A lot of people on the right would answer that question this way: because the GOP really doesn’t want to.
I wouldn’t answer that way, though. This is how I’d answer—
The GOP is hardly a unitary group. There are plenty of GOP members of Congress who would vote to fund the wall. But the GOP had to go it alone; almost no Democrats were going to agree. That’s where the numbers game comes in.
The House had the votes to do it—in fact, they did vote the funds—but the House can’t do much without the Senate. The GOP only held a single-vote majority there, which effectively meant that if only one GOP senator defected it would be a tie, and Mike Pence could break the tie, but if two defected on a bill that bill would fail.
There was more than one GOP senator who was going to defect on this. And there was little to nothing the others could do about it except exert whatever pressure senators (and particularly Senate leadership) can exert.
But did they try to exert that pressure? That’s the big question, and I don’t know the answer. I know that, if the situation had been reversed, the Democrats would have made that person vote with the group. Exactly what forces they would bring to bear in order to accomplish that I don’t know, but they would be fierce forces if necessary.
Now the GOP has a slightly larger margin in the Senate than before, although far from huge (the grand GOP total is 53). But it’s lost the House. So the situation now is similar but reversed. Trump needs some Democrats in the House to go along in order to get funding for the wall. I predict that he won’t get them. The real question is what he’ll do next.
And the comments! Most of them centered on the fact that they looked embalmed and spooky. Others talked about more of the specifics—Schumer’s asymmetrical eyes and Pelosi’s botox. Some said that the two looked so bad they made Trump look normal.
The whole thing threatened to overshadow the messages.
So, does this hurt the Democrats? I doubt it. I can’t imagine any Democrat I know changing his or her mind because of this appearance, or become of their appearance. Pelosi and Schumer have become institutions and their thing is power within the Party.
If you look at Pelosi’s political beginnings, you’ll see that not only was she very attractive at the time, but she was a Party player first and foremost in an area of the country where to win the Democratic primary (or in her case, to be appointed a successor) was to win it all automatically:
Pelosi represents one of the safest Democratic districts in the country. Democrats have held the seat since 1949 and Republicans, who currently make up only 13 percent of registered voters in the district, have not made a serious bid for the seat since the early 1960s. She won the seat in her own right in 1988 and has been reelected 16 more times with no substantive opposition, winning by an average of 80 percent of the vote. She has not participated in candidates’ debates since her 1987 race against Harriet Ross. The strongest challenge Pelosi has faced was in 2016 when Preston Picus polled 19.1% and Pelosi won with 80.9%
Nevertheless, Pelosi has botoxed herself into facial rigidity because she knows that she’s on the national stage and she doesn’t want to look like an old woman. Well, I’m not sure what she conjures up except a waxwork figure, but when you look at her you don’t immediately think “78-year-old woman,” which is what she is.
Schumer’s ten years younger, and he had a somewhat tougher political road once he decided to take the Senate route, because he had to appeal to the entire state of New York. But it’s not been all that difficult, particularly in recent years.
Looking good is a funny thing. For example, Mitt Romney is the handsomest pol I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen him close up during the 2012 campaign. Really quite incredible, and amazing for his age seemingly without any surgery or botox. But I don’t think it helped him at all. I think it hurt him, actually, contributing to the impression of a kind of falseness and Dudly-Do-Right perfection that excluded any sense of what most people have to deal with in life. Hard to relate to this guy.
No, the best looks for politics is to be handsome or pretty but not too handsome or pretty. Obama. Bill Clinton. I’m not sure about women, but I think the principle is pretty much the same. And age is a double-edged sword, particularly for women, who need some of it (at least, so far—AOC seems to be bucking that trend) to lend some gravitas, but not so much that it reads “decrepit old lady.”
He’ll be speaking from the Oval Office at 9 PM Eastern time.
The media was hesitant to even broadcast the speech at first, but apparently they have deigned to do so. Kind of them.
After hours of “will they, won’t they” coverage, the broadcast networks and cable news networks decided they will broadcast Trump on Tuesday night. Only CBS confirmed the broadcast by Monday evening.
But they can’t let him go unchallenged:
…[T]heir decision led to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to demand equal airtime…
Schumer and Pelosi wrote in a statement that since “television networks have decided to air the President’s address, which if his past statements are any indication will be full of malice and misinformation, Democrats must immediately be given equal airtime.”
As opposed to the sweetness, light, and strict adherence to facts for which Schumer and Pelosi are known.
Trump’s Monday request for networks to air his speech touched on a number of debates that have been raging in journalism since his ascension to the Oval Office. Among them: Should his fact-free speeches be aired live? What kind of fact-checking methods should networks employ?
There has been a recent debate in journalism circles about whether networks should air Trump’s words in real-time. Several media critics, for instance, told CNN last week that networks should not rush to air Trump’s remarks made during pool sprays and briefings, given how much misinformation he spreads.
“Some advice — demand to see the text in advance and if it is not truthful either don’t air it or fact check it live on lower third,” tweeted Joe Lockhart, the former White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. “And cut away if he goes off text and starts lying.”
Either the press doesn’t recognize its own bias and/or realize how often it lies, or the press recognizes and realizes both (my preferred answer) and thinks it’s done all in the noble service of telling too-stupid Americans what they should think and feel.
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
There was also an interesting and acrimonious exchange today between Kellyanne Conway and Jim Acosta. You may recall that, right at the beginning of the Trump administration during an interview with Chuck Todd, Conway used the phrase “alternative facts.” Her phrase was widely mocked and criticized as though she were talking about facts as having no intrinsic truth or falsehood. But it was clear even at the outset what she actually meant—she meant that on certain things such as crowd size where estimates differ, people pick and choose which estimates to use depending on their political bent. In fact, she said as much during the original interview, which aired about 2 years ago (full transcript here; it makes very interesting reading at this point):
I actually don’t think that– maybe this is me as a pollster, Chuck. And you know data well. I don’t think you can prove those numbers one way or the other. There’s no way to really quantify crowds. We all know that…
…What’s not right, Chuck, is that the day before, you had people releasing a dossier full of junk and lies and fake news. And why did they release the dossier?…
Here’s what happened today between Conway and Acosta:
UPDATE 9:50 PM
“This is just common sense.” Well, it is, but common sense has become a lot less common these days.
A humanitarian crisis, the wall would pay for itself, heroin overdoses, we should rise above partisan politics, wealthy politicians build gates around their homes not because they hate the people on the outside but because they love the people on the inside—many good arguments here. I didn’t expect him to declare a national emergency (which was the rumor) and he didn’t.
Here’s his well-placed shot at Chuck Schumer:
Senator Chuck Schumer, who you will be hearing from later tonight, has repeatedly supported a physical barrier in the past, along with many other Democrats. They changed their mind only after I was elected president.
I wish he’d shown the video of their prior statements; it would have been very effective. Perhaps they expected that particular line of attack, because Schumer and Pelosi’s rebuttal was mostly about the shutdown rather than the wall itself.
I didn’t watch any of it. I prefer to read speeches, although sometimes I watch them.
Here’s an unexpected angle from a person we haven’t heard from for a while:
Anyone who just watched Trump’s address, the most presidential he has ever delivered in his life, and still thinks he will be easy to beat, is living in fantasyland. He is not to be underestimated and too many Dems continue to do it. We better nominate a battle tested fighter.
I think I may have first heard the word “charisma” in connection with JFK. He had it. I could tell. I recognized it and I even felt it. But of course back then I was a kid. Have I ever been enchanted by political charisma since?
In a single word: no. I’ve liked some politicians (Paul Tsongas comes to mind) very much, but actually I’ve liked very few of them, and none enthralled me with their charisma. Maybe I’m a bit charisma-deaf.
And I guess I’m looking for a Churchill or a Lincoln. And even then, I’m not sure that what they had would be called “charisma.” At least, I wouldn’t call it that; I’d call it eloquence and depth. Do those qualities even correlate with charisma? I don’t think so.
This article tries to explain charisma, and although it really doesn’t either explain it or even describe it very well, it does discuss some interesting research involving how charisma relates to analytical skills:
Scientists have plenty to say about charisma. Individuals with charisma tap our unfettered emotions and can shut down our rational minds. They hypnotize us. But studies show charisma is not just something a person alone possesses. It’s created by our own perceptions, particularly when we are feeling vulnerable in politically tense times…
Jochen Menges, a lecturer in organizational behavior at the University of Cambridge, terms the emotional impact of charisma the “awestruck effect.” He came up with the concept as a doctoral student in 2008, when he traveled to Berlin to hear Barack Obama speak in the hopes he might glean some new insights about how charismatic alchemy worked. When Obama bounded onto the stage and announced he was not just a citizen of the United States, but a citizen of the world, Menges himself was taken in. For a few minutes, Menges forgot why he was there—he was taken out of himself, became a follower…
Afterward, a woman next to Menges gushed that Obama’s speech was “amazing,” “wonderful,” and “awesome.” Yet when Menges asked her to name three things she liked about the speech, she couldn’t…
Menges found that students were far more likely to report they remembered the exact contents of speeches delivered by individuals who used charismatic speaking techniques that evoke emotions, than the content of speeches from individuals using a straightforward, non-charismatic mode of delivery. Yet written tests revealed those exposed to charismatic speakers remembered far less than those exposed to the non-charismatic speakers. Even so, when offered the chance to follow each speaker into a coffee room to discuss the ideas of their talks, the students almost never followed the boring speaker—and almost always followed the charismatic one.
None of this is especially surprising, nor is it (IMHO) especially informative. Of course when a speaker exerts some sort of powerfully emotional and almost hypnotically attractive effect on listeners, their analytical powers and recall for the specifics often fall into a haze. It happens not just in political life, but in personal life as well.
For example, it’s one of the reasons people who fall in love quickly and then have troubles say that the danger signs were initially there in the beloved one, but they ignored them because they were just so very smitten.
Well, I don’t fall in love easily, either, although when I do I’ve been known to ignore a few red flags.
I’ve noticed something I’d call charisma among certain of my acquaintances who make friends effortlessly and easily. It seems that nearly everyone they meet wants to be around them and feed off something exhilarating about them. Is it their energy? Pheromones? I’ve tried and tried to define it, but the closest I can get is that people feel happy around those people.
Why? It’s not that these charismatic people all resemble each other. They don’t—not in most ways, anyway. They’re not even necessarily nice people; often they’re narcissists. That’s a clue, actually, because they do tend to have—and to project—a great deal of self-confidence. But self-confidence is not enough. Nor are they all physically attractive. But whatever charisma is, they’ve got it.
When the left predicts disaster and it doesn’t happen, there’s no accountability. Down the rabbit hole it goes, and on to the next prediction. What matters is the temporary buzz of alarm that gets the juices flowing;
Repealing “net neutrality” regulations “would be the final pillow in (the internet’s) face,” said The New York Times. The ACLU said it “risks erosion of the biggest free-speech platform the world has ever known.” CNET declared that “net neutrality repeal means your internet may never be the same.” CNN labeled repeal the “end of the internet as we know it.”
One of the Democratic commissioners on the FCC claimed that repealing “net neutrality” would “green light to our nation’s largest broadband providers to engage in anti-consumer practices, including blocking, slowing down traffic, and paid prioritization of online applications and services.”
What do we hear now? The sound of crickets chirping rather than the mea culpas we should be hearing.
It reminds me of psychics whose track record for predicting events is close to zero but it doesn’t seem to hurt their following. People tend to remember the few times prognosticators are right rather than the many times they’re wrong. People tend to focus on the concerns (and the stoked-up fears) of the moment.
Not only were the predictions of internet doom wrong, they were the opposite of what actually happened:
In fact, average internet speeds climbed by roughly a third last year. The number of homes with access to fiber internet jumped 23% last year, according to the Fiber Broadband Association.
Oh, and “net neutrality” was a nonissue in the Democratic midterm campaigns. One party official said that Dems didn’t campaign on it because: “It’s not something that people bring up in their top list of concerns.”
Hmmm—maybe Mexico (or some Mexicans) could pay for it, after all. Indirectly:
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today reintroduced the Ensuring Lawful Collection of Hidden Assets to Provide Order (EL CHAPO) Act. The bill would reserve any amounts forfeited to the U.S. Government as a result of the criminal prosecution of “El Chapo” (formally named Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman Lorea) and other drug lords for border security assets and the completion of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border…
Currently the U.S. Government is seeking the criminal forfeiture of more than $14 billion in drug proceeds and illicit profits from El Chapo, the former leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel who was extradited to the U.S. to face criminal prosecution for numerous alleged drug-related crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder and money laundering.
Raising the tax rate is not the same as raising the amount of tax money collected, either in the aggregate or from a selected group such as “the rich.”
Even a non-accountant non-economist like me knows that. Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? (excerpts are from an interview she gave on “60 Minutes”):
Anderson Cooper: You’re talking about zero carbon emissions — no use of fossil fuels within 12 years.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: That is the goal. It’s ambitious. And…
Anderson Cooper: How is that possible? Are you talking about everybody having to drive an electric car?
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now. What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?
Anderson Cooper: This would require, though, raising taxes.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: There’s an element where— yeah. There— people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes.
Anderson Cooper: Do you have a specific on the tax rate?
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You know, it— you look at our tax rates back in the ’60s and when you have a progressive tax rate system. Your tax rate, you know, let’s say, from zero to $75,000 may be ten percent or 15 percent, et cetera. But once you get to, like, the tippy tops —- on your 10 millionth dollar -— sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder you should be contributing more.
At the moment I can’t find a transcript of the entire interview, but my guess is that Cooper didn’t follow up with a question about effective tax rates back then, and the existence of so many loopholes and tax shelters at the time that the actual rate paid was much much lower. Would Ocasio-Cortez support the return of the shelters and loopholes that made it that way? I doubt it; that wouldn’t feed the hungry beast of leftist desire to punish the rich—those “tippy tops” that remain undefined as to the details of what income qualifies and what a “fair share” is.
We do know who will decide those things, though—the left. And human nature being what it is, plenty of people will cheer them on.
Anyone who’s interested in the actual situation that prevailed in the 50s and 60s might want to take a look at this (just one of many such articles):
There is a common misconception that high-income Americans are not paying much in taxes compared to what they used to. Proponents of this view often point to the 1950s, when the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent for most of the decade.[1] However, despite these high marginal rates, the top 1 percent of taxpayers in the 1950s only paid about 42 percent of their income in taxes. As a result, the tax burden on high-income households today is only slightly lower than what these households faced in the 1950s. [a graph follows]
…The data shows that, between 1950 and 1959, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average of 42.0 percent of their income in federal, state, and local taxes. Since then, the average effective tax rate of the top 1 percent has declined slightly overall. In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average tax rate of 36.4 percent.
All things considered, this is not a very large change. To put it another way, the average effective tax rate on the 1 percent highest-income households is about 5.6 percentage points lower today than it was in the 1950s. That’s a noticeable change, but not a radical shift.[3]
How could it be that the tax code of the 1950s had a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, but resulted in an effective tax rate of only 42 percent on the wealthiest taxpayers? In fact, the situation is even stranger. The 42.0 percent tax rate on the top 1 percent takes into account all taxes levied by federal, state, and local governments, including: income, payroll, corporate, excise, property, and estate taxes. When we look at income taxes specifically, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average effective rate of only 16.9 percent in income taxes during the 1950s.
There’s more at the link, but I also suggest you read this to get a lot more information on the subject. One of the many points made is that if tax rates are raised to that level on too many people it backfires, and if only a few are effected (one might call them the “tippy tippy tippy top”) it has almost no effect on revenue at all.
Ah, but this is all so hard and complex. It involves math, too. Much better to just ask the rich to pay their fair share—and of course, that won’t include us, right?
[NOTE: See also this from Scott Johnson at Powerline.]
In an article entitled “Why Trump’s Losing the Shutdown Fight—
A simple political rule of thumb: Never hold the government hostage for anything, even if it’s a cherished campaign promise,” Josh Kraushaar writes;
Here’s a simple, time-tested rule of politics: The party that’s divided is the one that’s going to lose a legislative showdown. That lesson should be growing clearer for Republicans…
The GOP has long been more divided than the Democrats, and probably always will be. There are many reasons for that (too numerous to go into in this post), but I think it’s far less of a definitive issue than this one: the party that’s labeled by the MSM as being to blame is most likely to lose a legislative showdown in the minds of the public, because it’s been labeled as being responsible and just plain mean, and that party is the GOP. So whatever the situation and whatever the issue, whichever party controls which branch of government, the GOP is the culprit.
That’s pretty hard to counter—although there’s no question that the divisions in the GOP don’t help at all.
Here’s how I see it. Funding the wall is something Trump must accomplish to save his political life because without it many of his supporters will desert him. Or, alternatively, if he fails to accomplish it, he must at the very least be seen by supporters as having fiercely fought to build the wall and to only have been stopped by the Democrats combined with RINOesque NeverTrumpers.
The Democrats have three big reasons to stand firm as well. The first is the aforementioned support of the MSM and the knowledge that the GOP and/or Trump will be blamed for a shutdown, so the Democrats believe they hold a winning hand even if the partial shutdown continues. Therefore they have no real incentive to end it, just in the tactical sense.
The second is that they really really really don’t want the wall built because they would like as many illegal immigrants to come as possible, because the assumption by Democrats is that the vast majority of the children of those arrivals who are subsequently born in this country will become Democrats (it’s indeed possible that this presumption is correct).
Third but far from least is the fact that the Democrats want Trump to lose not only the shutdown battle but the 2020 election, and they know that keeping him from building the wall is a vital part of that effort. If they can stop him and his base deserts him, they are home free no matter what person they nominate and how far to the left that candidate is.
Sometimes when I need some relaxing down time, I surf YouTube. A while back in my YouTube explorations, I came across what are known as “reaction videos.” They’re a strange genre in which people often rack up biggish view counts by listening to music (pop singers in particular) and reacting to them in real time, videoing themselves doing so.
It may sound odd—and it is indeed odd. But some of these videos can be hugely entertaining, and many of the practitioners have large followings.
One particular type of reaction video features someone relatively young (young to my way of thinking, anyway) listening to older pop recordings or watching older pop videos for the first time, and reacting to them. Often they seem very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the older music, or something about the singer.
Here’s a guy listening to the Righteous Brothers singing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” an old favorite of mine. During the song’s heyday, I never thought about the race of the Brothers, but now I can see what this guy means in his startled reaction. And boy, were the Righteous Brothers ever great!
Their emotive vocal style is sometimes dubbed “blue-eyed soul”…
…According to Medley [the bass-baritone of the duo], they then adopted the name “The Righteous Brothers” for the duo because black Marines from the El Toro Marine base started calling them “righteous brothers”. At the end of a performance, a black U.S. Marine in the audience would shout, “That was righteous, brothers!”, and would greet them with “Hey righteous brothers, how you doin’?” on meeting them.
Phil Spector was their producer, and they were his first non-black act:
Spector commissioned Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil to write a song for them, which turned out to be “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'”. The song, released in late 1964, became their first major hit single and reached No. 1 in February 1965. Produced by Phil Spector, the record is often cited as one of the finest expressions of Spector’s Wall of Sound production techniques. It is one of the most successful pop singles of its time, despite exceeding the then-standard length for radio play. Indeed, according to BMI, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” became the most-played song on American radio and television of the 20th century, with more than eight million airplays by the end of 1999.
Until I read that, I hadn’t known about the extreme popularity of the song. All I knew was that it was very popular with me.
“I thought her comments were disgraceful,” Trump said during a White House news conference about the ongoing government shutdown. “This is a person that I don’t know, I assume she’s new. I think she dishonored herself and I think she dishonored her family. Using language like that in front of her son and whoever else was there, I thought that was a great dishonor to her and to her family.”
Trump continued, saying he thought her comments were “highly disrespectful to the United States of America.”
Trump’s response is especially fascinating for at least three reasons. The first is that he took the high road, refraining from any response in kind. The second is that he emphasized the concept of dishonor, which would play especially meaningfully in an honor/shame culture such as the one Tlaib’s parents came from (Palestine). The third is that instead of saying that the remarks were disrespectful to Trump himself, he said they were disrespectful to the country, thus taking it out of the realm of possible narcissism and into the more basic arena of respect for the country.
The Democrats’ responses to Tlaib were almost comical in their attempts to thread the needle and blame the whole thing on Trump. That is, it all would be comical if the situation the country’s in weren’t so serious. Here are some of their reactions:
Ms Pelosi on Thursday said while she would not use such language, it was no worse than things Mr Trump has said…
Civil rights icon John Lewis said Ms Tlaib’s comments were “inappropriate” and “distracting”. The Georgia congressman also said talk of impeachment was “a little premature”.
Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri said: “What she said yesterday was wrong. Wrong is wrong.”
Jerry Nadler of New York told CNN: “I don’t really like that kind of language, but more to the point it is too early to talk about [impeachment] intelligently.”
Tepid gruel. At any rate, it’s all about impeachment, impeachment, impeachment. I’m not sure they’ll do that, however, rather than just talk incessantly about it.
Of two things I’m virtually sure, though. The first is that Pelosi is constantly monitoring how an impeachment would play politically, and she will act accordingly. And the second is that if she tells Democrats to vote for it, they will vote for it.
