‘It’s terrifying.’ Wyoming leads country with highest jump in Obamacare costs

‘It’s terrifying.’ Wyoming leads country with highest jump in Obamacare costs: For a 60-year-old Wyoming resident earning $63K a year, the average monthly ACA premium costs are increasing by 421%.

Truly an example, for Wyoming, of play stupid games, win stupid prizes, which we're seeing a lot of now days.  Chaining ourselves to the far right is proving to be a huge mistake in nearly everything.

Republicans have been opposed to the Affordable Health Care Act from the very beginning, but have failed to repeal it, and have failed to offer any alternatives to it.  The act itself definitely has flaws, but ironically the flaws that exist are due to ongoing right wing opposition to national health care, which every other advanced nation has.

The credit system that the AFHA currently has came in during the Covid pandemic, and because of it, given that so many people were out of work.  Removing them will cause a massive jump in insurance rates.  None of this is a surprise to people who have looked at it, and frankly I suspect its a backdoor path to Republicans removing the system on the basis that it's too expensive and hence a failure.

It might also prove to be the straw that breaks the back of resistance to national health care.  Thousand will not be able to afford insurance and it'll be a health crisis.  Populists on the right will receive the blame for it while those on the left, like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez will pick it up, arguing for a national system.  The political winds are already turning against the Republicans and this will make it worse for them.

Because of the cost of healthcare, this is an area where the principals of subsidiarity, as well as the principal of solidarity, really call for a basic national system, which shouldn't be all that hard to create. Such a system would cover basic health care.  Elective matters of a non life threatening nature it wouldn't.  And it wouldn't cover the "medical" items in the culture wars either, such as abortion  

Froma Harrop: How Low Can Deviancy Go?

 

How Low Can Deviancy Go?

House votes to release Epstein files.

The bill passed the House 427-1, with the only no vote coming from Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican who is a fervent supporter of Trump. He also chairs a subcommittee that initiated a subpoena on the Justice Department for the Epstein files.

Associated Press. 

Blog Mirror: You Can’t “Protect Children” While Defending a Predator. And, also, What's in those files?

You Can’t “Protect Children” While Defending a Predator

How much longer can Republicans pretend not to see?

We of course also wrote on this just yesterday.

Lex Anteinternet: The dog that hasn't barked.:   By the way, by odd coincidence, they've given Ghislaine Maxwell a therapy dog. None of this will matter.  People will say this doesn...

What is going on here?  Something sure is.  Trump's called out all the stops, even bringing in Lauren Boebert to the Situation Room to pressure her.  Beobert, who is somebody in the MAGA camp, is apparently refusing to go along with Trump.

That in and of itself is remarkable.

What we know is that up to 1,000 girls were raped in association with Epstein.  We don't know all of the details of that by any means.  Some of the rapes were pressured "statutory rapes", but others may have been physically violent rapes of female minors, based on what little we know.  In either instance, the entire thing is horrific.

Was Trump a rapist?  So far we have no reason to believe that, other than the "where there's smoke there's fire".  Trump has, a long history of hanging out with those who have an interest in screwing teenagers and who have carried out their interest.  Epstein wasn't the first in that category.  The first that we know of, and probably the first significant person, was John Casablancas, who owned a modeling agency. Frankly, modeling agencies tend towards being morally dubious in some instances, but Casablancas was personally so.  He divorced his first wife due to an affair with model Stephanie Seymour whom he began seeing when she was 14 years old. At age 50 he married 17 year old Aline Mendonça de Carvalho Wermelinger.

Casablancas  represented Ivanka Trump when she became a fashion model at age 15.¹ 

It's worth remembering here that Trump is nearly 80 years old.  He was born in 1946, which means he turned 20, as a rich man, in 1966, and 30, in 1976.  Trump, therefore, had wealth right in the era in which American sexual morals really began to plummet and he was in his 70s when the clubbing scenes in New York was in full swing.²  People complain about the US being a moral sewer now, but that's because their memories are bad.  The 70s were really a decade of rank libertinism.³ 

They were also one which winked at Hebephilia and Ephebophilia, or rather, more accurately accepted the gross sexualization of early teenage girls  and men preying on them, with that getting advanced at first by Playboy which really flirted with the lines of illegality with its centerfolds.⁴   Advertising in the era really dipped down into the younger years, for girls, in a way that you couldn't and wouldn't now, for instance:

How old do we think that girl is?  Not old.

Brooke Shields as a young woman was shown only in her "Calvin Klein's" and portrayed a 12 or 13 year old prostitute in the 1976 film Pretty Baby (which she now detests) and a castaway in Blue Lagoon who grows into, I guess, a teenage common law marriage portrayed as the natural ideal.  Shields regards herself as having been exploited, which she truly was.  Only slightly older, 1968's Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli featured Olivia Hussey' topless visage, albeit briefly, in a quite sexualized portrayal of the Juliet character. She was 14 years old and later sued.⁵

In spite of the horrors of such things as transgenderism, the re-creation of the lower class Victorian "common law" marriage arrangement in a new form in the American lower middle class, and the overall breakdown in sexual standards in the Western world, the outright aggressive exploitation of women sexually has really retreated.  Retreating with it was a fairly open acceptance of what we'd now call "date rape".  The concept that pressuring women into sex by way of position and power constituted rape flat out didn't exist.  Even as a teenager myself in the 1970s, I can recall that jokes based on "get 'er drunk" were really common with the suggestion that happened relatively commonly, and that it wasn't regarded as rape.  For that matter, as early as the early 1980s, I can recall instances of men in certain positions being caught in sexual relationships with underaged teens and simply losing their positions, quietly, over it.⁶ 

The point of all of this is that maybe a person could party down with John Casablancas while being a self admitted libertine and avoid picking the teenage fruit that others were picking, but most people who would find that morally reprehensible, which would be most people, would avoid hanging out with such people pretty quickly.  For one thing, the behavior is gross and disgusting. For another, hanging out with kiddy diddlers would cause a person to run the risk of being regarded as a diddler.

Be that as it may, Trump went from Casablancas on to Jeffrey Epstein, whom he started hanging out with in the 1990s, some twenty, more or less, years after Casablancas. Epstein shows up in a Mar A Lago party's video footage in 1992. That party featured NFL cheerleaders. Trump flew on Epstein's private jet at least seven times in the 1990s.  In 1997 Trump and Epstein were photographed together at a Victoria's Secret "Angels" party in New York.  In 2002 Trump made his now infamous comment that Epstein was a "terrific guy" they shared interest in "beautiful women".  Trump noted that Epstein's interests were in women on the "younger" side.  In 2003 Trump drew a nude figure, with oddly small breasts, in a birthday card for Epstein, with a really enigmatic comment, and signed his name as, basically, pubic hairs.⁷

Now we know that Epstein had commented that Trump knew about the "girls" and that Epstein claimed, in a private email, that Trump knew this due to Virginia Giuffre, the teenager who would be supplied to Prince Andrew.. Giuffre's father worked as a maintenance manager at the Mar-a-Lago property and helped Giuffre obtain a job there.  Maxwell recruited her to Epstein from Mar A Lago.

None of this proves in any fashion that Trump was diddling.  Indeed, Giuffre states that Trump never touched her.  Other women who were associated with Epstein have claimed that, but all of those claims have remained basically on the fringes of this story.  So all that can really be said is that Trump has lead a life of moral dissolution with adult women, and he's hung around with men who had an extremely creepy attraction to girls in their teens, but there's no evidence that Trump personally crossed that line.

But there sure is a lot of evidence that he doesn't want the Epstein files released.

Indeed, he's downright desperate about it.

Why?

Earlier on Trump indicated he wanted the files released.  Releasing the files became sort of a MAGA crusade, with MAGA's convinced that they'd provide damaging information on Bill (and maybe Hillary) Clinton.  Indeed, as recently as a couple of months ago a MAGA I know maintained that the files were being kept secret due to what they'd show about Clinton, and maybe Obama (who is in no way implicated in any of this), thereby making the bizarre assertion that the Republicans are keeping material secret to protect a former Democratic President they detest.

Eh?

Given Trump's change in tune, what probably is in there is one of two things.  One, the most likely, is that it's been pointed out that some rich and powerful person in the Trump circle is implicated, and badly.  Trump may be protecting that person or persons, and if he is, there's some connection either with Trump or the GOP that must really be needed for protection.

The other possibility is that he knows, which he didn't before, that he's implicated as somebody who really knew something grotesque.  Epstein himself, in his emails, noted that he apparently told Ghislaine to knock something off, and Trump has maintained that had to do with raiding staff from Mar A Lago.  But what if what he knew is something worse, that women were being recruited to be sex slaves, which is basically what these poor girls were.

Whatever it is, we don't know.

The files are going to be released, which brings up these two things.

Trumps willingness to act illegally is now so pronounced that there has to be a strong suspicion that the files are being scrubbed.  When they are released, and they will be, there's a good chance that some of the contents will be gone.  This did occur to some extent with the files on the Kennedy Assassination, although I personally don't believe in the various conspiracy theories in that area, so it can definitely be accomplished.

For that reason, and for others, I also feel that the files should be released as is, complete with names of the victims.  I know that's not the norm, and why, but the whole truth here is never going to come out if we don't know who was subject to this barbarity.  And, ironically, in this instance releasing the names protects them.  As noted earlier, Trump was sued by an anonymous woman who withdrew her suit after being subject to much pressure.  There may perhaps be nothing to those claims, but the fact is, at this point, that we're dealing with men who are enormously wealthy and powerful, and have the means to threaten their victims as long as their identities remain unknown.

Footnotes:

1.  On this, Trump has famously remarked about going back stage in, I believe, Miss World, competitions, or some such competitions, while the competitors were topless. These young women would, however, be of age.  This is still pretty creepy.

2.  The New York club scene was famously a cesspool, and heavily associated with drugs.  There is, however, no reason to believe that Trump has ever taken illegal drugs.  Indeed, due to the exposure to alcoholism provided by his brother, Trump does not drink.

3.  As a minor note, the culture of the times reflected back in the form of music.

Rock music has been regarded, probably pretty inaccurately, as sort of countercultural.  More accurately, when it was really popular, it reflected the cultural influence of people ranging from their teens into their thirties.  Real rock music is pretty much dead now.

The 1970s and early 1980s saw a fair amount of rock music that outright endorsed ephebophilia and hebephilia.  Ted Nugent's 1981 Jailbait outright did, with the female subject (victim) declared to be 13 years old. Kiss' 1977 subject was a bit older in Christine Sixteen. The Police hit the subject with Don’t Stand So Close to Me in 1980, which involves a teacher being attracted to a female student. That song is particularly creepy given its reference to Lolita and due to the fact that one of the members of The Police had been a teacher who admitted to having been attracted to female students, but not having acted upon it.

ABBA, which is regarded as sort of a bubblegum rock band, touched on the topic in 1979's Does Your Mother Know?, with the protagonist outright expressing torture over the advances of an underaged girl.  The Knack's 1979 song Good Girls Don't at least kept the behavior down at mutual teenage level.  Aerosmith broke into popularity with 1975's Walk This Way which is a tour de force of sexual double entendres all celebrating teenage sex. The story was flipped in Rod Stewart's 1971 Maggie May in which a teenage male regrets being seduced out of school by an older woman. 

So that's a bunch of song, but were they that popular?  Some really were, at least by my memory.  I don't recall Nugent's song at all, but the only song of Nugent's I recall being popular wsa Cat Scratch Fever, which is about prostitutes.  And Kiss was regarded, where I lived, as sort of juvenile joke more popular with junior high kids than us mature high schoolers, so I don't remember their song either.

The Police's Don't Stand So Close To Me, however, was hugely popular, although not with me, mostly because I can't stand that band.  ABBA's Does Your Mother Know? was also big.  Walk This Way was so big that even though it had been released in 1975, it was still really popular in the early 80s, which at the time was amazing as songs aged quickly.  Maggie May shares that status as it was popular over a decade after its original release.  Good Girls Don't didn't age well at all, in contrast, but it was huge in 1979.

Almost all of these songs, or maybe all of them, are outright reprehensible, which is the point.  Amazingly, they were heard all the time in the 70s and 80s, and nobody really said anything about it. The only time I recall anyone condemning the lyrics of a song was in 1977 when a Parish Priest lambasted Only The Good Die Young by Billy Joel from the pulpit.  I don't know where he'd learned of the song, but the Church was associated with the school, which went up to 9th Grade, and I now wonder if it was there.  I was in junior high myself at the time and I had no idea what he was talking about.  My father didn't either, and asked me about the song after Mass.  It'd be years before I heard it, and like every Billy Joel song, I was underwhelmed.

4. We've touched on this before, but Playboy got in trouble in Europe as it was viewed as encouraging ephebophilia and hebephilia, and moreover being in that category while barely disguised as not being.  It actually changed some of its content, notably its cartoons, as a result.  Nonetheless, some Playboy models, such as Frances Camuglia were barely legal teens when photographed, and in fact a few were younger than 18 years old.  One model's photographs went to press when she was still 17, with it apparently being the case that Playboy was unaware of her actual age, while it still played up that she was just out of high school.  Another was outright known to be 17 when she was photographed with the magazine holding her photos until she turned 18.

5.  All the then teenage actors in these films later maintained, probably correctly, that they suffered lifelong emotional trauma for having been in these films.  Shields has been particularly critical of her mother for pushing her into them.

6.  More specifically, I can recall three high school teachers in this category.  Neither was arrested, they were simply let go.  Another was a National Guard officer who was a local businessman.  He was quickly discharged from the National Guard and there was as criminal proceeding, but the charge never hit the news and the resulting sentence was minor.

7.  Trump has denied this, of course, but there seems to be no doubt.  Assuming that it is Trump's, it's impossible not to conclude that he at least knew of Epstein's unrestrained lustful conduct.  There was at least one other drawing, by somebody else, that alluded to the same thing.  The thing here is that Epstein was strongly attracted to teenage girls, and if you know that the guy is strongly attracted to females sexually, and his targets are. . . well.

Postscript:

I thought about predicting this, but thought it too icky.

The last few days, as this has been breaking, I thought that, at some point, MAGA commentors would come out and basically start excusing ephebophilia.  I should answer the question, first, on "what's that" although its been explained here before.  According to Wikipedia:

Ephebophilia is the primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19 and showing Tanner stages 4 to 5 of physical development.

And now its happened.

Megyn Kelly "There's a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old…”

Well, yeah, there is, in more ways than one.  A 5 year old is particularly gross as a victim and technically that's pedophilia.  But ephebophilia is pretty darned disgusting as well, and rape in that context, which much or all of this would be by modern definitions is horrific.  Moreover, according to some of the testimony, some of these girls were 14, or even 13, which is hebephilia and creeping right up n the edge of pedophelia.

And it's being excuse.  That's what I thought would start to happen.

So, what we're starting to see, so that it's clear, is "yeah. . well, sure, they were jumping little teenage girls, but that's okay. . "

It's not okay.

And not only is it not okay, these people are starting to make the excuses now, without anything actually saying that Trump did that.  We know of course that somebody was. . . but we don't know who.

What a moral sewer.

Related threads:

The dog that hasn't barked.

Labels: Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Hebephilia, Monarchy, Oligarchy, United Kingdom, United States

The Epstein Files. What's in them that Trump wants to keep them hidden?*

Labels: Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Hebephilia, Sex, Teenagers, The Second Trump Administration, Women, Zeitgeist

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 97th edition. The Epstein Connections.

Labels: Donald Trump, Epstein Scandal, flap de jour, Sex, Teenagers, Women, Zeitgeist

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Third Edition and Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 98th edition. The Perverts and Fellow Travelers Issue.

Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Donald Trump, Epstein Scandal, Ezra Klein, J. D. Vance, National Conservatism, Populism, Republican Party, Scandal, Stupidity, Teenagers, The Madness of King Donald, The written word, Women, Zeitgeist

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 96th edition. The Epstein Files.

Labels: 1980s, 1988 Election, 2020s, 2025, Bill Clinton, Crime, Donald Trump, Hugh Hefner, Pamela Jo Bondi, Playboy Philosophy, Scandal, Sex, Sic transit Gloria Mundi, Standards, Teenagers, The written word, Virgin Islands, Women, Zeitgeist

The UK and the US reaction to kiddy diddling, proving that the UK was right all along.

So, the Andrew formerly known as Prince has to get his own house due to Epstein, while in the US the House won't reconvene and take up the Epstein list.  Turns out the British were right all along, we're not capable of governing ourselves.

 

Froma Harrop: Democrats, stop being MAGA's mommy

Shut Down.

As people wake up this morning on a Wednesday of a week that's proving to be a surreal tour de force, the Federal government is "shut down".

Well, kinda. . . the government never actually shuts down, but partially shuts down.

Anyhow:

Today In Wyoming's History: October 1:  2025.  The Federal government entered a shutdown due to an impasse between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party on a continuing budget resolution, although the root causes of the dispute were the overall Trump Administration's refusal to yield on any of its policies.

And, of course, this:

Wyoming Delegation Pins Likely Federal Shutdown On ‘Idiocy’ Of Democrats

"Idiocy" of the Democrats is a pretty bold claim for a group of politicians supporting a President who routinely acts illegally, and who yesterday was demonstrated to be quite senile.  It's also quite the insult coming from three politicians who have decided to completely blow off the concerns of their constituents over public lands and whom at least one basically stated that Wyomingites had the opposite view because they're stupid.  The government is shut down as the Republicans simply won't yield on anything.

Speaking of idiocy, Wyoming's dependency on the Federal Government is now a concern, something we routinely fail to acknowledge here:

Gov. Gordon ‘monitoring potential federal government shutdown,’ issues protocol for Wyoming federal workers

This contest may play out over a protracted period.  I don't expect it to resolve anytime soon.

Also, the Republicans have enough votes to pass an actual budget.  They don't need a CR. . . unless they can't get all of the Republicans to vote for a budget.

Storm Warning.

Two things.

The government is likely to shut down this week as the Democrats have actually grown tired of giving the Trump Party a blank check.

Yes, it'll be a disaster.

Yes, Trump will run around firing people, as that's all he can do.

Yes, the Wyoming Congressional set will howl that it's all the Democrats fault.

It needs to happen anyhow.

Secondly, Pete Hegseth is summoning flag officers to D.C. for some reason. Current scuttlebutt is that he's going to give him a pep talk on the Warrior Ethos, which will cost a government that's massively in debt millions of dollars.

If they haven't bought off on Pete Hegseth's Storm of Steel already, they're not going to via a pep talk.

Frankly, I don't buy that this is what he's going to do.  I think he's going to do something else.  Perhaps announce that he's expelling women and homosexuals from the military, or perhaps do something deeply anti democratic that will be super dangerous for the republic.  

 

The Barroom Confession: A Fictional Republican Congressman Admits Why He Bows to Trump

The Casualty List.

Changes in the 119th Congress.

July 22, 2025.

Casualty List

Rep. Mark Green's last day in office was Sunday, leaving 219 Republicans and 212 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.   Green voted for the Big Ugly before leaving.

A 2025 Independence Day reflection.

I wasn't going to post a July 4th item this year, as I frankly feel pretty pessimistic about the state of the country.  But after reading some, I thought I ought to.

Independence Day marks, of course, the day 249 years ago when the Continental Congress declared the United States to be independent of the United Kingdom, which had founded the colonies.  It took over a year of pitched combat for Congress to reach that point.  What's really important about it, however, is not so much that the United Colonies declared independence from the mother country, but that it did it democratically and formed a democratic republic immediately.  Indeed, the country was acting as a democratic republic before it actually formed one officially.

From the very onset, the United States was a democracy.  I'll occasionally hear somebody who doesn't grasp that or understand it say "we're not a democracy, we're a republic".  That statements, which indeed was made by our serving Congress woman, shows a lack of understanding on what a democracy and a republic are.  We most definitely are a democracy, and always have been.

The initial structure of the country that was arrived upon by the founders of the country featured a very strong congress and a phenomenally weak president.  The US Constitution, it should be noted, is the country's second, not first, constitution.  The first one that featured that structure was the Articles of Confederation  It was John Hanson, not George Washington, who fulfilled the role of President at first.

The Articles didn't work well, but notable in them is that right from the onset the country was that, a country.  Some people will also occasionally claim that at first we were thirteen countries. That's nonsense.  We were, in fact, a putative country even before the Declaration of Independence, with the initial hope being that the country would be a union of fourteen, not thirteen, colonies.  The reluctance of the Quebecois to throw in with the virulently protestant colonies to their sound quashed that dream, with it setting the continuing tone that Canada wants nothing to do with being in the United States of America.  Nothing.

The Constitution of the US set us on an ongoing path which gives real concern to conservatives such as myself.  Right from the debate on the document there was a struggle between those who wanted to retain a weak national government and strong state governments.  States were, in fact, amazingly unrestrained in their powers early on.  In contrast, there were those who wanted a strong federal government and weak state governments.  The Federalist position, which was the more practical and realistic, ultimately won out, and it would have no matter what.  Even those who opposed Federalism found that they used its powers by necessity when they were in power.

That created, however, a structure in which the country converted the President of the Congress into the President of the United States.  Lacking a king, but remembering the model, the President occupied a position that vaguely recalled the monarch, in contrast to the British example in which the chief executive of the nation was and is a member of Parliament.  This worked well for a very long time, but it did put the US in a situation in which there existed a real possibility of a slow transfer of power to an executive divorced of the legislature.  

Indeed, expansion of executive power occurred nearly immediately.  It took a big jump during the Civil War, again by necessity, and it jumped again in the 20th Century.  Theodore Roosevelt expanded it as it suited his vigorous mindset.  Woodrow Wilson expanded it due to the Great War.  Franklin Roosevelt expanded it due to the emergency of the Great Depression and then World War Two.  Following World War Two the powers already expanded were thought normal, and again the Cold War seemed to make their retention necessary.  A President commited the country to a largescale war for the first time in the nation's history without a declaration of war when Truman sent forces into Korea.  This repeated itself when Johnson did the same with Vietnam.

Indeed, the disaster of the Vietnam War and the legacy of the Korean War caused Congress to attempt to claw back power with the War Powers Act.  The corruption of Richard Nixon resulted in Congress asserting its power as well.  But by the late 1960s the Democratic Party has also accommodated itself to revision of the national organic document, the Constitution, by a Supreme Court that simply made stuff up.  That accomodation started the development of the Democratic Party simply sitting on its hands and letting the courts rule to a large degree.  The Court became sort of an odd co chief executive, with the most egregious example being the absurd decision of Roe v. Wade, at least up until its progeny, Obergefell v. Hodges.

Abuses in the law, with Obergefell being the final example, and a Congress that simply accommodated itself to not really doing anything gave rise to the angered muddled populist far right, and the angry intellectual National Conservatives, the latter of which realised that the former was a plow mule that it could do its work with.  National Conservatives basically abandoned the concept of an expansive democracy in favor of a much more limited culturally correct one and took advantage of, and are taking advantage of, a chief executive whose mind is mush but whose ego is titanic.  They see him, effectively, as a "Red Caesar".

In the meantime, Mitch McConnell's Supreme Court began to hurl back to Congress the powers that it had dumped on the courts like city people dumping kittens on farms.  A Congress used to yapping but not doing anything was not prepared to exercise power once again, and very obviously still is not.  Much of what the Roberts Supreme Court has done in recent years really isn't radical at all, but its suddenly getting there, making decisions which are difficult not to view as seeking to empower the chief executive.

We can't tell where this will end up, and hence the pessimism. We may very well be in an era in which, when we look back a decade more hence, we will see a revived Congress that resumed its proper role, and a diminished Presidency, that's returned to its, even if that looks like something from, perhaps, the 1960s or 1970s.  Or we may seen an ineffective Congress and a nation ruled by a successor Red Ceasar who has more in common with Victor Orban than George Washington.

Perhaps we should be encouraged by the fact that the country has weathered previous existential threads to its democratic nature.  The War of 1812 presented one when a large portion of the country wanted nothing to do with the declared war and thought about leaving the infant nation.  The Mexican War saw something similar, and the Civil War, in which half the territory of the country attempted to leave in order to keep a large percentage of its population in chains.  World War One sparked further crises when it became unclear what the President's powers were in regard to a foreign war, and following the war the country acted wholly illegally towards those on the radical left.  During the Depression a right wing threat to the nation caused a putative coup to develop, the news of which was then suppressed.  Deep Communist penetration of the government in the 1930s and 1940s, was covered up in the 1950s and the reputation of the Congressman exposing it forever trashed, something his lack of restraint aided in.  The disaster of the Vietnam War and the following horror of Watergate caused many to feel that democracy in the US was dying.

Of course, we've never had a figure like Trump  before make it into the Oval Office.  The closest we've ever had to that was Jefferson Davis, in the Confederate White House, who at least was more genteel.  Huey Long was much like Trump, but of course he did not replace Franklin Roosevelt.

Still, there is reason for optimism.  Trump is not a popular figure.  He's wrecking conservatism which conservatives will have a hard time overcoming in the remainder of my lifetime, but there are signs that his bolt is now shot, in spite of his budget bill.  So much political capital was spent on that that it will bring the Democrats into power in Congress in 2026. They'll have to act like a Congress at that time.  Repairing the damage will take time, but perhaps not as much time as might be feared.  The populists may have done the country a favor by peeling back the lazy ineffectiveness of the pre 2016 Congress, and the National Conservatives may be doing the country a favor by restoring some of the basic elements of conservatism. They're both damaging the country enormously by being inhumane.

When the reign of the Red Ceasar ends, and I think that will be by this time next year, maybe  Congress will go back to its proper role and the gutless cowards of the GOP who have allowed this to occur will be retired in disgrace.  The country got over the Civil War.  There's hope it can get over this.

Common assumptions that may make an a**. . . well you get it. Economics.

As the Big Ugly is debated in Congress, I keep hearing a set of assumptions thrown around as if they're truths.

In each case, there's no reason to believe that they are.

The first one is that "the government is too big"?  Oh? What's the right size government.

Republicans like to claim that the best government is the one that governs the least, but they've never put that into practice. They aren't right now.  If you have masked Geheime Staatspolizei running around, you are definitely trying to govern.

They'd reply, as Mike Lee did the other day, that they're against faceless bureaucrats who are responsive to elected officials, which is pretty rich for a guy acting like he's the Senator from Deseret rather than Utah.

Anyhow, for a country of 300,000,000 what is the right size government?

Nobody seems to have an answer.

It's likely one, fwiw, that not only has more immigration officers, but more social security employees, and more IRS employees.  The military, which nobody is proposing to shrink, probably doesn't need to be anywhere near its current size.

Speaking of the IRS, we also hear that "Americans are overtaxed". This is actually complete crap.

The big problem in the US economy today is that Americans are grossly undertaxed but still want a government that would have to be funded by a lot more taxes.  Still, Americans believe they're heavily taxed.

I once had a die hard GOP Trumpee tell me that Americans paid the highest income tax rate in the world.  When I challenged him on it, he looked it up right then on his computer and was stunned.

Frankly, the wealthy should pay a lot more taxes than they do.

An outright myth is the trickle down economic theory that Republicans have revived.  Tax breaks for the wealthy don't trickle down.  It's well demonstrated.

Another one is that you can grow your way out of a budget deficit. We know that you can't. And yet I heard Mike Johnson claim that we surely would do just that if the Big Ugly was passed.

Johnson is a smart man.  He knows better, which either shows that he's sipping Sazerac with his coffee, willfully deluding himself, or flat out lying.  

A secretly held one that causes people like Grover Norquist to wake up in the middle of the night cackling is that you can starve the government into being smaller.  Newt Gingrich believed that.  It just doesn't happen. 

The rude truth of the matter is that the deficit has been too high for many years, but it really started ballooning during  Trump I.  Yes, it ballooned further during Biden's presidency.  The Trumpites plan to balloon it to the point that will cause a fiscal crisis, there's no doubt about it.

The Republicans voting for the Big Ugly know this. They'll either be dead before it matters, or are just hoping somebody else will come around and fix the budget after they've killed the government back to 1914 levels.  Why?

Well, um. . .the government is too big. . . and taxes are too high. . . and 1914 was a perfect year. . . 

Five Republicans listening to their base.

 

The margin on this bill is so tight that five votes has a very good chance of sinking it in the House.

Good for the five.

And shame on Wyoming's delegation in Congress if it does not follow suit.

Mike Lee’s Revised Land Grab Still Mandates the Sale of Up to 1.2 Million Acres of Public Land After telling outraged hunters that he was listening to their concerns, the Utah senator is doubling down on plans to sell off a large amount of federally managed public land in the West

 

Mike Lee’s Revised Land Grab Still Mandates the Sale of Up to 1.2 Million Acres of Public Land 

After telling outraged hunters that he was listening to their concerns, the Utah senator is doubling down on plans to sell off a large amount of federally managed public land in the West

Going Feral: Blog Mirror: Blog Mirror: Senate referee rules out public land sales in megabill

Going Feral: Blog Mirror: Senate referee rules out public land...:  

Blog Mirror: Senate referee rules out public land sales in megabill

 However, Lee still promises a new provision.

Senate referee rules out public land sales in megabill

Wyoming's broken politics.

Former Wyoming Governor Francis E. Warren, and sitting Senator at the time of the Johnson County War, F. E. Warren was a Republican Senator who knew how to cover his ass, whic his why he was able to survive the scandal of Republican support for the invasion of Johnson and Natrona Counties.  That scandal took down the GOP in the state for a period of time.

Back at least a decade ago I had a conversation with a high ranking member of the Wyoming Republican Party about some really odd going ons down at Cheyenne.  He stated, broken hearted, that Wyoming politicians had been "bought".

That's a pretty broad accusation. What he likely really meant is that right about that time the state started to be flooded by out of state political money, and it often went right into the most radical right wing politicians.  Wealthy people moving into the state brought their politics with them, and in a few cases if was radically far right.  That gave us, for example, the absurd example of Foster Friess and his goofball Dukes of Hazzard campaign for governor.

It also gave us, however, some people who moved in specifically for political reason. Chuck Gray, the family money backed son of a wealthy Republican, who was born in California and went to school at Wharton, like Trump, moved into the state and ran for office nearly immediately.  Living in a district in which the long time occupant of a legislative seat died, he managed to leverage a position at his father's radio station into a  legislative seat, and then captured the office of the Secretary of State in spite of having very little connection with the state in which he sits.  He's been a constant stream of Trump like invective.  His seat was taken over by Jeanette Ward, who was if anything even further to the far right. Ward, from Illinois, came to Wyoming as a "political refugee" and had been here so briefly that she barely qualified for her seat when she ran.  Her politics were too far to the right for even that district, which booted her after one embarrassing term in Cheyenne where she espoused far right populist, far right Evangelical, positions.

The state GOP was likewise taken over by far right populists, about whom we hear less now, but who went to war with the traditional GOP. They were largely successful, duping, although I expect only temporarily, a large number of Wyoming voters into believing the sh** sandwiches which Trump and his allies serve up as alleged filet mignon.

That they can be duped is because the state is in economic distress, and regular people don't know what to do about it.  Global Warming is real, not some sort of fib, and long term coal and oil are doomed.  A large number of workers who relocated form Texas and Oklahoma, and the like, are fairly poorly educated on top of it and are relatively easy to lead by being told that what they want to be true, is true.  The agricultural sector, which has deeply ingrained conservative tendencies, is rolling over from a generation that basically stopped its education at high school to one which is now college educated, but in the meantime the older agriculturalist who control the operations deeply want to believe that operations can be run the way they were in the 1970s, and that threats they need to deal with, which include Global Warming and the buying power of the Super Rich, really don't.

Basically, Wyoming's current politics can be explained by people voting for what they want to believe, over reality.  Coal and oil are never going way.  You'll always be able to get a job in the extractive industries, or as a truck driver, with a high school diploma, or even without one.  There are no deep existential problems with the economy here that aren't the result of a conspiracy against us.

It can't be us.

But it can be.

And right now, it is.

A further part of the problem, however, is that the Democratic Party in the state has displayed a level of intellectual denseness that would suck light out of a black hole  It's stunning.

It wasn't all that time that Wyoming had a viable Democratic Party that could serious contend for statewide and national seats.  That started to change, however, during the Clinton Administration for reasons that are now hard to discern, although the decline of unionized mining jobs in Wyoming are likely part of that problem.  Even after that, however, we had a Democratic Governor.

As the Democratic Party in the state declined it took on a lot of the same trend lines that the national Democratic Party did, which has helped explain the rise of Trump.  In a state that was both sort of conservative and sort of libertarian, they became goofball left wing as an organization, although not all of their candidates reflected that.  Over time, the Democrats never saw a fetus in the womb that they didn't' want to kill, or a brand new perversion that they didn't want to celebrate.  A party which at one time was lead by burly miners or grumpy rural lawyers is now lead by a guy who has the appearance of a bow tie wearing nerd.

Recent promo photograph of the Democratic Party.  This is a far cry from a party that once put a World War Two Marine Corps Raider in the Governor's office, a World War Two infantryman in Congress and a gruff prosecutor into office.  Marine Corps Raider gets votes, and inspires confidence.  Bow Tie Wearing Doofus does not.  And is that buffalo smiling?

Hypocritical or not, Wyomingites aren't going to vote for a party that they associate with men in tutus and that it's all okay.  Men might go into the voting booth with their third wife at home, before they go to see their mistress, but they're going to regard that as contrary to the moral law.  Interestingly, if politics returned to the "I don't care what you do, just leave me alone" ethos it once had, they'd be fine with that.  Indeed, that's how their living their private lives already.

In fairness, however, the last two chairmen of the Wyoming GOP don't win high marks either.  The current one, Bryan Miller, is another of the "I spent my life in the military and hate the government" Republicans.  After decades of drawing on the government tit, they claim to know what's wrong in a state where most people don't, or at least not openly.

We may, just might, be at a turning point, however.

We are certainly at a point where Republican office holders ignoring the real views of the state can be exploited.

Dr. John Barrasso.  He went from orthopedic surgeon to the Senate, having been appointed by the Legislature.  At age 72, he's now the Senate Whip and doesn't appear to have any desire to retire any time soon.

Wyomingites are overwhelmingly opposed to public lands being transferred out of government control.  In spite of that, Dr. John Barrasso supported Federal lands being transferred to the states in the 2016 GOP platform. That didn't happen in part because Eric Trump is a hunter.  Barrasso darned well knew that Wyomingites didn't support that, but somebody he was listening to did, as he supported it against the wishes of his constituents.

72 year old Barrasso is in that class of politicians who desperately seem to want to hang on to their jobs in spite of their advancing old age.  At 72 he ought to be retired, but he hung on and is how the Senate Whip.  Once a Republican moderate, he became a Trumpite by necessity.  That means he could become a moderate again, and if the political winds shifted, he would.  

This issue is one in which he's hearing from hundreds of Wyomingites per day.  He's heard from me twice.  

He hasn't responded, but he hasn't said what his position is.

If the proposals to transfer public lands advance, he ought to be sent packing.

Cynthia Lummis.  Once the State Treasurer, she entered the U.S. House in 2009, but stepped down in 2017 to take care of her dying husband, a very admirable thing to do.

70 year old Cynthia Lummis is likewise in the age group that ought to be out of politics.  She actually returned to it, however, to take her current Senate seat.  Lummis condescendingly stated that all Federal lands didn't need to remain in Federal lands forever, which is intellectually the same as maintaining that all privately held lands don't either, something she'd be in horror about as she comes from a ranching family.  She's also shown an ability to tack into the wind, however, as she was once a Trump opponent and now is a Trump backer.

Lummis is making sort of a big deal right now about her cryptocurrency bill which just passed the Senate, and nickname Crypto Queen she's been tagged with. The truth is, however, that the overwhelming majority of  Wyomingites don't give a rusty rats ass about this topic and aren't going to remember diddly squat about this bill.  It'll soon be a "what?" sort of topic.

The public lands vote, however won't be.

Harriet Hageman. She ran an unsuccessful campaign for Governor against Mark Gordon and then, when Liz Cheney ran into trouble, ran against he rand obtained her seat.

Harriet Hageman is on her first time as Congresswoman, having been able to take advantage of her former friend Liz Cheney's downfall.  Hageman is the only one of Wyoming's Washington delegation who probably comes by her public land vote, which was in favor of the Federal sales bill, honestly.  Daughter of Jim Hageman, who spent 23 years in the Wyoming House of Representatives, Hageman is from a farming family from Southeastern Wyoming where there is very little public land.  Jim Hageman was one of the backers of a proposal to allow for the privatization of wildlife in Wyoming, which almost destroyed the GOP during its go around.

This issue could be a similar one.

Wyomingites should make it.

At the top of this page is a portrait of Francis E. Warren.  Warren had been territorial governor, and then the first governor, of the State of Wyoming.

I don't admire him.

But his ability to read the political winds is admirable.

The state Republican Party was complicit in the invasion as so many of those in it were connected with Republican politics.  Planned at the Cheyenne Club, people kne what was going on.  Republican Governor Amos Barber did and had arranged to activate the National Guard in order to keep it from being deployed to Central Wyoming to stop the invasion.

Barber lost his seat following the event.

The Republicans lost the legislature.

Warren kept his.

There's a lesson there for those currently in office. . . and those who wish to be.

Amos W. Barber.  A dentist by profession, like Barrasso is a surgeon by profession, he disgraced himself with his support of the invaders in the Johnson County War and then thereafter by attempting to retain his office after he was defeated for reelection.  He became Wyoming Secretary of State immediately after that, as that was his prior office at the time of Warren's elevation to the Senate, and then returned to his dental practice.  Oddly, like the current occupant of the Secretary of State's chair, he was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.