Weekend Roundup

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

Some scattered links this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Sarah Jones:

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

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

  • Work or starve, Trump administration tells poor people.

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

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

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

• Eric Levitz:

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

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

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

• Ian Millhiser:

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

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

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

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

• Aaron Rupar:

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

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

• John Quiggin: Virtue signalling and vice signalling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Peter Wade:

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

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

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

• Matthew Yglesias:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music Week

Expanded blog post, December archive (in progress).

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

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

New music:

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

Historical music:

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

Miscellaneous categories:

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

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

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

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

New records reviewed this week:

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

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

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

Old music:

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

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other scattered links for the last two weeks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Jonathan Chait:

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

  • Report: Trump business more fraudulent than previously known.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Masha Gessen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Ed Kilgore:

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

  • Perry says Trump is the 'Chosen One'.

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

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

• Paul Krugman:

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

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

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

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

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

• Eric Levitz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Andrew Prokop:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Emily Stewart:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Alex Ward:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Matthew Yglesias:

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

Music Week

Expanded blog post, November archive (finished).

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

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

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

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

New records reviewed this week:

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

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

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

Old music:

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

Grade (or other) changes:

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

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

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

Link Cache

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

• A few links on the Democratic presidential debate:

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

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

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

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

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

• Ed Kilgore:

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

  ?>

  • Perry says Trump is the 'Chosen One'.

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

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

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

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

• Andrew Prokop:

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

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

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

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

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

• Emily Stewart:

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

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

• Alex Ward:

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

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

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

• Matthew Yglesias:

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

Music Week

Expanded blog post, November archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32371 [32345] rated (+26), 221 [221] unrated (+0).

I've been dreading this date for more than a month now. I should be feeling relief that the worst-case scenario has been avoided, but I'm still feeling pretty shaken and tattered. Thought I'd celebrate by rustling up a fairly simple dinner on Tuesday -- a big pot of paella plus something for dessert -- for a small group, figuring that's the one thing I can still depend on my competency for. But at the moment I'm feeling overwhelmed by pressing work -- including lots of things I've been putting off.

Indeed, I had quite a bit I wanted to write about here, but will have to cut very short. One thing that will seem obvious from the list below is that Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide: November 2019 came out on Wednesday. As the column currently depends on paid subscribers, I've held back the grade schematic from previous news rolls, but I will note a few things here: three pick hits are albums I previously graded A- (Raphael Saadiq: Jimmy Lee; Rachid Taha: Je Suis Africain; Jamila Woods: Legacy! Legacy!). Three more I came up short on, but revised my grades below: Kim Gordon: No Home Record; Sonic Youth: Battery Park; and That Dog: Old LP. I don't often change my grades after a Christgau review -- the only other time it's happened this year was The Coathangers: The Devil You Know.

My initial assessments of the first two were pretty close to the mark, but at the time I didn't feel like giving them the extra play they needed, and took that as a sign. That left one new record I hadn't gotten to (Ed Sheeran's -- well, more if you count the HMs, where I struck out), and two old ones where I was familiar with the music from other packages: I have two Spaniels CDs on Collectables which match the 2-CD Jasmine compilation closely, and I've heard all of the music on the 8-CD Bud Powell bargain box -- my previous grades (I have the two Trio albums on Roost combined on a single Roulette CD):

1. Bud Powell Trio (1951) -- in The Bud Powell Trio Plays (1947-53, Roulette) [A-]
2. The Amazing Bud Powell (1951) -- (1949-51, Blue Note) [A]
3. The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 2 (1953) -- (1951-53, Blue Note) [A-]
4. Bud Powell Trio Volume 2 (1953) -- in The Bud Powell Trio Plays (1947-53, Roulette) [A-]
5. The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 3: Bud! (1957) -- (1957, Blue Note) [B+]
6. The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 4: Time Waits (1958) -- (1958, Blue Note) [A-]
7. Blues in the Closet (1958) -- (1956, Verve) [B+(**)]
8. The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 5: The Scene Changes (1959) -- (1958, Blue Note) [A-]

I should note that my 2019 ratings and music tracking files have continued to grow (927 new releases rated so far, 3167 records listed). I've also done a very preliminary sort of my top-rated jazz and non-jazz records, showing 67 A/A- jazz records vs. 54 non-jazz. Last year at this time the split was 46-46, which I noted at the time was unusually balanced. Not easy to dig up stats on previous years, but I suspect 2016 was more typical, with a 61-41 jazz/non-jazz split. In most years, the numbers eventually even out, but I typically hold off on non-jazz records until I see them show up in EOY lists. One thing I should emphasize here is that the current lists are a first pass, and I expect the rank order to shift a lot in the near future. The other thing is that I will keep adding to (and otherwise reshuffling) those two files well into 2020 (as I've done in years past).

I should also note that my metacritic list is still growing. I started this file with mid-year lists, then added points based on grades (mostly as reported by AOTY and Metacritic). I don't have any actual EOY lists factored in (the first usually show up just before Thanksgiving, so . . . next week), but have added new records as they come out. First place has tottered between Sharon Van Etten and Billie Eilish all years, with Van Etten recently back on top. If I had time, I'd speculate on where I see the EOY lists going, based on this research (factoring in certain data artifacts), but will have to skip that for now.

Final point I wanted to make is that Francis Davis is running his 14th Annual Jazz Critics Poll, and once again I'll try to help out. I also don't have time to speculate on likely standings there -- indeed, I've given the subject very little thought, and doubt my metacritic file sheds much light on it at this point. One thing I do want to pass along from the invite letter is this:

One last request. I need your help to expand the poll's voter base. If you can recommend any writers, bloggers, broadcasters, or podcasters you believe are qualified but believe I've overlooked, please let me know as soon as possible.

I'd be happy to forward any critic nominations.

New records reviewed this week:

• Lolly Allen: Coming Home (2016 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Jon Batiste: Anatomy of Angels: Live at the Village Vanguard (2018 [2019], Verve): [r]: B+(*)
• Jon Batiste: Chronology of a Dream: Live at the Village Vanguard (2018 [2019], Verve): [r]: B+(*)
• Gerald Cleaver & Violet Hour: Live at Firehouse 12 (2019, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• The DIVA Jazz Orchestra: DIVA + the Boys (2017 [2019], MCG Jazz): [cd]: B+(*)
• DJ Shadow: Our Pathetic Age (2019, Mass Appeal, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• FKA Twigs: Magdalene (2019, Young Turks): [r]: B
• Gauche: A People's History of Gauche (2016-18 [2019], Merge): [r]: B+(***)
• Charles Gayle/Giovanni Barcella/Manolo Cabras: The Alto Sessions (2017 [2019], El Negocito): [bc]: B+(**)
• Ben Goldberg: Good Day for Cloud Fishing (2017 [2019], Pyroclastic): [r]: B
• Laura Jurd: Stepping Back, Jumping In (2019, Edition): [r]: B
• Kneebody: Chapters (2018-19 [2019], Edition): [r]: B+(*)
• Kodian Trio: III (2019, Trost): [r]: B+(***)
• Konstrukt + Ken Vandermark: Kozmik Bazaar (2018 [2019], Karlrecords): [r]: B+(**)
• Liquid Quintet [Agustí Fernández/Artur Majewski/Albert Cirera/Rafal Mazur/Ramon Prats]: Flux (2017 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(**)
• Made to Break: F4 Fake (2017 [2019], Trost): [r]: A-
• Rachel Musson/Pat Thomas/Mark Sanders: Shifa: Live at Cafe Oto (2019, 577): [r]: B+(**)
• Bob Ravenscroft & Inner Journeys: Phantasmagoria (2019, OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Bria Skonberg: Nothing Never Happens (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(***)
• SLD Trio: El Contorno Del Espacio (2018 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(**)
• Tierney Sutton Band: ScreenPlay (2019, BFM Jazz): [r]: B+(***)
• Pat Thomas and Kwashibu Area Band: Obiaa! (2019, Strut): [r]: B+(**)
• Threnody [Johan Berthling/Martin Küchen/Steve Noble]: A Paradigm of Suspicion (2018 [2019], Trost): [r]: B+(***)
• Jonah Tolchin: Fires for the Cold (2019, Yep Roc): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Future: Monster (2014 [2019], Freebandz): [r]: B+(***)
• ICP Orchestra: ICP Orchestra in Albuquerque: The Outpost Performance Space, March 17th, 2003 (2003 [2019], ICP): [bc]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Charles Gayle/Giovani Barcella/Manolo Cabras: Live in Belgium (2015 [2017], El Negocito): [bc]: B+(***)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Kim Gordon: No Home Record (2019, Matador): [r]: [was: B+(***)] A-
• Sonic Youth: Battery Park, NYC, July 4th 2008 (2008 [2019], Matador): [r]: [was: B+(***)] A-
• That Dog: Old LP (2019, UMe): [r]: [was: B+(**)]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Georg Graewe/Ernest Reijseger/Gerry Hemingway: Kammern I-V (2009, Auricle)
• Isabelle Olivier/Rez Abbasi: OASIS (Enja/Yellowbird) [12-06]
• Sonar With David Torn: Tranceportation (Volume 1) (RareNoise): cdr [11-29]

Weekend Roundup

Once again, no time for introduction.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem: Trump just issued multiple war crime pardons. Experts think it's a bad idea.

• Andrew Bacevich: Trump isn't really trying to end America's wars.

• David Bromwich: The medium is the mistake: Review of James Poniewozik: Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America, and Matt Taibbi: Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another. I got a lot out of the former book, and think it gets raked unfairly here -- not that I won't give Bromwich a couple of his points (The Beverly Hillbillies, Playboy). I've seen some parts of Taibbi's book, but didn't read them closely, and don't have a clear picture of the whole. Taibbi's first book on campaigning, Spanking the Donkey, was very sharp, not just on the candidates but on the press covering them (that's where he wrote up his Wimblehack brackets). Since then he's developed his own idiosyncratic version of "fair and balanced" centrism, which sometimes wears my patience thin. By the way, Bromwich has a recent book I hadn't noticed, but should take a look at: American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us. I'm also intrigued by parts of his earlier Moral Imagination: Essays. Just to pick one almost random quote from the latter's preface:

  We ought to describe as "terrorist" any act of deliberate violence that compasses the deaths of innocent persons in order to achieve a political end. State terror, such as Britain practiced in Kenya, Russia in Chechnya and the U.S. in Iraq -- state terror, as exemplified by our own state among others -- differs morally in no way from the terror of the people we are in the habit of calling terrorists. Moral imagination affirms the kinship in evil of these two sorts of violence.

• Laura Bult/Liz Scheltens: America's wilderness is for sale.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Impeachment and the Stone verdict show Trump is surrounded by criminals.

  • Ben Shapiro: Trump is too dumb to commit an impeachable offense: "But smart enough to be president for a second term"?

  • House Republicans lash out because they can't defend Trump's conduct: E.g., "Devin Nunes's crazy rant."

  • Trump tells crowd Ivanka has created 14 million new jobs: "Over 200 percent of all new jobs under Trump have been personally created by Ivanka. Impressive."

• Isaac Chotiner: How a Trump administration proposal could worsen public health: "Now, the Trump administration has proposed a new measure that would limit the research that the Environmental Protection Agency can use when regulating public health." Interview with Douglas Dockery.

• Jason Del Rey: The Seattle politician Amazon tried to oust has declared victory: Kshama Sawant.

• Masha Gessen:

  • What "corruption" means in the impeachment hearings.

  • The two irreconcilable realities of the impeachment hearings.

• David Graeber: Against economics: Review of Robert Skidelsky: Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics. Skidelsky is best known as Keynes' biographer, and wrote what was for all intents and purposes Keynes' reply to the 2008 collapse (Keynes: The Return of the Master), but seems to venture further here -- which Graeber, an anarchist-anthropologist whose most famous book was called Debt, applauds. Lots of interesting points here, including a discussion of money which echoes some points Art Protin's tried to convince me of last week. Of course, the following nugget helped convince me they're on solid ground:

  Surely there's nothing wrong with creating simplified models. Arguably, this is how any science of human affairs has to proceed. But an empirical science then goes on to test those models against what people actually do, and adjust them accordingly. This is precisely what economists did not do. Instead, they discovered that, if one encased those models in mathematical formulae completely impenetrable to the noninitiate, it would be possible to create a universe in which those premises could never be refuted. . . .

  The problem, as Skidelsky emphasizes, is that if your initial assumptions are absurd, multiplying them a thousandfold will hardly make them less so. Or, as he puts it, rather less gently, "lunatic premises lead to mad conclusions." . . .

  Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights here, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century's problems. The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same problem we are now facing: i.e., how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth. This demands a different science.

• Michael M Grynbaum: Blloomberg's teamcalls his crude remarks on women 'wrong'.

• Jeet Heer: The foreign policy establishment is hijacking impeachment. Trump has done hundreds of things that I would be happy to impeach him for, but to be real, impeachment needs a broad consensus, and the FPE has expanded that from roughly half of the Democrats in the House to all of them. So that puts them first in line to level charges, even if they pick a few that I wouldn't prioritize.

• Sean Illing:

  • The post-truth prophets: "Postmodernism predicted our post-truth hellscape. Everyone still hates it." Not his usual interview, although it's likely he's done interviews in this vein. I stopped paying attention to social theory around 1975, so I missed Lyotard's 1979 book where he coined the term postmodernism -- I did read precursors like Baudrillard, Foucault, and Lacan, but can't say as I ever got much out of them. The term meant nothing to me for a long time, before I came up with my own definition, using it to describe a world that had lost all sense of direction -- the one thing modernism promised -- and therefore let any damn thing go. I saw this most clearly in architecture, eventually in other arts, but it always remained something of a grab bag. What it might possibly mean for politics is especially hard to pin down, maybe because none of the rival claimants for a modernist politics ever got close to their intrinsic limits.

  • Did Trump just commit witness tampering? I asked 7 legal experts. "Probably not, but here's why it likely doesn't matter anyway."

  • Why we need a more forgiving legal system: Interview with Martha Minow, author of When Should Law Forgive?

• Alex Isenstadt: Louisiana delivers Trump a black eye: "The president lost two of three gubernatorial elections in conservative Southern states, raising questions about his standing heading into 2020." Louisiana just re-elected Democrat John Bel Edwards to a second term as governor.

• Molly Jong-Fast: Why Trump attacked Marie Yovanovitch: "He can't help but go after women, even when doing so hurts his cause."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Warren proposes two-step plan to implement Medicare for All. I see this as a fair and reasoned bow to the inevitable, not that I have any problem with Sanders sticking with his full-blown plan: how to get there matters, but not as much as knowing where you want to go. I could imagine even more steps along the way. M4A faces two major challenges: one is the money that is currently paid to private insurance companies over to the public program (most of that money is controlled by employers, who would like to keep it themselves); the other is getting the providers integrated into the M4A network, preferably on terms that allow M4A to better manage costs without reducing service. Warren's "head tax" is one way of dealing with the former (not an ideal solution, but should work as a bridge gap). Few people talk about the latter, probably because Medicare already has a large service network, but even there Advantage plans limit the network, and similar limits are common with private insurance plans. On the other hand, M4A would be more efficient (which is to say affordable) if providers dealt exclusively with it. I think this opens up three ideas that I've never seen really discussed. The first key is realizing that for well into the future private insurers will still be able to sell supplemental insurance plans. I'm on Medicare, but I still buy a "Medigap" private health insurance policy, which picks up virtually all of the deductibles and miscellaneous charges Medicare sticks you with. Sanders wants to eliminate all of those charges, but anything short of his plan will leave the insurance companies a viable market. Most practical implementations of M4A will leave a role for supplemental insurance. Doesn't this imply that M4A won't totally end the need for private insurance, but will simply shift it from primary to supplemental coverage? This opens up another way to incrementally shift to M4A: start by insuring everyone for certain conditions, and expand that list as you build up a general tax base to support it (part of the tax could be on private insurance premiums, which could be cost-neutral for the insurance companies). Some obvious candidates for the initial list: ER trauma, vaccinations, pre-natal care and deliveries. Another idea would be to start investing more funds into non-profit provider networks (which could be built around existing public providers, like the VA). Under M4A Medicaid wouldn't be needed as a second-class insurer, but could be repurposed to build affordable and accessible clinics, which would compete effectively with for-profit providers, and thereby help manage costs.

  • Bevin concedes after Republicans decline to help him steal the election.

  • Deval Patrick is officially running for President. Two-term governor of Massachusetts, a black politician who's open for business, so much so that after politics he went to work for Mitt Romney's vulture capital firm, Bain Capital. I recall that Thomas Frank, in Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Part of the People, looked past the Clintons to single Patrick out, along with Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emmanuel, as prominent Democrats always eager to sell out to business interests. Patrick's hat in the ring tells us that certain donors are spooked by Warren and Sanders, are convinced Biden will collapse, realize that none of the Senators (Booker, Harris, Klobuchar) have attracted enough interest, and doubt Buttigieg can expand beyond his niche. Those donors have been pushing several names recently, including Bloomberg (who has even more negatives), but Patrick is the first to nibble. The problem is that unless you're looking for financial favors, it's hard to see any reason for anyone to pick Patrick over anyone else in the middle of the Democratic Party road. Also on Patrick: Matt Taibbi: Deval Patrick's candidacy is another chapter in the Democrats' 2020 clown car disaster.

  • Nikki Haley's skillful and opportunistic MAGA balancing act: "Once again, Nikki Haley has figured out how to keep herself in the news as a potential Trump-Pence successor while declaring her Trumpist loyalties."

  • Is Buttigieg's presidential bid buoyed by male privilege? Amy Klobuchar seems to think so. I don't doubt that lots of people have lots of prejudices governing their preferences, but such a claim isn't going to change anything. Among moderate ("no we can't") candidates, maybe Buttigieg and Biden have advantages other than sex -- one's an old establishment figure, the other is a complete outsider not tainted by past failures. Besides, didn't Hillary break the "glass ceiling" for wimpy moderates (at least in the Democratic primaries)? You could just as well argue that Cory Booker hasn't taken off due to white privilege, but Obama didn't seem to have that problem.

• German Lopez:

  • Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, California: what we know: "At least one person was killed and five others, including the gunman, were injured."

  • Support for marijuana legalization is at an all-time high in a new poll.

• Alec MacGillis: The case against Boeing. Specifically, regarding the 737 MAX. One can make lots of other cases against Boeing, perhaps not all "proving that the company put profit over safety," but profit is never far from management's thinking.

• Ian Millhiser: 3 ways the Supreme Court could decide DACA's fate.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Roger Stone was just found guilty on all counts. Also on Stone: Jeffrey Toobin: Roger Stone's crimes.

  • /Alex Ward: 4 main takeaways from Marie Yovanovitch's impeachment hearing.

  • 4 takeaways from the first impeachment hearing.

• Emily Raboteau: Lessons in survival: Review of two books: Elizabeth Rush: Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, and Gilbert M Gaul: The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts.

  Both make the controversial case for managed retreat as our best defense, given the scale of the problem. This approach calls for withdrawing rather than rebuilding after disasters, and would include government buyout programs to finance the resettlement of homeowners from vulnerable areas.

• Robert Reich: Warren doesn't just frighten billionaires -- she scares the whole establishment.

• David Roberts: With impeachment, America's epistemic crisis as arrived: "Can the right-wing machine hold the base in an alternate reality long enough to get through the next election?"

  They [the right] are working with a few key tools and advantages. The first is a strong tendency, especially among low-information, relatively disengaged voters (and political reporters), to view consensus as a signal of legitimacy. It's an easy and appealing heuristic: If something is a good idea, it would have at least a few people from both sides supporting it. That's why "bipartisan" has been such a magic word in US politics this century, even as the reality of bipartisanship has faded.

  Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was very canny in recognizing this tendency and working it it ruthlessly to his advantage. He realized before Obama ever set foot in office that if he could keep Republicans unified in opposition, refusing any cooperation on anything, he could make Obama appear "polarizing." His great insight, as ruthlessly effective as it was morally bankrupt, was that he could unilaterally deny Obama the ability to be a uniter, a leader, or a deal maker. Through nothing but sheer obstinance, he could make politics into an endless, frustrating, fruitless shitshow, diminishing both parties in voters' eyes.

  This is what Republicans need more than anything on impeachment: for the general public to see it as just another round of partisan squabbling, another illustration of how "Washington" is broken. They need to prevent any hint of bipartisan consensus from emerging.

  Roberts refers to several previous articles, worth collecting here, starting with his own:

  • Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology. [2017-05-19]

  • America is facing an epistemic crisis: "What if Mueller proves his case and it doesn't matter?" [2017-11-02]

  • Why is this happening? "Chris Hayes speaks with journalist David Roberts about how the erosion of trust and manipulation of information has impacted the conservative movement."

  • Alex Pareene: The long, lucrative right-wing grift is blowing up in the world's face.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • How a bad-faith attack on Schiff made its way from Twitter to Trump's lips.

  • Coverage of the first impeachment hearing illustrates how the media is falling short.

  • Trump prepared for impeachment hearings with an epic Fox News binge. You know, I'm not a big impeachment fan, but I do find it gratifying how much he squirms. It seems to me he would be much better off just shrugging it off -- maybe even pointing out that it's little different than the impeachment show the Republicans ran on Clinton in 1998, and implying that it's unlikely to be any more successful.

• Dominic Rushe: Boo-hoo billionaires: why America's super-wealthy are afraid for 2020.

• Dylan Scott: Trump's big veterans health care plan has hit a snag. The "big plan" is to privatize health care services for veterans who don't live close enough to heavily used VA facilities. Once again, the privateers have overestimated the competency of the private sector, and underestimated its rapacity.

• Emily Stewart: "ok billionaire": Elizabeth Warren is leaning into her billionaire battle.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Michael Bloomberg apologizes for stop-and-frisk: 'I was wrong'. And this is supposed to restore our faith in his judgment?

  • Trump's hospital visit is still a mystery.

  • Trump does Erdogan's post-invasion PR for him in joint press conference.

• Jim Tankersley/Peter Eavis/Ben Casselman: How FedEx cut its tax bill to $0: "The company, like much of corporate America, has not made good on its promised investment surge from President Trump's 2017 tax cuts."

• Peter Wade: 'You're done': Conservative radio host fired mid-show for criticizing Trump.

• Alex Ward: The one big policy change 2020 Democrats want to make for veterans, explained.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • One advantage of Elizabeth Warren's employer health fee plan: It polls well.

  • The difference between good and bad state polls, explained.

  • The case for taking Trump's black outreach seriously.

Daily Log

Robert Christgau published his November 2019 Consumer Guide today. One of the records reviewed there was Bud Powell: Eight Classic Albums (Real Gone -4CD). The eight albums are:

1. Bud Powell Trio (1951) -- in The Bud Powell Trio Plays (1947-53, Roulette) [A-]
2. The Amazing Bud Powell (1951) -- (1949-51, Blue Note) [A]
3. The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 2 (1953) -- (1951-53, Blue Note) [A-]
4. Bud Powell Trio Volume 2 (1953) -- in The Bud Powell Trio Plays (1947-53, Roulette) [A-]
5. The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 3: Bud! (1957) -- (1957, Blue Note) [B+]
6. The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 4: Time Waits (1958) -- (1958, Blue Note) [A-]
7. Blues in the Closet (1958) -- (1956, Verve) [B+(**)]
8. The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 5: The Scene Changes (1959) -- (1958, Blue Note) [A-]

Music Week

Expanded blog post, November archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 32345 [32307] rated (+38), 221 [220] unrated (+1).

Pressure continues to build on my psych crisis. Hoped for a break today, but may have underestimated the holiday. Maybe tomorrow? I've been in a rut for nearly a month, getting damn little done. Still, might as well knock this out. Don't actually have much to say about it, anyway.

Next week will either be much better . . . or worse.

New records reviewed this week:

• Ben Allison/Steve Cardenas/Ted Nash: Quiet Revolution (2018, Sonic Camera): [r]: B+(***)
• Byron Asher: Byron Asher's Skrontch Music (2018 [2019], Sinking City): [r]: B+(**)
• The Bad Plus: Activate Infinity (2019, Edition): [r]: B+(**)
• Kenny Barron & Mulgrew Miller: The Art of Piano Duo: Live (2005-11 [2019], Sunnyside): [r]: A-
• Harold Danko/Kirk Knuffke: Play Date (2018 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (2018 [2019], Origin, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***) [11-15]
• Andy Fusco: Vortex (2017 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Mary Halvorson & John Dieterich: A Tangle of Stars (2018 [2019], New Amsterdam): [r]: B+(**)
• Kevin Hays/Mark Turner/Marc Miralta: Where Are You (2018 [2019], Fresh Sound New Talent): [r]: B+(***)
• Zlatko Kaucic Quintet: Morning Patches (2018 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(*)
• Michael Kiwanuka: Kiwanuka (2019, Polydor): [r]: B+(*)
• Kronos Quartet: Terry Riley: Sun Rings (2019, Nonesuch): [r]: B
• Travis Laplante: Human (2018 [2019], New Amsterdam): [r]: B
• Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage: Bad Wiring (2019, Don Giovanni): [r]: B+(***)
• Joe Morris & Evan Parker: The Village (2014 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(**)
• Ted Nash/Steve Cardenas/Ben Allison: Somewhere Else: West Side Story Songs (2019, Plastic Sax): [r]: B+(**)
• One O'Clock Lab Band: Lab 2019 (2019, North Texas Jazz): [cd]: B+(*) [11-22]
• Evan Parker/Lotte Anker/Torben Snekkestad: Inferences (2016 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(*)
• Marta Sánchez Quintet: El Rayo De Luz (2019, Fresh Sound New Talent): [cd]: A-
• Sirkis/Bialas IQ: Our New Earth (2018 [2019], Moonjune, 2CD): [cd]: B+(**)
• That Dog: Old LP (2019, UMe): [r]: B+(**)
• Jeremy Udden: Three in Paris (2018 [2019], Sunnyside): [r]: B+(***)
• Michael Zilber: East West: Music for Big Bands (2018 [2019], Origin, 2CD): [cd]: B+(*) [11-15]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Bulawayo Blue Yodel (1950s [2019], Olvido): [bc]: B+(**)
• Lloyd McNeill: Treasures (1970 [2019], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
• Lee Moses: How Much Longer Must I Wait? Singles & Rarities 1965-1972 (1965-72 [2019], Light in the Attic): [bc]: B+(**)
• Phil Ranelin: Collected 2003-2019 (2003-19 [2019], Wide Hive, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Tribe: Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014 (1990-2014 [2019], Art Yard/Strut): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Ben Allison: The Stars Look Very Different Today (2013, Sonic Camera): [r]: B+(*)
• Ben Allison: Layers of the City (2017, Sonic Camera): [r]: B+(**)
• Harold Danko: After the Rain (1994 [1995], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Harold Danko Quartet: Tidal Breeze (1995-96 [1997], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• Lloyd McNeill and Marshall Hawkins: Tanner Suite (1969 [2015], Universal Sound): [r]: B+(*)
• Lee Moses: Time and Place (1971, Maple): [r]: B+(***)
• Phil Ranelin: A Close Encounter of the Very Best Kind (1996, Lifeforce): [r]: B+(***)
• Phil Ranelin: Living a New Day (2005, Wide hive): [r]: B+(**)
• Phil Ranelin & Tribe Renaissance: Reminiscence: Live! (2009, Wide Hive): [r]: B+(***)
• Phil Ranelin: Portrait in Blue (2015, Wide Hive): [r]: B+(***)
• Pamela Samiha Wise: A New Message From the Tribe (2017, Tribe): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Lolly Allen: Coming Home (OA2) [11-15]
• The Diva Jazz Orchestra: Diva + the Boys (MCG Jazz)
• Rozina Pátkai: Taladim (Tom-Tom)
• Charlie Porter: Immigration Nation (OA2) [11-15]
• Bob Ravenscroft & Inner Journeys: Phantasmagoria (OA2) [11-15]
• Toh-Kichi: Baikamo (Libra)

Weekend Roundup

Another "going through the motions" week, so no introduction. I noted a friend of a friend commenting that people don't realize how much time it's going to take after the 2020 election to undo the damage Trump has inflicted (and is continuing to, no doubt with a special flurry after he gets beat, including a bunch of pre-emptive pardons). This person was citing the difficulties Laura Kelly has faced since becoming governor of Kansas, but it's a general rule. For me, the best election news last week was the defeat of Wichita Mayor Jeff Longwell, who spent his term making shady deals with real estate developers. One of those was to wreck McLean Boulevard, which used to hug the river from 13th North to Pawnee (23rd South), but now will have its downtown passage moved so realtors can offer exclusive river views. Unlikely that would ever have passed a public vote, but it's also unlikely that the new mayor will be able to undo the blight. Of course, a big part of Kelly's problem is that the state legislature is still controlled by Republicans. The bigger the Democratic wave in 2020, but more a new president will be able to do. But still, the task list is daunting, and growing every day.

Some scattered links this week:

• Sasha Abramsky: Trump throws more red meat to nativists, polluters, and evangelicals.

• Meher Ahmad: Austerity blues: "After sixty years of IMF intervention, Pakistan has little to show for it." Also: "The IMF bailout of today is far from what Keynes had envisioned for his lender of last resort: it does less to lift economies than break them in to be fit for Western interaction -- or exploitation."

• Robert P Alvarez: Republicans, not Russians, threaten our elections: "When turnout climbs, Republicans lose. No wonder they're closing polling places and purging voters all over the country."

• Jillian Ambrose: Fracking halted in England in major government U-turn.

• Andrew Bacevich: The Berlin Wall fell and the US learned the wrong lessons. It got us Donald Trump.

• Zack Beauchamp: What the right fears about Warren's wealth tax.

• Phyllis Bennis: Trump has stolen the anti-war mantle. Here's how to get it back.

• Michael Birnbaum: While Washington is checked out, Macron is pushing to lead the Western world. Here's a cluster of articles on NATO, reflecting the decline of American influence and interest. Others:

  • Ted Galen Carpenter: What's really undermining NATO? Europe's yearning for neutrality.

  • Jacob Heilbrunn: Emmanuel Macron is right: NATO is over: Starts with Lord Ismay's explanation that the purpose of NATO was to "keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." One might make a sensible argument that none of those things matter much these days, therefore neither does NATO. On the other hand, this veers off into insanity:

    The moment has arrived for France and Germany to adopt more than baby steps to make Europe great again. This would require them to establish a Franco-German condominium to assert their interests, including the joint development of new nuclear weapons to deter Russia and China. It would also allow Europe to win an independent footing from an increasingly hostile United States.

    Need I remind you that Europe's previous claim to greatness was built on the rape and pillage of the rest of the world, starting with the looting and extermination of the Americas and the enslavement of Africans. I'm always struck by the fact that British rule reduced India's share of world GDP from 20% to 5%. The post-colonial period hasn't been much more generous, as political control was sub-contracted to locals committed to preserving capitalism's property rights.

• Jonathan Blitzer: The Trump administration's plot to end DACA faces a Supreme Court test.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • New GOP Ukraine defense: Trump was just a patsy for Sondland.

  • Pretending Trump wants to stop corruption is the GOP's most insulting lie yet.

• David Daley: Secret gerrymandering files can now be made public, court rules.

• Julia Davis: Thanks to Rand Paul, Russian media are naming the alleged whistleblower. Two caveats here: one is that Davis doesn't repeat the unmasking; the other is that she seems to have cultivated a niche in painting Trump as Putin's puppet. E.g., see: Trump's Syria fiasco is part of Putin's to-do list. She filed that one under the tag "Donald J. Subservient."

• Jason Del Rey: Amazon tried to buy a new Seattle City Council. It doesn't look like it worked.

• Barbara Ehrenreich: The humanoid stain: "Art lessons from our cave-dwelling ancestors."

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

• Benjamin Y Fong/Christie Offenbacher: Medicare for All is a strategy.

• Constance Grady: 75 books from university presses that will help you understand the world.

• Mehdi Hasan: Bernie Sanders says denying aid because of Hamas is "part of an effort to dehumanize Palestinians".

• Adam Hochschild: When America tried to deport its radicals: Emma Goldman, for instance, a hundred years ago..

• Sean Illing:

  • Bullshit jobs: why they exist and why you might have one: Interview with David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

  • How TV paved America's road to Trump: Interview with James Poniewozik, author of Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America. I'm currently reading this book, and it's helping to connect a lot of dots.

  • The rot at the heart of American democracy: Interview with Daniel Ziblatt, co-author with Steve Levitsky of How Democracies Die.

• Daniel Immerwahr: The center does not hold: Review of Jill Lepore's books: These Truths: A History of the United States, and This America: The Case for the Nation.

• Umair Irfan: Virginia Democrats campaigned on their Green New Deal and fighting climate change. And won.

• Sarah Jones:

  • Kentucky voters rejected austerity. You know, in some ways Matt Bevin's win four years ago was a bigger surprise than his loss this week. All the things that made him "the most unpopular governor of any state" were well known then, but Republicans cracked the whip and delivered him a comfortable margin. Harder to do that a second time, although party discipline still made the race extremely close.

  • A Chilean activist explains the protests: 'people in the streets are experiencing an awakening'.

  • How can Democrats win back rural America? Related: Annie Gowen: 'I'm gonna lose everything': "A farm family struggles after rising debt pushes a husband to suicide."

  • Sad billionaire cries because he feels so misunderstood: "Why is everyone being so mean to Leon Cooperman?"

• Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein: The tears of the taxed: "Ignore the rich: tax opposition has never been about liberty."

• Fred Kaplan: Loyalty vs Democracy: "The impeachment transcripts say Republicans have to choose between Trump and America's political future." No prizes for hed writing here, as Republicans haven't trusted democracy for some time now, and most would be happy if Trump were the future. Moreover, while I'm not going to argue that Democrats shouldn't impeach Trump, the fate of democracy in America depends much more on the outcome of the 2020 elections and the build up of a political movement that is strong enough to overcome Republican obstruction -- something the currently constituted Congress is not able to do.

• Nicole Karlis: Thanks to Trump, STD rates hit a record high: "Trump's pro-life policies and attacks on reproductive health care are having repercussions beyond the GOP's intent."

  Titled "Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance Report," the report noted that in 2018, there were more than 2.4 million syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia infections combined -- an increase of more than 100,000 from the previous year.

  There was also a 71 percent increase in syphilis cases since 2014, along with a 22 percent increase from 2017 in the number of newborn deaths related to congenital syphilis.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Bloomberg to follow the not-so-successful Giuliani strategy in the primaries. The former New York City major, after months of first flirting with running for president then publicly deciding not to, filed last week to appear on the ballot in Alabama, just beating the deadline there. Presumably he's just keeping his options open, as opposed to making a strategic bet that there's serious interest in him down there. Still, he got a ton of publicity, even if the bottom line is that he has no chance, even if he floods the primaries with money. That's basically because he's a DINO: maybe his support for gun control makes him a non-starter in the Republican Party, but he doesn't offer any reason for rank-and-file Democrats to give him a moment's thought. His commitment to finance-based oligarchy is as deeply seated as his membership in same. The media may slot him as a "moderate," but his reaction to Occupy Wall Street was as rabid as Bull Connor's to civil rights marches. Hmm, maybe that explains Alabama? But doesn't he know that Connor's ilk are all Republicans now? More links on Bloomberg here:

    • David Byler: Hey, Michael Bloomberg, no one wants you to run for president.

    • John Cassidy: A Bloomberg presidential campaign would likely be a costly folly.

    • Jason Del Rey: Jeff Bezos asked Mike Bloomberg months ago if he's consider running for president.

    • Eric Levitz: Michael Bloomberg's ego is an agent of socialist change.

    • Nathaniel Rakish: How seriously should we take Michael Bloomberg's potential 2020 run? There's a good chart here which illustrates Bloomberg's problem succinctly. Y-axis is "net favorability rating" and x-axis is "share of Democrats with an opinion." Nearly everyone is very close to the trendline -- Buttigieg a bit above, Gabbard a bit below, the only ones with more space from the line than their avatar size are Biden (above), and Bloomberg way down and right (i.e., more people had an opinion of him than of Harris, but his favorability came in between Terry McAuliffe and Sherrod Brown). This was "early 2019" -- my guess is that since then Biden has returned to the trend line, the Harris-Booker-O'Rourke cluster has faded some, and Bloomberg has sunk even further.

    • Matthew Rosza: Bernie Sanders to Michael Bloomberg: "You ain't going to buy this election".

    • Matthew Yglesias: A Michael Bloomberg presidential run is unlikely to help moderate Democrats' cause.

  • Three years later, Trump has lost the element of surprise: "Memories of the shock of Election Night 2016 could become a strategic asset for Democrats, who sure won't get over-confident in 2020."

  • House Dems want to give America impeachment for Christmas.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Trump reportedly wanted Bill Barr to give a press conference about his Ukraine call.

  • Iraq's protests, explained.

• Sharon Lerner: Top US toxicologist was barred from saying PFAS cause disease in humans. She's saying it now.

• Nancy LeTourneau: Trump hires a con artist to provide outreach to white evangelicals: Paula White.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Leftism isn't very appealing to nonvoters. But Bernie Sanders is.

  • The GOP's opposition to impeachment is (terrifyingly) principled: "To many conservatives, Democrats (and/or popular democracy) are a greater threat to America than [XXX]." The actual quote said "Vladimir Putin," but you can fill that in with lots of things -- the author picks on Putin because lots of liberals instinctively regard him as an actual threat, even if the only concrete example they can give was the support Russian hackers gave to electing Trump. The fact is that conservatives have never trusted democracy, and have regularly done everything in their power to game it in their favor.

• Martin Longman:

  • I wish Joe Biden would stop saying Republicans can reform.

  • Why the left can't walk away from its farmer-labor roots.

• Alan Macleod: Multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi warns "fellow leftists": Medicare for All is a very bad idea. She's also knocking the wealth tax.

• Amanda Marcotte:

  • Sorry, pundits: The problem isn't "polarization" -- Republicans have lost their damn minds.

  • Now Mike Bloomberg wants to run:Why are these whiny billionaires up in our faces?

• Dylan Matthews:

  • The Trump Foundation was a sham. We have no idea how many other foundations are, too.

  • Why the left should worry more about AI. Refers to Kelsey Piper: The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity. Also: Sigal Samuel: Some AI just shouldn't exist. Also, an interview with Virginia Eubanks, author of Automating Inequality (2018).

• Katie Mettler: Nobody is buying Mark Halperin's book. The disgraced journalist's publisher lambastes 'cancel culture.' First week's sales of How to Beat Trump: America's Top Political Strategists on What It Will Take totaled 502. Halperin gained some fame when he co-wrote (with John Heilemann) a big book on the 2008 election (Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, but he's now viewed as the very definition of a hack political journalist -- qualities you can get for free any time you turn in a cable news panel. "Disgraced" refers to his "#MeToo" reputation, which can't have helped him, but he was a sinking ship anyway.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The controversy over "ethnonationalism" and a Trump judicial nominee, explained: On Steven Menashi, nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

  • A border guard shot and killed a Mexican boy. The Supreme Court will decide if he gets off scot-free.

• Ellen Nakashima/Greg Bensinger: Former Twitter employees charged with spying for Saudi Arabia by digging into the accounts of kingdom critics.

• Nicole Narea: State Department officials warned Trump not to revoke protections for immigrants.

• Ella Nilsen: Jeff Sessions announces a Senate run -- by telling voters he's still loyal to Trump. Also:

  • Ed Kilgore: Will Trump crush Jeff Sessions' Senate comeback?

  • Matt Stieb: Jeff Sessions announces Alabama Senate bid by sucking up to Trump.

• Hamilton Nolan: Why did Amazon spend $1.5m in Seattle's local elections?

• Anna North:

  • She had a stillborn baby. Now she's being charged with murder.

  • E Jean Carroll says Trump sexually assaulted her. Now she's suing him.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Steve Bannon just testified for the government at Roger Stone's trial.

  • Fiona Hill's testimony gives her account of a disturbing White House meeting on Ukraine.

  • Prosecutor: Roger Stone lied because "the truth looked bad for Donald Trump".

  • Gordon Sondland's revised testimony is still very difficult to believe.

  • "I couldn't imagine all of the things that have happened": What Marie Yovanovitch told impeachment investigators.

• Nathaniel Rakich: What Virginia, Mississippi and Kentucky can tell us about 2020.

• Hope Reese: The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower on how American voters are "primed to be exploited".

• Jennifer Rubin: How a former senator and defense secretary explains Republican spinelessness: "I think it's either fear or complicity." He's being too generous. Strikes me more as Führerprinzip. Having accepted Trump as their leader, they now have no option but to follow.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Lindsey Graham keeps moving the goalposts to downplay Trump's Ukraine dealings.

  • Trump's responses to the impeachment inquiry are becoming increasingly incoherent.

• Louis Sahagun: Trump team has a plan for national parks: Amazon, food trucks and no senior discounts.

• Tim Shorrock: South Koreans are pleading for a breakthrough in the US-North Korea talks.

• Amy Davidson Sorkin: Trump's frantic fight for immunity: "As public impeachment hearings begin, Trump's Presidency is still defined by his belief that he cannot be held to account."

• Keith A Spencer: There is hard data that shows that a centrist Democrat would be a losing candidate. This is largely based on a paper by Thomas Piketty, based on French and British data as well as American, which is only one of many reasons why the conclusions might not apply. More intuitively, I'd say that centrist Democrats face two major risks: one is that they spend so much time and effort discounting leftist proposals they're lose the ability to convince voters to trust them; the other is that their "centrism" is largely defined by their willingness to favor business, which makes them appear corrupt. Leftists face other obstacles, but they do have an edge in authenticity and integrity, which given Trump may be important.

• Emily Stewart: We get it, rich guys are not into Elizabeth Warren: "From Bill Gates to Jamie Dimon to Leon Cooperman, billionaires have lots of thoughts and feelings about Elizabeth Warren."

• Jennifer Szalai: In A Warning, anonymous author makes case against re-election: New book attempts to expand on last year's op-ed attributed to an anonymous but "senior Trump administration official." The idea then was to reassure us that sane conservatives are working stealthily to limit the damage of Trump's petulant insanity, but a year later the author is more pessimistic, admitting that "just a wet Band-Aid that wouldn't hold together a gaping wound." Related:

  • Charles P Pierce: The Anonymous White House bookwriter can anonymously bite me: "I am not interested in someone's heartfelt account of their near-collision with actual integrity."

• Res Thebault: Visit to Arlington Cemetery reminded Donald Trump Jr of all his family's 'sacrifices,' he writes. He has a new book with his name on the cover, under the ridiculous title Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

• Jake Thomas: Migrant children are being given to an adoption agency linked to Betsy DeVos. Probably over the top to accuse DeVos of human trafficking, but the anti-abortion movement has a long association with adoption agencies, and the latter seem to be happy to take children wherever they can find them.

• Yeganeh Torbati: How Mike Pence's office meddled in foreign aid to reroute money to favored Christian groups.

• Alex Ward:

  • White House official says Trump made a quid pro quo "demand" of Ukraine's president: Alexander Vindman.

  • Trump: We should keep Syria's oil. The Pentagon: Nope.

  • Why Democrats think the benefits of open impeachment hearings outweigh the costs.

  • Why James Mattis couldn't contain Trump: Interview with Guy Snodgrass, author of Holding the Line: Inside Trump's Pentagon With Secretary Mattis.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Republicans' smear campaign against Joe Biden is devastating to his theory of politics.

  • Health care is on the ballot in state elections.

  • The Sanders-Warren dispute about how to pay for Medicare-for-all, explained.

  • The debate over whether the very rich pay lower taxes than you, explained.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, November archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32307 [32276] rated (+31), 220 [224] unrated (-4).

Not as physically miserable on waking up this morning as last, but more deeply troubled. Figured I'd get even by doing a long groan and rant here, but 9-10 hours later, when I finally got started, all I wanted was the day to be over with. So I'll spare you the details on two major personal crises, other than to note that one I made some headway on today, and the other I sensibly put off until tomorrow. That leaves two or three technical problems that are easier to talk about. The one that bothers me most is the new computer.

To recap, I order a bunch of parts to build a new computer:

• AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8-Core 3.2GHz CPU
• ASRock X570 Steel Legend Motherboard
• G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Series 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 3000 SDRAM
• XFX Radeon RX 570 RS 8Gb Graphics Card
• Intel 660p Series M.2 1TB Solid State Drive (SSD)
• Lite-On DVD Burner SATA
• Corsair RM Series 750W Full Modular Power Supply
• Fractal Design Focus G Mid Tower ATX Computer Case
• AmazonBasics DisplayPort 6 Foot Cable
• Logitech M705 Cordless Mouse
• Samsung 32-Inch UJ59 UHD 3840x2160 Monitor

I'm reusing a Logitech K740 Mechanical Keyboard, plus (for now) a pretty cheap set of speakers -- gear originally attached to an old (and pathetically slow) machine that will be retired (or maybe used as a print server, as it's the last machine standing with a parallel port for my HP Laser Printer). Originally I misread the motherboard specs and thought I could make do with onboard video, but turned out that was dependent on a different CPU, so I had to add the video card. When I did install the card, the machine came up nicely, and I loaded Xubuntu 18.04 LTS easily enough.

Main problem I ran into then was that the default fonts were awful small on the high-resolution monitor, so I've had to find the various places where they are defined and tweak them up. The new machine is as powerful as I expected. However, I ran into a problem: the machine freezes after some period of inactivity. I've spent 3-4 days chasing after this problem, and still don't have a handle on it.

The obvious suspect is the power save and screen lock functions of the window manager. I've scaled them back (and eliminated light-locker all together). That eliminated the blank screen, but the system would leave either just wallpaper or the full workspace window when it freezes (in which state neither mouse nor keyboard wakes it up). I wondered whether parts of the window manager crashed, in which case it should be possible to ssh in from another machine -- but active ssh sessions are disconnected when the machine freezes. I've poured through syslogs, but have yet to find anything enlightening (obviously have more of that to do). The box felt a bit warm to me, so I wondered about thermal. Inserting an instant read thermometer through the back grill registers 93F, which doesn't strike me as unusually hot. Also, the timing always follows inactivity -- I played music for about 5 hours last night, then it shut down a few minutes after the music stopped.

Good news, I suppose, is that reset wakes it up, and reboot is pretty quick. Still, the most vexing problem I've run across in 6-8 computer builds -- rather dispiriting given my age and psychic frailty. Also, I shot way pass my original budget, so I'm extra reluctant to swap in extra new hardware. Plus this has come at a time when I'm also having to deal with repair/replace questions on dishwasher and car. One bit of good news is that I seem to have managed to repair the dishwasher leak.

[PS: I have ascertained that the freeze is a kernel panic, more specifically a watchdog timer detecting a soft lockup during a system call (timeout is 20 seconds). This indicates a bug in a kernel module, although I suppose it could be caused by a hardware fault. I need to better understand the context to figure out how to fix the problem or work around it. It would be helpful to get a call trace, which would map the source back to an application program.]

Not much to say about this week's music. Swapping out the old computer before getting the new one working forced me to spend more time working off the promo queue than streaming. As for the "old music," I picked up a friendly download of Carmen McRae's Live at the Dug -- one of the few records recommended in Will Friedland's The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums I hadn't heard), and thought I'd check out a few more promising albums without taking a deep dive.

In recent weeks I've been the best-reviewed new albums plus identifying other new ones of exceptional interest. Not much to report on that front this week: top-rated this week was Michael Kiwanuka: Kiwanuka (12), followed by Miranda Lambert: Wildcard (7), and Sudan Archives: Athena (4). The other new release that looks most promising is: Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage: Bad Wiring.

Among records I previously reviewed, the best to finally appear last week were: Roger Kellaway: The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway [A-]; and Roberto Magris: Sun Stone [***].

New records reviewed this week:

• Areni Agbabian: Bloom (2016 [2019], ECM): [r]: B
• The Carter Family: Across Generations (2019, Reviver Legacy): [r]: B
• Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Ghosteen (2019, Ghosteen/Bad Seeds): [r]: B
• Clipping.: There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(*)
• Dave Douglas: Engage (2018 [2019], Greenleaf Music): [cd]: A- [11-08]
• Nick Dunston: Atlantic Extraction (2019, Out of Your Head): [cd]: B+(**)
• Lorenzo Feliciati/Michele Rabbia: Antikythera (2019, RareNoise): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Floating Points: Crush (2019, Ninja Tune): [r]: B+(**)
• Calabria Foti: Prelude to a Kiss (2019, Moco): [cd]: B
• Hal Galper Trio: The Zone: Live at the Yardbird Suite (2016 [2019], Origin): [cd]: A- [11-15]
• Francesco Guerri: Su Mimmi Non Si Spara! (2019, RareNoise): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Jerome Jennings: Solidarity (2019, Iola): [cd]: B+(***) [11-09]
• Per Texas Johansson: Stråk På Himlen Och Stora Hus (2019, Moserobie): [cd]: B+(***)
• Lakou Mizik: HaitiaNola (2019, Cumbancha): [r]: B+(*)
• Miranda Lambert: Wildcard (2019, RCA Nashville): [r]: A-
• João Lencastre's Communion 3: Song(s) of Hope (2019, Clean Feed): [bc]: B+(**)
• Chris Lightcap: SuperBigmouth (2019, Pyroclastic): [r]: B
• Lil Tjay: True 2 Myself (2019, Columbia): [r]: B+(*)
• Fredrik Ljungkvist Trio: Atlantis (2019, Moserobie): [cd]: B+(***)
• Maurice Louca: Elephantine (2019, Northern Spy): [r]: B+(*)
• Nellie McKay: Bagatelles (2019, Palmetto, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• MIKE: Tears of Joy (2019, 10k): [bc]: B+(**)
• Mute: Mute (2018 [2019], Fresh Sound New Talent): [cd]: A- [12-13]
• The Niro Featuring Gary Lucas: The Complete Jeff Buckley and Gary Lucas Songbook (2019, Esordisco): [cd]: B [11-08]
• Northern Ranger: Eastern Stranger (2019, self-released, EP): [cdr]: B+(**)
• Nicholas Payton: Relaxin' With Nick (2019, Smoke Sessions, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Roberta Piket: Domestic Harmony: Piket Plays Mintz (2019, Thirteenth Note): [cd]: B+(**) [12-06]
• Polo G: Die a Legend (2019, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Colorado (2019, Reprise): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• James Brown: Live at Home With His Bad Self (1969 [2019], Polydor): [r]: A-
• Johnny Griffin & Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis: Ow! Live at the Penthouse (1962 [2019], Reel to Reel): [cd]: A-

Old music:

• Carmen McRae: Torchy (1955, Decca): [r]: B+(**)
• Carmen McRae: Sings Lover Man and Other Billie Holiday Classics (1961 [1962,1997], Columbia/Legacy): [r]: B+(***)
• Carmen McRae: As Time Goes By: Carmen McRae Alone Live at the Dug (1973 [1974], Victor): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin, 2CD) [11-15]
• Hal Galper Trio: The Zone: Live at the Yardbird Suite (Origin) [11-15]
• Roberta Piket: Domestic Harmony: Piket Plays Mintz (Thirteenth Note) [12-06]
• Marta Sánchez Quintet: El Rayo De Luz (Fresh Sound New Talent) [11-22]
• Jim Snidero: Project-K (Savant) [01-24-2020]
• Sirkis/Ballas IQ: Our New Earth (Moonjune)
• Michael Zilber: East West: Music for Big Bands (Origin, 2CD) [11-15]

Daily Log

Got a "summons for jury service" from the 18th Judicial District Court, Sedgwick County, Kansas. Filling the form out online, and on paper.

"The clerk may be contacted by telephone at (316) 660-9101, by fax at (316) 941-5355, by email at jury@dc18.org, or via the Kansas Relay Center at 1-800-766-3777."

Weekend Roundup

Late getting into this, and beset by more problems than I can cope with these days, so no introduction. Nothing fundamentally different. Just lots more of the same old shit.

Some scattered links this week:

• Spencer Ackerman:

  • Baghdadi is dead. The War on Terror will create another.

  • Trump says US troops have quit Syria. It's not true. Published Oct. 11, before the above (and other things) happened.

• Jared Bernstein: Medicare-for-all won't happen anytime soon, but Democrats should keep talking about it. I've been wondering why we don't see more practical half-measures advanced about health-care, as the debate between Medicare for All and its opponents has basically devolved into a debate over whether we can or cannot solve the most basic problem in the world's most expensive (and relative to cost most inefficient and in many ways dysfunctional) health care system. There were several such proposals early on, such as adding a "public option" to ACA and/or allowing various constituencies to buy into Medicare. But now that the race has boiled down to Sanders and Warren vs. Biden and Buttigieg, the debate is between those who understand the problem and are willing to present bold solutions vs. those who deny that significant change is possible, who don't even seem to understand the problem, and in any case won't put any serious effort into changing anything. Which is say, health care has become a proxy for the deeper division among Democrats: the rift between the "radicals," who believe that government should serve the people, and the "moderates," who believe that government should serve the donors, preferably without most other people getting hurt too bad (at least compared to Republican standards).

• Christopher Bertram: Contempt for human life: Starts with case in UK where the bodies of 39 Chinese nationals were found dead in a parked lorry container.

• Charles Bethea: After ICE came to Morton, Mississippi: "About one in ten of the city's residents was jailed or fired after raids at local chicken plants."

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • The 11-day teachers strike in Chicago paid off: "It got more than $30 million extra spending for public schools."

  • Puerto Rico's new push for statehood, explained.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • GOP leader has one chart showing why Republicans hate democracy. Kevin McCarthy's tweet shows a county map of 2016 voting results, so it heavily favors more rural, less populated counties. Head is: 63 million Americans put President Trump in office/ 231 Democrats are trying to reverse the results." Top line ignores the fact that Hillary Clinton got almost 3 million more votes than Trump, plus third party candidates got another 2 million votes, so Trump's total share was only 46.09% of the total. Second part ignores that impeachment would not make Clinton or any other Democrat president (isn't that what "reverse" means?). It would merely remove one spectacularly corrupt aand vile office holder, in accordance with the US Constitution.

  • Trump: The Soviet witch coup has found me innocent: Steve Scalise's poster decrying "37 days of Soviet-style impeachment proceedings" shows how little he knows about the Soviet Union -- also the US Constitution. Also how little grasp he has of irony.

  • If Trump is impeached or defeated, conservatives will call it a 'coup'.

  • The White House's Godfather fantasy.

    Stone's case underlines a principle that's long been clear: It is impossible to understand the Trump administration's cast of characters, their lingo, and their governing ethos without a working knowledge of La Cosa Nostra and its Hollywood lore. If the Kennedy administration created Camelot, the Trump presidency has built a kind of cultural gangster state.

• Chas Danner: Trump has been booed at another major sporting event: Well, only if you call "an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night" a "major sporting event."

• Lisa Friedman: EPA to roll back rules to control toxic ash from coal plants.

• Dan Gearino: Coal giant Murray Energy files for bankruptcy despite Trump's support.

• Masha Gessen: How Trump's supporters distort Alexander Vindman's very American origin story.

• Shirin Ghaffary:

  • Edward Snowden says Facebook is just as untrustworthy as the NSA.

  • /Rani Molla: Google says it won't use your Fitbit data to target you with ads. But what else will it do?

• Tara Golshan:

  • In Iowa, only 5 percent of Biden supporters are younger than 45. That compares to Warren (62%), Sanders (55%), and Buttigieg (30%); Biden also trails: Yang (12%), Harris (8%), and Don't Know/Refused (6%). Under "no big surprise," Yang has the highest M-F ratio (7%-1%), followed by Gabbard (3%-1%) and Klobuchar (7%-3%), skipping those with 0% F (Delaney 2% M, O'Rourke and Messam 1% M). Harris is the only candidate with a major F-M skew: 5%-1%. More surprising, Yang also has the highest ratio of High School or Less to Bach/Postgrad Degree, 10%-2% -- again, skipping 0% denominators for Delaney (4%) and Messam (2%); Biden is 35%-26%, and Sanders is 25%-24%. Most candidates do better with college graduates, like Booker 0%-5%, Harris 2%-7%, Klobuchar 4%-13%, and Buttigieg 9%-40%, but by far the most extreme is Warren 3%-59%. Those with electability concerns should be especially concerned about Biden's age skew. Most polls show young people breaking strongly for Democrats, but they're also the age group least likely to vote, and it stands to reason that many fewer will vote if the Democrats nominate Biden, especially compared to Sanders or Warren.

  • Kentucky's Republican governor is facing a tough race -- and he wants Trump to save him.

• Jeff Hauser/Eleanor Eagan: The impeachable offense that Democrats should stop ignoring: "A constitutional violation worthy of an impeachment probe has been sitting under Democrats' noses since Trump took office -- his efforts to undermine Obamacare."

• Fred Kaplan: The defeat of General Mattis: Review of Guy M Snodgrass: Holding the Line: Inside Trump's Pentagon with Secretary Mattis, and Mattis' own memoir (with Bing West): Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Off-year election preview: Is it all about partisanship?

  • Donald Trump Jr thinks his rust belt boarding school made him the salt of the earth.

  • Republicans going all-out red scare in off-year elections.

• Catherine Kim: Trump stumps for himself during a Mississippi rally for a tight governor's race.

• Jen Kirby: The future of Brexit will be decided in December 12 elections.

• Ezra Klein: Elizabeth Warren's plan to pay for Medicare-for-all, explained. Let's group some more pieces on Warren's Medicare-for-all plan:

  • Josh Barro: Three takeaways from Elizabeth Warren's plan to pay for single payer.

  • John Cassidy: Elizabeth Warren doubles down on Medicare for All.

  • Paul Krugman: Did Warren pass the Medicare test? I think so.

  • Eric Levitz: Elizabeth Warren's Medicare for All plan is a smart storytelling device.

• Michael Kruse: The 5 people who could have stopped Trump: "Gambling regulators once contemplated yanking Trump's casino licenses. Why they didn't holds a lesson for lawmakers today."

• Eric Levitz:

  • The week in impeachment: Ukrainegate becomes a sitcom?

  • Two more signs Trump's 'great' economy is failing workers.

• Marie Lodi: Tasteless 'Build the Wall' decor seen at White House kids' Halloween party.

• Mike Lofgren: 'Republicans have become a cult run by crooks': "Former GOP congressional staffer explains why the party 'has become a creepy mashup of grade B totalitarianism' and 'Freudian manias.'"

• Martin Longman: Hope for humanity as Trump's base begins to leave him.

• Denise Lu/Christopher Flavelle: Rising seas will erase more cities by 2050, new research shows.

• Ian Millhiser: The most important part of the Democrats' impeachment resolution.

  The most significant provision in the resolution exempts the Intelligence Committee's impeachment hearings from a rule that ordinarily limits questioning of witnesses to five minutes per committee member. Though the resolution leaves the five-minute rule in place for most members, it allows Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff to extend his own question time to as much as 45 minutes, so long as he gives equal time to Republican ranking committee member Devin Nunes.

  These are important changes because they will allow Schiff and the team of lawyers working for him to focus their time on the impeachment hearings and to spend significant amounts of time asking probing questions during those hearings. The new rules help ensure that the hearing will not be a disjointed process, constantly jumping from one questioner to the next, without giving anyone time to build a coherent narrative.

• Nicole Narea:

  • A new study shows that even the poorest immigrants lift themselves up within a generation.

  • /Alex Ward: Trump quietly cut legal immigration by up to 65%.

• Olivia Nuzzi: Inside MAGA Country's hottest club: The Trump-Pence 2020 Halloween Eve witch-hunt party.

• Peter Osnos: Editing Donald Trump: "What I saw as the editor of The Art of the Deal, the book that made the future President millions of dollars and turned him into a national figure."

• Thomas Pepinsky: Why the impeachment fight is even scarier than you think: "Political scientists have studied what our democracy is going through. It usually doesn't end well."

• Andrew Prokop:

  • The House of Representatives' big impeachment vote, explained.

  • Alexander Vindman is the latest impeachment inquiry witness to give damaging testimony for Trump.

• John Quiggin: Arrogance destroyed the World Trade Organisation. What replaces it will be even worse.

• David Roberts: The radical reform necessary to prepare California's power system for the 21st century.

• Theodore Schleifer: Silicon Valley billionaires keep getting richer no matter how much money they give away.

• Nathan Robinson: Goodbye, Beto O'Rourke. What a sad end to a pointless campaign. Also:

  • David Siders: Inside Beto O'Rourke's collapse.

  • Geoffrey Skelley: Why Beto O'Rourke's campaign failed.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump claims the impeachment inquiry will "backfire." Polling indicates he's wrong.

  • The latest Fox News impeachment poll contains remarkably grim news for President Trump.

  • Trump allies are now accusing an impeachment witness -- and Purple Heart recipient -- of disloyalty: Of course they are. But I am getting tired of constantly hearing about his Purple Heart, as if that signifies anything about his character.

• Emmanuel Saez/Gabriel Zucman: Make no mistake: Medicare for All would cut taxes for most Americans.

• Michael D Shear, et al.: How Trump reshaped the presidency in over 11,000 tweets.

• Jack Shenker: This wave of global protest is being led by the children of the financial crash.

• Katie Shepherd: An ad smeared a Kansas Democrat for sexual harassment. The main charge actually described a Republican. Wichita's nominally non-partisan mayoral race makes the national news.

• Alan Singer: Historian explains what binds Trump's extremely rich and economically struggling supporters together:

  What I struggle with understanding is how Trump, who is so self-evidently incompetent, morally repulsive, and biased in favor of the rich, holds onto his support among the white working-class and religious voters who attend his rallies and cheer hysterically for their hero. . . . What binds Trump's extremely rich and economically struggling supporters together are their cynical beliefs about the motives of others. They think everyone else is out to steal what is rightfully theirs.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Trump reportedly obsessed with impeachment coverage: 'We're getting killed'.

  • Trump announces he will move permanent residence to Mar-a-Lago after his presidency. Not unprecedented, given that Nixon moved his home base from California to New York after he resigned. Also, something of a major concession: yes, there will be an America after Trump. For more, see:

    • David Cay Johnston: Trump flees to his bankruptcy-proof home in Florida as New York prosecutors close in.

• Matt Taibbi: Baghdadi story reveals divided -- and broken -- news media.

• Alex Ward: The White House's top Ukraine official confirms there was a quid pro quo: "Tim Morrison tried not to make the president look bad. He failed."

• Matthew Yglesias: Health care is on the ballot in state elections starting next week.

• Li Zhou: The double standard at play in Katie Hill's resignation: Compared to, e.g., Duncan Hunter (R-CA). Also on Hill:

  • Heather Caygle: Katie Hill delivers fiery farewell speech on 'double standard' facing women in power.

  • Brian Feldman: MacArthur Genius Danielle Citron on deepfakes and the Representative Katie Hill scandal.

  • Anna North: What the Katie Hill story means for young women in public life.

Etc.

Picked up the following link during my search, before realizing that it was old:

• David Remnick: Obama reckons with a Trump presidency [2016-11-18].

Book Reports

Another batch of 40 brief notes on recently published books -- the third I've published this year, after March 15 and June 1. Actually, a good deal more than 40 books mentioned below, as I've tacked on lists of related books where it seemed appropriate and useful -- in some cases, the list is probably the point. Inclusion in a list doesn't guarantee that I'll never write a book up separately, but usually satisfies my sense of duty.

While the dates above seem to suggest a regular, orderly process, I only managed to do this once in 2018, and twice in 2017 (here and here), so I feel like I'm working my way out of a deep hole. Indeed, I have 55 more-or-less written entries in my scratch file for later, so I could do a fourth one next week, or at least by the end of the year. Oh, and that doesn't count the merely noted titles that follow the top 40 -- 46 more of them in the file, but I'll list some of them to end this post.

Worth noting that I have read (or am working on) the books I have cover art for on the right. Kate Brown's book on Chernobyl is probably the "best read" of the bunch. Just started Poniewozik's Audience of One, and he's scoring points from the very start (unlike, say, Tim Alberta, who wants you to regard John Boehner and Paul Ryan as normal, decent human beings). I checked out Astra Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist but We'll Miss It When It's Gone, but ran out of time before I got deep enough into it to count. I bought a copy of Stanley Greenberg's RIP GOP, but haven't gotten to it yet -- I figure it's next in queue after Poniewozik, but a lot of what I've read recently has been plucked opportunistically from the city library.

It occurs to me that I should probably do a whole piece on music, but these days I never find the time to read up on what's supposed to be my specialty. Still, I have a handful of music books in the draft file, starting with Robert Christgau's Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading, and John Corbett's Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music. I also started a list entry on cookbooks, which could grow into a specialized post -- not least because I do regularly buy and use cookbooks.

Tim Alberta: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (2019, Harper). It's pretty easy now to see how everything Republicans did from 1968 to 2016 paved the way for electing this crass, bigoted grifter and sham. Nixon laid the foundation with his crass appeals to racists and reactionaries, his Orwellian "peace with honor" (a tactical retreat covered by real and feigned escalation), above all his conviction that winning is the only thing that matters, and that excuses all manner of criminality. Reagan put a sunnier face on an even darker heart. Ditto the Bushes, less artfully. Alberta only picks up this digression in 2008, with the Sarah Palin boomlet, and 2009, with the Tea Party eruption, then goes on to show how Trump won the party over, delivering the one thing they craved most of all: winning. Of course, you know all of that, but Alberta puts you in the rooms as the party brass figures it out and comes to terms with their debasement. Some other recent books on how we got to Trump:

• Jim Acosta: The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America (2019, Harper).
• Dale Beran: It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office (2019, All Points Books).
• Barry Levine/Monique El-Faizy: All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator (2019, Hachette Books).
• Amanda Marcotte: Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Ratf*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself (2018, Hot Books).
• Joy-Ann Reid: The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story (2019, William Morrow).
• Rick Reilly: Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump (2019, Hachette Books).
• Nathan J Robinson: Trump: Anatomy of a Monster (paperback, 2017, Demilune Press).
• Michael Wolff: Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019, Henry Holt).

Binyamin Appelbaum: The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (2019, Little Brown): A history of the growing influence and power of economists from 1969, when economists were kept to the basement of the Federal Reserve, to 2008, when the world transformed by their fundamentalist faith in markets crashed and nearly burned. In between, business and political interests looked to economists for help, and many economists strove to service their masters. One line I noted: "Conservatism was a coalition of the powerful, defending the status quo against threats real and imagined." More recent books on economics:

• Abhijit V Banerjee/Esther Duflo: Good Economics for Hard Times (2019, Little Brown).
• David G Blanchflower: Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? (2019, Princeton University Press).
• Heather Boushey: Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It (2019, Harvard University Press).
• Thomas Philippon: The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets (2019, Belknap Press).
• Katharina Pistor: The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (2019, Princeton University Press).
• Robert J Shiller: Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events (2019, Princeton University Press).
• Jean Tirole: Economics for the Common Good (2017; paperback, 2019, Princeton University Press).
• Janek Wasserman: The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (2019, Yale University Press).

Kathleen Belew: Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018; paperback, 2019, Harvard University Press): Locates the roots of the alt-right/white power movement less in opposition to the civil rights movement than in reaction against the loss of the Vietnam War -- though either way you can see how Richard Nixon's "silent majority"/"Southern strategy" conjured up the seething hatred of this movement, which Trump has only stoked further. More recent books on the racist right-wing fringe:

• Kyle Burke: Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (2018, University of North Carolina Press).
• George Hawley: The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know (paperback, 2018, Oxford University Press).
• Daryl Johnson: Hateland: A Long, Hard Look at America's Extremist Heart (2019, Prometheus).
• George Lipsitz: The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics (1998; revised and expanded edition, paperback, 2006; 20th anniversary edition, paperback, 2018, Temple University Press).
• Michael Malice: The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics (2019, All Points Books).
• Elizabeth Gillespie McRae: Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (2018, Oxford University Press).
• Angie Maxwell/Todd Shields: The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (2019, Oxford University Press).
• Jonathan M Metzl: Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland (2019, Basic Books).
• David Neiwert: Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (2017; paperback, 2018, Verso).
• Christian Picciolini: White American Youth: My Descent Into America's Most Violent Hate Movement -- and How I Got Out (paperback, 2017, Hachette Books).
• Eli Saslow: Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist (paperback; 2019, Anchor Books).
• Alexandra Minna Stern: Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (2019, Beacon Press).
• John Temple: Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America's Patriot Militia Movement (2019, BenBella Books).
• Vegas Tenold: Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America (2018, Bold Type Books).
• Mike Wendling: Alt-Right: From 4Chan to the White House (paperback, 2018, Pluto Press).

Marcia Bjornerud: Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018, Princeton University Press): After my first wife died, I went through a period of several years where most of what I read was on geology, ranging from semi-popular books like John McPhee's I-70 quartet (later collected as Annals of the Former World) through some very technical texts on plate tectonics, plus a lot of paleontology and contemporary earth science. I suppose a big part of the attraction came from the vast time frameworks geologists routinely deal with, but I was also much impressed by the logic behind the science: how geologists work and think. Since 9/11, I've denied myself the indulgence of pursuing such pleasant interests. Otherwise this book would jump to the top of my reading list. Some other geology books that caught my eye:

• Michael J Benton: Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology (2019, Thames & Hudson).
• Marcia Bjornerud: Reading the Rocks: The Autogiography of the Earth (2005; paperback, 2006, Basic Books).
• Lewis Dartnell: Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History (2019, Basic Books).
• William E Glassley: A Wilder Time: Notes From a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice (paperback, 2018, Bellevue Literary Press).
• Mary Caperton Morton: Aerial Geology: A High-Altitude Tour of North America's Spectacular Volcanoes, Canyons, Glaciers, Lakes, Craters, and Peaks (2017, Timber Press).
• Donald R Prothero: The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution (2015, Columbia University Press).
• Donald R Prothero: The Story of the Earth in 25 Rocks: Tales of Important Geological Puzzles and the People Who Solved Them (2017, Columbia University Press).

Kate Brown: Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019, WW Norton): History of the 1986 nuclear plant explosion at Chernobyl, Ukraine, Soviet Union, but less on the explosion than on the disaster it spread, especially the faulty, fitful efforts to understand (or in some case not) the widespread effects of the radiation it left. Author has written a couple of books leading up to this one, and there's been a spate of recent books on Chernobyl and so forth:

• Svetlana Alexievich: Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (2005; paperback, 2019, Dalkey Archive Press): This is the classic book everyone draws on. The author later won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her oral histories of WWII and the postwar Soviet Union.
• Kate Brown: A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Hinterland (2004; paperback, 2005, Harvard University Press).
• Kate Brown: Dispatches From Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015, University of Chicago Press).
• Kate Brown: Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013; paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press).
• Charles A Castro: Station Blackout: Inside the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and Recovery (2018, Radius).
• Adam Higginbotham: Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (2019, Simon & Schuster).
• Andrew Leatherbarrow: Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster (paperback, 2016, Andrew Leatherbarrow).
• Serhii Plokhy: Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (2018, Basic Books).
• Silent Bill: Of Dust and Echoes: A Tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (paperback, 2019, self-published).

Elizabeth C Economy: The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (2018, Oxford University Press): A history of China since Xi Jinping came to power, bringing a series of reforms distinct enough from Deng Xioping's "second revolution" reforms to merit the title. I'm not really up enough on the subject to judge, but it seems that China has found a very different path to development -- one that Americans are especially ill-prepared to understand. Other recent books on contemporary China:

• Elizabeth C Economy/Michael Levi: By All Means Necessary: How China's Resource Quest Is Changing the World (2014; paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press).
• Graham Allison: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
• Yuen Yuen Ang: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016, Cornell University Press).
• Yukon Huang: Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Wisdom Is Wrong (2017, Oxford University Press).
• Sulimaan Wasif Khan: Haunted by Chaos: China's Grand Strategy From Mao Zedong to Xi Jiping (2018, Harvard University Press).
• Bruno Maçães: Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (2019, Hurst).
• George Magnus: Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy (2018, Yale University Press).
• Dinny McMahon: China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle (2018, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
• Tom Miller: China's Asian Dream: Empire Building Along the New Silk Road (paperback, 2017, Zed Books).
• Carl Minzner: End of an Era: How China's Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise (2018, Oxford University Press).
• Klaus Mühlhahn: Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping (2019, Belknap Press).
• Evan Osnos: Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (2014; paperback, 2015, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• William H Overholt: China's Crisis of Success (paperback, 2018, Cambridge University Press).
• Robert S Ross/Jo Inge Bekkevold, eds: China in the Era of Xi Jinping: Domestic and Foreign Policy Challenges (paperback, 2016, Georgetown University Press).

Richard J Evans: Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019, Oxford University Press): A big (800 pp) biography of a great historian, born in Egypt of 2nd generation British parents, orphaned at 14 in 1931, living in Berlin at the time, fleeing to England when the Nazis came to power, joined the Communist Party, went on to write major histories of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. The author is a notable historian in his own right, his writings including three major books on Nazi Germany (The Third Reich Trilogy).

Adam Gopnik: A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019, Basic Books): A staff writer for The New Yorker, seems like he's mostly written about innocuous topics, like art, travel, food, and (mostly) himself, so this foray into political philosophy ("a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition") comes as a bit of a surprise. Or maybe just to me, as his bibliographic note opens with a fairly long list of essays he has published on political figures. The central section of the book consists of three parts: a "manifesto," followed by chapters on "Why the Right Hates Liberalism" and "Why the Left Hates Liberalism" (the longest). If he's honest, the reasons are very different: the right fears any challenge to hierarchical order, while the left sees liberals as too willing to compromise their principles, because in a world of individualism self-interest is ultimately decisive. I recall being very critical of liberalism back in the late 1960s, when it seemed to be hegemonic. I've softened my stance since then: as the right has emerged as the greater threat, liberals offer a respectable stance and critique. Related:

• Richard Ebeling: For a New Liberalism (paperback, 2019, American Institute for Economic Research).
• Robert Kuttner: The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy (2019, WW Norton).
• Deirdre Nansen McCloskey: Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (2019, Yale University Press.
• James Traub: What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea (2019, Basic Books).

Stanley B Greenberg: RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans (2019, Thomas Dunne Books): Pollster, worked for Clinton and Obama, seems like he's been peddling rosy futures to mainstream liberals for more than two decades now: Middle Class Dreams: Building the New Majority (1995, Crown); The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics (ed. with Theda Skocpol, 1997, Yale University Press); The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It (2004, Thomas Dunne Books); It's the Middle Class Stupid! (with James Carville, listed first, and probably to blame for the title, not least the missing comma; 2012, Blue Rider Press); America Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation's Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems and Leading the 21st Century (2015, Thomas Dunne Books). This one seems more plausible, as it shifts the focus to Republicans with their failing programs and declining demographics.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Case for Trump (2019, Basic Books): The author is supposedly expert on ancient Greek military history, but he's been such a shameless right-wing hack for so long his credentials don't carry much weight any more -- other than perhaps to make him the natural leader of the parade of hacks and hysterics with recent books defending their Fearless Leader, campaigning for him, and (most often) slandering his "enemies":

• Conrad Black: Donald J Trump: A President Like No Other (2018, Regnery).
• Don Bongino: Exonerated: The Failed Takedown of President Donald Trump by the Swamp (2019, Post Hill Press).
• L Brent Bozell III/Tim Graham: Unmasked: Big Media's War Against Trump (2019, Humanix Books).
• Tucker Carlson: Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018, Free Press).
• Jason Chaffetz: Power Grab: The Liberal Scheme to Undermine Trump, the GOP, and Our Republic (2019, Broadside Books).
• Jerome R Corsi: Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump (2018, Humanix Books).
• Alan Dershowitz: The Case Against Impeaching Trump (2018, Hot Books).
• John L Fraser: The Truth Behind Trump Derangement Syndrome: "There Is More Than Meets the Eye" (paperback, 2018, JF).
• Newt Gingrich: Understanding Trump (2017, Center Street).
• Newt Gingrich: Trump's America: The Truth About Our Nation's Great Comeback (2018, Center Street).
• Newt Gingrich: Trump vs China: Facing America's Greatest Threat (2019, Center Street).
• Sebastian Gorka: Why We Fight: Defeating America's Enemies -- With No Apologies (2018, Regnery).
• Sebastian Gorka: The War for America's Soul: Donald Trump, the Left's Assault on America, and How We Take Back Our Country (2019, Regnery).
• Charles Hurt: Still Winning: Why America Went All In on Donald Trump -- And Why We Must Do It Again (2019, Center Street).
• Gregg Jarrett: The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump (2018; paperback, 2019, Broadside Books).
• Gregg Jarrett: Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History (2019, Broadside Books).
• Corey R Lewandowski/David N Bossie: Trump's Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency (2018, Center Street).
• Lily Manchubel: Too Far Left: An Eroding United States Democratic Republic: Anecdotal Observations of President Obama's Administration Left Leaning Cultural Shift, Poor Foreign and Domestic Government Policies; Versus That of Trump's More Right of Center Programs (paperback, 2019, Lulu Publishing Services): Deserves some sort of award for cutest fascist title.
• Jeffrey Lord: Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and the New American Populism vs. the Old Order (2019, Bombardier Books).
• Matt Margolis: Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacy (paperback, 2019, Bombardier Books).
• Andrew C McCarthy: Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency (2019, Encounter Books).
• Bill O'Reilly: The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America (2019, Henry Holt).
• Jeanine Pirro: Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2018, Center Street).
• Jeanine Pirro: Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge: The Left's Plot to Remake America (2019, Center Street).
• Allen Salkin/Aaron Short: The Method to the Madness: Donald Trump's Ascent as Told by Those Who Were Hired, Fired, Inspired -- and Inaugurated (2019, All Points).
• Michael Savage: Trump's War: His Battle for America (2017, Center Street).
• Roger Stone: The Myth of Russian Collusion: The Inside Story of How Donald Trump Really Won (paperback, 2019, Skyhorse).
• Kimberley Strassel: Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America (2019, Twelve).
• Donald Trump Jr: Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us (2019, Center Street).

Reed Hundt: A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions (2019, Rosetta Books): Inside adviser to Clinton (via Gore) in the 1990s, and to Obama from campaign to transition, recounts the personnel and policy decisions made by Obama during his transition and first few months which sharply limited the set of options that could be entertained to halt the collapse of the financial sector and to rebuild an economy that had been decimated by banking risks. One thing that was especially shocking was how little consideration was given to anyone other than Tim Geithner and Larry Summers for roles which ultimately prevented Obama from doing anything but protect the bankers who caused the recession. Hundt's own pet project during this period was setting up a program for infrastructure development, but it was killed by Summers on the assumption that the recession would be so short-lived that only short-term spending was needed. Other memoirs and assessments of the Obama years (skipping the most obvious right-wing rants):

• Brian Abrams: Obama: An Oral History (2018, Little A).
• Jonathan Chait: Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail (2017, Custom House).
• Pat Cunnane: West Winging It: An Un-presidential Memoir (paperback, 2018, Gallery Books).
• Michael D'Antonio: A Consequential President: The Legacy of Barack Obama (2017, Thomas Dunne Books).
• Andra Gillespie: Race and the Obama Administration: Substance, Symbols, and Hope (2019, Manchester University Press).
• Mark Greenberg: Obama: The Historic Presidency of Barack Obama: 2,920 Days (2017, Sterling): Photo blog.
• Valerie Jarrett: Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward (2019, Viking).
• David Litt: Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years (2017; paperback, 2018, Ecco).
• Alyssa Mastromonaco: Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House (2017; paperback, 2018, Twelve).
• Gautam Raghavan, ed: West Wingers: Stories From the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House (paperback, 2018, Penguin Books).
• Ben Rhodes: The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (2018; paperback, 2019, Random House).
• Pete Souza: Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents (2018, Little Brown).
• Beck Dorey Stein: From the Corner of the oval: A Memoir (2018, Spiegel & Grau).
• Julian Zelizer, ed: The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment (paperback, 2018, Princeton University Press). Previously edited The Presidency of George W Bush: A First Historical Assessment (paperback, 2010, Princeton University Press).

Nancy Isenberg/Andrew Burstein: The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality (2019, Viking): A dual biography of father and son, the second and sixth presidents of the US, each limited to a single, controversial term as they were the exceptions to the Virginia planters who dominated the early democracy, a forum they worked in if never totally approved of. Not sure what the "cult of personality" was -- Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson are mentioned, and they no doubt qualify. Isenberg previuosly wrote White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Burstein has written books on Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, and Washington Irving. His most intriguing title was Democracy's Muse: How Thomas Jefferson Became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead (2015; paperback, 2017, University of Virginia Press).

Stuart Jeffries: Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016, Verso): A group biography of the Frankfurt School, an important intersection of German Marxist thinkers who came together around 1923, and remained outside of (and often opposed to) the Soviet circle, ultimately having great influence in the development of the New Left in 1960s Europe and America. The standard book on the subject is Martin Jay: The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 1923-1950 (1973), which appeared when I was deeply immersed in these thinkers. Related:

• Perry Anderson: The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (2017, Verso).
• Deborah Cook: Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West (paperback, 2018, Verso).
• Howard Eiland/Michael W Jennings: Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014; paperback, 2016, Belknap Press).
• Peter E Gordon: Adorno and Existence (2016, Harvard University Press).
• Martin Jay: Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (paperback, 2017, University of Wisconsin Press).
• Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno: A Biography (2004; paperback, 2009, Polity).
• Stefan Müller-Doohm: Habermas: A Biography (2016, Polity).
• Eric Oberle: Theodor Adoro and the Century of Negative Identity (paperback, 2018, Stanford University Press).

Eric Kaufmann: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (2019, Harry N Abrams): Tempted to file this in the long list of books about how threatened white identity is shaping American and European politics, but this is a much bigger (624 pp), broader, deeper, and presumably more nuanced undertaking. Still, the very subject lies somewhere between unsavory and offensive. The basic truth is that when Europe started its project to conquer and colonize the world, it became inevitable that the conquered peoples would seep back into Europe and eventually change it: domination never lasts.

Naomi Klein: On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019, Simon & Schuster): Bestselling Canadian whose critique of capitalism started with globalization -- No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000) -- and evolved as the neoliberal market engulfed politics -- The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) -- and the environment -- This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). Her vision of the Green New Deal is way to fight back, but beneath it all is an ever-sharpening critique of capitalism.

• Kate Aronoff/Alyssa Battistoni/Daniel Aldana Cohen/Thea Riofrancos: A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (paperback, 2019, Verso Books): Foreword by Naomi Klein.
• Larry Jordan: The Green New Deal: Why We Need It and Can't Live Without It -- and No, It's Not Socialism! (paperback, 2019, Page Turner Books).
• Ann Pettifor: The Case for the Green New Deal (2019, Verso Books). Previously wrote: The Production of Money: How to Break the Bankers (2017; paperback, 2018, Verso Books).
• Jeremy Rifkin: The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth (2019, St Martin's Press).

Nicholas Lemann: Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Profiles of "three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras": Adolf Berle (of FDR's "brain trust"), Michael Jensen (of Harvard Business School), and Reid Hoffman (a Silicon Valley venture capitalist). Presumably the first two correspond to the Roosevelt and Reagan eras. Harder to figure where that third avatar is dragging us, but as the title suggests, the author is looking not at where we want to go, but where how the era's great profiteers intend to con us.

Christopher Leonard: Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America (2019, Simon & Schuster): Focuses more on the business behind the political forces that Jane Mayer wrote about in Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016).

Jill Lepore: This America: The Case for the Nation (2019, Liveright): A short (160 pp) postscript, I would guess, to last year's massive These Truths: A History of the United States, described as an "urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century." Sees American history as a struggle between liberal and illiberal nationalism, and tries to buck up the former at a time when many liberal-minded folks see nationalism as an atavistic regression. Lepore's earlier The Story of America: Essays on Origins (paperback, 2013, Princeton University Press) started with the same problems, exploring them in scattered essays, as historians are prone to do.

Rachel Maddow: Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (2019, Crown): The MSNBC pundit's obsession with Russia has been aired so thoroughly since the 2016 debacle that this book is likely to rise to the level of self-parody, but somewhere along the line Maddow discovered that Russia is a petro-state, and broadened her aim to include the international oil industry, finding particularly juicy stories in Oklahoma earthquakes.

Daniel Markovits: The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (2019, Penguin Press): I thought the best previous book on "meritocracy" was Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, which made it clear that "meritocracy" was little more than a deceptive argument for maintaining the class dominance of established elites. Markovits takes the further step of arguing that "meritocracy now ensnares event hose who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return." Related:

• James Bloodworth: The Myth of Meritocracy (2019, Biteback).
• Lani Guinier: The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (2015; paperback, 2016, Beacon Press).
• Nicholas Lemann: The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999; paperback, 2000, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Jo Littler: Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (paperback, 2017, Routledge
• Stephen J McNamee: The Meritocracy Myth (4th edition, paperback, 2018, RL).
• Michael Schwalbe: Rigging the Game: How Inequality Is Reproduced in Everyday Life (paperback, 2014, Oxford University Press).

Branko Milanovic: Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World (2019, Belknap Press): Economist, wrote Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Aims at a big picture, noting capitalism's considerable material benefits as well as its moral failings, trying to weigh such factors. Someone more optimistic might frame this as "post-capitalism," but he sees nothing beyond -- just a long struggle to keep from devouring ourselves.

Alexander Nazaryan: The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington (2019, Hachette Books): Attempts to look past Trump's personality and showmanship, but doesn't get deep enough to see the real effects of his administration. Rather, he offers us a rogues gallery of Trump's cabinet-level deputies, who more often than not turn out to reflect the vanity and avarice of their leader. Curiously, doesn't cover the whole cabinet, with scarcely any mentions at all of State, Defense, Justice, or Homeland Security. It might be interesting to contrast this with John Nichols' Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Giude to the Most Dangerous People in America, written and rushed into print almost as soon as the initial cabinet picks were announced.

Martha C Nussbaum: The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (2018, Simon & Schuster): Teaches philosophy in a law school, author of twenty-somebooks, won the 2016 Kyoto Prize ("the most presigious award available in fields not eligible for a Nobel" -- she accepted this the day after the Trump election, so it's a starting point), knows her Greeks and checks back with them regularly, also knows some psych and is not above folding in a little empirical research from the social sciences. Key concerns here are fear, disgust, and envy -- feelings which contribute to and exacerbate our struggles with everyday life, not least in politics.

Robert L O'Connell: Revolutionary: George Washington at War (2019, Random House): Looking for something to round out my evaluation of the USA's first president -- my gut tells me he presents a stark and illustrative counterpoint to the latest (or maybe last?) president -- I picked this up and found it fascinating. Far from hagiography, it presents us with a flesh-and-blood figure, molded by the events of war but always with a fine sense of political mission.

Daniel Okrent: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America (2019, Scribner): Probably spent more time as an editor than anything else, first attracting notice for his baseball fandom, but lately has been writing substantial, sweeping books on history: Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (2003), Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010), and now this book on the racist and xenophobic movement to pass the 1923 law that radically restricted immigration to the United States. As timely now as those working to resurrect that movement.

George Packer: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (2019, Knopf): Major (608 pp) biography of the late diplomat, whose career started with the American War in Vietnam, and ended with his failure to make any headway as Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Along the way, he gained a modicum of fame for brokering the Dayton Accords which ended the war between Serbia and Bosnia. Reviewers have focused on how both author and subject supported the Bush War in Iraq despite knowing better -- for Holbrooke it was a calculated cost of his ambitions to become Secretary of State (had Hillary Clinton won in 2008; with Obama winning, she settled for that position, and wrangled Holbrooke the Afghanistan/Pakistan portfolio). I suppose it's naïveté that lets Packer think Holbrooke's a worthy subject for such a massive effort. In the end, though, Holbrooke is a prime example of the moral and political bankruptcy of "the American era." And Packer's too competent a journalist not to expose that, even if he doesn't want to admit it.

Raj Patel/Jason W Moore: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017; paperback, 2018, University of California Press): A sweeping critique of capitalism, the force that cheapens things, in this case: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. This may slight what strikes me as the main effect of cheapening, which is that it makes things more plentiful. Moore previously wrote Capitalism in the Web of Life (paperback, 2015, Verso), which treats capitalism as a "world-ecology," Patel previously wrote Stuffed and Sarved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (2008), and The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (2010).

James Poniewozik: Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America (2019, Liveright). TV critic for the New York Times, traces Trump's long history of promotion and exposure on the tube, alongside the evolution of television from three major networks to "today's zillion-channel, internet-atomized universe, which sliced and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures." I've long suspected that too much TV isn't a good thing -- the classic treatment is Neal Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I've seen this likened to -- but fragmentation would seem to limit the appeal of someone like Trump. Indeed, it took no effort to ignore him until he ran for president, and the news masters found their love/hate obsession with him. So I suspect there are more levels to this than a mere TV critic can develop, although that may be a good place to start.

Corey Robin: The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (2019, Metropolitan Books): Author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (or, as recently reprinted, to Donald Trump), takes a shot at reconciling contradictions in the far right Supreme Court Justice, from his early embrace of black nationalism to the extreme conservatism he is known for -- another species of "reactionary mind," determined more by what he reacts so virulently to more than anything he believes in.

Brian Rosenwald: Talk Radio's America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States (2019, Harvard University Press): This goes back to 1988, when "desperate for content to save AM radio, top media executives stumbled on a new format that would turn the political world upside down." They may have only been seeking profits, but rage and reaction was quickly recognized as effective conservative propaganda, an easy way to move a mass of voters to support the right-wing agenda. After the Republican debacle in 2008, the dynamic changed, as mass rage wound up leading the politicians, and in Donald Trump ("the kind of pugnacious candidate they had been demanding for decades") they put their own chump in charge.

Bernie Sanders: Where We Go From Here: Two Years in the Resistance (2018, Thomas Dunne Books): These days most major election campaigns kick off with a book to introduce the candidate and set the tone for the campaign. But in 2016, Sanders waited until his campaign was over before releasing his, allowing him to open with a memoir, then tack a manifesto on at the end. He called it Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, and it was pretty credible for the genre. This one is reportedly sketchier, but even if he's just recounting his reaction to events, he's likely to give you insights you won't pick up from the usual sources. Elsewhere in the 2020 campaign wave (some are a bit old, more are on the way; some are by non-candidates, but fit the mold; I've written about Elizabeth Warren's book previously):

• Stacey Abrams: Minority Leader: How to Lead From the Outside and Make Real Change (2018, Henry Holt).
• Michael Bennet: The Land of Flickering Lights: Restoring America in an Age of Broken Politics (2019, Atlantic Monthly Press).
• Joe Biden: Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (2017, Flatiron).
• Michael Bloomberg: Bloomberg by Bloomberg (2nd edition, 2019, Wiley).
• Cory Booker: United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good (2016; paperback, 2017, Ballantine Books).
• Pete Buttigleg: Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future (2019, Liveright).
• Julian Castro: An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up From My American Dream (2018, Little Brown).
• John K Delaney: The Right Answer: How We Can Unify Our Divided Nation (2019, Henry Holt).
• Tulsi Gabbard: Is Today the Day? Not Another Political Memoir (2019, Twelve).
• Kirsten Gillibrand: Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World (2014; paperback, 2015, Ballantine Books).
• Kamala Harris: The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (2019, Penguin Press).
• John Hickenlooper: The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics (2016, Penguin Press).
• Jay Inslee/Bracken Hendricks: Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy (2007, Island Press): Pre-campaign book, establishes his bona fides to run on climate change issue.
• Amy Klobuchar: The Senator Next Door: A Memoir From the Heartland (2015, Henry Holt; paperback, 2016, University of Minnesota Press).
• Jeff Merkley: America Is Better Than This: Trump's War Against Immigrant Families (2019, Twelve).
• Beto O'Rourke/Susie Byrd: Dealing Death and Drugs: The Big Business of Dope in the US and Mexico (paperback, 2011, Cinco Puntos Press): Old book, so not a campaign primer.
• Tim Ryan: Healing America: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Recapture the American Spirit (paperback, 2018, Hay House). Previously wrote A Mindful Nation (2012), and The Real Food Revolution (2014).
• Howard Schultz: From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America (2019, Random House).
• Joe Sestak: Walking in Your Shoes to Restore the American Dream (paperback, 2015, Infinity).
• Elizabeth Warren: This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class (2017, Metropolitan Books).
• Marianne Williamson: A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution (2019, HarperOne). Also note: Healing the Soul of America (20th anniversary edition, paperback, 2018, Simon & Schuster).
• Andrew Yang: The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future (2018, Hachette Books).

Isabel Sawhill: The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation (2018, Yale University Press); Economist at the "centrist" Brookings Institute, stresses the importance of "mainstream values, such as family, education, and work." Detractors decry her as left wing nut job . . . the logic of know it all 5th grader and the mind set of a soviet thug." Chapters include "Why Economic Growth Is Not Enough," "The Limits of Redistribution," "A GI Bill for America's Workers," "A Bigger Role for the Private Sector" and "Updating Social Insurance." That all seems pretty modest to me, but "conservatives" can't so much as acknowledge the problem without flying off half-cocked. Makes one wonder why bother to appeal to them anyway.

Tom Segev: A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Big (816pp) biography of Israel's first Prime Minister, by one of Israel's most important historians. Few national leaders in our time have more completely defined their nations -- Attaturk comes to mind as the closest comparable figure, although Mao and Castro ruled longer and more forcefully. Even today, it's possible to map most currents in Israeli political life to one facet or another of Ben Gurion complex view of his mission. Other recent books relating to Israel:

• Seth Anziska: Preventing Palestine: A Political History From Camp David to Oslo (2018, Princeton University Press).
• Khaled Elgindy: Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump (2019, Brookings Institution Press).
• Noura Erakat: Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (2019, Stanford University Press).
• Michael R Fischbach: Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (2018, Stanford University Press).
• Michael R Fischbach: The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (2019, paperback, Stanford University Press).
• Matti Friedman: Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel (2019, Algonquin Books).
• Micah Goodman: Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War (2018, Yale University Press).
• Daniel Gordis: We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel (2019, Ecco Books).
• Sara Yael Hirschhorn: City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (2017, Harvard University Press).
• Amy Kaplan: Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (2018, Harvard University Press).
• Susie Linfield: The Lions' Den: Zionism and the Left From Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (2019, Yale University Press).
• Shaul Mitelpunkt: Israel in the American Mind: The Cultural Politics of US-Israeli Relations, 1958-1988 (2018, Cambridge University Press).
• Ilan Pappe: The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories (paperback, 2019, Oneworld).
• Dennis Ross/David Makovsky: Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel's Most Important Leaders Shaped Its Destiny (2019, Public Affairs): Ben-Gurion, Begin, Rabin, Sharon ("a leader who tells the settlers to give up the dream").

JC Sharman: Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order (2019, Princeton University Press): They say "history is written by the victors," and for 500 years we've been reading about how Europe's maritime conquest of the world reflected superior technology (and, less fashionably these days, genes and religion). This thin (216 pp) book tries to flip that argument on its head, asserting that the conquest "is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default because local land-oriented polities were largely indifferent to war and trade at sea." Some of these ideas resemble the ones Jared Diamond put forth in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), but both underestimate the amount of greed, bad faith, and knavery involved. The pattern I see most clearly is that European contact always started a corrosion of traditional social, economic, and political ties well before Europeans were able to seize control.

Jake Sherman/Anna Palmer: The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump's America (2019, Crown): Congress beat reporters for Politico report on the two year stretch when Republicans controlled both the White House and both houses of Congress, rehashing the jockeying behind the "repeal and replace" of Obamacare, the massive corporate tax giveaway, the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, and the partial government shutdown.

Matt Taibbi: Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another (2019, OR Books): Journalist, covers elections and other scandals for Rolling Stone, a path paved by Hunter Thompson, so he's all but expected to get a little gonzo. Outside the mainstream hive, he's written some of the sharpest analysis of the media's coverage of elections, starting with Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season (2005), but I thought his quickie book on 2016, Insane Clown Posse: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus failed to rise to the absurdity of events he was forced to cover. In some ways, this book looks like a do-over, but rather than stare straight into the sun, he's focusing on the mediaa, and how they got blinded not just by events but by their devil's bargain with the mega-corporations that employ them. Two appendices: "Why Rachel Maddow is on the Cover of This Book," and "An Interview with Noam Chomsky." I guess Sean Hannity's appearance on the cover (on the red side vs. Maddow on the blue) requires no further explanation. Taibbi has long had a habit of burnishing his independence by attacking both parties, or both right and left, even when there's no equivalence.

Astra Taylor: Democracy May Not Exist: But We'll Miss It When It's Gone (2019, Metropolitan Books): Ruminations on a much declaimed and frequently confused political principle, something we're taught to believe in, to pride ourselves in, yet not take too seriously, as it's been much abused by self-interested elites. That those abuses seem to increased, both in frequency and in crassness, in recent years is probably due to increasing inequality. Author also has a documentary film, What Is Democracy?, and another film on Marxian philosophe Slavoj Zizek.

Adam Tooze: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018, Viking): Economic historian, has a couple of major works: Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2007), and The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (2014). This sums up the decade following the 2008 crash. There have been a lot of books about the immediate causes of the crash.

David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019, Tim Duggan Books): A general primer on global warming, albeit one that goes beyond presenting what we know to look at, and take seriously, the worst case scenarios scientists imagine -- hence the title -- without blunting the impact by parading the usual list of "what we can do about it" palliatives. Reviews tend toward hyperbole: "the most terrifying book I have ever read," and "the most important book I have ever read." May be a good lead in for yet another list of recent climate books (I started one earlier under Jeff Goodell but they do keep coming):

• Mike Berners-Lee: There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years (paperback, 2019, Cambridge University Press).
• Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (paperback, 2017, University of Chicago Press).
• Andreas Malm: Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (paperback, 2016, Verso Books).
• Greta Thunberg: No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (paperback, 2019, Penguin Books).

Brenda Wineapple: The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019, Random House): This is probably number one on the short list of events that could have changed American history had it gone slightly differently. As it was, Andrew Johnson did much to weaken and undo plans to empower freed slaves and reconstruct the south more equitably. Those years he held power made it easier for white southerners to reclaim power and create a racist order that prevailed into the 1960s, with remnants still evident today. Wineapple previously wrote the broader period history, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 (2013; paperback, 2014, Harper Perennial). More on impeachment history (expect more on impeachment news soon):

• Frank O Bowman III: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump (2019, Cambridge University Press).

Other recent books noted with little or no comment:

HW Brands: Heirs of the Founders: Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants (2018, Doubleday; paperback, 2019, Anchor Books).

Bill Bryson: The Body: A Guide for Occupants (2019, Doubleday).

Gail Collins: No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History (2019, Little Brown).

Jay Cost: The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy (2018, Basic Books).

Kathleen Day: Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street (2019, Yale University Press).

Larry Diamond: Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (2019, Penguin Press).

Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (paperback, 2018, Beacon Press).

Ronan Farrow: Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (2019, Little Brown).

Silvia Federici: Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (paperback, 2018, PM Press).

Aaron Glantz: Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream (2019, Custom House).

Garrett M Graff: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).

Gerald Horne: The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean (paperback, 2018, Monthly Review Press).

Tom LoBianco: Piety & Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House (2019, Dey Street Books).

George Monbiot: Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (paperback, 2018, Verso Books).

Philip Mudd: Black Site: The CIA in the Post-9/11 World (2019, Liveright).

Margaret O'Mara: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019, Penguin Press).

Samantha Power: The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (2019, Dey Street Books).

Susan Rice: Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For (2019, Simon & Schuster).

Christopher Ryan: Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (2019, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).

Tatiana Schlossberg: Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have (2019, Grand Central Publishing).

Rebecca Solnit: Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters (paperback, 2019, Haymarket Books).

The Washington Post: The Mueller Report (paperback, 2019, Scribner).

Gary Younge: Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (2016; paperback, 2018, Bold Type Books).

Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive.

Music: current count 32276 [32248] rated (+28), 224 [224] unrated (+0).

Birthday last week, so I lost a day to cooking, most of another to shopping and prep. I usually like to do something new and extraordinary, but had a terrible time settling on a theme and menu this year. Finally, the final decision was made by Laura, in favor of an idea Max Stewart floated: fire up the grill and made burgers. That seemed pretty ordinary to me, but in fact I can't recall ever grilling hamburgers (I've grilled or smoked pretty much everything else). Turned out to be a pretty good idea. I picked up a new cookbook (The Ultimate Burger), and came up with three variations: teriyaki pork burgers with grilled pineapple, salmon burgers with tomato chutney, and good old bacon cheeseburgers. Even took a shot at making some potato buns (although I bought more for backup, mostly brioche and pretzel buns).

For side dishes, I did baked beans, two potato salads, coleslaw, corn and tomato salad, and my standard cucumber-yogurt thing. And for dessert, I stuck with my original choice: Mom's coconut cake, served with vanilla ice cream. Had nine people, and everyone seemed pleased.

October archive (see link above) is wrapped up and indexed. Not much to say about this week's haul, except perhaps that The Daisy Age was the surprise A+ in Robert Christgau's first new Consumer Guide under his And It Don't Stop subscription newsletter, and the only new CD I've bought in 3-4 months (not that I couldn't have assembled the play list from Napster). Back when I was writing Recycled Goods, I tried to get on Ace Records' promo list, but never got so much as a reply. So I was pretty jealous when Bob told me a few years back that they had started sending him records. This looks like the tenth of their records he's reviewed since 2013. (If anyone cares, I'd review every damn one.)

Some of the old music this week were rap records from that vintage (1989-95). Also filled in some EST back catalogue, after reviewing their Live in Gothenburg as an A- last week (which makes it, in my humble estimation, their best record ever).

Best-reviewed albums from the week of 10-25 (according to my metacritic file (4+ counting my grades in brackets, but paren totals don't count my grades): Anna Meredith: FIBS (9); Rex Orange County: Pony (5); Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Colorado (5); Blaenavon: Everything That Makes You Happy (4); Cigarettes After Sex: Cry (4) [***]; Hana Vu: Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway (4). Also note: Kanye West: Jesus Is King (2).

Best-reviewed albums from 10-18: Floating Points: Crush (13); Foals: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost (Part 2) (9); Caroline Polachek: Pang (9); Battles: Juice B Crypts (7); Clipping: There Existed an Addiction to Blood (7); Vagabon (7); Patrick Watson: Wave (5); Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis (3) [***].

New records I want to track down: The Bad Plus: Activate Infinity; Lakou Mizik: HaitiaNola; Nellie McKay: Bagatelles; Van Morrison: Three Chords & the Truth.

Also out since last week, previously graded: Randy Brecker/Ada Rovatti: Brecker Plays Rovatti: Sacred Bond [**]; Jeff Denson/Romain Pilon/Brian Blade: Between Two Worlds [*]; Laszlo Gardony: La Marseillaise (Sunnyside) [**]; Carmen Sandim: Play Doh (Ropeadope) [*]; Leo Sherman: Tonewheel (Outside In Music) [*]; Esbjorn Svensson Trio: EST Live in Gothenburg (2001, ACT -2CD) [A-].

New records reviewed this week:

• Big Thief: Two Hands (2019, 4AD): [r]: B+(**)
• The Nat Birchall Quartet: The Storyteller: A Musical Tribute to Yusef Lateef (2019, Jazzman): [r]: B+(**)
• Daniel Carter/Julian Priester/Adam Lane/Reggie Sylvester/David Haney: Live Constructions Volume 2 (2018 [2019], Slam): [r]: B+(*)
• Daniel Carter/Stelios Milhas/Irma Nejando/Federico Ughi: Radical Invisibility (2018 [2019], 577): [bc]: B+(**)
• Cigarettes After Sex: Cry (2019, Partisan): [r]: B+(***)
• Harry Connick Jr.: True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter (2019, Verve): [r]: B+(*)
• Satoko Fujii/Joe Fonda: Four (2018 [2019], Long Song): [cd]: B+(***) [11-08]
• Binker Golding: Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers (2018 [2019], Gearbox): [cd]: A-
• Kim Gordon: No Home Record (2019, Matador): [r]: B+(***)
• Homeboy Sandman: Dusty (2019, Mello Music Group): [r]: B+(***)
• Miles Okazaki: The Sky Below (2019, Pi): [cd]: B+(***)
• Anne Phillips: Live at the Jazz Bakery (2019, Conawago): [cd]: B-
• Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis (2019, Constellation): [r]: B+(***)
• Rocket 808: Rocket 808 (2019, 12XU): [r]: B
• Michael Jefry Stevens & the Mountain Chamber Jazz Ensemble: The Poet Is in the House (2019, ARC): [bc]: B
• Devin Brahja Waldman: Brahja (2019, RR Gems): [cdr]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• The Daisy Age (1989-94 [2019], Ace): [cd]: A
• Saadet Türköz/Elliott Sharp: Kumuska (2007 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Black Sheep: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (1991, Mercury): [r]: B+(**)
• Brand Nubian: Foundation (1998, Arista): [r]: B+(***)
• Fu-Schnickens: Greatest Hits (1992-95 [1995], Jive): [r]: B+(***)
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio: Plays Monk (1996, Superstudio Gul): [r]: B+(**)
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio: Winter in Venice (1997, Superstudio Gul; [1999], ACT): [r]: B+(*)
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio [EST]: From Gagarin's Point of View (1999, ACT): [r]: B+(**)
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio [EST]: Good Morning Susie Soho (2000, ACT): [r]: B+(***)
• E.S.T.: Leucocyte (2007 [2008], ACT): [r]: B+(**)
• E.S.T. [Esbjörn Svensson Trio]: 301 (2007 [2012], ACT): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Dave Douglas: Engage (Greenleaf Music) [11-08]
• Nick Dunston: Atlantic Extraction (Out of Your Head) [11-01]
• Johnny Griffin & Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis: Ow! Live at the Penthouse (1962, Reel to Reel) [12-06]
• Remy Le Boeuf: Assembly of Shadows (SoundSpore) [11-01]

Purchases:

• The Daisy Age (1989-94, Ace)

Weekend Roundup

Been distracted, so chalk this up as another week going through the motions, keeping open the option of looking back at this presidential term week-by-week as it unfolded. More time might have given me chance to group links on the same basic stories, as well as to build a bit more structure around everything. Started collecting on Saturday, after which the Baghdadi assassination story broke, John Conyers died, and Trump was greeted with boos and chants of "lock him up" at the World Series.

Some scattered links this week:

• Jared Bernstein/Dean Baker: Blame the economic policies, not the robots.

• Ryan Bort: Trump has officially weaponized the Justice Department to go after his rivals.

• Hannah Brown: A top Trump student loan official just resigned, calling for debt forgiveness. Related: Sarah Jones: Trump-appointed student loan official resigns: "Stop the insanity."

• Cristina Cabrera:

  • Trump claims ISIS leader's death is a bigger deal than the killing of Bin Laden.

  • Trump told Mattis to 'screw Amazon' in its bid for $10 billion Pentagon contract: The "cloud computing" contract was awarded to Microsoft this week.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: The GM strike has officially ended. Here's what workers won and lost.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump is almost certainly pushing China to smear Biden right now.

  • 'Abuse of power is not a crime': Trump's former Attorney General defines his credo.

  • Why Congress might impeach Trump and actually remove him from office: Chait continues to cling to the notion that Republicans still harbor a shred of decency, even ones who are well practiced at hiding it. ("Even the sycophantic Lindsey Graham left the door open more than a crack when asked by Jonathan Swan if he could imagine voting to convict.")

• Zak Cheney-Rice: Republicans want victimhood without being victimized.

• Jane Coaston: The right saw the outrage at Trump's "lynching" tweet as another example of liberal hypocrisy.

• Patrick Cockburn: The final outcome of the multiple Syrian wars is now in sight. By the way, a letter here notes that:

  Jeff Halper, in his 2015 book, suggested that people across the world exercising their democratic right to challenge their governments' misrule were becoming "Palestinianised" and the rulers were becoming "Israelised."

  For a case in point, the letter included a link to: Nasim Ahmed: 'Palestinanised' Chileans revolt against their "Israelised' government.

• Jonathan Cook: Tulsi Gabbard is right, and Nancy Pelosi wrong. It was US Democrats who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis.

• Jessica Corbett: Typhoon Hagibis kills dozens and causes "immense damage" in Japan.

• Max Fisher/Amanda Taub: The global protest wave, explained: "It's not your imagination, and the last few months are not an outlier: Mass protests are on the rise globally." Subheds:

  1. Democracy is stalling out
  2. Social media makes protests likelier to start, likelier to balloon in size and likelier to fail
  3. Social polarization is way up
  4. Authoritarian learning

  For more, Fisher and Declan Walsh also wrote: From Chile to Lebanon, protests flare over wallet issues. Fisher also wrote: The US turned Syria's north into a tinderbox. Then Trump lit a match. More articles on various ongoing protests:

  • Stephen K Hirst: Ecuador's unlikely revolution: "Indigenous communities stood up to the president and the IMF -- and won."

  • Joshua Keating: What the protests breaking out all over the world have in common: "Millions of people are taking to the streets. It might just be the beginning."

  • Lisa Khoury: An uprising in Lebanon.

  • Lili Loofbourow: Chile's people have had enough.

  • Andrew Richner/Abigail Gutmann-Gonzalez: Chile awakens.

  • Amy Wilentz: Haiti is in the streets.

• Quint Forgey: Trump warns US 'may have to get in wars': "The president specifically threatens to hit Iran 'like they've never been hit before' if the regime provokes Washington."

• Masha Gessen:

  • The Trump administration's war on the government is an "autocratic attempt".

  • Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know what the first amendment is for.

• Ryan Grim: Bernie Sanders vows to revive criminal prosecutions of CEOs for unfair trade practices.

• Sue Halpern: The problem of political advertising on social media.

• Benjamin Hart: President Trump is obsessed with stealing Syria's oil.

• Mehdi Hasan: Everyone is denouncing the Syrian rebels now slaughtering Kurds. But didn't the US once support some of them?

• Jeff Hauser/Eleanor Eagan: House Democrats are failing to protect farmers from Trump: "The administration is letting agribusiness monopolies run amok."

• Umair Irfan: Californians face more blackouts as fire risk remains high.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • We can't actually keep Syria's oil, but Lindsey Graham wants Trump to think we can: More paragraphs than I can quote here explain why the scheme is "preposterous." Still, it was the one trick that moved Trump to reverse his withdrawal, which is something Graham believes in more than reason:

    These geopolitical arguments didn't move Trump an inch. So Sen. Lindsey Graham -- Trump's most loyal political defender but also a fervent advocate for the Kurds -- shifted tactics to focus on something he figured the president would understand: finances. According to NBC News, Graham and Jack Keane -- an influential retired Army general who, back in 2007, persuaded President George W. Bush to order a "surge" of troops to Iraq -- brought maps into the Oval Office, showing Trump the network of oil fields across the region, including in Syria.

    The argument about oil was flimflam, and Graham and Keane knew it. Citing a defense official, NBC noted that "while the emphasis on oil in Syria is intended to convince the president that the U.S. military is valuable, securing the oil fields is not a military strategy. U.S. troops will not actually be guarding the oil fields."

    The ruse was reminiscent of the time, early in the administration, when Trump wanted to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, to the alarm of several officials. Trump paid no attention to arguments about counterterrorism or the balance of power, so the officials shifted tactics. Pentagon officials started talking about "rare-earth metals" in Afghan soil -- something that had never been in previous briefing books. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, then the national security adviser, showed Trump old photographs of Kabul in the 1970s, in which young women were seen wearing miniskirts. See, McMaster told the president, Afghanistan hasn't always been a graveyard of empires; it's been a "normal" country in the past, and it can be again.

    Trump not only reversed his decision to pull out -- he doubled the number of troops that President Barack Obama, toward the end of his term, had kept in.

    Graham, Keane, and many others wanted to keep some U.S. troops in Syria. Trump did not. So they made up a phony argument to get him to change his mind. It worked.

  • The US has 50 nuclear bombs in Turkey. Why?

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Federal judge rules impeachment inquiry is legal: I find it rather shocking that anyone even thought this needed ajudication.

  • Diversity will continue to be Democratic asset in 2020.

  • Clinton 2020? Say it ain't so, Hillary! If she can't even get a sympathetic hearing from someone like Kilgore, I'd say her chances are pretty negligible, even before you factor in the risk of getting beat twice by someone as unpopular and reviled as Trump.

  • Anti-abortion activist is rump's latest unqualified judicial nominee: Sarah Pitlyk. For more, see Dahlia Lithwick: The judges Republicans are doing it all for.

  • Trump sues California to kill cross-border cap-and-trade market.

  • Republicans storm closed meeting, demanding transparency for their stonewalling POTUS.

  • Voter enthusiasm for 2020 is off the charts -- especially for Trump fans.

• Jen Kirby:

  • The Justice Department's review of the Russia probe is reportedly now a criminal inquiry.

  • Prime Minister Boris Johnson to seek elections after Brexit deadlock: "British Prime Minister Boris Johnson couldn't get Brexit done by the end of the month like he'd promised he would -- so he's pushing for a general election instead."

• Markos Kounalakis: Trump's four horsemen: "The president is unleashing autocrats to create a Middle East apocalypse." Casts the "four horsemen" as Erdogan, Assad, Khamanei, and Putin, but he missed a few, especially the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and let's not forget Israel. Also Trump, who get criticized for stepping back then overcompensates by plunging forward, his "withdrawal" from Syria almost instantly reversed by an invasion to seize Syrian oil fields, while sending more forces to Saudi Arabia (once again, aimed at oil fields).

• Ivan Krastev/Stephen Holmes: How liberalism became 'the god that failed' in Eastern Europe.

• Eric Levitz:

  • 459,000 working-class white male Wisconsinites didn't vote in 2016. An untapped potential Trump resource in what's currently the key battleground state?

  • Recapping impeachment: Bill Taylor returns for one last mission.

  • Rudy and Hunter Biden both worked for the same Romanian kleptocrat.

  • USDA watchdog to investigate Department's alleged suppression of climate science.

  • How centrist Democrats botched the 2020 primary. I'd put less emphasis on the names than on bigger problems with the paradigm. The inescapable fact is that centrist Democrats -- Clinton, Obama, and their natural followers -- have failed on both fronts: they haven't been able to deliver real gains to the party rank and file, and even with their timid programs and compromises they haven't been able to keep the Republicans out of power. The left offers tangible answers to both problems: they promote real answers to the real problems faced by the party base, and they work hard to convince you that they'll follow through if given the chance. Also, one more reason: from the 1980s through Hillary Clinton in 2016, successful Democrats (like Republicans) were the ones most able to raise money from well-heeled donors. In 2016, Bernie Sanders came up with way to raise money that doesn't depend on PACs and fat cats, and Warren has followed his path. The whining you hear from centrists these days is mostly because the left is no longer dependent on their support. Of course, names do have some impact. Aside from Hillary and Biden, the two best-known pro-business centrists are probably Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emmanuel, but their failures and scandals have kept them from even running.

• Eric Lipton/Jesse Drucker: Symbol of '80s greed stands to profit from Trump tax break for poor areas.

• Josh Marshall: TPM's deep dive on the conservative deep state: A series of articles investigating right-wing political organizations, not necessarily within the state but trying to align state policy with their political interests. Some articles in this series:

  • Kira Lerner: How one conservative group plans to maintain Republicans' grip on state legislatures.

  • Bob Moser: Is the Koch Network winning its war on occupational licensing?

  • Sarah Posner: Inside the Christian legal army weakening the church-state divide.

  • David Walsh: It took decades, but the anti-New Deal crusaders have triumphed.

• Dylan Matthews: US air pollution deaths increased by 9,700 a year from 2016 to 2018.

• Nicole Narea:

  • The Trump administration just imposed another roadblock on low-income immigrants.

  • The Trump administration just admitted that it separated an additional 1,500 immigrant families.

• Anna North: Pennsylvania lawmakers want to ban abortion before many people know they're pregnant.

• Olivia Nuzzi: The zombie campaign: Joe Biden is the least formidable front-runner ever."

• Kelsey Piper: AI could be a disaster for humanity. A top computer scientist thinks he has the solution: "Stuart Russell wrote the book on AI and is leading the fight to change how we build it."

• Andrew Prokop: The week in impeachment inquiry news, explained.

• Corey Robin: The Obamanauts: Review of eight books on Obama in the White House, asking the question: "What was the defining achievement of Barack Obama?" Jonathan Chait thinks that's a dumb question, and tries to construct a defense of Obama against such "left-wing attacks."

• Aaron Rupar: Team Trump's efforts to spin Mulvaney's quid pro quo confession are not going well.

• Eugene Scott: Trump's lynching comparison shows there's no bottom to his sense of victimhood. Still, I take a certain gratification in that Trump seems to be acknowledging that lynching is a bad thing, although more likely with him it's more a matter of who's doing what to whom. (Same with witch hunts.)

• Liam Stack: Update complete: US nuclear weapons no longer need floppy disks. You know, I still have a couple of 8-inch floppy disk drives in the basement. Admittedly, I haven't used them since the 1980s. Also have the S-100 bus Z-80 computer I bought them for, with 64K of no-wait-state static RAM, and some orange plastic levers for toggling in binary boot programs. Also have a 1998-vintage computer with a 3.5-inch not-floppy removable disk drive. In between, there were 5.25-inch floppy disks. I have a bunch of those, but no computer I can read them in. Probably some marginally interesting baseball data on those. Maybe record lists, occasional scraps of writing.

• Matt Stieb: Trump's press conference announcing the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is peak deranged Trump.

• Peter Stone: William Barr, Trump's new Roy Cohn.

• Matt Taibbi: Everyone is a Russian asset. Hillary Clinton and her close supporters have been especially quick to make such charges. Taibbi doesn't talk about his own experience as a target of such slurs, but I've noticed he gets it a lot.

• Astra Taylor: Out with the old, in with the Young.

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

  • Trump's latest attempt to block impeachment inquiry testimonies faces a key court battle.

  • Top State Department official says ousting ambassador to Ukraine was a White House priority.

• Peter Wade:

  • World Series crowd serenades Trump with boos and 'lock him up' chants.

  • Replace me with a 'yes man' and 'you will be impeached' former Chief of Staff warned Trump.

• James D Walsh: 'The force of Trump's lying has ruptured the space-time continuum': Steve Schmidt on impeachment: Interview with Schmidt, an ex-GOP (Never Trump) pundit at MSNBC, who says:

  My perspective is that the Republican Party is profoundly corrupted by Donald Trump and it has been corrupted by a tolerance for all and any type of amoral and immoral behavior. Tolerance for astounding levels of corruption and exposure of hypocrisy from the religious far-right leaders like Falwell, to everybody who screamed and shouted about some perfidious act that Obama or the Clintons allegedly committed. Trump has remade the Republican Party into an isolationist, grievance-driven, resentment-driven political party.

  On the other hand, he still loathes the Democratic Party, and sees them as doomed. He notes, I think correctly, "A debate about stupid things benefits Donald Trump." He's specifically talking about Kamala Harris' argument that Trump should be banned from Twitter, but I see a much more pervasive example in the mass media, where every issue is reduced to stupid.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump's Baghdadi press conference shows how he ruins even his best moments.

  • The US is "committed" to staying in Syria -- to protect oil.

  • Top US diplomat to Ukraine testifies there was a quid pro quo.

• Sarah Westwood/Caroline Kenney: Mayor and college officials in city where Trump spoke Friday give changing numbers of student attendees at speech. Trump spoke in Columbia, SC, at "historically black" Benedict College, by invitation only to a crowd of 200. Note that: "only about 10 were actual students from the college." New York Magazine linked to this under the title, "Man of the white people."

• Robert Wright: What's good for Putin is not always bad for America: "Syria isn't a zero-sum game between Russia and the United States, so let's stop talking about it that way."

• Matthew Yglesias: It's time to broaden the impeachment inquiry: "The House should be asking questions about Trump's dealings with Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others." He's not broadening it much, and the three nations mentioned are easy to demagogue on, because they resonate with recent and/or ancient popular prejudices. But surely there's as much "smoke" around Israel, but no one wants to look in that direction (even though they wouldn't have to look much further than Sheldon Adelson).

Daily Log

Made birthday dinner. Had a horrible time trying to figure out what to do this year, then had a rough time trying to invite people. I've been wanting to make Mom's coconut cake, and that argued against most of the international cuisines I've explored in years past. Jerry came up with the idea of just grilling some hamburgers, and after I came up with a couple of alternatives, Laura voted for hamburgers. I looked around and picked up a copy of The Ultimate Burger, and there I found a few interesting new things to try, which I figured might fit in nicely with some old standby dishes. Final menu:

• Grilled bacon burgers
• Grilled teriyaki pork burgers: with grilled pineapple and onion.
• Crispy salmon burgers with tomato chutney
• Smoky grilled potato salad: with grilled onions and bacon.
• Smoked salmon vinaigrette: Russian potato salad recipe, with olives, capers, and dill.
• Buttermilk coleslaw
• Fresh corn and tomato salad
• Rebecca's baked beans: topped with bacon.
• Mast Va Khiar: Persian yogurt-cucumber with mint, scallions, sultanas, and black walnuts.
• Coconut cake: with vanilla ice cream.

I toyed with the idea of baking my own rolls, and I wound up trying to make a batch (8) of potato rolls. I screwed them up coming and going, but they weren't bad, and I used them with the salmon. But for backup, I bought two packages each of brioche buns and pretzel buns (8 of each). They were at least as good, and a lot more cost-effective. Also bought a package (4) of gluten-free (chia-rice) buns, which no one ate.

I bought two packages of Yoder thick bacon. Tried one batch of the cookbook recipe where you cover the bacon with water, then boil the water off and brown what's left. I can't say as it's a better method: definitely slower, may drain less fat off (you get less left over in pan).

Jerry ran the grill, and I was swamped inside, with various things running late. I had figured most of the hamburgers would be topped with blue cheese, but I also bought thick slices of colby, and that's what Jerry used. The pork burgers were to be topped with teriyaki sauce, but Jerry put the blue cheese on them. I tried reconstructing a pork burger according to recipe, and it was pretty good, but by then hardly anyone else was interested.

I forgot to serve the coleslaw. Wasn't missed, and frankly wasn't as good as the non-creamy slaw I've made before, but belonged with the dinner.

I undercooked the cake icing, so it thinned out a bit before serving (misremembered the temperature, so stopped the syrup at 232F, instead of 240F from past experiments). Cake was very moist. A guest brought a pan of brownies, so some guests opted for them.

Wound up with nine people after a string of last-minute invites all panned out (24 hours before it was looking like we'd just have 4). I got a little flustered in the endgame, but wasn't as worn out once it was served as I've been in recent years. Enjoyed the company.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32248 [32212] rated (+36), 224 [229] unrated (-5).

As of late Sunday. Monday's mail unpacked below but not counted above.

Last couple weeks I've barely been able to scratch out two A- records. In fact, only one of the last six weeks yielded more than three, but I'm up to a nearly unprecedented nine here (E.S.T. a late add). One reason is I did something different last week, in that I jotted down a list of seven "new records I most want to track down." I found all seven, and got four A- records there (Jaimie Branch, Chris Knight, L'Orange & Jeremiah Jae, Kelsey Waldon). Although I must admit that part of the reason I did that was that Knight and Waldon were riding multiple A/A- streaks, and L'Orange/Jae's previous also came in at A-. Nor was Branch much of a surprise. Had I looked further, I would also have flagged Crosscurrents Trio (Dave Holland has his own streak going), and maybe the two new Intakt releases.

Also got a couple pleasant surprises out of the promo queue. My other main source this week was Saving Country Music: I added their top-reviewed albums to my metacritic file, but the winners there were the expected ones from Knight and Waldon. Adds to this and my tracking file help keep me up to date. For instance, I can tell you the best-reviewed new records of the week (10-18): Battles: Juice B Crypts (6); Foals: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost (Part 2) (6); Vagabon (6); Clipping: There Existed an Addiction to Blood (5); Floating Points: Crush (4); Caroline Polachek: Pang (4); Patrick Watson: Wave (4). Best-reviewed new records of the previous week (10-11): Big Thief: Two Hands (17); Kim Gordon: No Home Record (12); Elbow: Giants of All Sizes (9); Richard Dawson: 2020 (8).

New records I most want to track down: Homeboy Sandman: Dusty; Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis; Rocket 808.

Also out 10-18, listed below or previously graded: Gebhard Ullmann: MikroPULS [A-]; Michael Formanek: Even Better [***]; Petros Kampanis: Irrationalities [**]; Derel Monteith: Connemara [**]; Chris Speed: Respect for Your Toughness [**]; Chip Stephens/Stenn Wilson: Sadness & Soul [**]; John Yao: How We Do [**]; Rez Abbasi: A Throw of Dice by the Silent Ensemble [*]; Derel Monteith: Quantity of Life [*]; Carrie Wicks: Reverie [*]; Katerina Brown: Mirror [B]; Dan McCarthy: City Abstract [B].

Old records this week were mostly the result of collecting several recent decade-or-two best-of lists. I've started to copy these down, mostly to provide a checklist against my own listening. There weren't many titles I hadn't heard, but I had totally missed Chromatics and Joanna Newsom, so now I know something. You can find the lists with my grades here (original links in the files):

• Guardian: The 100 Best Albums of the 21st Century (2019)
• Paste: The 100 Best Albums of the 2010s
• Uproxx: All the Best Albums of the 2010s, Ranked (2019)

One more week left in October, promises to have more than the usual batch of distractions. Had a "furnace tuneup" last week, which left both the system and us pretty confused, so I need to call them back and get to the bottom of that. Weather itself has been up and down, enough so to remind me that as much as I hate the heat, the cold is actually more painful. Birthday coming up, so I'll take a day or two cooking something. I usually do a broad tasting menu from some exotic cuisine (started with Chinese, then Indian, then Turkish; finally got to French last year), but I'm feeling more like comfort food this year (or maybe I just really want to end it with Mom's coconut cake).

Last two big meals have been Hungarian, so I'm done with that for a while (although I still want to make the dumplings at some point, possibly the rabbit goulash and/or the venison meatballs, and for that matter the somloi trifle and/or the dobos torte -- the two insanely classic Hungarian desserts). Just not this week. Two more big projects are putting together a new computer, and doing a major cleanup/reorganization of the tools in the basement and garage.

Decided to buy the computer parts after my secondary machine temporarily crapped out a week ago. Eventually got it to boot, but it's been so slow I've dragged my feet something awful on website work. But rather than buy something cheap to replace the secondary machine, I figured I should jump whole hog into a new primary unit. Well, "half hog": went with the $200 AMD Ryzen 2700 CPU (8 cores, double the Passmark of my main machine), but much cheaper than the $565 Ryzen 3900 (twice again as fast); 64G of DDR 3000 SDRAM, instead of the 128G maximum; a 1TB M.2 slot SSD; on-board graphics (serious gamers could double the price of their computer here); a mid-range 750W power supply; and a relatively cheap box (because I still want a built-in DVD drive, which the fancy boxes no longer support). Where I did splurge was on a new 32-inch monitor UHD monitor. Should be relatively easy to put it together and load up Xubuntu. One resolution is to only do UTF-8 on the new box, so to get the extra speed, I'll have to convert the websites.

The basement/garage project will be a lot more work, and take a lot more out of my music time. I'm sick and tired of not being able to find tools I know I have. I expect to wind up with an inventory, in some kind of database or spreadsheet, with everything a bit neater. Perhaps success there will lead to a second project, to start to unburden the house of excess stuff, including a few books and CDs. At one point I thought of donating the latter to a library, and never went through with that (and feel less inspired every time they name another building after the Kochs). Open to ideas there.

Haven't done any significant work on my 2020 election book, but keep thinking about it. The book I'm currently reading on George Washington has some relevance, as he has one thing in common with Trump (extraordinary riches) but is otherwise Trump's polar opposite (well, aside from the race thing).

New records reviewed this week:

• Yazz Ahmed: Polyhymnia (2016-19 [2019], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(**)
• Michaela Anne: Desert Dove (2019, Yep Roc): [r]: B+(*)
• Bonnie Bishop: The Walk (2019, Thirty Tigers): [r]: B+(**)
• Jaimie Branch: Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise (2018 [2019], International Anthem): [r]: A-
• Chromatics: Closer to Grey (2019, Italians Do It Better): [r]: B
• Crosscurrents Trio [Dave Holland/Zakir Hussain/Chris Potter]: Good Hope (2018 [2019], Edition): [r]: A-
• Croy & the Boys: Howdy High-Rise (2019, Spaceflight): [r]: B+(**)
• Michael Formanek Very Practical Trio/Tim Berne/Mary Halvorson: Even Better (2019, Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Bill Frisell: Harmony (2019, Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Abdullah Ibrahim: Dream Time (2019, Enja): [r]: B+(**)
• Gethen Jenkins: Western Gold (2019, 5 Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Georgette Jones: Skin (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Roger Kellaway: The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway (2010 [2019], IPO): [cd]: A- [11-01]
• Chris Knight: Almost Daylight (2019, Drifters Church): [r]: A-
• L'Orange & Jeremiah Jae: Complicate Your Life With Violence (2019, Mello Music Group): [r]: A-
• Doug MacDonald & the Tarmac Ensemble: Jazz Marathon 4: Live at Hangar 18 (2019, DMAC, 2CD): [cd]: B+(*)
• Dan McCarthy: City Abstract (2019, Origin): [cd]: B
• Mike & the Moonpies: Cheap Silver & Solid Country Gold (2019, Prairie Rose): [r]: B+(*)
• Joshua Redman & Brooklyn Rider: Sun on Sand (2019, Nonesuch): [r]: B+(**)
• Reut Regev R*Time: Keep Winning (2019, Enja): [r]: A-
• Chris Speed Trio: Respect for Your Toughness (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Chip Stephens/Stenn Wilson: Sadness & Soul (2018 [2019], Capri): [cd]: B+(**)
• Gebhard Ullmann/Hans Lüdemann/Oliver Potratz/Eric Schaefer: MikroPULS (2017 [2019], Intuition): [cd]: A-
• Kelsey Waldon: White Noise/White Lines (2019, Oh Boy): [r]: A-
• Alice Wallace: Into the Blue (2019, Rebelle Road): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Ernest Hood: Neighborhoods: Memories of Times Past (1975 [2019], Freedom to Spend): [r]: B
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio: E.S.T. Live in Gothenburg (2001 [2019], ACT, 2CD): [cd]: A- [10-25]
• Barney Wilen: Live in Tokyo '91 (1991 [2019], Elemental Music, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Chromatics: Kill for Love (2012, Italians Do It Better): [sc]: B+(***)
• Joanna Newsom: The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004, Drag City): [r]: B+(*)
• Joanna Newsom: Ys (2006, Drag City): [r]: B
• Joanna Newsom: Have One on Me (2010, Drag City, 2CD): [r]: B
• Reut Regev: This Is R*Time (2008 [2009], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Calabria Foti: Prelude to a Kiss (Moco) [11-01]
• Jerome Jennings: Solidarity (Iola) [11-09]
• Per Texas Johansson: Stråk På Himlen Och Stora Hus (Moserobie)
• Fredrik Ljungkvist Trio: Atlantis (Moserobie)

Weekend Roundup

Half a week here, after my Midweek Roundup came out on Thursday. Still too exhausted to write an intro.

Some scattered links this week:

• Aaron Bady: Jedediah Purdy has an idea that could save us from capitalism and the climate crisis: Interview with Purdy about his latest book, This Land Is Our Land. Article doesn't live up to its premise, not all Purdy's fault, but I've never found his books all that satisfying.

• Riley Beggin: Tulsi Gabbard calls Hillary Clinton "the queen of warmongers" in her latest clash with top Democrats. A point which was pretty obvious after Clinton called Gabbard "the favorite of the Russians." Clinton is also still bear-baiting Jill Stein; see Tessa Stuart: Green Party torches Hillary Clinton for claiming Jill Stein is 'totally' a Russian asset. I've seen people attempt to defend Clinton on this (e.g., Charles P Pierce: Hillary Clinton is more than qualified to judge the effectiveness of foreign-influenced candidates), but they're rubbing salt into a still tender wound. Russian interference in 2016 is well established as a fact, but neither explains nor excuses Clinton's loss to Trump, nor does it make Trump unworthy (although lots of other things do) let alone brand him as some kind of Russian stooge. Moreover, such charges appear to have the intent of worsening US-Russian relations, at a time when better relations with Russia would be helpful on many issues. When Clinton attacks Gabbard and Stein as "favorites of the Russians," she's really warning Democratic candidates that Russia is bad and they should repeat her 2016 sabre-rattling mistakes. That the net effect of her attacks has been to increase Gabbard's popularity only underscores how irrelevant Clinton has become. For something much deeper on Gabbard, see Kerry Howley: Tulsi Gabbard had a very strange childhood. [PS: Robert Wright on Clinton's attacks: Virality and virulence. Another valuable Wright post: How the New York Times distorts our view of Syria.]

• Max Blumenthal: The US has backed 21 of the 28 'crazy' militias leading Turkey's brutal invasion of northern Syria: "Former and current US officials have slammed the Turkish mercenary force of 'Arab militias' for executing and behading Kurds in northern Syria. New data from Turkey reveals that almost all of these militias were armed and trained in the past by the CIA and Pentagon."

• Hannah Brown: Wildfires are raging in Lebanon. Experts say they saw this coming. "Fires are burning across Lebanon during a record heatwave."

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump writes unhinged 'legal' letter demanding that CNN pay him money.

  • 'We do that all the time, get over it,' Mulvaney boasts about Ukraine plot. Later: James Downie: Mick Mulvaney tries to clean up his mess, and fails.

  • Two candidates, two investigations, one deeply flawed agency: Review of James B Stewart's book: Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law.

• Alvin Chang: The man who rigged America's election maps: "How Tom Hofeller shifted the balance of power by taking gerrymandering to the extreme."

• William D Cohan: "There is definite hanky-panky going on": The fantastically profitable mystery of the Trump chaos trades: "The president's talk can move markets -- and it's made some futures traders billions. Did they know what he was going to say before he said it?" Related: Jake Johnson: Democrats demand federal investigation of 'suspicious' stock sales linked to Trump's economy-shifting trade war moves. Also: Hey Securities and Exchange Commission, if you are watching. Someone is trading on insider info.

• Chas Danner: Ocasio-Cortez credits Sanders for her political awakening at Bernie's comeback rally in Queens.

• Warren Davidson: Trump is right: Ending the endless wars starts in Syria. This is a little mealy-mouthed, but not exceptionally so for a House Representative (R-OH): I'd reject "after 9/11, America had a clear cause for war in Afghanistan" and some of the chest-beating about America's military, but this shows that some Republicans are eager to claim the mantel of peace, especially when Democrats cede that ground. Also note: Dhrumil Mehta: Republican voters are largely backing Trump's withdrawal from Syria. Also note: Syria critic Lindsey Graham reverses stance, says Trump's policy could succeed. It's getting really hard to overstate how completely Trump has the Republican Party under his thumb.

• Anthony Faiola: Socialism doesn't work? An emerging middle class of Bolivians would beg to differ.

• Steve Fraser: Existential threat versus existential crisis: "The Great Depression and the Climate Crisis, New Deals then and now."

• Adam Goldman/William K Rashbaum: Review of Russia inquiry grows as FBI witnesses are questioned: After complaining about "witch hunts," Trump and Barr order up one more to their liking.

• Fred Hiatt: It's not news that Trump is corrupt. What's new is how he is succeeding in corrupting our government.

• Sean Illing:

  • Capitalism is turning us into addicts: Interview with David T Courtwright, author of The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business.

  • How propaganda works in the digital age: Interview with Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works (2015). I've read, and recommend, Stanley later book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

• Christopher Ingraham: For the first time, workers are paying a higher tax rate than investors and owners: "The proximate cause of the shift was Trump's 2017 tax cut, which dramatically slashed taxes on corporate profits and estates."

• Sarah Jones: Bernie Sanders hasn't killed identity politics: Maybe not, but he's defined an identity that transcends the usual boxes that Democratic Party proponents of "identity politics" like to tick off, partly because he's revived an old identity "centrist" Democrats have been trying to wash their hands of (the working class), and partly because he has no desire to make those other distinctions.

• Mark Karlin: Trump isn't bringing any troops home. In fact, he has sent an additional 14,000 troops to the Mideast since May. It's just another con.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Kasich comes out for Trump impeachment.

  • Trump believes he has a mandate for tyranny.

  • Poll: Only a minority of Republicans are sure Trump is innocent.

• Jen Kirby: The UK Parliament just blew up Boris Johnson's Brexit plans: "Parliament just voted the make the prime minister seek a Brexit delay, even if his deal passes." Kirby previously wrote: The UK and EU have a new Brexit agreement. But it's not a done deal yet. More on Brexit:

  • Riley Beggin: In London, hundreds of thousands demand another chance to vote on Brexit; later: UK leaders insist Brexit will happen by Oct. 31 despite an extension request.

  • Rowena Mason: Labour seeks new alliance to kill off Boris Johnson's Brexit deal.

  • Amy Davidson Sorkin: Boris Johnson's bad Saturday and the contradictions of Brexit.

• Jeff Klein: Syria, the Kurds, Turkey and the US: Why progressives should not support a new imperial partition in the Middle East.

• Anita Kumar: Trump can't stop bragging to foreign leaders about his resorts.

• Eric Lach: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez make a show of force in Queens.

• Michael Laris: Messages show Boeing employees knew in 2016 of problems that turned deadly on the 737 Max.

• Eric Levitz: Biden's attacks on Medicare for All undermine the entire Democratic agenda.

• Eric Lipton: Trump's choice to bring G7 to his own resort would violate conflict-of-interest law, if he weren't President.

• Mujib Mashal/Thomas Gibbons-Neff: Civilian casualties reach highest level in Afghan War, UN says.

• Aaron David Miller/Eugene Rumer/Richard Sokolsky: What Trump actually gets right about Syria: First paragraph back peddles a bit: "Trump's assessment of the situation [in Syria] is not entirely wrong." Still, their main points are spot on, even if they aren't flattering to the American ego: "The US-Kurdish relationship was never going to last"; "Russia is the key power broker in Syria"; "Assad is here to stay"; "There won't be a second caliphate"; and "Syria is not a vital US interest." Turns out that Miller wrote a book back in 2014 (ergo, pre-Trump): The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President. From a note on the book: "Americans are adrift in a kind of Presidential Bermuda Triangle suspended between the great presidents we want and the ones we can no longer have. . . . Indeed, greatness is too rare to be relevant in our current politics, and driven as it is by nation-encumbering crises, too dangerous to be desirable." Good thing he got this book written before Trump came around, else he would have had to incorporate a twist too deranged to anticipate: a "stable genius" with "unmatched wisdom" who blundered his way into crisis only to find himself totally lacking in whatever it takes for "greatness" to emerge.

• Ally Mutnick: Why Republicans should be worried about their chances of retaking the House.

• Adam K Raymond: World's least self aware person, Donald Trump Jr, attacks Bidens for nepotism.

• Jody Rosen: Staring down Donald Trump, the same elephant in every room.

  We are not "all Greta Thunberg," but all of us know what it's like to be ambushed by Donald Trump. He pops up on your social media feed with hateful words and impulsive policy announcements. He flickers on TV screens in bus terminals and airport departure lounges, forever looming over your shoulder. He barges unbidden into your dreams. It is a condition of being alive in America in 2019. No matter who you are or what you're trying to accomplish, whether you're a 16-year-old working to save the planet or an ordinary citizen trying to make it through the day with some peace of mind intact, you will inevitably confront the specter of Trump, drifting into the frame in a cloud of disorder and bad vibes. Even the president's most dedicated enablers scan the sky warily, awaiting today's cyclone, the next reckless, capricious twist of the plot. The door swings open, the president enters, all heads turn. The camera whips around, and suddenly, everything else -- better angels, higher ideals, common decency, common sense, beauty, truth -- blurs into the background.

• Matthew Rosenberg/Kevin Roose: Trump campaign floods web with ads, raking in cash as Democrats struggle.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's Dallas rally showed how untethered from reality his impeachment pushback is. Related here: Matt Stieb: 7 unhinged moments from Trump's Dallas rally.

  • Trump's move to host the G7 at his Doral resort takes self-dealing to new levels. [PS: I guess not. See Riley Beggin: Trump won't host the G7 at his Miami resort after all.]

• Alexander Sammon: The miseducation of Mean Pete: "Once the Rhodes Scholar version of Mister Rogers, Buttigieg has become the snarling incarnation of anti-left rage." You know, I've long suspect that a big part of the pitch centrist Democrats make to their donors, even if only implicit, is that they will help business by, among other favors, keeping the left contained. That's part of why Clinton and Obama hardly ever lifted a finger to help labor, and it's part of why they felt few qualms about surrendering control of Congress, thereby giving up any chance of implementing the progressive platforms they successfully ran for president on. Buttigieg has done an impressive job of raising money from those same donors, only he's having to be much more explicit about carrying their water, and in 2019 those donors are much more worried by the left than they are by Trump and the Republicans. His eagerness to do that has made him a viable niche candidate, but when it comes to converting money to votes he may find himself pinned down way too narrowly. A related article from June 25: Do Pete Buttigieg's donors know him better than we do?: "The South Bend mayor has become a darling to Silicon Valley and Wall Street elite. That alone is a red flag."

• Greg Sargent:

  • Internal Democratic poll suggests a new way to bleed Trump dry.

  • Mick Mulvaney's role in the latest Trump scandal just deepened.

  • John Bolton's eruption shows that Trump's defenses are collapsing.

• Jon Schwarz: What I learned from the debate: Democrats still can't level with voters about the American empire. Related: Alex Emmons: Trump's chaotic Syria exit puts anti-war 2020 Democrats in a delicate spot. Schwarz also wrote: The US is now betraying the Kurds for the eighth time.

• Philip Shenon: 'A threat to democracy': William Barr's speech on religious freedom alarms liberal Catholics.

• Gregory Shupak: Media alarmed by US pullout from Syria -- which didn't actually happen.

• David Smith: US justice department resumes use of death penalty and schedules five executions.

• Matt Stieb: As Trump fumes, GOP advances real party goal of making federal judiciary great again.

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: When the dream of owning a home became a nightmare: "A federal program to encourage black homeownership in the 1970s ended in a flood of foreclosures."

• Jeffrey Toobin: William Barr's wild misreading of the First Amendment.

• Paul Waldman: A new report suggests Trump may have committed financial crimes.

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The French economist who helped invent Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax: Gabriel Zucman.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump loves dictators. Erdogan is the latest to take advantage of that. I don't think it's right to call Erdogan a dictator. He holds his office due to winning a reasonably open election (although he has used surviving an attempted military coup as an excuse for consolidating power in ways that may undermine future democracy). Many of the other "dictdators" Trump seems to admire were also elected, including Putin (Russia), Modi (India), Bolsonaro (Brazil), and Duterte (Philippines), but so was the only one Trump has actually called a dictator: Maduro (Venezuela). Clearly, he has little appreciation of, or concern for, the democratic process -- no surprise, given that he was elected with the flimsiest popular mandate of any of the above, but also because right-wingers are always contemptous of democracy, perhaps because even they suspect that their rule is unwarranted.

  • The Syrian ceasefire the US brokered is already falling apart.

  • Top Trump official throws Giuliani under the bus in impeachment inquiry statement.

• Matthew Yglesias: Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress -- it's going to take mass mobilization. I don't want to rain on anyone's desire to march, but I don't really buy this, even before discounting the inapplicability of various foreign examples. If impeachment happens, it's going to be done on narrow legalistic grounds, and it's not going to change power dynamics in any way. Mike Pence would replace Trump as president, he's pretty much hand-picked the cabinet anyway, and Congress would remain divided and ineffectual as at present. Sure, it's merited, and sure, it would be a chastising lesson for future presidents. Most of all, it presents an educational opportunity. But nothing significant can change until the 2020 elections, so that's where most of that pent-up energy should be directed. Well, that and keeping the frameworks for the rest of the political struggle viable, because even if the Democrats win big in 2020, we're still going to need a peace and social justice movement, union organizing, environmental awareness, and so forth.

• Li Zhou:

  • Rick Perry, a key figure in Trump's dealings with Ukraine, will resign as energy secretary. Trump famously hired "only the best people" but over time, he's lost most of his first wave of political hacks, almost invariably replacing them with former lobbyists: in this case, Dan Brouilette. See Lisa Friedman: New Energy Secretary fits trend: Cabinet dominated by lobbyists.

  • The Senate fails to override Trump's veto on its national emergency resolution. Somehow a 53-36 majority isn't enough to stop Trump. This is democracy?

Midweek Roundup

Sometime Wednesday afternoon it occurred to me that I might as well go ahead and round up the first rush of Democratic debate links for the Weekend Roundup. Then I wondered whether I could just dispatch them early, in a Midweek Roundup (something I've done a couple times, but not often). So here's what I rounded up by bedtime. Not many comments, other than to note that the "conventional wisdom" on Syria is not only worse than what Tulsi Gabbard has to say, it's worse than Donald Trump (see, e.g., his dismissal of Lindsey Graham, below).

Some scattered links this week:

• FiveThirtyEight:

  • What went down in the fourth Democratic debate.

  • Who won the fourth Democratic debate?

  • The October Democratic debate in 6 charts.

• Cristina Cabrera: Graham threatens to become Trump's "worst nightmare" in escalating feud: This promises to be more fun than Graham's two-plus years of utter sycophancy, but amidst all the insanity Trump has spouted over the last week, he sure has Graham's number:

  Trump, however, doesn't seem to particularly care what his closest Senate ally thinks.

  "Lindsey Graham would like to stay in the Middle East for the next thousand years, with thousands of soldiers fighting other people's wars," Trump told reporters on Wednesday afternoon. "I want to get out of the Middle East."

  Trump said Graham ought to focus on "the judiciary" and investigating Trump's "deep state" conspiracy theory instead.

  "That's what the people of South Carolina want him to focus on," the President said. "The people of South Carolina don't want us to get into a war with Turkey, a NATO member, or with Syria. Let them fight their own wars."

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: No one has a damn clue how many jobs will be lost to automation.

• Matthew Chance: Putin is on a victory lap of the Middle East. I suspect this is overstated, and of little practical import, but it does reflect the fact that the US has seen its reputation as a benefactor and power erode after decades of incoherent, reckless, and obsessive actions (not least its subservience to Israel). Moreover, America's position is likely to deteriorate further, especially as American public opinion turns against Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, and Egypt -- a conjuncture of Islamophobia on the right and anti-authoritarianism on the left. Trump's unique contribution to this is that he's convinced many despots in the Middle East that they no longer have to choose between the US and Russia.

• Patrick Cockburn: Turkey's Syria invasion rapidly backfiring for Ankara.

• Jonathan Cook: Israel prepares to turn Bedouin citizens into refugees in their own country.

• Tom Engelhardt: American Brexit: "It's not just Britain headed for the subbasement of imperial history."

• Kareem Fahim: Turkey's Erdogan presses offensive in Syria boosted by a nationalist surge at home. Doesn't that often happen in the early days of a war, before blowback occurs and the consequences sink in?

• Tara Golshan: Bernie Sanders's plan to reshape corporate America, explained.

• Rebecca Gordon: Extorting Ukraine is bad enough, but Trump has done much worse.

• Ben Hubbard, et al: In Syria, Russia is pleased to fill an American void.

• Sean Illing: The racial pessimism of Clarence Thomas: Interview with Corey Robin, whose new book is The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.

• Sarah Jones: Trump 'surprised' the grieving parents of a British teen at the White House.

• Ed Kilgore: Moderators and rivals pound Warren on middle-class tax-hike evasions. It's a rather dumb question, implying that middle class people aren't paying for health insurance now, where in fact they're paying through the nose into a scheme that squeezes them harder every year.

• Jen Kirby:

  • 9 questions about Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds you were too embarrassed to ask.

  • Trump sanctions Turkey for the Syria invasion his troop withdrawal allowed.

• Ezra Klein: Sorry, but Democrats need to talk about Hunter Biden. "Trump won't be."

  In 2016, Bernie Sanders famously refused to attack Clinton's emails in the debates. "The American people are sick and tired about hearing about your damn emails," he said to applause. The result was that rather than Democrats realizing how damaging that story was -- and how ineffective Clinton was at putting it to rest -- during the primary, they found that out in the general election. And yes, the media deserves the blame for the coverage decisions, but Democrats can't simply assume the media won't make the same mistakes in 2020. The lesson of Clinton's emails is that unfair smears can help Donald Trump get elected.

  One thing that might help here would be to never let an answer to this question go more than one sentence without bringing up Trump and his family of leeches. Then feel free to point out more examples of families profiting from their genes, like the Bushs, the Cheneys, the Romneys, and (sure) the Kennedys. Nepotism is an endemic problem in America, but it's worse in times of greater inequality and corruption, like now. Maybe go on and offer a back-handed compliment to the Bidens, who at least have the decency to recognize that even the appearance of impropriety is something that needs to be avoided. Of course, this approach would work better if the candidate isn't Joe Biden, but even he could handle the question much better than he did in the debate.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Trump: Kurds are 'not angels.' In fact, they're 'worse at terror' than ISIS.

  • Bernie Sanders's campaign is alive and well.

• PR Lockhart: Forth Worth officer charged with murder in killing of black woman in her own home.

• Dylan Matthews, et al: 5 winners and 3 losers from the October Democratic presidential debate. Winners: Bernie Sanders; Elizabeth Warren; Pete Buttigieg; opioid epidemic activists; universal basic income. Losers: Tulsi Gabbard; Joe Biden; free trade. My biggest problem with these judgments concerns Gabbard. Zack Beauchamp charges her with "a series of blatantly false statements," but the first one he points out is "the regime change war we've been waging in Syria." He flatly asserts that "The US is not waging a war of regime chance in Syria (as Biden pointed out later in the debate)," but the US was an early supporter of anti-Assad forces, way before ISIS emerged as a factor in the war. ISIS gave the US an excuse to use air power and ground troops in Syria, but the US never wavered in its opposition to the Assad government (even while fighting ISIS undercut the opposition and helped Assad stay in power). Beauchamp repeats the "regime change war" canard several times, and applauds Buttigieg for his "succinct and devastating" putdown of Gabbard: "You can put an end to endless war without embracing Donald Trump's policy, as you're doing." But Gabbard has been much more consistently opposed to Trump on Syria than her critics, who seem to have forgotten how we got into this horrible, nasty war in the first place. You can read the debate transcript in Here's what the 2020 Democrats are saying about Trump's Syria policy. Warren's statement there isn't bad: "We need to get out but we need to do this through a negotiated solution." A President Warren might even be able to do that. Indeed, the best solution to all of America's many foreign policy problems would be negotiation, aimed at replacing the myopic projection of American power with mutually beneficial international frameworks. But Gabbard is less deluded by American myth than any other candidate, and that clarity helps her here. (Where she falls down is not having the commitment to justice that you see with Sanders, or for that matter with Warren.) But Trump is incapable of negotiating anything, not least because he has no sense of decency himself, so his own sloppy exit is probably the best one can hope for now. You could even say that what he's done is accidentally brilliant: by double-crossing first the Kurds then the Turks in rapid succession, he has pivoted US policy in favor of consolidating Assad's power, which is at present the only viable path to peace in Syria. No reason to think he was smart enough to figure that out himself, but maybe Vladimir Putin was. Trump's unique contribution was in being too insensitive to object.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment is in grave danger from the Supreme Court.

  • Trump keeps losing in court, but time is on his side.

• Ella Nilsen/Li Zhou: House Republicans joined Democrats in condemning Trump's actions in Syria. Vote was 354-60.

• Anna North: Ronan Farrow's new book is a reminder of how silencing women helped Trump get elected: Book is called Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. Also on the book: Daniel Lippman: Ronan Farrow: National Enquirer shredded secret Trump documents.

• Delia Paunescu: The fourth 2020 Democratic presidential debate, explained in under 25 minutes.

• Andrew Perez: Documents reveal hospital industry is leading fight against Medicare for All.

• Kelsey Piper: Tom Steyer shouldn't be running for president.

• Frank Rich: There are only 5 candidates still standing after the latest Democratic debate: He's counting Joe Biden out, which seems a bit premature, so you can probably guess the rest: Warren, Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. Assumption seems to be that the latter two-three will pick up "moderate" support as Biden falters/flails. I think that may misread much of Biden's support: what they like about him is that he comes off as a solid, old-fashioned Democrat, safe and respectable, at a time when Republicans have every structural advantage and have never been more dangerous. Others may have similar platforms, but no one else has that particular vibe, or comes close.

• David Roberts: California's deliberate blackouts were outrageous and harmful. They're going to happen again.

• Aaron Rupar:

  Michael Cohen's testimony about Trump's shady business practices just got strong corroboration: "A new ProPublica investigation found that Trump inflated and deflated his assets when convenient." See: Heather Vogell: Never-before-seen Trump tax documents show major inconsistencies. Vogell and Katherine Sullivan previously wrote (2018-10-17): Here are the Trump projects where Ivanka and her dad misled buyers.

  • Giuliani's $500,000 payout from Fraud Guarantee reveals the hypocrisy of his attacks on Hunter Biden: "Giuliani is staunchly opposed to cashing in on political connections -- unless he's doing it."

• Greg Sargent: Mick Mulvaney's role in the latest Trump scandal just deepened.

• Sabrina Shankman: Trump wants to erase protections in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, a storehouse of carbon.

• Emily Stewart: Kamala Harris's call to suspend Trump's Twitter account, explained. "It's complicated." I rather doubt that. Steve M. This is why it's not worth shutting down Trump's Twitter.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Trump has 'very serious meltdown' in meeting with Democrats: Following the House vote condemning his Syria moves. Trump's tweet version:

    Nancy Pelosi needs help fast! There is either something wrong with her "upstairs," or she just plain doesn't like our great Country. She had a total meltdown in the White House today. It was very sad to watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick person!

  • A fourth associate of Rudy Giuliani has been arrested: After Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Andrey Kukushkin, and now David Correia. As Molly Ivins liked to say, "lay down with dogs; wake up with fleas."

  • Rudy Giuliani pushed Trump to remove Turkish opposition leader from US: Report. Refers to: Carol D Leonnig, et al: Giuliani pressed Trump to eject Muslim cleric from US, a top priority of Turkish president, former officials say: Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan blamed for the 2016 coup attempt.

• Matt Taibbi: In Democratic debate, more evidence that Ukrainegate helps Biden: "The more Democrats rally around Joe Biden, the clearer Donald Trump's path becomes."

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Is this Elizabeth Warren's Democratic Party?

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump told 6 falseholds about Syria in 4 minutes.

  • "Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!": Read Trump's wild letter to Turkey's Erdogan.

  • Former White House official bolsters the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower's allegations: Fiona Hill.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Democrats' debate about automation missed the mark: "Both productivity and economic growth have slowed down, not sped up."

Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32212 [32183] rated (+29), 229 [229] unrated (+0).

Cutoff was Sunday evening, after posting Weekend Roundup. Didn't have all of the unpacking done, so unrated count is a bit low. The two A- records came early in the week. Both are available on Bandcamp: Drumming Cellist, Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou. There's a good chance that The Rough Guide to the Roots of Country Music might have hit A- on a second or third play, but not having the booklet, having to spend close to an hour checking dates, and the suspicion that I've heard everything there elsewhere didn't dispose me to be especially generous.

I saw a little bit (maybe 10%) of Ken Burns' Country Music PBS series. Not much there I didn't already know, but thought what I saw was pretty useful -- certainly didn't strike me as distorted and deceptive, like his Jazz series. As far as I can tell, the only product tie-ins are called The Soundtrack, available in both a 2-CD edition and a 5-CD box. I don't like streaming boxes -- actually, I don't have the patience, in large part because it's hard to break them up in to listenable chunks, and there's no booklet to help you keep score -- so I probably won't bother, but the tracklists look impeccable. Probably not as good as Classic Country Music: A Smithsonian Collection (also 5-CD), but better than Columbia Country Classics (from 1990, also 5-CD). Virtually no overlap with Rough Guide, for reasons that hardly need explication.

I read about the Exbats in last week's Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide. If the link doesn't seem to work, maybe you should subscribe? I was pleased to find my previous A- picks for Chance the Rapper and Tyler Childers as good or better. Also that he found more than I did in Black Midi, Chuck Cleaver, Rapsody, and Sleater-Kinney. Some folks have asked about XgauSez. It's on a new schedule, fourth Wednesday of each month, and subscribers will get it delivered to their mailboxes.

Continuing to plug things into my tracking and metacritic files, which is helping me keep up to date. For instance, I can tell you the best-reviewed new records of the week (10-11): Big Thief: Two Hands (15); Kim Gordon: No Home Record (12); Elbow: Giants of All Sizes (8). Best-reviewed new records of the previous week (10-04): Angel Olsen: All Mirrors (24) [*]; Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Ghosteen (22); Danny Brown: Uknowhatimsayin¿ (16) [***]; Wilco: Ode to Joy (10); DIIV: Deceiver (9). New records I most want to track down: Yazz Ahmed: Polyhymnia; Jaimie Branch: Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise; Bill Frisell: Harmony; Abdullah Ibrahim: Dream Time; Chris Knight: Almost Daylight; L'Orange & Jeremiah Jae: Complicate Your Life With Violence; Kelsey Waldon: White Noise/White Lines.

New records reviewed this week:

• Rez Abbasi: A Throw of Dice by the Silent Ensemble (2017 [2019], Whirlwind): [cd]: B+(*) [10-19]
• Mats Åleklint/Per-Åke Holmlander/Paal Nilssen-Love: Fish & Steel (2018 [2019], PNL): [bc]: B+(***)
• Simone Baron & Arco Belo: The Space Between Disguises (2019, GenreFluid): [cd]: B- [11-08]
• Katerina Brown: Mirror (2019, Mellowtone Music): [cd]: B [10-18]
• Cashmere Cat: Princess Catgirl (2019, Mad Love/Interscope, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Drumming Cellist [Kristijan Krajncan]: Abraxas (2019, Sazas): [cd]: A-
• David Finck: Bassically Jazz (2019, Burton Avenue Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Ras Kass: Soul on Ice 2 (2019, Mello Music Group): [r]: B+(***)
• Krokofant: Q (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B
• Remy Le Boeuf: Light as a Word (2019, Outside In Music): [cdr]: B
• Little Brother: May the Lord Watch (2019, Imagine Nation Music/For Members Only/Empire): [r]: B+(**)
• Joe McPhee/Paal Nilssen-Love: Song for the Big Chief (2017 [2019], PNL): [bc]: B+(**)
• Bernie Mora & Tangent: No Agenda (2019, Rhombus): [cd]: C+
• Poncho Sanchez: Trane's Delight (2019, Concord Picante): [r]: B
• Louis Sclavis: Characters on a Wall (2018 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Mike Stern-Jeff Lorber Fusion: Eleven (2019, Concord): [r]: C+
• Tinariwen: Amadjar (2019, Anti-): [r]: B+(**)
• Kiki Valera: Vivencias En Clave Cubana (2018 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(***) [10-16]
• Rodney Whitaker: All Too Soon: The Music of Duke Ellington (2017 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(***) [10-16]
• Barrence Whitfield Soul Savage Arkestra: Songs From the Sun Ra Cosmos (2019, Modern Harmonic): [r]: B+(**)
• Carrie Wicks: Reverie (2019, OA2): [cd]: B+(*) [10-16]
• Young M.A: Herstory in the Making (2019, M.A Music/3D): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• The Exbats: E Is 4 Exbats (2016-18 [2019], Burger): [r]: B+(***)
• Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou: Anou Malane (1994 [2019], Sahel Sounds): [r]: A-
• The Rough Guide to the Roots of Country Music: Reborn and Remastered (1926-33 [2019], World Music Network): [r]: B+(***)
• Cecil Taylor: Mysteries: Indent: Antioch College/Yellow Springs, Ohio/March 11, 1973 (1973 [2018], Black Sun): [r]: B+(***)
• Cecil Taylor: Mysteries: Untitled (1961-76 [2019], Black Sun): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• The Exbats: A Guide to the Health Issues Affecting Rescue Hens (2016, Burger): [r]: B+(**)
• The Exbats: I've Got the Hots for Charlie Watts (2018, Burger): [r]: B+(***)
• Rodney Whitaker: Ballads and Blues: The Brooklyn Sessions (1998, Criss Cross): [r]: B+(**)
• Barrence Whitfield & the Savages: Soul Flowers of Titan (2018, Bloodshot): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Binker Golding: Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers (Gearbox)
• Dan McCarthy: City Abstract (Origin) [10-16]
• Mute: Mute (Fresh Sound New Talent) [12-13]
• One O'Clock Lab Band: Lab 2019 (UNT) [11-22]
• Kiki Valera: Vivencias En Clave Cubana (Origin) [10-16]
• Rodney Whitaker: All Too Soon: The Music of Duke Ellington (Origin) [10-16]
• Carrie Wicks: Reverie (OA2) [10-16]

Mar 2001