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Speaking of* [40 - 49]

Sunday, July 30, 2023

Started early enough, but once again this is chewing up Sunday evening. While I'm having a lot of trouble getting my own projects organized, it's almost therapeutic to stumble across a piece and write a few off-the-cuff comments.

Here's a Patriotic Millionaires meme, picturing Ronald Reagan, saying: "In 1984 I lowered the top income tax rate from 70% to 28%. Then I imposed the first ever income tax on social security benefits to make up for it."

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: I've generally ignored the horserace articles, even the snippy ones about DeSantis's faltering (or rebooting, take your pick) campaign. Trump got back into the news cycle, provoked with additional indictments, which elicited the usual vicious incoherence. Elsewhere, Republicans have been very busy in their endless quest to hurt people and screw up the future.

• Zack Beauchamp: [07-28] Republicans are threatening to sabotage George W Bush's greatest accomplishment: It's a program I admit I hadn't heard of, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which "has saved as many as 25 million lives," and "is currently supporting treatment for over 20 million people who depend on the program for continued access to medication." So, just the sort of thing today's Republicans want to kill, all the more so since it gives them an opportunity to repoliticize AIDS and trash Anthony Fauci as one of the great monsters of our time. And if Bush's legacy gets trampled along the way, well, it turns out that he was just RINO scum all along.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • [07-26] Ron DeSantis's Nazi outreach is a strategy, not an accident.

  • [07-26] Conservatives have a new master theory of American politics: I'm always intrigued by theories, as they imply thinking, even when they derive from the right, where such skills have atrophied if ever they existed. This one's based on what Chait's calling Longmarchism, which argues that the Left has, over decades, implemented a "long march through existing institutions," infiltrating and capturing them to such an extent that only a political revolt by right-thinking Americans can restore the nation as God intended. Chait points to Christopher Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (reviewed here) and Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Generation of Decay, an essay collection edited by Arthur Milikh. Chait does a decent job of debunking this nonsense, but a few points could be clearer:

    1. There is no control structure on the left -- nothing remotely resembling the cells Communists and Birchers tried to set up long ago, nor even anything similar to the economic ties Koch, Thiel, etc., have set up to direct the right. (Koch was a Bircher, so that kind of thinking comes naturally to him. The right would like you to think of Soros in those terms, but he's just an old philanthropist, throwing money at worthwhile causes, and not just political ones.)

    2. The ideas that the right so objects to are less the result of conscious political propaganda than common reactions to situations that most people face. People become anti-racist because they don't like the effects of racism. As America has become more diverse, tolerance and respect have become more necessary, if just to get by and to get along. Even businesses understand that. (If the left really had infiltrated corporate America, wouldn't we have also changed their views on profits, on unions, on pollution, etc.?)

• Tim Dickinson: [07-29] These Christian nationalists want to stone adulterers to death: "Aspiring theocrats want to install Old Testament justice in America." Interesting that the first person I thought of after seeing the headline was Newt Gingrich. Dickinson also wrote: [07-28] Vivek Ramaswamy is on the rise. So are Christian nationalist attacks on his religion: He's Hindu, but this is the first I've heard of anyone giving him grief for it. He seemed to get along swimmingly at a recent Christian confab in Iowa. I can remember when Protestants could get really worked up over points of theology -- my Grandmother, for instance, told me that the Lutherans she grew up with were "worse than the Catholics" -- but nowadays the only thing good Christians need to agree on is the others they all hate in common.

• Robert Downen/Carla Astudillo: [07-25] Ken Paxton's far-right billionaire backers are fighting hard to save him: Otherwise it's sunk cost: buying an Attorney General only to see him impeached.

• Kate Kelly/David Perlmutt: [07-30] Inside the party switch that blew up North Carolina politics: Tricia Cotham, who ran as a pro-abortion Democrat, then switched to the Republicans to override an anti-abortion bill veto. You've long known that there is little Republicans wouldn't do to steal elections, but Trojan horse candidates are a new low.

• Ed Kilgore: [07-24] First Republican debate: Who's in, who's banned, who's boycotting: The Fox News debate is on August 23. It shouldn't be hard to find something better to do on that day (though probably not outside).

• Kelly McClure: [07-29] Judge throws out Trump's lawsuit against CNN. Trump sued CNN for $475 million for defamation. For more details, see Andrew Zhang: [07-29] Judge dismisses Trump's 'Big Lie' lawsuit against CNN. Evidently "big lie" isn't recognized as a Nazi trademark, so can be used by others to refer to other big lies. Trump also objected to being called "Hitler-like," which either means he's a little touchy or he's holding out for something stronger. The lawsuit was dismissed "with prejudice," which is technical jargon judges use for "you're wasting my time." No mention in these articles for CNN's countersuit against Trump for calling them "fake news." Maybe they didn't feel like wasting the judge's time suing?

• Ian Millhiser: [07-27] What's new in the new indictment against Donald Trump? "Trump allegedly tried to destroy evidence in the federal case involving classified documents."

• Nicole Narea/Li Zhou: [07-27] Your 5 biggest questions about Trump's latest indictment, answered. Not really. My first one is whether the revised indictment would push his court date out, and that wasn't broached. I'd expect his lawyers to make such a motion. The whole thing about whether Trump might go to jail isn't very clear. My impression is that, unlike the New York hush money case, everyone who's been convicted of the crimes Trump is charged with here has gotten a jail term. (For a "legal scholar" view, see Tom Boggioni: [07-29] Trump 'may die in prison' if he doesn't strike a deal after 'shocking' new charges.) The authors ask whether it's even possible to jail Trump, given his Secret Service protection. But why does he even need extra protection if he's in jail? (Sure, laugh, but aren't jails supposed to be the safest places in America?) If not, maybe you can find a higher security facility, like Guantanamo? Or maybe cut a deal with the British and exile him to Saint Helena, like Napoleon? He might even like that idea, at least until he got there. (Maybe he could build a luxury golf resort there, and it would be a pilgrimage destination.)

• Tori Otten: [07-28] Madman Trump promises to run for President from prison if he's convicted. It's been done before (Eugene Debs in 1920), but "it is unclear how things would work if Trump won." Author also wrote: [07-28] Elise Stefanik wins the prize for stupidest Trump indictment reaction.

• Catherine Rampell: [07-27] A year after Dobbs, House GOP proposes taking food from hungry babies: The concerns of the "pro life" begin at conception, and pretty much end with delivery.

• Adam Rawnsley/Asawin Suebsaeng: [07-26] Trump struggles to find enough lawyers to handle his many indictments: Reminds me that when Duke Ellington was asked how he kept such a great orchestra together for so many decades, he confided a secret: "I pay them." Maybe Trump should try that. Maybe he should also try to be a better client. I heard somewhere that MAGA really stands for "make attorneys get attorneys."

• Zachary Siegel: [06-27] Their kids died of fentanyl overdoses. Republicans can't wait to exploit it. "Grieving parents are at risk of becoming mere props in the latest chapter of America's twisted war on drugs."

• Molly Taft: [07-21] The GOP darling who claims fossil fuels are good for humanity: Alex Epstein, who's written the books The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) and Fossil Future, and insists that oil is "a wonderful, live-sustaining product," while deriding "wasteful, unreliable solar and wind schemes." Koch loves him.

• Michael Tomasky: [07-28] Trump is an extremely dumb fascist: "The latest criminal indictment highlights his idiocy -- but also the threat he still poses to American democracy." He points out that "fascism is a sensibility far more than it is a political program." Trump certainly has that sensibility, no matter how much one might quibble over his political alignment with historic fascists. And dumb? Very. The one thing he has is instincts, which are disturbingly popular, but not very original, given how easy they were to pick up from Fox and the like.

• John Wagner/Amy B Wang: [07-26] Giuliani not contesting making false statements about Georgia election workers.

• Scott Waldman: [07-26] Conservatives have already written a climate plan for Trump's second term. They call this "Project 2025," and describe it as not a white paper but a "battle plan," to implement as soon as a Republican is sworn in as president in 2025. "It would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency's environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department's renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California's car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials."

• Brett Wilkins: [07-26] DOJ sues Greg Abbott over "barbaric" Rio Grande buoy barrier: I'd be more inclined to charge him with attempted murder, then add further charges with each additional victim. That may not fly, given that those specific charges are usually filed by states, but the feds must have something along those lines. Or they could just extradite him to The Hague, to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Of course, he'd probably use that for a campaign ad. For more, see Nicole Narea: [07-25] Biden is taking Texas to court over its floating border barrier.

Biden and/or the Democrats: Note separate pieces on Hunter Biden and Robert F Kennedy Jr much farther down. There are also pieces under various topics, including Ukraine, Israel, and the military. Democrats have enough excess baggage without having to pile it all on here.

• EJ Dionne Jr: [07-30] The GOP pays a price for its extremism. But Biden does, too. He means, Biden pays a price for the GOP's extremism; not that there's anything extremist about Biden. He blames this on the media's habit of repeating whatever Republicans say, even if only to debunk it afterwards. "A two-minute report on a congressional hearing will inevitably air whatever charges some right-wing committee chair makes. They lodge in people's memories no matter what might be said during those 120 seconds to debunk them." Dean Baker suggests a better approach: "Actually, competent reporters would simply report that Republicans on a House committee repeated long-debunked lies about President Biden and son: full stop."

• Rebecca Leber: [07-26] Biden's $250 billion lure to clean up the dirty legacy of fossil fuels. One section here is subtitled: "Balancing ambition, exhaustiveness, and speed will make all the difference." Sounds difficult, and given the pervasive influence of moneyed interests in all facets of American politics, it will be a tough trick for Democrats to pull off, but at least they try to balance off a broad range of interests. Handing this over to the Republicans is a sure recipe for disaster.

• Eric Levitz: [07-28] The 'AOC Left' has achieved plenty. Rejoinder to Freddie deBoer: [07-25] AOC is just a regular old Democrat now, a piece that I found too cloying to cite on its own.

• Josh Marshall: [07-28] Age, the blue sky and that enduring question of 'is Joe Biden too old?' Of course he is. But it's not like with athletes, where losing a step off the dribble or a couple feet off the fastball can wipe you out. He needs to pace himself, surround himself with good people, get help when he needs it, and prepare to bow out if/when it gets to be too much. And if needed, there is a clear succession plan in place (which unfortunately involves a couple old-timers from Congress, but odds of getting to them are rather slim). Assuming Kamala Harris is his running mate again, it would be reassuring for her to step up, and for him to let her. But the underlying situation is that Democrats have decided not to risk another open primary in 2024. If they did, there would be a fight between left and corporate wings of the party, and Biden uniquely disarms that gap. The left has a lot of popular issues to run on, but the system (and not just the DNC) is rigged against them -- e.g., Bloomberg spent $500 million on a suicide mission just to keep Sanders from getting the nomination in 2020; this year No Labels is a ready-built stalking horse for the Bloomberg class -- and the risk of letting any Republican (much less Trump) back in so grave that few progressives are willing to risk backing anyone better than Biden. The age issue will fade in the general election, where Teams R & D will rally to their side. And if, perchance, Republicans wind up nominating someone younger than Trump, Biden can always roll out Reagan's disarming quip, that he "won't hold his opponent's inexperience against him."

The Supreme Court:

• Robert Barnes: [07-28] Alito says Congress has no authority to police Supreme Court ethics: So the President and members of Congress aren't above the law, but Supreme Court Justices are? But if that was obvious, why would they dissemble so much to hide their side deals? More on Alito:

  • Josh Gerstein: [07-28] Alito: Congress can't regulate Supreme Court ethics. A tweet from: Laurence Tribe: "Justice Alito should know better: The power of Congress to regulate the non-judicial conduct of all Article III judges, including the Supreme Court Justices, is grounded in the Constitution's Necessary & Proper Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 18."

  • Ruth Marcus: [07-30] No, Justice Alito. Congerss should not butt out on Supreme Court\ ethics.

  • Adrienne Masha Varkiani: [07-28] Alito to Congress: You have no business snooping into our ethics.

• Ian Millhiser: [07-26] How Alabama could get away with defying the Supreme Court.

Climate and Environment:

• Matthew Cappucci: [07-25] Violent storms tear through Europe with 'gargantuan' hail in Italy.

• Judith Deutsch: [07-27] What is the 'cost' of climate change? My eyes quickly glaze over when I read pieces like this, where the point seems to be: incalculable but certainly much more than we can afford. But it raises many more questions, like what is the distribution of costs? And how much of those costs are actually charged to those responsible for them? The answer to the latter is certainly very little. While one can imagine schemes to bring the two closer in line, I'm doubtful that they can ever get even moderately close.

• Laura López González: [07-25] What you need to know about killer humidity. Quotes Jeff Goodell, whose latest book is The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet: "A wet bulb temperature of 95 degrees -- which basically means both outdoor air temperature and humidity levels are high -- is the upper end of human adaptability to humid heat. Beyond that, our generates heat faster than it can dissipate it." You may be familiar with that wet bulb temperature (35°C) from Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, where it finally motivates a long list of reforms.

• Umair Irfan: [07-26] What "record-breaking heat" actually means.

• Pablo Manriquez: [07-27] 100 degree days, wildfires . . . to Congressional Republicans, nothing to see here.

• Bill McKibben:

  • [07-11] Is it hot enough yet for politicians to take real action? Not really, but that's mostly because politicians can't take real action on something as big and independent as the climate or the economy. They can, at best, nudge it a bit. The question is whether they can recognize the need, and find something they can do that might lead to that nudge. As far as I can tell, there is one party that sees the problem, and for them, virtually every bit of news reinforces that view. And there's one party that doesn't see the problem at all, or if they admit to, don't see any possible solution. (See Manriquez above.) The next question is, when new people start to see the problem, will they also be willing to select the one party that takes the issue seriously?

  • [07-26] Heat waves and the sweep of history.

• Alissa J Rubin: [07-29] A climate warning from the cradle of civilization: "Every schoolchild learns the name: Mesopotamia -- the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization. Today, much of that land is turning to dust."

Ukraine War:

• Connor Echols:

  • [07-28]] Diplomacy Watch: Putin fights to keep friends in Africa. There's an enigmatic "Putin has rejected a US offer to discuss the war" here, but nothing of substance. Russia's popularity among neutral African leaders appears to be waning.

  • [07-25] Uber Russia-hawk Victoria Nuland rises to acting deputy secretary of state: She's been serving as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Here's her Wikipedia page. Her husband is prominent neocon historian Robert Kagan, who was one of PNAC (Project for a New American Century) founders in 1998. Nuland bounced back and forth between State and outside think tanks, always taking a hard anti-Russian line, most notably in 2014, when she was in Kyiv and caught on tape picking who should take over Ukraine as Prime Minister.

  • [07-27] Biden roils oversight community with nominations for Ukraine aid watchdogs.

• Dave DeCamp: [07-27] Ukraine's Parliament votes to extend martial law, pushing back elections: So Ukrainians, and by extension their supporters in the West, are fighting for democracy, but they can't have it until their present leaders have met their war aims?

• Fred Kaplan: [07-27] Ukraine's new stategy against Russia: "Why Ukraine had to reboot its summer offensive." So it hasn't worked, but they're making adjustments, and both sides continue to inflict damage. Kaplan's conclusion: "the war remains, in some ways, what it has been almost from the beginning: a competition to see which side gives up first." Unfortunately, that conception only gives both sides reason to keep fighting.

• Daniel Larison: [07-26] Did the US know the Ukraine offensive might fail, and if so, when? Some prominent Americans are still in denial: e.g., Democratic Senators Mark Kelly and Tammy Duckworth: [07-24] We've been on the front lines. We know what Ukraine needs. More and fancier weapons, of course. That piece in turn led me to David Axe: [02-20] Some of the best weapons in the world are now in Ukraine. They may change the war. They haven't, at least yet. Even if Ukraine, at considerable cost, manages to gain some ground back this summer, it's hard to see a military path to the "victory" they desire. And what about those "best weapons in the world"? They're not looking so hot -- more like what you should expect when the arms industry is in corrupt embrace with a military that has only tested their wares in places like Afghanistan and Somalia. "Refusing to negotiate with an adversary, whether out of pride or ideological hostility to diplomacy, is usually self-defeating."

• Eve Sampson/Samuel Granados: [07-22] Ukraine is now the most mined country. It will take decades to make safe. Maybe the US should have signed that international treaty outlawing the use of mines, which would have put some pressure on Russia and Ukraine to conform. Same for cluster bombs. The "ordnance contamination" map reminds us that the problem isn't just mines. All kinds of shells and bombs can fail to explode, lying in wait for a future disturbance. "The sheer quantity of ordnance in Ukraine is just unprecedented in the last 30 years. There's nothing like it."

• Katrina vanden Heuvel/James Carden: [07-28] When facts cut through the fog of war: "As the Ukraine counteroffensive grinds on, conditions on the ground are now too obvious to ignore. Is it time for talking, yet?" Of course. It's never not been time to talk. Just as it's always been obvious that no definition of victory could justify the costs war has exacted on both sides.

Israel:

• Peter Baker/Ronen Bergman: [07-29] Biden presses ahead with effort to broker Israeli-Saudi rapprochement. Wholly on Israel's terms, of course, because the US is no longer master of its own foreign policy re Israel. And those terms, as with Trump's Abraham Accords, are Saudi acquiescence as Israel tightens the screws on Palestinians.

• Zack Beauchamp: [07-24] What Israel's new judicial law reveals about its democracy. Even most technically, the idea that the ruling junta would pass a law that prevents the Supreme Court to considering whether its acts are "reasonable" strongly suggests that they are planning acts that are clearly unreasonable. Since the Court has rarely objected to anything the government has done to Palestinians, those planned acts may well be directed at Israeli Jews. At least, that's who are protesting.

• Jonathan Guyer: [07-26] What Israel's judicial overhaul means for Palestinians. Israel's Supreme court has been "no reliable supporter of Palestinian rights," but the bill's supporters, specifically Yariv Levin, cite cases the Supreme Court has blocked as "unreasonable," and they were all directed against Palestinians.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [07-24] Leading liberal Zionist voices call for ending US aid to Israel. They're thinking of military aid, which Israel doesn't need, and mostly uses against its own people (why not call Palestinians that? the phrase was used very effectively against Saddam Hussein for his attacks on Iraqi Kurds). Links provided, starting with Nicholas Kristof.

• David Remnick: [07-24] In Israel, a glimpse of a Trumpian future. Americans, not unlike people elsewhere, inevitably view the present through the prism of their own experience. Hence, the idea that Israel might become like Trump terrifies a long-time Zionist supporter like Remnick. I'm much more worried that America, Trumpy as it already is, might become even more like Israel. (By the way, that's long been the fantasy of neocons and Christian Zionists, so we've experienced a fair amount of that already.)

• Richard Silverstein:

  • [07-26] Israel is bullying progressives on borrowed time.

  • [07-27] Judicial crisis: An existential battle for Israel's future.

• Philip Weiss:

  • [07-24] New Israeli law is shock to US Zionists, who fear break with American Jews.

  • [07-26] Awareness grows that Israel's crisis stems from a core issue: it's an apartheid state.

Around the world:

• Priti Gulati Cox/Stan Cox: [07-27] The war you're not reading about: "Struggle and suffering in Sudan."

• Jody Ray: [07-29] How Tunisia became the EU's border guard.

• Nick Turse: [07-27] Niger coup leader joins long line of US-trained mutineers. Also:

  • Ellen Ioanes: [07-30] Niger's coup and the international community's opposition, explained.

  • Alex Thurston: [07-28] Niger becomes the latest domino falling to Western-trained militaries.

Other stories:

Dean Baker:

• [07-25] Why we do this crap: Review of The Ends of Freedom, by Mark Paul. Not a new idea -- Baker cites Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King as predecessors -- but the argument here is that a bunch of basic economic needs should be provided as rights (work, housing, education, health care, basic income and banking, a healthy environment), wrapping up with a final chapter ("How Do We Pay for It?").

• [07-21] The Chinese need to stay poor because the United States has done so much to destroy the planet: John Kerry went to China last week to scold them for not doing enough to limit greenhouse gases (see: China's Xi rebuffs Kerry's call for faster climate action), even though one may legitimately wonder what sort of example the US set during its period (now distantly remembered) of comparable economic growth. Although the Chinese economy has grown very fast in recent years, its per capita income is still way below the US, so it shouldn't surprise us that its political leaders feel the need to make up the difference. And in any case, China seems much more committed to reducing emissions than the US is -- what with the still-powerful Republicans actively sabotaging any effort the Biden administration makes. As Baker notes, "China is by far the world leader in wind energy, solar energy, and electric cars." He adds: "If we did want an opportunity to put our money where our mouth is, the United States could adopt a policy of making all the technology that is develops fully open-source, so that everyone in the world could take advantage of it, without concerns about patent monopolies or other protections."

Ben Burgis: [07-28] The Pentagon budget is obscene, even without the right-wing culture-war amendments. It's also untouchable politically, especially as Democrats have, for various reasons, become its biggest supporters.

• Connor Echols: [06-26] Proposed military slush fund would risk new boondoggles.

• Binoy Kampmark: [07-28] Dotty domains: The Pentagon's Mali typo leak affair.

• Branko Marcetic: [07-29] NATO's expansion into Asia is the mother of bad ideas: Not a fine turn of phrase, but yes, a very bad idea. I could easily list five, maybe ten, instances where NATO would only make the situation worse. Taiwan is the big one, as it would shatter the "one China" fictions that seem to be so important to the Beijing regime. I'd also worry about the bad smell of Europe's former imperialists joining together to "protect" their favored "allies" in Asia and elsewhere.

• George Will: [07-26] It's time to end the 'era of Great Distraction': I'm not suggesting you read him, but wanted to note that this is what they're calling the Global War on Terror these days: a Great Distraction that caused us to lose focus on the big threats we need to spend trillions preparing for war with: Russia and China. Ends with an ominous warning, so you'll know that he's serious: "Time will tell -- soon -- whether we have refocused too late."

John Ehrenreich: [07-30] The making of Robert F Kennedy Jr: A long, critical, but not totally unsympathetic review of the fringe presidential candidate's public life. (I went with the subtitle above; the actual published title suggests that someone at Slate is eager to throw both author and subject under the bus.)

Jonathan Guyer: [07-24] The dark -- and often misunderstood -- nuclear history behind Oppenheimer, explained by an expert: Christopher Nolan's new Oppenheimer movie, serendipitously paired with Barbie, produced a bunch of links last week. This interview with Alex Wellerstein, author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, adds substantially to the discussion. Turning to the present, he says: "If you disengage, then the only people who are really making decisions on this issue are going to be the people who have a lot to gain from it. And that's how you end up in a situation with arms races, when the military, Congress, and contractors are making a lot of the decisions."

• Kai Bird: [07-17] The tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer: By the co-author of the book the movie is based on.

• Aja Romano: [07-24] Barbieheimer: Destroyer of worlds, savior of cinema. Reminds me of an old Minutemen album, Project: Mersh, where the cover image is a bunch of marketing types sitting with coffee and charts, and one of them exclaims, "I got it! We'll have them write hit songs." After several years of doldrums, with big budgets going almost exclusively to superhero fantasies, it's like someone decided to roll the dice on making good films on topics people could take seriously. Sure, there have been some decent films the last few years, but I can't remember when two films like these were the industry's major product rollouts at the same time. Also see David Dayen: [07-28] Barbenheimer reveals the drastic choices of Hollywood executives: "The big opening weekend contrasts with everything the studios have been doing for the last couple of decades."

• Ryu Spaeth: [07-25] Who are the Japanese in Oppenheimer? I was intrigued by the title, as I was surprised that there were any. After reading the article, my surmise was right, unless they dug up some documentary reels of devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But if the question is about the decision to kill so many people with such a "cruel" (Hirohito's word) weapon, we should entertain the question of just who we thought they were. It's hard for Americans now to appreciate how racist Americans then were regarding all Asians (though perhaps a bit less hard than it was in the years BT [Before Trump]). John Dower wrote about this in War Without Mercy.

• Jonathan Stevenson: [07-28] Why 'Oppenheimer' matters: "The father of the atomic bomb still speaks to the danger of complacency."

• Alissa Wilkinson: [07-27] The nuclear bomb's enduring, evolving place in pop culture.

Sarah Jones: [07-27] Walking out of the Dream Factory: Writers and actors are still on strike, as are many others.

Elias Khoury: [07-28] Anti-imperialism is both morally correct and absolutely necessary for the left.

Eric Levitz: [07-25] Why elite colleges do affirmative action for the rich. He means why elite colleges perpetuate the elite class system by favoring the rich -- especially through legacy admissions -- but the affirmative action programs that were just outlawed also existed to benefit the rich, because that's what elite colleges are all about. Related:

• Fabiola Cineas: [07-25] Affirmative action for white college applicants is still here: I rather wish he wouldn't call it "affirmative action," which can be read as an attempt to score points by reassigning a deprecating term, like "corporate welfare" or "socialism for the rich." Most likely he just means it as irony, as Ira Katznelson did with his book title, When Affirmative Action Was White, which showed how many New Deal programs, including Social Security, were written to avoid benefiting blacks.

Carlos Lozada: [07-18] A look back at our future war with China: Lozada was book review editor at the Washington Post, since graduated to opinion writer at the New York Times, but he's still just digesting books. There are a lot of books on developing conflicts between the US and China, many assuming that superpower conflicts are inevitable and likely to blow up in war. The books he touches on here have titles like Destined for War, Danger Zone, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, and The Avoidable War. Also Party of One, whose loose cannon author argues that "Xi's China is brash but brittle, intrepid but insecure, . . . a would-be superpower in a hurry, eager to take on the world while wary of what may come."

Dylan Matthews: [07-28] How "windfall profits" from AI companies could fund a universal basic income: "Companies like OpenAI and Google could make unthinkable profits from successful AI. Will they share the wealth?" Silly question. Given his hypothetical, he probably means: "will we tax it from them?" Although the question too obvious to ask is: "why should we give it to them in the first place?" Such profits depend on monopoly pricing, and that is a grant the government gives to companies, for reasons that are increasingly difficult to explain let alone justify. The other point hardly anyone is making is that nearly all of the misuses we can envision for AI are tied to its commercial exploitation. There are lots of good reasons for slowing AI down, which is why lots of people are talking about regulations. But regulating AI monopolies is going to be incredibly difficult, both technically and politically. It would be much simpler to limit the money flow, which would allow us to make more judicious decisions on how we use it.

Note that I'm not arguing against the author's "global UBI" proposals. They have some merits, but aren't dependent on this particular tax stream.

• Alexander C Karp: [07-25] Our Oppenheimer moment: The creation of AI weapons. CEO of defense contractor Palantir Technologies, so he's selling, but mostly he's worried that engineers might grow a conscience, as Oppenheimer did (belatedly, maybe). "The preoccupations and political instincts of coastal elites may be essential to maintaining their sense of self and cultural superiority but do little to advance the interests of our republic." On the other hand, putting nukes on autopilot . . .

• Sara Morrison: [07-27] The tricky truth about how generative AI uses your data.

Rani Molla: [07-25] A UPS strike would have been worse than you think. I'm pleased to see this strike not happening. Of course, my sympathies would have been with the union members had they struck, as I am with all unions, almost all of the time. But I'm a bit worried that a rash of strikes could provoke a backlash, as happened in 1946, leading to a Republican Congress passing Taft-Hartley (with enough racist Democratic support to override Truman's veto; unfortunately, Truman spent a lot of his time leading up to 1946 badmouthing strikers, who had spent WWII under wage controls while defense contractors were guaranteed cost-plus-10% profits).

Sara Morrison: [07-24] Welcome to X, the wannabe "super app" formerly known as Twitter. It's not only hard to imagine Musk's "super app" taking off, it's hard to comprehend what kind of ego could think it has a chance. One of the core problems of capitalism is that people don't have enough money to satisfy all the people who want to take it away. Back when Microsoft was top dog, they spoke of a "vig," which is a piece of all the commerce on the internet, much like what you'd pay your local mafiosi for protection. That didn't go over well, then other companies came along, each with its own angle to take a cut.

Musk faces two big problems. One is "first mover advantage," which is the tendency of first entrants to dominate the markets they open up. This is especially true where network effects are critically important: Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many others became unstoppable once they gained enough users that their networks became their strongest selling points. (And mostly they did this by offering services for free, a point Musk doesn't seem to understand.) The other is coming up with a new angle that's so incredibly attractive that people will sell their souls and worldly possessions to get in on it. After 25 years of fevered competition, how many great, and exploitable, ideas are left? Facebook thought they had one in VR, but how's that worked out? And everybody's hot for AI, but that's many different things to various people -- many of them mere productivity enhancements, to be bundled into other products and services.

Also:

• Paul Krugman: [07-27] What's in a name? Musk/Twitter edition.

• Jill Lepore: [07-26] Elon Musk's X factor: "The surprising personal and cultural reasons for his 'X' affection and rebranding of Twitter."

• Aja Romano: [07-24] The weird sorrow of losing Twitter.

Nicole Narea: [07-26] What the new Fed interest rate hike might mean for the economy: For starters, it shows that Powell's still willing to give recession a chance? Related:

• Dylan Scott: [07-29] 3 reasons the US might actually fix inflation without a recession:

  1. Pandemic-related economic disruptions have dissipated
  2. The labor market has been gradually normalizing
  3. People didn't freak out.

  The latter point isn't totally true.

Claire Potter: [06-28] The right's campus culture war machine: "How conservatives built a formidable network for ginning up scandal in higher education." Review of Amy J Binder/Jeffrey L Kidder: The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today, and Bradford Vivian: Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. One difference is that left student politics is spontaneous and local, whereas right organizes students for broader political purposes. As the pull quote puts it: "Conservatives are playing a long game that treats youth as junior partners in a larger political enterprise. They pay students more and invest heavily." A couple more quotes:

But what both books show is that the right is better positioned to take advantage of the scandals -- some provoked and others resulting from poor decisions -- that do erupt. National student organizations are better at channeling students with conservative leanings into professional activism aimed at creating bad press for higher education. Right-wing media is so effective at seizing on and amplifying controversies, making sure that the distortions that proliferate on social media become the focus of higher education coverage, that mainstream news organizations are often just covering the coverage rather than investigating events. The networks that sustain the campus culture wars are not only powerful and well-financed; they operate far beyond campus. . . .

As it turns out, however, conservatives are much better than liberals at recruiting and training students. Conservatives have "managed to build an elaborate, well-funded organizational space," Binder and Kidder write, "that galvanizes young supporters and grooms future leaders by pulling them outside the confines of campus" and into paid work that sets them up for postgraduation careers as movement conservatives.

Nia Prater: [07-24] Can last-ditch lawsuits kill congestion pricing in New York? I really hope so. I don't feel up to the full rant now, but I really hate the whole idea. (And to the extent that it is championed by liberals I fear it will be a political disaster, not unlike the 55 mph speed limit. On the other hand, I wouldn't be terribly opposed to the idea that Paul Goodman proposed in 1949: banning all cars from Manhattan.) For what it's worth:

• Paul Krugman defends the congestion pricing plan here: [07-24] An act of vehicular NIMBYism. I'm not convinced. For the case he's talking about, you could simply raise the existing toll, without having to do whatever they're planning on doing to collect and police the tax. If you carry this logic to extremes, everybody's car will have to be tracked everywhere, and everyone will eventually get billed for the congestion they cause. The effect is to turn every road into a toll road. There's a simpler way to tax people for road use, which is to tax gasoline, as we've done forever (but evidently it's more agreeable to levy phantom tolls than to raise the gas tax; there's also another whole scheme to tax miles instead of gas, arguing that only taxing gas would give electric cars a free ride -- why don't we just consider that a feature?).

It's no accident that the vogue for solving policy problems with economic cost-benefit solutions began when inequality started kicking off. Any time you make something depend on the ability to pay, you drive inequality upward. There may be cases where that's easier than other solutions, but as a general rule, it not only favors the rich, it drives people to become rich, by penalizing people who aren't. It also undermines the idea that government should provide free services. And if services for some reason have to be rationed for some reason, it makes their distribution unfair.

Andrew Prokop: {07-26] The drama over Hunter Biden's plea deal, explained. The judge threw Republicans in Congress a lifeline to continue their harping on the president's troubled son. Jonathan Chait [07-28] argues that The Democrats can't wave away their Hunter Biden problem, but why not? It's just noise coming from Republicans who have nothing better to rant about. It's not part of the value proposition to be decided in the 2024 elections. Hunter Biden is hardly the only presidential scion to trade on his family name while getting into drugs and other sleaziness. Consider George W Bush, who is arguably worse because he got into politics after he supposedly cleaned up. (You might say his past related to his character, and there's something to that, but it was really Dick Cheney's character that should have bothered us.) What's unique about Hunter Biden is that he's being prosecuted for infractions that would barely have warranted a wrist slap for anyone else (ok, at least for any wealthy, competently-lawyered white male). Of course, by all means, feel free to tackle such sleaze in general (which includes certain Supreme Court justices).

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-28] Roaming Charges: Fighting our real enemies. Starts with stories about the late Sinéad O'Connor. I don't have any, and barely remember her music, but they make for better reading than her obituary (or this one). He also reprinted her 2013 piece: It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

PS: I took a break from the above to read Phillip Maciak: [07-28] Behind the rage of Raylan Givens, on the TV series Justified: City Primeval (we've watched three episodes so far). The essay touches on race privilege, the sketchy relationship between policing and justice, and the deep anger of machismo, but it's also fiction, and entertainment (a lot of both).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 23, 2023

I saw a headline in the Wichita Eagle on Friday -- the article was unsigned but attributed to Las Vegas Review-Journal -- that puzzled me: "Bidenomics is just tired liberalism on steroids." So what is it they're trying to say? It's rejuvenated liberalism? Maybe they want it banned for doping? The phrase "on steroids" has largely lost its literal meaning, in favor of "much larger, stronger, or more extreme than is normal or expected." So at the very least it should cancel out "tired," leaving us with "Bidenomics is just liberalism." That may be the author's complaint, but why is that such a bad thing?

Trump waxes nostalgically about "make America great again," but the closest America ever came to something resembling conventional notions of greatness was the period during and after WWII, when liberalism was most pervasive and hegemonic. In many ways, the original MAGA movement was Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but unlike Trump, Johnson had no desire for nostalgia. His signature program meant to extend New Deal progressivism to all Americans.

Johnson isn't remembered especially well today because he blew so much political capital on the Vietnam War. One lesson we should draw is that it's always a mistake to assume military might is some kind of measure of greatness. Liberals made that mistake in WWII, partly because the enemies were so abhorrent, and partly because the war effort was led by one of their own (brilliantly, I might add). Vietnam started to divide liberals, but I'm old enough to remember when most were staunchly on board, and I've never really forgiven them for that war -- or for allowing themselves to be duped into thinking that communism was such a threat to freedom that they should kill or punish anyone tempted to think otherwise, or for becoming the unwitting victims of their own witch hunts.

Since the 1970s "liberal" has become little more than an epithet, thanks mostly to the relentless slanders of the right -- "tired" is just one of the milder ones, leaving us with this puzzle: if liberalism is so tired, how can it be such a threat?

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

• Zak Cheney-Rice: [07-21] What the most diverse GOP primary ever says about the GOP. Nothing, really, except that the media's preoccupation with looks is silly and stupid. (As, I might add, was Seth Meyers' endless riffs on Robert Mueller's look.) Not that I never wondered whether the more fervent racists in the Republican Party would find it hard to vote for a black Republican, but I got my answer when Jesse Helms voted for Clarence Thomas. Republicans will continue to vote for whoever they're told to, regardless of personal prejudices. And sure, Democrats can be every bit as dazzled by this skin game. Bill Clinton famously wanted a cabinet that "looked like America," and he got his point as far as looks go. But beneath that surface, damn near everyone in his cabinet had Ivy League degrees, which put them in a very small and exclusive minority, just like Clinton.

• Diana Falzone/Asawin Suebsaeng/Adam Rawnsley: [07-11] Murdochs start to sour on DeSantis: 'They can smell a loser'.

• Shane Goldmacher/Maggie Haberman: [07-23] A 'leaner-meaner' DeSantis campaign faces a reboot and a reckoning: So after a review of the candidate's "challenging learning curve" this is what his consultants advised: get meaner? Adam Serwer predicted as much when he titled his anti-Trump book The Cruelty Is the Point. For another view of this, see Nicole Narea: [07-20] Ron DeSantis is really bad at running for president.

• Margaret Hartmann: [07-14] Trump Super-PAC paid Melania $155,000 to choose tableware: May seem like something anyone could do, but economics teaches us that in a free market, marginal value is everything. But sure, if you aren't smart enough to understand that the market is perfect, this could just look like graft.

• Jeet Heer: [07-23] Young Americans for Freedom hates freedom: Interview with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. Note that YAF also hate most Americans. Jeer also wrote: [07-21] Why Trump 2.0 would be much worse: You already knew that, didn't you? He's made it clear that this time he's out for revenge, and he won't accept staff that will get in his way, as many did in his first term. But also, what would a Trump win say about the electorate? In 2016, it was naive and foolish to view him as an outsider who would "drain the swamp," but at least he presented himself that way. This time he's a known quantity, and there's no excuse for thinking he'll ever be anything else (except worse).

• Shayna Jacobs: [07-19] DeSantis, others sued over alleged 'election police' voter intimidation.

• Hugo Lowell: [07-21] Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • [07-21] Republicans will turn any anodyne bit of Congressional business into performative hatred.

  • [07-21] Thursday was a total crackpot day on Capitol Hill.

• Nikki McCann Ramirez:

  • [07-19] Trump is already fundraising off of his DOJ target letter.

  • [07-21] Michael Cohen settles lawsuit against Trump Organization days before trial: The suit was about unpaid legal bills. How much Trump settled for is unspecified.

• Jennifer Rubin: [07-23] Trump's made-for-MAGA arguments keep losing in court.

• Ashlie D Stevens: [07-18] Michigan attorney general charges 16 in 2020 Trump fake elector scheme.

• Tessa Stuart: [07-20] Nebraska teen sent ot jail over illegal abortion: "Celeste Burgess was arrested after Facebook turned over her private messages to police."

• Kevin Sullivan/Lori Rozsa: [07-22] DeSantis doubles down on claim that some Blacks benefited from slavery.

• Jonathan Swan/Charlie Savage/Maggie Haberman: [07-17] Trump and allies forge plans to increase presidential power in 2025: Much of this deals with the likelihood that the Republican-packed Supreme Court will allow a Republican president such license -- "the unitary executive theory" is basically a fancy term for dictatorship. Still, most ominous are the direct quotes from Trump, like his promise to "find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education," where "radicals" are pretty much anyone who believed in what used to be called "liberal education." (In typing that, I flashed on "liberal indoctrination," which is not what the phrase means, but testimony to the way conservatives see education as a process of indoctrination.)

  Even more striking is this Trump quote:

  We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class who hates our country.

  Aside from the red baiting, which just goes to show that Trump is always most at home with jingoism, the rest of that doesn't sound so bad. There certainly are warmongers, both deeply embedded in the state and in the revolving door businesses, foundations, and lobby shops that feed and further them. Same for globalists, although that's a fuzzier term: almost no one believes in "one world government," but lots of business interests promote global trade and finance, and they are well-represented in government, and among the donor class. As for "the sick political class that hates our country," that sounds like most Republicans. Still, I don't trust Trump to get rid of anyone who should be expelled. Rather, he seems to want a return to the spoils system, where everyone in the government works for the political interests of the president.

• Michael Tomasky: [07-21] McCarthy's vow to erase Trump's impeachment sums up the GOP's sickness. "It's a cult of one man -- not a political party anymore in any remote sense of the word. Trump says jump, and they ask how high. In fact, these days Trump rarely even has to say jump. A certain situation arises, and congressional Republicans anticipate that he's about to say jump, so they start jumping, trying to guess the height that will please him most." That's just the first of three reasons Tomasky gives why the Republican Party has become: "an extremist cult that has no incentive to behave otherwise."

• Mary Tuma: [07-21] Testifying against Texas, women denied abortions relive the pregnancies that almost killed them. No reason to file this elsewhere. It's not just policies that Republicans want to implement to make our lives more miserable. It's also about things they've already done.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

• Kevin T Dugan: [07-14] Biden's student-loan forgiveness program just got even bigger.

• Mike Konczal: [07-21] "Bidenomics" vs. "Reaganomics"

The Supreme Court:

• Ian Millhiser: [07-17] How the Supreme Court put itself in charge of the executive branch: "The major questions doctrine, explained."

• Walter Shapiro: [07-19] Sonia Sotamayor's book scandal is banal and troubling: "The Supreme Court justice's buckraking hardly compares to that of her conservative coleagues. But it still says a lot about how much Washington has changed." Well, it says two things: one is that no one in America thinks they're making enough money, even with a cushy lifetime job and pension; the other is that when other Justices are mired in scandals showing them to be truly corrupt, any innocuous bit of buckraking looks suspect.

• Stephen Siegel: [07-21] Clarence Thomas's cherry-picked originalism on affirmative action: "Originalism" originally meant whatever Antonin Scalia wanted it to mean, because only he claimed unique, divine, infallable insight into the minds of the crafters of the Constitution. Since his death, other conservatives have stepped up as originalism's self-appointed oracles, no less dishonestly than Scalia.

Climate and Environment:

• Kate Aronoff: [07-20] America's deadly heat isn't (officially) a major disaster: "Why doesn't the federal government recognize that this extreme weather is a catastrophe?" Probably because catastrophes are supposed to be rare events, and this summer's heat wave seems inevitable, something that we can expect to recur every summer for the rest of our lives. But also note that the purpose of such declarations isn't simply to acknowledge reality, but to allow the government to act to help the victims of disasters, and Republicans really don't like that (except when hurricanes hit Florida, for some reason). See Julia Rock: [07-19] New GOP bill would curb Biden's power to fight climate change. Because, well, heaven forbid that he should do things that would help people.

• Umair Irfan: [07-21] It's even hot underwater.

• Rebecca Leber: [07-21] The invisible consequences of heat on the body and mind: "Heat has bigger effects on us than we may realize."

• Matt Stieb: [07-20] 7 eye-popping numbers from tghe worldwide heat wave.

• Dan Stillman: [07-19] With record heat expected, these 5 maps show what's to come across the US.

• Molly Taft: [07-14] The media has no idea how to cover extreme heat.

• Tish Harrison Warren: [07-23] Rising heat deaths are not just about the temperature: "While it is important to highlight heat deaths as another example of the devastating toll of climate change, it is also important to say that, often, when people die of heat, they are actually dying of poverty."

• Li Zhou:

  • [07-17] Why Canada's wildfires will affect air quality for weeks to come. As of Monday morning, there were 882 active wildfires in Canada, most in British Columbia (373) and Alberta (121), with 579 deemed "out of control." "Experts have warned that the rest of the season could prove as damaging as the first part."

  • [07-17] The "new abnormal": The rise of extreme flooding, briefly explained. Interviews with several experts.

Ukraine War: The great "counteroffensive" has been going for more than a month now, but the New York Times hasn't changed its maps page since July 9.

• Blaise Malley: [07-21] Diplomacy Watch: Russia plays hardball with Black Sea grain deal: Formal withdrawal from the deal was followed by bombing of the port of Odesa.

• Andrew J Bacevich: [07-17] Ukraine and the great revival of American empire: "Kyiv's fate has always been an afterthought. The real goal is reinvigorating NATO and, by extension, US primacy."

• Andrew Cockburn: [07-18] The $850 billion chicken comes home to roost: "The military industrial complex is not designed to actually fight wars. If so, you wouldn't see Ukraine struggling right now to win one." Quotes Jim Burton, who wrote the 1993 memoir Pentagon Wars, as saying the US defense system is "a corrupt business -- ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom."

• Daniel L Davis: [07-19] Why Ukraine's counter-offensive is failing.

• Tamar Jacoby: [07-17] Ukraine's other front: The war on corruption. Ukraine's reputation for corruption goes back to its founding, creating a clique of oligarchs and mobsters, much like Russia, so this is bound to be a sensitive subject as the country is being flooded with arms and other support.

• Jen Kirby: [07-19] How bad will things get now that Russia has quit its grain deal with Ukraine?

Around the world:

• Syrus Jin: [07-21] US-Korea policy is 'trapped in a pattern of cyclical amnesia': "After 70 years, Washington needs to escape this Sisyphean tragedy of tough talk without any results." Also:

  • Gabriela Bernal: [07-20] It's time to end the forever war on the Korean Peninsula. Author previously wrote: [2022-11-03] Is anyone else concerned that 'deterrence' isn't working with North Korea? I'd go farther and say that deterrence is a fundamentally flawed concept: that it hardens disputes, and risks provoking the very wars that it's supposedly meant to prevent.

• Jo-Ann Mort: Ehud Barak: There's a phrase for what Bibi wants -- "de facto dictatorship". Barak also added: "Never in our history as a state has Israel suffered such a destruction of value in such a short time." Still worth remembering how Barak walked away from deals with Syria and Arafat, paving the way for the long-term rise of the Israeli right.

• Eric Alterman: [03-22] The New York Times and Israel: What is (and isn't) fit to print: "Netanyahu accuses the paper of record of anti-Israel bias. But for decades now, the opposite has been true."

• Richard Silverstein: [06-26] Israel's creeping genocide: "Pogroms in 20 Palestinian villages targeted by masses of settler-thugs protected by the IDF."

• Li Zhou: [07-21] Vox, the far-right party making gains in Spain, explained: I've seen a number of pieces predicting a Vox breakthrough, but they wound up in third, with 12.39% and 33 seats (down 19 from before, so not enough to form a coalition with the conservative PP (33.05%, 136 seats, vs. 31.70%, 122 seats for PSOE).

Other stories:

David Byler: [07-17] 5 myths about politics, busted by data: Or proven, depending on how you read the data:

1. Democrats aren't young. Both parties are old. Their breakdown has 30% of Democrats 65+, 28% 50-64, 29% 30-49, and 14% 18-29. But the older cohorts lean Republican (+7 and +5), and the younger ones favor Democrats (+8 and +5). They don't give you the median, but the median Democrat is 5-8 years younger than the median Republican.
2. Republicans aren't rural. Democrats aren't urban. Both are mostly suburban (57-53, edge Democrats), but as they note, "Democrats fare best in neighborhoods that are close to the city center, while Republicans thrive in exurbs and small metros." As for the rest, the urban split is 27-11 Democrats, the rural 36-16 Republicans.
3. Religious Democrats and secular Republicans are both common. The secular ("unaffiliated," a somewhat broader category) split is 39-14 Democrats, with Republicans leading 59-33 among Protestants and 21-17 with Catholics ("other" splits 10-6 Democrats). But they also note that the number of Republicans who seldom or never attend church has shot up from 30-42% (time frame unclear), so while Republicans are more likely to identify as Christian, they may be less than committed.
4. Both parties rely on White college graduates -- not just Democrats. Democrats have an edge among "white, college educated" of 37-31%, which is surely higher than it was even 10-20 years ago, maybe a reversal, as Republicans have had a big advantage there.
5. The Hispanic vote is not the GOP's only route to victory. I don't really get this point: "Republicans could very well win in 2024 by building on recent gains with the White working-class and Asian American voters, regaining recently lost college-educated suburbanites or finally making inroads with Black voters." Really? Based on what policy mix?

I see lessons here for Democrats, in that they need to hold onto and expand their substantial share of mainstream voters, especially ones free enough of Republican prejudice as to still have options. Of course, it's also important to keep the groups Republicans offer no joy to, which means offering tangible benefits, and not just taking them for granted. (Failure there may not translate to Republican votes, but to non-voting.) But I also don't put much stock in multisectoral statistical breakdowns and their attendant identity politics

As for Republicans, they're already performing way above where they should be if voters were rational and voted their best interests. How they improve on that is hard to imagine. They're certainly not going to change course, at least as long as the current one seems to give them a chance to squeeze through on some technicality. Their only real hope is that Democrats discredit themselves -- a card they've been playing, with diminishing returns, since the check kiting scandal of 1993.

Robert Crawford: [07-20] How media makes impact of U S forever wars invisible: Review of Norman Solomon: War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine. An excerpt from this book is here: The convenient myth of "humane" wars. There's also an interview with Solomon: [06-23] How America's wars become 'invisible'.

Tyler Austin Harper: [07-19] 'Barbie' and 'Oppenheimer' tell the same terrifying story: Author ties them both to the search for the Anthropocene boundary stratigraphy. Nuclear fallout is one obvious marker, as it was non-existent before the Trinity test in 1945 and the subsequent annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only to be followed by hundreds of further atmospheric tests (528, according to Arms Control Association, with 215 by US and 219 by USSR, 50 by France, 23 China, and 21 UK). But another marker would be to look for buried plastics, which are if anything more ubiquitous. The coincident release of two movies exploring such geologically important shifts is unlikely enough that some people have turned it into a thing. And many are writing on one, the other, or both. I should note that I haven't seen either movie, and I'm not likely to soon -- we just don't do that anymore, but I also gather that the formerly pretty good Warren Theatres we once had here have turned into rat traps under soon-to-be-bankrupt Regal.

• Siddhant Adlakha: [07-21] Who's who in Oppenheimer: A guide to 36 scientists, soldiers, and reds. One error here is under Edward Teller, where fission and fusion are reversed. Also, although Teller was the main proponent of a fusion bomb, I doubt that he would have insisted on doing it first, given that such bombs were more difficult, and depended on fission reactions to generate the heat to trigger thermonuclear explosion. Teller's "Super" wasn't tested until 1952, or weaponized until 1954.

• Haydn Belfield: [07-22] "Cry baby scientist": What Oppenheimer the film gets wrong about Oppenheimer the man.

• Jorge Cotte: [07-21] The many enigmas of Oppenheimer.

• Connor Echols: [07-21] What 'Oppenheimer' leaves out: Argues that the first victims of the nuclear age were New Mexicans exposed to nuclear fallout from the Trinity Test. There's a case to be made for that, and also for counting thousands (perhaps millions) of other exposed to explosions up to the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (many developing symptoms only later). Other victims of cancers eventually included virtually every Manhattan Project scientist of note. (I can't think of any exceptions.) I'm unclear on how much thought was put into the dangers of radiation before the bombs were developed and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The dangers of radiation poisoning were recognized by then, if far from perfectly understood.

• Whizy Kim: [07-21] This summer's biggest hit? The Barbie marketing team.

• David Klion: [07-21] Oppenheimer is an uncomfortably timely tale of destruction.

• Tori Otten: [07-21] Barbie breaks box office records as conservatives keep whining about it.

• Alexandra Petri: [07-22] The Barbie movie, according to conservative criticism. The article is satire, I think, but starts with links to people you're unlikely to find interesting.

• Grace Segers: [07-20] Can Barbie have it all.

• Alissa Wilkinson:

  • [07-20] In the beginning, there was Barbie.

  • [07-20] Oppenheimer is an audacious inquiry into power, in all its forms.

Idrees Kahloon: [06-05] Economists love immigration. Why do so many Americans hate it? Well, economists think growth can be infinite. More practical souls ask: where are you going to put it all?

Dylan Matthews: [07-17] The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn't destroy humanity: "The founders of Anthropic quit Open AI to make a safe AI company. It's easier said than done."

Matt McManus/Nathan J Robinson: [07-21] Are we in the grip of an 'American cultural revolution'? Christopher Rufo thinks it's already happened, but he's belatedly fighting back in his book: America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Sounds like good news, at least until I read the fine print:

The "revolution," in Rufo's telling, is comprised of -- wait for it -- diversity programs at colleges, Black Studies departments, protests against police brutality, and corporations that tweeted pro-BLM platitudes in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing. His evidence for dangerous revolutionary changes in our society consists of things like the appearance of the term "institutionalized racism" in the newspaper.

Since "the radical left conquered everything," you might wonder if Rufo is smuggling his missives from jail or some cave, but he's actually been appointed by Ron DeSantis to the board of trustees of New College. I know Robinson's made it his life's worth to debunk the so-called thinkers of the right, but why bother with one this hallucinatory?

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-21] Roaming Charges: Political crying games. He starts with the Congressional smackdown of Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) for identifying Israel as "a racist state" -- a reaction so shrill Jayapal wound up voting for a Resolution proclaiming that Israel is "not racist or an apartheid state" and that "the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel." No doubt such eternal fealty will be tried repeatedly as Israel's state lurches farther and farther to the right.

St Clair offers two quotes, one from Prime Minister Netanyahu ("Israel is not a state of all its citizens but rather, the nation state of the Jewish people and only them") and former PM Ehud Barak ("who says that the current government is 'determined to degrade Israel into a corrupt and racist dictatorship that will crumble society'"). When it does, bank on Congress to pass another near-unanimous Resolution reassuring Israel of America's eternal submission. Israel is no longer an ally. America has become its vassal.

The only argument I can imagine against Israel being a racist state is to question whether Jews are a race. While that has been a common claim in the past, it makes no sense to regard Jews as a race in America or Europe. However, in Europe, government-issued identity cards specify who is a Jew, and who is not, with the latter group subject to further distinctions. And those cards determine the rights you have, and how you are treated by the state, and probably how you are treated by many other organizations. Maybe there's a fancier word for that system, like ethnocracy, but if you're an American, that system sure sounds like racism. And if you know anything about South Africa, you'll probably see affinities to their since-abandoned system of Apartheid.

St Clair also mentions on RFK Jr's attack on Biden for "threatening Israel with ending of the special relationship between our two nations," and his pledge, "As President, my support of Israel will be unconditional." And he quotes Nikki Haley: "The U.S.-Israel alliance is unbreakable because Israel's values are American values." I've long felt that American neocons were jealous of Israel's freedom to bomb their neighbors (and their own people; I'd say "citizens" but they aren't recognized as such) with no fear of repercussions, but I'm not sure most Americans actually share those values. Which ones they do share are hard to pin down, especially given that the most vehemently pro-Israeli Americans are hoping for a rapture which will, or so they believe, consign all Jews to hell. But if you're pro-Israel enough, you never have to worry about being tagged as anti-semitic. (Just consider RFK Jr.)

St Clair also includes more than you want to know about Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town," including a contrast to the late Tony Bennett, whose experiences in small town America included the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march.

More links related to the above:

• Jonathan Bernstein: [07-20] Here's what's wrong with Jason Aldean's vision of America.

• Julia O'Malley: [07-19] Starving orcas and the fate of Alaska's dispapearing King Salmon.

• Jonathan Ofir: [07-20] Yes, Israel is a racist state.

• Tori Otten: [07-21] Republicans rush to defend Jason Aldean for racist song filmed at lynching site.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [07-20] Herzog's bland speech shows Israel still has great power in DC. Also from before the speech: Richard Silverstein: [07-14] Israeli President Herzog to address joint session of Congress: "A kindler, gentler version of Israeli apartheid."

• Pram Thakker: [07-21] Never enough: Now Republicans want to censure Jayapal for Israel comments.

PS: While American politicians are tripping all over themselves to swear allegiance to Israel, note that American elites are starting to have second thoughts:

• Max Boot: [07-23] Israel's biggest security threat is Benjamin Netanyahu.

• Thomas L Friedman: [07-23] Only Biden can save Israel now.

Tweet from No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen:

Marjorie Taylor Greene warns Joe Biden is trying to "finish what FDR started" by trying to address problems related to "rural poverty," "education," and "medical care." She warns it's similar to when LBJ passed "Medicare and Medicaid."

The White House responded:

Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families.

This may prove to be the silver lining in the right-wing bubble: that they can no longer hear themselves when they say things that are incredibly unpopular.

Biden also responded by using Greene as narrator for a 30-second political ad.

I've been reading Peter Turchin's End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which is a comparative history of several millenia of revolution and civil wars, attempting to glean some quasi-scientific insight into the evident disintegration all around us. Thumbnail histories going back as far as Nero's Rome are always interesting, but his conceptual framework is rather oddly framed if not plainly wrong. He sees two forces that drive societies to the brink of disintegration. Mass immiseration is widely recognized as one. But his main one is what he calls "elite-overproduction," by which he a fractious rivalry between multiple aspirants ("elites," if you must, but limiting that term to the political arena). Whether this is caused by too many elites or simply by weak governing structures is less clear. If sheer numbers of princes were the problem, you'd expect Saudi Arabia to be the most fractious country in the world today, which it plainly isn't.

Given the key concern of immiseration, and his identification of a "wealth pump" driving it, much of Turchin's current political analysis is quite reasonable. But then I ran across this (pp. 219-220):

The Democratic Party has controlled its populist wing and is now the party of the 10 percent and of the 1 percent. But the 1 percent is losing its traditional political vehicle, the Republican Party, which is being taken over by the populist wing. Tucker Carlson, rather than Donald Trump, may be a seed crystal around which a new radical party forms. Or another figure could suddenly arise -- chaotic times favor the rise (and often rapid demise) of new leaders. Earlier I argued that a revolution cannot succeed without large-scale organization. The right-wing populists intend to use the GOP as an already existing organization to group power. An added advantage is that control of one of the main parties offers them a non-violent legal route to power.

Two fairly staggering problems here: if the Democrats are the party of the 1%, how come most known one-percenters are big Republican donors? And how come Republicans campaign for them -- especially with tax cuts, deregulation, and anti-labor measures -- so shamelessly? Given this, it's especially bizarre to paint the Republicans as opposed to plutocracy. Sure, they pander to prejudices and exploit the fears of some people who have not fared well under plutocracy, but where are their programs to shut down the "wealth pump" and offer help to reduce immiseration?

It is true that some of the very rich hobnob with Democrats, that many Democrats are very solicitous of their support, and that Democrats like Clinton and Obama have rewarded such benefactors handsomely -- including doing very little to slow down the wealth pump. Some rich Democrats may see the need for sensible reforms -- Franklin Roosevelt was called "a traitor to his class," but his New Deal did much more than just rescue the poor from the Great Depression: it also saved the banking system, rebuilt industry, and built a large amount of infrastructure, which led to the post-WWII boom. Some may simply be thinking about how much damage dysfunctional Republican ideas could do. And some may simply regard the Democrats as offering better service for their interests.

Turchin's fascination with Tucker Carlson may be excused as he wrote this book before Fox fired him. Still, I have to think that part of Turchin's confusion lies in his overly broad notion of elites, which at various times he divides into economic and credentialed classes. The Democrats have made gains among the latter, mostly because the Republicans have turned savagely against education and expertise, especially science. Still, characterizing this latter-day know-nothingism as "counterelite" conflict ignores who's really in charge, functioning mainly to deflect blame where it is due.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Too late for an introduction.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: Seems like a relatively tame week for evil, but there are always examples.

• Aaron Blake: [07-15] Indictment paints tale of Chinese interests and 2016 Trump campaign: This doesn't strike me as anything Trump was culpable for, but does offer a lot of juicy details on how influence peddling works in and around political campaigns. That "Individual-1" is James Woolsey just confirms that he's a sleazebag, which you must have already suspected.

• Philip Bump: [07-14] The staggering scale of Donald Trump's speaking fees.

• Ryan Cooper: The GOP's Tommy Tuberville problem: "The Alabama senator's blockade of military promotions reveals the party's real position on abortion."

• David Dayen: [07-14] Jim Jordan misfires in attacks on Lina Khan. Or, per Bradley Blankenship: [07-15] Corporate America really doesn't like FTC chair Lina Khan challenging . . . corporate America.

• Ed Kilgore: [07-15] Tucker Carlson hijacks Christian right confab in Iowa.

• Joan McCarter: [07-16] Greene owns McCarthy, and he doesn't even realize it: And the picture of them cuddling is much cuter than one I cited a couple weeks ago.

• Nicole Narea:

  • [07-13] The GOP's anti-FBI turn, explained. I have to chuckle a bit. Where where these principled opponents against politicization of the FBI when Hoover was targeting antiwar and civil rights movements?

  • [07-14] Iowa has implemented one of the strictest abortion bans in the US. The latest poll in Iowa showed that 61% supported abortion rights, but this is what you get when you elect Republicans.

• Li Zhou: [07-14] How Republicans turned a must-pass defense bill into an "extremist manifesto". Republicans have this bizarre idea that the US military should be a captive training ground for their future militia soldiers. There certainly are examples of right-wing fanatics with military backgrounds, in part because access to guns is a recruiting tool. But the military is also the most thoroughly integrated organization in America, and the importance of, for lack of a better term, wokeness hasn't been lost on their officers. But also, military service is one of the few occupations where public service is respected and admired, which is one reason many ex-military people are running for office as Democrats. Even the Supreme Court carved out an exception for the military from its recent ruling against affirmative action, citing "national security." For more on this:

  • Dan Balz: [07-15] House Republicans wage 'woke' culture wars with the military.

  • Robert Schlesinger: [07-13] Far-right Republicans' radical, bigoted attack on the Defense bill: "Even the military isn't safe from the GOP's war on wokeness."

  • Tessa Stuart: [07-10] Republicans push to strip abortion access for veterans.

• Alex Skopic: [07-13] The Espionage Act is bad for America -- even when it's used on Trump: Sure, I agree. I also think drug possession laws are bad for America, and should be repealed. If somehow the Espionage Act got repealed, I'd be happy to pardon anyone convicted under it, as I would anyone convicted under drug possession laws, including Trump and the Rosenbergs (not that we can bring the latter back to life). Until then, I don't much care. After all, Trump had plenty of opportunity to pardon people convicted under this act (or charged, like Julian Assange), and never did. He was too busy pardoning his cronies and fellow creeps.

Biden and/or the Democrats: Necessarily a grab bag, but we're probably stuck with it.

• Eric Levitz: He's one of the better writers at New York Magazine, but I find a lot to quibble with this week:

  • [07-11] Biden's unpopularity is more mysterious than it looks. Returns to the subject of his previous piece: [07-06] It makes sense that Bidenomics is unpopular (so far), admitting that "the unpopularity of both Biden and his economy are stranger than I'd previously allowed." I find both arguments unconvincing, but I'm not sure I got them right. One problem is that lots of things are only explicable with statistics, but they don't carry the same weight as experience. And even experience is subject to interpretation. By all objective measures, the 1980s were a great decade for me, but I didn't credit Reagan with any of that, and in fact I blamed him for a lot of problems that hadn't really materialized yet, but which seemed all but inevitable given his policies. If you expect the economy to go to hell when a Democrat or Republican takes over, it isn't hard to find evidence that you're right -- especially given that both have primarily given us more inequality.

  • [07-08] The 'greedflation' debate is deeply confused: Sure, he scores easy points against straw men or hacks -- Robert Reich is an example -- not least by pointing out cases where profits all but automatically rise when external events impact supply. (If you're as old as I am, you may remember the "windfall profits tax" passed in 1973, when OPEC forced oil prices way up, inadvertently making American oil men suddenly much richer.) On the other hand, I don't buy the argument that monopoly couldn't be raising prices now because if it existed, it would have raised prices previously. There are lots of reasons for monopolists not to fully exploit their power the moment they get it, but to do so when others give them cover for rising prices (as well as the incentive kick of raising costs). But also, "greedflation" provides an alternative to the cruel notion that inflation should be fought by taking away people's jobs.

  • [07-12] The case for Cornel West 2024 is extremely weak. But the case would be stronger if Levitz hadn't made a wrong turn in his first sentence: Cornel West recently decided that the best way for him to advance economic and social justice in the United States . . . thereby marginally increasing the odds of a second Trump presidency." I'm not interested in debating the last part, which as Levitz admits is a very marginal concern. The mistake is in thinking that West's campaign is only about "economic and social justice," and only in the US. If that's all that's at dispute, I'd happily concede that Biden is already making progress in that direction, and that West, no matter how much more he wants to achieve, isn't likely to do much better. If that's all he wants, he, like Bernie Sanders, would be better off working with Biden. But West has another major plank in his campaign, one that is diametrically opposed to both Republican and Democratic leaders, and that is foreign policy, and the almost certainty that current policies will lead to more wars that will eventually prove disastrous both for America and for the world. [E.g., see this interview; also another interview by Chris Hedges.] Not many people understand that, but that's all the more reason for West to stand up and argue the case. My biggest worry for 2024 is that some Biden miscalculation will throw us into a war, that will trigger a rebound for Trump, who is already arguing that only he can save us from world war. The rest of the article consists of minor arguments with a pro-West piece by Lily Sánchez, which pale in importance to this issue.

  • [07-13] A new order blocking Manchin's pipeline could hurt the climate: "Restricting Congress's authority to exempt energy projects from judicial review would undermine the green transition."

  • [07-15] Can extremely reflective white paint save the planet? If anyone does come up with a plausible geoengineering scheme for cooling the atmosphere, Democrats (in particular) will happily throw a lot of money at it. This is an example of a small hack that's unlikely to scale significantly, but at least it involves spending more to avoid simply cutting back on energy use -- one solution that no one serious considers plausible.

• Nicole Narea: [07-14] Biden's new plan to forgive $39 billion in student loans, explained: "More than 800,000 borrowers are now eligible for student loan forgiveness." Something else for Republicans to try to ruin.

• John Nichols: [07-14] Jesse Jackson's politics of peace: "His 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns called for ending military interventions, supported disarmament, and sought deep cuts in Pentagon spending." Not even Bernie Sanders has done that since, which is more evidence of how deeply rutted our thinking is on the military. I've long thought that Jackson would have won the Democratic Party nomination had he run in 1992, but he didn't, to avoid blame for losing a second term to GWH Bush. I also thought that Clinton owed him big time for not making the run, and I expected some kind of payoff for the favor, but never noticed one.

• Timothy Noah: [07-12] You'll be very surprised who's benefiting most from Bidenomics: Not really. "Red states, not blue ones, are seeing the biggest income gains." Isn't it always like that? Poor states vote Republican, and better off states bail them out.

Climate and Environment:

• Matthew Cappucci/Tamia Fowlkes/Shera Avi-Yonah: [07-16] Relentless heat wave reaching maximum strength. Phoenix hit 118°F; Sardinia 117°F, Sanbao (China) 126°F. Miami has "seen a record 36 days in a row with heat index value above 100 degrees."

• Julia Conley: [07-14] Death Valley expected to record highest temp ever on earth as climate crisis roars.

• Rachel DuRose: [07-13] There's no such thing as a disaster-resistant place anymore. Photograph is from flooded Montpelier, VT, but other examples abound

• Benji Jones/Umair Irfan: [07-12] 3 reasons why this summer is so damn hot: How many ways can you say "climate change"?

• Umair Irfan: [07-13] It's even hot in Antarctica, where it's winter. Map shows "record-low early winter sea ice around Antarctica."

• Viviane Callier: [2020-04-08] The Story of More: Five Questions for the Lab Girl, Hope Jahren: I recently read the paleobotanist's memoir Lab Girl, so when I saw she had a book subtitled How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here, I dug up this interview, and eventually ordered the book.

• Nathan J Robinson: [07-14] The world needs many new climate activists right now: Interview with philosopher Henry Shue, author of The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now, who likens the task to "the World War II generation's duty to stop fascism."

Ukraine War: Conspicuous by absence is any news on how well Ukraine's "counteroffensive" is going, which suggests it isn't. On the other hand, NATO met, and continues to rack up milestones, which as usual mostly involve arms sales. Wake me when we see some diplomacy, because once again nothing else matters. The Gessen piece is historical, stuff you should know. It doesn't mean that Putin's invasion was in any way justifiable, or that sending arms to help Ukraine fend off that invasion is bad policy, but understanding America's deep culpability for the conflict would go a long way toward negotiating a way out of it. Conversely, not recognizing how this all went wrong prevents us from understanding the chief lessons of this war: that deterrence and sanctions are more likely to provoke war than to prevent it; and that not just the combatants but the world cannot afford for wars like this to go on and on.

• Connor Echols: [07-14] Diplomacy Watch: Sweden gets NATO, Turkey gets F-16s? Hard to see how anything accomplished at the Vilnius NATO summit last week brings us an inch closer to peace in Ukraine, while the continued posturing gives Russia all the more reason to hold out.

• George Beebe: [07-14] America's strategy for the NATO alliance is failing.

• Keith Gessen: [06-12] How Russia went from ally to adversary: A valuable bit of history, referencing on several recent books: Vladislav Zubok: Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union; Mary Elise Sarotte: Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate; Philipp Ther: How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War; Philip Short: Putin; and William Hill: No Place for Russia: European Security Institutions Since 1989, where the argument is that Russia was too big to integrate into Europe, so had to be pushed outside. These books cover ground I know well enough to have jumped ahead and wrote the following based on one anecdote, but the piece both confirms what I already knew and adds more telling detail.

  This starts with what we might view as the original disconnect: Gorbachev decided that the Cold War was a stupid and dangerous waste, so he offered not detente but cooperation; Bush saw Gorbachev's offer as a surrender, and demanded spoils, starting with East Germany. Americans saw the Cold War as not only justified but as victorious. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Americans saw more opportunities to press their advantage. Well into the Putin years, Russia tried to accommodate American hubris, but eventually they realized that American ambition was insatiable, and that it was increasingly directed at painting Russia as their enemy. That, after all, was key to NATO's eastward expansion. The pro-West coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the event that snapped Putin's tolerance, and the pro-Russian revolts in Crimea and Donbas allowed Russia to push back. This led to a significant rethink of how Russia could reassert its dignity, the invasion in 2022, and the current war quagmire. Of course, in the minds of Americans and their European allies and clients, this only confirms their fears and their commitment to deterrence as the only way to contain Russia. As this history makes clear, it didn't have to wind up like this. But the whole history of the Cold War was based on equally spurious assumptions and misreadings, lessons which given the vogue of triumphalism Americans have still refused to learn.

• Jen Kirby: [07-12] What Ukraine did -- and didn't -- get from the NATO summit.

• Anatol Lieven: [07-11] The case for Ukraine's NATO membership is the zombie that won't die: Written pre-Vilnius. Also Ivan Eland: [07-11] Ukraine should never be admitted to NATO.

• Suzanne Loftus: [07-13] Rise in German far-right reflects growing sentiment against Ukraine war: This should be accounted as a risk of continuing the war, of not moving as quickly as possible toward a negotiated agreement. Even if the far right only favors Russia as a fellow fascist, it is a bad look for the left to be seen as warmongers.

• Bryan Metzger: [07-13] Here are the 70 House Republicans who voted to cut off all US military aid to Ukraine. Lest you think that Republicans are turning to pacifism and/or isolationism, consider Kwan Wei Kevin Tan: [07-13] Matt Gaetz is back on the anti-Ukraine hamster wheel and floating the suggestion that Russia, not Ukraine, should be part of NATO so the organization can become an anti-China alliance.

• Nathan J Robinson: [07-11] Biden's provision of cluster bombs to Ukraine is illegal and immoral. So is the use of those same weapons, and for that matter mines, by Russia and Ukraine. That none of the three have signed international treaties banning their use is no excuse. But the US sending such weapons into a war zone does make it hard for the US to condemn Russia's use of them.

• Kelley Beaucar Vlahos:

  • [07-12] Riddle this: How many casualties are there, truly, on both sides of Ukraine war? Estimates are all over the place, and none of them are credible.

  • [07-14] Biden taps US reserves for NATO mission in Europe.

Around the world: But mostly Israel, again.

• Basel Adra/Juval Abraham: [07-10] The destruction of this Palestinian community was green-lighted by Israel's Supreme Court.

• James Bamford: [07-07] In Jenin, as elsewhere, Netanyahu knows he can count on Washington's complicity.

• Jonathan Guyer: [07-11] The Biden administration's remarkably unambitious approach to Israel: "What we learned from Ambassador Tom Nides's exit interview with the Wall Street Journal."

• Mitchell Plitnick: [07-14] As the US-Israel relationship is questioned, its 'shared fictions' remain strong. Refers to a column by Thomas Friedman: [07-11] The US reassessment of Netanyahu's government has begun.

• Jeff Wright: [07-16] Israel has turned all of Palestine into 'an open-air prison' to further annexation plans: So concludes the UN Special Rapporteur.

Other stories:

Kai Bird: [07-07] Oppenheimer, nullified and vindicated: Co-author of the biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bird explains the campaign to get the federal government to admit that they erred in 1954 in revoking Oppenheimer's security clearance, thus excluding the director of the Manhattan Project from any further role in atomic weapons planning. The vindication didn't come until December 18, 2022, and serves as another example of something Biden's administration has done that Obama's was too chickenshit to venture. I will quibble with the assertion that Oppenheimer was "the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism." Sure, he was the bigger celebrity, but the execution of the Rosenbergs was a graver miscarriage of justice. But Oppenheimer is a clearer example of how McCarthyism worked: it meant that anyone with a vaguely leftist past could be crucified as a traitor, and hardly anyone would dare come to their defense -- especially liberals who could themselves be tarred as "fellow travelers."

Jonathan Chait: [07-11] In defense of independent opinion journalism: "The 'hack gap' between right and left has been closing." I'm not convinced. I won't deny that there are hacks on the left, but they differ significantly from hacks on the right. For one thing, they're not all aligned against their partisan enemies. Take Chait, for instance, who only seems truly happy when he's attacking people to his left -- a considerable number, given his support for the Iraq war, his pimping for charter schools, and his "Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination." But even when leftists slip into hackdom, they still start with commitments to truth and justice that are utterly alien to the right. Then, by the way, there is the deeper problem of objectivity, which is impossible, making it a claim one should always be suspicious of.

Bob Harris/Jon Schwarz: [07-04] Carl Reiner's life should remind us: If you like laughing, thank FDR and the New Deal: "Their comedy descends directly from the Works Progress Administration." The WPA did a world of good for America, but much of what they did, especially in the arts, would be considered too frivolous, and in many cases too controversial, for "taxpayer" funding these days. Until that attitude changes, we're stuck with a government distinguished mostly by misery: how miserable its workers feel, and how miserable they make the rest of us.

Noasm Hassenfeld: [07-16] Even the scientists who build AI can't tell you how it works: Interview with Sam Bowman.

Oshan Jarow: [07-14] Poverty is a major public health crisis. Let's treat it like one. You'd think that such an argument would make people more inclined to support anti-poverty measures, but Republicans have aligned themselves pretty firmly against public health (or at least doing anything about it).

Jess Lander: [07-13] What led to Anchor Brewing's downfall? Sapporo, some workers say. America's oldest craft brewer is going out of business, supposedly a victim of Covid or maybe bad marketing, but I'm suspicious of two ownership changes: in 2010, owner Fritz Maytag, who had rescued the brewery after prohibition, sold to Griffin Group ("a local beverage consulting company," which smells a lot like private equity even if they're not a big name), and in 2017 Griffin pawned the carcass on to giant Japanese brewer Sapporo. It's easy enough to say that the latter didn't understand American craft brewers, and to illustrate this with various marketing blunders, but the deeper truth is that they simply didn't care, especially after the workforce unionized in 2019. After all, it's not unusual for big companies to buy up small ones only to shutter them, leaving the larger company with one fewer competitor (even if, as in this case, one that barely mattered).

Back when I worked for a high-tech startup, where most employees owned a small sliver of stock, I concluded that the world would be much better if employees owned a controlling share of stock, thus resolving conflict with management. (Unions, valuable as they are as a balance against management power, usually increase conflict, especially when they lack legal rights, as is often the case in the US; on the other hand, in Germany, where "co-determination" gives workers a stake in management, unions align more closely with management.) I'd like to see many policies that help facilitate employee ownership. One of the most obvious ones would be to allow employees to claim defunct businesses, wiping out the company's previous debt obligations, and providing funding for a fresh start. I have no doubt that a company like Anchor could be revived, if handed over to workers who care about the product and the customers, and about their own jobs.

Shira Ovide: [07-14] We must end the tyranny of printers in American life: "Printers cannot be reformed. They must be destroyed, once and for all." I had to include this because my latest printer purchase, a HP OfficeJet Pro 9010, is the biggest purchasing mistake I've ever made. They insisted that I use a wireless connection, and while it is recognized by my Linux computers, I'm not able to send any jobs from them to be printed. (At one point, this worked, but even then scans couldn't be uploaded, at least not using sane.) One main reason for the wireless connection is the need to reorder ink as part of a subscription program that was originally offered for $2.99/month, then immediately raised to $4.99/month. Of course, they haven't sent me any ink, because I haven't been able to print. I've owned several HP printers going back to their LaserJet II in the 1980s, but they've never pulled anything like this before. At last, as Ovide will be happy to hear, I'm learning to live without printing. Now I need to figure out how to stop paying for nothing.

Kelsey Piper: [07-12] Stop looking to Mother Nature for answers to resource questions: "The silly way we think about resource scarcity." Followed, sad to say, by an equally silly answer. While it's true that we haven't discovered every earthly resource we might eventually manage to exploit, that's mostly because people keep assuming that only very short terms matter: a "50 year" phosphorus find may be a big deal for 50 years, but 50 years is a pretty short time frame.

Sigal Samuel: [07-11] Scientists unveil the key site that shows we're in a new climate epoch: Title has it backwards: some scientists decided we are in a new climate epoch, then looked for a geologic site that could be used as a marker between the old Holocene epoch and the new Anthropocene. They found one, but it's not based on climate change. Rather, what it marks is the appearance of fallout from nuclear bombs testing, which increased significantly around 1950. On the other hand, human impact on the geostratigraphic record goes back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, eventually becoming dramatic enough to justify the term Anthropocene (much like the Cambrian is sometimes called the age of trilobites).

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-14] Roaming Charges: Clusterfuck in Vilnius. He's in a bad mood, starting with cluster bombs for Ukraine.

Two subjects I didn't want to say anything about are No Labels and RFK Jr. -- among other things, do I file them under Republicans, who they effectively work for, or Democrats? -- but if you want some well-reasoned analysis, turn to No More Mister Nice Blog:

• [07-16] Be very afraid of No Labels (unless you're Donald Trump).

• [07-16] I hope the mainstream media is proud of all the attention it gave RJF Jr.; also [07-14] Among dangerous bullshitters, game recognizes game; and [07-10] RFK Jr. doesn't have to try very hard to out-debate David Remnick.

An old piece I ran across, still worth mentioning:

• Alex Pareene: [2017-04-05] The long, lucrative right-wing grift is blowing up in the world's face.

• Rick Perlstein: [2012-11] The long con: Mail-order conservatism.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 9, 2023

I could write about Israel every week, as every week some new outrage occurs there. I don't, because I tire of making the same points over and over, and because what happens there is mostly out of sight and therefore out of mind. But since the current Netanyahu government took power, built as it is on ultra-religious parties tied to settler aggression and violence, a direction has clearly emerged, which if unchecked will lead to the end of Jewish Democracy -- let's face it, there's never been universal democracy in Israel -- and eventually to genocide against Palestinians. The ruling junta's plot to break the judicial system, which sometimes acts as a brake on the government's violence, has been widely reported, because it's been widely protested by Israeli Jews and their sympathizers in the US. The violence directed against Palestinians has received much less attention, mostly in the form of pieces like: [07-04] Israel targets West Bank militant stronghold in major operation. Of course, it helps to know that all Palestinians are considered "militants," and any place they're in the majority is a "stronghold." For a brief introduction to what happened there, see Jeffrey St Clair: [07-07] The meaning of Jenin.

I'll follow up with some more links, but first I want to be clear on several points:

1. From its inception in the 1880s, Zionism has always been a colonial settler project, pitched to gain sponsorship by an imperial power. The UK adopted the movement in 1917 to use against the Ottomans. After the British withdrew in 1948, Israel became independent, but still needed allies for arms (first Russia, then France, then the US).

2. With British protection secured, the Zionist community (Yishuv) was segregated and grew self-sufficient, buying land while marginalizing Palestinian workers -- the powerful Jewish labor union insisted on only employing Jewish labor. The adoption of Hebrew as their national language further isolated Jews from Arabs. When Israel was declared, a separate-and-unequal society and economy already existed, reinforced by law.

3. Like all settler colonialists, Zionists understdood that success depended on numbers. In the US and Australia, an overwhelming number of settlers (aided by disease and superior arms) relegated the few surviving natives to reservations. But settlers never had a chance in places where they were a tiny minority (like Haiti or Kenya), nor were settlers ultimately able to retain power in places where they held substantial power but were still a minority (like South Africa and Algeria). When the British withdrew, the Jewish population of Palestine was about 35%. Israel attempted to solve this problem by partition (a UN-approved plan they agreed to but didn't honor), war, and the mass expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from land they occupied during the war. The Palestinians remaining in Israel were accorded some rights, but lived under a military justice system separate from Jews, and faced economic restrictions.

4. Israel never accepted its borders. (There are still Israelis who believe they are entitled to the East Bank of the Jordan, to southern Lebanon, and to Sinai.) It obliterated the UN partition plan, by seizing West Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Western Galilee, among other expansions. It then launched wars in 1956 and 1967 to seize more land. After 1967, Israel developed a complex system of control over the occupied territories, but they kept wanting more, to which aim they permitted settlers to claim an ever-expanding array of select locations.

In 1967, Israel faced three threats -- Arab attack, Palestinian uprising, and world opinion turning against Israel -- beyond the obvious demographic trap, but could have navigated their way around them. The threat of Arab armies (mostly Egypt and Syria) was largely ended by Israel's 1967 blitz, which gave them territories that could be returned for peace -- as finally happened with Egypt in 1979, and almost happened with Syria in 2000 (before Barak got cold feet and/or greedy). Israel could have organized Gaza and the West Bank into an indepdendent Palestinian state, which could have repatriated refugees, thus degrading the PLO and its offshoots. And world opinion -- which would later tip the balance against South Africa -- was most sensitive to injustice, which Israel had started to address by ending military rule within the 1967 borders.

But Israelis weren't satisfied, and given the belief system they had painstakingly constructed, probably couldn't be. They had built a military juggernaut, and doubled down on it, becoming one of the most thoroughly militaristic societies the world has ever known. Meanwhile, the state supported the ultra-orthodox, who moved from apolitical to nationalist and beyond. The stratification of society and economy inflated Jewish pride, while grinding Palestinians into resistance, which could be met with half-hearted accommodation (like Oslo), or simply with violence. Such violence risks international support, but as long as the US blindly follows, Israel can manage the rest.

I'm not insensitive to the plight of Palestinians under Israel's yoke. Nor do I see this oppression as steady state. Under the current political regime, Israelis will continue to take land and livelihood from Palestinians. Moreover, they don't fear violent uprising. They welcome it as an opportunity for even more violent reprisals. No one can doubt that Israel has the firepower to commit genocide. And more than a few Israelis already have the mindset. With more violence, more will join them, until some tipping point, which is becoming increasingly likely -- especially if the US swings back to some Christian Zionist fanatic or fool. Donald Trump is certainly the latter, if not necessarily the former.

But I'm also bothered by what Israel's cult of dominance is doing to them. They have ordered a society which is racist at its core, which is profoundly unequal and unjust, which is maintained both by psychological manipulation and brutality. That's no way to live. (Late in his life, Ariel Sharon admitted as much, not that he did anything about it.) As a result, Israelis are doomed to struggle and suffer, finding themselves increasingly out of step from the rest of the world -- not least from Jews in the diaspora, who are finding it increasingly difficult to even recognize their brethren.

Injustices everywhere increase the odds of revolutionary violence spilling into further war, which is a big reason -- even if sympathy and solidarity doesn't move you -- to worry and warn against them. However you measure such things, Israel is one of the most unjust nations in the world today. It's also one of the most heavily armed, so it's not like world opinion can do much if they snap. But the threat I worry even more about is that the US will see Israel as a model, and seek to replicate its injustices at 50 times the scale. If you don't know who I'm talking about, start with the Republicans section below.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

• Walker Bragman: [07-06] How Ron DeSantis turned Covid denialism in a major political weapon: "The Florida governor's deadly anti-public health politics may just help him outflank Trump, who looks like a moderate in comparison." I wouldn't call Trump a "moderate" here. He just likes to have it both ways, taking credit for the vaccination program while through his own miraculous recovery testifying that we didn't really need it. If you want to dwell on a pivotal moment in history, consider what would be different if Trump had died in Walter Mead instead of bouncing back. His recovery, more than anything else, revitalized his campaign -- and, of course, allowed him to carry on with his post-election nonsense.

• Philip Bump: [07-05] You can't be more conservative than Trump when he defines conservatism.

• Margaret Hartmann: [07-06] Trump sours on Kari Lake because she's too Trumpy. Follow up to reports a few weeks back touting her as Trump's vice-presidential running mate. Not only does she add gender balance to the ticket, she's already proved she can lose Arizona. Highlight is a Trump "truth" on Lake's new book: "I know this book is great, because I wrote the foreword." Hartmann also wrote: [06-29] Melania Trump releases 'Yearning to Breathe Free' NFT. Biggest surprise here is that Melania seems to have gotten into the NFT racket earlier than her husband.

• Nicole Narea: [07-06] 4 revelations from the latest unsealed records in the Trump classified documents case:

  1. Prosecutors relied on security footage to build their case against Trump
  2. Trump didn't initially argue to prosecutors that he declassified the documents
  3. Trump's lawyers probably never looked beyond the storage room for classified documents
  4. We still don't know all the reasons why prosecutors believed that Trump still had documents in his possession

• Timothy Noah: [07-06] The truth about the GOP and the deficit: All they do is raise it. You know this, right?

• Robert Schlesinger: [07-06] Ron DeSantis's ghoulish embrace of American Psycho Patrick Bateman: "The increasingly hopeless presidential candidate is now clinging to a weird right-wing meme in hopes of winning over the misogynistic-sociopath vote." Aka, "the base"?

• Marianna Sotomayor/John Wagner: [07-07] House Freedom Caucus votes to oust conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Further proof that they eat their own. (Mo Brooks is a previous example, in case you forgot.) Admittedly, not as dramatic as the guillotining of Robespierre. More like a playground squabble. Also note: the most unflattering pic of MTG to date.

• Michael Tomasky: [07-07] Pay attention to what you see: Donald Trump is losing his marbles.

• Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [07-03] There are plenty of reasons to boo Lindsey Graham off a stage: "Let us count the ways." Provides many examples of Graham's warmongering over the years, but woefully incomplete, missing even such egregious examples as his insistence in 2008 that the US go to war with Russia over Georgia. But while he's a broken record on war, on many other subjects -- especially Trump -- the one thing he repeatedly shows us is how little thought occurs before he speaks. There's quite a bit on him in Mark Leibovich's Thank You for Your Servitude, where he is depicted as a habitual flunky who's always looking for a leader type to suck up to -- he's floundered since John McCain's death. (As Kathleen Parker put it: McCain's "death five years ago left his wingman without a lead pilot.")

  I still have this vague memory of a quote from him from back when he was still in the House (1995-2003), explaining that Republicans need to lock in as much power as possible while they still have the chance, because longer trends were working against them. That stuck with me as smart, cynical, and evil. But probably not an original thought, as those seem beyond him. Rather, as he's wont to, he just inadvertently spilled the beans about a plot that had already been hatched. Vlahos also cites: Jack Hunter: [2022-03-05] Sadly, Graham's call for Putin's assassination is not his craziest moment.

• Peter Wade: [07-09] DeSantis whines to Fox News that 'the media' is sabotaging his campaign. After all, that's his job.

Democrats: Like a shaggy old coat, the only thing protecting us from the life-sapping chill of Republican sociopathy. The latter should be so obvious by now that a Democratic rout in 2024 should be a lock, but still we worry.

• Jonathan Chait: [07-07] Non-white moderates are real Democrats -- not GOP pawns. My initial negative reaction here was to the hated word "moderates," which is used here for people (and not just non-whites) with a mix of conservative and liberal views. Some such views are reasonable and should be respected, while making an effort to bridge gaps and join forces.

• Michelle Goldberg: [06-30] Robert F Kennedy Jr and the coalition of the distrustful: This goes deeper than most critiques of Kennedy, noting how he personalizes conspiracism by starting with the assassinations of his uncle and his father. Paranoia works on the left as well as on the right, as there is little reason to trust official versions of most things. Other recent Goldberg pieces: [05-15] Whose version of Christian nationalism will win in 2024?; and [05-25] Ron DeSantis vs the 'woke mind virus'.

• Paul Krugman: [07-04] Biden versus the Bad News Bros, followed by [07-06] The rich are crazier than you and me.

• Jennifer Rubin: [07-07] A perpetually surprised media isn't doing its job: "When the media consistently gets the big stories wrong or fails to cover major economic changes, one would hope they'd look back to explain why their coverage diverged from reality and do a better job of covering actual developments rather than GOP talking points, process stories (how Biden is "selling" his plan) and polling." Also: "Democratic candidates would be smart to ask voters if they want to be ruled by judges who think constitutional law was frozen in the 19th century."

Courts and Law:

• [07-09] How abortion bans will strain an already failing foster system.

• Garrett Epps: [07-03] John Roberts's tiresome act: "The Supreme Court's conservative majority has taken a sledgehammer to precedent and balanced notions of judicial responsibility -- led by a chief justice who acts like he's just an ol' country lawyer."

• Michael Hudson: [07-07] Should there be a Supreme Court? Its role has always been anti-democratic.

• Ellen Ioanes: [07-09] A year after Dobbs, here's how states are legislating abortion.

• Ian Millhiser: [07-08] The importance of staying angry at the Supreme Court.

• Rob Pegorano: [07-07] A judge says Biden can't scold social media firms. That makes zero sense.

Climate and Environment: I can add that in Wichita, at least, we've been in a lucky bubble of nice weather, with major storm fronts bypassing us to the north or to the south. We did have three days over 100°F when the heat dome that's so impacted Texas spread north, but no record temps were threatened. We did have an exceptionally warm and early Spring, associated with a drought that really hurt the winter wheat crop (so farmers may dispute my use of "nice"). And while this week has brought a lot of rain -- still not enough to bring the year back to normal, but the farmers raising corn are optimistic -- we've been spared the severe weather that's repeated hit points to the east.

• Philip Bump: [07-07] Climate denialism has burnt to a crisp.

• Scott Dance: [07-08] Earth is at its hottest in thousands of years. Here's how we know.

• Jeff Goodell: [07-08] In Texas, dead fish and red-faced desperation are signs of things to come. Note that the author has a forthcoming book: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

• Benji Jones: [07-06] Yes, it's hot. But this could be one of the coolest summers of the rest of your life.

• Keren Landman: [07-06] 7 people have acquired malaria in the US. They're the first in 20 years. Well, in Florida and Texas. Just in time for Rachel DuRose: [07-06] We finally have malaria vaccines. The next hurdle: Distributing them.

• Ian Livingston: [07-07] Extreme heat wave bound for Phoenix and Southwest could be worst ever: "It's already hot and set to get much worse. Numerous heat records are at risk next week and probably beyond."

Ukraine War:

• Blaise Malley: [07-07] Diplomacy Watch: Washington may deny it, but looks like someone wants to talk to Russia. Still too early to declare that sanity is at long last breaking out, as details are few and veiled. The same "Track II" is discussed by Trita Parsi: [07-06] Former US officials reportedly open talks with Moscow. Also mentioned is Richard Haass/Charles Kupchan: [04-13] The West needs a new strategy in Ukraine: "A plan for getting from the battlefield to the negotiating table." Haass is outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, where Kupchan is a senior fellow. Both are wired deep into the foreign policy blob, but aren't speaking in any official capacity. Kupchan wrote on [02-24]: US-West must prepare for a diplomatic endgame in Ukraine. It doesn't take a genius to see that much, but feigned ignorance is still the word in Washington, and will be until it isn't.

• Jen Kirby: [07-07] The US's controversial decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, explained.

• Patrick Leahy/Jeff Merkley: [07-07] Here's why supplying Ukraine with cluster munitions would be a terrible mistake.

• Marc A Thiessen/Stephen E Biegun: [07-08] Only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine: I don't think I've ever linked to one of Thiessen's columns before. He's never right about anything, but this one is outrageously dumb that I couldn't help. Just give it a second's worth of thought. NATO's proposition offers two things: one is access to American and European arms; the other is the deterrence provided by its vow to jointly defend any member (at least attacked by a non-member, as Greece and Turkey found out). Maybe NATO membership would have deterred Russia from attacking, but that was never an option: before 2014, Ukraine was effectively aligned with Russia; and as soon as the government flipped in 2014, ethnic Russian enclaves divided Ukraine, with Donbas proclaiming independence and Crimea being annexed by Russia. From that point, Ukraine could buy arms from the West, but NATO membership was out of the question as long as borders were disputed. But it's too late now for joining NATO to deter a Russian attack.

  Until Ukraine settles its borders with Russia, NATO membership would mean two things: a declaration of war [*], committing NATO members to send troops into the fight to reclaim Ukrainian territory; and it would undermine Zelensky's command -- unless you think NATO would give up command of its own troops. And in theory it would commit Ukraine to defend other countries -- not that any of them are currently under threat, but there are always "war games" to participate in (which is pretty much NATO's speed -- it was never designed to fight real wars, just to parade about and feel self-important). Ukraine actually has the best of possible deals now: unlimited arms and support, while retaining its own control and autonomy.

  As for "after the war," NATO membership might be possible, but the prospect only gives Russia more reason to prolong the war. At best, it's a chip that Ukraine can exchange in negotiations, but there may never be negotiations if Zelensky holds it too tight.

  [*] Biden has said as much: see Katie Rogers: [07-09] Biden says Ukraine is not erady for NATO membership.

Israel, and elsewhere around the world: See the introduction above.

• Julia Frankel: [07-02] Israel to buy more F-35 fighter jets from US. Deal expands fleet by 50% and deepens partnership.

• Jonathan Guyer: [07-06] What the siege of Jenin signals about the future of Israel and Palestine.

• David Hearst: [07-05] As Israel smashes up Jenin, its British apologists are enabling this violence.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [07-06] Israel does not have a right to self-defense for its occupation: Amen. More people should be saying this. When Israel shoots a "militant" or bombs a building anywhere in the occupied territories, that's a crime. When a Palestinian shoots back, that's self-defense. I'm not sure that the latter is justified[*], but I am sure that the former is not. The UN muddles the situation when they say that rockets from Gaza and F-15s from Israel are both war crimes, so "both sides do it." Only one side occupies, blockades, and strangles the other. People have a right to fight back when that happens. They don't have a right to do it.

  [*] Not all "self-defense" is justifiable. "Stand your ground" may be defensible in some cases, but it shouldn't be a license to shoot just anyone. Also, a violent response to aggression may be bad tactics politically, but still fairly described as "self-defense." If someone had shot Bull Connor during a civil rights protest, I'd be tempted to acquit that person, but it would have messed with the political narrative.

• Nathan J Robinson: [07-05] If you support Ukrainian resistance to occupation, you must also support Palestinian resistance to occupation.

• Salman Abu Sitta: [07-05] 'Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing': How Zionism engineering the expulsion of Iraq's Arab Jews: Review of revisionist historian Avi Shlaim's Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew. As is well known, after WWII the Zionist settlement sent agents around Europe to organize the immigration of Jews to Palestine (mostly forbidden by the British). As independence approached, Israel also sent agents throughout the Arab world, in an effort to persuade or coerce as many as possible to immigrate. Iraq, which had been a home to Jews ever since the "first captivity" (the Babylonians), was a major target, and the exodus there was stimulated by acts of terror, mostly by Israeli agents.

• Philip Weiss: [07-04] Biden plays Netanyahu's lapdog -- but many in US are critical of Jenin onslaught.

• Mairav Zonszein: [07-07] From the Jenin raid to settlements, Biden is giving Israel's far-right government a green light.

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [07-09] Mixed progress in the fight against inequality and for democracy.

David Broder: [06-12] Silvio Berlusconi was the iconic political figure of our times: Trump, and maybe Putin, will be disappointed to have been overlooked, but if you've ever had trouble imagining what Trump might have been like if he had been twice as rich and not a fucking idiot, Berlusconi would fill the bill.

Sean T Byrnes: [07-06] The myth of Reagan's Cold War toughness haunts American foreign policy: I was just reminded of this in the Lindsey Graham articles above, where Graham's Reagan would be shooting Russian planes down. This is a review of William Inboden's book, The Peacemarker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. The book tries to pass Reagan off as a great diplomat. The reviewer is critical, and I'm more so, but sure, Reagan deserves some credit for overcoming his jingoism and letting the dissolution of the Soviet empire play out. But it's not like he learned any meaningful lessons from the experience. American hubris only grew after the Cold War, to no small extent out of the demented notion that Reagan's rhetoric and his military buildup had succeeded.

Sam Fraser: [07-06] Biden's disgraceful nomination of Elliott Abrams: It's not much of a reward: a seat on the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which can issue reports and make recommendations but has no policy role. The USACPD is variously described as non-partisan or bi-partisan (with four vacancies, is Biden obligated to appoint a Republican?). [PS: As the update to Corn, below, explains, Abrams was recommended by Republican congressional leaders to fill a Republican slot on the Commission. Still seems like Biden could have vetoed their recommendation, especially considering the embarrassment it caused.]

In any case, on paper Abrams looks like a perfect choice. He's had many titles involving "public diplomacy," and no one has more experience lying about human rights abuses by the US and its allies. Fraser mentions some of these, starting with the 1981 massacre in El Salvador that was the first of many things Abrams lied to Congress about. Fraser also reminds us that Abrams was finally convicted of lying to Congress in 1991, but avoided jail thanks to a pardon from GWH Bush. He also mentions Abrams' work for Trump to undo diplomatic relations with Venezuela and Iran. But for some reason he skips over Abrams' tenure under GW Bush, especially his role in dismantling the Oslo Accords and ending any prospect for a "two-state solution" in Israel. More on Abrams:

• Sarah Jones: [07-07] Why is the Biden administration rewarding Elliott Abrams? "It would seem the Biden administration is practically begging us not to take its human rights rhetoric seriously." This adds some details to Fraser's piece, but still doesn't address Israel.

• David Corn: [07-05] Why has Joe Biden just rewarded a guy who supported murderous war criminals?

• Jeet Heer: [06-07] Henry Kissinger, Elliott Abrams, and the rot of American foreign policy: "Our bipartisan elite is always willing to forgive war crimes by its made men."

• Caitlin Johnstone: [07-04] Presidents keep hiring Elliot Abrams because the US empire is just that evil.

• Branko Marcetic: [07-06] The nomination of Elliott Abrams is a stain on Joe Biden's human rights record.

• Charles P Pierce: [07-05] Congratulations to Elliott Abrams, hype man for murderous regimes past, on his new job.

I'm seriously baffled by the lack of reference to Abrams' role under GW Bush regarding Israel/Palestine. At the time, it was well known that he was in direct contact with Ariel Sharon, providing advice as well as cover for carving up the PA, especially the decision to dismantle settlements in Gaza and wall it up into a Hamas-run prison enclave. Afterwards, Abrams wrote a book about his role. I haven't read it, but I wrote up this Book Roundup entry at the time:

Elliott Abrams: Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2013, Cambridge University Press): A self-serving memoir in the manner of Dennis Ross and so many other failures, but Abrams didn't fail -- he was pure evil, and was remarkably successful not just at wrecking any prospects for peace in Israel's neighborhood but in making everyone involved, including the US, much meaner and crazier. No idea how much of this he admits to -- such creatures usually prefer to dwell in the dark.

Steve Fraser: [07-06] The return of child labor is the latest sign of American decline.

Eric Levitz: [07-06] It makes sense that Bidenomics is unpopular (so far): For one thing, I hate the term. New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, even Great Society were better. The only other president to get his own "omics" was Reagan, and hardly anyone ever understood what that was about. (Had they done so, they would have hated it.) Clement Attlee liked to speak of "leveling up" as a path to greater equality that didn't involve hardship. Biden's preferred term seems to be "middle out," which is less easily diagrammable, but at least graphic. The problem, of course, is that Biden's reforms, while more substantial than anything Obama or Clinton attempted, are still piecemeal, and depend a lot on companies to grow before the benefits trickle down to workers and the public. If that's a hard sell, it might help to offer greater rewards with more Democrats elected to Congress. And/or it might help to scare people about how much worse off Republicans would make us.

Annie Lowrey: [2019-10-21] $350,000 a year, and just getting by. We've heard variants of this many times before. They're always based on mistaking elite private services (e.g., education) for essentials and/or high savings rates based on the assumption that public programs like Social Security won't suffice.

Mark Oppenheimer: [07-07] In Tabula Rasa, John McPhee looks back at books not written. Since he turned 80, McPhee seems to have given up on writing about new travels and acquaintances, and settled for writing about writing, in this case "a charming, breezy collection of reminiscences about projects that didn't make it."

Adam Ozimek: [07-05] The simple mistake that almost triggered a recession: The "idea" is that the way to reduce inflation is to lay people off. I don't doubt that it works, but it's the worst of all possible solutions.

Nathan Robinson:

• [06-29] What 'economic freedom' would look like: Interview with Mark Paul, who "explains why we need an 'economic bill of rights' and why the right-wing libertarian conception of 'freedom' is bananas and won't actually make us free." Paul is the author of The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights.

• [07-07] How to explain socialism clearly in a way that actually persuades people: Interview with comedian and writer Danny Katch, author of Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Surviving the 21st Century, and several other books. For an excerpt, see his Socialism means expanding democracy to all of society.

Lily Sánchez: [07-08] Cornel West's presidential campaign deserves the left's solidarity: I wouldn't go that far, but it deserves some respect. West is going to be saying a lot of things that Biden won't say, and that deserve a respectful hearing. One hopes that if his arguments are persuasive, Biden (or whoever the Democratic nominee is) will adopt some of them. In any case, we should at least respect his freedom of speech, and see his campaign as an exercise thereof. Especially tiresome and disrespectful is the argument that he could act as a spoiler. If that happens, the only thing that proves is that the Biden/whoever failed to make the pretty obvious argument that a majority of voters would be better off with the Democrat than with the Republican. I know that no matter how much I might prefer West, it's extremely unlikely that I won't vote for the Democrat in 2024. But I'm not going to waste my breath denouncing West when there are Republicans that actually deserve taking down.

An alternative view comes from Ben Burgis: [06-13] Cornel West should challenge Biden in the Democratic primaries. This makes sense because we live in a two-party system, and the right has chosen one of those parties, which gives the rest of us only one realistic option. One result is that most of the left have aligned with the Democrats, as have most of the people the left needs to convince to achieve even the most obvious reforms. And sure, there are a lot of retrograde elements in the Democratic Party, but it's not beyond hope, or reason. One of my mantras is that the solutions are all on the left. Republicans are only interested in power, but Democrats are also interested in results, and that's what's moving them to the left. Well, along with Bernie Sanders, who by running with the Democrats has gotten a lot more open ears and doors than he ever could in a third party.

On the other hand, West may have his own reasons for running on the fringe. I can think of several, but no point speculating here.

Norman Solomon: [07-04] Patriotism and war: Can America break that deadly connection? I'd be happy just for a respite from the fireworks, which on the evening of the 4th were audible 50-100 times per minute for hours on end, well into the night. I always figured if you loved the land and the people you were good, but the never-before-permanent military became some kind of fetish after WWII. By the time I was a teenager, I was being told to "love it or leave it," where "it" was every stupid and senseless thing done in the name of "national defense." In that environment, the usual icons and tchotchkes like flags and anthems lost all their allure. Still, to the cultists who worship such things, our reluctance only proves that we should be chucked out (if not simply wiped out). On the other hand, we can still read the Declaration of Independence, which was what the day was originally about, as an aspiration we still need to work on. Meanwhile:

• Chantal Da Silva: [07-05] At least 17 mass shootings mark Fourth of July holiday weekend.

Too late for me tonight, but do take a look at the blog for No More Mister Nice Blog, especially First they came for the pro-LGBTQ retailers.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Started this early enough, but can't say as I brought much enthusiasm to it. Links are down to 63, words to 4752 (as I'm typing this, so a bit more [PS: now 68 links, 6061 words]). Main news was that the Trump Supreme Court finally (well, once again) lived up to our fears. It is, as Biden pointed out, still too early to resort to radical measures like expanding the court, but more and more people are grasping the need for bringing the Court back into the political mainstream. Still, the Court's partisan rulings aren't way out of whack given the still substantial extent of Republican power in Congress and in the States. What we need more than speculation about changing the Court is robust electoral victories. For instance, would the Court invalidate a law (as opposed to an executive order) that explicitly forgave student debt? Would the Court chuck out a voting rights act that applied to all states? Would the Court question a law which directs the EPA to regular carbon dioxide emissions? With this court, maybe, but until you pass the laws, we don't know. And until you get the power to pass such laws, you have no chance of expanding the Court (or impeaching a couple egregious examples).

I wrote quite a bit about Ukraine below. I should probably consolidate my recent points into something succinct (much more so than my still-useful 23 Theses on Ukraine). At the risk of being too schematic, let me point out:

1. It is important to understand what the US and NATO did to provoke the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and for that matter to provoke the regional revolts in Crimea and Donbas in 2014, not because they in any way justify Russia's reaction but because understanding is useful to figure out how to resolve the crisis.
2. And the extent of the current crisis is really huge, especially in Ukraine but also in Russia, and all around the world. And this crisis deepens with every day the war goes on. The long-term consequences are already unfathomable, and will only grow more so.
3. Russia is capable of fighting this war indefinitely, as long as its leadership believes necessary to secure its minimal goals, to the ever increasing destruction of Ukraine. Oh, and perhaps I should mention Russia's nuclear arsenal, which they are unlikely to use unless they get backed into a severe corner and/or get taken over by someone truly insane. Which, as far as we can tell, Putin is not, but he has gotten a bit wobbly.
4. We should recognize that Russia is "too big to fail." We all need Russia to be integrated into the world economy, and to participate in projects like limiting climate change. And to do that, we need Russia to have a stable political system (even if it doesn't fit our idea of democratic norms). Sanctions and disinvestment may have been reasonable responses to invasion, but are not things we should seek to maintain indefinitely).
5. On the other hand, Ukraine cannot afford to fight Russia indefinitely, even if the flow of arms is inexhaustible. The destruction of land and people have limits -- especially the latter, as it is unlikely that Ukraine's allies will send more than trivial numbers of volunteers to help Ukraine fight.
6. While I have no problem with arming Ukraine to defend itself against Russian invasion, we should recognize that its borders are arbitrary, and are ultimately subject to the will of the people who live there. A fair solution before the invasion would have been to let each disputed territory vote on whether it prefers to be part of Ukraine or Russia. The invasion and subsequent displacements have complicated this, but it should still serve as a basis for fairly resolving the conflict. Zelensky's refusal to negotiate until Russian troops retreat to their pre-2014 borders is not just impractical but wrong-headed.
7. Expansion is not a legitimate goal of NATO. The only legitimate goal is peace, and the only way to achieve it is to deëscalate the tension and hostility between Russia and the rest of Europe. On the other hand, Putin's actions would seem to justify both the existence and expansion of NATO, so it is largely up to him to show that NATO is no longer needed.
8. Once Ukraine is secure in universally recognized borders, it should be free to join the EU, NATO, and/or any other international arrangement. On the other hand, it is clear from the last year that Ukraine does not need to join NATO to obtain arms and other support necessary to defend itself. Such arrangements can continue, as long as Ukraine doesn't abuse them (e.g., by escalating the war against Russia).
9. The US and Europe need to fundamentally revise much of their strategic military thinking, based on its failure to prevent the current war. The practice of implementing sanctions against Russia has only aggravated the level of hostility (as well as preparing Russia to work around them). Sanctions are still better than armed reprisals, but only barely. They are more likely to provoke war than to deter it. Speaking of which, the idea of basing defense on deterrence is fundamentally flawed. It "works" primarily when the other country has no intention of attacking (as was the case between the US and USSR during the Cold War). Otherwise, it tends to incite wars, especially among relative equals, where there might seem to be an advantage to fighting now instead of later.
10. While the events leading up to Russia's invasion in no way excuse the invasion itself, those responsible for refusing to negotiate the current war are every bit as responsible for its continuation as Russia is for its launch. While it's certainly possible that Putin is in no mood to negotiate, that he has no opportunity is solely the fault of those in Kyiv and elsewhere who refuse to make the offer. I'm not saying that the US should force Ukraine to accept an adverse treaty, but that reasonable offers need to be entertained.
11. As A.J. Muste put it, the way to peace is peace. This war is what happens when you assign all power on all sides to people who don't have the slightest fucking understanding of that.

By the way, if you have some kind of publication and would be interested in reprinting the above on Ukraine, let me know, and I'll work with you on it. At present, this is a one-pass draft, with a couple extra points wedged in as seemed appropriate.

As usual, this is a quick scan through the usual sources. No doubt I missed much, but that's inevitable.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

• David Atkins: [06-26] Who's really in charge of the GOP? (Hint: It's not Trump): "Rabidly conservative base voters are the tail wagging the very sick dog." I wonder whether it's a good idea to blame the people for their leaders, no matter how much the latter pander to the baser impulses of the former. It's still the case that Republican legislators act with remarkable uniformity even when polls show the Republican base divided. That suggests that someone is coordinating, even if it isn't obvious who's in charge.

• Ryan Bort: [06-30] One thing GOP presidential candidates agree on: Marginalized Americans should suffer: "Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and other 2024 hopeful were quick to praise the Supreme Court's devastating decisions this week."

• Susan B Glasser: [06-28] Why Donald Trump was so mad at Mark Milley that he confessed to a crime: "The backstory on the tape that could get the ex-President convicted in the classified-documents case."

• Ginny Hogan: [06-29] Is Josh Hawley all right? "His new book Manhood advocates for a return to ancient values of family and masculinity. In reality, it reveals the Missouri senator's weird fixations." Another review of an easy target.

• Ed Kilgore: [06-29] DeSantis continues race to right with criminal-justice reform veto.

• Maria Laurino: [06-29] The right's new post-Dobbs panacea: The baby safe deposit box.

• Kelly McClure: [07-01] Trump thrilled with his appointed Supreme Court Justices -- calls them "gold": Although it appears that the ones who preceded him, Thomas and Alito, are the ones most closely tied to the gold. Or maybe the sleaze just hasn't caught up with the others yet.

• Heather Digby Parton: [06-26] Trump's messianic appeal can't be replicated.

• Christian Paz: [07-02] Florida's new immigration law previews a DeSantis presidency.

• Martin Pengelly: [06-27] Trump adviser suggested blowing up migrants' boats with drones, book says. The adviser is Stephen Miller. The book is Miles Taylor: Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump. The incident occurred in April 2018. Taylor was the Trump staffer who anonymously published A Warning in 2019.

The Supreme Court:

• Fabiola Cineas/Ian Millhiser: [06-29] The SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in colleges, explained. Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent policy. The idea was that, having discriminated so severely for so long, we should actively lean against discrimination. It was based on the principle that we can and should deliberately do things to affirm justice, and not just assume that the end of de jure discrimination will be sufficient. And it was a reaction to the slowballing of the "all deliberate speed" Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which by the late 1960s still had far to go. Whether affirmative action helped is hard to say: certainly there are cases where it did, but it was often implemented in bad faith, or in no faith at all, and often served as a rallying point for resistance, eventually allowing opponents to redefine their opposition as some kind of defense of civil rights. What hurts about the ruling isn't that now a few elite schools will have to work harder to show that they value diversity and oppose discrimination. Rather, what hurts is that the bigots finally won their case, even if they had to tone their racism down to do so. On the other hand, why not welcome the "race-neutral" rhetoric as vindication of the civil rights movement. And should those elite schools backslide, why not enforce the law and sue their asses for racial discrimination? Until this ruling, they could point to their affirmative action programs as a defense against such charges. Now they can't. Now they need to walk the walk, and should be held accountable when they fail.

• Daniel Boguslaw: [06-26] Samuel Alito's wife leased land to an oil and gas firm while the Justice fought the EPA.

• Kristine Bowman/Kimberly Robinson/Vinay Harpalani: [06-30] SCOTUS affirmative action ruling says military academies can still consider race in admissions.

• Kevin Breuninger/Chelsey Cox: [06-29] Supreme Court's Ketanji Brown Jackson blasts affirmative action ruling, clashes with Clarence Thomas.

• Jelani Cobb: [06-29] The end of affirmative action: "The scale of what has been lost is difficult to assess in the moment."

• Chas Danner: [07-01] Fallout from SCOTUS affirmative action, student-loan decisions.

• Matt Ford: [06-30] John Roberts begs the liberal Justices to stop criticizing the Court: "The chief justice doesn't like his conservative Supreme Court colleagues getting called out for judicial overreach." Of course, Roberts could limit the discrediting of the court, as he has done on occasion (if not nearly often enough) by moderating his opinions. The Supreme Court's right-wing majority is undermining the legitimacy of the institution, causing it increasingly to be recognized as a grave threat not just to democracy but to law and order. Dissent within the court at least shows that its rulings are not incontrovertible, and that the institution can eventually be saved from its current disease.

• Melissa Gira Grant: [06-29] The mysterious case of the fake gay marriage website, the real straight man, and the Supreme Court: The claimants were phony, the claim was imaginary, the case was hypothetical, and still the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in their favor, so anxious were they to exempt bigotry claiming to be religion from anti-discrimination law.

• Ankush Khardori: [06-29] The end of affirmative action is only the beginning: "Yet again, the Supreme Court's conservatives just get rid of precedents that they don't like."

• Jay Michaelson:

  • [06-29] What was affirmative action really about? And what happens now? One tangible effect of racism was income inequality, which was major before the passage of civil rights laws, and persists today. A big part of the problem was that we tried to solve the economic inequities of racism at the same time the nation as a whole was becoming -- and this was very much the effect of political policy -- more and more inequal. So while women, blacks, and other made marginal gains as compared to most white males, pretty much everyone lost ground to the very rich. And while the very rich is probably more diverse than 50+ years ago, that does the rest of us very little good.

  • [06-30] The Supreme Court sold its soul to the Christian Right.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [06-29] The other big decision handed down by the Supreme Court today, explained: The unanimous decision replaces one vague standard with another one, one that would appear to allow more businesses to reject employee requests for accommodations on religious grounds.

  • [06-30] The Supreme Court will decide if abusive spouses have a right to own guns.

  • [06-30] The Supreme Court's lawless, completely partisan student loans decision, explained: "The Court's decision in Biden v. Nebraska is nothing more than an exercise of raw power. It bears no resemblance to actual law."

  • [06-30] Neil Gorsuch has a problem with telling the truth: "Gorsuch hands a victory to the Christian right by making false claims about an important First Amendment case."

• Christian Paz: [06-30] The Supreme Court just struck down Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. Here's Plan B. "The White House hasn't given up on loan forgiveness."

• Li Zhou: [06-30] Anti-trans bills keep losing in court: "Kentucky and Tennessee are the latest states to see parts of gender-affirming care bans targeting trans youth blocked by a federal judge." Laws have also been struck down in Arkansas, Florida, and Indiana.

Climate and Environment:

• Kate Aronoff: [06-30] Texas GOP offers workers the freedom to boil alive: "A new bill rolls back city-level rights for workers to take breaks during hot days -- as Texas swelters through a punishing heat wave." As cities in Texas have become more Democratic, the Republicans in control of the state have been working ever harder to deny cities the right to govern themselves.

• Matthew Cappucci: [06-30] Derecho tears through Plains and Midwest, cutting power with 100 mph winds: "The storms traveled more than 600 miles from Kansas to Kentucky-Tennessee border."

• Umair Irfan: [07-01] The unusual factors behind the extraordinary heat across the southern US.

• Li Zhou: [06-29] Why Canada's wildfires will affect air quality for weeks to come.

Ukraine War:

• Blaise Malley: [06-30] Diplomacy Watch: How is the West responding to Prigozhin's abandoned revolt? No real change, although one should consider the chances that Russian leadership could change from bad to worse. As for diplomacy, which remains the only viable option, the Vatican sent its envoy to Moscow, where he was received politely.

• Matthew Blackburn: [06-29] The dangers of Europe's blindness to a long war in Ukraine.

• Chatham House Report: [06-27] How to end Russia's war on Ukraine: British think tank, founded 1920, aka The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Title is misleading, because the only end to the war they approve of is a smashing defeat of Russia, because, well, if we don't teach them a lesson, they in the future they might do something like they just did. The report attempts to dispell nine "fallacies," all set up as strawmen to be beat down, even though most of them are fallacious, or at least evasive, to begin with. The only thing that keeps this from being a plan for perpetual war is the "it's now or never for Ukraine" sense of urgent hawkishness: "A protracted or frozen conflict benefits Russia and hurts Ukraine, as does a ceasefire or negotiated settlement on Russia's terms." Protracted war hurts everyone, but most especially the people of Ukraine.

• Keith Gessen: [07-01] Could Putin lose power? Author turns to historian Vladislav Zubok and others for analogies, but doesn't find much, so falls back on: "Regime stability is a funny thing. One day it's there; the next day, poof, it's gone." Nothing here convinces me that this is a germane question. Even if Putin is replaced, the most likely scenarios favor someone already close to power, with the same basic commitments and views as Putin. This may promote someone more cautious and conservative, like Brezhnev replacing Krushchev. It may even be someone willing to make a tactical shift to end a debilitating war, as when Eisenhower replaced Truman -- ending the Korean War while planting seeds for future wars, especially in Vietnam. Less likely would be the rise of a Lenin, who accepted defeat then regrouped to become a still greater threat. Regime change rarely changes regimes in any fundamental way. If that's your best hope, you really don't have much. On the other hand, with Putin you have someone who still has enough national power to make a deal and make it stick. It should be clear now that the US could have negotiated better deals with Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein than they got by insisting on regime change.

• Masha Gessen: [06-26] Prigozhin showed Russians that they might have a choice: Talk about starry-eyed optimists: Prigozhin is a choice?

• Matthew Hoh: [06-30] Destroying Eastern Ukraine to save it. To take one example, Bakhmut had an estimated population of 71,094 in January 2022. The most recent estimate, much less precise, is ">500." The population of Mariupol, which fell to Russia relatively quickly, dropped from 425,681 to "<100,000." The total number of refugees from Ukraine has been variously estimated in excess of 8 million, plus millions more internally displaced within Ukraine, not counting an unknown number in Russia (one figure I've seen is 65,400). While the air war gets most of the press, the battle lines are mostly fought with artillery and small missiles, and the devastation is immense (e.g., Bakhmut). The longer the war drags on, the more devastating it will become. Zelensky's refusal to negotiate is based on the belief that Ukraine can regain its pre-2014 territory, but at the current rate, that will not only take years, it will deliver the "victors" nothing but a wasteland. By the way, Hoh includes a link to a [2022-03-15] piece by David Swanson: 30 Nonviolent things Russia could have done and 30 nonviolent things Ukraine could do. Number one was: "Continued mocking the daily predictions of an invasion and created worldwide hilarity, rather than invading and making the predictions simply off by a matter of days." Why is this sort of thing so hard for many people?

• Caitlin Johnstone: [06-29] Aging Iraq invaders keep accidentally saying 'Iraq' instead of 'Ukraine'.

• Frederick Kunkle/Kostiantyn Khudov: [07-02] Ukraine says Putin is planning a nuclear disaster. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plays is currently controlled by Russia, as was the now-destroyed Kakhovka dam. Both are in areas Ukraine is threatening to take back with its counteroffensive. It's not unusual for retreating armies to blow up things they're abandoning. (Both Russia and Germany blew up a Ukraine dam in 1941 and 1943, so the lesson is perhaps more vivid there.) By the way, the blown dam has reduced the power plant's access to cooling water.

• Branko Marcetic: [06-28] We shouldn't be cheering for state collapse in Russia: Starts by pointing out that Gen. Anthony Zinni in 1998 did a war game study of Iraq that concluded that removing Saddam Hussein would plunge Iraq into "bloody chaos," which is pretty much what happened five years later. Last week's mutiny revived dreams of regime change among hawks who dream of little else, but worse scenarios are possible if Putin should fall from power. Some links to older Marcetic pieces: [03-23] For Putin, Iraq War marked a turning point in US-Russia relations; and [06-13] Is the US military more intent on ending Ukraine war than US diplomats?

• Prisha: [07-02] CIA director calls Russia-Ukraine war 'once-in-a-generation opportunity' to recruit spies: Isn't this the sort of thing that you wouldn't say if it was true, because it would tip Russia off to the new spies, and that you wouldn't say even if it wasn't true, because it would give Russia cover for charging mere dissidents as being foreign spies? And wasn't Burns supposed to be the smart one among Biden's entourage of neocons?

• James Risen: [07-01] Prigozhin told the truth about Putin's war in Ukraine: "Yevgeny Prigozhin is a disinformation artist whose failed rebellion was marked by a burst of radical honesty." Risen also wrote: [06-24] Yevgeny Prigozhin's coup targets Putin and his "oligarchic clan".

• Mikhail Zygar: [06-30] Putin thinks he's still in control. He's not. Author of a book on the internal political dynamics of the Russian government (All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin) and the new (out July 25) War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, I linked to an interview with him last week. One of many premature obituaries, speculating about exposed weaknesses, his power "desacralized." The NY Times has been churning them out:

  • Andrei Kolesnikov: [06-27] Yesterday's Putin is gone.

  • Thomas L Friedman: [06-27] What happens to Putin now?

  • Serge Schmemann: [06-26] Prigozhin and the long and infamous history of failed Russian rebellions.

• Robert Wright: [06-30] Michael McFaul's dangerous muddle: The "influential Russia hawk, says Putin's handling of the [Wagner] crisis shows that fears of his using a nuclear weapon are exaggerated; Putin chose to negotiate with Prigozhin rather than fight, so we can assume that he wouldn't go nuclear if faced with big losses on the battlefield, including even the loss of Crimea." So, the more evidence that Putin is acting with sane restraint, the more recklessly we can trample over his "red lines"? One thing the hawks fail to understand is that evidence that Putin behaves rationally casts doubt on their picture of him as a tyrant with an insatiable lust for expansion. It actually suggests that he is someone who can be reasoned with, but to do so you'll need to match concessions to his, and not just beat him into submission. Unfortunately, the hawks are not just incapable of seeing possible compromises, they think the very idea of sitting down to negotiate is a sign of weakness. But it's really just a sign of contempt, a way of telling Putin you won't be satisfied until he's destroyed.

  The worst hawks, and McFaul is a good example, are obsessed with destroying Putin and Russia, and see Ukraine primarily as a cudgel to beat Russia with. That poisons their understanding of events. For instance, Wright writes:

  Yet McFaul seems to expect Putin, if cornered, to gracefully surrender -- because, according to McFaul, that's what happened last week. He says Putin "capitulated" to Prigozhin.

  Huh? Prigozhin had these demands: (1) Don't integrate Wagner's forces in Ukraine into the Russian military. (2) Fire Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. (3) Fire Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Prigozhin got none of these things. Plus, he got exiled! And the (probably few) Wagner troops who choose to follow him into exile won't be allowed to bring heavy armaments.

  The only concession Putin made was to withdraw his threat to prosecute Prigozhin for treason. That isn't much, seeing as how Putin has gone on to strip Wagner assets, and render Prigozhin powerless. On the other hand, he managed to avoid unnecessary bloodshed -- most likely, the "Russian blood" that Prigozhin claimed to have saved by accepting the deal was his own, although there always is a small chance that Russian soldiers would have refused to fire -- as they refused to support the coup against Gorbachev -- and that would have been disastrous. None of these things suggest to me that Putin is weak or foolish. He is, rather, someone who knows that his power and ambition have limits. I wish I could say the same thing for Zelensky, Stoltenberg, and Biden.

Around the world:

• Lee Hockstader:

  • [07-01] French cities are in flames over systemic racism.

  • [06-01] Germany has one politician who's serious about arming Ukraine: Meet Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who not only insists that Ukraine must win its war with Russia, but who also aims "for Germany to succeed in transforming its anemic military into a dynamic fighting force that could buttress a muscular European defense." So add that to your list of risks of not negotiating an end to the Ukraine war as soon as possible.

• Nicole Narea: [06-30] France's protests over a police killing, briefly explained.

• Michael D Swaine/Jake Werner/James Park: [06-29] How a reckless report could increase the chance of a crisis with China.

Other stories:

Phyllis Bennis: [06-30] A tale of two tragedies at sea.

Lindsey Bever: [06-29] President Biden uses a CPAP machine for sleep apnea. Here's what to know. Not sure this should be news, but good on him. I use a CPAP machine, and sleep much better for it, and never doze off during the day or evening, as I sometimes did before. I know many other people who use them. My father didn't, but suffered severely. He dozed off literally every evening in front of the TV. A cousin asked him how he decides when to go to bed. His answer: when I wake up.

Mark Hill: [06-29] A billionaire baseball owner failed to extort Oakland, so he's scamming Nevada instead: "John Fisher, an heir to the Gap fortune, is being handed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to screw over A's fans by moving his team to Las Vegas." Author notes that the move has "revived the national debate over public funding for private sports clubs," and adds that it's been proven that "the public never gets its money's worth." The debate it should stimulate is about expropriating the errant teams and redistributing ownership to the fans. That is, by the way, the reason the Packers are still in Green Bay, despite the fact that there are about 150 larger markets a greedy owner could shop the team to.

Elizabeth Kolbert: [06-26] How plastics are poisoning us: Draws on Matt Simon: A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. I personally cannot imagine how we could go on without plastics. (Kenneth Deffeyes, who wrote Hubbert's Peak about the impending "peak oil" crisis, believed that even after we ran out of oil for fuel, we'd still need what little was left to make plastics.) But we're hearing more and more about this, and it's not going to let up.

Mike Lofgren: [07-01] There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual -- only apologists for right-wing power: "From Burke to Buckley to Patrick Deneen, we've seen a 200-year history of defending the indefensible." Starts with the famous Lionel Trilling quote which dismisses conservative thinking as "irritable mental gestures." I wouldn't go as far as the title, but that's largely because I've never been comfortable calling myself an intellectual. Over the last couple centuries, intellectuals have mostly emerged from the conservative class, and have occupied rarefied positions in establishment-controlled institutions, which they rarely failed to serve. It's hard for me to deny that Friedrich Hayek, John Von Neumann, or T.S. Elliot were real intellectuals, even if they were often wrong.

However, as Trilling claimed, the dominant intellectual tradition in America was liberalism, which allowed for dissent and debate, and expected progressive (but not revolutionary) change. But as the Cold War heated up, and even more so with Reagan's win in 1980, conservative instincts gave way to reactionary ones, as the right sought to build its own politically charged intellectual world, from which liberals and worse would ultimately be purged. On the other hand, the more they insist that truth be politically theirs, the less credibility they have. Conservative public intellectuals like William F. Buckley often came off as empty rhetoric wrapped up in a gauze of snobbery -- a tradition that continues today with the likes of George Will and David Brooks, but has more often given way to even baser impulses. The subject here is Deneen, who wrote Why Liberalism Failed and has a new book: Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. You don't need an extended survey to see why such books don't deserve to be taken seriously (despite Deneen's real academic credentials), but Lofgren indulges you. Here's a bit:

Modern conservatives are hag-ridden by demons -- the fallen state of man, the hopeless decadence of secular humanism, the imminent collapse of Western Civilization (a term always capitalized). They are radical rather than pragmatic, undeterred by the mountain of evidence that tax cuts don't increase revenue, an unregulated market is not stable, and banning abortion won't make people more moral. They crave power, are as humorless as a commissar, and entirely lack introspection as to their own fallibility.

That the first line could easily have come from Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950; there must be earlier examples but this one is explicit) just reminds us how timeless the imminent demise of the upper class has been. The only thing that's changed of late is that the whines have become ever more shrill, and the proposed remedies ever more crude. I've tracked conservative thought as expressed in recent books (they're here, but so is everything else, so it might be useful to break them out into their own file), and they've gotten so deranged of late that it's hard to give them any credit at all.

Blaise Malley: [06-20] Do laws preventing Chinese from buying US land even make sense? I'm inclined to say yes, because I think local ownership is better than distant ownership, especially across borders. Sure, it doesn't help that these laws are being pushed by Republican presidential candidates -- Ron DeSantis (FL) and Doug Burgum (ND) recently signed bills to this effect -- combined with jingoistic anti-Chinese bile. I'd go further and say that companies should be employee-owned, and that land should either be owner-occupied or regulated (some form of rent control).

Timothy Noah: [06-30] Bidenomics is working -- here's why the business press won't say so: "To economics journalists, bad news is always just around the corner -- especially when a Democrat is in the White House." He blames the business press, but it's something deeper than that: "Democratic presidents consistently outperform Republicans on managing the economy. This isn't anything new. It's been true for the past century. Folks just don't want to believe it." Part of the reason, I think, is that rank-and-file Democrats are never really satisfied with the greater growth under Democratic presidents, largely because it rarely trickles down to their own bottom lines. And that's partly because the long-term trend has been toward greater inequality, and Democrats have abetted that trend, largely in pursuit of donors. On the other hand, Republican presidents always claim to be presiding over perfect economics, even with more or less major recessions in each of them. Lots of pundits want Democrats to brag more, but I doubt that's going to do the trick. Better to point out the myriad ways Republicans are plotting to screw virtually everyone over.

Alex Shephard: [06-24] He made a mess of CNN. Now he's ruining Turner Classic Movies too. "David Zaslav, whose Chris Light hire butchered CNN, is vandalizing TCM, a beloved cultural institution."

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-30] Roaming Charges: Strange coup. Admitting he has no idea how the war in Ukraine will end, he doesn't have anything definitive to add about Prigozhin's mutiny, but voice a thought that's also occurred to me: "I've always believed that fragging of officers by US troops did more to end the US's rampages in Vietnam than the peace movement back home." At the very least, fragging ended the draft, which meant that the war could no longer be fought the way it had been for ten years. Russia's use of "conscripts and convicts" (as well as private militias like Wagner, and he also mentions "Chechen paramilitaries under the control of Ramzon Kadyrov, who has repeated urged the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine," so another less than happy camper) has got to be a vulnerability. (On the other hand, note that Ukraine is also using conscription, much more aggressively than Russia is, but it seems to be less of a morale problem, most likely because Ukrainians are defending their own land from invasion.)

Nikki Haley tweeted this:

Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out.

Haley was born in 1972, by which time America had been divided by the civil rights movement and the racist reaction, by the Vietnam War and antiwar dissent, by women's liberation and a reaction that would soon kill the ERA, and by various cultural issues. She must have been pretty isolated to view those times as idyllic. I was born in 1950, before most of those fractures, in a period that could plausibly be remembered as a Golden Age of affluence and shared-interest, but the last word I would pick to describe my childhood is "easy." I mostly remember those years as demanding a lot of hard work. And threatening various terrors if we didn't work hard enough, or if we failed, or sometimes just for the hell of it. And we were fairly well insulated from the plight of the poorest. We never had to worry about where the next meal would come from, or that we might be evicted, or that we couldn't afford to see the doctor, in large part because we had little reason to fear that my father might lose his union job.

True that people today have things to worry about that we didn't. But that doesn't mean that we had it easy. As for Biden's role in ruining our country, I suppose that's easier to argue than it is to make a case that Haley or any other Republican could lead us into a promised land. But most of the things I can fault Biden for are cases where he simply went along with bad ideas other were pushing, and a number of those he seems to have grown out of. He's easy to mock, but he's the first president in my lifetime who's surprised me favorably. (To be fair, Haley surprised me favorably when she took those Confederate flags down, but she's not exactly playing that up in her campaign.)

St Clair's response to the Haley tweet:

Give Nikki credit. Perhaps she's talking about those easier, simpler days -- only a year ago -- when 10-year-old girls weren't forced to give birth to their uncle's child and 12 year-old boys weren't sent to work on the midnight shift sharpening cutting blades at the slaughterhouse.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

The Washington Post Editorial Board headline today is actually rather sensible (and hopefully sobering): Putin's humiliation means new dangers for Russia -- and the world. Still, given the dangers, maybe "humiliation" isn't the word we should be using. While the odds that Putin would resort nuclear weapons were never very high, it should be understood that they do go up with every humiliation, with every time he gets pushed back into a corner. The only way out of this trap is a negotiated settlement based not on the balance of power but on generally recognized principles, notably self-determination. And to bring that about, we still need a stable Russia. Blowing it up and replacing Putin with even crazier leaders isn't the way.

The Washington Post Editorial Board also wrote another piece that should be sobering but probably isn't: [06-24] Is there enough money to rebuild Ukraine? In it, they fantasize about getting Russia to pay for the rebuilding, which may be "an unarguable moral case" but is also a total non-starter. (Remember when LBJ promised to pay for rebuilding Vietnam?) Meanwhile, the fact that Americans are asking these questions suggests that they don't intend to pay either.

One problem is probably that the Post editors are reading their own war propagandists, like David Ignatius: [06-24] Putin looked into the abyss Saturday -- and blinked. From what I can gather, it looked like Prigozhin was the one who took the easy way out. But then the former Iraq War apologist has been writing pieces like this all along: [06-06] D-Day dawns for Ukraine.

As usual, it's impossible to get to everything. I do hope this is the last time I ever devote a whole section to Hunter Biden. Even with this much, I doubt I really got adequately into the Republican reaction, or their continuing obsession with him. Sure, he could serve as an example of why nepotism and influence-peddling are wrong, but that's not a point Republicans are going to make. Tax cheating and gun buying are things they normally celebrate.

Top story threads:

Trump:

• Adam Goldman/Traci Angel: [06-21] Former FBI analyst goes to prison for taking classified documents: "Like former President Trump, the former analyst was accused of violating the Espionage Act, taking home hundreds of classified documents and being unhelpful." Kendra Kingsbury was sentenced to 46 months jail for fewer charges than Trump is facing. Republicans like to say that if they can come for Trump, they can come for anyone. Looks like they got the order backwards.

• Margaret Hartmann:

  • [06-21] Trump pretends Jared and Ivanka didn't quit, he fired them.

  • [06-22] Kari Lake auditions to be Trump's next Pence and/or Melania: The latter is the more amusing prospect, but unlikely, given that Lake is actually older than Melania (by a few months; both are 53).

• Fred Kaplan: [06-23] When Trump promises to end the Ukraine War, here's what he really means. I initially filed this under Ukraine, but Trump has no plan as such. Rather, all he has is tremendous faith in his genius as a dealmaker, which is supported by absolutely nothing from his previous term as president. Kaplan cites Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China as examples. One problem with those cases is that his closest advisers (e.g., Pompeo and Bolton) didn't want deals, so they sandbagged every prospect, leaving him with nothing. Not mentioned are a couple cases where Trump's people did negotiate deals, which Trump agreed to but really didn't have any direction over. The first is a minor revision of NAFTA, fulfilling a campaign promise. He got a new name, plus a couple of trivial concessions he could tout as a victory. The other was the deal with the Taliban for a ceasefire and withdrawal of US forces. The Taliban was still free to attack Afghan forces. More effectively, they recruited so the moment the US left, Afghanistan fell into their hands. By that point the US was helpless, having put all its faith into an army and government who by then worked for the other side. What would have been much better was to negotiate an orderly transition, with promises of future support in exchange for protections (including a right to exile) of Afghans who had worked for the US-backed regime). But no American, least of all "strongman" Trump, could admit to such a defeat, so they concocted this charade that the Afghans would be able to survive on their own.

• Ed Kilgore: [06-20] Trump's Fox News interview exposed his real weakness: He "does not come across as a cunning predator avoiding the snares of his fearful liberal prey and plotting his revenge. He's more like a weak, confused old man worried about grubby law-enforcement personnel touching his golf clothes."

• Eric Lipton: [06-20] Trump real estate deal in Oman underscores ethics concerns.

• Ben Mathis-Lilley: [06-21] Donald Trump continues to twist what it means to be "conservative" into total incoherence: Good for him, too, because clear and lucid explications of "conservatism" are not just unappealing but repugnant to most people. However slipshod Trump might be on policy, he gets the appeal right: for him and his followers, conservativm is simply a matter of worshipping certain totems -- like God and country -- and hating people they deem unworthy. And while all conservatives agree with that much, no one else delivers hatred as unvarnished as Trump.

• Greg Sargent: [06-21] Trump's confession on Fox News should prompt Democrats to step up. Contrasts this with Hunter Biden case.

• Asawin Suebsaeng/Adam Rawnsley: [06-20] Team Trump suspects his former Chief of Staff is a 'rat': They're wondering what Mark Meadows is up to?

• Li Zhou: [06-20] Trump's Fox News interview was a defense attorney's nightmare.

DeSantis, and other Republican lowlifes:

• Ed Kilgore:

  • [06-21] House GOP forges ahead on wildly unpopular national abortion ban.

  • [06-22] Will Hurd bets GOP presidential voters want anti-Trump Texan: Former three-term Congressman, has proven appeal to center-Democrats, no chance with Republicans.

  • [06-23] Freedom Caucus mulls ejecting MTG for loyalty to Kevin McCarthy: I can imagine her hearing the news and breaking out in song: probably "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina."

• Ben Mathis-Lilley: [06-22] House Republican strategy of elevating unstable clown people reveals itself to have downsides.

• Catherine Rampell: [06-25] It's almost like the House GOP never cared about deficits after all: Almost?

• Beth Reinhard/Josh Dawsey: [06-20] Gov. Ron DeSantis used secretive panel to flip state Supreme Court.

• Maegan Vazquez/Marianna Sotomayor: [06-22] House votes to send articles of impeachment against Biden to committees: Introduced by Lauren Boebert, citing "dereliction of duty" and "abuse of power" over Biden's handling of the Mexico border, vote was 219-208, although some see this as a compromise among Republicans, where some are less gung-ho than Boebert to advance impeachment, and some just don't like her.

• Li Zhou: [06-22] Why Republicans are censuring Adam Schiff: After a first draft of this censure resolution failed last week, a Facebook Friend echoed Trump's directive that the 20 Republicans who voted against should be fired (primaried and purged from the GOP). My reaction was: "Not my party, but fire away." But I also wondered whether they realized what a favor their censure is doing for Schiff, who is by far the most conservative Democrat running for California's Senate seat in 2024. Certainly, testimony that Republicans hate him will get him more votes than his 2003 vote for Bush's Iraq War. [PS: See Ed Kilgore: [06-22] House Republicans' 'sham' censure was a gift to Adam Schiff.]

Hunter Biden: The president's son agreed to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and admitted to the facts of a rather dubious gun charge. The plea deal would give him three years of probation, plus a diversion on the gun charge, so it is expected that he will not go to jail. This should bring to a close one of the sillier outrages of the "lock her up" era, but Republicans have invested so much in it they can't bear the idea of letting go. Besides, what else to they have to run on? Certainly not policy ideas. On the other hand, it's hard to have much sympathy for him, even if you buy that he was railroaded. His influence-peddling schemes may not have been illegal, but probably should have been. (Had they been, that would wipe out a large swathe of Washington's upper crust, and good riddance to them.) And as a person, he seems to offer little to respect much less admire. But that, too, is hardly grounds for prosecution, and if it were, I can think of lots to put in line ahead of him.

• Andrew Prokop: [06-20] Hunter Biden's plea deal, explained: "The president's son will plead guilty to two tax charges and admit unlawfully buying a gun. Naturally, the right is furious -- that he wasn't charged with more."

• Norman Eisen: [06-22] Who wins in the Hunter Biden plea deal: Eisen sees it as a good deal for both sides. The prosecution gets a conviction that might have been hard to win in court, in what would certainly have been seen as a politically-driven vendetta. (Sure, Biden hasn't belabored that point as much as Trump has, but his case is at least as solid.) Biden gets a punishment he can live with, as well as some degree of closure (although the investigation of other possible crimes is still quite pointedly open).

• Matt Ford: [06-20] Republicans are smearing the Bidens like they did Hillary Clinton: It's like the old joke about lawyers: if you have the law, pound the law; if you have the facts, pound the facts; if you have neither, pound the table. The question is what sticks, and the Clintons looked much shiftier than Bidens ever did. On the other hand, the only ones who deserve to be grouped as a "crime family" are the Trumps.

• Ryan J Reilly: [06-20] Legal experts say the charges against Hunter Biden are rarely brought: "The federal statute making it unlawful for a drug addict to possess a gun faces court challenges. The misdemeanor tax charges also rarely result in jail time."

• Matt Stieb:

  • [06-21] Hunter Biden is tying off his legal loose ends.

  • [06-23] IRS whistleblower: Hunter Biden used dad's name in business deals: This is (a) disgusting, and (b) utterly unsurprising, given that it was pretty much his whole business plan. How this relates to the case isn't clear. Perhaps Henry Zhao can sue Hunter Biden for fraud?

• Tatyana Tandanpolie: [06-21] Experts say Hunter Biden deal is actually "harsh" -- and question when Trump will face tax charges.

Law and the courts: The Alito scandal broke last week, under Li Zhou below. It's beginning to look like Leonard Leo not only grooms conservatives for the Supreme Court, he hooks them up with billionaire patrons to keep them on the straight and narrow. And, let's face it, no one in recent history has been more narrowly partisan than Alito.

• Samuel G Freedman: [06-21] The DOJ barely scratched the surface of Minneapolis police thuggery. If the US had a sensible president at the time of the George Floyd murder, one easy step would have been to appoint a commission to provide an in-depth investigation of police prejudice and flouting of authority leading to such murders. Instead, Trump tried imposing martial law to suppress (and inflame) the demonstrations. (I've been thinking about this, while reading Karen J Greenberg's Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy From the War on Terror to Donald Trump, which dedicates a chapter to this episode.) While a commission report would go nationwide, this case study is a big part of what needs to be understood, and corrected.

• Kerry Howley: [06-21] Ginni and Clarence: A love story.

• Dahlia Lithwick/Michael Podhorzer: [06-21] Our major American misunderstanding: "It's been a long time since most Americans shared a values system. Maybe it's time to accept that." I'd say there's never been such a time -- it's not like you can reconcile slavery and abolition, which predates the Constitution, and you certainly can't deny that they represent different value systems. Although I will grant that the liberal consensus in the 1950s did an effective job of marginalizing the left, until the Vietnam War brought us back, not that right-wingers were going to let that consensus stand anyway. Of course, the authors have something narrower in mind: whether the DOJ stands for law and justice, or simply works for the president to help crush his political enemies. The latter is Trump's view, while Democrats -- at times to their own discomfort -- still believe in the former. Of course, we on the left always knew DOJ was out to get us, and blamed liberals for helping them along.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [06-20] One of America's top abortion rights lawyers was just confirmed as a federal judge: "Julie Rikelman, the abortion rights movement's top Supreme Court litigator, will serve on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit."

  • [06-21] The Fifth Circuit comes for the First Amendment right to protest: "A rogue federal court has spent years harassing a prominent civil rights advocate."

  • [06-22] The Supreme Court's latest opinion means innocent people must remain in prison.

  • [06-23] The Supreme Court may be running out of patience for Trump's worst judges: "The Court's decision in United States v. Texas stops rogue judges from seizing control of law enforcement."

• Li Zhou: [06-21] The Supreme Court has an ethics problem. Justice Alito's fishing trip is the latest proof. For quite some time, conservatives have fretted over Republican appointees to the Court drifting leftward. One way to keep that from happening is to keep the Justices closely bound to their sponsors. So no big surprise that Alito has his own version of the Scalia and Thomas scandals. Back in May, Zhou wrote: [05-05] The many ethics scandals of Clarence and Ginni Thomas, briefly explained. The report and other links follow:

  • Justin Elliott/Joshua Kaplan/Alex Mierjeski: [06-20] Justice Samuel Alito took luxury fishing vacation with GOP billionaire who later had cases before the Court.

  • Jonathan Chait: [06-21] Samuel Alito's ethics defense is even less persuasive than his legal rulings.

  • Jeet Heer: [06-23] Matchmaker Leonard Leo helps unite billionaires with Supreme Court justices.

  • Adam Liptak: [06-21] Justice Alito defends private jet travel to luxury fishing trip.

  • Dahlia Lithwick: [06-22] Justice Samuel Alito IS the salmon: "Calling this an ethics scandal misses the point."

  • Amanda Marcotte: [06-23] Samuel Alito scandal shows why conservative justices on the Supreme Court are so whiny.

Environment:

• Rachel DuRose: [06-22] How America solved its first air pollution crisis -- and why solving the next one will be harder.

• Evan Halper: [06-24] Heat is battering Texas's power grid. Are giant batteries the answer? "Texas is uniquely vulnerable to power failures because it cannot draw electricity from neighbors in a crisis. It is the only state in the contiguous United States disconnected from the national grid, a deliberate move to avoid federal regulation."

• Ian Livingston/Jason Samenow: [06-23] Rare pair of June tropical storms churn across record-warm Atlantic: "Bret and Cindy are the first pair of named storms to develop east of the Caribbean on record during June."

• Dan Stillman: [06-23] Texas heat wave is so bad, meteorologists are apologizing for it: "Dangerous heat expected to continue for at least another week, and possibly longer.

• Daniel Wu: [06-22] Meteorologist resigns, citing PTSD from threats over climate change coverage. Tempted to file this under Republicans, since you know who the threats are coming from.

Ukraine War: High hopes for Ukraine's counteroffensive have precluded any interest in diplomacy, but so far: [06-23] Early stages of Ukrainian counteroffensive 'not meeting expectations,' Western officials tell CNN. On the other hand, the head Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit Russia has employed especially at Bakhmut, has "declared war" on Russia's military command, which may signal a rebellion or even a coup against Putin. I cited this piece last week, by Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, which now looks prophetic. This is very much a developing situation. I'm citing some articles as it develops, but (as with the "counteroffensive") note that nobody knows very much. One thing that does seem clear is that Prigozhin's beef with the Russian command (and Putin?) isn't over whether to continue the war, but how to fight it more effectively. Lieven and Beebe ended their piece with: "however bad things are in Russia, they can always get worse."

PS: As of Sunday afternoon, the key events are: Wagner occupied Rostov (Russia's "southern command" center), and started to march on Moscow; Putin condemned them harshly ("Those behind the mutiny will pay"), then Belarus president Lukashenko negotiated a stand down, which will allow Prigozhin and those who revolted with him to relocate to Belarus.

• Connor Echols: [06-23] Diplomacy Watch: Brinksmanship on grain deal could frustrate Russia's friends.

• Isaac Chotiner: [06-15] Ukraine's counter-offensive, and what comes after. Interview with Marina Miron, a "postdoctoral researcher at the war-studies department, in King's College London." Not much detail here, but I'm not sure that details are that important. They key thing to understand is that this year's war is different from last year's war. Last year Russia was on offense, and Ukraine defense. Russia's blitz against Kyiv and Kharkiv failed, foiling Putin's hopes for a quick coup, leading to a strategic retreat. On the other hand, Russia's offensive from Crimea was fairly successful, including the hard-fought battle for Mariupol, securing a land corridor to Crimea (which otherwise is being supplied over the Kerch Bridge). This year, all Russia has to do is to defend against the much hyped Ukrainian offensive, and in doing so they have a fairly wide buffer territory they can afford to lose before Ukrainian forces approach the ethnically Russian enclaves that broke off from Ukraine in 2014. Most Ukrainians have fled this buffer zone, so the remaining inhabitants should be more favorable to Russia, as are the Donbas and Crimean zones. And most importantly, as Ukraine showed last year, it is easier to defend and disrupt than it is to attack. The prolonged battle of Bakhmut, where Russia prevailed, offers little hope that Ukraine will make major gains elsewhere.

  Zelensky has spent the winter promising NATO that if they give him enough weapons, Ukraine will win back all of the pre-2014 territory. That seems unlikely to happen, but few in the west were willing to sound a note of caution, least of all about the capabilities of their pricey weapons. The result is that the war will continue as long as the political orders on both sides remain entrenched, which could be a long time. Miron's main contribution here is to point out that even if Ukraine recovers territory, it will be nearly impossible to rebuild as long as hostilities ensue, and Russians would likely resort to some kind of guerrilla insurgency even if regular troops are withdrawn. Once again, the only solution is negotiation.

• Chas Danner: [06-24] Wagner's Prigozhin backs off after marching on Moscow.

• Valerie Hopkins: [06-25] One big winner of Kremlin-Wagner clash? The dictator next door. Don't bet on that. The last thing any dictator needs is an alien army with no one else to fight. (I imagine there are numerous examples, but the Vandals are the first to leap to mind.) Of course, it's also possible that Putin orchestrated the deal, and Lukashenko is just the patsy we always figured. Either way, he has little reason to sleep soundly, much less to gloat.

• Ellen Ioanes: [06-25] Russia's wild last 24 hours and the Wagner group's march to Moscow, explained.

• Jen Kirby:

  • [03-21] The Wagner Group, Russia's maybe-private army in Ukraine, explained: Background.

  • [06-24] Prigozhin's coup attempt unleashes chaos on Russia.

• Anatol Lieven/George Beebe:

  • w/George Beebe: [05-31] Prigozhin erupts: Has a Russian succession struggle begun? "The Wagner chief's furious attack on elites and the war could portend turmoil with potential to extend well beyond Moscow." Last line: "As an old Russian joke about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist should remind us, however bad things are in Russia, they can always get worse." [Cited last week, even more prophetic this week.]

  • w/George Beebe: [06-21] Rampant Russophobia takes us down a dangerous path: "Demonizing Russian culture and people only makes peace in Ukraine harder to achieve and plays into Putin's propaganda."

  • [06-25] Putin: Disastrous but indispensable for the system he created? "The Wagner insurrection has raised serious questions about not only the durability of Putin's role, but also that of the regime that he has built."

• David Remnick: [06-24] Putin's weakness unmasked: "How Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion exposed the Russian President." Well, not exactly. He draws on conversations with Mikhail Zygar, who wrote the 2016 book All the Kremlin's Men ("a best-seller in Russia and a well-sourced examination of Putin's rule and the inner dynamics of his ruling circle"), and has a forthcoming book, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, which is fast becoming obsolete. It's worth remembering that the word "dictator" implies much more autonomy at the top than is often the case. (Biden's recent slur on Xi Jinping and the furor it aroused should be another reminder.)

• Anton Troianovski: [06-25] Prigozhin revolt raises searing question: Did it harm Putin's staying power? Certainly the first question on the mind of American hawks dreaming of regime change, but way too early to answer. It looks to me like it does two things: one is that it immediately reduces Russian troops in Ukraine, at a time when Ukraine's "counteroffensive" is ramping up; the other is that it should shortly bring an end to the acrominiously divided Russian forces command. Any student of war will tell you that divided command is a recipe for disaster, so Russia may emerge in better shape -- though much still depends on whether Russian command is really as bad as Prigozhin alleged. My guess is that in the short term Putin can rally support, but the stakes of losing Ukraine are growing more severe.

• Joshua Yaffa: [06-24] The Wagner Group is a crisis of Putin's own making.

Sunday morning, Max Blumenthal tweeted: "Everything we said about Russia yesterday was an insane lie or completely wrong, now check us out on the White House ex-propaganda minister's show today." He's referring to "Inside with Jen Psaki," where the guests constitute a war council: Michael McFaul (former Ambassador to Russia), James Stavridis (Admiral), Anne Applebaum, Elissa Slotkin (Representative), and Nancy Pelosi (House Speaker Emerata). So the "we" isn't meant to include Blumenthal, but most likely it applies to him as well -- he has spent the last year attacking Ukraine and military support from US/NATO so exhaustively it's hard to draw a line between his stand against the US-led empire and his willingness to repeat Russian propaganda. But it's easy to imagine these five going gaga over the prospect of a revolution against Putin, even from the right -- something they have little conception of, despite the fact that Putin's harshest critics have always come from that direction -- then their disappointment when Prigozhin called the whole thing off. Whiplash is a risk of cheerleaders for politicians who can spin on a dime. I'm always reminded of the poor Communists who woke up one day finding they had to defend the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

[1] Blumenthal quotes Applebaum as saying: "Yet even the worst successor imaginable, even the bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be preferable to Putin, because he will be weaker than Putin." Weaker, but still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.

Around the world: Indian president Narenda Modi visited Washington last week, which occasioned much agonizing over India's human rights record, and Biden's willingness to overlook it. That actually strikes me as respect due to leader of another nation -- respect that the US, with its compulsion to divided the world up between friends and foes -- rarely shows. Which doesn't mean that the parties weren't up to no good.

• Ben Burgis: [06-22] Israelism is a powerful indictment of pro-apartheid indoctrination. Quotes a critic of the film complaining, "There is no mention, for instance, of the UN role in the creation of Israel, Arab aggression at the birth of the state," blah, blah, blah. True that the UN passed one resolution approving of the partition of the British protectorate of Palestine, but there is no reason to treat that as some sort of immaculate conception. While Israelis lobbied for the resolution, and cited it in their Declaration of Independence, they immediately discarded its borders, and moved to claim Jerusalem (an international zone per the resolution), as well as expelling Arabs from Jaffa (a Palestinian enclave surrounded by Israel). Then Israelis murdered the UN mediator. The UN never sanctioned the explusions that Palestinians know as the Nakba. The UN Security Council passed resolutions after the 1967 and 1973 wars that Israel gave lip-service to but never honored (although Egypt and Jordan eventually did, and Syria negotiated a peace deal that Israel ultimately rejected). The "peace offers" that Palestinians supposedly rejected were never made in good faith, but the Oslo Accords, which Arafat did accept, were wrecked by Israel. Still, I doubt the film dwells on all that history, when the case against Israel's denial of basic human and civic rights to Palestinians today is so clear cut, and really so shameless.

• Melvin Goodman: [06-23] Netanyahu takes aim at US diplomacy again: Over the last several weeks, I've seen reports that Biden is close to an agreement with Iran to restore the JCPOA deal that Obama negotiated and Trump scuttled. I haven't bothered reporting them because they're meaningless until announced, and the likelihood of that happening is slim given that Israel remains opposed -- it beggars belief why, suggesting that Israel would much rather prop up Iran as a mortal enemy (something that has never been true, either under the Shah or the Ayatollahs) than see its stated concerns actually addressed -- and Israel exerts such influence over American politics that it's unlikely that Biden would dare. The thing is, while Israel can afford pricking at Iran, the US actually does have good reason for negotiating friendlier terms. Non-proliferation matters, but more immediately pressing is Iran's ability to block oil traffic through the Straits of Hormuz. There's also the matter of Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq, which Israel periodically attacks, and could hit back at American troops there. Biden must also realize that pushing Iran into the embrace of Russia and China isn't helping. He also must realize that after the US military failed so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, a military threat against Iran would be several steps beyond stupid. But to move forward Biden would have to reassert the importance of American interests over Israel's.

• Jonathan Guyer: [06-23] Why the US is selling India so many weapons: "Prime Minister Modi visits the White House, and arms deals follow." It's almost like the sole determinant of US foreign policy is arms sales. India has most often bought arms from Russia, which is part of the reason India has refused to support US sanctions against Russia. But one can see the thinking as more than an immediate cash grab. But arms sales may be a lever both to divide India from Russia and to align India against China.

• Ellen Ioanes: [06-25] Guatemala's elections can't undo years of government corruption: Not to mention coups, most directed or at least sanctioned by the US.

• Achal Prabhala/Vitor Ido: [06-01] Next pandemic, let Cuba vaccinate the world. Uh, you think this pandemic is done yet? We're going to be taking boosters indefinitely. There's still plenty of world demand, especially if affordable. And Cuba's developments should remind us that we don't need billionaire patents to motivate people to develop life-saving pharmaceuticals. Even if the US companies shut down today, we could ride free on the rest of the world's research and development. Also the world could free ride on Cuba's investment. The embargo, which remains stupid and cruel, wouldn't stop others from manufacturing Cuban vaccines, assuming they got developed in the first place.

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [06-25] Why the RFK Jr., Rogan, Musk outrage machine doesn't bother Big Pharma. Also see Sarah Jones, below.

Tim Dickinson: [06-15] Is America already in a civil war? Interview with Bradley Onishi, author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism -- and What Comes Next. I have to admit that my eyes glaze over when I read these pieces about the Christian Right, given that my own faith is so lapsed that they seem to be from a completely different planet. The idea that anyone, much less than 30% of all Americans, believe in predispensationalism just boggles my mind -- even though I now realize that one of my more memorable conversations with my grandfather (1895-1965) was about exactly that. I never took him to be insane, but in that moment he was.

Andrea González-Ramirez: [06-23] One year without Roe: "All the ways abortion bans have affected pregnant people, providers, and clinics, by the numbers and in their own words." Also:

• Megan Carpentier: [06-23] The deadly silence since Dobbs.

• Grace Segers: [06-23] The end of Roe created two unequal Americas.

• Tessa Stuart: [06-22] Republicans are torching democracy to deny women abortions.

• Li Zhou: [06-23] The end of Roe, one year later: "The devastating impact of Dobbs, by the numbers."

Constance Grady: [06-22] When you can't separate art from artist: Interview with Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, a meditation on how to feel about art produced by people who turned out to have committed other reprehensible acts. (Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, and Bill Cosby are among the first-named, along with Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Roman Polanski.) I'm only bringing this up because my wife read the book, so it came up in conversations I never really answered. But I do have two core reactions: one is that I believe that works of art stand on their own the moment they are released (you might argue that copyrights and residuals argue differently, but I've never cared much for boycotts either); the other is that people are complicated but only turn monstrous when they take or are given power over others. So this isn't a dilemma I often engage in. I won't deny that some works of art embody their creator's damaged psyches in ways that merit little or no respect (e.g., Ayn Rand's novels). But the problem there is the art, not the artist (not that Rand, herself, wasn't quite some piece of work).

Greg Grandin: [06-21] Cormac McCarthy's unforgiving parables of American empire.

Sarah Jones: [06-24] Anti-vaxxers don't want a debate; they want a spectacle. Image here, with a mask reduced to the space of a Hitler moustache grafted onto a picture of Anthony Fauci, and the caption: "Stop! Faucism," is one way of saying, I'm so dumb, no point arguing with me! One of the most disturbing things about the Republicans (and one of the most Republican things about RFK Jr) is how completely, based on nothing but symbolism and bile, anti-vaxxers have taken over the collective consciousness of the GOP.

Naomi Klein: [05-08] AI machines aren't 'hallucinating'. But their makers are. Too broad a subject to simply endorse her take, although the core idea that AI will serve the powers that control it, which means that in a system of rapacious capitalism, that's what it will mostly be used for. The details are messier. The word "theft" gets thrown around a lot, which needs to be squared with a stiff critique of so-called "intellectual property" rights.

Eric Levitz: [06-23] The recession that didn't happen: Well, didn't happen yet -- Jerome Powell is still promising further rate increases, his pause explained by worry over failing more banks (the health and wealth of banks, after all, being the Fed's true raison d'être).

Nicole Narea: [06-22] What happens now that the Titanic submersible search has ended in tragedy. Not that you need more, but:

• Molly Osberg: [06-22] Who wants to die on vacation?

• Alex Shephard: [06-20 The media cares more about the Titanic sub than drowned migrants. E.g., [06-19] Up to 600 people drown off Pylos, Greece; [04-28] More than 200 refugees die off Tunisia coast in 10 days; [06-21] Dozens of people drown after dinghy sinks near Canary Islands; [02-26] Dozens of migrants found drowned off Italian coast. The contrast is further explained by Francois Furstenberg: [06-23] A tale of two disasters.

• Chas Danner: [06-23] What we've learned from the Titanic sub disaster.

Joseph O'Neill: [03-21] One man's foray into the heartland of the far right: Review of Jeff Sharlet's The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War.

Alex Park: [06-16] 'Freakonomics' was neoliberal bullshit: "A look back at the bestselling book franchise that taught people to 'think like economists,' by which it meant 'think cynically and amorally.'" The bestseller was written by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, and published in 2005, and sold over four million copies, spawning a sequel and other exploitations. I never read it, but I've read several other think-like-an-economist books (the most disturbing being Steven Landsburg's Armchair Economist, which left me haunted by "the principle of indifference"). I don't know about neoliberal, but I've been reading John Quiggin's Economics in Two Lessons, and I have little doubt that Freakonomics qualifies as what Quiggin calls "Lesson One economics": if it looks "cynical and amoral," that's because the theory doesn't allow for anything else.

Heidi Przybyla/Shia Kapos: [06-23] No Labels declines to reveal just who is funding its third party bid. I don't think I've mentioned this "centrist" group, with its plot to offer the distraction of a presidential candidate not aligned with either major party. I've had plenty of opportunities from Democrats who have been whining about third-party candidates on the left since Nader in 2000. This year their pet peeve is Cornell West -- for some reason they assume that they should pocket the votes of everyone on the left, even if they offer nothing in return. But this year, they're even more worried about No Labels siphoning away center votes they do bend over backwards to woo. After all, Biden in 2024 is the only possible protection against Trump (or some equally vicious MAGA maniac), and everyone should be willing to put up with a lot of waffling and compromise to keep that from happening. The fact that the money behind the operation is secret just adds to the air of conspiracy. As does the flirtation with conservative Democrats like Manchin and Sinema, which makes it look like they are prioritizing capturing Democratic votes. I suspect that, like most third party efforts, it won't ultimately amount to much, and is likely to serve as a protest outlet for more disaffected Republicans than Democrats, so may even help Biden. But in any case, the answer isn't to whine. It's to come up with a better campaign, and win so big the third parties are irrelevant.

Tweets:

Dr. David A. Lustig @drdave1999:

Ron DeSantis continues to drop in the polls, as Americans reject the chance to "make America more like Florida."

DeSantis miscalculated badly in believing that voters were looking for an authoritarian strongman with the social skills of a rabid wolverine.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Calling time on this, 10 PM Sunday evening. The most obviously missing story is something on the heat waves in Asia and Texas. Also, note that while the non-Trump Republican section is short, it's pretty ominous, and even worse things are lurking down in the miscellaneous section.

Top story threads:

Trump: He was arrested on Tuesday, pled innocent, and was allowed to leave. Republicans are so sure he's guilty they're already talking about pardoning him. Some "law and order" party they are!

• Ryan Bort: [06-16] Trump says his hand-picked chief of staff was 'born with a very small brain': If that doesn't narrow it down enough for you, I'll save you the jump and point out it's John Kelly, who "pretended to be a 'tough guy,' but was actually weak and ineffective." Trump also added: "In the end he was a 'mummy' who sat in his office and stared at the ceiling" -- actually, a pretty fair description of Kelly's photos from the period.

• Chris Cameron: [06-18] Barr says documents case against Trump is 'entirely of his own making'. Barr "also attacked his character in extraordinary language."

• Margaret Carlson: [06-13] Miami Nice: The Trump document plea deal we need. Anyone else would be looking for a deal here, but Trump seems to feel that his persecution is a political asset -- at least until the case goes to trial, and the risks start to become tangible. Whether Smith would give up a deal that would escape jail time -- about the best he could hope for -- is another story, especially because Smith can still file more charges. Plus Trump has his New York case, and probably one in Georgia. So I don't see this happening soon, unless Trump decides to punt on 2024, which has a slim but non-zero chance.

• Ed Kilgore: [06-13] Ramaswamy puts rivals on spot with Trump pardon pledge: So no cant about everyone being equal before the law. [PS: For Trump's response, see Adam Rawnsley/Asawin Suebsaeng: [06-15] Trump demands GOP rivals pledge to pardon him . . . or else. Pence still thinks such talk is "premature," but Nikki Haley spun around and declared herself "inclined in favor."]

• Eric Levitz: [06-13] The DOJ went easy on Trump for political reasons.

• Ian Millhiser: [06-13] Aileen Cannon, the Trump judge assigned to oversee his trial, explained. Cannon has a history of making rulings favorable to Trump that have been overturned on appeal, so it seems like a gamble to bring the case forward in her court. Also see: Tatyana Tandanpolie: [06-14] Jack Smith has a "backup plan" if Judge Aileen Cannon issues "Trump-friendly rulings": He could bring further documents charges in New Jersey, where Trump also kept secret documents. That doesn't sound like much of a plan to me. Regarding this, see Josh Kovensky: [06-14] The mystery of the Bedminster documents.

• Nicole Narea:

  • [06-13] Trump's post-indictment speech was a master class in alternative facts and false victim narratives.

  • [06-14] Why the Biden, Clinton, and Pence document cases don't compare to Trump's.

• James Risen: [] Trump is a predator who feeds on lackeys; and [] How many indictments does it take to bring down a cult leader?

• Nathan J Robinson: [06-12] Nobody can come up with a good defense of Donald Trump.

• Jon Schwarz: [] The special counsel who indicted Trump is no Democrat. They never are. Also: Chauncey DeVega: [06-17] Jack Smith is no hero: "The special prosecutor is a professional doing his job."

• Areeba Shah: [06-17] "DOJ really had no choice": Experts say non-lawyer Tom Fitton's advice horribly backfired on Trump: "Trump could have avoided charges if he listened to his lawyers. He trusted Judicial Watch activist instead." Trump's instincts are always political, and within limits he's pretty good at that.

• Alex Shephard: [06-16] Trump was begging to be indicted: "He passed on opportunities to bury his classified documents scandal, and now he's paying for the mistake."

• Matthew Stevenson: [06-16] Will Trump hang? Note that the death penalty is written into the law Trump violated (see St Clair, below, on how this was applied to the Rosenbergs), as well as long prison sentences -- which have been given for less egregious offenses than Trump is charged with.

• Jonathan Swan/Charlie Savage/Maggie Haberman: [06-15] The radical strategy behind Trump's promise to 'go after' Biden: "Conservatives with close ties to Donald J. Trump are laying out a 'paradigm-shifting' legal rationale to erase the Justice Department's independence from the president." Also note that DeSantis "rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent."

• Joshua Zeitz: [06-16] What Aaron Burr and Jefferson Davis tell us about the Trump indictments: Never say "unprecedented" to a historian.

DeSantis, and other Republican scum:

• Brakkton Booker: [06-18] DeSantis takes aim at Trump's signature criminal justice reform law. If all you're interested in is rhetoric, there's always room to pass on the right.

• Jonathan Chait: [06-16] Ron DeSantis wants more honoring Confederates, less funding for black history.

• Ed Kilgore: [06-15] Trump and DeSantis are on a mission to destroy the civil service: They believe that everyone who draws a paycheck from the government should be a loyal political operative. If someone isn't into them, they'll find someone who will carry their water. What they're pushing isn't just the return of the spoils system; it's the end of the very idea of public service.

• Kenny Stancil: [06-16] Republicans just annihilated local democracy in Texas: Gov. Abbott signed a bill "that drastically limits the ability of cities to enact progressive policies."

• Li Zhou: [06-15] The Republican attempt to censure Adam Schiff was a flop. The motion was tabled 225-196, with 20 Republicans shying away. [PS: Now Trump weighs in: Kelly McClure: [06-17] Trump calls for replacement of 20 Republicans who voted to block censure of Adam Schiff.]

Climate and environment, disastrous and new-normal:

• Ryan Cooper: [06-15] The climate home insurance apocalypse is nigh: Now "Farmers Insurance Group and AIG are halting home policy sales in Florida." One more reason to fear DeSantis's "make Florida America" vow.

• Umair Irfan: [06-16] The world's oceans are extremely hot. We're about to find out what happens next. Unprecedented heating in the Atlantic, and the return of El Niño.

• Norimitsu Onishi: [06-17] 'The fires here are unstoppable': "The first foreign firefighters to reach Quebec amid Canada's worst wildfire season on record said that some of the blazes were 100 times bigger than any they had ever seen."

• Lily Sánchez: [06-08] Air quality has long been overlooked, but it's a major environmental justice and public health issue.

Courts and the law:

• Adam Freelander: [06-15] Why the Supreme Court made this map illegal: The Republican gerrymander in Alabama and what's left of the Voting Rights Act.

• Ruben J Garcia: [06-08] The Supreme Court's latest ruling against unions is really aimed at the New Deal.

• Constance Grady/Anna North: [06-16] A damning new DOJ report accuses the Minneapolis Police Department of civil rights abuses.

• Evan Mandery: [06-16] How White people stole affirmative action -- and ensured its demise: "If elite colleges owned up to their racism, the Supreme Court might rule differently." What he's suggesting is that elite colleges should consider reparations. I'm not generally a fan, but I can see that making sense.

• Ian Millhiser: [06-15] The Supreme Court is doing something out of character: Obeying precedents: "A landmark statute protecting Indian tribes from cultural genocide is upheld."

• Nia Prater: [06-14] Grand jury indicts Daniel Penny in Jordan Neely's death: The charge is second-degree manslaughter. Sounds more like second-degree murder to me.

• Dylan Scott: [06-16] Big Pharma's legal fight to stop cheaper Medicare drugs, explained.

Ukraine War: The "counteroffensive" has officially started, but there's little reporting on it -- the best the cheerleaders of the New York Times can muster is: [06-18] Ukraine appears to make a small gain in the south as counteroffensive continues.

• Blaise Malley: [06-16] Diplomacy Watch: Roiling disagreements over Ukraine path at NATO: There hasn't been much diplomacy to watch for at least six months, as Ukraine has been arming for its counteroffensive, in the expectation that gains on the ground will offer leverage when they finally start negotiating. Meanwhile, pressing for NATO membership just confirms Putin's gravest fears and shores up Russia's resolve.

• Masha Gessen: [06-15] Putin's war hits close to home: "Russia has faced a series of recent attacks, but, in the absence of public space, military losses are personal tragedies, not collective experiences." More pointedly, attacks in Russian territory are more likely to rally support for Putin than to cause people to doubt his leadership. Includes some quotes from Jade McGlynn, author of the new book Russia's War.

• James Glanz, et al: [06-16] An inside job: "The evidence suggests Russia blew it up from within." I was inclined to keep an open mind on the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, but this presents a reasonably convincing case that Russia blew up the dam, causing extensive flooding along the lower Dnipro, and denying Ukraine a large hydroelectric power plant. In doing so, Russia sacrificed the power plant, the major water source for Crimea, and its occupied territory along the east bank of the river. The destruction is fairly described as an ecological disaster, and as a war crime -- one more in a war full of them. [PS: Robert Wright, who's followed this war more carefully than most, tweeted: "I'm calling bullshit on this Times piece. It makes no sense for Russia to have blown that dam."]

• Lev Golinkin: [06-13] The western media is whitewashing the Azov battalion: "Before Russia invaded Ukraine, these fighters were neo-Nazis. They still are." Not clear to me what "whitewashing" Nazis means, but this is an old story, one that got picked up by Putin as part of his rationale for invading, which is no more excuse for invasion than any of his others. It's much more accurate to say they're Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, which have practically everything in common with the Russian ultra-nationalists who fervently support Putin's war, except that they hate each other, going back to WWII, where the Russians fought the Nazis, and a faction of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, etc., saw Germany as their liberator from Russian rule. As long as Russia is fighting in Ukraine, I don't see any problem with them fighting for Ukraine. After the war, of course, they could be a problem, like the German Freikorps. Even in the run up to the war, Ukrainian nationalists made it harder to reach any sort of accommodation with the ethnic Russian minority, and thus helped trigger the invasion. After the war, they're likely to be a malign political force -- as ultra-nationalists are everywhere, but Ukraine is likely to emerge with a very powerful warrior caste.

• Greg Lane: [06-16] The real reason why Putin put Russian nukes in Belarus: I'm afraid that the "real reason" isn't very clear here. Has Belarus offered itself up as a Russian hostage? Is Putin hinting at nuclear aggression without blowing anything up? Is he setting Belarus up to demonstrate use of a tactical weapon while preserving a slim thread of deniability?

• Anatol Lieven: [06-14] Ukraine's paradoxical lessons for the future of warfare: Hard for me to comment on the technical military aspects Lieven focuses on, particularly "a kind of belated vindication of the 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA) of the 1980s." (Fred Kaplan wrote about RMA in Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, published in 2008.) I think it's too early -- Ukraine's gains to date can just as easily be seen as strategic retreats by Russia -- to enthuse about the superiority of American weapons and methods. I have no doubt that Ukrainian soldiers are more motivated than Russian soldiers, but wonder whether that advantage will hold up when/if Ukraine enters ethnic Russian strongholds in Donbas and Crimea. Meanwhile, the territory between the front lines and the strongholds could easily change hands, as it's of little value to Russia (but also few Ukrainians remain there to welcome liberation). Lieven doesn't bother with what I think of as the bigger lessons: the strategy of deterrence has completely failed; the threat of sanctions has had little effect on Russia; and while European unity against Russia has never been stronger, few beyond the US and Europe share that instinct (suggesting that the US and Europe aren't widely trusted as sympathetic powers).

• Branko Marcetic: [06-13] Is the US military more intent on ending Ukraine war than US diplomats? I think it probably is true that top military brass is more acutely aware of the limits of military power than the jingoistic neocons Biden has chosen to stock his State Department with.

• Alfred McCoy: [06-15] Is China the only way for peace to come to Ukraine? "It's beginning to look as though Beijing has the means, motivation, and ultimate self-interest to end the war." [Originally on TomDispatch.]

• David Sacks: [06-16] Will upcoming NATO summit launch forever war in Europe? "Pressure is mounting to make some sort of formal declaration over Ukraine's membership at meetings in Vilnius next month."

Around the world:

• Jonathan Guyer: [06-15] Why are there still American troops in Syria? Guyer calls it "classic forever war." My first riposte was: to give Iran target practice. Really, I think we're just too embarrassed to admit that Assad won, and is now the only ticket for peace and any kind of future. The mission was always doomed, in large part because it was always schizophrenic, which is what you get when your so-called allies are primarily at war with each other.

• Keren Landman: [06-16] Uganda's anti-gay law will hurt all Ugandans: "When identity gets criminalized, everyone gets hurt."

• Dana Priest: [06-16] Khashoggi's widow sues Israeli firm over spyware she says ruined her life.

• Sina Toossi: [06-14] Iran's Supreme Leader opens space for possible nuclear deal.

• Nick Turse: [] Climate change and conflict are wreaking havoc in Somalia.

Other stories:

Dean Baker:

• [06-07] Owning up to mistakes and pandemic deaths: As noted, the embargo of Cuba since 1962 has been an all-around failure. That it continues to hamper worldwide distribution of Cuba's affordable Covid-19 vaccines is one more problem, one that contrasts starkly with the massive subsidies the US has lavished on Moderna's pricey patents.

• [06-15] Biden's restrictions on oil drilling have pushed prices back up to where they were in the Bush administration: Irony alert (what "restrictions"?), but look at the chart: oil prices reached their absolute peak late in the Bush administration, before the economy cratered and took the oil market with it. I've long maintained that the dip had more to do with the financial collapse killing futures speculation than with unemployment reducing demand. Same thing happened with the pandemic in 2020, and since the Fed started increasing interest rates in 2022.

• [06-16] Will Biden's industrial policy create a lot more Moderna billionaires? It will unless it also addresses the gross inequality in power between companies and workers (unions would help; so would codetermination, which gives workers board representation; my favorite is worker-owned companies, which doesn't just tip the scales but blows them up).

Niccolo Barca/Tommaso Grossi: [06-15] The damage Silvio Berlusconi (1936-2023) leaves behind: "The notorious tycoon and former Italian prime minister is gone, but his toxic legacy remains." Before Trump, there was another billionaire who sought office to flamboyantly flount his ego. With his death (and his neo-fascist successor), I'm surprised not to see more on their analogies, including a stretch out of office before coming back, and various skirmishes with the law.

Ok, found one:

• Marina Catucci: [06-18] Was Silvio Berlusconi the "Trump before Trump"? Only in some ways -- but they're disturbing.

Zack Beauchamp: [06-15] What a new conservative call for "regime change" in America reveals about the culture war: Review of Patrick J Deneen's new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Deneen, a political science professor at Notre Dame, previously wrote Why Liberalism Failed in 2018. I grew up reading fairly radical critiques of liberalism, and only softened my view as liberals lost power and prestige and stopped being the ones chiefly responsible for American imperialism and instead became fair-weather defenders of people with little power that conservatives like to pick on. So I can imagine writing books with titles like these, but not this crap, which boils down to a program of seizing power for self-appointed right people and using that power to marginalize or suppress everyone else, resulting in a well-ordered utopia of well-behaved automatons. One problem with liberals is they cut fascists too much slack.

Frederick Clarkson: [06-17] "Unfriending" America: The Christian right is coming for the enemies of God -- like you and me. Inside the "New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement at the cutting edge of Pentecostal and Charismatic evangelicism, which is now the second largest Christian faction in the world after the Roman Catholic Church and the largest growth sector in American and global Christianity."

Fabiola Cineas: [06-17] The "anti-intellectual attack" on higher ed will take years to undo: Interview with Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), noting more than 50 bills in 23 states aimed at "chilling academic freedom." Could have filed this under DeSantis.

David Cohen: [06-16] Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the truth behind the Vietnam War, dies at 92. "Some called Ellsberg a hero and others branded him a traitor." Count me in the hero camp. As far as I know, there has never been any "top secret" document more in need of exposure than the deep history of mistruths and bad faith exposed in The Pentagon Papers. More on Ellsberg:

• Spencer Ackerman: [06-16] Daniel Ellsberg's heroism began with listening to the anti-war left.

• Ben Bradlee Jr: [06-16] Daniel Ellsberg's life beyond the Pentagon Papers: "After revealing the government's lies about Vietnam, Ellsberg spent six decades as an anti-nuclear activist, getting arrested as many as ninety times in civil-disobedience protests."

• Chip Gibbons: [06-16] Daniel Ellsberg, American hero.

• Morton H Halperin: [06-17] My reflections on Dan Ellsberg, a man who helped end a tragic war.

• Seymour Hersh: [03-08] My fifty years with Dan Ellsberg.

• Michael Hirsh: [06-04] Daniel Ellsberg is dying. And he has some final things to say. "The iconic whistleblower reflects on the urgent need for others to follow in his footsteps."

• Charlie Savage: [06-18] Why the Pentagon Papers leaker tried to get prosecuted near his life's end: "When Daniel Ellsberg was 42, a judge threw out Espionage Act charges against him. At 90, he sought such charges again in hope of challenging their constitutionality."

• Norman Solomon: [06-16] Daniel Ellsberg wanted Americans to see the truth about war: "In an interview before his death, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower urged the media and the government to be more honest about America's bombing of civilians."

Michael Hiltzik: [06-13] A farewell to James G Watt, environmental vandal and proto-Trumpian: Reagan's infamous Interior Secretary (1981-83) has died, at 85. His most Trumpian attribute was a loose tongue that repeatedly offended everyone but mining company executives, although it's worth noting that eventually he was (per Wikipedia) "indicted on 18 counts of felony perjury and obstruction of justice and accused of making false statements before a federal grand jury investigating influence peddling at the Department of Housing and Urban Development," which was settled when he "pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of withholding documents." More:

• Liza Featherstone: [06-16] Good riddance to the architect of the GOP's environmental culture wars.

Sarah Jones: [06-15] What the censors want. Same question raised by Jane Smiley: [05-30] What are the book banners afraid of? It's not just that they want to hermetically seal young people in a cocoon that celebrates the conservative order. "They are afraid of readers -- especially young readers -- learning the truth about humans, about American history, about, perhaps, their own lives." They talked less about banning books in my day, because it was effectively done before any schools could get their hands on contraband. My reaction was to seek out anything else I could find, and, well, look how I turned out.

Jay Caspian Kang: [06-13] What was Nate Silver's data revolution? I've sometimes wondered whether I should read Silver's book (The Signal and the Noise, 2014). I avoided statistics when I was a sociology major (much to my regret), but I've picked up a general understanding since then; even if I still lack technical skill, I have an interest in and feel for data. But scanning through the book sample on Amazon doesn't reveal much I don't already know. Nor is this piece especially enlightening, least of all about Silver's recent defenestration from FiveThirtyEight. On the other hand, it does highlight a new stats/gambling competitor, Split Ticket. Their Initial 2024 Presidential Ratings are almost exactly what you'd expect.

Ed Kilgore: [06-16] Why do so many Americans think Biden is doing a bad job? That's a good question. I'm afraid it boils down to Republicans never missed a beat in trashing Biden, Democrats rarely fighting back, and the media's predilection for bad news and/or controversy, and their lack of interest in context or complexity. It also hurts that Biden's not much good at speaking for himself. Context matters, because most of our current problems have been developing for decades, making change hard, especially given entrenched Republican power centers. Climate change is probably the clearest example, but workers have been losing ground since the 1980s, inequality has been increasing, the military has been growing (to no good effect), diversity has been increasing (along with a more virulent backlash). The net effect is a sense of decline, which Republicans rail against, blame and exacerbate, while Democrats craft weak reforms and try to exude confidence (without much conviction).

The easiest response here is to list the many ways Democrats are not as bad as Republicans, while glossing over the cases where there isn't much difference (foreign policy, especially the Ukraine War; support for the military; policing immigration; bailing out banks). Even there, it's possible to hope that Democrats will improve. But even where Biden has fallen short, the solution isn't to throw him out -- the only hope is to elect more Democrats. Related:

• Bill Scher: [06-15]l Republicans say inflation, crime, and immigration are out of control. The numbers disagree. Sure, but which story sounds more convincing? Even if you do understand that Democrats have done better, isn't there still room for improvement?

Ezra Klein: [06-18] 'What the hell happened to the California of the '50s and '60s?': Talks with California Gov. Gavin Newsom about permitting problems, especially environmental impact studies that are slowing down and often killing decarbonization projects needed to save the environment. While consideration of environmental impacts is important, it shouldn't be crippling, as is often the case. Republicans have made "permitting reform" a hot-button issue, with a view to pipelines and mines that are being held up, but it's also obstructing "green energy." Reading this, two thoughts came to mind: one is that California wouldn't exist as we know it had the water projects of the early 1900s had to pass environmental impact studies (one can argue whether that would be good or bad, but it's certainly big). The other is that the first principle of the New Deal was "do something." One looks back at the 1930s and marvels at how much they did, how fast and cheap it was. And sure, much of what they did was build dams, but they changed people's lives, mostly for the better. A progressive movement that can't do that is going to have a hard time surviving, much less flourishing.

Naomi Klein: [06-14] Beware: we ignore Robert F Kennedy Jr's candidacy at our peril: Useful if you're considering giving him a second thought. I read his 2005 book Crimes Against Nature: How George W Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy, which seemed solid enough, but in retrospect was an easy target. He dedicated that book to his then-wife ("the real environmentalist in the family"). He filed for divorce in 2012, and four days later she killed herself. He moved to Los Angeles, married an actress, and within months was railing against vaccines. As Klein documents, he went crackers after that, including his hate book (The Real Anthony Fauci, published by right-wing Skyhorse Publishing). One more point I'd like to add is that I really hate the idea of dynastic politics (and more generally the whole nepotism dynamic, and for that matter inherited wealth -- which better describes Trump than entrepreneur, not that new money can't be obnoxious either). Also on Kennedy:

• Lily Sánchez/Nathan J Robinson: [05-18] Robert F Kennedy Jr is a lying crank posing as a progressive alternative to Biden.

Eric Levitz: [06-14] Larry Summers was wrong about inflation. He argued that "we need two years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment" to contain inflation. Of course, he'd argue that it's still not contained, even if levels have dropped significantly. But the problem isn't just that Summers is often wrong. It's the ways in which he's wrong, and his obliviousness to the human toll that he argues for.

Jaclyn Peiser: [06-17] How Instant Pot went from coveted appliance to bankruptcy: Regardless of "post-pandemic trends," the real culprit is private equity, which robbed the company (Instant Brands) blind while saddling it with excessive debt.

Thomas Piketty: [06-15] The wealth of (some) nations: French economist, author of major works Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and Capital and Ideology (2020) as well as more pointedly political collections of essays, interviewed by Felicia Wong and Michael Tomasky.

Kelsey Piper: [06-14] Four different ways of understanding AI -- and its risks: I'm surprised this isn't illustrated with a simple four quadrant chart, where one axis is how important AI will be (really big to fairly minor) and the other is how useful or troubling it will be. The piece does mention four quadrants, but only focuses on the "big and good" corner.

I think the more important questions are whether access to AI will be restricted to enhance corporate profits, and whether the AI itself will be engineered to further corporate interests. Of course, the same thing can be said about software in general, and the line between crude deterministic software and AI is already rather blurry (e.g., in shopping for an electric toothbrush I found models that advertise AI, which almost certainly is far short of I). There are also questions of whether AI is subordinate to human decision making or autonomous, and whether it is able to command mechanical power (self-driving cars are a case in point), and therefore how fast it can act, or how hard it is to halt. The author's "four quadrants" depend a lot on these questions. Related:

• Faiz Siddiqui/Jeremy B Merrill: [06-10] 17 fatalities, 736 crashes: The shocking toll of Tesla's Autopilot.

Alex Shephard: [06-12] The rise of independent voters is a myth: Well, it feels better to think of yourself as an independent, as opposed to someone who blindly follows party choices you have little or no control over. Also, both parties share one major negative: both spend much of their time chasing donors, offering to do their bidding. And both parties are bound to the military and the residues of imperialism, even though we have nothing but sorrow to show for their last twenty (or, hell, seventy-five) years of belligerence. Democrats have the extra burden of having repeatedly ignored and undercut the interests of most of their voters. Republicans have the extra burden of nearly everything they try backfiring. So it's easy to see why many people prefer to distance themselves from such a dysfunctional system. But the self-proclaimed centrists rarely offer any sort of alternative. Rather, they embrace the worst of both parties, a muddle of clichés.

Alex Skopic: [06-13] How the lottery became a substitute for hope: I knew a guy who signed all his email with a definition of lottery: "a tax on stupidity." My quick take was that it's a tax on hopelessness. It offers people an extremely small chance of becoming rich, which could be seen as a good deal if your actual real life chances were even slimmer. But it also depends on people believing that becoming rich is the answer to their problems.

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-16] Roaming Charges: All the girls around him say he had it coming. Starts with a quote from the late Cormac McCarthy: "Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it." Then he mentions Trump, but just to point out he's no whistleblower (his counterexample is Julian Assange, who Trump's DOJ prosecuted, and Biden's is still after). Then: "When I think about the many victims of the Espionage Act, my thoughts immediately go to Ethel Rosenberg," who was convicted and executed not for treason but for "being engaged in a conspiracy to 'commit espionage.'" A crucial figure in that execution was Trump's old mentor, Roy Cohn, who personally lobbied the judge to sign the death warrant.

Trump fancies himself as the victim of a "witch hunt," but while he's earned a desire among many for vengeance, he doesn't grasp the most basic principle of actual witch hunts, which is less to punish the initial target than to smoke out more witches. Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible to point out how much McCarthyism had in common with the Salem witch trials -- two episodes in American paranoid thought that are now widely regretted (if not fully: one can imagine DeSantis setting up tribunals to interrogate witnesses -- "are you now or have you ever been woke?" -- and demand that they name names; and while none of the recent laws criminalizing aid and advice on getting an abortion specifically mention witches, the history there runs pretty deep; by the way, later down there's a Pat Robertson quote about the "feminist agenda" which lists "practice witchcraft" among other evils, like "leave their husbands" and "destroy capitalism").

St Clair shows a meme, where Trump says "In reality, they're not after me . . They're after you. I'm just in the way." But where was Trump when "the feds came for crack users, welfare mothers, immigrant families, striking workers, jaywalkers, whistleblowers, and medical pot users"? He was mostly cheering them on. "There are 2 million people currently incarcerated in US prisons and jails. There are 5 million formerly incarcerated people in the US. 20 million people have been convicted of felonies. 80 million have some kind of criminal record. They've already come for and gotten almost all the rest of us."

Then there's a quote from DeSantis vowing "We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress." St Clair:

Who knew the war on corporations would finally be launched because they sold t-shirts and beer to gay and trans people and not because they gouged prices, poisoned your drinking water, evicted you from your home, killed the Gulf of Mexico, made life-saving drugs too expensive to buy and turned the atmosphere into an air fryer?

Colin Woodard: [06-16] The geography of gun violence: Most likely interesting for the map, which was the subject of Woodard's 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. But the differences in gun deaths are striking (3.5 and 3.8 at the bottom, 12.2 in the Far West and 15.6 in the Deep South, and a few outliers even higher).

Notable tweet, from Dean Baker (linked to a Washington Post editorial you can chase down yourself):

Trump was completely right. He can shoot someone on 5th Avenue and the Washington Post would say that indicting him for murder endangered democracy.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 11, 2023

I see that Nathan Robinson's Current Affairs has launched a biweekly News Briefing via Substack. If the free first issue is anything to judge by, it's better than what I've been trying to do (e.g., below) over the last several years. Still, I stopped cold when confronted with the paywall (Substack's minimum $5 per month, or $50 per year). Nonetheless, I got an email within minutes saying, "You're receiving free posts from Current Affairs Biweekly News Briefing." (I did nothing more, but maybe they glommed onto a cookie, as I'm a non-paying subscriber to a couple other Substack newsletters. The way they do this makes it impossible for my wife and me to share Substack accounts, which disinclines me from doing anything with them at all.)

By the way, apologies for the paywalled content linked to below. My wife subscribes to a lot of stuff (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.), which I piggyback on, so I don't notice when it's not free. On the other hand, the titles usually work as an outline, and my comments are always visible, never joined to a shakedown or any other kind of scam. If Current Affairs (or anyone else) wants to fold stuff I write here into their own offerings, more power to them. Just don't charge me for it.

I continue to be bothered by my lack of progress on any other writing front, despite the relative ease with which this weekly compendium practically writes itself.

Top story threads:

Trump: I started collecting before the Trump indictments dropped, but that only partially obsoletes Andrew Prokop: [06-08] Trump's next indictment is looming -- and the evidence against him is trickling out. Prokop also wrote: [06-08] Trump says he's been indicted again: The Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, explained; and [06-09] The detailed, damning new Trump indictment, explained.

• Devlin Barrett: [06-11] Why Trump was charged on secret documents and Clinton, Pence were not: Actually, Trump (like Clinton and Pence) wasn't charged for illegal retention of documents returned. He was only charged for things that Clinton and Pence didn't do.

• Zack Beauchamp: [06-09] The dangerous Republican freakout about Trump's indictment: "The paranoid reaction to the Justice Department's charges reveal a party gripped by the politics of perpetual apocalypses." Starts by quoting Kevin McCarthy, Ron DeSantis, and Marco Rubio -- a list the author could have extended greatly, but he wanted to dig into "the paranoid style in Republican politics." Much can be said about that, including that the "weaponization" of investigators was pioneered by Republicans against Clinton in the 1990s. But these Republican reactions suggest something more troubling, which is the implied belief that Republicans should never have to answer for infractions against law. Note that I could have said "their crimes" instead of "infractions against law," because Trump's indictments so far fall short of what we universally recognize as criminality. One possible defense of Trump is that we've gone overboard in criminalizing lots of things that should be handled more delicately, often with harsh punishments meant to deter but hard to apply fairly. Of course, it's hard for Trump to make that defense, given that he's spent his entire political life grandstanding for ever harsher punishments. (One especially delicious irony here is that Trump himself signed the law that stiffened the punishment for secret document violations.)

• Christina Cauterucci: [06-10] Trump's messy bragging is all over this indictment: "He couldn't help but show off his beautiful, improperly hoarded classified documents.".

• Isaac Chotiner: [06-09] The legal dynamics of Trump's second indictment: Interview with Stephen Vladeck.

• Ellen Ioanes: [06-04] The Georgia Trump election investigation keeps getting bigger: Latest hints suggest using Georgia's RICO law.

• Chris Lehmann: [06-09] The criminal delusions of Donald Trump.

• Kelly McClure: [06-11] Former Trump AG Bill Barr says, "He's toast": "I mean, it's a very detailed indictment, and it's very, very damning." Also: "We can't forget here that this entire thing came about because of reckless conduct of the president. If he had just turned over the documents, which I think every other person in the country would have done . . ." McClure also reports: [06-10] Kari Lake takes wild leap in Trump's defense, threatening gun violence against DOJ and Biden.

• Nicole Narea: [06-09] Your 7 biggest questions about Trump's latest indictment, answered.

• Charlie Savage: [06-09] A Trump-appointed judge who showed him favor gets the documents case; and [06-10] Trump appointee will remain judge in documents case, clerk says: Judge Aileen Cannon, who showed egregious favoritism to Trump in the early days of this case. Mark Joseph Stern explains: [06-09] Judge Aileen Cannon can absolutely sink the federal prosecution of Trump.

• Kenny Stancil: [06-09] 12 million US adults think violence is justified to put Trump back in White House. Along similar lines: David Gilbert: [06-09] 'We need to start killing': Trump's far-right supporters are threatening civil war.

• Tatyana Tandanpiolie: [06-09] Indictment of Trump aide Walt Nauta suggests he's not cooperating -- but "that could change"

DeSantis, and other Republicans: I originally wanted to keep all the sociopaths together, but the Trump volume argued for a separate section. Still, the only significant difference seems to be that he got caught -- something that in happier times he derided John McCain for:

• Jonathan Chait::

  • [06-05] The GOP's authoritarian acceleration: "Internal resistance to its anti-democratic turn has all but vanished." Kind of odd that the first illustration here (four paragraphs long) of the Republican embrace of "violations of democratic norms" is Trump's firing of James Comey: "Now every FBI director is eminently fireable," which sounds to me like an improvement over the untouchable J Edgar Hoover. (The idea that Hoover was above politics is a pretty lame and narrow view of politics.) Of course, the basic point is valid: Republicans have always had an exaggerated sense of their own indispensability, and conservatives have never trusted democracy, so the combination has proven especially eager to cut corners and rig power centers in their favor. Nixon's "dirty tricks" backfired when exposed, but Trump can be more brazen about his authoritarian aims, largely because, to quote David Kochel, "the conservative media ecosystem has built a giant wall of inoculation around everything Trump." Or everything Republican.

  • [06-08] Mike Pence says Trump can commit all the crimes he wishes: "Enforcing the law would be 'divisive.'"

• Ana Marie Cox: [06-11] The war on drugs is getting meaner and dumber, and Texas and Florida show how bad it can get.

• Zach Despart: [06-09] GOP donor at center of Ken Paxton scandal charged with 8 felonies as prosecutors seek $172 million: "Texas real estate investor Nate Paul charged with making false statements to financial institutions."

• Margaret Hartmann: [06-08] Why I support Chris Christie's (doomed) 2024 presidential bid: More than a little tongue in cheek here, and "there's no chance he'll actually be president" isn't much of a reason. The one exception is that Christie's likely to be the only Republican candidate willing to talk about Trump's graft. Of course, Christie's such a sleazeball that could blow back on him.

• Jack Hunter: [06-07] Neocon Nikki Haley rides again: Every now and then I worry that some Republican will try to outflank Biden on war, and that one issue will sway people. To some extent, Trump did that in 2016, although he was never very credible, in part because he was so inconsistent. On the other hand, Biden came into office determined to bring NATO back into American orbit, and thanks to Putin he succeeded way beyond his wildest dreams. Less noticed, he's also managed to reunite America's allies around the Pacific rim, again by pushing the spectre of threat from China. Still, one Republican I'm not worried about upsetting Biden with a turn toward world peace is Haley.

• Ed Kilgore: [06-07] Doug Burgum bets that 2024 voters don't care about culture wars: Given the laws the North Dakota governor has signed recently, he's pretty well hedged on culture war issues. Hard to see what else he can run on, other than the once-successful "I'm a billionaire, so you know I'm honestly for you."

• Ezra Klein: [06-11] Ron DeSantis thinks Trump didn't go far enough: A fairly close reading of the Florida governor's campaign tome, The Courage to Be Free: "It's not a good book, exactly. But it's a revealing one." What it mostly reveal is that DeSantis is a vindictive prick who will use every ounce of power he can seize to punish his supposed enemies, which very likely means you and me.

• Mike Lofgren: [06-09] The party of pollution, disease and death: When Republicans tell you who they are, believe them. By the way, Lofgren previously wrote: [05-20] The GOP's heart of darkness: Why Ron DeSantis can never beat Donald Trump: "No Republicans can beat Trump, because no one else can command his coalition of damaged, discarded, marginal people." I've never been especially happy with deriding Trump's followers as mere miscreants, but he has something that brings to the fore those traits in lots of people, making them seem respectable and even special. (Lofgren, by the way, is a recovering Republican, author of The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.)

• Dana Milbank: [06-09] In the House, a spectacular flameout: Speaker Kevin McCarthy, after passing his debt limit deal with considerable help from Democrats, fails to get enough Republicans to pass his purely symbolic gas stoves initiative.

• Nicole Narea: [06-09] Why are all these random Republicans running for president? Well, it's not, as the subhed argues, because "everybody still thinks they can win in 2024." Most candidates, as ever, see it as a way to raise their political profile (a category that obviously includes Doug Burgum, and extends past Tim Scott to Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be happy just to sell more books). What's more remarkable is the absence of 2016 contenders (Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Kasich, Carson), who have more to lose than to gain by losing again. (Christie is the one back, but he has a fairly unique martyr angle. DeSantis and Pence are in, because they'd look like cowards if they didn't run, and each has an angle to claim Trump's mantle should Trump fail. Same could be said for Haley, although her angle is more oblique. And, well, while it's unlikely any Republican can beat Trump in the primaries, he could still be forced out, or simply collapse, creating an opening. [Who did I leave out? Looks like Asa Hutchinson and Larry Elder. Feel free to slot them yourself.]

• Katha Pollitt: [06-08] The Right's latest target: no-fault divorce: "Republicans have a new way of sticking their noses in other people's business." Not to mention that their favorite game is finding fault with everyone else for the myriad sins of the world. They can't fix anything, but at least they can assign blame.

• Alex Thomas: [06-09] The right has a vigilante fetish: "Daniel Penny takes his place in conservatives' growing pantheon of violent 'heroes.'"

• Ken Ward Jr: [06-01] West Virginia Governor's coal empire sued by the federal government -- again: "seeks millions in unpaid environmental fines."

• Linda K Wertheimer: [05-30] Inside the Christian legal crusade to revive school prayer.

While the following articles aren't strictly about Republicans, this seems like a good place for them:

• Rick Baum: [06-09] The US has made great progress at increasing economic inequality.

• Mitchell Zimmerman: [06-09] Anti-trans politicians are following the Nazi playbook.

Fire and smoke:

• Benji Jones: [06-08] Why is eastern Canada on fire -- and when will the smoke clear? Jones also wrote [06-08] The future of Canada's wildfires, explained by a Canadian fire scientist: Interview with Morgan Crowley.

• Rebecca Burns: [06-09] Oil lobby pushed pollution loophole for wildfire smoke.

• Rachel DuRose: [06-08] Why some of the US has the most polluted air in the world right now; also [06-08]: The future of Canada's wildfires, explained by a Canadian fire scientist.

• KK Rebecca Lai/Jon Huang: [06-09] See what Canadian wildfire smoke looked like in 8 places this week.

• Rebecca Leber: [06-08] The air we breathe was getting better. Then climate change hit.

• Robert Moor: [06-10] Canada is on fire. America is choking on smoke. Is this the 'new abnormal'? Interview with John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World.

And other environmental disasters:

• Jane Braxton Little: [06-04] Looking for home in an overheating world: "If emissions continue, will we all be migrants someday?"

• Abraham Lustgarten: [06-06] Climate crisis is on track to push one-third of humanity out of its most livable environment. Also see: New climate maps show a transformed United States.

Ukraine War: Most observers are reporting that Ukraine seems to have started their "counteroffensive," albeit with little fanfare. Their only discernible victory so far is in getting journalists to say "counteroffensive" instead of "[Spring] offensive" -- we still need to make clear that Russia is the aggressor in this war. It's been pretty clear all Winter that Zelensky has no intention of negotiating until he first gives his fancy new war weapons -- especially the tanks -- a chance to tip the scales. While I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine manages to claw back much of the territory they lost in 2022, the only solution is still negotiation, and the only reasonable basis for negotiation is the self-determination of the people involved. Until both sides realize that, the destruction continues. And if you think this week's dam destruction was a disaster for everyone, wait until the fighting overwhelms the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant (already endangered, especially denied water from the dam).

• Connor Echols: [06-09] Diplomacy Watch: S. Africa suggests moving BRICS summit to China: The change of venue would allow Putin to attend without fear of being arrested and handed over to the ICC. The BRICS nations have nearly all floated peace initiatives, as have (noted here) Indonesia and the Vatican. Meanwhile, Anthony Blinken dismisses any ceasefire as a "Potemkin peace."

• Ben Armbruster: [06-09] How WWII nostalgia fuels media's impractical Ukraine aims: "Yes fighting the Russians is just and Putin is a very bad guy, but analogies to the Nazi era rarely if ever apply." The most obvious difference is that Roosevelt's insistence that Germany surrender unconditionally is impossible: even if Ukraine recovered its 2014 borders, a hostile Russia would remain a persistent threat. The only way to eliminate this threat is to negotiate a deal which leaves Russia satisfied -- if not with Ukrainian territory, then with other (possibly economic) concessions.

• Chris Baraniuk: [06-08] The Kakhovka Dam collapse is an ecological disaster.

• Max Boot: [06-09] The Ukrainian offensive is beginning. David Petraeus is optimistic. Now, that's what I call "pathetic."

• Shane Harris/Souad Mekhennet: [06-06] US had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline. Further information from the what's now being dubbed the Discord leaks, suggests that Ukraine, rather than the US (as Seymour Hersh reported) was responsible for blowing up the gas line between Russia and Germany. This follows an earlier Discord leaks piece by John Hudson/Isabelle Khurshudyan: [05-13] Zelensky, in private, plots bold attacks inside Russia, leak shows.

• Matthew Hoh: [06-09] A war long wanted: Diplomatic malpractice in Ukraine: This provides a pretty detailed litany of the many acts seen as provocations by Russia since 1991, including the scuttling of the Minsk agreement and the military buildup in 2021 before Russia invaded in February, 2022. Part of the intent is "understanding the war through Russia's eyes," which should help open our own. Perhaps the article needs a stronger disclaimer that Putin in many cases misunderstood the provocations, and in any case had no right or even reason to invade as he did, but it's not like those are points we don't understand. Rather, they are chits that critics of US policy have to cash in order to be taken seriously on any other point. This ends with brief sections on "who profits?" and "the cost of war," as well as a couple paragraphs on the need for peace through diplomacy. All very sensible.

• Fred Kaplan: [06-08] Ukraine's counteroffensive has begun. Now what? "Impossible to say."

• Jen Kirby:

  • [06-08] Why the Ukraine dam destruction is a massive disaster -- now and in the future.

  • [06-10] A guide to understanding the Ukrainian counteroffensive: "Cool it with the predictions, for one." Or much ado about nothing? Except that any intensification of the fighting isn't nothing. It's greater suffering, more destruction, and further recriminations.

• Najmedin Meshkati: [06-09] Kakhovka dam breach raises risk for Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant -- receding waters narrow options for cooling.

• Samantha Schmidt/Isobel Koshiw/Natalia Abbakumova: [06-06] Damage to Russian-held hydroelectric plant floods south Ukraine battlefield. One possible factor is that Water level behind Russian-controlled Kakhkovka Dam was at historic high before it was destroyed. Of course, Russia and Ukraine are blaming each other for the destruction. While high water would have stressed the dam, making an accidental breach (somewhat) more likely, it more obviously made the flooding worse. Much depends here on whether Russia expected to lose the dam during Ukraine's counteroffensive, which last fall advanced to the Dnipro River. Blowing up the dam would presumably slow Ukrainian advance in the region, as well as adding to the rebuilding cost of the flooded areas. On the other hand, blowing the dam sacrifices the canal that diverts Dnipro water to Crimea -- a view that only makes sense if Russia expected to lose the dam and canal anyway. For Ukraine's spin, see Veronika Melkozerova: [06-06] Defiant Ukraine says dam carnage won't stop counteroffensive.

• Robert Wright: [06-09] Timothy Snyder's pernicious influence: I've long admired Tony Judt, so I was inclined to give his protégé some slack. But I'm left wondering whether the influence went the other way, with Judt's late celebration of East European revolts against Soviet domination boosted by Snyder's vicious anti-Russian prejudices. In any case, Snyder has become one of the most uncritical anti-Russia hawks anywhere. I'm reminded of an old saw: that America's China experts usually fell in love with China, but the Russia experts inevitably hated Russia. Anne Applebaum has rivaled Snyder among public intellectuals turned warmongers.

• Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [06-08] Nord Stream revelations should chasten Ukraine dam 'hot takes': Rule of thumb: Ukraine always blames Russia, and Russia always blames Ukraine. Ukraine blamed Russia for the Nord Stream sabotage, but that never made sense, for lack of motivation. Ukraine had the motive, but how could they do it? The US and maybe Poland or Norway had lesser motives, which allowed Seymour Hersh to construct a plausible (albeit uncertain) scenario for a US operation (with help from Norway). We've since seen a plausible scenario for Ukraine (with help from Poland). Still not proven, but makes sense. As for the Kakhovka Dam disaster, I can imagine motives for both Ukraine and Russia, and while it would be easier for Russia to pull off, it certainly could have been Ukraine. Yet neither motive is convincing, as each depends on assumptions about how the counteroffensive will go under different scenarios. And, let's face it, neither side knows, no matter how confident they seem. Then there's the third possibility, that it was some kind of accident. I'd score that as Russia's fault, because they had no business being there. But also because war always leads to unpredicted disasters, and Russia -- even admitting much provocation -- launched this war.

World:

• Katharine Houreld/Hafiz Haroun: [06-09] Sudan's rapid decline into war evokes Somalia's catastrophic collapse.

• Pankaj Mishra: [05-04] The big con: "on Modi's India and the New World Order."

• Yumna Patel: [06-08] Israel's punitive home demolition policy, explained.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [06-06] Blinken address to AIPAC epitomizes the failure of the Biden Administration: "Anthony Blinken resurrected the two-state zombie in his address to AIPAC on the 56th anniversary of the 1967 War." It's impossible to pledge blind obeissance to Israel without admitting that the much bruited "two-state solution" has never been anything but a farce, as the governing clique in Israel has repeatedly admitted. On the other hand, a limited two-state division has been trivially easy to implement since Sharon dismantled Israel's settlements in Gaza: spin Gaza off as an independent state, while Israel tries to deal with Jerusalem, the West Bank, Golan, and the refugees as a separate problem. I'm continually amazed that no one sees such a simple solution.

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [06-07] Owning up to mistakes and pandemic deaths: "It would be a huge step forward for both public health and US foreign policy if we could begin down the road of freely sharing health care technology rather than trying to bottle it up so that a small number of people can get very rich." Also see Ryan Cooper, below.

Zack Beauchamp: [06-11] How the right's defeats gave us the anti-LGBTQ moment: "The American right is returning to its homophobic roots." I figured the culture war over LGB was pretty much settled, but T opened it up again, largely, I think, because the right will embrace any non-economic grudge they can get any leverage on. (Gas stoves is an almost comical example.) Economic issues are trickier, because helping the rich get richer isn't all that popular, even among caste-conscious Republicans. Beauchamp's thesis is less convincing, but the right has few rivals when it comes to nursing grudges and stoking paranoia about vast left conspiracies. Otherwise, they might have to face responsibility for their repeated failures.

Irin Carmon: [06-06] When pregnancy is the crime: "An exit interview with Lynn Paltrow, who has spent decades representing women jailed for miscarriages and stillbirths."

Zachary Carter: [06-06] What if we're thinking about inflation all wrong? "Isabella Weber's heterodox ideas about government price controls are transforming policy in the United States and across Europe." With visions of magical markets dancing in their heads, economists hate price controls (even if coupled with wage controls, which softens the blow because economists also hate people), it's easy to see how they fell for the Volcker maneuver as the only proper remedy for inflation. But it's a very blunt, indiscriminate instrument, kind of like engineering a flood to put out a house fire. It may eventually work, but the collateral damage is immense, and may not even solve the real problem.

This recent round of inflation always struck me as caused by two things: the first is temporary supply chain kinks, which made it possible for companies to price gouge, some of which stuck given that most companies preferred profit to volume; which was possible due to increasing monopolization of damn near everything. Monopoly rents had trailed limits to competition because customers resist price increases, making companies reluctant to squeeze their every advantage, but the dam broke, companies could take whatever the market would bear. For proof, consider that most companies have been raking in record profits while others pay their premiums.

Weber has some interesting ideas for price controls -- often ones that avoid the bureaucratic overhead of the old OPA, although with modern computers you'd think that overhead could be slashed.

Ryan Cooper:

• [06-06] How Big Pharma rigged the patent system.

• [06-08] Merck says negotiating drug prices is unconstitutional.

• [06-07] The SEC comes for Big Crypto: "The agency has sued both Binance and Coinbase for violating securities law."

James K Galbraith: [06-09] Next time, dammit, just default: "Democrats feared a monster called 'default' -- but it's just another Washington scare story." Makes sense to me. In fact, makes me wonder why I didn't see something like this before the deal -- although parts of it are somewhat familiar. It's actually an old story where the Left (or its compromised proxies in parties like the Democratic) are called on to sacrifice their own goals in order to save capitalism, on the premise that not doing so would hurt worse.

Sarah Jones: [06-11] "It's not just the fringe who are committing these violent acts": Interview with Julie Burkhart, who runs the only clinic that provides surgical abortions in Wyoming. She formerly worked for the late George Tiller here in Wichita.

Peter Kafka: [06-07] Firing Chris Licht won't fix CNN. Licht drew flak for his efforts to move CNN toward the "center," especially the synthetic news event he billed as a "Trump town hall, but Kafka attributes his firing to the exposure in Tim Alberta: [06-02] Inside the meltdown at CNN. Alberta says "Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network's reputation for serious journalism." I'm not sure that "serious journalism" is even possible on TV given diminished attention spans, but if one wanted to try, the obvious way to go about it would be to look beneath the headlines and start to notice the interests that corrupt and distort understanding.

• Alex Shephard: [06-08] CNN's problems go way beyond Chris Licht.

Robert Kuttner: [06-09] Remembering William Spriggs: "A life devoted to pursuing economic justice." Died this week, at 68.

Dylan Matthews: [06-10] Labor unions aren't "booming." They're dying. "Unions won't come back without fundamental changes to bargaining."

Ian Millhiser:

• [06-08] Surprise! The Supreme Court just handed down a significant victory for voting rights. This throws out one of the most savagely gerrymandered district maps I've ever seen. (It racially divides two of Alabama's largest cities, Birmingham and Montgomery, then connects their black-majority neighborhoods through a winding path that includes Tuscaloosa and Selma, resulting in one majority-black district while reducing black representation in two or three more.) Also commenting, Ed Kilgore: [06-08] Supreme Court passes up chance to keep gutting Voting Rights Act.

• [06-08] Ketanji Brown Jackson's first major opinion saves Medicaid: "The Supreme Court voted not to make federal Medicaid law virtually unenforceable."

Nathan Robinson:

• [06-08] How the John Birch Society won the long game: Review of Matthew Dallek: Birchers: H ow the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. Argues that "The American right doesn't need the John Birch Society these days, but that is because it's adopted the Birchers' extremism wholesale."

• [06-05] We now know the full extent of Obama's disastrous apathy toward the climate crisis: Columbia University, with funding from the Obama Foundation, has compiled 470 interviews to form an "oral history of the Obama presidency." We also have what Robinson terms memoirs by sycophants and his own gargantuan self-exonerative autobiography, where even rose-tinted reflection fails to show Obama as concerned much less prophetic on the climate crisis (though maybe not contemptuous and imbicilic, which would be par for the Trump administration). I've always been dismayed at the lack of credit Obama got for expanding oil production (mostly through fracking, you may recall), but the media always assumed that Republicans were the oil party. Yet there is a bit here where Obama is speaking to a bunch of Texas oilmen and bragging: "You know how we became number one in the world in oil production? That was me." The oil men cheered. Then they voted for Trump.

• [05-31] Introducing Murray Bookchin, the extraordinary originator of 'social ecology': Interview with Janet Biehl, who wrote a 2015 biography (Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin) and edited The Murray Bookchin Reader (1999; looks like both of these are out of print). Bookchin's 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism had a great deal of influence on my own thought. Of late, I've been thinking about how anarchist cooperation models could help us with international relations, given the impossibility of establishing a world order (no matter how much Washington, Beijing, etc., might try).

Greg Sargent: [06-08] How Pat Robertson created today's Christian nationalist GOP: The Christian Broadcasting Network founder died at 93. Interview with Rick Perlstein.

• Sarah Posner: [06-09] How Pat Robertson helped create the Christian Nationalist Lawyer Brigade reshaping American life.

• Aja Romano: [06-09] Pat Robertson's influence over conservative culture spanned decades.

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-09] Infamy at sea, cover-up in DC: Israel's attack on the USS Liberty: In 1964, two American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin reported being fired on, which LBJ quickly blew up into the casus belli that justified America's escalation of war against Vietnam. Three years later, another American ship was attacked at sea, this time killing 34 US sailors and injuring 174. LBJ was still president, but the only thing he escalated this time was the amount of foreign aid sent to the attackers. This is an old piece, from a 2004 book, but perhaps the story is new to you?

Maureen Tkacik: [06-02] Days of plunder: A review of two recent books on the most malign force in modern capitalism: Gretchen Morgenson/Joshua Rosner: These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs -- and Wrecks -- America, and Brendan Ballou: Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America. Opens with more than you want to know about PetSmart, but that's just one example.

Robert Wright: [06-07] AI is at a dangerous juncture: It's hard to know just where to hook into this argument, mostly because it's unclear what AI is going to do -- the most obvious thing is to increase speed and productivity of data-intensive operations -- or more pertinently what it could do that we don't want it to do. One thing that makes that alarming is that for many years speed has been viewed as the holy grail of war (from blitzkrieg to the decision to respond to a nuclear first strike). Still, the question we should ask isn't how AI can give us (or them) an advantage in waging war, but whether our model of defense through deterrence hasn't been thorough discredited (e.g., in Ukraine).

One comment here: "AI will not be regulated properly because companies will always put profits over everything else." For all the talk about the need to regulate AI, I've never seen a concrete proposal for doing so. My best guess is that the first movers want it regulated to keep future competitors out -- that's actually a common regulation strategem. What would make more sense to me is not to regulate what AI can do but to regulate the business you can do with it, starting with how it can be monetized. A good start would be to deny any patents on it, which would disincentivize developers, especially from doing unsavory things with it. One could go a step further and require that the source code be free (in the GNU sense). For starters, that would make it publicly inspectable (and again it would disincentivize bad actors). And certainly, the products of AI shouldn't be copyrightable. (Thus far, as I understand it, they are not.) Of course, if we start talking along these lines, the current companies' push to regulate is going to evaporate. As long as politics are driven by greedy parties, this isn't likely to happen, but if the threat is real, how can we afford not to?

• Daron Acemoglu/Simon Johnson: [06-09] Big tech is bad. Big AI will be worse.

• Edward Ongweso Jr: [06-07] AI doesn't pose an existential risk -- but Silicon Valley does. For an idea where the author is coming from, you might also look back at his [05-23] article: Abolish venture capitalism.

Abby Zimet: [06-04] A rank immunity: Henry Kissinger is still a war criminal: I thought we had flogged this not-year-dead 100-year-old carcass enough over the last couple weeks, but couldn't resist tipping you to the Wonder Wart-Hog detail used as an illustration. If you can stand more, try Jonathan Guyer: [06-08] I crashed Henry Kissinger's 100th-birthday party: "The elite love him but for some reason won't say why."

Notable tweet from @sorrelquest:

it's insane how like half of all political "arguments" boil down to one side that's universally beneficial and that everyone agrees with and one side that we need to pretend is contentious because eight people with a lot of money feel strongly about it

From Zachary D Carter:

The vagueness around whether we "need" unemployment at 4.5 percent or 5.5 percent shows how imprecise enthusiasts of this model can be, but the really extraordinary line for me is: "That's why we have central banks, is to make tough choices."

The point Furman is making is that central banks exist to do unpopular things. Democracy left to its own devices will produce too much inflation. "Too much" here being defined as about 4 percent, the "though choices" solution being millions of layoffs.

Plenty of economists agree with Furman that this is the proper role of a central bank. But that has not always been the case. It's pretty easy to create unemployment without a central bank. The U.S. had decades of deflation and persistent financial crises from 1870 to 1913.

And one of the chief arguments for establishing a central bank was to create more economic flexibility so that these crashes didn't become depressions and that deflation didn't destroy American democracy.

The idea that the Fed was supposed to handle one aspect of a full employment program was pretty common until the Volcker era. Congress passed two laws to that end, one in 1946 and another in 1978.

Managing expertise and public opinion isn't obvious or easy. But the belief that the people want too many jobs for their own good, and need to be disciplined into unemployment is not inherent to central banking. It's a very particular worldview, and one that I think is wrong.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 4, 2023

Abbreviated this week, as I basically lost Friday and Saturday to a cooking project. Anyhow, enough for a placeholder. The non-story of the week is the debt deal. (Glad that's over.) The story that really looms large is the insurance industry debacle. Also note the problems in Kosovo, which should remind us that temporary hacks don't last where long-term stable solutions are needed.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republican sociopaths:

• Kate Aronoff: [05-30] Ron DeSantis threatens to "Make America Florida": "The GOP hopeful's climate denial papers over a horrifying reality in his home state." I've been to Florida a couple times, and it's a nice enough place to visit (in March, anyway). But is this really a workable sales pitch? Even if you ignore the considerable damage he's already inflicted on Florida, which is really more to the point. A while back, Aronoff wrote: [2022-10-12] Florida and the insurance industry weren't build to withstand a flooded world.

• Devlin Barrett/Josh Dawsey/Carol D Leonnig: [05-31] Prosecutors have recording of Trump discussing sensitive Iran document: "could undercut key defense claims that Trump declassified or didn't know about the documents."

• Ben Brasch/Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff: [06-01] Candidate charged with shooting at Democrats' homes after election loss. Solomon Pena (R-NM), lost state House seat nearly 2-to-1, blamed fraud, hired two more guys to help him with shootings.

• Fabiola Cineas: [06-02] Florida has launched an "unparalleled" assault on higher education: "Ron DeSantis is threatening academic freedom everywhere." Illustration here is a sign that gets to the point: "Support real education, not DeSantis indoctrination."

• Margaret Hartmann: [05-30] It turns out 'Trump Bucks' aren't actually legal tender.

• Ed Kilgore: [06-01] 2024 presidential candidates side with far right on debt deal: No responsibilities, no consequences.

• Eric Levitz: [05-29] The contradiction at the heart of DeSantis 2024: On the one hand, he wants to be seen as more electable than Trump; on the other, he also wants to be seen as doing everything Trump would do and then some, suggesting he intends to be more extreme. But that's only a contradiction if you assume that everything balances off the center -- a view that only centrists have these days, I suppose because they insist on being wrong about everything. DeSantis embraces both sides of this equation not because he's a centrist but because he's a cynic. In the Republican primaries, he'll run not as the saner Trump but as the more effective model: the guy who delivers things that Trump can only promise. If he's nominated, he'll pivot back to the middle, not because he's changed one iota but because the gullible media wants any excuse to cozy up to a Republican. If he's elected, he'll pull the same kind of stunts he's been doing all along in Florida, which will come as a complete surprise to all the centrists who rushed to support him. It's not a bad plan, and if he wasn't such a jerkwad (or at least could fake it) it might work, but there are lots of possible pitfalls. The first is that Trump's base don't want a subtler, more efficient strongman. They want one who acts up, who gets in their supposed enemies' faces and heads.

• Yvonne Wingett Sanchez: [06-01] After harassment, Arizona county official won't run for reelection: The unfortunately named Maricopa County Supervisor, Bill Gates.

• Li Zhou: [06-01] Mike Pence is a man without a constituency: That's not really fair. Pence has a constituency, just a very small one. It's wonks who liked Trump's policies but were ultimately taken aback by his personality. Billmon referred to the GW Bush years as the Cheney Administration, because the personnel and all the policies seemed to emanate from the VP. (Curiously, Cheney lost most of his influence in Bush's second term, especially after he lost Scooter Libby to indictment.) Same thing with the Trump years, except that Trump claimed all the glory. But even though Pence was central to policy direction, most people realize that any Republican flunky would have done the same, and most could have presented the same pious supplication.

Biden, Democrats, and the end of the debt crisis: For the record, I'm not unhappy with Biden's debt ceiling deal. He gave McCarthy a little victory and a bit of respect, which he probably didn't need to do, but it didn't cost much. And what Biden gained was to kill the issue until 2025, or longer if Democrats recover and win Congress. Anything else would be litigated endlessly, and while he'd probably win, that would have made the Supreme Court look a bit less fanatical than they are. It might have been different had he been able to rally the media to his viewpoint, but he's not that kind of guy. I wish Democrats could do better, but there's not much evidence of them even trying.

• Zack Beauchamp: [06-02] Everything is coming up Biden: "The president's had a string of recent wins. So why do his numbers suck?" Perhaps part of the reason is that even this generally sympathetic article starts with Biden tripping and falling, quite literally, at a recent speech.

• John Nichols: [06-02] Here's why principled progressives opposed a cruel and destructive debt ceiling deal: In the House, 46 Democrats voted against the debt ceiling deal, as did five Senators. I'm never going to complain when elected Democrats land top my left. Nichols also wrote: [05-31] There's never a debt ceiling for the Military-Industrial Complex.

• Andrew Prokop: [06-01] 5 winners and 5 losers from the debt ceiling deal.

• Bill Scher: [06-01] The debt-ceiling deal shows Joe Biden is a normal president just like he promised. Which begs the question, how low can you lower the bar?

Ukraine War:

• Blaise Malley: [06-02] Diplomacy Watch: A peace summit without Russia.

• Andrew Bacevich: [06-01] The compulsion to intervene: "Why Washington underwrites violence in Ukraine.

• Dave DeCamp: [06-01] SpaceX lands Pentagon contract for Starlink terminals for Ukraine: Add Elon Musk to the list of war profiteers.

• John Feffer: [05-31] How Russia's war in Ukraine threatens the planet.

• Anatol Lieven/George Beebe: [05-31] Prigozhin erupts: Has a Russian succession struggle begun? No reason to get excited here. "And if the choice of a successor to Putin really becomes that between President Prigozhin and President Patrushev, would either of these be an improvement on Putin himself?"

• Suzanne Loftus: Kazakhstan's view of Ukraine is complicated because it, too, is complicated.

• Neil MacFarquhar/Milana Mazaeva: [06-03] In Russian schools, it's recite your ABC's and 'Love your army': "The curriculum for young Russians is increasingly emphasizing patriotism and the heroism of Moscow's army, while demonizing the West as 'gangsters.' One school features a 'sniper'-themed math class." This just poisons the future.

• Nicole Narea: The potential fallout from drone attacks in Moscow.

• Timothy Noah: [05-08] Putin can't afford to lose in Ukraine -- but he can't afford to win, either: When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, it represented 10.5 percent of the global economy; by April 2022, Russia's share had shrunk to 3.5 percent, and GDP has shrunk by a quarter since 2013. Capitalism doesn't seem like much of a blessing.

• Jordan Michael Smith: [06-02] How Russia got the Ukraine War wrong: Review of two recent books on the war: Owen Matthews: Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin's War Against Ukraine, and Serhii Plokhy: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. I've read Plokhy's 2021 The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, which was pre-invasion but well into the 2014 division. No doubt he knows the history, but I have wonder how much inside scoop Matthews -- a British journalist based in Moscow in the late 1990s, and later in Istanbul -- actually has.

  Matthews offers three reasons behind Putin's decision to go to war. The first, that "Western influence was growing too powerful in a country vital to Russian influence," needs a lot more elaboration. It seems likely that Biden's administration took much more concern with Ukraine than Trump's had done, and that promise of support emboldened Zelensky to ditch the Minsk II accord and further threaten Russian separatists in Donbas. Why Putin should see Ukraine as a vital interest is deeply embedded in the history Plokhy explains, seeing it as a threat, and believing Russia could solve that threat with aggression, is a more complex problem.

  Matthew's second reason seems justified: Putin's belief that Russia could withstand sanctions has largely been vindicated, but like most conflict issues, it has a second side. It is just as possible that the US overestimated the sanctions threat. The third reason -- that the US was weakened by its clumsy retreat from Afghanistan -- makes the least sense. If anything, the US was more eager to confront Russia once it was no longer stuck in Afghanistan. If Putin thought otherwise, he was being foolish -- although it is just the sort of thing American hawks would say.

  I suspect much more research is needed to fill in the details, which is where the devil dwells. One pull quote deserves reiteration here: "A wounded Russia might be even more prone to extremism, paranoia, and aggression than it was before the war."

The rest of the world:

• Ellen Ioanes: [05-30] Uganda's extreme anti-LGBTQ legislation, explained. Three other African states have similar laws (Kenya, Zambia, Ghana). But there is an argument that the driving force behind such laws is "American evangelicals through their local actors."

• Marc Martorell Junyent: [06-01] Is the new Taliban reign less extreme than it was in 2001? Hassan Abbas has a new book on this, The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left, arguing that the question is open, but continued exclusion isn't helping.

• Anatol Lieven: [06-02] Ethnic conflict in Kosovo: Cutting the Gordian Knot: This is yet another diplomatic failure, exacerbated by foreign powers picking sides in a local ethnic dispute. One might even argue that NATO's intervention in Kosovo was every bit as egregious as Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Other stories:

Christopher Flavelle/Jack Healy: [06-01] Arizona limits construction around Phoenix as its water supply dwindles.

Matthew Duss: [06-01] The bad thing Henry Kissinger did that you don't even know about: "the practice of turning vast global contacts into wealth has been horrible for American democracy." After leaving government, Kissinger set up shop and encouraged rich people to give him money. What he did for all that money was often unclear (and still is). But he turned GW Bush's invite to oversee a commission on 9/11 because he feared that taking the post would expose his business to public scrutiny. He wasn't the first person to do that sort of thing, and many more have followed in his footsteps.

Victoria Guida: [05-29] Historic gains: Low-income workers scored in the Covid economy. Something else for Republicans to try to destroy.

Umair Irfan:

• [05-30] A big El Niño is looming. Here's what it means for our weather. "How warm water in the Pacific shapes storms, droughts, and record heat around the world."

• [06-02] Climate change is already making parts of America uninsurable: "We're steadily marching toward an uninsurable future." This is probably the biggest story of the week, and maybe the year. Two key problems with private insurance: the risk models haven't kept pace with increasing risks; and once you fix the risk models, the upshot is that few people can afford insurance. And if you can't insure property, how can you finance it? If we had understood this 20-30 years ago, maybe we could have done a realistic cost-benefit analysis on carbon reduction, but having ignored the real risks all this time, it's too late to catch up. I'm convinced that the solution will be for the federal government to provide insurance, either by backstopping the private companies or by offering some degree of insurance directly. If the latter seems hard to imagine, consider such current programs as flood insurance, crop insurance, FEMA disaster funding, and and too-big-to-fail banks. This will be a big political issue in the not-so-distant future, and needs to be thought about sooner rather than later.

Sarah Jones:

• [05-30] The revolt of the other mothers: "Moms for Liberty learned motherhood is a potent force. So too have their opponents."

• [05-30] A generation moves on: On a Washington Post feature about "Christina and Aaron Beall, parents who have abandoned the Christian homeschool movement." They themselves were home schooled, brought up to "discipline" their children as they had been "disciplined" (which is to say, beaten). As with all case studies, no way to tell how representative their stories are. Jones has a similar (though she suspects less extreme) background, which helps. By the way, I've kept Jones' [04-08] piece open, as it's one of the best I've seen all year: Children are not property. I find the notion that they are property, which is consistent with recent right-wing programming, horrifying. Even worse, I suppose, is the notion that your children should be their property too.

• [05-29] The fantasies of Josh Hawley: "The senator's new book, Manhood, is an exercise in cowardice." I've cited several rejoinders to this book in recent weeks, less because we need to tear it down than because its its author is often taken as a serious Republican thinker-activist yet the book is such an easy target. By the way, on Facebook Greg Magarian noted: "Masculinity? That's a complicated idea, but I've never encountered any idea of manhood that looks like Josh Hawley."

Glenn Kessler: [05-16] And the president most to blame for the national debt problem is . . . Author cites one fairly arbitrary study to pin the blame on Lyndon Johnson, on the theory that "entitlements" like Medicare and Medicaid are the culprit, and ranks Nixon second for similar reasons, despite later admitting that "social programs, in fact, can provide more benefits than costs in the long run." Curiously, no mention here of the impact of war and defense spending on the balance sheet -- not even Johnson's (and Nixon's) largely unfunded Vietnam War, which was the source of most budget imbalances at the time.

Whizzy Kim: [05-26] What was Succession actually trying to tell us? The HBO series has been a rare unflattering portrait of the very rich, and the many ways their wealth warps their perceptions and actions. For its first three seasons, it managed to be watchable despite a total absence of sympathetic characters, but it finally got good in the fourth season, when Logan Roy's death raised the stakes. Kim also wrote [05-29] Succession ends exactly how it needed to. I'd say they did what they could after painting themselves into a corner. To say Tom Wambsgans came out the winner overlooks how totally hollow his new position will be. But I don't like Lukas Matsson's odds any better. He came out as a phony and bully way out of his league. Except that everyone involved comes out with unimaginable piles of money, conjured from rarefied bullshit. This is no way to run a world.

Ian Millhiser: [06-01] The Supreme Court deals another blow to labor unions.

Andrew Perez: [06-03] Right-wing dark money funded Kansas's failed anti-abortion campaign.

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-02] Roaming Charges: The shame of the game. Not happy with the debt deal: "The Democrats asked for nothing and got less. The Far Right demanded all they could think of, got it and now wants more."

Peter Turchin: [06-02] America is headed toward collapse: From the author's new book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Section here is a very sketchy outline of two previous crises -- the Civil War and the Great Depression -- with similarities to the current period highlighted. Turchin has several previous books. His War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, is summarized as follows:

Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society's capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, May 28, 2023

I started collecting this on Thursday, and was pretty much done on Saturday before the "debt ceiling deal" broke. Most of the links there are to now-forgettable, soon-forgotten thinking, which I sympathized at the time, but the thing I like best about the deal is that it kills the issue until well after the 2024 election, whereas the unorthodox fixes would be litigated that long, even if they're ultimately found valid. In the meantime, the Republican House is going to cut more spending and encumber it with more stupid rules than Biden agreed to this round. The only response to that is to kick their asses in 2024, and any cause they give you should be used back against them.

Top story threads:

Ron DeSantis: The Florida governor announced he's running for president, which got enough ughs and moans to temporarily bump Trump off the top spot here.

• Zack Beauchamp: [05-25] The biggest problem with Ron DeSantis's announcement wasn't Twitter: Can you really run a winning campaign on the war against "wokeness" when hardly anyone knows what you're talking about?

• Gary Fineout/Sally Goldenberg: [05-24] In DeSantis' Sunshine State, life is not all sunny.

• Alex Isenstadt: [05-25] Here's what top DeSantis lieutenants said in their private huddle with donors. Unfortunately, this is mostly campaign strategy spin. The really juicy exposés are yet to come.

• Ben Jacobs: [05-24] Ron DeSantis's very online and very disastrous 2024 campaign announcement.

• Clarence Lusane: [05-21] For Trump and DeSantis, different paths, the same destination, or "Two peas in a (white nationalist) pod."

• Charisma Madarang: [05-26] DeSantis signs bill shielding Musk's SpaceX from 'spaceflilght entity liability'. I guess this shows that there are some corporations anti-woke enough to graft DeSantis.

• Charlie Mahtesian: [05-24] Ron DeSantis has a problem. It's Florida. For most politicians, this would be a cheap shot, but for DeSantis, the state is his platform.

• Nicole Narea: [05-24] Make America Florida: Ron DeSantis's pitch to beat Trump in 2024.

• Nicole Narea/Li Zhou: [05-25] A guide to Ron DeSantis's most extreme policies in Florida.

• Bianca Quilantan: [05-24] Ron DeSantis upended education in Florida. He's coming for your state next.

• Luke Savage: [05-26] Ron DeSantis is too extremely online to stand a chance: "Cruel and hateful, to be sure. But it's also emblematic of a political project whose sense of discipline and purpose has been overpowered by its own machinery -- whose activists increasingly speak an abstruse and impenetrable online jargon, strike maximalist poses by default, and obsess over causes that scarcely register outside the reactionary echo chamber."

• Bill Scher: [05-25] Ron DeSantis is not a competent governor: "Republicans looking for a Donald Trump who can get things done will find the Floridian is just another peformative pol who picks fights and doesn't understand public policy."

• Jack Shafer: [05-24] The media has got Ron DeSantis nailed: "Noting both his rigid demeanor and his deliberate avoidance of the nonpartisan press, the reporters covering DeSantis have gathered these behavioral cues to sew the candidate into a straitjacketed image, portraying him as a locked up, frozen and vengeful character whose veins pump bile, not blood."

• Alex Shephard: [05-24] Ron DeSantis's biggest problem isn't Donald Trump: Hard to rate the arguments here, but I was struck by one bit about Trump: "His campaign is built around few issues that matter to real people. Instead, it's mostly a platform for Trump to air a wide array of personal grievances, real and imagined. He's a bit like late-stage Lenny Bruce, drily reading legal filings aloud in a comedy club, only substantially less funny."

• Alex Skopic: [05-26] Florida Man: Examines his life and career, guided by his recent campaign brief, including a few details conveniently left out there.

• Michael Arria: [05-25] Can you run to the right of Trump on Israel? DeSantis is going to try. As Philip Weiss points out, "Ron DeSantis visited Israel four times in recent years -- the sum total of his official foreign visits."

• Margaret Hartmann: [05-25] 5 ways Trump trolled DeSantis over his disastrous launch.

Trump and other Republicans:

• Isaac Arnsdorf/Josh Dawsey/Adriana Usero: [05-24] The deepening radicalization of Donald J Trump: "Whatch how the former president's positions and rhetoric have grown more confrontational and extreme as he seeks a second term."

• Margaret Carlson: [05-25] Jim Jordan, John Durham, and their ridiculous investigations: "The House Judiciary Chairman and the hapless special counsel keep insisting they've found frightful evidence of the 'weaponization' of the government and especially the FBI and its poor target, Donald Trump."

• Ben Jacobs: [05-25] CPAC is rocked by a resignation: Matt Schlapp is out.

• Meryl Kornfield: [05-26] Boebert dismisses antisemitism push as effort to target conservatives: Where else would you look for antisemites?

• Andrew Lapin: [05-24] The Florida mom who sought to ban Amanda Gorman's poem says she's sorry for promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

• Nia Prater: [05-26] Texas AG Ken Paxton is being impeached over everything from retaliation to bribery: Well, it couldn't be happening to a more deserving SOB. [And yes, it happened. Also see: Jacey Fortin/J David Goodman: [05-28] Texas House votes to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton: What to know.]

• Tatyana Tandanpolie: [05-25] Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes sentenced to 18 years for seditious conspiracy.

• Bob Zeidman: [05-24] How I won $5 million from the MyPillow guy and saved democracy.

The debt ceiling: Latest reports are that Biden and McCarthy came to some sort of deal, which still needs to be passed before the latest June 5 disaster date projection (see: Li Zhou/Dylan Matthews: [05-28] Biden and McCarthy's budget deal to lift the debt ceiling, explained). Nihilist Republicans will still try to trash the deal (e.g., see: Furious Freedom Caucus vows to scuttle debt deal), so it will need Democratic votes to pass Congress. Left Democrats will also be unhappy that Biden went back on his initial position and caved in negotiations with terrorists. But most Democrats are solidly pro-business, and will line up behind any deal to save capitalism -- even one that hurts many of their voters. Most of the links below are pre-deal (check dates).

• Jeff Stein: [05-27] What's in the McCarthy-Biden deal to lift the debt ceiling? Here are 6 takeaways.

• Ryan Cooper: [05-25] Democrats need to get over their pathetic fear of the Supreme Court: "Remembering what Franklin Roosevelt did when faced with a potential Court decision that would blow up the economy: prepare to ignore it." Cooper also wrote: [05-23] Republican debt ceiling lies.

• David Dayen: [05-18] The access journalism-House Republican mind meld: "How the relationship between Punchbowl News and Kevin McCarthy is driving a bad resolution to the debt ceiling crisis." For more on Punchbowl News (a "membership-based news community," which delivers daily "tip sheets" to Washington insiders), see Ryan Cooper: [05-11] Savvy beltway reporters' debt ceiling duplicity.

• Paul Krugman: [05-25] Debt: The bad, the weak and the ugly: He offers three workarounds that don't involve surrendering to Republican extortion. He also doubts that the Supreme Court (unlike House Speaker McCarthy) wouldn't decide to blow up the world economy just to score a political point against Biden. He previously wrote: [05-16] How Biden blew it on the debt ceiling, the gist of which has little to do with recent negotiation strategy, but faults Democrats for not raising the debt ceiling (or eliminating it altogether) when they still had a chance before Republicans took over the House.

• Eric Levitz: [05-25] Is Joe Biden botching the debt-ceiling fight? Post-deal, Levitz wrote: [05-28] The no good, not that bad debt ceiling deal.

• Aneela Mirchandani: [05-27] Meet Russ Vought: Mild-mannered mastermind of the GOP's debt-ceiling power play.

• Christian Paz: [05-28] Why don't more voters care about the debt ceiling? A poll cited here shows that if the federal government couldn't issue any more debt, 45% would blame Republicans, 43% would blame Democrats, and 7% would blame both. That's roughly the partisan split on everything, so suggests that the issue doesn't mean anything more. One reason why might be that despite all the writing this and previous threats have produced, most of us have no real idea what the actual consequences of hitting the debt limit might be. I know I don't know, and I've read tons on the subject. People who have read less presumably have even less idea (or some less nuanced idea, which is most likely wrong). And ultimately, what we think has little import, because the people who really do have money at stake in this fight are the same ones best able to get heard in Washington. That once again they've resolved the issue to their satisfaction just validates our lack of interest in the details.

Ukraine War: There is a report that first steps in counteroffensive have begun. Ukraine has been advertising its "spring offensive" all winter, while pleading for more and more weapons, and waiting their arrival.

• Connor Echols: [05-26] Diplomacy watch: Denmark offers to hold Ukraine peace talks in July: That sounds kinda squishy, but expectations are high that Ukraine will launch a "spring offensive" soon, and they're unlikely to consider any form of talks until they first give war a chance -- after all, that is the point and the promise of all those tanks and planes they've been lobbying so hard for. Echols also wrote: [05-22] The West must prepare for Putin to use nukes in Ukraine. Interview with Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan, whose prediction that Russia will use nukes seems intended on pushing them along. But how exactly does one prepare for such an attack? It's not like fallout shelters are a practical project at this time. The only real defense is negotiating a winding down of the war. Anything else is just fucking insane. Robert Wright: also writes about Ryan: [05-26] Why the chances of nuclear war grew this week.

• Julian E Barnes: [05-26] Russian public appears to be souring on war casualties, analysis shows: I'd be inclined to file this under propaganda, not least because no one's reporting solid casualty figures. But sure, you can't totally hide these costs, so it makes sense that ordinary Russians would start to question the mission -- as happened with the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Just how that public perception can turn into policy is hard to imagine. Gorbachev gave his generals enough rope to hang themselves, then pulled the plug. Putin, on the other hand, is much more invested this time.

• Isaac Chotiner: [05-24] Why Masha Gessen resigned from the PEN America board: An interview.

• Eli Clifton: [05-24] Dedollarization is here, like it or not: The effective shift may have more to do with the US-China conflict, but Ukraine sanctions are convincing more and more nations not to trust the US. Few people talk about this, but the debt ceiling nonsense is further undermining world trust in the dollar. Clifton also wrote: [05-26] Jamie Raskin and Rachel Maddow, brought to you by Peter Thiel and Lockheed Martin.

• David Cortright/Alexander Finiarel: [05-25] Russians' support for the war may be softer than you think. I've always suspected there was little public support for war, which is why Putin moved so decisively to quash dissent. Still, there is no evidence that Putin's grasp on power is precarious.

• Daniel L Davis: [05-21] F-16s won't fundamentally alter the course of Ukraine War.

• Gregory Foster: [05-26] How war is destroying Ukraine's environment.

• Ellen Ioanes: [05-21] How Ukraine is trying to woo the Global South -- and why it's so hard: Ukraine has massive support from the US and Europe, but the rest of the world is a much tougher sell.

• Fred Kaplan: [05-16] How the Russia-Ukraine war has changed Europe: Mostly on Germany, where Kaplan spent a month recently. Russia burned a lot of bridges when they invaded Ukraine, and this has pushed Europe back into a closer alliance with America. The link title suggested a broader topic: "The ripple effects from the Ukraine War are becoming clear now." That could have been a more interesting story. Kaplan also wrote: [05-20] The alarming reality of a coming nuclear arms race.

• Michael Klare: [05-18] The G-3 and the post-Ukraine world: The Ukraine War dominated the latest G-7 confab, with all seven powers -- effectively the US and its six dwarfs -- firmly in the pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia camp. But it's impossible for such a group to mediate regional conflicts when they're busy fighting them. Back in the day, the US and USSR could quickly agree to impose a ceasefire on their clients (as they did in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars), yet no one today can do that -- even Klare's hypothetical G-2 of the US and China, or G-3 adding India (the world's most populous country; as Klare notes, the three of them would represent 40% of all people on the planet). Getting those three nations to work together for world peace will be much harder than lining up the G-7 to ratify Washington's wishes, but might actually work. This complements a piece by Juan Cole: [05-16] China and the Axis of the Sanctioned, occasioned by China taking the lead in reconciling Saudi Arabia and Iran.

• Eric Levitz: [05-24] Will the Ukraine War become a 'frozen conflict'? By "frozen conflict" he seems to mean something like Korea, where fighting has halted but neither side admits defeat or can reconcile with the other. Apparently, this is an idea being circulated in Washington (see Nahal Toosi: [05-18] Ukraine could join ranks of 'frozen' conflicts, US official say). But that's no solution. The main thing that's allowed the Korean War "freeze" to persist is how isolated North Korea is from the rest of the world. Russia is a much larger country, with a much more complex set of trading partners and relationships, including a large portion of the world not currently on board with America's sanctions regime.

• Anatol Lieven: [05-25] Ukraine attacks in Russia should be an alarm bell for Washington: Supposedly the US disapproves of such attacks, but that doesn't seem to be limiting the supply of weapons that could be used to attack beyond the Russian border. This is doubly dangerous as long as the US seems to be leaning against peace talks.

• Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [05-23] What does the fall of Bakhmut in Ukraine really mean? Interview with Anatol Lieven and George Beebe.

Around the world:

• Jen Kirby: [05-28] What Erdoğan's win means for the West -- and the world: Reports are that Turkey's long-time ruler has won the runoff (52.1%), giving him another term as President.

• Richard Silverstein: [05-28] IDF plans for imminent attack on Iran to include civilian targets: "Official iDF study urges attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, government buildings, communications and industrial targets." Silverstein also wrote: [05-13] Israel ends yet another disastrous, pointless assault on Gaza. We need to get that noted before they start the next one.

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [05-22] Should Jamie Dimon get a government salary? Points out that Dimon got $34.5 million last year as CEO of JP Morgan, and stands to get much more in coming years, despite much evidence of mismanagement. On the other hand, the head of FDIC makes $181 thousand, and the head of the Fed makes $190 thousand. I'm not really sure how the suggestion that bank heads should be put on civil service salaries would work, but it seems unlikely it would undermine the competency of management, and it might make the banks a bit less predatory. Then there's inequality: "We have let the right rig the market to generate the extremes of inequality we see. While government tax and transfer policy to reduce inequality is desirable, it is best not to structure the market to create so much inequality in the first place."

Zachary D Carter: [03-16] On Silicon Valley Bank, and finance as a public good: This is old as news goes, but worth the effort. One current thought is to wonder how many similar banks would have failed had the feds defaulted on the debt. I also like this line: "Nobody ever just came out and said it, but the basic attitude from the bill's Democratic supporters seemed to be that it was unfair to harp on Democrats doing something corrupt and stupid when Republicans were corrupt and stupid as a matter of principle."

Coral Davenport: [05-28] You've never heard of him, but he's remaking the pollution fight: "Richard Revesz is changing the way the government calculates the cost and benefits of regulation, with far-reaching implications for climate change."

David Dayen: [05-25] A liberalism that builds power: "The goals of domestic supply chains, good jobs, carbon reduction, and public input are inseparable." Related:

• Robert Kuttner: [05-23] Industrial policy works: "Exhibit A is long-depressed upstate New York."

David French: [05-28] The right is all wrong about masculinity: Occasioned by Josh Hawley's silly new book, but no need to dwell there when the inanity is everywhere: "But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness. Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults."

Luke Goldstein: [05-24] How Washington bargained away rural America: How farm bills get made, usually a bipartisan grand bargain ensuring food (SNAP) for the poor and profits for agribusiness.

DD Guttenplan/John Nichols: [05-26] Biden must remake his candidacy: I doubt I'll bother with many of the articles I'm sure we'll be seeing as various Democrats debate strategy going into 2024. But the point these left-Democrats make about Biden's lousy polling numbers is valid. It means that he can't run a campaign based on his personal charisma while ignoring the needs of his party, as Clinton did in 1996, and as Obama did in 2012. To win, he needs a Democratic Party sweep, giving him sufficient margins in Congress to actually get things done. You'd think Republicans are making such a campaign easy, but the media landscape remain treacherous, and Democrats have little practice settling on a winning message.

Benji Jones: [05-23] Why the new Colorado River agreement is a big deal -- even if you don't live out West.

Peter Kafka: [05-23] Do Americans really want "unbiased" news? "CNN and the Messenger both say they're chasing the middle." Well, bias is inevitable, and just because its 'centrist" variation is often incoherent doesn't except it from the rule. You can, of course, muddy up the situation by providing countervailing points of view, but as a practical matter that rarely works. In theory, you could clarify the situation by taking an unflinchingly critical view of everything, but in today's political arena, that would get you tagged as "left-biased" because the right is almost always not just wrong but lying their asses off.

Ian Millhiser:

• [05-26] Clarence Thomas's newest opinion would literally bring back child labor: "Some Supreme Court justices just want to watch the world burn." This is in a concurring opinion, incidental to the case decision and not binding as a precedent, but Thomas wants to government regulation of commerce to such an extent that states can bring back child labor and nullify other federal protections.

• [05-26] A new Supreme Court opinion is terrible news if you care about clean water: They basically changed the definition of water, so much of it is no longer covered by the Clean Water Act.

• [05-24] Trump's worst judge will hear a $1.8 billion attack on Planned Parenthood.

Timothy Noah: [05-26] Why workers will be treated better in the future. Researchers have noticed that in many cases higher wages pay for themselves, but it usually takes pressure to get companies to move in that direction. So much of what Noah predicts is based on the notion that political power will shift toward workers. It's clear enough what needs to happen, but harder to see how it happens. But the great suppression of wages can clearly be dated to the rise of Reagan Republicans in the 1980s.

McKenna Oxenden: [05-27] An 11-year-old boy called 911. Police then shot him.

Aja Romano: [05-24] Puritanism took over online fandom -- and then came for the rest of the internet: "Puriteens, anti-fans, and the culture war's most bonkers battleground." After reading Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland, I should have been prepared for this piece, but my basic reaction is to imagine that no one, even the author, could have anticipated how much more blurred the line between fantasy and reality could become in a mere six years. Less clear is how ominous all this fantasy is.

The temptation to inhabit imaginary worlds probably goes back to the oral folklore preserved as myths, and certainly encompasses the whole history of literature (usually explicitly labeled fiction). In recent years, three inventions have intensified this: television has immersed us in fiction, making it both easier to consume and more much vivid; gaming has added an interactive dimension; and the internet (social media) has made it trivially easy for people to react and expound upon the stories. As long as people recognize the line between fact and fiction, and as long as they maintain respect and decorum in their posts, it's hard to see much harm. But there have always been gray areas, especially where fantasy is presented as fact, even more so when it's driven by malign politics. Still, the problem here is less the art than the politics. As long as you can keep them straight, I don't see much problem. (For instance, we watch a lot of shows where cops are extraordinarily insightful and smart, have integrity and character, are profoundly committed to justice, and rarely if ever make gross mistakes -- traits uncommon among real cops.)

One thing that made this article difficult is the terminology. In particular, I had to go to Fanlore to find a definition of shipping: it is contracted from relationship, and used for promoting or derogating hypothetical relationships between fictional characters. This all seems to be tied to an increase in anti-sex attitudes -- no doubt this is amplified by the internet, but really? -- including an obsession with pedophilia and trafficking. Supposedly this has been made worse by the FOSTA-SESTA act, which originally sounded unobjectionable but its loudest advocates can turn it into cruel repression.

Jim Rutenberg/Michael S Schmidt/Jeremy W Peters: [05-27] Missteps and miscalculations: Inside Fox's legal and business debacle: "Fox's handling of the defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which settled for $787.5 million, left many unanswered questions."

Lily Sánchez/Nathan J Robinson: [05-18] Robert F Kennedy Jr is a lying crank posing as a progressive alternative to Biden. Also:

• Ed Kilgore: [05-26] Do RFK Jr.'s supporters really know who he is?

Richard Sandomir: [05-27] Stanley Engerman, revisionist scholar of slavery, dies at 87: Engerman co-wrote, with Robert W Fogel, the 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of Negro Slavery, which significantly changed our understanding of how slavery function within American capitalism. Fogel & Engerman were among the first prominent historians to base their work on extensive data analysis, as opposed to the standard practice of collecting stories from primary and secondary sources.

Jeffrey St Clair: [05-26] The Clintons and the rich women: No "roaming charges" this week, sad to say, so St Clair dusted off an oldie from his book, An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (a compilation of short essays published in 2022). This one explores the lobbying effort (and the money behind it) that secured Marc Rich a pardon in 2000. One surprise name that pops up here is Jack Quinn.

Maureen Tkacik: [05-23] Quackonomics: "Medical Properties Trust spent billions buying community hospitals in bewildering deals that made private equity rich and working-class towns reel."

Nick Turse: [05-23] Blood on his hands: "Survivors of Kissinger's secret war in Cambodia reveal unreported mass killings." More occasioned by his 100th birthday:

• Ben Burgis: [05-27] Henry Kissinger is a disgusting war criminal. And the rot goes deeper than him.

• Greg Grandin: [05-15] Henry Kissinger, war criminal -- still at large at 100: "We now know a great about the crimes he committed while in office, . . . But we know little about his four decades with Kissinger Associates." Grandin has a 2015 book on Kissinger: Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman. In that book, I found this quote, based on Seymour Hersh's 1983 Kissinger book, The Price of Power:

  Hersh gave us the defining portrait of Kissinger as a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and sycophancy to advance his career, cursing his fate and letting fly the B-52s. Small in his vanities and shabby in his motives, Kissinger, in Hersh's hands, is nonetheless Shakespearean because the pettiness gets played out on a world stage with epic consequences.

• Jonathan Guyer: [05-27] Henry Kissinger is 100, but his legacy is still shaping how US foreign policy works. I've never tried to figure out how much US foreign policy in the pivotal 1969-75 period was Kissinger as opposed to Nixon. My guess was that Kissinger added intellectual filigree to Nixon's baser impulses, but Kissinger was callous enough to suit Nixon's needs. As for his later freelance efforts, I knew few specifics, so I'm most likely to chalk them up as ordinary graft. With all the criminality -- in some ways, Kissinger's most damaging legacy isn't what he did but that he made such things seem normal, expected even, for those who followed -- it's easy to overlook one of Nixon's most important moves, which was to end the Bretton-Woods system, during which the US was responsible for maintaining a stable capitalist world market. After, it was each nation for itself, which ultimately turned into the US (and the few "allies" it intimidated) against the world.

• Fred Kaplan: [05-27] Henry Kissinger's bloody legacy: "The dark side of Kissinger's tradecraft left a deep stain on vast quarters of the globe -- and on America's own reputation."

• Jerelle Kraus: [05-27] Henry Kissinger: A war criminal who has not once faced the bar of justice.

• Bhaskar Sunkara/Jonah Walters: [05-27] Henry Kissinger turns 100 this week. He should be ashamed to be seen in public: The picture, from 2011, shows him with a rather giddy-looking Hillary Clinton.

You can also watch a piece from the Mehdi Hasan Show on Kissinger. You might also take a look at this chart of life expectancy in Cambodia, which falls off a cliff during the years Kissinger was in power (1969-77). Some commenters want to make a distinction between bombing deaths (150-500K) and the genocide unleashed by the Khmer Rouge (1.5-3M), but the the former destabilized the studiously neutral Sihanouk regime, allowing the Khmer Rouge to seize power.

Kayla M Williams: [05-28] Who should we honor on Memorial Day? The article argues that many veterans are unfairly not counted among the war dead heroes because they were felled by longer, slower maladies that only started in war, such as exposure to toxic chemicals (Agent Orange in Vietnam, burn pits in Iraq) or PTSD (the suicide rate among veterans if if anything even higher than the battlefield death rate). I have no quarrel with that argument, but my initial gut reaction to the title is that we shouldn't limit honor to war dead or even to veterans.

When I was young, the focus of Memorial Day was Fluty Cemetery down in Arkansas: either we went there, or my mother arranged for flowers to be placed there by relatives. Some served, but none of the people I knew of under the headstones were killed in war. But they worked the hardscrabble Ozark soil, and built homes and families, eventually leading to me (and, well, many others). As far as I know, they were all honorable people, and deserved remembrance. Of course, those who did die in war deserve remembrance as well, but less for their lives (however valiant) than for their waste, which we should be reminded of lest we blunder into even more wasteful wars.

Li Zhou: [05-23] Montana's TikTok ban -- and the legal challenge of it -- explained. My preferred solution is to ban all companies from collecting personal data, much less passing it on to others. If that impacts their business models, maybe that's a good thing.

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