This Week in America

Trump, Biggs, and the Klan: Racist Peas in a Hooded Pod

We don't write here often anymore; the outrages of the Trump administration could fill the Encyclopedia Brittanica at this point, and we just don't have the time. But occasionally the words and actions of our congressional representative, the smarmy Andy Biggs of Arizona's 5th Congressional District, force us back to the keyboard.

This time, it was this tweet:

Now for some important context:

It's been widely reported that Trump has known since at least February of this year, and perhaps early 2019, that Vladimir Putin has been paying bounties to Taliban fighters for the deaths of American troops in Afghanistan. That Biggs continues to ignore this fact--and indeed, praises Trump's comments on "patriotism" while knowing that Trump, by not acting when he first found out about the bounties, or even acting once they became widespread knowledge, and instead extending favors to Putin--has committed treason. Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution defines treason as "levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." That, Trump has surely done. Biggs knows it.

The mountain in South Dakota on which Mount Rushmore's famous faces are carved was sacred to the Great Sioux Nation. They called it the Six Grandfathers--the earth, the sky, and the four directions. That mountain, and the Black Hills of which it's a part, were stolen by the U.S. government in defiance of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. In 1980, the United States Supreme Court,  in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 US 371 (1980) ruled that the nation's violation of the treaty amounted to a "taking," for which just compensation was required. That compensation--with interest, now surpassing a billion dollars--has never been paid.

The sculptor behind the carvings was strongly associated with the Ku Klux Klan, and was an unrepentant racist throughout his life.

Currently in South Dakota, Trumpian Governor Kristi Noem is involved in a dispute with the Lakota nation over the state's anemic response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Knowing that nonwhite people are more susceptible to the virus (largely due to systemic racism and accompanying poverty; the Navajo nation, for example, has the country's highest per-capita rate of infection), the Lakota people established their own checkpoints--on their own land--to screen for Covid symptoms before people could be allowed into their territory. Gov. Noem has demanded the checkpoints be removed, and has in fact appealed to Trump for assistance in removing them.

Against this backdrop, then, Trump decided to hold an Independence Day event--in effect, a taxpayer-funded campaign rally--at Mount Rushmore on July 3. Noem announced ahead of the event that CDC and other public-health guidelines would be deliberately ignored. Fireworks would be part of the event, despite the fact that they haven't been allowed there since 2009 due to wildfire danger.

Ahead of Trump's arrival, protestors--mostly Native American--tried to block the road to the monument. Noem called out the National Guard to remove the people from their own land.

Trump's speech, as described in the Washington Post, was about what one might expect: "At the foot of Mount Rushmore’s granite monument to his presidential forebears, President Trump on Friday delivered a dark speech ahead of Independence Day in which he sought to exploit the nation’s racial and social divisions and rally supporters around a law-and-order message that has become a cornerstone of his reelection campaign."

All of this--a treasonous president holding a campaign rally at taxpayer expense, a Covid superspreader event made possible only by calling out troops to dispense with the land's rightful owners--fills Andy Biggs with patriotic pride.

And why not? Biggs consistently argues against any precautionary measures recommended by medical science. He wants the nation open for business, knowing that the plague kills non-whites in far greater proportion than whites. He recently referred to the governor's closing certain businesses as an "unconstitutional taking," while ignoring the much greater illegal taking of the Black Hills of South Dakota. He applauds Trump's racism because he shares it.

Biggs is, sadly, in a relatively safe district for a racist Republican. But he's tied himself to the coattails of our least popular president, one whose loss in 2020 is almost certain. Having lost white suburbanites--Biggs's own constituency--those coattails might drag him down to defeat. His likely challenger is Joan Greene.

We can only hope.

My Dinnertime with Andy

Former regular readers of TWiA will recall that we went on more-or-less permanent hiatus early in the Trump era, having foreseen that news would be flowing with the force and volume of a firehose, and no part-time, unpaid effort to keep up with it would be satisfactory. That hasn't changed; in fact, just the opposite. We're only coming off hiatus here to report on an event last night with Trump toady Representative Andy Biggs (AZ/05), because it might shed some light on the thought processes--such as they are--of Cult 45, and the lesser cult of loyal lieutenant Biggs. (Film buffs might recognize the title as a play on the classic "My Dinner with Andre." We couldn't resist.)

Biggs is notoriously averse to meeting with any constituents who might challenge his far-far-faaaaar-right views. But Tuesday night at 6:30, he was to speak at the open-to-the-public Sun Lakes Republican Club. I wolfed down a quick dinner and raced over there, arriving a few minutes late, but was ushered to a seat in the fourth row. The large room was packed with maybe 200 attendees. Those without silver hair had no hair at all, and there were plenty of red caps on display, along with a cardboard cutout of Trump standing at the front.

As it turned out, I needn't have hurried. When I walked in, someone who I presume is the club's president was droning away at the microphone. Shortly after I sat down, he turned it over to a former teacher who wanted to warn about the evils of school bond issues. She explained that the schools only ran out of money because they spent it all on sex-education materials, the contents of which she wouldn't share with us because it would make us cry. Therefore, we should all vote No on any bond issue that comes before us. The crowd loved it, and loudly shared its agreement.

What she didn't mention was that Maricopa County's population has been growing rapidly. Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the country, and is surrounded by a huge metro area. But most of our school buildings are at least 20-25 years old, with years of deferred maintenance due to longtime, notorious underfunding (which resulted in a massive Red for Ed movement last year, gaining some new funding but not enough). And we still have teachers making $38,000 a year, working long hours, and paying for vital classroom supplies out of pocket.

But those crazy sex ed curricula--they're the real problem.

After her, we had an extended--and I do mean extended--if the musicians playing for the crowd at the bar outside had been available, they'd have been brought in to play the guy offstage; instead, the club prez had to do it--talk by Mike Crawford, Republican candidate for Sheriff. Crawford's a portly guy who worked hard to demonstrate sincerity by nearly bringing himself to tears when he mentioned the Constitution. He didn't say what it was he liked about the Constitution, except for the Second Amendment, which he said you could understand by reading, then reading again. "It doesn't need to be interpreted!" he added, in his moment of greatest passion.

A reasonable interpretation of his statement would be that, if it's meant to be understood as-is and not interpreted, then the right to bear arms applies only to those enrolled in organized militias. That, after all, is how the courts understood it up until Scalia interpreted it in Heller v. DC. Somehow, though, I don't think that's what he meant. Which might mean he needs to read it one more time.

He also said that if he were elected sheriff, the flow of drugs through Maricopa County would stop, and therefore, drugs wouldn't make it to "other parts of the country, like Chicago and New York and Canada." I guess geography isn't necessarily an area of expertise that a sheriff requires, but it doesn't hurt.

He went on to complain that schools today don't teach anything about the Constitution (they do) or why you shouldn't take drugs (they do), and that sex-ed classes don't teach the birds and the bees, but they do teach "how to dress up like a drag queen." I'm not sure if that's what the former teacher was afraid would make us cry, but I am sure that's not taught in any public schools in Arizona. Which makes the guy who wants to be the county's chief law-enforcement officer--who specifically declared that he would never lie, under oath or otherwise--a liar. And what's with the Republican resistance to learning about sex? Aren't they getting any?

But his status as a liar should've been self-evident, because he's a Republican in the age of Trump. Speaking of whom, after Crawford had been ushered off the stage, he stepped back on long enough to embrace the cardboard cutout of 45, meaning his love of the Constitution was also a lie.

Finally, Rep. Biggs came on. But before he started to speak, the club prez came back with a gift. He complained that he'd never seen Biggs wearing a Trump hat, so gave him one. After some difficulty opening the plastic wrap, Biggs managed to get it on his head (though he never removed the tags, leaving some in the audience (me) in mind of the Grand Old Opry/Hee Haw comedienne Minnie Pearl).

I didn't take notes during Biggs's talk--I was too busy being outraged at the lack of respect he had for his audience, who he treated like not-very-bright children who needed to be constantly assured of their own worth, lest they attack.

He told them that the only people he trusts in America--the only ones who are educated and smart--are Trump supporters. The left, he said, are "not educated, they're indoctrinated." Which was only the first of many examples of projection to occur over the next 30 minutes or so, because it was clear from the crowd's responses and the buzzwords they shouted out that most of them are retired and do nothing but watch Fox "News" all day long. Biggs, of course, didn't address the fact that people with college degrees are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican, or that Trump's base is historically "whites without college degrees." Apparently earning a degree only means that you're less educated and more indoctrinated than those who get their information entirely from Fox.

He spent some time dishonestly attacking Democrats in general. He said all Democrats--not all Democratic candidates, or elected Democrats, but all Democrats, support open borders. This is not true.

He said all Democrats want to turn the U.S. into a socialist state. Also not true. The most extreme of the presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, describes himself as a Democratic Socialist, which is a very different thing from a Soviet-style socialist. It's also true that some socialist ideas--such as Social Security and Medicare--are woven into the American fabric so securely that they're incredibly helpful and popular, so why not see if similar ideas can be effective in other areas? That's not turning us into a socialist state, that's working to help the American people. Biggs doesn't seem to grasp that.

He said Democrats "literally" voted to give illegal immigrants better health care than veterans. Yet again, not true--the vote he's talking about was to create an electronic health record system for immigrants at the border. That system already exists for veterans. The bill does not provide health care of any kind to immigrants, it just tracks their health records.

He said if Trump is able to name another Supreme Court justice, that he expects to see "blood in the streets," because Democrats will riot. He didn't mention Trump retweeting calls for a new Civil War if he's removed from office for his crimes.

He said Democrats know they can't win elections on the issues (without explicitly saying how they do win elections, or mentioning that the last two Republican presidents both lost the popular vote, and were helped into office by outside forces). He also didn't mention that Republican positions on issues are far less popular than Democratic positions, and that Republican electoral strategies revolve around kicking voters off the rolls and choosing their own voters, via massive, crooked redistricting efforts.

He said Democrats want to imbue all power in the hands of "just a few people." Seriously. With a straight face, standing next to a cutout of Trump, in whose hands he wants to imbue all power. The irony, she burns.

He gave a wildly inaccurate summation of the whole Ukraine situation (and because he's an ignoramus, he frequently called the country "The Ukraine"). This was the point at which I started speaking up loudly, telling him that he was wrong, that what he's saying was not how it happened. He called into question the whistle-blower's credibility, even though the "transcript" and the ICIG's letter, as well as additional releases from the White House, confirm almost every detail of the whistle-blower's statement.

He stressed the point that there was no verbal threat or quid pro quo, conveniently never mentioning that Trump had already withheld military aid to Ukraine, appropriated by Congress, meant to help with its ongoing hot war against Russian incursion into its territory. He didn't mention the 13,000 Ukrainians who've already died in that war. He didn't mention the text messages demonstrating that everyone involved--including Ukrainian officials--knew that releasing that aid was predicated on Ukraine not only investigating imaginary corruption, but announcing publicly that they were conducting that investigation.

He grossly inflated the role of Ukraine's interference in the 2016 election (real, but minimal, and not conducted in coordination with any campaign), without mentioning, AT ALL, the Russian interference on behalf of Trump--exhaustively documented in the Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence Committee's reports (reminder--chaired by Republican Richard Burr). Volume 2 of that report--detailing social media manipulation of Americans by Russian actors at the direction of the Kremlin (read it here)--was, coincidentally, released yesterday. Biggs didn't mention it.

Biggs attacked the congressional impeachment inquiry as "unauthorized," while admitting that the Constitution doesn't set specific rules for the process, because, in his words, it ignores precedence. He did not, however, address whether the precedence-breaking of Mitch McConnell (who, need anyone be reminded, broke precedence by stealing Merrick Garland's Supreme Court seat, among other things), the Republican House under Paul Ryan, or Donald J. Trump, who breaks precedence every single day in one way or another, bothered him in the least. But if Nancy Pelosi breaks precedence on impeachment (of which there've only been three in the history of the nation, so not a lot of precedence there), then the whole thing is unauthorized, and therefore the White House can refuse entirely to respect Congress's Constitutionally required oversight role.

In other words, Biggs is a lying liar, and when he's not lying outright, he'd dissembling, shading, and propagandizing. Whatever you call it, it's dishonest. Biggs came across as a smooth-talking salesman trying to talk an ignorant victim into buying a lemon. "Such a deal I'm offering you. This car will last for a million miles and be worth more at the end of it than it's costing you today!"

At the end of his speech, he took a few questions, which had been written down sometime before my arrival--presumably by attendees and not by his own staff (although when there was one he couldn't read, nobody got up and told him what it was supposed to say). His answers ranged from the facile to the idiotic. One question, about how to stem the flow of drugs into the country (shouldn't the answer be to elect Crawford, who will even keep drugs out of the part of the country called Canada?), was answered with discussion about the importance of Trump's wall, then veered into the necessity to keep immigrants out of the country. No discussion of the demand side of the issue, no discussion of drugs arriving via the US Postal Service, etc. Just the border and the wall.

The crowd ate it up with a spoon. They shouted out the appropriate buzzwords, expressed their hatred of Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and Democrats in general. They nodded approvingly and applauded at his lies. To them, he was a truth-teller, because everything he said can be heard daily on Fox. Never mind that it's either false or, at best, misleading. He showed his contempt for his audience, lying to their faces with a grin on his face, and they showed that they deserved his contempt because they just loved being lied to. It's hard to see impeachment proceedings changing any of these people's minds, and there are, no doubt, groups of like-minded folks spread across the country. Trump's crimes, his raking of millions of taxpayer dollars into his own pockets, the many scandals engulfing his presidency, don't seem to exist for these voters. And as members of a Republican club, and mostly senior citizens, these people are very likely to vote. So don't think defeating Trump--or Biggs--will be easy. It's going to be a grueling campaign, a reality vs. lies battle, and the outcome is no sure thing.

After it was over, I approached Biggs and asked if I could make a point regarding the drug question. He said sure, so I told him that I used to live near the border, that I've known many Border Patrol agents, have been out at the border with them, held a mini-summit at my house with Border Patrol and US Army brass, and that I've written books about border issues and the drug trade. And I said, you didn't address the most important part of the equation, which is demand. As long as people can make billions of dollars by bringing drugs into the country, they're going to do it, and there's no wall or interdiction effort that can stop it. Further, because the cartels own every port of entry, building a wall will only eliminate any small-time competition the cartels have now--the guy trying to make a few bucks by humping 25 pounds of dope over the Huachuca Mountains, for example. Trump's wall will make the cartels absolutely ecstatic, because then they'll profit from every single ounce of drugs coming across the southern border, instead of just most of those ounces. Biggs agreed that he "forgot" to mention the demand issue, but I suspect he always does, because that shifts some of the blame onto American citizens and off the greedy brown people carrying drugs across the border. I told him that if you're talking about the drug problem and you don't start with the demand side, you're doing it wrong.

In other words, it was a disgracefully dishonest performance by an elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Growing up, I learned that one of the responsibilities of elected office was to tell one's constituents hard truths. Instead, some elected officials have decided that the easier course is to only talk to friendly crowds, pandering to their worst instincts and telling them only what they want to hear. One would like to hope that Cult 45 members could handle the truth. All evidence at last night's event suggests that isn't the case.

It can be argued--and I won't dispute it--that my behavior was disgraceful, as well. It was certainly ill-mannered. I don't like it when rabble-rousers interrupt my favorite politicians' speeches. But I felt that the truth needed to be aired, that Biggs had to be identified as the liar that he is. Before the end of his speech, he was referring to me as "The guy who calls me a liar."

That's an epithet I'm proud to embrace--the guy who calls a liar a liar. I'll take that.

 

PS: Sometime before my arrival, there was a cardboard cutout of Donald and Melania Trump on display. After I was seated, it was set down on its side behind a railing, which made it look like they were both behind bars (albeit the bars going the wrong way). Still, it seemed like a good look for them, so I snapped a quick pic.

 

TWiA Redux, Week 2

 A quick TWiA this week, to gauge interest in it continuing. Remember to follow us at @ThisWeekAmerica for on-the-spot news.

This Week in Health Care

In January, this is what soon-to-be-President Donald Trump promised, in an interview with the Washington Post:

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump said. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” People covered under the law “can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.”

That's not remotely what passed through the House this week, with the support of every Republican member except 20 (some of whom--like Andy Biggs, who represents the home district of TWiA World Headquarters--refused to vote for the bill because it was not sufficiently heartless) and precisely 0 Democrats. Also at WaPo, Philip Bump compares Trumps promises to the results.

Coverage of the House bill is everywhere, so we won't delve into it in detail. Suffice to say that Speaker Paul Ryan broke just about every promise he made about the way the GOP majority would operate when he took over. This bill did not go through its respective committees and get voted onto the floor. It was cobbled together like Frankenstein's monster out of bits and pieces of proposed legislation that had already died, and others that should never have been brought to life. It was rushed to a vote with 3 hours of debate, before the Congressional Budget Office could score it or most members could read it. Health care professionals, hospitals, insurance companies, and the American public all hate it. Ryan's calling it a victory, but his victory could come with scores of Americans dying because they can't get health care, personal bankruptcies skyrocketing because people seek health care they can't afford, and hospitals once again eating millions of dollars of care for which they won't be paid.

Say what you will about the Affordable Care Act. It was an imperfect bill that became an imperfect law--and was additionally hampered by the Supreme Court's decision that individual states could reject the Medicaid expansion, leaving their most vulnerable residents in the uncomfortable position of paying taxes that went toward the health care of people in other states but not for themselves. But the ACA dramatically cut the number of uninsured in this country, reduced personal bankruptcies, improved health results, and put insurance companies and hospitals on a sound financial footing.

The House's bill, by contrast, would, if enacted, increase the number of uninsured. It would lower some people's premiums by driving less affluent people out of the market altogether. It would bring back annual and lifetime caps and allow insurance companies to refuse to cover people with preexisting conditions. It would slash the Medicaid rolls. Americans would die, unnecessarily.

The House bill is the height of cruelty. Every member who voted for it--and those who didn't because it wasn't harsh enough--should be repealed and replaced in 2018.

This Week in Foreign Policy

Health Care dominated the headlines this week, but it's not the only trouble spot on the horizon. Over at Foreign Policy magazine, Harvard's Steven Walt wrote a devastating critique of Trump's foreign policy. He writes:

It follows that a realist approach in Asia calls for the United States to keep a wary eye on China and manage a sometimes delicate balancing coalition of Asian partners. This task is a tricky one that requires consistency, prudent judgment, and smart diplomacy, as well as credible military power. The latter quality is still abundant; the former, not so much.

Consider what Trump has done so far. He started out by taking an imprudent congratulatory phone call from the president of Taiwan and questioning the well-established “One China” policy, only to backtrack a few days later. He abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his third day in office, thereby destroying a key institution that would have bound a number of Asian countries more tightly to the United States and undermining local leaders who had spent political capital of their own in order to reach an agreement. He berated Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on a “get-acquainted” phone call, reinforcing growing Australian doubts about the merits of their long association with the United States.

There's more--on the Koreas, China, and the Philippines--but you should read it there. It's not long, but it's important, even if it has a low profile in the news this week. Walt's conclusion? "This unhappy situation may give people like me plenty to write about, but it isn’t good for the country and it sure as hell ain’t realism. Those who wish America ill could hardly ask for more."

This Week in the Census

In yet another undercovered story, why is the Trump administration sabotaging the 2020 census? As fivethirtyeight.com reports:

"Still, the bigger threat to the quality of census data could come next year. Trump’s preliminary 2018 budget would give $1.5 billion to the Census Bureau, effectively keeping spending flat in a year when, based on past 10-year cycles, it should be increasing by 60 percent or more. (Ahead of the 2000 census, funding lagged through the first seven years of the cycle, then jumped in 1998.) If Congress doesn’t decide to appropriate more money, the bureau could face a stark choice, said Phil Sparks, a former census official and co-director of the Census Project, an advocacy group. It could cut back the scope of the field test, increasing the risk of a failure in 2020 (imagine the census web site crashing as tens of millions of Americans try to log on to fill out their forms). It could make cuts to other programs, such as the annual American Community Survey, a key source of demographic and economic data. Or it could give up on shifting to an online census — a short-term savings that could end up costing $5 billion more over the full 10-year cycle, according to Commerce Department estimates."

This Week in Bears

One of our favorite bears has always been Smokey (who we used to visit in person --or in bear--in the National Zoo, decades ago). This weekend in Capitan, NM, home of the Smokey Bear Museum, Smokey's having a birthday celebration. Happy birthday, old pal!

TWiA Redux, Week 1 -- @realDonaldTrump #100Days=Weak

This Week in America took an extended hiatus following the inauguration of that guy who won the electoral college while falling short of Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million votes. The outrages were piling up so quickly that just keeping track of them all would have been a full-time job, and we here at TWiA World Headquarters already have multiple full-time jobs. We've never made a dime off TWiA (though you could change that by contributing a dime here), and simply couldn't afford--financially or emotionally--the cost of the reporting/analysis we like to do.

So 99 days later, we're wading back into those waters, with this abbreviated edition. Things have slowed down a little, and there are enough things going on this week that require some explication. If the response is good enough, or if we feel similarly about the task next week and beyond, we'll keep it going. Please help by sharing it on your social media and telling all your friends. Also, keep an eye on TWiA's Twitter feed, @ThisWeekAmerica , which we'll also try to make more active. One of these days we may actually launch that Facebook page, if people care.

This Week in 100 Days

As has been reported everywhere, Saturday marks Trump's 100th day in office. Desperate to look like they've done something, the administration has spent the last few weeks trying to do anything, without success. In fact, all Trump has to show for his 100 days are a bunch of executive orders like the ones he constantly attacked when Obama used them (and, as he's shown, executive orders are easily overturned), and one Supreme Court Justice.

That is, in fact, a momentous achievement, one that will last and bedevil our nation for decades to come. But that achievement doesn't belong to Trump. Instead, it's due to the act of near-treason by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: denying the twice-elected-by-a-much-Yuger-margin President Obama his rightful SCOTUS pick, then demolishing the Senate filibuster to install Trump's. That double-whammy will follow McConnell into the history books, forever tainting what could have been a reputation as one of the Senate's most significant players. Instead, he'll go down as a man who put party ahead of country in the most destructive way possible--no patriot, but instead a conniving huckster who did his best to harm America.

Given that Trump's only achievement in 100 days was one he had almost nothing to do with (Neil Gorsuch would have been on the list of any Republican), the only appropriate single-word summation of this president so far is weak. There's no reason to think that's going to change.

This Week in Taxes

One of the big topics under discussion this week has been Trump's tax "plan." In actuality, it's more of an idea for a concept of an outline of a plan--it all fits onto one side of a single sheet of paper, double-spaced, with a lot of white space and not many numbers on it. It could be summed up more succinctly than that, in these three words "Me want more!"

The "plan" includes some middle class tax cuts, but they're mostly cosmetic--essentially, confetti thrown our way so we don't notice that the prime beneficiaries are millionaires and billionaires and corporations (which are headed largely by millionaires and billionaires). The plan would cut Trump's own taxes bigly (the elimination of the alternative minimum tax alone would have sliced $31 million off his tax bill in 2005, the year we've seen two pages of tax documents from), as well as eliminating the estate taxes that his heirs might otherwise have to pay when he eventually dies (as if they weren't rich enough already). We can't know specifically how his taxes would be affected, since unlike every presidential candidate/president since Richard Nixon, he's refused to show the American public his tax returns, offering a series of nonsensical lies to explain his reticence. The truth, of course, is that he considers non-rich Americans a bunch of chumps who don't deserve to see behind his gold lamé curtains.

Because there's so little detail in his "plan," we can't know what we would pay--the tax structure is simplified down to three tax rates, but it's impossible to know which we'd fall under. Lots of tax deductions we might use are done away with, too. But we do know that the top corporate tax rate would be slashed from 35% to 15%. Now, most big corporations don't actually pay that 35%--some pay nothing at all.

What we can know about the "plan" is that if it were enacted, the national debt and the deficit would skyrocket. When there are Democratic presidents, or Democrats control Congress, Republicans like to pretend that they care about deficits. But when the tables are turned, as former VP Dick Cheney famously said, "Deficits don't matter." Trump seems to be working from that starting point, and genuine deficit hawks are already cringing.

His financial advisers, like former Goldman Sachs execs Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, claim that the economic growth that would be unleashed by this brilliant "plan" would make it pay for itself. That is, in a word, nonsense. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush made the same claim about their huge tax cuts. Reagan had to follow it up with multiple tax increases to try to control the damage. The first President Bush had to raise taxes again, and we still had a recession anyway. George W. Bush didn't even do that much, and at the same time put two wars on the national credit card. These ill-considered actions hampered the economy and made it hard to respond appropriately to the Great Recession that the tax cuts helped cause. Neither of their cuts paid for themselves; both increased the debt and ran up the deficit.

More recently, the governor of Kansas tried the same economic approach that Trump promises in his state, with disastrous results.

There is no time in the history of the country that tax cuts have paid for themselves, or led to ongoing economic growth.

The less-discussed flip side of this is what happens when the government isn't taking in the revenue that it needs to maintain services. Who suffers in those cases (or, to be more direct, who would suffer to give the rich the massive tax cuts Trump proposes)? Answer: not the rich. The programs that tend to be cut are those that benefit the middle class and the poor. Parks and libraries close. Government agencies are understaffed and therefore can't adequately serve the public. Assistance to the working poor shrinks. Medical care suffers.

Trump's "plan" would increase inequality in this country--making the rich richer and the rest of us poorer, and increasing the gap between us. It would take trillions of dollars out of federal hands--where, theoretically at least, it can be spent in ways that benefit us all: defense, security, infrastructure, scientific research, disease prevention, food safety, pollution mitigation, health care, and on and on--and hand it over to the richest among us. It's large-scale redistribution of wealth, from those who can afford it least to those who need it least.

It's unlikely to be passed--even by a Republican Congress--in this form, in part because it's so skimpy on details and in part because it wouldn't actually accomplish the goals that tax reform should aim for. But even though the "plan" as is won't go anywhere, House Speaker Paul Ryan and his colleagues will try for something else, probably equally damaging. We need to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't hurt the American public in their ongoing quest to cut taxes for the wealthiest of us.

Side Note: Yes, our tax code is way too complex. When you look at the thousands of pages it comprises, though, you're not--as conservatives would have you believe--looking at an overbearing government run amuck, but at the work of lobbyists protecting the interests of industry on multiple levels. There's not much in there that benefits ordinary Americans, but plenty that carves out big chunks of change for the wealthy and the corporations.

Sweden, on the other hand, has a streamlined, simplified tax system that we'd do well to emulate. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars and hours upon hours to do their own taxes, Swedes get their forms in the mail, already filled out. If they agree with what they get, they can simply accept the forms on their phones, and they're done. Yes, they pay a little more in taxes than Americans do, but not a lot--and what they get for those taxes is far, far more than we do. College? Paid for. Health care? Paid for. Infrastructure? Paid for. Have a kid? You don't have to take a deduction next April; you get a check in the mail every month, because having children is considered to benefit society.

Tax reform isn't a bad idea. Tax cuts, though, aren't tax reform. In this case, they're nothing but a giveaway to the rich at the expense of everyone else.

This Week in Corruption

Not unrelated to the above, Trump, his family, and his administration are almost unbelievably corrupt. As Common Cause reports in an extensive study of the administration's ethical lapses:and his

Rather than advancing the public interest in fixing the rigged system he assailed as a candidate, Trump and his team have set about serving private interests. Under the guise of promoting job growth, they are moving to privatize core government functions like public education and systematically dismantling regulations that, however imperfect, were put in place to protect public health and safety, and serve as the people’s checks and balances on private power. They have casually discarded decades of sound ethical practices, weakened enforcement of existing rules, and opened unprecedented opportunities for government officials to enrich themselves at public expense. Rather than advancing the intent of government of, by, and for the people, the Trump administration is turning the regulatory structures over to the very industries the agencies were intended to oversee.

The conclusion is inescapable: Donald Trump has presided over the most corrupt first hundred days in the history of the American presidency. The good news is that “we the people” still have the power to use other checks and balances on his authority.

And ProPublica took a look at Trump's definition of "accountability" in this enlightening Tweetstorm.

It's almost as if Trump looked at the worst, most venal banana republics in history--or, you know, the corrupt and murderous oligarchy that is Putin's Russia--and said, "If I could do that here, I could really cash in!" So far, Congress shows no interest in reining him in.

This Week in School

Trump's Education Secretary, the highly unqualified Betsy DeVos, is a huge proponent of using vouchers to enable kids to attend private schools--thereby defunding public schools and putting the profit motive in between our children and their education. A new study by her own Education Department shows that in the only federally funded voucher program in the country, the kids taking "advantage" of those vouchers performed worse in standardized testing than kids who didn't. Many other studies have shown negative results for kids in charter schools and other private schools. All this might make DeVos change her tune, if she were capable of learning. Alas, we don't have any reason to believe that's the case.

***

Then there's this news, from Alabama:

A federal judge’s ruling this week that allows a predominantly white Alabama city to separate from its more diverse school district is stoking new debate about the fate of desegregation initiatives after decades of efforts to promote racial balance in public education.

Judge Madeline Haikala of the U.S. District Court in Birmingham ruled that the city of Gardendale’s effort to break away was motivated by race and sent messages of racial inferiority and exclusion that “assail the dignity of black schoolchildren.”

She also found that Gardendale failed to meet its legal burden to prove that its separation would not hinder desegregation in Jefferson County, which has been struggling to integrate its schools since black parents first sued for an equal education for their children in the 1960s.

Still, Haikala ruled Monday that Gardendale may move forward with the secession, basing her decision in part on sympathy for some parents who want local control over schools and in part on concern for black students caught in the middle. The judge wrote that she feared they would bear the blame if she blocked the city’s bid.

Further down in the piece is this nugget:

Federal judges have over the years allowed a succession of majority-white cities to pull their schools out of the Jefferson system, leaving the county schools with a smaller tax base and a growing proportion of low-income and black students. But until now, no judge has so closely examined whether efforts to draw new school-district boundaries here were racially motivated — much less concluded that they were.

“It’s hard to square,” said Monique Lin-Luse, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who also represents black parents in the case. The court’s acknowledgment that race played a factor in the secession effort was a vindication “even beyond what we had hoped for,” Lin-Luse said, but the notion that the city of Gardendale can take steps toward forming its own system anyway is “of deep concern.”

Blatant racism is alive and well in America, and it elected its own president. We need to do better.

This Week in the Free Internet

Trump's new FCC Chair wants to put private profit ahead of the public interest (do you sense a theme with this administration?). In this op-ed, senators Ron Wyden (D/OR), Al Franken (D/MN), and former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler explain why this is a terrible idea:

For as long as the Internet has existed, it has been grounded on the principle of net neutrality — that what you read, see or watch online shouldn’t be favored, blocked or slowed down based on where that content is coming from. Net neutrality means that cable companies can’t reserve the fastest Internet speeds for the biggest companies and leave everyone else in the slow lane. That’s what ensures a website for a local pizza place in rural Oregon or Minnesota loads as quickly as the website for Pizza Hut or Domino’s. Or why a social network built in a garage is available to the same people as Instagram or Twitter.

That’s why it’s so alarming to see that the Federal Communications Commission, a federal agency that’s expected to help protect the Internet, is planning to roll back net neutrality rules.

In the past few months, President Trump’s new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has already abandoned other important consumer protections: He backed out of a proposal to free people from having to rent expensive cable boxes, and he is trying to make it harder for low-income families to access affordable high-speed Internet. It’s amazing that Trump, having promised to stand up to the powerful on behalf of ordinary Americans, now has an FCC that gives the powerful what they ask for — even if it hurts consumers.

Okay, that last line overstates it--there's nothing "amazing" about it, unless you believe the constant lies that tumble from Trump's mouth. In fact, any observant American could have seen just where he wanted to take us. Now he's in the White House, and the damage he can do is hard to fathom.

This Week in Public Lands

Public lands belong to all of us. The movement to "give them back to the states" (as if they ever belonged to the states anyway) is really about letting the states turn them over to private interests for short-term profits. Once they're exploited to pad the bank accounts of the rich, we'll never have them back. It's a con, and we're all the marks.

Trump has announced a plan to "review" the national monument designations the last few presidents have made under the Antiquities Act. Here's a piece from High Country News detailing some of the lies told by those who support his attack on our public lands.

This Week in Books

Longtime readers will know that we're huge fans of Pete Souza, the former official White House Photographer under Barack Obama. The publisher Little, Brown has just announced a new book by Souza, in which he'll pick 300 of his favorites from among the thousands of images he made while serving in that role. It comes out in November, so just in time for the holidays.

Side Note: Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day across the country. We here at TWiA World Headquarters will be celebrating by taking part in a writer's conference in Mesa, AZ, called Cirque du Livre, and doing a signing with independent bookseller Bonny Books, at the conference's Pop-up Bookstore (PUB). Check the conference website for the details, and stop by the signing at 3 PM if you're in the area.

This Week in Bears

Has there ever been a more adorable bear than Otto, an orphaned cub at Tennessee's Appalachian Bear Rescue facility? Hard to say.

In other bear news, although TV's Yogi used to steak pic-a-nic baskets, this Yogi just takes a seat at the family's picnic table and waits to be served. And in Montana, your more educated bears tote their own laptops.

This Week in America -- Thanks, Obama

It's been quiet here for the past couple of weeks, as I've been taking in and processing the increasingly terrible Trump transition process--a process in which our worst fears of a president with the emotional maturity of a first-grader, the intellectual curiosity of a tree stump, and the dignity and decency of an ax murderer all seem to be coming true. I'll try to resume our regular schedule after the inauguration, but I can't make any promises at this point.

This week, though, instead of looking toward the future, I want to take a backward glance. For the purposes of this post, I'm setting aside the editorial "we" and the multiple links, and I'll speak as one lone voice, with a unique perspective on the administration that comes to a close at noon today.

In 2008, during the presidential campaign, I was asked to write a comic book biography of Barack Obama. Another writer tackled a biography of his general election opponent, John McCain.

We each took our assignments seriously. We were to report only what could be documented, ideally by multiple sources. We had to provide all those sources to lawyers who would vet our scripts. For my part, I also provided detailed art references to Tom Morgan, who did a masterful job bringing Obama's story to life on the pages.

My book told of Obama's life from his birth (in Hawaii!) through the Democratic National Convention, at which he officially became his party's nominee (complete with Tom's illustration of what Fox "News" anchor E.D. Hill called Barack and Michelle Obama's "terrorist fist jab").

The through-line that underlay my extensively researched biography was that Obama had been an outsider all his life--the son of a white woman and a Kenyan man who'd left his family behind when the boy was an infant; living as a black boy with white grandparents in a society where mixed-race children were incredibly rare, living as an American in Indonesia, living in New York, away from everyone he'd ever known, when he attended Columbia University, then moving away from everyone he'd met at Columbia to work as a community organizer in Chicago, and finally heading east again, to Harvard, where he became the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. His life story, I decided, was a quest for belonging, for identity.

The books were published during the general election campaign, as individual standard-length comic books, and back-to-back as a flipbook (so one cover featured Obama, and turning the book over, the other cover featured McCain).

I'd first become aware of Senator Barack Obama (D/IL)--like much of the country--when I saw his stirring speech at the 2004 convention that had nominated John Kerry. I'd seen speak Kerry once, in person--a speech that ran 40 minutes, covering a wide variety of issues, delivered without a single note; Kerry's intellect was vast and his knowledge profound. When I saw Obama's convention speech, I said, "There's our first black president." But I thought he would need more time in the Senate to build up a policy resume and national name recognition. In 2008, at first, I still thought it was too soon, too early.

But the more research I did, reading both of the books he had written and hundreds of magazine and newspaper stories (in those days, it was still possible to read the huge majority of what had been written about the relative unknown), the more I came to respect and admire him. His life had never been easy, but he had never given up striving to succeed, to accomplish things that most people would have believed impossible. He was a brilliant writer, a deep thinker, a dedicated and determined public servant. My research led me to support his candidacy, even before he had secured the nomination.

When the books were released, my McCain counterpart and I were sent on a whirlwind tour, signing at comic book stores in New York City and Los Angeles, and for me, Phoenix, AZ. At each event, people came out in droves, many of them African American, most of them thrilled at the prospect of a black president. A few McCain supporters showed up, too, but in the end, the Obama book sold out four printings, while the McCain one was never reprinted--a statistic that also predicted the election result.

The press took notice, too. I was interviewed on CNN, Fox "News," and Reuters TV, as well as by multiple major newspapers. Around the country (and around the world) stories about the books appeared, even when I wasn't personally interviewed. The attention prompted a stream of messages, via mail, email, and even phone calls from people who'd managed to find my number and had something to say.

The end of the Bush administration was a dark time. The economy had cratered; Americans were losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands, and the ripples were spreading around the world. People were bring thrown out of homes they could no longer afford, thanks to the financial chicanery of big banks. Our troops were still deeply embroiled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan--conflicts that had resulted in the birth of the organization known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, which soon morphed into the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL). We'd lost more than 5,000 soldiers in those wars, without doing much to make America safer. Bin Laden was still on the loose, and President Bush had declared the he didn't much care where the terrorist mastermind was. The American president had reversed the country's historic ban on torture, instituted the practice that came to be called "extraordinary rendition," and created in Cuba a prison where the agreements of the Geneva Convention didn't apply and prisoners weren't granted the rights of prisoners on American soil. President Bush had uttered strong words opposing North Korea's nuclear program, but those words hadn't been backed up and the rogue nation now had nuclear weapons capability. Our prestige around the world had been diminished by our unilateral, unprovoked invasion of Iraq and the revelations of torture at American hands.

Obama was taking office at a difficult and dangerous time, and I wrote then that to recover from the Bush years and right America's course, he would need to be a great president. I thought then that he had that capability, but didn't know if he could pull it off.

The success of my comic--called Presidential Material: Barack Obama--spurred two additional comics (and, incidentally, a host of imitators, including one publishing company almost entirely dedicated to publishing biographical comics that look vaguely like it). The first covered the events of the presidential campaign, culminating in Obama's historic and inspiring inaugural address. That day, Obama said, in part:

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.  On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.  We remain a young nation.  But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.  The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation:  the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness. 

...

The state of our economy calls for action, bold and swift.  And we will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.  We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.  We'll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost.  We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.  And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.  All this we can do.  All this we will do.

 

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.  Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.  What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. 

 

...

 

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.  Our Founding Fathers -- our Founding Fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man -- a charter expanded by the blood of generations.  Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake.

 

And so, to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born, know that America is a friend of each nation, and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity.  And we are ready to lead once more.

 

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.  They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please.  Instead they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

 

We are the keepers of this legacy.  Guided by these principles once more we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort, even greater cooperation and understanding between nations.  We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.  With old friends and former foes, we'll work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.

 

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense.  And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken -- you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. 

 

...

 

Our challenges may be new.  The instruments with which we meet them may be new.  But those values upon which our success depends -- honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old.  These things are true.  They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. 

 

What is demanded, then, is a return to these truths.  What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.

 

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.  This is the source of our confidence -- the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.  This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall; and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath. 

 

So let us mark this day with remembrance of who we are and how far we have traveled.  In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river.  The capital was abandoned.  The enemy was advancing.  The snow was stained with blood.  At the moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words to be read to the people: 

 

"Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."

 

America:  In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words.  With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come.  Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

 

Thank you.  God bless you.  And God bless the United States of America.

 

The third comic told the story of Obama's first 100 days in office. They were busy days, with congressional hearings over his Cabinet nominations, the formation of a White House ethics office that would hold his administration to higher standards than those that had come before, and anxious action to halt and reverse the Great Recession. That period also saw the rise of the "Tea Party" movement, stirred up out of a belief that taxes and spending were going up (despite the facts that Obama's stimulus package--while smaller than it should have been--contained tax cuts for 95% of Americans, and that the government spending they opposed was necessary to turn the economy around). These two comics were also successful, and were combined into a hardcover book collecting all three as Barack Obama: The Comic Book Biography. It was the first book-length biography of Obama published, albeit in an unusual format for political biographies.

 

 

Researching and writing those books gave me a unique perspective on Obama and his administration. Between that and my conversations and correspondence with voters of every stripe, I felt a deeper, more participatory connection to it. Obama--from his inaugural address to his farewell address this month--has always stressed that America demands more than casual observation from its citizenry, more even than casting a vote once in a while. American democracy is government of, for, and by the people, and that "by the people" cannot be forgotten or stressed enough.

 

I haven't done enough. I've voted, called and written my elected representatives, made financial contributions as I've been able, written blog posts and letters to the editors of national and local publications, attended rallies and speeches. But democracy is a big commitment, and it requires active participation in all its facets--those duties of citizenship that Obama has often mentioned, from his inaugural address to his farewell speech.

 

Any list of the Obama administration's accomplishments is necessarily incomplete--there are too many, and the effects often seem intangible--but the list is long and the impact profound. The first bill Obama signed--the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, nine days into his first term--demonstrated that his priorities would be inclusiveness and equality of opportunity. The economy, we know now, did turn around, leading to a revival of the American auto industry, the longest stretch of private-sector jobs growth in history, an unprecedented stock market boom, and rising wages for most Americans, across lines of race, class, and location.

 

Tens of millions of Americans now have access to health insurance, resulting in better health outcomes and fewer bankruptcies. Climate change is finally being addressed, with a landmark international treaty, and alternative energy has become as cost-effective as fossil fuels. The administration deported 2.5 million undocumented people and beefed up border security, while helping Mexico improve its own economy, resulting in net-zero illegal immigration across our southern border. At the same time, it gave hope to millions of DREAMers, young undocumented people who have never known any country but this one.

 

The administration respected science and oversaw great technological advancements. It fought off threatening epidemics and instituted a cancer "moon shot." Obama fought for civil rights like no president since FDR and LBJ, and we saw the great institution of marriage become available to every American. The previous administration saw more than 4,000 Americans killed in terrorist attacks and more than 5,000 fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq; under Obama, the terrorist toll is in the low 100s (with no terror attacks carried out by groups external to the US), and we've lost fewer than 1,000 military personnel over the eight years. For the first time since the Carter administration, fewer people are incarcerated in federal prisons at the end of the administration than at the beginning, and we've made progress in reforming American law enforcement from top to bottom.

 

This is not to say that he didn't make mistakes. There was never a "good" policy alternative in Syria, but the fact is that we stood by while innocents suffered and died by the thousands (though it can be argued, as outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry has, that diplomacy--trying to bring the warring sides to the same table--held the best promise for peace). Terror attacks still take place around the globe with distressing frequency, and although ISIS is severely weakened, it still holds territory and inspires terrorist acts. The stimulus and financial bailout of the big banks could have been handled better, with more help going to homeowners than to bankers, and some of the people whose fraudulent practices nearly destroyed the world economy should have been prosecuted and jailed. Congress blocked the infrastructure improvements he wanted, so our bridges, roads, schools, and power grids are still crumbling and vulnerable. Climate change remains a major threat, and too many Americans are still out of work, homeless, or living in poverty. A president is not a king or a god, and he can't--with or without a cooperative legislature--solve every problem.

 

But the end result of his administration is that we live in a country that is more free, more fair, and more welcoming of diversity than the one he inherited. The changes have often been incremental, and thanks to Republic obstruction, some of the changes we've seen could be easily reversed. Others will be harder to undo. The arc of the moral universe is long, the Rev. Martin Luther King reminded us, but it bends toward justice. Obama and his administration did a lot of important bending.

 

The First Family itself offered Americans an important and inspiring picture. Barack and Michelle showed us a marriage full of love and respect, and Sasha and Malia showed us how children can grow up in extraordinary circumstances while retaining their decency, their humility, and their sense of humor. Even Bo and Sunny demonstrated exemplary dog behavior (until this week, when Sunny reportedly bit a family friend--in reaction, no doubt, to the familial and national upheaval taking place as the premises were prepared for a turn to the Dark Side). And it wasn't just them--thanks to the example from the top and the emphasis on ethical behavior, the entire administration was remarkably scandal-free, despite the best efforts of Republicans to manufacture one "scandal" after another.

 

The Obama family on Easter Sunday, 2015 (photo by Pete Souza/White House, from ABC News/Getty)

 

A great president? Opinions vary. Many on the left feel the strain of too much left undone, of racial animosity that is either increased or at least more visible, of a nation still threatened by a flood of gun violence, of imperfect and imperiled progress across the board. Many on the right still can't decide whether he's a hapless weakling or a tyrannical overlord (though clearly he can't be both, and in fact is neither).

 

But in the aftermath of his two terms, tens of millions of Americans have better lives. Their financial and health prospects are improved. They can marry and love one another without legal repercussions. Non-white Americans can see a living example of American equality in action--a black family living in the White House built with slave labor.

 

I've lived through every presidency since Eisenhower's. None has ever made me prouder of my country and our democracy than this one. As we prepare to live under a very different administration, one seemingly dedicated to reversing decades of progress on multiple fronts, all I can say is, "Thanks, Obama."

 

 

Side Note 1: One area of commonality between me and President Obama is a love of literature of all sorts, high and low. Growing up, he's admitted, he was a fan of Spider-Man and Conan, both of whom I've written novels about. Obama has written short fiction, and throughout his presidency, interspersed his briefing books and reports and presidential biographies and history with novels. Here's an interview with him about the reading habits that carried him through 8 years in the White House.

 

Side Note 2: Another worthwhile lens through which to view President Obama--his relationship with American culture, pop and otherwise, throughout his presidency. Of particular interest to this writer was this gem: "But has any president been as conversant in the art and popular culture of this country as Barack Obama? Who has been as committed to opening up the White House to the sorts of artists he has? Lunches with the novelists Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers and Colson Whitehead. One lunch, actually. That was one lunch." 

 

Side Note 3: Here's a long piece about the "Obama Doctrine," which emphasizes using local forces to fight terrorists in their own countries, rather than invading with overwhelming numbers of American troops. Yes, we could have retaken Mosul and Raqqa with a few Marine divisions, but to what end? We've done that. It didn't stick. Unless we're prepared to make Iraq and Syria military protectorates for the rest of eternity, we need to let Iraqis and Syrians retake their own cities from ISIS. They can do the job. It'll take longer, but in the end patience is rewarded with countries run by their own citizenry, not by the American military. Military commanders and troops agree that the Obama Doctrine is the best way to fight terror around the world. The question is, will Trump?

 

Side Note 3: Another worthwhile lens through which to view President Obama--his relationship with American culture, pop and otherwise, throughout his presidency. Of particular interest to this writer was this gem: "But has any president been as conversant in the art and popular culture of this country as Barack Obama? Who has been as committed to opening up the White House to the sorts of artists he has? Lunches with the novelists Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers and Colson Whitehead. One lunch, actually. That was one lunch."

 

This Week in Bears

 

Watch Bei Bei, the National Zoo's giant panda, eat a sweet potato.

 

Also, no, Betsy DeVos, schools don't need guns to "protect from potential grizzlies." In America's historical record, there are lots of recorded instances of students shooting each other, but no recorded instances of shootings of grizzly bears. Grizzlies are not a grave danger to American schoolchildren, but Betsy DeVos is.

This Week in America (Post-election Week 7--Here Comes 2017!)

Due to work pressures and holidays and general Trump-related exhaustion, we have only an abbreviated TWiA this week.

This Week in Understanding Trump

In 1953, the great fantasist Jerome Bixby published a short story called "It's a Good Life." In 1961, Rod Serling adapted that story for a Twilight Zone episode of the same name. In case you've forgotten it, here's Serling's opening narration:

Tonight's story on The Twilight Zone is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of introduction. This, as you may recognize, is a map of the United States, and there's a little town there called Peaksville. On a given morning not too long ago, the rest of the world disappeared and Peaksville was left all alone. Its inhabitants were never sure whether the world was destroyed and only Peaksville left untouched or whether the village had somehow been taken away. They were, on the other hand, sure of one thing: the cause. A monster had arrived in the village. Just by using his mind, he took away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines - because they displeased him - and he moved an entire community back into the dark ages - just by using his mind.

Now I'd like to introduce you to some of the people in Peaksville, Ohio. This is Mr. Fremont. It's in his farmhouse that the monster resides. This is Mrs. Fremont. And this is Aunt Amy, who probably had more control over the monster in the beginning than almost anyone. But one day she forgot. She began to sing aloud. Now, the monster doesn't like singing, so his mind snapped at her, turned her into the smiling, vacant thing you're looking at now. She sings no more.

And you'll note that the people in Peaksville, Ohio, have to smile. They have to think happy thoughts and say happy things because once displeased, the monster can wish them into a cornfield or change them into a grotesque, walking horror. This particular monster can read minds, you see. He knows every thought, he can feel every emotion.

Oh yes, I did forget something, didn't I? I forgot to introduce you to the monster. This is the monster. His name is Anthony Fremont. He's six years old, with a cute little-boy face and blue, guileless eyes. But when those eyes look at you, you'd better start thinking happy thoughts, because the mind behind them is absolutely in charge. This is the Twilight Zone.

Only now it's not the Twilight Zone, it's the America we all live in. And our President-elect, like Anthony Fremont, is an insecure, childish, petty, unthinking, uncaring bully. When you see the people around Donald Trump smiling, proclaiming their enthusiasm for his ignorance, his anti-intellectualism, his casual racism and misogyny, his unconsidered policies, his greed, his inability to accept criticism, remember that they have to smile. A minority of American voters--but enough of them, in the right places--have given him the power. Nobody in Trump's inner circle wants to be sent to the cornfield, and the more they bow to his wishes, the more power he'll amass. It will take courage--political courage and moral courage--to stand up to him. Soon enough, we'll learn who in Washington has courage and who doesn't.

 

This Week in Murder

Here's a year-end piece you should really read. Nobel Prize-winning economist describes good news for the Affordable Care Act, which has weathered some bad news and bad press in 2016 but is coming back stronger than ever. Krugman writes:

To appreciate the good news about Obamacare you need to understand where the earlier bad news came from. Premiums on the exchanges, the insurance marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act, did indeed rise sharply this year, because insurers were losing money. But this wasn’t because of a surge in overall medical costs, which have risen much more slowly since the act was passed than they did before. It reflected, instead, the mix of people signing up — fewer healthy, low-cost people than expected, more people with chronic health issues.

The question was whether this was a one-time adjustment or the start of a “death spiral,” in which higher premiums would drive healthy Americans out of the market, further worsening the mix, leading to even higher premiums, and so on.

And the answer is that it looks like a one-shot affair. Despite higher premiums, enrollments in the exchanges are running ahead of their levels a year ago; no death spiral here. Meanwhile, analysts are reporting substantial financial improvement for insurers: The premium hikes are doing the job, ending their losses.

In other words, Obamacare hit a bump in the road, but appears to be back on track.

Except that Republicans in Congress, led by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R/WI) are determined to kill it (and along with it, Americans who depend on the health insurance it has provided them). Krugman again:

Independent estimates suggest that Republican plans would cause 30 million Americans to lose coverage, with about half the losers coming from the Trump-supporting white working class. At least some of those Trump supporters would probably conclude that they were the victims of a political scam — which they were.

Republican congressional leaders like Paul Ryan nonetheless seem eager to push ahead with repeal. In fact, they seem to be in a great rush, probably because they’re afraid that if they don’t unravel health reform in the very first weeks of the Trump era, rank-and-file members of Congress will start hearing from constituents who really, really don’t want to lose their insurance.

Why do the Republicans hate health reform? Some of the answer is that Obamacare was paid for in part with taxes on the wealthy, who will reap a huge windfall if it’s repealed, even as many middle-income families face tax hikes.

More broadly, Obamacare must die precisely because it’s working, showing that government action really can improve people’s lives — a truth they don’t want anyone to know.

So for reasons of a twisted ideology that values only the lives of the rich, Republicans want to destroy a program that's working, that's bringing real, tangible benefits--including longer, healthier lives--to millions of Americans. They say they'll eventually replace the ACA with something, but they've been saying that for six years without offering a plan to do that. The reason? The ACA was structured along the lines of Republican-proposed plans that came out of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and that Republican Gov. Mitt Romney pushed through in Massachusetts.

It works because of the various moving parts that are all required to make it work. Take away any of those parts and it falls apart. But there are only two ways to achieve anything close to universal insurance, and the ACA is the right-wing, free-market way. The left-wing way is a single-payer plan--Medicare for all. There aren't any other options that work, and since Republicans will never propose single-payer, their choice is to keep the ACA or tear it down and skip the "replace" part.

If Ryan gets his way and the ACA is repealed--or even if, instead of full repeal, only one part of it is stripped away (probably the individual mandate, or the tax hikes on the wealthy)--Americans will get sick, go bankrupt, and die. And Ryan and his fellow conservatives will try to deflect the blame. We should remember that at the tail end of President Obama's second term, the ACA was alive and well, and getting better. If it dies, it's not from natural causes. It will have been murdered.

Side Note: Ryan claims that "Because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke." That's a lie, and Ryan knows it.

This Week in the White House

We here at WiA World Headquarters are unabashed fans of the work of official White House Photographer Pete Souza. Here's his final year-end retrospective of photos of life with the First and Second Families of the land. We'll miss Souza, almost as much as we miss the grace, dignity, and humanity of the Obama and Biden families.

This Week in Arizona

Rep. Trent Franks (R/AZ) went on MSNBC this week and said this:

I’m all for doing what’s necessary to protect the election here, but there’s no suggestion that Russia hacked into our voting systems or anything like that. If anything, whatever they may have done, was to try to use information in a way that may have affected something that they believe was in their best interest.

But the bottom line, if they succeeded – if Russia succeeded – in giving the American people information that was accurate, then they merely did what the media should have done.

We're not sure whether Franks knows the difference between investigative journalism and theft (honestly, we're not sure Franks knows much of anything). But even Franks should understand that stealing information from people's computers is not "what the media should have done."

The media, in fact, should not even have published as much of the stolen material as they did. The fact that Wikileaks released it does not, in itself, make it newsworthy. Of course, it translated into clicks and ad revenue. But people aren't supposed to profit from criminality, even indirectly. If the Russians were the thieves and Wikileaks their fence, the media was complicit in "monetizing" their ill-gotten goods.

And Franks thinks the media should have skipped the middle-men and stolen the material directly?

He's an embarrassment to Arizona. That's hard to do--as America's Most Corrupt Sheriff^TM, Jan Brewer, Paul Babeu, Matt Salmon, and dozens of other Arizona politicians have proved, going back at least to the days of Evan Mecham, ours is a state almost immune to embarrassment.

This Week in Bears

Here are pictures and videos of Jimbo, a 1400-pound Kodiak bear, hugging and playing with his caretakers, who have known him for 23 years. We've written about Jimbo before, but he's cool enough to revisit.

This Week in America (Post-election, Week 6) Happy Holidays, Whatever You Celebrate!

Far too much media coverage of politics focuses on the horserace angle--who's ahead, who's behind, who's up or down. It relies on false equivalency: if Politician A says X, then the reporter goes to Politician B, who's sure to say Y. That's lazy journalism, and it doesn't actually inform the public about which position (if any) is actually true, or adheres to the facts as we know them. At TWiA, our mission is to discuss politics through the prism of policy--to look, in other words, at the real-world implications of the things that politicians say and do, to make connections others might miss, and to explain it all in language a lay person can understand. Also to offer suggestions of how you can help somebody in need, to report on what's awesome, and to keep tabs on bears. If you like TWiA, share or repost or tell a friend, and be sure to leave comments, even if they're arguments. Especially if they're arguments. 

Follow us on Twitter: @ThisWeekAmerica 

 

This Week in How Bad Can It Get?

As a writer of horror fiction, it's in my nature to look for how bad things can get, and then to spin it to be a little bit worse. Naturally, without trying, I'm doing the same when considering the prospects for a Donald Trump presidency. It's easy, unfortunately, to imaging things being very, very bad.

In the New York Times, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt pondered the same question, and they're not optimistic. They write:

Among the unwritten rules that have sustained American democracy are partisan self-restraint and fair play. For much of our history, leaders of both parties resisted the temptation to use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage, effectively underutilizing the power conferred by those institutions. There existed a shared understanding, for example, that anti-majoritarian practices like the Senate filibuster would be used sparingly, that the Senate would defer (within reason) to the president in nominating Supreme Court justices, and that votes of extraordinary importance — like impeachment — required a bipartisan consensus. Such practices helped to avoid a descent into the kind of partisan fight to the death that destroyed many European democracies in the 1930s.

Yet norms of partisan restraint have eroded in recent decades. House Republicans’ impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 abandoned the idea of bipartisan consensus on impeachment. The filibuster, once a rarity, has become a routine tool of legislative obstruction. As the political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have shown, the decline of partisan restraint has rendered our democratic institutions increasingly dysfunctional. Republicans’ 2011 refusal to raise the debt ceiling, which put America’s credit rating at risk for partisan gain, and the Senate’s refusal this year to consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee — in essence, allowing the Republicans to steal a Supreme Court seat — offer an alarming glimpse at political life in the absence of partisan restraint.

In other words, they're arguing, since Republicans control Congress and--thanks to their unprecedented obstruction--will get a fifth seat on a divided Supreme Court, and also control the majority of statehouses in the country, it will be incumbent upon them to uphold the norms that maintain our democracy. But they've already demonstrated, over more than a decade, their rejection of many of those norms. They've also demonstrated, throughout 2016, an unwillingness to stand up to Trump. None of that bodes well for our republic.

It's not a done deal. Yet. But we'll need to be vigilant in watching what happens, and outspoken in standing up for civil rights, for decency, and for the democratic process. Given their recent history, we can't count on elected Republicans to join that effort, which will make the work even harder. But it has to be done.

Side Note: When you're thinking about an authoritarian regime, or a dictator, what's one of the first things that comes to mind? A private security force, a Royal Guard, something like that? Us, too. So, there's that.

This Week in the Economy

Donald Trump is inheriting an economy that's thriving, and moving in the right direction for all Americans. There are no indications that he'll continue the policies that are growing it, though; instead, he's giving every sign of pushing for huge tax cuts for the rich, increasing the opportunity and wealth gaps, and forcing spending cuts that will slash necessary services for those left behind.

Economist Robert Samuelson took a look this week at President Obama's greatest accomplishment--one that Trump may try to undo--but even if he can alter the future, he can't change the past, and in the past, Obama saved the country. Samuelson writes, "There is no mystery about Barack Obama’s greatest presidential achievement: He stopped the Great Recession from becoming the second Great Depression. True, he had plenty of help, including from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and from the top officials at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. But if Obama had made one wrong step, what was a crushing economic slump could have become something much worse."

He reminds us just how bad the situation was when Obama took office, and runs through some of the decisions Obama made that changed the course of events. We should remember this, and thank the outgoing president for his calm, cool nature. A Trump presidency will be very different.

This Week in Who to Blame

There are lots of people to blame for the election of Donald Trump. People who voted for him, people who didn't vote, Russians, fake news sites, people who believe fake news... but now we know specifically the two people who probably made the biggest difference, thanks to investigative reporting by the Washington Post. The piece describes a series of phone calls between the FBI and the Justice Department:

Justice officials laid out a number of arguments against releasing the letter. It violated two long-standing policies. Never publicly discuss an ongoing investigation. And never take an action affecting a candidate for office close to Election Day. Besides, they said, the FBI did not know yet what was in the emails or if they had anything to do with the Clinton case.

Remarkably, the country’s two top law enforcement officials never spoke. As Comey’s boss, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch could have given the FBI director an order to not send the letter. But Lynch and her advisers feared that Comey would not listen. He seemed to feel strongly about updating Congress on his sworn testimony about the Clinton investigation. Instead, they tried to relay their concerns through the Justice official whom the FBI had called.

Their efforts failed. Within 24 hours of the first FBI call, Comey’s letter was out.

So those are the two most responsible--James Comey and Loretta Lynch. Why did Comey decide to break policy and release the letter, and why didn't Lynch stop him? The Post's Paul Waldman explains:

One of the points that comes through in Horwitz’s account is that both Comey and Lynch were consumed with fear that they’d be criticized by the Republican outrage machine. Comey worried that if he didn’t immediately go public with the fact that the FBI was looking at these emails, then Republicans would say he was covering up an investigation in order to help Clinton. And Lynch worried that if she ordered Comey to adhere to department policy and not go public, then Republicans would say she was covering up an investigation in order to help Clinton.

So both of them failed to do their jobs, Comey with an act of commission and Lynch with an act of omission. You can sympathize with the pressure they were under and say that hindsight is always 20/20, but the fact is that they failed, and it was because they didn’t have the courage to do the right thing. The next time you shake your head at the sight of Republicans yelling into cameras or talk radio microphones about how terribly angry they are at whatever they’re supposed to be angry at today, remember how politically useful all that noise can be.

That was the turning point, he explains, because emails.

Why can we say that Comey’s decision to go public made the difference? It came at the tail end of an endless media campaign to convince the public that there was literally no issue in the world more important than whether Clinton used the wrong email account — not the economy, not terrorism, not health care, not climate change, nothing. One analysis showed that network newscasts devoted three times as much attention to the email story as to all policy issues combined. By the time the campaign reached its end, the one word Americans thought of when they heard the name Hillary Clinton was “email” (just look at these shocking word clouds from Gallup if you doubt).

Most of them couldn’t tell you what the email story was actually about, but they knew it had something to do with some kind of corruption or other, as Trump kept saying. And any story that had the word “email” in it — like the Russian hacking of John Podesta’s emails, which had absolutely nothing to do with what email Clinton used at the State Department — got mashed in the public’s mind into one big amalgam.

I’m not going to relitigate the email question here. But that was the context in which Comey and Lynch made their decisions. They knew full well that when Comey violated departmental policy to go public with this news, it would result in an explosion of “EMAAAAAIIILLLS!” coverage across every major news outlet in the United States, which it did. And copious evidence suggests that the race turned right then, as Comey’s message reinforced exactly the argument Trump was making about Clinton, late deciders swung toward him, and wavering Republicans came home to their party’s nominee.

Now the Republican outrage machine's biggest blowhard will take his seat in the Oval Office. It'll get worse before it gets better. We think Comey and Lynch deserve heaping helpings of coal in their stockings this year. The damage they've done to America is incalculable.

This Week in "Better is Good"

With one of the least intellectual, least intelligent, least well-spoken presidents ever about to take office, it's refreshing--if sad--to read a conversation between the very smart President Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of America's foremost public intellectuals. That's what we get in The Atlantic, and it's worth reading every word of. We won't see such an informed discussion of real issues coming from the Trump White House.

Here's a sample:

Coates: You’re supposed to be optimistic!

Obama: Well, I thought I was, but I’m not so optimistic as to think that you would ever be able to garner a majority of an American Congress that would make those kinds of investments above and beyond the kinds of investments that could be made in a progressive program for lifting up all people. So to restate it: I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader’s ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow. Now, we can debate the justness of that. But I feel pretty confident in that assessment politically. And, you know, I think that part of my optimism comes from the belief that we as a people could actually, regardless of all the disadvantage of the past, regardless of the fact that a lot of other folks got a head start in the race, if we were able to make the race fair right now, and—

Coates: You think we could catch up?

Obama: We were able to make sure that it stayed fair for a long time and that children going forward were not encumbered by some of that same bias of the past, I think it would not take long at all, because we are a talented, resourceful people. Just play this out as a thought experiment: Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America—but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America—is getting a really good education. And they’re graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs that say that you’re not going to be barred from school just because of how much money your parents have. So now they’re all graduating. And let’s also say that the Justice Department and the courts are making sure, as I’ve said in a speech before, that when Jamal sends his résumé in, he’s getting treated the same as when Johnny sends his résumé in.

Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc., as the white community? In 10 years? Probably not, maybe not even in 20 years. But I guarantee you that we would be thriving, we would be succeeding. We wouldn’t have huge numbers of young African American men in jail. We’d have more family formation as college-graduated girls are meeting boys who are their peers, which then in turn means the next generation of kids are growing up that much better. And suddenly you’ve got a whole generation that’s in a position to start using the incredible creativity that we see in music, and sports, and frankly even on the streets, channeled into starting all kinds of businesses. I feel pretty good about our odds in that situation.

And my point has always been: We’re so far from that. Why are we even having the abstract conversation when we’ve got a big fight on our hands just to get strong, universal antipoverty programs and social programs in place, and we’re still fighting to make sure that basic antidiscrimination laws are enforced, not just at the federal level, by the way, but throughout government and throughout the private sector? And those are fights that we can win because—and this is where I do believe America has changed—the majority, not by any means 100 percent, but the majority of Americans believe in the idea of nondiscrimination. They believe in the idea that Jamal and Johnny should be treated equally. They believe in the idea that a child shouldn’t be consigned to poverty just because of circumstances of their birth. Now, in practice, in daily social interactions, etc., there may be all kinds of biases and prejudices that are unspoken, that people aren’t aware of, that affect who’s hired, and who gets loans, and how kids are treated in school. But it’s a powerful thing if you have on your side an idea that the overwhelming majority of people believe in because that’s how you can build a consensus that’s lasting. And that’s how you avoid an argument that “I’m being treated unfairly because you are treating somebody differently than me.” Everybody potentially can make the claim that we should all be treated fairly. As opposed to getting into arguments about, well, these folks have been treated fairly so now we’re going to be doing things that, very easily in the minds of a lot Americans feel like, “Now I’m being treated unfairly.”

This Week in What You Never Thought You'd See

Full Frontal's Samantha Bee sat down with a reformed Glenn Beck, who admits what we here at TWiA have long claimed--his rhetoric was dividing Americans, not uniting them. But Beck and Bee are united against Trumpism. Watch their bizarre mating ritual here.

This Week in America's Most Corrupt Sheriff^TM

America's Most Corrupt Sheriff^TM has apparently never heard the phrase "Don't let the door hit you on the way out." This week, he hit himself with the door about a dozen times during an hour-long press conference devoted to the results of his nonsensical birther "investigation," which "found," to absolutely no one's surprise, exactly what he wanted it to. President Obama's birth certificate, according to AMCS^TM, is a forgery. We suppose the birth announcement in the August 13, 1961 edition of the Honolulu Advertiser was planted there, part of a decades-long conspiracy to elect--by overwhelming margins--a fraudulent president. Fiendishly clever, those Obamas.

Or mind-numbingly stupid, that AMCS^TM. He can't leave soon enough.

This Week in Heroes

With the Trump administration taking over in a few weeks, we expect the news to rank highly on the bad-to-worse scale for some time to come. We're already tired of writing about the outrages Trump is inflicting on the country, and he hasn't even taken office yet. So we're going to do our best to pepper TWiA with stories about exceptional, inspiring heroes, whether human, canine, feline, or ursine. And we start this week with Cindy Stowell.

Cindy, a 41-year-old science content developer, snatched the Jeopardy championship away from a 7-time winner. Her episodes were recorded in August, but didn't air until December. Over the next 5 episodes, she kept winning, eventually racking up $105,803 before being beaten her 7th time out.

What Cindy, the Jeopardy producers, and Alex Trebek knew, but her competitors and the TV audience didn't, was that when Cindy auditioned for the show, she had Stage IV colon cancer. She knew she was dying, and she didn't want the money for herself--anything she won would be donated to cancer research. Thanks to her trivia genius, she was able to give away a nice chunk of change.

Cindy died on December 5, a week before her first episode aired.

Cindy did what she loved, and did a good thing with it, despite what must have seemed like an incredible obstacle. She's a hero.

This Week in Bears

The New York Times Magazine ran a feature on important figures who died in 2016. Included in that list was Pedals the Bear. We honor and appreciate Pedals, and remember him fondly.

A letter to the editor that ran in the New Jersey Herald this week was critical of NJ Gov. Chris Christie for the annual bear hunts he's approved while in office. It says, in part, "Six hundred thirty-six beautiful bears' lives were savagely taken by individuals who find amusement and pleasure in maiming and killing animals. Six hundred thirty-six majestic bears, who cherished their lives and families, just as we do ours, had their homes invaded and were killed by deadly archery weapons, muzzle-loaders and shotguns. Can you imagine the fear, the pain, the suffering?"

State Senator Ray Lesniak is trying to pass a bill to end the bear hunts, called Pedals' Law. If you live in New Jersey, please sign the petition and support the bill.

***

Cartoonist Holly Hindle tackles difficult topics, like depression and anxiety--and she does it while drawing herself as a bear. Check out Bearly Functioning, her Tumblr.

This Week in America (Post-election, Week 5)

TWiA explores the intersection of policy and politics, and most importantly, how that intersection affects real people. It's dedicated to the proposition that good government is possible, it matters, and taxpayers deserve nothing less. Its starting point is that facts are facts, science is real, data are real, and we can and must learn from history. Below you'll find facts and opinions that derive from fact, informed by a close and careful study of these issues that began in 1968 and has never stopped. Note, when we discuss generic "Democrats" and "Republicans" or "conservatives" and "liberals," etc., we're generally talking about elected officials, unless otherwise noted. Also, bonus bear news and other awesomeness. We appreciate comments and arguments, so please chime in, and if you like it, spread the word.

Follow us on Twitter: @ThisWeekAmerica

 

This Week in Fake News

The "fake news" phenomenon has racked up a lot of press this year, because of its prominence in and impact on the presidential election. But it's nothing new. In this piece for The Trace, Adam Weinstein discusses the long tradition within the NRA of working to discredit traditional media and replace it with often completely false "news" stories of its own. Weinstein writes:

Take a moment to think about that. Of course you wouldn’t take an arrogant, unethical, biased, politically conniving source at its word. You wouldn’t ever trust it, even if it were telling the truth. You might even make a ritual, with like-minded individuals, of trashing that source’s content, of reaffirming your rightness and the media’s wrongness. You might be possessed by what the historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid tendency,” confronted by a media whose interests “are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable” with your own, “and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.”

Rather than critically evaluating articles for their correspondence to known facts, the NRA has long encouraged its audience to dismiss these reports and the outlets that produce them as irredeemably opposed to a cherished way of life. In the NRA’s view, the mainstream media not only fails to reveal the truth, its editors, reporters, and producers are inherently incapable of being honest about gun issues.

Why bash the press? Because it is a strategy that works. Many of the NRA’s members are primed to trade in “fake news” precisely because of the epistemological groundwork the lobby has laid. The price of admission in this pro-gun bubble is no longer merely firearms ownership or enthusiasm for shooting sports. The NRA is speaking to any real American concerned about the intentions of those cold, timid souls in the media who just don’t get gun people, much less bother to know the difference between full-auto and semi.  

Growing up as one of those gun people, I saw everything that outsiders got wrong about us. But any stroll through the table literature at the Saturday gun show laid bare how much we got laughably, conspiratorially, troublingly wrong about the world outside our bubble. The gun lobby did more than just impugn the mainstream media, it created its own new media channels and other alternative “news” sites as a corrective. In short, the NRA effectively helped establish the byways and highways on which today’s “fake news” travels.

The NRA didn't invent fake news, either, of course. In the Hofstadter essay Weinstein cites, 1964's essential-reading "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Richard Hofstadter warns that the right is already engaged in such practices. Newspapers in the early days of America used to print whatever they wanted and were explicitly partisan; it wasn't until the mid-19th century that the press even started thinking about things like reporting "objective fact," largely inspired by the wire service Associated Press (AP), which wanted to be able to sell its work to a wide variety of newspapers and understood that partisan reporting would limit its clientele. Later, as newspapers became more dependent upon advertising dollars, they voluntarily tacked toward a nonpartisan middle ground.

But there have always been outliers, and in today's media environment, where anyone with enough nickels to rub together to get a blog or a website, there are few rules and no universally imposed standards. TWiA makes no pretense of nonpartisanship, but we do make an effort to collect information from a huge variety of sources and never to publish anything we know to be false. We can't say the same for the NRA, or Fox "News," or obvious propaganda outlets like Breitbart, Drudge, Limbaugh, and Jones.

Side Note: Speaking of Alex Jones, Mother Jones (no relation, we presume) has published a rundown of violent attacks committed by people inspired by Jones, either through his Infowars efforts or by movies he's produced. It results in a disturbingly large list of victims, including friend of TWiA (and former Congresswoman) Gabrielle Giffords, and runs up to this month's "Pizzagate" gunman.

This Week in the Bill of Rights

This week marks the 225th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Some pro-gun death advocates claim that the Second Amendment comes second because the Constitution's authors considered it that important. Contemporary scholarship tells a different story--the amendments were tacked on over the objections of James Madison, who wanted them incorporated into the main text rather than attached at the end. Their placement in the Bill of Rights is strictly determined by where they fell in Madison's draft. Based on its placement, what we know as the Second Amendment had to do with Congress's war powers, not with the protection of people and property.

That alone puts the lie to SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia's highly flawed legal reasoning in District of Columbia v. Heller. In his majority opinion, Scalia threw away all Supreme Court precedent, which had always held that the first phrase in the amendment: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." was just as important to its meaning as "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Scalia decided on the basis of ideology rather than facts or research (which was his SOP when crafting opinions--he was a clever writer but his extremism clouded his judgment) that the first section meant nothing, and only the last part mattered. The Founders would not have felt that way.

DC v. Heller is the decision that opened up the floodgates of the gun violence we see today, making it much harder to restrict the flow of deadly firearms than it should be (although even Scalia's absurd conclusion didn't say that private gun ownership could never be controlled--it said there could be reasonable restrictions on certain types of firearms, and restrictions on where guns could be carried). America's pro-gun death forces have taken the most radical interpretation of what was already a very radical decision to claim that essentially anyone should be able to own any gun and take it anywhere. That's not what Heller says, and even what Heller does say is a far cry from what the Constitution intended.

Below the fold: The economy, the Unified Theory of Trump, morally repugnant philosophy, power grabs, and oil pipelines. And, oh yeah, bears.

 

This Week in America (Post-election, Week 4 - Up is Down, Black is White, and Trump is an Honest Man)

Far too much media coverage of politics focuses on the horserace angle--who's ahead, who's behind, who's up or down. It relies on false equivalency: if Politician A says X, then the reporter goes to Politician B, who's sure to say Y. That's lazy journalism, and it doesn't actually inform the public about which position (if any) is actually true, or adheres to the facts as we know them. At TWiA, our mission is to discuss politics through the prism of policy--to look, in other words, at the real-world implications of the things that politicians say and do, to make connections others might miss, and to explain it all in language a lay person can understand. Also to offer suggestions of how you can help somebody in need, to report on what's awesome, and to keep tabs on bears. If you like TWiA, share or repost or tell a friend, and be sure to leave comments, even if they're arguments. Especially if they're arguments. 

Follow us on Twitter: @ThisWeekAmerica 

 

This Week in Facts

Friday marks one month since that morning when so many of us woke up to the horrible news that Donald J. Trump would be the next president of the United States, despite demonstrating throughout a long campaign that he's entirely incapable of doing the job, intellectually stunted and uncurious, an authoritarian would-be strongman, a sexual predator, a racist, a swindler, a liar, and...well, you get the idea.

As one of TWiA's rotating headers states, our "starting point is that facts are facts, science is real, data are real, and we can and must learn from history."

Since we continue to believe that, a Trump presidency is anathema to TWiA. We fear for the nation that we love. We're no longer convinced that progress is gradual but certain. We never anticipated a United States run by a Hitler-like presence--and it's possible that to believe we're entering such an era is an overreaction to the election.

However...

Last week, Scottie Nell Hughes, a CNN commentator and Trump surrogate went on a radio show and said this:

On one hand, I hear half the media saying that these are lies. But on the other half, there are many people that go ‘No it’s true. "And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people who say "facts are facts,"— they’re not really facts.

Everybody has a way—It’s kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts.

And so Mr. Trump’s tweets, amongst a certain crowd, a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some facts—amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they’ll say that those are lies, and there are no facts to back it up.

"There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts."

That's an astonishing assertion, the kind of comment that could wake George Orwell from the dead to go on TV and declare, "You people said I was wrong because it didn't happen in 1984. I might have been a few decades off on the date, but not on the results!"

The Weekly Sift takes a slightly deeper dive into Hughes's bizarre assertion, and we won't duplicate all of their work. But there's an important connection that they haven't made, so we'll make it.

According to a tweetstorm by Elliot Lusztig quoted at the Sift:

Hannah Arendt in her book The Origin of Totalitarianism provides a helpful guide for interpreting the language of fascists. She noted how decent liberals of 1930s Germany would “fact check” the Nazis’ bizarre claims about Jews like they were meant to be factual. What they failed to understand, Arendt suggests, is that the Nazi Jew hating was not a statement of fact but a declaration of intent.

So when someone would blame the Jews for Germany’s defeat in [World War I], naive people would counter by saying there’s no evidence of that. What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next.

Did 3 million “illegals” cast votes in this election? Clearly not. But fact checking is just a way of playing along with their game. What Trump is saying is not that 3m illegals voted. What he’s saying is: I’m going to steal the voting rights of millions of Americans.

As we wrote last week, we fully expect Trump to ramp up Republican voter suppression tactics, perhaps to heights not seen in this country in many decades. But to us, the important part of Lusztig's comment is this: "What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next."

Because Trump isn't the only would-be Nazi out there. They're coming out of the woodwork--real Nazis, and people who don't call themselves Nazis but act like them.

And then Sunday night, this happened:

"A North Carolina man was arrested Sunday after he walked into a popular pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington carrying an assault rifle and fired one or more shots, D.C. police said. The man told police he had come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” a false election-related conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton that spread online during her presidential campaign."

Wait, what?

Yes, it's true. Absurd rumors started on the far-right fringes, and were picked up and amplified by "fake news" sites. The stories were shared millions of times on social media. When we read this New York Times story back in late November, we worried about exactly this sort of thing happening. In our imagination, it was worse than it turned out to be, because on Sunday, fortunately, nobody was killed. Edgar Welch, the gunman, has a criminal record and a long history of drug and alcohol abuse, including an incident in October when he hit and "severely injured" a teenager with his car (so much for being a protector of children), but was still able to get his hands on three guns for his DC trip.

The "pizzagate" story continues to spread around the morally malarial swamps of the far right, where people live in a bubble that encourages violence--and those people own most of America's guns. There's no way to know if this incident will be the last at Comet Ping Pong.

Among those spreading hateful, malicious lies connecting Clinton with "sex-trafficking" are Michael T. Flynn, the ex-general who Trump has tapped as his chief national security adviser, and Flynn's son Michael G. Flynn, who's working for the transition. On Sunday night--after the attack--the junior Flynn tweeted that the "pizzagate" still has not been "proven false." In other words, continuing to put the staff and clientele at Comet Ping Pong in danger for no reason. (In his first good personnel decision to date, on Tuesday Trump fired Flynn the younger from the transition team--but in a worse decision, didn't kick Gen. Flynn out as natsec adviser.)

It shouldn't have to be said that if Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were actually implicated in a pedophilia ring, it would have been covered by serious news outlets and legal action would have long since been taken. But the Trump community has decided that facts aren't facts, that fact-checkers are necessarily suspect, and that the mainstream media is not to be trusted but obviously bogus sources like Breitbart, Inforwars, and Drudge are. Given that resistance to real facts and reliance on not-real "facts," it's hard to see how America moves ahead as the enlightened, liberal democracy it's been for all these years. And given that the far-right swamp is full of gun-owners who believe that patently ridiculous things are true, it's hard to see how Americans aren't killed in increasing numbers by deluded "self-investigators."

There used to be a pro-gun bumper sticker that said, "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Maybe it's time to retool that as "If guns are outlawed, only conservatives will have guns (many of which will be stolen by criminals)."

Side Note: The fact-free future isn't just the domain of the Trumpists. Over the weekend, according to Steve Benen at Maddowblog, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R/WI) said, "that the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda is 'really just crushing jobs.'" Not to be outdone, VP-elect Mike Pence said, "“[W]e’re working on President-Elect Trump’s commitment to repeal and replace ObamaCare. It’s all going to begin right out of the gate by repealing this disastrous policy that’s been killing jobs.”

Coincidentally, immediately before the weekend, the newest jobs report came out, showing that the unemployment rate is down to 4.6% and we've hit a literally unprecedented 74 straight months of private sector jobs growth. To Mr. Pence's incorrect point, the ACA went into effect in March 2010. Since that month, there hasn't been a single month of negative job growth. By all available measures, the ACA has not killed a single job, but has created plenty. Politico reported on Friday that "The president is handing his successor an economy that’s now the envy of the world."

The economy is doing well, and continuing the existing policies--as we'd have done under a Clinton presidency--would keep things moving in a positive direction for the foreseeable future. Trump, however, has different ideas, most of which involve enriching himself and his pals at the expense of everybody else. So although the economy will continue to improve during his first months in office, thanks to momentum, we don't necessarily expect to see it heading upward a year from now.

Facts and Republican policy positions have been at odds for a long time. But a country in which two of the three most powerful elected Republicans in the country can say frankly idiotic things about the economy, and pay no penalty for their lies, is a strange and disturbing place to those who value truth.

Below the Fold: More lies, this time about the vote, intelligence failures, #NoDAPL, your money, and bears.

 

This Week in America (Post-election, Week 3)

 

This Week in #NoDAPL

Here's a map that vividly shows the original proposed route of the Dakota Access Pipeline--changed when the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged the concerns of the mostly white residents of Bismarck, ND about the potential impact to their drinking water--and the current route, crossing lands promised by an 1851 treaty to the First Americans living there and intersecting dangerously with the Missouri River, threatening the drinking water of millions. The pipeline just skirts the existing Standing Rock Sioux reservation by half a mile, and it cuts multiple times across their sources of drinking water.

People who think the controversy began with the standoff at the pipeline construction site are missing a big chunk of the story. Mother Jones reported back in September on the history of the controversy, going back to February 2015, when the Corps--required by law to seek tribal input, allegedly ignored multiple communications from the tribe requesting a full archaeological investigation. Months of litigation followed. The on-the-ground protests became even more intense after September 3, 2016, when, as Mother Jones describes: "Dakota Access bulldozers plow a two-mile-long, 150-foot-wide path through what the Standing Rock Sioux say is a sacred tribal burial ground. The Sioux had contested the permits for that land in its lawsuit. 'We're days away from getting a resolution on the legal issues, and they came in on a holiday weekend and destroyed the site,' said Jan Hasselman, attorney for the Standing Rock Sioux. According to EcoWatch, the ancient site was discovered 'only days before its destruction was awaiting review by the state historic preservation office.'"

One protestor, shot in the face with a tear gas canister, is in danger of permanently losing her sight in one eye. Another, shot with a rubber bullet, needed 17 staples to close the wound. They and others are suing law enforcement agencies for using excessive force.

This weekend, a couple thousand military veterans will be showing up at the protest site, to act as a "human shield" to defend the protestors. We applaud their effort.

The broader issue is that the pipeline's purpose is to make it easier to pull oil from the ground and get it to market. What we need, though, is to keep finding new ways to keep fossil fuels in the ground, to replace our dependence on them with energy that doesn't cook the only planet we have. Those standing in the way of the pipeline are not only trying to defend their ancestral homelands and their only sources of potable water, they're defending the Earth we all share. Their efforts should be honored.

This Week in Foreign Policy

It's not making headlines, except in foreign policy and national defense circles--then again, foreign policy and national defense circles are some of the most important circles we have--but lots of the people serving in the government, in those roles, are questioning whether they should stay on board during a Trump administration. The issues they face are real--will the new administration order Americans to torture prisoners? Will it renege on longstanding security agreements with our allies? Will it cozy up to dictators and strongmen?

A couple of those experts have written an important piece this week. They frame the issue thusly: "Unlike our counterparts who work on domestic policy, national security practitioners have long enjoyed a largely bipartisan consensus about the core principles of what makes America strong and secure: an open, liberal international order guaranteed by American leadership and power. Democrats and Republicans have fought long and hard about specific policies for decades, but those arguments have, for the most part, been about ways, not ends — how to best realize broadly shared principles, not whether they were the right principles in the first place."

Trump, however, threatens to upend those "broadly shared principles." So the question becomes, can those currently working in those jobs stay in them, in order to try to guide administration policy in directions that will protect our national security and our interests around the world? Or is it a hopeless cause? Will they be instructed to break longstanding norms, to justify actions they know will harm our country? At what point is one's moral compass too badly threatened to continue serving?

Side Note: Trump has promised to tear up the Iran nuclear agreement. Outgoing CIA Director John Brennan seems to think that would be the wrong way to go. According to the BBC:

He [Brennan] also warned Donald Trump's incoming team over their position taken during the campaign to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran.

"I think it would be disastrous," Mr Brennan told the BBC. "First of all, for one administration to tear up an agreement that a previous administration made would be unprecedented."

He said such a move would risk strengthening hardliners in Iran and risk other states pursuing nuclear programmes in response to a renewed Iranian effort. "I think it would be the height of folly if the next administration were to tear up that agreement," he said.

This Week in Negotiating with Terrorists

As everyone who watches cop shows on TV knows, the logic against negotiating with terrorists and paying ransom to kidnappers is the same--although to the family and friends of the victim, the only important goal is getting their loved one back in one piece, to society at large, the goal is the opposite. Pay off the bad guys, the logic dictates, and they'll just do it again. They (or others like them) will keep kidnapping or taking hostages or terrorizing communities, because it worked--they got paid for it.

This week, Donald Trump claimed "victory" because a Carrier Corp. plant in Indiana announced that it would not, as it had planned, move a thousand jobs to Mexico. The story is more complicated than it appears at first--1300 jobs are still going to Mexico, but 800 will stay in Indiana--and the state of Indiana (the governor of which just happens to be Trump's VP-elect) is giving Carrier (or its parent company, United Technologies) $7 million in taxpayer-funded tax breaks.

Trump, obviously, is not yet president, so couldn't have legally agreed to any particular terms on the federal side, although some reporting suggests that he might have promised that Carrier would be able to keep federal contracts that are worth about $6 billion, a huge part of the company's bottom line--which is not, we hasten to add, how the federal contracting process is supposed to work. We imagine that if/when those contracts are formally extended, there will be multiple challenges and plenty of lawyers will get rich off the litigation that follows).

The federal contracting process is a complex thing, but basically, companies are supposed to bid for projects. Agency professionals (not the president) evaluate the bids on a number of criteria, ultimately selecting the one that provides the best value for the taxpayers while providing the best possible result (the product or service being acquired). The president doesn't get to individually pick and choose.

Of course, there's also the issue that Trump campaigned saying the opposite--he would use sticks, not carrots, to keep jobs in the US. In this particular case, he said if Carrier moved the jobs, they would pay a 35% tariff on every air conditioner they tried to sell in the US. And the related issue, that Republicans constantly say there's no place for government interference in the free market. Unless, it appears, one is trying to make a PR splash about a result that in the end is a tiny drop in a huge bucket.

We're glad that Indianans will keep (some of) their jobs. But having sweetened the pot for Carrier, Trump and the state may have opened the floodgates. What's going to stop other companies from making "plans" to move jobs out of the country, knowing that the president and state officials will throw taxpayer money at them to keep them in place?

Apparently Trump and Pence have been too busy watching Fox "News" to watch those cop shows. We may all pay the price for that.

Below the fold: racism, recounts, health care and Medicare, and more. Also bears.