Monday, November 2, 2026

Loose Tabs

I collect these links and notes erratically over several weeks, then once a month or so binge to fill them out into a more or less monthly post. Having released my last one on September 30, I figured the sweet spot for this one would be between Israel's October 27 elections and the "midterms" on November 3. I'm cutting that close, but pre-election coverage is overwhelmingly speculation, even with me avoiding the horserace reporting as much as possible, and such speculation has a very short shelf life.

I've added stuff all day long on Nov. 2, without coming close to hitting all of my usual spots. Better to go ahead and post this than to keep plugging away at it. If I add anything later, I'll mark it with change bars, but most likely I'll move on quickly to the next one, as the "news" should change significantly after the "midterms" election. By the way, I've always hated to say "midterms," as in my understanding of American democracy the election of a new Congress is every bit as important as the election of a president. But Trump has dominated out headspace so thoroughly that his argument that we should act like he's on the ballot is persuasive. He's basically consolidated all of America's problems into his single person. Granted, his trick is negative: he's not the cause of those problems, but he cannot fix anything, and he is the first obstacle anyone hoping to fix any problem will run into.

As I was trying to wrap this up, I jotted down a summary which I will simultaneously send out to Notes on Everyday Life.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." With no strict schedule, I've tended to flush these notes out toward the end of each month. My previous one appeared 33 days ago, on September 30.

By the way, I've been trying to write some more in-depth pieces on major issues (and/or personal peccadillos), using Substack as an email agent. I call this series Notes on Everyday Life. I used to have a pinned list of pieces here, but as they've grown, I've moved them into separate index.

I should at least point out that my Trump's Greatest Hits piece has been reprinted by Counterpunch.

I also have a Notes feed there. While I've done very little with it so far, it occurs to me that I might be able to use it to publish Loose Tabs items and Music Week reviews as I write them, instead of having to wait for a long compilation post.

Table of Contents:

New Stories

Most stories fit into well-established categories, organized below as Major Threads. Some sources I lean on so regularly they have their own Regular Columnists section. I also have an End Matter section for dealing with regular occurrences like books, obituaries, and tweets. Stories that don't fit into any regular category appear under Miscellaneous Stories. However, occasionally a short-term story blows up to where it needs extra attention, in which case I included it here. Finally, there is End Matter, which includes regular notes on books and music, obituaries, and a few tweets that caught my eye.

Examples from last time: The Republican National ("Trumpalooza") Convention; The 25th Anniversary of 9/11.

Looking Back at Israel: 3 years after the "apocalypse," 1 year after the "ceasefire"; the quotes suggesting some ambiguity, but this does raise the question, if at any point the killing rises to the level of genocide, doesn't that apply not just to the peak moment but to the long process that led to the peak, and any aftermath that falls short of restitution? The war to demolish and erase Gaza, which Netanyahu launched in October 2023, is ultimately not all that different from the events Ilan Pappé documented in his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — something I was reminded of recently in reading Eyal Weizman's Ungrounding, which starts uncovering Gaza in 1948. We didn't call it genocide then, because Israel was more circumspect about covering their tracks, but we now know the intent was there, and the numbers were staggering. But does anyone argue that the mistreatment of Jews by Nazis from 1933 through the Kristallnacht of 1937 up to the invasion of Poland in 1939 wasn't part of the Nazi genocide?

I'm not very happy with litigating the word "genocide" as pertains to Israel. The point of the word, and the law, was to prevent anything remotely like that from ever happening, and it that it's failed. I've never like the term "ethnic cleansing," which was originally coined in Serbia as a euphemism for mass murder, but has come to mostly signify using threats of violence to drive people away from their homes, forcibly transferring them. That was explicit policy in some cases in 1948, in others less formal practice, elevated to policy by the refusal of a right to return. In 1967, Israel revived the practice, but trimmed it back after US complaints. Since 2023, many Israeli officials have wanted to revive forced transfer, but Egypt in particular has refused to cooperate. In between there were lesser attempts to force exile. The constant has always been the impulse to, and desire for, genocide. Even after 2023, whatever arguments you can make to diminish the charge against Israel are mostly limits Israel imposed on itself to avoid looking even worse. Who knows what would have happened had the killing been hidden from the public, as the Nazi genocide was.

NAZA: A documentary film made by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, including interviews with Israeli soldiers exhbiting their casual attitudes toward the genocide they were committing.

  • Séamus Malekafzali [09-25]: The backlash to "NAZA" shows how little Israeli citizenship really means: "By threatening the filmmakers, Netanyahu lays bare how fragile the notion of what it means to be Israeli is in the age of its genocide in Gaza."

  • Rachell Corbett [10-03]: NAZA is selling out theaters. Can it influence The Hague? "Whether the film can advance the case for genocide may be more complicated than convincing viewers." It shouldn't take a few interviews to tip the genocide case, as there is plenty evidence of intent from Israel's leaders, and of execution from the rubble. What the film adds is coherent detail of those actually doing the killing on the ground.

    At a sold-out screening at IFC Center, the audience sat silent until the last credit rolled on NAZA, the documentary in which two dozen Israeli military personnel admit to committing war crimes and genocide in Gaza. Throughout, no one dared touch their popcorn; the only sounds were sharp exhales during the most grotesque confessions — the former IDF soldiers and intelligence officers who recounted how bombing Palestinians was "insanely fun," how dogs ate the corpses and snipers gunned down starving Gazans as they ran to food at aid sites. One drew stick figures falling forward on their faces to show how the momentum caused their bodies to land. . . .

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to change Israel's laws in order to revoke Abraham and Szor's citizenship, while a mural went up on an Israeli street with crosshairs next to their faces. . . .

    The film also makes a case for those bigger accusations by focusing on the system that enabled the interviewees to carry out their crimes. "The danger of what Yuval did is that he went after the IDF, not the government, and that hurts Israel more substantially. Governments come and go, but the IDF is what Israel's entire national identity revolves around," says Muhammad Shehada, a Gazan political analyst and friend of Abraham.

  • Sebastian Ben Daniel (John Brown) [10-02]: Why NAZA terrifies Israel's liberal elite: "The film shatters 'respectable' Israelis' illusion of moral superiority: The most prestigious soldiers are the primary culprits of genocide."

  • Abdaljawad Omar [10-08]: Shooting and craving: on NAZA and the mediated obscene: "The documentary film by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor follows the predictable script of the regretful soldier, but the subjects in NAZA express something darker: mourning the loss of power."

  • Omer Bartov [10-09]: How do human beings explain taking part in genocide? NAZA provides a chilling look: "It is easier to blame brutes and sadists for extreme violence. But as we see in the documentary, modern genocides are fueled by people who are uncomfortably recognizable."

  • Davide Abbatescianni [10-11]: 'Citizen Osama' turns life under bombardment into urgent, intimate cinema: "As NAZA draws global attention to the Gaza genocide from the perspective of Israeli génocidaires, a lesser-known Palestinian documentary looks through the camera of a Palestinian journalist trying to document devastation while keeping his family safe."

  • Richard J Silverstein [10-12]: NAZA: Rage against the machine of death.

The Nobel Peace Prize: For 2026, awarded to Navi Pillay, a South African jurist, former judge of the International Criminal Court (2003-08) and high commissioner for human rights at the UN (2008-14).

Brazil: Brazil held its general election: On October 4, in the first round of Brazil's presidential election, President Lula da Silva trailed Flávio Bolsonaro (son of Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump favorite and former president currently in jail for trying to organize a coup against his electoral loss in 2022) 45.16% to 47.03%. Since no candidate got more than 50% of the vote, there was a runoff on October 25, which Lula won. Some articles, before and after:

  • Jean Wyllys [10-09]: Shame and guilt in politics: Brazil, 2026.

  • Robert Kuttner [10-26]: Lula's huge win for the left: "His come-from-behind victory in Brazil's presidential election spoils the storyline of right-wing dictators on the march."

  • Troy Farah [10-28]: Trump admin embraces fleeing Bolsonaro, losing Brazilian presidential candidate: Brazil's President Lula said, "This act of leaving Brazil is shameful."

  • Anthony W Pereira [10-30]: How Lula turned the tables on the right in Brazil and the US.

  • Brian Mier [10-30]: Lula's victory hinders Trump and tech bro dreams. Considering the following, it's hard to understand how this election could have been so close:

    It was an election that saw flagrant interference from the U.S. government in the form of tariffs and sanctions, with President Donald Trump personally meeting with a candidate in the White House. It saw massive intervention from Meta, whose owner was one of Trump's largest campaign donors, and a secret deal for rare earth minerals struck between Vice President J.D. Vance's Rockbridge Network and the Bolsonaro campaign. It was the first election in Brazilian history in which a candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, offered to turn supervision of his transition team over to the U.S. government if elected.

    The U.S. intervention was so obvious that a group of 31 U.S. lawmakers sent a letter to the State Department officially complaining about it, an act further supported by a public declaration denouncing U.S. intervention signed by 39 British members of Parliament.

Katie Zacharia: Not much of a story, but the press couldn't resist, and I might as well collect what I have in one place. Also, note that "half a Scaramucci" was being somewhat generous, as 5/11 is 45.4%.

Israel's Elections: Israel's legislative elections were held on October 27. The Knesset has 120 seats, which many parties compete for, so governments are inevitably coalitions of multiple parties. Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party finished first, with 27 seats (20.52%), −9 from the previous election in 2022. Netanyahu's current coalition fell to 53 seats, 8 short of a majority. Gadi Eisenkot's new Yashar party won 21 seats (16.05%). He would lead an opposition coalition of various "Jewish" parties, which together have 48 seats, also short of a majority. Two parties that mostly represent Arabic citizens of Israel (granted citizenship in 1950 as part of a law that denied refugees their right of return and confiscated their property) won 19 seats (+9), so they hold the balance of power, although no "Jewish" party has shown any willingness to form a coalition with them. Hence, the election is basically a stalemate, unless Eisenkot is willing to form a government with Palestinian support, or negotiate a "unity" government with Likud. Netanyahu's interest is to keep it stalemated, which will allow him to run a caretaker government until new elections, in six months. (In theory, Netanyahu could form a new coalition by adding elements from the opposition, but most are defined largely by their opposition to Netanyahu.) The articles below reflect this evolving situation, and are far from comprehensive.

Major Threads

War on Iran: The war continues to simmer, as neither Netanyahu not Trump wants to admit defeat before their respective elections. Netanyahu at least got his wish. Trump too, as Iran has been working behind the scenes to reinforce its diplomatic efforts. So there's not much to report here, other than gloom-and-doom scenarios that all sides are spinning. I'm skeptical that Trump will try to improve his bargaining position by lashing out after the elections (there are plans to do so, but that doesn't mean they will be followed). Three reasons: Trump doesn't know what he wants in the end; no amount of further bombing is going to get him there; Iran can respond to any escalation by hitting back, especially against the vulnerable Gulf States (whose money has Trump's ear).

  • Trita Parsi:

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [10-05]: Increase in Hormuz oil traffic is papering over a darker reality: "Experts say a closer look reveals increasing prices, exhausting reserves, and an unsustainable security situation because Iran is still attacking." What's going on here isn't very clear to me, but it seems like Iran is allowing some shipping through, which suffices to keep the Americans from escalating, while reserving the chance they could move to close the Strait again in the future. They may be guessing that Israel and the US will make no peace moves until after their elections, at which point this will either settle or blow up. Still, the exact protocols and quantities are unclear.

  • Seymour Hersh [10-08]: What Israel wants from Iran: "Amid secret talks between Washington and Tehran, Israel has new demands on nuclear verification." Paywalled, but one quote I've seen:

    "Israel is 'terrified,'" the Israeli said, because "the Iranians believe that the only way to survive is to lash out." He said the Iranian leadership has learned, like Mohammed Ali, the great American boxer, when to do "rope-a-dope" before lashing out.

    There's plenty of evidence of Israel lashing out, but is there any of Iran? Even if Iran were to lash out, Israel is the one with nuclear deterrence. If that isn't sufficient, maybe they should try some other tactic . . . like peace.

  • Frida Berrigan [10-09]: Where are the Iran war protests? "Despite a wildly unpopular war with Iran, a mass protest movement for peace hasn't materialized — at least in the ways we've been taught to recognize." But we're kind of overwhelmed with things to protest. The "No Kings" marches are pretty massive, and the war is a big part of that. She notes: "I love a good protest march." I don't like them at all, except that it is reassuring to find other people, often complete strangers, share my concerns. But their effect on elected officials is hard to gauge, especially as those in charge grow more stuck in their own thoughts.

  • Troy Farah [10-10]: Trump gets richer while gas prices soar: "The Iran war and energy crisis aren't problems for the president. They're a business model." You may well have figured that out by now. Gas prices are up, but oil company profits are up even more. Trump lobbied oil companies hard for contributions, and they're paying off. Meanwhile, insiders profit from stock bumps based on Iran war rumors, which are orchestrated by the White House. Curiously, the first paragraph here is about something else:

    In mid-September, Chinese scientists announced a breakthrough in extracting hydrogen and fresh water from the ocean with about 15% better energy efficiency than older techniques. Their research, published in Nature Energy on Sept. 15, underscores that China continues to dominate in the renewable energy race, generating so much that the country can't even use it all. As Reuters reported in August, "China turned away enough clean energy to power Mexico for a year in the six months through June as its grids hit their limits." At the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8, Youyuan Huang, executive vice chairman of BTR New Material Group, the world's top maker of battery anode materials, said "China's grid is a very strong and stable one . . . but we've installed too much green energy."

    Meanwhile, Trump wants to return America to coal, because that's where the grift is leading him. That he would start a war just to make money is, well, plain evil.

  • Lulu Garcia-Navarro [10-10]: The Interview: "She's been to Gaza. She met with the Iranians. Now she has a warning." She is Mirjana Spoljaric, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), "an independent and neutral guardian of the Geneva Conventions, a series of international agreements created in the wake of World War II that laid out the rules of war."

    I covered wars for a big part of my career as a journalist, and the world feels more dangerous and volatile than I can ever remember. How do you see things? I see it the same way, because the statistics prove it. We now count twice as many conflicts as 15 years ago. We are at 130 international and noninternational armed conflicts that we classify in our system. That's the highest number since the Second World War. So I think it's time we stop admiring the problem and start acting against this.

  • Julian Barnes, et al. [10-21]: US and Israel draw up plans for renewed strikes on Iran after elections: "Renewed hostilities might not be any more successful than the war's first phase, and President Trump has repeatedly canceled plans for a return to major combat."

  • Jeremy Scahill/Peiman Salehi/Ryan Grim [10-21]: The war Tehran believes is coming: "Iran believes the US and Israel may strike before the midterms. Top security official Gen. Mohsen Rezaei tells Drop Site Iran has new targets in its sights."

  • Mitchell Plitnick [10-23]: How the upcoming US and Israeli elections could lead to the third round of the Iran war: "The upcoming US and Israeli elections will likely lead Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to renew their misguided war on Iran with even greater ferocity than before in an effort to save their political lives." Peace with Iran could be perilous to Trump and especially to Netanyahu, but wrecking the MOU took that threat off the table. More war, on the other hand, entails more risks. Trump has said he won't escalate against Iran until after the election. Netanyahu is far from secure after his, but it's hard to see what his play may be. One is reminded of Bush's decision to postpone the destruction of Fallujah in 2004 to after the election, but while renewed war might have been a bad look, he didn't have to worry about counter-escalation. There is still a lot that Iran can do in response to American bombing, and that, more than wag-the-dog politics, is what limits Trump.

  • Ryan Grim/Iona Craig [10-27]: The UAE is secretly helping Ansarallah fight Saudi Arabia in Yemen: "In an extraordinary move, the UAE has been covertly sharing targeting assistance with the Iranian-aligned Ansarallah in its conflict against Saudi-backed forces inside Yemen." Hard to make much sense of this, including whether they're acting at the behest of Iran and/or Israel, or just continuing to pursue their own vicarious shenanigans. They do note that the UAE is using Israeli spyware.

  • Branko Marcetic [10-31]: The Iran War might soon get catastrophically worse: "It looks increasingly likely Donald Trump may try a reckless escalatory bombing campaign against Iran after the midterms. And it looks increasingly likely it will backfire terribly." I don't doubt that they are gaming out war options, but I really doubt if any of them will make sense, even to someone as cognitively impaired as Trump. (Netanyahu is another story: he has the motive, but not the means, and Iran can easily ignore any lashing out he does on his own.) Meanwhile, there are two (or possibly three) constraints on Trump: the first is his own military, which took their best shot, blew it, and have nothing else unless they want to go nuclear; the second is the Gulf states, which pay Trump a lot of money to protect them, and have a lot to lose if Iran strikes back. Thus far Iran has gone relatively easy on them, figuring them as long-term neighbors, but the harder Trump hits Iran, the more likely Iran is to throw caution to the wind and do them some serious damage. The possible third reason for restraint is the global economic impact. I take this less seriously, not because it isn't real, but because I doubt Trump understands anything more than that more war means more profits for his buddies in the oil industry. I expect that there are people in Trump's circle who understand this somewhat, and who will advise caution. Admittedly, it's hard for Trump to understand that hitting Iran will only make them tougher and more resentful, but he can only hit them if his people give him that option, and I don't see who wants to do that (even Netanyahu, who's already gotten all he needed out of the war).

    The real post-election question is whether Trump and Iran can come up with some formula that allows them both to back down gracefully. Trump has been blocked so far by Netanyahu and by his own stupid ego, but in both cases the reasoning was tied to election cosmetics. Right after the election is probably the best time to take the loss, rather than risk making it worse later.

  • Dave DeCamp [11-02]: Tucker Carlson says Trump is considering a nuclear strike on Iran's Pickaxe Mountain: "Trump has publicly ruled out using nuclear weapons against Iran but continues to threaten bombing Pickaxe Mountain." The rumor promoting this unprecedented escalation is that Iran has started nuclear weapons development deep under the mountain, and, per Carlson, "no conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place." Carlson says Netanyahu is pushing for the strike. The thing I'd be more worried about is that while Israel can do very little damage to Iran using conventional weapons, they could do such a nuclear strike largely on their own, confident that Trump will have to defend them when it all goes sideways.

Israel:The focus here is on Israel's wars, especially against their own people, and on internal Israeli politics (although this time the elections got their own section, as did revisits to 10/7 and the film NAZA). A second section will address Israel's relations with the world, especially the US.

Israel-American-World Relations: This section deals with Israel's relations with the world, especially the US, both at the state level and regarding public opinion.

  • Matt Sledge [09-30]: Israeli settlers killed his constituent. Fetterman is sole Democrats against investigating them. He voted with the Republican majority (51-47) against a resolution to force US probes on kilings of Americans in the West Bank.

  • Michael Arria:

    • [10-06]: The Gaza genocide permanently diminished the power of pro-Israel propaganda: "Since October 7 and the Gaza genocide, U.S. opinions on Israel and Palestine have drastically shifted. The power of Zionist propaganda has been permanently weakened, and the U.S.-Israel relationship is in a more precarious position than ever before."

    • [10-08]: Israel's reputation has fallen apart, but US officials haven't faced accountability: "Three years after October 7, Israel's reputation has fallen apart among the US population, but the architects of the genocide have yet to face accountability." Nor are they likely to, even if the prediction in Omar El Akkad's book title (One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This) proves true. Accountability is not really a thing in today's world. And even if the tide shifts, and responsible people do decide that we need some checks and balances against abuses of power, cleaning up the past is going to prove out of reach.

    • [10-15]: DHS raid on Ilhan Omar's house is 'exactly what a fascist police state does': "The Department of Homeland Security raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar's home is just the latest example of Trump weaponizing the federal government to target his political opponents. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris continues to launder her track record on Gaza."

    • [10-22]: AIPAC has grown so toxic that it has to shift its electoral strategy: "AIPAC will no longer issue endorsements or make direct contributions to candidates. A clear sign that it's grown deeply unpopular with U.S. voters."

    • [10-29]: The war on Iran looms over the midterms: "American voters are headed to the polls this midterm season with deepening frustrations over Trump's war on Iran and its impacts on the U.S. economy."

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [10-07]: NatCon 2026 in Israel: Coming home? "The annual confab, ostensibly launched for American conservatives in 2019, is in Jerusalem this week, largely focused on shoring up US support for the Jewish state."

  • Jeet Heer [10-09]: Does America first really mean Israel first? "Mike Huckabee's aide shows how an extremist agenda dominates Trump's Middle East policy."

  • James North [10-10]: New York Times report on AIPAC hides a central truth about Israel's unpopularity: "Four Times reporters, 53 paragraphs, and no mention of AIPAC's new stealth strategy: hiding Israel and running ads on unrelated issues in primaries."

  • Jordi Graupera [10-22]: A philosopher of war changes his mind: "Michael Walzer wrote Just and Unjust Wars half a century ago. The war in Gaza made him rethink one of its fundamental principles." Too bad it didn't make him rethink all of his fundamental principles, which basically provide a "moral" license for war which will inevitably lead to and cover up abuses, quite simply because war itself is immoral, regardless of any and all real or imagined rationales. I haven't read enough of this to figure out his labrynthine reasoning, but I've always known it was based on a fundamental misconception, which is that war can be justified. As such, he's as much of a "war lover" as any politician. (A book called The War Lovers was largely about Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst, so they come to mind, but feel free to pick your own examples: they are legion.)

  • Blaise Malley [10-26]: Meet the ex-Biden official working hard to rewrite history on Gaza: "Brett McGurk's former colleagues challenge his book's central premise that pressuring Israel would have been counterproductive." McGurk's book is Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages. The title itself testifies to the perverted logic and concerns of the Biden administration. Even if the hostages were of paramount importance, to free them first of all you have to keep them alive, which only a ceasefire could do. Hamas was always clear that their goal was a ceasefire and a hostage swap. Netanyahu rejected both, as he made clear in invoking the "Hannibal directive," whereby Israelis attempted to kill their own people to keep them from being taken hostage.

  • Akela Lacy [10-29]: AIPAC isn't retreating. Here's how it's already shaping the next Congress.

Ukraine, Other Hot Spots, and World Politics: A catch-all, where the focus is away from, but not unaffected by, Trump's wars. Also note the October 25 Serbian parliamentary election.

  • Stephen Crowley [10-07]: Are Europe and Russia slow-walking to World War III? "Dangerous rhetoric has been escalating on both sides for some time now."

  • George Beebe [10-09]: 2027: The Ukraine winter we prayed wouldn't come: "Relentless Russian attacks and energy crisis, matched with depleting resources from abroad, demand that Trump make dramatic changes in approach to war now." While Ukraine may still have some defensive depth on its own, it depends on Europe and America to keep fighting. It's annoying to read pieces like this about what "Team Trump" can/should do, because they have no idea why they want to do anything. Trump himself would just as soon throw Zelensky under the bus, but his European "allies" still have enough pull to keep that from happening. Meanwhile, Putin seems to be in no hurry to end the war, confident that he can keep fighting longer, if not necessarily harder. That life in Ukraine will only become harsher is a given. The thing is, as Beebe knows, some kind of solution should not be hard to fashion here. It's just that no one wants to admit that they've had enough.

  • Anatol Lieven [10-23]: Slouching toward Kaliningrad, NATO dismisses a nuclear threat: "As it encroaches on the western Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea, the alliance continues to underestimate Moscow's red lines."

  • Ashifa Kassam [10-25]: Serbian leader Aleksandr Vucic ousted by student movement in seismic election: "Vucic's 12-year reign looks to have been ended by record turnout of voters in election provoked by student-led protests."

  • Robert L Borosage/Katrina Vanden Heuvel [10-28]: Ukraine: Time to end the war: "For both Russia and Ukraine, the war has taken a staggering toll and poses an ever-greater danger of spreading."

  • Ishaan Tharoor [10-28]: A global anti-right backlash: "After Brazil's election, and ahead of the US midterms, progressives and liberals around the world find cause to celebrate." Right-wingers can seize power, and they can use that power to suppress dissent, but they cannot govern, because to do that they need cooperation across the breadth of society, and to achieve that they need to offer a semblance of economic justice. That's hard to do for rightists, when your entire reason for being is to preserve hierarchies and advance the interests of those at the top. But injustice isn't just theoretical in right-wing rulers: it starts with corruption, as everyone becomes more interested in climbing the hierarchy than on serving their public, and ends in incompetence and malfeasance, as corrupted services "race to the bottom." Tharoor focuses on Brazil and Serbia, while suggesting that all is not well in India (or Trumpland), but you can plug in other examples, such as the loss of the seemingly invincible Orbán in Hungary.

  • Lily Lynch [11-02]: Belgrade diary: Election day in Serbia.

  • Biljana Vankovska [11-02]: Serbia after the student landslide: the black box in Parliament.

Trump's War Department: I set this section up to deal with Trump's threats of war. We're obviously beyond that now, so see the section on Iran for more on that.

  • Nick Turse:

  • Atul Kohli [09-15]: Donald Trump's imperialism of decline is a global menace: US leaders have generally sought to cloak their imperialism with euphemistic rhetoric, but Trump has dropped any pretense about his shameless resource grabs. As the US grows weaker on the world stage, it's also becoming more brazen and more dangerous."

  • Antonio De Loera-Brust [09-30]: Venezuela blowback may have a long fuse. It always does. "The era of gunboat diplomacy in the early 20th century became the revolutions, insurgencies, and dictatorships of the future."

  • Sharon Zhang [10-02]: Trump used Grok to help talk him into illegal invasion of Venezuela: "The president reportedly used the AI chatbot for hours when Elon Musk visited the White House last December."

  • Amanda Marcotte [10-07]: Pete Hegseth's holy war on "weirdos" targets most Americans: "Forget Iran — the defense secretary is focused on forcing his religion on everyone else."

  • Harrison Berger [10-13]: Meet the US generals and admirals advancing Israeli policy: "JINSA and its American 'people' have taken credit for a number of recent legislative efforts, including the controversial NDAA Section 219."

  • Ishaan Tharoor [10-14]: Marco Rubio's wild wild west: "In Greece, the Secretary of State cast the West as a civilization defined by its warriors and conquerors, not by its democracies." That, of course, has always been the problem, but the secret of American influence has usually been that we try to explain how what's good for us is also good for the world. At a time when European empires were carving up fiefdoms for extraction, the US offered Open Doors and a Good Neighbor Policy. We talked up the virtues of liberal democracy, human rights, and free enterprise. Sure, practice rarely lived up to the story, but world politics is only a zero-sum game if you get greedy. Unfortunately, Reagan decided "greed is good," the neocons got drunk on their power fantasies, and Trump reduced foreign policy to nothing but.

  • Andrew Earvolino [10-26]: What Rubio really means when he talks about 'civilizational' renewal: "The Washington establishment is using new words to describe the old forms of interventionism." Or imperialism. Why do westerners always manage to make "civilization" sound like a synomym for racism?

  • Juan Cole [10-28]: The incredible shrinking superpower: "The failing war with Iran marks a dramatic retreat by the US from the Middle East."

  • David Swanson [11-02]: the 10 worst congressional excuses for voting for more military spending: This list is way too cute, partly because it goes about approaching the problem from the wrong end. Let's look first at how this normally operates:

    1. The President, the Defense Secretary, the Generals and Admirals, and all of the MIC (Military-Industrial Complex) intellectuals and lobbyists declare that the military has to be strong to ensure that we can live in peace. That there is no empirical evidence for such an assertion is completely ignored.
    2. They pick a number, which is an increase over last year's number, but not by an unseemly amount.
    3. Any actual wars will be covered by supplemental appropriations, so the Defense budget doesn't actually have to account for the chance that it might be used for something real. And, of course, any future costs of wars, like impact on the VA, are kept off-budget. The budget is just for play-acting.
    4. That budget is then sold to Congress as providing jobs in nearly ever district.
    5. The MIC has lots of lobbyists pushing for the bill, and ordinary citizens who simply want peace have none, so the odds of passage are very high. Everybody who votes for it gets campaign donations, paid for from the largesse of the contracts.

    This has changed under Trump, which explains why he's pushing for a 50% bump instead of the usual 5-10% increases:

    1. It's not just the usual planes-and-ships contractors in the MIC lobbying for a piece of the pie. All of Trump's new buddies in the high tech sectors, including Musk and Bezos in space, plus all of the AI hustlers, lobbying for government handouts, especially when they can sell vaporware and pretend it's going to work someday.
    2. Trump realizes that government budgets are really opportunities for graft: the government spends lavishly on junk, and the pushers kick back money and/or influence. And war is by far the biggest show in this game, both due to the amount of money available, and to the lack of criteria whereby the purchases can be evaluated.
    3. While big-ticket projects, like Trump's battleship, can really run up the budget, it also helps to have shooting wars like Iran, to use up inventories that then have to be replaced (with the usual kickbacks, of course).

    Trump also views the military as a grooming ground for his kind of people, which is to say psychopathic gun nuts, or as he likes to call them, "patriots." With Trump, everything is politics, and more war is his kind of good politics.

Trump vs. Law and/or Law vs. America: From ICE to the Supreme Court and the assault on democracy.

Trump's Administration: Trump can't remake America in his own image (i.e., destroy the country, culture, and civilization) just by himself. He needs help, and having largely purged the government of civil servants and replaced them with his own minions, this is what they are doing — whether he's paying attention or not, and that it's mostly not is no excuse: he sets the tone, then distracts the media with his own insanity.

Donald Trump: The cult (or should I say sinkhole?) of personality. While most of the bad things he has done and is doing are the work of his administration, and many of their bad ideas are deeply ingrained in the Republican Party, he hogs the spotlight, giving them a uniquely pungent odor.

  • Ross Rosenfeld [09-30]: Trump personifies the basic laws of human stupidity: "How a 50-year-old treatise by an Italian economic historian makes sense of our utterly senseless moment." Introducing Carlo Cipolla and his 1976 book, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. The "third law" seems to be the crux of the matter: "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incuring losses." While much of what Trump does fits this description, at the same time no president (and possibly no politician) has more frequently strived to profit from his office.

  • Margaret Hartmann: Note that her Katie Zacharia stories have been moved up.

    • [10-05]: 'Super intelligence,' Trump's dopey AI rebrand, explained: "Trump is trying to shut down AI doomerism by giving 'artificial intelligence' a friendlier name. But he may have a hard time making 'SI' happen."

    • [10-09]: MLK Day out, Trump's birthday in? All his holiday changes. "Despite claims like 'I'm reinstating' Columbus Day, Trump hasn't created any permanent federal holidays. And he said Americans have too many days off."

    • [09-11]: Trump is locked in a posthumous feud with Abe Lincoln: "This shockingly active rivalry has dragged on for years, though Honest Abe is both dead and better than Trump by just about every measure."

    • [10-20]: Trump helps out by dropping antisemitic slur at Kansas rally: "The president's comments defending Senator Roger Marshall were like an onion of things he shouldn't be saying."

    • [10-26]: Trump's male midterms crushes, ranked: "The president keeps admiring other men's bodies at his rallies. So if you're voting solely based on who has a MAGA-approved butt, you're in luck."

    • [10-29]: Natalile Harp taps 'court jester' of AI slop to cheer Trump: "Bill Pulte has worn many hats. Now he's joined Harp in feeding Trump flattering memes and polling — often on poster board — to soothe his dark moods."

    • [10-31]: Trump's most bizarre and baffling midterms rally rants: "From misgendering Melania to simulating puking to relentlessly praising John Husted's butt, his closing message to 2026 voters is stranger than ever." Let's list the sections (if you've watched Kimmel and/or Myers you'll probably remember the clips):

      • "My wife told me, 'Sir . . .'"
      • [Huuuh] "He's puking all over the place"
      • "Pacific Ocean, we're gonna call it the American ocean"
      • "New Mexico . . . I Want to change it to 'New America'"
      • "Most people don't know 'dumb' has a b"
      • "We had the hurricane. We call it a 'watercane'"
      • Solar panels "kill all the animals"
      • "You have to go to MIT to turn on a lawnmower now"
      • Kansas senator isn't "some kind of a Shylock-type guy"
      • "If you're Black or you're Jewish . . . you're crazy anyway"
      • Arnold Palmer's penis size was "unbelievable"
      • "I looked at his ass, and I've never done that with a man before"

    • [11-02]: Caviar and caged zebra: Inside Trump's Halloween bash for 'rich friends': From the live animals to the presence of Mike Johnson, Trump's pre-midterms Mar-a-Lago bacchanal was truly wild."

  • Frank Rich [10-07]: The Collaborators: "The cronies of Trump's second term are more brazen than the old ones. They're also heading for a harsher comeuppance."

    By most non-Nazi measures, the Trump administration is off the charts. Its Department of Justice, which pursues the president's personal vendettas in lieu of protecting anyone's human, civil, and voting rights, has enabled a kleptocracy that might make Suharto and Marcos look like shoplifters. The wholesale corruption and theft have exponentially increased not only the net worth of the president and his family but that of the large cast of cronies and grifters who have been cut in on the rackets rife in every corner of our government. Just a shortlist of the likely roster of criminal operations would include 24/7 insider stock trading; quid pro quo-driven real-estate deals in the Middle East, Europe, and even Yosemite National Park; no-bid government contracts handed out to favored vendors for federal boondoggles; crypto grabs engineered by Trump's sons with the sons of his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff; prediction-market investments benefiting Donald Trump Jr.; the direct and indirect purchase of presidential pardons; and the curbing of antitrust and IRS enforcement for well-connected fat cats. It will take an army of sleuths just to track down the untold taxpayer dollars expended during the extravagant joyride of the ousted Bonnie and Clyde of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski.

  • Margaret Sullivan [10-08]: Trump's latest attacks on the press exude desperation: "Trump seems to invent ugly new variations on his press-bashing theme almost every day."

  • Elie Mystal [10-30]: Why is the media ignoring the stunning new Trump-Epstein allegations? Well, here you go:

    The president of the United States of America has been accused of rape. Again. The president of the United States has been accused of rape in a report issued by the Democrats of the House Judiciary Committee, as part of their ongoing investigation of Donald Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The president has been accused of raping two women, one when she was as young as 13, and sexually assaulting three more. They are among 11 women who provided evidence or testimony that Trump "abused, assaulted, and even raped numerous women alongside, and in coordination with, the most infamous sex trafficker in history."

  • Matthew Stevenson [10-30]: Trump's great grift machine.

  • Troy Farah [10-30]: As midterms loom, anxiety rises about what Trump does next: "The president may try to declare an emergency or seize voting machines but some experts say his options are limited." From the title, I was expecting a different kind of article, one that would explore what might happen to Trump's delicate psyche as his illusions of popularity are crushed.

  • Clay Wirestone [10-31]: Thank goodness President Trump will return to Kansas. Now he can check out all our hot GOP men! "As a gay man, I obviously have opinions about the attractiveness of various menfolk, but I have made a practice of keeping such opinions to myself. The president as shown me a new way."

  • Chris Lehman [11-02]: Donald Trump as lost it: "At one of his final midterm rallies, the president showed just what a spent political force he has become — and what little grip on reality he has." I've spent more than a few hours this campaign watching clips from Trump rallies, mostly selected for late-night entertainment, so not what you'd call flattering, and what I always wind up focusing on is the expressions of his background chorus, so often confused as to when to clap, when to laugh, and/or when to pretend they're invisible. But just as the excerpts were selected to show how bad Trump is, his backdrop was selected from presumably rabid fans, so that seems like a fair trade. As someone who's reviewed a fair number of albums, I can assure you that what kills a grade isn't the stretches of competence, but the occasional faux pas into mediocrity or downright offense.

    Not as weird as the next video entry: the 2024 rally chestnut called "God Made Trump," delivered as a riff on radio Paul Harvey's address "God Made a Farmer," but shot through with the militant messianic imagery of the New Apostolic Reformation. The video starts with an AI-manipulated version of Harvey's voice announcing "On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a caretaker,'" and goes rapidly downhill from there, depicting Trump as an axe-wielding mortal foe of wolves, vipers, the deep state, and the fake news. . . .

    Trump, not surprisingly, didn't mention any of these problems, or GOP proposals to address them; his prescription for electoral victory in Iowa appeared to be Worship me harder. So he stayed firmly and gleefully within his comfort zone of deriding Democrats as "lunatics" hell-bent on spreading communism and forcing sex changes on the children of unwitting God-fearing parents. He made desultory promises that gas prices would come down shortly after the midterms — presumably by resuming the same large-scale attacks on Iran that have already caused those prices to skyrocket while completely failing to defeat the Islamic Republic. He reprised his bribery pledge of $5,000 to every voter who will preserve and expand the GOP majorities in Congress. But he relied mostly on more video footage to drive home the theme of the GOP 2026 campaign: "craziness versus common sense." One scattershot set of supercuts sought to dramatize the socialist orthodoxy and transgender fetishes of the Democrats, while another highlighted the alleged open-border excesses of the Biden White House, and dwelled on lurid details of murders and sexual attacks from undocumented immigrants. By the time the second video kicked in, people in my section and many on the main floor began to leave. They'd seen this show before — and besides, they could watch Fox News in the comfort of their home, without having to see Elvis hymn the Confederacy or Donald Trump cosplay as Jesus.

Electoral Politics: Pieces on US elections (recent and future) and, more generally, inter-party politicking. Party-specific pieces in following sections.

  • Michael Luttig [09-10]: The final battle for America's democracy: "Forget November 3. It's January 3 when Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all. Here's how." Don't forget November 3. Vote. You'll never know how desperate Republicans are to cling onto power until you get them cornered. Then, they'll risk further discrediting themselves with this cockamamie scheme.

  • Josh Marshall: [09-26]: Another factor: bad candidates: Picture of Roger Marshall here. Darline Graham also gets a mention here, as well as the R's in GA and NC.

  • Ed Kilgore:

    • [09-30]: Vance's wild Senate-takeover plan has a big flaw: "He and Trump 'war-gamed' plans to nix the Senate parliamentarian and filibuster to pass the toxic SAVE America Act."

    • [10-06]: MAGA can't let go of Tricky Dick: "Nixon apologists have now spurred a Justice Department investigation of Watergate. But the Trump parallels they draw aren't flattering to either man."

    • [10-07]: Is everything suddenly possible for Democrats? "They're expanding the map, and it's getting pretty wild." I think the main difference this year is that Democrats are running more articulate candidates, and they're campaigning on issues for votes, rather than spending all their time trying to raise money (like, e.g., Harris did). On the other hand, Republicans are blowing millions of dollars on ads that mostly just remind voters how stupid Republicans think they are.

    • [10-09]: With livestream execution, Hegseth goes full barbarian: Some interesting dates here, but one that's missing is that Nidal Hasan's crime was committed in 2009. Hegseth is quoted as saying that "people need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things," but after 17 years, who actually remembers what thing is being consequented so seriously? The longer you wait, the more the punishment overshadows the crime. Given that few people remember, why does Hegseth want to give Hasan and his crime the publicity, let alone turn him into some kind of martyr? Sure, that's rhetorical: Hegseth is doing this because Hegseth wants the publicity, as he wants to be known as the guy who is bringing the War Department back to glory as a killing machine. Trump has since overruled the live streaming, but not the execution, but the damage to America's public image has already been done. They could have just let Hasan rot and die quietly in prison, totally unforgotten. But they have to brag about what assholes they are, as if we don't already know. As for "full barbarian": not quite. For that, he would have had to beheaded Hasan and displayed the head on a pike. I'm sure Hegseth would have loved that.

    • [10-13]: Unhappy Trump voters are the midterms difference-makers: "The closer we get to the end of this election, the clearer it is that Republicans should have found a way to muzzle their unpopular president." While muzzling Trump certainly helped him in the late weeks of the 2016 campaign, it's not obvious what else Republicans have to run on but Trump's personal charisma, even as tarnished as it is. Disaffected Trump 2024 voters are no doubt a thing, but I'm also curious about the 2024 non-voters who now regret not voting against Trump. Most of the dropoff from 2020 to 2024 simply didn't vote. While disengaged voters are even less likely to vote in the mid-terms, where vote levels typically slack way off, they could make a difference this year — in addition to former Trump supporters who feel like sitting this one out.

    • [10-21]: Fear and loathing are all the GOP have left: "As the spate of nasty new attack ads show, Trump and his party's only remaining midterms move is to drive up turnout of hard-core supporters."

    • [10-24]: How Trump lost his 2024 coalition: "The president has worked hard to alienate every key group that swung him back into the White House." Title I clicked on was different: "7 Ways Trump Lost His 2025 Coalition." The article has 7 sections, but they don't correspond to "ways": the first is "Trump's 2024 coalition was never as big as he claimed." I wouldn't call the coalescence of 2024 Trump voters a coalition. To do so implies that multiple groups were willing to compromise with each other in order to get their separate agendas advanced. The Republicans have long had a coalition of gun nuts and religious bigots and haters of various stripes willing to work for the rich to gain recognition, while the rich recognized that they needed to rope in others to have any chance in a democracy. But the marginal gains Trump made in 2024 with blacks, latinos, and young voters didn't give them any place in a Republican coalition that was pretty much guaranteed to screw them over. Those gains came from disaffected voters, who bought the story that Biden was a bad president, who didn't trust Harris to be any better, and who somehow thought Trump deserved another chance. People who bought such lies were bound to be disappointed. Trump made their disinfatuation easier by being conspicuously himself, but it was bound to happen anyway.

    • [10-26]: The worst-case midterm scenario for Democrats: "Here are four good reasons for tempering the blue-wave optimism, including polling errors, turnout surprises, and Senate-race realities." Republicans often exceed my expectations, and I still recall a year in the 1980s when they swept a bunch of very close races, so luck (or God?) does seem to be on their side (although if you believe in God, I'd remind you that He has a long history of punishing us). And since 2004, I've never trusted those voting machines in Ohio — a factor Kilgore doesn't mention. As for his caveats about voter turnout, he cites an earlier piece that argues the opposite: that the Democratic base is much more motivated to vote than the MAGA base. Given that the Republican vote in 2024 was largely defined by anti-incumbent dread, they'll be battling their own cognitive dissonance.

    • [10-30]: The 'Dan Sullivan' stunt is political malpractice: This is nonsense, which you're only hearing about because Republican Dan Sullivan is likely to get beat. We had a similar situation here in Wichita a few years back when a bogus Ron Estes ran against the incumbent Ron Estes, who sailed to an easy victory. As noted here, in the August primary, Mary Peltola won 49.5% of the vote, "real" Dan Sullivan 41.4%, and "fake" Dan Sullivan 2.5%. Alaska has a ranked choice voting system, so anyone confused can vote for both Dan Sullivans, and rest assured that the "right" one will collect the votes.

    • [10-31]: The 13 governors' races worth watching on election night: Democrats favored: Alaska, Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon; Republicans favored: Florida, Nebraska, Texas; Toss-ups: Georgia, Kansas, Nevada, Wisconsin.

  • Nicholas Lemann [10-04]: The battle to pass a billionaire tax: "Most Democratic voters say that they favor a wealth tax, but a California ballot initiative has plenty of liberal opponents."

  • Bill Scher [10-06]: The Republican plan to buy the election got too expensive: "New data shows the GOP's money advantage has narrowed because it relies too heavily on super PACs, which pay more for broadcast ads." Republicans have a 2-to-1 or 3-to-2 edge in campaign money, but evidently candidates who raise their own money get better deals, so the difference in air time is much closer to even.

  • Michael Tomasky [10-26]: Three reasons why Donald Trump probably wants the Republicans to lose: "People seem surprised that Trump would dismiss high gas prices and claim the US is making a fortune from the Iran war. But if you know Trump's brain, it's not surprising at all." I haven't read much about this, but I rather suspect that a lot of business folk would be happy to see a return to divided government. They're not a majority — Republicans have a big lead in big donor cash, but Democrats are raising a lot of money, and not just from the small donations of mere concerned citizens. I can also see a case for Fox and Republican strategists, who can use a Democratic Congress to generate outrage in their base. But I don't see much value in trying to probe the dark reaches of Trump's brain on this issue. The general assumption is that Trump cares little about policy, but much about angles. Republicans are very bad on policy, losing Congress should help Trump to do fewer stupid things — of course, even as I write this, I know that most of the stupid things Trump has done have been by executive order. On the other hand, the angles favor fighting with Democrats over cooperation, so that's where he's likely to go. He's also likely to relish the idea of being the only significant Republican left in power. If he let this idea go to his head, he could try a coup toward the end of his term. I doubt it will work, but I also doubt that he knows that. But the real problem here isn't a careful weighing of the prospects, but the notion that Trump has given this the least bit of thought. He's just a bundle of instincts and reflexive acts. Looking back (and forward) at Tomasky's columns:

  • Troy Farah [10-20]: Musk's midterm meddling reeks of desperation: "So far, he's spent some $366 million in pro-GOP midterm TV spots and other campaign efforts, with $276 million donated since July alone. No other known donor comes close to dishing out more funding."

  • Jessie Blaeser/Erin Doherty [10-23]: Poll: Trump is mobilizing more Democrats against him than Republicans for him: There is much more to oppose than to support.

  • Jake Lahut [10-28]: The last stand of a MAGA party girl: "Lauren Boebert bucked Trump on Epstein, got ensnared in a sex scandal, and is now fighting for her political life."

  • Naomi Bethune [10-30]: The Sunshine State's progressive possibility: "In Florida, Angie Nixon's Senate campaign represents the power of progressive Black women in politics." This is my dream win for Tuesday, not just because she would be the red-state leftist that James Talarico and Adam Hamilton are not, but because she appears to be a gutsy but methodical campaigner, as shown by her primary win, where she was outspent by an "impeccably credentialed centrist" 19-to-1.

  • David Dayen [10-30]: Adam Hamilton's moral crusade: "The candidate with a chance to become the first Democrat elected to the US Senate from Kansas since 1932 is leading with his values." I didn't vote for Hamilton in the primary, and I still rather resent his virtue signaling about "leading from the middle" — if he has any idea what us leftists stand for, he's done a good job of keeping that insight out of circulation — but he's raised a ton of money, most of it locally (unlike Marshall), and he's run a remarkable campaign. If Kansas could straight up compare the candidates, especially against their own values, he'd win in a landslide. The only reason this is competitive is that Republicans seem to always runup the count in rural counties that Democrats pass on. Dayen also wrote the following articles with Maureen Tkacik:

    The Marshall story that has stuck longest with me is how during 2020 he prescribed hydroxychloroquine (Ivermectin?) to his wife and kids: Trump had been pushing it as a Covid preventative, and Marshall was trying to court Trump votes in a tough Republican primary. That's the kind of person he is. A story that's been getting more press recently is:

  • Emma Green [10-29]: How a Kansas megachurch pastor might determine who wins the Senate: "Adam Hamilton's campaign tests whether Democrats can find religion." So now he's even got a New Yorker profile.

    • Dale Hogg [10-30]: Marshall sued for charging 'callous and predatory' 18% interest rate on medical debt in Kansas. He's also gotten a lot of publicity for debt collection practices that have landed his former patients in jail (so much for his Hippocratic Oath). Also:

    • Christian Paz [10-26]: The Democrat capturing Christian voters in the Trump era: "On the trail and in the pews, Adam Hamilton is inspiring voters fed up with the status quo." Here's an interesting bit of back story:

      His faith journey started in high school. Raised nominally Catholic, he embraced atheism as he watched his parents go through a divorce and after his grandmother died by suicide. After a late night of smoking weed with a friend, he heard a knock at the door: a Pentecostal missionary was inviting him to church. Though not necessarily sold on this movement, he did meet his wife LaVon at church — and they married a week after graduating.

      Yet around this time, he says he felt a stirring to become a pastor. He enrolled at the evangelical Oral Roberts University to train as a preacher, but was thrown into despair, disillusionment, and doubt when his two best friends died in an accident. Seeking counsel and comfort from Pentecostal pastors and leaders, he was met with platitudes ("Everything happens for a reason") and unanswered questions — and so began a journey that led him to John Wesley, the English theologian, and the movement he founded, Methodism. . . .

      He was just 25 when he founded the Church of the Resurrection, commissioned by his bishops in the United Methodist Church to start a church "for thinking people."

      The point was to "use your intellect and not check your brain at the door," he says on the stump. "And have a heart. Focus on both a spiritual life, but also on living out faith and justice in the world. These things go hand in hand."

      There is much I can relate to here, although I started pretty much where he ended (with the Disciples of Christ, a Methodist offshoot), and I found a way out through Marx, which left me with little need of "spiritual life," but still in possession of heart and brain, "living out faith and justice in the world."

    • Anna Kaminski [10-31]: Marshall's payments from leadership PAC to top aide violate federal law, new ethics complaint says.

  • Rob Urie [10-30]: Oligarchs and elections, the endgame. This analysis (the quote follows the Calvin Coolidge quote, "the chief business of the American people is business") seems about right:

    'Business' hasn't been the business of the American people for at least the last half a century. Just getting by has been. The question now is whether to blame politicians or economics for the shift? On the one hand, politicians make economic policies. On the other hand, the special circumstance of the US having the only intact industrial infrastructure following WWII was temporary. The 'American Century' was an artifact of history. That Americans were told that the advantage was permanent explains some fair portion of the political rage of today.

    By the 1970s the writing was on the wall. The American infrastructure advantage began to wane. Imports from Japan were climbing the value chain from trinkets to consumer goods. American industrialists shifted from labor hoarding to searching abroad for poor, desperate workers who wouldn't contest poverty wages with no benefits. The claim that brutal labor relations were the key to American prosperity led to the passage of NAFTA (1994) and the elevation of finance as a disciplining factor for labor.

    The brutality towards labor emerges from the capitalist theory of capital accumulation. Capitalist economics posits that the social savings that fund capitalist investment produce a benefit for both capital and labor. But US economic evolution since the 1970s tells a different story. Capital understood that the post-War infrastructure advantage was over early on. The temporary truce between capital and labor was turned back into a zero-sum game where capital saw its future in treating labor as prey.

    I put the inflection point at 1969, when Hibbert's Peak hit, and the US was faced with a decision (not that any of us were asked what to decide): limit oil use, or import whatever it took to keep growing? But US oil companies had control over, or access to, cheap foreign oil, so to them (and therefore to American politics) that wasn't even a question. But it did mean that the US started running trade deficits, which went negative in 1970 and have remained there ever since. Where did the surplus dollars go? Some was kept, as the dollar became the world's reserve currency. And more was reinvested through American banks, who in short course became global banks. While the price shocks of 1973 and 1979 hit American consumers, for the oil companies, they were just windfall profits. Carter's efforts to limit oil use were massively unpopular, so a big part of the Reagan win was desire to keep oil flowing. He was aided in that a lot of non-OPEC oil flooded the market in the 1980s — if anything, his problem was that prices and profits crashed in the 1980s. But Carter also inserted the US military in the Persian Gulf to protect the oil flow, leading to Bush's forever wars, and Trump's oil market manipulations.

    Meanwhile, nations that had no oil, like Germany and Japan, taxed it heavily to suppress waste, and built up their industry, especially with more efficient cars. They ran trade surpluses, and used the profits to buy up assets in the US, which for them became not just a big market but a source of relatively cheap labor. American business, in turn, found more profitable opportunities elsewhere. But all of these things required politicians to grease the skids. America's political system has always been generous to the rich, and with Reagan's "greed is good" infatuation lost its last inhibitions against corruption: the idea that government, and public service, should ultimately benefit all, even if not all equally. That loss of inhibition was so complete that inequality grew as persistently under Clinton and Obama, who at least gestured at some notion of a common good, and whose political base deserved better, as under Reagan and the Bushes (who stressed tax cuts as opposed to actual growth). Trump, of course, is off the scales here, not just in terms of wealth numbers but the arrogance that such rich folk feel entitled to.

    Urie has a chart here showing how "Wealth concentration has spiked in recent decades," but more detail would be helpful for 1982-2013, especially as the 21-year-gap from 1992 to 2013 is where much of the action took place. Urie notes: "remarkably, nearly every name on this graph of billionaires whose wealth has ballooned in recent years is a recipient of Federal largesse, known colloquially as welfare." This is prejudicial abuse of the word "welfare," and not just because the targets here would object that they worked hard (spent lavishly) to buy the political favors that they profited from. The idea that welfare is undeserved is generally wrong. More welfare for everyone would be a good thing. But granting patent monopolies, permitting anti-competitive mergers, and selling useless crap and services to the military are not welfare. They are fraud or worse.

  • Corey Robin [11-02]: The US electorate is permanently mobilized and unable to move: An old-fashioned theses list, six of them, showing that the analyst is as "epically dissatisfied" with the state of elections as the voters are. His central point is that the voters want to do something, but the system doesn't allow any change, just a gradual drift toward ever greater inequality — which translates willy-nilly into injustice, because what's the point of getting so rich unless you can walk all over lesser people? I would have framed this differently, probably because I'm less impressed with the seemingly even partisan division: I'd say that Republicans have been significantly overperforming at least since 2000 (possibly 1968), due to a combination of money and media savvy, and equally to the incoherence of Democratic politicians.

    In 2008, Obama promised "change you can believe in," but he delivered no change whatsoever — just a mild return to an increasingly inadequate normalcy, like a recovery period between rounds of Republican chemo while the cancer is returning — papered over with increasingly implausible verities. The two most important things that happened during Obama's terms were the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, which is to say populist revolts on the right and on the left. By 2016, the people were aching for change or some sort, and that's what drove the primary campaigns of Sanders and Trump. Sanders lost because the status quo Democrats had a stranglehold on the party, from which they intimidated many voters who might have favored Sanders. Trump won because the Republicans weren't united — basically, every billionaire had his own sock-puppet candidate — and because in the end they weren't afraid of their insurgent, and they saw that he could reach voters they couldn't. As incumbent, Trump lost in 2020, but with his election denial, he managed to make himself look like the victimized outsider, which set him up for his 2024 revenge campaign.

    If Democrats do better this year, that's mostly because Trump and his lockstep Republicans (literally all of them) have lost all their credibility as revolutionaries. The Democrats (despite Sanders' term "political revolution") never had any credibility to lose, which as far as I'm concerned is just as well. (Only Republicans seem to think otherwise, and that just makes them look silly and/or paranoid. Even the DSA people are miles away from agitating for revolution.) I lost whatever infatuation I had with revolution long ago, if indeed I ever had any. As far as I am concerned, revolutions are massive failures in ruling class power, which can more or less easily be avoided by fairly moderate efforts at reform — a point grasped not just by liberals but by conservatives like Bismarck and Disraeli, although not Louis XVI, Nicholas II, or Iran's Shah. Or, it appears, by Trump and his Republicans.

    Still, today's Democrats have to move beyond the "do-nothing" days of Clinton and Obama. Hell, even "centrists" like Biden understood that much — his problem was thinking and especially talking coherently about what he was willing to do.

Other Republicans:

  • Sarah Jones:

    • [10-01]: What makes a tradwife quit? "As the movement loses women, the right's lonely idea of family has come into focus."

    • [10-28]: This is the dumbest culture-war fight I've ever seen: "The manufactured outrage over Obama's Cheesecake Factory joke is something to behold." As Obama pointed out, the real butt of his joke was Saddam Hussein, but that sailed right past Trump and his flacks. But is this even remotely real? "In the right's fantasyland, the Cheesecake Factory is a temple to American values." It's an upscale restaurant chain, with decor drawn from castle fantasies, an extremely cosmopolitan/eclectic menu, named after a dessert. It's far removed from places like Cracker Barrel, Applebees, or Bob Evans — chains I've enjoyed dozens of times — or Cheddar's (which has a similarly expansive, but rather less pretentious, menu). I've only eaten at Cheesecake Factory once, in Oklahoma City: as I recall, the food was pretty good, the tables and ambiance less so. (One just opened in Wichita, but we haven't been there yet.) I suspect that in his joke, Obama was thinking more of its tacky decor than its clientele.

  • Heather Digby Parton [10-04]: The dark reasons behind all the Richard Nixon worship: "MAGA needs to maintain its grip on the GOP after Donald Trump — and the 37th president is key."

  • Danielle Han [10-20]: Vivek Ramaswamy and Amy Acton's allegedly abusive mom reach monstrous low in new ad: Acton's brother responded: "This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core."

Democrats:

  • Camille Rivera [10-07]: Florida isn't red. Democrats just stopped showing up.: "With more than 900,000 Puerto Rican voters, Florida can be won in 2026 and put in play for 2028. Give Angie Nixon the chance she deserves."

  • Zack Beauchamp [10-15]: The radical Democratic plan to change the government for good: "The party is finally mounting an aggressive response to Trump's slash-and-burn second term. Could their ideas for a rebooted, reimagined Washington actually work?" Something to return to once the dust has settled. From the "key takeaways":

    • Democrats are developing their own equivalent to the GOP's Project 2025 — a radical new vision for remaking the US government if they take power in 2028.

      • Their ideas would do two things: boost the government's ability to deliver services efficiently, and constrain the anti-democratic abuses of the Trump era.

    • The goal isn't just to rebuild the systems that Trump broke, but to use his destruction to rebuild the federal government into something new and more modern.

    • A lot remains to be worked out. The vision is emerging from different groups, only loosely connected. And there's a built-in tension between empowering government and keeping a tighter leash on the White House.

  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells [10-18]: How the DSA learned to love elections: "Members of the Democratic Socialists of America believe deeply in the possibility of a class revolution. Meanwhile, they're running for office — and winning."

  • Susan B Glasser [10-29]: Obama's great skewering of Trump: "The former President's riff on Saddam Hussein, the Cheesecake Factory, and our gold-besotted leader was not only funny but politically brilliant." My wife loved this, and made me (and, later, my birthday party guests while I was still cooking) watch sizable chunks. I find it hard to listen to, even when his target is orders of magnitudes worse than himself. The article also highlights some of Trump's recent speeches, adding to the schadenfreude.

  • Dylan Scott [10-29]: Democrats have big healthcare plans. The industry is preparing for a fight. "Corporations have always fought universal healthcare proposals. But will their old playbook still work in a new era?"

  • Jeet Heer [10-30]: Centrist Democrats are trying hard to lose the midterms: "Wreckers like Haley Stevens are probably the GOP's last hope of avoiding a wipeout on Tuesday." Stevens, who lost the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan to Abdul El-Sayed, gracefully pledged to support him, but at the last minute switched her endorsement to his Republican opponent, can probably be attributed to something more fundamental than centrist ideology. After all, AIPAC put millions into her losing campaign, so maybe they still own her? Right-wing ("centrist" is at best a euphemism) Dems have sabotaged Democratic candidates in the past, most famously Bryan and McGovern, and they tried to do that with Mamdani only recently. Still, losing to Trump has been a severe blow to their credibility. So much so that Bill and Hillary Clinton are campaigning for El-Sayed. It certainly looks like Stevens has just sold out her entire political career. For what, one wonders?

    • Eoin Higgins [10-31]: Centrist Democrats would rather lose the Senate than win with El-Sayed: This is weirder than I expected: Stevens had agreed to appear with Rep. Jim Clyburn at an event supporting El-Sayed, then canceled at the last minute, endorsed Republican Mike Rogers, and appeared with him instead. I'm not sure you can blame this on "centrism." It's purely a question of blanket, single-issue Israel support, regardless of anything else that may concern voters. Although "centrists" tend to support Israel, that's usually because they have a nose for money, regardless of where it comes from.

    • Sophie Hurwitz [10-31]: Haley Stevens' fiancé seems dedicated to ruining her career: "The losing Senate candidate's partner can't stop campaigning against Abdul El-Sayed." Hurwitz also wrote [11-01]: Here are some things Haley Stevens said about Mike Rogers before endorsing him: "Not too long ago, 'MAGA Mike' was 'repulsive.' Now he's got Haley Stevens' vote."

    • Daniel Strauss [11-01]: Haley Stevens's sabotage mission: "The Democrat's 11-th hour endorsement in Michigan's Senate race could throw the seat to the GOP." Why? Does anyone think she has voters still waiting to find out what she thinks?

    • Eric Berger [11-02]: 'A despicable betrayal': Democrats incensed by Haley Stevens' endorsement of Mike Rogers: "Stevens' decision sparked fierce backlash from members of the party, while Donald Trump praised the sudden switch." By the way, that "despicable betrayal" quote comes from Chuck Schumer. Nancy Pelosi, who's been distancing herself from El-Sayed, also condemned Stevens. Trump called her "a highly respected Democrat, but the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party "said in a post that Stevens was not a member of the party 'nor will she be in the future.'" Trump said, "I'd love her to join the Republican party, actually, I think that could happen maybe." When asked about Trump's praise, "Stevens told CNN: 'Well, I impeached him twice," before criticizing Republicans for being 'really focused on just letting Trump be the dictator.'"

    • Blaise Malley [11-02]: Unhinged attacks against El-Sayed reach a fever pitch: "Republicans are now accusing the Democratic Senate nominee of being a 'jihadi' and posing a threat to national security."

    • Bess Levin [11-02]: The wildest details from the Haley Stevens train wreck.

Economists and the Economy:

  • Steven Rattner [08-18]: Trump's broken promises, in 11 charts. Each section starts with a Trump prediction, then offers a chart, usually showing the exact opposite.

  • Dean Baker:

    • [09-30]: Do lying shelf prices bias our inflation data? The case of convenience stores: This links to:

    • [10-01]: Trade deficit soars in August: The tariffs don't seem to be working: "Trump's tariffs were intended to reduce the US trade deficit, but the deficit has surged again in 2026, driven in part by rising semiconductor imports."

    • [10-02]: New York Times pushes Trumpian lies on the economy: "Biden's economic team emphasized measurable gains in wages, employment, and investment, while Trump's economic claims have repeatedly conflicted with the available data."

    • [10-07]: Under Trump, foreigners are ripping us off more than ever: Trade deficit jumps in August: "The US trade deficit hit $105.6 billion in August as importers stocked up ahead of Trump's tariffs."

    • [10-10]: The Trump economy: AI bubble and beyond: "Under Trump, job growth and real wages have weakened while investment and consumer spending increasingly depend on the AI boom and rising stock prices. The economy's outlook hinges on whether AI delivers the promised productivity gains or the bubble bursts." Well, the bubble doesn't just depend on those productivity gains; it also depends on the companies ability to capture the savings, which is to say it depends on how effective the companies are at reducing the value they deliver to customers toward the point of indifference. On the other hand, the social value of AI increases in making it as ubiquitous as possible, which is to say cheap, or free. Given that AI is basically data, and data is highly scalable, that seems bound to happen. So how can the bubble survive? That's where the politics comes in.

    • [10-14]: Trump's not so hot economy: China's growth far outpaces US: "China's economy was already larger than the United States' — and it is growing faster too." Of course, it's not just Trump they have been beating. They beat the much more formidable Clinton in the 1990s, and everyone since. China has an economy that is based on building things, cheaper and better all the time. Since the 1980s, the American economy has been increasingly based first on extracting profits, then on fraud, graft, and gambling.

    • [10-16]: Trumpflation is here! "Make no mistake: The current bout of inflation we are dealing with is all due to Trump."

    • [10-23]: The rich are awful people, let me count the ways: "Billionaires are using their control of major news outlets and social media platforms to advance their political agendas, threatening democracy. Teforms to Section 230 and public support for local journalism could help reduce their influence."

    • [10-24]: Medicare for All can be simple: "Medicare for All could expand access to health care while reducing administrative costs and prescription drug prices. Replacing patent monopolies with public funding for medical research could further lower costs and improve access to treatment." Of course, this has been obvious for decades, during which the share of GDP going to the health care industry has increased from 10% to 20%.

    • [10-27]: Could Trump's global warming hoax explain the cost-of-living paradox? "Homeowner's insurance costs have surged far faster than overall inflation, potentially helping explain the gap between weak consumer sentiment and standard measures of well-being." The higher insurance costs go, the more people will be tempted to risk being un- or under-insured. Loans are usually secured by property values, which are protected by insurance, so loans will become riskier and/or more expensive. The same thing is also true for businesses. I think we're fast approaching a catastrophic insurance crisis. The only way to manage it is likely to be government, in which case it will make a big difference whether government is run by the people who want to serve the public or the current crowd, which just sees government as a confidence scam to line their own pockets.

    • [10-28]: Anthropic promises to send the market for anti-virus software booming: "Anthropic's IPO filing highlights how advanced AI could empower hackers, expand ransomware attacks, and drive up cybersecurity costs for businesses and governments." If this is true, I suspect the costs could be geometric: we're in an era where defense costs much more than offense, because defense has to protect against everything, while offense just has to find one weak spot. In this world, the only solution is to dissuade or disincentivize would-be attackers from proceeding.

    • [10-31]: China's AI bubble burst: will this be another export to the United States? "China's AI stocks have plunged 40 percent, offering a warning to US investors about the risks of inflated tech valuations. The crash also highlights how Chinese companies are producing competitive AI models at a fraction of the cost of US competitors, raising questions about the sustainability of US tech spending."

  • Markus Schneider [10-20]: US inequalilty is getting worse in ways you might not expect: "Some policies enacted more recently appear to be accelerating this trend."

  • Gary Sernovitz [10-29]: How can sports teams possibly be worth this much? "The aren't good businesses. They don't make much money. And yet, American franchise valuations keep growing and growing." It's basically because rich people are too rich, and can pretty safely bet that other richer people will come along eventually to appreciate their investments. Meanwhile, they're good for the ego.

Technology (Including AI):

  • Jill Lepore [09-21]: Is AI above the law? "Our legal system isn't ready for machines that act on their own."

  • Bess Levin [09-29]: Anthropic warns AI may kill us all in $2 trillion IPO pitch.

  • Benjamin Hart [10-06]: 'I don't think we're all f***ed anymore': Interview with Kevin Roose, author of several books (and podcasts, etc.), most recently The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence.

  • Sarah Jones [10-09]: Anthropic's God Complex: "The company is courting religious leaders in an effort to make Claude 'good.' What exactly does that mean?"

  • Cory Doctorow [10-29]: Is there life after AI? Cory Doctorow thinks so.: An interview, talking "about the internet, whether machines are conscious, why copyright maximalism won't save us from ChatGPT, and why workers still have a chance to shape what comes next." I'll have to go back over this more carefully, but for now, let me recommend his book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

Media:

Regular Columnists

Sometimes an interesting columnist writes often enough on a range of topics that it makes sense to collect their work in one place, rather than scatter it about (especially if they cover a range of topics).

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [10-02]: Roaming Charges: "Lots of Very Good Wars!". Of course, there are no such wars, and anyone who even for a moment thinks differently needs their head examined. For instance, Barack Obama squandered whatever credibility he got for opposing Bush's Iraq War by calling Afghanistan "the right war" and escalating it. St Clair cites a tweet with this Obama quote: "What people are starved for at the moment is the ability to tell a moral and ethical story about how we live together in this moment." St Clair misses the point when he snarks: "who remains gullible enough to take moral advice from the Deporter-in-Chief, who droned American citizens and their kids?" One of Obama's great failings was his tendency to think all he had to do was to tell a good story, helping people feel good about themselves, regardless of what their government was actually doing in the world (which under Obama was near exactly the same as it was under Bush). In doing so, he extended the political savvy of Reagan (building on Nixon and extending to Clinton) in flattering Americans into accept a fantasy world they had no control over, and that was no longer accountable to them. By the time Obama was done, many Americans were so starved for honesty that they were willing to try Trump's candor instead — possibly because by they they had lost any moral compass. (Susan Nieman does a good job of explaining why in Call It Evil.)

  • [10-15]: Gaza Diary: Where are you now, beautiful world? Starts with the violent attack on American photojournalist Heidi Levine by Israeli settlers, under the watchful eye of the IDF. Most of the news here is actually from the West Bank, where settlers have accelerated their attacks on Palestinians, especially during the olive harvest.

    + Adam Johnson: "The Atlantic, supposed beacon of free speech and liberal principles, has published 30+ articles on Hasan Piker and zero about Israel's unprecedented killing of 230+ journalists in Gaza. Some are saying it's because it's run by a former volunteer IDF prison guard, but who's to say. The Atlantic employs about 900 variations of Jonathan Chait and I don't think it's because the market is organically demanding even more scoldy, bad-faith ideological disciplining of the left. I suspect this has more to do with their billionaire owner [Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs] and her investment portfolio [the Emerson Collective]."

    + There have been at least 13 attacks on mosques in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem this year, including one this week when Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque outside of Jerusalem.

  • [10-16]: Roaming Charges: Ain't but one way out.

  • [10-30]: Roaming Charges: The anal stage of US politics: Starts by quoting Marquis de Sade on the "Président," then zeroes in ours:

    Donald Trump seems to have reached that transcendent state of personal satori, where he is liberated from all inhibitions, political and psychological. His true persona has been unleashed out on the road, at one pit-stop rally after another.

    Trump seems not to care — perhaps he doesn't even notice — that the once-packed auditoriums have dwindled to the point where giant curtains don't cover the sections of empty seats. The rousing receptions have been groans and baffled silences, as he rambles on and on about his own peculiar obsessions. He riffs on Nicki Minaj's ass and Arnold Palmer's penis. He brags over and over again about being the only president to have taken and passed (without missing a question) "a very difficult" cognitive test, three times! Even though his recent performances would suggest otherwise.

    He drops strange hints about his declining health. He showed up to one rally with a bruise on his left eye, leaving some to wonder whether Meiania belted him or Natalie smacked him with her portable printer.

    He indulges in his lusty fantasies on the musculature of the male anatomy, using a sitting US senator as a case study. He spins sadistic stories of violence, murder and torture. He enjoys the theater of cruelty, though not Artuad's kind. He often sounds like he's narrating a slasher film.

    You can follow the link for an example of the latter: it's sick and gruesome. He continues:

    More and more of Trump's speeches have devolved into mere glossolalia (aka, grunts, groans, belches, wheezes and episodes of gurgling aphasia), which will be interpreted by the most devoted members of his cult as him speaking in the Divine Tongue. But most, I suspect, will see it as evidence of a mind unraveling in real time.

    Trump seems to have embraced his own weirdness, a weirdness that has gone pathological. He is the Buffoon-in-Chief and his presidency is our national opéra bouffe with a soundtrack by Lee Greenwood and the Village People.

    What is the point of his ravings? Often there is none, except his own gratification. . . .

    In the end, Trump replaced neoliberalism with neo-narcissism. His economic strategy is unabashed self-enrichment for him and his cronies. Though look out if you were a crony who made out better than he did. Trump has no friends, only collaborators and co-conspirators. He's never really trusted anyone, not even his sons and accountants. He trusts NDAs, not the people whom he forces to sign them.

    So, he celebrates his own malfeasance. Trump wallows in the aroma of his own mess. In the Anal Stage of US politics, it's a thin line between self-love and self-loathing. One oozes seamlessly into the other.

    Trump's personal wealth has swelled by $3.3 billion since retaking office. He may be America's first self-dealing president. He's turned the White House into his own gift shop. Contra Obama, it looks less like a Cheesecake Factory than Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. Interior design as an infantilism. . . .

    Trump believes the Supreme Court has given him the green light to do whatever he wants without legal consequences. And he may be right. He can trade on inside information. He can manipulate the markets to his advantage. He can cheat on his taxes. He can shake down white-collar criminals for pardons. He can accept jumbo jetliners from a foreign government with ties to terrorists. He can reward purchasers of his memecoins with private meetings, even foreign nationals with dealings before the federal government. He can build monuments to himself and deface those of his predecessors. He can target his enemies with revenge prosecutions. All without, he believes, legal consequences. The disruptor agenda of 2015 has shriveled away. All that's left is the cashing in.

    Other items:

    + Since the start of the Iran war, US residents have paid $147 billion more in fuel prices (about $1,100 for each US household). Much of this was pocketed as profits (not costs) by the oil companies, which made $130 billion in profits. For comparison, last year the 50 top US oil and gas companies reported less than $47 billion in profits.

    + In the run-up to Halloween, candy prices are up by 15% due to the escalating costs of cocoa and sugar.

    + The average monthly premiums for the most popular types of ACA plans will increase by 11% in 2027. This comes on top of the 30% in 2026, a consequence of the Trump administration's gutting of subsidies for ObamaCare.

    + Greenland's ice sheet, the world's largest, has shrunk for the 30th year in a row. From August 2025 to August 2026, it lost 135 billion tons of ice.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors may have collected pieces, and some entries may have related articles underneath.

Max B Sawicky [10-30]: Socialists need our own foreign policy agenda: "As socialists expand our footprint in Congress, we will need to articulate a distinctive agenda for US foreign policy — a vision different from both the wanton imperialism of MAGA and the feckless imperialism of mainstream liberals." I should just bookmark this for future reference, and move on. I identify as a leftist, but not especially as a socialist. (The only time I've identified as a socialist was when a cousin pointed asked whether I'm a Republican or a Democrat. She responded, "So you're a Democrat!" I could have accepted that, but wanted to make a distinction, which she saw as no difference.) I think of my ideas as more rooted in anarchism, but that's because I'm looking for an understanding that rejects power relations. A pull quote here says: "Socialists would at the very least place a high bar before any proposals for US military intervention." While a "high bar" would be better than recent US presidents have set, I question whether there is any criterion that justifies that sort of belligerence. I think Netanyahu is uniquely evil, but I don't favor any military action by anyone to "take him out." I'd also, based on overwhelming experience, put the US at the head of a list of countries that can never be trusted to do any such thing. Another pull quote is just a cliché. Two links for further reading on leftist strategizing are for subscribers only. My bottom line is that you don't have to be a socialist to understand that war is wrong and should always be opposed. And if you think you're a socialist but make exceptions for war, what good are you?

End Matter

Books: Multiple reviews are grouped under book.

  • New Yorker [09-16]: The best books of 2026 so far: A pretty long list. Many look interesting, but I think the only one I've read is Omar Bartov's Israel: What Went Wrong?

Obituaries: I had been using the New York Times, but they're giving me aggravation these days, so I've switched over to Wikipedia October, also November), which is probably better anyway. Roughly speaking, since my last report on September 30:

  • John Anderson, 71, country singer-songwriter. I've graded 14 of his albums here (4 A-list). [10-21]

  • Robert X Cringely, 73, tech journalist. I've read his book, Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date. [10-03]

  • Dennis Hastert, 84, US House (R-IL 1987-2007), House Speaker (1999-2007), resigned due to a sexual abuse scandal (students from when Hastert was a high school wrestling coach), was later convicted of bank fraud, but only served a few months in prison; as Speaker, his "majority of the majority" rule helped the Republican right gain veto power over anything their often slim majorities could do. [10-03]:

    • Chris Lehman [10-06]: The picture of Dennis Hastert: "The disgraced former congressman was a better representative of the GOP than the party would like to admit."

  • Patrick Stewart, 86, actor [10-28]. I saw all of the original Star Trek run when it was initially run, and again in syndication, and the later Kirk/Spock movies, but I missed Steweart's reboot. But I did notice this:

    • Ian Millhiser [10-31]: Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power: "Great leaders, and great nations, need role models like Jean-Luc Picard." Of course, the relevance is now:

      One of the hardest parts of living in Trump's America is that the man never gives us time to grieve. Every day can bring a new executive order that thousands of people must mobilize to fight. Institutions, like the federal judiciary, that exist to uphold universal rights are rapidly being corrupted into tools of the regime. A pandemic is overshadowed by a crisis of democracy. Even Trump's defeat in the 2020 election could only pause the parade of outrages. We are constantly being shuffled from one crisis to the next, without any time to pause and reflect on what we have lost. . . .

      In Trump's America, such role models [as Picard, and Atticus Finch] have become unfashionable for two reasons. The first, as I've already laid out, is that it is hard to tell a hero's story about good men achieving justice by working within noble institutions when this story is so much at odds with how institutions function in the real world. A closely related reason is that, even before the rise of Trump, there were myriad examples of powerful, well-meaning individuals fostering death in the name of democracy. The Iraq War, and the broader neoconservative foreign policy project, was a failed effort to spread liberal democracy through warfare. [Was it really? "Liberal democracy" was never more than cynical rhetoric wielded by people who rigged what passed for elections, always with an eye to their own power.]

    • Alexander Deley [11-02]: Captain Picard was a socialist, and so was Patrick Stewart: "Patrick Stewart, who died last week at the age of 86, was a committed socialist from the start. That conviction ran through his greatest role: Jean-Luc Picard, a leader who used reason and compassion rather than force."

Some other names I recognize:

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas.

  • Ryan Cooper [10-14]: After a chart of UK auto sales from September 2025-2026, showing: battery-electric +36.3%, plug-in hybrid +55.7%, hybrid −4.2%, petrol −6.7%, diesel +11.5% (but only 4.0% share).

    Boy Trump fucked the American auto industry. First he yanks their EV subsidies, leading them to slash production and write off tens of billions in investment, then he jacks up the price of oil by 50%, leading to skyrocketing EV demand going almost entirely to China because GM et al left the market.

  • Arun Gupta: Long Facebook critique of Naomi Klein, starting: "If you want to look at how bad left analysis of poltical-economy has become watch Naomi Klein's interview on the BCC where at the end she discusses the AI bubble." Gupta seems to agree that there is an AI bubble, that it will pop, and that in doing so it will wipe out at least several trillions of dollars of equity. So the argument is about size and resilience. He also agrees that opposing data centers is good, but expects it to fail, as data centers can be put anywhere. He compares it to the fight against fracking, which had little success despite being much more of a localized issue. I should research Gupta further. I doubt this dispute is properly aligned.

Current count: 297 links, 19008 words (23618 total)

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