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.
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
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.
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.
Sunday, June 4, 2017
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.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
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.
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.
Saturday, May 6, 2017
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.
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.
Friday, April 28, 2017
The Real Tragedy Here
Today marks Trumps 100th day in office, a benchmark that campaign Trump promised would be filled with glorious making America great again achievements but one that President Trump is complaining is an unfair and arbitrary marker dreamed up by the lying media to drag him down. Trump continues his habit of being the last person in the room to figure out a basic element of his job, like, it's hard. Who knew?
Trump may also be feeling down since he's finishing out his honeymoon period as literally the most unpopular president in history, but, if I were him, I wouldn't feel so bad about it; because for as bad as he's doing, the Democrats are doing even worse. The same ABC/Washington Post poll showed that only 52% of the Democratic base believes the party is in touch with the needs of common people. Again, that's not voters as a whole, that's the Democratic faithful saying their party is widely out of touch with their needs. The sad part of all this is it's not even a mystery as to why this is happening; for thirty years now the Democratic strategy has been to rail loudly against the social discrimination towards the poor and disaffected on the one hand while enacting economic policies that ensured they would stay poor and disaffected. It makes sense, in a way, if you ensure the downtrodden always exist, you'll have a reliable voting block. The idea that enacting popular, leftist polices that actually makes peoples lives better is a way easier path to getting votes is apparently a delusion best left to the college students before they can "grow up."
Watching the Democratic party through these first 100 days, the thing becomes glaringly obvious is that they really don't realize that they are a party in need of a serious revamp, instead they're doing everything they can to ignore that fact. You would think losing almost every state legislature, governorship, both houses of Congress, and the presidency over the last eight years, that self-reflection would be impossible to avoid, but these assholes have found a way. The final nail in the coffin should be the section of the ABC/Washington Post poll that showed that if the election were held again, today, Trump beats Clinton 43-40 because more Democrats than Republicans regret voting for their candidate and given the opportunity, Democrats would vote for someone else. Let that really sink in for a moment: After a 100 days of bumbling idiocy from the Trump Administration, the Democratic Party would still lose because their own base couldn't stomach voting for Hilary Clinton again. If there's a clearer sign out there that you've completely lost your base, let me know, because I can't think of anything.
And it's not like there isn't a viable way out of all this staring them right in the face. The popularity of Bernie Sanders isn't because of who he is, it's because he advocates for policies that are, surprise surprise, really popular with the American public. And sure, Tom Perez is currently doing a "Unity Tour" with Sanders to try to draw all his voters back into the Democratic fold, but this is somewhat undercut by the, surely spontaneous, hit pieces against Sanders in Slate, Salon, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. It sorta undercuts the DNC's message that they're willing to work with Sanders and listen to his voters when the usual Democratic media outlets suddenly start spewing out pieces about why no one should be listening to Sanders or his shitty little podcast.
This is especially stupid in the face of two special elections that, per traditional Democratic thinking, have no business being competitive. The special election in Kansas was determined by 8,000 votes, and the special election in Georgia is set for a run-off in June after the Democratic candidate received 48% of the vote. Getting nail-biter elections in deeply Republican states and districts should be enough for the DNC to go "Yeah, okay, this could work," but, I guess not. You can't expect the party ostensibly on the left side of spectrum to actually run leftists and progressives, that's just crazy talk.
Thankfully, if the people at the top won't get with the program, there's growing evidence that the voters themselves will throw them out to the garbage where they belong. Dianne Feinstein recently got hissed and booed at her town hall when she said she wouldn't support a Medicare-For-All single payer health program. It seems the Democratic voters are finally waking up to the fact that if they want the party to represent them, they actually have to force them to do it. Good thing too, because while it seems unlikely, eventually someone will emerge from the cesspool of ignorance that is the Republican party and figure out a way to get all of that horrific shit done. So, if we want to stop that from happening, we'll need to save ourselves, because no one else is really lining up to do so.
Trump may also be feeling down since he's finishing out his honeymoon period as literally the most unpopular president in history, but, if I were him, I wouldn't feel so bad about it; because for as bad as he's doing, the Democrats are doing even worse. The same ABC/Washington Post poll showed that only 52% of the Democratic base believes the party is in touch with the needs of common people. Again, that's not voters as a whole, that's the Democratic faithful saying their party is widely out of touch with their needs. The sad part of all this is it's not even a mystery as to why this is happening; for thirty years now the Democratic strategy has been to rail loudly against the social discrimination towards the poor and disaffected on the one hand while enacting economic policies that ensured they would stay poor and disaffected. It makes sense, in a way, if you ensure the downtrodden always exist, you'll have a reliable voting block. The idea that enacting popular, leftist polices that actually makes peoples lives better is a way easier path to getting votes is apparently a delusion best left to the college students before they can "grow up."
Watching the Democratic party through these first 100 days, the thing becomes glaringly obvious is that they really don't realize that they are a party in need of a serious revamp, instead they're doing everything they can to ignore that fact. You would think losing almost every state legislature, governorship, both houses of Congress, and the presidency over the last eight years, that self-reflection would be impossible to avoid, but these assholes have found a way. The final nail in the coffin should be the section of the ABC/Washington Post poll that showed that if the election were held again, today, Trump beats Clinton 43-40 because more Democrats than Republicans regret voting for their candidate and given the opportunity, Democrats would vote for someone else. Let that really sink in for a moment: After a 100 days of bumbling idiocy from the Trump Administration, the Democratic Party would still lose because their own base couldn't stomach voting for Hilary Clinton again. If there's a clearer sign out there that you've completely lost your base, let me know, because I can't think of anything.
And it's not like there isn't a viable way out of all this staring them right in the face. The popularity of Bernie Sanders isn't because of who he is, it's because he advocates for policies that are, surprise surprise, really popular with the American public. And sure, Tom Perez is currently doing a "Unity Tour" with Sanders to try to draw all his voters back into the Democratic fold, but this is somewhat undercut by the, surely spontaneous, hit pieces against Sanders in Slate, Salon, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. It sorta undercuts the DNC's message that they're willing to work with Sanders and listen to his voters when the usual Democratic media outlets suddenly start spewing out pieces about why no one should be listening to Sanders or his shitty little podcast.
This is especially stupid in the face of two special elections that, per traditional Democratic thinking, have no business being competitive. The special election in Kansas was determined by 8,000 votes, and the special election in Georgia is set for a run-off in June after the Democratic candidate received 48% of the vote. Getting nail-biter elections in deeply Republican states and districts should be enough for the DNC to go "Yeah, okay, this could work," but, I guess not. You can't expect the party ostensibly on the left side of spectrum to actually run leftists and progressives, that's just crazy talk.
Thankfully, if the people at the top won't get with the program, there's growing evidence that the voters themselves will throw them out to the garbage where they belong. Dianne Feinstein recently got hissed and booed at her town hall when she said she wouldn't support a Medicare-For-All single payer health program. It seems the Democratic voters are finally waking up to the fact that if they want the party to represent them, they actually have to force them to do it. Good thing too, because while it seems unlikely, eventually someone will emerge from the cesspool of ignorance that is the Republican party and figure out a way to get all of that horrific shit done. So, if we want to stop that from happening, we'll need to save ourselves, because no one else is really lining up to do so.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Fallout, Hopes and Wants
So I'm about 72 hours in on Fallout 4 and about 20 hours or so in to my second play-through on Fallout: New Vegas and doing a compare/contrast between the two has got me thinking about what I'd like to see from the the next Fallout game, be it a numbered sequel or a tie-in like New Vegas.
First, move the game back out West. The desolate beauty f the desert wasteland is a much better backdrop than the Northeast. For one thing, you don't have to do a lot of work to make the setting desolate because... it already is that way. With both 3 and 4 Bethesda had to do a lot of work in setting the stage with a lot of bombed out forests and the like, but, really, burnt up trees just don't quite pack the same apocalyptic punch as the basically unending ocean of sand with a relentless sun hanging overhead like the desert does. That, and when working with a barren landscape over a scarred one, the natural thematic curve of the story focuses around the player imposing their will on the Wasteland instead of trying to heal it, which is more in line with the series' emphasis on player choices anyway, so, that would be my hi-art reason if pushed to name another reason beyond aesthetics alone. So I'm hoping that the next game takes place in Arizona, the lower portion of California in the Mojave, or Wyoming, and as far as plot goes, I would want things to pick up pretty much where New Vegas left off.
My real, true hope is that the game takes place in Arizona, where a bolstered NCR is trying to claim all the lost territories of the a defeated Legion while trying to stamp out the remnants that are still scattered about the remaining territory. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to go with the NCR ending of New Vegas as the canon ending, so, the Brotherhood still exists under a shaky truce, the Khans left to Wyoming, and the NCR annexed New Vegas and much of the surrounding towns and communities. The reason why I want it to go this route is because it will offer players to a lot of opportunities to decide what the future of the area will be. Do they, for example, help the NCR in annexing and claiming even more territory and make the republic an empire? Or, does the player help all the wasteland tribes subjugated under the Legion reclaim their individual identities and try to govern themselves independently, or, along the same lines, does the player help them band together like the old Indian nations? Maybe, instead of all that, the player decides to rebuild the Legion, this time more in the mold of the military dictatorships of the Severan dynasty than the proto-imperial Cesarean legacy.
Point is, there's a shit ton of possibilities here with the chance to have multiple factions with lots of depth already there for the taking. I also think Bethesda should take Obsidian up on their desire to make a new Fallout game basically whenever because, honestly, doing that kind of world building and character depth is just not in Bethesda's wheelhouse. Better to give to people who've already proven they can deliver that kind of content and who also already know the lore of the universe that they're building off of.
As far as game play goes, there is actually a lot in 4 that I'd like to see kept in future installments. For one, actually creating the mods for your weapons and armor is so much better than just buying them from the store. Instead of jumping around to every place you can buy weapons from hoping that they'll randomly generate the thing you want/need, having crafting tables where you use materials you've gathered to create basically whatever the hell you want is really, the far superior option. Also I'd like to keep the option to raise the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats after your initial character creation, since it does create a much more flexible and fluid gaming experience to beef yourself up on things you may have been lacking in the first place. I will say though, I would like the leveling to go back to the 1-100 scale for each stat, since I don't really like not being able to increase my weapons damage until I've reached the appropriate level to scale it up; it's just an arbitrary ceiling imposed by the game to make sure you can't do too much too fast and it's more annoying than it is competitive.
What I'd also like to see re-tooled is the settlement mechanic. I actually think having the option to build up those communities is a great facet to add to the series and can greatly affect how people think about what they;re doing in game and how they go about shaping the world. But, it shouldn't be a mandatory thing. In my version of the next game, you'd have the choice to build up settlement spots into vibrant communities for whatever faction you choose, or, to basically use them as way stations and safe houses with AI that sees to their own needs. That way, if you want to invest the time and resources to get more out of them, you can, but if not, you can just have convenient places to stash your shit and sleep and just go on with whatever it is you want to do instead.
Oh, right, before I forget, re-add skill checks to the dialogue trees. Their absence in 4 made the dialogue feel constrained and much more limited than it had in previous installments, so, yeah, put that shit back in. It's not like there's a shortage of buttons on the controllers to assign the options to- you could put them on the triggers, for example- so please, Bethesda or whoever, get that back in there. Some of the best dialogue options have come from those skill checks, so don't sacrifice something that made your game what it is in the first place because you don't want to spend the time and money to have those lines recorded.
I always have high hopes for these games because it is my firm belief that the Fallout series is one of the main avenues we have in proving that gaming is as valid a storytelling medium as books or movies. And the glorious thing about the internet is that it gives the option to loudly, and incessantly, yell at the people who make the things we love to not fuck those things up. Plus, the better we demand games to be, the more fun we'll have playing them, so there's that too, which, I guess, is the more important thing in the end.
First, move the game back out West. The desolate beauty f the desert wasteland is a much better backdrop than the Northeast. For one thing, you don't have to do a lot of work to make the setting desolate because... it already is that way. With both 3 and 4 Bethesda had to do a lot of work in setting the stage with a lot of bombed out forests and the like, but, really, burnt up trees just don't quite pack the same apocalyptic punch as the basically unending ocean of sand with a relentless sun hanging overhead like the desert does. That, and when working with a barren landscape over a scarred one, the natural thematic curve of the story focuses around the player imposing their will on the Wasteland instead of trying to heal it, which is more in line with the series' emphasis on player choices anyway, so, that would be my hi-art reason if pushed to name another reason beyond aesthetics alone. So I'm hoping that the next game takes place in Arizona, the lower portion of California in the Mojave, or Wyoming, and as far as plot goes, I would want things to pick up pretty much where New Vegas left off.
My real, true hope is that the game takes place in Arizona, where a bolstered NCR is trying to claim all the lost territories of the a defeated Legion while trying to stamp out the remnants that are still scattered about the remaining territory. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to go with the NCR ending of New Vegas as the canon ending, so, the Brotherhood still exists under a shaky truce, the Khans left to Wyoming, and the NCR annexed New Vegas and much of the surrounding towns and communities. The reason why I want it to go this route is because it will offer players to a lot of opportunities to decide what the future of the area will be. Do they, for example, help the NCR in annexing and claiming even more territory and make the republic an empire? Or, does the player help all the wasteland tribes subjugated under the Legion reclaim their individual identities and try to govern themselves independently, or, along the same lines, does the player help them band together like the old Indian nations? Maybe, instead of all that, the player decides to rebuild the Legion, this time more in the mold of the military dictatorships of the Severan dynasty than the proto-imperial Cesarean legacy.
Point is, there's a shit ton of possibilities here with the chance to have multiple factions with lots of depth already there for the taking. I also think Bethesda should take Obsidian up on their desire to make a new Fallout game basically whenever because, honestly, doing that kind of world building and character depth is just not in Bethesda's wheelhouse. Better to give to people who've already proven they can deliver that kind of content and who also already know the lore of the universe that they're building off of.
As far as game play goes, there is actually a lot in 4 that I'd like to see kept in future installments. For one, actually creating the mods for your weapons and armor is so much better than just buying them from the store. Instead of jumping around to every place you can buy weapons from hoping that they'll randomly generate the thing you want/need, having crafting tables where you use materials you've gathered to create basically whatever the hell you want is really, the far superior option. Also I'd like to keep the option to raise the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats after your initial character creation, since it does create a much more flexible and fluid gaming experience to beef yourself up on things you may have been lacking in the first place. I will say though, I would like the leveling to go back to the 1-100 scale for each stat, since I don't really like not being able to increase my weapons damage until I've reached the appropriate level to scale it up; it's just an arbitrary ceiling imposed by the game to make sure you can't do too much too fast and it's more annoying than it is competitive.
What I'd also like to see re-tooled is the settlement mechanic. I actually think having the option to build up those communities is a great facet to add to the series and can greatly affect how people think about what they;re doing in game and how they go about shaping the world. But, it shouldn't be a mandatory thing. In my version of the next game, you'd have the choice to build up settlement spots into vibrant communities for whatever faction you choose, or, to basically use them as way stations and safe houses with AI that sees to their own needs. That way, if you want to invest the time and resources to get more out of them, you can, but if not, you can just have convenient places to stash your shit and sleep and just go on with whatever it is you want to do instead.
Oh, right, before I forget, re-add skill checks to the dialogue trees. Their absence in 4 made the dialogue feel constrained and much more limited than it had in previous installments, so, yeah, put that shit back in. It's not like there's a shortage of buttons on the controllers to assign the options to- you could put them on the triggers, for example- so please, Bethesda or whoever, get that back in there. Some of the best dialogue options have come from those skill checks, so don't sacrifice something that made your game what it is in the first place because you don't want to spend the time and money to have those lines recorded.
I always have high hopes for these games because it is my firm belief that the Fallout series is one of the main avenues we have in proving that gaming is as valid a storytelling medium as books or movies. And the glorious thing about the internet is that it gives the option to loudly, and incessantly, yell at the people who make the things we love to not fuck those things up. Plus, the better we demand games to be, the more fun we'll have playing them, so there's that too, which, I guess, is the more important thing in the end.
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