Tending to do better

Less than a month ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the president has the right to remove the heads of independent agencies at will, except for the Federal Reserve System.

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2026/07/supreme-court-overrules-humphreys-executor-upholds-federal-reserve-independence 

A recently fired member of the FTC said the difference between the two is that the FTC tends to regulate businesses, which their owners don't like, but the Federal Reserve tends to keep the economy running smoothly -- protecting consumers versus protecting capital -- so there are different feelings about it on the side of the powerful.

I'm summarizing, and doing some extrapolating. Technically those were two different cases, so the ostensible reason for the different court ruling in Trump v. Cook is in deference to that case.

I think the real reason is that corrupt court members who don't mind screwing over consumers do mind screwing over powerful donors and probably their own stock options as well. 

What I find interesting about that is how it signals that they know Trump's staff changes will be destructive. They don't mind in the areas that don't directly affect them, but they know he's incompetent. 

Okay, Trump is more incompetent than most, and more corrupt. Like, I didn't think it could get worse than W and I didn't realize that was actually optimistic.

Looking at more typical presidents, one of the points made in Presimetrics was that Alan Greenspan had very different interactions with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Bush just wanted to hear information that suited what he already wanted to do. That ended up being more devastating relating to security briefings and military information, but it mattered to the economy as well.

Clinton listened with an intent to understand and then make good policy. 

Going from debts incurred by the first Bush to a budget surplus back to deficit spending didn't just happen.

The ability to process information matters, but the interest in doing so is more important.

Even more important than that, I think, is the interest in doing good things for lots of people. 

If you talk about the middle class but make policies that benefit the donor class you may be incompetent, but the bigger problem is probably insincerity.

(We'll get to the group who insincerely and incompetently focuses on the working class soon.)

I think it's safe to argue that the biggest difference between the two parties is that one consists of more people who realize there is something more important than themselves. That doesn't mean that they do it perfectly. It doesn't mean that they have no ego or selfishness. It just means that there is a caring for justice and fairness, and then a willingness to try and make that work. Some do it better than others. Some react to opposition better than others. Overall, though, there is that desire to do right.

If they then end up also coming off as far more intelligent, maybe that is because when you are determined to do the wrong things when saying they are the right things, the necessary rejection of fact may eventually lead to an inability to process it.

Hypothetically. 

Good governance

I mentioned last month that I was doing some reading about statistics.

One of the books that I had not mentioned yet was Presimetrics: What the Facts Tell Us About How the Presidents Measure Up on the Issues We Care About by Mike Kimel and Michael E. Kannell, with illustrations by Nigel Holmes.

I generally thought that they made good choices in what to measure, how to measure it, and explaining why. This included giving clear explanations of some of the variables that presidents have no control over, or where their only control is how to react.

When there were factors that they did not get into that I still believed were significant, it appeared to be because critics would consider those factors as unfairly favoring Democrats.

Without that, Democrats still won, over and over again.

Going even farther back with my reading, one I have written about is Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke. Again, it was really well-written, and clarified some things I only kind of remembered from when they happened.

Clarke does not state it outright the way Kimel and Kannell do; the format of the book wouldn't make that as obvious a choice (and I think even realizing it without saying it made him very grumpy), but clearly Democrats still governed better.

Once again, I think this matters. 

In the past, you could not get conservatives to admit Democrats governed better. Perhaps it getting harder to deny explains the trends where leftists won't admit that good governance matters at all; when you get the right strong leader in, everything will work out fine.

This is why so many leftists keep echoing fascists and Nazis. It's dispiriting when conservatives do it, but you kind of understand how it happens.

Yesterday I went over some examples of how Al Gore might have governed differently than George W. Bush. In a post from two years ago I mentioned some of those but also some probable differences between how Hillary Clinton would have governed and the mess we have now. 

There are leftists who would tell you that Kamala Harris would be doing exactly the same things as Trump; there are no grounds for believing that. I think it is their attempt to continue avoiding responsibility for causing harm, which in turn allows them to continue attempting to be harmful. They don't call it that, which is a big part of the problem, but we don't have to listen.

In deciding to listen, though, the question becomes "Why?" Why do Democrats govern better? 

Currently much of the leftist complaint is against old people and needing to throw them out. That's discounting the value of experience, but there have been very old, long-serving Republicans who did not necessarily govern better.

That brings us into values. Some Republicans do obstruct effectively, but is that good governance? Does it take as much skill? 

No. No.

If the two parties are different, what are the differences? 

And also, what about the factions within? Is it even fair to call them "within"?

I'm afraid this may take a while. 

Related posts: 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/07/how-we-move-forward.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/06/personality-differences.html 

What if?

Obviously one themes in this series of posts is dominator culture, but another important component is that the Democrat and Republican parties are not the same and that those differences matter.

I want to go back in time to the 2000 election and imagine that Gore won.

You don't even have to imagine that crucial state Florida was not governed by George W. Bush's brother Jeb and that the secretary of state, Kathleen Harris, was not the co-chair of W's Florida state election efforts, and that boxes of votes didn't disappear from precincts with predominantly Black voters. (You don't even have to imagine a lifelong Republican temporarily registering as a Democrat and getting into position to design the notorious butterfly ballots.)

You probably should imagine that Ralph Nader did not run as a third-party candidate claiming there was no difference between the two parties. (It's not that he made the difference; it's just that he was an unhelpful liar with a huge ego, and we need to pay more attention to that sort of thing.)

The election was so close -- even with all of the Republican corruption -- that any attempts to fix some of the issues would surely have given Gore the victory. I know that influenced the Supreme Court decision. It should not be too hard to imagine Gore winning, even in the home of the proverbial "Florida man."

Do you believe that Al Gore would have ignored intelligence briefings about people wanting to learn how to fly but not caring about how to land?

Especially, would he have ignored the information because he only wanted to hear about potential justifications for invading Iraq?

Do you believe that if the attack had happened anyway, Gore would have invaded Iraq? Afghanistan maybe, but Iraq? 

Imagine no Patriot Act and no Abu Graib. 

Do you believe that -- after eight years under Clinton had created a budget surplus -- that Gore would have then decided the best thing for the economy was tax cuts for the rich? (A positive economic result from the tax cuts turned out not to be true.)

I think you could argue that Gore's environmental interest was not as obvious until An Inconvenient Truth came out a few years later, but it seems likely that he would have taken better environmental steps, something the Green Party would claim to believe in, though the Sunrise Movement doesn't seem to care anymore.

It is not unprecedented that a successful run by a vice president leads to only a single term, so Gore might not have still been in office when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. The stage was set before, so do you believe Gore would have ignored reports from the Army Corps of Engineers about the needed repairs to the levees in New Orleans?

Efforts to reduce global warming would probably not have acted quickly enough to reduce the strength of the storm, but the impact was not just the strength; it was construction and neglect that was man-made.

Clearly this is all speculative. First of all, even assuming that Gore would have had the same information and resources but better intentions, there are always other factors. You can send investigators after the flight students, but then the plan might be accelerated. You can schedule repairs to the levees, but maybe the soonest it can be done is 2006 so it still ends up being too late.

Gore would have continued to have an obstructionist congress, I am sure.

There are still things that can be better indicators. Better results can be more likely with some than with others. 

I have treated reasons for that before but I suspect I will get into them again. The main point for today is having the intellectual honesty to admit the difference and that the difference matters.

I should also add something about intellectual curiosity.

One of the common refrains on the right is "Hey remember how everyone made a big deal about the hole in the ozone, then it just went away?"

It didn't "just" go away. Scientists studied it and every member of the United Nations plus a few additional signatories ratified the Montreal Protocol  phasing out substances that contributed to ozone depletion, including chloroflourocarbons, in 1987. (It was a big Model UN issue.)

Even the United States under Ronald Reagan agreed to it and it worked.

It is not completely done. The ozone is healing, but the estimates are that it won't be back to 1980 levels over Antarctica until 2066, though for the rest of the world by 2040. That's 39 years later.

You can make improvements with knowledge, cooperation, and time. It can happen.

Then dishonest people will pretend it never mattered and uninformed people will agree with them and feel very superior.

It all matters.

Underrated (maybe) comics you have never (mostly true) heard of

Some time ago I came across an article that led to another article that sent me in pursuit of different comics.

"The most underrated comics, according to Goodreads"

https://bookriot.com/most-underrated-comics-according-to-goodreads/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us 

"The best graphic novels you've never heard of"

https://bookriot.com/underrated-graphic-novels/ 

As you can see, both articles were written by Rachel Brittain and came courtesy of BookRiot. They tend to be more enthusiastic than I am about things, but I don't hold it against them.

At the time, reading the articles did not require a subscription. That could have saved me a lot of time. (I might hold the subscription requirement against them.)

I'm not saying that I regret reading these comics, exactly, but a lot of them sure weren't that good. Maybe it's me.

Without being able to refer to the articles (I'm not going to pay for bad advice), I may have missed some or gotten some mixed up, but this is what I've got.

I hated these most of all

Heavy Vinyl by Carly Usdin 

Rocket Salvage by Yehudi Mercado

Godshaper by Simon Spurrier 

Vagrant Queen by Magdalene Visaggio 

The Heart Hunter by Mickey George 

The Many Deaths of Laila Starr by Ram V 

Welcome Back by Christopher Sebela

and also... 

Crowded by Christopher Sebela 

If the whole premise is built on keeping someone alive whom everyone is trying to kill, but the target is so obnoxious you kind of want her dead...Mainly when I hated them it was for a lot of bad attitude and noise (sometimes being pretentious instead) but without a core humanity. That was more true of Crowded than any of the others and there was some competition.

Too much world-building, not enough interesting happening in the world. 

The Witch Owl Parliament by David Bowles 

M.F.K.: Book One by Nilah Magruder

Isola by Brenden Fletcher 

Prism Stalker by Sloane Leong 

What is the point, exactly? 

I See A Knight by Xulia Vicente 

This one didn't even build the world; there were so many more questions than answers. That can be fine, but I don't think they were even great questions. 

Kind of meh or maybe weird

Fun Fun Fun World by Yehudi Mercado

Catboy by Benji Nate

Cosmic Pizza Party by Nick Murphy

The last one is really meant for children. I believe the inclusion was to try and represent more ages, but I don't think it works for adults. 

At least some interesting ideas 

Afar by Leila del Duca

Djeliya: A West African Fantasy Epic by Juni Ba

Eve by Victor Lavalle

Ronin Island by Greg Pak

Mech Cadets by Greg Pak 

FTL, Y'All: Tales From the Age of the $200 Warp Drive by multiple contributors  

The Black Bull of Norroway by Cat Seaton

The last one is inspired by a fairy tale I had not previously known, but I accidentally checked that out first. 

The weirdest

Meal by Blue Delliquanti

This is literally trying to sell everyone on eating insects and how elegant and delicious that can be.

My favorites 

Umma's Table by Yeon-Sik Hong

Lifetime Passes by Terry Blas

School for ExtraTerrestrial Girls: Girl on Fire by Jeremy Whitley

Everyday Hero Machine Boy by Irma Kniivila

Those last four could not have less in common with each other. Well, maybe the last two have some similarities in terms of young people dealing with space stuff, but even with that they are very different.

Perhaps the real key is that I am likely to hate stuff by Christopher Sebela and appreciate work by Greg Pak. 

I focused on authors because those were the issues. There may have been art I liked more or less than others, but the issue was the story or lack thereof. Isola was clearly making an effort to be visually lush, which may be why there wasn't any room for storytelling.

It can work that if you like one thing by an author that you will like other things by them, but it's not a hard and fast rule. Besides, sometimes you need to try new things.

Reconstructing this list, I remembered many comics that someone recommended and then I hated, but there were also so many that I really liked. 

You don't know if you don't try. 

One of the nice things about graphic novels is that you can try them out a bit more quickly than more non-graphic books. 

Thicker than political affiliation

I just saw a clip where Jake Tapper rightly called out Senator Sheldon Whitehouse for his failure to take early allegations against Graham Platner seriously.

https://x.com/TheLeadCNN/status/2077550284083966013 

"Called out" may not be the best term for it. There is a question and a response, then a kind of snide follow up with a quick "Thank you" from Tapper and a "You bet" that I perceived as angry but resigned. 

I guess that's how these interviews go. A history of people being more open and honest might involve Whitehouse saying something like that he wasn't paying that much attention or he is old-fashioned and doesn't worry too much about the complaints of women... there can be a lot of contributing factors.

I need to note that Jake Tapper sucks pretty frequently.

He has been better about this, following up with Lyndsay Fyfield and picking up the ball the New York Times dropped. 

Whitehouse is not a terrible senator. At least, there are worse ones. 

Representing Rhode Island, he might not even have been paying too much attention to the Maine race, but asked about Platner -- a candidacy that was getting a lot of attention -- Whitehouse said:

"Seems like a lot of nothing. I mean, the only one who had anything to say that seemed 'unsettling' was a woman who works for right-wing political operations."

That doesn't have to mean that Whitehouse was a big Platner fan either, but his answer came down pretty squarely on the side of Don't Believe Women.

I've written about this before, though it has been a few years. Once more, it's not that you automatically believe women, but you do take their stories seriously. You look into it. Is there corroboration?

One of the disturbing things about Whitehouse's comment here is that he refers to his experience as a prosecutor and professional skepticism is important, but there was no corroboration. 

Fyfield had corroboration, having told friends and having diary entries, which the Times knew but did not share.

Because of that, we can say it is not completely Whitehouse's fault that he did not know, but I can't help but wonder how perfunctory the dismissal of rape allegations was when he was a prosecutor. 

Whitehouse is a Democrat; this series is not just going to be picking on leftists.

Sadly, there are some forces that transcend political party, built into the structure of our society and government.

If I harp on that a little, well, I hope at some point it has an impact.

Poisoning the well... Oops! Too much!

I'm starting to think that yesterday's post was the wrong one for everything to go in the most logical, self-evident order.

I guess the odds were always against this being perfect.

Anyway, I have been thinking about James Comey.

I have this memory of the first time that he was talking about investigating Hillary Clinton's e-mail server. That seems like it should have been the July 5th, 2016 press conference, but that doesn't seem quite right. 

It was definitely before October 28th of that year.

What I remember is that after admitting that he could not find any wrongdoing, but that maybe they hadn't had enough time, someone (I assume a member of Congress) asked about if maybe they could open some other investigation and Comey responding "I wish you would." They were all very pleased with how amusing and clever they were.

Then in October 28th there was the release of a new investigation into Weiner. Even before knowing it would not have any implications for Clinton, it would have been unusual to announce at that point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comey 

Comey justified it as "guidance", perhaps feeling good about the final results exonerating Clinton, except that he just said it did not change his July results. 

Well, his July results had been to say that he couldn't find anything while still giving the impression that Clinton was crooked, which a lot of people were already eager to believe.  

I think Comey liked to see himself as a martyr for integrity. That he was accused of favoring Clinton by the right when he was clearly not being fair to her might give him the appearance of not being partisan.

I believe that Comey did not want Trump to win the election. Given how things played out, that would have been smart of him, though I do not believe he was thinking in those terms.

However, I also believe that Comey did not want Clinton to win. That she was on track to stuck in his craw. He didn't want her opponent, but he couldn't stand her being all high and mighty. He wanted to throw some mud at her so even though she would still win, she would at least still have mud clinging to her. He was the big boy who could make that happen.

Yeah, he lost his job, but other people have suffered far more for his actions. 

Comey was not a leftist; he wasn't even a Democrat. He still shares some traits.

One of those -- and we are in a different stage now -- was not truly understanding the depth of the racism in this country. (Easy to avoid when you're a white guy.)

Trump was such an unusually inexperienced, unintelligent, corrupt candidate that it was hard to believe he could possibly win. There should have been so much that made people reject him.

However, in the wake of a successful Black president, there were people who desperately wanted the racism, especially for the right to say that everyone else is the real problem; we're great! That's way better than a woman!

Maybe leftists do understand that now, and that's why they are going for white Nazi fail-sons. (Yeah, that's another post.)

Of course, that has drawbacks, and they have gone with some non-white candidates too, and even a few women. 

They remain notably racist and sexist. It's a feature, not a bug. 

Once you open the door to that, you can't always get it shut again.

Lies, lies, lies, yeah

 Last week's posts essentially made three points:

1. We are at our best through our caring for each other, but...
2. That gets held back by sexism.
3. That gets held back by racism. 

When I want to talk about how leftists (and Republicans) get it wrong, the racism and the sexism keeps coming up. They get very offended when you call it that, but ignoring that foundation won't help.

There is a strong resistance to engaging with the truth, which means resistance to any reasonable engagement, doubling down, and not worrying about sincerity.

I am going to give two very recent examples that relate.

One is from Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, regarding a lack of forthcoming information on Mitch McConnell's status:

"I publicly and privately urged the last administration to address the public’s concerns with the former president’s health. I’m calling on Sen. McConnell to do the same and provide voters an update on his own health. Let’s end the crazy speculation. Just tell us what’s going on." 

This series will also cover people who sound like they are saying good things but are doing damage at the same time. 

It is reasonable to call for information on McConnell, especially given some of the relevant circumstances. The public pronouncement may not have been the best way of doing it, but maybe he had tried other channels with no luck and that was a last resort.

What was completely unnecessary was the reference to Biden. It's easy to miss, but it's important because it's part of a larger theme of (I could also reference Jon Stewart here) trying to convince us all that Biden was severely incapacitated, as opposed to having one debate that didn't go well. The fact that the presidency was being well-conducted and that Biden is to this day -- although old -- healthy and functional and way more rational than the current president is not something to talk about. 

I believe there is some guilt for bad choices, but an inability to admit those choices or that guilt. Keep an eye out for it and you will see it a lot, with other themes that create a pattern.

The other example relates to several not well-established accounts going hard on calling Haley Stevens a millionaire.

Stevens is a Michigan representative who is currently running for Senate. She is running against Abdul El-Sayed, currently a favorite of those getting amnesia about their Platner support, so it's going to be that kind of campaign.

El-Sayed might be a millionaire, but he won't release his taxes so that's unknown.

Stevens has released her taxes; her income and accumulated worth and all of that is well below even one million. However, these attackers are saying that because she is keeping campaign donations from SpaceX instead of redirecting them to charity, and because she has a campaign chest of more than a million, that means she is keeping it and therefore a millionaire.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/haley-stevens-elon-musk-critic-keeps-spacex-pac-money-key-michigan-sen-rcna351252 

Many of the leftist candidates do refuse to take money from PACs, but they end up getting a lot of money from other donors and they tend to already be wealthy... I don't think it's the moral high ground they think it is.

As it is, the $50,000 from SpaceX has not kept her from criticizing Musk; she is known for that.

There is certainly the potential for corruption. Yes, big donors might expect to exert influence, though they can't force that. More common is that candidates will allocate a large part of their campaign chest to salaries for "advisors" who happen to be friends and family. Platner did a lot of that. 

Campaign finance laws can prevent some of that. Stevens so far has a pretty good record of being open about finances, but none of that matters if you have decided the person is not on your team.

A big theme is not giving anyone else any credit.

Currently, Zohran Mamdani is getting a lot of praise for his click-to-cancel rule. Biden had one, but then between a Federal Appeals court and Trump, it's dead. If you try and bring that up, you get responses that Biden just didn't have any initiative and gave up too easily, as opposed to it being easier to get things done in a pretty solidly liberal state than on a national level with a bunch of obstructionists.

Okay, if your philosophy is going to be that only my candidates are good and everyone running against them is bad, can you at least actually start with truly good candidates?

Or is there something you are looking for that gets in the way? 

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/07/better-than-wed-hope.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/07/worse-than-wed-like.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/07/with-friends-like-these.html