Current Affairs – US

What if the GOP planned all along to fail to pass a repeal bill for the ACA in both the House of Representatives and the Senate?
I can think of three very good reasons why they might want that to be the final outcome.
1. The ACA is growing steadily more popular
2. The POTUS made ACA repeal and replacement a centerpiece of his agenda, and the POTUS is unpopular
3. The POTUS promise of better insurance for less money is totally incompatible with giving rich folks a tax cut, if you try to trade the ACA off against tax policy

The GOP is, of course, hopelessly tangled up in a rhetorical cul-de-sac of its own making over the ACA. They have been promising to repeal the ACA since about the time that it was passed, and they have been bloviating and posturing to that end since 2010 (witness the number of votes scheduled in the House to repeal the ACA – up to over 60 the last time I looked).
The GOP cannot suddenly turn around and say “well, it seems that the ACA might not be all bad so let’s not repeal it”. The activist base of the party would be apoplectic with rage, and local pressure groups would immediately look for primary election targets in 2018, picking on representatives who they consider to be traitoriously disloyal. One of the reasons why so many GOP elected representatives make dingbat-crazy public pronouncements is that they are terrified of being primaried. When a representative like Renee Elmers, who was propelled into office by a Tea Party primary insurgency, can be dumped out of office by the same group of primary voters after being accused of being a RINO (a cardinal sin for any GOP political candidate), then nobody in the House from the GOP, no matter how batshit-crazy, is safe.
So, the GOP has been in rock-meet-hard-place territory. If they repeal the ACA, elected representatives fear a tidal wave of voter anger sweeping them out of office in 2018. If they abandon all attempts at a repeal, they fear primary challenges for being “insufficiently conservative” or (gasp) being named as a RINO.
So…what better option exists?
Allow the repeal bills to die due to (just failing) to get enough support.
This would be a classic tactic of virtue signalling, done all the time by politicians who want to appear tough and resolute. The world of politics is replete with examples of politicians proposing cockanamie legislation, having it shelved or voted into oblivion, and then going back to their supporters and saying “look, I tried to get it passed”.
So, the PR spin from Donald Trump that he got really close, is a classic rhetorical sleight of hand that papers over the reality that, in all probability, the majority of GOP senators and house members are glad that ACA repeal has died a death. They still have the option to slowly strangle the ACA by other means of course. That would be a cunning and slow dismantlement of the ACA without having to take ownership for publicly killing it. Think arsenic poisoning instead of shooting.

Ryan Lochte did more bullshit under the guise of the American flag than what people perceive Colin Kaepernick did. America.

— Try Me, Wypipo (@WinkWestwood) July 17, 2017

In his latest article at Pressthink, Jay Rosen explains how the deingration and dismissal of the media is a permanent feature of the Trump approach to governance, for a number of reasons which he explains in some detail.
Media employees and leaders who expect that he will suddenly smack his forehead one day in the near future and say “OMG I have made a terrible mistake by being mean to all those media folks – let me invite them to dinner at the White House so I can apologize” are living in cloud-cuckooland.
Trump’s entire strategy is to totally discredit the established media in order to promote only media channels that are beholden to him (step forward Breitbart), or to shift the entire focus of his communications towards direct communication with his support base, mostly using Twitter.
This is not exactly a new approach. GOP politicians have been doing this to varying degrees for a long time. Rick Perry, when running for re-election to the Governorship of Texas in 2012, persistently refused to meet with any of the Texas newspapers, most of whom endorsed his opponent, gave few interviews and almost no news conferences, and avoided debates as much as he could. Instead, he relied on his enormous fund-raising advantage to blanket the media outlets with his own adverts. Greg Abbott did much the same thing in 2016 against Wendy Davis, that time around he had an even bigger fund-raising advantage.
Distribution channel experts call this disintermediation. It has been happening in other industry sectors for decades (see the airline and travel industries, where travel agents are going out of business at a rate of knots as travelers deal direct with airlines, hotels, rental car companies etc.) If the media thought they were exempt from that trend, they clearly were not paying attention. All it needed was a political movement with the ability to either buy massive airtime on established media outlets (they don’t mind using the media channels for communication, they just don’t want any commentary or investigation), or a candidate or party with the ability to use free social media platforms as a direct communication tool. The ability to covertly flood social media channels like Twitter and Facebook with postings from fake accounts and bots has now been developed to a high degree in the last 2 years. The results can be seen easily today with analysis tools showing that 45% of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers are probably fake accounts or bots.
So, when it comes to election time, the GOP blankets the airwaves with paid adverts, and covert organizations flood social media with supportive posts and links from fake accounts and bots, while Donald Trump babbles and burbles away all the time on Twitter.
The result is likely to be the same.
The established media outlets can no longer obtain much of any airtime with the White House, and they still have not worked out what to do about it.
The media has to decide whether they want to be manipulated into playing by Trump’s rules or not. So far, all the indications are that they are unwilling to do what they should do; namely to stop attending briefings where the main content is a White House spokesperson whining about and excoriating the media for promoting “fake news”. Instead they need to be putting resources into the single most important activity that could change their image; investigative journalism. David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post has shown how to do it, with his relentless investigation of Donald Trump’s fake and bullshit charity donation trail.
A couple of dozen more people with Fahrenthold’s energy and resourcefulness might have uncovered a lot more well-researched facts by now. Instead, the media is still being played like the cheapest of cheap violins by a President whose only aim is to diminish their reputation down to something approaching zero. This is a classic rock-meet-hard-place dilemna. If the media repeats the Trump administration’s claims uncritically, a large number of people will regard them as spineless incompetents. If they critique the Trump administration claims, then Trump and his sycophants unleash a torrent of excoriation and abuse on social media. Most of the media outlets are unwilling to devote energy and time to refuting or dismantling the bullshit in a compelling way, and then telling the White House to go piss up a rope when they want props for a press conference whine-fest.
The clock is ticking. Another 2-3 years of this and the current generation of news networks will also be locked into a Dodo-like descent to extinction.

Coulter wrote a whole book about how the cult of victimhood is ruining America. 19 tweets & counting abt the tragedy of having to move seats pic.twitter.com/Dp40Dy675F

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) July 16, 2017

…the background to the charade that is Donald Trump’s election fraud commission.

For reasons that are rather obvious, a lot of Donald Trump supporters have very little of substance to point to as achievements of his Presidency to date.
So, engaging in diversions is one of the tactics that they have adopted.
One popular diversion is the whole “Yeahbut…Hillary would have been far worse!” claim. This takes all sorts of forms, usually starting with phrases like “criminal”, and possibly including words like Benghazi, Pizzagate, Vince Foster, and more recently, Seth Rich (Whitewater is rarely used, despite the massive amounts of money spent investigating it).
That is before the inevitable descent, for some complainers, to female perjoratives and other curse-words.
It is almost as if the people making these allegations think that Hillary Clinton is actually the current POTUS, with Donald Trump operating as The Patriotic Opposition.
It certainly tends to back up my opinion that 1/3 of the Trump supporters last November were less interested in liking Donald Trump than they were in despising Hillary Clinton.

The conviction of Desiree Fairooz has been overturned by an Appeal Court judge, who has ordered a new trial.
Whether the prosecution will want to go head with a new trial remains to be seen. I would bet money that they will, since there is a nasty authoritarian attitude settling over the justice system.

The failure of Jon Ossoff to win the special election in GA-06 is a damning indictment of the organizational and campaigning weaknesses of the Democratic Party.
From leading the race by 6 percentage points to losing today in 2 weeks? That takes a serious amount of organizational and messaging incompetence.
Ossoff played the last 10 days like an ultra-careful centrist, trying not to lose. Karen Handel went-all out with ad blitzes and mud-slinging. This was the 2000 Presidential Election all over again.
The Democratic Party has to understand and act on a fundamental reality. If you run down the middle of the road, you will get run over. Every time. Why would people vote for GOP lite when they can get the genuine article?
Here’s the underlying issue that the Democratic Party refuses to address. If you want to get out the vote, you have to run candidates that excite your natural supporters. The collection of milquetoast candidates that the Democratic Party often ends up with in elections do not excite the party base, nor do they impress young people, who will be a key voting group to be energized. Leaving aside ideology, the Republican Party currently does a far better job than the Democratic Party at running candidates that excite their core supporters. They seldom interfere in primary processes, unlike the Democratic Party, which never seems to be able to shake of the machine politics pathology of trying to fix the process to get the result that they think they need. Fixing primary processes may please centrists and establishment figures, but it sends a terrible and de-motivating message to party loyalists and young people, whose tolerance for cynical bullshit is still low, unlike the tolerance levels of the older and more cynical.
In addition the Democratic Party persistently falls prey to the “freezing in sight of the finish line” pathology, and I have seen it happen dozens of times.
1. New candidate is trumpeted by party at start of campaign, jumps out to big lead, looks to have race comfortably in hand.
2. Then suddenly, starting 3 weeks from polling day, candidate suddenly starts to act like they have to capture middle-of-the-road voters. They start talking all manner of conciliatory centrist guff.
3. Opponent goes all out on ad blitzes, FUD and all manner of mud-slinging.
4. Leading candidate determines that “say nothing and take the high road” is the right approach because it makes him or her seem to be statesmanlike and mature. Opposing candidate meanwhile is saying “***k that I’m going to damn well win”.
5. Candidate’s lead shrinks as fear of making a mistake adds to the “don’t piss anybody off” message being whispered in their ear by worried party grandees.
6. Would-be-supporters who were going to vote for candidate decide to not bother because candidate is a wimp. Uncommitted voters look at candidate and opponent and vote for opponent because damm it, they look like a winner.
7. Come election day, our former field-leading hero finishes second.

The inquest usually concludes that candidate was not “moderate” enough, ignoring the reality that at one point the candidate had a large lead, so was a good match most of the way.
The “not moderate enough” verdict is the best one to avoid further unpleasant scrutiny, since it places the blame on the primary electors, not the campaigning or messaging, which usually falls prey to risk-aversion dictated by the party establishment, whose attitude is “we write the checks, you do as we say”.
A new variation on this explanation that I am already hearing is that Jon Ossoff could never have won the seat, since he is not a Republican. The implication being that the seat was always unwinnable by a Democrat. If that was the case, how the hell did tracking polls consistently show Ossoff with a significant lead? A hopeless cause is when you are always behind in the polls, not when you lead by a significant margin until the last few days (see Dais, Wendy). This race was winnable. Ossoff, for reasons that look all too familiar, was unable to hold on to his lead.
If the message is that the Republicans managed to energize their supporters to get out at the last minute and vote, well, time for the Democratic Party to learn how to energize their supporters. (HINT – They won’t do that by telling the candidate to shut up and start trying to not piss off middle-of-the-road voters. You have to get your natural supporters to come out on polling day).

There is a lot of nonsense being talked about celebrities in the wake of the controversy over Kathy Griffin’s waving of a fake severed head of Donald Trump.
Celebrities are merely instances of homo sapiens, just like us. To use the old saying, hey put their pants on one leg at a time. They might be well-known public figures, but that doesn’t magically multiply their intellect or wisdom. In fact it may well reduce their overall wisdom, since many celebrities live in a bubble, cut off from the real world as most of us know it. This is one reason why many celebrity utterances sound disconnected from reality.
Numerous instances exist from prior election cycles of electors creating models of Barack Obama being hung in effigy, and Hillary Clinton models in jail clothing, and also a severed head model of Hillary Clinton. The action by Kathy Griffin is not a new development in public discourse. People who deny that reality are unserious partisans, and I have no interest in a debate on that topic.
As is normal when people are informed that their in-group is guilty of equally bad behavior, the people in question have been furiously rationalizing the behavior away. The most common attempted rationalization is that Fred Doe from Upper Podunk, who hung Barack Obama in effigy from his porch, is not a celebrity, unlike Kathy Griffin, so Kathy Griffin’s action is much worse.
This is bullshit. If you attach more importance to the words and actions of a celebrity, you’re the fool here. The USA has a fatal fascination with celebrity, as proven by the tendency of electors to be impressed by all manner of celebrities when they decide to run for elective office. If you buy this rationalization, you are perpetuating that naive fascination. Celebrities are not inviolate idols. They are regular people, and their words and actions should be assessed on that basis. Words can be multiplied across communication channels, but that does not magically convert gibberish to nonsense. (It’s like using ALL CAPS in comments on the internet. It might make you feel more important, but it makes you look like one of a combination of angry, pompous or unable to use a keyboard).
Charles Barkley had a memorable response to some of this a few years ago, when asked whether NBA players ought to be more conscious of being role models in their actions and words because of their impact on young people. “Why should NBA players be role models for kids? What about their parents?” was his response.
Let me be blunt. If you think that the words and actions of a person are any more powerful because they are a celebrity, you’re a dupe for the showbiz approach to the evaluation of facts, truth and what is wise.