Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The key actions that have so devastated our economy involved unilateral administrative actions by our sadly inept President, most taken within days of his accession to office, and done without any prior consultation with other parties.

...including the depletion of our strategic petroleum reserve...

...only a loss of stature in international relations.

The main legislative "triumph" of the administration, its misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" which will pump an unneeded Trillion dollars into an economy already beset with government induced supply shortages, and thereby induce continuing inflation was passed through the Congress with no consultation, negotiation or support from Republicans.

...but then we had a fast-growing economy low inflation, fast growing labor market participation and employment, widespread general prosperity. a fast improving situation on our southern border...

a fast improving situation on our southern border

and with a growing surplus of exportable petroleum

All of that is gone now.

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The key actions that have so devastated our economy involved unilateral administrative actions by our sadly inept President, most taken within days of his accession to office, and done without any prior consultation with other parties.

I strongly doubt that Biden made those decisions alone. I'm sure there was considerable discussion with other members of his cabinet and experienced policy makers.

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...including the depletion of our strategic petroleum reserve...

So prices should have just been allowed to keep getting higher when we had the means to prevent it?

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...only a loss of stature in international relations.

Our relations with key allies like North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Russia? You may have missed it, but our NATO allies are relieved to have seen the bumbling Trump depart the world stage.

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The main legislative "triumph" of the administration, its misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" which will pump an unneeded Trillion dollars into an economy already beset with government induced supply shortages, and thereby induce continuing inflation was passed through the Congress with no consultation, negotiation or support from Republicans.

This money supports important programs which invest in a low carbon future. If the Republicans actually cared about the climate crisis they might have been consulted but there is no reason to attempt a dialog when one side is categorically opposed to government spending.

Frank,
I find it both amusing and bewildering that so many Democrats characterize their Republican opponents as "authoritarian" (and worse). The observable fact is that the policies advocated by contemporary Democrats consistently involve ever more intrusive government management of the public and personal actions (and often even speech) of people everywhere, than do those of the Republicans they so falsely characterize as "authoritarian".

Republicans in the policies they favor and enact do indeed promote more individual freedom and initiative than do Democrats who generally favor increased government management of of our lives and economy.

Who are the real authoritarians here?

In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx famously observed, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Our choices are shaped, and even bound, by the histories and institutions we inhabit. And yet they’re still our choices. We are moral agents, responsible for our decisions even if we can’t fully escape the matrix in which we make them.

And yet so much of the conversation about the modern Republican Party assumes the opposite: that Republican politicians are impossibly bound to the needs and desires of their coalition and unable to resist its demands. Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold; no choice but to apologize for his every transgression; no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election; and now, no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country.

But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work — for the sake of their narrow political and ideological objectives.

Those objectives, for what it’s worth, are nothing new. To the extent that the Trump-era Republican Party has an agenda, it is what it has always been: to be a handmaiden to the total domination of capital, to facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth and to strengthen hierarchies of class and status. To those ends, Republicans in Washington have already announced plans to reduce social insurance, cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and restrict abortion rights.

What’s striking, again, is the extent to which many political commentators refuse to accept the moral and political agency of Republican politicians and officials. If there is a threat to democracy, goes one argument, it’s because liberals and progressives have refused to compromise their priorities in its defense. And according to another, similar argument, which I wrote about last week, the Democratic Party’s rhetoric embracing democracy is, itself, undermining democracy.

As it stands, plenty of Republican politicians and officials are making live plans to undermine any election they might lose. According to a report in The Washington Post, “Republican officials and candidates in at least three battleground states are pushing to disqualify thousands of mail ballots after urging their own supporters to vote on Election Day.”

It’s not that those mail ballots are illegal or illegitimate; the problem is that many have presumably been cast by Democrats. If Republicans can invalidate Democratic mail ballots while counting on their supporters to vote in person on Election Day, then they can forge an easier path to victory in closely divided states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Republicans have attacked ballot access for Native Americans in Arizona — a Democratic-leaning group in a contested swing state — and embarked on a project of voter intimidation in Florida. In August, the state’s new election police force arrested 20 people accused of voter fraud. Fifteen were Black voters charged with casting ballots illegally. Several said they thought they qualified to cast a vote under a state constitutional amendment that restored the right to vote to many former felons. And in interviews with investigators, all said they had received a voter registration card from their county election supervisors.

In the absence of any evidence of intent, the state’s case against these supposedly lawbreaking voters will fall apart. But that doesn’t mean the arrests were a failure. Some Floridians, accustomed to helping older family members cast ballots by mail, have refrained from giving assistance for fear of running afoul of the state election police.

The larger point is that we should not treat the Republican effort to suppress and intimidate voters — or invalidate elections — as if it were a force of nature or the automatic result of some mechanical process. Republican politicians in Florida chose to respond to hard-fought elections by burdening their opponents. Republican leaders in Washington, likewise, chose to elevate their most irresponsible colleagues into positions of influence and authority. And Republican politicians nationwide chose to embrace the lies and the conspiracy theories that undergird the idea that the only legitimate elections are the ones Republicans win.

Led by Donald Trump and his many acolytes, the Republican Party is poised to plunge this country into political and constitutional crisis over its refusal to share power or acknowledge defeat. We can treat this as some kind of an inevitability, the only possible outcome given the pieces at play, or we can treat it as what it is: a deliberate choice.

A remarkably weak argument you offer here.

“We did not address ‘collusion,’ which is not a legal term,” Mueller added. “Rather, we focused on whether the evidence was sufficient to charge any member of the campaign with taking part in a criminal conspiracy. It was not.”

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A remarkably weak argument you offer here.

In response to your remarkably weaker suggestion that Biden cooked up the entire program by himself in a few days.

So the thing about fueling your entire political campaign on the myth that the election system is corrupt, that election workers are incompetent and/or corrupt, and that the voting process overall can’t be trusted because of corruption is that you’re in a pretty awkward situation if you end up winning the election that you’d repeatedly claimed was rife with corruption.

That’s a potential dilemma far-right Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake’s facing right now, and it seems like she hasn’t quite figured out how she’ll navigate it.

When a reporter at Lake’s presser earlier today asked how she would be confident in her win if she doesn’t have confidence in the election, the election denier didn’t have much of an answer beyond simply attacking election officials as usual.

“I’m just not confident in the people who we’ve elected to run these elections. I mean, they’re not good. They’re not good at their jobs,” Lake said. “A bunch of bureaucrats who don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”

“more or less equivalent”

More or less equivalent

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Right now, Sen. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker are neck and almost entirely neck.

Frank,
I find it both amusing and bewildering that so many Democrats characterize their Republican opponents as "authoritarian" (and worse). The observable fact is that the policies advocated by contemporary Democrats consistently involve ever more intrusive government management of the public and personal actions (and often even speech) of people everywhere, than do those of the Republicans they so falsely characterize as "authoritarian".

Republicans in the policies they favor and enact do indeed promote more individual freedom and initiative than do Democrats who generally favor increased government management of of our lives and economy.

Who are the real authoritarians here?

This reminds me of Putin claiming he had no intention of invading Ukraine.