Category: Politics

Comments on recent political activities and developments primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

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Cuomo’s Franken-sense

With Eric Adams on the outs Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York State, has stepped in to run in a primary against Adams for mayor of New York City.

Adams is on the outs because he sucked up to Donald Trump in an obvious attempt to extract a shutdown of the investigation into charges of bribery against him which almost certainly would have resulted in conviction, according to insiders at the Attorney-General’s office of New York.

Well, a lot of people have stepped up to demand that Cuomo extract himself from the primary because, well, everybody knows he’s a sexual abuser.

Do they?

Here’s a summary of the claims made against Cuomo:

    • Lindsay Boylan: described several years of “uncomfortable interactions”.  He once “forcibly” kissed her and even compared her to a former girlfriend.  Yes, that’s it.  Cuomo’s former aide Melissa DeRosa claims Boylan never complained about it while working for Cuomo.
    • Charlotte Bennett: Cuomo once asked her about her sex life.
    • Anna Ruch:  Cuomo placed a hand on her back and once asked if he could kiss her.  Yes, that’s it.
    • Ana Liss: Cuomo once called her “sweetheart” and kissed her hand.  (I’m not making this up: this is Liss’ complaint.  Check it out.)
    • Karen Hinton:  Cuomo once hugged her.  “Unethically”.  That’s it.
    • Brittany Commisso: Cuomo once groped her breast.  She told Cuomo that his actions might get them into trouble.  Did she mean the two of them or the two of them.  Either way, this is probably most serious charge levelled against Cuomo, if it is true.
    • Kaitlin (mystery accuser): Cuomo made her feel uncomfortable, more than once.
    • Jessica Bakeman: Cuomo went crazy here– he touched her arms, shoulders, back, and waist and once held her hand for some time.  Again, I am not making this up.
    • Alyssa McGrath: Cuomo “ogled” staff and commented on their appearance.
    • Someone else said that Cuomo, noting a diet drink on the employee’s desk, asked if her goal was to look like a Playboy Bunny.

All of the allegations are evidence of a distasteful personality, immaturity, and poor judgment.  They shouldn’t be dismissed, entirely, as complaints, but, at most, they deserve a very stern letter to the administrator. 

None of these are serious.  None of them really rise to the level of “sexual harassment”.  None of these are sufficient to demand the resignation of  the governor of a state.  But most prominent Democrats– terrified, I think, of offending the feminist wing of the party– immediately piled on.  Biden, Harris, Schumer, Pelosi, and dozens more.  The party must be purified!

All the righteous denunciation of Cuomo by Democratic Party leaders and staffers for these minor offenses plays right into the hands of voters who kind of mostly shrug at this kind of behavior in the real world and don’t respect hard-core feminists for what they perceive to be hyper-sensitivity to minor issues.  It’s plays into the hands of conservatives who describe liberal feminists as snowflakes for presenting themselves as suffering victims of slight offenses.

All of the allegations are in that fuzzy area of “inappropriate” and “uncomfortable”.  None of them are really serious enough to justify the “cancellation” of Cuomo, though they do reveal that he was a compulsive flirt who obviously did hit on women in his orbit.  He was probing, obviously, for a favorable response, to see if one of them might like to go further.  Some of them (who aren’t part of the cabal) might have.

Why is he the target?

Because the Democrats have a habit of forming circular firing squads.  They know they can’t take down the long list of womanizers in the Trump Administration so how do you rally the troops and proclaim your own virtue when the enemy won’t willingly capitulate?  You attack someone in your own party, like Al Franken, or Eliot Spitzer, or Andrew Cuomo, who actually, on the whole, are on your side, but might also be standing in the way of an ambitious woman (like Kathy Hochul) who could use a leg up.

When Cuomo resigned, Kathy Hochul, as Lieutenant Governor, became Governor of New York.  She barely won re-election in 2022.  She has flip-flopped on some major issues (like a congestion tax for Manhattan) and seems afraid to commit to a position on others.

 

 

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The Trump Marathon

There are lots of movies that evoke the character of Trump’s hold on the Republican party and the republic– “The Godfather”, “Kingfish”, “Handmaid’s Tale”, “Succession”, “Peewee’s Big Adventure”– but the one I like the most– though it is a dark, unnerving film– is this one, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969). Trump as ringmaster of a dance marathon (they really did have them during the depression), offering desperate, unhappy people, a long-shot chance at money and fame, only to reveal to a contestant that expenses will be deducted from the prize money leaving the “winner” with nothing.

The ending is something only an adolescent could admire.  Heavy-handed, is the word.  It wasn’t necessary to make the point and though it has some narrative credibility the film would have been stronger without it.

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Canadian vs U. S. Health Care

Someone, an American friend of a friend, commented on Facebook:

Some Americans think that the Canadian care is inferior. What I have heard is that there are longer waiting periods. Also, I have heard that Canadians come to the states for more timely service or even better service, i.e. our doctors are better. I don’t know if any of this is true, but one thing I know to be true: we have plenty medical bankruptcies, and you have none.

If the first part was true, generally, then U. S. life expectancy and infant mortality would be a lot better than it is. I am sure that any individual’s experience will vary– there are good and less than good doctors in both countries. There are definitely areas of the U.S. that have lost their hospitals and have challenges finding family medicine practitioners, as in Canada. Canadian hospitals and physicians are generally as competent as their U. S. counterparts. But the difference in the catastrophic impact on personal finance is absolutely astounding. Europeans and Canadians alike just find it shocking that America refuses to adopt universal health care because the advantages we see every day are so, so significant.

The U. S. pays twice as much for the same procedures as we do in Canada. The U. S. system by it’s own principles is supposed to result in more efficient, cost-effective care: it does the opposite. The administrative overhead is colossal, compared to Canada’s far more efficient system.

I have often considered that if the American system resulted in more competition, for price and quality, and resulted in lower costs and better care (for all– not just the rich), it worth considering seriously as an alternative. But in that respect, it has failed.

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Nothing New Under the Sun

In regard to here.

It’s about someone named Aaron Renn.

Mr. Renn loves city life, and has lived in Manhattan, Chicago and Indianapolis. Carmel is different. Here, church bells chime full hymns over the town square. It’s a place where it’s easy to forget Mr. Renn’s best-known idea: his warning to Christians that America is in an era of distinct hostility to believers like them, and that they must gird themselves to adapt to, as the title of his recent book put it, “Life in the Negative World.”

I don’t think there is anything new here at all. Christians have a habit of periodically engaging in wildly enthusiastic embrace of some new “reinterpretation” that seems more engaged and relevant and intellectually credible. (Jesus Freaks, Christian Contemporary Music, Blue Like Jazz, and so on.) And then you investigate it more closely and you see that it’s the same old redneck fire and brimstone, pieties and hypocrisies, patriarchy, smugness, and materialism.

And, of course, extreme right-wing politics. No, you’re not smart now.

It’s not really Christian at all.  It’s superstition combined with reactionary politics.  It’s the politics of the rich and privileged, which isn’t all bad, but mostly is.  It’s paranoia and conformity, banality and self-regard.  The same old, same old, same old.  The blah blah blah of middle America.

It’s a sweet, wonderful world, if you’re in the club, of consumer trinkets, antiseptic public life, and space for all those men to get off to Vegas for a glorious weekend once in a while, of gambling and prostitutes and Wayne Newton, because, after all, boys will boys.

 

The Palladium, a proud edifice built in Carmel to demonstrate that even conservative Republicans can have good taste, features acts like Mickey Dolenz, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Itzhack Perlman, Emmy-Lou Harris, The U.S. Army Field Band and Male Chorus, and an official release party for some country singer named Tege Holt who sounds pretty harmless.

Emmy-Lou Harris and Itzhack Perlman are esteemed but safe choices.  The others speak for themselves.  They remind me of the problem Trump is going to have bringing A-list acts to the Kennedy Centre now that he is it’s chief.

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Ethanol

“I may have to spend a lot of time educating him about agriculture,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the largest corn-growing state, just ahead of Illinois, said of Mr. Kennedy last month. “I’m willing to do that.”  NY Times

That chilling statement from Senator Grassley should remind us that there is only one political party in America and it is the money party.

What Grassley is alluding to is the fact that American farmers in the mid-west grow a lot of corn and they need someone to buy it.  That is why we have ethanol and corn syrup.  There is no good rational reason for ethanol to exist except for the purpose of providing a rigged, locked-in market for corn farmers, who vote in the primaries in Iowa– among the first primary states in the Union– and basically control national policy by holding onto the agricultural dick of the Republican party.   (And the Democrats.)

Mr. Kennedy’s critique is broad and deep. Generous federal crop subsidies of soy, corn and wheat artificially lower their costs, making byproducts like corn syrup cheaper for manufacturers who put it into everything from soft drinks to hot dogs to heavily processed bread.

What should freak most people out is the word “educate”.  It is a very suggestive choice of language.  It is Orwellian.  It is not sufficient to say that we don’t care about the health of Americans or the nutritional value of all the foods processed corn syrup is added to.  You must be “educated”:  you must publicly offer your unconditional obeisance to the mantra.  You must be seen to adhere to the perverse logic that provides massive government subsidies to a useless crop simply in order to keep those “hard-workin’ ‘mericans” juiced and happy.

Most of those farmers probably privately hold nothing but contempt for people on welfare.  It’s one thing to take money for sitting around looking after your kids and quite another to work hard at cheating the system, which most of those corn farmers do.  But you never know: maybe they have no problem with welfare.  Maybe they recognize that government hand-outs are okay, as long as you get your share.  Like Exxon and Tesla and the Tampa Bay Rays.

Fun facts:

      • fructose uses only about 4% of the nation’s corn product.
      • ethanol consumes about 40%.

Think about it:  what if you (as government) decided– correctly– that ethanol was a bad product that should not be subsidized by the government.  How would you make up for the deficit in the market for corn?  What would you do about the corn farmers– who are generally massively in debt– who would be out of work?  How would you deal with the political fall-out: you did something that hurt farmers?  Those paragons of hard-working American virtue?

 

 

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Revenge of the Mistress: Coralie Fargeat

But one of the most impressive feats of all is the way Fargeat subverts and co-opts the male gaze, turning it into something that’s both playful and fierce. The sexy and scantily clad Matilda Lutz initially looks like an irresistible piece of eye candy, and Fargeat knows you’re thinking that. She toys with your expectations of how a woman who looks like Lutz is normally photographed in a film like this before ultimately celebrating her character for the warrior she becomes.

From this review of “Revenge” by Coralie Fargeat.

A woman, Jen, is raped by one of her boyfriend’s hunting buddies while another buddy watches indifferently.  The boyfriend– who is cheating on his wife with Jen– returns and doesn’t seem very disturbed about it.  When she demands justice, she is chased to a cliff by the three men and pushed over so that she is impaled on a tree.  Remarkably, she recovers, and returns to the scene to take brutal revenge.

This reviewer, and others, celebrate this fresh, exciting story because, after all, she was raped: the men deserve to die, and the action sequences are pretty cool.

Maybe they do deserve to die.  That’s for another day, and another philosophical discussion.  Maybe the scenario is contrived to allow you to feel good about watching these men suffer and die.  (That is absolutely true.)    And maybe the transformation of Jen from an air-head exhibitionist potential valley-girl into an action hero capable of astounding acts of athleticism is a puerile fantasy.

It doesn’t matter: the critics fall over themselves to sing the praises of Fargeat.  Why?  Is it because action films that feature male protagonists chasing and murdering males is such marvelous entertainment that a simple role reversal only spikes the tension?  Or is it because those films have become boring and the role reversal makes it interesting again?

 

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USAID

USAID has had it’s share of expensive failures (like any large corporation or agency does) but it has also had some truly extraordinary successes, like the HIV program, malaria prevention, and nutrition for starving children in war zones. It has literally saved millions– literally millions– of lives. It has often worked well with faith-based charities even if their values don’t perfectly align.

If Trump was really the genius he thinks he is, it would take little effort to appoint really competent administrators to fine-tune their programs and reduce waste. That would merely take skill and intelligence. Terminating the entire agency is easy– and of obscene criminality. It is beyond policy: it’s simply monumental mindless cruelty. All for less than 1% of the U. S. budget.

China, meanwhile, must be salivating at the opportunity to develop relationships with the countries USAID must now leave.

And Republicans in Congress are obviously terrified of offending the capo but the aversions and sidelong glances and evasive answers are telling.

Things Trump Did That I Liked

    • Got rid of the penny.
    • Reduced credit card interest rates to less than 10%.
    • Reduced inflation to below 2%.
    • Stopped the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
    • Reduced waste and corruption in military defense spending.
    • Reduced deaths from fentanyl overdoses.
    • Brought manufacturing back to America on a broad scale.
    • Put a stop to states competing with each other to offer tax breaks and incentives to corporations to locate there.

No, of course he didn’t do any of those things.  Not yet.  Probably not ever.  I just like to fantasize sometimes.

People should take note (most of the media does not) that most of the job losses in the manufacturing sector over the last decades has not been due to off-shoring but to automation.  An entire recent podcast by The Daily discussed the manufacturing issue at great length without once mentioning this fact.  In other words, all the tariffs in the world will not bring back most of the manufacturing jobs that have been lost.

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Trump the Negotiator

If you read– and believed– “the Art of the Deal” you might have come away with the impression that Trump was a brilliant negotiator. You might be surprised that he negotiated himself into 6 bankruptcies. Ironically, he made his real fortune selling himself, in the “reality” (ha ha!) tv series “The Apprentice.” As a great businessman. Most of the buildings with his name on it are owned by people who paid him for the right to stick his name on the front.

Then you won’t be surprised if he seems to get paltry returns for his “tough” negotiations on tariffs. What he got, so it appears, is stuff that was already in place in both Mexico and Canada, and a few symbolic gestures.

The EU will take note of just how serious he might or might not be.

Canada spending over $1 billion to interdict fentanyl? About 47 pounds goes over the border annually from Canada. That’s about $21.2 million a pound we are spending on this puppet show.

Does not strike me as the most efficient use of tax dollars.

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Tariffs

Sad and depressed? Disappointed in life? Hard to live with bad decisions? Annoyed by the success of others? Ask your doctor if you need Tariffs. Tariffs, from Trump Pharmaceutical, may be the answer. Tariffs will make you smile again. Tariffs will bring you joy and let you play with your children again. Tariffs will make that nagging feeling of unfulfilled expectations fade away into blissful contentment. Ask your doctor if Tariffs is right for you.

Side effects may include inflation, unemployment, trade wars, and recession.

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The Coming Republican Disaster

No one should say, when it happens, that nobody thought it would.  Everybody thought it would, just as they thought, eight years ago, that a vulgar, loud-mouthed, pathological liar like Trump could never be elected.   But don’t be fooled by a misfire on only one part of the equation.  Yes, Trump got elected,  once, and then again, for a second term, by a population that seemed oblivious to the real forces that shape and distort our economic and social lives.

This is a segment of the population that believes in barstool wisdom: some loudmouth sitting next to you at a bar and mouthing off about how high his taxes are, how crime is getting out of control, how America has outsourced all of the best jobs, how preposterous it is for people to choose their gender, could be the next cabinet secretary in a Trump administration.

When you hear interviews with the MAGA crowd, the first thing that is evident is that they have no idea what economic health or the cause of inflation is.  They believe that crime is on the increase when it objectively is not.  They have no idea that 75% of the manufacturing jobs that were lost over the last 20 years were lost to automation, not out-sourcing. They zero in on inflation and magically believe that Joe Biden’s policies caused it, even though it happened in every developed country.  They hated the constrictions imposed on them by the Covid epidemic but nobody had a magical formula for preventing its spread, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, while allowing everyone to conduct business as usual.  Nobody was going to be happy with any solution– and they weren’t.  They blamed Biden for the deplorable mess at the exit from Afghanistan, but only the generals who believed the U.S. should stay there for at least another 20 years had any alternative.  Diatribes about the messy exist almost never acknowledge the fact that the U.S. and it’s allies were losing, badly, by that time, and that the whole project was a colossal failure, and that it was the Republican Party that got America into that mess in the first place.  The honest Republican knows in his heart that it was their party’s great fortune that a plan devised by Trump had to be executed under a Democratic Administration.  Trump, who was just as determined to leave, would have fared no better.

Lost in all the flotsam around the Biden Administration, is the fact that he pulled off a singularly remarkable achievement: he kept the economy chugging along while reducing inflation.  Most economists will tell you that reducing inflation will causes joblessness to rise significantly.  Biden’s infrastructure investment and other policies prevented that.  That is a signal accomplishment for which Biden gets no credit.

I doubt that anyone would have fared better than Harris had Biden had the sense to not run for re-election.  It will be to his everlasting discredit that he allowed his ego to blind him to his own frailties, but had someone been nominated earlier, and contested the primaries, would it have made a difference?  A large portion of the voting public were ornery, dissatisfied with their lives, and infatuated with simplistic solutions.  Trump would make prices go down, houses go up, and people who don’t like me go away.  Trump will bring peace to Gaza and the Ukraine.  Trump will teach China a lesson.

And so we arrive at the Trump Administration.  I think it is natural for most informed observes to instinctively believe, on some level, that he can’t be serious.  He’s not going to impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, deport 15 million illegal immigrants, or invade Greenland.  He can’t let China bully Taiwan.  He can’t really end Obamacare.  He certainly won’t balance the budget.

He can’t be serious, because what he says he is going to do is stupid.

What will probably happen?

Either he will go ahead and impose the tariffs or he will grant so many exceptions that some people will realize– as if they didn’t already know– that he is a liar, like every other politician.  If he imposes the tariffs, he will re-ignite inflation, and that will be embarrassing, but he can try to blame it on some kind of hidden Biden policies that he couldn’t vanquish overnight.  But it will raise suspicions.  But then, other nations will retaliate with tariffs on U. S. exports, causing jobs to be lost and corporations to lose money.

He can try to round up millions of illegal immigrants, but that will require something that looks like concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands of state employees, guards, administration, lawyers.  It will be very costly, and it will have a large impact on some industries that depend on immigrants, like construction, meat packing, and agriculture.  Again, there will be a significant inflationary impact.

He will try to extend his tax cuts, due to expire next year, and add a few more.  This will lead to an interesting battle with the hard core tea-party Republicans who sincerely want to balance the budget.  Dream on.  In the meantime, Speaker Johnson will have a monumental challenge to get any budgetary measures passed given that he has a razor-thin majority and lots of members of his own party who won’t hesitate to sabotage their own agenda.  To keep the tax cuts, Trump badly needs an extension– or suspension– of the debt ceiling.  The Tea Party Republicans will probably try to hold the process hostage to their own radical agenda– massive cuts to the budget.  That should be fun.

Trump has nominated a bunch of clowns for the top cabinet posts in his administration.  Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr., are almost literally, yes, clowns.  You can be assured that most of government is actually carried out by deferential functionaries below the level of cabinet secretary, but these three, and the others, have big egos and extraordinary confidence in their own genius and may try to push through things that any sensible person would hesitate to push through.  Will Kennedy try to stop vaccine mandates, or undermine them?  Will he take on the processed food industry?  Will Hegseth stay sober on the job?  Will Gabbard try to restore Assad to power in Syria?

And will Trump cut off aide to Ukraine?  Ukraine does receive a lot of aide from other nations, including Germany, France, and Britain, but if it collapses, will the American public be as eager to wash their hands of it as Trump is?  And what if Putin, seeing the opportunity, starts to mass troops at the border of Moldova or Georgia?

Americans– aside from some Republican true believers– don’t care much about the deficit.  It will balloon under Trump because he will cut taxes even more than he did in his first term but won’t dare touch Social Security or Medicare, the two largest (by far) spending items in the budget.  But Republican strategy– the core of their very being as a political party– is to complain bitterly about the deficit only when they are not in office.

The last balanced budget in the U.S. was the last year of the Clinton Administration.

In Republican Fantasy, after a few months or a year of Trump, inflation will be down to below 2%, housing starts will rise, house prices will drop, mortgage rates will drop, Hamas will turn over the remaining hostages, Ukraine will surrender the seized territories to the Russians, NATO countries will increase their spending on defense, and thousands of factories will open to begin manufacturing televisions, washers, and driers in America.  With high-paying union jobs.  Wait– Trump is not going to be good for unions.

The sales of electric cars will decline while America will amazingly find even more oil to burn.  Don’t forget: crime will go down.

And if it happens, it will be due to the miraculous intervention of Donald Trump, or God, or both.  And if none of it happens, it will still be Joe Biden’s fault, whose administration policies were so bad that even Trump cannot undo them during his time of administration even though he told you that he could.

What he won’t be able to blame on Biden are the numerous scandals and blow-ups that seem likely to pervade this Administration.  Trump’s people are unusually shameless about wanting to get very rich while having a rather cavalier attitude towards ethics and propriety.  Trump’s family and cohorts are already lining up “investments” and real estate deals with the oil-producing Arab states.  In Trump’s view, MAGA people don’t mind. That’s why they elected him.  But there is a tiny smidgeon of shame left in the Republican Party and Trump is a lame-duck: he cannot run again.

I repeat: he is a lame-duck, who cannot run for president again.  If it is to the material advantage of one of his “friends” to turn on him, he will.  If it is to the political advantage of a Congressman or Senator to diverge from the Trump agenda, he or she will.

One last depressing probability: Supreme Court Justice Alito retires and, without McConnell to influence him, Trump gets to replace him with, I don’t know,  Donald Jr.  The most moronic president in recent history will have appointed four justices to the highest court in the land.