Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 1: For Want of a Villain

I've been thinking about the show Avatar: The Last Airbender a lot lately and decided to re-watch the series and do a write up for each season because I'm bored and feel like taking a break from politics. Also I'm starting grad school soon so I figured it'd be a good idea to start stretching those analysis muscles before the semester starts. The main thing I'm focusing on is how the show ups the quality and stakes of its conflicts by scaling up the quality of their villains in each season. Write up, and spoilers, below the cut.

( I don't want to do a whole plot summary for the show, so if you haven't seen it, watch the opening. It's only a minute.)

Let me just say that overall, I really love this show. It's the best supernatural martial arts show anyone has ever done, with a incredibly rich and developed world of disparate cultures and  peoples. That being said, this first season is, by a wide margin, the weakest in the series.

The primary reason for this is that the season doesn't have a very strong antagonist. Zuko is a red-herring since he's more of what's called the deuteragonist (literally the second most important person in the story) more than an antagonist. Sure, he is the primary pursuer of our main trio, but that is more because he needs them as objects to fulfill his own personal quest of restoring his honor and his destined place in the world. 

Zuko doesn't act out of any real sense of enmity; he, like Aang, is simply pursuing the person he thinks will help him restore balance to a world gone upside down. Enmity develops between Zuko and the main trio, because how can you not sorta hate the person trying to capture and imprison you, but this is used by the creative team as a smokescreen to obscure the similarities between Aang and Zuko this early in the story. It's good long-form story-telling, but it has the unfortunate side effect of sidelining Zhao, the actual antagonist, negating any threat he could pose.

Zhao, voiced wonderfully by Jason Issacs, is more of an impediment than he is a threat. He fights both Aang and Zuko one-on-one on two separate occasions over the season and is beaten by both of them. In Aang's case, Aang doesn't even throw a punch, he just tricks Zhao into destroying his own boats. Even when Zhao has Aang imprisoned, a disguised Zuko waltzes in and out of the prison Aang's being kept in with only minor difficulty. And since Zhao's pursuit of Aang is more of an attempt to humiliate Zuko, he's barely proactive in hunting down the main trio of Aang and siblings Sokka and Katara. 

Zhao, at best, is making his decisions as reactions to the actions of two other people, he never really seizes the initiative or forces anyone to reconsider their game plan. Sure, they have to work around him, but they do, easily and repeatedly. It really says something that the only time Zhao poses a legitimate threat is in the finale where the main trio, having successfully evaded him, are training in the North Pole. Basically, the team corners themselves and even Zhao can't fuck up posing a threat in that position.

But Zhao's incompetence does serve a broader, more important story function. His bumbling interference serves as a way to keep the Gaang (the shorthand term for Aang, Katara, and Sokka) out of any serious or perilous physical or emotional situations that they aren't prepared to handle. They're a relatively weak and incompetent lot of heroes, so they need a villain who's at the same level as they are and, on the other hand, prevent someone who is more driven and passionate in chasing the Gaang from fulfilling his own quest. Zhao is basically padding in living form- he keeps the story going without adding anything meaningful to it. It makes stretches of the season boring, unfortunately, but at this point he's something of a necessary evil.

The other aspect of this show that doesn't quite get used to the full extent is the cost of the war and its effect on the world these characters live in. "The Southern Air Temple", "Jet", and "The Northern Air Temple" are the episodes that handle the conflict and its costs best, but for a large part of the season, you could be forgiven that stopping this war is the whole point of making sure Aang learns how to use four elements. 

In context, I don't consider this criticism as important as the one about Zhao's listless villainy because, one, the characters themselves are still immature and don't have the full real-world experience to handle being fully exposed to the war, and two, when the writers do dip their toes into this area, they do exceptionally well.

The two Air Temple episodes are fantastic looks at Aang and his survivor's guilt. The death of his people, his culture, his entire heritage, crushes him in both episodes to a fantastic degree. Also, "The Northern Air Temple" introduces us to the Mechanist, a man who has converted the temple into a mechanized factory of sorts to build hot-air balloons and gliders for the surviving members of his tribe, including his crippled son Teo, after a Fire Nation attack. It's later revealed that the Mechanist has been building weapons for the Fire Nation for years. He explains that shortly after they came to the temple when Teo was still a baby, Fire Nation troops found them and threatened to kill them. In order to spare their lives, the Mechanist offered his services, and the troops accepted. 

What's most impressive about the whole episode is that while the show portrays the Mechanist's actions as terrible, it doesn't apply the same treatment to the man himself. Instead, they play them as a man who had to make a terrible choice, a man who knows that the same methods and devices he's using to create a safe, loving life for his son and the people he loves are, at the same time, destroying families and lives exactly like his every day. It's an awful burden, and to see it introduced and handled so well in any form of media is impressive as all hell, no matter if it's just a "kids" show.

Similarly, the episode "Jet" gives Katara and Sokka an opportunity of their own to see what they could become if they let go of their own code. The eponymous character leads a rag-tag group of child soldiers in a resistance against the Fire Nation soldiers garrisoned nearby. Like Sokka and Katara, Jet's mother was killed by Fire Nation soldiers-everyone in his group lost someone to the Fire Nation- like the Gaang, Jet is part of a loosely assembled band of children way out of their depth doing what they can to bring down an army that has ruined so much of their lives.  

 

Unlike the Gaang however, Jet becomes the very thing he hates the most. His plan in the episode is to manipulate Aang and Katara into filling up the local reservoir, then blow it up, flooding the town killing solider and civilian alike. He justifies himself by saying he wants to kick the Fire Nation out of the valley, and by killing everything, well that fulfills his mission. 

This "make a desert, call it peace" is the same style of conquest the Fire Nation engages in and Jet justifies himself by saying if you want to beat them, you have to use their own tactics against them. Unlike the example with the Mechanist, the show doesn't cut Jet any slack (at least not yet) because when confronted with the monstrosity of his choices and their consequences, he refuses to alter them. Again, the show doesn't downplay or diminish the validity or scale of his loss, but it does hammer home that no matter the pain or circumstance, our choices are always our own, and we will have to reconcile them sooner or later.

All that said, I still recommend the watching the show and starting it from this first season. The individual episodes are strong- "The Fortune Teller" and "The Great Divide" are the only real duds in the season- even if they don't do a very good job of building momentum towards the climax of the season. The three-part finale is (and I do hate using this) epic in all the best ways. 

 

Main reason I don't feel this season is bad, exactly, is because all the primary complaints I have with it disappear in the next two seasons once the trio moves directly into the main theaters of the war instead of being on its fringes. 

This season is very much concerned with laying the foundation for all the conflicts and character growth still to come and it does that quite well; everything is comparatively low stakes because the characters don't have the physical or emotional abilities to handle the higher ones yet. So while that may make for a dry and sometimes difficult experience watching the story, it's still necessary and I'm glad the showrunners got it all done at once.

That's all I've got for the first season.  Next up: Season two and the wrecking ball that is Princess Azula.

Rotting Our Brains Over Russia

On Tuesday Donald Trump Jr. released the email chain that led to his meeting a Russian lawyer with his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and his dad's then-campaign manager Paul Manafort.  There was much screaming of 'collusion' from pretty much every left-leaning news source the minute Dipshit Jr. released the emails, with the same matching yawns and shrugs in conservative circles.  Actual lawyers say that the emails by themselves are damaging but not enough to go to court let alone get a conviction, but, there's outrage to be had so the hell with those people.

I've written before about why I'm skeptical of the whole Russia business because I've always felt that it would be used as a distraction by the Democratic Party to point the finger at the traditional boogeymen of The Rooskies meddling in American affairs to cover up their own plentiful failings losing an election they should have easily won.  And for the most part, I still believe that.  I don't see Trump losing anything or Democrats gaining anything they didn't already have as a result of this so I'm more than a little frustrated that they still make this such an important cornerstone of their opposition to Trump.  But, we'll get to that.  First off I want to actually look at these emails and what we should, and should not, glean from them.

The headline exchange happens right away, with British music publicist Rob Goldstone telling Jr. that he knows a lawyer with documents from the (not-actually-a-thing) "Crown Prosecutor of Russia" to use against Hillary Clinton.  Goldstone also says that the documents come straight from the Russian government as part of "[their] support for Mr. Trump."  Jr. took the meeting and, according to him, did not receive any information since the lawyer just wanted to talk about adoptions.  According to Jr., the whole thing lasted twenty minutes and was done.  Leaving aside that his defense of not colluding with Russia is "I fully intended to receive incriminating information from possibly dubious sources, but since that was just a ruse, it's kinda like I'm the victim here" it's worth the effort to breakdown the law people are claiming he violated and whether or not the emails prove that he did.

So, the rope people are wanting to hang Jr. by is  campaign fiance law 52 U.S.C. 30121, 36U.S.C. 510 which says:

"A foreign national shall not, directly or indirectly, make a contribution or a donation of money or other thing of value, or expressly or impliedly promise to make a contribution or a donation, in connection with any Federal, State, or local election."

The law also says that a political campaign cannot solicit or receive donations of value from foreign entities, with the specific language relevant to that being:

"No person shall knowingly provide substantial assistance in the solicitation, making, acceptance, or receipt of a contribution or donation."

So does Jr. solicit a contribution from an outside source? Not in the way we usually think of it, no. Goldstone made first contact so from what we have, nothing shows anyone related to the campaign reaching out to Goldstone or anyone else asking if they have contacts in the Russian government and if they could hook them up, so that just leaves the "substantial assistance" path in going to the meeting under the belief he would be accepting a contribution.  It's there, but it's also not a lot. 

Second, did Jr. receive anything of value from the meeting? There's no proof that he did, either in the emails themselves or from any other reporting, so that, too, is something of a dead end until we have you know, actual proof and stuff.  Which, I understand not believing him about not getting anything, especially since he changed his story regarding this meeting three times, but if you want him to get dragged into court over this, you need more than "He's a lying piece of shit" to submit into evidence.

Even then, if evidence came out detailing that Jr. did indeed receive something from this meeting, we aren't quite done yet.  Because then you would to prove that whatever hypothetical thing Jr. received at the meeting was something of value.  So if this information was something that was public record, it's hard to see that meeting a specified definition of value in court considering that anyone could have found it and given it the Trump campaign, if said documents even exist.  Without knowing what information theoretically was on offer, or the methods it was obtained by, saying that Jr. went to receive hacked information is just reckless and only sets people up to issue yet another retraction to anything involving Russia and the hacking scandal.

The other part of the emails I want to look at is whether we should actually believe Goldstone was acting on behalf of the Russian government like he claims.  Goldstone's email does lay out his own connections to Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov (Goldstone represents Agalarov's popstar son), who met with a man named Yuri Chaika (who is Russia's equivalent of an Attorney General) who would pass along the information to a woman named Natalia Veselnitskaya who then, in turn, would pass it on to the Trump campaign.  It's a believable, self-contained chain of events, but I have three main hangups.  The first is that this spy-novel chain of association is proof of espionage is the exact same kind of reasoning used against political dissidents in both of our previous red scares so I think it's good to be resistant to anything that pulls you in to the same fever dream of paranoia like we've already done.  The second is believing that a government run by a former KGB agent who has in all probability assassinated people for possibly exposing his activities would orchestrate a plan to give out secret information via two guys using their personal emails and signing each one in their own fucking name. It's a Get Smart chain of events that's too stupid to believe happens in real life.

The last hangup I have is that the thing Jr. says Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about, the Magnitsky Act-which bars certain Russian officials from entering the U.S. or using U.S. banking systems- is something Putin has been trying to get reversed since it was passed in 2012. Also keep in mind that Veselnitskaya has usually been the front woman for that lobbying and that she was involved in the criminal case that got the Magnitsky Act's namesake killed regarding the $230 million fraud that was settled for $6 million in May. Point being, there's good enough reasons to believe that the meeting was to set up a more mundane form of corruption than the sensational. If you're wondering why all the pretense then, if it's just the usual level of evil, consider how the Trump's have no interest or understanding of actual policy so if they had been contacted with a proposal to talk with a Russian lawyer about a law they probably couldn't even name until they needed to say it on T.V. this week, they would've never been let in the building.  But, if the meeting is some cloak-and-dagger nonsense about juicy state secrets passed on by the Russian government, well, here we all are.

What the emails do prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the Trump campaign was perfectly willing to knowingly accept dirt from the Russian government and lie about it.  And as for the line that Trump himself didn't know about the meeting?  Bullshit.  There's no way his eldest son, son-in-law, and campaign manager have a meeting in his own building a floor beneath his office and he doesn't know.

So, what does it all mean for us as a country?  In my opinion, this will turn out to mean very little, if anything at all.  If we all woke up tomorrow with video evidence of Vladimir Putin speaking, in English, to Donald Trump about how he was going to rig the election for Trump, I doubt you could find a significant amount of Republicans to believe it, or care even if they did.  To them, it'll be just another Fake News story trying to tear down Trump over the Russia business.  Even for the ones left in reality, do you really expect a Republican voter to care that Hillary Clinton got cheated out of an election?  Please.  Republicans will upgrade gay people from deviant abominations to maybe real people before they shed a tear for anything that befalls Hillary.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are wasting whatever political interest or goodwill they could've mustered by focusing on a vague, abstract injury than the real, specific ones Trump is trying inflict on people.  Instead of talking about how Republican governors are lowering the minimum wage in four states, Democratic politicians and media pundits are content to stay focused on Russia, just to be sure the image the party has of caring more about it's own political ambitions and prospects than the lives of actual people outside of the coast cities doesn't get replaced by anything more, I don't know, worthwhile.  God forbid the party change tactics and try to get more people to show up and vote for them, then they could be held accountable for shit instead of just saying how terrible Republicans are.  I am honestly curious how Democrats expect their bleating about Russia to bring back young and independent voters who abandoned them for policy reasons, but, if the people who lost 1,000 seats at all levels of government think this is a winning strategy, who is anyone to say otherwise?

But wait, I'm sure some of you will say, they talk about it all the time because it violated our democracy and national character, or something.  To which, I say, the United States has never been all that interested in being a functioning democracy that let everyone have a voice, and indeed had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing so.  And even today, the whole of the South is still trying to make sure as few black people vote as they possibly can, because fuck them, right?  So, whatever spirit of democracy got offended was just the one we pretend to have instead the one that actually exists.  I do agree on the second point, though, that an interference in our election would be a blow against our own sovereignty and character, but, who do you really think we are?

National identities, like everything else, aren't intrinsic, they're made.  At the end of the day, the Constitution is just a bunch of words on a page, the principles behind them don't mean anything unless people make the conscience choice to force their government to live by them, and we, as a country, have abandoned that for a long time now.  You can't really have a meaningful protection against unreasonable search and seizure if you live in a country where the government intercepts and records every single communication you make.  Torture, kidnappings, assassinations, and imprisonment without trial are sorta incompatible with the whole due process and trial-by-jury things.  We willfully  traded all those away and either exiled or imprisoned anyone who bothered to remind us that these things were kind of awful.  When it comes right down to it, Russia interfering in our elections amounts to one oligarchical state taking pot shots at another oligarchical state that has a high value on pretense.  If you factor in all the democracies we've overthrown, then it looks more like an amateur giving an old pro a solid punch to the nose it didn't see coming.  In that context, it honestly makes more sense to me why we would take the Russia thing so horribly: it means we're becoming just like everyone else.  And that, is the worst thing in the world to us.

Addendum Post: Healthcare and the 2018 Midterms

This is mostly a tag along to the last piece I wrote.  Most of what's in here was originally in the last post as well, but that one was getting ungainly long so I decided to split them up in easier chunks.

Inertia with an Idiot Flair

There were many who hoped/feared that Donald Trump would be a transformative figure in our nation's politics.  As I'm at the broken-record point of saying though, he's really, really not; he's too stupid and pathetic to change much of anything with his non-existent force of personality.  As the last few months have demonstrated, now that the dubious shine of his victory has worn off, he's going down the exact same roads any other Republican President (and some Democratic ones) would've traveled with only an embellishment of incompetence to separate him from the pack.

On the foreign policy front, Trump has pulled back from his initial brand of unique idiocy and settled in for the comfortable, mainstream D.C. approved flavor instead.  Remember how we were worried he'd start a war with North Korea in the long long ago of April?  Well, that's not really a thing anymore, now we're just looking down possibly fighting Russia in case we shoot down one of their planes or they shoot down one of ours in Syria.  This is, effectively, a no-fly-zone and is just as insane and reckless as when Hillary Clinton proposed it.  Can you imagine the diplomatic pressure crisis that would result from the Russian military shooting down a United States bomber?  While I'm sure there are those delusional enough to think Trump is up to the task to diffuse such a hypothetical, the only real way I do see a situation like that playing out is if Trump actually is Putin's rent boy and backs down when daddy says so.

Trump has also made a commitment to being all buddy-buddy in public with Saudi Arabia again, which, is also not all that unusual, in context.  Some people have been claiming the relationship is a reversal of Obama's position to the House of Saud, but that's more than a little bullshit.  Sure, Obama wasn't going to pose for a Evil League of Evil photo-op complete with glowing orb of doom, but Obama was more than happy to provide the Saudi's everything they needed to bomb children's hospitals and institute a famine in Yemen and then quite noticeably do nothing to stop it.

The other factor at play in the Trump's press storm with the Saudi's is their ever increasing affinity with Israel.  The Saudi's and the Israeli's seem like unnatural allies, given that the Saudi's are the chief architect of pretty much every terrorist organization that wants to drive Israel into the sea, but, why should any of that matter when they have the far more important matter of hating the shit out of Iran?  The resurgence of Iran in the wake of the U.S. eliminating the Taliban and Saddam Hussein has put the ability of the Saudi's and Israeli's to dictate U.S. positions in the region; the rather sudden bus-throwing of Qatar is mostly an attempt by the Saudi's to flex their muscles and reestablish their dominance in the region with the aid of our stooge president.

On Friday the ultimatum demands of the Saudi's, Arab Emirates, and Egypt were leaked to the press.  And sure, the cessation of any and all funding to ISIS and Al-Nusra were included, but they were hardly the most important.  The ultimatum also demanded Qatar shut down the news network al-Jazeera (a news network that is coincidentally highly critical of all the governments demanding its closure), expelling all Turkish troops, the immediate end to all diplomatic and economic ties to Iran, and monthly "compliance" audits for the first year and quarterly audits in the second to make sure the al Thani family is following through on their commitments.

What this amounts to is the Gulf Monarchies and Egypt demanding Qatar cede all its sovereignty to their interests, and to end any and all independence Qatar has from them.  The main reason Qatar has a relationship with Iran is that the two countries share a massive shale-oil field in the Persian Gulf that is a primary source of wealth for both countries.  Obviously, Qatar doesn't have the option to just take its ball and go home and give Iran the finger because they'd be sabotaging their own welfare in doing so; the audits are also a fantastic example of demanding a country humiliate itself and its citizens by granting the right of any of the Gulf allies to put their boots on the country's neck in the name of diplomatic relations.

It should also come as no surprise that the military and theocratic despots of the Arab world are more than a little desperate to shut down the main news source in the Arab world that unabashedly and consistently points out what massive piles of shit they all are, either.  I mean, since they've all shut down dissenting voices in their own countries, can't really blame them for trying it out on one outside of their normal grasps.

So if the goal was to shut off Qatar from any outside influence, how's that going?  So far the blockade has driven Qatar deeper in its relationships to both Iran and Turkey, which one might call the exact opposite of what they wanted to happen.  It's sort of weird how abusing and exploiting your position in a relationship doesn't actually make people want to stay in that relationship.  Who knew?  And then there's the somewhat unsettling similarity to when Austria-Hungary sent a similar non-negotiable set of humiliating demands to Serbia: they too were backed by a clueless and indifferent superpower and given carte blanche to pursue the matter however they saw fit.  The Serbians agreed to all but one of the demands, the Austrians were less than pleased.  It didn't end well.

Depressing historical analogues aside, at least we get the amusing spectacle of watching James Mattis and Rex Tillerson desperately trying to diffuse the situation and work out a compromise while Trump blathers on about how great the blockade is.  It's actually amazing that the two main representatives of U.S. power abroad are very delicately, but firmly, telling everyone to ignore whatever is coming out of their bosses mouth.  I wonder what will happen once one of the office troglodytes clues Trump in that his two most powerful Secretary positions are under-cutting him.

Sadly, we don't have the luxury of people ignoring Trump on his domestic agenda, since it's no different from what the Republicans have been doing for decades now. Also on Friday the Republicans unveiled the healthcare plan they were keeping locked up tighter than a chastity belt and it's just as horrific as you would expect.  The bill cuts Medicaid, allows states to opt-out of the essential coverage provisions, and ends federal funding for Planned Parenthood, among other shitty things.  I singled those three out because of all the onerous bullshit in the bill, they have the potential to have the worst long lasting effects.

We'll start with the defunding of Planned Parenthood, since the Christian Right can't shut up about how it just fucking loves life so much, you guys.  Ending women's primary access to abortion services is the real point here, obviously, and there will be much crowing about all the precious whittle babies lives they're saving by bankrupting the evil planned parenthood.  To see how well this goes, we just have to look at what happened in Texas, which shut down most of their Planned Parenthood clinics with bullshit building regulations and also refused the Medicaid expansion in the ACA then not so coincidentally had their maternal death rate shoot to the highest in the developed world; an honor they've held for  last four years.  Odd how people start dying when you remove their access to medical care, isn't it?

But don't expect any "pro-life" organizations to kick up any fuss over that at all, they've never cared about people dying outside the womb so they sure as shit aren't going to start now.

The other fun thing that won't cause any problems for anyone is that one of the essential services insurers were required to cover under Obamacare was, drum-roll please, pregnancy.  Along with all the pre- and post-natal services that come with growing and expelling another human from your body.  Under the proposed law, each state would have the ability to opt-out of those essential services.  So, if you get knocked up, hope you can pay for those riders or cough up the $10,000 out of pocket costs, it's not like you're going to need any of that money with another to feed or anything.

Insurers could also opt out of if the law goes into effect, they could also go back to denying people coverage for pre-existing conditions, they could also go back to instituting a coverage cap that once you passed you no longer had insurance any more.  It's a good thing that we don't have a significant part of our population with chronic, expensive diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes; it's also awesome that we don't have a massive drug epidemic on our hands or else cutting out drug counseling and recovery programs from insurance coverage would be something of a dick move.  Yup, it's great to live in the land of clean healthy living, that's for sure.

Even with that, though, the Medicaid bit is really the worst part of this whole story.  You can really tell they took extra care to completely screw over as many people as they could with the Medicaid thing, because it's got the most layers of bullshit to go through. It starts with ending the payments to the states for the Medicaid expansions, which is expected to kick 15 million people out of their medical coverage alone by 2022.  And then, it gets worse.  The bill would also put a benefits cap on every Medicaid recipient to keep costs down; this is going to be a problem for the disabled adults who make up a large part of Medicaid spending since they obviously can't work or get any insurance with pre-existing conditions screening, either.  So... I guess they'll just die, then.

Continuing our way down, starting in 2025 the cap for your Medicaid services would stop rising with the medical costs they're paying for and instead rise with the overall cost increases in the wider economy.  That sounds like a dry, academic point, but medical costs always rise higher and faster than everything else, so what that translates to is Republicans will set a cap on how much the government will spend on keeping you alive and then switching the metric they use to measure that cost so the government short changes your medical expenses.  This basically amounts to an almost $500 billion cut in federal Medicaid spending that will cost who knows how many more people their medical coverage.

In its own horrific genius way, the Republican health plan seeks to lower the cost of insurance by making sure that insurance only covers the absolute bare-minimum of patients.  On a separate, but related, note, you kinda have to admire the sheer dedication Republicans have to being the worst thing to ever happen to so many people year-in, and year-out.  It takes a special sort of character to plan in such exacting people the best way to condemn so many people to bankruptcy, illness, and death all in the name of a $600 billion tax cut to the richest echelon of society.  Truly, they are something to behold.

Sad thing is, if you plug Hilary Clinton into all of this, not much changes.  There is no way in hell you can say with a straight face that the woman who never met a war she didn't love would be jumping at the same chances for war in Syria that Trump is doing right now.  She's already tried before, so it's only natural she would continue that trend.  I also have no doubt that she'd be planning another surge operation in Afghanistan, either; she probably wouldn't let the generals run the whole show, but if two runs for president have taught s anything is that she has a natural affinity for terrible plans that no one should ever act on.

Ironically, though, if Hillary was president I have no doubt that the House and Senate would've passed at least one Obamacare repeal law if not six, one for each month she was in office.  They had no problem doing it 60 times under Obama, so may be if Republican voters wanted to see some fire, spirit, and transparency from their lawmakers in repealing the ACA, they should've pinched their noses and voted for their own personal Whore of Babylon.  It is more than a little sad though when you consider that a government that would've accomplished absolutely nothing is the better option than the one that is currently flailing about on every single move.

Thoughts on Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman actually is the good step forward we've been waiting for in DC movies.  It's a nice change of pace, but there's still kinks that need working out.  Spoilers below the cut.

We Aren't Better Than This

If I believed Donald was an intelligent human being, I'd say this last week was all part of some grand plan to get impeached so he can just go home already and not have to work so hard at being president.  Telling the world that he flat-out fired the man in charge of investigating his campaigns ties to specifically because of said investigation would probably be enough, but, just to be safe, Trump went ahead and met with the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador (who is a key figure in said investigation, remember) which he barred American journalists from covering while allowing Russia state media to cover it and, just for the cherry-on-top, leaked out some confidential information just in case he wasn't selling the whole "I'm totally in the bag for these people" act hard enough.

Problem is, Trump is the President of the United States, so unless he holds a press conference in the Presidential Rose Garden confessing a decades-long practice of pedophilia with a live demonstration to go with it, that dude's not going anywhere.  You know Trump isn't really a student of history when he thought something as chump change as obstruction of justice would be enough to get him thrown to the curb.  His Republican predecessor started a war of aggression and launched an illegal domestic spying program and the worst thing that happened to him was almost choking on a pretzel that one time.  Obama assassinated American citizens but everybody just kinda forgot about that since he did a good Al Green impression and made a nice Superman quip.  Oh, and Obama also voted for the bill that retroactively made all the Bush-era bullshit legal before he expanded it and started his administration with 'Yeah, they did a lot of terrible things.  But since I'm going to pretty much do the same things and then some we can't really hold them accountable so let's look forward, not backward.'

And it's not like Trump's private life showed any examples of powerful people being held responsible for their fuck-ups.  All his Wall Street buddies who crashed the global economy by selling subprime mortgages they knew were garbage never even saw handcuffs, let alone jail time.  And in the almost ten years since after laundering money for the Sinaloa cartel, rigging pretty much every market they were involved in, plus foreclosing on homes they didn't legally own, all of that was met with the Obama administration telling them they were literally too important to prosecute.  Obviously we know how to make sure people suffer for their crimes and abuses of power, yes we do.

One does imagine that Congressional Republicans are privately giddy about the constant shit-storms emanating from the White House since the distractions make it absurdly difficult for them to get anything done.  They'll bitch and moan in public about how they hate it just so much, you guys, but since Republicans can't really maintain the con that they care about the common people if they keep passing bills that actively makes said people's lives worse, there's no way they're going to do anything to stop Trump from being a daily punchline.

Surely electing the Democrats back into majority could stop this madness, right?  Well, no.  Because remember oh, say, eleven years ago when there was a widely despised Republican president doing horrific shit and Democrats promised that if America just gave them the chance they would make things right and hold the president's feet to the fire?  No?  That's okay, because nothing ever really came of it since once Democrats had their majority they went about rubber-stamping everything Bush did anyway. You could say that this time it'll be different, that Trump is a new kind of awful, they're bound to do the right thing this time, just you wait.  And sure, you could say that, because I'm positive  once Godot shows up and makes his special delivery of backbones and principles Democrats will step up to the plate and right all the wrongs they played a pivotal role in creating.  You betcha.

What's most fascinating about Trump's presidency is how it's called forth this delusional picture of what the country was before he got elected. Liberals have been incessant in saying that Trump is Not NormalTM  but, let's examine that.  He won by inflaming white anger against the rest of society by playing into the sense that their well-being has been sacrificed at the altar of equality for the minorities.  This has been Republican politics 101 since the Southern Strategy and Regan hooked up with the Religious Right fanatics.  His immigration policy is basically "Deport like Obama did, add stupid wall."  His foreign policy just escalates the wars Obama and Bush started, and his treatment of the press again is hardly anything more than just continuing on the path laid by his predecessors.  Even the whole "possibly colluded with a hostile foreign power to get elected" thing isn't an original sin.  Yet everyone wants to pretend that he's some radical new figure in our political culture that will distort it beyond repair if we let him continue.

No one really wants to face the fact that Trump is just a by-product of the all the twisted and corrupt policies and strategies the parties to championed for decades.  Ever since 9/11 we've all watched as the presidency accumulated more and more dictatorial powers and even now, the discussion isn't really that no president should have that kind of power, but that Trump in particular can't have it.  We need to find the right kind of president again, one who will entrench a Stasi-level surveillance state and 1984 level of global warfare in a dignified, respectable manner.  Trump is nothing more than pus leaking from an infected wound, and all we're really focusing on is wiping it off and hoping the next piece of bile that trickles out doesn't reek so bad.

Settle in for the Slog

On Thursday, House Republicans passed a bill in what would be the first step in repealing the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.  Naturally, this caused a bit of a stir, but, really, don't freak out.  We've got a long, long way to go here and the Senate fight to get this thing passed is more likely than not going to be even worse for Trump than the one in the House.

For one thing, the Senate isn't voting on the bill that just passed the House.  All reports point to the Senate writing its own version of the bill which is going to take weeks if not months to get done.  So even if the Senate bill passes in say, a month or two from now, the likely differences between the two versions will mean a legislative conference, which is another very long draw-out process, giving everyone plenty of time to rake Trump, the House, and Senate Republicans over the coals.  So, yeah, the House bill is a bit of bad news, but in the long run, I think it's actually done them more harm than good.

The House bill was passed before anyone really had a chance to look at it or understand what its policy implications are.  Now that it's moved on to the Senate, the bill is going to be put under a microscope.  From early readings the new bill doesn't appear to be all that different from the version that got trotted out in March, so there's no way in hell the Senate is going to set themselves up for the same public backlash the House went through just to make Trump feel like he's accomplished something once the CBO weighs in and shows, yeah, millions of people are still likely to lose their insurance.

What also needs to be taken into consideration is the fact that the Senate will have to pass the bill on much thinner ground and under a much smaller majority than the House did; and even with all the built-in advantages to getting legislation through the House, we're basically starting this whole thing all over again with a much smaller margin of error.  If Trump had to go balls-to-the-wall just to barely scrape something through the House, I don't really understand why anyone thinks the Senate will have an easier time of things.

We're in for the long haul here, so don't panic just yet.  The previous incarnation of the bill was more unpopular than Congress itself (remember, Congress only has a 20% approval rating) and as the details of this new bill become clear, I doubt that number will change very much.  To just sum things up, we're talking about an incredibly disliked bill that's still barely crawling to becoming a law.  It'll be a bitter fight, no doubt, but it's not one that's going to be very easy for Trump and the Republicans to win.