#^d 2019-08-04 #^h Weekend Roundup
Starting this early (Friday), hoping to avoid the last-minute crunch. Not really news, but CNN's Democratic presidential debates got a lot of attention from the punditocracy this week. As usual, I didn't watch in real time (although my wife did, so I overheard some), but caught the "highlights" later (among the comics, Colbert was most informative). Let's group the links here, rather than clutter up the main section:
David Axelrod: Elizabeth Warren is running a brilliant campaign.
Zack Beauchamp:
4 winners and 3 losers from the second night of the July Democratic debates: With German Lopez, Dylan Matthews, and Andrew Prokop. Winners: Joe Biden ("Well, this one's complicated"); Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders ("weren't there, but they loomed large anyway"); Cory Booker; single-payer activists. Losers: Kamala Harris; CNN, again; the DNC.
3 winners and 4 losers from the first night of the July Democratic debates: With German Lopez, PR Lockhart, Dylan Matthews, and Ella Nilsen. Winners: Elizabeth Warren; John Delaney; the Republican Party ("several of the major issues were framed by the moderators in terms Republicans would love"). Losers: the policy needs of black voters; CNN; Beto O'Rourke.
Marianne Williamson isn't funny. She's scary. Picks on her views on depression and illness, which are not exactly tangential to either her career as a "self-help guru" or her political aspirations. As for funny, my take so far (and I know or care nothing about her career) is that she does a nice job of filling a niche in the Democratic Party that no one even imagined before: a soft focus on morals and emotions, like Ben Carson among Republicans. That role is unimagined because most Democrats try hard to be rational and grounded in reality, but sometimes she seems to be onto something at a primal, instinctive leve. Of course, much of what she says is, as Beauchamp puts it, "extremely vague and hard to parse, but managed to at times banal and at other times deeply weird."
Ryan Bort: Jake Tapper and CNN totally botched the health care discussion.
Alexia Fernández Campbell:
Democrats aren't going to win working-class voters this way, says labor union president: "Democrats have to speak about how they are going to take the shitty jobs that exist in this economy and make them good jobs." Isn't that usually just a matter of making them pay better? When Robert Reich was auditioning to become Clinton's Secretary of Labor, he came up with the rationalization that it didn't matter if American factories shut down, because unemployed workers could always be retrained to become high-paid "symbol manipulators." Ever since then, the only answer neoliberal Democrats had to declining working wages and standards was to offer more education (and debt). But no matter how much money we plow into education (and I don't doubt that we should spend a lot more than we've been doing), we'll still have shitty jobs we'll need people to do. But we can decide whether we respect and value the people who do those jobs enough to accord them a decent wage and fair and equal rights -- a status we used to call "middle class." Interview with Mary Kay Henry.
John Cassidy:
Tim Dickinson: Can Joe Biden sell 'no we can't'? "The triumph of the progressives on night one of the Detroit debates portends trouble for the former vice president."
FiveThirtyEight:
John F Harris: Democrats are veering left. It might just work. Cites Stanley Greenberg, who wrote a book about how Reagan "captured many working class Democrats who believed their party's liberalism was out of step with their lives. But now he "believes that the urgency voters feel for shaking up the status quo means there's less risk for candidates and the party in going too far than in not going far enough." For a contrary point, Harris cites Rahm Emanuel, whose fear and loathing of the left is even greater than his readiness to sell out Democratic voters. Greenberg has a book coming out in September: R.I.P. G.O.P.: How the New America is Dooming the Republicans.
Umair Irfan: 2020 Democrats are getting more confrontational with the fossil fuel industry.
Sarah Jones:
John Judis: The Democrats need to get their act together.
Ed Kilgore:
Why you can't ignore Marianne Williamson: "Mock her all you want, but Marianne Williamson speaks to people horrified by Trump who aren't satisfied with policy papers."
Trump outperformed his popularity in 2016. That might not happen in 2020. As I mentioned somewhere else here, many voters saw Trump as a solution to a very tangible problem in Hilary Clinton. Maybe they hated whatever it was they thought she stood for (and there was grounds for that from the right and also from the left), or maybe they just didn't want to subject themselves to four years of pompous clichés, inane backbiting, and petty pseudo-scandals blown way out of proportion. Maybe they even recognized the unfairness of the vitriol, but still, the only way to make it go away was to vote her down. But since 2016, he's dominated public consciousness, becoming the source of our public embarrassment to a much grosser extent than she ever was or could be. There will, of course, be a block of people that loves him no matter what, and another that despises him, but in between there's a slice that can break one way or another. If in 2016 they broke for Trump because they wanted to flip off the status quo and avoid its scandals, those exact same rationales suggest they'll break against him in 2020. That's probably not enough to seal his fate. I can imagine at least one other slice breaking the opposite way: people who support the status quo, even as it's been warped by Trump's malign rule. Moreover, I expect Trump will have a lot more money, and a much more professional campaign behind him this time, in lockstep with a pretty unified Republican Party. But still, the tables have turned on those last-minute impulse voters.
Jen Kirby: Pete Buttigieg says he'd withdraw troops from Afghanistan in his first year.
Eric Levitz:
Here's who won (and lost) the second Democratic debate, night two: In rank order: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Julian Castro, Michael Bennet, Jay Inslee, Bill de Blasio, Kamala Harris.
Here's who won (and lost) the second Democratic debate, night one: In rank order: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson, Pete Buttigieg, Steve Bullock, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney, Tim Ryan, Beto O'Rourke, John Hickenlooper.
German Lopez:
Democrats have been discussing the same ideas on guns for 25 years. It's time to change that. Also: Michael Luo: The mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton should spur Democrats to propose big ideas on gun violence.
The Democratic debates neglected one of America's biggest public health crises: "The opioid epidemic hardly came up at all." I'd argue that's because it is a mere side-effect of a cluster of more central issues, like our failure to guarantee everyone's right to quality health care, and also the general malaise in much of the economy. Also, it's boring, aside from proposals like "executing drug traffickers or building a wall" that are stupid and/or cruel. But if you do want something on opioids, see: Sally Satel: The truth about painkiller addiction.
Joe Biden's long record supporting the war on drugs and mass incarceration, explained.
Kamala Harris's controversial record on criminal justice, explained.
Robert Mackey:
Josh Marshall: Obama looms over the primary in invisible ways.
Dylan Matthews: The presidential debates wasted too much time talking about stuff only Congress can do: "The president has a lot of power -- so why wouldn't the candidates talk about it?"
Ella Nilsen: Jay Inslee points to Democrats' real problem: Mitch McConnell: "Even if the Democrats win the Senate, the filibuster stands in the way of their big plans."
Anna North: Joe Biden's 1981 views on child care haven't aged well. Gillibrand called him out on it.
Charles P Pierce:
Joe Biden is the product of a Democratic Party that was terrified of Ronald Reagan. I think this is the key point to understand about Biden, and why his campaign is intrinsically compromised. It's not so much that he believes in conservative maxims as that his instinct, which served him fairly well for decades, is to surrender ground to Republicans.
Debating the Obama presidency instead of the current one seems politically suicidal: "And yet, it's honest and justified. Just ask Julian Castro."
Andrew Prokop:
What Biden meant to say in his bungled debate closing statement. This is the guy who "won" the debate? The longer he stays in the race, the busier the "what Biden meant to say" industry is going to be.
The Democratic debate's incoherent discussion about who could best beat Trump. Notable quote, from Warren against Delaney: "I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for."
Max Read: Is Andrew Yang the doomer candidate?
Frank Rich: The Democratic debates were built to fail.
Rolling Stone:
Winners and losers on night 2 of the second Democratic debates. Winners: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, Andrew Yang. Losers: Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, Tulsi Gabbard. Treading water: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro.
Winners and losers on night 1 of the second Democratic debates: Winners: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamson ("go ahead, laugh"), Steve Bullock. Losers: John Delaney, Hickenlooper, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar. Treading water: Pete Buttigieg, Tim Ryan.
Aaron Rupar: "Your question is a Republican talking point": CNN frames debate questions around right-wing concerns: "Republicans weren't onstage during the Democratic debate -- but were living rent-free inside moderators' heads."
Dylan Scott: The messy health care discussion at the second Democratic debate, explained.
Emily Stewart:
Benjamin Wallace-Wells: At the Democratic debate, Joe Biden defends the party's past.
Alex Ward: The 2 veterans on the Democratic debate stage made a big promise about Afghanistan: That would be Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Buttigieg, who want out.
Lawrence S Wittner: The Democratic debates need more questions about nuclear war.
Matthew Yglesias:
The weird controversy over Democrats "criticizing Obama" at this week's debate, explained.
Democrats are skipping the most important health care debate: "should this even be the priority?"
Personally, I think the Medicare-for-all people are 100 percent correct. The current American health care system is bad and wasteful, and replacing it with something like the Canadian system would be a good idea. But the policy world is full of good ideas, and not every good idea can be your top priority. Prioritizing health reform has not, in the past, been an extraordinarily successful strategy for new presidents.
I agree with the first line here, and would add that any presidential candidate who disagrees is not just wrong (in all their arguments and rationalizations) but a coward to boot. On the other hand, if I was in charge and didn't have the votes, I'd write up a good single-payer bill and hold it in reserve, while trying to pass a bunch of less ambitious reforms to the ACA framework. If the reforms are thwarted, either by politics or by the courts, you can always fall back on the single-payer bill, and that case would become more compelling. Meanwhile, there is a lot that can be done, and not just by throwing more money at the blood-sucking insurance companies. The long-term answer is not just single-payer (cutting the for-profit insurance companies out of the system) but reducing the profit motive in the provider system. (You'll never wring all the profit-seeking out of the system, but non-profit hospitals were a lot more cost-effective than HCA is.) One thing that could be done would be to build up government-supported non-profits that could compete against the profit-seeking companies. (The "public option" under ACA is one example, but non-profit options wouldn't have to be directly under government bureaucracy.) One might, for instance, change bankruptcy law to allow failed hospitals and service providers to be reorganized with public support and employee control. Another idea I've been kicking around would be to offer a bare-bones universal insurance (e.g., through the Medicare provider network) that would cover an initially small set of emergencies and illnesses. This would make private insurance supplemental (rather than primary), reducing its cost while allowing it to fit more customized needs. (You can see how this works with Medicare supplemental plans. Medicare at present does most of the heavy lifting, but still leaves a lot of deductible nonsense that makes supplemental insurance attractive. That could change if Medicare-for-All improved a lot, but that's going to be a hard battle to fight -- especially all at once.)
3 winners and 4 losers from the Democrats' two-night debate extravaganza: Winners: Cory Booker (Yglesias thinks "neoliberal shill" is a compliment); Joe Biden; the Great Winnowing. Losers: knowing what powers the president has; comprehension of what is in these health care plans; all these housing plans; policy criticism of Donald Trump.
America deserves a debate between Joe Biden and his main progressive critics: "Elizabeth Warren versus John Delaney is not the drama we've been craving."
Elizabeth Warren's vision for changing America's trade policy, explained.
Lots of non-campaign news this week, but Donald Trump's flagrant racism caught the most attention, climaxing with two mass shootings which, despite pro forma denials, appear as the proof in the pudding.
Checked my Facebook feed shortly before filing this, and was rather surprised to find as many/maybe more pro-gun memes than anti, not that the former make any sense. One, for instance, links to a piece titled "Every Mass Shooting Shares 1 Thing in Common, NOT Guns": I didn't follow, but the picture shows a pile of pills. I doubt that, but even if lots of mass shooters popped pills, by definition every single one used a gun. All of those were forwarded by acknowledged friends. (Of course, I do also have anti-gun friends. They may even be in the majority, but lose out in this comparison because they tend to post their own thoughts instead of just propagating someone else's propaganda.)
Some links on this and other stories:
Tim Alberta: 'Mother is not going to like this': The 48 hours that almost brought down Trump: "The exclusive story of how Trump survived the Access Hollywood tape." An excerpt from the book, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. Ends with this memorable debate exchange:
Donald Trump: If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. Because there have never been so many lies, so much deception.
Hilary Clinton: Everything he just said was absolutely false. It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country. Donald Trump: Because you'd be in jail.
Trump later claimed "that debate won me the election." It was a lucky punch, but it landed because more people wanted to see her fail than so feared Trump they were willing to live with her constantly in their minds for the next four (or eight) years. It was not a moment American voters would be proud of.
AP: Police: Rookie Texas officer shoots at dog, kills woman.
David Atkins:
Andrew J Bacevich:
In the Trump era, Americans can't agree on the past, much less the future.
America's other original sin: "We have never reckoned with the bloody US takeover of the Philippines, our first bite at empire's apple."
Dean Baker:
Trump's fixation on intellectual property rights serves the rich.
The financial industry preys on 401(k) fees. It doesn't have to be this way. "Without change, we can expect a serious decline in retiree living standards."
Replace patent monopolies with direct public funding for drug research.
Donald Trump's capricious tariffs open the door to corruption.
Peter Beinart: The real reason so many Republicans love Israel? Their own white supremacy. Related: Jonathan Ofir: Racism is at the center of Israeli settler-colonialist venture: a review of Ronit Lentin's book, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism. Ofir also wrote this update on changing alignments in Israeli politics: Israeli pols merge parties, and the right-wing seems stronger than ever.
Phyllis Bennis: What the House anti-BDS resolution reveals about the Palestine solidarity movement. Related: Omar Barghouti: Why Americans should support BDS.
Jared Bernstein: We can't fund the progressive agenda by taxing the 1% alone: "The tricky politics of taxing the 1%, the middle class, and everyone in between." Basic point here is well taken. To do everything we'd like to see the government do requires that tax revenues be increased. While current tax rates leave a lot of leeway for increasing taxes on the very rich, that's not necessarily enough -- especially moving forward, especially if we do other things to diminish inequality. It may also be easier to increase a range of taxes by a small amount than it would be to increase one tax (income) by a lot. For instance, the easiest way to fund the sort of basic health insurance I outline elsewhere here would be to tack it onto the payroll tax that already funds Medicare, even though that's the most regressive tax we use these days. It would also be good to implement a small VAT (basically, a national sales tax), which is also regressive but could be scaled up to raise significant revenue as needed. One fact worth recalling is that not every tax has to be progressive -- you can compensate with more sharply progressive tax rates on incomes and estates, which is all you really need to bring the 1% back into mainstream America. Democrats need to be wary of falling for Republican talking points, which is what they're doing when they deny any tax increases on the middle class. They need to convince people that the returns on their taxes will be worthwhile -- which is basically what FDR did when he designed the payroll tax to fund Social Security.
Max Blumenthal: Behind the guise of adversarial journalism, CNN's Jake Tapper is taking America to war.
Barbara Boland: Unqualified UN Ambassador is the perfect weak link: "Don't be surprised if Kelly Craft's lack of experience is exactly what Bolton and Pompeo wanted for their war cabinet."
Bryce Covert: Right-wing troika: "The Republican Party's 50-state strategy." Review of Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's book, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States -- and the Nation.
Chas Danner:
Everything we know about the Dayton mass shooting: Nine dead, 16 injured, shooter a "young white man" with an AR-15-style assault rifle.
Everything we know about the El Paso Walmart massacre: Twenty dead, 26 injured, shooter "a 21-year-old white male gunman" with an AK-47-style assault rifle.
Jesse Eisinger: How Trump's political appointees overruled tougher settlements with big banks.
Henry Farrell: Don't ask how to pay for climate change. Ask who.
Tara Golshan: Rep. Will Hurd's retirement reflects GOP's biggest electoral struggle in the House: Trump.
Benjamin Hart: Trump seems thrilled that someone broke into Elijah Cummings's house.
Sheldon Himelfarb: The next election will require a new kind of vigilance.
The 2020 race has now begun in earnest, with the Democrats having their first primary debates last month [June]. Lurking in the background is something that once seemed inconceivable in modern-day America: the threat of election-related violence.
As the Southern Poverty Law Center said earlier this year in an annual report, there has been a rise in domestic terrorism, hate crimes, and street violence. It's no surprise, then, that on June 26, Reddit -- the fifth-most trafficked website in the U.S. -- announced it was "quarantining" a popular message board with 750,000 followers because of active discussions involving violence against political figures. . . .
Perhaps the biggest harbinger of election violence is the proliferation of disinformation, rumors, and hate speech. All of which are spreading further and with greater velocity than at arguably any other moment in American history.
Rachel Hodes: What 'abolish ICE' really means: "It's about asking whether we need an immigration system that terrorizes the least dangerous people in this country." Related: Emily Ryo: How ICE enforcement has changed under the Trump administration.
Eric Holthaus: Greenland is melting away before our eyes.
Umair Irfan:
b>Ellen Knickmeyer/Brady McCombs: Opponent of nation's public lands is picked to oversee them.
Markos Kounalakis: Donald Trump's dangerous empathy deficit.
Paul Krugman:
Why was Trumponomics a flop? "Neither tax cuts nor tariffs are working."
But why has Trumponomics failed to deliver much besides trillion-dollar budget deficits? The answer is that both the tax cuts and the trade war were based on false views about how the world works.
Republican faith in the magic of tax cuts -- and, correspondingly, belief that tax increases will doom the economy -- is the ultimate policy zombie, a view that should have been killed by evidence decades ago but keeps shambling along, eating G.O.P. brains.
The record is actually awesomely consistent. Bill Clinton's tax hike didn't cause a depression, George W. Bush's tax cuts didn't deliver a boom, Jerry Brown's California tax increase wasn't "economic suicide," Sam Brownback's Kansas tax-cut "experiment" (his term) was a failure.
A racist stuck in the past: "In Trump's mind, it's still 1989." Krugman picked 1989 because "that was the year he demanded bringing back the death penalty in response to the case of the Central Park Five," but for most of us that was just one year in a long continuum of viciousness (racist and otherwise).
Bess Levin: As deficit explodes, GOP demands emergency tax cut for the rich: "Twenty senators have urged the Treasury to give the wealthy another tax cut via executive order."
Gideon Levy: What Israel's demolition of 70 Palestinian homes was really about.
Dahlia Lithwick: It's never "too soon" to talk about preventing mass shootings. It's always too late.
Martin Longman:
How to campaign when nothing is possible. I suppose if I was a do-nothing "moderate" I'd take some comfort from this, realizing that even such a committed and principled radical as Bernie Sanders would preserve more status quo than another four years of Trump.
If the Republicans maintain their majority in the Senate, the new Democratic president will not be enacting one iota of their top shelf legislative agenda. There will be nothing major on health care or college loans or immigration or climate change. Even judges will be only confirmed in the most belated and begrudging manner, and only if they've never said anything on the record that conservatives find irritating. All legislative progress that can be made will come as the result of leverage over must-pass bills, and the leverage will only be truly significant so long as the Democrats retain control of the House of Representatives. But navigating government shutdowns and threats of national default in order to attach a few things to appropriations bills is not going to turn many of a candidate's campaign promises into reality. . . .
Yet, even if the Democrats win the trifecta and eliminate the legislative filibuster, they'll still have huge problems passing legislation. Even assuming that Nancy Pelosi can push the president's agenda through her chamber (and this is doubtful for some of the policies the candidates are pushing), there are senators (like Michael Bennet of Colorado, for example) on the record opposing much of the progressive candidates' agenda. . . .
I absolutely understand that people are hungry for change. People are sick to death of Congress and want to break this gridlock. But it's a problem that is beyond the power of any candidate or any rhetoric to fix.
On the other hand, while a left-committed candidate like Sanders or Warren might not get much more accomplished than mediocrities like Biden, Klobuchar, or Bennet, they would try, and be seen as trying, and their frustation and dedication would sustain the Party's slow drift to the left. And that would generate more creative discussion of real problems -- the solution to which is only to be found further left.
Business leaders flock to Trump for protections against socialism. Cites his previous piece, What if big business falls in completely with Trumpism?
Annie Lowrey:
The Supreme Court is bad for your health: "Its decision to let states opt out of the Medicaid expansion turned out to have lethal consequences." Or, more pointedly, "did Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts kill almost 16,000 people?"
Conservatives are wrong about what's driving immigration: "It's jobs and social networks that bring immigrants to America -- not government benefits."
What Acosta has done other than let Epstein off the hook: "Trump said the [now-ex] secretary of labor is doing a 'fantastic job.' Is that right?"
Andrew Marantz: The El Paso shooting and the virality of evil.
The national conversation will now turn, as it should, to gun control, to mental illness, and to the President's practice of exacerbating racial tensions, which has been one of his avocations for decades and now appears to be his central reëlection strategy. But there's also a more specific question: what can be done about the fact that so many of these terrorists -- in Pittsburgh, in Poway, in Christchurch, in El Paso -- seem to find inspiration in the same online spaces? Each killer, in the moment, may have acted alone, but they all appear to have been zealous converts to the same ideology -- a paranoid snarl of raw anger, radical nationalism, unhinged nihilism, and fears of "white genocide" that is still referred to as "fringe," although it's creeping precariously close to the mainstream.
Hilary Matfess: The progressive case for free trade. Related: Daniel Block: Free trade for liberals. This piece focuses more on European problems, and vainly posits that an alliance with American liberals would help "protect democracy, fight inequality, and save the environment." Lots of problems here, starting with the fact that US trade policy -- even under Democratic presidents -- has always been the province of business interests, and while those interests may like to tout "democracy" as a propaganda riff, fighting inequality and saving the environment never really was their thing. Moreover, any "Atlantic Alliance" is at present bound to reek of those nations' colonial/imperial pasts. On the other hand, other alliances have always been possible: internationalism was the hallmark of the labor movement at least since 1848, and could be again. But it will take some kind of political revolution before the US and Europe can see trade as a tool for promoting the welfare of all people.
Anna North: The movement to decriminalize sex work, explained.
Richard Parker: When hate came to El Paso.
Charles P Pierce:
Trump's Cincinnati rally had some ripe bits of Presidential* insanity.
The President* is determined to staff the whole government with sycophants. Makes me wonder, is "psychophants" a word? Should it be?
Russia is full of environmental time bombs. So is Detroit.: "The United States has no room to gloat here."
Elaina Plott: 'We're all tired of being called racists'. I'm getting tired of having to call them racists, too. Maybe they should do a better job of keeping their racism to themselves?
Daniel Politi:
Trump characterizes mass shootings as a "mental illness problem": That's not likely to be much of a defense against people to point to Trump as at least partially responsible for the problem.
Beto O'Rourke: Trump is "racist" whose words lead to violence like El Paso shooting.
Gun violence in 2019: There have been 251 mass shootings in the US in 216 days.
Nicholas Powers: When Trump calls people "filth," he's laying the groundwork for genocide.
Andrew Prokop: From condemning "white terrorism" to condemning video games: Republican responses to El Paso shooting.
Jennifer Rubin: There is no excuse for supporting this president. Looks like the Washington Post is piling on; e.g. EJ Dionne Jr: On guns and white nationalism, one side is right and one is wrong; Max Boot: Trump is leading our country to destruction. Needless to say, Trump's holding up his end of the feud. See: Jonathan Chait: Trump directs government to punish Washington Post owner.
Philip Rucker: 'How do you stop these people?': Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric looms over El Paso massacre. Also: Ayal Feinberg/Regina Branton/Valerie Martinez-Ebers: Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes. Coincidence?
Aaron Rupar:
At Cincinnati rally, Trump turns Baltimore violence victims into political pawns: "Explicitly demeaning blue cities and states is now a feature of Trump's campaign speeches."
The Gilroy, California, shooting highlights a big hole in Trump's logic about gun violence.
Adam Serwer: White nationalism's deep American roots: "A long-overdue excavation of the book that Hitler called his "bible," and the man who wrote it." That would be Madison Grant, author of the 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race.
Raja Shehadeh: The use and abuse of international law in the occupied territories: Review of Noura Erakat's book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.
Matt Shuham: Kobach used private border wall's email list to fundraise for Senate campaign: "This email could run afoul of campaign finance laws."
Richard Silverstein: Trump donor, Elliott Broidy, paid Dennis Ross $10,000 to publish pro-Saudi op-ed in The Hill.
Matt Simon: The bizarre, peaty science of Arctic wildfires.
Danny Sjursen: US troops are back in Saudi Arabia -- this will end badly.
Jordan Smith: As Trump fans the flames of anti-abortion rhetoric, Kansas offers a cautionary tale.
Yves Smith: Hospitals squeal over Trump proposal to disclose insurance company discounts.
Felicia Sonmez/Paul Kane: Republicans struggle to respond in wake of El Paso, Dayton shootings.
Matt Taibbi: The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller.
Nick Turse: Violence has spiked in Africa since the military founded AFRICOM, Pentagon study finds.
Alex Ward:
John Ratcliffe, Trump's pick for top intel post, withdraws amid scrutiny over exaggerated bio: Well, that didn't take long. Some more on Ratcliffe, for the historical file:
Trevor Aaronson: Trump's pick for top intelligence job bragged of experience as terror prosecutor -- but he doesn't have any.
Erin Banco/Asawin Suebsaeng: Whistleblower allegations surfaced just before DNI pick John Ratcliffe withdrew.
Will Sommer: Trump intel pick John Ratcliffe started theory of FBI anti-Trump 'secret society'.
Michael Warren: With Ratcliffe, another Trump nominee withdraws with a damaged reputation.
US and Taliban may strike a deal allowing American troops to come home from Afghanistan. Also:
Dan Lamothe/John Hudson/Pamela Constable: US preparing to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan in initial deal with Taliban.
The US just withdrew from an important nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Don't panic -- yet. Related:
Matt Korda: In memoriam: The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty dies at 32.
David E Sanger/Edward Wong: US ends Cold War missile treaty, with aim of countering China.
Trump announces tariffs on nearly all Chinese goods starting in September.
Will Wilkinson: Conservatives are hiding their 'loathing' behind our flag: "The molten core of right-wing nationalism is the furious denial of America's unalterably multiracial, multicultural national character."
Robin Wright: The rhetoric and reality of Donald Trump's racism.
Matthew Yglesias:
Today's budget deal proves once again Republicans never cared about the deficit. Nothing really new here: I still recall when Nixon declared himself a Keynesian. With their tax giveaways, Reagan, Bush, and Trump didn't even have to admit as much. They merely understood that the rules are different when the Republicans are in power or in opposition. That's only hypocrisy if you pretend there's a general principle involved.
The critical thing, however, is that if not for hypocritical Republican opposition, we could have been running these higher deficits in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. And if we had done that, the economy could have recovered faster from the Great Recession, the unemployment rate could have fallen more rapidly, and hundreds of billions of dollars of national income that is now irretrievably lost could have been earned.
America's dual housing crisis, and what Democrats plan to do about it, explained: "A crisis of low incomes and a parallel crisis of tight supply."
Trump is approving an anti-competitive merger that will cost you money: "But he seems to have made money off the deal personally." The merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, currently the 3rd and 4th largest mobile phone networks.
Li Zhou: The new bipartisan Senate bill aimed at making Big Pharma lower drug prices, explained.