Tag: President Trump

The Teachable Moment About Lying

By Michelle Naranjo

Last week, I overheard an 8-year old say to her parent, "Maybe I would vote for Trump because if I robbed a bank, I could probably lie and get away with it." The parent laughed, and exhaustedly sighed through another teachable moment.

We have persevered four years of this presidency, so it seems as if we should all be able to trudge through the final 12 days.

But we can't, and we shouldn't. 

This human-made disaster isn't about the personal indiscretions, the golf, the taxes, the children, or the fascination with dictators. 

It is about the lies. They added up until there was a tipping point that has caused a historic amount of damage. 

Inciting an insurrection with repeated and documented lies should have consequences. 

If the 25th Amendment is not brought forward immediately, then there should absolutely be an impeachment as soon as possible. 

But impeachment is just the start of the means to make the wrongdoer be held accountable. There should also be prosecution to return public trust and send a strong message to the treasonous supporters alike. 

Too many have turned a blind eye too often to Trump's treasonous acts during his presidency. It is almost as if some forgot their inalienable roles as inhabitants and allowed themselves to become viewers to be bought and sold. Too many found the manipulations and bungles...funny. 

The supporters of the inciter should also be held accountable, in whatever shape that might take. Historian Timothy Snyder recently wrote, "Politicians who do not tell the simple truth perpetuate the big lie, further an alternative reality, support conspiracy theories, weaken democracy, and foment violence far worse than that of January 6, 2021."

From the eight senators and 139 representatives who consciously chose to support the lies against democracy to those who claimed that believing was more important than their fellow citizens, violence and destruction is not an acceptable tactic to change the minds of non-believers.

 The chasm in the culture of this country is repairable but is so very fragile right now. 

Democracy is showing us a teachable moment. It is exhausting; it is not amusing. 

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Natasha Romanoff Is My Girlfriend. Everybody Says So.

By Stephen Macaulay

Amendment XXV, Section 4.  “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

As rioters attacked the Capitol, Donald Trump put up a video on Twitter—a tweet that carries a label “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence” — read that again and let it sink in and realize that this is a message from the President of the United States.

He claimed he’d won the election by a landslide. That the election has been stolen from him. That “There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us—from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election. …”

Oh, and he said that the people that he loved should go home.

In the weeks following the election, neither he nor his supporters have presented any certifiable proof of any fraud. Any landslide. Any malfeasance that would lead to a change of the election results.

Yet he repeats it. Over and over. Nothing tangible. Nothing real.

There is what is generally accepted to be reality. Then there is something that is pure fantasy. Most people can discern the difference.

Not even the most rabid Marvel fanboy believes that he’s ever going to date the Black Widow. But if someone kept repeating that he was going to be dating Natasha Romanoff, would someone take him aside and suggest that that isn’t ever going to happen? That he should move on?

And if that fanboy kept repeating it, perhaps saying things like “They are keeping her from me,” wouldn’t it seem that that person is more than a bit off?

Would you allow that person to have the nuclear codes?

There is reality. Things break. Things can’t readily be put back together.

Have we not gotten to the point where people who are allegedly responsible step up and do their sworn duty to preserve and protect the United States?

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Trump Must Resign

By Bryan Williams

Since the release of the smart phone upon the world in the latter half of the first decade of the 21st Century, our collective societal will to have patience has been nearly eliminated. These Internet connected devices have allowed for instantaneous communication, instantaneous transfer of money across the world, and food delivered to our door within an hour. Our political and governmental machinations have not caught up. They are still painstakingly slow. That it takes two and half months between a presidential election and the inauguration of the next president is enough to make us tear our hair out (and have enough time to order a wig on Amazon to be delivered within two days).

Let me be clear: Any admiration I had for President Trump is now gone. He must go. But how? It is agonizing to think he has (as of my writing this) 291 hours left in his presidency before Joe Biden is sworn in. How do we wait that long?

Many have said Vice President Pence and the Cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment. Cabinet secretaries are dropping like flies with resignations over Wednesday's chaos, so soon there may not even be enough of a Cabinet left to invoke the 25th. But even if there were, in my opinion, this would be the wrong course of action. The 25th Amendment is to be used when the president is physically or mentally incapacitated. Working in the mental health field as I do, I can tell you it would be a stretch to declare Trump mentally incapacitated. Trump is mentally capable of doing many things. He is of sound mind. The problem is, he just won't do what is right. We should not degrade the 25th Amendment even though it would be tempting to do so, and I believe, could be up to legal challenge in this case.

How about impeachment by Congress? This is most attractive and should be undertaken even if there is not enough time considering how slow this process is. At the very least Congress should censure Trump.

What should happen is for Trump to resign and let Pence be our President for the balance of the remaining 291 hours. But we all know he won't. Trump is going to ride this horse until its time is up on January 20th at 11:59AM EST.

So the rest of us here in America have to be adults and have a little patience - 291 hours isn't so bad, is it?

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Words Do Not Equal Violence

By Andrew Boyd

When my now wife and I were early in our dating relationship, some 25 years ago, she took a position as a “scab” at the Detroit News in the midst of a writers’ strike. I recall listening to a local NPR affiliate interview with the union’s leading spokesperson, who justified physical violence as a response to verbal violence, and I thought “no.”

The next morning, I was dropping my wife off at the curb and as she sought to navigate the picket lines, same said person put a megaphone to her ear and yelled a series of pejoratives. A minute or so later, people were pulling the two of us apart. Wait, did I just expose my hypocrisy? Yes, although one might argue the proximity of the megaphone threatened real physical damage. I’m not perfect, and I failed to live to my own standards, not for the first or last time. 

Silence isn’t violence. Words aren’t violence. Violence is violence, and those who commit it are due their punishment. Left, right, center.

British psychologist Havelock Ellis observed that all civilization has, from time to time, become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution. We’ve been taking a pickax to that crust for the better part of two decades, and there are more fingerprints on that tool than we can reasonably name in this column. 

Politics is blood sport, and it has a way of bringing out the worst in people on the margins socially, emotionally and ideologically. We saw that in full measure this past summer, and again, to a much lesser degree, yesterday. In neither case would I lay the responsibility legally at the feet of anyone whose rhetoric may have played a role. We can’t equate speech with physical violence. It’s not right on principle, and on the basis of that argument, I cannot support the notion of impeachment or invocation of the 25th Amendment.

Here we are talking about the difference between legal and moral obligations, a critical important distinction. Are Trump’s fingerprints on that pickax? Yes. So, too, Hillary with her “deplorables” invective, and Maxine Waters, and media who run cover for BLM and Antifa activist rioters, and popular voices on both sides of the aisle.

I’m not happy with Trump. Indeed, I’m deeply, deeply disappointed. His narcissism would seem to know no bounds. He shirks all responsibility for the power and purpose of his words. Managerially and ideologically, I’ll still take him six days a week and twice on Sunday over the likes of Joe Biden, but it’s fair to wonder about the net gains or losses for the Republican Party over time.  

Trump bears no small moral stain, but none that rises to the level of legal or constitutional action, IMHO. I feel bad for Pence, though. That guy has probably endured assaults to his character that would lay low a lesser man, like me. He didn’t deserve the opprobrium leveled at him by DJT in this refusal to take extra-constitutional action. Perhaps he’ll arise as the new voice of a more principled conservative movement that stands stalwart in the face of the morally bankrupt swamp.   

In the meantime, please, everyone, talk and act with care, and imagine that the person with whom you disagree, even vehemently, may not in fact be your enemy.  

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Democrats Take the Senate and Manchin Becomes Big Man on Capitol Hill

By Todd Lassa

Democrat Joe Manchin III of West Virginia was trending on Twitter late Tuesday night as the most important Senator, even before urban precinct ballot counts in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections had begun to flip the fortunes of Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff as cable news networks eagerly awaited results after polls closed. Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Ossoff decisively beat two Republican incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. 

Manchin is a Democrat who has served deep red West Virginia in the Senate for 10 years and now has the potential to become to his party what Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has been to the GOP, although more so. Sitting in the late centrist-Democrat Robert C. Byrd’s seat, Manchin becomes a true swing vote, likely to defeat along with 50 Republican Senate bills that come from the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the Senate as well as those that come up from “The Squad” wing of the House. 

The Democrats’ victories push their party to a 50-50 Senate count, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker on votes to give the party an effective majority over Republicans. Lame duck President Trump and GOP leaders tried to paint Democratic control of the House, Senate, and White House as the road to socialist damnation. But Georgia Democrats, led by likely 2022 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams and aided by such groups as Black Votes Matter, turned out about 4.5 million voters total by Tuesday, many of them using mail-in ballots. Meanwhile, President Trump’s unfounded claims of voter fraud in each of the swing states he lost apparently stifled Republican turnout, and his attack specifically on Georgia’s preference for Biden almost certainly prompted many supporters to stay at home.

The Reverend Raphael Warnock says he will remain leader of the Atlanta church once pastored by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and becomes the first Black senator from Georgia, the 11th Black senator in the history of the nation and one of three in the 117th Congress, with Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina, as Kamala Harris moves from the Senate to the vice presidency. 

Manchin’s power on Capitol Hill ultimately depends on where the GOP goes from here, what with Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., about to be demoted to minority leader and already distancing himself from the Trump administration while attempting to warn fellow Republican senators against challenging Electoral College votes for President-elect Biden Wednesday. So far, 12 Republican senators have indicated they plan to defy McConnell and challenge the results from their respective states, including lame-duck Senator Loeffler of Georgia.

By Todd Lassa Democrat Joe Manchin III of West Virginia was trending on Twitter late Tuesday night as […]

Twitter Trump Handed the Senate to the Democrats

By Bryan Williams

In thinking about this column, I tried to find a theme. The one that kept coming to my mind was “Let the chips fall where they may.” Ever since it became clear in early November 2020 that President Trump had lost the election, he and many Republicans have gone on a journey of lawsuits and arm-twisting with a goal of making those chips fall where they wanted them to.

Trump and the loyal Republicans in Washington spent the last two months losing the Georgia Senate runoff. What did they expect when they blurted out, “Don’t vote because the system is rigged, but please vote to defeat these socialist Democrats?” Huh?

I voted for Trump in November and I didn’t hold my nose. He won me over because I was able to separate Twitter Trump from the Trump who presides. I generally agreed with his policies. He cut taxes. He was prudent with the use of the military. He confronted China and engaged North Korea’s Kim Jong-un (with mixed results, but hey, he did more than most other presidents). Trump’s administration got us out of the Paris Climate Accord and Iran Nuclear Deal, which I think were both stinkers. He also had much success in advancing peace in the Middle East.

Then he lost in November and Twitter Trump took over and the wheels really fell off. Georgia voters noticed, and to their credit, organizers there were able to turn out the Democratic vote in volume not seen in decades.

It wasn’t all Trump’s fault. Incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were weak candidates in my opinion. Loeffler is a rich white woman who was appointed and never chosen by Georgia voters, to begin with. Perdue refused to debate Ossoff, which was a huge mistake. Also, my theory that the younger or more vigorous candidate usually wins held true in the case of Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff.

So now we have government run by the Democrats. It wasn’t inevitable, but Trump and his loyal Republicans made it inevitable with their odd behavior of the past two months. Will the Dems muck it up with their newfound power? As the outgoing President said so often, “We’ll see.”

By Bryan Williams In thinking about this column, I tried to find a theme. The one that kept […]

Getting to a Safe Market Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Cash

By Stephen Macaulay

Although Christmas 2020 is behind us, the current situation vis-à-vis the COVID-relief bill brings Dickens’ classic holiday horror story to mind. While most of us remember that there are the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, there is also the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge’s former partner, Jacob Marley. Marley is condemned to wander the earth wearing heavy chains because of his counting house-based greed and ill-will.

Donald Trump claimed that he didn’t want to sign the bill that was many months in the making and passed by both houses of Congress because, he belatedly claimed, the $600 that will go to adults with an adjusted gross annual income, in 2019, of up to $75,000 is too paltry. He wanted, as the Democrats had been working toward before they thought the best was the enemy of the good and negotiated it down, $2,000.

One wonders whether Saturday night during still another vacation at Mar-a-Lago he’d been visited by Jacob Marley. Or whether he wanted his Sharpie signature to be on something more robust. Bigly.

Without going all Scrooge, there is something that isn’t discussed a whole lot in light of the prevailing pandemic situation: the national debt.

If you want to see something that is both inexplicable and scary, go to usdebtclock.org and watch the number roll up at a rate that is probably best viewed on a gaming machine because it has a video card better capable of handling this rate of change.

As I am writing this the U.S. national debt is $27.5-trillion. By the time you read this, it may be higher.

So the question is, what’s a few trillion dollars more?

The first CARES Act was passed March 27, 2020. That was long before, arguably, the pandemic really hit the fan.

Let’s not just put Trump in the corner for his belated action on the demand for the increase in family funding. Congress is more than derelict in its response to the pandemic.

But here’s the thing. If $600 is too little, is $2,000 enough? Would $4,000 be better? How about more?

What is perhaps not recalled is that the CARES Act provided $1,200 per adult whose income was less than $99,000 and $500 per child under 17, or up to $3,400 for a family of four.

As Nic Woods points out, the economy is not going to get back into full swing unless people feel safe in the market. People — well, this is perhaps too broad a brush, because the images of the people filling airports during the holiday indicates that there are plenty who just don’t care or believe the danger — will not feel safe-ish until the pandemic is under control.

Citizens who are following the rules — wearing a mask, social distancing, washing hands frequently — with a Trump-signed check for $2,000 aren’t likely to spend that money at their local small business as they might have, say, last February, because they know what the consequences can be. So they order from Amazon. Which is good for Jeff Bezos, but how about the local economies?

What is really needed is Operation Warp Speed Squared in terms of getting the vaccines into arms so that people can truly be safe and then more likely to go out in the world in a more normal way, as well as testing that doesn’t require idling in a car for a few hours.

Of course, there is nothing normal about current conditions.

Let’s make sure that those who have been blindsided by the pandemic get help, whether they are individuals or owners of a family bakery. Let’s make sure that the first responders as well as those who are on the front lines, from medical personnel to teachers to the people who are working in grocery stores, are given additional support: that woman who is ringing a register at Kroger hour after hour sure as hell didn’t sign up for a job that puts her life at risk. That young guy who is emptying bed pans and pushing people in wheel chairs probably didn’t imagine that his main concern is keeping his parents safe when he gets home from work.

But let’s make sure we are providing money to create the conditions that will make the market safe so the economy can get back on its feet. Vaccinations. Testing. Rinse. Repeat.

That debt clock is still racking up numbers. At some point we’re going to have to pay it down. But unless the virus is controlled, there will be continued strains on people: Do you go to work if your kid is sick? On the health care system: Do we really expect all of those hospital employees to continue to work as hard as they have for the past many months? And there will be continued strains on the economy as a whole.

It isn’t necessarily about spending more. It is about spending better. There is a real cost to all of this. We can’t ignore it.

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It’s Official, Again, for Now, as Electoral College Votes

By Todd Lassa

California’s 55 electors formally cast their votes for longtime U.S. senator and former Vice President Joe Biden Monday, putting him over the 271 he needed to become president, and on to a 306-232 victory over incumbent President Trump.

Now, finally Trump will end his challenges against the presidential election outcome, based on unfounded claims of ballot fraud primarily in Democratic-majority urban areas, right? 

Not so fast. While electors met in 50 states plus the District of Columbia Monday, a joint session of Congress meets January 6 to count those votes, and hardcore Trump Republicans are still threatening to overturn Electoral College votes, NPR reports.

The latest of Trump’s more than 50 failed court cases came in Wisconsin Monday just one hour before the state’s 10 electors were escorted by police into a statehouse chamber to cast their votes for Biden. The state Supreme Court rejected the incumbent president’s bid challenging four types of ballots in Milwaukee and Dane counties after the first recount there added about 130 votes to Biden’s 0.6% margin.

Monday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court decision was close; 4-3, with one conservative justice joining the court’s three liberals. 

Michigan’s presidential electors met in the Lansing statehouse at 2 p.m. Eastern time Monday, in chambers closed because of safety precautions. Prior to the vote, Michigan Republican leaders stripped state Rep. Gary Eisen, R-St. Clair Township, of his committee assignments after he made comments on a local radio station that hinted he was part of a group that planned to undermine or overturn Biden’s 16 Electoral College votes from the state, the Detroit Free Press reports. 

And this all comes after the U.S. Supreme Court late last Friday rejected Texas’ Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s suit demanding that 20 million ballots from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin be thrown out. The court’s unsigned ruling prompted sometimes violent demonstrations in several U.S. cities Saturday, including Washington, D.C., where attendees included former national security advisor Michael Flynn, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and members of the right-wing Proud Boys, who have ties to white nationalism. 

A group of 126 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives backed Paxton’s suit to reverse the vote of the four “swing” states Biden won November 3, which left 74 House Republicans who declined to back President Trump’s effort. Or, 73 if you count out retiring Rep. Paul Mitchell, R-Mich., who announced Monday he would leave his party.

Please address comments to editors@thehustings.news

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A New Hat For America

By Jim McCraw

While it is maddening to know that President-elect Biden couldn’t get a really good start on 2021 between President Trump’s recalcitrance and COVID-19, there will eventually be a Biden administration, and it will be in trouble up to its hips from Day One.

Herewith, a suggestion for Biden/Harris I believe is important, and eminently doable. As Congress fights over both short- and long-term follow-up bills to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES), which ends the day after Christmas, I think it might be time for something as ambitious (though relatively easy, considering the big funding levels already proposed) and quick to do as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), circa 1933. Let’s call the new one the American Reconstruction Corps (ARC).

Lord knows there are plenty of skilled and unskilled people out of work.  And there are plenty of American infrastructure projects, largely ignored by the previous administration, that need doing.

Biden is not FDR, and we do not have a modern Robert Moses, the mid-20th Century “master builder” of New York, Long Island, Rochester and Westchester counties (it’s certainly not Donald J. Trump).

We are not Frank Lloyd Wright, the Ford Motor Company Whiz Kids, nor the first seven astronauts. We are just Americans who recognize a need to get a lot of things done by a mass of people willing to work. There has got to be a way to do this.

With widespread distribution of COVID-19 vaccines likely coming with warmer weather next summer, why couldn’t we dispatch squadrons of out-of-work Americans to do road, tunnel and bridge repairs that have been waiting years for funding and final approvals?  And not just men, which is how the original CCC operated. Skilled and unskilled women need work, too. At, say, $20 per hour.

Why not send platoons of the willing into every one of the national parks to do repairs and cleaning?

While the original CCC troops had uniforms, meals and housing, I humbly suggest self-provided work clothing, bring-your-own meals, work near home, and ARC baseball caps in red, white and blue.

There will be periodic need for FEMA supplies and equipment after summer storms, so why not divert some FEMA funding, vehicles and materiel to help Americans fix the things that are already broken?

Yes, men and women working and sweating in close quarters for eight-hour days may be problematic from a health standpoint, but with masks, distancing and frequent washing and spraying, I think it could work. Let’s get some guys from Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Ford, Google and Tesla to volunteer, put them in a room and see if they can figure this out while Biden and Harris get on with the rest of the recovery.

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When Will the Whining Stop?

By Stephen Macaulay

In 1997 Frank Costanza brought his holiday to the attention of the world: Festivus. The airing of grievances. And a demonstration of feats of strength.

Festivus occurs on December 23, thereby getting a jump on Christmas.

On December 2, Donald Trump held his own Festivus. But there was no un-decorated pole. Rather, there were the trappings of the Office of the President of the United States.

To be sure, Trump is still the president. But the clock is running on his occupancy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And he doesn’t like it.

Trump’s airing of grievances took the form of a 46-minute video shot in the Diplomatic Reception Room. Diplomats are supposed to be deft handlers of situations. There was nothing particular deft about his Facebook rant about the “rigged election”

Christopher Krebs was the director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency until Trump fired him by tweet (the new diplomatic channel?), because Krebs said that the election was not at all rigged or otherwise unduly influenced by dead Venezuelan politicians or whatever the conspiracy of the day might be.

Right now, William Barr, the attorney general whose actions over the past several months show that he would probably be more than glad to pick up Trump’s dry cleaning and shave his back, is reportedly on the edge of losing his job because he said the Department of Justice has uncovered nothing that would be voter fraud of the magnitude to change the outcome of the election.

The “Seinfeld” show broadcast on December 18, 1997, was and remains funny.

There is nothing amusing about the man who should be representative of all that is good and noble in this great country making it sound as though the United States is some third-world dictatorship.

Please address comments to editors@thehustings.news

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An airing of grievances before Festivus.

Georgia and the GOP Need Trump’s Support

By Bryan Williams

During our four years with President Trump, I had a rule of thumb: Pay attention to what he does, not what he says (or tweets).

I would check his twitter feed every once in a while for a laugh, but I would pay close attention to his official actions from the (supposedly) unbiased media reports, or from news broadcasts of his impromptu Q&A time with the media on his way to Marine One.

Since the election last month things have gotten weird. During my time in politics, we knew there was some shenanigans going on, but it was always so difficult to prove, and the local district attorney could not prove any fraud. So, I believe there may have been some election fraud last month in all the battleground states, but even I don’t buy the Trump campaign argument that it’s on the scale of thousands of votes, or part of some strange international conspiracy.

Now the Trump camp is telling Republicans in Georgia to not vote because of the rigged nature of the election as a way to boycott the "corrupt" system down there. 

Say what? I'm sorry but if I was registered to vote in Georgia, no one would tell me not to return to the polls. Corrupt or not, fraud or not, you need to show up and vote. Elections are a numbers game. If you don't vote, you will only hurt your candidates, ideals, and party. It's not like a business that will lose profits from a well-organized boycott.

If any Republican in Georgia is reading this, please vote. Do you really want the Democratic Party to control both houses of Congress and the White House? And to President Trump: Use your popularity to rally folks to vote. People love you, and the GOP needs your energy one more time.

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Georgia Republican Party needs you to vote.

The Decline in Standards

By Stephen Macaulay

Marco Rubio did not attend an Ivy League school. After graduating from South Miami Senior High School, he went northwest, to Missouri, where he spent a year at Tarkio College, as he received a football scholarship. Then it was back to Florida, Gainesville, where he attended what was then Santa Fe Community College. That was followed by attendance at the University of Florida, where he received a BA in political science in 1993. Then he attended the University of Miami School of Law in 1996.

Using what seems to be the communication tool of choice for Trump wannabes, Twitter, Rubio tweeted out that Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees “went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.”

There’s a lot to break down there. And we’ll give Rubio the benefit of the doubt that he’s not simply annoyed that he didn’t make that league.

But let’s start with the conclusion. That America is in decline. And who has been the president for the past four years? Who has failed to rally the American public to do the right things to stop the coronavirus in the way that a leader who has lost more than a quarter million of his people would? Whose lack of response has led to not only high rates of unemployment right now, but what is likely to get worse as the fall turns to winter. . .and the funding and restrictions against evictions run out?

Oh, and who had control of the Senate?

If America is declining, we can see where it started. And would it have been better to reinforce that decline by re-electing the person who has gotten the proverbial ball rolling?

Are manners now a thing of the past, politeness something that is to be demeaned?

If you are a parent and have a high school student, odds are it would be your fondest dream for them to attend an Ivy League school. You would be so very proud if they can achieve a strong resume. It would be something to brag about if they were able to attend the right conferences. And regardless of all of that, you want them to be polite and orderly.

When people start calling out other people for being smart and good mannered, there is evidently decline.

A decline in standards.

And we can clearly identify when that started: June 16, 2015.

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Culture Wars Go to College

By Todd Lassa

A bit like an NCAA football rivalry, the Culture Wars have stumbled onto the battlefield of the college and university alumni of presidential candidates’ staff and cabinet. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., fired an early shot as the former vice president began announcing his choices to staff the White House. Rubio expressed concern about people who received degrees from Ivy League schools, presumably in an effort to appeal to the Trump wing, as one of Trump’s biggest demographic constituencies consisted of non-college educated white males.*

Then the Biden transition team launched a trial balloon, or canary in the Senate coalmine if you will with Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, nominated to become director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden was a longtime confidant of Hillary Clinton tipped to potentially be her chief of staff, background that has drawn some opposition from supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who believe she helped torpedo his 2016 Democratic nomination bid. When Trump won instead, she took to Twitter with the “#Resistance” hashtag. Since Biden announced his intention to nominate her, she has deleted more than 1,000 tweets from over the last four years, according to the New York Post.

Her tweets’ alleged nastiness has drawn the ire of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, both Republicans, though one might presume that as far as Rubio is concerned, she won’t be among the “polite & orderly caretakers” of the nation’s decline. 

What’s more, Tanden has a law degree from Yale.

The other intended cabinet are mostly ivy leaguers. They include Ron Klain (chief of staff; Georgetown University and Harvard Law), Janet Yellen (Treasury; Pembroke College of Brown University and Yale), Antony Blinken (State; Harvard and Columbia), John Kerry (special envoy for climate; Yale, though he had “low grades”), Alejandro Mayorkas (Homeland Security; University of California-Berkeley and Loyola Law), Linda Thomas-Greenfield (United Nations ambassador; Louisiana State and University of Wisconsin-Madison, a “public ivy”) and Jake Sullivan (national security advisor; Yale). [Hat tip to Wikipedia and New York magazine’s Intelligencer.]

Biden will be the first non-Ivy grad to take the White House since Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ’84. He attended the University of Delaware and Syracuse University for law. Trump is an Ivy League grad with an economics degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Reagan? Eureka College. According to Lou Cannon writing in a piece for the UVA Miller Center (https://millercenter.org/president/reagan/life-before-the-presidency) “He majored in economics but was an indifferent student, graduating with a "C" average in 1932.”

Sounds like Rubio’s kind of guy.

*It should be noted that Rubio (along with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson) is considered a lead Republican candidate for president in 2024, assuming the party remains centered on its Trump populist wing and that no members of the outgoing president’s family—Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner—announce they’re running (which could explain the rumored pre-emptive pardons). To say nothing of Trump himself announcing another run in ’24 (which could also explain the rumored self-pardon).

Please address comments to editors@thehustings.news

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GM is Dialing it in for the Dollars

By Michelle Naranjo

In 2008, then-President Barack Obama set a goal of 1 million electric vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015, but that goal was hardly met. Fewer than 400,000 EVs had been sold. Plug-in vehicles accounted for less than 1 percent of all vehicle sales, about the same as the number of convertibles sold in the nation annually.

Despite the looming warnings from climate scientists, car buyers were more concerned with range anxiety and the cost to buy an EV. 

General Motors joining other automakers to follow more progressive Biden-led goals is admirable, but it is truly nothing short of GM seeing dollars. 

The President-elect sees his climate change policy to be an opportunity to create more jobs for millions of Americans. His vision includes investments in infrastructure, the auto industry, transit, the power sector, buildings, housing, and agriculture. 

Setting sights on a national standard is the right thing to do. The challenge will be to unite consumers into understanding that it is the right thing to do and holding the automakers accountable. 

Case in point, several manufacturers - including GM - have made vehicles for years that, while not plug-ins, were an attempt at bettering emissions, but they absolutely failed in following up with any significant customer education or marketing. Take any PZEV (partial zero-emissions vehicle). Most car buyers aren’t aware of what they are buying. In GM’s case, they had a mild hybrid system in the Buick LaCrosse, for example, but were almost afraid to tell that story to car buyers. 

But those car models were not the bread and butter that supports a global company, so there wasn’t much effort from the marketing companies.

Globally, EV sales are on the rise. Chinese EV sales currently total more than every other country in the world, combined. More than 60 percent of vehicle sales in Norway are plug-ins. Numerous countries have set dates to end the sales of traditional internal combustion engines.  

“The cost of energy from wind power has dropped by a factor of 10,” energy analyst Ramez Naam said on the Orange and Outrageous podcast, by Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. “The cost of electricity from solar power has dropped by a factor of 30.” In an even more dramatic statistic about the future affordability of electric-powered cars, BloombergNEF, estimates the cost of lithium-ion battery packs has dropped 87 percent between 2010 and 2019. 

GM can’t afford to not side with Biden.

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Business Community Pivots from Trump

By Todd Lassa

General Motors CEO Mary Barra (pictured) has announced that by the end 2025 there will be some 20 electric vehicles available to customers in the U.S. — 40 percent of all products on offer in its showrooms — which will go a long way toward the automaker meeting strict 2026 California fuel economy standards. But Barra waited until Michigan certified its 16 Electoral College votes would go to President-elect Joe Biden, to announce the automaker would separate from President Trump’s three-year plus legal proceedings to end the state’s special waiver allowing its own emissions laws.  

The California standard eases the Obama administration’s federal 54.5-mpg average by 2025, to about 51-mpg by 2026, while the Trump administration has sought a 40-mpg standard instead. GM, Toyota Motor and Fiat Chrysler signed on with the administration. Toyota, which built a reputation for low emissions and high fuel efficiency with its Prius hybrids, had said it joined Trump’s legal efforts because it prefers a single federal standard, no matter what the level.

Historically, until now, the standard set by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has been tougher than the federal standard. California has had a waiver from the federal government to set its own rules since the late 1960s, and 16 high-population Eastern states long ago signed on. It must be noted that the corporate average fuel efficiency (CAFE) standards, whether 40 mpg or 54.5 mpg, do not literally mean automakers must meet those numbers – there are very complicated formulas for determining each car or truck models’ average. 

But with its fleet of zero-emission EVs on the way over the next few years, GM could reasonably have joined Ford Motor Company, BMW, Volvo, Volkswagen Group (which has aggressive plans for a fleet of its own EV models) and Honda (which is partnering with GM on EV projects) when they signed on with California on its 51-mpg average. 

Legal efforts to lower the future standard undoubtedly will end with Biden’s inauguration Jan. 20, when the president-elect will add a special envoy for climate to his cabinet. Biden has chosen John Kerry, Obama’s second secretary of state, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement on climate change (another accomplishment that Trump reversed), for the post. 

Trump often attacked Biden as beholden to the Democratic Party’s progressive wing and a commitment to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal.” In the second presidential debate, held in late October, Trump predicted that Biden would lose Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for his commitment to turn the United States into a net-zero producer of climate-warming pollutants by 2035, and to cut total emissions to zero by 2050. For the time being, at least, Biden appears to be carving out a middle road between climate change activists and the fossil fuel industry.

Barra’s announcement Monday coincided with the administrator of the General Services Administration, Emily W. Murphy, acknowledging nearly two weeks after the fact that former Vice President Biden had won the election, which in turn allowed the transition process to commence. It also coincided with the efforts of  “160 top American executives” who signed a letter to the Trump asking him to acknowledge Biden’s victory and begin an orderly transition, The New York Times reported Nov. 24. Some of the signatories also threatened to withhold campaign contributions to Sens. Kelly Loefler and David Purdue, two incumbent Republicans seeking re-election in a January runoff in Georgia. If they both lose, the Democrats will gain majority control of the Senate. 

It seems fairly clear that the business world has moved on from Trump and his policies.

Please address comments to editors@thehustings.news

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PHOTO CREDIT: General Motors