Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1435
Politics stuff. What we can do.
Good morning. Hello. Hi. How are you? Are you sick? I am sick. Maybe Jane is. hard to say. Maybe it’s just cuz we ran out of kiddie claritin and I didn’t give it to her for three days. She handed me a giant booger the other night. Just massive. Would have been impressive if it had come out of my nose. But it came out of her teeny, tiny nose. Just handed it to me like it was a soda or something. I, myself, have a “sore throat.” Except it’s not really my throat. It’s a lymph node. Or something like that. Off to the left of my throat. I don’t know what a lymph node is, if I am being honest.
Attention Facebook readers: GMHHAY is leaving Facebook, migrating to Slack. This will be over a few months, and we’ll be completely off by March. I love you all. Please come join us in Slack. The invite link is in the comments below. If you’re an email reader, reply to this email and I’ll get you the link.
We are listening to a shoegaze band called Casino Garden this morning. Never heard of them. But I like them. Solid shoegaze. Four albums into this career. Man I will never learn about every shoegaze band out there. There are so many. It is so great. World of shoegaze. Maybe one day a single shoegaze band will make SNL.
It is cold and there are two to three inches of snow on the ground and this is bullshit and I might just move to the bahamas or something. I didn’t mind the -11°F in Fairbanks two weeks ago, because when I am in Alaska something kicks in and my body resets to its childhood defaults. But three inches of snow? And twenty five degrees at 9AM? Fuck that. I am ripshit. My greenhouse is probably miserable. This snow is probably covering the glass roof. My seedlings are probably miserable. Though I do have plenty of backup heat in there. Let’s check. Hrm looks like the low was 32.5° last night. Close but no cigar.
I am not in a super good emotional place this week. I am happy my wife is home, that is nice. I am sick. I have been solo parenting. I routinely suffer from depression even in the best of times. And there is a lunatic in the White House.
Ah yes we said we’d talk about politics today, didn’t we? I regret that statement. I should postpone. It’s an interesting thing, this horror that is looming over all of us. It consumes our life, but hey brah life goes on ob la di ob la da. We are all feeling it, sometimes we absolutely have to talk about it, sometimes we don’t want to hear a word about it. The thoughts and craziness swirling in all of our heads is bonkers. Well, I assume it’s the same for you as for me but I suppose one never knows.
Anyway, here is where I am at:
I am mostly acclimated to the shock-and-awe tactics of the mass firings and Musk’s panty raids. I am glad the dude is as ineffective as he is, it could be worse. It seems to me that, so far, the courts are holding. As in, Trump has not explicitly violated a court order yet. Until that happens, I do not view us as being in a constitutional crisis. I strongly suspect this will not last: I suspect he will, before too long, violate a court order. I think the Supreme Court will uphold a lot of his horrible acts, but they will not uphold them all, and he is a meglomaniac and will be satisfied with nothing less than absolute kingdom. I could be wrong, he may continue to listen to court orders. He did last time. I watch this single issue intently.
The anger I have for the Democratic party is eternal and vast and this is something new in me and I am not happy about it and sort of suspect that this is a Republican plot to feel this way, but:
All of this was foreseeable, they published a fucking book about what they would do, we screamed about that book from the rooftops, and our leaders did absolutely nothing to prepare. We should have foreseen that, many people did, but I confess I am shocked. I have never been the biggest Schumer or even Jeffries fan but I thought they were smarter than this. It is an absolute failure of leadership.
I am still very pissed at RBG. I am pissed at Obama and every Dem that held office during our assorted majorities that did not do anything about the fillibuster, about the courts, even though many of us were screaming about this non-stop.
This. Was. All. Foreseeable.
If you’re on the fence about the filibuster, might I recommend Kill Switch by Adam Gentleson. If you’re on the fence about packing the court, might I recommend Allow me to Retort by Elie Mystal. The tldr of both these books, though, is that these are not infinite escalation moves: the fear that “the republicans will use it too” is moot. In the case of the senate, they won’t because they don’t want government to function and they don’t need to pass laws and in the case of the courts, good! More justices, more justice. Both work to our favor and in any case this (gestures vaguely) is not working. It is time.
The new DNC chair — I don’t remember his name but he’s already lost me so I am not going to Google it. He showily put out a five-page “framework for action” on Monday about what we can do to fight this and that mofo — it literally did not have a single thing we can do to fight this in the document. Nothing.
Elizabeth Warren going on about how she still hopes to work with Elon on eliminating government waste, big ole nope. I was one her first major donors ever, back when she still had rich people fundraisers in Central Park East mansions with Soros representatives, I kid you not. I have the utmost respect for her, but… I think back to when she used to be on the Daily Show talking about bankruptcies and how medical debt crushed people and now? Oh yes let’s work with the richest man in the world to lay more people off. Big ole nope. Nope nope nope.
So, what to do. What to do. I do not think I have completely nailed this yet, but here is where I am at:
I expect more from our representatives right now, but I do not expect them to shut down the government. Probably. This is loosely held. If Schumer and Jeffries came out of the gate and said “fuck it we’re shutting it down,” honestly I’d probably respect them for finally showing an ounce of decisiveness. And if Trump does violate court order, then yeah, shut it all down. Picard gif the line stops here.
Everyone is going on about how we expect our congresspeople to do something. I am sympathetic to this. Of course we expect these people we elected to be our representatives to represent. I am also, however, sympathetic to their situation: we fucking lost, we lost hard, we lost big, we lost totally. But really, there’s only one thing I cannot abide from them right now and that is for them to keep doing what they’ve been doing. Because it is garbage and it is the exact tactics that they used to lose. When you are losing, literally trying anything else is the only course of action. To whit:
They need to radically change their media approach it is garbage.
They need to stop fucking voting for anything or saying they will “work with” any republican on anything. Their base has no taste for it, the Republicans would never do it, and it is utterly ineffective. We have spent a lot of time debating whether playing to your base or the masses is the best approach and that ship has fucking sailed. The base is it right now.
I do think a tactical retreat in a lot of ways in inevitable. This layoffs are going to happen. The damage to our international position is incalculable, and a lot of it will never be reversed. But also, there is wisdom in letting them hoist themselves by their own petard. We care, we are paying attention, and we can see the damage. But most people can’t. But they will. And they will in time for the midterms.
And it will absolutely be our job to shout about that from the rooftops.
Concretely, what I want from my current democratic congressional members is a vow: a vow they will not make the same mistakes. A vow they will eliminate the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court when they are back in power. A vow that they will prosecute any lawbreaking in this administration. Those are the three largest past failings of the Democratic party: Merrick Garland slow-rolled that was so stupid. We did not pack the courts and we kept the filibuster. These “norms” are out the window. I am done with any Dem who does not understand the new rules.
Bonus points for anyone who advocates or introduces very obvious self-evident, probably popular laws encoding any of those broken norms into law.
And then I want to focus on the midterms.
Any democratic congressperson who does not get on board with these things — who can’t resist, who has a garbage media operation, who fucking votes for his nominees, any of them, and who doesn’t support ending the filibuster and packing the courts? Primary them. I don’t care if it’s Chuck or Nancy or Hakeem. I don’t care if the person primarying them is a noob. Get on the train or get primaried. Even if you are going to win eventually, you need that pressure.
And then we focus on flipping, what? like four seats in the house! That’s it! That’s all it takes to stop a ton of this madness! Four seats!
Plus! Those seats can come from blue states! There are still a ton of red seats in blue states and a lot of them are full-on battleground. It should be trivial to flip the house.
And look. Trump cannot stop this. Elon’s too stupid to even understand how it works, and in any case, elections are chosen by the states. Trump, with his cowed cronies can probably find a way to keep, like, Tennessee from sending a blue senator, but he absolutely does not have the power or wherewithal to stop NY from sending two more dem house members in their next delegation.
If you live in a blue state, find the closest red seat to you that was won by only a few points, find a Dem to fill it, and do everything you can to flip that seat. Or run for it yourself!
If you live in a battleground state, same thing.
If you live in red state, you can find something local you think there’s a snowball’s chance of winning — especially if you have a flippable senate seat. Or you can adopt a purple district in a blue state. Here are some possibilities: AZ-01, AZ-06, CO-08, MI-07 PA-07, PA-10.
I have been very much enjoying Michael Tae Sweeney’s guide to simple messaging: Trump take Egg. Simple messaging for the masses that pins the obvious, observable shit happening on Trump. Eggs are the easy one right now. Probably plane crashes too. There will be more down the road as the impact of these lunatic actions become felt. But we have that one in the meantime. Trump Take Egg. Is it grammatically dubious? Sure. But it’s funny and it works in memes and its true.
As for your donations: Direct them to: flippable house/senate races, charities close to home, mutual aid orgs helping the displaced, and orgs fighthing Trump’s actions in court. Nothing else matters. Don’t give a penny to the DNC, don’t give a penny to anyone running for re-election except in very specific circumstances.
And if there are multiple dem primary candidates, give your money to the loudest, most media savvy, most angry, most TikTokian. There will be plenty of “smart level headed” snores to ultimately elect someone electable. Right now, we need the noise.
Is it enough? TBD. We don’t know how far he will take things. Yes, he could start violating court orders before the mid-terms and we will have a bona-fide constitutional crisis. That could happen. Probably will! And it will fucking suck because our bench is filled with burnouts right now. But for now, worrying about that instead of acting where we can is pointless. Unless you’re a LBJ-level master of the bureaucracy, in which case shit yeah, grind those gears to a halt.
Will it feel like enough? No, definitely not.
Is there hope? yes, there is always hope.
I have been reading, as you probably know, this 12-volume history of Middle Earth. I am on volume 8. Tolkien is currently wrestling with the exact interaction between Frodo and Faramir, who just became Faramir, Boromir’s brother, and not Falthorp or whatever his name was before that, where he was just a soldier buddy. And Christopher mentioned in passing that it is 1944 now. And I realized that as I have been reading these books, another giant world war happened, I didn’t even notice. Obviously Tolkien had to live through that and deal with it. The horror. The terror. The Blitz. But here he is, after the fact, just plopping back down and working on his books. I dunno. Personally, these days, I am having a hard time doing anything. A hard time being even functional. And maybe that’s all right.
For now.
Looks like I got a drone playlist for you today. ALL HANDS MAKE LIGHT one of my favorite records of ‘24. The Lael Neale record is old but another song from it has become a big hit in our house and Jane sings it all thew time. I have no recollection of 22° Halo. Water Damage, man. God, I don’t know anything about them but I love that album. Real Bailterspace-meets-Loop vibes. Amirite?
—
Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.