Month: January 2020

In a few hours, Trump is going to get a pass from the senate for committing the most impeachable offenses that a president can commit. And we’re all rightfully enraged at republicans, but they didn’t do this alone.

I know that no one wants to hear what I’m about to say, but it’s important and you need to hear it so that this doesn’t happen again.

For the past 50 years, republicans have been on a mission to expand presidential powers. By definition, this means they take power away from congress. And you know what? Congress has been fine with that. Regardless of who has control of congress, they’ve ceded power for decades. I’m going to go through the big ones over the past 40 years.

Iran Contra. For those who aren’t familiar with that situation, I’m going to give you the broad strokes, but here’s a detailed chronicle of what happened. In brief, the Reagan administration illegally sold arms to Iran in order to fund the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua. They did this, even though congress passed The Boland Amendment specifically prohibiting this type of interference in foreign conflicts. This was a president defying a law passed by congress, and there was never any serious talk of impeaching Reagan for it. Not ever. In fact, of the handful of people who were convicted of crimes for their involvement were subsequently pardoned by George HW Bush with the help of Bill Barr (yes, that Bill Barr).

Next came the George HW Bush presidency. He and he alone authorized an invasion of Panama in 1989, completely absent congress’ approval to go to war. He also deployed troops to Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War to push Saddam and his forces out of Kuwait. Congress didn’t do a fucking thing to push back and assert their powers of advice and consent even though democrats controlled the house for both the Reagan and Bush presidencies and had the senate for most of those years.

And then we go to George W Bush, for whom congress just straight up gave up their powers by passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force bill. That basically gave Bush the power to do whatever the fuck he wanted abroad without troubling congress with it, as long as we were still scared of terrorism (no, really). And then they gave him The Patriot Act, which enabled him to do whatever the fuck he wanted domestically, including unprecedented surveillance of American citizens. All American citizens, not just suspected terrorists. No warrants or judges were ever asked for, or reviewed or weighed in on that process.

Democrats had control of congress for Bush’s final year, but Nancy Pelosi didn’t want to “look back” at any of Bush’s crimes so all of those unprecedented expansions of presidential power went unchallenged, which meant that they were now precedent and basically codified into law. She failed us in a spectacular way, and set the stage for everything that’s happened under Trump. I will get to that later.

Obama came in and thoroughly made use of the powers Bush handed him. He continued the mass surveillance of Americans, but liberals were suddenly not outraged by this anymore. We had a republican congress through most of his presidency, so they pushed back on shit that would resemble invading Panama but he really took executive orders to a whole new level. He also assassinated a US citizen with a drone strike. That should have been really fucking disturbing to liberals, but it wasn’t because this shit is okay as long as the president doing it belongs to your tribe. Republicans didn’t push back because they just like this sort of crap and the victim was named Anwar al-Awlaki and that sounds super brown so who gives a shit? Plus, Obama hid behind that pesky Authorization for Use of Military Force bill.

Are you starting to see the pattern here? Each president takes all of the power that the previous president has garnered for them plus a little more. In the case of republicans, it’s a lot more, but it’s always more. And congress never, ever does anything to take those powers back.

Does anyone really think we would be here if one or two of the last 3 criminal presidents had been impeached?

And now we have Trump, a mind boggling unintelligent malignant narcissist and career criminal in the white house. He has all of the power that Reagan, Bush, Bush and Obama handed him, and he’s taken even more with the help of Bill Barr who has been a cornerstone of building a unitary executive. Lev Parnas was right, Trump didn’t really have power until he got Bill Barr on his side. He had the power, but he was surrounded by clowns and amateurs who didn’t know how to use it. Bill Barr came in to finish the job he started, not necessarily to cover for Trump and he knows that his legacy will outlive both he and Trump.

When Pelosi failed to address all of the obstruction that Mueller handed her, she paved the way for more obstruction by allowing a precedent for obstruction to be set. That’s a new power on top of all of the other power that she allowed Trump to take from Bush. Do you realize that congress still hasn’t seen all of the underlying evidence behind Mueller’s report? Did you know that? Why? Because Nancy hasn’t taken to the courts to fight Barr for it, thereby increasing presidential powers more. And Barr knew that the no consequences Trump suffered from the first round of obstruction was going to be a winning strategy for him again. Thanks Nancy!

I know that a lot of democrats are on the Pelosi train, but she has played a significant part in getting us to where we are now. I can’t think of anyone who has benefitted from the soft bigotry of low expectations more than Nancy Pelosi. I really can’t. She needs to be stopped, and we can stop her by electing better democrats. It’s time to stop blaming the other party for mess we’re in, and start taking a good hard look at our party. This team mentality that the country has had for the past 40 years has created an endless loop where shitty things happen, and everyone blames the other party.

Guess what? It’s easier to clean your own house, than it is to clean someone else’s. Republicans will never do anything to stop funneling power away from congress, and into one single person’s hands. Yes, they will curtail democratic presidents, but not by making systemic changes. They will challenge democratic presidents in a very narrow way that stops the immediate problem at hand without diminishing executive power. Personally, I want a system where hundreds of people are involved in making the big decisions. Hundreds of people who (in a perfect world) are accountable to their constituents every 2 or 6 years. But the electorate has to wake the fuck up.

We need to elect better democrats. We need principled democrats who aren’t working for the same corporations that republicans are working for. We need democrats who believe that the American people should have more power than we do in our elections. We need “unlikeable” democrats like Ilhan Omar, and Rashida “we’re going to impeach the motherfucker” Tlaib. We need democrats who are a thorn in the establishment democrats’ side like Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez. We need more of the kinds of democrats that Nancy Pelosi has pushed back more forcefully than she’s ever pushed back on any republican. Fortunately, we have primaries happening right now. I’m not talking about the presidential election. I’m talking about democratic primaries in your state for house, senate, and state level positions.

For the next couple of weeks, I’m going to focus on telling you about some excellent democratic candidates who are challenging shitty incumbent democrats like Joe Manchin and Henry Cuellar, who vote with republicans more often than they vote with democrats. In Cuellar’s case, he’s voting squarely against his constituents’ wishes but he has a “d” behind his name so he’s been flying under the radar in a very blue district.

It’s time to end this vicious cycle, and the only way to do that is to elect better democrats.

Okay, I just realized this title sounds like the name of a Big Bang Theory episode, but it fits so I’m not going to change it.

I’m seeing a lot of dead wrong punditry around republican senators and their incentives to do the right thing. I’m specifically referring to the analysis of the vulnerable 5: McSally, Gardner, Collins, Ernst, and Tillis. 3 of those are almost certainly going to lose their seats (Collins, Gardner, and McSally). Now, they’re not certain they’re going to lose their seats but they are, and it doesn’t matter anyway. They’re just trying to make it to November.

The vulnerable 5 know that they will face democratic challengers in November. They also know that democrats aren’t going to vote for them under any circumstances. There’s nothing they can do about that, and that’s not what they’re thinking about in terms of their impeachment ruling decisions.

They’re thinking about primary challenges from the right. That’s all they’re thinking about. The filing deadlines to run for a US senate seat are in March. So for the next approximately 6 weeks, that’s what’s top of mind for vulnerable republican senators.

So the ones that everyone thinks we have the most leverage over, are actually the ones we have the least leverage on.

I don’t want to be a downer, or to kill hope but we don’t have any leverage here. Thinking that we do, and expending energy on this is a waste of time.

Our efforts should be focused on primary races, particularly in Colorado where Gardner is almost certainly going to lose. We have control over who he’s going to lose to. There are 2 people running on the democratic side.

There’s John Hickenlooper who decided to settle for the Colorado senate seat when no one in America was interested in hearing his corporate loving pitch in the presidential primary. John Hickenlooper is a wholly owned subsidiary of the fracking industry. His nickname is actually John Frackenlooper. Don’t believe me? Believe him:

Trust me when I tell you that electing Hickenlooper isn’t going to be much of an improvement over Gardner.

But there is a really good progressive in the race. His name is Andrew Romanoff. He was killing it in the polls against Gardner before Frackenlooper came in with all of his fracking industry money and establishment democratic support.

Please take a hard look at him if you live in Colorado. If you don’t, take a look at him and consider making a donation to his campaign. He’s getting killed by corporate money.

Just flipping the seat isn’t enough, as we’ve all learned from the Joe Manchin debacle (Brett Kavanaugh was very grateful for that flip). We need to flip the seat in a way that’s actually going to help working class Americans, and I truly believe that Romanoff is the candidate for that job. I am certain that Hickenlooper will be another Manchin, who we now apparently pat on the head when he actually does the right thing.

I will be posting a list of primary candidates and links to their websites for your perusal in the next few days. These primary races are very important, as AOC taught us that. They should not go unnoticed.

I published part I of my vet a few weeks ago. That one was focused on his history in South Bend. This piece will be focused solely on his campaign.

I’m going to start with his core value proposition. He insists that he’s the only candidate who can unite us because he managed to win in a deep red state like Indiana. In fact, he loves to say that, “I won an election as a ‘Gay Dude’ in ‘Mike Pence’s Indiana”. Here are the actual facts. When he won his first term in South Bend, he received fewer than 11,000 votes. I live in New York City. We have more than 11,000 residents on some city blocks here so this is hardly impressive. He was reelected with 8,400 votes. Impressive.To claim what he claims based in 10,992 votes is comical enough if we don’t have a state wide election that he ran in to look at. He ran for state treasurer the year before he ran for mayor of South Bend. In that election, he lost the state by 25 points. So he got his ass handed to him “in Mike Pence’s Indiana”. By the way, Obama won Indiana in 2008.

So his core value proposition; the reason he gives for why he’s the best candidate in this race is 100% rectally generated bullshit. It’s not a stretch, he’s not looking at the situation through the rosiest of rose colored glasses, and he didn’t embellish. No, he’s just straight up full of shit and his previous election results clearly demonstrate that.

When Pete started his campaign in January of 2019, he was really in “introduction” mode meaning that he wasn’t rolling out any policies or staking any ground in terms of a platform. He was really just putting out some information about who he is. That was fine for a few months but as spring came and went and summer came and went, I was still waiting to hear anything resembling a policy position from him. It seemed to me like he was being deliberately ambiguous. Why? And the things that he did tell us about himself were really vapid and trivial. He’s gay, he learned to read Norwegian so that he could read a book he was interested in, and he served in the military. Okay, but what about your record? That’s usually what I expect to see during the introductory phase. He didn’t really talk about his record in South Bend much. When he started to, he embellished and presented his record in the best possible light. That part didn’t bother me, since that’s what almost every politician in the world does. But that initial period of not talking about his record started tingling my spidey sense and telling me that there was something horribly off about this guy.

Everything that I published in part I of my vetting of Pete, I knew in the spring of 2019 so he was already a hard no for me, but I wanted to see where he was going with all of this. He participated in the June and July debates and managed to roll out not one single substantive policy proposal. He stood on those stages with Bernie and Warren, who were trying to convince voters that the path forward is to make sweeping changes. He was also standing next to Bennett, Delaney, Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, and Biden who were trying to convince voters that the path forward is to make incremental changes and not rock the boat too much. He stood there and didn’t make a stand either way. This was again an odd strategy, and very suspicious. Finally, in September he came out as a centrist. Why so secretive? Why didn’t he do what the other centrists in this race were doing: convincing democratic voters that their way was the best way?

It’s no secret that I’m a progressive because I believe that we need to make all of the sweeping changes that we’ve been sweeping under the rug for the past 40 years. But my position doesn’t mean that I don’t have respect for people like Klobuchar, who is making the case for centrism in earnest. I happen to think she’s wrong, but I admire the straight forward way that she’s making her case. Pete on the other hand, thought that the winning strategy for him was to keep his centrism a secret for as long as possible. Again, why? Do you not believe that centrism is the best path forward? Why did he choose to hide what he was instead of promoting it and convincing people that he’s on the right track? Because oily is always his default position.

His platform (which is still the most ambiguous of all the candidates left in the face) isn’t the only thing he tried to keep secret. He also tried to hide his donors, his work at McKinsey, and what he actually did in Afghanistan. This guy doesn’t seem to realize that he’s applying for a job, and that we actually need to see a detailed resume.

Instead of coming up with ideas to solve the issues that Americans face, he spends most of his time using republican talking points to tell us how everyone else’s ideas suck.

Bernie’s free college tuition plan sucks because Pete doesn’t want to spend taxpayer money sending rich kids to college. Seriously? Does Pete think that Betsy Devos is going to send her kids to Ohio State instead of Harvard because it’s free? That’s not even anything resembling a legitimate argument, and it’s one that republicans have been making for decades. Republicans always tell you that you can’t have nice things because they’re “afraid” of giving your money to the rich. Does this sound familiar? The 400 richest families in American own more wealth than the bottom one hundred and fifty million Americans. So one hundred and fifty million can’t have access to a free education because (I’m ball parking here) 1,200 rich kids (per generation) are all going to be clamoring to take advantage of that?

Pete thinks you’re stupid.

Pete thinks that you don’t know that the two most popular programs in America (Medicare and Social Security) aren’t means tested and that rich people participate in those programs too. Pete thinks that you’re too stupid to figure out that not means testing programs is the best way to ensure that they’re never referred to as “welfare” programs, and that they will never be dismantled because Americans won’t stand for it. Once you means test a program, it becomes much more vulnerable to attack and people become much more susceptible to disinformation campaigns that make you feel like you’re being robbed by somebody else instead of realizing that you’re the beneficiary.

He does the same thing with Medicare For All. He uses the republican (and to be fair, also neoliberal) talking point that Americans love their health insurance companies so much, that taking that away from them would be too big a shock to the system. Let me show you what Pete really thinks about his plan. Go to the 5:26 mark on this video:

That’s Pete telling you that Pete is pushing a republican talking point and plan.

Are you starting to see the pattern here? Everything is framed the way republicans frame things, and then the challenges are challenges that republicans have created.

This is amazing. It’s 18 year old Pete telling you why Bernie is so amazing, while denouncing everything that 38 year old Pete has become. I honestly can’t close this piece more eloquently than with Pete’s own words so please click on that link.

We can all agree that the 2016 election results were bad, right? And that none of us wants to repeat those mistakes? We agree, right?

Great! I strongly believe that the best way to do that is to understand what happened in 2016 so that we don’t do it again. Because it’s election season again, the old false narratives about what happened in 2016 are back in full force so let me walk you through what happened.

First, I have to go back to 2008. In the 2008 general election, one out of four Hillary primary voters ended up voting for McCain. You read that correctly, 75% of Hillary primary voters voted for Obama in the general election. Hillary supporters said that they were going to do exactly what they ended up doing. The polls that asked about future behavior lined up almost perfectly with the polls that asked about past behavior so there’s absolutely no reason to doubt their accuracy. Those links I provided include a lot of interesting information that I’m not going to get into, so I highly suggest you take a look at them.

That first link I shared shows us that in a giant poll of over 64,000 people in a study found that 87% of Bernie primary voters voted for Hillary in the general. Polls are considered to be accurate when they use sound, unbiased methodology and gather around 1,000 responses. A poll of 64,000 is so massive that it’s hard to dispute. The lowest number I’ve seen in any poll is 85%, and that was a much smaller poll but let’s go with that number since it’s the worst case scenario. That still means that twice as many Hillary voters defected in 2008 than Bernie voters did in 2016. I’m not lying to you. That’s really what happened, and I’m pretty confident in this data after having sifted through the methodology.

Here’s another interesting thing.

It looks to me, like Sanders support was about 50% democrats, 40% independents, and 10% straight up republicans. More of those independents were democratic leaning, but a big chunk were republican leaning. Most of his voters who voted for Trump were never going to vote for Hillary.

I don’t share this data with you because I want to relitigate 2016. I don’t share this data with you because I want to take a swipe at Hillary. She’s not running this time, so I don’t have any interest in Hillary one way or another. I don’t share this data with you to defend Bernie. He didn’t do anything, and he’s not my daddy anyway so I don’t have an emotional urge to elevate him.

I share this with you for the reason I stated in the opening paragraph: I do not want to repeat 2016.

In 2008, we elected a candidate who set the world on fire. He was attracting tens of thousands of people to his rallies. The excitement was palpable. In 2016, we elected a candidate who was holding events at local YMCAs. She never once filled an arena. The excitement simply wasn’t there, and she wasn’t able to build a strong enough coalition to win the general election.

You can blame the Russians if you want, but that doesn’t explain why Obama was able to win the general with twice attrition numbers that Hillary had. I strongly believe that propaganda only works on people who are willing to receive it. I don’t believe that a single Russian bot changed a single Hillary supporter’s mind. The propaganda just reinforced feelings that people already had.

We have to pick a candidate that inspires. Every single election is about turning out your base. No election has ever been won by trying to change anyone’s mind. That’s why, if you’ve ever done door knocking for a candidate, you get sent to knock on doors of people who are registered to the party of the candidate that you’re door knocking for. If you’re volunteering for a democrat, you’re only going to call or knock on doors of democrats. I know the person who ran the analytics operation for Obama in 2008. We’ve discussed this at length. She never spent a minute of her time figuring out how to get republicans to vote for Obama. You have to vote for a candidate who inspires and excites the democratic base. If you’re voting based on who you think can get the most disgruntled republicans, you’ve made a horrible miscalculation based on literally no historical precedent whatsoever. And we are so polarized that, in order to get republicans, you’re most certainly not exciting the democratic base. There’s no way I can see to thread that needle, so it’s a fakakta strategy all the way around.

2004 and 2016 should have been unlose-able elections. We lost them because we elected the YMCA candidate, instead of the candidates who were attracting thousands (or tens of thousands) of people to their events.

Please, I’m begging you – let’s not do that again. No republican strategist or voter for that matter, has never thought about electing a candidate that democrats can vote for. Why do democrats insist on playing that game?

Political season is heating up so it’s that time in American life when people lose their minds. This is the time when the fact-free claims about candidates spread like wildfire because who has time to fact check, when you just like the claim because it attacks the candidate you hate.

Please fact check before you post or share. When people post fake claims, it shows me that they really don’t have legitimate reasons for the positions they hold so they have to make shit up. That’s not to say that sharing factual information to explain why you don’t like a candidate is problematic. You should show others how you came to the conclusions you came to, and you should be able to have respectful discussions about those conclusions. It’s no secret that I don’t like Mayo Pete. I have never posted a lie to attack Pete because I don’t need to. I have plenty of reasons why I concluded he would be a terrible candidate, and I invited everyone to fact check me.

But fakery isn’t what this post is about. This post is about helping people tell the difference between an “attack” and a political campaign in which someone is trying to win the democratic nomination.

I’m going to start with examples to show what I mean.

Pointing out that Mayo Pete attended a fundraiser in a wine cave is not an “attack”. It’s a factual statement that Pete himself has made about how he’s going to run his campaign: with lots and lots of corporate money. If you’re a Pete supporter and you see this as an “attack”, you may want to ask yourself why you’re so defensive.

Pointing out that Joe Biden’s bankruptcy bill resulted in an explosion of student loan debt, crippling our consumer based economy is not an “attack”. Biden himself has defended that bill. If you’re a Biden supporter and you see this as an “attack”, you may want to ask yourself why you’re so defensive.

Pointing out that Elizabeth Warren was once a republican is not an “attack”. It’s in her freaking book. If you’re a Warren supporter and you see this as an “attack”, you may want to ask yourself why you’re so defensive and why you’re unable to defend her evolution.

Pointing out that Bernie’s record in guns is pretty bad is not an “attack”. You can examine his voting record for yourself. He’s made some pretty terrible votes on the issue. If you’re a Bernie supporter and you see this as an “attack”, you may want to ask yourself why you’re so defensive.

Now for a couple of examples of attacks.

Now this is an attack. It’s a baseless claim designed to tap into fears. Hillary basically referred to Obama as a child for the better part of a year with no evidence whatsoever.

This is also an attack, although a particularly slimy one:

Hillary’s team put this out there in the 2008 primary, hoping to stoke Islamophobic fears in order to win the election. We know it was Hillary’s campaign because it took them a while to deny it.

Do you see the difference between an attack and running a campaign in which you explain to the voters that you’re a better choice than their opponents?

The two examples of attacks that I gave came from Hillary’s 2008 campaign because they were by far, the sleaziest examples of democrat-on-democrat attacks I’d seen in my lifetime. Truly. I looked at primary campaign ads and articles going back to 1991 and 2008 was by far the worst. If anyone can find an example of anything sleazier, please send it to me.

I get particularly bitchy when I see people with “I’m still with her” in their profiles clutching their pearls and posting articles like this, this, this, and this claiming that Bernie is “on the attack”. There have been dozens of these in just the past week, so the DNC is stepping up their efforts against Bernie. Anyone who voted for Hillary in the 2008 primary, the 2016 primary, or the 2016 general is clearly not offended by political “attacks”, and they obviously can’t tell the difference between an attack and a campaign.

Can we please try and limit the stupid this year? I want all of the candidates to be thoroughly vetted and challenged. And yes, that especially applies to the one I support. We need to be able to tell if they can stand up to scrutiny. Campaigning on differences between your record and your opponents’ is called campaigning. I promise you that Trump’s campaign isn’t going to ignore a single shitty vote any of these candidates took. So better to get it all out there in the primaries.

What I have no patience for is fake outrage, phony claims about a candidate’s record, and reactionary defensiveness upon hearing facts that are at odds with your positions. You have to reconcile those inconvenient facts somehow or revisit your position.That’s how sentience works.

For example I have concluded that in regard to Bernie’s crappy voting record on guns, his position on getting corporate money out of politics will do far more to break the NRA’s stranglehold on America than even dozens of good votes would do. See how that worked? I didn’t deny his crappy record because I don’t like it and I don’t get irate when someone brings it up because it’s true. So I accepted this fact about Bernie, on a topic that’s very important to me and I made my calculations based on my priorities and my own self interest. Without his firm stance on corporate money, his gun voting record would be a deal breaker for me and he would be off my short list.

I did the same thing with Elizabeth Warren’s early life as a republican. Nothing in her voting record in the senate suggests she’s anything but a very progressive democrat (on domestic issues, anyway) so I’m unconcerned about her prior republicanness.

To summarize, facts are not attacks. Even when they’re inconvenient for you, facts are facts and you’re going to have to learn to deal with them like a grown-up. Scaring you into voting for someone with baseless allegations and innuendo are attacks. Making shit up out of whole cloth to damage your opponent is an attack.

Please, for the sake of my sanity, learn to tell the difference. We have an important choice to make here. Let’s not repeat the stupidity of the last presidential election.

No, this post isn’t what you think it is. Okay, maybe it is a little but it’s more nuanced than what you’re expecting.

There’s obviously a pretty big generational divide going on these days between boomers and millennials, Gen Z and some Gen Xers. I’m going to be honest about where I’m coming from right upfront. For at least the past 10 years, I’ve been saying that boomers have been the worst electorate in modern history. WAIT! This is not a slam on boomers post. Just be patient.

The last 40 years have been by far, the worst for the working class since the electorate included women and black people. Wages have been completely flat while productivity continues to rise. There isn’t much of a middle class left, and we’re back to 1929 levels of income inequality. The preceding 40 years were much better for people who depend on a pay check to provide for their families. During that 40 year period, we saw The New Deal, the implementation of Medicare, and The Voting Rights act. Granted, the New Deal left out large swaths of women and African Americans but it helped to create a middle class in America when none had previously existed. LBJ signed Medicare into law and enacted it within one year.

This was an era of bold, sweeping changes that radically changed our country for the better. It was not a perfect era by any means, but it was significantly better than the subsequent 40 years.

The next 40 years were about selfishness and fear. It all started in earnest in 1980 when Americans were given a choice between a president who was telling them to conserve, and a guy who encouraged Americans to take out second mortgages on their homes so that they could have nice things. Prior to Reagan, Americans saved up, put down 20% to buy a house, and then paid off their mortgages for the next 20 – 30 years. And then, they left their fully paid off home to their kids. The notion of using your home as an ATM was not widespread and it certainly wasn’t baked into the culture. But boomers didn’t want to do that. They wanted to have nice things, whether they could afford them or not.

Why? What changed? I have a theory. I’ve always said that conservatism is a luxury item. People get selfish and self absorbed when things are going well. It’s really just human nature. When you have stuff, you become less concerned with others and more concerned with protecting your stuff and amassing more stuff. And naturally, you and you alone are the reason why you were able to get that stuff, so government needs to stay out of the way and let you go about the task of getting more stuff.

None of that is true, but it’s how humans are wired to think. Boomers were the recipients of all of the benefits of The New Deal and LBJ’s reforms, which afforded them the luxury of being selfish and demanding that government get out of their way.

The Silent Generation on the other hand, had to be liberal. Their formative years were The Great Depression. When you grow up in a society where there are no opportunities to succeed no matter how hard you’re willing to work, you want the government to help create the opportunities that you don’t have. The Silent Generation voted for FDR four times because his wide-eyed socialist ways were working in a big way. And you know what happened to republicans after that? They became flaming liberals. Dwight Eisenhower strengthened Social Security (and a lot of The New Deal), increased the minimum wage, created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, created the Interstate Highway System, and increased the top marginal tax rate to 91%. You read that correctly: ninety-one percent. This forced corporate executives to reinvest in their companies and ensured that vulture capitalism like Bain’s business model wasn’t possible. Richard Nixon created the EPA, ended the draft and (get this) passed a universal basic income bill through the house. That’s right, Richard Nixon wanted every American to receive a $10,000 a year safety net. And you know what? 90% of Americans were in favor of it.

This Hunger Games culture that we have now is relatively new, and it started with Reagan’s infamous, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help” mantra. I don’t blame boomers for partaking in the luxury that is conservatism. As I said, I think this is just human nature and I really don’t think they could have turned out any other way anymore than the Silent Generation could have turned out differently than they did.

Millennials, you should know that you would have turned out the same way if you grew up in the same country that boomers grew up in.

I have to digress for a minute to make this about me so that you understand my perspective. My family moved to the US from Iran when I was three years old. My father was a blue collar, (chef) immigrant, Reagan republican. I am part of Gen X. I wasn’t paying much attention to the election in 1980 because I was too busy being ten years old, but I knew that my father loved Reagan. I clearly remember Reagan’s inauguration. It was a split screen of Reagan being sworn in on one side of the screen, and the hostages being freed from Iran on the other side. The narrative that the country was fed (and ate) was that the Ayatollahs were so scared of the b-list movie actor, that they released the hostages before he could do anything mean to them. This was a narrative that my otherwise intelligent, Iranian father believed. As an 11 year old, I found this to be preposterous and knew that an evil and unholy deal had been made to put that image on our tv screens. Years later, a then former Iranian intelligence operative wrote a book in which he stated that Reagan traded arms in exchange for the release of the hostages. Those negotiations were done before he had any authority to make such a deal. That day, inauguration day 1981 was when I realized that I need to learn everything I could about politics.

Believe it or not, lots of immigrants were republicans at that time. They believed in the American dream, which still existed. They believed that if you work hard enough in America, you can achieve anything you want to. And they could, for a little while longer.

And then along came Bill Clinton. Here we had a democrat running on “ending welfare as we have come to know it”. Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound very FDR or LBJish. But again, when things are going well, you have the luxury of conservatively wanting to make sure that no one else is taking your stuff. When he finally managed to reform welfare, the bill was called, ‘‘Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996’’. And this was supposed to be a liberal. Here’s the part of his 1996 State Of The Union address that made my skin crawl:

And with that, neoliberalism became embedded in the American culture and telling the difference between a republican and a democrat became more difficult because both sides agreed that government was bad and corporations know best. The Overton Window massively shifted, The Hunger Games began and America went from supporting a universal basic income to internalizing the idea that if you’re poor, it’s because of some moral failing on your part.

I write all this to let millennials and gen z know that there’s a reason why boomers are the way they are, just like there’s a reason why you guys are the way you are. You grew up in completely different countries. So maybe you can stop with the derisive “okay boomer” and either accept that boomers are from mars and millennials are from venus, or make an effort to communicate in a way that’s relatable to the other generation.

Either way is fine because you, millennials, are finally the majority of the electorate. In the last midterm, gen x, millennials, and gen z outnumbered boomers in voting. You guys are at the helm now, and there’s probably not much of a reason to fight with boomers for much longer. By the next presidential election, they will be almost entirely irrelevant.

And boomers, please stop referring to millennials as entitled or spoiled. That’s honestly a bridge too far for your generation. Millennials have none of the advantages you had and squandered. If you don’t want to hear them and learn why their perspective is so different from yours, at least refrain from talking down to them. You are not going to talk them into the moderate incrementalism that you’ve been trying for the past 40 years, and you’re definitely not going to do it with insults. Maybe you can pass the torch with some graciousness?

Just a thought.

This is going to be a two parter because I have a lot I want to cover. This post will be about his track record in South Bend. Part II will be about just his presidential campaign. I’m not going to get into McKinsey because you can (finally) easily find that information.

I’m going to start with the accomplishments he touts, and I’m going to be as fair to him as I possibly can. This post is going to be laden with links to my sources, so please take a look at what I relied on to make my claims.

He put a lot of money and effort into transforming downtown South Bend. He did stretch the city’s funds and strapped them for years to come, but the result was a 21% increase in property value downtown. This brought in new outside investment so I’m going to go ahead and call this a win for Pete, although the linked article is more nuanced than that.

Now onto Pete’s claims about income and poverty in South Bend. Like nearly all politicians in the world, Pete presents the rosiest picture possible, and gives himself credit for national trends. He was after all, elected in 2012 so the country was still in recession recovery mode. Here’s a good article that takes an objective look at how South Bend fared compared to other similar cities. The short summary is that it’s complicated. His claims include the normal sort of puffery that one would expect from a politician. I’m going to disregard the increase in median income because that increased nationally during that period. One notable thing here is that the poverty rate in South Bend dropped from 32% in 2011 to 20% in 2017. I honestly can’t pinpoint what to attribute that to, but you should know that during that same period, the poverty rate nationally only dropped 2.7%. As of this year, that poverty rate is back up to 25.4%. Maybe Pete gets some credit here. Maybe not. I honestly can’t tell but if he gets credit for the drop, then he also gets credit for the rise.

Here’s one that Pete does get a lot of credit from me for. During his tenure, a lot of investment went into renovating and upgrading a lot of public spaces around South Bend including parks and community centers. I am always a big fan of this type of spending because everyone ultimately wins. It creates jobs, safer spaces, and most importantly; a place where people want to live. More spending on infrastructure and public spaces makes for a more attractive city to live in. I do want to note that this is the only think Pete has done in South Bend that tells me that he may actually be a democrat. Literally everything else he’s done comes from republican ideas of “trickle down” and McKinsey’s approach of “efficiency” (i.e. cut, cut, cut). But this investment is definitely a positive for Pete.

Here’s another thing Pete did that I can’t praise enough. He partnered with a Latino outreach organization (La Casa de Amistad) to create an ID card that undocumented residents of South Bend could use to come out of the shadows. The card itself and all of the administration and costs associated with it is run entirely by La Casa de Amistad so the city has no access to any information regarding the card holders. That was smart. Pete signed an executive order requiring city departments like as police, fire and parks to accept the card as valid ID.

One of the things that Pete liked to brag about was his “1,000 houses in 1,000 days” program. I’m not sure why he’s proud of this, since there was no plan beyond the demolition phase so now there are over 1,000 vacant lots that it appears, will remain vacant indefinitely. Here’s my main issue with what he did here, and it goes back to what I eluded to earlier when I said that it was hard for me to find much evidence that Pete is actually a democrat. This program was 100% republican. The city tore down abandoned homes. So far, so good. For run down homes that were occupied, the city issued fines and deadlines to make repairs. Now, I’m pretty sure that no one lets their biggest investment (and asset) decay because they’re too busy sipping champagne on The Riviera. No, you don’t paint your house because you can’t afford it. There was no investment from the city at all to help with repairs. Maybe they could have done a grant program where the city pays for supplies if the homeowner can find the labor to do the work? With the astronomical poverty levels in South Bend, I’m certain that there is a plethora of skilled labor that could have been tapped. Maybe a very low interest loan program? There are a myriad of things they could have done, rather than to punish poor people for being poor and I’m sure they could have been done for a fraction of what the downtown redevelopment project cost.

Now I’m going to get to the most problematic part of Pete’s record in South Bend. You’ve heard some of this, but I promise that you haven’t heard the details because the main stream media won’t report them to you. At this point, I hope that you noticed that I spend dozens of hours on the South Bend Tribune site to vet Pete. I got about 70% of this story from the South Bend Tribune’s reporting, and the rest from independent investigative journalists who dug up details that the Tribune didn’t have. The Tribune initially derided these reports, but they now cite them so we have a double verification situation here. I first became aware of this situation about 9 months ago via an independent investigative report. I spend literally months cross referencing information that I could verify in the Tribune so this was a long process of vetting for me. I bookmarked some of what I found, and unfortunately failed to bookmark some of it. In the interest of making this post less dense, here’s a link that will get you to all of the articles I read in the Tribune so that you can do your own poking around. Trust me when I tell you that I read every article in that search result. The rest of this post will include links as well.

This is about the firing of Darryl Boykins, which Pete has repeatedly lied about when asked for details. So let me start with Pete’s version: 13 weeks into his tenure as mayor of South Bend, Pete felt that he had no choice but to fire Darryl Boykins (who was the first black police chief in South Bend) because he discovered that Boykins was being investigated by the FBI for secretly taping police officers’ phone calls.

Right off the bat, Pete’s story is curious. He fired a police chief because he heard that there’s an investigation into potentially illegal wiretapping? An investigation. Not an indictment. So I guess there’s no presumption of innocence and no need to wait for the results of an investigation? And on the basis of an investigation, this (then) 30 year old Mayor, in his 13th week in office decides that it’s a good idea to fire (it ended up being a demotion) the first black Police Chief in a town whose black residents make up 1/4 of the population? This already smells funny. He had to know that firing (or trying) the first black police chief was going to set off a powder keg so the risk/reward ratio on waiting for the results of the investigation don’t make sense here.

I couldn’t find any information to indicate that Boykins was ever the target of any investigation, and his attorney claims that the FBI never informed him that he was the target of an investigation. 5 or 6 weeks after Pete tried to fire Boykins, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana announced that their investigation into the wiretap was closed, and that they weren’t going to proceed with any charges against anyone. Let me repeat, this happened weeks after the attempted firing. Weeks earlier, Pete claimed that the US Attorney told him that Boykins and DePaepe would face felony charges if the mayor didn’t make personnel changes in the police department. What the actual fuck? Someone is lying here, and his name rhymes with seat. But it gets worse.

In addition to firing Boykins, Pete fired Karen DePaepe. She was the only other person to hear what was recorded on those tapes. She subsequently sued the city and received a settlement of $235,000. Here’s what she claims (in court documents) are on the tapes, “The documents say that, in February 2011, two white police officers were heard discussing a campaign to get rid of Boykins, with Buttigieg donors acting as go-betweens. In April, the officers say they believe Buttigieg is unaware of the plan, and that they expect the “little fucking squirt,” as one calls him, to win the mayoral nomination. After he does win, a third officer in June reports hearing directly from Buttigieg that “Boykins is done.”

We don’t actually know what’s on the tapes because a lot of effort has been made to keep them from the public. These efforts have come from Pete and the police officers (who are presumably on the tapes). The law suits over the tapes have been going on since 2012. The City Council is adamant that they want the tapes released. The parties blocking the release keep changing slightly but until recently, it was Pete and some of his donors.

Pete has repeatedly said that he doesn’t know what’s on the tapes. Really? No curiosity at all, huh? Once again, this smells funny on its face. As you can see from this reporting, it’s inconceivable that he hasn’t at the very least read transcripts of the tapes. His lawyer definitely has. Maybe someone could translate them into Norwegian to help stimulate his intellectual curiosity?

Let me get back to Boykins for a second. In June, a couple of weeks after the investigation into the wiretap was complete, Pete was asked if he would reinstate Boykin. He replied,  “If somebody makes such a serious mistake, that they bring down a major investigation on their department, they’re not going to be able to keep a leadership position in this administration and they’re probably going to lose my confidence fast”. What? Boykins didn’t make a serious mistake. The wiretap was clearly a mistake and clearly not illegal and may well have preceded Boykins. This guy can’t stop lying.

There’s a lot more to this story that I won’t get into, but if you’re interested you can read this, this, this, and this. And when you’re done with that, you can use the link above to cross reference those articles with the Tribune. Just know that Pete and his campaign have never denied any of this reporting. When asked to comment, they’ve pulled things like, “we won’t dignify these allegations….” That’s a common tool used to avoid making an actual denial, which could become a legal liability later. The dumb ones like Trump deny with abandon, even when there’s video evidence contradicting the denials. The smart ones like Petey “won’t dignify….” so that they can avoid any legal liability if it comes out that they lied.

There’s another incident that helps to establish a pattern of behavior on Pete’s part. This one involves the police chief (Ron Teachman) that Pete appointed after he demoted Boykins. In this incident, there was a brawl at a rec center. A black police officer, Dave Newton went to break up the fight. The allegation is that Teachman watched this happen and didn’t bother to go out and back up Newton. There was an investigation into the incident which produced a report. Based on that report, Pete decided that Teachman did nothing wrong and no disciplinary action was warranted. The majority (we don’t have exact numbers) of the Board of Public Safety agreed that no disciplinary action was warranted. The board President, Pat Cottrell (he’s a retired cop) did not agree. In fact, he so vehemently disagreed that he resigned his position. Huh. As with the tapes, Pete refused to release the report. He said that it was “personnel matter… We don’t disclose personnel records as required by (state) law.”

Pete always chooses opacity over transparency. This has been true of his record in South Bend and of his campaign. It is oily, and really speaks to his character. As it happens, a transcript of the report was leaked and it says the opposite of what Pete says it said. In fact, all of the witnesses who were interviewed during the course of the investigation observed Teachman standing back and failing to back up his fellow officer. All of them. What happened, Pete? I thought that when someone made a serious mistake that creates the need for an investigation, they’ve lost your trust? I don’t know if Teachman is among the racists on the South Bend police force. I don’t know if racism is why he did what he did, but I do know that some form of disciplinary action was warranted here.

The tapes are going to come out. I don’t know if it’s going to be this year or 5 years from now, but they’re going to come out. Until they do, we have to wonder why the cops (who allegedly made a slew of racist remarks on those tapes) and Pete don’t want them made public.

There is clearly a pattern of racism on that police force, and no one including the mayor wants to do anything about it. So when Eric Logan was shot by a cop with a history racism, and Pete’s mea culpa is limited to “I didn’t get it done”, that’s not even in the ballpark of accurate. The murderous cop, like Dan Pantaleo (who murdered Eric Garner) had a history of charges of racism against him. In fact, these killer cops almost always have prior incidents that should raise red flags. In this instance, the cop was promoted by another Pete appointee.

No Pete, you didn’t fail to “get it done”, you perpetuated the problem.

So now you’re starting to see why Pete is polling at zero percent with the black vote.

Stay tuned for part II, which will focus on the fuckery during his campaign.