#^d 2024-02-11 #^h Speaking of Which
It's pretty exhausting trying to wrap this up on Sunday evening, early enough so I can relax with a bit of TV, a few minutes on the jigsaw puzzle, a few pages in my current book, and maybe a bit of computer Mahjong before I run make to get a jump on Monday's Music Week. After a night's sleep, chances are good that I'll think of some introductory text, and stumble across a couple stories I initially missed. If I do, I'll add them and mark them accordingly, with that red right-margin border.
But if you want a pull quote right now, it's probably this:
But if Biden can't get his wars under control by October, I fear he's toast -- and will be deserving of the loss, even if no one else deserves to beat him. After all, the ball is in his court.
Initial counts: 145 links, 5,485 words.
Israel:
Mondoweiss:
[02-05] Day 122: Endless killings and despair in Gaza: "Biden urges Congress to 'swiftly pass' a $118bn bipartisan deal that includes $14.1bn in military aid to Israel after the ICJ ordered Israel to halt its ongoing attacks on civilians in Gaza."
[02-06] Day 123: New testimonies emerge of Israel torturing detained Palestinians in Gaza: "Euro-Med publishes new testimonies of Palestinian detainees subjected to dog attacks, forced nudity, and sexual harassment in Israeli jails, as Israeli soldiers continue posting images and videos of themselves committing atrocities in Gaza."
[02-07] Day 124: Hamas proposes 135-day truce to exchange captives and end war: "Potential ceasefire deal still at discussion stage, as U.S. President Joe Biden calls Hamas counter-proposal "a little over the top." Israel continues to bomb Rafah and Khan Younis in Gaza, as Israeli forces raid the West Bank, killing one teenager."
[02-08] Day 125: Israel rejects ceasefire proposal, plans to expand ground invasion into Rafah: "Israel rejected a Hamas proposal for a ceasefire, which included the return of Israeli captives held in Gaza, and is preparing instead to expand its ground invasion to Rafah, where 1.9 million Palestinians are seeking refuge."
[02-09] Day 126: U.S. claims it won't support 'unplanned' ground operation in Rafah, Israel escalates attacks anyway: "Even Joe Biden admits that Israel's conduct in Gaza is "over the top," while the Israeli army has continued to intensify its attacks following Netanyahu's rejection of Hamas's most recent ceasefire proposal."
[02-10] Day 127: Growing international alarm over Israeli plans to invade Rafah: "Israel has announced its intention to push ahead with its plans to invade Rafah in the southernmost Gaza Strip, where 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering. Rafah's mayor, Ahmed al-Sufi, warns any military action there would result in a 'massacre.'"
[02-11] Day 128: Israeli snipers kill Palestinians at Nasser Hospital; gear up for Rafah invasion: "Hamas says an Israeli attack on Rafah would end any exchange talks for captives. The siege of the Al-Amal and Nasser hospitals in Khan Younis enters its third week, three patients die due to Israel blocking oxygen tanks from entering."
Richard Hardigan: [02-10] Polls show broad support in Israel for Gaza's destruction and starvation: "Nearly 58 percent of respondents in one poll said they think the IDF is using 'too little firepower' in Gaza."
Maryam Jamshidi: [02-05] Biden executive order on West Bank violence more likely to be used against Palestinians than Israeli settlers.
Tarif Khalidi/Mayssoun Sukarieh: [02-04] Leader of the underground tells all: "Yahya al-Sinwar's autobiographical quasi-novel Thorns and Carnations shows the Hamas leader has lived a life focused on faith and an obsessive project to build an infrastructure of resistance in Gaza."
Middle East Monitor: [02-11] Israeli soldiers steal over $54m from Gaza bank.
Tamam Mohsen: [01-10] The Gaza genocide is just an instrument in Israel's larger colonial project.
Loveday Morris: [02-10] Young Israelis block aid to Gaza while IDF soldiers stand and watch.
John Mueller: [02-05] After a spate of warnings, Israel went down the 9/11 path anyway: "Overreaction has unleashed a fury that has sucked away sympathy and likely spawned a new generation of terrorism."
Jeremy Scahill: Israel's ruthless propaganda campaign to dehumanize Palestinians.
Richard Silverstein: [02-09] Netanyahu: IDF to expel 1.5 million Gazans in Rafah: "Ground invasion to start within two weeks." It's hard to imagine how this plan might work, other than to knock down the walls separating Gaza from Egypt, making it impossible for Egypt to control the border.
Ishaan Tharoor: [02-09] Netanyahu's delusional, deadly quest for 'total victory'.
Eric Toler, et al: [02-06] What Israeli soldiers' videos reveal: cheering destruction and mocking Gazans: "The footage provides a rare and unsanctioned window into the war."
Sharon Zhang: [02-09] As Israel starves Gaza, 1 in 10 children under 5 are now acutely malnourished.
Oren Ziv: [02-08] Meet the settlers targeted by Biden's sanctions -- and their victims: "Palestinians and Israelis who've experienced the settlers' attacks first-hand see the move as a positive but wholly insufficient step toward accountability."
Israel vs. world opinion:
Ben Armbruster: [02-08] Media downplays lack of evidence in UNRWA employee scandal. More on UNRWA:
Jehad Abusalim: [02-01] Why the U.S. must restore funding to UNRWA.
Emine Sinmaz: [02-09] UNRWA staff accused by Israel sacked without evidence, chief admits.
Daniel Warner: [02-09] Suspending funding for UNRWA is an indirect violation of the International Court of Justice's decision and morally indefensible.
Zubayr Alikhan: [02-08] The unthinkability of slave revolt: "Those who say that Israel knew about the plans for October 7 all along are repackaging an old colonial trope which believes that the natives are too docile, too submissive, too cowardly, and too inferior to revolt against their oppressors."
Donald Earl Collins: [02-11] Western narcissism and support for genocidal Israel go hand in hand.
Masha Gessen: [02-07] The limits of accusing Israel of genocide: "Two recent court cases failed to stop the mass violence in Gaza, but they gave center stage to facts and historical interpretations that, in Western countries, at least, are often relegated to the margins."
Omar Karmi: [02-01] Gaza genocide turns into PR disaster for US.
Julianne McShane: [02-09] At Hillary Clinton's panel on sexual violence, a clash over the war in Gaza: Once again, she's stepping up to aid Israel's propaganda machine in its genocide promotion.
Mitchell Plitnick: [02-09] Dehumanization and misinformation in service of genocide: "The dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs combined with outright misinformation about October 7 is the engine powering the genocide in Gaza."
Alex Skopic/Nathan J Robinson: [02-07] Islamophobia will poison this country: "The U.S. media is once again presenting the vicious dehumanizing caricatures that make it easier to oppress and wage war on people."
Philip Weiss:
[02-11] Weekly Briefing: Biden buckles (under the weight of 28,000 Palestinian deaths): I've said all along that the genocide will stop only when Israeli authorities develops a conscience, or at least a sense of shame. No evidence of that in Israel, so we're looking at Biden, who thus far has remained politically subservient, but his complicity in genocide is taking a toll -- on his polls, if not necessarily on a conscience that has exhibited much flexibility over fifty-some years. It's hard to remember the last time any American president cajoled Israel into doing something its leader didn't want -- maybe GWH Bush dragging Shamir to the peace table at Madrid in 1991, only to endure endless haggling over the shape of the table (but enough Israelis took note of American displeasure to replace Shamir with Rabin, leading to the Oslo breakthrough). It would take a much clearer break to make any impression on Netanyahu or his voters, and Biden would need to grow a backbone as well as a conscience (something Eisenhower showed when he backed Ben Gurion out of Sinai in 1956-57 -- yeah, it took that long, even through a presidential election). But "buckled" is a bit optimistic here. But if Biden can't get his wars under control by October, I fear he's toast -- and will be deserving of the loss, even if no one else deserves to beat him. After all, the ball is in his court.
PS: For an examples of Biden's "buckling," see:
Yasmeen Abutaleb/John Hudson/Tyler Pager: [02-11] Biden moving closer than ever to a breach with Netanyahu over war in Gaza.
Michael Sainato: [02-11] Biden warns Netanyahu against Rafah operation without 'credible' safety plan.
Karen DeYoung: [02-11] Biden presses Netanyahu on plans for hostage release, protecting civilians in Rafah.
Netanyahu's already assured him there's no problem, but plans will go ahead. Something else he can buckle for.
William Youmans: [02-08] The Sunday talk shows on Israel-Gaza: The blob still reigns: "Unsurprisingly, numbers show how one-sided and detached America's elite newsmakers really are."
America's expansion of Israel's world war:
Spencer Ackerman:
[02-06] So how much of the Yemen war is Jim Mattis' fault? "The legendary Marine turned Pentagon chief was secretly working for the UAE as far back as 2015, the dawn of the devastating Yemen war. Wish I'd known that when I wrote my Rolling Stone profile!"
Chas Danner: [02-04] Are the U.S. and Iran inching toward war?
Dave DeCamp:
[02-06] US blocks Yemen-Saudi peace deal: "New sanctions on the Houthis will make it impossible for the first phase of the Saudi-Houthi peace deal to be implemented."
[02-08] Iraq repeats call for US forces to withdraw after Baghdad drone strike.
Kareem Fahim/Mustafa Salim/Missy Ryan/Abigail Haushlohner: [02-11] U.S. strikes on militias, some backed by Iran, rile key ally in Iraq.
Fred Kaplan: [02-05] What Biden's actually doing with those drone strikes in the Middle East.
Simon Tisdall: [01-29] There is a mega-bomb waiting to explode in the Middle East. Biden must not light the fuse by attacking Iran.
Trump, and other Republicans:
Nicole Narea: [02-09] Nevada's primary and caucuses didn't change the race. They did wreak avoidable chaos. "Trump won, Haley lost, and Nevada botched its key role in the GOP primary."
Nicole Narea: [02-07] How Nikki Haley lost the Nevada primary to "none of these candidates".
Isaac Arnsdorf: [02-09] Trump, using false comparisons with Biden, demands dismissal of documents charges.
Devlin Barrett/Perry Stein: [02-11] The Trump trials: Double hearings Thursday, awaiting Supreme Court action.
Jonathan Chait:
[02-06] Republicans killed the border deal to help Trump. Now they need a reason.: "Here comes the backfilled rationales." Since when do Republicans need plausible reasons? They got Democrats to embarrass themselves, then humiliated them further by double-crossing them anyway. If "owning the libs" is their highest commandment, this one will go into the textbooks.
[02-08] Trump says he'd encourage Russia to attack NATO allies who don't pay up: Chait adds the snark, "so much for Russia being afraid to start wars if he was in office." This is kind of silly, given how unlikely it is that Trump would stand up to the arms industry once he's in office, and how profitable that industry finds Russian menace to be. You might even say he's catering to him. For more, see Steve M.: [02-11] Trump's brain mostly works the way it always did, and that's the problem.
EJ Dionne Jr: [02-11] Let's just say it: The Republican problem is metastasizing. The long-time columnist is a little slow on the draw, as he implicitly admits in citing a 2012 op-ed from Thomas E Mann/Norman J Ornstein: Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem.
Tom Engelhardt: [02-06] A Trumpian Bacchanalia in 2024? The long-time editor wrote a prescient book in 1995 called The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, and went on to found TomDispatch and edit a long list of books chronicling the political, economic, and moral decay of the American empire. Now, he envisions a sequel:
And if Donald Trump were to be elected, we would also find ourselves in an almost unimaginable version of -- yes! -- defeat culture (and maybe that will have to be the title of the book I'll undoubtedly never write after I turn 80 and am headed downhill myself).
But don't make me go on! Honestly, you know just as well as I do that, if the man who only wants to "drill, drill, drill" ends up back in the White House, you can more or less kiss this country (which already happens to be the biggest oil producer and natural gas exporter around) and possibly this planet goodbye. And if he doesn't . . . well, you may have to kiss it goodbye anyway.
And that would be defeat culture, big time.
Garrett Epps: [02-05] It's not just the border: The Trump-Abbott-Republican nullification crisis is here.
Naomi Fry: [02-06] Donald Trump's chaos, straight to your in-box: "Political fund-raising e-mails are often touched by hysteria, but the former President's are unique -- wildly remixing favorite phrases into a fevered Surrealist cut-up."
Margaret Hartmann: [02-08] Rudy Giuliani's most eye-popping claims from his bankruptcy hearing.
Ed Kilgore: [02-09] Nikki Haley couldn't even win the Virgin Islands caucus: "Trump won big and swept the four delegates at stake."
Noel King: [02-09] What the business community thinks of a Trump economy reboot: "The economy did well under Trump the first time around." Really? "Here's why some CEOs are worried about the sequel." Interview with Economist columnist Henry Tricks.
Paul Krugman: [02-08] Can America survive a party of saboteurs? But Republicans aren't just saboteurs. They're extortionists. A big part of their campaign pitch is: elect us, or we'll make a stink and wreck government at every opportunity. But electing them doesn't end the sabotage. It merely shifts it into less public spheres, where they can ultimately do more damage. They are effectively nihilists, believers in nothing but their own infallible grasp of power. The only way to survive a party like that is to starve it of power, including publicity.
Kelly McClure: [02-09] Trump brags to NRA about lax gun control during his time in office. Again, see Steve M.: [02-10] Trump on guns: The ad writes itself.
Bill Scher: [02-08] Fear of immigrants has broken the Republican Party: "The Congressional Republican chaos over the border and how it's delaying, if not sinking, aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan is more proof that the GOP's nativist turn is not the surefire political winner conservatives think it is." Another foolish defense of Washington orthodoxy, if you ask me. The nativism may be unpopular among the capitalists Republicans love to cater to, but it does energize the Republican base, and the rich are hard-pressed to gain votes for tax breaks and deregulation elsewhere, so they've developed a cynical tolerance for right-wing bigotry. Given that Trump has already rode the issue to the nomination, the "chaos" is nothing more than a dispute over tactics. On the other hand, anyone who thinks that support and encouragement for foreign wars is a "surefire political winner," which seems to be Scher's point, is a total fool. Republicans smell victory in November because the Democrats are playing these two issues exactly wrong.
Margaret Sullivan: [01-25] We must start urgently talking about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
Li Zhou:
[02-07] Republicans' humiliating failed impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, explained.
[02-09] Trump's rumored VP shortlist, explained: Hard to imagine a clickbait article of less real interest, not least because it took so little intelligence to write. The shortlist, as if you couldn't list them yourself: Kristi Noem, Tim Scott, Elise Stefanik, J.D. Vance, Nikki Haley.
Biden and/or the Democrats:
Michael Arria: [02-09] The Shift: Biden and Michigan. The "swing state" is especially crucial for Biden's reelection. Few broad-spectrum Democrats will leave Biden for Trump no matter how much they oppose Biden's support for Netanyuahu's genocide, but many Arab-Americans voted Republican before Trump's racism drove them away, and they know all too well how war against Muslims abroad comes home to harass them, so it's not implausible they could tilt the election. Also:
Nadia B Ahmad: [02-08] Michigan Muslims and Arabs are over Biden.
Yousef Munayyer: Is Joe Biden uniquely indifferent to Palestinian suffering?
Sharon Zhang: [02-08] Sanders casts sole Democratic vote against bill to send $14B to Israel: He was embarrassingly slow to rise to the issue, but at least has. This vote throws into sharp relief the miserable argument that Biden would be just as good for all practical purposes. Genocide is not an issue that can be compromised at some midpoint.
Stephen Zunes: [02-03] The political costs of Biden's support for Israel's war are mounting: "The president's Gaza policy is isolating the United States internationally and threatening his reelection prospects."
Brakkton Booker: [02-06] South Carolina Dems wanted to prove they should be first. The turnout was underwhelming.
Ross Douthat: [02-10] The question is not if Biden should step aside. It's how. Good title, but I have so little respect for the messenger I almost didn't bother. Sure, his notion that Biden should hold back and throw the nomination open at the convention, without endorsing anyone, has some merit. It would deny the rank and file any real say, but would avoid bruising primaries, and most importantly the scramble for donors that tends to be so critical. The nominee might not be the best possible, but not the worst, either. Still, it smacks of desperation, and few insiders would be willing to give up easily. I don't see it happening.
Jill Filipovic: [01-22] Biden is whiffing it on the most important issue for Democrats: "He needs to campaign a lot harder on abortion rights -- and how it's inextricably tied to the threat Trump poses to democracy."
Jonathan Martin: [02-04] Forget No Labels. Biden's third-party peril is on the Left.
Andrew Prokop: [02-08] Biden and Trump are both old. Only one got a special counsel memory test. The special prosecutor's report seems designed to fend off Republican criticism for not indicting Biden by feeding them political talking points.
First off, this is another example of the universal rule: Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Democrats. And Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Republicans. It may not have been a great idea for Merrick Garland to have a two-time Trump appointee investigate Joe Biden. But here we are. Robert Hur totally slimed Biden with these gratuitous comments about his mental acuity and memory, referring to him as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." Even if you assume they are the product of a good faith evaluation they are still wildly inappropriate.
Heather Digby Parton: [02-09] Joe Biden falls victim to Democrats' special prosecutor delusion: "Special prosecutor is a Republican job, no matter what."
Steve M.: [02-09] Kamala Harris needs to step up.
Matt Stieb: [02-08] Marianne Williamson ends campaign in the most Marianne Williamson way possible.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [02-04] Joe Biden's weird perception problem: "For the President and his campaign staff, the problem is tactical. How can he pull this off? There is no shortage of advice."
Lots of people have unsolicited advice for the Biden campaign, which frankly seems to need one, but New Republic came up with a bundle of them this week -- enough to break out from the news items above, so let's collect them here.
Nancy MacLean: Warn voters about the radicalism beyond Trump: "The Republicans are plotting to literally rewrite the Constitution to eliminate core rights and protections."
Alex Shephard: Trump pretends he's still president. Biden should treat him that way.
Stuart Stevens: Just say it, Democrats: Biden has been a great president.
Michael Tomasky: Fight like the fate of the nation is at stake. Because it is.
Josh Marshall: [02-09] More angry Biden, please.
Legal matters and other crimes:
Kate Aronoff: The Supreme Court's big Chevron case could hamstring federal government. Here's how it got started.
Benjamin Hart: [02-05] Why politicians will probably keep getting swatted: Interview with Kevin Hendricks.
Dahlia Lithwick/Mark Joseph Stern: [01-30] A state Supreme Court just issued the most devastating rebuke of Dobbs yet: In Pennsylvania.
Ian Millhiser:
[02-06] The Supreme Court is about to decide whether to sabotage Trump's election theft trial: "The justices had their shot to hear Trump's immunity appeal. Now they need to stop delaying his criminal trial."
[02-06] Trump's legal arguments for staying on the ballot are embarrassingly weak.
[02-08] Can Colorado disqualify Trump from its ballot? 4 ways the Supreme Court might rule.
[02-08] The Supreme Court sure sounds eager to put Trump back on the ballot: "Trump's Supreme Court lawyer was a disaster, and it won't matter one bit."
Julia Reinstein: [02-06] Everything to know about Jennifer Crumbley's involuntary manslaughter conviction: She and her husband, who will be tried later, bought and gifted the gun that their 15-year-old son, Ethan Crumbley, used to kill four of his classmates.
Livia Albeck-Ripka/Orlando Mayorquin/J David Goodman: [02-11] Boy is critically wounded in shooting at Houston church led by Joel Osteen: "Off-duty officers shot and killed her [the shooter]."
Climate and environment:
Delger Erdenesanaa: [02-08] Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist, wins his defamation suit: I still don't approve of defamation suits, but anything that knocks Mark Steyn and National Review down a notch must be counted a win -- the other defendant, Rand Simberg, doesn't ring a bell, but Competitive Enterprise Institute sounds awful fishy. I'm aware of, but haven't read, Mann's books, most recently The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (2021).
Umair Irfan:
[02-06] How California's torrential, life-threatening storms got so bad.
[02-08] 2023 was the hottest year on record. It also pushed the world over a dangerous line: "Another analysis shows 2023 exceeded 1.5C of warming on average for the first time, a key limit in the Paris Climate Agreement." Article includes a link back to a 2014 article predicting this: Brad Plumer: Two degrees: The world set a simple goal for climate change. We're likely to miss it.
Sarah Kaplan: [02-09] Why this is one of the planetary shifts scientists are most worried about: Disruption of the complex AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) system, which circulates water in the North Atlantic.
Economic matters:
Ryan Cooper: [02-07] Why were inflation hawks wrong? "Economists like Larry Summers . . ."
Paul Krugman:
[02-05] Immigrants make America stronger and richer: That's an old and familiar argument, with a lot of empirical support. However, that's not the same thing as making individual existing Americans richer. Immigrant labor mostly generates returns to the immigrants. (Sure, businesses may capture some by underpaying workers, but these days they mostly do that by operating abroad.) Some of that wealth may trickle somewhere, and the aggregate is undoubtedly positive, but matters little to most people.
Branko Marcetic: [02-08] Americans have good reasons to be unhappy with the economy.
Ukraine War:
Connor Echols: [02-09] Diplomacy Watch: Putin heads to Turkey for new grain deal talks.
David French: [02-08] Why MAGA loves Russia and hates Ukraine: I won't dispute this for the tiny number of MAGA-heads who keep track of their fellow assholes around the world -- they're not wrong to count Putin, Orban, Bolsonaro, Modi, and others as kindred spirits -- but I'd stress two other points much more: one is that the MAGA masses intuitively grasp how apoplectic their embrace of Putin makes Clinton-Biden Democrats, and they simply love doing that; the other is that they've heard so much guff about how America's foreign wars are humanitarian gestures meant to help freedom-loving foreigners, and they're just sick and tired of helping people, especially foreigners.
Ellen Ioanes/Li Zhou: [02-09] Why Ukraine's new top general is known as the "butcher": Oleksandr Syrskyi.
Anatol Lieven: [02-09] Zaluzhny firing not even a band-aid as Ukraine strategy bleeds out: "Zelensky's sacking of the popular army chief is a colossal political gamble and reflects increasing desperation in Kyiv."
Around the world:
Ellen Ioanes: [02-08] Everything is chaotic about Pakistan's election -- except the outcome: "Pakistan's military drives its politics. And Pakistanis lose."
Jeffrey D Sachs: [02-09] The US toppling of Imran Khan.
Bret Wilkins: [02-11] Imran Khan's party surges in Pakistani election amid fraud allegations.
Ishaan Tharoor: [02-11] The powerful lesson behind Pakistan's stunning election result.
Margaret Sullivan: [02-09] Tucker Carlson's Putin interview wasn't journalism. It was sycophancy: "The Russian president was waiting for the right stooge. With Carlson, he got just that." Also:
Masha Gessen: [02-09] Tucker Carlson promised an unedited Putin. The result was boring.
Fred Kaplan: [02-09] Tucker Carlson's Putin interview was even worse than expected.
Al Jazeera: [02-02] Ex-CIA software engineer who leaked to WikiLeaks sentenced to 40 years: "Joshua Schulte had been found guilty of handing over classified materials in so-called Vault 7 leak.
Nicholson Baker: [01-31] No, aliens haven't visited the earth: "Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?"
Harry Brighouse: [02-05] What's wrong with free public college? Some reasonable points, but I'm not much bothered that a right to free higher education would benefit the middle class more than poorer students. Lots of worthwhile programs do the same, but we shouldn't, for example, give up on airline safety just because the beneficiaries skew up.
Elizabeth Dwoskin: [02-10] How a liberal billionaire became America's leading anti-DEI crusader: Profile of Bill Ackman. Another rich guy with money to burn, but how does having donated to Clinton and Obama make him any kind of liberal?
Nicholas Fandos: [02-10] What to know about the race to replace George Santos: "The special House election in New York pits Mazi Pilip, a Republican county legislator, against Tom Suozzi, a former Democratic congressman." In other words, the Democrats nominated the most anodyne white guy possible, while the Republicans calculated that the best way to advance their racist, sexist, nativist agenda was by nominating a black female Jewish immigrant from Ethiopia.
Abdallah Fayyad/Nicole Narea/Andrew Prokop: [02-09] 7 questions about migration and the US-Mexico border, answered. More border:
Rick Perlstein: [02-07] The REAL threat at our border: "Trump, Republican governors, and MAGA media have summoned their armed fanatics to the Rio Grande."
Areeba Shah: [02-10] Experts alarmed after Texas border "invaded" by far right "God's Army" convoy.
Rebecca Gordon: [02-11] Banning what matters: "Public libraries under MAGA threat."
Joshua Keating: [02-06] Welcome to the "neomedieval era": "Nations like the US have more firepower than ever before -- but they also appear weaker than ever. The upshot is a world that feels out of control."
Carlos Lozada: [02-16] : I was expecting, perhaps even hoping for, a Consumer Guide-style compendium of notes on political books, but instead got an introductory essay adapted from his forthcoming The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians. Of course, unless you're a writer with a specific assignment, it's very unlikely you'd actually have to read any book written by (or for) a Washington politician, nor would you do so voluntarily. But I find that such surveys, such as I attempt in my book roundups, can be useful for sampling the state of public discourse. By the way, I did finally pick up a copy of Lozada's What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Clare Malone: [02-10] Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event? "Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press's relationship to its audience."
AW Ohlheiser: [02-08] What we've learned from 20 years of Facebook.
Nathan J Robinson:
[02-06] More firefighters, fewer cops: "If we want to keep people safe, we need institutions more like the fire department and less like the police department."
[02-08] Rethinking the concept of 'philanthropy': Interview with Amy Schiller, author of The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong and How to Fix It.
Jeffrey St Clair: [02-09] Roaming Charges: Comfortably dumb. Harsh on Biden. Quote:
Sen. Chris Murphy on the failed Border/Ukraine/Israel deal: "They are a disaster right now. How can you trust any Republicans right now? They told us what to do. We followed their instructions to the letter. And then they pulled the rug out from under us in 24 hrs." ["They"? You got nothing but embarrassed.]
It's instructive that MAGA has threatened to "destroy" James Lankford, the rightwing Senator from Oklahoma who wrote a border closure bill that gave them 99% of what they wanted and Democrats are lining up behind Biden for endorsing a bill that betrayed everything he'd ever promised on immigration.
Bryan Walsh: [02-10] Taylor Swift, the NFL, and two routes to cultural dominance: My minor acknowledgment of the week's overweening culture story, not that I have anything to say about it. Cultural dominance isn't what it used to be LVIII years ago, when the Chiefs I remember fondly -- Len Dawson, Otis Taylor, Ed Budde, E.J. Holub, Buck Buchanan -- got butchered by the Green Bay Packers (IV was much more satisfying), while the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and James Brown were regularly outdoing themselves. These days, even the largest stars seem much smaller than they did when I was fifteen, because we now recognize that the world is so much larger. I haven't watched football since the 1980s (or baseball since the 1990s), and while I still listen to quite a bit of popular music, I doubt that any new artist has occupied as much as 1% of my time since 2000. I've listened to, and clearly like, Taylor Swift, but I hardly recognize her song titles, and certainly couldn't rank them (as Rob Sheffield did, 243 of them). I suppose you could chalk that up to age, but I'm feeling the least bit nostalgic. I reviewed more than 1,600 records last year. In 1966, I doubt I heard more than 10 -- supplemented, of course, by KLEO and TV shows like Shindig! and Hullabaloo, but the universe I was conscious of extended to at most a couple hundred artists. Back then, I thought I could master it all. Now I know I never stood a chance.
I know I promised, but what the hell:
Jennifer Weiner: [02-10] Why is everything suddenly Taylor Swift's fault?
Kyle Chayka: [01-31] America's paranoid Taylor Swift super bowl MAGA fever dream.
David Corn: [01-31] Why the right-wing conspiracy theory about Taylor Swift is good for American democracy.
Ross Douthat: [01-31] Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and the right's abnormality problem.
Maureen Dowd: [02-03] Inside Trump's not-so-Swift brain.
Alex Skopic: [02-09] The NFL is an abusive workplace.
Li Zhou: [02-06] The Grammys' Beyoncé snubs speak to a deeper problem: Beyoncé was snubbed? "They're emblematic of how the awards have failed Black artists." As someone who has never had any expectation of Grammy ever doing anything right, I find the very notion that anyone could be so certainly deserving of a win as to be snubbed baffling.
Sorry for doing this to you, but I'm going to quote a Donald Trump tweet (quoted by Matthew Yglesias, reposted by Dean Baker, my emphasis added):
2024 is our Final Battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will Drain the Swamp, and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all!
Yglesias responded: "This stuff is demented but it also serves to deflect attention from the boring reality that what he's going to do is cut rich people's taxes, raise prescription drug prices, let companies dump more shit in the water, etc etc etc." There's a lot of hyperbole in this pitch, but who can doubts that there are warmongers in the cururent government, that they are pushing us into more perilous foreign entanglements, and that Biden isn't likely to restrain much less break from them. There's good reason to doubt that Trump can fix this, but if he wants to campaign on the promise, many people will find slim chance preferable to none. Moreover, the rest of his pitch is coherent and forceful, and is likely to resonate with the propaganda pitch much of the media -- and not just the shills at Fox -- have been pushing over the last decade.
Countering that Trump won't really do this just feeds into the paranoia over the Deep State -- which, to be sure, thwarted him in 2017, but this time he knows much better what he's up against. Worse still is arguing that his actual government will be boring, with a side of petty corruption, just shows you're not listening, and also suggests that you don't much care what happens. If Trump did nothing more than check off Yglesias's list, he'd still be a disaster for most Americans. But at the very minimum, he's going to do much more than that: he's going to talk, and he's going to talk a lot, and he's going to bring more people into government and media who are going to add ever more vicious details to the mass of hate and pomposity he spews. And even though lots of us are going to recoil in horror, we'll still have to stuggle to survive being inundated by it all, all the while suffering the glee of our tormenters.
Of course, the "Final Battle" and "once and for all" is as over the top as the Book of Revelation he's taken to heart. But that it can't happen won't make them any less determined, or dangerous, or dreadful.