Veery Interesting…

Younger readers of this blog will probably not recall a comic named Arte Johnson, who played a “left-over” Nazi soldier on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In. (They probably don’t remember Laugh In, either…) Johnson would skulk behind a potted plant to spy on a comic bit, only to emerge and proclaim (with a German accent) “Veery Interesting..”

That comic bit and phrase came to my mind when a friend sent me an announcement from Governor Mike Braun’s official website,in which the Governor announced his gratitude for having been presented with the “Governor of the Year Award” from something called the Foundation for Government Accountability, or FGA. The award was described as a recognition of a “uniquely dedicated leader who advances policies that reduce barriers to work, increase trust in government, and promote self-sufficiency and dignity for individuals and families.”

Given Hoosiers’ general impression of Governor Braun’s “uniqueness”–an impression reflected in an approval rating in the high twenties–I found this veery interesting, especially since I’d never heard of the Foundation for Government Accountability.

My first suspicion was that the Foundation was one of those mythical organizations that used to be a staple of “dirty trick” politics: some supporters of Candidate A would invent an organization (“Housewives for Better Groceries…whatever) and issue the bogus organization’s endorsement of Candidate A. So, suspicious person that I am, I googled the Foundation for Government Accountability, which turns out to exist.

It’s website claims that FGA is “non-partisan.” It also describes an entity that is very far to the Right. Despite the fact that most Americans have never heard of it, the organization claims to be a “leading public policy organization” that has passed reforms in 34 states–reforms that “seek to free individuals from the trap of government dependence and to let them experience the power of work.”

Its website tells us that FGA was founded to offer a solution to America’s “increasingly unaffordable health care costs and broken state budgets.” The organization is particularly focused upon “families trapped on welfare, unable to free themselves from government dependency.” Rejecting what it calls “the one-size fits all solutions” that policymakers have been offering, “FGA saw another way—reducing government dependency through the power of work.” Indeed, the website claims that FDA is “driven by the proven results of the power of work. By the individuals whose lives have changed after being freed from the welfare trap. By the future generations who will succeed as a result of escaping the cycle of dependency.”

I think we can sense a theme…

Wikipedia lists FGA’s major funders (including Leonard Leo of Federalist Society infamy) and its policy positions. Those policy positions are eye-opening, to say the least: FDA strongly supports the SAVE Act that would disenfranchise millions of Americans, for example. It supports measures that would encourage patients to “shop” for medical care. It advocates repeal of several parts of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, “particularly with an eye towards expanding the legality of teenage labor,” and it supports the imposition of work requirements for food stamp recipients. As you’ve probably guessed, FGA opposes Medicaid expansion.

Perhaps most telling, FGA was a member of the advisory board of Project 2025. It was one of the collection of extreme right-wing policy organizations that crafted that odious document. As readers of this blog know, Project 2025’s outrageous proposals–which Trump has dutifully been implementing despite his statements that he had no idea what it was–would reshape the federal government, consolidate executive power and impose the fever-dreams of White Christian nationalists on all Americans.

That is the organization that has bestowed  a “best governor” award on Indiana’s governor, to celebrate his “bold, forward-thinking leadership.” The announcement congratulated Braun for efforts to reform Indiana’s food stamp program, and his work on the “Make Indiana Healthy Again initiative,” with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz. It noted Indiana’s leadership “in the popular movement to remove junk food from the food stamp program.”

Most of all, the award celebrated Braun for “elevating work over welfare.”

What the award really does is dispel any doubt about Braun’s political identity–and his willingness to publicize and celebrate the award dispels any lingering myth of his competence…

SEE MANY OF YOU AT NO KINGS later today…..

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GOP Chutzpah

Sometimes, there really isn’t an English word as useful as a Yiddish one. That’s the case with the word “chutzpah,” which –as I’ve previously explained– is a word that encompasses “nerve” “gall” “insolence” and several others. (A standard example of chutzpah is the guy who kills his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.)

And that brings me to the GOP’s recent effort to pass a poll tax–otherwise known as the SAVE Act.

I haven’t written anything about the SAVE Act because it wasn’t going to pass, despite our demented President’s threats to the Republican crazies and invertebrates in the Senate. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the mere fact that the GOP in the House narrowly passed it, and that leadership in the Senate was willing to bring this abomination to the floor makes it worth considering, because even an unsuccessful effort to pass a bill aimed at the heart of American democracy tells us something important about what the GOP has become.

The Act itself is an abomination. It rests on a transparent lie–the accusation that noncitizens are casting thousands of ballots. Study after study has confirmed that noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare, but MAGA partisans need some justification to explain support for a bill that would essentially nationalize our elections while massively suppressing the vote.

The Act would require voters to prove their citizenship. That may sound simple; it isn’t. It has been described as both a massive hurdle and a major poll tax. The Act would require all registered voters to go to a voting registrar in person to re-register, while providing that registar with proof of citizenship. In some 45 states, a Real ID will not do. Instead, voters would need a passport, passport card, or a certified birth certificate (not a copy). And of course, the Act would make it especially difficult for women, who disproportionately vote Democratic. The Act takes special aim at married women who have changed their names, requiring them to present a marriage certificate and other types of evidence in order to prove the legitimacy of their current name.

The New Republic has explained the enormity of the effect should the measure pass.

Half of Americans do not have passports; getting one costs at least $165, plus photos, and requires … a birth certificate or certificate of naturalization. A passport card, with the same requirements, costs $65 plus photos. Marco Rubio’s State Department has cut the passport office in half and removed the ability of people to submit applications for a passport to local libraries, meaning they would have to physically go to an official office, which for many would mean traveling hundreds of miles.

Many millions of Americans have no idea where their birth certificates are or have one that will not suffice under this bill; getting an official one, which is not always easy, can cost up to $100.

Rather obviously, the Act would hit poorer Americans the hardest–and minority voters are disproportionately poor. There’s a reason it has been dubbed a poll tax.

All that is horrifying enough, but the Act would do even more damage. All states would be required to turn over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. The states would also be required to use a voter purge system created by DOGE, a system using data that has been shown to be both unreliable and biased, with an error rate estimated at 14 percent. Use of this program would result in the disenfranchisement of millions of legitimate voters.

Although the measure would also hit a lot of MAGA voters, the clear intent of the SAVE Act is the suppression of Democratic votes. (Trump, incapable of subtlety, has publicly confirmed that intent.)

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment–passed in 1964–outlawed poll taxes. In any other administration, any other Congress, a measure so obviously and flatly unconstitutional would never have been brought to a vote, but–as we know–the guardrails of American democracy have become degraded. The proponents of this effort at massive vote suppression evidently believe that the measure–if it passed–would have supporters among the corrupt majority Justices of the Supreme Court, and thus an outside chance of passing muster.

Which brings us to the unbelievable chutzpah of today’s Republican Party–a Party willing to offer an overt, public, “in your face” effort to rig elections and terminate American democracy for everyone to see.

No Senator who votes for this abomination should be returned to office. I think it was Maya Angelou who said ” When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

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Identity And Politics

Apologies in advance for a trip into philosophical musing, rather than current events…

As part of my effort to understand our current disaster of a government, and especially my understanding of the people who continue to support it, I’ve been re-reading an old classic: Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” which I hadn’t read since college. (A long time ago!) Hoffer addressed the phenomenon of mass movements, and the reasons for their appeal and emergence. Basically, he argued that attachment to such movements is due to a personal emptiness and an accompanying need to feel a part of something larger than the self.

As I read, I highlighted observations that seemed particularly relevant to our current time (somewhat challenging in a Kindle!), and especially relevant to the appeal of MAGA and White “Christian” nationalism.

Hoffer wrote that “the less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.” In “The True Believer,” he frequently notes the religious character of mass movements and revolutions–writing that the hammer and sickle and the swastika “are in a class with the cross.”

Hoffer argued that people join mass movements to escape individual responsibility–that membership in a mass movement offers frustrated and/or unhappy folks a refuge from “the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”  Belonging allows one to escape an “intolerable individual separateness” by immersion in and identification with a tribe of some sort.

Hoffer’s analysis points to one of the many ways we can “slice and dice” a population and explain otherwise mystifying political differences.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a “true believer” in civil liberties. I celebrate America’s Bill of Rights because it protects an individual autonomy I cherish–the right of each of us to live a life in accordance with our individual goals and beliefs, so long as we do not harm the person or property of others and so long as we recognize the equal rights of those who differ.

It took me a long time to recognize that for some people individual liberty and autonomy are terrifying, and recognizing the equal rights of those who are different is heresy.

When I was at the ACLU, I sometimes debated the folks–mostly academics– who argued against “too much” liberty and championed a point of view called “communitarianism.” Communitarians argued that social cohesion was more important than liberal individualism and the emphasis on civil liberties and civic equality that were an outgrowth of Enlightenment philosophy. Their position was that, since individuals are necessarily “embedded” in various groups and institutions, they need to conform to the overarching values of those groups in order to find meaning in their lives.

Obviously, there’s a mean between extremes–too much liberty is anarchy and too much community is communism. The Greeks were right to advocate a “golden mean.” (It is also obvious that what constitutes “too much” is a matter of opinion…)

How does this very abstract debate operate in American society?

Civil libertarians understand that some people disapprove of others, but we take the position that “If you don’t like gays, or Jews, or Muslims, or whoever, fine. Don’t hang out with them. Don’t invite them over for dinner. But don’t try to take away their rights. Live and let live is the American creed. Those who are intent upon elevating the beliefs of their religions or cultures–their “tribes”– will advocate for rules that impose their tribal beliefs on society at large, disadvantaging or even outlawing people of whom they disapprove.

If there is a middle ground, I’m having trouble envisioning it.

If Hoffer and others are right–if people who are frustrated with their lives and terrified of freedom and personal responsibility are prime targets for membership in intolerant mass movements–we need public officials who understand the need to address the causes of that frustration to the extent possible. We live in a time of dramatic, complex and unsettling technological and environmental change, much of which is beyond the ability of even a wise and competent government to ameliorate–and right now, we don’t have a wise or even minimally competent government.

But diverting public monies from wars of choice to measures improving the quality of life and a rational social safety net would be a start…

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The Simple Truth

Academic types (I plead guilty) like to explain that reality is complicated and it isn’t always easy to determine just what causes have produced just what effects. When it comes to relatively complex policy issues, that’s (usually) true. But sometimes, we humans find ourselves in a situation that is far simpler to describe than the pundits and political scientists acknowledge.

Jason Linkins recently reminded us that there is a very simple explanation for why we are in an insane war in Iran.

What can be said about Trump’s war with Iran that isn’t already abundantly obvious? The answer: not much. It is not going well, and it probably won’t end well. But having spent time in the salt mines of Trump punditry, I can tell you that we’re going to endure a difficult round of think pieces purporting to explain How This Happened. So maybe this is the best time to assert the obvious, using my favored rubric of Trump analysis: Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. Then imagine he started a war with Iran. Now check the news. One look, and here’s what you should be thinking: “Yep, that tracks.”

As with all of Trump’s presidential exploits, success is always constrained by two factors: The aforementioned sharp limitations of his intellectual capabilities and the fact that he is perpetually surrounded by an inner circle made up of clowns somewhere on the spectrum between “rampantly evil” and “thoroughgoing dipshit.”

Lnkins reminds us that the purported goals of this exercise shift with the days of the week–sometimes it’s regime change, sometimes a nuclear threat that knowledgeable folks discount…the story changes with the weather. (Like me, Linkins thinks the “wag the dog” thesis deserves consideration–the more we learn about the Epstein files, the more likely it becomes that full disclosure would confirm what most of us already believe about this sorry excuse for a human being.)

Whatever the actual motivation–and it sometimes seems as if both Trump and Hegseth confuse war with a video game–we’ve seen Trump ask for help from the allies he has consistently demeaned and threatened. Trump seems amazed that  countries he has routinely spit on, countries upon which he has imposed shifting levels of punative tariffs, countries that are now facing the consequences of his third-grade understanding of how the world works–are now uninterested in saving his behind.

As Linkin notes, it is especially maddening (at least to sentient beings) to see the administration react to Iran’s clampdown of the Strait of Hormuz

as if it’s some unfair trick the Iranians pulled and not one of the most singularly obvious strategic choices the regime could make under the circumstances—the other being Iran’s decision to attack other Gulf states, knowing that it would be a pain point for the U.S. both economically and diplomatically. But by Trump’s own admission, the very fact that Iran retaliated in any way has caught him completely flat-footed. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” he told reporters on Monday. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked!” Right now, there are 13-year-old kids about to invade Kamchatka in their first-ever game of Risk that look like Carl von Clausewitz compared to Trump.

America may rid itself of this disaster of an administration. We may–may–reform some of the obvious structural flaws that got us here. (Curing the deep racism and White Christian nationalism of the MAGA cult is, unfortunately, less likely.) But the rest of the world will never again trust a United States that elevated so demonstrable a moron/asshole/lunatic to the Presidency. As Paul Krugman recently put it, Americans are now watching scenes from the death of Pax Americana.

At this point, we face a variety of consequences–all bad–including a not insignificant threat of worldwide economic disaster. And it will be our fault.

A few days ago, I had breakfast with a former colleague, who shared his fury with the people who he reminded me are ultimately to blame for the demise of American hegemony: the voters who supported a man who wasn’t simply obviously and clearly unqualified, but who was a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a highly-likely pedophile, a demostrable ignoramus and a certifiable moron.

Actually, it’s a toss-up between those voters and the would-be free-riders who didn’t bother to cast ballots.

Somehow, “told you so” doesn’t seem satisfactory….

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From The Middle Out

One of the most depressing aspects of contemporary politics has been the descent from civil debate to playground taunts. Name calling has replaced reasoned disagreement, an unfortunate shift vastly accelerated by the election of a President whose maturity and intellectual development stopped somewhere around third grade.

I have been particularly annoyed by the revisionist and entirely unfair criticisms leveled at former President Joe Biden. One can grant his deterioration with age without ignoring or diminishing the quality of his leadership, his policy decisions and his appointments of highly qualified people.

Despite the accusations of the bratty child who currently occupies the Oval Office, Biden left Trump an economy that was recognized globally as the best in the post-pandemic world. His approach to economic growth wasn’t simply light-years more grounded and sophisticated than Trump’s ignorant championing of tariffs and fossil fuels–it represented a welcome break from less empirically-grounded approaches, seen in his insistence that economic growth happens not from “trickle down,” but “from the middle out.”

A transcript of a 2024 conversation from Pitchfork Economics–a podcast by David Goldstein and Nick Hanauer (one of my longtime favorites)–featured a conversation with Jared Bernstein, who chaired Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, and it focused on Biden’s philosophy. As Bernstein explained,

Bidenomics starts from a framework that growth originates from the bottom up and the middle out. You asked for a contrast, and that’s very different than trickle-down economics, which not only doesn’t work—and that’s an empirical statement, not a judgmental one—but has in fact exacerbated inequality and damaged growth, particularly through an inability to make the kind of investments that you see our administration making. So let’s get to the pillars of Bidenomics because investment is one of them.

Empowering workers. Nick, you and I, as long as we’ve known each other, have talked about the importance of worker bargaining power. And in fact, that word power, those five letters, mean a ton to how economies function and yet they’re little-discussed in much of classical economics.

Pillar two: Investment. Reversing decades of disinvestment in our public goods and in many cases, partnering with the private sector to invest in domestic production in key areas where markets have consistently failed to provide adequate investment.

And pillar three: Competition and lowering costs. So those are the three pillars.

The podcast was taped in February of 2024, and Bernstein shared some data from that year, noting that the expectations for job growth in January had been for an additional 185,000 jobs, but 353,000 were created. The unemployment rate had been below 4% for two years. (And forgive my snark, but Biden–unlike Trump– hadn’t found it necessary to fire the statistician responsible for producing that data…)

As Hanauer noted, any reasonable examination of the empirical economic evidence available shows an absolutely consistent pattern: when you follow the policies that the Biden administration pursued, the results are higher job creation, higher GDP growth rates, and increased productivity— far better economic results than are achieved by cutting taxes for rich people.

Bernstein agreed, pointing out that growing an economy “from the bottom up and the middle out” produces strong demand from a vast majority of the population. The top 1%, however, is (duh!) only 1% of the population. When the vast majority are doing well, that not only boosts growth through consumption (this is a 70% consumer spending economy) it also  signals investors that the investment climate is good– reassuring them that consumer spending is strong and the broad middle class is strong.

Bernstein noted that the difference between the economics to which Biden subscribed and the older “trickle-down” is essentially the difference between economists who are “empirically driven”– economists who look at the real world results of policies, and reject elegant theories about how the world should work that rather clearly haven’t worked–and others.

But the “middle-out” approach is broader than encouraging demand. The supply side matters, too. Core to a healthy economy is the promotion of competition so that markets function properly. That means getting rid of junk fees, giving Medicare bargaining power, eliminating the overuse of non-competes, and other measures to ensure a vigorous marketplace. Bernstein quotes Biden: “capitalism without competition looks a lot more like exploitation.”

There’s much more in the linked transcript, and I encourage you to click through and read it. Biden inherited an economy just emerging from a global pandemic, and got far too little credit for bringing down the inflation that pandemic had produced. We’re now seeing what happens when an economic ignoramus assumes power, and blames all his own blunders on his predecessor.

The rich get richer…and we’re back to “trickle-down.”

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