Speaking of * [30 - 39]Sunday, October 8, 2023
Speaking of Which
I wrote the introduction below before Israel blew up. On Saturday,
I moved my irregular section on Israel up to the top of the "top story
threads" section, ahead of the breakout on the House Speaker -- lots
of links there, but the story is pretty pat. The Israel introduction
was written Saturday afternoon. I resolved to post this early Sunday,
as I have other things I need to do in the evening, so my coverage of
the rapidly unfolding Israel story is limited. Still, I think the
lessons are obvious, even if no one is writing about them. When I
see lines like "this is Israel's 9/11" I process that differently:
for America, 9/11 was a sad, sobering day, one that should have
led us to a profound reassessment of our national fetish of power;
instead, America's leaders took it as an unpardonable insult, and
plotted revenge in a foolish effort to make any further defiance
unthinkably costly. It didn't work, and in short order America had
done more damage to itself than Al Qaeda ever imagined.
The only nation in the world even more hung up on its ability
to project power and impose terror is Israel -- so much so that
America's neocons are frankly jealous that Israel feels so little
inhibition about flaunting its power. Today's formal declaration
of war was another kneejerk move. But until Israelis are willing
to consider that they may be substantially at fault for their
misfortunes, such kneejerk moves will continue, hurting Israel
as much as its supposed enemies.
Good chance Music Week won't appear until Tuesday, if then.
I ran across this paragraph on conservatism in Christopher Clark's
Revolutionary Spring (pp. 251-252), and thought that, despite
its unfortunate source, it has something to say to us:
In a sympathetic reflection on Metternich's political thought, Henry
Kissinger, an admirer, exposed what he called 'the conservative
dilemma'. Conservatism is the fruit of instability, Kissinger
observed, because in a society that was still cohesive 'it would occur
to no one to be a conservative'. It thus falls to the conservative to
defend, in times of change, what had once been taken for granted. And
-- here is the rub -- 'the act of defense introduces rigidity'. The
deeper the fissure becomes between the defenders of order and the
partisans of change, the greater becomes the 'temptation to dogmatism'
until, at some point, no further communication is possible between the
contenders, because they no longer speak the same language. 'Stability
and reform, liberty and authority, come to appear as antithetical, and
political contests turn doctrinal instead of empirical.
I draw several conclusions from this:
Reactionaries always emerge too late to halt, let alone reverse,
the change they object to. Change is rarely the result of deliberate
policy, which makes it hard to anticipate and understand. And change
creates winners as well as losers, and those winners have stakes to
defend against reactionary attack.
What finally motivates reactionaries is rarely the change itself,
but their delayed perception that the change poses a threat to their
own power, and this concern dominates their focus to the exclusion of
anything else. They become rigid, dogmatic, eventually turning their
ire on the very idea of flexibility, of reform.
Having started from a position of power, their instinct is to
use force, especially to repress anyone who threatens to undermine
their power, including those pleading for reasonable reforms. Reason
itself becomes their enemy.
While they may win political victories, their inability to
understand the sources and benefits of change, their unwillingness
to entertain reforms that benefit others, drives their agenda into
the realm of fantasy. They fail, they throw tantrums, they fail
even worse. Eventually, they're so discredited they disappear, at
least until the next generation of endangered elites repeats the
cycle.
Consider several major sources of change since 1750 or so:
Most profound has been the spread of ideas and reason, which has
only accelerated and intensified over time. One was the discovery
that we are all individuals, capable of reason and deliberate action,
and deserving of respect. Another is that we belong to communities.
Most relentlessly powerful has been the pursuit of profit: the
basic instinct that preceded but grew into capitalism.
The incremental development of science and technology, which has
been accelerated (and sometimes perverted) by capitalism.
The growth of mass culture (through print, radio, television,
internet), and its subsequent fragmentation.
The vast increase in human population, made possible by longer
lives and by the near-total domination of land (and significant
appropriation of water and air) on Earth, driven by the above.
Nobody anticipated these changes. Though reactionaries emerged at
every stage, they failed, and were forgotten, as generations came to
accept the changes behind them, often railing against changes to come.
It tells you something that conservatives claim to revere history, but
history just dismisses them as selfish, ignorant cranks.
Of course, there is no guarantee that today's reactionaries won't
win their political struggles. There may be historical examples where
conservatives won out, like the Dark Ages following the Roman Empire,
or the closing of China in the 15th Century. But human existence is
so precariously balanced on limits of available resources that the
threat they pose is huge indeed. Maybe not existential, but not the
past they imagine, nor the one they pray for.
Top story threads:
Israel: Last week I folded this section into "World." Friday
night I thought about doing that again, which a single link reviewing
the Nathan Thrall book wouldn't preclude. Then, as they say, "all hell
broke loose." When I got up around Noon Saturday, the Washington Post
headline was:
Netanyahu: 'We are at war' after Hamas attack. What he probably
meant is "thank God we can now kill them all with impunity, all the
while blaming our acts on them." The memory of occupiers is much
shorter and shallower than the memory of the occupied. The first
tweet I saw after this news was from a
derecka, who does remember:
Palestinians can't march, can't pray, can't call for boycotts, can't
leave, can't stay, can't publish reports, what's should people do?
land acknowledgments?
Here's another
tweet, from Tony Karon:
Is Netanyahu threatening genocide? "We will turn Gaza into a deserted
island. To the citizens of Gaza, I say. You must leave now." Everyone
knows the 2m Gazans can't leave because Israel has locked them in for
decades. So how will he make it a "deserted island"
Netanyahu is Prime Minister, comanding one of the world's largest
and most sophisticated war machines, so I don't think you can dismiss
such threats as idle huffing. Looking backward, Doug Henwood
tweeted:
Some perspective -- since September 2000:
Palestinians killed by Israeli forces: 10,500
Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians: 881
That's a 12/1 ratio.
I've written hundreds of thousands of words on Israel since 2001.
(You can find most of them in my
notebooks and also in the "Last Days"
series of
book drafts.) I've
read a lot. I've tried to be
reasonable. I've never described
myself as "pro-Palestinian" (or pro- any nation or ethnic group, not
even American). I suppose you could say I'm "anti-Israeli" in the sense
that I object to many policies Israel practices, also "anti-Zionist"
in the sense that I believe Zionism is a fundamentally flawed creed
and ideology. Still, I always felt that Jews had a right to settle in
what became Israel. I just objected to the terms they imposed on the
people who lived there before them, and continue to live there.
One piece I can point to is one I wrote on
November 17, 2012, which
is as good a place as any to start. In 2000, Ariel Sharon took over
as Prime Minister, demolished the Oslo Accords that promised some
sort of "two-state" division of Israel and Palestine, and provoked
the second Intifada (Palestinians called this the Al-Aqsa Intifada,
although I've always thought of it as the Shaul Mofaz Intifada, for
the Defense Minister whose heavy-handed repression of Palestinian
demonstrations kicked the whole thing off). By 2005, the Intifada
was defeated in what isn't but could be called the second Nakba (or
third, if you want to count the end of the 1937-39 revolt). Sharon
then pulled Israel's settlers from their hard-to-defend enclaves
in Gaza, sealed the territory off, and terrorized the inhabitants
with sonic boom overflights (which had to be stopped, as they also
bothered Israelis living near Gaza).
Hamas shifted gears, and ran in elections for the Palestinian
Authority. When they won, the old PA leadership, backed by Israel
and the US, rejected the results, and tried to seize power --
successfully in the West Bank, but they lost local control of Gaza
to Hamas. Ever since then, Israel has tried to managed Gaza as an
open-air jail, walled in, blockaded, and periodically strafed and
bombed. One such episode was the subject of my 2012 piece. There
have been others, every year or two -- so routine, Israelis refer
to them as "mowing the grass."
Once Sharon, Netanyahu, and the settlers made it impossible to
partition the West Bank -- something, quite frankly, Israel's Labor
leaders as far back as 1967 had never had any intention of allowing --
the most obvious solution in the world was for Israel to cut Gaza
free, allow it to be a normal, self-governing state, its security
guaranteed by Egypt and the West (not Israel), with its economy
generously subsidized by Arab states and the West. This didn't
happen because neither side wanted it: Palestinians still clung to
the dream of living free in their homeland (perhaps in emulation of
the Jews), so didn't want to admit defeat; and Israelis hated the
idea of allowing any kind of Palestinian state, and thought they
could continue to impose control indefinitely. Both sides were
being short-sighted and stupid, but one should place most of the
blame on Israel, as Israel had much more freedom to act sensibly.
But by all means, save some blame for the US, which from 2000 on
has increasingly surrendered its foreign policy to blindly support
Israel, no matter how racist and belligerent its politicians became.
I'll add a few more links, but don't expect much. It looks like
this will take weeks to play out, and while the lessons should be
obvious to any thinking being, Israel and America have dark blinders
to any suggestion that the world doesn't automatically bend to their
will.
Updates, by Sunday afternoon:
Israel formally declares war against Hamas as hundreds killed on both
sides;
U.S. to provide arms, shift naval group toward Mideast; death toll in
Israel, Gaza passes 1,100.
Zack Beauchamp: [10-07]
Why did Hamas invade Israel? "The assault on southern Israel exposed
the reality of the Palestinian conflict."
Jonathan Cook: [10-08]
The West's hypocrisy towards Gaza's breakout is stomach-turning.
Jonathan Guyer: [10-07]
This Gaza war didn't come out of nowhere: "Everyone forgot about the
Palestinians -- conditions have been set for two decades, and Biden's
focus on Israel-Saudi talks may have lit the match."
Maha Hussaini: [10-08]
Why Gaza's attack on Israel was no surprise.
Ellen Ioanes: [10-07]
Hamas has launched an unprecedented strike on Israel. Here's what you
need to know.
Lubna Masarwa: [10-07]
Israel 'can no longer control its own fate' after stunning Palestinian
attack: Interview with Meron Rapoport, arguing that "Israeli military
and intelligence is at a new low."
Haggai Matar: [10-07]
Gaza's shock attack has terrified Israelis. It should also unveil
the context: "The dread Israelis are feeling after today's
assault, myself included, has been the daily experience of millions
of Palestinians for far too long."
James North: [10-03]
Nathan Thrall has written a masterpiece about Israel's occupation:
"A Day in the Life of Abed Salama tells the story of Israel's
occupation of Palestine through one family's tragedy."
Paul Pillar: [10-07]
Why Hamas attacked and what happens next.
Richard Silverstein: [10-08]
Gaza invasion: Over 700 Israeli dead, 230 Palestinian dead as Israel
prepares massive assault.
Philip Weiss/Michael Arria: [10-07]
Democrats and liberal Zionists decry 'terrorists' and rally to 'stand
with Israel': Of course they did, but it's one thing to decry the
sudden outbreak of violence (the Bernie Sanders quote is an example;
he didn't even resort to the coded language of "terrorism"), quite
another to cheer Israel on in inflicting far greater violence on
Palestinians (even if not explicit, a "I stand with Israel" amounts
to the same thing). Morever, a little self-consciousness would help.
I don't disagree that "the targeting and kidnapping of civilians is
an inexcusable, outrageous war crime," but culpability isn't limited
to one side (even momentarily). Israel has thousands of Palestinians
in jail (with or without "due process," which in Israel is designed
to be discriminatory).
I especially hate the "Israel has the right
to self-defense" line people habitually parrot. Palestinians don't?
As a pacifist, I might argue not, but not in a way that would exempt
Israelis. When something like this happens, the first, and really
the only, matter is to stop it, then to learn, adjust, and make it
unthinkable in the future. I dare say that no one in the echelons
of Israeli government is thinking along those lines. Probably no one
in Hamas either, possibly because they've spent decades studying
power in Israel.
The shutdown and the speaker: A week ago, after acting like
a complete ass for months, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy
reversed course and offered a fairly clean continuing spending bill,
which instantly passed, cleared the Senate, and was signed by Biden.
A small number of Republicans (eight), led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL), felt
so betrayed by not shutting down the government that they forced a
vote to fire McCarthy, which succeeded.
Nicole Narea/Andrew Prokop: [10-04]
9 questions about Kevin McCarthy's downfall and House GOP chaos,
answered.
Matthew Cooper: [10-03]
The day after the McCarthy ouster: "After the shock wears off,
remember that this cannibalism started in the 1990s and won't go
away."
Hakeem Jeffries: [10-06]
A bipartisan coalition is the way forward for the House: This
won't happen, because the faction of Republicans who would even
consider it is even smaller than the Gaetz faction that just wanted
to trash the place. But unless something like this happens, the House
will continue to be a public embarrassment, at least until the 2024
elections, at which point it will either get better or even worse.
Ben Jacobs: [10-03]
Kevin McCarthy's historic humiliation.
Annie Karni: [10-04]
From a Capitol Hill basement, Bannon stokes the Republican Party
meltdown.
John Nichols: [10-05]
The "Trump for Speaker" campaign shipwrecks on the shoals of
stupidity: Turns out Republican actually had a rule against
an indicted felon becoming Speaker. So Trump resorted to the next
worse option, endorsing Jim Jordan. Nichols: [10-06]
Trump's pick for Speaker is a nightmare waiting to happen.
Timothy Noah: [10-05]
Who did in Kevin McCarthy? Maybe not Gaetz. Maybe not even Trump.
"James Carville thought the bond vigilantes controlled the world. He
just may have been right."
Nikki McCann Ramirez: [10-06]
Trump keys on Jim Jordan's wrestling history in speaker endorsement:
"omitting the scandal at the center of his coaching career."
Norman J Ornstein: [10-06]
How Kevin McCarthy planted the seeds of Kevin McCarthy's demise:
"Remember the 'young gun'? He doesn't want you to."
David Rothkopf: [10-06]
A broken Congress is what MAGA always wanted.
Leo Sands: [10-04]
Who voted Kevin McCarthy out? These 8 House Republicans.
Will Sommer: [10-06]
Fox News tries to referee House GOP chaos but cancels speaker 'debate':
Most likely Fox simply wanted to exploit the situation for profit, while
reminding everyone that they're the Mecca every Republican prostrates
and prays to (except, it would appear, Trump). On the other hand, even
the House demagogues realize that appealing to the public would only
further exacerbate their task of finding a leader no one hates enough
to kill over.
Michael Tomasky: [10-06]
Six reasons why liberals should salivate at a Speaker Jordan.
Trump:
Jim Geraghty: [10-04]
Populist passions, not Trump, rule the GOP. To the extent that
anyone can be said to rule the Republican Party, it's still the
billionaires who fund the party, and pull strings behind the scenes.
Aside from a few fixed ideas about taxes -- something other people
should pay -- they aren't completely aligned, as they have varying
business interests (some depend on government support, others loathe
government interference) and personalities (many are assholes, a
trait which great wealth promotes, but they are assholes in varied
ways). Trump is, at least nominally, one of the billionaires, but
he is a peculiar one: extremely, flagrantly outspoken, but not much
of a leader. That's largely because his thoughts are received from
elsewhere (mostly his Fox News gurus). For years, Republican thought
leaders cynically issued their dog whistles. Not Trump: he's just a
particularly loud dog.
I tend to resist any linkage between Trump and populism -- I still
respect and admire the original 1890s People's Party -- but sure, he
reflects his followers much more than they do him. The result is often
incoherent, which doesn't seem to bother either, especially as they're
defined much more by what they hate than what they want.
Tori Otten: [10-06]
Trump Organization exec admits he considered fraud part of the job:
"Jeff McConney is blowing the door wide open on exactly how the Trump
Organization operated."
Nia Prater: [10-03]
Trump hit with gag order after targeting judge's clerk.
Nikki McCann Ramirez: [10-05]
Trump blabbed about US nuclear capabilities to Australian billionaire:
who then "shared the potentially sensitive information with dozens of
other people."
Tatyana Tandanpolie: [10-06]
Trump abruptly drops Cohen lawsuit ahead of deposition: "Trump
sued former fixer Michael Cohen for $500 million -- then backed out
after repeatedly delaying deposition." Igor Derysh previously
wrote about this suit: [04-14]
Experts say Trump's lawsuit against Michael Cohen could badly
backfire. As Cohen put it: "I can't believe how stupid he was
to have actually filed it."
Emily Zemler: [10-05]
Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson says Trump threw his food
'once or twice a week'.
DeSantis, and other Republicans:
Perry Bacon Jr: [10-04]
Republicans are in disarray. But they are still winning a lot on
policy. Way, way too much, considering that their policy choices
are almost all deadass wrong.
Paul Krugman: [10-05]
Will voters send in the clowns? A lot of things that show up in
polls make little sense, but few show this much cognitive dissonance:
"Yet Americans, by a wide margin, tell pollsters that Republicans
would be better than Democrats at running the economy." Krugman
spends a lot of time arguing that the economy isn't so bad, but
regardless of the current state, how can anyone see Republicans as
better?
Biden and/or the Democrats:
Kate Aronoff: [10-05]
Biden scraps environmental laws to build Trump's border wall.
Also:
Nicole Narea: [10-02]
Who is Laphonza Butler, California's new senator? I did a double
take on this line about the Democrats already campaigning for the
Feinstein seat: "All three have sizable war chests for the campaign,
with Schiff, Porter, and Lee having $29.8 million, $10.3 million,
and $1.4 million on hand." Sure, they're all "sizable," but sizes
are vastly different. They are currently polling at 20% (0.71 points
per million dollars), 17% (1.65 ppmd), and 7% (5.0 ppmd).
Stephen Prager: [10-03]
Voters have the right to be dissatisfied with 'Bidenomics': "The
president's defenders think voters are ungrateful for a good economy.
But people's economics experiences vary widely, and much of the
country has little to appreciate Biden for." Well, compared to what?
Not if you're comparing to Republicans. I'll grant that it can be
hard to gauge, including shifts from Obama that I believe are very
significant. But blaming Biden for canceling the Child Tax Credit
misses the key point that Democrats didn't have enough votes to
extend it. Same for the rest of the cutbacks from the Build Back
Better bill that Bernie Sanders presented -- some of which (the
parts that Joe Manchin accepted) was eventually passed. This piece
cites another by Stephen Semler: [08-15]
Bidenomics isn't working for working people. One thing that jumps
out here is the chart "The U.S. is Shrinking Its Social Safety Net,"
where everything listed (and since phased out) was part of the
remarkable pandemic lockdown relief act, which Trump got panicked
into signing, but which was almost all written and passed by Pelosi
and Schumer. To get it passed and signed, they had to sunset the
provisions. Democrats need to campaign on bringing them back, and
building on them.
Legal matters and other crimes:
Climate and environment:
Economic matters:
Ukraine War:
Connor Echols: [10-06]
Diplomacy Watch: Ukraine's arduous path to EU accession: "A
hopeful summit obscured the difficulties facing Kyiv as it pushes
to join the bloc."
George Beebe: [10-04]
Will Ukraine's effort go bankrupt gradually . . . then suddenly?
Dave DeCamp: [10-08]
Biden considering huge $100 billion Ukraine spending package:
If at first you don't succeed, go crazy! Good chance he'll be adding
military aid for Israel before this passes. After all, look how
successful the last 50 years of aid was.
David Ignatius: [10-05]
A hard choice lies ahead in Ukraine, but only Ukrainians can make it:
First I've heard of a McCain Institute, but if someone wanted a pro-war
counter to the Quincy Institute, that's a pretty obvious name. As for
the opinion piece, it is half-obvious, and half-ridiculous. The obvious
part is that Ukraine, as well as Russia, will have to freely agree to
any armistice. The ridiculous part is the idea that the US shouldn't
exert any effort to achieve peace. The "defer to Ukraine" mantra is a
blank check policy, promoted by people who want to see the war go on
indefinitely.
Jen Kirby: [10-03]
The West's united pro-Ukraine front is showing cracks. The
leading vote-getter in Slovakia has promised to end military aid
to Ukraine. Still, he's a long ways from being able to form a
government. Biden's latest request for Ukraine got dropped from
the bill the House finally passed to avoid (or forestall) a
government shutdown. On a straight vote, it would probably have
passed, but straight votes are hard to come by.
Jim Lobe: [10-06]
Iraq War boosters rally GOP hawks behind more Ukraine aid:
"Elliott Abrams' 'Vandenberg Coalition' also assails the Biden
administration for being soft on Russia." Wasn't Abrams the guy
who back in 2005 was whispering in Sharon's ear about how a
unilateral dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza with no
PA handover could be spun as a peace move but would actually
allow Israel to attack Gaza with impunity, any time they might
choose to? (Like in the lead up to elections, or in the interim
between Obama's election and when he took office, so he's have
to pledge allegiance to Israel before he could do anything
about it.)
Siobhán O'Grady/Anastacia Galouchka: [10-06]
Russian missile attack at Ukraine funeral overwhelmingly killed
civilians: Link caption was more to the point: "Overwhelming
grief in Ukrainian village hit by strike: 'There is no point in
living.'" But already you can see the effort to spin tragedy into
a propaganda coup.
Robert Wright: [10-06]
The real lesson of Ukraine for Taiwan: Attempting to control
a conflict through increased deterrence can easily backfire,
precipitating the event one supposedly meant to deter. When
Russia started threatening to invade Ukraine, Biden didn't
take a step back and say, whoa!, can't we talk about this?
No, his administration cranked up their sanctions threats, and
expedited their increasing armament of Ukraine. Putin looked at
the lay of the land and the timelines, and convinced himself that
his odds were better sooner than later. Nor is this the only case
where sanctions have backfired: the context for Japan's attack on
Pearl Harbor was America's embargo of steel and oil. World War I
started largely because Germany decided that war with Russia was
inevitable, and their chances of winning were better in 1914 than
they would be later. All these examples are bonkers, but that's
what happens when states put their faith in military power. China
has long claimed Taiwan (going back to the day when Taiwan still
claimed all of China), but Peking has been willing to play a long
game, for 75 years now. But the more America wants to close the
door on possible reunification, the more likely China is to panic
and strike first.
Around the world:
Masha Gessen: [09-29]
The violent end of Nagorno-Karabakh's fight for independence. I cited
this article last week, without comment. I then started thinking about
another article last week: Richard Silverstein: [09-29]
Azerbaijan: Israeli arms sales, greased palms, ethnic conflict.
And lo, I became suspicious whether Israel's siding with Azerbaijan
was not just to make money, but to promote a mass exodus ("ethnic
cleansing") of Armenians from newly occupied territory. Perhaps if
they could show other examples, they could justify disposing of
their Palestinian population the same way? If so, the uprising in
Gaza is likely to accelerate their schedule.
Jonathan Guyer: [10-02]
How MBS has won over Washington and the world: Five years after
journalist Jamal Khashoggi was "murdered, dismembered, and disappeared"
in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the Saudis are back in Washington's
good graces. Also on Saudi Arabia:
Ahmed Ibrahim: [10-03]
How Somalia never got back up after Black Hawk Down: "The Battle
of Mogadishu in October 1993 unleashed decades of American intervention
with very little to show for it."
Louisa Loveluck, et al: 10-05]
How government neglect, misguided policies doomed Libya to deadly
floods.
Other stories:
Kate Cohen: [10-03]
America doesn't need more God. It needs more atheists. Essay
adapted from the author's book: We of LIttle Faith: Why I Stopped
Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too).
Kevin T Dugan: [10-03]
The 3 most important things to know about Michael Lewis's SBF
book: The book is Going Infinite, which started out as
one of the writer's profiles of unorthodox finance guys, and has
wound up as some kind of "letter to the jury" on the occasion of
crypto conman Sam Bankman-Fried's fraud trial. Also on Lewis:
Karen J Greenberg: [10-05]
The last prisoners? With its prisoner population reduced to 30,
why can't America close Guantanamo?
Eric Levitz: [10-06]
Don't celebrate when people you disagree with get murdered.
"In view of many extremely online, spritually unswell conservatives,
[Ryan] Carson's brutal death was a form of karmic justice. . . . Days
earlier, the nihilist right greeted the murder of progressive
Philadelphia journalist Josh Kruger with the same grotesque glee."
Blaise Malley: [10-05]
The plan to avert a new Cold War: Review of Michael Doyle's
book, Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War. "If all sides
continue to perceive actions by the other as hostile, then they
will constantly be at the precipice of a military confrontation."
Charles P Pierce: [10-05]
Guns are now the leading cause of accidental death among American
kids.
JJ Porter: [10-05]
Conservative postliberalism is a complete dead end: A review of
Patrick Deneen's Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future,
as if you needed (or wanted) one.
Emily Raboteau: [10-03]
The good life: "What can we learn from the history of utopianism?"
Review of Kristen R Ghodsee: Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of
Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Also see the
Current Affairs interview with Ghodsee: [10-04]
Why we need utopias.
Corey Robin: [10-04]
How do we survive the Constitution? Review of the new book,
Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt,
the comparative political scientists who previously wrote up many
examples of How Democracies Die. The authors are critical
of various quirks in the US Constitution that have skewed recent
elections toward Republicans, thus thwarting popular will and
endangering democracy in America. I haven't spent much time with
these books, or similar ones where the authors (like Yascha Mounk)
seem to cherish democracy more for aesthetic than practical reasons.
My own view is that the Constitution, even with its imperfections,
is flexible enough to work for most people, if we could just get
them to vote for popular interests. The main enemy of democracy
is money, abetted by the media that chases it. The solution is to
make people conscious, much less of how the Founding Fathers sold
us short than of the graft and confusion that sells us oligarchy.
By the way, Robin mentions a 2022 book: Joseph Fishkin/William
E Forbath: The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the
Economic Foundations of American Democracy. I haven't read this
particular book, but I have read several others along the same lines
(focused more on the authors and/or the text, whereas Fishkin &
Forbath follow how later progressives referred back to the Constitution):
Ganesh Sitaraman: The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why
Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (2017); Erwin Chemerinsky:
We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the
Twenty-First Century (2018); Danielle Allen: Our Declaration:
A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
(2015). I should also mention Eric Foner: The Second Founding: How
the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (2019).
Nathan J Robinson: [10-06]
How to spot corporate bullshit: "A new book shows that the same
talking points have been recycled for centuries, to oppose every
form of progressive change." Review of Corporate Bullsh*t,
by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, and Donald Cohen, with plenty of
examples.
Missy Ryan: [10-04]
Over 80 percent of four-star retirees are employed in defense
industry: "Twenty-six of 32 four-star admirals and generals who
retired from June 2018 to July 2023." Based on the following report:
Washington Post Staff: [10-03]
The Post spent the past year examining US life expectancy. Here's
what we found:
- Chronic diseases are killing us
- Gaps between poor and wealthy communities are growing
- US life expectancy is falling behind global peers
- The seeds of this crisis are planted in childhood
- American politics are proving toxic
Related articles:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, October 1, 2023
Speaking of Which
Front page, top headline in Wichita Eagle on Saturday:
McCarthy's last-ditch plan to keep government open collapses.
The headline came from an
AP article, dropping the final "making a shutdown almost certain"
clause. This headline, says more about the media
mindset in America than it does about the politics it does such a poor
job of reporting on. McCarthy is not trying to avert a shutdown (at
least with this bill). Even if he somehow managed to pass it, there
was no chance of it passing the Senate without major revisions, which
his caucus would then reject. His core problem is that he insists on
passing an extreme partisan bill, but no bill is extreme enough for
the faction of Republicans dead set on shutting down the government,
and nothing he can do will appease them.
If he was at all serious about avoiding shutdown, he'd offer a
bill that would attract enough Democrat votes to make up for his
inevitable losses on the extreme right. That's what McConnell did
in the Senate, with a bill that passed 77-19. But House Republicans
follow what they call the Hastert Rule, which states that leaders
can only present bills approved by a majority of the caucus -- in
effect, that means the right-wing can hold bills hostage, even
mandatory spending bills, and looking for bipartisan support is
pointless. McCarthy had to compromise even further to gain enough
votes to be elected Speaker.
If the mainstream media refuses to provide even the barest of
meaningful context, this kabuki propaganda will just continue, to
the detriment of all.
[PS: On Saturday afternoon, after I wrote the above, McCarthy did
just that, passing a bill 335-91, with 90 Republicans and 1
Democrat opposed. The bill continues spending for 45 days, adds
disaster relief funds, extends federal flood insurance, and
reauthorizes FAA, but does not include the new Ukraine aid Biden
wanted.]
Top story threads:
The shutdown:
[PS: Congress finally passed a continuing spending resolution on
Saturday, after McCarthy's "last-ditch" bill failed to pass the
House. The intro below -- original title was "Drowning government
in the bathtub" -- was written before this bill passed, as
were the articles dated earlier. On the other hand, we're only
45 days away from the next big shutdown scare, which the same
bunch of clowns and creeps are almost certain again to push to
the brink.]
The Grover Nordquist quote
(from 2001) is: "I just want to shrink [government] down to the size
where we can drown it in the bathtub." Later he managed to get every
Republican in Congress to sign onto his "Taxpayer Protection Pledge,"
which would seem to commit them to the ultimate destruction of the
federal government. None of this slowed, let alone reversed the
growth of government -- it just ensured that the growth would be
funded mostly by deficits, which conveniently give Republicans
something else to whine about, even though they're mostly just
tax giveaways to the very rich. So whenever an opportunity arises
for Republicans to vent their hatred of the government and their
disgust over the people that government serves, they rise up and
break things. One of those opportunities is this week, when the
previous year's spending bills expire, without the House having
passed new ones for next year. Without new authorization, large
parts of government are supposed to shut down, giving Republicans
a brief opportunity to impress Grover Nordquist. Then, after a
few days or a couple weeks, they'll quietly pass a resolution to
allow their incompetence to escape notice for another year. You
see, most of what government actually does supports the very same
rich people who donate to Republican politicians. I could file
all of these stories under Republicans, since they are solely
responsible for this nonsense, but on this occasion, let's break
them out.
Post-deal:
Corbin Bolies: [10-01]
Rep. Matt Gaetz: I will force vote to can McCarthy 'this week'.
Sam Brodey: [10-01]
It's bad news that so many in the GOP are pissed about averting a
shutdown: On the other hand, every tantrum here should be recorded
and thrown back in their faces in 2024. It's bad news because these
idiots still have considerable power to wreak havoc. Vote them down
to a small minority and it will merely be sad and pathetic, which
is what they deserve.
David Rothkopf: [09-30]
All that drama and the House GOP's only win was for the Kremlin:
I'm sorry to have to say this, but Russiagate -- not the "collusion"
but the jingoistic Cold War revival -- isn't over yet. One thing that
the Republican right understands is that Russia's "expansionism" is
fundamentally limited by their sense of nationhood, and as such is
no real threat to their own "America First" nationalism. Democrats
don't understand this. They view Russia through two lenses: one is
as a rival to the US in a zero-sum game for world domination -- which
was a myth in the Cold War era, and pure projection now; the other
is that Putin has embraced a social conservatism and anti-democratic
repression to a degree that Republicans plainly aspire to, so they
are strongly disposed to treat both threats as linked. (Which, by
the way, is not total whimsy: Steve Bannon seems to have taken as
his life's work the formation of an International Brotherhood of
Fascists.) The problem with this is that it turns Democrats into
supporters of empire and war abroad, and those things not only
breed enemies, they undermine true democracy at home. Still, I'm
not unamused by Rothkopf taking a cheap shot in this particular
moment. I just worry about the mentality that makes one think
that's a real point.
Michael Scherer: [09-30]
Shutdown deal avoids political pain for Republican moderates:
For starters, this helps with definition: A "moderate" is a Republican
who worries more about losing to a Democrat than one who worries more
about being challenged by an even crazier Republican. Shutting down
the government is a play that appeals to the crazies, but has little
enthusiasm for most people, even ones who generally vote Republican.
The Republican also-rans second debate: Six of the first
debate's eight made their way to the Reagan Library in California,
again hosted by Fox. Bear in mind that any judgments about winners
and losers are relative.
Intelligencer Staff: [09-27]
Republican Debate: At least 33 things you missed. If you're up for
the gory details, here are the live updates. Notable quotes: "It's kind
of sexist, but mostly it's just gross, and it drives home one essential
fact about the people on tonight's stage. They are unrelatable freaks.
There is something deeply off-putting about each person on stage." Also:
"Ramaswamy: Thank you for speaking while I'm interrupting."
Mariana Alfaro: [09-27]
Republican presidential candidates blame UAW strike on Biden:
What? For giving workers hope they might gain back some ground after
forty years of Republican-backed union busting?
Zack Beauchamp: [09-27]
The Republican debate is fake: "With Trump dominating the GOP
primary, the debate is a cosplay of a competitive election -- and
a distraction from an ugly truth."
Aaron Blake: [09-27]
The winners and losers of the second Republican debate:
- Winner: Nikki Haley: The press hope for a rational Republican
is getting real desperate here. Aside from dunking on Ramaswamy,
the other claims for her are really spurious. How can anyone argue
that the UAW strike was the result of "the impact of inflation on
the workers"?
- Winner: Donald Trump: "Okay, maybe this one's unoriginal."
- Winner: Obamacare: Because Pence repeatedly avoided the question?
- Loser: GOP debates: QED, right?
- Loser: Ron DeSantis: "there was nothing that seemed likely to
arrest his backsliding."
- Loser: GOP moderation on immigration.
Jim Geraghty/Megan McArdle/Ramesh Ponnuru: [09-28]
'It sucks:' Conservatives discuss the GOP primary after the latest
debate. I didn't listen to the audio -- I'm listening to music
almost all the time; I can read at the same time, but I don't have
free time for podcasts -- so I'm not sure where Geraghty is going
with this, but the gist is that Trump sucks all the oxygen out of
the party, and nobody else has the guts to say that he's suffocating
the party just to stroke his own ego, because even if he somehow
manages to win, he doesn't know how to actually do anything, other
than keep sucking. (Pun? Sure.)
Eric Levitz: [09-28]
Who won (and lost) the second Republican debate:
- Winner: Vivek Ramaswamy: "came across as a slicks sociopath."
- Winner: Chris Christie: "we're gonna call you Donald DUCK."
- Losers: All of them: "In seriousness, there were no winners in
Simi Valley." He then runs the rest down one by one.
Harold Meyerson: [09-28]
Debate number two: Phonies and cacophonies.
Alexandra Petri: [09-28]
Here's what happened at the second Republican primary debate. Really.
Really? My favorite line here is one attributed to DeSantis: "If you
measure popularity in number of tears that a candidate has collected
from crocodiles and others, I am by far the most popular candidate."
Andrew Prokop: [09-27]
1 winner and 3 losers from Fox's dud of a second GOP debate:
- Loser: Vivek Ramaswamy: "At tonight's debate, Ramaswamy's schtick
sounded stale."
- Loser: The moderators: "Dana Perino, Stuart Varney, and Illa
Calderón seemed puzzlingly reluctant to have the candidates actually,
well, debate each other."
- Loser: Fox News: "Fox had to reduce its ad time slot prices by
hundreds of thousands of dollars for this debate, compared to the
first one, because interest was expected to be low."
- Winner: You know who: "Sorry, Chris Christie, calling him 'Donald
Duck' is cheesy and ineffective."
Let me conclude this section with a quote from Jeffrey St Clair
(see his "Roaming Charges" below for link) summing up the debate:
The Republican "debate" at the Reagan Library seemed like an exercise
in collective madness. And 24 hours and half a bottle of Jameson's
later, I still don't know what's crazier, Nikki Haley saying that
she'd solve the health care crisis by letting patients negotiate the
price of treatment with hospitals and doctors, Tim Scott's assertion
that LBJ's Great Society program was harder for black people to
survive than slavery or Ron DeSantis' pledge to use the Civil Rights
Act to target "left-wing" prosecutors: "I will use the Justice
Department to bring civil rights cases against all of those left-wing
Soros-funded prosecutors. We're not going to let them get away with it
anymore. We want to reverse this country's decline. We need to choose
law and order over rioting and disorder."
Trump: While it was unprecedented for a former president to
be indicted (for even one felony, much less 91), I think we now have
to admit that's merely a historical curiosity, like Dianne Feinstein
having been the first woman elected mayor of San Francisco. What is
truly unprecedented is that this guy, facing so many indictments under
four separate judges (plus more judges in prominent civil cases), is
still being allowed to campaign for president, to fly free around the
country, to give speeches where he threatens the lives of people he
thinks have crossed him, to appear on television shows where he can
influence potential jurors, and do this with complete impunity. While
everyone knows that defendants are to be considered innocent until a
jury finds them guilty, has anyone else under indictment ever been
given such lax treatment? Many of them spend long pre-trial periods
stuck in jail. (According to
this report, there are 427,000 people in local jails who haven't
been convicted.) Those who, like Trump, could manage bail, are subject
to other numerous other restrictions. Maybe one reason Trump seems
to regard himself as above the law is that the courts have allowed
him such privileges.
Mark Alfred/Justin Rohrlich: [09-29]
First plea deal in Georgia RICO case is not good news for Trump:
Scott Hall to plead guilty and testify about his crime, which is a
big part of the foundation for the RICO case. The plea agreement
calls for five years probation, $5,000 fine, 200 hours of community
service, and other restrictions.
Lauren Aratani: [10-01]
The art of the fraudulent deal? Trump Organization trial set to
begin. This is the New York civil case against his business.
I'm a little unclear on how this works, given that there is already
a "pre-trial judgment ruling that Trump and his co-defendants,
including sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, committed financial
fraud through faulty financial statements." Aratani previously
wrote [09-26]
Five key takeaways from Donald Trump's financial fraud case ruling,
which says that the "bench trial" will be shorter, because the facts
of fraud have already been established, so the focus will be on the
amount and nature of the punishment.
Victoria Bekiempis: [09-30]
Trump calls for store robbers to be shot in speech to California
Republicans.
Kyle Cheney: [09-29]
Trump's attack on Milley fuels special counsel's push for a gag
order.
Tim Dickinson: [09-29]
This 'violence-ready' militia is hiding in plain sight: "White
supremacist Active Clubs are growing exponentially -- 'they're who
the Proud Boys wanted to be,' one researcher says."
Gabriella Ferrigine: [09-25]
Donald Trump ramps up the GOP's attack on the military with call to
execute top US general: Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley. This
was followed up by Chauncey DeVega: [09-27]
The real reason why Donald Trump wants Gen. Milley to be killed.
Rep. Paul Gosar [R-AZ] also chimed in: Trudy Ring: [09-26]
Republican Rep. Paul Gosar calls for death to 'sodomy-promoting traitor'
Gen. Mark Milley.
Margaret Hartmann: [09-30]
Master dealmaker Melania Trump keeps renegotiating her prenup.
Sarah Jones: [09-27]
The media falls for Trump's labor lies.
Ed Kilgore: [09-28]
With Trump's 2024 rivals out, who's left on his veep list? This
is a stupid game, but I was tempted to look. For some reason, the
actual names bruited here are all women: Kristi Noem, Sarah Huckabee
Sanders, Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Joni Ernst, Marsha
Blackburn, Elise Stefanik, Katie Britt. I wouldn't give any of
them as much as a 2% chance, although if Trump were a somewhat
more conventional politician, Ernst wouldn't be a silly choice --
she's won two terms in former-swing-state Iowa, and her sadistic
"make 'em squeal" motto should appeal to Trump, or at least his
fans. Beyond that, I have no idea. Maybe someone he can share
locker room banter with, like Michael Flynn or Ronnie Jackson?
In 2016 he picked Pence because he needed someone to reassure the
Republican regulars, and none of the candidates groveled more.
This time, he is the Republican base, and no one else matters,
so the last thing he'll want is some sniveling upstart who wants
to step into his shoes. And while he might be up for banging
anyone on Kilgore's list, he's never going to trust any of them.
Heather Digby Parton: [09-27]
Trump family fraud exposed -- but Ivanka dodges liability in N.Y. civil
case. DJTJ and Eric, on the other hand . . .
Christian Paz: [09-28]
Donald Trump isn't the union legend he's pretending to be.
Charles P Pierce: [09-27]
You've got to read this judge's ruling in Trump's New York fraud case.
Nia Prater: [09-27]
Trump might lose Trump Tower after scathing court ruling.
Alex N Press: [09-27]
Trump is speaking tonight in Michigan at a nonunion auto shop, as a
guest of its boss: This was the date of the "debate," after Biden
appeared on a UAW picket line.
Matt Stieb:
David Von Drehle: [09-27]
A judge calls out Trump's business lies. Voters can be just as
critical.
DeSantis, and other Republicans:
Jonathan Chait: [09-27]
DeSantis forced to say why he enjoys denying health insurance to poor
Floridians: Chait paraphrases: "Those people should work harder.
Indeed, to give them subsidized access to medical care will sap their
incentive. Poor people need motivation to work hard, and denying them
the ability to see a doctor and get medicine is part of that necessary
motivation." Conservatives believe that getting rich is a reward for
virtue, but they also seem to believe that if there are no consequences
for not getting rich, no one would bother putting the work in. (Even
though most of the people who actually are rich got that way not from
having worked hard, but from enjoying privileged access to capital.)
Ed Kilgore: [09-29]
Scott, Haley, and the Radicalization of the 'moderate' Republican:
It's ridiculous to call these people "moderate": they are the residue
left from the evolution of the South Carolina Republican Party from
Strom Thurmond through Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint. Their only
saving grace, which each of their predecessors had to some degree,
is that they aren't shamelessly stupid panderers. They have some
sense of how they look to others, and try to sound respectable.
But politically, there as far right as their predecessors (and
Haley is about as psychotically hawkish as Graham). Perhaps you
could give them some credit for moving beyond Thurmond on race,
but perhaps they were just cast to look like it?
Jasmine Liu: [09-26]
Everything you need to know about the right-wing war on books:
"Here's your guide to the heroes and villains -- plus a list of the
50 most banned books." Censorship chiefs: Ron DeSantis, Sarah Huckabee
Sanders, Greg Abbott, Moms for Liberty. Those have definitely gotten
more press than the Reading Rebels: Suzette Baker, Debbie Chavez,
Summer Boismier, and "Anonymous Utah parent." The books are mostly
off my radar, aside from two titles each for Toni Morrison and Ibram
X. Kendi.
Greg Sargent: [09-28]
New data on ultra-rich tax cheats wrecks the 'working-class GOP'
ruse.
Biden and/or the Democrats:
Legal and criminal matters:
Climate and environment:
Economic matters:
Ukraine War:
Around the world:
Dianne Feinstein: The Senator (D-CA) died Thursday, at 90,
after more than 30 years in the Senate. She had a mixed legacy, which
had soured lately as her absences kept Democrats from confirming many
Biden appointees.
Robert Menendez: Senator (D-NJ), was prosecuted for corruption
several years ago, beat the charges, managed to get himself reëlected,
and caught again.
- Aaron Blake: [09-26]
The GOP's defenses of Bob Menendez, and what they ignore. They
may not have gotten to where they automatically sympathize with all
criminals, but corrupt politicians are definitely their soft spot.
(Also tax cheats. Except for Hunter Biden, of course.)
- Bob Hennelly: [09-28]
Bob Menendez and the gold bars: A short history of New Jersey
corruption.
- Robert Kuttner: [09-27]
How to oust Menendez: The Agnew precedent: Good idea, but I don't
see this happening, mostly because nobody is that desperate to get
rid of Menendez: Garland probably likes the idea of being as tough on
a Democrat as on Trump, and Republicans would cry foul if Menendez got
off on a "sweetheart deal" while Trump still has to face trial. (Cf.
their reaction to the Hunter Biden plea deal, which was a much smaller
case than the ones against Menendez and Trump.)
Branko Marcetic: [09-27]
Bob Menendez isn't merely corrupt. He carried water for a brutal
dictator. Shouldn't that be plural? Menendez got caught taking
money from Egypt, but he's been a dependable supporter of other
nominal allies with troubled connections (Israel and Saudi Arabia
get mentions here, but not Latin America, where his antipathy to
anything leftist knows no bounds).
Timothy Noah: [09-29]
Why is the GOP suddenly defending Bob Menendez? "From Trump on
down, they're speaking out on behalf of a Democratic senator buffeted
by accusations of corruption --he's just one more Biden deep state
victim."
Henry Olsen: [09-27]
Bob Menendez is right not to step down: One of the conservative
hack pundits to rally behind Menendez, pleading "let the justice system
play out as it's supposed to," urging him to hang in there even past
conviction until all his appeals are exhausted, and assuring him that
"there's little proof that a senator's indictment affects voters'
decisions in other races." He offers the example of Virginia Gov.
Ralph Northam, who resisted pressure to resign after embarrassing
photos from a yearbook came to light, but Northam wasn't indicted,
and was barely distracted from doing his job. The charges against
Menendez are very serious, and derive directly from his abuse of
the power given him by his job. While the indictments may cramp
his ability to collect further bribes, his job is one where even
the appearance of corruption diminishes the office. It is this
very sense of taint that has led many Democrats to call for his
resignation. To see Republicans rally behind Menendez testifies
to how they've evolved to celebrate his kind of corruption.
Other stories:
David Atkins: [09-27]
America needs a true liberal media: "Our crisis of democracy is
exacerbated by conservative misinformation. Time for a balanced media
diet." Of course, he has a lot to complain about, but couldn't he put
it better? I shouldn't have to parse the difference between "liberal"
as an adjective and "liberal" (or "liberalism") as a noun, and explain
why a "liberal media" isn't just a propaganda outlet for liberalism
(as conservative media is for conservatism). If we had an honest media
dedicated to rooting out misinformation from any source, it would
easily find ten times as much emanating from right-wing interest
groups (which it would clearly label as such). Atkins cites several
examples of polls where scary large numbers of Americans believe
things that are plainly false. That such numbers persist goes a long
way toward indicting the media for failing to keep us informed.
On the other hand, another sense of "liberal" is that it provides
equal credence to all views, regardless of truth, merit or ulterior
motives. This was, for instance, the view Marcuse et al. put forth
in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965). In light of this,
one can be as critical as Atkins is of the present facts and draw
the opposite conclusion, that the problem we have today is that the
media, with its relentless balancing and its credulous repetition
of blatant falsehoods, is simply too liberal.
Zack Beauchamp: [09-24]
Is America uniquely vulnerable to tyranny? Review of a new book,
Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking
Point, by Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, whose previous book,
the comparative study How Democracies Die, was taken as a
landmark among liberals who worry more about the formal political
institutions than about government reflecting the interests of
most people.
Nina Burleigh: [09-26]
Are we in the last days of Fox News? "Michael Wolff's new book
on the Murdochs is full of juicy details, but its predictions may
be off." The book is called The Fall: The End of Fox News.
Joshua Green: [08-27]
How social justice activists lost the plot: A review of Fredrik
DeBoer's new book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,
"an entreaty to white, college-educated progressives: Stop obsessing
over identity and language and start fighting for working people."
I took a brief look at this book when assembling my latest
Book Roundup and couldn't decide what to make of it: he's reputed
to be a leftist, but he spends most of his time attacking others on
the left side of "social justice" issues, possibly for not being
leftist enough (on economic issues? for leftists of some vintage
what else is there?). I'm not engaged enough to recognize much less
care about many of the complaints lodged against today's younger
generation on the left, but back in my day (c. 1970) I ran into
similar problems, where comfortably well-off young people got
worked up over other people's problems without having the grounding
of knowing their own problems. (I was a rare working class kid, and
pathological introvert, in an elite university, so I never had that
luxury.) I have no idea how well, or how badly, DeBoer navigates
problems with his fellow leftists. Green, however, ends with one
piece of reasonable advice: "If they'd focus on electing Democrats,
they'd finally be in a position to deliver for those groups, rather
than just bicker over whose turn it is to talk next." I would add
that while I don't think leftists should adopt bad positions just
to get around, the only policy improvements that are achievable
are ones that pass through the Democratic Party, so that's where
you need to do your practical work.
Anthony L Fisher: [09-30]
Why the 2020 social justice revolutions failed: Interview with
DeBoer on his book, steering the discussion toward the 2020 BLM
protests and the coincident looting ("riots"). Maybe DeBoer has
something specific to say about all that, but that wasn't obvious
to me from what I previously read. I wouldn't say that the protests
failed -- they moved several meters significantly, especially in
that the cop who killed George Floyd and the cops who aided and
abetted the murder have been convicted of serious crimes, which is
never expected when police kill civilians -- and I also wouldn't
say that where they failed, they did so due to the liberal elite
syndrome I take DeBoer to be critical of. What was possible from
those protests was limited by Trump, other right-wing political
figures, including police and vigilantes, responded so negatively,
often deliberately attempting to provoke riots (which, based on
much experience, they assumed would be blamed on the protesters).
Becca Rothfeld: [09-01]
Should progressives want the support of the ruling classes?
A critical review of DeBoer's book, mentioned in the Fisher interview
above, the author dismissed by DeBoer as "exactly the kind of person
that is being indicted in the book."
[PS: On closer examination, this strikes me as a pretty good review
of the book.]
Freddie deBoer: [0-25]
AOC is just a regular old Democrat now. I saw this at the time,
and didn't think it was worth reporting on, but since we're talking
about the author now, it shines as much light on him as on her. The
theme is not something I'd lose any sleep over.
Tyler Austin Harper: [09-28]
Ibram X. Kendi's fall is a cautionary tale -- so was his rise:
Flagged for possible future reference, as I'm not close enough to
this story to have an opinion. I will say that I fifty-plus years
ago I read two important historical works on racism in the early
1970s: Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black: American Attitudes
Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968), and David Brion Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), which if
memory serves argued that racism wasn't Stamped From the
Beginning (the title of Kendi's big book) but was developed
over time, primarily to justify chattel slavery in the Americas,
and the profits derived therefrom. I read quite a bit more back
then, covering later history as well as contemporary books like
Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
But it had been quite a while when Kendi's book came out, so I
thought it might be useful to get a more contemporary reading
of Jordan's domain. But when I looked at the book, I decided I
didn't need or particularly want it. I had, by then, read lots
about Thomas Jefferson's racism (and for that matter, Lincoln's),
but didn't see much point in dwelling on it. But the big turn
off was the section on major aboltionist William Lloyd Garrison.
Looking at the Amazon preview now, my reaction may have been
hasty: surely the later chapters on W.E.B. DuBois and Angela
Davis weren't meant to be simple exposés of racist ideas like
chapters on Cotton Mather and Jefferson? But then, what were
they? Kendi followed up with an explicitly political book, and
evidently built a mini-empire on his reputation. That could
have been good, bad, irrelevant, or some combination thereof.
Sean Illing: [09-26]
Naomi Klein on her doppelganger (and yours): Another interview,
promoting her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror
World.
Sarah Jones: [09-24]
The dark side of courtship: "Shannon Harris's relationship was
held up as a model for millions of Evangelicals. Now she's reclaiming
her story."
David Masciotra: [09-26]
What the Clinton haters on the left get wrong: "A new book epitomizes
the risible belief that the 42nd president betrayed liberals and the 1990s
were a right-wing hellscape." The book is A Fabulous Failure: The
Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism,
by Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein. I note this in passing, and
also that the first publication to take such offense against such a
blight on Clinton's good name is the one where the term "neoliberalism"
was first coined. Somehow I doubt a book where the authors juxtaposed
"fabulous" and "failure" is simply "untruths they've written [to]
bolster the cynicism that undermines the trust vital to the survival
of the American experiment."
The first point anyone needs to understand
is that Clinton pioneered a new political path by trying not to fight
Reagan but to outflank him: to show leaders that Democrats in power
would be even better for business than Republicans. That Clinton won
gave his argument an air of gospel after a brutal decade, which only
deepened the more hysterically Republicans attacked him. However, his
two presidential wins were largely wiped out by losing Congress, and
with it the ability to legislate anything beyond his pro-business and
anti-crime initiatives.
On the other hand, his failures -- mistakes
and, especially, missed opportunities -- only grew. Listing them would
take a book (probably even longer than this one). Compounding Reagan's
turn toward increasing inequality is probably the top of the list. Or
failing to trim back America's imperial overreach to secure a truly
international peace -- today's conflicts with Russia and China, as
well as the long war against the Middle East, are easily traced back
to his failures. Or maybe we should wonder why Al Gore wasn't allowed
to work on climate change when it wasn't yet too late, but was tasked
instead with "reinventing government," which mostly meant making it
more profitable for lobbyists. Or maybe we should ask why he stripped
the Democratic Party down to a personal cult-of-personality, allowing
Republicans to repeatedly rebound from disaster every time they came
close to the lever of power?
Dylan Matthews: [09-26]
40 years ago today, one man saved us from world-ending nuclear war:
A Russian, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, who was monitoring Russia's ICBM
detection system, which had determined "with high probability" that
the US had launched five Minutemen missiles at the Soviet Union. It
hadn't, but two years of constant saber-rattling under Reagan, on top
of worsening US-Soviet relations under Jimmy Carter (or should I say
Zbigniew Brzezinski?), along with internal turmoil that might suggest
weakness, left top Soviet circles more in fear of an American attack
than ever before. David Hoffman wrote a book about this: The Dead
Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race & Its Dangerous
Legacy (2009).
Sara Morrison:
[09-28]
Net neutrality is back, but it's not what you think.
[09-26]
The government's case to break up Amazon, explained: "The Federal
Trade Commission, led by longtime Amazon critic Lina Khan, finally
makes its move." This particular case focuses on Amazon Marketplace --
the most obvious place to start, I agree. I could probably write a
lot on this, but some other time. There are a lot of things I like
about Amazon, but the potential for abuse is huge, and doesn't loom
purely in the future. I cited a David Dayen piece last week, and it
deserves to be mentioned again in light of this suit:
Jonah Raskin: [09-29]
"I am not now, nor have I ever been": Musings on communism and
anti-communism. I've known a few American communists, or at
least a few of their "red diaper baby" children. All good people,
as far as I can tell.
Heather Cox Richardson: [09-26]
The fight for our America: Excerpt, or maybe a précis, from her
forthcoming book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of
America. The setup: "There have always been two Americas. One
based in religious zeal, mythology, and inequality; and one grounded
in the rule of the people and the pursuit of equality. This next
election may determine which one prevails." My first cavil here
was over the word "prevails": recent elections (at least since 2000,
and arguably since 1968 -- the landslides of 1972 and 1984 now look
like flukes, as does the lesser margin of 2008) have turned out to
be pretty indecisive. There is little reason to think that 2024 will
turn out differently: a Trump-Biden rematch is unlikely to turn out
much differently than in 2020, but Republicans have structural
advantages in the Senate, the House, and the Electoral College
that could flip the popular vote -- further reinforcing the current
partisan divide over democracy itself.
Still, in searching for a better term than "prevails," I find
myself considering the more extreme "survives." While electoral
results have remained ambiguous, the stakes for (and fears of)
losing have only grown more urgent. Republicans have already used
their narrow margins to establish a Supreme Court supermajority,
which has already resulted in the loss of fundamental rights and
will continue to frustrate efforts of elected Democrats to address
important policy issues. Give them more power, and they'll continue
their efforts to fortify their power bases and impose their will
on a disempowered people.
Democrats are right to fear such authoritarianism, and are right
that the antidote is a renewed faith in democracy, but their defense
of democracy has been frustratingly difficult, because Democrats
rarely think of power in the broad sense that Republicans understand:
the power of business and money, of media, of social institutions
like churches, of culture (one area they have been least effective
at controlling, and therefore one they're most paranoid about, hence
their recent, seemingly desperate, stress on the "war against woke").
More often than not, Democrats have appealed to moneyed interests,
even to the point of sacrificing traditional allies like unions,
and this has tattered their reputation as champions of the people.
Richardson's "two Americas" may serve as generic shorthand for
the two highly polarized parties, but while identities align with
parties, the underlying philosophies are more or less present and
at tension in most people. By far the most important is the split
on equality: the right views the world as necessarily (or rightly)
inequal and hierarchical, where each person has a station, and
order is maintained by popular acceptance (and, often, by force);
the left views all people as fundamentally equal, at least in
rights, and ideally in opportunities. The left naturally leans
toward democracy, where government is constituted to act in the
popular interest. The right leans toward dictatorship (originally
of monarchs, although any strongman able to impose order to save
their hierarchy will do), and distrusts democracy, suspecting that
if given the chance, the majority would end the privileges of
those atop the hierarchy.
By the way, liberals are focused on the rights and ambitions
of individuals. Whether they lean right or left depends mostly on
the conservative hierarchy is in admitting talented upstarts --
for many would like to live like princes, but if they are locked
out, they're happy to tear the hierarchy down, and willing to
appeal to the masses for help in doing so. Liberals are disrupters,
which is why conservatives loathe them, but as long as they are
sufficiently corruptible, they can be co-opted. But until they get
bought off, they are likely to inspire more widespread ambitions --
which is why we still admire Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt (and
wanted to admire Obama).
It is important to remember that nearly everything we cherish
about our past was the work of liberals aspiring to the greater
(more universal) good. (Which is to say, of moves toward the left,
though often of people not strongly committed to the left.) Also
that every advance has been met with conservative reaction, which
was generally flexible enough to admit a select few in order to
cut short the hopes of the many. Richardson groups religious zeal
and mythology with the side of inequality. They are actually tools
of a hierarchy which, given America's founding as a liberal/mass
revolt against aristocracy, cannot be defended on its own terms.
Rather, the right, in order to maintain any plausibility at all,
has to spin a mythic past rooted in old fashioned religion and
pioneering entrepreneurial spirit -- the new hierarchy that rose
to replace the aristocracy dispatched by the Revolution.
Jeffrey St Clair: [09-29]
Roaming Charges: Our man in Jersey: Starts with Robert Menendez
as a Le Carré character, "New Jersey's own apex con man, whose personal
embellishments and political fictions have become so labryinthine
that now that he's been caught with gold bars in his closet, he
can't even get his own life story straight."
In other items, he notes that the US drug overdose rate, in the
fifty years since the War on Drugs was launched in 1973, has ("what
a smashing success it has been!") increased from 3.0 per 100,000 to
32.4.
Marcela Valdes: [10-01]
Why can't we stop unauthorized immigration? Because it works.
"Our broken immigration system is still the best option for many
migrants -- and U.S. employers."
Jason Wilson: [10-01]
'Red Caesarism' is rightwing code -- and some Republicans are
listening: This piece introduced me to a recent book by Kevin
Slack: War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became
Despotism, which argues that America has been destroyed by
three waves of liberals: "Teddy Roosevelt's Anglo-Protestant
progressive social gospelers, who battled trusts and curbed
immigration; Franklin Roosevelt's and Lyndon Johnson's secular
liberals, who forged a government-business partnership and
promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals, who
protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal
hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam," and
who finally cemented their power with "the 'great awokening'
that began under Barack Obama." The result: "an incompetent
kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful
people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own
empire."
I don't know how I missed this tome in my list of paranoid
rants tacked onto the end of my
Book Roundup entry on Christopher Rufo, as it's basically
Rufo's thesis backed up with more historical special pleading.
I do wonder, though, how you could get from Grover Cleveland's
America to world-topping empire and wealth except through the
progressive machinations of the Roosevelts and their followers.
The Amazon page for
Slack's book doesn't mention "Red Caesarism," which seems to be
the idea that Trump should seize power next chance he gets, and
dispense with all the other trappings of democracy. At this point,
the article shifts to Michael Anton's The Stakes, about
which I previously wrote:
Michael Anton: The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return
(2020, Regnery): Publisher is all the signal you need, but here's some
background: Anton wrote a famous essay calling 2016 "The Flight 93
Election," because he figured it was better to storm the cockpit and
crash the plane than to let Hillary Clinton win. He explains "the
stakes" here: "The Democratic Party has become the party of 'identity
politics' -- and every one of those identities is defined against a
unifying national heritage of patriotism, pride in America's past, and
hope for a shared future. . . . Against them is a divided Republican
Party. Gravely misunderstanding the opposition, old-style Republicans
still seek bipartisanship and accommodation, wrongly assuming that
Democrats care about playing by the tiresome old rules laid down in
the Constitution and other fundamental charters of American liberty."
While I'm skeptical both of Trump's chances of winning in 2024,
and even more so of his ability to seize total personal control of
the government (as, sorry but there is no clearer example, Hitler
did upon being appointed chancellor in 1933). Still, it is pretty
clear that he would like to, and that he will go out of his way to
hire people who have ideas about how to go about it (some of whom
he'll have to spring from jail), but these will largely be the
same sorts that talked him into thinking Jan. 6 was a bully idea.
Zack Beauchamp
announced: "I'm really excited to announce that I have written my
first book!" The title is: The Reactionary Spirit: How America's
Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. I'd be real
tempted to order a copy, but right now I'm bummed that there sems to
be another year until publication date (next year, maybe fall). I've
always imagined that if I could get my book written in the next 3-4
months, say, it could still appear several months before the 2024
election.
Beauchamp has been writing more/less philosophical pieces in
Vox for several years now. I've followed these with interest,
as they dovetail nicely with my own thinking. He described his
book in multiple tweets, collected and numbered here:
- Democracy as a system is based the idea that all people are
political equals. As such, it empowers people to challenge existing
social hierarchies through the political system -- which we saw, to
a globally unprecedented degree, in the second half of the 20th
century.
- This forces defenders of existing hierarchy to make a choice:
fight social change through the system, or turn against democracy
itself. The impulse to make the latter choice is what I call "the
reactionary spirit," and it is at the heart of today's global
democratic crisis.
- The reactionary spirit has threatened democracy since its
earliest modern stirrings. But today's reactionary politics is
different in a crucial respect: it pretends to be
democratic.
- In The Reactionary Spirit, I argue that this reflects
democracy's ideological triumphs. While reactionaries in the past
openly rallied for alternative systems, like monarchy or fascism,
today's reactionaries understand that democracy remains ideologically
dominant.
- This is a very longstanding pattern in one place -- the United
States, a country whose home-grown authoritarian tradition has
always claimed to be democratic. The 20th and 21st centuries,
I argue, have seen an Americanization of global reactionary politics
in this key respect.
- The Reactionary Spirit engages deeply with reactionary
political movements and thinkers, like John C. Calhoun and Carl
Schmitt. It focuses on four case studies to illustrate the nature
of our global crisis: the US, Hungary, Israel, and India.
- There's much more in the book, of course. I'll keep talking
about it till publication date -- looking to be late summer or
early fall 2024. The Reactionary Spirit synthesizes a decade
of thinking and reporting about democratic crisis. I am so excited
to share it with you.
I also see that a book is coming out in January, 2024, by Hunter
Walker and Luppe B. Luppen, titled The Truce: Progressives,
Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party (from
WW Norton). The key here isn't that the leftists became
reasonable -- we've long been eager to work on real even if
piecemeal solutions -- but that the centrists finally started
to realize that their approaches, which most often tried to
incorporate right-wing talking points while slightly toning
them down, weren't working, either for winning elections or
for making tangible improvements (which are always hard when
you're not winning elections).
As I was trying to wrap this up, I ran across this
Nate Silver tweet:
I am a statistician. I'm also a statistician with a good bullshit
detector.
There is little variation in age by state. And to the extent
there is, it doesn't argue in your favor. The four oldest states
are West Virginia (very red), Florida (pretty red), Maine (pretty
blue) and Vermont (very blue).
What are their COVID death rates (per 1M population) since
Feb. 1, 2021 (i.e. post-vaccine?):
- West Virginia: 3454
- Florida: 2992
- Maine: 1881
- Vermont: 1210
These states all have the ~same elderly population, and yet there
are huge variations in COVID death rates that line up 1:1 with partisan
differences in vaccine uptake.
In another
tweet, Silver noted:
Republicans have the same death rates as Democrats until the
introduction of vaccines, then they start dying at much higher
rates. That's a very useful first approximation.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Speaking of Which
Got a late start, as I thought it was more important to get my
oft-delayed
Book
Roundup post out first. Still, I didn't have much trouble
finding pieces this week. Seems like there should be more here
on the UAW strike, but I didn't land on much that I hadn't
noted previously.
Top story threads:
Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: Trump did very
little of note last week, so it's time to merge him back into the
field.
Mariana Alfaro/Marisa Iati: [09-22]
As UAW strike expands, here's where the 2024 presidential candidates
stand. They all blame Biden. Everything's Biden's fault, all the
time, doesn't matter what. But also, Tim Scott wants to see all the
striking workers fired. He didn't explain how they're going to hire
replacement workers. Maybe by spending billions of dollars moving
their plants to South Carolina, like Boeing did?
Ryan Cooper: [09-19]
The GOP is the party of corrupt oligarchy: "In Texas, Attorney
General Ken Paxton escaped conviction after being impeached."
Gabriella Ferrigine: [09-19]
Giuliani says it's a "shame" he's being sued by ex-lawyer:
Robert Costello, whose firm claims they are still owed $1.35
million.
Kelly Garrity: [09-20]
DeSantis: Humans are 'safer than ever' from effects of climate
change: "The comments come less than a year after Hurricane
Ian left more than 100 people dead in Florida."
Joan E Greve: [09-21]
McCarthy says hard-right Republicans 'want to burn whole place down'.
For the first time ever, McCarthy couldn't even pass a Defense spending
bill.
Carl Hulse: [09-23]
The wrecking-ball caucus: How the far right brought Washington to its
knees: "Right-wing Republicans who represent a minority in their
party and in Congress have succeeded in sowing mass dysfunction,
spoiling for a shutdown, an impeachment and a House coup." But in
this they're just following the playbook of past Republican leaders
like Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, pressing every available lever
for maximum impact.
Spencer Kimball: [09-22]
United Auto Workers files labor complaint against Sen. Tim Scott for
saying striking workers should be fired.
Jason Linkins: [09-22]
The looming government shutdown is not the fault of dysfunction:
"There's only one culprit for the chaos gripping Capitol Hill -- the
Republican Party." Advice to Democrats: "There's no need to get
involved. What Republicans are enduring can't be solved by rational
people appealing to better natures that don't exist."
Nicole Narea: [09-18]
How Florida became the center of the Republican universe: "Why
Florida went red -- and will probably stay that way." This is part
of a series of pieces Vox is running on
The United States of Florida.
Naomi Nix/Cat Zakrzewski/Joseph Menn: [09-23]
Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks:
"An escalating campaign, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other
Republicans, has cast a pall over programs that study political
disinformation and the quality of medical information online."
Norman J Ornstein/Donald F Retti: [09-22]
GOP prez wannabes' plans for government: dangerous -- and really
dumb: "Each wants to shrink government more than the last.
And none of them knows a lick about how the federal government
actually works."
Matthew Petti: [09-22]
Nikki Haley thinks China is coming for your brain.
Emily Tamkin: [09-22]
Why the GOP fell in love with Hungary: "The central European
country isn't exactly the right-wing paradise many Republicans
portrait it as." But it does provide practical examples in rigging
a political system for perpetual one-party rule.
Li Zhou: [09-21]
The Republican vs. Republican feud behind the government shutdown
fight, explained.
Biden and/or the Democrats: I was expecting more interest
in the Franklin Foer book, but the bottom two articles are about it
here. Biden's foreign policy issues are treated elsewhere, as is the
breaking Menendez scandal.
Kate Aronoff: [09-21]
Biden takes a tiny step toward a Roosevelt-style climate
revolution: He's creating a Civilian Climate Corps, almost a
homage to Roosevelt's CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). While the
new group may also plant some trees, I suspect it will wind up
mostly on the back side of climate change: not prevention, but
clean up.
Perry Bacon Jr: [09-19]
There's a simple answer to questions about Biden's age. Why don't
Democrats say it? "Yes, there's a chance Vice President Harris
becomes president -- and that would be fine."
Marin Cogan: [09-22]
Why Biden's latest gun violence initiative has activists
optimistic: By executive order, Biden is creating a new White
House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which won't do much, but
will surely talk about it more.
Oshan Jarow: [09-21]
We cut child poverty to historic lows, then let it rebound faster
than ever before: "The expanded child tax credit was a well-tested
solution to child poverty." Since it has expired, the case is clearer
than ever.
Robert Kuttner: [09-20]
Winning the ideas, losing the politics: "Progressives have won the
battle of ideas. And reality has been a useful ally. No serious person
any longer thinks that deregulation, privatization, globalization, and
tax-cutting serve economic growth or a defensible distribution of income
and wealth." Biden has "surprisingly and mercifully" broke with the
"self-annihilating consensus" of neoliberalism that gripped and hobbled
the Democratic Party from Carter through Obama. Meanwhile, "Republicans
have become the party of nihilism." So why do Republicans still win
elections? Whatever it is -- some mix of ignorance and spite -- is
what Democrats have to figure out a way to campaign against, before
the desruction gets even worse.
Kuttner recommends a piece by Caroline Fredrickson: [09-18]
What I most regret about my decades of legal activism: "By focusing
on civil liberties but ignoring economic issues, liberals like me got
defeated on both." She recalls the opposition to Reagan's nomination
of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Liberals objected to Bork's views
on race and abortion, but completely ignored his influential reframing
of antitrust law. (For my part, I always understood that Sherman was
written to protect businesses from monopolies. The idea that its intent
existed for consumer protection was as far from "originalism" as
possible.) She also points to Ted Kennedy's pivotal role providing
liberal blessing for right-wing business initiatives, and Democratic
Supreme Court appointments being "far more business-friendly than
Democratic appointees of any other Court era." It should give us
pause that ever since 1980, income and wealth inequality has grown
even more when Democrats were in the White House. Republicans sat
the table with tax cuts and deregulation, but also depressed wages
and the economy. Democrats grew the economy, giving that much more
to the rich. Biden shows signs of breaking with some, but not all,
of this.
Nathaniel Rakich: [09-20]
Democrats have been winning big in special elections: "That could
bode well for them in the 2024 elections."
Amy Davidson Sorkin: [09-10]
The challenges facing Joe Biden: "A new book praises the
President's handling of the midterms, but the midterms are
beginning to feel like a long time ago." The book, of course,
is Franklin Foer's The Last Politician.
David Weigel: [09-12]
In books, Biden is an energetic leader. Too bad nobody reads them.
This was occasioned by Franklin Foer's book because, what else is
available? (Actually, he mentions two more books -- the same two in
my latest Book Roundup.)
Legal matters and other crimes: The Supreme Court isn't
back in session yet, but cases are piling up.
Joshua Kaplan/Justin Elliott/Alex Mierjeski: [09-22]
Clarence Thomas secretly participated in Koch network donor
events. For more on this, see Dahlia Lithwick/Mark Joseph
Stern: [09-23]
Clarence Thomas' latest pay-to-play scandal finally connects all
the dots.
Robert Kuttner: [09-12]
The stealth attack on the power to tax: "The Supreme Court could
overturn a well-established form of federal taxation."
Ian Millhiser:
[09-18]
The Supreme Courrt's new term will be dominated by dangerous and
incoherent lawsuits.
[09-20]
The Supreme Court will decide if Alabama can openly defy its
decisions: "Alabama's racially gerrymandered maps are back
before the Supreme Court, this time with a dollop of massive
resistance."
[09-22]
The Supreme Court showdown over social media "censorship," explained:
"A rogue federal court effectively put the Republican Party in charge
of social media, and now the justices have to deal with this mess."
In two separate cases, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that the Biden
administration cannot ask Facebook to remove content (e.g., that
promotes terrorism, or spreads lies about public health), and also
that the state of Texas can force Facebook (or any other social
media company) to post things that violate the company's standards.
"These two decisions obviously cannot be reconciled, unless you
believe that the First Amendment applies differently to Democrats
and Republicans."
[09-23]
A new Supreme Court case could trigger a second Great Depression:
"America's Trumpiest court handed down a shockingly dangerous decision.
The Supreme Court is likely, but not certain, to fix it." The Fifth
Circuit decided that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
shouldn't exist, due to a technicality that they're almost certainly
wrong about.
Climate and environment:
Avishay Artsy: [09-22]
A climate scientist on how to recognize the new climate change
denial: Interview with Michael [E.] Mann, who's written at
least four books on climate change, most recently Our Fragile
Moment: How Lessons From Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the
Climate Crisis.
Lenny Bernstein, et al: [09-23]
Ophelia causes widespread flooding as storm marches up East Coast,
and Matthew Cappucci: [09-21]
Warnings issued ahead of storm set to batter the Mid-Atlantic,
Northeast:
This has been a very weird
Atlantic hurricane season, with wind shear inhibiting the
development of storms, but with ocean waters so abnormally hot
that the few storms that manage to form intensify very rapidly
Idalia is the prime example: it only formed off the coast of
Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, but reached 130 mph winds before
crossing Florida. Ophelia formed north of the Bahamas, but had
70 mph winds when it hit North Carolina. Meanwhile, hurricanes
like Don, Margot, and Nigel turned north well before reaching
North America -- Lee came closer, landing in Nova Scotia.
Scott Dance: [09-23]
Why September's record-warm temperatuers have scientists so
worried.
Brady Dennis: [09-22]
A saltwater wedge climbing the Mississippi River threatens drinking
water. New Orleans' water supply is at risk. "The Corps has
secured barges to bring in water [approximately 15 million gallons
next week] to help treatment plants reduce salinity and ensure safe
drinking supplies."
Benji Jones: [09-21]
I visited a beautiful coral reef in 2022. What I saw there this
summer shocked me.
Rebecca Leber: [09-21]
What climate activists mean when they say "end fossil fuels".
Ian Livingston: [09-22]
Atmospheric river, early-season bomb cyclone to hit Pacific
Northwest.
Kasha Patel: [09-24]
Scientists found the most intense heat wave ever recorded -- in
Antarctica: In March 2022, temperatures spiked 70°F above
normal.
Veronica Penney/John Muyskens: [08-16]
Here's where water is running out in the world -- and why.
Economic matters, including labor: The UAW strike is
escalating. It looks like the
Writers Guild has a tentative deal, after a lengthy strike,
while the actors strike continues. Republicans blame all strikes on
Biden, probably for raising the hopes of workers that they might get
a fairer split of the record profits they never credit Biden for.
Dean Baker:
[09-22]
Do people really expect prices to fall back to pre-pandemic
levels? No, unless you're a Republican, then you'll run by
promising miracles after you win, then forget about them the
next day.
[09-18]
Quick thoughts on the UAW strike: "Low pay of autoworkers;
Higher productivity can mean less work, not fewer workers; CEO
pay is a rip-off; Auto industry profits provide some room for
higher pay; Inflated stock prices for Tesla and other Wall
Street favorites have a cost; It is not an issue of electric
vs. gas-powered cars; The UAW and Big Three are still a really
big deal."
David Dayen: [09-21]
Amazon's $185 billion pay-to-play system: "A new report shows that
Amazon now takes 45 percent of all third-party sales on its website,
part of the company's goal to become a monopoly gatekeeper for economic
transactions."
Paul Krugman:
[09-19]
Inflation is down, disinflation denial is soaring: So, is the
denial fueled by people who have a vested interest in blaming Biden
for inflation? The same people who always root for economic disaster
when a Democrat is president (and who often contribute to it)? You
know, Republicans?
[09-22]
Making manufacturing good again: "Industrial jobs aren't
automatically high-paying." They do tend to have relatively high
margins, but whether workers see any of that depends on leverage,
especially unions.
Harold Meyerson: [09-18]
UAW strikes built the American middle class.
Ukraine War: Since Russia invaded in February 2022, I've
always put Responsible Statecraft's "Diplomacy Watch" first in this
section, but there doesn't seem to be one this week. They've
redesigned the website to make it much harder to tell, especially
what's new and what isn't.
Israel:
Around the world:
Zack Beauchamp: [09-20]
The wild allegations about India killing a Canadian citizen,
explained: "The killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar
in Canada has exposed a big problem for US foreign policy." There's
a list here that limits foreign assassinations to "the world's most
brutal regimes -- places like China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia,"
conveniently ignoring the US and Israel.
Edward Hunt: [09-23]
US flouts international law with Pacific military claims.
Ellen Ioanes: [09-23]
The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, explained: This is one of
a half-dozen (or maybe more) cases where the 1991 dissolution of
the Soviet Union eventually resulted in border disputes: this one
between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the latter including a region that
is primarily Armenian. This developed almost immediately into a
war, which has fluctuated and festered ever since. Several others
revolted: in Georgia and Moldova, where Russia favored separatists,
while brutally suppressing Chechen separatists. Crimea and Donbas
in Ukraine also: they didn't detonate until the pro-west coup in
2014, but now are engulfed in what is effectively a world war.
It would have been sensible to recognize these flaws at the time,
and set up some processes for peaceful resolution, but the US has
embraced every opportunity to degrade Russian power, while Russia
has become increasingly belligerent as it's been backed into a
corner.
Daniel Larison: [09-22]
Rahm Emmanuel in Japan, goes rogue on China: When Biden appointed
him ambassador to Japan, I figured at least that would keep him from
doing the sort of damage he did in the Obama White House. And here he
is, trying to start WWIII. For more details, see [09-20]
White House told US ambassador to Japan to stop taunting China on
social media.
Bryan Walsh: [09-22]
Governments once imagined a future without extreme poverty. What
happened?
Other stories:
Merrill Goozner: [09-12]
As dementia cases soar, who will care for the caregivers?
Anita Jain: [09-15]
Should progressives see Sohrab Ahmari as friend or foe? He has
a book, Tyrany, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty --
and What to Do About It, which I wrote something about but didn't
make the cut in yesterday's
Book Roundup. He's right about some things, wrong about others,
a mix that gives him to obvious political leverage, so does it
matter? The key question is whether he decides to be friend or
foe, because if he aligns with the Democrats he can hope for a
seat at the table, and he'll find people who agree with him on
most of his issues (but probably not the same people all the time).
But Republicans are never going to support his economic critique,
not so much because they love capitalism (although about half of
them do) as because they believe in hierarchical order, and rich
capitalists are clustered at the top of that totem pole.
Peter Kafka: [09-21]
Why is Rupert Murdoch leaving his empire now? At 92, he's
turned control over to one of his sons, Lachlan Murdoch. More:
Michelle Goldberg: [09-21]
The ludicrous agony of Rupert Murdoch: Draws on Michael Wolff's
"amusingly vicious and very well-timed book," The Fall: The End
of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.
In his tortured enabling of Trump, Murdoch seems the ultimate symbol
of a feckless and craven conservative establishment, overmatched by
the jingoist forces it encouraged and either capitulating to the
ex-president or shuffling pitifully off the public stage. "Murdoch
was as passionate in his Trump revulsion as any helpless liberal,"
writes Wolff. The difference is that Murdoch's helplessness was
a choice.
Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox
News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack
Obama's birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy
world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect,
a precondition for Trump's rise.
Alex Shephard: [09-21]
Rupert Murdoch made the world worse: And he got very rich
doing it.
Omid Memarian: [09-14]
Lawrence Wright on why domestic terrorism is America's 'present
enemy'. Interview with the author of The Looming Tower,
one of the first important books on Al Qaeda after 9/11.
Osita Nwanevu: [09-20]
The mass disappointment of a decade of mass protest: "The
demonstrations of the last decade were vast and explosive --
and surprisingly ineffective." Review of Vincent Bevins: If
We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.
Mostly not about America, although I can't think of any protests
here that have been notably successful. But the author starts
with Tunisia and Arab Spring, where protests were often brutally
repressed, turning into civil wars and attracting other nations
for bad or worse. But despite many bad tastes, not all of them
have been failures. And even those that failed leave you with
the question: what else could one have tried?
Andrew Prokop: [09-22]
The indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez, explained: "He and his
wife were given gold bars, a car, and envelopes of cash, prosecutors
say." How long before he joins Republicans in complaining about how
the Justice Department has been politically weaponized? This isn't
his first run in with the law. While he managed to dodge jail last
time, and even got reëlected afterwards, Democrats should do whatever
they can to get rid of him, especially as doing so wouldn't cost them
a Senate seat. It would also get rid of the most dangerous foreign
policy hawk on their side of Congress.
Gabriela Riccardi: [09-21]
Luddites saw the problem of AI coming from two centuries away:
"A new book surfaces their forgotten story -- along with their
prescience in a new machine age." The book is Brian Merchant:
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against
Big Tech. Ned Ludd's army has long been decried, becoming
synonymous with the futile, kneejerk rejection of progress, but
we shouldn't be so quick to insist that any new technology that
can be created must be used. Indeed, we've already decided not
to use a number of chemicals that have ill side effects, and
that list is bound to grow. Certain weapons, like poison gas and
biological agents, have been banned, and others like depleted
uranium should be. There is growing reluctance to nuclear power.
Biotech and AI raise deep concerns. Of course, it would be better
to settle these disputes rationally rather than through breaking
machines, but where no resolution seems possible -- the use of
fossil fuels is most likely -- sabotage is a possibility.
Rich Scheinin: [09-22]
How Sam Rivers and Studio Rivbea supercharged '70s jazz in New
York: "On the saxophonist's centennial, Jason Moran and other
artists celebrate his legacy." I'd put it more like: jazz (at
least the free kind) nearly was effectively on life support in
the 1970s. Rivers, both by example and patronage, revived it.
Of course, he wasn't alone. There was Europe, where the most
important labels of the 1980s were founded. But in New York,
it re-started in the lofts, especially chez Rivers.
Dylan Scott: [09-22]
Another Covid-19 winter is coming. Here's how to prepare.
Also:
Nick Shoulders: [09-24]
Country music doesn't deserve its conservative reputation:
"the genre isn't inherently right-wing -- it can also broadcast
the struggles and aspirations of the working class." Shoulders
is a singer-songwriter from Fayetteville, interviewed here by
Willie Jackson. I grew up with a lot of Porter Waggoner and
Hee Haw, but didn't take country music seriously until
I met George Lipsitz, who was a leftist who became a country
music fan through organizing. I didn't need much persuasion:
all you have to do is listen. Of course, that doesn't mean
there isn't a market for jingoism in country music: any time
someone cuts a right-wing fart, you can be sure it will go
viral. Shoulders, by the way, wrote an In These Times piece
in 2020:
Fake twang: How white conservatism stole country music.
I haven't heard his albums, but will check out All Bad,
at least, for next Music Week.
Jeffrey St Clair: [09-22]
Roaming Charges: Then they walked: Starts with more horror stories
of what cops do and get away with. One story from
Reuters "documented more than 1,000 deaths related to police
use of tasers." Much more, of course. There's a chart of new
Covid-19 hospitalizations by state. Number 1, by a large margin,
is Florida, followed by Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana.
There's a fact check on a David Brooks tweet, complaining that
a hamburger & fries meal at Newark Airport cost him $78:
"This is why Americans think the economy is terrible." Same
meal was found for $17, but that didn't factor in the bar tab.
If you can stand more: Timothy Bella: [09-23]
David Brooks and the $78 airport meal the internet is talking
about.
I didn't bother reading any of the Jann Wenner scandal last
week, but St Clair couldn't resist: "There's nothing more satisfying
than to watch a pompous bigot, who has paraded his misogyny and
racism for decades with a sense of royal impunity, suddenly implode
with his own hand on the detonator." He then excerpts the
interview, meant to promote The Masters: Conversations With
Bono, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger, Lennon, Springsteen, Townshend.
A couple days later, Wenner was kicked off his board seat at the
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and denounced by most of the staff
at Rolling Stone. Most likely he'll wind up as an example
in some future book about "cancel culture." Also on Wenner:
Jia Tolentino: [09-10]
Naomi Klein sees uncanny doubles in our politics: An interview
with the author of Doppelganger.
After the Brooks flare up above, someone recommended a 2004
article by Sasha Issenberg:
David Brooks: Boo-Boos in Paradise.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Speaking of Which
Started this on Friday, not with much enthusiasm, so many of the
early links I collected are just that. The comment on Levitz under
"Legal matters" is probably where I got started, after which I found
the Current Affairs interview.
I've tried of late to articulate moderate positions that one
might build a viable political consensus around, but lately I'm
despairing, not so much of the popular political potential as
of the probability that nothing possible will come close to what
is actually needed.
Back when I was a teenage schizophrenic, I was able to pursue
the two paths -- on the one hand I poured over political stats
as nerdishly as Kevin Phillips, on the other I immersed myself
in utopian fantasy writing -- without ever trying to reconcile
them. As an old man, I find once boundless time closing in, and
shutting down.
Just a few years ago, I was thinking that the
worst failures in American politics were opportunity costs:
wasting time and resources that could be used on big problems
while doing stupid things instead (like $800B/year on useless
"defense" spending). But it's looking more and more like the
problem is one of cognitive dysfunction, where there is little
to no hope of convincing enough of a majority that problems
are problems, and that their fantasies aren't.
Top story threads:
Trump: He was having a slow week, until NBC offered
him a free infomercial (see Berman, below). He is now virtually
assured of the Republican nomination, but also of a margin of
free publicity even exceeding his bounty in 2016 and 2020.
Ari Berman: [09-17]
The mainstream media still hasn't learned anything about covering
Donald Trump: Trump appeared on NBC's Meet the Press
in what was billed as "his first broadcast network interview since
leaving office," with Kristen Welker, nd, well, you can guess the
rest. NBC did a "fact check" after the fact, without attempting to
challenge the myriad lies it went ahead and broadcast.
Frank Bruni: [09-11]
Trump is really old, too. I don't follow Bruni's columns, but
fyi, I found links to these more/less recent ones:
Margaret Hartmann:
Kelly McClure: [09-15]
Prosecutors seek limited gag order after Trump's election case
statements lead to harassment.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [09-16]
The futility of the Never Trump billionaires. Paul Woodward
titled his excerpt
People are drastically underestimating the prospect of a second
Trump presidency, which sounds like something very different.
The Never Trump billionaires, like Charles Koch, are trying to
deny Trump the Republican nomination, which is going to be tough,
partly because their libertarian economics has near-zero support
even in the Republican Party, and partly because Trump is really
good at appealing to the base's prejudices and vanities. But the
chances of Trump getting elected is distinctly less than his odds
of getting the nomination of a Party that works 24/7 to make most
Americans fear and despise them. For Trump to win, there has to
be a fairly major meltdown on the Democratic ticket, which with
Biden and Harris already slotted is something hard to rule out.
As for the Never Trumpers, don't expect them to help defeat
Trump if/when he's nominated. Koch will continue to bankroll
Republicans down ballot, and every Republican on the ballot
will dutifully support the ticket. Division with in the Party
is a chimera, because what binds the Party together, especially
the cruelty, the graft, and the contempt for democracy, is far
stronger than the quibbles of a few elites over Trump.
DeSantis, and other Republicans: The Florida governor
has done little to justify being singled out, but Steve M [09-17]
assures us:
Ron DeSantis is still first runner-up, based on a recent
straw poll. He also argues, "I'd like DeSantis to be the
nominee, because he appears to be a much weaker general election
candidate than Trump," and has some charts that seem to support
his case.
Olivia Alafriz: [09-16]
Texas Senate acquits AG Ken Paxton on all corruption charges:
His impeachment moved me to ask the question, "when was the last
time an office holder was deemed too corrupt for the Texas lege?"
Since I never got an answer, I don't know whether they lowered
the bar, or never had one in the first place. But this was the
only opportunity since Nixon for Republicans to discipline one
of their own, and they've failed spectacularly.
Jonathan Chait: [09-13]
Mitt Romney and the doomed nobility of Republican moderation:
"The party's last antiauthoritarian walks away." It's silly to
get all bleary-eyed here. He isn't that moderate, noble, and/or
antiauthoritarian. Chait quotes Geoffrey Kabaservice, totally
ignoring the face that Romney ran hard right from day one of his
2012 (or for that matter his 2008) campaign, going so far as to
pick Koch favorite Paul Ryan as his VP. And he's old enough to
make his age concerns credible. And he's rich enough he doesn't
need the usual post-Senate sinecure on K Street. That he also
took the opportunity to chide Biden and Trump is also typical
of his considerable self-esteem. But it also saves him the
trouble of having to run not on his name but on his record --
much as he did after one term as governor of Massachusetts.
Also on Romney:
Sarah Jones: [09-13]
The enemies of America's children. This could be more partisan,
not that Joe Manchin doesn't deserve to be called out, but he's
only effective as a right-wing jerk because he's backed up by a
solid block of 49-50 Republicans.
Relevant here:
Nikki McCann Ramirez: [09-14]
DeSantis lived large on undisclosed private flights and lavish
trips: What is it about Republican politicians that makes
them think that just because they cater to every whim of their
billionaire masters, they're entitled to live like them?
Bill Scher: [09-14]
A shutdown will be the GOP's fault, and everyone in Washington knows
it.
Matt Stieb: [09-15]
New, gentler Lauren Boebert booted from Beetlejuice
musical: Another reminder that the most clueless thing a
politician can say to a cop is: "do you know who I am?"
[PS: Later updated: "New, gentler Lauren Boebert apologizes for
Beetlejuice fracas."]
Tessa Stuart: [09-16]
The GOP is coming after your birth control (even if they won't
admit it).
Li Zhou: [09-13]
Republicans' unfounded impeachment inquiry of Biden, explained:
"House Speaker Kevin McCarthy backed an inquiry despite no evidence
of Biden's wrongdoing." More on impeachment:
Jonathan Chait: [09-13]
Republicans already told us impeachment is revenge for Trump:
"They did it to us!"
Peter Baker: [09-14]
White House strategy on impeachment: Fight politics with politics.
Steve M
comments: "Are House Republicans really trying to impeach President
Biden, or do they just want him under a cloud of suspicion?" The only
way impeachment succeeds is if the other party break ranks. For a brief
moment, Clinton seemed to consider the possibility of resigning, then
decided to rally his supporters, and came out ahead. (In American
Crime Story, Hillary was the one who straightened out his spine.)
That was never a possibility with Trump, but at least the Democrats
had pretty compelling stories to tell -- whether that did them any
good is an open question. Now, not only is there no chance that Biden
and the Democrats will break, the only story Republicans have is one
their sucker base is already convinced of. So "cloud of suspicion"
seems to be about all they can hope for.
Biden and/or the Democrats: Big week for Democratic Party
back-biting. I find this focus at the top of the ticket silly and
distracting. True, Trump decided that "America is Great Again" the
moment he took office, but Democrats surely know that inaugurating
Biden was just the first step, and that lots of big problems were
left over, things that couldn't be solved quickly, especially as
Republicans still held significant levers of power and press, and
were doing everything possible to cripple Democratic initiatives.
So why do Democrats have to run on defending their economy, their
immigration, their crime, their climate, etc.? They can point to
good things they've done, better things they've wanted to do, and
above all to the disastrous right shift in politics since 1980.
Is that so hard to understand?
Liza Featherstone: [09-15]
We need bigger feelings about Biden's biggest policies: "Anyone
who doesn't want Trump to serve another term must learn to love the
Inflation Reduction Act, and despise those who seek its destruction."
This sentiment runs against every instinct I have, as I've spent all
my life learning to deconstruct policies to find their intrinsic
flaws and their secret (or more often not-so-secret) beneficiaries.
IRA has a lot of tax credits and business subsidies for doing things
that are only marginally better than what would happen without them.
Even if I'm willing to acknowledge that's the way you have to operate
in Washington to get anything done, I hate being told I need to be
happy about it. But as a practical matter, none of these things --
and same is true of the two other big bills and dozens or hundreds
of smaller things, many executive orders -- would have been done
under any Republican administration, Trump or no Trump. And while
what Biden and the Democrats have accomplished is still far short
of what's needed, sure, they deserve some credit.
Eric Levitz: [09-13]
The case for Biden to drop Kamala Harris: "The 80-year-old
president probably shouldn't have an exceptionally unpopular
heir apparent." What's unclear here is why she's so unpopular.
The whole identity token thing may have helped her get picked,
works against her being taken seriously, but probably makes her
even harder than usual to dump. But before becoming Biden's VP
pick, she was a pretty skilled politician, so why not put her
out in public more, get her doing the "bully pulpit" thing
Biden's not much good at anyway, give her a chance?
Andrew Prokop: [09-12]
Why Biden isn't getting a credible primary challenger: "Many
Democrats fear a challenge would pave the way to Trump's victory."
Responds to a question raised by
Jonathan Chait with my default answer, and pointing to four
cases where incumbent presidents were challenged (Johnson in 1968,
Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, and Bush in 1992) that resulted in
the other party winning. Chait, by the way, replies here: [09-15]
Challenging Biden is risky. So is nominating him. Steve M
comments here: [09-15]
Do we really want to endure the 2028 Democratic primary campaign
in 2024? Evidently, there's also a David Ignatius piece, but
wrong about pretty much everything, so I haven't bothered.
Katie Rogers: [09-11]
'It is evening, isn't it?' An 80-year-old President's whirlwind
trip: Raises the question, will the New York Times ever again
publish an article on Biden that doesn't mention his age? I don't
know whether his trip to India and Vietnam was worthwhile, either
for diplomatic or political reasons. I am not a fan of his efforts
to reinvigorate American leadership after the chaotic nonsense of
the Trump years: somehow, I rather doubt that "America's back" is
the message the world has been clamoring for.
I was taken aback by Heather Cox Richardson's
tweet on this article (my comment
here), but her write up on
September 11, 2023 is exceptionally clear and straightforward,
much better reporting than the NY Times seems capable of.
Legal matters and other crimes:
Josh Gerstein/Rebecca Kern: [09-14]
Alito pauses order banning Biden officials from contacting tech
platforms. The case has to do with whether the government
can complain to social media companies about their dissemination
of false information about the pandemic. One cherry-picked judge
thinks doing so violated the free speech rights of the liars
whose posts were challenged, so he issued a sweeping ban against
the government. (That's what Alito paused, probably because the
case is so shoddy he knows it won't stand.)
For a laugh, see Jason Willick: [09-15]
Worried about Trump? You should welcome these rulings against
Biden. This is bullshit for two reasons. One is that rulings
like this are deeply partisan, so there's no reason to expect
that a restriction on a Democratically-run government would also
be applied to a Republican-run one. And secondly, Republicans
(especially Trump) would be promoting falsehoods, not trying to
correct them. We already saw a perfect example of this in Trump's
efforts to gag government officials to keep them from so much as
mentioning climate change.
Eric Levitz: [09-12]
Prisons and policing need to be radically reformed, not abolished.
This is not a subject I want to dive into, especially as I pretty
much agree with all nine of the issues he talks about (6 where
abolitionists are right, 3 where they are wrong). One more point
I want to emphasize: we use an adversarial system of prosecutors
and defenders, each side strongly motivated to win, regardless
of the truth. More often than not, what is decisive is the
relative power of the adversaries (which is to say, the state
beats individuals, but also the rich beat the poor, which gives
rich defendants better chances than poor defendants). Some of
this is so deeply embedded it's hard to imagine changing it,
but we need a system that seeks the truth, and to understand
it in its complexity (or simple messiness).
Levitz properly
questions the desire for retribution driving long sentences,
but I also have to question the belief that long sentences
and harsh punishments (which is part of the reason why jails
are so cruel) deter others from committing crimes. Sure, they
do, except when they don't (e.g., mass murder as a recipe for
suicide by cop), but the higher the stakes, the less motive
people have to admit the truth. Also, as in foreign policy,
an emphasis on deterrence tends to make one too arrogant to
seek mutually-beneficial alternatives. A lot of crimes are
driven by conditions that can be avoided or treated.
Finally, we need to recognize that excessive punishment is
(or should be) itself criminal, that it turns us into the people
we initially abhor, a point rarely lost on the punished. And one
which only makes the punishers more callous. The big problem
with capital punishment isn't that it's cruel or that it's so
hard to apply it uniformly or that some people don't deserve
it. The problem is that such deliberate killing is murder, and
as done by the state is even colder and more deliberate than
the murders being avenged.
Ian Millhiser:
Andrew Prokop: [09-14]
The indictment of Hunter Biden isn't really about gun charges:
"Prosecutors are moving aggressively because the plea deal fell
apart. But why did it fall apart?"
Also:
By the way, no one's answered what seems to me the obvious
question: has anyone else ever been prosecuted for these "crimes"
before (standalone, as opposed to being extra charges tacked onto
something else)? Also, doesn't the Fifth Amendment provide some
degree of protection even if you don't explicitly invoke it?
Li Zhou: [09-15]
The fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants is caught in an
endless court fight: "The high stakes of the latest DACA
decision, explained."
Current Affairs: [09-15]
Exposing the many layers of injustice in the US criminal punishment
system: Interview with Stephen B Bright and James Kwak, authors of
The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of
Inequality in the Criminal Courts. Particularly check out the
section on privatized probation companies, which have come about due
to the belief that "the private sector can do things better than the
government," and that "there is a lot of legal corruption at all levels
of government."
Climate and environment:
Scott Dance: [09-15]
Odds that 2023 will be Earth's hottest year have doubled, NOAA
reports.
Nadeen Ebrahim/Laura Paddison: [09-15]
Aging dams and missed warnings: A lethal mix of factors caused Africa's
deadliest flood disaster: The weather is known as
Storm Daniel, "the deadliest and costliest Mediterranean tropical-like
cyclone ever recorded, which affected Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey as
well as Libya, where heavy rains (more than 16 inches in Al-Bayda)
caused two dams to fail, resulting in flooding that killed over 11,000
people in Derna.
Also on Libya:
Rebecca Leber: [09-13]
Climate disasters will happen everywhere, anytime. I must
say, I wasn't expecting fires in Maui and Louisiana, or storm
flooding in Death Valley and Libya, just to pick several of
the more outlandish examples.
Kylie Mohr: [09-12]
Wildfires are coming . . . for New Jersey?
Paul Street: [09-15]
Too bourgeois: Jeff Goodell's The Heat Will Kill You First:
Book review, compliments Goodell's research and storytelling skills,
then unloads on him for not putting the blame squarely on capitalism,
and concluding with a list of books that make his very point.
A Camden Walker/Justine McDaniel/Matthew Cappucci:
09-16]
Lee makes landfall in Nova Scotia with sustained winds of 70 mph.
Down from Category 5, but still an extremely rare hurricane to hit
Canada, after doing damage to the coasts from Rhode Island to Maine.
The trajectory calls for it to pass over the Gulf of St. Lawrence
and northern Newfoundland.
The UAW strike:
Ukraine War: I find it curious that despite all the
"notable progress" the New York Times has claimed for Ukraine's
counteroffensive (most recently,
retaking the village of Andriivka), they haven't updated
their
maps page since June 9. Zelensky is coming to America next
next week, to speak at the UN and to meet Biden in Washington.
Israel: This is 30 years after the Oslo Accords, which
promised to implement a separate Palestinian state in (most of) the
Occupied Territories, after an interval of "confidence building"
which Israel repeatedly sabotaged, especially by continuing to
cater to the settler movement. The agreements put the Intifada
behind, while seeding the ground for the more violent second
Intifada in 2000, brutally suppressed by a Sharon government
which greatly expanded settlement activity. The PLO was partly
legitimized by Oslo, then reduced to acting as Israeli agents,
and finally discredited, but was kept in nominal power after
being voted out by Hamas, ending democracy in Palestine.
Middle East
Eye has a whole series of articles on this anniversary,
including Joseph Massad:
From Oslo to the end of Israeli settler-colonialism.
Iran: One step forward (prisoner swap), one step back (more
sanctions as the US tries to claim Iranian protests against police
brutality and repression of women -- issues the US is not exactly
a paragon of virtue on).
Around the world:
Other stories:
Ana Marie Cox: [09-14]
We are not just polarized. We are traumatized.
Constance Grady: [09-13]
The big Elon Musk biography asks all the wrong questions: "In
Walter Isaacson's buzzy new biography, Elon Musk emerges as a callous,
chaos-loving man without empathy." Proof positive that no one should
be as rich and powerful as he is, and not just because he is who he
is.
Sean Illing: [09-12]
Democracy is the antidote to capitalism: Interview with Astra
Taylor, who has a new book: The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together
as Things Fall Apart.
Noel King: [09-15]
5 new books (and one very old one) to read in order to understand
capitalism: A podcast discussion. The old one is The Wealth
of Nations, by Adam Smith, which is somewhat more nuanced and
sophisticated than is commonly remembered. (For one thing, the
"invisible hand" is basically a joke.) The new ones:
- Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
(Nov. 2023)
- David Gelles: The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch
Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America --
and How to Undo His Legacy (2022)
- Martin Wolf: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2023)
- Jason Hickel: Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the
World (2020)
I'm not sure what I'd recommend instead, but here are a
couple ideas: George P Brockway's
The End of Economic Man: Principles of Any Future Economics
is my bible on economics, so I'd gladly swap
it for Smith. Zachary D Carter's The Price of Peace: Money,
Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes is all you
need on Friedman, plus a lot more. There are lots of books on
recent economic plunder. I'm not sure which one(s) to recommend,
but Jeff Madrick's Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and
the Decline of America, 1970s to the Present is good on the
bankers, and the Jacob Hacker/Paul Pierson books, from The
Great Risk Shift to Let Them Eat Tweets, are good on
the politics (also Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew).
Hope Jahren's The Story of More is an elegant if somewhat
less political alternative to Hickel.
Dylan Matthews: [09-14]
Lead poisoning could be killing more people than HIV, malaria, and
car accidents combined.
Kim Messick: [09-09]
The American crack-up: Why liberalism drives some people crazy.
Andrew O'Hehir: [09-14]
Naomi Klein on her "Doppelganger" -- the "other Naomi" -- and
navigating the far-right mirror universe. Klein's new book
is Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which
starts by noting the tendency people have of confusing her with
Naomi Wolf, then goes beyond that to show how much propaganda
from the right picks up memes from the left and twists them for
the opposite effect.
Also:
Jacob Bacharach: [09-06]
Is Naomi Klein's Doppelganger weird enough? Criticism
that promises more than it delivers, perhaps tipped off by the
by far most unflattering pics of the Naomis I've seen.
Laura Wagner: [09-11]
In Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, Naomi Wolf is more than a
gimmick.
Adrienne Westenfeld: [09-12]
Naomi Klein's double trouble: An interview with the author.
Democracy Now: [09-14]
Naomi Klein on her new book Doppelganger & how conspiracy
culture benefits ruling elite: I watched this, which is a
good but not great interview, but the reason I looked it up was
a turn of phrase that struck me as peculiar. Klein notes that:
When I would confess to people I knew that I was working on this
book, sometimes I would get this strange reaction like, "Why would
you give her attention?" There was this sense that because she was
no longer visible in the pages of The New York Times or on
MSNBC or wherever, and because she had been deplatformed on social
media -- or on the social media that we're on -- that she just
didn't exist. And there was this assumption that "we," whoever we
are, are in control of the attention, and so if this bigot gets
turned off then there's no more attention.
Of course, the New York Times reference is the one that
sticks in my craw, because I've never viewed them as "we," or even
bothered to read the thing on my own dime (or whatever it costs
these days, which is surely lots more). Klein's point is that
there is a lucrative right-wing media universe that welcomes and
supports people who lose their perch among the moderate elites.
My complaint is that the Times excludes more viewpoints
from the left than it does from the right, and those from the
left are essential to understanding our world (whereas those
from the right are mostly promoting misunderstanding).
Jeffrey St Clair: [09-15]
Roaming Charges: Just write a check. First fourth of the column
is devoted to outrageous police behavior: example after example,
impossible to summarize more briefly. Then he moves on to the War
on Terror.
Scott Wilson: [09-15]
Outflanked by liberals, Oregon conservatives aim to become part of
Idaho. There are several such secessionist movements, including
rural parts of Washington and California, where the population is
so sparse their reactionary leanings have little effect at the state
level. I only mention this because Greg Magarian did, adding: "Huh --
living in a state where your political opponents get to impose their
values on you. I wonder what the &@%$# that's like." Magarian lives
in St. Louis, so he very well knows what that's like. One could
imagine St. Louisans opting to join Illinois. If that happened,
and especially if Kansas City also defected to Kansas (which is
closer to tipping Democratic than Missouri would be without its
two big cities, and would also save Kansas from trying to poach
their teams), the rest of Missouri might as well be part of Arkansas.
In states where Republicans hold power, they're constantly passing
state laws to disempower local governments that may elect Democrats.
Florida and Texas have gotten the most press on that front lately,
but they've done that all over the map, a bunch of times even here
in Kansas. I'm not aware of Democrats behaving like that.
I finished reading EJ Hobsbawm's brilliant and encyclopedic
The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. Only disappointment
was that I expected more details on the 1848 revolutions, but
Hobsbawm just tiptoes up to the brink, satisfied as he is with
the "two revolutions" of his period (French and Industrial, or
British). I still have Christopher Clark's Revolutionary
Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849
on the proverbial bedstand, but I also have several more books
I'd like to get to. I need to make a decision tonight.
Books post is still in progress, with 23 (of a typical 40)
books in the draft main section, and 62 partials and 229 noted
books. Looking back at the
April 28, 2023 Book Roundup, I see that I was thinking
of cutting the chunk size down, perhaps to 20, to get shorter
and more posts, but also because the length of 40 has grown
significantly with supplemental lists. I need to think about
that. I certainly have much more research I can (and should)
do. The current
draft file runs 15,531
words, of which about 1/3 is in the finished section.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, September 10, 2023
Speaking of Which
I started to work on a books post this week, which caused some
confusion when I ran across reviews of books I had recently written
something about. I'm guessing I have about half of my usual batch,
so a post is possible later this week, but not guaranteed. I'm
still reading Eric Hobsbawm's brilliant The Age of Revolution:
1789-1848, which is absolutely jam-packed with insights --
probably why I drone on at such length below on liberalism and its
discontents. I got deep enough into it to order three books:
- Franklin Foer: The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's
White House and the Struggle for America's Future (2023,
Penguin Press)
- Cory Doctorow: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means
of Computation (2023, Verso)
- Astra Taylor: The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as
Things Fall Apart (paperback, 2023, House of Anansi Press)
I didn't bother with any reviews of Foer this week (there are
several), although I mentioned the book
last
week. I figured I'd wait until I at least get a chance to
poke around a bit. I have a lot of questions about how Biden's
White House actually works. I'm not big on these insider books,
but usually the outside view suffices -- especially on someone
as transparent as Trump. Two I read on Obama that were useful
were:
- Ron Suskind: Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington,
and the Education of a President (2011, Harper).
- Reed Hundt: A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining
Decisions (2019, Rosetta Books).
Suskind was a reporter who had written an important book on
the GW Bush administration (The One Percent Doctrine: Deep
Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11). Hundt
was a participant, but not an important nor a particularly
successful one, so he took his time before weighing in.
Top story threads:
Trump:
Holly Bailey: [09-08]
Georgia special grand jury recommended charging Lindsey Graham
in Trump case. We now know that the Grand Jury actually
recommended prosecution of 38 people, but the prosecutor
streamlined the case to just 19 defendants. It's easy to
imagine the case against Graham, who was especially aggressive
in trying to bully Georgia officials into throwing the election
to Trump. But it's also easy to see how prosecuting Graham, and
for that matter Georgia Senators (at the time) Loeffler and
Perdue, could distract from focusing on the ringleader.
Amy Gardner: [09-08]
Judge denies Mark Meadows's effort to move Georgia case to federal
court: This was the first, and probably the most credible, such
appeal, so it doesn't look good for the other defendants.
Alex Guillén: [09-07]
Trump's border wall caused 'significant' cultural, environmental
damage, watchdog finds. Rep. Raúl Grijalva put it more bluntly:
"This racist political stunt has been an ineffective waste of
billions of American taxpayers' dollars."
Nicole Narea: [09-06]
January 6 rioters are facing hundreds of years in prison combined.
What does it mean for Trump? Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio
was sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy, the longest
individual sentence yet. Jeffrey St Clair notes (link below) that
Tarrio was initially offered a plea deal of 9-11 years, in "a
textbook case of how prosecutors use plea deals to coerce guilty
pleas and punish those who insist on their constitutional right
to a trial." He lists four more Proud Boys who received sentences
approximately double of what they were offered to plea out.
Tori Otten: [09-07]
Guilty! Trumpiest Peter Navarro convicted of contempt of Congress.
Charles P Pierce: [09-08]
Get a load of the letter Fulton County DA Fani Willis sent Jim
Jordan: "I didn't think there were this many ways to tell
somebody to fck off."
Jack Shafer: [09-08]
Donald Trump destroyed horse race journalism: "At least for
now." I guess it's hard to enjoy a good horse race when something
more than your own bet depends on it. Like whether there'll ever
be another race. Especially when you have to spend so much time
scanning the grounds for snipers and ambulances, which are the
only things about this race you haven't seen before.
Li Zhou: [09-07]
Trump faces another big legal loss in the E. Jean Carroll case.
No More Mister Nice Blog: [09-08]
So why wasn't Trump impeached for emoluments?:
It's a shame, because much of America struggled to understand the
point of the first impeachment, whereas an emoluments impeachment
would have been extremely easy for ordinary citizens to grasp: If
you use your status as president to cash in, that's illegal.
Simple. Relatable. It's like stealing from the cash register. And
he was allowed to get away with it.
The question is probably rhetorical, but the obvious answer is
that there was a faction of Democrats who thought that national
security was the only unassailable moral high ground that exists,
therefore everyone would get behind it. In the end, it persuaded
no one who wasn't going to vote to impeach Trump for any of dozens
of things anyway. Ironically, the key witnesses against Trump at
the time have become the Washington's biggest Ukraine hawks, with
the same "security Democrats" cheering them the loudest. And still
Republicans are trying to get Hunter Biden prosecuted, so you
didn't even win the battle, much less the war.
DeSantis, and other Republicans:
Fabiola Cineas: [09-08]
Republicans in Alabama still want to dilute the Black vote:
"Here's why the state's congressional maps were just struck down --
again." Interview with Michael Li.
Prachi Gupta: [09-05]
Vivek Ramaswamy and the lie of the "model minority": "The
Asian American candidate is peddling a dangerous message."
Ben Jacobs: [09-07]
RFK Jr.'s Republican-friendly Democratic presidential campaign,
explained. One revealing stat here is that his approval rate
is 28% among Democrats, 55% among Republicans.
Sarah Jones: [09-08]
'Pro-Life' or 'Pro-Baby,' Republicans can't outrun abortion.
Robert Kuttner: [09-06]
US Steel and the Fake Populism of JD Vance: I don't doubt that
Kuttner is right, but when I read Vance's op-ed,
America cannot afford to auction off its industrial base, I
was surprised how persuasive he was. Not that I buy the "national
defense" crap, but there is something to be said for local rather
than foreign owners. Of course, my preferred local owners would
be the employees themselves, whose stake would indeed be local.
Nicole Narea: [09-05]
The impeachment trial of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,
explained: Or how evil do you have to be to get your fellow
Republicans to turn against you?
Will Norris: [09-06]
DeSantis loves stepping on Florida municipalities, thwarting the
popular will.
Michael Tomasky: [09-08]
Jim Jordan and Wisconsin Republicans know the law -- they just don't
care: "Conservatism is no longer defined by resistance to liberal
progress -- it's all about destroying the pillars of our democracy."
Maegan Vazquez/Amy B Wang: [09-10]
GOP presidential hopefuls take renewed aim at efforts to combat
covid. It's probably unfair to say that they want you to die,
but it's not inaccurate to say they don't care. And they really
hate the idea that government might respond to a pandemic by
trying to keep you well.
Biden and/or the Democrats:
Peter Baker/Katie Rogers: [09-10]
Biden forges deeper ties with Vietnam as China's ambition mounts:
Further proof that the only thing that can get American foreign policy
past a grudge is to spite another supposed foe.
Jonathan Chait: [09-09]
Biden or Bust: Why isn't a mainstream Democrat challenging the
president? The simple answer is that no one wants to risk
losing, not so much to Biden as to a Republican who should be
unelectable but still scares pretty much everyone shitless.
The greater left of the party isn't that unhappy with Biden,
at least as long as they don't have to think much about foreign
policy (which, frankly, is pretty awful, but so were Obama and
Clinton). The neolibs aren't that unhappy either, and they're
the ones most likely to sandbag anyone to Biden's left. Second
answer is money. Nobody's got any (unless Bloomberg wants to
run again, and that would really be stupid). But if Biden did
drop out, ten names would pop up within a month.
Lisa Friedman: [09-06]
Biden administration to bar drilling on millions of acres in
Alaska: This reverses leases granted in the late days of
the Trump administration, but only after [04-23]
Many young voters bitter over Biden's support of Willow oil
drilling, also on Alaska's north slope.
Molly Jong-Fast: [09-05]
Can Joe Biden ride "boring" to reelection? "His administration is
getting a lot done for the American people, yet its accomplishments
don't get the same media attention as Trumpian chaos."
Andrew Prokop: [09-08]
Should we trust the polls showing Trump and Biden nearly tied?
You have much more serious things to worry about than polls, but
what I take from this is that Democrats haven't really figured out
how to talk about their political differences, and the mainstream
media isn't very adept at talking about politics at all. There are
obvious, and in some ways intractable, reasons for this. The idea
of merely reporting the news gives equal credence to both sides
regardless of truth, value, or intent. Republicans are masters at
blaming everything bad on Democrats, while crediting them nothing.
Democrats are reluctant to reciprocate, especially as we've been
conditioned to dismiss their infrequent counterattacks as shrill
and snotty. The double standards are maddening, but somehow we
have to figure out ways to get past that. The differences between
Trump and Biden, or between any generic Republican and Democrat
you might fancy, are huge and important. At some level you have
to believe that it's possible to explain that clearly. But until
then, you get stupid poll results.
Legal matters and other crimes:
Climate and environment:
Kate Aronoff: [09-08]
World's wealthiest countries gather to admit continued failure to
address climate change: The G20.
Umair Irfan: [09-09]
The Southern Hemisphere, where it's winter, has been really hot
too.
Rebecca Leber: [09-08]
The oil industry's cynical gamble on Arctic drilling: "Companies
like ConocoPhillips are banking on a future filled with oil."
Rebecca Leber/Umair Irfan: [09-09]
The world's brutal climate change report card, explained: In
subheds: Coil, oil, and natural gas need to go; Everyone is doing
something, but everyone needs to do more.
Ian Livingston/Jason Samenow: [09-08]
A first: Category 5 storm have formed in every ocean basin this
year. One of them,
Hurricane Lee, is still well out in the Atlantic, and expected
to turn north before it gets to Florida and the Carolinas, but
could affect New England or (more likely) the Canadian Maritimes
(Nova Scotia and the Gulf of St. Lawrence).
Aja Romano: [09-06]
The Burning Man flameout, explained: "Climate change -- and
schadenfreude -- finally caught up to the survivalist cosplayers."
Ukraine War:
Connor Echols: [09-08]
Diplomacy Watch: Inquiry finds 'no evidence' South Africa armed
Russia. No meaningful diplomacy to report. The website has
a new design, which I don't like, mostly because it makes it
much harder to find new pieces on the front page.
Ben Armbruster: [09-05]
Why blind optimism leads us astray on Ukraine: "The
pre-counteroffensive debate in the US was dominated by claims of
'victory' and 'success' despite available evidence predicting it
wouldn't meet key goals." This is similar to the Confidence Fairy,
where Obama and his people seemed to think that the key to recovery
from the 2008 meltdown was projecting confidence that the economy
was really just fine. The effect of such thinking on war strategy
is even worse: any doubt that war aims will succeed is scorned as
giving comfort to the enemy, so everyone parrots the official line.
The final withdrawal from Afghanistan was hampered by just this
kind of thinking. The article includes a wide sampling of such yes
men cheering each other on into thinking it would all work out.
I've tried to take a different position, which is that it doesn't
matter whether the counteroffensive gains ground or not. In either
case, the war only ends when Russia and the US -- with Ukraine's
agreement, to be sure, but let's not kid ourselves about who
Putin's real opponent is -- decide to negotiate something that
allows both sides to back down. And the key to that isn't who
controls how many acres, but when negotiators find common ground.
Until then, the only point to the war is to disillusion hawks on
both sides.
Ben Freeman: [06-01]
Defense contractor funded think tanks dominate Ukraine debate:
A lengthy report, finding that "media outlets have cited think
tanks with financial backing from the defense industry 85 percent
of the time."
Jen Kirby: [09-07]
Are the US and Ukraine at odds over the counteroffensive?
Daniel Larison: [09-07]
Hawks want Biden to take the fight with Russia global:
"Walter Russell Mead thinks the West can wear down Russia by
attacking it everywhere." The first question I have is: isn't
it global already, or is he really arguing for escalating with
military action? (Syria and Mali are mentioned.) The bigger
question is why do you want to fight Russia in the first
place? I can see defending Ukraine, but the hawks seem to
be starting from the assumption the US should wage war
against Russia, and Ukraine is just an excuse and tool for
that purpose.
Anatol Lieven: [09-06]
Afghanistan delusions blind US on Russia-Ukraine: "If
Washington forgets the war's lessons, its mistakes are likely
to be repeated."
Robert Wright: [09-08]
Logic behind Ukraine peace talks grows: This is a pretty good
summary of an argument that I think has been obvious if not from
day one, at least since Russia retreated from its initial thrust
at Kyiv: that neither side can win, nor can either side afford to
lose.
Common Dreams: [09-02]
US to begin sending controversial depleted uranium shells to
Ukraine: The shells are effective at piercing tank armor,
but they ultimately disintegrate, leaving toxic and radioactive
uranium in the air, water, and soil. They were used extensively
in Iraq, and the results have been tragic; e.g., Sydney Young:
[2021-09-22]
Depleted Uranium, Devastated Health: Military Operations and
Environmental Injustice in the Middle East; and Dahr
Jamail: [2013-03-15]
Iraq: War's legacy of cancer.
Israel:
Around the world:
Daniel Handel: [09-05]
We're finally figuring out if foreign aid is any better than handing
out cash: "The rise of cash benchmarking at USAID, explained."
Ellen Ioanes:
[09-10]
What we know about Morocco's deadly earthquake: "A massive quake
near Marrakesh on Friday night has killed more than 2,000."
[09-10]
What's behind Africa's recent coups: Gabon, Niger, Burkina
Faso, Mali. And not just recent: worldwide, "from 1950 through
January 2022, there had been 486 coup attempts, 242 of which
were successful." For Africa, the numbers were 214 and 106,
ahead of 146 and 70 for Latin America.
Nicole Narea: [09-07]
Latin American abortion rights activists just notched another win
in Mexico: "The Mexican Supreme Court decriminalized abortion
nationwide. It's a big deal for the whole region."
Haris Zargar: [09-04]
India: Why Modi is fueling anti-Muslim riots ahead of 2024
elections.
Other stories:
Dan Balz: [09-09]
What divides political parties? More than ever, it's race and
ethnicity. That's what a report from the American Political
Science Association (APSA) says. My first reaction was: that's
a shame. My second was the suspicion that they got that result
because that's all they could think of to measure. It's always
possible to think of other questions that could scatter the
results in various directions. And my third is that this is
mostly an indictment of the news media, which seems completely
incapable of explaining issues in ways that people can relate
to.
Zack Beauchamp:
[09-06]
Elon Musk's strange new feud with a Jewish anti-hate group,
explained: So Musk is suing the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) . . .
for defamation? He blames them for a 60% loss of advertising revenue,
which couldn't possibly have been caused by anything he did?
[09-10]
Chris Rufo's dangerous fictions: "The right's leading culture
warrior has invented a leftist takeover of America to justify his
very real power grabs." Rufo's book is America's Cultural
Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo
is the guy whose rant on Critical Race Theory launched recent
efforts by DeSantis and others to ban its teaching, even though
it never had been taught, and thereby censoring the very real
history of racial discrimination in America, lest white people
be made to feel bad about what their ancestors did. CRT was
developed by legal scholars to show that some laws which were
framed to appear race-neutral had racist intent. This refers
to the Critical Theory developed by mid-20th century Marxists
like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, which was very useful
in detecting how capitalism and authoritarianism permeated and
refracted in popular culture.
I spent a lot of time studying Critical Theory when I was young.
(I recently cracked open my copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment
and was surprised to find about 80% of it was underlined.) It really
opens your eyes to, and goes a long way toward explaining, a lot of
the features of the modern world. But having learned much, I lost
interest, at least in repeating the same analyses ad nauseum. (To
take a classic example, I was blown away when I read How to Read
Donald Duck, but then it occurred to me that one could write
the same brilliant essay about Huckleberry Hound, Woody Woodpecker,
and literally every other cartoon or fictional character you ran
into.) But while Critical Theory appealed to people who wanted to
change the world, it was never a plan of action, much less the plot
to take over the world that Rufo claims to have uncovered.
Beauchamp does a nice job of showing up Rufo's paranoia:
Rufo cites, as evidence of the influence of "critical theory"
across America, diversity trainings at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon
that used the term "white privilege" and similar concepts in their
documents. This, he argues, is proof that "even federal defense
contractors have submitted to the new ideology."
But the notion that American arms manufacturers have been taken
over by radicals is ridiculous. Lockheed Martin builds weapons to
maintain the American war machine. It is not owned or controlled in
any way by sincere believers in the Third Worldist anti-imperialism
of the 1960s radicals; it is using the now-popular terms those
radicals once embraced to burnish its own image.
Rufo is getting the direction of influence backward. Radicals
are not taking over Lockheed Martin; Lockheed Martin is co-opting
radicalism.
So Rufo is not wrong that some radical ideas are penetrating
into the institutions of power, including corporations. Where he
is bonkers is in thinking that the ideas are power, plotted by
some malign adversary bent on total control, trying to force us
to think (gasp!) nice thoughts. What's scary is the mentality
that views any hint of civility or accommodation as a mortal
threat. Beauchamp continues, in terms that will probably drive
Rufo even crazier:
Historically, liberalism has proven quite capable of assimilating
leftist critiques into its own politics. In the 19th and 20th
centuries, liberal governments faced significant challenges from
socialists who argued that capitalism and private property led to
inequality and mass suffering. In response, liberals embraced the
welfare state and social democracy: progressive income taxation,
redistribution, antitrust regulations, and social services.
Reformist liberals worked to address the concerns raised by
socialists within the system. Their goal was to offer the
immiserated proletariat alternative hope for a better life
within the confines of the liberal democratic capitalist order --
simultaneously improving their lives and staving off revolution.
Meanwhile, conservatives like Rufo resisted every such reform,
often histrionically, even ones they eventually came to accept
as necessary.
Jonathan Chait: [09-07]
Samuel Moyn can't stop blaming Trumpism on liberals. I only
mention this because I recently spent a lot of time writing up a
book blurb on Moyn's Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War
Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. I'll save the
details, but note that Chait is upset because his heroes and
his muddle-of-the-road philosophy were critiqued -- he says,
incoherently. What happened was that after 1945, the New Deal
coalition was deliberately split as most traditional liberals
(like Chait, but he came much later) turned against the left,
both abroad and at home, as part of a bipartisan Cold War
consensus. They were pretty successful for a while, and with
Lyndon Johnson even did some worthwhile things (civil rights
and Medicare were big ones), but they neglected the working
class base of the party, while throwing America into nasty
(and in the case of Vietnam, hopeless) wars. So instead of
building on the significant progress of the New Deal, the
Democratic Party fell apart, losing not just to Republicans
but to its own neoliberal aspirants. How that brought us to
Trump is a longer and messier story, but it certainly got us
Reagan, and the rot that followed.
PS: I wrote this paragraph before the one above on Beauchamp,
so there's a bit of disconnect. Beauchamp talks about "reformist
liberals," which diverge somewhat from Moyn's "cold war liberals."
Chait thinks of himself as one of the former, but shares the
latter's aversion to the left. Classical liberalism contained
the seeds for both: first by individualizing society, breaking
down the traditional hierarchy, then by declaring that every
individual should have the right to "life, liberty, and pursuit
of happiness." It turns out that in order for any substantial
number of people to enjoy liberty, they need to have support
of government. Some liberals understood, and others (including
Hayek and Friedman) simply didn't care. Cold War liberals
wound up on both sides, but even those who still supported
reforms undercut them by fighting the left as much or more
than the right.
Rachel M Cohen: [09-05]
Is public school as we know it ending? Interview with Cara
Fitzpatrick, who thinks so, as in her book title: The Death
of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education
in America.
Richard Drake: [09-08]
Gabriel Kolko on the foreign policy consequences of conservatism's
triumph: I occasionally still crack open Kolko's brilliant
books on US foreign policy (both subtitled The World and United
States Foreign Policy, The Politics of War: 1943-1945,
and The Limits of Power: 1945-1954), but it's been some time
since I thought of his earlier The Triumph of Conservatism: A
Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (1963). The
point there is that while the progressive movement sought to limit
the manifest evils of capitalism, the actual reforms left big
business and finance in pretty good shape -- as was evident in
the post-WWI period, all the way to the crash in 1929.
Drake goes into the later books, but this piece doesn't do
much to clarify how the "triumph of conservatism" in 1916 led
to the "politics of war" in 1943. In this, I must admit I'm a
little rusty on my William Appleman Williams, but "democracy"
in Wilson's "making the world safe" slogan could just as easily
been replaced with "capitalism." That was exactly what happened
in the later 1943-54 period, when Roosevelt did so much to
revive Wilson's reputation, while forever banishing opponents,
including remnants of the anti-imperialist movement from 1898,
to obscurity as "isolationists."
Kolko's formulation also does a neat job of solving the
debate about whether Wilson was a progressive or a conservative:
he was the former to the ends of the latter. Nowadays we dwell
more on Wilson's racism, which we associate with the right, but
in his day the two weren't strangers, even if what we still
admire about the progressive idea suggests they should have
known better.
Zeke Faux: [09-06]
That's what I call ponzinomics: "With Sam Brinkman-Fried, Gisele,
and a credulous Michael Lewis at the zenith of crypto hype." On first
glance, I thought this might be a review of Lewis's forthcoming book
on Bankman-Fried (coming Oct. 3: Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall
of a New Tycoon), but it's actually an excerpt from Faux's new
book, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering
Fall, about a conference in 2022 where Lewis was talking about
Bankman-Fried "as if he were presenting a prize to his star pupil."
Constance Grady: [09-08]
The sincerity and rage of Olivia Rodrigo: One class of story
I invariably skip past is "most anticipated," especially with
albums, because interesting albums rarely get the advanced hype
to make such lists. (TV and movies fare a bit better, because
there are many fewer of them, at least that you'll ever hear
about.) But I gave this one a spin as soon as the banner popped
up on Spotify, and then I gave it a second. If you don't know,
she's a 20-year-old singer-songwriter from Los Angeles, whose
2021 debut Sour won me and practically everyone else over
immediately (RIAA has certified it 4x Platinum). Her new one,
Guts is her second, and I'll review it (sort of) next
Music Week.
For now I just want to note that she's getting newsworthy
press:
Adam Hochschild: [09-05]
The Senator who took on the CIA: Frank Church. Review of James
Risen/Thomas Risen: The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the
Mafia, and the Kennedys -- and One Senator's Fight to Save
Democracy.
Whizy Kim: [09-08]
The era of easy flying is over: "Lessons from a summer of
hellish flights." As far as I'm concerned, it's been over for
at least 20 years, about the time when it became obvious that
deregulation and predatory profit seeking were going to devour
the last shreds of decency in customer service.
Karen Landman: [09-07]
Covid is on the rise again, but it's different now: "Covid
transmission continues to ebb and flow -- but at least the latest
Pirola variant isn't too menacing."
Prabir Purkayastha: [09-08]
Is intellectual property turning into a knowledge monopoly?
The question almost answers itself, given that the current laws
defining intellectual property include grants of monopoly (with
minor exceptions, like mechanical royalties for broadcast use
of songs). The question of "knowledge" is a bit fuzzier, but
there is real desire to claim things like "know how" as property
(read the fine print on employee contracts). A patent can keep
others making the same discovery independently from their own
work, and the tendency to chain patents can keep competition
away almost indefinitely. Copyrights, as the word makes clear,
are more limited, but once you start talking derivative works,
the line gets harder to draw. Moreover, the smaller granularity
of fair use gets, the more likely accidental reuse becomes. How
serious this is depends a lot on how litigious "owners" are,
but in America, where so much seems to depend on wealth, we
are very litigious indeed. This piece is excerpted from the
author's book: Knowledge as Commons: Towards Inclusive
Science and Technology (LeftWord, 2023).
Ingríd Robeyns: [08-28]
Limitarianism: academic essays: Author has edited a book,
Having Too Much: Philosophical Essays on Limitarianism,
with various academic papers on the problem of having too much
stuff. Fortunately, they read their own book and decided to
make it available through
Open Book Publishers, so it doesn't add to your surplus of
stuff.
Dylan Scott: [08-07]
The NFL season opener is also the kickoff for the biggest gambling
season ever: "How America became a nation of gamblers -- and
what might happen next." Few things make me more pessimistic for
the future of the nation.
Norman Solomon: [09-07]
Venture militarism on autopilot, or "How 9/11 bred a 'War on
Terror' from Hell: America's response to 9/11 in the lens of
history." Seems like every week brings enough new stories about
America's bloated, wasteful, stupid, ineffective, but still
really dangerous war culture, even beyond the ones that fit
securely under "Ukraine" and "World." This gets to the big
picture, being adapted from the introduction to Solomon's new
book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll
of Its Military Machine. The focus here is less on what
war is and does than on how it is talked about, to make it
seem more valorous and/or less cruel than it is, or just as
often, how it's not talked about at all, allowing most of us
to go about our daily lives with no sense of what the US
government is actually doing, let alone why.
Melissa Garriga/Tim Biondo: [09-08]
The Pentagon is the elephant in the climate activist room:
"The US military is the world's largest institutional oil consumer.
It causes more greenhouse gas emissions than 140 nations combined
and accounts for about one-third of America's total fossil fuel
consumption."
Maha Hilal: [09-05]
22 years of drone warfare and no end in sight: "Biden's rules
on drone warfare mask continued violent islamophobia." Author
wrote the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the
War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, so that's
her focus, but one could write much more about the seductiveness
of drone warfare for the gamers who increasingly run the military,
with their huge budgets to waste while risking none of their own
lives.
Jeffrey St Clair: [09-08]
Roaming Charges: The pitch of frenzy. Lots here, as usual,
including some links I've cited elsewhere. One I'll mention here
is a tweet by anti-woke pundit Richard Hanania: "Jimmy Buffett
taught Americans to hate their jobs and live for nights and
weekends so they could stuff themselves with food and alcohol."
Actually, he picked that trope up from country music, where he
sold most of his records before being reclassified as Adult
Contemporary. The classic formula was to transpose Saturday
night and Sunday morning, but many singers never got to the
latter (or only did so in niche albums).
PS: I mentioned Biden's stop in Vietnam above, but hadn't
seen this article: Katie Rogers: [09-11]
'It is evening, isn't it?' An 80-year-old president's whirlwind
trip. Which focuses more on his age and foibles than on the
diplomatic mission, showing once again that the mainstream press
would rather focus on appearance than substance. Why does "the
rigors of globe-trotting statesmanship" even matter? I'd rather
prefer to have fewer photo-ops and more actual communication.
But the reason I bring this piece up isn't to rag on the sorely
atrophied art of journalism yet again. I found
this tweet by Heather Cox Richardson, which pointed me to the
article, even more disturbing:
Here's what I don't get: this administration's reworking of global
relationships is the biggest story in at least a generation in
foreign affairs -- probably more. Why on earth would you downplay
that major story to focus on Biden's well-earned weariness after
an epic all-nighter?
No doubt Biden has been very busy on that front, but it's hard
to tell what it all means, which makes it hard to agree that it's
big, harder still that it's good. GW Bush did at least as much
"reworking," but his assertion of imperial prerogatives wound up
undermining any possibility of international cooperation, and
more often than not backfired. Obama tried to unwind some of
Bush's overreach, and negotiated openings with Iran and Cuba,
but left the basic unilateral posture in place. Trump did more
in less time, but was too erratic, greedy, and confused to set
a clear direction.
Biden, on the other hand, is mostly intent
on patching up the mess Trump made, without addressing any of
the underlying problems. And because he's left the imperial
hubris unchecked, he's actually worsened relations with many
countries, of which Russia and China are the most dangerous.
On the other hand, even though Ukraine has brought us near a
precipice, he hasn't actually plunged into disaster yet, as
Bush did. It's still possible that, having reëngaged, he
could move toward a more cooperative relationship with an
increasingly multipolar world. But you can't call this a
"story" without some sense of how it ends, and that's far
from clear at the moment.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, September 3, 2023
Speaking of Which
I've been reading my old paperback copy of Eric Hobsbawm's
The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962, my paperback is
a New American Library pocket edition I've had for 50+ years --
retail $1.25, so it's bound as densely as it was written. I've
always been reluctant to read old books, but this one may get
me to change my mind, or at least continue to his sequels. The
first chapter, in particular, describes the European world so
compactly yet completely that you approach the French Revolution
thinking you know all the background you need. The next three
chapters -- one on the industrial revolution in Britain, the
next on France, and a third on the Napoleonic wars -- are every
bit as compact and comprehensive.
Much of the book is quotable, but I was especially struck by
the line at the bottom of this paragraph, from Part II, where
he goes back and surveys how ownership and use of land changed
during those revolutions (p. 191, several previous lines added
for context):
For the poor peasant it seemed a distinctly hard bargain. Church
property might have been inefficient, but this very fact recommended
it to the peasants, for on it their custom tended to become
prescriptive right. The division and enclosure of common field,
pasture, and forest merely withdrew from the poor peasant or cottager
resources and reserves to which he felt he (or he as a part of the
community) had a right. The free land market meant that he probably
had to sell his land; the creation of a rural class of entrepreneurs,
that the most hard-hearted and hard-headed exploited him, instead or,
of in addition to, the old lords. Altogether the introduction of
liberalism on the land was like some sort of silent bombardment which
shattered the social structures he had always inhabited and left
nothing in its place but the rich: a solitude called freedom.
The significance and relevance here has to do with the phenomenon
where former peasants leaned to the right politically, taking more
comfort in the memory of feudal bonds to lord and church. Liberalism
here means proto-capitalism, or what CB MacPherson more descriptively
called "possessive individualism." The later Luddite revolt grew from
a similar impulse, as does Trumpism today. In all these cases, the
satisfaction of joining the right is purely emotional, as the right
is every bit as controlled by people who saw in capitalism a path to
ever greater exploitation.
The difference between conservatism and
liberalism today is that one offers a better afterlife for their
deference, and the other offers a rarely achieved hope for better
in this life. The difference between liberals and the left is that
one idealizes individuals each responsible only to themselves, and
the other emphasizes solidarity, arguing that our fates are shared,
and therefore our responsibility is to each other. Liberals like
to call Trumpists, and their antecedents back to the Dark Ages,
populists, because they look down on common people as ignorant and
prejudiced (or as one put it memorably, "deplorable"). Leftists
hate that designation, because they feel kinship with all people,
not just because that's how solidarity works, but because they
see many of those people being critical of capitalism, even when
they aren't very articulate about why.
Top story threads:
Trump:
Jeff Amy: [08-31]
Efforts to punish Fani Willis over Trump prosecution are 'political
theater,' Georgia Gov. Kemp says. It seems unlikely that the
Republican threats to remove Willis will go anywhere without
Kemp's support, but this whole episode only underscores the point
that the party that wants to use the justice system as a political
weapon is the Republican. Such politicization is a two-edged sword.
Sure, it can involve prosecuting your opponents, but it also means
protecting your partisans from paying for their crimes.
Trump's pardons were often for political allies, like Michael
Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D'Souza, and
seven former Republican congressmen, including Duke Cunningham.
Nor was Trump the first Republican to excuse and shelter their
own criminals. Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, but let the rest of the
Watergate criminals serve their sentences. GHW Bush pardoned the
Republican
Iran-Contra felons. GW Bush
commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence (later
Trump pardoned Libby). But that's just one aspect of how politics
determines Republican attitudes to law enforcement. Republicans have
pushed for draconian enforcement of borders, drugs, and "fraud" in
voting and welfare, but are extremely lax when it comes to antitrust
cases, environmental disasters, and tax evasion. They've created a
culture of corruption where they've lost all sense of right and
wrong.
Maggie Astor: [08-31]
Offering few details, Trump says he knows how Republicans should
approach abortion.
Andrew Jeong: [09-02]
Trump lawyers evoke 1931 trial of 'Scottsboro boys' in election
case. The reference is described by one law professor as
"unbelievably juvenile."
Nicole Narea: [08-31]
Trump could soon be in big legal trouble for inflating his net worth.
This is New York's civil case against his business, so no jail jeopardy,
but it cost him up to $250 million and result in him and his family
being banned from doing business in New York.
Heather Digby Parton: [08-30]
Republicans demand a ransom: Defund the prosecution of Donald Trump
or else: Or else they'll force a government shutdown.
Nia Prater: [08-31]
It turns out Trump probably didn't get $2.2 billion richer in 2014:
You mean, he lied?
Ben Protess/Jonah E Bromwich/William K Rashbaum: [08-30]
Trump, under oath, says he averted 'nuclear holocaust': I'll
leave this to Dean Baker, who tweeted: "It's pretty funny that Donald
Trump apparently thinks he prevented a nuclear holocaust and we're
supposed to worry that Joe Biden is senile."
Jennifer Rubin: [09-01]
What responsible media coverage in the Trump era would look like:
I.e., "if the media stopped normalizing the MAGA GOP."
Myah Ward: [09-03]
Meet the white Trump official behind the launch of Black Americans for
Immigration Reform.
DeSantis, and other Republicans:
Dan Balz: [09-02]
Is America ready for another impeachment? McCarthy thinks maybe so.
Hard part is figuring out what for.
[PS: Also see Peter Baker: [09-02]
Biden team isn't waiting for impeachment to go on the offensive.]
Michael Barajas: [09-01]
The "chief lawbreaking officer" of Texas finally faces trial:
"Ken Paxton evaded scandal -- criminal indictments, a staff revolt,
a whistleblower lawsuit -- for years. But his impeachment trial
starts in the Texas Senate on Tuesday." Which raises the question,
when was the last time an office holder was deemed too corrupt for
the Texas Lege? (As Molly Ivins liked to call it. She, of course,
would know.)
Emma Brown/Peter Jamison: [08-29]
The Christian home-schooler who made 'parental rights' a GOP rallying
cry: "On a private call with Christian millionaires, home-schooling
pioneer Michael Farris pushed for a strategy aimed at siphoning billions
of tax dollars from public schools." I have mixed feelings about this,
in large part because I have bitter memories of my own public schooling,
but also I think most parents are incompetent at teaching children (mine
sure were, even if they had the time, which they didn't), and also because
I really hate the idea that children "are given by God to the parents,"
who can tyrannize them at will -- I'd say there's much more need for a
children's bill of rights than one for parents. I also have this view,
based on personal experience, that while adults should be free to adopt
any religion they fancy, imposing one on children is cruel. More generally,
I think all this indoctrination focus (either for or against, and those
who claim to be against public school indoctrination are usually the
strongest advocates of imposing it themselves) simply misses the point,
which is that people will react or rebel as they see fit. One of the
few pieces that seems to understand this is Sarah Jones: [04-08]
Children are not property. I'm so impressed by that piece, I've
kept it open ever since it appeared.
Chauncey DeVega: [09-01]
From RICO charges to loyalty pledges: Trump's transformation of the
GOP into a crime mob is complete. The article quotes
Shawn Rosenberg saying something which is the core point of
chapter two of my political book (except that I drew the conclusion
from Richard Nixon):
Donald Trump and other Republican leaders have weaponized the idea
that the rule of law, democracy and democratic norms and institutions
do not matter, because all that matters is the end result. Winning at
any cost. You go for what you believe is right, and you get it in
whatever way you can.
DeVega also cites
a new poll from the Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight showing
"evidence of how a significant percentage of Republican voters
support candidates who break the law if it helps them to win
elections and get power."
Ed Kilgore:
[08-29]
Francis Suarez drops out. Will the other 2024 duds follow?
I don't see why they're calling him a "dud": he got his name in the
press when he became the last to announce, and he got his name in
again when he became the first to quit. That's two more times than
Perry Johnson.
[09-01]
If Mitch McConnell goes, the Senate could get very scary.
I don't see any reason to get sentimental over that old coot.
It's not like he hasn't done immense damage over his long term
as Senate party leader. Even if the leadership goes to someone
much worse (like Rick Scott), as opposed to just a little worse
(like John Thune/Cornyn/Barrasso), it's hard to run the Senate
as tightly as the House, especially when the margins are so
slim.
Lisa Mascaro: [08-29]
Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and
replace it with Trump's vision.
Nicole Narea: [08-30]
A Florida hurricane and shooting are testing Ron DeSantis: I've
always thought that DeSantis's slogan
Make America Florida was a threat that would turn people away,
not something the rest of America would be attracted to. So this
week's brought more proof. On the other hand, faced with disaster,
even DeSantis recognizes he needs to tone it down a bit. One thing
you have to admit about Florida Republicans is that no matter how
much they complain about the federal government's spending, they
never take their hands back from a handout after a hurricane.
Andrew Prokop: [08-29]
The "I would simply . . ." candidate: Vivek Ramaswamy, who has
an easy answer for everything, because he doesn't understand much
of anything -- just how to con gullible people.
Greg Sargent: [08-30]
Nikki Haley's emotional plea about racist 'hate' takes a wrong
turn. "Why can't Haley just decry a horrifying white-supremacist
attack and leave it at that?" No, she also has to remind us not to
"fall into the narrative that this is a racist country." So when an
obvious racist kills someone, she feels the need to defend everyone
else -- really her fellow Republicans, who have so often exploited
racism for political gain, at least since 1964 -- from being tarred
as racists. Very few people actually believe that this has to be a
racist country, but most do get suspicious when you start denying
that it ever was: that's a lot of history to sweep under the rug,
all the way up to yesterday's newspaper.
Emily Stewart: [08-31]
The conservative boycott playbook is kind of working: "From Bud
Light to Target, right-wing anger at 'woke capitalism' is scaring
corporate America."
Kirk Swearingen: [08-20]
Guns, Republicans and "manliness": We all suffer from the right's
mental health crisis. Author also wrote: [09-03]
Can't we all get along? Actually, no -- not when the other side
behaves like that, rather belatedly in response to pretty dumb [08-02]
David Brooks column.
Li Zhou: [08-28]
White supremacy is at the heart of the Jacksonville shooting.
Biden and/or the Democrats:
EJ Antoni: [08-31]
Bidenomics robs from the poor, gives to donor class: This piece
of hackwork showed up in my local paper, along with Ryan Young: [09-01]
Don't let politicians take credit for economic recovery. Together
they give you a sense of how flailing and incoherent right-wing attacks
on Bidenomics have become: on the one hand, don't credit Biden for any
recovery, because that's just good old capitalism at work (an article
that none of them wrote when Trump or Reagan were president, but became
a staple during the much stronger recoveries under Clinton and Obama);
on the other blame everything bad on Biden, and imply that corruption
is the root of everything Democrats do (talk about projection). Antoni
is particularly ripe for his concern over "the radical disconnect
between Washington's ruling elites and working-class folks." It may
be true that much of the extra spending Biden accomplished -- the first
recovery act, the barely-bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the big
Inflation Recovery Act -- has passed through the hands of companies
that donated to Democrats (and usually Republicans, who get even more
of their money from rich donors), but most of that money has trickled
down, creating jobs that wouldn't have existed otherwise, and raising
wages in the process.
Both parties do most of their public spending
through companies, but Biden has done a much better job than previous
Democrats at seeing that spending benefit workers -- and indeed in
improving the leverage of workers throughout the labor market. Maybe
you can criticize him for not doing enough, but he clearly would have
done more if he had more Democrats in Congress (and better ones than
Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema). As for "robbing the poor," the only
evidence he has is inflation, which is simply the result of companies
actively taking advantage of supply shortages and growing demand --
lots of reasons for both, and I suppose you could blame Biden for
adding to the demand side, by giving jobs and raising wages. These
are, after all, complex issues, with many factors, but to the extent
you can isolate Biden's contribution, it clearly has helped large
segments of the economy.
[PS: Both links include author pics. I hate it when people make
assumptions about character based on looks, but I must admit I was
taken aback by this pair -- perhaps by how young they appear, and
how smiley when their messages are so disingenuous.]
Jessica Corbett: [08-30]
Biden admin proposes 'much-needed' overtime protections for 3.6
million workers.
Lee Harris: [08-07]
Biden Admin to restore labor rule gutted in 1980s.
Ben Jacobs: [09-01]
Sidelined and self-sabotaged: What The Last Politician says
about Kamala Harris. Franklin Foer's book, subtitled Inside Joe Biden's
White House and the Struggle for America's Future, is coming out
this week (Sept. 5). I've never been much of a Harris fan, but I've
also thought they should be using her more, and trying to build her
up, to make the 2024 campaign more of a team effort, reassuring voters
of continuity, should Biden's age get the better of him. Republicans
are going after her anyway, so why not lean into it and feature her
more?. For a bit more on the book, see this
Playbook column. There is also an excerpt on Afghanistan in
The Atlantic.
Harold Meyerson: [08-07]
Buybacks are down, production is up: "Bidenomics has begun to
de-financialize the economy."
Toluse Olorunnipa: [09-02]
Biden surveys Hurricane Idalia's damage in Florida, without DeSantis:
There is a photo of DeSantis (looking annoyed) with Biden after Hurricane
Ian a couple years ago. Such photo ops are normal, but Republicans often
take flak for mingling with the enemy, much as Trump did for posing with
Kim Jong Un. I wonder how much of this is because the White House Press
has nothing useful to do, but maybe if they were given fewer useless ops
they might think of something?
[PS: I see a
tweet with a New York Times: "Biden Won't Meet DeSantis in Florida
During Tour of Hurricane Damage"; but wasn't it DeSantis refusing to
meet Biden, not the other way? On the other hand, Rick Scott wasn't
afraid of having
his picture taken with Biden. DeSantis is such a wuss!]
Dylan Scott: [08-30]
Medicare's first-ever drug price negotiations, briefly explained:
Seems like a very modest first step, but looking at the list prices,
you can see how "serious money" adds up. (For you youngsters, back in
the 1970s, Sen. Everett Dirksen quipped: "a billion here, a billion
there, before long you're talking serious money"). After this ten,
another batch of fifteen are to follow. There is much more that should
be done. Such high prices are purely the result of government-granted
patent monopolies. The law could change the terms of patent use from
monopolies to some form of arbitration. Or (my preference) we could
end patents all together. And yes, I filed this under Biden/Democrats
because there is zero change of getting even this much relief when
Republicans are in power. Also see:
Legal matters: Ok, sometimes I mean illegal matters.
Obviously, Trump's crimes are filed elsewhere.
Adam Gabbatt: [08-30]
Kyle Rittenhouse sued by estate of man he killed at Kenosha anti-racism
protest: Also being sued, law enforcement departments: "They did
not disarm him. They did not limit his movement in any way. They did
not question him. They did not stop him from shooting individuals
after he started. They did not arrest him, detain him, or question
him even after he had killed two people." He is also facing two
other suits, by other people he shot (or their estates).
Caroline Kitchener: [09-01]
Highways are the next antiabortion target. One Texas town is resisting.
This sounds ridiculous, but it allows anyone to sue anyone they suspect
of "abortion trafficking," and is just a localization of a more general
trend of criminalizing assistance from friends and concerned citizens.
Conservatives think that such laws will only be used by their people
to harass others, but it's hard to imagine limits to such a potential
expanse of litigation.
Judd Legum: [08-31]
Top North Carolina judge faces potential sanctions for talking about
racial discrimination. Anita Earls, "the only Black woman on the
court, is under investigation by the state's Judicial Standards
Commission, a body largely comprised of conservative judges appointed
by North Carolina Chief Justice Paul Newby."
Amber Ferguson: [09-01]
Ohio police release video of officer fatally shooting pregnant
woman.
Alan Feuer/Zach Montague: [08-31]
Proud Boys lieutenant sentenced to 17 years in Jan. 6 sedition case:
Joseph Biggs. Prosecutors had asked for 33 years. Another Proud Boy
leader, Zachary Rehl, was sentenced to 15 years. Biggs' sentence was
the second-longest handed down, following the 18 years given to Oath
Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes.
Tom Jackman: [09-01]
Proud Boys leader gets 18 years, matching longest Jan. 6 punishment
to date: Ethan Nordean. Dominic Pezzola also received a 10-year
term..
Ian Millhiser: [08-29]
America's Trumpiest court just put itself in charge of nuclear
safety:
Judge James Ho strikes again. "Much of the Fifth Circuit appears
to be intentionally trying to sow chaos throughout the federal
government, without any regard to consequences."
Climate and Environment: Hard to find anything about it
in the US press, but they're having a rip-roaring typhoon season
in East Asia this year; e.g.:
Typhoon Saola makes landfall in China's coast after slamming Hong
Kong; and
As Typhoon Haikui barrels into Taiwan, thousands are evacuated.
These are big storms hitting heavily populated areas. Back in early
August, there was this: [08-02]
Heaviest rainfall in 140 years drenches Beijing while Typhoon
Khanun hits Japan's Okinawa. You may recall that in 2022 they
held the Winter Olympics in Beijing, so it's not exactly a place
you expect to be ravaged by tropical storms.
Jacob Bogage: [09-03]
Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks
grow. So what happens when you can't buy (or can't afford)
insurance against actual risks? At some point, I predict that the
insurance industry will be taken over by the federal government,
because no one else can afford to underwrite it.
Matthew Cappucci: [09-01]
Idalia is gone, but peak hurricane season is looming. What's next?
There are four named storms in the middle of the Atlantic (Franklin,
Gert, Idalia, and José), where the only thing they're likely to hit
is Bermuda. Another one, Katia, is likely to appear this week, but
not much is expected of it. Beyond that, each tropical wave coming
off Africa could develop into something big.
Umair Irfan/Benji Jones: [08-30]
Why Hurricane Idalia is so dangerous, explained in 7 maps.
On the other hand: Dan Stillman: [08-31]
Hurricane Idalia wasn't as bad as feared. Here are 5 reasons.
Hit at low tide; weakened just before landfall; hit an area with
lower population; moved relatively fast; the forecast was extremely
accurate. The day difference is explains the tone shift. It's normal
to try to scare people before the fact, then to soothe them after.
Still, with sources like these, it's hard to calibrate the right
level of hysteria.
Taylor Lane: [09-03]
Monsoon rain leaves Las Vegas roads flooded.
Rebecca Leber: [08-31]
There's been a shift in how we think about climate change:
Interview with "environmental psychologist" Lorraine Whitmarsh.
My quotes, because it seems to me like less a subspecialty than
a subject of investigation, but in a world with a shortfall of
answers there's always a market for "experts" (again, my quotes).
Ian Livingston:
Sophia Tesfaye: [09-03]
Thousands trapped at Burning Man after historic flooding.
Li Zhou: [08-30]
How Louisiana -- one of the nation's wettest states -- caught on
fire.
Ukraine War: The New York Times insists
Ukraine's offensive makes progress. Elsewhere, we are warned:
Ukraine tells counteroffensive critics to 'shut up'. Meanwhile,
Sen. Richard Blumenthal says
US is getting its 'money's worth' in Ukraine because Americans aren't
dying, which suggests ulterior motives and double standards.
More stories follow, but plus ça change, etc. Even if the
counteroffensive breaks the Russian line,
doing things in the next month or two (before winter) they haven't
even hinted at in the last three months, Ukraine will remain far
short of their goal of expelling Russia from their pre-2014 borders,
and will have no real leverage to force Russia to capitulate to
their terms. And even if they could expel Russia, they'd still be
locked in a state of war until a truce was negotiated.
The only way out is to find a combination of tradeoffs
that is agreeable both to Russia and to Ukraine, and (not that they
have any business dictating terms to Ukraine) to Biden, who is
engaged in his own shadow war with Putin, and has possibly decisive
chips to play (sanctions, trade, security assurances).
Blaise Malley:
[09-01]
Diplomacy Watch: The search for an endgame in Ukraine.
[08-29]
Can sanctions help win peace? According to this report, not likely:
"Not only does economic warfare not work because it ends up hurting the
people it claims to help, but it can stand in the way of diplomacy."
I don't think that is quite right. Sanctions can, and should, be
considered a chit for negotiation, but that only works if one is
willing to relinquish them as part of an agreement. The problem is
when sanctions are seen as permanent, foreclosing negotiation. For
instance, sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq demanded regime
change, not something Hussein could reasonably negotiate. Under
such conditions, sanctions are acts of kabuki warfare, symbolic
yet reflecting hostility and a desire to harm -- a meaning that
targets cannot fail to detect, but which, due to the arbitrariness
and overreaching hubris of American foreign policy, especially the
belief that enemies can only respond to a show of force, makes it
nearly impossible to defuse. US sanctions against Russia started
way before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and have only escalated
with each offense, paving the way to the present war, and possibly
to much worse.
The report is from International Crisis Group: [08-28]
Sanctions, Peacemaking and Reform: Recommendations for US Policymakers.
One key quote there is: "Sanctions can only help bring parties to the
table for peace talks, and provide leverage when they get there, if
negotiators can credibly promise meaningful and enduring sanctions
relief." Moreover:
The U.S. does not always make clear what parties can do that will
lead to sanctions relief. In some cases, Washington has not laid out
any such steps or it has outlined steps that are unrealistic. In
others, the U.S. was never willing to lift sanctions in the first
place. Elsewhere, Washington's communication on sanctions has been
vague, leaving targets in the dark about what might lead to reversal.
Targets can be unsure why they were sanctioned, as members of
Venezuela's electoral authority reported in 2020, or have learned
about the designations second- or thirdhand (a former Congolese
official found out about his listing from the newspaper and some
FARC members learned from listening to the radio). Some never see
the full evidence underpinning the designations -- even if they
lobby the Treasury Department. Without clarity on why they were
sanctioned and what they can do to be delisted, targets have
little incentive to make concessions in exchange for relief.
A big part of the problem is that the neocon view that talking
is a sign of weakness, and liberal-interventionist conviction that
America's unique moral legitimacy makes it a fair and necessary
judge of everyone else, has driven diplomacy from Washington,
leaving American foreign policy as little more than "irritable
mental gestures."
David Bromwich: [08-29]
Living on a war planet (and managing not to notice): Raises
the question (at least to me): if the war in Ukraine hadn't come
along, would America have invented it? ,Leaving aside the second
question (did it?), the withdrawal from Afghanistan left some
kind of void in the minds of that class of people whose sole
concern is America's military position in the world? Wars give
them meaning in life, and after twenty years of frustration in
Afghanistan and Iraq, Ukraine is some kind of dream: industry
is stoked delivering arms and explosives, while it's someone
else doing the fighting and bleeding, someone else having their
lives upended. The plotters in America haven't had so much fun
since Afghanistan in the 1980s -- another time when every dead
Russian was counted as a blow for freedom. But mostly it just
helped perpetuate the conflict, with no domestic political cost.
So of course they refuse to negotiate. Why spoil such a good thing?
After citing Roger Cohen's recent propaganda piece
(Putin's
Forever War), he notes that "Mikhail Gorbachev finally emerges
as the hero of this story," then adds:
Nowhere quoted, however, is the Gorbachev who, between 2004 and 2018,
contributed
eight op-eds to the New York Times, the sixth of which
focused on climate change and the eighth on the perilous renewal
of a nuclear arms race. Gorbachev was deeply troubled by George W.
Bush's decision to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile
Treaty (which Putin
called a "mistake") and Donald Trump's similar decision to pull
out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Does anyone
doubt that Gorbachev would have been equally disturbed by the Biden
administration's
virtual severance of diplomatic relations with Russia?
Daniel Brumberg: [08-30]
The Russia-Ukraine Jeddah meeting reflects a changing global
order.
Stephen F Eisenman: [09-01]
Some people will hate me for writing this: End the war!
Sounds like some people already do. Every war starts with efforts
to suppress doubters and dissenters in one's own ranks, which no
one doubts happened in Russia this time, but has been relentless
here as well (albeit stopping short of arrests, unlike the World
Wars and, in some cases, Vietnam). Lately we've been warned that
casting doubt on the counteroffensive's prospects is catering to
Russia, and that even suggesting talks should begin before Ukraine
is ready implies we're eager to sell them out. My counter is that
the war will never end until negotiators on all sides decide to
end it, and that you'll never know whether that is even possible
until you've set up a forum for negotiation.
Ellen Francis: [09-02]
Nobel Prize foundation scraps plan to invite Russia, Belarus after
criticism: Ukraine may be having trouble with their counteroffensive,
but they're winning regularly at shaming international bodies into
petty slighting of Russia.
Keith Gessen: [08-29]
The case for negotiating with Russia: Draws on RAND analyst
Samuel Charap, co-author of the 2016 book, Everyone Loses: The
Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Russia.
Since then, everyone has continued to lose, the pace accelerating
with the February, 2023 invasion. I'd argue that all wars are, as
he puts it, "negative-sum games," but the case here is especially
easy.
But among "defense intellectuals," that's a minority view --
in my formulation, it would probably disqualify you permanently
from employment. Gessen quotes Eliot A. Cohen as saying:
Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming
counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian
withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal
about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting,
shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian
defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.
The implicit assumption is that it's possible to inflict such
a defeat on Russia without further escalation or recourse: that
Putin (or some other Russian who might ascend to power) will take
such a catastrophic defeat gracefully, as opposed to, say, blowing
the world up. Note that if Putin is really as irreconcilable as
people like Cohen make him out to be, that's exactly what he would
do in that circumstance.
Joe Lauria: [08-29]
US victim of own propaganda in Ukraine War.
Anatol Lieven:
[08-30]
Few Russians wanted the war in Ukraine -- but they won't accept a Russian
defeat either. As bad as Putin has been -- for America, for Europe,
even (especially?) for Russia -- replacing him could get a lot worse.
The kind of embarrassing, punishing defeat that Cohen (above) demands
has been tried before, especially at Versailles after WWI, and tends
to backfire spectacularly.
[08-31]
Sarkozy vilified for speaking uncomfortable truths about Ukraine:
The quorted sections from Sarkozy's book seem pretty reasonable to me.
I've said all along that we should allow for internationally-supervised
referenda in the disputed territories. If Crimea, say, wants to be part
of Russia, it should be. Granted, it's harder to do now than it was
before the invasion, but it should be possible. I think that a similar
procedure should also be used to resolve disputes in Georgia, Serbia,
and elsewhere. If Scotland wishes to avail itself of a referendum, we
should allow it. It's easy enough to propose solutions on other issues
as well. But at some point Russia has to see NATO as a purely defensive
pact -- which NATO could help make more plausible with less war-gaming,
something that should be but doesn't have to be reciprocal -- and the
EU as simply an economic club, which Russia could conceivably join.
On the other hand, the US and allies need to see a path to dropping
the sanctions against Russia, and reintegrating Russia into the world
economy. Granted, there are problems with the way Russia runs itself,
but that's really their own business. One thing that would help would
be an international treaty providing a right to exile, so real or
potential political prisoners in any country could appeal to go to
some other country. It's hard to get a country like Russia to agree
to peaceful coexistence, but a necessary first step would be to tone
down the criticism, the meddling, the menace, and the isolation. In
the long run, none of us can afford this level of hostility.
Alice Speri: []
Prigozhin's legacy is the global rise of private armies for hire.
Israel:
Al Jazeera: [09-03]
Israel's Netanyahu calls for deportation of Etitrean refugee
'rioters'.
Jonathan Coulter: [09-03]
A seditious project: "Asa Winstanley's book shows how the Israel
lobby facilitated the influence of a foreign government's interests
in dictating who gets to lead the Labour Party, causing the downfall
of Jeremy Corbyn." The book is Weaponizing Anti-Semitism: How
the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn. Of course, the
Lobby is also active trying to purge any whiff of criticism from
the Democratic Party, but Corbyn was their biggest victim, all the
more critical as the Labour Party replaced him with the second
coming of Tony Blair ("Bush's poodle").
Nada Elia: [08-30]
Golda: A failed attempt to boost Israel's propaganda: There is
a new movie about the Israeli Prime Minister (1969-74), with Helen
Mirren in the title role. Looking at the film's plot on
Wikipedia, I see that it focuses on the 1973 war, when initial
setbacks led Meir to prepare to use nuclear weapons, and the immediate
aftermath, which led to recriminations over allowing those setbacks.
But it also notes: "Anwar Sadat, who like Golda Meir publicly speaks
English, agrees to establish diplomatic relations to Israel in
exchange for the return of the Sinai Peninsula." Sadat offered
that shortly after the war, but Meir didn't agree to any such deal.
That was Menachim Begin in 1979, under heavy pressure from Jimmy
Carter. By the way, one of the few stories I like about Meir is
how she casually referred to Begin, when he joined the war cabinet
in 1967, as "the fascist." (Begin doesn't appear in the film's cast,
although there are a bunch of generals, and Liev Schreiber playing
Henry Kissinger.)
Although the 1973 war occurred at the pinnacle of Meir's political
career, I doubt her leadership was any more decisive than Levi Eshkol's
was in 1967. In both wars, the key character was Moshe Dayan, and the
difference was that he was the aggressor in 1967, but in 1973 he had
to play defense, which wasn't as much fun, especially as it punctured
the air of invincibility he had built up through 1967. The key lesson
of 1973 is that if you refuse to negotiate with your enemies, as Meir
had done, they may eventually decide that their only option is war,
and at that point all sorts of bad things can happen. But to make
sense out of 1973, you need a lot more context than they're likely
to provide, especially given the usual propaganda mission.
I imagine that a more interesting film could be made about Meir
when she was younger, about how she became the only woman in the
Histadrut and Mapai inner circles, where she probably overcome the
default sexism by becoming the toughest character in the room --
not unlike Mirren's character in Prime Suspect. That would
have been a tougher movie to sell, especially without Mirren, and
it would be hard to present those times accurately, and easy to
wallow in post-facto mythmaking.
Having gone on at this length about Meir, I should close with a
quote of hers, which in my mind is possibly the most obnoxiously
self-flattering thing any political figure ever said:
When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the
Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive
them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when
the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.
But peace hasn't happened, and this attitude goes a long way to
explaining why. More on Golda:
Sonja Anderson: []
The real history behind the 'Golda' movie: A fairly detailed
biographic sketch of Meir's life, but very little to explain the
conflict leading to the 1973 war.
David Klion: [09-01]
The strange feminism of Golda. Regarding director Nattiv's
motives: "The answer seems to be that he is more interested in
rescuing the dignity of Israel's founding generation in the context
of its current political crisis." Still, that generation was at the
root and heart of Israel's later militarism and apartheid. To hold
them up as models barely rebukes Netanyahu and Ben Gvir for bad
manners.
Joseph Massad: [08-31]
Ben Gvir's racist comments are no different from those if Israel's
founders. Quotes from Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir
Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, even the usually circumspect
Abba Eban.
Peter Shambrook: [08-25]
Policy of Deceit: Britain and Palestine, 1914-1939: An extract
from a new book of that title. One of the first books I read on the
subject was Tom Segev: One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs
Under the British Mandate, which I recommend, although there
is certainly more detail that can be added.
Richard Silverstein: [08-29]
Why the US must not add Israel to its visa waiver programme.
Around the world:
Sarah Dadouch: [08-23]
Saudi forces killed hundreds of Ethiopians at Yemen border, report
says.
Brian Finucane: [07-17]
Dangerous words: The risky rhetoric of US war on Mexican cartels:
"War talk will only serve to strain US-Mexico ties." This has mostly
come from Republicans, including Trump, DeSantis, and Lindsey Graham,
who want to outdo each other in declaring the cartels to be "foreign
terrorist organisations" and bombing them as indiscriminately like
the US bombs Somalia. More:
Ellen Ioanes: [08-27]
Zimbabwe's elections herald more of the same.
Jen Kirby: [08-29]
China's economy is slowing down. What gives? Interview with Stephen
Morgan. I'm not making much sense out of it. China's GDP growth forecast
for 2023 is 5 percent. That's less than the ten-percent growth of recent
years, but it's still double the worldwide growth rate. It's like he's
trying to measure China with rules they've never been held to.
Paul Krugman: [08-21]
How scary is China's crisis?; and [08-31]
Why is China in so much trouble? I've come to be pretty skeptical
of the China doomsayers, because, well, they've always been wrong. So
I take these pieces with the usual measure of salt, but at least there's
a plausible kernel of substance here: it seems that a big slice of the
wealth China has accumulated has been channeled into a huge real
estate bubble, which is a surefire recipe for panic and recession.
That happened here in 2008, and Washington went into a tizzy, trying
at least to save the banking class, while leaving the rest of us to
adjust on our own. So if China does reach its own "Minsky moment,"
as Krugman notes: "the next few years may be quite ugly." But does
it have to be? China managed its way through 2008 better than most,
and same for 2020, especially compared to the armchair quarterbacks
in the US financial press.
Krugman, by the way, also wrote: [08-28]
The paranoid style in American plutocrats, about the not-so-curious
vortex of "the three C's: climate denial, Covid vaccine denial, and
cryptocurrency cultism," especially common among tech moguls.
Branko Marcetic: [08-31]
The BRICS expansion isn't the end of the world order -- or the end of
the world.
Other stories:
Rachel DuRose: [08-30]
The US has new Covid-19 variants on the rise. Meet Eris and Fornax.
Bill Friskics-Warren: [09-02]
Jimmy Buffett, roguish bard of island escapism, is dead at 76:
I wasn't going to mention this here, but No More Mister Nice Blog
picked out a selection of rabid hate comments from Breitbart on
how awful his politics were (see
Jimmy Buffett, Stalinist Nazi). Warms my heart more than his
music ever did (and let's face it, I'd never turn down a "Cheeseburger
in Paradise," although I must admit I've never gone to one of his
restaurants for one). Few things drive right-wingers crazier than
finding out a rich guy identifies with Democrats. By the way, this
blog is almost always worth reading, but his piece
Public Options is especially striking, as one that gets personal --
unusual for an author whose last name is M.
Sean Illing: [08-30]
Is the populist right's future . . . democratic socialism?
Interview with Sohrab Ahmari, explaining "why precarity is breaking
our politics." You see some of this happening in multiparty systems
in Europe, where it's possible to combine safety net support with
conservative social concerns, resulting in a party that could ally
with either right or left, but at least this two-party system has
little choice to offer: you can get a better break on economics
with the Democrats, but you have to accept living in a diverse
and predominantly urban country; on the other hand, if you insist
on the old "family values," you can get some lip-service from
Republicans, but in the end their embrace of oligarchy will hurt
you. I think such people should be more approachable by Democrats,
but I'm even more certain that as long as they back Republicans,
they will be screwed.
Eric Levitz: [08-31]
Was American slavery uniquely evil? Not sure why this came up,
other than that some right-wingers are irate about the tendency to
view all (or at least many) things American as evil. As Levitz
points out, all slave systems shared many of the same evils. One
could argue that America was more exploitative because American
slaveholders were more deeply enmeshed in capitalism, but it's
hard to say that the French in Haiti and the British elsewhere
in the Caribbean were less greedy. You can argue that America was
more benign, because after the import of slaves ended, the numbers
increased substantially, while elsewhere, like in Brazil, imports
barely kept up with deaths. Plus there were many more slave revolts
in Brazil and the Caribbean than in the US -- but still enough in
the US to keep the masters nervous. As for reparations, which comes up
tangentially here, I don't see how you can fix the past. But it
would be possible to end poverty in the near future, and to make
sure everyone has the rights they need going forward. History
neither precludes nor promises that. It just gives you lots of
examples of what not to do again.
By the way, Levitz cites a piece he wrote in 2021 about Israel
and Palestinian rights:
Why is this geopolitical fight different from all other fights?
He offers three reasons, and admits one more ("Israel's role in the
Christian right's eschatology is also surely a factor"). He omits
one or two that have become even more salient since then: Israel
is an intensely militarist nation, which makes it a role model for
Americans (and some Europeans) who want an even larger and more
aggressive military front. Israel is also the most racially and
religiously stratified nation, with discriminatory laws, intense
domestic surveillance, and strong public support for establishment
religion, and some Americans would like to see some or all of that
here, as well. I only quibble on the count because the prejudices
seem to go hand-in-hand. On the other hand, many of the moderate
and left people who have begun to doubt the blind support given
Israel by nearly all politicians started with alarm at what
Israel's biggest right-wing boosters want to also do to America.
Amanda Moore: [08-22]
Undercover with the new alt-right: "For 11 months, I pretended to
be a far-right extremist. I discovered a radical youth movement trying
to infiltrate the Republican Party." But they're pretty obvious about
that.
Jason Resnikoff: [08-31]
How Bill Clinton became a neoliberal: Review of a book by Nelson
Lichtenstein and the late Judith Stein (who started work on the book
that Lichtenstein picked up): A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton
Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism. First
I have to question whether the notion that Clinton wasn't any kind
of neoliberal before he became president. The premise of the New
Democrat movement was the promise to be better for business than
the Republicans were, and Clinton's long tenure as governor of
Arkansas, as WalMart and Tyson grew from regional to national
businesses, suggests that he was good at it. Clinton certainly
wasted no time throwing labor under the bus to pass NAFTA.
Sam Roberts: [09-02]
Bill Richardson, champion of Americans held overseas, dies at 75:
Former governor of New Mexico, served 14 years in Congress, was
Secretary of Energy, held various diplomatic posts, including US
Ambassador to the United Nations, ran for president in 2008, and
engaged in more freelance diplomacy than anyone but Jimmy Carter.
Curiously, there is only one line here about North Korea ("he
went to North Korea to recover the remains of American soldiers
killed in the Korean War," as if he had nothing more to talk to
them about).
Nathan J Robinson:
[08-31]
"Conservatism" conserves nothing: "Whatever 'conservatism' is,
it does not involve the conservation of a stable climate, or the
polar ice caps, or the coral reefs, or the global food supply."
The rejoinder is that the nation and the world are too far gone
to be satisfied with just preserving the status quo, which is
why others are more likely to call them reactionaries: they see
change they don't like, and react fitfully, contemptuously, often
violently. But not all change bothers them: what they hate above
all is any challenge to the privileges of wealth, or any limit to
their ability to accumulate more. Given that one of the easiest
ways to get rich is to suck wealth from the earth, conservation
is not only not in their portfolio, it's something they dread --
etymology be damned.
[08-29]
As cruel as it's possible to be: This week's example is Fox
host Jesse Waters, who wants to make homeless people feel more
ashamed for their misfortune, and argues that "the deaths of
homeless people are a form of cosmic justice."
Kenny Torrella: [08-31]
The myths we tell ourselves about American farming. One I
should write more about, one of these days.
Bryan Walsh: [09-01]
What America can learn from baseball (yes, baseball): "Baseball
fixed itself by changing its rules. The country should pay attention."
I used to know a lot about baseball. I could recall back to the 1957
all-star game lineups. (You know, the one where the Reds stuffed the
ballot box so Gus Bell and Wally Post got more votes than Hank Aaron
and Willie Mays.) And I looked up the rest. I was part of a club a
friend started called Baseball Maniacs, out of which Don Malcolm
started publishing his Big Bad Baseball annuals. (Malcolm
was my co-founder on
Terminal Zone, and he published
my Hall of Fame study, I think in the
1998 Annual.) Then with the
1994 lockout, I lost all interest, and never returned, although
I'm slightly more aware this year than I have been since 1994.
The difference is getting the "electronic edition" of the local paper,
which is padded out with a ridiculously large sports section. While
I speed click through everything else, that got me to following
basketball more closely, so I wondered if I might pick up a bit of
baseball while waiting for the season to change. A little bit is
about right: I land on the standings page, so I know who's leading
and who's beat, and sometimes look at the stats, but that's about
all. I do know a bit about the rules changes, because I've read a
couple pieces on them.
Walsh's point is that when people get too
good at cornering the rules, it helps to change them up a bit. In
baseball, that mostly means shorter games (not that they've gotten
much shorter: Walsh says they've been dialed back to the 1980s,
but I remember games that barely exceeded two hours). Walsh has
plenty of other examples of "operating under a rule book that is
out of date," many involving the gridlock in Congress. But baseball
at least has incentive to change (although it took an insanely long
time for the NL to accept the DH, even though watching pitchers try
to hit was embarrassing even back in the 1950s).
Li Zhou: [08-31]
Marijuana could be classified as a lower-risk drug. Here's what that
means. Well, for starters it would reduce the quantity of complete
nonsense the government swears on, which might make them more credible
about drugs that pose real dangers beyond mere bad habits.
There's a
meme titled "When the actual dictionary completely nails it." The
text offers a dictionary definition:
trumpery, n.; pl. trumperies, [Fr.
tromperie, from tromper, to deceive, cheat.]
- deceit, fraud. [Obs.]
- anything calculated to deceive by false show; anything externally
splendid but intrinsically of little value; worthless finery.
- things worn out and of no value; useless matter; trifles; rubbish;
nonsense.
This idolatrous trumpery and superstition.
Trump's German family name used to be Drumpf. After a brief search,
I'm unclear as to exactly when, where, and why the name change occurred,
but it does seem like a deliberate choice, if not necessarily a fully
knowing one.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, August 27, 2023
Speaking of Which
The Republican Party has been skidding into dysfunction and madness
for decades now -- take your pick when you want to start the plot --
but last week hit a new all-time low. Trump and eighteen others --
some conspiracists and others mere suckers -- had to trek to the
Fulton County Jail to be booked on racketeering charges, something
they turned into the mother of all photo-ops. Meanwhile, eight more
Republicans presidential candidates showed up in Milwaukee for a
Fox-sponsored debate forum, where they were torn between the need
to prove themselves as alpha leaders and the terror of saying
anything that could be construed as out of line with the dogma
propagated by the oracles of the right, ranging from QAnon to
Fox to Trump himself, whose 40+ poll leads exempted him from
having to associate with such meager strivers.
Weeks like this make me think I should dust off my political
book outline and finally get cranking -- although there seems to
be little chance of that happening. Basically, the idea is:
Introduction: The stakes of the 2024 election go way beyond
the usual patronage interests of political parties. This is not
just because Republicans and Democrats are rivals for popularity
and power. The Republicans have become so obsessed with seizing
and exploiting power, and so locked into a rich donor class and
a dwindling, emotionally fraught base, that in their desperation
they've turned against democracy, civil rights, reason, justice,
and civility, leaving them with a political agenda incapable of
addressing growing problems (like climate and war). The signs
are obvious. For example, when Trump lost in 2020, dozens of
Republican-controlled state legislatures passed new laws to
restrict or interfere with voting rights. They've gotten away
with this because they've been organized and ruthless, but also
because Democrats have been ineffective at countering them. The
first parts of the book will explore in more depth how and why
Republicans have gone so wrong. The latter parts will suggest
some ways Democrats can respond more effectively, and when they
do win, govern better.
- History and structure: Here I want to look at the evolution
of the two-party system -- with an aside on why third parties
don't work -- and how it has evolved into a right-left divide.
Part of this is the period scheme I've sketched out before:
Jefferson-to-Buchanan, Lincoln-to-Hoover, Roosevelt-to-Carter,
Reagan-to-Trump. (The first could be divided at Adams/Jackson.
The second might have split with the Populist revolt of Bryan,
but that break was suppressed. Teddy Roosevelt represented a
brief progressive revival within the Lincoln-to-Hoover period,
as Johnson did in Roosevelt-to-Carter. Washington-to-Adams has
a similar pattern, but wasn't long enough for an era.) While
the first three eras each marked a distinct shift to the left,
Reagan is exceptional in moving to the right, so we need to
explore that anomaly: particularly how Reagan's success moved
Democratic leaders to the right, while driving the Democratic
base to the left.
- The Modern Republicans: The core concept that Republicans
are the only true Americans was forged in the Civil War, even
as the Party was split from the start between progressive and
conservative factions. However, with Goldwater conservatives
became ascendant, but it was Nixon to taught them not just how
to win but that winning was the only thing that matters. Nixon's
dirty tricks eventually did him in, but his legacy was to take
every advantage, to undermine opponents at every opportunity.
Reagan and the Bushes did this, while seeming to be nice guys.
Gingrich and Cheney weren't nice at all, and the base liked
them even more -- especially as the Fox cheerleaders kicked in.
After Obama won, Fox got ever nastier, and the Republican sweep
in 2010 went to their heads. Trump was nothing but menace. When
he managed to win without even getting the votes, Republicans
knew they had found their messiah. Even after losing Congress
in 2018, he held firm. And when he lost in 2020, he simply cried
foul, and most Republicans were so invested in him, they played
along. Karl Rove had contrasted self-actualizing Republicans to
"the reality-based community." Trump went him one better, making
his followers believe that reality was just a conspiracy against
them.
- Republicans Against Reality: The problem with Republicans
isn't just that they have no ethics, that they are inextricably
wedded to graft, that the fear and hatred they exploit for votes
rebounds against them, and the contempt they show for everyone
else motivates opposition. They also have really bad ideas, based
on a really poor understanding of how the world works. The theme
for this section is to examine 4-6 problem areas and show how
Republican solutions only make them worse. Some possibilities,
in no particular order:
- Government and the public interest: Reagan's joke and
Norquist's bathtub. Attacks on civil service, including public
sector unions, and expanding political control. Revolving door
and regulatory capture. Privatization. Erosion of the very idea
of public interest.
- Macroeconomic policy, business cycle, wage suppression,
inflation, bailouts for certain businesses.
- Tax policy, increasing inequality, and consequences.
- Mass incarceration, the erosion of civil rights, and the
imposition of repressive thought control (e.g., in education).
- Health care (opposition to anything that might help improve
services and/or contain costs).
- Climate change and disaster management.
- Defense policy, opposition to international treaties/cooperation
(except trade with the requisite graft), the wasteful deployment of
armed forces in the War on Terror, and the reckless provocation of
Russia and China.
Obviously, each of these could be a chapter or even a book on its
own, but they cover a broad swath of major issues, and are typical
of Republican approaches.
- What Democrats Can Do: To counter the Republicans, Democrats
need to do two things: they need to win elections, and they need to
implement policies that deal constructively with problems. Republicans
only do the former, and they do it mostly by convincing people that
they should fear and loathe Democrats. It shouldn't be hard to turn
the tables, given the critique of the previous chapters. Fear and
loathing of Republicans isn't enough to clinch Democratic wins, but
it is pretty widespread by now, at least among people with any idea
of the Republican track record. But the other thing Democrats need
to do is to build trust, and prove themselves trustworthy. Democrats
are most vulnerable when Republicans can turn the tables and paint
them as corrupt and/or out of touch (cf. the check-kiting scandal
of 1994, Obama's aloof and tone-deaf confidence cult in 2010, and
Hillary Clinton's courting of special interests in 2016).
This could be divided into two sections, with one showing how
the Democrats have compromised themselves, especially during the
Reagan-to-Obama era. (It took Trump to finally repulse Democrats
enough to stop tacking toward the center, although Bloomberg and
others rose to do just that in 2020, anything to deny Sanders the
nomination.) It's possible that many of these points may have been
made in earlier sections. The second part would be a recommended
behavior guide for Democratic candidates. I don't see much value
in providing a catalog of possible problem solutions -- a subject
for another book (or several). Rather, the goal is to show ways
Democrats can respond to Republicans in ways that elicit trust
from voters. Democrats need to listen and engage. They need to
keep an open mind, and be flexible enough to change tack when
better (or easier) solutions emerge. They need to balance off
multiple interest groups, and they need to minimize losses when
tradeoffs are necessary. They need to be decent and empathetic.
They need to offer orderly transitions where change is required.
They need to be very reluctant to force changes. They need to
develop the skills to reason down people on all sides who get
hung up on details. They need to respect differences of belief,
and to avoid blanket condemnation. They need to recognize that
there are limits to power, and shy away from overstepping. And
they need to recognize that some things can't be fixed before
they break, so that much of the work ahead will be recovery,
and won't be helped by recriminations.
Afterword: Is there anything left that needs to be said?
At some point, I should explain that the target audience for this
book consists of Democrats who are active in electoral politics, and
are trying to navigate the two requirements noted above: win elections,
and govern to make conditions better. It is also for leftists who are
willing to work within the Democratic Party to advance their ideas,
which often involves coalition-building with people who don't share
many of those ideas. Hopefully, it will help both understand each
other, and join forces, at least for practical purposes. I also
think that Democrats should accept that there are leftists who
don't want to work with them, and not get all bent out of shape
over that. Some Democrats seem to get way more agitated that some
folks voted for a Jill Stein or Ralph Nader than that many more
voted for Trump or Bush (or against Clinton or Gore). I won't go
so far as to say that there are "no enemies on the left," but I
have found that principled refuseniks are more likely to show up
at a demonstration when you really need them than are your local
Democratic Party workers.
The main way the book helps is in providing a historical
framework to how politics has been practiced in America, and a
general sense of how hopelessly divided we are on a number of
important issues. I think this framework will make it easier
to approach issues as they come up in campaigns. The etiquette
guide may also help, but most people inclined to run for office
already know most of it. There I'm more concerned with leftist
readers, who may need to moderate their tactics, if not their
views.
The book is not intended to convince Republicans (even Never
Trumpers) or Mugwumps. That's different task, and may very well
require a different writer. I do think that most people who vote
Republican are very poorly served by their elected representatives.
Maybe a few of them will open the book and discover why, but I'm
not counting on that, and don't regard it as a priority. That does
not mean I see no value in approaching such people politically.
I think literally everyone will ultimately benefit from honest,
flexible, responsible politics -- even billionaires who could take
a big financial hit. But people are different, and need to be
approached differently.
Such a book would ideally be published by early summer 2024,
in order to have any impact on those critical elections. Of course,
it's still likely to be generally useful after the election, and
well into the foreseeable future. My fantasy is that someone will
read it and decide to run. It can't have that impact in 2024, but
there will be many more critical elections to come.
Still, nine months seems like a long time compared to the five
hours I invested knocking the above out off the top of my head.
Too bad I don't have the confidence to commit to that.
Top story threads:
Trump: His week was dominated by the order that he surrender
to the Fulton County Jail, which produced a rather peculiar mug shot,
and the usual senseless blather on Trump's part, and reams of reports
and commentary elsewhere. Pieces on this (and other Trumpiana) are
alphabetized below, with Zhou as an intro, his Wednesday-night debate
diversion at the end.
Li Zhou: [08-24]
Why Trump's surrender is such a big deal: "Everything you need to
know about Trump's arrest, mugshot, and coming arraignment."
Li Zhou/Nicole Narea: [08-25]
A visual guide to the 19 defendants in the Trump Georgia case:
"The mugshots and the charges they face, briefly explained." I have
to wonder about the mugshot process. For one thing, the Sheriff
medallions are different sizes, with Trump's especially small, all
but illegible. Also, Trump's picture is uniquely flattering, his
face sharply etched in shadows while the glare present in most of
the shots is limited to his shiny hair (which, as Warren Zevon once
put it, "is perfect").
Aaron Blake: [08-26]
Trump's Georgia case could get real -- quickly: With 19 defendants,
each relatively free to pursue their own options, including the early
trial date that Trump dreads. It's not unusual for defendants to plead
out during RICO trials, which usually means testifying against their
co-defendants -- of which one stands out as "more equal" than the
rest.
Philip Bump: [08-25]
Parsing Trump's post-surrender comments in Georgia.
Will Bunch: [08-27]
Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to
America: "Momentous week of GOP debate, Trump's arrest gets 'horse
race' coverage when the story's not about an election but authoritarianism."
Margaret Hartmann: [08-22]
Does Trump want me to think he's a flight risk? Well, he
does like to be seen as unpredictable, even though he rarely is. He
does tease a flight to Russia, but surely there must be preferable
retreats for an itinerant billionaire on the lam?
Vinson Cunningham: [08-25]
Trump's mug shot is his true presidential portrait: "He might be
angry in the mug shot; he might even be scared. But he damn sure doesn't
look surprised. Nobody is."
Ankush Khardori: [08-25]
Lock him up? A new poll has some bad news for Trump: Most
Americans believe Trump should stand trial before the 2024
election: 61% to 19% (independents 63% to 14%, Republicans 33%
to 45%). About half of the country believes Trump is guilty in
the pending prosecutions: 51% to 26% (independents 53% to 20%,
Republicans 14% to 64%). Half of the country believes Trump
should go to prison nif convicted in DOJ's Jan. 6 case: 50%
for imprisonment, 16% for probation, 12% financial penalty only,
18% no penalty (independents 51% prison to 14% for no penalty;
Republicans 11% to 43%). They also argue that "a conviction in
DOJ's 2020 election case would hurt Trump in the general
election," and "there is considerable room for the numbers
to get worse for Trump."
Akela Lacy: [08-24]
Georgia GOP gears up to remove Atlanta prosecutor who indicted Donald
Trump: "Lawmakers invoked a new law that's supposed to target
reform DAs. The real targets are Black Democrats." This is evidently
similar to the law that DeSantis has been using to purge Florida of
Democratic District Attorneys. But the grounds stated in the law are
using discretionary powers to not prosecute state laws, so it will
be a stretch to remove Willis for actually prosecuting a case. Not
that Republicans think they need an excuse to trash local democracy.
Amanda Marcotte: [08-21]
Let's pour one out for Mike Lindell: MyPillow Guy wasn't important
enough to get his own indictment. Speaking of unindicted
co-conspirators, Marcotte also wrote about: [08-23]
Roger Stone's hubris exposes Trump's plan: New video shows lawyers
faked distance from Capitol riots.
Patrick Marley: [07-18]
Michigan charges 16 Trump electors who falsely claimed he won the
state: This story is more than a month old, so "the charges are
the first against Trump electors" is still true, but now they're
not also the last. There is also a story by Kathryn Watson: [08-17]
Arizona AG investigating 2020 alleged fake electors tied to Trump.
Looks like there are also investigations in
other states.
Kelly McClure: [08-27]
Trump gripes on Truth Social that indictments are keeping him from PGA
championships in Scotland.
Nicole Narea: [08-25]
Why Trump seems to grow more popular the worse his legal troubles
become: "Trump isn't Hitler. But when it comes to the courts,
he's successfully borrowing the Nazi's playbook." But, like, is
any of that actually true? Sure, Trump has a hard core following,
but is it really growing with each indictment? He's good not just
at playing the victim, but in acting defiant, but that's easy given
how much deference his prosecutors have shown him. And is running
40 points above DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Pence, Scott, Haley, Christie,
et al. such an accomplishment? All it suggests that Republicans are
more into circuses than bread
As for Hitler, the best analogy is the one Marx coined comparing
the two Napoleons: the latter was as full of delusion and himself
as the former, but had none of the skills, and few of the grievances,
that made the original such an ill-fated menace. But Trump was never
a failed painter, nor a battered soldier. He wasn't hardened by jail,
and never tried to articulate a vision, even one as perverse as
Mein Kampf. His agenda to "make America great again" was
miraculously achieved on inauguration day, as him being president
was all greatness required. Conversely, as soon as he lost the
presidency, America fell back into the toilet. Hitler, on the
other hand, just started when he ascended to power,
and used it even more ruthlessly than Napoleon, until it consumed
him, destroyed his nation, and wrecked much of the world.
Given that there is little daylight between Trump and Hitler
regarding emotions and morals, we are lucky that Trump is pure
farce: he is stupid, he is lazy, and he understands politics
purely as entertainment (which is the only thing he has any
real aptitude at, although lots of us have trouble seeing even
that). But not being Hitler doesn't make him harmless. He's
created -- not from whole cloth but by building on decades of
resentment and vindictiveness, from Reagan to Gingrich and
especially through the talking heads at Fox and points farther
right -- what may be summed up as the Era of Bad Feelings: a
revival of right-wing shibboleths and fever-dreams that had
mostly been in remission. And then there are the opportunity
costs: things we will pay for in the future because we were
too cheap, or dumb, or distracted to deal with when they were
still manageable (climate, obviously, but also infrastructure,
health care, and perhaps most importantly, peace).
Nonetheless, Narrea has opted to go down this rabbit hole, by
interviewing Thomas Weber, who's written about the comparison in
a forthcoming book,
Fascism in America: Past and Present (along with others
writing on various right-wing movements). I've done considerable
reading into the history of fascism, and as a person on the left,
I've developed a sensitivity to both its politics and aesthetics,
so these questions engage me in ways that most other people will
find pedantic and probably boring. I won't go into all that here,
but will note that even I find this particular discussion rather
useless.
David Remnick: [08-22]
The mobster cosplay of Donald Trump.
Jeff Stein: [08-22]
Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic
war: "Former president floats 10 percent on all foreign imports
and calls for 'ring around the collar' of U.S. economy." Unlikely
he's thought this through, but a reason for doing something like
this would be to help balance a trade deficit the US has run since
1970 and never done anything serious about, because the dollar drain
is either held as capital abroad or returned for financial services
and assets in America -- both of which are massive transfers to the
rich both here and elsewhere. But it's unlikely to happen, because
it will upset a lot of apple carts, and those aggrieved interests
will have no problem reframing it as a massive tax on American
consumers, which it would be. For more, see:
Dean Baker: [08-23]
Donald Trump's $3.6 Trillion Dollar Tax Hike: This might look bad
for Republicans to be raising taxes, but the only taxes Republicans
care about are ones that take money from the rich and distribute it
downwards -- those they hate, and do anything in their power to kill.
Tariffs, on the other hand, are taxes on consumption -- the only one
of those Republicans get upset over is the gasoline tax (or worse,
any form of carbon tax). Moreover, tariffs allow domestic businesses
to raise prices and pocket the profits, so they're cool with that,
too.
Paul Krugman: [08-24]
Trump, lord of the ring (around the collar): Krugman hates the
idea for the usual reasons, plus some extras. At least he admits
that the economic inefficiencies are pretty minor. Given that any
taxes raised will be quickly respent, his complaint about the
regressive nature of the tax isn't such a big deal, either. His
bigger point has to do with international relations, although he
could explain it better. Trade makes nations more interdependent,
and less hostile. Unbalanced trade, like the US has been running,
also returns some good will. East Asia (China included) largely
grew their economies on trade surpluses with the US, and that
helps keep most of them aligned militarily aligned with the US
(not China, but it certainly makes China less hostile than it
would be otherwise). Trade wars, on the other hand, undermine
relationships, promote autarky and isolation, or drive other
countries into alliances that bypass the US (e.g., BRICS). The
few countries the US refuses to trade with fester economically
and become more desperately hostile (North Korea, Cuba, Iran,
Venezuela, and now Russia). They are usually so small that it
doesn't cost the US much, but Russia is stressing that, and a
trade war with China would stress everyone.
Caitlin Yilek/Jacob Rosen: [08-27]
Trump campaign says it's raised $7 million since mug shot release.
I had already snagged the Darko cartoon up top before linking to this.
After all, he always does this.
Matt Stieb: [08-23]
The craziest moments from Trump's Tucker Carlson interview.
For more crazy:
Jeanne Whalen: [08-22]
Trump promised this Wisconsin town a manufacturing boom. It never
arrived. Also on this:
DeSantis, and other Republicans: Starts with the Fox dog
and pony show in Milwaukee.
Eric Levitz: [08-24]
Who won (and lost) the first Republican debate: Scorecard format
counts DeSantis and Pence as winners; Ramaswamy, Scott, Haley, and
"your grandchildren" as losers. The knock on Scott was that he tried
to be sensible and was revealed as boring, while Haley tried to be
serious and turned preachy (she "came across as the most informed,
capable, and honest candidate on the stage. In other words, she's
cooked." Levitz didn't mention this, but she was also psychotic on
foreign policy, but sure, in Washington that counts as a synonym
for serious). Ramaswamy, on the other hand, tried to be "the biggest
sociopath at the prep-school debate" only to find out that he "just
isn't [MAGA Americans] kind of conman." That left the candidates
self-respecting Republicans can see themselves in, which is to say
ridiculous ones. As for the rest of us, we don't count to this
crowd. Levitz was much too kind in summing up their agenda for us
as a loss to "your grandchildren." The threat of these politicians
is much more urgent than that.
For more on the debate (let's try to contain this, although it
leaks out, especially in the attention suddenly being paid to Vivek
Ramaswamy):
Intelligencer Staff: [08-23]
34 things you missed at the Republican debate: The live blog, so
LIFO. Levitz skipped over Christie, but he wound up with the third
largest talking share (after Pence and DeSantis). Chait noted how
Christie got booed, and: "Christie picked the most moderate possible
ground to object to Trump's attempt to secure an unelected second
term. That stance was beyond the pale." As for DeSantis as winner:
Hartmann noted "Ron DeSantis almost appears human," while Rupar
conceded that "DeSantis is getting better at making normal human
facial expressions." With Republicans, it seems that journalists
have to take what they can get.
Dan Balz: [08-26]
'Democracy' was on the wall at the GOP debate. It was never in the
conversation. Clearly, they view democracy as the enemy, but
they can't exactly say that in so many words.
Emily Guskin, et al: [08-24]
Our Republican debate poll finds Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy
won: Poll limited to "likely Republican voters," with 29% to 26%.
Nikki Haley came in third with 15%, Pence had 7%, Scott and Christie
4%, Burgum and Hutchinson 1%, 13% had no idea. Comparing pre- and
post-debate polls, Haley got the largest bump (29-to-46%), followed
by Burgum (5-to-12%).
Ed Kilgore: [08-24]
The debate did nothing to diminish Trump's control of the GOP.
Rebecca Leber: [08-24]
The first GOP debate reveals a disturbing level of climate change
denial. The more impossible it becomes to ignore or waive away
the evidence, the more dogmatic they become in rejecting the very
notion, and the more they retreat from any possible compromise. Nor
is this the only example. On virtually every issue, Republicans have
hardened their positions into rigid principles that they will defend
even if it involves wrecking the government. This is in stark contrast
to the Democrats, who have long been willing to compromise anything.
The result makes Republicans look strong (albeit crazy) and Democrats
weak (while getting little sympathy for being sane).
Chris Lehmann: [08-24]
The Donald Trump look-alike contest.
Amanda Marcotte: [08-24]
Why do Republicans even bother with this whole farce? "trump wasn't
there, but we saw why he's leading: GOP voters don't care about substance,
just unjustified grievances." Still, a large swath of mainstram media
took this "debate" as serious news, lending support to the idea that
we should care about what various Republicans think, and that it makes
any difference who they ultimately nominate.
Osita Nwanevu: [08-24]
The first Republican debate was one long stare into a Trump-shaped
void.
Christian Paz: [08-24]
2 winners and 3 losers from the first Republican debate: Winner:
Donald Trump; Loser: Any alternative to Trump; Loser: Ron DeSantis;
Winner: A pre-Trump Republican Party; Loser: Bret Baier and Martha
MacCallum. I don't understand the point of the second "winner," but
the audience reliably booed any least criticism of Trump, of which
there were very few.
Nia Prater: [08-25]
Oliver Anthony didn't love his song being played at the GOP debate:
This should be a teachable moment. As I noted last week, the song's
first two lines could have kicked off a leftist diatribe. That he
then veered into stupid right-wing talking points was unfortunate,
but anyone who believes that working men are getting screwed should
have the presence of mind to see that the billionaires and stooges
on the Milwaukee stage were the problem, not the solution. Also see:
Dylan Scott: [08-25]
What the GOP debate revealed about Republican health care hypocrisy:
"The GOP loves Big Government in health care -- if it's blocking
abortion or trans care."
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [08-24]
GOP debate bloodbath over Ukraine leaves room for agreement -- on
China: "All agreed Beijing is the greatest threat to the US,
particularly at the American border." Huh? Evidently, they believe
that China is behind the fentanyl being smuggled in from Mexico,
and that the best defense would be a strong offense . . . against
Mexico.
Tony Karon: [10-24]
[Twitter]: "Whether it's Republicans or Democrats, US presidential
elections are conducted as TV game shows. America has entertained
itself to death, as Neil Postman warned it would . . ."
Philip Bump: [08-23]
One in 8 Republicans think winning is more important than election
rules: "Another 3 in 8 apparently think Donald Trump adheres
to those rules." I would have guessed it was more like 7 in 8, at
least if you limit the question to party activists (politicians,
donors, people who work campaigns, think tanks, and their media
flaks), and phrased it in terms that didn't inhibit from expressing
their beliefs. Their core belief is that anything that helps them
win is good, as is anything that can be used to hurt the Democrats.
I could, at this point, list a dozen, a score, maybe even a hundred
examples. This isn't just competitiveness -- Democrats can exhibit
that, too, although they're rarely as ruthless, in part because they
believe in representative democracy, where everyone has a say, and
that say is proportional to popular support. On the other hand,
Republicans believe that power is to be seized, and once you have
it, you should flout it as maximally as you can get away with. At
root, that's because most Republicans (at least most activists)
don't believe in democracy: they don't believe that lots of people
deserve any power or respect at all.
Thomas B Edsall: [08-23]
Trump voters can see right through DeSantis. Interesting. So why
can't they see through Trump?
James Fallows: [08-23]
"What's the matter with Florida?" "The GOP's doomed war against higher
ed."
Van Jackson: [08-23]
Vivek Ramaswamy's edgelord foreign policy: What do you get when
you flail senselessly at the "secular gods" of "Wokeism, transgenderism,
climatism, Covidism, globalism"? I had to look "edgelord" up, but here
it is: "a person who affects a provocative or extreme persona," e.g.,
"edgelords act like contrarians in the hope that everyone will admire
them as rebels." But wasn't Nixon's "madman theory" simply meant to
confuse and intimidate others, not to woo voters?
Glenn Kessler: [08-25]
Vivek Ramaswamy says 'hoax' agenda kills more people than climate
change. The Washington Post's Fact Checker says: "Four
Pinocchios."
Ed Kilgore: [08-25]
Palin's civil war threat is a sign of very bad things to come.
Mostly that Republicans think they'll prevail, if not at the ballot
box (that one's pretty much sailed) then because they own more guns
than Democrats. This assumes that the institutions of justice and
violence, which they've been courting so assiduously all these years,
will bend to the ir demands. That didn't happen on Jan. 6, and it
still seems pretty unlikely, although it happens all the time in the
"shithole countries" Republicans are trying to turn this one into.
Martin Pengelly: [08-25]
Ramaswamy's deep ties to rightwing kingpins revealed: Leonard
Leo and Peter Thiel, for starters.
Charles P Pierce: [08-23]
Gregg Abbott has outdone himself again: "Exactly what are the
upper limits of inhumanity he has to reach before the federal
government does something about this mad stage play?" This time
he sent a busload of refugees from Texas into a hurricane in Los
Angeles, instead of doing the decent thing, which was to lock them
up and wait for a hurriance to hit Texas.
Andrew Prokop: [08-23]
Vivek Ramaswamy's rise to semi-prominence, explained. The first
interesting question is how he got so rich. He started as a hedge
fund analyst investing in biotech, then bought a piece of a company,
which bought rights to an Alzheimer's drug that had repeatedly failed
trials. He hyped the drug into a lucrative IPO, before the drug again
flopped. Meanwhile, he sold off several other "promising" drugs, and
cleaned out, going back into the hedge fund racket, and his intro to
politics via books like Woke, Inc.
Ryu Spaeth: [08-25]
What if Vivek Ramaswamy is the future of politics? Could be, as
long as the media is more concerned with the performance of politics
than with its substance. The most persuasive paragraph here is the
one that shows how Ramaswamy draws on Obama: nothing substantive, of
course, but much performative. So it's fair to say he's not just
aimed at out-Trumping Trump.
[PS: See Tatyana Tandanpolie: [08-24]
Vivek Ramaswamy accused of plagiarizing Obama line at GOP debate.
I wouldn't call that plagiarism. It sounds more like an homage.]
Brynn Tannehill: []
Republicans' border policy proposals are sadistic and would lead to
chaos.
Prem Thakker: []
Republicans pushed almost 400 "education intimidation" bills in past
two years.
Li Zhou: [08-23]
A shooting over a Pride flag underscores the threat of Republican
anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
From my Twitter feed, Peter Baker: "In 1994, 21% of Republicans and
17% of Democrats viewed the other party very unfavorably. Today, 62%
of Republicans and 54% of Democrats do." Mark Jacob
responded: "Call it 'tribalism' ifyou want. But another explanation
is that one political party turned full-on fascist, and the rest of us
found that unacceptable." Baker cites a WSJ piece by Aaron Zitner,
"Why tribalism took over our politics," which offered "an uncomfortable
explanation: Our brains were made for conflict." I haven't read the
piece (paywall), nor do I particularly want to, as it seems highly
unlikely that our brains manifested themselves on such a level only
in the last thirty years.
Legal matters:
Matt Ford: [08-25]
The one thing the Supreme Court got right: Blowing up college sports:
"The NCAA's hold on its lucrative status quo looks more vulnerable than
ever, two years after the high court ruled against it." On the other
hand, it would have been better still to blow up the entire business
of college sports, which are a massive drain (financial as well as
mental) on higher education.
Stephanie Kirchgaessner/Dominic Rushe: [08-25]
Billionaire-linked US thinktank behind Supreme Court wealth tax case
lobbying.
Christiano Lima: ]08-24]
Judge tosses RNC lawsuit accusing Google's spam filters of bias.
Ian Millhiser: [08-26]
The edgelord of the federal judiciary: "Imagine a Breitbart
comments forum come to life and given immense power over innocent
people. That's Judge James Ho." Second time I've run across the
word "edgelord" this week: I think it was more accurately applied
to Vivek Ramaswamy (see Van Jackson, above), but the author was
evidently hard-pressed to find words to express his disgust with
Judge Ho. At one point he seems to give up: "There are so many
errors in Ho's legal reasoning that it would be tedious to list
all of them here." But then he comes up with five more paragraphs,
before warning us that "Ho could be the future of the federal
judiciary."
Climate and Environment:
Ukraine War:
Connor Echols: [08-25]
Diplomacy Watch: Washington's 'wishful thinking' on Ukraine:
Sub is "Russia hawks have no shortage of unrealistic assumptions
underlying their views of the conflict," but one can say the same
thing about American hawks, indeed about all hawks.
Dave DeCamp: [08-20]
US 'fears' Ukraine is too 'casualty averse': This was the
first of a number of recent articles where America's armchair
generals are unhappy, blaming Ukraine's slow counteroffensive on
reluctance to sacrifice their troops. This shows that those who
suggested that America is willing to fight Russia "to the last
dead Ukrainian" were onto something. On the other hand, it also
suggests that Ukraine should reconsider its war goals in terms
of what is actually possible. Some examples include:
Thomas Graham: [08-22]
Was the collapse of US-Russia relations inevitable?.
Branko Marcetic: [08-23]
Are US officials signaling a new 'forever war' in Ukraine? "Now
that Kyiv's counteroffensive is floundering, goal posts in the timing
for talks and a ceasefire are quietly being moved."
Fred Kaplan: [08-21]
No, Biden hasn't messed up an opportunity to end the war in Ukraine:
But he hasn't presented one, either. Rather, as long as Ukraine is willing
to continue fighting, he's happy to keep supplying Ukraine with weapons,
and to duck the question of whether the US has ulterior motives in backing
Ukraine.
Anatol Lieven/George Beebe: [08-25]
What Putin would get out of eliminating Prigozhin. The Wagner
Group CEO was presumably among the passengers in a plane that crashed
Thursday. Most commentators jumped to the conclusion that Putin was
behind the crash, because, well, it just seems like something he would
do. This piece doesn't offer any evidence. (Early speculation that the
plane was shot down seems to have fallen out, with a bomb now viewed
as the most likely. Another theory is that Prigozhin faked his death,
with or without Putin's collaboration, but I haven't seen any evidence
of that.) Lieven is usually pretty smart about reading Russian tea
leaves, but he doesn't have much to go on here.
More Prigozhin/Putin:
Robyn Dixon/Mary Ilushina: [08-27]
Russia confirms Wagner chief Prigozhin's death after DNA tests.
Fred Kaplan: [08-23]
Why it's easy to see Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane crash as Putin's
murderous revenge.
Joshua Yaffa: [08-24]
Putin's deadly revenge on Prigozhin.
Paul Sonne/Valeriya Safronova/Cassandra Vinograd: [08-25]
Putin denies killing Prigozhin, calling the idea anti-Putin propaganda:
There's no way short of a confession, of which there is none, to know
if Putin ordered the killing, but he is right that the insinunation is
"anti-Putin propaganda" -- one more instance in a long list of charges
going back to the
1999 Russian apartment bombings, which Putin used as cassus belli
to launch the Second Chechen War, followed by virtually every mishap
that befell any of his political opponents ever since. The idea is to
present him as a ruthless monster who cannot be trusted and negotiated
with, who can only be checked by force, and who must ultimately be
beaten into submission. For all I know, he may indeed be guilty of
many of the charges, but he is still the leader of a large nation
we need to find some way to respect and coexist with, to engage and
work with on problems of global import. The purpose of anti-Putin
propaganda is to prevent that from happening. The results include
the present war in Ukraine, which, as Crocodile Chuck never tires
of reminding me, is what happens when you start believing you own
propaganda.
Around the world:
Jonathan Guyer: [08-23]
BRICS, the economic group of America's rivals and friends alike,
explained: Starting off as an economic forum for five prominent
countries outside the G7 (and more generally, outside US-dominated
networks; all five BRICS founders also meet with G7 members in the
G20), they could expand into a new edition of the Non-Aligned
Movement of 1955, where "as many as
40 countries want to join BRICS." More on BRICS:
Sarang Shidore: [08-24]
BRICS just announced an expansion. This is a big deal. Six new
states will join BRICS: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
and UAE. In addition to its confabs, BRICS has its New Development Bank,
which is a potential rival to, or end run around, the US-controlled
World Bank. Of these, Iran is the most explicit challenge to the US, as
Trita Parsi explains.
Celina Della Croce: [08-25]
How US sanctions are a tool of war: The case of Venezuela.
Nick Turse: [08-23]
15 US-backed officers had hand in 12 West African coups. Turse also
wrote:
At least five members of Niger junta were trained in US;
Niger junta appoints US-trained military officers to key jobs; and
When is a coup not a coup? When the US says so.
More on the US in Africa:
Richard Silverstein: [08-25]
Ben Gvir: Give every Jew a gun.
Back to school:
Other stories:
Adam Bernstein/Robin Webb: [08-26]
Bob Barker, unflappable 'Price is Right' emcee, dies at 99: The
show debuted in 1956. I watched it pretty regularly into the early
1960s, and learned one indelible lesson: how list prices were inflated
to create the sense that sales offer bargains. Before we bought a set
of World Book in 1961, the book I most diligently studied was
the Sears & Roebuck catalog, so my knowledge of real prices was
close to encyclopedic, and the list prices on the show often came as
a shock. Barker didn't join the show until 1972, so I probably never
watched him except in passing. But the persistence of the show is a
tribute to the mass consumer society my generation -- the first to
watch TV from infancy -- was programmed to worship.
Rachel DuRose: [08-25]
AI-discovered drugs will be for sale sooner than you think:
"It takes forever to get drugs on the market. AI could help speed
up the process."
Ronan Farrow: [08-21]
Elon Musk's shadow rule: "How the US government came to rely on
the tech billionaire -- and is now struggling to rein him in." A
long and not unsympathetic profile, which starts from the fact that
Ukraine depended on Musk's Starlink satellite communications network,
which allowed him to shake the US down for profits. But what may have
started as a human interest story is rapidly becoming a morbid one,
the critical flaw not the person necessarily but the power he has
accumulated.
Adam Gopnik: [08-21]
How the authors of the Bible spun triumph from defeat. Reflects
on Jacob L Wright's new book, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative
History of Scriptures and Its Origins (out Oct. 19), which argues
that the secret of the Bible's long-term success was that it provided
a story of underdogs surviving against all odds:
The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world -- persecuted,
exiled, catastrophically defeated -- and yet the tale of their special
selection, and of the demiurge who, from an unbeliever's point of view,
reneged on every promise and failed them at every turn, is the most
admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts.
I've read several of Karen Armstrong's books, where she argues
that the major religions invented in the first millennium BCE were
attempts to limit the increasing horror of war -- one things of
the waves of Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks across the Middle
East, but India and China were similarly affected. It's hard to
say they worked: even Christianity, which was untainted by military
power until Constantine, proved to be amenable to state power.
I still find it puzzling that more than two-thousand years later,
the arts of war having advanced to an apocalyptic level, that no
comparable progress has been made in religion, leaving us stuck
grappling with these failed myths. As Gopnik notes, "Wright, like
so many scholars these days, cannot resist projecting pluralist,
post-Enlightenment values onto societies that made no pretense
of possessing them." But what else can he do, other than disposing
of the emotions that cling to belief in religion?
Sarah Jones: [08-25]
What is a university without liberal arts? More on West Virginia
Univeristy -- I noted Lisa M Corrigan:
The evisceration of a public university last week.
Andrea Mazzarino: [08-22]
The violent American century: "The ways our twenty-first century
wars have polarized Americans." I give you an example at the bottom
of this post. It's hard to imagine so many Americans stocking up on
guns as a solution to their concerns for safety and order without
the example of America's near-constant war -- at least since 1941,
but especially since 2001, when the "enemy" became as nebulous and
intimate as an idea.
Jonathan O'Connell/Paul Farhi/Sofia Andrade: [08-26]
How a small-town feud in Kansas sent a shock through American
journalism: The Marion County Record.
Emily Olson: [08-26]
Thousands march to mark the 60th anniversary of MLK's 'I Have a Dream'
speech. Also:
Nathan J Robinson:
[08-24]
This is only going to get worse until we make it stop: "Republicans
want to maximize the catastrophic heating of the globe. Democrats want
to pretend to be doing something without taking on the fossil fuel
industry." He starts by declaring that "I turned 34 yesterday." That
means he should have 38 more years left than I have. That calls for
a different perspective -- one I can't quite imagine, leaving me more
in tune with the cad he calls Martha's Vineyard Man.
[08-22]
There should not be "religious exemptions to laws: Or, if there
should be a religious exemption, most likely the law is wrong -- he
gives examples like forced cutting of Rastafarian dreadlocks, or the
allowance for certain Indians to take peyote.
[08-21]
How Rupert Murdoch destroyed the news.
Jeffrey St Clair: [08-25]
Roaming Charges: Through a sky darkly: Usual grabbag opens with
smoke close to his Oregon home, but goes far enough to note that
Europe has had over 1,100 fires this summer (up from a 2006-22
average of 724), offers a
map of Greece, notes the
Devastating floods in Slovenia, and the parade of hurricanes
currently crossing the Atlantic. Much more, of course.
Steve M (No More Mr Nice Blog) wrote a piece [08-23]
Vivek Ramaswamy wants to deport two members of congress (and doesn't
know one was born in America). I'm breaking this out because I
want to quote a big chunk, after he quotes Ramaswamy bitching: "We
need to weed out ingrates like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib who come
to this country and complain about it."
Hey, smart guy -- you know that Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit,
right?
Omar, of course, is a naturalized citizen (though as Essence
once noted, Omar has been a citizen longer than Melania Trump). It's
true that Omar has said some critical things about America. But do you
know who else "complains about" the U.S.? Every Republican.
Republicans hate the president. They hate most of the laws passed
during liberal administrations, and most of the laws passed in liberal
cities and states. Republicans hate millions of their fellow
citizens. They hate most of the nation's cities. And they have an
inalienable right as Americans to feel all this hate and complain that
America isn't exactly the way they want it to be. But Ramaswamy
doesn't want extend this right -- a right Republicans exercise every
single day -- to Omar and Tlaib.
I'm old enough to remember when "love it or leave it" was on the
lips of every Cold Warrior, but what they really meant by "love it"
was support America's imperialist war in Vietnam. A few years later,
few Americans doubted that Vietnam was one of the worst mistakes the
nation had ever made, but few conceded that antiwar protesters had
been right all along, let alone that they cared more for the country
than the people who led them into such an evil war.
Back then, as well as today, there was/is a certain type of
American who feels the country is theirs exclusively, and that no
one who disagrees with them counts, or should even be allowed to
stay in the country they grew up in. And, as someone with only one
set of immigrant ancestors in the last 200 years (my father's mother's
parents, in the 1870s from Sweden), it especially galls me to be
slandered by relatively arriviste "super-patriots" named Ramaswamy
and Drumpf. (I'm not saying that newcomers can't be real Americans,
but I have noticed a tendency to overcompensate -- as, indeed, my
grandmother did, in totally discarding her Swedish heritage.)
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Speaking of Which
Didn't really start until Friday, but by now this pretty much
writes itself. I do notice that I'm dropping more bits of memoir
into the mix. Also that I needn't comment on everything. But do
read the Astra Taylor piece. Not sure when the new book is coming
out, but you probably have time to Democracy May Not Exist:
But We'll Miss It When It's Gone first.
I clicked on a bunch of articles, and ran into the paywall at
The New Republic. Evidently my wife's subscription had
expired. It's probably worth straightening out ($15/year is pretty
decent as these things go), but meanwhile the articles that looked
promising but I wasn't able to read:
Top story threads:
Trump: He got indicted again, and the resulting tsunami
of press earned him his own section, separate from the Republican
mill.
Alexander Bolton: [08-14]
GOP sees turnout disaster without Trump. This suggests that
a sizable bloc of Trump supporters will only turn out for him,
so that if Republicans run some other candidate with the same
effective program, a lot of voters are likely to pass. And since
Republicans have alienated most people, they can only continue
to win by thin margins (even trying to rig them, as they do).
It is certainly true that a lot of Trump supporters really hate
many other Republicans -- Mitch McConnell is a good example --
although they hate Democrats so much more that the GOP benefits
when they show up. It's also true that Trump's fans are
spectacularly misinformed about nearly everything, which is
a trait Republican strategists bank on.
Jonathan Chait: [08-15]
Lindsey Graham: Don't indict Trump, or impeach Trump, or vote against
him: Two thoughts here: one is the extended portrait of Graham in
Mark Leibovich's Thank You for Your Servitude, which paints
Graham as an innate lap dog, who once took John McCain as his leader,
a role that, to the surprise of pretty much everyone, Trump has since
assumed (the insecurity to have made that transition is staggering);
the other is the old maxim, "all's fair in love and war." We won't
talk about Graham's love life, but no one in Congress in eons has
exhibited a more kneejerk affection for war. Graham has always seen
politics as war, so as long as Trump can be seen as an effective
warrior (and Graham can hardly see him otherwise), anything can be
excused (and most of it can be celebrated).
Kyle Cheney: [08-15]
Special counsel obtained Trump DMs despite 'momentous' bid by Twitter
to delay, unsealed filings show.
Isaac Chotiner: [08-16]
The benefits and drawbacks to charging Trump like a mobster:
"Racketeering statutes allow prosecutors to arrange many characters
and a broad set of allegations into a single narrative." Interview
with Caren Myers Morrison. Many people have observed that the Trump
indictments are designed to tell stories. Morrison contrasts Georgia
and Smith: "The other one's Raymond Carver, and this is Dickens."
Matthew Cooper: [08-17]
Willis's indictment is "an overwhelming show of force . . . shock
and awe": Interview with Jennifer Taub.
Norman Eisen/Amy Lee Copeland: [08-15]
This indictment of Trump does something ingenious.
Adam Gopnik: [08-16]
There is nothing élitist about the indictments against Trump:
"The judicial system is doing its work, and the former President
has never been a man of the people."
Danny Hakim/Richard Fausset: [08-14]
Two months in Georgia: How Trump tried to overturn the vote.
Margaret Hartmann:
[08-18]
Trump cancels press conference, will lie in legal filings instead:
On Monday, he promised to unveil on Friday an "Irrefutable REPORT"
about "the 2020 presidential election fraud that took place in
Georgia." Then, big surprise, he bailed.
- [08-18]
Melania really doesn't care about Trump's indictment, do u?
I had this theory back in 1988 that one of the reasons Bush won
(besides Willie Horton, you know) was that voters took pity and
decided to spare Kitty Dukakis the ordeal of being First Lady.
She was clearly unstable and easily freaked out during the
campaign, whereas, well, you might not like Barbara Bush, but
you knew she could take it. It's hard for me to gin up any
sympathy for Melania, but maybe someone should take pity on
her. Maybe not as much as I dread a second Trump term, but
putting her through a second term as First Lady seems like a
lot of unnecessary cruelty.
w/Chas Danner: [08-19]
Giuliani begged, but Trump refused to cover his crushing legal
bills.
Richard L Hasen: [08-15]
The biggest difference between the Georgia indictment and the Jan. 6
indictment: Race, which enters from several angles, but especially
from Trump, who wasted no time in calling the prosecutor racist.
Quinta Jurecic: [08-15]
Trump discovers that some things are actually illegal: "The cases
against the former president aren't criminalizing politics. They're
criminalizing, well, crimes."
Ed Kilgore: [08-17]
A pardon won't save Trump if he's convicted in Georgia: They've
rigged the system to make pardons virtually impossible.
Ian Millhiser: [08-15]
Will anyone trust these hyper-politicized courts to try Donald
Trump? "The federal judiciary is a cesspool of partisanship,
and now it's being asked to oversee some of the most politically
fraught criminal trials in American history."
Lisa Needham: [08-15]
Trump's Fulton County indictment, unpacked.
Andrew Prokop: [08-15]
The five conspiracies at the heart of the Georgia Trump indictment:
- Trump's effort to get Georgia officials and legislators to change
the outcome
- Trump's fake electors
- Jeff Clark's effort to have the US Justice Department case doubt
on Georgia results
- Trump allies' effort to influence poll worker Ruby Freeman's
testimony
- Trump allies' breach of voting data in Coffee County, Georgia
Matt Stieb: [08-18]
Threats from Trump supporters are piling up against the authorities:
This seems like one of those articles that's going to grow to book
length by the end of the year. The right-wing ecosystem is a cesspool
of hate and malice, so violence is inevitable, and not necessarily
preceded by easily traceable threats (such as the late
Craig Robertson).
Jennifer Rubin: [08-20]
Why Trump's Georgia case likely can't be removed to federal
court.
Charles P Pierce: [08-18]
I'm starting to think Donald Trump is untrustworthy: "He canceled
a Monday presser that was sure to be the mother of all conditions of
release violations."
Tatyana Tandanpolie: [08-16]
Economic analyst stunned at sources of Jared Kushner's funds:
"Just 1% of investments in Kushner's fund came from sources in the
United States." No doubt Trump has done a lot of disreputable and
dishonest things to get money, but he's never come remotely close
to the heist his son-in-law pulled off, leveraging his multiple
White House portfolios. The 1% figure looks bad, but the really
outrageous number is $3 billion.
Hunter Walker: [08-15]
The full story behind the bizarre episode that led to charges in
Trump's latest indictment: "How Kanye West's publicist, an "MMA
fighter," and a Lutehran pastor teamed up to pressure a Georgia
election worker."
Amy B Wang/Josh Dawsey: [08-19]
Trump to release taped interview with Tucker Carlson, skipping GOP
debate.
Odette Yousef: [08-18]
Threats, slurs and menace: Far-right websites target Fulton County
grand jurors. Follow-up: Holly Bailey/Hannah Allam: [08-18]
FBI joins investigation of threats to grand jurors in Trump Georgia
case.
Li Zhou/Andrew Prokop: [08-16]
Trump's 4 indictments, ranked by the stakes: About what you'd
expect, but the Georgia election case could add up to more time
than the federal election case, and couldn't be pardoned by a
Republican president. (As I understand it, the Georgia governor
doesn't have pardon power like the US president has. To secure
a pardon in Georgia, you have to go before the state parole
board.) The New York charges would also be more difficult to
pardon, but aren't very likely to result in jail time. Ranked
third is the federal documents case. The charges there are
pretty air tight, and the maximum sentences are very long,
plus such cases are usually judged harshly.
James D Zirin: [08-15]
Will the prosecution of Trump have terrible consequences?
"Maybe, but they're likely to be far less terrible than if he
wasn't prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." I'm not
sure I understand either argument. If Trump had quietly faded
into oblivion, as Nixon did, I could see letting these charges
slip by -- although pleading them out would have been better.
But Trump couldn't let it go, so now he really should face a
reckoning with his crimes (at least those he's been charged
with -- no doubt there were many more). Will this have a
chilling effect on the behavior of future presidents? Let's
hope so.
This is an aside, but I hadn't realized that Gerald Ford
was given a
John F Kennedy Profile in Courage award for pardoning Nixon.
There was nothing conventionally recognizable as courage in that
pardon. It was pure cover-up, meant to short-circuit further
investigations, taking the story out of the press cycle, and
saving Republicans from the continued association. Still, in
one sense the award was completely predictable. In
his 1956 book, Kennedy devoted a chapter to Edmund G. Ross
for voting against impeachment of Andrew Johnson, who had become
president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and who
used his office to sabotage Reconstruction, speeding the return
of white racist power in the South. Another of Kennedy's profiles
was Robert A Taft, who was praised for his criticism of the
Nurembert Trials of Nazi war criminals.
Zack Beauchamp: [08-17]
The Trump indictments reveal a paradox at the heart of American
democracy: "The Trump cases help us understand how America's
democracy can be both strong and weak at the same time." Last
section sketches out what he calls "the ominous Israeli parallel,"
which is interesting in that few people are willing to take it
seriously, but is not quite the one I would make.
The simplest
way to make sense of politics among Israeli Jews is to divide it
on two axes: conservative vs. liberal/socialist, religious vs.
secular. The Palestinian "citizens of Israel" are off on the
side, with their own conservative (religious) vs. socialist
(liberal/secular) spread, but they are rigidly excluded from
consideration by Jewish Israelis. The secular/liberal sector
was dominant up to 1978, and still an important factor up to
2000, but have since been largely wiped out, as the right has
taken the lead in fighting the Palestinians, while neoliberal
economic policies have undermined traditional support for
Labor. The religious parties early on were content to seek
special favors from joining Labor coalitions, but with the
rise of the right, they gravitated that way, and recently have
become even more anti-Palestinian.
That same matrix model works reasonably well for the US, at
least if you buy the superficially ridiculous idea that Trump
is the manifestation of the religious right. The key thing is
that the more violence against others, the more people rally
to the cult of violence, which is most clearly represented by
the party of Armageddon.
The big question in Israel is whether the threat to democracy
from the religious right, which thus far Likud has indulged, will
push enough moderate voters into opposition to curb the threat
from the far right -- which threatens not just democracy but
genocide. One could imagine a similar dynamic in America, but
the far-right is mostly out of power here, unable to manufacture
crises (although Abbott and DeSantis are trying), and are faced
with a more deeply democratic/liberal political culture. Still,
that Trump can be seriously considered as a political force, and
that Republicans have had so much luck leveraging their power
bases, means that the threat here is real. To get a better idea
of how real that could be, look no farther than Israel.
DeSantis, and other Republicans:
Jonathan Chait: [08-18]
'Lock them up' is now the Republican Party's highest goal:
"It's no longer about policy or even culture war but prosecutorial
revenge." Nobody seems to remember this, but it was GW Bush who
started started the purge of politically unreliable US attorneys
back in 2006 (see
Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy). I don't recall
anything remotely like that under Obama, and Biden hasn't lifted
a finger to curtail the Trump-appointed US attorney prosecuting
Hunter Biden. You'd think that if Republicans genuinely objected
to the partisan nature of being prosecuted by Democrats, they'd
deny that if given the chance they'd do the same thing, but the
opposite appears to be true: they're chomping at the bit. One
pretty good bit here, about Trump:
Trump's legal jeopardy is easily explained: His private sector
record was a long history of shady associations with gangsters
and running scams. His presidency was a continuous procession of
his own advisers pleading with him not to do illegal things while
he complained that his attorneys weren't as unethical as Roy Cohn,
the mob lawyer he once employed.
I wouldn't have bothered with the last clause, as anyone familiar
with Cohn knows that representing the mob was nowhere near the most
unethical thing Cohn did. Also that Cohn was more of a mentor to
Trump than an employee.
PS: Steve M. comments on Chait's piece: [08-18]
Republicans think Democrats stole their act (and are doing it
better), starting with a tweet from Ben Shapiro (if you
don't know who he is, Nathan J Robinson has
written reams on him):
Whatever you think of the Trump indictments, one thing is for certain:
the glass has now been broken over and over again. Political opponents
can be targeted by legal enemies. Running for office now carries the
legal risk of going to jail -- on all sides.
In some sense, that risk has always been there. John Adams passed
laws to criminalize the speech of his political opponents, but he
never got around to prosecuting his vice president, Thomas Jefferson,
who did wind up prosecuting his, Aaron Burr. But for the most part,
politicians behaved themselves, or at least managed to keep above
the fray when their subordinates misbehaved (Grant, Harding, and
Reagan are classic examples; Nixon only escaped with a pardon). But
the idea of using criminal prosecutions for political leverage was
mostly developed against Clinton, a period when "no one is above
the law" was etched on every Republican's lips. Nothing comparable
happened on during the Bush and Obama presidencies, although several
people wrote books urging the impeachment of Bush (Elizabeth de la
Vega was one, in 2006, although the Democratic Congress elected
that year didn't touch it), and (as Chait noted) Shapiro himself
wrote The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against
the Obama Administration, structuring his complaints as a RICO
case.
Trump, on the other hand, was hellbent on prosecuting his opponents
from early in the campaign, when "lock her up" became a rally chant.
He toned back a bit after taking office, probably realizing that he
didn't really have the power to order prosecutions (though Nixon
probably did just that with the Chicago 8 and Daniel Ellsberg), but
where he did have power he exercised it politically (e.g., to fire
James Comey, and to pardon a number of his allies). And in general,
he behaved as someone convinced he was above the law, as someone
who could never be held to account for trampling on the law, as
someone who had no sense of justice other than seizing advantage.
And he was above the law, until he wasn't. Prosecution for his
crimes may be precedent-setting, but the crimes are very carefully
defined, and the evidence overwhelming. As a precedent, it's also
a pretty high bar. If a Democrat did anything comparable, most of
us would have no problems with prosecution.
Ryan Cooper:
Beth Harpaz/Jacob Kornbluh: [08-14]
Former Trump adviser Michael Flynn blamed Jews for boarding trains
to Asuchwitz: And "more offensive comments he's made about Jews."
But not a single one involved Israel, so he must be OK.
Ed Kilgore: [08-18]
DeSantis targeting Ramaswamy in a debate a sure sign he's losing:
It's hard to see how calling him an "inauthentic conservative" will
pay off, but bashing Ramaswamy as a Hindu should help DeSantis with
his bigotry bona fides.
Eric Levitz: [08-19]
The rise of the young, liberal, nonwhite Republican
Nia Prater: [08-17]
Trump supporter arrested for threatening to kill Trump's trial
judge.
Matt Stieb: [08-18]
James O'Keefe is now under criminal investigation: Conservative
provocateur, recently ousted as CEO of Project Veritas, appears to
be one of those guys whose "favorite charity" is himself.
Ben Terris: [08-17]
Awkward Americans see themselves in Ron DeSantis: I'm not sure
which one this reflects more embarrassingly on: the candidate or
the journalist (who at least asks one further question: "but do
they like what they see?").
Chris Walker: [08-16]
Arkansas rejects credit for AP Black History -- but Europe history
is fine.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [08-17]
In Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republicans have something new: This
left me hoping we never have to take him seriously, but fearing
that he's proving much more effective at shoveling bullshit than
his milquetoast competitors.
Biden and/or the Democrats:
Legal matters:
Aaron Gregg/Jacob Bogage: [08-14]
After conservatives' Target boycott, Stephen Miller group sues over
losses. Miller's group is called America First Legal, "which
bills itself as the conservative movement's 'long-awaited answer
to the ACLU.'" It's unclear whether their mission is simply to
degrade and ultimately destroy Americans' civil liberties, or they
just mean to file lawsuits, like this one, to harass their imagined
enemies.
Ian Millhiser:
[08-16]
The fight over whether courts can ban mifepristone is headed back
to the Supreme Court: "The far-right court just tried to ban
an abortion drug. Here's why you can ignore that."
[08-20]
The case for optimism about the Supreme Court: "There are some
terrible things that even this Supreme Court isn't willing to do."
With power comes some measure of responsibility, I guess -- something
Thomas and Alito never learned, possibly because when they joined
the Court, right-wing agitators were still a minority. Or they may
simply bear in mind the threat that Congress can still restructure
the Court, a chance that goes up the more they embarrass themselves
as political hacks. Roosevelt's "pack the court" scheme wasn't very
popular, but ultimately failed because a majority of the Court read
the tea leaves and decided that Congress could legislate on issues
like child labor after all ("the switch in time that saved nine").
Andrew Perez/Julia Rock: [08-18]
The antiabortion judge with a financial ethics problem: James
Ho, who cast the decisive vote in the mifepristone case Millhiser
wrote about above. His wife, Allyson Ho, has "participated in events
with the Alliance Defending Freedom and accepted honoraria, or speaking
fees, every year between 2018 and 2021."
Climate and Environment: Record-setting high temperatures
here in Wichita, yesterday and today and probably tomorrow. Next week
we'll probably have news about Atlantic hurricanes, as no less than
five suspects have been identified late this week. And while the
rubble of Maui and the evacuation of Yellowknife are the big fire
stories below, there are also big ones in
Washington and
British Columbia.
Sue Halpern: [07-13]
Vermont's catastrophic floods and the spread of unnatural disasters.
Ellen Ioanes: [08-20]
Why Hurricane Hilary is so strange -- and how it could impact
California. Here's the
tracking and forecast.
[PS: There was also
a 5.1-magnitude earthquake, presumably unrelated, although in my
part of the country, water injected into faults does cause earthquakes.]
Benji Jones: [08-18]
9 things everyone should know about Maui's wildfire disaster.
Starts with: 1) This is the nation's deadliest wildfire in more than
a century; 2) More than 2,200 structures in the town of Lahaina were
damaged or destroyed; . . .
Mike Lee/Adam Aton: [08-17]
Electric cars face 'punitive' fees, new restrictions in many states:
"A growing number of conservative states are imposing new taxes on
drivers using electric vehicle charging stations and trying to limit
EV sales." Texas is prominent here, but unbeknownst to me, Kansas has
one too. Part of the rationale has to do with lost gas tax revenues,
but you're also losing a lot of pollution and other rarely recovered
costs.
Ian Livingston:
[08-16]
Canada's raging fires have burned the equivalent of Alabama:
"Wildfires continue to rage in Canada, burning twice as much land
as any previous season.
Yellowknife is being evacuated, as there are more than 200
wildfires in the Northwest Territories.
[08-17]
Brutal heat wave developing over central US, with excessive heat watches
in Midwest: It hit 110°F here in Wichita on Saturday, with Sunday
forecast for the same, and another five days of 100°F or higher.
/Diana Leonard/Ian Livingston: [08-19]
Hurricane Hilary barrelling toward California, 'life-threatening'
flooding possible Sunday: Winds are expected to weaken to
tropical storm levels, which would still make it the first such
storm to his southern California since 1939. [PS: Ioanes, above,
cites
Hurricane Nora in 1997 as the most recent similar storm. Its
path was somewhat to the east, so Arizona and Utah were most
affected.]
Kelsey Piper: [08-17]
We're bad at predicting the future and there's no way around it:
"Technology improves over time, but it's hard to know what that means
when it comes to calculating the social cost of carbon."
Ukraine War:
Blaise Malley: [08-18]
Diplomacy Watch: Will Russia follow through on Black Sea threats?
"Tensions are gripping the region as Ukraine begins to allow free
passage from its ports past the grain blockade." The end of the
Black Sea Grain initiative, and the subsequent Russian bombing of
Ukrainian ports, not only hurts world food supplies, it also means
suggests that Russia has decided that agreeing to such limits on
its warmaking won't lead to further negotiation. This is at least
partly the result of Ukraine crossing various red lines (mostly
through drone attacks, ranging from Black Sea ships to the Kerch
Strait Bridge to spots in Moscow), and partly due to ever-tightening
sanctions hurting Russia's efforts to export its own agricultural
products. Ukraine, meanwhile, is daring Russia to attack ships in
its newly-christened "humanitarian corridor." Nothing else in this
report suggests any diplomatic progress.
Paul Dixon: [08-15]
Five lessons from Northern Ireland for ending the Ukraine war.
These points are fairly reasonable -- especially the second that
"everyone must win" -- but it seems to me that a partition plan,
decided by popular vote that hands Russia a slice of Ukraine
somewhere between the pre-2022 secession borders and the current
battle lines, would be cleaner and simpler than trying to come
up with a power-sharing agreement under a neutral Ukraine. That
would allow Ukraine to join the EU and (effectively if not quite
completely) NATO, while allowing ethnic Russians the option of
moving east), so the pre-2014 divisions would effectively vanish.
(One wrinkle I would like to see is the option of a revote in 5
years. That would provide both powers with incentives to rebuild
and to rule responsibly.)
Benjamin Hart: [08-14]
How Ukraine's counteroffensive might end: Interview with John
Nagl, now a "professor of warfighting studies at U.S. Army War
College," once regarded as one of the Army's counterinsurgency
gurus. He's pretty gung ho on Ukraine, but he also admits that
Ukraine can't fight the war the way Americans would, and that's
the way he most believes in. He cites a piece by Steve Biddle: [08-10]
Back in the Trenches ("why new technology hasn't revolutionized
warfare in Ukraine") that gets technical about weapons systems and
trench warfare, while ignoring the only fact that matters: that this
war cannot be resolved on the battle field.
John Hudson/Alex Horton: [08-17]
US intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive's key
goal: "Thwarted by minefields, Ukrainian forces won't reach
the southeastern city of Melitopol, a vital Russian transit hub,
according to a US intelligence assessment."
Michael Karadjis: [08-17]
The Global South's views on Ukraine are more complex than you may
think: "The claim that developing countries are neutral about
the war or even pro-Russian oversimplifies and distorts a more
nuanced reality."
Paul Krugman: [08-15]
Science, technology and war beyond the bomb: Tries to make a
case that superior technology and "under the surface" tactical
adjustments may still give Ukraine a counteroffensive breakthrough,
analogous to the WWII Battle of the Atlantic. In support of this,
he cites a piece by Phillips P O'Brien: [07-23]
Weekend Update #38, arguing "Please give this time."
Branko Marcetic: [08-14]
Can Washington pivot from its maximalist aims in Ukraine?
Actually, many American presidents have talked themselves into
a blind alley. Truman couldn't accept a Korean armistice that
Eisenhower signed right after he took office. Johnson never got
a chance to negotiate a deal in Vietnam. Perhaps most egregiously,
GWH Bush's insistence that Saddam Hussein was Hitler redux made
it impossible to explain why he stopped the rout at the border
of Kuwait, leading to the grudge match in 2013. Anyone portraying
Ukraine as a life-or-death struggle for democracy is either full
of shit or incapable of thinking two or three moves ahead. Hard
to tell about Biden, but some of his people definitely are both.
Peter Rutland: [08-14]
Why the Black Sea is becoming ground zero in the Ukraine War:
"Kyiv's counteroffensive efforts have focused on cutting Russia
off from Crimea, while the grain export deal continues to falter."
Ted Snider: [08-16]
Why peace talks, but no peace? When I saw this piece, I guessed
it was about the recent conclave in Saudi Arabia which Russia wasn't
invited to -- really more of Ukraine rehearsing its talking points
(see
Kyiv says Jeddah participants back Ukraine territorial integrity in
any peace deal) -- but this goes back to actual talks, both
before and after invasion, which the US and UK helped subvert.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [08-17]
Bill Kristol leads charge to make Republicans think 'right' on
Ukraine: The neocon founder is juicing over another war,
and has some lobbying money to work with, though probably not
enough to stand up to Trump.
Marcus Walker: [08-20]
Why Russia's war in Ukraine could run for years: "The reason isn't
just that the front-line combat is a slow-moving slog, but also that
none of the main actors have political goals that are both clear and
attainable."
Lauren Wolfe: [08-14]
In occupied regions, Ukrainians are being forced to accept Russian
passports: While the annexation is not sanction by international
law, the idea that this amounts to genocide mocks the concept.
Joshua Yaffa: [07-31]
Inside the Wagner Group's armed uprising.
Around the world:
Sina Azodi: [08-16]
It's been 70 yrs since the CIA-assisted coup in Iran:
In many ways, the original sin of American Cold War foreign policy --
not the first move, as those as early as 1946 were directed against
actual communist influence and insurgencies, but in the case of Iran,
it was simply a favor to British imperialism and the "Seven Sisters"
of the oil world, which wound up compensating Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
for its suffering. By 1979, the event was little remembered in the
US, but etched unforgettably in Iran, leading directly to the hostage
crisis and all the subsequent bad blood. Stephen Kinzer's All the
Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
(2003) is a nice, short book on the subject.
Adriana Beltrán: [08-18]
The high stakes of Guatemala's presidential elections: "The world
is watching as a reformer takes on and tries to reverse the country's
slide into political corruption."
Connor Echols: [08-17]
What will happen to US troops stationed in Niger if the region
explodes?
Genevieve Glatsky/José María León Cabrera: [08-20]
Security is the main worry as Ecuador votes on Sunday. Here's what
to know. It looks like leftist candidate Luisa Gonzalez leads
the voting, with "business scion" Daniel Noboa in second-place,
advancing to the run-off on Oct. 15.
Uki Goni: [08-14]
Far-right outsider takes shock lead in Argentina primary election:
"Former tantric sex coach and Donald Trump admirer Javier Milei
has said he thinks the climate crisis is 'a socialist lie'." If
elected, it sounds like he could become the worst president
anywhere (although his party did poorly in Congressional races).
For another report:
Jack Nicas/Natalie Alcoha/Lucia Cholakian Herrera: [08-14]
Far-right libertarian wins Argentina's presidential primary:
With 30% of the vote, which puts him in the October 22 runoff.
The system is
pretty confusing, as the first round included primaries within
party coalitions, but it looks like the runoff will be between Milei,
Sergio Massa (21%, "center-left"), Patricia Bullrich (17%, "right-wing"),
and two others who cleared the 1.5% minimum: Juan Schiaretti (a
"non-Kirchnerist Peronist"), and Myriam Bregman ("a lawyer, human
rights and women's rights activist"). Eliminated are coalition
primary runners up Horacio Rodriguez Lareta (11%) lost to Bullrich
(which suggests the PRO vote is 28%), and Juan Grabois (6%) lost
to Massa (which would give FR 27%), so the top three coalitions
are pretty close, and a second runoff on November 19 seems likely.
Sarah Dadouch: [08-14]
Who is Javier Milei, Argentina's right-wing presidential front-runner?
Neve Gordon: [08-18]
The true face of Israel's protest movement. Cites a
"glowing profile" of Israeli particle physicist Shikma Bressler,
then adds some nuances the New York Times missed.
Ellen Ioanes: [08-20]
What's at stake in Guatemala's elections: "Anti-corruption
presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo is heavily favored in
polls." Meanwhile. the conservative establishment is trying to
get him removed form the ballot.
James Park/Mike Mochizuki: [08-18]
Camp David summit: A trilateral march toward instability?
The war council between the US, Japan, and South Korea met,
and decided to stroke each other to the exclusion of any more
serious issues of war and peace.
[PS: Fred Kaplan [08-18] has a different view:
Why Biden's summit with Japan and South Korea is a big deal.
He also gives Biden more credit on China than is clear to me: [08-11]
Biden's delicate dance with China.]
Roni Caryn Rabin: [08-15]
Growing segregation by sex in Israel raises fears for women's
rights: As this makes clear, Israel is moving way beyond
apartheid.
Other stories:
Dean Baker: [08-15]
Getting beyond copyright: There are better ways to support creative
work.
Paul Cantor: [08-18]
The other 9/11: Next month will mark the 50th anniversary of
the US-supported coup in Chile, where democratically elected
president Salvador Allende was killed, as were many more (the
final figure cited here is 3000), and replaced by Augusto Pinochet's
dictartorship. Henry Kissinger was chief among the conspirators,
and this figures prominent in his long list of crimes against
humanity. Pinochet remained in power until 1990, and turned
Chile into a laboratory for Milton Friedman's neoliberal economic
theories, which needless to say were disastrous.
Robert Sherrill: [1988-06-11]
William F Buckley lived off evil as mold lives off garbage:
An old piece, basically a review of John B Judis: William F
Buckley, Jr: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, which includes
a section on Buckley's junkets to Chile to help Pinochet. Sherrill
was 89 when he died in 2014. I remember reading his eye-opening
1968 book, Gothic Politics in the Deep South, which helped
clarify some memories I had of visiting Arkansas when Orval Faubus
was still governor. I also read, and occasionally drop the title
of, Military Justice Is to Justice as Military Music Is to
Music (1970).
Lisa M Corrigan: [08-16]
The evisceration of a public university: "West Virginia University
is being gutted, and it's a preview for what's in store for higher
education."
Carter Dougherty: [05-22]
A new vision for a just financial system: A laundry list of
mostly good ideas, but the one that always strikes me as key is
"provide public banking," which leads me to ask, what do we need
all these other crooks and predators for? I don't anticipate
outlawing them, and I can see likely value for innovation around
the margins, but most banking transactions can be done simply
and cheaply by a common non-profit, and that can easily extend
into large classes of routine loans (credit cards, mortgages,
small business loans, etc.).
Rachel DuRose: [08-12]
What's going on with your lightbulbs? Perhaps they're right
that "incandescent lightbulbs aren't banned," but they're getting
harder to find, not that I've looked in 10-20 years, at least
since LED manufacturers stopped trying to charge you for the
5-10 incandescent bulbs you might have bought during the expected
lifetime of the LED bulb. I've moved to LEDs wherever possible:
the main exception are places where only halogens seem to work;
my happiest switch was finding I could replace fluourescent
tubes with LEDs without having to rewire around the ballast,
and they are many times better.
Jordan Gale: [08-18]
An intimate look at Portland's housing crisis: "The ongoing
housing crisis in Portland, Ore., has desensitized us to the real
people who have been affected." A photo essay.
Peter E Gordon: [08-08]
President of the Moon Committee: "Walter Benjamin's radio years."
German literary critic, associated with Frankfurt School but legendary
in his own right, 1892-1940 (committed suicide when jailed while trying
to flee the Nazis). This collects what survives of radio transcripts
from 1927-33, a wide-ranging commentary meant to be more readily
accessible than his usual writings.
Constance Grady: [08-17]
How does Elon Musk get away with it all? "The billionaire's
heroic image is built on media praise, breathless fans, and . . .
romance novel tropes." But hasn't he also become the object of
intense ridicule, based on not just that he's a rich asshole but
that he flaunts that image endlessly. Or am I missing something?
And what's unusual about rich assholes getting away with things?
Sure, Donald Trump is turning into an exception, but think of
all the things he got away with before his luck turned. And as
a rich asshole, he still has such enormous advantages, he may
still get away with it.
Lauren Michele Jackson: [08-17]
The "-ification" of everything: "it's an interesting combination
of trying to do something original that is, in fact, already quite
derivative. That's how culture works."
Chalmers Johnson: [08-13]
Coming to terms with China: This is a piece written back in
2005 by the former CIA analyst (1931-2010), who wrote a series
of books I recommend highly: Blowback: The Costs and Consequences
of American Empire (2000; rev. 2004); The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2006);
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007);
and Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope
(2010). In one of those books, he published a thought experiment
as to how China could disable America's entire satellite network
(all it would take would be to "launch a dumptruck full of gravel"
into earth orbit), and how crippling that would be. This is a
sober analysis of trends already clear in 2005 as China was
emerging as a fully independent world power. He ends with the
question: "Why should China's emergence as a rich, successful
country be to the disadvantage of either Japan or the United
States?" In particular, he warns that: "History teaches us that
the least intelligent response to this development would be to
try to stop it through military force." Yet we clearly do have
strategists in Washington whose intelligence is that low.
Mike Joy: [08-15]
Critics of 'degrowth' economics say it's unworkable -- but from an
ecologist's perspective, it's inevitable. Looks like it was
David Attenborough who said, "someone who believes in infinite
growth is either a madman or an economist." Even some economists
realized that infinite growth can't possibly happen (although I
failed to find the quote; I vaguely remember Kenneth Arrow). One
of the big differences between eco-activists and Democrats is that
the latter see growth as the solution to all problems, whereas we
(putting on that hat, which isn't my only one) see it as one of
the most intractable of political problems. But at some point, I
think it does have to come into play, as I don't see any viable
alternative.
Stephen Kearse: [08-17]
The return of Nonane: "In her new album, Sundial, the
rapper melds her activism and artistry seamlessly." Before I heard
this album, I ran into complaints of anti-semitism, a kneejerk
reaction to guest Jay Electronica namedropping "Farrakhan sent
me." So this review is first of all interesting to me because
the reviewer didn't even notice the offense, casually grouping
Jay Electronica with Billy Woods among "the fellow rap mavericks,"
with an oblique reference to a different line. Expect my review
in the next Music Week. I wish I was as sure of her political
acumen as Kearse is, but I also doubt that it really matters.
Chris Lehman:
[08-16]
The patronizing moralism of David Brooks: "In a series of recent
essays, the New York Times columnist has pronounced all social
ills the result of deficient moral fiber among individuals." Reminds
me of a Bertolt Brecht line, but the English translations leave much
to be desired. ("Grub first, then ethics"? More like "morality is a
self-satisfying luxury for those who have eaten." Not that Brecht
couldn't be pithy, as in: "What keeps mankind alive? Bestial acts.")
Still, isn't it possible to accept Brooks' analysis and simply ask
"so what"? If problems are caused by "deficient moral fiber," why
should that prevent us from solving the problems? Does it sound like
too much work? Or is it possibly the sense of righteousness that
accrues to people who can afford to look down their noses at others?
It's even possible that people who "lack morals" now might develop
some once their baser needs are met. On the other hand, I rather
doubt that the conservative approach, which is to let people rot in
their squalor, or just lock them away or worse, gives "morals" a
very good reputation, or sets a positive example.
Interesting note toward the end here about Christopher Lasch.
I read much of his early work, but never got to The Culture of
Narcissism, which as Lehman notes is widely cited by social
scourges like Brooks. Lehman defends Lasch as much misunderstood,
which certainly sounds credible to me. After all, the amount of
stuff Brooks misunderstands seems boundless.
[08-18]
The new bard of the right: More than you need to know about a
country song by Oliver Anthony, "Rich Men North of Richmond,"
which earns its conservative bona fides by bitching about how
taxes are spent on poor people (without, of course, noting the
vastly larger sums spent making rich people richer).
PS: Listened to the
song and double-checked the
lyrics. First verse could just as easily have turned left
("I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day/ Overtime hours for
bullshit pay"), but then he makes a couple fairly major blunders.
You know about the punching down on welfare, which has been a
right-wing trope for more than fifty years, but the other one
still surprises me: "These rich men north of Richmond/ Lord
knows they all just wanna have total control." This notion that
"liberal elites" (which is what his phrase means, after stripping
away the gratuitous Confederate angst) want "total control" is
ridiculous on many levels, yet it is the common thread of
right-wing paranoia (e.g., Bill Gates' nanobots disseminated
through Covid vaccines). Such control, despite the diligent
efforts of regimes like China and Israel, is impossible, and
even if it were possible, no liberals would want it: central
tenets of liberalism include that all people should think for
themselves, and respect for (or at least tolerance of) different
thinking by others.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are opposed to those tenets,
which makes their aversion that liberals want "total control" look
like some kind of projection. On a practical level, this leads them
to prevent students from being exposed to facts and ideas that may
undermine their preferred beliefs, and where possible to ban those
ideas from the public, while using the power of the state for harsh
repression of any sign of dissidence.
A couple more comments on this song:
Gregory P Magarian: [08-20]
The revealing case of a Kansas judge and a search warrant:
The Marion, KS police raided the offices of a small-town newspaper
that had upset a local business owner.
Orlando Mayorquin: [08-20]
Store owner is fatally shot by man who confronted her about Pride
Flag. Her murderer was later tracked down and killed by police,
further proof that while guns are good for committing crimes, they're
not much good for self-defense.
Christian Paz: [08-14]
How two pop culture Twitter accounts turned into the internet's
wire service: "Are Pop Crave and Pop Base the future of
political journalism?" Noted out of curiosity, which so far
isn't sufficient to render an answer. I am, however, skeptical,
and not just about these particular portals but about "political
journalism" in general.
Andrew Prokop: [08-17]
The mystery of Hunter Biden's failed plea deal: "Incompetence,
malfeasance, or politics?" My best guess is mixed motives, undone
by politics. The plea deal was a way for the prosecution to score
a win, while Biden gets to put the case behind him without too much
pain. But neither motive was strong enough to overcome the politics,
where Republicans have been harping on "the Biden crime family" way
before Biden ran in 2020. Without this drumbeat of harassment, I
doubt the case would ever have been prosecuted, regardless of the
defendant's name. In any case, credit Republicans with extraordinary
chutzpah for juggling their political campaign against Biden while
while still decrying political motives in re Trump.
Sigal Samuel: [08-18]
What normal Americans -- not AI companies -- want for AI:
"Public opinion about AI can be summed up in two words: Slow.
Down." One significant polling result is: "82 percent of American
voters don't trust AI companies to self-regulate." One proposal
is that: "At each phase of the AI system lifecycle, the burder
should be on companies to prove their systems are not
harmful." Even this seems like a two-edged sword, as "harmful"
can mean different things to different people. I'm inclined to
limit ways companies can profit from AI, such as requiring the
software to be open source, so we can get lots of eyes evaluating
it and flagging possible problems. That would slow things down,
but also help assure us that what does get released will be used
constructively. If AI seems like a sudden emergence in the last
couple years, it's because companies have hit the point where
they have products to sell to exploit various angles. Given that
most new business development is predatory, that's something one
should be wary of.
Jeffrey St Clair: [08-18]
The night the cops tried to break Thelonious Monk. No "Roaming
Charges" this week, but this is worth perusing. It recounts the
story of how Monk took a rap for the more fragile Bud Powell in
1951, and how Monk got blackballed by NYC, so he couldn't perform
live during the period when he cut some of the most groundbreaking
albums in jazz history. I first encountered these stories in Geoff
Dyer's fictionalized But Beautiful, which I've always loved
(although I know at least one prominent Monk fan who flat out hates
the book).
Astra Taylor: [08-18]
Why does everyone feel so insecure all the time? One of the
smartest political writers working today, offers an introduction
to her forthcoming book, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together
as Things Fall Apart, where among much more she picks up on
Barbara Ehrenreich's "fear of falling" theme (title of her "1989
study of the psychology of the middle class"). The more recent
term is precarity. Much of this is quotable, as I'm reminded by
tweets quoting her:
The relatively privileged have "rigged a game that can't be won,
one that keeps them stressed and scrambling, and breathing the
same smoke-tinged air as the rest of us."
"Insecurity affects people on every rung of the economic ladder,
even if its harshest edge is predictably reserved for those at
the bottom."
Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [05-29]
The long afterlife of libertarianism: "As a movement, it has
imploded. As a credo, it's here to stay." Review of The
Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the
Soul of Libertarianism, by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi,
while roping in several other books. This reminds me that one of
my jobs, back in the mid-1970s, was typesetting reprints of several
Murray Rothbard books -- for the Kochs, as it turned out -- so I
got deep into the weeds of his arguments for privatized police and
fire departments, among everything else. Thus I was able to make
sense out of Michael Lind's quip: that libertarianism had been
tried and had failed; it was just called feudalism at the time.
(Can't find the exact quote.) It's easy to imagine the Kochs as
feudal lords, because that's how they run their company (and
would like to run the country), which not coincidentally leaves
precious little liberty but anyone but the lords. Still, when
governments do become overbearing, which is sadly much of the
time, it's tempting to fall back on the libertarians for sharp
critiques. It's just impossible to build anything that works
from negative platitudes. As I think back, the new left was
much smarter to focus not on government, which was a tool and
rarely monolithic, but on power itself. I don't recall when I
first ran across the maxim "power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely," but it was well before I turned left,
yet it remains as one of the great truths of our times.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, August 13, 2023
Speaking of Which
Midweek I thought I had an idea for a real essay on an important
issue. I then flailed for a couple days, ultimately writing nothing.
That's not unusual these days, making me despair of ever writing
anything worth being taken seriously. Then on Friday I pulled up
my template for this weekly compendium, and started scanning the
usual sources, and words came pouring out. I'm at 6600 mid-Sunday
afternoon, and still writing.
The piece I had in mind was a reaction to Roger Cohen: [08-06]
Putin's Forever War. I cited this piece last week, and wrote:
An extended portrait of a Russia isolated
by sanctions and agitated and militated by a war footing that seems
likely to extend without ends, if not plausibly forever. I suspect
there is a fair amount of projection here. The US actually has been
engaged in forever wars, boundless affairs first against communism
then against terrorism (or whatever you call it). Russia has struggled
with internal order, but had little interest in "a civilizational
conflict" until the Americans pushed NATO up to its borders. On the
other hand, once you define such a conflict, it's hard to resolve it.
The US has failed twice, and seems to be even more clueless in its
high stakes grappling with Russia and China.
I don't doubt that there is substance in this piece, but note also
that it fits in with a propaganda narrative that posits Putin as an
irreconcilable enemy of democracy, someone who will seize every
opportunity to undermine the West and to expand Russia.
I'd have to research prior uses, but "forever war" seems to have
appeared as a critical response to America's War on Terror, given
its vague rationale and arguably unattainable goals, but the terms
"endless war" and
"perpetual
war" go back farther, and have been applied to the US for cases
like Vietnam and Central America (which goes back to the "gunboat
diplomacy" of Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, which returned
in different guise with Reagan, Bush, and Clinton). But the Cold
War as a whole fits the term, as it was directed more against
working class and anti-colonial revolts everywhere, and not just
the Soviet Union that was imagined directing them. The Cold War
lost a bit of steam when the Soviet Union disbanded in 1991, but
continues to this day, most conspicuously against North Korea and
Cuba, but also more obliquely (I'm tempted to say aspirationally)
China and Russia.
Despite these examples, "forever war" isn't a popular idea in
America. At least through my generation, we grew up expecting quick,
decisive wars: big wars like WWII took less than four years, WWI
about half that, even the Civil War a few months more; Korea was
largely decided in the first year, but stretched out to three as
Truman refused to sign off; smaller wars were usually over quickly,
as were Bush's in Panama and Kuwait. Vietnam was viewed as "endless"
mostly by the Vietnamese, as they had struggled for independence
against China, France, and Japan before the Americans -- Gen. Tran
Van Don wrote a 1978 book to that effect. In America the preferred
word was "quagmire," reflecting a decision to get into something
that war couldn't fix, rather than evoking a struggle that would
go on for generations.
Throughout history, most protracted wars occurred on the margins
of empires. If you recognize America as an empire -- a word that
Jefferson was fond of, although lately it's fallen out of favor,
even as the evidence of 800+ bases around the world, and fingers
in the affairs of virtually every country, prove the point --
"forever wars" are all but inevitable. Especially since the US
built its permanent war machine, linked to an industrial complex
whose profits depend on projecting potential enemies, which will
supposedly be deterred by the terror the US could unleash upon
its enemies.
But deterrence is a frail, fragile concept, one that works only
as long as the country being deterred doesn't feel threatened. The
Soviet Union jealously guarded what Stalin regarded as his sphere
of influence, but had no real ambitions beyond that. Revolutions
would have to come on their own, as happened in China, Vietnam,
and Cuba. Most countries don't admit to feeling threatened, as it's
easy enough to humor the Americans, and possibly advantageous to
local elites. On the other hand, when Al Qaeda took a couple pot
shots at American power, the doctrine of deterrence, built on the
concept of America as the world's sole hyperpower, dictated war,
even if the US had to invent proxy countries to invade. This show
of absolute power only revealed its vulnerability.
But Islamic jihadists turned out to be only minor nuisances,
leading to endless skirmishes in places like Somalia and Niger,
while the arms merchants looked back longingly on the good old
days of the Cold War, when weapons systems were expensive and
didn't really have to work (e.g., the F-35), so they've fomented
a propaganda offensive against Russia and China -- the latter still
passes as communist, and the former is still Russian, so it's been
easy to revive old tropes. Finally, they hit pay dirt in Ukraine,
where they've been remarkably successful at avoiding any thought
of compromise, leaving endless war as the only thinkable option.
Of course, they're not selling it as an endless war. They hold
out a promise of Ukraine recapturing all of the Russian-occupied
territory, even regions that had rejected Kyiv's pivot to the West
in 2014. All winter we were regaled with stories about how Ukraine's
"spring offensive" would drive back Russia (provided we delivered
sufficient weapons). The optimism hasn't abated since the delayed
"counteroffensive" started in June, but they've made virtually no
net progress. In the long run, Russia has three big advantages:
a much larger economy, much more depth in soldiers, and they are
fighting exclusively on Ukrainian territory (although the native
population of Crimea and Donbas have always favored Russia, so
even if Ukraine regains ground, they may lose the defensive edge
way before they meet their goals).
The other hope is that Russia's will to fight might flag, given
how extensive sanctions have isolated the Russian economy. Again,
there is scant evidence of this, and sanctions may just as well
have hardened Russian resolve. There is also no reason to believe
that Putin's hold on Russia's political structure is slipping or
fragmenting. Sensible people would recognize this as a stalemate,
and attempt to find some negotiated compromise, but hawks on both
sides are working hard to keep that from happening.
Cohen's article is important for showing how Putin is organizing
support for extending the war indefinitely by portraying it as a
defense of Russian civilization against the West. In such a war,
the stakes are so high that the only option is to fight until the
threat gives up. We should find this prospect very disconcerting,
and should take pains to assure Russia that we're still looking
forward to a peace where we can coexist, work together, and prosper.
But America has its own coterie of civilizational warriors, who
have been stoking this war most of their lives. They insist that
Putin has been plotting revenge against the West since 1991, with
the immediate goal of restoring the Soviet Union borders, moving
on to restore the Russian Empire, and beyond that who knows? Most
of these people are Russophobes dating back to the Cold War, and
they may well have good reason for their prejudices, but turning
them into ideological principles makes them useless in a world
where war is so destructive that almost any kind of peace is
preferable.
There must be people in the Biden administration to understand
that such demonization of Russia (and China) risks developing into
a war of unimaginable dimensions. There must be people who realize
that cooperation is essential to keep economies functioning, to
transition away from fossil fuels, to save human life as we know
it. Yet they are cornered by arms merchants and strategists and
ideologues who are willing to risk all that just for some patch
of ground that ultimately means nothing.
I've insisted all along that there are ways to negotiate not just
an end to this war but a lasting peace based on mutual respect and
interests. The unwillingness on all sides in doing this is rooted
in misinformation and disrespect. Cohen's article shows one set of
myths taking root in Russia. Perhaps by examining those, we can also
start examining our own.
I suppose that's one way to end a piece. Obviously, much more can
be said. I refer you back to my original
23 Theses piece, and to the weekly sections on Ukraine
in every
Speaking of Which
since Putin's invasion in late February, especially the Feb. 26, 2022
Speaking of Ukraine, where I heaped plenty of blame on Putin,
but also wrote:
The real question is whether the US can come out of this with a
generous, constructive approach to world order -- something far
removed from the arrogance that developed after the Cold War, that
drove us into the manifest failures of the Global War on Terror.
Looking around Washington it's hard to identify anyone with the
good sense to change direction.
A
week
earlier, I was already writing about the war drums beating, starting
with "possibly the most dishonest and provocative [tweet] I've ever
seen," and including links to titles like: Army of Ukraine lobbyists
behind unprecedented Washington blitz; America's real adversaries
are its European and other allies; Why every president is terrible
at foreign policy now; and (just to show you I wasn't only thinking
about Ukraine/Russia) Some Trump records taken to Mar-a-Lago clearly
marked as classified, including documents at 'top secret' level.
I also ended with an 11-paragraph PS that worked up to this:
I don't know of anyone with a soft spot for Putin. I do know people
who consider him less of a threat to world peace than the leaders of
the country that spends more than 50% of the world's total military
expenditures, the country that has troops and 800+ bases scattered
around the world, the country that has (or works for people who have)
business interests everywhere, a country that does a piss poor job of
taking care of its own people and has no conception of the welfare of
others, a leadership that so stuck in its own head that it can't tell
real threats from imaginary ones, that projects its own most rabid
fears onto others and insists on its sole right to dictate terms to
the world.
I also wrote a fairly long piece on Ukraine and Russia back on
January 27, 2022:
NATO pushes its logic (and luck?). Not much more before that,
at least relative to everything else, but it's interesting to
scroll back, finding lots of stories that still reverberate,
and comments that are mostly still appropriate.
Top story threads:
Trump: The indicted one continues to draw enough comment
to merit his own section, mostly on his legal predicaments, as he
as nothing else substantive to offer -- other than an exceptionally
robust selection of "irritable mental gestures" (Lionel Trilling's
description of "conservative thought," which has only grown more
apt over seventy-plus years).
Holly Bailey: [08-12]
Georgia prosecutor to begin presenting 2020 election case next week
to grand jury: Promises, promises.
Zack Beauchamp: [08-11]
The constitutional case that Donald Trump is already banned from being
president: "Two conservative lawyers make a strong 14th Amendment
argument. But the politics of their theory are very, very dicey." I
don't really buy the "strong" arguments that Trump should be banned,
let alone the idea that doing so would help preserve democracy.
Jonathan Chait: [08-09]
Prosecuting Trump will only make Republicans crazier, warns law prof:
Bush henchman Jack Goldsmith
wrote the op-ed Chait's reacting to: [08-08]
The prosecution of Trump may have terrible consequences. I can
think of reasons why the prosecution may come to naught, but Trump's
acts were so egregious that I can't blame the the system for trying
to defend its conception of law and order. Goldsmith offers impeachment
as a preferable remedy but, you know, been there, done that, found it
didn't really work. Chait asks the obvious rhetorical question: "How
much crazier can they get, though?" It's beginning to seem limitless.
Matthew Cooper: [08-04]
"The jury is not going to believe" Trump's defense in the January 6
trial: Interview with Jennifer Taub: "The problem here is Merrick
Garland. In March 2021, when Garland was sworn in, he should have
appointed a special counsel. There's almost nothing in this indictment
that they would not have had earlier if they had had the special
counsel. We could have had an indictment a year ago. This would
have been resolved."
Ankush Khardori: [08-10]
Is it possible Trump will strike a plea deal to avoid prison?
That's what a sensible person would do, especially one with the
intrinsic advantages of Trump. But it would be political suicide.
His strength is that he always fights back, even when faced with
overwhelming odds. Take that away, and what does he have left?
Chris Lehman: [08-11]
A federal judge warned Trump not to make "inflammatory statements":
Or more precisely, "statements that might amount to witness intimidation
or jury tampering," which reads much more narrowly, given that Trump
makes nothing but inflammatory statements. Now the question is whether
the judge's warning will be enforced (e.g., by finding Trump in contempt
of court and/or revoking his bail). I seriously doubt the judge will do
either, although judge Chutkan has issued a novel threat: see Kyle
Cheney: [08-11]
Judge warns Trump: 'Inflammatory' statements about election case could
speed trial.
Timothy Noah: [08-08]
The commentariat lets Donald Trump off the hook: The thing is
that while there's no reason for sensible people to take anything
that Trump says seriously, there really are seriously deranged
individuals looking to him for inspiration and direction as to
who to hit in his name. So while Trump himself isn't competent
enough to organize a mugging or a hit, it's not inconceivable
that one of his fans might get the hint and try to please him.
A responsible person would recognize that anyone who has that
sort of influence needs to speak cautiously. Trump simply isn't
that kind of person.
Jose Pagliery: [08-11]
Inside one 'egregious' mistake from Trump's Florida Judge Aileen
Cannon.
Nia Prater: [08-10]
Trump is going after Fani Willis before he even gets indicted:
Have you noticed how Trump attacks every Black person who crosses him as
"RACIST"? Can't he conceive of any other reason someone might not
like him?
Christopher Robertson/Russell M Gold: [08-10]
Legal scholars reject Trump complaints: Prosecutors treating him
"a lot better" than most defendants: "We wish that our clients
received the advantages that prosecutors are giving Trump." It
would be more accurate to admit that most defendants are treated
harshly and imperiously, because prosecutors have the power to
do that. Trump is the exception, not just because he's white and
rich and massively lawyered up, but because he brings intense
public scrutiny to the case, forcing everyone to be on their best
behavior -- something almost unheard of in the American system of
justice.
Areeba Shah: [08-10]
Trump's Twitter account may be key "part of the puzzle" for Jack
Smith to "prove intent": This explains the rationale for the
subpoena. You can speculate over Elon Musk's obstruction, for
which see Tatyana Tandanipolie: [08-09]
Twitter fined $350K for not complying with Jack Smith subpoena
because they wanted to tip off Trump.
Alex Shephard: [08-10]
Trump as a big weakness, but his rivals don't want to exploit it:
"The former president has been an electoral liability three cycles
in a row. Why not mention it?" But they do at least allude to it,
and it surely gets an airing behind closed doors, especially in
the establishment campaign committees, but there's not much they
can do about it as long as Trump holds sway over a majority of
the base. And it's not as if mainstream Republicans are all that
popular. They depend a lot on gerrymanders, and they're masters
of nasty campaigning, but they're lucky if they break even, and
when they do win, their support quickly collapses. Besides, while
Trump lost some possible votes, he won a lot of crossover votes
in 2016, and even in 2020. And he wins on attitude and conviction,
which is what juices the base. Take that away and what do you
still have left? "Good government" conservatism? Ha!
Jonathan Swan/Ruth Igielnik/Shane Goldmacher/Maggie
Haberman: [08-13]
How Trump benefits from an indictment effect: "In polling,
fund-raising and conservative media, the former president has
turned criminal charges into political assets."
Betsy Woodruff Swan/Kyle Cheney: [08-08]
Special counsel still scrutinizing finances of Trump's PAC.
Joan Walsh: [08-11]
Please, please stop blaming "progressives" for Donald Trump's
fascism: My first reaction was: yeah, that's Walsh's job (cf.
her rants about Jill Stein, Cornel West, even
Bernie Sanders). Then I read the article, and found out that
this time she's dumping on Michael Schaeffer: [08-11]
Please, please stop with the progressive hero worship of Jack Smith
and Tanya Chutkan. (Not in the title, but in the illustration,
note Robert Mueller, making the point succinctly enough that the
rest of the article is redundant.) I'm not even sure who the
"progressives" are here, but they're obviously not much to the
left of Walsh. It's worth recalling that all of these people were
selected because they would be viewed as impartial by people in
the middle of the political spectrum, and that they will bend over
backwards to prove their impartiality before they're done. Sure,
it's reassuring that they're willing to level the most inarguable
charges against someone as flagrantly evil as Trump, but they're
not heroes; they're just doing their job, within the limits of
their power and understanding thereof.
DeSantis, and other Republicans:
Fabiola Cineas: [08-10]
DeSantis is still standing by Florida's revisionist Black history.
Nate Cohn: [08-10]
It's not Reagan's party anymore: "Our latest poll leaves little
doubt that Donald J. Trump has put an end to that era." This piece
could be an exhibit in How to Lie With Statistics. The very
concept of "Reagan's party" is pretty nebulous. He represented one
faction in a more diverse party, but was at least tolerant of the
other factions. Since the Hastert Rule, Republicans have become so
homogenized that they only move in lockstep. Hence the transition
from Paul Ryan to Trump has been like a school of fish all turning
in unison. Especially spurious is the definition of "Reagan's
three-legged stool": all three are vaguely but perversely defined,
with Reagan himself clearly opposed to the leg defined as "prefer
reducing debt to protecting entitlements" (debt exploded under
Reagan's tax cuts and defense build up, while he raised taxes to
shore up Social Security); "think America should be active abroad"
is way too vague (what about "think Iran-Contra was a good idea"?);
and "oppose same-sex marriage" wasn't even an issue for Reagan,
whose contempt for gays was summed up in his hopes for the AIDS
plague (thankfully, the government didn't actually follow his
lead on that one). No doubt the GOP as evolved since Reagan, but
it's usually been to universalize his most perverse impulses.
In that, we should be wary of excusing him just because later
generations of Republicans became even nastier and more brutish.
Reagan, like Nixon before him, set the tone, which hasn't changed
all that much with Trump. It's just become more shameless.
Ed Kilgore: [08-09]
Ohio blows up the Republican plan to block abortion rights:
Going back to the progressive era, Ohio allows citizens to petition
for a vote on a possible state constitutional amendment, which can
pass with a simple majority of votes. One is scheduled for November
to consider an amendment that will ensure abortion rights as a matter
of state constitutional right. After Kansas voted down 59-41% a state
amendment to remove a constitutional right to abortion, Republicans
in Ohio panicked, and pushed an amendment vote up to Tuesday, to
change the state constitution to require a supermajority of 60% to
pass future amendments. That's what got voted down this week, 57-43%,
allowing the November amendment to be decided by a majority vote.
Further evidence that no gimmick is so obscure or undemocratic for
Republicans to try if they see some advantage. Also that people are
wising up to their tricks.
Dan Lamothe/Hannah Dormido: [08-12]
See where Sen. Tommy Tuberville is blocking 301 military promotions:
I couldn't care less about the promotions, which are mostly general
officers, but it is notable how Senate rules allow one moron to cause
so much obstruction.
Rebecca Leber: [08-11]
An insidious form of climate denial is festering in the Republican
Party. They've basically reverted to shouting their denials
louder, as if that makes them more convincing. Not that Republicans
are unwilling to do something about "climate" if their incentives
are aligned: they're pushing a "Trillion Trees Act," which is
basically Bush's "Healthy Forests Initiative" warmed over (i.e.,
clearcut forests and replace them with tree farms). They also
want to, quoting Kevin McCarthy, "replace Russian natural gas with
American natural gas, and let's not only have a cleaner world, but
a safer world." That's wrong in every possible direction.
Jose Pagliery/Josh Fiallo: [08-09]
'Weak dictator' Ron DeSantis ousts another prosecutor he dislikes:
Orlando-area prosecutor Monique Worrell, a Democrat who won her district
with 67% of the votes. DeSantis previously suspended Tampa prosecutor
Andrew Warren. For more, see Eileen Grench: [03-04]
Florida prosecutor reveals real reasons she landed in DeSantis'
crosshairs.
Nikki McCann Ramirez: [08-10]
DeSantis says drone strikes against Mexican cartels are on the table:
I'd like to see this table, the one people are constantly piling stupid
ideas on, just to show they're so tough and brainless.
Michael Tomasky: [08-09]
Please, House Republicans, be crazy enough to impeach Joe Biden:
"If Kevin McCarthy does what his unhinged caucus wants him to do, he
may as well hand over his speakership to the Democrats." It's generally
believed that impeaching Clinton hurt the Republicans (Democrats in
1998 picked up 5 seats in the House, and held even in the Senate,
defying the usual shift to the party out of the White House). They
had a better case then, and a slight hope they might panic Clinton
into resigning. Conversely, it's hard to say that the first Trump
impeachment helped the Democrats (who lost seats in 2020, but took
the White House; after the second, they lost the House in 2022).
A Biden impeachment would be even more obviously a flagrant partisan
ploy, and is even more certain of failure. All it would do is expose
how unhinged Republican rhetoric has become. So I'm not worried that
they might bring it on.
Scott Waldman: [08-07]
DeSantis's Florida approves climate-denial videos in schools.
Noah Weiland: [08-13]
After end of pandemic coverage guarantee, Texas is epicenter of Medicaid
losses: "Texas has dropped over half a million people from the
program, more than any other state." In the early days of the pandemic,
Trump and the Republicans panicked -- most likely because the stock
market crashed -- and begged Democrats to pass a relief bill. What
Schumer and Pelosi came up with was remarkable, and saved the day,
while Republicans became increasingly upset that they had done
anything at all. The emergency reforms all had sunset dates, but
should have been the basis for extended reforms. Voters failed to
reward Democrats for what they did -- the tendency is to assume
that a disaster averted would never have happened -- and now the
American people (especially in "red states") are paying the price.
Biden and/or the Democrats:
Lee Harris: [08-07]
Biden admin to restore labor rule gutted in 1980s.
Robert Kuttner: [08-08]
Biden's New Hampshire blunder. Biden, or the DNC that he controls,
decided to promote South Carolina (which Biden won in 2020) ahead of
Iowa and New Hampshire (which Biden lost, both, badly, although as
the incumbent he'd be very unlikely to lose them in 2024). Folks in
New Hampshire put a lot of stock in being first in the nation. Aside
from ego, it draws a lot of tourist dollars in the middle of winter.
I've always thought this was a really terrible idea, and could write
reams on why, but right now it's simply a boat that doesn't need
rocking, fueled by rationales that don't need airing (e.g., NH is
too white; on the other hand, SC is too Republican; NH gets a lot
of press, but up third, SC has actually had more impact lately).
Jason Linkins: [08-12]
This week's Republican faceplant has a 2024 lesson for Democrats:
No matter how great Bidenomics is, the really persuasive reason to
vote for Democrats is to save us from Republicans. There are many
examples one can point to, but the stripping of abortion rights is
one of the clearest and most impactful.
Chris Megerian/Terry Tang: [08-08]
Biden creates new national monument near Grand Canyon, citing tribal
heritage, climate concerns.
Jeff Stein: [08-12]
5 key pillars of President Biden's economic revolution: run the
economy hot; make unions stronger; revive domestic manufacturing
through green energy; rein in corporate power; expand the safety
net.
Legal matters:
Climate and Environment:
Umair Irfan: [08-10]
This strange hurricane season may take a turn for the worse:
"Oceans are at record high temperatures, but El Nińo is keeping a
lid on tropical storms in the Atlantic." According to
Wikipedia, there were three named storms in June (before the
season officially started), but only one in July, and none so far
in August. You might also check out the trackers for
Pacific hurricanes (Dora, which crossed open seas, impacted Hawaii's
fires with strong winds);
Pacific typhoons (Mawar, which passed by Japan, was severe;
Doksuri, which hit Fujian and dumped record rainfall as far inland
as Beijing, and Khanun, which landed in Korea, were "very strong,"
as is Lan, currently approaching Japan); and
Indian Ocean cyclones (Mocha, which hit Bangladesh, and Biparjoy,
which hit Gujarat, were especially severe).
Benji Jones: [08-11]
How Maui's wildfires became so apocalyptic: "A large hurricane,
drought, and perhaps even invasive grasses have fueled the devastating
fires in Hawaii."
Kate Aronoff: [08-11]
WHO head on Hawaii: This is the "new normal." Actually, "normal" no
longer exists.
Kellen Browning/Mitch Smith: [08-13]
'We need some help here': West Maui residents say government aid is
scant: Haven't they heard Reagan's quip about "the seven scariest
words in the English language"? Seriously, it was a joke, and when
disaster hits, it isn't even that.
David Gelles, et al: [08-13]
The clean energy future is arriving faster than you think: Sure,
not fast enough, but after decades of talk with little to show for
it, this is starting to look real. Part of a series, including:
Matt Stieb: [08-11]
There will be more Mauis: "The dangers of high winds and dry
grassland make for a dangerous wildfire formula, and not just in
Hawaii." Interview with Nick Bond.
Dan Stillman: [08-11]
Unrelenting Hurricane Dora makes history by becoming a typhoon:
The difference between a hurricane and a typhoon is the international
date line: in the east Pacific, they're hurricanes; in the west, they're
typhoons. Dora started up as a tropical wave that crossed over Central
America into the Pacific, intensifying to Category 4 south of Cabo San
Lucas, Mexico, on August 2-3, and has headed pretty much due west ever
since, passing south of Hawaii but close enough to whip up the winds
that fanned fires in Maui, and it's still headed west, varying between
Categories 2 and 4. It seems to finally be degrading now, and the
forecast shows it curving north.
Molly Taft: [08-11]
Should climate protesters be less annoying? Sure. And I don't
see how some of these examples help. But it's so hard to get heard
that acts of desperation are all but inevitable, and are increasingly
likely as more and more cautiously reasoned projections turn into
hard facts (like the Maui fires this week). And if, for instance,
Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future is prophetic,
there's going to be a lot more of what we like to call "eco-terrorism"
in the near future, before serious people finally get serious about
solving the problem. Even when the protesters turn offensive, turning
away from the real problem to condemn them is a waste. They'll go
away when you fix the problem, and until then should only be a
reminder that you haven't.
Ukraine War:
Connor Echols: [08-11]
Diplomacy Watch: China looms large at Ukraine 'peace summit' --
which wasn't in any practical sense about peace, but was intended
to rally support for Ukraine's non-negotiable points. Echols also
wrote: [08-07]
America's top 5 weapons contractors made $196B in 2022.
George Beebe: [08-10]
The myth of a strong postwar Ukraine. It's easy to spin glib
prognoses about a postwar Ukraine, but there are many more questions
than answers. For starters, recall that Ukraine from 1991-2014 fared
even worse under capitalism than Russia. For all its vaunted democracy,
politics in Ukraine were dominated by oligarchs, whose dealings may
have oriented them East or West, without benefit to the masses. While
the West has been happy to provide arms that have devastated much of
the country, they have poor track records when it comes to rebuilding.
Postwar Ukraine is certain to be much poorer than prewar Ukraine. Nor
is the task of resettling millions of refugees likely to go easy. And
a significant slice of a generation is likely to be marred by war,
both physically and psychically. Compared to the existential crises
of war, the question of whether various patches of land wind up on
one side of the border or not is almost trivial -- no matter what
the war architects think at the moment. Everyone loses at war, and
everyone begrudges their losses. Beebe would like to reassure us
that "ending the conflict sooner" still offers "better prospects,"
but there's no calculating how much has been lost, and how much more
there still is to lose.
PS: In reading Philipp Ther: How the West Lost the Peace,
I'm reminded of the mass migrations after the fall of the communist
states in East Europe, especially from East to West Germany. Basically,
the most skilled and mobile workers left, leaving their old countries
impoverished. Something similar happened to Russia and Ukraine with the
departure of many Jews to Israel (and some to the US). Millions of
Ukrainians have already left to escape the war. I wouldn't be surprised
if most of those who can hack it in the West stay there, rather than
return to their bleak and broken homeland. A second point is that the
aid promised to the former communist states rarely amounted to much,
and usually came saddled with debt and neoliberal nostrums that made
a corrupt few rich but left most people much poorer. Maybe postwar
aid will be more enlightened this time, but there is much reason to
remain skeptical. EU membership will bring some redistribution, but
with strings, and will make it easier for Ukrainians to stay in the
West (or if they haven't already, to move there). And America has an
especially poor track record of rebuilding the nations it has ravaged.
Sure, the Marshall Plan helped, but that was 70 years ago, and really
just an indirect subsidy of American business, with strings.
Ted Snider: [08-09]
The Poland-Belarus border is becoming a tinderbox: Wagner Group
forces are training new the NATO border. And now
Poland plans to move around 10,000 troops to border with Belarus.
Neither side appears to be asking "what can go wrong"? The Poles
argue that the move will deter Belarus from misbehavior, but isn't
that what NATO is supposed to guarantee? And given the NATO umbrella,
doesn't Poland's move look like a threat?
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [08-10]
Biden asks Congress for $25 billion in new Ukraine aid: The lion's
share of a $40 billion emergency spending request, bundled with disaster
aid requests Congress will be hard-pressed to reject. Vlahos previously
wrote: [08-04]
Most Americans don't want Congress to approve more aid for Ukraine
war, with Republicans more reticent than Democrats. Still, Biden
hasn't had any trouble getting Republican votes for Ukraine (or for
anything that goes "boom"). Also:
Israel, again:
Michael Arria: [08-10]
AIPAC eyes another round of Democratic races, brings Jeffries group to
Israel.
Juan Cole: [10-10]
Israel's crisis is not about democracy but occupation.
Middle East Eye:
[08-08]
Israeli finance minister freezes funds for Palestinian citizens of
Israel: "Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also holds
up educational grants for Palestinians." Looking at this site's
Occupation links, this one struck me as exceptional. Israel was
founded on a compromise whereby Palestinians who had stayed in
Israel throughout the 1948-51 war would be considered citizens of
Israel, but those who had left the country would not, and had their
property confiscated. Palestinian citizens of Israel could vote,
but even so were subject to military law up to 1967, and subject
to other discriminatory laws. This citizenship could have been a
step toward normalizing relations, but a few months after military
law was ended within the Green Line (Israel's pre-1967 borders),
Israel went to war to occupy parts of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.
The people in those occupied territories were subjected to military
rule, without even basic rights of citizenship. As Israelis set up
settlements in the occupied territories, there emerged a two-tier
system of justice. Under recent right-wing governments, there has
been a movement not just to extend settlements in the West Bank
but to strip Israeli-Palestinian citizens of rights dating from
the 1952 compromise, so that this two-tier system is being imposed
in all of Israel. Smotrich's decisions seem deliberately intended
to fan protest within Israel, which can be used as pretext for ever
more violent repression. A glance at the other headlines shows where
this is heading:
Israeli forces kill Palestinian in raid on Tulkarm refugee camp;
Israeli forces kill Palestinian man in West Bank raid;
'Systemic abuse' by Israeli settlers displaces yet another Palestinian
community.
[08-08]
'Watershed moment': Over 700 academics equate Israeli occupation with
apartheid. The letter is here, called
The elephant in the room (the signature list is now up to 1400).
One of the more famous names on the list is Benny Morris, a historian
who did important work in documenting the Nakba expulsions, before
swinging hard to the political right around 2000. His Righteous
Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 was
a pivotal book for me.
Richard Silverstein: [08-11]
Israel: Chronicle of a genocide foretold.
Around the world:
Ben Armbruster: [08-11]
How US media builds public support for confrontation with China:
"A recent NBC Nightly News threat hyping segment exemplifies the fourth
estate's complicity in a march to a new cold war with Beijing."
Kate Aronoff: [08-10]
Britain's hot new import from America: The climate culture wars.
Ryan Grim/Murtaza Hussain: []
Secret Pakistan documents US pressure to remove Imran Khan. This
was supposedly part of a shakedown when Khan balked at supporting US
on Ukraine. Yet it's hard to think of any other cases where the US
cracked the whip this effectively, so there must be more to this
story.
More on Pakistan:
Jonathan Guyer: [08-11]
Biden's risky Persian Gulf bet: Quotes Emma Ashford: "We're
talking about putting Marines in harm's way to try to deter Iran
from attacking ships, because we're not willing to look at any of
the other political options." The one thing we should have learned
from the Ukraine war is that sanctions and deterrence are more
likely to provoke war than to prevent it. Also:
Trita Parsi: [08-04]
With Marines on Persian Gulf vessels, is Biden risking war with
Iran? Parsi comments that "it is impressive how MBS has played
Biden," but with Saudi Arabia and Iran normalizing relations under
a Chinese-brokered agreement, a more likely explanation is that
this is just further proof that Israel is running American foreign
policy.
Taiwo Hassan: [08-08]
Niger coup brings West Africa to brink of war: ECOWAS threatens
to intervene to restore the previous ("democratically elected")
government.
Ellen Ioanes: [08-12]
What could still go wrong with the US-Iran prisoner swap.
Middle East Eye: [08-11]
Iran nuclear deal opponents conspired to oust US special envoy Robert
Malley. The former not only include the usual suspects in Israel,
Saudi Arabia, and Washington, but "certain hardline and influential
elements within Tehran and out of government, without President Ebrahim
Raisi's consent and awareness." There have been rumors, which I never
bothered citing here, of an imminent revival of the anti-nuke deal
with Iran. Hamstringing Malley, who is one of the few Americans to
have actually worked out deals in the Middle East, is one way to keep
any deal from happening.
Li Zhou: [08-10]
A shocking assassination highlights escalating violence in Ecuador.
Li Zhou/Jen Kirby: [08-09]
A deadly shipwreck illustrates the tragedy behind Europe's migration
policies.
Other stories:
William Astore: [08-08]
An exceptional military for the exceptional nation: "Recall that,
in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending
by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just
three years in office. And that increase doesn't even include the cost
of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia -- so far, somewhere
between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising." Also:
The greatest trick the U.S. military ever pulled was essentially
convincing us that its wars never existed. As Norman Solomon notes
in his revealing book, War Made Invisible, the
military-industrial-congressional complex has excelled at camouflaging
the atrocious realities of war, rendering them almost entirely invisible
to the American people. Call it the new American isolationism, only this
time we're isolated from the harrowing and horrific costs of war itself.
America is a nation perpetually at war, yet most of us live our lives
with little or no perception of this. There is no longer a military draft.
There are no war bond drives. You aren't asked to make direct and personal
sacrifices. You aren't even asked to pay attention, let alone pay (except
for those nearly trillion-dollar-a-year budgets and interest payments on
a ballooning national debt, of course). You certainly aren't asked for
your permission for this country to fight its wars, as the Constitution
demands. As President George W. Bush suggested after the 9/11 attacks,
go visit Disneyworld! Enjoy life! Let America's "best and brightest"
handle the brutality, the degradation, and the ugliness of war, bright
minds like former Vice President Dick ("So?") Cheney and former Secretary
of Defense Donald ("I don't do quagmires") Rumsfeld.
Astore cites the
Costs of War Project,
that "roughly 937,000 people have died since 9/11/2001" thanks to the
Global War on Terror, which has thus far run up a bill of $8 trillion.
Of course, GWOT gets little press these days: George Will has dismissed
it recently as the
"era of Great Distraction" -- insisting we return to focus on the
more lucrative Cold War rivalry with Russia and China.
Dean Baker: [08-07]
Taxing share buybacks: The cheapest tax EVER! Baker is right on
here. Share buybacks would be easy to tax, and hard to evade. They
would only take money that's already on the table, and if that tips
the decision as to whether to buy, that's not something anyone else
needs to worry about. Besides, share buybacks are basically a tax
avoidance scheme.
Ross Barkan: [08-03]
Has the socialist moment already come and gone? "Bernie and AOC
helped build a formidable movement. Since Biden took office, we've
seen its reach -- and its limits." Well, what do you want? Sanders
was uniquely able to expand his ideological base of support because
he's one of the few politicians in Washington whose integrity and
commitment are unimpeachable. But also because he's actually willing
to work hard for very modest improvements. He's inspired followers,
but thus far no significant leaders. But does that matter? The
possibility of a resurgent independent left is restrained, as it's
always been in America and Western Europe, by two overwhelming
forces: one is fear of fascism on the far right (Republicans); the
other is the possibility of ameliorative reform from the center
(Democrats). Why risk the former and sacrifice the latter just for
the sake of a word ("socialism," or whatever)? On the other hand,
as long as Democrats -- even such unpromising ones as Biden -- are
willing to entertain constructive proposals from the left, why not
join them?
Colin Bradley: []
Liberalism against capitalism: "The work of John Rawls shows that
liberal values of equality and freedom are fundamentally incompatible
with capitalism."
Robert Kuttner: [08-07]
Eminent domain for overpriced drugs: "Exhibit A is the case of
the EpiPen. It should cost a few dollars rather than the $600 or
more charged by monopolist Viatris."
Althea Legaspi: [08-12]
Record labels file $412 million copyright infringement lawsuit against
Internet Archive: First of all, the
Internet
Archive is one of the great treasures of modern civilization.
A lawsuit against them is nothing less than an assault on culture and
our rights to it. Second, there are mechanisms under current law
for dealing with copyright disputes short of lawsuits. They aren't
necessarily fair or just, but they exist. It's possible that the
labels have exhausted these, but that seems unlikely, given the
ridiculous claims they are making about lost revenue from free
dissemination of 50-to-100-year-old recordings that are already
in the public domain in much of the world (just not the US, due
mostly to Disney lobbyists). Rather, this appears to be malicious
and vindictive, which is about par for the rentier firms that are
pursuing it. Of course, it would be nice to write better laws
that would if not tear down the paywalls that throttle free speech
will at least allow them to expire in a timely fashion.
Eric Levitz:
Miles Marshall Lewis: [08-09]
In 50 years, rap transformed the English language bringing the Black
vernacular's vibrancy to the world: Part of a series of pieces on
the 50th anniversary of rap music, which I'm sure will provide ample
target practice for anyone who finds "the paper of record" more than
a bit pretentious and supercilious. This one focuses on five words
(dope, woke, cake, wildin', ghost), which represent less than 1% of
what one could talk about. Links toward the bottom to more articles,
including Wesley Morris: [08-10]
How hip-hop conquered the world. I'm going to try to not get too
bent out of shape.
Julian Mark: [08-12]
'Unluckiest generation' falters in boomer-dominated market for homes:
"The median age of a first-time homebuyer climbs to 36, as high interest
rates and asking prices further erode spending power." First I heard of
the term (see Andrew Van Dam:
The unluckiest generation in U.S. history), the more common one
being "millennials" (born 1981-96). Van Dam's chart lists ten
generations, each spanning stretches that average twenty years
(min. 17, max. 30, start dates in order from 1792, 1822, 1843,
1860, 1883, 1901, 1925, 1946, 1965, 1981, ending in 1996; no data
for 1997 and beyond). I've never put much stock in these labels,
but have given a bit of thought to which years were the luckiest,
and concluded that men born between 1935 and 1943 hit the sweet
spot: the depression was waning, they were too young for WWII
and (mostly) Korea, too old for Vietnam; they started work in
the boom years of the 1950s, and many were well positioned to
benefit from inflation in the 1970s; they moved off farms and
into cities; many were the first in their families to go to
college. They drove big, gas-guzzling cars, and quite a few
retired to putter around the country in RVs. I have a half-dozen
cousins who fit that profile to a tee. On the other hand, I never
liked the Boomer designation, as it seemed to actually have three
subsets: the leading edge got ahead of the expansion of education
in the 1960s, which by the time I got there was already cooling;
the middle got diverted to Vietnam; and the tail end had to fend
off Reagan. Still, it's hard to feel when you get into your
seventies, even if that's some kind of proof.
Of course, no generational experience is universal.
Women were better off born after 1950, as career options opened
up in the 1970s, and abortion became legal. What is pretty clear
is that prospects have dimmed for anyone born after 1980. It also
seems pretty likely that unless there are big changes, those born
after 1997 will be even more unlucky. But it's more possible than
ever for young people to understand what made some lucky and what
doesn't, and to act accordingly.
Still, this particular article is more about housing prices than
generations. The median US home sold in 2023 for $416,100, up 26%
from 2020, which is pushing the age of first-time buyers up and up,
to 36 from 29 in 1981. I'm beginning to think we made a big mistake
long ago in treating houses not just as necessities but as stores
of wealth and vehicles for investment.
Steven Lee Myers/Benjamin Mullin: [08-13]
Raids of small Kansas newspaper raises free press concerns: "The
search of the Marion County Record led to the seizure of computers,
servers and cellphones of reporters and editors."
James Robins: [08-08]
The 1848 revolutions did not fail: "The year that Europe went to
the barricades changed the world. But it has not left the same impression
on the public imagination as 1789 or 1917." Review of Christopher Clark:
Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World,
1848-1849. This is a piece of history I've neglected, although I
have a theory -- partly informed by Arno Mayer's The Persistence of
the Old Regime, perhaps by Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution,
and more generally by Marx -- that 1848 marked the end of bourgeois
revolutions, as the rising of workers convinced the bourgeoisie and
the aristocracy that they had more in common. Clark has an earlier
book, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, so
perhaps he's looking backwards as well. China Miéville has another
book on 1848, from a different perspective: A Spectre, Haunting:
On the Communist Manifesto.
Nathan J Robinson: [08-11]
You either see everyone else as a human being or you don't:
"It's obviously morally abominable to booby-trap the borders with
razors. But some people think desperate migrants deserve whatever
cruelties we inflict on."
Aja Romano: [08-11]
The Montgomery boat brawl and what it really means to "try that in a
small town": The viral fight valorized Black resistance -- and
punctured Jason Aldean's racist 'small town' narrative."
Jeffrey St Clair: [08-11]
Roaming Charges: Mad at the world. Seems like every week brings
another story like this one:
An Arkansas woman called 911. When the cops arrived, an officer was
frightened by her Pomeranian, shot at the dog and missed, hitting the
woman in the leg. The cop then tries to tell her the bullet hole in
her leg is probably just a
scratch from the dog.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, August 6, 2023
Speaking of Which
Trump's third indictment led off the week, so naturally he
hogged the news. He complains about being singled out, as if
he's the only president ever to get caught running a byzantine
scam to reverse election results. If anything, he's the one
getting special favors. Anyone else trying to incite violence
against witnesses would at least get a gag order, or more
likely be remanded to jail for the duration.
Top story threads:
Trump: He gets his own section again this week, because
he got indicted again, and this time it's the big one, the case
we've been waiting for. Well, not all of it, but stripped down to
the most basic and unassailable points.
Scott R Anderson, et al: [08-01]
Trump Jan. 6 indictments: The statutes.
Zack Beauchamp: [08-04]
I regret to report the economic anxiety theory of Trumpism is back:
David Brooks wrote
another column, so now we have to contemplate it? Just because he
wonders, "what if we're the bad guys here?" Look, Brooks has never not
been a bad guy. That he sometimes quarrels with Trump doesn't redeem
him. He's the kind of elite that everyone can find fault with. As for
the notion that white blue-collar workers support Trump because of
economic anxiety, that's never been conscious. If they understood the
concept of precarity, they could figure out that Trump wasn't going
to help them. Rather, it's a theory of false consciousness: something
people like to believe as an alternative to facing the truth. It's
also a political proposition: do things to reduce such anxieties and
win some of their votes back. But if you want to understand why folks
vote for Trump, I'm afraid that the answer has nothing to do with
policy, ideology, or even culture. They like his style, and there's
really not much more to him than that.
Jamelle Bouie: [08-05]
Republicans chose their fate when they chose to shield Trump.
Luke Broadwater/Maggie Astor: [08-06]
Trump calls for judge's recusal as his lawyer deems effort to overturn
election 'aspirational': From anyone else, this might be written
off as "playing the refs," accusing the judge of bias to get the odd
call just to show she isn't. Still, Trump makes it look like a mere
tantrum. Above all, he's trying to litigate the case on his home turf,
which is the adoring media.
Kyle Cheney/Josh Gerstein: [08-04]
Feds alert judge to Trump's 'If you go after me, I'm coming after you!'
post: Sounds like a threat to intimidate witnesses, something few
judges in America would tolerate. Cheney previously wrote: [08-03]
Inside the courtroom: Donald Trump, Jack Smith and a historic glance,
which included a "standard list of warnings: Trump could be arrested
and jailed if he violates any of his release conditions -- including
a vow not to commit any crimes and not to 'obstruct the administration
of justice' by attempting to influence or retalliate against any
witnesses." That is exactly what Trump has since done, although he
has yet to be jailed for violating those conditions.
Isaac Chotiner: [08-03]
A former federal prosecutor explains the latest Trump indictment:
Interview with Mary McCord.
Alan Feuer/Ben Protess/Maggie Haberman: [08-05]
Trump's legal team is enmeshed in a tangle of possible conflicts.
Several have given evidence in various cases. Boris Epshteyn seems
to be the leading candidate for one of the unindicted co-conspirators
in the January 6 case. It's hard to get good help when your boss keeps
turning you into co-defendants.
Donell Harvin: [08-05]
Here's the intelligence assessment of Donald Trump that the government
can't write: "While generally highly decentralized and fractured,
violent extremist groups have begun to mesh over a unifying figure:
Trump. . . . Trump's willingness to fan the worst flames and division
is why, in my assessment, he is currently the greatest threat to our
nation."
Spencer S Hsu/Carol D Leonnig/Tom Jackman: [08-04]
If Trump is convicted, Secret Service protection may be obstacle to
imprisonment. I still have to ask, does he need Secret Service
protection in jail? I mean, jails are supposed to be safe, right?
Ankash Khardori: [08-02]
The most important criminal prosecution in American history: "Despite
the risks, the Justice Department's case against Trump is necessary and
just."
Ruth Marcus: [08-06]
How Trump will fight back in court: This is long on legal minutiae,
which is to say it's nothing that Trump understands or cares about.
Trump himself will fight back the only way he knows: politically. And,
as usual, it will work effectively with his base, while offending and
repelling everyone else, most likely including the judge, and .
Josh Marshall: [08-05]
John Eastman comes clean: Hell yes we were trying to overthrow the
government.
Ian Millhiser:
Christian Paz: [08-02]
Trump has been indicted for something Americans seem to have
forgotten.
Charlie Savage: [08-04]
How Jack Smith structured the Trump election indictment to reduce
risks.
Jason Smith: [06-16]
A two-tiered justice system: This phrase has been kicked around a
lot recently, with Republicans like Missouri Congressman Smith arguing
that the second tier was created by Democrats to prosecute opponents
like Donald Trump. Actually, the phrase goes back much further, being
used to describe a wide range of discriminatory practices, such as
much longer sentences for crack cocaine vs. powdered cocaine. It's
usually brought up in defense of people who get the short end of the
stick, ranging from
Glenn Greenwald to
Elizabeth Warren. I can also refer you to an analysis showing
Trump to be the beneficiary of two-tierism: Vera Bergengruen:
[06-21]
Pentagon leaker and Trump are a test of 'two-tiered' justice system.
My own take is that the most obvious tier division in the American
justice system is between defendants who can afford top attorneys
and those who get stuck with public defenders. Trump is very much
in the former group, even if one has doubts about how "top" his
actual attorneys are.
Isaac Stanley-Becker/Spencer S Hsu: [08-01]
Trump is charged under civil rights law used to prosecute KKK violence:
Not that it was effectively used after Reconstruction ended, but it has
been used recently.
Asawin Suebsaeng/Adam Rawnsley: [08-04]
Jack Smith has an indictment. Trump as a massive plan for revenge.
The authors also wrote: [08-01]
Trump's plan to save himself: Scapegoat his coup lawyers: At
least three of which (Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman)
were unnamed co-conspirators in the indictment, so doesn't blaming
them just prove the prosecution's case?
Michael Tomasky: [08-04]
Donald Trump's lawyer is dumber than Donald Trump: Peter Lauro,
but he's not the only one:
They will say anything, do anything, attack anything, allege anything,
lie about anything, repeat anything, proclaim anything, insinuate
anything, and imply anything. Except of course anything that's true.
They are turning the country and its principles upside down. They are
fomenting a furious army of acolytes who own a lot of guns. When Trump
is convicted here, as it appears he will be, given that his lawyer just
admitted to it, what will they do?
Peter Wade: [08-06]
Trump: I will 'IMMEDIATELY' ask for new judge, new venue in Jan. 6
trial. I'd like to see some statistics on how often change of
venue is granted in federal cases.
Katy Waldman: [08-03]
Trump's subdued courtroom appearance: Trump likes to imagine himself
as one of his Superman NFTs, and he talks a strong and defiant game in
his arena appearances, but there's little evidence of his bravado when
faced with a judge, or for that matter in small meetings with foreign
leaders or even his own staff. Some Democrats want the trials to be
televised so people can see the evidence, but if they were, it may be
more damaging to just watch him squirm and fidget.
Jeff Wise: [08-03]
Could Trump get tossed off 2024's ballots? Even if the 14th Amendment
applied to Jan. 6, 2021, which is a stretch, and even if Trump was guilty
of inciting that "insurrection," which is not something he's been charged
with, this would be a bad idea politically: one that would both reinforce
his "folk hero" status and drive his more fanatical followers to greater
flights of lawlessness. He needs to be beat at the ballot box, and the
bigger margin the better. But to deny him a run would be to discredit
the very democracy you want to save from him.
Li Zhou: [08-01]
Why Trump's PAC is almost broke.
DeSantis, and other Republicans:
Biden and/or the Democrats:
Paul Krugman: [07-31]
Goldilocks and the Bidenomics bears: "It's hard to overstate how
good the U.S. economic news has been lately. It was so good that it
didn't just raise hopes for the future; it led to widespread rethinking
of the past." After noting Larry Summers' plea for "many years of very
high unemployment," Krugman goes on to say: "And as I said, we've had
an astonishing recovery in jobs and G.D.P., which puts the sluggish
recovery of the 2010s to shame; indeed, it suggests that the failure
to achieve quick recovery from the financial crisis was a huge economic
tragedy." Then he wrote another column expanding on that: [08-01]
Frying pans and fiscal policy. Looking at the first two charts
there, the slow recovery from the 2008-09 recession up through 2016
can largely be explained by the Republican gospel of austerity, which
they dropped as soon as Trump took office. But especially in 2009-10,
when Democrats had Congressional majorities, Obama's "confidence men"
deserve much of the blame (especially Summers, who like Geithner and
Furman didn't get invites to return from Biden; the term was the title
of Ron Suskind's 2011 book on Obama's economic team, due to their
belief that the key to recovery was Obama projecting confidence about
the recovery; at the time, Krugman ridiculed them for their belief in
"the confidence fairy").
Eric Levitz: [08-04]
America's economic outlook keeps getting better: "Productivity and
real wages are rising."
Bill Scher: [08-04]
Don't expect Biden to get credit for the economy anytime soon.
Cites Clinton and Obama as Democratic presidents who saw sustained
economic growth during their terms, but got so little credit for it
that the voters replaced them with Republicans, leading to massive
redistribution toward the rich, and major recessions. I have some
theories about why things work out this way. One is that Democrats
can be counted on to support measures to stimulate the economy --
as they did with legislation to help Bush in 2008 and Trump in 2020 --
while Republicans insist on austerity when Democrats are in charge,
figuring that the president will be blamed for their own acts. Key
here is that Republicans are much more adept at blaming Democrats
for anything and everything, whereas Democrats prefer to frame their
policies positively, and are eager to compromise them to receive the
thin veneer of bipartisan support.
Emily Stewart: [08-01]
Can Joe Biden convince Americans the economy is actually good?
"Bidenomics, or the real story of a sort of made-up thing."
Law, order, and the courts:
Shera Avi-Yonah: [08-05]
Jim Crow-era lifetime ban on felons voting is unconstitutional, court
rules.
Radley Balko: [07-02]
Half the police force quit. Crime dropped. One case, and maybe not
a typical one, but worth looking at. The quitting started when a black
was appointed police chief, so you can guess who quit.
Neil Gross: [08-01]
People get scared and buy a gun. Here's what happens next. Their
new guns get stolen?
Ellen Ioanes: [08-05]
In Texas, a temporary win for abortion rights: "Vague health
exceptions to extreme abortion bans aren't just a Texas problem."
Eric Levitz: [08-03]
Conservatives: Punishing coup leaders is authoritarian: I might
be more sympathetic to this argument had they made it during the
trial of the Chicago 8/7. I certainly developed a distaste for the
laws against seditious conspiracy after seeing them used against the
fringe left in the 1970s. My friend Elizabeth Fink was a defense
lawyer in
one of those trials, which I recall as being a colossal waste
based on pure political vindictiveness. By the way, Robert Mueller
was the US Attorney in Massachusetts when those charges were filed,
although he had left office before the trial. At least the Jan. 6
seditious conspiracy trials resulted in convictions, probably because
that was exactly what they attempted to do. On the other hand, the
Proud Boys never stood a chance of carrying out a coup. They were at
most tools for higher-placed politicians, specifically Donald Trump.
That Trump hasn't been charged with seditious conspiracy suggests
that the Special Prosecutor realizes it would be a bullshit charge,
one that the state could only safely prosecute against chumps.
Needless to say, these conservatives aren't really bothered by
authoritarianism, as long as it's directed at their enemies,
while sparing their allies and agents.
Kelly McClure: [08-05]
Clarence Thomas bought a $267,000 RV using funds from a Democratic
donor. Democratic? "Anthony Welters, a former executive at
UnitedHealthCare who worked alongside Thomas in the Reagan
administration," but who donated big to Obama, netting an
ambassadorial appointment.
Ian Millhiser:
Li Zhou: [08-04]
How a Mississippi case of police brutality emphasizes the need for more
accountability.
Climate and Environment:
Kate Aronoff: [07-31]
What Florida's corals look like after catastrophic bleaching:
"What's alarming about this year's bleaching event is just how
quickly the corals died."
Tom Engelhardt: [08-03]
Extremely extreme: After a paragraph summarizing the shocking climate
news from this summer, he segues into the self-appointed leader of the
"Me-First" movement: Donald Trump. Sure, he did a lot of bad things as
president, only a small fraction of which he's since been indicted for,
but his sins of omission will be judged by history even more harshly,
including four years of doing nothing (beyond his active obstruction)
on climate change.
Georgina Rannard/Mark Poynting/Jana Tauschinski/Becky Dale:
[08-04]
Ocean heat record broken, with grim implications for the planet.
Ukraine War: Regarding the counteroffensive, Robert Wright
writes in [08-04]
Biden's Ukraine quagmire:
This week a widely followed Twitter account called War Mapper
quantified the amount of terrain Ukrainian forces have retaken
since the beginning of their counter-offensive two months ago. The
net gain is a bit over 100 square miles. So the fraction of Ukrainian
territory occupied by Russia has dropped from 17.54 percent to 17.49
percent.
This gain has come at massive cost: untold thousands of dead
Ukrainians, untold thousands of maimed Ukrainians, and lots of
destroyed weapons and armored vehicles.
At this rate of battlefield progress, it will be six decades
before Ukraine has expelled Russian troops from all its territory --
the point before which, President Zelensky has said, peace talks
are unthinkable. And at this rate of human loss, Ukraine will run
out of soldiers long before then -- and long before Russia does.
In short: Recent trend lines point to a day when Ukraine is
vulnerable to complete conquest by Russia. For that matter, the
counter-offensive has already made Ukraine more vulnerable to a
Russian breakthrough in the north, where Ukrainian defensive lines
were thinned out for the sake of the offensive in the south. . . .
The resolve is admirable. But have things really come to this?
We're throwing Ukrainian men into a meat grinder week after week in
hopes that maybe Putin's regime will collapse, and maybe this
will be good for Ukraine?
Emphasis in original. This last line is followed by reasons such
a collapse may not be good for anyone. Another
source points out that Russia has actually gained ground in the
north, while the counteroffensive has been grinding away in the south.
He also cites a series of tweets by a
Tatarigami_UA. Of course, much of this argument depends not just on
the amount of land gained but on the resources spent and other damages,
and on how much depth both sides have for reinforcements. While the US
and its allies can provide Ukraine with enough war matériel to fight
indefinitely, Russia has a big long-term advantage in manpower it can
commit to the fight. Russia also has two more big advantages: it can
hit virtually all of Ukraine, where Ukraine can barely nick territory
within prewar Russia (e.g., through recent drone attacks on Moscow,
or most recently [08-04]
Ukraine strikes Russian commercial port with drones for first time).
And Russia has nuclear weapons, which aren't terribly useful in the
war but should give one pause when hoping for any kind of militarily
dictated victory.
Also, I haven't seen anyone really put this info together, but it
looks to me like Ukraine is becoming much more cavalier at hitting
Russian targets behind various "red lines": in Crimea, the Black Sea,
and in Russia itself. Russia is responding with more purely punitive
attacks (i.e., nowhere near the front, such as on Black Sea ports).
Until recently, US aid was conditioned on Ukraine restraint, but that
seems to be going by the wayside.
Blaise Malley: [08-04]
Diplomacy Watch: Ukraine War 'peace talks' this weekend, but Russia
not invited.
Roger Cohen: [08-06]
Putin's Forever War: An extended portrait of a Russia isolated
by sanctions and agitated and militated by a war footing that seems
likely to extend without ends, if not plausibly forever. I suspect
there is a fair amount of projection here. The US actually has been
engaged in forever wars, boundless affairs first against communism
then against terrorism (or whatever you call it). Russia has struggled
with internal order, but had little interest in "a civilizational
conflict" until the Americans pushed NATO up to its borders. On the
other hand, once you define such a conflict, it's hard to resolve it.
The US has failed twice, and seems to be even more clueless in its
high stakes grappling with Russia and China.
Geoffrey Roberts: [08-02]
The trouble with telling history as it happens: More a reaction to
than a review of Serhii Polkhy's new book,
The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, which no matter
how expert or up-to-date ("early 2023") is
quickly passed by events, and inevitably swayed by unproven propaganda.
I've read Plokhy's The Gates of Europe: A history of Ukraine
and found it useful, although I already had a pretty decent grounding
when I wrote my
23 Theses.
Israel, again:
Izzeddin Araj: [08-01]
Israel's judicial crisis is not surprising: "Israel's settler-colonial
ideological mission not only impacts Palestinians but prevents the country
from being a democracy for Jews as well."
Jonathan Guyer: [08-03]
Biden wants to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together. But why?
"And who will actually get the most out of it? (Hint: Not Americans or
Palestinians.)" I haven't thought much about this, but can note that
both
Fred Kaplan and
Richard Silverstein are very critical. I see three obvious problems:
one is that, especially in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has a history of armed
aggression, not the sort of country you want to tie yourself to; I'm
a bit less worried than Kaplan about Saudi Arabia tarnishing America's
brand as a supporter of democracy, but autocratic states are by their
very nature brittle, so while you may like the current leadership (God
knows why), that could change any moment (cf. Iran); and as long as
Israel dictates American foreign policy, we're stuck holding the bag
for whatever commitments Israel makes (usually war tech, although I've
also read that the Saudis want nuclear tech). The tricky part with all
of these Abraham Accord deals is that they depend on Israel moderating
its treatment of Palestinians to not embarrass their new partners, but
Israel's domestic political dynamics are only becoming more violent and
abusive, effectively sabotaging the deals.
Jonathan Kuttab: [08-03]
Why the Israeli judicial protest movement is bound to fail: "The
time has come for Israeli Jews and their supporters to answer whether
they believe in human equality or will continue to insist on Jewish
supremacy."
Jonathan Ofir:
[07-31]
Israel expanded an apartheid law last week: "Israel broadened a
racist law that allows communities to exclude non-Jews based on 'social
and cultural cohesion.'" This is one of 65 laws in Adalah's
Discriminatory Laws Database.
[08-05]
Jewish supremacy won't end from within. BDS is still the only hope.
It's increasingly hard to argue that sanctions can persuade countries
to change their core policies -- more likely the isolation they enforce
only makes the rulers more recalcitrant, and sometimes more belligerent --
but they are something one can do to register disapproval short of war,
and they can be adopted by individuals and groups even short of persuading
states to act. Can it work? I doubt it. Up to 2000, Israeli politicians
at least made gestures -- often, we now know, in bad faith -- to maintain
good will from the US and Europe. Thereafter, the US capitulated, giving
Israel's right-wing a green light to do whatever they want, certain of
blind, uncritical American support. A reversal of that policy, where the
US joins the rest of the world in deploring Israeli human rights abuses,
while working to ensure Israel's security by negotiating normal relations
with Israel's supposed enemies (especially Iran and Syria), wouldn't
necessarily have any impact on Israeli politics, but it's the only
thing that might. Meanwhile, civilian efforts to support BDS is the
only game in town.
Philip Weiss: [08-02]
Israel advocates finally condemn skunkwater -- now that it's being
used on Jews.
Jeff Wright: [07-30]
Another North American church names Israeli apartheid: "The Christian
Church (Disciples of Christ) has declared that 'many of the laws, policies
and practices of the State of Israel meet the definition of apartheid as
defined in international law.'" Although I'm about as lapsed as a person
can be, I grew up in that church, and took it seriously enough that they
awarded me a Boy Scout God & Country medal. They are evangelicals,
but not Old Testament fundamentalists. On the other hand, their focus on
the New Testament has led many members (like my grandfather) to focus on
"Revelations," which is the gateway to "Christian Zionism." But they have
always been fundamentally decent people, and in the end that seems to
have won out.
Around the world:
Other stories:
Clay Risen: [08-05]
Charles J. Ogletree Jr, 70, dies; at Harvard Law, a voice for equal
justice.
Nathan J Robinson:
[08-04]
Does Hunter Biden matter? "Republicans believe the president's son
is at the center of the corruption scandal of the century. Democrats
think Hunter is a non-issue and the worst allegations are mere conspiracy
theory." This is pretty thorough, and cuts the Bidens less slack than I
would, but I can't quarrel much with his conclusion: "I certainly think
we have ample evidence that Hunter Biden is scummy and Joe Biden is
dishonest." It still doesn't answer the question raised up top: "Should
voters care, and how much?" If Democrats offered a clear alternative to
the graft that Republicans seem to revel in, they should be able to
overcome a few embarrassing slips. But while Obama campaigned against
money in politics back in 2008, he made no effort once he got elected
to change a system that happened to give him (if few Democrats) a big
advantage. Biden also seems comfortable with moneyed interests, even
though they're always accompanied by the smell of corruption. Still,
corruption isn't the only issue voters have to weigh. There are many
other issues, some much more important. Even if you believe the worst
about the Bidens, you should think back on the 1991 Louisiana governor
race, where voters were advised:
Vote for the crook: It's important.
[08-02]
Is the critique of consumerism dead? "Today's left seems less
inclined to critique advertising, consumerism, and pop culture."
Another piece tied into Barbie, which since I haven't seen
yet I should reserve judgment on, but it's clearly not tied into
Mattel's PR machine. Still, my first reaction is "boring," perhaps
because that's all stuff I examined so critically in the 1970s I
feel like I'm unlikely to come up with anything new. I will note
that although related, those are three different things.
Advertising is an industry which presents a view of products (and
the world) that is distorted to further the ends of its sponsors --
mostly to make more money, although political advertising has darker
goals). And by the way, advertising is not free speech. It is very
expensive speech, sponsored by special interests but ultimately paid
for by the people it targets. It is almost always intrusive and
unwelcome.
Consumerism is a political reaction to corporate malfeasance. It
attempts to give consumers rights and recourse against advertising,
and beyond that against malign products, whether by design or defect.
As we are all consumers, this movement is potentially universal, but
it tends to wax and wane as business practices become normalized. It's
possible that Robinson is thinking of something slightly different,
which doesn't have a good name. This is the idea that consuming is an
essential occupation of everyday life, a panacea for all our needs and
desires. That is, of course, an idea advertising is meant to stoke, and
one we may be better off learning to live with at a level well short of
an addiction or compulsion, but it's impossible to blot it out.
Pop art is simply art that reflects and reacts to popular consumable
objects. Growing up when and where I did, it always struck me as perfectly
normal: even if eventually it seemed a bit shallow, that shallowness was
as real as the world it represented. Robinson spends a lot of time on
what a leftist should make of this, and ultimately doesn't reach much
of a conclusion. Maybe because it's not a problem we need to solve.
[08-01]
Climate denial may escalate into a total rupture with reality:
If I were his editor, I'd be tempted to strike "may" from that title,
although I can see that it leaves open reason for contemplation, even
though the evidence is pretty conclusive. At this point, the really
dogmatic denialists aren't even the fossil industry shills who have
an obvious economic stake but others whose objections aren't based
on any understanding of science or economics, and their evidence,
well, isn't evidence at all.
[08-03]
Nomi Prins explains the difference between the market and the
economy: Interview with the former Goldman Sachs trader, turned
journalist, whose intro omits her 2009 book It Takes a Pillage,
which as I recall was the first to expose/explain how far the banking
bailouts went beyond the $700 billion slush fund Congress appropriated.
She talks about her new book: Permanent Distortion: How Financial
Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [08-01]
Americans' trust in military hits 'malaise era' territory. This
sounds like good news to me, although the numbers still have quite
a ways to fall. So does the
recruitment crisis. Now if only some politicians could see the
wisdom of cutting back on war spending. The pressure for more remains
intense:
Alissa Wilkinson: [08-04]
Lessons from a Barbenheimer summer: The fad of releasing serious,
thought-provoking movies appears to be over. (This week's most-hyped
releases are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and
The Meg 2: The Trench. Beware the colons.) The two movies are
still generating commentary, especially Oppenheimer.
William Hartung: [08-02]
Oppenheimer and the birth of the nuclear-industrial complex.
Jeffrey St Clair: [08-04]
Little Boy and Fat Man earrings: a nuclear parable: An excerpt
from St Clair's book, Grand Theft Pentagon, following by a
Roaming Charges, much of which (including digs at Pence, RFK Jr, and
"slit their throats" DeSantis I'm tempted to quote. Here's a taste:
- DeSantis reminds me of Phil Gramm, the TX politician who amassed
millions from banks and oil companies and seemed to be the prohibitive
favorite in '96 GOP primaries, but was soon exposed as just a mean SOB
with no real political skills at all other than shaking down corps for
PAC $$$.
- When DeSantis' campaign ran low on money and he began firing staffers,
he hired them to fill
government-funded positions in Florida instead.
- More than half ($5 million, in fact) of the funds in RFK, Jr's
SuperPAC came from Timothy Mellon, scion of the Mellon banking fortune,
who has denounced social spending as "slavery redux," donated $53 million
to state of Texas border wall construction fund, and gifted $1.5 million
toward the legal defense of Arizona's vicious anti-immigration law.
I can't call it a tweet, and certainly won't call it a truth, but
after Trump deemed "really quite vicious" Nancy Pelosi's quip about
him in court ("I saw a scared puppy"), he wasn't satisfied with just
being the victim. He added: "She is a Wicked Witch whose husbands
journey from hell starts and finishes with her. She is a sick &
demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!" True gentleman he
is. Salon, which never misses a tweet, covers this story
here and
here.
Another tweet, from Younis Tirawi, in Jenin: "Israeli occupation
forces fired 300 bullets on a car with 3 Palestinian fighters inside.
After they all were killed, they kept their bodies inside the car,
pulled it and paraded with their bodies home to the occupation
military camp near Dotan."
Also from Noga Tarnopolsky: "Israeli National Security Minister
Itamar Ben Gvir, convicted eight (8!) times of terrorism &
hate crimes, says a medal of valor ought to be awarded to his
Jewish Power activist Elisha Yered, a suspect in the murder of
19-year-old Palestinian Qosai Mi'tan."
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