Small potatoes

     "A lot of people don’t call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing." 

            President Donald Trump

"Small potatoes" was a risky thing to say. Foolish. Dismissive. But he will be politically OK. 

The Iran war is far away. 

The "small potatoes" comment could have hurt Trump. It could have been a "let them eat cake" moment. Senator Jon Ossoff made a "Trump fiddles while Rome burns" argument in his speech with a fleeting reference to the Qatari jet and Natalie Harp. But that story has faded. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama got badly hurt by their own dismissive comments: Hillary's "deplorables," and Obama's "clinging to their guns or religion." None of this has landed on Trump the way their words landed on Hillary Clinton and Obama. 

That idea of Trump being uninterested in the serious business of governing, caring more about ballrooms, reflecting pools, and getting medals, is in the zeitgeist. So this notion of being unconcerned with our soldiers in war-zones is out there. It comes on top of Trump's comment that the 250-plus-day deployment on the USS Abraham Lincoln was "not nearly long enough." The "small potatoes" comment could have filled the news with scenes of outraged parents of service members killed or injured in the war -- 18 killed, about 624 injured -- but I don't see much. I think Trump is getting away with this. 

Trump is positioning the war as an effortless display of U.S. total military superiority. The war keeps on going into its seventh month, but it's OK because we keep running up the score in this mismatch. We bomb and Iran suffers. Trump fills his Truth Social site with images reflecting a one-way war.

The reality is that the war is far away, and, except for gasoline prices, Americans can ignore it. There is a lot of complaining about gasoline prices because those have become a point of complaint, first by Trump against Biden, and now by Democrats against Trump. I just watched an MSNBC story this morning about the war; the words on the bottom of the screen throughout the story read, "Iran War pushes gas prices to $4/gallon." Politicians of both parties taught Americans to care a lot about the difference between a $60 fillup and a $75 fill-up. 

We are witnessing the consequences of an all-volunteer military fighting a foreign war. When there was a draft and American casualties in the 1960s and early 1970s, there were mass protests by young people. I was in them. Absent a draft, and with the war being fought as it is at this moment, the war is not in our faces. We aren't being remotely honest about paying for it. If Congress okayed the war and voted a one-percent war surcharge tax, so that people saw what the war was costing us financially, this would be different. We aren't doing that. We are simply adding the cost of the war to the deficit and debt which will be paid, or not paid, in the vaguely imagined future.

Americans can ignore the war, and mostly do. Americans have not engaged with this war except as spectators, so the public is extraordinarily sensitive to the relatively minor ways that it inconveniences us. Gasoline prices are moving public opinion.  If we get regime change in the USA, it will be because Americans won't tolerate a $75 fill-up. Iran's ability to persist in the war and slow oil traffic in the Persian Gulf is leverage against Trump. It appears to match our ability to effect regime change in Iran by killing their leaders and pummeling the country with bombs. It hasn't worked for us; new more aggressive and bellicose leaders are in place in Iran. Meanwhile, Trump is in trouble. 

Irony is not dead.

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Easy Sunday: "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!"

"The past is never dead. It isn't even past."
          William Faulkner

I don't blame Brad Hicks for trying to erase a history of Republican partisanship.

I am not surprised that a candidate with a million dollars of Republican money would try to sell: "Look! I'm a non-partisan guy! Really!"

I tuned into the Oregon Ducks-Boise State football game yesterday. It was a squeaker. Alas, Oregon did not look like a national championship team. Maybe they will improve.

The first ad I saw right at the kickoff was one for Brad Hicks, the candidate for Oregon state Senate in my district, a light blue district that includes Medford and Ashland, Oregon. I see his ads everywhere, all the time. He is awash in Republican money, so it he can easily afford them at a big Duck game, where ads are dominated by mass marketers like KFC, Coke, Subway, and the like. 

Hicks has two problems. The first is Trump.

Trump has nationalized politics down to the state and local level. Trump moved a space facility from Colorado to Alabama out of pique that state courts in Colorado prosecuted and convicted a county clerk for tampering with voting machines on his behalf. Trump also campaigned to defeat Indiana state senators who didn't buckle to his demand to gerrymander the state. Trump has made local offices about him.  A vote for Hicks is an affirmation of Trump, and his threat to our elections.

The second problem is that Brad Hicks is stuck with the past and current behavior of the organization he led. Hicks' ads claim he is a nonpartisan, work-across-the-aisle, not-a-party-rubber-stamp, kind of guy. He is using massive amounts of Republican money to broadcast that message. His problem is the financial record. That spot won't wash out: Oregon Secretary of State record. Then, go to "Campaign Finance Transactions," and enter 5067 for the Filer/Committee ID.

It is hard to sell an implausible lie, even with a lot of money, and especially when there is documentary evidence to the contrary. The Chamber was not nonpartisan. I do not blame Hicks, the Chamber, and its PAC for being relentless Republican partisans. It is their right. They are who they are. Fortunately, campaign finances are public records so we can see the reality behind the marketing.

KFC, to its credit, does not try to sell hot and spicy extra crispy chicken wings as diet food. Its ads show people finding the wings delicious. They promote what they are, not what they are not. KFC could try to argue that crispy chicken wings are a heart-healthy, low-calorie protein and "just like a green salad!" But it isn't true, and they know better than to try.

Can Hicks persuade voters to buy what he is selling? Possibly. A lot depends on whether there is a competent and well funded Democratic campaign to reveal the Chamber record of relentless partisanship under Hicks' leadership.

[FYI: Each bone-in wing has about 170 calories.  KFC extra crispy chicken is not "diet food." But you knew that.]

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Can a Republican candidate escape Trump? They can try.

A spectre is haunting Oregon -- the spectre of President Donald Trump. All the forces of Republican campaign consultants and their candidates have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. *

We don't see Donald Trump in the campaigns of GOP candidate for Oregon governor Christine Drazan or of Brad Hicks, the GOP candidate for Oregon Senate. We don't see that they are Republicans, nor that they are funded by giant PACs devoted to electing Republicans. 

In the case of Brad Hicks, the former CEO of the local Chamber of Commerce, there is no indication that the Chamber's political PAC operated as a GOP pass-through mechanism to turn supposedly nonpartisan campaign contributions into donations to Republicans. Oregon Secretary of State's Orestar report on campaign contributions tells that story, with in-and-out contributions to the Chamber PAC going promptly to state and local Republican candidates. 

Now Hicks tells a different story:

Brad Hicks: An Independent voice for Southern Oregon.

Affordability, Balance, and Common Sense. He will put families first, not special interests or political parties.

Brad Hicks doesn't believe in political problems or partisan solutions. He believes in Southern Oregon problems and commonsense solutions. For more than 30 years, Brad has brought Oregonians together across political lines to solve the problems. . . .

Christine Drazan sounds like a Democrat. She has just posted a 30-second ad that pulls a reversal on a public position pressed by Trump: his support for data centers. Drazan's ad condemns Democratic Governor Tina Kotek for having supported them in the past. Drazan also reverses the polarity on financial elites, saying that it is Kotek who is cosy with big business, not Trump and the GOP.

Click: Ad on X

Our 2nd District Congressman, Republican Cliff Bentz, when speaking to my Medford Rotary Club, focused nearly all his talk on state issues, not federal ones. He had staff members pass out a sheet of paper listing state problems while complaining that in years prior, when he was in the Oregon legislature, he was often outvoted. He had little to say about his current work as a reliable Trump supporter, enabling Trump on tariffs, the Iran War, and Trump's corruption. 

It is smart for all three of them to hide from an unpopular president. It is what I would do. 

Can Drazan and Hicks, campaigning in blue polities, avoid having Democrats see this election as anything other than a referendum on Trump? I think not. 

Trump is in our faces in a way that the Oregon governor and legislature are not. Trump is the prime mover on center stage in American politics. He works at it. Trump is attempting to ban the vote by mail that Oregon voters will use to mark a ballot for or against Drazan and Hicks. Trump bought 10 percent of Oregon's signature manufacturer, Intel, and is carrying out a trade war with the countries where Nike products are made. Trump is in the news multiple times a day. He is fascinating in his outrageousness.

An Oregon Democrat does not want to give Trump a "win," and Trump has made a lot of undecided people into Democrats this year. Electing a Republican governor or legislature would signal approval of Trump's America. Moreover, Republicans represent a risk. A Republican governor and legislature would be subject to Trump's demand that they find a pretext to void elections won by Democrats -- something already done by Bentz in his first vote in Congress. When pressured by Trump and their party, Republicans may need to find a pretext, however implausible, to overturn elections. Trump is actively laying the groundwork for it, doing so openly and proudly.

Would Drazan and Hicks cave to a Trump demand? Maybe, maybe not. That is the risk Democrats see. This is history, not imagination, evaluating that peril.

The problem with ghosts is that one is never sure if they are really there or what they might do, but the thought of them hangs in the air, an ever-present menace. Trump wanted Democrats to feel that menace, and he succeeded. He is a spectre overhanging Republican candidates.

------

(* That language may seem vaguely familiar. This post’s headpiece echoes closely the opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. Karl Marx was warning that revolution was in the air.)

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Israel: What a fool believes

The sentimental fool don′t see tryin' hard to recreate

What had yet to be created . . .
What a fool believes he sees. . .
What seems to be
Is always better than nothing
          Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, "What a Fool Believes," 1978

Democrats have a problem.

"No room for two states"

Democrats want a two-state solution in Israel. Israelis don't want it. 

Moreover, the Israeli settlements have made it impossible.

Democratic politicians are trying to find some sort of middle ground on the problem of Israel. A great many people retain some sympathy for Israel, a residual from the European Holocaust, refreshed by the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. But that sympathy has been strained and perhaps ruined by Israeli actions that are read as belligerent, racist, expansionist, dishonest, and manipulative. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, campaigning to hold his coalition together, bragged that his relentless effort, involving 1000 hours of persuasion, finally got the U.S. to join Israel in a surprise attack on Iran. This reaffirmed what U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged, that Israel forced America's hand into going to war. Netanyahu had nurtured Trump into being ready to jump when Israel said jump. Trump jumped.

The war has worked out poorly.

Israel made it nearly impossible for a Democratic politician to have full-throated support for Israel. The country's actions in the West Bank and Gaza read as ethnic cleansing to a great many Americans.

Most Democrats voice a middle-ground position. The Wall Street Journal expressed it in an article on Pennsylvania's Democratic governorJosh Shapiro.

Mr. Shapiro is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. At the same time, he favors a two-state solution, has been critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, and has spoken in general terms of using U.S. arms sales to Israel as leverage to change some of the Netanyahu government’s policies.

Here again, Mr. Shapiro seems to have found the point of equipoise.

The equipoise is based on a wish, not a reality. Gallup polling found that only 27 percent of Israeli citizens want a two-state solution.

The politicians with any chance of puling together a coalition to lead Israel don't want it either.

Netanyahu said in June:

The national government I intend to lead is that there is no room for two states between the sea and the Jordan River. Now if you ask me three years ago, before the war, the public was divided on the issue, although I believe most of the public was opposed. A significant portion supported it. I think that has changed.

Moreover, facts on the ground have changed. Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank made a coherent Palestinian state impossible. The "E-1" plan of settlements put corridors of Jewish settlement across the West Bank. The U.N. and European Union have protested, calling it "an existential threat" to a possible two-state solution, because it would "drive a wedge through the West Bank." An Israeli anti-settlement organization, Peace Now, has filed lawsuits trying to stop settlement expansion. They wrote:

The government is trying to sign contracts with contractors before the (upcoming October) elections so that it will be much harder for the next government to cancel the construction.

I expect Democratic candidates, including future candidates for president, to advocate a two-state solution. It is the sweet spot that tries to be supportive of Israel, of peace, of Palestinian aspirations, of the U.N., of the international community of nations, and most American voters. But it is a fragile message that I doubt will get a Democrat through the 2028 election, because it is built on a lie. Israel wants what it wants: an expanded, Jewish Israel, from the river to the sea. 

I suspect the Republican candidate for president to say the U.S. will help Israel get what it wants. Israel hitched its wagon to Republicans. Evangelicals see it as destiny and God's will. I expect the Democratic candidate for president to be put into anguish because the divides the party and American Jews, but the Israeli tie to Republicans will force Democrats' hand. Democrats will break from Israel and say they are on their own. They can voice it as their own version of America First and  Democras as the more authentic party of peace. 

Israel feels constrained by the tepid, ambiguous support it gets from Democrats, so this will be a painful breakup, a realignment within American Jews and between Jews and the Democratic Party, but it is not a surprise. The breakup has been underway for a long time.

She had a place in his life

He never made her think twice

As he rises to her apology

Anybody else would surely know

He′s watchin' her go

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Democrats can learn from what happened in Massachusetts this week.

Seth Moulton lost to U.S. Senator Ed Markey in Tuesday's Democratic primary in Massachusetts.

The 46-year-old moderate lost to the 79-year- old progressive.

I identify three lessons.

Lesson one: An incumbent senator, who has been in political office for 50 years, has a lot of good goodwill and is hard to unseat, even if his age worries people.

That lesson won't be lost on people who consider opposing my own 77-year-old senator, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, who I expect will stand for re-election in 2028.

Lesson two: On paper, Moulton was the right person at the right time. He is a combat Marine veteran, an incumbent U.S. Representative, a graduate of Harvard and the Harvard JFK School of Government, and a political moderate at a time when Democrats are getting uncomfortable with candidates who are too progressive. Many Democrats are backing away from the positions of the recent past. Yet there are contrary currents, with progressive candidates defeating moderate, establishment candidates in high profile races. Democrats want electability, but they also want a progressive fighter. There is the crosscurrent of Democrats wanting to replace old Boomers with a new generation. Markey survived this primary challenge because he represents something people wanted more than a new generation: true, blue, liberal policy. He did not leave credible room on his left. People voted for the more progressive candidate. 

Lesson three: Moulton blew the trans issue and it defined him as too conservative.  News stories and commentaries about Moulton's campaign quickly get to a comment like this one in The New York Times:

If Massachusetts were a general election battleground state, perhaps Mr. Moulton’s skepticism about trans athletes’ participation in youth sports might have played better among primary voters.

But from the moment Mr. Moulton entered the race last October, Mr. Markey used his remarks questioning transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports as a battering ram against him. Not only did it galvanize the L.G.B.T.Q. vote for Mr. Markey, it also helped frame him as the progressive candidate

Moulton expressed an opinion that is a majority opinion in this country, that allowing trans women to play in competitive sports creates problems of fairness and safety. But in Massachusetts, in a Democratic primary, it played badly.

I don't think Moulton was on the wrong side of that issue, even in a Democratic primary in blue Massachusetts. His problem was how he framed what likely is the majority opinion in the state. By saying he worried about his daughters' safety when competing against potentially larger, stronger trans athletes he framed trans women as threats. 

That was an error.

He needed to have begun by expressing compassion and support for trans women. He needed to have said he wants the very best for them, free of discrimination. Live and let live, let freedom ring. Having established that, a Democratic politician needs to say that his opposition to trans women playing in competitive female leagues is intended to benefit and protect trans women. Putting them into competition with women in women's leagues raises the question of unfair advantage. It pits the value of fairness against the value to women of having leagues where women are athletes, not cheerleaders, like in the bad old days of my youth. Women's athletics is a good thing. Say so. Say it needs to be protected, too. Trans women in competition creates enemies for trans people because it pits their interests against the group of people born biologically female. A fight between those interests focuses on distinctions and differences, which is terrible for trans women seeking live-and-let-live inclusion. Trans women athletes get judged as advantage-seekers, and in serious competitions is is read as cheating. That hurts the broad goal of inclusion. Limiting trans women in athletics is done to protect them.

Moulton's apology walk-back made his situation worse, because it defined his original statement as anti-trans. A better message strategy would have been to have affirmed his original statement, saying he was damned if he was going to advocate a position on trans competition that would end up hurting his trans friends. Then the competition with Markey would have been on who is really the better friend of trans women being allowed to live their lives in peace. Moulton could have won that argument.

This lesson is too late for Moulton, but not too late for other Democrats.

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Rope to hang himself, and fellow-Republicans

President Trump has a method, and it works. He games the legal system.

The problem with his having a free hand is that Trump has bad taste and judgment.

The Supreme Court just voted 5-4 that a board member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacked standing to object to the destruction of the East Wing of the White House and replacing it with a giant ballroom. 

Trump won another round. He called it a victory. It is a curse.

The legal issue was one of standing. Chief Justice John Roberts noted that the destruction of the East Wing was "likely unlawful." But since the executive department cannot enforce the law against its own executive, the law doesn't stop the president from doing as he wishes. Can a board member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation sue in federal court to stop a president? No. The Justice Department lawyer argued that even if a president removed the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument, no one would have standing to object.

This decision shines a spotlight on the Trump device for being lawless: President Trump does whatever he darned well wants to do, legal or not, then waits for the achingly-slow justice system to react, and by then it's a done deal. 

Trump's method of acting quickly and outrunning the legal system worked with imposing tariffs on a pretext, and it worked with invading Venezuela on a pretext. He flouts the War Powers Act on pretexts, and ,this week, his lawyers got the Supreme Court OK to let the Postal Service stop mail voting until states were in  fact hurt, not just prospectively hurt. 

America is going to get Trump's ballroom in all its splendor. Trump will have "won." It will reflect Trump's will and taste. It will project extravagance and self-serving Trump-style luxury. A golden ballroom is a classic "Nero fiddles" or "Let them eat cake" symbol. That was the point Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia made in the speech that drew attention for having named "Natalie" as Trump's close companion. Trump is not attending to his job while the public suffers. 

Had this gone through the normal legislative process, the East Wing/ballroom project would have been shown to be well- justified, or more likely, would have been scaled down to something politically manageable. There might have been a spirit of national pride in the improvements. Now Democrats deride the ballroom's extravagance, and Republicans in Congress are forced to defend it, or explain why they didn't stop it. 

Trump's willful, swashbuckling, narcissistic judgment creates a peril for Republicans candidates and officeholders. His tariffs are unpopular. His Iran war is unpopular. His inflation is unpopular, as is his minimizing it. His proposed Trump Arch is unpopular. His Qatar gift jet is unpopular. His Argentina beef deal is unpopular, at least with ranchers. His crypto meme coin grift and $1,776 billion settlement with himself are unpopular. His attaching his name onto the Kennedy Center is unpopular. His disruption of voting by mail is unpopular and will become more so if county clerks in both red and blue states say that Trump created election chaos.

Trump does what he wants, unmoderated by democratic checks, balances, laws, or norms. Republicans consent to what Trump does, so they will share the blame. Republican majorities in Congress have the power to constrain the president. They don't. They will get blamed. Democrats will see to that.



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Roses ,in Trump's District of Columbia

     "Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses!"

          Poem by James Oppenheim, "Bread and Roses," 1912;  based on a speech by labor organizer Helen Todd, 1911

Notwithstanding Trump's assertions, Washington, D.C., was not a hell-hole of crime in 2024, when Joe Biden was president. 

It isn't a hell-hole now, either, even with a few National Guard troops.

Jennifer Angelo had a career as an attorney for the U.S. Postal Service. She and her husband Jack Mullen live in Washington, and are eyewitnesses to conditions there. She sent me a field report on an event that didn't have Trump's stamp: the National Book Festival.

Amid the conflicts that roil the politics of our country, people still live their lives. Kids play, lovers love, people read books, and book readers congregate at book fairs.

Guest Post by Jennifer Angelo 

My husband, Jack Mullen, recently posted here about Trump’s America 250 festivities and architectural vanity projects. They started with a wrestling match at the White House and today culminated in a Grand Prix car race around our beautiful city. How these spectacles honor the country I do not know, but they have made 2026 a trying time for most Washingtonians. Thus, I was delighted yesterday to attend the National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress. It came with the tag line “America 250: It’s Your Story.”

The news about Americans’ reading habits is grim. A recent Atlantic piece by Rose Horowitch ran through the numbers: Fewer than half of us read a book in 2022; only 2 percent read to a child daily; only 16 percent read for pleasure on a given day. The culprit is screens, and even our attention span there has fallen to 47 seconds. There may come a time when no one under 70 understands references to a white whale, Catch-22 or Big Brother. (Let’s hear it for the Bible, which will never go out of print and gives us many of our best literary references.)

Given the sad reading statistics, it soothed my mind and my soul to walk into the two-million square foot Washington Convention Center yesterday and find it mobbed with book lovers. I read novels, history, memoirs, mysteries, essays, and short stories. I take at least one class every year on a classic novel by Austen, Dickens, Woolf, or the like. I keep track of my books on Goodreads and routinely exceed 75 books in a year (I cracked 100 in the Year of Covid). Those in the enormous convention center crowd were my people, and just being part of it was rejuvenating.

The presenting authors included Martin Scorcs(film preservation), Kate McKinnon (debut Young Adult novel), Baseball Orioles owner David Rubenstein (upcoming book about the business of baseball), our Poet Laureate Arthur Sze (poetry in translation), and Ann Patchett (best-selling and award-winning novelist and essayist). There were more than 60 others, each of whom has a devoted audience. My enthusiasm for the crowd size did not extend to standing in line for an hour or more to hear these icons, but I was starstruck nonetheless.

The attendees’ T-shirts were on point: “Born to read, forced to socialize,” “You can never have too many books,” “Book Nerd,” and a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Public Library. The pop-up bookstore on the huge lower level had a snake line six rows deep for the cash register. There were book-themed puzzles, mugs, shirts, and posters. A row of tables featured books for every U.S. state – Oregon featured Stubborn Twig by Lauren Kessler and a children’s book, Bing’s Cherries by Julia Kuo.

 I arrived early to grab a seat for a presentation on how audiobooks are made. My seat neighbor and I bonded right away over a favorite book reader (George Guidall). The featured narrator, Arthur Dent, was a buff Navy veteran with a deep, clear voice that was made for telling stories. An audiobook producer and an executive from the Audiobook Publishers Association completed the panel and answered questions about the technology, logistics and quality control involved in audiobooks. And because there is some debate about whether listening to an audiobook is “reading,” they reminded us that the Odyssey was passed on orally for generations. Take that, audiobook snobs!

I spoke to a woman who works in the Manuscript Room at the Library of Congress and scored a copy of Rosa Park’s hand-written recipe for pancakes. I picked up free bookmarks. I asked for directions many times. I saw a lot of young readers, and my heart soared. I would say I was one of the older people there and very much in the minority. Is there hope for reading after all?

Today, cars are racing around the Mall at 185 mph. The event’s promoter is a President who quite possibly has never read a book, even his own. He fired the Librarian of Congress and appointed Todd Blanche as its temporary head. When it comes to the city and well-educated residents of Washington, he cannot read the room. But at least he didn’t kill the National Book Festival.

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