The Daily Parker

So much to read, so much eye strain from the fluorescent lights:

• The federal budget deficit will hit $1 trillion in 2020, due mainly to the Republican tax cuts and spending increases. Note that Republicans have raised holy hell for smaller deficits during Democratic administrations.
• The 10th Circuit ruled this week that electors can vote for anyone they choose, which could have subtle effects in any presidential election.
• Drew Margary warns that President Trump "is not a cosmic 404 error." Brookings Institution senior fellow Thomas Wright thinks "Trump has defected." And Matt Ford bemoans "Trump's tax on the American psyche."
• The Prime Minister of Denmark finally said out loud what a lot of people have thought about the president's foreign policies.
• Chicago Gourmet has announced its lineup for this year's festival, to be held September 24th through 29th.

And finally, this year's Punderdome competition took on food; the audience ate it up.

Author Matt Grossmann argues that the Republican Party hasn't gotten their agenda through the states because most people just don't like their agenda:

Where Republicans gained policy victories, the consequences on the ground were surprisingly limited. Abortion and gun laws changed in every state, but not enough for Republican control to produce changes in state abortion numbers or crime rates. Republicans opposed raising income taxes on the rich, but not enough to exacerbate inequality or accelerate economic growth in their states. They promoted traditional families, but not enough to reduce divorces or increase births.

Republicans did not fail for lack of an ideological agenda. Their state legislative caucuses moved steadily rightward, replacing moderates with far-right Republicans. They nationalized state policymaking, often joining forces in state efforts to counter federal initiatives. They developed cookie-cutter legislation by organizing their allied interest groups and legislators.

But they faced the same problem of conservative parties worldwide: Translating a philosophy of small government and traditionalism into major cuts to public services is quite unpopular. The public sides with protesting teachers once schools are on the chopping block. Expanding health care draws far more support than cutting programs. Republican governors would rather announce new prekindergarten efforts than shutter nursing homes. Republican legislators reconsider their most ambitious tax promises once the consequences are clear. Unlike at the federal level, politicians in the states have to avoid deficits — meaning the service consequences of tax cuts are clear to voters. Since Republicans came to power mostly in the states that already had the smallest public sectors, there was less room to cut.

Does this mean Republicans will stop trying to impose idealistic right-wing policies? Don't be silly; ideologues never listen to reason. But it does mean that maybe our policies can win elections, now that people have seen theirs.

...I might have time to read all of these:

• President Trump's new rule, announced by acting USCIS chief Ken Cuccinelli, could radically change who gets to become an American.
• This week is the 10th anniversary of Kanye West's unpardonable dick move against Taylor Swift.
• The UK banned a Philadelphia cream cheese advert because it portrayed a gender stereotype.
• David Dudley argues that the bad mayor in Stephen Spielberg's 1975 movie Jaws explains "all I really needed to know about cities."
• Blogger Charles Phipps provides 50 bits of evidence that we're now living in a Cyberpunk future.
• Ross Douthat argues that sometimes—albeit rarely—you need to take conspiracy theories seriously.
• Peter Brannen points out that, at some point our entire history will be a few millimeters of rock under an ocean, so debating the "anthropocene" is kind of silly.
• Apparently, Ayn Rand has a recruiting problem.
• Fox and Friends doesn't really understand how tariffs work, even though the network they work for seems to get it.
• Rob Sylvan has some great tips for using Adobe Lightroom.

And now, back to work.

A diverse flock this afternoon:

• FedEx will sever ties with Amazon as the latter builds its own logistics operation.
• Jennifer Rubin complains about the inanity of intra-party debates that miss larger issues.
• The #MeToo movement has changed the way film studios direct sex scenes.
• Alex Pareene expresses frustration with Washington reporters not talking about the blatantly obvious reason the president has gone after politicians of color.
• CityLab has a primer on the history and language of municipal zoning laws.
• How do websites keep you coming back, and keep you from leaving? They manipulate you.
• From last November, Topic discusses "hostile architecture" designed to keep you moving along, especially when "you" means "homeless."
• Finally, TNR reminds us that the Second Amendment is no more settled than any other bit of common law, so have hope.

Your coder will now resume coding his previously-coded code.

As I continue my series on logical fallacies, I'd like to note cartoonist Scott Adams' latest blog post.

For years, Adams has talked about how people see what they want to see in the president's speech and actions, but only he and other Trump supporters deal with reality. He claims that people who believe the president is a racist are hallucinating, and that the media perpetuate this hoax.

The post contains extensive demonstrations of many, perhaps all, of the fallacies the complete series will discuss. He also lies. I would actually call the post as a whole "gaslighting," from its main premise on down to the details he cites. (He concludes by saying, "Given the subjectivity of reality, [critics] won’t be able to read this blog post without being triggered into cognitive dissonance," which, if you has experience with abusive relationships, should make your skin crawl.)

Adams has a good command of English and propaganda. He knows what he's doing. So I'm going to use Adams' post from today as a final exam of sorts for the entire series on fallacies. Should be fun.

Twenty-nine people died and 52 were injured in two mass shootings yesterday. Years of lying about the second amendment to encourage gun sales, and buying votes not only for legislation but also to confirm judges (including on the Supreme Court) have led to this.

I believe Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association since 1991, is the person most responsible for our current firearms laws. So far in 2019, he bears substantial responsibility for the 252 mass shootings that have taken 281 lives and ruined 1,025 others. (Today is the 216th day of the year. Do the math.) He shares responsibility with the Republican Party and its willful exploitation of fears of "others" that, when combined with easy access to deadly weapons, allows narcissistic and unstable young men to kill dozens of people at a time.

We are the only country in the world where this happens. We are the only country in the world where a substantial number of otherwise-literate people believe that a well-regulated militia requires everyone to carry an AR-15. We are the only country in the world where average people can walk down the street armed to the teeth legally. We are the only country in the world where it's easier to get a gun permit than a driving license.

We are the only country in the world where this happens.

Everything I'm learning about John Ratcliffe, the president's likely nominee for Director of National Intelligence, suggests he's orders of magnitude worse than the guy he's replacing:

The intelligence community will fight hard against a threat to its culture of avoiding open partisanship, former senior CIA operations officer John Sipher told NBC News. "It's all about professionalism and taking the world as it is. There is no such thing as Democratic or Republican intelligence. It is what it is, no matter how inconvenient."

Dan Coats, the former Indiana senator whose departure as DNI paved the way for Trump to pick Ratcliffe, appeared to live by that code. He discussed intelligence assessments in public that were at odds with Trump's worldview, and he focused on the issue of Russian election interference, an issue Trump appears to view as a threat to his legitimacy. As NBC News has previously reported, that candor contributed to a strain between Coats and Trump that led to the former's departure.

Ratcliffe, by contrast, has focused on what he believes was misconduct at the heart of the Russia investigation and has spent little time talking about Russia's interference in the American political system.

Ratcliffe, 53, has little experience in national security or intelligence. He was elected in 2014 with the support of the Tea Party, ousting 91-year-old incumbent Republican Ralph Hall. Ratcliffe had been the mayor of Heath, Texas — population 7,000 — from 2004 to 2012.

Reactions from Republicans to Trump's selection of Ratcliffe were tepid. Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, which will hold Ratcliffe's confirmation hearing, waited a day before congratulating Ratcliffe in a statement that did not quite endorse him.

The basic point I made Sunday stands: both Coats and Ratcliffe are party hacks, but Coats at least has experience and a surprising pattern of not just telling the president what he wants to hear. Ratcliffe doesn't seem to have that temperament. So in one more department, all we can do is hope that the career professionals will do their jobs well, and resist the partisan hackery from their political bosses.

Or, as Tom Lehrer once remarked, "I'm beginning to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis."

The latest exhibit: how the press reacted to Robert Mueller's testimony on Wednesday. Adam Serwer:

In any other administration, in any other time, a special prosecutor, former FBI director, and decorated Marine testifying that the president of the United States was an unprosecuted felon who encouraged and then benefited from an attack on American democracy in pursuit of personal and political gain would bring the country to a grinding halt. But the American political press found Mueller insufficiently dazzling.

All of this, of course, was in Mueller’s report, which most members of Congress still have not read. The press, for its part, first accepted a false summary put forth by Attorney General William Barr, and then largely persisted in repeating his mischaracterizations, even after the bulk of the report was released.

On Wednesday, media outlets had the chance to get the story right. Instead, they largely chose to focus on Mueller’s performance instead of on his findings.

Andrew Sullivan saw in this, and in the Democratic leadership's refusal to hold President Trump accountable for his crimes, as fresh evidence that "the American constitutional system is failing on every level":

The system, it turns out, is not even strong enough to withstand one Trump term, let alone two. Trump intuited this in 2016, and if he wins reelection, as he now has a good chance of doing, what’s left of liberal democracy will be under acute duress.

The “extinction-level event” that I feared in the spring of 2016 is already here. Look around you. And it wasn’t even a fight.

Now, Sullivan has been a pessimist on almost every level for years. But both he and Serwer have a point that it looks like our side don't know how to fight this insanity.

Adam Eichen bemoans the left's obtuseness in creating, sustaining, and funding a long-term strategy to regain power, the way the radical right has done for 50 years:

Republicans and their donors, on the other hand, got the message. In fact, not long after the memo was written, a handful of billionaires—including John Olin, who made his money in chemical and munitions manufacturing, newspaper publisher Richard Scaife, heir to Mellon fortune, and petrochemical scions David and Charles Koch—began to create an apparatus to shift politics rightward in much the way Powell outlined.

The realization of [Justice Lewis] Powell’s vision and America’s rightward shift did not happen overnight⁠—as Jane Mayer of The New Yorker exposed in her book Dark Money, the road to power took decades, with many disappointments along the way. But, from the formation of think tanks to legitimize radical economic viewpoints to the funding of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to create corporate-friendly, right-wing bill templates for state legislators; from corporate lobbying and targeted political campaign contributions to Astroturf political mobilizations; from the bolstering of the Federalist Society to reclaim the federal judiciary to the attacks on unions and education, the Kochs and their billionaire allies ultimately succeeded. And once power was obtained, they began rigging the system, via voter suppression and gerrymandering, to prevent Democrats from contesting elections on an even playing field.

What would such an electoral strategy look like?

Daily Kos election expert Stephen Wolf told TNR that, for maximum results, the Democrats should target the Texas State House, Florida State Senate, and both legislative chambers in Pennsylvania in 2020. Each of these chambers only require a handful of seats to flip to win Democratic control. Doing so, in the case of Texas and Florida, would block some of the worst and most devastating partisan gerrymanders of the next decade. Creating a Democratic trifecta in Pennsylvania, on the other hand, would open the door to a major voting rights expansion in a key swing state.

Similarly, Wolf suggests Ohio’s two Supreme Court races should be a priority, as a dual victory would give liberals a majority on the bench, providing the only vehicle moving forward to striking down GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression in the Buckeye State.

On the other hand, there may be a deeper problem. Our side wants to govern, not to rule. Our side believe in the back-and-forth of politics, the need for other voices to be heard, etc., etc. We always have. The fundamental difference between the right and left in the U.S. is the difference between closed and open. And those of us with open minds spend our energy thinking of how to solve real problems, not take power from the opposition. I'm not sure if that can change.

So, it turns out, the President of the United States is a racist bigot, who has calculated that the best way to win re-election is to smash all the norms we've had for a century and a half.

OK, noted. Now let's see what all that sound and confusion might be covering up? How about the dismantling of the administrative state and the removal of any meaningful checks on corporate power:

There are daily proof points that the former lobbyists in the administration are advancing Trump’s quest to eviscerate the administrative state. Just last night, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency quietly rejected a petition by environmental and public health groups to ban a widely used pesticide that has been linked to neurological damage in children, even though a federal court said last year there was “no justification” for such a decision.

“The Obama administration had proposed in 2015 to revoke all uses of chlorpyrifos after EPA scientists determined that existing evidence did not meet the agency’s threshold of a ‘reasonable certainty of no harm,’ given exposure levels in Americans’ food supply and drinking water,” Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin report. “EPA staffers cited studies of families exposed to it in apartment buildings and agricultural communities that found lower birth weight and reduced IQ, among other effects. But before the ban was finalized, in March 2017, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt rejected the agency’s own analysis, saying the agency would reassess the science underpinning that decision.”

Part of the battle to deconstruct the administrative state is a war of attrition. Two research agencies at the Agriculture Department are uprooting from D.C. to Kansas City this fall, for instance, but many staffers have decided to give up their jobs rather than move, prompting concerns of hollowed-out offices unable to adequately fund or inform agricultural science.

This is the flipside, the actual goal, of all the anti-American rallies and palling around with terrorists that the president has done in his administration. All of that is just to stay in power. It's what he has done with the power that will have the longest and most dangerous effects on the country.