Saint Mary's Parish, where the chemical explosion was said to occur, doesn't even have a Columbia Chemical plant (it's Columbian Chemicals).

A fascinating study was recently reported in Vox and The Root. And the conclusion of that academic study(1) is, as the title sadly suggests, that a mere photograph of a black person can actually make a Trump supporter angry. From The Root:

“When researchers simply asked subjects how they felt about a not-so-complex housing-assistance issue, they were split on their support. But there was a subtle twist to the study: When the information about the issue was accompanied by a picture of a white person, Trump voters were much more likely to support it than when they were cued by an image of a black person.”

If the study ended there, it would probably reveal only what we (sadly) already knew about too many of our fellow Americans.

But there was more:

“The study revealed that when Trump voters were exposed to the “black cue,” it not only made them less supportive of the issue. It made them angry. Yes, a picture of a black man—not an actual black man, but a picture of a black man—made them mad.”

German Lopez at Vox states this latest study is so notable simply because:

“...all it uses is an image of a black man to produce its results. That suggests that Trump has a powerful incentive to get people to keep thinking about race: If his most ardent supporters just need a slight racial cue to come around to his conservative policy views, then Trump simply has to bring up race to get his supporters fired up for him.”

There is no bigger (and staler) joke about 2016 then economic anxiety. Michael Harriot at The Root notes that this study comes on the heels of a volume of recent research correlating racial resentment to Republican preference:

Then there was the study that linked whites’ perception of our need to get “tough on crime” to racial resentment. And that other research that linked the government’s need to fix structural inequality to racial resentment. Don’t forget the Pew Research Center’s data showing that most Republicans oppose Black Lives Matter.

We were already aware that there is a strong correlation between Trump supporters and racial resentment. And this racism permeates all public perception. For example, one of the most illuminating data sets, in my opinion, is the Gallup economic confidence indicator, which spiked after Donald Trump was elected, and has remained at an elevated rate, despite little to no improvement in the economy between Barack Obama and Mr. Art of the Deal.

But how do we square this revelation with the fact that there were a non-insignificant number of Obama voters in 2012 who voted for Donald Trump? I think the best response is a quote by Josh Marshall:

I think political racism or white supremacy is best seen like a virus which can remain dormant only to be activated under certain conditions.

The Trump administration has already been open that they seek a cultural racial wedge issue ahead of 2018. They will try again in 2020, too. And their allies, not just domestically in the GOP and aligned media, but overseas (Russia), will be all too ready to help gin up racial resentment again.

_______________________

(1) Luttig, M.D., Federico C.M., and Lavine, H.G., Research & Politics. (In Press).

With all the horrors in Cassidy-Graham, and Senator Graham’s melodrama that his monstrosity is the only thing standing between America and socialism, a peculiar meme that has long simmered on the left, i.e., that the fall of Obamacare will somehow hasten single payer, has reemerged, and at the worst possible time.

It's weird that Graham et al are making the argument it's their bill or single payer. It's the opposite! Killing ACA paves way for SP. https://t.co/5SJRZPLJuR

Chris Hayes is a good guy, but he’s basically telling every Democrat to not bother saving Obamacare.

I would venture Cassidy-Graham passage would *improve prospects that Congress eventually enacts something like single-payer. https://t.co/yoMRDE8Apo

This seems very likely. https://t.co/v4TPmHp1S6

Jonathan Chait even has an entire article arguing that Cassidy-Graham would make single payer more likely.

Well, surprise! Proud federalist and states right True Believer Sen. John Kennedy has an amendment ready to explicitly ban states from using the blocked disbursements to pay for single payer style programs.

I do not subscribe to the school of optics punditry. With the resurgence of Cassidy-Graham, which has actually been in the works since the last effort failed this summer, Sen. Bernie Sanders has become the subject of ritualistic Democratic hand wringing (for the record, despite my many issues with Sen. Sanders, I am defending him here)

Did Democrats jump the gun with single-payer splash https://t.co/qwcjHscCdDpic.twitter.com/4jVdhDbwt2

In Sen. Sanders defense, he has spoken up in opposition to this monstrosity.

Now is the time to educate, organize and fight back. We won't allow Republicans to destroy our health care. pic.twitter.com/teUYp4rQEx

But the same could not be said for many of his satellite organizations, some (but not all of) which have been tragically silent on Cassidy Graham. Nina Turner, President of Our Revolution and Roseann DeMoro, President of National Nurses have yet to mention a piece of legislation so harmful and so profound and so antithetical to everything Sen. Sanders stands for even once. Meanwhile, they’ll be inviting Bernie Sanders to give what promises to be a sadly discordant rally for Single Payer on Friday the 22nd. Perhaps Sen. Sanders can use the stage to mobilize his satellite organizations?

I wrote back during a previous Zombie Trumpcare attempt that preserving Obamacare is fundamentally necessary to achieving a single payer system, not only to keep tens of thousands of people alive each year until such a system could be established in 2021 at the earliest, but to preserve President Obama’s achievement of establishing healthcare as a right in this Country. I also wrote that Democrats need to get serious about single payer, regardless of what happens to Obamacare, for when the time comes.

We all cope with the horrors of the Trump Administration in our own way,  sometimes through wistful magical thinking, or sometimes through malicious magical thinking that, perhaps, if things get bad enough, there will be some grand reckoning.

Here’s a reality check: if this legislation truly hastened single payer, Sen. Lindsey Graham wouldn’t be voting for it.

In my opinion, the best way to visualize the Republican Party in the Tea Party and then Trump era is as vandals. Grover Norquist famously wanted to drown the federal government in a bathtub. Paul Ryan dreamed of cutting medicaid doing keg stands. Steve Bannon wants to destroy the Administrative State. They are telling you exactly what they intend to do to the United States.

No CBO score? Tens of thousands dead? A recession? Maybe midterm losses if things don’t break their way? Who cares?

It’s far easier to destroy than create.

Smash healthcare to smithereens, and let the next Democratic Administration waste their precious legislative time picking up the pieces, perhaps while struggling to contain a financial crisis and diplomatic crises, all the while getting blamed, just like last time.

You just have to make sure they can’t succeed, by preventing states from setting up single payer systems that could rush in to solve the catastrophe. And that’s the foolishness of those who believe Cassidy-Graham would somehow hasten single payer.

As a Pinellas County native, I have been waiting 25 years for the announcement heard today: $1.25 billion would be granted for construction of a Florida high speed rail link. Estimated to cost $3.5 billion total, this award covers a substantial portion (35%+). High Speed Rail is finally coming to the rest of America.

But many have asked: why Florida?

Back in January 2010, I wrote a diary offering the political explanation for why Florida was granted $1.25 billion for a High Speed Rail line between Tampa and Orlando, as people understandably questioned what at face value seemed like such an obscure route.

As part of the ARRA, $8 billion was allocated for rail projects. Amongst legitimate objection, the Administration decided to spread the money across several projects around the country, with no one project receiving all it needed to begin construction. Critics, even on the left, derided this strategy as doomed to fail from resources spread to thin. As will be covered in this diary, the Obama Administration strategy of project seeding was ultimately vindicated, and then some.

Barack Obama has failed progressives in every arena. Although it'd be preferable to unseat Obama with a primary challenger in time for 2012, because none has stepped forward (tic toc...), it would be beneficial to the progressive movement in the long term for Obama to lose the Presidency in 2012.

This way, if not a radicalized Tea Party President (e.g., Romney), then one certainly beholden to such a radicalized Congress will take power, and will surely inflict so much pain and suffering on the American people, they will return power to liberal Democrats in a 2014 wave election. By controlling Congress in 2014, progressives will control the budget, spending, and National dialog. Progressives will then win the Presidency in 2016, led by a "True Progressive" leader to be named later, and with control of both houses of Congress, a new progressive era will dawn.

And Republicans will wander in the wilderness for 20 years. This time for real.

Words matter.

Growing up Jewish, although not really that religiously so, the Holocaust has always been a part of my life. From the earliest memories of Hebrew School and Sunday School, there was the Holocaust.

It starts out simple enough when you're a child. There was a bad man named Adolf Hitler who only wanted there to be people with blond hair and blue eyes, and he didn't like Jews.

When you're older, you see the Allied liberation videos; piles of bodies, starving people, gas chambers. It's all part of a grande story of survival and winning in the end, not unlike the story of Exodus. Everyone's relatives fought in WWII, and now there's the UN and Israel so none of this would ever happen again.

When you're older still, you learn that it really wasn't about blond hair and blue eyes, and that the holocaust happened because an entire industrialized society went mad. How could an entire civilization, one now remarked as a paragon of progress and liberalism, go mad?

The easiest explanation would be that the Germans were just bad people. But you learn this wasn't the case. Yes, antisemitism coursed throughout Europe for close to a millennium. But Jews had lived in Germany for hundreds of years too. You think Adolf Hitler seized power amidst the madness. But you learn he was elected democratically, with about a third of the vote. And then comes the hard part; asking why didn't the Jews just leave if it was so bad? And that's where the answers get really frightening and delve into human nature and creeping horrors.

One of my favorite quotes about the Holocaust was that it wasn't the bad Germans who put us in concentration camps, it was the good Germans.

And so here we are in 2016, wondering what the good Americans are going to do.

America just elected a man who ran on a white nationalist platform of racial resentment. Trump hasn't even been inaugurated yet, and there's talk about concentration camps. Camps for Muslims, for now. Although I'm sure it will come back to the Jews and other historically oppressed groups of people too. It always does. And like it even makes a difference to humanity in the end.

I'm not an alarmist. Well, I like to think I’m not an alarmist. So when I read news of white supremacy and fascism in an American presidential administration, I tend to dismiss it. Most importantly, I want to dismiss it. But when I start making excuses for Trump, they are the same excuses Germans made for the Nazis.

Those exact words were said by the establishment when Hitler was elected.

The hallmark of this election was the dissemination of false news and propaganda, overwhelmingly from one side.

Who said there's going to be another election? Well, another fair one. We already saw a foreign power interfere in this election, along with federal law enforcement in gross violation of the Hatch Act and every political norm. How would any opponent to Trump or Trumpism resist criminalization by a Trump FBI and DoJ? We saw a bullshit story about e-mail turn into a month's long scandal. What's to stop the next challenger from being smeared with ever greater nonsense?

Says who? We've seen fringe legal theories become law because the right says so. Who's going to stop this? The Trump Supreme Court will make the laws.

And that's what's so disturbing: My rational mind too desperately wants to say the Republicans aren't Nazis. Even the Nazis weren't like Nazis. Lightning doesn't strike twice. But every excuse I make for them is an excuse Germans made for the Nazi party. Until it was too late.

Donald Trump played with forces to assume power that I have good reason to fear he cannot and will not control. History has taught us ethnic nationalism is a Pandora's Box.

The one thing we've learned from Trump is that this is no reality TV act. He is a very damaged person. I think even his supporters would agree to some extent. This is a pathologically narcissistic and ill-tempered man completely ill-suited to the office who intends to be our first dictatorial/autocratic President in 224 years.

So what happens when things start to go wrong here? What happens when the economy begins to turn down? Or more importantly, when there's a terror attack on Trump’s watch? Who's going to be to blame? Not the Donald.

There needs to be a scapegoat. And in Germany, the times between the Reichstag Fire (February 1933), the Nuremberg Laws (September 1935), Kristallnacht (November 1938), and Genocide were astonishingly short, even by modern standards.

People want to believe there will be a happy ending here, that if things head south, this will all play out like World War II. Germany, for all the ten's of millions killed, was actually rather limited, militarily, compared to America today. We have a nuclear arsenal. So if things do go bad here, and that's a big if, who's gonna save us? No one.

Maybe if we're lucky, we'll just slip into 46 years of apartheid like South Africa.

The iconic photograph was taken by Mrs. Rachel Posner in 1931, from her window in Kiel, Germany. Rachel Posner was the wife of the town’s Rabbi, Akiva Boruch Posner.  From the Posner’s grandson(1):

“It was on a Friday afternoon right before Shabbat that this photo was taken. My grandmother realized that this was a historic photo, and she wrote on the back of the photo that ‘their flag wishes to see the death of Judah, but Judah will always survive, and our light will outlast their flag.’ My grandfather, the rabbi of the Kiel community, was making many speeches, both to Jews and Germans. To the Germans he warned that the road they were embarking on was not good for Jews or Germans, and to the Jews he warned that something terrible was brewing, and they would do well to leave Germany. My grandfather fled Germany in 1933, and … and before [he] departed he urged his people to flee Germany while there’s still time.”

The menorah and the original photograph survived World War II, and both now reside in the Yad Vashem, except during the festival of Hanukah, when they are returned to the descendants of the Posners who live, to this day, in Haifa, Israel.

Tonight(0) marks the eighth night of the festival of Hanukah 5777 and thus the 85th Anniversary of the photograph. Thanks to the Internet, the photo’s spawned numerous inane “resist Tyranny” memes. But it’s not saying ‘resist’ -- it’s telling us to ‘respond’. 

On Tuesday, the outstanding Greg Sargent at the Washington Post had an article on Coal Country Voters backing Trump... yet terrified about losing their Obamacare. For many, this loss will be a death sentence. Greg’s was the latest in a series of buyer’s remorse articles. Sarah Kliff noted days before that 82% of Whitley County, KY voted for Trump, despite the uninsured rate there dropping 60%.

And it wasn’t just the prospect of dying from lack of Obamacare that didn’t deter Trump voters. Michelle Goldberg wonders why did so many Planned Parenthood backers vote for Trump while professing outrage at anyone who plans to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. Defunding Planned Parenthood would put 900,000 women’s lives at risk. And Evan Urquhart talked to the 22% of the LGBTQ voters who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, but were nonetheless undeterred by losing their basic human rights when handing the Presidency to Trump by throwing their vote away on Jill Stein.

To which Markos responded that all these people are getting exactly what they voted for. After all, it’s not like the Republican desire to abolish Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, and eliminate equal rights are any secret. Why do you think they took all those pointless votes during the Obama Administration? To tell everyone precisely where they stood on these issues.

Markos’ diary caused quite a reaction, here as put by TomP, and elsewhere(2):

This is almost incomprehensibly vile. People are going to die. Real people, who spent their entire lives working in a pitch-black hole.

Yes, people are going to die. The hammer will fall the hardest on those that swung to Trump most fervently. That’s not hyperbole. It’s based on the actual Republican platform and campaign promises of Republican elected officials.

So how should we respond to these people who voted for death and the death of their neighbors?

Our Very Serious Betters at the New York Times stunningly insist an apology is in order. Liberals have wronged rural white Christian America by being accepting of all identities, according to Mark Lilla.

...the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.”

If we could just get back to pretending this is a white Christian country, Mark Lilla could spend his columns letting us know how his sabbatical in France went.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, in a more forceful op-ed, demanded that liberal stop shaming Trump supporters as racist, sexist, and xenophobic (for supporting racism, sexism, and xenophobia). White people, despite their white privilege, are ground down by unfettered capitalism, and being told the reality that we to this day benefit from slavery (we do) and the genocide of Native Americans (we do) is just too much to bear.

“The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism, sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans...”

Our third gilded DC-centric liberal castigation in as many weeks comes from David Paul Khun, who creates an elaborate straw man argument on the pages of (you guessed it) The New York Times that liberals are blaming bigotry for Clinton’s loss rather than donning the necessary sackcloth and ashes that come from electoral “defeat”.

“Bluntly put, much of the white working class decided that Mr. Trump could be a jerk. Absent any other champion, they supported the jerk they thought was more on their side — that is, on the issues that most concerned them.”

Trump’s white working class base have suffered economically far less than the rest of America. They are far less likely to be murdered by the police. They are far less likely to encounter an immigrant, let alone be affected by one. From Shawn Hamilton:

“So, why the rush to defend Trump’s supporters? Why the self-recriminations? Why the willingness to stretch the bounds of legitimacy to accommodate Trump’s antics? Much has been written about Trump’s demagoguery and its similarity to totalitarian leaders of the past, but what about Trump’s opponents? Are many of us borrowing a page from totalitarianism without realizing it?”

(Spoiler alert: yes)

And pointing out similarities between Trumpism and early Nazism is not out of bounds on a Godwin Point of Order. Trumpism has:

Please, stop me if I’ve gone too far here. More from Shawn Hamilton:

“So, in the last year, Trump has flirted with ... totalitarianism, yet the advice from many is to “give him a chance” ...”

So how do we respond to the calls for tolerance of the intolerable? The calls for empathy to the unsympathetic? The calls to just give him a chance?

Not as per our media elite have done, says Shawn Hamilton, quoting Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt:

...Many intellectuals of [the] time [of the rise of the Nazis] were ‘trapped by their own ideas.’...

The new paradigm of authoritarianism was so disorienting that they simply could not see it for what it was, let alone confront it...

Many continue to conflate Trumpism and the historic Republican Party, even though the former completely co-opted the latter(4) when Donald Trump was still doing pornos. They don’t see that an authoritarian illiberal regime has succeeded to power over both the (late) Republican Party and now the Democratic Party, in that order. 

When trapped in the expired paradigm of a two-party constitutional liberal democracy, it only makes sense for the losing party to prostrate before the victors in order to garner their support. It only makes political sense to blame the losing candidate’s campaign. It only makes political sense to believe buyer’s remorse stories, like clever graphs, will shift public opinion and deliver victory. But all these outdated yet perfectly natural political responses do now is aid totalitarianism.

Instead, respond as per the menorah in the Posners’ picture. From Shawn Hamilton one last time:

“We should not waste our time or imaginations trying to reconfigure Trumpism to explain why all of the ‘good people’ supported him. It is more important to see it for what it is and resist. Hopefully, they will join us. If not, it will not be necessary to call them names, they will have named themselves.”

Edit:

_______________________________________

(0) December 31, 2016.

(1) Via Rare Historical Photos. The Posners warning saved almost the entire community of Kiel. Only eight of the five hundred Jews perished in the Holocaust, with the rest fleeing before the systematic slaughter began.

(2) Sarah Jones is the social media editor at the New Republic.

(3) It is also important to note many differences. If anything, Trumpism most resembles Falangist Spain, which certainly left hundreds of thousands dead.

(4) 1994, if you ask me.

There is a pernicious myth that Democrats only road back to power is through progressive populism, a vision best summarized as the combination of anti-establishment sentiment with (far) left policies, and represented by politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

This theory admittedly has tremendous appeal:

This theory has been the subject of much attention in the media (to put it mildly), and is usually summarized as the need to appeal to the white working class (Democrats already win the working class handily). It is also usually presented as mutually exclusive with identity politics, a term typically used by the right to mean a focus on women, minority, and LGBTQ issues. Twitter user @coffee_minion assembled a montage, of which I have taken a sampling:

Daniel Marans is an excellent reporter and a representative of one who ascribes to this theory of the electorate. Marans has been pushing this progressive populist narrative heavily over at the Huffington Post. Yesterday, Marans penned an article on how Bernie Sanders’ vision is on the Michigan Democratic Primary Ballot:

Michigan's Democratic gubernatorial primary features Bernie Sanders-style populism against experience. My curtain raiser: https://t.co/NU6Y0c2G2a

That vision lost in a Democratic primary last night. El-Sayed always trailed in the polls, often in fourth place behind “Don’t Know” and the obviously fake progressive, despite being handpicked by Sanders, and promising to be the Nation’s first Muslim-American Governor. 

Michigan was supposed to be the test of the midwest progressive populist theory of the election. After all, a major argument of progressive populist proponents is that Sanders’ victory in the 2016 Democratic Michigan primary (albeit extremely narrow) means that Sanders could have won Michigan in the general. Tonight we can finally dispense with that theory.

Progressive populism vision was also on the ballot in the Kansas 3rd congressional district last night.

Bernie Sanders endorsed Brent Welder, a progressive labor attorney, who was running against another progressive, Sharice David, promising to become the first Native American woman and LGBTQ individual elected to Congress. There was much stanning, as the kids say these days, for the Sanders vision to prevail in the Heartland:

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even parachuted in to Witchita to campaign against Sharice Davids, which was the subject of a diary here (and which is, of course, entirely within their right):

But the Bernie narrative also may have fared poorly in KS03 last night, where it presently is finishing second in a crowded primary field. A narrow victory isn’t proof dispositive.

The truth is, only 22% of progressive primary candidates have won since 2016. This is far less than one would expect if the progressive populist vision was broadly appealing. There have been many notable high profile progressive losses, such as Tom Perriello losing to the more moderate and ultimate victor for Virgina Governor, Ralph Northam, by about 12%. And Phil Murphy, also the ultimate victor for New Jersey governor, defeating John Wisniewski by almost 2:1.

Something to remember about the battle inside the Democratic Party: "Bernie candidates" lost the #VAGov and #NJGov primaries, and the winners of those primaries passed a millionaire's tax, automatic voter registration, Medicaid expansion, etc.

Andrew Cuomo is truly odious, being called the single greatest obstacle to moving New York in a progressive direction. Despite his unpopularity, the Sanders backed candidate Cynthia Nixon is foundering, trailing by a whopping 36% in the latest poll.

It is true that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory was exciting, but Nate Silver makes an excellent point about reading too much into one primary victory in a 77%/20% Hillary Clinton congressional district with 11.8% turnout.

Two things can be true:1) The power/energy in the Democratic Party is moving leftward.2) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory was mostly because she was a great candidate, running in the right district at the right time, and probably had relatively little to do with her leftness.

So why the intense desire to push this narrative?

And then there’s Kansas. Prairie populists on the ballot. Thompson and Welder both have Sanders/AOC stamp of approval: https://t.co/fQUAQbvYZp

New, from Kansas City, Kansas: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to the Great Plains to try to prove progressivism can win anywhere.https://t.co/QAjZ908aES

There is nothing wrong with progressive populists running, and even winning, but the real story of this cycle is the victory of women. Perhaps some in the media don’t want to focus on that.

Perhaps I am optimistic, in a time when it is very hard to be optimistic, but I do believe that there will be another Democratic President after Trump. I also believe that President will have to clean up the enormous mess left behind; perhaps even one that makes the 2008 Financial Crisis seem small. I also believe that the next President will have a choice whether to save the Elkhart, Indiana’s of the Country.

Elkhart, Indiana is a small City of about 50,000 located on the border with Michigan, 110 miles East of Chicago. It is also the RV Capitol of the United States, with nearly 100 RV manufacturers and 400 RV suppliers. And it was unsurprisingly decimated by the financial crisis, with unemployment at one point reaching 20%.

President Obama responded by directing nearly $170 million in stimulus funds to the City. And the stimulus had an enormous impact:

For years now, customers have been gobbling up mobile homes. Sales are robust. Unemployment is low. And Elkhart, Indiana, the center of it all, is booming. On Middlebury Street along the town’s main stretch, manufacturers and warehouses have full parking lots and “we’re hiring!” signs planted in the grass along the road. Restaurants and bars have popped up downtown. New lofts are coming, too, as is a $65 million aquatic center.

The logic of Obama’s decision made sense... at the time. On a macro scale, so much of the RV industry being concentrated in such a small geographic area maximized the economic gain of any Keynesian input, for as we saw with the auto bailout, it is not just the manufacturers, but the auto parts suppliers located around the Country, and their raw material suppliers, and so on. Failure to save the RV industry, for Elkhart really was an RV bailout, would have had a devastating ripple effect across the Country, not unlike what would have happened if Mitt Romney had been President. On a more granular scale, the Northern tier of Indiana seemed like promising territory for Democrats. It voted for a Democratic President for the first time since Lyndon B. Johnson, and Obama only narrowly lost the City of Elkhart proper to John McCain.

But despite the bailout, the City of Elkhart never returned the favor. In fact, they refused to believe any favor had been done in the first place.

Stimulus recipients in Elkhart had no idea they’d benefited from the stimulus https://t.co/6TkBLf6fFcpic.twitter.com/kKUW1GSd7o

In 2016, Hillary Clinton would lose not just Indiana by 20 points, but the auto bailout states of Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin as well.  While these states voted for Obama 4 years prior, perhaps the writing was on the wall as early as 2010 that repayment for saving their livelihood would be met with electoral hostility. The Midwest, after all, was the epicenter of the 2010 Tea Party Rebellion, with Republicans winning the popular vote there 53% to 44%.

We don’t need blinkered interviews with downtrodden Trump voters in Rust Belt diners -- anyone paying attention knows The New York Times (and the serious journalistic outlets that follow their lede) just don’t get it.

In admitting what the media missed in 2016, @deanbaquet says: "I don't think we quite had a handle on how much anger there was in the country after the financial collapse of 2008… how much of a desire there was for change. How upset people were with the elites." #AxeFiles

In fact, economic anxiety has become a punchline for everyone besides Dean Baquet. But while The New York Times was fumbling around in diners, Sam Stein had been conducting some amazing journalism for years by following voter opinions in the same City heavily assisted by the stimulus, from passage to Tea Party to Trump.  What Stein found is that people in a fairly conservative area of the Country turned to Democrats to help them in 2008, were profoundly assisted, and then turned around to pretend that they’d pulled themselves up by their bootstraps all along in 2016.

“When I say that no serious person in this county gives Barack Obama credit for the recovery, I mean it,” said Holtz, who, nevertheless, gave credit to the Trump tax cuts for the current state of the economy.

I’m reminded by this quote of the amazing change in Gallup economic confidence the day after the 2016 election.

The factors that made the RV industry so susceptible to the last economic downturn haven’t gone away. RV’s are still luxury goods, and pretty much the first thing you toss aside in a downturn. Bruce Bartlett depressingly postulated that we are locked in a perpetual cycle where Republicans wreak economic havoc through tax cuts, and Democrats are blamed for deficits. This may be a bit too specific and cynical, and political cycles are perpetual until they aren’t. But the words out of Elkhart are illuminating: these people turned to Democrats to bail them out of the mess Republicans got them in to, only to return to the comfort of the Republican party once they’re safe from harm.

“What I look at from a personal situation is: how am I personally impacted? How’s my career? How’s my personal security around my area? How’s all of that being impacted?” Miller said, noting that all of his answers to those questions are positive—for now.

As Stein points out, Obama paid particular attention to Elkhart, Indiana, making it the fist City he visited after assuming office in 2009.  He would return several times.

But Elkhart, in my opinion, was just too conservative to ever be swayed by the saving of their entire livelihood, especially by a person named Barack Hussein Obama. In 2009, I would have said to the naysayers that these people are our fellow Countrymen and women who deserve assistance regardless of their political ideology.  I would have said Obama was making not just the economically logical but politically astute choice.  I would have said the President has a duty to all Americans. Today I would say let the City of Elkhart die.  

By the time the next Democratic President takes office, the deficit will be larger. The Country will likely be in a far more perilous state. Democrats will have to make choices about where to spend money. Let the City of Elkhart and the RV Industry be a lesson on where not to spend it.

I love the silence of snowfall. Sure, blizzards can howl, but there is something so pleasing about how a heavy snowfall can muffle the sounds of nature.

Trumpists like to call us snowflakes. For people whose entire political movement is based on white male fragility, the irony of the meme is overwhelming. I guess they use snowflake as a slur because an individual snowflake, while unique, is so insignificant and harmless. I’ll let George Takei respond better than I can.

The thing about "snowflakes" is this: They are beautiful and unique, but in large numbers become an unstoppable avalanche that will bury you

I was walking in just such a snowfall as dusk set in, with not a sound under the blanket of heavy wet snow and featureless grey sky, when the silence was suddenly broken by a large crack ricocheting through the valley, echoing off the hills. Snow was falling heavy, and it had pulled a great tree down. The sound was of a tree trunk, too large to put one’s arms around, snapping under the weight of an army of snowflakes.  A tree that had lived for maybe a hundred years saw its life come to an end in an instant.

Wood has such a natural beauty too. And it truly is an engineering marvel, as all but the smallest twigs are beyond the bare strength of human beings. Split wood with an axe, and you can see all the fibers created by the vessels, which in turn bundle together to provide such great strength. A relatively weak strike in just the right orientation and at just the right place will cleave those fibers apart. Otherwise, enormous forces of nature are required.

I understand this is a difficult time for many. It’s not just the confirmation of Kavanaugh. It’s the confirmation of institutional sexism and patriarchy. This is but my own attempt to help.

It’s easy to miss all the branches and roots of the patriarchy weaving through our society. It’s easy to dismiss it as no different than the thicket of problems facing progress. In my opinion, though, the past few years have never more clearly shown just how dangerous patriarchy is to progress, especially when it is threatened.  The hysterical need to preserve the patriarchy just caused the Senate Majority Leader to ram through not only a judge dismissed as unqualified by Supreme Court Justices of his own party, but one who will be haunted by legal jeopardy and illegitimacy for his entire tenure.

This stuff is going to keep coming out and it is going to be devastating for the legitimacy of both Kavanaugh and the court. https://t.co/XpYqbkkwce

Not that Republicans care.

Like most on the left, I tend to think of nature as intrinsically beautiful and benign, but the description of Old Man Willow from J.R.R. Tolkein may be more apt for how I liken the patriarchy:

...none were more dangerous than the Great Willow; his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river. His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig-fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs.

There are so many different cellulosic fibers winding strength to the patriarchy.

Sure, there was the response of Republican Senators, male and female, to allegations against Brett Kavanuagh. It’s not that they didn’t believe the allegations. If they didn’t believe them, they wouldn’t have rushed him through and then restricted an FBI investigation. They knew they were true. They just didn’t care. Boys will be boys.

There’s also the awe shucks patriarchy of George W. Bush, lending a hard candy to Michelle Obama at the funeral of John McCain, while making repeated phone calls to Senators, especially Susan Collins, to help get Kavanuagh confirmed. Kavanaugh’s intent is to reverse the gains of women by restricting their reproductive freedom. George W. Bush knows this.

The patriarchy poisons our news coverage.

Imagine if a woman president got on Twitter every morning to complain about people being mean and unfair to her. Weak. Hysterical. Shrill. Bitch. Unfit to lead.

The horrific sexism in the coverage of Hillary Clinton was obvious. Less obvious is the way it taints coverage between men who support and oppose the patriarchy, like how Trump’s job numbers are always reported as showing strength, even though they are weaker than Obama’s, which were routinely reported as mediocre and weak. And of course, how some voters are more significant than others.

How can Trump voters be "the forgotten" if we won't stop staring at them, poking at them, commiserating with them and studying them?

Institutional sexism doesn’t grow exclusively on the right. Lost in the story of Kavanaugh’s sexual misconduct was a brief news cycle where journobros (and becky’s) on the progressive left attempted to frame Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s reluctance to reveal the accuser’s name as an acquiescence to Kavanaugh.

Ryan Grimm is the DC bureau chief at The Intercept. You know, the brogressive news outlet that could get Edward Snowden to Russia but deliberately and purposefully burned Reality Winnersending her to jail for 5 years because they didn’t like her narrative.

And as we’ve seen women often violently defend the patriarchy as well. Even on the left. This is still an actual article on Vox:

There’s a lot holding the patriarchy together. But heavy wet snow is falling. At some point, the forces holding the tree up will be overwhelmed by the forces pulling it down. And in that instant, with a thunderous crack, fibers will be twisted and wrenched apart under forces well beyond any one human being, wood and bark will be explosively splintered, and the tree will come crashing down.

I wish I knew how much time was left. Some trees can live for thousands of years. Trees can heal as well, callusing over wounds.

But the sound of massive resistance you heard this past week? The sound of kamikaze desperation to get Kavanaugh confirmed? Kavanaugh’s tanking popularity? That was a massive fracturing within. Something broke that can’t easily be repaired.

There is something we can do in the mean time: Identify institutional sexism and defense of patriarchy in the media, especially on the center and left, and work to replace those journalists. Oh, and vote.

California recently surpassed the United Kingdom (😮!) to become the World’s fifth largest economy, if measured separately from the united states. Since the Great Recession, California has added 2 million jobs and grown its GDP by $700 billion. The state has 12% of the U.S. population, but has contributed 16% of the country's job growth over the last five years. Governor Jerry Brown inherited a budget deficit when he took office in 2011, but the state now has a $9 billion budget surplus. And all the while, Democrats dominate California politics. Democrats hold a super-majority in the state legislature and a near(1) super-majority in the state senate. Both Senators are Democrats, and only 14 of the 53 member congressional delegation are Republicans...for now(2). And under almost single party dominance and economic success, Democrats are doing something staggering: building the Nation’s first entirely new high speed rail network. Yes, this is actually happening.

The history of California High Speed Rail (CAHSR) dates back to 1996, when the State legislature chartered the CAHSR Authority (CAHSRA) to prepare for a ballot measure in 1998 or 2000. The ballot measure was delayed until 2008 over budgetary concerns by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, when it finally appeared as Proposition 1a on the ballot. Proposition 1a passed 52.6% to 47.4% (Obama won California 61% to 37%). Proposition 1a allocated $9 billion for the construction of CAHSR from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

The present estimate for the completed system is $77.3 billion.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included $8 billion for High Speed Rail, according to legend, at the urging of Joe Biden. California initially received $2.343 billion of that $8 billion, plus an additional $0.898 billion in 2010, for a total of $3.241 billion. Because of the time it takes to actually allocate the funds, which is a subject for a separate diary, implementation is highly vulnerable to changing political climates at the state level.

After the 2010 midterms, states that had initially requested and received (but not yet allocated) funding, rejected those funds at the behest of their newly elected Republican Governors. California received an additional $0.624 billion from Ohio and Wisconsin, plus $0.3 billion of the $2.02 billion Florida’s Governor Rick Scott rejected, for a total of $0.924 billion.

When you add up all these sources, California has about $13 billion for high speed rail (in 2010 dollars). As you can see, that’s not nearly close to the $77.3 billion (2018 dollars), which will only rise as time goes on due to escalation.

417(3) miles of 350(4) km/h High Speed Rail from San Jose to Los Angeles, plus an additional 51 miles of 165 km/h from San Jose to San Francisco, plus an additional approx. 50 miles of 200 km/h trackage from the main route to Merced and Anaheim. This is all to be built in what is called Phase 1, and includes 12 (or 15(5)) stations. Travel time from downtown San Francisco to Los Angeles will be under 2 hours and 40 minutes. CAHSR includes expansion up to approx. 800 miles and 24 stations by connecting Sacramento and San Diego to the system under a Phase 2.

The 13 billion from Proposition 1a and the stimulus is to be used towards building 130 miles of Phase 1 in the Central Valley, from Madera to Bakersfield, to be allocated in four construction packages (CP1 through CP5).

Here’s some more information about the four construction packages:

Construction of these packages was supposed to be complete in 2018. The delays behind commencing CAHSR project are a topic for a separate diary, and include an onslaught of litigation prior to awarding the construction contracts (i.e., delays not due to construction). After the packages were finally awarded, construction was further delayed due to difficulties in the 1,100 property acquisitions needed. Supposedly property acquisition delays are now mostly in the past. 

After construction of CP1-5, the Amtrak San Joaquin will begin using the newly constructed HSR tracks. The San Joaquin will be able to significantly reduce travel time by up to an hour from Bakersfield to Sacramento, since on the exclusive HSR tracks, it will be able to run at top speed, something which cannot presently be done on the shared freight line presently used.

Instead of a series of photograph of all the construction, here is a corny video put out by the Authority:

Well, HSR has historically worked the best in places where there is flat terrain and high population density. Even in authoritarian states like China, with no environmental laws and private property rights, HSR has been constructed where it makes the most economic sense. Look at the following maps of China and Europe, two locations with the preponderance of HSR in the World:

Contrast this construction to the United States, which certainly is populous, but not in the flat open spaces. California is no exception.

In other words, California, like most of the United States is a challenging place to build HSR. But it is.

No. A common right-wing attack on public works projects in the United states is that they simply cost too much due to unions, eminent domain purchases, and environmental regulations. Always to attack unions, eminent domain laws, and environmental regulations. And it is important to state that in an oppressive authoritarian regime like China that lacks unions, property rights, and environmental regulations, any public works construction job is going to be cheaper, faster, and easier. From Wikipedia:

“In July 2014 The World Bank reported that the per kilometer cost of California's high-speed rail system was $56 million, more than double the average cost of $17–21 million per km of high speed rail in China and more than the $25–39 million per km average for similar projects in Europe.[77] It should be noted, though, that high real estate prices in California and three mountain ranges to cross contribute to the difference. For example, Construction Package 2-3 in the farmland of the flat Central Valley works out to $11.4 million per km, although this figure does not include electrification or property values, so it's roughly comparable internationally. Furthermore, the proposed High Speed 2 in Great Britain is estimated to be more expensive on a per mile basis than the Californian system”

In other words, in the Central Valley, even with property acquisition, HSR has managed to get construction costs down to internationally comparable levels.

Ever since Proposition 1A was passed, and the companion funding from the Obama stimulus was awarded to California, CAHSR has been under constant assault. The vanguard of this attack is this unassuming man, Robert Poole. 

Robert Poole works for the Reason Foundation, which is a lobby group for dirty energy masquerading as a think tank, funded by Exxon Mobil and these two guys, who you already know:

And Robert Poole has a direct conduit to Ralph Vartabedian of the Los Angeles Times, who churns out critical stories on the project using “research” handed to him by Poole essentially on behalf of Charles and David Koch. And he’s been at it for years. A brief search of Vartabedian’s work will show zero articles imposing the same critical analysis on road projects that routinely fail to deliver and suffer huge cost overruns.

Then of course, there’s the tech lottery winners, who want those billions in public money to fund their perpetual money losing vanity ventures, like a private version of Soviet pre-Venera spaceflight, and hyper loop, to be brought to you by (IRL brilliant guy) Elon Musk:

White House NEC director Gary Cohn says @elonmusk thinks we "can tunnel the entire United States" and can "beat high speed rail"

Spoiler Alert: No he can’t. The electric car is 190 years old and you still can’t turn a profit? How are you going to make hyperloop?

Asshole Wastes Everyone’s Time https://t.co/n2dQApP42R

Hyperloop is the engineering equivalent of telling the Thai Navy SEALs how to rescue the stranded children. There’s a whole separate diary that needs to be written on how people need to stop falling for what are really publicly traded corporation publicity ploys by cosplay engineers.

Democratic wins mean money for public works. I don’t want to make any predictions about November…

But unlike major policy proposals requiring a filibuster-proof Senate majority and vulnerable years to implement, directing funds to the states can be achieved through reconciliation, and is often far less contentious. Taking the Senate would help (first let’s win the House), but Trump is just the kind of President that could be suckered into giving billions to infrastructure.

To be continued...

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(1) Democrats need to win a vacant seat and flip one seat in the Senate to obtain a super-majority there.

(2) Cook political report at the time of writing this months ago lists 5 of those 14 seats as tossup or lean R.

(3) Or 437 miles. The final route has not yet been established.

(4) I give speeds in SI units so they may be better compared to existing European and Asian HSR.

(5) The number of stations is also not yet established.

Daily Kos user TomPasked a very important question just a few days ago:

TomP is referring to hit pieces in the New York Times on Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams that ran late in the 2018 campaign, all too reminiscent of another hit piece that ran in the New York Times late in the 2016 campaign, and that ultimately cost Hillary Clinton the election. With Gillum at least having significantly under-performed the polls(1), I feel there’s a pattern here that needs to be investigated.

TomP’s point didn’t gone unnoticed by others. Nancy LeTourneau had an excellent article in the Washington Monthly back on October 19 about the New York Time’s peculiar slant on Andrew Gillum.

The Gray Lady’s story has no direct accusations about Gillum. It simply throws around a bunch of anecdotes that are designed to raise questions. https://t.co/pFxFocWWaH

It’s hard to pull a single blockquote from the entire awfulness that was the hit piece on Gillum. The entire article, from start to finish, was a stunningly impotent and ham-handed casting of aspersions.  The authors relied solely on guilt by association and innuendo.  And the best part is, the whole article concluded they could find no evidence of guilt or wrongdoing, but the whole affair has cast clouds and shadows over his campaign(2).

But there’s more.

When we look at the things Gillum is accused of, they are things any politician would come in contact with. Is Andrew Gillum ambitious? Yes. Did Andrew Gillum receive donations from wealthy people? Yes. Did Andrew Gillum accept a gift? Yes, and he reported it.  At the time, all this scrutiny directed at Gillum was really hard to square with the walking emoluments clause violation in the White House. From Nancy LeTourneau:

The whole thing seems to be an attempt to hint at the possibility that Gillum is corrupt. But the best they can come up with is that he’s ambitious and knows how to play the game of politics. Since that is true of pretty much every successful politician, it is hard to avoid the subtle message emanating from this piece that it is not OK for black politicians to posses those qualities.

It’s really not what clear what qualities are okay for a black politician to possess in the mind of the New York Times, as even the benign wearing of a tan suit and playing golf are also out of the question.

Now while authors Matt Flegenheimer and Patricia Mazzei were flopping around trying to score a hit on Gillum, their coworker Alan Feuer was busy in the cubicle next door whitewashing Mister McInness as just a hipster provocateur, right after he lead a vicious attack on civilians on the streets of New York back in October.

Part 8,451,039 in the New York Times’ ongoing series, “How Not To Cover Fascists” pic.twitter.com/3j0Kh8Cef2

And the Times’ peculiar fixation isn’t limited to Gillum, probably because (thankfully and amazingly) he isn’t the only black candidate running for high office this cycle(3). The New York Times felt the need to waste precious bandwidth on Stacey Abrams burning the traitor’s flag as a freshman in college 26 years ago. By all means, whatever immaterial youthful transgression is scaring Trump’s base at the moment, the New York Times is on that. But let’s not forget to talk civilly about her opponent, who somehow loaned himself $800,000 from a bank, and legitimately stole an election from her:

Fixed the headline. pic.twitter.com/Jn0siMFb5B

All of these articles were published by the same organization within a 72 hour period, showing plain and simple, the New York Times has a white supremacy problem.

“Now hold on”, you may say, “The New York Times isn’t the Ron Paul Newsletter(4).”

I like to say that one can best envision white supremacy as an iceberg.  There’s the tip you can see out in public. That’s the Wikipedia definition of white supremacy:

The belief that white people are superior to those of all other races, especially the black race, and should therefore dominate society.

That’s the double standard of conduct mirroring our (in)justice system(5); Grown white men are boys being boys, engaging in locker room talk, suffering from afluenzia, and partaking in shenanigans, while black men and women are held to a standard of political conduct nigh impossible to meet.

But there’s also a lot more lurking beneath the tip of that iceberg. 

Lurking beneath the surface is the notion that white people are just more legitimately American than people of color. Look no further than the media’s inane obsession with interviewing Trump voters in R+42 districts.  How many interviews did the media conduct with Obama voters in 2009? Elite New York Times reporters may never express notions of racial superiority at Brooklyn loft parties, and all may have close minority acquaintances. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a newsroom culture that allows them to be wooed by the notion that (certain types of) white people are just more American than others.

That’s still white supremacy, and it seeps into the journalistic coverage of the politicians who represent the interests of those deemed less American(6). A great example is the (economically) anxious manner in which a better economy under Obama used to be discussed by the New York Times, and how that economic coverage repeatedly differed (and again) from the manner in which a worse economy under Trump is touted as strong and healthy(7).

A lot of this racial double standard is difficult to disentangle from run-of-the-mill Both Sides atrocity™, since one party represents white supremacy and the other opposes it. False equivalency is a logical fallacy --  white supremacy is a consistent (yet evil) philosophy.

There was a great diary not too long ago on how “Both sides" is the most dangerous and insidious narrative in today's political climate. I agree with this diary in its entirety. I once stated that both sides journalism greased the skids for our decent into fascism.

Sometimes false equivalency is used innocuously to provide (false) balance. Sometimes it is used nefariously to conceal a defense of the indefensible, like from the former master of Both Sides™ journalism, Ron Fournier.

But observe closely how there is no attempt at equivalency, true or false, in the attacks on Gillum and Abrams. That’s the white supremacy distinguishing itself from run of the mill pandering to conservatives to achieve “balance”. Gillums and Abrams are attacked for what the Times would consider laughable indiscretions by a white (male) politician.

This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but making this distinction, in my opinion, is crucial to correcting journalistic coverage of the Democratic Party.  Journalists are ingrained with the notion from years of training that they must treat both sides fairly. While dim (or nefarious) journalists may slip into false equivalency, journalists are highly defensive and protective of their trade. Criticism of both sides is routinely shrugged off as the yelping of wounded partisans. The New York Times is a left of center publication(8), yes, a self-conscious one(9), but still a left of center publication. That doesn’t mean their newsroom isn’t permeated with a white supremacist mindset. 

But as we’ve seen since the decent of the Republican Party into madness, accusations of false equivalency against corporate media have zero impact.  They instinctively circle their wagons to protect what they believe is treating both sides fairly, and such criticism will be dismissed as trying to work the referees.  It’s a difficult task to separate false equivalency from racial bias, but if we can refine our criticisms, pointing out racial bias when it occurs may have a greater impact on newsroom coverage.

_________________________

(1) Polls that were otherwise very accurate.

(2) They didn’t use those exact words. This time.

(3) Andrew Gillum or Stacey Abrams would be only the third black governor elected in the United States. Abrams would be the first female black governor. That’s how amazing 2018 is.

(4) The connection between Ron Paul’s strain of conservatism, rooted in white nationalism and inherited by his Senator son slash likely Russian asset, was the predecessor to Trumpism.

(5) Here are the results of a great study showing that black men serve longer prison sentences for the exact same crime as white men to share with the racist Trump supporter in your life.

(6) Even if those politicians are white or male.

(7) Not unlike the adjectives white supremacists love to use for Trump himself.

(8) That doesn’t mean the Times is still too far to the right for the Nation.

(9) Yes, Dean Baquet has a well-documented neurotic fear of being branded a liberal. Why he needlessly suffers so is beyond me, as the Times’ entire business model consists of... liberals.

If you’re like me, you’ve found this to be a particularly infuriating news cycle. Especially considering that just a few days ago, Trump’s campaign advisor and long time friend Roger Stonewas indicted and will (FSM willing) will spend the rest of his life in jail.

Meanwhile, Trump has all but surrendered, groveling at the feet of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with Republicans now warning him against the use of a National Emergency.

So what’s there to be upset over (especially extrapolating Roger Stone’s prison photo from Paul Manafort’s, and daydreaming about the future Democratic nominee down on the border thunder dunking on Trump in an open field with no wall)?

All of these stories in a vacuum range from maddening to deeply disturbing.  Republican behavior makes them so much worse.

Ralph Northam will likely not survive politically.  Democrats have universally called for his resignation.  And he should resign.  But calls for resignation are also coming from the party of the Ku Klux Klan.

Just a few days ago Republicans refused to call for Steve King’s resignation for advocating white supremacy (in year 2019 of the Common Era).  Republicans blocked any real investigation into serious allegations that Brett Kavanaugh raped multiple women right around the same time Ralph Northam was posing for that yearbook photo. And this was followed by Trump, an avowed racist, attacking Northam for being racist.  Ed Krassenstein has an excellent twitter thread documenting the extent of (what would appear to be the maddening) hypocrisy of Trump calling anyone else a racist.

As President Trump attacks Northam for being Racist, as he should, let's all remember that Trump is a racist too! (Thread)● He called for a Mexican Judge to recuse himself in a case against Trump University.● Referred to White Supremacists as "very fine people".

There are no Republican calls for Trump to resign over his statements. Or Steve King. Or Brett Kavanaugh.

Meanwhile, anyone old enough to remember the 1980’s remembers that the Party of Ronald Regan also claimed to be the Party of single-handedly winning the cold war. The confrontation of Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik and getting the Soviets to knuckle under is a major part of Regan hagiography. 

Regan did sign the INF Treaty in 1987. This was followed by START I in 1991 and START II in 1994, which unarguably made the world a better place (a rare feat for the Republican Party). All the while, Democrats were painted as too weak to negotiate with the Russians.  This was the centerpiece of the Republican attacks on Democratic nominee Vice President Walter Mondale during the 1984 Presidential campaign, which American Dad parodied ad absurdum in The Best Christmas Story Never (S02E09).

And just a week ago Friday, Robert Mueller nabbed the latest player in the Trump campaign with (a luck number) 7 indictments, all pointing in the direction of collusion with Russia.  Yes, it was comic book villain Roger Stone’s time in the barrel.

This led to an interesting reaction from the party of law and order. Lindsay Graham demanded to know why Roger Stone was arrested in the typical by the book manner where authorities believe the suspect may destroy evidence and may be armed and dangerous.  Or as one Republican said (with at least feigned sincerity) on local talk radio: “Why was Roger Stone arrested like a common black man?”

Heck, one of the three individuals in the photo with Stone, above, engineered the famous Willie Horton attack on Michael Dukakis.  Lee Atwater said that by the time they were done with Dukakis, people were going to think Willie Horton was Dukakis’s running mate.  Trump himself notably pretends to be the heir of Nixonian Law and Order politics, although he seems to have an awful lot of criminals in his administration.

Trump can’t pardon Manafort, but I have no doubt he will try to pardon Stone. He already pardoned Arpaio. The range of misconduct in Trump’s orbit is simply staggering.

Again, this is all from just last week.  We haven’t even touched Republican treatment of sexual misconduct. Or Republican treatment of the deficit. And when we start to gaze back over the past five decades, back to the moment where the modern parties took shape, the expanse of apparent hypocrisy is staggering.  A brief search of hypocrisy here would reveal thousands of stories. In fact, I found 747 from the last year alone.  It’s impossible not to be infuriated by the shear magnitude of malfeasance. 

Even 700 years ago, Dante Dante Alighieri felt our modern rage. In his Divine Comedy, hypocrites are condemned to the 8th circle of Hell, below seemingly worse offense. Here is an excellent explanation why:

The offenses of circles 8 and 9--the lowest two circles of hell--all fall under the rubric of fraud, a form of malice — as Virgil explains in Inferno 11.22-7 — unique to human beings and therefore more displeasing to God than sins of concupiscence and violence…

But are Republicans really hypocrites?

Hypocrisy is the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform.  Republicans make no such claim.  In fact, they do the exact opposite.  The Republican Party in the age of Trump vacillates between celebrating and just hand waving immorality of their own. 

So if Republicans aren’t hypocrites, then what are they?

I argue they’re something much, much worse; they’re conservatives.

Probably the best description of Republican Party conservatism comes from Frank Wilhoit, and was fit into a single tweet by Jeet Heer.

Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” This seems increasingly true.

Completely antithetical to American notions of equal protection under the law first promised by the Declaration of Independence and then guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, conservatism in the Wilhoit interpretation believes that laws only exist to punish wrongdoing of the out group and to protect the in group from accountability. Would you be surprised to learn that Trump Republicans want to repeal the 14th Amendment to the Constitution? Really.

When viewed through the Wilhoit interpretation, much of the modern Republican Party begins to make sense; abortion, the deficit, gun rights, and so on.  It also explains why lower income white supremacists and evangelical xtians found such a comfortable home in the Republican Party, a Party that is antithetical to their economic interests.

So what do we do?

You demonstrate the laws of the United States apply equally to everyone.  Trump, his family, and his friends aren’t entitled to special treatment because they’re rich and white. You drag them. Democrats are already getting ready to subpoena Trump’s taxes. And Elijah Cummings is getting ready to rain Holy Hell down upon them.

Well, you don’t stop there.

There is less than two years until a new Democratic President can be sworn in. Nancy Pelosi gets it now. It would’ve been so easy to give Trump a little money for his wall out of fear of negative consequences of the shutdown. The wall will never be built. Instead she broke Trump on purpose. But Nancy Pelosi famously stated we need to look forward not back upon the criminality of the last Republican Administration.  There is no statue of limitations on War Crimes or Crimes Against Humanity.

And you keep on going.

The next Democratic President will appoint a new attorney general and others. Trump is famously in trouble for firing an FBI Director and an Attorney General who would not do his bidding. But who will the next Democratic nominee hire?

I am positive that the nomination process set to begin will be fraught with petty fights over nuances of single payer plans. If we win the Senate in 2020, we will get something to expand coverage. But I’m more interested in prosecutorial strategy.  Will we empty our prisons of people, exclusively poor and often minority, serving sentences for nonviolent drug offenses? Will our new attorney generals and agency directors have a mindset of accountability for the rich and powerful, and their foreign allies?

Or will we be looking forward and not back, again?

The Green New Deal published back on February 7 supports the $2 trillion infrastructure investment called for by the American Society of Civil Engineers, plus a National High Speed Rail (HSR) Network that is required to provide the zero emission transportation alternative the Nation needs to reach the greenhouse gas emissions goal set by the IPCC. This is tremendously exciting. Yes, I have had criticisms of the fact sheet put out by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, but the focus of this diary is on the concrete, real, and achievable Green New Deal goal of building a National HSR Network.

This is a diary about HSR. Why do we care about the power industry? Well, the generation of electrical power is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

And something amazing has happened in recent years. It’s not just that humanity knows what to do about solving the problem of greenhouse gasses resulting from power generation (i.e., wind plus solar). We are already doing it.

The United States has the third largest installed nameplate generating capacity of wind power in the World, behind China and the European Union. But this metric is largely meaningless, since the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the World, China, just isn’t as windy as the United States, and therefore doesn’t generate as much power despite having more wind turbines.  It’s clever marketing by China, but reality is from 2008 to 2016(1), the United States generates the more electricity from wind than any other Country, and that’s what really counts(2).

The United States has the fourth largest installed photovoltaic capacity by country(3), and the second largest concentrated solar power capacity by country. The United States frequently had the largest photovoltaic power plant(4), although China has since built one larger, and the United States is now pursuing more numerous, smaller plants, as large concentrated plants can generate a heat island effect, so again, don’t be too impressed with fewer large facilities as marketing ploys. The United States also has the the 2nd through 6th largest concentrated solar power stations in the World.

Look at the timeline for wind and solar growth:

What happened in 2007? Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and the United States, dramatically changing spending priorities. And what happened in 2009, when even bigger changes started happening, especially in solar? The much reviled (even on the left) stimulus.

Omitted from the New Green Deal is mention of the $100 billion that went towards supporting renewable energy, including $50 billion directly for wind and solar. And while the United States only counts for 14.3% of world greenhouse gas emissions, Renewables now count for 17.12% of the electricity generation in the United States(5). That’s double the number from before 2007.

Imagine what twenty times the green investment in the stimulus could accomplish? Do you think twenty times is a lot? That’s roughly the cost of the Trump tax cut.

Because Transportation is the second largest source of Greenhouse Emissions in the United States. And when we break that transportation slice out further:

The need to focus on rail is obvious. Again, we see that we already know what to do about some of the transportation emissions (electric cars, semi trucks, and buses). The problem is the remainder.

Surging air travel demand helped fuel the rise in US emissions after years of decline. And aircraft are extremely difficult to decarbonize. While electrification is coming for cars, trucks, and buses, no battery or fuel cell is going to fly anyone across the Pacific anytime soon.

And that’s where high speed rail comes in. Here, the Green New Deal makes reference specifically to a National High Speed Rail (line 24, pp. 8 of H. Res.109).  It was also listed as a bullet on the fact sheet.

One of the proposals in the “Green New Deal” is to build high-speed train lines so flying is less necessary. This is not a radical proposal. In Japan, the Shinkansen covers distance approx LA-San Francisco in 2.5 hrs. At peak, trains every 10 minutes. The line was built in 1964.

As Umair Irfan in Vox notes:

[A 2017 review study in the Journal of Advanced Transportation] also notes that aircraft start beating bullet trains in costs and travel times over distances greater than 620 miles. That’s just a bit more than the distance between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. So even with a high-speed rail network across the US, there will still be a market for air travel, and no one is proposing to get rid of airlines. It’s just that high-speed trains can replace many short-haul flights, giving travelers more options if they don’t want to fly.

“It’s perfectly reasonable to think we can have air travel, high-speed rail, and highways,” said Yonah Freemark, a doctoral candidate studying the politics of transportation at MIT. And adding more options like high-speed trains makes it easier for travelers if they don’t want to fly.

More importantly, trains already compete with planes in many parts of the world, including right here in the United States.

The population density of Japan is similar to that of the Boston-Washington Corridor. In Europe, smaller pop densities and larger distances also work for high speed trains. There are obstacles to better networks here, but they’re not invincible and they’re well worth fighting.

It Already does.

It should be noted that this abstract corridor is Dr. Mack speaks of is already served by the Nation’s only operative high speed rail corridor: Amtrak Acela.  Even at speeds slower than other high speed rail systems in the world(6), Amtrak’s Acela has been wildly successful.  From the Baltimore Sun:

Amtrak says that over the past five years, its share of the Washington-New York market has grown to 75 percent, up from 35 percent a little more than a decade ago. Its top producer — Acela — runs near capacity and annually produces $550 million in revenue while spending $360 million… Given the competition, low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines is eliminating service between Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and two New York metropolitan airports, LaGuardia and Newark.

That’s right. The government owned an operated Amtrak generates 52.7% profits of $190 million. The 2009 Stimulus Bill provided $8 billion in funds for high speed rail and a further $1.3billion for Amtrak. This is a paltry sum. But rail proponents have become a master of doing more with less, and part of those stimulus funds are being used to upgrade the top sped from 150mph to 165mph, which is still slower than the 200mph seen in Europe, but not by that much.

But there’s a problem(7): Amtrak’s Acela is too successful.

By 2040, the railroad expects Northeast Corridor ridership to climb from 12 million passengers annually to 43.5 million. Without a major investment in trains, tracks, tunnels and stations, the system will break, Amtrak officials warn.

Amtrak has called for $151 billion to upgrade the Northeast Corridor to more globally comparable high speed rail service, bringing 220 mph service from DC to NY with a travel time of 94 minutes (Phuiladelphia to NY in 37 minutes) by 2030, and NY to Boston in 94 minutes by 2040.

So what happened to the remainder of the very meager stimulus funds that went to high speed rail projects? They went west to California; the subject of a diary I wrote a little while ago.

California received about $4 billion of the stimulus funds dedicated for high speed rail, plus passed a $9 billion ballot initiative, for a $13 billion downpayment on a plan estimated to cost $77 billion; almost a bargain considering what the $151 billion required by the northeast corridor. And they’re using it to build world class high speed rail trackage, right now.

But these programs are highly vulnerable to critics, simply because there is no one paid to defend them. This is similar to why major networks have such a hard time booking scientists to challenge global warming denial — the scientist has a day job, while the climate science denier is paid to do nothing but appear on network television. As noted in my previous diary on California High Speed Rail, libertarian think tanks funded by the Koch Brothers and Big Oil have paid staff whose sole purpose is to provide soundbites for uncritical media, which then infiltrate mainstream sources.

Calling for a Green New Deal is easy. Pointing out that existing projects (which are progressing reasonably and reliably as far as large public projects go) are critical investments, and not boondoggles, requires a little more effort. A Green New Deal will never happen if supporters cannot defend green infrastructure work occurring right now.

There’s another important lesson in the success of California High Speed Rail. A mere $9 billion ballot measure and $4 billion in stimulus funds were able to build something real and tangible, and it’s a lot harder to kill a public works project once it is visible.

The Obama Administration was well-meaning but guilty of outdated political thinking in distributing limited stimulus funds primary to swing regions of swing states. The result was a rejection of most of those funds before anything could be built. It takes years between disbursement of funds and groundbreaking. But the funds that went to a stable deep blue state (in this case, California, with its Democratic supermajorities), were the ones that led to visible results.  The lesson for the Green New Deal is to first send those first funds to where they will be safe.

But the Green New Deal makes no specific reference to these projects. This didn’t go unnoticed by armchair critics of California high speed rail.  It also makes no mention of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (otherwise known as the “hated” stimulus bill), nor President Obama who brought these projects to life. It does, strangely, mention Tesla; an endeavor literally forced into reality through the vast personal fortune of a silicon valley tech lottery winner.

Republicans are going to criticize any spending no matter what you call it. Republicans will call any public works project a boondoggle no matter what you call it. Instead of changing the branding each time, why not stop and just defend the concept of spending?

Yes, the stimulus was too small.  And no one is saying we need to worship (or even like) the stimulus or even call the Green New Deal something inane like Stimulus 2.0🤮.

But the stimulus was a huge downpayment (to the tune of $100 billion) on all sorts of green projects and it changed the energy and transportation landscape in the United States using only minor adjustments in existing spending levels. And that success proved that with additional(8) spending, the United States absolutely can meet the lofty and worthy goals of the Green New Deal.

In other words, don’t forget the stimulus. Use it as an example that green spending works to save the planet.

I have criticized the branding of the Green New Deal too because Democrats can’t live in the past when talking about saving the future. From the fact sheet:

The Green New Deal resolution a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all

The problem is the intervening eight decades have seen tremendous changes in the workforce, labor laws, public works contracting, skills required for public works, laws, and private property rights, just to name a few. The Green New Deal claims:

There is no time to waste… [The] IPCC Report said global emissions must be cut by by 40-60% by 2030. US is 20% [sic.] of total emissions.  We must get to 0 by 2030 and lead the world in a global Green New Deal

Forget Republicans. There is no scientific or engineering way to construct what the Green New Deal calls for by 2030 in our present Constitutional Democracy.  The first chance to implement the Green New Deal is in 2021.  California High Speed Rail is pretty typical of a high-profile public works project, requiring significant amounts of property acquisition and public comments, not to mention being a lightning rod for NIMBYlegal opposition.

That’s 11 years, just for this first small stretch.

The 9 years the New Green Deal has to work with is even more daunting when you consider the Green New Deal calls for achieving 0 net carbon emissions by 2030 without nuclear power (which constitutes 54% of the United State’s non-fossil fuel power generation).  The Green New Deal will work best when a scientific and engineering path forward can be set.

No, that would be conflating wanting more from the Green New Deal with climate science denial

This is why no one takes you seriously.

One must laud Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s magical ability to take critical topics ignored by the mainstream media and bring them into the mainstream of discussion. I cannot consider a Democratic politician in living memory who could command media attention and direct a media narrative the way she does.  And for that she deserves a tremendous thanks for bringing climate change back into the public discourse, especially considering the travesty in 2016 of no Presidential debate moderator even asking the candidates a climate question. So in this sense, the Green New Deal is already a huge success. Public attitude is changing, which means all the Green New Deal calls for will be coming.

________________________

(1) The last year for which there is data. It is possible, that with China’s accelerated rate of installation, even though China is less efficient, they may have finally overtaken the United States.

(2) And as much as the United states generates in wind, it does in hydroelectric, although there is zero growth of hydroelectric power in the United Sates. Hydroelectric, while considered a renewable resource, also has an adverse environmental impact.

(3) In contrast to wind, the ranking of countries for solar separates EU Countries. If the EU countries were added together, the United States would be further down.

(4) And will again soon.

(5) Nuclear counts for another 20.0% in the United States. And while not thought of as green by many on the left, and even causing a bit of controversy over the green new deal roll out by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, there is considerable support that it is necessary, for now, to get to carbon free electricity generation.

(6) Not through any technical fault of the system itself, but due to congestion into and out of New York City’s Penn Station, where the Acela must share tracks with commuter trains.

(7) Funny how being too successful is never something Republicans have to worry about.

(8) Like the magnitude implied by the Green New Deal.

(9) My opinion is that there aren’t enough of her.

UPDATE: 2019-02-13 12:16 AM

Gov. Newsom, in his State of California Address this afternoon, has made the very regrettable decision to jeopardize California’s project already under construction.  I will provide a follow-up as soon as it can be determined what his decision means.

The rollout of the Green New Deal was just February 7, so it’s extremely frustrating that five days later, during the State of the California Address, California Governor Gavin Newsom moved to kill it.

So, we have @aoc working in Congress to expand rail use to save the climate, but then Gavin Newsom decides to kill California’s crucial high-speed rail project? What a failure to read the times and the moment. I’m really saddened about this.

Obviously, Newsom can’t kill the entire Green New Deal,  but in the case of worst timing on my part ever, I wrote at length just yesterday morning about how the Green New Deal, despite all its vagueness and other problems, calls funding to build National High Speed Rail.

Without a National High Speed Rail network, part of the larger Steel Interstate Initiative, there is no way to achieve transportation emissions to meet the IPCC goal. Air travel will still exist, and while there are electric cars, buses, trucks, and trains, there’s no electric passenger aircraft.

Newsom didn’t have make such a decision, which reeks of uninformed political expediency. California is a Democratic supermajority state. Democrats hold a supermajority in both the state legislature and state senate. Both Senators are Democrats, and only 7(!) of the 53 member congressional delegation are Republicans. The state even has a $9 billion budget surplus.

Unless Republicans and NIMBYs throw a fit about a bullet train, in which case we don’t have any courage at all https://t.co/1RnhqqDWUv

There is no funding in place for future work, but that doesn’t mean you preclude further progress. The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and Proposition 1a money has already been awarded for Construction of the 130 mile Central Valley Segment from Bakersfield to Fresno. And Gov. Newsom has pledged to see that construction through, creating a worst-case public relations scenario.

And yeah, ok, Newsom will finish construction of the Central Valley portion just so we don’t have to give $3.5 billion back to the feds. Fine. But that line will have super-low ridership, further fueling conservative attacks against rail. This is the worst possible outcome.

There’s no financial reason to kill the project. There’s no political reason to kill the project. Republicans are going to attack public works projects no matter.  We’ve been seeing increased strength from Democrats in just ignoring Republican attacks. If there was a time to ignore the Koch and Big Oil funded Reason foundation criticism, it is now.

We spent SO MUCH TIME AND EFFORT defeating right-wing efforts to derail HSR, only to have Gavin Newsom strike the blow? I’m hurt, man.

In the previous diary written before Gov. Newsom’s address, I noticed something unusual in the Green New Deal text: it omitted any reference to the ARRA, and the $100 billion in green spending and $8 billion of high speed rail funding included therein.

But the Green New Deal makes no specific reference to these projects... It also makes no mention of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act ..., nor President Obama who brought these projects to life. It does, strangely, mention Tesla; an endeavor literally forced into reality through the vast personal fortune of a silicon valley tech lottery winner.

How can you call for infrastructure spending on the environment if you don’t tout past successes?  Dave Weigel shed some light yesterday afternoon on how that decision by was deliberate.

The origin of the Green New Deal FAQ problems is in this New Yorker profile. “The Green New Deal, which in the past month has come to define the progressive cause in Washington, exists in its most authoritative form as an eleven-page Google Doc.” https://t.co/kYKrfYKtvU

Obviously, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t involved in Gov. Newsom’s cowardly and expedient decision.  This is not a decision Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s remotely wanted, and it is to her exclusive credit, at least as of yesterday (before Gov. Newsom acted), that we were having a National discussion about Green Infrastructure. I hope she speaks out against his decision. But the decision to omit any reference of California High Speed Rail from the Green New Deal text did not go unnoticed by armchair critics of the project (in the days before Gov. Newsom’s speech yesterday), and that might have been all the cover Gov. Newsom needed. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, proclaimed that:

Obama “wasn’t talking about a big mobilization and the solutions were too small.”

This is a sentiment echoed by many critics of President Obama; that his accomplishments were incremental. But instead of discussing the need for larger and renewed efforts, the same critics often make the error of simply pretending they never happened.

But no matter how incremental Obama’s solutions were, they were real, and they produced tangible results. There’s no way to know whether the decision had an impact on Gov. Newsom.  But we do know today the Green New Deal is further from becoming reality than it was just yesterday.

Labor unions and climate activists are going to go to war with Newsom over this decision. This is a crucial moment.

Elizabeth Warren continues to be an incredible asset to the ever growing field of Democratic Candidates for President.  I don’t believe in the theory of the Overton Window, just in whether the people we’ve entrusted with power are willing and able to expand public discourse.  Elizabeth Warren continued to do just that with her campaign.

In terms of bold and innovative policy ideas addressing big problems, Warren is ahead of anyone else in the presidential primaries. I wish her polling were better but that might change if people listen to her ideas. https://t.co/BFL0Ob0qo7

This came after an incredible 24 hours, where Sen. Warren was the first Democratic Presidential candidate to respond directly to the unfettered white privilege of the light sentence for Paul Manafort.

Sen. Warren proposed her ideas at a rally in Long Island City:

At a rally in Long Island City, the neighborhood that was to be home to a major new Amazon campus, Ms. Warren laid out her proposal calling for regulators who would undo some tech mergers, as well as legislation that would prohibit platforms from both offering a marketplace for commerce and participating in that marketplace

And this wasn’t just sloganeering. I was particularly impressed with how Sen. Warren took the time to actually provide workable details. From the New York Times:

Ms. Warren’s regulatory plan would also force the rollback of some acquisitions by tech giants, the campaign said, including Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram, Amazon’s addition of Whole Foods, and Google’s purchase of Waze. Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. Dual entities, such as Amazon Marketplace and AmazonBasics, would be split apart.

…

Ms. Warren’s plan creates two tiers of companies that would fall under the new regulations: those that have an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more, and those with annual revenue of $90 million to $25 billion. The upper tier would be required to “structurally separate” their products from their marketplace. Smaller companies would be subject to regulations but would not be forced to separate themselves from the online marketplace.

The corrosive nature of Big Tech on Democracy is well noted.  Russia had the motive to interfere in our Democracy, but Big Tech all too willingly gave them the means.

“We have these giants corporations — do I have to tell that to people in Long Island City? — that think they can roll over everyone,” Ms. Warren told the crowd, drawing applause. She compared Amazon to the dystopian novel “The Hunger Games,” in which those with power force their wishes on the less fortunate.

“I’m sick of freeloading billionaires,” she said.

This plan drew criticism from unlikely sources. Rep. Ro Khanna, who founded and leads the Justice Democrats in Congress and represents the Silicon Valley region (CA 17), objected.

Our technology industry is the envy of the world and we need policies that will foster innovation and consumer choice — but we also need stronger enforcement of antitrust law,” said Ro Khanna, the California House Democrat who represents Silicon Valley headquarters of companies such as Apple and eBay. He said that blanket statements against big tech companies weren’t helpful, but that each company needed to be “evaluated on a case-by-case basis and afforded due process

It also should be noted that the idea to actually break up Big Tech has been circling among some of the fabulous Democratic candidates we have running for President in 2020, notably including Sen. Klobuchar:

Senator @ewarren is getting a ton of much-deserved credit today for her bold proposals on Big Tech. Too few noticed, but another 2020 candidate waded into this arena: Senator @AmyKlobuchar called for the FTC to re-open the Google investigation three days ago. pic.twitter.com/UA6Zn8MRHq

And when asked if Sen. Warren would object to the Amazon Headquarters choosing Boston, she had a perfect response:

Part of Elizabeth Warren’s answer to whether she would have been OK with an Amazon HQ being set up in Boston: pic.twitter.com/fTh5hdQvvi

Beto O’Rourke Says Trump Colluded With Russia and Obstructed Justice https://t.co/tfLqiP06JLpic.twitter.com/pqolHdIj21

I think it is fair to assume the Trump crime family is the walking embodiment of white collar crime in this Country and can be used as shorthand for such. And second, we need to pack the courts.

In Iowa, @BetoORourke says term limits for SCOTUS justices should be considered, as well as as increasing the number of seats on the Court.

Mitch McConnell is well aware the Country is shifting dramatically leftward, and his Party's chances for the future are shaky at best, and potentially apocalyptic.  The Republicans just lost more house seats than any other midterm election since Watergate, 45 years ago.  Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven elections.  Sure, Trump is still here, but things aren't looking so good.  So what is a Senate Majority Leader to do? American history is replete with examples of how Party's respond to changing public sentiment in a Democracy. It's a dirty word around here, but Democrats did it.  The New Democrats arose from the very real issue of Democrats having lost the Presidency three times in a row in an era of rightward shifting politics, achieving just 49, 13, 111 electoral votes in the 1980, 1984, and 1988 elections, respectively.  Say what you will about Bill Clinton, he won (twice). And without him, there would be no CHIP, no Brady Bill, and no tax hike on upper incomes.  These accomplishments may seem "small" 25 years later when talk is now about Green New Deals and Medicare for All, amidst realization that the system is fundamentally broken.  And before the New Democrats, there were the Eisenhower era Republicans that arose in response to the New Deal Coalition.  Well, Mitch McConnell is having none of that.  Why change when you can rig the system against that inevitable wave.  McConnell doesn't even care if it costs him his Leadership and his Party control of Government.  One of six circuit court judges are now Trump appointees. And they, with the help of a stolen Supreme Court seat, are there to throw out any Medicare for All and Green New Deal that gets signed by any Democratic President.  They are young, and they are there for life.  The courts were never meant to be used this way, but McConnell doesn't care. He thinks he won.

In Beto O'Rourke's own words #TXSenateDebatepic.twitter.com/uUzW7DSqgo

Injustice is the disproportionately harsh treatment of minority populations in our criminal justice system. It is also the excuse of majority populations from accountability, and the system designed to ensure those unequal outcomes.

/6 That's not exactly a "liberal" or "conservative" position. So, for instance, Judge Ellis has been a strong critic of mandatory minimum drug and gun sentences, which are the reason he CAN'T give a convicted drug dealer a break like he gave Manafort.https://t.co/MMKlrsamI6

It is Trump’s ability to flaunt his criminality without consequence that is such an attractor to those seeking to preserve white make privilege in our society. White supremacy and white collar crime are wholly intertwined. With this pair of statements, Rep. O’Rourke is addressing that.

From the inimitable Charles P. Pierce in Esquire:

Elizabeth Warren should say this line every day for the rest of the campaign: https://t.co/gTQDVAX6Zapic.twitter.com/cOWWpd4e4Z

There is no embarrassment of riches in this primary season. Charles Pierce covers the three solo candidate appearances on cable news last night.

MSNBC had Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, back to back, the latter in a town hall format, and CNN had Senator Professor Warren, from the campus of Jackson State in Mississippi, which was an interesting choice on the part of her campaign.

Sen. Warren gave some great answersin the CNN town hall.

When Jake Tapper asked her if Mississippi should drop the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag, and she answered, simply, "Yes," it brought down the house and even got Tapper to admit that it was the most direct answer he'd ever received from a politician.

Sen. Warren also called for the abolition of the electoral college:

Presidential candidates should have to work for votes—and listen to voters—in more than 8-12 states. Abolish! https://t.co/6XggsVRQHa

And she put her reasoning in context of the war on voting, which is a war to maintain white supremacy.

It's exactly right that Warren places this discussion in the larger context of election reform and the restoration of voting rights in the face of voter-suppression laws targeting voters of color. It is fundamentally about the principle of one person, one vote. And she wisely focused on the fact that her Mississippi audience last night gets entirely ignored during a presidential election.

"Every vote matters," Warren said, "and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting. And that means get rid of the Electoral College and everybody counts. Everybody. I think everybody ought to come and have to ask for your vote. What do you think?"

But the line of the night came when she was asked the inevitable question about socialism:

"I believe in markets," she answered. "But I believe in markets with rules."

"Markets without rules is theft."

Charles Pierce on the origin of this clever turn of phrase by Sen. Warren:

[R]epurposing the 19th Century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's most famous axiom (La propriété, c'est le vol!/Property is theft!) as a call for a reinvigorated regulatory regime to safeguard the public welfare and break the power of corporations to cause widespread chaos and destruction. OK, Proudhon likely would be très en colère about her having appropriated his trademark aphorism for this purpose, but clearly, the crowd knew what she was getting at. That line should be in every speech she gives for the rest of the campaign. She should say it every day, whether she wins the election or not.

Indeed.

This story actually starts almost a year ago, but there is so much news about polls and fundraising totals, I want to ensure the amazing progressive policies being championed by all our wonderful democratic nominees don’t fall through the cracks.

Back in 2018, Sen. Cory Booker introduced the Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act.

The Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act, announced by Booker on Friday, would establish a three-year pilot program in which the Department of Labor would select up to 15 local areas (defined in the bill as any political subdivision of a state, like a city or a county, or a group of cities and counties) and offer that area funding so that every adult living there is guaranteed a job paying at least $15 an hour (or the prevailing wage for the job in question, whichever’s higher) and offering paid family/sick leave and health benefits.

Sen. Booker deserves a lot of credit for leading on this issue:

On Wednesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) jumped to the vanguard of those lawmakers pushing the federal-job-guarantee initiative when his office formally introduced a bill on the matter. And according to a source directly familiar with the legislation, Booker will have four powerful co-sponsors on his bill: Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Separately, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has already broadly outlined his own approach to a federal jobs guarantee.

Why guaranteed employment?

For a variety of political and institutional factors, the Fed and Congress weren’t able to do enough in 2008 to 2010 to prevent unemployment from breaking 10 percent, and they certainly weren’t able to effect a full recovery within a couple years. Returning to normal unemployment rates took nearly a decade, resulting in years of human misery and lost wage gains that a healthier and faster recovery could’ve delivered.

These institutional factors behind the inability to prevent unemployment from breaking 10 percent during the last recession have been discussed at Infrastructure Kos. In short, there is no such thing as a modern day Works Progress Administration that could be mobilized in sufficient time to keep unemployment down via infrastructure spending. And this is where Sen. Booker’s idea comes into play:

Job guarantee advocates argue that their plan effectively creates a permanent form of fiscal stimulus that politicians wouldn’t need to scramble to pass whenever disaster hits. Instead, if the economy took a turn for the worse and companies started shedding jobs, the government would automatically soak up anyone who’s laid off and give them work. That, in turn, would put more money in consumers’ pockets, boosting demand and improving business’ prospects. Before you know it, the economy’s back to normal.

Well, fast forward to February 2019, and Sen. Booker declares his candidacy.

The idea, according to job guarantee supporters, is to provide a buffer against economic downturns by having the government ensure that Americans who want a job can find one. Booker’s plan would create a three-year pilot through the Labor Department for jobs that pay at least $15 an hour — jobs that could then fulfill some certain social vacuum, like building parks or schools.

Sen. Booker’s bill will pilot the jobs guarantee first in the areas that have proved resistant to recovery. It is also important to note that a Jobs Guarantee eventually made its way into the version of the Green New Deal version released by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.