Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

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

Some scattered links this week:

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

• Jonathan Chait:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Sarah Jones:

  • We deserve a better debate over Medicare for All.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Eric Levitz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 5 takeaways from the Democratic debate in Iowa:"

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

• Ian Millhiser:

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

  • The coming Supreme Court showdown over birth control.

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

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

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

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

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

• Aaron Rupar:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Peter Wade:

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

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

• Alex Ward:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

Music Week

Expanded blog post, January archive (in progress).

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

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

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

New records reviewed this week:

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

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

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

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

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

Weekend Roundup

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

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

More links on Iran, war, and foreign policy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Ryan Cooper:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Fred Kaplan:

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

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

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

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

• Eric Levitz:

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

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

  • Trump administration accidentally declares end of war in Iraq.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Aaron Rupar:

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

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

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

• Alex Ward:

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

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

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

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

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

Some scattered links this week:

• Katelyn Burns:

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

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

  • Trump encourages new anti-government protests in Iran.

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

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

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

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

• Jonathan Chait:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Lisa Friedman:

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

  • Trump rule would exclude climate change in infrastructure planning.

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

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

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

• Sarah Jones:

  • Americans really want to raise taxes on the rich.

  • Is the Democratic primary about foreign policy now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Alex Pareene:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Aaron Rupar:

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

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

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

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

• Matt Stieb:

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

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

• Matt Taibbi:

  • The 10 laws of New Hampshire primary reporting.

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

• Matthew Yglesias:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

Notes:

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

Music Week

Expanded blog post, January archive (in progress).

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

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

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

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

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

New records reviewed this week:

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

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

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

Old music:

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

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

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

Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some links on Trump and Iran:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Juan Cole:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Graham E Fuller: US foreign policy by assassination.

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

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

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

• Chris Hedges: War with Iran.

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

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

• Fred Kaplan:

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

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

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

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

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

• Eric Levitz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Jonah Shepp: The real risk of assassinating Soleimani.

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

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

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

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

• Alex Ward:

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

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

• Philip Weiss:

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

  • Israel figured in US decision to assassinate Iranian general.

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

Some scattered links this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Sarah Jones:

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

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

• Ed Kilgore:

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

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

  • William Barr embodies the conservative surrender to Trump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Matthew Yglesias:

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

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

Music Week

Expanded blog post, December archive (complete).

Music: Current count 32538 [32491] rated (+47), 228 [230] unrated (-2).

Took an extra day to post Music Week this week. I figured I had one more day in the month to work with, or actually one more day to wrap up the year in calendar time, so I got in a little extra listening. Also used the time to add some lists to the EOY aggregate. Got up to Radio X in AOTY's list of lists. Haven't done anything from the NPR Jazz Critics Poll yet -- should be up in early January, not sure exactly when -- nor have a tracked down the JJA lists (that usually track JCP ballots). Hence, very little data so far on jazz (other than my own grades).

I did get an invite to join something called Village Voice Pazz & Jop Rip-Off Poll, and picked off a couple dozen ballots there. My rule there was to only count ballots from people I recognized, which mostly means members of the Expert Witness Facebook group.

This week's records were mostly things I took an interest in while compiling lists. The one major exception was that I resolved to listen to the last 2019 releases in my promo queue, including a couple I just got this week. The result is that, for now at least, the "pending" lists in my 2019 file are empty. On the other hand, I've tried not to accidentally delve into 2020 releases (looks like I have 18 records waiting).

Quite a few B+(***) records below (15). Probably means I moved too fast, at least on a few of them. (Kajfes is the one jazz record I'm most tempted to review, especially after his Nacka Forum record got an A-. But also I rarely give rap and electronica records anyway near enough attention, although that didn't stop YBN Cordae or Atom[TM], or for that matter Sault.)

All of this month's reviews have been rolled up in December 2019 Streamnotes, but I haven't done the usual indexing yet. Usually takes me 3-4 hours to do it all, and if I hold back for that I'll be even later. Sometime next week. More lists too. Maybe next week I'll be able to say a few things about the EOY Aggregate, and have some more general reflections on the year. Or maybe I'll just decide I'm due for a break.

New records reviewed this week:

• Abjects: Never Give Up (2019, Yippee Ki Yay): [r]: B+(**)
• Albare: Albare Plays Jobim (2019, Alfi): [cd]: B+(**)
• Backxwash: Deviancy (2019, Grimalkin, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• Philip Bailey: Love Will Find a Way (2019, Verve): [r]: B+(*)
• Barker: Utility (2019, Ostgut Ton): [r]: B+(***)
• Bonzo Squad: There's Always Tomorrow (2019, self-released, EP): [cd]: B
• Boogie: Everythings for Sale (2019, Shady/Interscope): [r]: B+(*)
• Peter Brötzmann: I Surrender Dear (2019, Trost): [r]: B+(**)
• Deep State: The Path to Fast Oblivion (2019, Friendship Fever): [r]: B
• Dumb: Club Nites (2019, Mint): [bc]: B+(***)
• EarthGang: Mirrorgang (2019, Dreamville/Interscope): [r]: B+(*)
• Emmeluth's Amoeba: Chimaera (2019, Řra Fonogram): [r]: B+(***)
• Gang Starr: One of the Best Yet (2019, TTT/Gang Starr): [r]: B+(*)
• Elena Gilliam/Michael Le Van: Then Another Turns (2019, Blujazz): [cd]: B+(***)
• Devin Gray: Devin Gray's Algorhythmica (2019, Rataplan, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
• Devin Gray GPS Trio: Blast Beat Blues (2019, Rataplan, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
• Jason Hawk Harris: Love & the Dark (2019, Bloodshot): [r]: C+
• The Hot Sardines: Welcome Home/Bon Voyage (2019, Eleven): [r]: B+(***)
• Insignificant Other: I'm So Glad I Feel This Way About You! (2019, Counter Intuitive): [r]: B+(*)
• Loraine James: For You and I (2019, Hyperdub): [r]: B+(**)
• Goran Kajfes Tropiques: Into the Wild (2019, Headspin): [bc]: B+(***)
• Ari Lennox: Shea Butter Baby (2019, Dreamville/Interscope): [r]: B+(*)
• Danny Lerman: Ice Cat (2019, Blujazz): [cd]: B-
• Haviah Mighty: 13th Floor (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(***)
• Nacka Forum: Sĺ Stopper Festen (2019, Moserobie): [cd]: A-
• The New Pornographers: In the Morse Code of Brake Lights (2019, Concord): [r]: B+(*)
• Isabelle Olivier/Rez Abbasi: OASIS (2019, Enja/Yellowbird): [cd]: B+(**)
• Henrik Olsson/Ola Rubin: Olsson/Rubin (2019, Barefoot): [cd]: B+(**)
• Rozina Pátkai: Taladim (2018 [2019], Tom-Tom): [cd]: B+(**)
• Lee Scratch Perry: Heavy Rain (2019, On-U Sound): [r]: A-
• Lee Scratch Perry: Life of the Plants (2019, Stones Throw): [r]: B+(***)
• Sampa the Great: The Return (2019, Ninja Tune): [bc]: B+(**)
• Sault: 5 (2019, Forever Living Originals): [bc]: A-
• Sault: 7 (2019, Forever Living Originals): [bc]: A-
• Derek Senn: How Could a Man (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(***)
• Somersaults [Olie Brice/Tobias Delius/Mark Sanders]: Numerology of Birdsong (2018 [2019], West Hill): [bc]: B+(***)
• Svetlost: Odron Ritual Orchestra (2019, PMG): [bc]: B+(***)
• Thick: Thick (2019, Epitaph, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
• Ronnie Wood & His Wild Five: Mad Lad: A Live Tribute to Chuck Berry (2019, BMG): [r]: B+(***)
• Billy Woods: Terror Management (2019, Blackwoodz Studioz): [bc]: B+(**)
• YBN Cordae: The Lost Boy (2019, Atlantic): [r]: A-
• Young Nudy & Pi'erre Bourne: Sli'mere (2019, RCA): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• AtomTM: Lassigue Bendthaus/Cloned (+ Singles) (1992, AtomTM Audio Archive): [bc]: A-
• Burial: Tunes 2011 to 2019 (2011-19 [2019], Hyperdub, 2CD): [r]: B+(*)
• Masahiko Satoh/Sabu Toyozumi: The Aiki (1997 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-

Old music:

• Olie Brice/Tobias Delius/Mark Sanders: Somersaults (2014 [2015], Two Rivers): [bc]: B+(***)
• Emmeluth's Amoeba: Polyp (2017 [2018], Řra Fonogram): [r]: B+(*)

Weekend Roundup

No intro. Didn't really feel like doing this in the first place, but had tabs I wanted to close.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • A new government study shows how Trump's tariffs have backfired.

  • What we know about a shooting at a White Settlement, Texas church.

  • What we know about the deadly car bombing in Mogadishu: "More than 70 people have been killed, and at least 100 people were wounded."

  • Mike Bloomberg has spent a staggering $100 million on campaign ads in a month. Just exercising his right to free speech, a right all of us share in "equally" (unlike his $50 billion).

  • Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wins party primary, weeks after indictments: I guess the Republicans aren't the only political party to value opportunism more than law.

• Eric Alterman: Trump's executive order on anti-semitism isn't about protecting Jews.

• Teo Armus: A NATO expert criticized Trump on Twitter. So a US ambassador barred him from speaking at a conference. Stanley Sloan. I meant to write some about this, at least after Robert Christgau endorsed and circulated a link to Sloan's talk notes. I can't go into it here, other than to note that I thought the talk was horrible. (The extent of Sloan's delusion can be gauged by his book title: Defense of the West: NATO, the European Union and the Transatlantic Bargain. You can see from that title why he's the sort of guy who gets invites to speak at NATO conferences.)

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Does the left have any better ideas than Obama's? "The Obama era produced the most sweeping combination of social reforms, economic rescue, and regulation of any presidency in half a century." That's bullshit hyperbole, depending on a very low bar, and overlooking the much more effective "reforms" of Reagan, the Bushes, and even Trump, just because they've nearly always been for the worse. Those 50 years include 40 since Reagan's "revolution," following what now looks like prefiguring by Nixon and Carter -- a period of Democrats trying to frame their policy objectives in Republican terms (e.g., as "market reforms"), to ever less avail. Chait wants to rail against recent re-evaluations of Obama's works, but I see those as necessary steps to clear the air of zombie ideas:

    • Alex Pareene: A decade of liberal delusion and failure.

    • Ganesh Sitaraman: The colapse of neoliberalism. Sitaraman also wrote After neolieralism: "The last 10 years have seen the collapse of neoliberalism. The question now is, what comes next?"

    • Libby Watson: The hell that was health care reform.

  • President Trump's dream is to become America's Viktor Orbán: "Why the president and his supporters are following the Hungarian autocrat's blueprint."

• Elizabeth Dias/Jeremy W Peters: Evangelical leaders close ranks with Trump after scathing editorial.

• Ben Ehrenreich: California is burning -- nationalize PG&E.

• Tom Engelhardt: Is Donald Trump the second 9/11?

• Kian Goh: California's fires prove the American dream is flammable: "If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership." Not the conclusion I would draw, even from only reading this article.

• Adam Gopnik: Behind the bewildering recent incidents of anti-semitism. Later, but related:

  • Chas Danner: 5 stabbed in Hanukkah attack in Monsey, New York.

• Dalia Hatuqa: "We are living in a touristic prison": Palestinians on life in the holy city of Bethlehem.

• Astead W Herndon: 'Nothing less than a civil war': These white voters on the far right see doom without Trump. E.g., "Mark Villalta said he had been stockpiling firearms, in case the 2020 election does not go in the president's favor."

• Daniel Immerwahr: A world to win: "Decolonization and the pursuit of a more egalitarian international order." Review of Adam Getachew's book, Worldmaking After Empire: Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.

• Umair Irfan: 2019 was a brutal year for American farmers.

• Nelma Jahromi: The hidden histories in the periodic table: "From poisoned monks and nuclear bombs to the "tranfermium wars," mapping the atomic world hasn't been easy."

• David D Kirkpatrick: How a Chase Bank chairman helped the deposed Shah of Iran enter the US: "The fateful decision in 1979 to admit Mohammed Reza Pahlavi prompted the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and helped doom the Carter presidency."

• Carolyn Kormann: Is nuclear power worth the risk?

• Paul Krugman:

  • Big money and America's lost decade. "Yes, the rich have too much political influence." One might addd, "in both political parties," but the key event of the "lost decade" was the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, which shifted political focus away from merely serving the rich (which Clinton and Obama did more successfully, flamboyantly even, than any Republican) to impoverishing working Americans.

  • The cruelty of a Trump Christmas: "Republicans aren't Scrooges -- they're much worse."

• Nancy LeTourneau: Republicans are fiscally reckless and irresponsible: Of couse they are. But they benefit from a double standard, as the media only seems to take the charge seriously if directed against a Democrat.

• Eric Levitz:

  • The public option is politically superior to Medicare for All -- but only as a sound bite.

  • Why Trump vilifies whistle-blowers and venerates war criminals: "In Trump's authoritarian worldview, real heroes don't let the rule of law constrain their viciousness toward enemies of the cause."

  • GOP lawmaker plotted insurrections to establish Christian state.

  • Donald Trump's not-so-hostile takeover of the GOP: "Trump conquered the GOP by surrendering to its establishment."

    Trump began accommodating the GOP Establishment from the moment he secured the nomination. In the early weeks of his primary campaign, Trump endorsed universal health-care, tax hikes on hedge-fund managers, and a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. After Trump won the Republican primary -- and, thus, the hearts and minds of many previously adversarial GOP donors -- he either abandoned or de-emphasized such heresies. Once in power, he outsourced his agenda to Paul Ryan. Trump could have devoted his "honeymoon" to his (broadly popular) ambitions for improving U.S. infrastructure. Instead, he let the Randian speaker try and fail to take health-care from poor people, before successfully delivering (deeply unpopular) tax cuts to wealthy ones.

• Alan Lichtman: The 2010s were the decade that bent democracy to the breaking point.

• Eric Lipton/Maggie Haberman/Mark Mazzetti: Behind the Ukraine aid freeze: 84 days of conflict and confusion: "The inside story of President Trump's demand to halt military assistance to an ally shows the price he was willing to pay to carry out his agenda."

• Alex Morris: False idol -- why the Christian right worships Donald Trump.

• Holly Otterbein/David Siders: Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination.

• Adam K Raymond: Thw world's 500 richest people increased their wealth by $1.2 trillion in 2019.

• David Roberts: The Trump administration just snuck through its most devious coal subsidy yet.

• Jay Rosen: The Christmas Eve confessions of Chuck Todd: "That disinformation was going to overtake Republican politics was discoverable years before he says he discovered it."

• Aaron Rupar: Future generations will look back on Trump's latest wind turbines rant in awe and horror.

• Greg Sargent: The massive triumph of the rich, illustrated by stunning new data.

• Christine Stapleton: Why did Trump ditch his church in Palm Beach on Christmas Eve for evangelical service? I predict that by election day he'll convert to Pentecostalism. That way his gibberish will be excused as "speaking in tongues."

• Katrina vanden Heuvel: Remembering Bill Greider: "Bill was an American heretic: inquisitive, unwilling to accept conventional dogmas, and always a voice for the people." A sampling of pieces by William Greider:

  • American hubris, or, how globalization brought us Donald Trump [2018-04-19]: "It was 'free trade' mania, pushed by both major political parties, that destroyed working-class prosperity and laid the groundwork for his triumph."

  • What killed the Democratic Party? [2017-10-30]: "A new report offers a bracing autopsy of the 2016 election -- and lays out a plan for revitalization."

  • Why American democracy has descended into collective hysteria [2017-09-28]: "We are a great power in decline -- but neither party has a clue what to do about it."

  • It's Groundhog Day in Washington, with Trump peddling the same old Reaganite snake oil [2017-04-28]: "Tax cuts for the wealthy didn't increase government revenue then, and they're not going to now. It's mourning again in America."

  • Here's what you need to know about the Federal Reserve [2017-03-17]: "We demand way too much from the central bank -- but that's because our elected politicians have done almost nothing to revive the economy."

  • Whom should we blame for our deranged democracy? [2016-09-20]: "Laying it all on Trump is too easy -- both political parties are out of touch and distant from the people."

  • How Trump dog-whistles the business establishment [2016-03-18]: "He cleverly woos the GOP base on issues like trade, but this working-class hero is actually a willing agent of the 1 percenters."

  • How Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton [2016-03-11]: "In the general election, he could win by running to her left -- and her right."

  • Vietnam is the war that didn't end [2015-05-05]: "Forty years later, we still haven't confronted the true lesson of Vietnam."

  • How the Democratic Party lost its soul [2014-11-11]: "The trouble started when the party abandoned its working-class base."

  • Why was Paul Krugman so wrong? [2013-04-01]: "Everyone's favorite Nobel-winning Keynesian is no longer gravely deluded on the global economy. How much can we trust him now?"

  • When big business needs a favor, George Bush gets the call [1984-04-12]: "Ronald Reagan's back-door man."

  • The education of David Stockman [1981-12].

  Other recent pieces on Greider:

  • Dean Baker: Bill Greider and secular stagnation.

  • Jessica Corbett: 'A stark loss for American journalism': Reporter and author William Greider dies at age 83.

  • John Nichols: William Greider knew what ailed the Democratic Party.

  • Ilana Novick: William Greider's blistering critiques of capitalism will be sorely missed.

  • Yves Smith: Links 12/27/19: "Depicting [Greider] as a journalist diminishes his importance. Let us not forget that Marx was a journalist too. I cited a key Greider observation often, that the US operates in a system not of free trade but of managed trade, and other countries have mercantilist objectives, namely seeking to run trade surpluses or at least not deficits so as [t]o boost domestic employment and savings."

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The telling conservative backlash to a Virginia zoning reform proposal, explained.

  • Trump really doesn't want to talk about his health care record.

  • The nuanced political impact of wine cave fundraisers. "Democratic donors are generally to the left of rank-and-file voters." Is this really true? A chart shows they're more polarized, and in a nod to Sanders, he admits that "small Democratic donors are even more left wing."

• Li Zhou: Senate Republicans were laser-focused on confirming judges in 2019 -- even the unqualified ones.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32491 [32466] rated (+25), 230 [226] unrated (+4).

Skipped last week, so this one covers two weeks, with a big hole in the middle. On. Dec. 12, I had surgery to open up my nasal passages, hopefully to breathe better. The surgery was fairly quick, and I was home by noon, but my recovery hasn't been anything to brag about. I did virtually nothing for over a week. Had a follow-up appointment after a week, with the PA poking around, pulling out scabs and clots of blood. During that week I checked email and processed a few late ballots for Francis Davis's NPR Jazz Critics Poll (we did finally match last year's total of 140), but couldn't work for more than 15 minutes at a time (even on something as mechanical as Noisey's EOY list, which took me 4-5 sessions). I didn't feel much better Friday, but found I could get some work done. I only played old jazz for a week, but started streaming some new music -- mostly hip-hop, as it turned out. Pretty much everything I heard landed at B+(**), and this week's reviews are even shorter and shabbier than usual.

Almost finished the week without a single A- record, but Trapline landed 10th on Phil Overeem's year-end list. I still can't tell you why, but three plays convinces me there's enough going on there to merit the grade. Almost added a second one, Emmeluth's Amoeba: Chimaera, from

While I was down, I missed three pieces (free, I think) from Robert Christgau's And It Don't Stop subscription newsletter, so I'll do penance for not announcing them in a timely manner here:

• Dean's List: The 2010s: The 25 best albums of the last 10 years.
• Xgau Sez: In praise of differenter things, suggestive titles and (relatively) unmediated aesthetic pleasure.
• Playing With (and Burying) the Big Boys: The Clash's London Calling at 40.
• Consumer Guide: December, 2019

Don't have much more to say at this point. The usual tracking files are in the usual places. I've added a few things to the EOY Aggregate, but it is nowhere near up to date (and while I'm likely to add to it, it may never try to make it as comprehensive as in recent years).

New records reviewed this week:

• Eric Alexander: Eric Alexander With Strings (2019, HighNote): [r]: B+(*)
• Gonçalo Almeida/Martin van Duynhoven/Tobias Klein: Live at the Bimhuis (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Rebecca Angel: Santa Baby (Timeless Grooves, 1): [cd]: B+(***)
• Atmosphere: Whenever (2019, Rhymesayers Entertainment): [r]: B+(***)
• Courtney Barnett: MTV Unplugged (Live in Melbourne) (2019, Mom + Pop Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Beck: Hyperspace (2019, Capitol): [r]: B
• Dopolarians: Garden Party (2019, Mahakala): [bc]: B+(***)
• Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program: Dance of the Cosmos (2019, Akashik, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Lafayette Harris Jr.: You Can't Lose With the Blues (2019, Savant): [r]: B+(*)
• Hiromi: Spectrum (2019, Telarc): [r]: B+(**)
• Hot Chip: A Bath Full of Ecstasy (2019, Domino): [r]: B+(*)
• Brittany Howard: Jaime (2019, ATO): [r]: B
• Kaytranada: Bubba (2019, RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• José Lencastre Nau Quartet: Live in Moscow (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Jeff Lofton: Jericho (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Caroline Polachek: Pang (2019, Columbia): [r]: B+(*)
• Slayyyter: Slayyyter (The Mixtape) (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Sly & Robbie/Roots Radics: The Final Battle: Sly & Robbie vs. Roots Radics (2019, Serious Reggae): [yt]: B+(**)
• Sly & Robbie: Dub Serge (2019, Taxi): [r]: B+(*)
• Snotty Nose Rez Kids: Trapline (2019, Fontana North): [r]: A-
• Stormzy: Heavy Is the Head (2019, Merky/Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)
• Dave Stryker: Eight Track Christmas (2019, Strikezone): [cd]: B
• Sudan Archives: Athena (2019, Stones Throw): [bc]: B+(**)
• Juan Vinuesa Jazz Quartet: Blue Shots From Chicago (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• The Who: Who (2019, Polydor): [r]: B

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Bobby Bradford/Frode Gjerstad/Kent Carter/John Stevens: Blue Cat (1991 [2019], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(**)

Weekend Roundup

I didn't feel like doing a Roundup this weekend, but found a piece I wanted to quote at length, and figured that might suffice: Andrew Sullivan: What we know about Trump going into 2020. I haven't been a fan of Sullivan's lately (well, ever), and don't endorse his asides on the moral superiority of conservatives, but his assessment of Trump hits a lot of key points, and is well worth reading at length (I am going to add some numbered footnotes where I have something I want to add):

So reflect for a second on the campaign of 2016. One Republican candidate channeled the actual grievances and anxieties of many Americans, while the others kept up their zombie politics and economics. One candidate was prepared to say that the Iraq War was a catastrophe, that mass immigration needed to be controlled[1], that globalized free trade was devastating communities and industries, that we needed serious investment in infrastructure, that Reaganomics was way out of date, and that half the country was stagnating and in crisis.

That was Trump. In many ways, he deserves credit for this wake-up call. And if he had built on this platform and crafted a presidential agenda that might have expanded its appeal and broadened its base, he would be basking in high popularity and be a shoo-in for reelection.[2] If, in a resilient period of growth, his first agenda item had been a major infrastructure bill and he'd combined it with tax relief for the middle and working classes, he could have crafted a new conservative coalition that might have endured.[2] If he could have conceded for a millisecond that he was a newbie and that he would make mistakes, he would have been forgiven for much. A touch of magnanimity would have worked wonders. For that matter, if Trump were to concede, even now, that his phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine went over the line and he now understands this, we would be in a different world.

The two core lessons of the past few years are therefore: (1) Trumpism has a real base of support in the country with needs that must be addressed, and (2) Donald Trump is incapable of doing it and is such an unstable, malignant, destructive narcissist that he threatens our entire system of government. The reason this impeachment feels so awful is that it requires removing a figure to whom so many are so deeply bonded because he was the first politician to hear them in decades. It feels to them like impeachment is another insult from the political elite, added to the injury of the 21st century. They take it personally, which is why their emotions have flooded their brains. And this is understandable.

But when you think of what might have been and reflect on what has happened, it is crystal clear that this impeachment is not about the Trump agenda or a more coherent version of it. It is about the character of one man: his decision to forgo any outreach, poison domestic politics, marinate it in deranged invective, betray his followers by enriching the plutocracy, destroy the dignity of the office of president, and turn his position into a means of self-enrichment. It's about the personal abuse of public office: using the presidency's powers to blackmail a foreign entity into interfering in a domestic election on his behalf, turning the Department of Justice into an instrument of personal vengeance and political defense, openly obstructing investigations into his own campaign, and treating the grave matter of impeachment as a "hoax" while barring any testimony from his own people.

Character matters. This has always been a conservative principle but one that, like so many others, has been tossed aside in the convulsions of a cult. And it is Trump's character alone that has brought us to this point. . . .

The impeachment was inevitable because this president is so profoundly and uniquely unfit for the office he holds, so contemptuous of the constitutional democracy he took an oath to defend, and so corrupt in his core character that a crisis in the conflict between him and the rule of law was simply a matter of time. When you add to this a clear psychological deformation that can produce the astonishing, deluded letter he released this week in his own defense or the manic performance at his Michigan rally Wednesday night, it is staggering that it has taken this long. The man is clinically unwell, preternaturally corrupt, and instinctively hostile to the rule of law. In any other position, in any other field of life, he would have been fired years ago and urged to seek medical attention with respect to his mental health.

Footnotes:

1. Restricing immigration is a favorite talking point of other "never Trump conservatives" (e.g., David Frum), one thing that helps them keep their identity distinct from liberals. There is a case to be made that low-wage immigrants undermine American workers, but Trump and anti-immigrant Republicans only frame the issue in racial and cultural terms.
2. Of course, this is sheer fantasy: the "conservative" mindset allowed Trump no room to maneuver toward giving even his white middle class supporters a break from the government, let alone more leverage against their employers and the predators who have been stripping wealth at every turn. They couldn't even imagine a government that helped balance the scales (although that's exactly what the New Deal did, with a bias for white people that Trump might admire). Thus, for instance, the infrastructure bill offered nothing but privatization measures.

Sullivan also has an appreciative piece on his old chum's win in the UK elections: Boris's blundering brilliance, including this bit:

The parallels with Donald Trump are at first hard to resist: two well-off jokers with bad hair playing populist. But Trump sees himself, and is seen by his voters, as an outsider, locked out of the circles he wants to be in, the heir to a real-estate fortune with no political experience and a crude sense of humor, bristling with resentment, and with a background in reality television. He despises constitutional norms, displays no understanding of history or culture, and has a cold streak of cruelty deep in his soul. Boris is almost the opposite of this, his career a near-classic example of British Establishment insiderism with his deep learning, reverence for tradition, and a capacity to laugh at himself that is rare in most egos as big as his. In 2015, after Trump described parts of London as no-go areas because of Islamist influence, Johnson accused him of "a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of president." Even as president, Trump is driven primarily by resentment. Boris, as always, is animated by entitlement. (The vibe of his pitch is almost that people like him should be in charge.)

Some scattered links this week:

• Sarah Almukhtar/Rod Nordland: What did the US get for $2 trillion in Afghanistan? Nordland also wrote: The death toll for Afghan forces is secret. Here's why.

• Robert P Baird: The art of the Democratic deal: "How Nancy Pelosi and her party navigated a historic week in the House of Representatives."

• Zack Beauchamp: The shamelessness of Bill Barr.

• Riley Beggin: Senate Republicans have already made up their minds on impeachment.

• Julia Belluz/Nina Martin: The extraordinary danger of being pregnant and uninsured in Texas.

• Katelyn Burns:

  • Trump promotes Putin's take on a "far-fetched" impeachment process.

  • Trump finally has his Space Force -- and it will make orbital security its priority.

  • "Wall Street Pete": Progressive protesters crash Buttigieg fundraiser.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump's attack on Amazon may be his most egregious abuse of power yet. I seriously doubt it, but isn't it pretty strange that a major media mogul (Jeff Bezos) could even be in position to be punished by pulling a $10 billion Defense contract?

  • Trump writes insane letter to Pelosi showing why he's unfit for office.

  • Don't make impeachment partisan, warns party that impeached Clinton over sex.

  • Republicans are right. The impeachment investigation shouldn't end too soon.

  • Why Trump wants even more pollution than industry does. [08-29]

• Isaac Chotiner:

  • Why the editor of Christianity Today decided to rebuke Trump: Interview with Mark Galli.

  • India's citizenship emergency: Interview with Niraja Gopal Jayal.

• Jane Coaston: Christianity Today called for Trump's removal. Here's why that doesn't matter.

• Jennifer Cohn: How new voting machines could hack our democracy.

• Juliet Eilperin/Steven Mufson: The Trump administration just overturned a ban on old-fashioned lightbulbs.

• Adam Gopnik: The field guide to tyranny: Review of Frank Dikötter: How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century, and Daniel Kalder: The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy.

• Sean Illing: Why so many people who need the government hate it: Interview with Suzanne Mettler author of The Government-Citizen Disconnect. Pull quote: "If we become more and more anti-government, we're against ourselves. We're against out own collective capacity to do anything."

• Sarah Jones: No, evangelicals aren't turning on Trump.

• John Judis: The right and wrong lessons from Corbyn and Labour's defeat.

• Roge Karma/Ezra Klein: In 2020, Joe Biden and the "moderates" are well to Obama's left. Examples group Sanders/Warren and Biden/Buttigieg and compare both to Obama in 2008. Had they picked Klobuchar for their "moderate" sample, the waters might have been a good deal muddier. (Same for Bloomberg.) Lots of reasons for the shift left, not least that even in the rare cases Obama managed to fulfill a promise, his solutions were no way near adequate to address the problems. I'm actually surprised that no one has tried to claim the "moderate lane" by conceding that Sanders is right on where we want to go but wrong on tactics, offering instead shorter steps that point us in the right direction, ones that one can build momentum on. One obvious thing is to promote schemes to expand on Medicare for more and more people. Every time Buttigieg attacks Medicare-for-All he exposes the loss of a couple points from his IQ. Before long, he'll sink below Beto O'Rourke, maybe even John Delaney. By then he'll be finished.

• Tony Karon: What's Russian for 'I told you so'? How American exceptionalism suppressed the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. I have a few quibbles here, but the main point (referencing "the Afghan war's equivalent of the Pentagon Papers) is valid, and one could build even more on the similar US/USSR experiences there: both shared a list of stages, for much the same reasons:

  1. A rash decision to invade for purely internal political reasons, using excessive force, producing an illusion of instant success.
  2. The hubris of imposing a centralized political structure, defined by nothing more than elevating local cronies, who would be kept in line by tolerating corruption.
  3. The gradual development of a rural-based resistance, initially underestimated because the invaders and their cronies were so full of themselves.
  4. A massive military escalation to suppress the insurgency, because US/USSR political leaders (no matter how skeptical) couldn't say no to their military leaders.
  5. A gradual drawdown of occupying forces as escalation failed and the costs grew excessive.
  6. A final withdrawal combined with promises of material support, ultimately leading to collapse of the crony government (in the USSR case; the US is still fighting to forestall the inevitable).

  Karon is right that Americans failed to recognized these parallels because Americans think they're different and special, even when they're doing the exact same things. Of course, they rarely even realized they were doing the same things. For one, they took credit for the Soviet failures in the 1980s, and knew that they wouldn't have to face comparable subversion by a foreign power. They knew they had more force at their disposal, and much deeper pockets -- which kept them in the war for a decade longer than the Russians, not that it's done they any good.

  This is the first piece I've noticed from the Koch-funded Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Some other pieces from their website:

  • Andrew Bacevich: An alternative to US world dominance. Bacevich, who landed the job of President of the Quincey Institute, also wrote: Iran might be America's enemy, but Saudi Arabia is no friend.

  • Jessica Lee: Breaking the deadlock: Jumpstarting talks between the United States and North Korea.

  • Samuel Moyn/Stephen Wertheim: The infinity war.

  • Trita Parsi: Is Trump accidentally triggering reconciliation in the Middle East? Parsi has several earlier articles: America's confrontation with Iran goes deeper than Trump; and Could Obama's Iran playbook save Trump from war?

  • Paul R Pillar: Government lies aren't solely responsible for our misguided wars.

  • Nikhil Pal Singh: Enough toxic militarism. "This rosy narrative no longer bears the weight of the United States' staggering contribution to mass violence, regional destabilization, and ecological decay."

  • Stephen Walt: A manifesto for restrainers.

  • Adam Wunische: The real lesson from the Afghanistan Papers: Pull the US military out of the statebuilding business.

• Jen Kirby: The USMCA trade deal passes the House in a rare bipartisan vote: 385-41, "after Democrats secured changes to labor and pharmaceutical provisions." For background, Kirby also wrote: USMCA, Trump's new NAFTA deal, explained in 600 words. Also: Democrats -- and Trump -- declare victory on USMCA.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Trump's EPA agenda is wildly unpopular. Dems should make it a 2020 issue.

  • What the UK election does (and doesn't) teach Democrats.

  • Congress learns Pentagon wasted $1 trillion, promptly gives it bigger budget.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • What Trump has done to the courts, explained.

  • The Republican judges who were widely expected to kill Obamacare got cold feet: "Sometimes, people who stare into the abyss blink."

• Ella Nilsen: "We're looking for undecideds": Pete Buttigieg's campaign is pitting its public option against Medicare-for-all.

• Kelsey Piper: The Nobel went to economists who changed how we help the poor. But some critics oppose their big idea. Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Kremer, and randomized control trials (RCTs).

• Andrew Prokop:

  • The drama over when Pelosi will send Trump's impeachment articles to the Senate, explained.

  • Democrats' new accusation that Trump violated federal bribery law, explained.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • The White House's defense of Trump's Dingell comments shows there's no bottom.

  • Trump attacks Greta Thunberg during record-setting Twitter binge.

  • Trump's speech in Hershey revealed a presidency off the rails.

• Theodore Schleifer: Pete Buttigieg is raising money from Silicon Valley's billionaires -- even as Elizabeth Warren attacks him for it.

• Matt Seaton: The strange death of social-democratic England.

• Jonah Shepp: Boris Johnson's 'radical' Brexit agenda.

• Emily Stewart: How Mike Bloomberg made his billions: a computer system you've probably never seen.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Trump's post-impeachment rally was his longest and strangest yet.

  • House Republicans liken impeachment to Pearl Harbor, say Trump treated worse than Jesus.

  • Trump suggests Adam Schiff be subject to Guatemalan justice for paraphrasing him.

  • Read President Trump's unhinged letter to Nancy Pelosi on impeachment.

  • UN climate talks fall apart over potential of Trump 2020 win.

  • Donald Trump Jr benefits from nepotism in foreign country by shooting endangered animal.

  • Trump expresses anti-semitic sentiments before a Jewish audience again.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • Michael Moore on 'Useful Idiots': 'If the election were held today, Trump would win'.

  • Five questions still remaining after the release of the Horowitz report.

  • Washington Post's Afghanistan story reveals core folly of American defense strategy: "Why are we still in Afghanistan? Because our policies make failure inescapable."

• Reis Thebault/Hannah Knowles: Georgia purged 309,000 voters from its rolls. It's the second state to make cuts in less than a week. The other is Wisconsin: see Marisa Iati: A judge ordered up to 234,000 people to be tossed from the registered voter list in a swing state.

• Emily Todd VanDerWerff:

  • The 18 best TV shows of 2019: I probably watched more TV this year than any since the 1960s. Took this as a checklist. Listed shows I watched:

    17. True Detective (HBO) [B]
    14. Chernobly (HBO) [A-]
    7. Barry (HBO) [B+]
    3. Succession (HBO) [B+]

    I watched previous seasons of (9) Mr. Robot (USA), but it got pretty disconnected from reality last time, so I haven't given it much thought this round. I watched one show each of (6) Lodge 49 (AMC) and (1) Watchmen (HBO). Commercial breaks killed the former, and I didn't see any point to the latter. No idea what I'd recommend in place of this list -- I'd have to rumage through a bunch of lists, as they're not coming readily to mind. I suppose watching 21 seasons of Silent Witness kept us away from lots of other series.

  • The 21 TV shows that explained the 2010s. Never even heard of the top pick here -- Nathan for You (Comedy Central) -- but more series I've watched substantial chunks of:

    3. The Leftovers (HBO) [B+]
    4. The Americans (FX) [A-] -- skipped part of first season, but got back into it later.
    7. Orange Is the New Black (Netflix) [A-]
    11. Hannibal (NBC) [B+]
    13. Girls (HBO) [B+]
    14. Mr. Robot (USA) [B] -- haven't watched latest season (but probably will; at least it's on DVR)
    19. American Crime Story (FX) [B+] -- only watched the first (O.J. Simpson) season)
    20. The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu) [B] -- only watched the first season
    21. Game of Thrones (HBO) [A-]
    22. Barry (HBO) [B+]
    23. Better Call Saul (AMC) [B+]
    24. Homeland (Showtime) [B+]
    25. Justified (FX) [A]
    26. Manhattan (WGN America) [A-] -- despite some of the fictions really bothering me.
    27. Rectify (Sundance) [A-]
    28. Silicon Valley (HBO) [B+]
    29. Succession (HBO) [B+]

    Watched small bits of (5) Halt and Catch Fire (AMC), (9) Atlanta (FX), (10) Bob's Burgers (Fox), Black-ish. There's also a list of "10 shows I loved that started in the 2000s and ended in the 2010s":

    • Big Love (HBO) [A-]
    • Breaking Bad (AMC) [B] -- missed a couple seasons in middle, when it was unbearably horrible.
    • The Good Wife (CBS) [B+] -- on average, sometimes better.
    • Mad Men (AMC) [A]
    • Parks & Recreation (NBC) [A]

• Alex Ward: Pentagon halts operational training for Saudi military students after Pensacola shooting.

• Craig Whitlock: At war with the truth: "US officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found." An introduction to "The Afghanistan Papers," with links to "more than 2,000 pages of interviews and memos" -- a collection widely compared to "The Pentagon Papers" (from the Vietnam War). Whitlock also wrote Part 2: Stranded without a strategy.

• Charlotte Wood: From disbelief to dread: the dismal new routine of life in Sydney's smoke haze. Related: Naaman Zhou/Josh Taylor: The big smoke: how bushfires cast a pall over the Australian summer.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Democrats' 2020 economy dilemma, explained.

  • Amy Klobuchar deserves a closer look from electability-minded Democrats. A lot of reporters thought Klobuchar got a boost from her performance at the December debate (e.g., see Amy Klobuchar made the biggest gains with voters at the debate), but from the bits I overheard -- I was working in a neighboring room -- I found her singularly annoying, and not just because her political stance has moved so sharply to the far right end of the Democratic Party spectrum. Yglesias cites her winning margins in Minnesota compared to other Democrats (that is, more liberal ones), although in my experience lopsided statewide margins most often reflect weak opposition campaigns -- something that doesn't happen in presidential contests. The more relevant "electability" question is how does she stack up directly against Trump? If the world neatly balanced on a left-right scale, being close to the right might be an advantage. But her centrism is a mix of "see no problems, broach no solutions" -- and who really cares about that? Trump at least sees problems, even if his answers are half-hearted and ill-reasoned. For another argument on electability, see Carl Beijer: Joe Biden will lose a general election to Donald Trump: but "there is one safe bet -- it's Bernie Sanders."

  • American democracy's Senate problem, explained.

  • To win reelection, Trump should try to deliver on his economic populist promises: But he won't, because the Republicans won't let him do anything significant on Yglesias's list (even as the Democrats give him minor victories on USMCA and drug prices). Still, every Democrat should memorize the section on "Trump's litany of broken promises" -- only problem there is that they never expected him to deliver on such promises, because they saw immediately how much of a fraud he is.

  • Air pollution is much more harmful than you know.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32466 [32422] rated (+44), 226 [230] unrated (-4).

I have very little time to spare on this, so will keep it short. Spent much of the weekend counting ballots for NPR's 14th Annual Jazz Critics Poll, something Francis Davis started back when we were writing for the Village Voice. Deadline was last night, but there's a good chance that any ballots that arrive today will be counted. I have 132 at present, down a bit from 2018. Some surprises (for me at least) among the new album leaders. Less so among the other categories. This week's haul includes a bunch of records I discovered among the ballots. Still, two/thirds of this week's A- records came from my queue.

Results will probably be posted in about a week. I'm liable to fall out of the loop on that, as I'm scheduled for what should be minor surgery on Thursday, and I'm pessimistic about what I will be able to do the following week or so. In fact, I'm pretty down on getting anything done beforehand either.

Until I got swamped over the weekend, I did a fair amount of work on the EOY Aggregate, which has changed rather dramatically. Up to Thanksgiving, the list was dominated by first-half albums which showed up in mid-year lists -- Sharon Van Etten's Remind Me Tomorrow was leading Billie Eilish's When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?. Eilish pulled back ahead last week, but the dramatic gains were from: (2) Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell; (4) Angel Olsen: All Mirrors; (5) Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Ghosteen; and (11) FKA Twigs: Magdalene. Among first-half albums, (7) Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising is the one that has gained some spots, evidently because those who can stand it like it a lot.

I was fairly up-to-date before the weekend, but haven't added much since. Should see many more lists in the next week or two, but unclear whether I'll be able to keep up. At any rate, the file is doing most of what it needs to do. Still, not much jazz in it, other than my own grades. I'll add the JCP data when it goes public.

New records reviewed this week:

• Awatair: Awatair Plays Coltrane (2019, Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(***)
• Bones [Ziv Taubenfeld/Shay Hazan/Nir Sabag]: Reptiles (2017 [2019], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Anthony Braxton: Quartet (New Haven) 2014 (2014 [2019], Firehouse 12, 4CD): [r]: A-
• Patrick Brennan/Abdul Moimęme: Terraphonia (2019, Creative Sources): [r]: B+(*)
• Terri Lyne Carrington + Social Science: Waiting Game (2019, Motéma, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Anthony Coleman: Catenary Oath (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Chick Corea/Christian McBride/Brian Blade: Trilogy 2 (2010-16 [2019], Concord, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Rodney Crowell: Texas (2019, RC1): [r]: B+(***)
• Nina De Heney/Karin Johansson/Henrik Wartel: Quagmire (2018 [2019], Creative Sources): [r]: B+(*)
• Doja Cat: Hot Pink (2019, Kemosabe/RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• Marc Edwards/Guillaume Gargaud: Black Hole Universe (2019, Atypeek Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Andy Emler/David Liebman: Journey Around the Truth (2019, Signature Radio France): [r]: B+(*)
• Erin Enderlin: Faulkner County (2019, Black Crow Productions): [r]: B+(*)
• Gorilla Mask: Brain Drain (2019, Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Alex Harding/Lucian Ban: Dark Blue (2019, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• Eric Hofbauer's Five Agents: Book of Water (2018 [2019], Creative Nation Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Eric Hofbauer & Dylan Jack: Remains of Echoes (2019, Creative Nation Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Carl Ludwig Hübsch/Pierre-Yves Martel/Philip Zoubek: Otherwise (2018, Insub): [bc]: B+(*)
• Ill Considered: Ill Considered 8 (2018 [2019], Ill Considered Music): [bc]: B+(***)
• Katarsis 4: Katarsis 4 (2019, NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(**)
• Kimchi Moccasin Tango: Yankee Zulu (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Lee Konitz Nonet: Old Songs New (2019, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(***)
• Mat Maneri Quartet: Dust (2019, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(*)
• MC Yallah X Debmaster: Kubali (2019, Hakuna Kulala): [r]: B+(*)
• Tom McDermott: Meets Scott Joplin (2018 [2019], Arbors): [r]: B+(**)
• Camila Meza & the Nectar Orchestra: Ámbar (2019, Sony Masterworks): [r]: B
• Roscoe Mitchell Orchestra: Littlefield Concert Hall Mills College March 19-20, 2018 (2018 [2019], Wide Hive): [r]: B+(**)
• Qasim Naqvi: Teenages (2019, Erased Tapes): [r]: B+(*)
• Tomeka Reid Quartet: Old New (2018 [2019], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(***)
• Michele Rosewoman's New Yor-Uba: Hallowed (2017-18 [2019], Advance Dance Disques): [bc]: B+(***)
• Bob Sheppard: The Fine Line (2019, Challenge): [r]: B+(**)
• Kalie Shorr: Open Book (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Sonar With David Torn: Tranceportation (Volume 1) (2019, RareNoise): [cdr]: A-
• Tim Stine Quartet: Knots (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Steve Swell/Robert Boston/Michael Vatcher: Brain in a Dish (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
• Fay Victor: Barn Songs (2018 [2019], Northern Spy): [r]: B+(**)
• Bobby Watson/Vincent Herring/Gary Bartz: Bird at 100 (2019, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Dusko Goykovich: Sketches of Yugoslavia (1973-74 [2019], Enja): [r]: B+(*)
• Dadisi Komolafe: Hassan's Walk (1983 [2019], Nimbus West): [bc]: B+(**)
• Yusef A. Lateef: Hikima: Creativity (1983 [2019], The Key System): [bc]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Kristijan Krajncan: Drumming Cellist (2017, Sazas): [bc]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ellen Edwards: A New York Session (Stonefire Music) [02-22]
• Amber Weekes: Pure Imagination (Amber Inn Productions) [01-08]

Weekend Roundup

No time for an introduction today. On the other hand, much reason to kick this out earlier than usual. Anyway, you know the drill.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem: Bloomberg's first TV interview showed him to be exactly who progressives feared he was. Yeah, but when you dig further, you'll find out he's even worse than that, and offensive not just to progressives. Someone asked me tonight whether there are any Democrats I wouldn't vote for against Trump. Bloomberg might be the one. Related:

  • Eric Levitz: Michael Bloomberg thinks you proles are stupid and ungrateful: "If you've ever grazed into the sweet, stupid eyes of a milk cow, then you've got a pretty good idea of what Michael BLoomberg sees when he looks at you." Also: "How could Trump possibly paint this Democrat as a lying, out-of-touch elite?"

  • Jack Shafer: Mike Bloomberg just made Trump look reasonable: "Their spat makes the case against moguls running our civic life."

    Bloomberg's cavalier relationship with Bloomberg News, his willingness to kick the can down the road and make up new justifications as he goes along, reminds us why tycoons and moguls make terrible national leaders. They're rich, they think the world revolves around them and they don't routinely encounter anyone who disagrees.

  • Peter Wade: Of course Bloomberg thinks just about anyone could run for President.

• Julia Belluz/Nina Martin: The extraordinary danger of being pregnant and uninsured in Texas: "The state's system for helping the uninsured thwarts women at every turn and encourages subpar care."

• Ben Burgis: Sorry Mayor Pete, means-testing is not progressive. Progressive is taking things that are currently rationed via the market (and therefore preferentially to the wealthiest) and turning them into public rights, shared equally by all. If you still feel that the rich aren't paying their fair share, taxing them more is a much preferable to restricting their benefits. I'll add that I suspect one reason Buttigieg is hounded for his McKinsey past is that means-testing is the sort of pet idea so favored by corporate consultants.

• Gabriel Debenedetti: Kamala Harris's long road to an early exit. Also on Harris:

  • Perry Bacon Jr: Why Kamala Harris's campaign failed.

  • Eric Levitz: Kamala Harris dropped out because the party doesn't decide.

• Ben Ehrenreich: Welcome to the global rebellion against neoliberalism.

• Brendan Fischer: How America's system of legalized corruption brought us to the brink of impeachment.

• Joshua Holland: What if Democrats have already won back enough white working-class voters to win in 2020? I see so much crap like this in The Nation, I responded to this by tweeting:

  I generally resist the notion that the left is full of morons, but "The Nation" keeps promoting them. We don't have enough votes anywhere. We should seek more and win bigger, e.g. on equality/environment issues we can all rally around:

• Sean Illing: A former Republican Congress member explains what happened to his party: "And why it belongs to Trump now." Interview with David Jolly.

  The reason Trump won was because he brought in populism, not conservatism. I don't see who follows that. Who's the populist in the Republican Party that comes next? I don't see one. I think it's a return to conservatism and largely white male flyover state conservatism, which statistically just isn't going to put Republicans in office a decade from now.

• Alex Isenstadt: Loeffler will cut huge check for Georgia special election: She'll start off with a $20 million headstart.

• Sarah Jones:

  • Do Americans want choice, or do they just want health care?

  • Labour to Brits: You don't want to end up like the Americans, do you?

  • Work or starve, Trump administration tells poor people.

• Ed Kilgore: Nikki Haley says Dylann Roof 'hijacked' confederate battle flag. She almost seemed thoughtful and principled when she decided, after Roof's racist mass murder, to take down the Confederate flag Roof had embraced, but now she wants you to know that was only a momentary lapse. Also, it was the media who misconstrued Roof's actions as racist:

  • Matt Shuham: Haley blames media for making Charleston massacre 'about racism'.

• Naomi Klein: Forged in fire: California's lessons for a Green New Deal.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Jobs, jobs everywhere, but most of them kind of suck.

  • Democrats can reduce third-party voting in 2020 by getting high on weed.

• German Lopez/Katelyn Burns: Pensacola, Florida, Naval Air Station shooting: what we know.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The Supreme Court just handed the Trump administration a rare rebuke: "Attorney General Bill Barr suffers a loss in a death penalty case."

  • The Supreme Court considers a $12 billion plan to sabotage Obamacare.

• Ella Nilsen: The House has passed a bill to restore key parts of the Voting Rights Act.

• Andrew Prokop: Why Democrats are moving so fast on impeachment.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Rudy Giuliani just blew up Trump's "no quid pro quo" talking point: "Posting from somewhere in Ukraine, Trump's lawyer tweets the quid pro quo."

  • The Trump campaign's boast about impeachment polling is actually an own goal: "45 percent of voters in a red Oklahoma district supporting impeachment isn't as awesome for Trump as his campaign thinks."

• John Quiggin: Virtue signalling and vice signalling.

  So, the intellectual apologists of the right can only resort to tu quoque, making the claim, in various forms, that the left is just as bad as their own side. This started with the Republican War on Science, but is now virtually universal.

  The point of "virtue signalling" is to make this claim, without having to say what is wrong with the virtue being signalled.

• Stephanie Saul: Elizabeth Warren's days of defending big corporations. Saul had previously written The education of Elizabeth Warren.

• David K Shipler: The pitfalls of political trash talk: "If Biden tries to beat Trump at his own game, he will lose. . . . Besides, Biden's not very good at it."

• Manisha Sinha: Donald Trump, meet your precursor: "Andrew Johnson pioneered the recalcitrant racism and impeachment-worthy subterfuge the president is fond of." Related:

  • Jamelle Bouie: Andrew Johnson's violent language -- and Trump's.

• Ramesh Srinivasan: Democratize the Internet: An interview with the author of Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow.

• Emily Stewart: The attacks on Ilhan Omar reveal a disturbing truth about racism in America.

• Emily Stewart/Ella Nilsen: Pete Buttigieg's McKinsey problem, explained. I know just enough about the management consulting company to give his employment with them all sorts of unsavory resonances. There's a Robert Townsend quote somewhere which sums up McKinsey perfectly: something to the effect that a sure way to panic your underlings into doing something is to threaten to hire McKinsey consultants if they don't perform. There is an incredible amount of formulaic bullshit in consulting, and few firms have raised that to the level of art as they have. Moreover, it's easy to imagine the appeal and utility of form of bullshit for a politician, especially one like Buttigieg. Related:

  • Trent Spiner: Buttigieg confronted by voters over work for McKinsey.

  • Michael Forsythe: When Pete Buttigieg was one of McKinsey's 'whiz kids'.

  • Ian MacDougall: How McKinsey helped the Trump administration carry out its immigration policies: "Newly uncovered documents show the consulting giant helped ICE find 'detention savings opportunities' -- including measures the agency's staff sometimes viewed as too harsh on immigrants."

• Laurence H Tribe: Why care about the Trump impeachment? Your right to vote in free elections is at stake. "The Trump impeachment is about protecting our freedom and right to vote from lawless foreign election manipulation invited by a dangerous president." Yeah, but even if successful it won't have that effect, other than perhaps to advance a principle that Congress should do something (or many things) to ensure the integrity of elections. And that means reining in all forms of manipulation, starting with the billions of dollars that are spent by all manner of interested parties to game the system -- foreign agents are a tiny fraction of that pool. The point about Trump being "a dangerous president" is more pointed, but again the problem is caused mostly by the extraordinary powers we've allowed presidents to collect. Removing Trump would help, but every president since FDR has been dangerous, and the trendline has been increasing -- electing someone as unstable and deranged as Trump has only made the danger more obvious. Unfortunately, none of these problems will be addressed seriously and soberly as long as one party sees advantage in continuing the current system (and biasing it even further toward the rich and powerful). Some more general links on impeachment:

  • Lawrence Lessig: This impeachment is different -- and more dangerous.

  • Charles Sykes: Democrats are speeding to defeat on impeachment.

• Peter Wade:

  • There's one less con man in Congress, as Rep. Duncan Hunter resigns: After pleading guilty to campaign finance violations.

  • Biden angrily issues push-up challenge to voter who criticized him.

• Alex Ward: Julián Castro explains his vision for a "progressive" foreign policy as president. Better, but he still earns the caveat quotes.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Joe Biden still needs a better answer on Hunter and Ukraine. Related:

    • Robert Mackey: Even Hunter Biden admits his work in Ukraine was a mistake. Why can't his father say that?

  • Joe Biden's plan to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, explained

    But strikingly, even though Biden's proposals on this front are much more moderate, they are almost identical in their orientation -- raising money from a similar group of people for mostly similar reasons. Despite the disagreement about how far to go, all Democrats these days are basically reading from the same playbook, one that says Reagan-era conventional wisdom about the relationship between taxes and growth is wrong.

  • "No malarkey," Joe Biden's unabashedly lame new slogan, explained: "Boldly unafraid to be uncool."

  • What Trump has actually done in his first 3 years: "A big tax cut, unprecedented environmental degradation, Wall Street unleashed, and a whole lot of judges." Actually, a good deal more than that, and hard to find anything good in the mix.

• Julie Rodin Zebrak: What the heck happened to Jonathan Turley? The sole law professor who opposed impeaching Trump on the first day of House testimony.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, December archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32422 [32388] rated (+34), 230 [221] unrated (+9).

I have 52 ballots counted for Jazz Critics Poll. Deadline is December 8, but I'm finding very little reason to shuffle the top of my EOY Jazz List, so I might as well file my own ballot sooner rather than later. This is what I'm handing in:

New music:

1. Steve Lehman Trio/Craig Taborn: The People I Love (Pi)
2. Heroes Are Gang Leaders: The Amiri Baraka Sessions (Flat Langston's Arkeyes)
3. Dr. Mark Lomax, II: 400: An Afrikan Epic (CFG Multimedia -12CD) **
4. Moppa Elliott: Jazz Band/Rock Band/Dance Band (Hot Cup, 2CD)
5. James Brandon Lewis: An Unruly Manifesto (Relative Pitch)
6. Dave Rempis/Brandon Lopez/Ryan Packard: The Early Bird Gets (Aerophonic)
7. Rich Halley: Terra Incognita (Pine Eagle)
8. Quinsin Nachoff's Flux: Path of Totality (Whirlwind, 2CD)
9. Per 'Texas' Johansson/Torbjörn Zetterberg/Konrad Agnas: Orakel (Moserobie)
10. Liebman Rudolph & Drake: Chi (RareNoise) *

Historical music:

1. Eric Dolphy: Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions (Resonance, 3CD)
2. Ran Blake/Jeanne Lee: The Newest Sound You Never Heard (1966-67, A-Side, 2CD)
3. Stan Getz: Getz at the Gate: The Stan Getz Quartet Live at the Village Gate Nov. 26 1961 (Verve, 2CD) **

Miscellaneous categories:

• Vocal: Heroes Are Gang Leaders: The Amiri Baraka Sessions (Flat Langston's Arkeyes)
• Debut: Javier Red's Imagery Converter: Ephemeral Certainties (Delmark) **
• Latin: Miguel Zenón: Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera (Miel Music)

One consideration I had was whether to omit records that I didn't receive (or obtain) physical copies of. In recent years, I've done that for historical releases (which have gotten to be hard to come by) but I allowed streamed new releases to slip onto my ballot. After I slid Ill Considered 6 down a couple notches, the only streamed item in my New top ten was the Mark Lomax mega-production. I decided to keep it on the ballot because I had rated it a full A (only three this year, although the top two A- records are good candidates for promotion), and because a couple other critics had voted for it, with a high enough points-per-ballot to move it into the top-30. Among historical records, I decided to keep Getz on the ballot because I didn't have a satisfactory alternative: the next two records I have physical copies of are samplers by Bill Evans and Wes Montgomery, but I'm rather chafed that I haven't been able to hear those artists new-old records (Evans in England and Back on Indiana Avenue), which are the ones other critics are voting for. (The other big set from the same label that I haven't been able to hear yet is Nat "King" Cole's Hittin' the Ramp, currently running 3rd in the poll.) I do have CDs of six more records further down the list, and I'm especially appreciative of the Sam Rivers and Horace Tapscott sets, but they are well down the list, barely over the cusp.

This week's haul is nearly all records suggested by counting JCP ballots. Also noticed a few things from recent lists by Phil Overeem and Chris Monsen, and scrounging through Tim Niland's recent reviews.

My EOY Aggregate was close to up-to-date until today, when we were hit with an avalanche of new lists. Main ways I track these things are through AOTY and Acclaimed Music's EOY 2019 forum. I'll catch up eventually, although lots of things aren't making it easy (slow recovery from illness, anticipation of surgery, visitors, my mind's inability to process it all).

New records reviewed this week:

• Stefan Aeby: Piano Solo (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(*)
• Rodrigo Amado/Dirk Serries: Jazzblazzt (2018 [2019], Raw Tonk): [bc]: B+(**)
• The Big Yes: The Big Yes (2018 [2019], Nakama): [bc]: B+(**)
• Johnathan Blake: Trion (2018 [2019], Giant Step Arts, 2CD): [bc]: A-
• Jane Bunnett & Maqueque: On Firm Ground/Tierra Firme (2019, Linus Entertainment): [r]: B
• Daniel Carter/Patrick Holmes/Matthew Putman/Hilliard Greene/Federico Ughi: Electric Telepathy, Vol. 1 (2018 [2019], 577 Records): [r]: B+(***)
• Cochemea: All My Relations (2019, Daptone): [bc]: B+(**)
• John Dikeman/George Hadow/Dirk Serries/Martina Verhoeven/Luis Vicente: Ideal Principle (2016 [2018], Raw Tonk): [bc]: B+(***)
• Petter Eldh: Koma Saxo (2018 [2019], We Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
• Ellery Eskelin/Christian Weber/Michael Griener: The Pearls (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Georg Graewe/Ernst Reijseger/Gerry Hemingway: Concertgebouw Brugge 2014 (2014 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(**)
• Joel Harrison: Still Point: Turning World (2019, Whirlwind): [r]: B+(**)
• Jazzmeia Horn: Love and Liberation (2019, Concord): [r]: B+(***)
• Keith Jarrett: Munich 2016 (2016 [2019], ECM -2CD): [r]: B+(*)
• Guillermo Klein: Los Guachos Cristal (2019, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(***)
• Kokoroko: Kokoroko (2019, Brownswood, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Ingrid Laubrock + Aki Takase: Kasumi (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(**)
• Metropolitan Jazz Octet Featuring Dee Alexander: It's Too Hot for Words: Celebrating Billie Holiday (2019, Delmark): [r]: B+(**)
• Van Morrison: Three Chords & the Truth (2019, Exile/Caroline): [r]: B+(***)
• Evan Parker/Barry Guy/Paul Lytton: Concert in Vilnius (2017 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Junius Paul: Ism (2016-19 [2019], International Anthem): [r]: B+(*)
• Ken Peplowski/Diego Figueiredo: Amizade (2018 [2019], Arbors): [r]: B+(*)
• Javier Red's Imagery Converter: Ephemeral Certainties (2019, Delmark): [r]: A-
• SEED Ensemble: Driftglass (2019, Jazz Re:freshed): [r]: B+(*)
• Christian Meaas Svendsen + Nakama + Rinzai Zen Center Oslo: New Rituals (2017-18 [2019], Nakama, 3CD): [bc]: B+(*)
• Pat Thomas/Dominic Lash/Tony Orrell: Bley School (2018 [2019], 577 Records): [bc]: B+(***)
• Trigger: Pull (2019, Shhpuma): [r]: B
• Jennifer Wharton's Bonegasm: Bonegasm (2018 [2019], Sunnyside): [r]: B+(*)
• Yong Yandsen/Christian Meaas Svendsen/Paal Nilssen-Love: Hungry Ghosts (2018 [2019], Nakama): [bc]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Joseph Daley: The Seven Deadly Sins/The Seven Heavenly Virtues (2010-13 [2019], Jodamusic): [r]: B+(**)
• Sam Rivers: Zenith [Sam Rivers Achive Project, Volume 2] (1977 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
• Makoto Terashita Meets Harold Land: Topology (1983 [2019], BBE): [bc]: A-

Old music:

• Johnathan Blake: Gone, but Not Forgotten (2014, Criss Cross): [r]: B+(***)
• Joseph Daley: The Seven Heavenly Virtues (2013, Jodamusic): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Rebecca Angel: Santa Baby (Timeless Grooves, EP)
• Benny Benack III: A Lot of Livin' to Do (LA Reserve) [01-24]
• Bones [Ziv Taubenfeld/Shay Hazan/Nir Sabag]: Reptiles (NoBusiness)
• Bobby Bradford/Frode Gjerstad/Kent Carter/John Stevens: Blue Cat (NoBusiness)
• Anthony Coleman: Catenary Oath (NoBusiness)
• Katarsis 4: Katarsis 4 (NoBusiness)
• Evan Parker/Barry Guy/Paul Lytton: Concert in Vilnius (NoBusiness)
• Sam Rivers: Zenith [Sam Rivers Achive Project, Volume 2] (1977, NoBusiness, 2CD)
• Masahiko Satoh/Sabu Toyozumi: The Aiki (1997, NoBusiness)
• Steve Swell/Robert Boston/Michael Vatcher: Brain in a Dish (NoBusiness)
• Juan Vinuesa Jazz Quartet: Blue Shots From Chicago (NoBusiness)
• The Westerlies: Wherein Lies the Good (Westerlies) [01-31]

Didn't do a Weekend Roundup last week, but I had a couple of links cached away, seed for today. Didn't much want to do one this week, either, but here goes.

First, a few links on the Democratic presidential debate (not many, as I started looking late, or maybe there wasn't much to find?):

• Aaron Bycoffe, et al. (538): Who won the fifth Democratic debate?

• Shane Goldmacher, et al. (New York Times): 5 takeaways from the November Democratic debate.

• Dylan Matthews, et al. (Vox): 4 winners and 3 losers from the November Democratic debate: Winners: Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Stacey Abrams. Losers: Joe Biden, asylum seekers, health care.

• Trent Spiner: New Hampshire voters to Steyer: Make it stop! Advertising blitzes, what's a billionaire to do?

In "this week in senseless violence," note that a couple people were stabbed in London in what's being taken as a "major terrorist incident" (What we know about the London Bridge stabbings), 11 were shot in New Orleans (New Orleans shooting: What we know), and A Mexican cartel gun battle near the Texas border leaves 21 dead).

Other scattered links for the last two weeks:

• Zeeshan Aleem: Bolivia's coup is still happening. More on Bolivia:

  • Marjorie Cohn: US is again complicit in an illegal coup, this time in Bolivia.

  • Vijay Prashad: After Evo, the lithium question looms large in Bolivia.

• Martin Belam: Republican committee bought Trump Jr book Triggered in bulk: "Reports claim title hit No 1 in bestseller list thanks in part to $94,800 advance purchase." More on this:

  • Elena Sheppard: Donald Trump Jr.'s New York Times bestseller 'Triggered' sparks literary list controversy. Literary?

• Carl Boggs: The grand illusion: On climate change, referring to David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable World.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Rudy's scheme to line his pockets in Ukraine keeps getting shadier.

  • Report: Trump business more fraudulent than previously known.

  • Devin Nunes sues over another news story, won't even deny it's true.

  • Trump's retribution against the Washington Post owner is his gravest abuse of power. You mean Trump's lobbying against the richest guy in the world?

• Zak Cheney-Rice: In the 2010s, white America was finally shows itself: Interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates on "Obama's decade," reparations, and Kaepernick.

• Nicholas JS Davies: Iraqis rise up against 16 years of 'Made in the USA', corruption. Related:

  • Patrick Cockburn: The resignation of the Iraqi Prime Minister may not halt the protests.

• Gabriel Debenedetti: Bill de Blasio's case against Michael Bloomberg 2020.

• Ross Douthat: The case for Bernie: Given his track record, one suspects he's merely trolling. Still, he makes some sound points about Bernie's appeal to diverse groups of Democrats, and shows a certain shrewdness in his claim that "he's the liberal most likely to spend all his time trying to tax the rich and leave cultural conservatives alone." Douthat may figure that the rich can take care of themselves, and can even afford to lose a little.

• Masha Gessen:

  • Conan, the gender-fluid hero dog: "Like most people, Donald Trump thinks that all dogs -- especially big dogs that look ferocious enough to threaten journalists -- are male."

  • The immigrant witnesses of the impeachment hearings: "Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, and Marie Yovanovitch showed that no one takes the promise of this country as seriously as immigrants do."

• Fred M Hechinger: Class war over tuition: Mike Konczal recommended this piece, written in 1974, as "one of the smartest and most prescient things I've read about current higher education."

• Adam Hochschild: When America tried to deport its radicals: "A hundred years ago, the Palmer Raids imperilled thousands of immigrants. Then a wily official got in the way." Louis F. Post.

• John Hudson: Trump official who suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Afghanistan now responsible for arms control issues.

• Umair Irfan: UN: The world has backed itself into a treacherous corner on climate change.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Christian right leaders suggest Trump critics are possessed by demons.

  • Perry says Trump is the 'Chosen One'.

• Colbert I King: It's a good bet Trump pardons his felon allies. Here's when that's most likely.

• Markos Kounalakis: King Trump: "The impeachment inquiry is testing us: Do we live in a nation of laws or a nation of men?" Funny thing, I was just thinking of contrasts between Trump and Washington, and it occurred to me that we've gone full circle from the revolutionary who overthrew George III to his the King's closest kin in American history.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Trump and his corrupt old party: "For Republicans, there is no bottom."

  • Doing the health care two-step: "Medium-size reform creates the conditions for bigger things." He's been saying this all along, and the record is mixed. It's probably true that the modest success of Medicaid expansion helped Democrats in Kentucky and Louisiana, but wouldn't more substantial reforms have fared even better?

  • Trump and his party of pollution: "Environmental destruction may be their biggest legacy."

  • Bursting the billionaire bubble: "No, America isn't waiting for a tycoon savior."

• Alexandra S Levine/Nancy Scola/Steven Overly/Christiano Lima: Why the fight against disinformation, sham accounts and trolls won't be any easier in 2020.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Americans are dying younger, having fewer babies, studies find.

  • Trump and Xi are bending the moral arc of history toward barbarism.

• Dahlia Lithwick: America's descent into legal nihilism: "The president would like to be president forever. And he's bending the law to his will do to so."

• Jane Mayer: The inside story of Christopher Steele's Trump dossier. Review of Glenn Simpson/Peter Fritsch: Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump.

• Ian Millhiser: Brett Kavanaugh's latest opinion should terrify Democrats.

• Pankaj Mishra: Liberalism according to The Economist. Reviews Alexander Zevin: Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist.

• Ella Nilsen: House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills. Trump and Republicans are ignoring them.

• Anna North: New Trump administration rules on sexual assault could keep survivors silent.

• Charles P Pierce: Democrats must get a handle on what 'unity' means when taking on a renegade presidency*: "The tale of Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and this anonymously sourced tale of Barack Obama, are instructive."

• Wendell Potter: Why Trump's health care cost transparency drive doesn't actually help anyone. Author is a former VP at Cigna, wrote a book (Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans), now runs an outfit called Business for Medicare for All.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Rudy Giuliani tried to score big bucks in Ukraine as scandal unfolded.

  • The latest news about SDNY's investigation into Rudy Giuliani, explained.

  • The new details about Trump blocking aid to Ukraine, explained.

• Robert Redford: President Trump's dictator-like administration is attacking the values America holds dear.

• Nathan Robinson: Progressives, trust your gut: Elizabeth Warren is not one of us. I'll note this, but add that nothing here particularly bothers me, except perhaps his "Sanders is far from a perfect candidate" aside. Warren took a different path than most leftists did, but she's wound up far more committed to our basic principles than is the norm for Democrats, let alone for Americans overall. No president is going to be able to do much more than Congress and the courts allow, so I'd be happy with anyone who would lead in the right direction, and not make many blunders along the way. Even some of the "moderates" might qualify (although Obama's mix didn't amount to much). I'll also note that while Warren isn't as grounded a leftist as Sanders, she may have a political advantage as more rooted in America's progressive/liberal tradition. Granted, that tradition's track record is profoundly flawed, but it's still what many Americans aspire to. (Jill Lepore has tried most recently to promote that viewpoint. Robinson probably hates her too.)

• Philip Rucker: Trump's photo op play: Facing impeachment, the president strives to look hard at work. Advising Trump "to focus on governing and travel frequently" is none other than former Clinton strategist Mark Penn.

• Darren Samuelsohn: Justice's election-year conundrum: How to probe team Trump.

• Michael S Schmidt/Julian E Barnes/Maggie Haberman: Trump knew of whistleblower complaint when he released aid to Ukraine.

• Adam Serwer: The war-crimes president: "When violence is directed at those Trump's supporters hate and fear, they see such excesses not as crimes but as virtues."

• Katie Shepherd: An ad smeared a Kansas Democrat for sexual harassment. The main charge actually described a Republican. By the way Brandon Whipple has since won his election to become Mayor of Wichita. It's nominally a non-partisan election, but Republicans worked hard to make it partisan.

• David K Shipler: The mythology of American virtue: "Impeachment supporters don't need to act like we're a perfect country to make the case against Trump."

• Emily Stewart:

  • Tom Steyer's impeachment group is missing its big moment because he's running for president.

  • Trump's made-up war on Thanksgiving, explained.

• Matt Stieb: House conspiracist Devin Nunes may be subject to ethics investigation for reported Ukraine meddling.

• Charlie Sykes: Devin Nunes' impeachment defense of Trump -- and possible Ukraine collusion -- redefines partisan hackery. Sure, but didn't Nunes set the previous standard during the Benghazi! hearings?

• Matt Taibbi: Michael Bloomberg, presidential candidate, just killed the Bloomberg News Agency.

  For Mike Bloomberg to own a media network for as long as he has without understanding or caring about this is astonishing. He's been a presidential candidate for just a few days now, and he's already done tremendous damage by telling voters he thinks it's OK to buy the free press. And this is the guy who's going to rescue democracy?

• Sabrina Tavernise/Aidan Gardiner: 'No one believes anything': Voters worn out by a fog of political news.

• Simon Tisdall: Benjamin Netanyahu's toxic legacy will haunt Israel long after he goes.

• Erick Trickey: San Francisco's quest to make landfills obsolete.

• Alex Ward:

  • "A terrible idea": Experts blast Trump's plan to label Mexican drug cartels "terrorists": "It would increase fears of a US military intervention in Mexico."

  • The controversy over Navy Secretary Richard Spencer's ouster, explained. Also see:

    • For Spencer's own explanation: I was fired as Navy secretary. Here's what I've learned because of it.

    • Fred Kaplan: Trump is dangerously undermining the authority of military commanders; and Trump's war crimes pardons show how little the Commander in Chief understands the military.

    • Danny Sjursen: America will never live down Trump's war crime pardons.

  • Sondland's testimony shows Mike Pompeo was far more central on Ukraine than we knew.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • America needs to hear -- under oath -- from Pompeo, Perry, Pence, and Bolton.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, November archive (finished).

Music: Current count 32388 [32371] rated (+17), 221 [221] unrated (+0).

Took ill late last week, spending a couple days doing nothing more ambitious than watching the remains of television series Laura had already given up on (The Durrells in Corfu, which I enjoyed very much, and Press, which barely kept me going). I'll add that we recently finished the latest seasons of Orange Is the New Black and Succession, which among other things remind us that class persists in quantum orbits so isolated that it's hard for most of us to imagine life like that.

No Weekend Roundup yesterday. I have a few links saved up for next time I manage to write one. Not much Music Week here either. The one thing I am trying to keep up with is tabulating ballots for this year's NPR Jazz Critics Poll. That pointed me to several records this week, no doubt more next week. (Playing Johnathan Blake's Trion at the moment, and it's sounding like a pretty solid A-.) Spent a lot of time early in the week just trying to round up the various pieces of Allen Lowe's box set, and wound up guessing a bit.

I still haven't finalized my ballot yet, but you can see a very rough draft here.

New records reviewed this week:

• Ilia Belorukov & Vasco Trilla: Laniakea (2017 [2019], Astral Spirits): [bc]: B-
• Leonard Cohen: Thanks for the Dance (2016 [2019], Columbia/Legacy): [r]: A-
• The Last Poets: Transcending Toxic Times (2019, Ropeadope, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Quiana Lynell: A Little Love (2019, Concord Jazz): [r]: B
• Aurora Nealand/Steve Marquette/Anton Hatwich/Paul Thibodeaux: Kobra Quartet (2018 [2019], Astral Spirits): [bc]: B+(*)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp/William Parker/Bobby Kapp: Ineffable Joy (2018 [2019], ESP-Disk): [r]: B+(***)
• Charlie Porter: Immigration Nation (2019, OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Wallace Roney: Blue Dawn-Blue Nights (2019, HighNote): [r]: B+(***)
• Toh-Kichi: Baikamo (2019, Libra): [cd]: B+(***)
• Torbjörn Zetterberg & the Great Question: Live (2017 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Georg Graewe/Ernest Reijseger/Gerry Hemingway: Kammern I-V (2009 [2019], Auricle): [cd]: B+(***)
• Allen Lowe: Jews & Roots/Radical Jewish Acculturation: An Avant Garde of Our Own: Disconnected Works 1980-2018 (1980-2018 [2019], Constant Sorrow/ESP-Disk, 8CD): [r/bc]: B+(***)
• Dudu Pukwana/Han Bennink/Misha Mengelberg: Yi Yole (1978 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(**)
• David S. Ware New Quartet: Théâtre Garonne, 2008 (2008 [2019], AUM Fidelity): [r]: A-
• Mary Lou Williams: Mary Lou Williams (1962-63 [2019], Smithsonian Folkways): [r]: B+(*)

Old music:

Georg Graewe/Ernest Reijseger/Gerry Hemingway: Continuum (2005 [2006], Winter & Winter): [r]: B+(*)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage: Bad Wiring (2019, Don Giovanni): [r]: [was: B+(***)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Carol Albert: Stronger Now (Cahara) [01-30]
• Frank Colón: Latin Lounge (Technoprimal Music) [01-01]
• Elena Gilliam/Michael Le Van: Then Another Turns (Blujazz)
• Danny Lerman: Ice Cat (Blujazz)

Link Cache

I'm skipping Weekend Roundup this week, but thought I'd cache some links for next week.

• A few links on the Democratic presidential debate:

  • Vox staff: 4 winners and 3 losers from the November Democratic debate: Winners: Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Stacey Abrams. Losers: Joe Biden, asylum seekers, health care.

• Martin Belam: Republican committee bought Trump Jr book Triggered in bulk: "Reports claim title hit No 1 in bestseller list thanks in part to $94,800 advance purchase."

• Jonathan Chait: Devin Nunes sues over another news story, won't even deny it's true.

• Zak Cheney-Rice: In the 2010s, white America was finally shows itself: Interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates on "Obama's decade," reparations, and Kaepernick.

• Umair Irfan: UN: The world has backed itself into a treacherous corner on climate change.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Christian right leaders suggest Trump critics are possessed by demons.

  ?>

  • Perry says Trump is the 'Chosen One'.

• Markos Kounalakis: King Trump: "The impeachment inquiry is testing us: Do we live in a nation of laws or a nation of men?" Funny thing, I was just thinking of contrasts between Trump and Washington, and it occurred to me that we've gone full circle from the revolutionary who overthrew George III to his the King's closest kin in American history.

• Eric Levitz: Trump and Xi are bending the moral arc of history toward barbarism.

• Ian Millhiser: Brett Kavanaugh's latest opinion should terrify Democrats.

• Anna North: New Trump administration rules on sexual assault could keep survivors silent.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Rudy Giuliani tried to score big bucks in Ukraine as scandal unfolded.

  • The latest news about SDNY's investigation into Rudy Giuliani, explained.

  • The new details about Trump blocking aid to Ukraine, explained.

• Nathan Robinson: Progressives, trust your gut: Elizabeth Warren is not one of us. I'll note this, but add that nothing here particularly bothers me, except perhaps his "Sanders is far from a perfect candidate" aside. Warren took a different path than most leftists did, but she's wound up far more committed to our basic principles than is the norm for Democrats, let alone for Americans overall. No president is going to be able to do much more than Congress and the courts allow, so I'd be happy with anyone who would lead in the right direction, and not make many blunders along the way. Even some of the "moderates" might qualify (although Obama's mix didn't help much). I'll also note that while Warren isn't as grounded a leftist as Sanders, she may have a political advantage as more rooted in America's progressive/liberal tradition.

• Katie Shepherd: An ad smeared a Kansas Democrat for sexual harassment. The main charge actually described a Republican. By the way Brandon Whipple has since won his election to become Mayor of Wichita. It's nominally a non-partisan election, but Republicans worked hard to make it partisan.

• Emily Stewart:

  • Tom Steyer's impeachment group is missing its big moment because he's running for president.

  • Trump's made-up war on Thanksgiving, explained.

• Alex Ward:

  • "A terrible idea": Experts blast Trump's plan to label Mexican drug cartels "terrorists": "It would increase fears of a US military intervention in Mexico."

  • The controversy over Navy Secretary Richard Spencer's ouster, explained.

  • Sondland's testimony shows Mike Pompeo was far more central on Ukraine than we knew.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • America needs to hear -- under oath -- from Pompeo, Perry, Pence, and Bolton.

Mar 2001