Author: A.T.

“If we want to protect the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, Kavanaugh should not be on it,” writes Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post, making the case that — based on his performance last week — he can’t be seen as impartial in any case involving a left-leaning litigant.

“This is a man soaked in the Clinton wars, who delivered dozens of speeches thrilling conservative activists at the Federalist Society and now lets on that he harbors rabidly hostile views of the Democrats. It’s inconceivable someone so biased, someone who vowed revenge (‘What goes around, comes around,’ he shouted), could be elevated to the Supreme Court.”

Also, he appears to have lied under oath.  Unless you believe boofing* is flatulence, the Devil’s Triangle a game with quarters — and that Christine Ford would somehow forget which boys assaulted her in the singularly most traumatic event of her life.

But lying under oath — or even just likely lying under oath — is thus far not a disqualifier in the eyes of Republican senators.

Speaking of whom . . . Willie Nelson sang this new two-minute song at a Texas rally over the weekend.  “Vote ‘Em Out.”

Speaking of which . . . vote, volunteer, give.

*The phrase “have you boofed yet?” in a high school yearbook would appear to make no sense if all it referred to was breaking wind.  But a risque sexual achievement would seem to fit perfectly in that context.  So while I have zero interest in what sexual acts Brett and Mark may or may not have engaged in, it seems clear (to me, at least), he was lying under oath to the Senate last week on this matter as well.

First off, you must change your plans and see Michael Moore’s new movie, Farenheit 11/9 today.  Or if not today, this week, for sure, “before it’s too late.”  It will leave you wanting to get everyone to see it, to register, to volunteer, and to give.

Unless, of course, you’re a Trumper.  Let alone a storm-Trumper (some of them very fine people).  Then, whether you see the film or not, you will give it one star out of ten.  And you will believe, among so much else (climate change hoax, Russia investigation witch hunt), that Brett Kavanaugh deserves a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Which bring me to this.

Picture it!

You are 15.

You are traumatically assaulted by a drunken teen you know well (and his drunken friend).

You hear their laughter to this day, and remember not being able to breathe.

An event that has haunted you every day of your life.

But along the way over the years you somehow forgot who did this to you?

Oh, please.

Everyone with an open mind must realize Brett and Mark did this.  The only question is whether they’re lying; or were so drunk that one or both truly managed to forget it.

My own guess is that, being the best little boy in the world — number one at everything all his life — Brett just can’t allow it to be true.  It can’t be true.  Because, as you may have read in the Washington Post (HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO BRETT KAVANAUGH?), this seat on the Court, given Brett’s lifetime of hard work and achievement, belongs to him.

Take six minutes to be dazzled by what we humans, and specifically we Americans, have been able to do (thanks, Mel!) . . . and then as much time as you need to figure out why we haven’t been able to manage something seemingly less complex: how to live with each other with kindness, making rational decisions and reasonable compromises.

(Steps in that direction: redistricting to give moderates a better chance . . . instant run-off voting, to empower third parties without unintended consequences . . . nullifying the Electoral College to accept majority rule . . . restoring earmarks (up to 1% of the federal budget) to lubricate deal-making and cooperation across party lines* . . . replacing caucuses with primaries and making it as easy as possible to vote in primaries, to lessen the influence of those with the most extreme views . . . overturning Citizens United and McCutcheon to lessen the distorting influence of big money . . . teaching civics — and science and logic — to give the voters of tomorrow the education they need to make sensible choices.)

*It’s not as though every earmarked dollar is wasted; and if your representative does fund a dumb project, vote him out of office!

Trump knows the best people (and the best words).  Wilbur Ross, co-chair of a Russian money-laundering Cyprus bank, was the obvious choice for Commerce Secretary.  Read Forbes’ profile and be appalled.

“Trump is giving swamps a bad name,” writes my pal Dan Magraw. “Swamps are actually very important ecologically and do great good by cleaning water, serving as fisheries and nurseries, etc. He should say he is trying to drain the sewer — but he may actually like sewers.”

(And do you know who lives in sewers?  Dana Milbank labels Mitch McConnell the biggest rat of all.)

Send folks to iwillvote.com and to Join Team Blue and (if they’re millennials) here!  And if you’ve done well on FANH or HD (and can forget the others), here!  I’ll see whatever you do and jump through the screen to say thanks.

Here are the Senators who voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 — all of them Republicans, of course.

And here are the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who will vote to decide whether Judge Kavanaugh is telling the truth.

See any overlap?

I notice Chuck Grassley, the committee chair . . . Ted Cruz and John Cornyn from Texas . . . Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee from Utah (really? Utah represents 1% of the US population but 10% of the Judiciary Committee?) . . . and Lindsey Graham, who says that if the Ford allegation is all there is, he can’t see “ruining Kavanaugh’s life” over it.

(If being relegated to a lifetime of comfort and prestige as an appellate court judge is to have one’s life ruined, one wonders how Lindsay would describe the consequences of violence against women?  Or of being denied health insurance because of a preexisting condition?)

Only one Republican on the Committee — Jeff Flake — voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act in 2013.  The remaining four were not yet senators, so we don’t know how they would have voted.

It seems to me there are two questions before the committee, if in fact Kavanaugh did what he is accused of (which, absent the equivalent of a blue dress, none of us can know for sure):

First . . . is such behavior in high school disqualifying 36 years later?

Second . . . is lying about it under oath this week disqualifying?

Just how high should the standard to be a Supreme Court Justice be? 

When something is really embarrassing, and perhaps in and of itself not disqualifying, is lying about it under oath okay?

Should anyone nominated to the Supreme Court be presumed qualified until proven to have lied?  Or is “reasonable doubt” a better standard?

Looking to volunteer?  Join Team Blue.  And (as always) if you have any more fuel to throw on our brightly burning fire, click here.

LOSE WEIGHT: A hedge fund guy I know — who never struck me as fat — spent $13 million of his own cash to develop SweetDefeat, which you can try out for quite a bit less.*  It’s a tiny plant-based lozenge you dissolve on your tongue that blocks your ability to taste sweetness.  This reviewer tells the story.  (And — FREE BONUS! — note her link to a separate study, of a separate weight-loss idea, showing that if you take a whiff of peppermint every two hours, you’ll consume 2,800 fewer calories a week.)

You’re welcome.

QUIT SMOKING: Here’s how Garrison Keillor kicked a three-pack-a-day habit.  A really nice read.  And here’s the book I’ve plugged before that’s help literally millions of people quit — including Ellen DeGeneres and at least one of you (who wrote to tell me).  Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking.  (Or as I put it in my book: one way, when you get to be my age, you have an extra $1 million in your Roth IRA; the other way, you’re broke and have lung cancer.  Stark, yes — but our young friends really need to know this.)

You’re welcome.

SAVE THE WORLD:  It’s not about advertising — persuading Trump supporters to vote Democrat — it’s about ORGANIZING — getting those literally tens of millions who reliably vote Democrat every four years but not in midterms to vote in this mid-term.  So . . . send folks to iwillvote.com and to Join Team Blue and here!  And if you’ve done well on FANH or HD (and can forget the others), here!  I’ll see whatever you do and jump through the screen to say . . .

Thank you.

*Indeed, they tell me, “customers who check out with the code AndrewTobias will get 50% off.”

Take 60 seconds to enjoy this ad for gerrymandered jewelry. “You select your legislators every two years, but every ten years they select you.”

Know folks unsure whether they’re registered?  Send them to iwillvote.com.

Know folks looking to volunteer?  Send them to Join Team Blue.

Know kids who relate to the world via Instagram?  Here.

Have more fuel to throw on our brightly burning fire? Here.

Read Fear. 

Watch Active Measures.

We are losing the Second Cold War. Just as the colonists defeated the British with asymmetrical warfare, so Putin’s Russia is defeating us.

As Trump, unchecked by the Republican Congress, tells the world he trusts and admires Putin, who murders and poisons his opponents.

And speaking of asymmetrical warfare, there’s China.  Here is David Ignatius last month in the Washington Post.  (Thanks, Glenn.)

---

. . . “It is not that we lack money. It is that we are playing a losing game,” Brose contended in a paper presented to the group. “Our competitors are now using advanced technologies to erode our military edge. This situation is becoming increasingly dire.”

Future needs are being drowned out by past practices, because of what Brose’s boss, Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), has called the “military-industrial-congressional complex.” Brose calculates that in the Pentagon’s initial request for $74 billion in new defense spending in fiscal 2019, only 0.006 percent was targeted for science and technology. . . .

. . . The Chinese are happy for the United States to keep building carriers and bombers, so long as they deploy the more advanced technologies that can disable these systems. . . .

America’s vulnerability to information warfare was a special topic of concern. One participant recalled a conversation several years ago with a Russian general who taunted him: “You have a cybercommand but no information operations. Don’t you know that information operations are how you take countries down?”

The Aspen Strategy Group is a devoutly bipartisan forum. But there was an intense discussion here of the issue that’s vexing America this summer: the growing political polarization that’s creating so much discord that it’s becoming a national security problem.

As the gathering concluded Monday, Republicans and Democrats were equally passionate about spreading the message that this is a Sputnik moment for modernizing our military. Competing with a rising China begins at home, with a more nimble Pentagon and a country that’s more united to face the big problems ahead.

Finally . . .

WhoWhatWhy contrasts the penalty for casting one illegal vote — accidentally, and only on a technicality — with the penalty for intentionally rigging an election:

. . . In 2016, Crystal Mason sought to vote in the presidential election in Tarrant County, TX. Her name wasn’t on the voter roll so, after being assisted by a poll worker, she signed an affidavit in her name — presenting her ID — and declared that she was eligible to vote. She was given a provisional ballot and filled it out.

What Mason did not do, however, was read the fine print at the top of the document. Had she done so, she would have realized that she was not eligible to vote because she had not completed the community-supervision portion of a tax fraud conviction. In her case, “community supervision” meant periodically logging onto a website to confirm her address and affirming that she had not been arrested.

She should have read the fine print and that was clearly her mistake. This isn’t a defense of people who vote but should not. However, it seems clear that Mason didn’t mean to cast a fraudulent vote. . . . It was an honest mistake . . . [and yet she] was sentenced to five years in state prison for voter fraud and last week she got an additional 10 months in federal prison for release violations.

Also last week, a North Carolina court ruled that, once again, Republicans had illegally gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts. As the court’s decision shows, this was not an honest mistake. It was a premeditated attempt to continue to allow the GOP to win a supermajority of the Tar Heel State’s congressional seats even if the popular vote did not reflect such a distribution.

The ruling means that, since Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2010, there hasn’t been a single congressional election held using a map that has not been deemed to be unconstitutional.

In effect, North Carolinians, especially African Americans, have been denied the right to participate in a fair congressional election for the better part of a decade.

Nobody has been punished for silencing the voices of hundreds of thousands of voters in North Carolina, and the illegal map will be used again in the midterms, because the court thinks there is no time to draw one that isn’t unconstitutional. Once again, Republican legislators got away with it.

In a nutshell, these two cases illustrate why widespread in-person voter fraud is so rare while voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other crimes against democracy are so widespread: The former has a very low upside and a major downside; the latter has a major upside and no downside whatsoever. . . .

---

One more reason to  buy gerrymandered jewelry.

Have a great weekend.

Know folks who are not sure how to register — or whether they’re registered?  Send them to iwillvote.com.

Know folks looking to volunteer?  Send them to Join Team Blue.

Know kids who relate to the world via Instagram, not MSNBC?  Send them here.

And, as always, if you have more fuel to throw on our brightly burning fire, click here.

Meanwhile, to read about Brett Kavanaugh growing up on the crime-ridden streets of Bethesda, Maryland, click here.

And to get 4% back on all your dining and entertainment, plus $500 after you spend $3,000, and the first year’s $95 fee waived, click here.  (Thanks, Brian!)

Here are 9 apps to try if you want to learn something new every day.  (Thanks, Evy!)  I signed up for the second, Blinkist, where you can read or listen to thousands of 15-minute non-fiction book digests ($6.67/month after free trial);  and the ninth, Duolingo, where I’m already having fun with Russian and Spanish (free).

‘It’s OK to be scared’ and 9 other messages we all probably need to hear right now. . . . ”

From Upworthy.

I particularly liked Dan Rather’s message . . . “Take a deep breath and feel the cool air of hope and justice in your lungs, and then march forward.” . . . excerpted from his post:

---

For decades, Republicans have been able to have it all ways. Promise a radical reactionary rethink of American democracy to their rabid base, and hide behind a court that protected them from what would be a very unpopular set of policies with the general public. Well no longer.

Do we really want to outlaw abortion? We may soon know. Do we really believe we can attack gay rights and other rights at unprecedented levels? We may soon know. Do we really believe that our corporations should have unfettered power and workers have relatively none? Here again, the movement is already afoot.

The farce is shattered, the fig leaf has disappeared, the obfuscations have been replaced by clarity. And what is in its place is a very unpopular President stoking the flames of a massive backlash.

I do not say this to be Pollyannish. The president and his supporters have a lot of power, and tens of millions of fervent members in their base. But we have seen a growing realization from not only moderates but conservatives who still care about the Constitution and recognize how perilous is the threat of the modern GOP. Look at Michael Bloomberg pledging tens of millions of dollars to elect Democrats. Look at opinion writers who have preached for the GOP in the past say now is a time to elect Democrats. Look at men and women of power and fame who are arguing that this cannot stand.

I know there is a feeling among many progressives that they have lost, that the future is a foregone conclusion. They see the forces arrayed against them on the battlefield of justice and feel the doom of certain and impending defeat. But turn to your left and right and see the long lines of fellow citizens. Look behind you and see the formidable artillery of wealth and power that is on YOUR side. Take a deep breath and feel the cool air of hope and justice in your lungs, and then march forward. #steady #courage

---

It is NOT symmetrical, as I’ve long argued . . . and as David Leonhardt again makes clear (subscribe!):

---

Conventional wisdom says that the middle is disappearing from American politics: The Republicans have moved far to the right, the Democrats far to the left, and woe to any moderate voters looking for politicians to represent their views.

Well, the conventional wisdom is wrong. The Democrats have not actually become radical leftists, or anything close to it.

You keep hearing this story partly because Republicans have an obvious interest in promoting it and partly because large parts of the news media find it irresistible. It’s a “both side do it” angle that allows us journalists to appear tough, knowing and above the partisan scrum. We love that image. But the facts don’t support the story in this case.

For starters, look at this year’s primaries, which finished last week. Across the country, a grand total of two Democratic incumbents in the House lost a primary. Zero Senate candidates did. In conservative states with moderate Democratic senators — like Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia — not one of those moderates even faced a serious primary challenge.

The situation was very different in 2010 with the Tea Party, which pushed the Republican Party to the right. Multiple incumbents lost that year, as Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report noted last week. “Please stop with the ‘revolution’ in the Democratic Party narrative,” she said. This year’s real story is the one that the political scholars Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol have tried to tell: Anti-Trump activists have taken a strategic approach, backing either moderate or more progressive candidates, depending on the district.

It’s true that a few proudly left-leaning Democrats won gubernatorial primaries, like Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida. But I encourage you to watch a few of their speeches. For one thing, both are strong candidates. For another, they are hardly socialists.

[And by the way?  If we are ALL socialists to some degree, if we support public schools or public highways or Medicare or public fire departments. — A.T.]

And the list of progressive insurgents who got thumped is much longer. In New York, Cynthia Nixon didn’t crack 35 percent.

Meanwhile, in Congress, the party’s reaction to President Trump tells a similar story. Political pundits sometimes talk about “Trump derangement syndrome” — a condition, supposedly, in which his presidency has made Democrats go crazy. Except that it hasn’t.

To take just one example: There is strong evidence that Trump has broken the law, both by obstructing justice and by using the presidency to enrich himself. Still, Democratic leaders refuse to push for impeachment. They say the country should wait for Robert Mueller’s investigation to finish. I think that’s wise. Either way, it’s certainly not deranged.

Finally, there is policy. Democrats have indeed moved somewhat to the left over the last few decades, on both social and economic issues. As Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary (and no lefty revolutionary), likes to say, the last 15 years should have nudged open-minded people to the political left: The free market isn’t delivering healthy increases in living standards for most Americans. In response, Democrats are focusing less on Bill Clinton’s old themes, like personal and fiscal responsibility, and more on using the government to help people.

But think about what a truly left-wing agenda would look like: Top tax rates of 70 percent (which we had as recently as 1980) or higher. A generous “universal basic income.” The elimination of employer-provided health insurance, with a system more like Britain’s. These ideas remain limited to the margins. None is likely to happen even if Democrats sweep the elections of 2020.

I’m not suggesting that the party has completely avoided Trump overreaction. In our polarized era, Democrats do sometimes confuse its progressive base with the country as a whole. They are to the left of the American public on immigration policy, for instance.

For the most part, though, the Democratic agenda remains decidedly center-left: Raise taxes on the rich, and use the money to help the middle class and poor. Protect civil rights. Expand educational access. Regulate Wall Street, and fight climate change. Expand health insurance using the current system. And compromise with Republicans when necessary.

The radical agenda is the Republican agenda: Make climate change worse, unlike almost every other conservative party in the world. Aggravate inequality. Sabotage health-insurance markets. Run up the deficit. Steal a Supreme Court seat. Keep dark-skinned citizens from voting. Protect Trump’s lawlessness.

If you consider yourself a moderate — whether you lean slightly right or slightly left — your choice in this year’s midterms is clear.

And if you consider yourself a leftist, I understand you are probably frustrated that the Democrats won’t go further. But look at the big picture. The Democratic Party may not have moved nearly as much as you would like, but the party has moved. It has adjusted its agenda in response to soaring inequality and stagnant living standards.

The one mistake no voter should make is pretending that the two parties are just different versions of the same thing.

---