it down further, we're still number one.  There are firearms in 42% of America's households.  If you want to assume that number includes hunters and exclude them, one way to do that is to count just the number of handguns.  When you do that, however, we're still tops. 21.9% of  all American households contain handguns.

Maybe you're with the "guns don't kill, people do" crowd and think mass murders happen everywhere and the United States is really no different from other countries. Well, for the twenty-year period ending in 2019, here's the data on that.  There were 121 mass shootings in the United States.  The next highest was Russia at 21. Every other country was in single digits and most of them recorded no more than one.

Thus . . .

It pretty obviously doesn't happen everywhere to the extent it happens here.

Not by a long shot.

So . . . 

How come it happens here?

The answer is simple.

It's the guns, stupid.

And the solution is actually pretty simple too.

If you want to make sure your kids won't get shot in kindergarten, your grandmother won't be offed at a dance hall, your workers won't be taken out at their job, and you won't meet your Maker at a nightclub or concert . . . 

Get rid of the guns.

All of them.

This is a radical idea here in the U S of A.  I will be called a Communist . . . or a Socialist . . . or at the very least a lunatic for advocating it.  Lawyers for the NRA will laugh, smug in the cocoon of gun rights known as the Second Amendment to the Constitution.   If I tell them they have it all wrong, that the right to bear arms was subservient to the need for a well-organized militia, that today's militia (i.e., the National Guard)  by no means requires that 42% of  American households be armed so it can be well-organized . . . 

They will laugh again.

Not according to Antonin Scalia . . .

They will say . . .

Or the current Supreme Court . . .

Rubbing it in.

And though academically wrong, they will be practically right.  

Trump's Supreme Court has made it practically impossible to get the guns off the street.  Just ask New York.  Last July, the Supreme Court struck down its law requiring applicants for a license to carry outside their home to demonstrate proper cause for the license, and this past fall a federal district judge struck down its law barring guns from so-called "sensitive" places -- museums, theaters, stadiums, libraries, places offering services to children, and anyplace serving alcohol -- and then later in the case issued an injunction prohibiting the government from compelling license applicants to disclose their social media accounts or those with whom they lived or from proving their "good moral character". 

The result of decisions like these is that, as a practical matter, America's war against mass murder is hamstrung.  

We can't take the guns away.  

We cannot even keep them away. 

We're in a world where anyone can presumably possess and carry a firearm anywhere and at any time. Some may be subject to background check.  Most won't.  

What to do?

I don't know.

The Second Amendment was passed in the 1780s.  There were no assault weapons or automatic firearms back then. The flintlocks took time to load.  And the militias really did have to be armed by citizen soldiers.  

Though Wyatt Earp could make Tombstone safe by making cowboys check their guns at his sheriff's office in the 19th century, and the federal government could stop more Valentines Day massacres in Chicago by making  submachine guns illegal in the 1930s, those days are long gone.

I do not think the Supreme Court is right about the Second Amendment.

But if they are . . .

It should be repealed.

BROKEN HOUSE

I come from a broken home.

But in navigating the break, those in charge did not kill the future for their children.

Or themselves.

In Washington DC, we are now in week three of divided government. 

Joe Biden is President and his Democratic colleagues control the Senate.  

For their part, the Republicans control the House.

There is, however,  one problem with that last sentence.   

The problem is that . . .

It is not particularly accurate. 

While 222 members of the House of Representatives are registered Republicans who won their seats on that party' s line, only about thirty to fifty of them actually control the place.  This reality was born early in the morning of Saturday, January 7, when California's Kevin McCarthy prostrated himself before the GOP's off-the-charts right wing (OTCRW) in order to be (finally) elected Speaker on the fifteenth ballot. 

To get there, McCarthy promised the OTCRW that they could vote to end his Speakership anytime one of them moved to vacate the office.  Among many other things, he also promised them outsized presence on the powerful Rules committee that first decides what gets to the floor; eliminated the rule which allowed the debt limit to rise without a separate vote; and  agreed to the creation of a select subcommittee to investigate "weaponization of the federal government"

The OTCRW plans to use these powers to launch scores of  investigations and to force Democrats to make massive spending cuts.  They also plan to refuse to increase the nation's debt ceiling unless Congressional Democrats and President Biden go along with their proposed cuts.

The debt limit debate is a classic example of the GOP's endemic hypocrisy.  House Republicans voted to raise the limit without condition three times during the Trump administration, two of which occurred when they controlled both the House and the Senate.  This does not mean that some on the Democratic side have not played politics with the issue from time to time, voting against a raise or to limit the raise when they knew an increase was passing anyway and performance could trump the need for good policy basically because the performance did not matter.  No Democrat, however, has ever actually voted against the limit when doing so would have resulted in default.

That, however, is what the OTCRW is saying it will do now.

This would, of course, amount to economic suicide.  The dollar is the world's reference currency and America's bonds with their guaranteed interest payments are the world's safest and most stable investments.  Upon default, America's credit rating would immediately plummet, as would the value of everyone's retirement accounts. And as cash reserves were spent, default would in short order result in the suspension of Social Security and Medicare payments, government salaries, and all other federal spending (including payments on government bonds) as well.

The OTCRW's rejoinder to this parade of horribles is that it does not want the limit to be reached or America to default but rather is simply insisting the the administration and Congressional Democrats "negotiate" on spending cuts as a condition for the GOP agreeing to raise the limit.  They then spin Biden's "no negotiation" stance as the arrogant muttering of a man who does not understand that his side no longer controls the entire government.  

Were this true, it would be persuasive.

But it isn't.

In point of fact, all the "spending" which is now moving the United States toward the borrowing limit has already been voted on and approved. Or, to put it differently, all of that spending has already been "negotiated".  By the same token,  all future spending will also have to be "negotiated".  Congress will hold hearings, take testimony, and vote.  If Republicans want to limit that spending, cut the deficit, sunset all federal programs (as proposed by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson), limit military and financial assistance to Ukraine (as suggested by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ohio's JD Vance),they will have ample opportunity to do so.

In the current debt ceiling debate, therefore, the OTCRW is not asking to negotiate spending.

Instead, it is trying to negotiate . . .

Paying.

Back in the 1960s and '70s when he was a rising GOP star and on his way to the presidency, Ronald Reagan made a repeated point of comparing the federal government to any American family.  The latter, he noted, had to live within its means and so, therefore, should the former.  That advice was sound.  Reagan, however, never said that an American had the right to tell the bank or the dealership that he was refusing to make the payments on the mortgage or car loan he had negotiated and agreed to years before. 

If a family does that, it loses its home or car.

But if America does that, it will lose its shirt.

The debt limit as currently set is $31.4 trillion.  It will be reached two days from now but given cash on hand and likely to be received in the near term, default will not occur until sometime this spring.  On its editorial page today, The Wall Street Journal, hardly the mouthpiece of liberalism, warned that "The first rule of negotiation is never take a hostage you're not prepared to shoot."  Setting the table, it noted that "Speaker McCarthy has promised his Members he won't move to raise the limit without spending concessions from President Biden.  But Mr. Biden says he won't negotiate at all over the debt limit."  It then concluded "Something or someone has to give because the debt limit has to be raised."

The Journal anchors itself firmly in the rational side of conservatism.  It doesn't espouse or forgive attempted coups or violent insurrections. Last July, in assaying January 6 and President Trump, it wrote that "the brute facts remain: Mr. Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander in Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking in his name . . . Instead he fed the mob's anger and let the riot play out." On the debt limit, however, the boat is a bit unmoored.  "The U.S. has already borrowed and spent the money," it explained, "and debt held by the public is a contract.  Nobody sane in Washington wants to be blamed for triggering a default, and the bond market ructions it would cause, which means it almost certainly won't happen."  

Almost is the operative word in that last sentence.

And it is pregnant with doubt.

Over the course of the next two months, the debt limit dance will proceed.  Biden and the Democrats will correctly insist that no one can negotiate whether America must pay its bills.  If necessary, and as has occurred in the past, they will agree to vote en masse to raise the limit with the assistance of only a handful of Republicans needed to reach 218 and actually pass the measure. This will solve the problem while leaving the OTCRW and its enablers their fig leaf of opposition.  This will only be possible, however, if McCarthy allows  that measure to go to the floor for a vote.

McCarthy has promised not do this.

Even though sanity -- and The Wall Street Journal  -- say he must.

The weirdest part of the GOP's first week, four-day, fifteen vote meltdown over the Speaker's gavel was that it continued even after Kevin McCarthy had given his opponents all they were asking for.  The hostage takers, it turned out,  weren't particularly interested in concessions on rules or in "democratizing" a body where polarization has empowered leadership more or less as a condition of getting anything done.  

They just wanted a scalp.  

Because of his limitless ability to abase himself, McCarthy became Speaker anyway and held off his inevitable execution.  Sooner or later, however, that execution will come. The rules just passed by House Republicans allow it. 

And the current debt ceiling impasse may deliver it.

Because . . .

At some point point in the not too distant future, Kevin McCarthy will either have to renege on his debt ceiling promise and kill himself politically.

Or honor his promise . . .

And kill the country economically.

This is not a choice the country voted for last November.  It is not even a choice the GOP's iconic Ronald Reagan would have advocated.  His American family did not embrace suicide as the solution to its fiscal challenges, and most broken homes survive the break.

Mine did.

But then again . . .

There were adults in charge.

CHRISTMAS 2022 -- CHURCHILL RETURNS, TRUMP DISSOLVES, GOP IMPLODES

Four score and a year ago today, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived in the United States.  

Over the previous fortnight, America had declared war on Japan and Germany and Churchill had come to visit his partner. For more than a year, he had led Great Britain in a solitary fight against Nazi Germany.  The European continent had been overrun and London bore the scars and almost daily trauma of German bombs.  Only his leadership, his countrymen's resolve, and the RAF had stood between them and defeat. 

Yesterday, Churchill returned.

This time in the person of Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine.

It is impossible to overstate the role Zelensky and Ukraine have played in stemming the tide of today's incipient fascism and preserving the rules-based  world order bequeathed to us by Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in the wake of World War II.  Since February, Ukraine -- a country of roughly 44 million -- has fended off invasion and destruction by Russia -- a nuclear power of 143 million now run by a paranoid authoritarian in love with war crimes.  Critically assisted by western money and arms, and a NATO rebuilt by Joe Biden, it has done what everyone thought impossible last winter.  It has . . .

Survived. 

Yesterday,  like Churchill before him, the president of that small nation spoke before a joint session of the US Congress. And like Churchill before him, he laid out what was at stake, not just for his country but for America and the world as well.  "The battle," he said, "is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians."  Rather, "[i]t will" determine "whether [there] will be democracy . . . for all."  It "cannot be postponed or frozen."  On it depends "the restoration of [our] international legal order."

He thanked America for the military and financial assistance it has already provided.

Profusely.

He also asked for more.

Predictably.

He made it clear, however, that our "money is not charity."

Critically.

"It's an investment in . . . global security and democracy".

When Churchill addressed Congress in 1941, he measured reality alongside the potential inherent in his cemented partnership with the United States.  "It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future," he admitted, "[Y]et in the day to come, the British and American people will, for their own safety and for the good of all, walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace."  When Volodymyr Zelensky addressed Congress yesterday, he did much the same.  "I know," he said, "that everything depends on us".  "Yet,"  he continued, "so much depends on the world." And "so much in the world depends on you." 

In the current war in Ukraine, America has already provided over $48 billion in military and financial assistance and is on track to provide another $45 billion in the omnibus spending bill the Senate passed today and sent to the House.  The EU as a whole has contributed $30 billion and others have contributed substantial albeit lesser sums. In the wake of the Cold War back in the '90s, when Madeleine Albright and others took to calling America the "indispensable nation", contributions like this are what they had in mind.  The fight in Ukraine is against this century's version of authoritarian fascism. For rights-based democracy and a rules-based world order to win that fight, nothing could be more indispensable.

Fascism, of course, is not just a foreign problem.

We have our own version here.

In the person of Donald Trump. 

And on that front, the January 6 Committee completed its own indispensable work earlier in the week.

On Monday, it held its last public hearing and announced that it was referring criminal charges against the  former president to the Department of Justice.  

The charges being referred  are for aiding and abetting the January 6 insurrection, obstruction of  the official electoral count taking place that day, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy in making false statements. They were supported by seventeen specific findings.  These included findings that Trump "oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress", "unlawfully pressured State officials . . . to change the results of the elections in their States", "purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud" in connection with the presidential election,  "summoned tens of thousands" of his supporters to Washington based on those fraudulent claims, and then refused repeated requests to tell those supporters to disperse after knowing they had violently overrun the Capitol.

The vote to refer was unanimous but represented a compromise. According to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the choices at the extremes were to do nothing on the theory that the committee's report as a whole lays out all the evidence (and constitutes more or less a de facto referral) or to make scores of referrals covering both the four sent and all the other process crimes (perjury, subornation of perjury, witness tampering) for which there is evidence.   Even though Raskin himself hopes and expects those process crimes to be prosecuted, he said that the committee as a whole decided to "focus on the central actors with the major offenses."

This capped off  what has been a bad two months for Trump.  

His candidates lost in the mid-terms last November; his company was found guilty of criminal tax evasion in New York earlier this month; he entertained two antisemites, one of whom is also a white supremacist, the week before that; his poll numbers are declining among GOP primary voters;  his presidential campaign had to lock people into the room in which he announced he was running; the DOJ is already investigating him in connection with both the January 6 insurrection and the illegal removal of presidential papers to Mar el Lago . . .

And now this.

The process of accountability in America can be slow.

But it also can be ineluctable.

For Trump,  disaster is a habit and attention a drug. This is a combination  that would destroy most people, never mind preclude them from becoming president, and though the Donald has been violating the law of averages for most of his  life, sooner or later the averages catch-up. And it now looks like . . .

Later has arrived.

Later, however, is not something House Republicans are negotiating particularly well these days.

Although they narrowly won control of  the House in the mid-terms, they remain frozen in their inability to make California's Rep. Kevin McCarthy the next Speaker.  

McCarthy as Speaker would be the expected outcome in any other year given his current position as Minority Leader. Standing in his way, however, is  a gaggle of far-right conservatives asserting their undying opposition to him and the GOP's underwhelming performance last November leaving him with no room to ignore them.  The GOP will have 222 seats in the next House.  McCarthy's opponents, however, have thus far made it impossible for him  to corral the 218 votes he needs to wield the Speaker's gavel.

The likely result here is that McCarthy will prevail.  

It is likely for two reasons.  

First, no other GOP member with any heft has emerged as a credible alternative, so much so that McCarthy's  supporters have created campaign-style buttons with the slogan "O.K." 

Meaning . . .

"Only Kevin". 

The "O.K."  buttons are a response to "Never Kevin" buttons sported by McCarthy's small but ardent opposition. The theory is that McCarthy is the only realistic choice.  The button, however, makes him sound like an all-that- is left consolation prize at the county fair.  Or, as pundit Molly Jong-Fast put it, his supporters chose O.K."because 'meh' was already taken."

Second, assuming ballots are taken in which McCarthy continues to fall short of a majority, the alternative would then be to look for a Speaker outside the House.  The problem here, however, is that most of those respectable enough to hold the job (e.g., Rob Portman, who by then will be a former Senator from Ohio) will never take it and those who would take it (e.g., Liz Cheney) will not be offered it.

So, O.K. may be it.

Which may not be all that ok at all.

To whittle his way to the top, McCarthy has had to make a series of unseemly compromises with extremists in his caucus.  He has already had to promise Marjorie Taylor Greene -- currently stripped of any committee assignments for basically advocating the assassination of Democrats -- that she will get assignments come January 3, and Greene herself is gunning for a spot on the powerful Oversight and Reform committee.  Though a steering committee of GOP members will pick who serves there, McCarthy is part of that committee and will probably agree to her request.  If so, Taylor-Greene will join other MAGA denialists and grenade-throwers (think Jim Jordan) and spend the next two years "investigating" the January 6 committee,  hyping spurious claims for impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, or assailing Hunter Biden for having traded on his last name.

McCarthy's other possible "give" is to agree to demands that he reinstate the rule that allowed the GOP caucus to force former Speaker John Boehner to retire in 2015.  Called a "motion to vacate", the rule permitted the caucus to vote on removal of the Speaker at any point in his two-year term.  In 2015, Boehner chose resignation suspecting he would lose that vote, and thus far McCarthy has refused to agree to reinstating the rule given the leverage it would provide his caucus opponents.  

Whether McCarthy will stand firm is unclear.  

In 2015, after Boehner quit, McCarthy wanted to be Speaker but stood down when it became clear he couldn't get the needed majority.  This allowed Paul Ryan to emerge as a consensus choice. Ryan, however, was pilloried by the same extremists who bedeviled Boehner and decided to leave once his term ended in 2018. McCarthy then became Minority Leader when the Democrats re-took Congress and has been salivating for the top job ever since.

Effective Speakers control their caucus.  They do this via some combination of hardball and honey.  They understand what each member in their caucus wants but also what cannot be given.  They know how to count.  And they are tough. Pelosi had to negotiate to get to 218 when she took the gavel for the second time in 2019 and she did so without compromising her ability to be effective.  

McCarthy, however, may be negotiating away his effectiveness.

And almost certainly will have done so if he resurrects the Boehner-era motion to vacate.

This is something none of us should encourage.

On Tuesday, McCarthy was forced to agree to a threat the Freedom Caucus advanced against Senate Republicans who planned to vote  for the omnibus spending bill that passed today.

The extremists want to use the need to raise the debt ceiling to force cuts in Democratic programs and are willing to shut down the government to do so. This tack has been tried and failed many times in the past, and most of the GOP has no desire to run a play that has blown up in their faces before.  

Not, however, the extremists.

They are now threatening any Republican Senator who accepted the omnibus with no cooperation on any of their future proposals.  One Republican Senator, North Dakota's Kevin Cramer, reacted to this latest act of petulance as follows: "Statements like that [are] the very reason that some Senate Republicans feel they should probably spare [House Republicans] from the burden of having to govern."

As if to hammer home the point that petulance is the House GOP's only policy, two from the Freedom Caucus, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, sat on the hands throughout Zelensky's speech to Congress. And earlier in the day, Don, Jr. -- proving once again that Putin must have something on his father --  called Zelensky "an ungrateful international welfare queen".

A House controlled by the GOP's Freedom Caucus would clearly be good for the Democrats. 

But not for the country.  

Or the world. 

The saving grace is that there are more of us than them.

And that there are still people in the world willing to stand up to bullies no matter the cost.

They exist in large numbers in Ukraine. . . 

Where one of them is president.

Merry Christmas.

SEASONS GREETINGS

It will be a Merry Christmas for Brittney Griner.

But not for Paul Whelan.

Which has driven American politics into its usual false corners.

This past week President Biden struck a deal with the world's worst reigning fascist, Russia's Vladimir Putin.  The Russians freed Brittney Griner, the WNBA basketball star they grabbed ten months ago and then sent to a penal colony for nine years because some hashish oil was found in her vape cartridges when she was departing the country last March. Griner, like many underpaid WNBAers, was moonlighting in her off-season for a team in Russia and had a medical prescription for the oil.  Putin -- who runs a country whose only exports are oil, gas and cyber-crime -- was in the process of beginning to get his ass whipped in Ukraine and thought he'd acquired some leverage -- or at least would "own the liberals" -- when his cops arrested a black lesbian American basketball star.

Once she was arrested and show-tried, the American State Department went into overdrive in an effort to get her out.  For his part, Putin wanted Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer who was two-thirds through a 25-year sentence for arms trafficking in connection with attempts to murder Americans.  Over objections from the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" crowd, Biden was initially willing to trade Bout for Griner so long as Russia released Paul Whelan as well.  

Whelan is an American businessman who the Russians imprisoned for espionage following his arrest in 2018.  

The Whelan arrest was a classic set up.  In Moscow, which he entered on his US passport (he is a multi-national with US, British and Irish citizenship) in order to attend the wedding of a service buddy, Whelan met a Russian friend (who was also a Russian Federal Security Service or FSB agent) beforehand and was arrested after the "friend" passed him a classified list of FSB employees.  The notion, however, that Whelan is a spy was (and remains) laughable.  For one thing, he was given a bad conduct discharge from the Marines in 2008 after being court-martialed and convicted of larceny, and that alone would have made spy craft impossible.  For another, when the CIA sends in agents, it uses diplomatic cover, which Whelan never had.

At the time of Whelan's arrest, American jails were stocked with high-value Russian prisoners (a high-value Russian prisoner is a prisoner either obsequiously loyal to Putin himself, a former KGBer/spy, or  a hacker/cybersleuth).  These included Bout (spy), Maria Butina (spy and obsequious),  Roman Seleznev (cybersleuth) and Alex Vinnick (hacker). When the US proposed that Griner and Whelan be swapped for Gout, the Russians insisted that Vadim Krasikov also be included in the deal.  Krasikov, however, is a Russian spy imprisoned in Germany . . .

By the Germans . . .

For the Putin-sanctioned murder in Berlin of an ethnic-Chechen in 2019.

At the end of the day, a double-swap was not possible.  

The Russians would not include Whelan with Griner  in any deal for Bout nor would they trade Bout for Whelan alone.  And the Germans would not agree to  release Krasikov. Biden therefore had to choose between bringing Brittney home alone or leaving both her and Whelan there for the foreseeable future.

He chose to bring her home.

And continue to negotiate for Whelan's release.

Since then, the reaction from America's various quarters has been sad but typical. 

It has also been anomalous.  

First, the anomaly.

The people with the biggest stake in Whelan's release, namely, his family, were told beforehand that Putin would not exchange him along with Griner for Bout, or him for Bout alone, and they wholeheartedly approved of going forward with the exchange to free Griner alone.  As Whelan's brother, David, noted to CNN, "Any time an American comes home is wonderful news. I'm so glad for Brittney and Cherelle.  It's a wonderful day."  In a later statement, he continued "As the family member of a Russian hostage, I can literally only imagine the joy she will have, being reunited with her loved ones, and in time for the holidays."

Talk about class.

The Whelans have it in spades.

The same, however, cannot be said for so many others.

Donald Trump called the exchange "a stupid and unpatriotic embarrassment" and wondered "why . . . Paul Whelan wasn't included in this entirely one-sided transaction". Marjorie Taylor Greene said Biden should be impeached for "trad[ing] a Russian terrorist . . . for a basketball player" while leaving "a US marine in [a] Russian jail".  Kevin McCarthy said the deal "made Putin stronger . . . and . . .  America more vulnerable."  Donald Trump Jr. snarked that the Biden administration "was apparently worried that their DEI score would go down if they freed an American Marine."  DEI is the corporate acronym for "diversity, equity and inclusion" and Tucker Carlson removed any subtlety. Griner, he said,  was brought home, "because she is a lesbian woman of color".   Whelan, he claimed,  "is a Trump voter and he made the mistake of saying so on social media,  and he's paying the price for that now".

This is all performative nonsense.  

Biden never had the option of trading Whelan for Gout or Whelan and Griner for Gout.  If Gout, who with good time had served two-thirds of his sentence, had to be locked up for the duration lest his release imperil national security (Kevin McCarthy's claim; and John Bolton's as well), neither Griner nor Whelan were ever getting out.  The Russians are only willing to trade Whelan for a spy and want what Germany will not give them -- Krasikov.  

So the choice here was not whether to leave Whelan in a Russian jail.

It was whether to leave both Whelan and Griner in one when only Griner could have been freed.

Putin is in the business of hostage taking because he thinks he has to be.  Krasikov basically committed a (Russian) state-sanctioned murder and will stay in jail for life unless Putin gets him out.   Bout was an ex-KGBer serving a 25-year sentence. Seleznev and Vinnick are cyber-criminals and thus particularly valuable in today's Russia.  

Trump (or the Trumps) and Greene and McCarthy's beef is not really with exchange as a matter of principle. Indeed, while he was president, Trump routinely made them.  In 2019, he traded three senior Taliban leaders for two Americans held by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Earlier, he dealt an Iranian scientist for an American student held in Teheran. 

Truth be told, on the hostages issue, Trump more or less gutted the "no concessions" policy embraced by all previous administrations, Republican and Democrat.  He did that as only he could.  He made the issue personal in order to be able to claim credit. Once a president makes hostage release personal, however, the price for hostages (and their value to people like Putin) increases.

The reality is that Biden lives in this post-Trump world.  

In that world, no American family will accept anything less than full presidential commitment (and involvement) when it comes to trying to release Americans unjustly imprisoned abroad.

So the Trumps and Greene and Carlson are taking a different tack.

They are de-valuing Griner. 

A black, lesbian basketball player who avoids the national anthem as part of a BLM protest is not equal to an ex-Marine . . .

Especially one who was a Trump voter.  

She's just a DEI score. 

She doesn't get to leave. 

Even if the Marine wasn't being released in any case.

Wow!

These people make Scrooge look good.

The bottom line here is that Griner and Whelan are equal.  Griner's BLM protest no more disqualifies her than does Whelan's bad conduct discharge. Their respective and ostensibly different politics, sexual orientations and races are also irrelevant.  Neither one of them belonged in a Russian jail.  

Both of them should have been released.

One was. 

To their undying credit, the Whelans are celebrating that.

We should too.

THANKSGIVING 2022 -- ON WEDDINGS, WAVES AND ONE GREAT WOMAN

It's that time again.

Thanksgiving.

And this year, I have a lot of thank-yous on my plate.

My daughter Courtney got married last month.  About 150 of our family and closest friends nestled ourselves along the Delaware River at the historic Glen Foerd mansion in north Philadelphia to watch the beaming bride and groom author their own vows.  Dad stifled a few tears even as he managed to get through the obligatory toast. The happy couple partied long into the night.  The Moms (step and groom's) were radiant.

The old (cynical) saw is that weddings are a triumph of hope over experience.  This is supposedly a concession to our data driven world in which half the marriages dissolve.  My own view, however, is that the cynics are really the boomers assuming their past is their children's prologue.

Even if it isn't.

My first thank you this year is that my kids are smarter than me.  

They know that dysfunction can be generational.

But does not have to be.

Choice . . .

And therapy . . .

Can break any pathology. 

Which gets me to my second thank you.

As I danced along the Delaware this October, America's background noise was forecasting a depressing November.  Pathological even. Depending on where you looked, the country's mid-term election -- its first since Trump's attempted coup on January 6, 2021 -- was about to deposit anywhere from 20 to 60 newly elected Republicans in the House of Representative, 5-7 newly elected Republicans in the Senate, half a dozen election-denying GOPers as Secretaries of State, and two nut-jobs (Kari Lake , or what Trump would be if he were trans, and Doug Mastriano) as Governors in Arizona and Pennsylvania, respectively.

None of this happened.

So . . .

Thank you,  America.

For the wave that wasn't.

But please do not become complacent or over-confident.

Arrogance has destroyed many a political party.  And it still may be in the process of destroying the Republican Party.  The pundits -- or at least Rupert Murdoch -- are all agog over the supposed end of Donald Trump as the GOP's anointed leader.  Trump, however, hasn't read the memo.  He announced last week that he was running for President yet again, and shortly thereafter told every Republican to get behind him "ASAP" or suffer the consequences. The week before, he threatened Murdoch's current favorite, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. If DeSantis runs, bellows Trump, the Donald will have a lot to say "about him that won't be very flattering".

This is Trump's standard mob-boss m.o.

But no one knows that it won't work.

The best analysis  on the issue so far has come from John Ellis, nephew and cousin to the President Bushes, former journalist and current venture capitalist.  

According to Ellis, Trump’s ability to survive is contingent on his ability to generate ratings for Fox. "Whoever is the Fox News candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination will have an enormous advantage over his or her competition," says Ellis, "Republican primary voters and caucus attendees are the core of the Fox news audience".   In 2015, he continues, Murdoch discounted Trump until it became clear that Fox's ratings doubled when Trump was on.  Thereafter, Fox had to "either become the Trump channel or watch another network become the Trump channel." 

In this cycle, if Ron DeSantis can do for Fox what Trump did four years ago, Ellis thinks Murdoch will dump Trump.  If, however, DeSantis over time is either a ratings flop or ratings fade and Fox viewers return to their "first love", Murdoch will have no choice but to drive the Trump train once again.

Rupert Murdoch probably has some data suggesting that the Trump of today is not the Trump of yesteryear.  The owner of Fox, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post  has not made a world-wide media-based fortune misunderstanding his audience and we should not assume he is doing so now. For his part, however, Trump has weathered the squalls of declining popularity before, even in the aftermath of January 6 when his core support started to dissipate, only to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes.  There is no guarantee he will not do so again.

Trump's other advantage is that the Republican Party today is a grievance party, not a governing one. It's base lives off anger, and its new (but slight) majority in the House of Representatives will be stoking that anger non-stop for the next two years. They have already announced that they plan to investigate Hunter Biden, Dr. Fauci and the FBI.  In each case, the pre-determined outcome of these efforts will enable Trump's lesser lies (that Hunter compromised Joe; that Fauci destroyed the economy; that the FBI planted evidence at Mar El Lago) while giving him the space to repeat his greatest one (that the 2020 election was stolen).

In these circumstances, DeSantis's ratings could easily fade.

Unlike Trump, he has a day job.

He is a Governor.

Which the GOP base finds boring.

My best guess is that, until the boil is lanced and Trump is forever gone, the GOP has no real chance of creating an electoral majority based on any coherent governing plan or policy.  

Stoking anger has made the Republican Party competitive.  

It has not made it successful.

What would?

If one were to generate a list of vilified politicians over the past thirty years, Trump would clearly be at the top. So, however, would Nancy Pelosi. In fact, in 2010,  toward the end of her first period as Speaker, her favorability rating was under 30% .  Trump's never got that low.  Even after January 6, 38% of America still gave him their thumbs up.  Nevertheless,  Pelosi is loved by her people, all of them, and Trump is merely tolerated (and in many cases silently despised) by a sizeable portion of his.

Why?

The reasons are too numerous to count.

But this Thanksgiving, here is another one.

Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  It is a job she held from 2007 through early 2011 and one she has held again from 2019 until now.  She will leave the job on January 3, 2023.  Though she will continue to serve in Congress as a Representative from California's 12th Congressional District in San Francisco, she will no longer be the leader of her party in the House.  Other than for her time as Speaker, she has led the Democrats in the House for the past nineteen years.

On Thursday, she gave her valedictory speech as Speaker in the well of the House.

It was a speech for the ages.

As a practical matter, she is a child of the House.  At birth her father was a Congressman from Baltimore and as a six-year-old she went there for the first time with her brothers to see him sworn in for his fifth term.  Forty years later, she returned on her own as a California Congresswoman.

When she stood with her father in 1947, she watched "as he took a sacred oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic".  It is the oath, she noted, that "all . . . who have served in [the] House" have taken, "the oath that stitches us together in a long and storied heritage".

"Colleagues who served before us are all our colleagues."

Lincoln, Webster, Chisolm, Lewis.

"In this room," she said, "our colleagues across history have abolished slavery, granted women the right to vote, established Social Security and Medicare, offered a hand to the weak, care to the sick, education to the young and hope to the many."

As a child of history, she has a devotion to it.

"American democracy is majestic," she explained, "But it is fragile."

"Many of us have witnessed its fragility firsthand," she intoned, "tragically in this chamber."

"So," she warned, "Democracy must be forever defended from the forces that wish it harm."

"Last week," she concluded, "the American people spoke.  And their voices were raised in defense of liberty, of the rule of law and of Democracy itself.  With these elections, people stood in the breach and repelled the assault on Democracy.  They resoundingly rejected violence and insurrection. And in so doing 'gave proof through the night that out flag was still there.'"

The week before  Francis Scott Key first wrote those last words in 1814, he had watched the British bombard Fort McHenry all night and marveled that the flag was still standing as morning broke.

In 2022, America's electorate was able to give its own “proof through the night" because, on January 6, 2021, the nation's first female Speaker calmly marshalled the forces that took back the House, ended an attempted coup, completed an electoral count, and saved the nation she loved from the pretender who would have destroyed it.

That is why Nancy Pelosi is loved.

Thank you, Madame Speaker.

FEWS-MAKERS 

There appear, these days, to be two  types of news.

There is the type that reports what has happened or is currently happening. And there is the type that reports what will happen. The second is not really news.  It has not occurred. At best, it is a sort of future news. It is, however, increasingly occupying space on our front pages. So much so, in fact, that we now need new word for it.

Here’s mine.

"Fews".

Pronounced fewz or fuze.

Short for “future news”.

As with its parent, this neologism will have many offspring.  

Fews-papers. 

Fews-casts. 

And, of course, fews-makers.

The biggest fews-makers these days are pollsters. 

It is a disturbing reality that most or at least a very large part of the reporting on this year’s midterm elections is about polls predicting what will happen less than two weeks from now. This is disturbing mostly because it upends the notion, central to America's founding, that a free press would be the best way to generate the informed electorate needed to create a representative but functional government. Polls do not tell us anything particularly relevant about the here and now of the actual candidates — what they believe or how and why they came to believe it. Even worse, the cynics among us, and there are many,  view polls as the (only) reason for that how and why. In their world, candidates do not espouse considered positions. Instead, they mindlessly regurgitate whatever “polls well”.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth in that cynicism.

Since Donald Trump, the Republican Party has embraced its own version of poll-tested mindlessness.  

In 2020, for the first time ever, the GOP did not publish any party platform. In Trump’s narcissistic “l’etat c’est moi” world, policy was irrelevant because he was the only one who mattered. 

Without him, however, not much has changed.  

In late September, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the GOP’s putative Speaker-in-waiting, published his party’s so-called  “Commitment to America”. The document fit on a pocket card and was basically just a list of wishes (“We want an economy that’s strong” and “a nation that’s safe”). Devoid of actual policy, its attempts to be specific (“expand US manufacturing” or “lower costs”) were empty.

The same type of mindlessness attaches to the GOP's candidates. 

Half of them deny that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election,  including three of their most prominent standard bearers --  Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Kari Lake in Arizona, and Herschel Walker in Georgia. In a world where policy is irrelevant, any experience forming or creating it is useless. So,  instead of the old GOP, the one Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1980 said had become "a party of ideas", there is this  new one headlined by election deniers who are TV personalities (Lake and Oz) or  erstwhile fullbacks (Walker).  

It is, of course, not the case that talking heads and professional athletes are inherently idea-less. Ronald Reagan was an actor with ideas, and Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley were athletes with them. Lake, Oz and Walker, however, are not even pale imitations.

For their part, the Democrats are running these days on policy.

The fews-makers, however, are getting in their way.

Though you would not know it from the front pages, over the course of the twenty-one months that have been the Biden administration, Democrats have produced.  And they did so on all the hot button issues, the ones the fews-makers say voters really care about.  

Depending on the week, and how fewsy any newsie wants to be, the order of that hot-button list changes. 

But,  regardless, here's the Democrats' report card on it.

On inflation, Biden and the Democrats  put shots in the arms of the entire country to help bring Covid under control, empowered Medicare for the first time to negotiate drug prices, and closed the coverage gap in Obamacare that was increasing health care costs by 20% for those who just missed qualifying for subsidies. Given that a large part of the current inflation was caused by supply chains broken by Covid, and that roughly 8% of every American family's annual budget goes to health care,  these legislative gains saved us . . . 

A huge chunk 'o change.

And it didn't end there.  

Everyone's yelling about crime. I can't turn on the TV these days without being told that my sub and ex-urban Congressman has authorized a district wide crime spree, even though no such spree has sprung.  It was more like a noticeable leak.   Unlike the GOP, however, the Democrats actually did something about it.  Fact: Biden has put more cops on the streets and taken more guns off of them than anything the GOP did when it last ran the country. 

Then, of course, there's the real elephant in the GOP's room otherwise empty of policy.

That would be . . .

Abortion.

In his Senate debate this week against John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Dr. Oz said that abortion should be between "women, their doctors and local political actors".

Uh-oh.

Bad move.

Even in Pennsylvania.

I have been in and around politics, candidates and campaigns for the better part of the last forty plus years.  I have met scores of "local political actors".  I can say with near certainty that, as a class, they are the last group of people who should be weighing in on anyone's decision regarding abortion. 

Don't get me wrong.  

Many local political actors do God's work . . . 

When God's work is about paving streets, fixing pot-holes, granting zoning variances and cleaning parks.  

If you include members of school boards, it gets dicey. Some clearly do God's work by empowering educators.  Others --  the book burners and trans haters --  are more in league with the Devil.  

None, however, should be telling any woman what to do with her uterus.

The mid-terms should not be a contest. Crazy is on the ballot and crazy should lose.

But, say the fews-makers, they won't

Or that it will be close.

I have no idea.

I read today that Dan Pfeiffer, a big-foot who once had the ear of President Obama, just wrote that "all polls should be ignored".   He said they "serve no purpose. None. Zero. Zilch." He called them "mood-altering statistical drugs."

He's right.

No one knows what is going to happen on November 8.  

That's why it's called . . .

Fews.

THIS MID-TERM'S CONUNDRUM

The mid-terms are upon us. 

These would be our biennial elections for members of the House of Representatives and the Senate that take place in the middle of the incumbent president's term.

For reasons that are no doubt a window on the deep state of America's psychology, these elections tend to go badly for the party that controls the presidency.   The conventional explanation for this trend is that they usually amount to report cards on -- and repudiations of -- the incumbent president.

Which raises a number of issues.

First, if true, it suggests that Americans are perpetually schizophrenic.  

I mean . . .

Why is it that a mere two years after winning the White House, often by dramatic margins, the incumbent's party takes a beating? 

In 1980, for example, Ronald Reagan won the White House with 489 electoral votes representing victory in 44 states. Two years later, his party lost 26 seats in the House, which basically amounted to a give-back of the 34 House seats it had won in the Reagan landslide.  Similarly, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes in 44 states and two years after that his party lost 47 seats in the House, which completely eliminated their 37-seat gain in1964.

This is buyers' remorse on a grand scale.

Second, it also suggests that Americans are  . . .

Well . . .

Lazy.

Because hiding behind these numbers is another statistical reality.  

That reality is about turnout, the number of eligible voters who actually go to the polls.  

In a presidential year, turnout is usually much higher than in a mid-term year.  In fact, as a general rule, turnout in mid-term elections is anywhere from 10-20 points lower than in presidential elections. It's as if those who wrestled the White House from their opponents sit out the battle two years later on the undercard.

Critically, however, this is not always the case.

And, more importantly, this has not been the case recently.

In 2018, for example, turnout in the mid-term elections went up . . . dramatically.  54% of eligible voters showed up, which was basically the same number who showed up in 2016 and thirteen points higher than the turnout in the previous mid-term in 2014.  

In that 2018 mid-term, moreover, another piece of conventional wisdom was upended.  One would have expected a presidential year turnout to result in a presidential year type of result.  But that didn't happen.  To the contrary,  Donald Trump's Republicans lost 40 House seats in 2018.  And that loss occurred in a world where the electoral lines had been drawn by Republican legislatures to protect Republican incumbents. 

What happened?

The answer is simple.  

Trump happened.

And America rejected him.

Decisively.

In 2020, that rejection continued and was even greater.  Because in that year, turnout was astronomical. Over 62% of America went to the polls and voted. 

For the last two election cycles, therefore, Americans have been anything but lazy and anything but schizophrenic, at least by historic standards.  

Confronted by the unique dangers Donald Trump posed to democracy and our republican form of government, the citizenry rose up in great numbers and rejected him.  Critically, in 2020, even a large number of his own voters rejected him.

What will happen this year?

If you listen to Republican talking heads, the GOP is about to win a substantial victory.  People like Chris Christie think Republicans will gain north of 20 seats to take control of the House and also win back the now 50/50 Senate where only Vice President Harris gives Democrats their tie-breaking majority.  If you read the polls, these suggest a narrower Republican margin but a Republican margin nevertheless.  According to them, inflation and the economy are now the number one issues and are driving voters to the GOP.

I beg to differ.

For a number of reasons.

First, and foremost, Donald Trump has not gone away.  In fact, he is as powerful as ever.  He orchestrated the January 6 attempted coup in the waning days of his administration and has preached the lie that he won the 2020 election every day thereafter.  As a result, more than half the Republicans running for office this year are election deniers themselves, and the loudest are willing to steal any elections Trump loses in the future.  This is a ticket to fascism, pure and simple.  

So . . .

If you want to know what America will look like in 2023 if the GOP runs things with Trump as their titular head and would-be nominee heading into 2024 . . .

Just read the history of Italy in the 1920s . . .

Or Germany in the early 1930s . . .

Or Hungary today.

Second, always remember that the underside of fascism historically has been a complacent and rich corporate class willing to look the other way as minorities are vilified to justify whatever incompetence there is in government and whatever economic pain there is in either inflation, depression or just plain Gilded-age inequality.  

America's current GOP has two sets of elites today: (1)  Trump and his band of deniers hell-bent on returning him and his pathological narcissism to power (and this time wiser to the institutional realities that stood in his way last time and will be avoided next) and (2) the corporatists on K-Street who control campaign contributions and thus own a tax-cutting (for the rich) and rights-cutting (in the Senate and therefore now on the Supreme Court) cadre of office holders in Congress and the state legislators and gubernatorial mansions who regularly do their bidding.

Third, Trump's daily dishonesty, along with  the Big Lie of election denialism, has made other lies more tell-able and (probably) more tolerable as well.  We now live in a political world where incompetents like Herschel Walker can lie about paying for abortions while pretending to be pro-life, and where slogans now replace policy platforms.  

The result is that inflation, a world-wide problem today that neither Joe Biden nor the Democrats in Congress caused and that both have enacted legislation (e.g., caps on drug prices, and with no votes from the GOP) to bring down, will not go away on any GOP future-watch.  They may be there to enjoy the fruits of Biden's and the Federal Reserve Board's labors, but -- other than cutting spending, which they always promise but rarely deliver -- they won't do anything to abate the problem.  

And the spending they do cut, in Social Security and health care,  will make things worse.

Inflation is bad.  

Because you have to plan and stretch to afford stuff.

But unemployment is worse.

Because you can't afford any stuff.

So, we come to the  conundrum in this year's mid-term election.

Not  . . .

Is past prologue?

But rather . . .

Which past is prologue?

We should all pray it is the most recent one.