Sunday, July 20, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 25 days ago, on June 26.

Some of what follows I've had sitting in the draft file a while. I figured that once I was done with the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: Mid-Year 2025, the next thing I should do is shake out the accumulated Loose Tabs, plus make a quick tour to catch up with news I've mostly neglected for a month or more. I knew I couldn't get that done by Monday's Music Week, so I kicked it out until the window opened for next week's column. I initially set Friday as the date, but I had until Sunday. No surprise that I'm wrapping this up Sunday evening, knowing full well I could continue working on it indefinitely. But I figure it's good enough for now. We'll talk about next week in the next Music Week.

Internal index:

Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill": I cribbed this from a meme explaining "what's in Republicans' 'Big, Beautiful Bill'?" Reading columns left-to-right, top-down within:

  • More than $3.5T added to the national debt
  • Cuts to food support for veterans
  • $148B in lost wages and benefits for construction workers
  • Billionaires get massive tax breaks
  • Hundreds of thousands clean energy jobs lost
  • 16 million kids lose free school meals
  • Higher premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses, even if not on Medicaid
  • Cuts tax credits for buying electric vehicles
  • Increases in gas prices
  • 16 million Americans lose health care
  • Nationwide increases in energy bills
  • The largest cut to Medicaid in history
  • $186B in cuts to SNAP food assistance
  • New student loan borrowers pay more
  • Billions for surveillance & deportation
  • Largest transfer of $$ from the poor to the rich in history

The bill has since been passed by Congress and signed by Trump, so is now the law of the land. Until it passed, it was essentially true that everything Trump's administration had done took the form of an executive power grab. Trump's ability to impose his will on Republicans in Congress was also evident here: the days of having to negotiate with nominal party leaders like Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan are long gone. The new law validates and extends many of Trump's power grabs. Meanwhile, the courts are bending over backwards to extend Trump's powers even more. Some more pieces follow here (and there'll probably be more scattered about):

  • Matt Sledge [05-28] Trump's big, beautiful handout to the AI industry: The bill "bans states from regulating AI while pumping billions into autonomous weapons."

  • Cameron Peters [07-02] Trump vs. after-school programs, briefly explained: "The Trump administration is withholding nearly $7 billion in education funding."

  • Umair Irfan [07-02] Trump's plan to replace clean energy with fossil fuels has some major problems: "The budget bill sabotages one of the biggest growth sectors of the US economy." There's also a map here of how "The Senate's bill would raise electricity prices in every state." As well as the usual trolling about how Trump is the future of clean energy development to China.

  • Andrew Prokop:

  • Russell Payne [07-02] "Special treatment": How Republicans bought Lisa Murkowski's vote.

  • Dylan Scott [07-03] Republicans now own America's broken health care system: "The $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts will be felt by Americans." I'll believe this one when I see it. Republicans have broken things to hurt many people's lives going at least as far back as Taft-Hartley in 1947, yet they rarely get blamed for anything, with even major debacles quickly forgotten.

  • Nicole Narea

  • Branko Marcetic [07-08] A Tale of Two BBBs: Trump's Big Beautiful Bill vs. Biden's Build Back Better. "It's hard not to conclude from all this that Trump and the GOP simply cared more about the policy agenda contained in their BBB than Biden and the Democrats did about theirs." I suspect that is largely because Republicans have learned that not delivering on their promises costs them credibility, while Democrats don't think they need credibility because even at their most inept they're still a better bargain than Republicans. Even when they went through the motions, as Clinton did in 1993-94 and Obama in 2009-10, they pulled their punches, passing weak measures that did little for their base (and in their trade deals actively undercut themselves). Then both lost Congress, and with it the expectation they could ever implement anything (even when they won second terms). Biden did a little better, but not much.

  • Eric Levitz:

    • [07-08]: The wrong lesson to take from Trump's gutting of Medicaid: "Did the president just blow up Democrats' model for fighting poverty?" This has to do with the debate between means-tested and universal rights. It's easier for Republicans to cut Medicaid because they think it only benefits poor people, who mostly aren't Republicans, so fuck them. On the other hand, if we had a universal right to health care, then we wouldn't need a cut-rate version just to apply to poor people. Medicaid was basically just a band-aid over a much larger wound, which the reductions will further expose. On the other hand, Republicans are ignoring two less obvious benefits of Medicaid: it saves lives of people who otherwise can't afford America's ridiculous profit-seeking system, as opposed to just letting them die, which could expose the injustice and moral bankruptcy of the system, and possibly undermine the social and economic order they are so enamored with; and it also provides a subsidy to the industry, without which they'd be driven to even greater levels of greed and extortion.

    • [07-16]: The lie at the heart of Trump's entire economic agenda: "The White House wants to send Medicaid recipients to the mines." Apt sub-heds here: "America is not desperate for more low-paying, arduous jobs"; "The administration's solutions to this problem are all whimsical fantasies"; "The high cost of post-truth policy."

  • Ryan Cooper/David Dayen [07-07] Ten Bizarre Things Hidden in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill: They suggest that "with the president asleep at the switch, all kinds of nutty provisions got snuck into the bill," but Trump's such a fan of nutty that even if he was unaware, they may have done it for his amusement. The list:

    1. Incentivizing SNAP Fraud
    2. The Mass Shooter Subsidy
    3. The Spaceport Sweetener
    4. No Tax on Oil Drillers
    5. Handouts for Chinese Steel Companies
    6. The Garden of Heroes [$40M to build big, beautiful statues]
    7. A Tax on Gambling Winnings
    8. Unlimited SALT [state and local tax deduction]
    9. Tax Breaks for Puerto Rican Rum
    10. More Chipmaker Subsidies?

  • Heather Digby Parton [07-09] How $178 billion is creating a police state: "A massive funding increase for ICE means more detention camps and more masked agents in the streets."

  • Dylan Scott [07-18] Your health insurance premiums could soon go up 15 percent -- or more: "The health care consequences of Trump's budget bill are already here."

  • David Dayen [07-18] Crypto Week Revealed the Dittohead Congress: "There are no 'hard-liners' in the Republican conference. And nobody interested in standing up for the institution of Congress either." Also on crypto:

    • Jacobin [06-13] The Crypto State: An interview with Ramaa Vasudevan: "The Trump White House has helped install the ticking time bomb that is cryptocurrency directly into our economy. When it blows up, the damage will be catastrophic."

Israel/Gaza/Iran/Trump: Another catch-all topic:

Current Affairs: Nearly everything here is worth looking at:

David Klion [02-27] Chris Hayes Wants Your Attention: "The Nation spoke with the journalist about one of the biggest problems in contemporary life -- attention and its commodification -- and his new book The Siren's Call." I picked this up, because I've started to read the book, although I'm not sure how much attention I want to give it. This reminds me a bit of James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (2000), which starts out with a concept that seems to govern much of everything, but all the examples pale next to the concept, which is more fun to think about than to read about. Interesting here that the interview suggests that Hayes has already moved on. When Klion makes a comment about "the development of a mass intellectual culture after World War II" and finishes with "it feels like we've come in at the very end of that era," Hayes responds:

Part of that is a story about that growth plateauing. There was an idea that an ever-higher percentage of people were going to be four-year college grads, but it stopped at a certain level. That's the structural, sociological part of the story, but it's also technological—we're seeing a generational shift from typing out your texts to dictating them, which seems deranged to me. The move away from writing and reading is clearly happening, and it is more than a little unnerving.

That bit about "growth plateauing" could be his next book. There's already a big, fairly technical book on the subject -- Robert J Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War -- but no one has really written the book about what it really means. For one thing, the notion that Clinton took from Robert Reich that increasing inequality would be palatable as long as there was sufficient growth and upward mobility via education has clearly failed -- and not just because growth has plateaued, which for the US happened in the 1970s, but because there never was (and never would be) enough work for "symbolic manipulators" in this or any world.

  • Eric Levitz [06-24] Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics? "Your brain isn't what it used to be." I looked at this piece, decided not to bother with it, then remembered it while reading the Hayes quote, so thought I'd log it here. I'm sure there's a vast literature on crap like this [I mean: unguarded generalizations based on defective psychological modeling, not that there aren't other kinds of crap floating about] where the exceptions turn the norms to mush. This one tempts me because I read serious non-fiction books, and doing so helps make me smarter about things than many of the people I read are, so there's an element of flattery at work here. But then I read something like: "Garfinkle believes that this aversion to the rigors of abstract thought underlies the left's illiberal dogmatism, and the right's xenophobic populism." Actually, if you had any skills whatsoever at abstract thought, you'd realize that two things that aren't things can't possibly have anything underlying them. I mean QED, motherfucker!

Peter Beinart [04-03] Chuck Schumer Cannot Meet the Moment: "In his new book on antisemitism, the minority leader offers a vision of progress without popular struggle that profoundly underestimates the Trump threat." This covers the book very nicely, but is if anything too gentle to the politician. He is certainly right that it wasn't just the Holocaust that convinced Americans to discard antisemitism: the civil rights movement was pivotal, and not just because most Jews supported it, but because most of us came to see antisemitism and racism as aspects of the same fundamental wrong. Schumer's focus on "left antisemitism" is not just an unwarranted exaggeration but a logical fallacy. All leftists, by definition, oppose all forms of subordination, directed against all classes of people -- Jews, Palestinians, any and every other identity group you care to name. Moreover, the left has a one-size-fits-all solution: don't privilege any group over any other. The right, on the other hand, breeds all sorts of prejudice and discrimination, because once you start with the belief that some people should rule over others, it's inevitable you'll start applying labels -- it's also inevitable that the people the right attack will resist, with some replying in kind, and others gravitating toward the left.

Jews in the diaspora have tended to align with the left, because they seek a principled opposition to the prejudice that targets them, and they understand that defending other targeted groups helps build solidarity for their own cause. (Right-wingers, at least in the US, keep returning to antisemitism less due to old prejudices than to the understanding that equality for Jews, as for any other group, undermines their preferred hierarchy, and their political program. The present moment is even better for them, as they get some kind of dispensation from the antisemitism charge by embracing Israel, in all its prejudice, repression, and violence -- trademarks of the right.) Some American Jews, like Schumer, find this confusing, because they so identify as Jews that they feel obligated to defend right-wing power in Israel that they neither agree with nor fully understand, often by misrepresenting or flat-out denying what that power is plainly doing. And they're so desperate to defend their credulity they buy into this totally bogus argument about "left antisemitism." Note that I'm not saying that there aren't some people who oppose Israel's apartheid and genocide don't also hold antisemitic beliefs: just that any such people are not leftists, and that the answer to them is to join the left in demanding liberty and justice for all. Name-calling by Schumer not only doesn't help -- it betrays one's ignorance and/or duplicity. This is perhaps most clearly exposed in the Schumer quote: "My job is to keep the left pro-Israel." The layers of his ignorance and arrogance are just mind-boggling. But doesn't this also suggest that the first loyalty of the Democratic Party leader in the Senate is not to his voters, to his constituents, to his party, or even to his country, but to Israel? Perhaps that's part of the reason he's served his party so poorly?

One more point should be made here: Israel is not, and for that matter never has been, worried about stirring up antisemitic violence in the diaspora: their solution is for Jews to immigrate to Israel, which they maintain is their only safe haven. They've done this for many years, especially in Arab countries like Iraq and Yemen. So they have ready answers whenever they provoke blowback. Nor do they mind when their right-wing allies use moral outrage against Israel for their own purposes, such as clamping down on free speech in US universities. Worse case scenario: people blame "the Jews" for this assault on their freedom, which they use to market aliyah.

Also worth citing here:

  • Peter Beinart [06-06] The Era of Unconditional Support for Israel Is Ending: Here I was expecting that this would be about the increasing turn of American Jews against blind blank check support for Netanyahu, but it's really more about how Trump has reprioritized US foreign policy to line his own accounts. Nothing to get excited by: even if Trump starts to maneuver independently, he has no principles we can put any faith in, and the Arab princes he's so enamored with are among the world's most right-wing despots.

  • Peter Beinart [07-06] Democrats Need to Understand That Opinions on Israel Are Changing Fast.

  • Ezra Klein [07-20] Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another. This tiptoes uneasily around the arguments, but at least acknowledges that for many American Jews, there are limits to their support for Israel, with an increasing share becoming quite critical. And that many of them oppose Netanyahu for the same reasons they oppose Trump.

Luke O'Neil [2019-04-09] What I've Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News: Old piece, but this dovetails with people I know. In particular, I had two cousins who were socioeconomic and cultural twins (both small town, one Arkansas, the other Idaho), but their views on politics and society diverged radically when one fell into the Fox lair, while the other got her news from sources like the BBC. This piece comes from a book, Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches From the American Dystopia. He also wrote a 2021 sequel, Lockdown in Hell World. Related here:

  • Sarah Jones [07-18] It's Okay to Go No Contact With Your MAGA Relatives. Sure, but is it necessary? In my experience it generally isn't, but I'm not easily offended, or offensive, and as someone who's social contacts are pretty limited in the first place, I don't feel like I need more trouble. On the other hand, I don't go looking for it either, so "no contact" can easily become the norm.

Yasha Levine [06-13] Bari Weiss: Toady Queen of Substack: "How a cynical operative married a California princess, sucked up power, and found fame and fortune and love. And how technology won't save us." I know very little about her other than that she's a major Israel hasbaraist, and that her "The Free Press" is the "bestselling" U.S. politics newsletter at Substack. Levine offers some numbers: one million free subscribers, "somewhere near" 150,000 paid subscribers, and a company valued at $100 million, partly due to investments of patrons like Marc Andreessen ("who also funds Substack") and David Sacks.

William Turton/Christopher Bing/Avi Asher-Schapiro [07-15] The IRS is building a vast system to share millions of taxpayers' data with ICE: "ProPublica has obtained the blueprint for the Trump administration's unprecedented plan to turn over IRS accounts." This is just one instance. Sorry for burying the lead, but for more on the big picture:

Viet Thanh Nguyen [06-16] Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades: "So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores? Some personal reflections on Marco Rubio and me -- and the roots of Trump's imperial ambitions." PS: I should take a closer look at Nguyen's older essays.

Timothy Noah [06-19] How the Billionaires Took Over: "Yes, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. But the far bigger menace is the monstrous growth in wealth concentration over five decades that made a Trump presidency possible -- and maybe inevitable. Here's how we let it happen." Long piece, lots of history.

Anatol Lieven [06-20] The 17 Ukraine war peace terms the US must put before NATO: "Threats must be imposed if either side or both reject these demands. The time is now." I've followed Lieven closely from well before Putin's military invasion of Ukraine, and I've found him to be a generally reliable guide, but I'm scratching my head a bit here. Certainly, if they all agreed to these 17 terms, far be it from me to object. But about half of them seem to add unnecessary complications just to check off superfluous talking points. For instance, "7. Ukraine introduces guarantees for Russian linguistic and cultural rights into the constitution. Russia does the same for Ukrainians in Russia." Why should either nation have its sovereignty so restrained? Ukraine was so constrained as part of the Minsk Accords, which turned out to be a major sticking point for Ukrainian voters. Besides, how many Russian-speakers still remain in Ukrainian territory? And how many Ukrainians are still living in Russian-occupied territory?

The arms/NATO provisions also strike me as added complexity, especially on issues that should be addressed later. In the long run, I'm in favor of disbanding NATO, but that needs to be a separate, broader negotiation with Russia, not something ending the war in Ukraine depends on. I could expand on this, but not here, yet.

I wrote the above paragraph shortly after the article appeared. Since then a lot has changed viz. Ukraine, or has it?

  • Aaron Sobczak [07-11] Diplomacy Watch: Trump changes tune, music to Zelensky's ears: "The president's views on Putin shifted dramatically this week."

  • Cameron Peters [07-14] Trump's new Ukraine plan, briefly explained.

  • Ian Proud [07-14] Russia sanctions & new weapons, is Trump stuck in Groundhog Day? "The president who insisted that the Biden era policies did not work finds himself in a rerun of his own first term on Ukraine policy." Which, you might recall, didn't work either. Trump's whole approach to foreign policy was so incoherent no one ever did a real accounting of all the things he screwed up, and what the long-term costs have become -- or will, as some of them are still mounting. Granted, his predecessors did a lousy job, and Biden's analysis of what Trump did wrong was faulty and Biden's fixes were worse. Ukraine is a good example: the drive to expand NATO started in the 1990s under Clinton, but the real demonization of Putin kicked in under Obama, and became much more tangible with the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which led directly to the secession crises and civil war. Trump sat on that conflict for four years, doing nothing but pushing Democrats into a hot lather over his efforts to extort Ukraine to gather dirt on Biden. Biden then tilted so hard toward Ukraine that Putin invaded, leaving the present stalled war -- which Trump campaigned on a promise to "end in a day," something he not only hasn't done but hasn't made any progress at. Speaking of things Trump could have done but only made worse (with no recovery from Biden):

  • Jennifer Kavanagh [07-15] How Trump's 50-day deadline threat against Putin will backfire: "The 'art of the deal' will likely result in the opposite of its intended effect on the Russian president."

  • Stavroula Pabst [07-18] Diplomacy Watch: Will Europe pay for Trump's Ukraine aid? "The Europeans, via NATO, will reportedly pay for the deal."

Samuel Moyn [06-25] Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State: "How FDR invented national security, and why Democrats need to move on from it." A review of Andrew Preston: Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security.

Jack Hunter [06-26]: Don't read the funeral rites for MAGA restraint yet: "Influencers in the movement are choosing to turn ire on Israel's role and warning Trump off protracted, regime change quagmire." But Trump is the one with all the power in this relationship, and the chorus only matters when they stay in tune. Besides, it's not like Trump needs, or even wants, ideological cover. His brand is to shoot from the hip, to be unpredictable, to take US foreign policy wherever the money leads. Hunter, on the other hand, is desperately looking for any inkling that at least some of his conservative cohort are anti-war. This leads to a long string of articles like:

Elie Honig [06-27] The Supreme Court Just Gave the President More Power. The Court's ruling in Trump v. CASA severely limits the power of district courts to issue injunctions against Trump's executive power abuses. More Court stuff:

  • Ian Millhiser: He covers the Supreme Court for Vox, and I've always found his explanations to be quite enlightening. I used to cover nearly everything he wrote, but haven't cited much of late, as Vox became increasingly difficult. So we've got some catching up to do.

  • Cameron Peters [07-08] The Supreme Court's order letting Trump conduct mass federal layoffs, briefly explained. I want to add a few points here, that may seem too obvious to mention, but are important nonetheless: (1) if Biden, or any other Democrat, was firing people and impounding money to pursue narrow political vendettas and/or to impose partisan policies, it's very unlikely that the Republican majority on the court would be ruling in favor as they did with Trump; it's even unlikely that the Democratic-appointed minority would allow a Democratic executive doing the same. (2) No Democratic president -- not just a Biden or an Obama, but you could extend the list as far left as Sanders and Warren, would think to invoke such powers, so the Court is risking very little in allowing to a generic "president" powers that would only be claimed by a fascist would-be dictator. (3) When/if we ever have another Democratic president, the Court majority will scramble to shut down this and many other doors they've opened Trump can unilaterally impose his will on government. After all, the main reason for packing the Court was to prevent any future change that would weaken autocratic/plutocratic power. (4) Any future Democratic president will face increasing pressure from their own ranks to make comparably bold actions in search of whatever policy goals were embraced by the voters. Democrats have long been lambasted for failing to deliver on promises. Trump shows that they shouldn't let "norms" and even existing laws get in the way. The Courts won't like this, but contesting it will be political, and will expose the partisan nature of the current packed Court. Savvy Democratic politicians should be able to campaign on that. (Meanwhile, the not-so-savvy ones -- the ones we're so accustomedto deferring to -- should fade to the sidelines.)

    I think the point I'm getting at is this (and let's bring out the bold here): The more Trump succeeds at imposing his agenda, the more he hastens his demise, and the more radical the reconstruction will have to be. Of course, my statement is predicated on strong belief that what Trump wants to do will fail disastrously, even on his own terms. It might take a sizable essay to explain how and why, but suffice it here to say that the more I see, the more I'm convinced. My first draft of that line had "restoration" in lieu of "reconstruction," but when I started thinking of history, my second thought (after the obvious Hitler/Mussolini analogues) was the Confederate secession. We tend to overlook Jefferson Davis as a revolutionary political figure, because his government was immediately overwhelmed by the Civil War. I keep flashing back to a weird, thin book I read 50 years ago, by Emory M Thomas, called The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1971), which tries to run with the idea. I only remember a few points -- like how late in the war they ran so short of soldiers they considered freeing slaves to fight on their behalf -- but with Trump one could riff on this subject ad nauseum. But it's not like we need more reasons to oppose Trump -- like there's anyone who failed to see Trump as a fascist would wake up and say, "oh yeah, now I see the problem." The more interesting thing is what happened to the Union once they were freed of the dead weight of the slaveocracy. The Civil War has been interpreted as a Second American Revolution, with profound effects, even if Reconstruction itself was sabotaged early by Andrew Johnson, ended prematurely by Rutherford Hayes, and ultimately undone by Jim Crow -- all mistakes that won't be forgotten. I'll spare you my own riffing on this, but lots of interesting things flow from this thought.

  • Karen J Greenberg [07-08] Courts open door to Trump's terrifying "occupying force" fantasy: "Trump's authoritarian playbook just got court approval -- and it won't stop at California."

  • Austin Sarat [07-16] Rule of loyalists: Emil Bove would be the perfect Trumpian judge: "A reckless judicial nominee who would serve Trump's agenda instead of the rule of law."

Kelsey Piper [06-27]: A million kids won't live to kindergarten because of this disastrous decision: "The world's war on child death was going well. Then RFK Jr. came along."

Nick Turse:

Ed Kilgore [07-01] Do Democrats Need or Want a Centrist 'Project 2029'? First thing is they shouldn't call it that, and anyone who thinks otherwise should be disqualified immediately. Trump ran scared from Project 2025, for good reason -- and clearly now, not because he disagreed with it, but because he realized it was bad marketing. Other than that, my first reaction was that it might not be such a bad idea. I'd like to see centrists try to articulate their policies, instead of just pissing on anything coming from the left as unrealistic, unaffordable, etc. I've long thought that if they ever honestly looked at problems as something they'd be obligated to solve, they'd find viable not in the corporate think tanks and lobbies but on the left. Maybe they could repackage ideas like Medicare for All and Green New Deal to make them more palatable to their interest groups, but the core ideas are sound. If so, they have a chance to regain some of the credibility they've lost in repeatedly losing to Trump. And if not, someone can rise from the ranks and rally the left against these scumbags. (Some of whom, like Jake Sullivan, are irredeemable.) More on 2029:

  • Branko Marcetic [07-20] Democrats' Project 2029 Is Doubling Down on Failure: At first this looks like the sort of anticipatory putdown left critics are prone to, but it offers profiles of the project's movers and shakers, and they are indeed a sorry bunch: Andrei Cherny, Neera Tanden, Jake Sullivan, Ann-Marie Slaughter, Justin Wolfers, Jim Kessler. That's as far as he gets, finally noting: "All but three of Third Way's thirty-two serving trustees hail from the corporate world, with a heavy emphasis on finance."

Emily Pontecorvo [07-02] Trump Promised Deregulation. His New Law Would Regulate Energy to Death: "The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers." I didn't read past the "to continue reading, create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles" sign, but scrolling down suggests that there are more articles worth exploring, like:

  • Here's How Much Money Biden Actually Spent From the IRA
  • NRC Expected to 'Rubber Stamp' New Reactors
  • Noem Defends FEMA's Response to Texas Floods
  • The Pentagon's Rare Earths Deal Is Making Former Biden Officials Jealous
  • EPA Claims Congress Killed the Green Bank
  • How the Interconnection Queue Could Make Qualifying for Tax Cuts Next to Impossible
  • Trump Opened a Back Door to Kill Wind and Solar Tax Credits
  • The Only Weather Models That Nailed the Texas Floods Are on Trump's Chopping Block
  • The Permitting Crisis for Renewables

Eric Levitz [07-03] California just showed that a better Democratic Party is possible: "California Democrats finally stopped outsourcing their policy judgment to their favorite lobbies." Well, specifically, they passed a pair of housing bills: "One exempts almost all urban, multifamily housing developments from California's environmental review procedures. The second makes it easier for cities to change their zoning laws to allow for more homebuilding." This looks like a big victory for the Abundance crowd, where California had been a prime example of regulation-stifled housing shortages. (Newsom was explicit: "It really is about abundance." That's the kind of left critique that centrists can get behind, because it doesn't necessarily involve taking from the rich.) What this shows to me is that Democrats are open to change based on reasoned arguments that appeal to the greater good. Don't expect that to work with Republicans. But a big part of my argument for voting for Harris and all Democrats in 2024 was that they are people who we can talk to, and sometimes get to listen.*

[*] Except for Israel, as Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick explain in their book, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. We're still working on that.

Abdallah Fayyad [07-03] Zohran Mamdani's not-so-radical agenda: "Despite the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor being labeled a communist, his agenda actually promises something more ideologically modest." I don't have a good sense of New York City these days, or follow its politics, so I've paid scant attention to Mamdani, even as lots of people I do follow are very besotted with him. But I know my left, so the first thing that struck me here was the implicit fear-mongering of assuming that a "Democratic socialist" -- or any other label you want to assign to someone who initially strikes me as a personable and very intelligent politician, including "communist" -- would run on a truly radical platform. That he won the primary in a city where Democrats are an overwhelming majority should be taken as proof that he presents himself as a reasonable, sensible guy, and that most of the people who have paid attention accept him as such. I can see how people who know next to nothing about New York might easily get confused, but they should just accept that they don't know, and leave it to the people who live there.

I know something of what I'm saying here. I lived in NYC in the late 1970s, when rents were manageable (sure, at first they seemed high after moving from Kansas, but wages -- I made my living as a typesetter, and wrote some on the side -- were better too), and I returned pretty regularly up through 2001 (I was there for 9/11). After that, not so much, and not at all in the last 10 years. My last couple visits were especially depressing, as rents had gone way up, and most of my favorite bookstore haunts had vanished. So I can see how some of Mamdani's proposals could resonate, even as they strike me as inadequate for real change. But that's always the problem for candidates who start out with a left critique but wind up spending all their energy just fighting the uphill battle against past failures and lingering corruptions. Left politicians are ultimately judged less on what they accomplish, than on the question of whether they can retain their reputation for care and honesty, even when they have little to show for it. So I respect them, first for running, perhaps for winning, and hopefully for surviving. But I also have some pity for what they're up against, at each step on the way. As such, I find it hard to get excited when they do succeed, as Mamdani has so far. One might hope that this shows that the people want what the left has to offer. But it may also just show that the people are so disgusted with the alternatives they're willing to try anything. After all, the guy Mamdani beat was Mario Cuomo, and do to some peculiarity of NYC politics he still has to beat him again. Then there's Eric Adams. Sure, in retrospect, Bernie Sanders' 2016 vote was inflated by the quality of his opposition. So, no doubt, is Mamdani's, but it's fun to watch, because he, like Sanders, is a rare politician who's fun to watch.

Ok, more Mamdani:

David Corn/Tim Murphy [07-03] Here are the Declaration of Independence's Grievances Against King George III. Many Apply to Trump.

Lydia DePillis/Christine Zhang [07-03]: How Health Care Remade the U.S. Economy. They lead with a chart showing that health care has become the single largest employment segment, with 13% of all workers, vs. 10% for retail, and 8% for manufacturing (down from a more than double that when Clinton was elected in 1992). The share of spending has grown even larger -- outpacing even housing, which is also growing -- in large part because profits are so exorbitant. They offer some other reasons, which are valid to a point, but profits are the driving force. None of this is news, unless you're one of those people who only believe what they read in the New York Times.

Andrew O'Hehir [07-06] Alligator Alcatraz: American history from the dark side: "Yeah, it's a concentration camp. It's also a meme, a troll and an especially ugly distillation of American history." It's significant enough that Trump has started building concentration camps, but even more important is the effort they're putting into marketing them. They not only think this is a good idea, they think it will be massively popular -- at least among the people they count on as their base.

Alligator Alcatraz, like nearly everything else about the second Trump regime, is a deliberate, overt mockery of the liberal narrative of progress. It's a manifestation of "owning the libs" in physical, tangible and almost literal form. (So far, MAGA's secret police have not specifically targeted the regime's domestic opponents, but the threats get more explicit every day.) Terrorizing, incarcerating and deporting immigrants is an important regime goal in its own terms, of course, but the real target of terrorism -- state terrorism included -- is always the broader public. Liberal outrage, to some significant degree, is the point, as are a mounting sense of powerlessness and increasing anxiety about the rule of law and the constitutional order.

  • Maureen Tkacik [07-17] Meet the Disaster Capitalists Behind Alligator Alcatraz: "Incompetent and militarized 'emergency response' is on track to be a trillion dollar industry by the end of Trump's second term." I've always thought that Naomi Klein's "Disaster Capitalism" was less a stage than a niche, but with Trump in power it's becoming a very lucrative one:

    The forecasters of such things predicted last winter that "emergency management" will be nearly a trillion-dollar sector of the economy by 2030. And that was before Trump declared eight new national emergencies during his first week in office, then went about variously nuking and systematically dismantling every federal agency equipped to respond to emergencies. Disaster capitalism's windfall could come a year or two early, so don't let this lesson escape you. Those who fail to procure a no-bid contract to build the next concentration camp may be condemned to live in it. Or as Crétier himself put it in 2020: "I see the world in a very predatorial way. You're either on the menu or you're looking in the menu."

Sarah Kendzior [07-07] Guns or Fireworks: "America is not its government and normal does not mean right." Celebrating the 4th of July in St. Charles, MO, with a "38 Special" ("fifty ride tickers for thirty-eight dollars"). The title is a guessing game played at the Riverfest ("full of fun, unsafe rides").

Maggie Haberman [07-09] Trump Treats Tariffs More as a Form of Power Than as a Trade Tool: "Instead of viewing tariffs as part of a broader trade policy, President Trump sees them as a valuable weapon he can wield on the world stage." I think this is an important insight, although one could push it a bit farther. Trump has no real trade policy. I don't think he can even conceive of one. He doesn't have a notion of national interests -- sure, he talks a lot about "nation," but that's really just himself: he assumes that the nation's happiness is a simple reflection of his own happiness. He understands power as a means for engorging himself, and that's all that really matters to him. Congress did something stupid way back when, in allowing presidents to arbitrary implement tariffs, sanctions, and such. They gave the office power, so now he has it and is using and abusing it, because that's all he is. I'm tempted to say that nobody imagined that could possibly happen, but that sounds just like something he'd say.

Zack Beauchamp [07-09] Liberalism's enemies are having second thoughts: "Why Trump 2.0 is giving some anti-liberals second thoughts." A rather scattered survey of various thinkers who have tried to critically distinguish their ideas from conventional liberalism, suggesting that there are anti-liberal currents both on the right and on the left. I'm not very conversant with these people, being only vaguely aware of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed from the right and Samuel Moyn's Liberalism Against Itself to the left, and little else other than the Abundance Agenda (under "Where do we go from here?" where it is viewed as part of the liberal revival). These titles suggest that the problem with liberalism was never what it promised but simply what it delivered, most often because the desire for equality so often fizzled once one's own needs were met.

Charles R Davis [07-09] "This is going to be normal": Soldiers descend on US cities: "The raid on MacArthur Park did not lead to any arrests, but that wasn't the point."

Elizabeth Kolbert [07-10]: Flash floods and climate policy: "As the death toll climbs in Texas, the Trump Administration is actively undermining the nation's ability to predict -- and to deal with -- climate-related disasters." See St Clair (below) for more on this, as well as:

  • Umair Irfan [07-07] Why were the central Texas floods so deadly? "How missed flood warnings and infrastructure gaps cost so many live in central Texas."

  • Cheyenne McNeil [07-08] Cruz pushed for NOAA cuts days before Texas flooding: "The Senator was on vacation in Greece when fatal flooding hit Texas." In case you were expecting him in Cancun.

  • Noel King/Cameron Peters [07-18] Trump cut the National Weather Service. Did that impact Texas flood warnings? "What NWS and FEMA cuts could mean for future disasters, explained." Interview with CNN climate reporter Andrew Freedman. NWS cut 600 employees, including several in key positions in Texas, while FEMA cuts were described as "quite broad." Freedman doesn't seem to think that made much difference. I'd counter that it says much about what Trump considers important. One side effect of all the climate change denialism is that they also wind up pretending climate disasters won't happen, so they don't prepare for them, so they screw up when they do. Democrats may not be any better than Republicans at preventing climate change -- their efforts are mostly limited to subsidizing businesses offering "green" technology -- but by accepting the reality of climate change, and by believing that government has an important role in helping people, they put a much more serious effort into disaster recovery assistance. Clinton promoted FEMA to cabinet level. Bush buried it under DHS, where the focus was countering terrorism (and, extremely under Trump, immigration).

Zack Beauchamp [07-10] Trump quietly claimed a power even King George wasn't allowed to have: "A scary new revelation about Trump's effort to circumvent the TikTok ban."

Adam Clark Estes [07-10] Little videos are cooking our brains: "The future of the internet is a slop-filled infinite scroll. How do we reclaim our attention?" I don't deliberately look at TicToc or Instagram, which seem to be the main culprits here, but I've noticed the same thing with X and Bluesky (although I've found settings on the latter to do away with autoplay). I've certainly felt the sensation, as I would scroll through dozens of short videos, finding it hard to resist, with my will power increasingly sapped. I ordered the Chris Hayes book, The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, after one such session. We'll see if that helps . . . if I can focus enough to read it?

Zusha Ellinson [07-10]: The Rapid Rise of Killings by Police in Rural America: "A 17-year-old shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy on a New Mexico highway last summer was one in a growing number of cases." This is uncomforting reading, even though it seems so predictable.

Jeffrey St. Clair:

  • [07-18] Roaming Charges: Masked and Anonymous: Starts with a long list of ICE horrors, before moving on to climate horrors and other horrors. He offers this translation of Ezra Klein's Abundance: "Trickle-Down for Hipsters." Offers this quote from Astra Taylor:

    Supreme Court says the president can't abolish student debt, but he CAN abolish the Department of Education. This isn't hypocrisy. It's end times fascism—a fatalistic politics willing to torch the government and incinerate the future to maintain hierarchy and subvert democracy.

  • [07-11]: Roaming Charges: Heckuva Job, Puppy Slayer! I assume you get the reference. While nobody expects Republicans to prevent disasters, you'd think that they'd try to seem less incompetent when they do happen, as with no prevention efforts they inevitably do. This starts off with the Texas flood disaster, and covers it succinctly, before moving on to ICE, Israel, and other matters. Closes by repeating his Mid-Year Poll ballot, having written more about Francis Davis (and me) here:

  • [07-07] Sound Grammar: Francis Davis and the Best Jazz of 2025, So Far.

Chris Hedges [07-11] The Persecution of Francesca Albanese: She holds the post of UN Special Rapporteur, charged with investigating the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Having found the obvious, the Trump administration is moving to sanction her. It's not clear to me how they can do that, or what the practical effects might be, but the linkage pretty much cinches the case that Trump is complicit in the genocide.

Michael Brenes [07-11] What If the Political Pendulum Doesn't Swing Back? This revisits Arthur M Schlesinger Jr's 1986 book, The Cycles of American History. Noted because I've been thinking about cycles theory, pendulum moves (including what Bill James called the "plexiglass principle"), and such, although I don't have a lot of respect or interest in Schlesinger.

Dexter Filkins [07-14]: Is the US ready for the next war? Long article on how cool drones and AI are, by a veteran war reporter who lacked the empathy and/or moral fiber to follow Chris Hedges into questioning the whole world. Ukraine and Israel are prime examples, where new techniques for dealing death are being field-tested. The real question isn't how to fight the next war, but why? Filkins, as usual, is clueless.

Adam Gurri [07-14] Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor: "It is the tech oligarchs, not young radicals, who have turned against the system that made them."

Kiera Butler [07-14] Churches Can Now Endorse Candidates and Trump Couldn't Be Happier:

David Daley [07-16]: How Texas could help ensure a GOP House majority in 2026: When I first heard Trump pushing to further gerrymander House seats in Texas, I was surprised they had left any seats open. The current split is 25-12, with Democrats concentrated in the big cities, and everything else neatly carved up to favor Republicans. Turns out there are two districts along the Rio Grande that Democrats won by thin margins in 2024. Still, that depends on Trump consolidating his 2024 gains among Latinos, which isn't a strong bet.

Molly Jong-Fast [07-18]: Canceling Stephen Colbert Isn't Funny. Coming two weeks after [07-02] Paramount to Pay Trump $16 Million to Settle '60 Minutes' Lawsuit, this feels like the other shoe dropping. The lawsuit was utterly bogus, and any company with an ounce of faith in free speech would have fought it to the Supreme Court (or probably won much easier than that), but the settlement is a conveniently legal way to pay off a bribe, and cheap compared to the multi-billion dollar sale Paramount is seeking government approval on. (And Trump, of course, is back at it again: see Trump will sue the WSJ over publishing a "false, malicious, and defamatory" story about Trump and Epstein.) I'm not up on Colbert: I haven't watched his or any other late night talk show since the election. Before the election, I took some comfort in their regular beatdowns of Trump and his crew, and especially in the audience's appreciation, which made me feel less alone. However, with the loss I resented their inadequacy (as well as even more massive failures elsewhere in the media and in the Democratic political classes). But I suppose I was glad that they still existed, and hoped they would continue fighting the good fight -- maybe even getting a bit better at it. At this point, it's pretty clear that Trump's popularity will continue to wane as the disasters pile up. So his only real chance of surviving is to intimidate the opposition, to impose such fear and dread that no one will seriously challenge him. You'd think that would be inconceivable in America, but here you see companies like Paramount bowing and scraping. And as the WSJ suit progresses, how much faith do you have that someone like Rupert Murdoch will stand up to Trump? More:

Kaniela Ing [07-18] This Viral Speech Shows How We Win Back Rural America: "Voters aren't tuning out because they don't care. They're tuning out because they've been exhausted by fake choices, sold out by both parties, and tired of inauthenticity."

Chuck Eddy [07-18] A Load of Records Off My Back. Mixed feelings here, including some I simply don't want to think about. My only serious attempt to sell my music was in 1999 in New Jersey, when we were moving and the LPs seemed like a lot of dead weight -- not least because some flood water seeped into still-packed boxes in the basement, making me think that if I couldn't take better care, I didn't deserve to own such things. I did spend many hours salvaging what I could from the mess: cleaning pulp out of the grooves of vinyl, putting them in blank sleeves. I mostly kept old jazz that I thought I might want to refer back to. I probably saved more money in moving charges than I made selling them. We moved here in 1999, and since then I've never sold anything. I do think of disposing of much of what I have, but it's a lot of trouble for very little reward (and I don't just mean money). Chuck's story doesn't inspire me, but I suppose it's worth knowing that if he can do it, maybe there's hope for me.

Obituaries: Last time I did an obituary roll was May 14, so we have some catching up to do. This is quickly assembled, mostly from New York Times obituaries.

  • John Ganz [06-05] The Last True Fascist: "Michael Ledeen and the 'left-hand path' to American Fascism." I remember him as the right-wing ideologue of the poli sci department at Washington University, back in the early 1970s when I was a sociology student there. I never had any dealings with him, but friends who majored there loathed him (and vice versa, I'm sure). This was well before he became famous for putting bad ideas into worse practice. But while I always knew him as an ogre, this adds much more detail and nuance.

  • John Fordham [07-27] Louis Moholo-Moholo obituary: "Jazz drummer with the Blue Notes who brought enthralling new sounds from South Africa to the wider world in the 1960s."

  • Jannyu Scott [06-26] Bill Moyers, a Face of Public TV and Once a White House Voice, Dies at 91: One of the few people from the Johnson Administration to put Vietnam behind him and redeem himself with a long public service career. I have many memories of him, but the one that always seemed most telling was the story of how he tried to get Johnson to call his program "The Good Society" instead of "The Great Society." Like another politician who comes to mind, Johnson always wanted more, and never got it. (Mary Trump hit a similar note when she called her book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.)

  • Linda Greenhouse [05-09] David H. Souter, Republican Justice Who Allied With Court's Liberal Wing, Dies at 85: "He left conservatives bitterly disappointed with his migration from right to left, leading to the cry of "no more Souters." Which is to say that he was the last of the Republicans to allow decency, good sense, and respect for law to guide him instead of right-wing ideology. He was GWH Bush's second appointment to the Court (after Clarence Thomas), a New Hampshire fellow promoted by John Sununu to replace William J. Brennan (an Eisenhower appointment, and one of the most honorable Justices in my memory). While Reagan's appointment of Scalia sailed through without a hitch, he leaned so hard to the right that the later appointments of Bork and Thomas turned into pitched political battles. Some Democrats feared the same from Souter, but I remember at the time two bits of evidence that suggested otherwise. One was that he showed great respect for Brennan, and solicited his advice. The other was a comment by a friend, Elizabeth Fink, that Souter might surprise us, because as a bachelor he had lived an unconventional lifestyle. She proved right, as she so often was. (Another Liz Fink story: Chuck Shumer used to like to walk up to people on the street and ask them "how am I doing?" He did that to Liz once, and she answered curtly: "you're evil.")

  • Alex Traub [06-02] Alasdair MacIntyre, Philosopher Who Saw a 'New Dark Ages,' Dies at 96: On him, also see Samuel McIlhagga: The Anti-Modern Marxism of Alasdair MacIntyre.

  • Ludwig vanTrikt (66): He was one of our long-time voters in the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, from Philadelphia, worked in radio there and wrote for Cadence. Here are notes on Instagram and Echovita. I've corresponded with him a fair amount, and always found him warm and engaging. Mutual friends have described him as "a really good person," who generously "did what he had to do in whatever way he could."

  • Some more names I recognize: with New York Times obituaries. Connie Francis (singer, 87); David Gergen (political hack, 83); Michael Madsen (actor, 67); Jimmy Swaggart (preacher/con man, 90); Dave Parker (baseball, 74); Mick Ralphs (guitarist, 81); Lou Christie (singer, 82); Foday Musa Suso (kora player, 75); Sly Stone (bandleader, 82); Guy Klucevsek (accordion player, 78); Al Foster (drummer, 82); Loretta Swit (actress, 87); Bernard Kerik (crooked cop, 69); Tom Robbins (journalist, 76); Susan Brownmiller (feminist author, 90); Joe Louis Walker (blues singer-guitarist, 75); Johnny Rodriguez (country singer-guitarist, 73).

    Some more I didn't catch in the Times, but found in Wikipedia: Hal Galper (pianist, 87); Alan Bergman (songwriter, 99); Lalo Schifrin (composer, 93); Sven-Ĺke Johansson (drummer, 82); Brian Wilson (singer, 82); Robert Benton (film director, 92). Obviously, some names in the second list should have been caught in the first (Wilson, Benton). I also took a glance at Jazz Passings, noting a couple more names (like Aďyb Dieng and Brian Kellock), but mostly from earlier in the year.

No More Mister Nice Blog: This is becoming a regular feature. I may skip the occasional piece.

  • [07-10]: This former(?) right-wing extremist is a smarter Democrat than most of the Party's establishment: Joe Walsh, "who was an extremely conservative Republican member of Congress before he became a Never Trumper," interviewing Dean Phillips, who ran for president as a Democrat in 2024, but now says there's no room in the Democratic Party for both him and Mamdani.

    Moderate Democrats don't have to like Zohran Mamdani. But if they're certain he's bad for the party, they should simply say as little as possible about him. That way, they're not denigrating the party as a whole and they have more time to criticize Republicans -- y'know, the party they run against every election cycle? But Democrats apparently don't believe that criticizing only your opponents is good politics.

  • [07-11]: Republican vulnerabilities are obvious, but the Democratic Party doesn't seem to notice.

  • [07-12]: Live by the ooga-booga, die by the ooga-booga.

  • [07-13]: Oh, look, it's time for the downfall of Trumpism (again): He's being sarcastic. Surely he knows better than to take David French's word for unease among the Magadom, especially over a charge as ridiculous as pedophilia: the reason they love to attack liberals for that is because they like to see them squirm and recoil in disgust (or look defensive in denial), not because they care one whit about the issue. And if you do manage to prove that Trump is guilty, that's just one more feather in the badass plumage they love him for. But this piece eventually comes around: "Republicans don't really fight one another. They hate us too much to do that."

  • [07-14]: This is how Trump thinks he'll turn the page on Epstein? Looks like he's doing some "wag the dog" over Ukraine. He's turning so belligerent that Lindsey Graham is on board.

  • [07-16]: Establishment Democrats choose the least appealing option: There's a lot here on how many of the young male-oriented podcasts that turned toward Trump in 2024 are turning against him, but not toward the Democratic Party (although Sanders and Mamdani have been picking up support):

    The one political philosophy that doesn't appeal to young voters is mealy-mouthed left-centrism, but that's precisely what Democratic leaders seem to want to give us all. They don't even want the Democratic Party to be a big tent that includes progressives, even though progressives seem to have solved the problem -- winning back young voters -- that the party is paying consultants millions to solve.

    There's a fumbled sentence next to the end here. I think what he means is that the party mainstream is so afraid of losing billionaire donors that they've forgotten that elections are ultimately about winning more votes. The Harris campaign offered pretty conclusive proof that raising more money doesn't guarantee winning, especially when you lose all respect doing so.

Mid-Year Music Lists: I usually collect these under Music Week, but it's probably easier here.

Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: Mid-Year 2025: I had hoped to see more press about our poll, and fear that once again I dropped the ball after struggling so just to get my piece published. I'll collect whatever relevant articles I find here. One sidelight: DownBeat published their 73rd Annual Critics Poll on the same day, competing with our claim to be the biggest critics poll anywhere. I don't mind. I'm not competitive in that way. I'm pleased to see many of our voters getting belated but much-deserved invites, and I suspect that they helped lift the margins of their major category winners this year, especially: Anthony Braxton (Hall of Fame); James Brandon Lewis (artist of the year); Mary Halvorson (group of the year); and Patricia Brennan (album of the year, our winner last year, Breaking Stretch; our Mid-Year winner, Steve Lehman's Plays the Music of Anthony Braxton came out after their disorienting April 1 dividing line, so not a fair comparison there). I'll have to look at their poll more closely, including the list of 251 voting critics, and write more on it later. I did, however, annotate my own ballot here.

Tweets:

  • Middle Age Riot: Picture of bleeding Trump with fist raised:

    FLASHBACK: One year ago, this was staged, I mean happened.

    sassymaster commented:

    you can't grow an ear back. What's the shooter's name? Why no 24 hour media coverage about the shooter. Maybe Jake Tapper will write a book with the answers.

    I threw in this lost-gestating comment:

    Isn't there an Agatha Christie book where the murderer shoots herself in the ear to deflect attention by pretending to be the target? The ear looks good: it bleeds profusely, and is scary close to the brain, but it's safer than anywhere else, so if you were going to fake a shooting, that's the way [to do it].

    I thought of that at the time -- we had just finished a massive Agatha Christie TV binge -- but discounted it only because I couldn't imagine how they thought they could keep such a scam secret. Of course, he wouldn't have had to shoot himself. Once he dropped to the ground, he could clamp a tiny explosive to the ear and detonate it. Killing the supporter behind him made it look more real, and killing the "shooter" on the distant roof brought the story to a sweet ending. The second "assassin" lurking at the golf course further sold the story, which couldn't have been better scripted to propel his "miraculous comeback." And his media critics are so conditioned to never believe conspiracy stories they never questioned it.

  • Laura Tillem [07-13]:

    Just watched the PBS Hannah Arendt documentary. Let me count the ways it is like now:

    1. The rise of Hitler so very much like Trump whipping up hatred against all kinds of people.
    2. The deliberate starvation of the Jews to the point of extermination like Israel's concentration camps in Gaza. As currently being described by Holocaust scholars.
    3. The rise of McCarthy and the searching out and turning in and persecuting dissent in the universities. Like Canary Mission et al.
    4. The lawlessness of Nixon just like Trump.

    Makes me sick.

The Intercept [07-19] No American Gulags. I gets tons of fundraising emails, and delete them nearly as fast as they come in. This looked like one, but is actually an action pitch -- something else I get lots of and quickly delete. If you want to sign up, the link will get you there. But I was struck by the text, which deserves a place here (their bold):

When unidentified people in masks jump out of unmarked vehicles, handcuff someone, take them to an undisclosed location, and detain them indefinitely, that's not law enforcement. It's kidnapping.

When the U.S. government then sends people it's kidnapped to a foreign country, the practice escalates to human trafficking.

ICE is creating a global pipeline of American-sponsored gulags in countries often notorious for violence and human rights violations.

People sent to these overseas prisons have no idea how long they'll remain incarcerated in a country that is not their home.

The U.S. Constitution is clear: Not only is every person entitled to due process in a court of law, but even those convicted of crimes must not endure cruel and unusual punishment.

More than 71 percent of current ICE detainees have no criminal conviction — and still ICE trafficked detainees to CECOT, the infamous Salvadoran torture prison where it's been said "the only way out is in a coffin."

There should be no such thing as an American gulag.

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