Author Archives: Sheila

Those Damn Courts Can’t Overrule Me!

Sometimes, only a Yiddish word is capable of adequately conveying the disdain of an insult. Chutzpah is infinitely stronger than gall, its most common English translation. It’s also more earthy than hubris, and more all-encompassing than smugness.

And chutzpah absolutely permeates a measure that has been introduced in the Indiana House of Representatives by  Representative Curt Nisly. Here is the digest of House Bill 1089:

Protection of life. Repeals the statutes authorizing and regulating abortion. Finds that human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm. Asserts a compelling state interest in protecting human physical life from the moment that human physical life begins. Provides that court decisions to enjoin the law are void. Specifies the duty of Indiana officials to enforce the law. Specifies that federal officials attempting to enforce contrary court orders against Indiana officials enforcing the law shall be subject to arrest by Indiana law enforcement. Redefines “human being” for purposes of the criminal code to conform to the finding that human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm. Makes other conforming changes.

Where to begin…

Ignore, for purposes of this rant, the fact that the only life Rep. Nisly is interested in “protecting” is that of the fetus; if the pregnancy threatens the life of the woman carrying that fetus, evidently that’s just too bad.

There is, of course, the enormous chutzpah displayed by a man with no medical credentials–a man who owns a sheet-metal company–who feels entitled to determine when life begins, and the chutzpah of a person who can never be pregnant dictating behavior to those who can be. (Pregnancy, as people with medical credentials will confirm, is a greater risk to women’s health than abortion. But Rep. Nisly is willing to force all women, whatever their medical or emotional or financial circumstances, to assume that risk. No skin off his nose.)

That’s bad enough, but what really is astonishing about this piece of excrement–what demonstrates both outrageous chutzpah and monumental constitutional  ignorance–is Nisly’s apparent belief that the legislature can pass a bill that overrules the courts and prevents the executive branch from enforcing court orders.

Checks and balances? Piffle.

Separation of powers? What’s that?

The Constitution? If Trump doesn’t have to read, understand or obey it, why should Rep. Nisly?

Even in a legislative chamber as overwhelmingly rightwing as Indiana’s, this is highly unlikely to pass. (I use the term “rightwing” rather than “conservative” because there is absolutely nothing conservative about people who don’t want to conserve the values of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.) Even our legislature’s dimmer bulbs aren’t likely to endorse a measure that simply ignores our country’s entire legal structure. But you have to ask yourself: who votes for the sort of ignoramus who would propose a bill like this?

And what sort of ego–what monumental amount of chutzpah–does a person have to have in order to run for public office without bothering to understand the government he wants to be part of?

Oh yeah…

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The Art Of The Religious Deal

Reporters who have followed Donald Trump over the years tend to describe his approach to pretty much everything–business, family, charity and now the Presidency–as transactional. (That’s a nicer way of describing the paradigm through which he operates than “what’s in it for me.”)

A recent article from the Guardian suggests that a similarly transactional approach is not only more widespread than we might suppose, but that it explains the otherwise inexplicable support for Trump of those “family values” Evangelical Christians who comprise the majority of his political base.

Before the end of 2016 there was little in Donald Trump’s life, or frequently offensive political campaign, to suggest that as president he would be hailed as God’s appointee on Earth, be beloved by born-again Christians, or compared to a biblical king.

Yet that is exactly what has happened in the three years since Trump took office, as he has surrounded himself with a God-fearing cabinet and struck up an unlikely but extremely beneficial relationship with white evangelical supporters.

It’s a relationship that, for Trump, has ensured unwavering support from a key voter base and for his religious supporters, seen a conservative takeover of the courts and an assault on reproductive and LGBTQ rights.

The Executive Director of Americans United has accurately summed up the transactional nature of this support, noting that Trump continues to confer “unparalleled privilege” on this one narrow religious constituency–and that, in exchange for that privilege, Evangelicals are willing to ignore the numerous behaviors that are blatantly inconsistent with their purported beliefs, and to exhibit loyalty at the ballot box.

In law school contracts class, students learn that enforceable transactions require consideration (promises) from both parties. If you do thus-and-so, I promise to do thus-and-so. If one of the parties breaches, by failing to deliver on those promises, performance by the other will be excused.

Thus far, at least, Trump has lived up to his end of this particular deal. That makes this  transaction unusual: he has stiffed contractors, banks and charities, cheated on wives, broken promises to students enrolled in Trump University…In this case, however, he undoubtedly realizes that failure to perform would doom any chance of re-election.

Trump’s capture by the Evangelical Christian constituency has been widely remarked, and the steadfast loyalty of that community has been the subject of significant commentary–most of which has revolved around the stunning hypocrisy shown by  religious right figures and their transparent efforts to justify support for a man who (if he wasn’t delivering judges) they would call the anti-Christ.

The unlikely alliance between those nominally following biblical interpretations of right and wrong, and a thrice-married man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault and infamously paid off a pornographic actor, has thrown up a rich – and bizarre – cast of characters.

A sustained effort by influential Christian voices to justify Trump’s personal misdeeds and political cruelty has led to the frequent portrayal of Trump as a flawed vessel for God’s will. In particular, Trump has been compared to King Cyrus, who, according to the Bible, liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity, despite himself being a Persian ruler.

The hypocrisy is certainly there. But what is becoming clear is that it isn’t only Donald Trump who approaches everything as a “deal.” In the Evangelical community, capitalism and market values have rather clearly overwhelmed (trumped?) theological commitments.

Wasn’t there a warning in Genesis about selling one’s soul for a bowl of pottage?

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The Disinformation Century

As citizens all over the world confront a daunting number of challenges–climate change, the rise of populism and white nationalism, the decay of social and physical infrastructure, the wealth gap, endless wars, terrorism, and on and on–we find ourselves deprived of an essential tool with which to address them: reliable information.

Such information exists, but it is increasingly countered by seductive propaganda.

I say “seductive” because–thanks to technology– disinformation can be crafted and aimed with precision at people whose profiles suggest the nature of their vulnerabilities.

Remember Cambridge Analytica? It turns out that its influence was far greater than we originally understood.

An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after the Observer revealed it had misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles.

More than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on “an industrial scale” are set to be released over the next months.

It comes as Christopher Steele, the ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called “Steele dossier” into Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that while the company had closed down, the failure to properly punish bad actors meant that the prospects for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse.

The documents were released by a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, Brittany Kaiser, who became a whistleblower. She starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary The Great Hack, and says she decided to go public after last month’s election in Britain.

“It’s so abundantly clear our electoral systems are wide open to abuse,” she said. “I’m very fearful about what is going to happen in the US election later this year, and I think one of the few ways of protecting ourselves is to get as much information out there as possible.”

Kaiser had shared some material with the British parliament in April 2018, but she has since said that there were thousands of additional pages, showing a “breadth and depth of the work” that went “way beyond what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal.”

Kaiser said the Facebook data scandal was part of a much bigger global operation that worked with governments, intelligence agencies, commercial companies and political campaigns to manipulate and influence people, and that raised huge national security implications.

The firm helped develop what Kaiser describes as a “sophisticated infrastructure of shell companies that were designed to funnel dark money into politics.”

Among the documents are exchanges between Trump donors discussing how to disguise the source of the contributions, and others disclosing tactics used in the election in Great Britain. The most chilling aspect of the new disclosures, however, wasn’t the fact that the organization’s operations were much more far-reaching than previously known, but the description of what it did, and how.

Emma Briant, an academic at Bard College, New York, who specialises in investigating propaganda and has had access to some of the documents for research, said that what had been revealed was “the tip of the iceberg”…

“There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of control but what this does is lay out what was happening with this one company.”

Politics in 2020 are almost guaranteed to be uglier and more misleading than any in the recent past. If we can get past November without self-destructing, however, the growing effort to teach media literacy may make a longterm difference.

Ad Fontes Media has created a very useful media bias chart.  Media Literacy Now has a state report on the status of media literacy education,as well as model legislation for states that currently don’t require such education. There are other, similar efforts underway.

For a long time, it has been popular to claim that “there’s nothing new under the sun,” but we live in an era that disproves the saying. The technical ability to create what the White House celebrates as “alternate reality” is new; we need to respond by creating tools that separate fact from fiction.

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RIP GOP?

I keep encountering people who share with me their (agonized) conviction that Trump will be re-elected. Admittedly, it’s a fear that keeps me up at night–despite my life-long belief that most Americans are good, sensible people, and despite consistent polling that shows a majority of citizens disapprove of him.

It isn’t an entirely unreasonable fear; thanks to the Electoral College, gerrymandering, vote suppression, Russian bots and the various electoral games at which the GOP excels, it can happen. The strength of turnout in November by voters determined to “vote blue no matter who” will tell us whether today’s optimism or pessimism is justified.

That said, I recently became aware of some polling that should cheer us up.

Stan Greenberg is a longtime Democratic pollster, and he predicts both massive turnout and a massive defeat for Trump and for the GOP generally. A column in the Los Angeles Times reports the basis for his optimism.

The columnist begins by conceding the possibilities for defeat: maybe the Democrats will self-destruct at their convention, for example.

Maybe vote suppression by Republicans will succeed. Maybe Tulsi Gabbard will run as a third-party candidate and draw enough votes in a few key states to give the election to Trump. Maybe Trump will lose the popular vote by millions — again — but squeak through in the electoral college by a few thousand.

Despite those possibilities, the column notes that Trump has done nothing to expand his base–and cites Greenberg and others for data showing that the GOP’s base is considerably smaller than that of the Democrats.

Almost half of registered voters (48%) say they are certain they will vote against Trump, while only a third (34%) say they are certain they will vote for him.

The Democratic strategist and pollster Stan Greenberg has a whole book about why Trump will lose (with the great title R.I.P. G.O.P.). He asked voters in a 2016 election day poll whether they could handle an unexpected expense of $500. A majority of unmarried women said they could not. They are unlikely to agree with Trump’s claims about his tax cut benefiting everybody, and unmarried women make up a quarter of the potential electorate.

On many of the issues Americans care most about, Trump is consistently on the wrong side. An increasing majority of people, as Greenberg points out, believe “immigration benefits our country,” up from 50% in 2016 to 65% today. An increasing majority — now more than 60% — believe that the government should play a bigger role in addressing our problems, especially in healthcare. Free college tuition and a wealth tax have widespread support.

But what about the Electoral College? Hillary Clinton was ahead in all the national polls, and won nationally by nearly three million votes. What about Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin?

Of course 2016 showed that we need to look beyond the national polls, and focus on the swing states. But there, too, the news is encouraging. In Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, since Trump took office, his net approval ratings, which started out on the plus side, have fallen — disastrously. In Pennsylvania they decreased by 17 points, in Wisconsin by 20 points, in Michigan by 22 points. In the midterm voting, those three swing states all elected Democrats in 2018. Wisconsin elected a Democratic governor to replace a Republican, and reelected a Democratic senator; Pennsylvania reelected a Democratic governor and Democrats there took three House seats away from Republican incumbents. In Michigan, which the Democrats lost to Trump by 11,000 votes, the Democrats had a huge victory in 2018, sweeping the elections for governor and senator and flipping two House seats. Voters also banned gerrymandering and created automatic voter registration, which together will bear fruit in 2020. All this explains why I’m quite certain we’ll be free at last from Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2021.

A lot can happen between now and November. We can’t afford to rely on this or any other analysis– we can’t let our guard down. We have to keep working hard and do everything in our power to get the vote out.

But these are good numbers and good omens. Fingers crossed…

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Could You Pass That Test?

According to several news outlets, a Justice Department inquiry into Hillary Clinton (launched some  two years ago at the insistence of conservatives unsatisfied with the results of multiple previous investigations) has effectively ended. Investigators found no wrongdoing, and (off the record) law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.

This inquiry was conducted by a Trump Justice Department headed by Bill Barr, not exactly a friendly group of investigators.

I’ve lost track of the number of investigations that have been conducted into Hillary Clinton’s activities. Whitewater. Bengazi. “But her emails!”

When I saw the headlines confirming that–once again–the investigators had come up empty, all I could think about was a joke my mother used to tell: an elderly woman goes into the butcher shop. She picks up a chicken, lifts each drumstick and sniffs under it; then she smells under each wing. Finally, she smells the cavity, turns to the butcher and says “Mr. Butcher, this bird stinks.”

To which the butcher replies, “Lady, could you pass that test?”

Partisans and others are certainly entitled to dislike Hillary Clinton, or to criticize her demeanor or campaign. Disagreement with her policy positions is clearly fair. But the intensity of the animus she arouses, and the persistence with which Republicans have hounded her–and continue to demonize her three years after she lost the election and (from all appearances) retired from political life– are so hysterical and disproportionate that you have to wonder just what is going on.

The obsession isn’t new, and it didn’t begin with her campaign for the Presidency. Throughout her public life, Clinton has been held to a standard that wildly exceeds expectations applied to male political figures. I can think of any number of male politicians who have exhibited every behavior and characteristic for which Clinton has been excoriated; none of them excited the level of vitriol that has been directed at her.

It is also worth noting that a substantial number of those male politicians have been found guilty of various levels of misbehavior–including crimes–while the incessant investigations into Clinton have uncovered nothing more culpable than occasional carelessness.

It is just impossible to see this relentless campaign as anything other than rank misogyny.

I am hopeful (although not entirely convinced) that Clinton generated that level of sexism simply because she was in many ways the first: the first First Lady to reject the traditional decorative and submissive role, the first to carve out a high-profile political career separate from that of her husband after leaving the White House; and the first woman to be the Presidential nominee of a major political party.

I am hopeful (although unconvinced) that in the wake of Clinton’s candidacy, the passage of time, the number of women in the Democratic Presidential primary, and the explosion in the number of women elected to positions at all levels of government have combined to moderate the sexist hostility that prompted the tsunami of vitriol directed at Clinton.

I am fearful that I’m wrong.

Donald Trump’s base is composed almost entirely of white Christian men who see Trump as their protector against the uppity blacks and pushy women whose demands for equality threaten their historic dominance. They became unhinged when an African-American was elected President, and it’s likely they will be equally threatened if it looks as if a woman is about to be elected.

Meanwhile, Hillary has emerged exonerated from yet another actual witch hunt– conducted by men who most definitely couldn’t pass that test.

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