#^d 2020-06-28 #^h Weekend Roundup
Late-breaking tweet from @realDonaldTrump: "Nobody wants a Low IQ person in charge of our Country," trying to deflect from the obvious by adding that "Sleepy Joe is definitely a Low IQ person!" Sure, he's never struck me as especially bright, but it's rather clever that the Democrats are nominating someone Trump cannot attack without the slanders reflecting back on him.
Trump's approval rate at 538 is down to 40.6%, with 56.1% disapprove. That's the biggest split I can recall.
Onion headline: Officials warn defunding police could lead to spike in crime from ex-officers with no outlet for violence. When I mentioned this to my wife, she already had examples to cite. Article cites "L.A. police chief Michel Moore" as saying:
The truth is that there are violent people in our society, and we need a police department so they have somewhere to go during the day to channel their rage. If these cuts are allowed to continue, we could be looking at a very real future where someone with a history of domestic abuse is able to terrorize their spouse with impunity instead of being occupied testing out new tactical military equipment or pepper-spraying some random teens. The fact that these dangerous attackers and killers are being gainfully employed by the LAPD is the only thing standing between us and complete chaos.
By the way, there is a new batch of questions and answers, not all on music. Ask more, here.
Some scattered links this week:
Zeeshan Aleem:
Hannah Allam: Vehicle attacks rise as extremists target protesters.
Isaac J Bailey: We don't need to cancel George Washington. But we should be honest about who he was. I agree with that. Washington, and for that matter Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe are not just important figures in American history, but can also still be inspiring. In some respects, I could argue the same for Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, to pick two highly problematic characters who have received some critical attention recently. Nor am I much bothered by statues of Christopher Columbus, although I can't think of any redeeming qualities he had. Again, the history should be made clear, but I'm not sure the icons matter much. The Confederates are one exception I'll grant: the sooner we get rid of these tokens of white supremacy, the better. And I hope some day the deliberately orchestrated plot to names things after Ronald Reagan gets unrolled. Nothing good can be linked back to his legacy. And if you don't want to melt all that "art" down, perhaps store it in a musty museum somewhere -- as long as it's treated with the solemnity of Auschwitz. By the way, I'm totally cool with John Wayne airport could get a new name that doesn't celebrate a homophobic white supremacist.
Riley Beggin:
Trump thanks the "great people" in a video featuring a supporter yelling "white power".
What we know about a shooting at a protest in Louisville: "One person was killed at an anti-racism and police brutality protest."
US must release children from detention centers due to Covid-19, judge rules.
Trump signs an executive order on prosecuting those who destroy monuments.
Steve Benen: How the GOP gave up on governing in order to keep winning elections: Excerpt from Benen's new book, The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics. More on this "no governing" meme below.
Charles M Blow: Can we call Trump a killer? Argues for "his culpability in the neglectful handling of the coronavirus." That's a distinction I don't find terribly interesting, but there are other cases where the evidence is undeniable, like the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Suleimani, which Trump has bragged about. You might object that all US presidents order killings abroad, but that's no excuse let alone comfort. Obama got his first taste of blood when he ordered the killing of a Somali pirate, and that just opened the floodgates, leading to hundreds of drone killings and the summary execution of Osama Bin Laden, as well as the Air Force's casual slaughter of bystanders. You might object that the sheer numbers lost to Trump's delayed Covid-19 reaction and premature re-opening far exceed the drone kill count (perhaps not the military offensives), and besides here we're talking dead Americans, but negligence is always messy to prove. On the other hand, where has Trump not been negligent and careless? The Mexico border and Puerto Rico are two cases that leap to mind, and I expect you can find bodies there, too. On the other hand, calling him Killer is too likely to be taken as flattery. I'll wait for the ICC indictments.
Max Blumenthal:
Jim Bovard: The Korean War atrocities no one wants to talk about. Technically, the Korea War is America's longest running war -- 70 years this week -- because the US never had the decency to acknowledge that it was pointless and over. But that's hardly the only thing the US remains in denial over. More on Korea:
Khang Vu: Trump is wrecking South Korea's relationship with North Korea.
Max Balhorn: How South Korea's pro-democracy movement fought to ban "murderous tear gas".
Doug Bandow: We should celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Korean War by leaving: "The US doesn't need to protect the south any more." More pointedly, the US is keeping South Korea from negotiating its own separate peace -- as such, the US presence is more threatening than reassuring.
Dan DePetris: Don't tie peace on the Korean Peninsula to denuclearization in the North. We have managed to live with "hostile" powers possessing nuclear weapons since 1950, and none have used those bombs against us (unlike what the US did to Japan in 1945, when the US still had a monopoly on such terror). The only thing that makes North Korea different is that we've insisted on not formally ending the war which de facto ended in 1953. The only way to lessen the threat is to reduce the degree of hostility, which at present mostly takes the form of crippling economic sanctions against the North, and to open up formal lines of communication and trade. Recognizing that North Korea has nuclear weapons and the rocketry to deliver them is at this point common sense. Morever, it's clear that the only reason they bothered to develop such useless weapons is to force the US to recognize that they're too dangerous not to treat with the basic respect that normal nations routinely show each other. For more, see the Reckford article below, which also cites the failure of sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela to produce any results imagined as favorable to the US.
Jessica Lee: The Korean War started the trend of endless wars for America. How do we change course?
The United States is not equipped to solve every global problem. No nation is. In the case of the Korean War, our failure to close that chapter of history has allowed mistrust to fester for so long that détente seems impossible, despite the fact that lowering tensions would protect U.S. interests in the region better than the status quo.
Owen Miller: Uncovering the hidden history of the Korean War.
Kap Seol: The US didn't bring freedom to South Korea -- its people did.
Seong-ho Sheen: To have any chance at ending the Korea War, America must become more flexible.
Louie Reckford: Why Trump's 'maximum pressure' campaigns are a maximum failure.
John Cassidy: Donald Trump's big problem with senior voters.
Kyle Cheney/Leah Nylen: Prosecutor says he was pressured to cut Roger Stone 'a break' because of his ties to Trump.
Sarah Churchwell: American Fascism: It has happened here.
American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn't mean they're not fascist, it means they're not European and it's not the 1930s. They remain organized around classic fascist tropes of nostalgic regeneration, fantasies of racial purity, celebration of an authentic folk and nullification of others, scapegoating groups for economic instability or inequality, rejecting the legitimacy of political opponents, the demonization of critics, attacks on a free press, and claims that the will of the people justifies violent imposition of military force. Vestiges of interwar fascism have been dredged up, dressed up, and repurposed for modern times. Colored shirts might not sell anymore, but colored hats are doing great.
Max Cohen: Bernie's student army learns to live with Biden. Given time (and Trump), stories like this were bound to appear.
Aaron Ross Coleman: Protesters win a new investigation into Elijah McClain's death.
Nancy Cook/Adam Cancryn: Trump team weights a CDC scrubbing to deflect mounting criticism. Does he know anything about management other than "you're fired"?
Ranjani Chakraborty: What "defund the police" really means.
Fabiola Cineas:
These protests feel different because they're shifting public opinion: Interiew with Megan Ming Francis.
As she points out in her book, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State, the NAACP from 1909 to 1923 mobilized state-building by first shifting public opinion, then creating change within political and legal structures. And according to polls, opinion is already shifting: In 2015, just 51 percent of Americans believed racism is a big problem in the US; now 76 percent of Americans do.
The menacing symbolism of the noose: "Noose incidents are uncoincidentally on the rise as protesters continue to demand justice for Black lives."
Eli Clifton: The hedge fund man behind pro-Trump media's new war on China. Huayi Zhang, associated with Robert Mercer.
Jason Ditz:
Trump plans to cut another 4,000 US troops from Afghanistan: "Plan would leave 4,500 left in Afghanistan by autumn."
Trump administration mulls ending Congressional review of arms sales.
Tiffanie Drayton: Global protests reveal that white supremacy is a problem everywhere.
John Feffer: What will it take to defeat Trumpism? "Learning lessons from the end of the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and Saddam's Iraq" -- a mixed bag of examples, all three thoroughly defeated militarily (Iraq least decisively), then allowed to reconstitute themselves (the Confederacy most along its original, white supremacist lines). It's much easier for a foreign power to defeat a malevolent faction (slaveholders, Nazis, Baathists) than it is to keep those ideas from re-emerging in the defeated populace. Still, the relative success in de-Nazifying Germany has more to do with ethnic unity (vs. the black-white divide in the South, and the Sunni-Shiite-Kurd divide in Iraq), and the annihilated value of Nazism for the resurgence of German capitalism. (A big part of the reason Germany recovered so well was the imposition of worker participation in corporate boards, which has mostly kept German corporations from turning into predatory profit-scrapers like their American and British counterparts.) Still, I wonder whether Feffer isn't making too much out of Trumpism. Given the incoherence of its leader and the ineptness of its followers, it's likely after defeat to break down into its constituent parts and crawl back into the woodwork, festering, waiting for its next charismatic revival.
Feffer notes that "in West Germany in 1947, 55% of those living under the US occupation believed that 'National Socialism was a good idea badly carried out.'" The occupation of Germany at that time was still pretty harsh, and poverty was widespread, but after the Bundesrepublic gained independence in 1949, and the economy boomed with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, Nazi sympathies faded away. The only sure way to get rid of Trumpism is to fix the problems it arose to fight, or show that those problems aren't real.
Russell Arben Fox: The coronavirus in Kansas: The first 100 days. Covid-19 cases have continued to rise, with Sedgwick County topping 1,000 cases. For more, see John Handy/Andy Tsubass Field: Kansas communities see dramatic spikes in coronavirus cases.
Andrew Freedman/Matthew Cappucci: Historic Saharan dust event fouls air along Gulf Coast as next blast enters Caribbean.
Susan B Glasser: Trump retreats to his Hannity bunker: "Beaten by the pandemic and down in the polls, a President and his propagandist create an alternate reality."
Amy Goldstein/Emily Guskin: Almost one-third of black Americans know someone who has died of covid-19, survey shows: Compare to 9% of white Americans.
Alex Henderson: Respected marketing guru explains how Trump could 'monetize' a loss to Biden in November -- and make millions of dollars from his far-right MAGA base: Donny Deutsch.
Eoin Higgins: Why a socialized system like Medicare for All beats for-profit healthcare in one chart of covid-19 infection rates.
Gil Hochberg: An anti-colonialist Zionist? Remembering Albert Memmi: "The great prophet of anti-colonialism embraces Zionism without ever questioning its colonial implications." Memmi was born in Tunisia, was Jewish, wrote The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) and many other books, was "asked to leave" when Tunisia became independent, lived in France until dying at age 99. Also on Memmi:
David Lloyd: Albert Memmi: Contradictions of the colonial condition.
Jack Holmes: There is no plan. There is no second-term agenda. Takeaway from a Hannity interview, but just because Trump couldn't think of an agenda doesn't mean there won't be one. Trump has long delegated odious tasks like thinking and doing to the little people (mostly, it seems, Pence and Kushner).
The fact is that the Republican Party hasn't been much interested in governing the country for some time. They want to deregulate industries whose executives pay the campaign bills, and cut taxes on the donor class, and knuckle immigrants, but the idea of drawing up a comprehensive set of policies to make life better for the broader American public has long been anathema. (The Democrats often govern incompetently, and with too much regard for the preferences of powerful interests over those of working people, but they do seek to govern the country.) Trump is merely the most garish expression of this, turning the nation's highest governing office into a rolling circus act while shredding the institutions of democracy, and while the termites of the state go to work behind the scenes.
This thing about the Republicans not being interested in governing has been making the rounds lately, and rather misses the point. The Republicans are obsessed with grabbing and monopolizing power, but they actually have a very narrow definition of governing. Their aim is to use power to accumulate more power, so they mostly see the government as a vast patronage machine that can be used to reward their supporters and punish their enemies, and that's about it. The closest thing any Republican had to a vision was Tom DeLay's K Street Project, where they demanded that lobbyists support their culture war in order to qualify for graft favors. But fear seems to drive them even more than greed: by seizing power, they deny it to their mortal enemies, the Democrats, who if given the opening would surely also use their power to reward their supporters and punish their enemies. That view isn't fair because Democrats habitually try to rule for the benefit of everyone, whereas Republicans are much more discriminating in who they help and hurt. Where Republicans most obviously fail is in trying to govern in a crisis. They don't plan, they don't prepare, their graft becomes visible, and quite often they simply don't care. Trump is the worst ever in this regard, but you have to go back generations to find competent Republican administrators. A big part of this can be traced back to how the Republican campaign machinery is designed expressly to do nothing but attack Democrats. Trump has no agenda for a second term because he doesn't even comprehend what he's been doing in his first term -- except, that is, relentlessly attacking his numerous enemies. That's all he's got to campaign on.
Sean Illing: "It's ideologue meets grifter": How Bill Barr made Trumpism possible. Interview with David Rohde, author of a New Yorker profile on Barr.
Christopher Ingraham: New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic.
Umair Irfan: Why it's so damn hot in the Arctic right now. Related:
Alex Isenstadt:
Trump admits it: He's losing. So the new strategy is what? Pity?
Roge Karma: 4 ideas to replace traditional police officers.
Ezra Klein:
Trump's reality TV presidency is being crushed by reality. Draws a lot on Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney's chief campaign strategist in 2012 and author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, talking a lot about the incompetency and incoherence of Trump's government. One thing Stevens says: "To me, the only thing remotely like it is the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, because the dissonance between what the party was and what it said it was was just so great."
In praise of polarization: "How identity politics changed the Democratic Party -- for the better." Without the guiding hand of identity there wouldn't be polarization, a subject that Klein flogged to death in his book, Why We're Polarized.
Carolyn Kormann: A disastrous summer in the arctic.
Paul Krugman:
America didn't give up on Covid-19. Republicans did. "Partisanship has crippled our response."
A plague of willful ignorance: "Trump has empowered America's anti-rational streak."
Nicole Lafond: Barr joins Trump effort to will antifa into existence with new 'anti-gov extremists' task force.
Eric Levitz: The 'V-shaped' recovery has died of coronavirus. Wasn't going to happen anyway, because the panic and lockdown changed buying habits in ways that simply re-opening wouldn't (and couldn't) undo. Perhaps at some point, if the stimulus remains robust and is widely distributed people will feel a desire to spend some of their savings on big-ticket items, but that's a while off. More likely, the Republicans will kill off stimulus (except for the stock market) and we'll get a double-dip recession instead. (Was tempted to say W-shaped, but still not sure of the eventual upstroke.)
Ryan Lizza/Laura Barron-Lopez/Holly Otterbein: Why Biden is rejecting Black Lives Matter's boldest proposals: "Activists want to defund the police. Biden won't even legalize pot." This stuff doesn't bother me, at least not like his Venezuela tweet did. He'll drag his feet, but he's at least somewhat open to reason. And given the gauntlet that any sort of reform has to run, he'll likely be there at the end, not leading but also not obstructing, and that's probably where his broadest supporters want him.
German Lopez:
Donald Trump's long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020: "Trump has repeatedly claimed he's 'the least racist person.' His history suggests otherwise." I'd suggest using a stronger verb, like "shouts" or "screams." This piece refers back to an important October 14, 2016 study by Sarah Posner/David Neiwert: How Trump took hate groups mainstream. They also wrote: Meet the horde of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other extremist leaders endorsing Donald Trump.
Robert Mackey:
Trump suggests Navy sent $5 billion to Wisconsin firm to help him win election.
Trump made a racist joke in a Phoenix megachurch and the crowd went wild. Well, "Kung Flu," so not much of a joke.
Through creative accounting, Trump tries to cast America's death toll as an achievement. Note: article from May 2. Death count has nearly doubled since then, so today's lesson has less to do with lying at the time than with the consequences of such deceit.
Josh Marshall: Princeton drops Woodrow Wilson from name of public policy school. Wilson was president of Princeton before moving into politics, so this particular naming was an obvious choice at the time, and I doubt it's being given up lightly. Wilson did several notably progressive things as president. He also started two wars with Mexico, engaged in a lot of "gunboat diplomacy" in the Caribbean, led the US into WWI, and ran a very aggressive campaign against war dissenters -- notably jailing presidential candidate Eugene Debs. He represented the US personally in the talks leading to the Treaty of Versailles, making a promise that David Fromkin turned on its head for his essential book on the post-WWI Middle East: A Peace to End All Peace. Well into the Cold War era, he was revered by Democrats for his internationalism, and his opponents' isolationism is still a dirty epithet. Many of these things should be giving us doubts about his legacy, but the one that's finally catching up with him is explained by Dylan Matthews in his 2015 article: Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist -- even by the standards of his time, which was written after Princeton students started objecting to his name heading Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs.
Madeline Marshall: Why America's police look like soldiers: "Why are the police bringing military assault rifles to protests?"
Dylan Matthews: How police unions became so powerful -- and how they can be tamed.
Media Matters: This could be an ongoing series, but for now just a taste of how Fox et al. are handling the debacle:
Ian Millhiser:
Trump's DOJ asks the Supreme Court to strip health care from 23 million people: "The government's arguments are ridiculous."
The night they'll tear old Dixie down: "For generations, a single street paying homage to Robert E Lee and his Confederate allies has upheld Richmond's racist foundations."
The court decision dismissing charges against Michael Flynn is astonishingly bad. Thanks to "Trump-appointed Judge Neomi Rao," who "has a history of writing dubious opinions that benefit Trump and his allies."
Meanwhile, Rao, who served in the Trump White House and only became a judge in 2019, has quickly built a reputation as a rubber stamp for the Trump administration's preferred outcomes. She wrote a widely mocked dissenting opinion that would have blocked much of Congress's power to investigate Trump. And she sought to delay the House's ability to obtain documents related to former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A top Democratic defender of the filibuster says it may need to go: Chris Coons (D-DE).
Justice Alito's jurisprudence of white racial innocence: "Alito gets very upset if you suggest that racism exists."
6 major questions the Supreme court still needs to resolve this term.
DC is closer to becoming a state now than it has ever been. For some background, see: Alan Greenblatt: The US almost tore itself apart to get to 50 states. Can DC make it 51? Not if Republicans can help it. See:
Jenna Portnoy: DC statehood approved by US House for first time in history.
Nancy LeTourneau: What Tom Cotton's racist speech against DC statehood says about the GOP. By the way, LeTourneau also wrote: Republicans are delusional to hope that Trump will change. I read this right after Martin Longman: What happens when Trump stops believing he can win reelection? Longman quoted Lindsey Graham claiming that "Trump can win with 'a little more message discipline' and a focus on policies that separate him and Biden." The problem with all this is that Trump's policies are even more unpopular than he is -- part of the reason why he lies about them all the time.
Nicola Narea:
Ella Nilsen: Progressive Black candidates swept key races on Tuesday. Results don't look quite that weeping, although Middle school principal Jamaal Bowman unseats Eliot Engel in New York was a big story (and not close, despite Engel endorsements from NY Dem leaders, not to mention AIPAC).
Anna North:
Do Americans support defunding the police? It depends on how you ask the question. "A new poll shows a majority of Americans support redirecting funds from police to other services."
/Fabiola Cineas: The fight for justice in the Breonna Taylor case, explained.
Ricardo Nulla: The coronavirus surge that Texas could have seen coming.
Chad Painter: 1960s coverage of Stonewall shows that mainstream press has always struggled to cover protests: "New Yorkers reading the local, mainstream papers wouldn't have known that a new civil rights movement was unfolding."
William J Perry/Tom Z Collins: Who can we trust with the nuclear button? No one.
Cameron Peters: Trump is holding a rally in one of the country's worst Covid-19 hot spots: Next stop (Tuesday, June 23): Phoenix, Arizona, where "cases in the state have increased by 174 percent over the past three weeks, and the Arizona Health Department reported a record-high 3,600 new cases on Tuesday alone."
Craig Pittman: Can Trump beat the Florida convention curse? I didn't know there was one -- Nixon won after Miami Beach conventions in 1968 and 1972; the Democrats also did Miami Beach in 1972, McGovern losing to Nixon; and Romney lost after being nominated in Tampa in 2012 -- but Trump is bound to bring out the worst in the state.
Andrew Prokop:
John Quiggin: Modern monetary theory: Neither modern, nor monetary, nor (mainly) theoretical?: Review of the MMT-based Macroeconomics textbook by William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts.
Anita Rao/Pat Dillon/Kim Kelly/Zak Bennett: Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote? A series of articles in the Guardian on "the fight to vote":
Shilpa Jindia: 'This is a war': Republicans ramp up bid to control election maps for next decade.
Sam Levine: Republicans devote $20m and 50,000 people to efforts to restrict voting.
Sam Levine/Anna Massoglia: Revealed: Conservative group fighting to restrict voting tied to powerful dark money network.
Sam Levine/Ankita Rao: In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted voting rights -- how has it changed the US?.
Robert Reich: Donald Trump's re-election playbook: 25 ways he'll lie, cheat and abuse his power: "From now until November, opponents of the most lawless president in history face a fight for democracy itself." Things like postponing the election remain to be seen, and would be hard to pull off. "Coddle dictators" sticks in my craw. Ever since WWII, US foreign policy has supported dictators who were deemed good for business, while opposing ones (and, by the way, democracies) who weren't (e.g., Iran, Guatemala, Chile). The only way Trump deviates from this is that he needs "good for business" to be good for him personally. Whether the US cherishes or ignores human rights depends strictly on which side of the good/bad ledger a country falls.
David Roberts:
Corey Robin: Forget about it. The author continues to be shocked that others can still be shocked by the latest Trumpian outrages, given how many comparable examples even a cursory remembrance of history offers up.
I've been reading and writing about conservatism since the summer of 2000, when I interviewed William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz for a Lingua Franca article. I was surprised to hear how discontented these elder statesmen were now that the Cold War was over. It was almost as if they longed for the United States -- or at least themselves -- to be back in the grip of murderous anxiety, ready to embark on a terrible rampage. Since then, what has always struck me is how turbulent and intemperate, how savage and ferocious, the dream life of the right truly is -- even among, especially among, its most staid figures.
When Trump became a contender for the White House, I saw him as an extension or fulfillment of the conservative movement rather than a break with it. Almost everything people found outrageous and objectionable about his candidacy -- the racism, the contempt for institutions, the ambient violence, the hostility to the rule of law -- I'd been seeing in the right for years. Little in Trump surprised me, except for the fact that he won.
Whenever I said this, people got angry with me. They still do. For months, now years, I puzzled over that anger. . . . Historical consciousness can be a conservative force, lessening the sting of urgency, deflating the demands of the now, leaving us adrift in a sea of relativism. But it need not be . . . Telling a story of how present trespass derives from past crime or even original sin can inspire a more strenuous refusal, a more profound assault on the now. It can fuel a desire to be rid of not just the moment but the moments that made this moment, to ensure that we never have to face this moment again. But only if we acknowledge what we're seldom prepared to admit: that the monster has been with us all along.
Charlie Savage/Eric Schmitt/Michael Schwartz: Russia secretly offered Afghan militants bounties to kill US troops, intelligence says: "The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment." This is supposedly a big deal, but sounds like a total crock. While Afghan government and Taliban have continued to attack each other, US fatalities in Aghanistan have dwindled to practically nothing -- not just since Trump signed a cease-fire with the Taliban, but you have to go as far back as 2014 to find a month with 10 US fatalities. So if Russia is paying a bounty, they're not finding many takers, and it's not costing them much. It seems much more likely that the whole story was hatched by "deep state" figures to try to scuttle the Taliban peace deal, to reverse US troop withdrawals, to gin up anti-Russian sentiment for a new Cold War, and (what the hell) to make Trump look bad by drawing out the Trump-Putin buddy meme.
This left me wondering whether the US had actually paid bounties for dead Russians during the 1980s, when inflicting casualties on Russians was the explicit goal of US support for Afghan mujahideen. I tried googling that, but all I got were echoes of the NY Times piece, like the Guardian's Outrage mounts over report Russia offered bounties to Afghanistan militants for killing US soldiers (and not wanting to be left out or devalued, Russia offered bounty to kill UK soldiers). Similar articles were all over the supposedly liberal press (Google it yourself: these are from the first two pages): ABC, Chicago Tribune, CNBC, CNN, LA Times, MSNBC, NPR, Reuters, Time, USA Today, Vox, Washington Post, Axios. Some bought the story but tried to put the focus on Trump, as in Jacob Kuntson: Trump denies report he was briefed on alleged Russian bounties on US troops (my favorite line here was "The report was confirmed by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and CNN," meaning that those organizations picked up and ran the story); also Bob Brigham: Trump remained silent as Putin paid to kill US soldiers; Peter Wade: Back from golfing, Trump denies knowing about Russian bounties to kill US soldiers.
Isaac Sebenius/James K Sebenius: How many needless Covid-19 deaths were caused by delays in responding? Most of them.
David Smilde: Joe Biden should not try to out-hawk Trump on Venezuela. Biden's tweet on Venezuela is one of the few things that genuinely disurb me about his nomination. It is factually inaccurate -- Trump may "admire thugs and dictators" but not Nicolas Maduro; he clearly loathes Maduro, and is using the power and influence of the United States to overturn Maduro's election victory and replace him with a pliable puppet. I"m not even sure that Maduro qualifies as a "thug and dictator" -- not that I doubt that power is seductive and tends to corrupt, but as far as I can tell, most of Venezuela's problems have been imposed by the US, and their propaganda is formulaic and suspect as usual. Biden's vow that he "will stand with the Venezuelan people and for democracy" shows, to put it charitably, how completely he has been taken in by the propaganda. If you want a definition of "thug and dictator," what about someone who would impose a puppet government on another nation? If Biden had any respect for democracy abroad, he wouldn't be casting his lot with Trump and the oil moguls on this issue. And if he had even the slightest self-awareness of how much havoc and misery US intervention in Latin America has caused, he would grasp the folly of trying to force American views on others. Nor do you have to go back to Monroe and Wilson for examples: the recent coups in Bolivia and Brazil are currently creating human rights disasters that reflect back on us. Biden needs to break with that legacy, not echo it.
Emily Stewart: The Georgia legislature finally passes a hate crime bill in the wake of Ahmaud Arbery's death. When signed, that will leave only three states without hate crime laws (the others are South Carolina, Wyoming, and Arkansas).
Rachel Stohl: Defense industry cheers as the Trump administration is poised to loosen restrictions on drone exports. Critics complain that "the Trump administration appears to be sacrificing long-term security goals for short-term economic gain" -- i.e., for the arms merchants, not for those who foot the military budget. Of course, if selling arms leads to an arms race, the industry would see long-term economic gains as well, and we would all wind up less secure.
Lawrence H Summers/Anna Stansbury: US workers need more power: Good title, but don't fear, he's not really offering much. No talk about co-determination, let alone making companies fully employee-owned, which is the direction we should be moving in.
Matt Taibbi: On "White Fragility": Review of Robin DiAngelo's book, "a few thoughts on America's smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism," one of which is it "may be the dumbest book ever written." I rather doubt that, if for no other reason than that I recall Taibbi's review of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat.
Michael Tomasky: Biden's journey left.
Nick Turse: Pentagon war game includes scenario for military response to domestic Gen Z rebellion. "Gen Z" is defined as those born after 1996.
Peter Wade: Trump can't name one thing he'd prioritize if re-elected: Good.
Paul Waldman:
Alex Ward:
The head of US broadcasting is leaning toward pro-Trump propaganda. Biden would fire him. Michael Pack, head of US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which runs "Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting," so is already neck-deep in the propaganda business.
Pack, a close ally of former top Trump strategist Steve Bannon, began his three-year tenure just this month and wasted no time making dramatic changes to reshape the agency. Last week, within hours of introducing himself to employees, he purged four top officials from the agency's media organizations. The two chiefs of Voice of America (VOA), the most prominent outlet in the agency, had already resigned earlier over Pack's appointment.
Related:
Yasha Levine: US state propaganda outlets censor Black Lives Matter protests: "It's hard for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to sell the USA as a shining example of civil liberties and democracy when the internet is drowning in pics of American killer cops beating down anyone in sight."
Gareth Porter: FBI launches open attack on 'foreign' alternative media outlets challenging US foreign policy.
The real villain of John Bolton's Trump book is John Bolton. More Bolton book:
David Badash: 'Trump comes off like a needy supplicant' in John Bolton's new book.
Michael Galant: John Bolton is not your hero, no matter what his book says.
Patrick Iber: John Bolton's accidentally unflattering self-portrait.
Fred Kaplan: John Bolton's book is a brutal, searing indictment . . . of John Bolton: "No one should let this man in 'the room where it happens' ever again."
James North: Reflexive support for Israel is a vital part of John Bolton's world view. This reminds me of a story (which I can't readily resource) where David Ben-Gurion tried to offer advice to Charles De Gaulle on how to handle the rebellion in Algeria. De Gaule stopped him, asking why France would want to get stuck in a never-ending war. De Gaule saw the folly of that, but Bolton only sees the opportunity -- a prescription for his life's work.
Trita Parsi: John bolton can stomach Kim Jong Un's North Korea, but not Iran. "The real revelation of the former national security advisor's memoir is that he placed Israeli and Saudi interests ahead of America's" -- a point better made without the Kim shaming. Bolton probably had more individual effect in scuttling the North Korea opening than he did on Iran, where he echoed the positions of others who already had Trump's ear.
Barbara Slavin: Bolton's book is an instruction manual for how not to do foreign policy.
How Trump's China obsession could derail nuclear arms control, in one tweet: "Bolton makes clear President Trump's foreign policy is absolutely terrible -- but Bolton's is much, much worse."
/Nicole Narea: The US military will stay on the US-Mexico border, even with migration falling.
Matthew Yglesias:
Trump is rescuing Maine lobstermen from himself, and blaming Obama: "The lobster bailout, explained."
Martha McSally's bailout proposal for the travel industry, explained: "The Arizona senator wants to give each US adult $4,000 to go on vacation -- but only if you're not too poor." The bottom line is that this is another Republican tax cut for the rich, albeit limited and dressed up funny.
Trump's reelection polling is looking really bad. Why does he always have to note: "After all, Michael Dukakis was up by 17 points in mid-July 1988"? Not only is that a bummer, there are lots of reasons why this year is nothing like that year.
Trump's catastrophic failure on testing is no joke: "The president is continually more focused on good numbers than good policy."
Why it feels like there are a lot more fireworks this year. No, I hadn't noticed. I don't think I've heard a single firework bang so far this month, or maybe this year. No doubt I will hear some closer to the 4th, but probably less than usual. The old Lawrence Stadium used to shoot off fireworks at least once a week, but they tore it down, built a new ballpark, and have yet to play a single game there. Wichita is not traditionally hostile to fireworks -- although the Fire Dept. had a lot more say in the matter when I was growing up than in recent years. I went out driving one July 4th and identified at least 20 places that were shooting off major fireworks (of course, the big one was downtown, which we could watch from out front lawn). Then I drove down Main St. toward where I grew up, and it looked like a war zone with all the debris. My mother especially loved fireworks, but I'd be just as happy never to see or hear any ever again.
Li Zhou:
Trump's racist references to the coronavirus are his latest effort to stoke xenophobia.
Trump is still using racist terms to describe the coronavirus. That has real consequences for Asian Americans. "The president's rhetoric is seen as fueling a surge in hate incidents toward Asian Americans."
Senate Democrats say the Republican police reform bill is "not salvageable".
/Ella Nilsen: The House just passed a sweeping police reform bill: "It's not expected to go anywhere in the Senate, however."