Category Politics

There you go again

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…we believed that after repeated clear demonstrations of the knowing falsity and deliberate deceptive intent of a politician’s claims, most Americans would grow tired of that politician’s attempts to mislead – and the implicit lack of respect for the voters that those attempts show – and they would turn their backs on the liar.  It was a more innocent time, one in which we never imagined that the lie was what so many Americans really wanted to believe.

Today, the official presidential firehose of lies was re-opened.  And the lies came so quickly, one false statement after another serving as bogus premises upon which to build an even bigger lie.  A performance by surely the most treacherous, perfidious president in American history, living down to a standard he himself established and which no one (I hope!) will ever challenge.

Our friends at PolitiFact live fact-checked the inaugural address, and found among other things:

–Trump made the case for his plan to enact tariffs: “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

Our reporting has found that most economists disagree tariffs will “enrich” Americans, and real-world examples of tariffs working that way are rare. Consumers in the tariff-levying country are on the losing end of the deals through higher prices, they said.

–Trump criticized the Biden administration’s response to natural disasters, including Hurricane Helene in North Carolina in 2024 and the Los Angeles fires that started this month.

“Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency, as recently shown by the wonderful people of North Carolina,” referring to Hurricane Helene, Trump said. Trump added, “or more recently, Los Angeles, where we are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago without even a token of defense.”

The Biden administration provided federal funding for both disasters.

–Trump repeated the campaign claim that people “from prisons and mental institutions … illegally entered our country from all over the world.”

Pants on Fire. There is no evidence that countries are emptying their prisons, or that mental institutions are sending people to illegally migrate to the U.S.

–Trump, who repeated his goal of taking back control of the Panama Canal, misled about the canal’s operations.

“And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal,” Trump said.

That’s false.

The Republic of Panama has owned and administered the Panama Canal since Dec. 31, 1999, when Panama took over full operation.

Panama Canal Authority, an autonomous government entity, governed by an 11-member board of directors manages the waterway.

China does have influence in the canal.Three defense experts who carried out fieldwork in Panama — Carla Martinez Machain of the University at Buffalo, Michael A. Allen of Boise State University and Michael E. Flynn of Kansas State University — wrote in a Jan. 13 article that Trump’s Dec. 25 claim that Chinese soldiers are operating the canal was false. However, the experts wrote that Chinese companies do have a stake in the waterway.

Check out the site for more, including something I just discovered: the MAGA-Meter, where they plan to concentrate research on the new Administration’s progress in keeping campaign promises.  PolitiFact, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker and CNN’s Daniel Dale have led the charge to hold Trump to account; I applaud their work, and refer to them regularly.

But even their effort to relentlessly chronicle what is and is not true wasn’t enough to get the scales to fall from the eyes of enough Americans to prevent this new assault on truth.  OK, America, don’t say you weren’t warned.  We are about to get what we asked for.

EDITOR’S NOTE: And as my gift, this free link to the Washington Post’s fact check on the second Trump inaugural.  (Hint, it finds even more of what you’d expect!)

In the matter of the new-but-same-old president, I have a few thoughts; let the sharing begin

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Presidential inaugurations are historic moments. I watch them all, even when it is a president I didn’t vote for, and I’ll watch this one, too. Here are a few things I’ll be thinking about.

The man who will take the oath of office as president of the United States this Monday has the support of only one-third of Americans who were eligible to vote in the last election.  The other two-thirds either voted for someone else (most of them for Kamala Harris) or didn’t vote at all.  According to data gathered by the University of Florida Election Lab, and neatly organized for even easier reading here on Wikipedia, the 156.3 million Americans who voted in November are less than 64% of all those Americans who were eligible to vote in that election.  The majority of citizens who did cast ballots, 77.3 million, voted for Donald Trump; that number of people is only 31.59% of the Americans who were eligible to vote in that election.  To Trump’s credit, there have been only three winners of presidential elections since 1980 (the period covered by this research) who got a higher percentage of votes from among all those eligible: Joe Biden in 2020 (33.78%, from 81.2 million voters), Barack Obama in 2008 (32.58%, 69.4 million votes) and Ronald Reagan in 1984 (32.47%, 54.4 million voters).

The hardest truth, I think, is this: 88.3 million Americans who were eligible to vote…didn’t.  Put another way, of those who had the right and privilege to participate in their own governance, 36% did not…either could not vote for some reason, or could not be bothered to.  That’s more than who voted for Trump, more than who voted for Harris.  Even though that is still the second-best participation rate in the period studied, trailing only the 2020 election.

Some of the youngest folks who voted this past November would have been as young as 10 when Trump was elected the first time, so they wouldn’t have been paying attention to the 2016 campaign or maybe remember some of those highlights. I found this handy reminder list on Twitter, and share it here as a public service.

Although the announcement came from TFG (now meaning “the felon guy” rather than “the former guy”), I do not believe for one instant that the man who eight years ago lied about the crowd size at his first inauguration to protect his fragile ego is the same guy who now made the very sensible decision to bring this year’s ceremony indoors to protect people from the cold.  In fact it is the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies which plans and executes these events, and I can completely see it not taking public credit for this choice so as not to be seen as bigfooting an incoming president, especially this one.  I’m not buying that the guy who four years ago encouraged Americans to risk their safety to commit violence at the Capitol as part of his attempt to overturn an election is the same guy who is looking out for others when he says “I don’t want to see people hurt, or injured, in any way. It is dangerous conditions for the tens of thousands of Law Enforcement, First Responders, Police K9s and even horses, and hundreds of thousands of supporters that will be outside for many hours on the 20th”.  Also, I think it should be “it will be dangerous conditions” rather than it is.  And also just by the way, who taught this nitwit the rules of capitalization?

— George Conway (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-01-17T18:54:25.940Z

It was disheartening to see the tenuous relationship with the concept of “truth” exhibited by some of the Trump Cabinet nominees during confirmation hearings.  To be fair, Republicans and Democrats are just as adept as MAGA persons are when it comes to the kabuki dance of non-answer answers to pointed questions, finding it a preferred alternative to perjury.  I accept the validity of politely refusing to provide a speculative answer to a hypothetical, or for judicial nominees to refuse to express an opinion about a case that might come before them some day.  But to say, for example, that some of Pam Bondi’s responses strained credulity is to really streeeetch the definition of “strained.”  Am I really expected to believe that Bondi did not/does not know certain facts of life, as reported by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

  • Did she hear Donald Trump’s telephone call to Georgia’s secretary of state asking him to find more votes? No, she never listened to it.
  • Did she hear Trump’s comments about prosecuting Liz Cheney? She never heard that.
  • Does she know about Trump’s pledge to prosecute Jack Smith? She does not.
  • His threat to go after Merrick Garland? No idea.
  • What does she think of Kash Patel’s much-vaunted enemies list? Oh. Did he say that on TV?
  • Patel’s threats to shutter the FBI? She doesn’t know.
  • Pardons for those convicted for the Jan. 6 insurrection? She dare not judge a matter that may come before her.
  • And did Trump lose the 2020 election? Biden is the president.
  • No really, did Trump win the 2020 election? She saw some STUFF on the ground in Pennsylvania.You have NO idea.
  • What does she know beyond a shadow of a doubt? There was a “peaceful transition” after the 2020 election.

Or her flat-out refusal to acknowledge that a part of the law is in fact a part of the law:

Padilla: Will you defend birthright citizenship as the law of the land?Bondi: I will study birthright citizenshipPadilla: You're asking to be considered for Attorney General and you still need to study the 14th Amendment of the Constitution?

— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2025-01-15T18:29:45.201Z

I really wish that in cases like this senators would at least stand up for themselves and the prerogatives of the Senate even if they won’t call bullshit on behalf of their constituents or their country. Some day, when a nominee refuses to answer a direct question in these ways, I would love the senator to respond by saying “Thank you. The lack of candor displayed by your refusal to respond to my question, and your refusal to participate in this Constitutionally-mandated procedure in good faith, means I will not vote to confirm your nomination and I urge my colleagues to do the same. Thank you for coming.”

TikTok

— Nick Anderson – political cartoonist (@andertoon.bsky.social) 2025-01-17T22:16:24.157Z

Nothing but Bluesky from now on

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

So it’s late at night and I’m at the desktop computer bopping around the interwebs looking for entertaining but brief stories…nothing too dense, you know, I really ought to just go on to bed.  I was checking out Slate and hit this headline: “Sick of X and Elon Musk? This App Might Be for You.”  Since I am that, I read on and learned that there is a thing called Bluesky, which is currently making news for its growing popularity as an alternative to Twitter.  (I still call it Twitter, can’t help it.)

What, then, is Bluesky? Until this week, one could think of it as a small, clean lifeboat, sitting off to the side of a sinking cruise ship where most of the passengers also have norovirus.

For more than a year, Bluesky has been the boat for left-leaning Twitter refugees who were so fed up with Musk that they beat the masses in deciding not to stick around on his platform. That could have some echo-chamber effects, not that such an outcome was any worse than being surrounded by the most obnoxious people on the internet over on X. (For example, a critical mass of Bluesky users were a good ways behind the rest of the internet last summer in recognizing that Joe Biden had no chance of political survival after his last debate performance.) X has remained where most of the action happens, because it is where politicians, companies, the biggest media outlets, and their reporters still live. The discourse has steadily degraded there, but the power users have not fled en masse.

But while X has spiraled deeper into a racist fever dream and Threads has kept building its sunshine-pumping text app for influencers, Bluesky has been building.

So OK, I signed up to check it out, the same way I did with Twitter in 2008, when I initially resisted because I bought the criticism that Twitter was just a bunch of people telling other peoplebafkreickppry5djbfnkxqijqap3bvglmguqdkgicr3rdzcdciritdbqzxu what they had for lunch today.  You’d have thought I’d just fallen into The Time Tunnel: it all looked and felt like Twitter did back in the early days, but without the overtly annoying stuff including the incessant interruptions from Musk with some new misleading or downright false information.  The Washington Post says Bluesky is where liberals who are fleeing Twitter are going:

With Musk taking on a central advisory role to Trump’s administration after leveraging X and his personal fortune to boost Trump’s campaign, U.S. liberals and others disenchanted with the site are once again scurrying to friendlier pastures. This time, though, the primary beneficiary may not be Meta’s Threads, which is controlled by Musk’s fellow billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and has acquired 275 million users in just over a year, many of them X refugees.

Instead, the upstart social network Bluesky is surging. It has more than doubled in size in the past three months. And in the eight days since the election, it has added more than 1.25 million users, bringing its total to more than 15 million as it topped Apple’s App Store rankings on Wednesday. Of those, some 8.5 million have logged in within the past month, spokesperson Emily Liu said Wednesday.

That’s nowhere near the number of users on Twitter or Threads, not even close.  But I found that a lot of the people who I enjoyed following on Twitter are already on Bluesky, and a visit there doesn’t have the feel of the slog I get whenever I check out Twitter.  Which, I will say, has become less frequent in the last few months since I realized I shouldn’t subject myself to getting bogged down in the negativity I kept finding.  Alex Kirshner on Slate characterizes the vibe this way:

Bluesky does not trap users in nonchronological feeds. It gives people only what they ask for, and it does so in real time. It turns out that when a lot of people join the fray, that creates a feeling of controlled but wholesome chaos that resembles what Twitter felt like to some of its earlier addicts around, say, 2014 or 2015. I have been on Bluesky for more than a year but cannot claim to have dived into it in earnest until this past weekend, when I found its college football–watching crowd to be much more energetic and fun than what I had seen this fall on X.

Eventually, more power users should migrate, in part because Bluesky does not throttle access to their work in the way that X, Meta, and Google have so frequently done. There are no bought-and-paid-for blue check marks that flood the zone. Bluesky doesn’t go out of its way to deprioritize posts with links. It encourages members of the news and sports media to spend time there and bring along their audiences. As the journalist Matt Pearce put it: “​​Hard to describe as a journalist how grateful I am to have a text-based app that does not suppress hyperlinks. I don’t know if people realize exactly how hostile the corporate internet has gotten toward news.” In building a social media site that does not go out of its way to be unusable for people distributing news or trying to consume it, Bluesky has been an innovator.

The platform already works as a place where people enjoy spending time on the internet, with a more bespoke experience and less online sewage than they find on X. That will need to be its value proposition to win over more people in moments when Musk isn’t helping Donald Trump return to power or peeling away more features that once made Twitter popular.

(snip)

Bluesky is winning a segment of the internet not because it is ideological but because it is customizable, allowing people to take more control of their experience online. It has not displaced X as a hub for the formation of elite public opinion, but it could dent Musk’s monopoly on that kind of discussion if enough power users, politicians, and companies eventually move. For now, it is a nice place to hang out with pals on the internet, get news without being confused, and take a quick break from thinking about Elon Musk.

I recommend checking it out.  That light blue butterfly icon in the sidebar of this blog is a link to my feed on Bluesky; use it as a way in the door.

As the coach used to say each Monday, let’s talk a bit about the happenings of last week

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… (Been done.)

It was the worst night of my entire life… (Take it easy, Princess.)

What in the actual f**k were you people thinking… (Leave that approach to Jon Stewart.  How about this:)

I am very disappointed with the result of the presidential election, and I’m concerned about what’s going to happen starting next year.  (OK…keep going.)

It’s not that I was firmly convinced that Kamala Harris was going to win and am now staring at the returns in disbelief.  I definitely wanted her to win, but wasn’t deluded into thinking there was only one possible outcome.  I am bewildered to think that more than 73 million Americans think the former guy – now the once and future guy, I guess? – is the best person for the job.  Unless they really don’t think that at all.

Now I’m reading (see the reading list below, and thanks to everyone who kept this such a secret until after the whole thing was over) that Trump, as opposed to Harris or Joe Biden or apparently any other Republican, represents a dramatic change from a system that these people do not trust.  Strenuously do not trust.  The theory is that Trump voters don’t really agree with everything that comes out of his mouth; some things, sure, but not everything.  But they do want a major change from the status quo.  They want to throw out the scoundrels of the political establishment, and they trust that anything is better than what we have right now.  Even crazy, lying, fascist Trump is, they think, preferable to more of the same old same old.

While recognizing that all of us only have two real choices in this race by the time we get to November, I’m still surprised that so many people would vote for Trump.  A guy who lies to us so profoundly and so often, who is a convicted criminal, who has shamelessly used public office to enrich himself; who offers a plan to fight inflation and lower prices with tariffs that will undoubtedly raise prices instead, who promises to deport tens of millions of people in a plan that will be enormously expensive and disruptive to the labor force and economy as well as probably inhumane, who promises the unattainable instantly (end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza?  Easy peasy) with no clear plan of action.  Or any plan at all.

I’m worried about what’s going to happen next.  We were surprised in 2017 when he didn’t become more presidential or tone down the rhetoric or act more like what we were used to, but this time no one should be surprised if he does some of the out-there things he promised to do.

–he promised massive tariffs on foreign goods; we’ll all pay higher prices for those goods because the higher prices will be passed along to us by the seller.

–he promised (allegedly) vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. control of our public health agencies; yeah, what could go wrong there.

–he promised to jail his critics; First Amendment, Schmirst Amendment.  Stand by for other protected rights to be ignored.

–he promised the largest mass deportation in American history; waiting now for the (multi-million dollar) plans to construct a new generation of internment camps while he strong-arms our allies to accept repatriation.

–he promised to settle the wars in Gaza and Ukraine; stand by for “America First” plans that will provoke Iran, threaten Ukraine’s sovereignty (to the benefit of Russia), and put the NATO alliance in jeopardy.

You get the picture.  If Republicans end up with control of the House of Representatives as well as the Senate, we’ll also see Trump’s sudden support for Project 2025 and any other effort to push the Christian nationalist agenda to remake America civil society in their image.  And he’ll do it all while, as he did the first time, illegally enriching himself (hello, Emoluments Clause, my old friend).

Oh yeah, there’s this result, too:

image

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

To those thinking, how could Trump possibly win – that’s not who we are: Michelle Goldberg makes the case that maybe it is:

“Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.”

The polls say Trump won big with male voters; Elizabeth Spiers explores just which men they mean: Trump’s appeal to men was

“a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright. That this appealed in particular to white men was not a coincidence — it intersects with other types of entitlement, including the idea that white people are superior to other races and more qualified to hold positions of power, and that any success that women and minorities have has been unfairly conferred to them by D.E.I. programs, affirmative action and government set-asides. For men unhappy with their status, this view offers a group of people to blame, which feels more tangible than blaming systemic problems like rising economic inequality and the difficulty of adapting to technological and cultural changes.”

Bernie Sanders’ take:

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

David French calls the vote a revolt against the ruling class and a faithful effort by those who believe Trump fulfills a prophecy.  (Honest to God)

Democratic mega-donor (and one-time candidate himself) Michael Bloomberg wonders how Democrats could possibly lose to such a bad candidate.

Just for fun, here’s a “deep dive” (as the kids say) on the scary details of Project 2025; Christian nationalists are unlikely to let this opportunity pass.

You know you’re in trouble when one candidate for president encourages violence as a response to free speech and honest journalism, and some people cheer

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Right after the U.S. Constitution established the three branches of government to provide checks and balances it immediately identified the next most important protections for American society: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”  In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers meant to make it clear that the people enjoyed freedom to live their lives on their own terms (within limits), and that the people (as a whole) were the superiors of the servants who staffed the government.  The people are free to say what’s on their mind and to share that information with others, and to call into question the words and ideas of their chosen and aspiring leaders.  And free to do so without retribution from the government.

Our most recent former president is hardly the first politician to have an adversarial relationship with American journalists; no president or any other government official enjoys being called out for flat-out lying or for bending the truth to his or her benefit.  But most don’t carry a crazy expectation that the free press is there to merely transcribe their words for posterity: he’s the only one I can remember who has, seemingly quite seriously, called for violence against anyone who criticizes him or fact-checks what he says.

Donald Trump told a crowd on Sunday that he wouldn’t mind if someone shot at the news media present at his rally here, escalating his violent rhetoric at one of his closing campaign events where he repeatedly veered off-message.

(snip)

Trump’s latest comments about the media underscored his embrace of violent language, days after he received blowback for suggesting former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney would not be such a “war hawk” if she went into combat and had guns “trained on her face.”

(snip)

Trump has also used violent language for hecklers at his rallies. In 2016, after someone interrupted a Las Vegas rally, Trump told the crowd: “Here’s a guy throwing punches, nasty as hell, screaming at everybody else,” then added, “I’d like to punch him in the face.”

In Iowa during the same campaign, he encouraged supporters to “knock the crap” out of potential hecklers. And last month, at a California rally, Trump suggested that a heckler would later get “the hell knocked out of her.”

Houston Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson puts a finer point on the problem:

More than 100 times since 2022, Trump has threatened to punish people who disagree with him, according to a tally by National Public Radio. He calls journalists the “enemy of the people,” anyone who disagrees with him “evil” and says critics are an “enemy within” more dangerous to the nation than Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping.

(snip)

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people,” Trump told Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures. “It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

The MILITARY used to “handle” his internal enemies?  Just what the hell does that actually mean?  Well, according to his supporters and his campaign, it’s just campaign rhetoric.

Supporters assure me that we have nothing to fear from another Trump presidency. The Republican nominee is only engaging in campaign hyperbole; he will not execute any of these plans.

I’m unsure how you vote for a candidate whose comments the public should not take seriously. (emphasis added) If we shouldn’t believe Trump will put millions of immigrants in camps and jail his opponents, then why should we think he will impose tariffs and promote tax cuts?

What’s serious, and what’s balderdash?

No other candidate in American history has run for office expecting voters to psychically divine his or her authentic policies. Conservatives excoriate Kamala Harris and Tim Walz if they put one word out of place, but they excuse everything Trump says or does.

I don’t object when people who are dissatisfied with the way the country is being run turn to a candidate who I disagree with, even when I disagree on a long list of topics.  I try not to demonize my fellow citizens who make a different choice from me; that is their right, and it doesn’t make them evil.  I do hope that all Americans look at the full picture in considering which candidate to support, and I don’t mean looking for a candidate with whom you agree on every single thing…hard to believe that’s possible, for any of us.  That full picture means considering policy positions, and your perception of the candidate’s belief in the fundamental norms of American society and the American system of government.  And of their basic, inherent honesty.  And wondering, are they in it for America or are they running to advance themselves…or to be able to corruptly abuse the system to keep themselves out of prison?

Many of the Republicans who have endorsed Kamala Harris have made plain in doing so that they do not agree with her, politically, on much of anything.  Nevertheless, their concern for the full picture and their knowledge of this Republican candidate have led them to choose against their party this time.

“I tell you, I have never voted for a Democrat, but this year, I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” [Liz] Cheney said at a Harris campaign event in Ripon, Wisconsin. In an attempt to persuade swing voters, she pointed toward former President Donald Trump’s actions on January 6, declaring that anyone “who would do these things can never be trusted with power again.”

“Donald Trump was willing to sacrifice our Capitol, to allow law enforcement officers to be beaten and brutalized in his name, and to violate the law and the Constitution in order to seize power for himself,” Cheney said as the event’s audience cheered. “I don’t care if you are a Democrat or Republican or an independent, that is depravity and we must never become numb to it.”

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