No reason to rush on Kavanaugh

Senate Republicans, I've heard, are suspicious that their Democratic colleagues are trying to delay filling Anthony Kennedy's seat until after the midterm elections.

What if Democrats are?

So what?

Mitch McConnell held open Antonin Scalia's seat for over 400 days. Although that record-setting vacancy was totally unnecessary, the country didn't grind to a halt.

The precedent has been set. Supreme Court seats can be held open while nominees for those seats are properly vetted (or, as in Merrick Garland's case, aren't given any consideration at all).

So you know what? Republican senators, shut the fuck up.

You have no reasonable grounds on which to object to a delay in Kavanaugh's confirmation. None.

And heaven knows, the mounting allegations against Kavanaugh make Republicans' refusal (specifically, Don Trumpone's White House's refusal) to permit an FBI investigation absolutely indefensible.

Kavanaugh behaved like a pig as a young man. Many young men do, to be sure. But the only ones who should make it onto the bench, and certainly the only ones who should be given a Supreme Court seat, are the ones who own up to their youthful misdeeds.

Kavanaugh has done exactly the opposite. He has demonstrated absolutely no remorse, or even any recognition that he did anything wrong.

If you Republicans think ramming Kavanaugh onto the bench won't start hundreds of thousands of motivated lawyers researching impeachment of Supreme Court Justices, you will discover your error very soon.

Pro Publica's voting guide

A couple of weeks ago, I discussed what the 2018 midterm elections are really about.

The bottom line was — and is — that you goddamned well have to vote in these midterms, and vote for Democrats.

The thing is, that's easier said than done for a lot of us. Thankfully, Pro Publica, the nonprofit investigative-journalism outfit, has a guide to what you can do right now to ensure you're able to vote in those midterms.

Verify that your name is on the voting rolls.

If your schedule will keep you from voting in person, then ask to vote by mail.

This is boring, administrative drudgery. Get over that.

Some states place serious obstacles in the way of doing these things. Grit your teeth and surmount them.

As I observed in the earlier entry, a lot of innocent people have been jailed, brutalized or killed trying to bring democracy to their countries. These midterms are about salvaging democracy in this country.

So consult Pro Publica's guide and make sure you can vote. Now.

The bum's rush to confirm Kavanaugh

The bum's rush is what you give an unwelcome guest at your party. In this case, though, Republicans are trying to rush an unwelcome nominee for the Supreme Court through his confirmation. It's a bum's rush into a lifetime appointment that will protect their party's standard bearer if — or rather, when — he is called to account for his official misconduct, as seems exceedingly likely.

Republican senators insist the Kavanaugh nomination, already moving faster than any previous Congress would have countenanced, must be voted on before the midterms. They're hoping you don't ask them why.

That's what you need to do. Ask your Republican senator why it's so goddamned important to confirm him that quickly.

It's a lifetime appointment, for crying out loud. What difference will an extra month or so make?

Why shouldn't the FBI investigate the attempted rape allegation against Kavanaugh before the Judiciary Committee, much less the full Senate, resumes consideration of Kavanaugh?

What reason is there for retired Justice Kennedy's seat to be filled with such haste? Mitch McConnell held open Antonin Scalia's former seat for a freaking year! If that was acceptable to Republicans, then a little more time to consider Kavanaugh is completely acceptable. In fact, I would argue more time is essential considering that Senate Republicans have been at pains to conceal much of Kavanaugh's record (as a Bush 43 administration lawyer) not just from the public but from the rest of the Senate.

What the hell are Senate Republicans (and the White House) afraid of?

My guess?

The truth. And justice. (And for all I know, the American way, too.)

Neither Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley nor any other Republican senator has the courage to come out and admit that their unseemly haste is down to their partisan need to protect our domestic Dear Leader from having to testify to Robert Mueller — or possibly even having to face criminal indictment for official misconduct. Heaven knows there's enough evidence of such misconduct just from what the public has seen.

To my mind, this rush to confirm Kavanaugh is yet another instance of Congressional Republicans' complicity in Don Trumpone's high crimes and misdemeanors. They are his enablers, aiding and abetting his attacks on our governmental institutions. If there's any justice in the world, Congressional Republicans will be held criminally responsible for obstruction of justice at the very least.

No surprise: Trump on Kavanaugh

Color me shocked by our domestic Dear Leader's stance on the delay in getting Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court:

President Trump on Tuesday charged that Democrats had sought to use a sexual assault allegation against his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, to obstruct his confirmation, calling for a swift process for airing the accusation on Capitol Hill.

Don Trumpone accused Democrats of deliberately not airing the allegation until near the end of the confirmation process. I don't have the timeline of events at my fingertips but even a serial and reflexive liar accidentally blurts out the truth once in a while, and it seems that's the case here. So I'll give him that. Dianne Feinstein's behavior in this situation is worth questioning.

That said, flash back to early 2016 and one Merrick Garland, nominated to the Supreme Court by then-President Obama. That ever-pious institutionalist Mitch McConnell declared that an appointment by a lame-duck president in his last year (!) of office, some nine months prior to the election that would determine his successor, would violate the sacred right of the people to weigh in on the matter. McConnell refused to let the Senate advise or consent on Garland's nomination, holding Antonin Scalia's former seat open until Don Trumpone squeaked into office. Thus Neil Gorsuch, whose conscience does not appear to be bothered by the naked abuse of power the majority leader committed to make him a justice.

Kavanaugh was nominated to fill Anthony Kennedy's seat much nearer to the 2018 midterms than Garland's nomination was to the 2016 presidential election. It seems to me, and to a lot of other pissed-off citizens, that both McConnell's and Trump's hypocrisy is showing.

After all, Mitch, it ain't just the presidential elections that matter to the citizenry. If you aren't the amoral, unprincipled hack that your career to date suggests you are, you'll remember 2016 McConnell's fealty to elections and their consequences for the Supreme Court.

Oh, and Don Trumpone? Nobody's buying your effusive praise for your boy Brett. Everybody but your willfully blind supporters knows you need him on the bench because Mueller's subpoena is sitting in a locked safe, just waiting for the right moment to be served on you. You need a Supreme Court that's packed with just enough Republican-leaning hacks to issue a manifestly unjust decision in your favor, granting you permission to ignore that subpoena — and maybe forbidding anybody but Congress from imposing legal consequences on you for abuse of power and gross corruption, among other charges. (The jury's still out on conspiracy with foreign agents to subvert the 2016 election.)

We know our domestic Dear Leader is corrupt and a liar. The question is whether McConnell has any trace of a conscience left in his withered soul. If he doesn't — if he pushes Kavanaugh through on the accelerated schedule Don Trumpone demands — then he'll prove his complicity in whatever high crimes and misdemeanors history eventually finds our domestic Dear Leader has committed.

Don Trumpone's view of the state of play of the Kavanaugh nomination doesn't surprise me. I'm not expecting Mitch McConnell's to, either. I expect both to go down in history as co-conspirators in a corrupt bargain to entrench the status quo: white supremacy, protection of big business at the expense of the ordinary citizen, privilege of men over women, promotion of a certain brand of Christian fundamentalism over all other beliefs (and certainly over non-belief), preservation of the fundamentally unjust distribution of wealth and income (by recognizing capital but not labor as worth defending).

I have never been a radical. Yet see what the unbelievably blatant corruption and abuse of power of both our domestic Dear Leader and his enablers/co-conspirators in this Republican Congress have done to me? I'm veering close to Marxist territory. That's how nakedly ambitious and bereft of fundamental morality and decency I think those despicable pols are.

What the midterms are really about

The punditry has been proclaiming for months that the 2018 midterm elections are a referendum on our domestic Dear Leader, Don Trumpone. (Whether you pronounce "-one" like "Capone" or "Corleone" is up to you.)

And so they are a referendum. We've lived through over eighteen months of his actual presidency, and we slogged through an additional year (or was it more?) of his candidacy. Figuratively speaking, he's on the ballot for every House and Senate seat.

However, Trump isn't just the president. He's a symbol — and a symptom — of our body politic.

Don Trumpone has a lot of enablers, most notably the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate. However, our domestic Dear Leader's enablers start and end with the people who voted him into office, the ones who continue to show up at his campaign rallies.

Most if not all of these supporters are die-hards who cannot be persuaded to abandon their support. So the question for 2018 now becomes, will those who oppose Don Trumpone come out in sufficient numbers to create the Democratic-dominated House that is the only hope of beginning to contain our domestic Dear Leader?

In other words, will the body politic of 2018 look like that of 2016, or not?

That's up to us.

If you're sickened by the stench of corruption in the executive branch ...

If you have had more than you can stand of the continuous, shameless, even prideful lying by this administration, driven by the liar-in-chief at its head ...

If you loathe the cruelty and viciousness rained down by our exceptionally thin-skinned domestic Dear Leader on anyone who dares criticize him ...

If you hate Don Trumpone's embrace of white supremacy and his full-throated race-baiting ...

If you despise the craven fealty our domestic Dear Leader shows to autocrats, dictators and the very wealthy ...

If you weep for the environmental damage our ignoramus-in-chief and his cronies are encouraging in the name of an imaginary rejuvenation of polluting industries ...

If you want to reclaim our nation from the backwards-looking troglodytes who claim that patriotism is theirs alone, and show them that a truly great nation finds strength in its ideals, not in emptyheaded boasting and posturing ...

... then you have one civic responsibility this year.

You must vote for Democrats.

The heroes of the civil rights movement endured water cannons and police batons. Journalists in other countries are imprisoned and killed for telling the truth about their repressive regimes.

Your job is trivially easy by comparison. Whatever obstacles are placed in your way, you must vote, and cast that vote for a Democrat.

Only those of us in the true Silent Majority can make a Democratic Congress happen.

That's what the midterms are really about. They're a test of our patriotism.

Don't blow it.

The drowning leader

We've heard it before: our domestic Dear Leader is hopelessly incompetent. His penchant for demonstrating that on a daily, sometimes hourly basis tends to numb us to that unsettling truth.

So every once in a while I need to be reminded of how staggeringly bad he is at management, a task that the first modern so-called businessman-president had bragged he could do far better than any of his predecessors.

Thank you, Matt Yglesias at Vox, for today's reminder: a sorrowful look at how Trump completely botched the federal government's reaction to Hurricane Maria, dooming Puerto Rico's residents to a year (and counting) of misery.

... something anyone in the media could tell you is that cable producers’ news judgment is not an infallible guide to the substantive importance of various stories....

This is why presidents have traditionally relied upon staff and the massive information-gathering capabilities of the American government for information rather than letting television set the agenda. Trump has a different philosophy, however, and spent the post-storm Saturday glued to his television and letting the hosts of Fox & Friends drag him into an ill-advised Twitter spat with NBA star Steph Curry and various NFL players.

...

Because Trump wasn’t paying attention, the [Maria] situation evolved into a catastrophe. And because the situation evolved into a catastrophe, it eventually ended up on television.

The Washington Post reports that by Monday, Trump “was becoming frustrated by the coverage he was seeing on TV.”

Yglesias notes that Puerto Rico already was more vulnerable to the disruption of a major natural disaster than it should have been. That wasn't Trump's fault. However, his administration's failure to focus on and to respond to the knowable facts on the ground was nothing less than an abdication of its responsibilities. Putting it more succinctly, the administration flatly failed to provide the aid Puerto Rico needed in a timely fashion.

The administration claimed that its response was "fantastic". Well, you can claim anything when you don't give a shit about the truth.

The administration didn't care that the official death toll of 64, issued by the Puerto Rican governor's office in the hurricane's immediate aftermath, was farcically low. Anybody with two functioning brain cells knew that that number could not be squared with the devastation on the ground and the dire calls for more aid that could not be entirely ignored by the media.

Of course, that official death toll was, a year later, finally revised — upward. It now far exceeds the death toll from Katrina, Bush 43's most damaging domestic crisis, and rivals the total count from the 11 September 2001 attacks.

That's staggering. It's also extremely embarrassing, to view it in terms of cold politics for a moment.

And yet our domestic Dear Leader denies any mistakes.

The tragedy of 2,975 American citizens (yes, Puerto Ricans are American citizens and have been for a century) dying as a result of a natural disaster cannot be minimized.

Yet it's merely a particularly grotesque and appalling example of the larger truth about this administration: it is incompetent. And the incompetence starts at the very top.

Trump likes to pretend that his executive orders are effective governance, but the truth is that the government only functions because a handful of his senior appointees know what they're doing and can keep the lights on. Trump himself does not comprehend his own responsibilities, much less what all his Cabinet members are supposed to be doing.

Until recently he didn't care, either, because as long as he was able to enrich himself and his family and friends, all was right in the world. Now, however, it's dawning on him that his casual corruption — which I suspect he doesn't even comprehend is corruption — will have legal consequences that could harm him and his family and friends.

He still doesn't know how far short he falls of his job's requirements. He will never understand that. (Indeed, it would be difficult to find another American as wrong for the job because very few people combine pathological self-absorption, obliviousness to their own shortcomings, and enough wealth to buy their way out of trouble.) But it's becoming clearer to him that he doesn't have a team he can trust to help him weather the storms on the horizon.

He's drowning: he just doesn't know it yet.

As always, he will be the last to know.

"American white people really hate being called 'white people' ", David Roberts

David Roberts' piece appears in Vox. It jumps off from the reaction to a poll in which Americans were asked whether becoming a so-called "majority-minority" nation will be net good or bad for the nation, with Roberts noting that the very question is premised on an assumption that is almost never stated in this country: that being white and male (and heterosexual) is the norm by which everything else is judged.

This is one of the more striking observations I've read in a while:

In most situations in the US, a woman is a female person. Someone part of a racial minority is a black person or a Latino person, etc. Gay people. Trans people. Immigrant people. All these groups are [adjective] people, people with an asterisk, while a white, heterosexual male is simply a person, as generic as he chooses. His presence is taken for granted; it rarely occurs to anyone to question it. A white man in khakis and a polo shirt can walk into almost any milieu in the US and, even if he’s greeted with hostility, be taken seriously. His legitimacy is assumed.

The power and privilege that come along with that — being the base model, a person with no asterisk — are invisible to many white men. Simply calling them “white people,” much less questioning the behavior or beliefs of white people, drags that power and privilege into the open.

This is indeed an eye-opening observation for those white (heterosexual) men who have never thought about the assumption that underlies everything in this country.

Nearly every country struggling with its self-identity right now seems to be majority-white, so it would be tempting to regard this as a "white person problem" if one was anxious to demonize. However, there's the instructive exception of India, which has been riven by divisions between Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists for generations. One wonders how a similar poll conducted there would play out.

My guess: what Roberts observes is not a "white people problem", it's a declining-majority problem.

That said, the fear among those who have it cannot be ignored. They will act on that fear. In the person of our domestic Dear Leader, they already have.