Sunday, October 6, 2024

Those hateful and stupid GOP ads wrecking your sports-watching experience? It's by design

In a typical October, a full day of college football and MLB playoffs on Saturday is a fun time. But because we are in "swing-state Wisconsin" in an election year, it also means the commerical breaks are filled with political ads. And especially filled with absurd and insulting Republican ads.

I know the point is to be as disgusting as possible and there's no sense in overthinking it, but the transphobic Trump ad airing during the baseball game is a decent metaphor for the broader goals of the movement. Just smearing their shit over every other thing, making it uglier and more like them.

— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 4:05 PM

We are definitely at the "stir up dumb white people with trans panic and scary non-white people with fuzzy-looking video" part of a GOP campaign. And it's become a consistent, solutionless GOP strategy to demoralize Dem voters and distract other ones.

Let's go back to the last time GOPs were polluting the MLB playoffs and other October sports viewing, back in 2022. And Roth wrote the definitive article on this strategy, titled "The Disgust is the Product." And in the article, Roth focused on gross ads being run by a RW front group known as Citizens for Sanity.
In theory, if not necessarily in practice, ideology exists at a remove from that kind of grubby, rube-running, retail stuff. If the political part can be understood as what a party actually does, the ideological aspect would be the ostensible reason why it does it. Given that the politics looks like what it looks like—one lavishly fetishized crisis after another, each carried forward through aligned media with the goal of creating in the consumer a constant state of furious full-spectrum derangement—the ideology is easy enough to guess. The obvious goal of all this is to get and keep people ready to do or think very strongly about how cool it would be to do some righteous violence against every other person and thing that exists. The name of the organization behind the advertisements, naturally, is Citizens For Sanity....

In its current state, Trumpism is entirely about feeling and fantasy. Instead of any plan to deal with crime, for instance, there is only the lascivious going-over of the problem; there is no program, or really any policies to advocate for, that is more expedient for the party than just continuing to fixate on it. There is a constituency — they are confused and vengeful and fucking livid, they are daily taking in and making up strange new stories to keep themselves that way, they are less mis- or disinformed than they are living inside the bilious and vengeful lore that sustains and explains their movement — and there is what that constituency feels, but there is nothing else. It is again worth noting that this constituency chooses to feel this way, every day; the most comfortable Americans have opted to wander this wilderness of prurience and threat and weird ugly lies instead of living in a reality they would have to share with anyone else. Where there might otherwise be ideology—where there might, actually, have been anything else—there is only politics. Of course it is ugly, small, even more fantastically dark than the truth of the moment. Being ugly, in precisely that way, is the reason that it exists. What began as a cynical set of best practices for keeping distracted people attached to their televisions has become the sacrament itself; they have built a church and then just fucking filled it with cable news.

In a characteristically thoughtful post about the advertisements at Baseball Prospectus, Steven Goldman wrote about how strange and jarring it was to see Citizens For Sanity's ads during these last weeks of extremely exciting and good baseball games, in part because those games consist, as baseball games do, of the best efforts of people from all over the world. "The dissonance tears something within you and you may feel distanced from the joy of the game," Goldman writes. "It’s exactly what they wanted." This is true, and the contrast between the baseball and the advertisements standing athwart it, yelling slurs, was certainly a big part of why I found the ads so repellent. But I also think that this collision is useful. It is not just that the two are in contrast, but that they are in some fundamental sense in conflict. You have these games, unfinished and alive and lit up with brilliance and the basic human thrill in things not yet known, and then you have its opposite: finished, closed, fearful, hateful, heaving itself into the way of all that life.
Trumpists want to bring low-information and casual voters down to their miserable and scared mentality, and anger Dems into distraction with this disgusting garbage. It is also intended to take the concept of hope and positive change away, and make people care more about hurting and resenting others, instead of trying to improve their own lives and demanding more of their government in making a society that improves their chances of stability and improvement.

And guess who gave a lot of money to Citizens for Sanity in 2022?

WSJ: Musk funded Stephen Miller's superPAC, which ran some of the nastiest, most vile and vicious anti-immigrant and anti-trans ads in 2022 "more than $50 million of Musk’s money funded a series of advertising campaigns by a group called Citizens for Sanity" www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

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— Joe Sudbay (@joesudbay.bsky.social) October 2, 2024 at 3:57 PM

I think we found the immigrant who's trying to wreck American society.

It seems well past time for Dems to go hard at oligarchs like Musk, and the hate merchants in the GOP in general. We know that the GOP's attempts to ignite a panic against trans people has been a loser with the wider electorate in the 2020s, and if it can be connected to the reality that GOPs don't want to talk about, which is the growing economy and respectful, decent country that exists in the Real America under Biden-Harris.

And if Elon Musk and the Uihleins (major donors to the smear ads against Tammy Baldwin) can try to get their anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda put in via ads about non-issues, why can't Dems forcefully attack GOPs on real issues? Including the Project 2025 Agenda that would allow a Trump or Vance Administration to turn wide swaths of Americans into second-class citizens, while allowing soulless corporations to run wild over the rights and protections of everyone else?

The only way that these lowlife GOP ads work in depressing Dem turnout is if Dems don't fight back against this garbage and stand up for the values and decency of Real America. I understand the point of the positive "moving forward" kind of campaign that the Harris-Walz team has been hitting on, and it probably does help them with some voters (like my mother, who voted GOP for president in every year from 1980 through 2016, but now votes Dem). But the best way for this country to move forward is to crush the bad guys who want to keep us dumb, desperate, and distracted.

Why don't Dems do a little "divide and conquer" themselves? And you know what else would fire up Dem base voters and reduce the feelings of being up against a wall of oligarch-funded RW hate and BS? Having Dems Americans that the blind eye to Republican lawlessness that Merrick Garland and Joe Biden have given for 4 years will be ended with Kamala Harris as President. And Harris can be included in a group of younger Dems in charge that realize The System doesn't work on its own, but instead requires constant work and activity to keep this country functional for all Americans, not just an elite few.

Anger and mockery is a strong weapon, when the anger and mockery is accurate. And there's plenty of Trump/GOP targets to hit, if Dems want to step up and win this election. It also should resonante to the majority of Americans, and make the GOP's idiotic and hateful ads look lame by comparison.
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Saturday, October 5, 2024

Big jobs report for September. In pretty much any way you want.

One month before the election, it was Jobs Report Friday this week! So what did we get?

​

Yep, it was a bigtime jobs report. On the payrolls side, gains were strong in a lot of areas, including continued strength in health care and a welcome rebound in leisure and hospitality. And the construction industry also kept hiring workers.
Employment in food services and drinking places rose by 69,000 in September, well above the average monthly gain of 14,000 over the prior 12 months.

Health care added 45,000 jobs in September, below the average monthly gain of 57,000 over the prior 12 months. Over the month, employment rose in home health care services (+13,000), hospitals (+12,000), and nursing and residential care facilities (+9,000).

Employment in social assistance increased by 27,000 in September, primarily in individual and family services (+21,000). Over the prior 12 months, social assistance had added an average of 21,000 jobs per month.

Construction employment continued to trend up in September (+25,000), similar to the average monthly gain over the prior 12 months (+19,000). Over the month, nonresidential specialty trade contractors added 17,000 jobs.
Also nice to see that unemployment dropped for the “good reason” – more people entering the work force, but even more Americans than that amount saying that they are now working.

​

“But c’mon Jake, you know this is going to be revised down, like they were in the past.” Revisions, you say?
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised up by 55,000, from +89,000 to +144,000, and the change for August was revised up by 17,000, from +142,000 to +159,000. With these revisions, employment in July and August combined is 72,000 higher than previously reported.
"But it's all foreigners that are getting the jobs. Try again, MAGAts.

So this is a blowout report, almost to a point where it’s too strong. Because it might slow down the speed of future interest rate cuts that the Federal Reserve may put in.
Within minutes, traders of futures that settle to the Fed's policy rate had all but abandoned bets on another upsized interest rate reduction before the end of this year, and moved to price in quarter-point reductions instead.

They are also pricing in an end point to the rate-cutting at somewhere between 3.25% and 3.75% by the middle of next year, above the 3.00% to 3.25% end-point range that traders had previously seen likely. The current range is 4.75% to 5.00%....

Friday's jobs report "is a potential game changer for the Fed and market expectations on the size and pace of future rate cuts," BMO economists wrote. "It also is a big upside risk to our consumer spending and GDP growth forecasts in the near-term."

Expectations could still change before the Fed's Nov. 6-7 policy meeting, which will come after fresh data on inflation and another monthly jobs report.
Oh no! We have a strong jobs market with good wage growth! Whatever will we do!

The wage increases are also nice to see, and continue a positive trend. We already knew that inflation-adjusted median household incomes had recovered back to 2019’s levels for 2023, and before today’s report, we had seen average hourly wages went up by 2.6% through August while the CPI only rose by 1.7%.

Now add in another 0.4% increase for September with hourly wages, and the knowledge that gas prices continued to trend down last month while food prices haven’t changed much, and it seems likely that those real wage gains are even larger now.

Republicans took the good jobs news in stride.

​

And Little Marco shrinks even more….

It again illustrates that a big question in this election comes down to whether voters are looking around and recognizing that the US has a strong economy with continued job growth and wage gains, and want to keep this going. Or do more voters buy the “crippling inflation and tough times” theme that Republicans are trying to sell (with no GOP solutions for these (non)-problems, mind you).

If we have an electorate that votes based on facts and reality, then Kamala Harris and the Dems should win. Which is likely why Republicans are spending so much ad money trying to convince people that what they’re seeing in their communities and in the economy in general isn’t real. Or that "scary" illegal immigrants and trans people are around every corner and.... existing?

Don’t be stupid, people. Believe what we see in the real world, and not the one that the TV ads and their oligarch funders are trying to convince you of.
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Wednesday, October 2, 2024

In 2024, do we choose the MAGAland of Make-Believe, or deal with reality and go forward?

I was heading into work and heard Wisconsin writer Mike McCabe on the radio, and he mentioned his most recent substack column, which discussed how so much of today's political discourse exists in a Land of Make-Believe.

On stage stands a very famous man, perhaps sensing his appeal is wearing thin, maybe fearing what the mileage on his tread could mean to his future prospects. The very famous man, brimming with intention, certain the willing and able are large in number, hurls an audacious lie to the wind, confident it will float as far and wide as a dandelion’s seeds.
In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs . . . they’re eating the cats.
He didn’t care it wasn’t true, didn’t give a thought to how many this preposterous yet vicious lie would hurt. The very famous man’s consort, undoubtedly sensing his railcar is hitched to a runaway train, surely fearing the coming wreck, nevertheless did not try jumping to safety. He stayed on board.
If I have to create stories . . . then that’s what I’m going to do.
Lies like these ones are akin to nuclear blasts, causing devastation at ground zero before showering toxic fallout over a wide radius. There are the immediate casualties. Then there’s the collateral damage.
McCabe then mentions that a reader complained about McCabe's decision to write a novel, as there was too much fiction in our political world, and we didn't more in another form. McCabe uses that comment to note that the barrage of Trumpian lies in 2024 America is limiting the ability of many of us to see things as they are, and more importantly, to visualize what things can become.
Several things bother me about this reader’s reaction. It conflates fiction writing and dishonesty, as if fiction and false mean the same thing. They do not. It also conflates factuality and truth. The two can go hand in hand, but that doesn’t make them exactly alike. Nonfiction is confined by facts, and that can prevent the whole truth from being told. Fiction is more unbounded, depending on imagination to identify and describe encompassing truths. Works of nonfiction or fiction both can lie. Either can speak truth.

Most troubling to me is how pervasive and persistent dishonesty can disparage and discourage imagination. If we stick to the facts before us and call off the search for yet undiscovered truths, hope for human progress is lost. If we trust only what currently is and stop trying to imagine what could be, the potential of civilization to advance is crippled.
And when certain people spend all of their time being scared about things that aren’t real, they don’t care to go outside and see what’s actually happening, and deal with that reality. It limits our growth, and sets us back.

Republicans know they can’t win in November if the election is based on reality. So they do things such as blowing up isolated incidents into “rampant migrant crime” while ignoring the myriad more crimes that are committed by Americans with guns and committed against women on a daily basis.

This is also why Republicans keep having ads where GOP activists everyday voters complain about “crushing inflation” when inflation has been under control for the last 18 months, to a point where the Federal Reserve is now cutting interest rates. GOPs also never mention that ever-increasing corporate profits are likely a significant reason behind the price rises of the 2020s, because that would require them to mention that concern and possibly have to give a solution to it. And they'd have to introduce that into the BubbleWorld that many GOP-leaning voters live in, which is not something GOPs want.

And why this is done is illustrated in an excellent column from Rick Perlstein in the American Prospect today.

"Journalistic norms are not a suicide pact." prospect.org/politics/202...

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— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein.bsky.social) October 2, 2024 at 9:36 AM

He starts the column by looking back at an article from 2004 in The New Republic written by a young Chris Hayes, who was walking around Wisconsin trying to figure out what undecided voters wanted in an election that would be decided by less than 1% up here.
The future MSNBC host’s TNR piece was an account of the lessons he learned canvassing among undecided voters in Wisconsin for John Kerry. It incinerates a basic foundation of how political junkies think: “Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the ‘issues.’ That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs.”

Chris noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, “such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number … the very concept of the ‘issue’ seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.”
Which means that there isn't a lot of deep analysis going on with these voters. They're just going on vibes and feelings.

And that's where Trumpian idiocy comes in, because by giving simple reasons and shallow statements to deal with real, complex problems, it takes the place of the honest, hard work and adjustments that real solutions require. Perlstein says that this allows for weak, vulnerable Americans to be susceptible to loudmouthed strongmen who don't ask anything more of them beyond "blame these others for why things are going wrong for you" and not have to put any more effort to improve your life.
Millions of pages have been filled by scholars explaining the psychological appeal of fascism, most converging on the blunt fact that it offers the fantasy of reversion to an infantile state, where nothing can come and harm you, because you will be protected by an all-powerful figure who will always put you first, always put you first. It is simply indisputable that this promise can seduce and transform even intelligent, apparently mature, kind-hearted people formerly committed to liberal politics. I’ve written before in this column about the extraordinary film The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which director Jen Senko describes the transformation of her Kennedy-liberal dad under the influence of right-wing talk radio and Fox News—and also how, after she explained the premise of her film for a Kickstarter campaign, scores of people came out of the woodwork to share similar stories about their own family members.

I’ve learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from the X feed of a psychologist named Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump’s gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut. Trump’s appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely this way. When he addresses women voters, for instance: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger …”...
Perlstein then combines Hayes' observations of undecided Sconnies from 20 years ago, and how these types of voters are basically deciding what American reality they are going to live in.
I imagine that what at least some of them — certainly more than those supposedly entering the two candidates’ issue positions onto spreadsheets to study, ruling out the candidate not “specific” enough about their fiscal policies — are undecided because they are poised at a threshold. “Undecided” is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy, and all the imaginary comforts it offers, and sticking with the rest of us in the reality-based community, despite all the existential terrors the real world affords.
It really feels like this election comes down to a relatively straightforward question. Do you believe that the country is going downhill, times are tough, and scary brown people are marauding the streets and making you cower in your basement? Or do you go outside, touch grass, look around, and realize things are much better than the hellscape we were in 4 years ago. And that you want to live in a diverse and becalmed country where respect for others is a virtue, versus something to be taken advantage of.

It seems like an easy choice, but it also involves thinking and making an effort to care. What MAGA is counting on is that enough Americans won’t do those things, and allow them to grab power through fear, idiocy, and self-centeredness. And if the bad guys win, we will have rulers that are not based in reality, dealing with non-problems and residing in BubbleWorld instead of real life.

The MAGA-GOPs would be using their power to actively build their Bubble of BS higher, and put those lies and deflections into policies and laws. We would then have a country that wouldn't be worth saving, because enough of its citizenry has decided it doesn't want to deal with reality, and there will be no sense for those of us living in the reality-based community to exert any effort to dig these jackwagons out of the hole that MAGAts will have put us in.
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