Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

I was promised a recession.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

John Fetterman: Too Manly for Pennsylvania.  Paid for by the Oz for Senator campaign.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

T R E 4 5 O N

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

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Listen To Someone Who Knows Something About The Shitgibbon’s Mentor

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Masha Gessen knows from vicious fascist dictators.  Here’s what she has to say under the headline “Autocracy: Rules for Survival“:

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says….

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.…

[See Betty’s post below]

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you….

Rule #4: Be outraged…

Rule #5: Don’t make compromises…

Rule #6: Remember the future….

ozymandias_collossus-_ramesseum_luxor_egypt

This is one of those read-the-whole-thing deals.  Masha has lived what she’s talking about here.  I have had the good fortune to spend some evenings talking with her, and she is at once one of the sharpest, most un-bull-shit-able political thinkers I know and among the most courageous people I’ve ever met.

If you don’t have time, or, like me, have only a finite tolerance for looking straight at the beast looking back at us, here’s the short form, as stated in Rule 4:

If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.

That leads to the logic of Rule 6:

Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.

I expect we will lose most battles for years to come. Perhaps all of them.  ETA: Fuck that noise.  The comments below decrying defeatism are right.  We’re going to win a bunch.  Not everything, and people will get hurt, badly.  But Republicans are already over reaching.  They’re fuck-ups and we’ll be able to take advantage of the openings they provide.  See this from David Cole for a little hope.  Which is why I keep coming back to Masha’s conclusion — say no, and keep on saying it — and see it as a pocket-guide-for-the-perplexed.

I’ve more to say, as I think towards what specific forms my resistance may take, but none of that’s really formed yet, beyond giving some money to some of the most obvious targets.  More later.  In the meantime, what Gessen says:  Trump will not last forever, and resistance is many things — but not futile.

Image: the Ozymandias Colossus — Raames II, mistakenly identified as the mythical king Ozymandias.  This ruin inspired Percy Bysshe Shelly to write this.

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He’s Got the Electrolytes We Need

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With little commentary, I present this, Del. Azinger (R-Wood County), explaining why he voted for the WV RFRA pro-bigotry bill:

I got nothing. Well, this:

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How the Party Decides

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From TPM:

Staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee are looking into whether Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) disclosed classified information during the debate, according to the committee chair.

From Marcy Wheeler:

Richard Burr has apparently stated publicly that he’s looking into not Marco Rubio’s serial leaking of classified information, but Ted Cruz’s alleged disclosure of classified information at least night’s debate. That’s particularly curious given that Rubio has gotten privileged access to this information on the Senate Intelligence Committee, whereas Cruz has not

Our very own Tom:

I think as an interested lay observer, that the Party Decides framework is pretty useful way at looking at presidential primaries. And if that basic thesis is true, this is a shining example of how the Party decides. One candidate gets a pass, while the other candidate gets called out and has a bad media cycle or three with minimal party support to validate their bona fides.

If this is the case, then I am trying to figure out the bet. The first part of the bet is simple. Rubio is a favored candidate for the Establishment as everyone in DC thinks Cruz is an asshole. The second part is where I am a bit lost. Is the optimal outcome Trump v Rubio instead of Cruz v. Rubio? It looks like Trump, Cruz, Carson and Fiorina are attractive to one cluster of voters while Rubio and other establishment hopes are attractive to a different set. In the initial knock-out stages, I don’t think there are too many voters in either cluster group whose next best choice is in the other cluster. Is the bet that if the nihilist cluster condenses down to Trump and Trump alone, he’ll max out at 40%?

Still trying to figure this one out.

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A Cynical Game

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These people are just despicable:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is the latest presidential candidate trying to downplay the role anti-abortion rhetoric may have played in motivating the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs Friday afternoon. When a reporter asked him at an Iowa campaign stop Sunday evening about suspect Robert Lewis Dear saying he was motivated by “no more baby parts,” Cruz countered that he’s also been reported to be a “transgendered [sic] leftist activist.”

Cruz explained, “We know that he was a man registered to vote as a woman.” This discrepancy on Dear’s voter registration was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, a self-described “right-of-center news website,” under the claim that he “identifies as [a] woman.” Conservatives have since run with the claim that Dear is transgender.

There is actually no evidence to suggest that he is transgender, nor a “leftist,” nor any kind of activist. In fact, all of the available information suggests he was none of those things.

It doesn’t matter if this is true or not. Not one bit. What matters is Cruz said it, that the idiots in the GOP base will repeat it, and in the minds of wingnuttia, it will just become the received view. See also “Liberal Fascism.”

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Split the party in two and win with the bigger half

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Just a quick  comment on a recent Vox article:

But in a head-to-head matchup among Republican voters, Trump beats Rubio 57-43. That suggests that Trump’s ceiling, at least among Republicans, is far above his current 25 to 30 percent, and he may well benefit as weaker candidates drop out.

This actually makes sense given the current polling that we have seen in the Republican race.  For most of the year, if you add up the combined polled support of Trump, Carson and Fiorina plus attribute some proportion of Ted Cruz’s vote as extraordinarily anti-Republican establishment vote, this faction is the dominant faction within the Republican primary electorate.  The sum of Trump, Carson, Fiorina often is over 50% and usually closer to 60%.  The favored Establishment candidates (Bush, Walker, Kasich, Christie, Rubio) have either dropped out, or combined can poll less then a quarter of the Republican primary electorate.

Primaries often see large swings as the differences between candidates are not stark.  However it is easier for a person to switch support to a candidate who is running in the same cluster as the candidate that the person is switching support from, than for support to go to a candidate in a distant cluster.  The anti-establishment lane in the GOP primary is bigger than the establishment, and one of the candidates can’t be pushed aside due to a lack of funds.

So when the question and answer space collapses to only a single establishment and a single non-establishment choice, people gravitate towards their closest option from their current preferred option. That means Trump is picking up all of his current support and the vast majority of the supporters of the other anti-establishment candidates while Rubio consolidates everyone else.  And one faction right now is much bigger than the other.

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KY and lies

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Earlier in the week, the Washington Post highlighted the story of a Kentucky voter who is on expanded Medicaid with a high cost condition and who voted for Matt Bevin who had been running on rolling back Medicaid expansion.  Quite a few liberal blogs tsk-tsk poorer Kentucky voters for voting against their direct interest.  I think there is a bit more sympathetic and cynical way to look at their decision process.

Dennis Blackburn has this splintered self-interest. The 56-year-old mechanic hasn’t worked in 18 months, since he lost his job at a tire company that supplies a diminishing number of local coal mines….

He has a hereditary liver disorder, numbness in his hands and legs, back pain from folding his 6-foot-1-inch frame into 29-inch mine shafts as a young man, plus an abnormal heart rhythm — the likely vestige of having been struck by lightning 15 years ago in his tin-roofed farmhouse….

On Election Day, Blackburn voted for Bevin because he is tired of career politicians and thought a businessman would be more apt to create the jobs that Pike County so needs. Yet when it comes to the state’s expansion of health insurance, “it doesn’t look to me as if he understands,” Blackburn said. “Without this little bit of help these people are giving me, I could probably die. . . . It’s not right to not understand something but want to stamp it out.”

They know that it is very likely that they are being lied to on major Tea Party policy planks and accept that.

Anne Laurie in this morning’s open thread is highlighting another Washington Post article that has an excellent analysis of the Republican base by Republican governor Nikki Haley:

“You have a lot of people who were told that if we got a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate, then life was gonna be great,” she said in an interview Thursday. “What you’re seeing is that people are angry. Where’s the change? Why aren’t there bills on the president’s desk every day for him to veto? They’re saying, ‘Look, what you said would happen didn’t happen, so we’re going to go with anyone who hasn’t been elected.’ ”

The Republican base voters are used to getting lied to on major policy planks.  And in the Kentucky case, that looks probable to be true as well.  Kynect is highly likely to go away, but it will be replaced by a reasonably well functioning Healthcare.gov with minimal hassle besides people having to create new accounts.  Bevin has already started backtracking from his promise to take away Medicaid expansion from Kentucky residents.  Instead, he is promising to keep Medicaid expansion but make it slightly worse and slightly more convoluted with a 1115 waiver that has to be approved by the dreaded Obama administration.

If there is an implicit assumption by Republican leaning voters that Democrats are trying to pick off with tangible policy benefits that the Republican candidate is likely lying to the voters the policy wedge disappears.  From here,  Republican leaning voters can can rationally vote on other, social and cultural grounds.  The economic policy ground will be indistinguishable when implementation comes around.

And assuming Bevins does get a 1115 waiver passed, the election was not Medicaid expansion versus no Medicaid expansion but  Coal, God, Guns and Gays versus those damn hippies in Louisville looking down at Appalachia.

 

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What is step 2?

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Via Paul Krugman an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune about a guy with a business model that the Underpants Gnomes look at as incomplete:

Under Jonathan Johnson’s leadership at Overstock.com, the company has socked away $10.9 million in gold and silver and has a three-month food supply for each employee, bracing for a financial crisis that the Republican gubernatorial candidate said is certain to come…
“We expect when there is a financial crisis, there will be a banking holiday,” Johnson, Overstock chairman of the board, told the group. “I don’t know if it will be two days or two weeks or two months. But we have $10 million in gold and silver in denominations small enough … that we can use it for payroll. We want to be able to keep our employees paid [and] safe and our site up and running.”

My wife is the Overstock user in the Mayhew household, but as I understand it, Overstock.com is a fairly typical business to consumer web portal that sells things to people and then ships orders from warehouses to people via either the US Postal Service or a number of private entities. An extremely large percentage of Overstock’s payments from customers are made via credit cards over the web.

Is that an accurate enough description of their business process?

If it is, how does having a Smaugian hoard help Overstock keep their site up and running in a bank holiday scenario?

A bank holiday would only happen if there is extreme doubt about the liquidity of the entire US banking system. It would come as all private short term (1 to 30 day) lending either comes to a halt or has credit card level interest rates attached to it. It would be a massive breakdown of social trust and every single entity that can grab cash is going to hold onto cash for as long as legally (and usually illegally) possible as the lawyers can fight later over contract breaches.

So in that scenario, who is actually going to go on Overstock.com and buy an expandable three piece luggage set?  Sure, Overstock might give their ISP four pounds of gold to keep their connection on as their bank account would be frozen, but their ISP’s bank account would be frozen so the four pounds of gold would be insufficient to keep the ISP’s lights on (which are probably going off shortly anyways as the natural gas power plant is shutting down as their supply is not being delivered unless the power plant can supply physical cash in unmarked, non-sequential twenties instead of a line of credit).

How does having a gold hoard for an online retailer actually help that retailer stay open when the rest of the social and commercial network is shutting down due to the lack of credit?

 

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