A (or One) Skeptic

When I started this post Jimmy Kimmel had just been suspended. Since then he has been (mostly) reinstated after some serious blowback from the viewing public. (The Sinclair Group still has him off the air.)

In any case, let’s review how we got here. Kimmel was taken off the air, in this case over what he said about the death of Charlie Kirk. 

What did he say?

The MAGA Gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK?

That’s what got Kimmel canned?

That’s what got him canned?

First of all, it’s true. While the MAGA team is working overtime to paint the shooter, Tyler James Robinson, as left-wing and infected with the “woke mind virus,” there seems to be no evidence for that at all. 

As it happens, organizations and researchers who have looked at the question, such as the Cato Institute — which is a Koch-funded libertarian think tank, in case you didn’t know —  have concluded that over the last generation, the vast majority of political violence has come from the political right (excluding the 9/11 terrorist attack). That would be 391 from the right and only 65 from the left.

As for Antifa, the right’s favorite bogeyman, it isn’t a thing. The term originated in Europe in the early 20th century as part of resistance to fascist movements like Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Nazis. In modern times, “Antifa” has been used to describe loose networks of activists, not a centralized group with formal leadership or membership, most of whose activities include protesting, counter-demonstrations, online organizing, and community defense.

That’s it. Antifa activists have not  gunned down anyone.

As for Robinson, we don’t actually know much about this kid, and what we do know is largely conflicting. We know that the kid is 22, that his family is Mormon and conservative Republican, that he was enrolled in an apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College and briefly attended Utah State University but dropped out. We know that he was registered to vote as “unaffiliated,” and we know there is no record of him ever having voted. Robinson is said to have had a romantic partner who is transgender, and reportedly objected to some of the hateful things that Kirk had to say about the transgendered.

In fact, Kirk had many hateful things to say about all kinds of people. If you don’t believe me, read what Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in an article for Vanity Fair about Charlie Kirk. 

Read some of the things that Kirk said about George Floyd, such calling him a “scumbag,” repeatedly claiming Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, claiming that Derek Chauvin’s 9-minute knee-on-neck restraint was an “approved police technique” and questioning the legitimacy of systemic racism narratives.

Read some of the other vile things that Kirk has said, including claiming that prominent black women such as Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Ketanji Brown Jackson did not have “the brain processing power to be taken seriously,” and that they had to “steal a white person’s slot” in order to be respected.

Kirk publicly endorsed the “great replacement” theory, stating that immigration and border demographics are being used to replace white rural Americans.

Kirk claimed that “large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America” and that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” 

But also, “Jewish donors,” were “the number one funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.” Indeed, Kirk claimed that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”

And of course, most ironically, Kirk was emphatic that it’s “worth it” to have “some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” 

And really, that’s just scratching the surface.

And  yet, somehow, it is Kirk who is now being deified and it’s Kimmel who was cast off the air. 

People like Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, keep saying things like “they” (meaning us) “don’t know what they (meaning us) have unleashed.”

Or Steven Miller, who said at the Charlie Kirk memorial on Sunday that “You (meaning us) have no idea the dragon you (meaning us) have awakened.”

“They” of course refers to us, the people who are still sane. And we haven’t unleashed anything because none of us took a shot at Charlie Kirk. That was actually one of “them,” the MAGA people, except that this particular MAGA person was also a whack job.

Steven Miller, in case you’ve forgotten, is Jewish, from the same tribe that, according to Kirk, represent the “number one” funders of “radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.”

Oh boy.

But actually, I think it’s the other way around.

The canning of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel — and Fallon, Seth Meyers and Jon Stewart can’t be far behind — is awakening something in us, the people who are still sane and still understand how the First Amendment works.

I believe there will be a huge backlash from our side. Colbert and Kimmel will find new opportunities, and might combine their talents with Rachel Maddow and others to work on new projects. 

Ironically, Fox News, that world record fabricator of new lies on a daily basis, is still on the air because it does not have a broadcast license (although individual Fox stations do). That alone proves that there are plenty of opportunities in this media environment to have a platform without needing a broadcast license. 

And finally I will note what is already well known, that the specifics for why Colbert and Kimmel were picked on first has to do with two separate media mergers that do require FCC approval: in Colbert’s case the Paramount Global / Skydance Media merger, and in Kimmel’s case the Nexstar Media Group / Tegna merger. That last one is a merger that should be denied on the merits alone, since that would lead to as many as 80% of American  households getting their local TV news from that combined entity. The current rules that say that no more than 39% of households could get their broadcasts from one entity would also have to be suspended, which is a terrible idea.

Congress? Do you have anything to say about this?

(For another analysis see what John Oliver had to say about this on Last Week Tonight.)

Well, it’s very interesting to watch the Republicans tie themselves into knots trying to blame the assassination of Charlie Kirk on Democrats. At the outset it should be noted that agree with him or disagree with him — and I disagreed with him on almost everything — Charlie Kirk is exactly the kind of guy who should not have been assassinated, if we want to have any kind of civil discourse. Kirk put himself squarely into the civic debate, daring people to prove him wrong. And that is the forum in which he should have been (and often was) defeated. Not by shooting him in the neck.

It should also be noted that of the two people who tried to take out Trump last summer and the guy who did take out Charlie Kirk, none of them was a Democrat. 

• Thomas Matthew Crooks is a registered Republican; 
• Ryan Wesley Routh is “unaffiliated” although he has sometimes voted in Democratic primaries; and now,
• Tyler Robinson is the son of a Mormon family all of whom were Trump-supporting MAGAs. Robinson was also registered to vote as “unaffiliated,” although there is no evidence that he ever voted.

So none of them are Democrats.

All of that did not keep Elon Musk from exclaiming on X that “The Left is the party of murder.” Ignoring for the moment that the left is not a “party,” it is also, of course, factually untrue. 

And then we got these kind of posts on X:

Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.

Oh boy.

I will say that I was impressed with the use of the word “stochastic” here, although it wasn’t quite used properly.

But the American Reichstag fire?

For those of you who don’t know, the Reichstag fire is universally regarded as the event that precipitated the changeover in the early NAZI regime from an arguably legitimate regime into a clearly illegitimate regime. The Reichstag fire occurred on February 27, 1933, when a 24 year old Dutch communist set a fire in the German parliamentary building, doing significant damage. Although the best evidence is that Marinus van der Lubbe acted alone, the NAZI’s blamed the communists as an organization, which precipitated the signing of the Reichstag Fire Decree a couple of weeks later. That was the beginning of the end for civil liberties under the new regime.

In other words, the Reichstag fire is not the kind of event I would be touting as what is needed in the United States of America in order for us to move forward politically.

Actually, the way that the killing of Charlie Kirk is much more likely to be used is the way that the NAZI’s used Horst Wessel. Wessel was a young man who was an early supporter of the NAZI party. Aside from being a militant street fighter, Wessel also wrote a song entitled “Die Fahne hoch” (“Raise the Flag”), which later became known as the Horst-Wessel-Lied.

In any case, on January 14, 1930, Wessel was shot in his Berlin apartment by Albrecht Höhler, a member of the Communist Party, during a dispute reportedly linked to both politics and personal entanglements involving his landlady and a former prostitute. Höhler had been brought in as “muscle” to help evict Wessel and his companion. Although he was shot at the beginning of 1930, Wessel did not actually die until February 23, after he contracted sepsis while in hospital.

The Nazis quickly turned his death into propaganda. Wessel was elevated as a symbol of youthful sacrifice for the Nazi cause, and his song became central to the movement’s identity.  The “Horst-Wessel-Lied” eventually became mandatory at Nazi ceremonies and was often paired with the national anthem.

That is the political danger that I’d be on the lookout for. Mythmaking for Charlie Kirk that is completely disproportionate to his actual character and accomplishments.

What’s going on with the current Texas redistricting is crazy. And you can thank the Supreme Court for that. In what may be the 3rd worst modern decision behind Citizen’s United v. FEC and Trump v. United States we have the 2019 case of Rucho v. Common Cause — a case you have likely never heard of — which held that questions of extreme partisan gerrymandering are non-justiciable political questions, so the courts had to keep hands off.

Even though a previous court had already decided in Baker v. Carr that questions of redistricting were justiciable by the United States Supreme Court.

But let’s back up for a moment.

First of all, redistricting is something that is required by the Constitution after the decennial census in order to be able to draw districts that have an equal number of voters apportioned therein.

What normally happens is that the census is taken every 10 years — I  myself worked on the 1980 decennial census — and within the next year or two the state legislatures redraw the districts based on their own population. The number of the 435 congressional districts gets reapportioned between the states at that time. Texas, with its growing population, went from 36 to 38 districts for the decade from 2022 to 2031.

That’s when redistricting happens.

After the census.

This is the way it has worked since the Reapportionment Act of 1929.

And now, at Donald Trump’s urging, Texas is trying to change the rules.

Unilaterally.

Because of the Rucho case, there is nothing really out there to stop Texas from doing so.

The Texas democratic representatives who fled the state aren’t going to be able to keep their Republican colleagues from enacting this scheme, and Governor Greg Abbott — proof positive that you can be both disabled and a complete dickhead at the same time — from signing it into law.

So now California and New York are threatening to retaliate. With artificial intelligence and very detailed data on who is registered to vote where, any state can draw up districts in which they maximize the chances for one party over another, virtually disenfranchising most of us, regardless of which side we’re on.

There is an obvious fix for this, one that everyone should be able to get behind: a Constitutional amendment that requires districts be drawn as close as possible to existing municipal and country boundaries, so that the districts reflect the natural and actual composition of the people who live there.

Of course, that’s not going to happen. That would make way too much sense. And try getting that through our hyper-partisan Congress.

Oh, and fuck the Supreme Court.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — and of course it passed this Cickenshit Congress, even if by a narrow margin — should really be called the One Big Cruel Bill. This is where we’re at in the United States of America.

Here’s a summary of the Senate version of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (H.R. 1), which the House had to accept without making any changes in order to avoid a conference committee.

🏛️ Major Tax & Budget Changes

• Extends Trump-era 2017 tax cuts permanently, including corporate, small-business (Section 199A), and expensing provisions.
• Child Tax Credit adjusted to $2,200 (down from $2,500 in earlier versions) .
• Senior tax break increased to $6,000.
• SALT deduction cap raised temporarily to $40,000 for households under $500K, reverting to $10K after five years.

💊 Healthcare & Medicaid Overhaul

• Massive Medicaid cuts: ~ $930 billion over 10 years, deeper than House version (CBO estimates ~11.8 million Americans could lose coverage over the next decade).
• Work requirements expanded, including for parents with children over 14.
• Provider tax for Medicaid phased out more aggressively—shrinking from 6% to 3.5% by ~2031.
• Rural Hospital Fund: $50 billion allocated to support small facilities.

🇺🇸 Immigration & Border Security

• Border and ICE funding ramped up, including:
  • $46.5B for wall construction;
  • $45B for detention;
  • $30B for ICE hires.

🌞 Energy & Environment

• Rollback of clean energy tax credits: subsidies for wind, solar (and EV credits) scaled back or tied to domestic content—limited viability after 2028 investors.com.
• Nuclear energy incentives restored: Production credits extended through 2032–2033

🛡️ Defense & National Security

• Defense & immigration budgets near $150B each.
• Missile defense (“Golden Dome”): $25 billion including hypersonic and space-based interceptors.

📊 Fiscal Outlook & Political Fallout

• The current U.S. federal debt ceiling (set at approximately $36.1 trillion) is increased by $5 trillion (vs. $4 trillion in House version).
• Deficit impact: CBO estimates +$3.26 trillion as opposed to the current CBO projection of a $1.9 trillion deficit.

And this is all happening in an environment where companies like Tesla, General Electric, Amazon, General Motors and T-Mobile paid as little as 0.4% on their earned income. 

Large pharmaceutical firms — including AbbVie, Amgen, Bristol‑Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer — did not pay U.S. corporate income tax on their 2023 profits. They effectively shifted profits offshore and had zero domestic tax liability. 

Nearly 10% of S&P 500 companies reported zero income tax expense in 2023.

A recent GAO report found that 34% of large, profitable corporations paid zero federal income tax in 2018.

It’s not just the corporations. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn & George Soros have paid little or no income tax over the last handful of years (and they land on both sides of the political aisle).

How greedy can we get?

By now it’s absolutely, crystal clear that in this world economy, none of this money is going to “trickle down” to the rest of us.

And with respect to health care, many Americans are at risk of losing health insurance under the Medicaid with, the CBO projecting 10–12 million will lose Medicaid coverage by 2034—and combined with ACA changes, up to 17 million uninsured 

Why are coverage losses likely to happen? Well here’s why:

1. New unrealistic work & documentation requirements in Medicaid.
2. Frequent eligibility reviews & red tape.
3. Reduced federal funding for Medicaid.
4. Rollbacks to Obamacare marketplace support.
5. Expiration of enhanced premium tax credits leading to ~5 million losing marketplace coverage.

What are some of the consequences of all of this?

• Combined with Medicaid losses, total uninsured could reach ~17 million within the next few years.
• Rural communities rely heavily on Medicaid; cuts threaten closure of 300+ rural hospitals due to unpaid care and less funding 
• Low-income families, seniors, and disabled individuals lose essential access to care—forcing reliance on expensive emergency services 
• National health costs may rise, with uninsured patients shifting costs onto insured taxpayers and commercial insurers.

I’m to the point where I say fuck it, let’s close a bunch of rural hospitals, let’s throw a bunch of people off of Medicare and out of their nursing homes.

Again, this may be the only way that the fever breaks. Let’s have a MAGA supporter discover that his mother was thrown out of her nursing home, which closed anyway, and now he can’t find any of the (mostly African) health care workers to assist because they either self-deported or are too scared to show up at an elder care agency.

Let’s see how Fuckface and his cohorts feels about it then.

The moral arc of this country has been twisted into knots, especially among those who identify as evangelical Christians. In the long run this is going to drive massive numbers of young people out of the churches, as the cognitive dissonance required to believe while seeing how people are actually treated exceeds the capacities of many young minds.

There is no intellectual way to defend this stuff anymore. There just isn’t.

The question arises, why is it so much worse for Iran to have nuclear weapons than it is for India and Pakistan to have them?

And the answer is that the reasons are not obvious. There are arguments to be made on both sides, but none of them is decisive.

Let’s backup for a moment and acknowledge that there are nine nations currently known to have nuclear weapons. 

• First, the big kahunas: the United States (5,244 total, 1,770 deployed) and the Russian Federation (5,580 total, 1,674 deployed).
• Second, China (about 500, but rapidly expanding).
• Then, the Europeans: the United Kingdom (about 225, up to 120 operational) and France (about 290).
• Then, India (about 270 warheads) and Pakistan (also about 270).
• Then, Israel (an estimated 80-90 warheads, never confirmed by Israel).
• Finally, North Korea (about 50-70 warheads).

There is also a separate question of delivery systems, but we’ll ignore that issue for now.

India and Pakistan have been in a low intensity conflict (mostly about the Kashmir region) since both of their founding in 1947, punctuated from time to time by more intense conflicts. These occurred in 1948, 1965, 1971 and 1999. Their warheads are mostly trained on each other in acts of mutual deterrence, and there is almost no possibility that either country would use their warheads against anyone except each other.

Israel has never formally acknowledged that it has nuclear weapons, but the general belief in the intelligence community is that they have around 80–90 warheads, with possible delivery systems by ballistic missiles, aircraft, and submarine-launched cruise missiles.

It’s a formidable deterrence, and could wipe out large portions of Iran.

So, why all the hysteria about Iran developing nuclear weapons?

I mean, I’m not personally excited about Iran developing nuclear weapons, but then I’m not personally excited about any country developing or possessing nuclear weapons.

Why all the hysteria about Iran?

Yes, Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapon state. So it would be breaking a treaty. Not good, but Iran is hardly the first nation in the world to break a treaty. Was there ever a treaty that the United States signed with native americans that we didn’t break? (Asking for a friend.)

Yes, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons could trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt have hinted they might pursue nukes in response. Again, not good, but hardly unprecedented. (See India and Pakistan, above). And mostly speculative at this point. For one thing, it’s very expensive to develop nuclear weapons.

Yes, Iran has a history of hostile rhetoric toward Israel and supports non-state actors like Hezbollah and the Houthis. Also not good, but what does that have to do with nuclear weapons?

It would be one thing if Israel didn’t have nuclear weapons, or the capacity to deliver them to Iran. Israel has, in fact, been kind of dishonest about their own nuclear weapons program. It follows a policy of “nuclear opacity” where it deliberately neither confirms nor denies having nuclear arms or the nature of those arms.

If that weren’t enough, the historian Heather Cox Richardson also disclosed this morning (based on reporting by the NY Times) that Trump decided to unload the 60,000 lb bombs primarily because of how Netanyahu’s war on Iran was “playing” on Fox News.

“The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved.”

Good Lord!

And for arranging a one-day cease fire (which did not hold for even a single day) Trump wants to be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize, something he has been obsessed with ever since Obama won a (largely undeserved) prize. (Obama won his prize in 2009 for — as some commentators have noted — “being President while being black.”)

And there it is, ladies and gentlemen, our current President at work.

I thought President Trump, right at the beginning of his Presidency, was going to solve the war between Russia and Ukraine and was going to bring to an end the war between Israel and Hamas. Isn’t that what he had promised. Instead we had the news that American warplanes and submarines attacked three key nuclear sites in Iran early Sunday, bringing the U.S. military directly into Israel’s war with Iran.

Oh boy.

Some of us remember that this problem had been virtually solved at the end of the Obama administration after John Kerry helped to negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which significantly, was not an agreement between Iran and the United States, but between Iran and the “P5+1” countries — China, France, Russia, the U.K., U.S., plus one — in other words, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. The deal was finalized in Vienna on 14 July 2015. The JCPOA was aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, in exchange for relief from international economic sanctions.

The main terms of the agreement included:

1. Uranium Enrichment Limits
   
   • Iran agreed to limit uranium enrichment to 3.67% (well below weapons-grade).
     
   • Iran could possess no more than 300 kg of enriched uranium for 15 years.
     
2. Centrifuge Reductions
   
   • Iran reduced its number of installed centrifuges by two-thirds (from ~19,000 to ~6,000), and only ~5,000 could be used to enrich uranium.
     
3. Reactor Modifications
   
   • The Arak heavy-water reactor was redesigned so it could not produce weapons-grade plutonium.
     
4. Inspections and Monitoring
   
   • Iran agreed to extensive IAEA inspections, including continuous surveillance of nuclear facilities.
     
   • The IAEA could access suspected undeclared sites with advance notice.
     
5. Sanctions Relief
   
   • In return, the U.S., EU, and UN agreed to lift nuclear-related economic sanctions, giving Iran access to international markets and billions in frozen assets.
     
6. Snapback Provision
   
   • If Iran violated the terms, sanctions could be reinstated (“snapped back”) by a UN process without veto power by Russia or China.
     

The deal was not perfect, and critics argued among other things that it delayed rather than eliminated Iran’s nuclear ambitions. 

So fucking what? You can’t negotiate away ambition. Something is better than nothing.

Since he had not negotiated the deal himself, Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in May 2018, reinstating sanctions. Not surprisingly, the deal fell apart.

I’m not quite sure what prompted Israel to go ahead and launch an unprovoked and unilateral attack on Iran, but that was the decision of Benjamin Netanyahu and the government of Israel. It’s not our fight.

And yet, here we are.

Some Republicans like Rand Paul, Mitt Romney and John Cornyn, as well as (gulp) Marjorie Taylor Green, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Matt Gaetz — do I now have to be in agreement on something with that demonic crew? — are opposed to our involvement, so at least there is some pushback within the Republican ranks themselves. 

Nevertheless, a majority of Republicans still have not noticed that Trump has failed to live up to just about every promise he made on the campaign trail. He hasn’t even deported more undocumented immigrants than Biden or Obama. It’s just that for the ones he has deported, it’s been in a much more lawless way. 

I don’t know if I can wait long enough for the fever to break and for some large portion of Trump supporters to finally recognize the fraud behind the curtain in Oz.

With Elon Musk’s recent departure from DOGE and his status as a special government employee, I don’t think any sane person is sad to see him go. Musk will, of course, be forever remembered as the person who completely ruined his reputation in two easy steps. Twitter and DOGE; that’s all it took. From Boy Genius to proto-fascist in less time than it has ever taken anyone else.

Now in the duration of its existence there has been a lot of conflicting information about what DOGE actually accomplished. DOGE, about which Musk claimed that he would identify $2 trillion in savings, didn’t get anywhere close. Beginning with the boy geniuses at DOGE not understanding how COBOL works — and thereby misidentifying everyone who did not have a birth date in the Social Security system as being 150 years old — on through to the many revisions of their own published data, DOGE has actually been a spectacular failure. Musk claims to have identified $175 billion in savings — which would be 8.75% of what he promised to find — but people don’t even believe that number. 

I could do better than that myself in a single day. Don’t believe me? I can prove it to you right now.

How would we get from here to there?

• You could double the staffing at the IRS and have them go specifically after high income earners (including corporations) who are suspected of cheating on their taxes. 

That would still leave us $812 million short of closing the deficit this year.

Eliminating debt, however, is not the kind of thing one can achieve in a single year. It would take years and years and years of consistent and persistent effort. We’d at least be moving in the right direction.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is my proof that I could have done a better job in a single day than Musk’s entire team of incels was able to accomplish in the 4½ months they’d been at it.

I’ll take my paycheck now, please.

The incessant news cycle about the Trump administration was interrupted oh so briefly by the news about President Biden. First we had the publication of the book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson entitled “Original Sin” and arguing that Biden’s cognitive decline in the 2nd half of his term was subject to a cover up. And, that his decision to run for a 2nd term was disastrous. And then, eight days later, there was the announcement of Biden’s prostate cancer, and that it had metastasized to his bones.

So, first of all, I have been saying since Biden’s election that he should serve as a one-term president. That would have rid him of the need to direct his policies to ensure his re-election, and it would have given the Democratic party four years to find a successor. But nobody listened to me (or all the rest of us who were saying the same thing).  No surprise there.

Secondly, it’s not surprising that Biden wanted to run for re-election given how badly Biden wanted to be President in the first place.  For those who have forgotten:

• Biden ran in 1988 (the Bush v. Dukakis election), and his campaign came to an end when Biden was accused of using parts of a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock without proper attribution. (A plagiarism scandal. How quaint!)
• Biden ran again in 2008, the same year that Barack and Hillary fought it out for the nomination. But Biden impressed Barack during the campaign enough so that he chose him for his Vice-President.
• And in 2020, of course, he won the election with the largest popular vote count in history (despite what Trump and his acolytes have insisted for all these years).

He clearly enjoyed being President, and was quite good at it.

But I’ve also been saying for quite some time that we should have elected Biden when we elected Obama, and we should have elected Obama when we elected Biden. That’s on us. That’s our mistake.

And finally, when it became clear that Biden had lost his fastball in the first debate, he did the agonizing thing — even though it took a while to get him there — and dropped out in favor of Kamala Harris, who turned out to be a very good candidate. 

Yes, a full four-year process might have led to a different candidate. Gavin Newsome? Maybe. Joshua Shapiro? Maybe. Gretchen Whitmer? Maybe. But there is no reason to believe that any of these candidates would have done better than Kamala Harris did. This country — for whatever reasons (and we will continue to discuss this) — was absolutely hell-bent on electing Trump. Again.

And now we will have to let Trump practically destroy the country before the fever may break — at least for those who are not hard-core MAGA — and the country can return back to some form of sanity, if not exactly prosperity.

I have been thinking a lot about why Republicans are so enraged at us, so enraged that they would inflict Donald Trump on us twice. I mean, I clearly got in 2016 that Trump was the FU candidate and that this was an FU election. But I thought they would have gotten it out of their system in 2016. Not so, of course.

So I asked ChatGPT to summarize what Republicans are so angry at us for. (ChatGPT, btw, is quite good at this kind of inquiry.) The list that ChatGPT came up with is set forth below. But before we even get to that, I have to acknowledge a few general grievances that I’m sure Republicans have.

First of all, on the left we have, over the years, been a little bit too smug. You can see this in particular during award shows or through the late night comedians. If you watch those shows you would think that everyone is with us, when clearly they are not. This is why Republicans hate “Hollywood” so much. We’ve got to watch our attitude.

Second, we have gone a little bit overboard with political correctness and the vocabulary one can and cannot use. For example, insisting that we all declare the gender pronouns we want to be known by. I’m all for people who are sincerely gender-fluid or transitioning getting to choose their pronouns — although the available options are often awkward, as pronouns like “they” and “them” really denote plurality — but asking some farmer in Kansas to declare what pronoun he wants be known through is a little bit silly.

So what are the issues that Republicans are so mad at us over. Let’s take a look.

Immigration Policy 

Many Republicans seem to think that Democrats are promoting open borders and that immigrants are taking their jobs. Of course, immigrants can’t simultaneously be blamed for jobs being shipped to China and taking jobs that most regular Americans don’t want to do. Most people with their eyes open know that farm work is dominated by Mexicans and elder care is dominated by Africans and almost all the available house cleaners are Brazilian, and these are all jobs that “domestic” American generally do not want to do. Otherwise, these would be Schrödinger’s immigrants. But no immigrant here has caused jobs to be shipped to China. That would be CEOs who need to take the blame for that.

The Size of Government

Ever since Ronald Reagan Republicans have basically seen the government as the enemy of the people and that it should be smaller and more “efficient.” Well, like any very large employer, the government is not always efficient. Not every program brings good results, and in fact, I’m actually on board with one conservative idea, and that is that most programs should have a seven year sunset, and unless its supporters can demonstrate at the end of seven years that the program is effective and should be renewed, then it should expire at that time. 

But other large organizations are also not super efficient. For example, Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, United Parcel Service and Home Depot — the largest employers in the United States — do some things well and some things not so well. And by definition, not everyone can be above average. Some people are better off in jobs that don’t require too much initiative.

Finally, the federal government contributes some amazing things, especially in areas like scientific research, without which many of the advances we’ve had in science would not have happened. Most of that stuff flies under the radar. Most of those things are done in partnership with other actors, like research hospitals, but these are very important things.

Just about every President who has ever been elected wants to make government more efficient, but that, it turns out, is a sisyphean task.

Social & Cultural Issues

Republicans are very worked up about “hot button” social issues like gay rights and abortion, and this has been true for a long time. With the Dobbs decision, they bought themselves a great victory.  Ironically, it turns out that even in conservative states, when the question of abortion rights is put directly to the voters, the voters approve of abortion rights.

Go figure.

Gay rights, on the other hand, is an issue that has changed with the generations. Most of the older generation is uncomfortable with gay rights, whereas much of the younger generation could care less. Remember that Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which legalized gay marriage, was only decided in 2003. It arguably tanked the presidential aspirations of John Kerry in 2004, even though he had nothing to do with it. Twelve years later we had Obergefell v. Hodges at the Supreme Court, and not even Donald Trump is currently advocating to reverse that decision.

But when it comes to the transgendered, we’re not there yet. We’ll most likely be there in another generation, but we’re not there yet today. We probably need to let that issue “marinate” until some of the controversy is bled out of it. In any case, it clearly has a lot of conservatives fired up.

Gun Rights

I’m not really sure why conservatives are still fired up about this, since you cannot even get any more pro-gun than the United States currently is. There are virtually no restrictions on gun purchases at the current time, and many conservatives are more concerned about the 2nd Amendment than they are about voting rights. Remember the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theories? Those worked out exactly like all the times that someone claimed that Second Coming was happening on a specific day. In any case, no one is “coming to take their guns.” That is now a settled issue. 

Climate Policy & Energy

Conservatives tend to be critical of climate and energy policies that promote sustainable energy and limit global warming, because they think there is a simple trade-off between progressive policies and harm to the economy. And to be fair, trade-offs can exist. But in the long run, sustainable energy is much better for the economy and creates many new local jobs here in America — something that the Trump administration is allegedly wanting to have happen — than committing to outdated industries. That’s not how capitalism works. 

Back in the day, we switched from steam locomotives to diesel because they were a much better technology; we switched from whale oil to shale oil because these were a much better technology (and whales were being hunted to extinction). We had to make the leap from horse and buggies to cars. 

Is there pain involved in these kinds of transitions? Sure.

Does the pain often hit the working class disproportionately? Yes.

But that doesn’t mean that we can stay committed to antiquated technologies forever.

The destruction that would  come with continued global warming would be a disaster not only for the United States but the entire planet. It’s time for us to “take our heads out of the sand.”

Crime and Policing

Republicans often claim that Democrats are “too soft” on crime and that our cities are overrun with criminals. Well, we’re not “soft” on crime, but more to the point, being too “hard” on crime is completely counterproductive. 

Years and years of experience with criminal justice has proven that rehabilitation and reintegration are the two things that statistically are most likely to keep people from reoffending. Policies like bail reform also lead to less recidivism. You can look it up.

Now, back during the George Floyd protests, the chants to “defund the police” were a huge mistake. I (and many others like me) knew that from day one. That was a rhetorical disaster. But often, it’s Democrats who are much more supportive of the police in actual practice, such as when Jon Stewart had to go to the wall to ensure the enactment of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Act over the objection of Republicans. Support for the police by Republicans is often merely performative, as it was on January 6th in the Capitol.

Election Integrity

This one is based on pure fantasy, and comes primarily from one man’s inability to accept defeat under any circumstances. The 2020 election was examined from every angle, and there was never any persuasive evidence that the election was rigged against Donald Trump. No, Trump lost in court 63 times, with just one small procedural victory which everyone conceded could not have affected the outcome. Still, there are Republicans to this day, who cannot accept the obvious.

A much more serious concern is that of voter suppression, which arguably made the difference in the outcome of the 2024 election, especially in the “swing” states. It is a false equivalence between “election integrity” and “voter suppression.” Almost all the evidence suggests that voter suppression is a much more serious concern than election integrity. 

Detachment from Reality

By now there is plenty of evidence that Republicans have essentially become detached from reality. Consider, for example, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent assertion that the DEA under Trump intercepted 71 million Fentanyl pills, and in the process saved “258 million” lives. Consider the absurdity of this post. First of all, how does 72 million pills translate to 258 million lives? That would mean that each pill intercepted — and who knows how many there actually were — would have saved 3.5 American lives. Now consider that 258 million lives is approximately 74.29% of the American population, babies, children and the elderly included. That would mean that you, and me, and my brother, and my sister, and my mother — well, maybe not my mother, maybe she is part of the quarter of the population that was not saved by Donald Trump — but that all of the rest of us were dying (pun intended) to get our hands on Fentanyl. Trump has repeatedly made assertions virtually every day that have no basis in fact whatsoever. I guess it’s not surprising that conservatives are so angry at us when they literally live in a fact free zone.

Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that “you’re entitled to your own opinion but not to your own set of facts.” Continuing to live in a fact free zone would eventually lead to the implosion of the Republican party. You can only live in a fantasy world for so long. Unless we can get to the point where we can at least agree on what the facts are, never mind what they imply, we are going to be a very sorry country indeed.

For the first time ever in my life I’m kind of hoping that Jesus does come back at Easter this year, just so he could tell all the MAGA “christians” that there is no way they’re getting into the Kingdom of Heaven. I hope he can call them all in individually to deliver the same message.

I mean, if Santa Clause can visit over one billion homes on Christmas Eve, I’m sure Jesus can talk to the 25-30 million evangelical Christians on one day.

Let Jesus tell them that it doesn’t actually matter what you believe or proclaim, it only matters how you behave. And that repeatedly demonstrating your cruelty is no way to get into any kind of beautiful afterlife.

Oh, and then I hope he tells them that there is no Heaven, that it’s a child’s fantasy, and it only matters what you do here in this life. Boy, I would love to see some of their faces after that conversation.