Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (finished).

Music: Current count 33526 [33485] rated (+41), 211 [216] unrated (-5).

Last Monday of the month, so spent most of the day doing bookkeeping for the monthly roll-up (link above). Five weeks this month, so the total is up -- 193 records, or 194 if you count the Hal Singer regrade, which I slipped into "old music" instead of "grade changes" for context. About half old music, with dives into records I had missed when a new one (or a death or a reader question) tempted me to look further or some other reference).

Speaking of questions, I field ones about David Murray and James Carter, and duck one on jazz books, in my latest batch. Use the form to ask me more.

Recommended music links: No systematic search, but these are a few things I had open:

• Adam Bernstein: Jazz musician who emerged from shadow of brother Nat 'King' Cole dies at 88. Cole was 12 years younger than his famous brother (1919-65), but got a late start, and didn't really claim his own voice until he hit 75 -- my favorites are The Dreamer in Me (2009) and Freddy Cole Sings Mr. B (2010), but I missed his pre-2006 albums, so have some research to do.
• Marcus J Moore: 15 essential black liberation jazz tracks. This reminded me to check out one of the Hal Singer records below.
• Hank Shteamer: 'He made the world bigger': Inside John Zorn's jazz-metal multiverse. Also, this map of Zorn recordings.

Songwriter Johnny Mandel (94) also died this week.

New records reviewed this week:

• Al Bilali Soudan: Tombouctou (2020, Clermont Music): [r]: A-
• Jehnny Beth: To Love Is to Live (2020, Caroline): [r]: B+(*)
• Don Braden/Joris Teepe Quartet: In the Spirit of Herbie Hancock: Live at De Witte (2019 [2020], O.A.P.): [r]: B+(***)
• Phoebe Bridgers: Punisher (2020, Dead Oceans): [r]: B+(**)
• Daniel Carter/Matthew Shipp/William Parker/Gerald Cleaver: Welcome Adventure! Vol. 1 (2019 [2020], 577): [r]: B+(***)
• Caterpillar Quartet: Threads (2020, ESP-Disk): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Whit Dickey Trio: Expanding Light (2019 [2020], Tao Forms): [r]: A-
• Beth Duncan: I'm All Yours (2020, Saccat): [cd]: B [07-24]
• Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020, Columbia): [r]: A-
• John Finbury: Quatro (2020, Green Flash Music): [cd]: B
• Jean-Marc Foussat/Daunik Lazro/Evan Parker: Café Oto 2020 (2020, Fou, 2CD): [cd]: B+(**)
• Wendy Gondeln/Mats Gustafsson/Wolfang Voigt: The Shithole Country & Boogie Band (2016-18 [2020], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• CeeLo Green: CeeLo Green Is Thomas Callaway (2020, Easy Eye Sound): [r]: B
• Haim: Women in Music Pt. III (2020, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Hinds: The Prettiest Curse (2020, Mom + Pop): [r]: A-
• Jason Kao Hwang: Human Rites Trio (2019 [2020], True Sound): [cd]: A- [07-01]
• Jumpstarted Plowhards: Round One (2019, Recess, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Corb Lund: Agricultural Tragic (2020, New West): [r]: B+(**)
• Benjamin Moussay: Promontoire (2019 [2020], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Bobby Previte/Jamie Saft/Nels Cline: Music From the Early 21st Century (2019 [2020], RareNoise): [r]: B+(*)
• Sonar With David Torn: Tranceportation (Volume 2) (2019 [2020], RareNoise): [bc]: B+(***)
• Alister Spence: Whirlpool: Solo Piano (2019 [2020], Alister Spence Music, 2CD): [cd]: B+(*) [07-24]
• Dan Willis and Velvet Gentlemen: The Monk Project (2018-19 [2020], Belle Avenue): [cd]: B [07-17]
• Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Jazz Is Dead 001 (2020, Jazz Is Dead, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Jazz Is Dead 002: Roy Ayers (2020, Jazz Is Dead, EP): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Willem Breuker/Han Bennink: New Acoustic Swing Duo (1967-68 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2CD): [bc]: B+(***)
• Grayson Capps: South Front Street: A Retrospective 1997-2019 (1997-2019 [2020], The Royal Potato Family): [r]: B+(*)
• Neil Young: Homegrown (1974-75 [2020], Reprise): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Al Bilali Soudan: Al Bilali Souadn (2012, Clermont Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Don Braden Quintet: The Time Is Now (1991, Criss Cross): [r]: B+(**)
• Don Braden: Organic (1994 [1995], Epicure): [r]: B+(**)
• Don Braden: Brighter Days (2001, High Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Milt Buckner & Hal Singer: Milt & Hal [The Defnitive Black & Blue Sessions] (1966 [2004], Black & Blue): [r]: B+(**)
• Hyphy Hitz (2004-07 [2007], TVT): [dl]: B+(***)
• Pharoah Sanders: Izipho Zam (My Gifts) (1969 [1973], Strata-East): [yt]: B+(***)
• Hal Singer: Rent Party (1948-56 [1994], Savoy Jazz): [r]: A-
• Hal Singer: Blues and News (1971, Futura): [r]: B+(**)
• Hal Singer/Jef Gilson: Soul of Africa (1974, Le Chant Du Monde): [r]: A-
• Hal Singer: Senior Blues (1991, Carrere): [r]: B+(**)
• Hal Singer & Massimo Faraò Trio: We're Still Buddies (2001 [2005], Azzurra Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Hal Singer: Challenge (2010, Marge): [r]: A-

Grade (or other) changes:

• Hal Singer With Charlie Shavers: Blue Stompin' (1959 [1994], Prestige/OJC): [r]: [was: B+] B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ricardo Grilli: 1962 (Tone Rogue) [07-10]

Daily Log

TomDispatch tweeted a link to the Robert Reich article I cited yesterday. I replied:

"Coddling dictators" isn't a strategy to get re-elected, but not escalating conflicts by shaming other countries is a good idea; Trump's willingness to deal with anyone could have been his saving grace in foreign relations; too bad it's no good at it.

Weekend Roundup

Blog link.

Late-breaking tweet from @realDonaldTrump: "Nobody wants a Low IQ person in charge of our Country," trying to deflect from the obvious by adding that "Sleepy Joe is definitely a Low IQ person!" Sure, he's never struck me as especially bright, but it's rather clever that the Democrats are nominating someone Trump cannot attack without the slanders reflecting back on him.

Trump's approval rate at 538 is down to 40.6%, with 56.1% disapprove. That's the biggest split I can recall.

Onion headline: Officials warn defunding police could lead to spike in crime from ex-officers with no outlet for violence. When I mentioned this to my wife, she already had examples to cite. Article cites "L.A. police chief Michel Moore" as saying:

The truth is that there are violent people in our society, and we need a police department so they have somewhere to go during the day to channel their rage. If these cuts are allowed to continue, we could be looking at a very real future where someone with a history of domestic abuse is able to terrorize their spouse with impunity instead of being occupied testing out new tactical military equipment or pepper-spraying some random teens. The fact that these dangerous attackers and killers are being gainfully employed by the LAPD is the only thing standing between us and complete chaos.

By the way, there is a new batch of questions and answers, not all on music. Ask more, here.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • Trump saw his Tulsa rally as a chance to reset his reelection campaign. It did not go well.

  • Nonwhite jail officers were not allowed to guard George Floyd's killer.

• Hannah Allam: Vehicle attacks rise as extremists target protesters.

• Isaac J Bailey: We don't need to cancel George Washington. But we should be honest about who he was. I agree with that. Washington, and for that matter Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe are not just important figures in American history, but can also still be inspiring. In some respects, I could argue the same for Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, to pick two highly problematic characters who have received some critical attention recently. Nor am I much bothered by statues of Christopher Columbus, although I can't think of any redeeming qualities he had. Again, the history should be made clear, but I'm not sure the icons matter much. The Confederates are one exception I'll grant: the sooner we get rid of these tokens of white supremacy, the better. And I hope some day the deliberately orchestrated plot to names things after Ronald Reagan gets unrolled. Nothing good can be linked back to his legacy. And if you don't want to melt all that "art" down, perhaps store it in a musty museum somewhere -- as long as it's treated with the solemnity of Auschwitz. By the way, I'm totally cool with John Wayne airport could get a new name that doesn't celebrate a homophobic white supremacist.

• Riley Beggin:

  • Trump thanks the "great people" in a video featuring a supporter yelling "white power".

  • What we know about a shooting at a protest in Louisville: "One person was killed at an anti-racism and police brutality protest."

  • US must release children from detention centers due to Covid-19, judge rules.

  • Trump signs an executive order on prosecuting those who destroy monuments.

• Steve Benen: How the GOP gave up on governing in order to keep winning elections: Excerpt from Benen's new book, The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics. More on this "no governing" meme below.

• Charles M Blow: Can we call Trump a killer? Argues for "his culpability in the neglectful handling of the coronavirus." That's a distinction I don't find terribly interesting, but there are other cases where the evidence is undeniable, like the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Suleimani, which Trump has bragged about. You might object that all US presidents order killings abroad, but that's no excuse let alone comfort. Obama got his first taste of blood when he ordered the killing of a Somali pirate, and that just opened the floodgates, leading to hundreds of drone killings and the summary execution of Osama Bin Laden, as well as the Air Force's casual slaughter of bystanders. You might object that the sheer numbers lost to Trump's delayed Covid-19 reaction and premature re-opening far exceed the drone kill count (perhaps not the military offensives), and besides here we're talking dead Americans, but negligence is always messy to prove. On the other hand, where has Trump not been negligent and careless? The Mexico border and Puerto Rico are two cases that leap to mind, and I expect you can find bodies there, too. On the other hand, calling him Killer is too likely to be taken as flattery. I'll wait for the ICC indictments.

• Max Blumenthal:

  • How a US and Qatari regime change deception produced 'Caesar' sanctions driving Syria towards famine.

  • From Occupation to 'Occupy': The Israelification of American domestic security.

• Jim Bovard: The Korean War atrocities no one wants to talk about. Technically, the Korea War is America's longest running war -- 70 years this week -- because the US never had the decency to acknowledge that it was pointless and over. But that's hardly the only thing the US remains in denial over. More on Korea:

  • Khang Vu: Trump is wrecking South Korea's relationship with North Korea.

  • Max Balhorn: How South Korea's pro-democracy movement fought to ban "murderous tear gas".

  • Doug Bandow: We should celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Korean War by leaving: "The US doesn't need to protect the south any more." More pointedly, the US is keeping South Korea from negotiating its own separate peace -- as such, the US presence is more threatening than reassuring.

  • Dan DePetris: Don't tie peace on the Korean Peninsula to denuclearization in the North. We have managed to live with "hostile" powers possessing nuclear weapons since 1950, and none have used those bombs against us (unlike what the US did to Japan in 1945, when the US still had a monopoly on such terror). The only thing that makes North Korea different is that we've insisted on not formally ending the war which de facto ended in 1953. The only way to lessen the threat is to reduce the degree of hostility, which at present mostly takes the form of crippling economic sanctions against the North, and to open up formal lines of communication and trade. Recognizing that North Korea has nuclear weapons and the rocketry to deliver them is at this point common sense. Morever, it's clear that the only reason they bothered to develop such useless weapons is to force the US to recognize that they're too dangerous not to treat with the basic respect that normal nations routinely show each other. For more, see the Reckford article below, which also cites the failure of sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela to produce any results imagined as favorable to the US.

  • Jessica Lee: The Korean War started the trend of endless wars for America. How do we change course?

    The United States is not equipped to solve every global problem. No nation is. In the case of the Korean War, our failure to close that chapter of history has allowed mistrust to fester for so long that détente seems impossible, despite the fact that lowering tensions would protect U.S. interests in the region better than the status quo.

  • Owen Miller: Uncovering the hidden history of the Korean War.

  • Kap Seol: The US didn't bring freedom to South Korea -- its people did.

  • Seong-ho Sheen: To have any chance at ending the Korea War, America must become more flexible.

  • Louie Reckford: Why Trump's 'maximum pressure' campaigns are a maximum failure.

• John Cassidy: Donald Trump's big problem with senior voters.

• Kyle Cheney/Leah Nylen: Prosecutor says he was pressured to cut Roger Stone 'a break' because of his ties to Trump.

• Sarah Churchwell: American Fascism: It has happened here.

  American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn't mean they're not fascist, it means they're not European and it's not the 1930s. They remain organized around classic fascist tropes of nostalgic regeneration, fantasies of racial purity, celebration of an authentic folk and nullification of others, scapegoating groups for economic instability or inequality, rejecting the legitimacy of political opponents, the demonization of critics, attacks on a free press, and claims that the will of the people justifies violent imposition of military force. Vestiges of interwar fascism have been dredged up, dressed up, and repurposed for modern times. Colored shirts might not sell anymore, but colored hats are doing great.

• Max Cohen: Bernie's student army learns to live with Biden. Given time (and Trump), stories like this were bound to appear.

• Aaron Ross Coleman: Protesters win a new investigation into Elijah McClain's death.

• Nancy Cook/Adam Cancryn: Trump team weights a CDC scrubbing to deflect mounting criticism. Does he know anything about management other than "you're fired"?

• Ranjani Chakraborty: What "defund the police" really means.

• Fabiola Cineas:

  • These protests feel different because they're shifting public opinion: Interiew with Megan Ming Francis.

    As she points out in her book, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State, the NAACP from 1909 to 1923 mobilized state-building by first shifting public opinion, then creating change within political and legal structures. And according to polls, opinion is already shifting: In 2015, just 51 percent of Americans believed racism is a big problem in the US; now 76 percent of Americans do.

  • The menacing symbolism of the noose: "Noose incidents are uncoincidentally on the rise as protesters continue to demand justice for Black lives."

• Eli Clifton: The hedge fund man behind pro-Trump media's new war on China. Huayi Zhang, associated with Robert Mercer.

• Jason Ditz:

  • Trump plans to cut another 4,000 US troops from Afghanistan: "Plan would leave 4,500 left in Afghanistan by autumn."

  • Trump administration mulls ending Congressional review of arms sales.

• Tiffanie Drayton: Global protests reveal that white supremacy is a problem everywhere.

• John Feffer: What will it take to defeat Trumpism? "Learning lessons from the end of the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and Saddam's Iraq" -- a mixed bag of examples, all three thoroughly defeated militarily (Iraq least decisively), then allowed to reconstitute themselves (the Confederacy most along its original, white supremacist lines). It's much easier for a foreign power to defeat a malevolent faction (slaveholders, Nazis, Baathists) than it is to keep those ideas from re-emerging in the defeated populace. Still, the relative success in de-Nazifying Germany has more to do with ethnic unity (vs. the black-white divide in the South, and the Sunni-Shiite-Kurd divide in Iraq), and the annihilated value of Nazism for the resurgence of German capitalism. (A big part of the reason Germany recovered so well was the imposition of worker participation in corporate boards, which has mostly kept German corporations from turning into predatory profit-scrapers like their American and British counterparts.) Still, I wonder whether Feffer isn't making too much out of Trumpism. Given the incoherence of its leader and the ineptness of its followers, it's likely after defeat to break down into its constituent parts and crawl back into the woodwork, festering, waiting for its next charismatic revival.

  Feffer notes that "in West Germany in 1947, 55% of those living under the US occupation believed that 'National Socialism was a good idea badly carried out.'" The occupation of Germany at that time was still pretty harsh, and poverty was widespread, but after the Bundesrepublic gained independence in 1949, and the economy boomed with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, Nazi sympathies faded away. The only sure way to get rid of Trumpism is to fix the problems it arose to fight, or show that those problems aren't real.

• Russell Arben Fox: The coronavirus in Kansas: The first 100 days. Covid-19 cases have continued to rise, with Sedgwick County topping 1,000 cases. For more, see John Handy/Andy Tsubass Field: Kansas communities see dramatic spikes in coronavirus cases.

• Andrew Freedman/Matthew Cappucci: Historic Saharan dust event fouls air along Gulf Coast as next blast enters Caribbean.

• Susan B Glasser: Trump retreats to his Hannity bunker: "Beaten by the pandemic and down in the polls, a President and his propagandist create an alternate reality."

• Amy Goldstein/Emily Guskin: Almost one-third of black Americans know someone who has died of covid-19, survey shows: Compare to 9% of white Americans.

• Alex Henderson: Respected marketing guru explains how Trump could 'monetize' a loss to Biden in November -- and make millions of dollars from his far-right MAGA base: Donny Deutsch.

• Eoin Higgins: Why a socialized system like Medicare for All beats for-profit healthcare in one chart of covid-19 infection rates.

• Gil Hochberg: An anti-colonialist Zionist? Remembering Albert Memmi: "The great prophet of anti-colonialism embraces Zionism without ever questioning its colonial implications." Memmi was born in Tunisia, was Jewish, wrote The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) and many other books, was "asked to leave" when Tunisia became independent, lived in France until dying at age 99. Also on Memmi:

  • David Lloyd: Albert Memmi: Contradictions of the colonial condition.

• Jack Holmes: There is no plan. There is no second-term agenda. Takeaway from a Hannity interview, but just because Trump couldn't think of an agenda doesn't mean there won't be one. Trump has long delegated odious tasks like thinking and doing to the little people (mostly, it seems, Pence and Kushner).

  The fact is that the Republican Party hasn't been much interested in governing the country for some time. They want to deregulate industries whose executives pay the campaign bills, and cut taxes on the donor class, and knuckle immigrants, but the idea of drawing up a comprehensive set of policies to make life better for the broader American public has long been anathema. (The Democrats often govern incompetently, and with too much regard for the preferences of powerful interests over those of working people, but they do seek to govern the country.) Trump is merely the most garish expression of this, turning the nation's highest governing office into a rolling circus act while shredding the institutions of democracy, and while the termites of the state go to work behind the scenes.

  This thing about the Republicans not being interested in governing has been making the rounds lately, and rather misses the point. The Republicans are obsessed with grabbing and monopolizing power, but they actually have a very narrow definition of governing. Their aim is to use power to accumulate more power, so they mostly see the government as a vast patronage machine that can be used to reward their supporters and punish their enemies, and that's about it. The closest thing any Republican had to a vision was Tom DeLay's K Street Project, where they demanded that lobbyists support their culture war in order to qualify for graft favors. But fear seems to drive them even more than greed: by seizing power, they deny it to their mortal enemies, the Democrats, who if given the opening would surely also use their power to reward their supporters and punish their enemies. That view isn't fair because Democrats habitually try to rule for the benefit of everyone, whereas Republicans are much more discriminating in who they help and hurt. Where Republicans most obviously fail is in trying to govern in a crisis. They don't plan, they don't prepare, their graft becomes visible, and quite often they simply don't care. Trump is the worst ever in this regard, but you have to go back generations to find competent Republican administrators. A big part of this can be traced back to how the Republican campaign machinery is designed expressly to do nothing but attack Democrats. Trump has no agenda for a second term because he doesn't even comprehend what he's been doing in his first term -- except, that is, relentlessly attacking his numerous enemies. That's all he's got to campaign on.

• Sean Illing: "It's ideologue meets grifter": How Bill Barr made Trumpism possible. Interview with David Rohde, author of a New Yorker profile on Barr.

• Christopher Ingraham: New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic.

• Umair Irfan: Why it's so damn hot in the Arctic right now. Related:

  • Eoin Higgins: Siberian forest fires increase by fivefold in week since record high temperature.

• Alex Isenstadt:

  • Trump admits it: He's losing. So the new strategy is what? Pity?

  • Inside Trump's Oklahoma debacle

• Roge Karma: 4 ideas to replace traditional police officers.

• Ezra Klein:

  • Trump's reality TV presidency is being crushed by reality. Draws a lot on Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney's chief campaign strategist in 2012 and author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, talking a lot about the incompetency and incoherence of Trump's government. One thing Stevens says: "To me, the only thing remotely like it is the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, because the dissonance between what the party was and what it said it was was just so great."

  • In praise of polarization: "How identity politics changed the Democratic Party -- for the better." Without the guiding hand of identity there wouldn't be polarization, a subject that Klein flogged to death in his book, Why We're Polarized.

• Carolyn Kormann: A disastrous summer in the arctic.

• Paul Krugman:

  • America didn't give up on Covid-19. Republicans did. "Partisanship has crippled our response."

  • A plague of willful ignorance: "Trump has empowered America's anti-rational streak."

• Nicole Lafond: Barr joins Trump effort to will antifa into existence with new 'anti-gov extremists' task force.

• Eric Levitz: The 'V-shaped' recovery has died of coronavirus. Wasn't going to happen anyway, because the panic and lockdown changed buying habits in ways that simply re-opening wouldn't (and couldn't) undo. Perhaps at some point, if the stimulus remains robust and is widely distributed people will feel a desire to spend some of their savings on big-ticket items, but that's a while off. More likely, the Republicans will kill off stimulus (except for the stock market) and we'll get a double-dip recession instead. (Was tempted to say W-shaped, but still not sure of the eventual upstroke.)

• Ryan Lizza/Laura Barron-Lopez/Holly Otterbein: Why Biden is rejecting Black Lives Matter's boldest proposals: "Activists want to defund the police. Biden won't even legalize pot." This stuff doesn't bother me, at least not like his Venezuela tweet did. He'll drag his feet, but he's at least somewhat open to reason. And given the gauntlet that any sort of reform has to run, he'll likely be there at the end, not leading but also not obstructing, and that's probably where his broadest supporters want him.

• German Lopez:

  • The US's new surge in coronavirus cases, explained.

  • Donald Trump's long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020: "Trump has repeatedly claimed he's 'the least racist person.' His history suggests otherwise." I'd suggest using a stronger verb, like "shouts" or "screams." This piece refers back to an important October 14, 2016 study by Sarah Posner/David Neiwert: How Trump took hate groups mainstream. They also wrote: Meet the horde of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other extremist leaders endorsing Donald Trump.

• Robert Mackey:

  • Trump suggests Navy sent $5 billion to Wisconsin firm to help him win election.

  • Trump made a racist joke in a Phoenix megachurch and the crowd went wild. Well, "Kung Flu," so not much of a joke.

  • Through creative accounting, Trump tries to cast America's death toll as an achievement. Note: article from May 2. Death count has nearly doubled since then, so today's lesson has less to do with lying at the time than with the consequences of such deceit.

• Josh Marshall: Princeton drops Woodrow Wilson from name of public policy school. Wilson was president of Princeton before moving into politics, so this particular naming was an obvious choice at the time, and I doubt it's being given up lightly. Wilson did several notably progressive things as president. He also started two wars with Mexico, engaged in a lot of "gunboat diplomacy" in the Caribbean, led the US into WWI, and ran a very aggressive campaign against war dissenters -- notably jailing presidential candidate Eugene Debs. He represented the US personally in the talks leading to the Treaty of Versailles, making a promise that David Fromkin turned on its head for his essential book on the post-WWI Middle East: A Peace to End All Peace. Well into the Cold War era, he was revered by Democrats for his internationalism, and his opponents' isolationism is still a dirty epithet. Many of these things should be giving us doubts about his legacy, but the one that's finally catching up with him is explained by Dylan Matthews in his 2015 article: Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist -- even by the standards of his time, which was written after Princeton students started objecting to his name heading Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs.

• Madeline Marshall: Why America's police look like soldiers: "Why are the police bringing military assault rifles to protests?"

• Dylan Matthews: How police unions became so powerful -- and how they can be tamed.

• Media Matters: This could be an ongoing series, but for now just a taste of how Fox et al. are handling the debacle:

  • As America faces 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, the national death toll is absent from Fox prime time
  • As more outbreaks emerge, Trump's propagandists suggest the coronavirus is a hoax (again)
  • Fox & Friends mentions the US coronavirus death toll for the first time in over a week -- to make fun of Joe Biden
  • Fox News is why Trump thinks he can get away with the Nixonian corruption of Barr's DOJ
  • Fox prime-time shows have covered the toppling of statues more than 3 times as much as coronavirus this week
  • Right-wing media vilify Black Lives Matter as the movement grows.
  • Tucker Carlson says ending qualified immunity would "end law enforcement"
  • Tucker Carlson unleashes deranged rant calling for protesters to be labeled domestic terrorists, arrested and paraded "in front of camera like MS-13"
  • Watch a Fox News panel attempt to spin a Fox News poll that shows devastating numbers for Trump.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • Trump's DOJ asks the Supreme Court to strip health care from 23 million people: "The government's arguments are ridiculous."

  • The night they'll tear old Dixie down: "For generations, a single street paying homage to Robert E Lee and his Confederate allies has upheld Richmond's racist foundations."

  • The court decision dismissing charges against Michael Flynn is astonishingly bad. Thanks to "Trump-appointed Judge Neomi Rao," who "has a history of writing dubious opinions that benefit Trump and his allies."

    Meanwhile, Rao, who served in the Trump White House and only became a judge in 2019, has quickly built a reputation as a rubber stamp for the Trump administration's preferred outcomes. She wrote a widely mocked dissenting opinion that would have blocked much of Congress's power to investigate Trump. And she sought to delay the House's ability to obtain documents related to former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.

  • A top Democratic defender of the filibuster says it may need to go: Chris Coons (D-DE).

  • Justice Alito's jurisprudence of white racial innocence: "Alito gets very upset if you suggest that racism exists."

  • 6 major questions the Supreme court still needs to resolve this term.

    • The Court could effectively eliminate the right to an abortion
    • Trump could gain sweeping immunity from congressional oversight
    • The religious right could be one of the biggest winners from this term
    • Trump could gain broad new power to fire people

  • DC is closer to becoming a state now than it has ever been. For some background, see: Alan Greenblatt: The US almost tore itself apart to get to 50 states. Can DC make it 51? Not if Republicans can help it. See:

    • Jenna Portnoy: DC statehood approved by US House for first time in history.

    • Nancy LeTourneau: What Tom Cotton's racist speech against DC statehood says about the GOP. By the way, LeTourneau also wrote: Republicans are delusional to hope that Trump will change. I read this right after Martin Longman: What happens when Trump stops believing he can win reelection? Longman quoted Lindsey Graham claiming that "Trump can win with 'a little more message discipline' and a focus on policies that separate him and Biden." The problem with all this is that Trump's policies are even more unpopular than he is -- part of the reason why he lies about them all the time.

• Nicola Narea:

  • The Supreme Court just allowed Trump's expansion of deportations to go unchecked.

  • A new Trump proclamation will block foreign workers.

• Ella Nilsen: Progressive Black candidates swept key races on Tuesday. Results don't look quite that weeping, although Middle school principal Jamaal Bowman unseats Eliot Engel in New York was a big story (and not close, despite Engel endorsements from NY Dem leaders, not to mention AIPAC).

• Anna North:

  • Do Americans support defunding the police? It depends on how you ask the question. "A new poll shows a majority of Americans support redirecting funds from police to other services."

  • /Fabiola Cineas: The fight for justice in the Breonna Taylor case, explained.

• Ricardo Nulla: The coronavirus surge that Texas could have seen coming.

• Chad Painter: 1960s coverage of Stonewall shows that mainstream press has always struggled to cover protests: "New Yorkers reading the local, mainstream papers wouldn't have known that a new civil rights movement was unfolding."

• William J Perry/Tom Z Collins: Who can we trust with the nuclear button? No one.

• Cameron Peters: Trump is holding a rally in one of the country's worst Covid-19 hot spots: Next stop (Tuesday, June 23): Phoenix, Arizona, where "cases in the state have increased by 174 percent over the past three weeks, and the Arizona Health Department reported a record-high 3,600 new cases on Tuesday alone."

• Craig Pittman: Can Trump beat the Florida convention curse? I didn't know there was one -- Nixon won after Miami Beach conventions in 1968 and 1972; the Democrats also did Miami Beach in 1972, McGovern losing to Nixon; and Romney lost after being nominated in Tampa in 2012 -- but Trump is bound to bring out the worst in the state.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Roger Stone prosecutor will testify about political interference from the Justice Department.

  • The firing of SDNY US Attorney Geoffrey Berman, explained: "It's part of a larger pattern."

• John Quiggin: Modern monetary theory: Neither modern, nor monetary, nor (mainly) theoretical?: Review of the MMT-based Macroeconomics textbook by William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts.

• Anita Rao/Pat Dillon/Kim Kelly/Zak Bennett: Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote? A series of articles in the Guardian on "the fight to vote":

  • Shilpa Jindia: 'This is a war': Republicans ramp up bid to control election maps for next decade.

  • Sam Levine: Republicans devote $20m and 50,000 people to efforts to restrict voting.

  • Sam Levine/Anna Massoglia: Revealed: Conservative group fighting to restrict voting tied to powerful dark money network.

  • Sam Levine/Ankita Rao: In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted voting rights -- how has it changed the US?.

• Robert Reich: Donald Trump's re-election playbook: 25 ways he'll lie, cheat and abuse his power: "From now until November, opponents of the most lawless president in history face a fight for democracy itself." Things like postponing the election remain to be seen, and would be hard to pull off. "Coddle dictators" sticks in my craw. Ever since WWII, US foreign policy has supported dictators who were deemed good for business, while opposing ones (and, by the way, democracies) who weren't (e.g., Iran, Guatemala, Chile). The only way Trump deviates from this is that he needs "good for business" to be good for him personally. Whether the US cherishes or ignores human rights depends strictly on which side of the good/bad ledger a country falls.

• David Roberts:

  • Democrats' infrastructure bill has a special delivery: ELectric mail trucks.

  • US public opinion supports action on climate change -- and has for years.

• Corey Robin: Forget about it. The author continues to be shocked that others can still be shocked by the latest Trumpian outrages, given how many comparable examples even a cursory remembrance of history offers up.

  I've been reading and writing about conservatism since the summer of 2000, when I interviewed William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz for a Lingua Franca article. I was surprised to hear how discontented these elder statesmen were now that the Cold War was over. It was almost as if they longed for the United States -- or at least themselves -- to be back in the grip of murderous anxiety, ready to embark on a terrible rampage. Since then, what has always struck me is how turbulent and intemperate, how savage and ferocious, the dream life of the right truly is -- even among, especially among, its most staid figures.

  When Trump became a contender for the White House, I saw him as an extension or fulfillment of the conservative movement rather than a break with it. Almost everything people found outrageous and objectionable about his candidacy -- the racism, the contempt for institutions, the ambient violence, the hostility to the rule of law -- I'd been seeing in the right for years. Little in Trump surprised me, except for the fact that he won.

  Whenever I said this, people got angry with me. They still do. For months, now years, I puzzled over that anger. . . . Historical consciousness can be a conservative force, lessening the sting of urgency, deflating the demands of the now, leaving us adrift in a sea of relativism. But it need not be . . . Telling a story of how present trespass derives from past crime or even original sin can inspire a more strenuous refusal, a more profound assault on the now. It can fuel a desire to be rid of not just the moment but the moments that made this moment, to ensure that we never have to face this moment again. But only if we acknowledge what we're seldom prepared to admit: that the monster has been with us all along.

• Charlie Savage/Eric Schmitt/Michael Schwartz: Russia secretly offered Afghan militants bounties to kill US troops, intelligence says: "The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment." This is supposedly a big deal, but sounds like a total crock. While Afghan government and Taliban have continued to attack each other, US fatalities in Aghanistan have dwindled to practically nothing -- not just since Trump signed a cease-fire with the Taliban, but you have to go as far back as 2014 to find a month with 10 US fatalities. So if Russia is paying a bounty, they're not finding many takers, and it's not costing them much. It seems much more likely that the whole story was hatched by "deep state" figures to try to scuttle the Taliban peace deal, to reverse US troop withdrawals, to gin up anti-Russian sentiment for a new Cold War, and (what the hell) to make Trump look bad by drawing out the Trump-Putin buddy meme.

  This left me wondering whether the US had actually paid bounties for dead Russians during the 1980s, when inflicting casualties on Russians was the explicit goal of US support for Afghan mujahideen. I tried googling that, but all I got were echoes of the NY Times piece, like the Guardian's Outrage mounts over report Russia offered bounties to Afghanistan militants for killing US soldiers (and not wanting to be left out or devalued, Russia offered bounty to kill UK soldiers). Similar articles were all over the supposedly liberal press (Google it yourself: these are from the first two pages): ABC, Chicago Tribune, CNBC, CNN, LA Times, MSNBC, NPR, Reuters, Time, USA Today, Vox, Washington Post, Axios. Some bought the story but tried to put the focus on Trump, as in Jacob Kuntson: Trump denies report he was briefed on alleged Russian bounties on US troops (my favorite line here was "The report was confirmed by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and CNN," meaning that those organizations picked up and ran the story); also Bob Brigham: Trump remained silent as Putin paid to kill US soldiers; Peter Wade: Back from golfing, Trump denies knowing about Russian bounties to kill US soldiers.

• Isaac Sebenius/James K Sebenius: How many needless Covid-19 deaths were caused by delays in responding? Most of them.

• David Smilde: Joe Biden should not try to out-hawk Trump on Venezuela. Biden's tweet on Venezuela is one of the few things that genuinely disurb me about his nomination. It is factually inaccurate -- Trump may "admire thugs and dictators" but not Nicolas Maduro; he clearly loathes Maduro, and is using the power and influence of the United States to overturn Maduro's election victory and replace him with a pliable puppet. I"m not even sure that Maduro qualifies as a "thug and dictator" -- not that I doubt that power is seductive and tends to corrupt, but as far as I can tell, most of Venezuela's problems have been imposed by the US, and their propaganda is formulaic and suspect as usual. Biden's vow that he "will stand with the Venezuelan people and for democracy" shows, to put it charitably, how completely he has been taken in by the propaganda. If you want a definition of "thug and dictator," what about someone who would impose a puppet government on another nation? If Biden had any respect for democracy abroad, he wouldn't be casting his lot with Trump and the oil moguls on this issue. And if he had even the slightest self-awareness of how much havoc and misery US intervention in Latin America has caused, he would grasp the folly of trying to force American views on others. Nor do you have to go back to Monroe and Wilson for examples: the recent coups in Bolivia and Brazil are currently creating human rights disasters that reflect back on us. Biden needs to break with that legacy, not echo it.

• Emily Stewart: The Georgia legislature finally passes a hate crime bill in the wake of Ahmaud Arbery's death. When signed, that will leave only three states without hate crime laws (the others are South Carolina, Wyoming, and Arkansas).

• Rachel Stohl: Defense industry cheers as the Trump administration is poised to loosen restrictions on drone exports. Critics complain that "the Trump administration appears to be sacrificing long-term security goals for short-term economic gain" -- i.e., for the arms merchants, not for those who foot the military budget. Of course, if selling arms leads to an arms race, the industry would see long-term economic gains as well, and we would all wind up less secure.

• Lawrence H Summers/Anna Stansbury: US workers need more power: Good title, but don't fear, he's not really offering much. No talk about co-determination, let alone making companies fully employee-owned, which is the direction we should be moving in.

• Matt Taibbi: On "White Fragility": Review of Robin DiAngelo's book, "a few thoughts on America's smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism," one of which is it "may be the dumbest book ever written." I rather doubt that, if for no other reason than that I recall Taibbi's review of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat.

• Michael Tomasky: Biden's journey left.

• Nick Turse: Pentagon war game includes scenario for military response to domestic Gen Z rebellion. "Gen Z" is defined as those born after 1996.

• Peter Wade: Trump can't name one thing he'd prioritize if re-elected: Good.

• Paul Waldman:

  • Here's what a second term of Trump would look like.

  • /Greg Sargent: Trump's unhinged crusade to destroy Obamacare boomerangs back on GOP.

• Alex Ward:

  • The head of US broadcasting is leaning toward pro-Trump propaganda. Biden would fire him. Michael Pack, head of US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which runs "Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting," so is already neck-deep in the propaganda business.

    Pack, a close ally of former top Trump strategist Steve Bannon, began his three-year tenure just this month and wasted no time making dramatic changes to reshape the agency. Last week, within hours of introducing himself to employees, he purged four top officials from the agency's media organizations. The two chiefs of Voice of America (VOA), the most prominent outlet in the agency, had already resigned earlier over Pack's appointment.

    Related:

    • Yasha Levine: US state propaganda outlets censor Black Lives Matter protests: "It's hard for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to sell the USA as a shining example of civil liberties and democracy when the internet is drowning in pics of American killer cops beating down anyone in sight."

    • Gareth Porter: FBI launches open attack on 'foreign' alternative media outlets challenging US foreign policy.

  • The real villain of John Bolton's Trump book is John Bolton. More Bolton book:

    • David Badash: 'Trump comes off like a needy supplicant' in John Bolton's new book.

    • Juan Cole: The final defeat of the John Bolton hawks? How Russia and China could humiliate Trump on eve of election by lifting Iran arms embargo.

    • Michael Galant: John Bolton is not your hero, no matter what his book says.

    • Patrick Iber: John Bolton's accidentally unflattering self-portrait.

    • Fred Kaplan: John Bolton's book is a brutal, searing indictment . . . of John Bolton: "No one should let this man in 'the room where it happens' ever again."

    • James North: Reflexive support for Israel is a vital part of John Bolton's world view. This reminds me of a story (which I can't readily resource) where David Ben-Gurion tried to offer advice to Charles De Gaulle on how to handle the rebellion in Algeria. De Gaule stopped him, asking why France would want to get stuck in a never-ending war. De Gaule saw the folly of that, but Bolton only sees the opportunity -- a prescription for his life's work.

    • Trita Parsi: John bolton can stomach Kim Jong Un's North Korea, but not Iran. "The real revelation of the former national security advisor's memoir is that he placed Israeli and Saudi interests ahead of America's" -- a point better made without the Kim shaming. Bolton probably had more individual effect in scuttling the North Korea opening than he did on Iran, where he echoed the positions of others who already had Trump's ear.

    • Barbara Slavin: Bolton's book is an instruction manual for how not to do foreign policy.

  • How Trump's China obsession could derail nuclear arms control, in one tweet: "Bolton makes clear President Trump's foreign policy is absolutely terrible -- but Bolton's is much, much worse."

  • /Nicole Narea: The US military will stay on the US-Mexico border, even with migration falling.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Trump is rescuing Maine lobstermen from himself, and blaming Obama: "The lobster bailout, explained."

  • Martha McSally's bailout proposal for the travel industry, explained: "The Arizona senator wants to give each US adult $4,000 to go on vacation -- but only if you're not too poor." The bottom line is that this is another Republican tax cut for the rich, albeit limited and dressed up funny.

  • Trump's reelection polling is looking really bad. Why does he always have to note: "After all, Michael Dukakis was up by 17 points in mid-July 1988"? Not only is that a bummer, there are lots of reasons why this year is nothing like that year.

  • Trump's catastrophic failure on testing is no joke: "The president is continually more focused on good numbers than good policy."

  • Why it feels like there are a lot more fireworks this year. No, I hadn't noticed. I don't think I've heard a single firework bang so far this month, or maybe this year. No doubt I will hear some closer to the 4th, but probably less than usual. The old Lawrence Stadium used to shoot off fireworks at least once a week, but they tore it down, built a new ballpark, and have yet to play a single game there. Wichita is not traditionally hostile to fireworks -- although the Fire Dept. had a lot more say in the matter when I was growing up than in recent years. I went out driving one July 4th and identified at least 20 places that were shooting off major fireworks (of course, the big one was downtown, which we could watch from out front lawn). Then I drove down Main St. toward where I grew up, and it looked like a war zone with all the debris. My mother especially loved fireworks, but I'd be just as happy never to see or hear any ever again.

• Li Zhou:

  • Trump's racist references to the coronavirus are his latest effort to stoke xenophobia.

  • Trump is still using racist terms to describe the coronavirus. That has real consequences for Asian Americans. "The president's rhetoric is seen as fueling a surge in hate incidents toward Asian Americans."

  • Senate Democrats say the Republican police reform bill is "not salvageable".

  • /Ella Nilsen: The House just passed a sweeping police reform bill: "It's not expected to go anywhere in the Senate, however."

Daily Log

Trying to figure out a sloppy joe recipe. Sources:

1. The Wholesome Dish
2. Five Heart Home
3. The Chunky Chef
4. Beef Is What's for Dinner
5. All Recipes
6. Taste of Home
7. Culintary Hill

• ground beef: 1 lb
• butter: C(1 tbs)
• onion: A(1/2 c), C(1/2 large), D(1 c), E(1/4 c), G(1)
• green bell pepper: A(1/2 c), C(1/3), D(1 c), E(1/4 c)
• garlic: B(2 cloves), C(3)
• tomato sauce: ABG(8 oz), D(14.5 oz)
• tomato paste: C(1 tbs)
• ketchup: BG(1/2 c), C(2/3 c), D(1/4 c), E(3/4 c), F(1 c)
• water: F(1/4 c)
• barbecue sauce: D(1/4 c)
• brown sugar: A(1/2 c), B(1-2 tbs), D(2 tsp), E(3 tsp), F(2 tbs), G(1 tbs)
• worcestershire sauce: B(2 tbs), C(1/2 tsp), DG(1 tbs), F(2 tsp)
• red wine vinegar: A(1 tbs)
• white vinegar: G(1 tbs)
• prepared (yellow) mustard: B(1 tsp), C(1 tsp), E(1 tsp), F(2 tsp)
• dry mustard: D(1 tsp), G(1 tsp)
• chili powder: C(3/4 tsp)
• garlic powder: B(1/2 tsp), E(1/2 tsp), F(1/2 tsp)
• onion powder: B(1/4 tsp), F(1/2 tsp)
• salt: A(1 tsp), FC(1/2 tsp), EG(to taste)
• ground black pepper: AC(1/4 tsp), BEG(to taste)

Came up with this one.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33485 [33449] rated (+36), 216 [215] unrated (+1).

Don't feel like writing much here. Started the week thinking I'd track down some records by the late Keith Tippett, but quickly got sidetracked by Stan Tracey, an older British pianist who did some duet records with Tippett c. 1977. I then picked up some old World Saxophone Quartet records, adding them to my David Murray Guide. I probably should have done this anyway, but someone on Facebook commented on my missing Revue, which he teased was some kind of consensus pick as the greatest jazz album of the decade. The old Gary Bartz records came after reviewing his new one. I should note that Harlem Bush Music, which combines the two albums before Juju Street Songs, was previously A-.

Didn't do much on new records this week. Started most days with golden oldies, then when I sat down at the computer, switched over to old jazz rather than going through my new queue. Best reviewed new records this week were by Bob Dylan and Phoebe Bridgers -- who got more favorable reviews than Dylan this week (32 to 22 in my metacritic file.) I'll check out both soon, but was more curious about Black Eyed Peas (AOTY critic score 50/1, user score 83/30). Not great, but much better than that, with a choice cut called News Today.

New records reviewed this week:

• Ambrose Akinmusire: On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment (2020, Blue Note): [r]: B+(**)
• Gary Bartz and Maisha: Night Dreamer Direct-to-Disc Sessions (2019 [2020], Night Dreamer): [r]: B+(***)
• Black Eyed Peas: Translation (2020, Epic): [r]: B+(***)
• Chromeo: Quarantine Casanova (2020, Chromeo, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Orrin Evans and the Captain Black Big Band: The Intangible Between (2020, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(**)
• Fra Fra: Funeral Songs (2020, Glitterbeat): [r]: B
• Mike: Weight of the World (2020, 10k): [bc]: B+(*)
• Aaron Parks: Little Big II: Dreams of a Mechanical Man (2019 [2020], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(**)
• Perfume Genius: Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (2020, Matador): [r]: B+(*)
• Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Sideways to New Italy (2020, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Misha Mengelberg/Peter Brötzmann/Evan Parker/Peter Bennink/Paul Rutherford/Derek Bailey/Han Bennink: Groupcomposing (1970 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Gary Bartz Ntu Troop: Juju Street Songs (1972-73 [1997], Prestige): [r]: B+(**)
• Gary Bartz Ntu Troop: I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies (1973, Prestige): [r]: B+(***)
• Gary Bartz: Shadows (1991 [1992], Timeless): [r]: B+(**)
• Gary Bartz: ?The Red and Orange Poems (1994, Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)
• Joe Harriott Quintet: Swings High (1967 [2003], Cadillac): [bc]: B+(**)
• Dudu Pukwana & Bob Stuckey: Night Time Is the Right Time: 60s Soho Sounds (1967-68 [2010], Cadillac): [r]: B
• Keith Tippett Tapestry Orchestra: Live at Le Mans (1998 [2009], Edition, 2CD): [r]: B
• Stan Tracey: Showcase (1958, Vogue): [r]: B+(*)
• The Stan Tracey Quartet: Jazz Suite: Inspired by Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (1965, Columbia): [r]: A
• Stan Tracey/Keith Tippett: Supernova (1977 [2008], Resteamed): [r]: B+(**)
• The New Stan Tracey Quartet: For Heaven's Sake (1995 [1996], Cadillac): [r]: B+(***)
• Stan Tracey: Solo : Trio (1997 [1998], Cadillac): [r]: B+(***)
• Stan Tracey & Danny Moss: Just You, Just Me (2003 [2004], Avid): [r]: B+(***)
• Stan Tracey Quartet: Senior Moment (2008 [2009], Resteamed): [r]: B+(**)
• Stan Tracey Quintet: The Flying Pig (2013 [2014], Resteamed): [r]: B+(***)
• Ben Webster/Stan Tracey: Soho Nights Vol. 2 (1964 [2012], Resteamed): [r]: A-
• Ben Webster/Stan Tracey: Soho Nights Vol. 1 (1968 [2008], Resteamed): [r]: B+(***)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Steppin' With the World Saxophone Quartet (1978 [1979], Black Saint): [r]: B
• World Saxophone Quartet: W.S.Q. (1980 [1981], Black Saint): [r]: B+(*)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Revue (1980 [1982], Black Saint): [r]: B+(*)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Live in Zürich (1981 [1984], Black Saint): [r]: B+(*)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Live at Brooklyn Academy of Music (1985 [1986], Black Saint): [r]: B
• World Saxophone Quartet: Four Now (1995 [1996], Justin Time): [r]: B+(**)
• World Saxophone Quartet: Takin' It 2 the Next Level (1996, Justin Time): [r]: B
• World Saxophone Quartet: 25th Anniversary: The New Chapter (2000 [2001], Justin Time): [r]: B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jeff Cosgrove/John Medeski/Jeff Lederer: History Gets Ahead of the Story (Grizzley Music) [07-17]
• Dan Willis and Velvet Gentlemen: The Monk Project (Belle Avenue) [07-17]

Blog link.

All in all, not a very good week for Donald Trump. It started off with Supreme Court rulings that the 1965 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ people, and that Trump's revocation of the DACA program was invalid because the Trump administration failed to explain why. The marches continued, as did the police outrages provoking more demonstrations, but also a few reform stories, and even some indictments and/or dismissals that show that, despite the fury of Trump and the right, protest is getting somewhere. Trump spent much of the week threatening and/or suing his former national security director and his niece for writing books showing some of the many ways he is incompetent and/or vile. And just as we're still processing his recent purge of federal inspectors for trying to do their jobs, he goes off and fires a US attorney who had opened investigations of some of his cronies. He's finding Covid-19 infection rates still on the rise in nearly half of the states, including virtually all of the "red" ones in the South. He expected to finish the week on a high after resuming his campaign rallies in one of those states, only to find the Tulsa arena half-empty (and considerably less than half-masked). It's hard to see how that turns into a win.

Even before the rally, most polls show Trump losing badly to Joe Biden. See Nate Silver: Our new polling averages show Biden leads Trump by 9 points nationally, which shows a bunch of 2016 Trump states flipping: Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, but not quite Iowa (where Biden is -0.6) or Texas (-0.7). Trump's approval rating is 41.4% (vs. 55.2% disapprove). The generic congressional ballot is at 48.4% Democrats, 40.4% Republicans. Of course, too early to count your chickens. The one thing I'm most certain of is that the rest of the 2020 campaign season is going to be the nastiest in American history.

Quite a few sublists below, usually starting with the first piece I found on a subject, so you'll have to scour around to find ones of personal interest. In fact, quite a lot of everything.

Some scattered links this week:

• Sasha Abramsky:

  • Following Supreme Court rulings, Trump attacks the independence of the judiciary.

  • The GOP is getting back to business as usual -- trying to gut social programs.

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • A Siberian town near the Arctic Circle just recorded a 100-degree temperature: Verkhoyansk, average June high 68F.

  • Brazil could surpass the US as the country worst hit by coronavirus this summer: "1 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Brazil." With deaths approaching 50,000.

  • /Sean Collins: The police killing of Rayshard Brooks at a Wendy's drive-through, explained. This happened the previous week. Recent updates include a "felony murder" charge against one police officer and an "aggravated assault" against another.

• Katelyn Burns: Seattle's newly police-free neighborhood, explained.

• Marc Caputo/Matthew Choi: Klobuchar shuts down VP speculation, urges Biden to pick woman of color. Article describes this as "a blow to the chances of Massachusetts' Sen Elizabeth Warren," but that assumes that someone who didn't rate high enough to still be a contender has somehow gained influence by pissing in the punch bowl on the way out. Leaves me with the feeling that not only does she want to torpedo the much more progressive Warren, she also can't bear losing to her fellow midwestern prospects (most often mentioned are Gretchen Whitmer, Tammy Baldwin, and Tammy Duckworth).

• Matthew Chapman: Trump claims his niece signed an NDA, threatens to sue her over tell-all book: report. The niece is Mary L Trump, PhD, the book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. Also:

  • Lachlan Cartwright: Revealed: The family member who turned on Trump.

• Fabiola Cineas:

  • Juneteenth, explained: I have to admit I blew this one. A couple weeks ago when Trump announced his June 19 rally in Tulsa, I assumed that uproar over the date had more to do with the 1921 Tulsa massacre. I knew a fair amount about the latter, but evidently nothing about Juneteenth. Good to get that cleared up.

    • Jamelle Bouie: Why Juneteenth matters: "It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln's promise of "a new birth of freedom." Bouie also wrote: To overturn Trump, we need to overturn white supremacy.

    • Jonathan Chait: Trump: 'I made Juneteenth very famous . . . nobody ever heard of it' before me: "And yet Juneteenth is so ungrateful to Trump."

    • Aaron Ross Coleman: Juneteenth should remind America what it owes black citizens: "As Americans protest, the holiday marks the end of slavery and beckons the country to close the racial wealth gap."

  • The disappearance and death of activist Oluwatoyin Salau, explained.

• Sean Collins: Police killings can be captured in data. The terror police create cannot.

• Jesselyn Cook/Nick Robins-Early: Inside the dangerous online fever swamps of American police: "Cops have a far-right media ecosystem of their own, where they post racist memes, spread disinformation and call for violence against antifa."

• Daniel Denvir: Donald Trump is a menace to American democracy. But he didn't come out of nowhere. "His rise was only possible because of a Republican and Democratic political consensus that has ravaged American politics and society for a generation." Long article, touches on a lot of things. It's certainly true that politics have become more polarized, especially on the very ideological and aggressive right, and Trump in many ways is a logical extension of where the right was already going. Still, I wonder if it might be more fruitful to look at how businessmen have become more imperious and arrogant (and, no coincidence, much richer) over the last 30-40 years. Trump may seem like a major break with previous politicians, but how different is he from the last few generations of CEOs/financiers? (Insert long list of names here, like Jack Welch, Carl Icahn, Charles Koch, Sheldon Adelson, etc.) Trump's instincts are certainly authoritarian, but they strike me as more like despotic monarchs, who grew up in worlds where everyone deferred to them, and fascist (or mafia) strongmen, who came to power by snatching it, and kept it by intimidation.

• Tom Engelhardt: The age of disappointment? Or how the American century ends. These TomDispatch articles get reproduced on various websites, often with slightly different titles. AlterNet calls this The American century is ending decisively with a pyromaniac in the White House.

• Mara Gay: Why was a grim report on police-involved deaths never released?

• Elena Goukassian: Who really was Roy Cohn?: Interview with Ivy Meeropol, who directed a new documentary on Trump's mentor, including his role in getting her grandparents executed, in what Alan Dershowitz thinks "was one of the greatest miscarriages of justice ever in this country."

• Constance Grady: Black authors are on all the bestseller lists right now. But publishing doesn't pay them enough.

• Glenn Greenwald:

  • With the world focused on the pandemic, Israel prepares to annex large swaths of the West Bank.

  • The New York Times admits key falsehoods that drove last year's coup in Bolivia: Falsehoods peddled by the US, its media, and the Times.

• Jeff Halper: Israelizing the American police, Palestinianizing the American people.

• Elahe Izadi/Paul Farhi: The standoff between owners and journalists that's eviscerating Pittsburgh's biggest newspaper. Newspapers are businesses, owned by rich people, who are often tempted to impose their political views on their reporters -- here the signal is the charge of "bias." Free press is a nice concept, but doesn't exist in America -- least of all, evidently, in Pittsburgh.

• Sarah Jones:

  • Seattle-Area Labor Council expels cop union.

  • Trump wanted to send in the troops. Now some are ready to quit.

• Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein:

  • Letting private equity billionaires rob worker retirement funds: "A new Department of Labor rule allows private equity to get into 401(k) plans. One expert estimates a $13.7 billion annual wealth transfer from workers to Wall Street tycoons."

  • The government can afford anything it wants: Review of Stephanie Kelton: The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy. I must admit that I've never understood MMT, although I have noticed that the predictions of "deficit scolds" have rarely (if ever) come true -- so it wouldn't surprise me if there is more flexibility for deficit spending than is commonly assumed (e.g., by those bemoaning how Bernie Sanders could ever pay for his proposals). Consider:

    "The problem we have today," Kelton writes, "is that economic policy is often prescribed by people who, despite holding advanced degrees in economics, possess no real understanding of how our monetary system works." The idea is that a basic understanding of how money works, of MMT precepts, could empower any citizen to fight for a better world. But this will only happen once we reconcile what the country is capable of and what the people are willing to do. "Austerity," Kelton writes, "is a failure of imagination." So what kind of society do we want to imagine, if we unshackle ourselves from the language of taxpayer-funded, deficit-diminishing government? Are we willing to stop shoveling resources into the military (and its domestic paramilitary offshoot, police departments) and start diverting them to working-class communities? If everyone deserves to be safe, housed, and prosperous, let's instruct the Federal Reserve to start marking up some different accounts.

• Seung Min Kim: Top State Department official resigns in protest of Trump's response to racial tensions in the country: Mary Elizabeth Taylor, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs..

• Jen Kirby:

  • Remember Brexit? It's still not over.

  • The 7 most disturbing allegations about Trump in John Bolton's forthcoming book. Bolton didn't get to start any major wars during his brief tenure as Trump's national security adviser, but at least he got a book out of it, The Room Where It Happened, and enough publicity that it's likely to be a bestseller (assuming a Trump administration lawsuit fails to quash it), setting himself up for a return to the limelight should Tom Cotton or Marco Rubio or some similar reptile become president. Subheds (which really aren't more disturbing than what you already know):

    • Trump asked Xi for help with his electoral prospects -- as if he ever thought about anything else.
    • Trump told Xi to go ahead with the internment of Muslims in China -- as if Xi cares what he thinks.
    • Trump learns about nukes . . . Trump didn't know that the UK has nuclear weapons, but (unlike the US) they've never used them.
    • . . . and about geography -- well, Finland used to be part of Russia, and the US actually did land marines in Venezuela, and later effectively owned its oil industry.
    • Trump wanted to withdraw from NATO with a dramatic made-for-TV scene
    • Trump had some issues with the Constitution -- like wanting to execute "scumbags" who rat him out; this is a polite way of saying he doesn't understand why a president shouldn't be able to do things any self-respecting mob boss would.
    • Meddling in Ukraine, yes, but so many other things

    More reaction to Bolton:

    • Nancy LeTourneau: John Bolton didn't tell the truth when it mattered most: "Instead, he kept his mouth shut until he could cash in on a book deal." This is the popular line among people who are eager to grasp at any cudgel to attack Trump, but we should be clear that Bolton always had his own private agenda, and it always included concern for his bottom line. Even before his book deal, Bolton has long made an unseemly amount of money by consistently hewing to the most hawkish line allowed at any given moment, even as each of his arguments has proven disastrous. That he occasionally finds Trump insufficiently belligerent is more of an indictment of him than of Trump. That he occasionally finds Trump to be stupid, vain and petty just shows that he can marshal ordinary perceptions into passages that make himself look smarter and more principled, if only by comparison.

    • Theodore J Boutrous Jr: Why Trump's lawsuit against John Bolton will fail.

    • Jonathan Chait: Trump: I didn't realize Bolton supported Iraq War until after I hired him: "A small slip-up in the vetting process"? What vetting process? Did Trump ever make his own concerns known? Bolton not only supported the Iraq War, he never stopped defending it. It's impossible to imagine a job interview, even by someone as inattentive and uncurious as Trump, failing to raise red flags.

    • Matthew Chapman: Trump is determined to get John Bolton jailed.

    • Matt Ford: John Bolton: American coward.

    • Andrew Gawthorpe: There are no heroes in the John Bolton v Donald Trump story.

    • Josh Gerstein/Kyle Cheney: 'The damage is done': Judge denies Trump administration request to block Bolton book: "but he warned the former national security adviser could face criminal charges."

    • John Hudson: Bolton book exposes rare fissures between Trump and Pompeo.

    • Steven Nelson: Trump: I should have fired John Bolton for botching North Korea nuclear talks. Yes you should have. No you didn't. Moreover, it was totally obvious when you appointed him that he would do everything he possibly could to make sure no agreement was reached. Same could be said of your boy Mike Pompeo, although he did a slightly better job of pretending he was with the program. Trump should rifle back through what remains of his memory and identify all the people who recommended Bolton to him, and fire them too. By the way, I wouldn't say that Trump's own words were especially eloquent or insightful, but for once their pith finds a deserving target:

      "When Wacko John Bolton went on Deface the Nation and so stupidly said that he looked at the 'Libyan Model' for North Korea, all hell broke out," Trump tweeted Thursday. "Kim Jong Un, who we were getting along with very well, went 'ballistic,' just like his missiles -- and rightfully so."

      Trump added that Kim "didn't want Bolton anywhere near him."

      "Bolton's dumbest of all statements set us back very badly with North Korea, even now. I asked him, 'what the hell were you thinking'" He had no answer and just apologized. That was early on, I should have fired him right then & there!" Trump wrote.

    • William Rivers Pitt: It's Trump vs Bolton, and I'm rooting for a meteor.

    • Frank Rich: The folly of Trump's Bolton lawsuit.

    • Zoë Richards: WH trade adviser slams Bolton book as 'deep swamp revenge porn': Peter Navarro.

    • Eugene Robinson: John Bolton is a weasel in a party of weasels.

    • Jennifer Rubin: Trump's Bolton problem is nothing compared with Senate Republicans' woes: "We knew Trump violated his oath. Now we're certain Senate Republicans did, too."

    • Jon Schwarz: John Bolton is telling the truth, but let's not forget his horrible, dangerous career.

    • Tierney Sneed: DOJ goes all in on trying to block release of Bolton book.

• Ellen Knickmeyer: US drops planned limit for toxin that damages infant brains.

• Bonnie Kristian: Another General wants forever war in Iraq: Meet CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth F McKenzie Jr.

• Jill Lepore: The history of the "riot" report: "How government commissions became alibis for inaction."

• Nancy LeTourneau:

  • The ongoing struggle between two American ideals: liberty and equality: "Inside the biggest fault line between the two parties in American politics today." The conservative mind-trick here is defining liberty as something that only a few people can enjoy because it's taken at the expense of others. But you never can get to "liberty and justice for all" that way, which makes me wonder if it isn't better to think of liberty as something equality makes possible. Even conservatives should be satisfied defining liberty as the ability to choose one's course of action without being compelled by economic constraints. Why can't everyone enjoy such freedom? The real "fault line" has nothing to do with liberty, which all pursue, but with equality, which conservatives deny and despise. Sure, they have their rationalizations, but even if true -- and I'd argue they are not -- why would a democracy prostrate itself to their vanity?

  • Why are conservatives so threatened by equality? Subhed says "It's the toxic and irrational fear that more freedom for LGBTQ Americans infringes on their own," but isn't that just a way of admitting that they believe that their freedom comes at the expense of other people? And not just LGBTQ -- there's also race, class, sex. They believe that unions are picking their pockets. Each plank is rooted in a sense of privilege, and a belief that force can safeguard their privileges. After all, we might all agree to be equal, but there can never be agreement (hence there can never be peace) that one class is entitled to rule over all others.

  • How Republicans convinced themselves that Trump will win in a landslide: "Delusional thinking often goes unchallenged when you're living inside a cocoon." Also:

    • John Hinderaker: The landslide of 2020? Someone recommended this link as the funniest thing he had read in quite some time. Doesn't quite qualify as a review of David Horowitz's Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win because he admits that he hasn't read the book, but he believes Horowitz ("one of the most perceptive observers of the current scene") blindly.

      The current environment reminds me of 1972, and a conversation I had then with a friend who was, like me at that time, on the left. The contest then was between Nixon and McGovern, and my friend said, "Nixon will win because he is for America, and McGovern is against America." He and I didn't see it that way, but we knew that was how the race was coming across to most voters. That is true in spades this year: McGovern was wrong about a lot of things, but he was a sincere patriot. Today's Democrats, in contrast, really are against America.

      The cognitive disconnect in the last sentence is so hard to process that the simplest explanation is that people who utter it are stark raving insane. Yet we hear this line repeated endlessly on the far right, especially since Obama won the presidency in 2008. (Sometimes at book length, as in David Limbaugh's The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic -- the most explicit title from a long list I compiled in 2012, which I summed up as "uninspired and empty.") The thing is, there's never been a shred of evidence that Obama or any other mainstream Democrat wanted to harm America. Maybe you can accuse a few fringe leftists (maybe even myself) with being insufficiently obeisant to the militarized symbols of American power, but Obama, Biden, the Clintons, Pelosi, Shumer, et al., have become the last true believers in American exceptionalism: the steadfast belief that this country remains a beacon of light, of hope and opportunity for the rest of the world. Even those of us who have become thoroughly disenchanted with America's long history of racism, militarism, colonialism, corruption, and economic plunder, tend to express our concerns by referring to the historical moments when Americans seemed to aspire to something better, and we can frame our solutions in terms which promise to help the majority of Americans. But while we believe that further left solutions would be better for Americans than what mainstream Democrats have done, the fact is that when given the power, Democrats have made the economy more prosperous, have reduced the harm done to less fortunate Americans, have blundered into fewer wars, have treated the environment better, and have responded to disasters more effectively, than Republicans have done. So how can people like the author here say such things? I considered the possibility that their definition of America was just so exclusive -- as Todd Snider put it, "conservative Christian, right-wing Republican, straight, white, American males" -- that maybe their paranoia was grounded in something real. But I know many such people, and I've never seen them actually hurt by things Democrats have done (even where they've felt outraged). So, I have to conclude, the depths of their delusion far exceeds my ability to explain.

    • David Siders: 'We're thinking landslide': Beyond DC, GOP officials see Trump on glide path to reelection: Quotes Phillip Stephens, a GOP county chairman in NC: "The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump. We're calling him 'Teflon Trump.' Nothing's going to stick, because if anything, it's getting more exciting than it was in 2016. We're thinking landslide."

    • Paul Waldman: Trump supporters already know he will definitely win by a landslide.

• Martin Longman: Two stories that show why Trump's unfit for office.

  The are two lightly reported stories in the news that really highlight the norm-breaking and criminality of the Trump administration. One involves the nation's inspectors general and the other the administration's treatment of science. Anyone who might care about these subjects is most likely already in Biden's camp, but they should get wider circulation because they ought to inform how people will vote.

  The stories Longman cites (though neither are isolated incidents):

  • Kyle Cheney/Zachary Warmbrodt: Inspectors general ask Congress for help in monitoring coronavirus relief payments.

  • Christopher Flavelle: NOAA chief violated ethics code in furor over Trump tweet, agency says.

• Joe Macaron: The 'Caesar Act' has no teeth and is not about Assad. Evidently "Caesar" is an anonymous photographer who documented human rights abuses by the Syrian military police, providing the basis for a report (known as "The Caesar Report") written by ICC prosecutors, and hence a law which allows the US (sworn enemies of the ICC) to levy sanctions on Syria, adding fuel to America's psychotic love/hate relationship with Syria. While I would have been pleased if the Assad regime had fallen and disappeared in Syria, at this point continued war is far worse for all concerned. Instead of figuring out ways to inflict further pain, the US would be well advised to make peace with Assad, and use whatever good will that produces to help the Syrian people recover from the war the US (and its nominal allies) did so much to protract. Related: Shahed Ghoreishi: The next US administration must fix our broken Syria policy. Notice that at this point no one has any hopes the present administration can fix anything.

• Dylan Matthews: A new paper finds stimulus checks, small business aid, and "reopening" can't rescue the economy.

• Bill McKibben: How public opinion changes for the better.

• Peter Miller: Policing or occupation? Crowd control practices in the US and Palestine.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The Supreme Court saved DACA because of a paperwork error by the Trump administration. For more:

    • Matt Ford: Trump's ineptitude keeps dream alive for DACA recipients.

    • Nicole Narea: The Supreme Court just ruled to preserve protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants for now.

    • Amanda Marcotte: The Supreme Court saves Trump from himself, twice -- will it do the same with abortion? I've wondered this myself: whether Roberts isn't soft-pedaling the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court so as not to panic people about what Trump has done -- especially on cases where there's a clear popular majority against Trump. Give Trump four more years and the takeover will be even harder to reverse.

    • Mark Joseph Stern: Why John Roberts had to block Trump's DACA repeal.

  • The Supreme Court turned away several cases seeking to rein in police violence: "It looks like qualified immunity is here to stay."

  • The Supreme Court's new decision could sink Trump's anti-LGBTQ agenda.

  • The Supreme Court's landmark LGBTQ rights decision, explained in 5 simple sentences.

    • Lauren Adler: The surprising roots of the Supreme Court's LGBTQ rights ruling: How surprising depends on how old you are. It was pretty widely known that the prohibition against discrimination by sex was added to the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a "poison pill," an amendment calculated to weaken support for the legislation. I didn't remember Howard W Smith (D-VA) as the author, but knew it was some Southern segregationist. For more, see Rebecca Onion: The real story behind "because of sex".

    • Elizabeth Dias: Conservative Christians see 'seismic implications' in Supreme Court ruling.

    • Burgess Everett/Marianne Levine: GOP backs Gorsuch's LGBTQ decision after conservative blowback.

    • Masha Gessen: The LGBTQ-rights movement wins its biggest Supreme Court victory.

    • Alex Henderson: Conservatives -- led by Justice Alito -- melt down over Supreme Court's pro-LGBTQ ruling.

    • Charles Kaiser: What makes Monday's gay rights ruling so historic.

    • Bruno Marcetic: Neil Gorsuch is still not your friend.

• Peter Montague: Trump wants to create election chaos by killing the Post Office:

  On March 30, Trump spilled the beans himself when he said, if it were easier to vote in the U.S., Republicans would never get elected. The president made the comments as he dismissed a congressional Democrat-led push for reforms such as vote-by-mail, same-day voter registration and early voting to help states run elections safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. "They had things, levels of voting that if you'd ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again," Trump said. "We don't want anyone to do mail-in ballots," the president said in May.

• Sara Morrison: The Trump administration's flawed plan to destroy the Internet as we know it: "Following the president's lead, Republicans are trying to chip away at Section 230."

• Yascha Mounk: Is Donald Trump a danger to democracy? Review of new books by Masha Gessen (Surviving Autocracy) and Eric A Posner (The Demagogue's Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy From the Founders to Trump), by the author of The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It (2018). All concerned are fond of analogies, so their books run the gamut. I think it's important to make a distinction between Trump with his authoritarian impulses and the Republican Party's greedy schemes to subvert democracy. Trump is reprehensible but dangerous only to the extent that the Party supports and defends him. The real threat is the Party, but I suspect that the authors would rather indict individuals than look into the profoundly anti-democratic beliefs of modern (or, indeed, any) conservatism.

• Ellen Nakashima/Shane Harris: Elite CIA unit that developed hacking tools failed to secure its own systems, allowing massive leak, an internal report found.

• Nicole Narea: Trump fires the US attorney investigating his allies: "Attorney General William Barr tried to fire Geoffrey Berman on Friday, but he refused to step down. So the president stepped in."

  • Jonathan Chait: Barr trying to purge the last prosecutor who can still investigate Trump.

  • Josh Marshall: A remarkable turn of events:

    The Trump administration, with its most effective enforcer, Bill Barr, is looking at an uphill reelection campaign, a range of still unfolding civic catastrophes, and trying to make the most of its executive power while it still holds it. Abusing the powers of office look like the clearest path to retaining those powers past next January. But since the rampant abuses are now adding to the marked deterioration of support for Trump's presidency the incentives for bad acting only grow more perverse, the need to keep doubling down or upping the ante only grows. As I noted above, Berman's public refusal is itself a sign of Trump's ebbing power. It all points to a perilous six months of mounting instability, wrongdoing and criminality in which Trump, his lieutenants and toadies see the need to keep rolling the dice, fomenting chaos in the hopes some version of it works in his favor.

  • Renae Merle: Trump's pick to run Manhattan US attorney's office defended prominent Wall Street firms for years: Jay Clayton, previously SEC chairman, another obvious perch for serving his past (and future?) clients.

• Terry Nguyen: Aunt Jemima and the long-overdue rebrand of racist stereotypes.

• Anna North:

  • "The oppression doesn't end, it adapts": America's history of lynching and its resonance today: Interview with Nicholas Creary, who "helped spearhead the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission."

  • The deaths of 2 black men by hanging, and calls for investigation, explained.

• Morgan Palumbo/Jessica Draper: Knockout in Washington: "A monumental lobbying battle over American foreign policy -- How the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Emiratis took Washington." I'm tempted to argue that the US hasn't had a coherent foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Maybe GW Bush thought he had one with his Global War on Terrorism. Maybe Obama thought his "Pivot to Asia" would fill the void left by abandoning the hapless GWOT. But really, US foreign policy just reverted to what it had been before rabid anti-communism added its ideologial veneer: favors for interest groups with business abroad. Before WWII, those favors were for US companies, especially in Latin America. More recently, the companies became multinationals, and sovereign nations got into the act, all working through the usual lobbyists. Trump's innovation was to drop the pretense that foreign policy was ever about anything but money. So if Saudi Arabia, for instance, wants to bomb a neighboring country, or kill an American journalist, all they really have to do is to make sure the checks clear, and America will be their ally.

• Steven Pearlstein: The Fed is addicted to propping up the markets, even without a need.

  Why, exactly, the Fed feels it necessary to inject more dollars into the corporate credit market is hard to fathom. The interest rate at which investment-grade companies can borrow on the bond market is now below 4 percent, about as low as anyone can remember. And the pace of bond issuance so far this year, at over $1.2 trillion, has been double that of last year's torrid pace. Indeed, there's so much capital sloshing around that investors are lining up to lend money to companies such as Boeing and Macy's and the cruise-line operator Carnival, although these companies' revenue has plummeted with along revenue in much of the travel and retail sectors. . . .

  The best explanation for this confidence is the widespread belief on Wall Street that the Fed will do "whatever it takes" -- that is, print money to buy as many bonds as necessary -- to keep credit flowing to the business sector, no matter the risk. By placing a floor under bond prices, the Fed makes it possible for over-indebted, sales-starved companies to borrow even more to cover operating losses, or refinance existing loans, allowing them to avoid, or at least delay, the day when they cannot pay their bills.

• Cameron Peters: Trump's executive order on police reform, explained.

• Brad Plumer/Nadja Popovich: Emissions are surging back as countries and states reopen.

• Ari Rabin-Havt: Mitt Romney is not your friend.

• Adam K Raymond: One of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor is getting fired.

• Rebecca Rivas: Feds dismiss incitement charge against Michael Avery. As near as I can tell, Avery (a "Ferguson activist") was charged for making posts on Facebook criticizing St. Louis police. Greg Magarian commented, "Winning malicious prosecution suits is nearly impossible, but Avery should go for it, and [prosecutor Michael] Reilly should have this abomination hung around his reputational neck for the rest of his professional life." Another piece from the St. Louis American that Magarian pointed me to: Chris King: New video shows Florissant cop swerve to hit fleeing man with SUV. King's follow up story: Florissant cop charged with felony assault, armed criminal action.

• David Roberts: A national US power grid would make electricity cheaper and cleaner.

• Dylan Scott:

  • Trump baselessly claims Covid-19 testing is "overrated" and people wear masks to spite him.

  • What Mike Pence got wrong about the new coronavirus spikes.

• David K Shipler: The racial stereotypes infecting American police departments.

• David Sirota: Republicans are hypocrites. They happily 'de-funded' the police we actually need.

• Emily Stewart: One of America's worst acts of racial violence was in Tulsa. Now, it's the site of Trump's first rally in months. More pieces on Tulsa, past and present (some before and some after Trump's event):

  • Zeeshan Aleem: Trump falsely suggests wearing a mask at his Tulsa rally could be harmful: "He anticipated a 'wild evening' where 'people do what they want.'"

  • Russell Berman: The 'Silent Majority' didn't show up for Trump.

  • Bob Brigham: "Pitiful turnout": Trump mocked for "hilariously weak" attendance at Tulsa comeback rally.

  • Matthew Chapman: Six Trump campaign staffers in Tulsa test positive for COVID-19 ahead of indoor rally.

  • Eugene Daniels: Trump campaign blames protesters for disappointing turnout at Tulsa rally.

  • Robin Givhan: Trump's rally looked like his vision of America. Limited and pitiless.

    It was a long, rambling performance with the president lamenting that he surely must have saluted some 600 times and by God, it was so hot that day and the ramp was like an ice-skating rink and he was wearing leather sole shoes. As far as he was concerned, he really should have been cheered for making it down that ramp unscathed instead of being mocked in the media. So perhaps it made him feel better when the Tulsa crowd -- his crowd -- applauded after he theatrically drank a glass of water onstage with only one hand and didn't dribble any of it on his tie.

    It was Trump's crowd. Everything is his. Everything is because of him. "We -- I -- have done a phenomenal job," he said about the federal government's response to the pandemic. "I saved hundreds of thousands of lives."

  • Virginia Heffernan: Trump's Tulsa rally is shaping up to be a coronavirus petri dish inside a wrecking ball.

  • Astead W Herndon: Black Tulsans, with a defiant Juneteenth celebration, send a message to Trump.

  • Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman/Reid J Epstein: How the Trump campaign's plans for a triumphant rally went awry: "Instead of offering President Trump a glide path back into the campaign season, Saturday's rally in Tulsa has become yet another flash point for a candidate who has repeatedly displayed insensitivity about race."

  • Paul Krugman: Tulsa and the many sins of racism: "The ugly story didn't end with the abolition of slavery."

  • Eric Lach: Donald Trump's empty campaign rally in Tulsa.

  • Taylor Lorenz/Kellen Browning/Sheera Frenkel: TikTok teens and K-Pop stans say they sank Trump rally: "Did a successful prank inflate attendance expectations for President Trump's rally in Tulsa, Okla.?"

  • Osita Nwanevu: This is how Trump plans to beat Biden: "In his latest campaign kick-off rally, the president maps his desperate plan to overcome the national crisis he enabled and win re-election."

  • Caitlin Oprysko: Trump accuses critics of attempting to 'Covid Shame' upcoming rally.

  • Mary Papenfuss: Dr Anthony Fauci warned White House that Tulsa rally would be dangerous.

  • Amber Phillips: 5 takeaways from Trump's Tulsa rally:

    1. Trump elevates violent rhetoric against protesters
    2. 'Kung Flu,' a testing slowdown and other flippant comments about the coronavirus
    3. No attempt to salve racial tensions
    4. Explaining 'the ramp and the water'
    5. Weaving old with the new for a 2020 campaign pitch

  • Randy R Potts/Victor Luckerson: A Trump visit lays bare two Tulsas, a mile and a universe apart.

  • Bret Schulte: How Tulsa's Republican mayor found himself at the center of America's debate on race.

  • Walter Shapiro: Trump is terrorizing America: "His reelection campaign is going to be all about one thing: fear. The Tulsa rally was just the beginning."

  • Brent Staples: The burning of Black Wall Street, revisited: "Nearly a century after the Tulsa Race Massacre, the search for the dead continues."

  • Marc A Thiessen: Trump must reach out to black voters. His Tulsa rally is the place to start. I don't normally read him, even given that his columns inevitably appear in my home town paper. In fact, he strikes me as the single most reprehensible political pundit in America. So I can't tell you whether this is more tone-deaf than usual. But I can assure you that Trump didn't deliver the hoped-for breakthrough message in Tulsa.

• Matt Stieb: Facebook removes Trump ads with Nazi symbol used to identify political prisoners. This story is so weird on many levels that I skipped over it many times before noting it.

• Matt Taibbi: Why policing is broken: "Years of research on brutality cases shows that bad incentives in politics and city bureaucracies are major drivers of police violence."

• Astra Taylor: A new group of leftist primary challengers campaign through protests and the coronavirus.

• Zephyr Teachout/Shaoul Sussman: Amazon's private government: "A new patent cements the company's aims to use its power over sellers to consolidate control." Hard to tell right now how big a deal this is, but several questions leap to mind: Should this technology even be patentable? If so, isn't it dangerous to assign it to an unregulated private company? If the service is really valuable, wouldn't it be much better to build it as a public utility? Many parts of Amazon (e.g., Marketplace), already raise this question.

  The patent, for a form of blockchain ledgering technology, will allow Amazon to oversee the collection of an unprecedented amount of data about the business operations of its sellers, including their entire supply chain. In essence, the patent fulfills Amazon's plans to create a private regulatory regime, where it uses proprietary information to create a "certification" bureaucracy: a private, for-profit alternative to the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission. Unlike governmental agencies, however, it will have no public oversight, and can use its certifying power to squeeze sellers and consolidate control.

  Brands and companies that use Amazon's technology would have to list the manufacturers, couriers, and distributors they use. Those entities will have to corroborate that they indeed sell to the brand. Amazon will know where and when every single sweater, earplug, and frying pan sold on its platform was made, and by whom. The patent states: To certify an item, a verifiable record for the item indicating, for example, what materials were used to make the item, where the item was made, who made the item, when the item was made, and so forth, is needed.

• Jason Tidd: Kris Kobach's guns stolen from truck at Wichita hotel. Kobach is running for US Senate. He says he always carries a gun for protection, and he left a few more in his car, planning on campaigning at some shooting event. "There were 255 guns reported stolen from vehicles in Wichita in 2019." Kobach may be the dumbest person running for Congress in Kansas this year, but don't sell his main rival, Roger Marshall, short. See Abigail Abrams: GOP Congressman says the poor 'just don't want health care.' Alright, he was quoted out of context. The full quote was: "Just like Jesus said, 'The poor will always be with us.' There is a group of people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves." Marshall, by the way, is a M.D., whose recent publicity stunt was to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for himself and his family. Latest piece on his is: Roger Marshall was convicted of reckless driving in 2008. Here's how it was erased. Turns out it helps to have the son of a business partner in the prosecutor's office.

• Craig Timberg: As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from the right-wing boogaloo movement.

  • Natasha Bertrand: Intel report warns that far-right extremists may target Washington, DC.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump and Steve Bannon want to turn a US-funded global media network into Breitbart 2.0: "Michael Pack's purge of the US Agency for Global Media, and his effort to produce tough-on-China journalism, explained."

  • India and China just had their deadliest clash since the 1960s.

• Adam Weinstein: Florida man leads his state to the morgue: "Ron DeSantis is the latest in a long line of Republicans who made the state a plutocratic dystopia. Now he's letting its residents die to save the plutocrats." Also:

  • Marc Caputo: DeSantis defies critics as coronavirus spreads in Florida.

• Philip Weiss:

  • Trump is pushing annexation as political tool to cast Dems as anti-Israel, says J Street expert: Interview with Neri Zilber.

  • /James North: It sure looks like Trump and Adelson have cut a deal on annexation.

    Sheldon Adelson, the Israel-loving, Iran-war-craving casino baron, talks to Donald Trump all the time, and for good reason, he and wife Miriam are the biggest Republican donors, poised to give as much as $200 million this year. Now that the White House appears to be lying down for the Israeli government as it moves to annex portions of the West Bank despite a growing chorus of international condemnation, the focus should be on Adelson. He has always been a strong supporter of Israeli expansion, a man who says, "There's no such thing as a Palestinian."

    So far, the Adelsons have gotten everything they've wanted from our transactional president: tearing up the Iran deal, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, defunding Palestinians, recognizing the Golan annexation, treating settlement expansion as legitimate, even a presidential medal of freedom for Miriam, etc. Right up to yesterday -- a Trump attack on the ICC in the name of Israel. As Trump once said when a Republican rival was getting Adelson's money, Adelson wanted a "perfect little puppet."

• Sean Wilentz: The disgrace of Donald Trump: "Was the battle of Lafayette Square the beginning of the end of his presidency?" Why call it a battle? Doesn't that imply two sides were fighting? (As opposed to one side using excessive force to drive people who were legally and peaceably assembled away.) As a historian, Wilentz can think of past events like Herbert Hoover's routing of the "Bonus Marchers" during the Great Depression, which was one of many things that led to Hoover's 1932 defeat.

• Stephanie Wykstra: The fight for transparency in police misconduct, explained: "New York's repeal of section 50-a -- which allowed police to shield misconduct records -- is a big win for activists, but there is more work to be done."

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The End of Policing left me convinced we still need policing: Critique of Alex Vitale's book. I've cited several Vitale pieces and interviews recently. I agree, although (as with ICE) I also think that some organizations are so rotten it might make sense to restart from scratch. The best thing I see coming out of the "defund" argument is a rethinking about what police should (and should not) be doing. But we're still stuck the the trials of the modern world. We need laws, and we need order, and we need a system to enforce that as fairly and as charitably as possible. In short, we need reform, but we still need to come out the other end with something, even if it too is imperfect. More pieces:

    • Gordon Adams: Abolish and replace: Ending the militarization of policing in America.

    • Amna A Akbar: How defund and disband became the demands.

    • Melissa Gira Grant: The rush to redefine "defund the police".

    • Mariame Kaba: Yes, we mean literally abolish the police: "Because reform won't happen."

    • Jen Kirby: Inside the fight to "defund" the NYPD.

    • Nolan D McCaskill: 'Defund the police' faces skepticism -- even in deeply liberal cities.

    • Alex Pareene: Abolish these police departments.

    • Ishmael Reed: Why killer cops go free.

    • Luke Savage: Defund the Pentagon: As Everett Dirksen used to say, now we're talking real money.

    • Libby Watson: The police can't shake their persecution complex.

  • Donald Trump is defunding the police: "He's proposed cuts in budget after budget, and is holding up needed fiscal aid." Meanwhile, it's the Democrats who are pushing federal aid to cities and states hit hard by revenue shortfalls

    But the larger and more significant budgetary context is that the HEROES Act passed by House Democrats and stalled by Senate Republicans appropriates $900 billion to state and local governments.

    With that kind of fiscal support, cities that don't want to defund their police departments wouldn't have to. And cities that do want to experiment with shifting funding out of law enforcement and into mental health, drug treatment, and youth services will have the opportunity to do that.

    Republicans, meanwhile, have characterized this idea as a "blue state bailout" and say Congress should instead consider changes to bankruptcy law that might allow states to shed their pension obligations in bankruptcy.

• Li Zhou:

  • "I am absolutely sitting here offended": Cedric Richmond calls out Republicans for distracting from police reform.

  • Senate Republicans' narrow new police reform bill, explained.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33449 [33418] rated (+31), 215 [214] unrated (+1).

British avant-pianist Keith Tippett died last week, at 72. He was a major figure, although having never sorted out his scattered discography, I can't say how major. I can say that on occasion he rivaled Cecil Taylor for explosive invention. One issue is that while he recorded several albums with Mujician as a title, he also led a group (with Paul Dunmall, Paul Rogers, and Tony Levin) by that name through seven 1990-2006 albums. Another is that he dabbled in a wide range of music, especially along the prog rock fringe. He married pop singer/actress Julie Driscoll in 1970, and she changed her name to Julie Tippetts (meanwhile, her husband dropped the 's'), continuing a long career that veered far from the pop charts. She survives him. Also on Tippett:

• Downbeat: British Jazz Pianist Keith Tippett Dies at 72
• Free Jazz Collective: Keith Tippett (1947-2020), by Martin Schray
• Guardian: Keith Tippett: British jazz pianist dies at age 72, by Laura Snapes
• London Jazz News: Keith Tippett (1947-2020), by Tony Dudley-Evans.
• Wire: Keith Tippett dies age 72

I'll look into Tippett a bit more next week, but as I'm writing this I've headed off on a Stan Tracey (1926-2013) detour.

One other death last week I should note somewhere is Carl Brewer, a former two-term mayor of Wichita. He was a moderate black Democrat, always seemed to be in tune with local business leaders but always seemed like a decent guy, never had a whiff of scandal, and never embarrassed us. (I'd like to say never did anything blatantly stupid, but I have to question his support for Lyndy Wells in the latest mayoral election.) People I know who knew him liked him a lot. None of those traits were common among the recent run of Wichita mayors.

Robert Christgau published his Consumer Guide: June, 2020, with an A+ for Run the Jewels RTJ4 (an A- here last week); an A for the Wussy album below; A- for Princess Nokia's Everything Is Beautiful, Serengeti's Ajai, and a Fats Domino live album I previously gave good but somewhat lower grades to; an A- for a Malian record I haven't found; a B+ for the Hamell on Trial album below; and a few more things -- I tried Westside Gunn, and even went back two previous releases, but nothing really stuck with me. I'm not conceding that I screwed up, but I've often had trouble catching rap lyrics (especially given limited plays), and that may be at work here.

Christgau asked me for some info on David Murray (occasioned by an Xgau Sez question), so I pasted a chunk of my Jazz Guides into an email. It occurred to me that I could add that to my Village Voice David Murray Guide (2006). The file turned out to be a mess, so I cleaned it up from "unpublished draft" and notes to incorporating the published edits. But rather than appending the more extensive reviews, I created a separate file. I also used the occasion to pick up a few records I had missed, as well as Kahil El'Zabar's new one, just out. Started a list of "other records" as a self-check, but haven't gotten very far with it.

After all my pleading, I only have one question answered this week. More, please.

I did get one more piece of mail via the form: Piotr wrote in to inform me that he's created a Wikipedia page for Tom Hull (critic). It's a very substantial page, with a lot of biographical detail, all properly footnoted (most based on my RockCritics.com interview). I've written him with a few corrections and clarifications, so no need to itemize them here. Besides, most make for slightly better myth than reality.

Two of the three new jazz A-list records this week were reviewed the old-fashioned way, from CDs. Probably helped get them the attention they deserve. I missed the A- Murray album because it was a mere Penguin Guide ***, but turns out it features El'Zabar as the magic beans. Found the old Joe Harriott records after noting the new vault release. Been wanting to hear them for a long time, but none match Free Form (1960).

By the way, I've been keeping the metacritic file reasonably up to date. Run the Jewels' RTJ4 made a strong run for the top spot, but is still one point behind Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters. At AOTY and Metacritic, the latter has slightly higher scores, but fewer reviews. Waxahatchie's Saint Cloud is third, then there's a substantial point gap before you get to Caribou, Dua Lipa, Perfume Genius, Tame Impala, Thundercat, Yves Tumor, Lucinda Williams, Charlie XCX, Shabaka and the Ancestors, and Soccer Mommy.

New records reviewed this week:

• AuB: AuB (2019 [2020], Edition): [r]: B+(*)
• César Cardoso: Dice of Tenors (2020, self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Elysia Crampton: Orcorara 2010 (2020, Pan): [r]: B-
• Whit Dickey: Morph (2019 [2020], ESP-Disk, 2CD): [cd]: A-
• Dion: Blues With Friends (2020, Keeping the Blues Alive): [r]: B+(*)
• Kahil El'Zabar: Kahil El'Zabar's Spirit Groove (2019 [2020], Spiritmuse): [r]: A-
• Hamell on Trial: The Pandemic Songs (2020, self-released): [bc]: A-
• Daniel Hersog: Night Devoid of Stars (2019 [2020], Cellar Live): [cd]: B+(**)
• Norah Jones: Pick Me Up Off the Floor (2020, Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Ute Lemper: Rendezvous With Marlene (2020, Jazzhaus): [r]: B+(***)
• Madre Vaca: Winterreise (2020, Madre Vaca): [cd]: B
• Rudresh Mahanthappa: Hero Trio (2020, Whirlwind): [cd]: A-
• Stephen Riley: Friday the 13th (2018 [2020], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• Dua Saleh: Rosetta (2020, Against Giants, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• John Scofield: Swallow Tales (2019 [2020], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Sara Serpa: Recognition (2019 [2020], Biophilia): [cd]: B+(**)
• Walter Smith III/Matthew Stevens/Micah Thomas/Linda May Han Oh/Nate Smith: In Common 2 (2019 [2020], Whirlwind): [r]: B+(*)
• Westside Gunn: Flygod Is an Awesome God (2019, Griselda): [r]: B+(*)
• Westside Gunn: Hitler Wears Hermes VII (2019, Griselda): [r]: B+(*)
• Westside Gunn: Pray for Paris (2020, Griselda): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Joe Harriott Quintet: Jazz for Moderns (1962 [2020], Gearbox, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Wussy: Ghosts (2006-19 [2020], self-released): [bc]: B+(***)

Old music:

• The Channels Featuring Earl Lewis: Golden Oldies (1956-59 [2013], Essential Music Group): [r]: B+(*)
• Joe Harriott & Co. Feat John Dankworth & Tubby Hayes: Helter Skelter: Live, Rare and Previously Unreleased Recordings 1955-1963 (1955-63 [2017], Acrobat): [r]: B+(**)
• Joe Harriott Quintet: Abstract (1961-62 [2015], J. Joes J. Edizioni Musicali): [r]: B+(***)
• The Joe Harriott Double Quintet: Indo-Jazz Suite (1966, Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)
• Ranee Lee: Seasons of Love (1997, Justin Time): [r]: B+(*)
• David Murray: Let the Music Take You (1978, Marge): [r]: B+(***)
• David Murray: Interboogieology (1978, Black Saint): [r]: B+(**)
• David Murray: The London Concert (1978 [1999], Cadillac, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• David Murray Quartet: A Sanctuary Within (1991 [1992], Black Saint): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Juhani Aaltonen/Jonas Kullhammar/Christian Meaas Svendsen/Ilmari Heikinheimo: The Father, the Sons & the Junnu (Moserobie)
• Beth Duncan: I'm All Yours (Saccat) [07-24]
• Jason Kao Hwang: Human Rites Trio (True Sound) [07-01]
• Noshir Mody: An Idealist's Handbook: Identity, Love and Hope in America 2020 (self-released) [07-03]
• Corey Smythe: Accelerate Every Voice (Pyroclastic)
• Stephane Spira/Giovanni Mirabassi: Improkofiev (Jazzmax) [06-19]
• Lou Volpe: Before & After (Jazz Guitar)

Blog link.

No intro this week.

Tweet of the week, from paulo. (@itskingapollo):

If the police did their jobs, everyone would trust them. Ain't no song called "Fuck the Fire Department."

Also, from Rhys Blakely (@rhysblakely):

A 70-year-old man in Seattle survived the coronavirus, got applauded by staff when he left the hospital after 62 days -- and then got a $1.1 million, 181-page hospital bill.

Some scattered links this week:

• Sasha Abramsky: Georgia primary sends us a warning -- November could be a voting rights disaster. On the other hand, interest in voting seems to be record high. See Dareh Gregorian: Voter turnout soared in Georgia despite massive primary day problems.

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • Atlanta police shot and killed a 27-year-old black man outside a Wendy's drive-through: Rayshard Brooks. Victim allegedly took a taser away from police and pointed it at them. If tasers are considered non-lethal force, does self-defense justify shooting and killing someone? Seems like it could have been avoided, but maybe cops know more about how dangerous tasers are than they let on. Also, note that this is "the 48th officer-involved shooting" in Georgia so far this year. For more, see Chas Danner: Everything we know about the killing of Rayshard Brooks by Atlanta police.

  • Trump's West Point speech contradicts one of the biggest themes of his presidency.

• Bocar Abdoulaye Ba/Roman Rivera: Police think they can get away with anything. That's because they usually do.

• Zack Beauchamp: Trump: "The concept of chokehold sounds so innocent, so perfect".

• Alleen Brown: Iowa quietly passes its third ag-gag bill after constitutional challenges.

• Katelyn Burns:

  • The Trump administration will now allow doctors to discriminate against LGBTQ people. As a subhed notes, "Conservatives haven't let the pandemic slow down their political agenda."

  • Trump tweeted a conspiracy theory that an elderly man knocked over by police is "antifa provocateur".

• John Cassidy: Economic reality bites Wall Street and Trump.

• Jonathan Chait: Michael Flynn writes op-ed confirming he's definitely insane.

• Fabiola Cinaes:

  • Trump postpones his MAGA rally planned for Juneteenth. Trump's first rally in months was scheduled in Tulsa on the anniversary of the 1921 massacre, where "a white mob destroyed the affluent Greenwood District of the city, known as Black Wall Street, burning down 35 blocks, including 1,200 homes, and killing 300 black people in the process." This was long referred to as a "race riot," but like all similar events of the period, it was white people "rioting," much like the pogroms Czarist Russian authorities organized against Jews. Tulsa stands out in memory because of the sheer size of the massacre, but also because it was the first instance of using airplanes to firebomb an American neighborhood. Speaking of Trump in Tulsa:

    • Caleb Gayle: Juneteenth in Tulsa is a day of joy and pain. Trump's visit worsens the pain.

    • Michele L Norris: The diabolical irony of Trump in Tulsa.

    • Jack Shafer: Trump's baggage on race will follow him to Tulsa: "The president's first post-quarantine rally will be held in a city known for a massacre of black people. Don't expect Trump to rise to the occasion."

    • Matt Stieb: Trump rally attendees must agree not to sue campaign if they get the coronavirus.

  • Trump's new recovery plan resists sweeping police reforms.

  • The police shooting of Maurice Gordon, a black man killed during a traffic stop, explained.

  • The sexual assault allegations against an officer involved in Breonna Taylor's killing say a lot about police abuse of power. Also note: "the Louisville Metro Council banned no-knock warrants with new legislation called Breonna's Law." Obviously, a few months too late for Taylor.

• Aaron Ross Coleman:

  • Minneapolis may be the first city to dismantle the police.

  • Body cams show police killing Javier Ambler while filming an A&E television show.

  • The devaluing of black property has led to the devaluing of black lives: Interview with Andre Perry.

• Aaron C Davis/Carol D Leonnig/Josh Dawsey: Officials familiar with Lafayette Square confrontation challenge Trump administration claim of what drove aggressive expulsion of protesters.

• Igor Derysh:

  • Melania Trump delayed move to White House as "leverage" to renegotiate a better prenup: report. Dish from Mary Jordan's upcoming book, The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump. Also:

    • Jane Eisner: The elusive truths of Melania Trump.

    • Dwight Garner: A new book brings Melania Trump into (slightly) better focus.

    • Arwa Mahdawi: Melania doesn't need to be #Freed and she's not an enigma -- she's an opportunist.

    • Karen Tumulty: No, Melania Trump doesn't want to be free. I believe this is the first time I've linked to Tumulty, forever immortalized as the winner of Matt Taibbi's Wimblehack tournament of America's worst political journalists. Seems like a subject appropriate to her talents. In fact, she's written about Melania before: Melania Trump's indefensible defense of her bully husband. One thing I haven't found is an article detailing how much fun comics have had with playing up the public distancing between the Trumps -- little things like her refusing his hand, or staring coldly. It's been a source of some comfort that she might be as disgusted with him as we are. The other possibility is that she's as unfeeling and unconcerned as he is, that theirs is a marriage of convenience where the returns have long diminished past the point of anyone caring.

  • CNN rejects Trump campaign's demand for apology over polls showing him losing to Biden by 14 points. But CNN's actual response was pretty clueless: "[authoritarian demands] have typically come from countries like Venezuela." But authoritarians (regardless of whether Venezuela qualifies as an example) typically understand the limits of their authority, which they'd undermine by demanding something they're in no position to enforce. Trump's demand is pure PR: rejecting the poll results so emphatically his supporters will hear and believe him, but expecting nothing further to come of it. Normally, the next step is to threaten a frivolous lawsuit, but CNN's pockets are deep enough to get that dismissed, and their own PR department would spin such a thing into an attack on free press.

• Dan Diamond: White House goes quiet on coronavirus as outbreak spikes again across the US: "It's been more than a month since the White House halted its daily coronavirus task force briefings."

• Masha Gessen:

  • Trump's hateful message on transgender health care.

  • "I didn't know" is not a defense for enabling Trump: As in Mark Esper's "I didn't know where I was going," or reports that Mark Milley "believed that he was accompanying Trump on a troop inspection." By the way, Gessen has a new book, Surviving Autocracy. For reviews, see:

    • Hari Kunzru: Democracy's red line.

    • Andrew O'Hehir: Masha Gessen on Trump, Putin and the attack on reality, meaning and democracy.

• Constance Grady: How 70 years of cop shows taught us to valorize the police: I've watched a lot of them, starting (as this article does) with Dragnet (and from that era I'd add Andy Griffith and Gunsmoke, which rounds out the picture considerably), and while I appreciate the positive image most shows attempt to project, I'm pretty doubtful that I've learned much if anything about the real world of police work. Nor have they made me any less fearful of interactions with the police, or the "justice system" more generally.

• Maggie Haberman: Trump's halting walk down ramp raises new health questions. Also see Philip Rucker: Trump tries to explain his slow and unsteady walk down a ramp at West Point: "Elements of Trump's explanation strained credulity."

• Fred Hiatt: Why the Republicans' 2020 strategy is to keep as many people as possible from voting. I'm not very worried that a fair election will give Trump a second term. And I think that efforts to suppress the vote tend to backfire, at least up to a point. Still, the Republicans have been working hard to trim and shape the electorate to their tastes, and it's not unreasonable to worry that they may ultimately be successful -- for one thing, look at how they've managed to gerrymander districts.

  What does it say about a political party when its chief strategy is to prevent as many people as possible from voting -- and its leader admits as much?

  That is where Republicans find themselves heading into the 2020 election.

  For the latest, breathtaking example of this pathology, look at Iowa. On June 2, Iowa held a highly successful primary, with record turnout -- and Republicans in the state legislature immediately initiated action to ensure the success is not repeated in the fall.

• James Hohmann: Trump poised to accept GOP nod in Jacksonville, Fla., on 60th anniversary of 'Ax Handle Saturday': After schedule Trump's Juneteenth rally in Tulsa, of course this comes next:

  On Aug. 27, 1960, a mob of 200 white people in Jacksonville, Fla. -- organized by the Ku Klux Klan and joined by some of the city's police officers -- chased and beat peaceful civil rights protesters who were trying to integrate downtown lunch counters. The bloody carnage that followed -- in which ax handles and baseball bats were used to club African Americans, who sought sanctuary in a church -- is remembered as "Ax Handle Saturday."

• Sean Illing:

  • The most powerful person in the White House not named Donald Trump: On Jared Kushner, interview with Andrea Bernstein, author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power. Also on Kushner:

    • David Roth: American psycho: "Jared Kushner -- climber, sycophant, snob -- is the perfect avatar of elite incompetence for our times.

  • The "abolish the police" movement, explained by 7 scholars and activists.

• Umair Irfan: 2 new studies show shutdowns were astonishingly effective.

• Bruce Jackson: Buffalo cops -- and all the other cops.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • The generals are turning on Trump: "Mark Milley's apology for the church photo-op is a major escalation."

  • West Pointless: "Trump made cadets return to campus during a pandemic to listen to his dull platitudes." First line in article is "It could have been worse." Hard to imagine the next paragraph ever being written about any other president:

    President Trump's Saturday morning commencement speech at West Point was merely dull rather than abhorrent, incendiary, or flagrantly self-aggrandizing, except for a couple of passages and -- significantly -- the fact of the speech itself, which was designed entirely as a video clip for an upcoming reelection campaign commercial.

    Sure, they'll cut out the bit where he waddles down the ramp. And to think how annoying I found it that every time GW Bush spoke you first had to watch him walk up to the podium. (OK, it was kind of sick-funny the time he made Ariel Sharon do the same.) But at least then we had a president who could walk -- not to mention read a teleprompter without his eyes glazing over. Who imagine those would some day be skills we could fondly reminisce over? (Even when performed by a major war criminal?)

  • Trump's support for Confederate base names has nothing to do with respecting the military.

• Roge Karma: Why this moment demands radical politics: Interview with Eddie Glaude Jr., author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul and Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

• Catherine Kim: The fatal arrest of Manuel Ellis, another black man who yelled "I can't breathe," explained.

• Jen Kirby: The "kettling" of protesters, explained.

• Aline Kominsky-Crumb/R Crumb: Bad diet & bad hair destroy human civilization.

• Robert Kuttner: About those improved unemployment numbers:

  As the Economic Policy Institute's Elise Gould explains in this indispensable short piece, if you add to the officially unemployed statistic those workers who were staying home for health or family reasons but reported themselves as employed, and workers who reported that they had left the labor force but would seek work if it were available, the adjusted unemployment rate for May is 19.7 percent.

  The clincher is the number of workers still drawing unemployment compensation, which was just under 30 million the week of May 16, according to the same BLS report.

• Dahlia Lithwick: Trump's use of the military does not create the "appearance" of abuse. It is abuse.

• Martin Longman:

  • The GOP's revealing decision not to debate on a 2020 platform: "It's another sign that the Republican Party's conversion to a cult is complete."

  • Why a GOP convention in Jacksonville could be a disaster.

• David J Lynch: Ripple effects of downturn show pandemic's early economic toll was just the beginning.

• Branko Marcetic: "Defenders of democracy" aren't bothered by its end in Bolivia.

• Ruth Marcus: If you don't believe systemic racism is real, explain these statistics.

• Dylan Matthews: Pandemic unemployment insurance is expiring soon. This economist has a fix for it. "Ioana Marinescu would allow people who've lost jobs to keep collecting $600 a week even after getting a new job."

• Jane Mayer: Ivanka Trump and Charles Koch fuel a cancel-culture clash at Wichita State.

• Meridith McGraw: Trump loses 2 pivotal allies in his anti-kneeling crusade: NASCAR and the NFL.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The Supreme Court normally hands down its biggest cases in June. Here's what to expect. Subheds:

    • The Court could effectively eliminate the right to an abortion
    • The Court will decide if federal law makes it illegal to fire someone for being LGBTQ
    • Trump could gain sweeping immunity from congressional oversight
    • Hundreds of thousands of DACA beneficiaries could face deportation
    • The religious right could be one of the biggest winners from this term
    • Trump could gain broad new power to fire people

  • 3 ways to ensure that rogue cops aren't above the law. Mostly about ending "qualified immunity."

• Nicole Narea:

  • Trump is quietly gutting the asylum system amid the pandemic.

  • How 2 weeks of protests have changed America: "Protesters have already brought about reforms to address systemic racism and police brutality following George Floyd's death."

• Timothy Noah: The black wage gap matters: "The grim state of racial economic inequality should sicken our consciences."

• Anna North: White Americans are finally talking about racism. Will it translate into action?

• JC Pan: The preachers of the austerity gospel are back: "Though we're in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, calls for budget-tightening have reliably restarted."

• Brian Resnick: "Totally predictable": State reopenings have backfired.

• James Risen: Donald Trump is an autocrat. It's up to all of us to stop him. Yeah, sure: not a position I'm going to argue with, or get bent out of shape over.

  Dictatorships are built on denial. Dictators take over gradually; each incremental step that erodes civil liberties and the rule of law can be justified and explained away. Sometimes a would-be dictator is laughed off as a political buffoon who shouldn't be taken seriously. While it is happening, no one can quite believe that they are on the road to serfdom.

  I might have skipped mention of this piece but wanted to save this paragraph-plus (more explicitly blood-thirsty than Tom Cotton's famous op-ed) for posterity:

  On Monday, Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and Trump acolyte, offered a typical Republican response to the protests when he called for all the lethal tools of the global war on terror to be brought home and turned on American protesters. "Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?" Gaetz tweeted Monday. Twitter restricted access to the Gaetz tweet, labeling it a glorification of violence.

  By advocating for an end to the rule of law, Republicans like Gaetz will find themselves surviving at the whim of Trump. That's when the jokes about drones and Gitmo won't seem so funny to them.

• David Roberts: The Tom Cotton op-ed affair shows why the media must defend America's values: America has values? The New York Times should decide what they are? I agree that Cotton's proposal to flood American cities with the same troops that tried so fitfully to quell protests in Baghdad is something one should oppose, but by recent evidence it's hard to say what he's proposing is un-American. For a couple more general pieces that take off from the Cotton op-ed:

  • Ezra Klein: America is changing, and so is the media.

  • Matt Taibbi: The American press is destroying itself.

  • David Greenberg: The New York Times used to be a model of diverse opinion. What happened?

• Travis Sawchik: Do baseball's labor fights drive away fans? Well, Well, I used to read box scores every day, but haven't followed MLB at all since the 1994 lockout. That's just one data point, but it's a pretty hard one. The article refers to "the 1994-95 strike," but all I remember is the owners' lockout, and that's where I put all the blame.

• Walter M Shaub Jr: Ransacking the Republic.

• Isaac Stanley-Becker: Fox News removes manipulated images from coverage of Seattle protests.

• Jennifer Steinhauer: Trump's actions rattle the military world: 'I can't support the man': "The president's threat to use troops against largely peaceful protesters, as well as other attempts to politicize the military, have unsettled a number of current and former members and their families."

• Mark Joseph Stern: Republicans attack Republican official for expanding voting access.

• Taylor Telford: Democrat accuses OSHA of being 'invisible' while infections rise among essential workers. One would think that OSHA would be the key agency consulted on all questions having to do with re-opening businesses.

  As of Thursday, infections tied to meat plants had surpassed 18,500 and worker deaths were approaching 70, according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, which is tracking industry outbreaks through local news reports. Grocery workers have been similarly hit hard, with more than 5,500 testing positive for the coronavirus and more than 100 dying of covid-19, the disease the virus causes, The Washington Post has reported. Front-line health-care workers have gotten sick in even greater numbers, with more than 60,000 infected and more than 300 dying of covid-19, according to new CDC data.

• Alex S Vitale: "Policing is fundamentally a tool of social control to facilitate our exploitation": An interview by Mike Uetricht with Vitale, who wrote The End of Policing back in 2017.

• Alex Ward:

  • Why the Trump administration is sanctioning a top international court: Against the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is charged with investigating possible war crimes. The US refused to ratify the ICC. The fear was that the ICC would investigate the US and Israel, and while that hasn't happened yet, it appears increasingly likely.

  • The Army was finally considering renaming bases that honor Confederates. Trump quashed it.

  • The racist history behind the 10 US Army facilities named after Confederate leaders.

• Erik Wemple: Forgive Tucker Carlson for his panicky desperation. His world is collapsing. I don't watch his show, but clips I've seen recently are extremely unhinged. Also see:

  • Roger Sollenberger: "Race-baiting filth": Carlson criticized for claiming a Black Lives Matter "mob" will "come for you"; and "Bye-bye Tucker Carlson!": Advertisers bail on Fox News host's program after "race-baiting" screed.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Study: Police killings traumatize high school students and hurt academic performance.

  • Study suggests Democrats should be running more ads about Biden, fewer about Trump. What I'd rather see is more ads that work for the whole party, not just Biden vs. Trump. The Democratic majority in the House, for instance, has passed a lot of bills that Republicans killed in the Senate, so those are good opportunities to compare parties. You can also point out differences between states with Democrats in power vs. Republican-run states, especially on metrics like how many people don't have health insurance. I don't see that running a lot of ads on how Biden's going to lead us to the promised land will have much traction, although you do want to suggest that you're not embarrassed by him as nominee (although I rather am).

  • Joe Biden has a really big lead in the polls. Compares his recent polls to Clinton's in 2016. The thing that always struck me about 2016 was that no matter how low Trump sunk, Clinton never could hit, let along top, 50%. ("Even on October 18, Clinton was only at 46 percent in the polls with Trump doing terribly at 39 and plenty of undecided and third-party voters.") The CNN poll not only gives Biden a 14 point margin, his actual figure is 55%.

• Li Zhou: "The protesters had to deescalate the police": Demonstrators are the ones defusing violence at protests.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33418 [33378] rated (+40), 214 [209] unrated (+5).

Cutoff was Monday evening, after I wrapped up Weekend Roundup, so that has a bit to do with the above-average count. Shifted back to new music last week, starting with some Phil Overeem recommendations, and ended with rummaging through my tracking file (jazz subset), with a few asides along the way. (One of Cliff Ocheltree's Facebook posts mentioned If Deejay Was Your Trade and Hyphy Hitz. Couldn't find the latter, but the Blood & Fire compilation was so good I wanted to hear more from Big Joe.) Still, didn't bother with my promo queue at all. It had been near-empty, but has recovered to the extent I need to pay it some attention.

I reviewed Thank Your Lucky Stars' Girl in Her 29s last week, noting that I couldn't find anything via Google on the CD. I'm told that this website will help. I also received a hand-written letter from Ben Barnes, which reads in part (or I think it does, as my eyes and his handlettering don't always mesh; I also spared you the all-caps, and added a link I'm almost 100% sure of and italics for the album title):

As for the mysterious online presence I vowed long ago to only spend time and money on the things I love and never try to profit from them. Whenever someone asks about buying a disc I ask them to contribute to Mikey's Chance Canine Rescue and then I happily mail them Girl in Her 29s.

Looking back at last week's "review," I realize I didn't finish it -- by, like, saying something about the record. Meant to, but ran out of time and decided to run what I had anyway, and still haven't gotten back to it, so sorry. I will re-run the album cover.

On June 3, Robert Christgau tweeted:

I try to be shrewd about this stuff, not show my hand before I publish my review, but it would be just wrong to deny that it's been A LONG TIME since I felt like a new album was just what I'd been needing the way the new Run the Jewels does.

I had the same reaction to RTJ4, although I didn't explain it very coherently below -- written after two plays before I saw the tweet -- no doubt because I always have trouble following rap lyrics. But even I caught enough to realize that this was the time. (Link above is to the whole feed. Even now the tweet in question is well down, but it won't hurt you to scroll for it.)

The Ogún Meji Duo album was reviewed by Karl Ackermann as a new release at All About Jazz. Ackerman wrote: "The album makes a powerful statement that could have been a response to Emmett Till in 1955 or George Floyd in 2020." True enough, but it actually dates from the Michael Brown era. I might have graded it higher, but tired of the lecture, and got annoyed by the Soundcloud-like website streaming. But drummer Mark Lomax and saxophonist Edwin Bayard are awesome as usual. I should note that Lomax's 400 Years Suite is currently number one on my 2020 list, and his 12-CD 400: An Afrikan Epic was number three on the 2019 list.

In non-musical matters, Crocodile Chuck suggested a Weekend Roudup link: Jack Rasmus: Confronting Institutional Racism. Rasmus is an economist in California, subtitles his blog "Predicting the Global Eonomic Crisis," has a bunch of books on economics (keyword: neoliberalism), as well as some stage plays and DVDs. I noticed one of his books in 2010 -- Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression -- but missed six since then. Most evocative title was Obama's Economy: Recovery for the Few (paperback, 2012, Pluto Press). First book was a big one: The War at Home: The Corporate Offensive From Ronald Reagan to George W Bush (2006, Kyklos)./p>

I got one question following last week's Questions and Answers post. I'll take a stab at answering it later this week. Meanwhile, ask me more.

New records reviewed this week:

• 79rs Gang: Expect the Unexpected (2020, Sinking City): [r]: B+(***)
• Sebastien Ammann: Resilience (2018 [2020], Skirl): [bc]: B+(**)
• Lucian Ban/John Surman/Mat Maneri: Transylvanian Folk Songs (2020, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• Will Bernard: Freelance Subversives (2020, Ropeadope): [r]: B
• Body Count: Carnivore (2020, Century Media): [r]: B+(**)
• Daniel Carter/Patrick Holmes/Matthew Putman: Whoadie (2018-19 [2020], 577): [r]: C+
• Emmet Cohen Featuring Benny Golson & Albert "Tootie" Heath: Masters Legacy Series Volume 3 (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Emmet Cohen Featuring George Coleman: Masters Legacy Series Volume 4 (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(***)
• Dinosaur: To the Earth (2019 [2020], Edition): [r]: B+(**)
• Dave Douglas: Dizzy Atmosphere: Dizzy Gillespie at Zero Gravity (2019 [2020], Greenleaf Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Lajos Dudas: The Lake and the Music (2019 [2020], JazzSick): [r]: B+(***)
• Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist: Alfredo (2020, ESGN/ALC/Empire): [r]: B+(*)
• GoGo Penguin: GoGo Penguin (2020, Blue Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Human Feel: The Tower Tapes #5 (2019 [2020], Jazz Club Ferrara): [bc]: B+(**)
• Anne Mette Iversen Quartet + 1: Racing a Butterfly (2020, Bjurecords): [bc]: A-
• KeiyaA: Forever, Ya Girl (2020, Keiya): [r]: B+(**)
• Lady Gaga: Chromatica (2020, Interscope): [r]: B+(***)
• John Law's Congregation: Configuration (2018 [2020], Ubuntu Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Little Simz: Drop 6 (2020, Age 101, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Sabir Mateen/Patrick Holmes/Federico Ughi: Survival Situation (2018 [2020], 577): [r]: B+(**)
• Medhane: Full Circle (2020, TBHG, EP): [bc]: B
• Medhane: Cold Water (2020, TBHG): [bc]: B+(*)
• Mike and the Moonpies: Touch of You: The Lost Songs of Gary Stewart (2020, Prairie Rose): [r]: B+(**)
• Eva Novoa: Satellite Quartet (2017 [2020], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(*)
• Kurt Rosenwinkel Trio: Angels Around (2020, Heartcore): [r]: B+(**)
• Run the Jewels: RTJ4 (2020, Jewel Runners/RBC/BMG): [r]: A-
• Matthew Shipp: The Piano Equation (2020, Tao Forms): [r]: B+(**)
• Sunwatchers: Oh Yeah? (2020, Trouble in Mind): [r]: B
• Chad Taylor Trio: The Daily Biological (2019 [2020], Cuneiform): [dl]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Bobby Shew/Bill Mays: Telepathy (1978 [2019], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Big Joe: Keep Rocking and Swinging (1977, Live and Love): [r]: B+(***)
• Dave Burrell: Black Spring (1977, Marge): [r]: B+(**)
• Emmet Cohen Featuring Jimmy Cobb: Masters Legacy Series Volume 1 (2017, Cellar Live): [r]: B+(***)
• Emmet Cohen Featuring Ron Carter: Masters Legacy Series Volume 2 (2017 [2018], Cellar Live): [r]: B+(**)
• Emmet Cohen: Dirty in Detroit (2017 [2018], self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Lajos Dudas: Radio Days: Birthday Edition 75 (2016, JazzSick): [r]: B+(***)
• Lajos Dudas: Some Great Songs Vol. 2 (2017, JazzSick): [r]: B+(**)
• If Deejay Was Your Trade: The Dreads at King Tubby's 1974-1977 (1974-77 [1994], Blood & Fire): [r]: A-
• Mister Charlie's Blues (1926-1938) (1926-38 [1970], Yazoo): [dl]: B+(**)
• Ogún Meji Duo: #BlackLivesMatter (2014, CFG Multimedia): [os]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Caterpillar Quartet: Threads (ESP-Disk) [06-26]
• Whit Dickey: Morph (ESP-Disk, 2CD)
• Jean-Marc Foussat/Daunik Lazro/Evan Parker: Café Oto 2020 (Fou)
• The Mark Harvey Group: A Rite for All Souls (1971, Americas Musicworks, 2CD) [07-17]
• Alister Spence: Whirlpool: Solo Piano (Alister Spence Music, 2CD) [07-24]

Weekend Roundup

Blog link.

While this week was unfolding, I've been reading a book by Sarah Kendzior: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. She is a journalist based in St. Louis, with a Ph.D. in anthropology and a specialty in post-Soviet Central Asia and its descent into mafia capitalism and oligarchy. She sees Trump as part of a vast criminal enterprise, anchored in Russia, which she insists on describing as "hostile to America." I think she has that analysis ass-backwards. Capitalism's driving force everywhere is greed, which constantly pushes the limits of custom and law. The only thing that separates capitalists from criminals is a democratic state that regulates business and enforces limits on destructive greed. The former Soviet Union failed to do that, but the United States has a checkered history as well, with the major entrepreneurs of the 19th century known as Robber Barons, and a sustained conservative assault on the regulatory state at least since 1980. Trump may be closer to the Russian oligarchs than most American capitalists because of his constant need to raise capital abroad, but he is hardly Putin's stooge. Rather, they share a common desire to suppress democratic regulation of capital everywhere, as well as an itch for suppressing dissent. Arguing that the latter is anti-American (treason even) ignores the fact that that's a big part of the program of the reigning political party in the US.

Kendzior's arguments in this regard annoy me so much I could go on, explaining why the supposed US-Russia rivalry is based on false assumptions, and why Democrats are hurting themselves by obsessing on the Trump/Russia connection. I was, after all, tempted at several points to give up on the book. But I stuck with it: it's short, and anyone who despises Trump that much is bound to have some points. Also, I lived in St. Louis a few years myself, so was curious what she had to say about her battleground state. My interest paid off with her discussion of the 2014 protests against police brutality in Ferguson, a majority-black suburb just north of St. Louis with a predominantly white police force that was largely self-funded by arrests and fines. This is history, but it's also today in microcosm (pp. 164-166):

Understanding Ferguson is not only a product of principle but of proximity. The narrative changes depending on where you live, what media you consume, who you talk to, and who you believe. In St. Louis, we still live in the Ferguson aftermath. There is no real beginning, because [Michael] Brown's death is part of a continuum of criminal impunity by the police toward St. Louis black residents. There is no real end, because there are always new victims to mourn. In St. Louis, there is no justice, only sequels.

Outside of St. Louis, Ferguson is shorthand for violence and dysfunction. When I go to foreign countries that do not know what St. Louis is, I sometimes joke, darkly, that I'm from a "suburb of Ferguson." People respond like they are meting a witness of a war zone, because that is what they saw on TV and on the internet. What they missed is that Ferguson was the longest sustained civil rights protest since the 1960s. The protest was fought on principle because in St. Louis County, law had long ago divorced itself from justice, and when lawmakers abandon justice, principle is all that remains. The criminal impunity many Americans are only discovering now -- through the Trump administration -- had always structured the system for black residents of St. Louis County, who had learned to expect a rigged and brutal system but refused to accept it.

In the beginning, there was hope that police would restrain themselves because of the volume of witnesses. But there was no incentive for them to do so: no punishment locally, and no repercussions nationally. Militarized police aggression happened nearly every night, transforming an already traumatic situation into a showcase of abuse. The police routinely used tear gas and rubber bullets. They arrested local officials, clergy, and journalists for things like stepping off the sidewalk. They did not care who witnessed their behavior, even though they knew the world was watching. Livestream videographers filmed the chaos minute by minute for an audience of millions. #Ferguson, the hashtag, was born, and the Twitter followings of those covering the chaos rose into the tens of thousands. But the documentation did not stop the brutality. Instead, clips were used by opponents of the protesters to try to create an impression of constant "riots" that in reality did not occur. The vandalism and arson shown on cable news in an endless loop were limited to a few nights and took place on only a few streets.

National media had pounced on St. Louis, parachuting in when a camera-ready crisis was rumored to be impending, leaving when the protests were peaceful and tame. Some TV crews did not bother to hide their glee at the prospect of what I heard one deem a real-life Hunger Games, among other flippant and cruel comments. The original protests, which were focused on the particularities of the abusive St. Louis system, became buried by out-of-town journalists who found out-of-town activists and portrayed them as local leaders. The intent was not necessarily malicious, but the lack of familiarity with the region led to disorienting and insulting coverage. Tabloid hype began to overshadow the tragedy. Spectators arrived from so many points of origins that the St. Louis Arch felt like a magnet pulling in fringe groups from around the country: Anonymous and the Oath Keepers and the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan and the Revolutionary Communist Party and celebrities who claimed they were out of deep concern and not to get on television. Almost none of the celebrities ever returned.

In fall 2014, the world saw chaos and violence, but St. Louis saw grief. Ask a stranger in those days how they were doing and their eyes, already red from late nights glued to the TV or internet, would well up with tears. Some grieved stability, others grieved community, others simply grieved the loss of a teenage boy, unique and complex as any other, to a system that designated him a menace on sight. But it was hard to find someone who was not grieving something, even if it was a peace born of ignorance. It was a loss that was hard to convey to people living outside of the region. I covered the Ferguson protests as a journalist, but I lived it as a St. Louisan. Those are two different things. It is one thing to watch a region implode on TV. It is another to live within the slow-motion implosion. When I would share what I witnessed, people kept urging me to call my representative, and I would explain: "But they gassed my representative too."

By the way, here are the latest section heads (as of 7:37 PM CDT Sunday) in The New York Times' Live Updates on George Floyd Protests:

• Majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledges to dismantle the Police Department
• Trump sends National Guard troops home
• New York's mayor pledges to cut police funding and spend more on social services
• Democratic lawmakers push for accountability, but shy away from calls to defund the police
• Barr says he sees no systemic racism in law enforcement
• Romney joins protesters in Washington.
• Protesters march through Manhattan, calling for an end to police violence.
• Thousands turn out in Spokane, Wa., to protest "a virus that's been going on for 400 years."
• Biden will meet with the family of George Floyd in Houston.
• The view from above: aerial images of protests across the country. [link]
• A Confederate status is pulled down during a protest in Virginia
• Global protests against racism gain momentum.
• An officer shot an anti-bias expert who was trying to end a clash at a protest in San Jose, Calif.

A couple items there look like major breaks with the past. While the "progressive" mayors of Minneapolis and New York seems to have spent much of the last week being intimidated by the police forces that supposedly work for them, the balance of political forces in both cities may have shifted to viewing the police as the problem, not the solution. I started off being pretty skeptical of the protests, and indeed haven't been tempted to join them. But it does appear that they're making remarkable progress. And while I abhor any violence associated with the protests, one should never allow such noise to distract from the core issue of the protests. Indeed, given that so much of the violence the media likes to dwell on is directly caused by the police and the government's other paramilitary forces, it's hard not to see that the only way this ever gets resolved is by restoring trust and justice -- which is to say, by radically reforming how policing is done in America.

I expected such sprawl at the start of the week that I decided not to bother organizing sublists. Still, some fell out during the process, but I haven't gone back and organized as many as might make sense. In particular, there are several scattered pieces on the "jobs report": the one by Robert J Shapiro is the most important, but I got to it after several others.

This wound up running a day late. Only a couple links below came out on Monday, and I tried to only pick ones that added to stories I already had (e.g., I added Yglesias' piece on economic reporting, but didn't pick up the one on Biden's polling).

Here's a piece of artwork from Ram Lama Hull occasioned by the recent demonstrations. I pulled this particular one (out of many) from his Facebook page. Some are also on Imgur.

Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that has come up a lot recently, as it makes it very difficult to hold police officers liable for their acts, even the use of excessive or deadly force. For example:

• Nathaniel Sobel: What is qualified immunity, and what does it have to do with police reform?

• Patrick Jalomo/Anya Bidwell: Police act like laws don't apply to them because of 'qualified immunity.' They're right.

• John Kramer: George Floyd and beyond: How "qualified immunity" enables bad policy.

• Christiana Silva: Cory Booker wants to end qualified immunity for police officers.

• Ella Nilsen/Li Zhou: Democrats' sweeping new police reform bill, explained: "Among other measures, Democrats want to end qualified immunity and chokeholds."

• CJ Ciaramella: The Supreme Court has a chance to end qualified immunity and prevent cases like George Floyd's.

Parting tweet (from Angela Belcamino):

Who else but Trump could bring back the 1918 pandemic, the 1929 Great Depression, and the 1968 race riots all in one year?

Some scattered links this week:

• Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit: "Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?" Why does she think "Republican leaders" have principles any different from their president? Applebaum is especially concerned about Lindsay Graham. I can't find the reference, but have a clear memory of Graham, when he was in the House in the 1990s, explaining that Republicans have to secure as many long-term posts of power as possible, before demographic changes make it impossible for R's to win fair elections. So he was always a practical, anti-democratic schemer. Back in 2016, Trump may have offended his sense of what's possible, but by winning he sealed his case, and won Graham over. Applebaum asks, "what would it take for Republican leaders to admit to themselves that Trump's loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love?" The answer is catastrophic defeat at the polls, so bad it sweeps all of them out of office. Losing the Senate seats of Graham and McConnell in 2020 would be a good start.

• David Atkins/Dante Atkins: Trump thought brutalizing protesters would save him. He was wrong. "His gamble on creating a militarized culture war has done the opposite of what he hoped for."

  Even before the brutal killing of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department, Trump knew that he would need to maximize his culture war appeal to non-college whites to make up ground lost to the faltering economy. There can be little doubt that Trump saw opportunity in the protests that followed to dust off the Nixon playbook, vowing to restore "law and order" in a country furious that the law seemed to protect only some, while enforcing a brutal order on others. If Trump's actions threatened to turn the culture war into an active shooting war, that would just be collateral damage on the road to his political recovery.

  The Trump orbit considers the iconography of jingoistic militarism and the violent suppression of protest to be a political winner. . . . Trump, like Nixon before him, uses "law and order" as a way of "talking about race without talking about race." In this narrative, a president who supports American "traditional culture" and stands strong against people who agitate for racial justice will win over a "silent majority" of people who just don't want to be disturbed and want to have some peace and quiet from their politics. . . .

  In one sense, [Trump]'s right: people are exhausted with chaos, and they do want a respect for law and order. The problem for Trump? The chaos is in large part of his own making, and insofar as it isn't, he's in the way of solving the problems created by institutional racism and overlapping hierarchies of oppression. The massive wave of police brutality has woken even many previously disengaged white people up to the need for true equality under the law, and an order in which everyone, including police and the president, are held to account. And many of the same people Trump is trying to persuade now believe that kicking him out of the White House is a necessary prerequisite for making that vision a reality.

• Dean Baker: The jobs report was good, but the economy is still bad. But see Shapiro, below.

• Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman/Katie Rogers/Zolan Kanno-Youngs/Katie Benner: How Trump's idea for a photo op led to havoc in a park.

• Kevin Baron: Trump finally gets the war he wanted.

• Katelyn Burns:

  • Cities and states are barring police from using chokeholds and tear gas.

  • Joe Biden now has the delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.

  • Trump's latest tweets are from an alternate reality where the protests are out of control.

  • 6 Atlanta officers have been charged in violent tasing incident: "A 22-year-old student was left with a fractured arm ad needed 20 stitches from the encounter, according to his attorney."

  • Trump called governors "weak" and said they need to "dominate" George Floyd protesters.

• John Cassidy: Trump represents a bigger threat than ever to US democracy.

• Sean Collins:

  • Trump's push for "law and order" only led to more chaos in DC Monday night. This is worth looking at, if just for the pictures, which show both the horror of the military occupation of DC and the vanity of Donald Trump and his entourage in staging his photo op.

  • The anger behind the protests, explained in 4 charts.

• Tray Connor/Lisa Khoury: Every Buffalo cop in elite unit quits to back officers who shoved elderly man to ground. Two officers were suspended for attacking a 75-year-old protester, cracking his head against the ground and leaving him bleeding. Fifty-seven quit to protest the suspensions.

• Mark Danner: Moving backward: Hypocrisy and human rights.

• Derek Davison/Alex Thurston: Expect more military "liberal interventionism" under a Joe Biden presidency: My first instinct was to play this down, but the sheer number of likely foreign policy mandarins mentioned, as well as Biden's alleged desire to hire anti-Trump Republicans, makes me nervous. One reason I doubt we'll see more interventionism is that I think the current generation of military leaders, many burned from Afghanistan and Iraq (and Syria and Libya), are likely to resist -- especially pleas on "humanitarian" grounds. Also, as I recall, Biden pushed for a more minimal policy in Afghanistan under Obama. On the other hand, his career in Congress always supported the hawks. People do tend to get more cautious with age, so there's that. But I do agree there is reason to fret over his personnel decisions.

• Elizabeth Dwoskin/Nitasha Tiku: Facebook employees said they were 'caught in an abusive relationship' with Trump as internal debates raged.

• Ariel Dorfman: Trump isn't a dictator. But he has a dictator's sense of impunity.

• Rob Eshman: What the old Jewish radical taught me about George Floyd: Our friend, Marsha Steinberg.

• Franklin Foer: The foundations of the Trump regime are starting to crumble.

  Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts -- and now he's meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them. What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milosevic, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali.

• Matt Ford: The police were a mistake: "Law enforcement agencies have become the standing armies that the Founders feared."

• Masha Gessen: Donald Trump's fascist performance.

  Donald Trump thinks power looks like masked men in combat uniforms lined up in front of the marble columns of the Lincoln Memorial. He thinks it looks like Black Hawk helicopters hovering so low over protesters that they chop off the tops of trees. He thinks it looks like troops using tear gas to clear a plaza for a photo op. He thinks it looks like him hoisting a Bible in his raised right hand.

  Trump thinks power sounds like this: "Our country always wins. That is why I am taking immediate Presidential action to stop the violence and restore security and safety in America . . . dominate the streets . . . establish an overwhelming law-enforcement presence. . . . If a city or state refuses . . . I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them. . . . We are putting everybody on warning. . . . One law and order and that is what it is. One law -- we have one beautiful law." To Trump, power sounds like the word "dominate," repeated over and over on a leaked call with governors.

• Chip Gibbons: Donald Trump's "Antifa" hysteria is absurd. But it's also very dangerous. I have a lot of trouble with "antifa": I'm not sure they exist, but if they do, I'm pretty sure they aren't part of the left -- which I'd define as the movement to universalize equal rights, secure peace, and enhance community through cooperation. Fascists hate the left for just these reasons, but more often than not they also hate other people, often for very arbitrary reasons (like race, religion, or favorite football teams). So it stands to reason that there are people who don't have any particular commitment to the left but still hate fascists -- because, well, hate begets more hate. After all, we live in a society that still puts a lot of stock in violence.

  • Ben Collins/Brandy Zadrozny/Emmanuelle Saliba: White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter.

  • Sean Illing: "They have no allegiance to liberal democracy": An expert on antifa explains the group: Interview with Mark Bray, who wrote Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, as near as I can tell because there was no such thing, and he wanted to sell himself as an expert when/if anyone asked.

  • Neil MacFarquhar: Many claim extremists are sparking protest violence. But which extremists?

  • Ben Zimmer: Why Trump is so obsessed with antifa.

• Susan B Glasser: #Bunkerboy's photo-op war.

• Constance Grady: A reading list to understand police brutality in America.

• Garrett M Graff: The story behind Bill Barr's unmarked federal agents. Also see: Washington DC now controlled by gunmen under William Barr's command, and William Barr's unaccountable nameless army suppresses dissent and threatens democracy, which starts off with Chris Murphy tweeting "We cannot tolerate an American secret police."

• Alisha Haridasani Gupta: Why aren't we all talking about Breonna Taylor? Could be that this particular case is complicated by the "war on drugs," which allowed police to "serve a no-knock warrant" in the middle of the night, and guns: she was killed after her boyfriend shot at a suspected intruder, which turned out to be armed police who returned fire massively and blindly (or at least that's how I understand it went down). As both the reason for the break in and the firefight were deliberate choices made by police, it's hard not to think that this could have been handled differently, in a way where no one got shot, and it's hard to dismiss the idea that racism didn't factor into those choices, even if the police never saw the person they were killing. But doesn't this also raise a key question about guns? A big part of the common rationale for owning a gun is the idea that you can use it to defend your home from invasion -- but clearly that doesn't work in cases where the police are the invaders. Maybe that rationale isn't as smart as its advocates think?

• Sean Illing:

  • Will he go? "A law professor fears a meltdown this November." Interview with Lawrence Douglas, who has a book on this: Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. This strikes me as something not worth worrying about now, although that anyone can raise such questions reminds us that Trump has no regard for the Constitution and the rule of law. I can't imagine that anyone in a position of power would support Trump in spite of a clear electoral defeat.

  • Why the policing problem isn't about "a few bad apples": "A former prosecutor on the fundamental problem with law enforcement: 'The system was designed this way.'" Interview with Paul Butler, Georgetown law professor, former federal prosecutor, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men.

• Quinta Jurecic/Benjamin Wittes: The law-enforcement abuses that don't bother Trump: "The president believes that those who oppose him should be punished, but that those who support him should be free to do as they please."

• Fred Kaplan:

  • James Mattis' scathing broadside against Donald Trump is unprecedented.

  • Military commanders are finally speaking out against Trump.

  • Sending troops into American cities will only cause more chaos and turmoil.

• Roge Karma: Chris Hayes on how police treat black Americans like colonial subjects: Interview with Hayes, who wrote a very clear book on the subject, A Colony in a Nation.

  We're seeing tactics of policing that are usually used on people that are outside of view: pressure, harassment, and ultimately domination.

  I think the word domination is so remarkable. The president has been explicit on this: The goal is domination. And what does domination look like? It looks like a knee on the neck. In fact, a boot to the neck is like the oldest trope we have to represent domination and represent tyranny. What is the flag of the colonies? It's a snake that reads, "Don't tread on me." Do not step on me. Do not place your foot on me. That is domination. And if you do, I will react.

• Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman: How Trump's demands for a full house in Charlotte derailed a convention.

• Amit Katwala: Sweden's coronavirus experiment has well and truly failed.

• Philip Kennicott: The dystopian Lincoln Memorial photo raises a grim question: Will they protect us, or will they shoot us?

• Catherine Kim:

  • Poll: Americans are more concerned about police violence than violence at protests.

  • The protests are growing larger, calmer, and more community-oriented.

  • The fatal arrest of Manuel Ellis, another black man who yelled "I can't breathe," explained: "A medical examiner ruled Ellis's death as a homicide caused by a lack of oxygen and physical restraint."

  • The White House went dark as protests raged outside.

• Jen Kirby: The disturbing history of how tear gas became the weapon of choice against protesters: "The chemical weapon was originally marketed to police as a way to turn protesters 'into a screaming mob.'" Interview with Anna Feigenbaum, author of Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today.

• Ezra Klein: America at the breaking point: "The social upheaval of the 1960s meets the political polarization and institutional dysfunction of the present." I don't have time to write about this piece, but probably should refer to it at some point when I finally try to sum up what's going on. I've always hated the notion that the 1960s divided and broke America. Rather, events exposed hypocrisies and weaknesses, but rather than heal them, political reaction took over and turned us into fantasists. That the same fractures have returned -- sure, plus some new ones -- should remind us that failure to heal can only be ignored for so long.

• Elizabeth Kolbert: How Iceland beat the coronavirus.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon: "He -- and his party -- is much, much worse." The subhed is critical, because is less the leader of his party than the vessel into which fifty years of megalomania and cynicism has been poured, the creature grown out of such vile soil. The first comparison I recall between Trump and Nixon concerned their respective convention acceptance speeches in 1968 and 2016: Nixon's was much more concise, and much more cunning, a carefully constructed pitch to the American people that exploited their feelings while betraying little of Nixon's real ambitions, whereas Trump's was, despite being scripted, an incoherent mess. Their presidencies have followed from those initial premises, but they started out from different places, and to my mind that makes Nixon more culpable for the ensuing disaster. In fact, when Trump apes Nixon's law-and-order rants, he's not just repeating past mistakes but testifying to Nixon's continued legacy. So I really don't have much patience when liberals like Krugman point out that Nixon put his signature to some pieces of progressive legislation (like the Clean Air Act) that Trump has sought to trash. Nixon was smart enough to bend with the wind, but he was also devious enough to put Donald Rumsfeld in charge of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and subvert LBJ's "Great Society" programs from the inside.

  • Trump takes us to the brink: "Will weaponized racism destroy America?"

• Heather Long/Andrew Van Dam: The black-white economic divide is as wide as it was in 1968: "14 charts show how deep the economic gap is and how little it has changed in decades. The covid-19 recession is also hitting black families and business owners far harder than whites."

• German Lopez:

  • How violent protests against police brutality in the '60s and '90s changed public opinion: "The backlash to unrest in the '60s gave the country Richard Nixon, one study found. But we don't know if that will apply today." One thing not noted here is that we tend to conflate two different things when we remember "violence in the '60s": "race riots" which flared up in various cities from 1965-68, most often in response to local police acts; and the police riot against anti-war demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Neither of these should be framed as "protests against police brutality" -- sure, they were occasioned by and exemplified by police brutality, but they weren't organized as protests. I've long felt that the former were pent-up explosions of anger, a release of pressures that had built up over decades of racism and impoverishment, as I noted that it was very rare for any city to "riot" more than once. Repeated experiences were prevented not by police dominance but by community leaders organizing bases of political power. (Also helpful were cases where white political leaders responded by getting out into the streets and making their concerns visible, as John Lindsay did in New York. RFK, campaigning in Indianapolis when Martin Luther King was killed, was also effective as keeping anger from turning into riot.) It is true that Nixon cultivated a backlash against blacks and anti-war protesters, but one thing that helped him was that he was out of office when the "violence" happened, unlike Trump. Of course, Nixon was responsible for much of the violence after he became president in 1969 -- in America, and much, much more around the world.

  • How to reform American police, according to experts.

    1. Police need to apologize for centuries of abuse
    2. Police should be trained to address their racial biases
    3. Police should avoid situations that lead them to use force
    4. Officers must be held accountable in a very transparent way
    5. On-the-job incentives for police officers need to change
    6. We need higher standards -- and better pay -- for police
    7. Police need to focus on the few people in communities causing chaos and violence
    8. We need better data to evaluate police and crime

• Kate Maltby: Viktor Orbán's masterplan to make Hungary greater again.

• Peter Manseau: The Christian martyrdom movement ascends to the White House: "A former professor of Kayleigh McEnany, Trump's new press secretary, explores her enduring obsession with religious persecution and death."

• Branko Marcetic: American authoritarianism runs deeper than Trump.

• Josh Marshall:

  • He's no Richard Nixon.

  • Surveying the whirlwind.

  • Farce, tragedy and photo op: Early in the week, I was thinking Marshall's "editors' blog" entries might be worth following, but I hit the paywall here. I used to look at his site first thing every day, but the returns have been so paltry with such added nuisance factor I hardly bother any more.

• Dylan Matthews: How today's protests compare to 1968, explained by a historian. Interview with Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • Black Lives Matter sues Bill Barr for order that led to tear gas attack on peaceful protesters.

  • The 3 former officers who aided Derek Chauvin are charged in George Floyd's killing: These guys were police officers who at the very least stood by while police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. They've since been fired for their conduct, so technically now they are former officers, but it seems disingenuous to refer to them as "former" when they were active when they committed their crimes. Indeed, I can't think of any other case where the press takes such pains to dissociate criminals from their occupation at the time of the crime. When Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy was described as "ex-CIA," that's because he was no longer employed by the CIA when he broke into Watergate.

  • The charges against former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, explained.

• Terry Nguyen: There isn't a simple story about looting.

• Tim Noah: Donald Trump is celebrating the wrong economic accomplishment: "The president wants credit for a largely illusory blip of improvement in the job market. He should be going all-in on the $600 sweeteners."

• Anna North/Catherine Kim: These videos show the police aren't neutral. They're counterprotesters.

• Osita Nwanevu: Tom Cotton and the elite media's dalliance with illiberalism. The New York Times published an op-ed by the Arkansas Republican called Send in the troops, demanding that the US military "restore order" -- a task that same military has repeatedly failed to do in Afghanistan and Iraq (indeed, a sober analysis would recognize that the US military only made those situations worse, and not for lack of arms or brutality). The Times justified printing Cotton with its commitment to airing "all" voices (meaning conservative ones)

  • Zack Beauchamp: The New York Times staff revolt over Tom Cotton's op-ed, explained.

  • Michelle Goldberg: Tom Cotton's fascist op-ed.

    Before Donald Trump became president, most newspaper op-ed pages sought to present a spectrum of politically significant opinion and argument, which they could largely do while walling off extremist propaganda and incitement. The Trump presidency has undermined that model, because there's generally no way to defend the administration without being either bigoted or dishonest.

  • David Roberts: The Tom Cotton op-ed affair shows why the media must defend America's values.

  • Libby Watson: At The New York Times, an uprising over James Bennet's incompetence. Bennet subsequently resigned.

• Alice Miranda Ollstein/Dan Goldberg: Mass arrests jeopardizing the health of protesters, police.

• Richard A Oppel Jr/Lazaro Gamio: Minneapolis police use force against black people at 7 times the rate of whites.

• Alex Pareene: The police take the side of white vigilantes: "Over the past week, cops have shown that they share a coherent ideology."

• Daniel Politi:

  • Video shows law enforcement officers slashing tires at Minneapolis protests.

  • Two Buffalo police officers charged with assault for shoving 75-year-old protester.

  • Trump retweets interview trashing George Floyd's character as he breaks own Twitter record.

• Linda Qiu: Trump's false claim that 'nobody has ever done' more for the black community than he has: "The records of Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon B Johnson, among others, beg to differ." Assuming pre-Lincoln presidents are ineligible, I thought it might be easier to list the ones who had done less (or who had done more harm). Andrew Johnson was more blatantly racist than practically anyone. And Woodrow Wilson did major harm in segregating the federal government. But beyond that just makes my head hurt.

• David Remnick: An American uprising: "Who, really, is the agitator here?"

• Brian Resnick: Rubber bullets may be "nonlethal," but they can still maim and kill: "The dangers of 'nonlethal' police weapons -- like rubber bullets, flash-bangs, and tear gas -- explained." As I recall, Israeli soldiers, who use a lot of rubber bullets on Palestinians, like to aim for eyes.

  The group found 26 studies on the use of rubber bullets around the world, documenting a total of 1,984 injuries. Fifteen percent of the injuries resulted in permanent disability; 3 percent resulted in death. When the injuries were to the eyes, they overwhelmingly (84.2 percent) resulted in blindness.

• David Roberts: The coronavirus crisis has revealed what Americans need most: Universal basic services. Interview with Andrew Percy, co-author with Anna Coote of The Case for Universal Basic Services.

• Katie Rogers: Ivanka Trump blames 'cancel culture' after college pulls her commencement speech: She was scheduled to address graduates of Wichita State University "Tech." (What is this "Tech"? Looks like the former Wichita Area Technical College [WATC], which is to say it it's not even the real third-tier state college in Kansas. I attended WSU for a year back when my only credential was a GED, and parlayed that into a scholarship at a much fancier college. WATC was originally an adult extension of the Wichita East High vocational program.) I'd like to know more about how this got contracted (and what the kill fee is). If Ivanka wanted to look for a prestige spot to speak, she settled pretty low. On the other hand, I can't imagine anyone there thinking she's just what WSU Tech needed to burnish its image -- unless, of course, one of the Kochs (who have a lot of pull at WSU) whispered in their ears. How it got canceled is no mystery. It was such a patently stupid idea, all it took was for one of the faculty to circulate a petition, which damn near everyone signed. "Cancel culture" is another new one for me (although evidently not for Vox). Controversial figures often get scheduled for events then canceled, but it's almost never due to a vogue for canceling. Usually, some hidden power (like the Kochs) stomps on the autonomy of some student group. Or sometimes, as in this case, a popular uprising spoils some shady insider deal. For more, see Daniel Caudill: WSU Tech reverses course; Ivanka Trump will not be a commencement speaker. Main additional piece of news here is that WSU Tech President Sheree Utash "serves on the American Workforce Policy Advisory board," giving her a connection to Ivanka, probably via Mike Pompeo (Trump's Secretary of State, formerly US Representative for Wichita area).

• Philip Rucker/Ashley Parker/Matt Zapotosky/Josh Dawsey: With White House effectively a fortress, some see Trump's strength -- but others see weakness. Also by Dawsey, with David Nakamura/Fenit Nirappil: 'Vicious dogs' versus 'a scared man': Trump's feud with Bowser escalates amid police brutality protests.

• Noam Scheiber/Farah Stockman/J David Goodman: How police unions became such powerful opponents to reform efforts.

• Michael Shank: How police became paramilitaries.

  That beat cops so often look like troops is not just a problem of "optics." There is, in fact, a "positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings," according to recent research. In other words, the more militarized we allow law enforcement agents to become, the more likely officers are to use lethal violence against citizens: civilian deaths have been found to increase by about 130 percent when police forces acquire significantly more military equipment. . . .

  Law enforcement has, in fact, been training for a moment like this -- specifically by learning techniques and tactics from Israeli military services. As Amnesty International has documented, law enforcement officials from as far afield as Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state, and the D.C. Capitol have traveled to Israel for such training. These programs, according to research backed by Jewish Voice for Peace, focus on exchanging methods of "mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent."

• Robert J Shapiro: No, the unemployment rate didn't really drop in May: "Donald Trump bragged about a bogus jobs number and defiled George Floyd's name in the process." This strongly suggests that the BLS cooked the books to give Trump a number (13.3% unemployment) he could brag about. This did this by not counting 9 million people who weren't working but could be construed as still having jobs (e.g., unpaid furloughed workers). The true number is closer to 19.0%.

• Rebecca Solnit: As the George Floyd protests continue, let's be clear where the violence is coming from: "Using damage to property as cover, US police have meted out shocking, indiscriminate brutality in the wake of the uprising."

• Jeffrey St Clair: Roaming charges: Mad bull, lost its way: I don't particularly like him, and rarely read him, but some weeks deserve one of his laundry lists, and he notices somethings that few other people do. For instance, he dug up a headline from 2003: "Rumsfeld: Looting is transition to freedom," adding: "Perhaps Rumsfeld will write an amicus brief on behalf of the more than 10,000 protesters arrested for rioting, looting and just pissing off cops."

• Yeganeh Torbati: New Trump appointee to foreign aid agency has denounced liberal democracy and 'our homo-empire': Meet "Merritt Corrigan, USAID's new deputy White House liaison."

• Emily VanDerWerff: America's contradictions are breaking wide open: "On Donald Trump, standing outside a church, pretending to be strong." Vox's TV critic, but isn't it all TV these days?

• Alex Ward:

  • The president is a danger to the US military: "Even Trump's former Secretary of Defense James Mattis agrees." The James Mattis piece is in The Atlantic. PS: Mike Mullen, former Joint Chiefs chairman, made an even more emphatic statement. We've also heard from retired General John Allen and retired Admiral James Stavridis. And, of course, there's also Colin Powell, whose reputation is so tarnished that Trump struck back, taunting him as "very responsible for getting us into the disastrous Middle East Wars."

  • The Insurrection Act, the 1807 law Trump could use to deploy troops to curb protests, explained.

  • Australia wants the US to investigate a police attack on 2 Australian reporters: "Videos show the on-air journalist and cameraman were attacked by a federal law enforcement officer outside the White House."

• Adam Weinstein: This is fascism: "Trump is sending an unambiguous message to a country in turmoil -- and his armed supporters, from cops to vigilantes, hear it loud and clear."

• Philip Weiss:

  • George Floyd killing highlights issue of US police training in Israel:

    At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.

    There they learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.

    The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.

    Also:

    Exchanges between US police and the Israeli army promote a brutal military occupation as a positive model for community policing. Under the banner of "counter-terrorism" training, Israel is presenting lessons learned from 50 years of illegal military occupation over a Palestinian population deprived of human and civil rights.

  • -/James North: NYT's meltdown on Tom Cotton recalls its four op-ed pieces justifying slaughter of Gaza demonstrators.

• Jordan Weissmann: Here's what happens if Republicans let those $600 unemployment benefits expire.

• Robin Wright: Is American becoming a banana republic?

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • It's way too early to declare "mission accomplished" on the economy.

  • 8 Can't Wait, explained.

  • The US economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. Unemployment rate for May dropped from 14.7% to 13.3%. See Shapiro above for a better explanation of this.

  • Vandalism and theft aren't helping.

    But while navigating these issues on a practical level is tricky, on an ethical level it's an easy problem -- those looting and vandalizing are in the wrong, and police officers who focus their ire on peaceful protesters while letting vandals roam free are also in the wrong, and political leaders like Trump who use the existence of vandals as a hazy excuse to fire tear gas into law-abiding crowds are the wrongest of all.

  • Growing calls to "defund the police," explained. Also see:

    • Kate Aronoff: Defunding the police is good climate policy.

    • Melissa Gira Grant: The pandemic is the right time to defund the police.

    • Jack Norton: Cut the carceral system now.

    • Farah Stockman/John Eligon: Cities ask if it's time to defund police and 'reimagine' public safety.

    • Alex S Vitale: We must defund the police now.

  • Black Lives Matter activism is working.

  • The most chilling aspect of Trump's Monday night crackdown on law-abiding protesters.

    Trump's politics are full of these little dominance rituals. To verbalize agreement with Trump because you genuinely agree with what he says proves nothing -- it's willingness to say things that neither you nor anyone else believes that truly proves your devotion.

    Monday night's use of force was similar in structure but more alarming in practice. Would law enforcement officials fire tear gas at an unarmed crowd that wasn't breaking the rules? That federal agents were deployed instead of DC police officers is perhaps a sign that there were some doubts. Regardless, one can never know for sure what kind of orders will be followed until they are given. A 7:01 pm dispersal wouldn't prove anything, whereas a 6:36 pm dispersal proved a great deal.

• Gary Younge: What Black America means to Europe. The size of the protests has surprised me everywhere, but especially in Europe. Still, as a placard in a photo here says, "The UK is not innocent."

  George Floyd's killing comes at a moment when America's standing has never been lower in Europe. With his bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, ignorance, vanity, venality, bullishness, and bluster, Donald Trump epitomizes everything most Europeans loathe about the worst aspects of American power. . . .

  Although police killings are a constant, gruesome feature of American life, to many Europeans this particular murder stands as confirmation of the injustices of this broader political period. It illustrates a resurgence of white, nativist violence blessed with the power of the state and emboldened from the highest office. It exemplifies a democracy in crisis, with security forces running amok and terrorizing their own citizens. The killing of George Floyd stands not just as a murder but as a metaphor.

• Li Zhou:

  • The trope of "outside agitators" at protests, explained. Interview with Howard law professor Justin Hansford.

  • Embattled Rep. Steve King has lost his primary: Nine-term House representative (R-IA), so racist he had become an embarrassment even to the Republican Party (and scarier for them, his hold on his previously safe seat had become tenuous).

Questions and Answers

Expanded blog post.

I asked Michael Tatum to take a look at my first batch of Questions and Answers. He helped flag some necessary edits before I posted them early this week. He also suggested that instead of just linking to them (as I did again above), I should have included them directly in the blog. I don't plan on doing that as a matter of course, but this time I reckon they could use a little more exposure. For one thing I got zero new questions (here's the form) since they went up.

I imagine there are hundreds (if not thousands) of similar offers scattered around the web. I've felt a need for some kind of feedback for a long time, but found that comment systems were more work to maintain than they're worth. Two features are direct antecedents to mine: Greil Marcus's Ask Greil), and Robert Christgau's Xgau Sez. Joe Levy suggested the latter as a way of generating some public interest in Christgau's then-new Duke University Press essay collections, Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017 and Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading.

Joe suggested "Ask Greil" as a model, but when I looked at the implementation, I had some second thoughts. I adapted the news roll code to display the Q&A in 15-unit chunks, most recent first, stringing earlier pages together. ("Ask Greil" is in flat files, one per year.) I added tags to the data file, thinking that someday I could support more search options. (I'd like to eventually put them into the database, but didn't want to have to update it more often than I do.) I also added a captcha to cut down on spam questions. I recently adapted the Christgau code for my own site, adding a few more tags (but still not making good use of them).

My main change was to add a "keywords" field. I expected (or hoped) to get a broader range of questions than the music queries that predominate for Christgau and Marcus, and thought it would be a good idea to be able to easily sort my answers into topics. Still, four of the first five questions were on music, including one of those potentially tedious requests to elaborate on grades. A sixth question, which I didn't answer here, was really more of a tip (Whitney Rose) -- more properly answered in last week's Music Week. While my email is elsewhere on the site (and still works best if you want a direct answer), feel free to use the form for tips, comments, or occasional kind words.

I rather hope to see wide-ranging questions, one that provoke me to think, maybe even do a little research, although I'd be happy enough with ones where I can just rattle off experiences and opinions. I like to keep an open mind about where this is going. And I'd like some feedback to prod me along. Thanks, in advance.

Pick up questions and answers here.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 33378 [33333] rated (+45), 209 [209] unrated (+0).

Post delayed a day because, well, a lot of things kept me from working on it on Monday. Frozen Sunday night, aside from adding Monday's unpacking.

A few weeks ago, I set up a form for asking questions. I finally decided I had enough to do the extra work of setting up an answer page, so Q&A is now a going concern. I've added a couple fields beyond what I did for Robert Christgau, but I'm not really using them yet. At some point, it should be possible to get selective lists based on keywords, or possibly other search methods.

One question I didn't answer was actually a tip, Jeopardy-style phrased as a question. Mongo asked if I had heard Whitney Rose's We Still Go to Rodeos ("the best country album I've heard so far this year"). No, I hadn't, but the obvious response was to listen to it, so it's in this week's list. I disagree, but my initial reaction was pretty similar to my initial underrating of Kalie Shorr's Open Book in 2019. Still, have major doubts it will ever catch up with the Lucinda Williams and Brandy Clark records (or Chicago Farmer, if he qualifies). I went on and sampled a few more recent alt-country albums, but didn't find anything really better.

Until those, most of what I listened to last week were old jazz albums. The first few were unheard items from the JazzTimes ballots I mentioned recently, at least until I got carried away with Paul Motian. Then I got into Max Roach, partly in response to one of the questions.

Got a rare rock record in the mail recently, with a hand-printed note explaining that Robert Christgau reviewed Thank Your Lucky Stars' debut album, Spinning Out of Orbit, in my one shot 2013 Black Friday Special, and hoping I might like the new one. I do. The CD is actually very nicely packaged, but has no presence on the web, and the note didn't even include an email address, so I have no idea how you'd go about buying a copy. (The old CD, which I haven't heard, is listed on Amazon, at $30.08, 1 copy left, with other vendor offers from $29.09.) Without an album cover available, I thought I'd try my old scanner -- an "all-in-one" Epson Stylus Photo RX580 -- only to find it doesn't work. (I replaced the 6 ink cartridges a while back, and now it's stuck in a mode where it insists on me first installing new ink cartridges before it does anything else. Two Ubuntu scanner programs fail to recognize it.) What I wound up doing was taking a picture with my cell phone, then running it through a bunch of rotate/shear/crop commands in Gimp. Very little margin on top to work with, but I managed to keep it even though I chopped off the other three edges. I'm real surprised it looks as good as it does.

I should mention that Joe Yanosik has written up Sonic Youth: A Consumer Guide to their live albums. They've released a bunch of them on Bandcamp. I had seen mention of a couple of them recently, but didn't realize there were this many, and after last year's release of Battery Park NYC, July 4th 2008 -- which Joe also includes, as an A+ -- I wasn't in a big hurry to go there. Nice that Joe has illuminated the way.

Alto saxophonist Lennie Niehaus (90) died last week. He's probably best known as the director of many Clint Eastwood soundtracks, but he was an important "West Coast cool jazz" musician, played for Stan Kenton 1952-59 (minus a stretch in the Army), and recorded a number of well-regarded (albeit a bit fancy for my taste) albums, especially in the 1950s, before focusing on soundtracks. I've heard a couple of his albums, and need to check out more.

English tenor saxophonist Don Weller (79) also died. I can't say that I know his work. I also heard that Sun Ra bassist Bill Davis died, but haven't found an obituary yet. Other recent musician deaths: Majek Fashek (57, Nigerian reggae singer), John Nzenze (80, Kenyan guitarist), Evaldo Gouveia (91, MPB singer-songwriter).

Horrors enough on Monday and Tuesday to get me to open Weekend Roundup as soon as I post this.

New records reviewed this week:

• Caitlin Cannon: The TrashCannon Album (2020, Caitlin Cannon): [r]: B+(**)
• Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit: Reunions (2020, Southeastern): [r]: B+(*)
• Carly Rae Jepsen: Dedicated Side B (2020, School Boy): [r]: B+(**)
• Rent Romus/Heikki Koskinen/Life's Blood Ensemble: Manala (2019 [2020], Edgetone): [cd]: B+(***)
• Whitney Rose: We Still Go to Rodeos (2020, MCG): [r]: B+(**)
• Thank Your Lucky Stars: Girl in Her 29s (2020, Sounds Deevine): [r]: A-
• Pam Tillis: Looking for a Feeling (2020, Stellar Cat): [r]: B+(*)
• Bill Warfield and the Hell's Kitchen Funk Orchestra: Smile (2020, Planet Arts/43 Street): [cd]: B
• Jaime Wyatt: Neon Cross (2020, New West): [r]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Paul Bley/Paul Motian: Notes (1987 [1988], Soul Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Bley: Reality Check (1994 [1996], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Bley: Notes on Ornette (1996 [1997], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Bley/Evan Parker/Barre Phillips: Sankt Gerold (1996 [2000], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Bley: Play Blue: Oslo Concert (2008 [2014], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Clifford Brown/Max Roach: Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street (1956 [2002], Verve): [r]: A-
• Miles Davis: Big Fun (1969-72 [2000], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Booker Little: Booker Little 4 & Max Roach (1958 [1959], United Artists): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian: Conception Vessel (1972 [1973], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian: Tribute (1974 [1975], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Motian Trio: Le Voyage (1979, ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian: Psalm (1981 [1982], ECM): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Motian: It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago (1984 [1985], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Paul Motian Trio: Sound of Love: At the Village Vanguard (1995 [1997], Winter & Winter): [r]: A-
• Paul Motian and the Electric Bebop Band: Flight of the Blue Jay (1996 [1997], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian: Trio 2000 + One (1997 [1998], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian and the E.B.B.B.: Europe (2000 [2001], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(*)
• Paul Motian and the E.B.B.B.: Holiday for Strings (2001 [2002], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(**)
• Paul Motian Trio 2000 + Two: Live at the Village Vanguard Volume III (2006 [2010], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(***)
• Paul Motian Trio 2000 + Two: On Broadway Volume 5 (2008 [2009], Winter & Winter): [r]: A-
• The Odean Pope Saxophone Choir: The Saxophone Shop (1985 [1986], Soul Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Buddy Rich/Max Roach: Rich Versus Roach (1959 [1990], Mercury): [r]: B+(**)
• Max Roach/Clifford Brown: The Best of Max Roach and Clifford Brown in Concert (1954 [1956], GNP): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: Max Roach + 4 (1956-57 [1990], Emarcy): [r]: A-
• Max Roach: Jazz in 3/4 Time (1956-57 [1957], Emarcy): [r]: B+(*)
• Max Roach: The Max Roach 4 Plays Charlie Parker (1957-58 [1995], Verve): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: Award-Winning Drummer (1958 [1960], Time): [r]: B+(**)
• Max Roach: Percussion Bitter Sweet (1961, Impulse!): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: It's Time (1962, Impulse!): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach Quartet: Speak, Brother, Speak! (1962 [1963], Fantasy): [r]: A-
• Max Roach: The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan (1964 [1965], Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: Drums Unlimited (1965-66 [1966], Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)
• Max Roach: Members, Don't Git Weary (1968, Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach Quartet: Pictures in a Frame (1979, Soul Note): [r]: B+(**)
• Max Roach: M'Boom (1979 [1980], Columbia): [r]: B+(***)
• Max Roach: Live in Berlin (1984 [2009], Jazzwerkstatt): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• John Finbury: Quatro (Green Flash Music)
• Madre Vaca: Winterreise (Madre Vaca) [06-04]
• Rudresh Mahanthappa: Hero Trio (Whirlwind) [06-19]

May 2020