Random Blogging – Page 18

Early Voting In Indiana..

Yesterday, in Indiana, early voting for the primary election started. My husband and I walked over to Indianapolis’ City-County building and cast our votes–including our votes for Marc Carmichael for U.S. Senate. In case you haven’t read my previous posts about why Marc deserves support--and why Jim Banks is a MAGA nightmare–I’m pasting in a video from Marc, and his own written perspective on the race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mwsP8eMfSk

Now, from MARC:

Dear Fellow Concerned (Scared) American,

To be blunt, on Tuesday, November 5, Indiana’s new United States Senator will either be me or MAGA Trumper and bomb thrower out of the US House Chaos Caucus, Jim Banks.

We get just this one chance to beat Jim Banks or he will be an Indiana incumbent Republican senator and we will never get rid of him or the constant shame he will bring on our state and the United States, not to mention the forced march he will lead back into the Dark Ages.

Fortunately we have a good chance to win this race. First, it is an open seat with no incumbent. Second, Banks is not known outside his 3rd Congressional District and intensely disliked within it. Third, thanks to Republicans inability to govern in DC and the Dobbs decision striking down Roe V Wade, this is shaping up to be a good year for Democrats, even in Indiana.

Trump’s MAGA (Make America White Again) base continues to shrink from a high of 42% to 35% and Jim Banks only appeals to that base. His Indiana Senate seat was gerrymandered for a Republican and so was his Congressional seat. He knows nothing about campaigning except pandering to the Trump MAGA base. He is boxed in between Trump and the NRA.

If elected to the US Senate I pledge: to work with President Biden to restore Roe V Wade; to ban the sale of assault weapons; to battle climate change; to enact Medicare for all including our LGBTQ kids who are being denied critical medical care by narrow minded, mean spirited Republican legislators; to confirm fair and impartial judges to counter the unqualified partisan judges foisted on us by Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party; to work for an immigration law that protects our borders and is fair and enforceable; to work on answers to our shortage of affordable housing; to help create good union jobs that help restore the middle class; to never vote for a tax cut for the rich; to address the inequity of pay for women; and many more things left undone by a do nothing Republican Party.

I (we) can do this. In 1986 I first ran for the Indiana House from Delaware County and my opponent was the Republican Speaker of the Indiana House, J. Roberts (Bob) Dailey. He was in a 60% Republican district, had been Speaker for 6 years, and was considered the most powerful person in the Indiana Legislature. No one thought I could beat him, but I didn’t know any better so I made up a cheap brochure and started walking door-to-door in July. It was hot and there were dogs, but when people found out I was running against Bob Dailey they were very glad to see me. That reception continued as I walked through August, September, October and November, and on Election Day I won by 18%, 59-41.

With your help I can win this race too. I can’t walk all of Indiana door to door, but I can go to every fair and festival and take my 1971 VW bus to every parade I can fit on my schedule between now and November. I can advertise on social media to reach various groups, I can send text messages, emails, and direct mail too, but in the end I will need to be on TV and that’s expensive.

Will you help me? We get just this one shot. I can do it if you will support me financially, otherwise we might as well just give up and accept Jim Banks as our US Senator. I refuse to give up. Please look me up at marcforindiana.com and see what I stand for. Provide a donation at www.actblue.com/donate/carmichael-for-us-senate-1. Please help me help you not suffer the fate of Senator Jim Banks.

Sincerely,

Marc Carmichael

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There Aren’t Two Sides To Facts

A few weeks ago, I read that a newspaper editor in Cleveland responded to complaints from readers that accused the paper of being “unfair” to Donald Trump by defending actual journalism. He noted that there aren’t “two sides” to facts, and that the paper would continue to report factually and accurately. If the facts reflect poorly on Trump, so be it.

If only all the news media followed that philosophy! But they don’t. There are a number of reasons–including concern about turning off subscribers at a time when newspapers are struggling, paying too much attention to the “horse-race” and too little to the issues, and/or a profound misunderstanding of the essential mission of journalism (hint: it’s “accurate and defensible,” not “fair and balanced”).

Dana Milbank, a columnist for the Washington Post, recently attended a Trump rally in Wisconsin. His whole column is worth reading, but I was particularly struck by his report on Trump’s multiple falsehoods, aka bald-faced lies:

He announced that he had won his fraud case in New York: “The appellate division said, ‘You won the case, that’s it.’” (The court has not yet heard his appeal of the fraud judgment against him.)

He also announced that “it came out that we won this state” in 2020. (Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes.)
Trump launched into a mantra that should be familiar to Hoosiers currently suffering from an assault of GOP primary advertisements, namely that “Crooked Joe and his migrant armies of dangerous criminals” are producing a “bloodbath” among innocent, native-born Americans. (Local Republicans have adopted those falsehoods.)

It’s not the least bit true. Homicide and violent crime, after rising during the pandemic, have dropped for two straight years and are lower than during Trump’s final year in office. There is scant evidence that immigrants — legal or undocumented — commit more than their share of crime, and a lot of evidence that migrants are more law-abiding, as The Post’s Glenn Kessler has detailed.

But that doesn’t stop Trump from talking about the “massive crime” brought by “[President] Biden’s flood of illegal aliens” — the theme of his Green Bay rally and an earlier event in Grand Rapids, Mich. “They’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals,” Trump said. “I’ll use the word ‘animal’ because that’s what they are.”

A friend involved with the recently launched “Hoosiers for Democracy” recently bemoaned the media’s normalization of such rhetoric, and its tendency to shrug off both Trump’s constant, preposterous and easily debunked lies, and his use of fascist terminology to dehumanize those he and his supporters consider “other”–mostly people of color. She’s absolutely right–and it’s dangerous. (Hoosiers for Democracy“ is a Hoosier movement working to ensure that Hoosiers, “across race, place and party” vote to protect democracy in 2024.)

What far too many in what the late Molly Ivins called “the chattering classes” fail to understand is that we Americans are not engaged in a political battle. It’s all well and good to counsel respectful disagreement when partisans are arguing about the merits of a proposed bill, or the proper approach to crime and punishment, or the most effective way to approach a social problem. Those sorts of disagreements are–as the late Dick Lugar used to say– “things about which people of good will can differ.” Those sorts of disputes call for civility, negotiation, mutual respect.

Our current divide is not political–it is moral. MAGA is a fascist movement, based upon hatred of a variety of “others.” it is profoundly reactionary, steeped in conspiracy theories, powered by deep-seated fears of displacement, dismissive of democratic norms, and most definitely not coming from a place of “good faith.”

Treating “both sides” as morally equivalent is bad journalism. Distorting news in an effort to give “both sides” the benefit of the doubt requires ignoring or eliding observable facts. Whatever the underlying cause of Trump’s incredible dishonesty (my own opinion is that he is profoundly mentally ill and incapable of telling the difference between fact and whatever falsehood he prefers), ignoring it is journalistic malpractice. Pretending that his MAGA supporters are not different in kind from past political partisans ignores the existential threat posed by far-Right populist/neo-Nazi movements.

You’d think the insurrection of January 6th would have driven that lesson home.

I am certainly not suggesting that media outlets all become clones of MSNBC, or that they see themselves as anti-Fox outlets. The proper response to propaganda isn’t more propaganda–it’s fact. I just want an end to the deeply-harmful and factually unsupportable portrayals that gloss over or even ignore profoundly anti-American rhetoric and behavior in a “both sides” effort to find “balance” and equivalence where it most definitely doesn’t exist.

What “fair and balanced” gets wrong is that balance is frequently unfair.

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Why Does Anyone Support This Buffoon?

I don’t get it.

Read a recent, snarky Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post. It began with a visit to Trump-speak–a language bearing less and less relationship to American English.

The Very Stable Genius is glitching again.

This week, he announced that he is not — repeat, NOT — planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He apparently forgot that he had vowed over and over again to do exactly that, saying as recently as a few months ago that Republicans “should never give up” on efforts to “terminate” Obamacare.

“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME,” the Republican nominee wrote this week on his Truth Social platform. Rather, he said, he wants to make Obamacare better for “OUR GREST AMERICAN CITIZENS.”

Joe Buden disinformates and misinformates? For a guy trying to make an issue of his opponent’s mental acuity, this was not, shall we say, a grest look.

Milbank offered some additional examples of Trump-speak: “We’ll bring crime back to law and order,” “We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after a Tuesday already,” and “You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season.”

Whenever I am reminded of Trump’s intellectual lapses and/or his inability to use the English language, I marvel that this is the guy MAGA folks think should control the nuclear codes….

Much of Milbank’s column was focused on Trump’s selective memory. When he recently recited the time-honored political question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Milbank theorized that he’d “forgotten all about the economic collapse and his administration’s catastrophic bungling of the pandemic.”

As the Supreme Court was hearing arguments about banning the abortion pill, Trump also conveniently “forgot” his previous emphatic support for that ban, and his proposal to ban it fortuitously disappeared from his web site. Given that polling shows some 7 in 10 Americans opposed to such a ban, the Heritage Foundation also experienced a website “glitch” that conveniently obscured that part of the Foundation’s Plan for 2025.

As Milbank wrote,

The Heritage Foundation-run Project 2025, to which Trump has unofficially outsourced policymaking for a second term, said that a “glitch” had caused its policies — including those embracing a mifepristone ban — to disappear from its website. The Biden campaign said it was “calling BS on Trump and his allies’ shameless attempt to hide their agenda,” and the missing documents returned — including the language calling abortion pills “the single greatest threat to unborn children” and vowing to withdraw regulatory approval for the drugs.

Evidently, the House Republicans didn’t get the polling memo.

The extremism isn’t just at Project 2025, stocked with former Trump advisers. The House Republican Study Committee, which counts 80 percent of House Republicans as members, put out a budget last week that would rescind approval of mifepristone, dismantle the “failed Obamacare experiment” and embrace a nationwide abortion ban from the moment of conception.

Sometimes its a convenient loss of memory; other times, it’s obvious mental illness compounded by jaw-dropping ignorance. Take Trump’s “explanation” of why Truth Social’s stock wasn’t listed on the New York Stock Exchange:

He said he didn’t list the company on the New York Stock Exchange because it would be “treated too badly in New York” by Democratic officeholders. So he instead listed the company on Nasdaq, which is based in … New York. Trump said the “top person” at the NYSE “is mortified. … He said, ‘I’m losing business.’ ” As CNN pointed out, neither the president nor the chair of the exchange is a “he.”

Then there’s the most recent grift: selling bibles.

Trump is getting kickbacks for selling the Gospel — marketing God the same way he sold Trump-branded “Never Surrender High-Tops” sneakers last month for $399 a pair and, before that, digital trading cards showing Trump as a superhero.

“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in the video promoting his new bible hustle.

Trump’s campaign shows a video at rallies announcing that “God Gave us Trump,” and he has called himself “the chosen one.” He’s shared a post calling him “the second greatest” after Jesus. And Milbank reports that Trump recently posted a verse from Psalms, topped by a message likening Trump’s suffering in the fraud case to the Crucifixion.

There’s much, much more–but it all begs the question: who in their right mind looks at this pathetic sociopath with his limited (and rapidly declining) intellect and his God complex and says “yes, that’s my guy!”? Is giving his supporters permission to express their racism and hostility to “elitists” really enough to outweigh the daily evidence of his manifest unfitness?

I don’t get it.

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Saving The World

I sometimes wonder what historians living a hundred years from now–assuming there’s still a planet populated with humans a hundred years hence–will dub these times? The Age of Chosen Stupidity? The Age of Tribal Reversion? Or perhaps The Age of Angst? (I think the Age of Anxiety has been taken…at least in poetry..)

It sometimes seems as if Americans who engage in or follow politics are divided into two camps. One is angry, resentful and acting-out (shorthand: MAGA), and the other is reacting to them with worry and anxiety. I know that I fall into that second group, and assuming my Facebook feed is representative, there are a lot of other people who are equally concerned about the threats to democracy, civility and the rule of law, and depressed by the seeming inability of individual action to counter those threats.

People who are “control freaks” (I plead guilty) are particularly affected by perceptions of powerlessness: tell me the only way to solve a problem is to climb that mountain, and I’ll put on my hiking boots. Tell me there is little or nothing I can do to solve that problem–that my small, local efforts really can’t make much of a difference– and I get depressed.

In the run-up to what will be an enormously consequential election, a lot of us feel pretty helpless.

But I recently came across a message that I found helpful.

The “Spark of Genius” newsletter highlights good news–progress on saving the environment, medical breakthroughs that save lives, government innovations addressing persistent problems. The linked issue addresses the anxieties of people frustrated by limits to our individual effectiveness; it was titled “Stop Trying To Save the World.”

When we try to be the hero, we act as if one person alone must do something great and heroic to enact change. We give ourselves too much importance.

When we employ a “yes, and” approach, we pile so many roles and responsibilities on ourselves that we can’t focus on what matters most. We give ourselves too many priorities.

But there’s a third way we can try to do too much. We try to take on the whole wide world and all its problems. Our scope is too broad. We forget that simply tending to our own lives and making authentic human connections is almost always the most impactful thing we can ever do.

The author acknowledges the multiple challenges we face:

the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, economic inequality, diseases of despair, pandemics, growing authoritarianism, terrorism, gun violence, runaway technological advancement, the erosion of shared knowledge and meaning, and much more. Together, these individual crises all complicate, exacerbate, and deepen one another, creating a knot of crises.

On top of all that, our experience of these crises is a crisis itself. Living with the troubling challenges of our world so often elicits anxiety, despair, and existential dread within us. This existential crisis then erodes our capacity to address the world’s more tangible challenges. As our capacity erodes, the problems intensify, and our existential crises deepen even further, and on and on. It’s the ultimate “wicked problem.”

As the article notes, caring people see the immensity and complexity of these challenges, which leads to a growing existential dread about the likely outcome and especially about one’s complicity in that outcome. Good people “yearn to do something meaningful that truly contends with this immensity and complexity.” But most of us are not in a position to save the world.

Because of that, perhaps the most strategic, elegant, all-encompassing contribution to the meta-crisis any of us can offer is simply showing up in our actual lives with more vulnerability, kindness, compassion, and courage. It’s making authentic human connections the very foundation of our lives and careers. It’s showing up to life with more heart…

Don’t overthink it. To get straight to the heart of the meta-crisis, you can just go straight to your own heart. It really can be as simple as that, if you let it.

The author is certainly not suggesting that the major innovations and breakthroughs that the newsletter reports are unimportant. The point is that most of us can only do what we can do– and that when we do whatever it is we are able to do with more kindness and courage, it really does make a difference.

If millions of Americans were to take that advice to heart, if millions of us model civility and helpfulness while we do the “small stuff”–registering voters, writing postcards, donating to campaigns, etc.– it really would make a difference. Maybe we can’t save the world, but we can improve our little corners of it.

And if enough people did it, maybe it could save the world.

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The 50-State Strategy

Remember Howard Dean’s introduction of the 50-state strategy? Dean insisted that Democrats needed to contest seats in every single state–even in states like Indiana, where gerrymandering has given the GOP a vise-like, if arguably illegitimate, hold on governance.

Dean was right.

In a recent Substack newsletter, Robert Hubbell quoted a woman named Jess Piper, who had taken that advice to heart, and had run in a Missouri state legislative race. In 2022, approximately 44% of the Missouri state legislative races had been uncontested, i.e., no Democratic candidate. Jess decided to run for the state’s legislature in District 22 .

Hubbell quoted Piper’s analysis about that experience.

I did not win. I got my butt kicked by a man who is very nice, but who ran on two issues: making sure his grandkids had access to guns and making sure they didn’t have to eat plant-based, meat-substitute burgers. I’m not kidding…here is an article.

But Piper definitely did not consider the experience to have been a waste of time and money. Far from it.

So what did happen? I made the GOP nominee spend money. I made him show up to town halls and forums to debate me. I made him knock doors. I made him call voters. I made him talk about abortion and school funding and roads and hospitals when all he wanted to talk about was Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID masking.

I knew my chances, but by God I knew I was going to make my opponent work for the seat rather than just handing him an uncontested victory and a trip to Jefferson City. I didn’t relent and he couldn’t avoid talking about the things that matter.

And there’s this: what happens when you make the GOP spend money in a mostly Republican voting district? They can’t spend it chipping away at mostly Democratic voting districts. The GOP has to drop money into rural races that they haven’t had to think about for decades.

As Hubbell went on to point out, Jess’s run for office was equal parts offense and defense. “Her chances of success were long, but the fact that she put up a fight may have helped a Democrat in another district win. The importance of that fact cannot be overstated.”

What too many Democrats in Red states overlook is that the absence of a contest–for city council, for the state legislature, for other local races–is an incredibly effective vote suppressor. I have previously shared a conversation I had with a graduate student a few years ago; an election was coming up, and I did my usual “sermonizing” about the importance of voting. I asked for a show of hands–how many of you are registered? How many of you will definitely vote? Then one of my better students raised his hand. “Professor, I’ve always voted, but I now live in Noblesville. I went online to confirm that my polling place hadn’t changed, and then I looked at the ballot. There are no contested races. Why should I vote?”

In his small, Red town, no one had bothered to be a Jess Piper, so there was no incentive for Democrats–or for that matter, Republicans– to turn out.

An analysis of Indiana’s politics suggests that if turnout increased substantially in supposedly “safe” districts, some number of those districts wouldn’t be safe. The process of gerrymandering, after all, relies on previous turnout figures. Add to that the fact that rural areas–at least in Indiana–are rapidly losing population, and many progressive urban folks are moving to small towns that are effectively suburbs of Indianapolis, like Danville and Noblesville.

For too many years, Indiana’s Democrats–like those in Missouri– have given up in advance. Legislative districts are left uncontested, and Democratic campaign contributions are sent to candidates in other states, where the donor thinks there’s a better chance of that candidate winning.

It’s a self-defeating attitude and it creates a reinforcing cycle of negativity.

In his newsletter, Hubbell also gave a shout-out to a group called Every State Blue. The organization’s website underscores the message:

When we don’t run and support Democrats, the people living in those districts feel abandoned, ignored… forgotten. Meanwhile, GOP nominees get free passes.

Every State Blue knows there’s a better way. Working together, we can show up, make sure no Democrat is left behind … no voter is left without a choice … and no Republican gets a free ride.

When the only races being contested are the ones the party pooh-bas think there’s a chance of winning, Democrats have already lost. Worse, they’ve defeated themselves.

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