#^d 2020-04-10 #^h Weekend Roundup
We seem to be at a crossroads, where the pandemic is undiminished but the pressures to re-open the economy have grown to the point where stupidity is taking over. I have to admit I was surprised to see the economy shut down as quickly and firmly as happened in the first weeks of March. I was also surprised that Congress moved so dramatically to compensate victims of the collapse. However, over the last couple of weeks Republicans have started to revert to form. It's never been clearer how they see the stock market as a proxy for America: with the stock market recovered from its initial shock, they don't have any qualms about letting the rest of the economy rot. Sure, they talk about opening up, but what they really want to do is to shirk responsibility: to blame unemployment on chickenshit workers and customers, and bully them into bucking up.
Meme of the week: "The end of stay-at-home orders doesn't mean the pandemic is over. It means they currently have room for you in the ICU."
Some scattered links this week:
David Bacon: Following Mexico's worker strikes, US steps in to keep border factories open.
Peter Baker/Michael Crowley: Two White house coronavirus cases raise question of if anyone is really safe.
Devlin Barrett: Trump vows complete end of Obamacare law despite pandemic.
Zack Beauchamp: The coronavirus killed American exceptionalism.
Katelyn Burns:
Adam Cancryn: Fauci and Birx's public withdrawal worries health experts: "As Trump clamps down on coronavirus communications, voices of experts give way to those of politicians."
John Cassidy:
The most alarming thing about the worst jobs report in history: I count several alarming things here, most suggesting that the 14.7% headline unemployment rate is much lower than reality.
Sean Collins:
The killing of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black jogger in Georgia, explained. Related:
Joel Anderson: The District Attorney who saw "no grounds for arrest" in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery has a history.
Gail Pellett: Running while white . . . and black.
Cleve R Wootson Jr/Michael Brice-Sadler: It took 74 days for suspects to be charged in the death of a black jogger. Many people are asking why it took so long.
Why the Covid-19 economy is particularly devastating to millennials, in 14 charts. Millennials are defined as people born between 1980 and 1997, so 23-40 years old now.
SV Date: Win or loose, Trump's top campaign aides are raking in the cash.
For Parscale, who just a few years ago was designing websites in San Antonio for Trump's properties, among other clients, the sudden wealth has afforded him a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a pair of million-dollar condos, a brand new $400,000 boat, and another half-million dollars in luxury cars, including a Range Rover and a Ferrari.
"This thing has been a large criminal enterprise. It's like that scene in the 'Goodfellas' after the heist," said Republican consultant Stuart Stevens, a veteran of the George W. Bush and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns. "Dishing out furs to mob bosses' girlfriends and wives."
On the other hand, you have to admit that Parscale et al. are really getting in tune with what Trump is all about.
Aaron C Davis: In the early days of the pandemic, the US government turned down an offer to manufacture millions of N95 masks in America. Related:
Isaac Stanley-Becker/Desmond Butler/Nick Miroff: In coronavirus scramble for N95 masks, Trump administration pays premium to third-party vendors.
Jason Dearen/Mike Stobbe: Trump administration buries detailed CDC advice on reopening.
Chauncey DeVega: Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges: These "are the good times -- compared to what's coming next." Interview with Hedges, who insists: "We're heading for a steep decline; Biden and the Democrats have no answers." Concludes with a long pitch on "what does it mean to vote for Joe Biden?" -- projecting into the future every mistake and misstep Biden has made over the last 40-50 years (and sure, there have been a lot of them). On the other hand, to pick just one example, do you really think that Biden wants to further militarize the police and double again the population of American prisons? And do you really think that Democrats today would let him do that? Or sign another trade deal like NAFTA, further decimating America's manufacturing industry? I think it speaks poorly as to Biden's character that he has gone along with (and in rare instances led) such things in the past, and I think Democrats made a mistake nominating a politician with such a miserable record, but I don't think it fates him or them to repeatedly worsen such mistakes in the future. Hedges insists, "America's current political system is a corporate political duopoly." He then admits trivial differences, although the Republican side of the list ("nativists and racists and climate deniers and creationists") doesn't strike me as all that trivial. True, Democrats have long been beholden to the donor class, and they've often put their donors' interests above the people's, but they also depend on the people for votes, and occasionally offer them some consolation and hope -- while Republicans under Trump have little to offer their "base" beyond vindictive rage. Hedges' critique of the "corporate Democrats" has been valid for a long time, but is eroding now as the reality of increasing inequality and risks posed by war, by pollution, by climate change, and by pandemic becomes undeniable. Biden's nomination may be a last hurrah for the Democratic Party old guard, but if elected the problems he will face are ones that only have viable solutions by moving the country to the left. He may well lack the imagination and leadership skills to succeed, but it's hard to see how he could fail worse than the current president and his party. I might respect Hedges' pessimism more if he offered some insight that wasn't simply rooted in repetition of past failures. It may well be true, for instance, that globalization and overpopulation has made pandemics (and similar health risks like resistant bacteria) inevitable and increasingly frequent. It probably is true that climate change is irreversible and will lead to catastrophic events. It may be the case that elites will prove so skilled at manipulating mass psychology that democracy will never get the chance to make rational poitical decisions. It is likely that technology will develop in strange ways with vast unintended consequences. It may be that people are so ill-adapted to civilization that they will tear it down rather than figure out how to humanize it. Serious pessimists can do something with such thoughts. Hedges, on the other hand, offers this prescription for a better future: "Mass mobilization and civil disobedience is what is needed to defeat the oligarchs and take those first steps necessary to win back an American democracy." Sure, that's what left-activists like Hedges have believed and lived by at least since the noble struggle for civil rights, but that never was a tactic virtuous in its own right -- as the anti-abortion movement proved, and today's anti-lockdown protests are reiterating. At some point every movement has to move off the streets and into the voting booths. And even if it's still hard to find candidates clearly committed to "defeating oligarchs" and "restoring democracy," it's not really that hard to identify differences. You can start by preferring candidates who empathize with more people and are more skeptical of elite favors. You can look for candidates who are smarter and more realistic. And if all else fails, you can vote for Democrats on the grounds that (unlike Republicans) they at least on occasion line up with reasonable, fair-minded people.
Jason Ditz:
Trump vetoes 'very insulting' measure limiting his powers to attack Iran. Wouldn't you think that since the Constitution reserves to Congress exclusive power to declare war, a majority resolution passed by both chambers of Congress would suffice to prevent a president from arbitrarily starting a war? Follow up: Senate fails to override Trump's veto of Iran war resolution that would have curbed his ability to launch a strike.
Pompeo vows US will use 'every tool' to rescue Americans from failed Venezuela attack. Wasn't "plausible deniability" part of the plan?
Alan Durning: The plague brought the Renaissance. What could Covid-19 bring? "Three hypotheses on post-pandemic life." Pull quote: "My three hypotheses (and my hope) is that the long-term effect of the coronavirus pandemic will be to strengthen the importance (at least in North America) of competence, science, and solidarity." Evidently by showing what happens when you lack or ignore all three.
Peter Elkind/Doris Burke/Meg Cramer: Meet the shadowy accountants who do Trump's taxes and help him seem richer than he is.
John Feffer: Debunking Trump's China nonsense.
Eric Foner: On the road to emancipation: "The making of the Radical Republicans." Reviews LeeAnna Keith: When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War. Here's a fact I didn't know, but which makes today's polarization seem relatively civil: "Joanne B. Freeman's The Field of Blood relates how nearly every session of Congress from the mid-1830s to the outbreak of civil war in 1861 witnessed members exchanging punches or drawing knives and pistols." I did know about the caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, but thought it more isolated. [Andrew Delbanco reviewed Freeman's book here, starting with details of the assault on Sumner.] Other notes: "Kellie Carter Jackson's recent study of black abolitionists, Force and Freedom, focuses on their increasingly vocal calls for slave rebellion." And: "In The War Before the War, his study of the response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Andrew Delbanco suggests that armed conflict over slavery began years before the attack on Fort Sumter" -- not so surprising given to anyone familiar with the career and legacy of John Brown.
Jacob Heilbrunn: Does the Never Trump movement matter?: Reviews a new book by Robert P Saldin and Steven M Teles: Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites. While GOP elites may have started out uneasy about Trump, their qualms were tactical rather than moral, and they vanished the moment Trump scored his upset victory. It is significant that there are virtually no politicians in the "Never Trump" camp. The only identifiable names are pundits, most of whom write for mainstream outlets which prize the occasional centrist heterodoxy a George Will or a David Brooks trades in. Such writers are only amusing when they lay into Trump (Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot show particular relish there) but become instantly ridiculous the moment they try to defend their conservative bona fides. One imagines they saw their apostasy as a calculated bet given certainty that Trump would prove a colossal failure, and now they're stuck and lost. When the time does come to blot Trump from GOP memory -- as it has for GW Bush -- the party faithful won't remember the "Never Trumpers" for their prescience. They're a spent force both in and beyond their party.
Murtaza Hussain: With a distracted public, the Pentagon tries to get away with killing innocent civilians. Sure, but since when did the US need a pandemic to provide cover for indiscriminate slaughter abroad?
Umair Irfan: It's not your imagination. Allergy season gets worse every year.
Ann Jones: Getting Trumped by Covid-19. First-person narrative, experiencing lockdown first in Norway then in America (Massachusetts). One of those nations dealt with it competently and effectively. One didn't. She tested positive after flying to Boston.
Fred Kaplan:
Trump's medical nationalism will make it harder to defeat Covid-19. Also see: Nahal Toosi/Natasha Bertrand: Fears rise that Trump will incite a global vaccine brawl: If there is one thing everyone should agree on it's that we need international cooperation to develop, test, manufacture, and distribute a coronavirus vaccine. Indeed, the US, with 4% of the world's population but with 30% of cases worldwide, should be especially desperate for the world's help. However, the Trump administration is more concerned with making sure that Big Pharma corners the market. Shows you who Trump really represents.
Sanjana Karanth: Ida B Wells awarded posthumous Pulitzer Prize for lynching investigations. A little late, given that she died in 1931, and her reporting on lynchings date from 1892.
Jen Kirby: The Justice Department has dropped Michael Flynn's case. Related:
Zack Beauchamp: Bill Barr's revealing defense of the Flynn decision.
Josh Gerstein: Barr reignites charge he is conducting Mueller cleanup for Trump.
Lloyd Green: Welcome to William Barr's America, where the truth makes way for the president.
Sean Illing: 11 legal experts agree: There's no good reason for DOJ to drop the Michael Flynn case.
David Kurtz: Why the Flynn dismissal is way worse than a pardon.
Mary B McCord: Bill Barr twisted my words in dropping the Flynn case. Here's the truth.
Heather Digby Parton: Michael Flynn walks free -- and Donald Trump's massive betrayal of America continues. Poor choice of words: "betrayal of America" implies that "America" has some interests distinct from the American people, and her thrust becomes clear with the second sentence landing on Vladimir Putin. As I see it, Flynn is guilty of three things: (1) politicizing his rank as a lieutenant general while still in service, setting himself up as an influential Republican operative once he got fired; (2) using his insider political status to seek out lucrative "consulting" fees from foreign governments (especially, but not exclusively, Turkey), even while seeking a Trump post that would obviously present conflicts of interest; and (3) lying to the FBI about what he had done. Now, the latter doesn't strike me as much of a crime -- indeed, it seems designed to criminalize behavior that is merely embarrassing -- but that he lied is an admission that what he lied about was embarrassing, even if not technically illegal (in which case he could have pleaded the fifth amendment, but that would probably have failed his FBI vetting, and therefore his chance of capitalizing on his appointment). In dropping the charges, Barr is doing something else, even if it's not quite clear exactly what. He seems to be signaling to other Trump people that it's OK to do Flynn-like things, including lie to the FBI, as long as they remain in Trump's good graces. He also seems to be telling the American people that it's OK if politics (or in Flynn's case, the pursuit of money and influence) skirts a few laws -- that the Justice Department will use its discretion to decide who to prosecute and who it can exempt, and that those decisions are more clearly than ever ones of political expediency. I don't know whether that "betrays America," but it most definitely screws the American people.
Jeffrey Toobin: The Michael Flynn dismissal is another shot in Trump's war on the Mueller investigation.
Philip Weiss: Mike Flynn ran interference for Israel -- but that angle goes unmentioned by press.
Michael Klare: The beginning of the end for oil? [Also at TomDispatch.]
Naomi Klein: Screen New Deal: "Under cover of mass death, Andrew Cuomo calls in the billionaires to build a high-tech dystopia." Also on Cuomo:
Paul Krugman:
An epidemic of hardship and hunger: "Why won't Republicans help Americans losing their jobs?"
Trump and his infallible advisers: "Beware men who never admit having been wrong." As many have noted, Trump seems constitutionally incapable of admitting error, even when confronted with his own claims that coronavirus cases "within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero" and the economy is "holding up nicely."
At a time of crisis, America is led by a whiny, childlike man whose ego is too fragile to let him concede ever having made any kind of error. And he has surrounded himself with people who share his lack of character.
But where do these people come from? What has struck me, as details of Trump's coronavirus debacle continue to emerge, is that he wasn't getting bad advice from obscure, fringe figures whose only claim to fame was their successful sycophancy. On the contrary, the people telling him what he wanted to hear were, by and large, pillars of the conservative establishment with long pre-Trump careers.
But when Krugman expands upon an example, he picks Kevin Hassett, who strikes me as pretty fringe, although he does have a long pre-Trump career, most notoriously his 1999 book Dow 36,000. Hassett was given the job of figuring out a way to model Covid-19 cases to make them disappear or at least diminish. For more on this, see Matthew Yglesias: The Trump administration's "cubic model" of coronavirus deaths, explained. Krugman closes:
Yes, Trump's insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P.
Trump's narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn't an outlier; he's more a culmination of the American right's long-term trend toward intellectual degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump's character, is what is leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.
Crashing economy, rising stocks: What's going on? "What's bad for America is sometimes good for the market." The simplest explanation is that Trump et al. actually care about the stock market, unlike workers, people, or even the economy -- not just because they're all about the 1% that owns 70% of the stocks, but because return on investment is the only thing that really matters to them. Of course, given their notorious incompetence, they still might blow it, but it turns out that it's remarkably easy to bolster the stock market: just shell out lots of money to companies, especially to banks, and the Fed is designed just to do that.
Robert Kuttner: The zombie invasion of Team Biden: "As I wrote last week, the Biden campaign has been doing its best to conceal Larry Summers's involvement in the campaign. But now Bloomberg News has outed him." Let me add one more point: the problem with Summers isn't just that he's often wrong (although he is, and spectacularly so), but that he's such a dominant intellectual bully that he sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, letting no one else get a word in. Of course, blame for that should be shared by Clinton and Obama, who gave Summers positions that gave him that kind of leverage. From what I gather, Obama had fairly major issues both with Summers and Geithner, but was rarely (if ever) able to overrule them. It's hard to see how Biden could stand up to him.
Eric Levitz: The GOP isn't cynical enough to save us from a depression: "For Republicans, some things are more important than winning an election -- and denying aid to vulnerable workers is one of them."
Laura McGann: The agonizing story of Tara Reade. "Here's what I found, and where I'm stuck."
Jeannie Suk Gersen: A fair examination of the allegations against Joe Biden can strengthen the #MeToo movement.
Linda Hirshman: I believe Tara Reade. I'm voting for Joe Biden anyway.
Amber Phillips: What we know about Tara Reade's sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden.
Matthew Surridge: The Biden bluff: "It would be better if Biden were a good man. But he's a better choice than Trump." I'd say that more important than being "a good man," I'd rather Biden had a good grasp of what we need politically.
Stephanie Mencimer: What's killing the white working class? "The GOP continues to supply more of the policies that are destroying its base." Review of Anne Case and Angus Deaton: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. They were among the first to note a downturn in life expectancy among working class whites, and they build on that discovery here. I'm less sure about the political dimension. Republicans get a reliable majority of white working class votes, even though by any objective measure Republican policies have made working class lives poorer and riskier. However, I wonder whether the subset of the working class that votes for Trump and other Republicans doesn't differ from the class as a whole: by having (for the moment) more stable jobs, by enjoying more robust families, by being able to call on the support of churches. In contrast, the people who are dying prematurely are most likely the ones who have slipped through the fractures. Republicans have done a remarkable job of convincing a majority of the white working class that the failures of their neighbors are due to their personal weaknesses (abetted by sinister liberal elites), and that their best defense is to join the Republican defense of their culture. That's a krock, of course, but until tragedy strikes, most people like to think they are immune.
Ian Millhiser:
Republicans plan to spend at least $20 million to combat voting rights lawsuits in 2020.
The Supreme Court's "Bridgegate" decision leaves a big hole in America's anti-corruption laws. Note the decision was unanimous, and written by Elena Kagan.
A Supreme Court showdown over birth control got much messier Wednesday.
The Supreme Court weighs whether to make the Electoral College even less democratic.
The Supreme Court hears the biggest presidential immunity cases since Nixon: "The Trump subpoena cases are about whether the president is above the law."
Supreme Court to hear 2 cases about when religious employers can ignore civil rights laws.
James Muldoon: Why we need cooperatives for the digital economy: I'd go a step further and assert that any commercial software platform can be supplanted by a publicly-funded cooperative which would be cheaper to develop and run, more reliable, more functional for many more people, and free of both obvious and hidden traps and taxes.
Jan-Werner Müller: One damn thing after another: Review of recent books by Sheri Berman (Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day) and Adam Przeworski (Crises of Democracy).
Anna North: Trump administration releases new campus sexual assault rules in the midst of the pandemic.
Caitlin Oprysko: Trump drafts everyday Americans to adopt his battlefield rhetoric. In his State of the Union speech, Trump warned about the peril of "stupid wars," not that his insight kept him from pursuing them at roughly the same rate as his predecessors (granting, of course, that the Bushes were a bit more intense and reckless). Trump's innovation has been to come up with an even stupider war: one fought against an "invisible enemy"; one to be fought not thousands of miles away but locally; one fought not by trained, expensively equipped volunteer soldiers but by every working person, with few (if any) defenses; one fought for no reason other than to make the president look good, and to help his business supporters make money. Trump's "leadership" in this reminds me of how eager many generals have often been to sacrifice foot soldiers to secure pyrrhic victories.
Encouraging the public to transition out of isolation and into the world, the president is increasingly deploying battlefield rhetoric in asking everyday Americans to confront a raging coronavirus pandemic that has already infected 1.3 million people in the U.S. and killed more than 80,000 -- and this week clawed its way into the inner circle of his White House.
"The people of our country should think of themselves as warriors," he said during a recent visit to a face mask plant in Arizona. "Our country has to open."
A day later, reporters at the White House asked the president whether the new moniker was his way of telling the American people to swallow the fact that reopening the economy will result in more Covid-19 cases -- and therefore more deaths.
"So I called these people warriors," he responded, gesturing to nurses gathered behind him. "And I'm actually calling now . . . the nation warriors. We have to be warriors. We can't keep our country closed down for years. And we have to do something."
As Leana S Wen explains in Six flaws in the arguments for reopening, "it's worth the sacrifice if some people die so that the country has a functioning economy" is "a false choice; there are ways to safely reopen, and consumer confidence depends on the reassurance of public health protections." More warrior talk:
Josh Marshall: The paramount leader is ready for sacrifice: your sacrifice.
Evan Osnos: The folly of Trump's blame-Beijing coronavirus strategy.
Alex Pareene:
Trump's coronavirus task farce.
The task force is the perfect model of governance for our time, because it is made up of people who assign tasks to other people, wait for them to finish, and then assume that somehow, they got it done themselves. It depends on our modern cult of executive worship, which takes the fact that certain people have the power to make people below them carry out their orders and turns it into an innate ability to Get Things Done.
The Democrats' cult of pragmatism: A piece I had missed from March 9, 2020, back when the Democrats still had a presidential primary race, and the inevitable didn't even look very likely. Indeed, more here on Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emmanuel than on the mediocrity who finally snagged the nomination.
Charles P Pierce: More than a dozen titles in his blog caught my eye, but I wanted to link to this one because it's a piece of the sort of everyday graft the Trump administration is rife with but rarely gets called out on: This is just business as usury for this administration*: "Mick Mulvaney's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pulled out all the stops to protect the profits of payday lenders." Some other representative titles:
Francine Prose: Will Americans ever forgive Trump for his heartless lack of compassion? I rather suspect the answer is mixed. If Trump was able to display the combination of diligence and compassion that we witnessed from, say, Rudy Giuliani in the first couple weeks after 9/11 (before he started reading his polling and decided he deserved a third mayoral term), his polling would be much higher (although soft, given the likelihood of a return to form). On the other hand, I imagine that a sizable chunk of his followers actually likes the idea that he's a cold, conniving bastard, and while they don't necessarily approve of him only thinking of himself, they do like the idea that he continues to piss off those they perceive as their sworn enemies -- and that matters much more to them than even whether he's relatable.
Brian Resnick: 4 reasons state plans to open up may backfire -- and soon. By the way, efforts to reopen in South Korea and Germany have already backfired. See: Nicole Winfield/Vanessa Gera/Amy Forliti: Reopenings bring new cases in S. Korea, virus fears in Italy.
David Roberts: Democrats should make voting reform a nonnegotiable baseline for the next stimulus bill: "Universal vote-by-mail is the only way to ensure free and fair elections in November." Cites Colorado research showing that mail-in voting "raised turnout more than 10 points among the most vulnerable demographics, including low-income voters, and benefited Republicans and Democrats equally." Republicans are unlikely to believe that the issue is non-partisan -- states with heavy mail-in voting tend to vote Democrat -- and have staked much of their political future on various schemes to suppress the vote. The one thing mail-in voting indisputably does is increase turnout, making elections more representative of popular will. Anyone who believes in democracy will take that as a plus, but unfortunately many Republican leaders do not, and are willing to risk questions about the legitimacy of their wins when they are based on ever-smaller plebiscites.
Corey Robin:
The pandemic is the time to resurrect the public university.
Comrades: The inner life of American communism. Review of Vivian Gornick: The Romance of American Communism (originally 1977) and Jodi Dean: Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. Robin also wrote this note: CUNY, corona, and communism.
Aaron Rupar:
Trump claims Germany and Japan are "following us" in their coronavirus responses. No chance.
"I learned a lot from Richard Nixon": Trump's latest Fox & Friends interview went strange places.
Trump's train wreck ABC interview illustrated why he rarely strays from Fox News.
Trump just completely mischaracterized new models showing a coming surge in coronavirus deaths.
TRUMP: "Katie, she tested very good for a long period of time, and then all of a sudden she tested positive . . . this is why the whole concept of tests aren't necessarily great . . . today, I guess, for some reason, she tested positive."
I noticed this when Rosanne Cash replied:
Once I took a pregnancy test and it was negative for a long time, and then ALL OF A SUDDEN it was positive and I said what is this whole concept and then, for some reason, I had a baby.
Alexander Sammon: The absolute absurdity of blanket corporate immunity: "With his new proposal, McConnell rides to the rescue of America's least imperiled." Well, there needs to be some form of enforcement of safety practices to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Torts have always been a last resort to limit abuses of power by businesses (or anyone else), but they're slow, expensive, and effectively arbitrary. I don't see how the long-term threat of lawsuits can be trusted to ensure public safety, but unless you come up with some more efficient means of enforcement, blanket immunity is only likely to encourage businesses to abuse their powers and skirt their responsibilities. Moreover, it's not clear where this is coming from. At this point, most businesses are much more concerned with reassuring workers and customers that they're safe to open. On the other hand, McConnell may have a long-term goal to make it all but impossible for customers and workers to sue companies, and sees this as a moment to wedge immunity in. "Never let a crisis go to waste," and all that.
Dylan Scott: Thousands will go uninsured in the Covid-19 outbreak because Republicans rejected Medicaid expansion.
Emily Stewart:
The essential worker trap: "It's hard to get unemployment benefits if you've been deemed 'essential.'" Indeed, it seems like a lot of the push to "re-open" the economy is coming from states looking to cut unemployment costs/benefits.
Matt Taibbi: The bailout miscalculation that could crash the economy.
Ishaan Tharoor: A Bay of Pigs-style fiasco in Venezuela.
Philip Weiss: Bush was worse than Trump. Reaction to Peter Baker: George W Bush calls for end to pandemic partisanship, where (not for the first time) Bush proved to be saner, smarter, and more of a statesman than Trump. Of course, any attempt to rehabilitate Bush -- even if the point is to illuminate how awful Trump is -- isn't worth the confusion. The fact is that Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump form a series, where each is worse because their predecessors each left the polity in much worse shape than they found it. Weiss singles out the Iraq War as proof that Bush was the worst, but my own view is that Iraq was just a stupid, arrogant afterthought to Bush's real disaster, which was the decision to invade Afghanistan -- a decision Bush still rarely gets credit for, because the media campaign was so automatic that the major people Bush defeated (McCain in the primary, Gore in the main) would have done exactly the same thing. (Presumably not my candidate, Ralph Nader. But even Bernie Sanders voted for the War on Terror; Barbara Lee was the only one with the foresight and fortitude to vote against the mad rush to war.) Every time I see one of these attempts at Bush nostalgia, I'm reminded of the SNL skit where Will Ferrell plays GW Bush and delivers the truest line ever: "So I just wanted to address my fellow Americans tonight and remind you guys that I was really bad." Also see:
David Sirota: Celebrating war criminal George W Bush to "own" Donald Trump.
One should never forget how much severe damage GW Bush did relative to when he started out -- worst of all was his "War on Terror," which his successors have extended another dozen years with no sense of a change of mind, a militarization of the American psyche that has meant that a generation of Americans have known nothing but vicious insanity, but his two terms were riddled with atrocious policy, starting with his tax cuts, ending with the recession caused by years of indulging Wall Street. Still, you Bush usually had the decency to hide his plans behind a shroud of lies and doublespeak. Trump has mostly extended Bush's standard Republican policy directions -- his cruel turn against immigration is Trump's one major innovation -- what has changed is how shameless Trump is about his contempt for law, for decency, for the great majority of people he seeks to trample on.
Matthew Yglesias:
The unemployment rate soared to 14.7 percent in April. The chart is especially striking, with the unprecedentedly huge instant jump, from the lowest rate since 1980 to nearly 30% more than the previous post-1980 high. Even so, the monthly report understates the current rate, which "is actually 20 percent." (A couple weeks ago I did some math based on raw figures and came up with 19.2% unemployment. Using my formula from then, unemployment should be up to about 25.1% now -- minus whatever small number of people who filed unemployment claims but have since returned or found new work.)
Li Zhou: "Leave no vacancy behind": Mitch McConnell remains laser-focused on judges amid coronavirus. He understands that Republican control of the Senate and Presidency are tenuous, but once confirmed judges serve for life. And while partisan judges cannot legislate, they can powerfully restrict the ability of the people to make meaningful changes to law and government. More evidence that the Republicans are more focused on conserving their power than on letting future governments serve the will of the people.