#^d 2019-09-06 #^h Weekend Roundup
Once again, ran out of time before I could get around to an introduction. The impeachment story rolls on, and Trump is getting weirder and freakier than ever. Meanwhile, more bad shit is happening than I can get a grip on. And what's likely to happen when the new Supreme Court gets down to business. Once you tote up all the damage Trump's election directly causes, you need to look up "opportunity costs."
Some scattered links this week:
Zeeshan Aleem: A second whistleblower on Trump and Ukraine is coming forward.
Michael Amia: Trump wants to shoot people in the legs. The United States' closest ally already does that. It's long been clear to me that a big part of the love US right-wingers have for Israel is envy: they wish their own country to become as brutal, as imperious, as militarist as Israel has proven to be.
Alexia Fernández Campbell:
The economy is slowing down. That's bad for Trump.: "The latest jobs report is . . . not great." For more, see: Dean Baker: Job growth remains slow in September.
Trump just expanded drug testing to hundreds of thousands of workers.
Warren just released the most ambitious labor reform platform of the 2020 campaign.
Jonathan Chait:
The only issue left is Trump's 'absolute right' to solicit collusion.
Trump just committed more high crimes on the White House lawn.
Trump recommends many books but never says he actually read them.
Pence: I participated in the Ukraine Plot but only as a patsy.
Intelligence Inspector General to GOP: You know nothing of my work; alt title: "Trump-picked Intelligence I.G.debunks GOP conspiracy theory."
Michelle Chen: The US border security industry could be worth $740 billion by 2023. A shocking number, but it was already worth $305 billion in 2011.
Jelani Cobb: Why Trump, facing impeachment, warns of civil war.
Andrew Cockburn: Just how swampy are US-Saudi arms deals?
Patrick Cockburn: The post-Saddam Hussein settlement in Iraq is on the brink of collapse.
David Daley: How to get away with gerrymandering.
Ryan Devereaux: Mining the future: Climate change, migration, and militarization in Arizona's borderlands.
Jason Ditz: US test fires ICBM, declares it a 'visible message of national security' ("which flew 4,200 miles from California to the Marshall Islands"): a non-story compared to North Korea test-firing smaller missiles or China "showing off arms in a parade," despite being pointed toward China and North Korea.
Harry Enten: Trump's impeachment polling is historically unprecedented.
James K Galbraith: This 50-year-old economic book helps explain the corporate republic we live in: On James K Galbraith's The New Industrial State (1967).
David Gardner: Donald Trump's 'maximum pressure' campaign against Iran has backfired.
Matt Gertz: Team Trump's 2020 strategy is Clinton Cash all over again. But wouldn't the likelihood of it working be dependent on the Democrats nominating a candidate like Hillary Clinton?
Masha Gessen: The difference between leaking and whistle-blowing in the Trump White House. Refers to a new book by Tom Mueller on the history of whistle-blowing: Crisis of Conscience, and notes:
An effective whistle-blower stays below the radar while methodically collecting information; staying power and an ability to remain inconspicuous are key. The person who blew the whistle on Trump and Ukraine appears to possess both of these qualities, and others: the complaint is meticulously documented and worded with exquisite care. By its very existence, the document blows the whistle on the Trumpian style -- hasty, sloppy, overblown, and unsubstantiated.
Other opponents of Trumpism within the government have leaked rather than blown the whistle. No sooner was the President inaugurated than members of the White House staff told reporters that the President acted like a "clueless child," had no interest in intelligence reports, spent his time watching TV, and was largely kept out of the decision-making process. These stories, which began in January of 2017, quickly grew familiar, and the more bizarre the reality they described, the greater their normalizing effect.
Tara Golshan/Ella Nilsen: Elizabeth Warren's new remedy for corruption: a tax on lobbying.
Dana Goodyear: Trump's war on California and the climate.
Conn Hallinan: How the Saudi oil field attack overturned America's apple cart: "For all their overwhelming firepower, the U.S. and its allies can cause a lot of misery in the Middle East, but still can't govern the course of events."
Sarah Jones:
Who ordered this Clinton comeback tour: "All she is doing is making herself radioactive."
Peter Kafka: The 2 companies that place all those ads at the bottom of webpages are combining: "Taboola is buying Outbrain."
Ed Kilgore:
Some impeachment-shy Democrats just fear it will backfire, as do some impeachment-shy "progressive" pundits. One worry is no doubt Trump campaign to drop bomb on Biden in early voting states: Trump's reelection effort "will air over $1 million in anti-Biden commercials in Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada" -- probably the most blatant attempt to influence other party primary voting since Nixon's "dirty tricks" campaign against Edmund Muskie in 1972. This almost looks like Trump baited the Democrats into impeaching him, just for the free publicity.
What will Republicans do if Trump goes down? A rather silly exercise in handicapping the Republican bench. Trump is more likely to die suddenly or become debilitated than to be convicted by this Senate, in which case Republicans could scramble but would probably figure Pence the best shot at saving Trump's legacy. The fact is that Trump not only owns the public perception of the Party, he's the only one with proven ability to convince a significant bloc of far-from-wealthy voters to cut their own throats. Kilgore also contributed to Is there any chance the GOP is about to turn on Trump? Uh, no.
Here we go: Supreme Court accepts first big post-Kavanaugh abortion case.
Will progressive Democrats 'move to the center' when facing Trump? Could be, but Sanders and Warren have spelled out their platforms so extensively that it will be hard for them to run on anything else -- at most, they'll concede that some things they want will be lesser priorities as long as significant numbers of Democrats aren't on board. Should they is another question. It looks to me like Trump's going to try to run to the left of centrist Democrats, presenting them as corrupt and himself as the champion of working people and as the defender of Social Security and Medicare. Moreover, he'll make mincemeat of any Democrat as hawkish as Hillary Clinton. Sure, it will all be lies, but he's done it before, and it's not clear how much credibility four years of broken promises has cost him. The one Democrat he can't feint left of is Sanders, and in that case he may not try, figuring red-baiting will do the trick. The big advantage that Sanders has, even over Warren, is that no one doubts his sincerity or his integrity, and up against Trump those are the characteristics that matter most. Of course, compared to Trump, any Democrat should be able to score those points, but moving to the lame, corrupt, ineffective center won't help them. Only moving to the left will.
Nixon's defenders claimed he was a victim of a 'coup.' So did Clinton's. Only a story now because Trump's claiming that too -- started, in fact, back during the Mueller inquiry.
Carolyn Kormann: How oceans rise and die on a warming planet: As Jane Lubchenco, a former US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator, puts it: "The ocean today is higher, warmer, more acidic, less productive, and it holds less oxygen."
As a result, coral reefs are bleaching a ghostly white, and, although some can recover, others are dying at a rapid rate. Monster storms are persistent. Marine heat waves -- projected to increase fiftyfold if current trends continue -- are depleting fisheries. Ocean acidification is severely harming all sorts of species, which then harms people, too, since many of these species are critical to local economies. Glaciers are melting faster with consequences for people in the mountains and on the coasts alike.
Anita Kumar: A Trump hotel mystery: Giant reservations followed by empty rooms: "The House is investigating whether groups tried to curry favor with Trump by booking rooms at his hotels but never using them."
Jonathan Lethem: Snowden in the labyrinth: Review of Edward Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record.
Eric Levitz:
Dylan Matthews: Why almost no one is guilty of treason, explained: "Adam Schiff isn't guilty of treason, nor is Donald Trump, and neither is just about any other person you can think of." Then why not just expunge the word from our vocabulary?
Jane Mayer: The invention of the conspiracy theory on Biden and Ukraine.
Ian Millhiser: Trump's DOJ just escalated the fight over whether religion is a license to discriminate.
Jeremy Mohler: This California highway boondoggle shows why we need more infrastructure funding: And why "public-private partnerships are a poor replacement for robust federal investment in infrastructure."
Benjamin Mueller: Jeremy Corbyn or no-deal Brexit? The UK might have to choose.
Ella Nilsen:
Democrats have subpoenaed the White House in the next phase of their impeachment inquiry.
Warren and Sanders raised significantly more money than Biden in the third quarter. Biden came in fourth, also trailing Pete Buttigieg. Or, as ABC put it, Warren surpasses Biden in latest fundraising haul but falls short of Sanders. I've seen a meme (probably from the Sanders campaign, but I can't find a viable link) which lists the "top donors by profession" for Biden (president of company, managing partner, real estate developer, lawyer, investor), Warren (psychologist, scientist, editor, librarian, psychotherapist), and Sanders (teacher, nurse, farmer, truck driver, waiter/waitress, construction). For a similar breakdown along these lines, see Karl Evers-Hillstrom: Sanders or Warren: Why gets more support from working-class donors?
Toluse Olorunnpia/Amy Goldstein: Trump attacks Democrats' health care plans and pledges to protect Medicare during political speech to Florida retirees. The big lie is on, but note that Trump is signaling that he intends to run to the left of Democrats on health care, even though what he means is something completely different.
President Trump blasted his potential Democratic presidential rivals in a highly political speech here Thursday, telling a group of senior citizens that "maniac" Democrats would rip away their health care, decimate their retirement accounts and prioritize undocumented immigrants over U.S. citizens.
"All of the Democrat plans would devastate our health care system," Trump said during a visit to The Villages, where he signed an executive order designed to expand the private-sector version of Medicare that Republicans favor.
Here's what Charles P Pierce wrote about the same Trump speech: The President* is a blight, but watch what the conservative movement's up to behind him: "They're coming for Medicare, folks." Pierce blogs more often than I feel like citing, but some of his best titles last week:
Eric Trump just penned one of history's greatest philosophical texts: "The Really Not Smart One strikes again, this time citing The Gladiator."
This is a John LeCarré novel starring the Marx Brothers. It's also a smoking arsenal. "Every Republican in Congress now looks like a fool or a crook. There is no alternative."
Nothing's over in the Ukraine mess until Giuliani's done breaking things: "Kurt Volker, former US special envoy to Ukraine, provided Congress with more background on Rudy's antics Thursday."
Florida just got a sneak peek of coming attractions in the climate crisis: "Those Chinese climate hoaxsters sure are working hard."
The Secretary of Agriculture just came out and said America is for Big Business: "Interesting tack at a meeting of small farmers who are already in trouble."
Freedom Caucus loon Mark Meadows is now embroiled in a creationist dinosaur dig controversy.
Brittany Packnett: The real reason Amber Guyger was convicted. An off-duty white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man in his apartment in Texas. Against odds, she was charged and convicted of murder.
Police officers have killed over a thousand people a year in recent years: Of those killed by police since 2005, less than 100 officers have been arrested, only 35 officers have been convicted -- and, as of March, only three of them of murder. Less than 1 percent of all officers are convicted when their victim is Black -- even though Black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed by police.
Packnett credits the verdict to a fully integrated jury. However, before you start thinking that justice is starting to work in America, note: Anya van Wagtendonk: Joshua Brown, a key witness in the murder trial against Amber Guyger, was fatally shot.
Troy Patterson: A new book argues that Trump is television in human form: On James Poniewozik's Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America.
Poniewozik almost wants to rate Trump as a great postmodern thinker, but the problem is that Trump does not think. Nonetheless, Trump is a great postmodern feeler, who intuits and responds to the stimuli of electronic media with the dark brilliance of an idiot savant, in the sure belief that only suckers care about objective truth. Poniewozik calls Trump's daily performance qua Trump a manifestation of "lizard-brain postmodernism -- the salesman's intuition that the cartoon of a thing was more powerful to people than the thing itself."
William Rivers Pitt: Trump is spreading fear because he fears impeachment: The one thing about the impeachment inquiry that I find most perplexing is why Trump has reacted with such crazed panic. Surely he knows that the Republican Senate will never remove him from office. And given that there is zero chance of the Republican Party denying him nomination for a second term, the only contest that really matters is the 2020 election. Yet every day he squirms, rants, raves, acting out in ways that not only don't offer any practical defense against the charges but really make most people question his competency and even sanity.
Peter Pomerantsev: Rudy Giuliani welcomes you to Eastern Europe: "So much about the Trump administration seems pulled from the playbook of a post-Soviet kleptocracy." Other Putin critics, like Masha Gessen, have said much the same thing, most likely because that's what they're used to seeing. I doubt Trump is consciously taking Putin as a model (no matter how sympathetic he is). Rather, cynical oligarchs don't have many options in how to spin their corruption.
Andrew Prokop: The incredibly damning Ukraine texts from State Department officials, explained.
Richard V Reeves: Now the rich want your pity, too: "If the wealthy are so stressed out, whose fault is that?"
David Remnick: "Stupid Watergate" is worse than the original. A game effort to make the case, anyway, not least by pointing out that both scandals started as efforts to rig elections and as such were attacks on our faith in democracy. But even though I don't doubt that a Trump dictatorship would be even more malign than a Nixon one, the only dimension where Trump is way ahead of Nixon is stupid, and I don't see how that makes it worse. What might make it worse is that most Republicans today are so shameless and so desperate to cling onto power that they've lost the capacity to understand when their president breaks bad.
Doyle Rice: The Earth just had its hottest September on record: For what little it's worth, Wichita bucked the trend all summer long, but got with the program for September: possibly not a record, but hottest month we've had all year, still above 90F on 9/30 (but 49F as I write this).
David Rohde: How disinformation reaches Donald Trump.
Aaron Rupar:
Mike Pence's stunning hypocrisy on foreign election interference, in one quote.
Trump insists he just wants foreign countries to tackle "corruption." Here's why that's absurd.
America's top election official explains why Trump may be committing crimes.
Irony is dead: The Trump sons are doing everything possible to make corruption a major 2020 issue.
48 hours illustrating how Trump's abuse-of-power scandal has split Fox News.
Eric Schmitt/Maggie Haberman/Edward Wong: Trump endorses Turkish military operation in Syria, shifting US policy: What's the Kurdish word for people who are recruited, used up, and carelessly discarded? Once "comrades-in-arms," now more like "losers."
Jeremy Singer-Vine/Kevin Collier: Political operatives are faking voter outrage with millions of made-up comments to benefit the rich and powerful. Case in point: 22 million public comments submitted to FCC on net neutrality regulations.
Danny Sjursen: Impeach all presidents: Sure, it's hard to think of any recent US president who hasn't committed high crimes along the way, especially in using the US military to kill people in other countries. Even Nixon's Watergate crimes paled in comparison to other things he did, like his coup in Chile and his escalation in Indochina. Some Democrats will tell you that Trump forced them to impeach, but it's always been a process that has been selectively used for distinct political purposes. On the other hand, when you can impeach, why not? The charges brought against Clinton were bullshit, but at the time I urged convicting him, because he had done other things that merited removing him from office (e.g., his bombing operations in Iraq, which his Republican foes usually applauded).
Jeff Stein/Tom Hamburger/Josh Dawsey: IRS whistleblower said to report Treasury political appointee might have tried to interfere in audit of Trump or Pence.
Jonathan Swan: Mulvaney predicts post-impeachment landslide. "Mulvaney also believes that the longer the impeachment process drags on, the better it is, politically, for Trump." Impeachment also seems to be spurring small donors, which is not a resource Trump had in 2016. I don't doubt that Mulvaney's attitude exists, especially among Trump's inner circle of sycophants, but I think it's more likely that less-committed voters will get sick and tired of all the noise, especially given how erratic Trump has been acting.
Matt Taibbi: The 'whistleblower' probably isn't: "It's an insult to real whistleblowers to use the term with the Ukrainegate protagonist."
Anton Troianovski/Chris Mooney: Radical warming in Siberia eaves millions on unstable ground.
Anya van Wagtendonk: Rick Perry's spent a lot of time in Ukraine. Now he's caught up in the impeachment inquiry. For more on Perry, see: Chas Danner: What we know about Trump's bizarre attempt to blame Rick Perry for the Ukraine call.
Alex Ward:
Robin Wright: Trump's close-call diplomacy with Iran's President.
Christopher Wylie: How I helped hack democracy: An excerpt from the author's book, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytics and the Plot to Break America.
Matthew Yglesias:
Li Zhou/Hannah Brown: 1999 vs. 2019: Senate Republicans' attitudes on impeachment sure have changed a lot: Many examples, first two Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell.