Music Week

Expanded blog post, January archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32712 [32640] rated (+72), 230 [228] unrated (+2).

Whereas last week I closed my count on Sunday as usual but didn't post Music Week until Thursday, this week I'm even later, and this time I used to the extra days to squeeze more records in. For the record, the count was +34 Sunday evening, when I would normally cut over. The reason for the extra days this week is that I usually save away a frozen copy of my yearly list on or near the end of January, and I thought it would make more sense to align that date with the end of January Streamnotes. Last year I decided to publish my reviews in my Music Week posts, out each Monday, and align the monthly Streamnotes archives with Music Week posts, cutting off each month on its final Monday. However, this year the final Monday left five days in the month, which is normally 20-25 records -- enough of a discrepancy to make me want to include them before freeze date.

On the other hand, I didn't get as much done in my extra days [of January] as I hoped. In fact, the only way I'll get anything up dated Jan. 31 is through the miracle of backdating. (I'm writing this on Feb. 1, and doubt I'll get done tonight, either. [I finally did the freeze Feb. 5, posting well after midnight, so Feb. 6.]) One thing that got in the way was my decision to rustle up a rather ambitious Friday dinner. I thought of this initially as my mother's birthday, but rather than fixing any of her specialties, I decided to slightly rework the last birthday dinner I fixed for her. Only later did I realize this was the 20th anniversary of that dinner. After she died in June, we drove to Dodge City, where I made the same dinner for my father's cousin, Zula Mae Reed. She was one of the first people to introduce me to Chinese food. Ever since I figured out how to make my own, I had wanted to cook Chinese or her.

After making the occasional stir-fry mess in New York, I moved to New Jersey, threw my wok away, bought some good aluminum core, stainless steel pans, and started studying Barbara Tropp's The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, and got pretty good at it. I later branched out to practically everything else. But lately I've steered away from Chinese for large dinners -- most dishes require a final stir-fry, which is chaotic and leaves a huge mess (I call this the "fire drill," a term which probably has racist origins but seems perfectly descriptive in this case, even if everything is perfectly executed). When I make Chinese these days, it's often for just the two of us. I did just that a week ago, and felt that I was losing my touch, so that made me all the more resolved to prove I could still do it.

My menu last night:

• Fried chicken Szechuan style: cubed chicken breast, deep-fried, stir-fried with spicy aromatics and a soy-based sauce.
• Stir-fried scallops with orange peel: velveted scallops, water chesnuts, orange peel, in a soy-based sauce, garnished with deep-fried spinach strands.
• Dry-fried beef: thin strips, marinated and deep-fried, then stir-fried with carrots and green bell pepper strips and a dark soy sauce.
• Dry-seared green beans: deep-fried, with stir-fried with pork, dried shrimp, Szechuan and Tientsin vegetables, soy, and scallions.
• Dry-fried Chinese eggplant nuggets: stir-fried with aromatics, and a chile-brown sugar-balsamic vinegar sauce.
• Shrimp, leek & pine nut fried rice: rice, with velveted shrimp, sauteed leeks, fried egg, and pine nuts.

Huge amount of prep work here, including initial cooking in the deep fryer (green beans, spinach, beef, chicken), in water (shrimp, scallops), or in the sauté pan (leeks, eggs), soaking, cutting/chopping, arranging aromatics on plates for each dish, mixing sauces for each dish (in two cases with a separate cornstarch slurry to thicken), and garnishes. Once everything was prepped, I did the final stir-fry two dishes at a time, in rapid succession. Some minor problems along the way, and one or two dishes didn't turn out quite perfect, but the dishes are so flavorful no one else seemed disappointed.

For dessert, I thought I'd try the "fusion east-west" recipes in Tropp's China Moon Cookbook: I did the chocolate-walnut tart and ginger ice cream. The tart was overdone (could be that I used too large a pan, making the crust and filling too thin), which made it hard to get out of the nominally non-stick pan, and probably made it a bit chewier than it was supposed to be. Neither turned out to be a problem with the ice cream on top. Bumped the recipe by 50%, which turned out to be the upper limit of the machine and a bit more than I could put into my chosen container, but it was all gone before the guests left.

Robert Christgau published his Dean's List 2019 on January 26, with 76 records, 14 released in 2018 or earlier (back to 2015, including my 2018 favorite, The Ex: 27 Passports). A half-dozen titles hadn't been reviewed yet in his Consumer Guide -- the biggest surprise Kalie Shorr's Open Book. I gave it a low B+ in December, resisting the glitzy Nashville production, but gave it another shot, and the songs started poking through. It's one of several re-grades below -- mostly records I admired first time but liked a little more on review. I replayed a few more I didn't budge, including Purple Mountains, The Paranoid Style, Danny Brown, and Slowthai -- all solid B+(***), as I originally thought. I played everything else I had missed (except couldn't find the Seeds soundtrack), but haven't gone down the list to biggest disconnects (like 100 Gecs).

I don't mean to nitpick, but thought it might be helpful to list my non-jazz A-list picks that Christgau hasn't yet reviewed or listed (skipping records, like Hayes Carll: What It Is and Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell, that Christgau gave B+ or stars to):

6. Yugen Blakrok: Anima Mysterioum (IOT)
8. Mdou Moctar: Blue Stage Session (Third Man)
9. Control Top: Covert Contracts (Get Better)
10. MexStep: Resistir (Third Root -18
11. Mavis Staples: We Get By (Anti-)
16. Dave: Psychodrama (Neighbourhood
17. Weldon Henson: Texas Made Honky Tonk (Hillbilly Renegade)
19. People Under the Stars: Sincerely, the P (Piecelock 70)
20. Chris Knight: Almost Daylight (Drifters Church)
23. Kelsey Waldon: White Noise/White Lines (Oh Boy)
25. L'Orange & Jeremiah Jae: Complicate Your Life With Violence (Mello Music Group)
26. Allison Moorer: Blood (Autotelic)
32. Willie Nelson: Ride Me Back Home (Legacy)
33. Nilüfer Yanya: Miss Universe (ATO)
41. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib: Bandana (Keel Cool/RCA)
43. Queen Key: Eat My Pussy (Again) (Machine Entertainment Group)
44. The Chemical Brothers: No Geography (Virgin EMI)
46. Caterina Barbieri: Ecstatic Computation (Editions Mego)
48. Czarface: The Odd Czar Against Us (Silver Age)
50. Murs: The Iliad is Dead and the Odyssey Is Over (Jamla/Empire)
51. Hieroglyphic Being: Synth Expressionism/Rhythmic Cubism (On the Corner)
52. YBN Cordae: The Lost Boy (Atlantic)
54. Sault: 5 (Forever Living Originals)
55. Sault: 7 (Forever Living Originals)
56. The Campfire Flies: Sparks Like Little Stars (OverPop Music)
57. Boy Harsher: Careful (Nude Club)
58. Apollo Brown: Sincerely, Detroit (Mello Music Group)
59. Pet Shop Boys: Inner Sanctum (X2)
60. Lee Scratch Perry: Heavy Rain (On-U Sound)
61. Sarathy Korwar: More Arriving (The Leaf Label)
62. Snotty Nose Rez Kids: Trapline (Fontana North)
63. Caroline Spence: Mint Condition (Rounder)
64. Ani DiFranco: No Walls: Mixtape (Righteous Babe)
65. Peter Perrett: Humanworld (Domino)
67. Oompa: Cleo (OompOutLoud)
70. Add-2: Jim Crow: The Musical (Add-2 Productions)
71. Omar Souleyman: Shlon (Mad Decent/Because)
72. Special Request: Offworld (Houndstooth)
74. Leonard Cohen: Thanks for the Dance (Columbia/Legacy)
75. Beans on Toast: The Inevitable Train Wreck (Beans on Toast Music)

I'm surprised this list ran so long (40 of 77 records, so 52%). One thing Christgau laments on his list is a hip-hop shortfall, but I count 13 here (including Blakrok, MexStep and Dave, but not Yanya, Korwar or Sault). Also 6 country, some political folkies, some electronica, and various world outposts. By the way, recent adds and promotions made the non-jazz A-list longer than the jazz one (77-to-75).

The extra listening time brought my number of reviewed 2019 releases to 1224. This compares to 1075 at freeze time last year, 1145 in 2017, 1075 in 2016, 1110 in 2015, 1173 in 2014, 1149 in 2013, 1068 in 2012, 1334 in 2011, and 1236 in 2010. (Going further back: 2009: 1050, 2008: 907, 2007: 1135, 2006: 1089, 2005: 871, 2004: 941, 2003: 525. No data for earlier years, as 2003 was when I started writing -- and getting promos -- again.) About 75% of this year's records were streamed or downloaded, which is probably a record high, but likely to be topped each coming year. I've been expecting the review total to decline each year since my 2011 peak. The only significance I attribute to the bump this year is that I haven't felt up to doing much else. I expect it to drop next year, perhaps significantly -- either if I get into writing long-contemplated but slow-starting non-music projects, or if my health declines.

Meanwhile, the main thing that slowed this post down wasn't a desire to cram in more records. It was the time it took to reach a break point in my EOY Aggregate. I wound up counting 689 lists, of which 174 were considered major (generally, 20+ ranked records, scored 1-5 points), vs. minor lists (top-tens, scored 1-3 points, or unranked lists), with some discretion exercised. Aside from the lists, this includes grade points from Robert Christgau, Michael Tatum, and myself (1-5 points), which admittedly gives the totals a slight bias. I also included a lot of Jazz Critics Poll individual ballots, which contributed significantly to the two jazz albums that cracked the top 40 (plus ten more in the top 100). On the other hand, with no Pazz & Jop poll this year, I wasn't able to cherry-pick individual ballots there. Two more systematic biases should be noted: I skipped nearly all metal lists this year, and I skipped most of the international press lists that Acclaimed Music Forums does such a good job of compiling. Both omissions were mostly the result of priorities as I was trying to catch up while recuperating from surgery, and I never got back to them. I may find some reason to fiddle further, but at this point the smart thing would be to leave well enough alone.

Here's the top 40, with points up front and my grades in brackets.

1. [447] Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell (Polydor/Interscope) [A-]
2. [380] Billy Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? (Darkroom/Interscope) [A-]
3. [334] Tyler, the Creator: Igor (Columbia) [**]
4. [319] FKA Twigs: Magdalene (Young Turks) [B]
5. [278] Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Ghosteen (Ghosteen/Bad Seeds) [B]
6. [275] Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising (Sub Pop) [B-]
7. [274] Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains (Drag City) [***]
8. [269] Lizzo: Cuz I Love You (Nice Life/Atlantic) [A-]
9. [265] Sharon Van Etten: Remind Me Tomorrow (Jagjaguwar) [*]
10. [259] Angel Olsen: All Mirrors (Jagjaguwar) [*]
11. [235] Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride (Columbia) [**]
12. [226] Big Thief: U.F.O.F. (4AD) [A-]
13. [224] Little Simz: Grey Area (Age 101) [A-]
14. [206] Solange: When I Get Home (Saint/Columbia) [*]
15. [181] Fontaines D.C.: Dogrel (Partisan) [***]
16. [178] Brittany Howard: Jaime (ATO) [B]
17. [173] Freddie Gibbs & Madlib: Bandana (Keep Cool/RCA) [A-]
18. [166] Big Thief: Two Hands (4AD) [**]
19. [166] Ariana Grande: Thank U Next (Republic) [**]
20. [160] Jamila Woods: Legacy! Legacy! (Jagjaguwar) [A-]
21. [148] Black Midi: Schlagenheim (Rough Trade) [**]
22. [141] Dave: Psychodrama (Neighbourhood) [A-]
23. [141] Michael Kiwanuka: Kiwanuka (Polydor) [*]
24. [130] Jenny Lewis: On the Line (Warner Bros.) [*]
25. [130] Slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain (Method) [***]
26. [129] Danny Brown: Uknowhatimsayin¿ (Warp) [***]
27. [125] Bon Iver: i,i (Jagjaguwar) [B]
28. [117] Aldous Harding: Designer (4AD) [B]
29. [116] Taylor Swift: Lover (Republic) [A-]
30. [112] Julia Jacklin: Crushing (Polyvinyl) [B]
31. [111] The Highwomen: The Highwomen (Elektra) [B]
32. [111] The National: I Am Easy to Find (4AD) [**]
33. [110] Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars (Columbia) [B-]
34. [109] Kris Davis: Diatom Ribbons (Pyroclastic) [***]
35. [107] Denzel Curry: Zuu (Loma Vista) [**]
36. [105] Thom Yorke: Anima (XL) [B-]
37. [103] Better Oblivion Community Center: Better Oblivion Community Center (Dead Oceans) [*]
38. [103] Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis (Constellation) [***]
39. [101] Carly Rae Jepsen: Dedicated (604/School Boy/Interscope) [***]
40. [100] Rapsody: Eve (Roc Nation) [***]

Every aggregate list (either of lists or of individuals) has its peculiar selection and weighting biases. I'm having trouble finding more, but the big ones are Album of the Year and Metacritic. I can't do any analysis at this time, but my impression is that for a long time, the lists were dominated by alt/indie rock with occasional celebrity-crossover hip-hop breakthroughs (e.g., Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar). Last few years alt/indie has waned, and pure pop albums have done better, as well as some artier things I often have trouble fathoming (Nick Cave and Weyes Blood are prime examples this year). One result is that there are more albums on the list I like these days, certainly compared to 6-10 years ago (when I started compiling these EOY lists). Still, not a lot of critically popular hip-hop this year (only Tyler, the Creator in the top 10 this year, although it was a huge year for British hip-hop, with Little Simz, Dave, Slowthai, and others just down the list).

New records reviewed this week:

• Snoh Aalegra: Ugh, Those Feels Again (2019, Artium): [r]: B+(**)
• Add-2: Jim Crow: The Musical (2019, Add-2 Productions): [r]: A-
• Altin Gün: Gece (2019, ATO): [r]: B+(**)
• Daymé Arocena: Sonocardiogram (2019, Brownswood): [r]: B
• BaianaSystem: O Futuro Não Demora (2019, Máquina De Louco): [r]: B+(***)
• BCUC: Emakhosini (2018, Buda Musique): [r]: B+(*)
• BCUC: The Healing (2019, Buda Musique): [r]: B+(**)
• Benny Benack III: A Lot of Livin' to Do (2019 [2020], LA Reserve): [cd]: B+(**) [01-24]
• Daniel Bernardes & Drumming GP: Liturgy of the Birds: In Memoriam Olivier Messiaen (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Big K.R.I.T.: K.R.I.T. Iz Here (2019, Multi Alumni): [r]: B+(**)
• Jim Black Trio: Reckon (2019 [2020], Intakt): [r]: A-
• Black Alien: Abaixo De Zero: Hello Hell (2019, Extrapunk Extrafunk): [r]: B+(*)
• Zack Brock/Matt Ulery/Jon Deitemyer: Wonderment (2018 [2019], Woolgathering): [r]: B+(**)
• Brockhampton: Ginger (2019, Question Everything/RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• Apollo Brown: Sincerely, Detroit (2019, Mello Music Group): [r]: A-
• Charly Bliss: Supermoon (2019, Barsuk, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Gary Clark Jr.: This Land (2019, Warner Brothers): [r]: B
• Luke Combs: What You See Is What You Get (2019, River House/Columbia Nashville): [r]: B+(**)
• Jamael Dean: Black Space Tapes (2019, Stones Throw): [r]: B+(*)
• Dreamville: Revenge of the Dreamers III (2019, Dreamville/Interscope): [r]: B+(*)
• Daniel Erdmann's Velvet Revolution: Won't Put No Flag Out (2019, BMC): [r]: B+(**)
• Dori Freeman: Every Single Star (2019, Blue Hens Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Jan Garbarek/Hilliard Ensemble: Remember Me, My Dear (2014 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Halsey: Manic (2020, Capitol): [r]: B+(***)
• Tim Heidecker: Another Year in Hell (2018 [2019], Jagjaguwar, EP): [r]: B
• Hieroglyphic Being: Synth Expressionism/Rhythmic Cubism (2019, On the Corner): [r]: A-
• Jenny Hval: The Practice of Love (2019, Sacred Bones): [r]: B+(***)
• Bobby J From Rockaway: Summer Classics (2019, Make Noise): [r]: B+(**)
• JackBoys & Travis Scott: JackBoys (2019, Cactus Jack/Epic, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Jealous of the Birds: Wisdom Teeth (2019, Atlantic, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Cody Jinks: After the Fire (2019, Late August): [r]: B+(***)
• Cody Jinks: The Wanting (2019, Late August): [r]: B+(**)
• Oumar Konaté: I Love You Inna (2018 [2019], Clermont Music): [r]: A-
• Arto Lindsay/Joe McPhee/Ken Vandermark/Phil Sudderberg: Largest Afternoon (2018 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(**)
• Fred Lonberg-Holm/Joe McPhee: No Time Left for Sadness (2019 [2020], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(**)
• John McLaughlin/Shankar Mahadevan/Zakir Hussain: Is That So? (2020, Abstract Logix): [bc]: B+(**)
• Microwave: Death Is a Warm Blanket (2019, Pure Noise): [bc]: B+(*)
• Hedvig Mollestad Trio: Smells Funny (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B+(**)
• Allison Moorer: Blood (2019, Autotelic): [r]: A-
• Bob Mould: Sunshine Rock (2019, Merge): [r]: B+(**)
• The Murder Capital: When I Have Fears (2019, Human Season): [r]: B+(*)
• Murs: The Iliad Is Dead and the Odyssey Is Over (2019, Jamla/Empire): [r]: A-
• Aaron Novik: The Fallow Curves of the Planospheres (2019, Avant LaGuardia): [r]: B+(*)
• Otoboke Beaver: Itekoma Hits (2019, Damnably): [r]: B+(**)
• Jeff Parker: Suite for Max Brown (2020, International Anthem): [bc]: B+(**)
• The Pernice Brothers: Spread the Feeling (2019, Ashmont): [r]: B+(*)
• Post Malone: Hollywood's Bleeding (2019, Republic): [r]: B
• Emily Scott Robinson: Traveling Mercies (2019, Tone Tree Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Kurt Rosenwinkel Bandit 65: Searching the Continuum (2019, Heartcore): [r]: B+(***)
• Serengeti: Music From the Graphic Novel Kenny Vs the Dark Web (2019, Burnco, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Shed: Oderbruch (2019, Ostgut Ton): [r]: B+(***)
• Ed Sheeran: No. 6 Collaborations Project (2019, Asylum): [r]: B+(**)
• Skyzoo & Pete Rock: Retropolitan (2019, Mello Music Group): [r]: B+(**)
• Sly Horizon: The Anatomy of Light (2018 [2019], Iluso): [bc]: B+(*)
• Son Volt: Union (2019, Transmit Sound): [r]: B+(*)
• The Steel Woods: Old News (2019, Woods Music): [r]: B-
• Harry Styles: Fine Line (2019, Columbia): [r]: C+
• Sunn O))): Life Metal (2019, Southern Lord): [r]: B-
• Leo Svirsky: River Without Banks (2019, Unseen Worlds): [r]: B+(**)
• Veronica Swift: Confessions (2019, Mack Avenue): [r]: B+(**)
• Rebecca Trescher: Where We Go (2019, Enja/Yellowbird): [r]: B+(**)
• Dwight Trible: Mothership (2019, Gearbox): [r]: B+(*)
• Amber Weekes: Pure Imagination (2019 [2020], Amber Inn Productions): [cd]: B+(*)
• Kanye West: Jesus Is King (2019, GOOD/Def Jam): [r]: B-
• Wilco: Ode to Joy (2019, dBpm): [r]: B+(*)
• Will of the People [Haftor Medbøe]: Will of the People (2019, Copperfly): [bc]: B+(**)
• Wire: Mind Hive (2020, Pink Flag): [r]: B+(***)
• Brandee Younger: Soul Awakening (2012 [2019], self-released): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Julie Coker: A Life in the Limelight: Lagos Disco & Itsekiri Highlife 1976-1981 (1976-81 [2019], Kalita): [r]: B+(*)
• Professor Longhair: Live on the Queen Mary (1975 [2019], Harvest): [r]: B+(***)
• Jim Sullivan: U.F.O. (1969 [2019], Light in the Attic): [r]: B
• Jim Sullivan: Jim Sullivan (1972 [2019], Light in the Attic): [r]: B+(*)
• This Is Toolroom 2019 (Edits) (2019, Toolroom): [r]: B+(***)

Grade (or other) changes:

• 75 Dollar Bill: I was Real (2019, Thin Wrist): [r]: [was B+(***)] A-
• Stella Donnelly: Beware of the Dogs (2019, Secretly Canadian): [r]: [was: B+(***)] A-
• Craig Finn: I Need a New War (2019, Partisan): [r]: [was: B+(***)] A-
• Kalie Shorr: Open Book (2019, self-released): [r]: [was: B+(*)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Mark Segger Sextet: Lift Off (18th Note) [02-07]

Weekend Roundup

[PS: Added links after initial post: Robert Wright.]

Not much on the impeachment trial below. I remember watching Senate hearings on Watergate, but haven't followed anything in Congress that closely since -- even the Iraq War votes (note plural), or a series of Supreme Court votes (starting with Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas) even though they were much more consequential. The Democrats would like to see this impeachment as a grave, solemn affair, but it doesn't differ from the Clinton impeachment enough to sway me. Of course, if given the chance, I'd vote to convict -- fact of the matter is I would have voted to convict Clinton as well -- but the 2020 election remains the prize, and this is just a distraction. If Republicans decide to throw Trump under the bus, they'd still have the colorless, soulless Mike Pence in the White House, still have their Senate majority, and still have all those judges they've confirmed during the last three years. On the other hand, the 2020 elections offer the hope of starting to reverse the tragic effects of electing those Republicans in recent years. I know I've eschewed reporting on horserace political stories, but I'd much rather be reading Bernie Sanders surges into lead in new CNN poll and Polls show Bernie Sanders surging at just the right time and Getting Bernie over the top than anything on the impeachment trial travesty or how sad our wretched democracy has become.

Some scattered links this week:

• Tim Alberta: How the gun show became the Trump show.

• Kate Aronoff: Why climate-conscious plutocrats still like Trump: "Attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week say they're worried about global warming. But they're also looking out for their business models." By the way, Trump was in Davos last week, trying to look busy during his trial, sending soundbites back home while contributing nothing there (e.g., see Trump roars, and Davos shrugs.)

• Zach Beauchamp: Bernie Sanders's Joe Rogan experience: "Joe Rogan's controversial endorsement of Bernie Sanders, explained." I can't say as I knew the first thing about Rogan before reading this. I add that nothing here makes me want to listen to Rogan's podcasts. On the other hand, any "leftists" who see this endorsement as rason to attack Bernie have a death wish, such that you have to wonder whether left politics has any practical meaning for them.

• Julia Belluz: A SARS-like virus is spreading quickly. Here's what you need to know. Related links:

  • Sasha Abramsky: The United States is more vulnerable than ever to deadly diseases: "In a bout of bipartisan neglect, Washington has cut billions from our public-health infrastructure over the past decade."

  • Eric Levitz: The coronavirus should be a wake-up call for Congress.

• Ben Burgis: The many bad arguments against Medicare for All.

• Peter Cary: How Republicans made millions on the tax cuts they pushed through Congress: "The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a case study of how lawmakers make themselves richer with the bills they pass."

• Casey Cep: The long war against slavery: A review of Vincent Brown's book, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which starts with a slave revolt in Jamaica and situates it in the context of the broader debate over slavery.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Tape records Trump ordering goons to get rid of Ambassador Yovanovitch.

  • Now we know what would have happened if Joe McCarthy became president.

• Clio Chang: The only thing stopping us from taxing the rich is political will: Interview with Gabriel Zucman, "the rock star behind the wealth tax," co-author with Emmanuel Saez of The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (a book I read and recommend). Of course, one should add that political will in the US is not equally (or even randomly) distributed, but is skewed heavily toward the rich. It's also technically more difficult to assess a wealth tax than a progressive income tax that would impact the rich and raise comparable revenues. The estate tax is an exception here, in that the government could simply confiscate whatever property is covered, liquidate the assets, and pay off the untaxed share (if there still is one) to the heirs in cash (possibly an annuity).

• Jelani Cobb: Trump, impeachment, and the short-term thinking of the GOP.

• Coral Davenport: Trump removes pollution controls on streams and wetlands.

• Jackson Diehl: Trump's hallmark foreign policy failure? 'Maximum pressure.'

• Larry Elliott: Soros gives $1bn to fund universities 'and stop the drift towards authoritarianism': That's the thing about the left-right split among billionaires. Not only are the right-wing types more numerous, they put their money fairly narrowly into securing even more political power. Soros does spend money on politicians, but he spends a lot more on projects that are meant to do direct good, rather than trying to redirect the corruption of the political class to more noble ends.

• Lee Fang: Interim Bolivian government taps the same lobby firm hired to sell the coup in Honduras. Big surprise: the firm is based in Washington, DC.

• Liza Featherstone: Adam Schiff is a dangerous warmonger: A track record which makes his promotion of weapons for Ukraine all the more disturbing.

• Thomas Geoghegan: Educated fools: Why Democratic leaders still misunderstand the politics of social class.

• Kim Ghattas: The Muslim world's question: 'What happened to us?' In an excerpt from his book, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East, the author points to three pivotal events from 1979: the Iranian Revolution, the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (which the US, allying with Islamist-ruled Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, countered by bankrolling jihad). I'd add the 1979 oil shock, which resulted in Carter declaring the Persian Gulf a vital interest to the United States, the US-brokered peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which split Egypt away from its previous interest in Arab unity, and Israel's initial invasion into Lebanon's civil war (which Carter was able to cancel at the time, but Israel repeated in 1982). Two points stand out here: from 1979 on the US took a much more direct, much more aggressive role in the Middle East; but in many ways the US let their "allies" direct operations at a detailed level, especially those based on politicizing religion, and that eventually resulted in those "allies" directing US policy for their own regional purposes, with little or no regard for broader American interests. So while it's true that much of the Muslim world is saying "what happened to us?" many in America are left wondering the very same thing.

• Amy Goodman: Law professor: Trump could also have been impeached for war crimes, assassinations and corruption: Title reflects interview with Marjorie Cohn. Such an indictment would be more interesting and more damning than the one that Pelosi, Schiff, and Nadler chose to prosecute.

• David A Graham: Here's what Trump has been up to while Americans have been distracted by impeachment. E.g.:

  The administration has announced a series of major steps just in the past few days, since senators were sworn in for the impeachment trial on January 16.

  On January 17, the Agriculture Department announced that it would roll back nutritional standards for school lunches that were championed by former first lady Michelle Obama. (In what the government insisted was a coincidence, January 17 is her birthday.) . . .

  Yesterday, while hobnobbing with the world's wealthiest elites at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Trump told CNBC that he would consider cutting entitlements in a second term. . . .

  He also said he'd expand his controversial travel ban to Belarus, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania, with different restrictions on people from different countries. . . .

  Meanwhile, the administration also disclosed plans to make it harder for pregnant women to get visas to travel to the United States, a move intended to prevent women from giving birth stateside and thus earning American citizenship for their children. The phenomenon of "anchor babies" or "birth tourism" has been, like Michelle Obama's lunch rules, a conservative obsession for years, though it's unclear how many people actually come to the U.S. to give birth. . . .

  Today is still young, but already the administration is set to announce a drastic reinterpretation of the Clean Water Act that will exempt a large number of waterways from protection and allow more pollution.

  All of this is only a few days' worth of changes. Impeachment has dominated political news for nearly four months now, and the administration has made plenty of other under-the-radar moves -- cuts to food stamps, rollbacks to LBGTQ protections, and diverting Pentagon funds to pay for border-wall construction among them.

• Greg Grandin: Slavery, and American racism, were born in genocide. A little history refresher, published for MLK Day.

• Jacob Heilbrunn: The Neocons strike back: "How a discreditdd foreign policy ideology continues to wreak havoc in Washington and around the world."

• Nathan Heller: Is venture capital worth the risk? "The industry shaped the past decade. It could destroy the next."

• Sean Illing: Is Trumpism a cult? Interview with Steven Hassan, author of a new book, The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control. Hassan's gained his "expertise" on cults by joining and eventually leaving the "Moonies." That doesn't strike me as very relevant, nor do I find it easy to credit Trump with the mental skills to be manipulative. On the other hand, there clearly are lots of people who want to think of him as the voice of God, and he's not one to dispel that sort of delusion. Maybe that dynamic will harden into a cult eventually, and as it does some of his followers will rebel, as Hassan eventually did. But I can't see any reason for the rest of us to read their inevitable books.

• Sarah Jones: Steve King is building a dank fascist meme stash.

• Joshua Keating: Forever wars don't end. They just go corporate.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Partisan polarization reaching record levels. That's because partisan differences actually mean something these days. But note also that it's the Republicans who are driving the polarization: Trump and his Congressional leadership have deliberately decided not to offer Democrats any concessions to broaden their appeal.

  • Could Bloomberg's billions boost the odds of a contested convention?

• Maya King: Bloomberg's massive ad campaign hikes TV prices for other candidates.

• Ezra Klein: Why Democrats still have to appeal to the center, but Republicans don't: The most convincing reason I see here is that most Democrats still depend on centrist corporate media giants to stay "reality-based," where the right has Fox, convincing the Republican base that there is no reality, just their political fears and biases.

• Steve Krakauer: Trump's wedding to Melania was 15 years ago. It explains so much about our cultural moment.

• Anita Kumar: How Trump fused his business empire to the presidency: "critics say the president has yet to face accountability for blatant conflicts of interest tied to his private businesses."

• Eric Levitz:

  • Donald Trump is already trying to cut entitlements: "Forget Trump's vague public remarks. His White House has officially endorsed cuts to Social Security, and is trying to cut Medicaid by fiat."

  • The left-wing realignment of American politics has already begun.

  • Hillary Clinton won't commit to endorsing Sanders if he wins nomination. Related: Luke Savage: We regret to inform you that Hillary Clinton is at it again.

• German Lopez: Marijuana legalization is about to have a huge year.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The head of ICE says he will deport DREAMers if the Supreme Court ends DACA.

  • The glaring problem in Trump's legal argument against impeachment.

• Ella Nilsen: Bernie Sanders's path to the 2020 Democratic nomination, explained.

• Anna North:

  • "They are coming after me because I am fighting for you": Trump at March for Life. More importantly, he's fighting "against them." Who are "them"? Well, most Americans.

  • The right keeps attacking Greta Thunberg's identity, not her ideas: "Steve Mnuchin says she needs to go to college before she talks about climate change."

• Andre Pagliarini: Brazilian conservatives really hate Glenn Greenwald. Other links on Brazil and/or Greenwald:

  • Isaac Chotiner: Glenn Greenwald on Brazil's charges against him.

  • Glenn Greenwald/Victor Pougy: Bolsonaro, under fire, dismisses his culture minister for giving a Nazi speech, but it is still representative of Brazil's governing ethos.

  • Matt Taibbi: Glenn Greenwald: 'Does the law in Brazil even matter anymore?'

  • Robert Wright: Glenn Greenwald has his reasons.

• Cameron Peters: Why a question about Ukraine sent Mike Pompeo into a rage. Well, he does come off as a guy with a lot of pent-up rage. Related:

  • Erik Wemple: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo berates NPR host.

  • Peter Wade: After Pompeo's bullying, Trump signals a renewed push to defund NPR.

• Kelsey Piper: Kansas's ag-gag law has been ruled unconstitutional: "The 1990 law banned documenting animal abuse on factory farms."

• Andrew Prokop:

  • A secret recording of a Trump dinner confirms one of Lev Parnas's allegations.

  • Mitch McConnell's impeachment trial strategy, explained.

• John Quiggin: Libertarians can't save the planet.

• Adam K Raymond: All the problems with the New York Times's televised endorsement special. Not all of them, of course. But it starts with the softball candidate interviews, continues with the ignorance and carelessness of the "judges," and continues through the decision to present the sausage making as reality TV faux drama, to the surprisingly indecisive finale. By the way, the actual written endorsement, which at least doesn't bury the lede, is here: The Democrats' best choices for president: Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar?

• Frank Rich: Trump's impeachment puts the Senate on trial.

• Tony Romm: Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade, new data shows.

• David Roth: The windbag of war: "Trump's boasts and lies about the conflict with Iran perfectly encapsulate America's petty, TV-addled, and increasingly degenerate president."

  The strangest and most enduring misapprehension about Donald Trump is that he has beliefs. He doesn't, or at least none beyond the lifelong conviction that Donald Trump really should be on television more often. Trump has his signature anxieties and appetites, numerous fears and a few oafish ambitions, and a wide spectrum of ancient and unexamined biases and bigotries, but he can claim nothing that rises anywhere near to being an actual belief. The attempt to retroactively graft something like a belief system onto the howling bottomless suckhole of Trump's idiocy and need, from both sides of the political spectrum, is a joke that stopped being funny long before Mark Levin sat in front of a fake fireplace on Fox News and did his grandiloquent best to describe the Trump Doctrine.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's impeachment trial countermessaging has been tasteless and incorrect tweets.

  • Fox News devised a way to cover the impeachment trial without covering it at all.

  • Trump's Davos news conerence featured a pack of lies about the impeachment trial.

  • Trump's lawyers began the impeachment trial with a blizzard of lies. /p>

• Greg Sargent: A big tell in Trump's own legal brief exposes McConnell's coverup.

• Jonah Shepp: Brexit is finally happening, but the drama is far from over.

• Henry Siegman: Is Apartheid the inevitable outcome of Zionism? I'm always uncomfortable with arguments about inevitability, but given that it's happened, it's hard to see how it could have turned out differently. There was a division within Zionism where Martin Buber, Joseph Magnes, and their circle tried to promote a less political, more cultural ideal, but they never mad much of a chance against David Ben-Gurion's socialist and his revisionist opponent-allies. Maybe earlier on the British could have imposed a power-sharing framework, but back then the British (as they were everywhere they set foot) were more concerned with exploiting race and religion to perpetuate their own rule.

• Jamil Smith: Trump, guns, and white fragility: "What do the Senate impeachment trial and the Virginia gun rally have in common?"

• Felicia Sonmez/Elise Viebeck: Schiff 'has not paid the price' for impeachment, Trump says in what appears to be a veiled threat.

• Nik Steinberg: Even before Mike Pompeo's blowup, State Department insiders were feeling undermined. Well, Trump's political appointees have been undermining the professional civil service almost everywhere. Rex Tillerson started this in the State Department: while he was less ideological than Pompeo, he was remarkably careless, ignorant, and callous. Michael Lewis wrote about several cases of this in The Fifth Risk. I have mixed views on this happening in the State Dept., as what passed for professional there was a lifelong commitment to anti-communism and neoliberalism -- the view that the sole purpose of US foreign policy is to secure business opportunities for the globalized rich (especially those in oil, arms, and finance). I could see doing some housecleaning there.

• Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Martha Nussbaum thinks the so-called retreat of liberalism is an academic fad. Interview with the philosopher on her latest book, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal, starting with some dumb things that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo) said.

• Emily Stewart: Hillary Clinton jumps into the 2020 primary by blasting Bernie Sanders. Explaining her fact-challenged rant against Sanders, Clinton is quoted as saying, "I thought everyone wanted my authentic, unvarnished views!" Maybe if they revealed some conscious remorse for her shortcomings, but just to remind us that deep down she's just another conceited asshole? Not really.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Bolton says Trump tied Ukraine aid to Biden investigation in book draft: One thing that wasn't clear before now was why Bolton, having refused to testify in the House, now wants to testify in the Senate. Evidently he now sees it as part of his book promo tour.

  • Ratings show Americans don't care about the impeachment trial enough to watch it.

  • Trump invites Israel, not Palestine, to discuss peace plan. This is Jared Kushner's "plan," which nobody likes -- even Israelis don't see the point, so it shouldn't be surprising that the first step is to get the US-Israeli side onto the same page. Then they (well, probably just Kushner) thinks they can ram a settlement they can call "peace" down everyone's throats. Not that there's any urgency here, but note the mug shots: one leader's impeached, the other's indicted. Both could use the distraction.

  • At Daos, Trump says US is a 'developing nation too'.

• Craig Timberg/Isaac Stanley-Becker: Sanders supporters have weaponized Facebook to spread angry memes about his Democratic rivals. This is probably meant to throw shade on Bernie for unsportsmanlike conduct -- "No other Democrat's supporters are engaged in behavior on a similar scale, which is more characteristic of the online movement galvanized by Trump" -- although I have to wonder whether this isn't an essential part of the skill-set necessary to run against Trump and win. A while back, I was trying to figure out what Democrats could do with Bloomberg's billion. I think I'd spend most of it on ground game, and secondly on social media. (Bloomberg is putting most of it into vanity TV ads, as if he's campaigning in the 1970s.) Meanwhile, Trump is doubling down. See: John Harris: Trump's greatest ally in the coming election? Facebook.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump said no US troops were hurt in the Iran strike. The number is now up to 34. Yeah, but for once a Trump lie made it easier to step back from a death spiral of escalation. On the other hand, this does remind us that war gamesmanship is always fraught with danger, something that sane people should always work against.

  • Thousands in Iraq called for US troops to leave the country. But there's more to the story. The US has long survived in Iraq by pitting factions against one another, casting itself as protector of minorities, plus a lot of bribes, so Trump officials are skeptical of having to respect the will of the majority. But the struggle continues: Huge rally as Iraqis demand US troops pull out.

• Libby Watson: The elite media's Amy Klobuchar blind spot: "That so many people in the pundit class promote a candidate credibly accused of being an abuse boss says a lot about their regard for ordinary people." That dredges up a story that made the rounds in the weeks after her announcement, but hasn't been heard from since.

• Alissa Wilkinson: The Fight explores how the ACLU is navigating the Trump era through 4 key cases: "The documentary shows the hard, exhausting work of fighting for civil and human rights."

• Gabriel Winant: No going back: The power and limits of the anti-monopolist tradition. Review of Matt Stoller's book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, roughly from the 1870s through the 1960s. With Reagan, anti-monopoly enforcement waned, while financiers went on a spree buying up, combining, and carving up businesses to reap more and more monopoly rents. Recently progressive Democrats have started to talk about monopoly (and monopsony) again, partly because anti-monopoly politics has always been rooted in a defense of markets against corrupting power. (E.g., see Thomas Philippon: The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets.)

• Robert Wright: Tom Cotton, soldier in Bill Kristol's proxy war against evil.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • It's Steven Mnuchin who should listen to economists on climate change.

  • The Bernie-Biden clash over Social Security, explained.

  • Democrats should talk about child care costs in a broader way.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, January archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32640 [32614] rated (+26), 228 [229] unrated (-1).

Three days late with this, but the cutoff was late Sunday night, so this is still an honest week's listening report. While I was not honoring my self-imposed schedule, I did continue to listen, so my scratch file for next week includes an additional 21 records -- a pace which will probably top 40 next week. Maybe more: it's tempting to run late next week so I can close January near the end of the month (instead of final Monday, the 27th this year). I usually do my freeze exercise the end of January: that being my signal to stop monitoring EOY lists and move on to the new year.

Actually, you'll find my first 2020 A- record below, as well as a few more 2020 releases. Most of the CDs in my promo queue are still future releases, so I'm noting release dates in cases that aren't out yet. I noticed on Facebook Phil Freeman noting that he already has over 100 promo records in his 2020 spreadsheet. I have a quarter of that, but might not be so far behind if I downloaded all the links that cross my mail. Thus far I've done none, but I am pleased to be getting mail from Astral Spirits now.

I've added quite a bit of jazz to my EOY Aggregate, including the NPR Jazz Critics Poll totals for new albums and reissues, plus about two-thirds of the critic ballots -- my first pass rule was to only list critics I had listed in previous years. This has pushed Kris Davis' poll-winning Diatom Ribbons to 33rd overall, the top-rated jazz album. I re-played the record when the poll dropped, but didn't feel like raising my initial B+(***) grade. I have maybe a dozen more records I feel like I should retry -- mostly Christgau picks that I liked but didn't spend much time with on first pass, like: Danny Brown, Stella Donnelly, The National, The Paranoid Style, Purple Mountains, Rapsody. Not much elsewhere has me wondering. Indeed, while my tracking file shows that there are literally thousands of unheard records that someone likes, I'm having a lot of trouble identifying ones that seem promising for me.

I also added in the totals from something called Pazz & Jop Rip-Off Poll. This is a fan poll which has existed for twenty-some years, but got more attention this year with Village Voice having abandoned their signature poll. I got an invite to join a while back, but never voted. I did, however, go through the ballots, and picked out fifty or so names I recognized -- mostly folks I had counted ballots from in past years. In the past I've been inclined to use P&J as an endpoint, testing how well my own lists anticipated the results, and in the process finding various biases of the critics polled. Still, nothing like what we see with this self-selected fan community. Purple Mountains won in a landslide, as both hip-hop and pop votes were pretty depressed. On the other hand, certain Christgau favorites did surprisingly well (e.g., The Paranoid Style at 17, 75 Dollar Bill at 8).

New records reviewed this week:

• Harry Allen/Mike Renzi: Rhode Island Is Famous for You (2019, GAC): [r]: B+(***)
• Beans on Toast: Cushty (2017, Xtra Mile): [r]: B+(**)
• Beans on Toast: A Bird in the Hand (2018, Beans on Toast Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Beans on Toast: The Inevitable Train Wreck (2019, Beans on Toast Music): [r]: A-
• Pip Blom: Boat (2019, Heavenly): [r]: B+(***)
• Satoko Fujii Orchestra New York: Entity (2019 [2020], Libra): [cd]: B+(***) [02-14]
• Gordon Grdina/Matt Mitchel/Jim Black: Gordon Grdina's Nomad Trio (2019 [2020], Skirl): [cd]: B+(**)
• Scott Hamilton Quartet: Danish Ballads . . . & More (2019, Stunt): [r]: A-
• Scott Hamilton: Jazz at the Club: Live From Societeit De Witte (2018 [2019], O.A.P.): [r]: B+(***)
• Scott Hamilton: Street of Dreams (2019, Blau): [r]: B+(***)
• Irreversible Entanglements: Homeless/Global (2019, International Anthem -EP): [bc]: B+(**)
• Aly Keïta/Jan Galega Brönnimann/Lucas Niggli: Kalan Teban (2019 [2020], Intakt): [r]: A-
• Peter Lemer Quintet: Son of Local Colour (2018 [2019], ESP-Disk): [r]: B+(**)
• Andrew Munsey: High Tide (2019, Birdwatcher): [r]: B+(**)
• Rex Orange County: Pony (2019, RCA): [r]: B

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Burnt Sugar/The Arkestra Chamber: Twentieth Anniversary Mixtapes: Groiddest Schnizzits: Volume One (2001-17 [2019], Trugroid/Avantgroidd): [r]: B+(***)
• Burnt Sugar/The Arkestra Chamber: Twentieth Anniversary Mixtapes: Groiddest Schnizzits: Volume Three (1999-2017 [2019], Trugroid/Avantgroidd): [r]: B+(***)
• Miles Davis: The Lost Quintet (1969 [2019], Sleepy Night): [r]: B+(**)
• Smokey Haangala: Aunka Ma Kwacha (1976 [2019], Séance Center): [r]: B+(*)
• ICP Tentet: Tetterettet (1977 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Sun Ra Arkestra: Live in Kalisz 1986 (1986 [2019], Languidity): [bc]: A-
• Laurie Spiegel: Unseen Worlds (1991 [2019], Unseen Worlds): [r]: A-
• June Tyson: Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra (1968-92 [2019], Modern Harmonic/Sundazed): [r]: B+(**)
• Hank Williams: The Complete Health & Happiness Recordings (1949 [2019], BMG, 2CD): [r]: A-

Old music:

• Harry Allen Quartet: London Date (2015 [2016], Trio): [bc]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• John Ellis and Andy Bragen: The Ice Siren (Parade Light) [03-20]
• Gilfema: Three (Sounderscore) [04-03]

Weekend Roundup

Last week's 6-candidate mini-debate reminded us that the Iowa Caucuses are fast approaching: February 3. It will be the first opportunity any Americans have to vote for candidates, the remnants of a field that has been reduced by half mostly through the whims of donors and the media. Unfortunately, the Americans voting will be Iowans. I was reminded of this by John Kerry, campaigning these days for Joe Biden. Kerry scored a surprise win in Iowa in 2004, kicking off an ill-fated campaign that resulted in a second term for GW Bush and Dick Cheney. As I recall, a lot of weight then was put on the idea of "electability," with many of Kerry's supporters figuring that Kerry's military record would sway voters against Bush. They miscalculated then, yet they're still in position to choose our fates.

I've been rather sanguine about the Democratic nominating process so far, but closing in on the start of actual voting, everyone is starting to get on my nerves. Even Sanders, who has by far the best analyses and positions, and the most steadfast character, but who I fear the media will never respect much less accept, and who will be hounded repeatedly with mistruths and misunderstandings. (The articles below that explicitly call out CNN will give you pretty glaring examples of what I mean.) Even Warren seems to have decided that the way to gain (or save) votes from Sanders is by resorting to half-truths and innuendo. I discuss one example below, but the whole pre-debate dust-up reflects very poorly on her, not least because it was done in ways that leave scars over trivial issues. Meanwhile Biden seems to be getting a free pass as he's blundering along.

I haven't been bothered much by the so-called moderates' plans, because no matter who wins it's effectively the right-most half of the party in Congress that will be passing laws and setting policy. But it does bother me that they've spent so much time trashing Medicare for All. In don't have a problem advocating half-measures to ameliorate the present system here and there, and figure that as a practical matter that's how reform will have to happen, but even the most reticent Democrat should realize that single-payer would be a better solution, and is a necessary goal. They really should acknowledge that, even if they doubt its practicality. But instead they're attacking it on grounds of costs and/or choice, which is simply ignorant.

I'm also rather sick of the "electability" issue, not least because I'm convinced that no one really understands the matter, because it's unprovable (except too late), and because it invites strong opinions based on nothing more than gut instincts. Still, I write about it several places below. Clearly, I have my own opinions on the matter, but can offer no more proof for them than you can for yours. I only wish to add here that one more thing I believe is that the election will turn not on whether the Democrats nominate one candidate or another but on whether Americans are so sick and tired of Trump they'll vote for any Democrat to spare themselves. And in that case, why not pick the better Democrat?

Some scattered links this week:

• Damian Carrington: Ocean temperatures hit record high as rate of heating accelerates. Also wrote: Who do record ocean temperatures matter?

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump lawyers argue no president can be impeached for any abuse of power.

  • In Trump's impeachment, Republicans don't even know what they're covering up.

  • Trump tried to legalize bribery, maybe wasn't worried about Ukrainian corruption.

  • Barr investigating Comey again, is going after Trump's enemies one by one.

• Aida Chávez: Bernie Sanders's lonely 2017 battle to stop Iran sanctions and save the nuclear deal.

• Timothy Egan: Trump's evil is contagious: "The president has shown us exactly what happens when good people do nothing."

• Lisa Friedman/Claire O'Neill: Who controls Trump's environmental policy?: "Among 20 of the most powerful people in government environment jobs, most have ties to the fossil fuel industry or have fought against the regulations they are now supposed to enforce." Names, faces, resumes. E.g., David Dunlap, Deputy head of science policy at EPA, former chemicals expert for Koch Industries, earlier VP of the Chlorine Institute (representing producers and distributors); currently oversees EPA's pollution and toxic chemical research.

• Dan Froomkin:, in a series called Press Watch:

  • Why is the mainstream media so gentle with Joe Biden? "Joe Biden gives addled, incoherent answers about his troubling record -- and most in the media just let it slide." Long article with lots of examples.

  • Wolf Blitzer wanted war drums; Democrats made the case for peace.

  • When Trump just makes stuff up, mainstream media still plays along.

  • Here's the crucial context every article on Trump and Iran should include.

• Masha Gessen: The willful ambiguity of Putin's latest power grab.

• Anand Giridharadas: Why do Trump supporters support Trump? Book review of Michael Lind: The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite. A fairly critical one, as the reviewer thinks Lind is a bit gullible when he attributes economic fears to Trump voters.

• Maya Goodfellow: Yes, the UK media's coverage of Meghan Markle really is racist. We just finished streaming this season of The Crown, which reaffirmed our understanding that the British monarchy is a preposterous institution inhabited by ridiculous people. The series reached the 25-year mark in Elizabeth II's reign, finding her lamenting the steady decline of the nation and the decay of its imperial pretensions, to which we could only add that the next 25 (actually 40 now) years would be even worse for British pretensions of grandeur. Few things interest me less than the bickerings of the Windsors, or surprise me less than that the few who still cling to monarchist fantasies would resort to racism when pushed into a corner. Indeed, back in the 1990s when I worked for a while in England, I was repeatedly struck by the casual racism of white Brits (even those quick to frown on American racism).

• Amy Goodman: Phyllis Bennis on Dem debate: Support for combat troop withdrawal is not enough to stop endless wars. Bennis noted:

  You know, I think one of the things that was important to see last night was that all of the Democratic candidates, including the right wing of the group, as well as the progressives, as well as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were vying with each other essentially to see who could be more critical of the Iraq War. They all have said that at various points, but last night it was very overt that this was a critical point of unity for these candidates. Now, whether that says much about the prospects for the Democratic Party is not so clear, but I thought that was an important advance, that there's a recognition of where the entire base of half this country is, which is strongly against wars.

• David Graeber: The center blows itself up: Care and spite in the 'Brexit election'.

• Sean Illing: "Flood the zone with shit": How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy: "The impeachment trial probably won't change any minds. Here's why." Not his usual interview piece (although he cites interviews along the way). Makes many important points; for example:

  As Joshua Green, who wrote a biography of Bannon, explained, Bannon's lesson from the Clinton impeachment in the 1990s was that to shape the narrative, a story had to move beyond the right-wing echo chamber and into the mainstream media. That's exactly what happened with the now-debunked Uranium One story that dogged Clinton from the beginning of her campaign -- a story Bannon fed to the Times, knowing that the supposedly liberal paper would run with it because that's what mainstream media news organizations do.

  In this case, Bannon flooded the zone with a ridiculous story not necessarily to persuade the public that it was true (although surely plenty of people bought into it) but to create a cloud of corruption around Clinton. And the mainstream press, merely by reporting a story the way it always has, helped create that cloud.

  You see this dynamic at work daily on cable news. Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway lies. She lies a lot. Yet CNN and MSNBC have shown zero hesitation in giving her a platform to lie because they see their job as giving government officials -- even ones who lie -- a platform.

  Even if CNN or MSNBC debunk Conway's lies, the damage will be done. Fox and right-wing media will amplify her and other falsehoods; armies on social media, bot and real, will, too (@realDonaldTrump will no doubt chime in). The mainstream press will be a step behind in debunking -- and even the act of debunking will serve to amplify the lies.

• Umair Irfan: Australia's weird weather is getting even weirder.

• Malaika Jabali: Joe Biden is still the frontrunner but he doesn't have to be. "Biden is surviving on the myth that he's the most electable Democrat. He's not."

• Louis Jacobson: The Democratic debates' biggest (electoral) losers, by the numbers. Elizabeth Warren usually makes well-reasoned arguments to advance carefully thought-out plans, but I found her debate point on the superior electability of women (or maybe just Amy Klobuchar and herself) to be remarkably specious and disingenuous. She said:

  I think the best way to talk about who can win is by looking at people's winning record. So, can a woman beat Donald Trump? Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they've been in are the women, Amy and me.

  She went on to add that she was "the only person on this stage who has beaten an incumbent Republican any time in the past 30 years." The time limit was especially critical there, as Bernie Sanders defeated an incumbent Republican to win his House seat in November 1990 -- 30 years ago, if you do some rounding up. The time limit also excluded Joe Biden from comparison, as his first Senate win (defeating Republican incumbent J. Caleb Boggs), was in 1972, 48 years ago. One could also point out that Warren's win over "Republican incumbent" Scott Brown in 2012 wasn't really an upset: Brown had freakishly won a low turnout special election[1] in 2010 in a heavily Democratic state -- the only one that had rejected Reagan in 1984, one that hadn't elected a Republican to the Senate since Edward Brooke (1967-79) -- which made him easy pickings in 2012.

  PolitiFact ruled that Warren's quoted statement was true, but the only way they got to 10 was by counting three "ran and lost for president" elections -- two for Biden (1988 and 2008), one for Sanders (2016). Sanders had 6 of the other 7 losses, all from early in his career, the House race in 1988 (against Peter Smith, who he beat in 1990). The other loss was Pete Buttigieg's first race, in 2010 for Indiana state treasurer, against a Republican incumbent in a solidly Republican state. One could say lots of things about this data set, but Warren's interpretation is very peculiar and self-serving -- so much so I was reminded of the classic sociology text, How to Lie With Statistics.

  If you know anything about statistics, it's that sample size and boundary conditions are critical. Comparing two women against four men (one who's never run before, the other much younger so he's only managed three races, two of them for mayor) isn't much of a sample. The 30-years limit reduces it even more, excluding a period when Biden and Sanders were undefeated. That's a lot of tinkering just to make a point which is beside the point anyway. When I go back to Warren's quote, the first thing that strikes me is that the premise is unproven ("the best way to talk about who can win is by looking at people's winning record") and frankly suspect. I can think of dozens of counterexamples even within narrowly constrained contexts, but that just distracts from the larger problem: that running for president is vastly different from running for Senator or Mayor. (Biden's experience running for VP may count for something here, but not much.) Moreover, running against Trump poses unique challenges, just because he's so very different (as a campaigner, at least) from the Republicans these candidates have faced and (more often than not) beat in the past. In fact, the only data point we have viz. Trump is the 2016 presidential election, which showed that Hillary Clinton could not beat him (at least in 2016 -- and please spare me the popular vote numbers). Indeed, based on history, we cannot know what it takes to beat Donald Trump, but if you wish to pursue that inquiry, all you can really do is construct some metric of how similar each of the candidates is to Clinton. Even there, the most obvious points are likely to be misleading: Clinton is a woman, and had a long career as a Washington insider cozy to business interests (like, well, I hardly need to attach names here). On the other hand, Trump today isn't the same as Trump in 2016. Still, there is some data on this question, not perfect, but better than the mental gymnastics Warren is offering: X-vs-Trump polls, which pretty consistently show Biden and/or Sanders as the strongest head-to-head anti-Trump candidates. Maybe they could falter under the intense heat of a Trump assault. Maybe some other candidate, once they become better known, could do as well. But at least that polling is based on real, relevant data -- a far cry from Warren's ridiculous debate argument.

  [1]: Brown got 51.9% of 2,229,039 votes in 2010; in 2012, with Obama at the head of the ticket, Warren got 53.7% of 3,154,394 votes, so turnout in the special election was only 70.6% of what it was in the regular election. Aside from the turnout difference, Obama/Biden carried Massachusetts in 2012 with 60.7%, leading Warren by 7 points -- one could say she coasted in on their coattails. Warren did raise her margin in 2018, to 60.4%, a bit better than Clinton's 60.0% in 2016.

• Sarah Jones:

  • We deserve a better debate over Medicare for All.

  • For the love of God, ask the candidates about unions: "Moderators keep missing opportunities to ask candidates about one of the day's most vital issues."

  • What's the deal with the Space Force Bible?

  • Iraq still matters: "Biden's foreign-policy record should haunt him."

• Ed Kilgore: No Senator is less popular in their own state than Susan Collins: Yeah, but when she loses in 2020, she'll never have to go there again. She can hang her shingle out as a lobbyist and start collecting the delayed gratuities she is owed for selling out her constituents and what few morals she ever seemed to profess.

• Catherine Kim: New evidence shows a Nunes aide in close conversation with Parnas.

• Jen Kirby: Trump signed a "phase one" trade deal with China. Here's what's in it -- and what's not.

• Ezra Klein: The case for Elizabeth Warren: Second in Vox's slow release of "best-case" arguments for presidential candidates, following Matthew Yglesias on Bernie Sanders.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Joe Biden's agreeable, terrific, very good, not at all bad week.

    But, by all appearances, the fact that Biden is no longer capable of speaking in proper English sentences will be no impediment to his political success -- in the Democratic primary, anyway.

  • Bernie isn't trying to start a class war. The rich are trying to finish one.

  • Trump tax cuts gave $18 billion bonus to big banks in 2019.

  • Bernie Sanders' foreign policy is too evidence-based for the Beltway's taste.

    The fundamental cause of all this rabid irrationality is simple: America's foreign-policy consensus is forged by domestic political pressures, not the dictates of reason. Saudi Arabia's oil reserves may no longer be indispensable to the U.S. economy, but its patronage remains indispensable to many a D.C. foreign-policy professional. Israel may no longer be a fledgling nation-state in need of subsidization, but it still commands the reflexive sympathy of a significant segment of the U.S. electorate. Terrorism may not actually be a top-tier threat to Americans' public safety, but terrorist attacks generate more media coverage than fatal car accidents or deaths from air pollution, and thus, are a greater political liability than other sources of mass death. And the Pentagon may have spent much of the past two decades destabilizing the Middle East and green-lighting spectacularly exorbitant and ill-conceived weapons systems, but the military remains one of America's only trusted institutions, and its contracts supply a broad cross section of capital with easy profits, and a broad cross section of American workers with steady jobs.

  • 5 takeaways from the Democratic debate in Iowa:"

    1. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren's friendship has seen better days.
    2. In hindsight, Joe Biden probably shouldn't have voted for the Iraq War.
    3. Tom Steyer wants you to know that he will put his children's future above "marginal improvements for working people." [This, by the way, is an unfair and misleading dig at Steyer for opposing USMCA. Given that Steyer is famous as a billionaire, you might think "his children's future" has something to with the estate tax, but (like Sanders) he is rejecting USMCA for its failure to make any positive step toward limiting climate change.]
    4. Amy Klobuchar made one-half of a very good point. [But only as part of "an argument against tuition-free public college."]
    5. Iowans' fetishization of politeness (and/or, the Democratic field's political cowardice) is a huge gift to Biden.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • Trump judge lashes out at a transgender litigant in a surprisingly cruel opinion: "Judge Kyle Duncan was a prominent anti-LGBTQ lawyer before joining the bench."

  • The coming Supreme Court showdown over birth control.

• Jim Naureckas/Julie Hollar: The big loser in the Iowa debate? CNN's reputation.

• Heather Digby Parton: Lev Parnas spins wild tales of Trumpian corruption -- and we know most of them are true.

• Daniel Politi: Trump targets Michelle Obama's signature school nutrition guidelines on her birthday.

• Andrew Prokop: Lev Parnas's dramatic new claims about Trump and Ukraine, explained.

• Matthew Rozsa: One-term presidents: Will Donald Trump end up on this ignominious list? Various things I'd quibble with, starting with "the list starts out well" -- I'd agree that John Adams and John Quincy Adams were great Americans with mostly distinguished service careers, but the former's Alien and Sedition Acts were one of the most serious assaults ever on democracy, and his lame duck period was such a disgrace that Trump will be hard-pressed to top -- and his decision to omit one-termers who didn't run for a second, like the lamentable James Buchanan. But this dovetails nicely with one of my pet theories: that American history can be divided into eras, each starting with a major two-term president (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and, sad to say, Reagan) and each ending with a one-term disaster (Adams, Buchanan, Hoover, Carter, Trump?). I can't go into detail here, but will note that each of these eras ended in profound partisan divides, based on real (or imagined) crises in faith in hitherto prevailing orthodoxies. That's certainly the case today. The Reagan-to-Trump era is anomalous in its drive to ever greater levels of inequality, corruption, and injustice, which have found their apotheosis in Trump.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's prayer event began with an inaccurate 2016 election map and ended with a rage-tweet.

  • Trump counterprogrammed the Democratic debate with a rally featuring a rant about toilets.

  • Trump: Saudi Arabia paid the US $1 billion for more troops. Pentagon: Eh, not quite.

• William Saletan: Trump is a remorseless advocate of crimes against humanity.

• Jon Schwarz: Key architect of 2003 Iraq War is now a key architect of Trump Iran policy: Remember David Wurmser? He was a major author of the 1996 neocon bible A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (which advocated "pre-emptive strikes against Iran and Syria"), author of the 1999 book Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, worked for VP Dick Cheney, helped "stovepipe" intelligence in the build-up to the Iraq War. After Bush, he cooled his heels in the employ of right-wing think tanks, then landed a Trump administration job thanks to John Bolton.

• Dylan Scott: The Netherlands has universal health insurance -- and it's all private: Sure, you can make that work. Their system is much like Obamacare, with an individual mandate and "a strongly regulated market," so "more than 99 percent" are covered, insurance companies have few options to rip off their customers. Also "almost every hospital is a nonprofit," and subject to government-imposed cost constraints. None of this proves that the Dutch system is better than other systems with single-payer insurance, but that it would be an improvement over America's insane system. TR Reid wrote an eye-opening book on health care systems around the world, showing there are lots of workable systems with various wrinkles: The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (2009). I don't recall much from Netherlands there, but he did especially focus on Taiwan and Switzerland, because they were relative late-adopters, and their systems were implemented by right-of-center governments. The Swiss system basically kept everything private, but imposed strict profit limits. Until then, Switzerland had the second highest health care costs in the world (after the US, which it had tracked closely). Afterwards, Swiss costs held flat -- still the second most expensive, but trailing the US by a growing gap. So, sure, the Swiss came up with a better system than they had (or we have now), but one that's still much more expensive, with slightly worse results, than countries like France and Japan, which seem to have found a better balance between cost and care. [PS: For another data point, see Melissa Healy: US health system costs four times more to run than Canada's single-payer system.]

• Tamsin Shaw: William Barr: The Carl Schmitt of our Time. You know, the eminent Nazi jurist and political theoretician.

• Emily Shugerman: Trump just hired Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers: Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr -- I'm not even sure Epstein was the low point of either legal career (even if we don't count Trump yet). Many more articles point this out. One that seems to actually be onto something is: Laura Ingraham praises Trump for putting together a legal team straight from "one of our legal panels".

• Andrew Sullivan: Is there a way to acknowledge America's progress? He makes a fairly substantial list of things that do mark progress (certainly compared to when I was growing up), yet, as he's very aware, there's Trump, his cabal of Republicans, and the moneyed forces that feed and feast on his and their corruption. If those who oppose such trends tend to overstate the peril of the moment, it's because we see future peril so very clearly. Still, I reckon those who can't (or won't) see anything troublesome at all will find the hyperbole disconcerting, and I don't know what to do about that, beyond trying to remain calm and reasoned. This piece is followed by "But can they beat Trump?": where Sullivan tries to weigh the Democratic field purely on electability consideration. He's most withering on Warren, and most sympathetic to Biden, but gives Sanders the edge in the end. His list of positives is worth reading:

  I have to say he's grown on me as a potential Trump-beater. He seems more in command of facts than Biden, more commanding in general than Buttigieg or Klobuchar, and far warmer than Elizabeth Warren. He's a broken clock, but the message he has already stuck with for decades might be finding its moment. There's something clarifying about having someone with a consistent perspective on inequality take on a president who has only exacerbated it. He could expose, in a gruff Brooklyn accent, the phony populism, and naked elitism of Trump. He could appeal to the working-class voters the Democrats have lost. He could sincerely point out how Trump has given massive sums of public money to the banks, leaving crumbs for the middle class. And people might believe him.

  On the other hand, he argues that "the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal," and gives examples that impress me very little. Most of them are sheer red-baiting, and I have to wonder how effective that ploy still is. Sure, many liberals of my generation and earlier find this very scary, but well after the Cold War such charges have lost much of their tangible fear -- even those liberals who still hate Russia must realize that the problem there now is oligarchs like Trump, not Bolshevik revolutionaries. Sure, Trump attacking Bernie is going to be nasty and brutish, but I expect it will be less effective than Trump attacking Biden as a crooked throwback to the Washington swamp of the Clintons and Obama -- charges that Bernie is uniquely safe from. There's also a third piece here, "Of royalty, choice, and duty," about you-know-what.

• Chance Swaim/Jonathan Shorman: Kansas energy company abandons plans for $2.2 billion coal power plant. This is a pretty big victory for envrionment-conscious Kansans, but the irony is that it comes at a point when virtually all political obstacles against been overcome. In the end, the company decided that coal-fired electricity is simply a bad investment. Kansans have followed this story for more than a decade, at least since Gov. Kathleen Sebelius halted development on the plant expansion. After she left to join Obama's cabinet, her successor reversed course, and Gov. Sam Brownback was a big booster, but Obama's EPA became an obstacle. Under Trump, all the political stars have aligned to promote coal, but the economics have shifted so much that coal use is declining all across the nation. Despite frantic efforts by the Kochs and Trump, wind power has become a major source of electricity in Kansas (fossil fuels account for less than half of Kansas electricity -- nuclear also helps out there). And thanks to Obama's support for fracking, natural gas has also become cheaper relative to coal. So it looks like we've lucked out, and been spared from the worst effects of having so corrupt a political system in Topeka and Washington. For that matter, Sunflower Electric Power Corp. has lucked out too, being saved from such a bad investment.

• Matt Taibbi: CNN's debate performance was villainous and shameful: "The 24-hour network combines a naked political hit with a cynical ploy for ratings."

• Peter Wade:

  • Trump: 'I should never have done that f-cking vaping thing'.

  • National Archives censors anti-Trump portions of Women's March photo. Later: Chas Danner: National Archives apologizes for censoring protest signs from Women's March.

• Alex Ward:

  • 11 US troops were injured in Iran's attack. It shows how close we came to war.

  • Trump wanted to repeal an anti-corruption law so US businesses could bribe foreigners. Based on a new book by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig: A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump's Testing of America. For more, see: Ashley Parker: New book portrays Trump as erratic, 'at times dangerously uninformed'. Also, by the authors, Carol D Leonnig/Philip Rucker: 'You're a bunch of dopes and babies': Inside Trump's stunning tirade against generals. For another book review, see Dwight Garner: A meticulous account of Trump's tenure reads like a comic horror story. Also see the comment by Steve M: In which I normalize Trump, up to a point, which quotes from the above, and adds:

    Well, actually, it is normal. Trump is a Republican. Both conservatives and the mainstream media agree that a Republican can't insult the troops, by definition. Only Democrats (and people to the left of the Democrats) can insult the troops.

    This is part of a larger problem that's plagued us over the past forty years. The world of politics has been incapable of reacting with sufficient outrage to Iran-contra, George W. Bush's post-9/11 toadying to the Saudis and Iraq War debacle, and Trump's Putin bootlicking because, performatively, Reagan, W, and Trump were all military-lovers and flag-wavers. The conventional wisdom is that right-wingers are correct: The telltale sign of disloyalty to America is insufficient jingoism. If you're a Republican, you're never a menace to America, even if you're actively doing it harm.

  • 21 Saudi military trainees in the US are being sent home for anti-US media and child porn. Evidently the two traits weren't mutually exclusive, as the subsets numbered 17 and 15. Real reason was the Saudi trainee who went on a shooting spree at a Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. Said trainee was killed, so isn't one of the 21.

  • Trump has apparently wanted to kill Soleimani for quite a while -- since as far back as 2017.

• Libby Watson: Let them fight!: "A great nation deserves a raucous and argumentative primary, not a fake demonstration of unity." Choice line here: "If Warren saw this as a way to innocuously smarm her way to the top . . ."

• Matthew Yglesias: Joe Biden skates by again. Notes that none of the other candidates are really attacking Biden, who remains the front-runner:

  This pattern of behavior raises, to me, a real worry about a potential Biden presidency. Not that his talk of a post-election Republican Party "epiphany" is unrealistic -- every candidate in the field is offering unrealistic plans for change -- but that he has a taste for signing on to bad bargains. There's potential for a critique of Biden that isn't just about nitpicking the past or arguing about how ambitious Democrats should be in their legislative proposals, but about whether Biden would adequately hold the line when going toe-to-toe with congressional Republicans.

• Karen Zraick: Jet crash in Iran has eerie historical parallel: You mean in 1988, when the US "accidentally" shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 people? Doesn't excuse this time, nor does this time excuse that time. Both were unintended consequences of deliberate decisions to engage in supposedly limited hostilities. They reflect the fact that the people who made those decisions are unable to foresee where their acts will take them and/or simply do not care. And while it's difficult to weigh relative culpability, the fact that the US alone sent its forces half-way around the world to screw up must count for something. For more examples, see Ron DePasquale: Civilian planes shot down: A grim history.

Daily Log

Wrote this as a facebook comment, in response to a post of a link to Matt Taibbi: CNN's Debate Performance Was Villainous and Shameful.

There's a classic sociology textbook called "How to Lie With Statistics." Warren's assertion about election histories could have been a prime example. When talking about the perfect record of women winning elections, the sample size was 2. When talking about male candidates losing elections, the sample size was 3 (Steyer has never run before, so has never lost). I can't imagine where she found 10 losses, except maybe in presidential primaries (Biden's run but never won one; Bernie's lost more than 10, but also won a fair number). Then she claims she was the only one to have defeated an incumbent Republican (in her case Scott Brown) in the last 30 years: the qualifier necessary because Sanders did just that in 1990, as Biden did in 1970 (beating J Caleb Boggs). Warren is capable of making sensible, well-reasoned points, so why resort to such specious chicanery?

Music Week

Expanded blog post, January archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32614 [32575] rated (+39), 229 [230] unrated (+0).

I've finally heard that NPR's Jazz Critics Poll will be published tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at 10 AM. I've been given advance URLs for the poll results and for the accompanying essay by Francis Davis.

No time to write much more. December Streamnotes still not indexed. EOY Aggregate still a work in progress. My own EOY lists for Jazz and Non-Jazz still growing. Did play a couple of 2020 releases last week. Going back and forth between the 2020 and 2019 tracking files reminds me of the cartoon depictions of the decrepit old man representing the old year giving way to the new year baby. Every year we get older, but 2019 hurt more than most.

New records reviewed this week:

• Franck Amsallem: Gotham Goodbye (2018 [2019], Jazz & People): [r]: B+(***)
• John Bailey: Can You Imagine? (2019 [2020], Freedom Road): [cd]: B+(**) [01-20]
• Lea Bertucci: Resonant Field (2017 [2019], NNA Tapes): [r]: B+(*)
• Black to Comm: Seven Horses for Seven Kings (2019, Thrill Jockey): [r]: B
• Boy Harsher: Careful (2019, Nude Club): [r]: A-
• Bremer/McCoy: Utopia (2019, Luaka Bop): [r]: B
• Diabel Cissokho: Rhythm of the Griot (2019, Kafou Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Theo Croker: Star People Nation (2019, Sony Masterworks): [r]: B
• Czarface: The Odd Czar Against Us (2019, Silver Age): [r]: A-
• Czarface: A Double Dose of Danger (2019,Silver Age, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Jeff Davis: The Fastness (2019, Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(***)
• Bertrand Denzler/Dominic Lash: Pivot (2019, Spoonhunt): [bc]: B-
• Mr Eazi: Life Is Eazi, Vol. 2: Lagos to London (2018, Banku Music)
• Ekiti Sound: Abeg No Vex (2019, Crammed Discs): [r]: B+(**)
• Go: Organic Orchestra & Brooklyn Raga Massive: Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas (2018 [2019], Meta, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Laurence Hobgood: Tesseterra (2019, Ubuntu Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Christopher Hollyday & Telepathy: Dialogue (2019 [2020], Jazzbeat Productions): [cd]: B+(**) [01-17]
• Ibibio Sound Machine: Doko Mien (2019, Merge): [r]: B+(**)
• Michael Janisch: Worlds Collide (2019, Whirlwind): [r]: B+(**)
• Lauren Jenkins: No Saint (2019, Big Machine): [r]: B+(**)
• Henry Kaiser/Anthony Pirog/Jeff Sipe/Tracy Silverman/Andy West: Five Times Surprise (2018 [2019], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(**)
• Egil Kalman & Fredrik Rasten: Weaving a Fabric of Winds (2019, Shhpuma): [r]: B
• Sarathy Korwar: More Arriving (2019, The Leaf Label): [r]: A-
• Kim Lenz: Slowly Speeding (2019, Blue Star): [r]: B+(**)
• Christian Lillinger: Open Form for Society (2018 [2019], Plaist Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Brian Lynch Big Band: The Omni-American Book Club: My Journey Through Literature in Music (2019, Holistic MusicWorks): [r]: A-
• Brad Mehldau: Finding Gabriel (2017-18 [2019], Nonesuch): [r]: B
• Microtub: Chronic Shift (2018 [2019], Bohemian Drips): [r]: B
• J. Pavone String Ensemble: Brick and Mortar (2019, Birdwatcher): [r]: B
• The Regrettes: How Do You Love? (2019, Warner Brothers): [r]: B+(***)
• Mark Ronson: Late Night Feelings (2019, RCA): [r]: B+(*)
• Gary Smulyan & Ralph Moore Quintet: Bird's Eye Encounter! (2018 [2019], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(**)
• Jim Snidero: Project-K (2019 [2020], Savant): [cd]: B+(***) [01-24]
• Earl Sweatshirt: Feet of Clay (2019, Tan Cressida/Warner, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Tuba Skinny: Some Kind-a-Shake (2018 [2019], self-released): [bc]: B+(***)
• William Tyler: Goes West (2019, Merge): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Endless Boogie: Vol. I, II (2005 [2019], No Quarter, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Martial Solal: And His Orchestra: 1956-1962 (1956-62 [2019], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(**)
• Horace Tapscott With the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra: Flight 17 (1978 [2019], Nimbus/Outernational): [bc]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Delfeayo Marsalis Uptown Jazz Orchestra: Jazz Party (Troubadour Jass) [02-07]
• John Vanore: Primary Colors (Acoustical Concepts) [02-07]

Weekend Roundup

As actual voting is just around the corner, I've started to stray from my no-campaign pledge. Part of this is that my wife has gotten much more involved, and is regularly reporting social media posts that rile her up. She's strong for Bernie, and I've yet to find any reason to argue with her. Several pieces below argue that only X can beat Trump. For the record, I don't believe that is true. I think any of the "big four" can win -- not that there won't be momentary scares along the way. Trump has some obvious assets that he didn't have in 2016: complete support of the Republican political machine, which has been remarkably effective at getting slim majorities to vote against their interests and sanity; so much money he'll be tempted to steal most of it; and even more intense love from his base. On the other hand, he has a track record this time, and he's never registered an instant where his approval rating has topped 44%. Plus I have this suspicion that one strong force that drives elections is fear of embarrassment. Thanks to the Hillary Clinton's unique path to the nomination, that worked for Trump in 2016, but no one on the Democratic side of the aisle is remotely as embarrassing as Trump -- well, Michael Bloomberg, maybe. He's the only "major" candidate I can see Trump beating. Indeed, if he somehow manages to buy the Democratic nomination, I could see myself voting for a third party candidate. I'm not saying he would be worse than Trump, but a Democratic Party under him would never be able to right the wrongs of the last 40+ years.

One indication of the current political atmosphere is that Trump's "wag the dog" attack on Iran didn't budge public opinion in the least (except, perhaps, in favor of Bernie among the Democrats). Trump walked back his war-with-Iran threat, no doubt realizing that the US military had no desire to invade and occupy Iran, and possibly seeing that the random slaughter of scattered air attacks would merely expose him further as a careless monster. Still, he did nothing to resolve the conflict, and won't as long as his Saudi and Israeli foreign policy directors insist on hostile relations. He sorely needs a consigliere, like James Baker was to Bush Sr., someone who could follow up on his tantrums and turn them into deals (that could have been made well before). All he really needs to do to open up Iran and North Korea is to let the sanctions go first, to establish some good will, and let those countries be sucked into normalcy with mutually beneficial trade. Most other foreign policy conflicts could be solved without much more effort. And he has one advantage that no Democrat will: he won't have a psycho like Donald Trump constantly attacking him from the right, arguing that every concession he makes is a sign of weakness. The only deal he's delivered so far (USMCA) is a fair test case. It sailed through without serious objection because the only person deranged enough to derail it kept his mouth shut.

More links on Iran, war, and foreign policy:

• Zack Beauchamp: Trump's "Mission Accomplished" moment?

• Frank Bruni: Tucker Carlson is not your new best friend: "The Fox News host's antiwar stance doesn't erase all that other ugliness."

• James Carden: Will this billionaire-funded think tank get its war with Iran? "The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' militaristic influence on US policy toward Iran is working. Suleiman's assassination is evidence of that."

• Jane Coaston: The Iraq War hawks are back: "Some of the biggest backers of the Iraq War sure have a lot of opinions on Iran."

• Patrick Cockburn: The West is still buying into nonsense about Iran's regional influence.

• Sean Collins/Jen Kirby: A Ukrainian plane crashed in Iran: What we know: "Iran has admitted to accidentally shooting down the plane."

• Ryan Cooper:

  • America is guilty of everything we accuse Iran of doing.

  • Bernie Sanders is America's best hope for a sane foreign policy.

• Sarah Ferris: 'History has proven her right': Barbara Lee's anti-war push succeeds on Iran.

• Karen J Greenberg: Killing Qassim Suleimani was illegal. And predictable. As this piece notes, America's history of assassinating foreign leaders goes back at least to 1960, with Patrice Lumumba ("success") and Fidel Castro ("failed"), but had been prohibited in 1976, and only returned to favor with GW Bush's Global War on Terror. I'd add that what really turned it into fashion was envy of Israel's "targeted killings," which really picked up in the 1980s.

• Shane Harris/Josh Dawsey/Dan Lamothe/Missy Ryan: 'Launch, launch, launch': Inside the Trump administration as the Iranian missiles began to fall. Key point here is that Iran tipped off Iraq well before the missile strike, and Iraq passed the information on to the US, so as to minimize casualties. Zero casualties made it easier for Trump to stand down after the strike, which was evidently just for show. As I recall, Trump did the same thing, tipping Russia on a big US strike against a Syrian air base: another big show that did little effective damage.

• John Hudson/Missy Ryan/Josh Dawsey: On the day US forces killed Soleimani, they targeted a senior Iranian official in Yemen. They missed, but they did hit someone. For more, see: Alex Emmons: US strike on Iranian commander in Yemen the night of Suleimani's assassination killed the wrong man.

• Sean Illing: The case against killing Qassem Soleimani: Interview with Dina Esfandiary. Vox paired this with The case for killing Qassem Soleimani, where Alex Ward interviewed Bilal Saab. Both are so-called experts (Saab a former Trump flunky), sharing a lot of DC groupthink about Iran (and the US -- the "against" case regards Iran as every bit as evil and duplicitous as "for" does). No one dares venture that a reason to argue against the killing is that it's bad (both practically and, dare we say?, morally) for any country to go around killing people in other countries.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • Trump's contempt for democracy has reached new depths during the Iran crisis.

  • The Iran crisis isn't even close to over.

  • Trump is lurching toward war with a totally unqualified team.

• Samya Kullab/Qassam Abdul-Zahra: US dismisses Iraq request to work on a troop withdrawal plan.

• Eric Levitz:

  • By 2-to-1 margin, voters say Soleimani strike made US 'less safe'.

  • Iran is not a threat to our security. Trump's saber-rattling is.

  • Trump administration accidentally declares end of war in Iraq.

• Michael McFaul/Abbas Milani: The minimal value of Trump's 'maximum pressure' on Iran. I wrote some about sanctions under Nichols below, but left out one point: even when sanctions have devastating impact on the target nation's people, they are rarely effective at deposing political leaders or toppling their governments. The obvious example is that the only communist countries to hold fast after 1989-92 were the ones the US subjected to the most vindictive pressure: North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and China.

• Meridith McGraw: Bush's Iraq hawks had Trump's back this week.

• Melody Moezzi: Trump's Twitter threats against Iran cultural sites borrow from the ISIS playbook: Could also have mentioned the Taliban's destruction of ancient Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan.

• John Nichols: Sanctions are economic warfare. There's an unnecessary word in that title: Sanctions are warfare, meant to impoverish an "enemy," to cripple their economy, ultimately to impose widespread suffering on all of the people in the target country. The most extreme sanctions are literally designed to starve the "enemy" into submission. Americans (like Trump) like them, not just because they are effective in imposing pain, but because they are asymmetrical. The economies of the US and its "allies" (some should be called "co-conspirators"; others are more like hostages) are so large that they can easily absorb the pain of not dealing with the target country, while the target is prevented from engaging in normal trade with much or most of the world. This size difference means that no proportionate response in kind is possible. That's why long-term victims of US sanctions like North Korea and Iran wind up seeking other countermeasures, such as developing nuclear weapons -- as we've seen, the only measure that seems to get American attention. Trump didn't back down from starting a war with Iran last week. He actually escalated on ongoing war -- one that won't end until the US suspends its sanctions against Iran, and permits Iran to normalize its relations with the rest of the world.

• Ella Nilsen: Trump's conflict with Iran exposed the real difference between Biden and Sanders. Good chance this has something to do with Sanders' recent poll advances. First thing Laura told me after the Soleimani assassination was "Trump just elected Bernie president."

• Nathan J Robinson: How to avoid swallowing war propaganda. Robinson also has a recent book out, Why You Should Be a Socialist, as well as an earlier one, Trump: Anatomy of a Monster (2017). Here's an interview by Teddy Ostrow. The interview piece offers links to highly critical pieces he wrote about Pete Buttigieg (All About Pete) and Joe Biden (Everybody's Chum). He turned me off a while back with a piece I don't recall well enough to look up now -- possibly something snippy about Bernie Sanders, but his latest thoughts on the campaign are worth reading: Everyone is getting on the Bernie train. For example:

  We need a candidate who fully understands the stakes. They need to know the source of what has gone wrong and have a radical alternative. . . . They can't capitulate before the fight starts. They need to have a moral seriousness that shows they take the pain of others seriously. They need to fill people's souls, to assuage their fears, to challenge them to be their best selves, and to present a vision of the beautiful world that could be if humanity got its act together, versus the horrendous world that will be if we allow the deadly logic of nuclear weapons and climate change to continue unfolding. This moment demands something, a kind of power, we have never before mustered, a resolve we have never before felt, a breadth and depth of vision we have never before dared to pursue.

  I cut a line from that paragraph: the one that starts "they can't be some tepid compromiser." He's talking about Elizabeth Warren, and I've been deluged today from her supporters taking umbrage that one of Sanders' staffers suggested that she is the "second best" candidate, so I figured we could do without the side-swipe. But I will note that Robinson has a long paragraph on Warren that is pretty devastating: look for the one that starts, "Personally I have long believed that Elizabeth Warren would be a disaster against Donald Trump." Some of his points don't bother me much, but "She is evasive where Bernie is frank" does cut to the quick.

• Gabor Rona: Iran plane crash likely caused by violations of international law -- by both Tehran and Trump.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Pompeo's shifting reasons for killing Soleimani puts the strike on shaky legal ground.

  • "These Media Posts will serve as notification": Trump's dangerous Iran tweets, briefly explained.

• Andrew Sullivan: Donald Trump is the war crimes president. In his dreams, maybe. He certainly lacks the elementary sense of right and wrong to steer clear of war crimes, but neither does he have the track record of GW Bush, let alone a Richard Nixon, and he still ranks well behind others, notably Harry Truman (still the only person in history to order the use of nuclear weapons on cities). On the other hand, those presidents used larger wars to camouflage their crimes, and probably didn't feel much kinship with the soldiers who carried their directives out, let alone those who exceeded their orders. Trump, on the other hand, has probably caught up with his reviled predecessor Obama, who himself set records for "targeted killings." Moreover, Trump's pardon of "Navy SEAL Commander Eddie Gallagher, a rogue soldier who routinely shot civilians in Iraq for the hell of it, and finally stabbed to death a barely conscious captive young ISIS fighter who was the lone survivor of a missile hit on an enemy house," shows a personal bloodlust beyond any president I can recall.

• Alex Ward:

  • Did impeachment weigh on Trump's Soleimani decision? Maybe.

  • The US killed Soleimani. What will Iran do next? Pure speculation, which usually tells you more about the speculator than the unknowable subject. However, for Iran the core problem remains: US-imposed sanctions that have been fairly successful at hamstringing the Iranian economy, perhaps even to the point of undermining the popularity of the ruling government. This is a huge problem for Iran, one to which Americans are largely indifferent. Iran has tried a variety of "carrot" and "stick" approaches, and will no doubt continue to do so. Probably more sticks than carrots for the near term, at least as long as Trump is president and continues to sublet control of US policy toward Iran to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

  • "Probably the worst briefing I've seen": Inside the disastrous congressional Iran meeting.

• Matthew Yglesias: The administration's deceptions about the Soleimani strike are a big deal.

• Li Zhou: The House sent a major message about checking the president's war powers on Iran. Now why don't they follow it up with another impeachment article? By the way, this time it appears that Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo are also equally culpable, so why not name them too?

Some scattered links this week:

• Katelyn Burns:

  • The Trump administration is still struggling to get its story straight on why it killed Soleimani. Some curious phrasing, from Defense Secretary Mark Esper: "What the President said with regard to the four embassies is what I believe as well."

  • Nancy Pelosi explains what Democrats gaind by holding onto the articles of impeachment.

  • Trump encourages new anti-government protests in Iran.

  • The Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to not rule on Obamacare until after the 2020 election.

  • Another earthquake hits Puerto Rico, with aftershocks expected: A 6.4 on Tuesday, then a 5.9 on Saturday, with many aftershocks (45 and counting of at least 3.0).

  • Trump has created a loophole to allow pipelines to avoid environmental review. Refers to the Lisa Friedman article, below. When I first read reports about this rule change, it was phrased vaguely in terms of generic infrastructure projects, like bridges and roads, and meant to cut through costly bureaucracy on projects where the environmental impact was obviously limited. Pipelines are another story. They leak, and the environmental impact of leaks is enormous. And at this point, it's probably impossible to argue that a new pipeline won't increase global warming, so eliminating that consideration is a life-and-death matter to pipeline developers.

• Edward Cavanough: As Australia fires kill animals and destroy property, costs of climate change become clear: "For those spuriously claiming climate ambition comes at a cost, let Australia's black summer serve as a potent reminder that inaction does, too."

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump cited GOP Senate impeachment pressure as reason to kill Soleimani: "You're not supposed to use foreign policy that way." Not that such scruples stopped Bill Clinton when he was impeached.

  • Maybe nominating Michael Bloomberg for president isn't a crazy idea: Chait's reasoning is that "only [Bloomberg] can outspend Trump five to one." That's putting a lot of faith in the power of money to buy elections, especially through lavish spending on TV. How's that working out? See: Bloomberg and Steyer $200m spend on TV ads: "Steyer's spending in South Carolina is beginning to slowly move the polls: he is now placed fifth with 5% of projected Democratic voters." However, he's stuck at 1.5% nationally. Bloomberg is supposedly doing better nationwide -- I've seen polls as high as 7% -- but he's not even in the race for Iowa or New Hampshire, nor has he qualified for a single debate, so all he has going is his TV ad buy, and even there his selling point is "Trump = bad," not Bloomberg offers unique hope for the real problems the country faces. (Also see: Michael Bloomberg outspent the entire Democratic field in TV ads last week.) Sure, it might be nice if the Democrats could draw on Bloomberg's deep pockets, but Bloomberg himself is by far the most reactionary, elitist, offensive candidate in the running (a list which, by the way, still includes John Delaney). [PS: Also see: Michael Bloomberg is open to spending $1 billion to defeat Trump, "even if the nominee was someone he had sharp differences with, like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren."]

• Jonathan Cohn: Iraq War at 154: Who voted for it, who didn't, and where are they now?

• Adam Davidson: Donald Trump's worst deal: The shady story of Trump Tower Baku.

• Miriam Elder/Ruby Cramer: Donald Trump is starting to fixate on Bernie Sanders.

• Tom Engelhardt: The global war on error: "No, that's not a typo." And yes, error is winning, handily.

• Lisa Friedman:

  • Trump's move against landmark environmental law caps a relentless agenda.

  • Trump rule would exclude climate change in infrastructure planning.

• Kathleen Geier: What an Elizabeth Warren presidency would look like. This is paired with Daniel Denvir: What a Bernie Sanders presidency would look like. Both are pretty good, although I'd give Sanders the edge for a foreign policy which is based on principles of justice for all, and a political strategy which promises to venture out to states beyond the "blue wall." I don't think Warren is opposed to either point, but her instincts for landing on the right side are less sure. The other thing about Warren is that her appeal hasn't spread beyond college-educated professionals. That should change if she's nominated, much like Buttigieg will wind up with strong support from blacks if he makes it to November, but Bernie has so far done a better job of broadening his base. In These Times and didn't bother attempting to assay other Democratic Party candidates. I doubt anyone really has a clue what a Buttigieg presidency might look like. On the other hand, we can picture a Biden one all too well.

• John F Harris: 'He is our OJ': "Readers explain why they're standing with Trump during impeachment." Author also wrote: Impeachment and the crack up of the conservative mind.

• Umair Irfan: As Australia burns, its leaders are clinging to coal.

• Sarah Jones:

  • Americans really want to raise taxes on the rich.

  • Is the Democratic primary about foreign policy now?

• Natalie Kitroeff: Boeing employees mocked FAA and 'clowns' who designed 737 Max. As one internal email put it, "this airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys." Reminds me of a friend who worked for Boeing, telling me of a company meeting where a manager bragged, "this isn't your father's Boeing any more." For the record, my father retired from Boeing as soon as he could draw his pension, and refused to ever fly in a Boeing airplane.

• Elizabeth Kolbert: What will another decade of climate crisis bring?

• Michael Kruse: Trump's art of the steal: "How Donald Trump rode to power by parroting other people's fringe ideas, got himself impeached for it -- and might prevail anyway."

• German Lopez: Study links Medicaid expansion to 6 percent reduction in opioid overdose deaths.

• Dylan Matthews: A new study finds increasing the minimum wage reduces suicides.

• Mark Mazzetti/Ronen Bergman/David D Kirkpatrick: Saudis close to Crown Prince discussed killing other enemies a year before Khashoggi's death.

• John McPhee: Tabula rasa: Volume one. Part of his "old-person project" -- writing about what he never got around to writing about. I'm a big McPhee fan, but this isn't especially promising.

• Ian Millhiser: The Trump administration's subtle, devious plan to dismantle abortion rights: "The Supreme Court could quash the right to an abortion entirely through procedural shenanigans."

• Nicole Narea: The Trump administration has finalized an agreement to deport asylum seekers back to Honduras.

• Anna North: Trump tried to get E Jean Carroll's lawsuit dismissed. It didn't work.

• Evan Osnos: The future of America's context with China: "Washington is in an intensifying standoff with Beijing. Which one will fundamentally shape the twenty-first century?" Reminiscent of the 19th Century's "Great Game" between Britain and Russia -- a contest which said much about the self-absorption of so-called great powers, not least their inability to consider that the rest of the world might have other plans.

• Alex Pareene:

  • The most popular crook in America: Larry Hogan, the "very popular" Republican governor of Maryland. For more, see Eric Cortellessa: Who does Maryland's governor really work for? Pareene writes:

    I've argued that, in many respects, the presidency of Donald Trump is more "normal" than some people would like to admit. That is, it's a logical end point of where conservatism has been moving, rather than an inexplicable break from a system that was working as intended. But even so, in his personal behavior and incendiary rhetoric, Trump is aberrant -- and, it should always be noted, he is deeply unpopular. The country, by and large, doesn't want what Trump has wrought. His election was both overdetermined and something of a bizarre fluke, which would, arguably, not have happened had it not been for geography and our illogical modern interpretation of archaic founding documents.

    Hogan, on the other hand, is exactly the "normal" to which politicians like Joe Biden promise to return us when they try to speak into existence a Republican Party that they can "work with."

  • How political fact-checkers distort the truth: "Glenn Kessler and his ilk aren't sticking to the facts. They are promoting a moderate dogma."

• Martin Pengelly: How to dump Trump: Rick Wilson on Running Against the Devil. Wilson is "a top Republican strategist with 30 years' experience," and that's the title of his new book, a sequel to his 2018 book Everything Trump Touches Dies.

• Charles P Pierce: He writes more than a dozen short posts a week, many interesting, although for me it gets tiresome to delve through all of them when I usually have some other source for the same story (usually covered in more depth). Still, some titles that caught my eye this week:

  • The President* likes to hand off responsibility for his own actions to whoever's around (Pierce, who probably knows who Ford Frick was, insists on asterisking the title, at least for this particular president);
  • Trump is going to run on the same war-crimes platform he did in 2016;
  • The President* ponders the 'rough neighborhoods' in the sky;
  • We took a step back from the brink, but not because the President* knows where he took us;
  • Mike Pompeo is a dollar store Kissinger;
  • Susan Collins has once again decided she is a Republican and, therefore, crazy;
  • Mike Pompeo fed the rats in the President*'s brain to get what he wanted;
  • It's never the right time to discuss climate policy, even when your country's on fire.

• Andrew Prokop: Pelosi: House will send impeachment articles to the Senate next week.

• Frank Rich: What will happen to the Trump toadies? "Look to Nixon's defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues." Steve M. has his doubts: Frank Rich's delusions of cosmic justice.

• Joshua Rothman: The equality conundrum. Much nitpicking, not sure he comes up with anything useful.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's climate change reading material is beyond parody. He claims he plans on reading a book on the subject. The book? It's by Ed Russo, with a title calculated to appeal to an audience of one: Donald J Trump: An Environmental Hero. Steve M. has more here: Our green president.

  • "You little pencil neck": Trump's taunts of Schiff in Toledo were like a parody of a playground bully.

• Dylan Scott: Kansas has reached a deal to expand Medicaid, covering 150,000 people. Not a "done deal," as there are still Republicans who will fight it.

• Amy Davidson Sorkin: In Ohio, Trump lists the sacrifices he makes for the nation.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Trump complains about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize days after threatening to commit war crimes.

  • Trump doesn't want voters to know how much his family's trips cost taxpayers.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • The 10 laws of New Hampshire primary reporting.

  • Campaign diary: notes from the most unpredictable primary race ever.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits.

  • Elizabeth Warren's new plan to reform bankruptcy law, explained

  • Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020. Surprised to see this, given that Yglesias last tried his "electability" argument to push Amy Klobuchar, and more generally given his designation as the 2019 "neoliberal shill of the year." This is supposed to be the "first in a Vox series making the best case for each of the top Democratic contenders," but I haven't noticed any of the others yet. Meanwhile, there's Katelyn Burns: Sanders tops latest Iowa poll, but the 2020 Democratic primary is still a four way race.

  • The US-Saudi alliance is deeply unpopular with the American people.

  • The strong economy is an opportunity for progressives. Claims that "voters are happy with the economy," citing a CNN poll where 76 percent of voters rate economic conditions as either "very good" or "somewhat good." Includes a chart that shows that "pick-up in wage growth has come from low-wage industries" -- something I've seen others cite, but what I haven't seen is a chart that distinguishes between low-wage workers who got raises due to minimum wage increases compared with purely economic effects on the labor market. There's no reason to attribute the former to Trump or the Republicans -- just the opposite. And while raises for low wage workers help, the poor are still poor, and prices -- Yglesias cites child care as a major concern -- eat up a good chunk of income. But even if Yglesias is right that most people are no longer worried about the economy, he's also right that Democrats have other issues to run on:

    But one nice thing about a strong labor market is that it creates political space to finally pay attention to the myriad social problems that can't be solved by a "good economy" alone -- things like child care, health care, college costs, and environmental protection -- that during, the Obama years, tended to be crowded out by a jobs-first mentality.

    Good times, in other words, could be the perfect opportunity to finally tackle the many long-lingering problems for which progressives actually have solutions and about which conservatives would rather not talk.

Daily Log

Need to write something (75 words) for NPR on the Steve Lehman album:

Steve Lehman Trio + Craig Taborn: The People I Love (Pi) The alto saxophonist extends his string of boundary-pushing albums by rediscovering the middle ground between his trio and the larger groups he has lately favored. Matt Brewer (bass) and Damion Reid return from his Dialect Fluorescent trio, while pianist Taborn harmonizes, comps, disrupts, and waxes eloquent. Could be his most conventional postbop effort, but that's only because he's pushed the envelope so far with such complete command.

Notes:

1. Prelude (T+L): short, just sax and piano.
2. Ih Calam & Ynnus: fast riffing over hard piano chords
3. Curse Fraction: slower, airier sax lines, piano comping
4. qPlay (Autechre):
5. Interlude (T+L):
6. A Shifting Design (Kurt Rosenwinkel): recorded 2018 in CA
7. Beyond All Limits:
8. Echoes/The Impaler (latter by Jeff "Tain" Watts):
9. Chance (Kenny Kirkland):
10. Postlude (T+L):

Music Week

Expanded blog post, January archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32575 [32538] rated (+37), 230 [228] unrated (+2).

I might as well go ahead and post this, as I'm nowhere near getting to a reasonable breakpoint. I haven't even done the indexing for last month's Streamnotes file. Nor do I have much to add on EOY lists. Latest I have on NPR's posting of the Jazz Critics Poll results is "end of this week or beginning of next." I've since got a request to write a little something by Thursday, so I'd say early next week is the more likely date.

All of the promos in my queue are 2020 releases, so I figured they could wait as I try to mop up what I've missed from 2019. Also, when I've been away from the computer, the CDs I've been playing have been old jazz: some Ellington, Hawkins, Webster, and a lot of Armstrong -- an especially pleasant surprise to find Armstrong's terrific Newport sets on the computer.

The B+(***) record with the most potential is the Sturgill Simpson. I only gave it one play, and really wasn't in the mood for an arena rock album -- much closer to that than to neotrad or neocosmopolitan coutry, a trend that Nashville artists like Eric Church have pursued of late. Still, an impressive performance, his third straight B+(***) in my book. On the other hand, Omar Souleyman's fifth straight A- was an easy call, not that I can keep any of them straight. Didn't hurt to be reminded of the humanity that the US has tried so hard to snuff out for decades now.

Also nice to find a new electronica artist I really like.

New records reviewed this week:

• Acid Arab: Jdid (2019, Crammed Discs): [r]: B+(*)
• Joe Armon-Jones: Turn to Clear View (2019, Brownswood): [bc]: B
• Blacks' Myths: Blacks' Myths II (2019, Atlantic Rhythms): [bc]: B+(**)
• Burna Boy: African Giant (2019, Atlantic): [r]: B+(*)
• Crazy P: Age of the Ego (2019, Walk Don't Walk): [r]: B+(***)
• Fruit Bats: Gold Past Life (2019, Merge): [r]: B+(*)
• (Sandy) Alex G: House of Sugar (2019, Domino): [r]: B
• Geometry [Kyoko Kitamura/Taylor Ho Bynum/Joe Morris/Tomeka Reid]: Geometry of Distance (2018 [2019], Relative Pitch): [bc]: B+(*)
• Ghost Rhythms: Live at Yoshiwara (2019, Cuneiform): [dl]: b>B+(*)/li>
• Hash Redactor: Drecksound (2019, Goner): [r]: B+(**)
• William Hooker: Symphonie of Flowers (2019, ORG Music): [r]: B+(**)
• IPT: Diffractions (2018 [2019], ForTune): [r]: B+(***)
• The Japanese House: Good at Falling (2019, Dirty Hit): [r]: B+(*)
• Lightning Bolt: Sonic Citadel (2019, Thrill Jockey): [r]: B+(*)
• Anna Meredith: FIBS (2019, Moshi Moshi): [r]: B
• The Messthetics: Anthropocosmic Nest (2019, Dischord): [bc]: B+(*)
• Moor Mother: Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes (2019, Don Giovanni): [r]: B+(**)
• Gurf Morlix: Impossible Blue (2019, Rootball): [r]: B+(**)
• Ralph Peterson & the Messenger Legacy: Legacy Alive: Volume 6 at the Sidedoor (2019, Onyx Productions): [r]: B+(**)
• Portico Quartet: Memory Streams (2019, Gondwana): [r]: B+(*)
• Sturgill Simpson: Sound & Fury (2019, Elektra): [r]: B+(***)
• Omar Souleyman: Shlon (2019, Mad Decent/Because): [r]: A-
• Soundwalk Collective With Patti Smith: The Peyote Dance (2019, Bella Union): [r]: B+(*)
• Soundwalk Collective With Patti Smith: Mummer Love (2019, Bella Union): [r]: B+(**)
• Special Request: Vortex (2019, Houndstooth): [bc]: A-
• Special Request: Bedroom Tapes (2019, Houndstooth): [bc]: B+(***)
• Special Request: Offworld (2019, Houndstooth): [bc]: A-
• Vinnie Sperrazza/Jacob Sacks/Masa Kamaguchi: Play Sonny Rollins (2018 [2019], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(*)
• Tropical Fuck Storm: Braindrops (2019, Joyful Noise): [r]: B+(*)
• Summer Walker: Over It (2019, Interscope): [r]: B
• Yola: Walk Through Fire (2019, Easy Eye Sound/Nonesuch): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Fred Anderson Quartet: Live Volume V (1994 [2019], FPE): [bc]: B+(***)
• Louis Armstrong & His All Stars: The Complete Newport 1956 & 1958 Recordings (1956-58 [2019], Legacy, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Guy Clark: The Best of the Dualtone Years (2006-13 [2017], Dualtone, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Jaye P. Morgan: Jaye P. Morgan (1976 [2019], Wewantsounds): [bc]: B
• John Prine: Chicago '70 (1970 [2019], Hobo): [r]: B+(***)
• Patrice Rushen: Remind Me: The Classic Elektra Recordings 1978-1984 (1978-84 [2019], Strut): [bc]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Ben Webster/Don Byas: Giants of the Tenor Sax (1944-45 [1988], Commodore): [cd]: B+(**)
• Ben Webster and His Quartet: Wayfaring Webster (1970 [2000], Daybreak): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Valery Ponomarev Big Band: Live! Our Father Who Art Blakey: The Centennial (Summit) [01-17]
• Purna Loka Ensemble: Metaraga (Origin) [01-17]

Weekend Roundup

In his 2019 State of the Union address, Donald Trump warned:

An economic miracle is taking place in the United States -- and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous partisan investigations. If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It doesn't work that way!

I remembered the quote slightly differently: as Trump saying that the only things that could stop America (by which he meant himself) are partisan investigations and stupid wars. Trump has blundered his way into both now.

After the Democrats won the House in 2018, it was inevitable that they would start investigating the Trump administration's rampant corruption and flagrant abuses of power, something Republicans in Congress had turned a blind eye to. It was not inevitable, or even very likely, that Trump would be impeached. Speaker Pelosi clearly had no desire to impeach, until Trump gave them a case where he had run so clearly afoul of national security orthodoxy that Democrats could present impeachment as fulfillment of their patriotic duty.

On closer examination, it's possible that the only war Trump was thinking of in the speech was one of Democrats against himself, but he had waged a successful 2016 campaign as the anti-war candidate -- a challenge given his fondness for bluster and violence, but one made credible by his opponent's constant reminders that she would be the tougher and more menacing Commander in Chief. But as president he's followed his gut instincts, and escalated his way to approximate war with Iran: not his first stupid war, but the first unquestionably attributable to his own folly.

The simplest explanation of how Trump got into war against Iran is that he basically auctioned US foreign policy off to the highest bidders, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia. (One should recall that Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson is also Benjamin Netanyahu's fairy godfather.) Israel and Saudi Arabia wanted Trump to tear up Obama's anti-nuclear arms agreement with Iran, so he did. They wanted Trump to strangle Iran with extra sanctions, so he did. They also wanted Trump to directly attack "Iranian-backed" militias in Iraq and Syria, so once again he did their bidding. That belligerence and those escalations have gotten us to exactly where we are, and it was all totally unnecessary, if only Trump had attempted instead to build on the good will Obama originally established. Granted, Obama could have gone further himself toward opening up cordial relations with Iran, but he too was limited by Israel and Saudi Arabia -- indeed, the letter of his agreement was meant to satisfy Israeli and Saudi demands that Iran halt nuclear weapons efforts, and indeed was the only possible approach that achieve those demands. The only thing that opposition to the treaty proves is that the demands weren't based on serious fears -- they were nothing but political posturing, meant to scam gullible Americans.

The only other explanation I can think of is that Trump has an unannounced foreign policy agenda, which basically inverts Theodore Roosevelt's dictum: "speak softly but carry a big stick." Perhaps Trump realizes that America's "stick" isn't nearly as intimidating as it was during the era of the Roosevelts, so he's compensating by shouting, often incoherently. Even if he doesn't realize the US has lost the respect and trust it once enjoyed -- in decline due to years of increasing selfishness and numerous bad decisions, further exacerbated by Trump's "America first" rhetoric -- the frustration of defiance must boil his blood. Whatever insight he once had about investigations and wars has long since been buried in the hubris of his rantings. That loss of clarity makes him even stupider than usual, leading him beyond blunders to crimes, against us and even against himself.

The result is that once again we're praying, and not for the redemption of the inexcusable behavior of the Trump administration, but for the greater sanity of Iran's leaders, the discipline not to play into Trump's madness. Unfortunately, Americans have never shown much aptitude for learning from their mistakes. Indeed, the only people who have ever learned anything from war were those who lost so badly their folly could not be shifted elsewhere -- e.g., Japan after WWII. Iran's eight-year war with Iraq wasn't a full-fledged defeat, but Iranians suffered horribly, and that has surely dampened their enthusiasm for war. On the other hand, the sanctions they already face must feel like war, without even the promise of striking back.

PS: I wrote the above, and most of the comments below, on Saturday, before this story broke: Riley Beggin: Iraqi Parliament approves a resolution on expelling US troops after Soleimani killing. As I wrote below, this would be the best-case scenario. Since Iraq appears to have no control over what US forces based there actually do, the only way Iraqis can escape being caught in the middle is to expel the Americans. Moreover, it's hard to see how Trump could keep troops in Iraq without the consent of Iraq's government. Note that this won't end the threat of war. The US still has troops and navy based around the Persian Gulf, from which it can launch attacks against Iran. But expulsion should extricate Iraq from being in the middle of Trump's temper tantrum.

On the other hand, Mike Pompeo has already rejected Iraq's vote, saying, "We are confident that the Iraqi people want the United States to continue to be there to fight the counterterror campaign." See Quint Forgey: Pompeo sticks up for US presence as Iraq votes to eject foreign troops.

Here are some links on Trump and Iran:

• Tallha Abdulrazaq: The US has no friends left in Iraq.

• Zack Beauchamp: Trump's Iran war has begun. One thing that bothers me about this and similar pieces is the repeated assertion that "neither side wants . . . a full-scale war." It's quite possible that no one in a position of real power in Iran wants such a thing, as the US has undoubted power to literally destroy every inch of Iran, killing nearly all Iranians and leaving the country an uninhabitable wasteland. But it clearly is the case that there are some Americans, in or close to the government, who want nothing less than full-scale war against Iran, and they have been bankrolled by Israel and Saudi Arabia, who see an American war against Iran as furthering their own "Middle East ambitions."

  Neither the US nor Iran appears to want a full-scale conflict, meaning an extended US bombing campaign inside Iran's borders or a ground invasion. Such a conflict would be devastating to both sides. However, when two enemies like these start openly shooting at each other, neither side wants to be seen as the one who blinks first. The result is a cycle of attacks and counterattacks, which has the potential to spiral outside of anyone's control.

  The closest recent analogy may be the Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition, over the Suez Canal between the 1967 and 1973 wars. Egypt vacillated between armed attacks and peace proposals, and eventually regained the Canal and the Sinai Peninsula through the 1979 Camp David Accords. That's a case where the indecisiveness of the border skirmishes lead to a larger war, and the threat of further wars led to the US-brokered agreement. However, US-Iran is a fundamentally dissimilar conflict. A closer conflict model might be the UK-China Opium Wars of the 1840s, where an imperial power, protected from counterattack by thousands of miles, waged war on the periphery of a country it couldn't conquer and occupy, to secure commercial demands meant to enrich itself and to weaken and impoverish its opponent. Same thing happened between the UK and Iran, only there Britain was able to secure the concessions they desired -- most profitably, control over Iranian oil -- with more pedestrian measures: bribes. Also recall that Iranian enmity against the US started with the CIA coup in 1953, which restored foreign control over Iran's oil, most of which went to American companies. American enmity against Iran started in 1979, when the revolution reclaimed Iran's oil for its people.

• Peter Beinart: The embassy attack revealed Trump's weakness [01-01]: "By abandoning diplomacy, the president risks war, humiliation, or both -- and has put himself at Iran's mercy." This was written before the assassination of Soleimani, so could arguably be charged with taunting Trump to show how tough he really is -- or how dumb he really is. That's always a risk to dwelling on how much America's military-based influence has declined of late -- especially with presidents who'd rather be seen as tough than as smart. (McGeorge Bundy made that distinction between Johnson and Kennedy, but the split between Trump and Obama is even more glaring.) On the other hand, America's military looks weakened because it's been much overused since 2001. While the damage it has wrought all across the Middle East and North Africa is staggering, the people who fight us now are by definition the ones who have survived the slaughter, who have learned the limits of "shock and awe," and who have been hardened against further threats. Trump's flaks have described the mass murder as establishing a deterrent, but deterrents are mental constructs; examples are mere atrocities. True that the US could kill many more people: with nuclear weapons, tens or even hundreds of millions, but that would make it impossible even for us to deny what kind of monsters we've become. (And make no mistake, America's wars abroad are driven mostly by domestic politics, by self-image.) On the other hand, the US still has much leverage diplomatically. The Iran deal that Trump tore up is ample testimony to how far Iran was willing to sacrifice its sovereign rights to appease the US and Europe. It's equally clear that North Korea would shelve its nuclear arsenal in exchange for an economic opening -- basically the same deal that the US happily offers South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, even Communist China and Vietnam. The problem is that Trump has no clue how "the art of the deal" really works. His only mode is bullying, which does little more than create resistance, while exposing the real limits of his power.

• Phyllis Bennis: The assassination of Suleimani escalates the threat of war: "President Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal nearly two years ago started the US down this path with Iran."

• Max Boot: Iran just outplayed the United States -- again [12-31] (not that I give a shit what Boot thinks on this).

• Peter Certo: Trump's Iran aggression deserves full-throated opposition. Related: Anti-war protesters organize around US following killing of Iranian general. By the way, we had a protest in Wichita, which drew about 150 people. Also, look at this.

• Jonathan Chait: Trump thinks attacking Iran will get him reelected. He's wrong.

  Trump's attacks on Obama were the purest form of projection. They reflect his cynical belief that every president will naturally abuse their powers, and thus provide a roadmap to his own intentions.

  And indeed, Trump immediately followed the killing of Qasem Soleimani by metaphorically wrapping himself in the stars and stripes. No doubt he anticipates at least a faint echo of the rally-around-the-flag dynamic that has buoyed many of his predecessors. . . .

  But presidents traditionally benefit from a presumption of competence, or at least moral legitimacy, from their opposition. Trump has forfeited his. He will not have Democratic leaders standing shoulder to shoulder with him, and his practice of disregarding and smearing government intelligence should likewise dispel any benefit of the doubt attached to claims he makes about the necessity of his actions. Trump has made it plain that he views American war-fighting as nothing but the extension of domestic politics. We should believe him.

• Martin Chulov/Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: Iran ends nuclear deal commitments as fallout from Suleimani killing spreads.

• Patrick Cockburn: Iraq's worst fears have come true -- a proxy war is on its doorstep. Some other recent Cockburn columns:

  • How Tehran-backed forces are taking over in Iraq [11-11].

  • Deadly army crackdown on protests risks turmoil in Iraq [10-03].

  • Iran-US tensions threaten fragile Iraqi stability, amid army dismissal [09-30]

  • Iraq is once again the battleground for an American proxy war [09-28].

  • I've seen for myself how sanctions only hurt the poor [07-05].

  • Trump may be in too deep to avoid war with Iran [06-23].

  • Trump is making the same US mistake in the Middle East yet again [05-17].

• Juan Cole:

  • Making America hated again: Tens of thousands of Iraqis chant "death to America" at Soleimani funeral in Baghdad.

  • Trump unites Iran and Iraq . . . against the United States.

• Ryan Costello: Trump and his team are lying their way to war with Iran.

• Chas Danner: Trump tweets threat to commit war crimes in Iran.

• Reese Erlich: Trump's Soleimani assassination: It's all about the oil. Actually, the article doesn't make much of a case for that -- not that control of Iranian oil wasn't the prime consideration in the 1953 CIA coup in Iran, or in Britain's numerous interventions over the previous century. But the most immediate effect of war around the Persian Gulf is the effect it has on driving worldwide oil prices up, which makes it a bonanza for oil companies all around the world. On the other hand, peace with Iran would risk flooding the market with cheap Iranian oil, which would hurt profits everywhere else.

• Andrew Exum: Iran loses its indispensable man: "The killing of Qassem Soleimani robs the regime of the central figure for its ambitions in the Middle East." I'd take this argument with several grains of salt, as the US, Israel, and Saudia Arabia have long made a habit of exaggerating Iran's "ambitions in the Middle East," and have had considerable success at getting the US media to repeat their claims. His killing would only make a critical difference if: he had substantial autonomy in directing Quds Force operations outside of Iran, and his successors are inclined now to change their strategy and tactics. It's hard to imagine the assassination of any US general (at least since US Grant) making such a difference. If anything, it's more likely that the vacuum will set off a contest to see which of his possible successors will be the most militantly vengeful.

• Dexter Filkins: The dangers posed by the killing of Qassem Suleimani. In 2013, Filkins wrote a previous profile of Suleimani: The shadow commander.

• Graham E Fuller: US foreign policy by assassination.

• Philip Giraldi: The Soleimani assassination: "The long-awaited beginning of the end of America's imperial ambitions."

• Benjamin Hart: Prominent Iraq War supporters think Soleimani killing was a great idea.

• Falih Hassan/Tim Arango/Alissa J Rubin: A shocked Iraq reconsiders its relationship with the US: "The killing of General Suleimani, intended as a shot against Iran, could accelerate an Iranian objective: pushing the United States military out of Iraq." This is probably the best-case scenario: Iraq tells the US to remove its troops, if not necessarily to close its embassy. The government in Iraq is already unpopular, and siding with the US when Trump is ordering bombing within Iraq is bound to be massively unpopular.

• Chris Hedges: War with Iran.

• Caroline Houck: A second airstrike against Iranian targets in Iraq: what we know: "The attack comes one day after a major escalation in US-Iranian tensions."

• Shireen Hunter: Why Trump assassinated Soleimani and what happens next.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • Trump just declared war on Iran: "There is no other way to look at the killing of Qassem Soleimani."

  • Trump once again proves himself clueless on Iran and North Korea.

  • It's time to worry about war with North Korea again. "The logjam stems from the fact that both leaders are, in their own ways, delusional." I didn't link to this last week, because Kaplan likes to parrot much of the conventional Washington blather on North Korea, but North Korea and Iran are linked in several critical ways: both nations have long been isolated from any contact, let alone normal trade, with the West; that isolation in both cases started with acts of war, which the US has never made any effort to resolve; both have sought to force an opening through the intimidation of building themselves up as nuclear powers; the US regards both regimes as utterly abhorent, so refuses any reconciliation without regime change, which they hope to achieve by impoverishment and starvation. There are minor differences: notably that North Korea has been isolated longer, and has developed a serious arsenal of weapons that could inflict real damage, both on neighbors and as far away as the continental US; and that US "allies" Israel and Saudi Arabia have been more aggressive at pushing the US to escalate the conflict with Iran -- not that Japan and, until recently, South Korea haven't been hostile to North Korea, thereby reinforcing American instincts. The US feels entitled to judge other countries, and to punish the ones it disfavors with sanctions, thinking them somehow more merciful than outright war. That may make sense when the sanctioned nation refuses even to negotiate, but both North Korea and Iran have both made it clear that they want more normalized relations with the US and others. Trump's refusal to offer any sanctions relief even after three summits is perverse and self-defeating, which is why Kim is tempted to return to his previous threats and taunts. Trump's treatment of Iran is even more contemptuous. Maybe in his business experience, Trump suffers no consequences when he imperiously demands submission from suitors, but the world doesn't work like that. The US sanctions regime doesn't let North Korea or Iran simply take their business elsewhere.

• Natasha Korecki: Biden: Trump is 'incredibly dangerous and irresponsible' as the 'walls close in'.

• Mark Kukis: The US can only lose in war with Iran. I take it as axiomatic that no side can win in war. The most you can say is that some sides lose more than others, but in the long run that evens out as well. But one thing to note here is that the US has a lot more to lose than Iran (currently impoverished by cruel sanctions) has -- perhaps as large an asymmetry as the differences in destructive power.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Iraqis storm US embassy in Baghdad to protest air strikes.

  • Trump puts business above democracy and human rights. So did Jimmy Carter. "As Iran's pro-business dictatorship faced an uprising, Carter's administration urged it 'to kill as many demonstrators as necessary,' documents show."

• Bobby Lewis: Fox News is already accusing Democrats who question Trump of being aligned with Iran. E.g., Sean Hannity calls for Trump to discard rules of engagement with Iran and "bomb the living hell out of them".

• Robert Mackey: As Sanders and Warren vow to block war with Iran, Biden and Buttigieg offer better-run wars. That seems a little unfair, as the salient point Biden and Buttigieg are making is that they offer leadership smart enough not to make such blunders (although they could have been clearer on the point). But the fact is nobody knows how to run wars better. The common denominator is always what Donald Rumsfeld called "the military we have," and efforts to make that military smarter, more agile, more sensitive, more responsive, more principled, have always failed.

• Jefferson Morley: After Mossad targeted Soleimani, Trump pulled the trigger.

• Emile Nakhleh: Extreme inequality will fuel Middle East turmoil and uncertainty into the new year. Posted Dec. 12, so before the latest specifics, but relevant nonetheless. Author also wrote Resolving Lebanon's crisis.

• George Packer: Killing Soleimani was worse than a crime: "It was a blunder." Always the optimist -- well, at the launch of a war, anyway.

• Trita Parsi: Trump faces swift backlash for killing Soleimani as Iraqi Parliament votes to expel US troops. Note especially this:

  Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi has made some shocking revelations that put the assassination of Soleimani in a completely different light. He told the Iraqi parliament on Sunday that he "was supposed to meet Soleimani on the morning of the day he was killed, he came to deliver me a message from Iran responding to the message we delivered from Saudi to Iran."

  If this account is true, Trump -- perhaps deliberately -- acted to scuttle an effort to reduce tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

• Nathan J Robinson: How to avoid swallowing war propaganda: "Cutting through bad arguments, distractions, and euphemisms to see murder for what it is."

• Aaron Rupar: Trump's tweets about Obama using war with Iran to win reelection are very awkward now: "In order to get elected, Obama will start a war with Iran." So, if he believed that worked, is Trump "wagging the dog" now?

  Trump's predictions not only turned out to be false, but the irony is that instead of starting a war, the Obama administration's diplomacy resulted in the multilateral Iran nuclear deal. Now that he's president, however, Trump has gone down a very different path, unilaterally pulling the US out of the nuclear deal, pursuing a "maximum pressure" campaign aimed at crippling Iran's economy, and assassinating the head of the country's paramilitary forces.

  It's no secret by now that many of Trump's attacks on his political foes are projection. He's spent months accusing former Vice President Joe Biden of corruption, despite the fact that Trump himself is arguably the most corrupt president in American history. He called Obama "a total patsy" for Russia even though he's never been able to bring himself to say a cross word about Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also attacked Hillary Clinton for purportedly silencing women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct at the same time Trump's lawyer was making illegal hush payments to women to cover up affairs.

• Missy Ryan/Josh Dawsey/Dan Lamothe/John Hudson: How Trump decided to kill a top Iranian general. One problem with having an egotistical moron as president is that it's awfully easy for underlings to steer him in ill-considered directions.

• David E Sanger: For Trump, a risky gamble to deter Iran: "The goal was to prove American resolve in the face of Iranian attacks." The effect was to challenge Iran to show greater resolve in the face of even larger American attacks.

• Jeremy Scahill: With Suleimani assassination, Trump is doing the bidding of Washington's most vile cabal.

• Dylan Scott: 9 big questions about Qassem Soleimani's killing, answered by an expert: interview with Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

• Evan Semones: Trump vows to target '52' sites if Iran retaliates for Soleimani death. I don't know about you, but I associate this class of threat with Nazi Germany, which promised to kill a hundred random people for every German soldier killed in their occupation of the Balkans. I can't think of any other examples, although Israel approaches that ratio, at least in Gaza. I've long said that American neocons suffer from Israel-envy, as they try to incorporate more and more elements of Israel's occupation strategy into American foreign policy (e.g., targeted assassinations).

• Mohammad Ali Shabani: Donald Trump's assassination of Qassem Suleimani will come back to haunt him.

• Jonah Shepp: The real risk of assassinating Soleimani.

• Gary Sick: Trump lit a fire by exiting the Iran deal & poured gasoline on it by assassinating Soleimani.

• Barbara Slavin: Qassim Suleimani's killing will unleash chaos: "Revenge is not a strategy."

• Emily Stewart: Democrats warn of the dangers of war while Republicans fall in line after the killing of Iran's Qassem Soleimani. I thought Warren's blame-Soleimani-first tweet was lame, then I read Klobuchar's: "Our immediate focus needs to be on ensuring all necessary security measures are taken to protect U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in Iraq and throughout the region." Not even Sanders, whose opposition to an Iran war was unequivocal, said the obvious: "what the fuck are American troops doing in Iraq in the first place?" The only Democratic tweet to make a key point was by Tim Kaine, blessed with the clarity of hindsight: "Trump's decision to tear up a diplomatic deal that was working and resume escalating aggressions with Iran has brought us to the brink of another war in the Middle East." Understand that much and you won't get snowed by the propaganda.

• Nick Turse: Trump threatens Afghan Armageddon. Quotes Trump: "If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don't want to kill 10 million people."

• Alex Ward:

  • "A nasty, brutal fight": what a US-Iran war would look like: "The bottom line: It'd be hell on earth."

  • The neoconservative fantasy at the center of the Soleimani killing.

• Philip Weiss:

  • Trump risks a major war in an election year -- why? Note photo of Trump fondling a menorah on stage with Sheldon Adelson.

  • Israel figured in US decision to assassinate Iranian general.

• Robin Wright: The killing of Qassem Suleimani is tantamount to an act of war.

Some scattered links this week:

• Andrew Bacevich: If Ukraine is impeachable, what's Afghanistan?: "A misguided war that drags on inconclusively for more than 18 years is, I submit, a great crime."

• Zack Beauchamp: Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to put himself above the law: "The Israeli prime minister's latest attempt to avoid jail time further demonstrates his treat to democracy."

• Max Blau: Marketing psychiatric drugs to jailers and judges: "Drug companies are courting jails and judges through sophisticated marketing efforts."

• James Bruno: Can we survive the post-truth era? "How Donald Trump's perverse brand of B.S. took over American politics."

• Jonathan Chait: Trump covering up scheme to use Justice Department to punish CNN.

• Juliet Eilperin: EPA's scientific advisers warn its regulatory rollbacks clash with established science. I suspect they also violate the laws that established the EPA in the first place. I'd like to see Democrats in the House write up another impeachment article over this.

• Richard Flanagan: Australia is committing climate suicide: "As record fires rage, the country's leaders seem intent on sending it to its doom." Related:

  • Nick Cohen: Australia's pathetic PM reveals much about the right's effort to deny reality.

  • Umair Irfan: Australia's hellish heat wave and wildfires, explained: "Ocean circulation, years of drought, and climate change are fueling Australia's record heat and deadly fires." Also see Irfan and Christina Animashaun: Australia' massive fires, as seen from space.

  • Isabella Kwai: Apocalyptic scenes in Australia as fires turn skies blood red.

  • Michael Mann: Australia, your country is burning -- dangerous climate change is here with you now.

• Conor Friedersdorf: Anti-war protesters were right about Afghanistan. Amen, and about time someone said so. I believed that going to war in Afghanistan was the original sin, the cardinal mistake from which every other atrocity of the Global War on Terror flowed. I was in New York on 9/11. I lost someone dear to me. She was a secretary in the World Trade Center, and I spent time grieving with her family. I also went to the first anti-war demonstration I could (in Union Square Park). I started blogging around then, and I've never regretted an anti-war post. That 80% of Americans at the time supported Bush's insane and cruel "crusade" only shows how thoroughly our brains had been permeated by the militarism this country has relished since WWII. (By the way, Bernie Sanders recently admitted that his 2001 vote for the war was a grave mistake, going so far as to acknowledge that Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the war.)

• Lisa Friedman: Trump rule would exclude climate change in infrastructure planning.

• Sarah Jones:

  • What's so hard to understand about the young left?

  • Please stop telling miners to learn to code: "Retraining programs can't make up for a century of exploitation."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • If Trump can't bully Iran into backing down, things could get scary fast: Any fucking idea what this is about? It was Trump who ordered the assassination of a prominent Iranian official. It was Trump who ordered attacks on militias allegedly backed by Iran. It was Trump who imposed crippling sanctions on Iran. It was Trump who tore up the agreement on nuclear technology. In each of these cases, Trump is the aggressor, and it's impossible to imagine an Iranian response short of total surrender that might satisfy him. Where does "backing down" come into play here? And by the way, Trump is playing the same game with North Korea, refusing to reduce sanctions for anything less than total surrender. The difference there is that North Korea actually does have nuclear warheads and missiles that can reach the US, but Trump doesn't recognize that threat.

  • Biden's imaginary Republican friends include a running mate.

  • William Barr embodies the conservative surrender to Trump.

  • The 5 biggest surprises of the Democratic presidential primary, so far: Biden's resilience; Bernie's resurgence; Pete's viability; nonwhite voters don't prefer nonwhite candidates; Yang is doing better than many conventional candidates.

• Paul Krugman: The legacy of destructive austerity: "The deficit obsession of 2010-2015 did permanent damage." I've often thought that the Democrats made a major mistake in not reversing the Bush tax cuts (and for good measure raising rates on estates, capital gains, and the top bracket) as soon as they took over Congress and the Presidency in 2009. They could have deferred some of the tax increases on account of the recession, but at least they would have defused most of the deficit alarms. As it was, they waited until after they lost the 2010 election, at which point their leverage was lost.

• Natasha Lennard: Chelsea Manning spent most of the last decade in prison. The UN says her latest stint is tantamount to torture.

• Sharon Lerner: The war on the war on cancer: "Trump's gutting of toxics regulations will mean higher profits for polluters and higher cancer rates for the American people."

• Nancy LeTourneau: Iowa and New Hampshire are skewing coverage of the Democratic primary: "If not for the polling results in those two states, no one would be talking about Sanders." I normally don't bother with horserace journalism, but this strikes me as especially egregious. According to 538, Sanders is in second place nationwide, with 17.8% (behind Biden's 27.5%, ahead of Warren's 15.0%, way ahead of Buttigieg's 7.7%). Sure, he's running closer in Iowa (20.6%, second to Biden's 22.0%, ahead of Buttigieg's 19.4%, Warren's 13.3%, and Klobuchar's 7.0%), and he leading in New Hampshire (21.3%, to 21.1% for Biden, 14.4% for Warren, and 13.7% for Buttigieg; Klobuchar is next at 4.9%). LeTourneau spends most of her space complaining about how white Iowa and New Hampshire are -- point taken -- but the main thing those two states have going for them is the intensity and intimacy of campaigning there. That they vote first makes them inherently newsworthy. I'd also add that they are real swing states, as opposed to South Carolina, which has only voted Democratic once since 1960 (Carter in 1976). LeTourneau just wants to call the other 48 states for Biden, race over. Nor does she care that Sanders led all Democrats in fundraising last quarter, with Buttigieg also leading Biden. The real question is why various sectors of the media were conspicuously ignoring Sanders for much of last year. LeTourneau shows how much they still want to.

• Eric Levitz: Man who gutted voting rights says Americans 'take democracy for granted': "John Roberts wants you to know that the unelected judges who keep sidelining voters and empowering plutocrats are the guardians of our democracy."

• Dahlia Lithwick: Trump's tent cities are on the verge of killing immigrant children.

• Gregory P Magarian: Trump's most tragic legacy will be seen in ranks of judiciary

• Dave Phillips: Former Navy SEAL capitalizes on newfound fame: "After receiving presidential clemency, Edward Gallagher has left the SEALs to become a pitchman and conservative activist." Related: Charles P Pierce: Make no mistake. Edward Gallagher will be a star of the Republican presidential campaign.

• Robert Reich: At every opportunity, Trump recklessly degrades American justice.

• David Roberts: California now requires solar panels on all new homes. That's not necessarily a good thing.

• Arundhati Roy: India: Intimations of an ending: "The rise of Modi and the Hindu far right."

• Jeremy Scahill: Astra Taylor talks about crushing debt, the 2020 race, and why we don't live in a democracy.

• Jon Schwarz: Goodbye to William Greider, a great American Democrat.

• Maggie Severns: Trump campaign plagued by groups raising tens of millions in his name: "Outside entities are raising huge money in Trump's name, despite disavowals from the campaign, and spending little of it on 2020." No surprise that there's a swamp of fraud surrounding Trump. He inspires it, and they're nothing if not gullible.

• Matt Stieb: Entire West Virginia correctional officer class fired following investigation into Nazi salute photo.

• Matt Taibbi: 2019: A year the news media would rather forget.

• Paul Waters-Smith: A Biden nomination means a second Trump term: "Democrats are desperate for a win, but desperation doesn't usually lead to clear thinking." This doesn't even bother with his shaky record or his middling program, but focuses on the rudiments of campaigning: "shockingly weak fundraising; a low energy campaign with no volunteer base; an inability to campaign vigorously." In the end, Waters-Smith proposes a better candidate. For more, see his Why you should take a chance on the socialist.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Trump's administration is deeply dishonest, and it's foolish to trust them: "Don't trust liars -- especially about matters of war and peace." Subheds: "Trump lies all the time about everything"; also: "Mike Pompeo lies a lot (albeit not as much as Trump)."

  • The controversy over Bret Stephens's Jewish genius column, explained: "Inquiries into Jewish genes always seem to lead someplace ugly." Related: Jack Shafer: Bret Stephens and the perils of the tapped-out column.

Daily Log

Wanted to save this quote from Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (pp. 240-241):

[Reid] Hoffman became one of the country's major political donors. He gave a million dollars to Priorities USA, a Democratic Party political action committee whose main project at that moment was getting Barack Obama reelected as president. [Mark] Pincus gave a million dollars too. That brought both of them into Obama's circle, perhaps not as intimately as Adolf Berle had been in Franklin Roosevelt's, but not casually either. What radio had been for Roosevelt, a new mass medium that offered unprecedented possibilities for a politician who wanted to connect with the public, the new online networks -- which by now had far bigger audiences than newspapers, radio, or television -- were for Obama.

The White House hired a former LinkedIn executive, DJ Patil, as its first chief data scientist. LinkedIn provided proprietary data about the employment market to the White House, to be used in the annual "Economic Report of the President." When the website associated with Obama's health-care reform legislation had an unsuccessful debut, Hoffman was part of a group of Silicon Valley executives that organized a rescue operation. Pincus had been granted a forty-five-minute private audience with Obama in the Oval Office, where he gave the president a PowerPoint presentation on "the product-management approach to government," and he also spoke to Obama on the phone occasionally. Hoffman regularly attended meetings and dinners at the White House, including a small gathering in 2015 to discuss Obama's postpresidential future, and he organized a meeting in Silicon Valley to advise the people who were setting up Obama's foundation on how to harness the power of social networks. On Obama's regular visits to Silicon Valley, Hoffman was usually on the list of people who saw him.

Silicon Valley was also, by now, an important Democratic Party business interest group. Obama was friendly to a number of the Valley's political causes, such as permitting generous allotments of H-1B visas, under which technology firms can hire engineers from abroad; net neutrality, which forbade Internet service providers from charging higher prices to heavy users of video, music, and gaming services; and a new law, opposed by Obama's own financial regulators, that permitted online sales of stock in technology start-ups. The Obama administration gave a $465 million loan to Tesla, the electric car company founded by Hoffman's friend Elon Musk. When the White House gave a state dinner for Xi Jinping, the president of China and therefore the person who controlled access to the most important growth market for LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman (in a tuxedo!) and Michelle Yee were among the guests. On Hoffman's office wall were framed photographs, impossible for any visitor to miss, of himself with Obama, Bloomberg, and Bill Clinton. Once, at a private meeting for big donors from the entertainment industry, one of the guests asked Obama why he had sided with Silicon Valley over Hollywood during a fierce regulatory battle over copyright law in 2011 and 2012. Hollywood, ,the makers of content, was for stricter protections, and Silicon Valley, whose business was to distribute as much material as it could for free, was against them. Silicon Valley won. (In this instance, and others, one of Silicon Valley's lobbying techniques was to mobilize its vast user base in support of its political goals.) It's simple, Obama told his Hollywood supporters: they do a lot more to help me out than you guys do.

The book features three subjects: Adolf Berle, representing the New Deal art of balancing large organizations and countervaling powers; Michael Jensen, an economist who led the fight to make "shareholder value" the sole pursuit of corporations; and Reid Hoffman, a Silicon Valley financier whose major company was LinkedIn. Mark Pincus is a close Silicon Valley associate of Hoffman's. His main company was a gaming outfit, Zynga.

Daily Log

After fixing some bugs in the music tracking file, I see that I've rated 1073 albums released in 2019: 308 from CDs, 765 from downloads and streaming. Of those, 684 were jazz (63.7%, 98.7% of the CDs). A-list totals for Jazz: 74 new + 21 historical (reissues and vault music); for Non-jazz: 61 new + 11 historical. I think these numbers are slightly up from 2018, at least at this date -- I've continued to add records to the various files, so it's hard to come up with exact comparisons.

As of now, I have 1238 rated 2018 releases (803 jazz, 64.8%). A-list jazz: 67 + 26; non-jazz: 58 + 8. I tried compressing this into a tweet:

Some numbers: reviewed/rated 1073 2019 releases (684 jazz); jazz A-list: 74 new + 21 historical; non-jazz: 61 + 11. Jazz 44% from CD promos; non-jazz virtually all from streaming. A-lists up this year (vs. 67+26, 58+8, a year later; 2018 total now 1238).

Dec 2019