Are Republicans waking up?

 For the past eight years, many of us have been waiting on Republicans to find the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Donald Trump. For the past eight years, we have seen glimmers of hope here and there, but we’ve been frequently disappointed.

Republicans who stood in front of the Trump Train were either drummed out of the party, packed off to early (or not-so-early in some cases) retirement, or coopted into the fold. I noticed a long time ago that people rarely go just a little bit trumpy. Going trumpy is often like a complete personality change a la “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and it’s rare to come back. But once again, I’ve seen some glimmers of hope in the weeks since Donald Trump became president-elect.

Image created using OpenAI's DALL·E, December 2024.

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For starters, the rumblings from Republicans about Matt Gaetz as attorney-general eventually persuaded Gaetz to withdraw from consideration. I guess he’s no RFKJR if he runs at the sound of a few harrumphs.

More serious for Trump is the growing number of people who supported him over Biden yet are now a bit nonplussed that Trump seems to be planning to do all the dastardly and inane things that he said he would do.

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal seems to be one of these people. In a recent op-ed, Strassell complains about RFKJR, writing, “No insider believes this is a heartfelt pick. Even political naïfs understand what happened: This agreement was entirely transactional.”

Strassell believes Republican senators should “rescue” Trump from his bad choice but laments that “Senate Republicans are playing monkey-see-monkey-do to an extent that even Mr. Trump must be exasperated.”

“Nearly every GOP senator looks at Mr. Kennedy with wincing concern—knowing the havoc the anticapitalist big-government regulator can and will wreak on a Trump agenda,” Strassel continues, “Yet no one steps up to save the president. If Joe Biden chose Hulk Hogan to be Treasury Secretary, does anyone think Democrats would have let him step into that trap? But so desperate right now are Republicans to nod along that they are abdicating the real job of advice and consent—and protection.”

I can guarantee that Trump is not exasperated by Republican spinelessness. The obsequiousness that Strassel has identified is something that Trump has cultivated for most of a decade. He doesn’t want people with the chutzpah to stand up to him when he’s wrong. He wants yes men who, when told to jump, will ask how high as they leave the ground. This is exactly what many of us warned about in the years before the election.

Not everyone has had the awakening that Strassel is experiencing, but I have seen signs of life from Mitch McConnell. When the Senate reconvenes, McConnell will pass the Majority Leader’s gavel to John Thune (R-SD). Thune’s election as Majority Leader is somewhat of a defeat for Trump since he is from the more traditional wing of the party and not as trumpy as Florida’s Rick Scott, one of the other likely contenders.

It may be that McConnell’s return to the relative anonymity of the backbench has made him more comfortable speaking his mind or that he is more willing to expose Republican fault lines now that the Democrats have been defeated, but McConnell has taken direct opposition to Trump policy recently on a couple of occasions.

First, McConnell fired a shot across RFKJR’s bow with a warning against undermining faith in vaccines. As reported by the AP, McConnell said in a statement, “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous, Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”

McConnell specifically defended the polio vaccine, which was invented by Jonas Salk in the 1950s. Before the vaccine, polio killed thousands (fewer than COVID-19 during the pandemic, I’ll note) every year and left many others crippled or in iron lungs. McConnell survived polio when he was two years old, but the disease still has no cure. Polio cases dropped sharply after the vaccine was introduced and there have been no reported cases in the US since 1998.

RFKJR’s position on the polio vaccine has been inconsistent. He has said that he supports the vaccine but has also specifically questioned its safety and said, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”

A few days after issuing the vaccine statement, McConnell authored an article in “Foreign Affairs” (which is not a magazine for men looking to hook up with international women despite how it sounds) defending American involvement in Ukraine and the Middle East. McConnell identifies China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea (the same countries that I noted in October comprised a new Axis of Evil) as “adversaries” to the US and warned against isolationism, calls to “give up on American primacy,” and the strategy of pivoting away from Europe and the Middle East.

McConnell convincingly argues that the world needs American “hard power” to preserve the peace and that defending Ukraine is part and parcel of resisting China. When America engages in isolationist navel-gazing, strongmen run amok and the world becomes a more dangerous place.

As McConnell puts it, “Standing up to China will require Trump to reject the myopic advice that he prioritize that challenge by abandoning Ukraine. A Russian victory would not only damage the United States’ interest in European security and increase U.S. military requirements in Europe; it would also compound the threats from China, Iran, and North Korea.”

The problem for Strassel and McConnell is that they are vestiges of a conservative party that no longer exists. This is evident if we look at public opinion polling of Republican voters.

When it comes to vaccines, Gallup reports that Americans are sharply more skeptical of childhood vaccinations than they used to be. This increased skepticism is driven mostly by Republicans. The share of Republicans who consider childhood vaccination important has plummeted 18 points since 2019. There can be no doubt that this is a reaction to the scaremongering about COVID vaccines, which has now spread to other drugs.

As you might expect, polling regarding RFKJR’s nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services reflects the Republican skepticism about vaccines. A new survey from the Democrat-leaning groups Protect Our Care and Data for Progress found that voters overall disapproved of the choice of Kennedy, but 74 percent of Republicans approved.

Likewise, McConnell is out of step with the Trump™ Republican Party on foreign policy. While McConnell’s view is still popular among Americans at large, it is no longer the view of a majority of Republicans. Only about a third of Republicans support continued aid to Ukraine and Republican support for an active role in world affairs was falling even while Trump was in office during his first term. (The Chicago Council Survey does show a slight rebound in July 2024.)

And let’s not forget tariffs. McConnell hasn’t mentioned them lately, but he did criticize Trump’s trade policies back in September. These days Republicans overwhelmingly favor a host of anti-trade ideas such as imposing reciprocal tariffs equal to what other countries impose on US goods (85 percent support per YouGov), banning imports of “essential goods” from China (77 percent), and imposing a 60-percent tariff on Chinese imports (72 percent). The free-trade days of the Republican Party are over.

Some Republicans may be waking up to the reality that Donald Trump is not going to usher in a conservative utopia. He’s not even going to usher in an era of conservative competency. He’s going to usher in a dumpster fire ensconced in a train wreck.

McConnell has probably been awake to Trump’s problems for quite a while. I’m not so sure about Strassel. Either way, they and others need to realize that placing party over country and ideology has resulted in a party that no longer resembles them.

The pair and their peers in politics and the conservative media are part of the reason that America has to deal with four more years of Trump. They continually underestimated The Former Guy’s uncanny ability to survive political scandals and bad behavior. They assumed that any Republican, even Trump, was better than any Democrat. They may be experiencing the onset of buyer’s remorse now, but it’s too late to change the fact that the country will be in Trump’s hands for the next four years.

What they can do, however, is to realize that Republicans won’t stop Trump. If they want to limit the damage that Trump does in his second term, Trump-skeptical conservatives are going to have to make common cause with moderate Democrats. America desperately needs a bipartisan coalition of the sane to marginalize both radical fringes. To do that, they must put party aside. The Republican Party is so intertwined with Trump that making Trump lose on any issue is going to be perceived as Democrats winning.

The conundrum is that winning is everything to Trump, and if Republicans save him from himself, he isn’t winning. It’s a Catch-22 for Trump and the GOP which probably means that Trump will get his way on most issues that can’t be blocked by congressional Democrats.

from the Racket News

Droning on in New Jersey

 

In an era of weird stories, one of the weirdest is the story of the mysterious drone swarms of New Jersey. For the past several weeks, baffling drones have been sighted around sensitive locations in New Jersey and there is no public explanation of who is flying them or why. 

Starting on November 18, mysterious drones have been spotted at night over a multitude of central New Jersey counties. Although concentrated over New Jersey, the sightings range as far west as Philadelphia and as far east as Staten Island. The drones have been reported lurking near military bases, emergency communications centers, and police stations as well as other infrastructure that includes highways, railroads, and powerlines. They have also been reported near residential neighborhoods and Donald Trump’s golf resort in Bedminster. 

Not a Jersey UFO drone. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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The worrisome drones are not the small quad-copters that are often associated with private drone flights. These mysterious vehicles are often reported to be the size of cars and seem to operate in coordinated swarms. While recreational drones are cheap and plentiful, the technology to fly large drones in coordinated fleets is not. 

The drones often fly with their lights off and appear to be able to avoid detection by normal methods. The delightfully named Dawn Fantasia, a Republican state assemblywoman, posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter that “helicopters and radio frequencies,” presumably referring to attempted interceptions and radar, had been unable to identify the drones. In one reported incident, a dozen drones allegedly followed a Coast Guard motorized lifeboat. 

Although the airspace around New York and New Jersey is some of the busiest airspace in the world, large parts of New Jersey airspace don’t require contact with air traffic control. Away from airports, airspace below 400 feet above the ground (AGL) is often uncontrolled (Class G airspace). Even above that altitude, much of the state is covered by Class E, i.e. general controlled, airspace that permits visual flights without contacting ATC. 

Even so, drones and their pilots still have to abide by Federal Aviation Regulations. These rules include operating with lights at night and using a transponder to identify location and altitude on radar. Drones larger than 0.55 pounds (250 grams) must have a remote ID, and drone flights outside of uncontrolled airspace and designated zones must comply with LAANC, the Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability, a sort of flight planning and coordination tool. The mystery drones don’t seem to be following these rules. 

It is not necessarily illegal to overly military bases. In my day job, I often fly over military bases, but I do so on a clearance and not at low altitude. I also remain outside of Restricted Areas that are active or “hot” in aviation parlance. Rules are often different for drone flying, however, and the Department of Defense has banned drone flying on all its installations. In the case of many drones, the software won’t allow the aircraft to fly within areas where drone flight is prohibited. 

So far, if anyone knows who or what is behind the drone infestation, they aren’t talking. In my view, there are a limited number of suspects in the case. 

For many, the prime suspect is the federal government. Pramod Abichandani, an associate professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s School of Applied Engineering and an expert on drone swarms, told the Asbury Park Press, “If I were to list all the options of who this could be, the very first obvious thing is it has something to do with the military, the US military.”

But a motive is lacking for the US government to terrorize the mid-Atlantic with mysterious drone fleets. The government would have no reason to snoop on its own bases and other American infrastructure sites. If the mission was to surveil civilians in the area, there are much more unobtrusive ways to do so. The New Jersey suburbs also seem like a poor choice for testing new drones when areas like Edwards and Nellis AFBs and the Tonopah Test Range are far from prying eyes. 

It also does not follow that the government would mount an operation that makes it look incompetent and incapable of defending the country. Governments typically try to project calm and competence rather than stirring up fear unless there is a specific reason to stoke anxiety such as trying to pass legislation relating to illegal immigration or climate change. There seems to be no such agenda here. 

While various branches of the government and military do operate a variety of drones, the commander of the Picatinny Arsenal, the base where the drones were first sighted, has denied that the drones are related to his base, and the FBI, Pentagon, and Department of Homeland Security appear to have no answers. However, the dismissive nature of government spokesmen who say that there is no credible threat at the same time they admit they have no answers leaves a lot of questions in itself. 

If the drones don’t belong to our government, it’s possible that they belong to a different one. It makes sense that a hostile government might be snooping around military bases and other sensitive areas, and just a few days ago, a Chinese citizen was arrested for flying a drone over Vandenberg AFB in California. 

A New Jersey congressman, Jeff Van Drew (R) has claimed on Fox News that the New Jersey drones were launched from an Iranian “mothership… off the east coast of the United States.” Government spokesmen have said there is “no evidence” for this claim but admit that they don’t have an answer. 

The mystery is deepened by the fact that no one seems to know where the drones are coming from. The sheriff of Ocean County, New Jersey reported that no one has seen the drones take off or land. Drones the size of cars should be fairly difficult to conceal and would require a decent amount of space to take off and land. In our society filled with mobile phones, Ring doorbells, and a plethora of other cameras, it is strange that no details of the launch and recovery of the drones have been reported. 

The absence of the drones from radar is not as strange. Air traffic control radars rely primarily on transponders to track aircraft and relay data. While the Northeast Corridor is well covered by ATC radar, air defense radars that are designed to pick up “skin paints” are probably fewer and farther between. They are also more likely to be pointing out from the coast rather than inward towards the Jersey marshes. The Gothamist reported this week that the federal government is deploying a specialized radar system to New Jersey to watch for the drones. 

I think that there may be more than one answer to the mystery. While it is possible that a secretive government agency is operating the drones without telling the other federal hands what it is doing, that still would not give an explanation for why. 

I think it is far more likely that at least some of the drones are being operated by a foreign power. My three prime suspects are Russia, Iran, and China. 

But there are still questions about the motive. As with federal surveillance, espionage with drones is somewhat counterproductive because it is too obvious. You never know the best spies were ever there, and that is definitely not the case with these drones. It would be far easier to use satellites or ground-based observers to get much of the information that can be obtained from drones, especially flying at night. 

An alternative explanation is that the drone operators want us to know they are there. They want to sow chaos and fear. They want to warn us that they are capable of launching large-scale drone attacks on our most vulnerable areas. If that’s the case, it probably isn’t Iran, which would probably have launched the attack already, but is more likely Russia or China. 

I think that some of the drone sightings are copycats as well. Civilian drone operators may not know or care about the rules and some may want to join in the fun of causing hysteria. 

And some of the reports are probably just that: hysteria. There have been numerous cases of mass psychoses throughout history, and at least some of the drone sightings are likely to be imaginary or misidentifications. There are enough photos and videos to prove that something is there, but quite a few of the “drone” videos that I saw online were pretty obviously conventional manned airplanes and helicopters. 

On Thursday, White House spokesman John Kirby said that there is currently no evidence that the drones “pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.” Kirby went on to say that the sightings are under investigation but that neither federal, state, nor local authorities have been able to “corroborate any of the reported visual sightings.” 

He added that “many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully” and “there are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace.”

It may well be that authorities already know more than what they are telling about the UFO drones, but the government does need to get a handle on the situation. At least some of the drones seem to be operating unlawfully and in a careless or threatening manner. Last week, a medical helicopter had to divert to a different landing site while responding to a car crash in Branchburg because of the presence of drones. 

Whether they are hostile or not, drone swarms can present a threat to aerial navigation. There are already a handful of incidents in which drones either collided with manned aircraft or caused accidents as aircraft pilots tried to avoid the drone. 

Some have suggested shooting down the mystery drones, but this could endanger civilians in the area and may not yield much information about who is flying the unmanned vehicles. If the drone is not totally destroyed, its parts would likely be “sanitized” if it is being operated by a hostile power. 

Some might be tempted to take air defense into their own hands as an Australian couple did a few years ago. In an image posted to Reddit, the Aussies are captured on drone footage hurling beer bottles at a drone flying over their property in what is a hilarious and memorable picture that makes me think of primitive tribesmen. 

Photo credit: https://www.reddit.com/r/blursedimages/comments/ndc0i9/blursed_drone_shot/?rdt=45437

Americans might consider using considerably heavier weapons than beer bottles to bring down the UFO drones, but USA Today helpfully points out that it is against federal law for private citizens to attempt to shoot down aircraft, including mystery drones. Firing guns into the air may also violate local laws and ordinances. 

And remember that bullets that go up must come down. Somewhere.

If you want to help solve the mystery, the government is asking for information regarding the drones. If you have pictures, video, or other information regarding the unidentified drones, you should call the FBI hotline at 1-800-225-5324 or submit your information through the FBI tip website at https://tips.fbi.gov/home.

The truth is out there. 

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AN ADDED BONUS: Comedian Matt Mitchell shows how Southerners would react to mystery drones on Facebook.

From the Racket News