Weekend Roundup

Quite a bit below. After a very depressing/blasé week, I got an early start on Friday, and started feeling better -- not for the nation or the world, but pleased to be occupied with some straightforward, tangible work. One thing I can enjoy some optimism about is the Democratic presidential campaign. I expected it to be swallowed whole with the sort of vacant, pious clichés that Obama and the Clintons have been campaigning on for decades now, but what we're actually seeing is a lot of serious concern for policy. The clear leader in that regard is Elizabeth Warren, and of course Bernie Sanders has a complete matching set with if anything a little more courage and conviction, but I've run across distinct and refreshing ideas from another half-dozen candidates. I haven't noticed Biden rising to that challenge yet. He remains the main beneficiary of as fairly widespread faction that would be quite satisfied with their lives if only the Republican threat would subside in favor of the quiet competency Obama brought to government. Personally, I wouldn't mind that either, but I recognize that has a lot to do with my age. Young people inhabit a very different world, one with less opportunity and much graver risks, so platitudes from America's liberal past don't do them much good, or offer much hope. They face real and growing problems, and not just from Republicans (although those are perhaps the hoariest). Talking about policy actually offers them some prospect that faith alone can never fill. And sooner or later, even Biden's going to have to talk about policy, because that's where the campaign is heading.

This could hardly offer a starker contrast to the 2016 Republican presidential primary, where there was virtually no difference regarding policy -- just minor tweaks to each candidate's plan to steer more of the nation's wealth to the already rich, along with a slight range of hues on how hawkish one can be on the forever wars and how racist one can be when dealing with immigrants and the underclass. The real price of entry wasn't ideas or commitment. It was just the necessity to line up one or more billionaire sponsors -- turf that credibly favored Trump as his billionaire/candidate were one. The fact that Cruz and Kasich folded when they still had primaries they could plausibly have won is all the proof you need that the financiers pulled the strings, and as soon as they understood that Trump would win the nomination, they understood that he was as good for their purposes as anyone else, so they got on board.

Democrats may have a harder time finding unity in 2020, because their candidates are actually divided on issues that matter. On the other hand, they are learning to discuss those issues rationally, especially the candidates who are pushing the Overton Window left. Even if they wind up nominating some kind of centrist, that person is going to be more open to solutions from the left, and that's a good thing because that's where the real solutions are. Franklin Roosevelt wasn't any kind of leftist when he was elected in 1932, and his famous 100 days were all over the map, but he was open to trying things, and quickly found out that left solutions worked better than conservative ones. We're not quite as mired in crisis as America was in 1932, but it's pretty clear that catastrophe is coming if Trump and the Republicans stay in power. The option for 2020 is whether to face our problems calmly and rationally with deliberate policy choices or to continue to thrash reflexively and chaotically. There's no need to imagine how bad the latter may be, because Trump's illustrating it perfectly day by day.

Some scattered links this week:

• Muhammad Idrees Ahmad: Bellingcat and how open source journalism reinvented investigative journalism.

• Eileen Appelbaum: Private equity pillage: grocery stores and workers at risk. I first noticed this as a twitter thread, but the article goes into a lot more detail (while including all the cartoons). The article focuses on food retailers, but if you want a quick rule-of-thumb, whenever you read about a familiar company filing for bankruptcy, you can be pretty sure there's a private equity fund behind it that has already sucked the firm dry of assets and piled up unsupportable debt. Private equity firms -- you may recall that's how Mitt Romney got so rich, not that having a rich and famous father didn't give him a leg up -- are a plague, especially on American workers. Some policy wonks should come up with a program to put them out of business. One idea here would be to allow bankrupted companies to be reorganized as employee-owned, writing down their PE debt, with public loans to recapitalize the company.

• Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman: Trump campaign to purge pollsters after leak of dismal results.

• Ross Barkan: Don't bother replacing Sarah Sanders -- there is no point. I figured I should offer something to mark the passing of Trump's second press secretary, but found very little that captures the true banality she brought to such a thankless and hopeless job. Failing that, this will have to do. Although I did also find: Luke O'Neil: Tweets, lies and the Mueller report: Sarah Sanders' lowest moments. On the other hand, Trump seems to think she has a future: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Governor of Arkansas? It's possible.

• John Cassidy: The Stephanopoulos interview is another fine mess for Trump.

• Jonathan Chait: Trump: witness to my crime can't testify, but trust me he's lying: That would be former White House counsel Don McGahn, who Robert Mueller interviewed at length.

• Sarah Churchwell: 'The Lehman Trilogy' and Wall Street's debt to slavery: How to get rich in the 1840s, and how to get richer after that stopped working.

• Iyad el-Baghdadi: The princes who want to destroy any hope for Arab democracy: Trump's best buds in "Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are backing military leaders who kill demonstrators.".

• Tom Engelhardt: If Donald Trump is the symptom . . . then what's the disease? Reflects on how Trump was elected based on a widespread fear of decline, economic as well as military, only to accelerate that decline, taking much of the planet with him. Some other recent TomDispatch posts:

  • William Astore: The dark side of air power: "Ten tenets of air power that I didn't learn in the Air Force."

  • David Bromwich: What it means to be "great" on a planet going down: Author of a new book (out June 25), American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us, which notes that "the political conditions of the present crisis were put in place over fifty years ago, with the expansion of the Vietnam War and the lies and coverups that brought down Nixon" -- and doesn't skip the contributions of later Democrats.

  • James Carroll: The 12 days of bombing that never end (for me).

  • Rebecca Gordon: Of crimes and pardons: "Clemency for the lowly, free passes for the mighty." Previously wrote the major book on this subject: American Nuremberg: The US Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (2016).

  • Laura Gottesdiener: Two Iraqi peace activists confront a Trumpian world.

• Dennis Etler: Getting Chian wrong, yet again: Reviews a Council of Foreign Relations report entitled "Trump's Foreign Policies are Better Than They Seem," so yeah, they have lots of examples. Also see: Michael Klare: Bolton wants to fight Iran, but the Pentagon has its eye on China. Pentagon strategists have long liked to promote conflicts with Russia and China, as they help fund their dreams of high-tech weapons systems that never get tested, because wars with nuclear powers like China and Russia are still unthinkable. Interesting that Klare's next book also looks at highly speculative Pentagon funding: All Hell Breaking Loose: Why the Pentagon Sees Climate Change as a Threat to American National Security. Without such threats, and the misunderstandings and myths they are based on, one might realize that such arms spending is unnecessary and, even worse, dangerous.

• Tara Golshan: Congress's high-stakes budget fight to avert an economic crisis, explained.

• Jeff Goodell: The world's most insane energy project moves ahead: the Carmichael coal mine, in Australia, controlled by Adani Group (of India).

• Lloyd Green: The Best People review: how Trump flooded the swamp: On Alexander Nazaryan's new book, The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington (out June 18), about "the scandals, the incompetence, the assault on the federal government, the bungled attempts to impose order on an administration lost in a chaos of its own making." Green also reviewed Michael Wolff's recent dirt-dishing Siege: Trump Under Fire: Siege review: Michael Wolff's Trump tale is Fire and Fury II -- fire harder. Related: Robert Reich: Welcome to Trump's corrupt state -- the Star Wars cantina of world politics.

• Nick Hanauer: Better schools won't fix America: "Like many rich Americans, I used to think educational investment could heal the country's ills -- but I was wrong. Fighting inequality must come first."

• Mehdi Hasan: Saudi Arabia may execute teenager for his protests -- including when he was 10.

• David Hearst: Why I'm optimistic about the 'deal of the century': Not because he thinks Jared Kushner's "peace plan" is viable let alone workable, but it marks the definitive end of the "two state" albatross that Israel has so easily slagged off. Rather: "The deal presents the biggest opportunity to those who have the most to lose from it." I don't get this optimism yet, although to the limited extent I understand the idea -- despite the advance publicity, it hasn't been fully presented yet -- but I can imagine some tuning that might be tolerable going forward. Hearst also wrote [February 2019]: Lords of the land: Why Israel's victory won't last. Meanwhile, some other relevant links:

  • Marco Carnelos: Cliches, lies and double standards: Jared Kishner's twisted views on Palestine.

  • Jonathan Cook: What's in Trump's 'deal of the century'? The answers are in plain sight. Cook also wrote: Trump enjoys bipartisan support for his plan to eradicate the Palestinian cause.

  • Rashid Khalidi: The neocolonial arrogance of the Kushner plan.

• Umair Irfan: The UK has now committed to the most aggressive climate target in the world.

• Thomas Kaplan/Jim Tankersley: Elizabeth Warren has lots of plans. Together, they would remake the economy. Related: Paul Krugman: Liberal wonks, or at least Elizabeth Warren, have a plan for that; also Sheelah Kolhatkar: Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?; also: Ed Kilgore: Elizabeth Warren's one-two punch for conquering Washington; also: Alex Isenstadt: Trump campaign zeroes in on a new threat: Elizabeth Warren. Best laugh line from the latter piece: "Warren's populist economic agenda, [Tucker] Carlson said, 'sounds like Donald Trump at his best.'"

• Ed Kilgore: Trump can't stop lying about his unpopularity:

  Donald J. Trump did not invent the art of political spinning. But he has perhaps raised it to an infernally high standard of sheer mendacity in his determination to attack any information suggesting he is anything other than the most wildly successful and popular politician since Pericles. That means, among other troubling things, that he is engaged in a perpetual war against the scientific measurement of public opinion.

• Catherine Kim:

  • Federal watchdog agency says Kellyanne Conway should be fired after violating the Hatch Act.

  • After Jon Stewart's speech, the House Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to extend the 9/11 fund: I've always thought of this as blood money, its affordability vouchsafed only because it was presented as a down payment to the much more expensive forever "wars against terror." On the other hand, most of what the fund covers are things that should be every American's right -- ironically, things that would have been much more affordable had we not flew off the handle to wage those hopeless, self-perpetuating wars.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Is it actually illegal to accept "campaign dirt" from foreigners? If it's "something of value" doing so would violate campaign finance laws. On the other hand, I doubt the law could prevent foreigners from simply publishing and promoting "dirt" -- which is presumably what a campaign would do with such information. In fact, most campaigns would probably prefer that it come from an independent source.

  • The race to be the next British prime minister, briefly explained: Seven candidates survived the first round of voting, the most famous (and possibly the farthest apart politically) Boris Johnson (leader with 114 votes) and Rory Stewart (last at 19 -- he's written a couple of books on Afghanistan and Iraq which show some understanding of and sympathy for the people there). Later rounds will reduce the field to two, to be decided by registered Conservative Party members -- no one in power there is eager to risk a new election. No mention of this here, but since the Tories are a minority in Parliament, it seems to me that their current coalition partners could scuttle the pick. [PS: See Michael Savage/Toby Helm: Boris Johnson's no-deal Brexit plan 'will trigger early election'.]

• Sharon LaFraniere/Charlie Savage/Katie Benner: People are trying to figure out William Barr. He's busy stockpiling power.

• Eric Levitz: The Fed just released a damning indictment of capitalism: Title after the jump: "The one percent have gotten $21 trillion richer since 1989. The bottom 50% have gotten poorer."

• Dara Lind/Libby Nelson: The fight over the 2020 census citizenship question, explained.

• Josh Marshall:

  • Trump tells Polish president: US media is corrupt: Actual quote: "Much of the media unfortunately in this country is corrupt. I have to tell you that, Mr. President." Trump could have turned this into a much smarter quote by dropping "unfortunately" and adding: "that's why we don't have to censor them." Of course, he wouldn't say that, because he wants to censor them anyway. He feels so entitled he cannot recognize that the media has been helped him out enormously. And he's such a thin-skinned whiner he complains about them endlessly. Anything to avoid a moment of reflection that might acknowledge that he's ever done anything regrettable, let alone embarrassing.

  • The American right gets tired of democracy. I'd say the American right has never liked democracy, and can point as far back as the early 1800s when proposals to extend the vote to white male non-property holders were met by worries that such people might use the vote to further their own personal interests (to the detriment of their richer "betters"). But the right is certainly getting more brazenly contemptuous of voting rights and other aspects of democracy. This connects to a cluster of other links, which purport to grapple with the question of what principles conservatism has left after the right has pledged itself to politicians like Trump:

    • Sohrab Ahmari: Against David French-ism.

    • Isaac Chotiner: Ross Douthat on the crisis of the conservative coalition: Interview with Douthat.

    • Ed Kilgore: Josh Hawley could be the face of the post-Trump right.

    • Adam Serwer: The illiberal right throws a tantrum: sample quote:

      I don't want to overstate the significance of this dispute between French and Ahmari. They are yelling at each other in a walled garden; conservative pundits in ideological magazines have little influence over a base whose opinions are guided by the commercial incentives of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, and the partisan imperatives of the Republican Party. If they possessed such influence, Trump would not be president.

      The question of whether the Republican Party would abandon liberal democracy for sectarian ethno-nationalism was decided in the 2016 primary, and all French and Ahmari are doing is arguing about it after the fact. The commercial and social incentives for conservative writers to succumb to Trumpism are vast. Some, like French, have had the integrity to stick to their stated principles. Others, like Ahmari, have already fallen. Today's skirmishes among conservatives resemble the irregulars in 1865 shooting at one another because they had not yet heard of Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. And the support Ahmari has drawn suggests that the conservative intelligentsia will offer less resistance to authoritarianism than it did in 2015 and 2016.

• Dylan Matthews:

  • The surprising truth about extreme poverty: "It's most common with childless adults." Basically because we're much stingier with programs like SNAP where children are out of the picture.

  • Rashida Tlaib wants to give low-income adults $3,000 a year each, no questions asked.

• Ella Nilsen: House Democrats want to make accepting dirt on campaign opponents from foreign governments a crime: "Democrats are rolling out a new package of election security bills after Trump said he's open to taking dirt on his 2020 opponents." That, or even the lesser requirement to report foreign offers to the FBI, strikes me as a bad idea: it practically begs foreign agents to set up and expose test cases.

• Anna North: Alabama's law forcing sex offenders to get chemically castrated, explained.

• Kelsey Piper: Will climate change kill everyone -- or just lots and lots of people? Oddly enough, I can think of adverse scenarios that are worse than the ones discussed here -- war over diminishing habitat and resources is the most obvious one -- but I can't imagine that no one would survive even that, and I'm dead certain that the survivors will prove adaptable enough to recover from any climate-induced dystopia. As for civilization ending, the bigger threat is politically-directed stupidity (which seems to have already claimed most of the Republican Party). As this explainer points out, much of the dispute here really turns on the question of how much threat we have to feel to act politically. Those who feel unheeded are eager to turn out the hyperbole, but my impression is that so far that has only had the perverse of undermining their credibility.

• Andrew Prokop: Trump's legally problematic claim that he'd accept "oppo research" from foreign governments, explained.

• Michael Sainato: Bosses pocket Trump tax windfall as workers see job promises vanish.

• Jason Samenow:

  • Planet is entering 'new climate regime' with 'extraordinary' heat waves intensified by global warming, study says.

  • Temperatures leap 40 degrees above normal as the Arctic Ocean and Greenland ice sheet see record June melting.

• David E Sanger/Nicole Perlroth: US escalates online attacks on Russia's power grid. Part of the rationale here is to deter Russia from interfering in US elections, but this reads more like a provocation along the lines of Nixon's famous "madman theory" of threatening nuclear war. The assumption seems to be that Russia will react rationally to such insanity, but if they believe that, why not just sit down and negotiate some kind of deal that would lessen the threat of cyberwarfare and present a unified front against hacking by private parties and other countries. Probably the same reason the US works to preserve its unique "first strike" capability: to cower the rest of the world into submission at the first demonstration of "shock and awe."

• Richard Silverstein: Is Pompeo angling to interfere in British politics? "In leaked comments from a recent meeting with Jewish leaders, the US secretary of state cites the need to 'push back' against a potential Corbyn victory." Found a couple of useful links there:

  • Amnon Cohen: Corbyn and anti-semitism claims: The real reason behind the attack on Labour leader [April 2018].

  • Jonathan Cook: How Israel helped to revive Europe's ugly ethnic nationalisms: "Israel preserved a tribal idea of citizenship that followers of Trump and Europe's far-right now seek to emulate." [July 2018]

  • Joseph Massad: Pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism are inseparable, and always have been: "Pro-Zionism is the only respectable form of anti-Semitism today, one that is welcomed by the Israeli government and pro-Zionist white nationalists everywhere." Also: Israel and the West: 'Shared values' of racism and settler-colonialism.

• Andrew Sullivan: Donald Trump and the art of the lie. He draws some examples from Michael Wolff's Siege, others from the George Stephanopoulos interview, but he could write the same article with fresh examples any week of the year.

  For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success. The brazenness of it unbalances and stupefies sane and adjusted people, thereby constantly giving him an edge and a little breathing space while we try to absorb it, during which he proceeds to the next lie. And on it goes. It's like swimming in choppy water. Just when you get to the surface to breathe, another wave crashes into you. . . .

  A tyrant's path to power is not a straight line, it's dynamic. Each concession is instantly banked, past vices are turned into virtues, and then the ante is upped once again. The threat rises exponentially with time. If we can't see this in front of our own eyes, and impeach this man now, even if he will not be convicted, we are flirting with the very stability of our political system.

  Sullivan also writes about Boris Johnson in the next section down the page: "My Old Chum Boris." Sullivan knew Johnson from their school days at Oxford together:

  Boris was so posh it was funny. . . . He belonged, for example, to the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive upper-class fraternity that specialized in hosting expensive restaurant dinners for themselves, in white tie and tails no less, with members eating and drinking till they were stuffed and thoroughly shit-faced and then proceeded to puke on the floors and vandalize the joint, smashing tables and chairs and china, breaking windows and the like. Daddy would always pick up the price for repairs. . . . Legend has it Johnson kept reinventing himself politically and playing down his Toryism and poshness -- with the help of then-student Frank Luntz, believe it or not -- and eventually it worked and he won. I have to say I found him hugely entertaining, and great company, but could never really take him seriously. He has a first-class wit but a second-class mind and got a second-class degree. If you want to measure the quality of his scholarship, check out his deeply awful biography of Churchill, a thinly veiled attempt to redescribe his own career as a Second Coming of Winston. . . . But there is some sweet cosmic justice in Boris having to take responsibility for the Brexit he backed. It may be a catastrophe, but it will be his, and, for him at least, it sure will be fun.

• Jon Swaine: Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017. Also, Vicky Ward: Jared Kushner may have an ethics problem -- to the tune of $90m.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • Bernie Sanders on democratic socialism, Elizabeth Warren and the media. Related: Bhaskar Sunkara: Bernie Sanders just made a brilliant defense of democratic socialism.

  • Elizabeth Warren's rise is a plus for issue politics -- and a bad sign for billionaires.

  • Campaign conventional wisdom is dead.

  • YouTube, Facebook purges are more extensive than you think.

• Peter Wade: Ivanka Trump cashed $4 million from her father's DC hotel in 2018: "She and her husband, Jared Kushner, reported earning between $28.8 million and $135.1 million in 2018.

• Alex Ward:

  • How the Trump administration is using 9/11 to build a case for war with Iran: "The case is legally dubious and factually challenged."

  • What Hong Kong's massive protests are really about: "The fight over an extradition law and democracy in China, explained." Update: Zeeshan Aleem: Huge Hong Kong protests continue after the government postpones controversial bill. Later update: Daniel Victor/Keith Bradsher: Protesters return to Hong Kong's streets, rejecting leader's apology.

• Joanna Weiss: How Trump turned liberal comedians conservative: Nice idea for a piece, but doesn't deliver on its premise, nor approximate its title. Weiss laments the eclipse of "wry satire," complaining that today "it's all outrage and punching up -- and it's not always clear where the joke is." I don't doubt that there has been a coarsening of humor since Trump became president. Is any other reaction possible? I worry that many of the jokes offer lazy simplifications (e.g., ragging on Trump for his spelling and vocabulary lapses, like "covfefe"). I've also noted that no one seems to be able to tell funny jokes about Democrats (exception Hillary, but mostly in contrast to Trump). For instance, I can't recall Seth Myers ever cracking a funny joke about Bernie Sanders. Also, I've found myself with a pre-emptive groan every time Colbert does his "Doin' It Donkey Style" routine. On the other hand, the real thing I've found myself looking for from these comedians is solidarity. I rarely need their help in understanding the news, but it's gratifying to know that someone else shares my outrage.

• Jennifer Williams: UK signs order for WikiLeaks' Julian Assange to be extradicted to the US.

• Paul Woodward: Why Trump remains open to receiving foreign aid during election campaigns: Mostly links to other articles, but his summary is worth underlining:

  As much as the media might be inclined to cast Trump's views on this issue as an aberration, they are, on the contrary, completely in line with what has become the GOP's overarching strategy for retaining power as its capacity to win votes declines: through gerrymandering, stacking courts, gutting campaign finance regulations, and now welcoming help from foreign governments.

  The Republicans' power-hunger corresponds directly with their dwindling democratic opportunities.

  A party that has realized it can't succeed by conforming with the operating rules for a functioning democracy has concluded its self-ascribed "right to govern" depends upon the systematic subversion of the principles upon which this country was founded.

• Robin Wright: A tanker war in the Middle East -- again? Two oil tankers were struck in the Straits of Hormuz between Iran and Oman. The Trump administration and Trump's "allies" in Saudi Arabia and the UAE were quick to blame Iran (with no proof but lots of innuendo), and Iran immediately denied responsibility. One line in passing here sticks with me: "Within hours, oil prices rose four per cent." A reminder here of the "tanker war" in the late 1980s, although no mention of the Iranian civilian airliner the US shot down then. More on Iran:

  • Peter Baker: As Trump accuses Iran, he has one problem: his own credibility.

  • Dave DeCamp: Japanese ship owner contradicts US officials on tanker attack.

  • Heather Hurlburt: Trump's Iran accusations put US credibility on the line.

  • Fred Kaplan: Trump's lack of credibility is hampering America's ability to respond to the crisis in the Gulf: Title after the jump: "Trump's weak case against Iran."

  • Trita Parsi: Trump blames Iran for the tanker attacks. But let's be skeptical of his administration's pro-war bluster.

  Meanwhile, no skepticism at the New York Times, where Bret Stephens is already clamoring for war: If Iran won't change its behavior, we should sink its navy.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • New Federal Reserve data shows how the rich have gotten richer: "It's been a great 30 years for people who own businesses."

    The top 1 percent of the US wealth distribution has increased its net worth by 650 percent since 1989, while the bottom 50 percent saw its wealth grow by a much more modest 170 percent during the same period. . . . The story that the rich have gotten richer and inequality has grown is not new. But the Fed data does let us peek under the hood to help understand why inequality has grown so much.

  • Trump's big problem is that he's unpopular: "Democrats should worry less about him and more about everything else on the ballot."

  • The case for fully cleaning up America's lead problem.

  • A new survey shows how economic policy divides the GOP and unites Democrats: "Lower-income Republicans are decidedly more moderate on economics." The charts say still not as progressive/liberal as Democrats, but still, if Democrats want to peel off some Republican votes, more promising to do so on economic policy (where Democrats are generally most credible) than by trying to appease "cultural conservative" prejudices (where Democrats are less credible).

  • Trump's possibly fake deal with Mexico, explained.

Daily Log

My tweet on Trump's boast to the president of Poland that "much of the media unfortunately in this country is corrupt":

So Trump tells president of Poland that the media in this country is corrupt. Would have been smarter to add "that's why we don't have to censor them." Or that he's built his career by exploiting that corruption. But he's so vain he'd like to censor anyway.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31614 [31587] rated (+27), 251 [248] unrated (+3).

Ran the numbers late Sunday evening, but added Monday's unpacking, so the numbers have a slight skew from reality. I'm especially pleased to get a copy of Orakel, the Swedish label Moserobie. It's currently ranked number two on Chris Monsen's Favorites list, and follows a Moserobie release that topped my own 2018 list. It's gotten very expensive to mail CDs from Europe to the US recently, and several of the last few labels I've been getting service from seem to have dropped out (the ones I've felt the worst about are Intakt and NoBusiness, plus Clean Feed a couple years back). With labels like that, I try to find streaming sources, but it's not always easy.

Joe Yanosik wrote to tell me he's working up a Franco discography, and asked whether I've considered doing a deep dive, especially into his numerous Sonodisc recordings. I had, in fact, picked up a couple of them in my shopping days, and have generally enjoyed everything I picked up. Napster has a few of them I hadn't heard, so before long I started working my way through them -- limiting myself to ones I could figure out dates for. The grades below split 3 A-, 4 B+(***), but there wasn't all that much to separate best from worst.

Notable music links this week:

• Hank Shteamer: Anthony Braxton's Big Ideas.

• New York City Jazz Record: I've never managed to see this before, although it seems like most of the Jazz Critics Poll voters write for it. I was first struck by Kurt Gottschalk's label spotlight on Fundacja Sluchaj -- a Polish label I follow fairly closely because they put whole records up on Bandcamp.

New records reviewed this week:

• Akiko Hamilton Dechter: Equal Time (2018 [2019], Capri): [cd]: B+(*)
• Angles 9: Beyond Us (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Big Thief: U.F.O.F. (2019, 4AD): [r]: A-
• Alan Broadbent Trio: New York Notes (2019, Savant): [r]: A-
• Avishai Cohen: Arvoles (2019, Razdaz/Sunnyside): [cd]: B+(***)
• Satoko Fujii/Ramon Lopez: Confluence (2018 [2019], Libra): [cd]: B+(***)
• Injury Reserve: Injury Reserve (2019, Senaca Village): [r]: B+(***)
• Kedr Livanskiy: Your Need (2019, 2MR): [r]: B
• Rosie Lowe: Yu (2019, Wolf Tone): [r]: B+(**)
• Kelsey Lu: Blood (2019, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Martha: Love Keeps Kicking (2019, Dirtnap): [r]: B+(**)
• Orville Peck: Pony (2019, Sub Pop): [r]: B-
• Red Kite: Red Kite (2019, RareNoise): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Chanda Rule: Sapphire Dreams (2016 [2019], PAO): [cd]: B
• The Jamie Saft Quartet: Hidden Corners (2019, RareNoise): [r]: [cdr]: B+(**)
• The Twilight Sad: It Won/t Be Like This All the Time (2019, Rock Action): [r]: B
• Federico Ughi: Transoceanico (2016 [2019], 577): [r]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Paul Bley/Gary Peacock/Paul Motian: When Will the Blues Leave (1999 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Alex Chilton: Songs From Robin Hood Lane (1991-94 [2019], Bar/None): [r]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Franco Et TP OK Jazz: 1966/1968 (1966-68 [1992], Sonodisc): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco Et TP OK Jazz: 1967/1968 (1967-68 [1992], Sonodisc): [r]: A-
• Franco & Le TP OK Jazz: 1971/1972: Likambo Ya Ngana (1971-72 [1994], Sonodisc): [r]: A-
• Franco, Vicky Et L'OK Jazz: Marceline Oh! Oh! (1972 [1998], Sonodisc): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco Et Le T.P. OK Jazz: 79/80/81 Live: Kinshasa Makambo (1979-81 [1994], Sonodisc): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco Et Le TP OK Jazz: Makambo Ezali Bourreau: 1982/1984/1985 (1982-85 [1994], Sonodisc): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco/Simaro/Jolie Detta Et Le T.P. O.K. Jazz: 1986-1987-1988 (1986-88 [1994], Sonodisc): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Sharman Duran: Questioning Reality (self-released)
• Rosana Eckert: Sailing Home (OA2): June 21
• Per 'Texas' Johansson/Torbjörn Zetterberg/Konrad Agnas: Orakel (Moserobie)
• La La Lars: La La Lars II (Headspin)
• Xavier Lecouturier: Carrier (Origin): June 21
• Greta Matassa: Portrait (Origin): June 21
• Moutin Factory Quintet: Mythical River (Laborie Jazz)
• Matt Olson: 789 Miles (OA2): June 21
• Marlene Rosenberg: MLK Convergence (Origin): June 21
• Chanda Rule: Sapphire Dreams (PAO)
• Erik Skov: Liminality (OA2): June 21
• Ståhls Trio: Källtorp Sessions: Volume One (Moserobie)

Weekend Roundup

No introduction. Cut my finger while cooking, and can't type worth a damn. Getting late, too.

Some scattered links this week:

• Riley Beggin:

  • US and Mexico reach an immigration agreement to avoid tariffs. Beggin and Eric Kleefeld followed this up with: The US-Mexico agreement to avoid tariffs is actually months old. This added information suggests that the tariff threat was always a political stunt, meant to make it look like Trump's tough guy stance works, and possibly also to make it easier for Mexico's president to sell his capitulation to Yankee bullying. Kleefeld also wrote: The Mexican ambassador to the US explains Trump's claim of a new agricultural deal.

  • Cory Booker's plan to fix the housing crisis and make renting affordable.

• Peter Beinart: 13 Democrats recorded messages about Israel. Only one spoke with courage. Bernie Sanders.

• Ronald Brownstein: Democrats learned the wrong lesson from Clinton's impeachment: "It didn't actually cost the GOP all that much."

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: The May jobs report is a big disappointment for workers and bad news for Trump.

• Juliet Eilperin/Josh Dawsey/Brady Dennis: White House blocked intelligence agency's written testimony calling climate change 'possibly catastrophic'.

• Masha Gessen:

  • The persistent ghost of Ayn Rand, the forebear of zombie neoliberalism. Review of Lisa Duggan's Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed. After mentioning various political figures, like Paul Ryan and Mike Pompeo, infatuated with Rand, Gessen finishes:

    Their version of Randism is stripped of all the elements that might account for my inability to throw out those books: the pretense of intellectualism, the militant atheism, and the explicit advocacy of sexual freedom. From all that Rand offered, these men have taken only the worst: the cruelty. They are not even optimistic. They are just plain mean.

  • What HBO's "Chernobyl" got right, and what it got terribly wrong: We watched all five episodes this week, and I thought they did a remarkable job of explaining the causes and consequences of one of the devastating man-made disasters of our time. Gessen compliments the series whenever it sheds a harsh light on the Soviet bureaucracy, then attacks it for not being harsh enough. Her critique is most effective regarding Ulyana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a single character invented to represent the hundreds of scientists assigned to figure out what went wrong, what more could go wrong, and how best to deal with all that. Gessen faults Khomyuk as a stock Hollywood hero, but what bothers me more is the reduction of a large group effort, with all the complex interaction of major scientific endeavors, to small acts of individual heroism. I've made the same complaint about the series Manhattan, which reduced nearly all of the high-level technical decision to just two characters -- both American, losing any recognition that most of the major scientists working on the project were Europeans (who, aside from some Brits and a celebrity visit by Niels Bohr, were totally written out of the story). The other conspicuous omission/error I found was when the lead scientist attributed the critical "design flaw" and the lack of a containment chamber to the Soviets' tendency to do things on the cheap. As I understand it, the main consideration for the RBMK reactor design was its use for producing bomb fuel as well as electricity, which required frequent access to extract plutonium from the core. Still, I think the writer here, Craig Mazin, makes a good case for telling the story this way. See: Emily Todd VanDerWerff: HBO's Chernobyl is a terrific miniseries. Its writer hopes you don't think it's the whole truth. I haven't yet followed the link to Mazin's podcasts, which reportedly go into more detail about what's true and what's been fictionalized in the series. VanDerWerff also wrote: Chernobyl's stellar finale makes a case for the show as science fiction. Also: Peter Maass: What the horror of "Chernobyl" reveals about the deceit of the Trump era.

• John Hudson/Loveday Morris: Pompeo delivers unfiltered view of Trump's Middle East peace plan in off-the-record meeting: What he told "a closed-door meeting with Jewish leaders."

• Murtaza Hussain: An Iranian activist wrote dozens of articles for right-wing outlets. But is he a real person? "Heshamat Alavi is a persona run by a team of people from the political wing of the MEK. This is not and has never been a real person."

• Sean Illing: Why conservatives are winning the internet: Interview with Jen Schradie, author of The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives. "Ultimately, it's not about the tool; it's about the inequalities in our society that give certain people advantages over others."

• Quinta Jurecic: 4 disturbing details you may have missed in the Mueller report: "and none of them are favorable to the president."

• Fred Kaplan: How Trump could restart the nuclear arms race. And how this dovetails with Putin's interests in the same: Reese Erlich: Nuclear disarmament: the view from Moscow.

• Rashid Khalidi: Manifest destinies: "The tangled history of American and Israeli exceptionalism." Review of Amy Kaplan's book, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance.

• Jen Kirby: Trump tightens Cuba travel rules: "The US bans cruises and restricts certain travel in a move meant to pressure Cuba. . . . All of these policy moves reflect the administration's Cold War-esque approach to Latin America that has emerged since Bolton arrived as National Security Advisor."

• Paul Krugman:

  • Heroes of the Great Patriotic Trade War: "People can't take America seriously anymore." Alas, the bad Korea example doesn't help anyone.

  • Mar-a-Lago comes for British health.

  • Trump makes America irresponsible again: "Why 'tariff' isn't a 'beautiful word'."

• Farhad Manjoo: I want to live in Elizabeth Warren's America: "The Massachusetts senator is proposing something radical: a country in which adults discuss serious ideas seriously."

  I'm impressed instead by something more simple and elemental: Warren actually has ideas. She has grand, detailed and daring ideas, and through these ideas she is single-handedly elevating the already endless slog of the 2020 presidential campaign into something weightier and more interesting than what it might otherwise have been: a frivolous contest about who hates Donald Trump most.

• Michael E Mann: Trump is giving Americans dirty water, dirty air, and a very dirty climate: Alternate title by Paul Woodward -- Newsweek's is "Trump lied to Prince Charles's face -- and to the world."

  To say that Donald Trump's jaw-dropping display of environmental ignorance while in the United Kingdom is an embarrassment to all Americans would be an understatement. But the worst part of his ramblings about how we have "among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics" isn't that it sounds like the ramblings of a Fox News addict. It's that his administration is doing everything it can to work towards the opposite: dirty water, dirty air, and, well, a very dirty climate.

  Found a link there to another article which people who regard Trump as Putin's stooge might pick up and run with: Hannah Osborne: Climate change could make Russia's frozen Siberia far more habitable by the 2080s.

• Dylan Matthews/Byrd Pinkerton: The incredible influence of the Federalist Society, explained.

• Rani Molla:

  • Foreign tech workers are turning to Canada as US immigration becomes more difficult.

  • The word of the day is "antitrust".

• Samuel Moyn: The nudgeocrat: "Navigating freedom with Cass Sunstein." Review of Sunstein's recent short book, On Freedom, although he's been rehashing those same ideas for a long time now, most notoriously in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (co-authored by Richard H. Thaler). He pushes "libertarian paternalism," where technocratic elites rig default choices to help guide the minions to better choices without making them feel like they're being run.

• Ella Nilsen:

  • Elizabeth Warren makes a forceful argument on how the Hyde Amendment worsens inequality.

  • Climate change is becoming a defining issue of 2020.

  • Democrats' extremely uphill battle to retake the Senate majority in 2020, explained (w/Tara Golshan).

• Anna North: Joe Biden's evolution on abortion, explained.

• John Quiggin: America needs to reexamine its wartime relationships: "The lessons of the 1920s have been painfully relearned." Evidently not the author's title, as the main thrust of the article is that Keynes was right about the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and is still right today. Quiggin also pointed me to this report: Advertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction: Cross-national evidence on one million Europeans.

• Nathan J Robinson: The best they've got: "Examining the National Review's 'Against Socialism' issue" -- an article-by-article answer, which mostly suggests that the writers are blithering idiots, with most authors understanding nothing more than that socialism is bad, bad, bad.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Hannity: "Hillary should be in jail." Also Hannity: Locking up Trump would be "beyond despicable."

  • Trump's UK trip illustrates why people worried about a Trump presidency: "Bad tweets, ill-advised statements, ignorance -- it's all on display." I understand the sentiment, and I think (though not as much as I hope) that Americans will decide they no longer want to be embarrassed by such a vile moron as president and will vote him down and out in 2020. But back in November 2016, that was pretty low on my list of fear and dread that Trump's election portended. Since then that list has proven to be well founded, not that I can claim to have anticipated every stupid and/or nauseating thing he's done or threatened to do.

  • 2 especially cringeworthy moments from Jared Kushner's Axios interview: "Kushner won't say whether birtherism was racist"; "Kushner might not contact the FBI if Russia offered help again"; "Kushner isn't sure about a lot of things." The latter avoided questions about Israel and Saudi Arabia, which no doubt would also have proven cringeworthy.

• Sigal Samuel: Forget GDP -- New Zealand is prioritizing gross national well-being.

• Dylan Scott:

  • Why Joe Biden is holding on to such a strong lead in the 2020 primary polls: "Biden has one big advantage in the 2020 Democratic primary polls: older voters." Some numbers: with voters over age 45, Biden leads sanders 45-10%; under 45, Sanders leads Biden 26-19%. Older dividing lines increase the break for Biden. I'd guess that the world looks very different as you move away from the 45 dividing line: older voters have their lives relatively set and secure, as long as moderate Democrats can protect Social Security/Medicare against further Republican depredation; on the other hand, younger voters have bleaker job prospects, lots of debt (their children's prospects looking even worse), and longer range fears over the environment and war. They see Biden as representative of the generation of mainstream Democrats whose accommodation to business and the Republicans have let their prospects decline.

  • Trump is really unpopular in the most important 2020 battleground states: "Trump is deep underwater in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other key 2020 states.

• Tim Starks/Laurens Cerulus/Mark Scott: Russia's manipulation of Twitter was far vaster than believed. Of course, not just Russia funds trolls. See: Jason Rezaian: The State Department has been funding trolls. I'm one of their targets.

• Joseph Stiglitz: The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response. I get his point, but when he brings up this particular analogy he wanders into all sorts of conceptual minefields. War and climate change both cause vast devastation, but the agencies are different, and so are most of the effects. Even more specious is the notion that we need a war to work up the courage and will to tackle difficult problems -- as phony wars on poverty and drugs and so forth have repeatedly shown. Moreover, you can never measure the true cost of wars in dollars -- as Stiglitz tried to do in The Three Trillion Dollar War: The Truth Cost of the Iraq Conflict (2008, so by now probably a couple trillion short).

  When the US was attacked during the second world war no one asked, "Can we afford to fight the war?" It was an existential matter. We could not afford not to fight it. The same goes for the climate crisis. Here, we are already experiencing the direct costs of ignoring the issue -- in recent years the country has lost almost 2% of GDP in weather-related disasters, which include floods, hurricanes, and forest fires. The cost to our health from climate-related diseases is just being tabulated, but it, too, will run into the tens of billions of dollars -- not to mention the as-yet-uncounted number of lives lost. We will pay for climate breakdown one way or another, so it makes sense to spend money now to reduce emissions rather than wait until later to pay a lot more for the consequences -- not just from weather but also from rising sea levels. It's a cliche, but it's true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

  The war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy -- just as the second world war set the stage for America's golden economic era, with the fastest rate of growth in its history amidst shared prosperity. The Green New Deal would stimulate demand, ensuring that all available resources were used; and the transition to the green economy would likely usher in a new boom.

  Lots of other analogies bother me here. I can't imagine that any amount of climate change will end human habitation or civilization, and even if it did the earth will carry on, oblivious to evolution of its surface chemistry. The great risk from climate change is that it will cause destabilization and disruption, and that those things will impose pain and loss and, most likely, greater strife. It may be hard to convince people that such threats matter, but reasonable people recognize that they do.

• Matt Taibbi: Michael Wolff's 'Siege' is like his last book -- but worse.

• Nick Utzig: Bowe Bergdahl's story lays bare the tragedy of our forever wars: review of American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan, a book by Matt Farwell and Michael Ames.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump's D-Day speech was great. He was the wrong man to give it. If all I knew was the title, I'd guess that someone wrote him a fairly decent speech, but it felt off because Trump is incapable of delivering the emotions the speech intended to convey. Aside from his peculiar form of malicious humor, which he manages to deliver with unthinking grace, he may be the worst speaker I've ever seen among major political figures. Even when he's reading lines, he's so obviously out of character it's disconcerting to try to follow him. But Ward doesn't say any of that. He genuinely praises the speech, quoting sections which reveal nothing more than the sanctimonious pablum of high school orators. Then he denies that Trump is entitled to be valedictorian, because he dodged the draft to avoid Vietnam, and because he's said various impolitic things about NATO, America's anointed allies, and Robert Mueller -- reminding us that Mueller is a veteran as well as a patriot. Final line: "If Trump really wants to honor D-Day's heroes, he should live and work by their values from here on out." Sometimes it's hard to sort out who confuses Ward the most, but given their demographics (male, 93+ years old) those surviving "D-day heroes" probably voted overwhelmingly for Trump. They were no more than typical Americans at the time, and 75 years of cynical, self-serving militarism later their view of the world is unlikely to be less warped than that of anyone else today.

    Oh, by the way, isn't the celebration of D-Day anniversaries a bit chauvinistic (for America, of course, but also for France, which bequeathed us the term)? The turning point of WWII in Europe was the Battle of Stalingrad, where the Soviet Union, at enormous cost, halted and started to reverse the German advance. Even after D-Day the war was overwhelmingly fought in the East, where the suffering was immense. Not that D-Day was a picnic. For something realistic, see: David Chrisinger: The man who told America the truth about D-Day, a profile of famed journalist Ernie Pyle.

  • Trump escalates feud with London mayor by calling him a "stone cold loser": "Trump's spat with Sadiq Khan has lasted years."

• Emily Wax-Thibodeaux: In Alabama -- where lawmakers banned abortion for rape victims -- rapists' parental rights are protected.

• Lauren Wolfe: Human rights in the US are worse than you think: "From police shootings to voter suppression to arrests of asylum seekers, a new report finds US human rights are abysmal."

• Paul Woodward: Trump's obfuscation on the climate crisis.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Public support for left-wing policymaking has reached a 60-year high: "Just slightly higher than the previous high point of 1961." The study specifically looks at public attitudes to "big government," although that's a right-wing scare term. The more basic question is how many people think government should take a more active role in addressing general problems, and consequently look to progressive politicians for help. One thing I find interesting about this is that this shift in opinion hasn't been led by Democratic politicians advocating a larger role for government. Rather, it seems to be a groundswell, as more and more people realize that the Republican "small government" obsession has lost credibility. I'd also add that popular belief in liberal and progressive ideals, so dominant in the New Deal/Great Society era, never changed. Rather, people lost faith in the Democrats' ability to defend and extend those ideals, which gave Reagan and his ilk a chance to argue that their conservative ideas might do a better job of securing the American Dream. They succeeded to a remarkable degree, but only used their power to increase inequality and injustice. As their effects have become more manifest, their rationalizations have become more threadbare and disingenuous, to the point where fewer and fewer people believe anything they say. The last to realize this seem to be the mainstream media and centrist Democrats, but even they are losing their blinders. Eric Levitz also writes about this study: America's political mood is now the 'most liberal ever recorded'.

  • Why Trump's Mexico tariffs are producing a revolt when China tariffs didn't. Trump's China trade war is (mostly) pro-business, while Trump's Mexico trade war is about immigration. Opposing immigration may still be good politics for Trump, but restricting trade makes it bad for business, and that's the one thing Republicans are willing to break with Trump on.

    What makes this standoff interesting is that Trump is asking, in a small way, for a sacrifice the business wing of the GOP is never asked to make. . . . The way the deal is supposed to work is that cultural conservatives provide the votes, and they get their way on issues the business community doesn't care about (until cultural conservatives' views become an unpopular embarrassment the way opposition to same-sex marriages and military service is), but business isn't supposed to actually sacrifice its interests for the sake of cultural conservative causes. With the tariff gambit on Mexico, Trump is overturning that logic in a way that his other trade shenanigans haven't. And that's why congressional Republicans are resisting in an unusual way.

  • The Joe Biden climate plan plagiarism "scandal," explained: "A reminder of some bad history, but far and away the least important part of his climate plan." Reviews the "bad history" of plagiarism charges against Biden in 1987 for cribbing from a speech by a British politician, which led to his withdrawal from the 1988 presidential race. Neither case bothers me as plagiarism -- admittedly, not much does -- but the charges reinforce the notion that Biden isn't a very original thinker. But so does his climate plan. Indeed, his embrace of received opinion is the foundation of his campaign.

  • Judy Shelton's potential nomination to a Federal Reserve Board seat, explained.

  • Elizabeth Warren's latest big idea is "economic patriotism": "The plan is to marry industrial policy to environmentalism and transform the economy." Robert Reich applauds: Elizabeth Warren's economic nationalism vision shows there's a better way.

  • Jared Kushner's telling indifference on refugees.

  • Banning former members of Congress from lobbying won't fix the revolving door: "Congress needs more staff money and public financing, not tighter rules." Yglesias previously argued members of Congress themselves should be paid more, so he's extending that logic to staff members: maybe if they're paid more as public servants better people would seek these jobs, and be less likely to sell out to lobbyists later. I rather doubt this. On the other hand, while a lifetime ban strikes me as excessive, I can imagine some regulations helping. One could, for instance, limit pay by lobbying firms, which would have put a severe cramp into Billy Tauzin's move from the House to head up PHARMA just after Tauzin managed the passage of the Medicare D bill (which kept insurers from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies). Still, it's hard to think of things that couldn't be worked around. The core problem is that we live in a very inequal society, which rewards (and therefore drives) everyone to maximize income, and rarely (if ever) enforces taboos (let alone laws) against graft. That may seem like too tall an order, but some little steps would help: much higher tax rates for high incomes, making lobbying expenses taxable, and most important of all, cutting off the main flow of corruption by public funding of campaigns.

• Gary Younge: How bad can Brexit get? "Theresa May is out, but the crisis that made her premiership both possible and untenable has intensified."

Daily Log

Scraped from Kathleen Geier's Facebook post:

If I am Donald Trump, the Democrat I most want to run against in 2020 is definitely Joe Biden.

Here are some of the reasons why:

• I can tell working class voters of all races about Biden has fucked them over by supporting NAFTA and championing the slimiest practices of the credit card industry and other corporate predators. This should help me hold on to some of the support I got from white working class voters in the Midwest and it will depress voter turnout among the working class voters who normally vote Democrat.

• If I once again get accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault, I can neutralize these charges by pointing to Hairsniffer Joe's history of touching women inappropriately, a behavior that continue into the present, as well as his treatment of Anita Hill.

• I will be sure to have my people place targeted ads that remind African-American voters of Biden's crime bill and his history as a white backlash anti-busing candidate. Do I think this will win me their votes? No, but it will cause a lot of them to stay home.

• When people raise concerns about my cognitive decline and my being too old to be president, I can point the finger at Biden, who at 76 is four years older than me, and whose affect and campaign is noticeably low-energy.

• Best of all, even if I lose, Biden has made it clear that, unlike Warren or Sanders, he's not going to make any structural changes to the system that made me so powerful in the first place. Biden has pledged that things will go "back to normal," which means that white collar elites like me, who have committed fraud and abuse in the private sector and high crimes and misdemeanors in office, won't be held accountable for them. Not only do I and my peeps get off the hook, but Biden's approach will breed the kind of apathy and cynicism that discourages left-wing activism and empowers the right and the GOP.

No other Democrat is anywhere near as vulnerable on a whole range of issues as Joe Biden is. He is clearly the weakest top-tier candidate in the race and the one that Trump, and the rest of the Republican party, would give their collective right arm to run against.

I am praying that my fellow Democrats don't make their dream come true.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31587 [31558] rated (+29), 248 [251] unrated (-3).

So, 29 again. Ran the counter this afternoon, after I found a missed grade and added a "remembered LP" grade -- an LP I distinctly remember having but which didn't get picked up when I jotted down my first grade list (mid-1990s, I think). I may have cut it some slack -- main thing I remember was being disappointed by it.

Once again, surprised that I bagged that many -- after a very slow start, one that kept the Salamon Freequestra album in the changer for close to three days. Finished with Alfred Soto's top 20 list, checking out Mountain Goats, National, Tyler, and Weyes Blood, leaving me with only 5 A- records from his 20 (Control Top's Covert Contracts, Billie Eilish's When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Robert Forster's Inferno, Lizzo's Cuz I Love You, and Nilüfer Yanya's Miss Universe). Only one Christgau pick in those five (Eilish), and only one more in Soto's other 15 (Sharon Van Etten's Remind Me Tomorrow, a low B+ for me).

Speaking of Eilish, Phil Freeman dissed her album in the course of making a Facebook rant:

I will never stop griping about "Best Albums of [Year]" lists that should be called "Best *Pop and Indie Rock* Albums of [Year]". Billie fucking Eilish's album (to pick but one example: sub in Tyler, the Creator if you're worried about sexism) is not better than the Art Ensemble of Chicago's, so own your ignorance or just fuck off, OK? And no, I'm not saying all jazz > all pop. I hear shitty jazz records every day. I'm just saying that if you're simply ignoring the possibility that a jazz album could even be one of the best records of the year, especially given what's been happening in the genre in the last 4-5 years, that's *fucked up*, and major publications are fucking up by doing it.

I commented, taking exception to his examples: Eilish is currently 12 on my Music Year 2019 list, behind 7 jazz albums (counting my top-rated Heroes Are Gang Leaders: The Amiri Baraka Sessions, which admittedly has vocals, although the other 6 don't) and 4 other non-jazz. Of course, Freeman isn't complaining about me ignoring jazz albums in my annual lists. And I'm not much bothered that who spends most of his non-jazz time listening to metal should have trouble appreciating a lo-fi girl singer-songwriter. Or even that he offers Tyler, a hip-hop artist who buries himself in soft off-kilter tones, as another option in hype. (I agree that he is overrated, but I also find Igor to be his most pleasing and interesting album yet.) Where I disagree is in positing that the Art Ensemble of Chicago survivors reunion album is this year's flagship jazz hope. I played it (both CDs) until I gave up all hope, then let if off easy with a B+(**), which is to say that I currently have at least 50 jazz records this year that I like better.

On the other hand, if I had to handicap the 2019 Jazz Critics Poll, I doubt I'd find more than a couple of my A- records in the top ten: James Brandon Lewis's An Unruly Manifesto seems most likely, then maybe Matthew Shipp's Signature, Moppa Elliott's Jazz Band/Rock Band/Dance Band, Quinssin Nachoff's Path of Totality, or David Berkman's Six of One -- hunches based as much on labels and publicists as on the records themselves. But none of those artists have fared well in past polls, which is a much stronger indicator. Some albums you're more likely to find on JCP ballots (my grades in brackets):

• Art Ensemble of Chicago: We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration (Pi, 2CD) [**]
• Bill Frisell/Thomas Morgan: Epistrophy (ECM) [*]
• Vijay Iyer/Craig Taborn: The Transitory Poems (ECM) [**]
• Julian Lage: Love Hurts (Mack Avenue) [***]
• Joe Lovano: Trio Tapestry (ECM) [***]
• Branford Marsalis Quartet: The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul (Okeh) [***]
• Matt Mitchell: Phalanx Ambassadors (Pi) [**]
• Joshua Redman Quartet: Come What May (Nonesuch) [***]
• Wadada Leo Smith: Rosa Parks: Pure Love: An Oratorio of Seven Songs (TUM) [*]
• David Torn/Tim Berne/Ches Smith: Sun of Goldfinger (ECM) [***]

AEC looks pretty imposing on this list: it's big (last year was dominated by 2-CD releases and won by Wayne Shorter's 3-CD monstrosity), has historic cachet that reconciles the avant-garde with the tradition; it augments what's left of a legendary group augmented with lots of guest stars, and is on a label which always places records high in EOY polls (that same label is the reason Mitchell is on this list). None of the other records have that sort of cred, so maybe Freeman is right to pick it. My only complaint is that it isn't good enough. If I wanted to broaden the horizons of non-jazz critics, I'd start by recommending better records.

Christgau remarked recently that EOY list-building has more to do with brand identification than diligent sorting and ranking. I know that to be true of my own lists, where my brand is somone who listens to all kinds of things and doesn't give a fuck about what anyone else thinks. As the Dean, I figure Christgau is more focused on building a pantheon, but individual lists tend to be idiosyncratically personal (and his certainly is). Freeman's referring to corporate lists, which are carefully crafted to cater to a target audience. There's no place for jazz in most, not because their writers dislike jazz (although many do, or simply don't get the exposure -- hardly anyone hears much outside of their niche these days), but because their editors don't expect their readers to be interested in such things. So what you see is what you'd expect when people of limited knowledge try to write down to appeal/appease people who know even less.

Nonethless, as someone who has compiled literally thousands of EOY lists in recent years, I believe that there is actually a tiny trend toward more crossover jazz in predominantly indie/pop lists (although more so in UK than US). Last year the major breakthroughs were Kamasi Washington, Makaya McCraven, and Sons of Kemet (two A- records among those three, the other a high B+, so those picks were much more respectable as jazz than, say, Bad Bad Not Good from a few years back).

I could write volumes more on EOY lists (for data, see last year's EOY aggregate and Jazz Critics Poll). But my bottom line is learn what you can from the data, don't begrudge other people's pleasures, and don't rag on people for not liking what you like.

Back to my original thread about what I reviewed this week: beyond Soto's list, I looked at AOTY's Highest Rated Albums of 2019 and picked out a few records that seemed promising. Three sounded good enough to warrant multiple plays before I settled on B+(***): Fontaines D.C.'s Dogrel (1), Slowthai's Nothing Great About Britain (22), and Craig Finn's I Need a New War. Two previously graded A- in top 25: Dave's Psychodrama (2), and Little Simz's Grey Area (6), and a bunch more I haven't heard. By the way, the Lee Perry dive started with Christgau's review of Rainford. I couldn't find it on Napster, so went to Bandcamp. Obviously, a lot more Perry I haven't heard. I've always recommended the 3-CD compilation, Arkology, but that only gets you 4 prime years (expect overlap with Super Ape). I also really like the recent (2014) Back at the Controls.

New records reviewed this week:

• Melissa Aldana: Visions (2019, Motéma): [r]: B+(**)
• Bruce Barth: Sunday (2017 [2018], Blau): [r]: B+(**)
• Jerry Bergonzi: The Seven Rays (2019, Savant): [r]: B+(*)
• Dave Douglas/Uri Caine/Andrew Cyrille: Devotion (2018 [2019], Greenleaf Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Ezra Collective: You Can't Steal My Joy (2019, Enter the Jungle): [r]: B
• Craig Finn: I Need a New War (2019, Partisan): [r]: B+(***)
• Fontaines D.C.: Dogrel (2019, Partisan): [r]: B+(***)
• Ryan Keberle & Catharsis: The Hope I Hold (2018 [2019], Greenleaf Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Maren Morris: Girl (2019, Columbia Nashville): [r]: B
• The Mountain Goats: In League With Dragons (2019, Merge): [r]: B+(**)
• The National: I Am Easy to Find (2019, 4AD): [r]: B+(**)
• Lee Scratch Perry: Rainford (2019, On-U Sound): [r]: A-
• Rotten Girlz: Punk You (2018 [2019], Sazas): [cd]: B+(*)
• Samo Salamon & Freequestra: Free Sessions, Vol. 2: Freequestra (2016 [2019], Klopotec): [cd]: A-
• Samo Salamon/Szilárd Mezei/Jaka Berger: Swirling Blind Unstilled (2018 [2019], Klopotec): [cd]: B+(**)
• Slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain (2019, Method): [r]: B+(***)
• Peter Stampfel and the Atomic Meta Pagans: The Ordovician Era (2019, Don Giovanni): [r]: B+(*)
• Mavis Staples: We Get By (2019, Anti-): [r]: A-
• Tyler, the Creator: Igor (2019, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride (2019, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising (2019, Sub Pop): [r]: B-

Old music:

• Jerry Bergonzi Trio: Lost in the Shuffle (1998, Double Time): [r]: B+(**)
• Jerry Bergonzi: Spotlight on Standards (2016, Savant): [r]: B+(***)
• Lee Perry: Africa's Blood (1971, Trojan): [r]: B+(*)
• Lee Perry and the Upsetters: Some of the Best (1968-79 [1985], Heartbeat): [r]: B+(***)
• The Upsetters: Super Ape (1976, Mango): [r]: A-
• The Upsetters: Return of the Super Ape (1978, Upsetter): [r]: B+(**)

Added grades for remembered lps from way back when:

• Lee "Scratch" Perry: The Return of Pipecock Jackxon (1980, Black Star Liner): B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Akiko Hamilton Dechter: Equal Time (Capri): June 21
• Satoko Fujii/Ramon Lopez: Confluence (Libra): July 29

Weekend Roundup

No time for an intro, but let's credit Bernie Sanders for this tweet:

Soon we will send soldiers to Afghanistan who weren't even born yet on September 11, 2001.

We've spent $5 trillion dollars on wars since 9/11.

And now some of the same people that got us into Iraq are trying to start a war with Iran.

We must end our endless wars.

Some scattered links this week:

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: Mexican president to Trump: tariffs and coercion won't work.

• John Cassidy:

  • Trump's crazy Mexico tariff is stoking a meltdown on Wall Street.

  • A new European parliament won't solve the continent's economic problems.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Study finds Trump tax cuts failed to do anything but give rich people money.

  • In terrifying interview, William Barr goes full MAGA: Jan Crawford interviews Barr (see transcript).

• Lee Fang: A major coal company went bust. Its bankruptcy filing shows that it was funding climate change denialism.

• Conor Friedersdorf: Saudi Arabia first: "The president is helping a repressive monarchy wage war in open defiance of Congress. That's grounds for impeachment."

• Anand Giridharadas: What to do when you're a country in crisis: Review of Jared Diamond's new book, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. Critiques Diamond for imposing his "framework" on his historical cases, and goes deep on fact checking -- some for sure, others pissier (like complaints about using "unanimous" where unanimity is statistically impossible). I recently wrote a Book Roundup blurb on Diamond's book, positing a similar critique but not having read the book, not distracted by trivia. Giridharadas ends by offering Jill Lepore's These Truths as a contrast, but I did read that book, and noted a handful of egregious factual errors there, as well.

• Dahr Jamail/Barbara Cecil: What would it mean to deeply accept that we're in planetary crisis?

• David D Kirkpatrick: The most powerful Arab ruler isn't M.B.S. It's M.B.Z.: Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of United Arab Emirates. Related: David Hearst: Abu Dhabi is trapped in a nightmare of its own making.

• Masha Gessen: How Nancy Pelosi's tactics affirm the Trumpian style of politics. "Trump will be gone someday, but the possibilities that Trumpism has created will remain." This strikes me as wrong. To have any degree of effectiveness, Pelosi has had to figure out how to stand her ground against Trump's bullying. Adjusting to Trump's reality doesn't imply accepting it as the new norm.

• Tara Golshan: Republicans' successful campaign to protect Trump from Mueller's report in one quote.

• Edward Helmore: Bannon described Trump Organization as 'criminal enterprise,' Michael Wolff book claims.

• Umair Irfan: More than 200 tornadoes devastated the Midwest over 13 days. Why? One subtitle isn't very convincing: "Storm damages are getting worse, but climate change isn't too much of a factor." Below it confirms my suspicion that "Tornado Alley . . . is shifting east" in what appears to be a long-term shift.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • The abortion wars, 10 years after George Tiller's assassination. Also see: Dr. Tiller was a hero to his abortion patients; Carole Joffe: Remembering George Tiller and his vital legacy in American abortion history.

  • A Kasich primary challenge to Trump ain't happening.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Virginia Beach shooting; What we know: "At least 12 people have been killed."

  • Trump wants to pass his trade deal. But he's not acting like it.

  • Netanyahu has failed to form a government, sending Israelis back to the voting booth. For more, see:

    • Bernard Avishai: A climax to the saga of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman.

    • Ricard Silverstein: Netanyahu calls new election: deja vu all over again.

• Josh Marshall: Bill Barr's Trump-toadying lickspittle ways, explained.

• Dylan Matthews: Bernie Sanders's most socialist idea yet, explained: "He wants to mandate employee ownership of big companies." Also: Eric Levitz: In appeal to moderates, Sanders calls for worker-ownership of means of production. I've long felt that employee ownership of companies is much preferable, both for workers and the public, to labor unions. I've seen firsthand how giving employees an ownership stake makes their work more productive and satisfying. Anything else generates class conflict, often degenerating into a zero-sum contest. Of course, I support labor unions, as they provide countervailing power against the arrogance and abuse of unfettered management: strong unions help their workers, of course, but they also strengthen the economy and reinforce/revitalize democracy.

• Anna North:

  • Missouri could become the first state with zero abortion clinics. How did we get here?

  • The Trump administration wants to let doctors discriminate against trans patients.

• Kevin Poulsen: We found the guy behind the viral 'drunk Pelosi' video.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • William Barr vs Robert Mueller, explained.

  • Mueller's punt keeps looking worse: "The special counsel's decision not to say whether Trump broke the law sets a bad precedent."

• Gabriela Resto-Montero:

  • Trump says the UK should "walk away" from its Brexit deal: "The president also suggested his 'smart' friend Nigel Arage lead a new round of Brexit negotiations." One wonders just who he is speaking for: the political leader of "America First"? the owner of a luxury golf club in Scotland? Either way, this is pretty blatant interference in the internal affairs of another country.

  • Italy revokes Steve Bannon's right to use a monastery for his political "gladiator" school.

  • Illinois affirms "fundamental right" to abortion by passing new bill.

• David Roberts:

  • More natural gas isn't a "middle ground" -- it's a climate disaster.

  • We'll soon know the exact air pollution from every power plant in the world. That's huge.

• Emily S Rueb: 'Freedom Gas,' the next American export.

• Aaron Rupar: Trump thinks the courts might save him from impeachment. It doesn't work like that.

• Danny Sursen: Troika fever: Key American allies in the Middle East are the real tyrants.

• Andrew Sullivan: This is what a real conservative looks like in 2019: In self-serving praise of Robert Mueller and Justin Amash. Defines conservatism as "a philosophy of limited, constitutional government, individual rights, trust in tradition, love of country, prudence in foreign policy and restraint at home." That's actually closer to classic liberalism: just town down the reflexive jingoism, and allow for the possibility of progress -- e.g., extending individual rights to more (potentially all) people. The more consistent core creed of self-annointed conservatives is their belief in a natural social/political/economic hierarchy which places some people above others. As democratic principles spread, conservatives have had to hide their true agenda behind faux populism -- appeals to tradition, to pride, and to prejudice -- which have often led them to embrace some pretty unsavory politicians. Trump won them over by offering them the only thing that matters to them: the spoils of winning.

• Matt Taibbi: Julian Assange must never be extradited.

• Karen Tumulty: Trump could save his presidency the way Bill Clinton did: Clever idea:

  Getting things done may be Trump's best hope of survival -- as the last president who found himself in the impeachment crosshairs demonstrated. In 1998, as Bill Clinton's presidency became engulfed in scandal surrounding his affair with a White House intern, his mastery of what was then called "compartmentalization" was tested. Day in and day out, Clinton made sure Americans saw a functioning presidency. . . .

  He could not prevent the investigation from going forward, or Congress from trying to remove him from office. In December 1998, the House voted two articles of impeachment against him, for perjury and for obstruction of justice.

  But that very week, Clinton's job approval in the Gallup poll reached 73 percent -- not only the highest of his presidency, but among the best recorded by any chief executive since the mid-1960s. By then, it had become clear that the charges against him would not stick in the Senate, which just under eight weeks later acquitted him.

  By doing his job, Clinton saved his presidency.

  Even in this polarized environment, there are still opportunities for Trump to do the same.

  Still, partisan asymmetry matters more than competency or popularity. There was never any chance that Clinton would lose enough Democrats in the Senate to be convicted there, and Trump is if anything in a stronger position in the Senate now. His real problem is that his approval numbers have never topped 43% since the election (compare to Clinton's 73%). Maybe if Clinton was that low, he'd have something to worry about, but Republicans are used to being unpopular, and most of what Trump is unpopular for these days is being a hardcore Republican.

• Alex Ward: In Japan, Trump broke a cardinal rule of being America's president.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The 9 least popular Democrats running for president, briefly explained: "The Laggard Nine," aka "the Sub-2 Percent Club"): Jay Inslee, Steve Bullock, John Delaney, Eric Swalwell, Bill de Blasio, Tim Ryan, Michael Bennet, Seth Moulton, Marianne Williamson.

  • Trump's new plan to tax Mexican imports, explained.

  • Robert Mueller should testify before Congress.

  • Joe Biden's low-key campaigning schedule, explained.

Daily Log

I started to include this link, because it fits into a discussion several friends have been having about creating a game that would make a case against nominating Joe Biden. I have mixed feelings about this, partially explained below. On the other hand, I didn't get around to presenting the other hand, so decided to drop it from the post.

• Mehdi Hassan/Rebecca Traister: Joe Biden would be a disaster: Podcast with transcript. I don't agree that Biden would be a disaster, although I do think that nominating him would be a missed opportunity. As I've noted, I think that 2020 may be a pivotal, era-founding election. (There's no ironclad law at work here, but we can identify four eras, each founded by a legendary president, each ending with a notoriously bad president: Jefferson-Buchanan, Lincoln-Hoover, Roosevelt-Carter, and Reagan-Trump; one might have included Washington-Adams, but 12 years doesn't make for much of an era. The latest era is anomalous in several respects, especially in that it represents a turn away from the progressive expansion of democratic rights.) Biden's total experience and instincts are totally rooted in the compromises Democrats made to compete in the Reagan-Trump era. That doesn't mean that if elected in 2020 he would continue to practice the same submissive triangulation that marred the Clinton and Obama presidencies. The party base today is going to pull him to the left, because it's increasingly clear that the solutions to pressing problems are on the left, and because we now know that centering impulses weaken the party.

After the post, I noticed an open tab with a multi-part tweet by Jared Yates Sexton that someone had pointed my way. I rather hate these things, so I may not have linked to it if I had noticed it in time, but thought I might copy it here to see how much sense it makes:

I've written about this extensively in my new book The Man They Wanted Me To Be, but it's really important to get this out: Trump's behavior with Pelosi completely reflects the cycle of abuse that myself and other survivors have endured. 1/

It's a really unpleasant thing to endure and it brings up some very awful memories from my childhood, where I was systematically physically and emotionally abused by insecure and unwell men. Unfortunately, the president is an insecure and unwell man, the Abuser-in-Chief. 2/

The cycle is very simple. When an insecure man is threatened, he'll lash out. This can be verbally or physically. It can be a dressing down, a verbal tirade, the throwing of things, or a beating. Then, after it's over, he'll try and make good or question the abusee's reality. 3/

Trump calling Pelosi "crazy" yesterday was really, really triggering. I've seen, time and again, abusive men calling the women they abuse crazy, calling into question what they endured, what I watched happen. It's almost as bad as the actual abuse because it fractures reality. 4/

Trump having his staff corroborate his version of events is something that happens all the time. I've been made to corroborate events I knew to be false simply because I was a frightened and intimidated child. It was . . . jarring to watch it happen on the national stage 5/

How this happens is pretty complicated and a lot to process. It begins with childhood, where men are systematically abused themselves in an effort to "toughen them up." By telling boys they can't have emotions they're actually being emotionally abused in the process. 6/

The message that's being sent though is that anyone who has emotions, in this case women, are irrational. That means that men own rationality and reality and that anytime a woman questions your reality she's being "crazy" or irrational, which is what happened with Pelosi. 7/

As I chronicle in THE MAN THEY WANTED ME TO BE, traditional masculinity is a lie. Nobody can repress their emotions. But they can pretend and pretend until eventually men develop what's called alexithymia, which is a terrible emotional condition where they lose ability. 8/

With alexithymia men lose the ability to understand their own emotions, they lose the ability to understand other's emotions, which leads to them being "crazy" or "irrational." They often lose the frame for their own emotional outbursts and ability to understand their actions. 9/

Watching Donald Trump, it's not hard to imagine he suffers from alexithymia. Obviously he doesn't understand his own outbursts and has no frame for the things he says and does. When he's questioned he lashes out. In this case, maybe he believed he was calm, but he's lost. 10/

When men behave this way, those around them only have a few options. You either submit to their worldview or face vicious abuse. You see men around Trump who kowtow in fear constantly. That's part of this cycle. With Pelosi, unfortunately, Trump isn't going to stop. 11/

As part of socialization men are taught the only acceptable expressions are anger and violence. What we're seeing with Trump is all his range of emotions. Pelosi challenged him and so he lashed out. He questioned her sanity and has even promoted fake videos to prove his point 12/

To anyone who's been abused, Trump is the embodiment of this cycle. He brags incessantly while he's obviously pathetically insecure. Anyone who even dares question him is ostracized and attacked, belittled because he's afraid. He's really, really pathetic. 13/

It makes me sad to see the country resemble the abusive households of my youth. Every day we worry what mood the president will be in, whether it's a bad day or if we'll just be left alone. I've talked to other survivors and the memories are visceral, palpable. 14/

Yesterday, as I heard him line up staff to back up his twisted memories, I felt like I was four years old all over again, an angry and dangerous man lording over me and demanding loyalty or else promising violence. You don't shake that, and unfortunately that's where we are. 15/

The truth is, Trump is unwell. Mentally, yes, but emotionally it's undeniable. He's the embodiment of toxic masculinity and is so far gone there's no reaching him. This is an abusive relationship, an abusive situation we're living through, and he simply knows no other way 16/

We're going to keep seeing this cycle repeat itself until he's out of office and we're going to be living with the ghosts of it. Survivors of abuse carry their abuse with them the rest of their lives. I certainly do, and to get better you have to recognize the abuse as abuse. 17/

Listening to shows last night call it maneuvering just hid the true nature of this. It isn't politics, it's personal, one-on-one abuse, and if we don't recognize it we're not going to escape it or understand it. There are many, many layers to this and simplifying worsens it. 18/

A large reason why Trump enjoys the devotion he does is because the people supporting him are locked into unhealthy cycles of abuse. They've been victims too and they become locked in with his abuse. It happens all the time. And to get past it we must recognize it. 19/

In the meantime, as a survivor of abuse, I can tell you this: reach out to anyone you know who is a survivor. These are really, really trying times that reawaken the scars of abuse. Everyday the president perpetuates a new dose of abuse and it takes a powerful toll. 20/20

Book Roundup

When I posted my latest Book Roundup on March 15 -- eleven months after my only 2018 compilation, after two in 2017, four in 2016, and five in 2015 -- I figured another one would be eminent. I got distracted, but here's a second batch of 40+ books, and I'm pretty certain that a third will be ready in a few weeks. These surveys are useful to me as a means of keeping track of what the world knows and is thinking about. I've been trying to track "the coming dark age" for some time now, but while lots of people seem to be getting dumber (or at least more certain of their ignorance), a lot of smart thinking is still being developed and preserved in books.

As I've started doing recently, I'm including various related books in bullet lists following a leading one. There's also a supplemental list at the end, of books worth noting but not (as far as I'm concerned) at much length.

Jill Abramson: Merchants of Truth: The Business and the Fight for Facts (2019, Simon & Schuster): Tries to update David Halberstam's The Powers That Be (1979) by profiling four major media corporation (The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE) as they make business out of the public's appetite for news. That, of course, raises the question of how the selection and reporting of news is filtered and often distorted by each of their business and cultural models. That's an intrinsically interesting question, but not necessarily one that can be answered -- for one thing the author adds her own limited vantage point. I can't say anything about charges that sections of the book were plagiarized. Related:

• Alan Rusbridger: Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now (2018, Farrar Straus and Giroux).

Carol Anderson: One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018, Bloomsbury USA): At some point in recent history, Republicans came to realize that it was easier to win by suppressing the vote among Democratic constituencies than it was to convince those voters of a political program which actually promises little more than to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. Of course, this isn't new: all republics have struggled over who counts and who doesn't, but the core idea of democracy -- each and every person is entitled to the same vote -- has been hard to argue with, until very recently. Even now, even among Republicans, the arguments tend to be disguised, and much of the mischief avoids the spotlight. Also wrote, with Tonya Bolden, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide (2018, Bloomsbury). Previously wrote: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Also on voting rights:

• Allan J Lichtman: The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present (2018, Harvard University Press).

Max Blumenthal: The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019, Verso): For the most part, a basic primer on how the US fed and nurtured its eventual enemies in the Middle East, in a long series of events that ultimately show how arrogant and self-centered the architects of American policy have been. That general book has been written a half-dozen times already, with dozens of other tomes treating one aspect or another of the big picture. However, by dropping Trump into the title, he's adding another dimension: not just what American plots and wars have done to the Middle East, but what such persistent warmaking has done to the psyches of ignorant and oblivious Americans-- Trump being an example.

Steven Brill: Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall -- and Those Fighting to Reverse It (2018, Knopf): Journalist, wrote a book on Obamacare called America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healtcare System (2015), looks for a bigger picture and finds it in "an erosion of responsibility and accountability, an epidemic of shortsightedness, an increasingly hollow economic and political center, and millions of Americans gripped by apathy and hopelessness." That sounds a bit like a backgrounder for Trump's "Make American Great Again" campaign slogan, but it appears that the culprit Brill identifies is Trump's own billionaire class.

Arthur C Brooks: Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt (2019, Broadside Books): Someone might be able to write a decent book on this theme, but I doubt that the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative propagandist who revels in his sense of moral superiority, is up to the task. Previous feel-good books include: Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (2006); Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America -- and How We Can Get More of It (2008); The Battle: How the Fight Between Big Government and Free Enterprise Will Shape America's Future (2010); The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise (2012), and The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America (2015). Turns out that it's easy to "love your enemies" once you've ground them under heel, which is the author's real mission. More recent efforts to make the conservatives seem like they think and care:

• Noah Rothman: Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America (2019, Gateway).
• Ben Shapiro: The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great (2019, Broadside Books).

Contrast these with the right's more pedestrian hackwork, designed to rile up hatred (and otherwise confuse you):

• Dinesh D'Souza: The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (2017, Regnery).
• Jonah Goldberg: Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (2018, Crown Forum).
• Mary Katherine Ham/Guy Benson: End of Discussion: How the Left's Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun) (2015; paperback, 2017, Crown Forum).
• Derek Hunter: Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood (2018, Broadside Books).
• Mark R Levin: Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism (2017, Threshold Editions).
• Ben Shapiro: Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (2004; paperback, 2010, Thomas Nelson).

Paul Buhle/Steve Max: Eugene V Debs: A Graphic Biography (paperback, 2019, Verso): Buhle was editor of Radical America, a major historian of American radical movements (co-editor of Encyclopedia of the American Let), and a long-time of the graphic book form, so the only thing surprising here is that it took so long to come together. Art by Noah Van Sciver, with additional help by Dave Nance. Actually, I've noted several of Buhle's graphic histories in the past. Here's a longer list (credits aren't always clear):

• Paul Buhle/Nicole Schulman: Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (paperback, 2005, Verso).
• Paul Buhle: The Beats: A Graphic History (2009; paperback, 2010, Hill & Wang).
• Paul Buhle/Sabrina Jones: FDR and the New Deal for Beginners (paperback, 2010, For Beginners).
• Paul Buhle: Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith (paperback, 2013, Herald Press).
• Paul Buhle/Noah Van Sciver: Johnny Appleseed (2017, Fantagraphics).
• Kate Evans: Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (paperback, 2015, Verso): ed, Paul Buhle.
• Harvey Pekar/Paul Buhle: Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation (paperback, 2009, New Press).
• Harvey Pekar: Students for a Democratic Society (paperback, 2009, Hill & Wang): ed, Paul Buhle.
• Harvey Pekar/Paul Buhle: Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land (2011, Harry N Abrams).
• Spain Rodriguez: Che: A Graphic Biography (paperback, 2017, Verso): ed, Paul Buhle.
• Sharon Rudahl: Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman (paperback, 2007, New Press): ed, Paul Buhle.
• Gilbert Shelton/Paul Buhle: Radical America Komiks (paperback, 2019, PM Press): reprint of Radical America "underground comix" edition from 1969.
• Nick Thorkelson/Paul Buhle/Andrew Lamas: Herbert Marcuse: Philosophy of Utopia: A Graphic Biography (paperback, 2019, City Lights).
• Howard Zinn/Mike Konopacki/Paul Buhle: A People's History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation (paperback, 2008, Metropolitan Books).

Chapo Trap House: The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason (2018, Atria Books): I went through a kneejerk period in the 1960s when I rebelled so hard against the liberal warmongers of the Democratic Party that I was willing to throw away all appeals to "logic, facts, and reason," and embrace its opposite (arts, irrationality, mysticism). I changed my tune when I found that one could arrive at right conclusions through reason, and I wound up more dedicated to rationality than ever before. So at first glance I took this book to be complete, reactionary bullshit. But it turns out this is meant to be funny, and it's aimed at young people today who feel the same incoherent rage and disgust over the powers that be as I felt back in the 1960s. The authors are comedians who run some kind of podcast. And while there are some lame jokes and outright bullshit here, their core claim harbors a kernel of truth: "Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under thirty who is not a sociopath." Once you understand that, you can look elsewhere for better-reasoned explanations and proposals, but that insight is a good place to start.

Sarah Churchwell: Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream" (2018, Basic Books): Two iconic notions, offered as sweeping generalizations about America's role in the world, adopted by various political movements for varying ends depending on the time and place. The contemporary interest angle is that both played large roles in the 2016 election, perhaps even more so than in their long and storied past. On the other hand, they're basically bullshit, at once able to flatter and mislead their political targets, and there's something rather hollow about stretching a book around them.

Kimberly Clausing: Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital (2019, Harvard University Press): Theory tells us that free trade and unrestricted mobility of capital and labor increases wealth all around. The reality is something else, as global capital has exploited economic theory to effectively escape nation-state regulation, leading to ever more extreme inequality, stripping most people of most nations of their political standing. That has in turn produced a backlash, both on the reactionary right and on the left, which sees things like "free trade agreements" as little more than a power- and wealth-grab. Causing attempts to save theory from practice, by advancing political schemes to make open borders work for everyone.

Anna Clark: The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy (2018, Metropolitan Books): We routinely receive warnings about America's crumbling infrastructure, but usually assume those threats are things that could happen in the future, not things already happening today. But the water system in Flint, Michigan has already turned toxic, killing and irreparably harming people who merely happened to live in the wrong place.

Michael D'Antonio/Peter Eisner: The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence (2018, Thomas Dunne Books): Two key questions here: How bad is Pence? And how powerful is he? Trump had promised to give his vice president unprecedented day-to-day power -- the first evidence of that was that Pence had the leading role in staffing the administration, which is how Trump got surrounded by so many orthodox extreme conservatives. But beyond his immediate influence, I can't recall a moment of disharmony between Trump and Pence -- indeed, hard to think of anyone else in the administration one can say that about. Part of this is that Pence has been eager and willing to support Trump's Kulturkampf fetishes, no matter how loony (e.g., his stunt leaving a NFL game after players took the knee during the national anthem, or his ridiculous task of holding the official press conference announcing the Space Force). The import of this is how Pence has set an example for even the most hopelessly ideological Republicans to line up behind and join forces with Trump.

Jared Diamond: Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (2019, Little Brown): An anthropologist who since his famous Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) has used his license to practice macrohistory, taking a view that straddles vast stretches of time and space to wrap big questions up into tidy boxes. He picks on six countries for his turning points this time: Japan (forced opening by US in 1860s), Finland (attacked by Soviet Union in 1939 following their "non-aggression" pact with Nazi Germany), Germany and Austria (post-WWII), Indonesia and Chile (victims of US-backed coups in 1965 and 1973). He draws lessons for Americans today. I doubt he has much to say about karma.

William Egginton: The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today's College Campuses (2018, Bloomsbury): "Egginton argues that our colleges and universities have become exclusive, expensive clubs for the cultural and economic elite instead of a national, publicly funded project for the betterment of the country. Only a return to the goals of community, and the egalitarian values underlying a liberal arts education, can head off the further fracturing of the body politic and the splintering of the American mind." Lots of gripes about higher education these days, many from the right. Hard for me to sort these book out, probably because my own stake in academia is so tenuous:

• Greg Lukianoff/Jonathan Haidt: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018, Penguin Books).
• Heather MacDonald: The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermined Our Culture (2018, St Martin's Press).

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018, Simon & Schuster): It's long been obvious -- I first picked up this insight from a book by Paul Sweezy written in the 1950s -- that we have a lot of jobs that don't really produce anything of value, that are effectively pointless and parasitical, what Graeber has finally called bullshit. He's an anthropologist and anarchist, the writer of a major tome Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and a book of his experience and theory of Occupy Wall Street, The Democracy Project:A History, a Crisis, a Movement.

Greg Grandin: The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019, Metropolitan Books): Author of a number of first-rate books on America's impact on Latin America -- e.g., Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006) -- easily sees the links between two centuries of US aggression and the militarization of the US-Mexico border. Timely enough to include Trump's border wall fixation, though not the latest blow up in Venezuela.

Bradley W Hart: Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States (2018, Thomas Dunne Books): Some were well known, like Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh, the Bund and the America First Committee. I wouldn't be surprised to hear names like Koch and Trump pop up, although neither appear in what I've read. Still, I'd guess that actual supporters were fewer in number than sympathizers and apologists, especially those with home-grown racist and/or anti-labor agendas. On the other hand I really doubt that every isolationist was anti-semitic. Before WWII, Americans had a long history of believing that we should stay away from foreign entanglements, and the war schemes they lead to.

Daniel Immerwahr: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Beyond the 48 continental states, the US managed to pick up various far-flung lands, and has actually managed to keep more of them than any European rival: Alaska and Hawaii have become full-fledged states, Puerto Rico and various smaller islands are in limbo, the Philippines were let go but only losing them to Japan, the Panama Canal Zone was returned to Panama (which was itself a US creation), Cuba was never officially on the books but treated like a colony until its revolution. This surveys most of that list, stopping short of the coups and incursions and a globe-straddling archipelago of bases and even more pervasive property claims by private Americans and friendly investors.

Stephen Kinzer: The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (2017; paperback, 2018, St Martin's Griffin): To be clear, Roosevelt was for and Twain was against in this particular political debate (c. 1898, what we've dubbed the Spanish-American War) over whether America should impose itself on others as an empire -- arguably not the first such debate, and most certainly not the last. Evan Thomas covered the pro-empire side (mostly) in The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire (2010); also Kinzer has previously written about the 1898 annexation of Hawaii in Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq (2006). Still, would be good to pay more attention to the anti-war/empire arguments.

Eric Klinenberg: Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (2018, Crown): Sociologist, writes about the value of shared spaces -- examples given include libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, synagogues, and parks -- for building social bonds and a sense of common interests, as opposed to the fragmentation and isolation that has lately taken hold almost everywhere.

Kevin M Kruse/Julian E Zelizer: Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (2019, WW Norton): A broad history of what I've started calling the Reagan-to-Trump era, backing up a couple years (the falls of Nixon and Saigon, OPEC embargoes, desegregation riots in Boston) to get a running start. Jill Lepore says this details how "Americans abandoned a search for common ground in favor of a political culture of endless, vicious, and -- very often -- mindless division." Kruse previously wrote White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), and One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015). Zelizer has written The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (2015, Penguin Press), and a few more, including books on the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

Milton Lodge/Charles S Taber: The Rationalizing Voter (paperback, 2013, Cambridge University Press): Argues that "political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts," testing five basic hypotheses: "hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion, and motivated reasoning." Yglesias used this book to explain Kanye West's embrace of Trump.

Michael Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (2019, Oxford University Press): Argues that "in the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history." Further asserts that this blissful state ended "because three major countries -- Vladimir Putin's Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping's China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics' Iran in the Middle East -- put an end to end to it With aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions." Pretty amazing that anyone can look at the last 25-30 years and fail to identify the one nation that has been almost constantly at war, attacking "enemies" in more than a dozen countries scattered all around the world. Also that the author overlooked a number of other wars that broke out during the period, including the period's most deadly wars (in and around Congo).

Bill McKibben: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019, Henry Holt): Wrote one of the early books on global warming, The End of Nature (1989). I read it during a mid-summer trip to Florida, where my initial skepticism was overcome by seeing and feeling how much heat could be absorbed into the atmosphere. Still, I hated his metaphor, and he has a knack for coming up with new irritating ways to say the same thing ever since. (Eaarth was the worst.) This is his latest, probably even more impassioned as he's made his career move from critic to activist. I'd probably find his 2013 memoir, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, more to my taste than this doomsday screed. But despite the hyperbole, he's been basically right all along. You have to respect that.

John J Mearsheimer: The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018, Yale University Press): Foreign policy mandarin, subscribes to the realist wing like his sometime co-author Stephen M Walt, has developed a healthy skepticism about how American foreign policy is practiced. Problem here is likely to be his choice of "Liberal Dreams" as his evil strawman. Although political liberals, especially in the anti-communist 1950s, readily supported America's originally bipartisan, military-first foreign policy, this policy has never advanced "liberal dreams." For the last 30-40 years, "liberal hegemony" has never been more than a neocon ruse, an attempt to dress up old-fashioned imperial power projection with a patina of nice words. Meanwhile, Walt has his own new book:

• Stephen M Walt: The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy (2018, Farrar Straus and Giroux).

Steve Pearlstein: Can American Capitalism Survive? Why Greed Is Not Good, Opportunity Is Not Equal, and Fairness Won't Make Us Poor (2018, St Martin's Press): Reminded me first of Robert Kuttner's 2018 book Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism (still unread on my shelf), but the questions are slightly different. Pearlstein seems to assume democracy will have the final say, and asks instead whether capitalism can be reformed in ways that will make it palatable to most people. Clearly, its current practices like "squeezing workers, cheating customers, avoiding taxes, and leaving communities in the lurch" tend to undermine public trust and confidence.

Nomi Prins: Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World (2018, Nation Books): Former bond trader, found her calling writing about the banking racket in the Bush years -- Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America (2004), Jacked: How "Conservatives" Are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not) (2006), It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals From Washington to Wall Street (2009) -- looks at how "the open door between private and central banking has ensured endless opportunities for market manipulation and asset bubbles." I'm not a big fan of the titles per sé, but few people have written more lucidly about how theirs racket works.

John Quiggin: Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly (2019, Princeton University Press): Author of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, an important effort to clear out much of the dead wood, takes up Henry Hazlitt's 1946 classic, Economics in One Lesson, which he summarizes as "leave markets alone, and all will be well." But all isn't well, as there are many cases of market failures, so Quiggin adds "Lesson Two: Market prices don't reflect all the opportunity costs we face as a society." He gives 400 pages of examples and explanations, in what may be one of the essential texts of modern economics.

Eric Rauchway: Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal (2018, Basic Books): After an overwhelming majority of Americans voted to free themselves from President Herbert Hoover, they faced a four-month delay until the new president could be sworn in -- a period so grueling that the US Constitution was changed to move future inaugurations up from March to January. This book covers those four months, a kind of pre-history to the famous "100 days" that followed Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. In terms of anticipatory obstructionism, Hoover probably holds the record -- although John Adams in 1800-01 raised the bar, and Donald Trump will no doubt try to top them all in the shorter 2020-21 transition period.

Richard Rhodes: Energy: A Human History (2018, Simon & Schuster): Recaps the history of mankind as the story of claiming and taming sources of energy, possibly starting with human and domesticated animal muscle, but wood, coal, oil, and nuclear play larger roles in this story -- Rhodes seems to be especially fond of nuclear, although the four major books he's written on nuclear bombs can be read as cautionary tales. I've read those four books, plus a couple more, and don't doubt that he is capable of synthesizing such a large and important story.

Nathaniel Rich: Losing Earth: A Recent History (2019, MCD): A history, pointing out that by 1979 "we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change -- including how to stop it," which goes on to show how supposedly responsible people failed to act on that knowledge, letting us slide into the ever-increasing crisis we face today. The Reagan administration's determination to promote coal and cripple the EPA and drive science from the policy process -- I'd say "echoes of Trump" but it's the other way around -- were key, but the thing you keep running into is human reluctance to deal with a catastrophe that seems to merely loom in the future, because the worst hasn't struck yet.

Sam Rosenfeld: The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (2017, University of Chicago Press): Assumes that the problem with politics today is partisan polarization, and seeks to find where that came from by examining the political period from 1945 through 1980, moving from "The Idea of Responsible Partisanship" to "The Making of a Vanguard Party" and "Liberal Alliance-Building for Lean Times." Winds up with a chapter on 1980-2000 and a "Conclusion: Polarization without Responsibility, 2000-2016." Rosenfeld attributes the idea that the two parties should be realigned on a liberal-conservative axis to Franklin Roosevelt. What actually forced the realignment was a single issue -- civil rights -- which straddled the 1980 divide (what we might call the tipping point). Whether this was a good or bad thing depends a lot on how important you think that issue is. But more generally, polarization always occurs when issues become more serious and less amenable to compromise -- and we see that happening now, on race (of course) but also on the more general principles of equality, fairness, justice, and whether government will serve or oppress the vast majority of the people. I don't mean to argue that polarization has no down side. The main one is that it's led one party in particular to view politics as a zero-sum game, even worse as it's blinded that party to recognizing common problems (most obviously, climate change, which Republicans furiously deny because it's inconvenient for some of their major donors).

Joseph E Stiglitz: People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (2019, WW Norton): Major liberal economist, advised Clinton in the 1990s and bragged about it in The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade (2003), warned about Bush in the 2000s and reminded us in Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (2010), wrote an important book on The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (2012), and several books on trade, starting with Globalization and Its Discontents (2002). I've read (and admired) most of his books, but overlooked an earlier book, Whither Socialism?, which claimed that "market socialism" couldn't work. His analysis back then probably has much to do with his decision now to push for what he calls "progressive capitalism" as the alternative to the burgeoning movement for socialism. I'm sure he's very smart about it, but I always find it a bit sad that the only occasions when the left gains enough power to do something, they first have to spend all their energy saving capitalism's sorry ass.

Bhaskar Sunkara: The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (2019, Basic Books). Editor of Jacobin offers a primer on the history of socialism since the mid-1800s and "a realistic vision for its future" -- well short of the Soviet-era ideals, but carefully, cautiously tailored to provide universal, fair and equitable solutions to economic problems. Related:

• Bhaskar Sunkara: The ABCs of Socialism (paperback, 2016, Verso).
• Cinzia Arruzza/Tithi Bhattacharya/Nancy Fraser: Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (paperback, 2019, Verso).
• Rutger Bregman: Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (2017, Little Brown; paperback, 2018, Back Bay Books).
• Nancy Fraser: The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born (paperback, 2019, Verso).
• Nancy Fraser/Rahel Jaeggi: Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (paperback, 2018, Polity).
• Kristen R Ghodsee: Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2018, Bold Type Books).
• Avel Honneth: The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (2017; paperback, 2018, Polity).
• Danny Katch: Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation (paperback, 2015, Haymarket Books).
• Leigh Phillips: Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff (paperback, 2015, Zero Books).
• Leigh Phillips/Michal Rozworski: The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (paperback, Verso).
• Chantal Mouffe: For a Left Populism (2018, Verso).

Michael W Twitty: The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (2017, Amistad): A family history back to its roots, focusing on the food that made each generation, and crossed in various ways from black to white and back. Also on food and the South: John T Edge: The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South (2017, Penguin).

Craig Unger: House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia (2018, Dutton): A journalist with a nose for corrupt relationships, previously wrote House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties (2004), seems to have a ripe subject digging into Trump's various deals with Russian mobsters and oligarchs.

Jose Antonio Vargas: Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018, Dey Street Books): Author spent 25 years as an "undocumented" American, "living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own," before outing himself to write about the experience in the New York Times -- becoming a spokesman for the millions of "undocumented" Americans. Less about immigration either as policy or practice than about what it feels like to live in a country you have to hide from. Other recent books on immigration:

• Francisco Cantú: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border (2018; paperback, 2019, Riverhead Books).
• Abdi Nor Iftin: Call Me American: A Memoir (2018, Knopf).
• Viet Tranh Nguyen, ed: The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018, Harry N Abrams).
• Peter Schrag: The World of Aufbau: Hitler's Refugees in America (2019, University of Wisconsin Press).
• Matthew Soerens/Jenny Yang: Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion & Truth in the Immigration Debate (paperback, 2018, IVP Books).

William T Vollmann: Carbon Ideologies: Volume One: No Immediate Danger/Volume Two: No Good Alternative (2018, Viking): Mostly a novelist, occasionally writes non-fiction and has been known to get carried away, like his Imperial (1306 pp). This "almanac of global energy use" is similar-sized, but published in two volumes.

Jon Ward: Camelot's End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight That Broke the Democratic Party (2019, Twelve): This suggests that Reagan's triumph in 1980 had more to do with a breakdown caused by Ted Kenndy's almost unprecedented primary challenge against a president of his own party. The closest analogy I can think of was Teddy Roosevelt's rebuke of William Howard Taft in 1912, which wound up with his Bull Moose third party and both losing to Woodrow Wilson. Lots of parallels there, not least the challengers' sense of entitlement. Looking back now it's clear that Carter was a forerunner of many of Reagan's issues, and as such helped to legitimize someone who had previously been viewed as a far-right fringe candidate. One wonders whether the clearer choice that Kennedy might have presented would have faired better.

Alan Wolfe: The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity (2018, University of Chicago Press). More like senescence, which has less to do with age than the popular choice 38 years ago to turn away from facing reality and pretend we're fine in Ronald Reagan's fantasy world. Wolfe is a political science prof (emeritus) with a long list of books, including The Seamy Side of Democracy: Repression in America (1973), Marginalized in the Middle (1996), Does American Democracy Still Work? (2006), and At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews (2014). I last noticed him when he published The Future of Liberalism (2009), a spirited defense that this must contrast with.

Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019 PublicAffairs): Seems to focus on the new information businesses, specifically the ones that track your every step in navigating the Internet, and analyze and market that information to others hoping to manipulate you. I'm not sure how far you can push this model: is it really that important? I suspect it may even be self-limiting.

Other recent books also noted without comment:

Ben S Bernanke/Timothy F Geithner/Henry M Paulson Jr: Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons (paperback, 2019, Penguin Books).

William J Burns: The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (2019, Random House).

Tucker Carlson: Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018, Free Press).

Robert A Caro: Working (2019, Knopf).

Susan Faludi: In the Darkroom (2016, Metropolitan Books; paperback, 2017, Picador).

Henry Louis Gates Jr: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019, Penguin Press).

Gary Giddins: Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (2018, Little Brown).

Jonah Goldberg: Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (2018, Crown Forum).

Max Hastings: Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018, Harper).

Steven Johnson: Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most (2018, Riverhead Books).

Dan Kaufman: The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (2018, WW Norton).

Yasmin Khan: India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War (2015, Oxford University Press).

Lawrence Lessig: America, Compromised (2018, University of Chicago Press).

Steve Luxenberg: Separate: The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson, and America's Journey From Slavery to Segregation (2019, WW Norton).

Anna Merlan: Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2019, Metropolitan Books).

Ashoka Mody: Euro Tragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (2018, Oxford University Press).

Raghuram Rajan: The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind (2019, Penguin Press).

Jeffrey D Sachs: A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018, Columbia University Press).

Darrel M West: Divided Politics, Divided Nation: Hyperconflict in the Trump Era (2019, Brookings Institution Press).

Joan C Williams: White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2017, Harvard Business Review Press).

Music Week

Expanded blog post, May archive.

Music: current count 31558 [31518] rated (+40), 251 [252] unrated (-1).

Last Monday in May, so extra work today doing my paperwork for the May Streamnotes archive. Rated count was 34 when I first checked on Sunday, but I've kept this open to see what fits into the month. Still, much of the bulk, both this week and for the month, has come from diving into back catalog. With new albums from George Cables and Jerry Bergonzi out, I thought they might be fun. When time ran out, I still had more Bergonzi to go, not least the new one.

The week's finds are scattered. The latest Christgau Expert Witness picked a Youssou N'Dour album I had noticed from publicist email but hadn't tracked down (not on Napster, but I was able to stream from Rock Paper Scissors). Also Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba's Miri, a previous A- here (also according to Michael Tatum). Phil Overeem's latest list pointed me at Beyoncé's Homecoming and A Day in the Life, but the album I liked most was an exceptionally genteel trad jazz quartet he had down at 23. I got some more ideas from Alfred Soto's The best albums of 2019, first draft: specifically Nilüfer Yanya's Miss Universe -- although I'll note that I had heard his six higher-rated albums and didn't A-list any of them. (Further down his list, I did pick Control Top: Covert Contracts; Robert Forster: Inferno; Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?; and Lizzo: Cuz I Love You; still unheard: The Mountain Goats, Vampire Weekend, The National; Tyler, the Creator; and Weyes Blood.) Lucas Fagen provided the tip on L7 (also one I did't follow up on yet: Gary Clark Jr.). First L7 play didn't convince me, so I went back and played the Best Of. Gave the new one an extra play later, but didn't move it. They have one of the all-time great band sounds, but at this point I'd guess it's more likely to drop a notch than to rise one. Opposite is true of their eponymous debut, which Christgau missed and I'd never heard. They get something out of youth there that they'll never get back to again.

It occurred to me that Ray Charles and Betty Carter might be on YouTube, and indeed it was. Someone wrote me a while back to point out that several albums I couldn't find on Napster were on YouTube (usually with nothing but the static album cover for video). I haven't followed that tip often, but with big chunks of backlist from both artists this month, seemed like good due dilligence. Disappointing album.

David Cantwell has written an exceptionally thorough review of Robert Christgau's two recent essay compilations, Book Reports and Is It Still Good to Ya? (Duke University Press): Robert Christgau's big-hearted theory of pop. I managed to screw up Cantwell's name when I initially posted the link, confusing him with a mediocre pitcher from 1927-37 (W-L record 76-108, mostly with the doormat Boston Braves, although he looked better before going 4-25 in 1936). Turns out David Cantwell has been cranking out country music list-articles for Rolling Stone. It might be fun to follow up on them in June.

I am posting tonight a new installment of XgauSez, Christgau's question-and-answer session.

New records reviewed this week:

• Beyoncé: Homecoming: The Live Album (2018 [2019], Columbia, 2CD): [r]: B+(*)
• Carlos Bica/Daniel Erdmann/DJ Illvibe: I Am the Escaped One (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Brooks & Dunn: Reboot (2019, Arista Nashville): [r]: B
• George Cables: I'm All Smiles (2019, HighNote): [r]: B+(**)
• Steve Davis: Correlations (2019, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(*)
• Elder Ones: From Untruth (2019, Northern Spy): [r]: B
• Luke Gillespie: Moving Mists (2018 [2019], Patois): [cd]: B+(*)
• Carly Rae Jepsen: Dedicated (2019, 604/School Boy/Interscope): [r]: B+(***)
• Norah Jones: Begin Again (2019, Blue Note, EP): [r]: B
• Kehlani: While We Wait (2019, Atlantic/TSNMI): [r]: B+(**)
• L7: Scatter the Rats (2019, Blackheart): [r]: B+(***)
• Doug MacDonald: Califournia Quartet (2018 [2019], Dmacmusic): [cd]: B+(*)
• Matt Mitchell: Phalanx Ambassadors (2018 [2019], Pi): [cd]: B+(**)
• Youssou N'Dour: History (2019, Naïve/Believe): [os]: A-
• Phicus + Martin Küchen: Sumpflegende (2017 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(*)
• Matthias Spillmann Trio: Live at the Bird's Eye Jazz Club (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Spring Roll: Episodes (2017-18 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B
• Ben Stapp/Joe Morris: Mind Creature Sound Dasein (2017 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(*)
• Oli Steidle & the Killing Popes: Ego Pills (2017 [2019], Shhpuma): [r]: B-
• Norbert Susemihl/Chloe Feoranzo/Harry Mayronne/Barnaby Gold: The New Orleans Dance Hall Quartet: Tricentennial Hall Dance 17, October (2018 [2019], Sumi): [r]: A-
• Tanya Tagaq: Toothsayer (2019, Six Shooter, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• The Dave Wilson Quartet: One Night at Chris' (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• Nilüfer Yanya: Miss Universe (2019, ATO): [r]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• A Day in the Life: Impressions of Pepper (2018, Impulse!): [r]: B+(*)
• L7: Pretend We're Dead: Best of L7 (1992-97 [2019], Warner Music Group): [r]: A

Old music:

• Jerry Bergonzi: Intersecting Lines (2012 [2014], Savant): [r]: A-
• Jerry Bergonzi: Dog Star (2017, Savant): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables: Cables Vision (1979 [1992], Contemporary/OJC): [r]: B
• George Cables Trio: Beyond Forever (1991 [1992], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• George Cables: Quiet Fire (1994 [1995], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables: Person to Person (1995, SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables Trio: Skylark (1995 [1996], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables Trio: Dark Side, Light Side (1996 [1997], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables Trio: Bluesology (1998, SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• George Cables: One for My Baby (2000, SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Ray Charles/Betty Carter: Ray Charles and Betty Carter (1961, ABC): [yt]: B
• Carly Rae Jepsen: Tug of War (2008, Maple Music/Fontana North): [r]: B+(***)
• L7: L7 (1988, Epitaph): [r]: B+(***)
• Art Pepper/George Cables: Tête-Ã-Tête (1982 [1983], Galaxy): [r]: A-
• Art Pepper/George Cables: Goin' Home (1982, Galaxy): [r]: B+(***)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Assif Tsahar/William Parker/Hamid Drake: In Between the Tumbling a Stillness (2015 [2018], Hopscotch): [cd]: [was: A-] A

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Avishai Cohen: Arvoles (Razdaz/Sunnyside): June 14
• Red Kite: Red Kite (RareNoise): advance, June 28
• The Jamie Saft Quartet: Hidden Corners (RareNoise): advance, June 28

Weekend Roundup

Here in Wichita it's rained every day for a week with more coming tonight, tomorrow, the day after. We're up to 11.96 inches this month (2nd wettest May ever; annual average is 34 inches). Many rivers in southeastern Kansas have flooded -- my recent trip to Oklahoma was detoured when the Kansas State Turnpike went under water. Wichita used to flood regularly, and my home would surely be under water but for "the big ditch" -- a flood control project built in 1950-59. (See Beccy Tanner: 'Big Ditch Mitch' saved Wichita many times; also, David Guilliams: The Big Ditch: The Wichita-Valley Center Flood Control Project [PDF].) I've been reading up on this, not least because I haven't seen the rivers this high since 1966, when the Ditch spared Wichita (barely) an epochal flood that wiped out the Arkansas River dam in Lamar, CO, and flooded every other town on the river's path into Oklahoma and Arkansas. Reading Guilliams' history reminds me that we had politicians in the 1940s who were as short-sighted as the ones we have today, but I'll always be thankful they got outvoted. That Ditch was the best investment Wichita ever made. Without it I wouldn't be able to get around to this week's other stories.

Some scattered links this week:

• Nancy Altman: Donald Trump's sneak attack on social security.

• Phyllis Bennis: Foreign aid that costs an arm and a leg -- literally: "The US-funded Israeli military is shooting so many unarmed Palestinians that the UN is warning of an amputation crisis in Gaza."

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: How Trump's new immigration plan could hurt the economy.

• John Cassidy:

  • The political logic behind Nancy Pelosi's go-slow strategy on impeachment.

  • The Trump administration is selling out hundreds of millioms of cell-phone users.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Laugh at Trump, sure -- but also watch what he's doing.

  • The new socialism panic is the right's trick to justify supporting Trump.

• Dave DeCamp:

  • US Army unpleasantly surprised after asking veterans about impact of serving. E.g.:

    Michael J Neel replied, "26 brothers dead. Only 8 in theater. Psyche ward myself after 3 attempts. Everything we accomplished in Mosul was wasted. Every life we gave was spat on. That's how serving impacted me." Veteran Drew Turner said, "Let's see. Lost the functional use of a hand, developed a rare movement disorder and cancer both likely from burn pit exposure, enjoy sleeping 3 to 4 hours most nights due to nightmares and during the day random anxiety attacks all due to PTSD, 7 herniated discs, arthritis . . ."

    Former Army Chaplain Bill Cork replied, "Given me memories of twelve soldiers who chose suicide, three killed in preventable rollovers, another dozen sexually assaulted, and lots of people and families broken by immoral acts in a war that won't end."

  • Pence promises combat to West Point class.

• Gaby Del Valle: The Harriet Tubman $20 bill was supposed to be unveiled in 2020. Now it might be delayed by almost a decade.

• Tom Engelhardt: Russia's election meddling is despicable, but don't forget our own.

• Dexter Filkins: John Bolton on the Warpath: One of America's more gullible war reporters, which lets him take Bolton more seriously than I would, offering a useful, respectful profile which nonetheless makes him even more disgusting than you imagined. Of particular interest are the details of how Bolton has made millions of dollars recently trying to stir up multiple wars.

• Lisa Friedman: EPA plans to get thousands of pollution deaths off the books by changing its math.

• David Frum: Trump's cover-up accelerates: "President Trump can only escalate. He cannot help it."

• Tara Golshan:

  • What Rep. Justin Amash's call for Trump's impeachment showed about the Republican Party. Related: Elaina Plott: How Trump broke the Freedom Caucus.

  • Congress's high-stakes budget fight to avert an economic crisis, explained: about budget caps and the debt limit, again.

• Ryan Goodman: Trump's position on the Mueller Report is legally ridiculous -- and dangerous.

• David A Graham:

  • A single scandal sums up all of Trump's failures: "The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm."

  • Trump's impeachment finger trap: "With each stonewall and demand that Democrats drop investigations, the president is making it more likely that Congress will feel compelled to act."

• Maggie Haberman/Annie Karni: A would-be Trump aide's demands: a jet on call, a future cabinet post and more: Give him lots of perks and Kris Kobach would be willing to serve Trump as "immigration czar" (for a while).

• Umair Irfan: One of the largest environmental protests ever is underway. It's led by children. Most famously, Greta Thunberg, but she's not alone. I've seen sub-teens on Jimmy Kimmel explain the science better than most Democratic politicians, let alone Republicans (who don't try to explain anything). In an effort to reassert his relevance, Bill McKibben responded: It's not entirely up to the school students to save the world.

• Kalpana Jain: Indian PM Narendra Modi and his party just swept India's elections. Some more pieces on India's election:

  • Jonah Blank: How Hinduism became a political weapon in India.

  • Isaac Chotiner: An Indian political theorist on the triumph of Narenda Modi's Hindu nationalism.

  • Basav Sen: The terrifying implications of India's elections for people and the planet.

• Quinta Jurecic: Impeachment is a refusal to accept the unacceptable.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Does Trump want to be impeached? That very thought has occurred to me. Bill Clinton actually got a bump in the polls out of being impeached. I don't recall anything similar with John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, or Richard Nixon, which is the company Trump will be joining. He may even think that in the Us-vs-Them world he imagines himself thriving in, that not getting impeached could be taken as not trying hard enough. Equally important, in taunting the Democratic House leadership, he may hope to show them up as weak and ineffective to their voter base. He's been campaigning hard since inauguration day. It seems to be the only thing he really cares about, so why not bet the farm? Maybe he even thinks there's a further endgame after the election. After all, I've also been wondering whether Erdogan wanted the failed coup that allowed him to purge his enemies in the military and the courts and consolidate his grip on power. It would be harder to pull that off in the US, but Trump's already broken numerous so-called "norms" as he's mocked and degraded our past notions of democracy.

  • Trump continues drive to protect religious-based discrimination.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Trump is sending 1,500 troops to the Middle East as the standoff with Iran continues.

  • Breit has finally brought down Theresa May. Well, not so fast: she will step aside as Conservative Party leader on June 7, but will stay as prime minister "until her successor is selected . . . without the need for a general election."

  • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. Related: Masha Gessen: Charging Julian Assange under the Espionage Act is an attack on the first amendment; also Fred Kaplan: The charges against Julian Assange are appalling (even if you despise him); also this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial: Amend the Espionage Act: Public interest defenses must be allowed.

• Eric Kleefeld: Lindsey Graham proposes invading Venezuela to oust Maduro. He's citing Reagan's 1983 invasion of Grenada as a precedent, now (as then) citing Cuban influence as a cassus belli. On the other hand, whereas Grenada "had a population of less than 100,000 . . . Venezuela, on the other hand, has a population of a little over 28 million people, is lager than Texas, and has roughly 160,000 troops in its military." Graham also wants to send more troops to the Middle East, where he's up in arms against Iran. Warmongers like Graham and Bolton readily group Iran and Venezuela without ever mentioning the one thing they obviously have in common: before US sanctions crippled them, both were major oil exporters. The effect of taking their oil off the world market is to push prices (and oil company profits) up, or at least to keep those profits from falling as global demand shifts to renewables.

• Paul Krugman:

  • After Draghi (wonkish): On the economic situation in the Eurozone since 2008, or more positively since Mario Draghi became president of the European Central Bank.

  • Trump tantrums the Dems out of a trap.

• Claire Lampen: Trump v Pelosi: anatomy of a feud.

• Jill Lepore: Confessions of a presidential candidate: "How the political memoir evolved."

• Eric Levitz: Moderate Democrats' delusions of 'prudence' will kill us all. This is in response to an op-ed by "moderate Democrat" Greg Weiner: It's not always the end of the world ("political prudence isn't in vogue, but it should be"). I can see both sides of this debate, but that's mostly because both are illuminated by the raging wildfires deliberately set by the Republican far-right. Right now, I think the balance of evidence favors Levitz, on two counts: the sheer amount of destruction caused by Republicans in power, and the lack of positive results from recent efforts by prudent Democrats (e.g., Obama).

• Dylan Matthews: The Fed's bad predictions are hurting us.

• Ella Nilsen:

  • Democrats in Congress are getting things done. Trump and Republicans are just ignoring them.

  • Trump wants everyone to know he is extremely calm and Pelosi is the "crazy" one: "Trump called himself a 'very stable genius,' after Pelosi suggested his family or staff should have an 'intervention'."

• Anna North:

  • Missouri governor signs 8-week abortion ban: "The law, which is likely to be challenged in court, contains no exceptions for rape or incest."

  • Alabama's abortion ban is being challenged in court by the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.

  • This is what it was like to perform abortions before Roe.

• Robert O'Harrow Jr/Shawn Boburg: A conservative activist's behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation's courts: "Leonard Leo helped conservative nonprofits raise $250 million from mostly undisclosed donors in recent years to promote conservative judges and causes."

• Nicole Perlroth/Scott Shane: In Baltimore and beyond, a stolen NSA tool wreaks havoc. With David E Sanger, the authors also reported: How Chinese spies got the NSA's hacking tools, and used them for attacks; also: Security breach and spilled secrets have shaken the NSA to its core: gives them more credit for conscience than they deserve. America's cyberwarriors aren't the first to fail to appreciate what happens when other "warriors" learn to do what they do.

• Katha Pollitt: How the right to legal abortion changed the arc of all women's lives.

• John Quiggin: Australia isn't doing its part for the global climate. Sooner or later we'll have to pay our share. Last week's elections kicked this can further down the road. Quiggin has a new book out, Economics in Two Lessons, explaining where markets work, and where they don't.

• Robert Reich: Trump's wrecking ball assaults American government. Luckily, it is strongly built. I think a big part of Reagan's popularity came from the fact that he couldn't do much short-term damage, even though that was plainly the intent of his program. Democrats controlled Congress most of the time, and liberals dominated the courts. Reagan indulged many people's prejudices, saying things that flattered his base and riled them up against supposed enemies, yet the real consequences of his presidency -- the destruction of the labor movement, the major shift toward ever-greater inequality, undermining civil rights while ramping up mass incarceration, the embrace of militarism and the withdrawal from international cooperation, the end of equal time and the takeover of politics by big money -- only gradually became evident (not that they explicit about their goals, but because most people didn't take the threat seriously). Of course, it became harder to overlook the cumulative effect of Reagan and later waves of conservative activism under the Bushes and Trump. Reich is probably right that the US political system still moderates the extremism of Republican presidents -- although it's been much more effective at neutering reformist impulses by Democrats -- yet clearly we are losing ground.

• Brian Resnick: Trump's hasty plan to get Americans back on the moon by 2020, explained. Worth noting that there is more at stake than just Trumpian ego. See Rivka Galchen: The race to develop the moon.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's interest in pardoning troops accused of war crimes, explained: "The military doesn't want these pardons. But Fox News does." Of course, the number of US troops who have been prosecuted for war crimes is a sad little joke, but the military brass still defends what they did because they need to maintain at least some discipline within the ranks. For more on this, see Ed Kilgore: Military brass warn Trump against Memorial Day pardons for war criminals.

  • Attorney General William Barr dining at the Trump hotel is a bad look: "Barr was photographed at the Trump International on a night when it hosted a pro-Trump Super PAC."

  • Trump's bizarre Rose Garden news conference on impeachment, explained.

• Michael S Schmidt/Julian E Barnes: Trump's targeting of intelligence agencies gains a harder edge. Trump directed Attorney General William Barr to investigate anyone who thought that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia in 2016, starting with the FBI and potentially going deeper into the CIA and the broader "intelligence community," and he's given Barr authority to declassify any secret documents he finds along the way (see: Trump gives Barr power to declassify US secrets in review of Russia probe). This extraordinary politicization of the Justice Department is obviously disturbing, but thus far most of the pushback has come from the intelligence agencies, who prefer to operate in secret, with little or no oversight -- e.g., Chuck Ross: Ex-CIA officials fume about declassification order, ignoring previous leaks of secret sources and methods. Also see: Natasha Bertrand: Trump puts DOJ on crash course with intelligence agencies.

• Dylan Scott: Congress wants to stop surprise medical bills. But they have one big problem left to solve.

• Mark Joseph Stern: The Trump administration releases its plan to let health care providers refuse to treat transgender people: This is getting real petty. Nor is this all. See: Camille Baker: The Trump administration wants to make it harder for transgender people to access homeless shelters.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • Avenatti, Wohl and the Krassensteins prove political media is a huckster's paradise.

  • We've hit a new low in campaign hit pieces: "Recent efforts to sandbag Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard are crude repeats of behaviors that helped elect Trump in 2016." Takes particular exception to a piece titled "Tulsi Gabbard is the top candidate of traitors."

• Alex Ward:

  • The US may use a loophole to sell billions in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

  • The Pentagon's plan to send up to 10,000 troops to the Middle East is about Iran.

  • "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh's controversial release from prison, explained. I recall thinking that his original 20-year sentence was a gross miscarriage of justice, enabled by a whipped-up war hysteria, which evidently hasn't gone away -- just calcified into prejudice. But my view was based more on what I know about the US than the virtually nothing I know about Lindh. For more on him, see: Graeme Wood: I wrote to John Walker Lindh. He wrote back.

  • Democrats are accusing Trump officials of inflating the Iran threat.

• Robin Wright: Does trump have an off-ramp on Iran? i doubt he even wants one, nor is he likely to show any interest on wright's history lesson. it looks to me like the conflict with iran is nothing more than a favor to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE -- all of which know how to push his buttons and stroke him with gifts. Moreover, he is incapable of seeing potential downsides, or even risk. Challenging him, or calling his bluff, would be unthinkable. He might even say suicidal.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The controversy over WeWork's $47 billion valuation and impending IPO, explained.

  • Holding Trump accountable is a pocketbook issue: After reviewing Trump's own history of cheating his contractors, note this:

    Trump, as president, is acting in line with his own predilection for alleged corporate criminals.

    • While Obama's Environmental Protection Agency sought a $4.8 million fine from Syngenta Seeds for poisoning workers with pesticides, Trump's EPA settled for $150,000.
    • Trump's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined a man $1 for allegedly swindling veterans out of their pensions -- also extracting from him a promise not to do it again.
    • In February 2018, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission settled with three major banks that had engaged in illegal market manipulation -- charging them a financial penalty but requiring no admission of wrongdoing and waiving "bad actor" penalties that would have impaired their ability to do business in the future.

    The specific dynamics of each agency and each industry are, of course, unique.

    But the basic pattern is the same -- under lax enforcement, crime basically pays. You might not get caught, and even if you do get caught, the monetary penalties will not create a meaningful deterrent to future misconduct. . . . The overall problem, in other words, is much larger in scope than Trump. But Trump is part of the problem. Not only is he emblematic, as a business leader, of the cost of inadequate enforcement, but he's also someone who clearly favors inadequate enforcement as a matter of principle and appoints regulators who make the problem worse.

  • What we know so far about Trump's tax returns, explained.

  • Men and women have similar views on abortion.

  Yglesias also has a piece called Daenerys was right: King's Landing had to burn, which goes to great lengths to try to rationalize the indiscriminate fire-bombing of the capitol of Westeros. I understand the impulse to try to take a contrary view, especially counter to those who casually impose their contemporary political prejudices on such a fantasy landscape, but Yglesias overlooks some pretty obvious clues (like the Daenerys speech to her troops where she vows to conquer/liberate all of Westeros and Essos -- a speech that the actress claims she studied Hitler for, but which sounded more to me like Napoleon), as well as a couple of much more fundamental problems. What always turned me off in Game of Thrones was its unquestioned bedrock belief in hereditary aristocracy, and its correlative commitment to war. Without having read the books, I gather that Martin is completely opposed to both, but rather than constructing cardboard characters for us to root for (in the vain hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil), he exposes the foundations by showing how every character is corrupted and disgraced by inequality and violence. That Yglesias winds up rooting for a strong and fearsome ruler shows how much he's willing to compromise.

• Gary Younge: Shocked by the rise of the right? Then you weren't paying attention. Young blames "endemic racism and unfairness" -- I take the latter to mean inequality and the business practices that increase it.

• Li Zhou:

  • One House Republican is holding up $19 billion in disaster aid funding.

  • The Senate finally approved a disaster aid package with $1.4 billion for Puerto Rico: "Trump has been a big reason for the delay in disaster relief . . . The fallout of this delay is staggering.".

  • Poll: Most Americans disapprove of the Alabama abortion ban.

Daily Log

From Greg Tate, on Facebook, comment reply to Allen Lowe question about Gary Davis:

A friend who speaks six languages fluently (including Arabic and Polish) told that in her mind its all one language. The Black American creative tradition is by necessity that of the auto-didact but on a deeper level its also one of people who couldn't afford to only be great at one thing or the luxury of compartmentalizing the world. The major innovators seem to be more inter-dimensional than the rest of us in mind body and spirit--You get the sense that All of Life is one language to them. Which is to say they are more West African than Cartesian how they integrate the world outside with the world inside. Nothing exemplifies this more to me than Davis saying he thought he heard a brass band the first time he heard a guitar. Which suggests his artistic high bar when he started playing wasn't mere competency but to make people feel like they too were experiencing a marching band projecting out of a guitar. Methinks we do a disservice to these innovative artists when we think they were only trying to work out mechanics--they were acquiring complex technique to reproduce MAGIC.

Susan Brown posted this on Facebook, crediting Gary Moss. It may be the single most horrific thing I've read all year:

i wish everyone would read this

94 yr old Kissinger takes on Trump

Recently, Henry Kissinger did an interview and said vary amazing things regarding President Trump. He starts with: "Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven't seen before"! The former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gives us a new understanding of President Donald Trump's foreign policy and predicts its success:

"Liberals and all those who favor (Hillary) Clinton will never admit it. They will never admit that he is the one true leader. The man is doing changes like never before and does all of it for the sake of this nation's people. After eight years of tyranny, we finally see a difference."

Kissinger knows it and he continues with:

."Every country now has to consider two things: One, their perception that the previous president, or the outgoing president, basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessments of their necessities.

And secondly, that there is a new president who's asking a lot of unfamiliar questions. And because of the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it.

Then Kissinger puts it bluntly:

"Trump puts America and its people first. This is why people love him and this is why he will remain in charge for so long. There is not a single thing wrong with him and people need to open their eyes." When he boasts that he has a "bigger red button" than Kim Jung Un does, he so transcends the mealy-mouthed rhetoric of the past, thereby forcing a new recognition of American power.

Kissinger once wrote:

"The weak grow strong by effrontery - The strong grow weak through inhibition!" No sentence better captures the U.S.-North Korea relationship.

Trump is discarding the inhibitions and calling the bluff on North Korea's effrontery: His point is that the contrast of American retreat under Obama and its new assertion of power under Trump creates a new dynamic that every one of our allies and of our enemies must consider.

Our allies grew complacent with Obama's passivity and now are fearful due to Trump's activism. And they must balance the two in developing their policies:

They realize that the old assumptions, catalyzed by Bush 43's preoccupation with Iraq and Obama's refusal to lead are obsolete. So, Trump is forcing a new calculus with a new power behind American interests. Those - here and abroad - who rode the old apple cart worry about its being toppled.

But, as Kissinger so boldly stated: "Trump is the one true leader in world affairs and he is forcing policy changes that put America first!"

This is the most accurate statement of what the American Citizens who live outside of the swamp want and expect from their government.

I like the list of 13 things that I, as a senior American citizen, want. Trump is at least talking about issues that most Americans are concerned about.

My mantra about Trump is this: Truthfully, We are in agreement with most of what he says. We are getting older and our tickers aren't what they used to be, but what matters is that he covers most of the 13 things we as seniors want, at least I do for sure

1. Hillary: held accountable for her previous wrongs!
2. Put "GOD" back in America!
3. Borders: Closed or tightly guarded!
4. Congress: On the same retirement & healthcare plans as everybody else
5. Congress: Obey its own laws NOW!
6. Language: English!
7. Culture: Constitution and the Bill of Rights!
8. Drug-Free: Mandatory Drug Screening before & during Welfare!
9. Freebies: NONE to Non-Citizens
10. Budget: Balanced
11. Foreign Countries: Stop giving them our money! Charge them for our help! We need it here.
12. Term limits for congress
13. "RESPECT OUR MILITARY AND OUR FLAG!" And our law enforcement. DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Further down, Susan offered this meme:

First Lady Melania Trump has sent out a request for prayers for our president. Let us be a shield for him as he fights for us.

Further down, she links to an AP News piece on Alabama's "near-total abortion ban," presumably favorably. But a commenter picked up another tweet, from Stephanie Wittels Wachs, which is on target:

Make no mistake - a state that criminalizes abortion but ranks 50th in public education doesn't give a shit about children.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, May archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31518 [31498] rated (+20), 252 [249] unrated (+3).

Rated count well down this week. Wednesday through Friday got totally wiped out, starting with a dental appointment, then shopping for dinner on Friday, then marathon cooking. Zhanna Pataki and I made a blini feast. I found a Russian grocery store in Tulsa the previous week, and picked up a pound of salmon caviar ("Alaskan rubies") and three whole schmaltz herring. The latter went, one each, into sour cream sauce, mustard sauce, and Estonian potato salad (with golden beets, apple, and ham (actually, Canadian bacon). Other side salads: poached cod with horseradish sauce, cucumbers in sour cream, green bean and walnut, carrot and garlic. I got a couple of salmon filets and salted them. I made two loaves of rye bread (only disappointment: came out dense and dry, probably because the dough was, or maybe I just don't know how to properly knead bread; anyway, the expensive Breville food processor wasn't up to the task). For dessert, I made a light sponge cake, and topped it with strawberries and whipped cream (recipe called for smetana, but I didn't allow myself enough time to make my own -- probably should have bought some in Tulsa, when I had the chance). I just now realized that I had brought a jar of eggplant caviar back from Tulsa but failed to serve it. Dinner was spectacular, and exhausting.

A couple weeks ago I learned that Ani DiFranco has written a memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream. She grew up in Buffalo, and was close to my cousin's family there, so I have some kind of personal interest in her story, and I've been aware of her musical career from near the beginning. Then last week I noticed her No Walls: Mixtape on Napster, so delved a bit deeper. I read what I could from Google's excerpt, while listening to Mixtape -- unplugged remakes of 25+ years of remarkable songs -- and a couple other items I had missed that I found on her Bandcamp. Stopped short of the bootlegs, although one of my favorites (and one of the best places to start with her) is the live Living in Clip. I was especially pleased that after panning most of her recent albums with Todd Sickafoose I enjoyed Red Letter Year so much. I wrote about her in [The New] Rolling Stone Album Guide. A current grade list is here.

Robert Christgau reviewed Epic Beard Men this week, along with two records by Quelle Chris that I had already reviewed. I gave Guns another spin, enjoyed it, but left my grade at B+(***). For whatever it's worth, I've graded A- all four of Strut's Nigeria 70 compilations. I couldn't begin to rank them, other than to note that I have the CDs to the first, and played one out of my travel case while cooking last week. I doubt any are as good as the best King Sunny Adé albums, or the second edition of The Rough Guide to Highlife, but the new one hits the exact same pleasure centers, and that was good enough for me.

The Ray Charles comp was the one I skipped when reviewing his Atlantics last week. It's the one you'd most likely buy if you're reluctant to get the entire 3-CD box (The Birth of Soul). Not sure why I didn't grade it as high as the box or two of the source albums, other than that I didn't give it a lot of time. I'm still bothered that we don't have the ABC albums available for streaming. And I will note that one problem with virtually every "greatest hit" collection from that period is the mandatory inclusion of two hideous Beatles covers. Compilers don't always pick the best songs, so that may be what's slightly off about the Rhino Atlantic Best Of.

Best jazz album of the week was the first 2019 Clean Feed release I've found on Napster. They've sometimes been hard to search out, but until this year all of their releases have been available for streaming, which lately has saved me the hassle of downloading. Not everything that's come out is available yet, but I'm glad to get what I can. I'll try to catch up in coming weeks. (There are a couple more on this week's list, as well as one where the musician sent me the CD -- thanks for that favor.)

New records reviewed this week:

• Charlie Apicella & Iron City: Groove Machine (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Camp Cope: How to Socialise & Make Friends (2018, Run for Cover): [r]: B+(***)
• Ani DiFranco: No Walls: Mixtape (2019, Righteous Babe): [r]: A-
• Epic Beard Men: Season 1 (2018, Strange Famous): [r]: B+(**)
• Epic Beard Men: This Was Supposed to Be Fun (2019, Strange Famous): [r]: A-
• The Fictive Five: Anything Is Possible (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• John Hart: Crop Circles (2017 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Fred Hersch & the WDR Big Band: Begin Again (2019, Palmetto): [cd]: B+(*)
• Jørgen Mathisen's Instant Light: Mayhall's Object (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: A-
• The Pete McGuinness Jazz Orchestra: Along for the Ride (2018 [2019], Summit): [cd]: B
• Yoko Miwa Trio: Keep Talkin' (2019, Ocean Blue Tear Music): [cd]: B+(***)
• Priests: The Seduction of Kansas (2019, Sister Polygon): [r]: B+(***)
• Scheen Jazzorkester & Thomas Johansson: «As We See It . . . » (2019, Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***)
• The Selva: Canicula Rosa (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Senyawa: Sujud (2018, Sublime Frequencies): [bc]: B+(***)
• Marcus Shelby Orchestra: Transitions (2017 [2019], MSO): [cd]:B+(*)
• Rodney Whitaker: Common Ground: The Music of Gregg Hill (2017 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Nigeria 70: No Wahala: Highlife, Afro-Funk & Juju 1973-1987 (1973-87 [2019], Strut): [bc]: A-

Old music:

• Ray Charles: The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years (1951-59 [1994], Rhino): [r]: A-
• Ani DiFranco: Red Letter Year (2008, Righteous Babe): [bc]: A-
• Ani DiFranco: Binary (2017, Righteous Babe): [r]: B+(*)
• Larry Ochs: The Fictive Five (2015, Tzadik): [bc]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Luke Gillespie: Moving Mists (Patois)
• Ryan Keberle & Catharsis: The Hope I Hold (Greenleaf Music): June 28
• Doug MacDonald: Califournia Quartet (self-released)
• Matt Mitchell: Phalanx Ambassadors (Pi)
• Samo Salamon & Freequestra: Free Sessions, Vol. 2: Freequestra (Sazas/Klopotec)
• Samo Salamon/Szilárd Mezei/Jaka Berger: Swirling Blind Unstilled (Klopotec)
• The Dave Wilson Quartet: One Night at Chris' (self-released): May 27

Weekend Roundup

Ran a day late on this one, partly because I went long on the intro, but also because I found so many links in my early trawl through the usual sources I wasn't able to finish my rounds, then found even more when I tried to wrap up. I'm sure it's always the case that an extra day or two to let the words settle and go back and restructure would be useful, but I've rarely felt that more than this week.

Abortion became a much hotter political issue last week, with the passage and signing of a law in Alabama which criminalizes abortion in all cases except when it is necessary to save the life of the woman, with doctors risking prison terms of up to 99 years if their call on life-saving is disputed. Much focus on this particular law centers on the lack of any exclusion for rape and incest, which most people agree would be reasonable grounds for abortion. (As Phil Freeman tweeted: "Your first mistake was assuming old white men in Alabama were against rape and incest.") But the Alabama law is just one of many state laws Republicans have been pushing lately, all aimed at relitigating Roe v. Wade in the Trump-packed Supreme Court. (E.g., The "heartbeat" bills that could ban almost all abortions, passed in four states including Ohio and Georgia, and coming soon in Missouri; still more draconian bills are in the works, such as A Texas bill would allow the death penalty for patients who get abortions.)

I'll start this off by quoting from a Facebook post by a relative of mine in Arkansas, Marianne Cowan Pyeatt, offering an unvarnished glimpse of what anti-abortion Republicans are telling themselves:

All of a sudden we are supposed to believe that millions and millions of aborted babies are the result of rape and not just a lack of responsibility to use birth control or face the consequences if you can't even be adult enough to take precautions. We all know that the reason they can't make exceptions for rape is because every women would lie and claim to be raped to get an abortion. There are morning after pills for real rape victims or they can give the child away. No one says they have to keep them. And the fact that this is even being debated is because all the people who did very little for decades when they could forget what was going on in those clinics are suddenly facing a world where full-term babies can be murdered at birth. YOU stupid liberals have taken it SO FAR that no decent person can ignore it any longer. And we aren't so stupid as to believe that only abortion of a baby could "save the mother's life" in medical emergencies . . . we know delivery is many, many times faster. At that point, if it dies, at least you tried and the mother is "saved" from her life-threatening condition with no murder involved. I find it hilarious that in insisting on that last frontier of killing babies right up to birth has finally given people the resolve to take a stand and right a wrong.

One thing this shows is that the fight over abortion rights is being fought at the margins, with both sides seeking maximalist positions, although there is nothing symmetrical about the conflict. There is only one fanatical side to this issue: those who, like Marianne here, want to ban all abortions. No one on the opposite side -- and I am about as opposite as anyone gets -- wants to terminate all pregnancies. Rather, we understand that pregnancy is a complicated issue that affects women in many different ways, and that there are some circumstances where some women feel they would be better off with an abortion. We believe that this should be a free and responsible choice, and to make this a real choice for all women requires that we isolate it from the encumbrances of government regulation and economic pressure.

I've long thought that conservatives and libertarians should be strong supporters of abortion rights. Libertarians cherish freedom, and freedom is the ability to make free choices -- among which one of the most important is whether to bear and raise children. Not everyone who wants children is able to have them, but safe abortion at least makes it possible to choose not to have children. As for conservatives, they always stress the responsibilities parenthood infers. It would be perverse if they did not allow those who felt themselves unable to assume the responsibility of raising children the option of not having them. Indeed, in the past have sometimes wanted to impose limits on the fertility of those they deemed unfit to raise children (e.g., the forced sterilization of the eugenics movement). Consequently, the hard turn of Republicans against free access to abortion and birth control has always struck me as bad faith: a political ploy, initially to capture votes of Catholics and Southern Baptists, who had traditionally voted Democratic. I first noticed this in Bob Dole's 1972 Senate campaign, and I never forgave him for politicizing the issue. (He was being challenged by William Roy, a ob/gyn who had occasionally performed abortions, which were legal in Kansas well before Roe v. Wade. Until that time Kansas Democrats were more likely to be anti-abortion than Republicans. Using abortion as a partisan tactic may have started with Nixon's 1972 "silent majority"/"southern strategy." It was especially successful in Missouri. See How abortion became a partisan issue in America.)

Abortion rights are desirable if there are any circumstances where abortion is a reasonable choice. Most people recognize rape and incest as valid reasons, as well as the health of the woman and/or the fetus. Beyond that there arise lots of possible economic and psychological concerns, which can only really be answered by the woman (with the advice of anyone she chooses to consult). We generally, if not always consistently, recognize that our freedom is rooted in a right to privacy. Since a decision to terminate has no broader repercussions, there is no good reason for the government to get involved. (One might argue that a decision not to terminate might concern the state, in that it would wind up paying for the child's education and health care, but no one who supports abortion rights is seeking that sort of oversight. China's "one child" policy is an example, but no one here is arguing for the state to enforce such a thing.)

Regardless of how cynical Republican leaders were when they jumped on the anti-abortion bandwagon, they learned to love it because it dovetailed with the prejudices and fears they exploited (Jason Stanley has a handy list, in his recent book, How Fascism Works), while doing little to detract from their main objective: making the rich richer, and building a political machine to keep the riches coming. (Thomas Frank, in his 2004 book What's the Matter With Kansas?, tried to expose their two-faced cynicism, but he wound up only agitating the anti-abortion mobsters into demanding more results for their votes.) Marianne's post is full of such prejudices, even while she tries to paper over others. But while the first line refers to the Alabama law, she'd rather turn the tables by accusing "stupid liberals" of wanting to kill babies the instant before birth. That would be a symmetrically opposite point of view, but even if legal it's not a real something anyone would do.

Some links on the Alabama law and the assault on abortion rights:

• Zeeshan Aleem: Trump and top Republicans distance themselves from Alabama's controversial abortion law. I take this as evidence it's polling very badly. Trump has never put much thought into abortion, and probably doesn't care, as strange as that seems given how much impact he has had on the issue. Back in 2016, he was asked whether women who sought abortions should be prosecuted, and he guessed they should. That was one of the very few instances where he took back a statement -- something he never did when criticized for sympathizing with Nazis and other racists, or spouting his own racist slurs on immigrants and "shithole countries." Those are things he has deep convictions about. Anti-abortion is just something he has to play along with because the base expects it.

• Jane Coaston: Why some anti-abortion conservatives think Alabama's abortion law goes too far.

• Elizabeth Dias/Sabrina Tavernise/Alan Blinder: 'This is a wave': inside the network of anti-abortion activists winning across the country.

• Ruth Graham: Why the anti-abortion movement stopped making allowances for rape and incest.

• Sarah Jones: Abortion is morally good:

  Were I still Evangelical, and still longed to end abortion, I'd have many reasons to celebrate. When your enemies pick up your arguments and tolerate your allies in their midst, you can be relatively confident that you've achieved the social and political dominance that you've worked toward for years. Milano and the DCCC have walked directly into a trap that abortion opponents set for them, and they don't even seem to realize what they've done. Anything less but the prioritization of women over the pregnancies they carry cedes ground the left cannot afford to lose.

• Katherine Kelaidis: I'm an anti-abortion Christian. But Alabama's ban will do more harm than good.

• Lili Loofbourow: The GOP has its final anti-abortion victory in sight: "Stripping voter rights. Rigging the Supreme Court. Dull procedural tricks. It's all paying off at once."

• Anna North, who also wrote the three articles linked above:

  • Elizabeth Warren just announced her abortion platform. It's aggressive. This is all good, and I can think of a few more details. Abortion is a civil right, and it's long been recognized that it is the prerogative of federal law to protect the people against state and local laws that undermine civil rights. Beyond that, I'd like to see the Veterans Administration offer abortions at their facilities everywhere. I also think that it should be understood that anyone who claims "abortion is murder" is practicing hate speech. I don't see any way to ban that, but it should be disparaged.

  • Abortion in America, explained in 10 facts.

  • Abortion is still legal in America.

  • Alabama just passed a near-total ban on abortion: "Though likely to be challenged in court, it's the strictest anti-abortion law in the country."

• Renee Bracey Sherman: Recent abortion bans will impact poor people and people of color most.

• Rickie Solinger: Alabama's near-total abortion ban is the ultimate elevation of the "unborn" over women.

• Jeffrey Toobin: The abortion fight and the pretense of precedent.

• Rachel Withers: Most Alabama voters don't support their state's exemption-free abortion ban.

Some scattered links this week:

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: Farmers are losing patience with Trump's trade war.

• John Cassidy:

  • More questions than answers about Boeing, the 737 Max, and the FAA: "Boeing bears a lot of responsibility for the two recent 737 Max plane crashes, and it is now facing numerous inquiries, but the Federal Aviation Administration is also culpable."

  • The stock market intrudes on the alternate reality of Trump's trade war. Not that the stock market, which basically measures corporate profits, is a useful guide to how this affects American consumers, let alone workers.

• Patrick Cockburn: Trump is making the same US mistake in the Middle East yet again.

• Helene Cooper/Edward Wong: Skeptical US allies resist Trump's new claims of threats from Iran. Meanwhile, the lame-brains in the Trump administration get carried away: see Eric Schmitt/Julian E Barnes: White House reviews military plans against Iran, in echoes of Iraq War. They're talking about deploying 120,000 troops, which seems like a lot but is actually the same number they used in 2003 to do such a bang-up job in Iraq -- a country about one-third the size of Iran (both in area and in population). For more details, see Fred Kaplan: War with Iran wouldn't be like Iraq: "It would be worse."

• Chas Danner:

  • Justin Amash becomes first GOP lawmaker to say Trump should be impeached, and will probably be the only one for a long time (although sometimes I wonder if Trump isn't just baiting the Democrats to impeach him, thinking he'll get a re-election bounce like Clinton did). PS: David Beavers: Romney: GOP congressman's call for impeachment 'a courageous statement', although Romney stopped short of exhibiting any courage of his own.

  • Trump wants to make war criminals great again. Also: Ed Kilgore reminds us that Nixon pardoned Lt. William Calley, the officer in charge of the My Lai massacre: Will Trump go Nixonian with clemency for war criminals? On the other hand, then and now the real war criminals never even get charged. They go on to have lucrative careers, like Henry Kissinger did. Also: Dave Phillips: Trump may be preparing pardons for servicemen accused of war crimes.

• David Dayen: The secret vote that could wipe away consumer rights.

• Isabel Debre/Raphael Satter: Facebook busts Israel-based campaign to disrupt elections.

• Sydney Ember: 'I did my best to stop American foreign policy': Bernie Sanders on the 1980s.

• Nicholas Fandos/Maggie Haberman: House panel investigates obstruction claims against Trump lawyers.

• David A Farenthold/Jonathan O'Connell: Trump's prized Doral resort is in steep decline, according to company documents, showing his business problems are mounting.

• John Feffer: Bolton in Wonderland: "The only upside to Bolton's dangerous aggression toward Iran is that it may put him too far out in front of Trump."

• Elaine Frantz: America's long, rich history of pretending systemic racism doesn't exist.

• Conor Friedersdorf: America needs a permanent anti-war movement: "Public apathy toward relatively small-scale military actions makes war with Iran more likely." Actually, most cities have anti-war organizations, but they don't get enough support, especially as we're swamped with domestic crises and more attention is paid to conventional politics (because Republicans are so bad more people in their desperation support Democrats).

• Tara Golshan: Elizabeth Warren's new policy rollout targets Pentagon corruption.

• Umair Irfan: Fossil fuels are underpriced by a whopping $5.2 trillion: "We can't take on climate change without properly pricing coal, oil, and natural gas. But it's a huge political challenge."

• Matthew Karnitschnig: Austrian government collapses over Russia scandal.

• Ezra Klein: Countervailing powers: the forgotten economic idea Democrats need to rediscover. Klein is right that hardly anyone uses the term these days, but I grew up with it, and still refer to it often. I'm not sure where I got the idea, but Klein starts with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1952 book, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power. The idea is to build up multiple sources of power to work against the abuses that follow from concentrations of wealth and power. (The maxim I learned alongside this was "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.") Klein also cites a recent book, Tim Wu's The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.

• Andy Kroll: Springtime for autocrats: "How Trump just legitimized one of Europe's most anti-democratic leaders." Hungary's Viktor Orbán visits the White House.

• Anatoly Kurmanev: Venezuela's collapse is the worst outside of war in decades, economists say.

• Mark Landler/Maggie Haberman/Eric Schmitt: Trump tells Pentagon chief he does not want war with Iran. This was the story which led Steven Colbert to exclaim, "I hope this doesn't get taken out of context, but thank God Donald Trump is president." Before I give Trump any credit on this score, I want to see him fire John Bolton, and tweet about how Bolton's been subverting his efforts to get along peacefully with the world. Even then, the fact that he hired Bolton never boded well.

• Eric Levitz:

  • EPA science said Trump's coal rule would kill 1,400. So the EPA ditched science.

  • Trump: E-Verify would make it too hard to hire undocumented workers.

• German Lopez: The House just passed a sweeping LGBTQ rights bill.

• Madeline Marshall: Why prescription drugs cost more in America: Video. Also a link to Sarah Kliff: The true story of America's sky-high prescription drug prices.

• Barbara McQuade: William Barr delivers chilling message to FBI for Trump. "If you come at the king, you best not miss"?

• David Miliband: On refugees, the Trump administration is competent and malevolent.

• Rani Molla: President Trump's new immigration proposal would be terrible for tech.

• Casey Newton: Trump's social media bias reporting project is a data collection tool in disguise: "Instead of cracking down on violent extremism, the government is collecting email addresses."

• James Petras: United States and Venezuela: a historical background.

• Thomas Powers: The fog of ambition: Review of George Packer: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.

• Robert Reich: The Trump economy is hurting most Americans. Statistics won't fool voters.

• Joe Romm: Bezos offers absurd and hypocritical reason for his massive space plan: He thinks we have to sustain economic growth indefinitely, even beyond the carrying capacity of Earth, which can only be done by escaping into space. Which I suppose means he can't imagine post-capitalism, even though there are dozens of books on the subject, and dozens more on sustainable economies. Maybe he should drop in on a local book store? His scheme would be deemed so crackpot he could never get funding from government let alone banks, but seeing as he's on track to become Earth's first trillionaire, we're tempted to take him seriously. That is an irony of capitalism: sometimes a blessing, sometimes a farce.

• Brian M Rosenthal: 'They were conned': how reckless loans devastated a generation of taxi drivers. Or what happens when you allow a secondary market for a limited number of licenses.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump gives up the game he's playing with Congress during Fox News interview: "Trump admits he's relying on the courts -- not Congress -- to change policy."

  • Trump's reckless "treason" accusation against the FBI, explained.

  • Trump pardons billionaire fraudster who wrote glowing book about him: Conrad Black, "a former media mogul and business partner," convicted for fraud and obstruction of justice, author of a 2016 piece "Trump is the good guy," the pardon citing his "tremendous contributions to business, as well as to political and historical thought." Also pardoned at the same time, Patrick Nolan. (See Aaron Blake: The very political pattern of Trump's pardons.) The latter article has a number of examples, notably Dinesh D'Souza, convicted for campaign finance fraud, author of a number of awful books and films, inventor of the "angry Kenyan" Obama theory.

• Richard Silverstein:

  • US-Iran standoff: Iran 1-US 0.

  • Ignore the propaganda: A US war against Iran would be a costly mistake.

  • Bolton sounds drumbeat of war based on tenuous Israeli claim of Iran threat.

• Matt Taibbi: The liberal embrace of war: "American interventionists learned a lesson from Iraq: pre-empt the debate. Now everyone is for regime change." He seems to have jumped the gun here, for while the liberal media heads he cites (e.g., Rachel Maddow) readily echoed the Bolton line on Venezuela and Iran, actual Democratic politicians have been less eager to topple foreign regimes. Jonathan Chait points this out: Taibbi's 'liberal embrace of war' screed cites zero liberals embracing war. I'd score that one for Chait, although I don't fault Taibbi's worries about Democrats enabling Republican warmongering. As for the "liberal" media, also see: James North: US mainstream media is contributing to rising risk of war with Iran. Nor is Chait above concocting his own shady, twisted titles: Bernie Sanders wants to destroy the best schools poor urban kids have. He means charter schools, which only succeed (relatively) in places where public schools have been grossly neglected (partly by politicians moving funds to charter schools). For more on Sanders' plan, see Dylan Scott: Bernie Sanders rolls out education plan that cracks down on charter schools; also Nikhil Goyal: Bernie's plan to save public schools.

• Alex Ward:

  • 9 questions about the scary US-Iran standoff you were too embarrassed to ask.

  • Trump vows to bring about "the official end of Iran" if it threatens the US again.

  • Trump's crackdown on China's Huawei is escalating the trade war.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • An expert's 7 principles for solving America's housing crisis.

  • The raging controversy over Ronald Sullivan, Harvey Weinstein, and Harvard, explained.

  • Bernie Sanders and AOC's plan to crack down on high-interest loans, explained: They call it the Stop Loan Sharks Act, by capping interest on things like credit cards at 15% (still sounds high to me).

  • Trump's puzzling trade war with China, sort of explained: Useful survey of Trump's side of the tariff war, credits Trump with more smarts than the evidence suggests: "Precisely because the trade war is an inherently lose-lose situation, any possible resolution of it is a win." But that assumes that the trade war will end some day, and that everyone will have forgotten about the costs of starting it.

  • Joe Biden's surprisingly controversial claim that Trump is an aberration, explained. Cites some critiques:

    • Peter Beinart: Unlike his rivals, Biden sees Trump as an aberration.

    • Mehdi Hasan: Joe Biden won't blame the Republicans for Trump. That should disqualify him.

    • Jamil Smith: We need a disunity ticket: "No, a Biden-Romney union would not bring this country together."

    • Michael Tomasky: Someone tell Joe Biden it's not 1973 anymore, the Republican Party now belongs to Trump.

  There's an interesting chart here showing that only a quarter of Clinton's ads primarily centered on policy, "a much lower number than any previous 21st-century campaign." That slack was made up by attacking Trump personally, trying to isolate him from the Republican Party, which not only didn't do Clinton much good, it also didn't help Democrats down ticket. Compare that to 2018, when Democrats focused on policy issues (like health care).

• Li Zhou:

  • Kamala Harris wants public defenders to get paid as much as prosecutors.

  • The disaster aid fight shows just how unprepared Congress is to deal with the effects of climate change. As an engineer, one of my core beliefs is that it's much cheaper and much more effective to prevent faults than to repair and compensate for disasters. But despite the title, that isn't the core problem here. (Even if it were, some natural disasters are way beyond our power to prevent. And while there is no doubt that climate change increases the number and severity of disasters, there is no quick and easy solution to that, either.) The immediate problem is that at the same time we're being hit with more and more disasters, Republicans have decided they don't want to pay for disaster relief, largely because it runs counter to their belief that government shouldn't involve itself in helping people (at least not Puerto Ricans).

Daily Log

Disconnected red speaker posts at 4:06 PM, then turned amplifier back on.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, May archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31498 [31469] rated (+29), 249 [248] unrated (+1).

Weird how these weekly totals keep landing on 29 (6th time so far this year). Should have been less, given that I drove to the Tulsa area on Wednesday, returning Friday evening. Took my travel cases for the car, nothing remotely new in them. Packed the Chromebook, but inadvertently left it at home. Supposedly I can check email and web on phone, plus a million apps including Napster, but I've never got the hang of that. My second cousin down there swears she does everything with Siri, and I could see how that might be better than trying to type on a clumsy and error-prone touch screen. As a confirmed Apple-phobe, that isn't even an option I'd consider, but I gather Samsung has something along those lines (bixby?). I suppose I should look into that. Meanwhile, I seem to be the only person I know who can go 3-4 days between charges, so I take comfort in that.

I wanted to visit my cousin Duan, second son of my mother's oldest sister, Lola. I hadn't been down there since his older brother, Harold, passed several years ago, and he's up to 92 now. He's lived in/around Bristow as long as I can remember -- we went to visit Aunt Lola every couple months when I was young, and by then Harold and Duan had their families, my second cousins just a couple years younger than I was, so we were fairly close. Harold and Duan were drafted into WWII, and Duan got called back for the Korean War. That seems to have qualified him for living in the Veterans Center in Claremore, where he moved a few months ago. Probably a good place for him at this stage, but not one I'd ever look forward to (not a prospect with my 4F). Can't say as we had good talks, but was good to see him.

I saw live music twice in Oklahoma, although nothing I can recommend. The first was a free concert at the Veterans Center, with a c&w singer who called himself Cowboy, and who toured with a dwarf pony in tow -- something the vets seemed to appreciate. He mostly played Merle Haggard songs (and nothing as obvious as "Okie From Muskogee"; more like "Silver Wings"). One bizarre moment: he had a little girl bring him up a disguise designed to make him look like Elvis Presley, then launched into a medley of three r&b songs ("Lawdy Miss Clawdy," "See See Rider," don't recall the third), suggesting not only that even today black music was only acceptable if dressed up as white. He then played a fourth Elvis song, something late and not black, and didn't bother with the disguise for that. Blackface has gone out of fashion, but whiteface still works in Oklahoma. (There were a few black residents at the Center, but they were a tiny minority, and I don't recall any at the show.)

Second live music experience was attending a recital at the Coweta High School of their various band ensembles, starting with 6th grade. All three of my second-cousin's granddaughters played there, among at least a hundred others. No strings, but lots of flutes and clarinets -- I counted 12 and 18 in the high school band -- a few saxophones, the odd oboe or bassoon, a fair amount of brass, and a pretty substantial investment in percussion (including a featured percussion ensemble). Best was a pair of Cuban tunes. More typical were the Andrew Lloyd Weber medleys. Lasted over two hours, which was exhausting for all (huge crowd, by the way). They made passing reference to also having a jazz ensemble, but nothing I heard fit that bill.

Given that hole in my week, the only way I got to 29 was by streaming oldies. I started by looking for Betty Carter's album with Ray Charles. Napster didn't have it, or for that matter much of anything else after Charles left Atlantic for ABC. I mostly know his Atlantics through the 1991 Rhino 3-CD box, The Birth of Soul (my grade: A), but since the individual albums were available, I worked through them, yielding most of this week's pick hits. That also got me Ray Charles Presents David 'Fathead' Newman, and I followed that up with a few more of Newman's records (especially his early HighNotes). I didn't go very deep there, as I've never found him to be especially remarkable.

After I got back from Oklahoma, I played the new Greg Abate record, so I took a look at his back catalog. He's a mainstream saxophonist, more rooted in bebop than swing, and I especially liked his 2014 album Motif, so I was more hopeful there. I skipped a few things like his samba album, but got a fairly good sense of where he's come from. Several very nice albums, the best being one with Alan Barnes. The next logical step would be to see what else I can find by Barnes. My database lists six of his albums, all Penguin Guide ***(*)-rated, but I haven't heard any of them yet. Surprised I've missed him, although I have rated records he shared but I've filed under other names: Tony Coe, Scott Hamilton, Warren Vaché.

Revisited the latest Coathangers album this week, after Robert Christgau gave it an A-. As I recall, Michael Tatum also likes the album. I gave it a B+(***) on one or two plays back in March, and found that my review didn't need much tweaking. I played his other pick, Priests' The Seduction of Kansas, after the break, so next week for it and Camp Cope's How to Socialise & Make Friends -- both good, high B+ records.

New records reviewed this week:

• Greg Abate with the Tim Ray Trio: Gratitude: Stage Door Live @ The Z (2019, Whaling City Sound): [cd]: B+(***)
• Rebecca DuMaine and the Dave Miller Combo: Chez Nous (2018 [2019], Summit): [cd]: B+(**)
• Peter Jensen & DR Big Band: Stand on Your Feet and Fight: Voices of the Danish West Indies (2018 [2019], ILK): [cd]: B+(*)
• Ellynne Rey: The Birdsong Project (2019, self-released): [cd]: B
• Gwilym Simcock: Near and Now (2018 [2019], ACT): [r]: B
• Aki Takase Japanic: Thema Prima (2018 [2019], BMC): [r]: B+(***)
• The United States Air Force Band: The Jazz Heritage Series: 2019 Radio Broadcasts (2019, self-released, 4CD): [cd]: C-
• Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet: The Rhythm of Invention (2019, Patois): [cd]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Greg Abate Quartet: Bop City: Live at Birdland (1991, Candid): [r]: B+(***)
• Greg Abate: Straight Ahead (1992 [1993], Candid): [r]: B+(**)
• Greg Abate Quintet: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1995, Candid): [r]: B+(*)
• Greg Abate Quintet: Bop Lives! (1996, Blue Chip JAzz): [r]: B+(**)
• Greg Abate: Evolution (2002, 1201 Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Greg Abate/Alan Barnes: Birds of a Feather (2007 [2008], Woodville): [r]: A-
• Ray Charles: Ray Charles (1953-56 [1957], Atlantic): [r]: A
• Ray Charles: The Great Ray Charles (1956 [1957], Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)
• Ray Charles: The Genius After Hours (1956-57 [1961], Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)
• Ray Charles: Yes Indeed! (1952-58 [1958], Atlantic): [r]: A-
• Ray Charles: What'd I Say (1952-59 [1959], Atlantic): [r]: A
• Ray Charles: The Genius of Ray Charles (1959, Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)
• Ray Charles: Ray Charles in Person (1959 [1960], Atlantic): [r]: B+(*)
• Ray Charles: Ray Charles Live (1958-59 [1987], Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)
• Ray Charles: The Genius Sings the Blues (1952-60 [1961], Atlantic): [r]: B+(***)
• David "Fathead" Newman: Fathead: Ray Charles Presents David 'Fathead' Newman (1958 [1960], Atlantic): [r]: B+(*)
• David Newman: Fire! At the Village Vanguard (1988 [1989], Atlantic): [r]: B+(**)
• David "Fathead" Newman: Chillin' (1998 [1999], HighNote): [r]: B+(*)
• David "Fathead" Newman: Keep the Spirits Singing (2000 [2001], HighNote): [r]: B+(*)
• David "Fathead" Newman: The Gift (2002 [2003], HighNote): [r]: B+(*)
• David "Fathead" Newman: Song for the New Man (2004, HighNote): [r]: B+(***)

Grade (or other) changes:

• The Coathangers: The Devil You Know (2019, Suicide Squeeze): [r]: [was B+(***)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Charlie Apicella & Iron City: Groove Machine (OA2): May 17
• Fred Hersch & the WDR Big Band: Begin Again (Palmetto): June 7
• The Pete McGuinness Jazz Orchestra: Along for the Ride (Summit): June 7
• Scheen Jazzorkester & Thomas Johansson: As We See It . . . (Clean Feed)
• Marcus Shelby Orchestra: Transitions (MSO): June 7
• Rodney Whitaker: Common Ground: The Music of Gregg Hill (Origin): May 17

Weekend Roundup

I spent much of the week in Oklahoma, visiting my 92-year-old cousin, his two daughters, and various other family. I packed my Chromebook, then forgot it, so went a few days without my usual news sources -- not that anything much changed while I was away. Trying to catch up here, including a few links that seem possibly useful for future reference.

Looks pretty obvious from my "recent reading" sidebar that I'm in a gloomy mood about the viability of democracy in this nation. The odd book out is subtitled "On the Writing Process" -- thought that might inspire me to write about it, and it has made me a bit more self-conscious in my writing. The one I recommend most is Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. I lumped it into a list in my recent Book Reports, but it's well thought out and clear, with a fair smattering of historical examples but more focused on here and now: things you will recognize. I rather wish there was a more generic word than "fascism": one with less specific historical baggage, one that can be used in general discourse without tripping off unnecessary alarms. On the other hand, as a leftist, I've always had a keen nose for generic fascism, so the word suits my purposes just fine. I have, in fact, been using it since the 1970s, which is one reason the modern American conservative movement always seems to coherent and predictable.

Some scattered links this week:

• Christine Ahn: More US pressure on North Korea is not the path to denuclearization.

• Matt Apuzzo/Adam Satariano: Russia is targeting Europe's elections. So are far-right copycats. I don't doubt Russia's capacity for spreading cyber-havoc, but isn't it more likely that Russia is the copycat, echoing and amplifying the far-right?

• Andrew J Bacevich: Why did we fight the Iraq War? Review of Michael J Mazarr's book, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy.

• Lily Batchelder: Trump is a bad businessman. Is he a tax cheat, too?

• John Cassidy:

  • Donald Trump's business failures were very real.

  • As a businessman, Trump was the bigest loser of all.

• Joel Clement: Once again, the US embarrasses itself on climate change.

• Juan Cole: It will be very hot and very wet -- we've exceeded 415ppm of carbon dioxide for the first time since the pliocene.

• Matthew Cole: The Complete Mercenary: "How Erik Prince used the rise of Trump to make an improbable comeback."

• Tim Dickinson: US fossil fuel subsidies exceed Pentagon spending: "according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund."

• Timothy Egan: Revenge of the coastal elites: "How California, Oregon and Washington are winning the fight against Trump's hateful policies."

• Neil Eggleston/Joshua A Geitzer: The court handling Trump's lawsuit must move at breakneck speed: "The president deserves his day in court. But the American people deserve that day to come quickly."

• John Feffer:

  • A farewell to arms control? "With Trump and Bolton at the helm, the international arms control regime is effectively dead."

  • What's behind Bolton's attacks on the 'troika of tyranny'? "Bolton's broadsides against Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela hint at ambitions for much more dangerous geopolitical conflict -- and nothing short of a new Cold War." You might think this impossible with the Soviet Union gone, and Russia more focused on promoting right-wing extremism, but the real enemy the US faced in the Cold War was always the workers and peasants oppressed by capitalists and their oligarchic allies, and that's an "enemy" that still exists.

• Niall Ferguson/Eyck Freymann: The coming generation war: "The Democrats are rapidly becoming the party of the young -- and the consequences could be profound." There are few scholars I hold in lower regard than Ferguson, but there are enough charts and numbers here to let you think. I still think that class matters more than age, probably other demographic factors as well, but I wouldn't be surprised that age skews as advertised in all categories. Maybe you could object that class rises with age -- as successful people accumulate wealth, the poor die off younger -- but the rich are such a slim slice of the population even a big skew is unlikely to amount to much.

• Ben Fountain: O billionaires!: Review of Michael R Bloomberg: Bloomberg by Bloomberg and Howard Schultz/Joanne Gordon: From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America. One thing about these political wannabes: they'll never be accused of being traitors to their class.

• Masha Gessen: Putin and Trump's ominous nostalgia for the Second World War.

• Todd Gitlin: The roots of Trumpian agitprop.

• Tara Golshan: Bernie Sanders's political revolution on foreign policy, explained. Related: Zack Beauchamp: What should a left foreign policy look like? An Elizabeth Warren adviser offers his vision. An interview with Ganesh Sitaraman, whose piece is: The emergence of progressive foreign policy. I still find parts of this disturbing, like the insistence on maintaining military alliances like NATO, as opposed to negotiating demilitarization and de-escalating conflicts through more even-handed institutions like the United Nations. Also, the shift in focus needs to be clearer: for a long time US foreign policy has mostly been dictated by the needs of multinational corporations, with little if any concern for economic justice, either for the majority of Americans or for people around the world.

• Ryan Grim: The Democratic counterrevolution has a self-appointed leader: Josh Gottheimer.

• James Hamblin: Has Trump actually done anything about drug prices?

• William Hartung/Mandy Smithberger: A dollar-by-dollar tour of the national security state: How a "base budget" of $554.1 billion adds up to $1.2542 trillion.

• Chris Hedges: Creeping toward tyranny: I haven't read Hedges for a few years now, so it hadn't quite sunk in how his principled hypersensitivity has decayed into an all-consuming pessimism (of the intellect, but also of the will):

  Capitalists, throughout history, have backed fascism to thwart even the most tepid forms of socialism. All the pieces are in place. The hollowing out of our democratic institutions, which cannot be blamed on Trump, makes tyranny inevitable.

  Bad timing to exempt Trump from any blame right now, as his defiance of Congressional subpoenas, his rejection (veto) of resolutions ending his border "state of emergency" and Yemen War support, and his unilateral sabre rattling over Venezuela and Iran are unprecedented. Still, he's right that the signs anticipated and enabled Trump. Indeed, we're likely to look back on his Bush-era books and accord him the honor of being our first major "premature anti-fascist" (as Americans who fought against the Fascists in Spain were labelled after the US declared war on Germany and Italy). The only real problem with his 2007 American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America was in focusing on gullible Christians rather than their secular manipulators. The last book I read by him was The Death of the Liberal Class (2010), which anticipated Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal (2016), his broadside on mainstream Democrats. But when I checked out Hedges' latest book, America: The Farewell Tour, I couldn't get into it. I'm past needing to learn how bad it can get.

• Murtaza Hussain: Right-wing Israeli author writes "The Virtue of Nationalism" -- and accidentally exposes its pitfalls: On Yoram Hazony. Pull quote: "Alongside Israel, there are two other countries Hazony claims have been similarly victimized by the shaming campaigns of liberals and globalists: apartheid South Africa and Serbia under the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic."

• Sean Illing:

  • How golf explains Trump. Seriously. Interview with Rick Reilly, author of Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, who says, "this guy cheats like a mafia accountant."

  • What's wrong with America? I debate Ben Shapiro. Wish he was better at it. Shapiro is a right-wing apologist/ideologue, whose latest book is The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great. Related: Nesrin Malik: Seeing Ben Shapiro flounder might be fun, but far-right celebrities are no joke.

• Jake Johnson: Juan Guaidó makes open plea for US military coordination in Venezuela.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • The US accepted more than 1 million refugees after Vietnam. What changed about us? Recounts a story from George Packer's new book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. Kaplan doesn't really answer the question, other than that "there are no Holbrookes or Mondales in positions of power to change that."

  • John Bolton is leading Donald Trump (and the rest of us) into conflicts in Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea. Alternate title: "John Bolton's dream world." Pull quote: "Bolton's ambitions -- which play well to Trump's mix of xenophobia and narcissism -- are, finally, getting us in a lot of trouble."

• Greg Kaufmann: Trump has a new solution for poverty: pretend poor people don't exist: "A proposal to redefine 'poverty' would throw potentially millions of low-income people out of government-assistance programs."

• E Tammy Kim: Do corporations like Amazon and Foxconn need public assistance?

• Jen Kirby: US-China trade talks end with no deal -- and more tariffs.

• Ezra Klein:

  • Facebook is a capitalism problem, not a Mark Zuckerberg problem. Response to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes's op-ed: It's time to break up Facebook.

  • Democrats need a power agenda, not just a policy agenda: "Concentration of power is the problem, so redistribution of power is the policy."

• Sarah Kliff: Trump to Congress: pass legislation to end surprise medical bills: "The president has a good idea on health care -- and one that could actually pass."

• Elizabeth Kolbert: Climate change and the new age of extinction: Until now, or maybe I just mean recently, this hasn't had much to do with climate.

  To keep nearly eight billion people fed, not to mention housed, clothed, and hooked on YouTube, humans have transformed most of the earth's surface. Seventy-five per cent of the land is "significantly altered," the I.P.B.E.S. noted in a summary of its report, which was released last week in Paris. In addition, "66 per cent of the ocean area is experiencing increasing cumulative impacts, and over 85 per cent of wetlands (area) has been lost." Approximately half the world's coral cover is gone. In the past ten years alone, at least seventy-five million acres of "primary or recovering forest" have been destroyed.

  Habitat destruction and overfishing are, for now, the main causes of biodiversity declines, according to the I.P.B.E.S., but climate change is emerging as a "direct driver" and is "increasingly exacerbating the impact of other drivers." Its effects, the report notes, "are accelerating." Watson wrote last week, in the Guardian, that "we cannot solve the threats of human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity in isolation. We either solve both or we solve neither."

  Related: Brad Plumer: Humans are speeding extinction and altering the natural world at an 'unprecedented' pace. Also: Robert Watson: Loss of biodiversity is just as catastrophic as climate change; Jonathan Watts: Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth's natural life; Damian Carrington: What is biodiversity and why does it matter to us?.

• Mike Konczal: Want to expand Medicare? Then answer the $5 trillion questions. "If you think the fight with insurance companies is tough, just wait until single-payer advocates have to go head-to-head with doctors." Admits that switching to "Medicare for All" could save overall health care costs ($2.1 trillion is the number given), but that assumes cost cuts, only 20% of which come from eliminating the insurance companies, with 70% expected to come from paying doctors and hospitals less. I don't see much of a problem here, although as usual the devil is in the details. Big chunks of that 70% can be recovered without hitting the wages of doctors, nurses, and other essential personnel. I also see reason to cap top earners, but that's something that should be done not just with doctors and administrators -- inequality is a problem everywhere. On the other hand, why not just focus on easy wins like cutting the private insurance companies out?

• Paul Krugman:

  • Killing the Pax Americana: "Trump's trade war is about more than economics."

  • Trump is terrible for rural America: "His biggest supporters are his biggest victims."

  • The economics of Donald J Keynes: "Austerity for Democrats, stimulus for Republicans."

  • The sabotage years: "What we now know about GOP economics."

  • The zombie style in American politics: "Why bad ideas just won't stay dead."

• Michael Kruse: Beto's long history of failing upward: I've tended to resist citing links on candidates, but this one is fairly deep. O'Rourke is one I don't have much enthusiasm for, but while this is sharply critical, it doesn't really lower my estimation of him.

• Talia Lavin: A reporter's long, strange trip into the darkest parts of the American mind: Review of Anna Merlan's new book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. With a picture of Alex Jones.

• Charles Leerhsen: Trump, the billion-dollar loser -- I was his ghostwriter and saw it happen.

• Ariel Levy: Who owns South Africa?: "A fiercely debated program of land reform could address racial injustice -- or cause chaos."

• Dahlia Lithwick: Are we in a constitutional crisis? "This is how democracy ends: not with a bang, but with a long and technical debate over whether we're using the right words."

• PR Lockhart: 65 years after Brown v Board of Education, school segregation is getting worse.

• German Lopez: North Dakota quietly decriminalized marijuana.

• Ella Nilsen:

  • The tense negotiations over whether Robert Mueller can testify before Congress, explained.

  • The House Judiciary vote on contempt of Congress and what it means for William Barr, explained.

• David Owen: Is noise pollution the next big public-health crisis? Owen has a book coming out this fall: Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World.

• Gareth Porter: Bolton is spinning Israeli 'intelligence' to push for war against Iran. Related: Sharmini Peries: The Trump Administration is manufacturing an Iran crisis.

• Gabriela Resto-Montero:

  • Trump asked Don McGahn to publicly state he didn't obstruct justice. McGahn refused.

  • Rudy Giuliani cancels Ukraine trip amid criticism he's courting election interference. Related: Robert Mackey: A Republican conspiracy theory about a Biden-in-Ukraine scandal has gone mainstream. But it is not true.

• Alex Ward: Over 4 months after Mattis quit, Trump picks Patrick Shanahan as defense secretary.

• James Reston Jr.: Trump's other impeachable offense: "As Nixon learned, Congress will not abide a president who defies its subpoenas."

• Jason Rezaian: Are we watching John Bolton's last stand? "Is John Bolton about to get the Iran war he's always wanted, or is he on the verge of losing his job?" I don't credit Trump with much insight or diligence on foreign policy, but even so he must suspect that Bolton was a remarkably poor pick as National Security Adviser. In particular, Bolton has his own agenda, and has no scruples about contravening and undermining Trump's own stated objectives. So it would make a lot of sense for Trump to fire Bolton (and Pompeo, who is an only slightly less egregious hawk, as well). Indeed, if I thought I'd get into the president's ear, I'd write an op-ed taunting Trump to do just that, justifying it as key to his 2020 re-election prospects. I'm still convinced that a major reason Trump beat Clinton in 2016 was her "commander-in-chief test," where she came off as the more dangerous hawk. Hiring Bolton undoes much of Trump's edge there, even if he doesn't trick Trump into much bigger wars.

• Corey Robin: Eric Hobsbawm, the communist who explained history: Review of Richard Evans' biography, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, referring back to Hobsbawm's own memoir, Interesting Times, and various of his books like The Age of Extremes (on the 20th century).

• Joe Romm: A new brain study shows a better way to engage voters on climate change: Call it "climate crisis."

• Aaron Rupar: Trump turns shooting migrants into a punchline at Florida rally.

• Rebecca Solnit: Unconscious bias is running for president: "On Elizabeth Warren and the false problem of "likeability." Recommended by a Facebook friend, this is a bit more than half right, but suffers from an as-yet-unnamed form of specious argument related to the "mansplaining" that Solnit has written extensively about. I don't doubt that the prejudices she decries are real, but the "privileges" she seeks to overthrow have never struck me as worth much. On the other hand, note that Warren's response to these prejudices hasn't been to whine about them. She's talking to the so-called privileged, and seems to be winning them over: Alex Thompson: Trump backers applaud Warren in heart of MAGA country.

• Emily Stewart: Trump lost $1 billion over 10 years, New York Times report shows: "So much for Trump's brand as a savvy, self-made business leader."

• Matt Taibbi: On the trail with Bernie Sanders 2.0.

• Astra Taylor: Time's up for capitalism. But what comes next? "Every day, we help decide how the future will unfold. But how do we cast ballots for a democracy that doesn't yet exist?" Adapted from her forthcoming book, Democracy May Not Exist but We'll Miss It When It's Gone. I've long meant to read her previous book, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (2014), recommended by a friend.

• Laura Tillem: Let's hit the pause button on more space for prosecutors: op-ed on prison overcrowding here in Wichita.

• Jeffrey Toobin: The constitutional system is not build to resist Trump's defiance of Congress.

• Anton Troianovski:

  • On a Russian outpost in the Pacific, fear and fantasies of a Japanese future: Aren't we accustomed to thinking of Russia as revanchist, seeking to regain territories of the former Russian/Soviet empire, but it looks here like Japan is the one with the stronger bent.

  • w/Josh Dawsey/Paul Sonne: Trump's interest in stirring Ukraine investigations sows confusion in Kiev.

• Alex Ward: Trump's Iran policy is making war more likely.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Pay Congress more.

  • The battle over Trump's tax returns, explained.

  • The Trump tweets that sent the stock market tumbling, explained.

  • The 20-year-argument between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren over bankruptcy, explained. Related: Annie Linskey: Elizabeth Warren reshaped our view of the middle class. But some see an angle.

• Matt Zapotosky: Trump would have been charged with obstruction were he not president, hundreds of former federal prosecutors assert.

I don't have much to say about Game of Thrones, but I was struck by this ratiocination by Zack Beauchamp: "But it's one thing for Daenerys to act like Bush, and another for her to act like Hitler." He's talking about the indiscriminate fire-bombing of cities full of innocent civilians, but while Bush criminally started wars, lied about his reasoning, rounded up and tortured supposed enemies, disrupted the lives of millions doing irreparable harm, just to show the world that it's more important to fear his "shock and awe" than to respect his self-proclaimed beneficence, and while Hitler did those same things on an even more epic scale, the most comparable historical example of a leader laying waste to entire cities was Harry Truman -- who we generally recall as an exceptionally decent and modest president.

You can say that war does that, even to otherwise decent people. You can say that Hitler and Bush were worse than Truman because they started wars whereas Truman was simply trying to end one he had inherited. (This is not the place to get into how he escalated the Cold War and the Korean War, which in many ways I find more troubling than his "final solution" to WWII.) You can say that Hitler was worse than Bush because his desire for war was more deeply rooted in the uncritical imperialism and racism of the era, which made him even more vindictive and bloodthirsty. But I'd also note that Truman was not above the prejudices of Hitler's era, and that Bush (while less racist than Truman let alone Hitler) was, like all conservatives ever, fully committed to traditional hierarchies of wealth and power, which made it easy for him to run roughshod over all the others.

I have no idea where Daenerys fits among this trio, as she is a fictional character in an imaginary world. Even if she reflects the world of her creators, she does so haphazardly and inconsistently.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, May archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31469 [31440] rated (+29), 248 [255] unrated (-7).

Had a low energy period after posting April Streamnotes last Monday, so I'm not surprised that the rated count dropped. If anything, I'm surprised it's as high as it is, but that was mostly from streaming back catalog of artists recently reviewed.

I speculated last week that Walt Weiskopf's Worldwide is his best yet, but I had missed most of his 1990s albums, so I had to hedge. There are still a couple things I haven't heard, but nothing old came close to the new one -- best of the albums below is probably Siren (1999). When I gave Betty Carter's The Music Never Stops an A- a few weeks back, I noted lots of holes in my database. Scratching my head for something to listen to, I remembered that, and plugged a few of them (while being unable to find others). The new Teodross Avery album also sent me back. No great finds from any of those excursions.

I also tried looking up the album Carter and Ray Charles did together in 1961, but couldn't find it. I noticed then I had an unrated Charles record, and wondered whether I could build a playlist to duplicate it (as opposed to having to dig up my physical copy). Turns out there's damn few of Charles' ABC records on Napster, but I still got 17/20 songs from Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, while the other three were easy to find on YouTube. Not quite an equivalent listening experience, but close enough, I figured (especially given that I recalled hearing nearly everything). I'll do a few more Ray Charles albums next week, starting with the early Atlantics.

On the other hand, this week's two new A- records are ones I hadn't read a thing about before they showed up. After months of second guessing other folks' picks, I feel like I've done my job.

I'll be posting a new XgauSez overnight (link always points to the latest Q&A).

New records reviewed this week:

• Teodross Avery: After the Rain: A Night for Coltrane (2019, Tompkins Square): [bc]: B+(***)
• The Campfire Flies: Sparks Like Litle Stars (2019, OverPop Music): [cd]: A-
• Mark Dresser Seven: Ain't Nothing but a Cyber Coup & You (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(**)
• Satoko Fujii: Solo Piano: Stone (2018 [2019], Libra): [cd]: B+(**)
• The Invisible Party: Shumankind (2017 [2018], Chant): [cd]: A-
• Jon Lipscomb Quartet: Fodder (2016 [2018], self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Rent Romus' Life's Blood Ensemble: Side Three: New Work (2018 [2019], Edgetone): [cd]: B+(***)
• The Richard Shulman Trio: Waltzing out of Town (2019, RichHeart Music): [cd]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Kinloch Nelson: Partly on Time: Recordings 1968-1970 (1968-70 [2019], Tompkins Square): [bc]: B+(*)

Old music:

• The Teodross Avery Quartet: In Other Words (1994, GRP): [r]: B+(**)
• Teodross Avery & the 5th Power: New Day, New Groove (1998 [2001], 5th Power): [r]: B+(*)
• Teodross Avery: Bridging the Gap: Hop-Hop Jazz (2008, BTG Music): [r]: B-
• Betty Carter/Ray Bryant: Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant (1955-56 [1996], Columbia): [r]: B+(*)
• Betty Carter: The Modern Sound of Betty Carter (1960, ABC): [r]: B+(*)
• Betty Carter: Inside Betty Carter (1964-65 [1993], Capitol Jazz): [r]: B+(*)
• Betty Carter: Finally, Betty Carter (1969 [1975], Roulette): [r]: B+(*)
• Betty Carter: At the Village Vanguard (1970 [1993], Verve): [r]: B+(**)
• Betty Carter: The Betty Carter Album (1976 [1988], Verve): [r]: B
• Ray Charles: Greatest Country and Western Hits (1962-66 [1988], DCC): [r]: A-
• Jon Lipscomb: Solo Guitar Improvisations Vol. 1 (2016, self-released): [bc]: B+(*)
• Walt Weiskopf: Night Lights (1995, Double Time): [r]: B+(**)
• Walt Weiskopf: Song for My Mother (1995 [1996], Criss Cross): [r]: B+(***)
• Walt Weiskopf: Sleepless Nights (1996 [1998], Criss Cross): [r]: B+(***)
• Walt Weiskopf: Anytown (1998, Criss Cross): [r]: B+(**)
• Walt Weiskopf: Siren (1999, Criss Cross): [r]: B+(***)
• Walt Weiskopf: Man of Many Colors (2001 [2002], Criss Cross): [r]: B+(***)
• Walt Weiskopf: Open Road (2014 [2015], Posi-Tone): [r]: B+(***)
• Walt Weiskopf: Fountain of Youth (2016 [2017], Posi-Tone): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Yoko Miwa Trio: Keep Talkin' (Ocean Blue Tear Music)

Weekend Roundup

No time to work on this, as I spent Sunday trying to break in a new Mexican cookbook. Much of Saturday too, and more of Friday -- not that I had even started then. The one story that dominated the interest of the liberal media was Attorney General William Barr's Senate testimony and his failure to appear before the House. I was tempted to tweet when I looked at Talking Points Memo and they had devoted their entire front page to Barr (aside from one bit on the implosion of Stephen Moore's Fed nomination).

Actually, this should have been a banner week for the media to pick apart Trump's increasingly manic and deranged foreign policy. The US hasn't been taken such a nakedly imperial stance toward Latin America since FDR traded in his cousin's penchant for Gunboat Diplomacy for the sunny promise of a Good Neighbor Policy. I didn't link to anything below on Trump's phone call to Putin, mostly because no one seems to know enough about it to write intelligently. But there were also fairly major stories that could have been reported about Korea, China, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, and Israel/Palestine (where Netanyahu celebrated his election victory by launching the heaviest assault on Gaza since 2014).

Some scattered links this week:

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • Americans are working harder these days. Their paychecks don't show it.

  • April jobs report: tons of new jobs and teeny-tiny pay raises.

• Jason Del Ray: The making of Amazon Prime, the internet's most successful and devastating membership program.

• Jason Ditz: Venezuela's Guaido 'consering asking US to invade. That'll really convince the Venezuelan people he has their best interests at heart.

• David Enrich: Trump wants to block Deutsche Bank from sharing his financial records.

• Matt Gertz/Rob Savillo: Major media outlets' Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day.

• Masha Gessen: Under Trump, the language we use to create political reality is crumbling:

  One of the most frightening things I've witnessed in recent months was a very polite conversation in a well-lit room in the Ronald Reagan Building, in Washington, D.C., on Monday. The director of policy planning at the State Department, Kiron Skinner, was interviewed onstage by a woman who used to hold her job: Anne-Marie Slaughter, who is now the head of the New America Foundation (where I am a fellow this year). . . .

  I have heard talk like this before, in Russia. A government official once told me that he "carried out emanations": not policies, laws, or even orders but signals akin to what Skinner called "hunches and instincts." It's what officials do in countries that are led by a combination of ignorance and corruption.

• Kathy Gilsinan:

  • A boom time for US sanctions: "The explosive growth in their use has prompted questionjs about how much is too much.

  • Pay attention to what the US is doing to Iran. Related: Krishnadev Calamur: Trump goes from threatening Iran to threatening the world.

• David A Graham: Why Stephen Moore's Fed bid failed.

• Sean Illing: Bill McKibben has been sounding the climate alarm for decades. Here's his best advice. Interview with McKibben, whose new book is Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.

• Quinta Jurecic: All of the impeachable offenses: "Focusing on the Mueller report alone risks leaving out the obvious.

• Jen Kirby: Trump has nominated Kelly Craft to be the next UN ambassador. Here's who she is.

• Sonali Kolhatkar: Trump's abortion lies are going to get somebody killed.

• PR Lockhart: Tennessee passed a law that could make it harder to register voters.

• James North: Once again, 'NYT' distorts the news, dishonestly making Gazans the aggressor and Israel the victim.

• Molly Olmstead: John Kelly joines board of company that detains migrant children.

• Joshua Partlow/David A Fahrenthold: At Trump golf course, undocumented employees said they were sometimes told to work extra hours without pay.

• Susan E Rice: The real Trump foreign policy: stoking the GOP base: "Why else would he pursue so many policies in Latin America that do not serve the national interest?" What about the economic interests of his donors? Or their more general hatred of popular rule (aka democracy)?

• Charlie Savage/Eric Schmitt/Maggie Haberman: Trump pushes to designate Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group. Paul Woodward, in linking to this, also linked to a background piece from Jan. 27, 2017: William McCants/Benjamin Wittes: Should the Muslim Brotherhood be designated a terrorist organization?

• Adam Serwer: The dangerous ideas of Bill Barr: "The attorney general's theory of executive power places presidents above the law."

• Danny Sjursen: The left needs to stop crushing on the generals. I'd respond that the left I know doesn't, but when you write for American Conservative your perspective might be distorted enough to include some "leftists" I wouldn't.

• Alex Ward:

  • Why North Korea's "projectiles" launch isn't a cause for concern -- yet.

  • The Trump administration's Venezuela policy is failing.

• Benjamin Wittes:

  • The catastrophic performance of Bill Barr.

  • Five things I learned from the Mueller report.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The push to break up Big Tech, explained.

  • Stephen Moore's failed Federal Reserve Board nomination, explained.

  • Medicare for Kids, a cheap step toward single-payer health care, explained.

For the record, tonight's Cinco de Mayo menu, nearly all from The Best Mexican Recipes (America's Test Kitchen):

• Chicken adobo
• Braised short ribs with peppers and onion
• Cheese enchiladas
• Classic Mexican rice
• Skillet street corn
• Restaurant-style black beans
• Shrimp and lime ceviche
• Mango, jicama, and orange salad
• Cherry tomato and avocado salad
• Key lime pie
• Duce de leche cheesecake

I generally cut the hot peppers back by 50%. I made the beef and the desserts the night before. Started around noon, aiming at 6pm dinner, but it wound up closer to 7pm, putting a couple guests to work. Used a gluten-free shell for the key lime pie, but made cheesecake crust from scratch, using a box of caramel and sea salt cookies plus some graham crackers. Used store-bought yellow corn tortillas, which were the weak link in the enchiladas (otherwise pretty great). Ten people, so the table was pretty crowded. Kitchen was a colossal mess, but got it straightened out by bedtime.

I've never been a big fan of Mexican food, but figured I should give it a try, especially given access to specialty grocers here. But when I bought my first Mexican cookbook, I found it impenetrable. This one is intentionally simplified, which helped get me started. This cookbook didn't have any desserts, so I scrounged around the web, not finding much that interested me. (I've made flan and rice pudding many times before, but didn't want to do them here. And while I'm partial to cake, tres leches isn't a favorite.) On the other hand, lime figures large in the meal, and I had the pie shell on the shelf. The cheesecake was a second thought, and turned out to be a nice complement.

Daily Log

Replied to a twitter thread. It seems to have started with Dave Weigel, who wrote:

To understand Bidenmentum, you've got to have some of the conversations I had yesterday: Middle-aged women explaining that 2016 showed that voters won't elect a female president, so they've got to be strategic.

Kathleen Geier wrote:

This is so depressing. Countries like Argentina, Chile, Liberia, and Taiwan have elected women presidents. Are those countries less sexist than the US? Just because Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate who ran a lousy campaign doesn't mean another woman can't win.

I responded:

Only reason I can think of why significant numbers of voters reject any woman candidate is that the US has been on a constant war footing since 1948, and that's seeped deep into our pores; ironically, overcompensating hawks like H Clinton scare more voters than they win over.

---

Wrote this up as a proposal for Mike and Ram:

Been kicking around various ideas, and thought this one might be worth sharing. I've spent a lot of time thinking about a political book, built around the idea that US history breaks neatly into four eras: 1800-1860, 1860-1932, 1932-1980, and 1980-2020. Each begins with a legendary president (Jefferson, Lincoln, FD Roosevelt, Reagan) and ends with a tragically inept one-termer (Buchanan, Hoover, Carter, and Trump). (In this regard, one could also cite 1788-1800, Washington-to-Adams, but that doesn't seem quite long enough to count. Each era was dominated by a single political party, although each had two minor breaks for presidents from the other party -- in three cases two for two terms each (Cleveland and Wilson, Eisenhower and Nixon, Clinton and Obama); in the 1800-1860 period the Whig party managed to win two elections with former generals (Harrison and Taylor), but they both died in office and were succeeded by exceptionally unpopular VPs (Tyler and Fillmore). Within each era, not only was one party dominant, but the other party tended to mimic the dominant party: most obviously, how Eisenhower and Nixon supported and extended New Deal reforms, while Clinton and Obama willingly gave ground to the pro-market, small-government Republican agenda. (The earlier eras are more mixed, partly because the dominant party was itself evolving. Cleveland, for instance, was more conservative than the most pro-business Republican of his day, while Wilson was relatively progressive, admittedly with certain blinders, most notoriously race.)

The Reagan-to-Trump era differs from the others in several respects. The first three eras started with major shifts to the left: the spread of democracy under Jefferson and Jackson; the end of slavery with Lincoln; Roosevelt's New Deal. Reagan led a backlash, aimed at making Americans less equal, at reducing democracy, and at limiting the rights of most Americans. Although Republicans captured the levers of power and dominated the public agenda, their program was never very popular, their winning margins (aside from Reagan's two elections) slim (twice, at least by actual votes, negative). The eras subdivide, this one breaking down into three waves as presidential power (Reagan, Bush, Trump) did their damage, separated by breaks which allowed the economy to recover (from the first Bush recession of 1992 and the much larger Bush recession of 2008), and the Republicans to recharge (taking control of Congress in 1994 and 2010, kneecapping the Democrats from making changes).

My original idea was to start with this framework, then expand on how Democrats should view 2020 as an epochal, era-ending election, an opportunity not just to reverse the Reagan-to-Trump tide but to build a new paradigm for decades to come. A lot of good things fall out of that perspective. I'm thinking now that I should dial back the ambition from book to essay length, crank out the essay, try to get it published somewhere respectable, and see if there's any further demand. But along the way, I thought of how either of you might help, then came up with something slightly different. That is to look at the Reagan-to-Trump era reactionary movement in the broader context of fascist movements around the world. Also, to lessen my load, and give this a better chance of actually happening, I propose that you two do it as a graphic book (Mike writing, Ram illustrating). Maybe I can contribute some rough ideas, a website, some online notes, like that.

The immediate trigger for the thought was reading Benjamin Carter Hett's "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic." Some descriptions of Hitler can easily be recast for Trump. Some cannot, but the essential point is that both are public faces of crazed mass movements which were handed power by arch-conservative power brokers (the Kochs and Mercers as much as Hindenburg and his business backers), in both cases understanding that their privileges can only be sustained if they can hide behind a political movement preoccupied with hating others. It's taken some countries much longer to mount a successful fascist movement than others. Germany in the 1920s could look back on its humiliating defeat in the Great War and rail against both internal traitors and the insults of reparations, while imagining that the extraordinary will of someone like Hitler could triumph, restoring Germany's greatness among nations. Fascists could build on lesser grounds, as Mussolini did in Italy. Even in England and France, small groups felt cheated and spawned lesser fascist movements.

It was even harder to get a fascist movement started in the US, but in the 1930s there was a clique of conservatives who harbored the fantasy, and they started to build as the Cold War lent their anti-union politics an air of respectability. As Robert Paxton argues in "The Anatomy of Fascism," fascists start out as the public face of oligarchic powers frustrated by having to deal with democracy. That turns out to be a pretty apt description of Trump. And it's worth noting that GW Bush made his own fortune working as the front man for the oil magnates who owned the Texas Rangers. Also that as Reagan's acting career washed up, he made his living as a shill for General Electric (see Kim Phillips-Fein's "Invisible Hands" for more on GE's hardcore opposition to FDR's New Deal). The difference between Hitler and America's leading fascists is that Hitler moved beyond being a front, seizing power and pursuing his own delusions, driving Germany to utter ruin, whereas the damage wrought by the American troika have yet to rebound against their masters.

Thinking along these lines, I was reminded of Marx's quip about Napoleon III in 1848: "history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce." That seems about right for contrasting Trump to Hitler and Mussolini, although one might not want to tempt fate given that the full bill for electing Trump has yet to be paid. Also one doesn't want to make light of the many terrible things that Trump as already done. Still, I see no reason why we can't present him as a buffoon as well as vile. Indeed, that's likely to be where the graphic form is most effective. Nor should we refrain from treating Hitler and Mussolini as farcical characters. Maybe if people had realized then how ridiculous they were, they might have been stopped before they could devastate so much of the world. Stopping Trump is still an option.

Monday, April 29, 2019

Music Week

Expanded blog post, April archive.

Music: current count 31440 [31400] rated (+40), 255 [256] unrated (-1).

Last Monday of the month, so time to unveil April Streamnotes, including this week's subset below. Five Mondays this month, so the totals are up handsomely from the two previous four-Monday months. Weekly rated count is up a bit, but that's partly because I found five records I failed to record grades for recently. Some of those bookkeeping errors probably caused me to log 29-album weeks (four so far this year) instead of 30, long my standard for a productive week.

Worth noting that all three of this week's new non-jazz A-list albums here also placed high on Phil Overeem's latest list (numbers 4, 6, and 20). For what little it's worth, I wrote those before seeing Overeem's list, but not before Dan Weiss praised them on Facebook (although I think I first heard of Billie Eilish from Christgau).

Those tips help make up for the frustration of declining awareness I've been feeling. Although I still keep a music tracking file, I've stopped making any systematic effort to find and list prospects, leaving me with little concept of what to search out next. As a result, I veer off on arbitrary tangents, as when I found a piece called A Guide to Drexciya's Futuristic Electro. I really liked Drexciya's Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller, Vol. I back in 2012, so that seemed worth pursuing. But it certainly fell far short of a plan.

Finally, a link that makes more sense to list here than in yesterday's Weekend Roundup: Rachel Syme: Vince Aletti's Obsessive Collection of Seminal Fashion Magazinse. Vince was one of the first people I met when I moved to New York City in 1977, so it's good to see him again, even older, as we all are.

---

New records reviewed this week:

• Kevin Abstract: Arizona Baby (2019, Question Everything/RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• Juan Álamo & Marimjazzia: Ruta Panoramica (2016 [2019], Summit): [cd]: B+(**)
• Anderson .Paak: Ventura (2019, Aftermath/12 Tone Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Brittany Anjou: Enamigo Reciprokataj (2015-16 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Seamus Blake: Guardians of the Heart Machine (2017 [2019], Whirlwind): [r]: B+(***)
• Club D'Elf: Night Sparkles (Live) (2011 [2019], Face Pelt): [r]: B+(***)
• Control Top: Covert Contracts (2019, Get Better): [r]: A-
• Cooper Moore/Stephen Gauci: Studio Sessions Vol. 1 (2019, Gaucimusic): [bc]: B+(***)
• Ronnie Cuber: Straight Street (2010 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• Billy Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019, Darkroom/Interscope): [r]: A-
• Anat Fort Trio: Colour (2019, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• Four: There You Go Thinking Again (2018 [2019], Jazz Hang): [cd]: B
• Bill Frisell/Thomas Morgan: Epistrophy (2016 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Stephen Gauci/Sandy Ewan/Adam Lane/Kevin Shea: Live at the Bushwick Series (2019, Gaucimusic): [bc]: B+(*)
• Lizzo: Cuz I Love You (2019, Nice Life/Atlantic): [r]: A-
• Lisa Maxwell's Jazz Orchestra: Shiny! (2018 [2019], Uncle Marvin Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Bennett Paster: Indivisible (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Andrew Rathbun: Character Study (2017 [2018], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Eric Reed: Everybody Gets the Blues (2019, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(**)
• Steph Richards: Take the Neon Lights (2019, Birdwatcher): [r]: B+(***)
• Dave Scott: In Search of Hipness (2018 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(*)
• Swindle: No More Normal (2019, Brownswood): [r]: B-
• Trapper Keaper: Meets Tim Berne & Aurora Nealand (2019, Ears & Eyes/Caligola): [cd]: B+(***)
• Cory Weeds Quintet: Live at Frankie's Jazz Club (2019, Cellar Live): [r]: B+(*)
• Walt Weiskopf European Quartet: Worldwide (2019, Orenda): [cd]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Afro-Blue Persuasion: Live at Haight Levels: Volume One (1967 [2019], Tramp): [r]: B+(**)
• Afro-Blue Persuasion: Live at Haight Levels: Volume Two (1967 [2019], Tramp): [r]: B+(**)
• Elecktrokids: Elektroworld (1995 [2019], Clone Classic Cuts): [bc]: B+(**)
• Mark Turner/Gary Foster: Mark Turner Meets Gary Foster (2003 [2019], Capri, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Bill Cunliffe/Gary Foster: It's About Love (2003, Torii): [r]: B+(***)
• Drexciya: Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller III (1992-97 [2013], Clone Classic Cuts): [bc]: A-
• Drexciya: Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller IV (1992-97 [2013], Clone Classic Cubs): [bc]: B+(***)
• Drexciya: Neptune's Lair (1999, Tresor): [r]: B+(***)
• Drexciya: Grava 4 (2002, Clone): [r]: B+(**)
• Billie Eilish: Don't Smile at Me (2017, Darkroom/Interscope, EP): [r]: B+(***)

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Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Greg Abate with the Tim Ray Trio: Gratitude: Stage Door Live @ The Z (Whaling City Sound)
• Brittany Anjou: Enamigo Reciprokataj (Origin)
• Rebecca DuMaine and the Dave Miller Combo: Chez Nous (Summit): June 7
• Satoko Fujii: Stone (Libra): June 7
• The Invisible Party: Shumankind (Chant -18)
• Peter Jensen & DR Big Band: Stand on Your Feet and Fight: Voices of the Danish West Indies (ILK)
• Ellynne Rey: The Birdsong Project (self-released): May 1
• Rent Romus' Life's Blood Ensemble: Side Three: New Work (Edgetone)
• The Richard Shulman Trio: Waltzing out of Town (RichHeart Music): May 11
• Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet: The Rhythm of Invention (Patois): June 7
• Walt Weiskopf European Quartet: Worldwide (Orenda): May 3

Purchases:

• Cardi B: Invasion of Privacy (2018 [2019], Atlantic) [A-]
• Todd Snider: Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 (2019, Aimless) [A-]

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Weekend Roundup

Started early and still running late. Having recently read Benjamin Carter Hett's The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, I woke up this morning with the idea of writing something about Trump, Republicans, and Fascism for today's introduction. Never got close to that. Hett's book is pretty straight history, but you can find a page here or there where you could easily gloss in Trump's name for Hitler's. Then you move onto other pages where Trump fails any comparison, usually by being too dumb or too lazy. There are also big differences between the Nazis and the Republicans, although differences on race, foreigners, unions, and military muscle are insignificant. The biggest one is that the Nazis actually had their own goon squad that could go out and physically attack their suspected enemies, whereas Republicans only wish they could do that. Still, the key point about Germany in 1932 was supposedly sober conservatives were so desperate to squash the left -- indeed, any trace of popular government, of democracy -- that they were willing to hand power over to a psycho like Hitler and his vicious gang of followers. Republicans seem happy to do the same thing here in America, for the same reasons, and with the same obliviousness to consequences.

I should note somewhere that former Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) died last week. Back in the 1980s he was the model of how a Republican politician could straddle moderate urban politics (he was mayor of Indianapolis) and the Reagan reaction, which for a time helped make the latter seem more innocuous and palatable. He was finally devoured by the right, purged in a primary by an opponent so extreme that the Democrats were able to (temporarily) pick up the seat. I never felt any particular fondness for Lugar, but I could understand why people respected him. Even his breed of Republican is now a thing of the past.

Also noted that historian David Brion Davis has died. His 1967 book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture greatly affected the way pretty much everyone understood the history of slavery in the Americas. I've often thought I should check out his later books, especially the ones that extended his study into the 19th century. I learned of his death from a cranky Corey Robin note, which I decided not to bother with below. Here's a more useful (and generous) obituary.

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Anyhow, this is what the week has to show for itself:

• Greg Asner: To solve climate change and biodiversity loss, we need a Global Deal for Nature.

• Nicholson Baker: My brain on cable news: "Tuning into TV's battle to the death."

  What's actually on cable these days is a bizarre legalistic death battle. Cohen, Manafort, Flynn, Butina, Mueller, Giuliani, et al. We aren't debating whether Trump has been responsible for the deaths of innocents, because everyone knows that he is -- presidents and collateral damage go hand in hand. If Trump goes to prison, it will not be for child murder, but for distributing hush money to silence former mistresses and for taking bribes and for engaging in back channel machinations with Russia. Whatever it takes, I suppose, but I have to agree with my cable guy: there's something unseemly about the means employed.

  Fox News is addictive and awful: choirboys gone to seed and women's dresses with weird portholes at the shoulders or at the cleavage. The anchors jeer smilingly at ideas that any sensible person of generous mind can see make sense. Quick clips of closed-circuit footage of humans with darker skin doing bad things are injected into the river of commentary -- mug shots included -- to create little mental firecracker pops of righteous wrath among the pickup-truck crowd, along with "funny" attacks on progressive causes by rightist comedians who love steak and country music. Fox & Friends is a hot mess of clean living and white-right American self-deception, and I can't watch it for very long without feeling queasy. But it's an easy mark.

• Jane Coaston: Trump's new defense of his Charlottesville comments is incredibly false. Related: Allegra Kirkland: Whitewash: Trump takes new approach to sanitizing Charlottesville protests.

• Helena Cobban: The UAE's seedy influence operations are a footnote to the Mueller report.

• Bryce Covert: Hedge-fund ownership cost Sears workers their jobs. Now they're fighting back. Seems like lots (damn near all of ) the companies you read about in bankruptcy first passed through a phase where private equity operators first bought the company with its own debt than stripped assets and paid themselves "management fees." Maybe if they were lucky they'd be able to sell the carcass off, but current bankruptcy law favors creditors over employees and customers, finishing the liquidation while leaving the public worse off. Our think tanks need to think about this situation, and come up with new bankruptcy laws that allow companies to survive such malign ownership, preferably under employee ownership, with debt loads reduced to levels which allow the companies to carry on. Other regulations could help, but just changing bankruptcy law would shift the incentives dramatically.

• Alex Emmons: Coalition airstrikes in Raqqa killed at least 1,600 civilians, more than 10 times US tally, report finds.

• Tom Engelhardt: Publisher and introduction writer at TomDispatch:

  • Collusion, hell, yeah!: "Suicide watch on planet Earth: as the flames began to rise, the arsonists appeared."

  • A "ridiculous" war: "American war is off the charts: how the US military feeds at the terror trough."

  • Allegra Harpootlian/Emily Manna: The AI Wars: "The end of war is just a beginning. Will technology stamp a 'forever' on America's wars?"

  • Jen Marlowe: Running for the Right to Thrive: "The Palestinian marathon: a window into occupation and survival in a less than holy land."

  • Nick Turse: No need to whisper, AFRICOM isn't listening in: "AFRICOM calls for my 'elimination' (from their daily media reports)."

  • Belle Chesler: Defunding children, a national crisis of the soul: "Making American schools less great again: a lesson in educational nihilism on a grand scale."

  • Arnold R Isaacs: The 100-year-old echoes of 2019: "Looking back at 1919: immigration, race, and women's rights, then and now."

  • Ann Jones: Our Veblen moment: "The man who saw Trump coming a century ago: a reader's guide for the distraught."

  • Alfred McCoy: America's self-inflicted wound: "Decriminalizing the drug war? Calculating the damage from a century of drug prohibition."

• Todd Gitlin: The roots of Trumpian agitprop: Hint: article namechecks Leni Riefenstahl, as well as Susan Sontag writing about Riefenstahl.

• Patrick Greenfield: Spain election: socialist party PSOE declared winner: live update blog; PSOE is expected to be able to form a coalition with the further leftist party Podemos; the far-right party Vox surged, but only wound up with 24 MPs (6.8%), at the expense of more mainstream conservatives (PP is down from 137 to 66).

• Sue Halpern: The terrifying potential of the 5G network: "The future of wireless technology holds the promise of total connectivity. But it will also be especially susceptible to cyberattacks and surveillance." Guess who else is selling snooping gear? Richard Silverstein: Israel and the selling of the surveillance state.

• Murtaza Hussain: Our enemies are the same people: San Diego synagogue shooter inspired by New Zealand anti-Muslim massacre.

• Sean Illing: White identity politics is about more than racism: Interview with Ashley Jardina, author of White Identity Politics..

• Christopher Ingraham: Rich guys are most likely to have no idea what they're talking about, study suggests.

• Greg Jaffe: Capitalism in crisis: US billionaires worry about the survival of the system that made them rich.

• Sam Knight: The uncanny power of Greta Thunberg's climate-change rhetoric.

  The climate-change movement feels powerful today because it is politicians -- not the people gluing themselves to trucks -- who seem deluded about reality. Thunberg says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us.

  Related: Stewart Lee: Why Greta Thunberg is now my go-to girl.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Armpits, white ghettos and contempt: "Who really despises the American heartland?" Opens with a sidebar on Stephen Moore (Trump's Fed pick), noting:

    Moore is an indefensible choice on many grounds. Even if he hadn't shown himself to be extraordinarily misogynistic and have an ugly personal history, his track record on economics -- always wrong, never admitting error or learning from it -- is utterly disqualifying.

  • Survival of the wrongest: "Evidence has a well-known liberal bias." Much more on Stephen Moore.

  • The great Republican abdication: "A party that no longer believes in American values." Wait! Aren't greed, hubris, and desperate schemes to rig every contest the ultimate American values? Those are clearly the hallmarks of the recent Republican Party, and those are traits one can question and denounce. But calling them un-American misses a big part of their appeal.

• Bill McKibben: To stop global catastrophe, we must believe in humans again: "We have the technology to prevent climate crisis. But now we need to unleash mass resistance too -- because collective action does work." Edited extract from his new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?. He also pleaded for mass resistance recently in Glaciers and Arctic ice are vanishing. Time to get radical before it's too late.

• Paul Mozur/Jonah M Kessel/Melissa Chan: Made in China, exported to the world: the surveillance state.

• Anna North: Trump's Fed pick wrote that women should be banned from March Madness: Well, actually he's written and said a lot of stupid things, not least on matters more germane to his appointment -- not that whether he's an asshole is irrelevant. As for Trump's other pick of a political hack for a Fed seat, see: Li Zhou: It's official: Herman Cain is not going to be on the Fed. Zhou also wrote: Young voters want more action on climate change -- even if it hurts the economy.

• Gabby Orr/Andrew Restuccia: How Stephen Miller made immigration personal.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • How to get away with obstructing justice.

  • What Donald Trump actually did in 2016, according to the Mueller report.

• Ben Protess/William K Rashbaum/Maggie Haberman: How Michael Cohen turned against President Trump.

• Eric Rauchway: Obama's original sin: "A new insider account reveals how the Obamas administration's botched bailout deal not only reinforced neoliberal Clintonism, but also foreshadowed an ongoing failure to fulfill campaign promises." Review of Reed Hundt: A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions. Reminds me that perhaps the first of those decisions was letting Clinton factotum John Podesta run the transition team, which initially penciled in such pivotal figures as Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers.

• Gabriela Resto-Montero: Most Americans believe Trump lied to them, but think impeachment is a bad idea. Related: Ella Nilsen: Democrats' impeachment dilemma, explained.

• James Risen: Unanswered questions in the Mueller report point to a sprawling Russian spy game.

• David Roberts:

  • Don't bother waiting for conservatives to come around on climate change. One sample quote:

    We know that personality traits can be pretty deeply embedded by early childhood, but we also know that which traits and dispositions are brought to the fore, individually and collectively, depends on circumstances. Crudely speaking, when people feel safe and cared for, they will be more open to extending the circle of care (that is, more liberal). When they feel anxious or threatened, they will be more inclined to draw the circle of care inward, i.e., to become more conservative.

    Right-wing media is a machine for scaring older white people -- i.e., for making them more conservative. A whole generation of young people has lost parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles to the Fox machine. It has dragged the political center to the right and slowed progressive reforms (like universal health care) that have been in place in other developed democracies for years. It will fight climate progress to its last breath.

  • Fox News has united the right against the Green New Deal. The left remains divided.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • "This was a coup": Trump escalates his authoritarian rhetoric. Trump goes on: "This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government." The unstated premise to that could only be, "L'état, c'est moi." Actually, the Mueller investigation was launched by Trump's own administration to rescue Trump from the appearance of having obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey, whose job involved investigating the lies and possible corruption of several Trump appointees, notably Michael Flynn.

  • Why Trump's tweets about Don McGahn and the Mueller report could backfire.

  • Trump's tweets are getting more unhinged.

  • Polling shows Fox News has been amazingly effective at shaping opinion on the Mueller report. Self self-selection as well: Fox viewers think that Mueller's report exonerates Trump by a 83-10 margin; MSNBC viewers break even harder the other direction, 7-90, while CNN is a bit less extreme, 17-71.

• Darren Samuelsohn/Andrew Desiderio/Kyle Cheney: 'This is risky': Trump's thirst for Mueller revenge could land him in trouble. Related: Andrew Restuccia: Mueller report exposes diminishing power of Trump denials: "The report has reignited a media debate about how seriously to take the White House's statements of fact."

• Eric Schmitt/David E Sanger/Maggie Haberman: In push for 2020 election security, top official was warned: don't tell Trump.

• Ben Schwartz: The trigger presidency: "How shock jock comedy gave way to Donald Trump's Republican Party.

• Dylan Scott: Trump's high-stakes subpoena battle with House Democrats, explained.

• Matt Shuham: Trump lets loose stunning falsehood that doctors, mothers 'execute' babies.

• Ben Taub:

  • How the War on Terror is being written: Starts on Guantánamo, ends with a long list of links to source documents. Midway, Taub notes:

    The year after [James] Mitchell published his memoir [Enhanced Interrogation], it was cited in a lengthy report by Physicians for Human Rights, which argues that the interrogation program represented "one of the gravest breaches of medical ethics" since the Nazi medical experiments during the Second World War.

    These documents -- along with contemporaneous reports and books by investigative journalists, academics, lawyers, and human-rights advocates -- make up an evolving draft of post-9/11 history. With each passing year, more details surface in memoirs, lawsuits, and military commissions, and the historical record comes into sharper focus. Millions of pages have come to light, and millions more remain classified. But, seventeen years into the war on terror, a core, uncomfortable fact remains: people on the receiving end of classified security programs -- from drone strikes to renditions and interrogations -- become aware of the outlines of secret U.S. national-security laws and practices long before American citizens have any clarity or say about what is being done in their name.

  • Guantánamo's darkest secret.

• Murray Waas: Mueller prosecutors: Trump did obstruct justice.

• Alex Ward:

  • Democrats want to challenge Trump's foreign policy in 2020. They're still working out how. Surprisingly little here, or maybe not given how readily Democrats have lined up behind the common consensus policies in place since shortly after WWII. Consider "the four main pillars of a progressive foreign policy (so far)":

    1. Confront climate change
    2. Democracy promotion and anti-corruption
    3. Strengthening alliances
    4. Rebuilding America

    I would have started off with negotiated demilitarization: securing treaties all around the world that resolve conflicts and reduce the military posture of all nations (especially the US). My second point would be to expand "democracy promotion and anti-corruption" to lean left, to support more power for workers and for women, while accepting that capital rights need to be limited and regulated. On trade, I'd work to limit (or in many cases eliminate) rents based on intellectual property. This in turn should lead to greater sharing of best practices in science and technology, which would help with problems like climate change, loss of biodiversity, etc. I'd also like to see some sort of international framework for dealing with migration. Democrats have done a miserable job of formulating foreign policy due to the old colonial mentality where they've never seen the rest of the world's peoples as our equals, and never recognized that our welfare is co-dependent on the world's. Another piece on trying to change Democratic strategy: David Klion: When will Washington end the Forever War?.

  • Sri Lanka suffered from decades of violence before the Easter Sunday bombings. Related: Samanth Subramanian: After the Easter bombings, Sri Lanka grapples with its history of violence.

• Robin Wright:

  • Trump's strange, tense campaign against Iran.

  • ISIS still has global reach, despite the Caliphate's collapse.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • We're not hearing enough from 2020 candidates about things they could do as president.

  • Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020: "Americans want outsiders, reformers, and fresh faces, not politicians with decades of baggage." Pretty much all you need to know about Biden in 2020, but not the only thing written this week. E.g.:

    • Moira Donegan: Anita Hill deserves a real apology. Why couldn't Joe Biden offer one?

    • Jill Filipovic: Joe Biden's policies are as troubling as his inappropriate touching.

    • German Lopez: Joe Biden's long record supporting the war on drugs and mass incarceration, explained.

    • Arwa Mahdawi: Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 -- and it won't end well this time either.

    • Jane Mayer: What Joe Biden hasn't owned up to about Anita Hill.

    • Jim Newell: The 2020 candidates smell blood: "The reason so many Democrats are running is they think Biden won't survive."

      The field in 2016 was so small not because politicians with national aspirations didn't exist, but because they thought Clinton -- with her name recognition, financial resources, party relationships, high early polling numbers, and general next-in-line aura -- was inevitable. She cleared the field of most competition because other mainstream candidates knew she would win (and non-mainstream Bernie figured she would too).

      Biden is something more like a 2016 Jeb Bush: a weak establishment favorite whose time might be past and -- should voters deprioritize his top perceived strength, electability -- who could soon face the wolves.

      Newell also wrote: Biden has successfullyl goaded Trump, which is exactly what he needs to do. One thing many Democrats will be looking for in primary season is the candidate who most effectively articulates their rage over Trump, and one of the best ways to do that is to get under his thin skin.

    • Nate Silver: How Joe Biden could win the 2020 Democratic Primary: Put a lot of weight on his initial poll lead, and hope nothing goes wrong.

    • Matt Taibbi: Is Joe Biden 'electable' or not? Thank God, nobody seems to know.

  • The Democratic establishment should chill out about Bernie Sanders.

    As Sanders continues to rate highly in national polls, many longtime party stalwarts are palpably agitated over a blend of personal grievances and overblown political and policy concerns. . . .

    As a personal matter, the establishment's response is understandable. Sanders, an independent Vermont senator, tends to portray the institutional Democratic Party as corrupt and relentlessly sows suspicion about the motives and integrity of everyone who disagrees with him. He treats the catastrophe of the 2016 election as a deserved rebuke to party leaders. And he brushes aside mountains of practical realities that others have spent years dealing with.

    But blowing up over this makes no sense. The whole point of a party establishment is to be cynical, detached, practical-minded, and realistic. If they assess Sanders's actual track record -- rather than his personally insulting rhetoric -- they'd discover a fairly unremarkable blue-state liberal who's good at winning elections and has extensive experience with the disappointing realities of the legislative process.

    Relevant here: Peter Daou: I was Bernie's biggest critic in 2016 -- I've changed my mind: "It would be an epic act of self-destruction for Democrats to try to hobble his campaign." Let's see if I can explain this in simple terms. During the Reagan-to-Trump era, Democrats have been preoccupied with raising money (cultivating donor support). Some, like Obama and the Clintons, have even done a good job of this, largely by promising that they'd do an even better job for business than the Republicans would -- something the stats clearly support. Meanwhile, the Democrats have let their base go to hell, and found their support eroding, even as Republicans have even less to offer. What Sanders is doing is rebuilding the Democratic Party base, by appealing to the people Democrats have been screwing for decades now. Attacking Sanders risks driving this base away, if not to the Republicans then to a third party or nothing. Sanders is doing the party a huge favor by not running as an independent. The party needs to reciprocate by welcoming him and his voters. They might even find, like Daou, that they'll learn something.

• Gary Younge: Brexit is not just a tragedy for Britain.

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Mar 2001