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Wednesday, June 4, 2025

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 21 days ago, on May 14.

I started this shortly after the last one, but added very little to it during the last week of May, before trying to wrap it up on June 3 (bleeding into June 4). Rereading the older material led to some editing and expansion, while the latter material is as slapdash and disorganized as ever, and I'm undoubtedly leaving more scraps on the table than I can possibly deal with in the moment.

PS: Posting this Wednesday afternoon, without the "index to major articles" or postscript, which I may try to add later. More loose tabs still open, and I'm finding more all the time, but I desperately need to break off and do some other work, and keep this from becoming an infinite time sink.

Ben Smith [04-27] The group chats that changed America. Evidently there's a whole world of private group chats dominated by billionaires -- Mark Andreessen's name keeps popping up -- where the affairs of the world are being hashed out (e.g., Group chats rule the world), far removed from public political discourse. Should we be surprised that these people are mostly fatuous assholes, with their experience of the world completely removed from almost everyone's daily life?

Jill Lepore [04-28] A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump: "Each morning before the day's decree, I turn to a slim book, hoping for sense, or solace." I'm not sure that the framing of short, classic books helps much, although any connection to the known world could have helped one get through the days. But the history of those 100 days seemed pretty well thought out, until I got to this:

Trump won the Presidency in a free and fair election with a mandate to curb inflation, restrict immigration, cut taxes, support small businesses, and reverse progressive overreach, especially in employment and education. From his first day in office, he set about dismantling much of both the federal government and the Constitution's system of checks and balances. By declarations of national emergency, by executive order, and by executive action -- and frequently in plain violation of the Constitution -- Trump gutted entire departments of the federal government. He defied the federal judiciary. He rescinded funds lawfully appropriated by Congress. He lifted regulations across industries. He fired, forced the resignations of, or eliminated the jobs of tens of thousands of federal employees. He hobbled scientific research. He all but criminalized immigration. He denounced the arts. He abandoned the federal government's commitment to public education. He revoked civil rights and shuttered civil-rights programs, deriding the goals of racial equality, gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. equality. He made enemies of American allies, and prostituted the United States to the passions of tyrants. He punished his adversaries and delighted in their suffering. He tried to bring universities to heel. He bent law firms to his will. He instituted tariffs and toppled markets; he lifted tariffs and toppled markets. He debased the very idea of America. He created chaos, emergency after emergency.

Trump felled so much timber not because of the mightiness of his axe but because of the rot within the trees and the weakness of the wood. Many of the institutions Trump attacked, from the immigration system to higher education, were those whose leaders and votaries knew them to be broken and yet whose problems they had failed to fix, or even, publicly, to acknowledge. Now is not the time to admit to these problems, leaders -- from Democratic Party officials to C.E.O.s, intellectuals, university presidents, and newspaper editors -- had advised, for years, because this is an emergency. They refused to denounce the illiberalism of speech codes, the lack of due process in the #MeToo movement and Title IX cases, mandatory D.E.I. affirmations as a condition of employment, and the remorseless political intolerance of much of the left. Even after Trump won reëlection on a promise to destroy those institutions, they refused to admit to their problems, presumably because his victory made the emergency even emergencier.

This starts off ok, although "free and fair" aren't the first words I'd choose to describe the 2024 election. And while Trump had campaigned on that issue list, his promises were rarely more specific than "Trump will fix it." Sure, a lot of people placed blind faith in his leadership, but nearly as many recoiled from the prospect in horror. If by mandate you mean popular support for his actual policies, that's quite a stretch. The second half of the first paragraph does provide a nice thumbnail sketch of what he actually did, but it was virtually all by executive fiat, and cost him a good 5 points in approval rating.

The second half goes awry with the list of "leaders," which could be designated the Establishment Democrats. While it is certainly true that they refused to admit some obvious problems -- the main ones I would group as Inequality and War -- they seemed pretty satisfied with the status quo, and campaigned on keeping things as they currently were, or were going. The word "emergency" causes much confusion here. They used the word to gain a bit of legal leverage to go around an obstructionist Congress that they couldn't win and hold, partly due to gerrymandering but mostly due to poor political messaging. On the other hand, Trump used the word to describe a purely imaginary existential terror, which only he can fix because only he can right the propaganda machine that sold the idea to the gullible masses, but which he has little intention of fixing once he discovered the extra powers presidents can claim during "emergencies."

Still, where does the second half of the second paragraph come from? So we're going to blame the failure of the Establishment Democrats to defend their ivory towers and executive suites from Trumpian chaos on "the remorseless political intolerance of much of the left"? The left has never been in any position to dictate establishment policy. If they bought into #MeToo or D.E.I., it's because they had their own reasons. Perhaps they saw them as sops to the left, or to the people the left tries to advocate for? Or maybe they were just diversions from the more important matters of Inequality and War, which produced much of the rot Trump is inadvertently disrupting.

For what it's worth, I don't especially disagree with the anti-woke critique, just with the blame heaped on the left for pushing the anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, etc., lines too far. If for some reason the powers-that-be overreact and "cancel" some racist/sexist/whatever jerk, why do we have to be the ones condemning illiberalism and demanding due process? Why do we have to pull our punches and defend free speech for Nazis? (And note that the ACLU actually does that, as that is their mission, and most of us support them for that.) I'm open to engaging in the left's perpetual practice of self-criticism, but sure, I can get a bit squirmish when admonished for the same faults by smarmy liberals, and even more so by outright fascists, possibly because they find it impossible to criticize the left without projecting their own sense of superiority.

But while much of what Trump has done in his first (and by no means his last) 100 days should be simply and resolutely undone, I wouldn't advise reflexively undoing everything. I don't doubt that there are bureaucrats who shouldn't be taken back, and dead wood programs that we're better off without, as well as much more that would benefit from a fresh rethink. I wouldn't rush to restore DEI programs, but I would restore the DOJ Civil Rights Division's enforcement budget, and encourage them to be more vigilant. I doubt you can undo his pardons, but you could add some more to spread out the effect: we should be more generous in forgiving those who trespass against us. And while I can't point to any even inadvertent blessings from Trump's foreign policy shake up, that's one area where a Biden restoration shouldn't even be contemplated.

At some point, it might be interesting to take Lepore's essay and strip it down to the plain history, skipping all of the Swift and Coleridge and Whitman fluff. Even knowing it's happened, such plain words are likely to still be sobering, shocking even. Lepore's idea may be that we can always look back to civilization. But perhaps civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Scott Lemieux [05-04] Thelma and Louise economics: Starts with a long quote from Maia Mindel [05-01] Check Your Exorbitant Privilege!, which includes the Thelma & Louise ending scene video, in case you need that reference explained. Lemieux adds: "The biggest problem with Trump's trade war is that it's based on nostalgia for something that can't be reconstructed." And he ends with Trump: "We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we're essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we're saving hundreds of billions of dollars. It's very simple."

Brad Luen [05-04] Top 50 albums of the Fifties: The jazz list here is so good I'm hard-pressed to supplement it. The pop and rock, country and blues hit the obvious high points with best-ofs limited to 1950s releases (some since superseded; Lefty Frizzell is an obvious omission). The Latin and "Old World" lists give me something to work on.

Mitch Therieau [05-06] Can Spotify Be Stopped? Which raises, but doesn't answer, the question of why should it be stopped? I'm pretty skeptical of tech giants, but I subscribe to Spotify, and it gives me pretty good value. There are things about it that I don't like, and there is much more I just haven't taken the trouble to understand. I could imagine something much better, but most of the complaints I hear have to do with shortchanging artists and labels, and I don't really see that as my problem, or even as much of an economic problem. This is a review of Liz Pelly's book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

Nate Weisberg [05-06] Inside the Trump Assault on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: "An agency lawyer and union representative opens up about the Trump/Musk rampage on the CFPB, what happens next, and why he's still optimistic." I think it's hard for people to recognize the extent to which the Trump administration has not only turned a blind eye to fraud and other white collar crime but has actively promoted it.

Samuel O'Brient [05-10] Bill Gates' major decision draws shocking response: He's says he's not only going to give away his fortune, but dissolve his foundation within 20 years. I've had very little kind of even nice to say about him or his company -- at least since 1984, when they had a good chance to hire me but passed because, like Trump, they "only hire the best people," and explicitly decided I wasn't one. But I'll save those sour grapes for the memoir. The Windows monopoly came later, as it was barely a demo program at the time: both the technical decisions that made it crappy software, and the business dictates that turned it into a profitable monopoly. So I've always viewed his philanthropy as whitewashing blood money. But dissolving his fortune shows a sensibility to human limits I never gave him credit for, one that appears to be as rare in high tech these days as it was a century ago among the Rockefellers and Mellons of yore. More radical still is the idea of dissolving a foundation, a major loophole in estate tax law that encouraged moguls to leave permanent monuments to themselves. I've long felt that foundations should be required to dispense all of their net income plus a fixed percentage of their endowment each year, so that they have limited lifetimes.

Joshua Schwartz [05-12] The hidden costs of Trump's 'madman' approach to tariffs: "The downsides of his trade policies are symptoms of a larger strategic flaw." Much to think about here, but my initial thoughts settle on how much I hate game theory. The madman theory assumes that your opponent is more rational than you are -- or at least is rational enough to avoid catastrophe -- so why can't you just reason with them and work out something sensible? And why make it some kind of contest of estimated power, when you know that even winning that game is at best temporary as the loss creates resentment that will eventually come back to bite you?

Jacob Hacker/Paul Pierson [05-13] How the economic and political geography of the United States fuels right-wing populism -- and what the Democratic Party can do about it. The authors have written a number of worthy books on American politics, including (at least these are the ones I've read and can recommend): Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005); The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement (2007); Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (2010); American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (2016); Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequalilty (2020). This will probably turn into another one, but it's going to take some more work. I think the "density divide" is a mostly illusory artifact of other factors. (Democrats have gotten very bad at talking to anyone other than well-educated pan-urban liberals.) Even more inexplicable is "plutocratic populism." What passes for "right-wing populism" these days is basically the substitution of false issues for real ones. That Republicans can get away with this is partly due to their clever efforts, but also to the Democrats' chronic ineptitude at talking about real issues and exposing and deflecting the nonsense they face. Also from this group:

• Alexander Hertel-Fernandez/Shayna Strom [04-30] Designing economic policy that strengthens US democracy and incorporates people's lived experiences.

• Yotam Margalit [05-13] Countering right-wing populism: Identifying its cultural roots and charting a path forward.

Sharon Zhang [05-13] DNC Moves to Oust David Hogg After He Says Party Isn't Standing Up to Trump. He's 28, and has made the DNC nervous by organizing a PAC calling for primarying against ineffective elders, so they approved a complaint from a 61-year-old woman who lost, citing the election as a violation of the party's "gender parity" rules. (Why do Democrats have rules that are so easily lampooned?) They also voided the election of Malcolm Kenyatta to a vice-chair slot, who seems to be less controversial but collateral damage.

• Chris Lehmann [05-19] The DNC's Latest Feud Is an Exercise in Futility.

• John Ross [04-30] David Hogg Is Not a Threat to the Democratic Establishment: "He's offering the appearance of change without the substance." Still, isn't appearances what matters most to the DNC? Can they even conceive of substance?

Nathan J Robinson [05-14] The Myth of the Marxist University: "Academia is not full of radicals. There just aren't many Republicans, perhaps because Republicans despise the academy's values of open-mindedness and critical inquiry." I don't feel like really sinking into this, but I could probably write a ton. One thing is that in the early 1970s, I actually did have significant exposure to explicitly Marxist academics: there were a half-dozen in just the sociology department at Washington University, and a few more I knew of in other departments. That was an anomaly, and the Danforths were already moving to dismantle the sociology department when I left. They fired my main professor there, Paul Piccone, and as far as I know never got another academic posting. I knew a few more Marxists elsewhere, mostly through Piccone, and many of them had a rough time, despite being very worthy scholars. Marxists had two strikes against them: one was that they were on the wrong side politically, as universities have traditionally been finishing schools for the upper class (a role they've largely reverted to, not least by making them unaffordable to the masses); and secondly, they demanded critical thinking, which made them not just subversive, but smarter than more conventional thinkers. I can't quite claim that there's no such thing as a dogmatic Marxist -- many academics in the Soviet Union were just that, and ridiculous as a result -- but most of us saw Marxism not as an ideology but as a step on the way towards better understanding the world (and sure, of changing it for a better future.

Since my day, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there seems to have been a concerted effort to poison the wells and salt the earth of academia to deny any sort of legitimacy to Marxian thought -- a campaign effective enough that even Robinson, who isn't afraid of declaring himself a socialist, shies away from admitting any sort of Marxist sympathies. In some ways this doesn't matter. While the Marxian toolkit is exceptionally powerful, there are many ways to get to the truth of a matter. But we should recognize that the right's agenda isn't just to stamp out a heresy. It is to shut down critical thought, and turn the universities back into a system for training cadres who accept and cherish the inequalities and injustices of the present system. Understanding Marxism will hobble their agenda, but even if one remains ignorant of Marx and his followers, inequality and injustice will drive a good many people to resist, to question, to research, and ultimately to reinvent the tools they need to defend themselves.

Some more Current Affairs:

• Interviews:

  • [05-07] The Political Perils of 'Common Sense': Interview with historian Sophia Rosenfeld.

  • [05-29] A Lack of US Diplomacy Is Destroying the World's Security: Interview with former ambassador Chas Freeman "on US failures to pursue mutually beneficial diplomatic resolutions in China, Ukraine, and the Middle East."

• Nathan J Robinson:

  • [05-28] Andrew Cuomo Is Worse Than Even You Know: "Why on Earth is he a contender for mayor?"

• Rob Larson [05-08]: The Wall Street Journal Admits It — Capitalism is a Miserable Tyranny: "The 'free market' workplace subjects people to an ugly, naked hierarchy." Then it's not really a free market, is it? (Your word for the day: monopsony. Granted, it's rarely applied to how a company controls its own workers, but it's what allows them to do so. And like monopoly, it's power obtained by removing freedom from the market.)

• Alex Skopic:

  • [04-10] China Knows How to Deal with its Billionaires.

  • [04-17] Trump Is What Happens When You Give a Landlord Power: "He wants to 'own' Gaza and Greenland, and he treats immigrants like tenants he can evict at will. The rent-seeking class created Trump, and now he's governing as America's landlord in chief."

  • [05-16] How the AP Stylebook Warps Reality to Serve Power.

  • [06-02] How the Right Abuses Tolkien: "For Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and other figures on today's far right, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien have become a cultural touchstone. Pity they don't understand the first thing about them." I don't know either, and don't care, but maybe you do.

Marci Shore/Timothy Snyder/Jason Stanley [05-14] We Study Fascism, and We're Leaving the U.S.: Three Yale historians pack up and leave Trumpland, in what looks less like a principled stand than a book promotion -- I'm not familiar with Shore (a specialist in Polish and Ukrainian intellectual history), but I've read books by Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom) and Stanley (How Fascism Works), and consider them useful (although, like most "threat to democracy" alarms, they fail to consider how little actual democracy they have left to defend -- a better book to read on this is Astra Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist but We'll Miss It When It's Gone).

I've pondered the fascism question quite a bit, and have no doubt that there are common ideas and attitudes among Trump and other Republicans, which become genuinely perilous when given power -- as has happened with Trump's election, and with his subsequent power grabs. When we look for historical insights, it is hard not to recall the early days of fascism: while the differences are considerable, few other analogies convey the gravity of what's happening, or the consequences should it continue.

David Klion [05-15] I Thought David Horowitz Was a Joke -- but He Foreshadowed the Trump Coalition: I wrote about Horowitz's obituary last time, but I figured this article is worth citing anew. One thing that could use a deeper look is the hustle that moved him into a position of prominence (editor at Ramparts) on the new left, and which found much more lucrative support when he moved to the far right (e.g., his son as Marc Andreessen's VC fund partner). Of course, it's not just hustle. More than that it's the ability to make yourself instrumental for people with the power to make you rich.

Jeffrey St Clair:

• [05-16] Roaming Charges: Sturm und Drang Warnings. Opens with a flurry of videos of ICE agents brutally attacking "suspects." Then there's "Trump grants white South Africans refugee status," with a picture that prompted Julie K Brown to quip, "I've never seen refugees with so much luggage." Much more, including this:

  There's not a single Congressional district where the support for slashing Medicare is more than 15%. Of course, this doesn't matter to MAGA. Unlike the Democrats, they sought power in order to use it, especially for malign unpopular policies, and they don't fret about the future political consequences. Imagine a party who won power and then fulfilled their promises for englightened popular policies, instead of worrying how it might piss off Wall Street?

  Of course, there is no such party. The Democrat establishment is Wall Street's first line of defense against any policy agenda that might restraint capital and/or redistribute wealth, regardless of how popular such programs might be.

• [05-23] Roaming Charges: White Lies About White Genocide: Starts with Richard Burton (more likely the 19th century imperialist explorer than the Welsh actor): "The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."

• [05-30] When the Dead Speak and the Living Refuse to Listen. Emphasis added:

  The problem with writing about Gaza is that words can't explain what's happening in Gaza. Neither can images, even the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. Because what needs to be explained is the inexplicable. What needs to be explicated is the silence in the face of horror.

  Israel has been brazenly upfront about its plans to subdue Gaza, depopulate it of Palestinians, and seize the Strip for itself. Israel will not change. It hasn't deviated from this genocidal course since October 8, 2023. For 19 months, every Palestinian has been a target because Israel wants Gaza cleansed of Palestinians. Therefore, everyone can be bombed. Everyone can be starved. Everyone can be denied medical care and the mere essentials of life.

  I would have added to the second bold bit, "and no one else can change it." Or maybe I mean "will," but the distinction between "can't" and "won't" isn't likely to be tested.

• Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson [05-13] How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump: "At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden's weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?" This is a chunk from their book.

James Kirchick [05-20] All the President's Enablers: "Three books on Joe Biden's presidency jointly paint a devastating portrait of an ailing, geriatric leader surrounded by mendacious aides and grasping family members." Review of Tapper's book, along with the campaign tomes by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Fight) and by Chris Whipple (Uncharted) -- how weird that both books include "Wildest" in their subtitles?

Jennifer Szalai [05-13] A Damning Portrait of an Enfeebled Biden Protected by His Inner Circle: A review of Tapper's Original Sin, which "depicts an aging president whose family and aides enabled his quixotic campaign for a second term."

Ravi Hari [05-14] Joe Biden's memory lapses sparked concern among aides, new book reveals.

Michelle Goldberg [05-16] How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden's Infirmity?

Benjamin Hart [05-22] Jake Tapper Dissects Bidenworld's 'Big Lie': An interview with Tapper. One tidbit here is about how Mike Donilon, who seems to be the most culpable person in Biden's entourage, made about $4 million on failed campaign.

Andrew Rawnsley [05-22] Who's to blame for the Biden tragedy?

John Koblin [05-23] Everyone Now Has an Opinion on Jake Tapper: "A book the CNN host co-wrote has received positive reviews and appears to be a sales hit. But it also has generated intense scrutiny of him and his work."

Scott Lemieux [05-24] Joe Biden winning the 2020 nomination was probably suboptimal, but it was not an elite conspiracy: Evidently Tapper is pushing the line that it was. Looking at the list of candidates and their money suggests that something screwy was going on, especially with the donors (two of whom spent lavishly and ruinously on themselves).

Lloyd Green: [05-25] Original Sin: How Team Biden wished away his decline until it was too late.

Carlos Lozada [05-20] Biden Is a Scapegoat. The Democrats Are the Problem. Of course it is. It's always "THE DEMOCRATS." Even though straw polls often show generic Democrats beating generic Republicans, when actual Democrats lose, it's always the fault of "THE DEMOCRATS." There's such a mismatch between what they say and what they actually do, that it's hard not to suspect them of deceit, corruption, ulterior motives, and sheer sophistry. For some reason Republicans manage to avoid or belittle such suspicions, even while engaging in much more egregious misbehavior -- for some reason that seems to build up their brand as badass action figures, while for all of their behind-the-scenes machinations, supposedly brilliant Democratic operatives keep squandering tons of cash and losing elections that should be easy.

Norman Solomon [05-13] The Careerism That Enabled Biden's Reelection Run Still Poisons the Democratic Party: Original Sin "reveals top White House aides lying to journalists and trying to gaslight the public over Biden's decline." What should also be clear is that journalists sleepwalked through all four Biden years: they were blinded by naive bipartisanship, allowing Republicans to drive the few stories they bothered with, which meant that they constantly sniped at Democrats over bullshit (which did include Biden's age)) while ignoring real problems, like war and inequality, that Biden was helpless at, or in some cases simply uninterested in.

Stanley B Greenberg [05-29] The Real Original Sins: "What do Democrats need to do to win back voters' trust?"

Branko Marcetic [05-23] Will Democrats Learn From the Biden Disaster? Probably Not. Author wrote the only serious (not just left, which counts for a lot) pre-2020 election book on Biden (Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden) and has covered him extensively as president, so I expected him at least to review Original Sin, and was surprised how hard this piece was to find. As he points out, "In hindsight, many of the most cynical theories about what was going on in the Biden White House turned out to be true." And: "The careerism, elite myopia, and poor judgment that led the party establishment to run an ailing man the entire country could see was plainly unfit to be president don't seem to have gone anywhere."

New Republic:

• Michael Tomasky [05-19] What the Democrats Need to Learn From the Biden Cover-Up Fiasco: "As much as covering up the president's infirmity was a scandal for all involved, the Democrats' mortal sin was the one that was right out in the open." Which one? Presumably the Harris succession, which was consecrated with hardly a whiff of debate, locked in (like so much in the Democratic Party) by the donor elite, who didn't dare risk running a candidate with ideas of proven popularity.

• Alex Shephard [05-21] Was It Really a "Cover-Up" if We All Knew the Truth About Biden? I think he's wrong here. Nobody knew the truth, possibly including Biden. How could they? Biden was sheltered, with his inconsistencies and lapses explained away by people in a position to know better, but influenced by political exigencies they never acknowledged. In this void, Republicans spread all sorts of charges and innuendos, which lacked credibility because they're extremely biased liars -- as was obvious from every charge based on policy differences. The problem was that Biden's people got caught in their competency lie, which not only discredited them but gave Republicans credit for their whole kit and caboodle. Nor was competency the only lie Democrats got trapped by: ending the war in Gaza was the big one, but there were dozens more, especially their crowing about how great the economy was when some factors were hitting many people hard (like high interest rates).

• Osita Nwanevu [05-23] The Democrats Are Having a False Reckoning Over Joe Biden: "Party elites aer considerably more responsible for their woeful state of affairs than the former president." Probably true, but he is their leader, and his reputation in tatters exposes their own desperation and malfeasance.

Nicholas Kristoff [05-17] The $7 Billion We Wasted Bombing a Country We Couldn't Find on a Map: The price tag comes from Yemen Data Project and Defense Priorities. Given the multi-trillion dollar price tags on Iraq and Afghanistan, this number seems like a pittance. While the cruelty, waste, and ineffectiveness are obvious, I don't get why any journalists would write like this:

I understand American skepticism about humanitarian aid for Yemeni children, for the Houthis run an Iran-backed police state with a history of weaponizing aid. Yet our campaign of bombing and starvation probably strengthens the Houthis, making their unpopular regime seem like the nation's protectors while driving them closer to Iran.

How would Kristoff know how unpopular the Houthis are? They must have some kind of popular base, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to displace the Saudi- and American-backed police state that they overthrew. As for their alliance with Iran, what other option did we give them? And would Iran be such a problem if we weren't so obsessed with cutting Iran off and pushing them away?

Dave DeCamp [05-19] Trump's 'Golden Dome' Missile Shield Expected to Cost $500 Billion: That's a wild guess that nobody believes. The only chance it has of working is if no one tests it. The cost of a working system is unimaginable, because any conceivable system can just as easily be circumvented, and anticipating how many ways, and handling all of them, adds orders of magnitude to the cost. Israel's Iron Dome works because Israel is small, and has weak enemies, with primitive technology. Even so, to say it "works" is pretty generous, given Oct. 7, 2023. (If it worked so well then, why is Israel still at war 18 months later? I know, "rhetorical question"! They're at war to kill Palestinians and render Gaza uninhabitable, and the attack was just an excuse for something they wanted to do anyway. In this context, Iron Dome may have helped sucker Hamas into an attack that was more a gesture of unhappiness than a serious attempt to hurt Israel.)

Taking Iron Dome and gold-plating it isn't going to make it work better (but it will make it more expensive, which is largely the point to advisers like Elon Musk). Reagan's Star Wars plan in the 1980s never turned into anything more than graft, and there's no reason to expect more here. The waste is orders of magnitude beyond insane, but worse than that is the attitude it presents to the rest of the world: we dare you to attack us, for which we will show you no mercy, because we really don't care how many of you we kill to "defend ourselves." Every time I see something like this, I recall the scenario laid out in one of Chalmer Johnson's books, where he talks about how easy it would be for someone like China to put "a dumptruck full of gravel" on top of a rocket and blast it into low earth orbit, destroying all of America's communications satellites -- which would wipe out much of our internet service, weather forecasting, GPS, and pretty much all of the command and control systems the US depends on for power projection around the globe. That wouldn't make it possible for China to conquer America, let alone to replace the US as "global hegemon," but it would undermine America's capability to fight wars in China's vicinity. That was all with technology China had 20 years ago. Note that North Korea, which the US has given much less reason to be cautious, has that same technology today. But someone like Trump is going to think that a Golden Dome protects him from such threats, so he's safe from having to make any peace gestures. After all, look at how much peace the Iron Dome gave to Israel.

Kyle Chan [05-19]: In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The US Will Be Irrelevant. Dean Baker recommended this "very good piece," adding "it's not good for the home team. Trump's loony fantasies are not a way forward." Chan is a Princeton-based expert on "technology and industrial policy in China," so he's looking for nail he can hammer. China has a real industrial policy, and while it's tolerated quite a bit of inequality, it's ultimately rooted in a civic desire to raise the entire country out of poverty and into everyday wealth. The US has no such policy, nor for that matter much civic desire. Chomsky summed up the American system succinctly: one where profits are privatized, while liabilities are socialized. That reduces all of us to marks, where entrepreneurs (and mobsters) are free to rob everyone (even each other) blind. When Trump became president, he didn't change from private taking to public service. He just realized that being president gives him leverage to take even more, and unlike his predecessors, he has no scruples to get in his way. (Also that his courts have promised him immunity, although one wonders how much he can flaunt this being-above-the-law thing?)

The issue I have with this piece is the concept of "dominant," and for that matter the horse race illustration, which seems like a lot of projection. What China can and will do is reduce a lot of the dominance the US has long exercised over the global economy and its politics -- including the part known as "exorbitant privilege." What China cannot do is to replace us and become the same kind of "global hegemon" the US has been. Americans can't conceive of a world without a ruler, so they assume that if they lose power, it must be to someone else -- someone less benign than we are.

The US gained its power during WWII, when its economy, planned and directed by the most socialist government in American history, blossomed, producing widespread prosperity for most Americans, while the rest of the world was reduced to ruins. That disparity couldn't last, but as long as the US didn't abuse its power -- and at first its "open door" policies were much preferable to the old colonial extracters -- many nations were inclined to follow along. The main problems came when countries tried to assert their independence, especially if they ran afoul of America's championing of capital, with or without any form of democracy. The nations we habitually describe as enemies are mostly struggling for independence.

PS: Consider this chart from a Richard D Wolff [06-02] tweet, which shows "GLobal average net favorability of the US and China, which a decade ago was running pretty steady with the US around +20 and China around -7, but the US rating sunk fast with Trump to -1.5, while China has improved to +8.8.

Jodie Adams Kirshner [05-20] The Sun Sets on West Virginia's Green-Energy Future: "President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act was finally bringing jobs and industry back to the state. But not for long." The picture here shows Trump grinning with a couple other suits, backed by grim men in hard hats -- presumably coal miners -- and flags. Even if Trump manages to bring coal back, and the economics of that are unlikely, they will do so with automation instead of workers, few of whom will benefit. West Virginia's flip to the Republicans is sad and pathetic.

Theodore Schliefer [05-20]: Democrats Throw Money at a Problem: Countering GOP Clout Online: This is probably true, up to a point:

Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump's victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.

This mentions some projects vying for donors: Chorus, AND Media, Channel Zero, Project Echo, Double Tap Democracy. And notes that one was founded by "Rachel Irwin, who led a $30 million influencer program last cycle for Future Forward, the biggest Democratic super PAC." I'd love to see a full accounting of the $1B-plus that the Harris campaign burned through to such underwhelming effect. My guess is that tons of money have already been spent along these lines, to very little effect, largely because the donor-friendly messaging was didn't gain any traction with voters. Perhaps the donors themselves are the problem, and we'd be better off with shoestring-funded grass roots projects which at least have some integrity?

This piece came to my attention via Nathan J Robinson, who suggested putting some of that money into his magazine, Current Affairs, "if you genuinely want to build media that effectively challenges the right and is not just telling Democrats what they want to hear." (Which, by the way, is definitively not today's lead article: Lily Sánchez [05-19] We Still Need to Defund and Abolish the Police. What we really need is some better way to make the police work for us, to solve our problems, and one thing for sure is that requires some funding -- not necessarily for the things we currently fund, but something. "Defund the police" is a joke hiding behind a slogan, but damn few people are likely to go for the slogan, and the joke isn't even very funny -- least of all to people who are routinely victimized by crime, which if you count fraud is pretty much everyone. What they're basically saying is that the police are so dysfunctional you could get rid of them and wouldn't be worse off.)

But Robinson is right: the left press gives you much more bang for the buck than the grant-chasing opportunists who try to pawn themselves off as consultants. Politics today is much more about who you fear and hate than who you like let alone what you want. Republicans understand this, so they fund all manner of right-wing craziness, even when they get embarrassing, because they turn lots of people against Democrats, and they know two things: they can use that energy, and they don't need to fear that it will go too far, because they're convinced they can control it. (Granted, they are not always right, Hitler being a case in point.)

But Democrats don't get this: first, they fear the left, perhaps even more than they fear the right (e.g., Bloomberg spent $500M to stop Sanders, but only $25M to support Harris over Trump); and second, they don't see the value in using the left against the right (possibly because they think their muddled programs, like ACA, by virtue of being more "centrist," have broader appeal than something like Medicare for All, or maybe just because they don't dare offending their donors). To some extent they are right: media bias is such that Hillary Clinton was seen as more dishonest and more corrupt than Donald Trump, but it's hard to fight that with candidates as dishonest and corrupt as the Clintons.

The only Democrat who realized he could use the left was Franklin Roosevelt. He saw unions as a way to organize Democratic voters, but he also thought that capitalism could survive a more equitable distribution of profits, and that the nation as a whole would be better that way. Meanwhile, union leaders like John L Lewis saw that communists were among his best organizers, so he used them as well, while cutting deals that fell far short of revolution. All that went out with the Red Scare, since which liberals have been much more concerned with distancing themselves from the left than from the right -- even though the "democratic wing of the Democratic Party" has always been happy to fall in line behind their modest corporate-blessed reform efforts (while the trans-Democratic left has, since FDR's day, been vanishingly marginal).

The one thing Trump might be good for is to finally bury the hatchet between pragmatic Democrats and the more idealistic left. We need both. We need the left to push us to do good things. We need the pragmatists to figure out ways do them that don't provoke counterproductive backlash.[*] And both, but especially the left, need to expose the right for what they are, in terms so clear that no one can deny their truth.

[*] Note that they don't have a very good track record on this. Even after they got all of the affected lobbyists to sign off on Obamacare, severely limiting the system, Republicans generated a huge backlash just to exploit the political opportunity.

Andrew Day [05-20] Cut Israel Off — for Its Own Sake: There are lots of good reasons for taking this position. Even American Conservatives can do it. Even people who seriously love Israel and care for little else are coming around. That just leaves the mass murderers in Israel, their paranoid, brainwashed and/or just plain racist cohort, and their sentimental fools -- probably not paranoid, but brainwashed and/or racist, for sure -- in the west. More Israel, and here I'm more concerned with the growing sense of futility than with the daily unveiling of more atrocities (for some atrocities, look further down):

• Ori Goldberg [05-12] Israel Is Spiraling: "The government's genocidal fervor is ripping through the carefully constructed layers of self-delusion that power this country."

• Kenn Orphan [05-21] Palestine is the litmus test for every value the West holds dear. "And we are failing miserably."

• Yakov M Rabkin: [06-03] Will Israelis Repent for Gaza Genocide? Re-Humanization Takes Courage.

  Jewish tradition teaches that it is never too late to change course, to repent, and to make amends. Of course, to make such a sharp turn requires courage. A well-known Jewish insight is quite clear about it: "Who is the greatest of all heroes? He who turns an enemy into a friend." Most people in Israel vehemently reject as "exilic" this traditional Jewish wisdom that upholds peace as the supreme value. They see in it only "comfort of the weak." But, in fact, this is what real strength is all about.

• Taya Bero [06-01] Why is a pro-Israel group asking the US to investigate Ms Rachel? I never heard of her before I started seeing tweets highlighting her Gaza statements, but evidently she's a big deal in some quarters. While the Trump administration hopes to chill free speech across the entire opposite political spectrum (see Magarian below), Israel is the one subject that has already moved to active suppression. It's tempting to say that's because it's the hardest to make light of.

  Not that this particular government has any scruples about banning speech, assembly, or anything else they find disobedient.

• Melody Ermachild Chavis: [06-02] Gaza's Destruction Injures Israel Forever: Maybe it seems perverse to focus on the self-harm Israel is responsible for, when there are much more obvious victims -- vast numbers of Palestinians, of course, but also a few widely scattered Jews who get caught up in blowback or (at least as likely) "friendly fire."

  Some Israeli soldiers have themselves tried for years to warn of exactly what I am pointing out. Former soldiers founded the NGO Breaking the Silence, which has published testimony of Israeli soldiers revealing the brutal ways the occupation is sustained. Today, they are saying that if anyone thinks they are being a friend to Israel by defending its actions in Gaza or by staying silent, they are not. Friends don't let friends commit war crimes.

  Eventually, every war ends. And when this one ends, Israel's young men and women will return from combat bringing with them the wounds we can see and those that cannot easily be seen. They, and Israel, will be changed forever.

• Ibrahim Quraishi [06-02]: "These Could Be Our Children:" Israeli Women Opposing the War, an Interview.

• Gary Fields [06-03] Never Again?

  It is now imperative to acknowledge what people of conscience the world over know to be true: The State of Israel is operating a Death Camp for the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. By forcibly confining the Palestinians of Gaza within impassable bounds, while at the same time slaughtering and starving them within this confined space, the State of Israel has made a mockery of the slogan, "Never Again."

Sandeep Vaheesan [05-21] The Real Path to Abundance: "To deliver plentiful housing and clean energy, we have top get the story right about what's standing in the way." Review of Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson: Abundance, in which he finds much to nitpick, before moving on to more general problems. Among the most cutting:

It's not insignificant that Klein and Thompson's attacks echo the Trumpist agenda they disclaim. The affluent undoubtedly have more time and resources to spend advocating for their interests than the poor. But instead of calling for steeper progressive taxation and anti-monopoly policies that would rein in the power of the affluent, Klein and Thompson focus single-mindedly on red tape. Instead of calling for expanded state capacity to expedite environmental reviews (as they do for some government projects, like California's High-Speed Rail Authority), they suggest we should ditch environmental review entirely. And instead of making the case for strengthening and broadening democratic participation in land use policy, they imply we should simply jettison it altogether. . . .

This vision is undemocratic in both form and function. Diminishing public power over land use decisions means greater private control, which in turn means more deference to the whims of the market and more discretion for corporate executives and financiers -- in short, more oligarchy. That is exactly what Trump and Elon Musk are hoping to achieve by taking the chainsaw to federal agencies, and that is why, as Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini puts it, they are "hitting the professional-managerial class -- and hitting them hard." These points of overlap with Trump's agenda also matter politically.

Also related here:

• Dean Baker [05-27] Why Are the Abundance Boys Scared to Talk About Patent Monopolies? He later expanded this to [06-01]: My Abundance Agenda. Nothing here questions the value of producing more, but stresses that it does make a lot of difference just how you go about doing it.

• Ed Kilgore [05-29] The Abundance Agenda Revives an Old Democratic Rivalry: "Helping the public sector get tangible things done may be the only way to protect progressive interest and identity groups from MAGA." Huh? This looks like (and he's quoting Jonathan Chait) anti-left Democrat think they've found a cudgel in the "abundance agenda" to beat down the left, who they continue to identify not in class but in identity terms. This assumes two things: that the "abundance agenda" will be massively popular once one has the power to implement it; and that its appeal will be so obvious that Democrats advancing it will be able to win the elections they need to implement it. There is little evidence for either. I agree that Democrats have to promote policies that will attract massive political support, and that once they have the power, they need to deliver substantial tangible benefits. I don't doubt that increasing production is part of the solution, but unless it can produce useful goods and services, and be directed where needed, it's just another scam for supply-side trickle-down.

Greg Grandin [05-22] The Conquest Never Ends: Tie-in to the author's new book, Greg Grandin: America, América: A New History of the New World, which I've just started, but also ties in to Israel's echo of the Conquest in Gaza. Subheds here: "Conquest, Then and Now"; "From Cortés to Hitler"; and "The End of the End of the Age of Conquest," which sees Trump's ambitions to expand American power from Greenland to Panama alongside Israel's clearing of Gaza and Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a deliberate reversal from the decolonization movement that followed the demise of the German and Japanese empires in WWII. Of course, there are differences, not least being that Israel is operating shamelessly in plain sight, but as Grandin points out, the Spanish broke new ground in documenting their destruction and enslavement through the then-novel medium of the printing press.

Also at TomDispatch:

• William D Hartung/Ashley Gate [05-27] The Coming of a Values-Free Foreign Policy: "Donald Trump has ripped off the human rights veneer that once graced US foreign policy." Or that tried to hide the disgrace of US foreign policy? While on the one hand I'm pleased to cut the hypocrisy, there was something comforting in the thought that Americans felt the need to pretend they were doing good in the world. With Trump, it's all transactional, and much of that is directed into his personal accounts.

• Alfred McCoy [05-25] How American Soft Power Turned to Dust in the Age of Trump: "Why the world's richest nation is killing the world's poorest children."

• Juan Cole [05-29] Trump of Arabia: "Is Trump's Axis of the Plutocrats Marginalizing Israel?" I don't see how anyone can doubt that pro-Israel donors are getting their money's worth out of Trump. His support for clearing Gaza out is undoubtable, and he'll probably wind up negotiating a mass evacuation. Similarly, he has no concerns or scruples about whatever Netanyahu wants to do in the occupied West Bank. On the other hand, he seems less inclined than Biden to let Israel dictate his foreign policy beyond Israel's immediate borders. Happy as he is to cash Israeli checks, he realizes that the real money is in oil, and that oil-rich Arabs are eager to grease his skids. There are even rumors that he'll resurrect the Iran nuclear deal he scuttled in his first term. Others have noticed this, although they keep trying to imagine less crass motives:

  • Elfadil Ibrahim [05-19] Why Trump ghosted Israel: He likes 'winning': "Leaving Netanyahu off his itinerary of must-see leaders was tactical, not so much a strategic, move."

• Todd Miller [06-01] Donald Trump's Border World in the Age of Climate Change: "The United States, the world's largest historic carbon emitter, had already been spending 11 times more on border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance and, under President Trump, those proportions are set to become even more stunningly abysmal."

• Liz Theoharis/Aaron Scott/Moses Hernandez McGavin [06-03]: The Christian Nationalist Mission to Banish Trans People.

Mike Lofgren [05-24] Pete Rose, Donald Trump and the corruption of literally everything: "Our president's meddling in baseball history: Another reminder that he ruins everything he touches." Aside from Rose, the other names are ancient, with only Joe Jackson likely to receive any HOF consideration at all (some other names I recognize: Eddie Cicotte, a near-HOF quality pitcher also part of the Black Sox scandal, as were Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver, and Lefty Williams; also: Benny Kauff, Lee Magee, Cozy Dolan; others I didn't recall: Joe Gedeon, Gene Paulette, Jimmy O'Connell, William Cox; I was surprised that Hal Chase was not on the list, but no one in MLB history has been so notoriously corrupt for so long -- probably not HOF caliber, but pretty comparable to a couple others who have been inducted; see Wikipedia for details on these and others). I always hated the way sports writers lionized Rose, so I tended to denigrate him. (I suppose Charlie Parker was another one I underrated because everyone else seemed to overrate him.) If I had to rank Rose, I'd put him somewhere just below Paul Waner, but well above Lloyd Waner. That Trump would favor Rose seems typical of both (sure, I'm less certain that Rose would reciprocate, but I wouldn't rule it out).

• George F Will [05-15] Pete Rose and Donald Trump, what a double-play combo: Will is categorically wrong on everything in politics, except that he hates Donald Trump, probably for the same reasons Churchill hated Hitler. Will's one saving grace is that he knows a lot about baseball, and writes about it intelligently and well. So when I wanted to compare notes on Rose and Trump, I landed here, where the key line is his description of Rose as "a monster of self-absorption." QED, I'd say.

Kenneth P Vogel [05-27] Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner: "Paul Walczak's pardon application cited his mother's support for the president, including raising millions of dollars and a connection to a plot to publicize a Biden family diary." Add his name to the list of examples "of the [Trump's] willingness to use his clemency powers to reward allies who advance his political causes, and to punish his enemies."

Yasha Levine [05-28] A Letter to My Fellow Jewish Americans: Starts with the killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington DC, by a shooter identified as Elias Rodriguez, predictably spun as "a pure act of antisemitism," because what other reason can there be for wanting to strike back at Israel?

So I want to say this to many of my fellow Jews in America: I know you are desperate to justify and deflect your support for Israel's actions. . . . This denial may work on you, but it has little power in the larger world. You've been sheltered for far too long, thinking that you and your children would never bear the cost of your political decisions. But here is the thing: What happened in Washington DC . . . there is a lot more of the same kind of violence coming our way. And it's all your fault. . . . Give up your biblical-nationalist fantasies before it's too late. We all live in one world. We're all connected. Continuing on this path will only bring ruin and death.

Jack Hunter [05-29] The great fade out: Neocon influencers rage as they diminish: "Mark Levin leads a dwindling parade of once important voices now desperate to stop an Iran deal. MAGA world is increasingly tuning out." They may be receding, but like a flood they've left their filth everywhere, deep in every crevice of the national security hive mind. Cleaning them out is going to take much more diligence than scatterbrained posers like Trump and Vance can muster.

Steve M [05-30] The New Sanewashing: Assuming Trump Has Ideas, Not Just Resentments and Personality Defects. This cites three examples, all from the New York Times within the week:

• Edward Wong [05-26]: Trump's Vision: One World, Three Powers?
• Edward Wong [05-29] Trump Makes a New Push to 'Decouple' U.S. From China.
• Glenn Thrush [05-29] Trump's Flurry of Pardons Signals a Wholesale Effort to Redefine Crime.

I sympathize with reporters who habitually seek to find some "method in the madness," but even if some in Trump's orbit would like to dignify his outbursts with some kind of underlying concept, Trump himself shows little interest in rationalization. As M puts it: "Trump's only idea here is: 'You're criminals. We're not.'" As for the Wong articles, "Donald Trump, geostrategist? Nahhh." His notion of a new tri-polar world order may be more realistic than the Clinton-Obama-Biden "indispensable nation" hypothesis, but even so he's way behind the curve, where even the lesser BRICS nations are charting their own courses, and Europe is only humoring American vanities as long as the demands (like buying F-35s) aren't too onerous.

More from No More Mister Nice Blog:

• [05-27] Democrats Need to Run on Their Policies' Coattails: Introduces Jess Piper, a Democratic Party activist who blogs as The View From Rural Missouri. (She doesn't say where, but in Applebaum and Joplin she gets there by driving south for four hours, so that puts her north of Kansas City, near the Iowa border. Joplin's 2.5-3 hours south of KC, and 3.5-4 hours east of Wichita. Piper is overly impressed with Anne Applebaum's Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, and for that matter with Heather Cox Richardson, who she reads "every morning," but unlike them shows little evidence of clamoring for foreign wars -- not least because she sees enough evidence of autocracy in Missouri to prioritize fighting it here.) Missouri is a former swing state that has turned into a Republican lock, but in recent years they've approved a number of referenda favoring issues like a $15 minimum wage and abortion rights -- issues that their elected Republicans then seek to nullify. The pitch: Democrats need to become recognized as champions and protectors of programs that are already popular. Which suggests they need to run on them, not just away from other Republican talking points.

• [05-28] Elissa Slotkin Almost Gets It. I could nitpick my way through this, but let's just say that Democrats need to find a leader who can channel Bernie Sanders' critique, in all of its intensity and passion along with his own unassailable credibility and integrity, yet not panic the donor class into self-destruction and caricature. Slotkin has some of what's needed, but isn't there yet.

  By the way, Sanders blew his chance in 2020, by running to the left to stave off Warren instead of ingratiating himself with the party centrists. I don't particularly blame him for sticking with his instincts: Trump did the same thing, but he didn't offend the donor class the way Sanders did (he was, after all, one of them, whereas Sanders is not). But the real reason Sanders beat Warren was not because he was farther left but because he had much broader appeal. I blame the "smart money" people for not seeing that what they needed to win wasn't ideological purity but someone who could get votes by credibly painting Trump as crooked and monstrous. On the other hand, they should have known that Sanders was at most a mild reformist, and even his most strenuous efforts would be tamed by the lobbyists and bureaucrats in their pockets, protecting their business interests. One almost suspects that the reason Bloomberg et al. panicked so was because they realized that the left critique of their ridiculous wealth was too right to permit any scrutiny.

• [05-29] That Origin Story for Trump's War on Higher Education Leaves Out a Few Facts: "Pro-Gaza campus protests are a pretext now. The war [he means Trump's war, or assault, on academia] would have happened anyway, because the right can't tolerate the existence of any institution it can't control."

• [05-31] Do Trump's Poll Numbers Improve Every Time We Beat Him? Here he develops a couple ideas from a Ross Douthat column, on Trump's ability to survive his own self-made crises:

  I worry that many Americans are having a reptile-brain response to Trump's push-and-pull on tariffs. Obviously, MAGA Nation is happy no matter what he does:

  

  But I worry that there's a psych-experiment quality to this:

  1. Trump arouses anxiety with new tariffs. Markets tumble.
  2. Trump removes/suspends all or some of the tariffs he imposed. Markets rally.
  3. Even though we're no better off than we were before step 1, voters feel as if progress is being made. Trump's poll numbers go up.

  Trump's poll numbers aren't terrible anymore because he's constantly doing things, and constantly telling us he's doing things. Biden did things that would have paid off in the long run, but most voters didn't know what he'd done because he was a terrible public communicator, and because Democratic presidents generally assume the public will simply know what they've done.

  Trump's decent poll numbers suggest that roughly half the country just wanted a president who seemed forceful, no matter what he was doing -- and if they don't like the specifics, they believe there are still guardrails to save them.

• [06-01] Trump Probably Doesn't Believe Biden Was Killed (but He Wants to Kill Biden's Presidency): Another example of how Trump doesn't just disregard truth but sees its violation as a stimulant, and how his fans find his lies all so very funny.

• [06-02] Stephen Miller Was Already Trying to Memeify the Colorado Attack Just Hours After It Happened: Well, sure, I agree that "Israel's brutality in Gaza is no justification for this." I am, however, a bit confused by this group (Run for Their Lives) and the final line: "US supporters of the Israeli hostages say they're scared but have vowed to keep demonstrating." In Israel, hostage supporters demonstrate against the government, which clearly has no interest in freeing the hostages (and indeed, would rather they had been killed than captured). But in the US, who are they demonstrating for or against? The simpler, clearer message here is to call for a cease fire and an end to the genocide, which would almost certainly lead to the hostages' release, as that message could be supported by both friends and critics of Israel. But if, as suggested here, the group's demonstrations are strictly against Hamas, their purpose here is nothing more than to rally support for Israel's genocide: the hostages are pawns of Israel as much as of Hamas. The meme, by the way, is something about "suicidal migration" ("a powerful term," "a term we should use more"). It's stupid, but sometimes that's the best they can come up with.

• [06-03] Democrats Aren't Doomed, Though They Should Be Less Doomed. This starts with Nate Cohn [06-03] Should Republicans Have Won in a Landslide?: "The question of whether Donald Trump cost conservatives a more decisive victory is a useful one to consider." This strikes me as fairly idle speculation, based on very little understanding of why Trump won and/or Harris lost. One thought that I do have is that while Trump may have had more negatives than many other Republicans, he alone was able to campaign on pure emotional energy (redemption, revenge, etc.). Any other Republican would have pulled the focus back toward policy, and Republican policies are notoriously unpopular -- which is a big part of why even Trump ducked Project 2025. And that's just the Republican side. Any chance that Democrats might run stronger candidates with better messaging? It's not like there's no room for improvement there.

Howard Dean [05-31] How Democrats can pull off a win under a GOP trifecta: Dismantle the "legal" drug cartel: Dean's leadership of the DNC produced major wins in 2006 and 2008, so Obama replaced him with a cronies who went on to squander Democratic majorities in Congress and in the States, leaving Obama as the only major Democrat to survive. I haven't noticed him name in ages, so I jumped on this. Not what I expected, but he has a good case against the rackets that manage pharmacy benefits. Just how Democrats can fight them without a power base isn't clear, but it should be a campaign issue.

Gregory P Magarian [05-31] Three ways the government can silence speech without banning it. "Among the present administration's chosen tools: making institutions stop or change their advocacy to get government benefits; inducing self-censorship through intimidation; and molding the government's own speech to promote official ideology."

Melvin Goodman [06-02]: Marco Rubio: The Secretary of Statelessness: One of the few hopes I have for Trump is the utter destruction and humiliation of Rubio, which seems to be well underway. He was the most unsavory of Trump's 2016 opponents, and by far the most ambitious of the 2024 cabinet picks, which is to say the one guy who still thinks he can outsmart and use Trump.

Tareq S Hajjaj [06-02] Aid massacre: Israeli forces kill 75 Palestinians at U.S.-run aid distribution center: "The Americans and Israelis set a huge trap for us to lure us here and kill us." Hajjaj had previous reports on the aid center from May 27 ("It looked like a large prison": Chaos ensures at U.S.-Israeli-backed aid distribution site in Gaza) and May 29 (Palestinians describe being treated like animals as chaos breaks out again at U.S.-run aid site in Gaza). Also:

• Abdaljawad Omar [05-30] The 'chaos' of aid distribution in Gaza is not a system failure. The system is designed to fail.

Blaise Malley [06-03] "Shameful, vindictive erasure": Hegseth orders removal of Harvey Milk's name from Navy ship: "announcing the renaming during Pride Month was intentional." One thing about the Trump administration is that no chance to offend is too petty for them.

Cheyenne McNeill [06-03] "Disgusting abomination": Elon Musk attacks "big, beautiful" spending bill: Needless to add, while vomiting the usual clichés about "this massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill," he also took exception to the removal of several cuts that would have specifically benefitted his companies. For more on this, see:

• Marc Caputo: [06-03] Four reasons Musk attacked Trump's "big beautiful bill".

Tweets:

• Jeffrey St Clair [05-17]: I've read this headline story [from Haaretz: Prominent French rabbi receives death threats over criticism of Israeli policy in Gaza] three times and it's giving me a migraine . . . The Rabbi's getting death threats for opposing a policy of starving children to death. Who's the real anti-Semite? The Rabbi or the Zionists threatening her life?

• Moira Donegan [05-18]: In what might be the logical endpoint of American Zionism, the Heritage Foundation has declared that pro-Palestinian activism is not just antisemitic, but is in fact a shadowy global conspiracy . . . led by Jews. [Link to NYT piece: The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement. Identified among the leaders of a global "Hamas Support Network" are "Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Sorow and Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois."]

• Tony Karon [05-20] Imagine if Gary Lineker[*] had said this? Or any New York Times editor, or Democratic Party politician? Even Israel's Zionist parliamentary 'left' is making clear that Israel is not a "normal" state; it's a psychotic genocidal regime that must be stopped.

  In an interview with Israeli public radio yesterday, the leader of Israel's Democrats party, Yair Golan, said: "A sane country doesn't engage in fighting against civilians, doesn't kill babies as a hobby and doesn't set for itself the goals of expelling a population."

  [*] I had to look up Lineker, an English sports broadcaster (former soccer player) who has been blackballed by BBC for expressing "political views," although as far as I can tell not very radical ones.

• Aaron Rupar [05-20] Tim Scott on crypto legislation: "This bill must go forward because it's good news for the American people, especially the ones living in poverty." [Rupar adds: "let them eat shitcoins"]

• Mark Jacob [05-20]: Trump and RFK Jr. say today's kids are "the sickest generation in American history." Is that just a feeling? Here are some facts: About 46% of children born in the U.S. in 1800 did not live to see their 5th birthday. In 1900, the figure was 24%. Now it's under 1%. [Link to New York Times article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg/Dani Blum: Kennedy and Trump Paint Bleak Picture of Chronic Disease in U.S. Children: "A highly anticipated White House report blames a crisis of chronic illness on ultraprocessed foods, chemical exposures, lifestyle factors and excessive use of prescription drugs, including antidepressants."]

• Alejandra Caraballo [05-22] This [the Republican budget bill] passed 215-214. We're going to lose our healthcare because 3 senior Dems have died this year. We lost Roe because Ginsburg didn't retire. We lost the election because Joe ran for reelection. Our country is being destroyed because geriatric Dems can't retire and let go of power. [What power? More like personal ego perks.]

• James Surowiecki [05-26] [Linking to a Bernie Sanders ad and tweet, saying "75% of Democrats want the party to move in a more progressive, pro-working class direction. Is the Party leadership listening? Or will they continue with their ideology of maintaining the status quo?"]

  Joe Biden was the most pro-working-class president in 60 years, and working-class voters did not care.

  Nathan J Robinson replied: "one reason they didn't care is because half the time he could barely speak in complete sentences." Of course, the more obvious riposte was that the bar was pretty low, and Biden didn't deliver on most of the gestures he made, that he didn't make that many, and that few of them were bold enough to get attention. No doubt his inability to speak coherently about what he wanted was part of the problem. But also after a long career in the business-as-usual center of the Democratic Party, he didn't want much. But even if you buy Surowiecki's assertion, what about Harris? Biden may have been on the minds of those who hated him, but the name on the ballot was Harris, and how much working class support, or even rapport, did she offer? Clearly there was a block of voters who felt enough of a bond with Biden to vote for him over Trump, but didn't feel the same about Harris or Clinton, and they seem to have been the swing voters. It's unfair, and dumb, that Biden could win those voters when a pair of educated and wonky women with essentially the same platform could not, but the answer isn't to whine. It's to present a critique and a vision that voters (and not just donors) can get behind.

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