Links for 8/29/19

Links for 8/29/19
A really good paid adult education on both sides of the border will lift everyone up into tolerance. Poverty allows reactionaries pawns. Get rid of wealth extremes and brotherhood really does come about. Catholics and Protestants do fine on the golf course together, even the ones owned by Trump. Brexit will not happen because it will dismember the realm. If that happens and Wales and Scotland leave the UK, Boris will have to answer to the Queen. If the Queen lets it happen, even at the risk of a constitutional crisis (and dismemberment is such a crisis), then the blame will be her Majesties and all the Plantagenet descendants will call for restoration, achieve it and behead Boris.

The hurricane missed. Reprogramming DHS money is easier than MILCON, but it will never happen. Trump knows nothing about government contracting. He was a failure in private construction. You cannot just grease the skids with a few bribes. He will be long gone, even if he does not resign once Deutchebank records are revealed to GOP Senators who still decline to vote for removal and even wins the election with pro-life lies about appointing Justices and overturning Roe (the last 4 GOP appointees vote pro-Roe), before the environmental impact statements and lawsuits are completed. There will be no wall. In a few months, Trump will die, like Nixon almost did, once removed - even if he is getting the best medical care Walter Reed in Bethesda provides all its mental patients.

Trump cannot roll back logging until after comments and lawsuits, as far as I know. The Administrative Procedures Act will stop most of his mischief and the permanent government will not tell his criminal appointees until it is too late.

It is not the activists who should be polled. It is the Democratic National Committee and State Committee members. Wikileaks was bad but not wrong. They have a thumb on the scale that is hard to cut off. Mayor Pete likely will not and his constitutional reforms have become tropes on the order of the Pro-Life Amendment. Presidential candidates talk about such things to keep the rubes happy, but Presidents have absolutely no say (nor do governors) in amending the Constitution. Small states prevent the electoral college from going anywhere, Blue states stop any pro-life amendment (which makes it safe to propose one) and the rich will easily stop any campaign finance amendment unless the parties are already honoring its principles. Taking money to stop the donors from giving it to you is the height of irony.

Rachel Bitecofer's models beat up the common wisdom on elections. How they will respond to Trump being gone or the usual shenanigans by the pro-life movement will change her predictions, but they will be correct. Unless Edsall takes them into account, he is sadly mistaken.

Modern liberalism includes while modern reactionaries find scapegoats. Catholics, the Irish, Freemen, Latinos, Gays and Lesbians have all been used in both ways. Tammany Hall did it. FDR did it. Nixon did it. Lee Attwater and the moral majority did it. Read the Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin to understand why this is not a new thing. LGBT reactionary politics and the pro-life movement are two sides of the same coin.