The Harris Plan--Supporting Our Values

 

What if the way to support families and the middle class was to put our money where our values are and invest in the changes we want to see to make life better for the average American? 

It's a loaded question, and I get why some folks would be mad--supporting new families and encouraging homeownership are fine things for people who want to talk about financial security for households to reference, but actually doing something about it? Isn't that the business of other people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps about? 

Look, I used to do a feature on this blog about our "Know Your Class War" and just like "Climate Sunday", it fell by the wayside because we have a first-world economy with disastrous outcomes in terms of health, happiness, and upward mobility in general. Democrats have, through measures like Social Security, Medicare, the ACA, and others--actually tried to do something about this. Republicans usually dub these measures "Communism".  (See Reagan and Medicare.)

Christmas Memories: 1991

 

The Soviet Union collapsed on December 25, 1991

The flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian flag.

Nobody thought USSR would fall, yet it did. There’s a lesson right here Putinpic.twitter.com/mQfKmC8dnI

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) December 25, 2023

Look, I was a Cold War kid and this was meaningful to me in the way the fall of the Berlin Wall was. My neighborhood had a lot of people who were immigrants from the USSR. I believed it was about generational change--the youth getting rid of the Communist gerontocracy. It felt like popular protest made things happen. But it wasn't that alone.  Not exactly. There are opportune times for things to happen. 

Putin tried to take an opportunity when the West was tired of war to make something happen that never will again.  Russia is paying a price for trying to make their neighbor, Ukraine, unfree. If US conservatives rooted against the USSR like I did as a liberal agnostic kid who passionately loves freedom, they would continue to support the valiant struggle for sovereignty and western values. Support NATO. Look down on despots.  

Otherwise, if they support tyranny and strongmen  (doing lipservice to religion as an opiate of the masses) who are really littledick men projecting terror because they can't fill potholes or collect taxes properly, or who are desperately clinging to power so they can avoid civil and legal penalties, they can go suck an exhaust pipe. 

This is my expressive Christmas wish for the CPAC/Turning Point/MAGA grifters. This love of eastern-style tyranny is fucked in the head and not what this nation was founded on. You all just gross me out for having no sense of history. Get with the western values that made America great, or admit you got nothing and just want to be arschleckers to a big daddy figure. 

Party Like it's 1959

 

You know, being lectured about whether it's cool to say "Jim Crow" or not about present voter suppression laws passed/proposed by Republicans is mighty Rich (Lowry), but the funny old thing about invoking Godwin is he isn't exactly right about what Godwin said (which was only that in online discussions, a comparison to Nazis will eventually come up--not that one has lost by so invoking, although it usually is over-the-top) and sometimes you have to call a fascist a fascist. But having another National Review writer argue that suppressing votes is good, actually is just--

Well, it's tradition, obviously. Of a long-standing sort. 

It's really hard to be sympathetic to cries that calling voter suppression laws what they are instead of the GOP's present sleight-of-tongue "voter integrity" are unfair when if we consider what voting can mean to a community in terms of allocation of resources--as our present argument regarding what constitutes infrastructure and who needs it, and as the previous arguments about, for example, the ACA, indicate, demographics do say a lot about what policies are proposed, what laws are enforced, what resources are allocated, and who benefits. It certainly isn't an argument about who is a "better" voter. Or at least, a better educated one. 

It's been about race, and we know this very good and well by now. Take the recent NYT story about what motivated the January 6 rioters. It only said something we already knew about Trump supporters in general: they are mad white people mad about white stuff. 

The GOP in the post-Trump era is just McCarthyism and anti-civil rights shit interspersed with pro-nuclear family circa-1950s and pro-religion stuff. Witness the Trump campaign's evangelical lawyer (who doesn't seem to know "Do not bear false witness" is one of Moses' top ten) calling Sen. Raphael Warnock a false Christian for saying that the resurrection alone is not the sole message of Christianity. As a Catholic adjacent atheist, I was raised to understand "faith without works is dead" and remain, culturally Christian as a Matthew moralist--I hold that you have to werk for your salvation, honey. 

But calling a Black pastor a non-Christian isn't just an echo of denying President Obama his Christian faith as a way of rejecting fellowship with him in mere racism, It's like denying him his Christianity because he's a Commie, the same way the hard-right once denied MLK his faith. Just as the Right today wants to label every little thing to the left "socialist". And use, as a donation-begging scam, the fear of being a traitor to encourage people to subscribe to more funding of this bullshit--otherwise you are a DEFECTOR!  (The term we used to use for people from behind the Iron Curtain who came here to the "free world" or vice versa.)

They aren't a 2021 party--they are regressive and backwards. And suppressive. And yeah, kind of racist. 

The Corporate Communist Mark of the Beast

Marjorie Taylor Greene says that a vaccine passport is "Biden's Mark of the Beast" and that any company the requires one is engaging in "corporate communism." pic.twitter.com/XtTvqw83tU

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 30, 2021

Okay, I get where the Mark of the Beast thing is coming from, because the government-industrial-Big Tech Mammon is just about always trying to put bar codes or RFID chips or masks on people and from there it is just one stripper-pole ride to the Devil if you know what I mean, but the more I think about the words "corporate communism", the less I believe that there is anything going on in Marjorie Taylor Green's mind other than a game of "Mad Libs" where the rules are 1) Be mad at libs and 2) say words.

No Holiday in Cambodia

"Ocasio-Cortez already receives a high number of death threats; by allowing this PAC to air an ad that links her to genocidal violence in Cambodia, ABC grants undeserved legitimacy to ideas that make her a target."https://t.co/fUWquQjDKc

— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) September 13, 2019

This is probably deeply ill-advised of me to notice, but I'm a Gen-X blogger who realized a long time ago that I'm not really presidential material (even if the fitness of the current resident makes even me and my tattoos feel a little like, what the hell? Y not?) so let me just say--wow, but by the visibly melting frame of the yet-living Hank Kissinger, are we really going to go through whether the left-liberalism calling itself democratic socialism is kinda Khmer Rougey and not take notice of the entire right-wing foreign policy failure at influencing positive change with respects to....

Why, no. No we are not doing that. Or at least, you go ahead and do that history dissertation if you've a mind, but:  This is actually just my usual warning that conservative rhetoric is inflammatory and that inflammatory rhetoric is really the thing we should worry about regarding genocide, not mere issues of domestic economy. Because conservatives have been doing this thing with inflammatory and violent rhetoric. And sometimes it results in bad things.

Have You Been Thinking About Ted Cruz?

Because fresh off of appearing at that weird little old Kevin Swanson thing,  Ted Cruz held another signifying event at Bob Jones University, and I want to just get this straight:

Ted Cruz will not ever happen in the general election.

Nope.

Not just because of some racist shit he's been on about.  Or the anti-LGBT stuff he's been on about. Or the misogyny.

Not any one of those. But the whole gestalt of all of those hateful things. He's called Harvard a hotbed of communism. They graduate a number of conservatives (like Tom Cotton)for a communist hotbed.

He's definitely smart enough to know better than positions he's actually taken, but he does not believe in human rights. He does not believe in women's rights, gay rights, he does not think most immigrants have rights.

When I think about Ted Cruz, I kind of feel like really smart people can go terribly wrong, and then just aren't in the right mental space to acknowledge it. But if I were wrong, as a reasonably smart person, I'd totally want to get right at my soonest opportunity. I don't think he cares. He'd rather be president than be right. That's why he shouldn't be president.

Unmitigated Socialism and the Modern-Day Red-Baiter

The one thing that would, I'd like to think, harsh the confidence of a modern-day red-baiter, is the actual lack of anything like a world socialism. When the Berlin Wall fell, if capitalists were keeping score on that day, Communism took a beating from which it was not to recover. With the impending normalization of relations with Cuba, I think it's safe to say that the US, as the leader of the free world in terms of buying missiles and giving shits, won the Cold War. We make the stuff the world wants dollars to buy.  Don't ask me how I feel about that.

Just chuckle with me when I notice that PK and all-around PITA TX Senator Ted Cruz called President Obama an "unmitigated socialist".

Oh, Ted, you slay me with this 1950's flavored performance art you do. Please do tell me about the industries our Red Diaper Dandy three-pointered into nationalization.  None? Look at that. None. And it seems like Obamacare is at any rate more of a free market private company thingamajig than the Medicare that Cruz thinks is now totally acceptable.

Could it just be because President Obama went to Harvard? Because Cruz totally believes there were Communists at Harvard. 

Cruz also went to Harvard--and so did Tom Cotton! I'm feeling menaced by Reds, you guys. I think I'll read the business pages of the newspaper until I feel better.  Because we weirdly are still not in a socialist workers paradise. But maybe people with money are doing okay? Could the senator from the Texas branch of Goldman Sachs cool his jets, already?

Regarding Cuba: It isn't 1961 Anymore

I'm in agreement with Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative-- normalizing relations with Cuba is well overdue. The Castro brothers are very old, the Soviet Union is very done, and there is a benefit in making things easier for Cuban-American to contact their families still there and for trading with Cuba.

I understand that the regime of Fidel Castro was far from ideal--but we have relationships with Saudi Arabia and China, and were cozy enough with Egypt's Mubarek, who was not a saint. Also, someone explain to me how you protest Communism with an economic embargo? It seems like the capitalistic way would be to want trade. They export cigars--we export capitalism. Works for me.

I feel like opposition to normalizing relations with our near neighbor is a case of living in the past. It isn't 1961 anymore. We can kiss the Cold War goodbye--or even just shake hands and let it go.

Climate Sunday: Climate Change Denialism is the New Red-Baiters

With a new climate assessment released by the White House, it sure does seem like there has been a lot of denialism hitting the airwaves. It struck me that as recently as six or seven years ago, you could still find conservatives who supported things like cap and trade, or acknowledged that global warming was real, at least, but it just doesn't seem to be the case anymore. The position on the right seems to have devolved somewhat,  And it's really bloody boring, because I feel like I have seen this kind of thing before.

Take Charles Krauthammer, who thinks climate science is a religion or a superstition, or like rain dances. So either he wants to denigrate religion (nice work, fella!) or he simply has no earthly idea how science works (and please don't bug me with his having been educated as a doctor, because just go and watch Youtubes of Paul Broun or Phil Gingrey and ask yourself if that means someone understands a daggone thing about science).  This is patently absurd because science is driven by observation and experimentation--not faith. Science either works, or it doesn't. Results can be reproduced, or they can't. He's been on this nonsense for a while now,  but it has never made sense. No--if Krauthammer thinks there is evidence that refutes the current consensus regarding climate change, he needn't speculate abut whether the science world or the environmentalist world would change--he just needs to bring it. But he hasn't got any, and it makes him feel bad. So he mouths some shit about rain dances, because naturally, you can't be snotty and denigrating about environmentalism without also putting down Native American culture, because, I presume, if you're an ass, you're an ass all the way....

He Ain't McCarthy--He's Just Another Weak Tea Bag

Look, I am one of those bloggers who will give anyone a chance. I even gave sad old Tailgunner Joe a little bit of props for being less in favor of torture than a certain breed of modern Republican (I can't be arsed to find it in my archives, and while I'm at it, when did Google become useless?). But I think, along with my Rumproast co-blogger Bette Noir, that the comparison of Ted Cruz to Joe McCarthy is probably valid.  But there is a subtle difference--and it is this:

We've already had a Joe McCarthy, thank you very much. We've also had a Cold War, and it is no longer quite the thing it used to be. The Berlin Wall, she is down. The bisnesmen have taken over in the east. And as for China, they will do whatever works, and call it socialism. Fidel Castro is clinging to life, and the Latin American Socialism is just not the Communist Domino Theory bullshit that led the Reagan-era Cold Warriors to actually deal weapons to Iran to fight a war in Nicaragua. To oust Daniel Ortega from being President there, I think. Since hardly any of them went to jail, I guess it went well enough for the Reaganites, but how about those goals?

Yeah. Stupid, and dangerous, and illegal, and. Yeah. Anyway, this post is about Cruz, because if it isn't enough that he in his first couple months of being in the Senate, accused former Senator Chuck Hagel of accepting money from foreign interests alleging that Hagel hated the US military--which, among other things, Hagel has a whole lot more experience with than Cruz. It seems Cruz also has a funny history of Red-Baiting which is not unlike this present episode--

In the '90's even. Which is so quaint. 

Anyway, the funny thing about today's Marxists is that being statists, they probably wouldn't want to overthrow the US government, I think, so much as become members of the US government, where, as government employees, they would get certain perquisites that the hoi polloi don't, usually. Great government-provided healthcare. Pensions, instead of private 401K's  How else would you bring communism here beside inflitrating the government? And Cruz himself was a Harvard man. How long has he been a Communist, I wonder? When he performs his "worse is better" antics, is he being such an Alinskyite that he thinks he's radically producing change by challenging the status quo?

Should I pop some popcorn? Will his show go on indefinitely, or will someone remind him he's new on the Hill?