Our Great Pundits solve the problem of indigestible refugees. Their solution will make you vomit.

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman with
Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

The influx of desperate refugees continues to bewitch, bollix, and bewilder our great public intellectual poo-bahs.  

We'll get to their miserable lucubrations shortly, but first we do have to point out that we offered up our humble views on how to solve the supposed refugee “crisis” just last week.

If the problem is that these refugees cannot legally work to support themselves for 180 days due to racist US law, we suggested that states could employ these refugees to do useful work and provide cash grants to those who do so.  

Amazingly enough, this idea appears to be getting some traction, according to a September 12, 2023 story in The New York Times:

Mr. Yale-Loehr and other immigration law experts have called for a different approach that they argue is allowed under federal law: having state governments hire asylum seekers directly. The University of California regents, for example, announced earlier this year that the university system would explore a way to hire students who lack legal status and work permits.

Just remember you read it first in the Spy.

So that's a solution that would lessen the financial burden on cities while giving refugees useful work experience and actually get stuff done that they might benefit from.  Sounds like a win-win-win.

Anybody got any worse ideas?

When we need useless (or worse) conventional wisdom on any topic of great public interest, we turn second to the The Washington Post editorial page (you already know what our first stop is for drivel).

Fareed Zakaria, come on down!

As Jon Stewart used to say, go on.

Actually, before we do, notice the classic Both Siders bloviator setup.  It's not just that your gasbag knows what's best for the country.  The problem is that Democrats need to confess their error and repent.  You could count on the hairs on Jeff Bezos's head the number of columns that are teased with “Republicans need to admit they're wrong on ....”  Only Democrats need to repent.  Republicans are permanently engraved for a blessing in the Book of Bloviating Bull****.

Why is that?  Is it in their manual?

But back to the, um, substance of Fareed the Magnificent's argument:

There is only one solution to this crisis....The president must use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending. The British government has passed a law to this effect.

How does one pundit pack so much wrong into one little sentence?

First the President does not have the power to suspend the admission of asylum seekers, which is a right guaranteed by statute and our international treaty obligations.  The Tangerine-Faced Defendant tried to assert such a right by falsely smearing refugees as public health risks.  After a series of court reverses, the Biden Administration dropped that patently fraudulent pretext.

(Zakaria supports his claim by linking to a piece arguing that the President could lock up all asylum seekers, a non-frivolous but unspeakably cruel and ridiculously expensive “solution.”).

Since Zakaria seems to have trouble doing any of his own fact-checking we'll give him the statute:

Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section.

8 U.S.C. §1158.

There's a lot more but nowhere does the law give the President the power to do what Zakaria suggests.

So Zakaria wants either to turn back desperate refugees at the border or lock them up indefinitely as a tonic to morale.  Seems like a pretty dire solution to a problem that Zakaria characterizes as “indigestion.”  That a supposedly respectable intellectual wrote this swill and that an allegedly great newspaper thought it was worthy of publication is making us nauseous.

To make us feel better, we took a slug of the Pepto-Bismol for sickening ideas: history.

Zakaria's claim that refugees and more generally immigrants cause an intestinal blockage of the body politic is hardly a new diagnosis.

In 1939, with hundreds of thousands of German Jews trapped in Hitler's Germany, Sen. Robert Wagner proposed admitting an additional 10,000 refugee children.  The law was sunk by anti-immigration forces who believed that the nation's vitals were already clogged by immigrants:

Source: U.S. Holocaust Museum

Until the nation solved its immigration problems. To opponents of immigration, that means never.

It turns out that anti-immigration advocates have been troubled by digestive issues for generations:

 

C. Jaret, Troubled by Newcomers: Anti-Immigrant Attitudes and Action during Two Eras of Mass Immigration to the United States 18 Journal of American Ethnic History at 11 (1999).

Since that article was published in 1999, we have all seen how the influx of new immigrants to places like New York City have destroyed its art centers, museums and symphony orchestras, right?

Let's see what's in today's New York Times:

Well, give 'em time. 

Another through line of anti-immigrant bigotry is that it's not immigration that causes the intestines to knot, it's the wrong kind of immigrants, as the passage from Professor Jaret states.  In 1939 it was alien Jews like this obvious threat to American values:

whose father tried desperately to obtain U.S. visas for their family, but was frustrated at every turn by anti-immigrant Jew haters in the prewar State Department.

Now, it's scary brown people like this guy:

Wait just a hot minute here?  Are you telling us that the same guy who recycles anti-immigrant tropes from generations of bigots is in fact – an immigrant?

 

Given his delicate anti-immigrant tum-tum, we had assumed he was a descendant of Squanto.

Wrong-o!

He's in fact a member of an elite intellectual family in India, attended the finest schools (like Ron DeSantis!), and now warns of the dangers of allowing in any more desperate women and children from the slums of El Salvador or the small towns of Honduras.

It's bad enough when the grandchildren of German immigrant pimps like Donald Trump tell us about the horrors of immigrants; it's even worse when it's an immigrant who apparently believes that the United States should welcome well-born intellectuals like him, while leaving the poor and persecuted refugee to her fate.

We have a hard time digesting that.  In fact, it makes us want to vomit.

We Solve the Latest Bad News for Biden. Don't Thank Us.

Downtown Syracuse, shown here overrun with refugees

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman with
Maria Boroaroma on Staten Island

How much more bad news can one President take?

Already reeling from galloping egg price inflation (down back to around $2/dozen), economic stagnation (with unemployment at a 40-year low), his craven withdrawal from Afghanistan (after 20 years of useless war and destruction), his midterm wipeout (which also didn't happen), and the collapse of the stock market (near its all-time highs), our doddering Commander-in-Chief (who has deftly pulled together a worldwide alliance to beat back Russian aggression) now faces his most ominous challenge, according to All Media:

The unconstitutional use of razor sharp floating killer barriers in the Rio Grande by Texas and the equally unconstitutional effort to criminalize giving an undocumented mother a ride to CVS to pick up her prescription by Florida are not the border crises that the Newspaper of Record is worried about.  

Instead, it's a supposed crisis caused by the fact that refugees are coming to cities to New York without the legal ability to work for six months, thanks to anti-immigrant legislation passed by Congress.

We'll get to the solution to this calamity after we let The New York Times outline its full horrors:

Eric Adams, the mayor of the nation’s largest city, declared this week that without a federal bailout and clampdown at the border, swelling migration “will destroy New York City.” The nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, has promised to sue Mr. Abbott. And the liberal mayor of the third-largest city, Chicago, began pleading last month for the White House to step in.

“Let me state this clearly: The city of Chicago cannot go on welcoming new arrivals safely and capably without significant support and immigration policy changes,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said.

It was nice of Eric to drive in from his home in Jersey City to warn that New York City, although it survived a mass terrorist attack and a devastating superstorm, is about to collapse under the strain of refugees who have moved there to live and work.

The Mayor of Chicago was able to put the problem in non-hysterical fashion, which is that cities need further support, mostly financial, to accommodate the new arrivals until they can become self-supporting.

It's not the economic issue that has GOP bigot-fluffers salivating; it's the possibility of using the specter of an “alien invasion” to animate white racists in the North and preserve its narrow House majority, which is regarded as otherwise unsalvageable due to the current shambolic dumpster fire that is the Republican-run House:

A year later, the migrant waves he helped set in motion have put northern “sanctuary” cities increasingly on edge, their budgets stretched, their communities strained. And a border crisis that has animated Republican politics for years is now dividing the Democratic Party. Humanitarian impulses are crashing into desperate resource constraints and once-loyal Democratic allies have reluctantly joined Republicans to train their fire on President Biden.

Let's put to one side for the moment the inconvenient facts that refugees are not coming to places like New York because they are supposed “sanctuary” cities and that Biden did not set in motion any “waves” (unless by that the Times means that he has refused to illegally bar all asylum admissions unlike his crooked depraved predecessor who opened his campaign with a lie-filled rant about Mexican rapists and assassins). We just note that the Times, in its imitable fashion, tries desperately to euphemize the white racism and hysteria that accompanies most of the opposition to refugee resettlement.  

The bucolic charm of Staten Island is threatened by refugees

Let's go to Staten Island, where opposition to sheltering a handful of refugees is undoubtedly based on economic anxiety, or condescending elites, or whatever the f*** else apologists for white racism like to trot out:

STATEN ISLAND - Protests continued Tuesday night on Staten Island, where hundreds of demonstrators marched through the streets with megaphones, signs and American flags.

"I realize it’s a sanctuary city, but there has to be a limit to our compassion," said protester, Michele Rubin. "We don’t have the infrastructure, we are not vetting anybody, we don’t know if anybody has a criminal background or what they did in their country of origin."

The borough has been at the center [Surely, far edge? – Ed.] of New York City's migrant crisis since the end of last month, when the Adams administration started to house asylum-seekers at St. John Villa Academy. 

Fun fact: refugees are vetted by CBP and ICE before being released.  Adults with criminal records are detained.  But you wouldn't know that by watching Rupert Murdoch's Fox New York bulls*** volcano, WNYW-TV.

In fact, cities and towns across New York State are in desperate need of workers, as even the Times had to admit:

“I’d hire probably 20 people tomorrow,” said Mr. Buicko, the president of the Galesi Group, a Schenectady-based developer, who said prospective workers are still waiting for legal authorization. “It’s crazy that we can’t fill a void, we don’t have population growth, and we’ve got people that we’re just bringing in, sitting around doing nothing.”

Mr. Buicko is not alone. Across the state, many large and small employers have expressed an overwhelming willingness to hire recent asylum seekers; migrants are even more eager to work.

The only bar to refugees becoming productive workers is the legal requirement that asylum seekers wait 180 days before they can receive work authorization.  Until then they must be supported by family, friends, or whatever aid cities like New York (pre-utter collapse) can provide.

Joe Biden can't waive that requirement because it's in the statute.  He could provide a type of temporary status for certain refugees based on state of origin, thus creating a two-tier system separating favored refugees from the rest.

There's actually another solution.  Instead of flushing $432,000,000 down the toilet of Jersey Eric's useless friends, that kind of money could be turned to good use.

States with rational Democratic governors like Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, all favored destinations for refugees, could provide cash grants to refugees willing to work on state-sponsored projects, many of which could involved caring for the newly-arrived.  Shelters need to be built out, children need tutoring, the sick need health care aides.  All these tasks could be provided by refugees themselves in exchange for the grants, which would also permit them to become self-sufficient and move out of the strained shelter system.

I hear you asking how states can pay refugees who are legally barred from working.  Fortunately, thanks to dead bent Supreme Court Justice Nino Scalia, now holding court in a much hotter place with his friend Torquemada, state sovereignty cannot be questioned.

Thank you, Nino Scalia!

At least that's what he said when evil Kenyan-born Socialist Barack Obama tried to restructure Medicaid to compel states to cover lots of folks who needed health care but couldn't afford it.  

That is forbidden, according to Scalia and his fellow Defenders of the Faith:

Coercing States to accept conditions risks the destruction of the “unique role of the States in our system.” ....“[T]he Constitution has never been understood to confer upon Congress the ability to require the States to govern according to Congress’ instructions.” New York, 505 U. S., at 162. Congress may not “simply commandeer the legislative processes of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” 

NFIB v. Sibelius, 567 U.S. 519, 677 (2012) (dissent)(although on this point this was the majority opinion)

What could be closer to the core of state sovereignty than its decision to spend its money as it sees fit, in the absence of a Fourteenth Amendment violation? And who could bring such a challenge? A bunch of goons on Staten Island?

Seems like a small legal risk to us, and well worth running if the alternative is to subject President Biden and every Democrat running for Congress to 16 months of GOP smears about the invasion of Mexican rapists and all of us to Jersey Eric's thirsty rants about the imminent collapse of the city he likes to hang out in from time to time.

"Mitch McConnell" and compassion: no results found

By Ida Tarbell
Washington Bureau with Meta-content Generator A.J. Liebling

The spectacle of decrepit Republican Senator and long-time reactionary powerhouse Mitch McConnell falling to pieces on live television has engendered a number of half-assed reactions from the usual suspects unwilling to state the obvious truth: this decompensating old tosser is unfit for office, or anything else other than serving as Elaine Chao's love machine.  

Mitch is not looking so spry these days

Our personal favorite came from former Republican plug-ugly and rabble-rouser, now doing business as one of our Wonderful Republican Allies, Charlie Sykes:

And I – I mean, I hope people react with nuance. I hope they react with compassion. But this is kind of a warning shot that that when you have people, you know, who have health problems and who have decided not to step aside, there can be these kinds of difficulties. And and so I, I hope that people will react with restraint to this. But we don’t live in an age of either nuance, restraint, or compassion, do we?

We sure don't, Charlie. For those of you who are unable or unwilling to recall the sordid pasts of our newly-minted allies (pretty much all of you), here's a handy reminder from the chronicler of their misdeeds, Mr. D. Glass:

In 2016 Sykes provided nearly unlimited airtime to conservative court candidate Rebecca Bradley after writings in which she revealed her virulent homophobia, compared birth control to murder and suggested women could be blamed for their date rape were publicized.

The broadcast behavior of Sykes was particularly despicable on issues of race and poverty. He used his show to broadcast a blatantly racist video mocking food stamp recipients and has referred to the First Lady of the United States of America, Michelle Obama, as “mooch.”... 

Not hearing a f***ton of compassion from Old Charlie. But what the hell this is America and anyone no matter how slimy or vicious should be able to reinvent themselves, as least as a useless taking head on MSNBC.  (This is the Nicolle Wallace rule, named after the former shill for Iraq warmonger and torture-lovin' President George W. Bush.)

We'd rather look at whether the intended object of our compassion ever showed even a flicker of that worthy emotion for any other human being. Ever.

You'll be shocked to know that our search engines weren't a lot of help:

It turns out that's an understatement.  

Let's go a million years back in American history when 26 little kids and their teachers were massacred at Sandy Hook by someone who borrowed a high-powered assault weapon from his mother.  Who could fail to be moved by the anguish of the survivors who had to identify their children and loved ones from their backpacks, because the victims had been torn to shreds by the military-grade weaponry?  Hint: the answer rhymes with “Snitch Shmeconnell:”

in January 2013 — less than month after Sandy Hook —... after Obama signed 23 executive orders on guns in response to the tragedy that left 20 kindergartners dead — McConnell recorded a robocall and sent it out to gun owners in his state.

“President Obama and his team are doing everything in their power to restrict your constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” McConnell said in the recording. “Their efforts to restrict your rights, invading your personal privacy and overstepping their bounds with executive orders, is just plain wrong.”

The Republicans boasted of his post Sandy Hook compassion

McConnell also refused a meeting with the Sandy Hook families, according to someone familiar with the request, ...But eventually, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) negotiated a modest bipartisan background checks bill, known as Manchin-Toomey. ...

When Manchin-Toomey finally came to the Senate floor for a vote in April 2013, McConnell pushed his conference to oppose the bill, which ultimately failed 54 to 46, falling short of the 60 votes needed for passage. ...

Jesse Benton — a conservative activist who managed Paul’s 2010 Senate campaign and who McConnell enlisted to manage his 2014 one — said that McConnell at the time “said something to me like, ‘I hope you know I’m not planning on supporting any of this crap.' ”

Protecting future generations of schoolchildren – like those in Uvalde, Texas and Parkland, Florida – from being slaughtered in their schools?  To Sen. Compassion, it's all “crap.”

What about compassion for the millions of Americans who had to face illness, possibly mortal, without health insurance, or the tens of thousands who died unnecessarily every year because they couldn't afford to pay for lifesaving care?  What did Sen. Compassion say about universal health care, after it had been in effect for seven years and its life-saving benefits were apparent to even the meanest intelligence?  Let's ask CBS News:

That would have worked out great for the at least 18,000,000 who relied on Obamacare to protect their health.

Just to complete the compassion hat trick, what about the millions of women who want to terminate their pregnancies, including those who conceived as a result of rape or incest?  How much compassion did Mitch have for them?

Thanks to Mitch's tireless efforts to pack the Supreme Court with extremist forced-birthers, that bent Court took away a woman's right to control her own body last year, leaving women in red states the choice of bearing an unwanted child or returning to the bad old days of coathangers.  Was he sensitive to their pain?  According to NPR he was concerned about basically anything else:

The desperate women, the unwanted babies born into poverty, the septic abortions, the lives ruined – to Compassionate Mitch, it would all come out in the political wash.

So what's the point?  It's not to suggest that we publicly mock Mitch for his disability (the way the most recent Republican president did to a reporter with a serious neurological disorder).  It's to turn the spotlight on who is entitled to compassion in Republican America and who isn't.

To Republicans and their apologists, like former insult comic Charlie Sykes, compassion is reserved for white men.  He's not alone in that view.  Salami-lovin' David Brooks recently condemned us coastal elites for showing insufficient compassion to white bigots.  And never Oregon Governor Nick Kristof recycled the same tiresome nonsense just last week.

Maybe we'd be better off if we directed our compassion to the desperate and hopeless who dwell in our midst.

Except for Ron DeSantis.

Trouble on the Border - With Quebec

By New Hampshire Bureau Chief and Media Coordinator Pam Smart

New Hampshire, that pointy little state not far from here, is generally thought of in these parts as a placid place, possibly because the locals are thwacked out on fentanyl, and a handy destination for skiing and buying cheap tequila, thanks to its stout embrace of liquor Socialism.

Apparently we were wrong.  New Hampshire is besieged on its borders, North and South.

First, let's head North, where New Hampshire shares a 40 mile or so international border with Canada.  It looks pretty placid to us:

GoogleEarth

But appearances can deceive, according to moderate mainstream Republican hope for the future Gov. Chris “My Struggle” Sununu, the latest member of the fatuous [Surely, fabled? – Ed.] New Hampshire Sununu political dynasty.

Not content to be shoved out of the political frame by 91-count Don, Sununu last week sent a crank letter to his two (Democratic) House members complaining that New Hampshire was under siege from those Mexican rapists and assassins now supposedly rampaging through the street of New Hampshire after successfully sneaking across the border from Quebec:

CONCORD, N.H. — New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu has been calling for more security and funding to go to New Hampshire's border with Canada, for months, and on Friday, he doubled down on his calls, writing in a letter to the state's congressional delegation that there has been a "surge of activity" at the border.

"Illegal border crossings, drug trafficking, and other crimes are increasing in frequency, and a stronger response from the federal government is necessary to keep Granite Staters from becoming victims to these bad actors," Sununu wrote.

Bad actors in New Hampshire? Didn't Adam Sandler move away decades ago?

Huge if true.  

But is it? WMUR-TV, a source of real news and the only network TV station in the state had the temerity to ask:

Despite Sununu's continued efforts, representatives from ACLU have publicly voiced their concern about the fact that some of the data relating to the Northern border have not been made public.

"The public is entitled to know what that data is and whether it supports or doesn't support, those type of resources being spent. But right now, we haven't seen any," Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, told News 9. 

Imagine the nerve of asking the Governor of a State to provide facts that support his alarming tale. It would be like asking a former President who has been indicted four times on 91 separate felony counts to tell us his weight.

What Sununu is really after, in addition to cheap publicity and the chance to burnish his credentials as an immigrant-bashing Republican in good standing is “an "adequate ICE Delegation Agreement,"” by which he means deputizing the New Hampshire smokies to act as adjunct body snatchers for ICE.  This would mean, for example, that after pulling someone over for the proverbial broken taillight, they could apprehend them on civil federal immigration charges, something that their counterparts in Massachusetts cannot do.

What this has to do with the chaos at the Quebec border is not clear, nor is it clear why the Governors of Vermont and Maine, with far longer and equally porous borders, failed to recognize the clear and present danger of ISIS operatives strolling down the streets of Pittsburg, NH ready to proclaim a caliphate covering all of Coos County.

As for the effect that this border chaos has on crime in border towns, the statistics are sobering.  For 2021, the last year for which the State of New Hampshire has released data, the percentage of violent crimes that remain unsolved in the border town of Pittsburg, NH was 100%.  100 per cent, people.

On a brighter note, though, here's the full violent crime data for that year:

We're not statistics experts, but we think we can round 1.0 violent crimes to, um, one.  So the NH border is not exactly Al Capone's Chicago.

At least not the northern border.

Massachusetts: high-tax drug-selling hellhole

But New Hampshire has other borders as well.

And to hear thirsty Republicans tell it, the real problem is at the Southern border.  That's the one next to that high-tax woke unlivable hellhole that is...Massachusetts.  Retread Republican Kelly Ayotte, running for Governor up there, sounded the alarm:

Former U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte is running for governor of New Hampshire, but Massachusetts seems to be the focus of her nascent gubernatorial campaign. Since she announced her candidacy late last month, Ayotte has warned repeatedly that her state is just “one election away” from becoming ours, and cited a number of ways in which she thinks that catastrophic convergence could occur. Is this a winning strategy in a swing state where plenty of residents work and recreate in Massachusetts?

What a nightmare!

It can't be the Dunkin' Donuts or the Red Sox.  Those are all over New Hampshire.  So what is it?  Her campaign website gives us a hint:

On day one, Kelly will work to strengthen penalties for heroin and fentanyl dealers. In particular, Kelly will work with law enforcement to prosecute dealers who come over the NH-MA border from the drug hubs of Lowell and Lawrence to the fullest extent of the law. 

Ah yes, it's those Tijuanas on the Merrimack, Lowell and Lawrence, two old mill towns now reinventing themselves as diverse mixed-income communities that welcome all comers.

But to Kelly Ayotte and her fellow white reactionary Republicans, they're cesspools of vice whose sole function is to lure the innocent youths of New Hampshire over the border and inject them with fentanyl, which even Ayotte admits is a problem in her drug-addled state [Surely, State? – Ed.]:

New Hampshire: where you want to be

The fight to end the drug crisis in New Hampshire must include care and support for those struggling with addiction. In the United States Senate, Kelly led the effort to pass the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which provided grant funding for drug prevention, education, and treatment programs. In New Hampshire, we must continue to improve our model while expanding coverage and outreach to those struggling.

So the white people who buy fentanyl, whether in Lawrence or anywhere else deserve our tender loving care.  The problem is the alleged drug supermarkets luring them to their doom just across the border.

Maybe New Hampshire should build a wall not on its northern border, but on its southern, to keep their honest yeomen safe from the hordes to the south?  The upside for the Bay State: no more New Hampshire hicks flooding across the border bearing Bruins tickets and vomiting on Causeway Street.  The downside: how do we get to Maine?

The two border hysterias are linked.  In Republican mythology, New Hampshire's problems aren't of its own making.  They're the fault of the Other, usually brown, flooding across one border or another.  

The solution is to foment fear and bigotry.  That will solve the problem. 

If the problem is how you elect mediocre Republicans to office, that is.

Why Our Democracy is Broken: Let's Ignore the Elephant in the Room!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

If it's a day ending in y, some bloviating hack named Dan or David is pontificating in a deep reporting media outlet about What Ails Our Republic.

On Thursday, it was the turn of venerable conventional wisdom dispenser Dan Balz in The Washington Post.  As usual, he missed pretty much every important point, beginning with his statement of the problem:

The good old days of bipartisan compromise

In a country where the search for common ground is increasingly elusive, many Americans can agree on this: They believe the political system is broken and that it fails to represent them.

They aren’t wrong.

Faced with big and challenging problems — climate, immigration, inequality, guns, debt and deficits — government and politicians seem incapable of achieving consensus. On each of those issues, the public is split, often bitterly. But on each, there are also areas of agreement. What’s broken is the will of those in power to see past the divisions enough to reach compromise.

Is that the problem?  Of course in a time of political gridlock, little gets done and people become frustrated.

But not all frustrations are created equal.

We know that about 40% of the electorate, comprising a large majority of white voters, is frustrated that it can no longer protect white privilege on a national level by majority vote.  (They can still impose cruel white-majority rule in a large swath of southern and midwestern states, including the nation's second and third largest ones)

We also know that progressive voters are frustrated by the failure of government to address unmet human needs, protect the rights of women and minorities, and save the planet from boiling to death.

But the frustrations of racists are not an argument against the current political system.  Rather the opposite.  Government should not represent and advance the interests of white racists and bigots.  That's how American government worked from 1791 to 1964, with a brief intermission from 1863 to 1877. It was very bad, despite what Prager “U's” cartoon version of Frederick Douglass tells you.

And that's not the only howler contained in three short paragraphs.  Balz like his fellow third wayers seems to think that in American democracy, progress arises out of bipartisan compromise.

Let's look at the moderate's worst enemy: the historical record.

The era from 1861 to 1876 saw enormous progress.  Slavery ended.  The rights of all persons were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.  The South was reconstructed, albeit imperfectly.  And that wasn't all.  We had a progressive income tax, a huge railroad infrastructure plan, a mammoth higher education construction scheme of “land-grant” universities that brought academic and research excellence out of the Northeast and across the nation, and fiat currency that permitted robust economic growth and provided the foundation for the economy we know today.

Bipartisan consensus at work!

None of this happened because all sides came together and compromised.  It came about because the Slave Power tried to destroy the nation and, after four years of war and 600,000 deaths, failed.  If the bloody ground of Antietam and Gettysburg was compromise, we'd hate to see Balz's idea of open warfare. 

How about 1933, when the Republic almost ground to a halt after four years of disastrous Republican inaction to combat the Depression?  Did Roosevelt and Hoover sit down and hash out a bipartisan compromise?  Of course not.  FDR and the Democrats won smashing victories in1932 and 1936, leading to huge Democratic majorities willing to enact the greatest program of social welfare legislation in American history.

(By the way, whatever bipartisan compromises were required were terrible, like exempting domestic and agricultural workers from Social Security to protect the purses of Southern white supremacists.)

In 1964, after Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats achieved another smashing victory, LBJ pushed through the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid.  And we don't want to hear about all the Republicans who voted for civil rights – on that issue, the partisan split was between white racists, then mostly Democratic, and everyone else.  The good guys won not because of consensus but because the power of Southern Democrats was broken. Don't worry; they got it back.

In 2008, after eight disastrous years of needless war followed by economic disaster, Barack Obama and the Democrats won big, and delivered at least some version of national health insurance, over implacable Republican opposition.  As was the case with previous bipartisan deals, the concessions made were uniformly terrible.  Imagine how much money we could have saved with a public option, but thanks to lovable bipartisan “Holy Joe” Lieberman, we can't have it.

So the two premises that underpin the piece are utter bollocks.  How about the execution?  It's a little better, but not by much.

Our bloviator goes on to examine what he believes are structural or Constitutional impediments to a functional government.  Let's see if we can find any common thread that connects them!

 1.  The Electoral College frustrates majority rule.  That's hard to argue with:

The Constitution created an unusual mechanism for electing the president — an electoral college. It was built on assumptions that over the years have proved to be faulty.

If only anyone had noticed this.

Oh, wait, they have: “More than 700 proposals to reform or abolish it have been introduced in Congress since 1800.”

So why can't we fix this flaw, either by Constitutional amendment or widespread adoption by states of commitments to award electors based on the winner of the national popular vote?  Here's a clue, courtesy of NBC News:

 

Republicans want to keep the Electoral College because they don't like the results obtained with direct democracy. They dress it up a little with some community-college word salad about the purple mountain majesties and fruited plains, like this classic from George Will:

Furthermore, choosing presidents by electoral votes is an incentive for candidates to wage truly national campaigns, building majorities that are geographically as well as ideologically broad. Consider: Were it not for electoral votes allocated winner-take-all, would candidates campaign in, say, West Virginia? In 1996 Bill Clinton decisively defeated Bob Dole there 52 percent to 37 percent. But that involved a margin of just 93,866 votes (327,812 to 233,946), a trivial amount compared to what can be harvested in large cities. However, for a 5-0 electoral vote sweep, West Virginia is worth a trip or two.

Like everything else spewed out by this long-time Republican hack, this is ass-backwards.  Thanks to the Electoral College, the 2024 Presidential election will be decided by voters in five states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and maybe North Carolina.  Voters in the rest of the country can just stay home.  Without an Electoral College, candidates would have to appeal to voters everywhere, not just in a few swing states.

In short, the problem is not the Electoral College; it is the refusal of Republicans to unrig a system that has worked in their favor twice in this century.  Elect more Democrats either to Congress or state legislatures and the problem goes away.  No consensus needed or wanted.

 2.  Gerrymandering has produced fewer competitive Congressional districts.  Also irrefutable.  And also caused by relentless Republican assaults on fair districts in Republican-run states, like Ohio, where the Republican-dominated legislature has defied not only the will of the voters expressed in a referendum but also multiple decisions of the Ohio Supreme Court enforcing the results of that vote.

Such blatantly unfair gerrymanders were made possible by a Republican-bent Supreme Court which concluded such anti-democratic vote rigging was A-OK, because...what were they supposed to do about it?

Which brings Balz and us to...

3.  The Republican-bent Supreme Court.  The Post finally reaches a third major cause of democratic dysfunction: a Republican-rigged anti-democratic Supreme Court that has arrogated for itself the right to decide what it will let the President do in implementing laws passed by Congress, which it calls the Major Questions Doctrine. (Capitalized to show that six Republicans didn't pull it out of their a**es.)

Even the Post had to note that

Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections. But during that time, Republican presidents have nominated six of the nine current members of the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices, including the three nominated by Trump, were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. 

The Supreme Court...is a problem

No s***, Sherlock.  It also didn't help that Senate Republicans wouldn't even grant a hearing to President Biden's nominee a year before the election while filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat less than a month before the next one.

There are fixes to the problem of Supreme Court tyranny, aggravated by their habit of deciding things in the absence of Constitutional power to do so under Article III, as noted last month in these pages.

Congress and the President could expand the Court by adding new Justices or they could limit the Court's jurisdiction to prevent them from for example stopping the actions of the democratic branches until after a full trial or only by unanimous vote.

There are such proposals before Congress. Guess who's blocking them?  Hint: it's the same law and order party that has lined up behind a tangerine-faced Russian agent with 91 criminal charges pending against him.

To sum up, there are solutions to these supposedly intractable structural problems that cripple our democracy.  The Post can't quite bring itself to admit that these solutions require only 56 things: a Democratic President, a Democratic House, and 54 Democratic Senators willing to abolish the idiotic filibuster.

It turns out that the crisis of democratic government in these United States isn't caused by “partisan gridlock,” as both-sides hacks like Balz have been telling us for years.  It's caused by Republicans.  And the solution is Democrats. 

Plucky Job Creators vs. The Crushing Fist of the Deep State - An Old, Old Story

By Business Editor Samuel Insull
with Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

The jackboots of liberal elite deep state job killers struck again, this time in Virginia, coming down like the proverbial ton of bricks on a hard-working small business owner.  Or, as The Washington Post described it,

The manager of a laundry business in Virginia was accused of pulling a 13-year-old girl’s hair while ordering her back to work. Other teenagers told investigators they were forced to toil through grueling 11-hour overnight shifts before school. And a new mother was grabbed by the arm and shaken when she asked for help taking care of her infant son, who was strapped in his stroller “with his bottle tied to the chair” while she worked, court records allege.

She's not being groomed to be a Lesbian!

Prosecutors say those were some of the conditions workers endured at Magnolia Cleaning Services, a Williamsburg-based business that cleaned linens for hotels and timeshares. Its owners and managers were charged with operating “a family-based labor trafficking enterprise” that smuggled over 100 migrants from El Salvador, including minors, and forced them to work under threats of violence and deportation, officials said Wednesday during a news conference.

Who will save us from overreaching Biden Administration shock troops like this, you may ask.

There's a clear answer: Republicans.  Just ask them. 

One of the many dark-money institutions established by plutocrats to provide, um, intellectual heft to Republican attacks on regulation, the Heritage Foundation, calmly explained the problems caused by government regulation:

The Biden Administration’s regulatory agenda for 2022 reveals complete indifference toward the social and economic chaos perpetrated to date by the President’s progressive policies. Few, if any, of the thousands of looming regulations are necessary or beneficial notwithstanding the enormous costs, and many will erode free enterprise and individual liberty....

[T]he White House boasts that federal agencies will “build on significant progress the Administration has already made advancing our priorities and proving that our Government can deliver results—from confronting the pandemic, to creating a stronger and fairer economy, to addressing climate change and advancing equity.”

As with so much of the Leftist manifesto, this conceit about government’s efficacy and beneficence is misguided. In actuality, the Biden Administration has failed to check the spread of the coronavirus.  [But unlike his Republican predecessor, he did manage to limit the death toll by requiring vaccines and masking, – Ed.]

Its unconstrained spending has contributed to the worst inflation in 40 years, while 18 months of welfare and unemployment profligacy has intensified an unprecedented labor shortage and supply chain crisis. [Seems like only yesterday! – Ed.]

There are also billions of dollars being funneled into destructive climate initiatives that actually undermine rather than enhance environmental quality. The Administration’s preoccupation with racial and gender equity is also exacerbating what Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez has dubbed America’s “grievance caste system,” thereby sowing discord and resentment.

For the Biden Administration to assert that more regulation and even bigger government will “improve the lives of the American people” mocks the challenges facing the nation and betrays the fundamental principles of its Founding [including or excluding slavery? – Ed.] . Now more than ever, citizens must demand that Congress reclaim its oversight responsibilities and lawmaking authority and codify rigorous rulemaking standards. Otherwise, the Biden Administration’s radical regulatory agenda will reduce America to “nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

So regulation is bad because it treats us like cows. That's a view.

While the Biden Administration seems content to turn us into sheep, this farrago of nonsense has had a more profound effect in the many Republican-ruled states, where child labor is now regarded as a good thing:

When Iowa lawmakers voted in mid-April to roll back certain child labor protections, they blended into a growing movement driven largely by a conservative advocacy group.

"Free market rules! Two cents please!"

At 4:52 a.m. on April 18, the state’s Senate approved a bill to allow children as young as 14 to work night shifts and 15-year-olds on assembly lines. The measure, which still must pass the Iowa House, is among several the Foundation for Government Accountability is maneuvering through state legislatures.

The Florida-based think tank and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have found remarkable success among Republicans to relax regulations that prevent children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. And they are gaining traction at a time the Biden administration is scrambling to enforce existing labor protections for children.

The FGA achieved its biggest victory in March, playing a central role in designing a new Arkansas law to eliminate work permits and age verification for workers younger than 16. Its sponsor, state Rep. Rebecca Burkes (R), said in a hearing that the legislation “came to me from the Foundation [for] Government Accountability.” 

And you thought it came to her in a dream!

What could go wrong with letting 14-year-olds labor all night on assembly lines or, as in slaughterhouses, disassembly lines?  According to CBS News, plenty:

Children are working dangerous jobs at JBS meat processing plants in Minnesota and Nebraska, hired illegally for overnight shifts and tasks that left a 13-year-old with caustic chemical burns, federal officials say.

The U.S. Department of Labor this week asked a federal court to issue a nationwide restraining order against the world's largest meat processing company's plant clean-up provider, Packers Sanitation Services, or PSSI, to stop it from employing dozens of workers under the age of 18. A U.S. district judge in Lincoln, Nebraska, granted the temporary request on Thursday, a department spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch in an email.

An investigation launched in August found that PSSI hired at least 31 children — ranging in age from 13 to 17 — to fulfill the company's sanitation contracts at JBS plants....

Which is the point. Despite endless bleating from Republicans and their owners about the supposed threat to “free enterprise and individual liberty,” regulation has a purpose. 

In the case of child labor laws, it's to protect children (and also to let them get an education). 

In the case of climate changes initiatives, it's to keep us from broiling or drowning, or both. 

In the case of vaccine and mask mandates, it's to keep millions of us alive. 

Those facts are not in dispute, despite the best efforts of disingenuous propagandists like our friends from the Heritage Foundation. Behind any regulation there's a reason. If there wasn't, it could be voided by a court under the Administrative Procedure Act [Stop snoring back there – Ed.] 

Using the skills his pappy learned in slavery

You'll be amazed to learn that the Republican indifference to the lives and fortunes of poor children and other intended beneficiaries of government regulation did not, despite the shrieks from our newly-minted Republican allies about the dangers of “Trumpism,” begin in 2017. The attack on government regulation sung to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’ goes back many decades, to the days when then TV pitchman Ronald Reagan inveighed against the assault on liberty that was – Medicare.

Once elected, St. Ronald of Bitburg assured us in his first inaugural address that "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." 

His solution to the problem of 13-year-olds working on the kill floor of chicken plants was to overthrow the Government of Nicaragua.  You had to be there.

The Republican Party's fervid and unshakable opposition to regulation as a method to solve problems up to and included mass extinction events is at the core of the party's appeal to voters and more crucially the rich and powerful who write the checks that keep them going. 

To be fair, there are a few regulatory initiatives that Republicans approve of, including those regulating the reproductive rights of women, the medical rights of children with identified conditions such as gender dysphoria, the right of the State of Texas to chop up desperate refugees seeking asylum, and the right of any yahoo, no matter how ignorant or bigoted, to control what everyone else's children can learn in school.

But that's different because those regulations don't “mock[]s the challenges facing the nation [or] betray[] the fundamental principles of its Founding.”

And if you still don't understand, we have a cartoon from Prager “U” in which Frederick Douglass explains it all to you.

Broken Opinion: It's All the Fault of Coastal Elites, Like You and Me!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Washington Correspondent Tess Harding

Having bored everyone last week with an endless interview with Spy Political Editor David Bloviator, we were really hoping to avoid bloviators named David this week.

But then we came across this Tweet [You mean X – Copy Ed][F*** that – Ed.]:

There are two types of Times columnists, the spectacularly ignorant and the actively malicious.

I'm not sure what the second type is. https://t.co/4rNDKHCBx1

— Edward (@Fornbirkibeinn) August 5, 2023

It turns out that Mr. Edward was referring not to the distinguished editorial page of The New York Times, but to the pages of another Rupert Murdoch disinformation volcano, doing business as The Times of London.

But the combination of spectacular ignorance and active malice so perfectly describes a half dozen of New York Times op-ed columnists that we couldn't let it pass.  The toxic stew is the favorite recipe of Pamela Pill, Bretbug, Monsignor Douthat, National Review David, and Kevin Dowd's sister Maureen, among others.

Today we turn to the other: that great public intellectual and connoisseur of fine Italian meats, Moral Mountain David Brooks. 

His topic for yesterday: who's to blame for the deep and wide loyal support of a thrice-indicted and twice-impeached corrupt subversive bigoted Russian stooge?

The question actually contains the correct answer, but that didn't stop our deep-thinking no-reporting columnist from arriving at the wrong answer.

His answer was, wait for it, 

Keep waiting.

Lie down.  Take an edible.

You are!

That's right: if you're the kind of person who shells out $1800 a year to read this codswallop every day, you're a coastal cultural elitist who has driven average Americans into the tiny orange hands of ex-President U Bum. 

Trump? it's all your fault!

Just to give you a flavor of what passes for his argument, we'll quote this much (and come back to it later when we deconstruct the sources of this drivel):

I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

We remember the history a little differently, which is to say correctly.  More on that later.  But let's just follow his causal chain to the last bite of the ciabatta sub:

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

Speaking of “epistemic,” we'll let our friend Greg Sargent point out that the ol' Perfessor's theory is, um, falsified by those pesky facts:  (His whole thread is well worth your time, unlike Brooks's crapcan column.)

In 2020, 53% of Biden voters didn’t have a college degree, vs. 46% who did, per Pew. Yes, that's more lopsided for Trump (31-70). But the Dem anti-Trump coalition has a lot of the “less educated class” in it.

So the facts don't support the ol' Perfessor's claim that Biden v. Trump is a battle between those nasty cultural elites (like us!) and the long-suffering working class.

In fact, the real facts suggest a contrary reading of who supports ex-Pres. Tiny Toadstool and why:

So it's not that highly-educated people like Biden and everyone else likes Trump. You see that split only among white voters.  Among Black voters, amazingly enough there isn't a fear of cultural elitism of the sort that desegregated the Boston Public Schools.  And by the way almost half of those white elitists voted for...a corrupt Russian-owned sex offender.

Nowhere in his column does Soprassata Dave touch on these amazing facts, probably because they fatally undercut his bullsh*t thesis.

In fact, once you start pulling on this thread, everything unravels.  As noted, his examples of cultural elitism are also rooted in white racism.  It wasn't “authorities” that ordered the Boston Public Schools desegregated because they had been illegally and intentionally segregated by race; it was federal judge Arthur Garrity, carrying out his duty to apply Brown v. Board of Education.  And Wellesley wasn't included in the plan because no one argued that the lack of Black students in ritzy suburbs (other than the ones that districts like Wellesley took in under the voluntary METCO program) had been caused by illegal de jure segregation.

And as for the old whine about how rich college educated liberals managed to dodge the draft (while trying to end the war for everyone), it doesn't explain why uneducated whites continue to support a coward who openly boasts of dodging the draft thanks to his rich daddy.

Brooks's stories do have an origin: they are the same toxic fictions peddled by white supremacists and other divisive hatemongers like Dick Nixon and George Wallace.  We're old enough to remember Nixon's war on elite “nattering nabobs of negativism” who dared to attempt extricating those poorer Americans from the pointless charnel house of Vietnam and got Medicare for everyone over 65 (which proved to have zero electoral upside in 1966).  And we're old enough to remember how bigots blamed their centuries-old bigotry on Blacks and liberals, except back then it was called “white backlash.”

And speaking of those arrogant elites, generations of Southern segregationists cloaked their racism in supposed populism. Then as now The New York Times fell for it.  Here's a 1972 sample describing the enduring appeal of all-time champion white racist George Wallace:

 

They're not racists – they're just letting off steam, they're just responding with understandable frustration to those nasty bra-burning coastal elites, they're just livin' in a small town, they're f***-all.  For over 60 years, white racists and their defenders have tried to get us to blame someone else for their unrelenting and virulent violent racism.  We suspect that Brooks knows this, but like a half century of apologists for the Republican pro-racist “Southern Strategy,” he knows that the truth will sink his not yet lost cause.

Before we go, we can't resist deflating one last Brooksean stupidity balloon:

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

It's remarkable that he can pack so much wrong in one short paragraph.  Who is excluded by using non-pejorative terms to describe sexual identity, other than bigots?  “Latinx” gets a big response from reactionaries like Brooks, but if the reason that white people support Trump is because they prefer “Latino” to “Latinx,” then they're a lot more fragile than anyone thought.

And who is being fired for not using newly minted words? If people are being fired for how they describe others, it's because the words they are using have a long and terrible history in this country. Of course, our expert on Italian cured meats and everything else cites no examples of such injustices, because, as we once said about former Chicago Tribune publisher Col. R.R. McCormick, “he cites no authority, being it.”