Music Week

Expanded blog post, February archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32823 [32778] rated (+45), 245 [242] unrated (+3).

Moving into 2020, starting with my most mechanical tasks. The usual ones are the Year 2020 file, with rated records plus my physical CD queues, and Music Tracking 2020, with additional records I've heard of. The latter is longer than in previous years at this time, because I've created a Metacritic Aggregate file. The latter will eventually morph into an EOY Aggregate, much like 2019.

Last year I started adding in points for 80+ reviews as collated by AOTY. I've made a couple of adjustments this year: the grades are marked by '*' (instead of '+'), and I've added A:i/j to most lines, where i = the average critic score, and j = the number of reviews. While this information is useful in itself, it also helps me locate new reviews/grade changes. AOTY tracks 50+ publications, although several don't have any entries thus far this year. I've included all except for several metal magazines (Metal Hammer, Metal Injection, Metal Sucks), basically because the odds of finding anything of interest to me there are approximately nil. (Nonetheless, 18 metal albums have crept into the list, as many other publications cover at least some metal. I haven't ventured beyond AOTY yet, other than to add my grades and those of Robert Christgau (counted as before: A = 5, A- = 4, down to * = 1).

I had done something like this several years ago, but stopped as it got to be too much work, but resumed last year. Using AOTY helped simplify the work, compared to looking at each publication myself. But given that AOTY has a fairly narrow rock bias, I also factored in a few other sources, especially for jazz (Downbeat, All About Jazz, Free Jazz Collective). I expect I'll get around to doing that sooner or later. Even as it stands, I have a fairly coherent view of what's new in 2020. A few of those records appear in the list below, and I'll check out more in coming weeks. I'm not fully committed to keeping this up, but mechanical tasks like this have been my default fallback lately.

Still, the two best new releases this week didn't clearly emerge from AOTY lists. Rather, they appeared in Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide (subscriber only). By the way, I have all of the free content from And It Don't Stop ready to post on Christgau's website, but have been hung up by indecision about whether we should force people to go to the subscription newsletter to find the pieces. We've decided that the Consumer Guides will be impounded for eight months, and that's demotivated me from adding the reviews to the CG database. I'd like to come up with some kind of scheme where subscribers get a cookie which would allow them to see embargoed entries in the database, but that will require some new code, and I don't have a scheme yet to validate the subscriber list.

Maybe I'll do some work on this and other website projects this week. Finally opening some time up.

This is the last Monday of February, so time to wrap up the Streamnotes: February 2020 archive. Review count is short compared to most months (106), because I extended January, and last Monday falls relatively early this month. More significant statistic is that I only got to 31 new releases (27 of new music), only 2 of which hit A-. That could be one of the lowest totals ever. On the other hand, a lot of old jazz this month, especially from Duke Ellington. I spread out from there, starting with artists who covered Ellington (and Billy Strayhorn) songs, band alumni (like Cat Anderson and Paul Gonsalves), and followed related links (like Fresh Sound reissues). Now that my rush to hear as many 2019 releases as possible is over, it's nice to spread out a bit.

Following up from yesterday's Weekend Roudup, 100% reporting (see Vox's tallies) hasn't changed much. Amy Klobuchar clung onto her 5th place in both raw votes totals, but slipped to 6th in the top-line County Convention Delegates totals. Next stop is the South Carolina primary this Saturday (February 29). Biden has led all year -- 46.4% to 12.0% for Sanders back on May 29 -- but the race tightened a couple weeks ago (25.0% to 18.4%), with the most recent polls showing Biden winning by 1%, 4%, or 15%. The bigger contest will be on March 3 ("Super Tuesday") in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. Bloomberg will be on the ballot then, and has been heavily advertising in those states.

Here's an article that argues back against the electability assertions of "moderate" Democrats: Ibram X Kendi: When will moderates learn their lesson?

New records reviewed this week:

• Carla Bley/Andy Sheppard/Steve Swallow: Life Goes On (2019 [2020], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Moses Boyd: Dark Matter (2020, Exodus): [r]: B+(**)
• Frank Colón: Latin Lounge (2019 [2020], Technoprimal Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Drive-By Truckers: The Unraveling (2020, ATO): [r]: A-
• John Ellis and Andy Bragen: The Ice Siren (2016 [2020], Parade Light): [cd]: B [03-20]
• Eminem: Music to Be Murdered By (2020, Shady/Aftermath/Interscope/Goliath): [r]: A-
• Georgia: Seeking Thrills (2020, Domino): [r]: B+(***)
• Gilfema: Three (2019 [2020], Sounderscore): [cd]: B+(*) [04-03]
• Holy Fuck: Deleter (2020, Last Gang): [r]: B+(***)
• Kesha: High Road (2020, Kemosabe): [r]: B+(*)
• Les Amazones D'Afrique: Amazones Power (2020, RealWorld): [r]: B+(**)
• Valery Ponomarev Big Band: Live! Our Father Who Art Blakey: The Centennial (2019 [2020], Summit): [cd]: B
• RJ & the Assignment: Hybrid Harmony (2019 [2020], self-released): [cd]: B
• Gil Scott-Heron: We're New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven (2010-19 [2020], XL): [r]: B+(**)
• Mark Segger Sextet: Lift Off (2019 [2020], 18th Note): [cd]: B+(***)
• Sergi Sirvent Octopussy Cats: Flax-Golden Tales (2017 [2019], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(**)
• Dave Soldier: Zajal (2019 [2020], Mulatta): [cd]: B+(*)
• Tame Impala: The Slow Rush (2020, Interscope): [r]: B+(*)
• The Westerlies: Wherein Lies the Good (2018 [2020], Westerlies): [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Rashied Ali Quintet: First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967 (1967 [2020], Survival): [r]: B+(*)
• Duke Ellington: The Washingtonians (1924-26 [2019], Squatty Roo): [r]: B
• Bryan Ferry: Live at the Royal Albert Hall 1974 (1974 [2020], BMG): [r]: B+(**)
• John Vanore: Primary Colors (1984-85 [2020], Acoustical Concepts): [cd]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Cat Anderson and His Orchestra: Cat's in the Alley (1958-59 [2011], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(***)
• Cat Anderson: Cat Speaks [The Definitive Black & Blue Sessions] (1977 [2003], Black & Blue): [r]: B+(***)
• Cat Anderson: Plays WC Handy [The Definitive Black & Blue Sessions] (1978 [1997], Black & Blue): [r]: A-
• Benny Bailey: In Sweden: 1957-1959 Sessions (1957-59 [2011], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(**)
• Benny Bailey: Grand Slam (1978 [1998], Storyville): [r]: B+(***)
• Josephine Baker: Breezin' Along [Art Deco Series] (1926-27 [1995], Columbia/Legacy): [r]: B+(***)
• Chris Barber's Jazz & Blues Band: Echoes of Ellington (1976 [2008], Timeless, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Arne Domnérus: Dompan! (2000 [2001], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington: Historically Speaking: The Duke (1956, Bethlehem): [r]: B+(*)
• Duke Ellington: Duke Ellington Presents . . . (1956, Bethlehem): [r]: B+(**)
• Duke Ellington: Duke Ellington's Concert of Sacred Music (1965 [1966], RCA): [r]: B+(*)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1950 (1950 [2001], Classics): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Gonsalves/Harry Carney/Mitchell "Booty" Wood: Stanley Dance Presents the Music of the Great Ellingtonians (1960-61 [2008], Fresh Sound, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Al Haig/Jamil Nasser Combo: Expressly Ellington (1978 [1979], Spotlite): [r]: B+(***)
• Coleman Hawkins and His All-Stars: The Complete Jazztone Recordings 1954 (1954 [2010], Fresh Sound): [r]: A-
• Earl Hines/Jonah Jones/Buddy Tate/Cozy Cole: Back on the Street (1972, Chiaroscuro): [r]: A-
• Jonah Jones: 1936-1945 (1936-45 [1997], Classics): [r]: B+(**)
• Jonah Jones: Confessin' [The Definitive Black & Blue Sessions] (1978 [1999], Black & Blue): [r]: B+(***)
• Don Redman and His Orchestra Featuring Coleman Hawkins: At the Swing Cats Ball (1957 [2005], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(*)
• The World's Greatest Jazz Band of Yank Lawson & Bob Haggart: Plays Duke Ellington (1973 [1999], Jazzology): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• John DiMartino: Passion Flower: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Sunnyside) [04-10]
• Liberty Ellman: Last Desert (Pi) [03-27]
• Vincent Glanzmann/Gerry Hemingway: Composition O (Fundacja Sluchaj)
• Georg Graewe/Ernst Reijseger/Gerry Hemingway: Concertgebouw Brugge 2014 (Fundacja Sluchaj)
• Paul Lytton/Nate Wooley: Known/Unknown (Fundacja Sluchaj)
• Denise Mangiardi: Brown Book (Alice's Loft Music)
• Nutria: Meeting in Progress (Ears & Eyes)
• Keith Oxman: Two Cigarettes in the Dark (Capri) [03-20]
• Suzanna Ross: Is Bewitched* . . . *Not Bothered, Not Bewildered (self-released) [03-20]
• Felipe Salles Interconnections Ensemble: The New Immigrant Experience: Music Inspired by Conversations With Dreamers (Tapestry) [03-20]
• Schapiro 17: New Shoes: Kind of Blue at 60 (Summit, 2CD) [04-03]
• Sestetto Internazionale: Live in Munich 2019 (Fundacja Sluchaj)
• Curt Sydnor: Deep End Shallow (Out of Your Head) [03-20]

Weekend Roundup

Mike Bloomberg had his coming out party at the Nevada Democratic debate, and the response was harsh -- e.g. (including a few extra Bloomberg links):

• 3 winners and 4 losers from the Nevada Democratic debate.

• The 7 most dramatic, eye-popping moments from the Democratic debate in Las Vegas.

• 'A bland, clueless billionaire with feet of clay': Comments on the debate from 14 observers, including: "Bloomberg was totally unready"; "Bloomberg failed miserably"; a reference to "the emperor has no clothes"; but some of these pundits were also pretty clueless (e.g., "the winer may have been Tom Steyer, for missing a particularly hostile debate marked by personal attacks").

• Gabriel Benedetti: How beating up Bloomberg has reinvigorated the Democratic field.

• Benjamin Dixon: Michael Bloomberg's campaign is an insult to democracy.

• Matt Flegenheimer/Alexander Burns/Jeremy W Peters: How Bloomberg bungled a debate that he had been prepared for.

• Joshua Frank: Bloomberg is a climate change con man.

• Sheera Frenkel/Davey Alba: Digital edits, a paid army, Bloomberg is 'destroying norms' on social media. Social media has norms?

• Ed Kilgore: Bloomberg walks onto the stage and into a buzzsaw.

• Eric Levitz: Love wanting to die? Then check out Bloomberg's anti-Trump billboards. At first I suspected a spoof; I mean, is this really the work of a human brain? One billboard message: "DONALD TRUMP EATS BURNT STEAK." Smaller print: "Mike Bloomberg likes his medium rare." I'm partial to medium rare myself, but I can't imagine that working as a litmus test -- not least because I come from a family (of farmers) where no one wants to see red oozing out of their meat. Nor does this one do anything for me: "DONALD TRUMP CHEATS AT GOLF. Mike Bloomberg doesn't." I don't have enough experience with golf to even have an opinion on that, but I don't think Bloomberg wouldn't cheat if all it took was money.

• German Lopez: Mike Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk problem, explained.

• Harold Meyerson: Why Bloomberg can't beat Trump: "It's hard to imagine a Democrat less able to win working-class votes."

• Anna North: "I'd like to do that piece of meat": The sexism allegations against Bloomberg, explained.

• Alex Pareene: Michael Bloomberg's polite authoritarianism.

• Monica Potts: Bloomberg: The 'Democrat' who treated minorities as inherently criminal.

• Rebecca R Ruiz: The Bloomberg campaign is a waterfall of cash.

• Michael Sainato: Michael Bloomberg's troubling record on unions and workers.

• Nate Silver: The debate exposed Bloomberg's downside -- but it was there all along, and visible to anyone who cared to look, not that anyone close to Bloomberg might dare point that out.

• Emily Stewart: Elizabeth Warren's evisceration of Mike Bloomberg should make Donald Trump nervous.

• Matt Taibbi: The Bloomberg myth exploded on live TV.

  Bloomberg stood in mute fury as his $400 million campaign investment went up in smoke. His contempt for democracy and sense of entitlement surpass even Donald Trump, who at least likes crowds -- Bloomberg's joyless imperiousness makes Trump seem like Robin Williams.

  That Bloomberg has been touted as a potential Democratic Party savior across the top ranks of politics and media is an extraordinary indictment of that group of people.

  Some endorsements were straight cash transactions, in which politicians who owe their careers to Bloomberg's largess repaid him with whatever compliments they could muster. How much does a man who radiates impatience with the idea of having to pretend to equal status with anyone have to spend to get someone to say something nice?

  California Congressman Harley Rouda called him a "legendary businessman": Bloomie gave her more than $4 million. New Jersey's Mikie Sherrill got more than $2 million from Bloomberg's Independence USA Super PAC, and in return the Navy vet said Bloomberg embodies "the integrity we need."

  Georgia's Lucy McBath, a member of the congressional black caucus, got $4 million from Bloomberg PACs, and she endorsed him just as an audio clip was coming out of the ex-mayor talking about putting black men up "against the wall" in stop-and-frisk. News accounts of the endorsement frequently left out the financial ties.

  That's fine. If you give a politician $2 million or $4 million, it must be expected that he or she will say you approximate a human being.

  But how does New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman excuse writing "Paging Michael Bloomberg"? (Well, Bloomberg philanthropies donated to Planet Word, "the museum my wife is building," says Friedman, so there's that.) How about Jonathan Chait at New York, who wrote, "Winning the election is starting to look hard. How about buying it instead?" Or John Ellis in The Washington Post, who declared Bloomberg the "dream candidate"?

  These pundits clung to a triumvirate of delusions: Bloomberg "gets things done," he's more electable than a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren because he can spend unlimited amounts, and he has the "toughness" to take on Trump.

  Far from showing "toughness," Bloomberg on Wednesday wilted under attacks from his five Democratic opponents.

• Alex Ward: Mike Bloomberg tweeted a doctored debate video. Is it political spin or disinformation?

• Matthew Yglesias: Mike Bloomberg is a disaster: "He's bad at politic and running scared from his own record."

• Li Zhou: Watch: Elizabeth Warren grills Mike Bloomberg over allegations of sexism and nondisclosure agreements.

The Nevada caucuses were held on Saturday. Results came in much faster than in Iowa, but 24 hours later we still only have 87.47% reporting (see Nevada Democratic caucuses: Live results. As with Iowa, there are three sets of results. The first-round votes are: Sanders 34.27%, Biden 17.86%, Buttigieg 15.18%, Warren 12.76%, Klobuchar 9.25%, Steyer 9.12%. Bloomberg wasn't on the ballot, and no write-in votes have been reported, so he's currently 123 votes behind Michael Bennet, and 12 behind John K Delaney. As in Iowa, there's also a "realigned vote", as most "unviable" candidates lose votes to "viable" ones (Bennet drops to 12 votes, but somehow Delaney got a boost to 16): The top six held place, but Sanders gained the most, to 40.73%, vs. Biden 19.69% and Buttigieg 17.14%. But the most commonly reported results were "County Convention Delegates: Sanders 47.08%, Biden 20.94%, Buttigieg 13.63%, Warren 9.71%, Steyer 4.65%, Klobuchar 3.89%. (This week's best humor article: Klobuchar congratulates herself for 'exceeding expectations' as early Nevada results show her in distant 5th.)

Unlike Iowa, it was clear early on who the winner was. Dylan Scott came up with 3 winners and 2 losers from the Nevada caucuses, but the only candidate on the list was Sanders (winner), and two of the other items were clearly Sanders wins (winner: Medicare-for-all; loser: Culinary Union Local 226). Sanders' win was so complete that Vox republished Matthew Yglesias: Mainstream Democrats shouldn't fear Bernie Sanders. Also on Nevada (and Sanders):

• Sarah Frostenson: Bernie Sanders is the front-runner

• Ryan Lizza: Sanders eviscerates conventional wisdom about why he can't win.

• David Roth: Bernie Sanders is no Donald Trump.

• Greg Sargent: Don't look now, but Bernie Sanders's coalition is expanding.

• Peter Wade: Blowback hits MSNBC after Chris Matthews compares Sanders' win to Nazis conquering France.

The last few days have produced an avalanche of Sanders articles -- hysterical attacks on him, defenses (including some meant to reassure mainstream Democrats, like Yglesias above, and Paul Krugman here -- although not without lamenting that Sanders may have no use for "center-left" wonks like Krugman), promotions, and good old fashioned horse race handicapping, but little I cared to get into.

Some scattered links this week:

• Justin Baragona/Asawin Suebsaeng: Trump grants clemency to another round of crooks he saw on Fox News. Rod Blagojevich gets the most press, but Bernard Kerik and Michael Milken are nearly as famous (and, if anything, more extravagant criminals).

• Julian E Barnes/Adam Goldman/Nicholas Fandos: Richard Grenell begins overhauling intelligence office, prompting fears of partisanship. Following up:

  • Isaac Arnsdorf: Trump's new spy chief used to work for a foreign politician the US accused of corruption. Who says Trump doesn't vet his appointees?

  • Matt Gertz: The Foxification of the intelligence community follows the DOJ script.

  • Josh Kovensky: Grenell brings in ex-Nunes loyalist and starts digging into raw intel on Russia. Previously wrote: Why Richard Grenell is such a 'dangerous' pick for acting DNI.

• Jonathan Blitzer: How Stephen Miller manipulates Donald Trump to further his immigration obsession.

• Sarah Chayes: This is how kleptocracies work: "Trump's pardons were shocking to some, but to me they were eerily familiar -- straight out of the kleptocratic playbook I've studied in a dozen other countries."

• Igor Derysh: Multiple studies show Medicare for All would be cheaper than public option pushed by moderates.

• Marc Edelman: How capitalism underdeveloped rural America.

• Tom Engelhardt: The war in questions: "After 18-plus years of our forever wars, where are all the questions?" I'll quote his questions, but they probably need more context (see the article, not that it fully works):

  1. When the Bush administration launched that invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 and followed it up with an invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, did we, in some curious fashion, really invade and occupy ourselves?
  2. Has there ever been a truly great power in history, still at or near the height of its militarily prowess, that couldn't win a war?
  3. How and why did the "hearts and minds" factor move from the nationalist left in the twentieth century to the Islamist right in the twenty-first?
  4. When it comes to preparations for war, why can't we ever stop?
  5. How can Washington's war system and the military-industrial complex across the country continue to turn failure in war into success and endless dollars at home?
  6. Why doesn't the reality of those wars of ours ever really seem to sink in here?

• John Ganz: Finding Neverland: "The American right's doomed quest to rid itself of Trumpism."

  The fact of the matter, then as now, is that ideas on the right are not so much irreconcilable as they are irrelevant. More than principle, the presence of threat and an enemy is the most important driver of right-wing energy, and since the end of the Cold War, the hunt for enemies has become ever more desperate. That's especially been the case from the moment since the wars on terrorism and Iraq failed to coalesce the movement -- let alone the country -- into any viable political coalition for any sustained interval beyond the moment they launched.

  You may recall how often we were lectured in the 1980-90s that all the good new ideas were coming from the right, but at this point Lionel Trilling's admonition has never been more accurate that all that's left of conservative thought are "irritable mental gestures."

• Anand Giridharadas: The billionaire election: "Does the world belong to them or to us?" Quote from Alexander Theodoridis, when asked "if any scholarship could shed light on Mr Bloomberg's method of campaigning," answered: "Most of the work on buying votes is about the developing world, which perhaps the US is joining."

• Michael Isikoff: Rohrabacher confirms he offered Trump pardon to Assange for proof Russia didn't hack DNC email.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • The senseless danger of the military's new "low-yield" nuclear warhead.

  • Trump's $740.5 billion military budget is wildly irresponsible and misleading.

• Ed Kilgore: Yes, Trump's job-approval ratings are finally rising. Well, up to 43.3% according to FiveThirtyEight, from 41.8% on Jan. 10, a low of 39.5% on Jan. 23, 2019, a record low of 36.5% on Dec. 15, 2017 (or 36.6% on Aug. 7, 2017). That's still well below his 52.2% disapproval rate. His approval rate never came close to 50%, and was above the disapproval rate only for about his first week after inauguration (crossover was Feb. 2, 2017, at 44.8% each). Of course, any change in his favor is disturbing, as it makes you doubt the sanity of your fellow citizens.

• Michael Klare: A military perspective on climate change could bridge the gap between believers and doubters. I doubt it, but it is true that the Pentagon has been uniquely free to consider the issue, and they're likely to buy into anything that could result in larger budgets, so their interest could disturb the convictions of some doubters. Klare has a new book, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change.

• James Russell Kretschmer: I was sexually abused as a Boy Scout. Thousands like me deserve a reckoning. Well, I was just abused (if there was anything sexual to it, I was too naive to recognize it). I can't even imagine what a proper reckoning might entail. But I have for many years referred to "a proto-fascist organization of my youth."

• David Kroll: The shadow cabinet: How a group of powerful business leaders drove Trump's agenda.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Warren, Bloomberg and what really matters: "Dems should be talking about fiancializatio and fraud."

  • Have zombies eaten Bloomberg's and Buttigieg's brains? Krugman has a new book of old essays to flak, called Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future. As you may know by now, "zombie ideas" are ideas which have been repeatedly proven to be false and bankrupt, but which keep getting resurrected by people whose interests they seem to support. John Quiggin either invented or popularized the idea with his 2010 book, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us.

• Anita Kumar: Trump seeks deal on foreign workers that could anger base: Looks like "guest workers" are back on the Republican agenda.

• Robert Kuttner: Green New Deal: The urgent realism of radical change.

• Branko Marcetic: The making of Joe Biden's conservative Democratic politics: An excerpt from the author's "forthcoming" book, Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. Seems likely to me that the publisher missed the window on this one.

• Ian Millhiser: Justice Sotomayor warns the Supreme Court is doing special favors for the Trump administration.

• Nicole Narea: Trump's expanded travel ban just went into effect for 6 new countries.

• Danielle Ofri: Why are nonprofit hospitals so highly profitable?

• Cameron Peters: The reports about Russian meddling in the 2020 election, and Trump's response, explained.

• Andrew Prokop: Roger Stone was just sentenced to 40 months in prison.

• Joe Ragazzo: There's no resurgence in American manufacturing. It's a myth.

• Corey Robin: The tyranny of the minority, from the Iowa Caucus to Electoral College.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump is making a mockery of Bill Barr: "Barr asked Trump to stop tweeting about DOJ cases. Trump responded by posting a bunch of tweets about DOJ cases." Not that Barr hasn't been making a mockery of his office, his department, and the law, in acting as "Trump's personal fixer."

  • Trump's Colorado rally featured an extended meltdown over 30 seconds of critical Fox News coverage: "It was one of his pettiest displays yet."

  • "Lock her up!" In Phoenix, the signature Trump rally chant was especially ironic. Final section: "The rest of the stuff was normal stuff from a deeply abnormal president."

  • Trump's latest pardons show how quickly he's normalizing corruption: "They're aimed at the very sorts of obstruction of justice and financial crimes he's been implicated in."

• Austin Sarat: Why Trump's post-impeachment actions are about vengeance, not retribution.

• Theodore Schleifer: She's Pete Buttigieg's top fundraiser. He's the founder of Nest. And they're Silicon Valley's new power couple. Swati Mylavarapu and Matt Rogers. What kind of person says this? "I would love to see the billionaires of Silicon Valley spend at least as much on giving back as they do on their yachts." Probably the kind that thinks hiring Buttigieg to defend and promote neoliberalism is "giving back."

• Avi Shlaim: Palestine and the West: A century of betrayal.

• Danny Sjursen: Why no retired generals oppose America's forever wars.

• Keith A Spencer: Why does the "BernieBro" myth persist? Because pundits don't understand how the internet works.

• Emily Stewart:

  • Mike Bloomberg and his billions are what Democrats need to beat Trump: Part of Vox's series where their various writers try to make the "best case" for each of the Democratic candidates. The case for Bloomberg is he has a lot of money, and that could be helpful -- although I'm unsure how helpful in an election where a major issue will be the overwhelming corruption of money. Less impressive is "Bloomberg has a strong record from City Hall." An even bigger stretch is "Bloomberg has spent years lifting up the Democratic Party and building an apparatus around him." No mention is made of his numerous contributions to Republicans. (Vox "does not endorse candidates," but note that founders Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein started the series off by claiming Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, leaving Joe Biden to Laura McGann, Pete Buttigieg to Dylan Matthews, and Amy Klobuchar to Kay Steiger.)

  • America's monopoly problem, explained by your internet bill. "In 2017, the average monthly cost of broadband in America was $66.17; in France, it was $38.10, and in South Korea, $29.90."

• Andrew Sullivan: Trump's presidency isn't a dark comedy -- it's an absurd tragedy. Headline reminds me of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, but even that play is more generous than Trump deserves.

• David Wallace-Wells: Jeff Bezos's $10 billion climate pledge is actually tiny: "Judged by the standards of the climate crisis, the sum is, practically speaking, almost nothing." And that's even before you discount the amount of graft it's likely to attract.

• Alex Ward: What the mass shooting in Germany tells us about its far-right extremism problem.

• Robin Wright: The one war that the human species can't lose: The "battle" to keep Antarctica frozen solid.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • How the good economy is benefiting workers with disabilities.

    It's deficits as far as the eye can see, and it's been paired with a low interest rate policy from the Fed that Trump has very much encouraged that has helped people get jobs without sparking inflation.

    This formula of bigger deficits plus a supportive Fed is exactly what progressives spent the years from 2011 to 2016 calling for. Trump delivered a version of it (although a progressive administration would obviously have used the money for different things) and it's basically working. As a result, the long-term unemployed, the disabled, the discouraged, and even some early retirees are hopping back into the labor force with no need to cut anyone off from benefits.

  • The mutually beneficial war between Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, explained.

• Kenji Yoshino: A Supreme Court for the rich: A review of Adam Cohen's book, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, February archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32778 [32759] rated (+19), 242 [241] unrated (+1).

Late again, but short as weeks go, given that last week's Music Week didn't appear until Thursday, February 13. My excuse then was that I was in the middle of a series on Duke Ellington's Chronological Classics (up to 1940, anyway). I decided not to bother with the 1940-1953 releases, figuring they're redundant to in-print albums on RCA and Columbia (and maybe Capitol?), but I've continued to trawl through Napster's offerings, using "ellington" as my titles search. That netted a few albums by other doing Ellington songs -- including titles by Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Zoot Sims, and Sarah Vaughan, below. I haven't hit the end of that list yet, so I'll keep plugging, and see what else catched my fancy. I briefly considered doing more individual albums from The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books, which I bought long ago and gave an A- to without subdividing, but I haven't followed up on that. (If I recall correctly, the best volume is the Harold Arlen, possibly followed by Irving Berlin or Cole Porter; the weakest may well be the Ellington, which is surprising given how much I like the later Ella and Duke at the Côte D'Azur -- a 2-CD sampler from a larger box I haven't heard, but which I believe is on Napster.)

All this old music digging has kept me off from new music, with only a few of my queue offerings this week. Robert Christgau sent his Consumer Guide out to subscribers last week, and included two new 2020 releases among his picks (Eminem and Drive-By Truckers) among his late-breaking 2019 picks (catching up with his Dean's List). Normally I'd jump on them, but this hasn't been a normal week.

Christgau followed that up with another list, Ten Movies I Love. I can't argue, not least because I've only seen four of those movies, and don't even recall hearing of most of the rest. [PS: Make that five: I've seen, but forgot the title of, Make Way for Tomorrow] I doubt I could even construct such a list, but I'd hate to leave out:

• Babette's Feast -- Gabriel Axel (1988)
• Before Sunrise -- Richard Linklater (1995)
• Hairspray -- John Waters (1988)
• High Hopes -- Mike Leigh (1989)
• Johnny Dangerously -- Amy Heckerling (1984)
• Made in Heaven -- Alan Rudolph (1987)
• Moonstruck -- Norman Jewison (1987)
• The Mosquito Coast -- Peter Weir (1986)
• O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- Ethan & Joel Cohen (2000)
• Ordinary People -- Robert Redford (1980)
• The Purple Rose of Cairo -- Woody Allen (1985)
• The Remains of the Day -- James Ivory (1993)
• Stars and Bars -- Pat O'Connor (1988)
• Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown -- Pedro Almodovar (1988)

First of all, I'm surprised to find these so concentrated in time: 1985-1995 accounts for all but two, one from 1980, the other 2000. The obvious explanation is that I watched a lot more movies then than any time before or since. I hardly ever watched movies before, aside from minor binges, but started renting tapes after my first wife died, and watched even more when I dated and moved in with Laura. My movie watching has tailed off in recent years, but not as dramatically as the omission of post-2000 movies in the list above suggests. Perhaps I was just more impressionable in that first decade. I did a quick search through the notebook, and found a lot of good movies, but the only ones that tempted me to add to the list were: Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000); The Barbarian Invasions (Denys Arcand, 2003); De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler, 2004); Letters From Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, 2006); The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2007); The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009, in Swedish); and Boyhood (2014).

A second point is that these are mostly small movies. (Three were nominated for Oscars, and one won.) A glance through the Oscar list and other lists at { IMDB, TimeOut, MSN } suggest some better-known epics that I like (in many cases a lot), in chronological order (while generally avoiding repeating directors from above):

Contributing to this week's delay, I cooked a rather fancy dinner Monday night. I made a couple stabs at Hungarian cuisine last fall, and had a few more recipes I wanted to try. My cookbook was Silvena Johan Lauta's The Food & Cooking of Hungary, but it didn't offer any promising vegetable side dishes, so I slipped a Greek fave into the menu:

• Rabbit Goulash Stew
• Venison Meatballs
• Hungarian Dumplings
• Green Bean Ragout
• Transylvanian Stuffed Mushrooms
• Somloi Trifle

Not sure I got the first three quite right. The meatballs were quite delicious, but could have used more sauce. I had a lot of trouble cutting up the rabbit, which made everything come out late. The one piece I had was a little tough and dry, but others disagreed. The mushrooms (stuffed with ricotta, bacon, and herbs) perhaps should have been cooked longer. Still, all came out pretty tasty.

The dessert wasn't in the cookbook, but showed up repeatedly when I was attempting to survey Hungarian recipes online -- along with a fancy multi-layer cake called a dobos torte. I wound up consulting several web recipes, mostly following this one, but taking a few liberties along the way (e.g., after my caramelized syrup burned, I went with a much safer non-caramel recipe; I missed the liquor store, so substituted amaretto for rum; I substuted apricot for strawberry jam, as all other recipes specified [PS: what I actually used was Bonne Maman Mango-Peach Preserves, made in France; picked up accidentally when I was reaching for the apricot]). The dessert is a pretty complicated affair: first make three sponge cakes (one plain, one with walnuts, a third with cocoa); make a light syrup with liquor (in my case, amaretto), and brush it over the cakes; make a "gruel" out of milk, sugar, flour, eggs, vanilla (more like a pudding -- other recipes use a pastry cream); build a stack of the three cakes, each one topped with a shmear of jam, raisins (soaked in syrup), walnuts, and "gruel"; sprinkle cocoa on top and chill for 12 hours. Make a chocolate sauce, with liquor (amaretto again). Whip cream. To serve, scoop out chunks of cake, top with chocolate, then with whipped cream. Before I was done, I doubted I'd ever do it again, but it turned out to be remarkably delicious.

A few links I had meant to include in Sunday's Weekend Roundup, but somehow didn't get to:

• Kos: Sanders wins New Hampshire by being the least-weak of a suddenly weak field. This was a "hot take" after New Hampshire, but since then I'm less persuaded of Bernie Sanders' "weakness." Sanders now seems to be ahead in Nevada, possibly ahead in South Carolina, indeed close to leading pretty much everywhere (FiveThirtyEight still likes Biden in Alabama). I've also seen polls that show his favorability ratings are high enough to give him a reasonable expectation of gaining vote share as other candidates drop out (much as Trump did in 2016, though Bernie's are higher than Trump's were, at least up to the 2016 convention, maybe even the election). Also, this article makes some really dumb points, such as:

  No white male has ever gotten 63 million votes in a presidential election. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both hit 65 million. When our nominees look like our base, we perform better.

  That doesn't prove anything, least of all its "looks like" conclusion. (Sure, it would disprove the opposite assertion, that you have to run a white male in order to win, but that's not the point here.) I remember when Clinton promised a cabinet that "looks like America," but all they looked like to me was a bunch of well-heeled lawyers. He throws out other meaningless facts, like Bloomberg was "major of a city that is larger than 38 states" [each of; the 9 least populous states + DC have more people combined than NYC], and he invents a ridiculous euphemism for dollars, as in "he spent another 3.5 million electability units on advertising in black newspapers."

• Joel Kotkin: You think Trump's a danger to democracy? Get a load of Bloomberg. Side note more relevant to the Kos article above: to win his third term as mayor of New York, Bloomberg spent $174 per vote; to match that running for president, he'll have to pony up $12 billion.

• Alexander Rubinstein/Max Blumenthal: Woke wonk Elizabeth Warren's foreign policy team is stacked with pro-war swamp creatures.

I should also note that a Guardian article I linked to about Bill Gates buying a £500 million superyacht has been pulled, due to "a fundamental error in facts reported." Evidently, Gates hasn't bought any such boat.

New records reviewed this week:

• The Coachella Valley Trio: Mid Century Modern (2019 [2020], DMAC): [cd]: B+(*)
• Lara Driscoll: Woven Dreams (2019 [2020], Firm Roots Music): [cd]: B+(***) [03-06]
• Kuzu [Dave Rempis/Tashi Dorji/Tyler Damon]: Purple Dark Opal (2019 [2020], Aerophonic): [cd]: B+(***)
• Purna Loka Ensemble: Metaraga (2018-19 [2020], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Duke Ellington: The Best of Early Ellington (1926-31 [1996], Decca): [r]: A+
• Duke Ellington: The Centennial Collection (1927-41 [2004], Bluebird): [r]: B+(**)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: The Great Paris Concert (1963 [1973], Atlantic, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington: Duke Ellington's My People (1963 [1964], Contact): [r]: B+(**)
• Duke Ellington/Ella Fitzgerald/Oscar Peterson: The Greatest Jazz Concert in the World (1967 [1990], Pablo, 3CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington: In Sweden 1973 (1973 [1999], Caprice): [r]: B+(**)
• Ella Fitzgerald: Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook (1956-57 [1991], Verve, 3CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Ella Fitzgerald: The Very Best of the Duke Ellington Song Book (1956-57 [2007], Verve): [r]: B+(***)
• Ella Fitzgerald: Ella at Duke's Place (1965 [1966], Verve): [r]: B+(**)
• Nina Simone: Nina Simone Sings Duke Ellington (1961 [1962], Colpix): [r]: B+(*)
• Zoot Sims: Passion Flower: Zoot Sims Plays Duke Ellington (1979-80 [1997], Pablo/OJC): [r]: B+(**)
• Sarah Vaughan: How Long Has This Been Going On? (1978, Pablo): [r]: B+(***)
• Sarah Vaughan: Duke Ellington: Song Book One (1979 [1980], Pablo): [r]: B+(***)
• Sarah Vaughan: Duke Ellington: Song Book Two (1979 [1980], Pablo): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Joyce Grant: Surrounded by Blue (Craftedair/Blujazz)
• JC Hopkins Biggish Band: New York Moment (Twee-Jazz) [04-05]
• Chanda Rule + Sweet Emma Band: Hold On (Blujazz/PAO)
• Paul Shaw Quintet: Moment of Clarity (Summit) [03-27]

Weekend Roundup

New Hampshire finally voted last week. Bernie Sanders won, although not by the margin I had hoped for -- 25.58% to 24.27% for Pete Buttigieg, 19.69% for Klobuchar, with significant drops for Elizabeth Warren (9.19%) and Joe Biden (8.34%). Sanders did, however, get more young voters than everyone else combined. As I note in the German Lopez note below, the Buttigieg/Klobuchar bubble seems to have less to do with anything attractive about their platforms than with the irrational fears of many Democrats (including some older ones who are philosophically aligned left, but grew up in a world where red-baiting was always effective) that Sanders would wind up losing to Trump. How they figure Buttigieg or Klobuchar might fare better is something I don't care to speculate on. Neither has the familiarity or national organization they'll need in coming weeks, and their repeated (misinformed and disingenuous) attacks on Medicare for All in recent months, while effective for raising donations and establishing themselves as niche candidates, makes them improbable (as well as damn unsatisfactory) party unifiers.

Biden is still better positioned to recover in later primaries, but did himself much harm in Iowa and New Hampshire. In particular, he lost favor with the "anybody but Trump (except Sanders)" party faction, and his support among Afro-Americans was never any deeper than a cautious wager. Biden has slipped behind Sanders in national polls, lost his big lead in Nevada, and may even lose his "firewall" state of South Carolina (see FiveThirtyEight, which also forecasts Sanders to lead in most "Super Tuesday" contests, including: California, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Colorado, and Tennessee -- in fact, the only state Biden is still favored in is Alabama). FiveThirtyEight still projects Biden to finish second, but they already have Michael Bloomberg in a close third, with Buttigieg a distant fourth, Warren with vanishingly slim chances in fifth, and Klobuchar even further behind. That assumes they all keep running, which almost certainly won't happen.

[PS: Closing this now to get it up and out of the way. I've been running into frustrating dead ends seems like everywhere.]

Some scattered links this week:

• Eric Alterman: The modern GOP is built on lies. A few tired examples here, going back to Nixon, but nothing that even pretends to argue, "in some ways Trump is more truthful than previous Republican presidents." I might concede that Trump's lies are more self-revealing than those of his predecessors, and add that the biggest lie of all was Reagan's "morning in America" slogan, which encouraged Americans to deny reality and live in their own heads. Do that long enough and you eventually get to a guy like Trump, who can't tell the difference, let alone care.

• Michael Arria: Amy Klobuchar says she would work on increasing support for Israel if elected president. Related: Stephen Zunes: Klobuchar has pushed extreme right-wing policy on Israel/Palestine.

• Monifa Bandele: Take it from an activist who was there: Stop and frisk cost New Yorkers their lives.

• Ross Barkan: Michael Bloomberg isn't a smug technocratic centrist. He's something far worse.

• Alexander Burns/Nicholas Kulish: Bloomberg's billions: How the candidate built an empire of influence. As David Sirota tweeted:

  In investment terms, this story makes clear Bloomberg spent years buying large blocs of shares of the Beltway Democratic apparatus, and now he's trying to buy the primary to complete a hostile takeover.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Obama auto standards may survive because Trump staff can't do math: "Malevolence tempered by incompetence."

  • Barr wants to hide Trump's authoritarian plans, but Trump keeps confessing: "A president uninterested in theory never stops asserting his 'absolute right' to destroy democracy."

  • Trump: If Romney was truly religious, he'd have convicted me on both counts. Sounds like Trump has a pretty bizarre notion of religion, but also reminds us that Romney's stand on principle was wobbly at the knees.

  • The GOP elite couldn't stop Trump in 2016. But maybe Democrats can stop Bernie. Yeah, but how hard did the "GOP elite" really try? Trump is an embarrassment, but he never really challenges orthodoxy, and he delivers votes for an agenda that is deeply unpopular. (When he does slip up, he apologizes quickly. Sure, his racist outbursts are the exception, suggesting that's something "GOP elites" have no serious problems with). By the way, who are these "GOP elites," and how do they enforce party discipline? Looks to me like a loosely connected circle of like-minded but mostly independent billionaire donors, kept in sync by propaganda networks like Fox News. The donors signaled their acceptance of Trump when they pulled the rug out from under Cruz and Kasich, when they were still likely to win a few primaries. Thanks to the Clintons and Obama, Democrat elites are more organized to control the party, and they are ideologically disposed to beat down any leftist deviations, as a big part of their pitch to donors over the last 30-40 years was that they could control the masses while making the world more profitable for the oligarchs. And unlike GOP elites view of Trump, they really do see left-populism as a threat, to their worldview as well as their all-important patronage. So Chait won't be able to lament their lack of effort, although he still may be disappointed at how ineffective they may be. Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar don't have half a vision between them, and their resolve to do nothing but accommodate business interests is less inspiring than ever. Chait regrets that the do-nothings don't have a charismatic candidate in 2020 like Obama in 2008, but why should he think that would do the trick? (It's not clear now that Obama had much vision either, but at least he let people imagine he did.) Obama showed us how little progress mere competent moderation delivers -- not enough to lift Hillary over Trump, who was able to campaign on "what do you have to lose?"

  • Joe Biden's campaign was a disaster for liberalism and the Democratic Party: If "liberalism and the Democratic Party" couldn't find a more articulate candidate than Biden, maybe the disaster was already there, just something not just Biden couldn't fix. After Hillary lost to Trump, it should have been obvious that the Clinton-Obama-Biden formula had run its course. Chait blames Biden for denying promising candidates the money they needed to run competitive races, but wasn't his weakness clear a year ago?

  • Trump fires Defense official for refusing the break the law on his behalf: Elaine McCusker.

  • Here's what I do like about Bernie Sanders.

• David Dayen: The lessons of the Culinary Union health care fight. Turns out the reason the Las Vegas union is so anti-Sanders is that they own and run their own health care provider system, which gives them a conflict of interest between their own business interest and the class of workers they represent. One reason unions are in such sad shape these days is that too many of them started thinking of themselves as separate from the broader working class. By the way, Pete Buttigieg tried to latch onto this one particular (but in next week's Nevada caucuses, strategic) union as support for his attacks on Medicare for All, not realizing (or caring) it's a minority position among unions. See Jason Lemon: Union president accuses Pete Buttigieg of 'perpetuating this gross myth' about union health care: 'This is offensive'.

• Benjamin Dixon: Michael Bloomberg's campaign is an insult to democracy.

• Lee Fang:

  • TV executives celebrate unprecedented flood of Bloomberg campaign spending.

  • Foreign-funded dark-money groups lobby IRS to repeal remaining reporting requirements.

• Christopher Flavelle: Global financial giants swear off funding an especially dirty fuel: Alberta oil sands.

• Melvin Goodman: The real John Bolton. By the way, Jeffrey St. Clair: Roaming charges: The steal of the century, has an amusing screen shot of Lou Dobbs backed by a framed photo of Bolton captioned: "A TOOL FOR THE LEFT." It's true that Bolton's always been a tool, but you only have to be marginally smarter than Dobbs to realize he's never been one of ours.

• Ryan Grim:

  • Mike Bloomberg is hiring so many operatives, local and state campaigns are starving for help.

  • /Akela Lacy: AIPAC is helping fund anti-Bernie Sanders super PAC ads in Nevada.

• Umair Irfan: Antarctica broke two temperature records in a week. Related: Juan Cole: It is 65° F in Antarctica and if the Thwaites Glacier plops in, expect 4 ft of sea level rise.

• Sarah Jones: Michael Bloomberg defended fingerpriting food-stamp recipients in 2018 interview.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • Trump's $740.5 billion military budget is wildly irresponsible and misleading.

  • Nearly everything Trump's State of the Union said about foreign policy was wrong.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • De Blasio to endorse, campaign with, Sanders: That won't sway many voters, but it does make him point man on Bloomberg.

  • Why there is no Democratic 'never Bernie' movement: Well, what do you call the Bloomberg candidacy? Even back in 2016 Bloomberg was calculating how his running could undermine Bernie. The only reason he's not talking about it now is he realizes that doing so would utterly discredit his campaign.

• Michael Kranish:

  • Mike Bloomberg for years has battled women's allegations of profane, sexist comments.

  • How the relationship between Trump and Bloomberg went into a tailspin.

• Maris Kreizman: $2 million book deals about the Trump administration are anything but brave: "John Bolton's latest tell-all book deal is part of a worrying trend within publishing."

• Nicholas Kristof: The hidden depression Trump isn't helping.

• John le Carré: On Brexit: 'It's breaking my heart'. Also colors his remembrance of Olof Palme, the assassinated Swedish statesman whose name adorns a prize le Carré was just awarded.

• Joshua Leifer: A tense relationship: "The vexed history of Zionism and the left." A review of Susie Linfield's book, The Lion's Den: Zionism and the Left From Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky.

• Will Leitch: Pete Rose's plea to be unbanned from baseball is right out of the Trump playbook. Well, with Trump in his corner, maybe this isn't the best time to even partially rehabilitate Rose. Trump seems to feel that the right politics excuses (or at least merits forgiveness for) all manner of wrongdoing, while those with wrong politics should be harassed and jailed. As such, he's managed to lump Rose in with the likes of Joe Arpaio and Eddie Gallagher (the Navy SEAL charged with war crimes). Nonetheless, I will say, as I've always said, that being banned from ever working for (or owning a stake in) any MLB organization is one thing, and being ineligible to have your pre-ban achievements evaluated by the Base Ball Hall of Fame is (or should be) another (and the fact that they aren't is really the fault of the BBHOF). I always thought Rose was slightly overrated as a ballplayer, but I was more bothered by the adoring sports writers who bought into his Charlie Hustle act. When you look at his numbers in context, he wasn't anyway near the second coming of Ty Cobb, but he was comparable to long time Hall of Famers like Sam Crawford, Zack Wheat, Paul Waner, and Paul Molitor (who Baseball References regards as Rose's most similar batter, followed by Robin Yount, Waner, and George Brett; they also list Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb at 2 and 3, and Cap Anson at 7, but clearly aren't making necessary adjustments for cross-historical context; more telling is the "most similar by ages" chart, which only matches Rose with three HOFers, for a single year each, from ages 22-37: Molitor, Rod Carew, and Freddie Lindstrom; on the other hand, he has multi-year matches with Buddy Lewis and Johnny Damon; everyone from 38-45 is in the HOF, but few lesser players last that long; even so, 38-41 is Molitor, 42 Waner, 43-44 Rickey Henderson, and 45 Anson). One irony since Rose was banned is that the steroid scandal has kept far greater stars like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens out of the HOF (Bonds' most similar matches are Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Babe Ruth; Clemens' top ten matches are all in the HOF, and that doesn't include what would have been my first guess, Lefty Grove). Another irony is that if you gave in and considered Rose, you'd probably also have to consider another banned gambler whose career (until he got banned) resembled Cobb's even more: Shoeless Joe Jackson. On the other hand, if you do insist on imposing a morals clause on HOF membership, why not kick a few folks out? Cap Anson was singularly responsible for driving black players out of MLB in the late 1880s, and a long list of executives continued the color ban until 1947 -- first among equals there was Kenesaw Mountain Landis (the commissioner who banned Jackson and set the precedent for Rose, although he later whitewashed similar charges against Cobb and Speaker).

• Nicholas Lemann: Can journalism be saved? A review of many books, one of the few posts at this site without a paywall lock.

• Mary Kay Linge/Jon Levine: Bloomberg reportedly considering Hillary Clinton as his running mate: One thing I've noticed this week is that I find Bloomberg so despicable I'm willing to give credence to any story, no matter how dubious the source, that makes him appear even more evil (or stupid or vain or conceited or vile).

• German Lopez:

  • Bernie Sanders lost among New Hampshire voters focused most on beating Trump. I saw this poll referred to first in FiveThirtyEight's New Hampshire live blog (since deleted?), and it goes a long way to explaining the results.

    But among the 34 percent of New Hampshire voters who prioritized a candidate who agrees with them on major issues, Sanders led with 39 percent support, with Buttigieg and Klobuchar lagging far behind at 21 and 12 percent respectively. (The top issues, according to the same poll: health care, climate change, and income inequality.) . . .

    While voters may name concrete priorities when asked by pollsters, voters in reality balance a whole host of variables, from electability to policy positions to personal likability, when picking a nominee. But given that so much of Democratic voters' attention is going to beating Trump -- and has been for some time -- this conflict between electability and policy positions will likely be a major one for the rest of the primary season.

    For Sanders, now the frontrunner, it also seems to be a notable weakness. It's not just that he lost among voters who prioritize beating Trump. Democrats in general seem to view him as less electable, at least according to the New Hampshire exit polls: Asked who stands the best chance against Trump, 27 percent of voters said Buttigieg, 21 percent said Klobuchar, and 19 percent said Sanders.

    This sounds like a lot of Democrats are so chickenshit they're willing to pick inferior candidates if they think they might fare better against Trump. The reasoning, I suppose, is that any Democrat would be better than Trump, which runs the risk of sliding into the notion that the Democrat most similar to Trump would capture the widest slice of in-between voters.

  • Virginia is poised to decriminalize marijuana.

• Annie Lowrey: The Berniephobes are wrong: "Wall Street fears the rise of the Vermont senator. The rest of America has less to worry about."

• Ann E Marimow: Trump takes on Judge Amy Berman Jackson ahead of Roger Stone's sentencing.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • How Justice Scalia paved the way for Trump's assault on the rule of law: "Three words: 'the unitary executive'."

  • America's democracy is failing. Here's why. "Four ways America's system of government is rigged against democracy (and Democrats)."

• Nicole Narea: Trump is sending armed tactical forces to arrest immigrants in sanctuary cities.

• Osita Nwanevu: End the GOP: "In order to save our democracy, we must not merely defeat the Republican Party."

• Alex Pareene: Michael Bloomberg's polite authoritarianism.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Andrew McCabe, Michael Flynn, and the latest Justice Department drama, explained.

  • The fiasco at Bill Barr's Justice Department, explained.

• Joe Ragazzo: There's no resurgence in American manufacturing. It's a myth.

• Nathan J Robinson: A Republican plutocrat tries to buy the Democratic nomination: "No Democrat should consider Michael Bloomberg as a candidate."

• Aaron Rupar:

  • "This is a president declaring himself above the law": A former ethics chief on Trump's dangerous new era: Interview with Walter Shaub, who says, "What I didn't expect is how badly the system would fail to stop him."

  • Trump: The economy is the best in history. Also Trump: We need to cut raises for federal workers.

  • Trump's New Hampshire rally showed how he's already sowing discord about the 2020 election.

• Charlie Savage/Adam Goldman/Julian E Barnes: Justice Department is investigating CIA resistance to sharing Russia secrets.

• Dylan Scott:

  • Why Medicare-for-all works for Bernie Sanders -- and nobody else.

  • Why Utah is sending workers to Mexico to buy Medicine: "The state's plan to send patients to Mexico to buy cheap drugs is an indictment of US health care."

• Rebecca Smithers: Bill Gates orders £500m hydrogen-powered superyacht. [PS: This article was subsequently removed. Evidently Gates did not buy this yacht.] Related: Rupert Neate: Superyachts and private jets: spending of corrupt super-rich revealed [2019-10-23].

Alanna Vagianos: Michael Bloomberg quietly rejoined clubs that largely exclude women, minorities

• Joyce White Vance: If Trump is allowed to turn the Justice Department into a political weapon, no one is safe.

• Peter Wade: Bloomberg said ending a racist housing practice caused financial crisis.

• Kimberly Wehle: A conservative judge draws a line in the sand with the Trump administration.

• Savannah Wooten: Trump's proposed budget is fuel for American militarism.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • 7 things to know about the private equity industry. A "Weeds" podcast with Emily Stewart, but the "seven main takeaways" are printed. I might try to reduce this to one: PE firms buy up supposedly underperforming firms with borrowed money, rob them, then dispose of the remains either by reselling them or by letting the bankruptcy courts settle with the creditors.

  • Mike Bloomberg is trying to remind voters that Trump inherited his money.

  • Mainstream Democrats shouldn't fear Bernie Sanders: "He'd be a strong nominee and a solid president." Under a section called "Stop freaking out":

    Some of his big ideas are not so hot on the merits, but it's not worth worrying about them because the political revolution is so unrealistic. And on a couple of issues where the next president will probably have a fair amount of latitude, Sanders breaks from the pack in good ways. He's perhaps not an ideal electability choice, but his track record on winning elections is solid and his early polling is pretty good. There's no particular reason to think he'd be weaker than the other three top contenders, and at least some reason to think he'd be stronger.

  • Amy Klobuchar is the thinking moderate Democrat's electability candidate.

  • Elizabeth Warren's once-promising, now-imperiled campaign, explained.

• Li Zhou: The Senate just voted to check Trump's ability to take military action against Iran. Have you noticed that when a president wants the authorization to use military force, it only takes a bare majority, but when Congress wants to limit a president's warmaking, it takes two-thirds to override a presidential veto?

Daily Log

Erin McCandlis wrote this on Facebook about her late grandmother:

Oh Grandma, I'm gonna miss you every day! Thank you for being such an incredible role model for all of us. Thank you for loving me, showing me how to care for others, shocking me with revelations when I thought I was going to shock you, all the delicious food (especially the biscuits and chocolate sauce breakfasts), all the laughs, all the long talks, for letting me vent when I needed to and for always being there for anyone in the family. You were our rock and we will be lost without you. Love you always!
Chloe Faye McCandlis
12/6/25-2/12/20

I chipped in this comment:

Very sad, not least because it closes so many opportunities to discover things about our shared past. Loved the "shocked me" line, as I've been there too. Well, not exactly shocked, because I've long known her as the sharpest lady ever to escape the back woods of Arkansas.

In other Facebook trivia, Bradley Sroka was trawling for "your favorite music moments in movies?" I replied:

Not sure this is my favorite, but given what I've been listening to, it popped into mind. There's a very surreal sequence in "Anatomy of a Murder" where Jimmy Stewart is driving a top-down convertible in a warm and sunny Michigan UP, then gets out and walks into a bar, where he finds Duke Ellington & Orchestra in full swing.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, February archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32759 [32712] rated (+47), 241 [230] unrated (+11).

Shortly after closing my last Music Week, I looked at the featured jazz records on Napster and noticed two volumes from Duke Ellington's Private Collection series. These appeared on Saja in 10 CDs from 1987-89, and I had picked up a few when I found them used. I figured I should play the ones I had missed, and that got me looking at Napster's Ellingtons. I had probably heard more records by Ellington than any other artist, but that still left a fair number unheard -- especially among the 44 Chronological Classics volumes. As most of the latter were available, I started working my way through the list, especially the stretch from 1931-39, which Ellington's American labels have failed to keep in print. That took me past my usual Monday deadline. I decided then to hold back until I hit 1940, because I planned on writing a general introduction to the series followed by notes and grades on each individual volume (as I had with Private Collection.

Chronlogical Classics goes on to 1953, but I figured they were less critical. That's not a judgment on the music, but because nearly all of them were in print and graded elsewhere: see, especially, the magnificent Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band, which covers 1940-42, The Indispensible Duke Ellington and the Small Groups (1940-46), and the slightly lesser Black, Brown and Beige (1944-1946). I picked up a few more titles along the way, plus a couple of records by others which showed up in the Ellington title search.

There are more I haven't gotten to. The big live chunks left are the Carnegie Hall Concerts from 1943-48 and The Treasury Shows from 1945-46 (25 volumes). There is also a fair amount of live Ellington floating around, especially from the 1960s -- Pablo picked up some of those, but we're still seeing occasional concerts pop up on European labels. I won't venture to say how much of this anyone actually needs, but aside from some redundancy, the A and A+ records listed above are really choice records. Nothing (other than the Armstrong-Ellington Summit, which matches a previous A graded package) in this week's many finds matches them, although the 1928-30 Chronological Classics overlap with some of my previous picks (especially the 3-CD Early Ellington on Decca), 1938 Vol. 3 has some of the small group recording from The Great Ellington Units, and Up in Duke's Workshop sounds like a first draft of Latin American Suite. On the other hand, I ran through the Chronological Classics very fast (almost always just one play), and aside from the usual caveats about surface noise and sequencing they all sounded pretty great to me.

Quite a bit of unpacking this week-plus, which came as a surprise to me after a few lean weeks. I've let the 2020 releases pile up while working on 2019, and barely touched them this week. But the Ellington orgy did break me out of the rut of searching around for 2019 stragglers. Also went the whole week without touching the 2019 EOY Aggregate. So I guess I'm moving on. Still expect to pick up a few more Ellington titles next week (playing The Great Paris Concert right now, and it's sounding pretty great, indeed). My new year resolution is to take 2020 easier. So far that's mostly involved starting each day off with a piece of classic old jazz. I had, in fact, been playing Early Ellington in the week before this kicked off, along with Ben Webster's Cottontail, an ASV best-of named for his 1935 hit with Ellington.

A final personal note: I just heard today that my cousin Chloe McCandlis died, at 94. She and her husband Paul moved from Arkansas to Snohomish, WA before I was born, so I probably only saw her a half-dozen times over the years. I don't remember the family's first trip to Washington, but we returned for the Seattle World's Fair in 1962, which was the high point of my life well past that point. I visited again, on my own, in 1984, and it totally changed my view of my family -- for one thing, despite the distance, she probably knew my mother better than any of my closer relatives (or maybe she was just more open about it). I saw her a couple years ago. Despite numerous physical ailments, she was in a very expansive mood, with lots of stories about long ago. She no doubt knew many more, and I could kick myself for not making more of an effort to keep close. That memory is lost now. The inspiration remains.

New records reviewed this week:

• Carol Albert: Stronger Now (2019 [2020], Cahara): [cd]: B-
• Lila Ammons: Genealogy (2019 [2020], self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Ellen Edwards: A New York Session (Stonefire Music, EP): [cd]: B- [02-22]
• Delfeayo Marsalis Uptown Jazz Orchestra: Jazz Party (Troubadour Jass): [cd]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Ronnie Lane: Just for a Moment: The Best of Ronnie Lane (1973-97 [2019], UMC): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington: The Great Summit: The Master Takes (1961 [2000], Roulette): [r]: A
• Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn: Great Times! Piano Duets (1950 [1989], Riverside/OJC): [r]: B+(*)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: A Drum Is a Woman (1956 [1957], Columbia): [r]: B-
• Duke Ellington: At the Alhambra: Recorded in Paris, 1958 (1958 [2002], Pablo): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: Featuring Paul Gonsalves (1962 [1991], Fantasy/OJC): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington: The Duke: The Essential Collection 1927-1962 (1927-62 [2000], Columbia/Legacy, 3CD): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington: In the Uncommon Market (1963 [1986], Pablo): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington: Soul Call (1966 [1999], Verve): [r]: B+(**)
• Duke Ellington/Boston Pops/Arthur Fiedler: The Duke at Tanglewood (1966, RCA Victor Red Seal): [r]: B+(**)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: The Popular Duke Ellington (1966 [1967], RCA Victor): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington: Solos, Duets and Trios (1932-67 [1990], RCA Bluebird): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: Berlin '65/Paris '67 (1965-67 [1997], Pablo): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington: 1969 All-Star White House Tribute to Duke Ellington (1969 [2002], Blue Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington: Duke Ellington's 70th Birthday Concert (1969 [1995], Blue Note, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: Up in Duke's Workshop (1969-72 [1990], Pablo/OJC): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington: The Duke's Big 4 (1973 [1974], Pablo): [r]: B+(**)
• Duke Ellington: The Private Collection, Volume Two: Dance Concerts, California, 1958 (1958 [1987], Saja): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington: The Private Collection, Volume Six: Dance Dates, California, 1958 (1958 [1989], Saja): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington: The Private Collection, Volume Seven: Studio Sessions 1957 & 1962 (1956-72 [1990], Saja): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington: The Private Collection, Volume Eight: Studio Sessions 1957, 1965, 1966, 1967, San Francisco/Chicago/New York (1957-67 [1990], SAJA): [r]: B+(**)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1927-1928 (1927-1928 [1990], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1928 (1928 [1990], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1928-1929 (1928-29 [1990], Classics): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1929 (1929 [1991], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1929-1930 (1929-30 [1991], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1930 (1930 [1991], Classics): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1930, Volume 2 (1930 [1991], Classics): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1930-1931 (1930-31 [1991], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1931-1932 (1931-32 [1991], Classics): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1932-1933 (1932-33 1992], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1933 (1933 [1992], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1933-35 (1933-35 [1992], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1936-37 (1936-37 [1992], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1938 (1938 [1993], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1938 Vol. 2 (1938 [1993], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1938 Vol. 3 (1938 [1993], Classics): [r]: A-
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1939 (1939 [1994], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: 1939-1940 (1938 [1994], Classics): [r]: B+(***)
• Vienna Art Orchestra: Duke Ellington's Sound of Love, Vol. 2: Live at Porgy & Bess, Vienna (2003, EmArcy): [r]: A-
• Ben Webster: Plays Duke Ellington (1967-71 [2002], Storyville): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Kenny Barron/Dave Holland Trio Featuring Johnathan Blake: Without Deception (Dare2) [03-06]
• Gerald Beckett: Mood (Summit)
• Benjamin Boone With the Ghana Jazz Collective: Joy (Origin) [03-20]
• Calle Loiza Jazz Project: There Will Never Be Another You (self-released)
• The Coachella Valley Trio: Mid Century Modern (DMAC)
• Sarah Elgeti Quartet With Friends: Dawn Comes Quietly (Gateway Music) [02-21]
• Nick Finzer: Cast of Characters (Outside In Music) [02-28]
• Al Gold: Al Gold's Paradise (self-released) [03-06]
• Christopher Icasiano: Provinces (Origin) [02-21]
• Brent Jensen: The Sound of a Dry Martini: Remembering Paul Desmond (2002, Origin) [02-21]
• Mike McGinniss/Elias Bailey/Vinnie Sperrazza: Time Is Thicker (Open Stream Music)
• New Stories: Speakin' Out (2019 [2020], Origin) [02-21]
• Gloria Reuben & Marty Ashby: For All We Know (MCG Jazz) [02-14]
• Reverso [Frank Woeste/Vincent Courtois/Ryan Keberle]: The Melodic Line (Out Note) [02-14]
• RJ & the Assignment: Hybrid Harmony (self-released)
• The United States Air Force Band Airmen of Note: Air Power! (self-released)
• Torbjörn Zetterberg & Den Stora Fragan: Are You Happy (Moserobie)

Weekend Roundup

Skipped a week because I was working on music stuff, so this week's links go back further than usual, but much of the previous week was absorbed in speculation about Iowa and Trump's impeachment trial, which became obsolete the moment the votes were counted (or are finally counted; see Riley Beggin: Final Iowa caucuses results expected just before New Hampshire begins voting). Trump was, of course, not convicted, the vote 48-52, with Mitt Romney the only Senator to break party ranks. This, and his own holier-than-thou explanation, occasioned pieces heaping undeserved praise or wrath on Romney, none of which mentioned the most obvious point: Trump's following among Republicans is significantly weaker in Utah than in any other state, probably because Utah is uniquely insulated from the fears he preys upon.

The Iowa caucuses were a huge embarrassment for the Democratic Party's professional elites, who came up with novel ways to avoid reporting unpleasant news (that Sanders won the popular vote), and reminded us that Republicans aren't the only party willing to use tricks (in this case "State Delegate Equivalents") to steal an election (allowing Buttigieg to claim a Trumpian victory, although even there, with still incomplete results, the margin is a razor thin 564-562; Sanders led the first-found popular vote 24.75% to 21.29%, followed by Warren 18.44%, Biden 14.95%, Klobuchar 12.73%, Yang 5.00%, Steyer 1.75%, Gabbard 0.19%, Bloomberg 0.12%, Bennet 0.09%, Patrick 0.03%, Delaney 0.01% [10 votes]). Lots of articles this week dredging up old standy complaints about Iowa's premier spot in presidential campaigns, including generic complaints about caucuses, and even more about Iowa.

New Hampshire will vote on Tuesday. Recent polling: Anya van Wagtendonk: Sanders leads in New Hampshire, but half of voters remain uncommitted -- subhed amends that to 30%. Buttigieg seems to be in 2nd place now (21%, behind 28% for Sanders), followed by Biden (11%), Warren (9%), Gabbard (6%), Klobuchar (5%), Yang and Steyer (3%), with Bloomberg (not on ballot) at 2%. The Democrats had another debate last week, resulting in the usual winners-and-losers pieces, none of which caught my eye below. (If you really want one, try Vox, which had Klobuchar a winner and Biden a loser.)

Meanwhile, Trump gave his State of the Union address, on the even of his "acquittal." It read (link below) more like his campaign stump speech, at least the one he'd give if he didn't wander off script, and Republicans in the audience tried to turn the event into a campaign rally, even at one point chanting "four more years" (but at least I haven't seen any reports of "lock her up"), and the fact that half of the audience were Democrats kept the chemistry down (and added a few boos and a couple of walkouts). Of course, the content got lost in the dramatics, especially Trump's refusal to shake Nancy Pelosi's hand on entering, and her ripping up his speech afterwards. It all led pundits and partisans to offer sermons on civility, but Trump had been absolutely vicious toward Pelosi ever since she got behind impeachment. But what the exchange reminded me most of was a story about Casey Stengel, where he artfully dodged an interview after a loss by making obscene gestures the media couldn't broadcast. By ripping up Trump's speech, Pelosi signaled there was nothing but lies and contempt there, more succinctly than any of the official party responders could possibly do.

Some Republican flaks claim that last week was one of Trump's best ever, and they can point to a trivial uptick in Trump's approval rating (43.8% at 538). It's clear now that the Senate's non-trial didn't move anyone, but while it was tedious and overwrought as it happened, it will be remembered differently. Democrats will remember it as a valiant attempt to do something about a president has repeatedly abused his office and violated his oath to support the Constitution and the laws of the land, which was thwarted not by facts or reason but by cynical partisan solidarity, making clear that the Republican members of Congress are fully complicit in Trump's crimes. That's something they can campaign on this fall.

Trump celebrated his "acquittal" with a series of extremely boorish public appearances (some noted below). I've gotten to where it's hard for Trump to shock me, but his is the most disgusting performance I've ever seen by a public figure. I've long maintained that Trump himself isn't nearly as dangerous or despicable as the orthodox Republicans he surrounds himself with, but I may have to revise my view. I've long believed that the swing vote in the 2020 election will turn on those Americans who don't particularly object to Trump's policies but decide that his personal behavior is too embarrassing to tolerate further. This week has provided plenty for them to think about.

The only issue below I tried to group links under was the Kushner "deal of the century," partly because they separate out easily enough. Trump issues, Democrat issues, they're all over the place.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem: Trump's State of the Union suggests he's worried about Bernie Sanders.

• Robert P Baird: The prosecution of President Donald Trump.

• Natylie Baldwin: Obama Russia adviser on cold war liberals: Interview with James Carden, who previously (2019-12-30) wrote Meet the cold war liberals, where he suggests FDR's Good Neighbor Policy as a way out of America's cold war rut.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • Trump's impeachment acquittal shows how democracy could really die: "The Senate's sham trial revealed a philosophical flaw in American liberal democracy." The problem with this argument is that "could" implies a possible future event, whereas what the trial shows is that for one major political party democracy is already dead -- at least it's not something they have to pretend to respect.

  • The Democratic primary has a legitimacy problem: "The Iowa results debacle has undermined faith in the entire primary process."

  • Lamar Alexander and the power of right-wing political correctness.

• Peter Beinart: Impeachment hurt somebody. It wasn't Trump. "In the end, the president succeeded in doing precisely what he wanted in the first place: tarring a leading Democratic rival."

• Julia Belluz: 9 questions about the coronavirus outbreak, answered.

• Katelyn Burns: Democratic candidates aren't happy about new debate rules that seem to benefit Bloomberg. No "seem" about it. Donors aren't necessarily a good metric, but dropping it opens the door to billionaire egotists like Bloomberg to scam polls through massive ad buys, and reaffirms the DNC's commitment to oligarchy. The DNC may have had an impossible and thankless job in managing the debates, but once again they've come out looking hapless and more than a little corrupt.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Now Trump is charging Nancy Pelosi with fake crimes, too.

  • If you think it looks bad for mainstream Democrats now, just wait. I realize they're not happy with any of their candidates, but could that possibly have something to do with: Their positions? Their track record of promising progressive reform and delivering nothing? Bad as it seems, I can't imagine any scenario looking worse for them this year than having their perfect candidate, Hillary Clinton, lose to Trump in 2016.

  • Impeachment exposed President Trump's authoritarian ambitions.

  • Trump baffled why African-Americans don't want to vote for him: "Maybe giving Rush Limbaugh another medal will fix it."

  • Trump speech cites sole triumph: Rebranding Obama's economy as his own.

  • Trump attacks John Bolton as desperate loser who nearly destroyed the planet. A rare occasion of Trump speaking truth, although Bolton was so stuck in his obsessions for so long you have to wonder about Trump's command of the vetting process.

  • Running Bernie Sanders against Trump would be an act of insanity. Wait! Isn't the stock definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result? Running the only person in America who ever lost a general election to Trump a second time would be insane. Wouldn't it be saner to nominate a very different candidate? Sanders may not be perfectly tailored, but he has some real strengths that are hard to find in other candidates, notably principles and integrity. In a Trump vs. Sanders election, Trump has already made it clear that he's going to practice nonstop red-baiting: an old song that for most non-Republicans has worn thin enough to be easily dismissed. Against anyone else, Trump is going to harp on the supposed corruption and perfidy of the Democrats -- points that still disturb most Americans, and are likely to hurt even where grossly unfair.

• Joan Coaston: The Iowa Republican caucuses you didn't know where happening, explained. I have a pretty low opinion of Republicans these days, but I'm still a bit surprised that no serious candidate emerged to register an anti-Trump protest vote in the Republican primaries. There are still a few "never Trump" pundits flopping around, and there are some obvious names who seem to be biding their time, figuring a Trump debacle in 2020 will give them a springboard for redeeming the party in 2024 (Kasich, Ryan, Romney, with Rubio trying to have it both ways). But viability in the Republican Party almost exclusively depends on the blessing of billionaire donors -- Newt Gingrich explained his loss to Romney: "he had five billionaires, and I only had one" -- and clearly none of them came up with a favorable cost/benefit analysis. That left Bill Weld and Joe Walsh as the only candidates to solicit votes in Iowa, and all they could do was 1.54% and 1.31% respectively. Hard to know whether the media consciously ignored them to leave Trump a clear path, or just didn't notice in the first place. Even this article omitted Trump's actual vote, although you can figure out it was close to 97%. [PS: Walsh has since dropped out. See Benjamin Hart: Joe Walsh will not be the next President of the United States.

• Sean Collins: Trump's Super Bowl interview was 8 minutes of pettiness and empty braggadocio.

• McKay Coppins: The billion-dollar disinformation campaign to reelect the president. Including quite a bit about Trump's internet czar, Brad Parscale -- now campaign manager, which tells you something about how and where the campaign will be fought.

• Neta C Crawford: The Iraq War has cost the US nearly $2 trillion . . . and counting, on track to exceeding the estimate in the 2008 book by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

• Chas Danner:

  • Trump awards Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh at State of the Union: I know a lot of assholes and worse have been given this award, but it usually happens in a White House ceremony, and I find it unbearably crass for Trump to presume he can do it in Congress, let alone during the SOTU address. Possibly the most disgusting thing he's done in one of his worst weeks to date. Coincidentally, I was just listening to the music from the event in 1969 when Nixon gave this same award to Duke Ellington. I doubt I'll ever despise a politician more completely than Nixon, but I've always had to give him credit for honoring Ellington.

  • Trump avoids handshake with Pelosi at State of the Union, and Nancy Pelosi rips up Trump's State of the Union speech: More pettiness on a bad night for both.

  • Watch Trump act bored and ignored during the singing of the national anthem.

• David Dayen:

  • Welcome to the bullshit economy: Hey, sucker, wanna buy a disruptive app?

  • Building the people's banks: "Establishing financial institutions and regulations that work for middle- and low-income Americans is possible."

• Ryan Devereaux: Trump is blowing up a National Monument in Arizona to make way for the border wall: Organ Pipe Cactus NM.

• Eliza Relman/Lauren Frias: Trump supporters intentionally swarmed the Iowa caucus phone lines to delay the results: News reports that the Iowa caucus wasn't hacked were wrong. What this story shows is that Nixon's tricksters are back in force (even with Roger Stone locked up).

• Matt Ford: The empire strikes back: "With impeachment behind him, Trump is already steering his cruel reign in a darker direction." Starts by quoting Bill Clinton after his impeachment acquittal, saying "I want to say again to the American people how profoundly sorry I am for what I said and did to trigger these events and the great burden they have imposed on Congress and on the American people." Trump, by contrast, makes Clinton look like the epitome of class and grace:

  It's hard to imagine how President Donald Trump could have done things more differently in his own address on Thursday. Speaking to a motley crowd of White House aides, Cabinet officials, and congressional allies, the president bounced between gratitude for his most ardent supporters and anger toward his perceived enemies. "It was evil, it was corrupt, it was dirty cops," he seethed, referring to years of investigations into his misconduct. Now that Trump will no longer face consequences for his actions, the president and his allies are eager to inflict them upon everyone else.

• Adam Gopnik: Thirteen (well, ten) ways of looking at impeachment and acquittal: Actually, they all strike me as bullshit:

  1. Impeachment was, despite it all, essential.
  2. Yes, but Trump won, and the consequences are terrifying.
  3. Actually, Trump won, but it's trivial.
  4. And you know what? Actually, Trump lost.
  5. Adam Schiff's eloquence will always be remembered.
  6. And so will Romney's courage.
  7. There was a truly shocking collapse of conscience.
  8. It's over, and Trump will win.
  9. It's not over, and Trump will lose.
  10. History has its eyes on you.
  11. History is happening.

  The most plausible is 3 -- not so much that Trump won as that his win was trivial. Trump's big win was that he didn't get charged with corruption, which is his calling card, or with lying, which he does nearly every time he opens his mouth. This didn't happen because it would have involved more work, and it's not something Democrats are squeaky clean on. Plus, many Democrats still think Russia is the silver bullet, and those Democrats were the ones that unified the party on impeachment. Unfortunately, they also unified Republicans in defense, ensuring defeat. Which brings me back to what I think of as a fundamental principle: never prosecute someone you have no chance of convicting. Granted, it's tempting with someone you really want to make squirm, and it did have the effect of making Trump (and ultimately the Republican Senate) look bad. Still, it's not something you want to make a habit of.

• Courtney Hagle/John Kerr: After his acquittal, Fox goes all in on the sycophantic praise of Donald Trump. Related: Rob Savillo: Fox & Friends reported on Pelosi ripping up her copy of the State of the Union 55 times more than actual lies from Trump's speech.

• Rebecca Heilweil:

  • It's not just Iowa: Election tech is messy.

  • Why we don't know as much as we should about police surveillance technology.

• Sean Illing:

  • "Flood the zone with shit": How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy.

    For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.

    And it produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search. The fact that 60 percent of Americans say they encounter conflicting reports about the same event is an example of what I mean. In the face of such confusion, it's not surprising that less than half the country trusts what they read in the press.

  • "We're losing our damn minds": James Carville unloads on the Democratic Party: Interview with the crusty Clinton strategist, mostly a rant against the "democratic wing of the Democratic Party," but I'm reading his complaints about the farthest reaches in their platform as a gripe about how "moderate" Democrats haven't been able to articulate practical intermediate steps and show how they'd really be positive steps. I doubt that's really fair, but the media would rather see Democrats fight than find fertile common ground, so what gets broadcast are the "Republican talking points" the centrists seem to embrace. So I don't disagree with his pull quote: "The fate of the world depends on the Democratic Party getting its shit together and winning in November."

• Umair Irfan: Tree planting is Trump's politically safe new climate plan.

• Jake Johnson: 'No better distillation of Washington': Democrats and GOP join Trump in standing ovation for failed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó.

• Sarah Jones:

  • Man who owns news outlet guilty of plagiarism: Michael Bloomberg. By the way, this isn't something that bothers me about Bloomberg, but since everything else does, I decided to mention it. More disturbing: Alex Henderson: Michael Bloomberg is "paying influencers" to make his 2020 campaign "seem cool".

  • Trump didn't "lift people off welfare." He cut them off.

  • South Carolina Democrats sure sound open to Medicare for All: "A new poll shows high levels of support for government-run health care."

• Ed Kilgore: How much did Iowa slow Joe's roll? By the way, I counted 33 Kilgore posts since last Roundup, and this is the only one I thought worth mentioning. A lot of them have very short shelf lives; e.g., before this one, there was: In Iowa, a collision of campaigns before the caucuses; Two campaigns on the brink in Iowa (Warren and Buttigieg); How do the Iowa caucuses work?; In Iowa on caucus night: the view from the ground; The mourning after in Iowa.

• Catherine Kim:

  • Trump's criminal justice record is more complicated than he claims.

  • John Delaney's been running for president since 2017 -- and it's finally come to an end. When the first batch of Iowa voting numbers came in, I was amused to find that Delaney's first-round vote totals were exactly 0. Latest figures I've seen had him up to 10, but you still need a lot of digits to turn that into a percentage. So, yeah, he's toast, and should hang it up. The article spends a lot of time on his "simple" health care plan, and it's not bad -- or wouldn't be if he had only framed it as a first step toward the sort of comprehensive universal coverage plan Sanders has proposed. But he didn't campaign like that. Rather, he spent all his time attacking the left, winding up with no solutions and no hope. Makes you wonder why he bothered to run in the first place.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Alexander Vindman, a key impeachment witness, is dismissed from the White House.

  • Read Trump's bananas, post-impeachment victory lap speech.

  • Trump vilified socialism in his State of the Union, using Venezuela as his foil.

  • Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is officially going to trial on corruption charges.

• Bonnie Kristian: Why Trump can't believe his opponents' prayers. So this is what happened when Trump took his victory tour to the National Prayer Breakfast in DC. I'm sympathetic to people who regard Trump as a piss-poor specimen of a Christian, but empirically speaking, I've noticed that Christians (at least the hard-scrabble Protestants I grew up with and have known since childhood) easily divide into two camps: one that loves their neighbors and sincerely tries to help them through their troubles, and another who only invoke God to smite down their neighbors and consign them to hell. In his introductory remarks, Arthur Brooks made a pitch to the former. Then Trump came on, and replied: "Arthur, I don't know if I agree with you, and I don't know if Arthur's gonna like what I've got to say." They he started laying into his enemies (especially the ones who say, "I pray for you").

• Paul Krugman:

  • How zombies at the GOP's soul: "Everyone with principles has left the party."

  • Does it matter who the Democrats choose? "It matters hugely whether a Democrat wins, it matters much less which Democrat wins."

• Robert Kuttner: Was impeachment a mistake? He says no, but his analysis suggests we won't know until the Senate is decided in November.

• Nina Lakhani: Hundreds of Salvadorans deported by US were killed or abused, report reveals. Related: William Wheeler: How the US helped create El Salvador's bloody gang war.

• Eric Levitz:

  • The insane criminal president held a party today.

  • Donald Trump is winning the 2020 Democratic primary: "The Democratic Party turned the Iowa caucuses into an infomercial for its incompetence and internal divisions." Alt-title, on the page: "This is how he wins."

• Dara Lind: "Women to one side, men to the other": How the Border Patrol's new powers and old carelessness separated a family.

• Erik Loomis: What are you going to do when Bernie wins the nomination? The question, of course, is only raised due to the extreme vitriol of anti-Bernie hysteria among the elite tier of self-proclaimed "moderate Democrats." The fact is that those who can't "Deal. With. It." will be worse than "as bad as any Nader voter" (he's trying to hit them where they hurt). Refusing to support the Democratic nominee if it's Bernie is an admission that you never cared about progress or justice in the first place -- that the repeated failures of recent Democratic regimes were nothing more than bad faith (as opposed to conflicted interests, fear, stupidity, and ineptness). For examples of vitriol, see the comments. "I think Bernie is an increasingly bitter old man who does not play well with others" is relatively mild and laughable. Even more deranged:

  I didn't vote for the fascist and I'm not voting for the Communist either. Bernie has spent his entire existence undermining Democrats and will not be rewarded for getting Trump installed. We can vote down ballot for actual Democrats. There will be no forgiveness for what the deranged old coot and his bros have done to the working class. Not to mention, his voting record is fairly despicable. He's no different than Trump. F him and his ratferking teabagging psychos as well.

  In what universe is a person with so much fear and loathing not already a Trump disciple?

• German Lopez: Democrats have good plans to tackle the opioid epidemic. They should talk about them.

• Amanda Marcotte: Voting to acquit this noxious criminal is the point of no return for the Republican Party. I think Republicans crossed that point long ago, but it's hard to pin down one point. One might be the "Hastert rule," by which the far right could veto any moderate deals the House Republican leadership might entertain, and McConnell's 2009 decision to use the filibuster to block all bills by Democrats. On the other hand, Republican solidarity dates back at least to the fight against Clinton's health care reform, and further back to the defense of the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court (who, you may recall, was a pretty noxious pick). [Also see note on Marcotte below.]

• Daniel Markovits: How McKinsey destroyed the middle class: "Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities." Buttigieg worked for McKinsey, although to be fair, he was but a small cog in their vast machinery.

• David Masciotra:

  • America's fatal flaw: The founders assumed our leaders would have some basic decency. I'm not sure that's true: otherwise, why would they have concocted such an elaborate system of checks and balances to make impossible any real concentration of power? And why would they take care to proscribe titles, emoluments, bribes, and other high crimes? On the other hand, decency is a pretty low bar, one that Trump uniquely seems to have no claim to. More importantly, the founders didn't anticipate political parties, and they didn't expect the president to have anywhere near the broad powers of modern presidents. Perhaps they were naive in authorizing as much power as they did, expecting George Washington to wield that power responsibly, setting an example others might emulate. The only thing Trump and Washington have in common is exceptional wealth, but Washington also had a long record of public service, and took great pains to avoid any suspicion of corruption. Trump, well, could hardly be more opposite.

  • Trump's real base isn't the famous "white working class" -- it's the billionaire class.

• Laura McGann:

  • One of America's most prominent racists just received the Presidential Medal of Freedom: Rush Limbaugh.

  • Joe Biden is the only candidate with a real shot at getting things done: One of Vox's series of "best case" arguments for each of the candidates (following Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, followed by Pete Buttigieg). Much of the headline claim is based on the assumption that "Biden has the best shot at carrying the Senate," which in turn is based on the idea that capturing seats depends more on swaying the center than on motivating the left. Unclear to me that Biden can do either, not least because he doesn't seem to really want (or feel the need for) much change.

• Casey Michel: How the US became the center of global kleptocracy. "For the world's warlords, criminals, and autocrats, there's no gift finer than an anonymous American shell company."

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The Senate's decision to acquit Trump is even less democratic than you think: "The 48 senators who voted to remove Trump represent 53 percent of the nation."

  • Mitt Romney just did something that literally no senator has ever done before: "Before this day, no senator has ever voted to remove a president of the same party from office." Points out that all nine Democrats in the Senate voted to acquit Andrew Johnson (Johnson was not technically a Democrat when he was elected vice-president in 1864, but by impeachment time the few Democrats left in Congress allied with him against the "Radical Republicans"). I was thinking there had been some breaks against Clinton (Joe Lieberman?), but a check shows not. On the other hand, 4 Republicans voted not guilty on the obstruction of justice charge (John Chafee, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter), and 5 more on the perjury article (Slade Gorton, Richard Shelby, Ted Stevens, Fred Thompson, John Warner). The votes to convict Clinton failed 50-50 and 45-55. Still, not enough of a sample to make Romney's apostasy stand out. One can argue that the case against Trump fared better relative to party standing than the strongest charge against Clinton did (+1 vs. -4), and Romney's vote helped there. On the other hand, the raw vote (48-52) fell short of the previous 50-50.

  • The biggest lie in Trump's State of the Union speech: "Trump wants people who depend on Obamacare to relax. They do so at great peril."

  • What Trump has done to the courts, explained.

• Rani Molla: Why your free software is never free: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." He has a point, but it's not about free software, a category which includes the operating system I'm using (Linux), the software distribution (Xubuntu), the editor I'm typing into (GNU emacs), the web server I'm distributing my writing over (Apache), or the browser I used to view it (Firefox), or the hundreds of other programs that fill role and do tasks in my digital universe. I paid $0 for all of them, and expect to pay $0 every time I update them. And while I rarely do so, I can in nearly every case download the source code to these programs, fix bugs, add features, and redistribute my changes to the world, who will also pay $0 for my contributions. (The few exceptions usually have to do with proprietary hardware or restricted file formats for media and "digital rights" policing. While these also cost me $0, they aren't free software, because I can't download, modify, and redistribute the source code. Sometimes such programs are referred to as freeware, but most such programs are distributed free in hopes of getting tip income and/or as demos for pricier product upgrades.) What Molla's talking about is something else: proprietary software that you don't have to pay directly for, but which collect data on you that the that the vendor can monetize, often at you expense. Google has a whole suite of tools like that, while Facebook offers a one-size-fits-all virtual world meant to monopolize all your time and run your life. Before 2000, when it ate my job at SCO, free software seemed like the next big thing, promising a future where software was freed from ulterior motives of corporate control. (Having worked in the software business for 20 years, I happened to know a lot about how that worked.) Since then, these new business models of capture, control, and manipulation have taken root, to the point where someone like Molla can pretend no other world was ever possible. But really free software is still being developed, and is available if you know where to look, and what to do (although, frankly, it's a lot easier to use now than it was when I got started).

• Sara Morrison: The Iowa caucus smartphone app disaster, explained.

• Nicole Narea:

  • The Trump administration is freezing New Yorkers' access to Global Entry.

  • /Catherine Kim: Read the full text of Trump's State of the Union speech.

• Ari Natter: Trump withholding $823 million for clean energy, Democrats say.

• Ella Nilsen: The Iowa caucuses have a big accessibility problem. And therefore, turnout is low, and possibly skewed. For instance, in 2016, turnout was just 15.7%, vs. 52% for the New Hampshire primary. [PS: From a tweet, Iowa Democratic turnout this year was up 5,146 from 2016 (up 3.0%), but way down from 2008 (63,436 votes, 26.5%).

• Anna North: Pelosi's State of the Union response: Rip up Trump's speech.

• Osita Nwanevu:

  • History will remember Democrats' timidity, too. The main thing I fault the impeachment effort for is the failure to bring additional charges, specifically on charges Republicans might find it even more embarrassing to vote against: Trump's self-dealing corruption; his many abuses of executive powers to keep his administration from enforcing the law (e.g., on the environment) or for overstepping the law (e.g., on refugees), and those policy links to corruption; his refusal to respect Congressional resolutions limiting his war powers (again, no doubt linked to corruption).

  • Trump has never looked more comfortable as a demagogue: "The president's State of the Union previewed his reelection themes: Socialism and health care and socialism and xenophobia and socialism."

• Alex Pareene: Democrats embrace the grift: "The decidedly Trumpian nonprofit behind the Iowa app debacle."

• Jake Pearson/Anand Tumurtogoo: Donald Trump Jr went to Mongolia, got special treatment from the government and killed an endangered sheep.

• Brianne Pfannenstiel: Iowa caucus 2020: Inside the Iowa Democratic Party's 'boiler room,' where 'hell' preceded the results catastrophe.

• Andrew Prokop: Iowa Democratic caucuses: Live results: Like all similar pages, their ambitions foiled by the Iowa Democratic Party, but as of Feb. 7, 4:38 am, they claimed to have 99.5% reporting, with Pete Buttigieg 2 State Delegate Equivalents ahead of Bernie Sanders, and Sanders leading Buttigieg in the Round 1 popular vote 24.75% to 21.29%, followed by Elizabeth Warren (18.44%), Joe Biden (14.95%), Amy Klobuchar (12.73%), Andrew Yang (5.00%), and Tom Steyer (1.75%). In the second round, where "non-viable candidates" (everyone from Biden down, with Yang hit hardest) faded and "lesser evilism" kicked into consideration, Buttigieg and Warren gained some ground, but still trailed Sanders. I also looked at similar pages from The Washington Post and The New York Times, which have some additional analysis, but make it harder to find raw vote numbers. For another weird wrinkle, see Nathaniel Rakich: Satellite caucuses give a surprise boost to Sanders in Iowa.

• Frank Rich: Iowa is just the latest chapter in a rolling Democratic calamity.

• David Roberts:

  • With impeachment, America's epistemic crisis has arrived: Originally published in November 2019, updated here.

  • New conservative climate plans are neither conservative nor climate plans: "They are mainly designed to protect fossil fuels." I don't see any point in today's right-wingers aren't true conservatives, given that the only consistent aim of "conservatives" has been to defend and increase the privileges and power of those already rich and powerful. Of course, prominent among "conservatives" are those heavily invested in fossil fuels, but you can chalk that up to self-interest, and their fellow travelers to [upper] class consciousness. And sure, they've most often tried to advance their efforts through fraud and corruption. It's not as if an appeal to reason would help them.

• Nathan J Robinson:

  • The failure of Democratic opposition: "The Democratic party establishment have shown they are incapable of taking on Trump. They are assuring his reelection." I get the point about Democrats not putting together a story credible enough to convince low information/interest voters to counter Trump's. But a big part of that is that the media isn't listening to the narratives that various candidates have crafted, let alone presenting them cogently enough to get the attention of said low information/interest voters. But Democrats are facing a bigger problem: Trump and Republicans haven't created a big enough, immediate enough crisis to jar those voters out of their complacent everyday lives. On the other hand, it's not as if he's actually convinced anyone who didn't vote for him in 2016 to support him now.

  • Donald Trump will run to the left. Well, depends on what you mean by "left." Robinson's example: "Do not be surprised when Trump runs as the candidate of criminal justice reform." That's still a far cry from real left issues, like promoting unions, or soaking the rich. Moreover, much will depend on who he winds up running against: it'll be much easier to outflank Buttigieg on the left than Sanders. Indeed, with Sanders it's clear that Trump will run so hard against Sanders' "socialism" he won't have any credibility to move to the left on anything.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Threats, misogyny, hypocrisy -- Trump's bonkers post-impeachment speech had a little bit of everything.

  • Trump strikes a bitterly vindictive tone during National Prayer Breakfast speech.

  • Trump immediately refuted the Republican idea he was chastened by impeachment.

  • Trump's post-Iowa caucuses messaging is a bad omen for Democrats in 2020.

  • Pam Bondi's been a punchline during the impeachment trial. But her role speaks to something important. "The shamelessness is the point."

  • Wilbur Ross sees the coronavirus outbreak as a moneymaking opportunity for the US.

• Bhaskar Sunkara: The DNC can't steal the election from Bernie Sanders despite the Iowa chaos.

• Theodore Schleifer: A new social network makes an old bet: That we want to hear from rich people. The startup is called Column, and it's basically an effort to monetize free speech by dividing the world between those who can afford to be speakers, and the rest, who can only follow. Still, I expect they'll be tracking the latter's data, and selling what they learn off to whoever is willing to pay for it (just like all the other "social networks").

• Dylan Scott:

  • Trump undercut his message to black voters with celebrations of racism and white history.

  • Trump called on Congress to pass a drug prices bill. Democrats reminded him they already did.

• Nate Silver:

  • The calendar isn't helping Biden, but his Iowa performance points to bigger problems.

  • Our post-Iowa primary forecast is up, and Biden's chances are down. Quite a bit, with his "chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates being halved -- from 43 percent before Iowa to 21 percent now." Sanders got a bump, from 31% to 37%, although odds for "nobody" rose even more, from 17% to 27%.

• Emily Stewart:

  • The latest Iowa caucuses drama, from an app meltdown to a possible recanvass, explained: "Well, the Iowa caucuses are turning out to be a real shitshow."

  • Acronym, the dark money group behind the Iowa caucuses app meltdown, explained.

  • Why Nancy Pelosi ripping up some papers has set the internet on fire.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Trump proposes massive cuts to safety net once again.

  • Trump world's backlash toward Mitt Romney has begun, and it will never end.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • Yesterday's gone: Iowa was Waterloo for Democrats.

  • 10 things that went wrong in Iowa.

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:

  • Democrats gave Obama a free pass. That could hurt us on election day. "We refuse to talk about how his failure to deliver major changes may have fed voter disaffection in 2016." For what it's worth, I've been pretty critical of Obama, both before and after he was elected, even though I voted for him in the 2008 caucus, and twice in November. He promised change and, after blowing the Congressional majority he was initially elected with, delivered nothing more than a slow recovery from the deep recession he inherited, with all the profits going to the top 1% -- a legacy so underwhelming Hillary Clinton blew her pitch for a "third Obama term" who promised little more than to vent the voters' frustration. Clearly, he wasn't nearly as bad as his predecessor or his successor, but his legacy is very thin compared to his promise, and twelve (or should I say twenty?) years of lost opportunity calls for much bolder leadership -- not candidates who would like to be his clones, but aren't even that.

  • Don't think Sanders can win? You don't understand his campaign.

• Anya van Wagtendonk: What is up with that tan line photo of Trump?

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump just fired Gordon Sondland as EU ambassador: The post-acquittal purge continues.

  • 6 top 2020 Democrats vow to reverse Trump's new landmine policy.

  • Trump's Israel-Palestine peace plan: Read the full text of his so-called "deal of the century." Some key elements of the plan, as noted here:

    • The Vision provides for a demilitarized Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel, with Israel retaining security responsibility west of the Jordan River.
    • Over time, the Palestinians will work with United States and Israel to assume more security responsibility as Israel reduces its security footprint.
    • Neither Palestinians nor Israelis will be uprooted from their homes.
    • Israel has agreed to a four-year land freeze to secure the possibility of a two-state solution.
    • Jerusalem will stay united and remain the capital of Israel, while the capital of the State of Palestine will be Al-Quds and include areas of East Jerusalem.
    • Palestinian refugees will be given a choice to live within the future State of Palestine, integrate into the countries where they currently live, or resettle in a third country.

    I've spent a lot of time thinking about viable peace plans, so I've considered many of these ideas, but I haven't read this thing closely. For now, I'll just collect various links here:

    • As'ad AbuKhalil: Trump 'solves' the Arab-Israeli conflict.

    • Hanna Alshaikh: Palestinians don't need Jared Kushner to civilize them. They need rights.

    • Ramzy Baroud: Kushner as a colonial administrator: Let's talk about the 'Israeli Model'.

    • Jonathan Cook:

      • Duh, Jared! So who built the PA as a 'police state'?

      • Trump's Deal of the Century won't bring peace . . . that was the plan.

    • Belen Fernandez: On Jared Kushner's 25 books of undiluted Zionist propaganda. Kushner explained his expertise by having read "25 books on it," so when I saw this article, I was hoping for a list. (I've read, well, at least that many, so I can appreciate how one might consider oneself an expert after that.) Still, not finding one here, but Middle East Eye has offered its own list: Jared Kushner, here are 25 more books you should read about Palestine, Israel relations. Turns out I haven't read any of these 25 either, although I have read other books by Ilan Pappé and Raja Shehadeh. I'm afraid my own reading has been strongly oriented to the Israeli side. A comment added another book I wasn't aware of: Nur Masalha: Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought 1882-1948 (1992). Transfer was supposedly a British idea, introduced in the 1937 Peel Report, but was readily embraced by Ben-Gurion at that time, as the concept was not foreign to Zionist thinking. Mary Dockser Marcus discusses and dates it in her Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

    • Robert Fisk: Kushner's "ultimate deal" would strip Palestinians of their human dignity.

    • Marc Owen Jones: The colonial mindset behind his so-called 'peace plan'.

    • Rashid Khalidi: The erasure of Palestinians from Trump's Mideast "peace plan" has a hundred-year history.

    • Daniel Levy: Don't call it a peace plan: "Ten ways Trump has launched a relentless assault on the very idea of Israeli-Palestinian peace."

    • Saree Makdisi: What's new about Trump's Mideast 'peace' plan? Only the blunt crudity of its racism.

    • Nizar Mohamad: The 'Deal of the Century,' an architecture of exclusion.

    • Jo-Ann Mort: The Trump-Netanyahu plan to force Arab population transfer.

    • Emile Nakhleh: Trump's 'peace plan' is the death knell of the two-state paradigm.

    • James North:

      • 'NY Times' covers up annexation plan scheme to 'denationalize' 350,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel.

      • The 'NY Times' should stop calling the Netanyahu/Trump proposal a 'peace plan,' without quotation marks.

      • Jared Kushner taunts Palestinians because he wants them to reject his 'peace plan'.

    • Yunna Patel: Understanding the Trump 'Deal of the Century': what it does, and doesn't say.

    • Stephen Robinson: Kushner warns Palestinian leaders not to make him read a 26th book about this crap.

    • Richard Silverstein:

      • Israel: Never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

      • Muted praise, silence and dismissal: How US Jewish groups divided over Trump's Middle East plan.

    • James Zogby: Trump and Balfour compared.

    • Netanyahu: 'Israeli right turns against Deal of the Century'.

  I haven't really tried to digest this yet, but do want to emphasize several points that are essential for any such deal:

  1. Israel must effectively be barred from any administrative or direct security role in any territories given to the Palestinians. Independent has to mean independent.
  2. Any Palestinians still resident in Israel after withdrawal from Palestinian territories must have full citizenship and equal rights in Israel.
  3. There needs to be an internationally administered tribunal to assess claims of violence between the two states, with the power of exacting monetary damages for acts committed by either government, or by citizens of either state.
  4. There needs to be an international bank to fund reconstruction and development projects, with the power to audit projects in case of corruption. US aid to Israel should be routed through this bank (but can be earmarked for Israel). Damage claims can be assessed against bank funds.

  I don't much care what borders are decided. The division could be as small as Gaza only, or could include parts of the West Bank (provided connectivity without checkpoints) as Kushner's plan proposes (although I don't see any reason why a Palestinian enclave in the West Bank should not extend to the Jordan River). A number of ancillary issues need to be decided on a fair and generous basis: water, air space, sanitation, prisoners, etc. I would advise Palestine to have a bare minimum of armed forces, which may require guarantees against Israeli attack or invasion beyond 3 above. I would also advise Israel to reduce its armed forces, but don't see either limit as required. One might require international supervision of free elections in the Palestinian state, at least for the reconstruction period. Such supervision would not be able to limit or exclude candidates or parties. Given these basic guidelines, Kushner's plan appears to be unviable. Even given the unreasonable biases of the plan, it's likely that many Israelis will reject it, as they prefer no limits on their power to seize land and repress the Palestinian people.

• Philip Weiss: Lis Harris wanted to understand how Israel had gone this way: Interview, the author of In Jerusalem: Three Generations of an Israeli Family and a Palestinian Family.

• Edward Wong: Americans demand a rethinking of the 'Forever War'.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Bernie Sanders showed us he's a very skilled politician.

  • The Democratic establishment is doing a really bad job of stopping Bernie Sanders.

  • 3 winners and 3 losers from the impeachment and acquittal of Donald Trump. Maybe, but it's hard to tell or care given how little public opinion budged on the issue. Note that Trump himself wasn't on either list.

  • Gretchen Whitmer's smart, boring speech highlighted Democrats' biggest 2020 dilemma.

  • The real state of the union.

  • Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he's a socialist. The real news here is that Sanders loses when you tell voters he's a Democrat, but gains them back when you tell them he's a socialist. That basically means that the Democratic brand is more tarnished than the socialist brand. That should be sobering to those Democrats who keep complaining that Bernie isn't a real Democrat. It's almost as if they'd rather lose.

  • The case against the case against Joe Rogan.

• Li Zhou:

  • A brief guide to the State of the Union guests. They're all there to make one point or another.

  • "He is not who you are": Adam Schiff makes last-ditch plea to Senate Republicans. I'm not sure whether this pitch is more stupid or pathetic. Even if some Republicans think of themselves as possessing noble moral standards, they're not likely to feel any need to impress Schiff with them. But most, like Trump, see impeachment as a cynical political ploy. (Indeed, many were around when they did the same thing to Bill Clinton.) But deep down, Congressional Republicans aren't that different from Trump. They get their news from the same partisan wells, they share most of the same prejudices, and their loathing for Democrats knows few if any bounds.

PS: I've never been much impressed by Amanda Marcotte, but her visceral rejection of Trump seems to be leading her to deeper truths. She has a recent book, Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Ratf*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself, which is about as pointed a title as the subject deserves. From the blurb:

Trump was the inevitable result of American conservatism's degradation into an ideology of blind resentment. For years now, the purpose of right wing media, particularly Fox News, has not been to argue for traditional conservative ideals, such as small government or even family values, so much as to stoke bitterness and paranoia in its audience. . . . Conservative pundits, politicians, and activists have abandoned any hope of winning the argument through reasoned discourse, and instead have adopted a series of bad faith claims, conspiracy theories, and culture war hysterics. Decades of these antics created a conservative voting base that was ready to elect a mindless bully like Donald Trump.

I also want to quote an Amazon comment on the book by a Joseph Caferro, which gives us a peek into the Trump troll mindset:

Why [really] do Trump and his followers troll? And the answer is not hatred.

It's a tactic to destabilize the tenuous parasitic leftist coalitions that are built on a dizzying array of incompatible grievances against imagined enemy institutions. These enemies of leftists include most of the most stable, successful institutions that make civilization possible: religion, capitalism, meritocratic education and commerce, strong national defense, controlled borders, and solvent government spending. The incessant attacks on these institutions by the left are largely encouraged by the DC establishment and most state and local governments, and the result has been failure of safety, solvency, competence, and sanity. Leftism causes parasitic failure across the board. To defend leftist policies on merit is impossible, so the left decided the primary tactic for persuasion should be defamation, intimidation, and even criminal extortion, persecution, and assault. So the right has had enough, and has decided, symbolized by and led by Trump, to assail the leftist establishment with criticism, skepticism, insults, and challenges to their authority and power at all levels. Like in any street fight, you can't win if you aren't willing to use the tactics your enemy is willing to use. So the right trolls, because the left smears. As long as the left smears and commits crimes to further their agenda, the right will troll and be willing to stop those crimes with equal or greater force. That is why the right trolls. Not because of your imagined telepathic detection of deep seated Nazi hatred, but because your leadership are a bunch of parasitic communist thugs who aspire to totalitarian tyrannical rule, and deserve trolling.

I quote this because it's a lot more coherent than what you usually get from this quarter, but still, there's a lot wrong here, starting with a gross misapprehension of what the left is concerned with, and more fundamentally with failure to understand that the bedrock of "stable, successful institutions" is a widely shared sense of justice. It's true that our notions of justice used to be rooted in religion, but that splintered long ago. Some of us gave up the religion we were born into precisely because it no longer seemed to satisfy our sense of justice, and because we found it manipulated by charlatans for special interests. Caferro's list of "successful institutions" turns out to be less coherent than he imagines. Meritocracy sounds good, but more often than not is just a ruse for rationalizing inequality. The last three are arbitrarily grafted into the others: the rationale behind a strong police state is to protect its rulers from the effects of its misrule. "Leftism causes parasitic failure across the board" is a crude way of restating Hayek's Road to Serfdom thesis, which could be used to explain the economic failures of the Soviet Union, but Hayek and his followers have always expected the same doom to befall western social democracy, which has never happened. Where Caferro's argument goes off the rails is his bit about how "the left are largely encouraged by the DC establishment and most state and local governments" and his later reference to "the leftist establishment" -- there is no such thing, as should be clear from the shit fit old guard Democrats are having over the prospect of Sanders winning the Democratic Party nomination.

Then there's the question of tactics. Caferro argues that Trump supporters have to troll because that's the way leftists fight them, but that's neither supported by fact nor by logic. The left offers much more substantial arguments than the name-calling Caferro hates, but it's worth noting that the name-calling would hurt less if it didn't smack of truth. Trump is a racist, a sexist, a liar, a crook, and an all-around asshole. One can document those assertions with hundreds or possibly thousands of pages of examples, but sometimes the shorthand is all you need. Whether he's also a fascist depends on some extra historical knowledge that may not be widely agreed on, but most leftists define fascists as people who want to kill them, so that's a relevant (if not universal) framework.

But just because your opponent fights one way doesn't mean you have to fight the same. Strong occupying armies are most often countered not by equivalent armies but by guerrilla warfare. One might argue that they are morally equivalent, in that both seek to kill the other, and that is often the downfall of the guerrillas. So the other major example is non-violent resistance, such as the movements led by Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King in the US. I'd submit that Trump trolls have chosen their tactics not because the left has but because they're more suited to taste, needs, and morals (which approve of lies and distortions to sway people, and violence to suppress them, all in support of an authoritarian social and economic order which benefits people they identify with).

Daily Log

Greg Magarian asked:

This is a question for my fellow left-wing Democratic voters -- supporters of Sanders or Warren (or, like me, just either of them over the field). If you had to back one of the surviving centrist candidates -- Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar (I'm not sure whether she actually survived Iowa) -- whom would you choose and why? I'm not certain at all, so I'm very interested in what others think.

I commented:

Biden is probably the most progressive both by policy choices and empathy, but has a sad (and sometimes tragic) history of compromise, and is totally plugged in to the Clinton/Obama nomenklatura. Trump will attack him as corrupt, and he's not adept enough to disarm that charge. On the other hand, Buttigieg is an outsider, and is likely to be more flexible. He's running as a neoliberal, because he saw a niche there where he could raise money, and his policies reflect his donors -- for now. I don't expect much from him, but he's young and smart and, considering where he started, has run a remarkable campaign so far. He must know he has to broaden his base to get the nomination, and probably knows that most real answers to real problems come from the left. so I'd expect him to keep an open mind. No reason to think that anything good might come from the others: Klobuchar is rigid and cliched in her anti-progressive stance, although she might be a viable (albeit mediocre) candidate; Bloomberg would be a disaster, on every level, in every respect.

Jan 2020