Category: politics

Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate seat in Texas says that there are six biological sexes

September 19, 2025 • 10:00 am

You may remember the attack ads on Kamala Harris put out by Trump’s team during the last election. Some of them singled out her statement that the government should fund gender transitions for prison inmates, while others mentioned that Harris wants to “allow biological men to compete in womens sports” (see video in tweet at bottom).  Most of these ads ended with the mantra: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” I have to admit that that’s a clever ending, though I dislike the general anti-trans tone of the ads. While I agree that trans-identified men (biological men) should not compete in women’s sports, these ads, aimed mostly at young men, rest heavily on a Republican foundation of anti-trans bigotry rather than on reasoned discussion of whether men should compete against women in athletics or whether taxpayers should fund gender changes.

Did the ads work?  (There’s even a Wikipedia page on them.)  Both that page and a HuffPo article show that the ads might have been effective in converting swing voters to Trump, but, on the other hand, might not have been. The evidence is mixed, though it’s pretty clear they didn’t clearly hurt Trump or help Harris.

From Wikipedia:

The ads, which had several different variations, aired more than 30,000 times in every swing state. The Trump campaign put the ads in heavy rotation during televised NFL and college football games and NASCAR Xfinity Series races. According to an analysis by Future Forward, a Democratic super PAC, “Kamala is for they/them” was one of Trump’s most effective 30-second attack ads, shifting the race 2.7 percentage points in favor of Trump after viewers watched it.  Conversely, an RCT study by Ground Media released by GLAAD, an LGBTQ media monitoring organization, stated that the ad did not have an impact on who viewers intended to vote for.

HuffPo (the surveys are different from those given above):

Republican ads suggesting Vice President Kamala Harris cared more about promoting transgender rights than boosting the economy likely contributed to Donald Trump’s victory, according to a new survey conducted after Tuesday’s election.

Another poll released this week by a different Democratic firm found, however, that hardly any voters were motivated by opposition to transgender surgeries or what Republicans derisively call “boys in girls sports.”

Here’s a video from Reuters discussing these ads:

The video says that Trump’s ad campaign was “against transgender rights”, suggesting that it was about more than sports or funding gender change in prisons. But these are only two forms of “transgender rights”, and for nearly every other right, I’ve argued that transgender people should be treated the same way as everyone else.  But because of the conflation of these different “rights,” and the fact that trans issues aren’t on most voters’ radar (voters care more about their own economic well being), it’s probably best for the Democrats not to pronounce on trans sports participation—or to proclaim that there are more than two sexes. And the number of biological sexes happens to be the subject of this post.

Some Democrats, it seems, just can’t seem to stay away from crazy pronouncements about sex and gender, and that could hurt us in the midterm elections. If I were a Republican, I would ask my opponent to tell me how many biological sexes there are. If they say anything other than two, they look mushy and woke, sort of like the Society for the Study of Evolution.

Reader Robert called my attention to the Substack post below by Josh Barro. reporting that the leading Democratic candidate for the upcoming Texas Senatorial election is saying things like “there are six sexes” (yes, six) and that “God is nonbinary”. Click the screenshot to read:

Who’s author Josh Barro? He’s described by Wikipedia this way:

Barro has expressed heterodox political views, and has criticized both major parties.

. . .On October 11, 2016, following the Republican Party’s nomination of Donald Trump for president, Barro said he had left the Republican Party and registered as a Democrat.  Barro cited as reasons for his decision the “fact-free environment so many of its voters live in, and because of the anti-Democrat hysteria that had been willfully whipped up by so many of its politicians,” which created a “vulnerability in our democracy.”

In November 2024, after Democrat Kamala Harris was defeated by Trump in the 2024 United States presidential election, Barro published a column entitled “Trump Didn’t Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose,” wherein he broadly criticized the Democratic Party, including Democratic governance of New York City, where he lives. Barro particularly criticized Democrats for ineffectively responding to issues such as inflation and immigration, adding, “I am unfortunately a Democrat.” In February 2025, he wrote that “[t]he woke brigades in the Democratic Party aren’t merely annoying. They have undermined Democrats’ appeal to the same minority communities they are supposedly so focused on ‘including.’ “

Barro, then, seems to be a moderate Democrat who shares some of my opinions on the election.  And his column is largely about the Texas Senatorial candidate James Talarico, described this way:

. . . . an American politician, Presbyterian seminarian, and former public school teacher serving in the Texas House of Representatives since 2018.  He is a member of the Democratic Party and has been called a “rising star” among Texas Democrats.

. . . .. In September 2025, Talarico announced his candidacy for the 2026 US Senate race in Texas.

In that election Talarico, should he win the Democratic primary, will face John Cornyn, a Republican who has held a Texas Senatorial seat since 2002, and is now senior Senator above Republican Ted Cruz. Given that no Democrat has won a U.S. Senate seat from Texas since 1990, Talarico, who won his state House seat handily, seems unlikely to repeat that win for a U.S. Senate seat. But we need all the seats we can get in the Senate, and Talarico isn’t helping himself, at least according to Barro:

. . . And yet the new hotness in Texas is James Talarico, a handsome 36-year-old Presbyterian seminarian who represents part of Austin in the state legislature. He’s undeniably charming, and he’s gotten a lot of mileage out of a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. But he’s a liberal’s idea of what a conservative might like: A clean-cut young man who’s adept at quoting scripture in support of a conventional set of liberal policy priorities.

As his primary opponent Terry Virts has pointed out in a short attack video, Talarico has one particular liability related to this that sticks out like a sore thumb. He made a bunch of out-there comments about sex and gender at a hearing where he argued against legislation that would have set a (widely popular) restriction limiting girls’ sports at schools in the state to female participants. At the 2021 hearing, Talarico offered a bunch of ideas about how both science and scripture cut against such a rule.

“Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes,” he declared. “In fact, there are six.”

“God is non-binary,” he said, with unintentionally comical gravity, in another speech about the bill. I really suggest watching the video to get a sense of how these quotes are going to be clipped into highly effective attack ads if Talarico becomes our nominee in this race.

(The video of Talarico’s remarks is below.) Shoot me now! What six biological sexes does Talarico favor? I want to know! And as for God being nonbinary, well, for an atheist like me that’s a non-starter, but even if you’re religious, how can you claim that God is “nonbinary”. The only evidence is against that: in the Bible where God is always referred to as “he”.  Barro goes on:

Virts, a former fighter pilot and astronaut who once commanded the International Space Station, has a clear argument about what’s wrong here: These arguments are out of step with the vast majority of Texans. We saw with the “Kamala is for they/them” ad that attacks on this issue can be highly effective, even if the comments made on tape are a few years old, and even if Democrats think people really ought to pay more attention to Medicaid cuts. So Virts challenges Talarico: How will he respond to those attack ads that will inevitably come?

I asked the Talarico campaign that question, and they provided me a statement from the candidate that does not give me confidence that he’s prepared to go into a general election and neutralize this issue in a race against Paxton.

I reproduce it here in full:

As I’ve said before, there are two sexes and intersex people.

When it comes to trans student athletes, I believe sports need to be safe and fair. These decisions are best left up to sports leagues and local officials — not politicians — with sensible limitations on who plays in competitive leagues.

This quote — pulled out of context from a nuanced conversation about a bill that would impact Texas students — represents what our campaign is running against: the billionaires and their puppet politicians who divide the rest of us so we don’t notice they’re gutting our healthcare, defunding our schools, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends.

We’ve noticed. And we’re done being divided.

The third paragraph is classic politics of evasion: a candidate responding to an attack on an issue where he is weak by saying the real issue is something else. This has not worked as a strategy for Democrats when theyhave taken unpopular stances on issues they’d rather not discuss, like crime, immigration, and what gender even is. The second paragraph, meanwhile, is an effort to fudge the question of girls’ sports by taking no position at all. This just isn’t going to be good enough to counter what voters will see in the ads: Talarico saying something bizarre, in support of an unpopular policy, in a way that shows he does not think like ordinary Texans.

It’s too late for Talarico, who is religious, to take back what he said, but his attempt to “clarify” it just muddled the issue. It’s clear that Talarico does indeed believe there are six biological sexes, but realized too late how dumb that looked to the public, and in his correction erased 67% of the sexes. The quote was not pulled out of context.  See for yourself below:

 

Barro goes into the intersex issue, something you can read for yourself, showing that Talarico has apparently been seduced by Anne Fausto-Sterling’s claim that 1.7% of people are intersex, a figure that’s a huge overestimate no matter what you define as “intersex”—or even if you want to use that term.  Barro closes by returning to the number of sexes and sports again:

But to step back, the big political problem here is the emergent liberal instinct toward galaxy-brain, well-ackshually there are six sexes-style argumentation. We could call it the party’s John Oliver problem — some Democrats’ excessive interest in counterintuitive arguments that only impress people who start from strongly liberal preconceptions. Sex and gender are subjects that everyone has a lot of direct personal experience with. And we know, from life, that sex is by and large not a difficult concept — there are males and females and, if you look at their genitalia, it’s almost always quite easy to find out who’s what. Then, some liberal comes around and tells you he’s read The Science and everything you thought you knew about that is wrong. Sex is a spectrum and actually quite confusing and difficult to assess. In fact, there are four new sexes you hadn’t even heard of! Very complex, very complex, you see. This does not make the liberal sound smart. It makes him sound like an idiot who’s easily drawn to fashionable-but-silly ideas.

Or like Steve Novella or Agustín Fuentes or any number of misguided academics and physicians. Barro continues:

. . . .On girls’ sports specifically, Democrats’ problem is that they’ve gotten on the unpopular side of an issue by arguing for something that was never morally necessary. But more broadly, on some of these social issues, Democrats’ problem is that they have gotten attached to a way of thinking that makes them overly open to implausible claims and overly impressed by rhetorical flourishes. Addressing the problem requires pausing before one speaks to ask, “Will I sound normal if I say this? Will I sound like I’m using rhetoric to camouflage a weak idea? Will I sound like I spent too much time talking to graduate students?”

If you ask yourself those questions, you’ll never make the mistake of saying “God is non-binary” in front of a camera.

Note that Barro argues that one can recognize biological sex by genitalia, which isn’t precisely correct. It’s recognized by gamete type—large and small—and there’s a very high correlation between the gamete-producing apparatus of a person and the morphology of their genitals (doctors don’t look at gonads at birth). Beyond that, Barro is right. Democrats should not look like they just fell out of a coconut tree!

Bill Maher: Latest “new rule” on timorous Democrats

August 20, 2025 • 11:45 am

I guess Bill Maher is back with his “Real Time” show, and in the latest bit he’s going to anger a lot of “progressives”. Why? Because he’s taking out after Democrats—in particular, the cowardice of Democrats.  (Even liberal Democrats haven’t forgiven Maher for saying that he had a cordial dinner with Trump—despite Maher’s having called out Trump’s politics during that dinner.)

It is curious that prominent Democrats won’t appear on Maher’s show while prominent Republicans will, even knowing that Maher is going to try to take them down. And Maher is a Democrat! I conclude that he’s right: the Seth Moultron example is right on point, and I suspect Democrats like Kamala Harris and Bill or Hillary Clinton won’t go on the show for the reason that Maher proposes: they’re afraid of an open and confrontational discussion. I’m betting that you will never see AOC, Elizabeth Warren, or Zohran Mamdani on that show.

It’s a pretty good bit (I like the gender [really “sex”] joke and his discussion of Title IX), but it’s better than usual because it makes a serious point. Dems won’t start winning until they start facing the hard questions, including ones about wokeness.

Mamdani’s unworkable proposal for NYC-owned grocery stores

July 27, 2025 • 9:45 am

Democrat Zohran Mamdani is likely to be the next mayor of NYC, as he proffered a number of campaign promises that delighted progressives young and old. (This is besides his pro-Palestinian stand on the Gaza war, which is irrelevant to his actions as NYC mayor but still delighted the benighted.)

Here are a few of those promises taken from a June 25 article in the NYT:

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani set himself apart early despite his lack of name recognition.

He did it largely by connecting with younger voters, producing sleek, engaging campaign ads on social media and beating the drum about the need to make life in New York more affordable. This narrow focus on a single, salient issue drove Mr. Mamdani’s campaign, which his main rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, described as “highly impactful” as he conceded the race on Tuesday night.

In his victory speech, Mr. Mamdani hammered home his message one last time, attributing his success to New Yorkers who had voted for “a city where they can do more than just struggle.”

I’ve lumped the promises under bold headers, but what’s indented comes from the NYT:

1.) Cheap, city-owned grocery stores funded (like other stuff) by increases in corporate taxes.

One of his ideas to tackle rising costs was to create a city-owned grocery store in each borough. The stores would operate on city-owned land or in city buildings, buy food wholesale and be exempt from property taxes, which would keep the cost of their offerings down, he said.

Experts say the logistics of such a plan are complex, but similar initiatives are already in place in other parts of the United States. Municipalities in Kansas and Wisconsin have operated similar models since 2020 and 2024, and Chicago and Atlanta are working on their own versions.

To fund his affordability initiatives, Mr. Mamdani plans to raise the corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, which he says will create an additional $5 billion in revenue. He also plans to charge the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers a flat 2 percent tax.

2.) Free city buses (and other transportation improvement).

Among Mr. Mamdani’s most distinctive campaign promises is his vow to make city buses free. As a state legislator, Mr. Mamdani worked with Gov. Kathy Hochul to start a pilot program offering free fares on five bus routes for a limited period. (He later sought to expand the program, but the pilot was not renewed.)

3.) Rent freezes.

In outlining his vision for the city, Mr. Mamdani identified the high cost of housing as the leading reason that residents had left New York in recent years. His main campaign promise was to freeze rents for nearly one million New Yorkers via his appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board, which decides on rent increases for stabilized apartments.

He promised to triple the number of available affordable housing units, with 200,000 new homes to be built over the next decade. Mr. Mamdani also said he would double the amount of money the city currently spends to preserve public housing.

4.) Barring ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) from city facilities.

On his campaign website, Mr. Mamdani pledged to bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from city facilities while increasing legal support for immigrants being targeted and protecting their personal data.

5.) Free child care.

The rising cost of child care is among the most pressing issues for parents in New York City. Mr. Mamdani has promised to make free child care available for children between six weeks and five years old and to deliver “baby baskets” to new parents that would include educational resources and necessities like diapers, baby wipes and swaddles.

6.) Replacing some police services (Mamdani originally pledged to defund the police but then backed away on that:

Mr. Mamdani has proposed creating a Department of Community Safety, separate from the Police Department, to respond to people having mental health crises, and to expand violence interrupter programs. In April, he told The Times that the new department would free up “police resources to increase clearance rates for major crimes.”

7.)  Criticizing Israel and promoting Palestine (which is irrelevant, as I said, to running NYC:

Mr. Mamdani has accused the Israeli government of committing apartheid and genocide in Gaza. His criticism of the Israeli government and its treatment of Palestinians came under fire during the campaign, as did his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.

In a podcast interview with The Bulwark days before the primary, Mr. Mamdani declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” a phrase that Palestinians and their supporters see as a rallying cry for liberation, but that many Jews consider inherently threatening.

Note that Mamdani says he will order Netanyahu arrested if he sets foot in NYC, though that scenario ain’t gonna happen.

Now these promises all sound good and generous, but all of them have problems.  Barring ICE from city facilities may be illegal, rent control could drive up other rents in the city by huge amounts, free buses and child care could help bankrupt the city or reduce transportation options, and a rise in corporate taxes could drive businesses from the city. Not one of these promises has been free of criticism, and not just by Republicans. It’s one thing to offer people pie in the sky, and another to bring that pie down to earth. While I hope these things are possible, I don’t expect that more than one or two of them can actually be met.

In fact, a contributing NYT opinion writer has outlined some of the problems with one of Mamdani’s promises: city-owned grocery stores. (The two store programs outlined above are in small cities lacking any grocery stores, and one of the two hasn’t even come into being yet, as it’s just a proposal). The author of the piece below is is Nicole Gelinas. Yes, she’s a conservative, but you should hear her out, as I haven’t seen anybody say these city-owned stores would ameliorate any problem.

Click the headline to read, or find it archived here

Gelinas’s words are indented:

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s fresh Democratic nominee for mayor, devotes 126 words and a 43-second TikTok on his website to a signature proposal: “city-owned grocery stores.” This brevity might imply that function will follow form, that the idea is so self-evidently sensible that little needs to be said about it.

What this self-assurance shows, though, is that Mr. Mamdani knows nothing about the grocery business, raising broader questions about the practicality of an assertive socialist agenda like his.

He claims that “a network of city-owned grocery stores” would offer cheaper food and dry goods because it would avoid paying rent or property taxes, “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehousing and distribution.” These assertions collapse upon the slightest scrutiny.

Here are the problems with the proposal (again NYT stuff is indented)

a.) There’s no space for such stores. 

New York City’s government does not have a secret stash of large, empty, retail-ready ground-floor spaces conveniently located along major pedestrian and transit corridors. Indeed, the city regularly rents real estate, including retail-style space, from private owners.

b.) The city government likely lacks the ability to buy groceries at lower wholesale prices compared to regular stores.

As for city-owned grocery stores’ ability to “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehouse and distribution,” the supermarket industry is an intensely intricate business.

“Product doesn’t magically appear on store shelves,” says Ron Margulis, who long covered the industry as a journalist and who hails from a family of supermarket operators. “There is a science that’s applied to making sure the product sent to the shelf is actually going to be purchased, and that science costs money.”

The price a store or chain pays depends on a number of factors, from size and efficiency — volume discounts — to location to an understanding of the complex supply chain.

Whether Mr. Mamdani will have one supermarket in each of the five boroughs, as he originally proposed, or more, as implied by the imprecise term “network,” the city probably will not be able to get wholesale prices as low as far larger and more efficient supermarket chains.

c.) Some distributors would not sell to nonprofit stores:

Moreover, some major New York supermarket operators cooperatively own grocery distributors that buy products from manufacturers and share income with the members. They would not allow a nonprofit public entity to join these networks. As for the city creating its own centralized distribution and bulk purchaser, John Catsimatidis, the Republican billionaire who owns the Gristedes and D’Agostino chains, says such an investment would make sense only if the city operated at least 100 stores.

d.) Mamdani hasn’t shown that the city can bet already-existing stores with their razor-thin profit margins. Anybody who’s looked knows that the profit margin of grocery stores is only about 2%.

Other pesky details intrude on Mr. Mamdani’s plan. Wholesalers offer stores lower prices if they participate in promotions, with in-store coupons and prominent placement. To take advantage of such offers, the city would have to be a marketer of branded products — often, less healthy, higher-margin products.

The reward for successfully navigating the science of stocking shelves is an average 2 percent profit for grocery retailers, Mr. Margulis notes. Mr. Mamdani has made no compelling case that the city could engage in such superior negotiation and cost-cutting techniques to overcome this margin and provide less expensive products. This prospect is especially uncertain because the city-owned stores would probably face higher labor costs, including government-scale pension and health benefits.

e.) Who decides what to sell in these stores?

Once Mr. Mamdani has addressed these issues, he and his top staff members would have to confront another question: What products to sell in the stores? His idea of partnering with “local neighborhoods on products and sourcing” may sound straightforward. But are community board members going to argue over whether to stock Pringles or Lay’s potato chips? Should a city-owned store even sell sugary soda? Should vegetarians who are morally opposed to killing animals be forced to subsidize other New Yorkers’ steak purchases? And while it would be virtuous for the city to focus on selling fresh produce, retailers need to stock high-margin snacks and processed foods to subsidize fresh produce, meat and fish, which carry lower profit margins.

. . .And if city stores would be selling fresh produce for no profit, they would be competing with 1,000 low-priced street vendors, many of them immigrants, who operate carts under a program the Bloomberg administration began.

In his TikTok, Mr. Mamdani pledges to work with “nearby farms.” But as the city’s green markets demonstrate, high-quality food from regional sources is expensive, even absent profits for a third-party retailer.

The problem is that Mamdani is riding on a wave of socialist sentiment promoted by the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC, who appeal to the benighted young folk.

But don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of American society that should be at least partly socialist, including Social Security, Medicaid, free school lunches for the poor, and, especially, free medical care for Americans who can’t afford it.

But there are those who spend their whole lives carping about capitalism, saying that we shouldn’t allow people to be billionaires, etc., and yet most of those people spend their lives taking advantage of the benefits of American capitalism.  (I expect you can name one such person pretty quickly.) If Mamdani can get those grocery stores built, funded, and selling healthy food, more power to him. But his entire socialistic program simply isn’t going to work, and I think he’ll find that out pretty quickly. As for the free buses and child care and so on, well, those pies are still up there in the stratosphere.

James Carville suggests how to repair the Democratic Party

July 22, 2025 • 8:15 am

I’m a big fan of James Carville: I love that he’s a curmudgeon, speaks plainly, curses a lot, wears Louisiana State University tee-shirts (his school) during interviews, and opposes the “progressiveness” (aka wokeness) of the Democratic Party. (In case you don’t know, he’s a diehard Democrat and has helped many Democratic candidates with campaign strategies, most notably Bill Clinton in 1992.)

Now he’s not always right. In the last election, he first predicted that Kamala Harris would win, and, when she didn’t, gave a bunch of explanations about why her loss was inevitable (she was, he said, too woke). Still, I always listen to him, and he has a column in today’s NYT telling Democrats what they need to do to fight back against the odious Trumpian regime. Click the headline below or find his piece archived here.

His suggestions boil down to two things (headings are mine, indented prose is Carville’s), both of which, says Carville, can help Democrats recapture Congress at the midterms.

a.) Find a leader.

Constipated. Leaderless. Confused. A cracked-out clown car. Divided. These are the words I hear my fellow Democrats using to describe our party as of late. The truth is they’re not wrong: The Democratic Party is in shambles.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary wasn’t an isolated event. It represents an undeniable fissure in our political soul. We are divided along generational lines: Candidates like Mr. Mamdani are impatient for an economic future that folks my age are skeptical can be delivered. We are divided along ideological lines: A party that is historically allegiant to the state of Israel is at odds with a growing faction that will not look past the abuses in Gaza and the West Bank. From Medicare for All purists to Affordable Care Act reformists, the list goes on and on.

The Democratic Party is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war. It’s necessary to have it. It’s even more necessary to delay it. The only thing that can save us now is an actual savior, because a new party can be delivered only by a person — see Barack Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1992. No matter how many podcasts or influencer streams our candidates go on, our new leader won’t arrive until the day after the midterms in November 2026, which marks the unofficial-yet-official beginning of the 2028 presidential primary contest. No new party or candidate has a chance for a breakthrough until that day.

That makes sense to me, and I spend what time I hve musing about this issue trying to find a good leader for our party. Well, it ain’t AOC, it’s ain’t Gavin Newsom, and it doesn’t look like my erstwhile favorite, Gretchen Whitmore. I once hoped that Mayor Pete could rise to the occasion, but he’s been pretty quiet (though he was effective in oofice) and doesn’t seem to aspire to a leadership role. If you have good candidates for someone to lead us out of the muck, put them below.

b.) Loudly call out Trump’s most palpable mistakes—mistakes that have angered even Republicans.  I’m not talking about his EOs on the sex binary or universities, which some Democrats approve of, but things that are just arrantly dumb:

Our midterm march starts with a simple phrase every candidate can blast on every screen and stage: We demand a repeal. A repeal of Mr. Trump’s spending law is the one word that should define the midterms. It is clear, forceful and full-throated. It must be slathered across every poster, every ad, every social media post from now until November 2026. That single word is our core message. Every Democrat can run on it, with outrage directed not at the president or a person but at this disastrous bill. And the reasons are countless, each one a venom-tipped political dagger.

. . . We demand a repeal to protect Medicaid. Mr. Trump’s law will slash roughly $1.1 trillion from health care programs, stripping coverage from an estimated 11.8 million people over the next decade.

. . . We demand a repeal to save the deficit. Not only will the new policy explode the national debt — the Congressional Budget Office estimates it could add $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years — but it will also take money away from the poorest 20 percent of Americans

. . . We demand a repeal to end the endless wars, because the bill boosts military spending to $1 trillion for the very first time. We demand a repeal for students who are losing loan protections or who may no longer be eligible for Pell Grants. We demand a repeal for working families, children and seniors who could go hungry because the bill is estimated to demolish SNAP by over $180 billion.

. . . We’ve never had a simpler, more unifying oppositional message. Soon it will no longer be possible to avoid a brawl between the factions ignited back in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. But for now, whether you’re the progressive Mr. Mamdani, the centrist former Representative Abigail Spanberger running for the Virginia governorship or even Elon Musk, we can all agree on one thing: We demand a repeal. Onward to the midterms.

Note that all of these things echo the famous phrase that Carville used when he ran the Clinton campaign, a phrase he repeated over and over again to energize the volunteers: “It’s the economy, stupid.” As Wikipedia notes,

In order to keep the [1992] campaign on message, Carville hung a sign in Bill Clinton’s Little Rock campaign headquarters that read:

  1. Change vs. more of the same.
  2. The economy, stupid.
  3. Don’t forget health care.

Although the sign was intended for an internal audience of campaign workers, the second phrase became a de facto slogan for the Clinton election campaign.

Now I don’t know if this new strategy will work. But it sure makes a lot more sense than whatever “strategy” the Democrats are using now, and in fact there doesn’t seem to be one. What we have is endless squabbling, with younger Democrats calling for older Democratic leaders to step down.  That’s a recipe for disaster, with the end result of Dems backing someone like Sanders or (heaven forbid) AOC.  Yes, those “candidates” may have charisma, but they’re not going to unite Democrats.

Of course I’m not a pundit with experience like Carville’s. These are just some random thoughts before I wander into downtown Reykjavik to find some coffee.

Bill Maher’s latest bit: Flirting with fascism

April 26, 2025 • 11:25 am

A lot of people came down on Bill Maher for his report about dining with Trump at the White House and, although Maher took Trump to task several times during that visit for the administration’s policies, he had the temerity to confess being surprised that Trump actually was gracious to him in person and even laughed.  For saying that Maher was demonized widely. Larry David joined in the pile-on in a satire in the NYT called “My dinner with Adolf“, a satirical parallel about dining with Hitler and finding him gracious.

Well, I wasn’t so amused by that parallel, for although I think Trump is a narcissistic loon who is on track to wreck the country, he is not equivalent to Hitler, and I detest the “Hitler parallel” that is so widespread these days.  The trope, of course, is that if you dislike someone and his actions, then every single thing that person does must be bad and he’s pretty much like Hitler.

This extremism and demonization is in fact the subject of a good book I’m reading now: Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind , which takes up Great Untruth #3 of Haidt and Lukianoff’s earlier bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Let me remind you of all three of those Untruths whose embrace by the young is, Haidt and Lukianoff argued, responsible for a lot of turmoil, divisiveness, and rancor on and off campus:

  1.  What doesn’t kill you make you weaker
  2.  Always trust your feelings
  3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people

We see #3 on both sides in American politics, including in the criticism of Maher, and all I can say is that by and large I embrace the arguments of Democrats, but I try hard not to see Republicans as evil, much less as a pack of Hitlers. Yes, of course there are some bad Republicans, but they’re not all Hitler equivalents.

Indeed, some of the NYT readers pushed back on David in a new collection of responses.

I had no doubt that after the dinner Maher would go back to dissing Trump on his show. And sure enough, he did in his latest “Real Time” comedy/opinion bit, called “New Rule: Flirting with Fascism”. Watch the 7.5-minute video below. As you see, Maher more or less calls Trump a liar, a violator of the Constitution, a flirter with authoritarianism and dictatorship, and an instigator of the January 6 insurrection. Not to mention the title of the bit. . .

Maher tells Democrats that they have to evolve a new strategy to win back seats and perhaps the White House, but he still favors trying to talk to the other side. He even mentions the crap he took for dining with Trump. Here’s the last bit that starts at 6:11:

“I’ve taken some shit from the looney Left for just reporting honestly how the President reacted in private when I criticized him to his face.   What I should have said is that he eats with his hands and that he showed me his collection of human ears pressed between the pages of Mein Kampf. . . . But I didn’t do that. I was honest about it, and that gives me standing to say to conservatives, ‘Now okay: you appreciated my honesty and balls, now I want to see your balls. . . . It’s not how I meant it to come out. . . . What I mean is ‘It’s your turn. You know things aren’t going well and the first hundred days has been, yes, a shitshow. Show me that you can be honest about that. Show me that you’re not just a MAGA cultist’.”

I would say that’s a pretty hard-headed criticism of Trump, and you won’t find harder criticism even in the NYT.  So let’s not have any demonization of Maher or flippant comparisons with Hitler here. If you want to emit the Hitler tropes, I’d advise you to abstain and reserve them for other websites I can point you to. In fact, I may make that the latest one of the Roolz.

Now the government is trying to police scientific journals for “viewpoint diversity”

April 25, 2025 • 9:30 am

The article below from MedpageToday (click headline below to read, or find it archived here) reports that the government has begun policing at least three scientific journals, asking them if they enforce viewpoint diversity and how their vet their manuscripts, especially those with “competing viewpoints.” In other words, the Trump administration is now doing to scientific journals (well, at least a few) what it’s doing to American colleges and universities. The only difference is that the letter to the journals doesn’t have an explicit threat, though there’s an implicit one since the letter is from a U.S. Attorney and requests a response.

An excerpt from MedpageToday:

A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.

MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.

“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter stated.

Martin’s letter asks five questions, including how the journal assesses its “responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation,” and how it “clearly articulate[s] to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others.”

It also asks whether the journal accepts manuscripts from “competing viewpoints” as well as how it assesses the role of “funding organizations like the National Institutes of Health in the development of submitted articles.”

Finally, it asks how the journal handles allegations that authors “may have misled their readers.”

“I am also interested to know if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints,” Martin wrote. “Are there new norms being developed and offered?”

Martin requested a response by May 2.

The letter to CHEST was dated April 14 and was originally posted on Xopens in a new tab or window by Eric Reinhart, MD, of Chicago.

These of course are not only unethical but probably illegal attempts at censorship—trying to chill science, and for reasons I can’t quite discern.

The article has a few responses, including one from FIRE:

Adam Gaffney, MD, MPH, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, said the letter “should send a chill down the spine of scientists and physicians.”

“It is yet another example of the Trump administration’s effort to control academic inquiry and stifle scientific discourse — an administration, it warrants mentioning, that has embraced medical misinformation and pseudoscience to reckless effect,” Gaffney said in an email to MedPage Today. “Journal editors should join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science political blackmail.”

JT Morris, a senior supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, noted that in a First Amendment case such as this, the law is clear: “A publication’s editorial decisions are none of the government’s business, whether it’s a newspaper or a medical journal.”

“When a United States Attorney wields the power of his office to target medical journals because of their content and editorial processes, he isn’t doing his job, let alone upholding his constitutional oath,” Morris said in an email to MedPage Today. “He’s abusing his authority to try to chill protected speech.”

CHEST is, according to Wikipedia, “a peer-reviewed medical journal covering chest diseases and related issues, including pulmonology, cardiology, thoracic surgery, transplantation, breathing, airway diseases, and emergency medicine. The journal was established in 1935 and is published by the American College of Chest Physicians.”  It’s not a predatory journal, as far as I can see, but a reputable one of value to the relevant group of doctors.
You can see the contents of the latest issue of the journal here; there doesn’t seem to be anything amiss. And here’s the letter to Chest from (gulp) the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Sounds official and scary, no? (Click to enlarge or go to the link just given.)

 

 

The best response to such a stupid letter is no response: were I the editor, I wouldn’t respond, and then if the government pulls out the heavy artillery, sue them. As the reader who sent me this link noted, “This request is simple to address.  If the DOJ were shown the rigor and vigor with which  scientific viewpoints are attacked and defended during the review process, they would be disabused quickly of any suspicion that competing, non-frivolous  viewpoints are underrepresented in the journals.”

But of course the government doesn’t care about that. It’s more concerned with bullying and chilling science. I hope this doesn’t go to every journal, because you’d see an outcry bigger than the one accompanying the administration’s threat to universities.  In the case of journals, which I don’t believe get federal funding, it’s a case of attempted censorship, pure and simple, and although the government may have some rationale for trying to control the behavior of universities, there is none for censorship of scientific publications. The only censors of such publications are scientists or the journals themselves.

 

h/t: Edwin

Harvard sues the Trump Administration

April 23, 2025 • 10:00 am

I am late to the party, so you probably already know about this, but Harvard has refused to truckle to the demands of the Trump administration and has filed a lawsuit (Harvard v. HHS; see below). Briefly, those demands to Harvard were: “shape up or we’ll withhold federal grant money.” You can see the administration’s letter here and can read my summary of what the administration wanted let it withhold $2 billion in grant money:

This is a Big Demand and covers multiple areas, which I’ll just summarize with bullet points. Quotes are from [the administration’s] letter:

  • Harvard has to fix its leadership, reducing the power held by students, untenured faculty, and by “administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.”
  • All hiring from now on must be based on merit and there will be no hiring based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
  • By August of this year, Harvard must have solely merit-based admissions, again without admissions based on ‘race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof.” The “proxies” presumably mean the way universities now get around bans on race-based and similar admissions by asking admission questions like, “describe how you overcame hardships in your life.”
  • Reform international admissions, by not admitting students “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism.”
  • Harvard is to commission an external body to audit the university for viewpoint diversity. Though they’re not clear what “viewpoint diversity” means, it’s obvious that they want more conservative points of view and fewer professors pushing pro-Palestinian points of view
  • Reforming programs with “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”, including information about individual faculty who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or who incited violence
  • Discontinue DEI programs, offices, committees, and the like
  • Students are to be disciplined for violating University speech regulations, and student groups that promote violence, illegal harassment, or act as fronts for banned groups
  • Harvard is to establish a whistleblowing procedure so that noncompliance with the Diktat above can be safely reported.

President Alan Garber responded by giving the administration the middle finger in a short response.

Yesterday I got an email from Harvard (it’s below but the link works, too) with an announcement by Garber that Harvard is suing the federal government:

 

It’s a good letter, but note in the third paragraph that the emphasis on why this bullying is bad centers on its medical effects: it will impede research on human diseases, and thus could hurt or kill humans as the withdrawal of funds brings a halt to research (it already has stopped some research).  Well, there’s far more than that at stake, yet the health aspects are what take center stage.

But Presidcent Garber’s announcement does emphasize the government’s attack on Harvard’s values, which include academic freedom in the classroom. Garber is also clearly upset (I am reading between the lines) at the administration’s demand that the university produce more “viewpoint diversity” (see paragraph 5). Further, it’s demeaning to Harvard for the government to demand that an independent body certify the rise viewpoint diversity and to report back to the administration at intervals.

Now certainly many of the changes the administration demands are salubrious (I for one agree that DEI has to be dismantled, which comports with Harvard’s own internal committee of reformist professors, as well as the stipulation merit be the sole criterion for hiring and admissions (my own university has a similar hiring procedure in its Shils Report).  As I’ve said, and others may disagree, I do think that minority status can be taken into account when two candidates are equally qualified, so that is a diluted form of affirmative action. And of course there should be no climate of antisemitism or hatred of any other group on campus, as specified by Title VI.  I do note, though, that Garber says this:

We will also soon release the reports of the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias. I established these groups last year as part of our efforts to address intolerance in our community. The reports are hard-hitting and painful. They also include recommendations with concrete plans for implementation, which we welcome and embrace. No one in our community should experience bias, intolerance, or bigotry. We believe adoption of the recommendations and other measures will go far toward eradicating those evils on our campus.

Yet according to the Free Press (article archived here), the report on antisemitism hasn’t been published on time, and I have no information about the Islamophobia report. From the FP:

The demand is only the latest controversy for Harvard’s antisemitism task force, a committee that has been plagued by problems throughout its short existence.

Foremost among them: its failure to deliver a report. The task force had originally said they would publish their findings in the “early fall” of 2024, yet the report has still not been released. The report is meant to detail all occurrences of antisemitism at the university.

The committee has been mired in controversy from the moment it was announced in January 2024.

First, Derek J. Penslar’s appointment as co-chair of the task force was met with harsh criticism from the Harvard community over Penslar’s public comments about Israel and antisemitism on campus. Larry Summers, Harvard’s 27th president, wrote that “Penslar has publicly minimized Harvard’s antisemitism problem, rejected the definition used by the U.S. government in recent years of antisemitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel, referred to Israel as an apartheid state, and more.” Summers added that “none of this in my view is problematic for a professor at Harvard or even for a member of the task force, but for the co-chair of an antisemitism task force that is being paralleled with an Islamophobia task force it seems highly problematic.”

Then, less than a month after Harvard’s antisemitism task force was announced, its co-chair, ​​Raffaella Sadun, resigned, claiming she wanted to “refocus her efforts on her research, teaching, and administrative responsibilities.”

A source close to Sadun told The Free Press that the real reason for her resignation was that “she found it impossible to make any progress” or to get the committee “to take the problem of antisemitism as seriously as she thought it ought to be taken.”

. . . .  [Claudine Gay] ended up forming an Antisemitism Advisory Group and asking Wolpe to join. Summers cautioned Wolpe not to take the position for fear he was “being used,” but Wolpe accepted anyway. Two months later, in December 2023, Wolpe resigned from the advisory group, stating that “both events on campus and [Claudine Gay’s] painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.”

Rabbi Wolpe notes that there is indeed endemic antisemitism at Harvard, though former President Larry Summers says that the big drop in Jewish student enrollment at Harvard (now less than 5% compared with 25% in the 1970s) reflects not antisemitism but “an arithmetic consequence of efforts and developments leading to more African American, Hispanic, Asian, and more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.”  Not being at Harvard, I have no opinion on this but will be interested to see the reports of the task forces when they come out.  I do not know, however, of much “Islamophobia” at Harvard save the outing of students who said that October 7’s attack was Israel’s fault.

All that said, it’s reprehensible when the government forces Universities to make changes to comport with their political views by threatening to withhold grant money and impede research. This would give any administration the right to mold universities to its liking simply by withholding federal funds, which come in many forms. But punishing grantholders for the sins of their university seems somehow wrong. Yes, the government does already demand enforcement of some provisions and has made implicit threats (recall the “Dear Colleague” letter of Obama), but what the administration is doing to Harvard is qualitatively different, and far more threatening to the working of American universities.

Greg Mayer has read the lawsuit complaint (below) and gave me permission to add his comments:

As Garber wrote, the complaint is worth reading. It strikes back on two fronts: First Amendment and due process. The latter, I think, is critical, as the wholesale illegality — not unconstitutionality, just facial illegality—of the Trump administration actions is blatant, and I can’t imagine even the most conservative court overlooking it.

To use a criminal justice analogy, constitutional arguments over whether particular forms of capital punishment are permissible might go either way; but you certainly can’t execute someone who hasn’t been convicted of any crime!

I’m not saying that Harvard’s First Amendment argument isn’t strong, just that the due process argument is so compelling that it should put a halt to the rescission of grants without any need to decide constitutional issues until much later. (Courts love deciding on single issues, putting off more difficult questions till another day.)

The change in overhead rates is a different situation– that’s more of a contractual dispute than just plain breaking the law.

The complaint (click on screenshot below to go to it; it’s also here.) The lawsuit is 51 pages long.

There’s also a NYT news article about the lawsuit (archived here). Their short summary of the points at issue:

The 51-page lawsuit accused the Trump administration of flouting the First Amendment by trying to restrict what Harvard’s faculty could teach students. “The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas’ that the First Amendment is designed to safeguard,” the complaint argues, quoting from a 1969 Supreme Court opinion upholding the First Amendment rights of high school students.

The complaint also argues that the government “cannot identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, science, technological and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives.”

I have a feeling the administration is going to lose this one big time. And, as I’ve said, if Trump is to be taken down for his unwarranted executive hubris, it will not be through the rage of Democrats or through demonstrations, but through the courts. We Democrats won’t get everything we want, but I think that the blatantly illegal excesses of the administration will be curbed.