A Few Words For Tucker Carlson

As few as possible, considering the fact that Tucker Carlson is the object of them.  But it also applies to all of his partners in journalistic crime at Fox, and otherwise in the employ of Rupert Murdoch.  All of the mouthpieces dedicated to lying and spewing hate at the expense of the Constitution that protects everyone's freedom of speech.  Even theirs.

Shut up.

SHUT.  THE.  F***.  UP.

At least when it comes to incendiary garbage like this.

We are now in political and legal waters that are alternately bracing and terrifying.  We all need to take a deep breath, and resist the temptation to trouble those waters for the sake of short-term self-gain.

Because what is now going on with Donald Trump and the State of New York is bigger than all of us.  If it becomes an opportunity for those who live for violence to act out their worst fantasies, it may bring us, our nation, and our heritage crashing down around all of us.  Never to be recovered or repaired.

Let the process play out.  Criticize who and what you will.  But don't encourage protests that end at the barrel of a gun.

You have enough blood on your hands already.

In Praise Of Women

That title, as all Sondheim fans know, comes from the title of a song in "A Little Night Music," in which the song's lyrics offer praise undermined with wry commentary on the reasons for offering it.  But that's not my purpose today.  I write this to offer genuine praise for women, and specifically for three women, two of whom have had a profound effect in my life, and one who had a profound effect on the lives of all of us.

That may not, in and of itself, sound overly political.  But THR has never been strictly about politics, and especially not when it's appropriate for me to comment on the passing of someone who has had a major, special impact on my life, whether a public figure like Sondheim, or a private one like my mother.  Besides, historically, and up through the moments in which I'm typing this, to be a woman has been to be the relentless focus of all forms of politics.  And, right now, after more than sixty years in which women thought that they were making progress on leveling the gender playing field, they are finding themselves the subject and the object of political oppression.  Which makes it all the more important to tell the stories of women, and the impact that they have had in our lives.  And this burden should fall all the more heavily on men, who have for far too long had an interest in suppressing those stories.

And I'm happy to do my part.  So here we go.

The first woman is Melissa Borgerding, a new playwright with whom I'm working to produce a wonderful play she wrote, "Someone Close To You."  As I mentioned in closing out my blog for last year, I've formed a production company dedicated to producing the work of those whose voices are not heard often enough, culturally and otherwise.  I've selected Melissa's play as my first project and, last month, we had two readings of the play at Theatre West in Los Angeles, and both audiences responded enthusiastically to it.  As a result, we are now in the process of planning for a limited run of SCTY at a theater in Los Angeles, which will (if it happens) take place sometime this fall.

Like a lot of American dramas, Melissa's play is a family drama, one that depicts a couple in the middle of two challenges:  a pregnancy, and caring for a parent in declining health.  How they meet those challenges is something that I believe will challenge audiences.  In fact, when I first read the script, I found the ending to be at least a little bit challenging.  But, far more importantly, I found it to be real, poignant, and thought-provoking.  In other words, exactly the sort of theater that matters the most to me.  That's why I was not surprised by the success of our readings.  Not completely, anyway.  

I told Melissa that, no matter how well a script reads, you never know whether a script can become a play until it's up on its feet on stage.  But I had a good feeling about this one, based on decades of reading, seeing, and acting in plays, and our experience at Theater West validated that feeling.  In addition to being a talented writer, Melissa is a terrific collaborator, who has responded very well to feedback from our director, James A. Goins, and me.  Both of us look forward to working with her on the next stage (no pun intended) for this project.

Now, unfortunately, for a far sadder tribute.

In a former life, I worked for three years in New York City as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration, taking and approving or disapproving claims for Social Security benefits.  I tremendously enjoyed living in New York, and enjoyed (for the most part) the people I interviewed as well as the people I worked with.  But the system itself was and probably still is the most complicated system of legislation and regulation in our Federal system.  Even worse, in fact, than the laws and regulations of the Internal Revenue Service, with which I've also worked in my legal career.  

And, when I say I got along with my colleagues, that was not always the case when it came with the ones in management.  In fact, when the Republicans came into national power, those latter relationships got worse, as all of us came under greater pressure to deny claims and otherwise find ways to cut benefits.  This was my first career-type of position, and I was not prepared to deal with any of the stresses my job created, especially the Reagan-related stresses.

Fortunately, throughout all of this, I had one person I could turn to.

Her name was Julia Brandner.  

Like me, she was a claims representative, although she had been working long enough (unlike me) to no longer have conditional status, as my employment did.  Accordingly, she had a considerable amount of experience with both the technical knowledge of the work, as well as the politics of the office.  More importantly, we shared an affinity for the arts and show business, although her tastes ran more to television, and "Peter Gunn" in particular, than to Broadway (or, even worse for her, science fiction).  But, more importantly than anything else for me at that point, she was a kind and generous person, one who always organized office lunches at restaurants near our office, and who was always willing to listen when I had problems either with cases, or my immediate supervisor for most of my time there.  The less said about him, the better, except I understand that, when he left SSA, he worked for a bill collector, and one could not possibly imagine a better match between employer and employee than that one.

What astonished me about her friendship was the fact that it extended for so very long a time after I left New York in 1982.  Up until September of 2020, each year without fail, I would get both a birthday and Christmas greeting from her.  Thanks in no small part of this faithfulness on her part, I was able to keep up to date on what was going on with many of my former colleagues, and to be invited to her retirement party in 1999, which gave me the opportunity to see her and my colleagues one last time.  Her kindness and generosity at every step of the past four decades has meant more than I can say, both personally and professionally.

Julia, no one has a greater right to be called my friend than you did, and always will.  Baruch dayan ha'emess.

Finally, one more sad tribute for someone who added immeasurably to all of our lives.  If you are an American, and regardless of your sexual identification, you owe her gratitude, although she has not been a household name for decades.

Her name was Patricia Schroeder.  She was a congresswoman from Colorado, at a time when the House of Representatives was an almost entirely white, male political preserve.  That is has moved some distance away from that status, albeit not completely, is due in no small measure to the rare combination of perseverance and progressivism that she brought every day to her career in the House.

I have taken the liberty here of reprinting the following, from Daily Kos.  It is well worth your time to read it.

Former Colorado Rep. Pat Schroeder, a Democrat who was one of the most prominent voices for women’s rights in Congress during her service from 1973 to 1997, died Monday at the age of 82. Schroeder, who was just one of just 14 women in the House when she first arrived, was instrumental in passing legislation like the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. However, she acknowledged how much work still needed to be done in the title of her 1998 memoir, “24 Years of House Work … and the Place Is Still a Mess.”

Schroeder, who got her piloting license as a teenager, was one of only 15 women in her 1964 class of more than 500 at Harvard Law School. She recounted that, after the dean had told the small group, “Do you realize you have taken this position from a man?” another woman responded, “Well, I am only here because I could not get in at Yale.” Schroeder and her husband relocated to Denver after they both graduated, and at first it looked like Jim Schroeder would be the one who would have a political career.

In 1970 he campaigned for a seat in the state House and lost the general election by fewer than 50 votes. Pat Schroeder would recount decades later that legislators responded to that close call by drawing up a gerrymander that specifically placed their home in a new seat, boundaries that “didn't make any sense, except that's where Schroeder lived.” The future congresswoman, though, wrote in 1998, “But the law of unintended consequences bit the gerrymanderers―they kept Jim from running but they launched my political career!”

It was another 1970 election that would set in motion a chain of events that would help propel her to Congress two years later. Democratic Rep. Byron Rogers narrowly lost renomination after 10 terms to Craig Barnes, who emphasized his own opposition to the Vietnam War, but angry Rogers backers refused to support Barnes in the general election. That left an opening for Denver District Attorney Mike McKevitt, a Republican who had made headlines for shutting down screenings of the erotic film “I Am Curious (Yellow)” and who crusaded against restaurants with large hippie clienteles. McKevitt ended up winning the 1st Congressional District 52-45, which made him Denver’s first Republican House member in a quarter century.

Schroeder recounted that the original favorite for the Democratic nomination for 1972 was state Sen. Arch Decker, but her husband was one of many who wanted an alternative to someone they saw as “an elephant in donkey's clothing.” That proved to be a tough task, though, as few wanted to campaign in a year where they expected presidential nominee George McGovern to tank their chances. Schroeder, who taught law and had worked for the National Labor Relations Board, was therefore taken aback when Jim Schroeder relayed the news that local Democrats had mentioned her as a candidate.

She described her first reaction as, “Don't tease me, I'm tired. Why should I be the designated kamikaze?” Jim Schroeder agreed that she stood no chance of beating McKevitt and likely wouldn’t even be the nominee, but she wrote that he continued, “But if you don't get in the race and articulate the issues, they will not be discussed. You think the government's policies about Vietnam and the environment are wrongheaded, and you're always urging your students to get involved.”  

While Schroeder, who was still left “wonder[ing] what they served at this meeting,” still needed persuasion, she agreed to be “Dona Quixote” in a hopeless race: She’d remember, to her frustration, a newspaper summing up her announcement with the headline “Denver housewife runs for Congress.”

Schroeder had to quickly organize a campaign to beat Decker, who remained the favorite of the party establishment. She remembered that at the important state party convention she was granted only 30 seconds to speak by leaders who wanted to “muzzle me with their fast clock.” She used her limited time to declare her support for Cesar Chavez’s lettuce boycott, an issue that resounded “with the “large Chicano population of the city” and helped her win the convention.

Schroeder went on to beat Decker 55-45, and he did not respond well to that shock defeat. “He went into a massive pout,” Schroeder wrote in her 1998 book, “literally pulling down the blinds in his house and refusing to speak to the press.” But despite that upset win, she had an even tougher six-week battle ahead of her against McKevitt, “who thought he was going to waltz through a non-campaign to victory.”

The incumbent wasn’t the only one: Schroeder in a 2015 oral history interview with the House’s Office of the Historian said that the DCCC told her, “Well, we really have nothing to say to you; we can’t waste our money.” The Democrat, who ran on the slogan, “She wins, we win,” decided to wage an anti-war campaign that also emphasized her support for the children of migrant families and opposition to Denver hosting the 1976 Winter Olympics. (Colorado voters that fall would decisively back a referendum to withhold funding for the event, which ended up relocating to Austria.)  

Schroeder believed that, because establishment leaders didn’t help her, she benefited from running a nontraditional campaign that “seemed to penetrate the normal clutter and noise of politics.” She also said that Barnes, two years after his loss, transferred his “energized grassroots group to me.”

McKevitt, who demeaned his opponent as “Little Patsy,” continued to ignore Schroeder’s campaign, but the FBI didn’t. Schroeder said that her home was broken into “a couple of times” without anything obviously being stolen, but she didn’t think much of it at the time. She would learn a few years later, though, that the FBI suspected her slogan meant she was a communist, and that her husband’s barber was one of their informants. (“In hindsight it did seem rather odd how often he would show up in the middle of dinner,” she’d write.)

Schroeder ended up shocking everyone, including herself, by unseating McKevitt 52-47, a victory that made her the first woman to represent Colorado in Congress. That win came at the same time that, according to analyst Kiernan Park-Egan, President Richard Nixon was beating McGovern 55-45 in the district.

Schroeder soon found herself in the “guy gulag” that was D.C., and she immediately faced a hostile reception from a prominent Democrat after she became the first woman to ever serve on the House Armed Services Committee. Chairman Edward Hébert, a longtime supporter of segregation, made Schroeder share a seat with Black colleague Ron Dellums, with her remembering him saying, “The two of you are only worth half the normal member.” (It’s disputed whether he actually uttered those words.)

Schroeder, though, went on to become an influential member, and she quickly became entrenched at home. The congresswoman turned back state Rep. Frank Southworth 58-41 during the Democratic landslide of 1974, and she went on to beat another state representative, Don Friedman, 53-46 as Jimmy Carter was pulling off a tiny win in her constituency. This would be the last time Schroeder would fall below 59%: In 1982 she even fended off her old foe Decker, who had joined the GOP, 60-37. During the Reagan era, Schroeder also became known for dubbing the commander in chief the “Teflon president,” a label that ironically stuck.

Schroeder briefly formed a presidential exploratory committee in 1987 after former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart dropped out, but she failed to raise enough money. The congresswoman announced her decision to stay out of the race in a press conference where she fought back tears, something that drew scorn from several feminist leaders who argued she’d badly damaged the presidential hopes of future women. Schroeder later said, “I think it’s amazing that no one ever said that Joe Biden had ruined the future of men forever because people would think that they all plagiarized or that Gary Hart ruined the future of men forever because they all played around.”

Schroeder decided to retire the cycle after the 1994 Republican wave left her in the minority for the first time, and she went on to spend 11 years leading the Association of American Publishers. During her final month in the House she responded to a Los Angeles Times’ question about what advice she’d give women arriving in Congress, “I think women still should never kid themselves that they’re going to come here and be part of the team. And you ought to come here with a very clear definition of what it is you want to do, and that you will not be deterred.”

What an amazing combination of courage and cleverness she possessed!  The Democratic Party could use candidates with that same combination now more than ever!  Truly, all that I can add to the above is that now, more than ever, today's Democratic Party needs to run everywhere across the county, to find ways to communicate its progressive message in places where it may not be easy to do so.  It will entail risks.  

But, with a nation on the edge of civil war, it has never been more necessary.  My generation is particular has been able to grow up in an age of leisure, one that kindled indolence at the same time it inspired idealism.  We have generations ready to come after us, eager to build on the progress that has been made, and yet we have allowed our indolence to squander our idealism.  Shaking off the former to embrace the latter will entail facing risks greater than the ones Congresswoman Schroeder faced.  But, if she were still here with us, no one would insist harder that we face those risks without fear, without favor, without pause, and without pity for those who would be happy to reduce the words "freedom" and "democracy" to labels to be slapped on the face of their proposed tyranny.  Her example will always live with us.  Let us embrace it, build on it, and find true American greatest in the place where it has always lain.  In each other.

Three stories of three remarkable women.  All of whom deserve our praise and respect.  Let their stories be told again and again.  And let many other similar ones be added to them.

The Power And The Glory, Threatened By The Young And The Restless

One of the things about writing a blog, as is the case with any regularly scheduled program of writing:  some days you can't wait to sit down and start typing, and other days, you sit in front of your screen and think, "OK, now what?"  And then, there are the weeks, like the past few, where a political writer has all sorts of options.  Fox News. The Georgia grand jury.  Jimmy Carter, speaking about Georgia.  East Palestine.  Ukraine.  The SOTU address, speaking about Biden.  MTG's plan for red and blue states to divorce, speaking of Congress.

I'd like to write about all of that.  I will, in fact, write about at lease some of it next month.  But I've been moved by two events to return to a subject I've written about a number of times, and yet it never gets old for me.  Even though I may not have much in the way of new information to share about it.

I'm talking about evangelical Christianity, with which I had a long, difficult, and ultimately traumatic relationship in my young adulthood.  For me, part of the trauma was the feeling that being "born again" had been actually a kind of "failure to launch" into an adulthood, one that I carried within my family as a kind of source of shame, even though there was a profound benefit to that failure:  my marriage, my new family, and career choices that I could only have dreamed about when I was younger.  It's why I don't regret at all the trajectory of my life.  On the other hand, having had my development "sidetracked" the way it was made me feel like I was unique, and not in a particularly good way.

And then, I read this.

I have always been an admirer of Kirsten Powers' work.  I believe that, among political commentators, that she is truly and consistently fair and balanced.  I think that she comes as close as it is possible to being a "centrist" in a world where centrism has been hard to find and therefore harder than ever to define.  Which is why I appreciated her humility and candor in sharing by way of Substack her experience with born-again Christianity, and her difficult separation from it.

For me, it was especially bracing to read her description of her struggle to regain her sense of personal agency after she left the evangelical world.  As I told her in my comment on her post, this was the breaking point for me with that world, twelve years into it.  I finally realized, during what was for me one very bleak December, when I was in danger of becoming unemployed, with no immediate career prospects, very little in the bank, and two very frustrated parents who were wondering when I was going to put life together, what the problem was.

And that was the point when I figured out what the problem was.

Evangelical Christianity, boiled down to its functional essence, has something in common with the political world to which, in the U.S., it is now joined at the hip.  Unlike the Gospel it supposedly preaches, it is not a world in which the greatest virtue is humility and the worst sin is pride.  Indeed, on a brass-tacks basis, it is 180 degrees away from that Gospel.  Evangelical Christianity is about power.  Not in any democratic sense.  Not even in the sense of power for all evangelicals.  It is about power for a few wealthy, well-connected members of the clergy, over their congregants, their congregations, and the Constitution they pretend to defend.

And to get there, they play mind-control games with their followers, by teaching them to doubt their simplest impulses and inclinations, and to see any form of failure in their personal lives as a reflection of some sort of secret "sin" that must be flushed out.  And, of course, that flushing out must be done under the supervision of some supposedly more mature, more "enlightened" person or program, in return for your providing a hefty portion of your disposable income to the "enlightened."

Ultimately, this leads the poor suckers who fall under the spell of the "enlightened" to question all of life's decisions.  Even the most basic ones, like taking a specific job, moving to a certain city, dating a certain person.  And I was absolutely there, with a sense of self-esteem so low I would have to reach a thousand miles down to touch the top of it.

I had, in short, completely lost my sense of self-agency.  And that December, I finally realized it.  What G-d has really given each of us, in the form of a soul, and a body with various abilities, is a kind of ship.  We are, in some sense, limited by the ship's limitations.  But it's otherwise up to us to be the captain of it.

That's what Kirsten Powers had to re-learn, and that is also what I had to re-learn as well.

But here's the larger point:  I stated a moment ago that evangelical Christianity and politics are joined at the hip.  I should have been more specific.  Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, with which it shares an obsession with control, are joined at the hip.  That has been true for decades.  But it has never been more dangerous than now, when political conservatism has shifted from being a philosophy to being a fifth column.

At the same time, conservatives of both the secular and spiritual variety are recognizing that, having won victories with the Greatest Generation and Boomers, they are losing the battle with the generations that follow.  Take, for example, the "He Gets Us" Super Bowl ads that provided the jumping-off point for Ms. Powers' post.  As you can read about here, these ads, which are framed to make Jesus sound like some sort of latter-day hippie (gee, haven't we tried this before, too?), are in fact bought and paid for by some of the most powerful conservatives infecting our politics.

I say "infected," because these people, far from doing G-d's will, work actively to subvert that will in a variety of ways, whether it involved crippling the IRS to ensure it won't look too closely into the finances of megachurches, or preventing those who have suffered from abuse by priests (which probably included at least one member of my family) from coming forward to seek justice.  As the latter point indicates, the problem is by no means limited to Christianity of the evangelical variety.

But the "He Gets Us" campaign exists for a reason:  it is addressing the uprising by young people against the authoritarian theocracy that all of us have allowed to spring up in our midst.  You need look no further than this to see what I'm talking about.*

If we all heed the words of Jinger Duggar, and many others like her, we may all yet find ourselves freed from the power and the glory of evangelical conservatism by the young and the restless who have learned to see through its false promises and its greater lust for a secular kingdom rather than a spiritual one.  Democracy can only survive if each citizen reclaims the helm of his, her, or their personal ship.  Ms. Powers and I have reclaimed ours.  I hope and pray that you reclaim yours.

*Full disclosure:  the Times article to which I have linked here references both Bill Gothard and Brian McLaren.  I went to one of Mr. Gothard's seminars, an experience that contributed mightily to my loss of self-agency.  As for Mr. McLaren, I had the good fortune to meet him later on, an experience that helped me to regain it.

Good Riddance To Larry Hogan

I've waited eight years to write that headline.  Sometimes, it felt like I would never get a chance to do it, even though I knew it would happen.  In an election season where it seemed like that the political tide would flow toward the GQP, I was able to console myself, as a native and nearly lifelong resident of Maryland, with one powerful and incontrovertible fact.

Come January of 2023, Larry Hogan would be out of the Governor's Mansion, and out of Maryland politics.  He would be free to pursue the fantasy shared by him and an incredibly supple corporate press:  using his reputation as a "moderate" Republican to tame the Trump-transformed national party, sweep through the 2024 primary season toward nomination for the presidency, and Make America Safe Again from both the Orange Iguana and the leftist hordes of the "Democrat" Party.

Well, you be the judge of how likely this fantasy is to come true.  I know that polls are increasingly unreliable as the thermometers of political reality, but I read their results at any rate, and I have yet to see a single one concerning the 2024 Republican presidential nomination showing Hogan with anything other than single-digit support.  To be precise, low single-digit support.  To put an even finer point on it, think of the numeral 1.  But not as in "number one choice."

Consider this fact as well:  Hogan's would-be Republican successor in Annapolis, Dan Cox, made absolutely no effort to appear "moderate" next to anyone, except possibly Attila the Hun.  He ran an unabashedly Trumpian campaign, and the voters handed him his political head as a result, preferring the moderate-in-tone, progressive-in-substance Wes Moore.  But why?  Why, if Hogan's brand of so-called moderation was so impressive, was no Republican able to capitalize on it?  Why, by electing Moore, did Maryland effectively return (thankfully) to its prior default position as a state that preferred a slow but steady policy course to the left?

Because, politically speaking, Larry Hogan is a complete fake.  And, when it comes to Larry Hogan, that's the good news.  Because Larry Hogan, deep down inside, is little more than a kinder, gentler version of Trump.

I take no pleasure in making this assessment.  Like an all-too-growing cohort in conservative politics, Hogan is a legacy politician.  His father, with whom he shares his first and last name, was a true moderate back in the days when such creatures actually existed in office.  Of special importance is the fact that he served on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate period, and broke with his party's official line at the time to support the impeachment of Richard Nixon.  The subsequent release of Nixon's Oval Office tape recordings revealed how farsighted, as well as courageous, that break was for our democracy.

Hogan rode his father's reputation into office in 2015, running against an inept Democratic candidate (good luck to him as our new attorney general, by the way) as well as voter frustration with Martin O'Malley's pursuit of national office at the expense of his local obligations.  Then, early in his first term, when he and we learned that he was facing a battle against cancer, he was able to rally Marylanders across party lines to route for his recovery, including me.  However, when Hogan noticed that this had the effect of softening and even reducing political criticism of him generally, he did not do what most public figures do when they disclose a health-care battle:  treat it as a personal matter, and ask for privacy.  Instead, he used it as the center of a full-court-press reshaping of his image, wiping out most if not all discussion of his more controversial moves and transforming his image from that of a politician to that of a heroic survivor.

Hogan's use of his cancer diagnosis to soften his media image, and the media willingness to accept the soft-news bait he was offering them by doing so, has been incredibly useful in disguising the fact that, as "moderate Republicans" go, Hogan is more Republican than moderate.  He managed to stretch the cancer-related good will through two terms, making the prediction in this article a bit off.  But, in a sense, the article also anticipated the outcome of Hogan's re-election as governor, by noting the role that positioning himself as a cancer survivor played in obscuring the substance of his governing.

And this media slight-of-hand was by no means limited to local coverage.  He even managed to parlay his diagnosis into a national reputation, of which this New York Times interview is a sad, pathetic example.  I have a very high regard for Frank Bruni, but this piece just absolutely reeks of what has been described (I think fairly) as "helicopter journalism":  well-known national reporter drops in on a local official for a day and, solely on the strength of that visit, performs a complete public diagnosis of politics in that state.  It's not an exaggeration to say that Hogan's national reputation is almost entirely built on puff pieces like Bruni's.

The worst things about those pieces are not only their contribution to the well-deserved poor reputation of journalism today, but the role they have played in obscuring the hard political facts of Hogan's governance--or, more precisely, his failure to govern and even subvert good governance.  On that subject, the facts speak for themselves, in articles that have not received the same level of attention as the cancer-related coverage.

Let's start with the giant anchor around both the GQP and the nation, the 800-pound gorilla that refuses to go away, even though he can't win a majority of the popular vote:  Donald Trump.  Since then, a significant number of Republicans have walked away from their party, clearly stating that there is no chance of their return until Trump and the lunatic brand of politics he represents goes away.  But Hogan has gone in the opposite direction, refusing, in fact, to refrain from declaring that he would not support Trump if he were once again the GQP nominee.

And why should he?  What really is the substance of Larry Hogan's politics?  The fact is that he's gone out his way to dodge taking positions on a number of issues, and many pieces of popular legislation addressing these issues, even going so far as to allow many of them to become law without his signature.  Frequently, this is what corporate media means when they describe him as a "moderate."  Apparently, if you're a public official in contemporary America, all you have to appear to be a "moderate" is to do is nothing at all.

Unfortunately, that's a trick that not even Hogan has been able to pull off.  He has done things.  Bad things, unfortunately.

When he had the opportunity to bring refugees into the state that would have helped boost its economy, especially in Baltimore, where block after block is filled with empty houses, Hogan said no.

When, early last year, it was first apparent that the Supreme Court would reverse Roe v. Wade, and the Comptroller requested that state funds be released to train abortion providers, Hogan said no.

While hate crimes and opioid deaths rose here and around the country, Hogan failed to keep a promise to treat the latter as an emergency, and ignored the pain created by the former by associating with supporters of the likes of Roy Moore and Brett Kavanaugh.

And, in a state that prides itself on having world-class public education, not only did Hogan make war on the General Assembly's implementation of a plan to make Maryland education second to none, he used funds from dark-money sources to do it.

Of course, it's not like he made it easy for you to find out about any of this, as he found and implemented a way to subvert state record-keeping laws.

Perhaps his greatest act of both hypocrisy is his handling of state transportation needs.  Despite a reputation as "Governor Asphalt," ready to pave Maryland with roads, roads, and still more roads, the fact is that Hogan grossly underfunded state transportation projects, then proposed a monstrous "public-private partnership" that would use park land to create more traffic-clogged lanes in the DC area, and stick taxpayers for the bill if the "partnership" fails to make money off of it.  

This, and many other penny-wise pound-foolish decisions in other areas of state spending, is the cost of his war on taxes and user fees.  If you're going to fight that war, and deliberately starve the needs of the public, you owe it to that public to advertise the price tag.  But that was not Hogan's style.  Never has been, and never will be, for any Republican; far easier, as well as far more deceitfully to pretend that every meal can consist of three courses of dessert.

But then, there was one transportation decision that summed up Hogan's deceit, as well as the subtextual racism of his party and his administration:  his cancellation of what he characterized as a "wasteful boondoggle," the Red Line potentially connecting eastern and western Baltimore County (in which I live) with the existing Metro and light-rail lines in Baltimore City.  Had this been allowed to become a reality, it could have led to the beginning of a true metropolitan rail system in the Baltimore area, and one that might have been able to connect with the Washington Metro system and create a regional system on the scale of New York and Chicago.  And, were that to happen, the economic benefits for the state would have truly been explosive.  You need look no further than the D.C. metropolitan area to see the dynamic effect that the Metro has had there.

A small personal digression is in order.

I worked for the State of Maryland for twelve years, the last eight of which were spent working in procurement.  During that time, I saw a transition in state government from a Democratic governor, Parris Glendening, to a Republican successor, Robert Ehrlich.  I expected, as did many of my colleagues, that fiscal belt-tightening would be the order of the day.  But one exception to that made by Governor Ehrlich had to do with federal money.  He believed the state had an obligation to capture every federal dollar that might be available to it.  This was especially important with regard to child welfare, the area in which I worked.  Despite the fact that the Governor and I were members of different parties, I appreciated the fact that he took the impact of federal spending on the state seriously.

Would that Hogan had followed his example, not only regarding the Red Line but other public priorities as well.  But Hogan's fiscal strategy was not entirely designed to address fiscal purposes.  In truth, it was part of a larger strategy was part of a larger strategy to keep Baltimore segregated, and poor.  In other words, to fulfill the goals of his political base in Western Maryland, the people who believe that public money should only be spent according to the wishes of the people who provide it.  In practice, that means more for white people, and less for people of color.  And you may be sure that, for Western Marylanders and Hogan, their political patron, that was the real point.

This is why Hogan not only cancelled the Red Line, but spent eight years making war on Baltimore's economic development and education funding.  He did his best to hide this, and the cancer diagnosis helped him do that.  But, every so often, something would seep out into public attention.  Here is one example:  some of Hogan's Anne Arundel County supporters wanted to close light-rail stops in their county, for specious reasons.

But then, all you really have to do is take the word of the man himself.

I will give him this much credit.  Larry Hogan did a brilliant job for two terms as the Governor of Western Maryland.  But he did it at the expense of the short-term and long-term needs of the rest of the state.  And he has left behind a residue of racial animus that reminds those of us with a long memory for Maryland politics, and not in a good way, of this man.

Do you get it now?

This is the man who wants to now run off to Iowa, and other presidential primary states, along with his corporate media press clippings, and sell himself as some kind of middle-of-the-road alternative to Donald Trump, as well as Ron DeSantis.

Larry Hogan is not an alternative to them.  He may be slightly softer in style, but in substance he is a carbon copy of Trump.

And I think that voters on the ground know it.  Which goes a long way toward explaining the 1%.  Why buy a steak with no sizzle, when you can buy one that ignites itself to become as well-done as the customers want?

That's Trump.  And that's what DeSantis wants to be, although, when it comes to presence, he's still quite a ways behind Trump, no matter how many times he says "woke."

But that's the national battle, to be fought nationally over the next two years.  For now, I am grateful that the local political scene has reverted back to sanity, to inclusion, to public service over self-service.  With our first governor and lieutenant governor of color, and a state legislature solidly in Democratic hands, the future of the Free State looks bright.  Maryland can be Maryland again.  Maybe, just maybe, with a little bit of luck and hard work, America can be America again.  Meanwhile, Marylanders can look forward to projects like this, which one day could become a major hub of a truly regional rail system.

Good riddance to Larry Hogan.  G-d grant that, soon, we may say good riddance to Trump, and to MAGA politics.

Two Points Regarding Classified Documents

A planet on fire, an economy riddled with debt run up by the millionaires that control it, the vast majority of people struggling daily to make ends meet, authoritarianism on the rise, and what is the corporate press (left and right) wringing its digital hands about?

Right.  Who is the greater sinner when it comes to unauthorized possession of classified documents--Trump or Biden?

I'm going to start here with the larger point that everyone seems to be missing about this:  how is it apparently so easy to obtain and hold onto classified documents long after the apparent need to possess them is finished?  On the strength of both the Trump and Biden stories, it appears to be far easier than any of us might have previously thought.  Which, in turn, ought to raise another question:  how many more people, in and no longer in government service, are in possession of such documents?  For what purpose?  And is the National Archives aware of any such documents?  Does it not have some sort of tracking system in place to ensure who has what, and what needs to come back to the Archives when the professed need for the documents has ended?

This, I think, is the larger scandal that's evidenced here.  At some point, there has to be a congressional investigation of what happened, not only with regard to the Trump and Biden cases, but also to identify any other cases that might exist.  At a guess, it's probably safe to assume that there are many more cases out there than anyone might have imagined.  And, given the potential damage to American interests that might result from those cases, the sooner a bipartisan commission gets to the bottom of what's going on, the better.  Of course, good luck with that in the House, given its current <ahem> configuration.  Perhaps something can happen on the Senate side; if so, it should with all deliberate speed.

My second point:  conceding that both Biden and Trump are on the wrong side of the law here, has the press coverage of this story descended into false equivalency territory?

I'm almost tempted to ask:  what do you think (and, as always, you're more than welcome to leave comments).

Of course they have, and that is to be expected, because the corporate press lives to protect its profits rather than the public interest that the First Amendment is meant to help them protect.  The differences between the way Trump and Biden have responded to their respective situations could not, in any case, be more different.  Biden has extended the maximum amount of cooperation to the Justice Department.  He has not pretended that the documents are his property, nor have any of his lawyers, staff members, or allies pretended that he has a right to them.  There has been no need for a warrant, or an FBI raid.  And, finally, the difference in the respective numbers of documents in each case differs, as of this point, by a factor of 30.  A factor that weighs against Trump.

It's not surprising that Biden's political enemies have weighed in against him on this.  It's marginally more surprising that some of his allies have gone so far as to suggest that he should step aside in 2024 as a result of it.

For whom?

Here's an example.  Read it carefully.  One thing you should notice:  the absence of an alternative.

That's not accidental.  The fact is that there is no viable political alternative.  None.  Zero.  No one that has the same level of political recognition and support that Biden has.  Even with this anchor tied around his neck.  And his opponents on the left know that.  All they have is a handful of future possibilities and a ton of wishful thinking.

My advice to my friends on the left:  reframe the issue, along the lines of the points I've made here.  Advocate for a bipartisan Senate committee for reforming not just the Archives, but the entire classification process, which is long overdue in any case.  That's how you take charge of the narrative.  And I would bet real money that, if such a committed is convened and launches an investigation, more sinners on both sides of the aisle will be identified.

Which means that the issue will lose its partisan punch, And Trump's far greater sins on this issue will fold back into the larger image of him as the most corrupt President in the history of the Republic.  I can assure you that the process of this happening will be aided by the larger swirl of scandal surrounding him.  That, and the indictments that I believe will finally be announced this year.

Stop letting the media wring your hands, folks, and don't lose sight of the real enemy.  It isn't Biden, who is far from perfect.  But you don't even want to begin to think about the potential reality of what GQP authoritarian might replace him.

McCarthy's Mess, Or How To Get Started On The Wrong Foot

Happy New Year to you and everyone!

And where to begin?  Well, the most logical place to begin is with the convening of the new House of Representatives.  After all, if it's possible for most of us to agree on anything when it comes to politics, it's that none of us have ever witnessed the opening of a new Congress that looked like the spectacle that has unfolded over the past two weeks.  And we should be thankful for that fact.  When I use the word "spectacle," it's because I try to spare my readers the experience of my using more colorful language.

I witnessed most of the first week, or as much as I could stand of it, because I knew going in that the events that unfolded were going to do even more damage to our politics and governance than we've already witnessed in the Trump era (a label I use reluctantly, since I'm acquainted with Trump's love of plastering his name on everything he touches).  I found myself reacting to what I saw with a wider range of emotions than I expected.  

On the one hand, not everything I witnessed upset me.  Some of it even made me proud.  On the other hand, that which I fully expected to be revolting revolted me even more than I expected.  Just when you think contemporary Republicans have reached the sub-cellar for bad behavior, they suddenly seem to find another level underneath it.  Maybe Trump's background in real estate helps them with that.  Maybe, more likely, it simply encourages the cynicism, ambition, and deceit that was always there.

At any rate, the following are my random thoughts and reactions to what unfolded in the People's House.

The professionalism of the congressional staff.

I don't think enough can be said about this.  Technically, the new House does not exist until a Speaker is elected, which, in this case, took the better part of a week.  As a result, for that span of time, the Clerk of the House, Cheryl Johnson, and her staff were in charge of the proceedings.  They are part of that permanent army of government employees that we routinely, and often unthinkingly, refer to with disdain as "bureaucrats."  And yet, without that army, the routine functioning of the government, the functioning that we take for granted, the functioning that is based as much on loyalty to our country and dedication to serving its interests, as well as a deep well of institutional experience and professional training, simply would not take place.

I might as well put my personal cards on the table here:  I have spent fifteen years of my life as a bureaucrat, in federal and state agencies.  During that time, I had the privilege of working with people from both parties, and am happy to assure you that the same level of loyalty, dedication, experience and training that you saw from the Clerk and the members of her staff is typical of most, if not all, of the people working in those agencies--both the career civil servants, and the political appointees.  It is, however, the former that particularly carry the burden of day-to-day business.  I am proud to be one of them, and I am proud of my bureaucratic brothers and sisters for the work they did in holding the House proceedings together for the week without a Speaker.  

Don't take it from me. If there was one thing on which everyone was agreed, it was, based on several of the statements from the House floor, it was on the quality of the work done by the Clerk and her staff.  But I want everyone, and I mean everyone, to think about that very carefully, the next time they hear anyone use "bureaucrats" as a scapegoat for what's wrong in Washington, and elsewhere.

The unity and boldness of Democrats

The Democratic caucus, now in the House minority, made it clear that that the three D's the media love to place on their party--depressed, divided, and in disarray--do not define their willingness to do the people's business, or their appreciation of the challenges that exist for them in doing so.

In talking about that, let's start with this.

The entire caucus assembled on the steps of the Capitol, to commemorate the second anniversary of an attempt by a  right-wing thugocracy to destroy the honest counting of presidential electoral votes and the legislative process more generally.  They were their to commemorate the failure of that effort, and the sacrifices made by law enforcement officials to ensure that failure.

And they were joined by a single Republican.  Single, as in one of of the 222-member majority.  None of them could be bothered to show up and back the blue with their colleagues.

That may have been the most subtle breach of constitutional behavior by the new majority.  But, as other events demonstrated, it was far from the only one.

More about that presently.  Back, for now, to Democratic unity.

Perhaps it's because the size of the Republican majority is so small, as well as unstable.  Perhaps it's because even the older, less diverse members of the Democratic caucus have seen the future in the increasing number of younger, more diverse members, and understand that it's a future that works (apologies, Lincoln Steffens).  Perhaps, more than anything else, it's because every one of those members, young or old, understands the exact nature and power of the threat from across the aisle.

Nevertheless, over the course of all fifteen ballots in the speakership vote, they unanimously stood behind their new leader Hakeem Jeffries, resisting the pleas of corporate media to "reach across the aisle" and vote for a man who couldn't even muster a strong showing from within his own party.  They openly mocked, in ways subtle and not-so subtle, the disarray and associated lunacy that they and the people they represent were being subjected to.  And, when Jeffries took the podium after the voting for the formal transfer of power from one party to another, they cheered him with one voice as he used the alphabet to mock the new regime.

I appreciate the fact that Democrats stood together and publicly treated the nonsense as nonsense.  Which is why I think not having C-SPAN in the House is a bad idea.  After all, the current state of disrepair in the House began back in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich used C-SPAN to turn voters away from the long-standing Democratic majority.  Turnabout may not be pretty, but it can and should certainly be fair play.

The violence on the floor

In life, as someone once said, there are leaders and followers.  And in politics, there are people who have the label of a leader and the behavior of a follower.  And, in our current crisis, Kevin McCarthy is Exhibit A for the latter proposition.

Despite being repeated touted in the legacy corporate press as a "moderate," McCarthy is a man without any political compass, or even a moral one.  No greater illustration of this exists than his backtracking from his fiery denunciation of Trump and the Capitol attack Trump instigated to his trip to Mar-A-Lago weeks latter to get down on his knees to the Orange Iguana and beg for forgiveness.  This show of sniveling was, as the night would show, the shape of things to come.  In more ways than one.

The chaos and extremism of the January 6 attack had its analog in the first week of the new Congress, in both the multiple ballots for the speakership and the outrageous demands of a fraction of the GQP caucus for the sake of awarding it to McCarthy.  As is the case after every election, the new majority had nearly two months to get its act together, to hash out their differences and show on Day One that they were ready to serve the interests of the nation.  In our lifetimes, this sort of orderly transition is so orderly it barely rates five minutes on the evening news.  

In this case, it seems that those two months could not have been devoted to anything except the level of disorder and disruption to which the American people were treated to for a week on their screens.  And all for the sake of appeasing people who are, basically, unappeasable.  They have absolutely no goals other than being in charge.  And that much they plainly accomplished.  But, in the process, they accomplished something else:  demonstrating that the insurrection has moved from outside of the Capitol building to inside the House chamber.

And, however much the House Democrats may have enjoyed watching the party-in-disarray narrative flip to characterizing their opponents, they can't be content with laughing at what is on one level laughable.  The chaos inside of the House is likely to lead, perhaps is already beginning to lead, to violence on a par with the attack two years years ago.  The near-fist-fight toward the end of the balloting could be a small taste of what is to come.

And not only on the floors of Congress. but here.  And abroad.  Perhaps nearly everywhere.

You don't want to be in a position of having to oppose force with force?  Fine.  The sooner one draws a line, the less likely it becomes that one has to openly defend it.  We are, frankly, in that position because Democrats in the past haven't heeded that lesson.  For all of our sakes, they'd better start heeding it now.  That show of unity can't run for a day or a week.  It has to be nonstop from here on out.

The transparent weakness of McCarthy 

From the partisan standpoint of the GQP, the spectacle of McCarthy sacrificing every perogative he needs to keep the House in order to the claque of fanatics who want to watch everthing burn, and even begging on camera for the votes he needed to stick his nose across the finish line, could not possibly have been worse.  Gutting the House ethics office, even as the fanatics scheme to impeach the entire Biden administration.  Given them a chance to systemically defund entire federal offices should anyone in them make a peep against the interests of the fanatics' donors.  Enabling them to put McCarthy's job in jeopardy by a single vote if he doesn't say "How high?" every them one of them says "Jump!"

McCarthy has given away so much of the power of the office he just barely obtained that it might be a compliment to even call him a follower.  He is certainly no one's idea of a leader.  He may very well be little more at this point than a hood ornament on the authoritarian jalopy of his caucus.

The transparently bad GQP spin on the process

Spin, spin, spin.  Yes, both parties do it, and I'm guilty of it from time to time myself.  But the Republicans do it with more shamelessness and less fidelity to the facts than do Democrats.  That's primarily because Republicans, like the majority of Americans, evaluate everything, even matters of significant substance, by way of style points.  That, sadly, is evidence of a society that is in decay because of the distance between its founding principles and its present state.

And without question, the House GQP caucus was doing its best (or worst) to spin-doctor the nightmare unfolding before the viewing public.  Oh, its members said, this is just the sort of deliberation every party needs to go through when it re-takes power.  Once this sorts itself out, they assured us, we'll be astonished by how ready they are to lead the nation, by way of investigating every Biden they can get their hands on.

I'll say this much for them:  they are astonishing, although not in the way they might want us to think that they are.  But I repeat:  they had nearly TWO MONTHS to sort everything out and spare us the week-long debacle.  I find myself remembering the public clichés of previous Republican conquests.  "Hit the ground running."  "Ready on Day One."  This was more like hitting the ground stumbling, and needing all the luck in the world to be ready by Labor Day.

Perhaps the best way to sum up both the cravenness of McCarthy's grasping climb to power and the Orwellian confidence the GQP has in its ability to memory-hole anything is this. I tend to doubt that this can or will actually happen. Expungement is a legal procedure by which an individual convicted of a crime can have all records related to that conviction purged. How do you do that with a historic event that has been recorded all over the world? For that matter, how do you convince the other house of Congress to purge its records of the trials it conducted, neither of which resulted in a conviction?

And one more thing, relating to my earlier observation about C-SPAN. Whether or not you think that open monitoring of Congress is or is not a good idea, you're about to lose the opportunity to gain more evidence for making a decision on that point. That's because Kevin and company are, at least for now, making that choice for you.

The bad news is that the only thing this House will ever be ready for is chaos. The even worse news is that it is likely to drag all of us into that chaos.

Leaving one last point to make here:

The education for the rest of us:  is it even possible to reach across the aisle if all you’re going to get is a fist fight?

Very unlikely. There are only going to be two things that will take their focus off of shooting themselves and the rest of us in the foot.

The first is going to be the need to protect themselves. Gutting the House ethics office is only the first step. After that, they're going to need to spend time on putting out the fires that will erupt in the press whenever one or more members stumble and have their corruption exposed for all to see. Freshman GQP Congressman George Santos (or whatever his name is) remains the most immediate example for the moment. But be assured: there will be others.

Speaking of Santos, note that his Republican defenders are describing what he has done as having "embellished" his resume. Wrong. I speak as someone who has, in a former life, been paid to write resumes professionally. Using a word like "manage" to describe making multiple coffee deliveries is embellishment. Saying you graduated from a college you never attended is a bald-face, unabashed lie. And Santos' resume is chock-full of them. If Gym Jordan is right in saying that every Republican does this, that's all you need to know to never vote for a Republican again.

Later, they will branch out from protecting themselves to protecting their donors, by making sure, for example, that those donors never have to worry about committing tax fraud at the expense of the rest of us.

Finally, they will use the need to raise the debt ceiling as an excuse to blow up the economy and attempt to seek even greater, and far more unconstitutional, power in the ensuing catastrophe.  This is Donald Trump 101:  create a disaster, point fingers at everyone but yourself, and manipulate the circumstances for your benefit.  Anyone who thinks we're living in some kind of wonderful post-Trump age is kidding themselves.  Donald Trump hasn't gone away.  If anything, he's more of a Speaker of the House than McCarthy is.

Which is why Biden and Senate Democrats are wise to refuse McCarthy's invitation to "discuss" the threat that he and his caucus are deliberately manufacturing.  One does not negotiate with someone pointing a gun at you.  You make it clear that they will either have to pull the trigger, deal with the possibility that you may be able to protect yourself, and wait until they understand that you've called their bluff.

This is how you deal with bullies.  I speak from experience.  I hope that the Democrats retain and practice this wisdom.  The embarrassing opening of the new House of Representatives shows that our future depends on it.

A Few, Parting 2022 Thoughts

In past years, when I've come to this point on the calendar, I've usually aimed for big-picture statements about where the U.S. is, where I think it's going, and where I hope to see it go.  Sometimes, I've aimed to be a little more personal, whether it's discussing my wife's immigration law practice, or the medical issues faced by one of my grandchildren.  But for the most part, I've wanted to write about us.  Not me.

But this year's a little different, as it may have an impact on this blog.

Not on its existence.  But on its schedule.  And perhaps in other ways as well.

Over the past several years, I've launched a production company dedicated to producing plays (and perhaps, at some point, films) written by members of historically marginalized communities:  women, Blacks, peoples of color, and LGBQT authors.  I've been working with one playwright over the past few years on a play she wrote and submitted to the Baltimore Playwrights Festival.  I'm a reader for the Festival, which is how I found her play.  I was very deeply impressed by it, and think that it deserves an audience.  With that in mind, I have optioned it, worked with her on re-writes, found a director, and scheduled a reading of it at Theatre West in Los Angeles for next month.  Needless to say, I'm very excited about doing this, even though I obviously can't say how far this venture will go.  That will ultimately be up to audiences to decide.  But I'm very hopeful that this one will be received, and received well.

As for the blog?

Well, depending on how things go, you may find me talking a lot more about my producing efforts, which will cut into my political commentary.  Depending on how things go, I may end up setting up a second blog, so that I can keep the focus here on politics and political issues, while having a separate space for talking about producing.  If that happens, I'll include a link in a post here, so that you can check it out.

But TRH, in any case, is not going away.

I'll still be here.  I'll be with all of you, riding the same crazy ride we're all taking together, especially with a new GQP House that can't even choose who's going to lead it.  (Spoiler alert:  I have a sneaking suspicion Kevin's not going to make it.)

I'll be saying whatever I have to say, to help you make sense of all of it.  And, frankly, to help myself doing the same thing.  To be honest, one of the things that blogging here has done it to help me put the pieces together.  It's made me read more.  It's made me think more.  And it's been an outlet for my passion and anger about what's going on in this country, when I've really needed one.

But, more than anything, I appreciate those of you who read it.  I hope that it's been of at least some value to you.  I wish all of you, and those in your lives, the happiest possible New Year, and I look forward to continuing this journey the same way we've been taking it so far.

Together.

What NFL Stadiums Can Teach Us About The Age Of The Grifter

Professional sports, at their best and their worst, reflect the culture of the people who follow them.  And yet sometimes, when I read stories about professional sports, I still find myself surprised to find details that can teach us something about where we are.  As well as where we need to go.

That happened to me a few weeks ago, when I read this article with a counter-intuitive lead:  after years of new football stadiums being built with ever-increasing capacities, they are now being planned with fewer seats in the stands.  But, in at least one case, the same capacity in the overall structure.

How does this work?  Very simple.

Fewer "nosebleed seats."  More luxury boxes.  And giant sports bar-style lounges, with paid admissions, and giant videos screens that show NFL action from all around the country, with every play-by-play analysis program available, as well as the game in progress elsewhere in the building.  Sort of a Doctor Doom-style man cave.

Hmm, you might say.  Not all that impressive.  You miss the thrill of feeling connected to the action on the field, to being a real part of the live event, to being part of the proverbial "12th man" on the field.  Instead, you get to be part of a glorified version of your club basement.  Plus, you're being charged for the privilege of doing so.  Quite a bit, in fact.

But still not nearly as much as the people in the stands and luxury boxes.  They are being charged a fortune.  More than the original franchise prices of the teams on the field.  And, since the season tickets and boxes are largely being purchased or leased for "business purposes," they're tax deductible by the purchasers and lessees.  You know what the real definition of "tax deductible" is?  It's IRS-speak for the suckers get to pay for it twice.

And by "suckers," just to be clear, I mean folks like you and me.  Oh well, maybe not me.  I won't go to the games, at least not most of them.  I'll only be nicked by the "business purposes" folks.  But that's plenty bad enough, when you consider we're all being nicked badly enough by these people, whose relative life of luxury is being subsidized by the folks choosing between paying the rent and dining on cat food.

Of course, television has long been the primary revenue source keeping the NFL in business.  But that audience numbers in the millions, so that's not so surprising.  Actual seats in the stands, on the other hand, only number in the thousands.  And when there are even fewer of those seats than there were before, as is the case with any scarce commodity, you can jack up the price to exospheric levels, and still get away with charging a fortune to sit in them.  More money, in fact, than you could ever get from the folks who can only afford a seat in front of a TV screen.

I'm talking, of course, about millionaires.  And, even more amazingly, billionaires.  We have literally millions of the former, and hundreds of the latter.  Yet together, they number less than 9% of this country's total population.  Putting it in practical terms--that is to say, in political terms--their dollars exponentially outnumber our votes.  The money they have for entertainment purposes, such as watching professional sports, outnumber our votes.

And therein lies the central problem with our politics.

The central problem, contrary to the excessive media coverage of him, is not Donald Trump, as revolting and destructive as he is.  As others have said, Trump is not the problem.  Trump is a glaring symptom of a much bigger problem than the Trump circus of corruption and criminality.

We live in an age in which four decades of fiscal and monetary con-artistry has conspired to send so much wealth to the already wealthy that they can quite literally buy out the rest of the country.  Even sports, one aspect of our national culture which supposedly exists to bring us all together, now exists to divide us into those who get to savor participating in the actual event, and those who get to "savor" mass-produced, flash-frozen-and-then-thawed buffalo wings.

And when the folks at the top of the financial pyramid use their goldmine to give the rest of us increasingly desperate folks the shaft, guess who really thrives in an age divided between the comfortable and the comfortless?

Con artists.  Because, when work as a path to wealth becomes meaningless, people will become desperate enough to believe anyone.  Even those who make promises they have no intention of keeping.

And so, contrary to what Trump's canyon-sized ego might want to believe, we do not live in the age of The Donald.  We live in the age of the Grifter.  And this year has exposed it more than ever before.

The age of the Grifter is possible only because we live in the age of billionaires, people with so much money that they can buy anything, even the government and a new citizenship to avoid their obligations to anyone but themselves.  Even a pandemic can't stop their explosive growth; if anything, it may have enabled it.  And why not?  The COVID-19 nightmare created levels of desperation in this country that most of us have never seen, or even imagined seeing.  Put yourself in the plutocrat's position.  You've got hundreds of millions of desperate people, and something they need.  What would you do?  (More about that later.)

As a consequence, the sort of lifestyle, the salaries and benefits Americans took for granted in the last century can no longer be taken for granted.  In fact, for some of the nation's hardest working employees, despite being routinely exposed to danger and disease, are forced to beg for the most basic rights in order to cope.  And ultimately be denied those rights.

That's bad enough.  But it gets even worse.  

Most of the billionaires aren't the inventive class of the past.  They are the investing class of the present, with an appetite for wall-to-wall public worship and the means to borrow money (not always honestly) in order to build the illusion of invulnerability.  They buy businesses that are popular, built by those who have real talent, and pretend to be the source of all greatness.  They are not people who were born on first base and think they hit a triple.  They are people who have stolen home plate while pretending they have invented baseball.  And, all too often, the incompetence that comes from a lack of experience merges with the malevolence that comes from being unchallenged, and allows a billionaire with superhuman economic power to buy a popular business and, through incompetence and malevolence, drive it into the ground.

I hope you recognize Elon Musk in all of this.

Especially since Musk has already shown that, in the age of the Grifter, the Grifters have acquired enough economic power and personal will to purposefully silence the voices opposed to them, even the ones who add value to the business owned by the Grifter while he grifts it into nothingness.  Indeed, many of them don't need to be deliberately silenced; if their position in society is marginal enough, even the threat of being silenced is enough to coerce the same effect.

The trend of silencing voices in opposition to the ruling class is really nothing new.  It's been going on since the first presidential term of Ronald Reagan, the marginal B-movie actor who made his real fortune as a spokesperson for General Electric, a company that began with Thomas Edison and ended up splitting itself into pieces to survive.  It survived him into the 1988 presidential campaign, when the focus of the DC press was not on the integrity of Republican campaigning, but on how well they were working.  Thus began the era of horse race coverage of politics, which has now become the era of horse race coverage of everything.  Independent news sources have been replaced by corporate ones, who make more money off of "trends" than anything else.  And who now have the power to manufacture their own "trends."

This is how and why almost everyone feels so disconnected, why so few people seem to know what's going on.  They don't.  And they are not being helped by a media that is increasingly disconnected from reality.

And it therefore should not surprise anyone that, for the billionaires and millionaires, this level of disconnect creates and fosters the illusion of moral superiority.  This, in turn, leads to the absence of any kind of feedback loop.  And that, in turn, leaves the billionaires more and more isolated from the people who ultimately create the wealth through labor, investing, or spending.  In a word, us.  The result is what some of the wealthy's defenders in the chattering classes refer to "bossism," but what should more honestly be described by its original name.  Fascism.  That is, the merger of government and corporate power.  It happened under Mussolini.  It happened under Hitler.  And yes, it can and will happen here.  It nearly happened here in the 1930s.  And there are signs around us that it could easily happen again.  Let's face it:  it almost happened on January 6, 2021.

You know how little the billionaire class cares about you?  They're willing to bet your life that they can use your safety to maximize their bottom line.  Literally.  Take a look at this.  And ask yourself the question:  in an emergency, would you want to be on a plane that had only one pilot?  Would you actually pay to be on a plane that had only one pilot?  And, perhaps key to what I've been discussing here, would you trust a profit-hungry airline to make that decision for you while keeping your safety and that of your fellow passengers uppermost in their thinking?  Particularly after the recent Southwestern fiasco?  I would like to think that no one would answer those questions with a "yes."

It's stories like this one, and, for that matter, the recent cryptocurrency collapse, that expose the fallacy of the libertarian fantasy of a world with no government, which has effectively deluded people into thinking we can give everyone unlimited personal freedom, including the freedom to not only help billionaires build fascism, but even invest in a form of "money" absolutely unconnected to any real value.  Money in any form, whether backed by the full faith and credit of a government, means nothing without a connection to real value.  The value can be in intangibles, such as intellectual property rights and future interests in real estate.  But it must be connected to something that exists.  Cryptocurrencies, to me, have always been a form of digital riverboat gambling.  That's why I've never touched them, and never will.

Libertarianism is every bit as toxic as racism.  Both distort the use and acquisition of power for the benefit of a privileged few, but always in the name of "the people."  This is why we live in an era in which Republicans, having built their political power over four decades with a toxic brew of libertarianism and racism, have as much political clout as they have, a clout that is utterly disproportionate to the results that power has achieved.  A nation crippled with debt and disease, and a people increasingly disenfranchised from the means by which to reverse and recover their fortunes.

It also explains the so-called inflation of the present period, which is in fact price-gouging.  Prices don't need to be tamed by the Fed, whose raising of interest rates may in fact help to trigger not a recession, but a depression, something that may finish everyone off, even the wealthy for whose primary benefit the rates are being raised.  Yes, this is what's being done by the party that denounces "big government."  Small government is exactly what they don't want.  Their dirty little secret is that they use rhetoric opposing "big government" to create exactly that--a big government that serves the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

They have done all of this while operating under the label of "conservatism," a philosophy that, in its classic form counsels heeding the lessons of history and, in the process, being mindful of the limitations that those lessons illustrate.  But so powerful and brazen have they become that they are no longer pretending to be "conservative."  They are openly declaring their true identities as reactionaries, painters of a mythical past that never existed, but which still serves for them as the only justification for their outrageous demands for power.

When the only justification for power is a lie, the justification cannot stand forever because the lie cannot stand forever.  Truth is truth, no matter how much the Trumps of the world pretend that it's Silly Putty.  At some point, it always finds away out of the web of lies woven around it.

When, if ever, will people finally wake up to this?

Perhaps they already are.

Along with the Supreme Court's execrable Dobbs decision, and the rise of a new, more diverse generation of young voters Dobbs decision, it may very well have influenced the better-than-expected (for Democrats) outcome in the recent midterm elections.  The lack of success by GQP election deniers on Trump's behalf would certainly seem to suggest as much. 

Perhaps an even stronger indication of people waking up involves an issue that, in the post-Reagan era of politics, has been something of a third rail for progressives generally:  taxes.

As the clock winds down on two successful years of Democratic control of Washington, the House of Representatives is wrapping up its work not only on its investigation of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, but also on its investigation of Trump's tax returns.  You remember Trump's tax returns.  They were the things people have been demanding since 2016, and that he has lied time and again about his willingness to release them, and the circumstances under which he would do so.  Now he doesn't need to do so, thanks to the persistence of the House Ways and Means Committee in pursuing the release by the IRS of Trump's tax returns.

This is not good news for Republicans who tried to scare people on behalf of Trump by pushing the tax button and complaining about how the release of Trump's tax returns might lead to such "terrible" scenarios as the release of the tax returns for Supreme Court justices.  Given the current makeup and output of the Court, all I could do when I heard that was to mentally respond "Yeah ... how about that?"

I'm deadly serious about that.  I think everyone running for public office, federal, state, and local, should be required to put out six years of tax returns, enough to bring their tax matters within the scrutiny of the Internal Revenue Service under its statute of limitations.  Maybe it would be a check on all of the principle-less con artists who think they can imitate Trump and con their way up the ladder of power.  In the case of the Supreme Court, perhaps that's how we can get back to checking it with what has been historically a check on it:  the court of public opinion.

And, if social media feedback counts for anything, it would appear that a significant number of people agree with me.  I can't be certain, but I would like to think that the real issue with taxes in the U.S. is not tax rates, but whether or not everyone is pulling their weight.  I hope and pray that's the case.  And Trump is all but the poster child for the willingness and resourcefulness of the rich in making sure that everyone else pulls their weight.

We know this now, because we actually have the returns.  And they show that Trump is not only a financial failure, but that he has lied in a desperate attempt to avoid being an even bigger financial failure.  In the process, my hope is that we all learn what a terrible price has been paid to satisfy the political need of the Republicans to make people worship the power of the rich, as well as the popular need to fantasize about how wonderful it would be to be rich.

And to satisfy both needs, we have gone out of our way to let Republicans cripple the IRS, which (like it or not) collects the tax revenue needed to pay the price tax for the civilization we take for granted.  The effect is that the rest of us pay more so that those with the most get to pay less.  You want evidence that the IRS hasn't been allowed to do their job?  Presidental tax returns are supposed to be routinely audited by it.  Guess which president's returns weren't audited?  I'm going to assume you got it right, but here you go anyway.

What must we do?

I've been talking about the need for a more progressive tax system from the time I started this blog nearly 14 years ago.  Not just because we need to honestly pay our bills for the things we both want and need, instead of taking the plutocrat path of financing it through debt and sticking it to everyone else.  But to avoid giving the plutocrats the power to stick it to everyone else.  To force them to put some skin into the game they play with our country and its future.  To remind them that we are all part of the same nation, and that we each have an obligation to its continued existence proportionate to what it has given us and what we are able to contribute.  

And one more thing:  to remind all of us that capitalism is a system that works best when you are forced to use your own money to build the dreams you want to build.  It forces you to think practically, and to work with others in a manner that treats them with respect and enables them to contribute their own ideas as well, and build their own dreams.  That is the difference between democratic capitalism and crony capitalism.  Democratic capitalism is real capitalism:  putting one's money to work.  Not someone else's.  Your own.  We are, in fact, where we are because of crony capitalism.  And, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the problem with crony capitalism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people's money.

We have gone a very long way down a very bad road.  Is it too late to turn back?

I don't think so.

If I take anything away from the midterms, it's the possibility that the tide may be turning in a way that not even all of the election-related gimmickry of the GQP may be able to stop it.  But that only remains true if all of us, myself included, remain involved.  To whatever degree you can be.  In whatever way you can be.  I know that a lot of you have issues with the corporatism of the Democratic Party in the post-Clinton age.  I do too.  But pay the MAGA hats the compliment of doing what they've done:  change the messaging of the party by burrowing into it.  Get involved in your local branch of it.  Organize your friends.  Blog.  Contribute whatever time, money, and energy you have to contribute.

And, above all, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, VOTE!

It's the only way things are ever going to get any better, without resorting to a full-scale civil war.

And maybe, one day, among other things, we'll all be able to sit together in stadiums again, and cheer for the same team.