Author Archives: Sheila

Who Votes For These Clowns?

At the recent CPAC meeting, Donald Trump gave a rambling, largely incoherent speech during which he promised attendees that–if re-elected–he would be their “retribution.”

Maybe that’s the clue. Maybe the voters who cast their ballots for obviously mentally-ill candidates are seeking retribution– using those ballots as weapons, as signals of hostility to a society that they believe has failed to properly appreciate them.

Or perhaps they are as nutty as the Congresscritters Dana Milbank recently profiled., Maybe they suffer from what he labeled “long covidiocy.”

The pandemic has faded, but one of the least understood effects of the virus still eludes treatment: There is no known cure for long covidiocy.

House Republicans presented with a textbook case of the ailment this week. The newly formed select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic met for the first time for what its chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), said would be some “Monday-morning quarterbacking.” It instead became a Tuesday afternoon of false starts and illegal blocks.

Republicans on the panel, some of them medical doctors and others just playing one on TV, offered their predictable assessments. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) kicked off with the unsupported allegation that “covid was intentionally released” from a Chinese lab because “it would be impossible for the virus to be accidentally leaked.”

Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.) advanced the ball by informing the panel that coronavirus booster shots “do more harm than good.”

And then, of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene secured her position as the poster child for lunacy, testifying about a stunning (albeit wholly imaginary) medical discovery: “Researchers found that the vaccinated are at least twice as likely to be infected with covid as the unvaccinated and those with natural immunity.”

As Milbank responded, “Thank you, Dr. Jewish Space Lasers.”

The panel heard from three scientists who had championed a herd-immunity approach to covid. Two of them had co-authored a 2020 publication in which they argued for just letting COVID run wild through the general population.

Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and Fox News regular, suggested (among other things) that Dr. Fauci had bribed people in the medical community to dissemble about the virus.

Makary is the guy who predicted in late February 2021 that “covid will be mostly gone by April.” He was also the source of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s dubious claim that face masks cause unhealthy levels of carbon dioxide in children’s blood.

Another witness, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University (also a Fox News regular, on matters medical and nonmedical), had called coronavirus testing “actively harmful” and warned about “great harm” and “danger” from vaccination. He worked on a study that claimed the covid death rate was similar to the flu’s, and he argued in March 2020 that “there’s little evidence” that “the novel coronavirus would kill millions” if left unchecked….

Milbank noted that the Trump Administration embraced these scientific outliers; they became right-wing celebrities, and their fantasies promoted resistance to masks and vaccines. The results of that resistance are now being tabulated;  actual research confirms that  covid deaths in counties that voted for Trump vastly exceeded the death toll in counties that went for Biden.

The hearing that was the subject of Milbank’s column raised a number of questions, the most obvious of which is why on earth presumably serious public officials would provide a platform to people promoting “facts” and conspiracies that medical science has conclusively disproven.

That question, of course, leads us back to the central conundrum of our times: the voters who support these deranged people. Who looks at a Marjorie Taylor Greene or a Paul Gosar (whose siblings took out a TV ad warning voters that he was nuts) or the multiple others who are at best an embarrassment and at worst a threat to America’s civic fabric, and thinks “Yes, I want that jerk to represent me”?

What sort of seething vitriol impels an American voter to cast a ballot for a candidate who doesn’t even try to present a rational facade? Who chooses the candidate who proudly parades bigotry while exhibiting an utter lack of  temperament and gravitas?

The answer, evidently, is “the GOP base”–voters looking for White Christian retribution.

Those voters are in the minority, so in order to win elections, Republicans need to depress overall turnout.  Like Republicans elsewhere, Indiana’s GOP is working on that.

 Governing recently reported

The Indiana Senate Committee on Elections heard testimony Monday concerning an absentee voting measure that would change who may deliver absentee ballot applications to voters and what proof of identification is required from voters to be able to obtain a ballot…

Voters’ and civil rights’ organizations say the measure duplicates existing processes and laws and will disenfranchise the most vulnerable of voters: the elderly, disabled and members of the military.

 Extreme gerrymandering evidently wasn’t anti-democratic enough…

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“Privatizing” Our Schools

I devoted a fair amount of my academic research to the issue of privatization, and I largely agree with the periodic analyses on the “In the Public Interest” website.

Confounding the issue is the fact that what Americans call “privatizing,” is really something quite different: contracting out.

Margaret Thatcher privatized many of her country’s industries–she sold them off to private-sector operators, who then owned them and paid taxes (and in some cases went bankrupt and out of business). In the U.S., by contrast, we “privatize” by encouraging government agencies to contract with for-profit and non-profit organizations to manage government programs. 

In other words, a program that government is obligated to provide continues to be paid for with tax dollars, and government remains responsible for ensuring that it is operated in a manner that’s consistent with the Constitution, the terms of the contract, and (ideally, at least) the public interest.

My research convinced me of three things: 1) while contracting may be appropriate under some circumstances, it is not the panacea that so many politicians seem to think. Sometimes it makes sense, often it doesn’t.  2) the cost savings that are touted by privatization advocates are largely mythical, the result of omitting what it costs government to manage these contracts–or the even greater costs of failing to manage them. And 3) far from shrinking the size of government, as proponents seem to believe, contracting actually expands both the size and scope of government, while at the same time making that expansion less visible and government less accountable.

Bottom line: contracting out doesn’t usually save money, and the ability of government to monitor those with whom it contracts has proved to be less than ideal, to put it mildly.

Also, in far too many situations, contracting has become the new patronage.

I have written pretty extensively about the issues involved, including Indianapolis’ unfortunate flirtation with “privatizing” under former Mayor Stephen Goldsmith. 

Years of research have taken much of the bloom off the privatization rose, but of course, as readers of this blog are well aware, there is one area in which proponents stubbornly continue to insist upon benefits that have proved imaginary, while studiously ignoring numerous and troubling negative consequences. 

That area is public education.

“Florida Man” DeSantis isn’t the only ideologue  pushing a voucher program, but an article in the linked website  revolved around a set of concerns explored by a Florida  newspaper :

With Tallahassee “poised to bleed billions from public classrooms through a sweeping expansion of private school vouchers,” The Sun Sentinel lays out some of the problems this will bring:

If a private school wants to teach children that Jesus rode dinosaurs and call it geography, the state has no say.

If a private school wants to expel an honor-roll child for being gay, that child is out of luck.

If a private school wants to teach students in a building rife with code violations, students will just need to bring buckets on rainy days. Or fire extinguishers.

If a private school wants to hire teachers with a criminal background, or teachers repeatedly fired from previous jobs, or teachers who have no training in teaching, who in the state has the authority to stop them?

If a private school abruptly closes mid-year, who takes care of the students?
The answer? No one.

These are not scenarios limited to Florida. You can find troubling examples of each of them in existing voucher programs in Indiana and elsewhere. 

Most of us understand–and budget numbers confirm– that voucher programs bleed dollars from public schools that need those resources.

I don’t know about Jesus riding a dinosaur, but multiple investigations of private religious schools accepting vouchers have found creationism  substituted for science instruction. Many of those same schools proudly and publicly decline to accept gay students, or even non-gay students who have two mommies or two daddies.

In Ohio a few years ago, David Brennan, a politically well-connected businessman, opened a chain of schools in order to profit from that state’s then-new voucher program; students didn’t learn much, and several of the schools were found to have multiple, dangerous code violations.

In Indiana, we’ve had voucher schools that suddenly closed, leaving parents and students high and dry.

Forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but there was a reason Americans  established public schools. Public schools are intended to teach more than “reading, writing and arithmetic.” They are intended to create informed and engaged citizens–to advance e pluribus unum by pursuing what is termed the civic mission of the schools.

Heedless of the educational failures and lack of accountability, the World’s Worst Legislature is planning to expand Indiana’s already out-of-control school privatization. No wonder Indiana ranks 43d in the percentage of citizens with  bachelor’s degrees–and  worse, lacks legislators having common sense.

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Telling The Truth About The War On Trans Children

Indiana isn’t the only state waging war on trans children, their parents and the medical providers trying to help them. At a time America (and the whole world, for that matter) is facing innumerable challenges–climate change, Putin’s war in Ukraine, a re-ordering of world power generally, etc.–today’s GOP has fixated on the “threat” posed by defenseless children.

About those claims that Republicans are defending “parental rights”– it seems the GOP only defends parents who share their constipated views of the world.

Want to ban some books? Make life difficult for LGBTQ children? The GOP will empower you! Want to allow educators and librarians to share books that other parents consider appropriate? Want to be supportive of your child struggling with gender dysphoria? Not so fast!

In Red Texas, being supportive of your child’s transition has actually been defined as child abuse.

Kentucky recently passed a bill not unlike a handful of hateful measures on their way to passing in Indiana. The bill limits medical care related to gender transition services for minors and punishes providers who assist their minor patients. It also prohibits “a public school counselor, school-based mental health services provider, or another public employee from aiding or assisting in the provision of gender transition services for a person under the age of 18 years.”

During the debate preceding Kentucky legislators’ lopsided vote to make life more difficult for trans children, a state representative named Pamela Stevenson gave an impassioned speech in which she told the ugly–but undeniable– truth.

 “I’m not even sure how we got here, but as a 27-year military veteran, I fought so that all people could have freedoms, not just the ones I liked,” said Stevenson, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel.

When a co-sponsor of the bill said she’d written it to “protect children from irreparable damage,” Stevenson had a withering response.

“Don’t tell me it’s about irreparable harm because you’re not doing anything for the children that are hungry,” Stevenson said.

“You’re not doing anything for the children that are in foster care being abused. You’re not doing what needs to be done for the little black kids who are experiencing racism every day. It is not for irreparable harm. It’s because they are not like you. And as a mother, how dare you interfere with one of the most intimate relationships.”…

If you were really, really concerned about children, I could give you 100 other things you could do to make sure that every kid in Kentucky thrives. Let’s try giving them water out in the rural areas, potable water. Let’s try Medicare and Medicaid, so they can go to the doctor. Let’s try getting the kids off the street that are homeless and sleeping with snow as a blanket. I was born at night, but not last night. This is not about what you say it is.”

What I find so depressing about these attacks on vulnerable children is the likely reason for this particular culture-war focus: America’s current acceptance of LGBTQ+ citizens and same-sex marriage. Polling regularly confirms that acceptance; Gallup fielded a 2022 poll that showed 71% of Americans agreeing that same-sex marriages should enjoy the same rights as opposite-sex ones.(That’s a staggering figure: These days, seventy-one percent of Americans probably don’t agree that the Earth is round.)

Since gay folks came out of the closet, most Americans have discovered that they know gay people and that they aren’t any different from the rest of us. Trans people, however, are rarer and still considered “exotic”–or in Republican-speak, fair game.

We no longer live in the “good old days” when Republicans could generate turnout with hysterical warnings about same-sex marriage or other attacks on LGBTQ folks generally–these days, such broad-based attacks are too likely to create backlash. But the GOP isn’t going to abandon its most effective strategy–generating fear and hatred of the “other”–so the party has narrowed its focus to Drag Queens and trans Americans.

Human Rights Watch  is just one of the organizations that has documented the extent of discrimination and violence experienced by the trans community. Those reports are depressing and sobering, but the viciousness of the attacks on children is particularly disgusting.

As Axios has explained, these bills are part of a larger, “carefully coordinated campaign by the far right and religious conservatives to attack trans people in the wake of their failures to stop marriage equality and pass anti-trans bathroom bills over the past decade.”

After all, if a few kids kill themselves as a result–tough. All’s fair in politics and culture war.

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The Death Of Satire

A few days ago, I posted about the increasing prominence of what I can only call bat-shit crazy political beliefs–beliefs that evidently function to justify the adherents’ fear and hatred of various “others.”

The growth of what we might call the fantasy phenomenon has a number of consequences; for one thing, it makes it difficult–okay, impossible–to “reach out” and try to find common ground. What do those of us who live in what we fondly hope is the real world have in common with people who actually believe that an elitist “cabal” rules the world, and that its members keep children in basement hideaways so that they can periodically drink their blood? Because they also believe that drinking young blood keeps them young…

I’m not making that up; it’s a staple of the QAnon fantasy.

A troubling but far less consequential result of “the crazy” is its effect on satire. It would seem that our current political reality has killed satire. And that matters for far more than entertainment, because satire can be a particularly effective form of political criticism.

Satire is defined as the” use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.”  Exaggeration is particularly important to the creation of a satirical observation; it is by exaggerating an argument or behavior that the humorist identifies and amplifies what is ridiculous (or at least silly) about it.

So what do you do when reality overpowers your ability to exaggerate a position in order to demonstrate its essential nuttiness–when what people say or believe is already so outsized and insane that there’s nowhere else to go?

I think we are there. I was struck by a recent post to Daily Kos that featured a quiz: Is it satire or is it real?

Here’s the quiz:

1)  Eighty-five Percent of White Evangelicals Support Boastful, Lying, Thrice-married Serial Adulterer, Say He’s “Good Christian.”

2)  Republicans Who Oppose Using Tax Money to Aid Needy Americans Lament That Money Sent to Ukraine Could be Used to Aid Needy Americans.

3)  Congressman Who Claims He Didn’t Witness Systemic Sexual Abuse of College Athletes Named to Oversight Committee

4)  Mass Shooting Victims Offered Thoughts and Prayers by Thoughtless, Godless Politicians.

5)  Majority of Republicans Deem Colleges, Universities Harmful to Society, Prefer People Remain Ignorant.

6)  Republicans Who Warn of “Government Coming Between You and Your Doctor” Mandate Medically Unnecessary, Invasive, Trans-Vaginal Ultrasounds, Feel No Disconnect

7)  Congresswoman Who Angrily Disrupted State of the Union Bemoans Lack of Civility in Restaurant.

8)  Book Banners and History Deniers Decry “Cancel Culture.”

9)  Conservative Commentator Sexualizes M&Ms, Gives “Melts In Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands” Disturbing New Connotation

10)  Supporters View Man who Lost Money Owning Casino as Great Businessman

11) Reporters Routinely Hide Blockbuster News Until Book Published, Still Regard Themselves as Journalists

12) News Media Insists Upon Calling Most Radically Activist SCOTUS Justices in History “Conservative.”

13) Republicans who Tout Deregulation of Rail Safety, Environmental Protection Criticize Safety Regulators, EPA, For Not Doing Enough

14) Republicans in Uproar Over Mister Potato Head Call Other People “Snowflakes”

15) Tennessee Legislator Promotes Lynching as Capital Punishment Method, Remains Utterly Lacking in Awareness of Term “Utterly Lacking in Awareness.”

16) Georgia Congresswoman Proposes Red State/Blue State “Divorce,” Forgetting Her State Elected Democratic President And Two Democratic Senators.

Those of you who follow this blog, or political life in general, undoubtedly answered correctly that all of these examples are real world specimens snatched from today’s degraded political landscape. (Granted, the framing betrays some bias, but the identified behaviors are accurate.)

How can you possibly exaggerate today’s walking, talking buffoonery?

The purpose of satire has always been to make a point–to demonstrate the inanity or wrong-headedness of a particular behavior or belief, and (hopefully) to shame those who are engaging in that behavior or endorsing that belief. What we are discovering in our bizarro new political world is that the people who take these positions and/or trumpet these beliefs are either dishonest–playing to the MAGA crowd–or clueless true believers, and in either case, that they are utterly shameless.

Whatever the true beliefs of today’s performative political figures, the real question doesn’t focus on them. The conundrum is the question that several commenters to this blog routinely pose: what is wrong with the people who vote for these buffoons?

The real problem isn’t the embarrassing idiots who dominate the news cycles. It’s the large number of our fellow-Americans who are evidently impossible to embarrass.

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GOP: Climate Is A Dirty Word

The other day, I was doing the “housewife” thing–which included cleaning bathroom toilets–and because I am a nerd of the first order, the sight of soapy water swirling down the drain made me think of the GOP.

When “Republican” was the name of a political party that had a policy agenda, a major part of that agenda was protection of the free market and a pretty sustained pushback over government ‘s business regulations. (Barry Goldwater famously proclaimed that government didn’t belong in either your boardroom or your bedroom…but of course, Barry is now considered a RINO.)

Most GOP lawmakers acknowledged the need for government regulations that were necessary to provide an economic “level playing field”–the sorts of regulations meant to prevent unfair business practices, corruption and collusion, and/or harm to the public. The policy arguments focused on the extent and necessity of those rules– matters about which people could have good-faith disagreements.

Those were the good old days!

Axios recently reported on the GOP’s eagerness to tell private businesses what they can and cannot do, and their preferred rules have absolutely nothing to do with bad behavior by their targets. Quite the contrary.

Republicans in Congress have teed up the first veto of the Biden presidency. Curiously, the vetoed bill has nothing to do with children’s books, unisex bathrooms, or even fiscal policy. Instead, it focuses on stock-market asset allocation.

Why it matters: The environmentally conscious global consensus of institutional investors is highly unlikely to be derailed by U.S. political point-scoring. But no good can come from the way in which investment officers increasingly need to navigate a political gantlet.

Driving the news: Both the House and the Senate this week passed legislation overturning a Labor Department rule designed to ensure that fund managers remain capable of considering environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors when making investments.

The aim of the bill was not to change the law — a veto was always certain — but rather to create a 2024 campaign issue. Politicians like Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, characterize the Department of Labor rule as creating “regulations to invest retirement money in far-left liberal causes.” That’s false — the rule mandates nothing at all — but Republicans are hoping it might prove an effective attack vector all the same.

The article quotes an NYU law professor–an expert on environmental law– opining that the  bill “has to be the ne plus ultra of hysterical overreaction to any policy with the word climate in it.”

As the Axios report notes, the GOP is politicizing a “decidedly anodyne” Department of Labor rule that is, in fact, a “laissez-faire attempt to reiterate that investors are free to follow any investment thesis they like.” In other words, a rule aiming to strengthen what used to be Republican orthodoxy.

Climate change is probably the biggest risk facing global markets over the long term. Investors therefore have a clear financial incentive to invest in the companies that are best placed to mitigate or adapt to climate risk, as a way of maximizing their own long-term returns.

There is always a fiduciary reason for ESG investments, but a Trump-era rule tried to discourage such strategies anyway. Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute were unenthusiastic about the Trump administration’s stance.

The Department of Labor rule the current bill tries to overturn was written to make it clear that investors don’t need to fear the potential ire of regulatory agencies when they adopt ESG investment frameworks.

It bears emphasizing that the rule the GOP wants to overturn amounts to a promise that, if your business wants to take climate risk into account, government won’t punish you for doing so.

But today’s Republicans insist that concern for climate is a “far left” marker. Today’s GOP has totally abandoned its previous respect for private enterprise and limitations on  legislative authority. The party used to be animated by the libertarian principle that government should be limited to protecting citizens against harm. Americans can and do differ about the nature of the harms that justify government intervention, but things like caring about the environment, reading the “wrong” books, or loving the “wrong” people, were not (at least officially) among them.

Some of this anti-climate fervor reflects the worries of fossil fuel companies, of course, and those companies are big donors to the GOP lawmakers driving this exercise.  Still, we shouldn’t dismiss the political motives behind this propaganda. As the Axios article notes, Republicans are trying to reach swing voters by labeling anything climate-conscious as being part of a far-left agenda.

If recognition of climate change is “leftist,” my belief that words have fixed meanings is  swirling like the water around the drain in my toilet…

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