Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Speaking of Which

Opened this file on Friday, July 26, early evening. Thought I might wrap this up Monday evening, but I had a very stressful day, got bummed out, and accomplished little. Hence, this week's piece has lapsed into Tuesday, but coverage of [07-30] will be spotty, at best.

One thing I did accomplish on Monday was to write a bit of code that I'm using here, and should save me a lot of trouble in the future. As I've been writing these posts, I've often wondered how much I had written. It then occurred to me that I could measure the post using two Linux shell commands:

fgrep 'href' FILENAME | wc -l
wc -w FILENAME

The former counts links (assuming there is no more than one link per line). The latter counts words. I usually omitted the wc options, since it's easy to visually pick out the number I wanted: the default counts lines, words, and characters. My first thought was to wrap those two commands into a shell script, then run it and append the answer to the web page. Then it occurred to me that I'm already reading the file to find a few directive lines (mostly used for the title and date), so I could count links and words as I go, then add a directive to print them out at (or near) the end. (Which gives me a bit of flexible control, as opposed to just automatically appending the stats to every page -- something I still may decide to do.)

At present, the link counts match the program output, but the word counts vary somewhat. Obviously, word counts depend on how you delimit words (e.g., is a "hyphenated-word" 1 or 2 words?). I used wc just because it was easy and close enough for my purposes. The new code also takes the easy route, using the PHP str_word_count() function, which at least initially produced larger word counts (e.g., 11616 vs. 8674, so in this case +25.6%). But rather than try to tune the PHP code to better match the wc results, I thought maybe I should aim for more useful results. I knew that a lot of the text in these particular files appeared in HTML tags and comments, which never appears as words on the web page, so I tried removing them -- using a regular expression replace:

preg_replace('/<[^>]*>/', ' ', LINE)

I then called the word count function both on the edited line and on the original one -- I was curious what the effect was, and wound up printing out both totals. I also eliminated the directive lines from the word count, since like markup they do not appear in the page, and I was already separating those lines out. For the page cited above, the word counts wound up at 7996 (tags stripped) and 11616 (total). I can imagine refining this further. The most obvious thing is I'm not checking for HTML entities right now, which are few (so have little practical effect), and are rather complicated (so would require much more complex code).

I don't doubt that my programming skills have atrophied over the score-plus years since my last full-time job, but it's always a good feeling to see that I still have some.

One more new formatting tic this week. I thought I'd like to have some way to draw extra attention to articles that seem especially important. What seemed like the simplest, most intuitive way was to change the • bullet to something that would stand out more, like this -- a bright red star.

I've applied this in a few places, and probably should in a few more. (This was a very late addition to the file.) I figured I could do this with CSS, but ran across the problem that once an element was selected for the star, any child elements also inherited the star. (There's a Sarah Jones example below, which is actually pretty unusual.) I haven't found a way in CSS to prevent or stop such inheritance, so resorted to another hack to undo it.

Top story threads:

Israel:

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

Netanyahu wangled an invitation to speak to a joint session of Congress, first lining up his right-wing allies to float the invite, then giving the Democratic leadership little choice but to join in. He may be massively unpopular in Israel, but when he appears in Washington, he can preen like he owns the place, as he essentially does. And his exhibition of power over Washington helps maintain his perch in Israel, where regardless of his many faults, he is widely seen as the one guy who can force presidents to kowtow. The whole spectacle was deeply embarrassing for all concerned. So while he got the ovations he expected, his message just underscores how deeply out of touch Israel is with world opinion. Mustafa Barghouti was absolutely right: "a disgusting speech in a session of shame to the U.S. Congress."

Other stories in this nexus:

  • Michael Arria: [07-25] The Shift: Biden's legacy is genocide. Biden's withdrawal elicited "sentimental tributes," but not from those who focused on his defense and support of genocide by Israel.

  • Dexter Filkins: [07-22] Will Hezbollah and Israel go to war? That's really up to Netanyahu, who is fully able to push Hezbollah's buttons to get whatever level of back-and-forth he wants -- thus far, enough to provide cover for the real wars against Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank, and to keep the Americans in line with their depiction of Iran the puppet master on many fronts. As last week showed, escalating the bombing of Lebanon is easy within those parameters. Launching a real ground war isn't so easy, with little to gain and a fair amount to lose.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-25] What Kamala Harris really thinks about Israel and Gaza: "Biden's approach to the war in Gaza has been divisive. Would Haris chart a new path?" I have a whole section for Harris, where I'll slot pieces on every other aspect of her campaign and politics, but for now I'd rather compartmentalize and keep her Israel stuff here, as a subset of the Washington-based group-think that lets American politicians and their cronies avoid having to think or care about the issue. I don't think anyone really knows what she thinks here, because the position she's in doesn't allow thinking, or doing for that matter.

    Maybe when she is president, she will be in a position to do, and therefore will need to think. But right now, all she really has to do is to avoid the pitfalls being laid out for her. (Having to meet with Netanyahu is just one such pitfall.) I'm not unsympathetic to people who regard Israel (or at least Gaza) as the biggest political issue of the moment, but through the election, I think they/we should give her a pass. I'm pretty sure that she's no worse than Biden, and undoubtedly a lot better than Trump. You don't have to endorse her (at least for this). You can even rag on Genocide Joe if you want. But this is just speculation, and probably not helpful at all. Of course, once she's elected, the gloves can come off. My hope, and that's really all it is, is that she'll listen better than Biden, and act more decisively. The time to talk specifically to her is when she's ready to listen and act.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: {07-24] Peter Thiel: 'I defer to Israel': "Video surfaces showing the Palantir tech giant strugglig to answer questions about client's use of AI-generated kill lists."

  • Brett Wilkins: [07-24] Ben-Gvir endorses Trump, says he's more likely to back war on Iran: "The Israeli security minister, who leads the far-right Jewish Power party, accused the Biden administration of thwarting Israel's victory against Hamas."

Israel vs. world opinion:

Election notes:

Trump:

Vance:

Trump's running mate, a Republican Senator from Ohio, one thing you can say for him is that he's gotten more press attention than any VP candidate since Sarah Palin, and probably more, since he's not just a turbocharged gaffe machine but has a more philosophical side that is also easy to chew over. I'm pretty sure that had Trump picked Doug Burgum or Elise Stefanik, this phase would be done by now.

  • Karyn Amira: [07-29] JD Vance's selection as Trump's running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism. Problem here is the author's definition of conservatism: "a philosophy that supports smaller and less-centralized government because consolidated power could be used to silence political competition and deny citizens their liberties." That's almost exactly wrong: conservatives believe in order defined by their preferred hierarchy, which is necessarily enforced by power in a state that they seek to control. That's precisely what Trump and Vance believe in.

    On the other hand, Amira's definition actually describes an obsolete version of liberalism, which has been cynically used by conservatives to oppose the modern democratic state. From the progressives in the early 1900s through the New Deal and Great Society, liberals came to realize that laissez-faire capitalism had ceased to expand "liberty and justice for all," and if left unchecked would revert to a new version of feudal aristocracy. So they came up with a very successful alternative, where the state, embodying the will of the popular majority, would organize and regulate countervailing institutions, their powers limited and regulated in the public interest.

    Needless to say, the would-be lords of neofeudal capitalism hated this, and fought to preserve and extend their superiority with every trick they could muster -- including adopting the time-tested rhetoric of classical liberalism, but redirected against the democratic state -- which they characterized not just as a revival of pharoahs and czars but as something more impersonal and nefarious, as totalitarianism -- and really against the people it represented.

    But while "small government" may have been useful rhetoric when the government was held by people conservatives reviled, have you ever seen conservatives once they control the state reduce its size and power? You might point to deregulation, but that's effectively a transfer of power from public to private hands. Similarly, tax cuts and credits are transfers of money from public to private hands. By debilitating public interest functions, conservatives seek to discredit the state as a means by which the people can help themselves. Conservatives may see the state, in the wrong hands, as a repressive force, but given power, they eagerly use that force for their own ends, especially against the people they see as enemies, which is most of us.

    Trump and Vance aren't the end of Republican conservatism. They're more like its apotheosis, grown powerful and arrogant enough they can quit pretending they're doing anyone any favors but themselves. Maybe they mark some kind of denouement for conservative naïveté, but few real world conservatives were ever so deluded.

  • Maureen Dowd: [07-27] JD Vance, purr-fectly dreadful.

  • Elizabeth Dwoskin/Cat Zakrzewski/Nitasha Tiku/Josh Dawsey: [07-28] Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance: "A small influential network of right-wing techies orchestrated Vance's rise in Silicon Valley -- and then the GOP. Now the industry stands to gain if he wins the White House." There hasn't been a VP pick this explicitly tied to donor choice since the Koch Network (uh, Mitt Romney) picked Paul Ryan in 2012. And while Republicans are more likely to brag about their corruption, what are the odds that Harris's VP pick will be traceable to another megadonor? (I mean, beyond the default conspiracist pick: George Soros?)

  • Paul Elie: [07-24] J.D. Vance's radical religion.

  • Rebecca Jennings: [07-25] J.D. Vance didn't have sex with a couch. But he's still extremely weird. "The rumors were easy to believe, especially when the potential VP has such terrible ideas about sex."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-26] Dear J.D. Vance, childless cat ladies are people too. Emphasis added:

    "Normal people" see this bleak prospect for what it is, and they have rejected it repeatedly in the voting booth. That probably won't change. Vance's comments are weird, cruel, and, yes, creepy. They don't reflect the way most people think or live, even if they do have biological children. By attacking childlessness, the right cheapens parenthood, too. The act of having children is no longer about joy but conquest. I can't imagine anything sadder, though I am but a childless cat lady. Vance's worldview is poisonous to parents and children, too: Babies should be loved and wanted for their own sake, not because they're future nationalists or tradwives. The right offers a small and selfish vision that is authoritarian to its core. Their America belongs only to the righteous few, but my America belongs to everyone. I may never give birth, but I too have a stake in this country. We're all responsible for creating a future worth living in. It will belong to somebody's children, if not to ours.

    By the way, Jones also wrote:

    • [07-23] A woman can win, which probably belongs with the Harris articles, but is more about how Hillary Clinton's didn't win, and the precedent that doesn't really set.

    • [07-30] American freak show. I've thought of myself as weird much of my life, so I've learned to flip the insult and see weirdness as a more interesting attribute. And that's just one of many pejoratives that I've been prodded into reconsidering based on my experiences with the people they are and are not applied to. For instance, people who call themselves "patriots" because they support wars and who call people who don't support those wars "traitors" not only have a very shabby vocabulary, they're also, in my mind at least, making "patriots" appear to be horrible people, and "traitors" to be fundamentally decent ones. So I was initially reluctant to jump on the bandwagon that labels Trump, Vance, et al. as "weird." (I see Tim Walz getting credit here, but Seth Myers has been leaning in to this line of attack for several years now.) It just feels to me like we need some qualification, like in the song: "well I hear he's bad/ hmm, he's good-bad, but he's not evil." Surely, lots of people are simply "good-weird," but Trump and Vance are venturing into real "weird-evil" territory.

      Any formerly weird child can attest to how difficult it is to shrug off this label. What are you going to do, put your fingers in your ears and chant "I'm not weird, you're weird" until somebody eventually believes you? I was a little awkward in my day, and I know that's not how things work. You can refute the attack only by not being weird -- an idea that seems to elude many conservatives. They've left themselves few options. To address the attack, the bizarre right would have to reconstitute an entire movement, and that will take time and political will. Both are in short supply. Go on, then, and call the right weird, as long as it's part of a bigger argument. Progress ought to be normal, and it's worth fighting for, too.

      But I'm starting to appreciate the advantages of flipping scripts like this. And when you think about it, there's a lot of not just weird but very bizarre thought going on with the far-right these days. I mean, I'm 73, and my thinking has evolved a lot over the years, but I can still remember things that I learned as norms and rules when I was a child, like the 10 Commandments, the 7 Deadly Sins, the Boy Scouts' 12 laws, the Golden Rule, the maxim that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," and strategic bits of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and much more that I never really rejected even though I eventually disposed of most of the dross and cant they were wrapped up in. And because I can remember, and still largely respect, those norms and rules, it's really easy to see just how far many right-wingers have strayed from principles they claim as exclusively their own, and how ridiculous they look when they do. In some ways, calling them "weird" is the kindest way you can point that out. Their weirdness may even be their one saving grace. It certainly won't be in their Project 2025.

  • Ezra Klein: [07-17] The economic theory behind J.D. Vance's populism: Interview with Oren Cass, who was Mitt Romney's domestic policy director in 2012, who since "evolved" and founded American Compass, a think tank catering to "populist" Republicans.

  • Paul Krugman:

  • Bradley Onishi: [07-27] J.D. Vance will be a more extremist Christian VP than Mike Pence: "The vice presidential pick's Catholicism hasn't received a lot of attention, but it's the key to the populist radicalism he wants to impose on America."

  • Andrew Prokop: [07-25] J.D. Vance has made it impossible for Trump to run away from Project 2025: "He wrote the forward for a new book by Project 2025's architect -- and has backed some of its most extreme ideas." The book is Kevin D Roberts: Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, coming out on Sept. 24.

  • Corey Robin: [07-26] Like a diary, only far more masculine: Reading J.D. Vance's, from his blog days.

  • Robert Schlesinger: [07-29] J.D. Vance proves it: Trump hires the very worst people: Trump's new running mate will haunt him just like all of the fools and weasels from his first administration."

  • Alex Shephard: [07-26] Is J.D. Vance the worst vice presidential pick ever? Fair question, unless you know much about American history, in which case it's way too early to tell. It also depends on what you mean by "worst." John Tyler and Andrew Johnson probably helped their tickets win, but were really terrible presidents. Some others that didn't become president were also pretty notoriously bad, like Aaron Burr and John Calhoun (two terms, under two presidents who were polar opposites in every aspect except for their loathing of Calhoun). Then there was Spiro Agnew, the only VP ever forced to resign. And what about Dick Cheney? If memory serves, the only VP ever to finish his term with a single-digit approval index. Then there are the ones who never won anything. They tend to be easily forgotten, but tag reads "Palin Lite," in case you want a hint. So with competition like that, Vance hardly has a chance. But it's early days, and at least he's in the running.

  • Ed Simon: [07-17] J.D. Vance keeps selling his soul. He's got plenty of buyers.

    Mr. Vance is more a product of the Upper West Side and New Haven, Capitol Hill and Cambridge, than of the Appalachian hollers. "Hillbilly Elegy" owed much of its critical and commercial success to how it flattered its audience about their own meritocratic superiority over the people whom Mr. Vance was supposedly championing, and reaffirming some of the most pernicious stereotypes about the residents of Appalachia. "What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives," Mr. Vance wrote. In his telling, those who fell into poverty, unemployment or substance abuse hadn't dreamed big enough.

    He points to whole books written about Vance's book, like:

  • Matt Stieb: [07-27] J.D. Vance can't stop saying the dumbest things imaginable.

And other Republicans:

  • Emily Bazelon: [07-27] The right-wing dream of 'self-deportation': "Some conservatives have a grim proposal to make undocumented immigrants leave: exclude their children from schools." I hadn't heard of "self-deportation" until Mitt Romney adopted it as his anti-immigration platform in 2012. It is quite the euphemism. It basically means systematically treating immigrants (and, to be sure, anyone who looks or sounds like an immigrant) so cruelly they resign themselves to leaving on their own. Or it could just as well drive them to turn to crime, which expedites the regular deportation process.

  • Jenny Brown: [07-27] Project 2025's anti-union game plan.

    From there, the plan is to bulldoze the protections US workers have built up over one hundred years of determination, sacrifice, and unity.

    It's ugly: abolish overtime pay laws, outlaw public sector unions entirely, get rid of health and safety protections, eliminate the federal minimum wage, make it harder to receive unemployment, and put children back to work like in the 1920s.

    Hitting building trades workers, they would get rid of requirements for prevailing wage pay and project labor agreements in federal projects.

    There's more. They want to get rid of the Department of Education. Ban teaching women's history and African American history in schools -- lest we get ideas about how to change things! Ban abortion nationwide. (The AFL-CIO details the whole alarming list here.)

  • Patrick T Brown: [07-19] Pro-lifers helped bring Trump to power. Why has he abandoned us? Because you're losers? You don't think he ever actually cared about you, did you?

  • Thomas B Edsall: [07-24] What the Trump-Vance alliance means for the Republican Party. One thing that occurs to me here is that the more Republicans like Vance talk about supporting American workers, the more ground that opens up for Democrats to appeal to same, only with more realistic programs and greater credibility. It encourages them to lean left, rather than crawl scared toward the right (like so many have been doing since Reagan).

  • Jack Herrera: [07-28] Trump says he wants to deport millions. He'll have a hard time removing more people than Biden has. "Even as Trump slams the president for open borders, the Biden-Harris administration has kicked out far more immigrants than Trump ever managed."

  • Hassan Alu Kanu: [07-29] DEI and the GOP: "Hey Republicans, your racism is showing."

  • Julius Krein: [07-23] Republican populists are responding to something real. One could argue that -- although Krein isn't very clear here -- but not that they're offering realistic responses to real problems.

  • Robert Kuttner: [07-30] The left's fragile foundations: "Could a weaponized Trump IRS wreck the progressive infrastructure by attacking the entire nonprofit ecosystem?" This is a big and important article. "Defund the left" has long been a major Republican goal. One small bit:

    These vulnerabilities remain in place today. It has long galled the right that Planned Parenthood is a major recipient of government funds; of its budget of over $2 billion, about $700 million comes from government health service reimbursements and grants. While the Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funding of abortion, 17 states allow Medicaid funding of abortion through their state contributions to the mixed federal-state program. In addition, Planned Parenthood is a major recipient of federal Title X family-planning support of its clinics. As right-wing groups keep complaining, money is fungible and federal family-planning funds free other money to pay for abortions. Under Trump, the government did bar Planned Parenthood from the Title X program in 2019, but this was restored by Biden in 2021.

    The battle to defund the left would be far more sophisticated under a second Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation's detailed blueprint, Project 2025, systematically targets the entire range of agencies, and one of its tactics is to undermine agencies that help progressive organizations such as the NLRB and numerous others. With a second Trump presidency, the right's war against Planned Parenthood will only intensify.

  • Michael Lind: [07-20] Trump's transformation of the Republican Party is complete.

  • Calder McHugh: [07-27] Republicans keep trying to copy Trump's humor -- and voters keep cringing. Perhaps the material never was funny in the first place -- just the buffoon delivering it?

  • Pamela Paul: [07-25] The Republican Party's elite conundrum: Let me condense this a bit (all her words, but with less wandering):

    Donald Trump loves to show off how smart he is. [But] Trump is shrewd enough to know that Americans don't like a guy who acts smart. So if his fumbles are strategic, it's not entirely dumb. In MAGA world, glorified ignorance actually serves as a qualification for higher office, empowering more effective rage against 'the liberal elite' and 'the ruling class.' This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position, like the guy who shows up in a tux for a rodeo wedding. In order to say in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers. After all, the Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.

    Of course, this is ultimately about Ron DeSantis (Yale, Harvard Law), Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law), Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), and now J.D. Vance (Ohio State, but finally Yale Law).

  • Charles P Pierce:

  • Tessa Stuart: [07-25] Trump allies sure are talking a lot about civil war: "The former president's supporters keep raising the idea there's violent conflict in America's future." When lies don't suffice, Republicans will try extortion: vote for us, or we'll [insert threat here, ranging from shut down the government to killing you].

Harris:

Biden:

  • Dean Baker:

    • [07-22] A tribute to President Biden.

    • [07-18] Adjusting the Washington Post's Biden-Trump scorecard.

    • [07-26] Bloomberg says things are almost as bad as 2019, when Trump was in the White House: "Seriously, they probably don't want readers to walk away with that impression, but that is the implication of the piece they did complaining about people working multiple jobs."

    • [07-29] The biggest success story the country doesn't know about: "Yes, inflation has been punishing. But there is a mountain of good news that media have barely reported. Here's the real record the Democrats can run on."

      Under Biden, the United States made a remarkable recovery from the pandemic recession. We have seen the longest run of below 4.0 percent unemployment in more than 70 years, even surpassing the long stretch during the 1960s boom. This period of low unemployment has led to rapid real wage growth at the lower end of the wage distribution, reversing much of the rise in wage inequality we have seen in the last four decades. It has been especially beneficial to the most disadvantaged groups in the labor market.

      The burst of inflation that accompanied this growth was mostly an outcome of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. All other wealthy countries saw comparable rises in inflation. As of summer 2024, the rate of inflation in the United States has fallen back almost to the Fed's 2.0 percent target. Meanwhile, our growth has far surpassed that of our peers.

      Furthermore, the Biden administration really does deserve credit for this extraordinary boom. Much of what happens under a president's watch is beyond their control. However, the economic turnaround following the pandemic can be directly traced to Biden's recovery package, along with his infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which have sustained growth even as the impact of the initial recovery package faded. While the CARES Act, pushed through when Trump was in office, provided essential support during the shutdown period, it was not sufficient to push through the recovery.

      One should also use every opportunity to stress that the CARES Act, at least everything that was good in it, was the result of leverage Democrats in Congress had. With the economy in free fall, Trump wanted something to save the stock market. That the act also helped unemployed workers, collapsing small businesses, and helped many stave off debt collection, was because Trump had to deal with Pelosi and Schumer. Without their help, Trump's own dismal record would have been that much worse.

  • Zachary D Carter: [07-24] You have no idea what Joe Biden for employment.

  • Elie Honig: [07-26] Let's knock off the 25th amendment talk.

  • Kerry Howley: [07-27] Exit ghost: "Watching Joe Biden say good-bye."

  • Umair Irfan: [07-23] Joe Biden's enormous, contradictory, and fragile climate legacy: "If elected, Trump could slow down Biden's progress, but the shift to clean energy is unstoppable."

  • Branko Marcetic:

    • [07-22] Joe Biden wanted this. This is a left view, but seems fair:

      There is a tendency, even among the Left, to overstate the extent of Biden's populism. This is, after all, a president who nickel-and-dimed Georgia voters on the $2,000 checks he had pledged, quickly abandoned his promise of a $15 minimum-wage increase that might have helped voters weather inflation, and refused to fight to keep transformative pandemic-era policies like Medicaid expansion and expanded unemployment insurance. However ambitious his Build Back Better legislation was, we sometimes talk about it as if it had actually become law, when the reality is it died -- and did so in large part because Biden considered getting a handshake with Republicans a higher priority.

      That his presidency became the unlikely vehicle for progressive economic populism tells us less about Biden himself than the state of the Left: a Left that, however disorganized and defeated, succeeded in dragging someone like Biden into adopting even a watered-down version of its political program. It did so not just through political pressure, but by changing the political landscape to such an extent that a man who had spent his life tacking right in the chase for political power came to realize there was a popular constituency for a left-populist agenda, and that it was worth his while politically, crucial to his legacy even, to give pursuing such a thing an honest-to-God shot.

    • [07-25] How Joe Biden became a steadfast Israel defender.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-24] So what does Joe Biden do now? "In an Oval Office speech, Biden said his farewells. But his job isn't done yet."

  • Noah Rawlings: [07-29] Build no small things: "A sampling of innovative projects made possible by the Biden legislative wins."

And other Democrats:

  • Lee Drutman: [07-28] The Democratic Party is (still) broken: "The sudden ascendance of Kamala Harris doesn't change the fact that the party suffers from deep, possibly fatal problems." I'm not sure how useful this analysis is. I don't doubt that the Democratic Party has structural problems, tied mostly to the need to raise huge amounts of money from interest groups that want favors not solutions, and the double standards that blame Democrats for all problems while excusing Republicans. But the Democrats do have one big advantage: in a two-party system, they're the only ones who are sane and conscientious and actually care about people, which should give them some advantages, wouldn't you think? However, the author seems to be wedded to a fantasy idea, explained in his book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

  • Lulu Garcia-Navarro: [07-27] The Interview: Pete Buttigieg thinks the Trump fever could break.

  • Michael Podhorzer: [07-24] Democrats are poised to win. But only if they make the election about Trump. As I've been saying, all along.

  • Michael Tomasky: [07-25] The race the Democrats need to run now: "How the party can reshape this election so it isn't about Donald Trump's martyrdom." I dunno. I mean, there's something to be said for martyring Donald Trump. It's not that I don't think this has a place:

    That's all the more reason for Harris to make the race a contest between not only two people but two ideas of America, two extremely different visions of what the federal government can and will do to protect the rights of all Americans, especially vulnerable ones. That means talking about Trump's plans. But just as importantly, it means trying to make voters understand that the presidency is much larger than one person. It's an army of people with a set of beliefs who either will or will not protect abortion rights, defend workers' interests, insist upon the basic human dignity of migrants, fight for the human and civil rights of LGBTQ people, continue the fight against the effects of climate change, uphold civil liberties, and respect the principles of democracy.

    But anything that gets people to turn on Trump is fine with me.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

In some ways, just another mid-summer week, but one with four days topping all-time heat records, and 104 (at least that's one count) active wildfires in the US.

Economic matters:

  • Jake Johnson: [07-25] Global 1% captured $42 trillion in new wealth over past decade.

  • Jean Yi: [07-24] The great telemarketing scam behind pro-police PACs. Before we got a phone system that announces caller IDs, we were plagued with 2-5 phone calls per week trying to shake us down for donations to help out our poor police. We probably still are, but simply don't answer any calls we don't recognize and welcome. We always figured these calls as scams, but this article makes it all much more clear. If any politicians wanted to do something that would immediately better the lives of most Americans, they would come up with a legal framework to destroy the entire telemarketing industry (and hopefully take junk texts and emails with it -- for now at least, I'm ok with advertisers buying stamps, which at least helps fund the post office, even though most of our mail goes straight to recycle).

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:

Other stories:

Obituaries

Books

Music (and other arts?)

Chatter

  • Dean Baker: [07-30] [in response to: X has SUSPENDED the White Dudes for Harris account (@dudes4harris) after it raised more than $4M for Kamala Harris.] Musk is using his control of X to make in-kind contributions to Trump in lieu of his pledge to contribute $45 million a month to a Trump super Pac

  • Ramesh Ponnuru: [07-31] Trump policing who's really black and who's a good Jew in the same week.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): Netanyahu's speech, music.

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