Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Speaking of Which

Big breaking news this week was the end of Joe Biden's campaign for a second term as president. This became public on Sunday, July 20. I started collecting bits for this post back on Thursday, July 18, and in the intervening days I collected a fair number of pieces on the arguments for Biden to withdraw. I've kept those pieces below (and may even add to them), while splitting the section on Biden, and adding one on Kamala Harris, who as Vice-President and as Biden's running mate is the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Biden won all of the primaries, so an overwhelming majority of DNC voters were selected and pledged to Biden (and implicitly to Harris). Biden has endorsed Harris. And most of the people who put pressure on Biden to withdraw did so realizing that Harris would be his most obvious replacement. Opposition to Biden was almost never rooted in rejection of his policies or legacy. (Critics of Biden's deaf, blind and dumb support for Netanyahu's genocide may beg to differ, but they had little if any clout within the party powers who turned on Biden. Nor do Israel's supporters have any real reason to fear that Harris will turn on them.)

I originally meant to start this post with a bit from a letter I wrote back on Thursday [07-18], which summed up my views on Biden's candidacy at the time:

For what little it's worth, here's my nutshell take on Biden:

  1. If he can't get control of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza by early October, he's going to lose, no matter what else happens. For people who don't understand them, they're bad vibes, so why not blame the guy who was in position to do something about them. That may be unfair, but that's what uninformed voters do. And if you do understand them (which I think I do), Biden doesn't look so good either. He sees Ukraine as a test of resolve, and Israel as a test of loyalty, and those views are not just wrong, they kick in his most primitive instincts.

  2. Otherwise, the election will go to whichever side is most effective at making the election into a referendum on the other side. That should be easy when the other side is Trump, but it gets real hard when most media cycles focus on your age and/or decrepitude. That story is locked in, and isn't going away. When your "good news" is "Biden reads from teleprompter and doesn't fumble," you've lost.

  3. Even if Trump's negatives are so overwhelming that even Biden, incapacitated as he is, beats him (and surely it wouldn't be by enough to shut Trump up), do we really want four more years of this?

As of early Tuesday evening, I'm still preoccupied with trying to wrap up my jazz critics poll. I expect to mail that I will get that mailed in tonight, and hope that I may wrap this up as well, with the by-now-usual proviso that I may add more the next day, but certainly will have lots to return to next week.

As of late Wednesday evening, I figure I should call it a week. I still haven't gotten to everything, but I've deliberately skipped anything on the Netanyahu speech to Congress, and various other pieces of late-breaking news (including recent campaign rallies by Trump, which I overheard some of, and by Harris, which I gather was much more fun. If I do grab something more while working on Music Week, I'll flag it as usual. Otherwise, there's always next week.

One half-baked thought I will go ahead and throw out there is this: maybe this was the plan all along? I know it's hard to credit the Democratic Party insiders with devising much less executing such a clever plan. But if you wanted to get to where we are now, it's not that hard to imagine. If Biden hadn't run, Harris would have been his probable successor, but not without a bruising and potentially divisive primary fight. Biden's reelection campaign kept that from happening -- and to make extra sure, scotching the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary eliminated the two best opportunities potential opponents might gamble on. Biden wound up with an overwhelming majority of delegates locked in, and predisposed to Harris as his successor.

Biden's presumptive nomination also gave cover to Trump, who never had to face the age questions that dogged the slightly older Biden. Then Biden tanks the debate, which gives Trump a huge psychological boost, but drags out his withdrawal until after Trump's nomination becomes official. By the time he does announce, all the ducks are lined up for Harris, cemented by the record-breaking cash haul. No one will run against her, and all Democrats will unite behind her. It's not a very good example of democracy in action, but it's clean and final, and she enters the campaign against Trump with few wounds and very little baggage.

On the other hand, Trump, despite all the optimism he brought into the RNC just last week, has tons of debilitating baggage -- to which he's already added his "best people" VP pick, J.D. Vance. I've said all along that the winner will be the one who does the best job of making the election into an opportunity for the people to rid themselves of the other candidate. The odds of Trump being the one we most want to dispose of just went way up.

Make no mistake, there is something profoundly wrong with our democracy, and it goes way beyond gerrymanders and registration scheming. It mostly has to do with the obscene influence of money not just on who can run in elections and what they can campaign on, but also on what whoever manages to get elected can or cannot do with their post. This influence goes way back, and runs very deep, but it's pretty clear that it's gotten significantly worse over the last several decades, as income and wealth have become much more unequally distributed.

We are, of course, fortunate that not everyone with great sums of money wishes to harm most of us. It's mostly just Republicans who want to drive us to ruin, and who surely will if we allow them the power to do so. (The Supreme Court is one place where they already have that power, and it is already providing us with a steady stream of examples of how "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.") Rich Democrats may be every bit as self-interested and egocentric as rich Republicans, but at least they can see that government needs to work reasonably well for everyone, and not just for the rich at everyone else's expense. They understand things that Republicans have turned against: that life is not a zero-sum game (so you don't have to inflict losses in order to gain); that security is only possible if people sense that justice prevails; and that no matter how much wealth and power you gain, you still depend on other people who need to be able to trust you.

Perhaps you can and should trust rich Democrats in times of severe crisis, such as in this election. Today's Republican Party, with or without Trump, is threat enough. But know that those same rich Democrats don't trust you to make decisions they can support, which is why they hijacked the 2020 primaries to stop Sanders with Biden, and why they've micromanaged the 2024 process to give your nomination to Harris. And actually, I'm strangely OK with that.

Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Israel vs. world opinion:

Election notes:

  • Jeffrey St Clair: [07-19] Politics on the verge of nervous breakdown. This starts with the most detailed and credible account of the Trump rally shooting I've bothered to read, ranges wide enough to include a picture of Mussolini with a nose bandage after a 1926 assassination attempt, then moves on to Biden (pre-withdrawal), compares his tenure to that of Stalin and Brezhnev, doubles back to J.D. Vance, and winds up with a potpourri of scattered points, like:

    • As if to emphasize their indifference to the victims of the shooting, they're having an AR-15 giveaway at the GOP convention . . .

    • Days after a 20-year-old tried to nail Trump with an AR-15, a federal appeals court ruled that Minnesota's law requiring people to be at least 21 to carry a handgun in public is unconstitutional.

    • While the Democrats -- for some reason comprehensible only to Democrats -- have "paused" fundraising after the failed assassination attempt, a Trump-owned company is selling sneakers for $299 a pair with an image of his bloodied face after the rally shooting . . .

Republican National Convention:

Focus on the Convention here. Articles that focus on Trump and Vance, even at the convention, follow in their own sections.

Trump:

  • New York Times Opinion: Donald Trump's first term is a warning. This looks like they finally went back and reviewed their own reporting, and belatedly realized, oh my God, how could we just let all this happen?

    This week, Republicans have tried to rewrite the four years of Trump's presidency as a time of unparalleled peace, prosperity and tranquility: "the strongest economy in history," as Senator Katie Britt of Alabama put it. The difference between Trump and Biden? "President Trump honored the Constitution," said Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia offered Mr. Trump's first term as an example of "common-sense conservative leadership."

    The record of what Mr. Trump actually did in office bears little resemblance to that description. Under his leadership, the country lurched from one crisis to the next, from the migrant families separated at the border to the sudden spike in prices caused by his trade war with China to the reckless mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. And he showed, over and over, how little respect he has for the Constitution and those who take an oath to defend it.

    For Americans who may have forgotten that time, or pushed it from memory, we offer this timeline of his presidency. Mr. Trump's first term was a warning about what he will do with the power of his office -- unless American voters reject him.

    The timeline is mostly told through pictures, which are often shocking, and tweets, which are mostly stupid. One thing I was especially struck by was the prominence given to Trump's catering to the whims and desires of the right-wing in Israel, while still neglecting to point out their direct bearing on increasing hostilities and the ongoing genocide. Also seems to me like there's too much focus on Trump's national security lapses, which caters to the worst instincts of the so-called Security Democrats, when the real problem with Trump is not lack of vigilance but a general disinterest and even contempt for peace and real democracy.

    I expect this timeline will be recut into campaign commercials, fast and furious, driving home the point that Trump is nothing but trouble.

  • Anna Betts: [07-25] FBI director questions whether Trump was hit by bullet or shrapnel in shooting.

  • Jonathan Blitzer: [07-15] Inside the Trump plan for 2025: "A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President's return to the White House."

  • Jonathan Chait:

    • [07-17] Trump invites China to invade Taiwan if he returns to office. Given all the credible charges you could lay at Trump, why bother with this bullshit? Trump has this dangerously stupid idea that if he can scare Taiwan, they'll pony up for more US arms and bribes for security. China's just the bogeyman in this scam. Chait has his own dangerously stupid idea here, which is that American deterrence is the only thing keeping China out of Taiwan. I'm not saying that Taiwan has nothing to worry about, but they do have more control over their own predicament than the ridiculous whims of presidents and pundits.

    • [07-19] Donald Trump cannot even pretend to change who he is.

  • John Ganz: [06-05] The shadow of the mob: "Trump's gangster Gemeinschaft."

  • Jay Caspian Kang: [07-19] Are we already moving on from the assassination attempt on Trump? "When an act of violence doesn't lend itself to a clear argument or a tidy story, we often choose not to think about it."

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-19] The old, ranting, rambling Trump was back at the Republican convention.

  • Eric Levitz: [07-19] The RNC clarified Trump's 2024 persona: Moderate authoritarian weirdo: "The Trump campaign is at once a savvy, disciplined operation and an illiberal narcissist's personality cult." Weirdo, sure, but considered in light of the whole package, weirdo loses all of its affectionate and amusing traits. "Moderate" is the word that hurts here, like a toenail cut into the quick. On some political policy scales, Trump may rate as more moderate than many other prominent Republicans (off the top of my head: Abbott, DeSantis, Cruz, Rubio, Cotton, Hawley, Vance, Gosar, Gaetz, Mike Lee, Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney), but every bit of his persona screams extremism -- he sees himself as a real fighter, as one real bad dude, and that's how he wants you to see him. That's the act he puts on, and that's what most of his fans are lapping up. Once you see that, the weirdo stuff falls into place, and should be viewed much more harshly: he's showing you that he doesn't care what others think, that he can be as weird as he wants, and there's nothing they can do about it.

  • Chris Lewis: [07-15] The dangerous authoritarian gunning to serve as Trump's grand vizier: "Russell Vought is rumored to be under consideration for chief of staff in a second Trump administration. This would be a disaster."

  • Nicole Narea: [07-17] Why tech titans are turning toward Trump: "Silicon Valley isn't right-wing, but its Trump supporters are getting louder."

  • Tom Nichols: A searing reminder that Trump is unwell: "His bizarre diatribe at the RNC shows why the pro-democracy coalition is so worried about beating him."

  • Matt Stieb:

  • Robert Tait: [07-25] Trump monetizes assassination attempt by using photo as book cover.

  • Maureen Tkacik: [07-18] The assassin amid the undesirables: "On the abiding despair of the failed Trump assassin's post-COVID, private equity-looted nursing home."

  • Li Zhou: [07-16] The Trump shooting points to shocking Secret Service security lapses.

Vance:

Trump picked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate and potential vice-president, confirmed by the RNC, so he's very much in the news, and for this week at least, elicited quite a bit of response: much more than I suspect any of his competition would have generated.

  • Alex Abad-Santos: [07-19] The damsel-ification of Usha Vance: "What people project onto the would-be second lady fits a pattern of benevolent sexism about GOP wives."

  • Michael Arria: [07-16] The Shift: J.D. Vance's anti-Palestine record: "J.D. Vance is a strong supporter of Israel, and, like many U.S. Zionists, he attributes the allegiance to his Christianity."

  • Aaron Blake: [07-24] Could Republicans get buyer's remorse with J.D. Vance? "New polls show him to be unusually unpopular for a new VP pick. Here's how that compares historically, and what it could mean."

  • Ben Burgis: [07-16] On stochastic terrorism and speech as violence: Responding to Vance's tweet blaming Biden for the attempted shooting of Trump:

    In effect, conservatives like Vance are appropriating the idea, long put forward by some liberals, that overheated political rhetoric is itself a form of violence. The theory of "stochastic terrorism" holds that over-the-top rhetoric about a targeted individual or group has the effect of encouraging "lone-wolf" political violence -- that is to say, political violence carried out by individuals on their own initiative rather than terrorist organizations -- and that this makes the purveyors of the rhetoric responsible for the violence.

    Actually, the right is far more likely to employ verbal threats and agitation toward violence than the left is, largely because they're much more into violence as a tool of political power. It's hard not to believe that the atmosphere of malice they create has no relationship to occasional violent outbursts, but causality or even responsibility is hard to pin down. Burgis concludes, "let's not go down that road." But Vance is so imbued with the culture of violence that his own charge can just as easily be taken as encouragement for his "2nd amendment people" to take a shot at Biden. When Democrats criticize Trump, their obvious even if just implcit remedy is the ballot. But when Trump rails against "vermin," just what is he imploring his followers to do? And given that a couple of his follows have actually committed acts of criminal violence against his designated enemies, shouldn't we be alarmed at such speech?

  • Kevin T Dugan: [07-18] Why J.D. Vance wants a weak dollar. Is that a good idea? I'm not so sure it isn't. I've been bothered by trade deficits since the 1970s, when they mostly started to cover up the drop in domestic oil production. Since then, they've mostly worked to increase inequality both here and abroad.

  • Gil Duran: Where J.D. Vance gets his weird, terrifying techo-authoritarian ideas: "Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator's benefactor. But they're both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society."

  • Thom Hartmann:

  • John Ganz: [07-16] The meaning of JD Vance: "The politics of national despair incarnate."

    Vance himself, of course, is a winner in the cultural sweepstakes: his Hillbilly Elegy became a massive success, explaining the failures of the white poor. He made it okay to look down on them. After all, one of them said it was okay. Conservatives who reviled Trump's base turned to Vance as well as liberals who condescendingly wanted to "understand" them. It was really the same old conservative nonsense about "cultural pathology" applied to whites now instead of blacks -- a way to blame the poor for being poor, to "racialize" the white poor as the blacks had been; to find in them intrinsic moral weaknesses rather than just a lack of money and resources.

    But Vance always wanted to run with hares and hunt with the hounds. He wants to hold fast to the his wounded Scots-Irish machismo while simultaneously rising to heights of both American capitalism and cultural success. He took his background to be both an advantage and a handicap, a counter-snobbery that served him well as he entered the halls of power and wealth. Look back at the famous American Conservative interview that turned him into a sensation: ". . . the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse snobbery. It's the great privilege of my life that I'm deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism. Like I said, it keeps you grounded, if nothing else! But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18." . . . Reverse snobbery, like all snobbery, comes from comparison, of a feeling of not living up, of wanting to best others. As Peter Thiel acolyte, he's familiar with René Girard's theories of envy and knows how that emotion gives rise to hate. Vance once said that Trump might be "America's Hitler" to a law school buddy. This is what that friend says now: "The through line between former J.D. and current J.D. is anger . . . The Trump turn can be understood as a lock-in on contempt as the answer to anger . . ." To people like that, Hitler, so to speak, has a point.

  • Jacob Heilbrunn: [07-17] With Vance selection, Trump doubles down on America first. One can readily fault Vance for lots of things, but calling him an "isolationist" -- "the heir to Charles Lindbergh, Pat Buchanan, and other GOP isolationists" -- is pretty flimsy.

  • Sarah Jones: [07-16] The billionaire and the bootlicker.

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-18] Who is J.D. Vance? His muddled RNC speech didn't tell us.

  • Paul Krugman: [07-18] J.D. Vance puts the con in conservatism. Well, it's always been there, but he takes it to especially extravagant lengths.

  • Eric Levitz: [07-17] J.D. Vance's GOP is for bosses, not workers: "Trump's 'populist' running mate won't change his party's class allegiances."

  • Nicholas Liu: [07-18] JD Vance wants to abandon Ukraine but bomb Mexico and Iran.

  • Ryan Mac/Theodore Schleifer: [07-17] How a network of tech billionaires helped J.D. Vance leap into power: "Mr. Vance spent less than five years in Silicon Valley's tech industry, but the connections he made with Peter Thiel and others became crucial to his political ascent."

  • Arwa Mahdawi: [07-20] Sorry, JD Vance, but being a 'childless cat lady' is actually not a bad thing.

  • Andrew Prokop: [07-17] J.D. Vance's radical plan to build a government of Trump loyalists: "Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people." Obviously, this isn't original with Vance. Republicans have been dreaming of this for years, and Trump did a fair amount of it during his first term -- especially in purging employees who think there might be something to fossil fuel-based climate change. It was part of Rick Scott's Senate plan, and is part of Project 2025.

  • Max Read: [2020-07-21] Peter Thiel's latest venture is the American government: This old article popped up, but should by now have spawned many updates. My view all along was that Trump was putting the VP slot up for bids -- in effect, he was shopping for the best dowry. Burgum made the short list because he has his own money. The rehabilitation of "Little Marco" also suggested that he brought some serious money into play -- every serious Republican candidate in 2016 had some kind of billionaire in the wings. (In 2012, Newt Gingrich griped that he couldn't compete, because he only had one billionaire, whereas Romney had four.) I don't know who was backing Rubio, but J.D. Vance was always a front for this guy, Peter Thiel.

  • Veronica Riccobene/Helen Santoro/Joel Warner: [07-16] J.D. Vance wants to crack down harder on abortion access.

  • Becca Rothfeld: [07-23] Hillbilly Elegy and J.D. Vance's art of having it both ways.

  • Martin Scotten: [07-22] JD Vance owes almost everything to Peter Thiel, a pro-Trump billionaire and "New Right" ideologue.

  • Ishaan Tharoor:

  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [07-15] Why Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance for Vice-President: "The Ohio senator is an attack dog for the former President, but he is also something more emergent and interesting: he is the fuse that Trump lit."

  • Robert Wright: [07-19] J.D. Vance, the tech oligarch's populist.

  • Simon van Zuylen-Wood: [07-24] Democrats might want to take J.D. Vance seriously: But isn't it so much more fun to take him as a joke? Does he really deserve anything else?

And other Republicans:

  • Dean Baker: [07-17] Decision 2024: Would people be willing to pay higher taxes to make Elon Musk richer?

    That is a question that should occur to people who read through the Republican Party's platform. Not only does the platform promise to extend the 2017 tax cuts, which will potentially put tens of billions of dollars in Elon Musk's pocket over the next decade, it also promises to "modernize the military."

    "Republicans will ensure our Military is the most modern, lethal and powerful Force in the World. We will invest in cutting-edge research and advanced technologies, including an Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield, support our Troops with higher pay, and get woke Leftwing Democrats fired as soon as possible."

    This looks to be hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in additional spending over the next decade. Elon Musk, among others, is likely to be well-situated to get some of the contracts that will be involved in modernizing the military. . . .

    As far as how much Musk and other military contractors are likely to get out of an increase in spending, it is worth noting that excessive payments and outright fraud are already big problems with military contracting. However, the problem is likely to get considerably worse in a second Trump administration.

    There are a number of potential checks on fraud and abuse in place at present. These include the Defense Department's Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Justice Department, which can investigate allegations of fraud.

    Donald Trump has said that he wants to remove these sorts of checks on his presidential power. They would all fit into his category of the "deep state." These people are likely the "woke Leftwing Democrats" who the platform promises to fire as soon as possible.

  • Zack Beauchamp: [07-19] It's Trump's party now. Mostly. "How the Trumpified GOP resembles Frankenstein's monster."

  • Tim Dickinson: [06-09] Meet Trump's new Christian kingpin: "Oil-rich Tim Dunn has changed Texas politics with fanatical zeal -- the national stage is next."

  • Abdallah Fayyad: [07-16] The crime wave is over but Republicans can't let go: "The GOP is still pretending that crime is spiraling out of control."

  • David Frum: This crew is totally beatable: "Democrats just need to believe they can do it."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-18] The GOP is still the party of the boss.

  • Christian Paz: [07-16] The clever politics of Republicans' anti-immigrant pitch: "The Republican National Convention featured plenty of angry rhetoric about immigration. It might find a receptive audience."

  • Nikki McCann Ramirez/Ryan Bort: [07-10] A guide to Project 2025, the right's terrifying plan to remake America.

Biden:

He announced he was withdrawing as the Democratic candidate for president in 2024 on Sunday, July 21, so the following links can be easily divided into before and after sections. More recent links first:

I had already collected a bunch of links before the withdrawal. While this should be a moot issue going forward, we shouldn't forget too readily what happened and why.

  • Intelligencer: [07-19] Pressure builds as more Democrats call on Biden to step aside: "Here are the latest developments on the efforts to get Joe to go." Following some earlier reports scattered about this section, he's getting the "live updates" treatment.

  • Russell Berman: 'I think it's happening': "The lone senator who has called on Biden to withdraw is growing confident that the president will leave the race."

  • Jonathan Chait: [07-18] The presidential nomination is becoming worthless for Joe Biden: "A devastating polling nugget shows what happens if he stays in."

  • David A Graham: [07-18] The end of Biden's candidacy approaches: "At the start of the day yesterday, it was conceivable that Joe Biden might manage to hold on to the Democratic nomination for president. But this morning, things seem to be slipping out of his grasp." He cites a number of reports of people who are close enough to Biden to have leverage but who still don't want to be seen with blood on their hands. There's also the all-important fear of "money drying up." The big selling point is fear of a Trump presidency, but if you're rich enough to splurge on politics, you don't have that much to fear. It's more a matter of hedging your bets.

  • Elie Honig: [07-19] The secret Biden tape that we shouldn't hear. That's special counsel Robert Hur's interview of Biden in conjunction with the "top secret" documents Biden found in his garage. At the time it was first disclosed, it was reported that the tape made Biden out like a doddering fool, so naturally Republicans in Congress set out to subpoena it.

  • Dhruv Khullar: [07-18] Doctors are increasingly worried about Biden: "Nine physicians weighed in on the President's health. Almost all were concerned that Biden's symptoms might go beyond a gradual, aging-related decline."

  • Eric Levitz: [07-18] Democrats are finally taking on Biden -- and giving the party a chance to win: "Pelosi, Schumer, and Obama have all signaled to Joe that it's time to go."

  • Nicole Narea: [07-18] Biden is betting on impossible promises to progressives: "Biden is trying to reinvigorate his candidacy by pushing progressive priorities." That might work better if the left had any real power in the Democratic Party, if Biden had the power to deliver, and if the promise didn't panic the corporate faction into dumping him.

  • Nia Prater: [07-18] The push to replace Biden is rapidly gaining momentum.

Harris:

  • Intelligencer Staff: [07-22] Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee: live updates: She cleared 2,579 delegates less than 36 hours after Biden dropped out and endorsed her.

  • Mariana Alfaro/Marianna Sotomayor: [07-24] House GOP leaders ask member to stop making racial attacks against Harris. Probably more where this came from:

  • Michael Arria: [07-22] Looking at Kamala Harris's record on Israel: "If elected president, many believe that Kamala Harris will continue Joe Biden's doomed policy in Gaza."

  • Karen Attiah: [07-24] The first clean-up job for Harris is Biden's horrible Gaza policy. I sympathize with the sentiment, but I don't see the political angle. The Biden administration needs to quietly shut the Gaza war down, with a stable ceasefire, with no Israeli troop presence in Gaza, and with some kind of international salvage/reconstruction effort, probably under the UN with some contingent of Arab volunteers. Harris should (and hopefully can) work behind the scenes to firm up the administration's resolve to do this, but also shouldn't be seen as getting her hands too dirty in the effort. She needs this, because if the war/genocide is still continuing in October, that's going to reflect very badly on Biden, and therefore (but probably somewhat less) on her. So yes, this is important. But advice like this -- Indigo Olivier: Kamala, denounce Netanyahu. Do it now. -- is neither likely to work on Israel, nor is it likely to gain her any voters.

  • Ryan Cooper: [07-23] What would President Harris do with Gaza?: "There are tentative signs that she would not indulge Israel's war as President Biden has done." This is pretty speculative. No one expects Harris to break with Israel, or even to rethink the fundamentals of the alliance, but it's possible to love Israel and still exercise some restraint to steer Israelis away from embarrassing themselves, as they have done ever since their defense against Hamas attacks turned into a campaign of genocide. Indeed, many Israelis -- not Netanyahu and his allies, who will take every atrocity they can get away with, but many of his wholeheartedly Zionist opponents -- expect the US to act as a brake on their own worst impulses. It is worth noting that when the Biden administration briefly held up supply of 2000 lb. bombs, Harris was disciplined enough to keep her messaging in line with the policy, while Biden waffled and gave up any pretense.

  • David Dayen: [07-23] Who is Kamala Harris? "The vice president has been a cautious political operator. Her vision for the future points in several directions."

  • Benjamin Hart: [07-24] Kamala Harris's biographer says she's always been underestimated. Interview with Dan Morain, author of Kamala's Way: An American Life.

  • Susan Milligan: [07-24] Sexism and racism only make Kamala Harris stronger.

  • Christian Paz: [07-18] Kamala Harris and the border: The myth and the facts.

  • Greg Sargent: [07-23] Fox News's awful new Kamala Harris smears hit nuclear levels of idiocy: "As right-wing media scramble for an effective attack on the vice president, a reporter who has closely examined Harris's career explains why her political identity is so hard to pin down."

  • Michael Scherer/Gerrit De Vynck/Maeve Reston: [07-23] Historic flood of cash pours into Harris campaign and allied groups: "Democrats reported raising more than $250 million since Biden announced he was leaving the presidential race and endorsed Harris."

  • Marc A Thiessen: [07-24] Harris is a gaffe-prone leftist. Why didn't anyone challenge her? "That would-be rivals are waiting for 2028 suggests they know our democracy will survive Trump." When I saw this title, I had to click on it, just to see who could be that dumb (although in retrospect I should have guessed). If you do bother to read this, you'll get a prevue of all the angles Republicans will use against Harris. If I knew nothing else, I'd take them as reason aplenty to vote for her. Still, I have to wonder whether the rest of the Republicans will even rise to Thiessen's level of sophistry. Consider this recent run of advice-giving columns:

  • Rebecca Traister: [07-24] The thrill of taking a huge risk on Kamala Harris: "The actual case for being unburdened by what has been." I think the author is really onto something here:

    None of us knows if we can do this. And we are about to do it anyway. And the combination of those truths helped me, in those vertiginous few minutes, to not feel panic but excitement. I felt excited about the future for the first time in years.

    More than that: I felt excited not in spite of my uncertainty, but because of it. I felt that our national political narrative was finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don't know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, underpolled, creative measures to change, grow, and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us. No more clinging to the walls of the past for safety, no more adhering to models or traditions or assumptions that the autocratic opposition has shown itself willing to explode over the past two decades in its own efforts to win.

    Our aversion to uncertainty is part of how we got to this precipice. Too unwilling to take risks -- on people, ideas, and platforms, on the next generation of leadership -- Democrats have remained chained to the past.

    In some ways, Harris is the safe choice right now, but after Biden and Clinton, she doesn't feel like such a stale, stodgy compromise. She feels like a candidate who can fight back, who won't spend the next four months backpedaling and disclaiming. And why can't she win? Who really believes racist, sexist, red-baiting Republicans theses days? Just cowards who take their clues from the fear and shame of those being maligned? Traister addresses this here:

    There are certainly terrible things in store: the racism and sexism Harris will face, the monstrous and vengeful resistance to her rise, in which she will be accused of incompetence and radicalism and being an affirmative-action token and a barren cat lady and a welfare queen who has slept her way to the top, all according to the right's overfamiliar playbooks for how to discredit people they would rather not participate fully in this democracy and helped by a media happy to engage in double standards. We know there will be bad polls and gaffes. And those who feel scared about what is on the line, including possibly me, will be tempted to say, "I told you this would happen!" because in our moments of direst discomfort we take slim consolation in certainty, even when the certainty is about how awful we knew everything was going to be.

    But if we permitted that dismal comfort to guide us, we would not have any space to be shocked and inspired by how good some things can be: the giddy memes emerging from an improbably enthused online left, the cheerily halved "BIDEN/HARRIS" yard signs now reading simply "HARRIS." The $81 million in donations raised in 24 hours. The 58,000 volunteers who stepped up in less than two days to work phones and knock doors. The Sunday-night zoom call hosted by Win With Black Women and Jotaka Eaddy, which was scheduled to accommodate 1,000 women, that eventually had to make room for 44,000 participants, all within hours of Harris becoming the unofficial candidate. The next night, a call organized by Win With Black Men drew 53,000 registrants, well above its capacity, of whom 21,000 were ultimately able to attend.

And other Democrats:

Included here are pieces about the upcoming procedure for replacing Biden as presidential nominee, any candidates beyond Harris, and the upcoming convention.

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War and Russia:

  • Blaise Malley: [07-19] Diplomacy Watch: Europe turns attention to GOP ticket: "Moscow, Kyiv, also react to eventuality of Trump returning to White House." This was written post-Vance, pre-Harris, so maybe the panic has subsided a bit. What hasn't changed is the war's stalemate, or more accurately, spiraling self-destruction.

America's empire and the world:

  • Wesley K Clark: [06-23] America is already great again: "Don't let doomsayers like Donald Trump fool you. On every meaningful metric of national strength, the United States under Joe Biden is a rising power -- and we have the economic means and necessary alliances to meet our gravest challenges." He's fighting bullshit with bullshit, which he wouldn't have to if he could just escape the "metric of national strength" Trump characterizes as greatness. I remember how Bill Moyers tried to convince LBJ to call his programs "the good society," but Johnson, ever the bullshit artist, insisted on "great" -- and got neither. Clark actually does a fair job of pointing out how the reforms Biden started, and further reforms that are broadly supported by the democratic wing of the Democratic Party, can make our lives better, can help the rest of the world, and put us in better alignment with peace and justice everywhere -- an analysis that could be much sharper with a bit less ego and arms hawking.

  • Tom Engelhardt: [07-18] Where did the American Century go? "The decline and fall of presidential America: are we now living in a defeat culture?"

  • Mike Lofgren: [06-23] Why can't America build enough weapons? That's really not the question we should be asking, but that anyone can bring it up should expose the hopeless trap we've locked ourselves into. "The debasement of the U.S. defense industrial base began, ironically, under Ronald Reagan, and won't be reversed until we abandon the free-market fundamentalism he introduced." This is a subject that merits a long screed, one I have no time or patience for now.

Other stories:

Adam Clark Estes: [07-11] Why I quit Spotify: Some things to think about, especially as "Spotify raised its prices in July for the second time in as many years." As I recall, in the announcement letter they touted all the extra podcast content the extra money will help them develop. (They develop things? I've never listened to a podcast there, so the all money they spent on Joe Rogan -- and on pissing off Neil Young and Joni Mitchell -- was wasted, as far as I'm concerned).

Bryan Walsh: [07-16] It's time to stop arguing over the population slowdown and start adapting to it: "The world population could peak in your lifetime."

Li Zhou: [07-19] The "largest IT outage in history," briefly explained: "Airlines, banks, and hospitals saw computer systems go down because of a CrowdStrike software glitch." Note that only Microsoft Windows users were affected ("Mac and Linux users were not affected").

Obituaries

John Otis: [07-24] Lewis Lapham, editor who revived Harper's magazine, dies at 89: "He turned Harper's into what he called a 'theater of ideas,' promoting emerging voices including David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens and Fareed Zakaria." I only occasionally read Harper's (and later Lapham's Quarterly), but I've read a couple of his books, and thought he was a superb political essayist: Theater of War: In Which the Republican Beocmes an Empire (2003), and Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration (2006). I should do a complete book rundown, but for now I just ordered a copy of his 2017 book, Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy.

Larry Rohter: [07-23] John Mayall, pioneer of British blues, is dead at 90: "He was best known not for his own playing or singing but for recruiting and polishing the talents of one gifted lead guitarist after another, starting with Eric Clapton."

Giovanni Russonello: [07-24] Toumain Diabaté, Malian master of the kora, is dead at 58: "He believed that music could transcend national borders set by colonialism and restore ancient ties, even as it embraced the changes of a globalizing society."

Alex Williams: [07-19] Happy Traum, mainstay of the folk music world, dies at 86: "A noted guitarist and banjo player, he emerged from the same Greenwich Village folk-revival scene as his friend and sometime collaborator Bob Dylan."

Books

Zack Beauchamp: [07-17] Why the far right is surging all over the world: "The 'reactionary spirit' and the roots of the US authoritarian moment." Excerpt from a book the author has been working on: The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.

Doug Storm: [2022-09-16] A crash course in the works of H Bruce Franklin . . . with H Bruce Franklin. I just read the late cultural historian's memoir, Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War, which does a good job of recounting the path of post-WWII militarism from the red scare into Vietnam, as he discovered it in real time, and also recounted a much more militant anti-war movement than I was ever involved in. The book ends rather abruptly after Vietnam, making me wonder whether he planned a second one, or just figured his later life just wasn't that interesting. The interview covers the book, as well as other works, like

Music (and other arts?)

Ian Bogost: The mid-year best-of list is a travesty: "The worst idea of 2024 so far." And here I was thinking that the worst idea of 2024 was using AI to select bombing targets on Gaza. Or using drones for terror bombing around nuclear power plants in Ukraine. Or major political parties picking two doddering idiots to debate the very serious issues facing America and the world. The author seems to have reconciled himself to end-of-year lists: "These annual rundowns arrive during a period of reflection, when a full year's worth of human art and industry is about to recede into history." That's an odd turn of phrase: don't things turn into history the moment they happen? Whether they recede or not depends on whether they still have continuing import, or have (like most things) turned into passing fancies. Even so, one suspects that passing fancies are precisely what end-of-year lists are meant to recognize.

But it end-of-year lists are ok, what's so bad about mid-year lists? The time chunks are arbitrary. Smaller ones give us less material to cover, but you don't have to think back so far, and when it comes to music albums, it's not like we have a scarcity problem. My mid-year jazz critics poll (89 voters) identified 468 albums, vs. the full-year 2023 total of 760 (159 votes). It sounds like he's complaining about the novelty, but I've been tracking mid-year lists for a decade or more. They're still not nearly as common as end-of-year lists, but I've tracked about 35 so far this year, which includes a majority of the music publications that Album of the Year follows. As far as I know, nobody's taking the 6-month time chunk seriously enough to run a second-half list at end-of-year time, but I have seen movement toward shorter time periods, with quarterly and even monthly retrospectives.

Paul Schwartzman: [07-11] Who killed the Kennedys? The Rolling Stones won't tell you anymore. Songs evolve, sometimes as historical references slip from memory -- "On the Sunny Side of the Street" lives on, but increasingly likely to substitute for "rich as Rockefeller" -- and sometimes when casual terms fell out of fashion, as when Louis Armstrong changed "darkies" to "the folks."

Mid-year best-of lists:

Chatter

Zachary D Carter: [07-25][Response to Matt Stoller: "Democratic Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman gives $7 million to Harris, immediately demands she fire FTC Chair Lina Khan."]

  • Hoffman is a fool, these Silicon Valley gazillionaires don't actually believe in democracy.

  • The US economy is great, business is booming, the threat to growth is Jay Powel refusing to cut interest rates, not Lina Khan enforcing the law.

Nathan J Robinson: [07-25]

  • The core problem that Republicans have, and the reason they struggle to win the popular vote, is that they seem to despise the majority of people who live in this country.

  • We hate cat ladies, LGBTQ people, teachers, baristas, union members, immigrants, the underclass, "DEI," librarians, Hollywood, welfare moms, civil servants, professors, students, environmental activists, atheists, Muslims. Am I missing anyone from the list?

  • ok well your little cult should go form its own country where you don't have to live with anyone who doesn't share your theocratic morality

Rick Perlstein: [07-25]:

  • This video I made of a beautiful nature scene slowly defaced by the ugliest, most arrogant building this side of Pyongyang: I feel like it Says Something about Obama, and how history might judge him.

  • An arcadian fantasy, then the banal reality.

  • Terrible at building a bulwark against incipient fascism. That may become the salient metric, like for James Buchanan or Neville Chamberlain.

Tikun Olam: [07-25] [Responding to Ami Dar: "Former IDF Chiefs of Staff and Mossad directors (i.e. just a bunch of antisemitic leftist traitors) write the Congressional leadership: 'Netanyahu poses an existential threat to the State of Israel.'"]

  • It's amazing how generals and Shin Bet chiefs who performed horrible crimes during their careers, all of a sudden develop a moral conscience after they retire.

Actually, there's a movie about this phenomenon. It's called The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, came out in 2012, featuring interviews with six former Shin Bet heads. These people rise in the ranks based on their drive to dominate Palestinians, then when they retire, they realize they've accomplished nothing, leaving nothing but blown opportunities in their wake. But by then they've been replaced by younger men eager to proove they can be even more aggressive.

Rick Perlstein: [07-25]

  • Wow, the story the wily old pol who says "my opponent fucks goats" so the guy has to deny it has been one-upped by a twitter troll. Vance is just . . . a total loser.

This links to Jordan Liles: [07-23] No, JD Vance did not say he had sex with couch cushions: "A false online ruor about former U.S. President Donald Trump's running mate, a latex glove and couch cuishions spawned a number of jokes and memes." I must have heard of Snopes (a "fact-checking website," originally set up in 1994 as the Urban Legends Reference Pages) before, but can't ever recall consulting it. It is possibly useful for debunking false rumors, but it also does a nice job of propagating them, and possibly even turning them into an art form. I can see this as scurrilous, but it can also be kind of funny. For instance, this page links to six more stories on Vance:

  • JD Vance had middle-class upbringing in 4-bedroom house in suburban Ohio?
  • JD Vance said women should stay in violent marriages?
  • Trump mistakenly referred to JD Vance as 'JD Wentworth'?
  • JD Vance once called Trump 'America's Hitler'?
  • JD Vance's last name means 'bedbug' in Yiddish?
  • JD Vance says parents should have bigger say in democracy than non-parents.

The links are laid out in a grid, reminding me of those "prove you're not a robot" matrixes, challenging you to pick which ones are true and which are false. I'm not interested in playing, but will note that four sound somewhat familiar, and only one strikes me as implausible.

PS: I also stumbled across this: "When I get that feeling I want sectional healing . . ."

Initial count: 209 links, 10413 words. Updated count [07-25]: 228 links, 11635 words.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): music.

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