Pushing for way overdue election reforms

Maybe some of this could actually happen. This article is lengthy and rather comprehensive.

The task force made 28 recommendations in several areas, including: election administration, with regard to how states helped voters both to get a ballot during the pandemic and to ensure their votes were accurately counted; legal reforms, ranging from clarifying federal laws governing the Electoral College and presidential transitions to urging that states modify their post-Election Day procedures to allow more assurances that votes were being counted accurately; and social media platforms, which would do better to delete false posts, not merely add warning labels.

As extensive as this to-do list seems, it is not the full democracy reform agenda. In July 2020, a 25-member expert panel based at Harvard University and the Washington-based Brookings Institution issued a report calling for mandatory voting. As María Teresa Kumar, founding president of Voto Latino, who participated in that panel and the bipartisan task force, said, universal voting was one way to dilute the power of the most extreme political factions.

"Universal voting, in countries that practice it, actually tones down the extremism on both sides because it involves everybody," she said. "If there are methods to promote that type of practice in the country, we will see not only fair elections but more participation… with the hopes of toning down that extremism that we are witnessing today."

An even longer-standing reform effort led by voting rights advocates is calling for swift passage of H.R. 1. That 791-page House bill addresses election intricacies, campaign finance and ethics. It is comprised of reforms proposed mostly by Democrats from more than 50 bills that failed to pass during the past decade when Republicans controlled at least one chamber in Congress. A growing coalition of 170 center-left groups are pushing for H.R. 1, even though most of it was drafted before the pandemic dramatically altered how 2020's general election was conducted, including greatly expanding the use of mailed-out ballots and early in-person voting. One day before Biden's inauguration, a version of H.R. 1 was introduced in the Senate. - The National Memo

Get going on expulsions

A straightforward metric, indeed.

We can go on, and we should. The metric that should be used for expulsion should be a simple one.

- If a member of Congress advocated for overturning a U.S. election based on fraudulent claims, that member should be expelled.

- If a member of Congress promoted known-false conspiracy theories designed to discredit the U.S. election that were used to justify the violent insurrection against Congress, that member must be removed.

That really is not a hard measure of who should be a lawmaker and who should not. It requires no ideological litmus test. There is no "conservative" or "liberal" label that needs to be applied. Fomenting insurrection by using your office to promote hoaxes discrediting U.S. democracy itself is not an edge case. It does not matter if these members chose to spread sedition-justifying hoaxes because they were incompetent paint-huffing dullards or with explicit intent to deceive; either is sufficient reason to expel them from government service. Any government service.

This will not be easy, because the Republican House and Senate are full of co-conspirators to this attempt to overturn democracy in favor of one-party rule. They have been willing saboteurs who have allied themselves with Trump's criminal acts, who have blocked probes into those acts, who have abided as Trump misled the American people using a torrent of lies and who took up those lies and fascist causes themselves. But it needs to be done. This nation cannot survive if governed by seditionists and traitors. Democracy is already dead if the public can, without consequence, be manipulated into believing whatever hoax their leaders find it most advantageous to push. - Daily Kos

The best boot-on-Trump's-ass rant I've seen yet

There are a lot of progressives who write with high excellence. Three of my favorites (though they're stylistically quite different from one another), at national websites, are David Dayen at The American Prospect, William Rivers Pitt at Truthout, and Hunter at Daily Kos.

Most importantly, we must look forward, not back. Instead of dwelling on the past, we should instead dwell on the clusterf--k that will be the future if Trump's unending list of white nationalists, professional liars, and eager criminals does not receive our public revulsion, our contempt, and the fullest possible prosecutions. Our nation depends on coming together, here and now, to wipe every last incompetent Republican sycophant from our politics and our televisions.

This means all those that stood by Trump, as he careened through our "norms" and revealed us to be an autocracy in waiting. The pundits. The Republican lawmakers. The "conservative" think tankers. The appointees. Every last one of them has betrayed this nation, has shown themselves to be supporters of even this, and the damage done has been incalculable. It is unforgivable. There is no possible repentance. They must be purged—or the next Republican autocrat may be successful where this incompetent, addled fart of a man was not. - Daily Kos

Military basically says if Trump orders them to do something crazy, they won't

I think that's pretty clear, here. The article spins it a little differently.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley held an off-the-record video call with top generals and network anchors this weekend to tamp down speculation about potential military involvement in the presidential election, two people familiar with the call tell Axios.

Why it matters: The nation's top military official set up Saturday's highly unusual call to make clear that the military's role is apolitical, one of the sources said — and to dispel any notion of a role for the military in adjudicating a disputed election or making any decision around removing a president from the White House. - Axios

Young voters have little use for Trump and Republicans

You have to click the link, and check out the "18-34" box, to get the gist.

There are only five states in the U.S. where voters younger than 35 embrace President Trump over Joe Biden, and none are swing states, according to new 50-state SurveyMonkey-Tableau data for Axios... The data also serves as a warning for the Republican Party in nearly every state as it looks beyond one presidential contest. - Axios

I'm not the biggest believer in SurveyMonkey polling. But this is actually just another dump into a sea of data confirming how progressive young voters are. My own take is that we'll know after 2022 if we can start counting on young'ns to turn out, in every election, in numbers large enough to make a big difference. They did in 2018, and very likely are doing so this year, and that's encouraging.

Alternatives to voting by mail

Trump is astonishingly stupid, and going after the Post Office months before the election, giving public outrage ample time to build, is yet another indicator of that. That said, here's something to consider, given current reality.

But there are always ways to wade around pond scum like Trump and his cronies. Here are four ways you can cast your ballot this election that will cut out Trump’s possible sabotage. - Daily Kos

The reality of the Trump economy

While the plethora of reasoning from fact therein won't have the slightest effect on those in MAGA fantasyland, or on Trump's boosters in corporate (especially financial) "news" media, this one's worth keeping on hand. It's by Joseph Stiglitz.

It is becoming conventional wisdom that US President Donald Trump will be tough to beat in November, because, whatever reservations about him voters may have, he has been good for the American economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. - Project Syndicate

New NAFTA apparently limps to the finish line

To be clear, New NAFTA, aka the U.S., Mexico, Canada Trade Agreement, regarding which a deal was announced yesterday, does have some improvements over the existing one.  According to the text it does, anyway. Whether, for example, new environmental and labor protections will be enforced remains to be seen.

But in other ways it’s not really any better at all. The content of this blog often reflects my interest in farm issues, and that’s where I’m going, here:

But what exactly is the win for farmers in the new USMCA? Nearly all tariffs for agriculture were removed under the original NAFTA. The International Trade Commission, which analyzes trade deals for Congress, projected that the USMCA would result in a slight net deficit for agriculture trade: meaning we would import slightly more than export. The small projected increase in agriculture exports – mostly dairy to Canada – would have no substantive effect on the ongoing, dramatic loss of small and mid-sized dairies in the Midwest.

Grading trade deals solely on the value of goods crossing the border has always obscured the real winners and losers. The original NAFTA, combined with the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the 1996 Farm Bill, led to the ramping up of agricultural production and an increase in agriculture exports. It also led to an almost immediate drop in commodity crop prices and farmer income. In fact, since the original NAFTA we’ve seen the steady consolidation of agribusiness firms and of farmland ownership, the loss of hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized farms and independent ranches, and the rapid growth of large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) fueled by cheap (often below cost) feed. We now have a largely integrated North American agriculture market, where young cattle from Mexico and feeder pigs from Canada routinely cross borders to be finished here. For agriculture, NAFTA’s real winners were not countries, but global agribusiness firms like Cargill, JBS, Tyson and Smithfield that operate in all three countries. - IATP

As far as the politics goes, this isn’t going to be huge for the 2020 election. Nothing else has changed the fact that half of American adults (that is, almost twice the percentage that actually voted for him, in 2016) - including 60% of women - want Trump gone, like, yesterday, whatever it takes, and this won’t, either. We just rightfully loathe and despise the guy, as the utterly repugnant, despicable failure as a human being that he is. But I’m adding this as a politics junkie thing.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), an adviser to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said a deal that the AFL-CIO's endorsed "could be problematic," but vowed to reserve judgement until senators got a presentation on the agreement. "I just hope he hasn't gone too far in Speaker Pelosi's direction, and the AFL-CIO's direction that he might lose some support here," he said. "My concern is that what the administration presented has now been moved demonstrably to Democrats, the direction that they wanted." - The Hill

Someone gets slammed on Twitter for suggesting progressives need to cool it

I’m not a big Twitter person. But I do use it some. And if you follow, you will get a follow back as long as you’re not a spammer. And unless after you get that follow back you turn around and unfollow later. I do check.

Anyway, I dug this.

In turn, many who fit the description were not going to let the former president—especially a Democrat who swept to power in 2008 on the campaign promise of "hope and change"—get away with the comments without a characteristic retort. On Saturday, the hashtag #TooFarLeft was trending on Twitter.

Political operative Peter Daou, who took credit for launching the hashtag, said: "I launched the #TooFarLeft tag because I've had it with Republicans, media elites, and corporate Dems enabling fascists while denigrating those who seek economic and social justice as 'too far left.'  I'd like to ONCE hear them complain America is too far right." - Common Dreams

A progressive president could indeed accomplish a great deal, no matter what

Closest thing I’ve seen in a while to what I’d call a “must-read.”

A president has a thicket of checks and balances to maneuver through. But America has also been passing laws for over 232 years, and buried in the U.S. Code are the raw materials for fundamental change. It doesn’t take Green Lantern’s ring to unearth these possibilities, just a president willing to use the laws already passed to their fullest potential.

The Prospect has identified 30 meaningful executive actions, all derived from authority in specific statutes, which could be implemented on Day One by a new president. These would not be executive orders, much less abuses of authority, but strategic exercise of legitimate presidential power.

Without signing a single new law, the next president can lower prescription drug prices, cancel student debt, break up the big banks, give everybody who wants one a bank account, counteract the dominance of monopoly power, protect farmers from price discrimination and unfair dealing, force divestment from fossil fuel projects, close a slew of tax loopholes, hold crooked CEOs accountable, mandate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, allow the effective legalization of marijuana, make it easier for 800,000 workers to join a union, and much, much more. We have compiled a series of essays to explain precisely how, and under what authority, the next president can accomplish all this. - David Dayen/The American Prospect

Weirdness in Round 2 of Trump farm bailout

Happened yesterday:

The U.S. government will pay American farmers hurt by the trade war with China between $15 and $150 per acre in an aid package totaling $16 billion, officials said on Thursday, with farmers in the South poised to see higher rates than in the Midwest. - Reuters

The "weirdness" is political. Why would they send more to the safely red states of the South, than to the much more iffy (to say the least, for Republicans in 2020) Midwest?

Here's more information. Things are being figured differently this time around, and apparently that's what's leading to the notable geographic differences.

In other words, political calculation is not overtly the #1 factor here. What's best for corporate ag profits is. That's my inexpert take, based on what I've seen so far, anyway.

What does "media losing its Trump bump" really mean?

I saw this this morning, though what it’s about has apparently been noticeable for a while.

Top news executives tell Axios that a real "Trump slump" is hitting digital, cable and more.

Why it matters: The shock factor around President Trump's unplanned announcements, staff departures, taunting tweets and erratic behavior is wearing off, and media companies are scrambling to find their next big moneymaker.

Driving the news: Executives tell Axios that Trump fatigue is very real: Interest in political coverage overall is down, which is spurring investments in other beats, like technology and the global economy. - Axios

The following is just a few thoughts, not the result of any effort at deep profundity. Several possibilities come quickly to mind:

1. People who have been pretty solid Trump fans are becoming disinterested, even disillusioned. (He will always have his real diehards.)

2. A lot of people across the political board are experiencing Trump fatigue, for now. That is, they’re just no longer into following his daily displays of demented buffoonery. But many will start paying attention again in the coming election year.

3. People are deciding that the utterly corrupt, degraded, and at times actually quite frightening spectacle of this deranged lunatic in the White House is really no big deal after all.

Obviously, #1 is best, and #3 is worst. It’s probably some combination of the above, along with other things I haven’t thought of.

The extent to which media losing its Trump mojo may or may not equal Trump losing his electoral mojo remains to be seen.