Monday Open Thread

23 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

1. Republicans Attack on Social Security. Paul Krugman.

   The attack on Social Security is something that should both inspire outrage and offer an opportunity to connect with working-class Americans.

   I can’t help noticing that the inverse correlation between how Americans voted in 2024 and their real interests makes it clear that two of the main factions in the intra-party debate about Democrats’ next moves are talking nonsense.

   On one side there are relatively conservative Democrats and Democratic-leaning pundits telling us that the party must move to the center. But when it comes to Social Security, which is really important to most Americans, Democrats — who want to preserve the program — are very much in the center, while Republicans — who want to kill it — are extremists. Yet last November, the voters who have most to lose from this extremism didn’t notice.

   On the other side there are progressives who argue that Democrats are in trouble because they abandoned the working class. But even if you think that Democrats have been too friendly toward globalization, or deregulation, or low corporate taxes, the Democratic Party has been far more favorable to workers than the Republicans. The Biden administration was especially pro-worker. But working-class voters didn’t notice.

   What all this says is that the priority for Democrats isn’t to pursue whatever you think is a better policy mix. It is to get voters to notice. 

   This almost certainly requires new leadership, if only to help persuade voters that the party isn’t run by tired careerists. The problem with someone like Chuck Schumer isn’t that he’s too centrist, it’s that he’s a 74-year-old (writes a stripling of 72) whose instinct is to try to deftly navigate his way through a political landscape that demands not careful calculation but vocal, visible outrage, both to motivate the Democratic base and to get other voters’ attention.

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   1. I certainly don't want to defend all of Schumer's behavior, especially in the most recent budget vote. 

      But a Senate Minority Leader has a large number of functions — and I'm not certain who among the Conference would be a better performer for the full range of expectations.  First things first — who is stepping forward and saying they WANT to be the Minority Leader?  Who do you expect could gather a majority of the 47 Senators in the Conference and take Schumer's place?

      Next, changing leaders in mid-fight doesn't always produce superior results. Less than a year ago, there was a groundswell of opposition to Biden as leader.  Several years ago, there was a strong opposition to Pelosi as leader. 

      I believe the more important approach would be for Democrats to develop a common understanding and coordinate with each other.  The common approach would likely create a national leader with support from Senators, House members, and Governors.  It COULD be the Senate or House Minority Leader, It COULD be some other elected official like Gov. Pritzger. 

       

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      1. There are times when one of the most important things to do is to stand up and yell – this is wrong and I will fight it with every fiber of my being. I think this is one of those times. Schumer is not the person to do that.

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         1. Yes, I agree completely. 

            Thank you Bernie & AOC. Whether you like their policy positions or not, they are displaying empathy for the anger that is appropriate for this moment. 

            Have to give a shout out to Liz Cheney as well.

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   2. contact your senators. Tell them not to confirm the Social Security nominee Frank Bisignano, whowould work to privatize and increase his own company's profits, Also to save the fricking Post Office.

      https://www.hickenlooper.senate.gov/email-john/

      https://www.bennet.senate.gov/contact/

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2. President Donald Trump took to social media Sunday night to complain about what he called a “distorted” portrait of himself hanging in the Colorado State Capitol’s Gallery of Presidents.

   “Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before,” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social.

   The portrait, commissioned during Trump’s first term, was paid for with a Republican-led fundraising effort and approved by Colorado Republicans before it was put on display in 2019.

   Incompetent Colorado Republicans screwed up again.  They didn't use enough orange pigment in the portrait!

   

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3. CBS News Colorado reported that Mayor

   Johnston and 14 of his advisers, lawyers and appointees used the app Signal as part of a group within the administration called “Strike Force, a group formed to communicate about the illegal immigration crisis costing taxpayers millions.

   Signal is a encrypted communication app in which messages auto delete. A number of specific questions directed to the Mayor’s office concerning the use of the app were not answered.

   First Amendment experts Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information and First Amendment attorney Steven Zansberg say this violates both Schedule 145 of the City’s Retention policy as well as CORA.

   Last year the Democrat controlled Legislature passed and Democrat Governor signed a bill exempting the Legislature from much of the state’s open meetings law.

   It’s regrettable the self proclaimed “party of democracy” has abandoned the fundamental truism that “democracy dies in darkness”.

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   1. I probably agree that Signal is a problem when used to quickly delete communications that ought to be public record. However, it's not just Dems who have used it. From a Colorado Sun story on a 2023 legal action challenging open meeting law violations at the Capitol:

      The legal action argued that House Republicans have violated open meetings laws, too, through their regular caucus meetings and communications on Signal, an app through which users can send and automatically delete encrypted messages.

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      1. Just sort of coincidentally, I read again about Signal in an Atlantic story about high-level US national security affairs. But the part that was more interesting came in this lede from writer Jeffrey Goldberg:

         The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

         I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

         So, I guess it is possible to have too much transparency!

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         1. Hey the BroSecDef probably had a few too many shots at that point and ended up accidentally doing a "drunk-texting your ex" moment. He's stepping on his d1ck enough times that I think he'll be gone by the end of the year, and maybe by summer. 

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            1. If so, maybe it's a bit worse that the text was sent before noon!

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   2. It must be fun to be a Colorado Republican/Trumpist. You can complain about issues like this and feel like your “concern” is righteous while supprting far worse things (like the erosion of democracy and no longer being a first-world country) that Trump and the Republican goons are doing that are even screwing you over!

      It’s ironic, you get to enjoy all your rights and freedom of speech because you live in a blue state. If Colorado was a red state, you woudn’t get to enjoy most things you likely partake it (looking at all the weed-lovng, pro-labor, pro-abortion Trumpists/conservatives). And Republicans would show you what actual corruption looks like if they had their way. I’m glad the state is blue and mostly governed by rational adults rather than far-right, narcissistic, pro-oligarch, religious fundamentalists that now represent most of the COGOP.

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4. If Trump's United States can decide, without any process at all, that random people are members of Tren De Aragua and ship them off to El Salvador then they can decide that I'm a member or you're a member and ship you off too.

   There was no opportunity for any of those deported to contest their removal, or to argue that they were not, in fact, members of Tren de Aragua, the gang named in Trump’s proclamation.

   – https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/judge-boasberg-lays-out-how-he-thinks-trump-admin-tried-to-thwart-him

   Republicans should not be ok with this.

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   1. Republicans don’t care. Why should they? They just have to let Trump run around a bit more and never have fair elections again so they never have to care about what voters think again. It’s just ironic that the party of “law and order” are the ones destroying it, supporting a felon and letting criminals free if they agree with their political views. It’s disturbing to see so many right-wing sheriffs and “law and order” obsessed people support this and start acting like little troopers and cheerleaders for Trump and the GOP, forgetting we are a nation of laws all of a sudden. Crazy that we used to think far-right militia vigilantes were fringe freaks just to realize that there’s no notable differences nowadays.

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      1. I can think of 2 ways to get Republicans to care. They only care if it affects them. One way is hilarious, both ways are stupid.

         Option 1: Convince Tren De Aragua leadership to include MAGA hats as a symbol of being in the gang. Then we can just send anyone in a MAGA hat to an El Salvadorian prison with no hassle!

         Option 2: The next Democrat President administration just starts shipping off MAGA folks to prisons in other countries with no process at all for equally made up reasons.

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5. The Sad-ministration is openly for sale:                                                                           https://thehill.6com/homenews/administration/5210052-white-house-seeks-corporate-sponsorships-for-easter-egg-roll-report

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6. Ok, today's blog post is totally off topic from the really serious issues discussed above. But what Andreesen said was, in my opinion, total bullshit.

   Is Marc Andreesen a Snowflake?

   Speaking as a CEO Marc's fears are way overwrought

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7. Democratic Brand vs Taking a Stand? Josh Marshall at TPM (as usual) lays it on the line:

   The real division now among Democrats is not principally ideological, it’s fight vs risk aversion and the old proceduralism. They think the left/center and fight/no fight spectra overlap more or less perfectly. They’re wrong.

   I’ve made two points again and again. This fight is fundamentally over public opinion. And the actual hard powers the Democrats have are minimal. The one real cudgel the Democrats had was the continuing resolution. That’s gone. It is what it is. I don’t have a lot of patience for rehashing that. I’m focused on what’s next. We found out over the weekend that Trump and Musk are on track to have lost the US government half a trillion dollars by putting the IRS into the wood chipper. On Friday the DOGE-appointed acting head of the Social Security Administration was literally threatening to shut the agency down – all checks stop, immediately. Elon Musk already makes millions a day in federal contracts and he’s going through executive branch grabbing more contracts for himself. These are mind-bending realities we know from common sense and new polling a broad swath of the public is upset about. Basically everything the Democrats do right now should be tied to these and other similar outrages.

   Final point: Half the articles I read now are about the Democrats’ horrible position and broken brand. Indeed, the loudest voices arguing something to the contrary of the above are saying that what the Democrats really need to be doing is taking stock of what happened in 2024 and/or repairing their brand. This is wrong, both as a matter of priorities and repair. There is only one issue today in American politics: President Trump’s hacksaw attack on the American Republic. Even if you describe it more favorably, no one questions that. The only available position is opposing it. Championing it is taken. If Democrats aren’t aggressively opposing that they become irrelevant to the vast majority of voters who don’t actively support President Trump. The central part of a party’s “brand” to the extent there is such a thing is whether it is able to defend the people or priorities it champions. If it’s priorities are unpopular it loses doubly: it alienates supporters and it suffers loses since unpopular policies are inherently difficult to defend. DOGE’s spree is packed with 80/20 issues favoring Democrats. It’s open political territory and the only territory available. It may be an overstated critique that Democrats got off track by focusing on priorities that didn’t resonate for ordinary working Americans. But if that’s your theory the current moment is the one you would create in a lab to get back on that track.

   More to the point I don’t think Democrats should be caring about the Democratic brand right now. Bloody MAGA’s nose, force turnovers and the brand will take care of itself.

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8. JVL's column in today's edition of The Bulwark dot com.

   "How to think (and act) like a dissident movement."

   "AOC, Solidarity, and People Power."

   "Any institution not explicity anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump."

   "The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message testing cross-tabs. This battle is half mobilization and half asymmetric warfare."

   You can read the rest on your own.

    

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9. For those that don't have an Atlantic subscription.

   https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

    

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   1. it didn't work, David. I still hit the paywall. 

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      1. Try this one:  The Atlantic: labeled a Gift Link

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         1. Thanks JiD. That one worked. I'm anxious to read the original report.

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