Too late to write an intro, but you know the drill.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias: The 4 biggest political stories of the week, explained: President Trump endorsed some gun reforms -- well, sort of, but he also endorsed nonsense like arming teachers (at least any who were ex-Marines); Robert Mueller's investigation heated up -- especially for Paul Manafort; HHS is undermining the Affordable Care Act ("Insurers will be able to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions on these short-term plans, meaning a better deal for those who don't have any preexisting conditions -- but that will drain the regular market of many customers, leaving those with significant health care needs facing higher costs"); Pennsylvania got a new congressional map. Other Yglesias posts this week:
Donald Trump's CPAC speech is a reminder that he's not really in charge of his White House: "He riles up crowds, but nothing he says actually matters or reflects administration policy."
Confessions of a Russiagate true believer. Dubious premise here: "Trump isn't an idiot."
Jill Abramson: Do You Believe Her Now? "It's time to reexamine the evidence that Clarence Thomas lied to get onto the Supreme Court -- and to talk seriously about impeachment." "Her" is Anita Hill, and I believed her then (unlike. e.g., Joe Biden). One thing worth reminding ourselves of is that a big part of the reason Hill's charges carried so much weight was that Thomas ran the government office responsible for investigating and enforcing charges of sexual harassment, so there was some reason for holding him up to a higher standard. As for impeachment, I've long thought that the best case against Thomas would be for the longstanding conflict of interest caused by his wife working for a right-wing lobby shop. Republicans have long felt like they had a problem with appointees drifting toward more liberal positions. One solution to that was to pick more ideological candidates, and another was to keep them on a tight payroll leash. Thomas fits both bills (as, by the way, did Scalia). Not going to happen, of course, but worth recalling.
Julia Belluz: Guns are killing high school kids across America at alarming rates: "Firearms killed more 15 to 19 year olds than cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined in 2016." Total 16,111 from 2010-2016, an average of 2300 per year, "more deaths than the next 12 leading causes of teen deaths combined." Meanwhile, Donald Trump wants to arm teachers, claiming that will deter kids from bringing guns to school. His proposal is so insane I expected it to be laughed away almost instantly, but he's stuck to it, doubled and tripled down, despite the revelation that there were armed guards at Parkland High School and they did nothing to stop the shooter. Some links:
German Lopez: Why the NRA wants you to talk about arming teachers: "Arming teachers isn't just a ridiculous idea. It's a deliberate distraction. When something like this consumes attention, the public and lawmakers don't talk about the real issue."
This is also true about the focus on mental health care. Every time there's a mass shooting, gun rights activists -- including Republicans and the NRA -- argue that the real problem behind mass shootings is the shooter's mental health.
Don't have the link, but I read a column last week by Cal Thomas arguing that we need to put some serious investment into mental health, with the focus more on locking up crazies than on helping them. There's virtually no chance that Thomas would actually back a serious program on mental health, even one that was overwhelmingly punitive.
"There's never enough training," Coby Briehn, a senior instructor at Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training, told Klepper. "You can never get enough."
The FBI's analysis of active shooters between 2000 and 2013 has another relevant data point: "Law enforcement suffered casualties in 21 (46.7%) of the 45 incidents where they engaged the shooter to end the threat." These are people trained to do this kind of thing full time, and nearly half were wounded or killed.
Emily Stewart: Multiple armed officers hung back during Florida school shooting, reports say.
Rachel Wolfe: Trump: 10 to 20 percent of teachers are "very gun adept." Reality: not even close.
Juan Cole: Top Ten Signs the US Is the Most Corrupt Nation in the World (2018 Edn.). Cole dismisses Afghanistan right out of the box, then makes his case by toting up the money at stake and in play. It's been a while since I looked at Cole's site -- he was an essential blogger back in the heyday of the Bush/Iraq War -- but I also noticed his What Does Netanyahu Corruption Case Tell Us About Trump's Fate? I should also note that he's been covering energy issues; e.g., Despite Coal Lobby, Australia to Double Solar Energy in 2018; and In Anti-Trump Surge, Renewables Make 18% of US Electricity and Impel Job Growth.
Antonio Garcia Martinez: How Trump Conquered Facebook -- Without Russian Ads: Actually, this does explain how some of the Russian trolls worked, much like Trump's own social media minions. This includes both efforts to zero in on possible Trump supporters and to bum out likely Hillary voters, hopefully suppressing the vote. Among other things, this article shows that Trump got more bang for the advertising buck by creating more outrageous ads and aiming them at people more likely to pass them along.
Emily Stewart: Study: Conservatives amplified Russian trolls 30 times more often than liberals in 2016. I'm rather skeptical of several of these findings; e.g., "Conservatives approach the situation from the start with greater reactivity to threat, a greater prior belief of danger in the world." I think many conservatives would disagree, pointing out how liberals are the ones who constantly harping on pseudo-threats, everything from guns to fracking to global warming. On the other hand, I suppose I can accept that "liberals appear to have more of a need to think critically than conservatives." But what the basic numbers show is that Russian trolls were much more aligned with American conservatives, and that they fed each other in symbiotic ways. They were amplified because they fed into this alignment, and in many ways they simply amplified conservatives' own political interests. Why Russia should do this doesn't make a lot of sense. One theory is that Russia wants to undermine democracy and general welfare in America, and many conservative policies effectively do just that. Another is that oligarchs and/or nationalists -- Putin at various times wears both of those hats -- seem to have some sort of mutual admiration society, which is the most obvious common denominator between the foreign leaders Trump most obviously admires.
Recently in my Twitter feed I noticed an image of an article which proclaims: "Russia 'is a bigger threat to our security than terrorists'." I eventually tracked this down to a piece published in England, and while I couldn't read the actual article -- it was behind some sort of paywall -- I gather that the gist was that Britain should spend more money on "defense" weaponry, which is the same pitch neocons here in America have made of anti-Russian alarmism for ages. Still, even if you agree that the threat of terrorism has been overhyped, isn't the exaggeration of "Russian threat" more of a provocation than a solution? Would North Korea, to pick a timely example, be even more of a threat had we simply ignored them once it was clear that the truce had held, instead of repeatedly attempting to isolate and cajole them? America's "enemies" these days are virtually all enemies of convenience: countries we could have better relations with but we hold old grudges, pick at festering wounds, and feel the need to project the dual threats of our military might and our universalist ideology. And all that generates unnecessary blowback, sometimes acts of terror but more often in the form of petty resentments, like trolling for Trump.
Some more, generally skeptical, links:
Matthew Avery Sutton: Billy Graham was on the wrong side of history: Graham, who died last week at 99, was a big deal in the 1950s when I was a child. My grandmother, especially, loved him. She was the most bigoted person I knew back then, a model for me to rebel against. And while I gave the fundamentalist church of my parents a fair try, going so far as to earn a Boy Scouts God & Country medal, even back then I was more than a little suspicious of Graham (or for that matter of any of the evangelists who got their mugs on television). The turning point for me was the Vietnam War. And while even then I must have recognized that there were lots of perfectly respectable Christians opposed to the war, the media savvy that Graham had plied so successfully in making himself the face of Christian America had much to do with my rejection of both God and Country. Graham faded, at least from my view, after Nixon, but I did notice that he was the pastor the Bushes called to get wayward George W. back on the straight and narrow. Last I noticed was his son Franklin, picking up the family business, vowing to follow US troops into Iraq to convert the heathens -- a mission that wasn't so warmly embraced by the Occupation generals. As Sutton notes, the evangelical movement Graham did so much to politicize has gotten more narrow-minded and vindictive over the years, becoming a pillar of a Republican Party that increasingly makes the Book of Revelations' locusts look benign.
Some others who remember Graham: