Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31749 [31726] rated (+23), 262 [262] unrated (+0).

Slow getting this out, with Monday wiped out by a house emergency (water heater broke down). Had a nagging sore throat much of the week, but right now mostly feel exhausted. Relatively mild summer so far, but looks like triple digits coming soon and probably persisting. Next couple weeks will probably be worse.

Rated count cut off Sunday evening, but I've added unpacking since then, so the numbers are a little out of whack.

Second straight week with an unusually low rated count (24 last week). Again, spent some time on the Resonance anthologies without writing any reviews, and also found a higher-than-usual split of A- records, plus high B+ that merited extra plays. Most of the finds this week come from Chris Monsen's Jazz favorites list, plus a few more from Phil Overeem's Halfway to Listville. The easiest one was John McPhee's Nation Time: I skipped over it when I was catching up with Corbett vs. Dempsey's Bandcamp a few weeks back, as I had already given Corbett's 2000 reissue a full A, and hadn't noticed the extra cuts. No reason to repurchase if you have the Atavistic release, but the bonuses are just that.

Had a minor role in helping Joe Yanosik publish his magnum opus A Consumer Guide to FRANCO. I have a Guests section on my website, which I've used a few times but never really tried to promote. I've long thought that a better solution would be to set up guest areas on my Hullworks website, perhaps as sub-domains, which could be spun off should the guests decide to pony up for a domain name. I'm in a position where I can host those as well. I also considered hanging Joe's piece at Terminal Zone -- long my pet idea for a music-themed website (named for the zine Don Malcolm and I published back in 1977). In the end, I went with the path that involved the least thought and work.

When Joe first mentioned his Franco project to me, I glanced at Napster's Franco offerings, and spent a week digging around. My own (much more limited) set of Franco grades are here. You can also look up what Robert Christgau has written.

I might as well mention two projects that I've started but haven't gotten very far on. I've started to add recent reviews to the two large book manuscript files I have on jazz. Rather slow work, but I've added 99 pages up to January, 2019, pushing the 20th century jazz guide over 800, and the 21st over 1700. Files are backed up online, in ODT format.

I've also started collecting mid-year lists, as I did last year. This uses the EOY list aggregate format, and most likely will eventually evolve into a full EOY list aggregate later this year. Only have four lists compiled so far (about a third of those collected on AOTY). I'm surprised there aren't more, but haven't really looked yet. The current aggregate is way too sparse to draw any real conclusions from. One issue here is that I'm only awarding 1 point for each list mention. (Two reasons: one is that so far many of the lists are unranked; the other is that it makes it easier to clean up with I replace the midway lists with EOY lists.) The other point I should note here is that I'm factoring in my graces (A: 5, A-: 4, ***: 3, **: 2, *: 1), which currently results in quite a bit of skew. E.g., 6 of the top 8 records now are ones I've graded A- (Billy Eilish, Lizzo, Charly Bliss, Big Thief, Little Simz, Jamila Woods), and the other two (Carly Rae Jepsen and Vampire Weekend) were *** and ** respectively. Expect my picks to slip as I add further lists, while records I like less will make inroads (Solange is the surest shot; maybe also Tyler the Creator, Sharon Van Etten, Jenny Lewis). Record that I haven't heard with the most list mentions so far: Flying Lotus' Flamagra.

New records reviewed this week:

• Maria Faust/Tim Dahl/Weasel Walter: Farm Fresh (2018 [2019], Gotta Let It Out): [r]: B+(***)
• Fire! Orchestra: Arrival (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B
• Alex Fournier: Triio (2018 [2019], Furniture Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Lafayette Gilchrist: Dark Matter (2016 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• GoldLink: Diaspora (2019, Squaaash Club/RCA): [r]: B+(***)
• Bjørn Marius Hegge: Ideas (2019, Particular): [r]: A-
• Megan Thee Stallion: Fever (2019, 300 Entertainment): [r]: B+(***)
• Nature Work: Nature Work (2018 [2019], Sunnyside): [r]: A-
• Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unity: To Whom Who Buys a Record (2019, Odin): [r]: A-
• Pere Ubu: The Long Goodbye (2019, Cherry Red): [r]: B+(**)
• Santana: Africa Speaks (2019, Concord): [r]: B
• Bruce Springsteen: Springsteen on Broadway (2018, Columbia, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars (2019, Columbia): [r]: B-
• Zhenya Strigalev/Federico Dannemann: The Change (2018 [2019], Rainy Days): [cd]: B+(*)
• Gebhard Ullmann Basement Research: Impromptus and Other Short Works (2018 [2019], WhyPlayJazz): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Dexter Gordon: At the Subway Club 1973 (1965-73 [2019], Elemental Music, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Clifford Jordan Quartet: Glass Bead Games (1973 [1974], Strata East; [2019], Pure Pleasure): [r]: A-
• Eero Koivistoinen: The Front Is Breaking (1976, Love; [2017], Svart): [r]: B+(*)
• Joe McPhee: Nation Time (1970 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A
• Harry Mosco: Peace & Harmony (1979 [2019], Isle of Jura): [r]: B+(*)
• Woody Shaw Quintet: Basel 1980 (1980-81 [2019], Elemental Music, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Sonic Youth: Battery Park, NYC, July 4th 2008 (2008 [2019], Matador): [r]: B+(***)
• Bruce Springsteen: The Live Series: Songs of the Road (1977-2013 [2018], Columbia): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• John Bacon/Michael McNeill/Danny Ziemann: Refractions (Jazz Dimensions): August 1
• Mike Holober/The Gotham Jazz Orchestra: Hiding Out (Zoho): August 9
• From Wolves to Whales: Strandwal (Aerophonic): August 26
• Dave Rempis/Joshua Abrams/Avreeayl Ra + Jim Baker: Apsis (Aerophonic): August 26

Weekend Roundup

Fairly large (7.3) earthquake in Halmahera, Indonesia today. It's in a fairly isolated corner of the nation, an island with about 450,000 people, north of Ceram and midway between the outstretched peninsulas of New Guinea and Sulawesi. Probably not much news on this, unlike last week's similar-sized earthquakes near Ridgecrest, California.

On the other hand, quite a bit of news attention to Hurricane Barry, slowly moving today through north Louisiana and into Arkansas, dumping a lot of rain over already flooded terrain. Two things worth noting here. One is that this is still very early in the season (nominally June 1 to November 30). For a record fifth year in a row, the first named storm (Andrea) appeared before the season officially started. June was quiet, but it's still very rare to have hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico in July. Odder still, where most hurricanes start as low pressure zones over West Africa, then pick up strength crossing the width of the subtropical Atlantic Ocean, this one started in Tennessee, then curved in a clockwise motion through Georgia and Florida before intensifying over the Gulf. I've never seen a storm follow that trajectory, or for that matter one that spent so little time over water developing to hurricane level. Granted, it only briefly achieved level 1 strength, but that doesn't bode well for later storms that traverse much more of the still warming Gulf (currently 86°F). [PS: The Wikipedia page suggests several similar hurricanes, but the only one that comes close is 1940 Louisiana hurricane, which formed in early August off the coast of Georgia, crossed Florida and covered a much longer stretch of the Gulf before making landfall in southwest Louisiana. It is regarded as "the wettest tropical cyclone in state history," with a peak rainfall of 37.5 inches. Barry is forecast to produce up to 25 inches of rain. Actual rain so far appears to be much less -- see Barry downgraded to a depression but still brings risk of flooding from Louisiana to Arkansas. This article also notes that the average date for first hurricane of season is August 10, and that this is the first July hurricane in continental US since Arthur in 2014, and only the 4th in Louisiana history according to records going back to 1851.]

Some scattered links this week:

• William Astore: The riptide of American militarism.

• Aaron Blake: Donald Trump's origin story suffers another severe blow:

  The new report by Kranish also recalls perhaps the biggest revelation undercutting Trump's self-published origin story: how he became wealthy in the first place. While Trump has claimed he got only a $1 million loan to start out with, the Times detailed how the younger Trump "received at least $413 million in today's dollars from his father's real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s." The paper said these tax dodges included "instances of outright fraud."

  And when it comes to Trump's education, he has apparently gone to great lengths to obscure the record and seems to have tapped powerful connections in the process, as The Post's Marc Fisher detailed in March. The New York Military Academy, which Trump attended before college, moved its Trump files to a more secure location amid pressure from wealthy Trump allies. Around the same time that was revealed, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who flipped on Trump and pleaded guilty to several crimes, released a 2015 letter he wrote threatening Fordham University with legal action if Trump's records were released.

  The combined picture is one of a president who may not have been able to attend Penn or assemble anywhere close to such a fortune without familial connections.

• Jonathan Blitzer: Trump is poised to sign a radical agreement to send future asylum seekers to Guatemala.

• Frank Bruni: Joe Biden, Closet Republican: "He's the liberal Bob Dole, the looser Mitt Romney, the supposedly safe bet who's owed a shot." I'm not a Biden fan, but this is pretty unfair. For starters, it vastly understates how despicable the vast majority of Republican politicians have become -- ironically, a trait that Biden and Bruni seem to share. Biden has been a reasonably successful politician during the 40-year Reagan-Bush-Trump era, at least in part because he's often been willing to bend with the wind. That bending may have helped lend credence to the Republicans, and that's reason enough to doubt him as a candidate. Still, there's a big gap between Democrats like Biden and supposedly respectable Republicans like Dole and Romney. Bruni's not doing us any favors by papering over that chasm.

• Cristina Cabrera: Trump launches racist attack against 'progressive Democrat congresswomen'. Related: Peter Wade: Of course, Fox News delighted in Trump's racist tweet. The question Fox raised on the screen was "DEMOCRATS DIVIDED?" Actually, the reaction there was pretty united: it speaks volumes that the one thing every Democratic politician in America agrees on is that Trump is a racist, and that it's fair game to put it that explicitly.

• Jonathan Chait: President Trump says only Trump supporters deserve free speech.

• Ryan Devereaux: Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost was a member of secret Facebook group.

• Brian Feldman: FTC fines Facebook $5 billion over Cambridge Analytica scandal.

• Ryan Gallagher: How US tech giants are helping to build China's surveillance state. Same deal here: Middle East dictators buy spy tech from company linked to IBM and Google.

• Masha Gessen:

  • Donald Trump's "inoffensive" war on reality.

  • Mike Pompeo's faith-based attempt to narrowly redefine human rights.

• Tara Golshan:

  • Progressives just got a major win against Trump on Iran. Can they hold on to it?

  • Elizabeth Warren's immigration proposal goes much further than a pathway to citizenship.

• David A Graham: The best way to get fired by Trump: "The president's new strategy for getting rid of scandal-tainted aides: Quickly accept their resignations, but heap praise on them as they leave."

• Ryan Grim: Amy McGrath is challenging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. She's everything wrong with the Democratic Party. Yeah, but if I was misfortunate enough to be represented by McConnell, I'd cheerfully vote for her anyway. Note that she wound up correcting her faux pas on the Kavanaugh question.

• Neil Irwin: The Fed's new message: The economy can get a lot better for workers: "A rejection of what had been a consensus view of the relationship between the jobless rate and inflation."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • The case for Biden's 'electability' fades under scrutiny.

  • Trump caves on census citizenship question, but hints at broader fight ahead.

  • House votes to require congressional approval for war with Iran.

• Jen Kirby:

  • The UK ambassador to the US has resigned. Here's why it's a big deal. Follow up to Trump tweets "we will no longer deal" with UK ambassador after leaked cables. Richard Wolffe notes: Trump's spat with the UK reveals the bottomless depths of his insecurities.

  • Joe Biden wants to restore the pre-Trump world order.

  • Prosecutors are investigating whether GOP donor Elliott Broidy used Trump ties to profit.

• Michael Klare: It's always the oil: The missing three-letter word in the Iran crisis.

• Ezra Klein: What Donald Trump got right, and Justin Amash got wrong, about conservatives: "Conservatism is an identity more than an ideology, and Trump knows it."

• Carolyn Kormann: The case for declaring a national climate emergency.

  While Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez's calls for a climate-emergency declaration are not solving any problems, they are providing the language that needs to dominate the national conversation. And that matters. The United Nations recently warned that climate disasters are happening at the rate of one per week. This past June was the hottest on record. At the end of the month, a freak storm buried Guadalajara, Mexico, in hail, and on Thursday morning news outlets reported that freak hailstorms in Greece killed seven people. A month's worth of rain fell on Washington, D.C., in an hour on Monday (while Trump completely ignored the climate crisis in his speech on the environment), then more flash floods drowned New Orleans, which is now preparing for a tropical storm that could dump another twenty inches of rain and test the city's levees. The warming that happens over the next few decades could kill all of the world's coral reefs, lead to even more severe storms and wildfires, and set off the sorts of tipping points that most concern scientists -- specifically, the irreversible dissolution of the Greenland ice sheet, where, in June, a heatwave set off melting across half of its surface.

• Josh Kovensky: Rudy Giuliani, Joe Lieberman team up for Albania MEK conference.

• Eric Levitz: Why the GOP might learn to love putting price controls on drugs.

• German Lopez: How to dramatically reduce gun violence in American cities: Based on a new book by Thomas Abt: Bleeding Out.

• Robert Mackey:

  • Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden condemn Israeli Occupation, as young American Jews urge Democrats to press Isarel. Seems like this is significant, but note that Buttigieg went on to cite Ariel Sharon as saying the occupation must end.

  • Give Elizabeth Warren a break -- even Ariel Sharon said the Israeli Occupation had to end.

  • Trump takes the bait, lashing out at UK Ambassador whose private notes were leaked.

• Dylan Matthews: AOC's policy adviser makes the case for abolishing billionaires: Interview with Dan Riffle.

• Joan McCarter: How Trump swallowed the GOP whole and exposed Paul Ryan's craven moral failings. Refers to a forthcoming book by Tim Alberta: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. For more, see:

  • Josh Dawsey: New book details how Republican leaders learned to stop worrying and love Trump.

  • John Nichols: The Republicans who made Trump possible cannot remove the badge of shame.

  • Jennifer Szalai: 'American Carnage' shows how war between Republicans led to their peace with Trump. Ryan looms large in the book, so Trump's already singled him out for opprobrium.

  • Christian Vasquez: Trump: Republicans like Paul Ryan are 'weak, ineffective & stupid.'

  • Jonathan Chait: Trump: Paul Ryan was bribed to call me stupid.

• Rani Molla: Conservatives pretending to be suppressed by social media dominated social media.

• Suzanne Moore: Of course Boris Johnson wants a royal yacht. He's the king of fake-it-till-you-make-it.

• Dina Nayeri: Why they fear Ilhan Omar: "Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson don't think she's dangerous. They hate that she's full of potential."

• Anna North: Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta has no good answer for cushy Jeffrey Epstein plea deal. Acosta wound up resigning, after Trump swore, "I'm with him". For more, see:

  • Jane Coaston/Anna North: Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who is friends with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, explained.

  • Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman: Jeffrey Epstein was a 'terrific guy,' Donald Trump once said. Now he's 'not a fan.'

  • Michelle Goldberg: Acosta resigned. The Caligula administration lives on.

• Amanda Petrusich: Going home with Wendell Berry: Interview. Sample quote I should save and maybe use some time: "Every generation is a bridge between something that's past, and something that's coming."

• Charles P Pierce: Nancy Pelosi's leadership now constitutes a constant dereliction of duty. Pierce is the kind of pundit I'd expect to go to the mat defending Party leadership like Pelosi, so I'm impressed first of all that he snapped, second that he snapped this direction. What this shows is that AOC and her "gang of four" have struck a chord that extends even to middling Democrats. Maybe that's because they're scoring points while Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer, et al. look like mere bystanders. Another non-radical suddenly soured on Pelosi: Andrew Sullivan: Hey, Nancy Pelosi: Please stop coddling Donald Trump.

• Gareth Porter: Lies about Iran killing US troops in Iraq are a ploy to justify war.

• Andrew Prokop: Trump's census citizenship question fiasco, explained. Related: Michael Wines: The long history of the US government asking Americans whether they are citizens.

• Gabriela Resto-Montero:

  • Mayors and protesters remain defiant ahead of ICE raids: "You're going to have to come through us."

  • Mike Pence visits a crowded immigrant detention center: "This is tough stuff." More on this: Nicole Lafond: In 'tough' visit, Pence uses crisis he helped create to push immigration overhaul.

• David Roberts: Coal left Appalachia devastated. Now it's doing the same to Wyoming.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's latest press conference was a master class in gaslighting.

  • Trump's social media summit was a circus. Its aftermath was even worse.

  • Trump's latest morning of tweets was off the rails, even by his standards.

  • One day encapsulated everything that's wrong with Fox News.

• Matt Shuham: House report shines light on multiple infants under one separated from parents.

• Tierney Sneed: How Trump doubled down on the crazy claim he's immune from oversight.

• Paul Sonne/Karoun Demirjian/Missy Ryan: Sexual assault allegations complicate confirmation of Trump's nominee for military's No. 2 officer: Air Force Gen. John E Hyten, commander of US Strategic Command, nominated to be vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

• Matt Taibbi: Ross Perot had the last laugh. The business mogul and third-party presidential candidates (1992/1996) died last week, at 89.

• Alex Thompson: Elizabeth Warren shuns conventional wisdom for a new kind of campaign: Key sentence: "She's largely rejecting DC's consultant class."

• Marc Tracy: As the world heats up, the climate for news is changing, too.

• Alex Ward:

  • "Trump is quite easy to buy off": how Trump is putting American foreign policy up for sale: "Want to understand Trump's foreign policy? Just follow the money."

  • Biden releases video blasting "the Trump Doctrine" of foreign policy. Defines "five core elements of what Biden calls 'The Trump Doctrine'":

    1. Embrace dictators
    2. Threaten war
    3. Rip up international agreements
    4. Launch trade wars
    5. Embarrass the US

    Lots of problems here, starting with the assertion that what Trump's doing is coherent and consistent enough to imply a "doctrine" (especially when no such thing has been stated). He's pretty selective about which dictators he "embraces," favoring those who align with his worldview, especially those who cater to his personal finances. And while he has no personal interest in democracy, international law, and/or concern for human rights, he's willing to slander his enemies (and only his enemies) for their shortcomings there. Similarly, his treatment of international treaties and trade agreements is unprincipled, riding almost exclusively on his personal (and partisan) economic interest. He's a committed bully, and feels that by virtue of its wealth and power America is entitled to threaten and cajole the little countries around, but he has yet to act as recklessly as his rhetoric suggests. Of course, he's a huge embarrassment. But aside from being somewhat less of an embarrassment, one wonders what Biden would do differently. US foreign policy has been remarkably consistent across parties, both in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, as if presidents don't actually have many real options. In his long career, Biden has very dependably gone along with whatever the prevailing "wisdom" dictated, so there's little reason to think he won't continue to serve the same interests US foreign policy has long followed.

  • The US has a risky new plan to protect oil tankers from Iranian attacks.

• New leak claims Trump scrapped Iran nuclear deal 'to spite Obama'.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31726 [31702] rated (+24), 262 [260] unrated (+2).

Rated count down this week. Maybe I didn't focus well while Laura was in Boston, but it's also likely that coming up with a relative bounty of A- records had an effect: they always take more time. Also, I didn't take any dives into old music (the VSOP Quintet shows up in Napster's featured new jazz list, but with digital reissues I usually just cite the original release label/date -- and it wasn't good enough to inspire me to check out their other albums).

This is my first Music Week since Robert Christgau posted his final Noisey Expert Witness column, so it's fitting that I looked a little harder than usual for recent non-jazz. In this I was helped by Phil Overeem's halfway through 2019 list (Freddie Gibbs & Madlib, Peter Perrett, Billy Woods & Kenny Segal, Abdullah Ibrahim), and by Facebook comments from Dan Weiss (DaBaby, Open Mike Eagle, Gibbs again -- he's also big on Denzel Curry's Zuu, which I previously had at B+(**)). Most of the others were picked up by scrounging for new music on Napster.

The most controversial of these is probably Madonna's Madame X. Metacritic average is 70. Rob Sheffield wrote a 3-star pan at Rolling Stone, although it reads better than the rating. Spencer Kornhaber takes offense in The paradox of Madonna's gun-control music video. Took me a lot of plays before I recognized that the number of songs I was pleased to recognize exceeded the number of fingers I had available for counting. I have more doubts about the Peter Perrett album, but I gave How the West Was Won an A-, and this one hit the same pleasure spots. Makes me wonder if I underrated Special View (the 1979 Only Ones album), where I remembered his voice from.

I'll also note that I've given Wes's Best: The Best of Wes Montgomery on Resonance 3-4 plays with increasing pleasure. I'd like to review the albums it was selected from before doing the compilation, but the release schedule hasn't made that possible. Haven't played the Bill Evans compilation yet, but same considerations apply there. I've been wanting to hear those records ever since they came out, but probably wouldn't have bothered with the compilations had they not appeared in the mail. Also got a note in email today asking whether I've downloaded recent AUM Fidelity releases. I've looked for them on Napster, but didn't notice the email invites. I'll eventually dig them out, but if you want my attention, best way is still to send a CD.

There will be a new XgauSez out by Tuesday morning. I'm hope to get this post wrapped up before I take a good look at it, and I've been hobbled by Weekend Roundup running into overtime. Also in my input queue is a lengthy and quite extraordinary "Consumer Guide to Franco" that Joe Yanosik compiled and asked if I would publish. Expect that later this week.

New records reviewed this week:

• 75 Dollar Bill: I Was Real (2019, Thin Wrist): [r]: B+(***)
• JD Allen: Barracoon (2019, Savant): [r]: A-
• Gretje Angell: In Any Key (2018 [2019], Grevlinto): [cd]: B+(**)
• Blind Lemon Jazz: After Hours: New Pages in the American Songbook (2019, Ofeh): [cd]: B+(*)
• DaBaby: Blank Blank (2018, South Coast Music Group, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• DaBaby: Baby on Baby (2019, South Coast Music Group): [r]: B+(**)
• Open Mike Eagle: The New Negroes: Season 1 Soundtrack (2019, Comedy Central, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Freddie Gibbs & Madlib: Bandana (2019, Keep Cool/RCA): [r]: A-
• Jesca Hoop: Stonechild (2019, Memphis Industries): [r]: B+(*)
• Abdullah Ibrahim: The Balance (2019, Gearbox): [r]: B+(***)
• Mike LeDonne: Partners in Time (2019, Savant): [r]: B+(**)
• Madonna: Madame X (2019, Interscope): [r]: A-
• Buddy & Julie Miller: Breakdown on 20th Ave. South (2019, New West): [r]: B+(**)
• Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real: Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) (2019, Fantasy): [r]: B+(*)
• Willie Nelson: Ride Me Back Home (2019, Legacy): [r]: A-
• Peter Perrett: Humanworld (2019, Domino): [r]: A-
• Mette Rasmussen/Julien Desprez: The Hatch (2016 [2019], Dark Tree): [cd]: B+(**)
• Rebekah Victoria: Songs of the Decades (2018 [2019], Patois): [cd]: B+(*)
• Billy Woods & Kenny Segal: Hiding Places (2019, Blackwoodz Studioz): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Stan Getz: Getz at the Gate: The Stan Getz Quartet Live at the Village Gate Nov. 26 1961 (1961 [2019], Verve, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Sourakata Koité: En Hollande (1984 [2019], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [bc]: B+(**)
• Asnakech Worku: Asnakech (1975 [2018], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [bc]: B+(**)

Old music:

• The V.S.O.P. Quintet: Five Stars (1979, CBS/Sony): [r]: B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Rodrigo Amado/Chris Corsano: No Place to Fall (Astral Spirits)
• Peter Eldridge/Kenny Werner: Somewhere (Rosebud Music)
• Augie Haas: Dream a Little Dream (Playtime Music): August 30
• Rich Halley: Terra Incognita (Pine Eagle): August 9
• Jelena Jovovic: Heartbeat (self-released)

Weekend Roundup

Donald Trump's big July 4 "celebration" was the week's big non-event, so naturally garnered plenty of press attention. We'll collect the links here, to try to keep the silliness of the event from infecting everything else:

• Jonathan Freedland: Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. It's not enough just to laugh at him.

• Masha Gessen: Donald Trump's "inoffensive" war on reality.

• Philip Kennicott: Forget the tanks. Trump's violation of the Lincoln Memorial is the real offense.

• Osita Nwanevu: Cutouts of J.F.K., Jr., tanks, and adulation at Trump's "Salute to America".

• Adam K Raymond: What you missed at Trump's July 4th spectacular.

• Aaron Rupar: Trump's "Salute to America" speech wasn't as bad as some feared. But it was still weird. "Trump avoided politics, but his over-the-top glorification of the military felt more Moscow than Washington, DC."

Some scattered links this week:

• Ben Armbruster: The Trump administration is trying to make war with Iran inevitable: "We should view Iran's recent posturing for what it is: retaliation to the Trump administration's unnecessary and deliberate provocation." Related: Phyllis Bennis: If war breaks out with Iran, it won't be an accident.

• Dean Baker: Why aren't Democrats talking about ending patent-financed drug research? Good question, especially since "free market drugs are a really big deal." One point I'd stress more is that public funding of drug research is not only more efficient, and much more transparent, but that it would also demolish borders which impose artificial costs. Free market drugs would spread out research investment, allowing all to benefit.

• Julian Borger: Nuclear weapons: experts alarmed by new Pentagon 'war-fighting' doctrine.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • The latest jobs report is great news for Wall Street. Not so much for workers.

  • Reminder: Trump doesn't need to keep migrants in detention camps: "The administration has better options to enforce immigration and asylum laws."

  • A $15 federal minimum wage won't cost American jobs, new study says.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • How Hitler's rise to power explains why Republicans accept Donald Trump. Back when GW Bush was president and still popular, I bought a copy of Richard J Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich, figuring it might be interesting to compare the machinations of the Bush-Cheney regime to the ascent of the Nazi party in Germany. I never got around to reading that book, but that same question arose again with Trump, and this time I did some reading: Benjamin Carter Hett's The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, James Q Whitman's Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, and Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. The unstated assumption here is that similarities between now and early stages of Hitler's arc to disaster predict the path we will follow if we don't change direction. Given how bad things turned out, it's hard to be shocked by each unfolding step. But Chait makes a key point (leaving out the parentheticals):

    All this is to say that German conservatives did not see Hitler as Hitler -- they saw Hitler as Trump. And the reasons they devised to overcome their qualms and accept him as the head of the government would ring familiar to followers of the 2016 campaign. They believed the responsibility of governing would tame Hitler, and that his beliefs were amorphous and could be shaped by advisers once in office. They respected his populist appeal and believed it could serve their own ends. Their myopic concern with specifics of their policy agenda overcame their general sense of unease. Think of the supply-siders supporting Trump in the hope he can enact major tax cuts, or the social conservatives enthused about his list of potential judges, and you'll have a picture of the thought process.

  • Today in 'Donald Trump's campaign is a garbage fire'.

  • Sorry, Obama: Donald Trump is a populist, and you're not: Sorry, Chait, Trump isn't a populist either, even according to either of your dubious definitions:

    1. "The ideological definition of populist means traditionalist on social issues and interventionist on economic policy -- the opposite of libertarianism, in other words."
    2. "Populism can also be defined as a certain kind of political style. Populists believe the government has been captured by evil and/or corrupt interests, and that it can be recaptured by a unified effort by the people (or, at least, their people)."

    I've long identified with populism (see the little blurb top left: "An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music"), most likely because the political movement it refers to was most identified with the people and place I came from (three generations of Kansas farmers before my father got his job in a Wichita airplane factory). Chait's definitions are wrong for that particular movement, and do little to capture the populist impulse as it has periodically erupted in various situations since then. The essential demand of populism is that power serve the people. It's easy enough to show that liberal technocrats like Obama at best give lip service to real democracy, but reactionary demagogues like Trump veer even farther from the principle. They only appear "populist" to elitist pundits who regard the masses as nothing more than a seething horde of prejudices. The more general historical term for such demagoguery is fascism.

• Michelle Chen: AOC's Green New Deal is just the start. Next let's make it global.

• Jelani Cobb: The Supreme Court just legitimized a cornerstone element of voter suppression.

• Tom Engelhardt: War With . . . ?: "We're not the good guys: why is American aggression missing in action?"

  So here's the strange thing, on a planet on which, in 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to 149 countries, or approximately 75% of all nations; on which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside its own territory; on which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas; on which U.S. unmanned aerial drones conduct assassination strikes across a surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been fighting wars, as well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it chose to launch full-scale invasions of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), is it truly reasonable never to identify the U.S. as an "aggressor" anywhere?

  One should add that there are two major forms of aggression that aren't even being counted here: cyberwarfare and economic warfare in the form of sanctions.

• Garrett Epps: Where John Roberts is taking the court.

• Jeannie Suk Gersen: The Supreme Court is one vote away from changing how the U.S. is governed.

• Jeet Heer: Democrats don't need David Brooks: Response to Brooks' Dems, please don't drive me away.

• Umair Irfan: Restoring forests may be one of our most powerful weapons in fighting climate change: "Adding 2.2 billion acres of tree cover would capture two-thirds of man-made carbon emissions, a new study found." But we're still cutting down more trees than we plant -- especially in Brazil. See Alexander Zaitchick: Rainforest on fire.

• Jake Johnson:

  • 'We are in a climate emergency, America': Anchorage hits 90 degrees for the first time in recorded history. Meanwhile, France records all-time highest temperature of 45.9C (i.e., 114.6F).

  • After British commandos seize oil tanker, Iran accuses UK of committing 'maritime piracy' on behalf of US.

• Fred Kaplan: Bolton of Mongolia: "The national security adviser's banishment during Trump's big diplomatic weekend suggests his days may be numbered."

• Jen Kirby: Sudan's military and civilian opposition have reached a power-sharing deal.

• Gary Leupp: Thoughts on the impromptu Kim-Trump summit: Regarding the US media: "One doesn't hear common sense: that this was a rational friendly gesture towards a country that Trump has rationally decided not to attack." Related: Christine Ahn: It's time to formally end the Korean War.

• Eric Levitz: Trump's Fed nominee pledges to serve as a partisan hack: Judy Shelton, who established her credentials as a partisan back in 2010 when she lobbied for raising Fed interest rates when unemployment topped 10 percent, but insists that we should lower them now that unemployment rates are at a record low. The difference, of course, is the party affiliation of the president.

• Robert Lipsyte: How the worst values of sports are taking over America:

  A half-century ago, the sporting Cassandras predicted that the worst values and sensibilities of our increasingly corrupted civic society would eventually affect our sacred games: football would become a gladiatorial meat market, basketball a model of racism, college sports a paradigm of commercialization, and Olympic sports like swimming and gymnastics a hotbed of sexual predators.

  Mission accomplished!

  The Cassandras then forecast an even more perverse reversal: our games, now profaned, would further corrupt our civic life; winning would not be enough without domination; cheating would be justified as gamesmanship; extreme fandom would become violent tribalism; team loyalty would displace moral courage; and obedience to the coach would supplant democracy.

  Okay, I think it's time for a round of applause for those seers. Let's hear it for Team Trump!

• PR Lockhart: The Alabama woman indicted after a miscarriage will not be prosecuted.

• Robert Mackey: Stephanie Grisham, new White House Press Secretary, has already been caught lying.

• Dylan Matthews: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake: This questions some of my longest and most deeply held beliefs, but for the record:

  1. Abolution would have come faster without independence.
  2. Independence was bad for Native Americans.
  3. America would have a better system of government if we'd stuck with Britain.

• Yascha Mounk: The more you watch, the more you vote populist: Another entry in the "television rots your brain" sweepstakes, using Italy and Silvio Berlusconi as the example.

• Ella Nilsen: Republicans dominate state legislatures. That decides political power in America.

• Anna North: The legal battle over the Trump administration's "domestic gag rule," explained.

• Kelsey Piper: George Soros and Charles Koch team up for a common cause: an end to "endless war": "The controversial billionaire philanthropists are launching a new anti-interventionist think tank": The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, named for John Quincy Adams ("who said in an 1821 speech that America 'goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy'").

• Robert Reich: There is no 'right' v 'left': it is Trump and the oligarchs against the rest: Actually, that's the very definition of right v left. Such naivete Makes me doubt Reich his own title for the otherwise reasonable Avbolish the Billionaires!

• Aaron Rupar: The viral video of Ivanka Trump at the G20 perfectly captures the problem with nepotism.

• Raja Shehadeh: State of exception: Review of Noura Erakat: Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, asking "what role has local and international law played in the Occupied Territories?"

• Emily Stewart: Did Justin Amash leave the GOP, or did the GOP leave him? The only Republican member of Congress willing to consider impeachment spared the Party the embarrassment of his presence, writing an op-ed announcing his exit from the party. Trump cheered him on:

  Great news for the Republican Party as one of the dumbest & most disloyal men in Congress is "quitting" the Party.

  Related: Bianca Quilantan: Justin Amash: GOP was broken even before Trump's presidency.

• Nicholas Thompson: Tim Wu explains why he thinks Facebook should be broken up. I will add that buying competitors to put them out of business has been a very business practice for quite a while now. The startup I worked for from the late 1980s (Contex Graphic Systems) was eventually sold off to a competitor (Barco), which shut it down within a year. Other antitrust matters: Steven Overly/Margaret Harding McGill: Google's onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare.

• Anya van Wagtendonk: Two earthquakes shook southern California this week. More could come, but predicting them isn't easy.

• David Wallace-Wells:

  • The uninhabitable Earth: "Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak -- sooner than you think."

  • The man who coined the term 'global warming' on the worst-case scenario for Planet Earth: Interview with Wallace Smith Broecker.

  • 'The models are too conservative': Paleontologist Peter Ward on what past mass extinctions can teach us about climate change today.

• Alex Ward:

  • Biden believes NATO will cease to exist in Trump's second term. That's a bit far-fetched. And Biden thinks this is a reason to vote for him instead of Trump?

  • Violent protests erupt in Israel over police shooting of unarmed Ethiopian teen.

  • Trump calls Afghanistan "the Harvard of terrorists," says he'll leave intel assets there.

  • Why Iran just violated part of the 2015 nuclear deal.

  • The one big benefit to Trump's diplomacy with Kim Jong Un: "Minimizing the chance of war is nothing to scoff at."

• Peter Wehner: The deepening crisis in evangelical Christianity: "Support for Trump comes at a high cost for Christian witness." Wehner has been described as "an outspoken Republican and Christian critic of the Trump presidency." But the article is less interesting for what he fears Trump idolatry is doing to evangelical Christianity that for its description of how deranged Trump's evangelical fans have become. Wehner has a recent book: The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

• Philip Weiss: Biden often praises Israeli racists -- but don't expect Kamala Harris to call him out.

• Brett Wilkins: A brief history of US concentration camps.

• Thomas Wright: Trump couldn't ignore the contradictions of his foreign poicy any longer: "The president moves to straighten out his own foreign policy -- and leaves his hawkish national security adviser on the sidelines."

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Democratic candidates' school integration plans, explained: "Bernie Sanders and Julián Castro have one, Kamala Harris doesn't really."

  • Democrats are learning the wrong lesson from Donald Trump: He ran as a moderate -- and it worked." A moderate, that is, only compared to his fellow Republican candidates, who weren't moderate by any measure. Moreover, since his election, he has regularly surrendered his promises to Republican orthodoxy, except in cases like immigration where he is the lunatic fringe. But Yglesias didn't write this piece to change our perception of Trump. He wrote it to disparage those Democrats who see Trump's extremism as reason to driving the Democratic platform further to the left.

• Gary Younge: Britain is run by a self-serving clique. That's why it's in crisis.

• Matthew Zeitlin:

  • The racial roots of Trump's anti-trade agenda: "The Trump campaign's trade policy can't be disentangled from its rhetoric on race and immigration."

  • There's a huge debate over how the very poorest are doing. There's no debate about whether food stamps help them.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31702 [31671] rated (+31), 260 [264] unrated (-4).

Noisey has evidently decided to drop Robert Christgau's Expert Witness column, the last one running on Friday. Christgau tweeted:

I do this for money as well as love. So just in case this is the last Expert Witness not just at Noisey, which I'm sad to announce it is, but anywhere, it sticks to albums I'm way late on and albums I wanted to be sure to weigh in on. Enjoy. Consume, even.

Obviously, I should make it a priority to round up these latest Consumer Guide reviews and stuff them into the database. Christgau's first Consumer Guide column was published July 10, 1969, so he's ten days short of fifty years. The whole list is here.

Twice before, Michael Tatum responded to lapses in Christgau's review schedule, first by debuting then relaunching his A Downloader's Diary column. As it happens, he had a new column, his 50th, ready to roll last week when he read Christgau's news, and revised his introduction. (Christgau started the parenthetical numbering scheme, but gave it up after reaching 52 in 1975. I also used it for my Recycled Goods columns.)

I managed to check out a few of Tatum's picks this week, but had previously given A- grades to Big Thief, Coathangers, Control Top, Dave, Billie Eilish, Little Simz, and Jamila Woods -- also a B+(***) to Stella Donnelly, B+(**) to Vampire Weekend. I haven't, however, checked any of his Trash picks.

Streamnotes appeared last week, so this starts a new month.

Don't have anything more to add -- at least anything fit to print. Bad day for me.

New records reviewed this week:

• Ilia Belorukov/Gabriel Ferrandini: Disquiet (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Lewis Capaldi: Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent (2019, Capitol): [r]: B+(*)
• Charly Bliss: Young Enough (2019, Barsuk): [r]: A-
• Sylvie Courvoisier/Mark Feldman: Time Gone Out (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(*)
• Caroline Davis: Alula (2017 [2019], New Amsterdam): [r]: B+(*)
• Whit Dickey/Kirk Knuffke: Drone Dream (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Sharman Duran: Questioning Reality (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: Be Known: Ancient/Future/Music (2019, Spiritmuse): [r]: B+(***)
• Damon Locks/Black Monument Ensemble: Where Future Unfolds (2019, International Anthem): [bc]: B+(*)
• Jan Maksimovic/Dimitrij Golovanov: Thousand Seconds of Our Life (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Jenna McLean: Brighter Day (2018 [2019], Moddl): [cd]: B+(*)
• Gabriele Mitelli/Rob Mazurek: Star Splitter (2019, Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Monopiece/Jaap Blonk: Monopiece + Jaap Blonk (2019, Shhpuma): [r]: B
• Angelika Niescier/Christopher Tordini/Gerald Cleaver: New York Trio Feat. Jonathan Finlayson (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Evan Parker/Paul G. Smyth: Calenture and Light Leaks (2015 [2019], Weekertoft): [bc]: B+(**)
• Evan Parker & Kinetics: Chiasm (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: A-
• Caroline Spence: Mint Condition (2019, Rounder): [r]: A-
• Aki Takase: Hokusai: Piano Solo (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(**)
• AJ Tracey: AJ Tracey (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Gianluigi Trovesi/Gianni Coscia: La Misteriosa Musica Della Regina Loana (2019, ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• G. Calvin Weston/The Phoenix Orchestra: Dust and Ash (2019, 577): [r]: B+(*)
• Wschód: Wschód (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Chance the Rapper: 10 Day (2011 [2019], self-released): [r]: A-
• Detail: Day Two (1982 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(**)
• Kang Tae Hwan/Midori Takada: An Eternal Moment (1995 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Sunny Murray/Bob Dickie/Robert Andreano: Homework (1994 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(**)
• Horace Tapscott With the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Great Voice of UGMAA: Why Don't You Listen? Live at LACMA 1998 (1998 [2019], Dark Tree): [cd]: A-
• David Wertman Sun Ensemble: Earthly Delights (1978 [2019], BBE)

Old music:

• Peter Kowald/Kent Kessler/Fred Lonberg-Holm: Flats Fixed (1998 [2014], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ola Onabulé: Point Less (Rugged Ram): August 30
• Mette Rasmussen/Julien Desprez: The Hatch (Dark Tree)
• Horace Tapscott With the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Great Voice of UGMAA: Why Don't You Listen? Live at LACMA 1998 (Dark Tree)

Weekend Roundup

I paid rather little attention to the Democratic Party presidential debates this week: Laura watched them, I overheard some bits, saw some more (not so fairly selected) on Colbert and Myers, and read a few odd things. Some links here, including a few non-debate ones that highlight various candidates, but no attempt at comprehensive:

• Kate Aronoff: Jay Inslee just dropped the most ambitious climate plan from a presidential candidate. Here's who it targets.

• Zack Beauchamp: 4 winners and 2 losers from the two nights of Democratic debates: For instance, he counts "Bernie Sanders' ideas" as a winner, but Sanders himself as a loser.

• Robert L Borosage: The second Democratic debate proved that Bernie really has transformed the party.

• Ryan Bort and others: A report card for every candidate from the first Democratic debates.

• Laura Bronner and others at FiveThirtyEight: The first Democratic debate in five charts.

• David Brooks: Dems, please don't drive me away. My gut reaction is that there's nothing I feel less interest in than mollifying the vain egos of "Never Trump" conservatives. I'd take his polling reports with a grain of salt ("35 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, 35 percent call themselves moderate and 26 percent call themselves liberal"), and also doubt his self-characterization as "moderate," but I'll quote his stab at articulating the "moderate" viewpoint:

  Finally, Democrats aren't making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump. They are good at pointing to Trump's cruelties, especially toward immigrants. They are good at describing the ways he is homophobic and racist. But the rest of the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.

  A decent society rests on a bed of manners, habits, traditions and institutions. Trump is a disrupter. He rips to shreds the codes of politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity, and so renders society a savage world of dog eat dog. Democrats spend very little time making this case because defending tradition, manners and civility sometimes cuts against the modern progressive temper.

  Actually, the further left you go the more sharply moralistic the critique of Trump becomes, but despite his "savage world of dog eat dog" line Brooks can't hear this because he only recognizes morality as the imposition of conservative order, where inequality is a given. Brooks' "moderates" are closet conservatives. While there are many Democrats (not just moderate- but also liberal-identified) who agree with most of Brooks' verities ("politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity"), Brooks' knee-jerk anti-left instincts prevent him from joining any democratic movement he can't dictate to. In particular, he cannot conceive of the need to lean a bit harder to the left than he'd like in order to get back to the center he so adores. [PS: Just found this, but not yet interested enough to read: Benjamin Wallace-Wells: David Brooks's conversion story.

• Alexander Burns/Jonathan Martin: Liberal Democrats ruled the debates. Will moderates regain their voices? Pieces like this are annoying, and are only likely to become more so, and more strident, as the election approaches. A better question is: will "moderates" find anything constructive to say? Their most succinct declaration so far is Biden's assurance that "nothing would change" under a Biden presidency. I suppose that's more honest than the "hope and change" Obama campaigned on in 2008, let alone Bill ("Man from Hope" Clinton's populist spiel 1992, but at least Clinton and Obama waited until after the election to hand their administrations over to crony capitalists and sell out their partisan base. Left/liberals dominate the debates because: the voters recognize that most Americans face real and immediate problems; the left/liberals have put a lot of thought into how to deal with those problems, and the only credible solutions are coming from the left; having been burned before, the party base is looking not just for hope/change but for commitment. It's going to be hard for "moderates" to convince people to follow without promising to lead them somewhere better.

• John Cassidy: Joe Biden's faltering debate performance raises big doubts about his campaign.

• Alvin Chang: Kamala Harris got a huge number of people curious about Joe Biden's busing record.

• Zak Cheney-Rice: Kamala Harris ends the era of coddling Joe Biden on race.

• Maureen Dowd: Kamala shotguns Joe Sixpack. Favorite line here, and you can guess the context: "In my experience, candidates with advisers who belittle them on background do not win elections." I rarely read Dowd, finding her longer on snark than analysis, but you may enjoy (as I did) her Blowhard on the brink. Again, you can guess the context.

• David Frum: The second debate gives Democrats three reasons to worry: The view of a Trump hater who hasn't really changed any other of his right-wing views: "the weakness of former Vice President Joe Biden"; "the weakness of the next tier of normal Democratic candidates -- especially Harris -- in the face of left-wing pressure"; "the unwillingness and inability of any of the candidates -- except, quietly, Biden -- to defend their party's most important domestic reform since the Lyndon Johnson administration: Obamacare."

• Abby Goodnough/Thomas Kaplan: Democrat vs. Democrat: How health care is dividing the party: "An issue that united the party in 2018 has potential to fracture it in 2020." What united the party was the universally felt need to defend ACA against Republican attempts to degrade and destruct it. Looking forward, I think there are very few Democrats who don't see the main goal as comprehensive health care coverage, as a universal right. The differences arise over how to get there from where we are now. One way to do that would be to expand Medicaid and private insurance subsidies under the ACA, and one thing that would help with the latter would be to offer a non-profit "public option" to ensure that insurance markets are competitive. One way to provide that public option would be to let people buy into America's already-established public health insurance option: Medicare. Many candidates have proposals to allow some people to do that. I expect that a Democratic Congress and President to move quickly on implementing some of those proposals to shore up ACA. It's not the case that proponents of a true government-run single-payer system will cripple ACA to force us to take their preferred route (e.g., Bernie Sanders voted for ACA). But there is one major problem with ACA: the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot force everyone to participate in a scheme that requires some people to buy private insurance. That's a bad ruling, but fixing the Supreme Court is likely to be a harder sell than Medicare-for-All -- especially given that the latter promises better coverage for less cost than any private/public mix of competing insurance plans. You may wonder why some Democrats are against Medicare-for-All. The main reason is they believe the insurance companies are too powerful to fight, but one thing you'll notice is that the people saying that (e.g., Ezekiel Emmanuel) are mostly beneficiaries of insurance industry payola. That preference for ACA over Medicare-for-All is seen as a sign of "moderation" only shows that "moderates" don't have the guts, the stamina, or even the imagination to fight for better solutions. Put Democrats who stand up for their principles and their people in the White House and Congress, and the "moderates" will start compromising in the direction of progress. Until then, why should we listen to anything they say? [PS: For some diagramming, see: Dylan Scott: The 2 big disagreements between 2020 Democratic candidates on Medicare-for-all.]

• Jeet Heer: Elizabeth Warren's ideas dominated the debate more than her stage presence.

• Umair Irfan: Climate change got just 15 minutes out of 4 hours of Democratic debates.

• Caitlin Johnston: Kamala Harris is everything the establishment wants in a politician. Proof of point is no matter how hard the author tries to attack Harris, she only winds up making her look more formidable (which is something we desperately crave, isn't it?).

• Sarah Jones: Elizabeth Warren thinks we need more diplomats.

• Jen Kirby: Foreign policy was a loser in the Democratic debates.

• Michael Kruse: The 2008 class that explains Elizabeth Warren's style.

• Dylan Matthews and other Vox writers: 4 winners and 3 losers from the second night of the Democratic debates.

• Anna North: Kirsten Gillibrand gave her opponents a history lesson on abortion politics at the debate.

• Ilana Novick: Why are Democrats afraid to end private health insurance?

• Andrew Prokop: This wasn't the way Joe Biden wanted the first debate to go.

• Gabriel Resto-Montero: Democrats rally behind Kamala Harris following Donald Trump Jr.'s "birther-style" tweet.

• Frank Rich: Kamala Harris's debate performance should scare Trump.

  There may be no word that Trump fears more than "prosecutor," and no professional expertise that the Democratic base is more eager to see inflicted on him. At a juncture when Trump defends himself against a charge of rape by sliming women who are not his "type," Harris's emergence could not be better timed. She is not his "type," heaven knows, and, not unlike her fellow San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi, she is not a "type" he knows how to deal with at any level, whether on Twitter or a debate stage.

• David Rothkopf: Hey Dems, take it from this ex-centrist: We blew it. Author is one of the guy who made the Clinton Administration a money-making machine for Wall Street, so that's where he's come from.

  As the first round of debates among Democratic candidates for president clearly showed, the intellectual vitality of the Democratic Party right now is coming from progressives. On issue after issue, the vast majority of the candidates embraced views that have been seen as progressive priorities for years -- whether that may have been a pledge to provide healthcare for all or vows to repeal tax cuts benefiting the rich, whether it was prioritizing combating our climate crisis or seeking to combat economic, gender, and racial inequality in America.

  Indeed, as the uneven or faltering performance of its champions showed, it appears that the center is withering, offering only the formulations of the past that many see as having produced much of the inequality and many of the divisions and challenges of today.

  During the debates and indeed in recent years, it has been hard to identify one new "centrist" idea, one new proposal from the center that better deals with economic insecurity, climate, growth, equity, education, health, or inclusion. You won't find them in part because the ideas of the center are so based on compromise, and for most of the past decade it has been clear, there is no longer a functioning, constructive right of center group with which to compromise.

• Aaron Rupar: The Democratic debates helped demonstrate the dubiousness of online polls: "Gabbard and Yang were the big winners -- on Drudge, at least."

• Dylan Scott: Kamala Harris's raised hand reveals the fraught politics of Medicare-for-all. This refers to one of the more weaselly moments in the two debates, where the moderators asked for a show of hands of those who would "abolish private health insurance." The only candidates who raised their hands were Bill de Blasio, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. The framing was designed to split the ranks of Democrats who believe health care should be a universal right, but have different ideas about how to get that from where we are now: creating a public option under Obamacare would help, and/or allowing individuals or various groups to buy into Medicare, are approaches that have broad support. Moreover, nearly everyone who supports those schemes (and for that matter who opposes them) believes that a public insurance program would ultimately drive for-profit private insurance companies out of the arena, even if they were never explicitly prohibited. But the other thing that's confusing about the question is that many (if not most) of the current users of Medicare have private supplemental insurance policies, which pick up most of the co-payments and shortages that current Medicare sticks you with. Sanders' plan would fill in those holes, truly eliminating the need for supplemental insurance, but to most people the words "Medicare for all" leaves open a role for some kind of private supplemental insurance.

• Danny Sjursen:

  • The Tulsi effect: forcing war onto the Democratic agenda. Misleading to say "she is the only candidate who has made ending the wars a centerpiece of her campaign," as several others are leaning more or less strongly in that direction, but her scrap with Tim Ryan is worth recounting. I don't give her military background anything like the special weight she claims. I'd rather people not have to learn lessons the hard way, but it says something when they do.

  • The Democratic Party can't escape its own militarism: Mostly on Beto O'Rourke, who seems to be hitting this theme hard. Sjursen, like Andrew Bacevich, is an ex-military anti-war conservative, which gives him some peculiar opinions (like favoring bringing back the draft) and no sympathy whatsoever for liberal Democrats. I think at least part of the reason so many of the latter feel so warm and cozy with veterans is that they're desperately trying to bring back a social ethic of public service and common good, and they think that the most undeniable example of that is the people who join the military. I doubt that's a general rule, but there are people who fit that bill, and Democrats have been eager to run them for office.

• David Smith: No country for old white men: Kamala Harris heralds changing of the guard. Cute title, but unfair to group Biden and Sanders in the photo. Harris attacked the former, but held her hand up with Sanders on the public health care insurance question. I rarely get bent out of shape when people generalize about "old white men" (or "straight male Caucasian") but here it ignores the fact that Biden and Sanders have virtually nothing else in common, and that Sanders has had to work very hard and overcome a lot of adversity to earn a spot on that stage (wasn't Biden first inept run for president in 1988?). Even today he's more likely to be attacked for who he is than anyone else in the candidate roster (not that anyone makes a point of his being Jewish). The only reason he didn't make Smith's "standouts" list -- other than prejudice -- is that he's been outstanding for so long that reporters are starting to take him for granted.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • A quiet Joe Biden debate moment that deserved more attention: "He cited a bad deal with Mitch McConnell as a legislative success story." This was the 2012 "fiscal cliff" resolution where the Democrats, with Biden playing a major role, gave in to making most of the 2001 Bush tax cuts permanent while cutting spending through a "sequester" and extending unemployment benefits. Michael Bennet, "one of only two Senate Democrats to actually vote no on the deal," described it as "a complete victory for the Tea Party." [PS: I tried looking up the vote on this, and found 3 D's opposed: Bennett, Carper, and Harkin. Surprised that Sanders voted yea, after initially filibustering -- his long speech was published in book form as The Speech. Five R's voted against, including Tea Party favorites Mike Lee and Rand Paul, not disproving Bennet's characterization so much as reminding you that even in victory the Tea Party was insatiable.] For more on this: Ryan Grim: Joe Biden says he can work with the Senate. The last time he tried, Mitch McConnell picked his pockets badly. By the way, Grim also wrote: Joe Biden worked to undermine the Affordable Care Act's coverage of contraception.

  • Elizabeth Warren proved she's ready for the big show.

• Li Zhou: 14 political experts on why the first Democratic debates were history-making.

You might also find these links useful:

• Vox's giude to the 2020 presidential candidates.
• Vox's guide to where 2020 Democrats stand on policy.

One of my right-wing Facebook friends posted a meme from Fox News with a picture of Bill de Blasio and a quote: "There's plenty of money in this world. There's plenty of money in this country, it's just in the wrong hands. We Democrats have to fix that." Only thing my friend ever posted that I agreed with, and this time completely. The comments validated my suspicion that the poster expected readers to react with horror. I was tempted to comment, or to just give it a big love emoji, but lost the opportunity.

Beyond the candidates and debates, some scattered links this week:

• Josh Barro: Democrats obsess over health insurers when they should fight doctors and hospitals. Sure, if it was just about costs, and if you could tackle the problem on all fronts at once. I often worry that people think that health care will be fixed as soon as single-payer is implemented, but that's really just the first step -- the low-lying fruit, expendable because insurance companies are parasitical obstacles to health care. On the other hand, lots of countries adopted single-payer insurance while leaving doctors and hospitals to operate as private businesses, and all of those countries achieved significant cost savings (at least relative to previous cost trends). E.g., Switzerland had the second most expensive health care system in the world (12% of GDP, vs. 14% for the US at the time) when they implemented single-payer. A decade later they still had the second most expensive system, but it had held at 12%, while the US system expanded to gobble up close to 20% of GDP.

• Andy Beckett: The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism.

• Maysam Behravesh: 'Alarm bells': Saudi Arabia's nuclear ambitions cast shadow over the region.

• Charles M Blow: Is Trump a rapist?

• Miranda Bryant: Alabama: pregnant woman shot in stomach charged in fetus's death. Related: Katha Pollitt: Marshae Jones is proof pro-lifers don't care about life. Greg Magarian commented on Facebook:

  Alabama (1) imposes excessive criminal liability on (2) an African-American woman for (3) the death of her fetus from (4) shooting by a "law-abiding gun owner" whom the state isn't charging due to (5) its stand-your-ground law. Congratulations, Alabama -- you've hit right-wing lunatic bingo.

• Lee Camp: Trump's military drops a bomb every 12 minutes, and no one is talking about it.

• Jonathan Chait: Trump thinks Putin's attack on 'western-style liberalism' was about California.

  Trump's riff encapsulates the comic and sinister aspects of his political rise. As demographic change has made the U.S. population more progressive, Republicans have embraced more authoritarian methods to preserve their minority rule. . . . But Trump, rather than being grateful for their efforts to create a rationale for his authoritarianism, is completely ignorant of them. His contempt for democratic norms is sub-ideological, a pure product of his narcissistic fear of disobedience and innate belief in natural hierarchy. He hates democracy deep in his soul, but does not understand why.

• Sahil Chinoy: What happened to America's political center of gravity?

• Stephen F Cohen: Will US elites give détente with Russia a chance? No other piece I've seen on this meeting got behind the dumb/vile things Trump said to Putin about election hijinkss and fake news, and Putin's comments about "Western liberalism." E.g., Fred Kaplan: Trump's dictator envy isn't funny anymore.

• Chas Danner:

  • Everything we know about Trump's DMZ meeting with Kim Jong-un: Late-breaking news, so I'm not clear on this, but if Trump's finally found a way to offer at least some sanctions relief without requiring total North Korean capitulation, this is good news. Some more links:

    • Michael Crowley/David E Sanger: This North Korea nuclear deal would halt new weapons but initially keep arsenal intact.

    • Cristina Cabrera: Trump took Fox News Tucker Carlson, not John Bolton, to North Korea. "Meanwhile, Bolton was shipped off to Mongolia over the weekend." Cabrera also wrote this unrelated nugget: Ex-Michigan Governor tied to Flint water scandal named Harvard Fellow. That's Rick Snyder. The announcement read: "We are excited that he will be joining the Taubman Center and confident that he will bring tremendous value to us and our students."

    • Peter Wade: Tucker Carlson on North Korea: 'To lead a country, it means killing people': Dude's trying to make excuses for Kim Jong-un, or maybe for Donald Trump, or maybe for several others in the neo-fascist strongmen mutual admiration society, but there are countries where political leaders don't kill people, even with legal "due process."

    • Uri Friedman: The normalization of meeting Kim Jong Un.

    • Robin Wright: Trump's curious rendezvous with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ.

  • Trump's big tariff threat against China is officially a flop.

  Laura Tillem took exception to Elizabeth Warren's tweet on Trump's DMZ meeting. Warren wrote: "Our President shouldn't be squandering American influence on photo ops and exchanging love letters with a ruthless dictator. Instead, we should be dealing with North Korea through principled diplomacy that promotes US security, defends our allies, and upholds human rights." I'm not so bothered here, because in the end she does call for principled diplomacy, and I believe that she could do that if given the chance. I'm a bit bothered by the clichéd "US security/allies/human rights" litany, but I think she's smart enough to realize that no human right is as important as avoiding nuclear war, and the only real way to do that is to reduce conflict and normalize relations (something that the US has been loathe to do for nearly 70 years). The first line is more troubling, as it appears to prejudice the diplomacy against success (something baked into all previous American negotiation efforts). In particular, there is nothing diplomatic about referring to Kim as a "ruthless dictator." The rest is pretty ridiculous: Trump isn't squandering anything; his schmoozing is a limitless resource, and it's not as if there's anything better he can do with his time. This is simply his way of doing diplomacy, and while it's not very constructive or effective, there's no reason to think that turning it over to underlings like Mike Pompeo is going to work any better. Trump can plausibly claim to have made more progress at reducing North Korea's nuclear threat posture than any of his predecessors, precisely because he stopped treating Kim with personal contempt and let himself be seen jerking him off in public. It hasn't been pretty, but it's a good deed -- practically the only one Trump can claim.

• Emma Green: Imagining post-Trump nationalism: "The small conservative magazine First Things aims to reclaim what has become a dirty word in the Trump era." Not clear what that word is -- the first one in quotes is "bigotry," which doesn't quite seem right, although one could argue that the point of First Things is to defend the God-given right of Christian conservatives to attack those they see as unfit and unworthy -- a practice we often describe as bigotry. But then not much comes clear when conservative intellectuals try to ruminate on their conceits and prejudices.

• Mark Hannah/Stephen Wertheim: Here's one way Democrats can defeat Trump: be radically anti-war.

• Jemele Hill: Megan Rapinoe is on to him, and Trump can't stand it: "In his rambling screed against the soccer star, the president revealed a lot about his worldview."

• Umair Irfan: 113 degrees in France: why Europe is so vulnerable to extreme heat.

• Carolyn Kormann: How rogue Republicans killed Oregon's climate-change bill. Related: Zoë Carpenter: Behind Oregon's GOP walkout is a sordid story of corporate cash.

• Scott Lemieux: 5 takeaways from the Supreme Court's just-ended term: "Liberals should brace themselves for the next one."

• George Monbiot: Shell is not a green saviour. It's a planetary death machine.

• Gabriel Resto-Montero: Federal judge blocks new stretch of the US-Mexico border wall.

• Adam Serwer:

  • Roberts's rules of misrepresentation: "The chief justice has enshrined bad-faith argumentation as the legal strategy most likely to succeed at the Supreme Court."

  • The children America throws away. This starts with a story of a student whose ticket to Harvard was rescdinded after discovering he had published racial slurs. Right-wing pundits are outraged. This gets into a discussion of why we're so unforgiving, although one could just as well write about why power is wielded so capriciously. This article led me to Alex Pareene: Teenage pricks: Trumpism's brand of boy power, which in turn brought me to Tom Carson: Empire's children: What's behind the American cult of eternal adolescence.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The youngest American adults are the least nationalistic.

Finally, some book reviews/notes:

• Gary J Bass: Democracy in crisis: Review of Larry Diamond: Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. Russia = bad. China = bad. America is a little too innocent for its own good. He even uses Clinton's "indispensable nation" quote.

• David A Bell: Lost Bearings: "Adam Gopnik and the search for a 21st-century liberalism."

• Eric Foner: Alan Brinkley's visions of liberalism.

• Randall Kennedy: What, exactly, do we mean by 'democracy' anyway?: Review of Astra Taylor: Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone.

Miscellaneous Notes

One of my right-wing Facebook friends posted an image from Fox News with a picture of Bill de Blasio and a quote: "There's plenty of money in this world. There's plenty of money in this country, it's just in the wrong hands. We Democrats have to fix that." Nothing more, as if that's self-evidently absurd or insane. But I agree with de Blasio, completely.

Greg Magarian, on Facebook, along with this link:

Alabama (1) imposes excessive criminal liability on (2) an African-American woman for (3) the death of her fetus from (4) shooting by a "law-abiding gun owner" whom the state isn't charging due to (5) its stand-your-ground law. Congratulations, Alabama -- you've hit right-wing lunatic bingo.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive.

Music: current count 31677 [31641] rated (+36), 264 [256] unrated (+8).

Spent most of the week exploring the Corbett vs. Dempsey catalogue, newly available on Bandcamp. I've been wanting to do that for a while now -- even wrote them an unanswered letter after Amarcord Nino Rota and others placed strong in last year's Jazz Critics Poll. I even bought a couple of John Corbett's recent books (although not yet Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music, which looks like it parallels my own 1970s experience -- except that he covers a lot of jazz I only got to 20-30 years later). Corbett previously compiled the Unheard Music Series that Atavistic ran in the early 2000s, which brought 50-60 avant-jazz albums out from deep obscurity. Atavistic started in the 1990s as an avant-rock label (big names there were Swans and Lydia Lunch) before they picked up the Vandermark 5, which pulled them more into jazz. Not sure what happened to them, but most of their records are on Napster, so I complemented my CvD dive with a few Unheard titles (Tom Prehn, with one title on each and nothing else anywhere, got me going that way).

The result is a week which is very slanted toward avant-jazz, and mostly old music at that. I went with the CD release dates to decide which CvD records qualified as recent (2018 or later releases, with 2008 the dividing line between new and old music). I went ahead and included records I got to on Monday after my initial freeze Sunday night, figuring it's a short (4-week) month, and it would be nice to keep all this avant-jazz together. That added one more A- record, by Rodrigo Amado. I noted that Amado has another new record out, a duo on Astral Spirits. Their records are on Bandcamp, and I've reviewed a fair number of them there, but recently they've cut them back to 2 cuts each, so I usually don't bother with them, as they're not really reviewable as such. I made an exception here, hedging a bit based on 2/5 cuts. I decided to mark records like that "**?" in my annual list. When/if I get the chance to listen further, I'll revise.

New records reviewed this week:

• Rodrigo Amado/Gonçalo Almeida/Onno Govaert [The Attic]: Summer Bummer (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
• Rodrigo Amado/Chris Corsano: No Place to Fall (2014 [2019], Astral Spirits): [bc]: B+(**)
• Albert Beger Quartet: The Gate (2017 [2019], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Hamid Drake/Joe McPhee: Keep Going (2018, Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Rosana Eckert: Sailing Home (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B
• Mats Gustafsson/Jason Adasiewicz: Timeless (2017 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)
• Dom Minasi/Juampy Juarez: Freeland (2018, Cirko): [r]: B+(*)
• Thurston Moore/Frank Rosaly: Marshmallow Moon Decorum (2012 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)
• Matt Olson: 789 Miles (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Marlene Rosenberg: MLK Convergence (2016 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(***)
• Ken Vandermark/Mats Gustafsson: Verses (2013 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Amarcord Nino Rota (1981 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Steve Lacy: Stamps (1977-78 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2CD): [bc]: B+(***)
• Joe McPhee/Mats Gustafsson: Brace for Impact (2007 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Fred Anderson Quartet: Dark Day + Live in Verona (1979 [2001], Atavistic Unheard Music Series, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Fred Anderson Quartet: The Milwaukee Tapes Vol. 1 (1980 [2000], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Beresford/Tristan Honsinger/David Toop/Toshinori Kondo: Double Indemnity/Imitation of Life (1980-81 [2001], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(*)
• The Peter Brötzmann Trio: For Adolphe Sax (1967 [2002], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(*)
• The Peter Brötzmann Sextet & Quartet: Nipples (1969 [2000], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(***)
• The Peter Brötzmann Sextet/Quartet: More Nipples (1969 [2003], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(***)
• Günter Christmann/Torsten Müller/LaDonna Smith/Davey Williams: White Earth Streak (1983 [2002], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B
• Guillermo Gregorio: Otra Musica: Tape Music, Fluxus & Free Improvisation in Buenos Aires 1963-70 (1963-70 [2000], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B
• Mats Gustafsson: Torturing the Saxophone (2008-13 [2014], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)
• Staffan Harde: Staffan Harde (1968-71 [2015], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(**)
• Steve Lacy/Steve Potts Featuring the Voice of Irène Aebi: Tips (1979 [2015], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B-
• Jimmy Lyons: Push Pull (1978 [2016], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Joe McPhee Quintet/Ernie Bostic Quartet: Live at Vassar 1970 (1970 [2011], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)
• Joe McPhee: The Willisau Concert (1975 [2017], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Joe McPhee: Variations on a Blue Line/'Round Midnight (1977 [2012], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(**)
• Joe McPhee: Glasses (1977 [2012], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Joe McPhee: Alone Together: The Solo Ensemble Recordings 1974 & 1979 (1974-79 [2015], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Joe McPhee & André Jaume: Nuclear Family (1979 [2016], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Louis Moholo/Larry Stabbins/Keith Tippett: Tern (1982 [2003], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: A-
• Pipeline: Pipeline (2000 [2013], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Tom Prehn Quartet: Axiom (1963-66 [2015], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Tom Prehn Quartet: Prehn Kvartet (1967 [2001], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(***)
• Phillip Wilson: Esoteric (1977-78 [2016], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Gretje Angell: In Any Key (Grevlinto): July 25
• Blind Lemon Jazz: After Hours: New Pages in the American Songbook (Ofeh): July 1
• Mark Doyle: Watching the Detectives: Guitar Noir III (Free Will)
• Pablo Embon: Reminiscent Moods (self-released): July 8
• Bill Evans: Smile With Your Heart: The Best of Bill Evans on Resonance (Resonance)
• Lafayette Gilchrist: Dark Matter (self-released): July 19
• Jazz Piano Panorama: The Best of Piano Jazz on Resonance ([2019], Resonance)
• Wes Montgomery: Wes's Best: The Best of Wes Montgomery on Resonance (Resonance)
• Sing a Song of Jazz: The Best of Vocal Jazz on Resonance (Resonance)
• Zhenya Strigalev/Federico Dannemann: The Change (Rainy Days)
• Rebekah Victoria: Songs of the Decades (Patois)

Weekend Roundup

The week's biggest, and most ominous, story was the Trump administration's decision to launch a "limited" missile attack on Iran, then the reversal of those orders minutes before execution. Here are some links:

• Michael D Shear with others:

  • Strikes on Iran approved by Trump, then abruptly pulled back.

  • Trump stopped strike on Iran because it was 'not proportionate'.

• Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman/Thomas Gibbons-Neff: Urged to launch an attack, Trump listened to the skeptics who said it would be a costly mistake: E.g., Tucker Carlson, who pointed out that "the same people who lured us into the Iraq quagmire 16 years ago are demanding a new war, this one with Iran."

• Zack Beauchamp: John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are the hawks behind Trump's Iran policy.

• Peter Beinart: Bolton keeps trying to goad Iran into war.

• Barbara Boland: Media, war boosters slam Trump for 'chicken' response to Iran: "The hawks are in their element today, screeching for air strikes and promising cake walks."

• Max Boot: In Iran crisis, our worst fears about Trump are realized.

• Marjorie Cohn: Iran had the legal right to shoot down US spy drone.

• David Ignatius: Iran must escape the American chokehold before it becomes fatal: Not someone I look to for sane opinions, but this offers a sense of how Trump's administration has cornered Iran, leaving their leaders with few (if any) good options, and thereby ratcheting up pressure for greater violence. I didn't say "war" there because that implies that war is a future threat. Ignatius makes clear that the US has already started war with Iran, but for now is playing a "long game" by using ever-tightening sanctions to weaken and finally strangle Iran's leadership.

• Jen Kirby: US-Iran standoff: a timeline: Start with Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal on May 8, 2018, and Pompeo's "12 demands for a new agreement for Iran" (May 21, 2018), and the imposition of a new round of sanctions, aimed at applying "maximum pressure" to cripple Iran's economy.

• Taly Krupkin:

  • Iranian officials issue warnings to the US as Trump announces new sanctions.

  • Iranian officials issue warnings to the US as Trump announces new sanctions.

• Jim Lobe: Trump has a $259 million reason to bomb Iran: An accounting of campaign donations from known Iran hawks.

• Aaron David Miller/Richard Sokolsky: Why war with Iran is bad for Trump -- and America.

• Trita Parsi: America's confrontation with Iran goes deeper than Trump.

• Elham Pourtaher: For Iranians, the war has already begun: "In Iran, US sanctions are producing a level of suffering comparable to that of wartime."

• Jason Rezaian: Iran is outmatched in its latest game of rhetorical chicken. But it might be too late.

• Greg Sargent: Trump's Iran reversal exposes one of his most dangerous lies.

• Matt Taibbi: Next contestant, Iran: Meet America's permanent war formula.

• Michael G Vickers: To avoid a wider war, Iran must be deterred with limited US military strikes: Argues that Trump should be ordering more air strikes, citing Reagan in the late-1980s as an example of forceful deterrence (e.g., shooting down civilian Iranian airliners).

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

  • Trump called off a military strike against Iran. The US targeted its computer systems instead. Contrast this with Iranian cyberattacks against the US are on the rise. Both sides at least given some consideration to consequences when it comes to shooting off missiles. Iran, for example, stressed than when they shot down a US drone, they allowed a manned aircraft accompanying it to pass safely. But neither side seems to worry about cyberwar turning into full-scale war. That strikes me as reckless ignorance: the fact is we know very little about the risks and consequences of attacking and terrorizing computer networks. It also seems pretty obvious that when the US attacks Iran, Russia, China, and others, the response will be counterattacks against civilian computers. As no one has more potential targets for cyberattacks, cyberwarfare puts Americans at far greater risk than anyone else. Given this, you would think that it would be in the interest of most Americans to negotiate protocols against cyberwarfare, but the war planners can't think that far ahead. They'd rather just press what they see as carefree advantages, regardless of future blowback.

  • After cancelling a retaliatory strike on Iran, Trump warns: "If they do something else, it'll be double".

• Andrew Ward:

  • Why Iran is fighting back against Trump's maximum pressure campaign: Interview with Afshon Ostovar.

  • Iran shoots down US military drone, increasing risk of war: Update of the previously unreported story: "US flies military drones over Iran, increasing risk of war."

  • 9 questions about the US-Iran standoff you were too embarrassed to ask: The questions aren't that unreasonable, although the answers could be sharper. Ward is only partly right that the run-up to war against Iran is different from Iraq. With Iraq, Bush led the propaganda campaign from the top, with his entire administration in lockstep, and they had very ambitious goals of invading, seizing power, and reconstructing Iraq under US control. Under Trump, the pro-war faction is smaller and, of necessity, more furtive and disingenuous. They haven't articulated clear goals (least of all a plan to invade and seize power -- Iran is, after all, a much more daunting target than Iraq and Afghanistan, and neither of those adventures are remembered as successes). Their more limited goal has been to sow discord and cultivate enmity, applying pressure to increase tension and provoke reaction in the hope that incidents like we've seen this past week will convince Trump to escalate hostilities.

  • Trump plans to nominate Mark Esper, a former combat veteran and lobbyist, as Pentagon boss: "He was a former classmate of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo [at West Point]." And, more recently, a lobbyist for Raytheon, and continues as an advocate of high-tech weapons systems aimed at China and Russia.

• Brett Wilkins: The exceptionally American historical amnesia behind Pompeo's claim of '40 years of unprovoked Iranian aggression'.

• Robin Wright: What will follow Trump's cancelled strike on Iran?

• Ardeshir Zahedi/Ali Vaez: The US should strive for a stable Iran. Instead, it is suffocating it.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem: Benjamin Netanyahu just unveiled Israel's newest town: "Trump Heights".

• Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman: Trump campaign to purge pollsters after leak of dismal results.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: Congress has set the record for longest stretch without a minimum wage increase.

• Igor Derysh: Joe Biden to rich donors: "Nothing would fundamentally change" if he's elected.

• Glynnis Fawkes: Nineteenth-century novels, with better birth control.

• Tara Golshan:

  • Bernie Sanders's free college proposal just got a whole lot bigger: "Sanders wants to cancel all student loan debt."

  • Are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders the same? The debate, explained. Not all that satisfactorily, but the two candidates offer a lesson in how distinct political traditions can converge on similar answers given our current set of political and economic problems. Early in the 20th century, people who thought that the system had to be changed could be divided up as progressives and socialists. (The populist party pre-dates this split, and had elements that went both ways, but isn't a very useful distinction these days. Later liberals liked to malign populists as bigots, which is why the term is sometimes applied to bigots like Trump today, who lack any affinity to populism.) With her focus on expanding the middle class and her near-obsession with policy reforms, Warren fits pretty clearly into the progressive tradition. Sanders, on the other hand, identifies with the working class, and still likes the idea of revolution (always qualified as "political" -- i.e., non-violent). Still, the practical effect of either winning is likely to be very similar, both because they agree on the key problems (much more equality, an end to war), and because their scope will be limited by more conservative Democrats in Congress. I should probably add that within this household, Warren is deemed less trustworthy on war and the military -- she did, after all, vote for Trump's military spending increase -- which is something that presidents have a lot of leeway to act directly on. Golshan doesn't see that much of a gulf there but, well, this is something we're pretty sensitive to.

• Umair Irfan:

  • Elizabeth Warren thinks corruption is why the US hasn't acted on climate change.

  • Trump's EPA just replaced Obama's signature climate policy with a much weaker rule: Obama's "Clean Power Plan" attempted to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. New one is called "Affordable Clean Energy Plan." It's more affordable to power plant owners, by letting them burn dirtier fuel and release more carbon into the atmosphere.

• Rebecca Jennings: Taylor Swift's "You Need to Calm Down" wants to be a queer anthem. It also wants to sell you something. You might find the video link inspiring, or at least amusing. I noted the "Get a Brain Moran" sign -- a thought I've had before, although to be fair the Jr. Senator from KS has more on top than most of his caucus (e.g., just voted against arms sales to Saudi Arabia).

• Sarah Jones: E. Jean Carroll: "Trump attacked me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman." He's just one of many featured in Carroll's My list of hideous men. Related: Anna North: E. Jean Carroll isn't alone. That matters. Also: Laura McGann: Donald Trump is trying to gaslight us on E. Jean Carroll's account of rape.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Another SCOTUS precedent falls. Could Roe v Wade be next?

  • Trump is helping Democrats mobilize against him.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi dies after collapsing in courtroom.

  • Patrick Shanahan withdraws from consideration as Trump's secretary of defense: For reasons more bizarre than the obvious reason for rejecting Shanahan: his career as a Boeing shill. Next in line is Mark Esper, comparably corrupt, his allegiance to team Raytheon.

• Sam Knight: The empty promise of Boris Johnson: A portrait: "The man expected to be Britain's next Prime Minister makes people in power, including himself, appear ridiculous, but that doesn't mean he'd dream of handing power to anybody else." Hard to believe that whoever wrote that line wasn't also thinking of Trump, who may not be as sui generis as he'd like to think. Article mentions that Johnson is one of ten candidates in the race for Conservative Party leader. That field has been reduced to two now: Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, with Johnson still heavily favored. [PS: Or maybe not: Rebecca Mead: Will Boris Johnson's "late-night altercation" sink his bid to become Prime Minister?.

• Ari Kohen: The GOP doesn't actually care if you call them 'concentration camps': "This bad faith criticism isn't based on a great deal of care for the feelings of Jews or a deep understanding of the Holocaust." Related:

  • Caitlin Dickerson: 'There is a stench': no soap and overcrowding in detention centers for migrant children.

  • Isaac Chotiner: Inside a Texas building where the government is holding immigrant children

  • Masha Gessen: The unimaginable reality of American concentration camps.

  • Anna Lind-Guzik: I'm a Jewish historian. Yes, we should call border detention centers "concentration camps."

  • EJ Montini: Joe Arpaio ran a self-proclaimed 'concentration camp' for years. Where was GOP outrage?

  • Andrea Pitzer: 'Some suburb of Hell': America's new concentration camp system.

  • Peter Beinart: AOC's generation doesn't presume America's innocence, where he notes that "for the first time in decades, the left is mounting a serious challenge to American exceptionalism." He admits that the 1960s new left did that too, even citing Noam Chomsky's 1969 book American Power and the New Mandarins, but he doesn't seem to have registered that Chomsky has written more than 100 books since then. [PS: for his latest, see Noam Chomsky: The real election meddling isn't coming from Russia.] While the Vietnam War did much to make Americans aware that their government habitually lied about its good intentions and covered up its misdeeds, even then one could not avoid awareness that the government had systematically oppressed Native Americans and African-Americans ever since the first Europeans arrived, or that the US had waged brutal wars of conquest against Mexico and the Philippines. Indeed, the historiography on all of these issues has grown steadily since the 1960s. Beinart's assertion only makes sense if, like him, you assume that the leading lights of "the left" in recent decades were the "liberal interventionists" of the Clinton and Obama administrations: people like Madeline Albright, Samantha Power, and Beinart himself (temporarily, at least, as when he wrote his first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror). Between Vietnam and the War on Terror, many Americans worked hard to forget their "barbaric" past (as Beinart quotes George McGovern putting it), which is what allowed the Clintons and Obama to try to reclaim the lost moral high ground. That those claims increasingly ring hollow is not just because the left has resurfaced as a force that can be talked about. It's also because the right, especially since Cheney started bragging about "taking the gloves off," has become perversely proud of American atrocities.

• Eric Levitz: 10 takeaways from the Times' interview with 21 Democratic candidates: My takeaway from the article is "Elizabeth Warren is definitely to the right of Sanders on foreign policy."

• David Lightman/Ben Wieder: Trump states and rural areas grab bigger chunk of transportation grant funds: Something reassuring about this bit of old fashioned pork barrel politics. I don't even mind the increased rural road funding, although the cuts elsewhere probably affect more people.

• PR Lockhart: Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates gives Mitch McConnell a thorough history lesson on reparations. Related: Here's what Ta-Nehisi Coates told Congress about reparations.

• Lili Loofbourow: The genius of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

  Sanders didn't just defend the president from the effects of his own statements; she offered herself as a kind of prosaic presence whose function it was to act like anything Trump did, no matter how shocking, was no big deal. She exemplified the stolid approval Trump wanted for everything from family separations to tax cuts for the rich. As her tenure ends, we can now see how much her reliance on reassuring phrases like "make a determination" -- and unblinkingly calling lies differences of opinion and hush payments not worth discussing -- provided a kind of muted laugh track to the terrible show being forced upon America. Rather than laugh at unfunny jokes, she loyally normalized despicable conduct.

• David Nakamura/Holly Bailey: 'There's no accountability': Trump, White House aides signal a willingness to act with impunity in drive for reelection.

• Ella Nilsen: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders had 2 very different answers to Trump's official 2020 campaign launch.

• Alex Pareene: Give War a Chance: "In search of the Democratic Party's fighting spirit." Title is a sick joke -- Democrats have given war plenty of chances, and for a long while counted warmaking as one of their "core competencies" (as the MBA's like to put it). Subtitle is closer to the intended mark, but I still don't care for the imagery. (Fittingly, Elizabeth Warren, author of books like A Fighting Chance and This Fight Is Our Fight, is featured in the graphic.) What should be clearer is that Democrats need to find and stick to some principles ("worth fighting for" is a cliché hard to avoid here), instead of always trying to broker compromises with an opposing party that seeks nothing less than abject surrender. Pareene makes Biden out to be the poster boy for gutless, guileless surrender -- a task that Biden himself made easier last week in touting his ability to "work with" rabid racists like James Eastland and Herman Talmadge (see Jeffrey St. Clair for "a taste of the rhetorical stylings of James Eastland"; he also quotes a Biden "love letter" thanking Eastland for his help "to bring my ANTIBUSING legislation to a vote").

• Kelsey Piper: Death by algorithm: the age of killer robots is closer than you think.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • "We r all on the same team": read Sean Hannity's chats with Paul Manafort.

  • Trump's 2020 message: "Depraved" Democrats "want to destroy you": "Trump's polling isn't great. So he's using the one play he knows." No doubt there are people within the right-wing echo chamber who will embrace this message, but I have to believe that this kind of blanket slur campaign, especially pitched at such a hysterical level, won't travel well, and will start to make people question the sanity of the Trump campaign.

  • Joe Biden's controversial comments about segregationists and wealthy donors, explained.

• Frances Robles/Jim Rutenberg: The evangelical, the 'pool boy,' the comedian and Michael Cohen: How Jerry Falwell Jr. fell in love with Donald Trump.

• Aja Romano: Curtis Flowers was tried 6 times for the same crime. The Supreme court just reversed his conviction. Related: Jeffrey Toobin: Clarence Thomas's astonishing opinion on a racist Mississippi prosecutor.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump is trying to rewrite the history of his family separation policy before 2020.

  • Trump postpones ICE's planned deportation raids in 10 big cities.

  • Trump blindsides ICE with mass deportation announcement on eve of reelection rally.

  • Sean Hannity just demonstrated how not to interview President Trump.

  • Trump's interview with George Stephanopoulos, explained: "Donald Trump doesn't normally talk to journalists willing to challenge him. His big ABC interview illustrated why."

  • Trump's historic one-day fundraising haul, explained: "Trump raised nearly $25 million on Tuesday. That's a ton of money -- but it comes with some caveats." His days of "self-funding" are long gone. He may not know much, but it's hard not to credit him with a vision and knack for turning a political campaign into a massive funding resource.

  • Trump's 2020 kickoff made it seem as though he's running against Hillary Clinton: And why not, if she's the only Democrat he can beat?

  • Trump still refuses to admit he was wrog about the Central Park 5: Or anything else, for that matter -- especially if race is involved.

• Timothy Smith: How Republicans stopped worrying about the right to vote: "The GOP launched a four-pronged plan in 2008 to undercut the American tenet of 'one person, one vote.' We're now entering the final phase."

• Tierney Sneed: Will a Trump trade move create an election mess for overseas US voters? That's actually just one aspect of Trump plans to withdraw from the Universal Postal Union.

• William Spriggs: We're less prepared for the next recession than we were for the last: You may recall that the economy entered a steep decline early in the 2008 recession very similar to the one in 1929, but unlike the Great Depression, the free-fall was stopped by "automatic stabilizers" like the unemployment compensation system that saved many families from ruin. Those automatic stabilizers have not been maintained during the post-2008 austerity, and that will let the next collapse hit even harder.

• Matt Stieb: Six takeaways from Hope Hicks's House Judiciary testimony: One I believe is "Hicks said Trump's 'Russia, if you're listening' line was a joke."

• Matt Taibbi: Trump kicks off re-election campaign: Get ready for 'Billionaire Populist II: The Sequel'.

• David Wallace-Wells: Disaster upon disaster: Sample paragraph, relatively close to home (and by no means the most harrowing):

  Last month, in the Midwest, 500 tornadoes swept through the region in just 30 days -- an average of 20 every day. The region is still underwater from historic flooding earlier in this spring, with some places deluged by seven feet of water and others issuing multiple disaster declarations in a single week. The Mississippi River has been flooding for three straight months; in Baton Rouge, the river rose past "flood stage" the first week of the year, according to Weather.com, 'and has been above that threshold ever since." In March, major flooding began in Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska -- and in Nebraska alone, damages are expected to reach $1.3 billion. The whole Midwest, the New York Times wrote, "has been drowning," and farmers are so far behind in their planting -- with only a fraction of corn and soybean crops actually in the ground -- that the whole year's harvest is in peril.

• Li Zhou:

  • Kamala Harris wants to give every unemployed worker $8,000 for job training: Not a bad idea, but a special case stopgap, compared to universal right to free college education (including remedial high school and trade schools) would be a much broader approach, perhaps combined with extending unemployment benefits for full-time students.

  • The recent Republican blowback to trump judicial nominees, explained: Basically, some of Trump's nominees aren't bad enough for them.

Felt like making a rare political tweet today (tortured into fitting their character count limit, depending heavily on the reader's "cultural literacy"):

Another way Trump isn't Hitler: you can't imagine the latter announcing then postponing Kristallnacht two weeks. Real fascists made the trains run on time. Poseurs and wannabes flirt with evil, then make nice, like "good people on both sides." Vile, at least.

Other tweets I felt like saving:

• @nycsouthpaw I wonder at Trump's dismal career. Assault after assault. Fraud piled upon fraud. An endless succession of victims churned up behind him like a ship's wake. Somehow cutting the web of consequence that ensnares and stops most bad men in time like a hull through so much blue water.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31641 [31614] rated (+27), 256 [251] unrated (+5).

Didn't expect to get to much music this week, but the planned project fell through. Responded to that by feeling listless and depressed, so not much of a recovery. Spent a lot of the time I did use on the Moserobie package, the extra plays merely confirming my first pass impressions. Finally started in on Weekend Roundup early Friday afternoon, and finally felt like I was getting something done -- wouldn't call it mindless, but the task posed enough structure to keep me going through the motions. The result was the most personally satisfying Weekend Roundup all year, plus I ticked off enough records to get close to my 30-per-week target.

The Jamila Woods album was recommended by Michael Tatum, who should have a new Downloader's Diary out this week. I gave it a spin when I first heard about it, and probably would have filed it as a mid-B+, but decided to hold off a while. Returned to it mid-week, and 3-4 plays got better and better. Followed up on some Downbeat jazz reviews -- nothing very good there -- and landed on a couple of Bandcamps that looked promising: Fundacja Sluchaj (François Carrier has been very good at sending me records, so I held off on his record there, but eventually couldn't wait), Unseen Rain (Dom Minasi sent me mail about his record there, and I found more), and Corbett vs. Dempsey (Jon Corbett's obscure reissue label, one I've long wanted to be able to cover). All typically offer the chance to listen to full albums, which makes them reviewable. (Many other Bandcamps have dropped down to a sample cut or two, which makes them unusable for reviews -- that's the main reason I miss more Ken Vandermark albums than I hear these days.) More on the CvD next week, and probably for several weeks to come.

Spoke too soon about NoBusiness dropping me, as I got a big package early last week. The Sam Rivers set was the one I had heard about, so I jumped on it first. Would have been a high B+ had I used their Bandcamp, but having the CD and booklet encouraged me to play it a few extra times.

I also looked up what I've been missing from Intakt -- two monthly packages so far, so four releases -- but nothing looked critical right now (with Fred Frith's 3-CD live set the most imposing). They have a Bandcamp as well, but recent releases only have a couple of cuts available. I think the full records are on Napster -- at least the old ones are -- so I'll catch up there, but no rush.

The Team Dresch reissues were all I got from looking at Pitchfork's Best New Music page -- something I rarely check, but Woods and Denzel Curry are also listed there, along with a Don Cherry reissue of an album (Brown Rice) I gave a B+ to long, long ago, and Slowthai's Nothing Great About Britain (a high B+ last week).

New batch of Robert Christgau's XgauSez questions and answers up tonight. Still hope to launch something like that myself.

New records reviewed this week:

• Fabian Almazan Trio: This Land Abounds With Life (2018 [2019], Biophilia): [r]: B+(*)
• Brad Barrett/Joe Morris/Tyshawn Sorey: Cowboy Transfiguration (2018 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(***)
• François Carrier/Alexander Hawkins/John Edwards/Michel Lambert: Nirguna (2017 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj, 2CD): [bc]: B+(***)
• Trish Clowes: Ninety Degrees Gravity (2019, Basho): [r]: B+(**)
• Anat Cohen Tentet: Triple Helix (2019, Anzic): [r]: B+(**)
• Denzel Curry: Zuu (2019, Loma Vista): [r]: B+(**)
• Fennesz: Agora (2019, Touch): [r]: B
• Mark Guiliana: Beat Music! Beat Music! Beat Music! (2019, Motéma): [r]: B
• Per 'Texas' Johansson/Torbjörn Zetterberg/Konrad Agnas: Orakel (2018 [2019], Moserobie): [cd]: A-
• Angelique Kidjo: Celia (2019, Verve): [r]: B+(*)
• La La Lars: La La Lars II (2019, Headspin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Matt Lavelle Quartet: Hope (2019, Unseen Rain): [r]: B+(**)
• Xavier Lecouturier: Carrier (2018 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B
• Greta Matassa: Portrait (2019, Origin): [cd]: B
• Dom Minasi: Remembering Cecil (2019, Unseen Rain): [bc]: B+(***)
• Nobject [Martin Küchen/Rafal Mazur/Vasco Trilla]: X-Rayed (2018 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(**)
• RPM: Just Like Falling (2019, Unseen Rain): [bc]: B+(**)
• Erik Skov: Liminality (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Ståhls Trio: Källtorp Sessions: Volume One (2017-18 [2019], Moserobie): [cd]: B+(***)
• Mary Stallings: Songs Were Made to Sing (2019, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(*)
• Jamila Woods: Legacy! Legacy! (2019, Jagjaguwar): [r]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Agustí Fernández With William Parker & Susie Ibarra: One Night at the Joan Miró Foundation: July 16th 1998 (1998 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: A-
• Beaver Harris-Don Pullen 360° Experience: A Well Kept Secret (1984 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Sam Rivers Trio: Emanation (1971 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
• Team Dresch: Personal Best (1994 [2019], Jealous Butcher, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Team Dresch: Choices, Chances, Changes: Singles & Comptracks 1994-2000 (1994-2000 [2019], Jealous Butcher): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The Attic: Summer Bummer (NoBusiness)
• Albert Beger Quartet: The Gate (NoBusiness)
• Whit Dickey/Kirk Knuffke: Drone Dream (NoBusiness): cdr
• Kang Tae Hwan/Midori Takada: An Eternal Moment (1995, NoBusiness)
• Jan Maksimovic/Dimitrij Golovanov: Thousand Seconds of Our Life (NoBusiness)
• Jenna McLean: Brighter Day (Moddl)
• Sunny Murray/Bob Dickie/Robert Andreano: Homework (1994, NoBusiness)
• Sam Rivers Trio: Emanation (1971, NoBusiness)

Weekend Roundup

Quite a bit below. After a very depressing/blasé week, I got an early start on Friday, and started feeling better -- not for the nation or the world, but pleased to be occupied with some straightforward, tangible work. One thing I can enjoy some optimism about is the Democratic presidential campaign. I expected it to be swallowed whole with the sort of vacant, pious clichés that Obama and the Clintons have been campaigning on for decades now, but what we're actually seeing is a lot of serious concern for policy. The clear leader in that regard is Elizabeth Warren, and of course Bernie Sanders has a complete matching set with if anything a little more courage and conviction, but I've run across distinct and refreshing ideas from another half-dozen candidates. I haven't noticed Biden rising to that challenge yet. He remains the main beneficiary of as fairly widespread faction that would be quite satisfied with their lives if only the Republican threat would subside in favor of the quiet competency Obama brought to government. Personally, I wouldn't mind that either, but I recognize that has a lot to do with my age. Young people inhabit a very different world, one with less opportunity and much graver risks, so platitudes from America's liberal past don't do them much good, or offer much hope. They face real and growing problems, and not just from Republicans (although those are perhaps the hoariest). Talking about policy actually offers them some prospect that faith alone can never fill. And sooner or later, even Biden's going to have to talk about policy, because that's where the campaign is heading.

This could hardly offer a starker contrast to the 2016 Republican presidential primary, where there was virtually no difference regarding policy -- just minor tweaks to each candidate's plan to steer more of the nation's wealth to the already rich, along with a slight range of hues on how hawkish one can be on the forever wars and how racist one can be when dealing with immigrants and the underclass. The real price of entry wasn't ideas or commitment. It was just the necessity to line up one or more billionaire sponsors -- turf that credibly favored Trump as his billionaire/candidate were one. The fact that Cruz and Kasich folded when they still had primaries they could plausibly have won is all the proof you need that the financiers pulled the strings, and as soon as they understood that Trump would win the nomination, they understood that he was as good for their purposes as anyone else, so they got on board.

Democrats may have a harder time finding unity in 2020, because their candidates are actually divided on issues that matter. On the other hand, they are learning to discuss those issues rationally, especially the candidates who are pushing the Overton Window left. Even if they wind up nominating some kind of centrist, that person is going to be more open to solutions from the left, and that's a good thing because that's where the real solutions are. Franklin Roosevelt wasn't any kind of leftist when he was elected in 1932, and his famous 100 days were all over the map, but he was open to trying things, and quickly found out that left solutions worked better than conservative ones. We're not quite as mired in crisis as America was in 1932, but it's pretty clear that catastrophe is coming if Trump and the Republicans stay in power. The option for 2020 is whether to face our problems calmly and rationally with deliberate policy choices or to continue to thrash reflexively and chaotically. There's no need to imagine how bad the latter may be, because Trump's illustrating it perfectly day by day.

Some scattered links this week:

• Muhammad Idrees Ahmad: Bellingcat and how open source journalism reinvented investigative journalism.

• Eileen Appelbaum: Private equity pillage: grocery stores and workers at risk. I first noticed this as a twitter thread, but the article goes into a lot more detail (while including all the cartoons). The article focuses on food retailers, but if you want a quick rule-of-thumb, whenever you read about a familiar company filing for bankruptcy, you can be pretty sure there's a private equity fund behind it that has already sucked the firm dry of assets and piled up unsupportable debt. Private equity firms -- you may recall that's how Mitt Romney got so rich, not that having a rich and famous father didn't give him a leg up -- are a plague, especially on American workers. Some policy wonks should come up with a program to put them out of business. One idea here would be to allow bankrupted companies to be reorganized as employee-owned, writing down their PE debt, with public loans to recapitalize the company.

• Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman: Trump campaign to purge pollsters after leak of dismal results.

• Ross Barkan: Don't bother replacing Sarah Sanders -- there is no point. I figured I should offer something to mark the passing of Trump's second press secretary, but found very little that captures the true banality she brought to such a thankless and hopeless job. Failing that, this will have to do. Although I did also find: Luke O'Neil: Tweets, lies and the Mueller report: Sarah Sanders' lowest moments. On the other hand, Trump seems to think she has a future: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Governor of Arkansas? It's possible.

• John Cassidy: The Stephanopoulos interview is another fine mess for Trump.

• Jonathan Chait: Trump: witness to my crime can't testify, but trust me he's lying: That would be former White House counsel Don McGahn, who Robert Mueller interviewed at length.

• Sarah Churchwell: 'The Lehman Trilogy' and Wall Street's debt to slavery: How to get rich in the 1840s, and how to get richer after that stopped working.

• Iyad el-Baghdadi: The princes who want to destroy any hope for Arab democracy: Trump's best buds in "Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are backing military leaders who kill demonstrators.".

• Tom Engelhardt: If Donald Trump is the symptom . . . then what's the disease? Reflects on how Trump was elected based on a widespread fear of decline, economic as well as military, only to accelerate that decline, taking much of the planet with him. Some other recent TomDispatch posts:

  • William Astore: The dark side of air power: "Ten tenets of air power that I didn't learn in the Air Force."

  • David Bromwich: What it means to be "great" on a planet going down: Author of a new book (out June 25), American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us, which notes that "the political conditions of the present crisis were put in place over fifty years ago, with the expansion of the Vietnam War and the lies and coverups that brought down Nixon" -- and doesn't skip the contributions of later Democrats.

  • James Carroll: The 12 days of bombing that never end (for me).

  • Rebecca Gordon: Of crimes and pardons: "Clemency for the lowly, free passes for the mighty." Previously wrote the major book on this subject: American Nuremberg: The US Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (2016).

  • Laura Gottesdiener: Two Iraqi peace activists confront a Trumpian world.

• Dennis Etler: Getting Chian wrong, yet again: Reviews a Council of Foreign Relations report entitled "Trump's Foreign Policies are Better Than They Seem," so yeah, they have lots of examples. Also see: Michael Klare: Bolton wants to fight Iran, but the Pentagon has its eye on China. Pentagon strategists have long liked to promote conflicts with Russia and China, as they help fund their dreams of high-tech weapons systems that never get tested, because wars with nuclear powers like China and Russia are still unthinkable. Interesting that Klare's next book also looks at highly speculative Pentagon funding: All Hell Breaking Loose: Why the Pentagon Sees Climate Change as a Threat to American National Security. Without such threats, and the misunderstandings and myths they are based on, one might realize that such arms spending is unnecessary and, even worse, dangerous.

• Tara Golshan: Congress's high-stakes budget fight to avert an economic crisis, explained.

• Jeff Goodell: The world's most insane energy project moves ahead: the Carmichael coal mine, in Australia, controlled by Adani Group (of India).

• Lloyd Green: The Best People review: how Trump flooded the swamp: On Alexander Nazaryan's new book, The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington (out June 18), about "the scandals, the incompetence, the assault on the federal government, the bungled attempts to impose order on an administration lost in a chaos of its own making." Green also reviewed Michael Wolff's recent dirt-dishing Siege: Trump Under Fire: Siege review: Michael Wolff's Trump tale is Fire and Fury II -- fire harder. Related: Robert Reich: Welcome to Trump's corrupt state -- the Star Wars cantina of world politics.

• Nick Hanauer: Better schools won't fix America: "Like many rich Americans, I used to think educational investment could heal the country's ills -- but I was wrong. Fighting inequality must come first."

• Mehdi Hasan: Saudi Arabia may execute teenager for his protests -- including when he was 10.

• David Hearst: Why I'm optimistic about the 'deal of the century': Not because he thinks Jared Kushner's "peace plan" is viable let alone workable, but it marks the definitive end of the "two state" albatross that Israel has so easily slagged off. Rather: "The deal presents the biggest opportunity to those who have the most to lose from it." I don't get this optimism yet, although to the limited extent I understand the idea -- despite the advance publicity, it hasn't been fully presented yet -- but I can imagine some tuning that might be tolerable going forward. Hearst also wrote [February 2019]: Lords of the land: Why Israel's victory won't last. Meanwhile, some other relevant links:

  • Marco Carnelos: Cliches, lies and double standards: Jared Kishner's twisted views on Palestine.

  • Jonathan Cook: What's in Trump's 'deal of the century'? The answers are in plain sight. Cook also wrote: Trump enjoys bipartisan support for his plan to eradicate the Palestinian cause.

  • Rashid Khalidi: The neocolonial arrogance of the Kushner plan.

• Umair Irfan: The UK has now committed to the most aggressive climate target in the world.

• Thomas Kaplan/Jim Tankersley: Elizabeth Warren has lots of plans. Together, they would remake the economy. Related: Paul Krugman: Liberal wonks, or at least Elizabeth Warren, have a plan for that; also Sheelah Kolhatkar: Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?; also: Ed Kilgore: Elizabeth Warren's one-two punch for conquering Washington; also: Alex Isenstadt: Trump campaign zeroes in on a new threat: Elizabeth Warren. Best laugh line from the latter piece: "Warren's populist economic agenda, [Tucker] Carlson said, 'sounds like Donald Trump at his best.'"

• Ed Kilgore: Trump can't stop lying about his unpopularity:

  Donald J. Trump did not invent the art of political spinning. But he has perhaps raised it to an infernally high standard of sheer mendacity in his determination to attack any information suggesting he is anything other than the most wildly successful and popular politician since Pericles. That means, among other troubling things, that he is engaged in a perpetual war against the scientific measurement of public opinion.

• Catherine Kim:

  • Federal watchdog agency says Kellyanne Conway should be fired after violating the Hatch Act.

  • After Jon Stewart's speech, the House Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to extend the 9/11 fund: I've always thought of this as blood money, its affordability vouchsafed only because it was presented as a down payment to the much more expensive forever "wars against terror." On the other hand, most of what the fund covers are things that should be every American's right -- ironically, things that would have been much more affordable had we not flew off the handle to wage those hopeless, self-perpetuating wars.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Is it actually illegal to accept "campaign dirt" from foreigners? If it's "something of value" doing so would violate campaign finance laws. On the other hand, I doubt the law could prevent foreigners from simply publishing and promoting "dirt" -- which is presumably what a campaign would do with such information. In fact, most campaigns would probably prefer that it come from an independent source.

  • The race to be the next British prime minister, briefly explained: Seven candidates survived the first round of voting, the most famous (and possibly the farthest apart politically) Boris Johnson (leader with 114 votes) and Rory Stewart (last at 19 -- he's written a couple of books on Afghanistan and Iraq which show some understanding of and sympathy for the people there). Later rounds will reduce the field to two, to be decided by registered Conservative Party members -- no one in power there is eager to risk a new election. No mention of this here, but since the Tories are a minority in Parliament, it seems to me that their current coalition partners could scuttle the pick. [PS: See Michael Savage/Toby Helm: Boris Johnson's no-deal Brexit plan 'will trigger early election'.]

• Sharon LaFraniere/Charlie Savage/Katie Benner: People are trying to figure out William Barr. He's busy stockpiling power.

• Eric Levitz: The Fed just released a damning indictment of capitalism: Title after the jump: "The one percent have gotten $21 trillion richer since 1989. The bottom 50% have gotten poorer."

• Dara Lind/Libby Nelson: The fight over the 2020 census citizenship question, explained.

• Josh Marshall:

  • Trump tells Polish president: US media is corrupt: Actual quote: "Much of the media unfortunately in this country is corrupt. I have to tell you that, Mr. President." Trump could have turned this into a much smarter quote by dropping "unfortunately" and adding: "that's why we don't have to censor them." Of course, he wouldn't say that, because he wants to censor them anyway. He feels so entitled he cannot recognize that the media has been helped him out enormously. And he's such a thin-skinned whiner he complains about them endlessly. Anything to avoid a moment of reflection that might acknowledge that he's ever done anything regrettable, let alone embarrassing.

  • The American right gets tired of democracy. I'd say the American right has never liked democracy, and can point as far back as the early 1800s when proposals to extend the vote to white male non-property holders were met by worries that such people might use the vote to further their own personal interests (to the detriment of their richer "betters"). But the right is certainly getting more brazenly contemptuous of voting rights and other aspects of democracy. This connects to a cluster of other links, which purport to grapple with the question of what principles conservatism has left after the right has pledged itself to politicians like Trump:

    • Sohrab Ahmari: Against David French-ism.

    • Isaac Chotiner: Ross Douthat on the crisis of the conservative coalition: Interview with Douthat.

    • Ed Kilgore: Josh Hawley could be the face of the post-Trump right.

    • Adam Serwer: The illiberal right throws a tantrum: sample quote:

      I don't want to overstate the significance of this dispute between French and Ahmari. They are yelling at each other in a walled garden; conservative pundits in ideological magazines have little influence over a base whose opinions are guided by the commercial incentives of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, and the partisan imperatives of the Republican Party. If they possessed such influence, Trump would not be president.

      The question of whether the Republican Party would abandon liberal democracy for sectarian ethno-nationalism was decided in the 2016 primary, and all French and Ahmari are doing is arguing about it after the fact. The commercial and social incentives for conservative writers to succumb to Trumpism are vast. Some, like French, have had the integrity to stick to their stated principles. Others, like Ahmari, have already fallen. Today's skirmishes among conservatives resemble the irregulars in 1865 shooting at one another because they had not yet heard of Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. And the support Ahmari has drawn suggests that the conservative intelligentsia will offer less resistance to authoritarianism than it did in 2015 and 2016.

• Dylan Matthews:

  • The surprising truth about extreme poverty: "It's most common with childless adults." Basically because we're much stingier with programs like SNAP where children are out of the picture.

  • Rashida Tlaib wants to give low-income adults $3,000 a year each, no questions asked.

• Ella Nilsen: House Democrats want to make accepting dirt on campaign opponents from foreign governments a crime: "Democrats are rolling out a new package of election security bills after Trump said he's open to taking dirt on his 2020 opponents." That, or even the lesser requirement to report foreign offers to the FBI, strikes me as a bad idea: it practically begs foreign agents to set up and expose test cases.

• Anna North: Alabama's law forcing sex offenders to get chemically castrated, explained.

• Kelsey Piper: Will climate change kill everyone -- or just lots and lots of people? Oddly enough, I can think of adverse scenarios that are worse than the ones discussed here -- war over diminishing habitat and resources is the most obvious one -- but I can't imagine that no one would survive even that, and I'm dead certain that the survivors will prove adaptable enough to recover from any climate-induced dystopia. As for civilization ending, the bigger threat is politically-directed stupidity (which seems to have already claimed most of the Republican Party). As this explainer points out, much of the dispute here really turns on the question of how much threat we have to feel to act politically. Those who feel unheeded are eager to turn out the hyperbole, but my impression is that so far that has only had the perverse of undermining their credibility.

• Andrew Prokop: Trump's legally problematic claim that he'd accept "oppo research" from foreign governments, explained.

• Michael Sainato: Bosses pocket Trump tax windfall as workers see job promises vanish.

• Jason Samenow:

  • Planet is entering 'new climate regime' with 'extraordinary' heat waves intensified by global warming, study says.

  • Temperatures leap 40 degrees above normal as the Arctic Ocean and Greenland ice sheet see record June melting.

• David E Sanger/Nicole Perlroth: US escalates online attacks on Russia's power grid. Part of the rationale here is to deter Russia from interfering in US elections, but this reads more like a provocation along the lines of Nixon's famous "madman theory" of threatening nuclear war. The assumption seems to be that Russia will react rationally to such insanity, but if they believe that, why not just sit down and negotiate some kind of deal that would lessen the threat of cyberwarfare and present a unified front against hacking by private parties and other countries. Probably the same reason the US works to preserve its unique "first strike" capability: to cower the rest of the world into submission at the first demonstration of "shock and awe."

• Richard Silverstein: Is Pompeo angling to interfere in British politics? "In leaked comments from a recent meeting with Jewish leaders, the US secretary of state cites the need to 'push back' against a potential Corbyn victory." Found a couple of useful links there:

  • Amnon Cohen: Corbyn and anti-semitism claims: The real reason behind the attack on Labour leader [April 2018].

  • Jonathan Cook: How Israel helped to revive Europe's ugly ethnic nationalisms: "Israel preserved a tribal idea of citizenship that followers of Trump and Europe's far-right now seek to emulate." [July 2018]

  • Joseph Massad: Pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism are inseparable, and always have been: "Pro-Zionism is the only respectable form of anti-Semitism today, one that is welcomed by the Israeli government and pro-Zionist white nationalists everywhere." Also: Israel and the West: 'Shared values' of racism and settler-colonialism.

• Andrew Sullivan: Donald Trump and the art of the lie. He draws some examples from Michael Wolff's Siege, others from the George Stephanopoulos interview, but he could write the same article with fresh examples any week of the year.

  For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success. The brazenness of it unbalances and stupefies sane and adjusted people, thereby constantly giving him an edge and a little breathing space while we try to absorb it, during which he proceeds to the next lie. And on it goes. It's like swimming in choppy water. Just when you get to the surface to breathe, another wave crashes into you. . . .

  A tyrant's path to power is not a straight line, it's dynamic. Each concession is instantly banked, past vices are turned into virtues, and then the ante is upped once again. The threat rises exponentially with time. If we can't see this in front of our own eyes, and impeach this man now, even if he will not be convicted, we are flirting with the very stability of our political system.

  Sullivan also writes about Boris Johnson in the next section down the page: "My Old Chum Boris." Sullivan knew Johnson from their school days at Oxford together:

  Boris was so posh it was funny. . . . He belonged, for example, to the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive upper-class fraternity that specialized in hosting expensive restaurant dinners for themselves, in white tie and tails no less, with members eating and drinking till they were stuffed and thoroughly shit-faced and then proceeded to puke on the floors and vandalize the joint, smashing tables and chairs and china, breaking windows and the like. Daddy would always pick up the price for repairs. . . . Legend has it Johnson kept reinventing himself politically and playing down his Toryism and poshness -- with the help of then-student Frank Luntz, believe it or not -- and eventually it worked and he won. I have to say I found him hugely entertaining, and great company, but could never really take him seriously. He has a first-class wit but a second-class mind and got a second-class degree. If you want to measure the quality of his scholarship, check out his deeply awful biography of Churchill, a thinly veiled attempt to redescribe his own career as a Second Coming of Winston. . . . But there is some sweet cosmic justice in Boris having to take responsibility for the Brexit he backed. It may be a catastrophe, but it will be his, and, for him at least, it sure will be fun.

• Jon Swaine: Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017. Also, Vicky Ward: Jared Kushner may have an ethics problem -- to the tune of $90m.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • Bernie Sanders on democratic socialism, Elizabeth Warren and the media. Related: Bhaskar Sunkara: Bernie Sanders just made a brilliant defense of democratic socialism.

  • Elizabeth Warren's rise is a plus for issue politics -- and a bad sign for billionaires.

  • Campaign conventional wisdom is dead.

  • YouTube, Facebook purges are more extensive than you think.

• Peter Wade: Ivanka Trump cashed $4 million from her father's DC hotel in 2018: "She and her husband, Jared Kushner, reported earning between $28.8 million and $135.1 million in 2018.

• Alex Ward:

  • How the Trump administration is using 9/11 to build a case for war with Iran: "The case is legally dubious and factually challenged."

  • What Hong Kong's massive protests are really about: "The fight over an extradition law and democracy in China, explained." Update: Zeeshan Aleem: Huge Hong Kong protests continue after the government postpones controversial bill. Later update: Daniel Victor/Keith Bradsher: Protesters return to Hong Kong's streets, rejecting leader's apology.

• Joanna Weiss: How Trump turned liberal comedians conservative: Nice idea for a piece, but doesn't deliver on its premise, nor approximate its title. Weiss laments the eclipse of "wry satire," complaining that today "it's all outrage and punching up -- and it's not always clear where the joke is." I don't doubt that there has been a coarsening of humor since Trump became president. Is any other reaction possible? I worry that many of the jokes offer lazy simplifications (e.g., ragging on Trump for his spelling and vocabulary lapses, like "covfefe"). I've also noted that no one seems to be able to tell funny jokes about Democrats (exception Hillary, but mostly in contrast to Trump). For instance, I can't recall Seth Myers ever cracking a funny joke about Bernie Sanders. Also, I've found myself with a pre-emptive groan every time Colbert does his "Doin' It Donkey Style" routine. On the other hand, the real thing I've found myself looking for from these comedians is solidarity. I rarely need their help in understanding the news, but it's gratifying to know that someone else shares my outrage.

• Jennifer Williams: UK signs order for WikiLeaks' Julian Assange to be extradicted to the US.

• Paul Woodward: Why Trump remains open to receiving foreign aid during election campaigns: Mostly links to other articles, but his summary is worth underlining:

  As much as the media might be inclined to cast Trump's views on this issue as an aberration, they are, on the contrary, completely in line with what has become the GOP's overarching strategy for retaining power as its capacity to win votes declines: through gerrymandering, stacking courts, gutting campaign finance regulations, and now welcoming help from foreign governments.

  The Republicans' power-hunger corresponds directly with their dwindling democratic opportunities.

  A party that has realized it can't succeed by conforming with the operating rules for a functioning democracy has concluded its self-ascribed "right to govern" depends upon the systematic subversion of the principles upon which this country was founded.

• Robin Wright: A tanker war in the Middle East -- again? Two oil tankers were struck in the Straits of Hormuz between Iran and Oman. The Trump administration and Trump's "allies" in Saudi Arabia and the UAE were quick to blame Iran (with no proof but lots of innuendo), and Iran immediately denied responsibility. One line in passing here sticks with me: "Within hours, oil prices rose four per cent." A reminder here of the "tanker war" in the late 1980s, although no mention of the Iranian civilian airliner the US shot down then. More on Iran:

  • Peter Baker: As Trump accuses Iran, he has one problem: his own credibility.

  • Dave DeCamp: Japanese ship owner contradicts US officials on tanker attack.

  • Heather Hurlburt: Trump's Iran accusations put US credibility on the line.

  • Fred Kaplan: Trump's lack of credibility is hampering America's ability to respond to the crisis in the Gulf: Title after the jump: "Trump's weak case against Iran."

  • Trita Parsi: Trump blames Iran for the tanker attacks. But let's be skeptical of his administration's pro-war bluster.

  Meanwhile, no skepticism at the New York Times, where Bret Stephens is already clamoring for war: If Iran won't change its behavior, we should sink its navy.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • New Federal Reserve data shows how the rich have gotten richer: "It's been a great 30 years for people who own businesses."

    The top 1 percent of the US wealth distribution has increased its net worth by 650 percent since 1989, while the bottom 50 percent saw its wealth grow by a much more modest 170 percent during the same period. . . . The story that the rich have gotten richer and inequality has grown is not new. But the Fed data does let us peek under the hood to help understand why inequality has grown so much.

  • Trump's big problem is that he's unpopular: "Democrats should worry less about him and more about everything else on the ballot."

  • The case for fully cleaning up America's lead problem.

  • A new survey shows how economic policy divides the GOP and unites Democrats: "Lower-income Republicans are decidedly more moderate on economics." The charts say still not as progressive/liberal as Democrats, but still, if Democrats want to peel off some Republican votes, more promising to do so on economic policy (where Democrats are generally most credible) than by trying to appease "cultural conservative" prejudices (where Democrats are less credible).

  • Trump's possibly fake deal with Mexico, explained.

Daily Log

My tweet on Trump's boast to the president of Poland that "much of the media unfortunately in this country is corrupt":

So Trump tells president of Poland that the media in this country is corrupt. Would have been smarter to add "that's why we don't have to censor them." Or that he's built his career by exploiting that corruption. But he's so vain he'd like to censor anyway.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31614 [31587] rated (+27), 251 [248] unrated (+3).

Ran the numbers late Sunday evening, but added Monday's unpacking, so the numbers have a slight skew from reality. I'm especially pleased to get a copy of Orakel, the Swedish label Moserobie. It's currently ranked number two on Chris Monsen's Favorites list, and follows a Moserobie release that topped my own 2018 list. It's gotten very expensive to mail CDs from Europe to the US recently, and several of the last few labels I've been getting service from seem to have dropped out (the ones I've felt the worst about are Intakt and NoBusiness, plus Clean Feed a couple years back). With labels like that, I try to find streaming sources, but it's not always easy.

Joe Yanosik wrote to tell me he's working up a Franco discography, and asked whether I've considered doing a deep dive, especially into his numerous Sonodisc recordings. I had, in fact, picked up a couple of them in my shopping days, and have generally enjoyed everything I picked up. Napster has a few of them I hadn't heard, so before long I started working my way through them -- limiting myself to ones I could figure out dates for. The grades below split 3 A-, 4 B+(***), but there wasn't all that much to separate best from worst.

Notable music links this week:

• Hank Shteamer: Anthony Braxton's Big Ideas.

• New York City Jazz Record: I've never managed to see this before, although it seems like most of the Jazz Critics Poll voters write for it. I was first struck by Kurt Gottschalk's label spotlight on Fundacja Sluchaj -- a Polish label I follow fairly closely because they put whole records up on Bandcamp.

New records reviewed this week:

• Akiko Hamilton Dechter: Equal Time (2018 [2019], Capri): [cd]: B+(*)
• Angles 9: Beyond Us (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Big Thief: U.F.O.F. (2019, 4AD): [r]: A-
• Alan Broadbent Trio: New York Notes (2019, Savant): [r]: A-
• Avishai Cohen: Arvoles (2019, Razdaz/Sunnyside): [cd]: B+(***)
• Satoko Fujii/Ramon Lopez: Confluence (2018 [2019], Libra): [cd]: B+(***)
• Injury Reserve: Injury Reserve (2019, Senaca Village): [r]: B+(***)
• Kedr Livanskiy: Your Need (2019, 2MR): [r]: B
• Rosie Lowe: Yu (2019, Wolf Tone): [r]: B+(**)
• Kelsey Lu: Blood (2019, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Martha: Love Keeps Kicking (2019, Dirtnap): [r]: B+(**)
• Orville Peck: Pony (2019, Sub Pop): [r]: B-
• Red Kite: Red Kite (2019, RareNoise): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Chanda Rule: Sapphire Dreams (2016 [2019], PAO): [cd]: B
• The Jamie Saft Quartet: Hidden Corners (2019, RareNoise): [r]: [cdr]: B+(**)
• The Twilight Sad: It Won/t Be Like This All the Time (2019, Rock Action): [r]: B
• Federico Ughi: Transoceanico (2016 [2019], 577): [r]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Paul Bley/Gary Peacock/Paul Motian: When Will the Blues Leave (1999 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Alex Chilton: Songs From Robin Hood Lane (1991-94 [2019], Bar/None): [r]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Franco Et TP OK Jazz: 1966/1968 (1966-68 [1992], Sonodisc): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco Et TP OK Jazz: 1967/1968 (1967-68 [1992], Sonodisc): [r]: A-
• Franco & Le TP OK Jazz: 1971/1972: Likambo Ya Ngana (1971-72 [1994], Sonodisc): [r]: A-
• Franco, Vicky Et L'OK Jazz: Marceline Oh! Oh! (1972 [1998], Sonodisc): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco Et Le T.P. OK Jazz: 79/80/81 Live: Kinshasa Makambo (1979-81 [1994], Sonodisc): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco Et Le TP OK Jazz: Makambo Ezali Bourreau: 1982/1984/1985 (1982-85 [1994], Sonodisc): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco/Simaro/Jolie Detta Et Le T.P. O.K. Jazz: 1986-1987-1988 (1986-88 [1994], Sonodisc): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Sharman Duran: Questioning Reality (self-released)
• Rosana Eckert: Sailing Home (OA2): June 21
• Per 'Texas' Johansson/Torbjörn Zetterberg/Konrad Agnas: Orakel (Moserobie)
• La La Lars: La La Lars II (Headspin)
• Xavier Lecouturier: Carrier (Origin): June 21
• Greta Matassa: Portrait (Origin): June 21
• Moutin Factory Quintet: Mythical River (Laborie Jazz)
• Matt Olson: 789 Miles (OA2): June 21
• Marlene Rosenberg: MLK Convergence (Origin): June 21
• Chanda Rule: Sapphire Dreams (PAO)
• Erik Skov: Liminality (OA2): June 21
• Ståhls Trio: Källtorp Sessions: Volume One (Moserobie)

Weekend Roundup

No introduction. Cut my finger while cooking, and can't type worth a damn. Getting late, too.

Some scattered links this week:

• Riley Beggin:

  • US and Mexico reach an immigration agreement to avoid tariffs. Beggin and Eric Kleefeld followed this up with: The US-Mexico agreement to avoid tariffs is actually months old. This added information suggests that the tariff threat was always a political stunt, meant to make it look like Trump's tough guy stance works, and possibly also to make it easier for Mexico's president to sell his capitulation to Yankee bullying. Kleefeld also wrote: The Mexican ambassador to the US explains Trump's claim of a new agricultural deal.

  • Cory Booker's plan to fix the housing crisis and make renting affordable.

• Peter Beinart: 13 Democrats recorded messages about Israel. Only one spoke with courage. Bernie Sanders.

• Ronald Brownstein: Democrats learned the wrong lesson from Clinton's impeachment: "It didn't actually cost the GOP all that much."

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: The May jobs report is a big disappointment for workers and bad news for Trump.

• Juliet Eilperin/Josh Dawsey/Brady Dennis: White House blocked intelligence agency's written testimony calling climate change 'possibly catastrophic'.

• Masha Gessen:

  • The persistent ghost of Ayn Rand, the forebear of zombie neoliberalism. Review of Lisa Duggan's Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed. After mentioning various political figures, like Paul Ryan and Mike Pompeo, infatuated with Rand, Gessen finishes:

    Their version of Randism is stripped of all the elements that might account for my inability to throw out those books: the pretense of intellectualism, the militant atheism, and the explicit advocacy of sexual freedom. From all that Rand offered, these men have taken only the worst: the cruelty. They are not even optimistic. They are just plain mean.

  • What HBO's "Chernobyl" got right, and what it got terribly wrong: We watched all five episodes this week, and I thought they did a remarkable job of explaining the causes and consequences of one of the devastating man-made disasters of our time. Gessen compliments the series whenever it sheds a harsh light on the Soviet bureaucracy, then attacks it for not being harsh enough. Her critique is most effective regarding Ulyana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a single character invented to represent the hundreds of scientists assigned to figure out what went wrong, what more could go wrong, and how best to deal with all that. Gessen faults Khomyuk as a stock Hollywood hero, but what bothers me more is the reduction of a large group effort, with all the complex interaction of major scientific endeavors, to small acts of individual heroism. I've made the same complaint about the series Manhattan, which reduced nearly all of the high-level technical decision to just two characters -- both American, losing any recognition that most of the major scientists working on the project were Europeans (who, aside from some Brits and a celebrity visit by Niels Bohr, were totally written out of the story). The other conspicuous omission/error I found was when the lead scientist attributed the critical "design flaw" and the lack of a containment chamber to the Soviets' tendency to do things on the cheap. As I understand it, the main consideration for the RBMK reactor design was its use for producing bomb fuel as well as electricity, which required frequent access to extract plutonium from the core. Still, I think the writer here, Craig Mazin, makes a good case for telling the story this way. See: Emily Todd VanDerWerff: HBO's Chernobyl is a terrific miniseries. Its writer hopes you don't think it's the whole truth. I haven't yet followed the link to Mazin's podcasts, which reportedly go into more detail about what's true and what's been fictionalized in the series. VanDerWerff also wrote: Chernobyl's stellar finale makes a case for the show as science fiction. Also: Peter Maass: What the horror of "Chernobyl" reveals about the deceit of the Trump era.

• John Hudson/Loveday Morris: Pompeo delivers unfiltered view of Trump's Middle East peace plan in off-the-record meeting: What he told "a closed-door meeting with Jewish leaders."

• Murtaza Hussain: An Iranian activist wrote dozens of articles for right-wing outlets. But is he a real person? "Heshamat Alavi is a persona run by a team of people from the political wing of the MEK. This is not and has never been a real person."

• Sean Illing: Why conservatives are winning the internet: Interview with Jen Schradie, author of The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives. "Ultimately, it's not about the tool; it's about the inequalities in our society that give certain people advantages over others."

• Quinta Jurecic: 4 disturbing details you may have missed in the Mueller report: "and none of them are favorable to the president."

• Fred Kaplan: How Trump could restart the nuclear arms race. And how this dovetails with Putin's interests in the same: Reese Erlich: Nuclear disarmament: the view from Moscow.

• Rashid Khalidi: Manifest destinies: "The tangled history of American and Israeli exceptionalism." Review of Amy Kaplan's book, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance.

• Jen Kirby: Trump tightens Cuba travel rules: "The US bans cruises and restricts certain travel in a move meant to pressure Cuba. . . . All of these policy moves reflect the administration's Cold War-esque approach to Latin America that has emerged since Bolton arrived as National Security Advisor."

• Paul Krugman:

  • Heroes of the Great Patriotic Trade War: "People can't take America seriously anymore." Alas, the bad Korea example doesn't help anyone.

  • Mar-a-Lago comes for British health.

  • Trump makes America irresponsible again: "Why 'tariff' isn't a 'beautiful word'."

• Farhad Manjoo: I want to live in Elizabeth Warren's America: "The Massachusetts senator is proposing something radical: a country in which adults discuss serious ideas seriously."

  I'm impressed instead by something more simple and elemental: Warren actually has ideas. She has grand, detailed and daring ideas, and through these ideas she is single-handedly elevating the already endless slog of the 2020 presidential campaign into something weightier and more interesting than what it might otherwise have been: a frivolous contest about who hates Donald Trump most.

• Michael E Mann: Trump is giving Americans dirty water, dirty air, and a very dirty climate: Alternate title by Paul Woodward -- Newsweek's is "Trump lied to Prince Charles's face -- and to the world."

  To say that Donald Trump's jaw-dropping display of environmental ignorance while in the United Kingdom is an embarrassment to all Americans would be an understatement. But the worst part of his ramblings about how we have "among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics" isn't that it sounds like the ramblings of a Fox News addict. It's that his administration is doing everything it can to work towards the opposite: dirty water, dirty air, and, well, a very dirty climate.

  Found a link there to another article which people who regard Trump as Putin's stooge might pick up and run with: Hannah Osborne: Climate change could make Russia's frozen Siberia far more habitable by the 2080s.

• Dylan Matthews/Byrd Pinkerton: The incredible influence of the Federalist Society, explained.

• Rani Molla:

  • Foreign tech workers are turning to Canada as US immigration becomes more difficult.

  • The word of the day is "antitrust".

• Samuel Moyn: The nudgeocrat: "Navigating freedom with Cass Sunstein." Review of Sunstein's recent short book, On Freedom, although he's been rehashing those same ideas for a long time now, most notoriously in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (co-authored by Richard H. Thaler). He pushes "libertarian paternalism," where technocratic elites rig default choices to help guide the minions to better choices without making them feel like they're being run.

• Ella Nilsen:

  • Elizabeth Warren makes a forceful argument on how the Hyde Amendment worsens inequality.

  • Climate change is becoming a defining issue of 2020.

  • Democrats' extremely uphill battle to retake the Senate majority in 2020, explained (w/Tara Golshan).

• Anna North: Joe Biden's evolution on abortion, explained.

• John Quiggin: America needs to reexamine its wartime relationships: "The lessons of the 1920s have been painfully relearned." Evidently not the author's title, as the main thrust of the article is that Keynes was right about the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and is still right today. Quiggin also pointed me to this report: Advertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction: Cross-national evidence on one million Europeans.

• Nathan J Robinson: The best they've got: "Examining the National Review's 'Against Socialism' issue" -- an article-by-article answer, which mostly suggests that the writers are blithering idiots, with most authors understanding nothing more than that socialism is bad, bad, bad.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Hannity: "Hillary should be in jail." Also Hannity: Locking up Trump would be "beyond despicable."

  • Trump's UK trip illustrates why people worried about a Trump presidency: "Bad tweets, ill-advised statements, ignorance -- it's all on display." I understand the sentiment, and I think (though not as much as I hope) that Americans will decide they no longer want to be embarrassed by such a vile moron as president and will vote him down and out in 2020. But back in November 2016, that was pretty low on my list of fear and dread that Trump's election portended. Since then that list has proven to be well founded, not that I can claim to have anticipated every stupid and/or nauseating thing he's done or threatened to do.

  • 2 especially cringeworthy moments from Jared Kushner's Axios interview: "Kushner won't say whether birtherism was racist"; "Kushner might not contact the FBI if Russia offered help again"; "Kushner isn't sure about a lot of things." The latter avoided questions about Israel and Saudi Arabia, which no doubt would also have proven cringeworthy.

• Sigal Samuel: Forget GDP -- New Zealand is prioritizing gross national well-being.

• Dylan Scott:

  • Why Joe Biden is holding on to such a strong lead in the 2020 primary polls: "Biden has one big advantage in the 2020 Democratic primary polls: older voters." Some numbers: with voters over age 45, Biden leads sanders 45-10%; under 45, Sanders leads Biden 26-19%. Older dividing lines increase the break for Biden. I'd guess that the world looks very different as you move away from the 45 dividing line: older voters have their lives relatively set and secure, as long as moderate Democrats can protect Social Security/Medicare against further Republican depredation; on the other hand, younger voters have bleaker job prospects, lots of debt (their children's prospects looking even worse), and longer range fears over the environment and war. They see Biden as representative of the generation of mainstream Democrats whose accommodation to business and the Republicans have let their prospects decline.

  • Trump is really unpopular in the most important 2020 battleground states: "Trump is deep underwater in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other key 2020 states.

• Tim Starks/Laurens Cerulus/Mark Scott: Russia's manipulation of Twitter was far vaster than believed. Of course, not just Russia funds trolls. See: Jason Rezaian: The State Department has been funding trolls. I'm one of their targets.

• Joseph Stiglitz: The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response. I get his point, but when he brings up this particular analogy he wanders into all sorts of conceptual minefields. War and climate change both cause vast devastation, but the agencies are different, and so are most of the effects. Even more specious is the notion that we need a war to work up the courage and will to tackle difficult problems -- as phony wars on poverty and drugs and so forth have repeatedly shown. Moreover, you can never measure the true cost of wars in dollars -- as Stiglitz tried to do in The Three Trillion Dollar War: The Truth Cost of the Iraq Conflict (2008, so by now probably a couple trillion short).

  When the US was attacked during the second world war no one asked, "Can we afford to fight the war?" It was an existential matter. We could not afford not to fight it. The same goes for the climate crisis. Here, we are already experiencing the direct costs of ignoring the issue -- in recent years the country has lost almost 2% of GDP in weather-related disasters, which include floods, hurricanes, and forest fires. The cost to our health from climate-related diseases is just being tabulated, but it, too, will run into the tens of billions of dollars -- not to mention the as-yet-uncounted number of lives lost. We will pay for climate breakdown one way or another, so it makes sense to spend money now to reduce emissions rather than wait until later to pay a lot more for the consequences -- not just from weather but also from rising sea levels. It's a cliche, but it's true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

  The war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy -- just as the second world war set the stage for America's golden economic era, with the fastest rate of growth in its history amidst shared prosperity. The Green New Deal would stimulate demand, ensuring that all available resources were used; and the transition to the green economy would likely usher in a new boom.

  Lots of other analogies bother me here. I can't imagine that any amount of climate change will end human habitation or civilization, and even if it did the earth will carry on, oblivious to evolution of its surface chemistry. The great risk from climate change is that it will cause destabilization and disruption, and that those things will impose pain and loss and, most likely, greater strife. It may be hard to convince people that such threats matter, but reasonable people recognize that they do.

• Matt Taibbi: Michael Wolff's 'Siege' is like his last book -- but worse.

• Nick Utzig: Bowe Bergdahl's story lays bare the tragedy of our forever wars: review of American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan, a book by Matt Farwell and Michael Ames.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump's D-Day speech was great. He was the wrong man to give it. If all I knew was the title, I'd guess that someone wrote him a fairly decent speech, but it felt off because Trump is incapable of delivering the emotions the speech intended to convey. Aside from his peculiar form of malicious humor, which he manages to deliver with unthinking grace, he may be the worst speaker I've ever seen among major political figures. Even when he's reading lines, he's so obviously out of character it's disconcerting to try to follow him. But Ward doesn't say any of that. He genuinely praises the speech, quoting sections which reveal nothing more than the sanctimonious pablum of high school orators. Then he denies that Trump is entitled to be valedictorian, because he dodged the draft to avoid Vietnam, and because he's said various impolitic things about NATO, America's anointed allies, and Robert Mueller -- reminding us that Mueller is a veteran as well as a patriot. Final line: "If Trump really wants to honor D-Day's heroes, he should live and work by their values from here on out." Sometimes it's hard to sort out who confuses Ward the most, but given their demographics (male, 93+ years old) those surviving "D-day heroes" probably voted overwhelmingly for Trump. They were no more than typical Americans at the time, and 75 years of cynical, self-serving militarism later their view of the world is unlikely to be less warped than that of anyone else today.

    Oh, by the way, isn't the celebration of D-Day anniversaries a bit chauvinistic (for America, of course, but also for France, which bequeathed us the term)? The turning point of WWII in Europe was the Battle of Stalingrad, where the Soviet Union, at enormous cost, halted and started to reverse the German advance. Even after D-Day the war was overwhelmingly fought in the East, where the suffering was immense. Not that D-Day was a picnic. For something realistic, see: David Chrisinger: The man who told America the truth about D-Day, a profile of famed journalist Ernie Pyle.

  • Trump escalates feud with London mayor by calling him a "stone cold loser": "Trump's spat with Sadiq Khan has lasted years."

• Emily Wax-Thibodeaux: In Alabama -- where lawmakers banned abortion for rape victims -- rapists' parental rights are protected.

• Lauren Wolfe: Human rights in the US are worse than you think: "From police shootings to voter suppression to arrests of asylum seekers, a new report finds US human rights are abysmal."

• Paul Woodward: Trump's obfuscation on the climate crisis.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Public support for left-wing policymaking has reached a 60-year high: "Just slightly higher than the previous high point of 1961." The study specifically looks at public attitudes to "big government," although that's a right-wing scare term. The more basic question is how many people think government should take a more active role in addressing general problems, and consequently look to progressive politicians for help. One thing I find interesting about this is that this shift in opinion hasn't been led by Democratic politicians advocating a larger role for government. Rather, it seems to be a groundswell, as more and more people realize that the Republican "small government" obsession has lost credibility. I'd also add that popular belief in liberal and progressive ideals, so dominant in the New Deal/Great Society era, never changed. Rather, people lost faith in the Democrats' ability to defend and extend those ideals, which gave Reagan and his ilk a chance to argue that their conservative ideas might do a better job of securing the American Dream. They succeeded to a remarkable degree, but only used their power to increase inequality and injustice. As their effects have become more manifest, their rationalizations have become more threadbare and disingenuous, to the point where fewer and fewer people believe anything they say. The last to realize this seem to be the mainstream media and centrist Democrats, but even they are losing their blinders. Eric Levitz also writes about this study: America's political mood is now the 'most liberal ever recorded'.

  • Why Trump's Mexico tariffs are producing a revolt when China tariffs didn't. Trump's China trade war is (mostly) pro-business, while Trump's Mexico trade war is about immigration. Opposing immigration may still be good politics for Trump, but restricting trade makes it bad for business, and that's the one thing Republicans are willing to break with Trump on.

    What makes this standoff interesting is that Trump is asking, in a small way, for a sacrifice the business wing of the GOP is never asked to make. . . . The way the deal is supposed to work is that cultural conservatives provide the votes, and they get their way on issues the business community doesn't care about (until cultural conservatives' views become an unpopular embarrassment the way opposition to same-sex marriages and military service is), but business isn't supposed to actually sacrifice its interests for the sake of cultural conservative causes. With the tariff gambit on Mexico, Trump is overturning that logic in a way that his other trade shenanigans haven't. And that's why congressional Republicans are resisting in an unusual way.

  • The Joe Biden climate plan plagiarism "scandal," explained: "A reminder of some bad history, but far and away the least important part of his climate plan." Reviews the "bad history" of plagiarism charges against Biden in 1987 for cribbing from a speech by a British politician, which led to his withdrawal from the 1988 presidential race. Neither case bothers me as plagiarism -- admittedly, not much does -- but the charges reinforce the notion that Biden isn't a very original thinker. But so does his climate plan. Indeed, his embrace of received opinion is the foundation of his campaign.

  • Judy Shelton's potential nomination to a Federal Reserve Board seat, explained.

  • Elizabeth Warren's latest big idea is "economic patriotism": "The plan is to marry industrial policy to environmentalism and transform the economy." Robert Reich applauds: Elizabeth Warren's economic nationalism vision shows there's a better way.

  • Jared Kushner's telling indifference on refugees.

  • Banning former members of Congress from lobbying won't fix the revolving door: "Congress needs more staff money and public financing, not tighter rules." Yglesias previously argued members of Congress themselves should be paid more, so he's extending that logic to staff members: maybe if they're paid more as public servants better people would seek these jobs, and be less likely to sell out to lobbyists later. I rather doubt this. On the other hand, while a lifetime ban strikes me as excessive, I can imagine some regulations helping. One could, for instance, limit pay by lobbying firms, which would have put a severe cramp into Billy Tauzin's move from the House to head up PHARMA just after Tauzin managed the passage of the Medicare D bill (which kept insurers from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies). Still, it's hard to think of things that couldn't be worked around. The core problem is that we live in a very inequal society, which rewards (and therefore drives) everyone to maximize income, and rarely (if ever) enforces taboos (let alone laws) against graft. That may seem like too tall an order, but some little steps would help: much higher tax rates for high incomes, making lobbying expenses taxable, and most important of all, cutting off the main flow of corruption by public funding of campaigns.

• Gary Younge: How bad can Brexit get? "Theresa May is out, but the crisis that made her premiership both possible and untenable has intensified."

Daily Log

Scraped from Kathleen Geier's Facebook post:

If I am Donald Trump, the Democrat I most want to run against in 2020 is definitely Joe Biden.

Here are some of the reasons why:

• I can tell working class voters of all races about Biden has fucked them over by supporting NAFTA and championing the slimiest practices of the credit card industry and other corporate predators. This should help me hold on to some of the support I got from white working class voters in the Midwest and it will depress voter turnout among the working class voters who normally vote Democrat.

• If I once again get accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault, I can neutralize these charges by pointing to Hairsniffer Joe's history of touching women inappropriately, a behavior that continue into the present, as well as his treatment of Anita Hill.

• I will be sure to have my people place targeted ads that remind African-American voters of Biden's crime bill and his history as a white backlash anti-busing candidate. Do I think this will win me their votes? No, but it will cause a lot of them to stay home.

• When people raise concerns about my cognitive decline and my being too old to be president, I can point the finger at Biden, who at 76 is four years older than me, and whose affect and campaign is noticeably low-energy.

• Best of all, even if I lose, Biden has made it clear that, unlike Warren or Sanders, he's not going to make any structural changes to the system that made me so powerful in the first place. Biden has pledged that things will go "back to normal," which means that white collar elites like me, who have committed fraud and abuse in the private sector and high crimes and misdemeanors in office, won't be held accountable for them. Not only do I and my peeps get off the hook, but Biden's approach will breed the kind of apathy and cynicism that discourages left-wing activism and empowers the right and the GOP.

No other Democrat is anywhere near as vulnerable on a whole range of issues as Joe Biden is. He is clearly the weakest top-tier candidate in the race and the one that Trump, and the rest of the Republican party, would give their collective right arm to run against.

I am praying that my fellow Democrats don't make their dream come true.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31587 [31558] rated (+29), 248 [251] unrated (-3).

So, 29 again. Ran the counter this afternoon, after I found a missed grade and added a "remembered LP" grade -- an LP I distinctly remember having but which didn't get picked up when I jotted down my first grade list (mid-1990s, I think). I may have cut it some slack -- main thing I remember was being disappointed by it.

Once again, surprised that I bagged that many -- after a very slow start, one that kept the Salamon Freequestra album in the changer for close to three days. Finished with Alfred Soto's top 20 list, checking out Mountain Goats, National, Tyler, and Weyes Blood, leaving me with only 5 A- records from his 20 (Control Top's Covert Contracts, Billie Eilish's When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Robert Forster's Inferno, Lizzo's Cuz I Love You, and Nilüfer Yanya's Miss Universe). Only one Christgau pick in those five (Eilish), and only one more in Soto's other 15 (Sharon Van Etten's Remind Me Tomorrow, a low B+ for me).

Speaking of Eilish, Phil Freeman dissed her album in the course of making a Facebook rant:

I will never stop griping about "Best Albums of [Year]" lists that should be called "Best *Pop and Indie Rock* Albums of [Year]". Billie fucking Eilish's album (to pick but one example: sub in Tyler, the Creator if you're worried about sexism) is not better than the Art Ensemble of Chicago's, so own your ignorance or just fuck off, OK? And no, I'm not saying all jazz > all pop. I hear shitty jazz records every day. I'm just saying that if you're simply ignoring the possibility that a jazz album could even be one of the best records of the year, especially given what's been happening in the genre in the last 4-5 years, that's *fucked up*, and major publications are fucking up by doing it.

I commented, taking exception to his examples: Eilish is currently 12 on my Music Year 2019 list, behind 7 jazz albums (counting my top-rated Heroes Are Gang Leaders: The Amiri Baraka Sessions, which admittedly has vocals, although the other 6 don't) and 4 other non-jazz. Of course, Freeman isn't complaining about me ignoring jazz albums in my annual lists. And I'm not much bothered that who spends most of his non-jazz time listening to metal should have trouble appreciating a lo-fi girl singer-songwriter. Or even that he offers Tyler, a hip-hop artist who buries himself in soft off-kilter tones, as another option in hype. (I agree that he is overrated, but I also find Igor to be his most pleasing and interesting album yet.) Where I disagree is in positing that the Art Ensemble of Chicago survivors reunion album is this year's flagship jazz hope. I played it (both CDs) until I gave up all hope, then let if off easy with a B+(**), which is to say that I currently have at least 50 jazz records this year that I like better.

On the other hand, if I had to handicap the 2019 Jazz Critics Poll, I doubt I'd find more than a couple of my A- records in the top ten: James Brandon Lewis's An Unruly Manifesto seems most likely, then maybe Matthew Shipp's Signature, Moppa Elliott's Jazz Band/Rock Band/Dance Band, Quinssin Nachoff's Path of Totality, or David Berkman's Six of One -- hunches based as much on labels and publicists as on the records themselves. But none of those artists have fared well in past polls, which is a much stronger indicator. Some albums you're more likely to find on JCP ballots (my grades in brackets):

• Art Ensemble of Chicago: We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration (Pi, 2CD) [**]
• Bill Frisell/Thomas Morgan: Epistrophy (ECM) [*]
• Vijay Iyer/Craig Taborn: The Transitory Poems (ECM) [**]
• Julian Lage: Love Hurts (Mack Avenue) [***]
• Joe Lovano: Trio Tapestry (ECM) [***]
• Branford Marsalis Quartet: The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul (Okeh) [***]
• Matt Mitchell: Phalanx Ambassadors (Pi) [**]
• Joshua Redman Quartet: Come What May (Nonesuch) [***]
• Wadada Leo Smith: Rosa Parks: Pure Love: An Oratorio of Seven Songs (TUM) [*]
• David Torn/Tim Berne/Ches Smith: Sun of Goldfinger (ECM) [***]

AEC looks pretty imposing on this list: it's big (last year was dominated by 2-CD releases and won by Wayne Shorter's 3-CD monstrosity), has historic cachet that reconciles the avant-garde with the tradition; it augments what's left of a legendary group augmented with lots of guest stars, and is on a label which always places records high in EOY polls (that same label is the reason Mitchell is on this list). None of the other records have that sort of cred, so maybe Freeman is right to pick it. My only complaint is that it isn't good enough. If I wanted to broaden the horizons of non-jazz critics, I'd start by recommending better records.

Christgau remarked recently that EOY list-building has more to do with brand identification than diligent sorting and ranking. I know that to be true of my own lists, where my brand is somone who listens to all kinds of things and doesn't give a fuck about what anyone else thinks. As the Dean, I figure Christgau is more focused on building a pantheon, but individual lists tend to be idiosyncratically personal (and his certainly is). Freeman's referring to corporate lists, which are carefully crafted to cater to a target audience. There's no place for jazz in most, not because their writers dislike jazz (although many do, or simply don't get the exposure -- hardly anyone hears much outside of their niche these days), but because their editors don't expect their readers to be interested in such things. So what you see is what you'd expect when people of limited knowledge try to write down to appeal/appease people who know even less.

Nonethless, as someone who has compiled literally thousands of EOY lists in recent years, I believe that there is actually a tiny trend toward more crossover jazz in predominantly indie/pop lists (although more so in UK than US). Last year the major breakthroughs were Kamasi Washington, Makaya McCraven, and Sons of Kemet (two A- records among those three, the other a high B+, so those picks were much more respectable as jazz than, say, Bad Bad Not Good from a few years back).

I could write volumes more on EOY lists (for data, see last year's EOY aggregate and Jazz Critics Poll). But my bottom line is learn what you can from the data, don't begrudge other people's pleasures, and don't rag on people for not liking what you like.

Back to my original thread about what I reviewed this week: beyond Soto's list, I looked at AOTY's Highest Rated Albums of 2019 and picked out a few records that seemed promising. Three sounded good enough to warrant multiple plays before I settled on B+(***): Fontaines D.C.'s Dogrel (1), Slowthai's Nothing Great About Britain (22), and Craig Finn's I Need a New War. Two previously graded A- in top 25: Dave's Psychodrama (2), and Little Simz's Grey Area (6), and a bunch more I haven't heard. By the way, the Lee Perry dive started with Christgau's review of Rainford. I couldn't find it on Napster, so went to Bandcamp. Obviously, a lot more Perry I haven't heard. I've always recommended the 3-CD compilation, Arkology, but that only gets you 4 prime years (expect overlap with Super Ape). I also really like the recent (2014) Back at the Controls.

New records reviewed this week:

• Melissa Aldana: Visions (2019, Motéma): [r]: B+(**)
• Bruce Barth: Sunday (2017 [2018], Blau): [r]: B+(**)
• Jerry Bergonzi: The Seven Rays (2019, Savant): [r]: B+(*)
• Dave Douglas/Uri Caine/Andrew Cyrille: Devotion (2018 [2019], Greenleaf Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Ezra Collective: You Can't Steal My Joy (2019, Enter the Jungle): [r]: B
• Craig Finn: I Need a New War (2019, Partisan): [r]: B+(***)
• Fontaines D.C.: Dogrel (2019, Partisan): [r]: B+(***)
• Ryan Keberle & Catharsis: The Hope I Hold (2018 [2019], Greenleaf Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Maren Morris: Girl (2019, Columbia Nashville): [r]: B
• The Mountain Goats: In League With Dragons (2019, Merge): [r]: B+(**)
• The National: I Am Easy to Find (2019, 4AD): [r]: B+(**)
• Lee Scratch Perry: Rainford (2019, On-U Sound): [r]: A-
• Rotten Girlz: Punk You (2018 [2019], Sazas): [cd]: B+(*)
• Samo Salamon & Freequestra: Free Sessions, Vol. 2: Freequestra (2016 [2019], Klopotec): [cd]: A-
• Samo Salamon/Szilárd Mezei/Jaka Berger: Swirling Blind Unstilled (2018 [2019], Klopotec): [cd]: B+(**)
• Slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain (2019, Method): [r]: B+(***)
• Peter Stampfel and the Atomic Meta Pagans: The Ordovician Era (2019, Don Giovanni): [r]: B+(*)
• Mavis Staples: We Get By (2019, Anti-): [r]: A-
• Tyler, the Creator: Igor (2019, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride (2019, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising (2019, Sub Pop): [r]: B-

Old music:

• Jerry Bergonzi Trio: Lost in the Shuffle (1998, Double Time): [r]: B+(**)
• Jerry Bergonzi: Spotlight on Standards (2016, Savant): [r]: B+(***)
• Lee Perry: Africa's Blood (1971, Trojan): [r]: B+(*)
• Lee Perry and the Upsetters: Some of the Best (1968-79 [1985], Heartbeat): [r]: B+(***)
• The Upsetters: Super Ape (1976, Mango): [r]: A-
• The Upsetters: Return of the Super Ape (1978, Upsetter): [r]: B+(**)

Added grades for remembered lps from way back when:

• Lee "Scratch" Perry: The Return of Pipecock Jackxon (1980, Black Star Liner): B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Akiko Hamilton Dechter: Equal Time (Capri): June 21
• Satoko Fujii/Ramon Lopez: Confluence (Libra): July 29

Weekend Roundup

No time for an intro, but let's credit Bernie Sanders for this tweet:

Soon we will send soldiers to Afghanistan who weren't even born yet on September 11, 2001.

We've spent $5 trillion dollars on wars since 9/11.

And now some of the same people that got us into Iraq are trying to start a war with Iran.

We must end our endless wars.

Some scattered links this week:

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: Mexican president to Trump: tariffs and coercion won't work.

• John Cassidy:

  • Trump's crazy Mexico tariff is stoking a meltdown on Wall Street.

  • A new European parliament won't solve the continent's economic problems.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Study finds Trump tax cuts failed to do anything but give rich people money.

  • In terrifying interview, William Barr goes full MAGA: Jan Crawford interviews Barr (see transcript).

• Lee Fang: A major coal company went bust. Its bankruptcy filing shows that it was funding climate change denialism.

• Conor Friedersdorf: Saudi Arabia first: "The president is helping a repressive monarchy wage war in open defiance of Congress. That's grounds for impeachment."

• Anand Giridharadas: What to do when you're a country in crisis: Review of Jared Diamond's new book, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. Critiques Diamond for imposing his "framework" on his historical cases, and goes deep on fact checking -- some for sure, others pissier (like complaints about using "unanimous" where unanimity is statistically impossible). I recently wrote a Book Roundup blurb on Diamond's book, positing a similar critique but not having read the book, not distracted by trivia. Giridharadas ends by offering Jill Lepore's These Truths as a contrast, but I did read that book, and noted a handful of egregious factual errors there, as well.

• Dahr Jamail/Barbara Cecil: What would it mean to deeply accept that we're in planetary crisis?

• David D Kirkpatrick: The most powerful Arab ruler isn't M.B.S. It's M.B.Z.: Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of United Arab Emirates. Related: David Hearst: Abu Dhabi is trapped in a nightmare of its own making.

• Masha Gessen: How Nancy Pelosi's tactics affirm the Trumpian style of politics. "Trump will be gone someday, but the possibilities that Trumpism has created will remain." This strikes me as wrong. To have any degree of effectiveness, Pelosi has had to figure out how to stand her ground against Trump's bullying. Adjusting to Trump's reality doesn't imply accepting it as the new norm.

• Tara Golshan: Republicans' successful campaign to protect Trump from Mueller's report in one quote.

• Edward Helmore: Bannon described Trump Organization as 'criminal enterprise,' Michael Wolff book claims.

• Umair Irfan: More than 200 tornadoes devastated the Midwest over 13 days. Why? One subtitle isn't very convincing: "Storm damages are getting worse, but climate change isn't too much of a factor." Below it confirms my suspicion that "Tornado Alley . . . is shifting east" in what appears to be a long-term shift.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • The abortion wars, 10 years after George Tiller's assassination. Also see: Dr. Tiller was a hero to his abortion patients; Carole Joffe: Remembering George Tiller and his vital legacy in American abortion history.

  • A Kasich primary challenge to Trump ain't happening.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Virginia Beach shooting; What we know: "At least 12 people have been killed."

  • Trump wants to pass his trade deal. But he's not acting like it.

  • Netanyahu has failed to form a government, sending Israelis back to the voting booth. For more, see:

    • Bernard Avishai: A climax to the saga of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman.

    • Ricard Silverstein: Netanyahu calls new election: deja vu all over again.

• Josh Marshall: Bill Barr's Trump-toadying lickspittle ways, explained.

• Dylan Matthews: Bernie Sanders's most socialist idea yet, explained: "He wants to mandate employee ownership of big companies." Also: Eric Levitz: In appeal to moderates, Sanders calls for worker-ownership of means of production. I've long felt that employee ownership of companies is much preferable, both for workers and the public, to labor unions. I've seen firsthand how giving employees an ownership stake makes their work more productive and satisfying. Anything else generates class conflict, often degenerating into a zero-sum contest. Of course, I support labor unions, as they provide countervailing power against the arrogance and abuse of unfettered management: strong unions help their workers, of course, but they also strengthen the economy and reinforce/revitalize democracy.

• Anna North:

  • Missouri could become the first state with zero abortion clinics. How did we get here?

  • The Trump administration wants to let doctors discriminate against trans patients.

• Kevin Poulsen: We found the guy behind the viral 'drunk Pelosi' video.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • William Barr vs Robert Mueller, explained.

  • Mueller's punt keeps looking worse: "The special counsel's decision not to say whether Trump broke the law sets a bad precedent."

• Gabriela Resto-Montero:

  • Trump says the UK should "walk away" from its Brexit deal: "The president also suggested his 'smart' friend Nigel Arage lead a new round of Brexit negotiations." One wonders just who he is speaking for: the political leader of "America First"? the owner of a luxury golf club in Scotland? Either way, this is pretty blatant interference in the internal affairs of another country.

  • Italy revokes Steve Bannon's right to use a monastery for his political "gladiator" school.

  • Illinois affirms "fundamental right" to abortion by passing new bill.

• David Roberts:

  • More natural gas isn't a "middle ground" -- it's a climate disaster.

  • We'll soon know the exact air pollution from every power plant in the world. That's huge.

• Emily S Rueb: 'Freedom Gas,' the next American export.

• Aaron Rupar: Trump thinks the courts might save him from impeachment. It doesn't work like that.

• Danny Sursen: Troika fever: Key American allies in the Middle East are the real tyrants.

• Andrew Sullivan: This is what a real conservative looks like in 2019: In self-serving praise of Robert Mueller and Justin Amash. Defines conservatism as "a philosophy of limited, constitutional government, individual rights, trust in tradition, love of country, prudence in foreign policy and restraint at home." That's actually closer to classic liberalism: just town down the reflexive jingoism, and allow for the possibility of progress -- e.g., extending individual rights to more (potentially all) people. The more consistent core creed of self-annointed conservatives is their belief in a natural social/political/economic hierarchy which places some people above others. As democratic principles spread, conservatives have had to hide their true agenda behind faux populism -- appeals to tradition, to pride, and to prejudice -- which have often led them to embrace some pretty unsavory politicians. Trump won them over by offering them the only thing that matters to them: the spoils of winning.

• Matt Taibbi: Julian Assange must never be extradited.

• Karen Tumulty: Trump could save his presidency the way Bill Clinton did: Clever idea:

  Getting things done may be Trump's best hope of survival -- as the last president who found himself in the impeachment crosshairs demonstrated. In 1998, as Bill Clinton's presidency became engulfed in scandal surrounding his affair with a White House intern, his mastery of what was then called "compartmentalization" was tested. Day in and day out, Clinton made sure Americans saw a functioning presidency. . . .

  He could not prevent the investigation from going forward, or Congress from trying to remove him from office. In December 1998, the House voted two articles of impeachment against him, for perjury and for obstruction of justice.

  But that very week, Clinton's job approval in the Gallup poll reached 73 percent -- not only the highest of his presidency, but among the best recorded by any chief executive since the mid-1960s. By then, it had become clear that the charges against him would not stick in the Senate, which just under eight weeks later acquitted him.

  By doing his job, Clinton saved his presidency.

  Even in this polarized environment, there are still opportunities for Trump to do the same.

  Still, partisan asymmetry matters more than competency or popularity. There was never any chance that Clinton would lose enough Democrats in the Senate to be convicted there, and Trump is if anything in a stronger position in the Senate now. His real problem is that his approval numbers have never topped 43% since the election (compare to Clinton's 73%). Maybe if Clinton was that low, he'd have something to worry about, but Republicans are used to being unpopular, and most of what Trump is unpopular for these days is being a hardcore Republican.

• Alex Ward: In Japan, Trump broke a cardinal rule of being America's president.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The 9 least popular Democrats running for president, briefly explained: "The Laggard Nine," aka "the Sub-2 Percent Club"): Jay Inslee, Steve Bullock, John Delaney, Eric Swalwell, Bill de Blasio, Tim Ryan, Michael Bennet, Seth Moulton, Marianne Williamson.

  • Trump's new plan to tax Mexican imports, explained.

  • Robert Mueller should testify before Congress.

  • Joe Biden's low-key campaigning schedule, explained.

Daily Log

I started to include this link, because it fits into a discussion several friends have been having about creating a game that would make a case against nominating Joe Biden. I have mixed feelings about this, partially explained below. On the other hand, I didn't get around to presenting the other hand, so decided to drop it from the post.

• Mehdi Hassan/Rebecca Traister: Joe Biden would be a disaster: Podcast with transcript. I don't agree that Biden would be a disaster, although I do think that nominating him would be a missed opportunity. As I've noted, I think that 2020 may be a pivotal, era-founding election. (There's no ironclad law at work here, but we can identify four eras, each founded by a legendary president, each ending with a notoriously bad president: Jefferson-Buchanan, Lincoln-Hoover, Roosevelt-Carter, and Reagan-Trump; one might have included Washington-Adams, but 12 years doesn't make for much of an era. The latest era is anomalous in several respects, especially in that it represents a turn away from the progressive expansion of democratic rights.) Biden's total experience and instincts are totally rooted in the compromises Democrats made to compete in the Reagan-Trump era. That doesn't mean that if elected in 2020 he would continue to practice the same submissive triangulation that marred the Clinton and Obama presidencies. The party base today is going to pull him to the left, because it's increasingly clear that the solutions to pressing problems are on the left, and because we now know that centering impulses weaken the party.

After the post, I noticed an open tab with a multi-part tweet by Jared Yates Sexton that someone had pointed my way. I rather hate these things, so I may not have linked to it if I had noticed it in time, but thought I might copy it here to see how much sense it makes:

I've written about this extensively in my new book The Man They Wanted Me To Be, but it's really important to get this out: Trump's behavior with Pelosi completely reflects the cycle of abuse that myself and other survivors have endured. 1/

It's a really unpleasant thing to endure and it brings up some very awful memories from my childhood, where I was systematically physically and emotionally abused by insecure and unwell men. Unfortunately, the president is an insecure and unwell man, the Abuser-in-Chief. 2/

The cycle is very simple. When an insecure man is threatened, he'll lash out. This can be verbally or physically. It can be a dressing down, a verbal tirade, the throwing of things, or a beating. Then, after it's over, he'll try and make good or question the abusee's reality. 3/

Trump calling Pelosi "crazy" yesterday was really, really triggering. I've seen, time and again, abusive men calling the women they abuse crazy, calling into question what they endured, what I watched happen. It's almost as bad as the actual abuse because it fractures reality. 4/

Trump having his staff corroborate his version of events is something that happens all the time. I've been made to corroborate events I knew to be false simply because I was a frightened and intimidated child. It was . . . jarring to watch it happen on the national stage 5/

How this happens is pretty complicated and a lot to process. It begins with childhood, where men are systematically abused themselves in an effort to "toughen them up." By telling boys they can't have emotions they're actually being emotionally abused in the process. 6/

The message that's being sent though is that anyone who has emotions, in this case women, are irrational. That means that men own rationality and reality and that anytime a woman questions your reality she's being "crazy" or irrational, which is what happened with Pelosi. 7/

As I chronicle in THE MAN THEY WANTED ME TO BE, traditional masculinity is a lie. Nobody can repress their emotions. But they can pretend and pretend until eventually men develop what's called alexithymia, which is a terrible emotional condition where they lose ability. 8/

With alexithymia men lose the ability to understand their own emotions, they lose the ability to understand other's emotions, which leads to them being "crazy" or "irrational." They often lose the frame for their own emotional outbursts and ability to understand their actions. 9/

Watching Donald Trump, it's not hard to imagine he suffers from alexithymia. Obviously he doesn't understand his own outbursts and has no frame for the things he says and does. When he's questioned he lashes out. In this case, maybe he believed he was calm, but he's lost. 10/

When men behave this way, those around them only have a few options. You either submit to their worldview or face vicious abuse. You see men around Trump who kowtow in fear constantly. That's part of this cycle. With Pelosi, unfortunately, Trump isn't going to stop. 11/

As part of socialization men are taught the only acceptable expressions are anger and violence. What we're seeing with Trump is all his range of emotions. Pelosi challenged him and so he lashed out. He questioned her sanity and has even promoted fake videos to prove his point 12/

To anyone who's been abused, Trump is the embodiment of this cycle. He brags incessantly while he's obviously pathetically insecure. Anyone who even dares question him is ostracized and attacked, belittled because he's afraid. He's really, really pathetic. 13/

It makes me sad to see the country resemble the abusive households of my youth. Every day we worry what mood the president will be in, whether it's a bad day or if we'll just be left alone. I've talked to other survivors and the memories are visceral, palpable. 14/

Yesterday, as I heard him line up staff to back up his twisted memories, I felt like I was four years old all over again, an angry and dangerous man lording over me and demanding loyalty or else promising violence. You don't shake that, and unfortunately that's where we are. 15/

The truth is, Trump is unwell. Mentally, yes, but emotionally it's undeniable. He's the embodiment of toxic masculinity and is so far gone there's no reaching him. This is an abusive relationship, an abusive situation we're living through, and he simply knows no other way 16/

We're going to keep seeing this cycle repeat itself until he's out of office and we're going to be living with the ghosts of it. Survivors of abuse carry their abuse with them the rest of their lives. I certainly do, and to get better you have to recognize the abuse as abuse. 17/

Listening to shows last night call it maneuvering just hid the true nature of this. It isn't politics, it's personal, one-on-one abuse, and if we don't recognize it we're not going to escape it or understand it. There are many, many layers to this and simplifying worsens it. 18/

A large reason why Trump enjoys the devotion he does is because the people supporting him are locked into unhealthy cycles of abuse. They've been victims too and they become locked in with his abuse. It happens all the time. And to get past it we must recognize it. 19/

In the meantime, as a survivor of abuse, I can tell you this: reach out to anyone you know who is a survivor. These are really, really trying times that reawaken the scars of abuse. Everyday the president perpetuates a new dose of abuse and it takes a powerful toll. 20/20

Book Roundup

When I posted my latest Book Roundup on March 15 -- eleven months after my only 2018 compilation, after two in 2017, four in 2016, and five in 2015 -- I figured another one would be eminent. I got distracted, but here's a second batch of 40+ books, and I'm pretty certain that a third will be ready in a few weeks. These surveys are useful to me as a means of keeping track of what the world knows and is thinking about. I've been trying to track "the coming dark age" for some time now, but while lots of people seem to be getting dumber (or at least more certain of their ignorance), a lot of smart thinking is still being developed and preserved in books.

As I've started doing recently, I'm including various related books in bullet lists following a leading one. There's also a supplemental list at the end, of books worth noting but not (as far as I'm concerned) at much length.

Jill Abramson: Merchants of Truth: The Business and the Fight for Facts (2019, Simon & Schuster): Tries to update David Halberstam's The Powers That Be (1979) by profiling four major media corporation (The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE) as they make business out of the public's appetite for news. That, of course, raises the question of how the selection and reporting of news is filtered and often distorted by each of their business and cultural models. That's an intrinsically interesting question, but not necessarily one that can be answered -- for one thing the author adds her own limited vantage point. I can't say anything about charges that sections of the book were plagiarized. Related:

• Alan Rusbridger: Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now (2018, Farrar Straus and Giroux).

Carol Anderson: One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018, Bloomsbury USA): At some point in recent history, Republicans came to realize that it was easier to win by suppressing the vote among Democratic constituencies than it was to convince those voters of a political program which actually promises little more than to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. Of course, this isn't new: all republics have struggled over who counts and who doesn't, but the core idea of democracy -- each and every person is entitled to the same vote -- has been hard to argue with, until very recently. Even now, even among Republicans, the arguments tend to be disguised, and much of the mischief avoids the spotlight. Also wrote, with Tonya Bolden, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide (2018, Bloomsbury). Previously wrote: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Also on voting rights:

• Allan J Lichtman: The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present (2018, Harvard University Press).

Max Blumenthal: The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019, Verso): For the most part, a basic primer on how the US fed and nurtured its eventual enemies in the Middle East, in a long series of events that ultimately show how arrogant and self-centered the architects of American policy have been. That general book has been written a half-dozen times already, with dozens of other tomes treating one aspect or another of the big picture. However, by dropping Trump into the title, he's adding another dimension: not just what American plots and wars have done to the Middle East, but what such persistent warmaking has done to the psyches of ignorant and oblivious Americans-- Trump being an example.

Steven Brill: Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall -- and Those Fighting to Reverse It (2018, Knopf): Journalist, wrote a book on Obamacare called America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healtcare System (2015), looks for a bigger picture and finds it in "an erosion of responsibility and accountability, an epidemic of shortsightedness, an increasingly hollow economic and political center, and millions of Americans gripped by apathy and hopelessness." That sounds a bit like a backgrounder for Trump's "Make American Great Again" campaign slogan, but it appears that the culprit Brill identifies is Trump's own billionaire class.

Arthur C Brooks: Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt (2019, Broadside Books): Someone might be able to write a decent book on this theme, but I doubt that the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative propagandist who revels in his sense of moral superiority, is up to the task. Previous feel-good books include: Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (2006); Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America -- and How We Can Get More of It (2008); The Battle: How the Fight Between Big Government and Free Enterprise Will Shape America's Future (2010); The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise (2012), and The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America (2015). Turns out that it's easy to "love your enemies" once you've ground them under heel, which is the author's real mission. More recent efforts to make the conservatives seem like they think and care:

• Noah Rothman: Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America (2019, Gateway).
• Ben Shapiro: The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great (2019, Broadside Books).

Contrast these with the right's more pedestrian hackwork, designed to rile up hatred (and otherwise confuse you):

• Dinesh D'Souza: The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (2017, Regnery).
• Jonah Goldberg: Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (2018, Crown Forum).
• Mary Katherine Ham/Guy Benson: End of Discussion: How the Left's Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun) (2015; paperback, 2017, Crown Forum).
• Derek Hunter: Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood (2018, Broadside Books).
• Mark R Levin: Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism (2017, Threshold Editions).
• Ben Shapiro: Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (2004; paperback, 2010, Thomas Nelson).

Paul Buhle/Steve Max: Eugene V Debs: A Graphic Biography (paperback, 2019, Verso): Buhle was editor of Radical America, a major historian of American radical movements (co-editor of Encyclopedia of the American Let), and a long-time of the graphic book form, so the only thing surprising here is that it took so long to come together. Art by Noah Van Sciver, with additional help by Dave Nance. Actually, I've noted several of Buhle's graphic histories in the past. Here's a longer list (credits aren't always clear):

• Paul Buhle/Nicole Schulman: Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (paperback, 2005, Verso).
• Paul Buhle: The Beats: A Graphic History (2009; paperback, 2010, Hill & Wang).
• Paul Buhle/Sabrina Jones: FDR and the New Deal for Beginners (paperback, 2010, For Beginners).
• Paul Buhle: Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith (paperback, 2013, Herald Press).
• Paul Buhle/Noah Van Sciver: Johnny Appleseed (2017, Fantagraphics).
• Kate Evans: Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (paperback, 2015, Verso): ed, Paul Buhle.
• Harvey Pekar/Paul Buhle: Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation (paperback, 2009, New Press).
• Harvey Pekar: Students for a Democratic Society (paperback, 2009, Hill & Wang): ed, Paul Buhle.
• Harvey Pekar/Paul Buhle: Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land (2011, Harry N Abrams).
• Spain Rodriguez: Che: A Graphic Biography (paperback, 2017, Verso): ed, Paul Buhle.
• Sharon Rudahl: Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman (paperback, 2007, New Press): ed, Paul Buhle.
• Gilbert Shelton/Paul Buhle: Radical America Komiks (paperback, 2019, PM Press): reprint of Radical America "underground comix" edition from 1969.
• Nick Thorkelson/Paul Buhle/Andrew Lamas: Herbert Marcuse: Philosophy of Utopia: A Graphic Biography (paperback, 2019, City Lights).
• Howard Zinn/Mike Konopacki/Paul Buhle: A People's History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation (paperback, 2008, Metropolitan Books).

Chapo Trap House: The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason (2018, Atria Books): I went through a kneejerk period in the 1960s when I rebelled so hard against the liberal warmongers of the Democratic Party that I was willing to throw away all appeals to "logic, facts, and reason," and embrace its opposite (arts, irrationality, mysticism). I changed my tune when I found that one could arrive at right conclusions through reason, and I wound up more dedicated to rationality than ever before. So at first glance I took this book to be complete, reactionary bullshit. But it turns out this is meant to be funny, and it's aimed at young people today who feel the same incoherent rage and disgust over the powers that be as I felt back in the 1960s. The authors are comedians who run some kind of podcast. And while there are some lame jokes and outright bullshit here, their core claim harbors a kernel of truth: "Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under thirty who is not a sociopath." Once you understand that, you can look elsewhere for better-reasoned explanations and proposals, but that insight is a good place to start.

Sarah Churchwell: Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream" (2018, Basic Books): Two iconic notions, offered as sweeping generalizations about America's role in the world, adopted by various political movements for varying ends depending on the time and place. The contemporary interest angle is that both played large roles in the 2016 election, perhaps even more so than in their long and storied past. On the other hand, they're basically bullshit, at once able to flatter and mislead their political targets, and there's something rather hollow about stretching a book around them.

Kimberly Clausing: Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital (2019, Harvard University Press): Theory tells us that free trade and unrestricted mobility of capital and labor increases wealth all around. The reality is something else, as global capital has exploited economic theory to effectively escape nation-state regulation, leading to ever more extreme inequality, stripping most people of most nations of their political standing. That has in turn produced a backlash, both on the reactionary right and on the left, which sees things like "free trade agreements" as little more than a power- and wealth-grab. Causing attempts to save theory from practice, by advancing political schemes to make open borders work for everyone.

Anna Clark: The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy (2018, Metropolitan Books): We routinely receive warnings about America's crumbling infrastructure, but usually assume those threats are things that could happen in the future, not things already happening today. But the water system in Flint, Michigan has already turned toxic, killing and irreparably harming people who merely happened to live in the wrong place.

Michael D'Antonio/Peter Eisner: The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence (2018, Thomas Dunne Books): Two key questions here: How bad is Pence? And how powerful is he? Trump had promised to give his vice president unprecedented day-to-day power -- the first evidence of that was that Pence had the leading role in staffing the administration, which is how Trump got surrounded by so many orthodox extreme conservatives. But beyond his immediate influence, I can't recall a moment of disharmony between Trump and Pence -- indeed, hard to think of anyone else in the administration one can say that about. Part of this is that Pence has been eager and willing to support Trump's Kulturkampf fetishes, no matter how loony (e.g., his stunt leaving a NFL game after players took the knee during the national anthem, or his ridiculous task of holding the official press conference announcing the Space Force). The import of this is how Pence has set an example for even the most hopelessly ideological Republicans to line up behind and join forces with Trump.

Jared Diamond: Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (2019, Little Brown): An anthropologist who since his famous Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) has used his license to practice macrohistory, taking a view that straddles vast stretches of time and space to wrap big questions up into tidy boxes. He picks on six countries for his turning points this time: Japan (forced opening by US in 1860s), Finland (attacked by Soviet Union in 1939 following their "non-aggression" pact with Nazi Germany), Germany and Austria (post-WWII), Indonesia and Chile (victims of US-backed coups in 1965 and 1973). He draws lessons for Americans today. I doubt he has much to say about karma.

William Egginton: The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today's College Campuses (2018, Bloomsbury): "Egginton argues that our colleges and universities have become exclusive, expensive clubs for the cultural and economic elite instead of a national, publicly funded project for the betterment of the country. Only a return to the goals of community, and the egalitarian values underlying a liberal arts education, can head off the further fracturing of the body politic and the splintering of the American mind." Lots of gripes about higher education these days, many from the right. Hard for me to sort these book out, probably because my own stake in academia is so tenuous:

• Greg Lukianoff/Jonathan Haidt: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018, Penguin Books).
• Heather MacDonald: The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermined Our Culture (2018, St Martin's Press).

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018, Simon & Schuster): It's long been obvious -- I first picked up this insight from a book by Paul Sweezy written in the 1950s -- that we have a lot of jobs that don't really produce anything of value, that are effectively pointless and parasitical, what Graeber has finally called bullshit. He's an anthropologist and anarchist, the writer of a major tome Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and a book of his experience and theory of Occupy Wall Street, The Democracy Project:A History, a Crisis, a Movement.

Greg Grandin: The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019, Metropolitan Books): Author of a number of first-rate books on America's impact on Latin America -- e.g., Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006) -- easily sees the links between two centuries of US aggression and the militarization of the US-Mexico border. Timely enough to include Trump's border wall fixation, though not the latest blow up in Venezuela.

Bradley W Hart: Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States (2018, Thomas Dunne Books): Some were well known, like Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh, the Bund and the America First Committee. I wouldn't be surprised to hear names like Koch and Trump pop up, although neither appear in what I've read. Still, I'd guess that actual supporters were fewer in number than sympathizers and apologists, especially those with home-grown racist and/or anti-labor agendas. On the other hand I really doubt that every isolationist was anti-semitic. Before WWII, Americans had a long history of believing that we should stay away from foreign entanglements, and the war schemes they lead to.

Daniel Immerwahr: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Beyond the 48 continental states, the US managed to pick up various far-flung lands, and has actually managed to keep more of them than any European rival: Alaska and Hawaii have become full-fledged states, Puerto Rico and various smaller islands are in limbo, the Philippines were let go but only losing them to Japan, the Panama Canal Zone was returned to Panama (which was itself a US creation), Cuba was never officially on the books but treated like a colony until its revolution. This surveys most of that list, stopping short of the coups and incursions and a globe-straddling archipelago of bases and even more pervasive property claims by private Americans and friendly investors.

Stephen Kinzer: The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (2017; paperback, 2018, St Martin's Griffin): To be clear, Roosevelt was for and Twain was against in this particular political debate (c. 1898, what we've dubbed the Spanish-American War) over whether America should impose itself on others as an empire -- arguably not the first such debate, and most certainly not the last. Evan Thomas covered the pro-empire side (mostly) in The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire (2010); also Kinzer has previously written about the 1898 annexation of Hawaii in Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq (2006). Still, would be good to pay more attention to the anti-war/empire arguments.

Eric Klinenberg: Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (2018, Crown): Sociologist, writes about the value of shared spaces -- examples given include libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, synagogues, and parks -- for building social bonds and a sense of common interests, as opposed to the fragmentation and isolation that has lately taken hold almost everywhere.

Kevin M Kruse/Julian E Zelizer: Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (2019, WW Norton): A broad history of what I've started calling the Reagan-to-Trump era, backing up a couple years (the falls of Nixon and Saigon, OPEC embargoes, desegregation riots in Boston) to get a running start. Jill Lepore says this details how "Americans abandoned a search for common ground in favor of a political culture of endless, vicious, and -- very often -- mindless division." Kruse previously wrote White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), and One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015). Zelizer has written The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (2015, Penguin Press), and a few more, including books on the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

Milton Lodge/Charles S Taber: The Rationalizing Voter (paperback, 2013, Cambridge University Press): Argues that "political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts," testing five basic hypotheses: "hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion, and motivated reasoning." Yglesias used this book to explain Kanye West's embrace of Trump.

Michael Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (2019, Oxford University Press): Argues that "in the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history." Further asserts that this blissful state ended "because three major countries -- Vladimir Putin's Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping's China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics' Iran in the Middle East -- put an end to end to it With aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions." Pretty amazing that anyone can look at the last 25-30 years and fail to identify the one nation that has been almost constantly at war, attacking "enemies" in more than a dozen countries scattered all around the world. Also that the author overlooked a number of other wars that broke out during the period, including the period's most deadly wars (in and around Congo).

Bill McKibben: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019, Henry Holt): Wrote one of the early books on global warming, The End of Nature (1989). I read it during a mid-summer trip to Florida, where my initial skepticism was overcome by seeing and feeling how much heat could be absorbed into the atmosphere. Still, I hated his metaphor, and he has a knack for coming up with new irritating ways to say the same thing ever since. (Eaarth was the worst.) This is his latest, probably even more impassioned as he's made his career move from critic to activist. I'd probably find his 2013 memoir, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, more to my taste than this doomsday screed. But despite the hyperbole, he's been basically right all along. You have to respect that.

John J Mearsheimer: The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018, Yale University Press): Foreign policy mandarin, subscribes to the realist wing like his sometime co-author Stephen M Walt, has developed a healthy skepticism about how American foreign policy is practiced. Problem here is likely to be his choice of "Liberal Dreams" as his evil strawman. Although political liberals, especially in the anti-communist 1950s, readily supported America's originally bipartisan, military-first foreign policy, this policy has never advanced "liberal dreams." For the last 30-40 years, "liberal hegemony" has never been more than a neocon ruse, an attempt to dress up old-fashioned imperial power projection with a patina of nice words. Meanwhile, Walt has his own new book:

• Stephen M Walt: The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy (2018, Farrar Straus and Giroux).

Steve Pearlstein: Can American Capitalism Survive? Why Greed Is Not Good, Opportunity Is Not Equal, and Fairness Won't Make Us Poor (2018, St Martin's Press): Reminded me first of Robert Kuttner's 2018 book Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism (still unread on my shelf), but the questions are slightly different. Pearlstein seems to assume democracy will have the final say, and asks instead whether capitalism can be reformed in ways that will make it palatable to most people. Clearly, its current practices like "squeezing workers, cheating customers, avoiding taxes, and leaving communities in the lurch" tend to undermine public trust and confidence.

Nomi Prins: Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World (2018, Nation Books): Former bond trader, found her calling writing about the banking racket in the Bush years -- Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America (2004), Jacked: How "Conservatives" Are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not) (2006), It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals From Washington to Wall Street (2009) -- looks at how "the open door between private and central banking has ensured endless opportunities for market manipulation and asset bubbles." I'm not a big fan of the titles per sé, but few people have written more lucidly about how theirs racket works.

John Quiggin: Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly (2019, Princeton University Press): Author of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, an important effort to clear out much of the dead wood, takes up Henry Hazlitt's 1946 classic, Economics in One Lesson, which he summarizes as "leave markets alone, and all will be well." But all isn't well, as there are many cases of market failures, so Quiggin adds "Lesson Two: Market prices don't reflect all the opportunity costs we face as a society." He gives 400 pages of examples and explanations, in what may be one of the essential texts of modern economics.

Eric Rauchway: Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal (2018, Basic Books): After an overwhelming majority of Americans voted to free themselves from President Herbert Hoover, they faced a four-month delay until the new president could be sworn in -- a period so grueling that the US Constitution was changed to move future inaugurations up from March to January. This book covers those four months, a kind of pre-history to the famous "100 days" that followed Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. In terms of anticipatory obstructionism, Hoover probably holds the record -- although John Adams in 1800-01 raised the bar, and Donald Trump will no doubt try to top them all in the shorter 2020-21 transition period.

Richard Rhodes: Energy: A Human History (2018, Simon & Schuster): Recaps the history of mankind as the story of claiming and taming sources of energy, possibly starting with human and domesticated animal muscle, but wood, coal, oil, and nuclear play larger roles in this story -- Rhodes seems to be especially fond of nuclear, although the four major books he's written on nuclear bombs can be read as cautionary tales. I've read those four books, plus a couple more, and don't doubt that he is capable of synthesizing such a large and important story.

Nathaniel Rich: Losing Earth: A Recent History (2019, MCD): A history, pointing out that by 1979 "we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change -- including how to stop it," which goes on to show how supposedly responsible people failed to act on that knowledge, letting us slide into the ever-increasing crisis we face today. The Reagan administration's determination to promote coal and cripple the EPA and drive science from the policy process -- I'd say "echoes of Trump" but it's the other way around -- were key, but the thing you keep running into is human reluctance to deal with a catastrophe that seems to merely loom in the future, because the worst hasn't struck yet.

Sam Rosenfeld: The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (2017, University of Chicago Press): Assumes that the problem with politics today is partisan polarization, and seeks to find where that came from by examining the political period from 1945 through 1980, moving from "The Idea of Responsible Partisanship" to "The Making of a Vanguard Party" and "Liberal Alliance-Building for Lean Times." Winds up with a chapter on 1980-2000 and a "Conclusion: Polarization without Responsibility, 2000-2016." Rosenfeld attributes the idea that the two parties should be realigned on a liberal-conservative axis to Franklin Roosevelt. What actually forced the realignment was a single issue -- civil rights -- which straddled the 1980 divide (what we might call the tipping point). Whether this was a good or bad thing depends a lot on how important you think that issue is. But more generally, polarization always occurs when issues become more serious and less amenable to compromise -- and we see that happening now, on race (of course) but also on the more general principles of equality, fairness, justice, and whether government will serve or oppress the vast majority of the people. I don't mean to argue that polarization has no down side. The main one is that it's led one party in particular to view politics as a zero-sum game, even worse as it's blinded that party to recognizing common problems (most obviously, climate change, which Republicans furiously deny because it's inconvenient for some of their major donors).

Joseph E Stiglitz: People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (2019, WW Norton): Major liberal economist, advised Clinton in the 1990s and bragged about it in The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade (2003), warned about Bush in the 2000s and reminded us in Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (2010), wrote an important book on The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (2012), and several books on trade, starting with Globalization and Its Discontents (2002). I've read (and admired) most of his books, but overlooked an earlier book, Whither Socialism?, which claimed that "market socialism" couldn't work. His analysis back then probably has much to do with his decision now to push for what he calls "progressive capitalism" as the alternative to the burgeoning movement for socialism. I'm sure he's very smart about it, but I always find it a bit sad that the only occasions when the left gains enough power to do something, they first have to spend all their energy saving capitalism's sorry ass.

Bhaskar Sunkara: The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (2019, Basic Books). Editor of Jacobin offers a primer on the history of socialism since the mid-1800s and "a realistic vision for its future" -- well short of the Soviet-era ideals, but carefully, cautiously tailored to provide universal, fair and equitable solutions to economic problems. Related:

• Bhaskar Sunkara: The ABCs of Socialism (paperback, 2016, Verso).
• Cinzia Arruzza/Tithi Bhattacharya/Nancy Fraser: Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (paperback, 2019, Verso).
• Rutger Bregman: Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (2017, Little Brown; paperback, 2018, Back Bay Books).
• Nancy Fraser: The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born (paperback, 2019, Verso).
• Nancy Fraser/Rahel Jaeggi: Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (paperback, 2018, Polity).
• Kristen R Ghodsee: Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2018, Bold Type Books).
• Avel Honneth: The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (2017; paperback, 2018, Polity).
• Danny Katch: Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation (paperback, 2015, Haymarket Books).
• Leigh Phillips: Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff (paperback, 2015, Zero Books).
• Leigh Phillips/Michal Rozworski: The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (paperback, Verso).
• Chantal Mouffe: For a Left Populism (2018, Verso).

Michael W Twitty: The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (2017, Amistad): A family history back to its roots, focusing on the food that made each generation, and crossed in various ways from black to white and back. Also on food and the South: John T Edge: The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South (2017, Penguin).

Craig Unger: House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia (2018, Dutton): A journalist with a nose for corrupt relationships, previously wrote House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties (2004), seems to have a ripe subject digging into Trump's various deals with Russian mobsters and oligarchs.

Jose Antonio Vargas: Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018, Dey Street Books): Author spent 25 years as an "undocumented" American, "living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own," before outing himself to write about the experience in the New York Times -- becoming a spokesman for the millions of "undocumented" Americans. Less about immigration either as policy or practice than about what it feels like to live in a country you have to hide from. Other recent books on immigration:

• Francisco Cantú: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border (2018; paperback, 2019, Riverhead Books).
• Abdi Nor Iftin: Call Me American: A Memoir (2018, Knopf).
• Viet Tranh Nguyen, ed: The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018, Harry N Abrams).
• Peter Schrag: The World of Aufbau: Hitler's Refugees in America (2019, University of Wisconsin Press).
• Matthew Soerens/Jenny Yang: Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion & Truth in the Immigration Debate (paperback, 2018, IVP Books).

William T Vollmann: Carbon Ideologies: Volume One: No Immediate Danger/Volume Two: No Good Alternative (2018, Viking): Mostly a novelist, occasionally writes non-fiction and has been known to get carried away, like his Imperial (1306 pp). This "almanac of global energy use" is similar-sized, but published in two volumes.

Jon Ward: Camelot's End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight That Broke the Democratic Party (2019, Twelve): This suggests that Reagan's triumph in 1980 had more to do with a breakdown caused by Ted Kenndy's almost unprecedented primary challenge against a president of his own party. The closest analogy I can think of was Teddy Roosevelt's rebuke of William Howard Taft in 1912, which wound up with his Bull Moose third party and both losing to Woodrow Wilson. Lots of parallels there, not least the challengers' sense of entitlement. Looking back now it's clear that Carter was a forerunner of many of Reagan's issues, and as such helped to legitimize someone who had previously been viewed as a far-right fringe candidate. One wonders whether the clearer choice that Kennedy might have presented would have faired better.

Alan Wolfe: The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity (2018, University of Chicago Press). More like senescence, which has less to do with age than the popular choice 38 years ago to turn away from facing reality and pretend we're fine in Ronald Reagan's fantasy world. Wolfe is a political science prof (emeritus) with a long list of books, including The Seamy Side of Democracy: Repression in America (1973), Marginalized in the Middle (1996), Does American Democracy Still Work? (2006), and At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews (2014). I last noticed him when he published The Future of Liberalism (2009), a spirited defense that this must contrast with.

Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019 PublicAffairs): Seems to focus on the new information businesses, specifically the ones that track your every step in navigating the Internet, and analyze and market that information to others hoping to manipulate you. I'm not sure how far you can push this model: is it really that important? I suspect it may even be self-limiting.

Other recent books also noted without comment:

Ben S Bernanke/Timothy F Geithner/Henry M Paulson Jr: Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons (paperback, 2019, Penguin Books).

William J Burns: The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (2019, Random House).

Tucker Carlson: Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018, Free Press).

Robert A Caro: Working (2019, Knopf).

Susan Faludi: In the Darkroom (2016, Metropolitan Books; paperback, 2017, Picador).

Henry Louis Gates Jr: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019, Penguin Press).

Gary Giddins: Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (2018, Little Brown).

Jonah Goldberg: Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (2018, Crown Forum).

Max Hastings: Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018, Harper).

Steven Johnson: Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most (2018, Riverhead Books).

Dan Kaufman: The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (2018, WW Norton).

Yasmin Khan: India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War (2015, Oxford University Press).

Lawrence Lessig: America, Compromised (2018, University of Chicago Press).

Steve Luxenberg: Separate: The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson, and America's Journey From Slavery to Segregation (2019, WW Norton).

Anna Merlan: Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2019, Metropolitan Books).

Ashoka Mody: Euro Tragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (2018, Oxford University Press).

Raghuram Rajan: The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind (2019, Penguin Press).

Jeffrey D Sachs: A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018, Columbia University Press).

Darrel M West: Divided Politics, Divided Nation: Hyperconflict in the Trump Era (2019, Brookings Institution Press).

Joan C Williams: White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2017, Harvard Business Review Press).

Music Week

Expanded blog post, May archive.

Music: current count 31558 [31518] rated (+40), 251 [252] unrated (-1).

Last Monday in May, so extra work today doing my paperwork for the May Streamnotes archive. Rated count was 34 when I first checked on Sunday, but I've kept this open to see what fits into the month. Still, much of the bulk, both this week and for the month, has come from diving into back catalog. With new albums from George Cables and Jerry Bergonzi out, I thought they might be fun. When time ran out, I still had more Bergonzi to go, not least the new one.

The week's finds are scattered. The latest Christgau Expert Witness picked a Youssou N'Dour album I had noticed from publicist email but hadn't tracked down (not on Napster, but I was able to stream from Rock Paper Scissors). Also Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba's Miri, a previous A- here (also according to Michael Tatum). Phil Overeem's latest list pointed me at Beyoncé's Homecoming and A Day in the Life, but the album I liked most was an exceptionally genteel trad jazz quartet he had down at 23. I got some more ideas from Alfred Soto's The best albums of 2019, first draft: specifically Nilüfer Yanya's Miss Universe -- although I'll note that I had heard his six higher-rated albums and didn't A-list any of them. (Further down his list, I did pick Control Top: Covert Contracts; Robert Forster: Inferno; Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?; and Lizzo: Cuz I Love You; still unheard: The Mountain Goats, Vampire Weekend, The National; Tyler, the Creator; and Weyes Blood.) Lucas Fagen provided the tip on L7 (also one I did't follow up on yet: Gary Clark Jr.). First L7 play didn't convince me, so I went back and played the Best Of. Gave the new one an extra play later, but didn't move it. They have one of the all-time great band sounds, but at this point I'd guess it's more likely to drop a notch than to rise one. Opposite is true of their eponymous debut, which Christgau missed and I'd never heard. They get something out of youth there that they'll never get back to again.

It occurred to me that Ray Charles and Betty Carter might be on YouTube, and indeed it was. Someone wrote me a while back to point out that several albums I couldn't find on Napster were on YouTube (usually with nothing but the static album cover for video). I haven't followed that tip often, but with big chunks of backlist from both artists this month, seemed like good due dilligence. Disappointing album.

David Cantwell has written an exceptionally thorough review of Robert Christgau's two recent essay compilations, Book Reports and Is It Still Good to Ya? (Duke University Press): Robert Christgau's big-hearted theory of pop. I managed to screw up Cantwell's name when I initially posted the link, confusing him with a mediocre pitcher from 1927-37 (W-L record 76-108, mostly with the doormat Boston Braves, although he looked better before going 4-25 in 1936). Turns out David Cantwell has been cranking out country music list-articles for Rolling Stone. It might be fun to follow up on them in June.

I am posting tonight a new installment of XgauSez, Christgau's question-and-answer session.

New records reviewed this week:

• Beyoncé: Homecoming: The Live Album (2018 [2019], Columbia, 2CD): [r]: B+(*)
• Carlos Bica/Daniel Erdmann/DJ Illvibe: I Am the Escaped One (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Brooks & Dunn: Reboot (2019, Arista Nashville): [r]: B
• George Cables: I'm All Smiles (2019, HighNote): [r]: B+(**)
• Steve Davis: Correlations (2019, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(*)
• Elder Ones: From Untruth (2019, Northern Spy): [r]: B
• Luke Gillespie: Moving Mists (2018 [2019], Patois): [cd]: B+(*)
• Carly Rae Jepsen: Dedicated (2019, 604/School Boy/Interscope): [r]: B+(***)
• Norah Jones: Begin Again (2019, Blue Note, EP): [r]: B
• Kehlani: While We Wait (2019, Atlantic/TSNMI): [r]: B+(**)
• L7: Scatter the Rats (2019, Blackheart): [r]: B+(***)
• Doug MacDonald: Califournia Quartet (2018 [2019], Dmacmusic): [cd]: B+(*)
• Matt Mitchell: Phalanx Ambassadors (2018 [2019], Pi): [cd]: B+(**)
• Youssou N'Dour: History (2019, Naïve/Believe): [os]: A-
• Phicus + Martin Küchen: Sumpflegende (2017 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(*)
• Matthias Spillmann Trio: Live at the Bird's Eye Jazz Club (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Spring Roll: Episodes (2017-18 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B
• Ben Stapp/Joe Morris: Mind Creature Sound Dasein (2017 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(*)
• Oli Steidle & the Killing Popes: Ego Pills (2017 [2019], Shhpuma): [r]: B-
• Norbert Susemihl/Chloe Feoranzo/Harry Mayronne/Barnaby Gold: The New Orleans Dance Hall Quartet: Tricentennial Hall Dance 17, October (2018 [2019], Sumi): [r]: A-
• Tanya Tagaq: Toothsayer (2019, Six Shooter, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• The Dave Wilson Quartet: One Night at Chris' (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• Nilüfer Yanya: Miss Universe (2019, ATO): [r]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• A Day in the Life: Impressions of Pepper (2018, Impulse!): [r]: B+(*)
• L7: Pretend We're Dead: Best of L7 (1992-97 [2019], Warner Music Group): [r]: A

Old music:

• Jerry Bergonzi: Intersecting Lines (2012 [2014], Savant): [r]: A-
• Jerry Bergonzi: Dog Star (2017, Savant): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables: Cables Vision (1979 [1992], Contemporary/OJC): [r]: B
• George Cables Trio: Beyond Forever (1991 [1992], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• George Cables: Quiet Fire (1994 [1995], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables: Person to Person (1995, SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables Trio: Skylark (1995 [1996], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables Trio: Dark Side, Light Side (1996 [1997], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables Trio: Bluesology (1998, SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables: One for My Baby (2000, SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Ray Charles/Betty Carter: Ray Charles and Betty Carter (1961, ABC): [yt]: B
• Carly Rae Jepsen: Tug of War (2008, Maple Music/Fontana North): [r]: B+(***)
• L7: L7 (1988, Epitaph): [r]: B+(***)
• Art Pepper/George Cables: Tête-Ã-Tête (1982 [1983], Galaxy): [r]: A-
• Art Pepper/George Cables: Goin' Home (1982, Galaxy): [r]: B+(***)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Assif Tsahar/William Parker/Hamid Drake: In Between the Tumbling a Stillness (2015 [2018], Hopscotch): [cd]: [was: A-] A

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Avishai Cohen: Arvoles (Razdaz/Sunnyside): June 14
• Red Kite: Red Kite (RareNoise): advance, June 28
• The Jamie Saft Quartet: Hidden Corners (RareNoise): advance, June 28

Weekend Roundup

Here in Wichita it's rained every day for a week with more coming tonight, tomorrow, the day after. We're up to 11.96 inches this month (2nd wettest May ever; annual average is 34 inches). Many rivers in southeastern Kansas have flooded -- my recent trip to Oklahoma was detoured when the Kansas State Turnpike went under water. Wichita used to flood regularly, and my home would surely be under water but for "the big ditch" -- a flood control project built in 1950-59. (See Beccy Tanner: 'Big Ditch Mitch' saved Wichita many times; also, David Guilliams: The Big Ditch: The Wichita-Valley Center Flood Control Project [PDF].) I've been reading up on this, not least because I haven't seen the rivers this high since 1966, when the Ditch spared Wichita (barely) an epochal flood that wiped out the Arkansas River dam in Lamar, CO, and flooded every other town on the river's path into Oklahoma and Arkansas. Reading Guilliams' history reminds me that we had politicians in the 1940s who were as short-sighted as the ones we have today, but I'll always be thankful they got outvoted. That Ditch was the best investment Wichita ever made. Without it I wouldn't be able to get around to this week's other stories.

Some scattered links this week:

• Nancy Altman: Donald Trump's sneak attack on social security.

• Phyllis Bennis: Foreign aid that costs an arm and a leg -- literally: "The US-funded Israeli military is shooting so many unarmed Palestinians that the UN is warning of an amputation crisis in Gaza."

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: How Trump's new immigration plan could hurt the economy.

• John Cassidy:

  • The political logic behind Nancy Pelosi's go-slow strategy on impeachment.

  • The Trump administration is selling out hundreds of millioms of cell-phone users.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Laugh at Trump, sure -- but also watch what he's doing.

  • The new socialism panic is the right's trick to justify supporting Trump.

• Dave DeCamp:

  • US Army unpleasantly surprised after asking veterans about impact of serving. E.g.:

    Michael J Neel replied, "26 brothers dead. Only 8 in theater. Psyche ward myself after 3 attempts. Everything we accomplished in Mosul was wasted. Every life we gave was spat on. That's how serving impacted me." Veteran Drew Turner said, "Let's see. Lost the functional use of a hand, developed a rare movement disorder and cancer both likely from burn pit exposure, enjoy sleeping 3 to 4 hours most nights due to nightmares and during the day random anxiety attacks all due to PTSD, 7 herniated discs, arthritis . . ."

    Former Army Chaplain Bill Cork replied, "Given me memories of twelve soldiers who chose suicide, three killed in preventable rollovers, another dozen sexually assaulted, and lots of people and families broken by immoral acts in a war that won't end."

  • Pence promises combat to West Point class.

• Gaby Del Valle: The Harriet Tubman $20 bill was supposed to be unveiled in 2020. Now it might be delayed by almost a decade.

• Tom Engelhardt: Russia's election meddling is despicable, but don't forget our own.

• Dexter Filkins: John Bolton on the Warpath: One of America's more gullible war reporters, which lets him take Bolton more seriously than I would, offering a useful, respectful profile which nonetheless makes him even more disgusting than you imagined. Of particular interest are the details of how Bolton has made millions of dollars recently trying to stir up multiple wars.

• Lisa Friedman: EPA plans to get thousands of pollution deaths off the books by changing its math.

• David Frum: Trump's cover-up accelerates: "President Trump can only escalate. He cannot help it."

• Tara Golshan:

  • What Rep. Justin Amash's call for Trump's impeachment showed about the Republican Party. Related: Elaina Plott: How Trump broke the Freedom Caucus.

  • Congress's high-stakes budget fight to avert an economic crisis, explained: about budget caps and the debt limit, again.

• Ryan Goodman: Trump's position on the Mueller Report is legally ridiculous -- and dangerous.

• David A Graham:

  • A single scandal sums up all of Trump's failures: "The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm."

  • Trump's impeachment finger trap: "With each stonewall and demand that Democrats drop investigations, the president is making it more likely that Congress will feel compelled to act."

• Maggie Haberman/Annie Karni: A would-be Trump aide's demands: a jet on call, a future cabinet post and more: Give him lots of perks and Kris Kobach would be willing to serve Trump as "immigration czar" (for a while).

• Umair Irfan: One of the largest environmental protests ever is underway. It's led by children. Most famously, Greta Thunberg, but she's not alone. I've seen sub-teens on Jimmy Kimmel explain the science better than most Democratic politicians, let alone Republicans (who don't try to explain anything). In an effort to reassert his relevance, Bill McKibben responded: It's not entirely up to the school students to save the world.

• Kalpana Jain: Indian PM Narendra Modi and his party just swept India's elections. Some more pieces on India's election:

  • Jonah Blank: How Hinduism became a political weapon in India.

  • Isaac Chotiner: An Indian political theorist on the triumph of Narenda Modi's Hindu nationalism.

  • Basav Sen: The terrifying implications of India's elections for people and the planet.

• Quinta Jurecic: Impeachment is a refusal to accept the unacceptable.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Does Trump want to be impeached? That very thought has occurred to me. Bill Clinton actually got a bump in the polls out of being impeached. I don't recall anything similar with John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, or Richard Nixon, which is the company Trump will be joining. He may even think that in the Us-vs-Them world he imagines himself thriving in, that not getting impeached could be taken as not trying hard enough. Equally important, in taunting the Democratic House leadership, he may hope to show them up as weak and ineffective to their voter base. He's been campaigning hard since inauguration day. It seems to be the only thing he really cares about, so why not bet the farm? Maybe he even thinks there's a further endgame after the election. After all, I've also been wondering whether Erdogan wanted the failed coup that allowed him to purge his enemies in the military and the courts and consolidate his grip on power. It would be harder to pull that off in the US, but Trump's already broken numerous so-called "norms" as he's mocked and degraded our past notions of democracy.

  • Trump continues drive to protect religious-based discrimination.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Trump is sending 1,500 troops to the Middle East as the standoff with Iran continues.

  • Breit has finally brought down Theresa May. Well, not so fast: she will step aside as Conservative Party leader on June 7, but will stay as prime minister "until her successor is selected . . . without the need for a general election."

  • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. Related: Masha Gessen: Charging Julian Assange under the Espionage Act is an attack on the first amendment; also Fred Kaplan: The charges against Julian Assange are appalling (even if you despise him); also this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial: Amend the Espionage Act: Public interest defenses must be allowed.

• Eric Kleefeld: Lindsey Graham proposes invading Venezuela to oust Maduro. He's citing Reagan's 1983 invasion of Grenada as a precedent, now (as then) citing Cuban influence as a cassus belli. On the other hand, whereas Grenada "had a population of less than 100,000 . . . Venezuela, on the other hand, has a population of a little over 28 million people, is lager than Texas, and has roughly 160,000 troops in its military." Graham also wants to send more troops to the Middle East, where he's up in arms against Iran. Warmongers like Graham and Bolton readily group Iran and Venezuela without ever mentioning the one thing they obviously have in common: before US sanctions crippled them, both were major oil exporters. The effect of taking their oil off the world market is to push prices (and oil company profits) up, or at least to keep those profits from falling as global demand shifts to renewables.

• Paul Krugman:

  • After Draghi (wonkish): On the economic situation in the Eurozone since 2008, or more positively since Mario Draghi became president of the European Central Bank.

  • Trump tantrums the Dems out of a trap.

• Claire Lampen: Trump v Pelosi: anatomy of a feud.

• Jill Lepore: Confessions of a presidential candidate: "How the political memoir evolved."

• Eric Levitz: Moderate Democrats' delusions of 'prudence' will kill us all. This is in response to an op-ed by "moderate Democrat" Greg Weiner: It's not always the end of the world ("political prudence isn't in vogue, but it should be"). I can see both sides of this debate, but that's mostly because both are illuminated by the raging wildfires deliberately set by the Republican far-right. Right now, I think the balance of evidence favors Levitz, on two counts: the sheer amount of destruction caused by Republicans in power, and the lack of positive results from recent efforts by prudent Democrats (e.g., Obama).

• Dylan Matthews: The Fed's bad predictions are hurting us.

• Ella Nilsen:

  • Democrats in Congress are getting things done. Trump and Republicans are just ignoring them.

  • Trump wants everyone to know he is extremely calm and Pelosi is the "crazy" one: "Trump called himself a 'very stable genius,' after Pelosi suggested his family or staff should have an 'intervention'."

• Anna North:

  • Missouri governor signs 8-week abortion ban: "The law, which is likely to be challenged in court, contains no exceptions for rape or incest."

  • Alabama's abortion ban is being challenged in court by the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.

  • This is what it was like to perform abortions before Roe.

• Robert O'Harrow Jr/Shawn Boburg: A conservative activist's behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation's courts: "Leonard Leo helped conservative nonprofits raise $250 million from mostly undisclosed donors in recent years to promote conservative judges and causes."

• Nicole Perlroth/Scott Shane: In Baltimore and beyond, a stolen NSA tool wreaks havoc. With David E Sanger, the authors also reported: How Chinese spies got the NSA's hacking tools, and used them for attacks; also: Security breach and spilled secrets have shaken the NSA to its core: gives them more credit for conscience than they deserve. America's cyberwarriors aren't the first to fail to appreciate what happens when other "warriors" learn to do what they do.

• Katha Pollitt: How the right to legal abortion changed the arc of all women's lives.

• John Quiggin: Australia isn't doing its part for the global climate. Sooner or later we'll have to pay our share. Last week's elections kicked this can further down the road. Quiggin has a new book out, Economics in Two Lessons, explaining where markets work, and where they don't.

• Robert Reich: Trump's wrecking ball assaults American government. Luckily, it is strongly built. I think a big part of Reagan's popularity came from the fact that he couldn't do much short-term damage, even though that was plainly the intent of his program. Democrats controlled Congress most of the time, and liberals dominated the courts. Reagan indulged many people's prejudices, saying things that flattered his base and riled them up against supposed enemies, yet the real consequences of his presidency -- the destruction of the labor movement, the major shift toward ever-greater inequality, undermining civil rights while ramping up mass incarceration, the embrace of militarism and the withdrawal from international cooperation, the end of equal time and the takeover of politics by big money -- only gradually became evident (not that they explicit about their goals, but because most people didn't take the threat seriously). Of course, it became harder to overlook the cumulative effect of Reagan and later waves of conservative activism under the Bushes and Trump. Reich is probably right that the US political system still moderates the extremism of Republican presidents -- although it's been much more effective at neutering reformist impulses by Democrats -- yet clearly we are losing ground.

• Brian Resnick: Trump's hasty plan to get Americans back on the moon by 2020, explained. Worth noting that there is more at stake than just Trumpian ego. See Rivka Galchen: The race to develop the moon.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's interest in pardoning troops accused of war crimes, explained: "The military doesn't want these pardons. But Fox News does." Of course, the number of US troops who have been prosecuted for war crimes is a sad little joke, but the military brass still defends what they did because they need to maintain at least some discipline within the ranks. For more on this, see Ed Kilgore: Military brass warn Trump against Memorial Day pardons for war criminals.

  • Attorney General William Barr dining at the Trump hotel is a bad look: "Barr was photographed at the Trump International on a night when it hosted a pro-Trump Super PAC."

  • Trump's bizarre Rose Garden news conference on impeachment, explained.

• Michael S Schmidt/Julian E Barnes: Trump's targeting of intelligence agencies gains a harder edge. Trump directed Attorney General William Barr to investigate anyone who thought that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia in 2016, starting with the FBI and potentially going deeper into the CIA and the broader "intelligence community," and he's given Barr authority to declassify any secret documents he finds along the way (see: Trump gives Barr power to declassify US secrets in review of Russia probe). This extraordinary politicization of the Justice Department is obviously disturbing, but thus far most of the pushback has come from the intelligence agencies, who prefer to operate in secret, with little or no oversight -- e.g., Chuck Ross: Ex-CIA officials fume about declassification order, ignoring previous leaks of secret sources and methods. Also see: Natasha Bertrand: Trump puts DOJ on crash course with intelligence agencies.

• Dylan Scott: Congress wants to stop surprise medical bills. But they have one big problem left to solve.

• Mark Joseph Stern: The Trump administration releases its plan to let health care providers refuse to treat transgender people: This is getting real petty. Nor is this all. See: Camille Baker: The Trump administration wants to make it harder for transgender people to access homeless shelters.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • Avenatti, Wohl and the Krassensteins prove political media is a huckster's paradise.

  • We've hit a new low in campaign hit pieces: "Recent efforts to sandbag Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard are crude repeats of behaviors that helped elect Trump in 2016." Takes particular exception to a piece titled "Tulsi Gabbard is the top candidate of traitors."

• Alex Ward:

  • The US may use a loophole to sell billions in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

  • The Pentagon's plan to send up to 10,000 troops to the Middle East is about Iran.

  • "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh's controversial release from prison, explained. I recall thinking that his original 20-year sentence was a gross miscarriage of justice, enabled by a whipped-up war hysteria, which evidently hasn't gone away -- just calcified into prejudice. But my view was based more on what I know about the US than the virtually nothing I know about Lindh. For more on him, see: Graeme Wood: I wrote to John Walker Lindh. He wrote back.

  • Democrats are accusing Trump officials of inflating the Iran threat.

• Robin Wright: Does trump have an off-ramp on Iran? i doubt he even wants one, nor is he likely to show any interest on wright's history lesson. it looks to me like the conflict with iran is nothing more than a favor to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE -- all of which know how to push his buttons and stroke him with gifts. Moreover, he is incapable of seeing potential downsides, or even risk. Challenging him, or calling his bluff, would be unthinkable. He might even say suicidal.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The controversy over WeWork's $47 billion valuation and impending IPO, explained.

  • Holding Trump accountable is a pocketbook issue: After reviewing Trump's own history of cheating his contractors, note this:

    Trump, as president, is acting in line with his own predilection for alleged corporate criminals.

    • While Obama's Environmental Protection Agency sought a $4.8 million fine from Syngenta Seeds for poisoning workers with pesticides, Trump's EPA settled for $150,000.
    • Trump's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined a man $1 for allegedly swindling veterans out of their pensions -- also extracting from him a promise not to do it again.
    • In February 2018, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission settled with three major banks that had engaged in illegal market manipulation -- charging them a financial penalty but requiring no admission of wrongdoing and waiving "bad actor" penalties that would have impaired their ability to do business in the future.

    The specific dynamics of each agency and each industry are, of course, unique.

    But the basic pattern is the same -- under lax enforcement, crime basically pays. You might not get caught, and even if you do get caught, the monetary penalties will not create a meaningful deterrent to future misconduct. . . . The overall problem, in other words, is much larger in scope than Trump. But Trump is part of the problem. Not only is he emblematic, as a business leader, of the cost of inadequate enforcement, but he's also someone who clearly favors inadequate enforcement as a matter of principle and appoints regulators who make the problem worse.

  • What we know so far about Trump's tax returns, explained.

  • Men and women have similar views on abortion.

  Yglesias also has a piece called Daenerys was right: King's Landing had to burn, which goes to great lengths to try to rationalize the indiscriminate fire-bombing of the capitol of Westeros. I understand the impulse to try to take a contrary view, especially counter to those who casually impose their contemporary political prejudices on such a fantasy landscape, but Yglesias overlooks some pretty obvious clues (like the Daenerys speech to her troops where she vows to conquer/liberate all of Westeros and Essos -- a speech that the actress claims she studied Hitler for, but which sounded more to me like Napoleon), as well as a couple of much more fundamental problems. What always turned me off in Game of Thrones was its unquestioned bedrock belief in hereditary aristocracy, and its correlative commitment to war. Without having read the books, I gather that Martin is completely opposed to both, but rather than constructing cardboard characters for us to root for (in the vain hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil), he exposes the foundations by showing how every character is corrupted and disgraced by inequality and violence. That Yglesias winds up rooting for a strong and fearsome ruler shows how much he's willing to compromise.

• Gary Younge: Shocked by the rise of the right? Then you weren't paying attention. Young blames "endemic racism and unfairness" -- I take the latter to mean inequality and the business practices that increase it.

• Li Zhou:

  • One House Republican is holding up $19 billion in disaster aid funding.

  • The Senate finally approved a disaster aid package with $1.4 billion for Puerto Rico: "Trump has been a big reason for the delay in disaster relief . . . The fallout of this delay is staggering.".

  • Poll: Most Americans disapprove of the Alabama abortion ban.

Daily Log

From Greg Tate, on Facebook, comment reply to Allen Lowe question about Gary Davis:

A friend who speaks six languages fluently (including Arabic and Polish) told that in her mind its all one language. The Black American creative tradition is by necessity that of the auto-didact but on a deeper level its also one of people who couldn't afford to only be great at one thing or the luxury of compartmentalizing the world. The major innovators seem to be more inter-dimensional than the rest of us in mind body and spirit--You get the sense that All of Life is one language to them. Which is to say they are more West African than Cartesian how they integrate the world outside with the world inside. Nothing exemplifies this more to me than Davis saying he thought he heard a brass band the first time he heard a guitar. Which suggests his artistic high bar when he started playing wasn't mere competency but to make people feel like they too were experiencing a marching band projecting out of a guitar. Methinks we do a disservice to these innovative artists when we think they were only trying to work out mechanics--they were acquiring complex technique to reproduce MAGIC.

Susan Brown posted this on Facebook, crediting Gary Moss. It may be the single most horrific thing I've read all year:

i wish everyone would read this

94 yr old Kissinger takes on Trump

Recently, Henry Kissinger did an interview and said vary amazing things regarding President Trump. He starts with: "Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven't seen before"! The former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gives us a new understanding of President Donald Trump's foreign policy and predicts its success:

"Liberals and all those who favor (Hillary) Clinton will never admit it. They will never admit that he is the one true leader. The man is doing changes like never before and does all of it for the sake of this nation's people. After eight years of tyranny, we finally see a difference."

Kissinger knows it and he continues with:

."Every country now has to consider two things: One, their perception that the previous president, or the outgoing president, basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessments of their necessities.

And secondly, that there is a new president who's asking a lot of unfamiliar questions. And because of the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it.

Then Kissinger puts it bluntly:

"Trump puts America and its people first. This is why people love him and this is why he will remain in charge for so long. There is not a single thing wrong with him and people need to open their eyes." When he boasts that he has a "bigger red button" than Kim Jung Un does, he so transcends the mealy-mouthed rhetoric of the past, thereby forcing a new recognition of American power.

Kissinger once wrote:

"The weak grow strong by effrontery - The strong grow weak through inhibition!" No sentence better captures the U.S.-North Korea relationship.

Trump is discarding the inhibitions and calling the bluff on North Korea's effrontery: His point is that the contrast of American retreat under Obama and its new assertion of power under Trump creates a new dynamic that every one of our allies and of our enemies must consider.

Our allies grew complacent with Obama's passivity and now are fearful due to Trump's activism. And they must balance the two in developing their policies:

They realize that the old assumptions, catalyzed by Bush 43's preoccupation with Iraq and Obama's refusal to lead are obsolete. So, Trump is forcing a new calculus with a new power behind American interests. Those - here and abroad - who rode the old apple cart worry about its being toppled.

But, as Kissinger so boldly stated: "Trump is the one true leader in world affairs and he is forcing policy changes that put America first!"

This is the most accurate statement of what the American Citizens who live outside of the swamp want and expect from their government.

I like the list of 13 things that I, as a senior American citizen, want. Trump is at least talking about issues that most Americans are concerned about.

My mantra about Trump is this: Truthfully, We are in agreement with most of what he says. We are getting older and our tickers aren't what they used to be, but what matters is that he covers most of the 13 things we as seniors want, at least I do for sure

1. Hillary: held accountable for her previous wrongs!
2. Put "GOD" back in America!
3. Borders: Closed or tightly guarded!
4. Congress: On the same retirement & healthcare plans as everybody else
5. Congress: Obey its own laws NOW!
6. Language: English!
7. Culture: Constitution and the Bill of Rights!
8. Drug-Free: Mandatory Drug Screening before & during Welfare!
9. Freebies: NONE to Non-Citizens
10. Budget: Balanced
11. Foreign Countries: Stop giving them our money! Charge them for our help! We need it here.
12. Term limits for congress
13. "RESPECT OUR MILITARY AND OUR FLAG!" And our law enforcement. DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Further down, Susan offered this meme:

First Lady Melania Trump has sent out a request for prayers for our president. Let us be a shield for him as he fights for us.

Further down, she links to an AP News piece on Alabama's "near-total abortion ban," presumably favorably. But a commenter picked up another tweet, from Stephanie Wittels Wachs, which is on target:

Make no mistake - a state that criminalizes abortion but ranks 50th in public education doesn't give a shit about children.

Mar 2001