Left Jabs

I had hoped to write something new for today, but the holidays have a way of intruding on one’s plans, so I’m returning to a post from last March, when Putin’s atrocities were still fresh and Republicans were envious of his absolute power. As it happens, little has changed since I first posted this, though the tanking of Roe v. Wade was not yet a fait accompli at the time. Which means things have only gotten worse.   On one hand, we have Putin, perfectly content to obliterate anyone in his path, with a special emphasis on pregnant women, children, and babies. On the other hand, we have the Republican right, perfectly content to obliterate anyone in its path, with a special emphasis on pregnant women, children, and babies. The difference is one of degree. Putin can make obliteration depressingly literal — he kills and maims indiscriminately, and with impunity. Republicans are — for the moment anyway — more subtle. They’re more abo...

Rural school districts in Texas are switching to four-day weeks this fall due to lack of staff. Florida is asking veterans with no teaching background to enter classrooms. Arizona is allowing college students to step in and instruct children.                                    —    The Washington Post , 08/03/2022 We appear to be experiencing a rather serious teacher drain. I say ‘appear’ because I’ve read one reputable source that says the data doesn’t support findings of a nationwide shortage. But even so, its author admits there are some states — most in the deep South, unsurprisingly — with severe shortages, both chronic and acute. But whether there’s an actual teacher shortage or not, there is no question there’s a teacher crisis.  Teachers all over the country are either leaving the profession, or seriously thinking about it. And who...

When the current 6-3 Supreme Court agrees to hear a case — no matter how crackpot the legal theory might be — you can be sure we will soon be kissing some important precedent goodbye. First, they make up their minds, then they hear the arguments. Consequences are for the little people. With the Dobbs decision, as I’ve written , they’ve upended not just legal precedents, but also the legal institutions that have grown up around those precedents. Generations of case law will now need to be re-litigated, as different states enact different sets of laws based on diametrically opposed worldviews. State-v.-state lawsuits are already starting to fly, and the legal positions are already being hardened. Interstate cooperation — a crucial component of daily life — is already fraught, and could at any time turn ugly. It’s almost as if chaos were the point. The six “conservative” justices — they’re conserving very little these days — are pushing everything in the direction of chaos. Whatev...

Once again, there is blackmail afoot. Once again, the GOP is hellbent on playing chicken with the lives of ordinary citizens, and with the solvency of the government. For most of us, it’s boring to even think about the federal debt ceiling. Yet for the umpteenth time, the GOP intends to weaponize it. Which could bore us, quite literally, to death. We’ve seen this movie before. In 2011, they refused to raise the debt limit, which had the effect of reducing the credit rating of the U.S. Treasury for the first time ever. Ultimately they backed down, and they took a huge political hit that cost them dearly in the 2012 election. But in the process, they extorted Obama into spending cuts that were, in the context of such short-sighted bad faith, totally outrageous.   To Republicans, that was a victory. Debt ceiling blackmail had been shown to work. Most economists — the reputable ones, anyway — agree that there shouldn’t be any ceiling at all on the national debt. It’s natura...

  I didn’t find much time to write over the holiday, so I’ve dredged up an oldie from the summer of 2021. This was well before we ever heard the word “angertainment,” a portmanteau just now entering the language. While it’s easy to apply such a word to the nutso antics of a Marjorie Taylor Greene or a Lauren Boebert, there is, as I wrote back then, something much more basic — and insidious — at work in the cynical manipulation of anger. Please excuse the references to events that were current then, but seem almost quaint now. Anger has long played a key role in authoritarian regimes. Since before Julius Caesar, slick propagandists with fascist agendas have routinely used the anger of the downtrodden to market lies and distract attention. The Republican party, taking full advantage of the ignorance and poor education of its constituency, has learned well how to gull the gullible into ignoring their own interests and focusing instead on their anger. No...

In March 2021, Ron Weiser, co-chair of the Michigan GOP, addressed the Republican Club of Oakland County, not far from where I live. It’s hard to overstate the lunacy of Michigan Republicans at that point, many of whom were up to their eyeballs in election denial, some of whom were suspects in election-related crimes, and sixteen of whom are now under federal investigation as fake electors. But in his speech, Weiser — who had himself narrowly escaped being charged with campaign finance violations — decided to bring some snark: “… Our job now is to soften up those three witches and make sure that when we have good candidates to run against them, that they are ready for the burning at the stake.” The “three witches” he was referring to, of course, were the three Democrats who had steered Michigan through the pandemic: Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Attorney General Dana Nessel. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. All women. All with national spotlights. All smarter than anyone in ...

For me, the biggest surprise is how surprised they all were. Did the mainstream press really believe its own bullshit? Or were they just pretending to believe it? Let’s call out The New York Times and The Washington Post by name. Not because they’re better or worse than any of the other pushers of supposedly reputable journalism, but because they, of all people, should know better. They assured us that the midterms were about three things, and three only: inflation, gas prices, crime. Exactly the crap Republicans were peddling. And when they weren’t obsessing on those, they always found time to point out Biden’s low approval numbers — as if those numbers weren’t juiced by fraudulent polling, and by relentless rightwing assaults on his “failed presidency.” There were endless stories about those feckless Democrats, always in disarray, who were never quite able to “work across the aisle” with stochastic terrorists openly plotting to kill them. Democracy? Abort...