Music Week

Expanded blog post, August archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31902 [31860] rated (+42), 259 [259] unrated (+0).

Running late again, mostly because I've been fiddling with the 2019 Metacritic file, adding extra points for high grades (not just midyear list picks) for most of the publications tracked by Album of the Year. The specific lists are noted here: in most cases one point for grades scored 80+, although for some relatively generous publications I've used 90+ (e.g., for AllMusic Guide, I'm counting 4.5 star records, but not 4.0 star ones). My latest project there has been to add points for All About Jazz grades of 4.5+ stars (4 stars is probably their median grade; at any rate it's very common). I've worked my way back to March 26, and the work has slowed down as I've had to check more release dates to separate 2019 releases out from the earlier ones (mostly late 2018's, but sometimes they review older releases). AOTY doesn't track AAJ (or any other jazz sources), so this has started to generate some jazz coverage. I should probably do Downbeat next.

Many of this week's picks are things I stumbled onto from various lists, and they're a pretty patchy group. I've finally started adding the final/latest Christgau EW reviews to his database, so a couple records (like the Diana Gordon EP) were suggested there -- which, by the way, led me to find Taana Gardner's disco classic (one of very few Christgau-rated A records I missed). Phil Overeem's latest list (link last week) led me to several things, including the George Jones United Artists Rarities, which sent me on a minor dive with a side of Little Jimmy Dickens.

The bigger dive this week was into the works of Jon Lundbom and Bryan Murray. This started with Balto Beats and swept up pretty much everything I had missed. (I had heard their often excellent records on Moppa Elliott's Hot Cup label, but missed almost everything else.)

The other smaller dive was into country singer-songwriter Tyler Childers. I initially graded his new one B+(***), but wondered if I shouldn't revisit 2017's Purgatory -- graded B+(**) by me at the time, but later a Christgau A-. Both of my initial reviews admitted that more spins may be called for, and it didn't take many. Also found two relatively crude earlier releases, which really brought his songwriting into focus. A couple more spins of the live EPs will raise could that grade as well, but the best songs are repeats from the debut -- probably still the best place to hear them.

One minor note: I've taken the time lock off the August Streamnotes draft file, which is where the monthly archive winds up. I won't do any indexing of the file until the end of the month, nor am I likely to be citing the URL in my weekly posts (although it's appeared in the notebook since I went weekly). But the naming convention is likely to be consistent moving forward, and you might spy something for the next Music Week there (e.g., the records I'm listening to as I'm writing this).

New records reviewed this week:

• Leila Bordreuil/Michael Foster: The Caustic Ballads (2016, Relative Pitch): [bc]: B+(*)
• Tyler Childers: Country Squire (2019, Hickman Holler/RCA): [r]: A-
• The Cinematic Orchestra: To Believe (2019, Domino): [r]: B+(**)
• Mark De Clive-Lowe: Heritage (2018 [2019], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(*)
• Mark De Clive-Lowe: Heritage II (2018 [2019], Ropeadope): [r]: B
• Elephant9: Psychedelic Backfire I (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B+(*)
• Elephant9 With Reine Fiske: Psychedelic Backfire II (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B+(**)
• Diana Gordon: Pure (2018, self-released, EP): [yt]: B+(*)
• Harbinger: Extended (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Mike Holober/The Gotham Jazz Orchestra: Hiding Out (2017 [2019], Zoho, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)
• Anne Mette Iversen's Ternion Quartet: Invincible Nimbus (2018 [2019], BJU): [r]: B+(***)
• Mark Kavuma: The Banger Factory (2019, Ubuntu Music): [r]: B+(*)
• LSD: Labrinth/Sia/Diplo Present . . . LSD (2019, Columbia): [r]: B-
• Lage Lund: Terrible Animals (2018 [2019], Criss Cross): [r]: B+(*)
• Jon Lundbom/Bryan Murray: Beats by Balto! Vol. 1 (2018 [2019], Chant): [r]: A-
• Moutin Factory Quintet: Mythical River (2019, Laborie Jazz): [cd]: B-
• Simon Nabatov Quintet: Last Minute Theory (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Ola Onabulé: Point Less (2019, Rugged Ram): [cd]: B
• Mario Pavone Dialect Trio: Philosophy (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Alberto Pibiri & the Al Peppers: The Nacho Blues (2019, Alberto Pibiri Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• The John Pizzarelli Trio: For Centennial Reasons: 100 Year Salute to Nat King Cole (2019, Ghostlight): [r]: B+(**)
• Noah Preminger: After Life (2018 [2019], Criss Cross): [r]: B+(**)
• Jenny Scheinman/Allison Miller: Jenny Scheinman & Allison Miller's Parlour Game (2019, Royal Potato Family): [r]: B+(***)
• Fabrizio Sciacca Quartet: Gettin' It There (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Paul Silbergleit: January (2018 [2019], Blujazz): [cd]: B+(**)
• Paul Zauner's Blue Brass feat. David Murray: Roots n' Wings (2019, PAO/Blujazz): [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Tyler Childers: Live on Red Barn Radio I & II (2013-14 [2018], Hickman Holler, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• George Jones: United Artists Rarities (1962-64 [2019], EMI Nashville): [r]: B+(***)
• Masayuki Takayanagi New Directions Unit: April Is the Cruellest Month (1975 [2019], Black Forms Editions): [r]: B-

Old music:

• Balto Exclamationpoint/Plaidworthy: If the Big Hurt (2015, self-released): [bc]: B+(***)
• Balto!: Balto! (2016, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Balto!: Two Cans of Soup (2017, self-released, EP): [bc]: B-
• Balto!: Taco Cat Poops (2018, self-released, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
• Baltbom!: ¡!Baltbom!¡ (2015, self-released): [bc]: B+(*)
• Baltsticks!!: Play You, Play Me (2016, self-released): [bc]: B+(*)
• Bryan and the Haggards/Eugene Chadbourne: Merles Just Want to Have Fun (2012 [2013], Northern Spy): [bc]: A-
• Tyler Childers: Bottles and Bibles (2011, Hickman Holler): [r]: A-
• Little Jimmy Dickens: 16 Biggest Hits (1949-65 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): [r]: B+(***)
• Taana Gardner: Heartbeat (1981, West End, EP): [r]: A-
• George Jones: George Jones Sings the Hits of His Country Cousins (1962, United Artists): [r]: B+(***)
• George Jones: My Favorites of Hank Williams (1962, United Artists): [r]: B+(*)
• George Jones: George Jones Sings Like the Dickens! (1964, United Artists): [r]: B+(**)
• Jon Lundbom: Big Five Chord (2003 [2004], self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord: All the Pretty Ponies (A Live Recording) (2004 [2005], self-released): [r]: B
• Bryan Murray: What You Don't Forget (2007, Jazz Excursion): [bc]: B+(***)
• John Pizzarelli: P.S. Mr. Cole (1996-97 [1999], RCA): [r]: B+(***)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Tyler Childers: Purgatory (2017, Hickman Holler): [r]: [was B+(**)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Steve Lehman Trio/Craig Taborn: The People I Love (Pi): August 30
• Dave Miller Trio: Just Imagine (Summit): October 4
• Bill O'Connell and the Afro Caribbean Ensemble: Wind Off the Hudson (Savant)
• Mike Pachelli: High Standards (Fullblast): September 1
• Houston Person: I'm Just a Lucky So and So (HighNote)
• Lyn Stanley: London With a Twist: Live at Bernie's (A.T. Music)
• Tucker Brothers: Two Parts (self-released): October 3

Weekend Roundup

Again, spent a little over two days collecting what seems to be a bottomless series of links that show various aspects of the same basic fact: that Donald Trump is like all other conservatives in the sense that he believes some people (like himself) are innately superior to other people, and that the political system should be rigged to favor superior people over inferior ones, but even among conservatives, as an individual he is exceptionally ignorant, abusive, vain, and corrupt. Most weeks I take pains to remind you that what's wrong with him is just a reflection of his political beliefs, and we need to focus on the broader right-wing and not just on him. Still, this week he was such a flaming asshole that it's hard to get beyond the horror and disgust he reeks of.

Some scattered links this week:

• Gary Abernathy: Trump is not a racist. His voters aren't either. Nothing here convinces me of the title, and I doubt that's even the author's intent. Rather, he's saying that Trump and many of his voters don't think of themselves as racists, but the more they're called racists, the more likely they are to start identifying that way. I can see the logic here, even relate it to a personal incident. I had a boss once who complained that I had a "bad attitude" and, well, my attitude got much more pronounced after that. Still, we have a fair amount of empirical experience with calling Trump and Republicans racist, and thus far their response is almost always to deny rather than embrace it. Sure, they get upset and irritated, and some try to turn the tables and paint themselves as victims of racists, but as long as they're defensive they aren't that much of a threat. Moreover, the real problem with racism isn't that some people identify as racists. It's that lots more people practice racism, often without giving it much thought. Those people need to know that they're going to get called out on their racism when it's evident -- something that even the President hasn't been immune to lately. For more on Trump's history of being called racist, see Philip Rucker/Ashley Parker: The brand label that stokes Trump's fury: 'Racist, racist, racist.'

• Josh Barro: The Trump boycotts pose a grave danger to the Equinox and SoulCycle businesses. Also: Alex Abad-Santos: SoulCycle instructors are as mad about its investor's Trump fundraises as its riders are; Lizzie Widdicombe: Equinox members take a stand against Trump (sort of); Ilana Novick:. Billionaire Trump supporter Stephen Ross can't have it both ways.

• Jo Becker: The global machine behind the rise of far-right nationalism.

• Julie Bosman/Kate Taylor/Tim Arango: A common trait among mass killers: hatred toward women.

• Perrie Briskin: Why we should let more foreign doctors practice in America.

• Jason Burke: Norway mosque attack suspect 'inspired by Christchurch and El Paso shootings'.

• Cristina Cabrera: CBP chief forced to explain why ICE raids haven't targeted Trump's companies.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • The Mississippi ICE raids expose the biggest problem with US immigration laws: "They ignore the high demand for workers to fill low-skill jobs in America." I don't know. Maybe those jobs should pay more? Related: Angela Stuesse: The poultry industry recruited them. Now ICE raids are devastating their communities.

  • Trump described an imaginary "invasion" at the border 2 dozen times in the past year.

• John Cassidy:

  • Some reasons to be skeptical about Trump's embrace of gun control.

  • Donald Trump's trade war with China is spiralling out of control.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump calling his white nationalist fans crazy is not the defense he thinks it is.

  • Biden: If elected President, I'll let Mitch McConnell block everything. What he actually said was "ending the filibuster is a very dangerous move," but that's a fair translation. I doubt he'll actually put "No We Can't" on his posters, but if that's what people hear, he'll lose.

• Zak Cheney-Rice: The sleight of hand at the heart of Trump's appeal.

• Helena Cobban: On "humanitarian intervention".

• William Cummings: 'Only in the Panhandle': Trump chuckles when audience member suggests shooting migrants.

• Cora Currier: Pushing out the border: How the US is waging a global war on migration.

• Chas Danner/Margaret Hartmann: Everything we know about Jeffrey Epstein's death: A news blip I would barely have noticed until I needed somewhere to hang the extra links:

  • McKay Coppins: Why conspiracy theorists will never believe the 'official' Epstein story/a>.

  • Margaret Hartmann: What the unsealed Jeffrey Epstein documents reveal about Donald Trump.

  • Harry Litman: Jeffrey Epstein's apparant suicide is unfathomable.

  • Dylan Matthews: The conspiracy theories about the Clintons and Jeffrey Epstein's death, explained.

  • Anna North: Jeffrey Epstein is dead. His story isn't over.

  • Charlie Warzel: Epstein suicide conspiracies show how our information system is poisoned.

  • David Frum: The shame and disgrace will linger: Still trying valiantly to be shocked by Donald Trump (here "accusing the Clintons of murdering Jeremy Epstein," but really, could be anything any week).

• Brady Dennis/Andrew Freedman: Here's how the hottest month in recorded history unfolded around the world.

• EJ Dionne Jr: On guns and white nationalism, one side is right and one is wrong.

• Kayla Epstein: Climate change isn't an intangible future risk. It's here now, and it's killing us.

• Steven Erlanger: Are we headed for another expensive nuclear arms race? Could be. Main problem with this "logic" is that the fix is already in: the intent to spend more than a trillion dollars to stockpile new bombs, regardless of whether anyone else shows up for the race.

• Helena Bottemiller Evich: 'It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie': "A top climate scientist [Lewis Ziska] quit USDA, following others who say Trump has politicized science."

• Mary Fitzgerald/Claire Provost: The American dark money behind Europe's far right.

  A recent openDemocracy investigation found that America's Christian right spent at least $50 million of "dark money" to fund campaigns and advocacy in Europe over the past decade. (By the measures of US political financing, this may not seem like a vast sum, but by European standards it's formidable. The total spend on the 2014 European elections, for example, by all of Ireland's political parties combined was just $3 million.)

• Ben Freeman/Nia Harris/Cassandra Stimpson: The military-industrial jobs scam: $750 billion for the Pentagon, a record haul, but the "stubborn truth" is that more money begets fewer jobs. Also at TomDispatch:

  • Aviva Chomsky: How the Green New Deal is changing America.

  • John Feffer: How to decide the fate of the planet: "Is China or the Green New Deal the answer to climate change?"

  • Karen Greenberg: What the child detentions at the border really tell us.

  • Adam Hochschild: America's real war: "Trump's venom against the media, immigrants, 'traitors,' and more is nothing new." Remembering xenophobia 1917-23.

  • Robert Lipsyte: A comic stands up to racism: "When comedian Dick Gregory tried to bust the word."

• Conor Friedersdorf:

  • Dismantling Tucker Carlson's white-supremacy argument.

  • National service is a terrible idea: "John Delaney's plan amounts to forced labor."

  • What ails the right isn't (just) racism.

• Grace Gedye: Can journalism be saved from the tech giants? There's a problem here -- advertising revenues that previously supported newspapers and magazines have been sucked up by Google and Facebook, undermining the business viability of a free press -- but I don't see this "solution" as helping much. The proposal is to allow content-providers to band together to negotiate better terms with the tech giants. Seems to me that the real problems are deeper than revenue distribution, starting with the very model of depending on advertising to support journalism. We're actually going through a period where the marginal distribution cost of journalism has dropped to virtually nothing, which should make it cost-effective to dramatically expand production, but we're stuck with a business model (advertising + subscriptions) that drags both consumers and content-producers into a death spiral. The obvious way out of this is to free distribution while finding some other way to pay for content creation. In the long run, that way needs to be public funding, the trick being to come up with schemes that are responsive to diverse consumers, that are professional, and that are fair and as free as possible of corruption. That's a tough sell in a period when virtually everything is politicized, but we've tried commercializing everything, and have the present political mess to show for it.

• Shirin Ghaffary: Trump's executive order on social media bias is a distraction: "Trump is reportedly drafting an executive order on tech bias against conservatives, even though there's no proof this bias exists."

• Tara Golshan: Joe Biden accidentally said "poor kids" are just as bright as "white kids": "The former vice president immediately corrected himself to say "wealthy kids." Or, as Jim Newell put it: In Iowa, Joe Biden's mouth keeps getting away from his brain; also Matt Stieb: Joe Biden gaffes his way through Iowa.

• Constance Grady: The Dayton, Ohio, shooter reportedly kept a "rape list" of potential victims.

• Joan E Greve: New York Times changes front-page Trump headline after backlash. On Trump's Monday teleprompted speech, original headline read "Trump urges unity vs. racism." Later changed to "Assailing hate but not guns." Trump objected to the change: Allyson Chiu: Trump lashes out after New York Times amends 'bad' headline about his response to mass shootings. Both articles have scans of both cover pages, and various tweets. As Jamil Smith put it: "This is the 'Dewey Defeats Truman' of racism." For more: Aaron Blake: Why the New York Times's Trump headline was so bad.

• Jeff Halper: The meaning of Israel's massive housing demolitions in East Jerusalem.

• Mehdi Hasan: These 7 prominent conservatives have nothing i common with white supremacists, nothing at all: What we used to call "satire." FYI: Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Donald J Trump, Stephen Miller, Laura Ingraham, Candace Owens, John Cornyn.

• Fred Kaplan: Trump's new arms race makes the Cold War era look rational and restrained. "The secretary of defense is keen to test a type of missile that no one has requested for more than 30 years, without knowing where it would be stationed or why it's particularly needed."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Is beating Trump the best Democrats can hope to achieve in 2020?: I don't mind some prudent skepticism, but this guy is trying hard to be a major killjoy. People, especially Democrats, need to understand that the difference between even the minimal Democratic agenda and Trump/Republicans is something that matters a lot, and they have to get serious about implementing that agenda. That means: first of all they have to win big, they have to make aggressive use of the power they gain, and they have to make the Republicans the shadow government of the super-rich own their failures, so they can build and run again and again until they succeed. The Democratic candidate should be the one who makes the strongest case for doing all that, as opposed to someone who's just marginally better than Trump.

  • Nadler makes it clear House is already in 'impeachment proceedings'. Related: Quinta Jurecic: Impeachment, but without the moral clarity.

• Jen Kirby: The Trump administration adds even more sanctions to try to push out Venezuela's Maduro.

• Ken Klippenstein: Leaked FBI documents reveal Bureau's priorities under Trump.

• Josh Kovensky: In new interview, Bill Barr sees Dirty Harry, Death Wish as justice done right.

• Paul Krugman:

  • China tries to teach Trump economics: "If you want to understand the developing trade war with China, the first thing you need to realize is that nothing Donald Trump is doing makes sense."

  • Tariff tantrums and recession risks: "If the bond market is any indication, Donald Trump's escalating belligerence on trade is creating seriously increased risks of recession."

  • Trump's China shock.

  • Trump, tax cuts and terrorism: "Why do Republicans enable right-wing extremism?" I would say it's because they've found a successful political strategy in provoking strong, irrational responses from their base, and they have few if any scruples about anyone acting on those impulses. Race is just one of those nerve points, but it's been successfully exploited by Nixon (his "Southern strategy"), Reagan ("welfare queens"), Bush I ("Willie Horton"), and no one's hit it harder than Trump. It's not the only one, but when you play it and follow with guns and war and general contempt for law and civility, it's not hard to figure out what happens next.

    But racism isn't what drives the Republican establishment, and my guess is that a majority of the party's elected officials find it a little bit repugnant -- just not repugnant enough to induce them to repudiate its political exploitation. And their exploitation of racism has led them inexorably to where they are today: de facto enablers of a wave of white supremacist terrorism.

• Michael Kruse: How San Francisco's wealthiest families launched Kamala Harris.

• Jason Lemon: Nearly all of Mexico's gun violence is committed with illegal firearms coming from US, officials say.

• Helen Lewis: To learn about the far right, start with the 'manosphere': "The sexist world has become a recruiting ground for potential mass shooters."

• Jonathan Lis: The only way to stop the catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit? Revoke article 50.

• PR Lockhart: Ferguson changed how America talks about police violence. 5 years later, not much else has changed.

German Lopez:

• Elizabeth Warren has a new plan to reduce gun violence by 80 percent: "Warren's plan combines various policies, from universal background checks to licensing to police reform, to bring down US gun violence."

• Guns are the problem: "America doesn't have a monopoly on hate or mental illness. What is has is a lot of guns."

• Sebastian Mallaby: How economists' faith in markets broke America: Review of Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream, and Binyamin Appelbaum's The Economist's Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society.

• Dylan Matthews: Stop blaming mental illness for mass shootings: "It's about the guns."

• Dana Milbank: A worried nation wonders: How can we keep Wayne LaPierre safe?

  The longtime head of the National Rifle Association, it turns out, is worried sick about his personal safety in this gun culture.

  After the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, he and his wife bravely waited out the uproar on the pink-sand beaches of the Bahamas, part of $542,000 in private jet trips and personal items the NRA bought for him. And now, thanks to some delightful reporting by my Post colleagues Carol D. Leonnig and Beth Reinhard, we know that last year's Parkland massacre left LaPierre so fearful for his personal safety that he tried to have the NRA buy him a $6 million French-chateau-style mansion with nine bathrooms in a gated Dallas-area golf course community.

  He told associates he was worried about his safety and thought his Virginia home was too easy for potential attackers to find.

  Ultimately, the financially stressed NRA didn't buy LaPierre the mansion. That's too bad, because, as the saying goes: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a French chateau."

• Rani Molla: Trump says Google is biased against conservatives. Here's how search actually works. One thing that remains unmentionable here is whether or to what extent advertisers influence Google search results. That's certainly my impression as a long-time user.

• Robert Myers: The 'warspeak' permeating everyday language puts us all in the trenches.

• John Nichols: Beto O'Rourke is doing what Donald Trump is simply incapable of: "The Texan is demonstrating real leadership in the wake of a horrific mass shooting by unequivocally condemning racism." I'm less impressed. I've seen his expletive-filled clip responding to "What can Donald Trump do?" several times, and while he's fumbling on, the only answer I can think of is "resign."

• Ella Nilsen: Trump's sudden push for a possibly doomed background check bill, explained.

• Helaine Olen: Trump's speech was like a hostage video.

• Mark Osborne: Florida white supremacist arrested for threatening shooting at Walmart, police say. Also: Tom Winter/Dennis Romero: FBI arrests Las Vegas man who allegedly wanted to shoot Jews, LGBTQ bar patrons.

• Keith Payne: The truth about anti-white discrimination: "Many white Americans feel that discrimination against whites is on the rise. Experiments suggests otherwise." By the way, I took a semester of psych during my brief tenure in high school, and learned a few things there. One key concept was projection: the tendency people have to impute their own beliefs and feelings to other people. We see projection everywhere. Especially we see white racists assuming that non-whites are racist against them. In 50 years since then, I've seen non-whites who were wary and cautious and sometimes even bitter, but I've never seen any say or do the sort of things I've seen white racists do hundreds of times.

• Jeremy W Peters/Michael M Brynbaum/Keith Collins/Rich Harris/Rumsey Taylor: How the El Paso killer echoed the incendiary words of conservative media stars.

• Daniel Politi: Elderly Washington couple dies in murder-suicide blamed on worries over medical bills: Another shooting guns weren't responsible for.

• Tom Porter: FBI agents are reluctant to pursue white nationalist extremists because they don't want to target Trump's base, former counterterrorism official says.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok are both suing the Justice Department: "The two former FBI officials filed separate lawsuits this week, alleging improper political retaliation."

  • The polls are in, and here's who won the second Democratic debate: The most interesting of the polls was one by HuffPost/YouGov, which offered separate percentages for whether the debate performance improved or worsened opinion on the candidate. The difference produce a net change: Warren (+44), Buttigieg (+24), Booker (+20), Castro (+17), Yang (+13), Sanders (+12), Klobuchar (+8), Gillibrand (+7), Inslee (+4), Gabbard (+3), Biden (+2), Bennet and O'Rourke (-4), Harris (-5), Bullock and Williamson (-6), de Blasio (-14), Hickenlooper (-15), Ryan (-17), Delaney (-30). Compare this to last week's pundit rankings, which accorded wins to Biden (for not doing as poorly as last time) and Delaney (for talking a lot even though no one much liked what he had to say).

  • Democrats' confusing debate over an "impeachment inquiry," explained.

• Jennifer Rubin: Democratic candidates grasp the moral seriousness of this moment.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump would rather blame Democrats than grapple with his "invasion" rhetoric.

  • Fox & Friends pushes incendiary "invasion" conspiracy theory -- even after El Paso shooting.

  • "Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger": Trump's speech about shootings ignored the real problem.

• Sigal Samuel:

  • Trump wants to "detect mass shooters before they strike." It won't work.

  • Facebook is building tech to read your mind. The ethical implications are staggering. Offhand, I'd say this is impossible. On further thought, you might be able to approximate it by subliminally planting thoughts in luser heads, then pretending they're authentic. That's something that Facebook has the vision and ethics (i.e., lack thereof) to aim at.

• Rosa Schwartzburg: The 'white replacement theory' motivates alt-right killers the world over.

• Somini Sengupta/Welyl Cal: A quarter of humanity faces looming water crises. This strikes me as an even more acute threat to humankind than climate change, not that the latter doesn't have something to do with it. Also: Christopher Flavelle: Climate change threatens the world's food supply, United Nations warns. Also by Sengupta: Earth's food supply is under threat. These fixes would go a long way.

• Matt Shuham: 'Ruthless': How it feels when the Trump administration guts your agency.

• Richard Silverstein: Expanding fight against Iran, Israel opens new military front in Iraq.

• Ali H Soufan: I spent 25 years fighting jihadis. White supremacists aren't so different.

• Emily Stewart:

  • The drama over Mitch McConnell's Twitter account, explained.

  • Why Joaquin Castro's tweet of a list of Trump donors is so controversial: "Take note: If you donate to a political campaign, some of your information will probably be made public." Well, it wouldn't be so controversial if showing public support for Trump wasn't something to be ashamed of. Castro's list of 44 Trump donors in San Antonio makes me want to see the comparable list for Wichita (not that I can't guess a few).

• David Swanson: Long after Hiroshima: Last week marked 74 years since the people charged with "thinking about the unthinkable" cavalierly went ahead and just did it. Maybe the bigger number next year will motivate some attention, like the 75th anniversary of D-Day (although it's harder to spin Hiroshima as a day to celebrate American chauvinism). Maybe the scuttling of arms control treaties and the trillion dollar scam to "renovate" America's nuclear bomb arsenal will bring out some protest.

• Matt Taibbi: Who's afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?.

• Giacomo Tognini: Here are the Democratic presidential candidates with the most donations from billionaires: Buttigieg (23), Booker (18), Harris (17), Bennet (15), Biden (13), Hickenlooper (11), O'Rourke (9), Klobuchar (8), Inslee (5), Gillibrand (4), Delaney (3). Warren has 2, tied with Bullock. Sanders has 0 (tied with Castro, De Blasio, and Ryan). One each for Gabbard, Yang, and Williamson. Not listed is Tom Steyer, who like Donald Trump is his own billionaire. (See: Jessica Piper: Billionaire Tom Steyer spends more than $7 million on ads in first month.)

• Peter Wade:

  • Trump blows up over report on his dismal performances in Dayton and El Paso: Leads off with what may be the creepiest photo-op of his presidency. By the way, Dahlia Lithwick agrees (although she uses a less pointed term): Trump's photo-op with the orphaned El Paso baby was the smallest moment of his presidency; also Graeme Wood: Trump's El Paso photo is obscene.

  • Walmart takes action to stop mass gamings: "The company will continue to sell the guns and ammunition needed to conduct mass shootings."

• Alex Ward:

  • Narendra Modi tells India that "a new era has begun" after Kashmir power grab.

  • The latest crisis between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, explained in under 600 words. By the way, more on Kashmir:

    • Richard Silverstein: India joins China and Israel as world's leading ethnic cleansers. Author previously (April 18, 2017) wrote: Kashmir-Palestine: India and Israel both use human shields to maintain military occupation.

    • Sameer Yasir/Suhasini Raj/Jeffrey Gettleman: Inside Kashmir, cut off from the world: "A living hell' of anger and fear.

• Richard Wolffe: Trump could renounce white nationalism -- but he can't pretend he cares. Personally, I couldn't care less whether "a president can offer comfort at times like these." I think it's stupid and wasteful for the president to scurry around to disaster zones -- in fact, that it causes more problems than it solves. Of course, it's even worse with a guy who's stupid, arrogant, and incapable of empathy. Embarrassing is the word -- one that applies to Trump literally every day.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Trump's Twitter rant about the Federal Reserve and the dollar, explained.

  • Billionaire Trump donor explains he's in it for the tax cuts, not the racism.

  • Trump's designation of China as a currency manipulator, explained.

    As is typically the case with Trump administration moves, it's not entirely clear what the administration is trying to accomplish here, in part because the administration doesn't do briefings in a well-organized way and in part because various players in the administration are often not on the same page. . . . And in this particular case, it's extremely unlikely the IMF will do anything, because China is not, in fact, manipulating its currency in any traditional sense. It's essentially a policy of the US government stamping its feet while it figures out what it wants to do next.

  • Joe Biden's rivals should attack him with some "Republican talking points": Obviously, not the one about Biden being too far to the left, but: "Joe Biden is old"; "Joe Biden is very establishment"; "the Biden family has made money off of politics."

  • Video games don't cause violent crime: "Research indicates that, if anything, it's the opposite."

• Stephen Zunes: Biden is doubling down on Iraq War lies.

Not news, but let me note in passing a few more historical links on intellectuals who had some influence on me:

• Johanna Fateman: The power of Andrea Dworkin's rage.

• Peter E Gordon: The utopian promise of Adorno's 'open thinking,' fifty years on.

• Tom Holland: America is not Rome. It just thinks it is.

• Judith Shulevitz: Kate Millett: 'Sexual Politics' & family values.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31860 [31831] rated (+29), 259 [257] unrated (+2).

I continue to be surprised at the pro-gun memes showing up in my Facebook feed. Consider this screed (from kin in Arkansas, if that matters):

"When I was in high school we had gun racks in trucks, and they had guns in them, and they were loaded. We even had fist fights! But never once did someone get pissed and go get a gun to shoot someone. We don't have a gun problem people, we have a people problem, a sin problem, a lack of heart and soul problem, a lack of respect for human life problem ,or even a mental health problem. . . . but we DO NOT have a gun problem! I think it's easier for some people to blame an inanimate object instead of taking responsibility."

This starts off with an anecdote which may have been true in the author's personal experience but is far from the general rule. Then it offers up a list of suspect people, blaming them and exculpating the guns they use to commit crimes. We watch a lot of crime stories on TV, and they invariably come down to motive and opportunity. Lots of people have motives that some people have killed for, but they don't do so because they never had the opportunity (or they had some scruples that inhibited them from striking out). Guns may do nothing on their own (there's a Steve Earle song called "The Devil's Right Hand" that argues otherwise), but when someone picks one up, they offer the opportunity of killing someone else, even at a distance. The basic idea behind gun control is to keep guns out of the hands of people who might use them criminally. One might argue that the government isn't smart or fair enough to make those decisions, but reasonable people could surely agree in minimal lists of guns that no one should have and people who should not have guns.

The problem there is finding reasonable people, especially among those on the right who have been propagating these stupid gun memes. Admittedly, there are people who would like to outlaw all guns, but they aren't numerous, and aren't in any position to reject reasonable compromises. My own position is that I dislike guns, and don't see any good reason for the vast majority of Americans (including myself) to own any, but I'm pretty resistant to the idea of outlawing things just because lots of people dislike them -- alcohol, drugs, and sex are cases we should have learned better than. On the other hand, I can occasionally see a case for prohibiting or strictly regulating some things that are especially dangerous, and I could understand wanting to include guns in that category.

Of course, there are some things that government is even more inept at dealing with than guns, and oddly enough they show up on the list of things pro-gun people like to blame gun violence on. Foremost is mental illness, which heads up Trump's list of scapegoats (along with ubiquitous things like violent video games). The fact is we don't do a very good job of treating (or even identifying) mental illness in this country, partly because we don't try (and conservatives are even more lax in this regard), but also because nobody's really very good at it. A rigorous system that tried to quarantine crazy people to keep them away from guns would be orders of magnitude more expensive and more hurtful than one that prohibited guns from all but the certifiably sane. Yeterday's meme blaming gun violence on drugs diagnosis without a solution.

I didn't mean to go down this rathole, but it just opened up -- as is so often the case. What I did want to do is quote a Barbara Ehrenreich tweet:

The mental illness we really have to fear is narcissism. It makes dumb, loathsome people feel virtuous and smart. Gun ownership is another form of narcissism. It makes little men feel big.

I'll also add this one from Adam Serwer, on Trump's Monday morning backpedal:

Trump sounds like a robot when condemning white supremacy and like himself when he's attacking religious and ethnic minorities because one is him pretending and one is him being himself.

Moving on, we have a week's worth of new music for you below. I added some grade data to my mid-year list aggregate, checking sites that hadn't produced lists and (usually) according one point for each record rated 80+ (based on AOTY lists. This had the surprise effect of boosting Sharon Van Etten's Remind Me Tomorrow to first place, 48-47 over Billie Eilish (gain from last week was 10-4). The only other notable shift was Weyes Blood, up from 15 to 10. Biggest drop was probably James Blake, 10-14.

Much of what I listened to last week came from looking at these lists. My other major source was Phil Overeem's July honor roll -- most impressively the MexStep record that came out mid-December, with no one noticing it in 2018 lists.

New batch of q&a from Robert Christgau up tonight: XgauSez.

New records reviewed this week:

• Iggy Azalea: In My Defense (2019, Bad Dreams/Empire): [r]: B+(***)
• John Bacon/Michael McNeill/Danny Ziemann: Refractions (2017 [2019], Jazz Dimensions): [cd]: B+(***)
• J. Balvin & Bad Bunny: Oasis (2019, Universal Music Latino): [r]: B+(**)
• B.J. the Chicago Kid: 1123 (2019, Motown): [r]: B+(*)
• Chance the Rapper: The Big Day (2019, self-released): [r]: A-
• Chuck Cleaver: Send Aid (2019, Shake It): [bc]: B+(***)
• Chick Corea/The Spanish Heart Band: Antidote (2019, Concord): [r]: B-
• Default Genders: Main Pop Girl 2019 (2019, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Pablo Embon: Reminiscent Mood (2018-19 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B-
• Empath: Active Listening: Night on Earth (2019, Get Better): [r]: B+(*)
• Filthy Friends: Emerald Valley (2019, Kill Rock Stars): [r]: B+(**)
• Fred Frith: All Is Always Now: Live at the Stone (2007-16 [2019], Intakt, 3CD): [r]: B+(***)
• From Wolves to Whales: Strandwal (2017 [2019], Aerophonic, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)
• Rhiannon Giddens: There Is No Other (2019, Nonesuch): [r]: B+(***)
• Charles Wesley Godwin: Seneca (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Maxo Kream: Brandon Banks (2019, Big Persona/RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• MexStep: Resistir (2018, Third Root): [r]: A-
• The Paranoid Style: A Goddamn Impossible Way of Life (2019, Bar/None): [r]: B+(***)
• Pink: Hurts 2B Human (2019, RCA): [r]: B+(***)
• Dave Rempis/Joshua Abrams/Avreeayl Ra + Jim Baker: Apsis (2018 [2019], Aerophonic): [cd]: A-
• Herlin Riley: Perpetual Optimism (2017 [2019], Mack Avenue): [r]: B+(*)
• Sasami: Sasami (2019, Domino): [r]: B+(*)
• Betty Who: Betty (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Mark Wingfield & Gary Husband: Tor & Vale (2018 [2019], Moonjune): [cd]: B

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• The Tubby Hayes Quartet: Grits, Beans and Greens: The Lost Fontana Studio Session 1969 (1969 [2019], Decca): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Bob Moses: When Elephants Dream of Music (1982 [1983], Gramavision): [r]: B
• Pink: Funhouse (2008, LaFace): [r]: B+(**)
• Pink: Greatest Hits . . . So Far!!! (2000-10 [2010], LaFace/Jive): [r]: A-
• Olaf Polziehn Trio Featuring Harry Allen: American Songbook Vol. 2 (2003, Satin Doll): [r]: B+(**)
• Olaf Polziehn/Ingmar Heller/Troy Davis/Harry Allen: American Songbook Vol. 3 (2006, Satin Doll): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Corey Christiansen: La Proxima (Origin): August 12
• Harbinger: Extended (OA2): August 12
• New York Voices: Reminiscing in Tempo (Origin)
• Alberto Pibiri & the AI Peppers: The Nacho Blues (Alberto Pibiri Music)
• Paul Silbergleit: January (Blujazz)
• Paul Zauner's Blue Brass feat. David Murray: Roots n' Wings (PAO/Blujazz)
• Miguel Zenón: Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera (Miel Music); August 30

Weekend Roundup

Starting this early (Friday), hoping to avoid the last-minute crunch. Not really news, but CNN's Democratic presidential debates got a lot of attention from the punditocracy this week. As usual, I didn't watch in real time (although my wife did, so I overheard some), but caught the "highlights" later (among the comics, Colbert was most informative). Let's group the links here, rather than clutter up the main section:

• David Axelrod: Elizabeth Warren is running a brilliant campaign.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • 4 winners and 3 losers from the second night of the July Democratic debates: With German Lopez, Dylan Matthews, and Andrew Prokop. Winners: Joe Biden ("Well, this one's complicated"); Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders ("weren't there, but they loomed large anyway"); Cory Booker; single-payer activists. Losers: Kamala Harris; CNN, again; the DNC.

  • 3 winners and 4 losers from the first night of the July Democratic debates: With German Lopez, PR Lockhart, Dylan Matthews, and Ella Nilsen. Winners: Elizabeth Warren; John Delaney; the Republican Party ("several of the major issues were framed by the moderators in terms Republicans would love"). Losers: the policy needs of black voters; CNN; Beto O'Rourke.

  • Marianne Williamson isn't funny. She's scary. Picks on her views on depression and illness, which are not exactly tangential to either her career as a "self-help guru" or her political aspirations. As for funny, my take so far (and I know or care nothing about her career) is that she does a nice job of filling a niche in the Democratic Party that no one even imagined before: a soft focus on morals and emotions, like Ben Carson among Republicans. That role is unimagined because most Democrats try hard to be rational and grounded in reality, but sometimes she seems to be onto something at a primal, instinctive leve. Of course, much of what she says is, as Beauchamp puts it, "extremely vague and hard to parse, but managed to at times banal and at other times deeply weird."

• Ryan Bort: Jake Tapper and CNN totally botched the health care discussion.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • What Biden doesn't get about immigration.

  • Democrats aren't going to win working-class voters this way, says labor union president: "Democrats have to speak about how they are going to take the shitty jobs that exist in this economy and make them good jobs." Isn't that usually just a matter of making them pay better? When Robert Reich was auditioning to become Clinton's Secretary of Labor, he came up with the rationalization that it didn't matter if American factories shut down, because unemployed workers could always be retrained to become high-paid "symbol manipulators." Ever since then, the only answer neoliberal Democrats had to declining working wages and standards was to offer more education (and debt). But no matter how much money we plow into education (and I don't doubt that we should spend a lot more than we've been doing), we'll still have shitty jobs we'll need people to do. But we can decide whether we respect and value the people who do those jobs enough to accord them a decent wage and fair and equal rights -- a status we used to call "middle class." Interview with Mary Kay Henry.

• John Cassidy:

  • Where do Trump and the Democrats stand as the Summer recess arrives?

  • The battle over Barack Obama's legacy at the Democratic debates.

• Tim Dickinson: Can Joe Biden sell 'no we can't'? "The triumph of the progressives on night one of the Detroit debates portends trouble for the former vice president."

• FiveThirtyEight:

  • The second Democratic debate in 5 charts.

  • What went down on night two of the second Democratic debate.

  • What went down on night one of the Second Democratic debate.

  • Nate Silver: Where I think the candidates stand after the second debate.

• John F Harris: Democrats are veering left. It might just work. Cites Stanley Greenberg, who wrote a book about how Reagan "captured many working class Democrats who believed their party's liberalism was out of step with their lives. But now he "believes that the urgency voters feel for shaking up the status quo means there's less risk for candidates and the party in going too far than in not going far enough." For a contrary point, Harris cites Rahm Emanuel, whose fear and loathing of the left is even greater than his readiness to sell out Democratic voters. Greenberg has a book coming out in September: R.I.P. G.O.P.: How the New America is Dooming the Republicans.

• Umair Irfan: 2020 Democrats are getting more confrontational with the fossil fuel industry.

• Sarah Jones:

  • Joe Biden is the reason Obama's legacy is on trial.

  • How do you host a debate in Detroit without asking about labor rights?

• John Judis: The Democrats need to get their act together.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Gravel '20 is done.

  • Why you can't ignore Marianne Williamson: "Mock her all you want, but Marianne Williamson speaks to people horrified by Trump who aren't satisfied with policy papers."

  • Trump outperformed his popularity in 2016. That might not happen in 2020. As I mentioned somewhere else here, many voters saw Trump as a solution to a very tangible problem in Hilary Clinton. Maybe they hated whatever it was they thought she stood for (and there was grounds for that from the right and also from the left), or maybe they just didn't want to subject themselves to four years of pompous clichés, inane backbiting, and petty pseudo-scandals blown way out of proportion. Maybe they even recognized the unfairness of the vitriol, but still, the only way to make it go away was to vote her down. But since 2016, he's dominated public consciousness, becoming the source of our public embarrassment to a much grosser extent than she ever was or could be. There will, of course, be a block of people that loves him no matter what, and another that despises him, but in between there's a slice that can break one way or another. If in 2016 they broke for Trump because they wanted to flip off the status quo and avoid its scandals, those exact same rationales suggest they'll break against him in 2020. That's probably not enough to seal his fate. I can imagine at least one other slice breaking the opposite way: people who support the status quo, even as it's been warped by Trump's malign rule. Moreover, I expect Trump will have a lot more money, and a much more professional campaign behind him this time, in lockstep with a pretty unified Republican Party. But still, the tables have turned on those last-minute impulse voters.

• Jen Kirby: Pete Buttigieg says he'd withdraw troops from Afghanistan in his first year.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Here's who won (and lost) the second Democratic debate, night two: In rank order: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Julian Castro, Michael Bennet, Jay Inslee, Bill de Blasio, Kamala Harris.

  • Here's who won (and lost) the second Democratic debate, night one: In rank order: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson, Pete Buttigieg, Steve Bullock, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney, Tim Ryan, Beto O'Rourke, John Hickenlooper.

  • What Andrew Yang gets wrong (and right) about robots.

• German Lopez:

  • Democrats have been discussing the same ideas on guns for 25 years. It's time to change that. Also: Michael Luo: The mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton should spur Democrats to propose big ideas on gun violence.

  • The Democratic debates neglected one of America's biggest public health crises: "The opioid epidemic hardly came up at all." I'd argue that's because it is a mere side-effect of a cluster of more central issues, like our failure to guarantee everyone's right to quality health care, and also the general malaise in much of the economy. Also, it's boring, aside from proposals like "executing drug traffickers or building a wall" that are stupid and/or cruel. But if you do want something on opioids, see: Sally Satel: The truth about painkiller addiction.

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

  • Kamala Harris's controversial record on criminal justice, explained.

• Robert Mackey:

  • Protesters target Joe Biden on deportation and Bill de Blasio on Eric Garner during Democratic debate.

  • Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders dominate Democratic debate set up to ambush them.

• Josh Marshall: Obama looms over the primary in invisible ways.

• Dylan Matthews: The presidential debates wasted too much time talking about stuff only Congress can do: "The president has a lot of power -- so why wouldn't the candidates talk about it?"

• Ella Nilsen: Jay Inslee points to Democrats' real problem: Mitch McConnell: "Even if the Democrats win the Senate, the filibuster stands in the way of their big plans."

• Anna North: Joe Biden's 1981 views on child care haven't aged well. Gillibrand called him out on it.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • Joe Biden is the product of a Democratic Party that was terrified of Ronald Reagan. I think this is the key point to understand about Biden, and why his campaign is intrinsically compromised. It's not so much that he believes in conservative maxims as that his instinct, which served him fairly well for decades, is to surrender ground to Republicans.

  • Debating the Obama presidency instead of the current one seems politically suicidal: "And yet, it's honest and justified. Just ask Julian Castro."

• Andrew Prokop:

  • What Biden meant to say in his bungled debate closing statement. This is the guy who "won" the debate? The longer he stays in the race, the busier the "what Biden meant to say" industry is going to be.

  • The Democratic debate's incoherent discussion about who could best beat Trump. Notable quote, from Warren against Delaney: "I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for."

• Max Read: Is Andrew Yang the doomer candidate?

• Frank Rich: The Democratic debates were built to fail.

• Rolling Stone:

  • Winners and losers on night 2 of the second Democratic debates. Winners: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, Andrew Yang. Losers: Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, Tulsi Gabbard. Treading water: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro.

  • Winners and losers on night 1 of the second Democratic debates: Winners: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamson ("go ahead, laugh"), Steve Bullock. Losers: John Delaney, Hickenlooper, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar. Treading water: Pete Buttigieg, Tim Ryan.

• Aaron Rupar: "Your question is a Republican talking point": CNN frames debate questions around right-wing concerns: "Republicans weren't onstage during the Democratic debate -- but were living rent-free inside moderators' heads."

• Dylan Scott: The messy health care discussion at the second Democratic debate, explained.

• Emily Stewart:

  • about social media manipulation.

  • Bill de Blasio's new plan to "tax the hell" out of rich people, explained.

  • Why Bill de Blasio is so hated, explained.

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: At the Democratic debate, Joe Biden defends the party's past.

• Alex Ward: The 2 veterans on the Democratic debate stage made a big promise about Afghanistan: That would be Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Buttigieg, who want out.

• Lawrence S Wittner: The Democratic debates need more questions about nuclear war.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The weird controversy over Democrats "criticizing Obama" at this week's debate, explained.

  • Democrats are skipping the most important health care debate: "should this even be the priority?"

    Personally, I think the Medicare-for-all people are 100 percent correct. The current American health care system is bad and wasteful, and replacing it with something like the Canadian system would be a good idea. But the policy world is full of good ideas, and not every good idea can be your top priority. Prioritizing health reform has not, in the past, been an extraordinarily successful strategy for new presidents.

    I agree with the first line here, and would add that any presidential candidate who disagrees is not just wrong (in all their arguments and rationalizations) but a coward to boot. On the other hand, if I was in charge and didn't have the votes, I'd write up a good single-payer bill and hold it in reserve, while trying to pass a bunch of less ambitious reforms to the ACA framework. If the reforms are thwarted, either by politics or by the courts, you can always fall back on the single-payer bill, and that case would become more compelling. Meanwhile, there is a lot that can be done, and not just by throwing more money at the blood-sucking insurance companies. The long-term answer is not just single-payer (cutting the for-profit insurance companies out of the system) but reducing the profit motive in the provider system. (You'll never wring all the profit-seeking out of the system, but non-profit hospitals were a lot more cost-effective than HCA is.) One thing that could be done would be to build up government-supported non-profits that could compete against the profit-seeking companies. (The "public option" under ACA is one example, but non-profit options wouldn't have to be directly under government bureaucracy.) One might, for instance, change bankruptcy law to allow failed hospitals and service providers to be reorganized with public support and employee control. Another idea I've been kicking around would be to offer a bare-bones universal insurance (e.g., through the Medicare provider network) that would cover an initially small set of emergencies and illnesses. This would make private insurance supplemental (rather than primary), reducing its cost while allowing it to fit more customized needs. (You can see how this works with Medicare supplemental plans. Medicare at present does most of the heavy lifting, but still leaves a lot of deductible nonsense that makes supplemental insurance attractive. That could change if Medicare-for-All improved a lot, but that's going to be a hard battle to fight -- especially all at once.)

  • 3 winners and 4 losers from the Democrats' two-night debate extravaganza: Winners: Cory Booker (Yglesias thinks "neoliberal shill" is a compliment); Joe Biden; the Great Winnowing. Losers: knowing what powers the president has; comprehension of what is in these health care plans; all these housing plans; policy criticism of Donald Trump.

  • America deserves a debate between Joe Biden and his main progressive critics: "Elizabeth Warren versus John Delaney is not the drama we've been craving."

  • Elizabeth Warren's vision for changing America's trade policy, explained.

Lots of non-campaign news this week, but Donald Trump's flagrant racism caught the most attention, climaxing with two mass shootings which, despite pro forma denials, appear as the proof in the pudding.

Checked my Facebook feed shortly before filing this, and was rather surprised to find as many/maybe more pro-gun memes than anti, not that the former make any sense. One, for instance, links to a piece titled "Every Mass Shooting Shares 1 Thing in Common, NOT Guns": I didn't follow, but the picture shows a pile of pills. I doubt that, but even if lots of mass shooters popped pills, by definition every single one used a gun. All of those were forwarded by acknowledged friends. (Of course, I do also have anti-gun friends. They may even be in the majority, but lose out in this comparison because they tend to post their own thoughts instead of just propagating someone else's propaganda.)

Some links on this and other stories:

• Tim Alberta: 'Mother is not going to like this': The 48 hours that almost brought down Trump: "The exclusive story of how Trump survived the Access Hollywood tape." An excerpt from the book, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. Ends with this memorable debate exchange:

  Donald Trump: If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. Because there have never been so many lies, so much deception.

  Hilary Clinton: Everything he just said was absolutely false. It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

  Donald Trump: Because you'd be in jail.

  Trump later claimed "that debate won me the election." It was a lucky punch, but it landed because more people wanted to see her fail than so feared Trump they were willing to live with her constantly in their minds for the next four (or eight) years. It was not a moment American voters would be proud of.

• AP: Police: Rookie Texas officer shoots at dog, kills woman.

• David Atkins:

  • Trump still refuses to condemn violent white supremacy.

  • We have a gun problem, and we have a white supremacist terrorism problem.

  • Republicans won't go back to "normal" after Trump.

• Andrew J Bacevich:

  • An alternative to US world dominance.

  • In the Trump era, Americans can't agree on the past, much less the future.

  • America's other original sin: "We have never reckoned with the bloody US takeover of the Philippines, our first bite at empire's apple."

• Dean Baker:

  • Employment is high -- but job growth is slowing down.

  • Trump's fixation on intellectual property rights serves the rich.

  • The financial industry preys on 401(k) fees. It doesn't have to be this way. "Without change, we can expect a serious decline in retiree living standards."

  • Replace patent monopolies with direct public funding for drug research.

  • Under Trump, manufacturing job growth slows to a trickle.

  • Donald Trump's capricious tariffs open the door to corruption.

• Peter Beinart: The real reason so many Republicans love Israel? Their own white supremacy. Related: Jonathan Ofir: Racism is at the center of Israeli settler-colonialist venture: a review of Ronit Lentin's book, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism. Ofir also wrote this update on changing alignments in Israeli politics: Israeli pols merge parties, and the right-wing seems stronger than ever.

• Phyllis Bennis: What the House anti-BDS resolution reveals about the Palestine solidarity movement. Related: Omar Barghouti: Why Americans should support BDS.

• Jared Bernstein: We can't fund the progressive agenda by taxing the 1% alone: "The tricky politics of taxing the 1%, the middle class, and everyone in between." Basic point here is well taken. To do everything we'd like to see the government do requires that tax revenues be increased. While current tax rates leave a lot of leeway for increasing taxes on the very rich, that's not necessarily enough -- especially moving forward, especially if we do other things to diminish inequality. It may also be easier to increase a range of taxes by a small amount than it would be to increase one tax (income) by a lot. For instance, the easiest way to fund the sort of basic health insurance I outline elsewhere here would be to tack it onto the payroll tax that already funds Medicare, even though that's the most regressive tax we use these days. It would also be good to implement a small VAT (basically, a national sales tax), which is also regressive but could be scaled up to raise significant revenue as needed. One fact worth recalling is that not every tax has to be progressive -- you can compensate with more sharply progressive tax rates on incomes and estates, which is all you really need to bring the 1% back into mainstream America. Democrats need to be wary of falling for Republican talking points, which is what they're doing when they deny any tax increases on the middle class. They need to convince people that the returns on their taxes will be worthwhile -- which is basically what FDR did when he designed the payroll tax to fund Social Security.

• Max Blumenthal: Behind the guise of adversarial journalism, CNN's Jake Tapper is taking America to war.

• Barbara Boland: Unqualified UN Ambassador is the perfect weak link: "Don't be surprised if Kelly Craft's lack of experience is exactly what Bolton and Pompeo wanted for their war cabinet."

• Bryce Covert: Right-wing troika: "The Republican Party's 50-state strategy." Review of Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's book, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States -- and the Nation.

• Chas Danner:

  • Everything we know about the Dayton mass shooting: Nine dead, 16 injured, shooter a "young white man" with an AR-15-style assault rifle.

  • Everything we know about the El Paso Walmart massacre: Twenty dead, 26 injured, shooter "a 21-year-old white male gunman" with an AK-47-style assault rifle.

• Jesse Eisinger: How Trump's political appointees overruled tougher settlements with big banks.

• Henry Farrell: Don't ask how to pay for climate change. Ask who.

• Tara Golshan: Rep. Will Hurd's retirement reflects GOP's biggest electoral struggle in the House: Trump.

• Benjamin Hart: Trump seems thrilled that someone broke into Elijah Cummings's house.

• Sheldon Himelfarb: The next election will require a new kind of vigilance.

  The 2020 race has now begun in earnest, with the Democrats having their first primary debates last month [June]. Lurking in the background is something that once seemed inconceivable in modern-day America: the threat of election-related violence.

  As the Southern Poverty Law Center said earlier this year in an annual report, there has been a rise in domestic terrorism, hate crimes, and street violence. It's no surprise, then, that on June 26, Reddit -- the fifth-most trafficked website in the U.S. -- announced it was "quarantining" a popular message board with 750,000 followers because of active discussions involving violence against political figures. . . .

  Perhaps the biggest harbinger of election violence is the proliferation of disinformation, rumors, and hate speech. All of which are spreading further and with greater velocity than at arguably any other moment in American history.

• Rachel Hodes: What 'abolish ICE' really means: "It's about asking whether we need an immigration system that terrorizes the least dangerous people in this country." Related: Emily Ryo: How ICE enforcement has changed under the Trump administration.

• Eric Holthaus: Greenland is melting away before our eyes.

• Umair Irfan:

  • Russian cities are choking under smoke from massive Siberian wildfires.

  • Air travel is a huge contributor to climate change. A new global movement wants you to be ashamed to fly.

• b>Ellen Knickmeyer/Brady McCombs: Opponent of nation's public lands is picked to oversee them.

• Markos Kounalakis: Donald Trump's dangerous empathy deficit.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Trump's trade quagmire (wonkish).

  • Why was Trumponomics a flop? "Neither tax cuts nor tariffs are working."

    But why has Trumponomics failed to deliver much besides trillion-dollar budget deficits? The answer is that both the tax cuts and the trade war were based on false views about how the world works.

    Republican faith in the magic of tax cuts -- and, correspondingly, belief that tax increases will doom the economy -- is the ultimate policy zombie, a view that should have been killed by evidence decades ago but keeps shambling along, eating G.O.P. brains.

    The record is actually awesomely consistent. Bill Clinton's tax hike didn't cause a depression, George W. Bush's tax cuts didn't deliver a boom, Jerry Brown's California tax increase wasn't "economic suicide," Sam Brownback's Kansas tax-cut "experiment" (his term) was a failure.

  • A racist stuck in the past: "In Trump's mind, it's still 1989." Krugman picked 1989 because "that was the year he demanded bringing back the death penalty in response to the case of the Central Park Five," but for most of us that was just one year in a long continuum of viciousness (racist and otherwise).

• Bess Levin: As deficit explodes, GOP demands emergency tax cut for the rich: "Twenty senators have urged the Treasury to give the wealthy another tax cut via executive order."

• Gideon Levy: What Israel's demolition of 70 Palestinian homes was really about.

• Dahlia Lithwick: It's never "too soon" to talk about preventing mass shootings. It's always too late.

• Martin Longman:

  • How to campaign when nothing is possible. I suppose if I was a do-nothing "moderate" I'd take some comfort from this, realizing that even such a committed and principled radical as Bernie Sanders would preserve more status quo than another four years of Trump.

    If the Republicans maintain their majority in the Senate, the new Democratic president will not be enacting one iota of their top shelf legislative agenda. There will be nothing major on health care or college loans or immigration or climate change. Even judges will be only confirmed in the most belated and begrudging manner, and only if they've never said anything on the record that conservatives find irritating. All legislative progress that can be made will come as the result of leverage over must-pass bills, and the leverage will only be truly significant so long as the Democrats retain control of the House of Representatives. But navigating government shutdowns and threats of national default in order to attach a few things to appropriations bills is not going to turn many of a candidate's campaign promises into reality. . . .

    Yet, even if the Democrats win the trifecta and eliminate the legislative filibuster, they'll still have huge problems passing legislation. Even assuming that Nancy Pelosi can push the president's agenda through her chamber (and this is doubtful for some of the policies the candidates are pushing), there are senators (like Michael Bennet of Colorado, for example) on the record opposing much of the progressive candidates' agenda. . . .

    I absolutely understand that people are hungry for change. People are sick to death of Congress and want to break this gridlock. But it's a problem that is beyond the power of any candidate or any rhetoric to fix.

    On the other hand, while a left-committed candidate like Sanders or Warren might not get much more accomplished than mediocrities like Biden, Klobuchar, or Bennet, they would try, and be seen as trying, and their frustation and dedication would sustain the Party's slow drift to the left. And that would generate more creative discussion of real problems -- the solution to which is only to be found further left.

  • Business leaders flock to Trump for protections against socialism. Cites his previous piece, What if big business falls in completely with Trumpism?

• Annie Lowrey:

  • The Supreme Court is bad for your health: "Its decision to let states opt out of the Medicaid expansion turned out to have lethal consequences." Or, more pointedly, "did Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts kill almost 16,000 people?"

  • Conservatives are wrong about what's driving immigration: "It's jobs and social networks that bring immigrants to America -- not government benefits."

  • What Acosta has done other than let Epstein off the hook: "Trump said the [now-ex] secretary of labor is doing a 'fantastic job.' Is that right?"

• Andrew Marantz: The El Paso shooting and the virality of evil.

  The national conversation will now turn, as it should, to gun control, to mental illness, and to the President's practice of exacerbating racial tensions, which has been one of his avocations for decades and now appears to be his central reëlection strategy. But there's also a more specific question: what can be done about the fact that so many of these terrorists -- in Pittsburgh, in Poway, in Christchurch, in El Paso -- seem to find inspiration in the same online spaces? Each killer, in the moment, may have acted alone, but they all appear to have been zealous converts to the same ideology -- a paranoid snarl of raw anger, radical nationalism, unhinged nihilism, and fears of "white genocide" that is still referred to as "fringe," although it's creeping precariously close to the mainstream.

• Hilary Matfess: The progressive case for free trade. Related: Daniel Block: Free trade for liberals. This piece focuses more on European problems, and vainly posits that an alliance with American liberals would help "protect democracy, fight inequality, and save the environment." Lots of problems here, starting with the fact that US trade policy -- even under Democratic presidents -- has always been the province of business interests, and while those interests may like to tout "democracy" as a propaganda riff, fighting inequality and saving the environment never really was their thing. Moreover, any "Atlantic Alliance" is at present bound to reek of those nations' colonial/imperial pasts. On the other hand, other alliances have always been possible: internationalism was the hallmark of the labor movement at least since 1848, and could be again. But it will take some kind of political revolution before the US and Europe can see trade as a tool for promoting the welfare of all people.

• Anna North: The movement to decriminalize sex work, explained.

• Richard Parker: When hate came to El Paso.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • Trump's Cincinnati rally had some ripe bits of Presidential* insanity.

  • The President* is determined to staff the whole government with sycophants. Makes me wonder, is "psychophants" a word? Should it be?

  • Russia is full of environmental time bombs. So is Detroit.: "The United States has no room to gloat here."

• Elaina Plott: 'We're all tired of being called racists'. I'm getting tired of having to call them racists, too. Maybe they should do a better job of keeping their racism to themselves?

• Daniel Politi:

  • Trump characterizes mass shootings as a "mental illness problem": That's not likely to be much of a defense against people to point to Trump as at least partially responsible for the problem.

  • Beto O'Rourke: Trump is "racist" whose words lead to violence like El Paso shooting.

  • Gun violence in 2019: There have been 251 mass shootings in the US in 216 days.

• Nicholas Powers: When Trump calls people "filth," he's laying the groundwork for genocide.

• Andrew Prokop: From condemning "white terrorism" to condemning video games: Republican responses to El Paso shooting.

• Jennifer Rubin: There is no excuse for supporting this president. Looks like the Washington Post is piling on; e.g. EJ Dionne Jr: On guns and white nationalism, one side is right and one is wrong; Max Boot: Trump is leading our country to destruction. Needless to say, Trump's holding up his end of the feud. See: Jonathan Chait: Trump directs government to punish Washington Post owner.

• Philip Rucker: 'How do you stop these people?': Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric looms over El Paso massacre. Also: Ayal Feinberg/Regina Branton/Valerie Martinez-Ebers: Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes. Coincidence?

• Aaron Rupar:

  • At Cincinnati rally, Trump turns Baltimore violence victims into political pawns: "Explicitly demeaning blue cities and states is now a feature of Trump's campaign speeches."

  • The Gilroy, California, shooting highlights a big hole in Trump's logic about gun violence.

• Adam Serwer: White nationalism's deep American roots: "A long-overdue excavation of the book that Hitler called his "bible," and the man who wrote it." That would be Madison Grant, author of the 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race.

• Raja Shehadeh: The use and abuse of international law in the occupied territories: Review of Noura Erakat's book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.

• Matt Shuham: Kobach used private border wall's email list to fundraise for Senate campaign: "This email could run afoul of campaign finance laws."

• Richard Silverstein: Trump donor, Elliott Broidy, paid Dennis Ross $10,000 to publish pro-Saudi op-ed in The Hill.

• Matt Simon: The bizarre, peaty science of Arctic wildfires.

• Danny Sjursen: US troops are back in Saudi Arabia -- this will end badly.

• Jordan Smith: As Trump fans the flames of anti-abortion rhetoric, Kansas offers a cautionary tale.

• Yves Smith: Hospitals squeal over Trump proposal to disclose insurance company discounts.

• Felicia Sonmez/Paul Kane: Republicans struggle to respond in wake of El Paso, Dayton shootings.

• Matt Taibbi: The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller.

• Nick Turse: Violence has spiked in Africa since the military founded AFRICOM, Pentagon study finds.

• Alex Ward:

  • John Ratcliffe, Trump's pick for top intel post, withdraws amid scrutiny over exaggerated bio: Well, that didn't take long. Some more on Ratcliffe, for the historical file:

    • Trevor Aaronson: Trump's pick for top intelligence job bragged of experience as terror prosecutor -- but he doesn't have any.

    • Erin Banco/Asawin Suebsaeng: Whistleblower allegations surfaced just before DNI pick John Ratcliffe withdrew.

    • Will Sommer: Trump intel pick John Ratcliffe started theory of FBI anti-Trump 'secret society'.

    • Michael Warren: With Ratcliffe, another Trump nominee withdraws with a damaged reputation.

  • US and Taliban may strike a deal allowing American troops to come home from Afghanistan. Also:

    • Dan Lamothe/John Hudson/Pamela Constable: US preparing to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan in initial deal with Taliban.

  • The US just withdrew from an important nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Don't panic -- yet. Related:

    • Matt Korda: In memoriam: The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty dies at 32.

    • David E Sanger/Edward Wong: US ends Cold War missile treaty, with aim of countering China.

  • Trump announces tariffs on nearly all Chinese goods starting in September.

• Will Wilkinson: Conservatives are hiding their 'loathing' behind our flag: "The molten core of right-wing nationalism is the furious denial of America's unalterably multiracial, multicultural national character."

• Robin Wright: The rhetoric and reality of Donald Trump's racism.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Today's budget deal proves once again Republicans never cared about the deficit. Nothing really new here: I still recall when Nixon declared himself a Keynesian. With their tax giveaways, Reagan, Bush, and Trump didn't even have to admit as much. They merely understood that the rules are different when the Republicans are in power or in opposition. That's only hypocrisy if you pretend there's a general principle involved.

    The critical thing, however, is that if not for hypocritical Republican opposition, we could have been running these higher deficits in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. And if we had done that, the economy could have recovered faster from the Great Recession, the unemployment rate could have fallen more rapidly, and hundreds of billions of dollars of national income that is now irretrievably lost could have been earned.

  • The Federal Reserve's interest rate cut, explained.

  • America's dual housing crisis, and what Democrats plan to do about it, explained: "A crisis of low incomes and a parallel crisis of tight supply."

  • Trump is approving an anti-competitive merger that will cost you money: "But he seems to have made money off the deal personally." The merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, currently the 3rd and 4th largest mobile phone networks.

• Li Zhou: The new bipartisan Senate bill aimed at making Big Pharma lower drug prices, explained.

Expanded blog post, July archive (complete).

Music: current count 31831 [31798] rated (+33), 257 [259] unrated (-2).

Got a good start last week, even while I delayed posting Music Week, then lost most of three days with company and cooking, before partially recovering while I wrote up Weekend Roundup. The reason for last week's delayed posting was that I was tied up in one of my favorite wastes of time: compiling several dozens of mid-year ("so far") best-of lists. I've scoured through 66 lists, where each mention counts as one point regardless of rank (most lists are unranked, and many are are short compared to EOY lists, so this scheme is just easier to build the EOY list aggregate on top of. I've also included letter grades for Robert Christgau and myself (although only so far for records mentioned on other lists), using { A = 5, A- = 4, B+/*** = 3, ** = 2, * = 1 }. This introduces a slight skew, but it's diminished as I've added more lists. And since I'm actually more interested in using this as a tool to guide my own listening than as some sort of value-free social science research, I've included a few lists from friends and allies, including at least one I scraped off the unlinkable Facebook. (I suppose it might be possible to link to it, but common decency suggests otherwise.)

One thing I found odd is that I literally didn't find a single jazz list. Maybe I'll write one up later this week. The other thing I'm tempted to do is to add in points for AOTY 80+ ratings. For a few years I actually collected those ratings, but gave it up 2-3 years ago as too much work. On the other hand, some record of those ratings would round out the picture.

Without further ado, here are the top 30 records (so far), with point counts in braces and my grades in brackets:

1. Billy Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? (Darkroom/Interscope) {43} [A-]
2. Lizzo: Cuz I Love You (Nice Life/Atlantic) {40} [A-]
3. Tyler the Creator: Igor (Columbia) {38} [**]
4. Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride (Columbia) {38} [**]
5. Sharon Van Etten: Remind Me Tomorrow (Jagjaguwar) {38} [*]
6. Solange: When I Get Home (Saint/Columbia) {37} [*]
7. Ariana Grande: Thank U Next (Republic) {33} [**]
8. Big Thief: UFOF (4AD) {32} [A-]
9. Little Simz: Grey Area (Age 101) {32} [A-]
10. James Blake: Assume Form (Polydor) {25} [B-]
11. Carly Rae Jepsen: Dedicated (604/School Boy/Interscope) {25} [***]
12. Jenny Lewis: On the Line (Warner Bros) {24} [*]
13. Charly Bliss: Young Enough (Barsuk) {23} [A-]
14. Jamila Woods: Legacy! Legacy! (Jagjaguwar) {23} [A-]
15. Stella Donnelly: Beware of the Dogs (Secretly Canadian) {22} [***]
16. Slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain (Method) {22} [***]
17. Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising (Sub Pop) {22} [B-]
18. Dave: Psychodrama (Neighbourhood) {20} [A-]
19. Flying Lotus: Flamagra (Warp) {20} [**]
20. Fontaines DC: Dogrel (Partisan) {19} [***]
21. Megan Thee Stallion: Fever (300 Entertainment) {19} [***]
22. Anderson .Paak: Ventura (Aftermath/12 Tone Music) {19} [***]
23. Better Oblivion Community Center (Dead Oceans) {18} [*]
24. Denzel Curry: Zuu (Loma Vista) {18} [**]
25. The National: I Am Easy to Find (4AD) {18} [**]
26. Maggie Rogers: Heard It in a Past Life (Capitol) {17} [**]
27. Billy Woods & Kenny Segal: Hiding Places (Blackwoodz Studioz) {17} [***]
28. Nilufer Yanya: Miss Universe (ATO) {17} [A-]
29. Rico Nasty/Kenny Beats: Anger Management (Sugar Trap) {16} [**]
30. Kevin Abstract: Arizona Baby (Question Everything/RCA) {14} [**]
31. Julia Jacklin: Crushing (Polyvinyl) {14} [B]

Cutoff just above {13}: PUP, Quelle Chris, Toro Y Moi; {12}: Malibu Ken, Khalid, Bassekou Kouyate; {11}: 2 Chainz, Chemical Brothers, The Comet Is Coming, Aldous Harding, Priests, Todd Snider. Highest ranked records I haven't heard: {10}: Holly Herndon: Proto, Jessica Pratt: Quiet Signs; {8}: Deerhunter: Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?; {6}: Baroness, Gary Clark Jr., Flume, Foals, Cate Le Bon, Mark Ronson, Yola. I didn't bother with metal lists, so only noted 35 records as such, 0 heard by me. The overall list collected 745 titles (only 64 jazz, 50 heard by me).

I can't draw many conclusions from this data. The point scheme tends to keep any record from breaking out, with the top nine records (down to Little Simz but not James Blake) on most of the same lists. My guess is that if I had consistent ranking information Tyler, Vampire Weekend, and/or Solange would advanced a bit (also Weyes Blood, which topped two lists). Indeed, without the RC/TH grade points, Tyler would have come in first, with 36 points, vs. Eilish (34), Vampire Weekend/Van Etten (33), Lizzo (32), Grande (28), Blake (25), Big Thief/Little Simz (24).

I will probably add a few more lists as I find them. For instance, I have two specialized lists at Noisey open in tabs now (33 Essential Albums You Probably Missed So Far in 2009 and The 37 Best Ambient Albums of 2019 So Far) but held them back in case I found a more general list there. I may also, as noted, come up with a way to factor some grading data into the list.

Most of the non-jazz albums I've listened to in the last two weeks were suggested by these lists. They haven't been especially reliable, but have generated a couple surprise finds (e.g., Christina Barbieri and Queen Key last week). But two of this week's top records came on CDs from a friendly publicist. I dragged my feet on the Bill Evans and Wes Montgomery label best-ofs, thinking I'd prefer to hear the original albums they were selected from. Finally broke down and graded them last week, then found some of the missing records (badly misfiled by Napster). We're still missing the latest releases -- Evans in England and Montgomery's Back on Indiana Avenue: The Carroll DeCamp Recordings. Turns out that the compilations do a good job of picking hilights from the series, and help round out a view of the artists beyond their masterworks (still Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Incredible Jazz Guitar).

I wanted to write a few words about DownBeat's Critics Poll results, but don't have the time (or possibly the stomach) for that right now. I missed the official deadline to vote, but was able to submit a ballot, which evidently was counted (my name is in the voter list, and they sent me a T-shirt). On the other hand, the disconnect between my votes and the charts is almost complete. Their HOF picks were especially paltry: I can sort of understand Nina Simone, who could be a great singer on occasion, but released a lot of bad-to-worse albums; but the Veterans Committee picks of Scott LaFaro and Joe Williams are hard to imagine. I might be OK with Williams if Jimmy Rushing was in, but even then he wouldn't be an obvious pick. LaFaro died at 25, having played with Bill Evans for two years, and with Ornette Coleman for considerably less. I've been touched by some of his work, but I have no idea how to compare his tiny discography against that of many other bassists not in the DBHOF. (On the other hand, the similarly short-lived Jimmy Blanton is in, as are such obvious contemporaries as Oscar Pettiford, Paul Chambers, Milt Hinton, Ray Brown, Ron Carter, and his predecessor with Coleman, Charlie Haden.)

Forthcoming week relatively open. Hope to get some work done on the Christgau website.

New records reviewed this week:

• James Blake: Assume Form (2019, Polydor): [r]: B-
• Julia Jacklin: Crushing (2019, Polyvinyl): [r]: B
• Judy and the Jerks: Music for Donuts EP (2019, Thrilling Living, EP): [r]: C+
• Aubrey Logan: Your Mom's Favorite Songs (2019, Resonance, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Charlie Marie: Charlie Marie (2019, self-released, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
• The Mauskovic Dance Band: The Mauskovic Dance Band (2019, Soundway): [r]: B+(**)
• MC Frontalot: Net Split, or the Fathomless Heartbreak of Online Itself (2019, Level Up): [r]: B+(**)
• Nots: 3 (2019, Goner): [r]: B+(**)
• Nubiyan Twist: Jungle Run (2019, Strut): [r]: B-
• Karen O & Danger Mouse: Lux Prima (2019, BMG): [r]: B+(**)
• Old Man Saxon: Goldman Sax (2019, Saxon Kincy, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• William Parker/In Order to Survive: Live/Shapeshifter (2017 [2019], AUM Fidelity, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Joel Ross: KingMaker (2019, Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Mavis Staples: Live in London (2018 [2019], Anti-): [r]: B+(**)
• Wreckless Eric: Transience (2019, Southern Domestic): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Bill Evans: Smile With Your Heart: The Best of Bill Evans on Resonance (1968-69 [2019], Resonance): [cd]: A-
• Jazz Piano Panorama: The Best of Piano Jazz on Resonance (1968-2011 [2019], Resonance): [cd]: B+(*)
• Wes Montgomery: Wes's Best: The Best of Wes Montgomery on Resonance (1956-66 [2019], Resonance): [cd]: A-
• Sing a Song of Jazz: The Best of Vocal Jazz on Resonance (1956-2018 [2019], Resonance): [cd]: B
• Neil Young + Stray Gators: Tuscaloosa (1973 [2019], Reprise): [r]: B-

Old music:

• The Legendary Bill Evans Trio: The 1960 Birdland Sessions (1960 [2005], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(***)
• Bill Evans: Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest (1968 [2016], Resonance, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Bill Evans: Another Time: The Hilversum Concert (1968 [2017], Resonance): [r]: B+(***)
• Franco, Josky, Matalanza Du T.P. OK Jazz: A Paris 1983 Missile (1983 [1996], Sonodisc): [dl]: A

• Wes Montgomery: In the Beginning (1949-58 [2016], Resonance, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Wes Montgomery: Fingerpickin' (1957-58 [1996], Pacific Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
• Wes Montgomery: Far Wes (1958-59 [1990], Pacific Jazz): [r]: B+(*)
• Wes Montgomery: One Night in Indy (1959 [2016], Resonance): [r]: A-
• Wes Montgomery: Smokin' in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse (1966 [2017], Resonance): B+(***)
• Kristi Stassinopoulou/Stathis Kalyviotis: NYN (2016, Riverboat): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Moy Eng/Wayne Wallace: The Blue Hour (Patois)
• Pearring Sound: Nothing but Time (self-released): October 4
• Fabrizio Sciacca Quartet: Gettin' It There (self-released): September 1

Weekend Roundup

Lots of links below -- probably more than usual, although as always I feel like I'm leaving a lot of stuff untouched. Some topics I only decided late in the game to break out (Boris Johnson under Mackey, impeachment under Reich, Iran under Simon/Stevenson) could have picked up more links had I acted earlier and more consciously. I meant to write more on Mueller under Alksne when I first found the piece, but by the time I got to it I had scattered Mueller links all over the page.

Some scattered links this week:

• Cynthia Alksne: No knight on a white horse: "House Democrats have spent the last two years waiting for someone else to solve the Trump conundrum."

• Josh Barro: The T-Mobile/Sprint merger remedy makes no sense.

• David Barsamian: Noam Chomsky: Life expectancy in the US is declining for a reason.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • 5 losers and 0 winners from Robert Mueller's testimony to the House of Representatives: "Yes, it really was that bad." The list of losers: Robert Mueller, the House of Representatives, impeachment, President Trump, the Mueller report.

  • Mueller said Trump could be indicted once he leaves office.

• Russell Berman: Robert Mueller kept his promise:

  Democrats can't say Robert Mueller didn't warn them.

  For months, the former special counsel told them in every way he could -- in private negotiations, in his sole public statement on his investigation, through letters from the Justice Department -- that he did not want to testify before Congress, and that if he did, his appearance would be a dud.

  Today, Mueller fully delivered on that promise.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: Puerto Ricans pushed out a sitting governor for the first time in history: "The massive protests worked." Related: Zeeshan Aleem: Puerto Rico's week of massive protests, explained.

• Leticia Casado/Ernesto Londono: Under Brazil's far right leader, Amazon protections slashed and forests fall. Also: Alexander Zaitchik: Rainforest on fire: "On the front lines of Bolsonaro's war on the Amazon, Brazil's forest communities fight against climate catastrophe." For a comment, see David Wallace-Wells: Could one man single-handedly ruin the planet?

• John Cassidy:

  • Why the Mueller hearings were so alarming.

  • Donald Trump and the GOP confirm their fiscal conservatism was a sham.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Why Trump spent his summer vacation sending racist tweets: "His entire adult life is devoted to associating nonwhites with crime, filth, and disorder.":

    It does not occur to Trump that the patriotic requirements of his office require representing the whole of it. It is not merely that Trump is unfit for his job. He refuses, almost literally. to be president of the United States.

  • Trump tries to think up crime by Obama, comes up with 'wrote book'.

• Zak Cheney-Rice:

  • Profiling doesn't bother conservatives unless it targets white people. Well, you are what you are, and it isn't hard to imagine how an offense (like profiling) might affect people like yourself. Harder to see how it affects people unlike yourself. And conservatives, almost by definition, are people who believe it's ok to treat other people poorly, especially people unlike themselves. Note quote from Trump: "You know, in Israel, they profile. They've done an unbelievable job -- as good as you can do."

  • The death penalty is already a farce. William Barr's plan might make it torturous. Related: Winnie Wong: The Trump Administration's death penalty cult.

• Gareth Cook: The economist who would fix the American dream: "No one has done more to dispel the myth of social mobility than Raj Chetty. But he has a plan to make equality of opportunity a reality."

• Adam Federman: How science got trampled in the rush to drill in the Arctic. Related: William deBuys: The 'drill, baby, drill' crowd wants access to this arctic reserve.

• Crystal Marie Fleming: The composure and civility of "the Squad" against Trump's attacks.

• Kathy Gilsinan: Dan Coats spoke truth to Trump. Now he's out. Oh? Now? Gilsinan also wrote Don't expect Mark Esper to contain Trump (you know, the new Secretary of Defense), and The impossible job of speaking truth to Trump. Coats' replacement is John Ratcliffe, a Texas Congressman in the press last week for his attacks on Robert Mueller.

• James Gleick: Moon fever: On the Apollo 11 moon landing, 50 years ago.

• Danny Goldberg: Goodbye to free-thought icon and merry prankster Paul Krassner.

• Tara Golshan:

  • The House just passed a budget deal, taking a key step toward averting a massive fiscal crisis.

  • Joe Biden has questions about Medicare-for-all. We answered them.

  • The surprising thing about older voters: they're moving more to the left.

  • Study: the US could have averted about 15,600 deaths if every state expanded Medicaid.

• David A Graham:

  • Forget the theater criticism -- Mueller's conclusions are the real news.

  • The overhyped feud between Nancy Pelosi and AOC.

• Ali Harb: How Iranian MEK went from US terror list to halls of Congress.

• William D Hartung: Trump's Saudi arms vetoes, deconstructed.

• Nathan Heller: Was the automotive era a terrible mistake?

• Edward Hellmore: 'Unprecedented': more than 100 Arctic wildfires burn in worst ever season: "Huge blazes in Greenland, Siberia and Alaska are producing plumes of smoke that can be seen from space."

• Umair Irfan: 108 degrees in Paris: Europe is shattering heat records this week.

• Sarah Jones: An other person has died after rationing insulin. Jones had previously warned (Jan. 31, 2019): Rising insulin costs are a life-or-death political crisis. I've been rather taken aback by these stories. My first wife had diabetes. I never remembered any particular problem with insulin expense, but she died over 30 years ago, so I've been out of touch. Best explanation I've found for recent insulin pricing is here: 8 reasons why insulin is so outrageously expensive. The big one here is patents, which is the public's way of saying: rape me, pillage, take it all. There's no good reason why governments should create or even allow patents. Take them away, and the problems with biologics and biosimilars will become purely technical -- real, but much more manageable. And if private industry cannot find the motivation to bring the price of insulin back to a reasonable level, governments could finance non-profit manufacturers aiming at the lowest possible cost. Moreover, the cost savings go way beyond direct costs. Failure to properly regulate blood sugar levels leads to all kinds of further expense -- my wife being an especially dramatic example of what all can go horribly wrong.

• Ben Judah: The millennial left is tired of waiting: "Saikat Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, is working to build a generational movement."

• Peter Kafka: Facebook will pay the US government a $5 billion fine for privacy failures -- but it won't have to change the way it does business.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Is 'doing the right thing' worth increasing the risk of a second Trump term? More rationalization against trying to impeach Trump.

  • Trump's hate offensive could turn off white working-class women.

• Catherine Kim: The Trump administration is bringing back federal executions.

• Natalie Kitroeff/David Gelles/Jack Nicas: The root of Boeing's 737 Max crisis: A regulator relaxes its oversight.

• Ezra Klein:

  • The case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek: Interview with Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists.

  • How "Medicare Extra" gets to universal coverage without single-payer: Didn't make much sense of this in a quick read. I'm skeptical that you can actually achieve universal coverage while requiring so much paperwork, and using a means-tested sliding scale that guarantees pinch points. Or I suppose you could pitch this as system that defaults to single-payer but allows people to opt out to select inferior private insurance -- with the added costs of public subsidies to the private insurance companies (if not direct, then at least by allowing them to piggyback on universal negotiated pricing). But then you have to ask yourself: why go through this charade of pretending that private for-profit insurance companies can compete meaningfully against a non-profit single-payer service.

• Lucas Koerner/Ricardo Vaz: Western media losing enthusiasm for failing coup in Venezuela.

• Paul Krugman: Trump's secret foreign aid program: "He's giving away billions to overseas investors."

• Amanda Cohen Leiter: Justice John Paul Stevens and the slow evolution of the law.

• Christopher Leonard: How an oil theft investigation laid the groundwork for the Koch playbook: "In the late 1980s, Charles Koch faced a federa probe, rallied all of his resources to fight it off and came away with lessons that would guide the Kochs for decades." Leonard has a book coming out Aug. 13: Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.

• Daniel Lippman: 'It's a disaster over there': Commerce reaches new heights of dysfunction: "Under Secretary Wilbur Ross, the department is chaotic and adrift." Related: Matt Stieb: Wilbur Ross is falling asleep in Commerce Department meetings.

• Martin Longman:

  • By cutting food stamps, Trump will starve kids.

  • The Democrats can't cede Facebook to Trump again.

• Robert Mackey: Donald Trump praises Boris Johnson, who once called him "unfit to hold the office of President of the United States". Also on Johnson:

  • The Guardian: The next prime minister will be Boris Johnson. What now? Our panel responds.

  • TJ Coles: The tragic inevitability of Boris Johnson PM.

  • John Feffer: Boris Johnson and the new battle of Britain.

• Chase Madar: Ilhan Omar's anti-semitism is becoming a load-bearing myth for American politics.

• Madeline Marshall: How Trump took over America's courts.

• Jonathan Martin/Maggie Haberman: Trump relies on populist language, but he mostly sides with corporate interests: Trenchant reporting from the New York Times.

• Jane Mayer: The case of Al Franken.

• Middle East Eye: Israel destroys Palestinian homes in biggest demolition push since 1967. Also: Michelle Nichols: US blocks UN rebuke of Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes.

• Alec MacGillis: Jared Kushner's other real estate empire in Baltimore. Related: Beatrice Dupuy: Jared Kushner's family company faces more than 170 Baltimore violations.

• George Monbiot: From Trump to Johnson, nationalists are on the rise -- backed by billionaire oligarchs.

• Anna North: Al Franken needs to stop comparing his resignation to death.

• Ilhan Omar: It is not enough to condemn Trump's racism.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • The Democratic divide over impeaching Trump, explained.

  • Mueller's testimony, and what it means for President Trump, explained.

• Robert Reich: The real reason we need to impeach Trump immediately: Actually, he offers close to a dozen, but they're just examples of a more fundamental contempt Trump holds for law and order:

  Every child in America is supposed to learn about the Constitution's basic principles of separation of powers, and checks and balances.

  But these days, every child and every adult in America is learning from Donald Trump that these principles are bunk.

  More impeachment talk:

  • Shaun King: Racism is an impeachable offense.

  • Charles P Pierce: Impeachment is not an exercise in futility; also: This is an impeach by any other name.

• David Roberts: Ohio just passed the worst energy bill of the 21st century: "A corrupt bailout for dinosaur power plants that screws renewable energy in the process." Also: Ryan Grim/Akela Lacy: Ohio Republicans balked at a nuclear bailout, so the industry elected new Republicans -- and walked away with $1.1 billion.

• Jacob Rosenberg: "Love it or leave it" has a racist history. A lot of America's language does. I've always heard "love it or leave it" as "be complacent, or get banished," because you're not entitled to your own opinions, or in any way to criticize your government, and if you dissent, you're not entitled to keep living your life where you grew up. Racism is one of many things that we weren't allowed to question (and the "back to Africa" movement was largely a concession to this dictate), but there are a great many more things that triggered this demand -- in my time, most memorably, America's imperialist war against Vietnam.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Devin Nunes's behavior during the Mueller hearing was bizarre -- unless you watch Fox News.

  • It took the Trump campaign 2 minutes to lie about Mueller's testimony.

  • Trump now: Criticizing America is unpatriotic. Trump then: America "is going to HELL."

• David E Sanger/Catie Edmondson: Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states, report finds: I don't doubt Russian machinations, nor excuse them with the fact that the US routinely and methodically attempts to interfere and influence elections in Russia and damn near everywhere else. But one should bear in mind that Republicans are much more active underminers of democracy. And that the common interest that Russia and Republicans share is their dedication to oligarchy.

• Kori Schake: The bill for America First is coming due: "Two of America's closest treaty allies have announced military efforts explicitly designed to exclude the US." As Trump's foreign policy becomes more arbitrary and erratic, it's inevitable that other countries will go their own way -- in this case, UK and Australia, reverting to their basest imperialist roots. Not a good sign, although anything that reduces the American bootprint on the world's neck can't be all bad. Schake directs a UK security think tank, IISS, and her recent pieces offer various hints at how Trump's vacuous foreign policy is perturbing America's former clients. For example, see: A Middle East peace plan built in un-American principles, and Worse than Obama's red-line moment: taunting Trump for not bombing Iran ("Trump has now shown himself just as willing as President Obama to make empty threats that damage American credibility").

• Eric B Schnurer: Facebook doesn't just need to be broken up. It needs to be broken into. "To create real competition, let other social networks operate on the architecture Mark Zuckerberg built." I haven't digested this yet, but my general response to proposals to attack web service monopolies is to provide public funding to stand up open source alternatives. This subject is worth a much deeper discussion.

• Adam Serwer:

  • The press has adopted Trump's reality-show standards: "The reaction to the special counsel's testimony shows how deeply the president has conditioned the media to treat political events like reality television."

  • What Americans do now will define us forever: "If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere.".

  • Trump tells America what kind of nationalist he is: "In a series of tweets attacking four Democratic congresswomen, the president reiterated his belief that only white people can truly be American."

  • Trump lied to the Supreme court, and four justices don't care.

• Steven Simon/Jonathan Stevenson: Iran: The case against war. More recent pieces on Iran:

  • Patrick Cockburn: Brexit, Britain and the permanent crisis in the Gulf.

  • Juan Cole: How Bolton tricked clueless UK Conservatives into confrontation with Tehran.

  • Jason Ditz: US poised to send 500 troops to Saudi Arabia amid Iran tensions.

  • Fred Kaplan: Sleepwalking into war with Iran.

  • Tony Karon: Iran is gambling that Trump is afraid of war.

• Danny Sjursen: Could Donald Trump end the Afghan War?

• Maggie Stevens/Derek Willis: How conservative operatives steered millions in PAC donations to themselves.

• Emily Stewart: Elizabeth Warren sees "serious warning signs" of an economic crash. Warren's piece: The coming economic crash and how to stop it. Another important Warren piece: End Wall Street's stranglehold on our economy. Yves Smith writes about this latter piece: Elizabeth Warren seeks to cut private equity down to size.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • The Iowa circus: "Clown Car II: The Democrats. God help us." He wrote a great campaign book once, but it wasn't his 2016 effort (Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus -- it was his 2004-based Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season). But clearly he's just running on auto-pilot now, not even considering whether to revamp his circus metaphors -- it's like he's forgotten that there's a distinction between a sequel and a parody.

  • Banks sued for LIBOR collusion -- again!.

  • The myth of Robert Mueller, exploded.

• Siva Vaidhyanathan:

  • Why conservatives allege big tech is muzzling them.

    [Sen. Ted] Cruz knows that conservatives need Facebook and Google and that they benefit greatly from the algorithmic amplification that occurs in both systems. Trump's 2020 campaign manager is Brad Parscale, who ran digital operations for the president's successful 2016 campaign. Parscale declared that his mastery of Facebook for advertising, amplifying pro-Trump videos and memes, and fundraising won the 2016 election.

    Scholarship supports this conclusion. As the sociologist Jen Schradie demonstrates in great detail in her new book, The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, Facebook and Google work better for top-down, well-funded, disciplined, directed movements. Those adjectives tend to describe conservative groups more than liberal or leftist groups in the United States. In our current media ecosystem, right-wing sources of news and propaganda spread much further and faster than liberal or neutral sources do, according to a rigorous quantitative study of communication-network patterns by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Internet platforms are demonstrably not silencing conservative ideas. If anything, the opposite is true.

  • Billion-dollar fines can't stop Google and Facebook. That's peanuts for them.

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

  • Trump launches another racist attack on a lawmaker of color: Elijah Cummings, and his "rodent infested mess" of a district.

  • A controversial deal between US and Guatemala could reshape the asylum process.

  • In a victory for Trump, the Supreme Court frees up $2.5 billion for the border wall.

• Katrina vanden Heuvel: The transpartisan revolt against America's endless wars.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump says Daniel Coats, director of national intelligence, to step down.

  • Navy SEAL platoon sent home from Iraq over rape allegation and drinking while deployed: "SEAL scandals are piling up."

  • Senate confirms Army Gen. Mark Milley as new Joint Chiefs chair.

  • Mueller explained why he didn't push to interview Trump: "Trump would've fought a subpoena, and that would've taken too long.".

  • Trump says he could wipe Afghanistan off face of the earth in 10 days: "Trump said he doesn't want millions to die, but mused about wiping out Afghanistan, a country we are supposedly trying to help."

  • Iran says it arrested 17 people spying for the CIA. The US says it's fake news.

• Peter Wehner: George Will changes his mind -- but stays true to his convictions: Proving his convictions were always the problem with him. While it's tempting to admire people who are so consistently dedicated to wrong principles that they occasionally stand up against more opportunistic evils, they're ultimately not that useful, and never reliable. This turns into a puff-piece interview, not unlike Wehner's previous David Brooks's journey toward faith. Wehner's own mission is to rescue evangelical Christianity ffrom the shame of association with Donald Trump. That's a decent and noble endeavor, but misses the problem in favor of a bogus solution.

• Kelly Weill: MAGA bomber's lawyers blame Trump, Sean Hannity for his radicalization. Related, from Oct. 27, 2018: Rick Wilson: Of course Donald Trump inspired Cesar Sayoc's alleged terrorism.

• Philip Weiss: Ilhan Omar's case for foreign influence is more convincing than Mueller's.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • New GDP data confirms Trump's tax cuts aren't working. Seems to me they're doing exactly what they were intended to: help the rich get even richer, and weaken the government by piling up debt, which they can later use as a cudgel against spending by a future Democratic government. Sure, tax cut propagandists trotted out a few macroeconomic rationalizations, but they were such obvious horseshit at the time that their thorough debunking here offers no surprise and scant comfort. Or, as Eric Levitz reviews the same issue: The Trump tax cuts worked (as a scam):

    In the Trump era, Republicans have become masters of rationalizing the indefensible. But even they couldn't defend running up the deficit (and clamping down social spending) to boost corporate profits at a time when such profits were already high. Thus, they insisted that the president's tax cuts would neither increase the deficit nor benefit the wealthy much at all. . . .

    There was little empirical evidence to support this argument when Republicans were making it two years ago. There is even less today. In May, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) found no sign that the Trump tax cuts made any discernible contribution to growth, wages, or business investment. Corporations did not plow their windfalls into exceptionally productive and innovative ventures. Instead, they mostly threw their handouts onto the giant pile of cash they were already sitting on, and/or returned it to their (predominantly rich) shareholders. . . .

    If you take Republicans at their word -- and assume that they earnestly believed they could massively increase business investment by slashing corporate rates -- then the Trump tax cuts have been a miserable failure.

    If, however, you assume that the party's goal was always to prioritize the bottomless avarice of its megadonors over the pressing needs of the American people -- without paying a huge political price -- then the president's signature legislation has worked like a charm.

  • Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, not the unpopular ones.

  • Mueller's testimony matters even if he doesn't say anything new.

  • Al Franken did the right thing by resigning.

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31798 [31749] rated (+49), 259 [262] unrated (-3).

I had a lot of stuff I wanted to write about this week, but never found the time, and it doesn't look like that'll change over the next several days. Therefore, let's just dump this out, and try again next week.

New records reviewed this week:

• 100 Gecs: 1000 Gecs (2019, Dog Show): [r]: B
• Jay Anderson: Deepscape (2018 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Caterina Barbieri: Ecstatic Computation (2019, Editions Mego): [r]: A-
• Michael Bisio/Kirk Knuffke/Fred Lonberg-Holm: Requiem for a New York Slice (2018 [2019], Iluso): [bc]: B+(*)
• Black Midi: Schlagenheim (2019, Rough Trade): [r]: B+(**)
• Blood Orange: Angel's Pulse (2019, Domino): [r]: B+(**)
• Daniel Carter/Tobias Wilner/Djibril Toure/Federico Ughi: New York United (2016 [2019], 577): [r]: B+(***)
• Cheekface: Therapy Island (2019, New Professor Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Stef Chura: Midnight (2019, Saddle Creek): [r]: B+(*)
• Flying Lotus: Flamagra (2019, Warp): [r]: B+(***)
• Future: Future Hndrxx Presents: The Wizrd (2019, Epic/Freebandz): [r]: B+(**)
• Hilliard Greene: Spirituals (2019, Unseen Rain): [r]: B+(*)
• Augie Haas: Dream a Little Dream (2019, Playtime Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Rich Halley: Terra Incognita (2018 [2019], Pine Eagle): [cd]: A-
• Aldous Harding: Designer (2019, 4AD): [r]: B
• Randy Houser: Magnolia (2019, Stoney Creek): [r]: B+(**)
• Jelena Jovovic: Heartbeat (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B-
• Juice Wrld: Death Race for Love (2019, Interscope): [r]: B-
• Steve Lacy: Apollo XXI (2019, 3Qtr): [r]: B+(*)
• Lady Lykez: Muhammad Ali EP (2019, Hyperdub, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
• Alex Lahey: The Best of Luck Club (2019, Dead Oceans): [r]: B+(**)
• Lil Nas X: 7 (2019, Columbia, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Maluma: 11:11 (2019, Sony Music Latin): [r]: B+(**)
• Mannequin Pussy: Patience (2019, Epitaph): [r]: B+(**)
• Rico Nasty/Kenny Beats: Anger Management (2019, Sugar Trap, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Jai Paul: Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) (2013 [2019], XL): [r]: B+(**)
• PUP: Morbid Stuff (2019, Rise/BMG): [r]: B
• Queen Key: Eat My Pussy (Again) (2019, Machine Entertainment Group): [r]: A-
• Resavoir: Resavoir (2015-19 [2019], International Anthem): [bc]: B
• Maggie Rogers: Heard It in a Past Life (2019, Capitol): [r]: B+(**)
• ShitKid: [Detention] (2019, PNKSLM): [r]: B+(*)
• Skepta: Ignorance Is Bliss (2019, Boy Better Know): [r]: B+(**)
• Sote: Parallel Persia (2019, Diagonal): [bc]: B+(*)
• Emily A. Sprague: Water Memory (2017, self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Emily A. Sprague: Mount Vision (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Supa Bwe: Just Say Thank You (2019, Freddy Got Magic/Empire, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Kate Tempest: The Book of Traps and Lessons (2019, Republic): [r]: B+(*)
• Yves Theiler Trio: We (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(**)
• Turning Jewels Into Water: Which Way Is Home? (2018, FPE, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
• Turning Jewels Into Water: Map of Absences (2019, FPE): [r]: B+(***)
• Faye Webster: Atlanta Millionaires Club (2019, Secretly Canadian): [r]: B
• The Yawpers: Human Question (2019, Bloodshot): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Johnny Shines: The Blues Came Falling Down: Live 1973 (1973 [2019], Omnivore): [r]: B+(**)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Rodrigo Amado/Chris Corsano: No Place to Fall (2014 [2019], Astral Spirits): [cd]: [was B+(**)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ezra Weiss Big Band: We Limit Not the Truth of God (OA2): August 16
• Mark Wingfield & Gary Husband: Tor & Vale (Moonjune)

Weekend Roundup

We spent much of the past week arguing not about whether Donald Trump is a racist -- some might prefer not to discuss it, but hardly anyone doubts or denies such an abundantly settled fact. A week ago we faced what struck me as an artificially inflated schism between Party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and the more determined reformers in "the squad," but that division vanished instantly thanks to their common enemy -- Trump, for starters, and the racism he and his party so naturally indulge in. Pelosi may be jealous of the squad's popularity with the Democratic base, and she may be overly concerned with her reputation as a Washington power broker. But the fact is that since the 2018 election, the right-wing media has been most obsessed with raising alarms over the squad. Given that context, Trump's tweets strike me less as recurring racist bluster (to which he's certainly prone) than as confirmation that the Republicans' campaign strategy for 2020 will be to try to turn every local election into a referendum on Ilhan Omar. Pelosi knows that better than anyone, because Republicans have tried for years to make her the public face of Democratic-Socialist-Liberal dread.

Most important piece below is Matthew Yglesias's Trump's racism is part of his larger con. I didn't quote from it, but could have quoted the entire piece. Just read it.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • Trump met a lot of refugees and seemed to learn about their crises for the very first time. By the way, the refugees he met were pretty carefully selected (by Sam Brownback?) to appeal to administration prejudices ("Rohingya in Myanmar, Uighurs in China, and Yazidis in Iraq").

  • Puerto Rico's week of massive protests, explained.

• Andrew J Bacevich: The decline of our nation's generals: "Once powerful titans of policy, today no one knows who they are. Given all the mistakes they've made, is it any wonder?"

• Peter Baker, et al.: Trump employs an old tactic: using race for gain.

• Emily Bazelon: Justice John Paul Stevens had some things to say before he died: Actually, a review of his book, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years. Stevens died last week, at 99.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • "Send her back" is where racism and authoritarianism meet: "The viciousness isn't an accident. It's what Trumpism is really about."

  • Trump and the dead end of conservative nationalism. I've scanned through this twice and have no idea what the concept is, probably because conservatism and nationalism these days have little to offer other than bitter and vindictive reactions against whatever they find offensive. Trying to define either as a coherent ideology is hopeless. Merging them both into a synthetic (much less unifying) movement is even more ridiculous. Related:

    • Park MacDougald: What the hell is 'national conservatism' anyway?

    • Jacob Heilbrunn: National conservatism: retrofitting Trump's GOP with a veneer of ideas.

    • Eric Levitz: National conservatives want cultural dominance not 'social cohesion'.

    • Osita Nwanevu: Conservatism nationalism is Trumpism for intellectuals.

• Peter Beinart: By Republican standards, almost nothing is racist.

• Jared Bernstein: What economists have gotten wrong for decades: "Four economic ideas disproven by reality." This starts with the so-called "natural rate of unemployment" ("NAIRU" to its fans):

  The natural rate of unemployment that AOC questioned is one such idea (more on that below). There are three others worth singling out:

  • that globalization is a win-win proposition for all, an idea that has deservedly taken a battering in recent years;
  • that federal budget deficits "crowd out" private investments; and
  • that the minimum wage will only have negative effects on jobs and workers.

  Economists and policymakers have gotten these ideas wrong for decades, at great cost to the public. Especially hard hit have been the most economically vulnerable, and these mistakes can certainly be blamed for the rise of inequality. It's time we moved on from them.

  By the way, not every economist bought into these ideas, even in their heyday. George P. Brockway (1915-2001) was especially critical of NAIRU (see his short collection Economics Can Be Bad for Your Health as well as his masterpiece, The End of Economic Man). John Quiggin wrote about much of this in Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (2010). By the way, when Joe Biden became Vice President, he picked Bernstein as his economic adviser. I'm not a Biden fan, but that was a smart and gutsy pick at a time when Obama was hiring economists like Larry Summers. Back in 2008, before his appointment, Bernstein wrote an insightful book called Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries).

• Jamelle Bouie: The joy of hatred: "Trump and 'his people' reach deep into the violent history of public spectacle in America."

• Aleia Fernández Campbell: The House just passed a $15 minimum wage. It would be the first increase in a decade.

• John Cassidy: There is nothing strategic about Trump's racism.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Welcome to the post-post-corruption era of the Republican Party. Takes a detour from its original subject -- Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta's temporary and more permanent replacements (the former a Jack Abramoff associate, the latter Antonin Scalia's son, Eugene) -- to review the Party's checkered history both for and against corruption.

    Conservatism never fails, Rick Perlstein archly observed at the time; it is only failed. . . . It is almost impossible to overstate how much weight conservatives placed on corruption as their diagnosis of failure. This conviction led straight to their Obama-era posture as a "reformed" party of pure fiscal conservatism. . . . Pizzella may not lead the agency for long, and by Trump-era standards, of course, his offenses barely register as scandals at all. The Trump administration is shot through with corruption, from petty grifts like Cabinet members abusing their expense accounts to legislation written by and for lobbyists. The president himself is taking payoffs from corporate lobbyists and foreign governments through his Washington hotel and other properties.

    The party's whole post-Bush backlash against corruption and deficit spending, and the notion that those values are antithetical to conservatism, has been forgotten. ("Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore," Rush Limbaugh casually declared. "All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it's been around.") Having fulfilled its use by giving Republicans a reason to absolve their ideology of any role in Bush's failure, they discarded it.

  • Republicans baffled why Trump keeps saying racist things.

• Jane Coaston: The Trump racism spin cycle.

• Jelani Cobb: Donald Trump's idea of selective citizenship.

• Chas Danner: Trump shows yet again that he can't even pretend to reject racism.

• Tom Engelhardt: Planet of the surreal: Turning 75 in the Age of Trump.

• Eric Foner: The Supreme Court is in danger of again becoming 'the grave of liberty'.

• Masha Gessen:

  • The weaponization of national belonging, from Nazi Germany to Trump.

    By turning unspoken assumptions into hateful rally chants, Trump is not merely destroying the norms of political speech but weaponizing them. He is cashing in on the easy trick of saying out loud what others barely dare to think. But his supporters are also enforcing the prohibition on his opponents' taking part in the conversation -- as when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was reprimanded for calling Trump's speech "racist" on the House floor. Trump has initiated a radical renegotiation of belonging in this country and then monopolized it. This is what happens first: a political force seizes the power to define themselves as insiders and certain others as intruders. This is done in the name of protection of the motherland, which the newly marginalized are said to hate. Everything else follows.

  • Trump, Pelosi, and the Squad are fighting over who belongs in government.

• Susan B Glasser: "I'm winning": Donald Trump's calculated racism.

• Michelle Goldberg:

  • Defenders of a racist president use Jews as human shields: "Trump's bigoted attack on four congresswomen of color has nothing to do with fighting anti-Semitism."

  • Please, Pelosi, fight Trump, not the Squad.

• Tara Golshan: Mark Sanford is willing to run against Trump for president if people start talking about the debt.

• Emily Holden: Trump drilling leases could create more climate pollution than EU does in a year.

• Caroline Houck: Mark Esper, President Trump's pick for defense secretary, explained: Key point: "former top lobbyist from Raytheon." Also: Thomas Gibbons-Neff: No questions about US wars in Defense chief's confirmation hearing.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Trump's racism is pushing away the voters he needs in 2020. I don't really buy this. Past history shows that Trump's economic beneficiaries (almost exclusively stock and business owners) care very little about his race messaging. On the other hand, people who have no economic stake in his policies but support him for cultural reasons need reinforcement, which comes not so much because they identify with racism as that they fear and loathe the sort of people who get offended over such. That's in a nutshell why his support figures have increased (marginally, for sure) as nearly every Democrat/Independent has been blasting him.

  • Susan Collins's approval rating dives as reelection contest approaches.

• Catherine Kim: New polling indicates Republicans actually like Trump more following racist tweet controversy.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Trump says US Navy destroyed Iranian drone.

  • Boris Johnson, the frontrunner to be the UK's next prime minister, explained. Related: James Butler: Boris Johnson is how Britain ends.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Deficit Man and the 2020 election. Contrasts Deficit Man with Tariff Man, both Trump attempting to lead the economy, and argues that so far the economic stimulus caused by running high deficits has limited the damage caused by Trump's tariffs. Overall prognosis for the Trump economy is "meh."

  • Racism comes out of the closet: "The dog whistle days are apparently over." Well, that's what happens when you elect the dog.

  • Trump and the merchants of detention: "Every betrayal seems to profit the president and his friends."

  • Trump is losing his trade wars.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Moderate Democrats warn that AOC is distracting from their nonexistent message.

  • 15 ways President Trump has hurt the American worker: Old piece (Sept. 4, 2018), linked from article above, but worth recalling. Of course, a current piece could easily be expanded to 30 ways.

• PR Lockhart: The racism in Trump's attacks should be impossible to deny.

• German Lopez: Cory Booker's latest criminal justice reform bill takes aim at life imprisonment.

• Ella Nilsen: House votes to hold AG Barr and Commerce Secretary Ross in contempt of Congress over census citizenship question.

• Anna North: How 4 congresswomen came to be called "the Squad".

• Jeremy W Peters/Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman: Trump sets the 2020 tone: like 2016, only this time 'the Squad' is here.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • The EPA's new 'no surprise' policy protects everything except the environment.

  • This was a fascist rally down to its bones.

  • The unholy trinity of voter suppression is having a no good, very bad week: Kris Kobach, J Christian Adams, Hans von Spakovsky.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Michael Cohen documents unsealed as Trump hush money investigation concludes.

  • Jeffrey Epstein's connections to Donald rump and Bill Clinton, explained.

• Jonah Raskin: Paul Krassner, 1932-2019: American satirist. I should note that I started reading The Realist shortly after I dropped out of high school, so Krassner played an outsized role in my discovery that there are other ways of understanding the world than had been drilled into my tiny brain by the official guardians of virtue.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • "Incredible patriots" is the new "very fine people": Trump defends racist chants.

  • "Send her back!": Trump's attacks on Ilhan Omar -- and the response to them -- represent a new low.

  • Trump claims he tried to quell "send her back!" chants. The video says otherwise.

  • It wasn't just Ilhan Omar -- Trump disparaged 8 women during his speech in North Carolina.

  • "What's your ethnicity?": Kellyanne Conway's defense of Trump's racism isn't helping.

  • Trump's threat to investigate Google isn't based on evidence. It's based on Fox News.

  • Trump says he's not concerned about being racist because "many people agree" with him.

• Jeffrey D Sachs: America's economic blockades and international law: I'm not sure who Sachs thinks has been calling Trump an isolationist, but at least he rejects that label. What's different about Trump isn't the degree the US engages with other countries but the terms of alliance and intervention. From FDR through Obama, the US has generally tried to find agreement on areas of mutual interest, often trading economic help for joint security. Trump's intent is to put American (by which he often means his personal) interests first, reducing everyone else to paying tribute for some degree of privilege within the US-directed world order. If it seems like little has changed under Trump, that's mostly because the US position at the top of the informal world order has, at least since WWII, been rooted in the relative size and wealth of the American economy (although these days it has largely transformed itself into global financial networks, which nation states have little effective power to regulate). Where his predecessors preferred to build alliances based on mutual interest, all Trump sees is the power to extract profit. In the past, NATO was presented as a trade: member countries would open themselves up to global capitalism, and in turn would receive security guarantees. (Indeed, the "carrot" of capital investment was probably more decisive to expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe than fears of Russian aggression.) On the other hand, Trump views NATO as a protection racket, and wants to do what any gangster/boss would do: raise the tribute. As an authoritarian, Trump much prefers his sticks to carrots, much as he'd rather be feared than befriended (not that he minds having friends, as long as they are properly submissive). Short of risking his bloated military, the most powerful stick he has at his disposal is the economic blockade (sanctions), which he's employed more aggressively than ever before (e.g., North Korea, Iran, Venezuela). So far, nothing disastrous (for the US, anyway) has come of this. None of the targeted countries have submitted, but few (if any) nominal allies have yet decided to buck US authority and circumvent the sanctions, so Trump appears to be in control. However, you have to wonder how long China, Europe, Russia, India, Japan, etc., will continue to kowtow to a thin-skinned, thankless bully like Trump.

• William Saletan: Is Trump a racist or a narcissist? Here's a puzzle even Saletan can solve: "He's both." But aren't those just facets of an even broader and deeper sociopathy?

• Theodore Schleifer: A plan to fix inequality would target CEOs who make 100 times more than their employees: CEO pay has been a useful metric for measuring inequality for several decades now, but the most one can hope for by narrowly targeting it is to muddy the metric. CEO's represent a small sliver of the very rich, and as such a small sliver of the money that a more general program could tax. I think it's long been clear that the main reason boards have moved so strongly to increase CEO pay has been the desire to make CEO's act more like owners and less like managers: to focus more on short-term profitability, while allowing more risks to long-term stability.

• Emily Stewart: Elizabeth Warren's latest Wall Street enemy: private equity.

• Matt Taibbi: CNN's debate lottery draw is a new low in campaign media: "If you cover elections like reality shows, you will get reality stars as leaders."

• Robin Wright: Iran's eye-for-an-eye strategy in the Gulf.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The controversy over Bernie Sanders's low-paid field staffers, explained.

  • Trump's racism is part of his larger con.

  • Trump's racist tirades against "the Squad," explained.

  • The controversy over whether the media should call Trump's tweets "racist," explained.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31749 [31726] rated (+23), 262 [262] unrated (+0).

Slow getting this out, with Monday wiped out by a house emergency (water heater broke down). Had a nagging sore throat much of the week, but right now mostly feel exhausted. Relatively mild summer so far, but looks like triple digits coming soon and probably persisting. Next couple weeks will probably be worse.

Rated count cut off Sunday evening, but I've added unpacking since then, so the numbers are a little out of whack.

Second straight week with an unusually low rated count (24 last week). Again, spent some time on the Resonance anthologies without writing any reviews, and also found a higher-than-usual split of A- records, plus high B+ that merited extra plays. Most of the finds this week come from Chris Monsen's Jazz favorites list, plus a few more from Phil Overeem's Halfway to Listville. The easiest one was John McPhee's Nation Time: I skipped over it when I was catching up with Corbett vs. Dempsey's Bandcamp a few weeks back, as I had already given Corbett's 2000 reissue a full A, and hadn't noticed the extra cuts. No reason to repurchase if you have the Atavistic release, but the bonuses are just that.

Had a minor role in helping Joe Yanosik publish his magnum opus A Consumer Guide to FRANCO. I have a Guests section on my website, which I've used a few times but never really tried to promote. I've long thought that a better solution would be to set up guest areas on my Hullworks website, perhaps as sub-domains, which could be spun off should the guests decide to pony up for a domain name. I'm in a position where I can host those as well. I also considered hanging Joe's piece at Terminal Zone -- long my pet idea for a music-themed website (named for the zine Don Malcolm and I published back in 1977). In the end, I went with the path that involved the least thought and work.

When Joe first mentioned his Franco project to me, I glanced at Napster's Franco offerings, and spent a week digging around. My own (much more limited) set of Franco grades are here. You can also look up what Robert Christgau has written.

I might as well mention two projects that I've started but haven't gotten very far on. I've started to add recent reviews to the two large book manuscript files I have on jazz. Rather slow work, but I've added 99 pages up to January, 2019, pushing the 20th century jazz guide over 800, and the 21st over 1700. Files are backed up online, in ODT format.

I've also started collecting mid-year lists, as I did last year. This uses the EOY list aggregate format, and most likely will eventually evolve into a full EOY list aggregate later this year. Only have four lists compiled so far (about a third of those collected on AOTY). I'm surprised there aren't more, but haven't really looked yet. The current aggregate is way too sparse to draw any real conclusions from. One issue here is that I'm only awarding 1 point for each list mention. (Two reasons: one is that so far many of the lists are unranked; the other is that it makes it easier to clean up with I replace the midway lists with EOY lists.) The other point I should note here is that I'm factoring in my graces (A: 5, A-: 4, ***: 3, **: 2, *: 1), which currently results in quite a bit of skew. E.g., 6 of the top 8 records now are ones I've graded A- (Billy Eilish, Lizzo, Charly Bliss, Big Thief, Little Simz, Jamila Woods), and the other two (Carly Rae Jepsen and Vampire Weekend) were *** and ** respectively. Expect my picks to slip as I add further lists, while records I like less will make inroads (Solange is the surest shot; maybe also Tyler the Creator, Sharon Van Etten, Jenny Lewis). Record that I haven't heard with the most list mentions so far: Flying Lotus' Flamagra.

New records reviewed this week:

• Maria Faust/Tim Dahl/Weasel Walter: Farm Fresh (2018 [2019], Gotta Let It Out): [r]: B+(***)
• Fire! Orchestra: Arrival (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B
• Alex Fournier: Triio (2018 [2019], Furniture Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Lafayette Gilchrist: Dark Matter (2016 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• GoldLink: Diaspora (2019, Squaaash Club/RCA): [r]: B+(***)
• Bjørn Marius Hegge: Ideas (2019, Particular): [r]: A-
• Megan Thee Stallion: Fever (2019, 300 Entertainment): [r]: B+(***)
• Nature Work: Nature Work (2018 [2019], Sunnyside): [r]: A-
• Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unity: To Whom Who Buys a Record (2019, Odin): [r]: A-
• Pere Ubu: The Long Goodbye (2019, Cherry Red): [r]: B+(**)
• Santana: Africa Speaks (2019, Concord): [r]: B
• Bruce Springsteen: Springsteen on Broadway (2018, Columbia, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars (2019, Columbia): [r]: B-
• Zhenya Strigalev/Federico Dannemann: The Change (2018 [2019], Rainy Days): [cd]: B+(*)
• Gebhard Ullmann Basement Research: Impromptus and Other Short Works (2018 [2019], WhyPlayJazz): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Dexter Gordon: At the Subway Club 1973 (1965-73 [2019], Elemental Music, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Clifford Jordan Quartet: Glass Bead Games (1973 [1974], Strata East; [2019], Pure Pleasure): [r]: A-
• Eero Koivistoinen: The Front Is Breaking (1976, Love; [2017], Svart): [r]: B+(*)
• Joe McPhee: Nation Time (1970 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A
• Harry Mosco: Peace & Harmony (1979 [2019], Isle of Jura): [r]: B+(*)
• Woody Shaw Quintet: Basel 1980 (1980-81 [2019], Elemental Music, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Sonic Youth: Battery Park, NYC, July 4th 2008 (2008 [2019], Matador): [r]: B+(***)
• Bruce Springsteen: The Live Series: Songs of the Road (1977-2013 [2018], Columbia): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• John Bacon/Michael McNeill/Danny Ziemann: Refractions (Jazz Dimensions): August 1
• Mike Holober/The Gotham Jazz Orchestra: Hiding Out (Zoho): August 9
• From Wolves to Whales: Strandwal (Aerophonic): August 26
• Dave Rempis/Joshua Abrams/Avreeayl Ra + Jim Baker: Apsis (Aerophonic): August 26

Weekend Roundup

Fairly large (7.3) earthquake in Halmahera, Indonesia today. It's in a fairly isolated corner of the nation, an island with about 450,000 people, north of Ceram and midway between the outstretched peninsulas of New Guinea and Sulawesi. Probably not much news on this, unlike last week's similar-sized earthquakes near Ridgecrest, California.

On the other hand, quite a bit of news attention to Hurricane Barry, slowly moving today through north Louisiana and into Arkansas, dumping a lot of rain over already flooded terrain. Two things worth noting here. One is that this is still very early in the season (nominally June 1 to November 30). For a record fifth year in a row, the first named storm (Andrea) appeared before the season officially started. June was quiet, but it's still very rare to have hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico in July. Odder still, where most hurricanes start as low pressure zones over West Africa, then pick up strength crossing the width of the subtropical Atlantic Ocean, this one started in Tennessee, then curved in a clockwise motion through Georgia and Florida before intensifying over the Gulf. I've never seen a storm follow that trajectory, or for that matter one that spent so little time over water developing to hurricane level. Granted, it only briefly achieved level 1 strength, but that doesn't bode well for later storms that traverse much more of the still warming Gulf (currently 86°F). [PS: The Wikipedia page suggests several similar hurricanes, but the only one that comes close is 1940 Louisiana hurricane, which formed in early August off the coast of Georgia, crossed Florida and covered a much longer stretch of the Gulf before making landfall in southwest Louisiana. It is regarded as "the wettest tropical cyclone in state history," with a peak rainfall of 37.5 inches. Barry is forecast to produce up to 25 inches of rain. Actual rain so far appears to be much less -- see Barry downgraded to a depression but still brings risk of flooding from Louisiana to Arkansas. This article also notes that the average date for first hurricane of season is August 10, and that this is the first July hurricane in continental US since Arthur in 2014, and only the 4th in Louisiana history according to records going back to 1851.]

Some scattered links this week:

• William Astore: The riptide of American militarism.

• Aaron Blake: Donald Trump's origin story suffers another severe blow:

  The new report by Kranish also recalls perhaps the biggest revelation undercutting Trump's self-published origin story: how he became wealthy in the first place. While Trump has claimed he got only a $1 million loan to start out with, the Times detailed how the younger Trump "received at least $413 million in today's dollars from his father's real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s." The paper said these tax dodges included "instances of outright fraud."

  And when it comes to Trump's education, he has apparently gone to great lengths to obscure the record and seems to have tapped powerful connections in the process, as The Post's Marc Fisher detailed in March. The New York Military Academy, which Trump attended before college, moved its Trump files to a more secure location amid pressure from wealthy Trump allies. Around the same time that was revealed, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who flipped on Trump and pleaded guilty to several crimes, released a 2015 letter he wrote threatening Fordham University with legal action if Trump's records were released.

  The combined picture is one of a president who may not have been able to attend Penn or assemble anywhere close to such a fortune without familial connections.

• Jonathan Blitzer: Trump is poised to sign a radical agreement to send future asylum seekers to Guatemala.

• Frank Bruni: Joe Biden, Closet Republican: "He's the liberal Bob Dole, the looser Mitt Romney, the supposedly safe bet who's owed a shot." I'm not a Biden fan, but this is pretty unfair. For starters, it vastly understates how despicable the vast majority of Republican politicians have become -- ironically, a trait that Biden and Bruni seem to share. Biden has been a reasonably successful politician during the 40-year Reagan-Bush-Trump era, at least in part because he's often been willing to bend with the wind. That bending may have helped lend credence to the Republicans, and that's reason enough to doubt him as a candidate. Still, there's a big gap between Democrats like Biden and supposedly respectable Republicans like Dole and Romney. Bruni's not doing us any favors by papering over that chasm.

• Cristina Cabrera: Trump launches racist attack against 'progressive Democrat congresswomen'. Related: Peter Wade: Of course, Fox News delighted in Trump's racist tweet. The question Fox raised on the screen was "DEMOCRATS DIVIDED?" Actually, the reaction there was pretty united: it speaks volumes that the one thing every Democratic politician in America agrees on is that Trump is a racist, and that it's fair game to put it that explicitly.

• Jonathan Chait: President Trump says only Trump supporters deserve free speech.

• Ryan Devereaux: Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost was a member of secret Facebook group.

• Brian Feldman: FTC fines Facebook $5 billion over Cambridge Analytica scandal.

• Ryan Gallagher: How US tech giants are helping to build China's surveillance state. Same deal here: Middle East dictators buy spy tech from company linked to IBM and Google.

• Masha Gessen:

  • Donald Trump's "inoffensive" war on reality.

  • Mike Pompeo's faith-based attempt to narrowly redefine human rights.

• Tara Golshan:

  • Progressives just got a major win against Trump on Iran. Can they hold on to it?

  • Elizabeth Warren's immigration proposal goes much further than a pathway to citizenship.

• David A Graham: The best way to get fired by Trump: "The president's new strategy for getting rid of scandal-tainted aides: Quickly accept their resignations, but heap praise on them as they leave."

• Ryan Grim: Amy McGrath is challenging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. She's everything wrong with the Democratic Party. Yeah, but if I was misfortunate enough to be represented by McConnell, I'd cheerfully vote for her anyway. Note that she wound up correcting her faux pas on the Kavanaugh question.

• Neil Irwin: The Fed's new message: The economy can get a lot better for workers: "A rejection of what had been a consensus view of the relationship between the jobless rate and inflation."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • The case for Biden's 'electability' fades under scrutiny.

  • Trump caves on census citizenship question, but hints at broader fight ahead.

  • House votes to require congressional approval for war with Iran.

• Jen Kirby:

  • The UK ambassador to the US has resigned. Here's why it's a big deal. Follow up to Trump tweets "we will no longer deal" with UK ambassador after leaked cables. Richard Wolffe notes: Trump's spat with the UK reveals the bottomless depths of his insecurities.

  • Joe Biden wants to restore the pre-Trump world order.

  • Prosecutors are investigating whether GOP donor Elliott Broidy used Trump ties to profit.

• Michael Klare: It's always the oil: The missing three-letter word in the Iran crisis.

• Ezra Klein: What Donald Trump got right, and Justin Amash got wrong, about conservatives: "Conservatism is an identity more than an ideology, and Trump knows it."

• Carolyn Kormann: The case for declaring a national climate emergency.

  While Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez's calls for a climate-emergency declaration are not solving any problems, they are providing the language that needs to dominate the national conversation. And that matters. The United Nations recently warned that climate disasters are happening at the rate of one per week. This past June was the hottest on record. At the end of the month, a freak storm buried Guadalajara, Mexico, in hail, and on Thursday morning news outlets reported that freak hailstorms in Greece killed seven people. A month's worth of rain fell on Washington, D.C., in an hour on Monday (while Trump completely ignored the climate crisis in his speech on the environment), then more flash floods drowned New Orleans, which is now preparing for a tropical storm that could dump another twenty inches of rain and test the city's levees. The warming that happens over the next few decades could kill all of the world's coral reefs, lead to even more severe storms and wildfires, and set off the sorts of tipping points that most concern scientists -- specifically, the irreversible dissolution of the Greenland ice sheet, where, in June, a heatwave set off melting across half of its surface.

• Josh Kovensky: Rudy Giuliani, Joe Lieberman team up for Albania MEK conference.

• Eric Levitz: Why the GOP might learn to love putting price controls on drugs.

• German Lopez: How to dramatically reduce gun violence in American cities: Based on a new book by Thomas Abt: Bleeding Out.

• Robert Mackey:

  • Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden condemn Israeli Occupation, as young American Jews urge Democrats to press Isarel. Seems like this is significant, but note that Buttigieg went on to cite Ariel Sharon as saying the occupation must end.

  • Give Elizabeth Warren a break -- even Ariel Sharon said the Israeli Occupation had to end.

  • Trump takes the bait, lashing out at UK Ambassador whose private notes were leaked.

• Dylan Matthews: AOC's policy adviser makes the case for abolishing billionaires: Interview with Dan Riffle.

• Joan McCarter: How Trump swallowed the GOP whole and exposed Paul Ryan's craven moral failings. Refers to a forthcoming book by Tim Alberta: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. For more, see:

  • Josh Dawsey: New book details how Republican leaders learned to stop worrying and love Trump.

  • John Nichols: The Republicans who made Trump possible cannot remove the badge of shame.

  • Jennifer Szalai: 'American Carnage' shows how war between Republicans led to their peace with Trump. Ryan looms large in the book, so Trump's already singled him out for opprobrium.

  • Christian Vasquez: Trump: Republicans like Paul Ryan are 'weak, ineffective & stupid.'

  • Jonathan Chait: Trump: Paul Ryan was bribed to call me stupid.

• Rani Molla: Conservatives pretending to be suppressed by social media dominated social media.

• Suzanne Moore: Of course Boris Johnson wants a royal yacht. He's the king of fake-it-till-you-make-it.

• Dina Nayeri: Why they fear Ilhan Omar: "Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson don't think she's dangerous. They hate that she's full of potential."

• Anna North: Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta has no good answer for cushy Jeffrey Epstein plea deal. Acosta wound up resigning, after Trump swore, "I'm with him". For more, see:

  • Jane Coaston/Anna North: Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who is friends with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, explained.

  • Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman: Jeffrey Epstein was a 'terrific guy,' Donald Trump once said. Now he's 'not a fan.'

  • Michelle Goldberg: Acosta resigned. The Caligula administration lives on.

• Amanda Petrusich: Going home with Wendell Berry: Interview. Sample quote I should save and maybe use some time: "Every generation is a bridge between something that's past, and something that's coming."

• Charles P Pierce: Nancy Pelosi's leadership now constitutes a constant dereliction of duty. Pierce is the kind of pundit I'd expect to go to the mat defending Party leadership like Pelosi, so I'm impressed first of all that he snapped, second that he snapped this direction. What this shows is that AOC and her "gang of four" have struck a chord that extends even to middling Democrats. Maybe that's because they're scoring points while Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer, et al. look like mere bystanders. Another non-radical suddenly soured on Pelosi: Andrew Sullivan: Hey, Nancy Pelosi: Please stop coddling Donald Trump.

• Gareth Porter: Lies about Iran killing US troops in Iraq are a ploy to justify war.

• Andrew Prokop: Trump's census citizenship question fiasco, explained. Related: Michael Wines: The long history of the US government asking Americans whether they are citizens.

• Gabriela Resto-Montero:

  • Mayors and protesters remain defiant ahead of ICE raids: "You're going to have to come through us."

  • Mike Pence visits a crowded immigrant detention center: "This is tough stuff." More on this: Nicole Lafond: In 'tough' visit, Pence uses crisis he helped create to push immigration overhaul.

• David Roberts: Coal left Appalachia devastated. Now it's doing the same to Wyoming.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's latest press conference was a master class in gaslighting.

  • Trump's social media summit was a circus. Its aftermath was even worse.

  • Trump's latest morning of tweets was off the rails, even by his standards.

  • One day encapsulated everything that's wrong with Fox News.

• Matt Shuham: House report shines light on multiple infants under one separated from parents.

• Tierney Sneed: How Trump doubled down on the crazy claim he's immune from oversight.

• Paul Sonne/Karoun Demirjian/Missy Ryan: Sexual assault allegations complicate confirmation of Trump's nominee for military's No. 2 officer: Air Force Gen. John E Hyten, commander of US Strategic Command, nominated to be vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

• Matt Taibbi: Ross Perot had the last laugh. The business mogul and third-party presidential candidates (1992/1996) died last week, at 89.

• Alex Thompson: Elizabeth Warren shuns conventional wisdom for a new kind of campaign: Key sentence: "She's largely rejecting DC's consultant class."

• Marc Tracy: As the world heats up, the climate for news is changing, too.

• Alex Ward:

  • "Trump is quite easy to buy off": how Trump is putting American foreign policy up for sale: "Want to understand Trump's foreign policy? Just follow the money."

  • Biden releases video blasting "the Trump Doctrine" of foreign policy. Defines "five core elements of what Biden calls 'The Trump Doctrine'":

    1. Embrace dictators
    2. Threaten war
    3. Rip up international agreements
    4. Launch trade wars
    5. Embarrass the US

    Lots of problems here, starting with the assertion that what Trump's doing is coherent and consistent enough to imply a "doctrine" (especially when no such thing has been stated). He's pretty selective about which dictators he "embraces," favoring those who align with his worldview, especially those who cater to his personal finances. And while he has no personal interest in democracy, international law, and/or concern for human rights, he's willing to slander his enemies (and only his enemies) for their shortcomings there. Similarly, his treatment of international treaties and trade agreements is unprincipled, riding almost exclusively on his personal (and partisan) economic interest. He's a committed bully, and feels that by virtue of its wealth and power America is entitled to threaten and cajole the little countries around, but he has yet to act as recklessly as his rhetoric suggests. Of course, he's a huge embarrassment. But aside from being somewhat less of an embarrassment, one wonders what Biden would do differently. US foreign policy has been remarkably consistent across parties, both in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, as if presidents don't actually have many real options. In his long career, Biden has very dependably gone along with whatever the prevailing "wisdom" dictated, so there's little reason to think he won't continue to serve the same interests US foreign policy has long followed.

  • The US has a risky new plan to protect oil tankers from Iranian attacks.

• New leak claims Trump scrapped Iran nuclear deal 'to spite Obama'.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31726 [31702] rated (+24), 262 [260] unrated (+2).

Rated count down this week. Maybe I didn't focus well while Laura was in Boston, but it's also likely that coming up with a relative bounty of A- records had an effect: they always take more time. Also, I didn't take any dives into old music (the VSOP Quintet shows up in Napster's featured new jazz list, but with digital reissues I usually just cite the original release label/date -- and it wasn't good enough to inspire me to check out their other albums).

This is my first Music Week since Robert Christgau posted his final Noisey Expert Witness column, so it's fitting that I looked a little harder than usual for recent non-jazz. In this I was helped by Phil Overeem's halfway through 2019 list (Freddie Gibbs & Madlib, Peter Perrett, Billy Woods & Kenny Segal, Abdullah Ibrahim), and by Facebook comments from Dan Weiss (DaBaby, Open Mike Eagle, Gibbs again -- he's also big on Denzel Curry's Zuu, which I previously had at B+(**)). Most of the others were picked up by scrounging for new music on Napster.

The most controversial of these is probably Madonna's Madame X. Metacritic average is 70. Rob Sheffield wrote a 3-star pan at Rolling Stone, although it reads better than the rating. Spencer Kornhaber takes offense in The paradox of Madonna's gun-control music video. Took me a lot of plays before I recognized that the number of songs I was pleased to recognize exceeded the number of fingers I had available for counting. I have more doubts about the Peter Perrett album, but I gave How the West Was Won an A-, and this one hit the same pleasure spots. Makes me wonder if I underrated Special View (the 1979 Only Ones album), where I remembered his voice from.

I'll also note that I've given Wes's Best: The Best of Wes Montgomery on Resonance 3-4 plays with increasing pleasure. I'd like to review the albums it was selected from before doing the compilation, but the release schedule hasn't made that possible. Haven't played the Bill Evans compilation yet, but same considerations apply there. I've been wanting to hear those records ever since they came out, but probably wouldn't have bothered with the compilations had they not appeared in the mail. Also got a note in email today asking whether I've downloaded recent AUM Fidelity releases. I've looked for them on Napster, but didn't notice the email invites. I'll eventually dig them out, but if you want my attention, best way is still to send a CD.

There will be a new XgauSez out by Tuesday morning. I'm hope to get this post wrapped up before I take a good look at it, and I've been hobbled by Weekend Roundup running into overtime. Also in my input queue is a lengthy and quite extraordinary "Consumer Guide to Franco" that Joe Yanosik compiled and asked if I would publish. Expect that later this week.

New records reviewed this week:

• 75 Dollar Bill: I Was Real (2019, Thin Wrist): [r]: B+(***)
• JD Allen: Barracoon (2019, Savant): [r]: A-
• Gretje Angell: In Any Key (2018 [2019], Grevlinto): [cd]: B+(**)
• Blind Lemon Jazz: After Hours: New Pages in the American Songbook (2019, Ofeh): [cd]: B+(*)
• DaBaby: Blank Blank (2018, South Coast Music Group, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• DaBaby: Baby on Baby (2019, South Coast Music Group): [r]: B+(**)
• Open Mike Eagle: The New Negroes: Season 1 Soundtrack (2019, Comedy Central, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Freddie Gibbs & Madlib: Bandana (2019, Keep Cool/RCA): [r]: A-
• Jesca Hoop: Stonechild (2019, Memphis Industries): [r]: B+(*)
• Abdullah Ibrahim: The Balance (2019, Gearbox): [r]: B+(***)
• Mike LeDonne: Partners in Time (2019, Savant): [r]: B+(**)
• Madonna: Madame X (2019, Interscope): [r]: A-
• Buddy & Julie Miller: Breakdown on 20th Ave. South (2019, New West): [r]: B+(**)
• Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real: Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) (2019, Fantasy): [r]: B+(*)
• Willie Nelson: Ride Me Back Home (2019, Legacy): [r]: A-
• Peter Perrett: Humanworld (2019, Domino): [r]: A-
• Mette Rasmussen/Julien Desprez: The Hatch (2016 [2019], Dark Tree): [cd]: B+(**)
• Rebekah Victoria: Songs of the Decades (2018 [2019], Patois): [cd]: B+(*)
• Billy Woods & Kenny Segal: Hiding Places (2019, Blackwoodz Studioz): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Stan Getz: Getz at the Gate: The Stan Getz Quartet Live at the Village Gate Nov. 26 1961 (1961 [2019], Verve, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Sourakata Koité: En Hollande (1984 [2019], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [bc]: B+(**)
• Asnakech Worku: Asnakech (1975 [2018], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [bc]: B+(**)

Old music:

• The V.S.O.P. Quintet: Five Stars (1979, CBS/Sony): [r]: B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Rodrigo Amado/Chris Corsano: No Place to Fall (Astral Spirits)
• Peter Eldridge/Kenny Werner: Somewhere (Rosebud Music)
• Augie Haas: Dream a Little Dream (Playtime Music): August 30
• Rich Halley: Terra Incognita (Pine Eagle): August 9
• Jelena Jovovic: Heartbeat (self-released)

Weekend Roundup

Donald Trump's big July 4 "celebration" was the week's big non-event, so naturally garnered plenty of press attention. We'll collect the links here, to try to keep the silliness of the event from infecting everything else:

• Jonathan Freedland: Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. It's not enough just to laugh at him.

• Masha Gessen: Donald Trump's "inoffensive" war on reality.

• Philip Kennicott: Forget the tanks. Trump's violation of the Lincoln Memorial is the real offense.

• Osita Nwanevu: Cutouts of J.F.K., Jr., tanks, and adulation at Trump's "Salute to America".

• Adam K Raymond: What you missed at Trump's July 4th spectacular.

• Aaron Rupar: Trump's "Salute to America" speech wasn't as bad as some feared. But it was still weird. "Trump avoided politics, but his over-the-top glorification of the military felt more Moscow than Washington, DC."

Some scattered links this week:

• Ben Armbruster: The Trump administration is trying to make war with Iran inevitable: "We should view Iran's recent posturing for what it is: retaliation to the Trump administration's unnecessary and deliberate provocation." Related: Phyllis Bennis: If war breaks out with Iran, it won't be an accident.

• Dean Baker: Why aren't Democrats talking about ending patent-financed drug research? Good question, especially since "free market drugs are a really big deal." One point I'd stress more is that public funding of drug research is not only more efficient, and much more transparent, but that it would also demolish borders which impose artificial costs. Free market drugs would spread out research investment, allowing all to benefit.

• Julian Borger: Nuclear weapons: experts alarmed by new Pentagon 'war-fighting' doctrine.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • The latest jobs report is great news for Wall Street. Not so much for workers.

  • Reminder: Trump doesn't need to keep migrants in detention camps: "The administration has better options to enforce immigration and asylum laws."

  • A $15 federal minimum wage won't cost American jobs, new study says.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • How Hitler's rise to power explains why Republicans accept Donald Trump. Back when GW Bush was president and still popular, I bought a copy of Richard J Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich, figuring it might be interesting to compare the machinations of the Bush-Cheney regime to the ascent of the Nazi party in Germany. I never got around to reading that book, but that same question arose again with Trump, and this time I did some reading: Benjamin Carter Hett's The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, James Q Whitman's Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, and Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. The unstated assumption here is that similarities between now and early stages of Hitler's arc to disaster predict the path we will follow if we don't change direction. Given how bad things turned out, it's hard to be shocked by each unfolding step. But Chait makes a key point (leaving out the parentheticals):

    All this is to say that German conservatives did not see Hitler as Hitler -- they saw Hitler as Trump. And the reasons they devised to overcome their qualms and accept him as the head of the government would ring familiar to followers of the 2016 campaign. They believed the responsibility of governing would tame Hitler, and that his beliefs were amorphous and could be shaped by advisers once in office. They respected his populist appeal and believed it could serve their own ends. Their myopic concern with specifics of their policy agenda overcame their general sense of unease. Think of the supply-siders supporting Trump in the hope he can enact major tax cuts, or the social conservatives enthused about his list of potential judges, and you'll have a picture of the thought process.

  • Today in 'Donald Trump's campaign is a garbage fire'.

  • Sorry, Obama: Donald Trump is a populist, and you're not: Sorry, Chait, Trump isn't a populist either, even according to either of your dubious definitions:

    1. "The ideological definition of populist means traditionalist on social issues and interventionist on economic policy -- the opposite of libertarianism, in other words."
    2. "Populism can also be defined as a certain kind of political style. Populists believe the government has been captured by evil and/or corrupt interests, and that it can be recaptured by a unified effort by the people (or, at least, their people)."

    I've long identified with populism (see the little blurb top left: "An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music"), most likely because the political movement it refers to was most identified with the people and place I came from (three generations of Kansas farmers before my father got his job in a Wichita airplane factory). Chait's definitions are wrong for that particular movement, and do little to capture the populist impulse as it has periodically erupted in various situations since then. The essential demand of populism is that power serve the people. It's easy enough to show that liberal technocrats like Obama at best give lip service to real democracy, but reactionary demagogues like Trump veer even farther from the principle. They only appear "populist" to elitist pundits who regard the masses as nothing more than a seething horde of prejudices. The more general historical term for such demagoguery is fascism.

• Michelle Chen: AOC's Green New Deal is just the start. Next let's make it global.

• Jelani Cobb: The Supreme Court just legitimized a cornerstone element of voter suppression.

• Tom Engelhardt: War With . . . ?: "We're not the good guys: why is American aggression missing in action?"

  So here's the strange thing, on a planet on which, in 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to 149 countries, or approximately 75% of all nations; on which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside its own territory; on which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas; on which U.S. unmanned aerial drones conduct assassination strikes across a surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been fighting wars, as well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it chose to launch full-scale invasions of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), is it truly reasonable never to identify the U.S. as an "aggressor" anywhere?

  One should add that there are two major forms of aggression that aren't even being counted here: cyberwarfare and economic warfare in the form of sanctions.

• Garrett Epps: Where John Roberts is taking the court.

• Jeannie Suk Gersen: The Supreme Court is one vote away from changing how the U.S. is governed.

• Jeet Heer: Democrats don't need David Brooks: Response to Brooks' Dems, please don't drive me away.

• Umair Irfan: Restoring forests may be one of our most powerful weapons in fighting climate change: "Adding 2.2 billion acres of tree cover would capture two-thirds of man-made carbon emissions, a new study found." But we're still cutting down more trees than we plant -- especially in Brazil. See Alexander Zaitchick: Rainforest on fire.

• Jake Johnson:

  • 'We are in a climate emergency, America': Anchorage hits 90 degrees for the first time in recorded history. Meanwhile, France records all-time highest temperature of 45.9C (i.e., 114.6F).

  • After British commandos seize oil tanker, Iran accuses UK of committing 'maritime piracy' on behalf of US.

• Fred Kaplan: Bolton of Mongolia: "The national security adviser's banishment during Trump's big diplomatic weekend suggests his days may be numbered."

• Jen Kirby: Sudan's military and civilian opposition have reached a power-sharing deal.

• Gary Leupp: Thoughts on the impromptu Kim-Trump summit: Regarding the US media: "One doesn't hear common sense: that this was a rational friendly gesture towards a country that Trump has rationally decided not to attack." Related: Christine Ahn: It's time to formally end the Korean War.

• Eric Levitz: Trump's Fed nominee pledges to serve as a partisan hack: Judy Shelton, who established her credentials as a partisan back in 2010 when she lobbied for raising Fed interest rates when unemployment topped 10 percent, but insists that we should lower them now that unemployment rates are at a record low. The difference, of course, is the party affiliation of the president.

• Robert Lipsyte: How the worst values of sports are taking over America:

  A half-century ago, the sporting Cassandras predicted that the worst values and sensibilities of our increasingly corrupted civic society would eventually affect our sacred games: football would become a gladiatorial meat market, basketball a model of racism, college sports a paradigm of commercialization, and Olympic sports like swimming and gymnastics a hotbed of sexual predators.

  Mission accomplished!

  The Cassandras then forecast an even more perverse reversal: our games, now profaned, would further corrupt our civic life; winning would not be enough without domination; cheating would be justified as gamesmanship; extreme fandom would become violent tribalism; team loyalty would displace moral courage; and obedience to the coach would supplant democracy.

  Okay, I think it's time for a round of applause for those seers. Let's hear it for Team Trump!

• PR Lockhart: The Alabama woman indicted after a miscarriage will not be prosecuted.

• Robert Mackey: Stephanie Grisham, new White House Press Secretary, has already been caught lying.

• Dylan Matthews: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake: This questions some of my longest and most deeply held beliefs, but for the record:

  1. Abolution would have come faster without independence.
  2. Independence was bad for Native Americans.
  3. America would have a better system of government if we'd stuck with Britain.

• Yascha Mounk: The more you watch, the more you vote populist: Another entry in the "television rots your brain" sweepstakes, using Italy and Silvio Berlusconi as the example.

• Ella Nilsen: Republicans dominate state legislatures. That decides political power in America.

• Anna North: The legal battle over the Trump administration's "domestic gag rule," explained.

• Kelsey Piper: George Soros and Charles Koch team up for a common cause: an end to "endless war": "The controversial billionaire philanthropists are launching a new anti-interventionist think tank": The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, named for John Quincy Adams ("who said in an 1821 speech that America 'goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy'").

• Robert Reich: There is no 'right' v 'left': it is Trump and the oligarchs against the rest: Actually, that's the very definition of right v left. Such naivete Makes me doubt Reich his own title for the otherwise reasonable Avbolish the Billionaires!

• Aaron Rupar: The viral video of Ivanka Trump at the G20 perfectly captures the problem with nepotism.

• Raja Shehadeh: State of exception: Review of Noura Erakat: Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, asking "what role has local and international law played in the Occupied Territories?"

• Emily Stewart: Did Justin Amash leave the GOP, or did the GOP leave him? The only Republican member of Congress willing to consider impeachment spared the Party the embarrassment of his presence, writing an op-ed announcing his exit from the party. Trump cheered him on:

  Great news for the Republican Party as one of the dumbest & most disloyal men in Congress is "quitting" the Party.

  Related: Bianca Quilantan: Justin Amash: GOP was broken even before Trump's presidency.

• Nicholas Thompson: Tim Wu explains why he thinks Facebook should be broken up. I will add that buying competitors to put them out of business has been a very business practice for quite a while now. The startup I worked for from the late 1980s (Contex Graphic Systems) was eventually sold off to a competitor (Barco), which shut it down within a year. Other antitrust matters: Steven Overly/Margaret Harding McGill: Google's onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare.

• Anya van Wagtendonk: Two earthquakes shook southern California this week. More could come, but predicting them isn't easy.

• David Wallace-Wells:

  • The uninhabitable Earth: "Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak -- sooner than you think."

  • The man who coined the term 'global warming' on the worst-case scenario for Planet Earth: Interview with Wallace Smith Broecker.

  • 'The models are too conservative': Paleontologist Peter Ward on what past mass extinctions can teach us about climate change today.

• Alex Ward:

  • Biden believes NATO will cease to exist in Trump's second term. That's a bit far-fetched. And Biden thinks this is a reason to vote for him instead of Trump?

  • Violent protests erupt in Israel over police shooting of unarmed Ethiopian teen.

  • Trump calls Afghanistan "the Harvard of terrorists," says he'll leave intel assets there.

  • Why Iran just violated part of the 2015 nuclear deal.

  • The one big benefit to Trump's diplomacy with Kim Jong Un: "Minimizing the chance of war is nothing to scoff at."

• Peter Wehner: The deepening crisis in evangelical Christianity: "Support for Trump comes at a high cost for Christian witness." Wehner has been described as "an outspoken Republican and Christian critic of the Trump presidency." But the article is less interesting for what he fears Trump idolatry is doing to evangelical Christianity that for its description of how deranged Trump's evangelical fans have become. Wehner has a recent book: The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

• Philip Weiss: Biden often praises Israeli racists -- but don't expect Kamala Harris to call him out.

• Brett Wilkins: A brief history of US concentration camps.

• Thomas Wright: Trump couldn't ignore the contradictions of his foreign poicy any longer: "The president moves to straighten out his own foreign policy -- and leaves his hawkish national security adviser on the sidelines."

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Democratic candidates' school integration plans, explained: "Bernie Sanders and Julián Castro have one, Kamala Harris doesn't really."

  • Democrats are learning the wrong lesson from Donald Trump: He ran as a moderate -- and it worked." A moderate, that is, only compared to his fellow Republican candidates, who weren't moderate by any measure. Moreover, since his election, he has regularly surrendered his promises to Republican orthodoxy, except in cases like immigration where he is the lunatic fringe. But Yglesias didn't write this piece to change our perception of Trump. He wrote it to disparage those Democrats who see Trump's extremism as reason to driving the Democratic platform further to the left.

• Gary Younge: Britain is run by a self-serving clique. That's why it's in crisis.

• Matthew Zeitlin:

  • The racial roots of Trump's anti-trade agenda: "The Trump campaign's trade policy can't be disentangled from its rhetoric on race and immigration."

  • There's a huge debate over how the very poorest are doing. There's no debate about whether food stamps help them.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31702 [31671] rated (+31), 260 [264] unrated (-4).

Noisey has evidently decided to drop Robert Christgau's Expert Witness column, the last one running on Friday. Christgau tweeted:

I do this for money as well as love. So just in case this is the last Expert Witness not just at Noisey, which I'm sad to announce it is, but anywhere, it sticks to albums I'm way late on and albums I wanted to be sure to weigh in on. Enjoy. Consume, even.

Obviously, I should make it a priority to round up these latest Consumer Guide reviews and stuff them into the database. Christgau's first Consumer Guide column was published July 10, 1969, so he's ten days short of fifty years. The whole list is here.

Twice before, Michael Tatum responded to lapses in Christgau's review schedule, first by debuting then relaunching his A Downloader's Diary column. As it happens, he had a new column, his 50th, ready to roll last week when he read Christgau's news, and revised his introduction. (Christgau started the parenthetical numbering scheme, but gave it up after reaching 52 in 1975. I also used it for my Recycled Goods columns.)

I managed to check out a few of Tatum's picks this week, but had previously given A- grades to Big Thief, Coathangers, Control Top, Dave, Billie Eilish, Little Simz, and Jamila Woods -- also a B+(***) to Stella Donnelly, B+(**) to Vampire Weekend. I haven't, however, checked any of his Trash picks.

Streamnotes appeared last week, so this starts a new month.

Don't have anything more to add -- at least anything fit to print. Bad day for me.

New records reviewed this week:

• Ilia Belorukov/Gabriel Ferrandini: Disquiet (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Lewis Capaldi: Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent (2019, Capitol): [r]: B+(*)
• Charly Bliss: Young Enough (2019, Barsuk): [r]: A-
• Sylvie Courvoisier/Mark Feldman: Time Gone Out (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(*)
• Caroline Davis: Alula (2017 [2019], New Amsterdam): [r]: B+(*)
• Whit Dickey/Kirk Knuffke: Drone Dream (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Sharman Duran: Questioning Reality (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: Be Known: Ancient/Future/Music (2019, Spiritmuse): [r]: B+(***)
• Damon Locks/Black Monument Ensemble: Where Future Unfolds (2019, International Anthem): [bc]: B+(*)
• Jan Maksimovic/Dimitrij Golovanov: Thousand Seconds of Our Life (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Jenna McLean: Brighter Day (2018 [2019], Moddl): [cd]: B+(*)
• Gabriele Mitelli/Rob Mazurek: Star Splitter (2019, Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Monopiece/Jaap Blonk: Monopiece + Jaap Blonk (2019, Shhpuma): [r]: B
• Angelika Niescier/Christopher Tordini/Gerald Cleaver: New York Trio Feat. Jonathan Finlayson (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Evan Parker/Paul G. Smyth: Calenture and Light Leaks (2015 [2019], Weekertoft): [bc]: B+(**)
• Evan Parker & Kinetics: Chiasm (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: A-
• Caroline Spence: Mint Condition (2019, Rounder): [r]: A-
• Aki Takase: Hokusai: Piano Solo (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(**)
• AJ Tracey: AJ Tracey (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Gianluigi Trovesi/Gianni Coscia: La Misteriosa Musica Della Regina Loana (2019, ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• G. Calvin Weston/The Phoenix Orchestra: Dust and Ash (2019, 577): [r]: B+(*)
• Wschód: Wschód (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Chance the Rapper: 10 Day (2011 [2019], self-released): [r]: A-
• Detail: Day Two (1982 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(**)
• Kang Tae Hwan/Midori Takada: An Eternal Moment (1995 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Sunny Murray/Bob Dickie/Robert Andreano: Homework (1994 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(**)
• Horace Tapscott With the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Great Voice of UGMAA: Why Don't You Listen? Live at LACMA 1998 (1998 [2019], Dark Tree): [cd]: A-
• David Wertman Sun Ensemble: Earthly Delights (1978 [2019], BBE)

Old music:

• Peter Kowald/Kent Kessler/Fred Lonberg-Holm: Flats Fixed (1998 [2014], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ola Onabulé: Point Less (Rugged Ram): August 30
• Mette Rasmussen/Julien Desprez: The Hatch (Dark Tree)
• Horace Tapscott With the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the Great Voice of UGMAA: Why Don't You Listen? Live at LACMA 1998 (Dark Tree)

Weekend Roundup

I paid rather little attention to the Democratic Party presidential debates this week: Laura watched them, I overheard some bits, saw some more (not so fairly selected) on Colbert and Myers, and read a few odd things. Some links here, including a few non-debate ones that highlight various candidates, but no attempt at comprehensive:

• Kate Aronoff: Jay Inslee just dropped the most ambitious climate plan from a presidential candidate. Here's who it targets.

• Zack Beauchamp: 4 winners and 2 losers from the two nights of Democratic debates: For instance, he counts "Bernie Sanders' ideas" as a winner, but Sanders himself as a loser.

• Robert L Borosage: The second Democratic debate proved that Bernie really has transformed the party.

• Ryan Bort and others: A report card for every candidate from the first Democratic debates.

• Laura Bronner and others at FiveThirtyEight: The first Democratic debate in five charts.

• David Brooks: Dems, please don't drive me away. My gut reaction is that there's nothing I feel less interest in than mollifying the vain egos of "Never Trump" conservatives. I'd take his polling reports with a grain of salt ("35 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, 35 percent call themselves moderate and 26 percent call themselves liberal"), and also doubt his self-characterization as "moderate," but I'll quote his stab at articulating the "moderate" viewpoint:

  Finally, Democrats aren't making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump. They are good at pointing to Trump's cruelties, especially toward immigrants. They are good at describing the ways he is homophobic and racist. But the rest of the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.

  A decent society rests on a bed of manners, habits, traditions and institutions. Trump is a disrupter. He rips to shreds the codes of politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity, and so renders society a savage world of dog eat dog. Democrats spend very little time making this case because defending tradition, manners and civility sometimes cuts against the modern progressive temper.

  Actually, the further left you go the more sharply moralistic the critique of Trump becomes, but despite his "savage world of dog eat dog" line Brooks can't hear this because he only recognizes morality as the imposition of conservative order, where inequality is a given. Brooks' "moderates" are closet conservatives. While there are many Democrats (not just moderate- but also liberal-identified) who agree with most of Brooks' verities ("politeness, decency, honesty and fidelity"), Brooks' knee-jerk anti-left instincts prevent him from joining any democratic movement he can't dictate to. In particular, he cannot conceive of the need to lean a bit harder to the left than he'd like in order to get back to the center he so adores. [PS: Just found this, but not yet interested enough to read: Benjamin Wallace-Wells: David Brooks's conversion story.

• Alexander Burns/Jonathan Martin: Liberal Democrats ruled the debates. Will moderates regain their voices? Pieces like this are annoying, and are only likely to become more so, and more strident, as the election approaches. A better question is: will "moderates" find anything constructive to say? Their most succinct declaration so far is Biden's assurance that "nothing would change" under a Biden presidency. I suppose that's more honest than the "hope and change" Obama campaigned on in 2008, let alone Bill ("Man from Hope" Clinton's populist spiel 1992, but at least Clinton and Obama waited until after the election to hand their administrations over to crony capitalists and sell out their partisan base. Left/liberals dominate the debates because: the voters recognize that most Americans face real and immediate problems; the left/liberals have put a lot of thought into how to deal with those problems, and the only credible solutions are coming from the left; having been burned before, the party base is looking not just for hope/change but for commitment. It's going to be hard for "moderates" to convince people to follow without promising to lead them somewhere better.

• John Cassidy: Joe Biden's faltering debate performance raises big doubts about his campaign.

• Alvin Chang: Kamala Harris got a huge number of people curious about Joe Biden's busing record.

• Zak Cheney-Rice: Kamala Harris ends the era of coddling Joe Biden on race.

• Maureen Dowd: Kamala shotguns Joe Sixpack. Favorite line here, and you can guess the context: "In my experience, candidates with advisers who belittle them on background do not win elections." I rarely read Dowd, finding her longer on snark than analysis, but you may enjoy (as I did) her Blowhard on the brink. Again, you can guess the context.

• David Frum: The second debate gives Democrats three reasons to worry: The view of a Trump hater who hasn't really changed any other of his right-wing views: "the weakness of former Vice President Joe Biden"; "the weakness of the next tier of normal Democratic candidates -- especially Harris -- in the face of left-wing pressure"; "the unwillingness and inability of any of the candidates -- except, quietly, Biden -- to defend their party's most important domestic reform since the Lyndon Johnson administration: Obamacare."

• Abby Goodnough/Thomas Kaplan: Democrat vs. Democrat: How health care is dividing the party: "An issue that united the party in 2018 has potential to fracture it in 2020." What united the party was the universally felt need to defend ACA against Republican attempts to degrade and destruct it. Looking forward, I think there are very few Democrats who don't see the main goal as comprehensive health care coverage, as a universal right. The differences arise over how to get there from where we are now. One way to do that would be to expand Medicaid and private insurance subsidies under the ACA, and one thing that would help with the latter would be to offer a non-profit "public option" to ensure that insurance markets are competitive. One way to provide that public option would be to let people buy into America's already-established public health insurance option: Medicare. Many candidates have proposals to allow some people to do that. I expect that a Democratic Congress and President to move quickly on implementing some of those proposals to shore up ACA. It's not the case that proponents of a true government-run single-payer system will cripple ACA to force us to take their preferred route (e.g., Bernie Sanders voted for ACA). But there is one major problem with ACA: the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot force everyone to participate in a scheme that requires some people to buy private insurance. That's a bad ruling, but fixing the Supreme Court is likely to be a harder sell than Medicare-for-All -- especially given that the latter promises better coverage for less cost than any private/public mix of competing insurance plans. You may wonder why some Democrats are against Medicare-for-All. The main reason is they believe the insurance companies are too powerful to fight, but one thing you'll notice is that the people saying that (e.g., Ezekiel Emmanuel) are mostly beneficiaries of insurance industry payola. That preference for ACA over Medicare-for-All is seen as a sign of "moderation" only shows that "moderates" don't have the guts, the stamina, or even the imagination to fight for better solutions. Put Democrats who stand up for their principles and their people in the White House and Congress, and the "moderates" will start compromising in the direction of progress. Until then, why should we listen to anything they say? [PS: For some diagramming, see: Dylan Scott: The 2 big disagreements between 2020 Democratic candidates on Medicare-for-all.]

• Jeet Heer: Elizabeth Warren's ideas dominated the debate more than her stage presence.

• Umair Irfan: Climate change got just 15 minutes out of 4 hours of Democratic debates.

• Caitlin Johnston: Kamala Harris is everything the establishment wants in a politician. Proof of point is no matter how hard the author tries to attack Harris, she only winds up making her look more formidable (which is something we desperately crave, isn't it?).

• Sarah Jones: Elizabeth Warren thinks we need more diplomats.

• Jen Kirby: Foreign policy was a loser in the Democratic debates.

• Michael Kruse: The 2008 class that explains Elizabeth Warren's style.

• Dylan Matthews and other Vox writers: 4 winners and 3 losers from the second night of the Democratic debates.

• Anna North: Kirsten Gillibrand gave her opponents a history lesson on abortion politics at the debate.

• Ilana Novick: Why are Democrats afraid to end private health insurance?

• Andrew Prokop: This wasn't the way Joe Biden wanted the first debate to go.

• Gabriel Resto-Montero: Democrats rally behind Kamala Harris following Donald Trump Jr.'s "birther-style" tweet.

• Frank Rich: Kamala Harris's debate performance should scare Trump.

  There may be no word that Trump fears more than "prosecutor," and no professional expertise that the Democratic base is more eager to see inflicted on him. At a juncture when Trump defends himself against a charge of rape by sliming women who are not his "type," Harris's emergence could not be better timed. She is not his "type," heaven knows, and, not unlike her fellow San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi, she is not a "type" he knows how to deal with at any level, whether on Twitter or a debate stage.

• David Rothkopf: Hey Dems, take it from this ex-centrist: We blew it. Author is one of the guy who made the Clinton Administration a money-making machine for Wall Street, so that's where he's come from.

  As the first round of debates among Democratic candidates for president clearly showed, the intellectual vitality of the Democratic Party right now is coming from progressives. On issue after issue, the vast majority of the candidates embraced views that have been seen as progressive priorities for years -- whether that may have been a pledge to provide healthcare for all or vows to repeal tax cuts benefiting the rich, whether it was prioritizing combating our climate crisis or seeking to combat economic, gender, and racial inequality in America.

  Indeed, as the uneven or faltering performance of its champions showed, it appears that the center is withering, offering only the formulations of the past that many see as having produced much of the inequality and many of the divisions and challenges of today.

  During the debates and indeed in recent years, it has been hard to identify one new "centrist" idea, one new proposal from the center that better deals with economic insecurity, climate, growth, equity, education, health, or inclusion. You won't find them in part because the ideas of the center are so based on compromise, and for most of the past decade it has been clear, there is no longer a functioning, constructive right of center group with which to compromise.

• Aaron Rupar: The Democratic debates helped demonstrate the dubiousness of online polls: "Gabbard and Yang were the big winners -- on Drudge, at least."

• Dylan Scott: Kamala Harris's raised hand reveals the fraught politics of Medicare-for-all. This refers to one of the more weaselly moments in the two debates, where the moderators asked for a show of hands of those who would "abolish private health insurance." The only candidates who raised their hands were Bill de Blasio, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. The framing was designed to split the ranks of Democrats who believe health care should be a universal right, but have different ideas about how to get that from where we are now: creating a public option under Obamacare would help, and/or allowing individuals or various groups to buy into Medicare, are approaches that have broad support. Moreover, nearly everyone who supports those schemes (and for that matter who opposes them) believes that a public insurance program would ultimately drive for-profit private insurance companies out of the arena, even if they were never explicitly prohibited. But the other thing that's confusing about the question is that many (if not most) of the current users of Medicare have private supplemental insurance policies, which pick up most of the co-payments and shortages that current Medicare sticks you with. Sanders' plan would fill in those holes, truly eliminating the need for supplemental insurance, but to most people the words "Medicare for all" leaves open a role for some kind of private supplemental insurance.

• Danny Sjursen:

  • The Tulsi effect: forcing war onto the Democratic agenda. Misleading to say "she is the only candidate who has made ending the wars a centerpiece of her campaign," as several others are leaning more or less strongly in that direction, but her scrap with Tim Ryan is worth recounting. I don't give her military background anything like the special weight she claims. I'd rather people not have to learn lessons the hard way, but it says something when they do.

  • The Democratic Party can't escape its own militarism: Mostly on Beto O'Rourke, who seems to be hitting this theme hard. Sjursen, like Andrew Bacevich, is an ex-military anti-war conservative, which gives him some peculiar opinions (like favoring bringing back the draft) and no sympathy whatsoever for liberal Democrats. I think at least part of the reason so many of the latter feel so warm and cozy with veterans is that they're desperately trying to bring back a social ethic of public service and common good, and they think that the most undeniable example of that is the people who join the military. I doubt that's a general rule, but there are people who fit that bill, and Democrats have been eager to run them for office.

• David Smith: No country for old white men: Kamala Harris heralds changing of the guard. Cute title, but unfair to group Biden and Sanders in the photo. Harris attacked the former, but held her hand up with Sanders on the public health care insurance question. I rarely get bent out of shape when people generalize about "old white men" (or "straight male Caucasian") but here it ignores the fact that Biden and Sanders have virtually nothing else in common, and that Sanders has had to work very hard and overcome a lot of adversity to earn a spot on that stage (wasn't Biden first inept run for president in 1988?). Even today he's more likely to be attacked for who he is than anyone else in the candidate roster (not that anyone makes a point of his being Jewish). The only reason he didn't make Smith's "standouts" list -- other than prejudice -- is that he's been outstanding for so long that reporters are starting to take him for granted.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • A quiet Joe Biden debate moment that deserved more attention: "He cited a bad deal with Mitch McConnell as a legislative success story." This was the 2012 "fiscal cliff" resolution where the Democrats, with Biden playing a major role, gave in to making most of the 2001 Bush tax cuts permanent while cutting spending through a "sequester" and extending unemployment benefits. Michael Bennet, "one of only two Senate Democrats to actually vote no on the deal," described it as "a complete victory for the Tea Party." [PS: I tried looking up the vote on this, and found 3 D's opposed: Bennett, Carper, and Harkin. Surprised that Sanders voted yea, after initially filibustering -- his long speech was published in book form as The Speech. Five R's voted against, including Tea Party favorites Mike Lee and Rand Paul, not disproving Bennet's characterization so much as reminding you that even in victory the Tea Party was insatiable.] For more on this: Ryan Grim: Joe Biden says he can work with the Senate. The last time he tried, Mitch McConnell picked his pockets badly. By the way, Grim also wrote: Joe Biden worked to undermine the Affordable Care Act's coverage of contraception.

  • Elizabeth Warren proved she's ready for the big show.

• Li Zhou: 14 political experts on why the first Democratic debates were history-making.

You might also find these links useful:

• Vox's giude to the 2020 presidential candidates.
• Vox's guide to where 2020 Democrats stand on policy.

One of my right-wing Facebook friends posted a meme from Fox News with a picture of Bill de Blasio and a quote: "There's plenty of money in this world. There's plenty of money in this country, it's just in the wrong hands. We Democrats have to fix that." Only thing my friend ever posted that I agreed with, and this time completely. The comments validated my suspicion that the poster expected readers to react with horror. I was tempted to comment, or to just give it a big love emoji, but lost the opportunity.

Beyond the candidates and debates, some scattered links this week:

• Josh Barro: Democrats obsess over health insurers when they should fight doctors and hospitals. Sure, if it was just about costs, and if you could tackle the problem on all fronts at once. I often worry that people think that health care will be fixed as soon as single-payer is implemented, but that's really just the first step -- the low-lying fruit, expendable because insurance companies are parasitical obstacles to health care. On the other hand, lots of countries adopted single-payer insurance while leaving doctors and hospitals to operate as private businesses, and all of those countries achieved significant cost savings (at least relative to previous cost trends). E.g., Switzerland had the second most expensive health care system in the world (12% of GDP, vs. 14% for the US at the time) when they implemented single-payer. A decade later they still had the second most expensive system, but it had held at 12%, while the US system expanded to gobble up close to 20% of GDP.

• Andy Beckett: The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism.

• Maysam Behravesh: 'Alarm bells': Saudi Arabia's nuclear ambitions cast shadow over the region.

• Charles M Blow: Is Trump a rapist?

• Miranda Bryant: Alabama: pregnant woman shot in stomach charged in fetus's death. Related: Katha Pollitt: Marshae Jones is proof pro-lifers don't care about life. Greg Magarian commented on Facebook:

  Alabama (1) imposes excessive criminal liability on (2) an African-American woman for (3) the death of her fetus from (4) shooting by a "law-abiding gun owner" whom the state isn't charging due to (5) its stand-your-ground law. Congratulations, Alabama -- you've hit right-wing lunatic bingo.

• Lee Camp: Trump's military drops a bomb every 12 minutes, and no one is talking about it.

• Jonathan Chait: Trump thinks Putin's attack on 'western-style liberalism' was about California.

  Trump's riff encapsulates the comic and sinister aspects of his political rise. As demographic change has made the U.S. population more progressive, Republicans have embraced more authoritarian methods to preserve their minority rule. . . . But Trump, rather than being grateful for their efforts to create a rationale for his authoritarianism, is completely ignorant of them. His contempt for democratic norms is sub-ideological, a pure product of his narcissistic fear of disobedience and innate belief in natural hierarchy. He hates democracy deep in his soul, but does not understand why.

• Sahil Chinoy: What happened to America's political center of gravity?

• Stephen F Cohen: Will US elites give détente with Russia a chance? No other piece I've seen on this meeting got behind the dumb/vile things Trump said to Putin about election hijinkss and fake news, and Putin's comments about "Western liberalism." E.g., Fred Kaplan: Trump's dictator envy isn't funny anymore.

• Chas Danner:

  • Everything we know about Trump's DMZ meeting with Kim Jong-un: Late-breaking news, so I'm not clear on this, but if Trump's finally found a way to offer at least some sanctions relief without requiring total North Korean capitulation, this is good news. Some more links:

    • Michael Crowley/David E Sanger: This North Korea nuclear deal would halt new weapons but initially keep arsenal intact.

    • Cristina Cabrera: Trump took Fox News Tucker Carlson, not John Bolton, to North Korea. "Meanwhile, Bolton was shipped off to Mongolia over the weekend." Cabrera also wrote this unrelated nugget: Ex-Michigan Governor tied to Flint water scandal named Harvard Fellow. That's Rick Snyder. The announcement read: "We are excited that he will be joining the Taubman Center and confident that he will bring tremendous value to us and our students."

    • Peter Wade: Tucker Carlson on North Korea: 'To lead a country, it means killing people': Dude's trying to make excuses for Kim Jong-un, or maybe for Donald Trump, or maybe for several others in the neo-fascist strongmen mutual admiration society, but there are countries where political leaders don't kill people, even with legal "due process."

    • Uri Friedman: The normalization of meeting Kim Jong Un.

    • Robin Wright: Trump's curious rendezvous with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ.

  • Trump's big tariff threat against China is officially a flop.

  Laura Tillem took exception to Elizabeth Warren's tweet on Trump's DMZ meeting. Warren wrote: "Our President shouldn't be squandering American influence on photo ops and exchanging love letters with a ruthless dictator. Instead, we should be dealing with North Korea through principled diplomacy that promotes US security, defends our allies, and upholds human rights." I'm not so bothered here, because in the end she does call for principled diplomacy, and I believe that she could do that if given the chance. I'm a bit bothered by the clichéd "US security/allies/human rights" litany, but I think she's smart enough to realize that no human right is as important as avoiding nuclear war, and the only real way to do that is to reduce conflict and normalize relations (something that the US has been loathe to do for nearly 70 years). The first line is more troubling, as it appears to prejudice the diplomacy against success (something baked into all previous American negotiation efforts). In particular, there is nothing diplomatic about referring to Kim as a "ruthless dictator." The rest is pretty ridiculous: Trump isn't squandering anything; his schmoozing is a limitless resource, and it's not as if there's anything better he can do with his time. This is simply his way of doing diplomacy, and while it's not very constructive or effective, there's no reason to think that turning it over to underlings like Mike Pompeo is going to work any better. Trump can plausibly claim to have made more progress at reducing North Korea's nuclear threat posture than any of his predecessors, precisely because he stopped treating Kim with personal contempt and let himself be seen jerking him off in public. It hasn't been pretty, but it's a good deed -- practically the only one Trump can claim.

• Emma Green: Imagining post-Trump nationalism: "The small conservative magazine First Things aims to reclaim what has become a dirty word in the Trump era." Not clear what that word is -- the first one in quotes is "bigotry," which doesn't quite seem right, although one could argue that the point of First Things is to defend the God-given right of Christian conservatives to attack those they see as unfit and unworthy -- a practice we often describe as bigotry. But then not much comes clear when conservative intellectuals try to ruminate on their conceits and prejudices.

• Mark Hannah/Stephen Wertheim: Here's one way Democrats can defeat Trump: be radically anti-war.

• Jemele Hill: Megan Rapinoe is on to him, and Trump can't stand it: "In his rambling screed against the soccer star, the president revealed a lot about his worldview."

• Umair Irfan: 113 degrees in France: why Europe is so vulnerable to extreme heat.

• Carolyn Kormann: How rogue Republicans killed Oregon's climate-change bill. Related: Zoë Carpenter: Behind Oregon's GOP walkout is a sordid story of corporate cash.

• Scott Lemieux: 5 takeaways from the Supreme Court's just-ended term: "Liberals should brace themselves for the next one."

• George Monbiot: Shell is not a green saviour. It's a planetary death machine.

• Gabriel Resto-Montero: Federal judge blocks new stretch of the US-Mexico border wall.

• Adam Serwer:

  • Roberts's rules of misrepresentation: "The chief justice has enshrined bad-faith argumentation as the legal strategy most likely to succeed at the Supreme Court."

  • The children America throws away. This starts with a story of a student whose ticket to Harvard was rescdinded after discovering he had published racial slurs. Right-wing pundits are outraged. This gets into a discussion of why we're so unforgiving, although one could just as well write about why power is wielded so capriciously. This article led me to Alex Pareene: Teenage pricks: Trumpism's brand of boy power, which in turn brought me to Tom Carson: Empire's children: What's behind the American cult of eternal adolescence.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The youngest American adults are the least nationalistic.

Finally, some book reviews/notes:

• Gary J Bass: Democracy in crisis: Review of Larry Diamond: Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. Russia = bad. China = bad. America is a little too innocent for its own good. He even uses Clinton's "indispensable nation" quote.

• David A Bell: Lost Bearings: "Adam Gopnik and the search for a 21st-century liberalism."

• Eric Foner: Alan Brinkley's visions of liberalism.

• Randall Kennedy: What, exactly, do we mean by 'democracy' anyway?: Review of Astra Taylor: Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone.

Miscellaneous Notes

One of my right-wing Facebook friends posted an image from Fox News with a picture of Bill de Blasio and a quote: "There's plenty of money in this world. There's plenty of money in this country, it's just in the wrong hands. We Democrats have to fix that." Nothing more, as if that's self-evidently absurd or insane. But I agree with de Blasio, completely.

Greg Magarian, on Facebook, along with this link:

Alabama (1) imposes excessive criminal liability on (2) an African-American woman for (3) the death of her fetus from (4) shooting by a "law-abiding gun owner" whom the state isn't charging due to (5) its stand-your-ground law. Congratulations, Alabama -- you've hit right-wing lunatic bingo.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive.

Music: current count 31677 [31641] rated (+36), 264 [256] unrated (+8).

Spent most of the week exploring the Corbett vs. Dempsey catalogue, newly available on Bandcamp. I've been wanting to do that for a while now -- even wrote them an unanswered letter after Amarcord Nino Rota and others placed strong in last year's Jazz Critics Poll. I even bought a couple of John Corbett's recent books (although not yet Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music, which looks like it parallels my own 1970s experience -- except that he covers a lot of jazz I only got to 20-30 years later). Corbett previously compiled the Unheard Music Series that Atavistic ran in the early 2000s, which brought 50-60 avant-jazz albums out from deep obscurity. Atavistic started in the 1990s as an avant-rock label (big names there were Swans and Lydia Lunch) before they picked up the Vandermark 5, which pulled them more into jazz. Not sure what happened to them, but most of their records are on Napster, so I complemented my CvD dive with a few Unheard titles (Tom Prehn, with one title on each and nothing else anywhere, got me going that way).

The result is a week which is very slanted toward avant-jazz, and mostly old music at that. I went with the CD release dates to decide which CvD records qualified as recent (2018 or later releases, with 2008 the dividing line between new and old music). I went ahead and included records I got to on Monday after my initial freeze Sunday night, figuring it's a short (4-week) month, and it would be nice to keep all this avant-jazz together. That added one more A- record, by Rodrigo Amado. I noted that Amado has another new record out, a duo on Astral Spirits. Their records are on Bandcamp, and I've reviewed a fair number of them there, but recently they've cut them back to 2 cuts each, so I usually don't bother with them, as they're not really reviewable as such. I made an exception here, hedging a bit based on 2/5 cuts. I decided to mark records like that "**?" in my annual list. When/if I get the chance to listen further, I'll revise.

New records reviewed this week:

• Rodrigo Amado/Gonçalo Almeida/Onno Govaert [The Attic]: Summer Bummer (2018 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
• Rodrigo Amado/Chris Corsano: No Place to Fall (2014 [2019], Astral Spirits): [bc]: B+(**)
• Albert Beger Quartet: The Gate (2017 [2019], NoBusiness): [cdr]: B+(***)
• Hamid Drake/Joe McPhee: Keep Going (2018, Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Rosana Eckert: Sailing Home (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B
• Mats Gustafsson/Jason Adasiewicz: Timeless (2017 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)
• Dom Minasi/Juampy Juarez: Freeland (2018, Cirko): [r]: B+(*)
• Thurston Moore/Frank Rosaly: Marshmallow Moon Decorum (2012 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)
• Matt Olson: 789 Miles (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Marlene Rosenberg: MLK Convergence (2016 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(***)
• Ken Vandermark/Mats Gustafsson: Verses (2013 [2019], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Amarcord Nino Rota (1981 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Steve Lacy: Stamps (1977-78 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2CD): [bc]: B+(***)
• Joe McPhee/Mats Gustafsson: Brace for Impact (2007 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Fred Anderson Quartet: Dark Day + Live in Verona (1979 [2001], Atavistic Unheard Music Series, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Fred Anderson Quartet: The Milwaukee Tapes Vol. 1 (1980 [2000], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Beresford/Tristan Honsinger/David Toop/Toshinori Kondo: Double Indemnity/Imitation of Life (1980-81 [2001], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(*)
• The Peter Brötzmann Trio: For Adolphe Sax (1967 [2002], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(*)
• The Peter Brötzmann Sextet & Quartet: Nipples (1969 [2000], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(***)
• The Peter Brötzmann Sextet/Quartet: More Nipples (1969 [2003], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(***)
• Günter Christmann/Torsten Müller/LaDonna Smith/Davey Williams: White Earth Streak (1983 [2002], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B
• Guillermo Gregorio: Otra Musica: Tape Music, Fluxus & Free Improvisation in Buenos Aires 1963-70 (1963-70 [2000], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B
• Mats Gustafsson: Torturing the Saxophone (2008-13 [2014], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)
• Staffan Harde: Staffan Harde (1968-71 [2015], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(**)
• Steve Lacy/Steve Potts Featuring the Voice of Irène Aebi: Tips (1979 [2015], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B-
• Jimmy Lyons: Push Pull (1978 [2016], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Joe McPhee Quintet/Ernie Bostic Quartet: Live at Vassar 1970 (1970 [2011], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)
• Joe McPhee: The Willisau Concert (1975 [2017], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Joe McPhee: Variations on a Blue Line/'Round Midnight (1977 [2012], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(**)
• Joe McPhee: Glasses (1977 [2012], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Joe McPhee: Alone Together: The Solo Ensemble Recordings 1974 & 1979 (1974-79 [2015], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Joe McPhee & André Jaume: Nuclear Family (1979 [2016], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Louis Moholo/Larry Stabbins/Keith Tippett: Tern (1982 [2003], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: A-
• Pipeline: Pipeline (2000 [2013], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Tom Prehn Quartet: Axiom (1963-66 [2015], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Tom Prehn Quartet: Prehn Kvartet (1967 [2001], Atavistic Unheard Music Series): [r]: B+(***)
• Phillip Wilson: Esoteric (1977-78 [2016], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Gretje Angell: In Any Key (Grevlinto): July 25
• Blind Lemon Jazz: After Hours: New Pages in the American Songbook (Ofeh): July 1
• Mark Doyle: Watching the Detectives: Guitar Noir III (Free Will)
• Pablo Embon: Reminiscent Moods (self-released): July 8
• Bill Evans: Smile With Your Heart: The Best of Bill Evans on Resonance (Resonance)
• Lafayette Gilchrist: Dark Matter (self-released): July 19
• Jazz Piano Panorama: The Best of Piano Jazz on Resonance ([2019], Resonance)
• Wes Montgomery: Wes's Best: The Best of Wes Montgomery on Resonance (Resonance)
• Sing a Song of Jazz: The Best of Vocal Jazz on Resonance (Resonance)
• Zhenya Strigalev/Federico Dannemann: The Change (Rainy Days)
• Rebekah Victoria: Songs of the Decades (Patois)

Weekend Roundup

The week's biggest, and most ominous, story was the Trump administration's decision to launch a "limited" missile attack on Iran, then the reversal of those orders minutes before execution. Here are some links:

• Michael D Shear with others:

  • Strikes on Iran approved by Trump, then abruptly pulled back.

  • Trump stopped strike on Iran because it was 'not proportionate'.

• Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman/Thomas Gibbons-Neff: Urged to launch an attack, Trump listened to the skeptics who said it would be a costly mistake: E.g., Tucker Carlson, who pointed out that "the same people who lured us into the Iraq quagmire 16 years ago are demanding a new war, this one with Iran."

• Zack Beauchamp: John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are the hawks behind Trump's Iran policy.

• Peter Beinart: Bolton keeps trying to goad Iran into war.

• Barbara Boland: Media, war boosters slam Trump for 'chicken' response to Iran: "The hawks are in their element today, screeching for air strikes and promising cake walks."

• Max Boot: In Iran crisis, our worst fears about Trump are realized.

• Marjorie Cohn: Iran had the legal right to shoot down US spy drone.

• David Ignatius: Iran must escape the American chokehold before it becomes fatal: Not someone I look to for sane opinions, but this offers a sense of how Trump's administration has cornered Iran, leaving their leaders with few (if any) good options, and thereby ratcheting up pressure for greater violence. I didn't say "war" there because that implies that war is a future threat. Ignatius makes clear that the US has already started war with Iran, but for now is playing a "long game" by using ever-tightening sanctions to weaken and finally strangle Iran's leadership.

• Jen Kirby: US-Iran standoff: a timeline: Start with Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal on May 8, 2018, and Pompeo's "12 demands for a new agreement for Iran" (May 21, 2018), and the imposition of a new round of sanctions, aimed at applying "maximum pressure" to cripple Iran's economy.

• Taly Krupkin:

  • Iranian officials issue warnings to the US as Trump announces new sanctions.

  • Iranian officials issue warnings to the US as Trump announces new sanctions.

• Jim Lobe: Trump has a $259 million reason to bomb Iran: An accounting of campaign donations from known Iran hawks.

• Aaron David Miller/Richard Sokolsky: Why war with Iran is bad for Trump -- and America.

• Trita Parsi: America's confrontation with Iran goes deeper than Trump.

• Elham Pourtaher: For Iranians, the war has already begun: "In Iran, US sanctions are producing a level of suffering comparable to that of wartime."

• Jason Rezaian: Iran is outmatched in its latest game of rhetorical chicken. But it might be too late.

• Greg Sargent: Trump's Iran reversal exposes one of his most dangerous lies.

• Matt Taibbi: Next contestant, Iran: Meet America's permanent war formula.

• Michael G Vickers: To avoid a wider war, Iran must be deterred with limited US military strikes: Argues that Trump should be ordering more air strikes, citing Reagan in the late-1980s as an example of forceful deterrence (e.g., shooting down civilian Iranian airliners).

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

  • Trump called off a military strike against Iran. The US targeted its computer systems instead. Contrast this with Iranian cyberattacks against the US are on the rise. Both sides at least given some consideration to consequences when it comes to shooting off missiles. Iran, for example, stressed than when they shot down a US drone, they allowed a manned aircraft accompanying it to pass safely. But neither side seems to worry about cyberwar turning into full-scale war. That strikes me as reckless ignorance: the fact is we know very little about the risks and consequences of attacking and terrorizing computer networks. It also seems pretty obvious that when the US attacks Iran, Russia, China, and others, the response will be counterattacks against civilian computers. As no one has more potential targets for cyberattacks, cyberwarfare puts Americans at far greater risk than anyone else. Given this, you would think that it would be in the interest of most Americans to negotiate protocols against cyberwarfare, but the war planners can't think that far ahead. They'd rather just press what they see as carefree advantages, regardless of future blowback.

  • After cancelling a retaliatory strike on Iran, Trump warns: "If they do something else, it'll be double".

• Andrew Ward:

  • Why Iran is fighting back against Trump's maximum pressure campaign: Interview with Afshon Ostovar.

  • Iran shoots down US military drone, increasing risk of war: Update of the previously unreported story: "US flies military drones over Iran, increasing risk of war."

  • 9 questions about the US-Iran standoff you were too embarrassed to ask: The questions aren't that unreasonable, although the answers could be sharper. Ward is only partly right that the run-up to war against Iran is different from Iraq. With Iraq, Bush led the propaganda campaign from the top, with his entire administration in lockstep, and they had very ambitious goals of invading, seizing power, and reconstructing Iraq under US control. Under Trump, the pro-war faction is smaller and, of necessity, more furtive and disingenuous. They haven't articulated clear goals (least of all a plan to invade and seize power -- Iran is, after all, a much more daunting target than Iraq and Afghanistan, and neither of those adventures are remembered as successes). Their more limited goal has been to sow discord and cultivate enmity, applying pressure to increase tension and provoke reaction in the hope that incidents like we've seen this past week will convince Trump to escalate hostilities.

  • Trump plans to nominate Mark Esper, a former combat veteran and lobbyist, as Pentagon boss: "He was a former classmate of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo [at West Point]." And, more recently, a lobbyist for Raytheon, and continues as an advocate of high-tech weapons systems aimed at China and Russia.

• Brett Wilkins: The exceptionally American historical amnesia behind Pompeo's claim of '40 years of unprovoked Iranian aggression'.

• Robin Wright: What will follow Trump's cancelled strike on Iran?

• Ardeshir Zahedi/Ali Vaez: The US should strive for a stable Iran. Instead, it is suffocating it.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem: Benjamin Netanyahu just unveiled Israel's newest town: "Trump Heights".

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

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: Congress has set the record for longest stretch without a minimum wage increase.

• Igor Derysh: Joe Biden to rich donors: "Nothing would fundamentally change" if he's elected.

• Glynnis Fawkes: Nineteenth-century novels, with better birth control.

• Tara Golshan:

  • Bernie Sanders's free college proposal just got a whole lot bigger: "Sanders wants to cancel all student loan debt."

  • Are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders the same? The debate, explained. Not all that satisfactorily, but the two candidates offer a lesson in how distinct political traditions can converge on similar answers given our current set of political and economic problems. Early in the 20th century, people who thought that the system had to be changed could be divided up as progressives and socialists. (The populist party pre-dates this split, and had elements that went both ways, but isn't a very useful distinction these days. Later liberals liked to malign populists as bigots, which is why the term is sometimes applied to bigots like Trump today, who lack any affinity to populism.) With her focus on expanding the middle class and her near-obsession with policy reforms, Warren fits pretty clearly into the progressive tradition. Sanders, on the other hand, identifies with the working class, and still likes the idea of revolution (always qualified as "political" -- i.e., non-violent). Still, the practical effect of either winning is likely to be very similar, both because they agree on the key problems (much more equality, an end to war), and because their scope will be limited by more conservative Democrats in Congress. I should probably add that within this household, Warren is deemed less trustworthy on war and the military -- she did, after all, vote for Trump's military spending increase -- which is something that presidents have a lot of leeway to act directly on. Golshan doesn't see that much of a gulf there but, well, this is something we're pretty sensitive to.

• Umair Irfan:

  • Elizabeth Warren thinks corruption is why the US hasn't acted on climate change.

  • Trump's EPA just replaced Obama's signature climate policy with a much weaker rule: Obama's "Clean Power Plan" attempted to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. New one is called "Affordable Clean Energy Plan." It's more affordable to power plant owners, by letting them burn dirtier fuel and release more carbon into the atmosphere.

• Rebecca Jennings: Taylor Swift's "You Need to Calm Down" wants to be a queer anthem. It also wants to sell you something. You might find the video link inspiring, or at least amusing. I noted the "Get a Brain Moran" sign -- a thought I've had before, although to be fair the Jr. Senator from KS has more on top than most of his caucus (e.g., just voted against arms sales to Saudi Arabia).

• Sarah Jones: E. Jean Carroll: "Trump attacked me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman." He's just one of many featured in Carroll's My list of hideous men. Related: Anna North: E. Jean Carroll isn't alone. That matters. Also: Laura McGann: Donald Trump is trying to gaslight us on E. Jean Carroll's account of rape.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Another SCOTUS precedent falls. Could Roe v Wade be next?

  • Trump is helping Democrats mobilize against him.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi dies after collapsing in courtroom.

  • Patrick Shanahan withdraws from consideration as Trump's secretary of defense: For reasons more bizarre than the obvious reason for rejecting Shanahan: his career as a Boeing shill. Next in line is Mark Esper, comparably corrupt, his allegiance to team Raytheon.

• Sam Knight: The empty promise of Boris Johnson: A portrait: "The man expected to be Britain's next Prime Minister makes people in power, including himself, appear ridiculous, but that doesn't mean he'd dream of handing power to anybody else." Hard to believe that whoever wrote that line wasn't also thinking of Trump, who may not be as sui generis as he'd like to think. Article mentions that Johnson is one of ten candidates in the race for Conservative Party leader. That field has been reduced to two now: Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, with Johnson still heavily favored. [PS: Or maybe not: Rebecca Mead: Will Boris Johnson's "late-night altercation" sink his bid to become Prime Minister?.

• Ari Kohen: The GOP doesn't actually care if you call them 'concentration camps': "This bad faith criticism isn't based on a great deal of care for the feelings of Jews or a deep understanding of the Holocaust." Related:

  • Caitlin Dickerson: 'There is a stench': no soap and overcrowding in detention centers for migrant children.

  • Isaac Chotiner: Inside a Texas building where the government is holding immigrant children

  • Masha Gessen: The unimaginable reality of American concentration camps.

  • Anna Lind-Guzik: I'm a Jewish historian. Yes, we should call border detention centers "concentration camps."

  • EJ Montini: Joe Arpaio ran a self-proclaimed 'concentration camp' for years. Where was GOP outrage?

  • Andrea Pitzer: 'Some suburb of Hell': America's new concentration camp system.

  • Peter Beinart: AOC's generation doesn't presume America's innocence, where he notes that "for the first time in decades, the left is mounting a serious challenge to American exceptionalism." He admits that the 1960s new left did that too, even citing Noam Chomsky's 1969 book American Power and the New Mandarins, but he doesn't seem to have registered that Chomsky has written more than 100 books since then. [PS: for his latest, see Noam Chomsky: The real election meddling isn't coming from Russia.] While the Vietnam War did much to make Americans aware that their government habitually lied about its good intentions and covered up its misdeeds, even then one could not avoid awareness that the government had systematically oppressed Native Americans and African-Americans ever since the first Europeans arrived, or that the US had waged brutal wars of conquest against Mexico and the Philippines. Indeed, the historiography on all of these issues has grown steadily since the 1960s. Beinart's assertion only makes sense if, like him, you assume that the leading lights of "the left" in recent decades were the "liberal interventionists" of the Clinton and Obama administrations: people like Madeline Albright, Samantha Power, and Beinart himself (temporarily, at least, as when he wrote his first book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror). Between Vietnam and the War on Terror, many Americans worked hard to forget their "barbaric" past (as Beinart quotes George McGovern putting it), which is what allowed the Clintons and Obama to try to reclaim the lost moral high ground. That those claims increasingly ring hollow is not just because the left has resurfaced as a force that can be talked about. It's also because the right, especially since Cheney started bragging about "taking the gloves off," has become perversely proud of American atrocities.

• Eric Levitz: 10 takeaways from the Times' interview with 21 Democratic candidates: My takeaway from the article is "Elizabeth Warren is definitely to the right of Sanders on foreign policy."

• David Lightman/Ben Wieder: Trump states and rural areas grab bigger chunk of transportation grant funds: Something reassuring about this bit of old fashioned pork barrel politics. I don't even mind the increased rural road funding, although the cuts elsewhere probably affect more people.

• PR Lockhart: Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates gives Mitch McConnell a thorough history lesson on reparations. Related: Here's what Ta-Nehisi Coates told Congress about reparations.

• Lili Loofbourow: The genius of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

  Sanders didn't just defend the president from the effects of his own statements; she offered herself as a kind of prosaic presence whose function it was to act like anything Trump did, no matter how shocking, was no big deal. She exemplified the stolid approval Trump wanted for everything from family separations to tax cuts for the rich. As her tenure ends, we can now see how much her reliance on reassuring phrases like "make a determination" -- and unblinkingly calling lies differences of opinion and hush payments not worth discussing -- provided a kind of muted laugh track to the terrible show being forced upon America. Rather than laugh at unfunny jokes, she loyally normalized despicable conduct.

• David Nakamura/Holly Bailey: 'There's no accountability': Trump, White House aides signal a willingness to act with impunity in drive for reelection.

• Ella Nilsen: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders had 2 very different answers to Trump's official 2020 campaign launch.

• Alex Pareene: Give War a Chance: "In search of the Democratic Party's fighting spirit." Title is a sick joke -- Democrats have given war plenty of chances, and for a long while counted warmaking as one of their "core competencies" (as the MBA's like to put it). Subtitle is closer to the intended mark, but I still don't care for the imagery. (Fittingly, Elizabeth Warren, author of books like A Fighting Chance and This Fight Is Our Fight, is featured in the graphic.) What should be clearer is that Democrats need to find and stick to some principles ("worth fighting for" is a cliché hard to avoid here), instead of always trying to broker compromises with an opposing party that seeks nothing less than abject surrender. Pareene makes Biden out to be the poster boy for gutless, guileless surrender -- a task that Biden himself made easier last week in touting his ability to "work with" rabid racists like James Eastland and Herman Talmadge (see Jeffrey St. Clair for "a taste of the rhetorical stylings of James Eastland"; he also quotes a Biden "love letter" thanking Eastland for his help "to bring my ANTIBUSING legislation to a vote").

• Kelsey Piper: Death by algorithm: the age of killer robots is closer than you think.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • "We r all on the same team": read Sean Hannity's chats with Paul Manafort.

  • Trump's 2020 message: "Depraved" Democrats "want to destroy you": "Trump's polling isn't great. So he's using the one play he knows." No doubt there are people within the right-wing echo chamber who will embrace this message, but I have to believe that this kind of blanket slur campaign, especially pitched at such a hysterical level, won't travel well, and will start to make people question the sanity of the Trump campaign.

  • Joe Biden's controversial comments about segregationists and wealthy donors, explained.

• Frances Robles/Jim Rutenberg: The evangelical, the 'pool boy,' the comedian and Michael Cohen: How Jerry Falwell Jr. fell in love with Donald Trump.

• Aja Romano: Curtis Flowers was tried 6 times for the same crime. The Supreme court just reversed his conviction. Related: Jeffrey Toobin: Clarence Thomas's astonishing opinion on a racist Mississippi prosecutor.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump is trying to rewrite the history of his family separation policy before 2020.

  • Trump postpones ICE's planned deportation raids in 10 big cities.

  • Trump blindsides ICE with mass deportation announcement on eve of reelection rally.

  • Sean Hannity just demonstrated how not to interview President Trump.

  • Trump's interview with George Stephanopoulos, explained: "Donald Trump doesn't normally talk to journalists willing to challenge him. His big ABC interview illustrated why."

  • Trump's historic one-day fundraising haul, explained: "Trump raised nearly $25 million on Tuesday. That's a ton of money -- but it comes with some caveats." His days of "self-funding" are long gone. He may not know much, but it's hard not to credit him with a vision and knack for turning a political campaign into a massive funding resource.

  • Trump's 2020 kickoff made it seem as though he's running against Hillary Clinton: And why not, if she's the only Democrat he can beat?

  • Trump still refuses to admit he was wrog about the Central Park 5: Or anything else, for that matter -- especially if race is involved.

• Timothy Smith: How Republicans stopped worrying about the right to vote: "The GOP launched a four-pronged plan in 2008 to undercut the American tenet of 'one person, one vote.' We're now entering the final phase."

• Tierney Sneed: Will a Trump trade move create an election mess for overseas US voters? That's actually just one aspect of Trump plans to withdraw from the Universal Postal Union.

• William Spriggs: We're less prepared for the next recession than we were for the last: You may recall that the economy entered a steep decline early in the 2008 recession very similar to the one in 1929, but unlike the Great Depression, the free-fall was stopped by "automatic stabilizers" like the unemployment compensation system that saved many families from ruin. Those automatic stabilizers have not been maintained during the post-2008 austerity, and that will let the next collapse hit even harder.

• Matt Stieb: Six takeaways from Hope Hicks's House Judiciary testimony: One I believe is "Hicks said Trump's 'Russia, if you're listening' line was a joke."

• Matt Taibbi: Trump kicks off re-election campaign: Get ready for 'Billionaire Populist II: The Sequel'.

• David Wallace-Wells: Disaster upon disaster: Sample paragraph, relatively close to home (and by no means the most harrowing):

  Last month, in the Midwest, 500 tornadoes swept through the region in just 30 days -- an average of 20 every day. The region is still underwater from historic flooding earlier in this spring, with some places deluged by seven feet of water and others issuing multiple disaster declarations in a single week. The Mississippi River has been flooding for three straight months; in Baton Rouge, the river rose past "flood stage" the first week of the year, according to Weather.com, 'and has been above that threshold ever since." In March, major flooding began in Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska -- and in Nebraska alone, damages are expected to reach $1.3 billion. The whole Midwest, the New York Times wrote, "has been drowning," and farmers are so far behind in their planting -- with only a fraction of corn and soybean crops actually in the ground -- that the whole year's harvest is in peril.

• Li Zhou:

  • Kamala Harris wants to give every unemployed worker $8,000 for job training: Not a bad idea, but a special case stopgap, compared to universal right to free college education (including remedial high school and trade schools) would be a much broader approach, perhaps combined with extending unemployment benefits for full-time students.

  • The recent Republican blowback to trump judicial nominees, explained: Basically, some of Trump's nominees aren't bad enough for them.

Felt like making a rare political tweet today (tortured into fitting their character count limit, depending heavily on the reader's "cultural literacy"):

Another way Trump isn't Hitler: you can't imagine the latter announcing then postponing Kristallnacht two weeks. Real fascists made the trains run on time. Poseurs and wannabes flirt with evil, then make nice, like "good people on both sides." Vile, at least.

Other tweets I felt like saving:

• @nycsouthpaw I wonder at Trump's dismal career. Assault after assault. Fraud piled upon fraud. An endless succession of victims churned up behind him like a ship's wake. Somehow cutting the web of consequence that ensnares and stops most bad men in time like a hull through so much blue water.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31641 [31614] rated (+27), 256 [251] unrated (+5).

Didn't expect to get to much music this week, but the planned project fell through. Responded to that by feeling listless and depressed, so not much of a recovery. Spent a lot of the time I did use on the Moserobie package, the extra plays merely confirming my first pass impressions. Finally started in on Weekend Roundup early Friday afternoon, and finally felt like I was getting something done -- wouldn't call it mindless, but the task posed enough structure to keep me going through the motions. The result was the most personally satisfying Weekend Roundup all year, plus I ticked off enough records to get close to my 30-per-week target.

The Jamila Woods album was recommended by Michael Tatum, who should have a new Downloader's Diary out this week. I gave it a spin when I first heard about it, and probably would have filed it as a mid-B+, but decided to hold off a while. Returned to it mid-week, and 3-4 plays got better and better. Followed up on some Downbeat jazz reviews -- nothing very good there -- and landed on a couple of Bandcamps that looked promising: Fundacja Sluchaj (François Carrier has been very good at sending me records, so I held off on his record there, but eventually couldn't wait), Unseen Rain (Dom Minasi sent me mail about his record there, and I found more), and Corbett vs. Dempsey (Jon Corbett's obscure reissue label, one I've long wanted to be able to cover). All typically offer the chance to listen to full albums, which makes them reviewable. (Many other Bandcamps have dropped down to a sample cut or two, which makes them unusable for reviews -- that's the main reason I miss more Ken Vandermark albums than I hear these days.) More on the CvD next week, and probably for several weeks to come.

Spoke too soon about NoBusiness dropping me, as I got a big package early last week. The Sam Rivers set was the one I had heard about, so I jumped on it first. Would have been a high B+ had I used their Bandcamp, but having the CD and booklet encouraged me to play it a few extra times.

I also looked up what I've been missing from Intakt -- two monthly packages so far, so four releases -- but nothing looked critical right now (with Fred Frith's 3-CD live set the most imposing). They have a Bandcamp as well, but recent releases only have a couple of cuts available. I think the full records are on Napster -- at least the old ones are -- so I'll catch up there, but no rush.

The Team Dresch reissues were all I got from looking at Pitchfork's Best New Music page -- something I rarely check, but Woods and Denzel Curry are also listed there, along with a Don Cherry reissue of an album (Brown Rice) I gave a B+ to long, long ago, and Slowthai's Nothing Great About Britain (a high B+ last week).

New batch of Robert Christgau's XgauSez questions and answers up tonight. Still hope to launch something like that myself.

New records reviewed this week:

• Fabian Almazan Trio: This Land Abounds With Life (2018 [2019], Biophilia): [r]: B+(*)
• Brad Barrett/Joe Morris/Tyshawn Sorey: Cowboy Transfiguration (2018 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(***)
• François Carrier/Alexander Hawkins/John Edwards/Michel Lambert: Nirguna (2017 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj, 2CD): [bc]: B+(***)
• Trish Clowes: Ninety Degrees Gravity (2019, Basho): [r]: B+(**)
• Anat Cohen Tentet: Triple Helix (2019, Anzic): [r]: B+(**)
• Denzel Curry: Zuu (2019, Loma Vista): [r]: B+(**)
• Fennesz: Agora (2019, Touch): [r]: B
• Mark Guiliana: Beat Music! Beat Music! Beat Music! (2019, Motéma): [r]: B
• Per 'Texas' Johansson/Torbjörn Zetterberg/Konrad Agnas: Orakel (2018 [2019], Moserobie): [cd]: A-
• Angelique Kidjo: Celia (2019, Verve): [r]: B+(*)
• La La Lars: La La Lars II (2019, Headspin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Matt Lavelle Quartet: Hope (2019, Unseen Rain): [r]: B+(**)
• Xavier Lecouturier: Carrier (2018 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B
• Greta Matassa: Portrait (2019, Origin): [cd]: B
• Dom Minasi: Remembering Cecil (2019, Unseen Rain): [bc]: B+(***)
• Nobject [Martin Küchen/Rafal Mazur/Vasco Trilla]: X-Rayed (2018 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: B+(**)
• RPM: Just Like Falling (2019, Unseen Rain): [bc]: B+(**)
• Erik Skov: Liminality (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
• Ståhls Trio: Källtorp Sessions: Volume One (2017-18 [2019], Moserobie): [cd]: B+(***)
• Mary Stallings: Songs Were Made to Sing (2019, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(*)
• Jamila Woods: Legacy! Legacy! (2019, Jagjaguwar): [r]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Agustí Fernández With William Parker & Susie Ibarra: One Night at the Joan Miró Foundation: July 16th 1998 (1998 [2019], Fundacja Sluchaj): [bc]: A-
• Beaver Harris-Don Pullen 360° Experience: A Well Kept Secret (1984 [2018], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: B+(***)
• Sam Rivers Trio: Emanation (1971 [2019], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
• Team Dresch: Personal Best (1994 [2019], Jealous Butcher, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Team Dresch: Choices, Chances, Changes: Singles & Comptracks 1994-2000 (1994-2000 [2019], Jealous Butcher): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The Attic: Summer Bummer (NoBusiness)
• Albert Beger Quartet: The Gate (NoBusiness)
• Whit Dickey/Kirk Knuffke: Drone Dream (NoBusiness): cdr
• Kang Tae Hwan/Midori Takada: An Eternal Moment (1995, NoBusiness)
• Jan Maksimovic/Dimitrij Golovanov: Thousand Seconds of Our Life (NoBusiness)
• Jenna McLean: Brighter Day (Moddl)
• Sunny Murray/Bob Dickie/Robert Andreano: Homework (1994, NoBusiness)
• Sam Rivers Trio: Emanation (1971, NoBusiness)

Weekend Roundup

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

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

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

Some scattered links this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Catherine Kim:

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

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

• Jen Kirby:

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

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

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

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

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

• Josh Marshall:

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

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

    • Sohrab Ahmari: Against David French-ism.

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

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

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

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

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

• Dylan Matthews:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Jason Samenow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Matt Taibbi:

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

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

  • Campaign conventional wisdom is dead.

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

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

• Alex Ward:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Matthew Yglesias:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Log

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

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

Music Week

Expanded blog post, June archive (in progress).

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

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

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

Notable music links this week:

• Hank Shteamer: Anthony Braxton's Big Ideas.

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

New records reviewed this week:

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

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

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

Old music:

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

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

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

Mar 2001