Conservatives Sure Enjoy Whining

I have a rather startling confession to make --- I'm a liberal (try to contain your surprise).  But someone somewhere made the wise point that we should expose ourselves to opposing points of view, so as to test our assumptions and biases, and not become detached from reality in a bubble of like-minded thinkers.

So in this spirit, I follow S.E. Cupp and David French on Twitter.  I have learned that Cupp occasionally takes a break from her fact-free attacks on the left and exercises in false equivalence to level the occasional well-placed attack on Trump.  I haven't followed French for very long, but if most of his views are like his recent essay on masculinity, I have very low expectations.

French is unhappy because the APA (American Psychiatric Association) just released it's first-ever guidelines for working with men and boys.  And French disagrees strongly with it:

The APA sees the challenges facing young men and rightly seeks to overcome those challenges, but then diagnoses the wrong cause. As Stephanie Pappas notes on the APA website, the new guidelines conclude that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.”

French presents his case citing essentially no facts other than two charts which show that women have seen greater wage gains than men over the past 40 years --- which is kind of to be expected, considering the stark gender-based wage discrimination 40 years ago (not to mention the fact that women were still largely shut out of lucrative fields like law and medicine).  And he certainly makes no effort to refute any of the APA's 13 years of research.  The rest of his piece is the kind of primal scream one typically hears from the right any time someone suggests that it's possible for men to improve their behavior.  A typical passage:

Yet as we survey a culture that is rapidly attempting to enforce norms hostile to traditional masculinity, are men flourishing? And if men are struggling more the farther we move from those traditional norms, is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy’s essential nature? Male children are falling behind in school not because schools indulge their risk-taking and adventurousness but often because they relentlessly suppress boys and sometimes punish boys’ essential nature, from the opening bell to the close of the day.

Are men flourishing?  Well, we're currently suffering under the misrule of history's most corrupt and incompetent president, in part due to the fact that his opponent was a woman.  Women's earnings are still only 80% of men's.  And to the extent that men aren't flourishing (suicide rates are rising generally, but it is much higher among men than women), French makes no effort to relate it to 'norms hostile to traditional masculinity'.

Is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy's essential nature?  I wonder whether French is familiar with the concept of a straw man.

Male children are falling behind in school . . . Without even the pretense of a factual basis to back it up.

The whole essay is like this, and I wouldn't bother writing about it, except that his closing argument is: a) Anecdotal, and b) A tremendous self-own:

Then, one day after I returned from overseas, I was on a Cub Scout hike with my son. We were at the bottom of a ravine, when one of the boys threw a rock that hit my son square in the head. The gash was deep, blood was everywhere, and he started to lose consciousness. Our cell phones worked to call 911, but there was no way the ambulance could come down to us. We had to run up to it.

So, with the pack leader applying direct pressure to his head, I picked him up and started to run — straight up a steep incline. I ran, carrying him, until I was about to pass out. Then my wife (who is very strong but couldn’t carry him as far) would spell me for a bit. Then I’d grab him and run some more. We got to the top of the hill just as the ambulance arrived, and they were able to stop the bleeding before the blood loss got too serious.

Exciting!  And in French's mind, the perfect example of why we shouldn't listen to the APA when they say that "stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful."

French doesn't explain which of these traditionally male traits --- stoicism, competitiveness, dominance or aggression --- was the key ingredient in getting his son to the top of the hill.  Nor does he explain how his wife came by those same traditionally male traits when she took her turn.

But the 800-lb. gorilla that French ignores is that there would have been no need to carry his son up a ravine in the first place if another boy hadn't thrown a rock and hit his son in the head, in exactly the kind of dominance and aggression the APA wants to address.

What's more amazing than French's lack of self-awareness is that of his right-wing buddies, who jumped on Twitter to praise him for writing such a marvelous rebuttal to the APA.

In sum, we have:

1. The nation's most respected body in the study of psychology releases a document which is the result of 13 years of clinical study and analysis.
2. A right-wing commentator with no background in psychology (who probably didn't even read the full APA document) throws together a response full of right-wing grievance and unsupported whining, concluding with a self-refuting anecdote.
3. The rest of the right-wing applauds him on his accomplishment.

I don't think I'll be adding other conservatives to my list of Twitter follows any time soon.

Spolier Alert: Republicans Don't Give A Damn About National Security

Tweets like this are infuriating:

AP-NORC POLL: “Immigration among the top concerns in 2019.” People want to stop drugs and criminals at the Border. Want Border Security! Tell the Dems to do the inevitable now, rather than later. The wait is costly and dangerous!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019

Any time you hear a trumpian use the phrase 'national security', that's a clue that they're handing you a load of BS.  To them, national security is just another tool in their collection of partisan talking points.

For example, anyone with a pulse and a memory which extends longer than 2 years is aware that the trumpians want Hillary Clinton to be locked up due to her email practices, which supposedly put our national security at risk.  But their hypocrisy is exposed when stories about multiple officials in the Trump White House doing the same thing disappear with barely a ripple, or when Trump himself is allowed to use an insecure iPhone for official business.

But it's not just engaging in poor security practices with official information --- which, for the record, was wrong when Hillary did it and it's wrong when the trumpians do it --- Trump is blatantly and repeatedly putting our national security at risk, and at worst a few Republicans have engaged in some quiet tut-tutting.

Take for example Trump's admission that he makes decisions based on his gut, rather than the consensus wisdom of the U.S. intelligence community.  Intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance warns:

At some point, the reality gap between Donald Trump‘s personal psychosis that imagines all sorts of mythic threats that are generated from his ‘gut’ will constitute the true national security threat to the nation.

Of course, given Trump's narcissistic personality disorder, this reliance on his gut doesn't necessarily demonstrate a disdain for U.S. national security.  But one thing that DOES indicate such disdain is the way Trump has politicized security clearances.

In February 2018, it was revealed that there were still dozens of White House staff working without appropriate security clearances more than a year in to Trump's term of office.  This included Jared Kushner, who didn't receive a proper clearance until May, and even then there were problems.  And finally in July, Trump used security clearances as a political weapon by revoking ex-CIA Director John Brennan's clearance for political purposes --- another act which put our national security at risk.

Of course, our national security really takes a beating when it goes up against Trump's personal business interests.  Since the day he was sworn in, Trump has been trading on the presidency to personally enrich himself and his family, and nearly 200 members of Congress have filed suit in an effort to stop his violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitition.

It's self-evident that the president has a conflict between his personal financial interests and the nation's interests when he makes business deals with foreign powers, and there are at least two concrete deals which clearly run counter to the nation's security interest.  First, there is Trump's decision to scrap the long-planned relocation of FBI headquarters.

More stirking (and shockingly underreported) is Trump's decision to end sanctions on Chinese telecom ZTE, despite bipartisan consensus that ZTE poses a serious national security threat:

. . . it was congressional investigators who sounded the alarm about possible cyberespionage by ZTE and Huawei in 2012, after an 11-month probe by the House Intelligence Committee concluded that the companies were essentially arms of the Chinese government that could be used as conduits for spying on American citizens and companies. And Rubio along with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced a bill earlier this year that would bar the U.S. government from buying or leasing telecommunications equipment from the companies over those concerns.

In February, FBI Director Chris Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Americans shouldn’t use ZTE or Huawei products or services. He was joined by the heads of the CIA and National Security Agency, and the director of national intelligence, who also cautioned against the public using ZTE's products.

This isn't a partisan issue; it's a Trump issue.  Republicans, Democrats and the intelligence community ALL agree that ZTE is a national security threat, but Trump dropped sanctions on them in return for a $500 million loan from the Chinese government.

And yet, the Republican party continues to pretend that they care about national security.

Finally, let's focus on border security specifically, since that's the theoretical rationale for Trump's stupid $25 billion wall.

For starters, one might expect that a president truly focused on border security might spend a lot of money on it, and one who is willing to shut down the government over border security would spend every penny on it that Congress allocates.  In Trump's case, however, only 60% of the money available has even been allocated to contracts, and only 6% has been spent.

For another thing, a wall is one of the least effective ways to spend $25 billion on border security.  And Trump's focus on the southern border is misguided at any rate, as the number of unauthorized immigrants from the southern border has been steadily declining for more than a decade.

So let's mock the trumpians' supposed concern about 'border security' for what it is: A naked attempt to politicize national security for the purpose of pleasing Trump's xenophobic base.  And then let's change the conversation to focus on the national security disaster which is the Trump presidency.

I Pledge to Vote for the Democrat in 2020

Hopefully all visitors to this site will consider this as obvious as 'water is wet', or 'breathing is better than the alternative'.  The blog title is Things Everyone Knows, after all.

Then again, we're still more than 23 months out from election day, and already I'm seeing crap like this:

Since we're apparently going to start doing this now, I guess it's time to remind everyone of the simple formula for winning elections:

1. Find your favorite candidate.  If s/he is a Democrat, great.  If s/he is not a Democrat, and refuses to run as a Democrat, find someone else.
2. Do everything you can to help that candidate win the nomination.
3. Once the nomination has been decided, do everything you can to get the nominee elected --- even if that person is not the person you identified in step 1.

Easy, right?  And obvious, too.  But since it seems some people still don't get it, let's break it down a bit.

The rationale for step (3) is that any Democrat will be a better president than Trump.  And if this isn't self-evidently obvious to you, then clearly you aren't enduring first-hand the consequences of Trump's attacks on health care, his sympathizing with white supremacists, his ethnic cleansing policies, his assault on the environment, his unconcern for victims of natural disasters, his unnecessary tariffs, etc.  And apparently you aren't sufficiently concerned about the dangers of a Supreme Court with Neill Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

The rationale for step (1) should be even more obvious.  The only candidate capable of beating Trump in 2020 is the Democratic nominee.  So if there's some Johnny Unbeatable candidate who you think will make the best president ever, but he refuses to run as a Democrat, then to hell with him.  We really don't have time for third-party purity tests.

I'll provide one brief example, just because it happens to come from my own congressional district, MN-02.  First, I'll show you the result for our congressional race in 2016:

As you can see, a left-leaning independent candidate, who had no hope of winning the election, took 7% of the vote in an open-seat race in a historically red district, where the Republican candidate ended up winning with just under 47% of the vote.

Would the Democrat have won in a 2-way race?  Well, we can't re-run the 2016 election, but as it turns out, the independent candidate chose not to run in 2018 (she ran against Amy Klobuchar in her Senate race instead), so the 2018 race ended up as a 2-way race between the same Republican and Democratic candidates --- and guess what?

Yes, the dynamics of the race were different in 2018.  This was a Democratic wave election, and the Republican Lewis was now an incumbent who branded himself as an 'independent' Republican (while still very much a trumpian).  So it's not an exact comparison, but --- it appears that practically all of the independent candidate's vote went to the Democratic challenger, leading to the first election of a Democrat in this district in nearly 20 years.

There is really no argument in favor of a third-party lefty candidate which outweighs this result.

So I'm asking nicely, please, if you oppose Trump and support good things like the Constitution and the rule of law and human rights and affordable health care --- follow this simple formula.  There is far more at stake than any one person's opinion about the 'right' kind of Democrat/liberal/progressive.

The 2018 Election Isn't Over Yet

There are still two races where extra dollars might make a difference.

1. The race for Georgia Secretary of State is headed for a runoff, to be held on December 4.  Do you remember the (now former) Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, and his heavy-handed voter suppression?  Well, here's a chance to put someone in that office who will actually encourage and facilitate voting in the state of Georgia, which can only be good news for any Democrats running in the future (like for the U.S. Senate in 2020).  So please give what you can to the Democratic candidate, John Barrow.
2. This one is more aspirational than anything --- we're trying to elect a Democrat to the Senate in Mississippi.  In a 4-way race, Mike Espy and his main Republican opponent each totaled about 41% of the vote, and so a runoff election will be held there in about 2 weeks.  There's really no good reason to think that Espy has a chance at this, except that with the country's attention on Georgia and Florida, it doesn't seem like the national parties are focusing much on Mississippi.  Perhaps if we can really turn out the Democrats on November 27, we can pull of the upset!  It's worth a few bucks, anyway.  (Note: Espy's opponent recently made a lynching joke, which can't possibly help her).

Trump is Playing Xenophobic Political Games With America's Troops

For perspective, here's a table showing the number of people Customs and Border Patrol arrested illegally crossing the border each year since the turn of the century:

Fiscal Year	Illegal Crossings
2000	1,676,438
2001	1,266,214
2002	955,310
2003	931,557
2004	1,160,395
2005	1,189,075
2006	1,089,092
2007	876,704
2008	723,825
2009	556,041
2010	463,382
2011	340,252
2012	364,768
2013	420,789
2014	486,651
2015	337,117
2016	415,816
2017	310,531

Trump recently announced that he is sending 5,200 military troops to respond to a caravan of refugees heading our way from Central America --- a caravan with a current estimated size of about 4,000.

Note that by law, the American military is prohibited from engaging in immigration enforcement, or indeed, ANY kind of law enforcement, without the explicit authorization of Congress.  So it's not clear what Trump expects the troops to do.

Also note that 4,000 refugees --- assuming they all make it here --- is just about 1% of the total number of people CBP routinely deal with on a yearly basis.

Also note that Trump is sending more troops than the estimated number of refugees.  Does he think that every single refugee needs their own personal military escort (and that some of them need two)?

Finally, and most damningly, note that in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the number of illegal border crossings was more than three times what it is today --- yet George W. Bush never saw a need to send our military to the Mexican border.

So is Trump just a coward, afraid of a moderate-sized group of unarmed, tired and hungry refugees?  Is he completely unqualified for his job, and doesn't know the difference between typical immigration and an actual threat to the country?  Or is he just using our troops like toy soldiers to stir up fear and xenophobia in an attempt to scare people into electing Republicans?

There's no reason it can't be all three.  And all of them are reasons to vote out Trump's Republican enablers and replace them with Democrats who aren't scared, clueless and craven.

So vote for all the Democrats on the ballot.  And contribute what you can in the campaign's closing days.

Final Donation Roundup for 2018

With 8 days to go until the election, it's time to sit down, figure out how much you can afford to give campaigns for their final stretch, and decide where you think your dollars can do the most good.

And I'm here to help.  I believe that the most important thing we can do in these final days is to work to reclaim the Senate.  I'm under no delusion that it will be easy --- consensus opinion is that it won't happen.  But it's also not impossible, and we don't want to spend the next 2 years wondering what if.  So I'm going to strongly encourage folks to give to any and all Senate races where there's even an outside chance of a Democrat victory.

For House and Gubernatorial races, however, I'm only going to include races where FiveThirtyEight estimates that the two parties are separated by less than 3 percentage points (using the 'Deluxe' model).  With just 8 days left, we're really not likely to see much more movement than that.

Choose wisely.  Give what you can.  Then sign up to help Get Out the Vote!!!

Senate

• Beto O'Rourke (TX).  Trailing incumbent Ted Cruz by 5.2%.
• Phil Bredesen (TN).  Trailing Marsha Blackburn by 4.4% in the race to fill the seat vacated by Bob Corker.  MoveOn has pulled its funding from Bredesen for saying he supports Brett Kavanaugh, but that was a mistake.
• Heidi Heitkamp (ND).  Trailing challenger Kevin Cramer by 4.4%.  Cramer who recently said that even if Brett Kavanaugh DID attempt to rape Christine Blasey Ford, it's 'nothing' because it 'never went anywhere'.
• Jacky Rosen (NV).  Trailing incumbent Dean Heller by 0.8%.
• Claire McCaskill (MO).  Leading her challenger by 0.7%.
• Kyrsten Sinema (AZ).  Leading her opponent by 1.7%.
• Joe Donnelly (IN).  Leading his opponent by 2.3%.
• Bill Nelson (FL).  Leading Florida governor Rick Scott by 2.6%.

Two points to call out here.  First, if these numbers match the final results at the polls, then Republicans will retain their 51-49 Senate majority.  So somehow, the Democrats need to beat the odds in two of the four races in Texas, Tennessee, North Dakota and Nevada.

So if you live in or near any of those states, please help GOTV!

Second --- sadly, the Republicans have been steadily gaining ground in all of these races.  It appears that their xenophobic fearmongering about the refugee caravan is having the desired effect.

House

• Kim Schrier (WA-08).  Leading by 1.2%.
• Katie Hill (CA-25).  Leading by 2.0%.
• Harley Rouda (CA-48).  Leading by 2.6%.  This would be a huge victory, as it would bring down incumbent Republican Dana Rohrabacher.
• Katie Porter (CA-45).  Leading by 2.6%.
• Ben McAdams (UT-04).  Leading by 0.2%.
• Xochitl Torres Small (NM-02).  Trailing by 0.4%.
• Lizzie Fletcher (TX-07).  Leading by 0.2%.
• Collin Allred (TX-32).  Trailing by 1.8%.
• Dan Feehan (MN-01).  Leading by 0.8%.
• Cindy Axne (IA-03).  Leading by 2.5%.
• Sean Casten (IL-06).  Leading by 2.2%.
• Lauren Underwood (IL-14).  Trailing by 2.0%.
• Kristen Carlson (FL-15).  Trailing by 1.8%.
• Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (FL-26).  Leading by 0.2%.
• Amy McGrath (KY-06).  Leading by 0.5%.
• Elissa Slotkin (MI-08).  Leading by 0.4%.
• Danny O'Connor (OH-12).  Trailing by 1.9%.
• Scott Wallace (PA-01).  Trailing by 0.4%.
• Abigail Spanberger (VA-07).  Leading by 0.1%.  This would be an especially sweet win.
• Leslie Cockburn (VA-05).  Trailing by 2.0%.
• Kathy Manning (NC-13).  Trailing by 2.0%.
• Dan McCready (NC-09).  Leading by 1.0%.
• Andy Kim (NJ-03).  Leading by 1.4%.
• Tom Malinowski (NJ-07).  Leading by 1.9%.
• Anthony Brindisi (NY-22).  Leading by 1.6%.
• Antonio Delgado (NY-19).  Leading by 1.4%.
• Jared Golden (ME-02).  Leading by 1.8%.

UPDATE: SwingLeft has a site set up where you can make a single donation that will be split evenly among Porter, Mucarsel-Powell, Finkenauer, Golden, Brindisi, Scott, Allred, McAdams and Spanberger, if you want to save yourself some clicks.

Governor

• Steve Sisolak (NV).  Trailing by 1.4%.
• Tony Evers (WI).  Leading by 1.7%.
• Richard Cordray (OH).  Trailng by 1.2%.
• Stacey Abrams (GA).  Trailing by 0.8%.  I don't know whether FiveThirtyEight has taken blatant Republican vote suppression into consideration when forecasting the race.

17 Reasons to Vote for Every Democrat on the Ballot

The election is 17 days away, so I thought I would write up 17 reasons why you need to vote for every Democrat on the ballot, wherever you are (kind of like my closing argument back in 2016).  Since no one has an attention span these days, I've tried to make them all short enough to fit in a tweet.  I thought about posting one per day to help boost site traffic, but I think it's more important to get all the information out there well before the election.  If you only want to see one reason per day, bookmark this page and keep coming back!

1. Democrats want to help students with college loan debt, which would stimulate the economy.  Republicans want to help for-profit colleges and debt collectors.
2. The $1.5 trillion tax cut blew a hole in the budget, which Republicans now want to close by cutting Medicare and other programs.  The tax cut mainly gave even more money to corporations, which passed it along to their wealthy investors.
3. Citing the deficit their tax cut created, the GOP House has already voted to cut nearly $1 trillion from income security programs, with an additional $500 billion from Medicare.
4. The GOP Congress refuses to check Trump's abuses of power, for example, his consistent attacks on U.S. law enforcement.
5. Republicans have tried 3 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which has given affordable health care to an estimated 20 million Americans.  If they retain control of Congress, they will succeed in taking health care away from those Americans.
6. The Trump administration initiated a horrific and unnecessary family separation policy, which took more than 2,500 immigrant children from their parents with no plan for reuniting them.  Months after a court deadline, nearly 200 children are still separated.
7. The family separation policy was a true travesty of justice, demanding that parents agree to deportation before reuniting them with their children, and making children as young as 2 defend themselves in court.
8. The GOP Congress refuses to investigate Trump's flagrant corruption, like the $500 million loan he accepted from China in exchange for dropping sanctions on Chinese telecom ZTE.
9. If Republicans hold the House of Representatives, they will probably name Jim Jordan as Speaker, a man who turned a blind eye to widespread sexual abuse of athletes when he was a coach at Ohio State.
10. From Trump to Kavanaugh to Bill Shine to Rob Porter to Jim Jordan, Republicans have demonstrated that they just don't care about sexual assault.
11. The GOP Congress refuses to investigate Trump's past criminal behavior, like his years-long tax fraud.
12. Trump's election emboldened white supremacists, many of whom are now running for office as Republicans.  A Republican victory in 2018 will embolden them further.
13. If Republicans hold the Senate, they will confirm even more of Trump's conservative judges, even if they're liars and accused sexual predators.
14. America is averaging ONE MASS SHOOTING PER DAY, and Republicans refuse to pass ANY gun safety legislation to change that.
15. Widespread Republican campaigns of voter suppression must not be allowed to succeed.  If you don't use your vote to eject Republicans from office, you may one day lose the chance to vote at all.
16. The GOP Congress refuses to check Trump's assault on a free press.  Days after a Washington Post reporter was brutally murdered in Saudi Arabia, Trump told the crowd at his rally how great it is to physically assault reporters.
17. Republicans know that the Trump White House is corrupt as hell --- they've even made a list of more than 100 investigations of Trump they are currently BLOCKING.  Only a Democratic Congress will provide adequate oversight of Trump.

So that's it.  If you want fiscal policy that helps students and ordinary Americans instead of more tax cuts for Trump's Wall Street buddies, vote for the Democrats.  If you want every American to have affordable health care, vote for the Democrats.  If you want humane immigration policy and common-sense gun safety, vote for the Democrats.  And if you want meaningful oversight of a historically corrupt president, it will only happen if we make sure Democrats control the levers of power in Washington.

Now go vote.