Not that the recent catastrophes aren't daunting. The budget bill is insane, as are the lies they're telling to razzle-dazzle the rubes -- like that "nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits" (that's bullshit) and that there are no Medicaid cuts (also bullshit). And the expansion of ICE is clearly meant to elevate it from a Sturmabteilung to a Gestapo. I'm a little surprised that, when Tubby and his mob push their creepy "Alligator Alcatraz" propaganda with pictures of alligators wearing ICE hats, no one seems to notice that an alligator would as happily eat a MAGA chucklefuck as it would an immigrant.
Still recovering from surgery, I woke up late this morning to the smell of burning Constitution. I thought any decision on Trump v CASA less extreme than “14th Amendment is invalid if Dear Leader says so” would be a relief, but this one basically makes it incredibly hard to defend the rights guaranteed under that (I must emphasize) Constitutional Amendment if you live in one of America’s many MAGA fiefdoms. And, as has been pointed out, it also remains to be seen whether a citizen of a blue state will still be treated as a citizen when crossing a red state line – or whether they can be snatched by Tubby’s goon squads and sent to a foreign torture camp if they do.
This has to be fixed and I don’t mean stern letters from Chuck Schumer. Democrats absolutely have to yeet all their centrists into the sea (start with Chuck and fucking Gillibrand) and go whole hog for programs that were once thought radical, including and especially expanding the Court – because otherwise what’s the point in running for office: Who will vote for a candidate who admits up front that the policies they’re running on, and that their constituents want, can just be invalidated by six appointed fascists?
Well, let us hope you and I are not the only ones who get it. I know a lot of New York Democrats are getting it – how ‘bout that Zohran? Your Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie this week, building on a related alicublog post, is my consideration of Mamdani's primary victory and the meaning of it. The scumbags currently trying to derail him on his way to Gracie Mansion -- not just the out racist creeps, but also the New York Times and other Prestige Press outlets -- are not just opposing a candidate; they’re opposing the whole idea that anything can possibly get better. But on the contrary: Most of us know, and more are leaning every day, that things can’t possibly stay the same. How’s that for hope? Well, for now it’ll have to do.
Regular readers know I lived most of my life in New York and love it in the bittersweet way of exile. So the mayoral primary victory of Zohran Mamdani delights me. One reason is that he has been opposed by the worst people alive – not just rich fucks in the city, but also reactionaries across the country and even around the world, as seen in Rod Dreher’s dispatch from whatever European foodie tour he’s presently on.
Dreher claims that “the parts of the city that voted Mamdani are the whitest, [and] those that voted Cuomo are, for the most part, the most non-white,” not because it portrays reality (Mamdani took Harlem, Lefferts Gardens, Fort Greene, Crown Heights, Cypress Hills for fuck’s sake – Cuomo took the Upper East Side by double digits!) but because “Liberals Are The Real Racists” is part of his shtick. Speaking of racism, as one always must when considering Dreher, the thing is titled “Mamdani's Big Apple Intifada,” and contains this:
New York City is home to about one million Jews, one of the largest concentrations of Jews on the planet. And the city has now, in effect, elected a mayor who embraces the slogan “globalize the intifada.”
Ah ha ha ha ha. Not only Dreher but the whole Prestige Press tried to make Mamdani’s support for the tormented Palestinians into a synonym for antisemitism, notwithstanding his considerable Jewish support, not least meaningfully from his fellow candidate Brad Lander (which of course Dreher does not acknowledge). So one of the beauties of this victory is that the ancient trick of conflating less-than-total support of Israeli foreign policy with the Holocaust looks less surefire than before. (Tubby’s and Netanyahu’s recent bombing spree may have helped there.) The boys at Commentary must be chewing the carpet.
They won’t learn. Will the Democrats? Mamdani’s program, as he eloquently lays it out, is hardly collectivist, and mostly common-sense reform for a city that’s been mugging the shit out of its poor and middle-class people and turning their money over to billionaires for decades. Like the man says, “there are far too many New Yorkers who do not know if they will be able to call themselves that next year, who do not know if they will be able to afford their rent, or their child care, their groceries, or even their MetroCard.” If you’re panicking over a rent freeze and free buses, you’re not on his side – nor on the side of the people who gave him victory, which used to be considered the core Democratic constituency, back before neoliberal trimmers turned politics into a game to see who can deliver the least for their constituents.
Much has been made of the sex pest angle — that voters (as opposed to pundits) were disinclined to forgive and forget the scandals that drove Cuomo from the statehouse. It makes some sense — Bill Clinton’s endorsement seems not to have helped Cuomo, and Anthony Weiner lost his comeback race too. It makes still more sense in context: these guys’ antique attitudes toward women are part and parcel of their whole moldy worldview. People are catching on and I’m beginning to think that all the stupid Democratic rearguard sabotage, with elderly timeservers driving out or squelching their best young talent, is not in fact the insurmountable obstacle it sometime appears, but one that’s now starting to crumble.
The Spanish guys working on the building down the street played this. They know what's good.
I'll be less attentive to the collapse of the Republic over the next week because I'm having surgery. Prospects are good but if it all goes south, best of luck and see you on the other side.
When I say this, you may read my meaning to be, “The subways are fine if you are brave,” or “Riding the subway is a character-building because it teaches you to be tough.” No. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the subway is fine. It is not scary. It is the standard mode of transportation for millions of New Yorkers. Six million rides a day. Let me try to put it in terms that a non-New Yorker can understand. “I am scared of riding the Google shuttle bus to my job at Google.” “I am scared of riding the Epcot monorail.” See how crazy that sounds? Same basic thing.
As you know I've been beating this drum for years: Conservatives use fake horror stories about city life to promote fear and hatred of cities as a political tool. I love pushing back on it, not only because it's a lie but also because I'm convinced it's fast becoming a losing proposition -- most Americans live in metro areas, for Chrissakes! And even the Los Angeles invasion -- a classic "strafe a few city blocks with tear gas and rubber bullets and then blame liberalism" con job -- seems not to be as popular as Tubby and his goons assumed. I'm with this guy in general:
We're not (just) fighting a deformed political philosophy. We're fighting bullshit. Standing for truth isn't a chore!
Used to worry on Friday the 13th but we’re not feeling too lucky anyhow; every week it seems Tubby’s mob pushes a little harder against the foundations of democracy. There are a few things about the goons tackling U.S. Senator Alex Padilla that seem significant (besides the obvious, I mean). Least of these is Secretary Noem lying that she didn’t know who he was – like her whole mob, she lies all the time, reflexively, and her lies of late have reached a level of stark-mad ravings (“millions of people are in Los Angeles illegally’) that would embarrass a street preacher:
Also, I think about the recent arrest in Newark of Mayor Ras Baraka and the indictment of Rep. Monica McIver for the crime of conducting Congressional oversight of ICE facilities. Now we have a Hispanic Senator roughed up by fed thugs for questioning the DHS Secretary. Maybe these creeps have decided it’s easy to put over if the public officials they attack aren’t white. (I'm reminded of Rudy Giuliani's police riot in 1992, and the cop saying about about Una Clarke, "This n****r says she’s a member of the city council.”)
But as usual it’s mainly the fascism. Back in September I said of Tubby’s mob: I say they're Nazis and I say to hell with it. I was motivated then by the tiresome hair-splitting over whether they were fascists or not – a discussion that seems to have ceased, as no one besides MAGA apparatchiks and Matthew Yglesias is denying it now.
At this point, however, I’m inclined to call them Nazis because that’s clearly what they’re going for. These aren’t guys who pore over Carl Schmitt and Giovanni Gentile and argue theory – no, their actions are inspired by gut-level appreciation of, and patterned after, the kind of high-profile Nazi actions you don’t need scholarly help to comprehend -- the Beer Hall Putsch, the Reichstag Fire, promotion of Dolchstoßlegende, and the dehumanization of low-status social groups via the proto-Fox News, Der Stürmer.
Like, do you have any pals who get a little too excited about the exploits of the Wehrmacht? Same thing, only suffused with ambition and power. Their approach is pure monkey see, monkey do. They like what the Nazis did, and what it achieved, and are convinced that they can get further with the same shtick because there’s no United States to stop them since they’ve taken it over. When someone shows you who they are, etc.
Plus here’s this week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – based on earlier outrages, in fact pre-cognizant of them because I did the things before they got even worse! For example, based on ABC News suspending Terry Moran for saying something too, too hurtful about Stephen Miller (speaking of Nazis): BOLT UPRIGHT AND THE RECEIVED OPINION DECISION DESK ARE ON IT! (Later ABC fired Moran.) Also too, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. firing all the CDC vaccine advisors because they were too mobbed up with Big Science (i.e., science) -- I imagined the replacements and was not too far off!
I know everyone’s enjoying the TrumpMusk drama, and I hate to find myself on the side of the squares, but I have to say experience has taught me that, except when these Trump episodes are actually lethal – either to human life, the Constitution, or both – they seldom work out the way we would hope in terms of swaying the voter. Remember Tubby Term I, when he fired people left and right and “Scaramucci” became a unit of time? And how no one gave a shit? Now look – where back in the first term the “Muslim Ban” generated some negative publicity, he just put in an even bigger one and the Prestige Press can hardly be made to notice.
But the PP loves drama, as you can see by the huge play this tweet-battle got on the front page of the New York Times. This is basically WWE Feud Tracker for nerds, and for voters who will look at the journalistic real estate and figure, huh, so this is what I’m supposed to pay attention to, I’ll make space accordingly – guess that guy in El Salvador died or something?
I will add: Beating up on Musk is a proven winner for the Democrats – it has tanked his brand and his stock and made him genuinely toxic with everyone but the freakish incels who make up his base. The idea that talking up Trump as Musk’s foe will be useful to anyone but these two professional con artists who are experts at – yes, I’ll say it – kayfabe is absurd.
OK, the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies (and once again, subscribe why don’t’cha, it lasts longer): First, a scene-we’d-like-to-see from the WelcomeFest. That huge collection of dweebs, dorks, and trimmer dipshits got a lot of publicity by telling America that what he world wants from the opposition is the Democratic Leadership Conference ca. 1992, but not as liberal, and beating up trans people instead of Sistah Souljah. In the early 90s, after two terms of Reagan, this mistake was almost forgivable – though how much better our politics would have been had the Dems chosen to stand on its traditional values rather than triangulation! To try it now in Tubby Term II, which promises to be even more of a disaster than the first, is just ridiculous.
PS Oh yeah, Washington Post: Since "to DOGE" basically means to slash public services without any attention to whether they're needed or not, all DOGE firings will be of "too many people."
You know what, I don't listen to enough Betty Wright.
In addition to serving as the conscience of the nation I have a day job, so it’s nice to get an extra day off. (If you don’t have this privilege, condolences and smash the state!) I will briefly fulfill my Friday duty (with Roy Edroso Breaks It Down FREEBIES!) and take my leave.
First unlocked item from my paid newsletter (and by “paid” I mean cheap at the price, why not subscribe) is my consideration of Kristi Noem’s Magna Carta mouth-fart in a Senate hearing and what it means about MAGA. Now, I know the whole Trump thing can lead to overthinking – the bottom line is he’s a con man who scored big, and he muscles people and institutions for three reasons: 1.) to shake them down for cash; 2.) to distract his rubes from this robbery with a Principled Stand Against Wokeness, i.e. cruelty against women and minorities; and 3.) to keep the cowards too scared to stop him.
We could just leave it at that! But I think it’s worthwhile to examine how and why he gets his goons in the cabinet to do his advance work. No one in the Senate is intimidated or confused by Noem pretending shit is sugarcandy. Rather, the domination/humiliation ritual is meant to show his power to the rest of us, like Claire Zachanassian parading the castrates Koby and Loby in Dürrenmatt’s The Visit.
But never mind that and the crimes it’s meant to cover — did you know that Joe Biden is old? And, even more scandalously for the Democrats, that the ex-President is sick? If you wonder why anyone gives a shit except to wish him well, you must be missing the Prestige Press’ counterintuitive coverage – take it away, Bolt Upright and the Decision Desk on Received Opinion! Or you could just put “Biden” “Cancer,” and “Jake Tapper” in Google News and see what you get:
Murrow wept. Meanwhile the Medicare, Medicaid, and Everything-Else-slashing budget bill is headed to the Senate, where it will be no doubt loaded with bells and whistles to disguise its destructiveness and then dropped on the unlucky non-millionaire population as the rich collect their winnings. As mentioned last week, the press has done its part on the oligarchs’ behalf. Here’s a honey from today’s Wall Street Journal:
How the Senate Can Improve the House Tax and Budget Bill
Reduce tax carve-outs like SALT and do more to reduce spending and form Medicaid.
“Form” Medicaid? That’s a new one. Maybe they mean "formaldehyde."
The bill’s tax and Medicaid provisions are absorbing media oxygen, but there are brighter spots elsewhere.
Ha ha, if you give a shit about paupers they suppose you can read further down:
Elsewhere, the policy potpourri is disappointing. On Medicaid, Chip Roy and other conservatives were able to move up the work requirement to 2026 from 2029. But House Republicans couldn’t find the courage to fix Medicaid’s core dysfunction, which is that the feds pay a larger share of the cost for covering able-bodied adults than for pregnant women.
These fuckers will never get over their outrage that some waster who’s able-bodied enough to bend over and pick up a cigar butt might get some free medical care. Speaking of which, the bill sticks a knife in the ACA’s Medicaid expansion -- here’s what the plutes think about that:
The House did add a late provision allowing certain higher payment rates for states that have declined the ObamaCare bribe to expand Medicaid. The hope is that the fillip, plus the bill’s attempt to crack down on state Medicaid financing scams, will dissuade the 10 state holdouts from taking the cash bait.
They haven’t been able to kill guaranteed issue and essential health benefits quite yet, but at least they’ll kill some poor people, and that’ll tide them over emotionally until Tubby can finally vaporize Congress and end this whole “last best hope of earth” bullshit for good. Happy Memorial Day!
One of the problems with missing my customary Friday 'R-T-H filing is, so much weird stuff comes over the transom between Friday and the day I do manage to post that it seems out of date. But I will do what I can to make it daisy-fresh.
There was plenty strangeness in the week that was the provender of my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions -- for example (yes, joy-poppers, there are links to FREE editions tucked into this post!) we had Tubby's Bribeplane and the Prestige Press' strange tendency to explain it away, as if they were aware that every man, woman, and child over the age of reason could see the Qataris were paying off our famously avaricious president for services expected, and felt it was the duty of the newly re-imagined Fourth Estate to take, in fairness, the other, unbelievable side.
One obvious reason is cowardice: ABC News' mild hints in their coverage that 2+2=bribery got Trump to threaten to extort them again, like he did in January, leading to the Stephanopoulos settlement. But it looks more and more as if the Prestige Press simply sees this as their job now, leaving it to brave newsletter editors such as myself to expose them in satire which as we all know is where all real change comes from. (Look how Swift settled the Irish question!)
But since then the news has been even more full of nonsense, none more nonsensical than the flipout over 86 47. As a former food service worker I can say with confidence this is the stupidest goddamn shit of all time. Sometime I will have to spell it out in a few detailed paragraphs for future generations (if we have any) who may not understand the context, but I think nearly all people who are currently conscious and able to read, write and cipher already know how stupid it is, though some shitheels pretend not to, in hopes that other people, depraved by long fealty to Tubby, with rise up ravening at this latest rage-cue and frighten folks away from criticizing Der Fätso lest they incur their wrath.
My hands were made out of silver/ But they were looking for gold
Another wild week, this one with a Pope in it, an American at that! I hardly need rehearse all the insane rightwing ravings that have ensued because the new Pontiff Leo XIV follows, as Popes are wont to do, the example of Christ -- you can find many such ravings here. It's been fun, but be not deceived -- Leo will not hasten the glorious workers' revolution any more than Francis did -- he's just likely to be less horrible than what the worst people in the world would wish, which is pretty much the best Americans have been able to expect for about sixty years now.
"I'm a traditionalist going back to 2002," said Dougherty. "We tend to have almost an anti-clerical strain in us and a jaundiced eye when it comes to the senior prelates of the church." Given recent history, he said, he has "always been filled with fear and trepidation that they'll elect a progressive that will ban the Latin Mass."
While many others viewed the impending announcement with joy and anticipation, Dougherty said he was "sitting there tapping my foot and nervous, pacing around." He added, "In 2005, when Ratzinger was announced and he was the only one I could have imagined being a friend of our movement, then, you know, I literally began crying tears of joy, I was so relieved," said Dougherty. But "when Francis was elected, it was pure dread and sorrow."
You know, if I were an adherent of a sect whose leader is supposed to be Christ's emissary on Earth and infallible, I wouldn't sweat these things so much.
Here in the non-Papal States our leaders are not only not infallible but also shit. Just today we see Tubby's idiot lawyer promoted to idiot U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba got masked goons -- "ICE" I guess, though the credentials for these pigs are not evident -- to seize Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for daring to appear at their local privatized insta-prison to demand that they follow local laws. Baraka is also the son of the poet Amiri Baraka, and if you're seeing portents in this happening as Trump welcomes South African Boers into the country as "refugees" we're on the same page. (I wonder where he'll put them? Probably out in the White Open Spaces, though maybe someone in the regime has enough sense of humor to drop some in West Baltimore.)
Normally I'd say I'm pretty sure the press secretary doesn't think the Library of Congress has a children's reading room, but frankly they lie so readily that I have to assume she doesn't know or care to know the difference between truth and lies, or between the believable and the ridiculous.
I seldom post outside of Friday-'Round-the-Horn weekly summaries anymore -- subscribe to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down for daily doses! -- but I figured I owe this one to history.
Ross Douthat interviews some neo-Nazi crap diffuser for the New York Times and it's absolutely surreal -- not least (though not mostly!) when the diffuser, Jonathan Keeperman, posits Douthat's more fash-friendly side as "Italics Ross" and they have what to them must be a thoroughly enjoyable chin-wag (I just read the transcript, no way I'm listening to these guys giggle and snort) but for any neutral eavesdropper would be a hard cue to change seats:
[Keeperman:] I do want to point out that in 2020, when we first were having this dialogue and debate over the election, you also had something of a pseudonym. I was arguing as much with Ross Douthat as I was with Italics Ross. As Italics Ross, you had written at least one column, maybe two, in which you made the case for why Trump might be a superior choice to lead the country, despite the amount of chaos that we’d have to endure under his leadership.
I was trying — if I remember the whole episode correctly — to get Italics Ross closer to the surface of the real Ross, the underlying Ross. We all are trafficking in certain kinds of multi-identities, I guess.
Douthat: Those were columns that I wrote where I essentially deliberately cultivated a kind of split personality and drew up out of my Jungian subconscious a version of myself that would be pro-Trump.
Keeperman: Right.
Douthat: I was never for Trump. I was part of “Never Trump” — whatever that may have been way back in the past — and I retained a basic view that it was a mistake for conservatives to lash themselves to the Trump phenomenon.
For me, Italics Ross was not the true Ross lurking below the surface. That wasn’t how I thought about it. I thought about it as a set of ideas that certainly existed in my consciousness and that were really useful for understanding where American culture was and why people supported Trump, and which New York Times readers needed to engage with.
Attributing paranoid schizophrenia to the "Jungian subconscious" and "multi-identities" seems like a dodge to me, but this is in the Times so I guess it's consensus reality now.
Anyway they get into Whither Conservative Art and it's every bit the cystoscopy you might imagine, but I must draw your attention this bit:
Douthat: What is the coding? To a listener for whom it seems absurd to call “No Country for Old Men” right wing, what makes that right wing to you?
Keeperman: Because I like it, it’s good, and therefore I want it to share my political preferences.
No need to bother with the ensuing discussion of what makes choc-o-mut ice creams and other neat junk conservative -- it has to do with "vitality," the boys say, whereupon they are docked a few more points for not calling it "purity of essence" instead. Also they get into to the old rightwing trope about Lena Dunham's "Girls" being conservative because the eponymous characters were whores who would never know God. We marvel these days at the absolute screaming lunatics like RFK Jr. who infest Tubby's cabinet, but it's instructive to be reminded that the madness really started in the meth labs of conservative journalism.
