The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Sure Happy It's Thursday!

Here are the news stories that filtered through today:

See? You thought more of the news would be bad.

Elizabeth Warren's early career

I'll be watching the debate tonight, as the candidate I support (including financially) has become the party's front-runner. Today's Washington Post takes a long look at how she got started in her career:

Warren loved her job [as an associate law professor at the Houston Law Center]. To keep it, she realized she would have to maintain a good relationship with [Professor Eugene Smith], while also deflecting what she described as increasingly inappropriate behavior from him.

He regularly sat in on her classes, evaluating her talent as a professor. He wrote memos to the law school dean and others as part of the process to determine whether she would be promoted from associate professor to tenured faculty member. He was, in many ways, the gatekeeper to her future.

But, according to Warren, he was also increasingly a harasser: He commented on her clothes and appearance in ways that made her feel uncomfortable. He told dirty jokes and invited her out for drinks, which she declined. She had to get home to her family, she reminded him, hoping he would get the hint.

Warren thought she was managing him until that day in early 1979 when she said he lunged for her in his office.

“If Gene wanted to sink me, he could,” she said. “If he had said, ‘She’s not very good. Let’s push her out the door,’ I would have been gone. And so, when he chased me around his office, I wasn’t afraid of him physically so much as I was afraid of what I knew he could take away from me.”

He didn't. And right now, Warren is ahead in the polls for both the Democratic Party nomination and for winning the general election next year.

False equivalence and journalistic malfeasance

It has become a lot more likely in the last two weeks that my party will nominate Elizabeth Warren for President. (Note: I am a financial contributor to the Warren campaign.) One way you can tell is that journalists have started writing misleading stories about her:

It is certainly true, as CBS noted, that some people have questioned Warren’s account [of being fired because she was pregnant in 1971]. A story in the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, did so, as did a writer for Jacobin, a socialist publication. But to say that stories have raised questions is not the same thing as saying the questions are good ones.

Over the years, people have also “raised questions” about whether the earth rotates around the sun, the moon landing happened, Communism was fatally flawed, Elvis died and Barack Obama is an American. But I wouldn’t recommend putting any of those questions in a headline.

A good rule: Whenever you see the phrase “raises questions” in a story, you should be deeply skeptical of its assertions. The phrase is a crutch that journalists too often use to make implicit accusations they can’t support.

Regardless of who gets the nomination for either party, the next election (389 days away), we can all to to bed each night knowing the next day will have even worse coverage of the election than the day before. If Warren runs against President Trump, I can scarcely imagine the sexist and anti-intellectual campaigning and journalism we'll get.

Meanwhile, in the same newspaper, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman puts into words something I've thought for years: we're actually lucky that Trump is an unstable moron.

What's happening today?

Not too much:

And two algorithms I'm testing that should produce similar results are not. So back to the coding window I go.

Nice legislature you've got there. Shame if something happened to it

President Trump has told Congress that he doesn't believe they have any right to investigate him or any other part of the executive branch. This, ah, innovative view of the Constitution has garnered some criticism from just about everyone:

Legal experts have already torpedoed the absurd idea that the White House gets to declare the House’s impeachment inquiry illegitimate. The Constitution grants the House “sole power of impeachment,” and the chambers set their own rules. The White House claims the House must hold a full vote to render the inquiry operative, but this is simply baseless.

But, putting aside the fact that Trump’s demands were based on nonsense, what’s notable here is that the White House’s official position is that the conduct itself, that is, Trump’s act of pressing Zelensky to do these things, is perfectly okay.

Jennifer Rubin says this merely delays the inevitable:

The problem with this tactic, obvious to those outside the Trump cult, is that it is hard to imagine the House forgoing impeachment, unless of course Trump resigns before it can. Furthermore, while the House is free to pursue contempt proceedings against Sondland and other non-cooperating witnesses, it does not have to hold up impeachment proceedings. There is nothing wrong with moving forward with multiple articles, including one on obstruction, while also seeking enforcement of a contempt proceeding against current or former officials who refuse to appear or provide documents.

In short, there is more than enough evidence already and more than enough public support as we speak for the House to move to impeachment right now. To the extent over the next few weeks that it can gain further incriminating material or reveals incriminating material it possesses, the House will only bolster its case. However, nothing we have seen in the underlying evidence or the polling suggests any reason not to proceed to impeachment.

By fighting against the inevitable, acting more illogical and unhinged than usual and refusing to give Senate Republicans reason to support him, his current strategy only makes it easier for more Senate Republicans to break with him in a trial for removal. His flailing just heightens the perception among voters that one way or another, this guy has to go.

But let's not get complacent. With enough support from part of the legislature, or from the judiciary should it come to that, the Constitutional order of each branch policing the other two could fall apart. The Republican Party has long sought a (Republican) unitary executive that rules over the other two branches.

Trump, mostly for personal reasons as I don't believe he has any concept of the US Constitution nor has he read the document, is pushing for this goal harder than any president in history. I include Lincoln, by the way. Lincoln tried very hard to ensure that his decisions would pass Constitutional challenges after the Civil War, and he succeeded.

We should be thankful, then, that the instrument of the Republican Party's headlong push into authoritarian government turns out to have no clue how to do it, and undermines both himself and the Party every time he Tweets.

It's still horrifying to watch. And we still have 390 days until the next election.

Does Warren have it sewn up?

John Judis thinks she might:

At the risk of appearing foolhardy several months hence, I want to say that in the last week, it has become very likely that Elizabeth Warren will win the Democratic nomination. A two-tier race, with Warren, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders in the top tier, has become a race largely of Warren against herself.

Sanders – justifiably in my opinion, and I am of the same rough age – always faced questions about his age.  These questions have been answered in the negative, sadly, by his recent heart attack. Voters will be right to doubt whether someone of Sanders’ age and medical history can handle one of the most stressful jobs on earth – especially, in Sanders’ case, because he would be coming into the job anew and face a hostile Washington and Wall Street. He needs to prepare for a graceful exit.

Biden, on paper, has always been the most electable Democrat, and if the presidential election had been held last month, he probably would have won.  To undecided voters in swing states – and I always believe they number more than the political scientists claim – Biden comes off as “one of us.” It’s an inestimable advantage that Warren, for instance, doesn’t enjoy. He has also steered clear of extreme positions that would cost him in a general election. But Biden seems even slower on the uptake than in the past.  I don’t believe these claims that he (or Trump for that matter)  has dementia – enough with these amateur psychiatrists! – but he shows the disabilities of age.

The general election is in just under 13 months, but the Iowa caucuses are only 119 days away. I have always thought Sanders too far to the left, and too policy-focused, to win; but his age also matters. And I love Uncle Joe, but again, do we need another 70-something in the hardest job in American politics?

I've supported Warren for a while now. I think the rest of the party ought to as well.

Moscow on the Potomac

Author Peter Pomerantsev says that the behavior of the Trump Administration, especially around its false accusations of illegal behavior by Hunter Biden, could not have better demonstrated how much Vladimir Putin has taught the West:

The message of much of Kremlin propaganda is not to showcase Russia as a beacon of progress, but to prove that Western politics is just as rotten as President Vladimir Putin’s. We may have corruption, the argument goes, but so does the West; our democracy is rigged, but so is theirs.

The media manipulation of the early Putin years didn’t try to convince you of a fabricated version of “truth.” Instead, it worked by seeding doubt and confusion, evoking a world so full of endlessly intricate conspiracies that you, the little guy, had no chance to work out or change. Instead of conspiracy theories being used to merely buttress an ideology as under Communist rule, a conspiratorial worldview replaced ideology as a way to explain the world, encouraging the public to trust nothing and yearn for a strong leader to guide it through the murk — a tactic that’s as common in Washington these days as in Moscow.

This attitude is what makes Kremlin propaganda today different from its Soviet predecessor. The Soviets tried to make their lies sound factual. Even their disinformation in the West was meant to feel foolproof: For example, the 1980s campaign to show that the C.I.A. had invented AIDS was carefully curated through Soviet-controlled medical conferences. When President Ronald Reagan called out the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr. Gorbachev feigned horror at the idea that the Soviet Union would stoop to lies. Today, when the Kremlin pushes conspiracies claiming Americans invented Ebola or Zika, these stories are thrown online with no serious attempt to make them sound believable. Their aim as much to confuse as to convince. And there’s no shame in being caught lying.

And Putin is loving it.

Pile-up on the Link Highway

I was busy today, and apparently so was everyone else:

I'm sure there was other news today. But this is what I have open in my browser for reading later on.

What a morning

PM Boris Johnson is now addressing the House of Commons, capping a crazy day in the UK. And that's not even the most explosive thing in the news today:

I'll be listening to Johnson now, daring the House to call for a vote of no-confidence, daring them to have an election before October 31st.

The Real Donald Trump

...is a character on TV, according to TV critic James Poniewozik, writing in today's Sunday Review:

The taunting. The insults. The dog whistles. The dog bullhorns. The “Lock her up” and “Send her back.” All of it follows reality-TV rules. Every season has to top the last. Every fight is necessary, be it against Ilhan Omar or Debra Messing. Every twist must be more shocking, every conflict more vicious, lest the red light grow bored and wink off. The only difference: Now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos, only press secretaries, pundits and Mike Pence.

To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.

And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.

Well, it does: 20th January 2021, just 500 days from today.