Dear Trumpers: Please stop sending him money

I see The Donald held his first large rally since losing to Biden a month ago. The rally was being touted earlier this week as a campaign event to support the Republican candidates in the run-off election that could flip the Senate (sort of) and wrest the Majority Leader title away from Moscow Mitch, an outcome the Party of Trump does not want. In short, Trump's job in Georgia yesterday was to promote David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and not himself. Could he rise to the occasion?

We all know the answer. The rally meant to help the incumbent Republicans cling to their seats turned into the usual Trump "It's all about me" self-aggrandizing monologue. It was apparently one long pity party on the part of the lame duck President. He just can't let go. I'm kind of hoping he included a lot of rhetoric about rigged systems and fraud and don't bother voting because the Democrats are going to cheat and your vote won't count. If he wants to discourage Republicans from voting that's fine with me. I do, nonetheless, still wish he'd just shut up and get back to packing for the trip home to his Florida golf course. 

Please, Trumpers, stop sending him money. He's lost. He might be psychologically incapable of ever admitting in a public forum that he lost, but he lost. The states he's yelled about fraud the loudest in are all states that have Republican controlled legislatures. Those legislatures have certified the election results. They agree Joe Biden won. No fraud, no mystery suitcases full of ballots, no weirdness. Trying to read fraud into a system that functioned exactly as it is designed to do is an exercise in futility. But as long as the e-mails and tweets keep the money flowing in, he's not going to shut up and go away. 

At this point, Trump knows full well he's not going to manage to bully the courts or state legislatures or anyone else into letting him linger in the White House one second past noon on January 20. He's admitted privately that he lost. He's unhappy, depressed, definitely in a bad mood because he's gotten used to the perks of being President. I mean, what are the odds anyone at Fox & Friends is going to take an on-air call from him a few weeks from now? He's also likely about to get booted off Twitter. He'll be stuck posting on Parler and nattering on at Newsmax or One America. And, yes, he'll still have an audience, but he's going to know it's just the tinfoil hat crowd, the rubes he despises because they fall for his cons.   

So why doesn't he simply concede? Why keep pushing his legal team to pursue unwinnable cases? Well, for a start, as soon as he concedes he's admitted the election wasn't rigged. If there was no fraud, no dirty tricks, no shenanigans worth mentioning then he has no rationale for begging his die-hard fans to keep sending money. And, boy, have they been sending money. Trump's base has been believing his bullshit for over 4 years now. They've pinned all their hopes and dreams and bizarre fantasies on the Donald. In their minds, if they just send him a few more dollars, all will be well. The last I heard, he's managed to raise over $400 million with his "help me fight the fraud" pleas. A public concession means cutting off the money flow. 

Oh well. At some point the small dollar donors will be tapped out, and the richer ones will realize they're getting suckered. One millionaire donor has already filed suit to get his $2.5 million donation back because the Trump team's efforts to prove fraud are failing. Once it gets to where the fund-raising efforts are costing more than they're collecting, Trump may not concede but he should at least go silent. One can hope. 

A minor side note: one of the funnier things I've seen in comment threads on social media is the belief on the part of some Trumpers that because the Donald has not publicly conceded that he lost he can stay in the White House as long as he wants. The stupid, it burns and amuses. 

Why are some jobs more important to save than others?

We were watching "Real Time" with Bill Maher last night, and one of the professional political operatives, one of those people I tend to think of as being akin to whores except practicing a less respectable profession, started regurgitating right wing talking points about how absolutely devastating it's going to be to make it harder for power plants to burn coal. You know the type of political operative I mean, the folks with absolutely no discernible principles of their own -- they simply parrot whatever the latest talking points their party is promoting. Sometimes after the fact they'll concede that the nonsense they cheerfully spouted a few years before was absolute garbage, but of course by then the damage has been. You know, like the various Bush administration officials and advisers who are now willing to admit that invading Iraq in 2003 was a super stupid thing to do. Why didn't any of them speak up at the time? Because they preferred collecting a paycheck for repeating propaganda and lies more than they preferred being honest and retaining a soul.

Anyway, the panel on "Real Time" included Gavin Newsom (Democrat), Mary Matalin (Republican, former member of Dick Cheney's staff), and Steve Schmidt (Republican, and chief strategist for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign). Not surprisingly, one of the topics discussed was climate change (California is burning), which naturally led to Schmidt and Matalin going into full-scale parrot mode about the economic costs of trying to do anything. That in turn led to talking about fossil fuels and trying to move away from burning coal in power plants. Except, of course, we can't move away from coal because of the "economic costs." Lots and lots of blathering on about how we can't move away from burning coal because it's going to cost miners in Wyoming their jobs or result in BNSF running fewer coal trains or something. The blathering about saving certain jobs always results in me wanting to reach through a tv screen and strangle someone -- or at least put a 2x4 alongside their head. What about the economic cost of sea levels rising to the point where New York subways become unusable? Or big chunks of Florida uninhabitable? And why is it more important to keep coal miners employed doing what has to be one of the nastiest, dirtiest jobs on the planet than it is to provide adequate funding for schools to keep teachers working? It's fine to slash funding for education or maintaining infrastructure, but god forbid some poor miner in West Virginia or Wyoming end up being laid off for lack of work. It's bizarre.

I have ranted on this topic before, like when discussions of the defense budget come up. It's more important to keep machinists employed building useless crap like the F-35 (the airplane pilots refer to as "the Lawn Dart" because it's so unstable in flight) than it is to make sure schools are adequately staffed, for example. This country's priorities are remarkably screwed up. 

As for the talking heads on the panel, Mary Matalin is, of course, not the sharpest tool on the planet. Or the most ethical, despite the way she kept trotting out the fact she's a convert to Catholicism. Her resume does include that stint working for Darth Cheney, and she is married to James Carville, a political operative who prefers to collect his checks from the Democrats. When you have two people sharing a bed but who claim to espouse opposite ends of the political spectrum, common sense says one (and no doubt both) is simply a paid shill who will say anything if she knows the check will clear. As long as the Republicans keep paying her, she'll keep parroting their talking points. I'm not sure how much longer she'll continue to be invited to do that parroting in front of a camera, though, as the woman is not aging well. She's 62 now but looks at least a decade older -- and the main stream media is not fond of women who actually look old. In any case, Matalin's been a paid shill for so many decades now that it's highly unlikely she retains the ability to think for herself.

Steve Schmidt, on the other hand, is a little more intriguing. He retains some shreds of individuality. He has been brutally honest on the subject of the Palin disaster, and he has brief flashes of honesty. Still, watching political operatives in action always reminds me of a line from a Dr. Hook song, "how much soul must a poor man sell just to rub two coins together?" I once worked for a distinctly conservative daily paper. A few times I found myself having to whip together a last minute editorial, a couple hundred words of meaningless right-wing platitudes that would pass muster with our corporate overlords, because the person whose job it normally was to plug that hole on the page was not available. It wasn't hard to do, but it definitely felt weird. I don't think I could have done it on a daily basis. And, in retrospect, I'm rather happy that editorials were anonymous -- it was the voice of the paper, not that of any particular person. I'm not sure I could ever do the type of publicly visible  political hackwork people like Schmidt and Matalin do. Would I have written those editorials if I had to slap my name on them? I don't know.

As for why we were watching "Real Time" on Sunday evening instead of when it was broadcast on Friday, we rarely see anything on its original broadcast date. We watch "Real Time" through the wonders of You Tube, which means we always see it at least a day late.

Lighten up, people, the blogosphere isn't the real world

I had a rather bizarre experience this week. I had a brief skirmish in what might be termed a flame war. It was weird. A few weeks ago I had a fellow visit my blog, he left a comment, I checked out his blog and thought it was interesting enough to merit adding to my blog roll. Then things took a very strange turn: he did a post, I left a completely innocuous comment, and he decided I wanted to argue with him. I apologized for any misunderstanding, said no way was that my intention, and figured that was that.

Well, the next post he did was one that got fairly heavily into making a teleological argument for why we exist as well as throwing in a pretty heavy dose of biological determinism. I minored in philosophy. Talking biological determinism was like dangling red meat in front of a hungry Doberman. So I wondered if he'd thought it through. If the sole purpose of man is to plant his seed and the sole purpose of women is to be mothers, where does that leave the poor saps who suffer from infertility? I attempted to start a conversation using the familiar gambit of asking a rhetorical question. I even labeled it as a rhetorical question, which to most people on the planet is a signal you'd like to have a purely intellectual discussion. You're not dismissing what the original speaker has said; you just want additional explication. I was, in short, looking forward to a lively peer-to-peer discussion of a philosophical question.

Holy fuck. There's no other way to put it. You'd have thought I'd just drowned kittens in his bathtub. Not only did he freak out in his reply to me, he devoted an entire blog post to ranting about how unnatural a woman I was because I had the nerve to not be blown away or absolutely riveted in awe by his deathless prose. My kids and grandkids would certainly be a tad surprised to learn that I had no interest in motherhood and that apparently I'd never learned to bake an apple pie. So much for the lively adult discussion and life of the mind I'd envisioned.

Okay. I got it. Some people need more validation than others. Maybe they didn't get enough gold stars pasted on their homework back in elementary school, maybe they're still smarting from the time someone kicked sand in their face at the beach, . . . who knows? It was a tad sad, but no big deal. It was now clear that whatever this fellow said was meant to the The Absolute Last Word on any particular topic. He didn't want readers or conversations; he wanted a cheering section. So I tossed out a parting shot, dropped him from the blog roll, and moved on. Life's too short to waste it trying to indulge in a battle of wits with an unarmed person.

But this is where it gets bizarre. He's still obsessing. I hear through other sources that he just devoted a post to telling the entire Upper Peninsula to kiss his nether regions. Why bother? Why is he wasting his time obsessing about a couple of comments from a person he's never met and never will meet? He seemed like a pretty nice guy until this weirdness happened -- why is he so upset about something so trivial? It's all very strange.

That poor bastard really needs to get a life. The blogosphere is not the real world. Yes, it's nice when people read your blog, it's validation of a sort when they leave comments, but (wash, rinse, repeat) It's not the real world. It doesn't matter if it's a compliment ("Nicely said"), neutral ("We like that restaurant chain, too"), or an insult ("You've got a fat ass"), it has no effect on your life other than the time it takes to read it. The healthy response would be a smile, a shrug, or a brief flare of annoyance and that's that.

As to why I'm wasting my time blogging about this weirdness . . . good question. Maybe it was that business about telling everyone in the U.P. to fuck off and die. That's just so sweeping in its megalomania that I couldn't resist.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world

I'm listening to the news this morning and once again (still, as usual) there's a lot of hot air being generated about the looming fiscal cliff and the horrible, horrible things that will happen if Federal Insurance Contributions Act (aka "payroll") taxes go back to the rates they used to be (6.2% instead of the current 4.2%). Now, I know there are some potential truly serious consequences if a budget deal isn't reached, most of which are completely unrelated to FICA, but I also know something that the inside-the-Beltway bloviating pundits and so-called experts won't acknowledge: most people either won't notice or don't care. Why won't they notice or care? I just spent a few days out in the real world out among people who do not spend their days wandering around the blogosphere. It was a good reminder that most people are not hard-core news junkies. The average person doesn't spend his or her days glued to Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN. They're not on the Internet obsessing over the latest posts on various political sites, and they're not reading multiple newspapers trying to glean the most recent bits of wisdom on current events. They may have a vague feeling Congress is busy being dysfunctional, but this isn't news. It doesn't touch them the way more immediate or local issues do, like whether or not it's going to snow enough to make it a good year for snowmobiling (tourist dollars) or if the price of gas will continue to drop.

Further, most people did not notice when their taxes dropped a couple years ago and they're unlikely to notice when they go back up again. Why? Well, although the pundits keep obsessing about what's going to happen to households earning more than $50,000 or $75,000 or some other number that allows them to say "Taxes will go up by $2000/$3000/whatever," the sad truth is that median household income in the U.S. right now is right about $50,000. That means half the households in the country have incomes low enough that any change is not going to be dramatic. Someone making minimum wage while working a part-time job might not even notice if his or her check is a dollar or two less than it might have been a couple weeks earlier, especially if the hours that person works vary from week to week -- and for a depressingly large percentage of the workforce, the hours do vary.

I can remember a few years ago when there was a lot of hype about the Bush income tax cuts. I don't recall exactly what I was earning then, but when I did the math, it turned out the tax cut worked out to the equivalent of one soda from a vending machine per week. Yep, my Bush tax cut was about $52 annually. No doubt it was nice to have a few extra coins each week, but if I hadn't been paying attention or if I worked irregular hours I might not have ever noticed. Would I have noticed if my taxes had gone up instead of down? I have no clue. Maybe, but maybe not. I noticed the Bush income tax cut because I was paying attention; the change in FICA withholding slid right past me at the time, and it involved more money.

Personally, I'm hoping FICA does go back to its old rate. Cutting it in the name of stimulating the economy was a truly stupid thing to do. FICA funds Social Security; reducing contributions to Social Security made no sense. All it did was play into the hands of the right-wing crowd that wants to eliminate old age insurance. By reducing the amount of money going into the Social Security trust fund, the right wingers positioned themselves for ratcheting up their claims Social Security is going broke. . . but that's a subject for a different post.

Who says there's never any good news?

From the New York Times:

Lou Dobbs, the longtime CNN anchor whose anti-immigration views have made him a TV lightning rod, said Wednesday that he is leaving the cable news channel effective immediately.

Yesterday's show was his last.  Anyone else want to bet he's on Fox by Monday?

Update: The Onion has the reason why Dobbs departed so abruptly.