Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33607 [33567] rated (+40), 225 [212] unrated (+13).

Trumpet player Eddie Gale (78) died last week. He had a spotty recording career, but always came up with something interesting when he appeared. He achieved a measure of fame for his role on Cecil Taylor's 1966 album Unit Structures, then followed that with two excellent albums on Blue Note: Ghetto Music (1968) and Black Rhythm Happening (1969). He had a revival c. 2004 with reissue of his albums on Water and a new one, Afro Fire.

I added a lengthy midyear list by Stephen Thomas Erlewine to my metacritic file (code SE). He added first mentions of 10 new albums (mostly country), plus a bunch of reissues and vault music. He shows some favor there for lavish box sets, and also seems to get good service from Ace, Bear Family, Cherry Red, and Omnivore. I'm so jealous.

Robert Christgau published his July Consumer Guide mid-week. I was originally pleased to see that for four 2020 releases I had previously rated A- got the same grade from him (Chicago Farmer, Bob Dylan, Hinds, Waxahatchie), and that the other new records I had graded lower also got lower grades from him (Terry Allen, Jason Isbell). That also left some things I hadn't heard (or in some cases hadn't heard of), but further digging revealed that I had given the Daniele Luppi/Parquet Courts EP a B+(***) back in January 2018. I played most of the rest, still procrastinatig on the Sonic Youth bootleg (one of way too many for my purposes, although I may reconsider when I get around to formatting Joe Yanosik's Consumer Guide for his corner of my website) and Joe Levy's Uprising 2020 playlist (not my idea of a real thing, although so immediately relevant to the times I expect to listen to it).

I got to the Thiago Nassif and Moor Jewelry A- records after my cut-off, but figured why make you wait, especially given that there are other ways to find my grade. Usually takes me 8-16 hours to catch everything up after my break, so I always listen to a few records during that time. (Four more in the scratch file at present, not counting these two.)

Quite a bit of unpacking below, many from Lithuania. Also got a hard copy of Luis Lopes' Believe, Believe, which I had given a B+(***) to based on streaming. I looked for records by the late bassist Simon H. Fell. Found quite a few, but mostly Bandcamp with most tracks missing, so didn't manage to review much. Took a dive into pianist Hampton Hawes, thanks to a question. I will answer that (and whatever else comes in) later during the week. I've gotten into a rut where I start each day off by playing something classic, then when I settle down in front of the computer, find it easier to dial up something to stream. I'll make a conscious effort to catch up a bit next week.

New records reviewed this week:

• Anteloper: Tour Beats Vol. 1 (2020, International Anthem, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Arca: Kick I (2020, XL): [r]: B+(*)
• Bananagun: The True Story of Bananagun (2020, Full Time Hobby): [r]: B+(*)
• Beauty Pill: Sorry You're Here (2020, Taffety Punk Theatre Company): [r]: B+(***)
• Beauty Pill: Please Advise (2020, Northern Spy, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Clint Black: Out of Same (2020, Black Top): [r]: B+(*)
• Clem Snide: Forever Just Beyond (2020, Ramseur): [r]: B+(**)
• Jeff Cosgrove/John Medeski/Jeff Lederer: History Gets Ahead of the Story (2018 [2020], Grizzley Music): [cd]: B+(***) [07-17]
• Dream Wife: So When You Gonna . . . (2020, Lucky Number): [r]: A-
• Baxter Dury: The Night Chancers (2020, Heavenly): [r]: B+(*)
• Field Music: Making a New World (2020, Memphis Industries): [r]: B+(*)
• Khruangbin: Mordechai (2020, Dead Oceans): [r]: B+(*)
• King Krule: Man Alive! (2020, True Pather): [r]: B
• Stephen Malkmus: Groove Denied (2019, Matador): [r]: B+(**)
• Stephen T. Malkmus: Traditional Techniques (2020, Matador): [r]: B+(*)
• Moor Jewelry: True Opera (2020, Don Giovanni): [r]: A-*
• Thiago Nassif: Mente (2020, Gearbox): [r]: A-
• Carlos Niño & Miguel Atwood-Ferguson: Chicago Waves (2020, International Anthem): [r]: B+(*)
• Pearl Jam: Gigaton (2020, Monkeywrench/Republic): [r]: B
• Margo Price: That's How Rumors Get Started (2020, Loma Vista): [r]: B+(*)
• Tenille Townes: The Lemonade Stand (2020, Columbia Nashville): [r]: B+(**)
• The Weeknd: After Hours (2020, Republic): [r]: B
• Gillian Welch & David Rawlings: All the Good Times Are Past & Gone (2020, Acony): [r]: B+(**)
• X: Alphabetland (2020, Fat Possum): [r]: B+(*)
• Yonic South: Wild Cobs (2019, La Tempesta, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Yonic South: Twix and Dive (La Tempesta, EP): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Nublu Orchestra Conducted by Butch Morris: Live in Bergamo (2008 [2020], Nublu): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Simon H. Fell: The Exploding Flask of Muesli: Electroacoustic & Electronic Works 1994-2002 (1994-2002 [2013], Bruce's Fingers): [r]: B+(*)
• Simon H. Fell: Le Bruit De La Musique (2015 [2016], Confront): [r]: B+(*)
• Hampton Hawes: Everybody Likes Hampton Hawes: Vol. 3: The Trio (1956 [1990], Contemporary/OJC): [r]: B+(**)
• Hampton Hawes Quartet: All Night Session! Volume 1 (1956 [1991], Contemporary/OJC): [r]: B+(***)
• Hampton Hawes Quartet: All Night Session! Volume 2 (1956 [1992], Contemporary/OJC): [r]: B+(**)
• Hampton Hawes Trio: The Séance (1966 [1998], Contemporary/OJC): [r]: B+(***)
• Hampton Hawes: Trio at Montreux (1971 [1976], Jas): [r]: B+(**)
• Hampton Hawes/Cecil McBee/Roy Haynes: Live at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago: Volume Two (1973 [1989], Enja): [r]: B+(**)
• Hampton Hawes: Something Special (1976 [1994], Contemporary): [r]: B+(***)
• William Parker: In Order to Survive (1993 [1995], Black Saint): [r]: A-
• William Parker/Giorgio Dini: Temporary (2009, Silta): [r]: B+(*)
• Jessie Ware: Glasshouse (2017, Interscope): [r]: B+(*)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Beauty Pill: Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are (2015, Butterscotch): [r]: [was: B] B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Conrad Bauer/Matthias Bauer/Dag Magnus Narvesen: The Gift (NoBusiness): cdr (lp only)
• Adam Caine Quartet: Transmissions (NoBusiness)
• François Carrier/Masayo Koketsu/Daisuke Fuwa/Takashi Itani: Japan Suite (NoBusiness)
• Vincent Chancey: The Spell: The Vincent Chancey Trio Live 1987 (NoBusiness) *
• DUX Orchestra: Duck Walks Dog (With Mixed Results) (1994, NoBusiness): cdr (lp only)
• Falkner Evans: Marbles (CAP)
• John Fedchock NY Sextet: Into the Shadows (Summit) [07-17]
• Agustí Fernández/Liudas Mockunas: Improdimensions (NoBusiness): cdr (lp only)
• Gato Libre: Kaneko (Libra) [07-10]
• Sue Anne Gershenzon: You Must Believe in Spring (self-released) [08-01]
• Keys & Screws [Thomas Borgmann/Jan Roder/Willi Kellers]: Some More Jazz (NoBusiness): cdr (lp only)
• Luís Lopes Humanization 4tet: Believe, Believe (Clean Feed)
• Sam Rivers: Richochet [Sam Rivers Archive Project, Volume 3] (1978, NoBusiness)
• Jason Robinson & Eric Hofbauer: Two Hours Early, Ten Minutes Late: Duo Music of Ken Aldcroft (Accretions)
• Benny Rubin Jr. Quartet: Know Say or See (Benny Jr. Music)
• Threadbare [Jason Stein/Ben Cruz/Emerson Hunton]: Silver Dollar (NoBusiness)

Daily Log

Consumer Reports "best stick vacuums for $150 or less:"

• Shark APEX UpLight Lift-Away Duo Clean LZ601: CR97, $275
• Shark APEX DuoClean Corded ZS360: CR94, $220
• Shark Rocket DuoClean Ultra-Light Corded UV380: CR94, $180
• Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Slim 2897 (Walmart): CR85, 27 ft cord, 9 lbs
• Dirt Devil Power Stick SD12530: CR88, $88.45
• Dirt Devil Power Swerve BD22050: $86.40
• Dirt Devil Reach Max Plus BD22510PC: $42.41
• Hoover Platinum LiNX BH50010: $108.95
• Kenmore CSV Go 10438: 5 lbs, $129.99
• Shark Navigator Freestyle SV1106:

Amazon shopping:

• Dyson V11 Cordless: $608.89
• Dyson V10 Cyclone Absolute: 5.88 lbs, $599.99
• Dyson V10 Animal Cordless: $499.99
• Dyson V8 Animal Cordless: $412.50
• Dyson V7 227591-01 Cordless: 5.3 lbs, $268.99
• Shark APEX UpLIght Lift-Away Duo Clean LZ601 (Renewed): 15.32 lbs, $268.95
• Shark APEX DuoClean ZS362 Corded: "A choice", 8 oz, $249.99
• Shark Rocket ZS351 Corded: 9.3 lbs, $209.99
• Shark Rocket IX141 Cordless: 7.5 lbs, $199.99
• Shark Rocket HV301 Bagless Corded: 7.6 lbs, $149.00
• APOSEN H251 Cordless: 5.5 lbs, $146.97
• Eureka RapidClean Pro Cordless: "A choice $100-200", 5.26 lbs, $134.99
• Shark Rocket ZS351 Corded [Renewed]: $134.99
• Shark Navigator Freestyle SV1106 Cordless: 7.5 lbs, $129.99
• Eureka Flash NES510 Corded: 6.3 lbs, $125.98
• APOSEN H250 Cordless: $122.39
• Bissell Adapt Ion Pet Cordless: 7.68 lbs, $119.99
• Simplicity S60 Spiffy Bagless Corded: 7.94 lbs, $119.99
• Hoover Platinum LiNX BH50010 Cordless: 10 lbs, $108.95
• MOOSOO XL-618A Cordless: HEPA filters $14.99/2, $106.99
• APOSEN Cordless: $98.99
• Dirt Devil Power Swerve Pet BD22052 Cordless: 5.2 lbs, $86.82
• Bissell 81L2W Hard Floor Expert Corded: "A choice under $100", 7 lbs, $54.99

Note: we could get another 30 foot hose (2-way switch, pigtail a/c power) for $145, or a 30 foot hose (1-way switch) for $109.

Ultimately ordered the APOSEN H251. I liked the modular design, the the tools, the removable battery, what appears to be a relatively clean way of emptying, and the washable filters. For occasional spot work, cordless seemed the way to go. We have an Electrolux stick vac downstairs. I haven't been much impressed with its cleaning, and Laura thought it was heavy and hard to use. At 5.4 lbs. it's about the same weight as the APOSEN, but the latter has more of its weight at the top than at the bottom, and the stick connection to the floor unit is much more lexible, so it should be easier to maneuver. I'd never heard of the brand (most likely a Chinese knock-off). Shark was rated highly by Consumer Reports, but corded models were heavier and more expensive. I haven't seen any Dyson ratings, but their new models are very expensive.

Weekend Roundup

Blog link.

Today's headline: Florida shatters single-day infection record with 15,300 new cases. I don't generally like linking to video, but here's Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis bragging about how safe Florida is (video seems to be from May 20), and how the alarmists have been disproven.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem: The Goya Foods free speech controversy, explained: "Goya Foods' CEO says his speech is being suppressed by a boycott. It's not." I don't care much one way or the other, but when corporate spokespeople make inflammatory political comments, which is their right if not evidence of good sense, others have a right to get upset and withhold their business. For past examples, look at what right-wing pundits had to say about Nike. While I don't care much, I did include this link because I wanted to add this tweet from Charles M Blow:

  Once more: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CANCEL CULTURE. There is free speech. You can say and do as you pls, and others can choose never to deal this you, your company or your products EVER again. The rich and powerful are just upset that the masses can now organize their dissent.

• Jay Ambrose: Slavery is not all that America is about: Another right-wing pundit, can't find much about him but he started appearing in the Wichita Eagle recently, sandwiched between Cal Thomas and Marc Thiessen. This piece is especially wretched. It starts:

  The New York Times last year came up with a project to debase America, to say this country is about nothing but slavery, that the institution has determined everything we are, that it instructs us to this day on the maltreatment of Black people. The Revolutionary War was fought to keep it going, and the pretenses of liberty and equality have been just that, pretenses. Slavery even fashioned a capitalism that maintains its evils and built our economy, we learn.

  Black Americans are the real purveyors of the ideas of liberty and equality, not racist whites, we are also instructed in the so-called 1619 Project that started with a bunch of essays in The Times Sunday magazine. . . .

  The really scary thing is The Times has so arranged things that a book of the project's contents will be taught in public high schools. That will help to further dislodge future generations from any understanding of how our values fought slavery instead of bowing to it, that many have understood that slavery and Jim Crow are our vilest faults without saying we have no virtues.

  It is certainly important to recognize our faults but also to acknowledge, as Black American pundit Thomas Sowell has pointed out, that Black Americans were making far more progress on their own initiative before some liberal politicians in the 1960s entered in to do misconceived things for votes and guilt atonement.

  The key word here is "debase": Ambrose thinks the only reason for writing about slavery is to make America look bad. He further surmises that if schoolchildren were exposed to this history, they'd -- well, I'm just guessing here -- grow up with some kind of guilt complex about being American. And why would that be such a bad thing? Well -- another guess, but less of a leap -- they might doubt their conservative leaders about how virtuous America has always been. Maybe 1619 Project tilts a bit too hard the other way, but their view hasn't been given much airing, and it uncovered a lot of forgotten (or ignored) history. The last part of the quote is even more scurrilous. It's true that blacks were making progress before the 1964 Civil Rights Act: that's why the Act was passed, to secure as well as to advance that progress. And if some whites voted for it for "guilt atonement," they often did have much to feel guilty about. But one should also mention that many felt anger about the extremely public violence segregationists used to deny Americans rights we supposedly all cherish. The implication that the Civil Rights Act ended that progress is ludicrous. Progress since then has been erratic and sometimes glacial, but the obstacles have always come from conservatives like Ambrose, who feel my guilt and take no responsibility for their ancestors or, indeed, their racist selves.

  Ambrose's one attempt to argue with the 1619 historiography is his citation of Gordon Wood ("who says there is not a single quote anywhere to be found of a colonist saying the war could save slavery"). Wood is my "go to" historian of the Revolution and the early republic (at least since Richard B. Morris passed), so I respect his criticism of the 1619 Project, but find that he invalidates very little of its historical contribution. See: An interview with historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times' 1619 Project.

• Dean Baker: Is it impossible to envision a world without patent monopolies? Elisabeth Rosenthal, at the New York Times, thinks not.

  While her points are all well-taken, the amazing part is that she never considers the simplest solution, just don't give the companies patent monopolies in the first place. The story here is the government is paying for most of the research upfront. While it has to pay for it a second time by giving the companies patent monopolies.

  There is no reason that the government can't simply make it a condition of the funding that all research findings are fully open and that any patents will be in the public domain so that any vaccines will be available as a cheap generic from the day it comes on the market. Not only does this ensure that a vaccine will be affordable, it will likely mean more rapid progress since all researchers will be able to immediately learn from the success or failures of other researchers.

  I'd go further and add that even when government does not fund the research, prospective patents are not necessary to encourage research and development and are often counterproductive. Moreover, the efficiencies within any given country from publicly funding research and publishing findings others can freely build upon would be multiplied many times over if adopted everywhere. One more point is that ending patents would significantly change the dynamics of "free trade" pacts, which often are more preoccupied with forcing adherence to an international tribute system to owners of "intellectual property," even at the expense of free trade.

• Zack Beauchamp: What the police really believe: "Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing -- and how it justifies racist violence."

• Jamelle Bouie: Maybe this isn't such a good time to prosecute a culture war

• Ronald Brownstein: Trump's America is slipping away: "He's trying to assemble a winning coalition with a dwindling number of sympathetic white voters." Nixon, with Kevin Phillips crunching the numbers, figured that if he could add Southern whites and Northern ethnics (mostly Catholics) to the Republican core he'd have a coalition capable of winning for decades. He came up with the basic pitch in 1972, and Reagan clinched the deal in the 1980s before, well, they proved basically incompetent at running the government. Since then they've mastered the mechanics of tilting elections their way, and they've repeatedly doubled down on the demagoguery, recovering quickly from the inevitable setbacks when their record came into focus. Trump is still using the Nixon/Reagan coalition plan. He won in 2016 by hitting it hard, while facing a uniquely compromised opponent running on a lacklustre record of indifference to average Americans. And no, he has no new ideas on coalition-building, even though (as the article points out) the numbers have shifted significantly away from his favor.

• Kate Conger/Jack Healy/Lucy Tompkins: Churches were eager to reopen. Now they are confronting coronavirus cases.

• David Dayen: Just one week to stop a calamity. Technically, two weeks until the federal "stimulus" payments expire, but the Senate is adjourned for another week, so no discussion until then.

• Matt Ford: Fear of a Forever-Trump administration: "There doesn't seem to be much faith in the peaceful transition of power, if the burgeoning canon of postelection pulp horror is any guide." I think we've gotten carried away with projecting Trump's authoritarian tastes and temperament into a threat to end democracy. While Trump himself may be so inclined, and while his personality cult gives him some leeway to act out, I don't see any ideological or institutional support for such a change. What I do see is a Republican Party dedicated to bending the rules, trying to tailor the electorate to its taste and scheming to grab pockets of power that will allow them to survive momentary lapses. I also see many people who are willing to follow any crackpot who flatters them and promises them dominance over myriad threats. Least of all is Trump's personal cult, which while substantial is still a minority taste, and more generally an embarrassment even to his sponsors. If fascism does come to America, they'll pick a more agreeable (and more competent) front man than Trump.

• Masha Gessen: A theme park of Donald Trump's dreams: Trump's executive order to establish a National Garden of American Heroes. It includes an initial list of people to be represented in stone. It's a peculiar list, with a judicious selection of women (Susan B Anthony, Clara Barton, Amelia Earhart, Dolley Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Betsy Ross, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman) and blacks (Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr, Jackie Robinson, Tubman, Booker T Washington), without any Confederate leaders or ideologues, but the only 20th century president is Ronald Reagan, and the only Supreme Court Justice is Antonin Scalia. As Gessen notes, the only writer is Stowe, and there are no artists or scientists. Also, no Indians (but also no Andrew Jackson or George Armstrong Custer, although Davy Crockett made the list). I'll add that there are no major business figures, and the only inventors are the Wright Brothers. Also, one name I had to look up: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (a governor of Maine). Other relative obscurities are McAuliffe (the much touted teacher-astronaut blown up by NASA) and Audie Murphy (a WWII soldier who capitalized on his Medal of Honor to become a minor Hollywood actor). As Gessen sums up: "a skeletal, heroic history, with a lot of shooting, a lot of flying, and very little government."

• Brittany Gibson: One billionaire vs. the mail: "A new report details Charles Koch's 50-year war on the US Postal Service."

• David A Graham: Donald Trump's lost cause.

• Stanley B Greenberg: The Tea Party's last stand. "The right wing's current pathetic defense of President Trump contrasts sharply with the Tea Party revolt against the election and re-election of President Barack Obama." The Tea Party only worked as an attack vehicle. They never had any program to advance. They simply meant to oppose whatever it was Democrats wanted, starting with recovery from the recession. Even today, Trump appeals to them not for any program but because Trump is the embodiment of their nihilistic worldview. Greenberg writes: "President Trump is trapped by a pandemic and protests that only magnify his insecurity and weak hold on his own party -- and by his need to provoke a Tea Party to make its last stand." But the Tea Party can't save Trump, because they can't turn their intensity into votes. On the other hand, Trump's demise won't be their end. They will find even more to hate in the next wave of Democrats. The open question is whether the media will take them seriously next time around, allowing them to magnify their impact. A big part of the reason they were able to pull that off in 2009 was Obama's efforts to "reach across the aisle" and "heal the divide" -- by their very existence they proved Obama wrong. Better to dismiss them as the whiny dead-enders they are.

• Glenn Greenwald: How the House Armed Services Committee, in the middle of a pandemic, approved a huge military budget and more war in Afghanistan.

  • Michael T Klare: Congress wants more unnecessary anti-China weapons programs in annual defense bill.

• Jonathan Guyer: How Biden's foreign-policy team got rich: "Strategic consultants will define Biden's relationship to the world."

• Jack Healy/Adam Liptak: Landmark Supreme Court ruling affirms Native American rights in Oklahoma.

• Sean Illing: Is evangelical support for Trump a contradiction?: "A religious historian explains why Trump wasn't a trade-off for American evangelicals." Interview with Kristen Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

  According to Du Mez, evangelical leaders have spent decades using the tools of pop culture -- films, music, television, and the internet -- to grow the movement. The result, she says, is a Christianity that mirrors that culture. Instead of modeling their lives on Christ, evangelicals have made heroes of people like John Wayne and Mel Gibson, people who project a more militant and more nationalist image. In that sense, Trump's strongman shtick is a near-perfect expression of their values.

  That doesn't even sound like values to me, but I've long noted a division among Christians between those who care for and seek to help their neighbors and those who wish to consign them to hell. The prevalence of revenge fantasies in American culture certainly feeds that tendency.

• Umair Irfan: Why extreme heat is so alarming for the fight against Covid-19. Interesting that the focus here isn't about global warming, even though the impetus is a 120F forecast for Phoenix, which would be a record high (tying the third highest temperature ever in Phoenix, the highest being 122F). On the other hand, Arizona is the worst Covid-19 hotspot in the nation, and probably the world. Remember how Trump was talking about the virus vanishing when it warms up?

• Jen Kirby:

  • America's looming housing catastrophe, explained.

  • Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro gets coronavirus after months of downplaying the pandemic: "The country has more than 1.6 million cases and over 65,000 coronavirus deaths."

  • Trump just commuted Roger Stone's sentence. He was expected to report to prison on July 14, so will serve zero of the 40 months in prison he was sentenced to. More on Stone:

    • Aaron Blake: Why Trump's intervention in the Roger Stone case is extraordinary -- even for him.

    • Max Boot: The worst president ever keeps getting worse.

    • Matt Ford: The most corrupt president in American history.

    • Andrew Gawthorpe: Roger Stone has escaped punishment for his crimes. Trump is sending a signal.

    • Beth Reinhard/Rosaline S Helderman/Spencer S Hsu/Josh Dawsey: Trump confidant Roger Stone leaped over thousands of inmates seeking clemency.

    • Jeffrey Toobin: The Roger Stone case shows why Trump is worse than Nixon.

• Ezra Klein: Masha Gessen on the frightening fragility of America's political institutions: Interview, based on Gessen's new book Autocracy: Rules for Survival.

• Bonnie Kristian: The real story about Russian bounties on US troops isn't whether Trump knew about it,

• Robert Kuttner:

  • Biden's new economic nationalism: Better than you may think: "And some of it seems to have been inspired by Elizabeth Warren." Also:

    • Timothy Noah: The two sides of Biden's economic plan. Sad to see that Noah counts "protecting intellectual property" among Biden's "worthwhile proposals."

  • Privatizing our public water supply.

    The House Democrats have made a good start with HR2, the Invest in America Act -- but with one weird exception: A provision slipped into the bill by the water privatization industry and its Congressional allies would create incentives to privatize America's water supply systems, one of the few essential services that are still mostly public thanks to the heroic struggles of our Progressive Era forebears, who worked to assure clean and affordable water via public systems. . . .

    Privatized systems are typically less reliable, far more expensive, and prone to corrupt deal-making. The average community with privatized water paid 59 percent more than those with government supplied water. In New Jersey, which has more private water than most, private systems charged 79 percent more. In Illinois, they charged 95 percent more. Private water corporations have also been implicated in environmental disasters. The French multinational, Veolia, issued a report in 2015 certifying that Flint, Michigan's water system met EPA standards, but neglected to mention high lead concentrations.

• Dave Lindorff: Why the high dudgeon over alleged Russian bounties for Taliban slaying of US troops: This was my second thought on hearing of the story, but I've been waiting for someone else to quote: "Paying for scalps has a venerable tradition in the US. Ask any Native American." My first thought was that the US did something damn similar when the Russians occupied Afghanistan. Maybe not bounties per sé, but the CIA certainly pressed its client mujahideen to focus on inflicting blood losses on Russia.

• Martin Longman: The spiraling downward trend of Donald Trump's political life: "My best guess is that for the rest of the campaign, every day is going to be worse for Trump than the last. And that means every day will technically be the worst day of Trump's political life."

• Annie Lowrey: The pandemic proved that cash payments work: "An extra $600 a week buys freedom from fear."

• Farhad Manjoo: I've seen a future without cars, and it's amazing. When I was growing up, cars meant everything. Even now, when our car use as atrophied to the point I've only filled it up once since March, I can't imagine doing the things we need to do without one. On the other hand, when I was growing up, I had an aunt who didn't drive, and today I have a nephew who doesn't drive, and both managed to deal with the trade-offs. Before I could drive, I was able to get around most of Wichita on bike. And I've had a couple of stretches without a car: two years at college in St. Louis, and three years living in Manhattan. Manjoo's article actually limits itself to Manhattan, where the cost/benefit ratio of having a car is higher than anywhere else in America, and the externalities of others' cars are even greater. His idea is freshly illustrated, but I'd like to point out that it isn't new: Paul and Percival Goodman wrote it up c. 1950, and included it in Paul Goodman's Utopian Essays & Practical Proposals (1962). Even now, Manjoo concedes: "With a population that is already quite used to getting along without cars, the island is just about the only place in the country where you could even consider calling for the banishment of cars."

• Dylan Matthews: Congress's Covid-19 rescue plan was bigger than the New Deal. It's about to end.

• Terrence McCoy: They lost the Civil War and fled to Brazil. Their descendants refuse to take down the Confederate flag. "It's one of history's lesser-known episodes. After the Civil War, thousands of defeated Southerners came to Brazil to self-exile in a country that still practiced slavery." Somehow I missed this story, although I did know about the "loyalists" who left America for Canada during/after the Revolution, "fundamentalist" Mormons to settled in Mexico, and Nazis who made their way to Paraguay and other South American countries. I'd guess some Confederates landed in Cuba as well, given that Cuba was the last place in the America to abolish slavery, and that slaveholders in the 1850s were so anxious to annex it as a slave state.

• John Merrick: Mike Davis tried to warn us about a virus-induced apocalypse. He did so in a book called The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005). Now he returns with a "substantially expanded edition," The Monster Enters: Covid-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism. By the way, that last bit didn't come from nowhere. That was the subject of his 2001 book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • Why did liberals win so many cases before a conservative Supreme Court? "Don't expect them to last."

    A partial explanation for the liberal victories this term is that conservative advocates got ahead of their skis. . . . When the Court moves rightward, conservative advocates are more likely to bring dubious cases -- and conservative lawmakers are more likely to enact laws of dubious constitutionality -- out of a belief that an ideologically sympathetic Court is likely to rule in their favor. Liberal lawyers, meanwhile, will be more likely to avoid federal court unless they are sure their arguments are airtight. As a result, the Supreme Court will tend to hear weaker claims from conservatives and stronger claims from liberals.

  • The Supreme Court's landmark new Native American rights decision, explained.

  • The Supreme Court just dealt a huge blow to Congress's power to investigate Trump.

  • The Supreme Court just gave Republicans a powerful new weapon against Obamacare: "A decision that was supposed to be limited to birth control threatens one of the core elements of the Affordable Care Act."

  • The Supreme Court stripped thousands of teachers of their civil rights: "The Court's 'ministerial exception' decision means many Americans just lost their right to be free from discrimination."

  • The Supreme Court decides not to make the Electoral College even worse: "'Faithless electors' may be sanctioned for defying voters."

• Lee Moran: GOP state lawmaker: 'I want to see more people' get coronavirus.

• Sean Murphy: Health official: Trump rally 'likely' source of virus surge.

• Ellen Nakashima: Trump confirms cyberattack on Russian trolls to deter them during 2018 midterms.

• Nicole Narea:

  • How "abolish ICE" helped bring abolitionist ideas into the mainstream: "Both 'abolish the police' and 'abolish ICE' have reframed the conversation around criminal justice reform."

  • Trump is trying to kick out foreign students amid the pandemic.

• Ella Nilsen: How Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders joined forces to craft a bold, progressive agenda.

• Osita Nwanevu:

  • The willful blindness of reactionary liberalism: "The critics of progressive identity politics have got it all wrong: They're the illiberal ones." This is relevant to the discussion of the Harper's letter below (although I doubt I'll have time to sort it all out).

  • Trump is numbing America to the pandemic's ravages: "The president believes he can win reelection if voters become indifferent to the dead and suffering."

• Ashley Parker/Philip Rucker/Josh Dawsey: Trump the victim: President complains in private about the pandemic hurting him.

  Callers on President Trump in recent weeks have come to expect what several allies and advisers describe as a "woe-is-me" preamble.

  The president rants about the deadly coronavirus destroying "the greatest economy," one he claims to have personally built. He laments the unfair "fake news" media, which he vents never gives him any credit. And he bemoans the "sick, twisted" police officers in Minneapolis, whose killing of an unarmed black man in their custody provoked the nationwide racial justice protests that have confounded the president.

  Gone, say these advisers and confidants, many speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations, are the usual pleasantries and greetings.

  Instead, Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation's turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim -- of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country.

• Andrew Prokop: The past 24 hours in Trump legal issues and controversies, explained: "Supreme Court decisions, closed-door testimony, and developments for Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen."

• Nathan Robinson: Trump's Mount Rushmore speech was a grim preview of his re-election strategy.

  • Lynnette Grey Bull: Trump's postcard to America from the shrine of hypocrisy.

  • David Smith: US under siege from 'far-left fascism,' says Trump in Mount Rushmore speech.

• Jeffrey Sachs: Keynes and the good life. Review of two recent books: Zachary D Carter: The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, and James Crotty: Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism.

• Dylan Scott: Covid-19 cases are rising, but deaths are falling. What's going on?

• Alex Shephard: Mary Trump diagnoses the president: "A dark new family history from Donald Trump's niece may be the most intimate psychological portrait of him yet." Her book is Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. She also happens to be a clinical psychologist, so sure she goes there. After considering the pathetic demise of Trump's older brother (Fred Trump Jr., Mary's father):

  Donald was the one Trump child who lived up to Fred Sr.'s expectations (he would also be the only one Fred Sr. would remember when suffering, late in life, from dementia). While the other Trump children gained little from their extremely wealthy father for most of his life (Maryanne, who became a federal judge, at one point was reduced to begging her mother for spare change), Donald was endlessly rewarded for his mendacity and aggression in the rough-and-tumble world of New York real estate. Fred Sr. showered his son with money, allowing him to create the illusion that he was self-made, a brilliant dealmaker. This phony personal brand would be the foundation of Donald's successful presidential campaign.

  Seems like I've heard that story before: sounds a lot like spree killer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, although Trump's money saved him from taking such a murderous turn. The review continues:

  But Donald, in Mary's telling, was the most wounded of the Trump children. He was also the most pathetic. He became profoundly needy as a result of childhood neglect but lacked the means of processing his emotions. He got stuck in an endless feedback loop of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing, seeking out sycophants to assure him that he really was great -- even though, deep down, he knew he was unloved and incapable of executing even the most basic tasks.

  This too is a familiar story: the basis of the recurring Seth Meyers features of exclusive access to the tiny voice in the back of Trump's head.

  • David Cay Johnston: The Donald Trump that only his family has ever seen.

• David Sirota: Trump's Labor Secretary is reaching cartoonish levels of supervillainry. Eugene Scalia.

• Bhaskar Sunkara: Stop trying to fight racism with corporate diversity consultants: "Inclusivity seminars and books like White Fragility protect power; they don't challenge it. We're being hustled."

• Margaret Talbot: The study that debunks most anti-abortion arguments.

• Jeffrey Toobin: Why the Mueller investigation failed: "President Trump's obstructions of justice were broader than those of Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, and the special counsel's investigation proved it. How come the report didn't say so?" This is a substantial article covering the Mueller investigation and Attorney General William Barr's handling of the report. Presumably it's related to Toobin's new book, True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, out August 4.

  According to the Administration, Mueller and his team displayed an unseemly eagerness to uncover crimes that never existed. In fact, the opposite is true. Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal. Especially when it came to Trump, Mueller avoided confrontations that he should have welcomed. He never issued a grand-jury subpoena for the President's testimony, and even though his office built a compelling case for Trump's having committed obstruction of justice, Mueller came up with reasons not to say so in his report. In light of this, Trump shouldn't be denouncing Mueller -- he should be thanking him.

• David Wallace-Wells: America is refusing to learn how to fight the coronavirus.

• Laura Weiss: How America exports police violence around the world.

• Philip Weiss:

  • Liberal Zionists use arguments -- 'There is no equality between us and the Palestinians' -- that echo white nationalists: Both are stuck in the mentality of white settler colonists, something which seems more anachronistic in America (where the question has been effectively settled) but more urgent in Israel (where the native population is still large, and the settler advantage more obviously compelled by force). I've long felt that the rationale for two states was ultimately rooted in the colonialist-racist desire to keep the Palestinian population as small as possible, even if it means giving up some land. That's what we're seeing here in liberal Zionist opposition to annexation, and of course it's ugly.

  • Beinart is the latest liberal Zionist to abandon two-state solution. Beinart's op-ed is I no longer believe in a Jewish state, and he writes at greater length: Yavne: A Jewish case for equality in Israel-Palestine.

• Conor P Williams: To DeVos, the virus is an excuse to strip public money from public schools: "The policy is in line with conservative goals of converting public dollars into private K-12 scholarships." More on DeVos:

  • Peter Wade: If you weren't afraid to send your kids back to school, DeVos' disastrous interview might change that.

• Robin Wright: Trump's impeachment revenge: Alexander Vindman is bullied into retiring.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Joe Biden's surprisingly visionary housing plan, explained.

There's also this: A letter on justice and open debate. It appeared in Harper's, and was signed by 152 people, mostly authors, between a third and a half names I readily recognize. Unfortunately, half of those I recognize mostly for their support of American (and often Israeli) military ventures abroad and/or their propensity to attack the left (often including Sanders supporters within the Democratic Party). This adds an air of disingenuity to what otherwise appears to be an innocuous (albeit deliberately vague) defense of free speech. The middle paragraph could offer some clues if you could map the unnamed censorious forces seeking to punish the unnamed actors for their unspecified offenses: although Trump is the only named threat, I wouldn't be surprised to find many more worried by what the left might provoke than by what the right actually does, and some may even fear winding up on the wrong side of justice. Take Yascha Mounk's tweet, for example:

If the crazy attempts to shame and fire people for signing this reasonably anodyne letter don't convince you that our current intellectual atmosphere is deeply unhealthy, then you're more invested in parroting the propagandistic line of the moment than in acknowledging the truth.

Tom Scocca replied:

The use of "shame and fire" here is the whole damn game. Treating them as interchangeable is, in fact, a cynical attack on free discourse.

Osita Nwanevu's piece on "reactionary liberalism" (see above) fits in here, without actually making the connection. Many of the signatories fit that mold, and they're the main reason people like myself have taken exception to the letter. I actually share a wariness about overly harsh and arbitrary punishments.

Also relevant here is Alex Shephard: The problem with Yascha Mounk's Persuasion, which does discuss the Harper's letter.

Persuasion has the feel of a club of no-longer-coddled elites, banded together in an attempt to maintain their status in a rapidly changing world. At this point, it doesn't seem to be about changing minds. It may be dressed up as a new institution for promoting a free society, but so far its cause célèbre is the process by which op-eds are published. Liberalism deserves better.

Daily Log

Tweet in response to Maura Johnston's tweet about a Harper's Letter on Justice:

What's the point here? Complain as vaguely as possible? Cast shade on anyone who gets too worked up over injustice? With few exceptions, an imposing list of right-center intellectuals in defense of moral high ground they profit from but rarely do any good with.

Ballot from the JazzTimes poll for best album of the 1990s, with my grades (!indicates grade added after first pass):

• Geri Allen: The Nurturer (Blue Note, 1990) [+]
• Bob Belden: Treasure Island (Sunnyside, 1990) []
• Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra: Groove Shop (Capri, 1990) []
• Steve Coleman and Five Elements: Black Science (Novus, 1990) []
• Charlie Haden: Dream Keeper (Blue Note, 1990) [A-]
• Roy Hargrove: Diamond in the Rough (RCA, 1990) []
• Abbey Lincoln: The World Is Falling Down (Verve, 1990) [B]
• Pat Metheny/Dave Holland/Roy Haynes: Question and Answer (Geffen, 1990) []
• Don Pullen: Random Thoughts (Blue Note, 1990) [A-]
• Marcus Roberts: Deep in the Shed (RCA, 1990) []
• Renee Rosnes: For the Moment (Blue Note, 1990) []
• John Scofield: Time on My Hands (Blue Note, 1990) [+]
• Various Artists: Music from Mo' Better Blues (Sony, 1990) []
• Kenny Wheeler: Music for Large & Small Ensembles (ECM, 1990) [B]
• Mark Whitfield: The Marksman (Warner Bros., 1990) []
• John Zorn: Naked City (Nonesuch, 1990) [B]
• Gerald Albright: Live at Birdland West (Atlantic, 1991) []
• Arthur Blythe: Hipmotism (Enja, 1991) []
• Jane Bunnett: Spirits of Havana (Denon, 1991) []
• Harry Connick, Jr.: Blue Light, Red Light (Columbia, 1991) []
• Miles Davis & Quincy Jones: Live at Montreux (Warner Bros., 1991) []
• Béla Fleck & the Flecktones: Flight of the Cosmic Hippo (Warner Bros., 1991) []
• Stan Getz/Kenny Barron: People Time (A&M, 1991) [A]
• Julius Hemphill: Fat Man and the Hard Blues (Black Saint, 1991) [+]
• Kenny Kirkland: Kenny Kirkland (GRP, 1991) []
• Abbey Lincoln: You Gotta Pay the Band (Verve, 1991) [B-]
• Jean-Luc Ponty: Tchokola (Epic, 1991) []
• Don Pullen & the African-Brazilian Connection: Kele Mou Bana (Blue Note, 1991) [A-]
• Dianne Reeves: I Remember (Blue Note, 1991) []
• Wallace Roney: Obsession (Muse, 1991) [B]
• Gonzalo Rubalcaba: The Blessing (Blue Note, 1991) [A-]
• David Sanborn: Another Hand (Elektra, 1991) []
• Arturo Sandoval: Flight to Freedom (GRP, 1991) []
• Sonny Sharrock: Ask the Ages (Axiom, 1991) [A-]
• Randy Weston: The Spirits of Our Ancestors (Verve, 1991) [A-]
• Yellowjackets: Greenhouse (GRP, 1991) []
• Geri Allen: Maroons (Blue Note, 1992) []
• Tim Berne: Diminutive Mysteries (JMT, 1992) [B]
• Terence Blanchard: The Malcolm X Suite (Columbia, 1992) [+]
• The Brecker Brothers: Return of the Brecker Brothers (GRP, 1992) [B]
• Don Byron: Tuskegee Experiments (Nonesuch, 1992) [+]
• Paquito D'Rivera: Who's Smoking? (Candid, 1992) [B]
• Kevin Eubanks: Turning Point (Blue Note, 1992) []
• Bill Frisell: Have a Little Faith (Elektra, 1992) [B]
• Joe Henderson: Lush Life (Verve, 1992) [+]
• Shirley Horn: Here's to Life (Verve, 1992) []
• Keith Jarrett: Vienna Concert (ECM, 1992) []
• Charles Lloyd: Notes From Big Sur (ECM, 1992) [*]
• Joe Lovano: Universal Language (Blue Note, 1992) [B]
• Russell Malone: Russell Malone (Columbia, 1992) []
• Medeski Martin & Wood: Notes from the Underground (Accurate, 1992) []
• Gerry Mulligan: Rebirth of the Cool (GRP, 1992) []
• Courtney Pine: To the Eyes of Creation (Island, 1992) []
• John Scofield: Grace Under Pressure (Blue Note, 1992) [+]
• Mike Stern: Standards and Other Songs (Atlantic, 1992) [+]
• Dr. Billy Taylor: Mr. T (GRP, 1992) []
• Gary Thomas: Till We Have Faces (JMT, 1992) [B]
• David S. Ware: The Flight of I (Columbia, 1992) [A-]
• Kenny Wheeler: Kayak (Ah Um, 1992) []
• Tony Williams: The Story of Neptune (Blue Note, 1992) []
• Steve Coleman and Five Elements: The Tao of Mad Phat: Fringe Zones (RCA Novus, 1993) [A-]
• Dave Douglas: Parallel Worlds (Soul Note, 1993) [B]
• Marty Ehrlich: Can You Hear a Motion? (Enja, 1993) [B]
• Charles Gayle/William Parker/Rashied Ali: Touchin' on Trane (FMP, 1993) [A-]
• Benny Green: That's Right (Blue Note, 1993) []
• Antonio Hart: For Cannonball & Woody (RCA Novus, 1993) []
• Joe Henderson: So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles) (Verve, 1993) [B]
• Fred Hersch Trio: Dancing in the Dark (Chesky, 1993) [**]
• Charlie Hunter Trio: Charlie Hunter Trio (Prawn Song, 1993) []
• Keith Jarrett: Bye Bye Blackbird (ECM, 1993) []
• Joe Lovano: Tenor Legacy (Blue Note, 1993) [A-]
• Kevin Mahogany: Double Rainbow (Enja, 1993) []
• Medeski Martin & Wood: It's a Jungle in Here (Gramavision, 1993) []
• Marcus Miller: The Sun Don't Lie (PRA, 1993) []
• Greg Osby: 3D Lifestyles (Blue Note, 1993) []
• Joshua Redman: Wish (Warner Bros., 1993) [A-]
• Sonny Rollins: Old Flames (Milestone, 1993) [**]
• Renee Rosnes: Without Words (Blue Note, 1993) []
• Henry Threadgill: Too Much Sugar for a Dime (Axiom, 1993) [B]
• David S. Ware: Third Ear Recitation (DIW, 1993) [A-]
• Bobby Watson: Tailor Made (Columbia, 1993) [B]
• Randy Weston: Volcano Blues (Antilles, 1993) [+]
• Cassandra Wilson: Blue Light 'Til Dawn (Blue Note, 1993) [B]
• Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra: Desert Lady/Fantasy (Columbia, 1994) []
• Geri Allen Trio: Twenty One (Blue Note, 1994) [+]
• Ginger Baker Trio: Going Back Home (Atlantic, 1994) [+]
• Black/Note: Jungle Music (Columbia, 1994) []
• Peter Brötzmann/Toshinori Kondo/William Parker/Hamid Drake: Die Like a Dog (FMP, 1994) [B]
• Ray Brown Trio: Don't Get Sassy (Telarc, 1994) []
• James Carter: JC On the Set (DIW/Columbia, 1994) [A-]
• Dave Douglas: In Our Lifetime (New World, 1994) [A-]
• Sonny Fortune: Four in One (Blue Note, 1994) [A-]
• Bill Frisell: This Land (Nonesuch, 1994) [+]
• Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Tony Williams and Wallace Roney: A Tribute to Miles (Qwest, 1994) []
• Roy Hargrove: With the Tenors of Our Time (Verve, 1994) [A-]
• Franklin Kiermyer: Solomon's Daughter (Evidence, 1994) [B]
• Danilo Pérez: The Journey (RCA, 1994) []
• Joshua Redman Quartet: MoodSwing (Warner Bros., 1994) [+]
• Pharoah Sanders: Crescent With Love (Evidence, 1994) [A-]
• Maria Schneider: Evanescence (Enja, 1994) []
• John Scofield: Hand Jive (Blue Note, 1994) [***]
• Sonny Simmons: Ancient Ritual (Qwest, 1994) [+]
• Henry Threadgill: Carry the Day (Columbia, 1994) [+]
• Ernie Watts: Reaching Up (JVC, 1994) [+]
• Eric Alexander/Lin Halliday: Stablemates (Delmark, 1995) []
• Dee Dee Bridgewater: Love and Peace: A Tribute to Horace Silver (Verve, 1995) [A-]
• Don Byron: Music for Six Musicians (Nonesuch, 1995) [A-]
• Holly Cole: Temptation (Alert, 1995) []
• Ornette Coleman: Tone Dialing (Harmolodic/Verve, 1995) [+]
• Al Di Meola, Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty: The Rite of Strings (Gai Saber, 1995) []
• Kurt Elling: Close Your Eyes (Blue Note, 1995) [B]
• Gateway: Homecoming (ECM, 1995) []
• Joe Lovano: Rush Hour (Blue Note, 1995) [B]
• Jim Hall: Dialogues (Telarc, 1995) []
• Hannibal (Marvin Peterson): African Portraits (Teldec, 1995) [B-]
• Tom Harrell: The Art of Rhythm (RCA, 1995) [A-]
• Joe Henderson: Double Rainbow: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim (Verve, 1995) [+]
• Jon Hendricks: Boppin' at the Blue Note (Telarc, 1995) []
• Dave Holland Quartet: Dream of the Elders (ECM, 1995) [+]
• Charlie Hunter: Bing, Bing, Bing! (Blue Note, 1995) []
• Abbey Lincoln: A Turtle's Dream (Verve, 1995) [+]
• Kevin Mahogany: You Got What It Takes (Enja, 1995) []
• Christian McBride: Gettin' To It (Verve, 1995) [A-]
• John McLaughlin: The Promise (Verve, 1995) [B]
• Greg Osby: Black Book (Blue Note, 1995) []
• Sun Ra: Second Star to the Right: A Salute to Walt Disney (Leo, 1995) [***]
• Renee Rosnes: Ancestors (Blue Note, 1995) [+]
• David Sanchez: Sketches of Dreams (Columbia, 1995) [+]
• Wayne Shorter: High Life (Verve, 1995) [C+]
• Henry Threadgill: Makin' a Move (Columbia, 1995) [+]
• Ralph Towner: Lost and Found (ECM, 1995) []
• Cassandra Wilson: New Moon Daughter (Blue Note, 1995) [B]
• Michael Brecker: Tales From the Hudson (GRP, 1996) []
• Don Byron: Bug Music (Nonesuch, 1996) [+]
• James Carter: Conversin' with the Elders (Atlantic, 1996) [A]
• Herbie Hancock: The New Standard (Verve, 1996) [B]
• Branford Marsalis: The Dark Keys (Columbia, 1996) []
• William Parker: In Order to Survive (Black Saint, 1996) [A-] !
• Danilo Pérez: Panamonk (Impulse!, 1996) [**]
• Dianne Reeves: The Grand Encounter (Blue Note, 1996) []
• Kenny Wheeler: Angel Song (ECM, 1996) [B]
• Tony Williams: Wilderness (Ark 21, 1996) []
• Joe Zawinul: My People (Escapade, 1996) []
• Geri Allen: Some Aspects of Water (Storyville, 1997) []
• Ray Brown/John Clayton/Christian McBride: SuperBass: Live at Scullers (Telarc, 1997) []
• Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny: Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) (Verve, 1997) [+]
• Holly Cole: Dark Dear Heart (Alert, 1997) []
• Steve Coleman: The Sign and the Seal: Transmissions of the Metaphysics of a Culture (RCA, 1997) []
• Chick Corea: Remembering Bud Powell (Stretch, 1997) [B]
• Dave Douglas: Sanctuary (Avant, 1997) []
• Kurt Elling: The Messenger (Blue Note, 1997) [*]
• Kenny Garrett: Songbook (Warner Bros., 1997) [B]
• Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter: 1+1 (Verve, 1997) []
• Diana Krall: Love Scenes (GRP/Impulse!, 1997) [A-]
• Wynton Marsalis: Blood on the Fields (Columbia, 1997) [B]
• Pat Martino: All Sides Now (Blue Note, 1997) []
• Pat Metheny Group: Imaginary Day (Warner Bros., 1997) [B-]
• Greg Osby: Further Ado (Blue Note, 1997) [B]
• William Parker & the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra: Sunrise in the Tone World (AUM Fidelity, 1997) [B]
• Courtney Pine: Underground (Verve, 1997) []
• John Pizzarelli: Our Love Is Here to Stay (RCA, 1997) []
• Renee Rosnes: As We Are Now (Blue Note, 1997) [A-]
• Matthew Shipp Trio with Joe Morris: Thesis (Hatology, 1997) [B]
• Tomasz Stanko Septet: Litania: Music of Krzysztof Komeda (ECM, 1997) [A-]
• Jane Ira Bloom: The Red Quartets (Arabesque, 1999) [***]
• Michael Brecker: Two Blocks from the Edge (Impulse!, 1998) [B]
• Don Byron: Nu Blaxploitation (Blue Note, 1998) [+]
• Dave Douglas: Convergence (Soul Note, 1998) [+]
• Charlie Haden and Kenny Barron: Night and the City (Verve, 1998) [A-]
• Herbie Hancock: Gershwin's World (Verve, 1998) [B]
• Shirley Horn: I Remember Miles (Verve, 1998) []
• Joe Lovano: Trio Fascination: Edition One (Blue Note, 1998) [A-]
• Russell Malone: Sweet Georgia Peach (Impulse!, 1998) []
• Brad Mehldau: Songs: The Art of the Trio, Vol. 3 (Warner Bros., 1998) [+]
• Greg Osby: Banned in New York (Blue Note, 1998) [+]
• William Parker: The Peach Orchard (AUM Fidelity, 1998) [A]
• Michel Petrucciani: Solo Live (Dreyfus, 1998) [+]
• Joshua Redman: Timeless Tales (for Changing Times) (Warner Bros., 1998) [+]
• Amon Tobin: Permutation (Ninja Tune, 1998) []
• Kenny Wheeler: All the More (Soul Note, 1998) []
• Matt Wilson: Going Once, Going Twice (Palmetto, 1998) [A-]
• Denny Zeitlin Trio: As Long as There's Music (Venus, 1998) []
• John Zorn: The Circle Maker (Tzadik, 1998) []
• John Abercrombie: Open Land (ECM, 1999) []
• Bablicon: In a Different City (Misra, 1999) []
• The Cinematic Orchestra: Motion (Ninja Tune, 1999) []
• Steve Coleman and Five Elements: The Sonic Language of Myth: Believing, Learning, Knowing (RCA, 1999) []
• Charlie Haden Quartet West: The Art of the Song (PolyGram, 1999) [B-]
• Jim Hall & Pat Metheny: Jim Hall & Pat Metheny (Telarc, 1999) []
• Dave Holland Quintet: Prime Directive (ECM, 1999) [A-]
• Keith Jarrett: The Melody at Night, With You (ECM, 1999) [+]
• Diana Krall: When I Look in Your Eyes (Verve, 1999) []
• Brad Mehldau: Elegiac Cycle (Warner Bros., 1999) [+]
• Jason Moran: Soundtrack to Human Motion (Blue Note, 1999) [A-]
• William Parker: Posium Pendasem (FMP, 1999) []
• Renee Rosnes: Art & Soul (Blue Note, 1999) []
• Bobby Watson: Quiet as It's Kept (RED, 1999) [A-]
• Cassandra Wilson Traveling Miles (Blue Note, 1999) [+]

1. Miles Davis: Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970) [A-]
2. Herbie Hancock: Head Hunters (Columbia, 1973) [+]
3. Chick Corea: Return to Forever (ECM, 1972) [A-]
4. Keith Jarrett: The Köln Concert (ECM, 1975) [A-]
5. Weather Report: Heavy Weather (Columbia, 1977) [B-]
6. Pat Metheny: Bright Size Life (ECM, 1976) []
7. Freddie Hubbard: Red Clay (CTI, 1970) [A-]
8. Jaco Pastorius: Jaco Pastorius (Epic, 1976) [+]
9. Miles Davis: A Tribute to Jack Johnson (Columbia, 1971) [A+]
10. Weather Report: Weather Report (Columbia, 1971) [B]
11. George Benson: Breezin' (Warner Bros., 1976) [B]
12. The Mahavishnu Orchestra: The Inner Mounting Flame (Columbia, 1971) [A]
13. Dave Holland: Conference of the Birds (ECM, 1973) [A]
14. Charlie Haden: Liberation Music Orchestra (Impulse!, 1970) [+]
15. The Mahavishnu Orchestra: Birds of Fire (Columbia, 1973) [+]
16. Return to Forever: Light as a Feather (Polydor, 1973) [B]
17. Wayne Shorter: Native Dancer (Columbia, 1975) [B-]
18. Miles Davis: On the Corner (Columbia, 1972) [***]
19. Weather Report: Black Market (Columbia, 1976) []
20. Grover Washington Jr.: Mister Magic (Kudu, 1975) [B]
21. Bill Evans: The Bill Evans Album (Columbia, 1971) []
22. Weather Report: Mysterious Traveller (Columbia, 1974) [B]
23. Joe Pass: Virtuoso (Pablo, 1973) [+]
24. Charles Mingus: Changes One & Two (Atlantic, 1974) [A] [A-]
25. Dexter Gordon: Homecoming (Columbia, 1976) [A-]
26. Ornette Coleman: Science Fiction (Columbia, 1971) [A-] -- expanded reissue
27. Return to Forever: Romantic Warrior (Columbia, 1976) [C+]
28. Bill Evans/Tony Bennett: The Bill Evans/Tony Bennett Album (Fantasy, 1975) [+]
29. Charles Mingus: Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia, 1972) [C+]
30. Stanley Turrentine: Sugar (CTI, 1970) [A-]
31. Herbie Hancock: Mwandishi (Columbia, 1971) [B] -- expanded reissue
32. Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson: Ella and Oscar (Pablo, 1975) [*]
33. Keith Jarrett: Belonging (ECM, 1974) [A]
34. Keith Jarrett: My Song (ECM, 1978) [A-]
35. Oscar Peterson/Joe Pass/Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen: The Trio (Pablo, 1974) []
36. V.S.O.P.: The Quintet (Columbia, 1977) []
37. Stan Getz: Captain Marvel (Columbia, 1972) []
38. Old and New Dreams: Old and New Dreams (ECM, 1979) [**]
39. Al Jarreau: Look to the Rainbow (Warner Bros., 1977) [C+]
40. Woody Shaw: Rosewood (Columbia, 1978) [**]
41. John McLaughlin & Carlos Santana: Love Devotion Surrender (Columbia, 1973) []
42. Stanley Clarke: School Days (Nemperor, 1976) [C+]
43. Carla Bley: Escalator Over the Hill (JCOA, 1971) [B]
44. Jack DeJohnette: New Directions (ECM, 1978) [*]
45. Grover Washington Jr.: Inner City Blues (Kudu, 1972) [*]
46. Freddie Hubbard: Straight Life (CTI, 1971) [***]
47. Paul Desmond: Pure Desmond (CTI, 1974) [B]
48. Julius Hemphill: Dogon A.D. (Mbari, 1972) [A-]
49. McCoy Tyner: Trident (Milestone, 1975) []
50. Sarah Vaughan: The Duke Ellington Songbook, Vols. 1 & 2 (Pablo, 1979) [***] [**]
51. George Benson: Beyond the Blue Horizon (CTI, 1971) [*]
52. John McLaughlin: My Goal's Beyond (Douglas, 1971) []
53. Shakti: Shakti With John McLaughlin (Columbia, 1976) [***]
54. Betty Carter: The Audience with Betty Carter (Bet-Car, 1979) [B-]
55. The Art Ensemble of Chicago: Nice Guys (ECM, 1978) [***] !
56. Bill Evans: Alone Again (Fantasy, 1975) []
57. Weather Report: 8:30 (Columbia, 1979) []
58. The Art Ensemble of Chicago: Les Stances a Sophie (Nessa, 1970) []
59. McCoy Tyner: Echoes of a Friend (Milestone, 1972) []
60. Cecil Taylor: Silent Tongues (Arista, 1974) [A-]
61. Sarah Vaughan: Send in the Clowns (Mainstream, 1974) []
62. Art Pepper: The Trip (Contemporary, 1976) [+]
63. Lee Ritenour: Captain Fingers (Epic, 1977) []
64. Joe Henderson: In Pursuit of Blackness (Milestone, 1971) []
65. Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass: Fitzgerald & Pass . . . Again (Pablo, 1976) []
66. McCoy Tyner: Supertrios (Milestone, 1977) []
67. Stanley Clarke: Journey to Love (Nemperor, 1975) []
68. Air: Air Lore (Arista Novus, 1979) [A]
69. Sonny Rollins: Next Album (Milestone, 1972) [+]
70. Sonny Rollins: Don't Stop the Carnival (Milestone, 1978) []
71. Herbie Hancock: Herbie Hancock Trio (CBS, 1977) []
72. Dexter Gordon: Bouncin' with Dex (SteepleChase, 1975) []
73. The Art Ensemble of Chicago: Fanfare for the Warriors (Atlantic, 1973) [B-]
74. Ornette Coleman/Charlie Haden: Soapsuds, Soapsuds (Horizon, 1977) [+]
75. George Benson: Good King Bad (CTI, 1976) []
76. Charlie Haden: Closeness (Horizon, 1976) [+]
77. Tony Williams: The Joy of Flying (Columbia, 1979) []
78. Ron Carter: Piccolo (Milestone, 1977) []
79. Sonny Rollins: Easy Living (Milestone, 1977) []
80. The Heath Brothers: Passin' Through (Columbia, 1978) []
81. Bill Evans with the George Russell Orchestra: Living Time (Columbia, 1972) []
82. Ron Carter: Peg Leg (Milestone, 1978) []

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33567 [33526] rated (+41), 212 [211] unrated (+1).

I've been ambivalent about adding mid-year lists to the metacritic file. Last couple years I actually started with those lists, but this year I've been collecting ratings pretty extensively, so the current file should provide you with a fairly accurate account of critical consensus on records so far. More importantly, the method should continue to work week in, week out through the end of the year. Right now, the ratings (with points in braces, and, where available, my grades in brackets):

1. Run the Jewels: RTJ4 (Jewel Runners/RBC/BMG) {58} [A-]
2. Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters (Epic) {54} [A-]
3. Waxahatchee: Saint Cloud (Merge) {46} [A-]
4. Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways (Columbia) {40} [A-]
5. Phoebe Bridgers: Punisher (Dead Oceans) {38} [**]
6. Dua Lipa: Future Nostalgia (Warner) {34} [A-]
7. Lucinda Williams: Good Souls Better Angels (Highway 20) {34} [A-]
8. Haim: Women in Music Pt III (Columbia) {33} [**]
9. Perfume Genius: Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (Matador) {31} [*]
10. Caribou: Suddenly (Merge) {30} [**]
11. Tame Impala: The Slow Rush (Interscope) {28} [*]
12. Drive-By Truckers: The Unraveling (ATO) {27} [A-]
13. Thundercat: It Is What It Is (Brainfeeder) {27} [B]
14. Jessie Ware: What's Your Pleasure? (Interscope) {26} [***]
15. Shabaka and the Ancestors: We Are Sent Here by History (Impulse!) {25} [A-]
16. Soccer Mommy: Color Theory (Loma Vista) {25} [***]
17. Yves Tumor: Heaven to a Tortured Mind(Warp) {25} [**]
18. Charli XCX: How I'm Feeling Now (Asylum) {25} [***]
19. Moses Sumney: Grae (Jagjaguwar) {23} [B]
20. Gil Scott-Heron: We're New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven (XL) {22} [**]
21. Grimes: Miss Anthropocene (4AD) {22} [***]
22. Lady Gaga: Chromatica (Interscope) {21} [***]
23. Pearl Jam: Gigaton (Monkeywrench/Republic) {20} []
24. Jehnny Beth: To Love Is to Live (Caroline) {19} [*]
25. Cornershop: England Is a Garden (Ample Play) {19} [A-]
26. Destroyer: Have We Met (Merge) {19} [*]
27. Halsey: Manic (Capitol) {19} [***]
28. Laura Marling: Song for Our Daughter (Chrysalis/Partisan) {19} [**]
29. Mac Miller: Circles (Warner) {19} [A-]
30. Rina Sawayama: Sawayama (Dirty Hit) {19} [B-]
31. US Girls: Heavy Light (4AD) {19} [B-]
32. Hayley Williams: Petals of Armor (Atlantic) {19} [*]

Well, it's skewed somewhat. Some of the lists I monitor are from friendly sources, and that moves the consensus a bit toward things that are more likely to interest me. Also, I don't skip sources that focus exclusively on metal or classical, though I occasionally pick up samples of each from elsewhere. The idea is less to sample public opinion than it is to sift through it to find things that might be interesting to review. And while this top-32 (despite the numbers, everything from 24-32 are tied). But I also feel entitled to add in some points myself (matching the points for Robert Christgau's grades; all other sources are treated as one point each mention as noted in the legend).

I skewed the results further by adding in mid-year lists scraped from the Expert Witness Facebook group, comments to a July 2 post. I picked up lists from: Steve Alter, Kevin Bozelka, Jeffrey D. Callahan, Joey Daniewicz, Chris Gray, Paul Hayden, Eric Johnson, Tom Lane, Brad Luen, Eric Marcus, Greg Morton, Stan Piccirilli, Harden Smith, John Speranza, Thomas Walker, plus a few bits from others I had already been following (especially Chris Monsen). In compiling these lists, I've omitted records that didn't qualify by my relaxed 2020 standards (which include all December 2019 releases and any other 2019 releases that didn't appear in my 2019 EOY aggregate). Also note that the lists almost always identify records by artist name only, so I had to guess here and there. (Old releases I didn't tally were: Constantinople & Ablaye Cissoko, Kefaya + Elaha Soroor, Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage, Post Malone, Red Velvet, Matana Roberts, Kalie Shorr.)

All this skewing probably contributed to me grading 10 (of 32) records A-, 6 more B+(***). If you subtract my points, Christgau's, the Expert Witness lists, Monsen, Phil Overeem, and Tim Niland, the list would run: Phoebe Bridgers {33}, Run the Jewels {32}, Fiona Apple/Haim {31}, Perfume Genius/Waxahatchie {30}, Caribou {28}, Bob Dylan/Tame Impala {27}, Thundercat {25}, Dua Lipa {24}, Yves Tumor/Charli XCX {22}, Moses Sumney {21}, Pearl Jam/Soccer Mommy {20}, US Girls/Jessie Ware {19}.

The new records below mostly came from the Expert Witness lists -- expecially from Monsen (6). The other big block is a bunch of records by the late Freddy Cole. I've long recommended two later records -- The Dreamer in Me (2009) and Freddy Cole Sings Mr. B (2010) -- so I was especially surprised to find my favorite among the rest was his 1964 debut. Milt Hinton and Osie Johnson are names I know well, but this also made me want to explore saxophonist Sam "The Man" Taylor. He recorded quite a bit, but only has one compilation on Napster, and I passed on it due to lack of discography.

Ennio Morricone (91) has died. He was possibly the most famous soundtrack composer of the last 50-60 years. I've always harbored an active dislike for soundtrack albums, which is probably why I've never delved into his, despite much enjoying his music in the context of the movies. I can recommend his 1987 compilation on Virgin, Film Music, Volume 1.

Another recent death was English bassist Simon H. Fell (61), another musician I've heard very little from. I dutifully listed 12 of his titles, all highly touted by Penguin Guide, in my shopping list/database, but never found a one of them, so I've only heard one more recent album -- SFE (2011, Clean Feed) [B+(***)]. That's not likely to change much. I see that selections from most of his albums are available on Bandcamp, but none complete enough for me to review.

I am toying with the idea of taking notes on fractional albums, since that would seem to offer a way to glimpse much of the work that I find currently inaccessible. I currently use U to designate records that I possess a copy of but haven't graded yet. I'm tempted to add a new U+ for records I've only heard part of but would like to hear more, and U- for records I've heard enough of to doubt any further interest. One reason I haven't done this is that I'm not sure how the programs would deal with the introduction of a new grade. I wouldn't want to count U+ or U- albums as graded, or as ungraded (a number I've been trying to whittle down, without much success lately).

One question in the queue, which I'll probably get to this week. By all means, please ask more.

New records reviewed this week:

• 6lack: 6pc Hot EP (2020, Interscope, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Juhani Aaltonen/Jonas Kullhammar/Christian Meaas Svendsen/Ilmari Heikinheimo: The Father, the Sons & the Junnu (2019 [2020], Moserobie): [cd]: A-
• Aardvark Jazz Orchestra: Faces of Souls (2015-19 [2020], Leo): [r]: B+(*)
• Aksak Maboul: Figures (2020, Crammed Discs): [r]: B+(**)
• James Carney Sextet: Pure Heart (2020, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(***)
• Drakeo the Ruler: Thank You for Using GTL (2020, Stinc Team): [r]: B+(**)
• Hegge: Feeling (2020, Particular): [r]: B+(***)
• Derrick Hodge: Color of Noize (2020, Blue Note): [r]: B
• John Pål Inderberg Trio: Radio Inderberg (2019 [2020], AMP Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Edward "Kidd" Jordan/Joel Futterman/William Parker/Hamid Drake: A Tribute to Alvin Fielder: Live at Vision Festival XXIV (2019 [2020], Mahakala Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Machine Girl: U-Void Synthesizer (2020, 1818199 DK2): [r]: B-
• Nicole Mitchell/Lisa E. Harris: Earthseed (2017 [2020], FPE): [r]: C-
• Noshir Mody: An Idealist's Handbook: Identity, Love and Hope in America 2020 (2020, self-released): [cd]: B
• Hedvig Mollestad: Ekhidna (2020, Rune Grammofon): [r]: A-
• Willie Nelson: First Rose of Spring (2020, Legacy): [r]: B+(***)
• Pere Ubu: By Order of Mayor Pawlicki: Live in Jarocin (2017 [2020], Cherry Red): [r]: B+(**)
• Francis Quinlan: Likewise (2020, Saddle Creek): [r]: B+(*)
• Jorge Roeder: El Suelo Mio (2020, T-Town): [r]: B+(*)
• Randy Rogers & Wade Bowen: Hold My Beer, Vol. 2 (2020, Lil' Buddy Toons): [r]: B+(*)
• Claire Rousay: A Heavenly Touch (2020, Already Dead): [r]: B
• Sault: Untitled (Black Is) (2020, Forever Living Originals): [bc]: B+(***)
• Øyvind Skarbø/Fredrik Ljungkvist/Kris Davis/Ole Morten Vågan: Inland Empire (2016 [2020], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Stephane Spira/Giovanni Mirabassi: Improkofiev (2020, Jazzmax): [cd]: B+(**)
• Grant Stewart Quartet: Rise and Shine (2019 [2020], Cellar Live): [r]: B+(**)
• Jessie Ware: What's Your Pleasure? (2020, Interscope): [r]: B+(***)
• Bobby Watson: Keepin' It Real (2020, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B
• Westside Gunn: Flygod Is an Awesome God II (2020, Griselda): [r]: B+(*)
• Hailey Whitters: The Dream (2020, Pigasus): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• The Mark Harvey Group: A Rite for All Souls (1971 [2020], Americas Musicworks, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***) [07-17]

Old music:

• Freddy Cole: "Waiter, Ask the Man to Play the Blues": Freddy Cole Plays & Sings Some Lonely Ballads (1964, Dot): [r]: A-
• Freddy Cole: The Cole Nobody Knows (1973, First Shot): [r]: B
• Freddy Cole: One More Love Song (1978, Poker): [r]: B
• Freddy Cole: I'm Not My Brother, I'm Me (1990 [2004], High Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Freddy Cole: This Is the Life (1993 [2003], Savoy Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
• Freddy Cole: To the Ends of the Earth (1997, Fantasy): [r]: B+(**)
• Freddy Cole: Love Makes the Changes (1998, Fantasy): [r]: B+(***)
• Freddy Cole: Le Grand Freddy: Freddy Cole Sings the Music of Michel Legrand (1994-99 [1999], Fantasy): [r]: B+(**)
• Freddy Cole: This Love of Mine (2005, High Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Freddy Cole: He Was the King (2016, High Note): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Gregory Dudzienski Quartet: Beautiful Moments (OA2) [07-17]
• Bartosz Hadala Group: Three Short Stories (Zecernia)
• Jeremy Levy Jazz Orchestra: The Planets: Reimagined (OA2) [07-17]
• Quinsin Nachoff: Pivotal Arc (Whirlwind) [08-07]
• Owl Xounds Exploding Galaxy: The Coalescence (ESP-Disk)
• Soft Machine: Live at the Baked Potato (Moonjune)

Weekend Roundup

Blog link.

The Wichita Eagle doesn't publish a paper edition on Saturdays any more, so I had to scrounge around for something to read with breakfast. Picked up the 4 June 2020 London Review of Books, and started reading Eliot Weinberg's lead article, "The American Virus":

As confirmed American coronavirus deaths pass 67,000, the president declares, in an interview with Fox News held inside the Lincoln Memorial, where events are traditionally banned: "They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse." A Twitter wit writes that, for the massive marble sculpture looming above, "It was the second worst thing Lincoln ever watched."

Internal White House documents predict three thousand American deaths a day by the end off May. The president weeets: "Getting great reviews, finally, for how well we are handling the pandemic." He retweets that the Trump Turnberry golf course has been named by Golf World magazine as the best golf course in the UK and Ireland for 2020. . . .

Republicans continue the fight against voting by mail. (The president has said that if this were universally allowed, "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again," though he himself mails in his ballot.) In Wisconsin in April, the Republican-majority Supreme Court had demanded that voters appear in person, leading to a spike in infections. In Texas, which permits voting by mail for the ill, the attorney general rules that fear of Covid-19 is an "emotional reaction . . . and does not, by itself, amount to a 'sickness.'"

Signs at the many protests at state capitols against the lockdown, where crowds wave Confederate and "Don't Tread on Me" flags and (legally) carry assault riffles:

• FAKE CRISIS
• COVID-19 IS A LIE
• MY RIGHTS DON'T END WHERE YOUR FEAR BEGINS
• FAUCI IS NOT OUR PRESIDENT
• MY BODY MY CHOICE
• JESUS IS MY VACCINE
• KEEP TEXAS FREE FROM TYRANNY
• GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME COVID-19
• SOCIALISM SUCKS
• SACRIFICE THE WEAK: REOPEN
• ARBEIT MACHT FREI
• A WANT A HAIRCUT

In the ten days after the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, reopens gyms, spas, hair salons, tattoo parlours and other essential services, confirmed coronavirus cases in the state rise by 42 per cent.

Of course, this is one news, but not very old. The death count has nearly doubled since this was written (132,000 on Saturday; the 67,000 figure dates to April 25). The anti-lockdown demonstrations receded as all states followed Georgia in re-opening non-essential businesses, mostly with the same increase in infections. One thing that hasn't changed is Trump's fetish for large statues, once again selecting a large stone Lincoln for his July 4 spectacle. (See: Jordan Muller: Trump seeks to claim the mantle of history in fiery Mount Rushmore address.)

But the Fourth of July celebrations were a side show. The big article this week is Derek Hawkins/Marisa Iati/Jacqueline Dupree: Seven-day average case total in the US sets record for 27th straight day.

Some scattered links this week:

• Kate Aronoff:

  • The Democrats new climate plan is weirdly isolationist: "A new 538-page report adopts an America First strategy to solve a global problem."

  • The world order is broken. The coronavirus proves it. "Rich countries have pushed economic policies that set poor countries up to fail."

  • The Fed is bailing out polluters while cities struggle.

  • Is BlackRock the new vampire squid? "The investment giant casts itself as socially responsible while contributing to the climate catastrophe, evading regulatory scrutiny, and angling to influence a Biden administration."

• David Atkins:

  • Universal basic income continues to gain mainstream support due to COVID-19. By the way, I just finished Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, which starts with UBI, which pointed out that the idea was widely considered in the early 1970s: he cites Nixon's interest, but my recollection is more McGovern. I recall reading several books on it back then, especially by Robert Theobald (1929-99), best known for Free Men and Free Markets (1963). For a new piece on UBI: Luke Savage: Want to fight poverty? Give poor people money.

  • Why a movement like Trumpism doesn't have a future. The takeaway from the Mt. Rushmore speech:

    It is no accident that the same president who delivered this revanchist, defensive Fourth of July message also could not articulate a single second-term policy priority in front of a friendly interviewer. The gauzy haze of nostalgia that it activates in the conservative mind can be good at whipping up certain kinds of votes, but it cannot serve as the basis for a coherent policy platform. It can encode certain sentiments -- that America should be primarily for white evangelical Christians and run primarily by older white men -- but those sentiments are not only deeply unpopular, they run contrary to the actual words of most of the country's founding documents and the majority of the last century's constitutional jurisprudence.

    Trump has failed on policy at every level because his vision is difficult to translate into legislation, and when articulated almost impossible to enact democratically. As a substitute for literally Making America White Again, building a big wall, enacting travel bans on certain countries or putting migrant children into cages is not only unpopular and villainous, it's also difficult to do legislatively and simply ineffectual in accomplishing the task. That's why these sorts of right-wing populist jabs have historically been culture war red meat designed to keep the bigots distracted while the rich people in charge made off the loot in the form of subsidies and tax cuts. So has it been also with Trump: his base gets to feel like they owned the "libs," but in actuality the only structurally significant outcomes have been tax cuts and giveaways for rich corporate executives and a raft of corporate-friendly judges. Meanwhile, everyone else gets the shaft economically -- including his own downwardly-mobile supporters. . . .

    Trump's vision has no future at all and cannot be negotiated or compromised with. Even if it weren't morally repulsive, it would still be a dead-end for what politics is supposed to be all about: solving problems. During more frivolous times that might not be seem like such a big deal: after all, in 2016 many people voted for Trump out of a sense of "let's see what happens" bored amusement. Many thought that the country essentially ran itself, so why not put a showman in charge? Well, we've now seen what happens.

  • The Trump administration is giving up on fighting the pandemic: The term narrowly considered, meaning the political operatives in and near the White House: the conscious, political direction. But the term is more often used to refer to the whole executive branch, which still harbors countless anonymous bureaucrats who are merely doing their jobs, or trying to (despite political obstacles).

• Mike Baker/Jennifer Valentino-DeVries/Manny Fernandez/Michael LaForgia: Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of 'I can't breathe.'

• Dan Balz: Trump turned July Fourth into a partisan event. The damage could be long-lasting.

• William J Barber/Phyllis Bennis: The police and the pentagon are bringing our wars home.

• Medea Benjamin/Nicolas JS Davies: Trump's record on foreign policy: Lost wars, new conflicts, and broken promises.

• Matt Bruenig: The racial wealth gap is about the upper classes.

• James Bruno: Netanyahu wants to annex the West Bank. Will Joe Biden stop him? Argues: "The Democratic nominee needs to be clear: the move would come with real consequences if he's elected." I doubt that: annexation will be baked into "the facts on the ground" by the time Biden can take office, and he has never shown any evidence of standing up to (or even questioning) Israel. Moreover, while the US has given lip service to a "two-state solution" for a long time, the US has never really done anything to make it happen. The problem Netanyahu faces most immediately is losing European support to BDS -- that would be a "real consequence." Longer term, Israel risks losing its bedrock Democratic Party base -- not Biden directly, but people Biden will ultimately depend on, and who will eventually follow him. Netanyahu may think annexation will be the great finale of his career, but it will leave his successors in an impossible situation, as a pariah nation with an unassimilable and rebellious underclass. On some level, he must realize that every Black Lives Matter placcard that's appeared all around the world the last few months can easily be repurposed to point a finger at him.

  • Tareq Baconi: Israel's annexation plan, a new era in Palestinian resistance.

  • Badia Dwaik: Annexation is a war crime.

  • Alexandra Gerasimcikova: Israel's annexation plans and Europe's sanctions problem.

  • Yumna Patel: In the Jordan Valley, Palestinians brace for annexation.

  • Philip Weiss: Netanyahu will go forward with annexation, because he worries more about Adelson than Biden: Or so says Daniel Levy, of US Middle East Project, in an interview with Jeremy Ben-Ami, of J Street.

  • Brett Wilkins: Palestinians file ICC complaint against Trump, Kushner and Netanyahu over annexation.

• Jonathan Chait: Trump blames losing campaign on listening to 'woke Jared': "Trump decides to ignore his son-in-law and focus on voters who fear he isn't racist enough."

• Jane Coaston: Social conservatives feel betrayed by the Supreme Court -- and the GOP that appointed it.

• EJ Dionne Jr: A vicious culture war is all Trump has left. Also: Zeeshan Aleem: Trump is going all in on divisive culture wars. That might not work this time.

  In his speeches this weekend, Trump positioned himself as a guardian of American identity, depicting protests against police brutality and racism -- which have slowed significantly in recent weeks, and have been largely peaceful -- in paranoid and cartoonish terms as a "fascist" threat to the republic.

  It should be noted that Trump's claims of the existence of "far-left fascism" are fundamentally incoherent: fascism is a right-wing form of ultranationalism calling for a rebirth of a nation or race, and that has nothing to do with liberal and left-wing calls for an end to police brutality and racism. But that didn't stop Trump from making it the central message of his speeches, which aimed to sensationalize the issue of protests and statue-toppling.

  Speaking at Mount Rushmore, amid peaceful protests led by members of the Sioux Nation meant to underscore the fact the monument was built on stolen and sacred land, Trump promised that the South Dakota monument "will never be desecrated." And he went on to describe the ongoing re-evaluation of public symbols of racism in American life as a threat to civilization.

• W Ralph Eubanks: The Confederate flag finally falls in Mississippi.

• M Steven Fish/Neil A Abrams/Laila M Aghaie: Make liberalism great again: "Liberals around the world have let right-wing authoritarians claim patriotism as their own, with disastrous consequences. It's time to take it back." This is a long article, only given a cursory glance, partly because while I'm not unsympathetic to those who would like to present a progressive agenda in the context of America's oft-stated, rarely-realized ideals -- cf. Jill Lepore's This America: The Case for the Nation, backed by her longer These Truths: A History of the United States, or (much better) Ganesh Sitaraman's The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution -- I don't find it very satisfactory to go to all that trouble only to end up with another paean to old-fashioned, left-hating liberalism. But also, deep down, I just don't care much for the idea of patriotism, which has been left to the right to debase as knee-jerk militarist idolatry precisely because both liberals and the left (who are really just liberals who emphasize that universal rights means everyone, not just individuals) feel any real need to limit their horizons to a single nation. Consequently, much of the framing pushed here sounds like bullshit, more or less on the same level as the right-wing's patriotic claims.

• Nima Gerami: To defeat systemic racism, America must end endless war. Well, America's systemic racism predates "endless war," even the sporadic imperial wars against Mexico (1848) and Cuba/Philippines (1898), which it colored and conditioned -- one can trace it back to the Indian wars of the 17th century. Still, every new war gins up yet another wave of racism, as we've seen clearly in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East (despite the efforts of Bush et seq. to exempt "our allies" in and around Saudi Arabia). By the way, "endless war" perpetuates much more than racism. Most obviously, there's gun violence. Also see:

  • Walden Bello: The racist underpinnings of the American way of war.

• Amy Goldstein: Voters in deep-red Oklahoma approve Medicaid expansion. I have no doubt this would pass in Kansas if the voters are given the chance. Almost passed in the legislature this year, spoiled only by Senate majority leader Susan Wagle refusing to schedule a vote.

• Graig Graziosi: Trump ally Herman Cain who attended Tulsa rally hospitalized with coronavirus. Of course, he didn't necessary get the virus there. He also traveled to "a lot of places" that week, including hotspot Arizona. Related?

  • Jordan Muller: Kim Guilfoyle, campaign official and girlfriend of Trump Jr., tests positive for coronavirus in South Dakota.

• Miranda Green: It will take years to undo the damage from Trump's environmental rollback: "Even if Democrats win back the White House and the Senate, it will be a long struggle to restore the regulations the Republican-controlled EPA has erased."

• Glenn Greenwald: House Democrats, working with Liz Cheney, restrict Trump's planned withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Germany. Jason Crow (D-CO) co-sponsored the amendment with Cheney. This particular amendment was approved 45-11, opposed by 8 Republicans and 3 Democrats.

• Ryan Grim: National Review is trying to rewrite its own racist history. One thing I've long been struck by is how virulently racist 1950s conservatives were, especially William F Buckley. (Nancy McLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America has many examples.) Barry Goldwater denied that he was a racist when opposing civil rights laws -- something I could never square with his supposedly principled positions on individual freedom, but which made sense given how inextricably the 1950s conservative project was bound up with the support of segregation and white supremacy.

• Gabrielle Gurley: This time, it's the Democrats' infrastructure week: "House Democrats steered an ambitious transportation and infrastructure plan through the chamber. Structured more like a wish list, it's dead on arrival in the Senate."

• Bob Harris/Jon Schwarz: Carl Reiner's life should remind us: If you like laughing, thank FDR and the New Deal. The comedian died at 94 last week. He got his start in a WPA class for would-be actors. The New Deal had a number of programs to support the arts in the 1930s. A similar effort would be a great idea today, but doesn't seem to be on anyone's agenda. It is currently impossible for most musicians to make their usual living performing, but they could be paid to record music and make it freely available over the Internet.

• Jeet Heer: Trolling Trump, the Lincoln Project also peddles militarism: "The Never Trump super PAC makes entertaining ads that get under the president's skin -- but progressives should take a closer look at their agenda." When asked about the maxim that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," Richard Stallman noted that was, at best, an heuristic. I doubt it's even that useful. It's easy to get seduced by people who hate Trump for totally wrong reasons, like for making conservatives look bad, or for failing to be a monomaniacal hawk like John Bolton.

  Writing in The Atlantic, conservative writer Andrew Ferguson, no fan of the president, criticized the Lincoln Project for fighting Trump with Trumpian means. He described the ads as "personally abusive, overwrought, pointlessly salacious, and trip-wired with non sequiturs."

  This ethical critique has merit, but the real problem with the Lincoln Project is political. To the extent that the ads articulate any political vision, it is a desire to return to the hard-line military aggression of the George W. Bush era.

  On Tuesday, the Lincoln Project released an ad addressing accusations that Trump hasn't protected American troops in Afghanistan from a bounty on their lives supposedly placed by the Russian government. The ad, titled "Betrayed," features Dr. Dan Barkhuff, a physician and former Navy SEAL. "Months ago, Donald Trump learned the Russians were paying a bounty for dead American soldiers in Afghanistan and chose to do nothing about it," Barkhuff said. "Any commander in chief with a spine would be stomping the living shit out of some Russians right now -- diplomatically, economically, or, if necessary, with the sort of asymmetric warfare they're using to send our kids home in body bags." He added, "Mr. Trump, you're either a coward who can't stand up to an ex-KGB goon, or you're complicit. Which is it?"

  The article cites a bunch of liberals who applauded this ad. On some level, I don't care why people decide to oppose Trump, but I do worry about people who encourage Biden to be even more hawkish than Trump, both because it's the wrong stance to take and because I'm convinced that Hillary Clinton's commander-in-chief posturing and long history of applauding belligerence cost her the 2016 election. Biden's record is little better, which is all the more reason to downplay his past mistakes. For some better advise, see: John Nichols: Anti-war groups push Biden and the Democrats to rethink foreign policy.

• Sean Illing: How Black Lives Matter fits into the long history of American radicalism: Interview with Michael Kazin.

• Umair Irfan: The "Godzilla" Saharan dust cloud over the US, explained: "The giant dust cloud is part of a system that feeds the ocean, fertilizes the rainforest, and suppresses hurricanes."

• Mugambi Jouet: The Trump cult is loyal to an ideology, not the man: "A rise in extreme polarization culminated in Trump -- and likely won't be vanquished by Biden." This is an idea that's going around, but it doesn't make much sense to me. Although some of Trump's followers -- someone like Steve Bannon -- could conjure up something that looks like an ideology, Trump couldn't begin to articulate it. He's just a rich guy who likes being in front of the camera, spouting the received prejudices and irritable mental gestures he's picked up watching Fox. His fans share those prejudices, and appreciate that he's able to say what they can't -- they may even think that he's fighting for them, but he's really just stroking his own ego. Once he's gone, others will try to pick up the mantle, but I don't see how anyone else can keep his movement together. On the other hand, I doubt Trump will fade away like GW Bush did. He's going to rule right-wing media until he dies or is incapacitated, so, sure, his cult will be with us for a while. But it won't be an ideology.

• Jen Kirby:

  • China's new national security law and what it means for Hong Kong's future, explained.

  • Russia just paved the way for Putin to be president for life.

• Ezra Klein:

  • The radicalism of the American Revolution -- and its lessons for today: Interview with Danielle Allen, author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.

  • Trumpism, not polarization, drives America's disastrous coronavirus politics. Some indication here that Republicans are starting to turn on Trump. Better news would be if Americans turned sharp against Republicans. Trump is basically a vessel that collected decades of Fox-spread bile and insanity, something he reflects all the way down to the blank stare of oblivion as the world crumbles around him.

• Natasha Korecki/Marc Caputo: A Sun Belt time bomb threatens Trump's reelection: "Rising Covid-19 caseloads in Florida, Arizona and Texas raise fresh doubts about the president's reelection prospects." Favorite line here: "Trump's campaign accuses Democrats of exploiting tragedy."

• Josh Kovensky: Trump admin scales back mandate that health insurers cover Covid tests.

• Michael Kranish: New York court sides with publisher of explosive book by President Trump's niece. Kranish previously wrote about the book: Mary Trump once stood up to her uncle Donald. Now her book describes a 'nightmare' of family dysfunction.

• Martin Longman: What if Trump decides not to seek a second term? "It's not as crazy of an idea as it sounds" -- but, really it is. Trump filed for reëlection the day after his inauguration. Running for a second term is the only thing he's actually wanted to do as president. He lets his underlings run everything else, at least until they become too embarrassing, in which case he makes them find more pliable and less competent replacements. So what if he's going to lose? He stayed true to his blindest and dumbest followers, and he certainly knows how to monetize whatever treachery undid him. As for the Republicans, it's too late for them to find a credible replacement. Sure, they could go with Mitt Romney, and piss off his base. Or they could elevate Mike Pence, and bore them to death. In any case, they're stuck with Trump's record, which is arguably worse than the man himself (not that such distinctions matter to most of us). Longman also wrote: What happens when Trump stops believing he can win reelection? Problem there is that the "chaos and malevolence" is coming anyway. Trump can't help himself (not that he would if he could). Related:

  • Robert Kuttner: Trump to Trump: You're fired!. Also not going to happen. Although I did imagine that he might resign after getting reëlected, to get a jump on cashing in. Or maybe after getting trounced, to give Pence a presidential legacy, although he'd really just be running out the clock, like a third-string quarterback.

• German Lopez: Just 2 states meet these basic criteria to reopen and stay safe: New York and Rhode Island meet 4 (of 5) criteria; 21 states and DC meet 2 or 3; 27 states 0 or 1. Only 2 states and DC have "a sustained two-week drop in coronavirus cases": Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

• Eric Margolis: The coming ecosystem collapse is already here for coral.

• Alan MacLeod: In 'Russia bounty' story, evidence-free claims from nameless spies became fact overnight. A story claiming "Russia secret offered Afghan militants bounties to kill U.S. troops" was planted in the New York Times and picked up everywhere, including among liberals who figured they could spin it into their favored story lines: that Trump is a Putin puppet, or (more plausibly) incompetent and indifferent. My initial reaction was that the story was a crock, meant purely to sabotage the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and/or to ratchet up cold war tensions with Russia, and nothing since then -- an investigation that found one soldier who might have been affected, or a "confirmation" from the Taliban -- has changed my mind. There are lots of good reasons for being critical of Russia, but this one makes no sense. For more:

  • Meridith McGraw: 'Like yelling squirrel': White House goes after media over Russia bounty story.

  • Danny Sjursen: Serving the bottomless Kool-Aid: 'Blame Russia' rides again!

  • David Swanson: The Russian menace and the dangers of believing the New York Times.

• Louis Menand: This fourth of July, consider Trump's lobster fib.

  It's not hard to understand Trump. It is hard to understand the people in his Administration who enable the blather and the misinformation, who spin-cycle it to bleach out the most offensive or dangerous implications, and who parrot it dutifully. For the first two years of Trump's Presidency, some of these people were known as "the adults in the room." To an admittedly remote observer, those people looked indistinguishable from opportunists willing to suppress their opinions in the hopes of becoming Presidential puppet masters. They were dreaming. All of them have departed with their reputations scarred.

• Stephen Miles: It's bad politics for Democrats to be hawkish on foreign policy. Cites Elliot Engel ("one of only two dozen House Democrats out of 1888 who ultimately voted against the Iran deal"), defeated in last week's primary, as a cautionary example, but the point should be made much more generally. Hawkish Democrats are especially suspect, not least because they usually frame their interventionist appeals as acts of humanitarianism, and such crises are numerous and inevitable. Besides, there's nothing many Americans hate more than "helping" unappreciative others. Republicans may be more supportive of funding America's imperial overreach, but they usually withhold actual war until they can gin up a popular desire for spite and revenge -- something Americans do believe in.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The Supreme Court just handed down some truly awful news on voting rights.

  • The Supreme Court's big decision on the separation of church and state, explained.

  • Trump's Justice Department has a powerful tool to fight police abuse. It refuses to use it. "Right before he resigned, Jeff Sessions sabotaged the DOJ's ability to fight police abuse."

  • The Supreme Court's big decision on the CFPB and the "unitary executive," explained.

  • Why conservative Chief Justice Roberts just struck down an anti-abortion law: "Roberts didn't save abortion rights, he told future litigants how to bury them."

• Jeanne Morefield: 'Never in my country': COVID-19 and American Exceptionalism.

  Senator Bernie Sanders' reasonable suggestion that the U.S., like Denmark, should nationalize its healthcare system is dismissed as the fanciful pipe dream of an aging socialist rather than an obvious solution to a human problem embraced by nearly every other nation in the world. The Seattle healthcare professional who expressed shock that even "Third World countries" are "better equipped" than we are to confront COVID-19 betrays a stunning ignorance of the diversity of healthcare systems within developing countries. Cuba, for instance, has responded to this crisis with an efficiency and humanity that puts the U.S. to shame.

  Indeed, the U.S. is only beginning to feel the full impact of COVID-19's explosive confrontation with our exceptionalism: if the unemployment rate really does reach 32 percent, as has been predicted, millions of people will not only lose their jobs but their health insurance as well. In the middle of a pandemic.

  Over 150 years apart, political commentators Edmund Burke and Aimé Césaire referred to this blindness as the byproduct of imperialism. Both used the exact same language to describe it; as a "gangrene" that "poisons" the colonizing body politic. From their different historical perspectives, Burke and Césaire observed how colonization boomerangs back on colonial society itself, causing irreversible damage to nations that consider themselves humane and enlightened, drawing them deeper into denial and self-delusion.

• Anna North: Roe v. Wade isn't safe: "The Supreme Court just struck down an anti-abortion law. Here's why access is still at risk."

• JC Pan: Democrats can't quit their addiction to big-money donors: "The urgency of beating Trump in November has once again set campaign finance reform on the back burner." After 2008 would have been an ideal time for Democrats to clamp down on money in campaigning, but Obama had raised significantly more money than McCain, and was looking forward to repeating his dominance in 2012, and members of Congress in both parties were united in their ability to raise more funds than their opponents. Further complication comes from a Supreme Court firmly committed to protecting corruption in at least two ways: equating money with free speech, and making it virtually impossible to convict anyone of taking bribes.

• Daniel Politi: Washington NFL team launches review of racist nickname: You mean the Redskins? I remember that name being questioned fifty years ago. On the other hand, the proposed replacements, starting with Warriors, are often worse.

• John Quiggin: Trumpism after Trump. More notes and conjecture than an argument. Quiggin has also signed up to write a book on The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic. If, as he assumes, Biden will be the next president, with a workable majority in Congress, the real question has less to do with rump Trumpism than his third assumption: whether "mainstream Democrats recognize the need for radical change, and Biden will align with the mainstream position as he always has done." Quiggin's book will presumably argue for "radical change" under those conditions.

• David Roberts: House Democrats just put out the most detailed climate plan in US political history: "A new select committee report is perfectly in tune with the growing climate policy alignment on the left around standards, investments, and justice."

• Paul Rosenberg: The secret of his success: Donald Trump's six weird tricks for authoritarian rule: Interview with Jennifer Mercieca, author of: Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.

• Daid Rothkopf: 'The most ignorant and unfit': What made America's worst ever leader? Starts with a convenient quote from Michelle Obama: "Being president doesn't change who you are, it reveals who you are." Rothkopf sifts through various historian surveys of the worst presidents ever -- poor lists, if you ask me, prejudiced against the mediocrities of the 19th century while omitting Nixon and the Bushes, whose only saving graces were to be followed by even worse Republicans -- but ultimately settles on a past leader more temperamentally (and cognitively) suited for comparing Trump to: George III.

• Theodore Schleifer: America has almost 800 billionaires, a record high. Well, 788, up 12% from a year before, or 27% (from 620) in 2016. That's 0.0002409% of the US population (328.2 million). Maybe it would be fairer to divide by US households (128.58 million): 0.00061284%, or 1 in every 163,174 households. That's an unimaginably tiny fraction of the total -- about 2 people in Wichita (who happen to be Charles Koch and Phil Ruffin, something you may know even if you're not from here). But those 788 billionaires control $3.4 trillion in assets, up 14% since the end of 2018.

• Andrea K Scott: The removal of a Theodore Roosevelt statue is a good first step in rethinking America's monuments.

• Melody Schreiber: The climate crisis will be just as shockingly abrupt.

• Dylan Scott:

  • How Trump gave insurance companies free rein to sell bad health plans. "Obamacare wasn't repealed. Trump's deregulation is eroding it anyway." I an think of few things that are more injurious than insurance plans that don't actually protect you from unexpected health care expenses. One thing Obamacare did so was establish minimum standards of coverage -- although they also allowed huge deductibles and co-payments, so a great many people wound up paying more out of pocket, but at least they had some coverage for major expenses. Trump is just a co-conspirator to fraud.

  • Why a Covid-19 drug costs $3,100. This piece doesn't provide a very good explanation -- it mostly muddies the water with insurance variations like deductibles -- and the section "is this a fair price for remdesivir as a Covid-19 therapy?" is mostly nonsense. (For instance, Gilead figures that if their drug reduces hospital stays 3-4 days, their "value proposition" should reap a significant percentage of the saved hospital costs.) Bottom line is that Big Pharma is built on patents and extortion pricing. This is an example, not an exception.

    • David Dayen: Time to seize drug patents.

      The entire pharmaceutical sector has been raising prices during the pandemic: 245 drugs hiked up between January and June according to Patients for Affordable Drugs, including 61 being used for COVID-19 treatment and another 30 in use in clinical trials. . . . Hilariously, Gilead's stock fell in Monday trading because investors thought they should charge more.

      If remdesivir were sold at the cost of production, it would cost $10, not $3,120. The "value" of the drug comes with the reduction in admission length, and the savings to hospitals and patients. But even that value, based on the known science, shouldn't go too far past $400, according to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review. You could say that Gilead needs to recoup its research and development costs, but of course the U.S. government financed much of that research.

    • Donald Shaw: Biden sides with Big Pharma against affordable coronavirus vaccine plan [Marh 19].

    • David Sirota: The US public paid to develop this COVID-19 drug. It will cost $3,000 a dose. Title seems to have the price wrong ($3,100 for a 5-day course of treatment, not per dose).

      Similarly, bipartisan legislation passed in 1980 created so-called march-in rights that empower the government to authorize another company -- or the government itself -- to produce a lower-priced generic version of a high-priced medicine.

      The problem, of course, is that the government's health care apparatus is controlled by former pharmaceutical industry executive Alex Azar.

• Robert J Shapiro: Trump's bungled pandemic response is crushing American incomes: "New data shows the costs of the administration's failure to stem the coronavirus outbreak."

  The only force staving off desperate conditions for many households was the one-time checks the government sent most Americans and the temporary expansion of jobless benefits.

  Now with the resurgence of COVID-19 infections, Congress has little choice but to approve another round of checks and extend the generous unemployment benefits. If Congress does approve a lot more help, millions of American households will still face financial peril -- and if Congress fails to step up again, tens of millions of Americans could confront financial ruin.

  As a dose of reality, the new income data show that our current conditions are roughly three times as severe as the Great Recession. All personal income fell 4.2 percent in May and 3.0 percent over the three months from March through May. It took nine months for personal income to fall that much during the Great Recession. Wage and salary income actually increased by 3.3 percent in May, as the payroll grants under the CARES program kicked in and businesses began to reopen. Even so, wage and salary income fell 7.9 percent from March through May, again more than during the entire Great Recession.

  The reason that total personal income fell "only" 3.0 percent over the three months -- the steepest drop on record -- while total wage and salary income fell an astounding 7.9 percent in three months was due almost entirely to those government checks and jobless benefits. After setting aside government transfers, the BEA reports that total personal income fell 7.5 percent in three months.

• Apa Sherpa (as told to Emily Atkin): I've climbed Everest 21 times. It's not the mountain it used to be.

• Matt Shuham: "Nothing is normal here": Trump campaign claims its NDA applies to Omarosa's WH work.

• Jeffrey Toobin: John Roberts distances himself from the Trump-McConnell legal project: But (see Millhiser above) he still strikes me as a team player, casting the deciding vote to uphold Republican voting restrictions. Occasional votes that seem independent could just as well be calculated to retain a shred of integrity for a Court that will increasingly curtail democracy, especially if people don't panic and stop the flow of Federalist Society judges.

• Nahal Toosi: Human rights groups turn their sights on Trump's America.

• Sina Toosi: How John Bolton and Mike Pompeo thwarted Trump's plan to get a deal with Iran. More Bolton (not that you need any):

  • John Feffer: Why Bolton matters.

  • Bryce Greene: In the name of anti-Trumpism, media elevate a lying warmonger.

  • James North: Bolton's real shocker: That someone with his bad judgment and moral blindness got anywhere near the White House.

• Alex Ward: Donald Trump is vulnerable on China. So is Joe Biden. They're both wrong, too, although that's not what they perceive as each other's faults.

• Liz Essley Whyte: Trump's favorite weapon in the coronavirus fight: Deregulation: Well, his favorite weapon in every fight, regardless of aptness. "Instead of addressing this crisis head-on, the Trump administration appears to be exploiting the chaos of the pandemic by rolling back critics civil rights regulatory protections and environmental safeguards." Appears?

• Colin Woodard: Woodrow Wilson was even worse than you think.

• Robin Wright: To the world, we're now America the racist and pitiful.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Trump's surprising resilience with Hispanic voters, explained.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (finished).

Music: Current count 33526 [33485] rated (+41), 211 [216] unrated (-5).

Last Monday of the month, so spent most of the day doing bookkeeping for the monthly roll-up (link above). Five weeks this month, so the total is up -- 193 records, or 194 if you count the Hal Singer regrade, which I slipped into "old music" instead of "grade changes" for context. About half old music, with dives into records I had missed when a new one (or a death or a reader question) tempted me to look further or some other reference).

Speaking of questions, I field ones about David Murray and James Carter, and duck one on jazz books, in my latest batch. Use the form to ask me more.

Recommended music links: No systematic search, but these are a few things I had open:

• Adam Bernstein: Jazz musician who emerged from shadow of brother Nat 'King' Cole dies at 88. Cole was 12 years younger than his famous brother (1919-65), but got a late start, and didn't really claim his own voice until he hit 75 -- my favorites are The Dreamer in Me (2009) and Freddy Cole Sings Mr. B (2010), but I missed his pre-2006 albums, so have some research to do.
• Marcus J Moore: 15 essential black liberation jazz tracks. This reminded me to check out one of the Hal Singer records below.
• Hank Shteamer: 'He made the world bigger': Inside John Zorn's jazz-metal multiverse. Also, this map of Zorn recordings.

Songwriter Johnny Mandel (94) also died this week.

New records reviewed this week:

• Al Bilali Soudan: Tombouctou (2020, Clermont Music): [r]: A-
• Jehnny Beth: To Love Is to Live (2020, Caroline): [r]: B+(*)
• Don Braden/Joris Teepe Quartet: In the Spirit of Herbie Hancock: Live at De Witte (2019 [2020], O.A.P.): [r]: B+(***)
• Phoebe Bridgers: Punisher (2020, Dead Oceans): [r]: B+(**)
• Daniel Carter/Matthew Shipp/William Parker/Gerald Cleaver: Welcome Adventure! Vol. 1 (2019 [2020], 577): [r]: B+(***)
• Caterpillar Quartet: Threads (2020, ESP-Disk): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Whit Dickey Trio: Expanding Light (2019 [2020], Tao Forms): [r]: A-
• Beth Duncan: I'm All Yours (2020, Saccat): [cd]: B [07-24]
• Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020, Columbia): [r]: A-
• John Finbury: Quatro (2020, Green Flash Music): [cd]: B
• Jean-Marc Foussat/Daunik Lazro/Evan Parker: Café Oto 2020 (2020, Fou, 2CD): [cd]: B+(**)
• Wendy Gondeln/Mats Gustafsson/Wolfang Voigt: The Shithole Country & Boogie Band (2016-18 [2020], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• CeeLo Green: CeeLo Green Is Thomas Callaway (2020, Easy Eye Sound): [r]: B
• Haim: Women in Music Pt. III (2020, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Hinds: The Prettiest Curse (2020, Mom + Pop): [r]: A-
• Jason Kao Hwang: Human Rites Trio (2019 [2020], True Sound): [cd]: A- [07-01]
• Jumpstarted Plowhards: Round One (2019, Recess, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Corb Lund: Agricultural Tragic (2020, New West): [r]: B+(**)
• Benjamin Moussay: Promontoire (2019 [2020], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Bobby Previte/Jamie Saft/Nels Cline: Music From the Early 21st Century (2019 [2020], RareNoise): [r]: B+(*)
• Sonar With David Torn: Tranceportation (Volume 2) (2019 [2020], RareNoise): [bc]: B+(***)
• Alister Spence: Whirlpool: Solo Piano (2019 [2020], Alister Spence Music, 2CD): [cd]: B+(*) [07-24]
• Dan Willis and Velvet Gentlemen: The Monk Project (2018-19 [2020], Belle Avenue): [cd]: B [07-17]
• Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Jazz Is Dead 001 (2020, Jazz Is Dead, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Jazz Is Dead 002: Roy Ayers (2020, Jazz Is Dead, EP): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Willem Breuker/Han Bennink: New Acoustic Swing Duo (1967-68 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2CD): [bc]: B+(***)
• Grayson Capps: South Front Street: A Retrospective 1997-2019 (1997-2019 [2020], The Royal Potato Family): [r]: B+(*)
• Neil Young: Homegrown (1974-75 [2020], Reprise): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Al Bilali Soudan: Al Bilali Souadn (2012, Clermont Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Don Braden Quintet: The Time Is Now (1991, Criss Cross): [r]: B+(**)
• Don Braden: Organic (1994 [1995], Epicure): [r]: B+(**)
• Don Braden: Brighter Days (2001, High Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Milt Buckner & Hal Singer: Milt & Hal [The Defnitive Black & Blue Sessions] (1966 [2004], Black & Blue): [r]: B+(**)
• Hyphy Hitz (2004-07 [2007], TVT): [dl]: B+(***)
• Pharoah Sanders: Izipho Zam (My Gifts) (1969 [1973], Strata-East): [yt]: B+(***)
• Hal Singer: Rent Party (1948-56 [1994], Savoy Jazz): [r]: A-
• Hal Singer: Blues and News (1971, Futura): [r]: B+(**)
• Hal Singer/Jef Gilson: Soul of Africa (1974, Le Chant Du Monde): [r]: A-
• Hal Singer: Senior Blues (1991, Carrere): [r]: B+(**)
• Hal Singer & Massimo Faraò Trio: We're Still Buddies (2001 [2005], Azzurra Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Hal Singer: Challenge (2010, Marge): [r]: A-

Grade (or other) changes:

• Hal Singer With Charlie Shavers: Blue Stompin' (1959 [1994], Prestige/OJC): [r]: [was: B+] B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ricardo Grilli: 1962 (Tone Rogue) [07-10]

Daily Log

TomDispatch tweeted a link to the Robert Reich article I cited yesterday. I replied:

"Coddling dictators" isn't a strategy to get re-elected, but not escalating conflicts by shaming other countries is a good idea; Trump's willingness to deal with anyone could have been his saving grace in foreign relations; too bad it's no good at it.

Weekend Roundup

Blog link.

Late-breaking tweet from @realDonaldTrump: "Nobody wants a Low IQ person in charge of our Country," trying to deflect from the obvious by adding that "Sleepy Joe is definitely a Low IQ person!" Sure, he's never struck me as especially bright, but it's rather clever that the Democrats are nominating someone Trump cannot attack without the slanders reflecting back on him.

Trump's approval rate at 538 is down to 40.6%, with 56.1% disapprove. That's the biggest split I can recall.

Onion headline: Officials warn defunding police could lead to spike in crime from ex-officers with no outlet for violence. When I mentioned this to my wife, she already had examples to cite. Article cites "L.A. police chief Michel Moore" as saying:

The truth is that there are violent people in our society, and we need a police department so they have somewhere to go during the day to channel their rage. If these cuts are allowed to continue, we could be looking at a very real future where someone with a history of domestic abuse is able to terrorize their spouse with impunity instead of being occupied testing out new tactical military equipment or pepper-spraying some random teens. The fact that these dangerous attackers and killers are being gainfully employed by the LAPD is the only thing standing between us and complete chaos.

By the way, there is a new batch of questions and answers, not all on music. Ask more, here.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • Trump saw his Tulsa rally as a chance to reset his reelection campaign. It did not go well.

  • Nonwhite jail officers were not allowed to guard George Floyd's killer.

• Hannah Allam: Vehicle attacks rise as extremists target protesters.

• Isaac J Bailey: We don't need to cancel George Washington. But we should be honest about who he was. I agree with that. Washington, and for that matter Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe are not just important figures in American history, but can also still be inspiring. In some respects, I could argue the same for Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, to pick two highly problematic characters who have received some critical attention recently. Nor am I much bothered by statues of Christopher Columbus, although I can't think of any redeeming qualities he had. Again, the history should be made clear, but I'm not sure the icons matter much. The Confederates are one exception I'll grant: the sooner we get rid of these tokens of white supremacy, the better. And I hope some day the deliberately orchestrated plot to names things after Ronald Reagan gets unrolled. Nothing good can be linked back to his legacy. And if you don't want to melt all that "art" down, perhaps store it in a musty museum somewhere -- as long as it's treated with the solemnity of Auschwitz. By the way, I'm totally cool with John Wayne airport could get a new name that doesn't celebrate a homophobic white supremacist.

• Riley Beggin:

  • Trump thanks the "great people" in a video featuring a supporter yelling "white power".

  • What we know about a shooting at a protest in Louisville: "One person was killed at an anti-racism and police brutality protest."

  • US must release children from detention centers due to Covid-19, judge rules.

  • Trump signs an executive order on prosecuting those who destroy monuments.

• Steve Benen: How the GOP gave up on governing in order to keep winning elections: Excerpt from Benen's new book, The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics. More on this "no governing" meme below.

• Charles M Blow: Can we call Trump a killer? Argues for "his culpability in the neglectful handling of the coronavirus." That's a distinction I don't find terribly interesting, but there are other cases where the evidence is undeniable, like the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Suleimani, which Trump has bragged about. You might object that all US presidents order killings abroad, but that's no excuse let alone comfort. Obama got his first taste of blood when he ordered the killing of a Somali pirate, and that just opened the floodgates, leading to hundreds of drone killings and the summary execution of Osama Bin Laden, as well as the Air Force's casual slaughter of bystanders. You might object that the sheer numbers lost to Trump's delayed Covid-19 reaction and premature re-opening far exceed the drone kill count (perhaps not the military offensives), and besides here we're talking dead Americans, but negligence is always messy to prove. On the other hand, where has Trump not been negligent and careless? The Mexico border and Puerto Rico are two cases that leap to mind, and I expect you can find bodies there, too. On the other hand, calling him Killer is too likely to be taken as flattery. I'll wait for the ICC indictments.

• Max Blumenthal:

  • How a US and Qatari regime change deception produced 'Caesar' sanctions driving Syria towards famine.

  • From Occupation to 'Occupy': The Israelification of American domestic security.

• Jim Bovard: The Korean War atrocities no one wants to talk about. Technically, the Korea War is America's longest running war -- 70 years this week -- because the US never had the decency to acknowledge that it was pointless and over. But that's hardly the only thing the US remains in denial over. More on Korea:

  • Khang Vu: Trump is wrecking South Korea's relationship with North Korea.

  • Max Balhorn: How South Korea's pro-democracy movement fought to ban "murderous tear gas".

  • Doug Bandow: We should celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Korean War by leaving: "The US doesn't need to protect the south any more." More pointedly, the US is keeping South Korea from negotiating its own separate peace -- as such, the US presence is more threatening than reassuring.

  • Dan DePetris: Don't tie peace on the Korean Peninsula to denuclearization in the North. We have managed to live with "hostile" powers possessing nuclear weapons since 1950, and none have used those bombs against us (unlike what the US did to Japan in 1945, when the US still had a monopoly on such terror). The only thing that makes North Korea different is that we've insisted on not formally ending the war which de facto ended in 1953. The only way to lessen the threat is to reduce the degree of hostility, which at present mostly takes the form of crippling economic sanctions against the North, and to open up formal lines of communication and trade. Recognizing that North Korea has nuclear weapons and the rocketry to deliver them is at this point common sense. Morever, it's clear that the only reason they bothered to develop such useless weapons is to force the US to recognize that they're too dangerous not to treat with the basic respect that normal nations routinely show each other. For more, see the Reckford article below, which also cites the failure of sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela to produce any results imagined as favorable to the US.

  • Jessica Lee: The Korean War started the trend of endless wars for America. How do we change course?

    The United States is not equipped to solve every global problem. No nation is. In the case of the Korean War, our failure to close that chapter of history has allowed mistrust to fester for so long that détente seems impossible, despite the fact that lowering tensions would protect U.S. interests in the region better than the status quo.

  • Owen Miller: Uncovering the hidden history of the Korean War.

  • Kap Seol: The US didn't bring freedom to South Korea -- its people did.

  • Seong-ho Sheen: To have any chance at ending the Korea War, America must become more flexible.

  • Louie Reckford: Why Trump's 'maximum pressure' campaigns are a maximum failure.

• John Cassidy: Donald Trump's big problem with senior voters.

• Kyle Cheney/Leah Nylen: Prosecutor says he was pressured to cut Roger Stone 'a break' because of his ties to Trump.

• Sarah Churchwell: American Fascism: It has happened here.

  American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn't mean they're not fascist, it means they're not European and it's not the 1930s. They remain organized around classic fascist tropes of nostalgic regeneration, fantasies of racial purity, celebration of an authentic folk and nullification of others, scapegoating groups for economic instability or inequality, rejecting the legitimacy of political opponents, the demonization of critics, attacks on a free press, and claims that the will of the people justifies violent imposition of military force. Vestiges of interwar fascism have been dredged up, dressed up, and repurposed for modern times. Colored shirts might not sell anymore, but colored hats are doing great.

• Max Cohen: Bernie's student army learns to live with Biden. Given time (and Trump), stories like this were bound to appear.

• Aaron Ross Coleman: Protesters win a new investigation into Elijah McClain's death.

• Nancy Cook/Adam Cancryn: Trump team weights a CDC scrubbing to deflect mounting criticism. Does he know anything about management other than "you're fired"?

• Ranjani Chakraborty: What "defund the police" really means.

• Fabiola Cineas:

  • These protests feel different because they're shifting public opinion: Interiew with Megan Ming Francis.

    As she points out in her book, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State, the NAACP from 1909 to 1923 mobilized state-building by first shifting public opinion, then creating change within political and legal structures. And according to polls, opinion is already shifting: In 2015, just 51 percent of Americans believed racism is a big problem in the US; now 76 percent of Americans do.

  • The menacing symbolism of the noose: "Noose incidents are uncoincidentally on the rise as protesters continue to demand justice for Black lives."

• Eli Clifton: The hedge fund man behind pro-Trump media's new war on China. Huayi Zhang, associated with Robert Mercer.

• Jason Ditz:

  • Trump plans to cut another 4,000 US troops from Afghanistan: "Plan would leave 4,500 left in Afghanistan by autumn."

  • Trump administration mulls ending Congressional review of arms sales.

• Tiffanie Drayton: Global protests reveal that white supremacy is a problem everywhere.

• John Feffer: What will it take to defeat Trumpism? "Learning lessons from the end of the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and Saddam's Iraq" -- a mixed bag of examples, all three thoroughly defeated militarily (Iraq least decisively), then allowed to reconstitute themselves (the Confederacy most along its original, white supremacist lines). It's much easier for a foreign power to defeat a malevolent faction (slaveholders, Nazis, Baathists) than it is to keep those ideas from re-emerging in the defeated populace. Still, the relative success in de-Nazifying Germany has more to do with ethnic unity (vs. the black-white divide in the South, and the Sunni-Shiite-Kurd divide in Iraq), and the annihilated value of Nazism for the resurgence of German capitalism. (A big part of the reason Germany recovered so well was the imposition of worker participation in corporate boards, which has mostly kept German corporations from turning into predatory profit-scrapers like their American and British counterparts.) Still, I wonder whether Feffer isn't making too much out of Trumpism. Given the incoherence of its leader and the ineptness of its followers, it's likely after defeat to break down into its constituent parts and crawl back into the woodwork, festering, waiting for its next charismatic revival.

  Feffer notes that "in West Germany in 1947, 55% of those living under the US occupation believed that 'National Socialism was a good idea badly carried out.'" The occupation of Germany at that time was still pretty harsh, and poverty was widespread, but after the Bundesrepublic gained independence in 1949, and the economy boomed with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, Nazi sympathies faded away. The only sure way to get rid of Trumpism is to fix the problems it arose to fight, or show that those problems aren't real.

• Russell Arben Fox: The coronavirus in Kansas: The first 100 days. Covid-19 cases have continued to rise, with Sedgwick County topping 1,000 cases. For more, see John Handy/Andy Tsubass Field: Kansas communities see dramatic spikes in coronavirus cases.

• Andrew Freedman/Matthew Cappucci: Historic Saharan dust event fouls air along Gulf Coast as next blast enters Caribbean.

• Susan B Glasser: Trump retreats to his Hannity bunker: "Beaten by the pandemic and down in the polls, a President and his propagandist create an alternate reality."

• Amy Goldstein/Emily Guskin: Almost one-third of black Americans know someone who has died of covid-19, survey shows: Compare to 9% of white Americans.

• Alex Henderson: Respected marketing guru explains how Trump could 'monetize' a loss to Biden in November -- and make millions of dollars from his far-right MAGA base: Donny Deutsch.

• Eoin Higgins: Why a socialized system like Medicare for All beats for-profit healthcare in one chart of covid-19 infection rates.

• Gil Hochberg: An anti-colonialist Zionist? Remembering Albert Memmi: "The great prophet of anti-colonialism embraces Zionism without ever questioning its colonial implications." Memmi was born in Tunisia, was Jewish, wrote The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) and many other books, was "asked to leave" when Tunisia became independent, lived in France until dying at age 99. Also on Memmi:

  • David Lloyd: Albert Memmi: Contradictions of the colonial condition.

• Jack Holmes: There is no plan. There is no second-term agenda. Takeaway from a Hannity interview, but just because Trump couldn't think of an agenda doesn't mean there won't be one. Trump has long delegated odious tasks like thinking and doing to the little people (mostly, it seems, Pence and Kushner).

  The fact is that the Republican Party hasn't been much interested in governing the country for some time. They want to deregulate industries whose executives pay the campaign bills, and cut taxes on the donor class, and knuckle immigrants, but the idea of drawing up a comprehensive set of policies to make life better for the broader American public has long been anathema. (The Democrats often govern incompetently, and with too much regard for the preferences of powerful interests over those of working people, but they do seek to govern the country.) Trump is merely the most garish expression of this, turning the nation's highest governing office into a rolling circus act while shredding the institutions of democracy, and while the termites of the state go to work behind the scenes.

  This thing about the Republicans not being interested in governing has been making the rounds lately, and rather misses the point. The Republicans are obsessed with grabbing and monopolizing power, but they actually have a very narrow definition of governing. Their aim is to use power to accumulate more power, so they mostly see the government as a vast patronage machine that can be used to reward their supporters and punish their enemies, and that's about it. The closest thing any Republican had to a vision was Tom DeLay's K Street Project, where they demanded that lobbyists support their culture war in order to qualify for graft favors. But fear seems to drive them even more than greed: by seizing power, they deny it to their mortal enemies, the Democrats, who if given the opening would surely also use their power to reward their supporters and punish their enemies. That view isn't fair because Democrats habitually try to rule for the benefit of everyone, whereas Republicans are much more discriminating in who they help and hurt. Where Republicans most obviously fail is in trying to govern in a crisis. They don't plan, they don't prepare, their graft becomes visible, and quite often they simply don't care. Trump is the worst ever in this regard, but you have to go back generations to find competent Republican administrators. A big part of this can be traced back to how the Republican campaign machinery is designed expressly to do nothing but attack Democrats. Trump has no agenda for a second term because he doesn't even comprehend what he's been doing in his first term -- except, that is, relentlessly attacking his numerous enemies. That's all he's got to campaign on.

• Sean Illing: "It's ideologue meets grifter": How Bill Barr made Trumpism possible. Interview with David Rohde, author of a New Yorker profile on Barr.

• Christopher Ingraham: New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic.

• Umair Irfan: Why it's so damn hot in the Arctic right now. Related:

  • Eoin Higgins: Siberian forest fires increase by fivefold in week since record high temperature.

• Alex Isenstadt:

  • Trump admits it: He's losing. So the new strategy is what? Pity?

  • Inside Trump's Oklahoma debacle

• Roge Karma: 4 ideas to replace traditional police officers.

• Ezra Klein:

  • Trump's reality TV presidency is being crushed by reality. Draws a lot on Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney's chief campaign strategist in 2012 and author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, talking a lot about the incompetency and incoherence of Trump's government. One thing Stevens says: "To me, the only thing remotely like it is the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, because the dissonance between what the party was and what it said it was was just so great."

  • In praise of polarization: "How identity politics changed the Democratic Party -- for the better." Without the guiding hand of identity there wouldn't be polarization, a subject that Klein flogged to death in his book, Why We're Polarized.

• Carolyn Kormann: A disastrous summer in the arctic.

• Paul Krugman:

  • America didn't give up on Covid-19. Republicans did. "Partisanship has crippled our response."

  • A plague of willful ignorance: "Trump has empowered America's anti-rational streak."

• Nicole Lafond: Barr joins Trump effort to will antifa into existence with new 'anti-gov extremists' task force.

• Eric Levitz: The 'V-shaped' recovery has died of coronavirus. Wasn't going to happen anyway, because the panic and lockdown changed buying habits in ways that simply re-opening wouldn't (and couldn't) undo. Perhaps at some point, if the stimulus remains robust and is widely distributed people will feel a desire to spend some of their savings on big-ticket items, but that's a while off. More likely, the Republicans will kill off stimulus (except for the stock market) and we'll get a double-dip recession instead. (Was tempted to say W-shaped, but still not sure of the eventual upstroke.)

• Ryan Lizza/Laura Barron-Lopez/Holly Otterbein: Why Biden is rejecting Black Lives Matter's boldest proposals: "Activists want to defund the police. Biden won't even legalize pot." This stuff doesn't bother me, at least not like his Venezuela tweet did. He'll drag his feet, but he's at least somewhat open to reason. And given the gauntlet that any sort of reform has to run, he'll likely be there at the end, not leading but also not obstructing, and that's probably where his broadest supporters want him.

• German Lopez:

  • The US's new surge in coronavirus cases, explained.

  • Donald Trump's long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020: "Trump has repeatedly claimed he's 'the least racist person.' His history suggests otherwise." I'd suggest using a stronger verb, like "shouts" or "screams." This piece refers back to an important October 14, 2016 study by Sarah Posner/David Neiwert: How Trump took hate groups mainstream. They also wrote: Meet the horde of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other extremist leaders endorsing Donald Trump.

• Robert Mackey:

  • Trump suggests Navy sent $5 billion to Wisconsin firm to help him win election.

  • Trump made a racist joke in a Phoenix megachurch and the crowd went wild. Well, "Kung Flu," so not much of a joke.

  • Through creative accounting, Trump tries to cast America's death toll as an achievement. Note: article from May 2. Death count has nearly doubled since then, so today's lesson has less to do with lying at the time than with the consequences of such deceit.

• Josh Marshall: Princeton drops Woodrow Wilson from name of public policy school. Wilson was president of Princeton before moving into politics, so this particular naming was an obvious choice at the time, and I doubt it's being given up lightly. Wilson did several notably progressive things as president. He also started two wars with Mexico, engaged in a lot of "gunboat diplomacy" in the Caribbean, led the US into WWI, and ran a very aggressive campaign against war dissenters -- notably jailing presidential candidate Eugene Debs. He represented the US personally in the talks leading to the Treaty of Versailles, making a promise that David Fromkin turned on its head for his essential book on the post-WWI Middle East: A Peace to End All Peace. Well into the Cold War era, he was revered by Democrats for his internationalism, and his opponents' isolationism is still a dirty epithet. Many of these things should be giving us doubts about his legacy, but the one that's finally catching up with him is explained by Dylan Matthews in his 2015 article: Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist -- even by the standards of his time, which was written after Princeton students started objecting to his name heading Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs.

• Madeline Marshall: Why America's police look like soldiers: "Why are the police bringing military assault rifles to protests?"

• Dylan Matthews: How police unions became so powerful -- and how they can be tamed.

• Media Matters: This could be an ongoing series, but for now just a taste of how Fox et al. are handling the debacle:

  • As America faces 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, the national death toll is absent from Fox prime time
  • As more outbreaks emerge, Trump's propagandists suggest the coronavirus is a hoax (again)
  • Fox & Friends mentions the US coronavirus death toll for the first time in over a week -- to make fun of Joe Biden
  • Fox News is why Trump thinks he can get away with the Nixonian corruption of Barr's DOJ
  • Fox prime-time shows have covered the toppling of statues more than 3 times as much as coronavirus this week
  • Right-wing media vilify Black Lives Matter as the movement grows.
  • Tucker Carlson says ending qualified immunity would "end law enforcement"
  • Tucker Carlson unleashes deranged rant calling for protesters to be labeled domestic terrorists, arrested and paraded "in front of camera like MS-13"
  • Watch a Fox News panel attempt to spin a Fox News poll that shows devastating numbers for Trump.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • Trump's DOJ asks the Supreme Court to strip health care from 23 million people: "The government's arguments are ridiculous."

  • The night they'll tear old Dixie down: "For generations, a single street paying homage to Robert E Lee and his Confederate allies has upheld Richmond's racist foundations."

  • The court decision dismissing charges against Michael Flynn is astonishingly bad. Thanks to "Trump-appointed Judge Neomi Rao," who "has a history of writing dubious opinions that benefit Trump and his allies."

    Meanwhile, Rao, who served in the Trump White House and only became a judge in 2019, has quickly built a reputation as a rubber stamp for the Trump administration's preferred outcomes. She wrote a widely mocked dissenting opinion that would have blocked much of Congress's power to investigate Trump. And she sought to delay the House's ability to obtain documents related to former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.

  • A top Democratic defender of the filibuster says it may need to go: Chris Coons (D-DE).

  • Justice Alito's jurisprudence of white racial innocence: "Alito gets very upset if you suggest that racism exists."

  • 6 major questions the Supreme court still needs to resolve this term.

    • The Court could effectively eliminate the right to an abortion
    • Trump could gain sweeping immunity from congressional oversight
    • The religious right could be one of the biggest winners from this term
    • Trump could gain broad new power to fire people

  • DC is closer to becoming a state now than it has ever been. For some background, see: Alan Greenblatt: The US almost tore itself apart to get to 50 states. Can DC make it 51? Not if Republicans can help it. See:

    • Jenna Portnoy: DC statehood approved by US House for first time in history.

    • Nancy LeTourneau: What Tom Cotton's racist speech against DC statehood says about the GOP. By the way, LeTourneau also wrote: Republicans are delusional to hope that Trump will change. I read this right after Martin Longman: What happens when Trump stops believing he can win reelection? Longman quoted Lindsey Graham claiming that "Trump can win with 'a little more message discipline' and a focus on policies that separate him and Biden." The problem with all this is that Trump's policies are even more unpopular than he is -- part of the reason why he lies about them all the time.

• Nicola Narea:

  • The Supreme Court just allowed Trump's expansion of deportations to go unchecked.

  • A new Trump proclamation will block foreign workers.

• Ella Nilsen: Progressive Black candidates swept key races on Tuesday. Results don't look quite that weeping, although Middle school principal Jamaal Bowman unseats Eliot Engel in New York was a big story (and not close, despite Engel endorsements from NY Dem leaders, not to mention AIPAC).

• Anna North:

  • Do Americans support defunding the police? It depends on how you ask the question. "A new poll shows a majority of Americans support redirecting funds from police to other services."

  • /Fabiola Cineas: The fight for justice in the Breonna Taylor case, explained.

• Ricardo Nulla: The coronavirus surge that Texas could have seen coming.

• Chad Painter: 1960s coverage of Stonewall shows that mainstream press has always struggled to cover protests: "New Yorkers reading the local, mainstream papers wouldn't have known that a new civil rights movement was unfolding."

• William J Perry/Tom Z Collins: Who can we trust with the nuclear button? No one.

• Cameron Peters: Trump is holding a rally in one of the country's worst Covid-19 hot spots: Next stop (Tuesday, June 23): Phoenix, Arizona, where "cases in the state have increased by 174 percent over the past three weeks, and the Arizona Health Department reported a record-high 3,600 new cases on Tuesday alone."

• Craig Pittman: Can Trump beat the Florida convention curse? I didn't know there was one -- Nixon won after Miami Beach conventions in 1968 and 1972; the Democrats also did Miami Beach in 1972, McGovern losing to Nixon; and Romney lost after being nominated in Tampa in 2012 -- but Trump is bound to bring out the worst in the state.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Roger Stone prosecutor will testify about political interference from the Justice Department.

  • The firing of SDNY US Attorney Geoffrey Berman, explained: "It's part of a larger pattern."

• John Quiggin: Modern monetary theory: Neither modern, nor monetary, nor (mainly) theoretical?: Review of the MMT-based Macroeconomics textbook by William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts.

• Anita Rao/Pat Dillon/Kim Kelly/Zak Bennett: Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote? A series of articles in the Guardian on "the fight to vote":

  • Shilpa Jindia: 'This is a war': Republicans ramp up bid to control election maps for next decade.

  • Sam Levine: Republicans devote $20m and 50,000 people to efforts to restrict voting.

  • Sam Levine/Anna Massoglia: Revealed: Conservative group fighting to restrict voting tied to powerful dark money network.

  • Sam Levine/Ankita Rao: In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted voting rights -- how has it changed the US?.

• Robert Reich: Donald Trump's re-election playbook: 25 ways he'll lie, cheat and abuse his power: "From now until November, opponents of the most lawless president in history face a fight for democracy itself." Things like postponing the election remain to be seen, and would be hard to pull off. "Coddle dictators" sticks in my craw. Ever since WWII, US foreign policy has supported dictators who were deemed good for business, while opposing ones (and, by the way, democracies) who weren't (e.g., Iran, Guatemala, Chile). The only way Trump deviates from this is that he needs "good for business" to be good for him personally. Whether the US cherishes or ignores human rights depends strictly on which side of the good/bad ledger a country falls.

• David Roberts:

  • Democrats' infrastructure bill has a special delivery: ELectric mail trucks.

  • US public opinion supports action on climate change -- and has for years.

• Corey Robin: Forget about it. The author continues to be shocked that others can still be shocked by the latest Trumpian outrages, given how many comparable examples even a cursory remembrance of history offers up.

  I've been reading and writing about conservatism since the summer of 2000, when I interviewed William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz for a Lingua Franca article. I was surprised to hear how discontented these elder statesmen were now that the Cold War was over. It was almost as if they longed for the United States -- or at least themselves -- to be back in the grip of murderous anxiety, ready to embark on a terrible rampage. Since then, what has always struck me is how turbulent and intemperate, how savage and ferocious, the dream life of the right truly is -- even among, especially among, its most staid figures.

  When Trump became a contender for the White House, I saw him as an extension or fulfillment of the conservative movement rather than a break with it. Almost everything people found outrageous and objectionable about his candidacy -- the racism, the contempt for institutions, the ambient violence, the hostility to the rule of law -- I'd been seeing in the right for years. Little in Trump surprised me, except for the fact that he won.

  Whenever I said this, people got angry with me. They still do. For months, now years, I puzzled over that anger. . . . Historical consciousness can be a conservative force, lessening the sting of urgency, deflating the demands of the now, leaving us adrift in a sea of relativism. But it need not be . . . Telling a story of how present trespass derives from past crime or even original sin can inspire a more strenuous refusal, a more profound assault on the now. It can fuel a desire to be rid of not just the moment but the moments that made this moment, to ensure that we never have to face this moment again. But only if we acknowledge what we're seldom prepared to admit: that the monster has been with us all along.

• Charlie Savage/Eric Schmitt/Michael Schwartz: Russia secretly offered Afghan militants bounties to kill US troops, intelligence says: "The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment." This is supposedly a big deal, but sounds like a total crock. While Afghan government and Taliban have continued to attack each other, US fatalities in Aghanistan have dwindled to practically nothing -- not just since Trump signed a cease-fire with the Taliban, but you have to go as far back as 2014 to find a month with 10 US fatalities. So if Russia is paying a bounty, they're not finding many takers, and it's not costing them much. It seems much more likely that the whole story was hatched by "deep state" figures to try to scuttle the Taliban peace deal, to reverse US troop withdrawals, to gin up anti-Russian sentiment for a new Cold War, and (what the hell) to make Trump look bad by drawing out the Trump-Putin buddy meme.

  This left me wondering whether the US had actually paid bounties for dead Russians during the 1980s, when inflicting casualties on Russians was the explicit goal of US support for Afghan mujahideen. I tried googling that, but all I got were echoes of the NY Times piece, like the Guardian's Outrage mounts over report Russia offered bounties to Afghanistan militants for killing US soldiers (and not wanting to be left out or devalued, Russia offered bounty to kill UK soldiers). Similar articles were all over the supposedly liberal press (Google it yourself: these are from the first two pages): ABC, Chicago Tribune, CNBC, CNN, LA Times, MSNBC, NPR, Reuters, Time, USA Today, Vox, Washington Post, Axios. Some bought the story but tried to put the focus on Trump, as in Jacob Kuntson: Trump denies report he was briefed on alleged Russian bounties on US troops (my favorite line here was "The report was confirmed by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and CNN," meaning that those organizations picked up and ran the story); also Bob Brigham: Trump remained silent as Putin paid to kill US soldiers; Peter Wade: Back from golfing, Trump denies knowing about Russian bounties to kill US soldiers.

• Isaac Sebenius/James K Sebenius: How many needless Covid-19 deaths were caused by delays in responding? Most of them.

• David Smilde: Joe Biden should not try to out-hawk Trump on Venezuela. Biden's tweet on Venezuela is one of the few things that genuinely disurb me about his nomination. It is factually inaccurate -- Trump may "admire thugs and dictators" but not Nicolas Maduro; he clearly loathes Maduro, and is using the power and influence of the United States to overturn Maduro's election victory and replace him with a pliable puppet. I"m not even sure that Maduro qualifies as a "thug and dictator" -- not that I doubt that power is seductive and tends to corrupt, but as far as I can tell, most of Venezuela's problems have been imposed by the US, and their propaganda is formulaic and suspect as usual. Biden's vow that he "will stand with the Venezuelan people and for democracy" shows, to put it charitably, how completely he has been taken in by the propaganda. If you want a definition of "thug and dictator," what about someone who would impose a puppet government on another nation? If Biden had any respect for democracy abroad, he wouldn't be casting his lot with Trump and the oil moguls on this issue. And if he had even the slightest self-awareness of how much havoc and misery US intervention in Latin America has caused, he would grasp the folly of trying to force American views on others. Nor do you have to go back to Monroe and Wilson for examples: the recent coups in Bolivia and Brazil are currently creating human rights disasters that reflect back on us. Biden needs to break with that legacy, not echo it.

• Emily Stewart: The Georgia legislature finally passes a hate crime bill in the wake of Ahmaud Arbery's death. When signed, that will leave only three states without hate crime laws (the others are South Carolina, Wyoming, and Arkansas).

• Rachel Stohl: Defense industry cheers as the Trump administration is poised to loosen restrictions on drone exports. Critics complain that "the Trump administration appears to be sacrificing long-term security goals for short-term economic gain" -- i.e., for the arms merchants, not for those who foot the military budget. Of course, if selling arms leads to an arms race, the industry would see long-term economic gains as well, and we would all wind up less secure.

• Lawrence H Summers/Anna Stansbury: US workers need more power: Good title, but don't fear, he's not really offering much. No talk about co-determination, let alone making companies fully employee-owned, which is the direction we should be moving in.

• Matt Taibbi: On "White Fragility": Review of Robin DiAngelo's book, "a few thoughts on America's smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism," one of which is it "may be the dumbest book ever written." I rather doubt that, if for no other reason than that I recall Taibbi's review of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat.

• Michael Tomasky: Biden's journey left.

• Nick Turse: Pentagon war game includes scenario for military response to domestic Gen Z rebellion. "Gen Z" is defined as those born after 1996.

• Peter Wade: Trump can't name one thing he'd prioritize if re-elected: Good.

• Paul Waldman:

  • Here's what a second term of Trump would look like.

  • /Greg Sargent: Trump's unhinged crusade to destroy Obamacare boomerangs back on GOP.

• Alex Ward:

  • The head of US broadcasting is leaning toward pro-Trump propaganda. Biden would fire him. Michael Pack, head of US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which runs "Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting," so is already neck-deep in the propaganda business.

    Pack, a close ally of former top Trump strategist Steve Bannon, began his three-year tenure just this month and wasted no time making dramatic changes to reshape the agency. Last week, within hours of introducing himself to employees, he purged four top officials from the agency's media organizations. The two chiefs of Voice of America (VOA), the most prominent outlet in the agency, had already resigned earlier over Pack's appointment.

    Related:

    • Yasha Levine: US state propaganda outlets censor Black Lives Matter protests: "It's hard for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to sell the USA as a shining example of civil liberties and democracy when the internet is drowning in pics of American killer cops beating down anyone in sight."

    • Gareth Porter: FBI launches open attack on 'foreign' alternative media outlets challenging US foreign policy.

  • The real villain of John Bolton's Trump book is John Bolton. More Bolton book:

    • David Badash: 'Trump comes off like a needy supplicant' in John Bolton's new book.

    • Juan Cole: The final defeat of the John Bolton hawks? How Russia and China could humiliate Trump on eve of election by lifting Iran arms embargo.

    • Michael Galant: John Bolton is not your hero, no matter what his book says.

    • Patrick Iber: John Bolton's accidentally unflattering self-portrait.

    • Fred Kaplan: John Bolton's book is a brutal, searing indictment . . . of John Bolton: "No one should let this man in 'the room where it happens' ever again."

    • James North: Reflexive support for Israel is a vital part of John Bolton's world view. This reminds me of a story (which I can't readily resource) where David Ben-Gurion tried to offer advice to Charles De Gaulle on how to handle the rebellion in Algeria. De Gaule stopped him, asking why France would want to get stuck in a never-ending war. De Gaule saw the folly of that, but Bolton only sees the opportunity -- a prescription for his life's work.

    • Trita Parsi: John bolton can stomach Kim Jong Un's North Korea, but not Iran. "The real revelation of the former national security advisor's memoir is that he placed Israeli and Saudi interests ahead of America's" -- a point better made without the Kim shaming. Bolton probably had more individual effect in scuttling the North Korea opening than he did on Iran, where he echoed the positions of others who already had Trump's ear.

    • Barbara Slavin: Bolton's book is an instruction manual for how not to do foreign policy.

  • How Trump's China obsession could derail nuclear arms control, in one tweet: "Bolton makes clear President Trump's foreign policy is absolutely terrible -- but Bolton's is much, much worse."

  • /Nicole Narea: The US military will stay on the US-Mexico border, even with migration falling.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Trump is rescuing Maine lobstermen from himself, and blaming Obama: "The lobster bailout, explained."

  • Martha McSally's bailout proposal for the travel industry, explained: "The Arizona senator wants to give each US adult $4,000 to go on vacation -- but only if you're not too poor." The bottom line is that this is another Republican tax cut for the rich, albeit limited and dressed up funny.

  • Trump's reelection polling is looking really bad. Why does he always have to note: "After all, Michael Dukakis was up by 17 points in mid-July 1988"? Not only is that a bummer, there are lots of reasons why this year is nothing like that year.

  • Trump's catastrophic failure on testing is no joke: "The president is continually more focused on good numbers than good policy."

  • Why it feels like there are a lot more fireworks this year. No, I hadn't noticed. I don't think I've heard a single firework bang so far this month, or maybe this year. No doubt I will hear some closer to the 4th, but probably less than usual. The old Lawrence Stadium used to shoot off fireworks at least once a week, but they tore it down, built a new ballpark, and have yet to play a single game there. Wichita is not traditionally hostile to fireworks -- although the Fire Dept. had a lot more say in the matter when I was growing up than in recent years. I went out driving one July 4th and identified at least 20 places that were shooting off major fireworks (of course, the big one was downtown, which we could watch from out front lawn). Then I drove down Main St. toward where I grew up, and it looked like a war zone with all the debris. My mother especially loved fireworks, but I'd be just as happy never to see or hear any ever again.

• Li Zhou:

  • Trump's racist references to the coronavirus are his latest effort to stoke xenophobia.

  • Trump is still using racist terms to describe the coronavirus. That has real consequences for Asian Americans. "The president's rhetoric is seen as fueling a surge in hate incidents toward Asian Americans."

  • Senate Democrats say the Republican police reform bill is "not salvageable".

  • /Ella Nilsen: The House just passed a sweeping police reform bill: "It's not expected to go anywhere in the Senate, however."

Daily Log

Trying to figure out a sloppy joe recipe. Sources:

1. The Wholesome Dish
2. Five Heart Home
3. The Chunky Chef
4. Beef Is What's for Dinner
5. All Recipes
6. Taste of Home
7. Culintary Hill

• ground beef: 1 lb
• butter: C(1 tbs)
• onion: A(1/2 c), C(1/2 large), D(1 c), E(1/4 c), G(1)
• green bell pepper: A(1/2 c), C(1/3), D(1 c), E(1/4 c)
• garlic: B(2 cloves), C(3)
• tomato sauce: ABG(8 oz), D(14.5 oz)
• tomato paste: C(1 tbs)
• ketchup: BG(1/2 c), C(2/3 c), D(1/4 c), E(3/4 c), F(1 c)
• water: F(1/4 c)
• barbecue sauce: D(1/4 c)
• brown sugar: A(1/2 c), B(1-2 tbs), D(2 tsp), E(3 tsp), F(2 tbs), G(1 tbs)
• worcestershire sauce: B(2 tbs), C(1/2 tsp), DG(1 tbs), F(2 tsp)
• red wine vinegar: A(1 tbs)
• white vinegar: G(1 tbs)
• prepared (yellow) mustard: B(1 tsp), C(1 tsp), E(1 tsp), F(2 tsp)
• dry mustard: D(1 tsp), G(1 tsp)
• chili powder: C(3/4 tsp)
• garlic powder: B(1/2 tsp), E(1/2 tsp), F(1/2 tsp)
• onion powder: B(1/4 tsp), F(1/2 tsp)
• salt: A(1 tsp), FC(1/2 tsp), EG(to taste)
• ground black pepper: AC(1/4 tsp), BEG(to taste)

Came up with this one.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33485 [33449] rated (+36), 216 [215] unrated (+1).

Don't feel like writing much here. Started the week thinking I'd track down some records by the late Keith Tippett, but quickly got sidetracked by Stan Tracey, an older British pianist who did some duet records with Tippett c. 1977. I then picked up some old World Saxophone Quartet records, adding them to my David Murray Guide. I probably should have done this anyway, but someone on Facebook commented on my missing Revue, which he teased was some kind of consensus pick as the greatest jazz album of the decade. The old Gary Bartz records came after reviewing his new one. I should note that Harlem Bush Music, which combines the two albums before Juju Street Songs, was previously A-.

Didn't do much on new records this week. Started most days with golden oldies, then when I sat down at the computer, switched over to old jazz rather than going through my new queue. Best reviewed new records this week were by Bob Dylan and Phoebe Bridgers -- who got more favorable reviews than Dylan this week (32 to 22 in my metacritic file.) I'll check out both soon, but was more curious about Black Eyed Peas (AOTY critic score 50/1, user score 83/30). Not great, but much better than that, with a choice cut called News Today.

New records reviewed this week:

• Ambrose Akinmusire: On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment (2020, Blue Note): [r]: B+(**)
• Gary Bartz and Maisha: Night Dreamer Direct-to-Disc Sessions (2019 [2020], Night Dreamer): [r]: B+(***)
• Black Eyed Peas: Translation (2020, Epic): [r]: B+(***)
• Chromeo: Quarantine Casanova (2020, Chromeo, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Orrin Evans and the Captain Black Big Band: The Intangible Between (2020, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(**)
• Fra Fra: Funeral Songs (2020, Glitterbeat): [r]: B
• Mike: Weight of the World (2020, 10k): [bc]: B+(*)
• Aaron Parks: Little Big II: Dreams of a Mechanical Man (2019 [2020], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(**)
• Perfume Genius: Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (2020, Matador): [r]: B+(*)
• Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Sideways to New Italy (2020, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Misha Mengelberg/Peter Brötzmann/Evan Parker/Peter Bennink/Paul Rutherford/Derek Bailey/Han Bennink: Groupcomposing (1970 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Gary Bartz Ntu Troop: Juju Street Songs (1972-73 [1997], Prestige): [r]: B+(**)
• Gary Bartz Ntu Troop: I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies (1973, Prestige): [r]: B+(***)
• Gary Bartz: Shadows (1991 [1992], Timeless): [r]: B+(**)
• Gary Bartz: ?The Red and Orange Poems (1994, Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)
• Joe Harriott Quintet: Swings High (1967 [2003], Cadillac): [bc]: B+(**)
• Dudu Pukwana & Bob Stuckey: Night Time Is the Right Time: 60s Soho Sounds (1967-68 [2010], Cadillac): [r]: B
• Keith Tippett Tapestry Orchestra: Live at Le Mans (1998 [2009], Edition, 2CD): [r]: B
• Stan Tracey: Showcase (1958, Vogue): [r]: B+(*)
• The Stan Tracey Quartet: Jazz Suite: Inspired by Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (1965, Columbia): [r]: A
• Stan Tracey/Keith Tippett: Supernova (1977 [2008], Resteamed): [r]: B+(**)
• The New Stan Tracey Quartet: For Heaven's Sake (1995 [1996], Cadillac): [r]: B+(***)
• Stan Tracey: Solo : Trio (1997 [1998], Cadillac): [r]: B+(***)
• Stan Tracey & Danny Moss: Just You, Just Me (2003 [2004], Avid): [r]: B+(***)
• Stan Tracey Quartet: Senior Moment (2008 [2009], Resteamed): [r]: B+(**)
• Stan Tracey Quintet: The Flying Pig (2013 [2014], Resteamed): [r]: B+(***)
• Ben Webster/Stan Tracey: Soho Nights Vol. 2 (1964 [2012], Resteamed): [r]: A-
• Ben Webster/Stan Tracey: Soho Nights Vol. 1 (1968 [2008], Resteamed): [r]: B+(***)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Steppin' With the World Saxophone Quartet (1978 [1979], Black Saint): [r]: B
• World Saxophone Quartet: W.S.Q. (1980 [1981], Black Saint): [r]: B+(*)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Revue (1980 [1982], Black Saint): [r]: B+(*)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Live in Zürich (1981 [1984], Black Saint): [r]: B+(*)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Live at Brooklyn Academy of Music (1985 [1986], Black Saint): [r]: B
• World Saxophone Quartet: Four Now (1995 [1996], Justin Time): [r]: B+(**)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Takin' It 2 the Next Level (1996, Justin Time): [r]: B
• World Saxophone Quartet: 25th Anniversary: The New Chapter (2000 [2001], Justin Time): [r]: B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jeff Cosgrove/John Medeski/Jeff Lederer: History Gets Ahead of the Story (Grizzley Music) [07-17]
• Dan Willis and Velvet Gentlemen: The Monk Project (Belle Avenue) [07-17]

Blog link.

All in all, not a very good week for Donald Trump. It started off with Supreme Court rulings that the 1965 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ people, and that Trump's revocation of the DACA program was invalid because the Trump administration failed to explain why. The marches continued, as did the police outrages provoking more demonstrations, but also a few reform stories, and even some indictments and/or dismissals that show that, despite the fury of Trump and the right, protest is getting somewhere. Trump spent much of the week threatening and/or suing his former national security director and his niece for writing books showing some of the many ways he is incompetent and/or vile. And just as we're still processing his recent purge of federal inspectors for trying to do their jobs, he goes off and fires a US attorney who had opened investigations of some of his cronies. He's finding Covid-19 infection rates still on the rise in nearly half of the states, including virtually all of the "red" ones in the South. He expected to finish the week on a high after resuming his campaign rallies in one of those states, only to find the Tulsa arena half-empty (and considerably less than half-masked). It's hard to see how that turns into a win.

Even before the rally, most polls show Trump losing badly to Joe Biden. See Nate Silver: Our new polling averages show Biden leads Trump by 9 points nationally, which shows a bunch of 2016 Trump states flipping: Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, but not quite Iowa (where Biden is -0.6) or Texas (-0.7). Trump's approval rating is 41.4% (vs. 55.2% disapprove). The generic congressional ballot is at 48.4% Democrats, 40.4% Republicans. Of course, too early to count your chickens. The one thing I'm most certain of is that the rest of the 2020 campaign season is going to be the nastiest in American history.

Quite a few sublists below, usually starting with the first piece I found on a subject, so you'll have to scour around to find ones of personal interest. In fact, quite a lot of everything.

Some scattered links this week:

• Sasha Abramsky:

  • Following Supreme Court rulings, Trump attacks the independence of the judiciary.

  • The GOP is getting back to business as usual -- trying to gut social programs.

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • A Siberian town near the Arctic Circle just recorded a 100-degree temperature: Verkhoyansk, average June high 68F.

  • Brazil could surpass the US as the country worst hit by coronavirus this summer: "1 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Brazil." With deaths approaching 50,000.

  • /Sean Collins: The police killing of Rayshard Brooks at a Wendy's drive-through, explained. This happened the previous week. Recent updates include a "felony murder" charge against one police officer and an "aggravated assault" against another.

• Katelyn Burns: Seattle's newly police-free neighborhood, explained.

• Marc Caputo/Matthew Choi: Klobuchar shuts down VP speculation, urges Biden to pick woman of color. Article describes this as "a blow to the chances of Massachusetts' Sen Elizabeth Warren," but that assumes that someone who didn't rate high enough to still be a contender has somehow gained influence by pissing in the punch bowl on the way out. Leaves me with the feeling that not only does she want to torpedo the much more progressive Warren, she also can't bear losing to her fellow midwestern prospects (most often mentioned are Gretchen Whitmer, Tammy Baldwin, and Tammy Duckworth).

• Matthew Chapman: Trump claims his niece signed an NDA, threatens to sue her over tell-all book: report. The niece is Mary L Trump, PhD, the book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. Also:

  • Lachlan Cartwright: Revealed: The family member who turned on Trump.

• Fabiola Cineas:

  • Juneteenth, explained: I have to admit I blew this one. A couple weeks ago when Trump announced his June 19 rally in Tulsa, I assumed that uproar over the date had more to do with the 1921 Tulsa massacre. I knew a fair amount about the latter, but evidently nothing about Juneteenth. Good to get that cleared up.

    • Jamelle Bouie: Why Juneteenth matters: "It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln's promise of "a new birth of freedom." Bouie also wrote: To overturn Trump, we need to overturn white supremacy.

    • Jonathan Chait: Trump: 'I made Juneteenth very famous . . . nobody ever heard of it' before me: "And yet Juneteenth is so ungrateful to Trump."

    • Aaron Ross Coleman: Juneteenth should remind America what it owes black citizens: "As Americans protest, the holiday marks the end of slavery and beckons the country to close the racial wealth gap."

  • The disappearance and death of activist Oluwatoyin Salau, explained.

• Sean Collins: Police killings can be captured in data. The terror police create cannot.

• Jesselyn Cook/Nick Robins-Early: Inside the dangerous online fever swamps of American police: "Cops have a far-right media ecosystem of their own, where they post racist memes, spread disinformation and call for violence against antifa."

• Daniel Denvir: Donald Trump is a menace to American democracy. But he didn't come out of nowhere. "His rise was only possible because of a Republican and Democratic political consensus that has ravaged American politics and society for a generation." Long article, touches on a lot of things. It's certainly true that politics have become more polarized, especially on the very ideological and aggressive right, and Trump in many ways is a logical extension of where the right was already going. Still, I wonder if it might be more fruitful to look at how businessmen have become more imperious and arrogant (and, no coincidence, much richer) over the last 30-40 years. Trump may seem like a major break with previous politicians, but how different is he from the last few generations of CEOs/financiers? (Insert long list of names here, like Jack Welch, Carl Icahn, Charles Koch, Sheldon Adelson, etc.) Trump's instincts are certainly authoritarian, but they strike me as more like despotic monarchs, who grew up in worlds where everyone deferred to them, and fascist (or mafia) strongmen, who came to power by snatching it, and kept it by intimidation.

• Tom Engelhardt: The age of disappointment? Or how the American century ends. These TomDispatch articles get reproduced on various websites, often with slightly different titles. AlterNet calls this The American century is ending decisively with a pyromaniac in the White House.

• Mara Gay: Why was a grim report on police-involved deaths never released?

• Elena Goukassian: Who really was Roy Cohn?: Interview with Ivy Meeropol, who directed a new documentary on Trump's mentor, including his role in getting her grandparents executed, in what Alan Dershowitz thinks "was one of the greatest miscarriages of justice ever in this country."

• Constance Grady: Black authors are on all the bestseller lists right now. But publishing doesn't pay them enough.

• Glenn Greenwald:

  • With the world focused on the pandemic, Israel prepares to annex large swaths of the West Bank.

  • The New York Times admits key falsehoods that drove last year's coup in Bolivia: Falsehoods peddled by the US, its media, and the Times.

• Jeff Halper: Israelizing the American police, Palestinianizing the American people.

• Elahe Izadi/Paul Farhi: The standoff between owners and journalists that's eviscerating Pittsburgh's biggest newspaper. Newspapers are businesses, owned by rich people, who are often tempted to impose their political views on their reporters -- here the signal is the charge of "bias." Free press is a nice concept, but doesn't exist in America -- least of all, evidently, in Pittsburgh.

• Sarah Jones:

  • Seattle-Area Labor Council expels cop union.

  • Trump wanted to send in the troops. Now some are ready to quit.

• Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein:

  • Letting private equity billionaires rob worker retirement funds: "A new Department of Labor rule allows private equity to get into 401(k) plans. One expert estimates a $13.7 billion annual wealth transfer from workers to Wall Street tycoons."

  • The government can afford anything it wants: Review of Stephanie Kelton: The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy. I must admit that I've never understood MMT, although I have noticed that the predictions of "deficit scolds" have rarely (if ever) come true -- so it wouldn't surprise me if there is more flexibility for deficit spending than is commonly assumed (e.g., by those bemoaning how Bernie Sanders could ever pay for his proposals). Consider:

    "The problem we have today," Kelton writes, "is that economic policy is often prescribed by people who, despite holding advanced degrees in economics, possess no real understanding of how our monetary system works." The idea is that a basic understanding of how money works, of MMT precepts, could empower any citizen to fight for a better world. But this will only happen once we reconcile what the country is capable of and what the people are willing to do. "Austerity," Kelton writes, "is a failure of imagination." So what kind of society do we want to imagine, if we unshackle ourselves from the language of taxpayer-funded, deficit-diminishing government? Are we willing to stop shoveling resources into the military (and its domestic paramilitary offshoot, police departments) and start diverting them to working-class communities? If everyone deserves to be safe, housed, and prosperous, let's instruct the Federal Reserve to start marking up some different accounts.

• Seung Min Kim: Top State Department official resigns in protest of Trump's response to racial tensions in the country: Mary Elizabeth Taylor, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs..

• Jen Kirby:

  • Remember Brexit? It's still not over.

  • The 7 most disturbing allegations about Trump in John Bolton's forthcoming book. Bolton didn't get to start any major wars during his brief tenure as Trump's national security adviser, but at least he got a book out of it, The Room Where It Happened, and enough publicity that it's likely to be a bestseller (assuming a Trump administration lawsuit fails to quash it), setting himself up for a return to the limelight should Tom Cotton or Marco Rubio or some similar reptile become president. Subheds (which really aren't more disturbing than what you already know):

    • Trump asked Xi for help with his electoral prospects -- as if he ever thought about anything else.
    • Trump told Xi to go ahead with the internment of Muslims in China -- as if Xi cares what he thinks.
    • Trump learns about nukes . . . Trump didn't know that the UK has nuclear weapons, but (unlike the US) they've never used them.
    • . . . and about geography -- well, Finland used to be part of Russia, and the US actually did land marines in Venezuela, and later effectively owned its oil industry.
    • Trump wanted to withdraw from NATO with a dramatic made-for-TV scene
    • Trump had some issues with the Constitution -- like wanting to execute "scumbags" who rat him out; this is a polite way of saying he doesn't understand why a president shouldn't be able to do things any self-respecting mob boss would.
    • Meddling in Ukraine, yes, but so many other things

    More reaction to Bolton:

    • Nancy LeTourneau: John Bolton didn't tell the truth when it mattered most: "Instead, he kept his mouth shut until he could cash in on a book deal." This is the popular line among people who are eager to grasp at any cudgel to attack Trump, but we should be clear that Bolton always had his own private agenda, and it always included concern for his bottom line. Even before his book deal, Bolton has long made an unseemly amount of money by consistently hewing to the most hawkish line allowed at any given moment, even as each of his arguments has proven disastrous. That he occasionally finds Trump insufficiently belligerent is more of an indictment of him than of Trump. That he occasionally finds Trump to be stupid, vain and petty just shows that he can marshal ordinary perceptions into passages that make himself look smarter and more principled, if only by comparison.

    • Theodore J Boutrous Jr: Why Trump's lawsuit against John Bolton will fail.

    • Jonathan Chait: Trump: I didn't realize Bolton supported Iraq War until after I hired him: "A small slip-up in the vetting process"? What vetting process? Did Trump ever make his own concerns known? Bolton not only supported the Iraq War, he never stopped defending it. It's impossible to imagine a job interview, even by someone as inattentive and uncurious as Trump, failing to raise red flags.

    • Matthew Chapman: Trump is determined to get John Bolton jailed.

    • Matt Ford: John Bolton: American coward.

    • Andrew Gawthorpe: There are no heroes in the John Bolton v Donald Trump story.

    • Josh Gerstein/Kyle Cheney: 'The damage is done': Judge denies Trump administration request to block Bolton book: "but he warned the former national security adviser could face criminal charges."

    • John Hudson: Bolton book exposes rare fissures between Trump and Pompeo.

    • Steven Nelson: Trump: I should have fired John Bolton for botching North Korea nuclear talks. Yes you should have. No you didn't. Moreover, it was totally obvious when you appointed him that he would do everything he possibly could to make sure no agreement was reached. Same could be said of your boy Mike Pompeo, although he did a slightly better job of pretending he was with the program. Trump should rifle back through what remains of his memory and identify all the people who recommended Bolton to him, and fire them too. By the way, I wouldn't say that Trump's own words were especially eloquent or insightful, but for once their pith finds a deserving target:

      "When Wacko John Bolton went on Deface the Nation and so stupidly said that he looked at the 'Libyan Model' for North Korea, all hell broke out," Trump tweeted Thursday. "Kim Jong Un, who we were getting along with very well, went 'ballistic,' just like his missiles -- and rightfully so."

      Trump added that Kim "didn't want Bolton anywhere near him."

      "Bolton's dumbest of all statements set us back very badly with North Korea, even now. I asked him, 'what the hell were you thinking'" He had no answer and just apologized. That was early on, I should have fired him right then & there!" Trump wrote.

    • William Rivers Pitt: It's Trump vs Bolton, and I'm rooting for a meteor.

    • Frank Rich: The folly of Trump's Bolton lawsuit.

    • Zoë Richards: WH trade adviser slams Bolton book as 'deep swamp revenge porn': Peter Navarro.

    • Eugene Robinson: John Bolton is a weasel in a party of weasels.

    • Jennifer Rubin: Trump's Bolton problem is nothing compared with Senate Republicans' woes: "We knew Trump violated his oath. Now we're certain Senate Republicans did, too."

    • Jon Schwarz: John Bolton is telling the truth, but let's not forget his horrible, dangerous career.

    • Tierney Sneed: DOJ goes all in on trying to block release of Bolton book.

• Ellen Knickmeyer: US drops planned limit for toxin that damages infant brains.

• Bonnie Kristian: Another General wants forever war in Iraq: Meet CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth F McKenzie Jr.

• Jill Lepore: The history of the "riot" report: "How government commissions became alibis for inaction."

• Nancy LeTourneau:

  • The ongoing struggle between two American ideals: liberty and equality: "Inside the biggest fault line between the two parties in American politics today." The conservative mind-trick here is defining liberty as something that only a few people can enjoy because it's taken at the expense of others. But you never can get to "liberty and justice for all" that way, which makes me wonder if it isn't better to think of liberty as something equality makes possible. Even conservatives should be satisfied defining liberty as the ability to choose one's course of action without being compelled by economic constraints. Why can't everyone enjoy such freedom? The real "fault line" has nothing to do with liberty, which all pursue, but with equality, which conservatives deny and despise. Sure, they have their rationalizations, but even if true -- and I'd argue they are not -- why would a democracy prostrate itself to their vanity?

  • Why are conservatives so threatened by equality? Subhed says "It's the toxic and irrational fear that more freedom for LGBTQ Americans infringes on their own," but isn't that just a way of admitting that they believe that their freedom comes at the expense of other people? And not just LGBTQ -- there's also race, class, sex. They believe that unions are picking their pockets. Each plank is rooted in a sense of privilege, and a belief that force can safeguard their privileges. After all, we might all agree to be equal, but there can never be agreement (hence there can never be peace) that one class is entitled to rule over all others.

  • How Republicans convinced themselves that Trump will win in a landslide: "Delusional thinking often goes unchallenged when you're living inside a cocoon." Also:

    • John Hinderaker: The landslide of 2020? Someone recommended this link as the funniest thing he had read in quite some time. Doesn't quite qualify as a review of David Horowitz's Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win because he admits that he hasn't read the book, but he believes Horowitz ("one of the most perceptive observers of the current scene") blindly.

      The current environment reminds me of 1972, and a conversation I had then with a friend who was, like me at that time, on the left. The contest then was between Nixon and McGovern, and my friend said, "Nixon will win because he is for America, and McGovern is against America." He and I didn't see it that way, but we knew that was how the race was coming across to most voters. That is true in spades this year: McGovern was wrong about a lot of things, but he was a sincere patriot. Today's Democrats, in contrast, really are against America.

      The cognitive disconnect in the last sentence is so hard to process that the simplest explanation is that people who utter it are stark raving insane. Yet we hear this line repeated endlessly on the far right, especially since Obama won the presidency in 2008. (Sometimes at book length, as in David Limbaugh's The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic -- the most explicit title from a long list I compiled in 2012, which I summed up as "uninspired and empty.") The thing is, there's never been a shred of evidence that Obama or any other mainstream Democrat wanted to harm America. Maybe you can accuse a few fringe leftists (maybe even myself) with being insufficiently obeisant to the militarized symbols of American power, but Obama, Biden, the Clintons, Pelosi, Shumer, et al., have become the last true believers in American exceptionalism: the steadfast belief that this country remains a beacon of light, of hope and opportunity for the rest of the world. Even those of us who have become thoroughly disenchanted with America's long history of racism, militarism, colonialism, corruption, and economic plunder, tend to express our concerns by referring to the historical moments when Americans seemed to aspire to something better, and we can frame our solutions in terms which promise to help the majority of Americans. But while we believe that further left solutions would be better for Americans than what mainstream Democrats have done, the fact is that when given the power, Democrats have made the economy more prosperous, have reduced the harm done to less fortunate Americans, have blundered into fewer wars, have treated the environment better, and have responded to disasters more effectively, than Republicans have done. So how can people like the author here say such things? I considered the possibility that their definition of America was just so exclusive -- as Todd Snider put it, "conservative Christian, right-wing Republican, straight, white, American males" -- that maybe their paranoia was grounded in something real. But I know many such people, and I've never seen them actually hurt by things Democrats have done (even where they've felt outraged). So, I have to conclude, the depths of their delusion far exceeds my ability to explain.

    • David Siders: 'We're thinking landslide': Beyond DC, GOP officials see Trump on glide path to reelection: Quotes Phillip Stephens, a GOP county chairman in NC: "The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump. We're calling him 'Teflon Trump.' Nothing's going to stick, because if anything, it's getting more exciting than it was in 2016. We're thinking landslide."

    • Paul Waldman: Trump supporters already know he will definitely win by a landslide.

• Martin Longman: Two stories that show why Trump's unfit for office.

  The are two lightly reported stories in the news that really highlight the norm-breaking and criminality of the Trump administration. One involves the nation's inspectors general and the other the administration's treatment of science. Anyone who might care about these subjects is most likely already in Biden's camp, but they should get wider circulation because they ought to inform how people will vote.

  The stories Longman cites (though neither are isolated incidents):

  • Kyle Cheney/Zachary Warmbrodt: Inspectors general ask Congress for help in monitoring coronavirus relief payments.

  • Christopher Flavelle: NOAA chief violated ethics code in furor over Trump tweet, agency says.

• Joe Macaron: The 'Caesar Act' has no teeth and is not about Assad. Evidently "Caesar" is an anonymous photographer who documented human rights abuses by the Syrian military police, providing the basis for a report (known as "The Caesar Report") written by ICC prosecutors, and hence a law which allows the US (sworn enemies of the ICC) to levy sanctions on Syria, adding fuel to America's psychotic love/hate relationship with Syria. While I would have been pleased if the Assad regime had fallen and disappeared in Syria, at this point continued war is far worse for all concerned. Instead of figuring out ways to inflict further pain, the US would be well advised to make peace with Assad, and use whatever good will that produces to help the Syrian people recover from the war the US (and its nominal allies) did so much to protract. Related: Shahed Ghoreishi: The next US administration must fix our broken Syria policy. Notice that at this point no one has any hopes the present administration can fix anything.

• Dylan Matthews: A new paper finds stimulus checks, small business aid, and "reopening" can't rescue the economy.

• Bill McKibben: How public opinion changes for the better.

• Peter Miller: Policing or occupation? Crowd control practices in the US and Palestine.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The Supreme Court saved DACA because of a paperwork error by the Trump administration. For more:

    • Matt Ford: Trump's ineptitude keeps dream alive for DACA recipients.

    • Nicole Narea: The Supreme Court just ruled to preserve protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants for now.

    • Amanda Marcotte: The Supreme Court saves Trump from himself, twice -- will it do the same with abortion? I've wondered this myself: whether Roberts isn't soft-pedaling the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court so as not to panic people about what Trump has done -- especially on cases where there's a clear popular majority against Trump. Give Trump four more years and the takeover will be even harder to reverse.

    • Mark Joseph Stern: Why John Roberts had to block Trump's DACA repeal.

  • The Supreme Court turned away several cases seeking to rein in police violence: "It looks like qualified immunity is here to stay."

  • The Supreme Court's new decision could sink Trump's anti-LGBTQ agenda.

  • The Supreme Court's landmark LGBTQ rights decision, explained in 5 simple sentences.

    • Lauren Adler: The surprising roots of the Supreme Court's LGBTQ rights ruling: How surprising depends on how old you are. It was pretty widely known that the prohibition against discrimination by sex was added to the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a "poison pill," an amendment calculated to weaken support for the legislation. I didn't remember Howard W Smith (D-VA) as the author, but knew it was some Southern segregationist. For more, see Rebecca Onion: The real story behind "because of sex".

    • Elizabeth Dias: Conservative Christians see 'seismic implications' in Supreme Court ruling.

    • Burgess Everett/Marianne Levine: GOP backs Gorsuch's LGBTQ decision after conservative blowback.

    • Masha Gessen: The LGBTQ-rights movement wins its biggest Supreme Court victory.

    • Alex Henderson: Conservatives -- led by Justice Alito -- melt down over Supreme Court's pro-LGBTQ ruling.

    • Charles Kaiser: What makes Monday's gay rights ruling so historic.

    • Bruno Marcetic: Neil Gorsuch is still not your friend.

• Peter Montague: Trump wants to create election chaos by killing the Post Office:

  On March 30, Trump spilled the beans himself when he said, if it were easier to vote in the U.S., Republicans would never get elected. The president made the comments as he dismissed a congressional Democrat-led push for reforms such as vote-by-mail, same-day voter registration and early voting to help states run elections safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. "They had things, levels of voting that if you'd ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again," Trump said. "We don't want anyone to do mail-in ballots," the president said in May.

• Sara Morrison: The Trump administration's flawed plan to destroy the Internet as we know it: "Following the president's lead, Republicans are trying to chip away at Section 230."

• Yascha Mounk: Is Donald Trump a danger to democracy? Review of new books by Masha Gessen (Surviving Autocracy) and Eric A Posner (The Demagogue's Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy From the Founders to Trump), by the author of The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It (2018). All concerned are fond of analogies, so their books run the gamut. I think it's important to make a distinction between Trump with his authoritarian impulses and the Republican Party's greedy schemes to subvert democracy. Trump is reprehensible but dangerous only to the extent that the Party supports and defends him. The real threat is the Party, but I suspect that the authors would rather indict individuals than look into the profoundly anti-democratic beliefs of modern (or, indeed, any) conservatism.

• Ellen Nakashima/Shane Harris: Elite CIA unit that developed hacking tools failed to secure its own systems, allowing massive leak, an internal report found.

• Nicole Narea: Trump fires the US attorney investigating his allies: "Attorney General William Barr tried to fire Geoffrey Berman on Friday, but he refused to step down. So the president stepped in."

  • Jonathan Chait: Barr trying to purge the last prosecutor who can still investigate Trump.

  • Josh Marshall: A remarkable turn of events:

    The Trump administration, with its most effective enforcer, Bill Barr, is looking at an uphill reelection campaign, a range of still unfolding civic catastrophes, and trying to make the most of its executive power while it still holds it. Abusing the powers of office look like the clearest path to retaining those powers past next January. But since the rampant abuses are now adding to the marked deterioration of support for Trump's presidency the incentives for bad acting only grow more perverse, the need to keep doubling down or upping the ante only grows. As I noted above, Berman's public refusal is itself a sign of Trump's ebbing power. It all points to a perilous six months of mounting instability, wrongdoing and criminality in which Trump, his lieutenants and toadies see the need to keep rolling the dice, fomenting chaos in the hopes some version of it works in his favor.

  • Renae Merle: Trump's pick to run Manhattan US attorney's office defended prominent Wall Street firms for years: Jay Clayton, previously SEC chairman, another obvious perch for serving his past (and future?) clients.

• Terry Nguyen: Aunt Jemima and the long-overdue rebrand of racist stereotypes.

• Anna North:

  • "The oppression doesn't end, it adapts": America's history of lynching and its resonance today: Interview with Nicholas Creary, who "helped spearhead the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission."

  • The deaths of 2 black men by hanging, and calls for investigation, explained.

• Morgan Palumbo/Jessica Draper: Knockout in Washington: "A monumental lobbying battle over American foreign policy -- How the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Emiratis took Washington." I'm tempted to argue that the US hasn't had a coherent foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Maybe GW Bush thought he had one with his Global War on Terrorism. Maybe Obama thought his "Pivot to Asia" would fill the void left by abandoning the hapless GWOT. But really, US foreign policy just reverted to what it had been before rabid anti-communism added its ideologial veneer: favors for interest groups with business abroad. Before WWII, those favors were for US companies, especially in Latin America. More recently, the companies became multinationals, and sovereign nations got into the act, all working through the usual lobbyists. Trump's innovation was to drop the pretense that foreign policy was ever about anything but money. So if Saudi Arabia, for instance, wants to bomb a neighboring country, or kill an American journalist, all they really have to do is to make sure the checks clear, and America will be their ally.

• Steven Pearlstein: The Fed is addicted to propping up the markets, even without a need.

  Why, exactly, the Fed feels it necessary to inject more dollars into the corporate credit market is hard to fathom. The interest rate at which investment-grade companies can borrow on the bond market is now below 4 percent, about as low as anyone can remember. And the pace of bond issuance so far this year, at over $1.2 trillion, has been double that of last year's torrid pace. Indeed, there's so much capital sloshing around that investors are lining up to lend money to companies such as Boeing and Macy's and the cruise-line operator Carnival, although these companies' revenue has plummeted with along revenue in much of the travel and retail sectors. . . .

  The best explanation for this confidence is the widespread belief on Wall Street that the Fed will do "whatever it takes" -- that is, print money to buy as many bonds as necessary -- to keep credit flowing to the business sector, no matter the risk. By placing a floor under bond prices, the Fed makes it possible for over-indebted, sales-starved companies to borrow even more to cover operating losses, or refinance existing loans, allowing them to avoid, or at least delay, the day when they cannot pay their bills.

• Cameron Peters: Trump's executive order on police reform, explained.

• Brad Plumer/Nadja Popovich: Emissions are surging back as countries and states reopen.

• Ari Rabin-Havt: Mitt Romney is not your friend.

• Adam K Raymond: One of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor is getting fired.

• Rebecca Rivas: Feds dismiss incitement charge against Michael Avery. As near as I can tell, Avery (a "Ferguson activist") was charged for making posts on Facebook criticizing St. Louis police. Greg Magarian commented, "Winning malicious prosecution suits is nearly impossible, but Avery should go for it, and [prosecutor Michael] Reilly should have this abomination hung around his reputational neck for the rest of his professional life." Another piece from the St. Louis American that Magarian pointed me to: Chris King: New video shows Florissant cop swerve to hit fleeing man with SUV. King's follow up story: Florissant cop charged with felony assault, armed criminal action.

• David Roberts: A national US power grid would make electricity cheaper and cleaner.

• Dylan Scott:

  • Trump baselessly claims Covid-19 testing is "overrated" and people wear masks to spite him.

  • What Mike Pence got wrong about the new coronavirus spikes.

• David K Shipler: The racial stereotypes infecting American police departments.

• David Sirota: Republicans are hypocrites. They happily 'de-funded' the police we actually need.

• Emily Stewart: One of America's worst acts of racial violence was in Tulsa. Now, it's the site of Trump's first rally in months. More pieces on Tulsa, past and present (some before and some after Trump's event):

  • Zeeshan Aleem: Trump falsely suggests wearing a mask at his Tulsa rally could be harmful: "He anticipated a 'wild evening' where 'people do what they want.'"

  • Russell Berman: The 'Silent Majority' didn't show up for Trump.

  • Bob Brigham: "Pitiful turnout": Trump mocked for "hilariously weak" attendance at Tulsa comeback rally.

  • Matthew Chapman: Six Trump campaign staffers in Tulsa test positive for COVID-19 ahead of indoor rally.

  • Eugene Daniels: Trump campaign blames protesters for disappointing turnout at Tulsa rally.

  • Robin Givhan: Trump's rally looked like his vision of America. Limited and pitiless.

    It was a long, rambling performance with the president lamenting that he surely must have saluted some 600 times and by God, it was so hot that day and the ramp was like an ice-skating rink and he was wearing leather sole shoes. As far as he was concerned, he really should have been cheered for making it down that ramp unscathed instead of being mocked in the media. So perhaps it made him feel better when the Tulsa crowd -- his crowd -- applauded after he theatrically drank a glass of water onstage with only one hand and didn't dribble any of it on his tie.

    It was Trump's crowd. Everything is his. Everything is because of him. "We -- I -- have done a phenomenal job," he said about the federal government's response to the pandemic. "I saved hundreds of thousands of lives."

  • Virginia Heffernan: Trump's Tulsa rally is shaping up to be a coronavirus petri dish inside a wrecking ball.

  • Astead W Herndon: Black Tulsans, with a defiant Juneteenth celebration, send a message to Trump.

  • Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman/Reid J Epstein: How the Trump campaign's plans for a triumphant rally went awry: "Instead of offering President Trump a glide path back into the campaign season, Saturday's rally in Tulsa has become yet another flash point for a candidate who has repeatedly displayed insensitivity about race."

  • Paul Krugman: Tulsa and the many sins of racism: "The ugly story didn't end with the abolition of slavery."

  • Eric Lach: Donald Trump's empty campaign rally in Tulsa.

  • Taylor Lorenz/Kellen Browning/Sheera Frenkel: TikTok teens and K-Pop stans say they sank Trump rally: "Did a successful prank inflate attendance expectations for President Trump's rally in Tulsa, Okla.?"

  • Osita Nwanevu: This is how Trump plans to beat Biden: "In his latest campaign kick-off rally, the president maps his desperate plan to overcome the national crisis he enabled and win re-election."

  • Caitlin Oprysko: Trump accuses critics of attempting to 'Covid Shame' upcoming rally.

  • Mary Papenfuss: Dr Anthony Fauci warned White House that Tulsa rally would be dangerous.

  • Amber Phillips: 5 takeaways from Trump's Tulsa rally:

    1. Trump elevates violent rhetoric against protesters
    2. 'Kung Flu,' a testing slowdown and other flippant comments about the coronavirus
    3. No attempt to salve racial tensions
    4. Explaining 'the ramp and the water'
    5. Weaving old with the new for a 2020 campaign pitch

  • Randy R Potts/Victor Luckerson: A Trump visit lays bare two Tulsas, a mile and a universe apart.

  • Bret Schulte: How Tulsa's Republican mayor found himself at the center of America's debate on race.

  • Walter Shapiro: Trump is terrorizing America: "His reelection campaign is going to be all about one thing: fear. The Tulsa rally was just the beginning."

  • Brent Staples: The burning of Black Wall Street, revisited: "Nearly a century after the Tulsa Race Massacre, the search for the dead continues."

  • Marc A Thiessen: Trump must reach out to black voters. His Tulsa rally is the place to start. I don't normally read him, even given that his columns inevitably appear in my home town paper. In fact, he strikes me as the single most reprehensible political pundit in America. So I can't tell you whether this is more tone-deaf than usual. But I can assure you that Trump didn't deliver the hoped-for breakthrough message in Tulsa.

• Matt Stieb: Facebook removes Trump ads with Nazi symbol used to identify political prisoners. This story is so weird on many levels that I skipped over it many times before noting it.

• Matt Taibbi: Why policing is broken: "Years of research on brutality cases shows that bad incentives in politics and city bureaucracies are major drivers of police violence."

• Astra Taylor: A new group of leftist primary challengers campaign through protests and the coronavirus.

• Zephyr Teachout/Shaoul Sussman: Amazon's private government: "A new patent cements the company's aims to use its power over sellers to consolidate control." Hard to tell right now how big a deal this is, but several questions leap to mind: Should this technology even be patentable? If so, isn't it dangerous to assign it to an unregulated private company? If the service is really valuable, wouldn't it be much better to build it as a public utility? Many parts of Amazon (e.g., Marketplace), already raise this question.

  The patent, for a form of blockchain ledgering technology, will allow Amazon to oversee the collection of an unprecedented amount of data about the business operations of its sellers, including their entire supply chain. In essence, the patent fulfills Amazon's plans to create a private regulatory regime, where it uses proprietary information to create a "certification" bureaucracy: a private, for-profit alternative to the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission. Unlike governmental agencies, however, it will have no public oversight, and can use its certifying power to squeeze sellers and consolidate control.

  Brands and companies that use Amazon's technology would have to list the manufacturers, couriers, and distributors they use. Those entities will have to corroborate that they indeed sell to the brand. Amazon will know where and when every single sweater, earplug, and frying pan sold on its platform was made, and by whom. The patent states: To certify an item, a verifiable record for the item indicating, for example, what materials were used to make the item, where the item was made, who made the item, when the item was made, and so forth, is needed.

• Jason Tidd: Kris Kobach's guns stolen from truck at Wichita hotel. Kobach is running for US Senate. He says he always carries a gun for protection, and he left a few more in his car, planning on campaigning at some shooting event. "There were 255 guns reported stolen from vehicles in Wichita in 2019." Kobach may be the dumbest person running for Congress in Kansas this year, but don't sell his main rival, Roger Marshall, short. See Abigail Abrams: GOP Congressman says the poor 'just don't want health care.' Alright, he was quoted out of context. The full quote was: "Just like Jesus said, 'The poor will always be with us.' There is a group of people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves." Marshall, by the way, is a M.D., whose recent publicity stunt was to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for himself and his family. Latest piece on his is: Roger Marshall was convicted of reckless driving in 2008. Here's how it was erased. Turns out it helps to have the son of a business partner in the prosecutor's office.

• Craig Timberg: As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from the right-wing boogaloo movement.

  • Natasha Bertrand: Intel report warns that far-right extremists may target Washington, DC.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump and Steve Bannon want to turn a US-funded global media network into Breitbart 2.0: "Michael Pack's purge of the US Agency for Global Media, and his effort to produce tough-on-China journalism, explained."

  • India and China just had their deadliest clash since the 1960s.

• Adam Weinstein: Florida man leads his state to the morgue: "Ron DeSantis is the latest in a long line of Republicans who made the state a plutocratic dystopia. Now he's letting its residents die to save the plutocrats." Also:

  • Marc Caputo: DeSantis defies critics as coronavirus spreads in Florida.

• Philip Weiss:

  • Trump is pushing annexation as political tool to cast Dems as anti-Israel, says J Street expert: Interview with Neri Zilber.

  • /James North: It sure looks like Trump and Adelson have cut a deal on annexation.

    Sheldon Adelson, the Israel-loving, Iran-war-craving casino baron, talks to Donald Trump all the time, and for good reason, he and wife Miriam are the biggest Republican donors, poised to give as much as $200 million this year. Now that the White House appears to be lying down for the Israeli government as it moves to annex portions of the West Bank despite a growing chorus of international condemnation, the focus should be on Adelson. He has always been a strong supporter of Israeli expansion, a man who says, "There's no such thing as a Palestinian."

    So far, the Adelsons have gotten everything they've wanted from our transactional president: tearing up the Iran deal, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, defunding Palestinians, recognizing the Golan annexation, treating settlement expansion as legitimate, even a presidential medal of freedom for Miriam, etc. Right up to yesterday -- a Trump attack on the ICC in the name of Israel. As Trump once said when a Republican rival was getting Adelson's money, Adelson wanted a "perfect little puppet."

• Sean Wilentz: The disgrace of Donald Trump: "Was the battle of Lafayette Square the beginning of the end of his presidency?" Why call it a battle? Doesn't that imply two sides were fighting? (As opposed to one side using excessive force to drive people who were legally and peaceably assembled away.) As a historian, Wilentz can think of past events like Herbert Hoover's routing of the "Bonus Marchers" during the Great Depression, which was one of many things that led to Hoover's 1932 defeat.

• Stephanie Wykstra: The fight for transparency in police misconduct, explained: "New York's repeal of section 50-a -- which allowed police to shield misconduct records -- is a big win for activists, but there is more work to be done."

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The End of Policing left me convinced we still need policing: Critique of Alex Vitale's book. I've cited several Vitale pieces and interviews recently. I agree, although (as with ICE) I also think that some organizations are so rotten it might make sense to restart from scratch. The best thing I see coming out of the "defund" argument is a rethinking about what police should (and should not) be doing. But we're still stuck the the trials of the modern world. We need laws, and we need order, and we need a system to enforce that as fairly and as charitably as possible. In short, we need reform, but we still need to come out the other end with something, even if it too is imperfect. More pieces:

    • Gordon Adams: Abolish and replace: Ending the militarization of policing in America.

    • Amna A Akbar: How defund and disband became the demands.

    • Melissa Gira Grant: The rush to redefine "defund the police".

    • Mariame Kaba: Yes, we mean literally abolish the police: "Because reform won't happen."

    • Jen Kirby: Inside the fight to "defund" the NYPD.

    • Nolan D McCaskill: 'Defund the police' faces skepticism -- even in deeply liberal cities.

    • Alex Pareene: Abolish these police departments.

    • Ishmael Reed: Why killer cops go free.

    • Luke Savage: Defund the Pentagon: As Everett Dirksen used to say, now we're talking real money.

    • Libby Watson: The police can't shake their persecution complex.

  • Donald Trump is defunding the police: "He's proposed cuts in budget after budget, and is holding up needed fiscal aid." Meanwhile, it's the Democrats who are pushing federal aid to cities and states hit hard by revenue shortfalls

    But the larger and more significant budgetary context is that the HEROES Act passed by House Democrats and stalled by Senate Republicans appropriates $900 billion to state and local governments.

    With that kind of fiscal support, cities that don't want to defund their police departments wouldn't have to. And cities that do want to experiment with shifting funding out of law enforcement and into mental health, drug treatment, and youth services will have the opportunity to do that.

    Republicans, meanwhile, have characterized this idea as a "blue state bailout" and say Congress should instead consider changes to bankruptcy law that might allow states to shed their pension obligations in bankruptcy.

• Li Zhou:

  • "I am absolutely sitting here offended": Cedric Richmond calls out Republicans for distracting from police reform.

  • Senate Republicans' narrow new police reform bill, explained.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33449 [33418] rated (+31), 215 [214] unrated (+1).

British avant-pianist Keith Tippett died last week, at 72. He was a major figure, although having never sorted out his scattered discography, I can't say how major. I can say that on occasion he rivaled Cecil Taylor for explosive invention. One issue is that while he recorded several albums with Mujician as a title, he also led a group (with Paul Dunmall, Paul Rogers, and Tony Levin) by that name through seven 1990-2006 albums. Another is that he dabbled in a wide range of music, especially along the prog rock fringe. He married pop singer/actress Julie Driscoll in 1970, and she changed her name to Julie Tippetts (meanwhile, her husband dropped the 's'), continuing a long career that veered far from the pop charts. She survives him. Also on Tippett:

• Downbeat: British Jazz Pianist Keith Tippett Dies at 72
• Free Jazz Collective: Keith Tippett (1947-2020), by Martin Schray
• Guardian: Keith Tippett: British jazz pianist dies at age 72, by Laura Snapes
• London Jazz News: Keith Tippett (1947-2020), by Tony Dudley-Evans.
• Wire: Keith Tippett dies age 72

I'll look into Tippett a bit more next week, but as I'm writing this I've headed off on a Stan Tracey (1926-2013) detour.

One other death last week I should note somewhere is Carl Brewer, a former two-term mayor of Wichita. He was a moderate black Democrat, always seemed to be in tune with local business leaders but always seemed like a decent guy, never had a whiff of scandal, and never embarrassed us. (I'd like to say never did anything blatantly stupid, but I have to question his support for Lyndy Wells in the latest mayoral election.) People I know who knew him liked him a lot. None of those traits were common among the recent run of Wichita mayors.

Robert Christgau published his Consumer Guide: June, 2020, with an A+ for Run the Jewels RTJ4 (an A- here last week); an A for the Wussy album below; A- for Princess Nokia's Everything Is Beautiful, Serengeti's Ajai, and a Fats Domino live album I previously gave good but somewhat lower grades to; an A- for a Malian record I haven't found; a B+ for the Hamell on Trial album below; and a few more things -- I tried Westside Gunn, and even went back two previous releases, but nothing really stuck with me. I'm not conceding that I screwed up, but I've often had trouble catching rap lyrics (especially given limited plays), and that may be at work here.

Christgau asked me for some info on David Murray (occasioned by an Xgau Sez question), so I pasted a chunk of my Jazz Guides into an email. It occurred to me that I could add that to my Village Voice David Murray Guide (2006). The file turned out to be a mess, so I cleaned it up from "unpublished draft" and notes to incorporating the published edits. But rather than appending the more extensive reviews, I created a separate file. I also used the occasion to pick up a few records I had missed, as well as Kahil El'Zabar's new one, just out. Started a list of "other records" as a self-check, but haven't gotten very far with it.

After all my pleading, I only have one question answered this week. More, please.

I did get one more piece of mail via the form: Piotr wrote in to inform me that he's created a Wikipedia page for Tom Hull (critic). It's a very substantial page, with a lot of biographical detail, all properly footnoted (most based on my RockCritics.com interview). I've written him with a few corrections and clarifications, so no need to itemize them here. Besides, most make for slightly better myth than reality.

Two of the three new jazz A-list records this week were reviewed the old-fashioned way, from CDs. Probably helped get them the attention they deserve. I missed the A- Murray album because it was a mere Penguin Guide ***, but turns out it features El'Zabar as the magic beans. Found the old Joe Harriott records after noting the new vault release. Been wanting to hear them for a long time, but none match Free Form (1960).

By the way, I've been keeping the metacritic file reasonably up to date. Run the Jewels' RTJ4 made a strong run for the top spot, but is still one point behind Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters. At AOTY and Metacritic, the latter has slightly higher scores, but fewer reviews. Waxahatchie's Saint Cloud is third, then there's a substantial point gap before you get to Caribou, Dua Lipa, Perfume Genius, Tame Impala, Thundercat, Yves Tumor, Lucinda Williams, Charlie XCX, Shabaka and the Ancestors, and Soccer Mommy.

New records reviewed this week:

• AuB: AuB (2019 [2020], Edition): [r]: B+(*)
• César Cardoso: Dice of Tenors (2020, self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Elysia Crampton: Orcorara 2010 (2020, Pan): [r]: B-
• Whit Dickey: Morph (2019 [2020], ESP-Disk, 2CD): [cd]: A-
• Dion: Blues With Friends (2020, Keeping the Blues Alive): [r]: B+(*)
• Kahil El'Zabar: Kahil El'Zabar's Spirit Groove (2019 [2020], Spiritmuse): [r]: A-
• Hamell on Trial: The Pandemic Songs (2020, self-released): [bc]: A-
• Daniel Hersog: Night Devoid of Stars (2019 [2020], Cellar Live): [cd]: B+(**)
• Norah Jones: Pick Me Up Off the Floor (2020, Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Ute Lemper: Rendezvous With Marlene (2020, Jazzhaus): [r]: B+(***)
• Madre Vaca: Winterreise (2020, Madre Vaca): [cd]: B
• Rudresh Mahanthappa: Hero Trio (2020, Whirlwind): [cd]: A-
• Stephen Riley: Friday the 13th (2018 [2020], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• Dua Saleh: Rosetta (2020, Against Giants, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• John Scofield: Swallow Tales (2019 [2020], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Sara Serpa: Recognition (2019 [2020], Biophilia): [cd]: B+(**)
• Walter Smith III/Matthew Stevens/Micah Thomas/Linda May Han Oh/Nate Smith: In Common 2 (2019 [2020], Whirlwind): [r]: B+(*)
• Westside Gunn: Flygod Is an Awesome God (2019, Griselda): [r]: B+(*)
• Westside Gunn: Hitler Wears Hermes VII (2019, Griselda): [r]: B+(*)
• Westside Gunn: Pray for Paris (2020, Griselda): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Joe Harriott Quintet: Jazz for Moderns (1962 [2020], Gearbox, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Wussy: Ghosts (2006-19 [2020], self-released): [bc]: B+(***)

Old music:

• The Channels Featuring Earl Lewis: Golden Oldies (1956-59 [2013], Essential Music Group): [r]: B+(*)
• Joe Harriott & Co. Feat John Dankworth & Tubby Hayes: Helter Skelter: Live, Rare and Previously Unreleased Recordings 1955-1963 (1955-63 [2017], Acrobat): [r]: B+(**)
• Joe Harriott Quintet: Abstract (1961-62 [2015], J. Joes J. Edizioni Musicali): [r]: B+(***)
• The Joe Harriott Double Quintet: Indo-Jazz Suite (1966, Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)
• Ranee Lee: Seasons of Love (1997, Justin Time): [r]: B+(*)
• David Murray: Let the Music Take You (1978, Marge): [r]: B+(***)
• David Murray: Interboogieology (1978, Black Saint): [r]: B+(**)
• David Murray: The London Concert (1978 [1999], Cadillac, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• David Murray Quartet: A Sanctuary Within (1991 [1992], Black Saint): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Juhani Aaltonen/Jonas Kullhammar/Christian Meaas Svendsen/Ilmari Heikinheimo: The Father, the Sons & the Junnu (Moserobie)
• Beth Duncan: I'm All Yours (Saccat) [07-24]
• Jason Kao Hwang: Human Rites Trio (True Sound) [07-01]
• Noshir Mody: An Idealist's Handbook: Identity, Love and Hope in America 2020 (self-released) [07-03]
• Corey Smythe: Accelerate Every Voice (Pyroclastic)
• Stephane Spira/Giovanni Mirabassi: Improkofiev (Jazzmax) [06-19]
• Lou Volpe: Before & After (Jazz Guitar)

Blog link.

No intro this week.

Tweet of the week, from paulo. (@itskingapollo):

If the police did their jobs, everyone would trust them. Ain't no song called "Fuck the Fire Department."

Also, from Rhys Blakely (@rhysblakely):

A 70-year-old man in Seattle survived the coronavirus, got applauded by staff when he left the hospital after 62 days -- and then got a $1.1 million, 181-page hospital bill.

Some scattered links this week:

• Sasha Abramsky: Georgia primary sends us a warning -- November could be a voting rights disaster. On the other hand, interest in voting seems to be record high. See Dareh Gregorian: Voter turnout soared in Georgia despite massive primary day problems.

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • Atlanta police shot and killed a 27-year-old black man outside a Wendy's drive-through: Rayshard Brooks. Victim allegedly took a taser away from police and pointed it at them. If tasers are considered non-lethal force, does self-defense justify shooting and killing someone? Seems like it could have been avoided, but maybe cops know more about how dangerous tasers are than they let on. Also, note that this is "the 48th officer-involved shooting" in Georgia so far this year. For more, see Chas Danner: Everything we know about the killing of Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta police.

  • Trump's West Point speech contradicts one of the biggest themes of his presidency.

• Bocar Abdoulaye Ba/Roman Rivera: Police think they can get away with anything. That's because they usually do.

• Zack Beauchamp: Trump: "The concept of chokehold sounds so innocent, so perfect".

• Alleen Brown: Iowa quietly passes its third ag-gag bill after constitutional challenges.

• Katelyn Burns:

  • The Trump administration will now allow doctors to discriminate against LGBTQ people. As a subhed notes, "Conservatives haven't let the pandemic slow down their political agenda."

  • Trump tweeted a conspiracy theory that an elderly man knocked over by police is "antifa provocateur".

• John Cassidy: Economic reality bites Wall Street and Trump.

• Jonathan Chait: Michael Flynn writes op-ed confirming he's definitely insane.

• Fabiola Cinaes:

  • Trump postpones his MAGA rally planned for Juneteenth. Trump's first rally in months was scheduled in Tulsa on the anniversary of the 1921 massacre, where "a white mob destroyed the affluent Greenwood District of the city, known as Black Wall Street, burning down 35 blocks, including 1,200 homes, and killing 300 black people in the process." This was long referred to as a "race riot," but like all similar events of the period, it was white people "rioting," much like the pogroms Czarist Russian authorities organized against Jews. Tulsa stands out in memory because of the sheer size of the massacre, but also because it was the first instance of using airplanes to firebomb an American neighborhood. Speaking of Trump in Tulsa:

    • Caleb Gayle: Juneteenth in Tulsa is a day of joy and pain. Trump's visit worsens the pain.

    • Michele L Norris: The diabolical irony of Trump in Tulsa.

    • Jack Shafer: Trump's baggage on race will follow him to Tulsa: "The president's first post-quarantine rally will be held in a city known for a massacre of black people. Don't expect Trump to rise to the occasion."

    • Matt Stieb: Trump rally attendees must agree not to sue campaign if they get the coronavirus.

  • Trump's new recovery plan resists sweeping police reforms.

  • The police shooting of Maurice Gordon, a black man killed during a traffic stop, explained.

  • The sexual assault allegations against an officer involved in Breonna Taylor's killing say a lot about police abuse of power. Also note: "the Louisville Metro Council banned no-knock warrants with new legislation called Breonna's Law." Obviously, a few months too late for Taylor.

• Aaron Ross Coleman:

  • Minneapolis may be the first city to dismantle the police.

  • Body cams show police killing Javier Ambler while filming an A&E television show.

  • The devaluing of black property has led to the devaluing of black lives: Interview with Andre Perry.

• Aaron C Davis/Carol D Leonnig/Josh Dawsey: Officials familiar with Lafayette Square confrontation challenge Trump administration claim of what drove aggressive expulsion of protesters.

• Igor Derysh:

  • Melania Trump delayed move to White House as "leverage" to renegotiate a better prenup: report. Dish from Mary Jordan's upcoming book, The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump. Also:

    • Jane Eisner: The elusive truths of Melania Trump.

    • Dwight Garner: A new book brings Melania Trump into (slightly) better focus.

    • Arwa Mahdawi: Melania doesn't need to be #Freed and she's not an enigma -- she's an opportunist.

    • Karen Tumulty: No, Melania Trump doesn't want to be free. I believe this is the first time I've linked to Tumulty, forever immortalized as the winner of Matt Taibbi's Wimblehack tournament of America's worst political journalists. Seems like a subject appropriate to her talents. In fact, she's written about Melania before: Melania Trump's indefensible defense of her bully husband. One thing I haven't found is an article detailing how much fun comics have had with playing up the public distancing between the Trumps -- little things like her refusing his hand, or staring coldly. It's been a source of some comfort that she might be as disgusted with him as we are. The other possibility is that she's as unfeeling and unconcerned as he is, that theirs is a marriage of convenience where the returns have long diminished past the point of anyone caring.

  • CNN rejects Trump campaign's demand for apology over polls showing him losing to Biden by 14 points. But CNN's actual response was pretty clueless: "[authoritarian demands] have typically come from countries like Venezuela." But authoritarians (regardless of whether Venezuela qualifies as an example) typically understand the limits of their authority, which they'd undermine by demanding something they're in no position to enforce. Trump's demand is pure PR: rejecting the poll results so emphatically his supporters will hear and believe him, but expecting nothing further to come of it. Normally, the next step is to threaten a frivolous lawsuit, but CNN's pockets are deep enough to get that dismissed, and their own PR department would spin such a thing into an attack on free press.

• Dan Diamond: White House goes quiet on coronavirus as outbreak spikes again across the US: "It's been more than a month since the White House halted its daily coronavirus task force briefings."

• Masha Gessen:

  • Trump's hateful message on transgender health care.

  • "I didn't know" is not a defense for enabling Trump: As in Mark Esper's "I didn't know where I was going," or reports that Mark Milley "believed that he was accompanying Trump on a troop inspection." By the way, Gessen has a new book, Surviving Autocracy. For reviews, see:

    • Hari Kunzru: Democracy's red line.

    • Andrew O'Hehir: Masha Gessen on Trump, Putin and the attack on reality, meaning and democracy.

• Constance Grady: How 70 years of cop shows taught us to valorize the police: I've watched a lot of them, starting (as this article does) with Dragnet (and from that era I'd add Andy Griffith and Gunsmoke, which rounds out the picture considerably), and while I appreciate the positive image most shows attempt to project, I'm pretty doubtful that I've learned much if anything about the real world of police work. Nor have they made me any less fearful of interactions with the police, or the "justice system" more generally.

• Maggie Haberman: Trump's halting walk down ramp raises new health questions. Also see Philip Rucker: Trump tries to explain his slow and unsteady walk down a ramp at West Point: "Elements of Trump's explanation strained credulity."

• Fred Hiatt: Why the Republicans' 2020 strategy is to keep as many people as possible from voting. I'm not very worried that a fair election will give Trump a second term. And I think that efforts to suppress the vote tend to backfire, at least up to a point. Still, the Republicans have been working hard to trim and shape the electorate to their tastes, and it's not unreasonable to worry that they may ultimately be successful -- for one thing, look at how they've managed to gerrymander districts.

  What does it say about a political party when its chief strategy is to prevent as many people as possible from voting -- and its leader admits as much?

  That is where Republicans find themselves heading into the 2020 election.

  For the latest, breathtaking example of this pathology, look at Iowa. On June 2, Iowa held a highly successful primary, with record turnout -- and Republicans in the state legislature immediately initiated action to ensure the success is not repeated in the fall.

• James Hohmann: Trump poised to accept GOP nod in Jacksonville, Fla., on 60th anniversary of 'Ax Handle Saturday': After schedule Trump's Juneteenth rally in Tulsa, of course this comes next:

  On Aug. 27, 1960, a mob of 200 white people in Jacksonville, Fla. -- organized by the Ku Klux Klan and joined by some of the city's police officers -- chased and beat peaceful civil rights protesters who were trying to integrate downtown lunch counters. The bloody carnage that followed -- in which ax handles and baseball bats were used to club African Americans, who sought sanctuary in a church -- is remembered as "Ax Handle Saturday."

• Sean Illing:

  • The most powerful person in the White House not named Donald Trump: On Jared Kushner, interview with Andrea Bernstein, author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power. Also on Kushner:

    • David Roth: American psycho: "Jared Kushner -- climber, sycophant, snob -- is the perfect avatar of elite incompetence for our times.

  • The "abolish the police" movement, explained by 7 scholars and activists.

• Umair Irfan: 2 new studies show shutdowns were astonishingly effective.

• Bruce Jackson: Buffalo cops -- and all the other cops.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • The generals are turning on Trump: "Mark Milley's apology for the church photo-op is a major escalation."

  • West Pointless: "Trump made cadets return to campus during a pandemic to listen to his dull platitudes." First line in article is "It could have been worse." Hard to imagine the next paragraph ever being written about any other president:

    President Trump's Saturday morning commencement speech at West Point was merely dull rather than abhorrent, incendiary, or flagrantly self-aggrandizing, except for a couple of passages and -- significantly -- the fact of the speech itself, which was designed entirely as a video clip for an upcoming reelection campaign commercial.

    Sure, they'll cut out the bit where he waddles down the ramp. And to think how annoying I found it that every time GW Bush spoke you first had to watch him walk up to the podium. (OK, it was kind of sick-funny the time he made Ariel Sharon do the same.) But at least then we had a president who could walk -- not to mention read a teleprompter without his eyes glazing over. Who imagine those would some day be skills we could fondly reminisce over? (Even when performed by a major war criminal?)

  • Trump's support for Confederate base names has nothing to do with respecting the military.

• Roge Karma: Why this moment demands radical politics: Interview with Eddie Glaude Jr., author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul and Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

• Catherine Kim: The fatal arrest of Manuel Ellis, another black man who yelled "I can't breathe," explained.

• Jen Kirby: The "kettling" of protesters, explained.

• Aline Kominsky-Crumb/R Crumb: Bad diet & bad hair destroy human civilization.

• Robert Kuttner: About those improved unemployment numbers:

  As the Economic Policy Institute's Elise Gould explains in this indispensable short piece, if you add to the officially unemployed statistic those workers who were staying home for health or family reasons but reported themselves as employed, and workers who reported that they had left the labor force but would seek work if it were available, the adjusted unemployment rate for May is 19.7 percent.

  The clincher is the number of workers still drawing unemployment compensation, which was just under 30 million the week of May 16, according to the same BLS report.

• Dahlia Lithwick: Trump's use of the military does not create the "appearance" of abuse. It is abuse.

• Martin Longman:

  • The GOP's revealing decision not to debate on a 2020 platform: "It's another sign that the Republican Party's conversion to a cult is complete."

  • Why a GOP convention in Jacksonville could be a disaster.

• David J Lynch: Ripple effects of downturn show pandemic's early economic toll was just the beginning.

• Branko Marcetic: "Defenders of democracy" aren't bothered by its end in Bolivia.

• Ruth Marcus: If you don't believe systemic racism is real, explain these statistics.

• Dylan Matthews: Pandemic unemployment insurance is expiring soon. This economist has a fix for it. "Ioana Marinescu would allow people who've lost jobs to keep collecting $600 a week even after getting a new job."

• Jane Mayer: Ivanka Trump and Charles Koch fuel a cancel-culture clash at Wichita State.

• Meridith McGraw: Trump loses 2 pivotal allies in his anti-kneeling crusade: NASCAR and the NFL.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The Supreme Court normally hands down its biggest cases in June. Here's what to expect. Subheds:

    • The Court could effectively eliminate the right to an abortion
    • The Court will decide if federal law makes it illegal to fire someone for being LGBTQ
    • Trump could gain sweeping immunity from congressional oversight
    • Hundreds of thousands of DACA beneficiaries could face deportation
    • The religious right could be one of the biggest winners from this term
    • Trump could gain broad new power to fire people

  • 3 ways to ensure that rogue cops aren't above the law. Mostly about ending "qualified immunity."

• Nicole Narea:

  • Trump is quietly gutting the asylum system amid the pandemic.

  • How 2 weeks of protests have changed America: "Protesters have already brought about reforms to address systemic racism and police brutality following George Floyd's death."

• Timothy Noah: The black wage gap matters: "The grim state of racial economic inequality should sicken our consciences."

• Anna North: White Americans are finally talking about racism. Will it translate into action?

• JC Pan: The preachers of the austerity gospel are back: "Though we're in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, calls for budget-tightening have reliably restarted."

• Brian Resnick: "Totally predictable": State reopenings have backfired.

• James Risen: Donald Trump is an autocrat. It's up to all of us to stop him. Yeah, sure: not a position I'm going to argue with, or get bent out of shape over.

  Dictatorships are built on denial. Dictators take over gradually; each incremental step that erodes civil liberties and the rule of law can be justified and explained away. Sometimes a would-be dictator is laughed off as a political buffoon who shouldn't be taken seriously. While it is happening, no one can quite believe that they are on the road to serfdom.

  I might have skipped mention of this piece but wanted to save this paragraph-plus (more explicitly blood-thirsty than Tom Cotton's famous op-ed) for posterity:

  On Monday, Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and Trump acolyte, offered a typical Republican response to the protests when he called for all the lethal tools of the global war on terror to be brought home and turned on American protesters. "Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?" Gaetz tweeted Monday. Twitter restricted access to the Gaetz tweet, labeling it a glorification of violence.

  By advocating for an end to the rule of law, Republicans like Gaetz will find themselves surviving at the whim of Trump. That's when the jokes about drones and Gitmo won't seem so funny to them.

• David Roberts: The Tom Cotton op-ed affair shows why the media must defend America's values: America has values? The New York Times should decide what they are? I agree that Cotton's proposal to flood American cities with the same troops that tried so fitfully to quell protests in Baghdad is something one should oppose, but by recent evidence it's hard to say what he's proposing is un-American. For a couple more general pieces that take off from the Cotton op-ed:

  • Ezra Klein: America is changing, and so is the media.

  • Matt Taibbi: The American press is destroying itself.

  • David Greenberg: The New York Times used to be a model of diverse opinion. What happened?

• Travis Sawchik: Do baseball's labor fights drive away fans? Well, Well, I used to read box scores every day, but haven't followed MLB at all since the 1994 lockout. That's just one data point, but it's a pretty hard one. The article refers to "the 1994-95 strike," but all I remember is the owners' lockout, and that's where I put all the blame.

• Walter M Shaub Jr: Ransacking the Republic.

• Isaac Stanley-Becker: Fox News removes manipulated images from coverage of Seattle protests.

• Jennifer Steinhauer: Trump's actions rattle the military world: 'I can't support the man': "The president's threat to use troops against largely peaceful protesters, as well as other attempts to politicize the military, have unsettled a number of current and former members and their families."

• Mark Joseph Stern: Republicans attack Republican official for expanding voting access.

• Taylor Telford: Democrat accuses OSHA of being 'invisible' while infections rise among essential workers. One would think that OSHA would be the key agency consulted on all questions having to do with re-opening businesses.

  As of Thursday, infections tied to meat plants had surpassed 18,500 and worker deaths were approaching 70, according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, which is tracking industry outbreaks through local news reports. Grocery workers have been similarly hit hard, with more than 5,500 testing positive for the coronavirus and more than 100 dying of covid-19, the disease the virus causes, The Washington Post has reported. Front-line health-care workers have gotten sick in even greater numbers, with more than 60,000 infected and more than 300 dying of covid-19, according to new CDC data.

• Alex S Vitale: "Policing is fundamentally a tool of social control to facilitate our exploitation": An interview by Mike Uetricht with Vitale, who wrote The End of Policing back in 2017.

• Alex Ward:

  • Why the Trump administration is sanctioning a top international court: Against the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is charged with investigating possible war crimes. The US refused to ratify the ICC. The fear was that the ICC would investigate the US and Israel, and while that hasn't happened yet, it appears increasingly likely.

  • The Army was finally considering renaming bases that honor Confederates. Trump quashed it.

  • The racist history behind the 10 US Army facilities named after Confederate leaders.

• Erik Wemple: Forgive Tucker Carlson for his panicky desperation. His world is collapsing. I don't watch his show, but clips I've seen recently are extremely unhinged. Also see:

  • Roger Sollenberger: "Race-baiting filth": Carlson criticized for claiming a Black Lives Matter "mob" will "come for you"; and "Bye-bye Tucker Carlson!": Advertisers bail on Fox News host's program after "race-baiting" screed.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Study: Police killings traumatize high school students and hurt academic performance.

  • Study suggests Democrats should be running more ads about Biden, fewer about Trump. What I'd rather see is more ads that work for the whole party, not just Biden vs. Trump. The Democratic majority in the House, for instance, has passed a lot of bills that Republicans killed in the Senate, so those are good opportunities to compare parties. You can also point out differences between states with Democrats in power vs. Republican-run states, especially on metrics like how many people don't have health insurance. I don't see that running a lot of ads on how Biden's going to lead us to the promised land will have much traction, although you do want to suggest that you're not embarrassed by him as nominee (although I rather am).

  • Joe Biden has a really big lead in the polls. Compares his recent polls to Clinton's in 2016. The thing that always struck me about 2016 was that no matter how low Trump sunk, Clinton never could hit, let along top, 50%. ("Even on October 18, Clinton was only at 46 percent in the polls with Trump doing terribly at 39 and plenty of undecided and third-party voters.") The CNN poll not only gives Biden a 14 point margin, his actual figure is 55%.

• Li Zhou: "The protesters had to deescalate the police": Demonstrators are the ones defusing violence at protests.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33418 [33378] rated (+40), 214 [209] unrated (+5).

Cutoff was Monday evening, after I wrapped up Weekend Roundup, so that has a bit to do with the above-average count. Shifted back to new music last week, starting with some Phil Overeem recommendations, and ended with rummaging through my tracking file (jazz subset), with a few asides along the way. (One of Cliff Ocheltree's Facebook posts mentioned If Deejay Was Your Trade and Hyphy Hitz. Couldn't find the latter, but the Blood & Fire compilation was so good I wanted to hear more from Big Joe.) Still, didn't bother with my promo queue at all. It had been near-empty, but has recovered to the extent I need to pay it some attention.

I reviewed Thank Your Lucky Stars' Girl in Her 29s last week, noting that I couldn't find anything via Google on the CD. I'm told that this website will help. I also received a hand-written letter from Ben Barnes, which reads in part (or I think it does, as my eyes and his handlettering don't always mesh; I also spared you the all-caps, and added a link I'm almost 100% sure of and italics for the album title):

As for the mysterious online presence I vowed long ago to only spend time and money on the things I love and never try to profit from them. Whenever someone asks about buying a disc I ask them to contribute to Mikey's Chance Canine Rescue and then I happily mail them Girl in Her 29s.

Looking back at last week's "review," I realize I didn't finish it -- by, like, saying something about the record. Meant to, but ran out of time and decided to run what I had anyway, and still haven't gotten back to it, so sorry. I will re-run the album cover.

On June 3, Robert Christgau tweeted:

I try to be shrewd about this stuff, not show my hand before I publish my review, but it would be just wrong to deny that it's been A LONG TIME since I felt like a new album was just what I'd been needing the way the new Run the Jewels does.

I had the same reaction to RTJ4, although I didn't explain it very coherently below -- written after two plays before I saw the tweet -- no doubt because I always have trouble following rap lyrics. But even I caught enough to realize that this was the time. (Link above is to the whole feed. Even now the tweet in question is well down, but it won't hurt you to scroll for it.)

The Ogún Meji Duo album was reviewed by Karl Ackermann as a new release at All About Jazz. Ackerman wrote: "The album makes a powerful statement that could have been a response to Emmett Till in 1955 or George Floyd in 2020." True enough, but it actually dates from the Michael Brown era. I might have graded it higher, but tired of the lecture, and got annoyed by the Soundcloud-like website streaming. But drummer Mark Lomax and saxophonist Edwin Bayard are awesome as usual. I should note that Lomax's 400 Years Suite is currently number one on my 2020 list, and his 12-CD 400: An Afrikan Epic was number three on the 2019 list.

In non-musical matters, Crocodile Chuck suggested a Weekend Roudup link: Jack Rasmus: Confronting Institutional Racism. Rasmus is an economist in California, subtitles his blog "Predicting the Global Eonomic Crisis," has a bunch of books on economics (keyword: neoliberalism), as well as some stage plays and DVDs. I noticed one of his books in 2010 -- Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression -- but missed six since then. Most evocative title was Obama's Economy: Recovery for the Few (paperback, 2012, Pluto Press). First book was a big one: The War at Home: The Corporate Offensive From Ronald Reagan to George W Bush (2006, Kyklos)./p>

I got one question following last week's Questions and Answers post. I'll take a stab at answering it later this week. Meanwhile, ask me more.

New records reviewed this week:

• 79rs Gang: Expect the Unexpected (2020, Sinking City): [r]: B+(***)
• Sebastien Ammann: Resilience (2018 [2020], Skirl): [bc]: B+(**)
• Lucian Ban/John Surman/Mat Maneri: Transylvanian Folk Songs (2020, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• Will Bernard: Freelance Subversives (2020, Ropeadope): [r]: B
• Body Count: Carnivore (2020, Century Media): [r]: B+(**)
• Daniel Carter/Patrick Holmes/Matthew Putman: Whoadie (2018-19 [2020], 577): [r]: C+
• Emmet Cohen Featuring Benny Golson & Albert "Tootie" Heath: Masters Legacy Series Volume 3 (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Emmet Cohen Featuring George Coleman: Masters Legacy Series Volume 4 (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(***)
• Dinosaur: To the Earth (2019 [2020], Edition): [r]: B+(**)
• Dave Douglas: Dizzy Atmosphere: Dizzy Gillespie at Zero Gravity (2019 [2020], Greenleaf Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Lajos Dudas: The Lake and the Music (2019 [2020], JazzSick): [r]: B+(***)
• Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist: Alfredo (2020, ESGN/ALC/Empire): [r]: B+(*)
• GoGo Penguin: GoGo Penguin (2020, Blue Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Human Feel: The Tower Tapes #5 (2019 [2020], Jazz Club Ferrara): [bc]: B+(**)
• Anne Mette Iversen Quartet + 1: Racing a Butterfly (2020, Bjurecords): [bc]: A-
• KeiyaA: Forever, Ya Girl (2020, Keiya): [r]: B+(**)
• Lady Gaga: Chromatica (2020, Interscope): [r]: B+(***)
• John Law's Congregation: Configuration (2018 [2020], Ubuntu Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Little Simz: Drop 6 (2020, Age 101, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Sabir Mateen/Patrick Holmes/Federico Ughi: Survival Situation (2018 [2020], 577): [r]: B+(**)
• Medhane: Full Circle (2020, TBHG, EP): [bc]: B
• Medhane: Cold Water (2020, TBHG): [bc]: B+(*)
• Mike and the Moonpies: Touch of You: The Lost Songs of Gary Stewart (2020, Prairie Rose): [r]: B+(**)
• Eva Novoa: Satellite Quartet (2017 [2020], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(*)
• Kurt Rosenwinkel Trio: Angels Around (2020, Heartcore): [r]: B+(**)
• Run the Jewels: RTJ4 (2020, Jewel Runners/RBC/BMG): [r]: A-
• Matthew Shipp: The Piano Equation (2020, Tao Forms): [r]: B+(**)
• Sunwatchers: Oh Yeah? (2020, Trouble in Mind): [r]: B
• Chad Taylor Trio: The Daily Biological (2019 [2020], Cuneiform): [dl]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Bobby Shew/Bill Mays: Telepathy (1978 [2019], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Big Joe: Keep Rocking and Swinging (1977, Live and Love): [r]: B+(***)
• Dave Burrell: Black Spring (1977, Marge): [r]: B+(**)
• Emmet Cohen Featuring Jimmy Cobb: Masters Legacy Series Volume 1 (2017, Cellar Live): [r]: B+(***)
• Emmet Cohen Featuring Ron Carter: Masters Legacy Series Volume 2 (2017 [2018], Cellar Live): [r]: B+(**)
• Emmet Cohen: Dirty in Detroit (2017 [2018], self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Lajos Dudas: Radio Days: Birthday Edition 75 (2016, JazzSick): [r]: B+(***)
• Lajos Dudas: Some Great Songs Vol. 2 (2017, JazzSick): [r]: B+(**)
• If Deejay Was Your Trade: The Dreads at King Tubby's 1974-1977 (1974-77 [1994], Blood & Fire): [r]: A-
• Mister Charlie's Blues (1926-1938) (1926-38 [1970], Yazoo): [dl]: B+(**)
• Ogún Meji Duo: #BlackLivesMatter (2014, CFG Multimedia): [os]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Caterpillar Quartet: Threads (ESP-Disk) [06-26]
• Whit Dickey: Morph (ESP-Disk, 2CD)
• Jean-Marc Foussat/Daunik Lazro/Evan Parker: Café Oto 2020 (Fou)
• The Mark Harvey Group: A Rite for All Souls (1971, Americas Musicworks, 2CD) [07-17]
• Alister Spence: Whirlpool: Solo Piano (Alister Spence Music, 2CD) [07-24]

Weekend Roundup

Blog link.

While this week was unfolding, I've been reading a book by Sarah Kendzior: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. She is a journalist based in St. Louis, with a Ph.D. in anthropology and a specialty in post-Soviet Central Asia and its descent into mafia capitalism and oligarchy. She sees Trump as part of a vast criminal enterprise, anchored in Russia, which she insists on describing as "hostile to America." I think she has that analysis ass-backwards. Capitalism's driving force everywhere is greed, which constantly pushes the limits of custom and law. The only thing that separates capitalists from criminals is a democratic state that regulates business and enforces limits on destructive greed. The former Soviet Union failed to do that, but the United States has a checkered history as well, with the major entrepreneurs of the 19th century known as Robber Barons, and a sustained conservative assault on the regulatory state at least since 1980. Trump may be closer to the Russian oligarchs than most American capitalists because of his constant need to raise capital abroad, but he is hardly Putin's stooge. Rather, they share a common desire to suppress democratic regulation of capital everywhere, as well as an itch for suppressing dissent. Arguing that the latter is anti-American (treason even) ignores the fact that that's a big part of the program of the reigning political party in the US.

Kendzior's arguments in this regard annoy me so much I could go on, explaining why the supposed US-Russia rivalry is based on false assumptions, and why Democrats are hurting themselves by obsessing on the Trump/Russia connection. I was, after all, tempted at several points to give up on the book. But I stuck with it: it's short, and anyone who despises Trump that much is bound to have some points. Also, I lived in St. Louis a few years myself, so was curious what she had to say about her battleground state. My interest paid off with her discussion of the 2014 protests against police brutality in Ferguson, a majority-black suburb just north of St. Louis with a predominantly white police force that was largely self-funded by arrests and fines. This is history, but it's also today in microcosm (pp. 164-166):

Understanding Ferguson is not only a product of principle but of proximity. The narrative changes depending on where you live, what media you consume, who you talk to, and who you believe. In St. Louis, we still live in the Ferguson aftermath. There is no real beginning, because [Michael] Brown's death is part of a continuum of criminal impunity by the police toward St. Louis black residents. There is no real end, because there are always new victims to mourn. In St. Louis, there is no justice, only sequels.

Outside of St. Louis, Ferguson is shorthand for violence and dysfunction. When I go to foreign countries that do not know what St. Louis is, I sometimes joke, darkly, that I'm from a "suburb of Ferguson." People respond like they are meting a witness of a war zone, because that is what they saw on TV and on the internet. What they missed is that Ferguson was the longest sustained civil rights protest since the 1960s. The protest was fought on principle because in St. Louis County, law had long ago divorced itself from justice, and when lawmakers abandon justice, principle is all that remains. The criminal impunity many Americans are only discovering now -- through the Trump administration -- had always structured the system for black residents of St. Louis County, who had learned to expect a rigged and brutal system but refused to accept it.

In the beginning, there was hope that police would restrain themselves because of the volume of witnesses. But there was no incentive for them to do so: no punishment locally, and no repercussions nationally. Militarized police aggression happened nearly every night, transforming an already traumatic situation into a showcase of abuse. The police routinely used tear gas and rubber bullets. They arrested local officials, clergy, and journalists for things like stepping off the sidewalk. They did not care who witnessed their behavior, even though they knew the world was watching. Livestream videographers filmed the chaos minute by minute for an audience of millions. #Ferguson, the hashtag, was born, and the Twitter followings of those covering the chaos rose into the tens of thousands. But the documentation did not stop the brutality. Instead, clips were used by opponents of the protesters to try to create an impression of constant "riots" that in reality did not occur. The vandalism and arson shown on cable news in an endless loop were limited to a few nights and took place on only a few streets.

National media had pounced on St. Louis, parachuting in when a camera-ready crisis was rumored to be impending, leaving when the protests were peaceful and tame. Some TV crews did not bother to hide their glee at the prospect of what I heard one deem a real-life Hunger Games, among other flippant and cruel comments. The original protests, which were focused on the particularities of the abusive St. Louis system, became buried by out-of-town journalists who found out-of-town activists and portrayed them as local leaders. The intent was not necessarily malicious, but the lack of familiarity with the region led to disorienting and insulting coverage. Tabloid hype began to overshadow the tragedy. Spectators arrived from so many points of origins that the St. Louis Arch felt like a magnet pulling in fringe groups from around the country: Anonymous and the Oath Keepers and the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan and the Revolutionary Communist Party and celebrities who claimed they were out of deep concern and not to get on television. Almost none of the celebrities ever returned.

In fall 2014, the world saw chaos and violence, but St. Louis saw grief. Ask a stranger in those days how they were doing and their eyes, already red from late nights glued to the TV or internet, would well up with tears. Some grieved stability, others grieved community, others simply grieved the loss of a teenage boy, unique and complex as any other, to a system that designated him a menace on sight. But it was hard to find someone who was not grieving something, even if it was a peace born of ignorance. It was a loss that was hard to convey to people living outside of the region. I covered the Ferguson protests as a journalist, but I lived it as a St. Louisan. Those are two different things. It is one thing to watch a region implode on TV. It is another to live within the slow-motion implosion. When I would share what I witnessed, people kept urging me to call my representative, and I would explain: "But they gassed my representative too."

By the way, here are the latest section heads (as of 7:37 PM CDT Sunday) in The New York Times' Live Updates on George Floyd Protests:

• Majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledges to dismantle the Police Department
• Trump sends National Guard troops home
• New York's mayor pledges to cut police funding and spend more on social services
• Democratic lawmakers push for accountability, but shy away from calls to defund the police
• Barr says he sees no systemic racism in law enforcement
• Romney joins protesters in Washington.
• Protesters march through Manhattan, calling for an end to police violence.
• Thousands turn out in Spokane, Wa., to protest "a virus that's been going on for 400 years."
• Biden will meet with the family of George Floyd in Houston.
• The view from above: aerial images of protests across the country. [link]
• A Confederate status is pulled down during a protest in Virginia
• Global protests against racism gain momentum.
• An officer shot an anti-bias expert who was trying to end a clash at a protest in San Jose, Calif.

A couple items there look like major breaks with the past. While the "progressive" mayors of Minneapolis and New York seems to have spent much of the last week being intimidated by the police forces that supposedly work for them, the balance of political forces in both cities may have shifted to viewing the police as the problem, not the solution. I started off being pretty skeptical of the protests, and indeed haven't been tempted to join them. But it does appear that they're making remarkable progress. And while I abhor any violence associated with the protests, one should never allow such noise to distract from the core issue of the protests. Indeed, given that so much of the violence the media likes to dwell on is directly caused by the police and the government's other paramilitary forces, it's hard not to see that the only way this ever gets resolved is by restoring trust and justice -- which is to say, by radically reforming how policing is done in America.

I expected such sprawl at the start of the week that I decided not to bother organizing sublists. Still, some fell out during the process, but I haven't gone back and organized as many as might make sense. In particular, there are several scattered pieces on the "jobs report": the one by Robert J Shapiro is the most important, but I got to it after several others.

This wound up running a day late. Only a couple links below came out on Monday, and I tried to only pick ones that added to stories I already had (e.g., I added Yglesias' piece on economic reporting, but didn't pick up the one on Biden's polling).

Here's a piece of artwork from Ram Lama Hull occasioned by the recent demonstrations. I pulled this particular one (out of many) from his Facebook page. Some are also on Imgur.

Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that has come up a lot recently, as it makes it very difficult to hold police officers liable for their acts, even the use of excessive or deadly force. For example:

• Nathaniel Sobel: What is qualified immunity, and what does it have to do with police reform?

• Patrick Jalomo/Anya Bidwell: Police act like laws don't apply to them because of 'qualified immunity.' They're right.

• John Kramer: George Floyd and beyond: How "qualified immunity" enables bad policy.

• Christiana Silva: Cory Booker wants to end qualified immunity for police officers.

• Ella Nilsen/Li Zhou: Democrats' sweeping new police reform bill, explained: "Among other measures, Democrats want to end qualified immunity and chokeholds."

• CJ Ciaramella: The Supreme Court has a chance to end qualified immunity and prevent cases like George Floyd's.

Parting tweet (from Angela Belcamino):

Who else but Trump could bring back the 1918 pandemic, the 1929 Great Depression, and the 1968 race riots all in one year?

Some scattered links this week:

• Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit: "Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?" Why does she think "Republican leaders" have principles any different from their president? Applebaum is especially concerned about Lindsay Graham. I can't find the reference, but have a clear memory of Graham, when he was in the House in the 1990s, explaining that Republicans have to secure as many long-term posts of power as possible, before demographic changes make it impossible for R's to win fair elections. So he was always a practical, anti-democratic schemer. Back in 2016, Trump may have offended his sense of what's possible, but by winning he sealed his case, and won Graham over. Applebaum asks, "what would it take for Republican leaders to admit to themselves that Trump's loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love?" The answer is catastrophic defeat at the polls, so bad it sweeps all of them out of office. Losing the Senate seats of Graham and McConnell in 2020 would be a good start.

• David Atkins/Dante Atkins: Trump thought brutalizing protesters would save him. He was wrong. "His gamble on creating a militarized culture war has done the opposite of what he hoped for."

  Even before the brutal killing of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department, Trump knew that he would need to maximize his culture war appeal to non-college whites to make up ground lost to the faltering economy. There can be little doubt that Trump saw opportunity in the protests that followed to dust off the Nixon playbook, vowing to restore "law and order" in a country furious that the law seemed to protect only some, while enforcing a brutal order on others. If Trump's actions threatened to turn the culture war into an active shooting war, that would just be collateral damage on the road to his political recovery.

  The Trump orbit considers the iconography of jingoistic militarism and the violent suppression of protest to be a political winner. . . . Trump, like Nixon before him, uses "law and order" as a way of "talking about race without talking about race." In this narrative, a president who supports American "traditional culture" and stands strong against people who agitate for racial justice will win over a "silent majority" of people who just don't want to be disturbed and want to have some peace and quiet from their politics. . . .

  In one sense, [Trump]'s right: people are exhausted with chaos, and they do want a respect for law and order. The problem for Trump? The chaos is in large part of his own making, and insofar as it isn't, he's in the way of solving the problems created by institutional racism and overlapping hierarchies of oppression. The massive wave of police brutality has woken even many previously disengaged white people up to the need for true equality under the law, and an order in which everyone, including police and the president, are held to account. And many of the same people Trump is trying to persuade now believe that kicking him out of the White House is a necessary prerequisite for making that vision a reality.

• Dean Baker: The jobs report was good, but the economy is still bad. But see Shapiro, below.

• Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman/Katie Rogers/Zolan Kanno-Youngs/Katie Benner: How Trump's idea for a photo op led to havoc in a park.

• Kevin Baron: Trump finally gets the war he wanted.

• Katelyn Burns:

  • Cities and states are barring police from using chokeholds and tear gas.

  • Joe Biden now has the delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.

  • Trump's latest tweets are from an alternate reality where the protests are out of control.

  • 6 Atlanta officers have been charged in violent tasing incident: "A 22-year-old student was left with a fractured arm ad needed 20 stitches from the encounter, according to his attorney."

  • Trump called governors "weak" and said they need to "dominate" George Floyd protesters.

• John Cassidy: Trump represents a bigger threat than ever to US democracy.

• Sean Collins:

  • Trump's push for "law and order" only led to more chaos in DC Monday night. This is worth looking at, if just for the pictures, which show both the horror of the military occupation of DC and the vanity of Donald Trump and his entourage in staging his photo op.

  • The anger behind the protests, explained in 4 charts.

• Tray Connor/Lisa Khoury: Every Buffalo cop in elite unit quits to back officers who shoved elderly man to ground. Two officers were suspended for attacking a 75-year-old protester, cracking his head against the ground and leaving him bleeding. Fifty-seven quit to protest the suspensions.

• Mark Danner: Moving backward: Hypocrisy and human rights.

• Derek Davison/Alex Thurston: Expect more military "liberal interventionism" under a Joe Biden presidency: My first instinct was to play this down, but the sheer number of likely foreign policy mandarins mentioned, as well as Biden's alleged desire to hire anti-Trump Republicans, makes me nervous. One reason I doubt we'll see more interventionism is that I think the current generation of military leaders, many burned from Afghanistan and Iraq (and Syria and Libya), are likely to resist -- especially pleas on "humanitarian" grounds. Also, as I recall, Biden pushed for a more minimal policy in Afghanistan under Obama. On the other hand, his career in Congress always supported the hawks. People do tend to get more cautious with age, so there's that. But I do agree there is reason to fret over his personnel decisions.

• Elizabeth Dwoskin/Nitasha Tiku: Facebook employees said they were 'caught in an abusive relationship' with Trump as internal debates raged.

• Ariel Dorfman: Trump isn't a dictator. But he has a dictator's sense of impunity.

• Rob Eshman: What the old Jewish radical taught me about George Floyd: Our friend, Marsha Steinberg.

• Franklin Foer: The foundations of the Trump regime are starting to crumble.

  Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts -- and now he's meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them. What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milosevic, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali.

• Matt Ford: The police were a mistake: "Law enforcement agencies have become the standing armies that the Founders feared."

• Masha Gessen: Donald Trump's fascist performance.

  Donald Trump thinks power looks like masked men in combat uniforms lined up in front of the marble columns of the Lincoln Memorial. He thinks it looks like Black Hawk helicopters hovering so low over protesters that they chop off the tops of trees. He thinks it looks like troops using tear gas to clear a plaza for a photo op. He thinks it looks like him hoisting a Bible in his raised right hand.

  Trump thinks power sounds like this: "Our country always wins. That is why I am taking immediate Presidential action to stop the violence and restore security and safety in America . . . dominate the streets . . . establish an overwhelming law-enforcement presence. . . . If a city or state refuses . . . I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them. . . . We are putting everybody on warning. . . . One law and order and that is what it is. One law -- we have one beautiful law." To Trump, power sounds like the word "dominate," repeated over and over on a leaked call with governors.

• Chip Gibbons: Donald Trump's "Antifa" hysteria is absurd. But it's also very dangerous. I have a lot of trouble with "antifa": I'm not sure they exist, but if they do, I'm pretty sure they aren't part of the left -- which I'd define as the movement to universalize equal rights, secure peace, and enhance community through cooperation. Fascists hate the left for just these reasons, but more often than not they also hate other people, often for very arbitrary reasons (like race, religion, or favorite football teams). So it stands to reason that there are people who don't have any particular commitment to the left but still hate fascists -- because, well, hate begets more hate. After all, we live in a society that still puts a lot of stock in violence.

  • Ben Collins/Brandy Zadrozny/Emmanuelle Saliba: White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter.

  • Sean Illing: "They have no allegiance to liberal democracy": An expert on antifa explains the group: Interview with Mark Bray, who wrote Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, as near as I can tell because there was no such thing, and he wanted to sell himself as an expert when/if anyone asked.

  • Neil MacFarquhar: Many claim extremists are sparking protest violence. But which extremists?

  • Ben Zimmer: Why Trump is so obsessed with antifa.

• Susan B Glasser: #Bunkerboy's photo-op war.

• Constance Grady: A reading list to understand police brutality in America.

• Garrett M Graff: The story behind Bill Barr's unmarked federal agents. Also see: Washington DC now controlled by gunmen under William Barr's command, and William Barr's unaccountable nameless army suppresses dissent and threatens democracy, which starts off with Chris Murphy tweeting "We cannot tolerate an American secret police."

• Alisha Haridasani Gupta: Why aren't we all talking about Breonna Taylor? Could be that this particular case is complicated by the "war on drugs," which allowed police to "serve a no-knock warrant" in the middle of the night, and guns: she was killed after her boyfriend shot at a suspected intruder, which turned out to be armed police who returned fire massively and blindly (or at least that's how I understand it went down). As both the reason for the break in and the firefight were deliberate choices made by police, it's hard not to think that this could have been handled differently, in a way where no one got shot, and it's hard to dismiss the idea that racism didn't factor into those choices, even if the police never saw the person they were killing. But doesn't this also raise a key question about guns? A big part of the common rationale for owning a gun is the idea that you can use it to defend your home from invasion -- but clearly that doesn't work in cases where the police are the invaders. Maybe that rationale isn't as smart as its advocates think?

• Sean Illing:

  • Will he go? "A law professor fears a meltdown this November." Interview with Lawrence Douglas, who has a book on this: Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. This strikes me as something not worth worrying about now, although that anyone can raise such questions reminds us that Trump has no regard for the Constitution and the rule of law. I can't imagine that anyone in a position of power would support Trump in spite of a clear electoral defeat.

  • Why the policing problem isn't about "a few bad apples": "A former prosecutor on the fundamental problem with law enforcement: 'The system was designed this way.'" Interview with Paul Butler, Georgetown law professor, former federal prosecutor, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men.

• Quinta Jurecic/Benjamin Wittes: The law-enforcement abuses that don't bother Trump: "The president believes that those who oppose him should be punished, but that those who support him should be free to do as they please."

• Fred Kaplan:

  • James Mattis' scathing broadside against Donald Trump is unprecedented.

  • Military commanders are finally speaking out against Trump.

  • Sending troops into American cities will only cause more chaos and turmoil.

• Roge Karma: Chris Hayes on how police treat black Americans like colonial subjects: Interview with Hayes, who wrote a very clear book on the subject, A Colony in a Nation.

  We're seeing tactics of policing that are usually used on people that are outside of view: pressure, harassment, and ultimately domination.

  I think the word domination is so remarkable. The president has been explicit on this: The goal is domination. And what does domination look like? It looks like a knee on the neck. In fact, a boot to the neck is like the oldest trope we have to represent domination and represent tyranny. What is the flag of the colonies? It's a snake that reads, "Don't tread on me." Do not step on me. Do not place your foot on me. That is domination. And if you do, I will react.

• Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman: How Trump's demands for a full house in Charlotte derailed a convention.

• Amit Katwala: Sweden's coronavirus experiment has well and truly failed.

• Philip Kennicott: The dystopian Lincoln Memorial photo raises a grim question: Will they protect us, or will they shoot us?

• Catherine Kim:

  • Poll: Americans are more concerned about police violence than violence at protests.

  • The protests are growing larger, calmer, and more community-oriented.

  • The fatal arrest of Manuel Ellis, another black man who yelled "I can't breathe," explained: "A medical examiner ruled Ellis's death as a homicide caused by a lack of oxygen and physical restraint."

  • The White House went dark as protests raged outside.

• Jen Kirby: The disturbing history of how tear gas became the weapon of choice against protesters: "The chemical weapon was originally marketed to police as a way to turn protesters 'into a screaming mob.'" Interview with Anna Feigenbaum, author of Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today.

• Ezra Klein: America at the breaking point: "The social upheaval of the 1960s meets the political polarization and institutional dysfunction of the present." I don't have time to write about this piece, but probably should refer to it at some point when I finally try to sum up what's going on. I've always hated the notion that the 1960s divided and broke America. Rather, events exposed hypocrisies and weaknesses, but rather than heal them, political reaction took over and turned us into fantasists. That the same fractures have returned -- sure, plus some new ones -- should remind us that failure to heal can only be ignored for so long.

• Elizabeth Kolbert: How Iceland beat the coronavirus.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon: "He -- and his party -- is much, much worse." The subhed is critical, because is less the leader of his party than the vessel into which fifty years of megalomania and cynicism has been poured, the creature grown out of such vile soil. The first comparison I recall between Trump and Nixon concerned their respective convention acceptance speeches in 1968 and 2016: Nixon's was much more concise, and much more cunning, a carefully constructed pitch to the American people that exploited their feelings while betraying little of Nixon's real ambitions, whereas Trump's was, despite being scripted, an incoherent mess. Their presidencies have followed from those initial premises, but they started out from different places, and to my mind that makes Nixon more culpable for the ensuing disaster. In fact, when Trump apes Nixon's law-and-order rants, he's not just repeating past mistakes but testifying to Nixon's continued legacy. So I really don't have much patience when liberals like Krugman point out that Nixon put his signature to some pieces of progressive legislation (like the Clean Air Act) that Trump has sought to trash. Nixon was smart enough to bend with the wind, but he was also devious enough to put Donald Rumsfeld in charge of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and subvert LBJ's "Great Society" programs from the inside.

  • Trump takes us to the brink: "Will weaponized racism destroy America?"

• Heather Long/Andrew Van Dam: The black-white economic divide is as wide as it was in 1968: "14 charts show how deep the economic gap is and how little it has changed in decades. The covid-19 recession is also hitting black families and business owners far harder than whites."

• German Lopez:

  • How violent protests against police brutality in the '60s and '90s changed public opinion: "The backlash to unrest in the '60s gave the country Richard Nixon, one study found. But we don't know if that will apply today." One thing not noted here is that we tend to conflate two different things when we remember "violence in the '60s": "race riots" which flared up in various cities from 1965-68, most often in response to local police acts; and the police riot against anti-war demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Neither of these should be framed as "protests against police brutality" -- sure, they were occasioned by and exemplified by police brutality, but they weren't organized as protests. I've long felt that the former were pent-up explosions of anger, a release of pressures that had built up over decades of racism and impoverishment, as I noted that it was very rare for any city to "riot" more than once. Repeated experiences were prevented not by police dominance but by community leaders organizing bases of political power. (Also helpful were cases where white political leaders responded by getting out into the streets and making their concerns visible, as John Lindsay did in New York. RFK, campaigning in Indianapolis when Martin Luther King was killed, was also effective as keeping anger from turning into riot.) It is true that Nixon cultivated a backlash against blacks and anti-war protesters, but one thing that helped him was that he was out of office when the "violence" happened, unlike Trump. Of course, Nixon was responsible for much of the violence after he became president in 1969 -- in America, and much, much more around the world.

  • How to reform American police, according to experts.

    1. Police need to apologize for centuries of abuse
    2. Police should be trained to address their racial biases
    3. Police should avoid situations that lead them to use force
    4. Officers must be held accountable in a very transparent way
    5. On-the-job incentives for police officers need to change
    6. We need higher standards -- and better pay -- for police
    7. Police need to focus on the few people in communities causing chaos and violence
    8. We need better data to evaluate police and crime

• Kate Maltby: Viktor Orbán's masterplan to make Hungary greater again.

• Peter Manseau: The Christian martyrdom movement ascends to the White House: "A former professor of Kayleigh McEnany, Trump's new press secretary, explores her enduring obsession with religious persecution and death."

• Branko Marcetic: American authoritarianism runs deeper than Trump.

• Josh Marshall:

  • He's no Richard Nixon.

  • Surveying the whirlwind.

  • Farce, tragedy and photo op: Early in the week, I was thinking Marshall's "editors' blog" entries might be worth following, but I hit the paywall here. I used to look at his site first thing every day, but the returns have been so paltry with such added nuisance factor I hardly bother any more.

• Dylan Matthews: How today's protests compare to 1968, explained by a historian. Interview with Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • Black Lives Matter sues Bill Barr for order that led to tear gas attack on peaceful protesters.

  • The 3 former officers who aided Derek Chauvin are charged in George Floyd's killing: These guys were police officers who at the very least stood by while police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. They've since been fired for their conduct, so technically now they are former officers, but it seems disingenuous to refer to them as "former" when they were active when they committed their crimes. Indeed, I can't think of any other case where the press takes such pains to dissociate criminals from their occupation at the time of the crime. When Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy was described as "ex-CIA," that's because he was no longer employed by the CIA when he broke into Watergate.

  • The charges against former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, explained.

• Terry Nguyen: There isn't a simple story about looting.

• Tim Noah: Donald Trump is celebrating the wrong economic accomplishment: "The president wants credit for a largely illusory blip of improvement in the job market. He should be going all-in on the $600 sweeteners."

• Anna North/Catherine Kim: These videos show the police aren't neutral. They're counterprotesters.

• Osita Nwanevu: Tom Cotton and the elite media's dalliance with illiberalism. The New York Times published an op-ed by the Arkansas Republican called Send in the troops, demanding that the US military "restore order" -- a task that same military has repeatedly failed to do in Afghanistan and Iraq (indeed, a sober analysis would recognize that the US military only made those situations worse, and not for lack of arms or brutality). The Times justified printing Cotton with its commitment to airing "all" voices (meaning conservative ones)

  • Zack Beauchamp: The New York Times staff revolt over Tom Cotton's op-ed, explained.

  • Michelle Goldberg: Tom Cotton's fascist op-ed.

    Before Donald Trump became president, most newspaper op-ed pages sought to present a spectrum of politically significant opinion and argument, which they could largely do while walling off extremist propaganda and incitement. The Trump presidency has undermined that model, because there's generally no way to defend the administration without being either bigoted or dishonest.

  • David Roberts: The Tom Cotton op-ed affair shows why the media must defend America's values.

  • Libby Watson: At The New York Times, an uprising over James Bennet's incompetence. Bennet subsequently resigned.

• Alice Miranda Ollstein/Dan Goldberg: Mass arrests jeopardizing the health of protesters, police.

• Richard A Oppel Jr/Lazaro Gamio: Minneapolis police use force against black people at 7 times the rate of whites.

• Alex Pareene: The police take the side of white vigilantes: "Over the past week, cops have shown that they share a coherent ideology."

• Daniel Politi:

  • Video shows law enforcement officers slashing tires at Minneapolis protests.

  • Two Buffalo police officers charged with assault for shoving 75-year-old protester.

  • Trump retweets interview trashing George Floyd's character as he breaks own Twitter record.

• Linda Qiu: Trump's false claim that 'nobody has ever done' more for the black community than he has: "The records of Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon B Johnson, among others, beg to differ." Assuming pre-Lincoln presidents are ineligible, I thought it might be easier to list the ones who had done less (or who had done more harm). Andrew Johnson was more blatantly racist than practically anyone. And Woodrow Wilson did major harm in segregating the federal government. But beyond that just makes my head hurt.

• David Remnick: An American uprising: "Who, really, is the agitator here?"

• Brian Resnick: Rubber bullets may be "nonlethal," but they can still maim and kill: "The dangers of 'nonlethal' police weapons -- like rubber bullets, flash-bangs, and tear gas -- explained." As I recall, Israeli soldiers, who use a lot of rubber bullets on Palestinians, like to aim for eyes.

  The group found 26 studies on the use of rubber bullets around the world, documenting a total of 1,984 injuries. Fifteen percent of the injuries resulted in permanent disability; 3 percent resulted in death. When the injuries were to the eyes, they overwhelmingly (84.2 percent) resulted in blindness.

• David Roberts: The coronavirus crisis has revealed what Americans need most: Universal basic services. Interview with Andrew Percy, co-author with Anna Coote of The Case for Universal Basic Services.

• Katie Rogers: Ivanka Trump blames 'cancel culture' after college pulls her commencement speech: She was scheduled to address graduates of Wichita State University "Tech." (What is this "Tech"? Looks like the former Wichita Area Technical College [WATC], which is to say it it's not even the real third-tier state college in Kansas. I attended WSU for a year back when my only credential was a GED, and parlayed that into a scholarship at a much fancier college. WATC was originally an adult extension of the Wichita East High vocational program.) I'd like to know more about how this got contracted (and what the kill fee is). If Ivanka wanted to look for a prestige spot to speak, she settled pretty low. On the other hand, I can't imagine anyone there thinking she's just what WSU Tech needed to burnish its image -- unless, of course, one of the Kochs (who have a lot of pull at WSU) whispered in their ears. How it got canceled is no mystery. It was such a patently stupid idea, all it took was for one of the faculty to circulate a petition, which damn near everyone signed. "Cancel culture" is another new one for me (although evidently not for Vox). Controversial figures often get scheduled for events then canceled, but it's almost never due to a vogue for canceling. Usually, some hidden power (like the Kochs) stomps on the autonomy of some student group. Or sometimes, as in this case, a popular uprising spoils some shady insider deal. For more, see Daniel Caudill: WSU Tech reverses course; Ivanka Trump will not be a commencement speaker. Main additional piece of news here is that WSU Tech President Sheree Utash "serves on the American Workforce Policy Advisory board," giving her a connection to Ivanka, probably via Mike Pompeo (Trump's Secretary of State, formerly US Representative for Wichita area).

• Philip Rucker/Ashley Parker/Matt Zapotosky/Josh Dawsey: With White House effectively a fortress, some see Trump's strength -- but others see weakness. Also by Dawsey, with David Nakamura/Fenit Nirappil: 'Vicious dogs' versus 'a scared man': Trump's feud with Bowser escalates amid police brutality protests.

• Noam Scheiber/Farah Stockman/J David Goodman: How police unions became such powerful opponents to reform efforts.

• Michael Shank: How police became paramilitaries.

  That beat cops so often look like troops is not just a problem of "optics." There is, in fact, a "positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings," according to recent research. In other words, the more militarized we allow law enforcement agents to become, the more likely officers are to use lethal violence against citizens: civilian deaths have been found to increase by about 130 percent when police forces acquire significantly more military equipment. . . .

  Law enforcement has, in fact, been training for a moment like this -- specifically by learning techniques and tactics from Israeli military services. As Amnesty International has documented, law enforcement officials from as far afield as Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state, and the D.C. Capitol have traveled to Israel for such training. These programs, according to research backed by Jewish Voice for Peace, focus on exchanging methods of "mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent."

• Robert J Shapiro: No, the unemployment rate didn't really drop in May: "Donald Trump bragged about a bogus jobs number and defiled George Floyd's name in the process." This strongly suggests that the BLS cooked the books to give Trump a number (13.3% unemployment) he could brag about. This did this by not counting 9 million people who weren't working but could be construed as still having jobs (e.g., unpaid furloughed workers). The true number is closer to 19.0%.

• Rebecca Solnit: As the George Floyd protests continue, let's be clear where the violence is coming from: "Using damage to property as cover, US police have meted out shocking, indiscriminate brutality in the wake of the uprising."

• Jeffrey St Clair: Roaming charges: Mad bull, lost its way: I don't particularly like him, and rarely read him, but some weeks deserve one of his laundry lists, and he notices somethings that few other people do. For instance, he dug up a headline from 2003: "Rumsfeld: Looting is transition to freedom," adding: "Perhaps Rumsfeld will write an amicus brief on behalf of the more than 10,000 protesters arrested for rioting, looting and just pissing off cops."

• Yeganeh Torbati: New Trump appointee to foreign aid agency has denounced liberal democracy and 'our homo-empire': Meet "Merritt Corrigan, USAID's new deputy White House liaison."

• Emily VanDerWerff: America's contradictions are breaking wide open: "On Donald Trump, standing outside a church, pretending to be strong." Vox's TV critic, but isn't it all TV these days?

• Alex Ward:

  • The president is a danger to the US military: "Even Trump's former Secretary of Defense James Mattis agrees." The James Mattis piece is in The Atlantic. PS: Mike Mullen, former Joint Chiefs chairman, made an even more emphatic statement. We've also heard from retired General John Allen and retired Admiral James Stavridis. And, of course, there's also Colin Powell, whose reputation is so tarnished that Trump struck back, taunting him as "very responsible for getting us into the disastrous Middle East Wars."

  • The Insurrection Act, the 1807 law Trump could use to deploy troops to curb protests, explained.

  • Australia wants the US to investigate a police attack on 2 Australian reporters: "Videos show the on-air journalist and cameraman were attacked by a federal law enforcement officer outside the White House."

• Adam Weinstein: This is fascism: "Trump is sending an unambiguous message to a country in turmoil -- and his armed supporters, from cops to vigilantes, hear it loud and clear."

• Philip Weiss:

  • George Floyd killing highlights issue of US police training in Israel:

    At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.

    There they learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.

    The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.

    Also:

    Exchanges between US police and the Israeli army promote a brutal military occupation as a positive model for community policing. Under the banner of "counter-terrorism" training, Israel is presenting lessons learned from 50 years of illegal military occupation over a Palestinian population deprived of human and civil rights.

  • -/James North: NYT's meltdown on Tom Cotton recalls its four op-ed pieces justifying slaughter of Gaza demonstrators.

• Jordan Weissmann: Here's what happens if Republicans let those $600 unemployment benefits expire.

• Robin Wright: Is American becoming a banana republic?

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • It's way too early to declare "mission accomplished" on the economy.

  • 8 Can't Wait, explained.

  • The US economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. Unemployment rate for May dropped from 14.7% to 13.3%. See Shapiro above for a better explanation of this.

  • Vandalism and theft aren't helping.

    But while navigating these issues on a practical level is tricky, on an ethical level it's an easy problem -- those looting and vandalizing are in the wrong, and police officers who focus their ire on peaceful protesters while letting vandals roam free are also in the wrong, and political leaders like Trump who use the existence of vandals as a hazy excuse to fire tear gas into law-abiding crowds are the wrongest of all.

  • Growing calls to "defund the police," explained. Also see:

    • Kate Aronoff: Defunding the police is good climate policy.

    • Melissa Gira Grant: The pandemic is the right time to defund the police.

    • Jack Norton: Cut the carceral system now.

    • Farah Stockman/John Eligon: Cities ask if it's time to defund police and 'reimagine' public safety.

    • Alex S Vitale: We must defund the police now.

  • Black Lives Matter activism is working.

  • The most chilling aspect of Trump's Monday night crackdown on law-abiding protesters.

    Trump's politics are full of these little dominance rituals. To verbalize agreement with Trump because you genuinely agree with what he says proves nothing -- it's willingness to say things that neither you nor anyone else believes that truly proves your devotion.

    Monday night's use of force was similar in structure but more alarming in practice. Would law enforcement officials fire tear gas at an unarmed crowd that wasn't breaking the rules? That federal agents were deployed instead of DC police officers is perhaps a sign that there were some doubts. Regardless, one can never know for sure what kind of orders will be followed until they are given. A 7:01 pm dispersal wouldn't prove anything, whereas a 6:36 pm dispersal proved a great deal.

• Gary Younge: What Black America means to Europe. The size of the protests has surprised me everywhere, but especially in Europe. Still, as a placard in a photo here says, "The UK is not innocent."

  George Floyd's killing comes at a moment when America's standing has never been lower in Europe. With his bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, ignorance, vanity, venality, bullishness, and bluster, Donald Trump epitomizes everything most Europeans loathe about the worst aspects of American power. . . .

  Although police killings are a constant, gruesome feature of American life, to many Europeans this particular murder stands as confirmation of the injustices of this broader political period. It illustrates a resurgence of white, nativist violence blessed with the power of the state and emboldened from the highest office. It exemplifies a democracy in crisis, with security forces running amok and terrorizing their own citizens. The killing of George Floyd stands not just as a murder but as a metaphor.

• Li Zhou:

  • The trope of "outside agitators" at protests, explained. Interview with Howard law professor Justin Hansford.

  • Embattled Rep. Steve King has lost his primary: Nine-term House representative (R-IA), so racist he had become an embarrassment even to the Republican Party (and scarier for them, his hold on his previously safe seat had become tenuous).

Questions and Answers

Expanded blog post.

I asked Michael Tatum to take a look at my first batch of Questions and Answers. He helped flag some necessary edits before I posted them early this week. He also suggested that instead of just linking to them (as I did again above), I should have included them directly in the blog. I don't plan on doing that as a matter of course, but this time I reckon they could use a little more exposure. For one thing I got zero new questions (here's the form) since they went up.

I imagine there are hundreds (if not thousands) of similar offers scattered around the web. I've felt a need for some kind of feedback for a long time, but found that comment systems were more work to maintain than they're worth. Two features are direct antecedents to mine: Greil Marcus's Ask Greil), and Robert Christgau's Xgau Sez. Joe Levy suggested the latter as a way of generating some public interest in Christgau's then-new Duke University Press essay collections, Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017 and Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading.

Joe suggested "Ask Greil" as a model, but when I looked at the implementation, I had some second thoughts. I adapted the news roll code to display the Q&A in 15-unit chunks, most recent first, stringing earlier pages together. ("Ask Greil" is in flat files, one per year.) I added tags to the data file, thinking that someday I could support more search options. (I'd like to eventually put them into the database, but didn't want to have to update it more often than I do.) I also added a captcha to cut down on spam questions. I recently adapted the Christgau code for my own site, adding a few more tags (but still not making good use of them).

My main change was to add a "keywords" field. I expected (or hoped) to get a broader range of questions than the music queries that predominate for Christgau and Marcus, and thought it would be a good idea to be able to easily sort my answers into topics. Still, four of the first five questions were on music, including one of those potentially tedious requests to elaborate on grades. A sixth question, which I didn't answer here, was really more of a tip (Whitney Rose) -- more properly answered in last week's Music Week. While my email is elsewhere on the site (and still works best if you want a direct answer), feel free to use the form for tips, comments, or occasional kind words.

I rather hope to see wide-ranging questions, one that provoke me to think, maybe even do a little research, although I'd be happy enough with ones where I can just rattle off experiences and opinions. I like to keep an open mind about where this is going. And I'd like some feedback to prod me along. Thanks, in advance.

Pick up questions and answers here.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33378 [33333] rated (+45), 209 [209] unrated (+0).

Post delayed a day because, well, a lot of things kept me from working on it on Monday. Frozen Sunday night, aside from adding Monday's unpacking.

A few weeks ago, I set up a form for asking questions. I finally decided I had enough to do the extra work of setting up an answer page, so Q&A is now a going concern. I've added a couple fields beyond what I did for Robert Christgau, but I'm not really using them yet. At some point, it should be possible to get selective lists based on keywords, or possibly other search methods.

One question I didn't answer was actually a tip, Jeopardy-style phrased as a question. Mongo asked if I had heard Whitney Rose's We Still Go to Rodeos ("the best country album I've heard so far this year"). No, I hadn't, but the obvious response was to listen to it, so it's in this week's list. I disagree, but my initial reaction was pretty similar to my initial underrating of Kalie Shorr's Open Book in 2019. Still, have major doubts it will ever catch up with the Lucinda Williams and Brandy Clark records (or Chicago Farmer, if he qualifies). I went on and sampled a few more recent alt-country albums, but didn't find anything really better.

Until those, most of what I listened to last week were old jazz albums. The first few were unheard items from the JazzTimes ballots I mentioned recently, at least until I got carried away with Paul Motian. Then I got into Max Roach, partly in response to one of the questions.

Got a rare rock record in the mail recently, with a hand-printed note explaining that Robert Christgau reviewed Thank Your Lucky Stars' debut album, Spinning Out of Orbit, in my one shot 2013 Black Friday Special, and hoping I might like the new one. I do. The CD is actually very nicely packaged, but has no presence on the web, and the note didn't even include an email address, so I have no idea how you'd go about buying a copy. (The old CD, which I haven't heard, is listed on Amazon, at $30.08, 1 copy left, with other vendor offers from $29.09.) Without an album cover available, I thought I'd try my old scanner -- an "all-in-one" Epson Stylus Photo RX580 -- only to find it doesn't work. (I replaced the 6 ink cartridges a while back, and now it's stuck in a mode where it insists on me first installing new ink cartridges before it does anything else. Two Ubuntu scanner programs fail to recognize it.) What I wound up doing was taking a picture with my cell phone, then running it through a bunch of rotate/shear/crop commands in Gimp. Very little margin on top to work with, but I managed to keep it even though I chopped off the other three edges. I'm real surprised it looks as good as it does.

I should mention that Joe Yanosik has written up Sonic Youth: A Consumer Guide to their live albums. They've released a bunch of them on Bandcamp. I had seen mention of a couple of them recently, but didn't realize there were this many, and after last year's release of Battery Park NYC, July 4th 2008 -- which Joe also includes, as an A+ -- I wasn't in a big hurry to go there. Nice that Joe has illuminated the way.

Alto saxophonist Lennie Niehaus (90) died last week. He's probably best known as the director of many Clint Eastwood soundtracks, but he was an important "West Coast cool jazz" musician, played for Stan Kenton 1952-59 (minus a stretch in the Army), and recorded a number of well-regarded (albeit a bit fancy for my taste) albums, especially in the 1950s, before focusing on soundtracks. I've heard a couple of his albums, and need to check out more.

English tenor saxophonist Don Weller (79) also died. I can't say that I know his work. I also heard that Sun Ra bassist Bill Davis died, but haven't found an obituary yet. Other recent musician deaths: Majek Fashek (57, Nigerian reggae singer), John Nzenze (80, Kenyan guitarist), Evaldo Gouveia (91, MPB singer-songwriter).

Horrors enough on Monday and Tuesday to get me to open Weekend Roundup as soon as I post this.

New records reviewed this week:

• Caitlin Cannon: The TrashCannon Album (2020, Caitlin Cannon): [r]: B+(**)
• Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit: Reunions (2020, Southeastern): [r]: B+(*)
• Carly Rae Jepsen: Dedicated Side B (2020, School Boy): [r]: B+(**)
• Rent Romus/Heikki Koskinen/Life's Blood Ensemble: Manala (2019 [2020], Edgetone): [cd]: B+(***)
• Whitney Rose: We Still Go to Rodeos (2020, MCG): [r]: B+(**)
• Thank Your Lucky Stars: Girl in Her 29s (2020, Sounds Deevine): [r]: A-
• Pam Tillis: Looking for a Feeling (2020, Stellar Cat): [r]: B+(*)
• Bill Warfield and the Hell's Kitchen Funk Orchestra: Smile (2020, Planet Arts/43 Street): [cd]: B
• Jaime Wyatt: Neon Cross (2020, New West): [r]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Paul Bley/Paul Motian: Notes (1987 [1988], Soul Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Bley: Reality Check (1994 [1996], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Bley: Notes on Ornette (1996 [1997], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Bley/Evan Parker/Barre Phillips: Sankt Gerold (1996 [2000], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Bley: Play Blue: Oslo Concert (2008 [2014], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Clifford Brown/Max Roach: Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street (1956 [2002], Verve): [r]: A-
• Miles Davis: Big Fun (1969-72 [2000], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Booker Little: Booker Little 4 & Max Roach (1958 [1959], United Artists): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian: Conception Vessel (1972 [1973], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian: Tribute (1974 [1975], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Motian Trio: Le Voyage (1979, ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian: Psalm (1981 [1982], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Motian: It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago (1984 [1985], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Paul Motian Trio: Sound of Love: At the Village Vanguard (1995 [1997], Winter & Winter): [r]: A-
• Paul Motian and the Electric Bebop Band: Flight of the Blue Jay (1996 [1997], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian: Trio 2000 + One (1997 [1998], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian and the E.B.B.B.: Europe (2000 [2001], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(*)
• Paul Motian and the E.B.B.B.: Holiday for Strings (2001 [2002], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian Trio 2000 + Two: Live at the Village Vanguard Volume III (2006 [2010], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Motian Trio 2000 + Two: On Broadway Volume 5 (2008 [2009], Winter & Winter): [r]: A-
• The Odean Pope Saxophone Choir: The Saxophone Shop (1985 [1986], Soul Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Buddy Rich/Max Roach: Rich Versus Roach (1959 [1990], Mercury): [r]: B+(**)
• Max Roach/Clifford Brown: The Best of Max Roach and Clifford Brown in Concert (1954 [1956], GNP): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: Max Roach + 4 (1956-57 [1990], Emarcy): [r]: A-
• Max Roach: Jazz in 3/4 Time (1956-57 [1957], Emarcy): [r]: B+(*)
• Max Roach: The Max Roach 4 Plays Charlie Parker (1957-58 [1995], Verve): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: Award-Winning Drummer (1958 [1960], Time): [r]: B+(**)
• Max Roach: Percussion Bitter Sweet (1961, Impulse!): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: It's Time (1962, Impulse!): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach Quartet: Speak, Brother, Speak! (1962 [1963], Fantasy): [r]: A-
• Max Roach: The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan (1964 [1965], Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: Drums Unlimited (1965-66 [1966], Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)
• Max Roach: Members, Don't Git Weary (1968, Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach Quartet: Pictures in a Frame (1979, Soul Note): [r]: B+(**)
• Max Roach: M'Boom (1979 [1980], Columbia): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: Live in Berlin (1984 [2009], Jazzwerkstatt): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• John Finbury: Quatro (Green Flash Music)
• Madre Vaca: Winterreise (Madre Vaca) [06-04]
• Rudresh Mahanthappa: Hero Trio (Whirlwind) [06-19]

Weekend Roundup

Blog link.

Lot of articles below on the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the demonstrations that have ensued, and reports of violence (especially in Minneapolis). I have no idea how extensive the violence is, let alone who's responsible for what, but I'm skeptical of reports that the nation is being torn apart, let alone that urban America is being reduced to rubble. I remember the riots of the late 1960s, Kerner Commission Report, and the backlash Nixon so profited from. I doubt this is anything like that, but should also note that the degree of anger over this particular killing -- as you well know there have been dozens that have risen to cause célèbre status, and hundreds that remain obscure. There was, for instance, a completely peaceful demonstration here in Wichita that drew some 2,000 people -- much more than I would have imagined. (No link, as The Wichita Eagle won't let me get past the headline, even with a subscription -- making it pointess to pass the link along.) What does make the current situation worse than in the 1960s is malignant lout in the White House, his toxic party, and their deluded followers. We used to jeer LBJ with "how many kids did you kill today?" but there's no point taunting Trump like that: not only doesn't he care, he's likely to take it as a challenge.

Speaking of the dead, the coronavirus death count in the United States topped 100,000 this week. It topped 10,000 on April 17, and 50,000 18 days later, on April 25. It took 32 days from there to double. The lockdown in Kansas has pretty much ended, although that makes me even more wary of going out. I do, however, have a doctor appointment on Monday, and have been assured they got their protocols together. May make a grocery run as well, as we're low on pretty much everything.

When I got up this morning, I played Down in the Basement (a "treasure trove of vintage 78s 1926-1937") and Maria Muldaur's Garden of Joy. From the former, I was especially struck by the continuing relevance of Bessie Brown's "Song from a Cotton Field." The latter ends with a 2009 remake of the Depression-era "The Panic Is On," with a new line for Obama. Couldn't find a YouTube link, but here's Spotify, if that helps. Here's the 1931 original, by Hezekiah & Dorothy Jenkins; I'm more familiar with a later version which drops the complaint about Prohibition and adds an optimistic like about FDR -- on a compilation somewhere, can't find the link now. I did find more recent ones: by Loudon Wainwright III (2010); Daddy Stovepipe (2013); and by Matt Rivers (2013).

Some scattered links this week:

• Jamelle Bouie:

  • Did you really think Trump would mourn with us:

    The president's indifference to collective mourning is of a piece with a political movement that denies our collective ties as well as the obligations we have to each other. If Trump represents a radical political solipsism, in which his is the only interest that exists, then it makes all the sense in the world that neither he nor his allies would see or even understand the need for public and collective mourning -- an activity that heightens our vulnerability, centers our interconnectedness and stands as a challenge to the politics of selfishness and domination.

  • Trump is following in Herbert Hoover's footsteps: "And we know how that worked out." Well, yes and no. Hoover was smart and disciplined and he was not without caring, but for some reason didn't believe he had any options -- maybe because his super-rich Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon vetoed them. (Mellon served 12 years, so the old joke was that three presidents served under him.) Trump has none of Hoover's virtues, and even more remarkably neither do his principle advisers. Also namechecking Hoover:

    • Tom Engelhardt: Donald Trump may not be Herbert Hoover.

• Philip Bump: Trump just said what Republicans have been trying not to say for years: "The president revealed his real concern about mail-in voting: He's worried Republicans will lose more."

• Jane Coaston: Trump's social media executive order, explained: "It won't hold up in court. That's not the point." Also:

  • Sasha Abramsky: Trump's Twitter tirade is the tantrum of a troll.

  • Peter Baker/Daisuke Wakabayashi: Trump's order on social media could harm one person in particular: Donald Trump: "Without certain liability protections, companies like Twitter would have to be more aggressive about policing messages that press the boundaries -- like the president's."

  • John Cassidy: Trump's phony war with Twitter escalates: "If Twitter were to fact-check all of President Trump's posts, he could significantly hamper his ability to propagandize effectively." Not to mention, send him into an endless recursive loop of rage.

  • Shirin Ghaffary: Twitter has finally started fact-checking Trump.

  • Sara Morrison: Section 230, the internet free speech law Trump wants to change, explained.

  • Alex Shephard: Mark Zuckerberg comes to Trump's defense.

  • Zeynep Tufecki: Trump is doing all of this for Zuckerberg: "The new executive order targeting social-media companies isn't really about Twitter."

    Trump is unlikely to repeal Section 230 or take any real action to curb the power of the major social-media companies. Instead, he wants to keep things just the way they are and make sure that the red-carpet treatment he has received so far, especially at Facebook, continues without impediment. He definitely does not want substantial changes going into the 2020 election. The secondary aim is to rile up his base against yet another alleged enemy: this time Silicon Valley, because there needs to be an endless list of targets in the midst of multiple failures. . . .

    Playing the refs by browbeating them has long been a key move in the right-wing playbook against traditional media. The method is simple: It involves badgering them with accusations of unfairness and bias so that they bend over backwards to accommodate a "both sides" narrative even when the sides were behaving very differently, or when one side was not grounded in fact. Climate-change deniers funded by fossil-fuel companies effectively used this strategy for decades, relying on journalists' training and instinct to equate objectivity with representing both sides of a story. This way of operating persisted even when one of the sides was mostly bankrolled by the fossil-fuel industry while the other was a near-unanimous consensus of independent experts and academics.

  • Siva Vaidhyanathan: Well done, Twitter. You've finally figured out how to deal with Trump's tweets.

• Matt Ford: Trump's one constant is a fetish for bloodshed: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, and the president has bunkered down." Aside from the notes on bullies and cowards, I note this Trump tweet: "It makes me feel so good to hit 'sleazebags' back -- much better than seeing a psychiatrist (which I never have!)." Assuming that seeing a shrink is supposed to make you feel better only makes sense when you realize that he has no capacity for self-reflection, in which case his denial is not just vanity (something he has tons of) but also an implicit recognition of his emptiness. Makes me wonder how terrifying it is to know you know nothing of yourself.

• Cindy Forster: Bolivia's post-coup president has unleashed a campaign of terror.

• Susan B Glasser:

  • Trump plays macho man as America burns.

  • The most mendacious president in US history: "On Trump, his Twitter lies, and why it's getting worse."

    From the start of his Administration, his tweets have been an open-source intelligence boon, a window directly into the President's needy id, and a real-time guide to his obsessions and intentions. Misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies were always central to his politics.

    In recent months, however, his tweeting appears to have taken an even darker, more manic, and more mendacious turn, as Trump struggles to manage the convergence of a massive public-health crisis and a simultaneous economic collapse while running for reëlection. He is tweeting more frequently, and more frantically, as events have closed in on him. Trailing in the polls and desperate to change the subject from the coronavirus, mid-pandemic Trump has a Twitter feed that is meaner, angrier, and more partisan than ever before, as he amplifies conspiracy theories about the "deep state" and media enemies such as Scarborough while seeking to exacerbate divisions in an already divided country.

    Glasser refers to a piece by former Trump ghost-writer Tony Schwartz: The psychopath in chief, which she sums up:

    [Schwartz] argues that the Presidency has transformed Trump from an attention-seeking narcissist, who spent decades lying about his golf trophies, his sex life, and his real-estate properties, into an ends-justify-the-means ruler who has increasingly and ominously escalated his lies and extreme behavior. Many of Trump's lies, Schwartz argues, come from his grandiose misconception of his own knowledge and powers, including his bragging that he knows more "than anyone" about ISIS, drones, social media, campaign finance, technology, polls, courts, lawsuits, politicians, trade, renewable energy, infrastructure, construction, nuclear weapons, banks, tax laws, the economy, and, during the pandemic, medicine. "His obsession with domination and power have prompted Trump to tell lies more promiscuously than ever since he became President, and to engage in ever more unfounded and aggressive responses aimed at anyone he perceives stands in his way," Schwartz wrote.

    Glasser also reviews a forthcoming book by the Washington Post's Fact Checker staff, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth.

• Katie Glueck: Kris Kobach is back, and a Kansas Senate seat may be up for grabs: From where I sit, it looks to me like Roger Marshall has sewn up the Senate nomination, although his stunt aping Trump and forcing his whole family to take hydroxychloroquine makes me question his sanity. Kobach, having failed to get a Trump admin job (other than the "voter fraud" commission that he ran into the ground), and having failed to win his governor race, strikes me as damaged goods (like Roy Moore in Alabama, who after losing the special election dropped to fourth in the Senate primary this year). Admittedly, Kobach is bad enough to worry about, but so is Marshall and the rest of the field. I'm not impressed by Barbara Bollier, but we'll take whatever we can get.

• Erica L Green: Over veterans' protests, Trump vetoes measure to block student loan rules.

• Chris Hedges: The coming collapse: "It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion."

• Sheila Kaplan/Matthew Goldstein/Alexandra Stevenson: Trump's vaccine chief has vast ties to drug industry, posing possible conflicts: Moncef Slaoui: a venture capitalist, former executive at GlaxoSmithKline, a board member of Moderna.

• Catherine Kim: The fatal arrest of George Floyd, a black man kneed in the neck by police, explained. As one section here notes, "the history of police brutality against the black community is long and repetitive." This event, following recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, led quickly to protests and more. Also see:

  • Karen Attiah: How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in another country. Later I saw a Tony Karon tweet that suggests the answer to this question is that they'd dub the demonstration "the American spring."

  • Radley Balko: White people can compartmentalize police brutality. Black people don't have the luxury.

  • Katelyn Burns:

    • Trump responded to the protests by lashing out at antifa, the media, and Democrats. Is there anything Trump doesn't blame on "his favorite political punching bags"? Trump has gone on to tweet: "The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization." I don't see how he can do that, not just because the law only applies to foreign organizations, but also it's not clear that "antifa" is an organization at all. More ominously, Attorney General William Barr "announced that the federal law enforcement will activate the 56 regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to apprehend and charge what he described as 'violent radical agitators.'" Using the FBI to investigate and harass political "enemies" was common back when J Edgar Hoover ran the agency, so I can't say his move is unprecedented, but it is extremely repugnant to the Constitution and democracy. On the other hand, if you do want to tackle "domestic terrorism," be aware that virtually all of the threats are on the right.

    • Police targeted journalists covering the George Floyd protests.

    • The racist history of Trump's "When the looting starts, the shooting starts" tweet.

  • Paul Butler: Law professor, former federal prosecutor, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men:

    • Filing charges in George Floyd's death was the easy part. Now comes the hard part.

    • Policing in the US is not about enforcing law. It's about enforcing white supremacy.

  • Jonathan Chait: Trump's plan to end Obama's peaceful police reform succeeded.

  • Zak Cheney-Rice: The lies we tell about riots: "How America mystifies the wages of racism."

  • Jelani Cobb: The death of George Floyd, in context.

  • Sean Collins:

    • The anger behind the protests, explained in 4 charts.

    • Trump's policies have enabled police violence against black Americans: "With pardons, abdication of oversight, harsh rhetoric, and executive orders, the Trump administration has encourage violent policing."

  • Matthew Dessem: Police erupt in violence nationwide.

  • Shane Harris: Officials blame outsiders for violence in Minnesota but contradict one another on who is responsible.

  • Derek Hawkins: Officer charged in George Floyd's death used fatal force before and had history of complaints.

  • Rebecca Heilweil: Feds flew an unarmed Predator drone over Minneapolis protests to provide "situational awareness".

  • Jason Johnson: What we're missing when we condemn "violence" at protests.

    Which brings us to perhaps the most important thing to understand about how to watch protests: the context of what kind of protest garners police response. Over the past three months, the 24-hour cable networks have extensively covered mostly white armed men and women threatening police and politicians at state capitols across the nation over coronavirus lockdown policies.

    How often have you seen police in riot gear? In fact, police seldom use force or even present in force (protest shields, black helmets, etc.) when conservative or right-wing groups protest. When is the last time you saw a group of anti-abortion activists get tear-gassed? Yet left-leaning groups, and especially groups of minorities, their protests are often met with shows of force. Right-wing groups spit in the faces of police in regular gear in Michigan, while SWAT teams show up like Storm Troopers to chanting teens in Minneapolis.

  • John Judis: Violent protests could be a gift to Trump: This is an obvious fear many of us have, especially those of us who remember how Nixon exploited the urban "riots" of the late 1960s. It also seems to be much on the minds of pro-Trump media today, who have come out in force to spread their take on whatever is happening. Personally, I don't see much to gain from demonstrating at this point: the key message is getting out more effectively via social media, and the Minneapolis city government (if not the police) seems to be responding constructively. On the other hand, if you must have a villain for the "riots," how about Trump? For a better take also at TPM, see Josh Marshall: The gang leader as president.

  • Kim Kelly: No more cop unions: I'll file this here because many of the examples of how police unions have saved their members from responsibility for acts of violence against the public come from Minneapolis. Of course, I don't believe that police should not be allowed to join a union. But there is much evidence of such unions behaving badly, from supporting Republicans (which proved to be a fatal mistake in Wisconsin) to bending policy for their own temperament.

  • Catherine Kim:

    • Images of police using violence against peaceful protesters are going viral.

    • What we know about the officers involved in George Floyd's death.

    • -/Kainaz Amaria: George Floyd's death set off uprisings across the country.

  • Daniel Kreps: Killer Mike delivers emotional speech to Atlanta protestors at Mayor's press conference. Robert Christgau tweeted a link to this. When I returned, the top item on my feed was by an Ali Velshi: "I'm hit in the leg by a rubber bullet but am fine. State Police supported by National Guard fired unprovoked into an entirely peaceful rally."

  • Nancy LeTourneau: In Minneapolis, a police union gone rogue.

  • Dahlia Lithwick: Whether the president understands the racist history of "looting and shooting" is beside the point.

  • German Lopez: Former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin charged with murder in the death of George Floyd.

  • Media Matters: Fox News hosts racist former detective Mark Fuhrman to analyze protests following George Floyd's killing. Also: Lou Dobbs blames "black churches," "black teachers and leaders" for Minneapolis protests.

  • Blake Montgomery: After George Floyd's death, Klobuchar faces scrutiny over record on police brutality. On the other hand, see Igor Derysh: Amy Klobuchar denies that she failed to prosecute former officer who kneeled on George Floyd's neck.

  • Mark P Nevitt: Trump cannot legally use "looting" to justify "shooting".

  • Michele L Norris: How Amy Cooper and George Floyd represent two versions of racism that black Americans face every day.

  • Tess Owen: Far-right extremists are hoping to turn the George Floyd protests into a new civil war.

  • Matt Purple: Maybe we should stop giving the Minneapolis police military equipment.

  • Dylan Scott:

    • Thousands of Americans across the US are peacefully marching against police violence.

    • Violent protests are not the story. Police violence is.

    • -/Libby Nelson: What we know about the natiowide protests over George Floyd's death.

  • Ryu Spaeth: America's social contract is broken: "The protests across the country are about more than police violence."

  • Alice Speri/Alleen Brown/Mara Hvistendahl: The George Floyd killing in Minneapolis exposes the failures of police reform.

  • Emily Stewart: George Floyd's killing has opened the wounds of centuries of American racism.

  • Alex S Vitale: The answer to police violence is not 'reform.' It's defunding. Here's why. "Bias training, body cameras, community dialogues -- Minneapolis has tried them all." Maybe the 30% of the city budget that the police suck up isn't the best way to use that money?

  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The intolerable tensions between American cities and their police forces.

  • Alex Ward: "Directly at us": Louisville law enforcement shoots reporters with pepper bullets.

  • Matt Zapotosky/Isaac Stanley-Becker: Gripped by disease, unemployment and outrage at the police, America plunges into crisis.

  • Li Zhou: "We're a country with an open wound": Joe Biden condemns the police killing of George Floyd.

  • David Badash: 'Absolute vacuum in leadership': Internet sheds 'coward' Trump for hiding as 75 cities protest. Assembled from tweets, the least original being "We don't have a president" and "Hitler hid in a bunker too." My favorite:

    Kind of like those FDR Fireside Chats.

    You know, without the inspiration, empathy, concern, sacrifice, honesty, integrity, and 3-syllable words.

  • Common Dreams: Michigan sheriff and police didn't use harsh tactics to control Flint Township's protest -- they laid down their batons and joined it.

• Jen Kirby: Trump's purge of inspectors general, explained: "In an unprecedented move, Trump has fired or sidelined at least five watchdogs in recent weeks."

• Ezra Klein: The vital missing piece of the Democrats' stimulus bill: "If the rule House Democrats followed doesn't allow enough spending, what use is their rule?" What's missing is automatic stabilizers, so in the future something like a rise in unemployment will automatically be met with funding for unemployment insurance. The rule that prevents this is one the Democratic leadership foolishly adopted when they took over the House in 2019, meant to show that they're responsible about deficits. However, if we've learned one thing about economics over the last century, it's that deficit spending is the only way to reduce the tragedy of economic catastrophe.

• David Klion: David Frum's hold over the center: "The Never Trumpers styled themselves as critics of the GOP. Instead, they built up power over liberals." Review of Frum's latest essay collection, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy. For another review, see:

  • Joe Klein: David Frum rethinks conservatism. Actually, one thing that I've found is that Frum remains very entrenched in certain parts of conservatism. For example:

    He proposes a political trade: a severe tightening of immigration rules in return for the passage of much-needed social and climate legislation -- a comprehensive national health care system, a carbon tax (that would include products imported from polluters like China and India). "If Democrats want to perpetuate their health care reforms, they must do a better job of solidifying a sense of national belonging. If Republicans want to safeguard the border, they must offer a better deal to those living on that border's American side."

    I might take such a deal, especially if I could stipulate that the immigration limits were combined with a program to legitimate all or most currently undocumented immigrants. But I doubt Republicans would offer any such deal, because they're more committed to blocking health care reform and limits on global warming than they really care about immigration limits.

• Mike Konczal: Unemployment insurance is a vital part of economic freedom.

• Paul Krugman:

  • On the economics of not dying: "What good is increasing the GDP if it kills you?"

  • In praise of fallible leaders: He means in praise of leaders who can admit errors and learn from them. Trump isn't one of them, and not for lack of mistakes.

  • How many will die for the Dow?: "In a pandemic, Trump is reverting to type." I didn't notice that he ever deviated.

  • We should help workers, not kill them: "Unemployment benefits: an unheralded success story."

• Jon Letman: Trump boosts nuclear weapons spending, fueling a new arms race.

• Eric Levitz: GOP vows to kill only thing keeping economy (and Trump) afloat: Enhanced unemployment benefits: the spectre of workers laid off due to the pandemic not feeling the pinch of starvation enough to settle for even lower-wage jobs.

• Douglas London: How John Brennan and Mike Pompeo left the US blind to Saudi problems.

• Mujib Mashal: How the Taliban outlasted a superpower: tenacity and courage.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • How the Supreme Court enabled police to use deadly chokeholds. Recounts City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983). As it happens, I just read about this case last week in Erwin Chemerinsky's book, We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century, as an example of the many Supreme Court rulings that should be reversed. Also:

    • Jim Bovard: Cops kill because we gave them a legal framework to do it.

  • Why 4 justices on the Supreme Court voted to reopen churches in the pandemic.

  • A Texas Supreme Court decision could disenfranchise millions during the pandemic.

• Timothy Noah: The Trump administratio has abandoned worker safety at the worst moment.

• Alex Pareene: The crumbling cult of Jamie Dimon: "Dimon is a serial Noticer That Things Could Be Better, but he has always remained quite vague on why those things could be better or what might be required to improve them." That much, plus being extremely rich, seems to pass for profundity these days. I once wrote that "Barack Obama is so conservative he cannot even imagine a world where Jamie Dimon isn't CEO of a major Wall Street bank." Obama, you may recall, demanded a major shake up at GM as part of the price for a bailout, but never pushed to change a head on Wall Street.

• Heather Digby Parton: Trump opposes masks because culture war nihilism is his last lie of defense.

• Jeremy W Peters: They predicted 'The Crisis of 2020' . . . in 1991. So how does this end? Recalls two scholars, William Strauss and Neil Howe, whose 1991 book Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, tried to work out a cyclical view of American history, based on 80-year cycles broken up into 20-year phases. They later published a somewhat shorter similar sequel, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous With Destiny (paperback, 1997), which is still in print. The fourth phase of these cycles is "crisis," which they projected to come to a head in 2020, right about now. This is not far removed from the "four eras" schema I've been writing about -- their turning points line up with 1780, 1860, 1940, and 2020, whereas mine are 1800, 1860, 1932, 1980, and (most likely) 2020.

• Michael Pollan: The sickness in our food supply: Explains, among much else, why some farmers are dumping milk, eggs, and chickens, even with grocery store shelves bare. That's just the way the industry is organized, for maximum profit, until it breaks.

• James Poniewozik: CNN arrest is what actual censorship looks like.

• David Roberts: Joe Biden has a chance to make history on climate change: "All he has to do is embrace the consensus that's waiting for him."

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump dismisses his own government's guidance about masks as "politically correct": "Trump's latest unhinged news conference illustrates why he's no longer doing daily coronavirus briefings."

  • "Human capital stock": White House adviser Kevin Hassett uses dehumanizing term for US workers. I'm not a big fan of taking an unfortunate turn of phrase and blowing it up into a story, but this is pretty egregious, as well as revealing. He could have said "our workers are ready to get back to work," and all we'd be questioning is whether that's really true. He could have said "workforce," and while the abstraction is creepier and dehumanizing, we'd probably let is pass. It's true that some economists and businessfolk like to talk about "human capital," but that's usually to posit a human alternative to other forms of capital, and even there it suggests that people's skills and "know how" can be owned as an asset -- something that most of us reject. However, "stock" is where this gets really insulting: a word usually used for animals (e.g. livestock). One could say "our bovine capital stock is ready to be eaten," but who the fuck actually talks like that? That's a question I doubt anyone has asked before, but now we have an answer: Trump economic adviser.

  • Packing 20,000 people into an arena for the RNC is a bad idea. Trump wants it to happen anyway.

• Robert J Shapiro: The economic recovery will be a whimper, not a bang: "Many economists, including some liberals, are predicting a strong comeback by November. They are using the wrong models."

• Felicia Sonmez: Graham urges senior judges to step aside before November election so Republicans can fill vacancies. Always scheming.

• Joseph E Stiglitz: Argentina and the future of finance capitalism.

• Alex Thompson: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory: That's what Stan Greenberg says.

• Andrew Van Dam: The unluckiest generation in US history: "Millennials have faced the worst economic odds, and many will never recover." As I recall, it was baseball mogul Branch Rickey who said, "luck is the residue of design." What me meant was built strong, deep teams, and luck will break your way. The converse also applies: the more fundamental weaknesses you have, the more likely luck will turn against you. The long-term trends of the last 20-40 years have been: the rich have gotten much richer; safety nets have eroded, so most people are at greater risk should something bad happen; and bad events have become more frequent due to war, climate change, and lack of infrastructure investment. Those are trends that are hard to notice as they're happening, only becoming evident when things break bad. At first that may look like luck, but deeper down lies design.

• Peter Wade: In a disturbing rant, Trump says protesters 'would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs'. What is it with Trump and dogs?

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump announced US withdrawal from the WHO. It's unclear if he can do that. Related:

    • John A Tures: Why ditching the WHO will backfire on Trump.

  • China and India are in a dangerous standoff over a hotly contested border.

  • How South America became a coronavirus epicenter.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Household income surged in April despite the collapsing labor market. For once, you should thank the Democrats for that. When the stock market collapsed, Trump and the Republicans were desperate to inject cash into the collapsing economy -- especially those $1200 checks with Trump's name on them. Democrats went along, but only after insisting on funding the unemployment insurance system, including broader eligibility and a $600 per week supplement, which meant that some laid-off workers actually came out ahead. That was absolutely the right thing to do, and Republicans went along with it only because it was bound to their own poorly thought out plan. It's clear now that the "stimulus" didn't save the economy -- most of the money went into savings or debt reduction -- but it did help a lot of people. Thank the Democrats for that. And expect the Republicans to revert to form as the economy opens up slowly, and actually does need a shot of stimulus spending.

  • CNN reporter Omar Jimenez arrested live on air in Minneapolis.

  • Twitter flags Trump for "glorifying violence" in "looting starts, shooting starts" tweet.

  • Let Hong Kong move to America: "Visas could do more than sanctions to help Hong Kong and punish China." Contrast this with Jen Kirby: Trump says he will revoke Hong Kong's special trade status. I don't see how Trump's threat does anything but force Hong Kong ever deeper under China's thumb. On the other hand, I'm not wild about Yglesias's plan either. Reminds me of the special visa class that has allowed right-wing Cubans to flood the country, warping any chance of ever normalizing relations with Cuba, while sticking us with right-wing political operatives like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

  • The US should prioritize reopening schools, not salons and restaurants.

  • Joe Biden has a plan for that: "Not a joke, folks: He's running on a transformative policy agenda." Most of these points have substance while falling short of what Sanders (or for that matter Warren) proposed. The weakest area remains health care, where he wants a "public option" in what's probably a vain hope of reducing public costs by making the marketplace more competitive.

I was asked a question about Questlove's 100 albums list.

1. Terence Trent d'Arby: Neither fish nor flesh [B+]
2. Tower of Power: Live and In Living Color -[]
3. James Brown: In the Jungle Groove [A+]
4. Jeru the Damaja: The Sun Rises In The East []
5. Jazzy Jeff & Will Smith: And In This Corner [B+]
6. Gary Wilson: You Think You Really Know Me -[]
7. J Dilla: Donuts [B]
8. Wynton Marsalis: Live At Blues Alley []
9. Young Black Teenagers: With The Young Black Teenagers -[]
10. Syreeta: Stevie wonder presents Syreeta -[]
11. London music works: Pee-Wee's Big Adventure Score -[]
12. Jackson 5: Get It Together -[]
13. Wu Tang: Enter the 36 Chambers [A-]
14. Larry Young: Unity [A]
15. Gil Scott-Heron: Reflections -[]
16. Kali Uchis: Isolation [A-]
17. Son of Bazerk: Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk []
18. Diana Ross: Diana []
19. Funkadelic: Let's Take It To The Stage [A-]
20. Minnie Riperton: Come to my garden -[]
21. Nina Simone: Nina Simone & Piano -[]
22. The Meters: Look-Ka Py Py []
23. Al Jarreau: Look to The Rainbow [C+]
24. Tony Toni Tone: Sons of Soul []
25. Jungle Brothers: Straight out the jungle [A-]
26. Jill Scott: Who is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1 [**]
27. The Isley Brothers: The Heat Is On [B+]
28. Rick James: Street Songs [*]
29. Los Lobos: Kiko [B+]
30. Louis Jordan: Let the Good Times Roll [A-]
31. The Beatnuts: Street Level []
32. Sting: Nothing Like The Sun []
33. Curtis Mayfield: Curtis/Live! -[]
34. Brand Nubian: One for all [A-]
35. Radiohead: Kid A [B]
36. Cody Chesnutt: The Headphone Masterpiece [B+]
37. Prince: The Truth -[]
38. Stereolab: Dots & Loops [B]
39. Common: Like Water for Chocolate [A-]
40. Richard Pryor: That Nigger's crazy -[]
41. The Avalanches: Since I left you [B+]
42. Peter Rock & C.L. Smooth: Mecca & The soul brother []
43. Sade: Stronger than pride -[]
44. Ahmad Jamal Trio: The Awakening []
45. Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part one [***]
46. The Beatles: Revolver [A]
47. Tears for Fears: The seeds of love [B-]
48. Herbie Hancock: Thrust [**]
49. Max Roach: Percussion Bitter Sweet []
50. The Police: Reggatta De Blanc [B+]
51. Ultramagnetic MCs: Critical Beatdown []
52. Fiona Apple: Tidal []
53. Fela Kuti: Beasts of No Nation [B]
54. The Pharcyde: Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde [B-]
55. Joni Mitchell: The Hissing of the Summer Laws [B-]
56. Clipse: Hell Hath No Fury [A-]
57. Marvin Gaye: Here, My Dear [A-]
58. Graham Central Station: Release Yourself -[]
59. Amy Winehouse: Back To Black [**]
60. Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth: Pleasure -[]
61. Earth, Wind & Fire: All 'N All [B+]
62. John Coltrane: Coltrane Plays the Blues [B+]
63. Eugene McDaniels: Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse -[]
64. Talking Heads: Remain in Light [A+]
65. Beastie Boys: Licensed to Ill [A-]
66. Led Zepplin: Physical Graffiti [B+]
67. The Time: What Time is it? [B+]
68. Slum Village: Fantastic Vol 2 []
69. Sly & the Family Stone: Fresh [A-]
70. Max Roach: Drums Unlimited []
71. Fishbone: Fishbone -[]
72. Stevie Wonder: Talking Book [A]
73. The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland [A]
74. James Brown: Revolution of the mind: Live at the Apollo Vol3 -[]
75. The Beatles: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band [A]
76. Stevie Wonder: Songs in the Key of Life [A-]
77. Miles Davis: On the Corner [***]
78. John Coltrane: A Love Supreme [A+]
79. Stevie Wonder: Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants [C+]
80. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds [A+]
81. Janet Jackson: Control [*]
82. Ice Cube: Amerikkka's Most Wanted -[]
83. Beastie Boys: Paul's Boutique [B+]
84. The Police: Synchronicity [A-]
85. Miles Davis: Nefertiti [A-]
86. Marvin Gaye: What's Going On [A-]
87. Bill Withers: + 'Justements -[]
88. Prince: Parade: Music from the motion picture Under the Cherry Moon [A-]
89. Sly & The Family Stone: There's a Riot Going On [A]
90. Michael Jackson: Thriller [A]
91. Stevie Wonder: Music Of My Mind [B+]
92. A Tribe Called Quest: Midnight Marauders [A-]
93. Prince: 1999 [A-]
94. D'Angelo: Voodoo [A-]
95. De La Soul: De La Soul Is Dead [C+]
96. Rufus: Ask Rufus -[]
97. Michael Jackson: Off The Wall [A]
98. Slum Village: Fan-Tas-Tic Vol 1 -[]
99. Public Enemy: It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back [A+]
100. Average White Band: Person To Person -[]

Music Week

Expanded blog post, May archive (finished).

Music: Current count 33333 [33277] rated (+56), 209 [214] unrated (-5).

Played a lot of old jazz last week. I mostly started with albums that were nominated by JazzTimes in reader polls to select the best albums of the 1970s and 1980s, but once I got into an artist's oeuvre I let myself wander. A couple of these albums were singled out by Chris Monsen as among the ten best of the 1980s, and they fared considerably better than average. I was particularly on the lookout for ECM releases, as they've only recently become available on Napster. Dozens more records on the list, so I may stick with this for a while.

I'm not giving up on new records -- more like pacing myself. I am still maintaining my tracking and metacritic files. They're just not inspiring me to check out a lot of albums at the moment.

Rated count includes a few records I missed counting in previous weeks, but mostly reflects that I rarely gave records a second play (especially old jazz). More exposure could lift a few of them -- especially among the Sonny Rollins releases, given that I have The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (1962-64, 6CD) at A-, and Gary Giddins' expert selection from the Milestones (1972-2000), with one song per album, Silver City, at A+.

This is the last Monday of May, so Streamnotes (May, 2020) is wrapped up. I noticed that I had missed doing the indexing for April, so fixed that. I still haven't done the indexing for the last two Book Roundups, so need to work on that. I also have enough Questions to start trying to write up some answers. Should have some of them by the end of the week.

PS: Thought I had got through a week with no major jazz or pop deaths to report, but found out about Jimmy Cobb (91) just after I posted. Also missed Mory Kanté (70).

New records reviewed this week:

• The Dream Syndicate: The Universe Inside (2020, Anti-): [r]: B+(*)
• Steve Earle: Ghosts of West Virginia (2020, New West): [r]: B+(***)
• Joel Harrison + 18: America at War (2019 [2020], Sunnyside): [r]: B+(***)
• Alain Mallet: Mutt Slang II: A Wake of Sorrows Engulfed in Rage (2018 [2020], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• Ted Moore Trio: The Natural Order of Things (2019 [2020], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Shelly Rudolph: The Way We Love (2010-17 [2020], OA2): [cd]: B

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Apala: Apala Groups in Nigeria 1967-70 (1967-70 [2020], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(*)
• Eddie Russ: Fresh Out (1974 [2019], Soul Jazz): [r]: B

Old music:

• Muhal Richard Abrams: Young at Heart/Wise in Time (1969 [1996], Delmark): [r]: B+(**)
• Muhal Richard Abrams: Think All, Focus One (1994 [1995], Black Saint): [r]: B+(***)
• Muhal Richard Abrams: Song for All (1995 [1997], Black Saint): [r]: B+(***)
• George Adams: Sound Suggestions (1979, ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• George Adams/Don Pullen Quartet: Live at Montmartre (1985 [1986], Timeless): [r]: B+(**)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: Bap-Tizum (1972 [1973], Atlantic): [r]: B
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: Nice Guys (1978 [1979], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: <Full Force (1980, ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: The Third Decade (1984 [1985], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Tim Berne Sextet: The Ancestors (1983, Soul Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Tim Berne: Mutant Variations (1983 [1984], Soul Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Arthur Blythe: Blythe Spirit (1981, Columbia): [r]: B+(***)
• Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy: I Only Have Eyes for You (1985, ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy: Avant Pop (1986, ECM): [r]: A-
• Tommy Flanagan: Thelonica (1982 [1983], Enja): [r]: B+(**)
• Charlie Haden/Paul Motian Feat. Geri Allen: Etudes (1987 [1988], Soul Note): [yt]: A-
• Jimmy Lyons: Other Afternoons (1969 [1979], Affinity): [r]: B+(**)
• Jimmy Lyons Quintet: Wee Sneezawee (1983 [1984], Black Saint): [r]: A-
• Jimmy Lyons Quintet: Give It Up (1985, Black Saint): [r]: B+(***)
• Oregon: Oregon (1983, ECM): [r]: B
• Oregon: Crossing (1984 [1985], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Sonny Rollins: With the Modern Jazz Quartet (1951-53 [1982], Prestige/OJC): [r]: B+(**)
• Sonny Rollins: Sonny Rollins [Volume 1] (1956 [1957], Blue Note): [r]: B+(**)
• Sonny Rollins: Sonny Rollins Volume 2 (1957, Blue Note): [r]: B+(**)
• Sonny Rollins: Sonny Rollins Plays (1956-57 [2010], Essential Music Group): [r]: B+(***)
• Sonny Rollins Featuring Jim Hall: The Quartets (1962 [1986]. RCA Bluebird): [r]: B+(***)
• Sonny Rollins/Don Cherry Quartet: The Complete 1963 Copenhagen Concert (1963 [2014], Doxy, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Sonny Rollins & Don Cherry: Live at the Olympia '63 (1963 [2010], Master Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Sonny Rollins: Live in Tokyo, Japan '63 (1963 [2010], Master Classics): [r]: B+(**)
• Sonny Rollins: Sonny Rollins and Co. 1964 (1964 [1995], RCA Bluebird): [r]: A-
• Sonny Rollins: Horn Culture (1973, Milestone): [r]: A-
• Sonny Rollins: The Cutting Edge (1974, Milestone): [r]: B+(*)
• Sonny Rollins: Easy Living (1977, Milestone): [r]: B+(***)
• Sonny Rollins: Don't Stop the Carnival (1978, Milestone): [r]: B+(**)
• Sonny Rollins: Don't Ask (1979, Milestone): [r]: B
• Sonny Rollins: Love at First Sight (1980, Milestone): [r]: B+(***)
• Sonny Rollins: No Problem (1981, Milestone): [r]: B+(**)
• Sonny Rollins: Reel Life (1982, Milestone): [r]: B+(*)
• Sonny Rollins: The Solo Album (1985, Milestone): [r]: B+(**)
• Sonny Rollins: Old Flames (1993, Milestone): [r]: B+(**)
• Kenny Wheeler: Gnu High (1975 [1976], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Kenny Wheeler: Around 6 (1979 [1980], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Kenny Wheeler: Double, Double You (1983 [1984], ECM): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Sara Serpa: Recognition (Biophilia) [06-05]

Weekend Roundup

Blog link.

Robert Christgau wrote an impassioned piece last week on why it matters for people to vote for Biden and the Democrats against Trump and the Republicans in November. You can find it here and here -- scroll down to the last question and answer. I agree substantively, but have a few quibbles.

First, I gagged on the phrase "criminally stupid." Stupid, maybe, but that isn't (and shouldn't be) a crime. Gauging the importance of any election requires both a lot of information and a good sense of political dynamics over time. How difficult it is should be clear from our different estimates and prognoses of what a Trump victory would mean. (Which, just to be clear, don't diminish our agreement that this election is "crucial" and that if it goes the wrong way a lot of very bad things will happen.)

For instance: "Abortion will end, feminism atrophy, gay rights shrivel." If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, states will be free to outlaw abortion (and for that matter birth control), but only a few states will. Same with LGBTQ rights. The effect will be to undermine rights that currently all Americans share, but unless this can be followed up with new federal legislation the effect will be to make red and blue states diverge further. Granted, if Republicans win by landslides (augmented or enabled by gerrymandering and voter suppression, which is the only way that seems possible) they might be able to rewrite federal law to force their views on blue states. They might even amend the constitution to get rid of parts they don't like (although most likely they'll be happy enough to have their packed courts read the constitution their way).

None of this woud cause feminism to "atrophy": if anything, it will make it sharper and more necessary. Indeed, while we prefer not to speak of it, one thing that invariably happens is that when power tilts one direction, resistance grows. A lot of bad things have happened since 2016, but resistance has grown, both in numbers and in clarity and resolve. The lines about what Hillary would have done differently aren't very convincing -- especially the one about billionaires, because while she was chummy with different ones than Trump was, she was always very deferential to them (as were Democrats like Obama and Biden). At least with Trump as president, we don't have to go through this election defending her. I'm not a person who believes that things have to get worse before they can get better, but I do recognize that people often learn things only the hard way. I voted for Hillary even though I thought she was fucking awful, because I understood how much worse Trump was, but also because I thought we'd be better off starting from her as a baseline than we'd be with Trump.

Obviously, I think that with Biden vs. Trump, as well. I voted for Bernie Sanders, and Biden was one of my least favorite candidates, so I'm not happy he's the nominee, but I'm also not very unhappy with the way the race has shaped up. Aside from the necessity of beating Trump and the Republican ticket -- which in terms of policy (if not personality) if anything worse than Trump -- the second most important thing for me is to advance the ideas of the left. While Sanders and others have made remarkable progress, it was clear that they have not swayed the powers in the party, and that the latter would stop at nothing (including self-defeat) to keep control of the Democratic Party. With Biden we have a seat at the table to argue for policies on their merits, and we shouldn't have to spend much of our energy fighting off internecine attacks from the right. Nothing is certain, but as I keep insisting, the answers to our major problems are on the left. Biden needs answers as much as we do.

The Democratic Primary in Hawaii went for Joe Biden (63.23%), over Bernie Sanders (36.77%). You can draw either conclusion from this. On the one hand, Biden has drawn consistent majorities everywhere since shortly after Super Tuesday, and there's no real chance he's going to weaken. On the other hand, there's still a sizable bloc of Democrats who think we can do better, and that too -- despite the campaign blackout and Bernie's own endorsement of Biden -- shows no sign of weakening.

Some scattered links this week:

• Jon Lee Anderson: The coronavirus hits Brazil hard, but Jair Bolsonaro is unrepentant.

• Kate Aronoff: America's deadly obsession with intellectual property.

• Andrew Bacevich: Still, the Global War on Terrorism goes on.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • The American right's favorite strongman: "Viktor Orbán dismantled Hungary's democracy. Conservatives love him." What they really love about him is how his party (Fidesz) has managed to lock themselves into power even if elections turn against them.

    In the United States, the Republican Party has shown a disturbing willingness to engage in Fidesz-like tactics to undermine the fairness of the political process. The two parties evolved independently, for their own domestic reasons, but seem to have converged on a similar willingness to undermine the fairness of elections behind the scenes.

    Extreme gerrymandering, voter ID laws, purging nonvoters from the voting rolls, seizing power from duly elected Democratic governors, packing courts with partisan judges, creating a media propaganda network that its partisans consume to the exclusion of other sources -- all Republican approaches that, with some nouns changed, could easily describe Fidesz's techniques for hollowing out from democracy from within.

    In this respect, Hungary really is a model for America. It's not a blueprint anyone is consciously aping, but proof that a ruthless party with less-than-majority support in the public can take durable control of political institutions while still successfully maintaining a democratic veneer.

  • Trump says he's taking hydroxycloroquine. Related:

    • Ariana Eunjung Cha/Laurie McGinley: Antimalarial drug touted by President Trump is linked to increased risk of death in coronavirus patients, study says.

    • Stuart Emmrich: Is Donald Trump lying about taking hydroxycloroquine?

    • Josh Marshall: Hydroxychloroquine isn't a joke it's a scandal.

    • Morgan Gstalter: GOP lawmaker says his entire family is taking hydroxychloroquine: Roger Marshall (R-KS), who by the way is an MD (OB-GYN), and is running for Senate, in a race where he used to be regarded as the sane one. This strikes me as a stunt to draw Trump votes away from Kris Kobach.

• Ginia Bellafante: First they fled the city. Now they're building $75,000 in-ground pools: "When the going gets tough, the rich buy oases."

• Barbara Boland: IG fired days after inquiring about Pompeo's 'donor dinners'.

• Megan Cassella: Reopening reality check: Georgia's jobs aren't flooding back: "A month after easing lockdown restrictions, the state is still seeing a steady stream of unemployment claims, economic data shows."

• John Cassidy: The coronavirus is exposing Wall Street's reckless gamble on bad debt.

• Casey Cep: Telling the stories of the dead is essential work. I've been reading obituaries regularly, at least since my parents died (2000). Very rarely do I notice anyone I knew or recognized, although I did run across a couple of Intermediate School teachers I loathed. But one thing that's always bothered me is that they're not written up as stories. They're basically run as advertisements: you buy space, and get to write whatever drivel you want, and for a bit extra you can add a picture. Made me think that if I ever ran a newspaper, I'd at least research and write up this one story on everyone. The point of this article is that in the pandemic, every obituary has become a story. Same thing happened after 9/11, when the New York Times took a moment to write about every victim, no matter how insignificant. Actually, they never were insignificant. They just looked that way from Mount Olympus.

• Amee Chew: Stop the $2 billion arms sale to the Philippines.

  Duterte's human rights record is atrocious. If the arms sale goes through, it will escalate a worsening crackdown on human rights defenders and on dissent -- while fomenting an ongoing bloodbath. Duterte is infamous for launching a "War on Drugs" that, since 2016, has claimed the lives of as many as 27,000 souls, mostly low-income people summarily executed by police and vigilantes.

  In Duterte's first three years of office, nearly 300 journalists, human rights lawyers, environmentalists, peasant leaders, trade unionists, and human rights defenders were assassinated. The Philippines has been ranked the deadliest country for environmentalists in the world, after Brazil. Many of these slayings are linked to military personnel.

  Now, Duterte is using COVID-19 as a pretext for further militarization and repression, despite the dire consequences for public health.

• Andrew Desiderio: Fired watchdog was investigating arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

• Chauncey DeVega: Trump's HHS secretary accidentally tells the truth: Racism is driving pandemic policy.

• Jason Ditz:

  • Trump administration discussing new nuclear test, first since 1992.

  • Trump extends 2003 'national emergency' on Iraq.

  • US clears more UAE arms sales despite evidence of past violations: "UAE transferred US arms to al-Qaeda, other terrorists."

  • US withdraws from Open Skies treaty. Also see: David E Sanger: Trup will withdraw from Open Skies arms control treaty."

    With the loss of INF, Open Skies, and the imminent expiration of New START, the US and Russia are going to find themselves with few treaties designed to prevent military exchanges, and a lot of new opportunities for arms races.

• Mark Fitzpatrick: Will the US try to interdict Iranian tankers bound for Venezuela?

• Laurie Garrett: Trump has sabotaged America's coronavirus response: I mentioned this article in Book Roundup, but one to note one more thing: the date (January 31, 2020). That's pretty early (before the first US cases were reported), although much of what's here has since become common knowledge:

  For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government's entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is -- not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.

• Colin Gordon: The coronavirus wouldn't be decimating meatpacking plants if company bosses hadn't busted the unions. Although western Kansas hasn't gotten much publicity, Ford and Finney counties have the highest per capita infection rates in Kansas.

• Murtaza Hussain:

  • With a distracted public, the Pentagon tries to get away with killing innocent civilians. To be fair, they've been getting away with it for decades, whether the public was distracted or not.

  • There's no one worse than Trump on climate and war. Only comparisons here are with former presidents, mostly Obama (but he's not very hopeful about Biden), so wannabes like Lindsay Graham aren't given their due.

• Umair Irfan/Jen Kirby: The other plague: Locusts are devouring crops in East Africa and the Middle East.

• Eileen Jones: There's nothing good about Phyllis Schlafly: Deconstructing Mrs. America.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • This is not a good time to start a new arms race: "And there is no good reason for one." But that's what Trump is aiming for in withdrawing from Open Skies and INF and New START -- arms limitation treaties with Russia.

  • The ultimate disgrace of Mike Pompeo: "THe IG firing shows the sordid truth behind the secretary of state's moralistic sneering."

  • "Obamagate" is a 3-year-old story that wasn't a scandal the first time.

• Jen Kirby: Inspectors general, explained by a former inspector general: Interview with Clark Ervin, following Trump's firing of State Department IG Steve Linick.

• Michael T Klare: The US and China are dangerously close to a military confrontation in the South China Sea.

• Ezra Klein:

  • Why "essential" workers are treated as disposable: Interview with SIEU president Mary Kay Henry.

  • Why are liberals more afraid of the coronavirus than conservatives? My answer is that liberals still think reality matters, and as such respond to real problems, whereas conservatives live in a fantasy world where political will creates its own reality. Klein, liberal that he is, surveys the research, and even quotes Jon Haidt: "Conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination." On the other hand, people of all political stripes tend to react as herds, and right now conservative leaders have their own reasons for making light of the pandemic, and that's emboldening conservative followers. It's tempting to say that the scales would be tipped if Obama were president and spouting his usual lines about confidence. Still, the flip wouldn't be symmetrical: Democrats are more likely to trust the science, because they believe that government should serve the public, especially in times of crisis. Republicans, on the other hand, seek power to favor private interests, and even go so far as to deny that public interests exist (except for national security, which they conflate with the needs of private arms merchants), and would like to cripple government's ability to help, lest people look to government for help in the future. (Although note that Republican governors are the first in line for federal relief when disaster strikes their states.)

• German Lopez: Biden's opposition to marijuana legalization is at odds with most Americans' views.

• Robert Mackey:

  • Trump hails "good bloodlines" of Henry Ford, whose anti-semitism inspired Hitler: I think it would be more accurate to say that Ford and Hitler came to anti-semitism independently, although their times and fame made sure that they would inspire and comfort each other (well, until Hitler went a bit too far; Ford died in 1947, 2 years after Hitler, but his anti-semitic rants go back to 1922). Still, the Trump quotes on "good bloodlines" and "good DNA" are pretty creepy.

  • Alarm and confusion at Fox News as Trump says he takes hydroxychloroquine.

• Windsor Mann: Trump's lethal aversion to reading: "Trump is a know-it-all who knows almost nothing and refuses to read anything except his own name."

• Greg Miller/Josh Dawsey/Aaron C Davis: One final viral infusion: Trump's move to block travel from Europe triggered chaos and a surge of passengers from the outbreak's center.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • Trump claims he will "override the governors" who closed churches in the pandemic.

  • Trump says he'll cut off funding to states that make it easier to vote.

• Ella Nilsen: Democrats suddenly have a much better chance of retaking the Senate in 2020.

• Anna North:

  • The plaintiff of Roe v. Wade made a big revelation on her deathbed. Here's what it means.

  • Essential workers are losing their hazard pay even though the hazard isn't over.

• Osita Nwanevu:

  • We're not polarized enough: Review of Ezra Klein's book, Why We're Polarized.

    Nevertheless, the health and stability of the American political system depends on the defeat of the Republican Party. Absent a radical shift in the right's priorities, the only way to depolarize our institutions is to win and win big against those who want to keep them undemocratic, protecting the right from the moderating influence more competitive elections could have. Those victories will depend on reformers successfully marshaling the forces driving group identity, rather than assuming the balance of power in America has been set primarily by immutable psychologies. The way forward lies in convincing Americans not to retreat from national politics but to think even more broadly and abstractly about where this country ought to go. Why We're Polarized does some of the job, but leaves a daunting truth unsaid: To fight polarization, we'll have to get much more polarized. The only way out is through.

  • Workers deserve to be owners, too. I think extending significant ownership shares to workers is one of the most important things that can be done in America.

• Ari Rabin-Havt: Inside the latest plan to "bankrupt" and privatize Social Security: Bankrupting, sure, but I don't see anything here about privatizing, which -- beyond the push toward optional 401(k) plans -- has always been a pipe dream. One can imagine ending Social Security and plunging millions of elderly and disabled Americans back into poverty, but one cannot imagine a privatized system where most (let alone all) Americans would be better off.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • New Fox News poll finds Biden with healthy lead, sends Trump into tailspin: "The president is mad that Fox News isn't rigging polls for him."

  • Trump's remarks about firing the State Department IG show how he's destroyed the norm of oversight.

  • Trump's latest tweet about coronavirus testing is like a greatest hits of his favorite lies.

• Matthew Sitman: Why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals mad: Not as broad as I'd like, focusing as he does on one R.R. Reno, although he does bring Peggy Noonan into it.

• Danny Sjursen: US regional imperialism: big sticks, and even bigger guns.

• Sarah Stillman: Will the coronavirus make us rethink mass incarceration?

• Matthew Walther: A predictable catastrophe in Michigan: Multiple dams failed alog the Tittabawassee River, causing massive flooding.

  These are the sorts of problems no one wants to address until it's too late, not just in Michigan but across the United States, where the phrase "crumbling infrastructure" has been with us so long that it too is probably on the verge of collapse. We are an old broken-down country, physically and spiritually, incapable of meaningful action until we find ourselves in the middle of a totally predictable crisis. So many of the issues that have arisen during the current pandemic -- the dangers of nursing homes, racial inequality, social atomization -- were ones that should have been familiar to us and dealt with long before we found ourselves faced with a novel virus. Instead we waited as we always do until the dams burst, metaphorically and otherwise.

  Also see:

  • Sophia Tesfaye: Republican corruption and carelessness led to devastation in Michigan: Does Trump care?

• Alex Ward:

  • A massive cyclone battered India and Bangladesh. The coronavirus makes recovery even harder.

  • Anti-lockdown protests aren't just an American thing. They're a global phenomenon.

• Philip Weiss: Peace process was never intended to give Palestinians a state -- true confessions from Council on Foreign Relations. Cites an article by Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • A huge boost in infrastructure spending is very popular -- if rich people pay for it. Argues that it's going to be very hard to get a big boost in infrastructure (or other pubic service) spending if most people perceive it's being paid for out of their own pockets. (Paying for it by taxing the rich is OK, and indeed the most popular tax proposal on a long list is the wealth tax.) Personally, I think this would be a very good time to raise the gas tax. Sure, a flat sales or excise tax isn't progressive, but prices at present are so depressed consumers come out ahead anyway. And to the extent that the tax increase reduces demand (and global warming), that's not such a bad thing either.

• Neil J Young: Flooding the swamp: "Why Trump's many scandals never seem to stick." Alternate title: "There's always a bigger scandal.

• Li Zhou/Ella Nilsen: Congress should consider these 7 ideas for the next stimulus package. Bold ideas, no chance of surviving a Republican veto, and indeed it's not clear even to me where the money comes from.

Mar 2001