Author: A.T.

It’s The Economy, Stupid

Courtesy of the White House:

After decades of trickle-down economics that slashed taxes for the wealthy, diminished public investments, offshored jobs and factories, destroyed unions, and ripped at the social safety net, President Biden has written a new playbook that’s growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up . . .

. . . delivering the strongest recovery in the world, and laying a strong foundation for years to come by:

  • Investing in our infrastructure, manufacturing, scientific development, and communities that have been left behind after decades of neglect;
  • Giving working families and the middle class the chance to get ahead by creating good jobs with family-sustaining wages and by supporting unions;
  • Lowering costs and giving smaller businesses a fair chance to compete.

Over the last four years, we have made remarkable progress:

  • Over 16 million jobs created—the most in a single presidential term in American history—with jobs created every single month;
  • The lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years;
  • A record 20 million new business applications;
  • A doubling of union petitions;
  • The smallest racial wealth gap in 20 years;
  • More Americans with health insurance than ever before;
  • The stock market at record highs and 401(k)s up;
  • More than $1 trillion in announced private sector investments in clean energy and advanced manufacturing in America;
  • Lowering inflation while supporting a strong labor market—with inflation down faster and lower than almost any other advanced economy, and incomes up almost $4,000 more than prices.

To see all this in pictures — with links to The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, et al — click here.  (And share?)

BONUS

Tales from the Transition.

Amazing.

 

What She Deserves

Robert Reich on What Liz Cheney deserves from Joe Biden:

She doesn’t need a pardon from Biden because Trump’s claim wouldn’t last an instant in federal court. What she deserves from Biden is a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

→ So true.

And speaking of democracy defenders . . .

Kris M.:  “I was excited to read (listen to) On Freedom but about a quarter of the way through I switched to another book.  It requires more reflection than I can give it when I’m mucking my horses’ stalls and filling hay bags.  My plan is to buy a paper copy and use my eyes, so that I can give it undivided attention.  One book that does make great listening: Professor Corey Brettschneider’s The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It.  I found it inspiring; it made me more hopeful and ready to do my part, however tiny a bit part that may be.  (And, it completely changed my impression of John Adams, which had been mostly formed by David McCullough’s biography.)”

Jim L.: “You’ve stopped linking to DNC.  I assume this is due to the horrifying news of mishandled DNC funds (which would have been far less scrutinized had Kamala won).  I can’t be your only reader who’d love to hear your perspective on the topic.  It’s an awful time to be a (strongly anti-MAGA) Centrist, dismayed by all the nonsense.”

→ Never fear, Jim – I’ll be linking to the DNC again before you know it.

In a presidential year, the DNC only nominally controls its funds – it’s the campaign that mostly runs the show.  With hindsight, some money could doubtless have been more wisely spent, some contracts more aggressively negotiated.  But in the heat of a 107-day campaign to save democracy (as many saw it), some bad judgments and bad deals were likely inevitable.

(And it would have cost nothing to go on Joe Rogan.  All so easy in hindsight.)

To put the scale of the campaign’s spending in context — $1.5 billion or so — Americans spend more than that every 107 days . . . on ketchup.  But still — I hear you.

As to your being a centrist . . . hats off to you.  Most Americans, I think, basically are — a little to the left or the right.

If only we had ranked-choice voting, moderates would have a far better chance of winning and “the sensible center” would once again have a powerful voice.

 

It Does No Good To Be Depressed

The Guardian calls On Freedom, Tim Snyder’s just-published encore to On Tyranny, his #1 New York Times best-seller, “A rigorous and visionary argument . . . Buy or borrow this book, read it, take it to heart.”  I’m buying it.

The Economist has chosen kakistocracy — “a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens” — to be its word of the year. 

With a pathological liar narcissist convicted felon and adjudicated rapist about to take office and seeking to put this man in charge of the Defense Department, could there have been any other choice?

The Scariest horror film of the year:  Stop the Steal.  My bad for not linking to it before the election.  January 6th — a religious war.  Which brings us back to Pete Hegseth, a religious warrior himself.

All that said:

It does no good to be depressed. 

Every day is a gift.  (We have hot water!)

What could do some good:

> Join an Indivisible chapter.

> Read their Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink.

> Deposit $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 every month into an account you’ll be using soon to help win back the House and Senate.

> Post actively on social media (thoughtfully, respectfully, accurately) . . . criticizing when criticism is due; pushing back when the other side takes credit for Democratic accomplishments, like infrastructure projects Trump’s team voted unanimously against or the low unemployment and inflation he will have inherited.

Have a great week.

 

Your Excellent Feedback

But first my two cents:

Joe should have waited for Hunter’s sentences to be handed down later this month . . .

. . . which might have been nothing more than community service and an acknowledgement that criminal charges are almost never brought for either of these crimes, and thus the normal “sentence” for committing them is . . . no sentence at all.

If one of the sentences had involved prison, Joe might then have commuted it — but not issued a pardon.

Or Hunter might have done a truly patriotic thing and prevailed on his dad not to pardon him.  He might have said:  “Let’s not let them equate my transgressions with theirs, Dad.  Bashing cops in the head, trying to subvert the election, and maybe hang the vice president, is nothing like failing to file your taxes.  I can spend a few months in jail for my country.”

Either way — what was the rush?

Two more cents for the PRKR shareholders among us:  Diving into the ParkerVision Litigation Against Qualcomm.

And now your excellent feedback to yesterday’s post, Why We Lost: The Elephant In The Bathroom.

Steve S.:  “Another important reason: Biden should have stuck to being a transitional president which most of us believed meant a one-term president. Had he done so, there would have been ample time for whoever was the nominee to put together a campaign that dealt with all of the issues you cited.”

Norm O.:  “You forgot Covid frustration. People suffered mightily with shutdowns and school closures.  If you had two in a family working to make ends meet, and one had to stay home with kids, or if you had seven in a family stuck for a year or more in a tiny apartment 24/7, your lives were upended, and the sense was that the scientists, doctors, elites — and Democrats — were insensitive, just spouting ‘It’s the science!’  Dems think actions speak for themselves. No empathy. That was a huge part of the revolt against elites, the establishment, the experts. Trump exploited that brilliantly.”

Eric M.: “The elephant in the room is none of what you cited.  Since 2014, there has been an information war going on, but the only side fighting has been MAGA. The goal of this war, best but not solely waged by Steve Bannon, is not to advance one party, but something more strategic — to shift American culture to the right and create an irrational cult around that shift.  The methods include psychological warfare techniques paired with social media and right-wing-controlled traditional media.  The strategy and tactics of this prolonged initiative are made plain in the book Mindf*ck and elsewhere.  Until we build campaigns that take a long view . . . leverage psychology to shift how people think rather than focusing narrowly on how they vote . . . and manage (build and dominate) the communication channels, we will continue to fail.”

Paul B.:  “The reason Democrats lose is simple. Republicans pick 2 or 3 subjects and repeat them over and over and over whether or not any of it is true. It is one of marketing’s basic tenets:  A customer needs to hear something seven times to hear it!  Republicans do this! Immigration, inflation, trans! Democrats scatter shot a couple dozen messages.  Any one person is lucky to hear one twice.  Also: Democrats are horrible at taking credit for what they do!  So bad that we allow Republicans to steal that credit! And, lastly, Democrats are so worried about fairness that they will make a statement but then hedge it with some qualifier that steals from the original statement!”

Bryan N.:  “I agree with your reasons but would add the lack of response to Republican attack ads.  We saw it in 2020 with GOP ads running in Florida, endlessly, that showed Biden, Castro, and Maduro ‘together’ and labeled them socialists. The ads said ‘socialist’ over and over. There was no pointed response from the Dems. This year, if you watched football, you saw the anti-trans ads over and over with no response. It was the same strategy: Push the same button over and over, harder and harder.”

→ You are exactly right.  We should have countered — over and over — with a former football star, or maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying:

Hey – let’s leave the issue of trans athletes to the coaches, not the politicians.  OK?  The NCAA is all over this with a sensible approach you can read for yourself.  [A QR code appears.]  Trump just wants to distract you from his plans to enrich billionaires and stick it to working families. [Another QR code, linking to Project 2025]  Enjoy the game!

(Hindsight is so easy, isn’t it?)

Michael H.: “When I was in public high school in L.A., you were given ‘points’ based on age, height and weight if you wanted to play interscholastic sports. If you had a lot of points, you had to play Varsity or JV; if you had lower points, you could play B level or C level.  (If you were good enough, you could play up but not down.) Boys and girls played on different teams then but the same principles could apply to resolve the trans issue — and it could be done, as you suggest, on a community by community or league by league basis.  PS — The trans community spokespersons need to stop saying that anyone who disagrees with them is guilty of ‘genocide’!”

Dan W.: “I’ve long wondered why no one brings up the analogy of a wrestler who is missing a leg. (Not as uncommon as you’d think.) Let’s say he normally would compete in the 152-pound category, but based on his actual weight he competes against 126-pounders. Plus, he has two other advantages: He’s learned to compensate throughout his life and has developed more upper body strength than his competitors. Plus – crucially – he practices every day against wrestlers with two legs. His opponent has never wrestled anyone with one leg before, though – so he has no way to figure out what to do when, for example, the leg he always goes after for a takedown is not there.”

Jane A.: “Our country throughout its history seems to swing from one extreme to the other, passing the middle only on its way to one extreme or another.   America so far has not inherently been a country of moderation. Perhaps we’re still too young.  And it’s also possible that our 2-party, dialectic system feeds into that.  Do we need a centrist third party?  For now, I hope the Democratic Party continues to move in the direction of being the party of competence and common sense.  We support the right values and good solutions.  We just need to sell them a whole lot better.”

→ The solution, I think, is not a third party but, rather, open primaries and ranked-choice voting.  To win, you’d have to appeal to the great common-sense middle.  That would empower moderates, disempower the extremes.

David Z: “W.O.K.E. = World Of Kindness & Empathy.  That’s it.  None of our candidates actually ran on it but the thugs kept demagogue-ing it anyway.  They spent a fortune on ads about pronouns and trans healthcare in prisons.”

BONUS

The Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters worked really well.  Trump got just a few more votes than he had in 2020, when he lost by 7 million to Biden.  But enough Democrats stayed home to put him back on the throne.

Joe Klein on weakness being our weakness — and other important points to ponder.

 

Why We Lost: The Elephant In The Bathroom

Presumably, you’ve seen Defense-Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth’s mom’s letter?

So now to the topic at hand:

The first reason we lost the election goes all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 and the staggering rise in inequality it kicked off, as described in two minutes here — and in Nick Hanauer’s seminal 2014 must-read ‘pitchforks’ piece.  People are pissed.  And when people are pissed, they are more than ever susceptible to demagoguery.

The second reason is that we failed adequately to explain the causes of inflation and adequately to show that we understood how badly it was hurting people.  And adequately to explain our plan to tame it with a “soft landing” — which we did — rather than the old-fashioned way, with a crushingly painful recession.  We would never have gotten everyone on board with those explanations but could have done a lot better.

The third reason was how we handled — and, again, failed adequately to explain — our handling of immigration.  The President was slow to fix the border crisis because he wanted to keep the pressure on for a permanent legislative fix that would stand up in court.  And he got it!   A tough bi-partisan bill that was on the verge of fixing everything — until Trump instructed Mitch McConnell, et al, to kill it.  It was an unpatriotic act of breathtaking selfishness and we shouldn’t have let him get away with it.  Remember how Republicans voted 52 times to kill Obamacare?  We should have voted 52 times to fix the border, with ever increasing fanfare, until every American knew just what was in the bill, how well it would have worked, and how Trump was the only thing keeping the border “open.”

The fourth reason is the one I’d like to address in some detail here: over-wokeness.  Long-time readers know I’ve been ranting about this for years. (Bill Maher sums it up in 56 seconds.)

In speech after speech, Democrats should have said, in effect:

Look:

If ‘woke’ means being alert to the feelings of others and treating them fairly, then we’re woke.  Indeed, most Republicans are, too.

But when it means everybody has to walk on eggshells for fear of inadvertently giving offense or losing their jobs — it’s gone too far.

People must be allowed to speak freely and . . . if they do inadvertently offend . . . be allowed to apologize.

Indeed, they must be allowed to not apologize if they don’t think they did anything wrong . . . or even if they don’t care whether they did anything wrong . . . and even if the apology seems lame or insincere . . .

. . . while the rest of us should feel equally free to think they’re idiots.

It’s a free country.  Some of us, sometimes, ARE idiots.  And people can disagree over who’s an idiot and who’s not.

(Best, of course, would be for the offenders to explain why they don’t think they said anything hurtful — or why they don’t care that they did — and then to listen to the offended party.  In at least a few cases, better understanding might be reached on both sides.)

And we should have given examples:

STATUES — It’s woke to remove those that glorify men who led the fight for slavery; over-woke to advocate removing statues of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence.

PRONOUNS — Woke to respect the wishes of all who feel the need to specify theirs (though the grammarian in me chokes at calling a single person “them”); over-woke to implicitly pressure the rest of us to specify ours in solidarity.

TRIGGER WORDS — I may need further education on this one (I’m old) but am I really not allowed to say, “Shoot for the stars, kids!” or “Shoot! I forgot my phone charger!”  Really?

Three more:

DEFUND THE POLICE — No Democratic candidate advocated literally doing it (voters of both parties saw the need for improvement and welcomed, for example, the widespread adoption of body cams that resulted).  But the over-woke slogan itself, while well-intentioned, was a gift to Republicans.

$5 MILLION PER PERSON REPARATIONS — No Democratic candidate supported this either; but the over-woke proposal was itself a gift to the party of White Christian Nationalism.

CANCEL CULTURE — Political correctness, especially on college campuses, has gone way too far — and we should be decrying that just as loudly as our Republican friends are.

Older readers will understand when I say: we badly needed some Sister Soulja moments this past year.  With them, we might well have won the trifecta that the other team narrowly did. 

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE ELEPHANT IN THE BATHROOM

Most Americans don’t know a lot of trans people.  It’s easy to fear — even to despise — what you don’t know.

Just as Republicans for decades exploited homophobia, now they’ve found fertile ground to exploit fear of trans people.*  And Anti-Trans Ads Were A Key Trump Strategy.  (Click that link for details.)

Until more of us get to know trans people that strategy will have legs.

Americans could do a lot worse than getting to know these two:

Take 7 minutes to watch Congresswoman Sarah McBride on last week’s “Face the Nation.”  

Or 2 to watch the “Will & Harper” trailer.

It’s really hard for anyone, I think, to fear or loathe Sarah or Harper.  A certain lingering discomfort?  Sure — maybe.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  But the more people come to know wonderful trans people like these (or my friend Martine Rothblatt, whose work may one day save their children’s lives), the less potent Republican anti-trans ads — and legislation — will be.

Which is one reason it’s so great Sarah will soon take her seat in Congress.

And so great, I think, that Republicans have over-reached by making a big deal out of where she should go to the bathroom.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has forbidden her to go the ladies’ room.  And presumably, male Republicans won’t be thrilled sharing their men’s rooms with her — so is the idea that she shouldn’t be allowed to go to any public bathroom?

It reminds one of this must-see scene in “Hidden Figures” (2 minutes) where the brilliant NASA mathematician . . . well, just watch.

That was America not so long ago.

If today’s Republican idea is that all Americans must, by law, use only the bathroom that corresponds to the genitals of their birth, how will we enforce this?  With medical examiners outside every public bathroom?  Randomized spot checks?

Will fines be imposed by the bathroom police?  Prison sentences for repeat offenses?  Will we be required to present birth certificates every time we need to pee?

Or will we just grow up?

Is not the common-sense solution simply for people who are uncomfortable in a particular restroom simply to leave as quickly as they can?  Or if they see someone scary entering the restroom ahead of them, simply to delay their own entry until the scary person comes out?  Or use the restroom one flight down?

It’s not perfect — but what is there about public restrooms that is?

In short, why make “a federal case” out of this (which, to her credit, Congresswoman-elect McBride has not done).

Likewise, gender and sports.

Why is that a federal case?  Is it not best left to the common sense of coaches to determine who can compete with whom?

Why not leave it to, say, the NCAA, whose thinking on the issue you can read here: Understanding the NCAA: Transgender Student-Athlete Participation Policy (but will find nowhere referenced in the 30,000 TV spots Republicans ran targeting football fans in advance of the election).

And while we’re at it, gender issues aside, how about other physical advantages and disadvantages?  Can a 180-pound 16-year-old be allowed to compete against 12-year-olds?  How about a 150-pound 15-year-old?  Where do you draw the line?  Is the United States Congress the best place to decide this?  Or the state legislature?  Why not leave it to the coaches — and resign ourselves to the fact that nothing is perfect or ever will be.

In the meantime, what should Democrats say and do?

I’m with Seth Moulton, the Democratic Massachusetts Congressman widely criticized within his own party for saying recently that our approach to trans issues should allow for honest discussion and nuance.

We need to show we understand people’s concerns and do our best to allay them — not cancel them for being fearful for their daughters’ safety or for being less woke than we.

The bottom line, argues Anand Giridhara: “Wokeness is good, actually. But we need a plan for the still-waking.”

 

*Happily, after literally decades of struggle, most Americans — not all — have come to know, and often to like, friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers, and classmates who happen to be gay.  Or bi- or lesbian.  Today, most Americans don’t care that an openly gay man runs the most valuable company in the world or that Trump’s Treasury Secretary-designate has a husband.  Most would get a kick out of having Ellen DeGeneres or Martina Navratilova, or the lesbian governors of Massachusetts and Oregon, over for dinner.