Dr. Christine Blasey Ford opened the door with her heroic testimony on Friday and then these two women forced Senator Flake to listen. This is telling truth to power.
Category Archives: Politics
Confirmation bias
I ran into an interesting statistic the other day. The fourth district of California, the western Sierra slope from Tahoe to Sequoia National Park voted for Trump over Hillary 54 to 39.3% but they voted for Kamala Harris 63.3 – 36.7%. My immediate reaction was that this confirms my belief that the main problem the Democrats have is that they are running people who are not liberal enough, that they are running the same old, tired, candidates who are indebted to their corporate masters rather than running younger candidates who are willing to fight for Single Payor, a real minimum wage, and free college – in other words, those things the big corporate donors are against.
But, as soon as I thought about it, I remembered that, in California, the election is between the two candidates who had the highest vote during the primary. In this case, the highest vote getters were Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez, both Democrats and, although Harris was the more liberal and Sanchez is an old-fashioned pol, she wasn’t running against a Republican so the results are not really a good test.
What does seem to be a good test, however, is the Florida race, Tallahassee’s liberal mayor Andrew Gillum verses Trump backed Ronald DeSantis from Florida’s 6th congressional district. I don’t really know much about either candidate – except what I’ve read in the last two days – but my bias is towards Gillum (and everything I read about him confirms that bias, what a surprise).
Left Wing of the Possible
I’m a radical, but I tell my students at Queens, I try not to soapbox. I want to be on the left wing of the possible. Michael Harrington, a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The Left Wing of the Possible is also the title of an interesting and very complimentary article on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist phenom from the Bronx, in the New Yorker (interestingly, the same article is entitled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party in the online edition). The article is by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker since 1998, who wrote a very favorable article on Barrack Obama in 2007, painting him as a centrist, that was instrumental in my getting on the Obama bandwagon. As with most New Yorker articles, it is about 75% context, so, if you are at all interested in politics, I suggest you give it a read.
Ocasio-Ortega is running on a platform that, the article points out, is not that radical. She is running on a platform that includes single-payer health insurance, a minimum wage of $15, equal rights for women and minorities, and free college, but, to quote Bernie: “not the government taking over industry”. As the article title suggests, she wants what she thinks is possible. I think it is possible, too and, I don’t understand why I often read the opposite from the Democratic establishment. Taking a hypothetical Trump voter – who voted for Trump because they don’t like income inequality or are afraid that their middle-class life will not be there for their kids, not a Trump voter who voted for him because they think he is a racist – I think they are more likely to vote for somebody who is pushing free college rather than somebody who is pushing we will significantly cut interest rates for future undergraduates because we believe that making college more affordable is…important.
I don’t think that the Democratic voter base, including many Trump voters – many of whom also voted for Obama – are against free college and single-payer health care, for that matter, I think the Democratic corporate base is. I think that, if the Democrats want to win back Congress, they are going to have to start listening to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes, not just their rich financial contributors.
As an aside, after WWII, education at state colleges was virtually free and remained so at the University of California until 1970 when a $150 “education” fee was added. Now the tuition fee is $14,460. As an aside to the aside, I don’t think it is a coincidence that, as the number of minorities has gone up at Cal, so has the tuition. I think the governmental and educational infrastructure, consciously or unconsciously, just doesn’t think educating people of color is as important as it was when most of the students were white. End aside.
The Donald. Incompetence and Competence
The scandal won’t go away, largely because Donald Trump and his lawyers have propelled it forward. Amy Davidson Sorkin, the first line in a snarky article in the New Yorker about Trump’s incompetence in trying to make the Stormy Daniels problem go away.
For me, one of the surprising things about the Trump Administration is Trump’s petulant incompetence. From early in his presidency, when his Travel Ban came up to the Supreme Court and Trump’s website still said: “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the country” that forced the Supreme Court ruling against the ban on religious rights grounds, to leaking Israeli intel to the Russians, to bragging about lying to Trudeau, Trump continually seems to undermine himself. Then he does something even more surprising, orchestrate a subtle campaign to get Justice Kennedy to retire. In an article in the New York Times, Adam Liptak and Maggie Haberman detail that campaign. It is scary reading and I recommend it.
Distracted by shiny objects
Republicans have blown this deficit up to places one couldn’t even imagine it could go: a statement by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) who still voted for the 2019 military budget of approximately 716 billion dollars.
While the press – and, correspondingly, the people who rely on the press for information, that’s us – have been watching the Trump Administration put children in cages, a bi-partisan Congress has voted for a new military budget. A military budget that includes a boost in defense spending of approximately 82 billion dollars for next year. To put that in perspective, the increase just voted on is bigger than the entire Russian military budget which was 69.2 billion dollars last year (according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).
Think about that for a second, the increase of the United States’ military budget, next year over this year, is bigger than Russia’s entire military budget. Lest you think that this is all the nasty Republicans’ fault, the 2019 military budget was a bi-partisan effort with only ten Senators voting against it and two of the Ney voters were Republicans (Mike Lee and Paul Rand). I am glad to say that both of California’s Senators, as well as Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, voted Nay. I wasn’t surprised that Bernie voted Nay, but I am surprised Cory Booker voted Yea for the increase, seeing as how he is rumored to be running for President.
It is interesting to note that the Department of Education estimates that free college – belittled by much of the political establishment, on both sides of the aisle, as being unaffordable – would cost about 62.6 billion dollars, about 20 billion dollars less than the one year increase for our already bloated military. In my opinion, this is a good measure of our National Values and it is hard for me not to get enraged.