Sunday, March 17, 2024

Mainstream Republicans have a few loose screws, doors, panels, windows, etc. etc.

 By Financial Editor Samuel Insull with
Aviation Correspondent Douglas Corrigan

Like omens, pieces of Boeing planes keep dropping out of the sky.  A door plug out West.  Another 737 Max left its wheel in San Francisco.  Then an exterior body panel fell off somewhere over Oregon.

And let's not forget the 346 innocents who died because Boeing didn't want to tell pilots about the changes they had snuck into the 737 Max autopilots.

Sounds like some planes and some people have a few screws loose.

How'd that happen?  

As we've mentioned before, it's due to the usual suspects: rich white men and Republicans.

The story of how Boeing's culture of profits-first and safety last led to the catastrophic 737 Max 8 disasters has been well told elsewhere by the great James Surowiecki elsewhere so we don't see the value in plagiarizing him further here

Doors closed. Wheels on.  Those were the days!

Oh, OK just one quote:

Boeing migrated away from an engineering-centric culture in order to boost profits and shareholder value.

Actually some of the sordid details are worth mentioning.  They start, as with much corporate malfeasance, in the boardroom:

During a series of meetings in 2010 and 2011, Boeing’s board discussed how the company should respond to the threat of a new, more fuel-efficient line of Airbus jets, ... The board talked about how it would be faster and cheaper to revamp an older version of a Boeing jet.

The plan to revamp an older 737 jet included larger engines mounted farther up on the wings, which altered the plane’s balance. Boeing engineers designed the [lethal] MCAS software to compensate for this imbalance. In both crashes, investigators believe an instrument called an angle-of-attack sensor fed the MCAS software bad data, causing it [to] push the planes’ noses downward.....

One challenge for board members is a lack of technical expertise. [One] Boeing director ...doesn’t remember anyone in that group questioning whether a reconfiguration of the 737 with larger engines would create trade-offs that would affect safety.

“The board doesn’t have any tools to oversee [safety],” [the director] said....Some corporate boards, such as JetBlue and Dow Chemical, mandate safety oversight in their bylaws, seeing it as a part of their duty to manage risks. Boeing’s corporate governance principles do not mention the word “safety,” and its board does not include any experts in airplane safety.

Who was worthy (and spineless and ignorant) enough to serve as a Boeing director?

Wait for it...

Photo: Washington Post

Note she wasn't around for the fatal crashes, but as for the recent safety lapses....

We'll get back to her, as soon as we find out where she is.

The investigation into the door plug debacle has revealed the surprising tidbit that the company that actually duct-tapes the plane's body together is not Boeing itself, but something called Spirit AeroSystems.

Who they?  It turns out they're a separate company that used to be part of Boeing until it was spun out in 2005.  It seemed like a great idea at the time, according to Forbes:

Oh.

Why in the name of Wilbur and Orville Wright would you separate the building of the plane from the company that is supposed to build planes?  The original idea was to unload some prairie factories it no longer wanted onto a private equity consortium, while retaining the option to buy what the factories made. 

But the hard-eyed money men (apologies to Russell Baker) at Boeing realized that spinning out the enterprises that actually bolted together the planes could have a number of good effects, including unloading the expenses and bother of negotiating with a unionized work force off its financials and onto someone else's.

As for safety, well:

The underlying cause of problems on Boeing’s production lines are not clear, but analysts and some former employees point to pressure to meet delivery schedules and, more recently, workforce turnover during the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the years, former company employees have come forward with concerns about what they viewed as sloppy work at Boeing’s plants. The Senate Commerce Committee documented many of those issues ...based on the accounts of seven whistleblowers. The whistleblowers included Ed Pierson, a former manager at the 737 factory, who alleged an unusual number of quality control problems at a plant under “relentless schedule pressure.” 

It's not surprising given that Boeing accounts for 64% of Spirit's revenue.  When one customer who represents almost two-thirds of your revenue says jump you say how high.  And when it says you need to work faster you say, “Thank you sir may I have another.”  You don't say you need more time to attach the bolts to the door. 

Although its 10-K is a little squirrely on the details, it appears that Spirit supplies the fuselages for a fixed price.  Therefore, if it has to spend more on say safety (like making sure the doors stay on), that's Spirit's problem, not Boeing's.  Nice for Boeing's profits, but less nice for passengers who didn't want to fly to San Francisco in a convertible.  Maybe that's why Spirit has lost over $1.6 billion in the last three years (losses that don't appear on Boeing's income statement of course).

In the wake of recent developments and stuff falling off the planes, Boeing and Spirit have talked about merging the two companies, which would have the salutary effect of making Boeing financially responsible for its planes.  Salutary unless you are a Boeing honcho whose lavish compensation is tied to profitability and stock performance.  

But delegating the real work of bolting together the planes to a subordinate nominally separate company might be good for transferring losses of out of Boeing, but sadly for Nikki Haley and Boeing management, it doesn't insulate Boeing from having to deal with its woke deep-state out-of-control regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.

The FAA is now telling us that Boeing has flunked 1/3 of its safety procedures audits:

George W. Bush thought that 66% on an exam was good enough for him at Yale and thereafter, but when it comes to the lives of passengers, the FAA says maybe not.

The FAA wasn't always so rigorous in its oversight of Boeing, according to The Washington Post:

The 2018 and 2019 [fatal 737 Max] crashes...raised questions about how the agency had reviewed the design of the Max, an updated version of Boeing’s popular 737. Investigators found that regulators had failed to understand the risks posed by an automated system that pushed the noses of the planes down before they crashed, in part because Boeing employees had sought to minimize its significance. The FAA relies heavily on Boeing employees to carry out safety work on its behalf, but in some cases those workers have reported feeling pressured by the company to rush their work.

The last time you were pulled over by cops and you told them you weren't drunk, did they rely on your self-certification?

Before regulation took away our freedoms.

The FAA's what-me-worry attitude didn't come out of nowhere. And here we get back to our friend and Boeing director Nikki Haley. For over half a century, it has been a fundamental tenet of Republican dogma that regulation is bad, bad, bad and we should let the free market regulate itself. Of course, those who died in air crashes don't get to vote.

The Republican Party's ideological arm (one of them at least), the CATO Institute has only 17,392 examples of the derogatory term “administrative state” on its website.  Spoiler alert: they hate it.  Matthew Continetti, better known as Billy Kristol's son-in-law, who holds a sinecure at AEI, another fake “think tank” admitted the through line from St. Ronald of Bitburg to the Tangerine-Faced (but regulation-hating) Fascist:

Any conservative president would have embraced [tax cuts for the rich], deregulation, and originalist judges.

And the authors of 2025 Project, the neo-Fascist blueprint for the forthcoming Trump dictatorship, admit that dismantling the regulatory system (of which the FAA is a part) lies at the core of their mission:

Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.... Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.

Letting Lara Trump fire FAA aerospace engineers? The wheels would never fly off of that. 

And how would Nikki Haley have reined in the power-mad administrative state?

Haley, meanwhile, has said she would limit federal government officials to five years in the same job. On its face, this is even more sweeping than Trump’s plan, since it would apply to the entire federal bureaucracy — the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell argued that it would “destroy the basic machinery of government.” 

You wouldn't want her company Boeing regulated by anyone with extensive experience and institutional memory, would you?

The decades of Republican hostility to and undermining of regulation in the public interest set the stage for the collapse of oversight at Boeing, whose consequences can be found scattered all over the back yards of Oregon.

And if Trump is elected in 2024, the best advice we have is: stay on the ground and stay alive.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Who will save us from this bent Supreme Court?

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

Another week, and another set of fresh outrages from our Republican-bent Supreme Court.

In their ceaseless effort to re-elect whatever Republican is running for President to ensure that the Court will continue to be packed by bent extremist Republicans like Sulky Sam Alito and Brett “It just wants some fresh air” Kavanaugh, the Court produced two terrible decisions relating to the Tangerine-Faced Defendant's effort to seize power and avoid justice until he is able to fire his prosecutors.

Arguably the worst decision was contained in a one-page order setting down the TFG's appeal of his crapcan total immunity argument for April 25.  The Court knows full well that the immunity claim is ridiculous and must eventually fail, but its goal is to make sure that the insurrection trial doesn't take place before the election. 

Let's look at the record.

Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump's preposterous immunity claims in a careful opinion issued on December 1, 2023.  To expedite consideration of any appeal, Special Counsel Jack Smith urged the Supreme Court to decide the matter directly, bypassing the D.C. Circuit.  

On December 22, the Supreme Court denied the request without explanation.

This not just in: the Supreme Court is bent

The D.C. Circuit duly heard the appeal on an expedited basis on January 9, 2024 and issued its opinion knocking down Trump's frivolous arguments seriatim on February 6, 2024

Some pundits thought that the Supreme Court's December denial suggested that they might just let the D.C. Circuit decision stand.

Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

After sitting on the petition for Supreme Court review (which your mansplaining law school ex-boyfriend called “cert.”) for over two weeks, the Court on February 28 in its wisdom granted cert., blocked further proceedings, and set a hearing date almost two months in the future.

Funny they didn't take nearly that long to award the 2000 election to Republican George Bush.  It took them four days.

This time, though, no one expects a decision until mid- to late-June at the least.  So four days to hand the 2000 election to the Republican, and four months before they will let a Republican stand trial for his insurrection.

Are you beginning to think this game isn't on the level?

And who knows how this Court will f*** up the obvious conclusion?  It could even say that there may be limited “official acts” immunity, pull some ad hoc standards out of Alito's blowhole, and demand that Judge Chutkin decide count-by-count whether the charged acts are “official ” before trial.

Even if they follow the law and uphold the D.C. Circuit, if the decision doesn't come down until the end of June, it may difficult if not impossible to hold a trial before the election.  Which is what the six bent Republican Justices want.

It might even lead to trying and convicting the President-elect on insurrection charges in November, before the Electoral College and the Congress meet.  Then what?  

Which brings us to the second pro-Trump opinion they issued in February: overturning Colorado's decision to bar the Former Insurrectionist-in-Chief from the ballot, contrary to the plain text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which had been passed after the Civil War to prevent insurrectionists from holding federal office.  Like the Presidency.

While all Justices, including the three unbent ones (and we'll get back to them), overturned Colorado's decision on the grounds that one state can't set standards that would affect a national election (unless they are intended to disenfranchise minority voters or put third-party spoiler candidates on the ballot like Ralph Nader or Jill Stein, which is OK, apparently), the Republican majority went well beyond what was needed to decide the case to pronounce that Section 3 a dead letter in the absence of legislation.

The unbent concurrence had some fun with this:

“If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” Dobbs ... (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment). That fundamental principle of judicial restraint is practically as old as our Republic. This Court is authorized “to say what the law is” only because “[t]hose who apply [a] rule to particular cases . . . must of necessity expound and interpret that rule.Marbury v. Madison....

Today, the Court departs from that vital principle, deciding not just this case, but challenges that might arise in the future. 

This modest jape at the expense of John Roberts '76, which would have gone unnoticed by 99% of the public, provoked a hissy fit from Handmaid Amy Comey Barrett:

In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.

Speaking of Courts settling politically charged issues without stridency, here's just a few highlights from the opinion she joined in Dobbs, which took away the reproductive freedom that 170,000,000 American women had enjoyed for over half a century: 

Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” [the opinion] said. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. ...Abortion destroys what those decisions call ‘potential life’ and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an ‘unborn human being,...”

Imagine what Alito would have written if he wanted to be strident.

But our point isn't that Amy Coney Barrett is a prissy hypocrite.

Our point is the one that dissenters on the Court have been making throughout this century: this Republican-bent Supreme Court is not a judicial institution but an illegitimate House of Lords, legislating according to its own terrible political preferences.

The question is what to do about it. 

Despite their grandiose behavior, the Supreme Court can be brought into line easily in one of three ways: (1) enlarging the Court with some new seats, (2) enforcing term limits for Justices (although probably not the bent six Republicans already there), or (3) limiting its power to f*** things up by for example taking away their ability to enjoin federal action prior to judgment or to void certain types of legislation (like voting rights).

We don't have space here to deal with the usual whines about these fixes, which run along the lines of how dare Congress politicize the Court.  But it's the Court that politicized itself and it's the job of the branches who were in fact elected by somebody to bring it back into line.

Then there's the argument that if a Democratic Administration can add seats and limit jurisdiction, a later Republican Congress could do the same thing. Of course they could and they will if they have to whether or not we beat them to the punch. In the long term, the rehabilitation of the Supreme Court into an institution devoted to justice and not reactionary Cathlolic extremism depends upon the will of the American people to make it so and keep it. No one is coming to save us.

Some brave souls have already advocated for some or all of these things, like our very own Sen. Ed Markey.  And some legal academics have weighed in as well, like Penn's Kermit Roosevelt, a surname not normally associated with treason.

But imagine if the pressure to fix the impossibly broken Court came from inside the building.  Three eminent justices in their dissent to Dobbs said:

The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law

That's a plain statement of the illegitimacy of the current Supreme Court. Why shouldn't the three Justices who said it (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan,and Stephen Breyer) take the obvious next step and say publicly to the political branches that it is their job to fix it? 

The Supreme Court is out of control

There's no good reason why they shouldn't speak in some public forum (hell, we bet Breyer could wangle a slot at Harvard Commencement) and do what George Marshall did 75 years ago: demand urgent political action.

Their action will be seen by the usual suspects as some sort of bad faith undermining of the Court as a national treasure of dispassionate justice.  But the Court lost that reputation almost 25 years ago:

this highly politicized matter....runs the risk of undermining the public’s confidence in the Court itself. That confidence is a public treasure.  

Bush v. Gore, 591 U.S. 38, 157 (2000).

What's the point of pretending the Court is acting as a court when it indisputably is not, according to the unbent Justices who sit on it? 

We'd argue that the maintaining the false pretense is itself dangerous because it helps perpetuate the injustice and corruption of the six Republican wardheelers in robes.  

Imagine how powerful the effect would be of three past and present Justices admitting that the current Court is not only strutting down First Street NE naked, its pubes flying into Coke cans all over Capitol Hill, but that the time has come for the President and the Congress to fix the ongoing coup against democracy with appropriate legislation.

Indeed, the time came in 2000. 

Pretending since then that nothing is wrong has led us to observe helplessly the plight of 26,000 pregnant rape victims in Texas and the outrageous stacking of the criminal justice system deck in favor of a corrupt Russian-owned insurrectionist criminal defendant.

The supposed treasure of the Supreme Court's commitment to the rule of law was looted years ago and the Nazis have loaded it onto a plane to Berlin.  It would be great if Stephen Breyer could like his contemporary Indiana Jones rise to the occasion and crack the whip.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

388 years of indoctrination in Harvard Yard, anti-Semitic and otherwise

 

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Archivist Aula Minerva

In case you haven't been paying attention, or, just possibly, you don't give a toss, things still aren't going Harvard's way, except they managed to screw the grieving survivors of corpses whose body parts were sold like merch by Harvard Medical School staff, thus proving the continuing viability of free-market economics.

Other than that, it's all bad.  The poor struggling hedge fund that runs a university on the side continues to be, like Joe Biden, beleaguered.

With the team of Garber and Manning, Harvard
has returned to its wise 400-year policy
of entrusting its governance to white men

The University's response continues to be tepid and tentative, much to the surprise of those who remember what a hell-raiser interim President Alan Garber '76 was back in Dunster House.  This week Garber, no doubt with the 1,000% backing of the Corporation (and you can ask Claudine Gay how much that's worth), appointed, after the proverbial worldwide search, a new interim Provost, who was found across Cambridge St. in the Dean's Office at Harvard Law School.

If you guessed that Garber chose a white man with multiple Harvard degrees, you win an all-expense-paid trip to Allston!

Garber's choice is one John Manning '82, J.D. '85.  Manning declared in the official Harvard newspaper, the Gazette:

“A great university must be a place of great humility, curiosity, and openness...”

Humility? 

Openness? 

Curiosity? 

At Harvard? 

This guy has his work cut out of him. 

Fortunately, his resumé is replete with instances of his service in humble, open, curious places:

Manning, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard College, also held various notable positions earlier in his career, including serving as a law clerk to the Hon. Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States and to the Hon. Robert H. Bork on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Additionally, he served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice and as an assistant to the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Scalia. Bork. Why do those names sound familiar? And by the way, when did he “serve” in the Department of Justice?  You'll be shocked to learn that he did his stint in the Office of Legal Counsel, an agency devoted to arguing that the President can do whatever the f*** it wants, during the twilight days of the Reagan Administration, 1986-88.  No word on whether he worked on the memo confirming that the “arms for hostages” scam was well within the President's inherent power to sneak guns to the Contras.

We're going to go way out on the ivy here and speculate that Manning was put into the job to give Harvard desperately-needed credibility with its Republican tormentors.  After all, he's one of them.  I mean, if you're willing to kowtow to the guy who fired Archie Cox and the guy who boasted about his law-free rigging of the 2000 election, you've got to be comfortable dealing with Republican a**holes, right?

But Garber's move only shows how out of touch Harvard is with their persecutors.  In the old days, a well-connected Republican white man like Manning could place a few calls, jet down to DC for a quiet lunch at the Metropolitan Club, and all would be well.

Those days are over.  We doubt greatly whether his brilliantly-crafted arguments will cut much ice with the hooligans, crooks, Nazis, and thugs who make up today's Republican base. But maybe it's worth a try, if he's willing to take Lauren Boebert out for a, um, matinée.

Let's just say he's got a big stable to clean out. 

A recent example of the task that awaits him appeared in one of Harvard's two hometown papers, The Boston Globe:

A group of Harvard Jewish alumni is scouring the school’s course offerings, critiquing diversity and inclusion policies, and lobbying top administrators in an attempt to root out what they view as pervasive antisemitism plaguing the university....“There are entire Harvard courses and programs and events that are premised on antisemitic lies,” [said] Dara Horn, a writer and Harvard graduate....

Pervasive anti-Semitism in the University of Larry “Gals Can't Add” Summers and Counselor Underpants, former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz? Entire courses premised on antisemitic lies? Huge if true.

Of course, Ms. Horn, a gifted writer with a, shall we say, unusual perspective has her own hot takes on truth.  She once wrote a novel intended as a historical survey of generations of supposed anti-Semitism, including a long chapter on how the Viet Cong were bad for the Jews.

If we were going to make inflammatory statements terming whole swaths of the Harvard academic enterprise as “premised on antisemitic lies ”we'd want to bring some receipts.

We'd at the very least want our organization, supposedly representing Harvard's Jewish alums, to be a shining model of free discourse and respect for dissenting views.

Um, not so much:

Prof. Feldman knows anti-Semitism when he sees it

One early member, Marc Bodnick, an entrepreneur and 1990 Harvard graduate, was kicked out of the chat forum after clashing with other members there about Elon Musk, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israel-Hamas war. In messages, Bodnick was sharply critical of all three, prompting pushback from other members and, eventually, his expulsion. 

Free discussion and debate is all well and good, as long as you toe the group's Likudnik/neocon Republican line, as set forth in the Tanakh, of course.

But we were talking about pervasive anti-Semitic content in Harvard's academic offerings.  Like what?

In WhatsApp messages and in planning documents reviewed by the Globe, some HJAA members articulated the view that antisemitism is exacerbated by Harvard professors teaching students certain worldviews, such as those that divide the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Some argue these viewpoints lead to demonization of Jews and Israel — a claim that has led to fierce campus debates and pushback.

So could viewpoints expressed by Plato, for arguing that a state should be ruled by secular philosophers, for that matter. Sounds like advocacy of a one-state solution in which Jews could be a minority!

Or of course a theory that emphasizes the struggle between oppressors and oppressed might be philo-Semitic, depending on where you put the Chosen People. Or even worse, the historical record might allocate them to both sides to some extent, depending on the evidence (like the remorseless 60-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank.)  This would seem to be a paradigm of the kind of open debate for which a university is dedicated,  even the lesser ones – like Yale.

You might think that but if you do you're just another Jew hater.  Big thanks to Harvard Law Professor and happily married man Noah Feldman for enlightening us:

The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors: imperialists, colonialists, and even white supremacists.

Well, are Israelis on the West Bank or Gaza oppressors or not? If you think that universities or even just ordinary folks in Dearborn, Michigan should have the option to explore this question in light of, you know, facts, you're a new-style anti-Semite, according to Prof. Feldman. 

But there's a deeper intellectual failing in scouring the Harvard course catalog for examples of ideologies you don't like.  The enterprise proceeds from the fallacy that Harvard has fallen from its former glory as a purveyor of objective non-ideological knowledge to which it must be compelled to return by deep thinkers like Virginia Foxx and Bill Ackman. 

But has it?  We happen to have on our shelves the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Courses of Instruction from 1973.  Let's take a look back at the days before Jew-hating ideology infected the purity of Harvard's intellectual pursuits.

Back then, the History Department offerings were refreshingly free of all that anti-Semitic oppression stuff.  Instead, eager young minds, including jocks looking to fulfill their pre-1600 distribution requirements, could take three, count 'em, three full-year courses on the “Great Age of Discovery” (History 136, 137 & 138).  

As oppression is nobody's idea of greatness, we're going to guess that in that halcyon era, any discussion of the possibly oppressive treatment of indigenous populations and imported Black slaves was avoided.  Since, unlike the football team, we didn't take “Boats,” we can't be sure.

Over in the Government Department, where oppression as a political phenomenon might be discussed, the totally non-ideological offerings included Gov. 148, taught by clash of civilization gasbag Sam Huntington, asking how long the American political system might last and considering its “viability and future.”  Fortunately, there's no oppression in this topic.

And of the six courses offered in International Relations, none explored issues like colonialism, oppression, or racism, because as was well known back then those issues play no role in international relations.

You can go all the way back to 1636 to learn that Harvard was founded as a sanctuary of wide-open and unfettered inquiry, free from any taint of anti-Semitism. Actually, it was founded to train Puritan ministers.  That sounds a wee bit anti-Semitic to us.

The point is that for 388 years, Harvard's offerings have reflected some ideology or another, whether it was training future witch hunters in Salem or future war criminals like Henry Kissinger.  There is no single objective model of a suitable curriculum, despite what you might have been told in Gov. 106a, Ancient Political Theory. Looking at the history of the world and deciding that the oppression of some groups by others is a worthy organizing principle seems as valid as the former principle that white men conquering a New World already full of people not in need of conquest was “great.”

See any oppression here?

And none of it is either a cause or effect of anti-Semitism.

Speaking of oppression, David Ignatius, a very mainstream Washington Post pundit, reported on the reason Gaza is starving:

But in late January, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told police to allow demonstrators to close the main border crossing at Kerem Shalom to protest Hamas’s refusal to release all hostages.

 

With the crossing blocked, panic began to spread, U.S. officials say. Food supplies in Gaza soon became scarce, triggering hoarding and looting. United Nations relief workers were attacked by armed gangs as they tried to bring trucks into Gaza. The trucks had been accompanied by Gazan police. But the police were affiliated with Hamas, and after Israel began targeting them with drones, the U.S. officials told me, the police backed away. 

Is that oppression of a hungry civilian population by an extremist hatemonger with a senior position in a heavily armed state that denies to West Bank Palestinians the rights of free movement and self-determination, among others?

Discuss.

If Noah Feldman and Dara Horn will let you, that is.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Cognitive Decline: In Washington, it's a contagious disease

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Medical Correspondent Vincent Boom-Batz, M.D.

The media has been spilling a lot of pixels these days ruminating without evidence about Joe Biden's cognitive decline.  Here's just a few egregious examples from the last two weeks alone:

Do you prepare for important meetings? Court hearings?  Speeches?   Congratulations, you may be a vegetable! 

If you don't believe us (or conventional-wisdom fount Axios), just ask The New York Times:

It appears that cognitive decline is contagious.  Consider the nonstop farrago of incomprehensible demented nonsense from the Tangerine-Faced Defendant.  In just one speech he was unable to pronounce “evangelical,” claimed he was leading Nikki Haley by 91 points, complained about “swastickers” plastered on buildings in Washington, said unnamed woke types were replacing baseball fields with “knocker” fields, said everyone agreed with overturning Roe, and repeated the mainstream Republican talking point that doctors were killing babies after they were born.

Those ravings followed hard on the heels of his confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, and then later claiming he intended to “interpose” the two names to make a (false) point:

"It’s very hard to be sarcastic when I interpose," Trump told the crowd. "I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki from tricky Nikki, tricky Dicky."

But somehow our mainstream media's cognitive abilities short-circuit when it comes to highlighting the overwhelming evidence of Trump's dementia. You might argue that this cognitive breakdown is severe enough to warrant replacing the broken-down old hacks now covering the election with younger journalists who haven't yet lost their ability to report what's really going on.

Just this week, the failing memories of the press were displayed again in the coverage of the Alabama Supreme Court's decision to outlaw IVF on the grounds that the embryos frozen in those test tubes are bouncing bundles of baby joy entitled to the same protections as real live human beings who can be seen without a microscope.

The decision was made possible by the bent Supreme Court's overruling of Roe, on the grounds that states can and should be entrusted to make decisions about matters like reproductive rights and the definition of human life.  Many states had already said that a fertilized egg was as human as the baby Jesus, but those laws had been nullified by Roe. 

As a result of Trump packing the Supreme Court with three new bent forced-birthers, 

there are fears around not only what this means for the future of IVF in Alabama, but reproductive rights across the country. Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, emphasized this didn’t just happen because of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling — and it didn’t start with overturning Roe v. Wade, either.

There has been a concerted effort in Alabama and elsewhere for years to give legal rights to embryos and fetuses,” Kolbi-Molinas said. “Extremist politicians see decisions like this as part of the building blocks to force the U.S. Supreme Court to eventually say that not only are states permitted to ban abortion, but if embryos and fetuses have legal rights the same way as people, then states must ban abortion.”

This was apparent to anyone who followed the issue of reproductive freedom over the past 40 years.  Some, like Ross the boy no one would have lunch with Leverett House, intended this very outcome.

Others like NPR tried to sound the alarm:

“What is happening is that for 50 years, there has been a constitutional right to privacy and now that right is going away. States can pass laws banning or restricting reproductive medical procedures.” That covers abortion, but could also include IVF, as it is a process inherently focused on the creation of fertilized eggs — and what happens next with them.

And yet thanks to the cognitive decline of our media, the threat to Alabamans who want to have a child came as an utter shock:

To be fair, it's not just The New York Times that was perplexed by fetal-personhood laws and the demise of reproductive freedom.

Republicans too seem to be suffering from near-universal memory lapses and cognitive breakdown.  

Let's help them reclaim their past. Since 1996, Republican platforms have stated that fetuses are entitled to all the rights of children. Now-forgotten moderate mainstream Republican George Bush liked to emphasize the supposedly inherent humanity of embryos by trotting out in front the cameras what his flacks called “snowflake children,” which were children born from embryos (as indeed all are):

Kellyanne's ex doesn't remember much

The message was unmistakable: Within every frozen embryo were the beginnings of a[n adoptable, artificially produced] child... When Karl Zinsmeister, my domestic policy adviser, suggested inviting a group of snowflake babies to the White House, I thought the idea was perfect. Each had come from a frozen embryo that, rather than being destroyed for research, was implanted in an adoptive mother.

He was using those children as props to explain his opposition to stem cell research using frozen embryos – the same embryos that Republicans are now shocked, shocked to discover are routinely destroyed in IVF procedures.

Just this week, Republicans have piously stated their support for IVF, including the 166 House Republicans who signed onto legislation that would have granted full Constitutional rights to embryos.  These Republicans have such bad short-term memories that you have to wonder if they could pass a competency exam.

Which leads to yet another group of supposedly distinguished political savants: ex-Republicans now doing business as never-Trumper allies, who can't stop moaning about what has happened to their once beloved thoughtful moderate party.

They seem to have forgotten the last 30 years of Republican policy positions on reproductive freedom, Bush's insane spineless anti-science decision to cripple stem cell research, and, of course, the fact that three of the six bent Republican Justices who voted to overturn Roe were appointed by Presidents named Bush.  

George Conway, prominent never-Trumper has to be reminded that he cast his ballot in 2016 for his wife's employer, Trump (who appointed three bent forced-birthers to the Supreme Court, in case you like George have forgotten).  At least when called on it he had the grace to apologize, but otherwise he seems to have forgotten his years toiling in the Republican slime factories for the Federalist Society and Clinton's impeachment.

Or former Iraq warmonger Tom Nichols, who seems to have grave difficulty recalling why his shilling for George Bush's disgraceful war of lies and torture in Iraq was so terrible, including the bit about helping to form today's Republican view that the rule of law is, shall we say, optional.

We can't even characterize the case of longtime Republican neocon bag carrier Bill Kristol as cognitive decline because he started from such a low baseline.  He's forgotten that as late as 2021 he was described by The Washington Post as a “prominent anti-abortion commentator.” 

Back in the day he was the forced-birth movement's favorite yeshiva bocher:

Billy just can't remember

A story that I love is the one where Jody Bottum met with Bill Kristol about a job at The Weekly Standard. Jody told Kristol that the day the Standard wavered on the question of abortion would be the day Jody quit. Jody says Kristol “drew his finger along the desk, tapped it for emphasis and said, “We are square on life and getting squarer.”

Back in those long-ago days, the Standard used a pro-life article written by Kristol as a copy-editing test. This to warn any pro-choicer that this magazine was pro-life.

Those were the days, my friend.  

Here's five words for Billy: woman, uterus, freedom, embryo, hypocrisy. Now let's wait five minutes and see how many he can remember.

That's why when we hear plaintive mourning over the wonderful vanished Republican party of snowflake babies and fetal personhood, we wonder if these blowhards are likewise too cognitively impaired to be taken seriously as contributors to political discourse in our time.

What to do about the epidemic of cognitive decline and memory loss in Washington, afflicting as it does the Washington punditocracy, virtually every elected Republican, and even our dear precious Republican allies?

We think that they all need to take a break from their current pursuits, which clearly strain their increasingly fogged brains, and just take the time to enjoy looking at flowers and clouds from their Chevy Chase porches.

As for us, we'll go ridin' with Biden.

Monday, February 19, 2024

Red Sox Spring Training Preview: It's Time to Load the Schmucks!

It's time for that great Red Sox tradition: the loading of the schmucks!

By Spy Baseball Correspondent Sisyphus
with Jenny Herk in Ft. Myers, Florida

It's a Boston tradition as old as flipping off drivers trying to merge ahead of you on the Pike.

In the depths of winter, thousands of Red Sox fans line up in the cold on Jersey St. to participate in the Loading of the Schmucks.

Every year, the Spy's ace baseball columnist Shill Shamelessly hitchhikes down to Sox Spring Training to bring true Sox believers his peerless insights into the Olde Towne Team gained from his decades of baseball experience and close relationships with Sox insiders.– Ed.

Sox fans, take it from ol' Shill! This is the year! Better line up for Series tickets now, because this is a team of destiny

Sure you'll hear a lot of complaining from the usual Grumpy Gusses complaining about the Red Sox failing to sign any of the top-tier free agents. It would have been the easy, popular thing to do to open up John Henry's bank vault and shell out for an impact pitcher like Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Jordan Montgomery.

But the Red Sox supremo is too smart for that.  The fact that Montgomery hasn't gotten the contract he wanted proves how clever John Henry is.

Henry and his brain trust instead shrewdly invested in All-Star reliever Liam Hendriks.  No doubt he'll be ready to go by August, when the Sox are contending for a pennant, and he'll be fully recovered from both Tommy John surgery and a serious form of cancer.  Brains, not bucks – that's the Red Sox story.

And I don't want to hear a lot of whining about how the Sox let Justin Turner get away for short money. Just because Turner was the second most productive hitter in the lineup (.800 OPS, 23 home runs, and 96 RBIs) doesn't mean he was worth the $13 million those silly Blue Jays paid for him.

You've got to remember that the Red Sox are a small-market franchise.  You can't expect them to compete with New York and Los Angeles for expensive talent they way they did before 2019.

If they blow all of John Henry's hard-earned jack on overpriced players, how can you expect them to pay for that great cold cut buffet for all hungry baseball writers, including all the ice-cold 'Gansetts you can drink (or, in ol' Shill's case, stick into his backpack for later consumption at the Palmetto Bug RV Park)?

So here's a shout-out to the 2024 Red Sox and their genius front office.  If I was in the duck boat business, I'd be planning ahead for a busy November!

This winter, as past, the Red Sox are trying to stir up interest in their last-place team by celebrating the loading up of the loyal Red Sox schmucks who travel to Spring Training in Ft. Myers to celebrate the hopeful start of yet another futile Sox season.

Such cynicism, a requirement of membership in Red Sox Nation in the previous century, has returned in full force in recent years as the team that won four World Series championships in 14 years has descended back into the dull mediocrity that Sox fans enjoyed in the days of Frank Malzone and Dick Stuart.

The difference is that now the Red Sox are charging the highest prices in baseball to watch one of its worst teams.  At least when Dalton Jones played, you could watch the game from the bleachers for a buck.

Despite the crushing expense of watching the Sox either live or for a mere $30 a month on their captive TV network, Red Sox billionaire supremo John “I am the boss” Henry has decided to throw his nickels around like manhole covers while he expands his empire into crap like a bunch of tossers kicking a ball in Liverpool, wherever the f*** that is.

By the way, nobody gives two wanks about watching English soccer teams run around and do nothing for 90 minutes on Saturday morning.  Nobody, John, no f***in' body.  Am I going too fast for you?

Despite the caliber of play on the field, and the tightfisted owner's refusal to improve his outfit, the loyal schmucks are loaded up and ready for another unexciting season of Red Sox baseball.

“I look forward to going to Ft. Myers every winter and watch the team,” said schmuck Jeremiah T. Burke of Milton.  “Nothing like cashing those disability checks from the State Police and knocking back a few dozen tall cool ones,” said the former State Police Captain who was injured in the line of duty on a wet floor at Dunkin' Donuts.

His wife Kathleen Burke is another loyal schmuck: “It's so much fun to watch the players work out and run, their taut muscled bodies gleaming in the Florida sunshine.  They're so handsome all I want to do is wait outside the locker room – [I think that's enough from Mrs. Burke –Ed.]

But some schmucks believe that this is the year that the Sox can turn it around.  “This is a good young ballclub and I think that Justin Turner can really step up and be a team leader,” remarked James X. Burke of Wakefield.

Informed that the Sox had lost Turner to free agency because ownership was too cheap to pay up for him, Burke exclaimed, “F***in-A!”

The annual loading up of the schmucks has become a key part of the Red Sox marketing plan.  “Without the millions of schmucks who pay hundreds of dollars for tickets, plus another Benjamin's worth of hot dogs and beer-flavored water, we couldn't afford to give the people of Liverpool the sports team that they deserve, ” said Red Sox PR functionary Tiffany Burke.  “Not to mention $30 a month to watch a mediocre team on TV.”

“And this year we're going to have special days for all the loyal schmucks from around New England without whose support the Sox might actually have to pay for a competitive team,” she said.

“In addition to special games honoring our Maine Schmucks, Rhode Island Schmucks, and Connecticut Schmucks, we're going to target specific cities.”  She mentioned that on Pawtucket Schmuck Night, Pawtucket fans will receive a splinter from the wreckage of McCoy Stadium, abandoned by the Sox minor league affiliate when Rhode Island taxpayers refused to build them a new stadium. 

The excitement around the ceremonial loading of the schmucks was heightened this year when Sox brass announced that baseball genius Theo Epstein was coming back to recruit some deep-pocketed schmuck billionaires to buy Henry out [Surely, advise on strategic issues? – Ed.]

To long-time Red Sox Schmuck Anthony DiBurke of Attleboro, Epstein's return heralds a new age of winning baseball in Boston: “Theo's got a great eye for talent and I'm sure he'll bring in players as good as Mookie Betts.  Or better!”

It's not clear that the Red Sox will even manage to get to .500 this year with their weak staring pitching, lack of bullpen depth, and questionable offense. 

But at least we'll all be able to enjoy great Sox traditions like the season-long loading up and subsequent fleecing of the schmucks!

By the way, the equipment truck arrived in Ft. Myers.

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Yard Time: Meet the hatemonger who is supposedly the best friend of 10,000 Jews of Harvard!

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Nellie Bly in Washington

Poor Harvard.  The colossus of wealth, power, championship squash teams, and privilege remains besieged.  On the other hand, nothing burnishes its reputation better than the caliber of its tormentors, like long-time Republican hatemonger Rep. Virginia “Shut Up, Girl” Foxx.

We'll get to her.  But first, it sounds as if things are still pretty rough in Harvard Yard.  No less a personage than Acting President Alan Garber '77 is feeling the heat:

Maybe some Jewish students aren't
really Porcellian material

Harvard University’s interim president Alan Garber...is concerned by reports of “social shunning” of Jewish students in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war, and said there “needs to be a discussion about what are the limits” of permissible speech....

Garber said that what he finds “most disturbing of all are situations or experiences students describe where they have felt they could not speak in class because there are attacks on Israel or maybe Israelis.”

“They feel unsupported in contradicting them,” he said.... 

Social shunning of Jewish students? This is news to Alan? Why does he think that after careful consideration his application to join the Porcellian Club in 1974 was, um, put on the shelf behind the S.S. Pierce Scotch?

So are we to understand that the crisis at Harvard is that students, especially Jewish students, are afraid to speak?  That would come as a refreshing change to contemporaries of Alan Garber, who remember that students, Jewish and otherwise, would never shut the f*** up, even when they had no f***in' idea of what they were talking about.  A little silence at dinner in Dunster House might even have been welcomed back in the day.

Are today's Harvard students more easily cowed than Alan and his buddies? Let's ask a real journalist who hangs around Harvard a lot these days.

They aren't, reports Jill Abramson '76, former Executive Editor of The New York Times:

Over nearly 10 years I taught 250 students. Some of my students came from privileged backgrounds, like one of my best students, Mary Julia Koch, the daughter of the late David Koch. My students also included lefties, whose doctrinaire comments sometimes annoyed me. But they were willing to respectfully engage with their classmates, like Sophia Downs, a leader of the Harvard affiliate of ...the national antiabortion group. (Aren’t those kinds of class discussions what a university education should be?)....

Alan's contemporary John Roberts '76
always shared his views and his weed freely

During the semester she was in my class, I asked Sophia to take me to one of the Students for Life campus meetings ....Sixty students attended the meeting to listen to the speaker, Kristen Hawkins, head of Students for Life. At a place supposedly infested by cancel culture, there were no disruptions.

You don't say?  

By the way, Alan has recently been informed that it's not just the Jewish students who worry about what happens if they run their mouths:

Harvard University faced new challenges Tuesday, from pro-Palestinian and Muslim students alleging the school has not protected them from harassment and racism,...A legal group representing 14 Harvard students asked the Department of Education this week to investigate the school for allegedly failing to protect them from discrimination and targeted harassment due to their Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian backgrounds, or their pro-Palestinian views

Gee maybe if your views on the current Gaza war involve valorizing the suffering of your compatriots (whoever they are) and ignoring or worse yet exulting in the suffering of your adversaries, maybe you should keep quiet and study your stats problem set.  If you are a Harvard student, you can be assured that despite what your parents have told you your whole life, no one wants to hear your opinions.  And if the dining room conversation makes you uncomfortable, maybe the whole point of a college education is to have your preconceived notions challenged in ways that discomfort you.

But the hurt feelings of Harvard students, real or imagined, aren't the real crisis facing the University.  

The real crisis is that that bad-faith Republican ideologues have decided to jump on the alleged assault on free speech, not to mention former President Claudine Gay's scholarship issues, to attack the entire structure of higher education and free inquiry itself.

Exhibit A: Mean racist old hag Virginia Foxx, previously best known for telling a Black women journalist who asked a perfectly appropriate question to “shut up.”   She, like fellow bad-faith blowhard Elsie Stefanik '06, has decided that attacking Harvard and other universities is a sure path to ill-gotten fame if not fortune.

So who is she anyway?  It turns out that despite the trailer-trash demeanor, she's a canny well-educated reactionary in the mold of a Phyllis Schlafly with a doctorate in, wait for it, education.   She was one of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election (although not the votes for her in her district).

Virginia Foxx has always been interested in education

Before she glommed onto universities, she had sought to advance bigotry and oppression in America's public schools:

Now Foxx is championing parental rights in schools, a hot-button issue in many states, and recently shepherded a bill through a divided House. She also wants to bar transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.

“Progressivism and the lies it espouses have devastated our public education system,” Foxx says. It’s hardly radical, she says, to declare “men are not women. Women are not men.
” 

She knows full well that the path to wrecking American higher education is to attack it at what she thinks she can sell as its weak points: its refusal to take the quantification of white privilege – excuse us, “merit”–  at face value and the supposed climate of anti-Semitism on campus (a campaign immensely aided by brilliant comments like Alan Garber's above).

She knows how to generate headlines like:

As her role model Joe McCarthy proved, you can drag out an inquisition with subpoenas forever, generating additional scurrilous headlines of “coverup” should the unfortunate victim not wish to strip naked for her pleasure.  We'll bet that somewhere in the documents Harvard, no doubt advised by the crack defenders at WilmerHale, someone said something stupid.  That will generate more headlines, more sound bites, and more subpoenas.

If you think that this batsh** crazy supporter of a tangerine-faced bigot and his effort to overthrow democratic government is not really concerned about the well-being of the Jews, just ask her:

Foxx also insisted that her investigation is not being fueled by political or ideological motivations.

“What is driving us is concern for students and for faculty,” she said. “It has nothing to do with ideological beliefs. It’s all about protecting the students.”  

Would she lie to you?

Yes, she would:

Conservative Republicans have long decried higher education in the United States, describing the cultures on most college campuses as being captured by liberal elites who inculcate students with left-wing values and suppress conservative thought. And over time their disdain has deepened.

From 2015 to 2019, the share of Republicans and independents who lean Republican saying that colleges have a negative effect on the country rose from 37 percent to 59 percent, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. By 2022, another Pew poll reported that 76 percent of conservative Republicans said colleges affect the country negatively. Meanwhile, a number of Republican-dominated state legislatures have moved to end what they consider “woke” policies and teachings on campuses.

Democrats on the committee noticed what was happening. “I also want to note that the main point of this hearing should be to identify bipartisan solutions to combat antisemitism, not an excuse to attack higher education, liberal arts education, or important diversity, equity and inclusion work that’s happening at colleges and universities across the country,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore).

And the chaos agent behind this well-financed ideological attack on education under the guise of protecting the Jews, Chris Rufo, is a neo-Nazi eugenics freak.  By definition, that's not a friend of the Jews.

What's really appalling is how few are willing to speak out in defense of Harvard and other universities, either because they aren't exactly appealing victims or because their defenders don't want to fan the flames of the controversy.

That would be a serious mistake.  Letting bad-faith ideologues conduct inquisitions into Harvard and liberal education under the guise of combating anti-Semitism legitimizes these attacks.  That's how it worked in the 1950's until Joe Welch finally stood up to Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, after thousands of lives were ruined.  

It also worked in other places not that long ago:


 

 

That's something that Alan Garber should really be concerned about.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

Op-Ed from Zontar: Why won't working class voters try to understand us?

Editors' Note: You can't open your newspaper (assuming you live somewhere that still has them) without running across the usual drivel about how the reason that white working class voters support the Tangerine-Faced Rapist is because those nasty mean coastal elites don't understand them, won't reach out to them, and are generally just so mean! 

Interestingly, the Spy Deep Space Desk recently intercepted another transmission from the distant planet Zontar, which has just the opposite problem.  Their complaint was incomprehensible to us but in the spirit of promoting galactic peace and harmony, we present it to you the reader so that – [They get the setup. Get on with it – Ed.]

By Z. Jean Carroll
Guest Writer

The New Zork Times

It's a commonplace to say that Zontarian politics are polarized.  But what accounts for the wide gap between the two sides?  We think it's because that orange working-class voters have a warped understanding of who the pink professional class are and what we stand for.  They should try harder to reach out to us, with whom they have little contact and even less sympathy.

The highly educated elite brought you television!

Our message to the orange working class is simple: You should get to know us.  We are the people who cure your illnesses, teach your dumb as paint children, design your smartphones and 90-inch TV's you are glued to, even synthesize the fentanyl that you love so much.  We have every skill the pickup-driving, drug-abusing, wife-beating, ignorant orange working classes lack.  So why do you hold us in such scathing contempt?

Professional-class Zontarians often supported Republicanz  until the party shifted its focus to orange supremacy and bigotry against those with different gender or other identities, thus abandoning the emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion that once marked the ZOP. Through this new and divisive bigoted approach, hard-right orange Republicanz not only ignored anyone who looked or sounded different from them, but also started to judge them as not real Zontarians and not worthy of the love and support of the orange working class voter.

Most of us care deeply about respecting the rights of anyone in the LGBTQ population and protecting the reproductive freedom of women. Why can't the orange working class understand our belief that women are entitled to control their own bodies regardless of what religious beliefs you hold?  We also think that women have the right to go out in public or shop without being raped by rich, powerful men who then smear them when they appeal for justice. 

And we can't understand why they describe such violent criminals as “authentic” and then when they lie about their depredations defend these fiends as “he is who he is.“ We're hurt when we hear orange-faced men and women say they like such behavior and invective.  Do they actually approve of sexually abusing women, including underaged ones? 

Well-educated liberals place great weight on family values!

The orange working-class should also know that many of us are deeply religious.  Our religions don't teach hate, intolerance, greed, and self-indulgence.  Instead, they emphasize the dignity of all humanity, the important of good deeds, and the duty to help the poor.  Why can't the orange working class accept our religion as genuine, too?

When the ZOVID epidemic struck, those of us in the healthcare professions bravely went to work to help victims of an unknown contagious disease that for all we knew might claim our own life.  We feared that our children would grow up without parents or worse yet we would bring the virus home to our family.  But we took care of everyone as best we could.

So you can imagine how disappointed we were when many orange working class voters rejected and mocked our science-based efforts, choosing instead to dose themselves with horse dewormers and bleach.  Worse yet, those same orange working class persons refused to cooperate with simple public health measures like masking in close spaces.  They even engaged in intimidation of and violence against those who sought to enforce masking rules.  And it was all because their candidate didn't want to smear his greasy makeup by wearing a mask.

You should know that we, the highly educated, place a great weight on learning, scholarship, and free inquiry.  That's why we react so badly when politicians supposedly representing the orange working class try so hard to cripple our public schools and threaten our teachers. Don't they realize that strong public schools are the only hope for the children of the orange working class?

Because we tolerate diversity and welcome inclusion, we also are firmly opposed to efforts to exclude and stigmatize students who, for example, have a different gender identity.  When will orange working class voters learn that hatred and bigotry have no place in our public schools or indeed anywhere in public life?

Professionals like air traffic controllers keep us safe!

We do understand the resentment of orange working class voters who have seen their standards of living decline after 50 years of largely Republicanz rule.  What we don't understand is why the voters who have suffered so much from Republicanz policies that gave tax cuts for the rich and took away union protections from them consistently vote for the party that exacerbates their very real economic plight.

Many of us spent our entire lives working to improve the lot of the orange working class whether through guaranteed health care, aid to education, protecting public health, or building a planetary infrastructure that promotes economic growth.  Yet in return all we get from the orange base is anger and paranoid conspiracy theories. 

We beg the orange working class Republicanz to speak the language of the educated class again. Put value on the value we contribute to this country. We want to be valued, heard, and shown some respect. 

If only the orange working class voter would reach out to us, they would see we are not their enemies.

They would see we are their friends.  Their only friends.