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Sunday, October 27, 2019

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

Some scattered links this week:

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

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

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

• Cristina Cabrera:

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

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

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

• Jonathan Chait:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Lisa Khoury: An uprising in Lebanon.

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

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

  • Amy Wilentz: Haiti is in the streets.

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

• Masha Gessen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Fred Kaplan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Ed Kilgore:

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

  • Diversity will continue to be Democratic asset in 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

• Jen Kirby:

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

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

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

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

• Eric Levitz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Nicole Narea:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

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

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

• Peter Wade:

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

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

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

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

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

• Alex Ward:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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