Archive for 2020

WHAT HE SAID:

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, MERRY CHRISTMAS, AND HAPPY HANUKKAH from the Reynolds/Smith household.

NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER:

Given Nate Silver’s track record, maybe he shouldn’t be throwing shade here.

OLD NARRATIVE: THE MEXICANS HATE TRUMP. Now: Mexico’s President Still Refuses to Recognize Biden Win.

While the mainstream media has used every opportunity to smear President Donald Trump as an ‘anti-Mexican” figure since the day he announced his candidacy five years ago, the U.S. forged a strong relationship with its southern neighbor under his leadership. “President Trump has been very respectful of us, and we have reached very good agreements, and we thank him because he has not interfered and has respected us,” President Obrador admitted.

Unlike neighboring Mexico, Communist China has been more than forthcoming in recognizing the Biden team’s victory claim.

How about that?

OPEN THREAD: Explore things.

HOPE YOU HAD A HAPPY THANKSGIVING! We had Thanksgiving for two at my house, instead of 30, but with one family household locked up because of a Covid case (now recovering nicely), and others unable to travel, our traditional gathering wasn’t going to happen. We did manage the traditional Glenn-with-turkey shot, though, and everybody got together over Zoom, which wasn’t as nice as the real thing, but which wasn’t bad either.

HEH:

THE NEW REPUBLIC: The Biden Popular Front Is Doomed to Unravel: It may turn out that Donald Trump was the one force keeping the Democratic Party together.

The coming weeks may see the reemergence in backrooms and boardrooms of the tensions that loomed over the 2020 Democratic primaries. Let us review the three power centers in the party as they existed then:

The new economy. Two titans of the finance world (Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer) sought to win the Democratic nomination by funding their own and various down-ballot candidacies. (Both would eventually back Biden.) There was also one impecunious primary candidate who had some original ideas about the tech world: Andrew Yang. The new economy provides wealth for so few people that it can never command the party’s rank and file. But it exercises a dizzying gravitational pull on its leaders.

Socialism. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were its candidates, the former in a doctrinal way (unions, benefits, income redistribution), the latter in a way adapted to strike more precisely at modern power relations (financial regulation, economic rights), which she denied was any form of socialism at all. Each was a more dire threat to the interests of people like Bloomberg and Steyer than anything the tax-cutting, deregulatory Republicans might produce. This is the great drama of the Democratic Party: They are the party of the 1 percent. They are also the party of expropriating the 1 percent.

Civil rights. The party’s glue is civil rights, broadly understood. Civil rights long meant looking out for the practical and principled interests of Black people—naturally a commitment on which cooperation with socialists is possible. But over the decades, civil rights has also become a regulatory and judicial system for advancing the interests of other groups, including immigrants (elite and mass), women executives, two-income gay couples, and lawyers—commitments more consistent with those of the Democrats’ plutocratic wing. The role of civil rights as reconciler-of-contradictions can be compared to that of anti-Communism in the tripartite Reagan coalition of the 1980s, which appealed in one way to Christians who thought the country ought to be more fraternal and in another to businessmen who thought it ought to be more rapacious. . . .

Trump didn’t sell out his supporters. In fact, his presidency saw something extraordinary, even if it was all but invisible from the country’s globalized cities: the first egalitarian boom since well back into the twentieth century. In 2019, the last non-Covid year, he presided over an average 3.7 percent unemployment rate and 4.7 percent wage growth among the lowest quartile of earners. All income brackets increased their take. That had happened in the last three Obama years, too. The difference is that in the Obama part of the boom, the income of the top decile rose by 20 percent, with tiny gains for other groups. In the Trump economy, the distribution was different. Net worth of the top 10 percent rose only marginally, while that of all other groups vaulted ahead. In 2019, the share of overall earnings going to the bottom 90 percent of earners rose for the first time in a decade.

How about that?

EVEN THE ATLANTIC HAS NOTICED: The Logic of Pandemic Restrictions Is Falling Apart: This is why you can eat in a restaurant but can’t have Thanksgiving.

It isn’t just New York; in states across the country, local officials have urged caution and fastidiousness. But those words can seem tenuously connected, at best, to the types of safety measures they’ve put in place. In Rhode Island, for example, residents are prohibited from gathering with even one person outside their household, even in the open air of a public park. But inside a restaurant? Well, 25 people is fine. Hire a caterer? You’re legally cleared to have up to 75 outdoors. The governor’s executive order merely notes: “The lower attendance at such events, the lower the risk.” (The Rhode Island governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Yes, there’s a lot of absurd TDS in this piece, but some reality has managed to force its way in, though the author seems to have no understanding whatsoever of business or economics.

Also in The Atlantic, from May, Quarantine Fatigue Is Real: And Shaming People Won’t Help.

HERE’S SIDNEY POWELL’S COMPLAINT, just filed today in Michigan.