PMC Commentary

DeSantis's recklessness, and Trump is sure to follow

Attempting to outflank Trump's right, now-official presidential candidate Ron DeSantis declared Monday on "Fox and Friends" that "Our country was careening toward bankruptcy, and after this [debt] deal, our country will still be careening toward bankruptcy." So he's agin' it.

In his first major test of presidential thinking, DeSantis showed himself to be utterly without principle, responsibility or reason. By 5 June, says the Treasury, the country will be in default, its economy will careen into chaos and rippling destruction, and the world will suffer equally.

No prudent, conscientious candidate for the U.S. presidency would conceivably entertain such a global calamity. So you can toss DeSantis into the Trumpian well of Ayn Randian nihilism.  

He pulled this remarkably clownish stunt because Trump, so far, "has stayed quiet" (NYT) on the debt-limit deal. His Truth Social entries are all about his sublime polling leads and what a hopeless stumblebum Gov. DeSantis has been. Not a word about the most pressing issue facing the nation today.

Of course Trump hasn't any room to lecture anyone on debt and deficits. (Not that that will stop him tomorrow, Q.E.D.) He was bequeathed a deficit of $590 billion. The first year of his presidency, it rose to $670 billion. Then $780 billion in 2018, then $980 billion, with his administration winding with an eye-popping deficit of $3.13 trillion.

Much of that was covid relief, but his idiotic 2017 tax cut accounted for much of it as well. "In all," writes the Times, "Mr. Trump added $7.8 trillion in deficit spending over 10 years through legislation and executive orders during his four years in office." 

Hence DeSantis plans to attack his main rival on his affinity for debt — but he's doing so in the most reckless way: opposing a deal, whatever its merits or demerits, that will at least foreclose on default and disaster. 

Trump, coward that he is, appears likely to wait until the deal is done. Then he'll rag on it. DeSantis has simply chosen to demonstrate his unpresidential thinking beforehand.

If his fiscal approach were to be characterized in its truest form, it would have a big red nose, a fright wig, big floppy shoes, and be carrying dynamite.     

Some thoughts on the roots of Trumpism. (The roots are old, and European.)

Joey Mannarino, with 168,000 followers — just one crackpot out of a million on Twitter. "In 2015, when this man" — Trump — "walked down the golden escalator," he once tweeted, "he changed my life." Not for the better. A college-educated Obama voter — a sign of some rationality — Mannarino became entranced by Trump. And down the rabbit hole he went; so far down, he now tweets vacuous items like this: 

We have a problem.

Chick-Fil-A just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

This is bad. Very bad.

I don’t want to have to boycott.

Are we going to have to boycott?

— Joey Mannarino (@JoeyMannarinoUS) May 30, 2023

Elsewhere, Mannarino displays his proclivity toward rather confused thinking. In one post: "My problem with DEI is not the 'diversity' and 'inclusion.'" In another: "I have no problem with diversity." Yet after all that, he then writes: "We have a problem with [diversity, equity and inclusion]." Some might object, "No no, that's not 'confused thinking,' that's stupidity."

I mention this because a Montreal correspondent of mine has been asking about a seemingly intelligent friend, a writer and poet, who also went down the many rabbit holes of Trump — and has stayed there. Why? asks my Canadian friend. What would possess a literate person to sign on to such fatuously transparent demagoguery?

As a blanket answer, stupidity is out — consider my friend's intelligent friend — although stupidity surely accounts for a good deal of Trumpism. Thus I suggested to my Canadian friend that political ignorance and naïveté are the major contributors. And to that I shall add something else.

Of late I have been reading a fair amount of Isaiah Berlin's works on the Romantic Era, roughly 1770-1830. Its essence, as the Oxford philosopher emphasizes again and again, was "the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything." This came in reaction to the Enlightenment Era, in which discoverable answers to humanity's travails were held as the ultimate objective. We could have lasting peace and social harmony, if only we put our minds, our Reason, to it. The truth is out there, to quote "The X-Files."

The Romantics — painters, poets, politicos — rebelled at this, rebelled at what they saw as a stultifying ideation. The true nature of "man," they contended, was to release his inner self, his thundering thoughts, his supreme individualness, his (coming) Nietzschean energy — even if he is altogether barmy in his formulations. Because there is no truth, no eternal, universal values — only the heroic deeds of man. (One can see how modern fascism took root in Romanticism's ethics.)

I submit that my friend's friend, a poet, has been captured intellectually by the aged frissons of Romanticism. There is no truth; there can be no "stable structure of anything"; the Enlightenment's ethics are those of enslavement to faulty Reason.

Real life lies in blowing things up. Hence the endless appeal of Trump. 

The near-death experience of the 14th Amendment option

The question of using the 14th Amendment's wording — "The validity of the public debt ... shall not be questioned" — to shut down all future Republican attempts to extort legislative concessions when the lethal debt limit is reached appears to be on indefinite hold.   

On its face, the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. It is also vastly contradictory. Its statutory wording attempts to override the clear phrasing of the 14th Amendment, and though Congress is free to authorize spending, it then runs up against an arbitrary ceiling. Both cannot live in peaceful coexistence.

Not with Republicans in Congress, who are always eager to replace sober governance with spectacular, bloody theatrics. Let us be absolute on this point. When it comes to the debt ceiling, it is always Republicans who threaten Armageddon, despite The NY Times' silly reporting this morning: "[The Biden-McCarthy agreement] has reopened the door to the debt limit being a perpetual point of leverage that allows the party in the minority — in this case, the Republicans — to use the borrowing cap to extract legislative concessions." 

In this case? When have the Democrats ever brought the nation to the brink of default and economic ruin?

That aside, the Biden administration has seemingly bypassed an opportunity to have the 14th Amendment question answered in federal court. I say seemingly, since legal confusion surrounds the issue, as is true with virtually all legal issues.   

Earlier this month, as default was nearing, the National Association of Government Employees union filed suit in a Boston district court challenging the constitutionality of the statutory debt limit. The case was humming along, but when Biden-McCarthy reached an agreement, the administration had Justice Department lawyers request the postponement of a hearing scheduled for today, and the judge agreed to one, "indefinitely."  

So where does the question of the debt limit's constitutionality stand? Harvard Law's Laurence Tribe tells the Times: "I don’t think there is a judicial solution that lies ahead because the only time that courts can get involved is when it’s a live issue." The good professor recommended that lawmakers "act to iron out the contradictions between the fact that they authorize spending and then set a limit on how much the government can borrow to pay for those expenses" — a recommendation that has as much chance of succeeding as that of Marjorie Taylor Greene curing her psychosis. 

Notwithstanding Tribe's opinion, the NAGE union's president, David Holway, says "This weekend’s announcement of a deal on the debt ceiling does not resolve ... our federal lawsuit." By that I assume he means to press it somewhere, somehow. Yet Tribe's take on the matter would seem dispositive. Without a "live issue," a federal lawsuit appears doomed.

Nevetheless, it's unfortunate that the Biden administration asked that the matter be dropped. The Times reports that the administration "preferred to keep its legal thinking on the matter private," but the matter's legal thinking has already been publicly splashed hither and yon. Perhaps the Boston district court could have revealed its thinking, had the Justice Department asked instead that that the lawsuit be pursued.  

Trump is still Republicans' choice. (Duh.) But they're missing the fun of a DeSantis nomination.

In a dazzling flurry of barely differentiated connotations, a Monmouth University poll (A) released today finds that "Nearly half (45%) of Republican [and Republican-leaning] voters say Trump is definitely the strongest candidate to beat President Joe Biden in 2024, and another 18% think he is probably the strongest candidate.

"Among voters who name Trump as their top-of-mind preference for the GOP presidential nomination, 74% say he is definitely the strongest candidate the party can put up against Biden and 21% say he probably is."

Roughly one in five Republicans say the strongest contender would "definitely" be a non-Trump, and 33% say the strongest contender would "probably" be someone else. "Just one-third of GOP voters say another Republican would definitely (13%) or probably (19%) be a stronger candidate than Trump."

After hopelessly wading through the "strongest candidate" vs. the "strongest candidate against Biden" and all the definitelys and probablys, one is left with the essential finding: Republicans still want Trump.   

This is not to say they dislike Ron DeSantis. Although his electoral support has declined, he remains "about as well liked as Trump among GOP voters," observes Monmouth. One suspects they don't wish to throw him away just yet, since things could get, ahem, a trifle dicey for their still-preferred candidate — reams of state and federal indictments against him, don't you know.

Indeed, even the present gap between Trump and DeSantis is far from insurmountable for the challenger: in a head-to-head matchup, it's the former president 56%, the governor 35%. Sadly for Ron, those stats are a flip from February, when it was DeSantis 53% and Trump 40%. By March it was a tie in the mid-40s. If DeSantis is permitted to keep talking sans a script, the challenger's challenge may yet become insurmountable. 

Initially I was a hardcore Trump man; the Republican Party could not possibly do worse, I reckoned, than with this criminal sociopath at its ticket's top. Further reflection, however, softened my pro-Trump stance. If DeSantis were the party's presidential nominee, Trump would splenetically unravel in apoplectic fits of resentful entitlement and quotidian vindictiveness. It would be a splendid campaign, Republicans gutting Republicans rather than battling Biden.     

So you folks In Magaland should keep those indictments in mind, while keeping the governor in your back pocket. Since chaos, sheer anarchy and flying ad hominens are your favorite pastime, what could be better than a DeSantis nomination?    

A debt deal about very little, but with a lot of American politics

From former econ professor and now Substack blogger Noah Smith, in Noahpinion: 

Over the last three years I became a lot more optimistic about U.S. politics.... [Bipartisan covid relief, a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the bipartisan CHIPS Act, bipartisan support for Ukraine, no "angry," 2022 red wave. But] this whole episode has deflated some of my budding optimism about the effectiveness of the American political system.....

The recent fight over the debt ceiling ... seems more like a return to the pointless obstructionism and grandstanding that characterized politics in the 2010s. There was absolutely zero reason for the House GOP leadership to use the debt ceiling — they could have just forced a deal through the normal appropriations process. Few people actually believed that the country’s leaders would let the U.S. default on its sovereign debt due to a random minor budget fight — I certainly didn’t. So the net effect of using this tactic seems to have been to make the U.S. look like a dysfunctional clown show in front of our allies, at a time when we need to be projecting an image of dependability....

The House GOP went through months of dramatic, high-stakes negotiations, forced the administration to consider the Fourteenth Amendment and the trillion dollar coin, got the media talking seriously about the prospect of a U.S. sovereign default ... all that for a little bit of discretionary spending restraint, a few added work requirements for food stamps, and a little defunding of the IRS? Seriously?? It’s like if a guy walked into a restaurant with a ticking bomb demanding to blow everyone up if he didn’t get a free peppermint!

All true, save for Smith's assertion that there was "absolutely no reason" for the Republican leadership to use default as an apocalyptic explosive. Perhaps only an economist could make such a nonsensical political remark. The GOP leadership had every reason to threaten default, from the Freedom Caucus's throatcutting demands on it, to its suicidal option of enraging the base, to staging yet another clown show in its heretofore remorseless campaign of gratuitous clown shows. Even a hint from Kevin McCarthy that "the normal appropriations process" would replace this operatic tragicomedy would have dethroned the speaker in a two-minute overnight coup.   

And Republicans won, if one can call wrecking the "normal" political process winning. (Plus we must remind Smith that the Republican House did not "return" to "pointless obstructionism and grandstanding"; of that, it has an uninterrupted record since at least its Tea Partying of 2011.) Dysfunction is Republicans' goal, their holy grail, their nirvana — and lately they've been in heaven. For instance they managed to inflict some cruelty on poor 50-to-54-year-olds while also managing to relieve some of the insufferable IRS pressure on the wealthiest among us.    

As for Smith's emotional and intellectual deflation — the puncturing of his "budding optimism about the effectiveness of the American political system" — to each his own. I would only add that now is too soon to weigh in with judgment. We cannot know the true course of American politics until November 2024. Either Trumpian dysfunction, incompetence and aggressive ignorance will make a return — and in the next go-around, with hopped-up authoritarianism — or the forces of far-right darkness will be egregiously scattered to the electoral winds, forcing Republicans at large to renavigate their route.         

I reserve a prediction. 

The Russia-Ukraine war: A small-scale Battle of Britain, and D-Day's timing has been decided, says Zelensky

I recently read Erik Larson's superb The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, virtually a day-by-day account of the shattered British homefront, 1940, and Prime Minister Churchill's magnificent leadership throughout.

The book's alternating theme is Hitler's sinister determination to demoralize "the enemy" via the Luftwaffe's air campaign, and then sue for peace. What the Nazi dictator failed to weigh was the superior determination of Britain's prime minister and England's citizenry.        

The contemporary comparison of President Zelensky, the Ukrainian people, and dictator Putin has been made many times. And the similarities become more striking by the day. The one major difference is that while Hitler was unable to launch an invasion of the isles — "Operation Sea Lion" — Putin commenced his Ukrainian campaign with a ground assault. That, having miscarried, has since transformed into an air campaign against the Ukrainian citizenry.

This week, Russia has let loose an extraordinary assault from the sky on Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, just as Hitler tried to bomb Britain's capital, London, into submission.

Kyiv's air-raid alarms have sounded throughout the day, "sending parents racing to get their children to safety and hospital workers to take cover in bomb shelters," reports The NY Times. "Powerful explosions echoed around the city within minutes, as Ukrainian air defenses sprung into action. Children wearing backpacks started to run and scream when booms resounded on one Kyiv street."

Kyiv. Morning after sleepless night under fire. Anxiety once again...
Children running and screaming for shelter to the sounds of explosions. But it should not be like this - anywhere and never. Fear cannot be turned off – but we do not stop, we act. Ukraine continues to fight 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/wTKS3sv6qi

— Олена Зеленська (@ZelenskaUA) May 29, 2023

Daytime attacks have followed nighttime attacks. In one, Russia fired 40 cruise missiles and sent 38 Iranian-made drones into Kyiv. Thanks to U.S. assistance — which was deep in the works against despotic aggression in 1940, as well — 36 of the missiles and 30 drones were shot down. Today, Kyiv was again attacked, this time by 20 drones. 

During the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, Churchill decided to repay Hitler with aerial assaults on Germany, including Berlin. Likewise, Zelensky's special operation forces, or possibly his intelligence units, struck Moscow today with "at least eight drones," writes the Times — "the first attack to hit civilian areas in the Russian capital and a potent sign that the war is increasingly reaching the heart of Russia."

In yet another display of breathtakingly transcendent, hypocritical arrogance, the Russian Defense Ministry accused Ukraine of having launched a "terrorist attack" on Moscow. 

Today's blockbuster news, however, is that President Zelensky says he has now approved the date for Ukraine's D-Day counteroffensive. "The decisions have been made," he said last night in an address to the nation. The offensive is likely to feature firepower — some of it, already in progress — principally in the south of Ukraine, as its forces attempt to interrupt Russia's east-to-west supply line, from Mariupol to Kherson. 

The Russian dictator's attacks on Kyiv and other cities “bring us and the whole world to an obvious conclusion: Russia wants to follow the path of evil to the end," said Zelensky. No more vivid comparison could be made to Nazi Germany's dictator, or Ukraine's leader to Winston Churchill. 

Trump, of course, makes even Memorial Day about ... Trump

We're not shocked. (After all, as a 2016 candidate he disparaged Gold Star families and demeaned a war hero.) Just sickened.

How Trumpers — who claim to honor war veterans — can possibly tolerate Cadet Bone Spurs — who narcissistically converts a day to honor dead veterans into a day to promote himself — is utterly beyond me.

We are sickened, but they are sick.    

The one man who could sink the debt-limit deal

For the debt-ceiling agreement to make it to the House floor in legislative form, it must first make it through the Rules Committee, which Kevin McCarthy monstrously contaminated with three hardcore "conservatives" in exchange for his speakership.

They are Reps. Ralph Norman and Chip Roy of the Freedom Caucus, and Thomas Massie (pictured), who, as The Washington Post describes him, "is an eclectic libertarian who is socially and ideologically close to the Freedom Caucus."

The Rules Committee is composed of nine Republicans and four Democrats, the latter of whom will, presumably, vote against the debt-ceiling bill. That means the legislation will require the votes of at least seven Republicans.

Roy, who indecorously calls the bill a "turd-sandwich," takes that number to eight. Norman cuts the number to seven, since he calls the bill "insanity" and "totally unacceptable."  

That leaves the committee vote up to Massie — again, assuming no Democrat votes in favor. The Post reports he is "officially undecided on the legislation." He says he "need[s] to see text." 

Massie represents northeast Kentucky's 4th congressional district, which is about to become lathered in federal largess. That, or Roy, Norman and the other Freedom Caucus crackpots, cranks, freaks, wackos, demagogues, creationists, cultists, conspiracy theorists, theocrats, monomaniacs, extremists, harebrains, psychotics and nihilists will convince him to set the world on fire. 

We await The Honorable Eclectic Libertarian Mr. Massie's decision.

The ruinous democratization of the GOP's presidential nomination process: It will likely produce Trump

By mid to late summer, as many as a dozen Republican presidential candidates will be chasing the nomination crown; each one of them a declared alternative to Trump, and each one of them the destruction of alternatives to Trump. The party establishment — what's left of it — claims to be aghast at another top-of-the-ticket go-around with the Donald, but it's powerless to narrow the field, which could ensure a Trump renomination.

If only the days of party bosses and pragmatic machines were still with us. For example in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt incorrigibly decided he wanted his old job back, the ironfisted establishment went to work on behalf of William Howard Taft. It squeezed Teddy out, relegating him to third-party status. Of course T.R. blew up the party's general election chances — Woodrow Wilson squeaked by with about 42% of the vote — but in the nomination game, the party would not be denied its rightful, kingmaking place.

Today, it's anarchy. No one is beholden to parties because the parties are dispensable. With the right small-dollar operation, a handful of big-money pals and a touch of   photogenesis, every man and woman is his or her own king- or queenmaker. So even establishment participants can and do say to hell with the establishment. And that is the gift the anti-Trump establishment is feebly, insipidly, paradoxically giving to Trump.  

It was not meant to be. "The conventional wisdom at the beginning of the year was that the field would be relatively small.... Republican anti-Trump donors were working to thin the herd to prevent a repeat of the divided field that guaranteed Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016," writes the Times. But major donors have their favorites and kept pets, and so the field has widened, possibly up to 10 or 12 contenders. And Trump is loving it.   

He has other advantages aside from the sheer number of candidates. The not-Trumps turn ghostly pale and go paralytically mute at the mere thought of criticizing the is-Trump by name. The criticisms they do cast are veiled beyond effortless recognition. What's more, the not-DeSantises are carving up the potential DeSantis vote as well, thus weakening the one guy with a realistic chance at being Trump.  

Michelle Cottle notes that "so far, the pack of pretenders to Donald Trump’s throne reeks of weakness." Their behavior has been somewhat "passive-aggressive," she continues, and "the result is a collection of challengers trying to sell beta-male energy to a voting base hooked on outrage, machismo and blood lust." It may be that attacking Trump is a sure way to lose, but licking his golf shoes is an even surer path to undignified defeat.  

Although the DeSantis camp intends to forsake obsequiousness (we think), it has also taken up the hustling of downright hallucinatory tales. "We don’t believe it’s 2016 again," said senior adviser Ryan Tyson, who went on to parse the field: "35 percent as 'only Trump' voters, 20 percent as 'never Trump' and the remaining 45 percent as the DeSantis sweet spot." 

That, regrettably for DeSantis and Tyson, is not how the respondents to a May 24th Fox News poll (A) saw it. They had Trump beating the Florida governor 53-20 in a crowded field. Worse yet is Iowa, where a May 25th Emerson poll (A-) had Trump over DeSantis, 62-20.

Among the rest of the already swollen field — you know their names; most, anyway — only Asa Hutchinson and the two Chrises, Christie and Sununu, have shown an inclination to take on Trump. Hutchinson has said he "has led us astray" and "undermined the fabric of our democracy." Christie has deliriously said "I don’t believe that Republican voters penalize people who criticize Trump."

Only Sununu made a rather pragmatic observation: "Everyone says, 'We have to keep people from getting in.' That’s the wrong message.... The discipline is getting out."

Sununu is wrong on the front end, if by getting out he means after Iowa and New Hampshire (where DeSantis once led). It could be over by then. But he's correct on the backend, assuming he means departing well before the two early primary states. Yet even that seems unlikely, since each candidate has his or her own angel, allowing them to remain in the race well after their inevitable expiration date.  

Oh for the days of party bosses, efficient machines, smoke-hazed backrooms and the flow of bourbon. The election year of 2024 would be 1912 all over again, with DeSantis as Taft, Trump as third-party Roosevelt, and Biden as the victorious Wilson.

The debt ceiling deal: a conventional compromise, but in criminal circumstances

Although the spending deal reached yesterday between the White House and House Republicans was unusual in its degrees of partisan malice, it was also rather conventional in this age of elected maliciousness. Vastly unconventional was the manner in which the deal was reached. 

The agreement's details are only broadly known, but include caps on discretionary spending for two years, no new taxes, more money for the military and veterans, a cut in IRS appropriations, the reclamation of some unspent funds from a pandemic relief bill, faster environmental reviews of gas and oil drilling projects, and most critically, new work and duration requirements for food stamps and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. 

Those last provisions were a centerpiece of legislation that House Republicans' had already passed, and only their inclusion would permit the debt ceiling's lift. We get the boorishness we voted for, so in that, the compromise agreed to yesterday was only fitting; a product of representative democracy, divided government and — pluralism?

No. Pluralism entails the reasoning together of disparate political factions. It most decidedly does not entail agreements reached while one party holds a knife to the other's throat. That's extortionist terrorism, not pluralism.

And that is what delegitimizes the debt ceiling deal. It will — maybe, for this is the next drama —  pass Congress and go on the books as a negotiated compromise. But it was in reality a ransom paid by executive marks to legislative goons and con artists.

President Biden intentionally misspoke when he announced that "the agreement represents a compromise," and The NY Times cooperatively misreported when it wrote that the previous House bill's passage "forced Mr. Biden to do what he had said he never would: negotiate over raising the debt ceiling." 

No subject of terrorism is ever forced to parley with the terrorists. It's a choice, and unquestionably the wrong choice. It will, of course, invite more terrorism. Yet to students of political philosophy, most objectionable is that the agreement violates every principle of pluralism, upon which our representative democracy is founded.

The chief goon could not even bring himself to be gracious in victory:  

I just got off the phone with the president a bit ago. After he wasted time and refused to negotiate for months, we've come to an agreement in principle that is worthy of the American people.

I'll deliver a statement at 9:10pm ET. Watch here:https://t.co/vmn31INPH5

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) May 28, 2023

And so a second knife was plunged into the president's back. Republicans have scored not only a legislative victory, they have led in the public relations game, daily accusing Biden of intransigence while the White House kept mostly silent.

As for that next drama, who knows? The latest drop-dead date is 5 June, but Republican extortionists are immensely displeased that the poor and disadvantaged among us were not thoroughly screwed in the agreement. Everything "they fought for" in the earlier House bill was omitted, cried Representative and Freedom Caucuser Bob Good of Virginia, and the Times reports that his hateful little club is now "huddling to identify procedural tools to delay passage of the agreement or make the bill more conservative."

Progressive Democrats are also honked — some, seemingly for the wrong reason. Said Lindsay Owens of the liberal Groundwork Collaborative: "Conceding to Republican demands to hamstring the I.R.S.’s ability to go after wealthy tax evaders is a losing proposition for Democrats." It wasn't the idiotic hamstringing of the I.R.S. that was most repugnant; it was the way in which the hamstringing was accomplished. 

If passed, the debt ceiling "compromise" will be a black mark on President Biden's legacy. He need not have been victimized; his correct course was to maintain the direction he for so long dictated: no negotiations with a knife at his, ours, and the world's throat. Capitulation not only produced a bad deal, it blew up the very foundation of authentic representative democracy and the American political tradition: pluralism.

I just spent four hours, 15 minutes on the phone with Apple "tech support." My eyes are glazed, my brain is mush, my blood pressure is up. In short, this is not the time to write a post on anything but the pathetic, sorryass assistance provided to MacBook customers. Disconnected calls, had to start over; wrong departments and transferred calls; low-level tech supporters who knew not what they were talking about, I had to figure out two issues on my own; had to reinstall the entire operating system, wiped out saved information after being assured that would not be the case; wound up with a "senior" tech adviser who declared I would have to send this shitty laptop — which has had constant problems from Day One — off to repairs in another state FOUR TIMES before anyone would even consider replacing it, which I had already been told, by two other senior advisers, was an impossibility: "Apple does not replace lemon laptops, even while still under warranty — period." Nine-hundred dollars I spent on this MacAir; Apple has $1 trillion in the bank but won't shell out the replacement cost, perhaps no more than $450. I have been informed repeatedly that I'm just shit out of luck. All agree at Apple their corporate policy is insane, but also immovable, unchangeable, nonnegotiable. Beware.       

OK we're convinced. Poltergeists are after Ron DeSantis.

From the Daily Beast:

"For the second consecutive night, 2024 GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis ran into a technical difficulty during an important moment—this time during a Newsmax interview."

Network host Eric Bolling asked him about the NAACP's travel advisory for minorities and LGBTQ+ individuals so utterly out of it that they're willing to spend their money in DeSantis's racist, homophobic, authoritarian state. Notes the Beast parentetically, "Bolling incorrectly referred to the advisory as a 'ban.'" 

In his answer, the governor projected: "This is such a stunt. It’s a typical political farce" — while the audience watched "a frozen split-screen." 

The feed then resumed, "only to freeze again about 40 seconds later when DeSantis was talking about minorities in places that aren’t Florida.

"Nearly 30 seconds later, the visual feed finally resumed, this time for good."

Or until the next interview, anyway. 

DeSantis's campaign once released a video in which a voice thunders: "And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: 'I need a protector.' So God made a fighter.'" Oh God, you're such a jokester. But he may have a rather partisan side, too. On the ninth day, he just might feed DeSantis's main opponent, Donald Trump, a cholesteral-filled, artery-clogging, "cardiac-event"-inducing cheeseburger. 

Slouching toward compromise, and speeding toward McCarthy's doom

If reports of the debt ceiling talks are accurate, then Kevin McCarthy's final demand should be a re-extension of federal unemployment benefits. He may need them himself, because the House's Matt Gaetzes will be out for his hide. 

After all of the House speaker's calls for suicidal charges of his lightheaded Freedom Caucus brigade, the deal in the works looks more like a feint. It would raise the debt ceiling for two years, after which the apocalyptic game would resume, but critically, well beyond the 2024 election.

Military and veterans-care spending would increase, while nondefense discretionary spending would, for two years, remain pretty much where it is now. Inflation would mean an effective cut in domestic programs, although the White House would redirect about $10 billion slashed from the IRS's budget back to those programs.  

The Biden administration contends that "those shifts would functionally make nondefense discretionary spending the same next year as it was this year," reports the Times. And that is where Speaker McCarthy's severe indigestion would begin.  

Such a deal would satisfy all but the right and left's hardcore ideological factions. But while President Biden's job depends not on the left's contentment, at least for the next 18 months, McCarthy's speakership is wholly reliant on the good graces of roughly three dozen lunatics in the Freedom Caucus.  

"Liberal groups were already complaining on Thursday about the reported deal to reduce the I.R.S. funding increase," continues the Times, and "the cuts contained in the package were all but certain to be too modest to win the votes of hard-line fiscal conservatives in the House." 

With amusing understatement, McCarthy acknowledged, "I don’t think everybody is going to be happy at the end of the day." I seem to recall Louis XVI saying something similar about his view of the French Revolution.

Indeed, Texas Rep. Chip Roy is preparing McCarthy's trundle. "Someone explain to me why that’s an off-ramp that should be taken now," he told reporters. "I think it’s an exit ramp about five exits too early." Said Rep. Bob Good, "That would absolutely collapse the Republican majority for this debt ceiling increase." Added Congressman Ralph Norman, "What I’ve seen now is not good." 

All three of these House members are Freedom Caucusers, and any one of them can call for McCarthy's head. 

Early morning medical appointments, but new posts are below.  

DeSantis stumbles his way to the STARTING line, but the funny is actually quite scary

If it hadn't been so par for the course, just business as usual, merely another habitual indignity, I'd guess that Ron DeSantis's Twitter debacle was orchestrated by the Greek gods. But even Aristophanes would not be so ironically obvious as last night's tragicomic play of a muted presidential announcement.      

DeSantis had invited a ballroom-full of deep pockets to the Miami Four Seasons to watch his launch on a large-screen TV. What they — along with more than 600,000 other viewers, soon to shrink to 275,000 — got instead was dead air and the occasional whisper for nearly a half-hour. Two Twitter employees said "there was no planning for what are known as 'site reliability issues' for the event" — even though the site's technical troubles have mushroomed under Elon Musk's infamous management.

Is any of this of lasting import? Is it something other than a momentary embarrassment? A pregnant comment on DeSantis's leadership abilities? Of course not — other than his having made the unintelligible decision to announce on Twitter. What could be of lasting import, and far more tragedy than comedy, however, is this assessment from a journalist who has covered him for six years:  

"Mr. DeSantis’s willingness to exert ... power in extraordinary ways has led him to barrel through norms, challenge the legal limits of his office and threaten political retribution against those who cross him. Unlike former President Donald J. Trump ... Mr. DeSantis is a keen student of American government who has expanded his influence tactically and methodically, using detailed knowledge of the pliable confines of his office to his advantage."

Patricia Mazzei's first sentence is as Trumpian as it is DeSantian: the Florida governor shatters norms, tortures his office's legal limits, and terrorizes opponents with political retribution. These characteristics are, after all, originally what made DeSantis appealing to the deviant GOP base.

Yet Mazzei's second sentence is anything but Trumpesque: the highly educated Florida governor knows government, and he has used this knowledge to methodically enlarge his power. As president he would be, as many observers have already noted, a "smart Trump" — a clever, competent, and thus far more dangerous authoritarian than the former chief executive. Trump was Mussolini; DeSantis would be Stalin.

As bumbling as the governor has been to date, his stupendous awkwardness would in no way inhibit his abominable lust for, and attainment of, untrammeled presidential power. Trump was simply too stupid to know how to wield unfettered authority; DeSantis would shrewdly mold it in his own image and to his own liking. Within a year, the nation's founding document would be wastepaper. The government would be of President DeSantis, by President DeSantis, for President DeSantis.             

As he wrote in his campaign book, The Courage to Be Free, "[As governor] I was able to ... to leverage authority to achieve substantive policy victories." The state's ACLU legislative director, Kara Gross, pointedly stripped the line of its euphemism (that of "leveraging authority"): "What is scary in Florida is that we’re seeing the governor’s continued efforts to consolidate power under himself so that there are not any checks and balances for what he does."  

And so when DeSantis says he wishes to "Make America Florida," in scary reality he's saying that he would, as president, do away with any bothersome (Constitutional) restraints. As he has shown in his home state, "leveraging authority" translates into any means at all to an end. 

This would become the new and really frightening par for the course, which would indeed be worthy of the Greek gods' machinations.