Monday, April 24, 2023

🔮

No, my day didn't start with the news of celebrities losing their cable news gigs.  It started here:

The NY Times had an article a few days ago that he Heritage Foundation has become the point organization for generating list of conservatives to staff Federal agencies when the Republicans are back in power. They are planning to couple that with executive orders to turn what are currently large numbers of civil service jobs into political appointees. Trump singed such an executive order right before the election and it was quickly eliminated by Biden, one of his very first acts as president. The goal is to staff all the government agencies with people actively opposed to the agencies they lead with a goal to destroy their function and existence. Imagine Betsy DeVos on steroids. I have a good friend that worked at the SEC leading some of their biggest enforcement actions, he left when Trump came to power and they settled cases for effectively nothing. He left, why work hard when you are undermined by those in charge. I can imagine an EPA or OSHA that is completely gutted and left ineffective for a generation.

It's not so theoretical, the Washington Post had an article on something similar in a count in Michigan. I have a subscription so this gift link hopefully works. https://wapo.st/3AnXnQg

The Republicans are picking ideologues candidates over experienced, (the Michigan article mentions this, experienced Republicans were tossed out for reactionaries), and the same is true for now picks to operate the government. An HVAC technician to run public health, and here in NH a guy with a business degree and zero experience in education to run our department of education. What is true in all is a hostility to the actual function of government. 

Institutions take a long time to build, but can be rendered ineffective for decades in one election cycle. It's hard to see the way out of this bind when one political party refuses to act in good faith in any way. 

And then I read this:

A year ago, two runaway fires set by the U.S. Forest Service converged to become the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon wildfire. It rode 74 mph wind gusts, engulfing dozens of homes in a single day as it tore through canyons and over mountains. 
The blaze became the biggest wildfire in the continental United States in 2022 and the biggest in New Mexico history. And it was the federal government’s fault: An ill-prepared and understaffed crew didn’t properly account for dry conditions and high winds when it ignited prescribed burns meant to limit the fuel for a potential wildfire. 
By the time the blaze was fully contained in August, it had destroyed about 430 homes, according to the Forest Service. Monsoons helped extinguish the fire, but they spurred floods that caused more damage.

FEMA stepped in to help, and actually made things worse, because FEMA is used to handling floods and hurricanes, and doesn’t do well with fires in rural areas with small populations. And that’s according to FEMA.

I’m sure the people in New Mexico are wondering how the federal government could get any worse.

Here in Texas we're wondering if the state government can get any stupider.  The Texas Senate wants to give $8000 vouchers to families who want to put their kids in private schools. The state allots $6100 per student for public schools. Even the arch-conservative crazies on the local school board can see what that means: strangulation of their schools, of the entire school district. It’s sparked outrage because the local school district superintendent finally sent an email to the district explaining what was happening in Austin, and local news picked it up. At a meeting with the two state senators for the area, the superintendent was told: “Tell your people on Twitter to back off.” Meanwhile other districts are working to make May 1 “Mayday,” to raise awareness of what’s happening to public schools in Texas. The idea, you will pardon the metaphor, is to turn this into a prairie fire 🔥. The GOP has had its way; now they are going too far. The people on Twitter are not going to back off.

The upside is, the crazies on the school board are backing off. Even they understand it’s no good complaining about settled district policies that are now “woke” if the district is closing schools and laying off 50% of the teachers and staff. Parents don’t like it when the school district that has been the pride of the area for half a century or more, is threatened with ruin and destruction. Even Austin is hearing about that.

The crazies in the GOP are about to catch the car they’ve been chasing. Indeed, in Austin and Washington, they have. And nobody really likes what they’re doing with it.

I’ll just drop this in as the latest example of what I mean:

Kevin McCarthy is third in line to the Presidency. He holds one of three constitutionally mandated offices. He operates that office like a man in a round room looking desperately for the corner.  What can we expect from this?

According to an analysis by MSNBC's James Downie, McCarthy's tenure as speaker has been filled with stumbles and incompetence that will likely lead to his ouster by members of his own caucus who weren't thrilled with his ascension -- that required 15 ballots -- from the start.

Addressing McCarthy's debt ceiling proposal, Downie wrote, "The problem here isn’t the bill itself — even though it has the absence of substance you’d expect from today’s GOP. The problem is that the basic elements of what’s being requested in the bill have been public knowledge for months, and yet McCarthy and his team have dawdled on bringing it to the floor."

Add to that, he pointed out, there is no indication McCarthy has the votes he needs to get it passed and there is no way Democrats are going to bail him out.

McCarthy is a lame-duck Speaker who probably won't last until the 2024 elections and a new Congress.  But even his own party is ready to turn on him, even as they turn on each other.  This may inspire a few MAGA heads, but it won't inspire the country to vote again for the Grand Old Party.  Which isn't a political party anymore, anyway. 

And there it is: the lesson in Washington, the lesson in Austin: public scrutiny = ☠️.  Do you remember George W. putting a former horse trainer (or trader; or something to do with horses) in charge of FEMA?  And then came Katrina, and suddenly everybody cared about who was in charge of FEMA?  We are only 3 years away from this: Surprisingly, despite that, Trump was not re-elected. I have no explanation for this, except that people do actually expect competence from their government.

Polls now show Biden is suffering from low approval ratings and a lack of enthusiasm for the economy (which my daughter the Golden Child insists is suffering runaway food inflation prices, even as I remember real, double digit inflation.  I remember when prices would rise in the store when the new deliveries came in at much higher prices than the stuff on the shelves. She's also concerned about interest rates, as she and her husband want to buy a house, and I remember the 25% interest rates Paul Volcker imposed on the economy to stop inflation in the '80's.)  I think it's the province of youth to complain about how expensive adult life is; sometimes just because.  I also know nobody likes the incumbent POTUS until it comes time to turn him out of office; and then the incumbent almost invariably wins re-election (how many incumbents in the 20th century lost re-election?  Poppy, I know.  And Trump, in this century.  Other than that?)  But when it comes down to:  "Do you want government to function, or to be dismantled?," the enthusiasm for "dismantled" starts to wane when it actually happens.  Republicans in Texas think the voting public won't care if they give vouchers to people who can afford private school, or even if they repeat the debacle from the end of the last century, and pay public money to anybody who says they're operating a school (that went so badly it was ended before the next regular session of the Lege could repeal the law).  It's not clear even now the radical attempts to destroy public schools in Texas, from kindergarten to graduate school, will become law.  But the real discussion about it is happening now (finally!).  And the Republicans I know about in the Lege are, to put it mildly, scared shitless.

Will Trump get his chance to shred the federal government?  I don't think so.  Will the GOP try again to do so in 2028?  Probably.  But the GOP has lost every election (effectively if not always actually) since 2016.  And I don't think they're doing well right now with bare control of the House.  With Trump topping the ticket in 2024, everyone below him on the GOP ticket has to hope he stays away from their race.

Besides, as government shutdowns and 4 years of gross incompetence in the Administration have shown:  the majority of us like government to function, over all.  Enthusiasm for book bannings is meeting more and more resistance in school boards, where the reasonable position of "you don't decide for me what my kid can read" is asserting itself.  And frankly, whether we're going to fund our public shools in the second most populous state in the Union is going to swamp all lesser concerns this year.

Or the schools will collapse, after making sure the blame falls on the Lege.  The old fall back is that the schools "waste" their money, and need to learn to be less profligate.  But up against the fact the vouchers will pay $8000 per student while the Lege is only giving schools $6100 per student, that argument loses all its punch.  Add to that the "local taxes" school districts collect is 1/3rd of the "surplus" the Lege is currently bragging about, and you've set the stage for a prairie fire revolution.

I think the MAGA heads in the GOP who fantasize about dismantling government from the top down are the blush on the cheek of a dying age.  Their time has already passed and they don't realize they are dead men walking.  Because the GOP "deep bench" after Trump is...Ron DeSantis:
Yeah, he's done. Who else? Nikki Haley? Tim Scott? Ted Cruz? Granted, the Democrats have to come up with somebody after Biden, but I'm not seeing a juggernaut in the GOP heading for the White House in 5 years. And then there are the guys considered ideological leaders in the GOP:
"I believe firmly if it was not for the leadership of Tucker Carlson, I don't think that the ideological atmospherics would have been created for Elon Musk to purchase Twitter," [Charlie Kirk] said.
Yeah, except Elmo made a bid on Twitter he then tried to get out of ("Just kidding, Twitter!"), and was forced to consummate by a court in Delaware, where they don't find rich boy's jokes funny.   Other than the court creating the conditions that required Elmo to purchase Twitter, Kirk is absolutely...still wrong.

Such genius does not long lead anything.
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